Movement Spaces Have Become So Unserious

Do we not have a bottom line anymore?!!?!

Some of you have lost the plot entirely. Matter of fact, some of y’all have completely lost your gotdamn minds. And this I fear is what historical organizers have warned us about. You’re not down a rabbit hole at this point, you’ve built a whole apartment down there with furniture and wifi. And what I mean by losing the plot has a lot to do with how we have allowed people in these spaces without asking them to be clear on why they’re here in the first place.

For example, folks can’t even be clear about what they want to be liberated from. You’ll ask and they usually say “the system” and I think it’s such a cop-out response that really means “I don’t really know, I just know right now, it’s really bad and I want to be clear that I’m against it.” But if you sat with your emotions and frustrations enough, you should be very clear about what you’re against and what you’re wanting abolished. “The system” is a loaded phrase with no clear positioning in it. When it’s time to be clear on building, y’all have to sharpen up because right now it’s looking like a performance for many of you and we can all see it.

Here’s where I’m seeing people lose the plot in different ways:

The commentary without the building.

And let me be clear about something before I go any further. I am not shaming commentators. I’m not saying what they do is ineffective. Political commentary, education, analysis, all of that is essential to the ecosystem. I am who I am because leaders instilled praxis and theory in me when I was young.

But here’s a pattern I keep noticing. The people who are heaviest on commentary and lightest on building tend to also be the ones who don’t believe genuine divesting is real or possible. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. When you’re not involved in building community welfare systems or any kind of alternative infrastructure, when you’ve never experienced what it feels like to pool sustainable resources with your neighbors or build governance from scratch or sustain a program through sheer community will, it makes sense that you wouldn’t believe it works.

You’ve never seen it from the inside. So the commentary becomes the whole contribution and eventually the cynicism follows. You start believing only the government can respond to the people’s issues and nothing can actually change because, well, you’ve never been part of changing it at the ground level. And that cynicism spreads to everyone around you.

I’m not asking or expecting everyone to be a builder. That’s not everyone’s lane and I’ve said that before. But if your entire contribution to the movement is reactive and you have no connection to anything being built on the ground, I need you to ask yourself honestly whether that’s made you more hopeful or more cynical over time. Because what I keep seeing is people who are so deep in the analysis and the outrage and the tracking of every injustice that they’ve lost all faith in the possibility that communities can actually govern and sustain themselves. And that loss of faith is dangerous because it spreads. When someone says “divesting isn’t realistic” or “mutual aid based practices are not effective” or “community governance always falls apart” and they’ve never actually tried any of it, they’re projecting their inexperience as universal truth and discouraging people who are ready to build.

You're obsessing over white folks' every move.

Be weary of white folks, absolutely. Many creators are coming from a protective angle and I respect that. But I want us also so obsessed with our people and our freedom physically that we can’t sit in reaction all day. Why are we still reacting? Aren’t we very aware and aren’t they very clear on their participation? I’d rather be having these hard conversations while we’re building. Not instead of building. While building. That’s the difference. When we’re in a workshop mapping out a community welfare system and someone brings up a policy that just passed or something harmful that just happened, that’s a building-adjacent conversation. That’s useful because it’s informing what we’re constructing in real time. But when the conversation is the whole thing and there’s no building happening around it at all, that’s where I start to worry.

Your rage has you stuck.

The rage is justified. I will never tell anyone in our community that their anger is misplaced because it’s not. But I need more from you than anger and honestly I think you need more from yourself too. Because I’m watching people sit in it like it’s a recliner. Getting comfortable in the rage. Letting it become the identity.

And I think the rage and the cynicism feed each other. You’re angry, so you consume more content that makes you angry, which makes you more cynical about alternatives, which makes you less likely to build, which makes you more angry because nothing is changing. It’s a loop. And the only thing that breaks it is doing something tangible in your actual community. Not online. In your community. Because the moment you start building, even something small, the cynicism starts to lose its grip. You realize things can actually work when people commit to them. But you have to start to know that.

**acknowledging briefly that I’m aware community can and does exist online. I’m specifically talking about arguing in the comments of videos or awaiting the next problematic take to have commentary on more than participating in communal care.

Your community can’t eat your rage. They can’t live in it. Rage is supposed to move you somewhere and if it’s just sitting in you with no direction and no infrastructure attached to it, it’s not doing what you think it’s doing. Take it somewhere. A governance structure. A resource pool. A program. Something.

You’re not collaborative with anyone.

This one breaks my heart because this is where the ego really shows up. Some of you have developed a stinginess with whatever resources or access or platform you have and convinced yourself that collaboration threatens your position. You’ve hoarded information and contacts and opportunities because sharing feels like losing. And I need you to trace that back to where it comes from because that is a scarcity mindset that was taught to you by the very system you say you’re fighting. You brought capitalism’s logic right into movement work and called it leadership.

So instead of community you’ve made yourself the savior. The one person everyone has to come through. And that makes you not just ineffective but a liability. Because one person with all the resources and none of the willingness to share is just replicating the exact power dynamics you say you’re against. You became the thing. And the ego that got you there is the same ego telling you you’re different.

So, what’s your bottom line?

What does your practice of liberation look like on a Tuesday morning? Not in theory. On a Tuesday. When someone in your community loses their job, what catches them? When a mother needs childcare, where does she go? When there’s conflict between two members, what process exists? If you can’t answer those questions, your liberation may still be abstract and abstract liberation helps nobody today nor down the line should any of this become abolished in the near future.

The people who built before us could name it. Fannie Lou Hamer could tell you exactly what Freedom Farm was going to do. The Panthers could tell you exactly who the Free Breakfast Program was feeding and how. They weren’t vague about their vision. They were specific. And that specificity is what made them dangerous to the systems they were challenging.

If your whole contribution is commentary with no connection to building, check whether that’s made you more hopeful or more cynical. If your rage has nowhere to go and nothing to show for it, that’s not necessarily a politic. If you can’t collaborate because sharing feels like losing, trace that instinct back to where you learned it. And if you can’t name what liberation looks like in your community on a regular Tuesday, you’ve lost the plot.

I love us enough to say we need to get it together. The people we claim to be doing this for don’t have time for the spiral. They need systems and infrastructure and governance and people who are willing to build together even when it’s messy.

I say all of this because I love us. And because we’re looking unserious right now.

We have work to do.