Doing Good for the Wrong Reasons: Performative Activism Ethics

Two years ago my roommate Sarah posted a black square on Instagram for Blackout Tuesday, added three hashtags, and never mentioned racial justice again. Last month she spent her spring break volunteering at a food bank in our hometown, told nobody except the organization itself, and came back with blisters and stories about a woman named Ms. Rodriguez who needed help carrying groceries. The first act looked like activism but meant nothing. The second one actually helped people, even though Sarah never got credit for it.

Watching her taught me that performative activism, doing good things primarily for social approval rather than genuine concern, raises a troubling question: if someone helps others but does it for selfish reasons, does the help still count? I believe the answer splits into two parts. The immediate benefit to people in need remains real and valuable regardless of the volunteer's motives, but performative activism ultimately causes harm by replacing sustained effort with empty gestures and by making social change feel like a trend instead of a responsibility.

I first noticed performative activism during my senior year of high school when everyone suddenly cared about climate change for exactly one week. Our student council organized a beach cleanup that fifty people attended, all of them posting photos with trash bags and captions about saving the ocean. I went too, honestly, because my friend Alex was going and I wanted to hang out. We picked up cigarette butts and plastic bottle caps for two hours on a Saturday morning in March. The beach looked noticeably cleaner when we left. But the next Monday I watched those same classmates throw away aluminum cans instead of recycling them, and by April nobody mentioned the ocean anymore. That week taught me the difference between doing something and performing something. The cleanup itself mattered to that specific beach on that specific day, but it did not represent any real change in how we lived or what we prioritized.

The immediate good that comes from performative activism cannot be dismissed, even when the motives behind it are questionable. When my Introduction to Sociology professor assigned us to volunteer somewhere for five hours, half the class groaned because it interfered with spring break plans. We were doing it for a grade, not because we cared, which seemed like the definition of wrong reasons. I chose a literacy program at the public library where I helped a third-grader named Marcus sound out words in a book about space. He did not care why I was there. He cared that someone sat with him for an hour each week and celebrated when he finished a page by himself. The reading improvement Marcus experienced was not less real because I started volunteering to avoid a bad grade. The meals served at a food bank feed hungry people whether the volunteer truly empathizes with poverty or just wants a good photo. Outcome matters, and in the immediate sense, help is help.

But the long-term consequences of performative activism actively damage the causes it claims to support. Real social change requires boring, unglamorous work repeated over months and years: attending city council meetings, making phone calls, reading policy proposals, having uncomfortable conversations with family members who disagree. Performative activism offers an easier substitute. It lets people feel like they contributed by sharing an infographic or wearing a pin, and that feeling of accomplishment replaces the motivation to do harder things. After I posted about volunteering at the literacy program, three people told me it was inspiring, and I felt a warm rush of pride that had nothing to do with Marcus. That pride was dangerous because it made me feel finished, like I had done enough. I almost skipped my next session because I had already gotten the emotional reward. Performative activism turns causes into performance opportunities, and once you have performed, the urge to actually work diminishes.

Some people argue that performative activism serves as a gateway, that posting about an issue introduces people to it and eventually leads them toward genuine involvement. My hallmate Jordan makes this case whenever we discuss it over late-night pizza in the common room. He insists that his Instagram posts about mental health awareness have started real conversations with people who messaged him privately about their own struggles, and I believe him because I have seen the screenshots. His point has merit in individual cases. Visibility does matter, and some people do transition from performance to practice. But I think this argument gives performative activism too much credit. For every person like Jordan who moves deeper into the work, dozens of others treat the post as the endpoint. They mistake awareness for action and never take the next step. The gateway only works if people walk through it, and most do not.

I still volunteer at the library on Thursday afternoons, though the class ended in December and nobody knows I go except Marcus and the program coordinator. I do not think this makes me morally superior to people who volunteer for credit or recognition. Honestly, I continue partly because I like Marcus and partly because skipping feels worse than going, which are not particularly noble reasons. But I have learned that examining my own motives matters less than examining what I actually do over time. Performative activism fails not because the initial motive is impure but because it encourages people to stop after the performance, to mistake the symbol for the substance. Maybe the real ethical question is not whether we start helping for the wrong reasons but whether we stay long enough for the reasons to stop mattering. I do not have a clean answer, but I know the black squares disappeared from Instagram years ago and the problems they claimed to address remain.

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