Kat from “10 Things I Hate About You” is a rabid feminist until she’s cured by getting a boyfriend. Topanga’s feminism on “Boy Meets World” was often a punch line. On “Saved by the Bell,” Jessie Spano was relentlessly mocked for calling out Slater’s chauvinism. It was a running gag for the entire series.

There was always reverence for “real” activists, of course — the heroes of the civil rights movement, the suffragists, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk — people who had lived and died and won great battles before we were born. But social justice activism as a continuum, a mantle to take up, a moral obligation (particularly for those of us born into comfort and power) was harder to see. Contemporary activists were human hacky sacks with suspect motives or imperfect methods or any other number of manufactured excuses as to why they weren’t legitimate, weren’t the same as our parents marching to end segregation on the same streets a couple of decades before.

This artificial divide between past and present is a tactic I recognize now. The modern right loves to quote the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a “real” activist, while deriding Black Lives Matter. Conservatives claim to support social justice in the abstract but hate “social justice warriors.” They’re all for freedom and equality, they say, but sneer at the mechanisms that might actually help get us there as bleeding-heart pandering to the dreaded “politically correct.”

I did not go to the W.T.O. protest partly because my mom told me I couldn’t and partly because I didn’t understand it, but primarily because I’d been taught that when ordinary people, especially young people, try to do activism, they look stupid.

But things are different now.

One recent afternoon, my stepdaughter, who is neither mediocre nor white, paused while passing through the living room and asked, “Are you guys busy tomorrow night?”

“Probably,” my husband said. “Why?”

“Oh, you know how I’m in the Art of Resistance and Resilience Club? We’re finally unveiling our Black Panthers mural. Bobby Seale is going to be there, and I’m giving a speech. Well, actually, it’s more of a poem. You guys can come if you want to.” Shrug, bye.

We canceled our plans.

The mural is spectacular, at the intersection of the two major roads that carry drivers from fully gentrified central Seattle to quickly gentrifying south Seattle. Images of Black Panthers distributing food and registering black voters stretch 40 feet along the sidewalk outside the high school, which is 93 percent kids of color.