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Angela Davis says, “radical” means “‘grasping things at the root,’”
the work of changing, imagining, reimagining, building, and rebuilding the world—is on me, too, because it’s on all of us.
“The struggle for freedom and transformation is not a dream. It’s a fire that’s burning in real time. And the blaze is spreading.”
They are always fueling the blaze—not just telling you about the blaze, not just insisting the blaze is necessary, but helping to ignite it themselves and urging you to help gather kindling and imagine strategies to keep it going, to help it spread in generative and life-giving ways, ways that will nourish lush new growing things.
I think that in a world facing ever more-urgent existential threats, growing more radical—going deeper politically, becoming more courageous in both our dreams and our daily practices—will indeed be a necessary condition for life on Earth.
The book is powered by hope. And it draws that hope not from theoretical aspirations but from existing movements that—in spite of all the scary odds—are winning.
Often, they’re about making it possible for a person, or a family, or a community, to survive another day.
“Hope and grief can coexist,”
“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”
organizing is the work of dreaming new worlds into being.
“In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.”2
“you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from / hangs from the heaven you create.”
To understand the past, we must investigate the stories we were not told, because those stories were withheld for a reason. We must search out all the pieces we weren’t meant to find, the things that disrupt the narratives we’ve been given.
Creating connection, potential, and possibility is creative work.
that “the people” were not being sufficiently engaged in “our” struggles.
there was a time in this country when it was presumed that Black women could not be raped. The idea, enforced by police and courts and structural white supremacy and patriarchy, was that Black women were naturally promiscuous and that their bodies were inviolable. In other words, no never meant no for Black and brown women (and some poor white women).
Mutual aid, of which defense committees are good examples, has the power to change our social relationships, to galvanize us into groups and communities that confront specific crises—and then move on to fight much broader battles.
I have learned to take the construction work of organizing as it comes, creating things that I believe have to exist, and working with others to build containers, organizations, and projects that I believe the world needs.
Transformative change happens when we are willing to build the things that we know must exist.
We would argue that every organizer is an activist, but not every activist is an organizer.
“I think of organizers,” Ransby told us, “as people who really are trying to move other people, [and] create collective movement in a very conscious, deliberate and strategic way, informed by a larger social change agenda.”
In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.
grassroots group
Facts are not enough to mobilize people into action.
From the climate crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic to the horrors of the prison-industrial complex, organizers often raise the alarm about present or future catastrophes.
This assumption can sometimes lead activists to become walking, talking encyclopedias of doom.
Our work is full of truths that should be unthinkable—yet, the mere recitation of these facts does not move people into the streets or lead them to join movements.
As organizers, we’re repeatedly disappointed by others’ lack of response to urgent crises. In cases like these, it’s tempting to impose moral binaries—to deem people good or bad based on whether the facts moved them to act.
But not every action, speech, or conversation about climate should be an apocalyptic snapshot, for the same reason that not every protest against police brutality should be a die-in. Death and devastation are only one part of the story organizers are trying to tell. They are an essential part of that story, and people should be moved to appreciate the stakes, but appreciating the stakes is not enough.
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.
To inspire constructive behaviors like these, we must embrace storytelling that centers support and inspiration not just fear.
“We do need to tell stories that evoke emotion,” she says, “and fear is an emotion, but it is not the only emotion available to us. There are many other emotions we can tap into.”
people were afraid to suffer. It was the refusal or the incapacity to suffer.
that acceptance of that discomfort and pain actually reflected the depths of your caring and commitment to life.10
That is the organizer’s unique gift: an invitation to participate in a transformation worth experiencing and fighting for.
Fear—of punishment, of the unknown, of one another—often prevents us from protecting and connecting with each other.
People are capable of generating social mechanisms and relations that foster safety and understanding within communities. People are capable of overcoming, or at least negotiating, difference for the sake of their common interests, especially in moments of crisis.
The state sees communal care as an ideological threat.
From prison-industrial-complex abolitionists organizing to free people from cages to Indigenous people defending their ancestral lands around the world, these battles have powerful lineages.
When we are no longer ruled by a manufactured fear of one another, we experience a form of liberation. It is not a total liberation, as the structures that oppress us are, for now, very much intact, but we experience a kind of unshackling that allows us to begin the process of dismantling individualism—a violent ideology that has siloed us and stifled our collective potential.
We have been taught to imagine that “the alternative” to policing is nothing less than brutal chaos. Then, in addition to building relationships that foster collective power, interdependence, and care, we must educate people about alternative interventions that actually address the needs of people affected by violence, poverty, and climate collapse.
As author and organizer Shane Burley told us, “Solving a problem collectively takes a great deal of faith in others. We have been trained to see our survival in opposition to the community, something we do by putting ourselves and our families first. So it is a big leap to start trusting that collective liberation will actually care for us.”
In order to invest in a new vision, and a new way of living, we have to believe in each other and our capacity to create something better.
Projects and actions that anchor us awaken compassion, enliven our connectedness, reinforce our values, and, when necessary, reorient our political focus.
Effective organizing, therefore, does not begin with having the most compelling argument or the most dazzling direct action, but with developing the capacity to bring people into relationship with one another, such that they might begin to overcome alienation and fear.
Radha Agarwal writes that belonging is “a feeling of deep relatedness and acceptance; a feeling of ‘I would rather be here than anywhere else.’”
Belonging is about shared values and responsibility, and the desire to participate in making your community better. It’s about taking pride, showing up, and offering your unique gifts to others. You can’t belong if you only take.”
The social life support system that Cosby described also involved the cultivation of joy as a form of sustenance and a means of rebellion. To lift each other’s spirits and imbue life with a more joyous energy, some of the people Cosby was imprisoned with would sing until they got in trouble—and then keep singing.
These practices of cultivating hope and joy as a matter of survival, under extremely oppressive conditions, are instructive in these times. We must throw our energy into building active relationships with other people whom we refuse to abandon and who refuse to abandon us. To resist the erosion of empathy, we must invite people to participate in acts of care, defense, aid, and rescue. We must normalize acts of mutual aid amid the everyday crisis of capitalism and build these mechanisms into our organizing work at the ground level.
When people fail to act against these forces, or fail to even denounce them, our frustration is valid. People should be moved by injustice, and they should take action.
