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

by Kelly Hayes

A person who has attempted nothing can easily point to the fact that they have never failed, but what have they built? What have they healed?

As an organizer, you do not owe political hobbyists your time and energy. This does not mean you should brush off input, but it does mean that you should take uninformed critiques with a grain of salt

It’s easy to dismiss any given injustice as “nothing new,” because there is always a parallel to highlight in this country’s bloody history.

As organizers, when we find ourselves correcting people’s ignorance, we should ask ourselves what we are inviting those people to do. What are we directing them toward? What do we ultimately want from them? And are our words in line with those goals?

Do your words and actions lend themselves to the creation of that outcome?

What power do you possess, and how are you leveraging that power in relation to the issue at hand?

Grief work, healing work, and conflict resolution have always been important to our movements,

A strong organizing community is more than a labor force for social justice. It is an ecosystem of care, learning, relationship building, and action.

When we organize people, we are inviting them to relate to others.

Over time, support for the 2020 protests predictably dissipated. It was a presidential election year, and fears that the protests would help fuel a Trump victory led some liberals to insist that the protests should cease entirely.

If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because “violence” is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo.

When state actors refer to “peace,” they are really talking about order. And when they refer to “peaceful protest,” they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state.

The more uncooperative you are, the more you will be accused of aggression and violence.

Protesters are expected to absorb violence but never inflict it—to function as shock absorbers to be acted upon, whose sympathetic value is nullified by any deviation from that standard.

activists are now taking precautions usually reserved for protests—such as writing their lawyers’ phone numbers on their bodies and wearing glasses instead of contacts, in case of pepper spray—“when we go to poll monitor or even to vote,” due to escalating police harassment and right-wing interference.

the antibail provision of the law “is reminiscent of the detention without charge policies that characterize dictatorships around the world and regimes like the former apartheid system in South Africa.”

The fact that these laws draw on national security legislation created in the wake of 9/11 is illustrative of two important facts: laws that supposedly target “terrorists” will always be used to target activists,

if] you were stopped with red, white, green, and black paint that you would just claim you were painting watermelons instead. So then watermelons became a symbol of resistance.”

With society on the brink of full-blown fascism, many of us worried that a lack of memorialization played into a larger erosion of empathy that would ultimately empower fascists.

“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair,”

We also know this: hope and grief can coexist, and if we wish to transform the world, we must learn to hold and to process both simultaneously. That process will, as ever, involve reaching for community. In

Grief is painful, but when we process our grief in community, we are less likely to slip into despair.

“There has to be hope. There has to be hope. There has to be some light ahead that we can follow.”

“The fact that they could have done scans much earlier, but they didn’t, probably because I was uninsured at the time—that just made me so mad,” she told us. Changa also knows too well that medical racism may have played a role in her delayed diagnosis, as the concerns of Black women are often written off or dismissed by doctors. She wrestles with that outrage as well.

also struggled with acknowledging and accepting her physical limitations. She understands that coming to terms with those limitations is part of “grieving the person who I thought I was on track to be.”

“Becoming aware of grief gives us more choices about how to respond to grief and opens up possibilities to approach grief not only with compassion for self and others, but also with joy. Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference.”

In Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower, characters who had previously been deprived of the opportunity to memorialize lost loved ones buried acorns together, to lay their memories to rest and create new life in their honor.

How does your community practice hope and grief in collectivity? Are such efforts planned intentionally? Has your group created any space, physical or otherwise, for people to process their hope or grief about the pandemic? One exercise that might allow for the practice of hope and grief simultaneously might be the creation of a memorial time capsule.

Not everyone we work with on a particular issue has to have deep ideological alignment with us. A skilled organizer should be able to work with people who aren’t of their own choosing, including people they don’t like.

Once the attack begins, there are two sides: armed police inflicting violence and everyone else. We need to be able to see each other in those terms, reeling in the face of unthinkable violence, scrambling to stay alive and uncaged, and doing the work to protect one another.…

For organizers, burnout is a stubborn enemy. In our struggles for justice, people’s lives and liberty are forever at stake, and the urgency of our movements can become all-consuming.

“Burnout usually means I went way past my boundaries, or I deeply believed I wasn’t good enough unless I did more than I could do.”

People experiencing burnout may feel unappreciated, betrayed, exploited, blamed, or as though they no longer belong, in addition to feeling physically and emotionally depleted.

Too often, burnout marks the end of an organizer’s work, as many depart our movements resentful...

The two of us have learned that care must be a community practice and, further, that our personal care practices may require discipline.

make space for rest, learning, and joy,

“I wish that people would have been more staunch in reminding me that I get to prioritize myself at times, that I get to center myself in my own well-being, in addition to everything that I can give to the movement.”

feel like I wore this work as an identity for a long time, and it was the thing that I was, and stepping outside of that meant that I wasn’t supporting my people or supporting the Earth, that I wasn’t doing my job for humanity when I was capable and had gifts that would support this movement and support our people.”

feelings of guilt and obligation that Lungo described are common among heavily engaged...

“I should have taken more opportunities to learn, to find a mentor, and indulge in learning things that weren’t necessarily in service of the movement—skills or crafts that I found interesting, but didn’t take time for, because I told myself I needed to give 100 percent to my work.”

I should have given myself permission to love myself by saying no to things.”

Most communities have stalwart organizers who will work through the night to make sure an important event happens or that a deadline gets met. The personal sacrifices of those organizers are rarely acknowledged, just as their labor is generally assumed rather than supported or reinforced.

termed “hyper-accountability,”2 where, in addition to performing a disproportionate amount of labor for a cause, a person (usually a marginalized person) is expected to respond immediately and flawlessly to any and all claims that their work or behavior is somehow lacking or problematic.

experienced a profound level of burnout and faced a reckoning: Was she truly disposable, or was she deserving of care, healing, and recovery? After years of self-neglect, Lungo chose to heal.

“I gave myself permission to go to therapy, to get massages and other treatments that support my body, to sleep in hotel beds instead of [on] couches, and to not feel bad about not going to every march or rally,” she said.

We must understand that “surges” cannot structure our whole organizing lives. For the most part, transformation is slow work, and as such, we must find ways to sustain it for the long haul.

a “thirst for something big or monumental” that would “move and shake people in big ways” can inhibit an activist’s ability to pace their work, which can lead to both burnout and strategic failure. “We

We do not all have the same skill sets or capacity for risk, but “getting in the game” to take pressure off of organizers can take many shapes. “To get in the game with me can mean asking, ‘Hey, Ejeris, are you eating? Can I send you food? Hey, how do I take something off your plate?’ Not, ‘You should slow down,’ but, ‘I see what you’re doing and what we’re up against. How do we do that together?’”

I think the best way to do collaborative and collective care is to ask, How are we backing each other up? How are we encouraging each other to take the breaks we need, but not making ourselves make impossible choices? How do we make sure the goals of our work are covered so that nobody has to burn themselves out because they’re politically committed? Are we making sure that every role has multiple people in that role? How do we create more of our work in teams?

when organizers start to understand movements in terms of roles and labor that can be shared among people who cycle in and out they can develop a more sustainable flow.