## Metadata - Author: [[Alicia Garza]] - Full Title: The Purpose of Power - Category: #books ## Highlights - Recently I was in a staff retreat with my team at the Black Futures Lab, an organization I started in 2018 to make Black communities powerful in politics. We were discussing a breakdown in communication, trying to get to the root of how it happened, ostensibly so we could avoid it happening again. At a certain point in the conversation, the facilitator interrupted and said, “When I was growing up, and I would get into an argument with my mother, she would say to me, ‘What happens between us is half yours and half mine.’ I want to encourage you all to take that approach here—how would the story of what happened change if you all acknowledged that what happened between you is half yours and half theirs?” ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=263)) - Among her many colloquialisms, one of my mother’s favorites was “Sex makes babies.” For her, the practice of talking about sex was important to the well-being of her Black daughter. She never used phrases like “the birds and the bees” or “down there.” There was no stork who brought a baby in a bundle to a house that wanted one. In my house, I would sit at the kitchen table late into the night while my mother would buzz around like a hummingbird. “I can’t stand how white people sugarcoat everything,” she would say. Buzz. “It’s not the birds and the bees, it’s sex. Ain’t no damn stork. Sex makes babies. And babies are expensive.” Buzz. ([Location 353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=353)) - For most of us, whatever we call our politics—leftist, feminist, anti-racist—dignity and survival are our core concerns. ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=376)) - What does it mean to be “right wing”? In the United States, “right wing” usually refers to people who are economically, socially, or politically conservative. What does it mean to be “conservative”? I’m using “conservative” to describe people who believe that hierarchy or inequality is a result of a natural social order in which competition is not only inevitable but desirable, and the resulting inequality is just and reflects the natural order. Typically, but not always, the natural order is held to have been determined and defined by God or some form of social Darwinism. The terms “right” and “left” when used to describe political leanings or political values have their origins in the French Revolution, where they were used to describe who sat where in the National Assembly. If you sat to the right as seen from the president’s perspective, you were seen as in agreement with the monarchy, which tended toward hierarchy, tradition, and clericalism. We didn’t start to use these terms to apply to our political system or political activities until the twentieth century. ([Location 403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=403)) - Reagan declared a War on Drugs in America the year after I was born. His landmark legislation, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, enacted mandatory minimum sentences for drugs. This single piece of legislation was responsible for quadrupling the prison population after 1980 and changing the demographics in prisons and jails, where my mother worked as a guard, from proportionally white to disproportionately Black and Latino. ([Location 520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=520)) - Organizing is the process of coming together with other people who share your concerns and values to work toward a change in some kind of policy, usually of the government, but also of universities, private companies, and other institutions whose policies affect and shape our lives. ([Location 869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=869)) - Humans are social creatures; connection is at the core of who we are. And organizing is connecting with a purpose. When we connect to others, we learn about them and about ourselves. And that understanding is the beginning of real political change. ([Location 875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=875)) - I saw how some forms of social currency changed how people perceived my Blackness; I also saw how my Blackness changed how much value that social currency gave me. This introduced me to the truth that while each of us carries the particular privileges and burdens of our individual lives, those burdens are dramatically shaped by race, gender, class, citizenship, sexuality, disability, and other features of our identity. ([Location 895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=895)) - Everything that was not “Yes, I will definitely be there” was an opportunity to get them there eventually. ([Location 974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=974)) - Organizing is about building relationships and using those relationships to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish on our own—but there’s more to it than that. The mission and purpose of organizing is to build power. Without power, we are unable to change conditions in our communities that hurt us. A movement is successful if it transforms the dynamics and relationships of power—from power being concentrated in the hands of a few to power being held by many. ([Location 985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=985)) - Most people, when they think about power, are actually envisioning empowerment. I think those things are related, but different. Power is the ability to impact and affect the conditions of your own life and the lives of others. Empowerment, on the other hand, is feeling good about yourself, akin to having high self-esteem. Empowerment is what happens when people come together and don’t feel alone anymore and don’t feel like they’re the only ones who experience what they do. Unless empowerment is transformed into power, not much will change about our environments. It’s power that determines whether or not a community will be gentrified, a school district funded, a family provided with quality healthcare that is affordable on any budget. ([Location 988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=988)) - Community organizing is the messy work of bringing people together, from different backgrounds and experiences, to change the conditions they are living in. It is the work of building relationships among people who may believe they have nothing in common so that together they can achieve a common goal. That means that as an organizer, you help different parts of the community learn about one another’s histories and embrace one another’s humanity as an incentive to fight together. ([Location 999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=999)) - Organizers are engaged in solving the ongoing puzzle of how to build enough power to change the conditions that keep people in misery. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1003)) - An organizer gets high off motivating others to take action. ([Location 1008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1008)) - If an important component of organizing is knowing what moves people to take action and what keeps them from getting active, in Bayview—and other Black communities—we saw how important it was to understand the specific historical dynamics that shaped the community’s understanding of how the world functions and why. ([Location 1288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1288)) - While it may be safe to say that Black communities want to see a better world for themselves and their families, it isn’t accurate to assume that Black people believe that all Black people will make it there or deserve to. While some of us deeply understand the ways in which systems operate to determine our life chances, others believe deeply in a narrative that says we are responsible for our own suffering—because of the choices we make or the opportunities we fail to seize. ([Location 1294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1294)) - Black people were not a robust component of San Francisco’s progressive community. I was often one of a very few in coalitions and meetings. And while I thought that perhaps this was just a phenomenon in San Francisco, I would later learn that Black people are not a huge force—at least in numbers—in any progressive political community. This is a problem. Black communities are on the losing end of the spectrum when it comes to anything that progressives care about, whether it be affordable housing, affordable and quality education, democracy, maternal health, police violence, incarceration and criminalization, or environmental concerns, to name a few. Without Black people, there is no such thing as “progressive” anything. ([Location 1319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1319)) - Organizing in Bayview forever shifted my orientation toward politics. It’s where I came to understand that winning is about more than being right—it is also about how you invite others to be a part of change they may not have even realized they needed. ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1362)) - As organizers, our goal was to get those in the 99 percent to put the blame where it actually belonged—with the people and institutions that profited from our misery. And so, “unite to fight” is a call to bring those of us stratified and segregated by race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and body, country of origin, and the like together to fight back against truly oppressive power and to resist attempts to drive wedges between us. More than a slogan, “the 99 percent” asserts that we are more similar than we are different and that unity among people affected by a predatory economy and a faulty democracy will help us to build an unstoppable social movement. ([Location 1390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1390)) - There are very practical reasons why multiracial movements are vital to building the world we deserve. Segregation by race and class has been used throughout history to maintain power relationships. Segregation, whether through redlining or denying citizenship, helps to create an other, which helps in turn to justify why some people have and other people don’t. It reinforces the narratives that make unequal power relationships normal. This is why it’s so important—and difficult—to engage authentically in the complicated conversation about multiracial organizing as a theory of social change. When I say “theory of social change,” I mean an organizing idea that helps us answer these simple questions: What sparks change? How do we inspire our communities to fight, and how do we keep our communities fighting for the long haul? What gets in the way of fighting back, and how do we address those challenges? ([Location 1397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1397)) - Asking questions is one of the most important tools we as organizers have at our disposal. Asking questions is how we get to know what’s underneath and in between our experiences in communities. Knowing why something is happening can change behavior, in that it develops a practice in a person of doing the same—asking why they see what they see, what’s behind what they see, and, most important, if they are motivated not to experience it anymore, what can be done about it. ([Location 1507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=1507)) - Successful movements also have broad appeal. They aren’t just groups that everyone knows about; they are what everyone wants to join because they know that if that movement can win, it will change their quality of life. Movements embrace those who have been marginalized in one way or another, and movements move them from marginal to central. The shifts that movements advance are those that make visible those who have been invisible, those who our society and our economy and our government say are of no consequence to our future. ([Location 2154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2154)) - A movement is not intersectional if I am invited to join it but my concerns, my experiences, and my needs are not a part of what the organization or effort, as a whole, sees as its concerns and needs—or its path to power. ([Location 2177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2177)) - Intersectionality is what happens when we do everything through the lens of making sure that no one is left behind. More than surface-level inclusion (or merely making sure everyone is represented), intersectionality is the practice of interrogating the power dynamics and rationales of how we can be, together. ([Location 2183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2183)) - Intersectionality says two things: First, by looking at the world through a lens that is different from that of just white people, we can see how power is distributed unevenly and on what basis, and second, we need to ensure that the world that we fight for, the claim we lay to the future, is one that meets the needs of all those who have been marginalized. ([Location 2205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2205)) - What’s at stake with intersectionality? Whether or not all of us are entitled to live a dignified life. ([Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2208)) - Intersectionality asks us to examine the places where we are marginalized, but it also demands that we examine how and why those of us who are marginalized can in turn exercise marginalization over others. ([Location 2212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2212)) - Linda Burnham, leader of the Third World Women’s Alliance, a dear friend and mentor, introduced the usage of the term “people of color” as a way to get people who were not white to see common cause with one another. ([Location 2223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2223)) - Yet there is no hope for a unified coalition or alliance that does not understand, viscerally and intellectually, that Black communities are critical, that Black communities are underorganized, and that Black communities are not just cultural cachet—the suppression of Black communities is the fulcrum of how white supremacy is able to rule. ([Location 2294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2294)) - In a society where anti-Blackness is the fulcrum around which white supremacy functions, building multiracial organizations and movements without disrupting anti-Blackness in all of its forms is about as good for a movement as a bicycle is for a fish. ([Location 2302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2302)) - Patrisse and I were trained in an organizing tradition in which activists are taught to develop other leaders; this philosophy asserts that many leaders are needed to create transformative change, and those leaders should come from communities that have traditionally been excluded from power. And yet we were a part of hierarchical organizations. Hierarchy can help with efficiency—making decisions and getting things done—but of course it is also racialized, gendered, and classed, and it often reflects existing power dynamics. Hierarchies also open themselves up to corruption and abuse when one person or a small group of people have too much power. There is good reason to be suspicious of hierarchies, particularly as they relate to Black people. Racism inherent in systems, structures, and practices in government, institutions, and the like has meant that Black people are often on the losing end of hierarchies. ([Location 2387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2387)) - Decentralizing leadership, however, is not synonymous with having “no leaders.” Decentralization means distributing leadership throughout the organization rather than concentrating it in one place or in one person or even a few people. ([Location 2400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2400)) - Occupy Wall Street designated itself as “leaderless.” Everyone was a leader and no one was a leader. All that was required was that you showed up. The problem, however, was that simply declaring that there were no leaders didn’t mean there weren’t any. And declaring that there were no leaders didn’t address the fact that not only were there leaders but those leaders struggled to not replicate the leadership they were fighting against. Leadership was largely male, largely heterosexual, largely white, and largely educated at elite universities. If we perpetuate the same dynamics that we aim to disrupt in our movements for change, we are not interrupting power and we are not creating change—we are merely rebranding the same set of practices and the same dysfunctions. ([Location 2402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2402)) - Black Lives Matter designates itself a leader-full organization. That means that there… ([Location 2407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2407)) - Leaders within Black Lives Matter will tell you that I am not the leader, and they will remind me of this fact as well if they believe I am unilaterally speaking for the network. I have become much more deliberate about being transparent about what opinions are mine and what… ([Location 2411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2411)) - Decentralization also has another purpose, however. It allows for an organization—or a group of people trying to accomplish something together, if you will—to get ideas, leadership, strategy, and input from more people. From that perspective, decentralization is simply… ([Location 2414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2414)) - As an organizer, I see clear value and purpose in decentralized leadership. I value the input, opinions, and contributions of many, and decentralization can challenge the ways that we’ve been conditioned to value the input of some over others. It can also allow for a plurality of political worldviews, if constructed deliberately. But it’s also a way to be strategic, to fight more effectively. Imagine if the Black Panther Party for Self Defense had functioned as a… ([Location 2417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2417)) - One of the challenges that decentralized practices posed for Black Lives Matter was how to make quick decisions in an ever-changing environment. We did not have a model for how to make decisions, grounded in our values, in moments when we needed to respond quickly to changing conditions. In my experience, decentralization, or perhaps a misapplication of decentralized methods of leadership, has meant that we’ve had to let go of many… ([Location 2424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2424)) - I believe that in organizing, one has to be able to adapt or pivot with nimbleness. Upholding principle over purpose can be… ([Location 2429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2429)) - Imagine asking a person with no experience in the kitchen to become a chef at a Michelin-star restaurant, without the proper training, simply because our principles that everyone is a leader tell us that they can. A misapplication of decentralized practices can at times result in bringing a knife to a gunfight. Denying that not everyone is good at everything can be dangerous for what we are trying to accomplish. So, while everyone can, theoretically, lead, leadership is not only earned, it is a skill that is deliberately built over time. Movements need millions of leaders. Decentralization, along with other methods and models of leadership, can help us activate those leaders. Rather… ([Location 2432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2432)) - Hillary Clinton was the front-runner to win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. The mainstream women’s movement had already decided that she was their candidate and, more important, that it was her turn to be president. Many claimed that Clinton’s career and political trajectory had been unfairly tarnished by the actions of her husband, unfairly diminished by and then judged through the lens of patriarchy. But while conceding that she was, at times, judged by the failures of her husband, we must still acknowledge that Hillary Clinton’s worldview and politics were shaped and supported by dog-whistle racism and triangulation—an intentional political strategy of winning over swing voters by pushing off the left and positioning yourself as the one who can rise above ideology to pursue solutions. ([Location 2468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2468)) - During Clinton’s first bid for president in 2008 against then–senator from Illinois Barack Obama, she dog-whistled to white voters that Obama was connected to Minister Louis Farrakhan via the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was criticized by some for a sermon he gave in which he declared “God damn America,” among other seemingly controversial statements. Her campaign leaked a 2006 photo of Obama in Somali dress, a thinly veiled attempt to evoke fears about so-called Muslim terrorists in a post-9/11 context. ([Location 2475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2475)) - Cracking down on Black communities across America allowed the Clintons to become one of the most powerful and influential families in America, if not the world. From welfare reform to mass incarceration to Wall Street to war, the Clintons used Black America to advance their agenda and that of other powerful and aligned interests. The more they could be seen as a friend to Black communities, the better. But in truth, the Clintons did little good for Black communities. ([Location 2495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2495)) - Black communities are woefully underorganized. There isn’t (yet) an agreed-upon agenda or set of goals that the majority of us are moving toward together or collectively holding politicians accountable to. As a result, candidates who run for elected office don’t feel accountable to Black people. Our demands are often diffuse and muted, and they are often rooted in what is already politically possible rather than setting the tone for what must be prioritized politically in order to gain the support of Black voters. In the 1990s, it was enough for Bill Clinton to go on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show and play the saxophone to feel as though he’d done his outreach to Black voters. However, at no time did Clinton talk substantively about any policy agenda that would improve the lives of most Black people—despite the fact that they made up the core audience of Arsenio Hall’s show. ([Location 2522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2522)) - Because identity politics is ultimately a political concept, to fully understand why identity politics is important, we should start by defining power. I define power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed. ([Location 2709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2709)) - One can wake up in the morning feeling empowered—but empowerment is different from power. Power is about who makes the rules, and the reality is that most of us lack real power, even over the decisions that are closest to us. Sure, I am empowered to decide what I eat for breakfast today, but larger forces create the options I can choose from—or whether or not breakfast is even available to me. A lack of understanding of power is central to how power operates. Power prefers to operate in obscurity; if how power operates was fully transparent, I suspect many of us would rebel against it. ([Location 2713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2713)) - When conducting a scientific experiment, in order to understand results, you need a control group and an experiment group. The control group is what happens when there is no change of what is constant. It is what has not been experimented on; it is what the experiment is compared to in order to see if there has been any change. In the United States, white people, white culture, and white experiences are the control against which everything else is compared. For people who are not white, this can be incredibly alienating—never seeing people who look like you in fashion magazines, not being able to get makeup that matches your skin tone. Whiteness as the control looks like clothes that fit only a certain type of body, as defined by whiteness. Whiteness as the control looks like nude tones on Band-Aids or pantyhose, or makeup being a certain shade of peach. Whiteness, white identity, is a core organizing principle for America. ([Location 2723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2723)) - “The personal is political” is an adage that comes out of the women’s movement, and yet the members of the Combahee River Collective took that adage and made it specific to the lives of Black women. Identity politics in this case meant that Black women could not afford to cast aside Black men, because of their shared experiences of racism, and yet had to contend with the fact that Black men, white women, and white men all found benefit from the oppression of Black women. Identity politics, then, becomes a defiant rejection of the flattening of their lived experiences for the sake of uniformity or unity. ([Location 2748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2748)) - And yet many white feminists cannot understand why Black women don’t just get in line. Why declare a separate racial identity? If whiteness is a kind of collective amnesia, then this kind of white feminism that asks Black women to forget is certainly one of its manifestations. Should Black women forget that under slavery they were forced to nurse white children while neglecting their own? Should Black women forget the ire they faced from white women whose husbands lusted after Black women in subjugated positions? ([Location 2755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2755)) - Though there is much to gain from equity among all subjugated genders, it is also true that America has historically subordinated white women under white men but given… ([Location 2761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2761)) - Thus, identity politics is the radical notion that your worldview is shaped by your experiences and history and that those experiences will vary in relationship to the power a group or an individual has in the economy, society, or democracy. And given that America is powered by the politics of white identity, whiteness itself is the first and essential enactment of identity politics. America is built on white identity politics: the attempted genocide of indigenous people in the Americas in order to access the land and resources needed to build a white Christian nation; the enslavement of people from the African diaspora in order to secure free labor to build a white Christian nation; the exploitation, internment, and degradation of Chinese… ([Location 2763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2763)) - I often laugh to myself when I hear sentiments like those expressed by the blonde in the bar, because the first thing that comes to mind is You brought this on yourself. In other words, if white people had not created false classifications for people based on skin color or genitalia or class status in order to maintain power and privilege over others, would we even be having this conversation? If white people had not enacted a system of enslavement where Black people from the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America were stolen and forced into subjugation for generations, would we be having this conversation? If the effects and impacts of maintaining that system of enslavement and subjugation—where Black people are seen as less than human… ([Location 2772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2772)) - Controlling the story of who we are and what makes us who we are is an exercise of power—the more people you can get to invest in that story, to make your story their own, the more powerful you become. This is the right’s narrative: The story of America is about perseverance, rugged individualism, faith, and hard work. Inside that story are characters who threaten the success of the project, who were never meant to be included in it in the first place: Black people who were brought to this country enslaved and then fought for and won our freedom. Indigenous people who resist genocide and colonization, who refuse to cede their land and their way of life. Women who refuse to serve merely as breeding machines and keepers of the home. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-variant, gender-nonconforming people who refuse the nuclear family, who refuse binaries like man and woman, gay and straight, who embrace the complexity of who we are and who we are becoming. Immigrants who refuse assimilation. The story is not meant to be challenged, yet it is being challenged each and every day, many times successfully. Telling a new story requires that we accept the ways in which norms have changed, lifestyles have changed, and what is possible has changed. As Octavia Butler said, “The only lasting truth is Change.” It is fascinating to be in a nation that claims to value innovation and yet is so resistant to change. ([Location 2808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2808)) - It is often those who don’t have to be faced with the politics of their identities—because power obscures their privileged identities—who decry identity politics in the first place, unable to acknowledge why there are those who cannot separate their lived experiences from the identities they have adopted and those that have been assigned, without choice or agency. ([Location 2826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2826)) - What some white liberals and progressives get wrong about identity politics is that if power is only transactional, we will never unify those who lack power and those who fear losing power. A just reckoning isn’t a simple shift in who gets to oppress whom—it will come when those who have been used to unparalleled power must reckon with what it means to distribute power more equally. ([Location 2834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2834)) - When I write, I want to accomplish an outcome. I write when I feel that my throat is clogged and I cannot breathe. When I write, I offer what is weighing on my heart and on my spirit. I have learned that to block these impulses is detrimental to my physical, spiritual, and emotional health. When I write, words and sentences, phrases and metaphors, come together in my mind before they ever reach the terrifying blankness of a page. I can hear the cadence before the words arrange themselves, as if something outside me is pushing me to put it on the page. I tingle, my body electric with a spirit that moves from my chest, down my arms, and into my fingers. Sometimes I cry as my fingers fly across the keyboard, hot tears spilling on my lap. On any given day, I can be found writing notes to myself on my phone or on scraps of paper. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. It is a purging, a renewal, a call to action that I am unable to defy. It is the way I learned to communicate when there seemed to be no other options. ([Location 2840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2840)) - Every membership organization that I have ever been a part of had women doing the administrative work, women doing the relationship-building work, women developing the strategies, and men acting as the visible and external leadership of the organization. The same patterns were reflected in our membership as well. The majority of our membership was always women—poor and working-class women of color, immigrant women, and queer women. But when men came to our community meetings, they would often take up the most space. They would talk the most, pontificate, and be quick to try to tell people what they “really needed to be doing.” ([Location 2910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=2910)) - believe that all communities are inherently messy, that our perspective depends on whom we spend the most time talking to. ([Location 3014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3014)) - Anything that reaches toward the sky must have a strong foundation to hold it up. That’s how I think of movements—movements reach toward the sky to achieve what has been deemed impossible. And in order to stay sturdy, they need a base—people who keep the movements anchored in the needs, dreams, and lived experiences of those who are directly impacted by the problem at hand. ([Location 3064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3064)) - To build the kind of movement that we need to get the things we deserve, we can’t be afraid to establish a base that is larger than the people we feel comfortable with. Movements and bases cannot be cliques of people who already know one another. We have to reach beyond the choir and take seriously the task of organizing the unorganized—the people who don’t already speak the same language, the people who don’t eat, sleep, and breathe social justice, the people who have everything at stake and are looking to be less isolated and more connected and who want to win changes in their lives and in the lives of the people they love. ([Location 3110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3110)) - Political education helps us see the world from different perspectives without elevating the viewpoint and perspective of white, Christian, heterosexual men over that of anyone else—including those groups whose presence, contributions, and history have suffered erasure. Political education is a part of the process of interrupting old power dynamics in our communities, the ones that privilege some experiences, perspectives, and tactics over others. ([Location 3195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3195)) - Political education acknowledges that no education is neutral—that all information has a story behind it and an implicit agenda. ([Location 3202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3202)) - Gramsci is best known for his theories of cultural hegemony, a fancy term for how the state and ruling class instill values that are gradually accepted as “common sense”—in other words, what we consider to be normal or the status quo. Gramsci studied how people come to consent to the status quo. According to Gramsci, there are two ways that the state can persuade its subjects to do what it wants: through force and violence, or through consent. While the state does not hesitate to use force in pursuit of its agenda, it also knows that force is not a sustainable option for getting its subjects to do its will. Instead, the state relies on consent to move its agenda, and the state manufactures consent through hegemony, or through making its values, rules, and logic the “common sense” of the masses. In that way, individuals willingly go along with the state’s program rather than having to be coerced through violence and force. ([Location 3215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3215)) - Hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense, is mostly developed and reinforced in the cultural realm, in ways that are largely invisible but carry great power and influence. For example, the notion that pink is for girls and blue is for boys is a pervasive idea reinforced throughout society. If you ever look for a toy or clothing for a newborn assigned either a male sex or male gender, you find a preponderance of blue items. If boys wear pink, they are sometimes ostracized. This binary of pink for girls and blue for boys helps maintain rigid gender roles, which in turn reinforce the power relationships between the sexes. Transgressions are not looked upon favorably, because to disrupt these rules would be to disrupt the distribution of power between the sexes. To dress a girl-identified child in blue or to dress a boy in pink causes consternation or even violence. These are powerful examples of hegemony at work—implicit rules that individuals in a society follow because they become common sense, “just the way things are” or “the way they’re supposed to be.” ([Location 3231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3231)) - Since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, hegemonic ideas have slowed our progress. One piece of hegemonic common sense is the idea that Black men are the central focus of Black Lives Matter and should be elevated at all times. The media rushed to anoint a young gay Black man as the founder of the movement, even though that was not the case. This same sort of prioritizing of Black men happened all over the country: young Black men elevated to the role of Black Lives Matter leaders, regardless of the work they’d actually put in. ([Location 3248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3248)) - The Trump campaign successfully reached white people, particularly white men, who felt left out of the economy and the government. They felt left out not just because of the undue influence of the corporate class and the elite but also because they perceived that the wealth, access, and power promised to them were being distributed to women, people of color, and queer people. Trump’s campaign relied on the hegemonic idea of who constituted the “real” America, who were the protagonists of this country’s story and who were the villains. The protagonists were disaffected white people, both men and women, and the villains were people of color, with certain communities afforded their own unique piece of the story. ([Location 3257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3257)) - These ideas are called hegemonic because they are embedded and reproduced in our culture. Wild West movies are an embodiment of the nation’s origin story that paints white men as heroes and indigenous communities as savages in need of taming. The notion that white women are superior to Black women is codified in movies like Driving Miss Daisy and The Help, in which white women are portrayed as heroes and saviors while Black women play supporting roles or are the ones to be saved. It is codified in clothing ads, like the controversial Gap ad in which a white model is literally posing with her arm on top of a Black girl’s head, as if she is a piece of furniture to prop her up. ([Location 3269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3269)) - Culture and policy affect and influence each other, so successful social movements must engage with both. This isn’t a new idea—the right has been clear about the relationship between culture and policy for a very long time. It is one of the reasons they have invested so heavily in the realm of ideas and behavior. Right-wing campaigns have studied how to culturally frame their ideas and values as common sense. ([Location 3276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3276)) - Culture has long been lauded as an arena for social change—and yet organizers often dismiss culture as the soft work, while policy is the real work. But policy change can’t happen without changing the complex web of ideas, values, and beliefs that undergird the status quo. When I was being trained as an organizer, culture work was believed to be for people who could not handle real organizing. Nobody would say it out loud, but there was a hierarchy—with community organizing on top and cultural organizing an afterthought. ([Location 3279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3279)) - When culture change happens, it is because movements have infiltrated the cultural arena and penetrated the veil beyond which every person encounters explicit and implicit messages about what is right and what is wrong, what is normal and what is abnormal, who belongs and who does not. When social movements engage in this arena, they subvert common ideas and compete with or replace them with new ideas that challenge so-called common sense. ([Location 3285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3285)) - By laying claim to civil society, we assert that there is an alternative to the white, male, Christian, heterosexual “common sense” that is the status quo—and we work to produce new knowledge that not only reflects our vision for a new society but also includes a new vision for our relationships to one another and to the planet. ([Location 3290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3290)) - Popular fronts are alliances that come together across a range of political beliefs for the purpose of achieving a short-to-intermediate-term goal, while united fronts are long-term alliances based on the highest level of political alignment. The phrases are often used interchangeably but shouldn’t be. ([Location 3351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3351)) - Popular fronts help you engage with the world as it is, while united fronts offer the possibility of what could be. United fronts allow us to build new alternatives, to test new ideas together, because there is already a high level of trust, political clarity, and political unity. Popular fronts, however, teach us to be nimble, to build relationships across difference for the sake of our survival. ([Location 3396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3396)) - We need movements that can hold complexity so that we can learn how to reach for one another, even when reaching for one another makes us uncomfortable. We need movements inside of which millions of people can grow and learn, movements where people can come as they are, as long as they are willing to be transformed in the service of our full and complete liberation. We need people who’ve never graduated from college. People who come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds. We need people who think that corporate approaches to solving problems are the only way to change the world. We need people who believe that charity will make the world a better place. We need people who think all these ways, because without being part of a movement that offers them the opportunity to see differently and do differently, they will continue to see the world the way that they do. Without being engaged somehow in a movement for change, where would they get exposure to a different way of seeing the world? ([Location 3412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3412)) - Every actor within a social movement has a role to play and contributions to offer that at some point should be recognized. But the pedestals we create for individuals have the opposite effect: They obscure people’s contributions. They serve to situate the success of a movement inside one person, as opposed to that success being based on how much a movement grows beyond itself. ([Location 3588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3588)) - Can I move the people who follow me on Twitter into votes that oust problematic decision makers and instill people with vision and a plan? Can I transform my Facebook friends into leagues of democracy defenders in fifty states—people who ensure that every voice is counted? If not, frankly, fuck a platform and fuck a profile. Platforms and profiles are only as useful as what they are in service of. ([Location 3616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3616)) - I’ve learned we need bases, not brands. ([Location 3620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3620)) - I know there is hope because I have helped to unlock a potential that I did not really think was possible, even as I pushed for it—the potential for other Black people to see that we are worthy beyond measure and to allow that hope, that merciless hope, to push us forward. I have seen what can happen when we crack the code that allows others to believe that they are exactly who we need in order to bring about change in this country. We can transform power so that it is no longer producing misery around the world. ([Location 3813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3813)) - For nearly twenty years now I have been sitting at tables and muttering under my breath about what wasn’t working, what could be happening, and what needed to be done. Finally I decided to stop complaining about what didn’t exist, what wasn’t working, what needed investment, and instead create what didn’t exist, try the strategies I thought could work, invest in what I thought needed investment, and dare to do what I thought wasn’t being done well enough, by enough people, or loud enough. ([Location 3824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3824)) - We don’t believe in supporting leaders who are Black simply because they are Black. To do so would be supporting the state of politics that we have today. We support Black leaders who have a transformative vision, who believe that politics should be about engaging as many people as possible in the project of governance. ([Location 3870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3870)) - If today’s hashtag is Make America Great Again, then the movement we need to build is one that will force America to be great for the first time. A movement where we recognize that we need one another to survive and that our survival can be interdependent rather than parasitic. A movement where we remind ourselves of what really connects all of us—a desire to be seen and valued, to make each day count, to be loved and to love in return. A movement where we resist replicating the same dynamics that we fight against. ([Location 3903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3903)) - I don’t believe in utopias. There is not a scenario where suddenly everybody gets it and starts organizing with an intersectional lens, politics sheds its corruption, and corporations reverse their death grip on the economy and civil society. What is more likely is that there will be one step forward and a few more steps back, and, like an onion, each layer we peel back exposes more questions, more contradictions, more challenges that we did not anticipate. That is the hard and beautiful work of movement building—figuring out how to solve the problem of how to be who we need to be in this moment so that we can be powerful together. It’s figuring out who the “we” must be for us to unlock the next level. ([Location 3907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=3907)) - Across the country, new activists ask me how I balance everything, and my answer is: I don’t. I have plenty of days where everything doesn’t get done, and if it does get done it’s not the way I would have wanted it to. The secret is that getting things done isn’t about your ability to do it, it’s about the fact that the society we live in inherently creates problems that replicate themselves endlessly, because problems are built into systems in which everything can be bought or sold but some people will never have the money, access, or social capital to afford what they need to take care of themselves. ([Location 4040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=4040)) - My hope for us is that we begin to intimately understand that living in a society where everything can be bought or sold but not everyone can buy or sell is harmful to our health, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. That the best way to care for ourselves is in the manner that Audre Lorde described: to connect with each other in ways that propel all of us toward care—for ourselves and one another. But with that hope, I also see reality. I believe with all my heart that change is possible and inevitable, but my honest estimation is that we are far from that change. And that means, for me, that we need to treat our work as if it is in fact hospice care for that which is dying and prenatal care for that which is being born. In hospice, care is the most important thing, the principle around which everything is organized. ([Location 4054](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B088QN4H8N&location=4054))