Working Class Calendar

When I was young, I learned about Rosa Parks in much the same way that children often learn about historic figures — as a hero who effected change through an isolated, grand act of defiance in the right place and the right time.

When I was a teenager, I learned that her act of resistance wasn't spontaneous, but planned by civil rights activists. Months earlier, Claudette Colvin had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus months earlier, but this incident did not receive much attention. Leaders in the Civil Rights movement wanted to make the "most appealing" protesters the most seen, and Colvin was a pregnant teenager who did not have fair-skin, or "good hair" — so she very much wasn't an ideal poster child. Rosa Parks was more respectable, which was why she was the one whose case was pushed — and the one whose name school children learned. This made me feel cynical due to the disenchantment of the story of a heroic, spontaneous act of resistance from an ordinary person that I had previously learned.

Years later, I got to see how activism actually works. I learned about all the work that goes into sustaining a movement, and I understood that spontaneous acts of heroic resistance don't really exist — at least, not in the way I was taught. Even an unplanned, independent act of defiance doesn't exist in isolation of the community of other oppressed people. And the acts that history tends to remember are all the more likely to have layers upon layers of social infrastructure supporting them. This reenchanted the story for me, but in a more authentic way. The machinery of change does not materialise on its own, but now I know about all the expertise and labour that goes into building and maintaining it, it's all the more beautiful.

I wrote this comment to pay respects to Rosa Parks, and to all the activists whose names have been forgotten by history. I thank them for helping me to understand the impact that I can have on the world; I can't imagine myself as the kind of bold person whose acts of resistance are remembered by history, but I know now that the most effective thing I can do is to dispense with grand narratives, and instead immerse myself in politically conscious communities. That's a much nicer mode to exist in, because no matter my skills or ability level, there will always be ways that I can help.