People say you’re wearing rose-colored glasses if you see the world as fine and dandy just as it is. The rose lenses create a pleasant blur. This could mean that you see beauty even in ugliness, but it also implies that the glasses help you ignore bad stuff rather than face it.
I do see a lot of good in the world, but my glasses, the red-lens activist model, don’t show a pleasant blur. Quite the contrary, they show everything in terms of the struggle for justice on the planet. Oppression and injustice show up in sharp detail, making me see not rose but angry red.
The red lenses do not make me feel safe and cozy. Still looking at the phone, I think: who can track my whereabouts? Who knows all my contacts and appointments? The fact that ever since traveling to Standing Rock in North Dakota, my phone has a peculiar bug that shuts it down completely and even the phone company doesn’t recognize it, does little to quell this uneasiness. And why should it? We know that reasons for paranoia are real. Exactly how extensive, how risky and what if anything to do about them, are a special area of anxiety for activists. We know we are targeted; yet even writing these words brings up voices that tell me I am paranoid, aka crazy.
My red glasses count and keep track of all kinds of things–how many women and people of color and other oppressed folk are in the room or at the table. Who gets to talk and who gets to lead and who does what. . And they see not only oppression but internalized oppression–that’s how sharp they are.
They Which I can’t help turning upon the most mundane elements of my daily life. For instance, the “smart” phone, which dominant culture has obliged me to acquire. Like it or no, my red glasses become X-ray lenses, causing me to see into its interior and wonder about the resources that went into it, the people who made it, all the different processes–design, extraction, design, assembly, transport, administration, mailing… My red glasses show me all these things and make me wonder: Did those folks have decent working conditions and pay? Workplace safety? Were the metals and other elements in it from conflict areas? Were the profits from their extraction used to fuel civil wars? Are any of these materials toxic? Do they give off radiation? How much CO2 was emitted in making this little object? Sometimes I think I see the fingerprints, and feel the energy, of each person who touched some element of this phone.
Can I take off my activist glasses? That’s not quite like asking if a person can stop being a woman or have time off from the consequences of being African American. The most I can do is try to relax, which may or may not be the same as spraying on a light veneer of denial in order to counteract the excessive acuity of my red glasses.
But the truth is that these glasses, like the rest of my Activist Identity, are real and permanent. It’s conventional wisdom that you start out idealist when you’re young and then you get jaded. LLZ and stop seeing what goes on in the world as you set your nose to the grindstone. It is harder to see far and wide when your nose is up against that daily grindstone–one of the many advantages to the ruling class of keeping this grindstone grinding.
But the truth is, it is better to see through these glasses if they help see the truth. They are better than the filters and blinders we are forced to wear to keep plugging along in a system of such inequality. These red glasses don’t guarantee it, but that is their purpose. As far as I can see, my red glasses are on for good.