#thisisimportanttome

THEM: Fascinating. FuckNoSocialJusticeWarriors.tumblr.com curates "the best (worst?)…idiocy of…social justice warriors."

HER: well. in the opinion of two anonymous teenagers.

ME: I have a lot of faith, or at least a strong interest, in listening to the opinions of "anonymous" teenagers when it comes to perceiving and critiquing Internet culture.

HER: on the other hand, it can be very ... lacking in perspective when discussing social justice, which is not something you can really encapsulate in a meme.

THEM: Quite the contrary. It's a very valuable perspective. Also, I'm going to cut you off here because I hear enough devaluing of youth's perspectives in other places, and I have no desire to see it on my Facebook wall, too.

HER: that's a very valid point, and I certainly concede it.

ME: FWIW, I started educating myself about/involving myself in social justice politics, theory, and activism when I was 15. I had a little bit of guidance from some thoughtful adults in my life but, by and large, I learned through conversations with my peers and resources on the Internet.

I'll be honest: While understanding oppression culture is, of course, a life-long project for anyone who's genuinely invested in it, I don't think anything I've learned about it in the past 10 years holds a candle to the intellectual and personal work I was doing around it as a teenager.

Over time, I've come to more detailed articulations of concepts I originally explored then, but that will happen to anything you think about for a long time. And because social justice aims to address questions of oppression as it exists in the world *right now*, I suspect I had a better, clearer, more cutting-edge perspective on social justice at 20 than I could ever hope for at 31. Meanwhile, a great deal of my adult social justice "education" has revolved less around digging deep into challenging concepts and more around keeping up on the most fashionable jargon and Media-Event du Jour, so I can flag to others in the social justice scene that I'm part of the in-group.

Let's not kid ourselves. Authentic social justice isn't complicated. It's simply the process of learning how to treat other humans, all of them (including ourselves), like humans. Some people are naturally talented at this and don't need a political philosophy to understand how to do right by the people in their world. Others of us need more help, and studying social justice theory can be great for that. But it's not some kind of arcane or technical discipline that requires years of hard work under educated gurus to understand. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

In short: If you think social justice is complicated in some way such that teenagers can't come to a meaningful understanding of it using the Internet, then I think you probably misunderstand social justice, teenagers, and/or the Internet.