Notes on building The Movement
If you aren’t an organizer, learn from those who do organizing on a grassroots level, learn from prison abolitionists, learn from indigenous people who have had to defend their land, learn from the Black Lives Matter movement, learn from NO DAPL Standing Rock water protectors, learn from activists and organizations who are and have been fighting revolutions in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, who are resisting U.S. backed regime change, U.S. intervention, drone strikes on their homes and their people. Get involved on the most local level you can and offer generously. Your degree of humbleness and willingness to do menial tasks and uncredited behind-the-scenes work should increase in proportion to your privilege and your safety and your history of involvement in organizing. That is to say if you are able-bodied, if you have money, if you have resources, if you are seen as white, hetero, cis, if you have had the opportunity to develop your politics through theory rather than through forced violations against your body and your people, then take that backseat, offer a share of your resources to help organizers and activists travel and stay sheltered, protect and stand with communities you are not from, but do not take up space. Humbleness is what fuels a courageous fight that does not center you as savior.
Accept that you will always have more to learn. Foundational texts are fundamentally insufficient, though they are a starting point. There have been PoC activists, organizers, socialists, and anarchists who have long been drawing connections between the U.S. occupation and wars at home, and the U.S. occupation and wars abroad–the violence the U.S. continues to commit against its black, Latinx, API, and indigenous communities must be understood within the same framework of violence this country continues to commit in supporting Israeli terrorism against a free Palestinian state, or in obstructing Puerto Rican self-determination, not to mention the too-many-to-list times the U.S. led and backed violent regime changes all around the world, including but not limited to Honduras, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Myanmar, and Laos.
Know that the violation, ownership, entitlement and destruction to the gender non-conforming and women’s bodies is deeply connected to the legacies of slavery and genocide and to the continued invasion, colonization, and occupation of lands abroad–this is the vile extent and pervasiveness of rape culture. Know that a true critique and denouncement of capitalism can only come from those who do not trivialize the resistance to gentrification, to anti-blackness, to Orientalism, to Islamophobia. Know that sex work, like all work under brutal capitalism and white supremacy, must be decolonized, not legalized.
Stay away from white people who are the loudest about their Marxism, their willingness to smash a window, who speak first at community meetings, who do not shut up when their time is up, who seek glory through their politics but offer little tenderness in their relationships; but do stay close to black and brown folks who know what it is to use their bodies to resist death and degradation, who love without domination. We do not deserve to only know love while colonized. We do not deserve to only build families while occupied.
–Jenny Zhang, Against Extinction
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