I’ve got a beef with Awareness Days. A big one – it’s ever-present and ever-growing. It’s an elephant in my room that needs to be let out.
It’s one of those blights where once you see it, it can’t be unseen.
But first, let me just say that I have supported Awareness Days before. I have posted about SMA Awareness Month on this blog (which you can read here). When I look back over that post, I know I’ve grown in who I am and would not write about my disability in that way again. That post had a definite purpose at least. The access to medical therapies and treatments for SMA is a distressing and classist issue. It is one that I will re-visit in future, but not here. Past Me at least had the foresight to post what meant something to me, that tied back to lived experience, and raised issues for my community that are real and ongoing. And therein lies the issue.
Some of my changed thinking about Awareness Days came from reading Carly Findlay’s Say Hello (my review here). My thinking also changed when I noticed how performative “raising awareness” can be. What I want to focus on in this post are organisations and businesses, the ones who “support”.
More and more of these Awareness Days and Awareness Months are popping up and its nice to be seen. But, how these types of days benefit the communities they are intended to support? Further, and the thing I want to target here – if you are a business or an organisation that acknowledges and posts about a particular day on your social media – what are YOU doing for that community to better them, make them more visible, to understand them as people in their own right? How are you amplifying the voices and doing the work to create lasting change? You say it’s about inclusion, do you?
When was the last time you ever interrogated what you mean when you say that you want an inclusive world?
Yeah, I know its cool to say you’re inclusive now. But does inclusion exist in a vacuum? If I heart react enough of these posts where you post a symbol or a logo and tell me how committed you are, are you doing anything for that community? Am I becoming more aware of your work in this space and how my actions could be used to create change?
We all want to be inclusive, unless you want to be portrayed as someone unsympathetic. Being inclusive is supposedly pre-requisite for being a decent human, you’re not meant to applaud yourself for that. I’m sick and tired of hearing about your commitment to inclusion. Unless you’re doing the work and involving the target population in the conversation, then your commitment to inclusion is hollow.
How do you know you’re not just play-acting at inclusion?
Next time you plan to post about an Awareness Day to get a few likes and a few follows for The Gram, ask yourself this, what work are you doing for that cause? Do you have friends in that community? Are you supporting activists from the community? Do you listen and amplify them? Have you taken the time to learn about their issues and needs? Do you make attempts at supporting those communities when you can, whether that’s through learning, financial support or active involvement and participation? If the answer is no to any of these, then I don’t want to see your post clogging up my feed.
Go do the work.
