Brookline High School Program in Social Justice Leadership Cultivating life-long leaders for social justice

Paolo Freire:  "True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity."

Bill Moyers:  Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don't go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.

Paul Rogat Loeb:  [from Greg Ricks, City Year, who] compared the situation of community service volunteers to people trying to pull an endless sequence of drowning children out of a river. Of course we must address the immediate crisis, and try to rescue the children. But we also need to find out why they're falling into the river - because no matter how hard we try, we lack the resources, strength, and stamina to save them all. So we must go upstream to fix the broken bridge, stop the people who are pushing the children in, or do whatever else will prevent the victims from ending up in the water to begin with (p. 209)

UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare Second Annual Social Justice Symposium:  Social Justice is a process, not an outcome, which (1) seeks fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities, and responsibilities; (2) challenges the roots of oppression and injustice; (3) empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential; (4) and builds social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action.

National Women's Alliance (http://www.nwaforchange.org/nwa/main_htmls/define.html):  Progressive social justice organizing is organizing that recognizes the intersecting nature of oppression....Progressive social justice organizing requires a shift in thinking about power relationships and the root causes of oppression....[I]t becomes clear that race, class, gender, ethnic, and sexual oppression are inextricably linked and cannot be separated to advance single-issue agendas....

(from Social Justice Training Institute, http://www.sjti.org/home_professional.html, Adams, Bell and Griffin (1997): The goal of social justice education is full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. Social justice includes a vision of society that is equitable and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure.

Roger Grande:  Social Justice is a social, political or economic transformation that expands opportunity and decreases need among marginalized people and groups, resulting in a condition of greater fairness or equality.  When it is fully catalyzed, social justice work must ultimately demand a change in power relations. 

But social justice is also the struggle to achieve such an objective.  Unlike charity work, social justice work begins with global analysis and collective reflection and then acts in service and solidarity to those in need, always keeping a long-term change in power relationships in mind.  Social justice is realized in the transformation that takes place among individuals and groups in the process of working collectively towards a just end.  In fact social justice is the formation of struggle, regardless of the outcome, because the formation of bonds in common cause with others creates a medium for the telling of stories of subjugation and resistance that is otherwise silenced.

Lastly, the depth of social justice work is measured by the degree to which the participants are willing to engage in acts of courage, including the courage to see one's place in the world as a mirror of power relations.  It is the courage to revisit the familiar and relinquish tacit acceptance of our conditions, commodities and experiences as value-free.  It is our willingness to sharpen our gaze so that which is comfortable no longer obscures what is unjust.  Thus social justice is both a product and a process:  It is not merely how one reshapes the world, but also the transformation in how one sees the world.

Aristotle:  Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Cesar Chavez:  The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.

Harriet Hosmer, American sculptor:  I honor every woman who has the strength enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another (Heifer Intl. publication).

Dolores Ibarruri:  It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Edmund Burke:  All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Oscar Olivera, Bolivian community leader profiled in the film Thirst:  When we lost our fear, I knew we'd win.

Rachel Naomi Remen (Loeb, Soul of a Citizen, 44):  Being brave does not mean being unafraid.  It often means being afraid and doing it anyways.

Robert Kennedy:  Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills-against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence...Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation....It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.  Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:  Well behaved women seldom make history.

Marianne Williamson:  Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Juan Luis Segundo, Uruguayan Jesuit priest:  The world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is devastating to [the poor]."

Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill and Douglas Morrison (theologians):  Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears.  Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless....its an ethical essential to reclaiming our souls. (Loeb).

Reverend William Sloan Coffin:  If you are not angry, you are probably a cynic.  And if you lower your quotient of anger at oppression, you lower your quotient of compassion for the oppressed.  I see anger and love as very related (in: Loeb p. 323)

The Dalai Lama:  Without love we could not survive.  Human beings are social creatures, and a concern for each other is the very basis of our life together.

Rabbi Hillel:  If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  And if I am only for myself, what am I?

The Dalai Lama, The Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1989:  Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.

Eugene Debs, 1908 speech:  Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.

Mohandas Gandhi:  Be the change you want to see.

Justice Louis Brandeis:  Many of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done (Loeb 98).

Paul Rogat Loeb:  Our personal lives are to a great extent shaped by decidedly impersonal forces.  And we have far more power to influence those forces than we know.  By retreating, we don't escape from the world so much as submit to it.  We conspire in our own defeat (p. 91).

Julia Butterfly Hill: The question is not 'can you make a difference?'  You already do make a difference. It's just a matter of what kind of difference you want to make, during your life on this planet.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:  Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Edmund Burke: Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Margaret Mead:  Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Roger Grande:  Students everywhere are involved in making a difference in their communities.

Marian Wright Edelman:  A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back -- but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Marian Wright Edelman:  We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

Rabbi Tarfon:   Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Paolo Freire:  Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Frederick Douglass:  If there is not struggle there is no progress.  Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.  They want rain without thunder and lightning.  They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.  This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.  Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.

Marianne Williamson:  If you get involved in trying to heal the world, you're not guaranteed specific results as you define them.  You're not promised that because you're doing this, a particular organization will work or a particular cause prevail.  But you gain the satisfaction of living your life for a higher purpose (Loeb p. 113).

Rashida Bee, recipient, 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize:  We are not expendable.  We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power.  We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and magic and mystery of life.

Gene Sharp:  Some people naively think that if they assert their goal strongly and firmly enough, long enough it will somehow come to pass.  Others assume that if they remain true to their principles and ideal, and witness to them in the face of adversity then they are doing all they can to achieve them.  Assertion of desirable coals and remaining loyal to ideals are admirable, but are in themselves grossly inadequate to change the statues quo and bring into being designated goals.  (from:  The importance of strategic planning in nonviolent struggle,www.nonviolence.org)

Reinhold Niebuhr: Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime.  

Therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;

Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.

Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;

Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Lao Tzu:  The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Jacob Riis: When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.  Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it-but all that had gone before (Loeb 312).

Martin Luther King, Jr.:  A final victory is an accumulation of may short-term encounters.  To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory (Loeb p. 107).

Stephen Jay Gould:  I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Dom Helda Camara:  When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education:  It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop the type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.

Bishop Desmond Tutu:  We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Kahlil Gibran:  A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.