Jamal Burns (he/him) is originally from Saint Louis, Missouri, and is a current senior at Duke studying History with a concentration in Women and Sexuality Studies. Much of Jamal's work focuses on making education more equitable for systemically neglected populations. He conceives of activism as a community-oriented project that is fundamentally inclusive.
In this episode, we talk to Jamal about shaping an activist identity, what makes a movement, and how to sustain your activism efforts.
Guest: Jamal Burns
Writers: Katherine Li '22, Georgie Stammer '24
Hosts: Katherine Li '22, Georgie Stammer '24
Audio Engineer: Emily Nagamoto '24
Music:
reCreation by airtone
Time by ASHUTOSH-MUSIC
Inspired to do more? If you want to learn how your time and skills can best help the climate, you can create a climate action plan at youchangeearth.org/operationclimate.
TRANSCRIPT:
KATHERINE: Think of a social cause that you care about. Maybe it’s fighting racial injustice. Pushing for gender equality. Mental health advocacy. LGBTQ+ rights. Ending hunger and homelessness. Climate action. The list goes on. Now think about why you care about that issue. Did you, or someone you know experience hardships related to it? What emotions do you feel when you think about this issue?
GEORGIE: If you feel strongly about a cause, you might feel inclined to make an impact by engaging in activism. But what does it mean to be an activist? What does it mean to be deeply engaged in a social cause? These are the questions that we’re going to be answering on this episode of Operation Climate, joined by Jamal Burns.
KATHERINE: Welcome to Operation Climate, the one-stop-shop for environmental discussions that matter to Duke and Durham community members. We’re a podcast run by Duke University students, aiming to inform and empower Duke-at-large to create lasting change in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation.
GEORGIE: Today, we are joined by Jamal Burns. Jamal is originally from Saint Louis, Missouri, and is a current senior at Duke studying History with a concentration in Women and Sexuality Studies. Much of Jamal's work focuses on making education more equitable for systemically neglected populations. He conceives of activism as a community-oriented project that is fundamentally inclusive.
Katherine Li: My name is Katherine,
Georgie Stammer: I'm Georgie
Katherine Li: and welcome to Operation Climate. Today we are joined by the wonderful Jamal Burns, who is a senior at Duke majoring in history, and he is one of the people that I think of when I think of the word activist. So thank you so much for joining us today, Jamal!
Jamal Burns: Thank you for having me.
Katherine Li: Like I said before, today we're going to get into the heart of the question, what does it mean to be an activist? What does it mean to really be engaged in a social cause? And to start off with this, let's learn a little bit more about you.
Georgie Stammer: What specific work have you been doing recently like I guess a little pre-pandemic, and then since that started.
Jamal Burns: Yeah, that's a good question. So pre-pandemic, a lot of the work that I've been doing was semi-institutional through Duke and then external to Duke as well. So I helped co-found, and was the president of an organization for low income and first generation students on campus. That organization is called Duke LIFE (Low-Income & First Generation) and a later subsequent office was built within the university to kind of meet the needs of students who identify as low income, and or first generation. So that was a kind of a long and tiring process and honestly took about three years. So since the beginning, since I entered the institution, I was kind of working on that.
I also named that organization, and it was kind of an arduous battle, but then of course we have to understand that activism doesn't really work just solely in an institutional, microcosmic level and a lot of the work that I've been doing outside of that has been working on culturally relevant pedagogical models-- specifically STEM models. So I worked on a curriculum last year, my junior year that was an electrical and computer engineering curriculum, which is interesting because, you know, I'm a historian, right. I'm a history major, But I found the opportunity to do that and kind of understand and look at where we were implementing it in Durham public schools, and say, okay, so in this region, we see that lower income and minority students do not participate in upper level STEM classes. So how can we tailor this curriculum to be more inclusive and inviting.
So those were some of the pre-pandemic things; post-pandemic, a lot of the work that I've been doing has been on educating individuals around police abolition and prison abolition and working on projects that way.
Katherine Li: So could you speak about your journey with these causes and why you decided to engage with these issues at a deeper level?
Jamal Burns: Yeah, I definitely can. I think for me, it begins with understanding that we live in a system of inequity and that comes from my upbringing of identifying as low income. I've lived below the poverty line my entire life. So it was something that I didn't really think about consciously because when everyone around you exists in the same state like you believe that state is normal.
But kind of when I started to get exposed to individuals from different areas of society. So around high school and things of that nature, I began to notice that there were larger discrepancies that hinder certain populations from achieving. And for me that looked like the form of education. So a lot of the work that I have done has been related to education and, yeah so that's where I kind of started with that.
Katherine Li: So I guess in a general sense, then, what motivates you to make an impact? Like, getting down to the specific feelings that you have?
Jamal Burns: Oh, that's a good question. I think the foremost emotion that I have is urgency, right, it's the acknowledgement that the world that we live in is vastly changing and could end very soon with the kind of direction that we're moving. And with that, it's kind of like how do I make society better for the lived in the now? And I don't really think in terms of futurism. So a lot of people will say, for my kids or for my grandkids. Like, I don't really think in terms like that just because I think that negates the fact that there are lived populations currently who rely on certain material existences, that rely on kind of the work that needs to be done in the here and now. Like we can't just always think of futuristic terms because then the goal is almost always in sight, but never reached.
So that's one of the emotions that I feel the most. The other is probably empathy and sympathy and compassion. It’s this understanding that where I'm coming from, as an individual, the privileges and the disadvantages that I have, the oppressions that I hold and just kind of working in that framework of empathy and understanding, working alongside people rather than for people.
Katherine Li: Yeah, just a quick comment when you were talking about that sense of urgency. It made me think of a lot of the way that people frame the climate crisis. A lot of the time, the main motivations for people to care about this is because of future generations. But like you said, it's important to realize that the climate crisis and the issues that come along with it are affecting people right now in this day and age. So definitely, I thought that was a great point that you brought up.
Georgie Stammer: So in a broader sense, just in terms of like activism in general, from your perspective, what makes a movement? And what do you think inspires a massive ignition in the momentum of a movement like we saw this summer with Black Lives Matter?
Jamal Burns: That is a great question. I think historically, this is where I think my actual sort of discipline comes in is that a movement is sustained, the movement is organized. And I think that's something that we've seen a lot in recent years, especially Black Lives Matter, is this kind of recurring movement and it has kind of ebbs and flows and it's an intermittent thing. Because individuals come in and they have all of this energy after the result of, let's say, a murder. Most of the time by the police. And that's great and it's not to delegitimize that as not being a legitimate movement, but I think it's to say that, that form of movement is relatively new right, it's propagated by the social media ignition and the social media kind of world that we live in where in the past, people had to organize for months to do a march. Right. And I think that's what we're missing is that grounded sense of organization.
And it doesn't need to be through bureaucratic lenses. I'm not saying we need to go through bureaucracy, but I'm saying that in order for something to be truly sustained and truly a mass movement, it has to be something that results in change and something that is sustained. And right now, a lot of the Black Lives Matter instances that we saw over the summer--they resulted in very, very micro level changes in policy, but nothing to a larger scale. And maybe that's just me, because I have a large imagination that I want things to be changed radically, but it is a start. And I think that it has the potential to be like something even a lot larger than it is.
Katherine Li: So when you were talking about sustaining a movement, and thinking back to the massive ignition of momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement that we saw in the summer. I saw a lot of non-black people who weren't affected by racial injustice issues on social media. Maybe they were actively engaged in the movement at the beginning, maybe because they felt things like sadness or anger or fear, or other emotions, but a lot of those times those emotions don't last especially when you're not someone who is personally affected by those issues. And so with this in mind, what would you like to say to those individuals who aren't personally affected by an issue to get them to, you know, keep that movement sustained and get them to keep doing the work?
Jamal Burns: That's really great. I like the way you frame that because you framed it around individuals having energy based off of the temporality of emotions. And so I think that the first thing that I would say based on that construct of your framing is to say that although your emotions around this issue may be temporary, the conditions in which your emotions were born are permanent and have been permitted, have been substantiated by historical evidence. And so that's the first thing is to say, like, you know, you may have this temporary emotion and feeling, but so reason you have the emotion is and has been a permanent part of American existence.
The second thing is to say that recognizing your own privilege is kind of a complicated process. So it's to understand that unlearning and decolonizing the kind of knowledge base that you have is a lifelong process. It is not something that is temporary and just happens in an on off switch. And it may be jarring to look at the world that you've grown up in and that you've seen as kind of this ideal society and they have that kind of shifted. So it doesn't need to be a process that is, you know, overnight you go from a conservative to like an abolitionist, but I think just the process of unlearning being a permanent process or a lifelong process goes to show that these issues and movements need to be sustained because your learning and your unlearning needs to also be a sustainable thing so it doesn't have to all happen all at once. So, and then for the people who just kind of did it for the summer did it for the clicks are, you know, I don't know how to reach those people yet, but it's something that definitely is disheartening for me.
Georgie Stammer: And I guess just to directly bounce off of that, what is your perspective on digital activism and the rise of like performative activism? Especially like you were just talking about with Black Lives Matter. Do you think that it is better than doing nothing, or does it actually do harm?
Jamal Burns: That's a good question. I think it depends. I definitely don't think that it is net negative. I think that it kind of paints this picture of the society that we're talking about, like this very hyper capitalistic society because it goes to show that people do things for an end, right. They use activism as a means to an end to climb up the social ladder or to be relevant in a social group and things of that nature. And that is ultimately... I changed my mind, that is net negative. Because that goes to show that they're perpetuating a system in which they're critiquing only to, kind of exist within it for, like, you know what I'm saying, like they are
perpetuating a system they're critiquing if they're only doing it for performance. And that's a problem for sure.
But they think that doing nothing is even more of a problem because if you do absolutely nothing, like you're not even engaging, you're not even acknowledging anything? At least people who do performative activism, like I'm convinced that they believe a little bit of the performativity that they're kind of giving off right.
I don't know if that answers your question. But like both are kind of bad.
In digital activism... digital activism is something I would put in a separate category than performative activism because the internet is a wonderful tool for connecting people and for disseminating knowledge, but also what angers me the most about digital activism (and then I'll say a positive thing) is people usually only share information in their microcosmic circles. So people who will already have access to similar levels of information. And that's a problem. And that's kind of an inherent issue with social media. If something doesn't go incredibly viral then you're just retweeting a post that all of your friends have already seen. So it's like, how are you engaging with individuals who may not have the same knowledge base or access to information as you?
The second thing is that that same level of access that I'm kind of critiquing, it's becoming more widely available for individuals and that's great. So I think digital activism has its pros and has its cons, but I want to urge people to go kind of outside of that digital bubble to engage meaningfully with communities.
Katherine Li: Kind of moving on to a different topic… but kind of related. When we go on social media, it's really easy to, you know, “doom scrolI”. I don't know if you've ever done that, but I definitely have. It is when you see bad news after bad news, you uncover all of these systemic injustices, and you're learning so much about how the world is like...horrible. And that can have an impact on mental health and wellness. So can you speak a little bit about taking care of your own mental health and wellness while being an activist?
Jamal Burns: 100% my favorite quote, literally, I say this quote probably once a day, it’s by Audrey Lorde, and it says that “self care is not indulgence. It is a form of preservation and that is an act of political warfare”.
And when I think about that quote, it really goes to show that our bodies have been politicized in such a way to kind of inculcate this idea of work, work, work, work, work. Don't stop, continue to uncover, and then exhaust us. And the capitalist machine wants us to be exhausted. So when we take the moment to step back and say, “I acknowledged for now my capacity is at a certain level. And so maybe I won't doom scroll today”, or maybe “I won't engage in this meeting” or something like that. That's not disengaging from the realities that exist. It's acknowledging that those realities have an effect on you. And it's acknowledging that those realities will continue to have an effect on others around you.
Like when I think about activism, rest has to be a fundamental part of activism. That's a part of sustainability right? It's to take a step back, and when I say take a step back, I mean, more of a physical, emotional action. It doesn't mean the movement is taking a step back or anything like that.
It's hard because a lot of the “activism” we've seen as college students has been on a university level. And those are hyper capitalistic spaces that only focus on movement forward, right, and we know that movement isn't a linear process, and history is not a linear process, so activism and rest cannot be linear processes, either.
Georgie Stammer: So moving on from that, focusing especially on this year. How has the pandemic specifically affected your activism?
Jamal Burns: That's a good question. I've been exhausted by the pandemic. It's definitely increased my own personal anxiety. So the logical answer to that question is, first, like of course everything moved to online virtual platforms. So a lot of my activism kind of… I guess it had to transition to a form that I wasn't familiar with entirely. So it's Zoom, it’s this.
So it's been less, I think less effective. And it's hard for me to say that, as someone who wants all of my work to be relevant or everything that I do to be relevant.
But there have been less people coming to things. There's been less opportunity to connect with people. Because if people have Internet or housing insecurity, like they're not going to get on a zoom call and talk about these things in that format. So you're limiting the scope of people you can work with.
So it's been limiting and it's been less effective. But I'm still trying to find my way around these things.
Katherine Li : Last question for you to close this interview off. This is something that we're asking all of our interviewees. What does activism mean to you?
Jamal Burns: That's a good question. I think activism… And I actually I'm really, really happy you asked that question because I think oftentimes people create an exclusive movement out of activism.
They say, “Oh, me and my activist friends” or “me and the activists are getting together”, and I've heard these terms before, and that's why I'm so hesitant to call myself an activist because I don't want to be associated with an exclusive label. So for me, activism means inclusivity, and it means understanding the ways that your personal identity can welcome people in and draw people away, you know, and so it's really reflective, inclusive, and it's having a desire to change.
It's not necessarily change all together because we know that these processes are slow. And a lot of the things that are initiated today can happen for generations to come. And that's why I think the argument of futurism always comes in, because it's really hard to see your work being materialized in the contemporary moment. But I will say it's inclusive, it's reflective, and it's having a desire to change.
Katherine Li: I love that. Thank you.
KATHERINE: Operation Climate listeners, we know that you care about a lot of things, and you want to make the world a better place. We encourage you to examine your activism journey, the thoughts and feelings that come along with it, and think about how you can help sustain the movements that you care about.
GEORGIE: Whether that is educating yourself and the people around you, organizing, protesting, or taking time to rest and recharge, it’s always important to remember why you want to engage in activism in the first place. Like Jamal described, the emotions that you have surrounding a cause may be fleeting, but the reason you had those emotions is a fundamental part of your identity that can’t easily be changed.
KATHERINE: Looking to the climate movement, we need everyone’s energy and support now more than ever. How will you make a difference?
GEORGIE: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Operation Climate. Make sure to subscribe to stay updated about future episodes. For more information on who we are, what we’re doing, and a full transcript of this episode, visit our website at bit.ly/operationclimatepodcast to learn more.