The Personal is Political

Summer is a time for reflection. A moment to consider who we are and how we have changed after experiencing the fever dream that is a Middlebury semester. For me, this meant taking a hard look in the mirror and coming to the conclusion that I’m not too happy with some of the choices I’ve made and patterns I’ve fostered over the last half year.

It goes without saying that last semester was a difficult one for many on Middlebury’s campus. We struggled with the untimely death of a peer and the invisible pain of countless others. We grappled with the challenge of achieving “success” at an elite college and, more, having to define that term for ourselves.

I was dangerously sleep-deprived, valued my friendships less than their worth and forgot to live in the present. What’s worse, I felt weak and ashamed for struggling with my sense of self. I felt as if spending time on “personal” issues of balance and body was somehow selfish, a product of first-world privilege.

Who am I to worry about the correct pro- portion of schoolwork time to socializing time when people in our world’s poorest countries are being displaced as a result of climate change and Syrian children are washing up on shores dead due to violence and a global shortage of compassion?

I believed that you could either care about the internal world or the external one. I chose the latter, spending my time writing about environmental injustice and immigrant rights and advocating for Middlebury to divest from fossil fuels. History, let alone our present society, confirmed my assumption.

The 1960’s countercultural movement was divided into two camps. While the politically oriented “New Left” marched in opposition to the Vietnam War, the “New Communalists,” who held no trust in the power of political activism for social change, fled to the countryside to create self-sufficient communities, believing a truly egalitarian society could only manifest itself through a collective transformation of consciousness.

And more recently, in 2008, environmental activist Van Jones bemoaned the environmental community’s inability to unite as a single movement, writing, “Leaders from impoverished areas like Oakland, California, tended to focus on three areas: social jus- tice, political solutions and social change,” while those “from more affluent places like Marin County (just north of San Francisco), San Francisco and Silicon Valley had what seemed to be the opposite approach,” focusing more on “ecology, business solutions and ‘inner change.’”

My hyper-political beliefs are undoubtedly influenced by the fact that I did indeed grow up in that mecca of political activism, Oakland, CA. But it wasn’t until I returned there for a brief hiatus at the end of summer and reflected more intensely on how I want to approach this new semester that my blindly political beliefs changed, or rather morphed into something more true to their core.

Almost subconsciously I began repeating the mantra, “The Personal is Political,” a phrase I likely picked up from a feminist documentary but never understood beyond a basic level. I did some research and discovered the phrase was first used in the title of a 1969 essay by radical feminist Carol Hanisch.

In the essay, Hanisch addresses criticism of “consciousness raising groups.” These were discussion groups that popped up around the country in the late 1960s for women to share their personal, and otherwise unheard, experiences in patriarchal society. They discussed issues such as workplace discrimination, housework, the family and abortion, issues with political dimensions that had been previously been ignored by the dominant New Left groups of the early 1960s. Opponents, mainly women who considered themselves “more political,” considered “consciousness raising discussions” to be nothing but meaningless “therapy” and “personal” work. Hanisch sought to dispel this notion, instead asserting that “consciousness raising discussions” were themselves a form of political action that united women to fight male supremacy as a movement, rather than blaming individual women for their oppression.

A year before the publication of her essay, Hanisch put the sentiment of “consciousness raising discussions” into practice by protesting the Miss America pageant. She argued that women are oppressed by impossible standards of female beauty, including the contestants. Though Hanisch’s Miss America protest had some strategic flaws, the concept – that the personal truly is political – is powerful, and one which I propose we adopt and sustain throughout the year.

As I advocate for President Patton and the Board of Trustees to divest our endowment from fossil fuels, I will work hard to see the ways in which the fossil fuel industry not only exploits the environment of low-income communities and people of color, but also creates a toxic political culture that holds politicians captive to the fossil fuel industry for campaign donations and distracts those politicians’ from building local renewable energy sources. This energy could fuel a new environmentally sustainable, just economy with the capacity to better support my neighbors.