Get Yer Kumbaya-yas Out

Whenever someone asks me what led me to become a nonprofit lawyer and professor of social enterprise, my mind inevitably wanders back to the halcyon days of my childhood, when idealistic young teachers would gather us kids in a circle to bring justice the world by singing Kumbaya. In fact, I still remember what I was thinking in those times of song and earnest meditation:

"This is %@*!?! stupid."

Turns out I was far from alone. Although Kumbaya had been an anthem for a generation seeking social change, for many kids my age, the song became a punchline -- shorthand for the naive pretense of virtue that we'd come to associate with our Baby Boomer overseers.

And herein lies the tale of how Kumbaya helped change my life. It soon became apparent that the problem lay not with the song itself, but in the people singing it.

Kumbaya, we learned, had its roots in an old spiritual sung by the descendants of slaves who themselves had suffered gross economic injustice. The song's variety in repetition grew out of the rhythm of their working life, as they sang in hope and despair through hour after hour of soul-numbing manual labor.

We, on the other hand, were a bunch of middle-class kids who, after singing about other people's unjust suffering, played dodgeball and ate Snack Packs.

Which brings me to the perspective that will no doubt shape many of the posts you'll see coming from my virtual pen. Although social enterprise has more or less moved beyond ersatz hippie singalongs, it is nonetheless a movement plagued by a fundamental lack of self-awareness. Glib solutions, easy virtue and a self-serving appropriation of other people's pain remain as much problems today as they were in the 1960s. If we're not careful, the sacrosanct shibboleths of sustainability, world-changing and, yes, social enterprise will themselves be fodder for ridicule when the wide-eyed kids we teach today eventually grow up.

Photo Credit: John-Morgan