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photo credit: createherstock During the last five years, I’ve intentionally blurred the line between the personal and professional. This process is not unlike interrogating the feminist phrase, the personal is political, because the current job market necessitates grappling with difference between career orientations today and just ten, twenty, and thirty years ago. I wanted to carve out the kind of work I enjoy for basic provision, to align every facet of my self with my politics, and to deconstruct what I had come to believe: somehow, my labor and the life I lead are entirely separate entities meant to consume each other. Live to work, work to live. I began by trying to further liberalize work-life balance, finding work that closely fit the ideal picture slowly becoming clearer in my head. I’ve loved community-building, writing, facilitating, and creating since my formative years, but I didn’t have the language for the expertise and associated skillset until I entered the professional realm. My résumé serves as a living illustration of negation, showing just how quickly I figured out what was not for me to learn what is. Job-hopping, hour caps, lack of benefits, low wages and underemployment, competitive and punitive policies, and juggling several jobs are telltale signs the gig economy is eroding the dwindling sense of job security my parents still enjoy. My choice to move a little differently is made possible by a dependable car, access to technology and internet, and a college degree. I have an incredibly supportive partner and family that lives smartly and comfortably. I have room to explore by virtue of who I am and what is afforded me. I’ve often wondered how to stay or change course when I am making the course up as I go. As I am building out this space to write and create, to emotionally stretch, think critically, and imagine otherwise community, I am best guided by my values. My values are a set of principles to measure my internal and external work against, sharpen my discernment, consider options, and take action accordingly. I have practiced my values long before I named, re/defined, and honored my values as my moral and social compass. Like other creative practitioners, I frequently struggle with anxiety and imposter syndrome, even as support for and engagement with my work grows in magnitude and depth. My values are a means to simply cope when I need to and bravely confront what I must so that I can create as I am compelled to. In a recent Lithum, Eve L. Ewing shares, I don’t disaggregate my politics from my artistic practice, a way of being and becoming that is also my own. I occasionally reflect on and pin down the common threads of my self work and community work in my notebooks. I write down what is important to me regarding what I am doing and what I want to do, highlight the themes and patterns, and narrow down language that succinctly names and briefly explains the values I hold at a given time. I write and rewrite and rewrite and return to what I have written ceremoniously. The values I share here now are starkly different from and the same as those I scribbled in a retired notebook three years ago, last year this time, even six months ago. They are as constant and consistent as they are responsive, fluid, and growing me, growing alongside me. political alignment Political moments and movements have caused us to collectively question the relationship between individual people and their productions. I think separating art from the artist is both objectively and subjectively impossible. Our being and doing are inextricably tied. Who we are molds what we do, and our doing, in turn, shapes our being. This position extends beyond artistic expression. How we move through and interact with the world is a microcosmic reflection of structural power dynamics and our lived experiences constantly colliding and connecting with those of others. On adrienne maree and Autumn Brown’s podcast How to Survive the End of the World, Alexis Pauline Gumbs asserts, Black feminism is a rigorous love practice. Black Queer Feminism is my politic of choice to affirm my self and remain politically attuned to the immediate, long-term, and liberatory needs and efforts of black queer women within and beyond my own community. In practice, this means:
joy Black joy is an inherently subversive response to systemic oppression. As Audre Lorde imparts, we were never meant to survive in her seminal poem A Litany for Survival. Lorde further writes in Uses of the Erotic: That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible. Seeking and creating joy is both a political practice and personal pursuit. To varying degrees, we are conditioned to disassociate from joy and pleasure, emotion and sensations as a whole, to reinforce raced/gendered/classed dominance and inferiority assigned by identity. As a black queer woman, to continuously recover and engage with my whole self upsets the social order that renders my living, loving, and labor open to erasure and exploitation.
I am hard-pressed to commit to anything that does not produce and aid in maintaining my joy and the joy of others — everyday tasks, relationships, opportunities, exposure and visibility in any regard — simply because I don’t have to. value My creative practice exists in a long line of historical tradition and contemporary urgency shaped by blackness, womanhood, queerness, and femininity alike. The cultural and intellectual productions of artists, writers, creators drive popular culture and innovative practices and social change across mediums. And yet, one of the most difficult parts of being a creative person without a clearly precedented career path to point to is determining the value of what I do while uprooting the notion that my worth is weighed in dollar increments. There is no one right way to navigate capitalism responsibly, to employ harm reduction in a system unapologetically cannibalizing the margins. I can, however, make economic decisions based on the social position I hold and what I have available to me. This requires me to periodically take stock of all the ways I labor and the ways I benefit from the labor of others -- emotionally, creatively, physically, relationally, invisibly. I am not required to intrinsically honor the unseen and undervalued parts of my work to ask for equitable wages, to demand my needs for survival, to reinvest what capital I do have back into community, but my gumption certainly serves as substantive cause. I am compelled to assign value to my time, energy, and labor itself, and design my life to meet my individual, familial, and communal needs as best I can. I drafted a set of questions almost a year ago to ask myself and reflect on as I am waist-deep in personal, professional, and political convergence.
I don’t always have all the answers and my process is in-process, but I am moving closer to clarity and consistency in my quest to tie my creative practice to my values. In the midst of uncertainty, that is the best I can do. Continual reflection on personal values as a moral, social, and creative compass is an important component of practicing communal accountability because:
The external act of holding each other accountable in "the work" is rooted internally, with the self work of determining our personal values to undergird our actions.
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 Before digging into this piece, read part one: Confronting Conflict Within Movement Work and part two: Limitations of Binaries.
public/private dichotomy Wider access to the Internet affords the public-at-large unprecedented opportunity to directly engage within and beyond in-person relationships. We can better connect and get to know each other, share information and resources, navigate disputes and conflicts and much more. A number of online platforms allow us to make public a multitude of difficult experiences, from unpleasant service at a restaurant to an acquaintance tweeting an offensive remark. The politics of open forums to air grievances invoke issues caused by how we conceptualize public and private spaces in the digital realm. Perhaps our understanding of the public/private divide has not yet caught up to cultural trends driven by social media. Systemic oppression and identity-based power dynamics inform the public/private binary, deeply impacting our physical and digital interactions, influencing what we choose to keep to ourselves and among folks we spend time with in person, and what we share online. Social media platforms are just one of many kinds of spaces to work through conflicts among organizers. We use social media to increase awareness, promote actions, connect with fellow organizers and the public, and share and celebrate successful praxis. We also use social media to drag one another, call each other out, and sometimes, to show off our performative bullshit. Far too often, we decide for affected parties if conflicts should play out privately or publicly without considering restorative solutions, the weight of our own ego, the power we wield, the consequences of our actions, the benefits of mutuality and holding multiple truths, and figuring out what our end goals are. Every conflict involves different spaces, motivating factors, people and groups, communal impact, and resolutions. Establishing our personal and group values, identifying where our values diverge, overlap, coexist and clash, and strengthening our toolkit with conflict resolution practices helps us exercise a consistent approach to handling conflicts. This continual practice of self and communal reflection is well worth our time and effort because a substantial amount of problems in organizing spaces could be resolved and sharpen our work long before they become larger conflicts unnecessarily impeding movement building. call outs, a brief case study An online call out is not a fundamentally unhelpful tactic to use, but depending on the situation, private conversations may be more effective to engage people we know and work with often. However, an online call out may well be the best method for calling attention to a problem and justice-oriented ideas. This past January, the local chapter of the Women’s March organized an anniversary rally and invited Leah Humphrey and Kyra Harvey of Indy10 Black Lives Matter to speak. Their speech served as a call to action for white women in feminist spaces to confront their own racism and show up for women of color, black women in particular. Two days later, IUPUI professor and political blogger Sheila Suess Kennedy published a post describing their speech as an offensive attack on women in attendance, and characterized Humphrey and Harvey as divisive and counterproductive. A day after, Indy10 posted a statement, a line by line rebuttal to Kennedy’s assertions. The situation highlights several layers of power dynamics at play impacting the problem-solving methods employed. Kennedy is an older white Jewish woman, and a fairly popular pundit in Democratic spaces in Central Indiana. Her platform touts a large public and academic following at and beyond IUPUI. Humphrey and Harvey are young black women leading the local Black Lives Matter chapter, a grassroots organization sustained by unpaid labor and in-kind donations. Kennedy’s blog post juxtaposed hopeful white allies and ungrateful black organizers, shaming and policing Humphrey and Harvey’s tone, language, and organizing tactics, while failing to recognize her actions demonstrated the gendered racism their speech was about. In this instance, an online call out involving two parties with considerable impact in shared communities was not unwarranted. Indy10’s statement sparked ongoing conversations about the insidiousness of white supremacy and anti-black racism in organizing spaces and resulted in a donation campaign to the organization to support their upcoming projects. attention economy Online call outs are effectively a public response to inter/personal issues, meant to garner attention to meet an end goal. The purpose may be personally motivated, communally minded, and may be entirely unknown. Without attention, a call out remains in our own echo chamber. Social media gives us the attention we seek when we call others out. Experts argue current technological developments exploit what is called the attention economy, treating the attention span as a scarcity. This is not a piece about social media supposedly killing real communication, but some platforms are explicitly designed to capture and keep human attention for as long as possible. Whether our collective attention span is dwindling is not the point here. We have, however, socially constructed attention as a valuable resource in organizing spaces. A commodified attention span is a reflection of neoliberalism, what Eve Ewing describes as “the prevailing political logic of our era.” Simply put, a neoliberal politic applies capitalist principles of scarcity and competition to movement building. This practice quantifies the attention span and casts attention as a primary source of genuine care and compassion and appropriate public response to injustice. Conflict occurs among us as we utilize inflammatory means of gaining attention to inflate our sense of self worth and in hopes of producing positive results in our work. And worse, we tend to conflate heightened public attention with justice itself. Promoting awareness is important to movement building, but more attention does not directly translate to material investment or meaningful progress. Attention is an unreliable resource in this regard. Attention, our work, social causes themselves are commodities open to oppressive violence when we subscribe to this politic. In effect, we are competing against ourselves for public attention, creating and aggravating conflict that harms rather than builds. This is not a unique problem of community organizers and movement workers, but we must mitigate its effect on our work. Audre Lorde reminds us in Sister Outsider, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” We cannot submit to the politics of scarcity and appeal of power-grabs when our work is to uproot global capitalism and remove its chokehold on our communities, our bodies. Liberation is not possible within the confines of oppression and we must not embrace ways of being remade in its image.  photo source: mic.com Before digging into this piece, read part one: Confronting Conflict Within Movement Work. binaries got us fucked up At the core of relational and communal conflict is a fundamentally flawed belief that power is innately evil (unless it is the power we personally hold), causing us to forgo critical analyses of power and disavow its uses and imaginative possibilities. We yield collective power to the binary of oppressor and oppressed, stopping short of accounting for the ways we cause and endure harm on all sides of oppression. Evil latitude of power is not the sole territory of people holding ideologically opposed positions. Systemic oppression we are trying to dismantle is not simply the other side. It is also inside of us and our communities. It is all parts rather than either/or, because sometimes, there is no other side. When we fail to understand power structures and the power we hold as individuals, the power we are granted by virtue of identity and perceived position, the power reclaimed through solidarity, we will continue to abuse our selves and others. What is considered evil and wrong, good and right, politically “progressive,” are social constructions that leave no room for honesty and humility, expansive nuance, analysis of power, self-reflection, individual and collective values, or mutual goals for accountability when harm breaches relationship and community. Assigning conflicting parties to polarized ends of this false binary forces a limited and limiting spectrum where a full picture with many possibilities and options and methods exist. Our commitment to binaries is fruit of systemic oppression. We are conditioned to adhere to a certain school of thought: only two of a thing exists, positioned in direct contrast, to superiorize one over the other. Our approach to engaging one another when we disagree, when personalities clash, when harm has caused a rift tends to err toward replicating the same false binaries. What may be most unhealthy is our manner of applying this practice to conflicts across the board, from petty arguments of personal difference to disagreements about the direction of a political action to rooting out sexual violence committed by an organizer against another community member. conflict is not abuse except when it is Abuse and sexual violence is not conflict, but violation. However, the aftermath of abusive behavior devolves into what we widely consider conflict. Our response to conflict can and frequently does become abusive. Our reactions to abuse and conflict and their overlap parallel one another in many ways. We disbelieve and attack victims, justify wrongdoing and harmful behavior, devalue mutual respect for boundaries, building a culture that yields compounded harm. Ashley Yates is a queer black woman and activist formerly affiliated with the Black Lives Matter national network. She cut ties with the organization before publicly sharing the abuse she endured at the hands of a BLM staff member, another queer black woman, and subsequent harm caused by top leaders’ unwillingness to hold their colleague accountable. Her deeply personal analysis via open letter to BLM leadership highlights the misuse of identity politics as a fatal flaw in binary thought specific to conflict and abuse. “Identity doesn’t give you free reign to abuse or continue to abuse in private through whisper campaigns and discrediting of your survivors. Identity doesn’t grant free escape from accountability,” Yates writes. She continues, “Identity does not equal infallibility. Abusers don’t just occupy the identities you don’t like. They are often people that look just like YOU.” Othering abuse and harmful behavior by sole virtue of identity is dangerous praxis that prevents us from seeing and uprooting our own harmful actions. When organizers abuse other organizers, the identities we share, our common struggles as organizers, and adulation of individual leaders causes us to question whether abuse is even possible in organizing spaces or between organizers. Addressing abuse and conflict head-on falls by the wayside. be humble At best, constructive criticism from fellow community organizers and other folks who know us best is communal love incarnate. Criticism is necessary to and for our work. It builds us up, calls out what needs improvement, and holds us accountable to our selves, communities, and movements. The moral high ground is an incredibly dangerous position to self-determine. Thankfully, we do not exist or operate in isolation. The thoughts inside our heads, the ideas that pour out of us when we are most creative, are collaborative and generative. We are products of environments made up of small, in/consequential collisions with other people and their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and creations. We work alongside brilliant minds, busy hands, blazing hearts, people carrying wholly different lived experiences to broaden and sharpen our critical thought, emotional intelligence, analysis and action, and most important — our connection to each other and our worlds. Our relationships and communities help us determine what values we must shed, those we must take up, and how to practice our shared values with one another. Unfortunately, conflict often favors ego over mutuality and radical humility. Humility grants us necessary space to sit with our shortcomings and open our hearts and minds to feedback gifted to us by our peers. Progress cannot afford to avoid, mishandle, or fail to gain forward movement from conflict. Conflicts are unique in magnitude and impact and relationship between parties involved and affected, but we tend to fall back on various means of avoidance and proven unhelpful methods that treat conflicts as indistinguishable. This habit overlooks our ability to hold multiple truths at once, to ask hard questions of our selves and others, to discover paths forward without reflexively resorting to harmful binaries, disposability, and punitive practices. bad blood When conflict between two or more parties occurs, we engage in some age-old patterns of behavior. We tend to:
adrienne maree brown shares in her interactive text Emergent Strategy, “So many of our organizations working for social change are structured in ways that reflect the status quo.” She highlights small problems that can infect organizational culture. Two elements of note are “destructive methods of engaging conflict” and “personal drama disrupting movements.” Our general inability and unwillingness to navigate interpersonal conflict balloons into toxic community spaces, detracts from and hinders urgency, focus, and collaborative effectiveness. A hypervisible means of addressing conflict in organizing spaces are callouts, publicly naming and shaming harm done, usually after other interpersonal methods have been exhausted or are unhelpful. Callouts are one tool of many and play out differently depending on moving factors. We size up others’ character, work, and our personal feelings about them arbitrarily. Arbitrary, because we don’t spend significant time learning our selves and the values we hold that direct our living, loving, and labor. We largely disregard the importance of the continual process of self-recovery. The baseline we can hold ourselves and others to must be centered on firm foundation. Further, we fail to effectively communicate and share in our values with our peers, then consequently hold them to a standard they may or may not be aware of and cannot meet even if they wanted to. This cycle is an unsustainable way to address conflict, politically grow, and resolve to work together inside of difference. When fellow organizers don’t meet the bar we have set, what do we gain from draggings or cancelations? How do we measure their shortcomings against that of their contributions to community and the weight of the harmed party’s voice and desires? How do we remain in community with someone who has caused us personal harm? In what ways do we submit ourselves to punitive methods of engaging conflict? How can we imagine healing and restoration into being? Our experiences on all sides of varied conflicts, of giving ourselves over to debilitating fear, sadness, ignorance, anger, is fertile ground for radically different ways of being, relating, and connecting.
loyalty loyalty loyalty We are a loyal people, creators and community builders and organizers alike. We are loyal to our work, our co-conspirators, our friends, our chosen families as we connect over our labors of love. Regardless of how we each define our loyalty, it demonstrates a willingness to defend specific people and groups, and by extension, their ideas and actions, due to our respect for them even if we don’t personally know them. Black Lives Matter promotes the campaign to “protect black women” and “say her name,” but according to Ashley Yates’ account, leadership silenced and disparaged her for speaking truth to her abuse. We have increasing difficulty supporting ideas apart from personality. Our attachments to specific people doesn’t always translate to loyalty to worthwhile work. It is, in part, why a significant majority of our political initiatives and community groups are led by and produce what adrienne maree brown names “singular charismatic leaders” and “top-down structures.” We habitually attempt to build whole movements around such leaders and structures, leaving our work open to ego-driven conflict and disruption. Ella Baker imparted to us, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” People-centered movements cannot sustainably run and grow on person-focused work. Our individual relationships should not act as a shield for people we love when they cause harm to others. Those we care deeply for are capable of committing acts of harm against other people, just as we are capable of committing acts of harm against others. It is our duty to hold our selves and loved ones accountable as an act of freeing love and loyalty. The love we hold for friends and family and fellow organizers in its best form bends toward accountability, restoration, and freedom. Absolution without question or consequence at the direct expense of those harmed is a telltale sign of loyalty without principle. When conflict arises our loyalty to the people of our choosing can hinder our compassion for others, erase the reality of multiple truths, and upend the transformative power of honesty and humility. This is a corrupted kind of tribalism, a dangerously subtle form of perpetuating and recreating harm at the root of systemic oppression. But our work is to free our selves and communities from its chokehold on our imagination, to connect in spite of barriers before us and built by us. Ashon Crawley encourages us, “We do not need to cede care, concern, compassion, love, forgiveness in order to contend against forces that seek our separation.” An unapologetic lack of care is not revolutionary. A politic of disconnection and disposability will not liberate us. Imagining communal accountability pushes us to feel, think, and co-create otherwise means of engaging in conflict and deeply connecting. Let’s.  photo source: mic.com I am a community organizer and storyteller with a globally-minded yet hyper-local focus on Indianapolis and Central Indiana. I have lived in the city for four years, serving several different nonprofits, and leading and working alongside community organizations as a teaching artist, engagement specialist, and program coordinator. In what seems like relatively short time, I have learned about building relationships with neighbors and leaders alike, creating and growing grassroots spaces, navigating layers of personality and politic, bridging art-making and political education, all while leveraging few resources. I have since taken a step back from community organizing this summer.
Scaling back gives me space to observe and self-reflect, and relieves the unsustainable pressure to do everything and be everywhere ascribed to active participation. It is easier for me to think about our work and my role with one foot now placed firmly outside of my network of fellow organizers. The break has provided needed perspective on a variety of aspects of local movement work, helping me theorize and practice better ways of approaching frequent points of contention between groups and individual people, points that more often than not impede collaboration and solidarity usually at the direct expense of already marginalized people. We are a relatively small but mighty contingent, and we are our work — many of the most visible organizers are also members of the communities and identity groups we serve and advocate for. okay, but why write about conflict For the last year or so, I have been wrestling with the concept of accountability, conflict resolution, and their impact on relationships between people both contributing to and leading movement work in Indianapolis. I am not the first or last person to feel, think, write, fail, flourish, share my way through difficulties concerning conflict and accountability, specifically among community organizers. We can and should draw from the lived experience and expended emotional labor of organizers creating and building on models to confront and work through conflict rather than over, around, or ignored altogether. A single gold standard how-to manual does not exist for us to reference, to revere as the answer. We can and should study and incorporate historical examples gifted to us by past and present movement workers and storytellers, elders and ancestors. We can and should allow hard lessons to transform our selves and our work, and share and adapt best practices from one another in real time. We are making up whatever this is as we go, and mountains and molehills abound. Traversing the unknown and uncertain space of conflict requires radical, decolonized, collective imagination. Otherwise we risk remaking conflict resolution or glaring lack thereof in the image of systemic oppression we seek to deconstruct. wtflols of red state organizing, an indianer tale Contrary to inter/national belief, “progressive” ideology and initiatives can and do thrive Indiana, from labor protections and fair wage campaigns to reproductive health clinic escort programs to growing rural Pride celebrations to Black Lives Matter statehouse demonstrations and more. Indianapolis is a peculiar city, a blue blip of a county swallowed by deep red statewide save for few exceptions like Bloomington, South Bend, and Northwest Indiana, the Region of my upbringing. The city-county, primarily governed by establishment Democrats, is home to people upholding municipal policy producing systemic harm neatly swept beneath a facade of hospitable and sensible, moderate Hoosier politics. I am hard-pressed to distinguish between Democrats and the GOP when Indianapolis Metro Police Department tactical operations touted by our new mayor target predominately black and brown neighborhoods and an ultra-conservative campaign to defund the state’s Planned Parenthood facilities results in the worst HIV outbreak in Indiana history. These policies and practices are fruit of the same systemic oppression. Movement workers in this area are often disregarded by national, mainstream organizations advancing progressive efforts. Funds, resources, and people power tend to better saturate larger metro areas like New York City or Chicago while community organizers in Indianapolis and similar cities generally have to fight for disappearing grants, rub crowdfunded pennies together to somehow manifest miracles. The months prior to the election of our current president injected an influx of newly excited and politicized people into various local movements. A noted lack of regard for and partnership with existing community organizations caused ongoing conflict and unrequited hope to stretch political understanding and action sparked by anti-Trump sentiment. Affluent white women crowded out the substantial boom in influential demographic blocs, flocking to establish women’s groups, pussy hat marches, and bipartisan political action committees to fund women candidates for local and state offices boasting thousands of dollars in disposable revenue. These circumstances force familiar compromises, sometimes affectionately called infighting, between ideologically related yet juxtaposed groups primarily representing radical leftists, liberal centrists, center left folks as a whole: police and prison reform and abolition, pro-choice feminism and reproductive justice advocacy, Medicare expansion and the Fight for $15, to connect and name a few. This political and material reality leaves little room for cooperative trial by fire among Indianapolis organizers. Perhaps we should and must join forces to accomplish our political goals because hands, hearts, heads, and hard cash are seemingly and actually geographically limited. How we navigate and overcome these conditions affecting our work here in Indianapolis influences and exacerbates conflict between us. and ya cousins too, or, catching these communal hands Conflict is a natural part of relationship between two or more. The potential for trouble rears up when we submit to the idea that conflict is inherently devastating and we repeatedly employ dysfunctional tactics expecting positive results, or worse, avoid addressing conflict to the point of uninhibited replication. Creativity, collaboration, sociopolitical solidarity beyond lip service cannot come to fruition without conflict. Conflict challenges our comfort and sharpens our critical thinking and emotional intelligence, and pushes us to communicate honestly and clearly with our selves and others. Further, conflict should expose, heal, reduce, and prevent exploitation, violation, and abuses of power we wield on one another without question or consequence. Conflict between two or more organizers can affect capacity for teamwork and interrupt partnerships of respective groups and/or create friction within organizations. The blurred line between personal and professional and few degrees of separation among Indianapolis organizers affords the benefits of close proximity and varied levels of comradery. However, the same dynamic also fosters an environment when conflict remains unresolved and festers, spilling over into organizational operations and causing what begins as an individual dispute to become a communal impasse. The impact of abuse at the heart of conflict is egregious as violent acts employed by an individual are extensions of systemic domination that do not exist in a vacuum. This week’s #metoo campaign is yet another indication of a sobering reality. Sexual violation by one organizer against another, for example, not only directly harms the survivor/victim, but damages the working relationship and necessarily calls organizational integrity and values into question. A community organization operating under the banner of social justice cannot approach abuse as an isolated problem between two parties in good faith. Rather, we have to consistently handle singular violations connected at the roots and address gendered norms abetting domination. We repeatedly neglect addressing micro and macro in tandem, relegating victimized organizers into silence, exile, and further harm for the “greater good” of political progress. We are aiding oppression we claim to labor against. binaries got us fucked up, an interlude At the core of relational and communal conflict is a fundamentally flawed belief that power is innately evil, and causing us to forgo critical analyses of power and disavow its uses and imaginative possibilities. We yield collective power to the binary of oppressor and oppressed, stopping short of accounting for the ways we cause and endure harm on all sides of oppression, directly and indirectly. Evil latitude of power is not the sole territory of people holding ideologically opposed positions. What we are trying to dismantle is not simply the other side. It is also inside of us and our communities. It is all parts rather than either/or, because sometimes, there is no other side. When we fail to understand systemic power structures and the power we hold as individuals, the power we are granted by virtue of identity and perceived position, the power reclaimed through solidarity, we will continue to misuse and abuse ourselves and others. |