[Wash Times] Protests over police shootings of black men. Outrage over gender bias in business and government. Panic over melting ice caps and rising sea levels. Demonstrations against the "1 percent."
Racism. Sexism. Environmentalism. Classism. What's a social justice warrior to do? Protest without end, apparently.
D'Artagnan Scorza, executive director and founder of the Los Angeles-based Social Justice Learning Institute, says the social justice movement aims to uplift different groups who have been staggered and stymied by the weight of historical prejudices, oppression, exclusion and other transgressions.
"Social justice is an umbrella that encompasses a deeper desire for individuals and communities to see injustices made right," Mr. Scorza says. "That's really the goal."
Yet the concrete, ultimate goals of the social justice movement often go unheard amid the noise and the furor of the protest of the moment, be it a rally for a new minimum wage law, calls for single-payer universal health care or demands that police release body-camera video footage of the latest shooting of an African-American.
Those goals appear as varied as the progressive factions that compose the social justice movement -- often unrelated, sometimes redundant and occasionally competitive. Societal change so profound that no single policy or set of policies could address or deliver seems to be movement's endpoint, and success a distant speck of possibility on a far-off horizon. |