Justice amateurs

Being in love and making mistakes > being an invulnerable know-it-all

In my 20s, I was on an amateur salsa team. I loved it — the way the choreography exercised my body and my brain, the friendships formed through long hours of rehearsals as we worked to ensure that everyone could perform the routine with confidence, the thrill of performing before an eager crowd. The one downside was the dance world’s clear demarcation between amateurs (who were seen as dancing just for the fun of it), and professionals (those seen as the “real dancers” paid to take dance very seriously). When I hear the word “amateur,” I tend to imagine it on the lips of someone deemed worthy of professional status and compensation, wielded with a smack of elitist condescension to cement this hierarchy of human worth.¹

However, I recently learned from a creator on Instagram that “amateur,” in the original French, doesn’t mean beginner, or even non-professional. It simply means “lover of.” Since then, I have been pondering how this understanding of being an amateur could serve our movements for justice.

Photo by Matthieu Jungfer on Unsplash

Lovers of justice

There are lots of self-styled justice professionals out there. You can find them one-upping one another with woker-than-thou rebuttals in the comments section. They tend to live in their heads to avoid the vulnerability of being an embodied person with Big Feelings. They don’t react well to constructive feedback. They seek celebrity and fortune based on their perceived expertise. With justice professionals, it’s cancel or be canceled.²

We don’t need more status-seeking justice professionals. But we desperately need more justice amateurs.

Justice amateurs are lovers of justice. Justice amateurs are not in this work for the sake of status — in fact, living with courage and integrity often involves sacrificing opportunities for institutional advancement and monetary gain.³ They labor on, with all the risks this work involves, because they are deeply in love with justice.

Now, to be fair, I can fall into justice professional tendencies (and I’m sure I’m not the only one!) This isn’t a binary, or a linear trajectory. Rather, I am curious about the orientation of our aspirations for justice. Is our pursuit of justice lifting us out of patterns of self-preservation? Is it beckoning us toward an ever-expanding sense of community?

What if we were guided by the question: “How can I fall more deeply in love with justice today?”

When I speak of love, I am not referring to a mere feeling. As bell hooks reminds us in All About Love, love is a verb: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

Lovers of justice do justice. Justice amateurs are not content to simply talk about justice, or know things about justice. They must enact justice with their bodies in the context of complex, messy communities.

Approaching justice with this love ethic means having the humility to confess our mistakes and give ourselves the grace to grow, and then treating others with this same graciousness. It means keeping the faith that humans can change, and that if this is so, human-made systems can be changed too.

Lovers of justice are visionary healers. They can, as adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy, “look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.” They embrace practices that slowly but surely bring their inner worlds and outer surroundings into alignment with a hopeful vision of the world that could be.

Lovers of justice nurture what Buddhists call beginner’s mind — an insatiable holy curiosity, an openness to being wrong, a spirit of teachability. (Perhaps this is how we arrived at an understanding of an amateur as a beginner!) This means you don’t need all the answers to get started. The work is keeping your eyes on Justice, trusting her to guide you toward ever-deeper integrity. When you don’t know, and are corrected, receive it as a gift: an opportunity to grow in love.

Loving justice means being more focused on holding onto your humanity than with keeping score. It means keeping your heart warm and soft when the looming numbness of despair threatens to shut everything down. It means exercising fierce vulnerability in the face of ferocious violence.

Finally, lovers of justice remember that each of us is only one person in the extraordinary tapestry of the universe. We each have a unique contribution to make to the world-changing work of justice. Mindful of our humble yet irreplaceable role, we would do well to turn with grateful, loving attention to our ancestors for their wisdom; to the trees for theirs; to our fellow creatures for theirs. We might ask them: How do you stay in love with this aching, beautiful, wounding and wounded world?

Perhaps in the listening is where our work really begins.

Questions for reflection: What if our highest ambition was to be justice amateurs? That is, to wholeheartedly love justice? How might our movements grow and change if we were rooted in this love?

1. It’s important to be clear that I know and have met some lovely pros. This is a characterization of a particular professionalized culture, not of all the individuals in it.

2. Justice professionals are not to be confused with those lovers of justice who are recognized and rewarded because their vantage point is so compelling, their vision of tomorrow so inspiring, and their liberative work so transformative. They’re not platforming themselves so much as platforming the work.

3. Just because this is what happens to people living in alignment with their values, doesn’t mean it should. Justice demands that lovers of justice be able to eat and put a roof over their heads. To put it pragmatically: pay folks for their labor — especially Black women and femmes.