On Civil Discourse

What is civil discourse? It’s a term I’ve heard over and over again, though I’d never really understood why. And so, at the age of thirteen, I decided to find out what all the fuss was about. And as an eighth grade civil discourse novice, I turned to a method old and reliable: peaceful protest. After all, what is peaceful protest but civil discourse’s twin sister — a word for word synonym! And so I headed out, sign in hand, to the Women’s March. At first, I was elated. This was it! I was finally out, marching, and protesting for… what was I protesting for? Theoretically, this was an opportunity for women to come together and show their support for each other. But standing there in Cesar Chavez Plaza, named for the man who embodied the legacy of civil discourse in California, I didn’t feel like I was supporting, nor being supported. I was lost in a sea of cat-ear hats and selfie sticks. Everywhere I looked I saw photos snapped and posted on the spot, racking up thousands of likes and reposts and “OMG, you are so inspiring!”s. This didn’t feel like the civil discourse I’d signed up for. It felt like a performance marketed as activism, something that a multitude of companies could safely sponsor to bolster their brand without engaging the issues we were supposed to be fighting for.

So as I entered high school, I was still chasing what civil discourse meant to me. And at first, again, I felt comforted by the people surrounding me. The schoolwide recognitions broadcasted every month instilled me with a sense of awe. After all, it’s not every day you meet a teenager who started their very own nonprofit! Turns out, at least in my Silicon Valley school, you do. And while there’s a number of people who are passionate about what they create, more often than not, these “charities” serve one main purpose. Wait for it… getting into college! Say what you will about linear algebra, but college applications really do prepare you for the real world. Because it’s all about marketing. It’s turning your hobbies, your interests, into a brand worth investing in. It’s about finding a gimmick that sets you apart from the rest of the commonfolk with their diminutive 4.8 GPAs and positively measly seven extracurriculars. Words of a bitter high school junior? Perhaps. Which may be why I found myself in a state of shock upon reading a NBC article about a student who wrote #BlackLivesMatter on his college application one hundred times in lieu of an essay. I was shocked. Who was this quiet revolutionary who didn’t care about what Stanford thought of him? Upon further investigation, I discovered him to be a newly committed (and very much non-Black) Yale student… with his very own nonprofit, consulting with corporations about how to best market their products to “Generation Z” (read: young folk willing to overlook a little bit of child labor in Indonesia for a T-shirt that says “Love is Love”). Either way, the large part of the nonprofits I saw weren’t pushing for change as I saw it. Because when you create a passion for the purposes of attracting an institution, you are pushing nothing except a comfortable but seemingly progressive furthering of the status quo. And that wasn’t the civil discourse I wanted, either.

And so, leaving my first years of high school thoroughly disillusioned, I dove into advocacy. Policy drafting, bill backgrounders, even travelling to Washington D.C. to push what we believed in. And now would be the perfect time to bring up the oft-referenced Constitution, our national protector of civil discourse—the right to protest. But quite frankly, the more I worked with the passionate people I am privileged enough to work with, the less faith I had in the Constitution. And as I led a voting awareness campaign, I couldn’t help but realize that the electoral system touted by our Constitution meant a large part of my community wasn’t being heard: that Black and Latine voters were being systematically disenfranchised and that the popular vote had less weight than a few academics. How could I stand up and say Your Vote Counts when I found that it very often does not? How could I say that we all had to unquestioningly stand behind a document that once claimed that African-Americans were ⅗ of a person? What I realized, irrevocably, is that I can’t stand behind anything unquestioningly. Because questioning, criticizing, creating discourse — that’s how change happens.

Civil discourse Isn’t a brand. It isn’t an animal-shaped hat you put on. And it’s not a pretty nonprofit that looks good on your college application.

So what is civil discourse to me? It’s saying things that are hard, but that you believe in. It’s being uncomfortable in new spaces, but letting that feeling settle because you know what you are doing is right. It’s knowing that saying what you’re saying won’t be accepted by all, but at the very least, it’ll start a conversation. Because that’s all you can hope for. And though it seems a thankless task, living to see that one that one instant where what you say is heard? It is — civil discourse is — above all, worth it.