JustMaybeCo.

As organizers, our challenge is to identify the nature of our raw opposition and build/create within the space between oppression and freedom. We are charged with entering the space of raw opposition with clarity, precision, and analysis, passion, energy, and generosity. In Black tradition, this is known as the “Cool.” Think Miles Davis. We are challenged to develop shared strategy and principles. Power-sharing, confronting privilege, and building trust are central to this work. We are challenged to willingly participate in ongoing critique of our methodologies and outcomes—making adaptations where necessary and continuing to build upon our strengths. We are also challenged to “reproduce” a future generation of organizers across racial, gender, sexual-orientation, class, physical/mental abilities, geographic location, age, cultural, and political boundaries.  We are challenged to replace ourselves—share leadership in a responsible way, making space for “new” voices while integrating the knowledge and experience of the past. Yet, replication is complex because political, economic, and social contexts constantly shift and we want more than to simply mint newer versions of ourselves. We are challenged to draw upon collective abundance. Acting from a place of abundance allows us to challenge scarcity. Collective abundance produces flexibility, creative problem-solving, and courage. I am reflecting here on the ways that the Black tradition models a practice of abundance. Without access to and control of resources, we have managed to pay rent, feed our families, send our children to college, and create hip hop. We are challenged to utilize our agency in the service of our shared goals and charged with a demand for constant creativity, risk-taking, and self-determination. Agency is as empowering as it is messy. It helps us challenge the “cops in our head” or the complex ways we internalize power structures in our daily lives. Additionally, we are challenged to foster a healthy culture of accountability and repair.  Understanding that contradictions are integral to any process of change, we are challenged to construct a dialectical analysis. We are challenged to be fluid in our work, transparent about our mistakes, seek non-punitive methods of repair for the harms we both cause and survive, and willingly struggle to transform. This is not the work of a selective “we.”  It is work that must be done by everyone. To willingly and actively take on the challenges above, places one in this working group. This is work that demands a deep commitment to foment transformative revolutionary change within our individual selves and among our families, friends, communities, organizations, coalitions, and allies.

As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.

I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask...Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them.

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. [I]t comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future...We must dare to invent the future.

The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work and go away from labor. We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves. We are at the stage where the people in charge of the government and industry are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s up to us to reimagine the alternatives and not just protest against them and expect them to do better.

I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people. Every time I see a young person who has come through the system to a stage where he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who identifies more with the struggle of black people who have not had his chance, every time I find such a person I take new hope. I feel a new life as a result of it.

“There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that that have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”