04.14.08
Awareness is good, but often not good enough
I have often seen descriptions of conferences, workshops, blogs, and forums, whose purpose is to “raise an awareness.”
Raising an awareness is a good thing because it is a necessary step forward in rallying people behind a cause. There is, however, a danger of complacency in awareness. It is all too easy to get caught up in “awareness,” and somehow be led to believe that offenses to the Asian American community can be solved through “awareness.” It’s like believing that the process of making other people aware of problems will somehow allow them to be magically fixed by someone else.
This belief, if you get caught up in it, allows you to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges because the only challenge of raising awareness is people not being aware. In a worst case scenario, if you fail, someone would end up not knowing about the problem. End of story.
What makes this even more appealing is that you can raise “awareness” through expensive dinners, parties, marathons, selling t-shirts, fashion shows, concerts, and organizing student conferences. In other words, you can keep doing stuff you like to do, except that now, you’re able to feel better about making a difference. Raising awareness is also awesome because once you raise awareness to an acceptable, arbitrary level, you can just back off and say “Bam! I did my part. Now it’s your turn. Fix it.” You get all the benefits of helping (self satisfaction, telling other people that you “did something”), but no need for difficult decisions or the ensuing criticism, because really, there’s no way to criticize “awareness.” This allows you to score that sweet double victory.
Don’t get me wrong here. “Raising awareness” on issues is a difficult task in and of itself. You can ask any of the organizers at the NYCAASC conference that we attended, and they’ll confirm how much time and effort goes into the planning and execution of those things. It’s a tremendous effort. Spending time reading up on a subject or incident, formulating an opinion, and then writing about it on your blog takes a lot of time and effort as well.
However, the moment you believe that raising an awareness is an end in and of itself is the moment that you’ve failed in making forward progress toward the goal you were trying to achieve by raising it in the first place: social change.