Book Thoughts: Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
Going to be pretty sparse about this. There were good parts to think about, and the workbook is useful, but I think this is ultimately a book that should be read in tandem chapter by chapter & discussed as such with a group you're organizing with. I am not organizing currently.
I listened to the audiobook and then flipped through about half of the book in text form, but didn't really finish reviewing the text. If I did, there would probably be more to copy and paste here. Basic things I thought about:
Listening as a skill that you learn that isn't about thinking about what to say next and to take the attention. This is actually pretty hard for me right now because I'm very worried about the pressure to perform lest people hate me and find me boring. It is something that I should probably work on more, but I think to also be a good listener, you have to be good with being vulnerable and having conversations that don't go well. I think when you're preoccupied with not being hated, it's kind of a blocker. Maybe I'll figure it out someday.
Hope as a discipline means that you don't necessarily have to believe that you'll win. You just show up because you're committed to the work and the people that you're doing the work with. Sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised.
It's okay if tools have served their purpose; not everything has to continue on forever. You can let something be done.
Mutual aid is important to set up. Also, lots of organizing starts really small. In fact, a book club can lead to greater action. Thinking about how people recently got sentenced like 30 years in jail just for attending a protest and having a leftist book club... Even reading, and therefore claiming knowledge that people in power don't want you to have, can build to greater action for change. Especially if done with other people.
Organizing isn't matchmaking. You have to be ready to work with people who get things wrong and don't have the same politics as you. That's what the listening part is for. Also, it's inevitably messy... I don't really know if I have it in me to deal with that right now, just watching what my sister goes through, for instance. But it is good to know it as a fact.
Related, organizing means that you're going to make mistakes. If you haven't made mistakes, it's probably because you haven't actually built anything. This is what separates keyboard theorists who critique stuff as a hobby and always pretend they know better from people who actually do the work. It's important to be able to separate useful critique from critique from people who don't actually want to participate.
Hope/grief coexisting and grief actually being a good thing if people come together for it. There's a quote in the book where the writers posit that grief is a form of love and proportional to your capacity to care. I have semantic disagreements about this, but it's an interesting concept.
Small selection of quotes section:
In addition to providing a window into the dangers of cynicism, the moment in which people were activating to push back on Trump’s child-separation policy also brings up the issue of comparison versus connection. In responding to the child-separation policy, some commentators compared child separation to the removal of Native children, who were sent to residential boarding schools in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, this comparison inevitably led to debates about which was worse. Similarly, comparing Native genocide and the enslavement of Black people can lead to debates about which group has suffered more. Such debates are always self-defeating. With regard to chattel slavery and Native genocide, in both cases we are talking about unspeakable horrors that occurred on unthinkable scales, at the hands of the same system. The character of and connections between these atrocities frame every horror that the United States has perpetrated since, including the violence of border imperialism.
As strategists, we must ask what is the value of attempting to rank atrocities. If two people have been wounded by the same attacker, should the afflicted expend their strength arguing about whose injuries are more severe? Or should they carefully assess the harm done to each so that their injuries can be attended to and they can unite in their efforts to heal and create safety? In such a scenario, most of us would view the assessment of harm not as a competition but as an examination of what must be done to preserve people’s lives and well-being and to heal the damage done. We would likely focus on our immediate safety and the prevention of further harm. In such a moment, it would be clear to many of us that our mutual survival could depend on our ability to cooperate, extend care, and strategize. The stakes in our larger struggle against this death-making system are no lower, but they can be less visible to us because systemic violence is more widely distributed and largely normalized.
Effective organizers emphasize the connections between struggles, instead of making totalizing comparisons.
The task of understanding the connections between historical harms and the dynamics they have created over time is much more challenging than venting our emotions through debate or even successful “awareness raising.” Sometimes becoming “aware” or “bearing witness” is simply an act of consumption.
Kayali points out that under international law, Palestinians have the right to violently resist Israel’s unlawful occupation of Gaza, but she also cautions against placing an overemphasis on “structures of law and legality.” As Kayali told Kelly on Movement Memos in May 2021, as Israeli bombs were raining down on Gaza, “What this comes down to, in my mind, is kind of the omnipresence of neoliberalism and its tight grip on our framing of justice.” Kayali explained, “After the Oslo Accords, which were the peace deals that happened in the 1990s, we saw a really detrimental shift in international discourse about Palestine that really framed everything in terms of the rights of the individual, everything centering the individual and the ascendance of the state as the ultimate goal of the Palestinian people.” Kayali says this shift ushered in an era of discourse about a “two-state solution” and protecting the “human rights” of Palestinian people. Discussions of human rights are inherently limited, she noted, because rights are afforded to individuals by larger structures of power and can be revoked by those structures. “I want my existence and liberation to be valid, whether or not the UN agrees with me,” Kayali told us. “So I think what this framing can deprive us of is an understanding of collectivism and an understanding of liberation.”
Some people in her life have tried to comfort Changa by reminding her that our fates are never certain. But, she says, these platitudes are not a comfort. “The fact that uncertain things could happen to us does not really help when we have this idea or vision for our future laid out,” she said. Instead, she began to grieve her diagnosis—not because her fate was decided but because her feeling of certainty that she’d reach old age was gone.
Changa said she’s learned to focus less on the potential scarcity of time. “The clock is definitely ticking,” she told us, “but instead of worrying about how little time we have left, I’m thinking about what we can do with the time we have—or who we need to move to extend the time we have.” As we work to use and extend our time on this planet, we should also avoid becoming mired in assessing our chances of success, Changa advised. “In organizing, the odds are always stacked against you,” Changa told us with a knowing smile. “That’s always been the way. So you find a window. And if the window is small, you still aim for it. And you go.”
But even as the culmination of COVID-19, carceral violence, and environmental racism bore down on them, Pino and her co-strugglers did not lose hope. “I think it’s important that we recognize that our work happens in opposition to statistics,” she said. “Our work happens in opposition to what is likely, or what others in power think will happen. I think remembering that allowed us to push back the hopelessness, and to find each other, as people committed to the work and community, in that sort of relational space, and that’s where we found the energy to fight back.” Pino told us that strained organizers “really went back down to basics”: checking in on individuals, going door to door to make sure residents had access to water, providing transportation, and making sure people knew about COVID tests and where they could access them. Organizers acted as problem solvers in the community, asking people, “‘Do you have everything you need to get to the end of the day? If not, let’s figure out how to make that happen.’
"We sometimes think about our organizing work in terms of these big campaigns that we wage, but there are also these sort of micro-campaigns, where literal acts of care are what we are waging,” said Pino. “We wage acts of care, and that’s how we navigate loss and create hope. We say, ‘We will wage this act of care in defiance of the state, which tells us that our bodies are worthless and expendable.’” Pino said that by waging acts of care, organizers in Little Village raged against the normalization of mass death and against the erasure of the inequities they experienced in the face of disaster. “That was the navigation,” she told us. “It was in the waging. It was in the care we extended. It was in the rejection of disposability. It was in the constant check-ins. It was seeing each other’s faces over video and looking into each other’s eyes and saying, ‘Are you OK? Do you have what you need?’
As Malkia Devich-Cyril writes, “Becoming aware of grief gives us more choices about how to respond to grief and opens up possibilities to approach grief not only with compassion for self and others, but also with joy. Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference.”
Hope, too, requires us to reject indifference. And like any indifference-rejecting phenomenon, it demands effort in order to thrive. When we talk about hope in these times, we are not prescribing optimism. Rather, we are talking about a practice and a discipline—what Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone have termed “Active Hope.” As Macy and Johnstone write, Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction. Since Active Hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be our guide.
To practice active hope, we do not need to believe that everything will work out in the end. We need only decide who we are choosing to be and how we are choosing to function in relation to the outcome we desire and abide by what those decisions demand of us.