In times like these when hundreds of thousands of people are coming into action, either for the first time, or in new ways, there are dynamics that happen frequently.
I’ve been talking with organizers around the country about ways that we can go on the offensive against these dynamics.
Ways we can actively support, nourish, cultivate, and resource, liberation culture that warmly welcomes people in. Liberation culture that has a priority on supporting people's sense of belong, and helping guide them into purpose, and positive growth.
Rather than culture on the left that has absorbed frameworks developed by the right wing to undermine our efforts by making us inaccessible to, and intolerable of new people.
How many of us have heard the terms “performative” or “virtue signaling”? These terms are used routinely, especially in social media, critiquing other peoples efforts to engage in social justice.
Both of these terms were developed by the right wing in the 1980s and 90s to attack the credibility of people taking public social justice action. To mock and ridicule them. AND to stigmatize nearly every easy access point for someone to show opposition to injustice and become part of the left.
By mocking and demeaning initial efforts to take social justice positions and get involved in the left. By labeling nearly every effort to get involved as being performative, virtue signaling, being cringe. This has led to progressive cultural norms that reinforce despising new people.
Cultural norms that create widespread anxiety about “conditional belonging”, in which anyone could be rejected or quickly be thrown out. Anxiety that leads to individuals trying to prove themselves, rather than a culture of bringing people together through solidarity to build power and find shared interest and common cause.
It’s important that we recognize that the right wing has waged ideological war on left culture. That this was done intentionally to isolate the left from everyday people. To portray us as elitist and even worse, to get us to internalize these frameworks as our own.
The right wing does not want us to know how to build power labor movements, strong community institutions, become leaders that people can trust and look to for help and guidance.
Rather they want us to strive for political purity requiring an extremely high bar for entry. Because anything less than already having years of study, years of somehow acquiring worthy experience, of being already known and vouched for - is performative and problematic.
There are organizing spaces, where having a high bar is very helpful, even necessary. Leadership spaces, alliance building spaces. But while that is true, this can't be seen as the norm for all our spaces.
We need far more organizations and spaces committed to a base building approach that is actively recruiting, helping people join, low bars for joining, where the culture is helping people get organized - given guidance by those more experienced, supported to plug in, a spectrum of options for engagement, pathways for member and leader development.
The right wing has actively created terminology and frameworks in which someone who is new is cringe, questionable, someone who, at best, must be tolerated. Frameworks that lead to a culture of “well, we’ll see if they are still around” rather than “how can we help them find their place, so they will know how to stick around.”
The left has a long history of liberation culture, that loves people, loves our communities, and believes in people’s capacity for positive change and positive engagement. Liberation culture that calls us to become leaders who create the conditions for people to come alive and find purpose in the left.
Liberation culture that teaches us how to become organizers who don’t just want new people, but know what to do with new people.
And this liberatory organizing is vital, life affirming, soul nourishing, and helps us focus on building majorities so that we can win.
The right wing wants us to despise as many people around us, as possible, who are taking action. Whether they are new or not. While simultaneously wanting us to feel alone, isolated, and powerless.
The right wing has given us tools to critique and dissect the failures of everyone who wants positive change. Tools to see everyone (including ourselves) as being problematic, not enough, too late, performative.
The reality is, it’s rare that anything we do is enough. But liberation culture helps us see connections and possibilities.
Liberation culture helps us see that one move in the right direction, aligning with thousands of other people’s moves, is what makes movements. And movements in motion are what helps us achieve our goals.
Liberation culture, helps us see each other, in our tenderness, our wholeness, our inadequacies, and our sacredness.
Liberation culture helps us use our analysis and strategy, but also our senses of smell, hearing, seeing, feeling, our intuition and hearts - to connect to deeper sources of power, and possibility. Our words, actions, buttons, quilted hats, Rebel Alliance state birds, are almost always “inadequate” in the face of the nightmare.
Liberation culture helps us connect to our ancestors, helps us feel each other in our lives, even when hundreds of miles apart. It helps us feel our hands on each other's backs, whispering kindness, encouragement, and affirmation.
Liberation culture, is something we cultivate in welcoming gestures, expressions of care and solidarity, expressions of outrage and heartbreak at the injustices occurring. Liberation culture encourages us to become and be the leaders we needed, or wish we had, when we were new.
Liberation culture does not demand that people already know all the right words, all the right phrases, all the right reference points, all the right people.
Rather, liberation culture believes in people’s capacity. And helps us, as organizers and leaders, to get really good at putting that belief into action. Including believing in ourselves.
There is deep grief, trauma, devastation in all our work for collective liberation. Liberation culture wants us to heal and care and support one another. The right wing wants to weaponize our pain, and turn it on each other - and ourselves.
The best way to grow liberation culture, is that when we experience it - we affirm it, notice it, name it, appreciate it, draw lessons from it, and expand it. And train others in it as well.
We can be critical when we see negative culture for sure. And let’s also bring some gentleness to it. Negative culture is often our unprocessed pain and trauma.
There are many different kinds of people, many different roles and tasks. And we can delegate and focus, as leaders, on doing the things that work best for us. Some will be great at working with some people, and not others. Based on how we have been divided by race, class, gender, sexuality, we can be smart about who can work best with different kinds of people. But in all of this, getting free from right wing frameworks intended to isolate the left, is imperative.
For this to work well, white leaders and organizers need to develop our capacity to especially do this well with new white people.
Men developing our capacity to do this well, with other men. It’s not that only people of certain identities can organize people of other identities, but liberation culture calls us to not have this work fall on the shoulders of BIPOC leaders. On the shoulders of women, non-binary and trans people. Leaders who have shouldered this work, often at emotional costs that deplete needed capacity for critically important additional roles and responsibilities.
This dynamic in organizing also undermines us and is part of the ravages of structural inequality and supremacy systems. We cannot let those systems defeat us and divide us. We can all find the ways we can bring a vast array of kinds of leadership to take on our parts in movement building.
Liberation culture whispers, “I believe in you, and love you”. Liberation culture connects us to organizing ancestors who can teach us and guide us.
Liberation culture wants us to heal and care for one another as leaders, to hold each other in the pain of these monstrosities.
And liberation culture wants to help us remember, that we can win.
Chris Crass has been organizing to help build movements for collective liberation for over 35 years. With a focus on organizing in white communities as part of multiracial movement building for racial, gender, and economic justice. He is the author of the Towards Collective Liberation and several other books and essays.