“As an expression of love as radical responsibility, mutual comradeship guides activism and organizing in the Black radical tradition and helps to bridge strategic unity and productive conflict. It does all this in specifically political circumstances, with a specific political goal: the process of envisioning and striving to build a world beyond racial capitalism and imperialism—and of weathering the inevitable backlash for doing so. Moving beyond shared ideology, mutual comradeship is simultaneously an ethical, epistemological, and political practice of solidarity. Ethically, it emanates from the guiding principle of courage—the willingness to place oneself at risk for the betterment of others and shared values of cooperative social activity, a common conception of social transformation rooted in the eradication of racial capitalism, and the establishment and maintenance of expectations and standards through consistent struggle, debate, criticism, and self-criticism. These ethics are in the service of protecting, preserving, and valuing not only movements and organizations, but also each other.”
Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Settle Your Quarrels” (2023)