Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

by Kelly Hayes

“If we don’t have police,” I’d asked Mariame, “who do we call?” “Who do you think we should call?” she’d asked. “What do you think we should create?”

that we all have a role in imagining and building the world we want to live in.

Possibility is the hope we wear when we charge into battle.

We would argue that every organizer is an activist, but not every activist is an organizer.

Organizing, on the other hand, is a more specific set of practices. It is a craft that requires us to cultivate a variety of skills, such as intentional relationship building and power analysis.

Taking action is a practice of hope.

fear alone doesn’t usually hold people’s attention, let alone inspire them to action.

If the information does not fit their sense of reality, people will often let it go or even forcefully reject it.

“organized abandonment.”

Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling.

If spitting horrifying facts at people changed minds and built movements, we would have overthrown the capitalist system long ago, because the facts have always been on our side.

But I realized … it was not that people didn’t care or didn’t know, but that people were afraid to suffer. It was the refusal or the incapacity to suffer.

and perhaps most dauntingly, the fear that we cannot do any better than this, that our hopes to the contrary are the utopian dreams of childish idealists.

The remedy to alienation, a state that often keeps people cooperative and docile in the face of injustice, is belonging.

You can’t belong if you only take.”13