Awareness-Raising Protests Won’t Threaten the Richest, Most Well-Armed People on Earth

In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and I talk about protest, why large “awareness raising” events will not defeat Trump and the kind of actions and formations we need in these times.

Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is shared here with permission.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about protest, coalitional politics, the Trumpian crusade against DEI, and why the right doesn’t care what kind of leftist you are. We will be hearing from Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. Olúfẹ́mi is an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. He is the author of Elite Capture, Reconsidering Reparations, and a contributor to Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book. Olúfẹ́mi is someone I am constantly looking to as I try to make sense of this moment and what it demands of us, and I hope you’ll find his insights as helpful as I have.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: Thanks for having me.

KH: How are you doing today?

OOT: Pretty good, all things considered. How are you doing?

KH: I am managing and muddling, which I guess is pretty okay, all things considered. I am also really grateful to be in conversation with you today.

OOT: Likewise.

KH: So, some of our listeners will obviously be familiar with your work, or might remember our last conversation, but for the unacquainted, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your work?

OOT: I teach political philosophy at Georgetown. My political interests extend beyond teaching political philosophy. I’m one of the fellows at the Climate and Community Institute. I’ve done organizing in the past with my workers union, first in grad school, which was a UAW local, and am now one of the people organizing Georgetown’s AAUP chapter. And beyond that, my interests are in the Black radical tradition, anticolonial traditions, both intellectually and otherwise.

KH: Well, I am so glad to have you back on the show, because, among other things, I have been eager to discuss your recent piece, “Why Protests Should Be Promises,” which was published in Time magazine. In the piece, you argue that protests should not only express dissent but also serve as credible threats of sustained action, such as strikes, boycotts, or other forms of collective withholding to compel systemic change. Could you talk about why this concept of a protest as a promise feels especially urgent in this moment?

OOT: I think one of the things that, obviously, veteran organizers well know, but maybe people who are newer to organizing, newer to protest culture, might reflect on is why protests work. I think we’ve been often given this very tidy story about past political movements, especially the civil rights movement, where there was a march and there was expression of disagreement, there was awareness spread about social injustices of various kinds. Then question mark, question mark, then change happened, and a lot of details go unremarked on, unreflected on in those question marks that we skip past.

And in general, I think we’re starting to see that lack of reflection reflect itself in the organizing. It’s fine if people have criticisms of this or that particular organization out there, if you have criticisms of a particular union or unions in general, or if you have criticisms of a particular church or churches in general or if you have criticisms of a particular religious organization. But the reason why these kinds of collections of people were able to succeed at being parts of social change in previous generations, in previous eras of political history, is because of what I was talking about in the article.

It was because they were able to command not just attention, not just cause awareness of political issues, but they could meaningfully mess things up for the powerful as a result of being able to organize people at scale, whether it was the bus boycotts, whether it was strike actions, whether it was withholding rent. And I think we need to think about that kind of leverage if we believe our own criticisms of the people in power.

I think a lot of people agree with the notions that the various people in power, the health care executives, the shareholders of large corporations – they don’t care. They’re insufficiently attentive to what’s going on in our society. They’re letting people become homeless, they’re letting people die of preventable health care problems. And if we really internalize the view of the world that I think follows from that, then I don’t think we can have an awareness-based strategy of how we get them to stop running health care or housing or anything else in the way that they’re doing.

KH: I really appreciate what you’ve raised here about leveraging power, because I agree that we are dealing with some major, popular misunderstandings around protest. In addition to the historical simplifications you were talking about, one of my concerns is that a lot of people simply don’t know what it means to build leverage. For example, after the Hands Off marches that some of us participated in, which drew millions of people into the streets, I saw some people referring hopefully to the “3.5 percent rule.” For folks who are unfamiliar, the 3.5 percent rule is a theory derived from Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth’s research on nonviolent movements. The theory suggests that no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5 percent of the country’s population mobilizing against it in a peak event.

Now, in addition to the fact that Chenoweth has acknowledged that there are actual historical exceptions to this theory, including recent uprisings in Bahrain, where the government withstood a mobilization of 6 percent of the country’s population, Chenoweth has also stated:

The rule does not speak to leadership, strategic imagination, organizational capacity, or sustainability. Strategic leadership is required to organize a constituency, motivate their engagement, design campaigns adaptively, innovate tactics creatively, mobilize allies, respond to adversaries, sustain long-term organizational capacity, and devise alternatives to existing systems. A movement’s ability to do this is probably more important than a movement’s ability to quickly mobilize a large number of people, especially because today’s digital organizing environment makes it easier to coordinate mass protests but not necessarily to sustain them.

Now, I know that was a long quote, but I think it’s really important. Chenoweth also specifies that the movements she studied for her dataset were not reformist movements, but movements that sought maximalist outcomes, such as overthrowing governments or claiming independence. So we’re talking about different contexts as well, depending on your perspective.

Alongside those caveats, there are also critiques of Chenoweth and Stephan’s work that I think are worth considering. I find Andreas Malm’s counterarguments particularly compelling, but even if we were to take the 3.5 percent rule, as Chenoweth has explained it at face value, we need to understand that it doesn’t mean that 3.5 percent of us getting together on a Saturday afternoon and participating in permitted marches across the country and holding signs will mean that Trump has to resign. That is not a thing. And I am not saying this to devalue the big marches that people have organized because I do think they have value. I attended those protests for a reason. I believe mass marches can help us rally our collective spirits and remind people that they’re not alone, and that they have the potential to be a part of something larger than themselves.

But I think trying to recreate that energy through mass marches repeatedly, whether the marches are permitted or not, is a losing proposition because you’re not really amassing power. You’re not, as you’re saying, establishing leverage, and you’re not affecting material outcomes. And over time, people get tired of doing the same thing and not seeing any results. So numbers dwindle, which feels disempowering to the people who do keep showing up. And I have seen this kind of errant approach of continuously trying to replicate moments that feel empowering or inspiring across a number of movements. And we really don’t have time to get stuck in this cycle this time around.

Strategy right now is not about scheduling the next big march.

OOT: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I would just add, if we’re talking about a counterexample to the surface-level misreading that once you get a mass protest of 3 percent of the population that you get large-scale social change, we could add ourselves in the United States to that, right? The estimates of the percentage of the population that participated in the 2020 summer uprisings after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, they range from 6 percent to 10 percent of the U.S. population. So I think it’s important both that we understand that the claim being made in the first place wasn’t if you have a protest or a series of protests with a certain percentage of the population that you’re automatically going to get social change, and then I think it’s also important, the clarification that you point out about Chenoweth, what demands people were making is an important aspect of the extra details we would want to know besides the 3.5 percent magic number, what other organizational capacities the people represented in the 3.5 or whatever percent have and cultivate is something that we would want to know that gets left out of that simple story. And the more you stare at those details, the more, I think, you have to come to the conclusion that those are actually the things that matter most, more than the 3.5 percent number.

So, obviously, the more people are involved, the better, and there’s a reason to keep track of how many people are involved, but we really need to focus in on what we’re getting people involved to do. And it’s got to be something better, deeper, and more compelling than just telling people to express displeasure with how things are going.

KH: So, in thinking about what actually makes a protest effective, I’m curious, is there a protest you’ve participated in that you believe was especially effective?

OOT: There’s one I think about a lot in this context, just because, in a way, it’s my personal best counterexample to the excessive number focus. One of the most influential, most successful protests I’ve ever participated in had, if I recall correctly, exactly five people involved. We were protesting the lack of all-gender restrooms on the third floor of our building, which is where the philosophy department was at UCLA. And one of my union siblings, she figured out who the decision-maker was on the facility side of things that was the immediate barrier between getting a bathroom designated as an all-gender bathroom and not.

And she organized a bunch of us to go plaster this guy’s name across campus, to make signs, to have a bullhorn, and walk the right blocks of campus where the right people would notice us. And lo and behold, I think to this day, there is still an all-gender bathroom on the third floor of Dodd Hall. And all it took was knowing specifically who to pressure, how to pressure them, and getting not zero people, not one person, but enough people, which turned out to be literally five. But the context was we were all members of the workers union or most of us were. And I think the administration knew that if they dug in too hard, the next version of this confrontation might involve more than five people. It might involve things like the press and so on and so forth.

So I don’t want to make it sound as though as soon as you find four other people, you can make any change to any political system. But I think the point stands that making durable changes, making specific kinds of interventions politically, isn’t always about the raw numbers. Sometimes it’s about picking your spots and knowing what’s vulnerable, and importantly, having the ability to, when the chips are down, move large numbers.

KH: I love that. And to be honest, this question of what makes a protest effective is really dear to my heart, as a movement educator, so I am going to geek out and go on a bit of a rant here.

I usually think of protest, not in terms of permitted marches, but in terms of direct action. Every direct action is a protest, but not every protest is a direct action. A direct action is an intervention that occurs outside the status quo, so it’s something we’re not getting permission for. And in the school of thought I’ve worked with, there are four primary purposes for a direct action: To advance a strategic campaign, to mark a momentous occasion, to participate in acts of political communion, or to address the needs of our communities in ways that defy or challenge the status quo. Some direct actions represent a mashup of these intentions.

For example, here in Chicago, we have a long tradition of rallying outside juvenile detention centers around the December holidays. We sing songs and sometimes we carry lighted messages that spell out the words, “WE LOVE YOU,” and we bring messages of love and care to the young people inside those facilities, which fulfills a community need. Those young people need our love and support. And at the same time, by standing out there in the cold, and singing, and tearing up while those children wave and draw hearts in soap on their windows, we are also reaffirming our values. That’s political communion. We are being reminded of who we are, and why we’re in the struggle in the first place — and that’s very important to our political endurance.

But we’re not just organizing to comfort people who are harmed by the system or to reaffirm who we are in relation to the system, we’re also trying to make material changes.

So in that vein, another action that comes to mind for me is a really simple one, in the home stretch for the fight for reparations, for victims of police torture in Chicago, Rahm Emanuel was particularly politically vulnerable very suddenly because he wound up in a mayoral runoff. We planned and executed a lot of actions during that time, but one that I think carried a lot of weight was an artful action outside his home. It was very cold, there was a lot of snow on the ground, and there were cops outside guarding his house because this was a moment of peak protest. But a group of people all sprang out of their cars and around corners at the same time. And we spelled out a message in lights outside his home and the message read, “REPARATIONS NOW.”

We got a photo with the house in the background and we turned around for a moment to face the house so Rahm could see the message. We saw lights go out inside the house, so we knew there were people there seeing it, pretending not to be home. And then we got out of there before anyone got arrested. That image, as part of the campaign, went viral on social media. It was published, and republished, and it really carried the message that this legacy of torture and the demand to address it was inescapable for Emanuel. We were literally bringing it to his doorstep.

That attention was the last thing he needed or wanted to focus on at that time. And we ultimately won that campaign. And a lot of people, who were tortured under the leadership of Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, received reparations in the form of monetary compensation, mental health care, access to education for themselves and their families, and more. And that home stretch of direct actions was crucial to that outcome. But we’re also talking about an effort that was many years in the making, a true coalitional effort between groups and individuals. And ultimately, it was won by leveraging our power and the political vulnerability of our bitch-ass mayor.

OOT: Magnificent.

KH: So let’s talk about what we need to accomplish and build right now. What do you think the organizing and formations we need to get out of this mess look like?

OOT: So I think anything that can play the role of strong-arming the people in charge could potentially be the kind of organization or the kind of effort that would work. Historically, unless you’re seceding from a country, then maybe you’re talking about an army or a militia. I guess if folks want to do that, they can do that. But historically, we’re talking about unions, workers unions, tenants unions. More recently, people have been talking about creating debtors unions. These are organizations that involve the disempowered, but don’t just involve them in the way that NGOs might involve the disempowered or the way that philanthropy, that charity might involve the disempowered, that’s like recipients of something that some other group of people are doing. But the point of a union is to make the disempowered powerful.

The point of a tenants union is that if the landlord has to deal with all the tenants at once, now suddenly it’s not as obvious. It’s not as clear who has the upper hand in that engagement. You’re evening the playing field just a little bit. And the more powerful the tenant union is, the more even the playing field is. I think in principle, any group of people that’s prepared to take an action, whether it’s one of those kinds of organizations or some other kind, could be that kind of organization, so long as the action hits the enemy where it hurts. So the Montgomery bus boycott, not principally organized by unions, but withholding money from people that want money, that’s a way to have leverage. The people boycotting Target right now, I think you could say, are doing a version of that. And I think they’re putting some real pressure on Target and I think time will tell how well that works. But I think it’s certainly the kind of thing that has worked historically, and it represents smart political thinking, so we need to do a lot more of that.

KH: I agree that we need union power, now more than ever. If people want to learn more about union organizing, I really recommend checking out No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey. And if people are interested in tenant organizing, I think Abolish Rent is an absolute must-read. I really agree with you that moments of mass protest should be moments where we are flexing the structured power that we are building.

I also really think this is a time for people to experiment, in terms of doing what it takes to meet community needs, from accessing the care people need to organizing community defense. There are longstanding traditions of harm reduction work that people can learn from, in terms of what it means to care for people, even when that means breaking the rules. For people who feel drawn toward that kind of work, I really recommend checking out Shira Hassan’s book Saving Our Own Lives and Angela’s Hume’s book Deep Care. Dean Spade’s book Mutual Aid is also a really important resource, if you’re focused on addressing community needs.

And if people are really interested in work that involves breaking rules, I would also encourage folks to know who they are working with and make sure that you have a lot of trust, and have done some solid risk assessment, because we want people to act righteously and consent to risk in an informed way. For some people, who they can trust with information that shouldn’t be public is obvious — maybe you have co-strugglers or trusted neighbors, or people you’ve known for years who are the only people you would do that kind of work with. That’s ideal. But if you don’t have that kind of long-term understanding, and you’re looking to break rules, I highly recommend checking out Vision Change Win’s Get in Formation Toolkit. There is a section on vetting that everyone should read, and you can also use their risk assessment toolkit to think through what you’re doing, and make sure you’ve covered all of your bases. Because whatever we’re doing, we want to look out for ourselves and each other, and move in a good way.

And speaking of how we move, and how we build with people, I have frequently quoted something you said on social media about what we prioritize in our dealings with other people. You wrote, “At some point, you should decide whether you will accept the discipline imposed by your material objectives and commitments or the discipline imposed by your resentments.” Can you talk about the distinction between the discipline imposed by our objectives and the discipline imposed by our resentments, and how you see these motivations showing up on the political landscape?

OOT: So one of the themes I’ve talked a lot about in the last few years, especially around the idea of elite capture and some of the discussions that get brought up in that context, is coalitional politics. I think people rightly have lots of resentments about the way that they are treated, people who are dealing with bigotry on a daily basis, dealing with disrespect on a daily basis. Part of being the kind of person that would fight for a better world is being the kind of person that doesn’t just take disrespect and bigotry lying down. We should be the kind of people that object to that, whether it happens at work or in the organizing place or wherever it happens.

So at bottom, I’m deeply sympathetic to the resentment people have about misogyny or about racism or about any of the other things that we’re fighting against in our organizations. But one of the places that people often take it is a suspicion, sometimes even what they take as a principled stance against certain kinds of relationships. We’re not going to work politically with this kind of person or with that organization because of the kind of people that are in that org. And that is one response you can have to the well-earned, well-justified resentments that we all develop.

But there is still the question of what it is you’re trying to accomplish politically and whether or not, as a matter of fact, you can do it without that org over there or without that neighbor over there or without that section of the union. And I think if we’re serious about things like the 3.5 percent rule, if we’re serious about things like mass politics, if we’re serious about things like organizing across our workplace or our apartment building or our church congregation, we’re going to find ourselves in a position where we have to choose between leaning into our assessments of who deserves our support or who deserves our scorn and resentment and who it is that we, in fact, need to work with and build with if we’re going to get the job done, if we’re going to challenge the richest, most well-armed organizations and people on the planet.

And I think we will find, if we ask ourselves the strategic questions that we … We need a lot of people. We certainly don’t need people who are going to actively work against our interests. So there’s a fine line between letting things go and letting wreckers in, but we need to be honest about where that line is. And sometimes we mobilize arguments that are designed to prevent people from entering the movement who are wreckers, and we use those arguments to defend our own wrecker-type behavior. And that is what I’m getting at with that quote. We need to be disciplined … We will be disciplined by something. We will behave, we will make choices, we will make connections or fail to make connections, and we can either let our anger do the choosing for us or we can let our goals do the choosing for us.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying about taking mass politics seriously, and taking what we believe it takes to win seriously, because, as a jumping off point, I don’t think everyone does. I think that some of the politics of disqualification, where people kind of wear ideologies and ideas as merit badges, and strut around saying, “Behold my righteous politics,” and vote people off the island all day — I think that shit’s often, really, a form of surrender. It’s a resignation, a shrinking down of what it means to do politics to the scale of maybe winning arguments or coming off as better than someone else. It’s about having a righteous political identity rather than winning a political battle, and I think that often, the object of winning doesn’t even enter into the calculus, because there’s no theory or vision of that — other than maybe, at best, the bad guys will eventually crumble on their own, and personally, I can’t accept that as a game plan. Even if I were to accept that as inevitable, the costs along the way are too damn high.

Dwelling in expressions of disdain, disgust, and sanctimony may get likes and reposts, because people love that shit, but it does not build power. And while people on the left model that, and some folks mistake that kind of acting out for the work of doing politics, the right is accumulating more and more actual power, and taking even greater control of our lives.

And so I think that we need to, as you say, acknowledge that we have a right to be mad about some shit, and also be disciplined about what we want to see happen. As Mariame and I wrote in Let This Radicalize You, how much discomfort is the whole world worth? That is an admonition I take seriously in my own work, and I am challenged by it all the time. And you know, anyone who has worked with me knows, I am no pushover. I will push back on some fucked up behavior, but I also approach difference more carefully and diplomatically than I would have ten years ago, because I am a better organizer now than I was ten years ago. Organizing is a craft, and I am better than I used to be at prioritizing what I want to see happen, and what I hope we’re all going to do in order to survive, or have health care, or have homes, or end police violence — whatever it is, I know how to make that more important than the fact that I am not gonna like everyone in the room, and that some folks are gonna be on some bullshit.

But sometimes when I say this, people will tell me that people not experiencing social consequences for having taken bad or offensive positions doesn’t help us move forward. What would you say to those folks?

OOT: If someone can tell me the story, actually, if someone can paint me the consequential picture that starts at being shunned by a few leftists on the internet or something and ending up at a real change of heart, not just on the scale of the particular individuals being shunned, but on the scale of, say, the 3.5 percent number or even larger than that, if that’s the story of a massive cultural shift, I’d be receptive to that. I don’t think out of hand that it’s impossible that we could get to one from the other, but I don’t myself see it.

I think at the end of the day, you have to make a decision about what it is that you mean when you’re saying that what your politics is informed by is a political ideology like anti-imperialism or socialism, or is informed by advocacy for a particular marginalized group, a pro-women politics or pro-Black politics, something like that, is what you mean that the aesthetic in your head that you attach to those ideas you describe as pro-Black or pro-woman or pro-colonized, or something like that, or do you mean that you actually want to do something for the actual people out there in the world that correspond to those labels because those people think all sorts of things and are problematic in all sorts of ways and are excellent in all sorts of ways and have opinions that were not formed in a radical reading group, but were formed by the same propaganda and the same material oppression that formed the rest of the world.

And I think the retreat from engaging with the actual empirical things that people think and say across identity groups, across classes, across races, across genders, et cetera, and just carving out a small niche of like-minded people that you’re willing to engage with is a form of surrender, as you were saying, because it’s trading the actual nature of the struggle that we have in front of us with a science fictional one. We don’t need to contend with the things people actually think and say out there in the world outside of the people that view the world in the way that we do. And we certainly don’t need to deal with the consequences of the decisions those people make out there, except as they inform what criticisms we circulate amongst ourselves in here. But once you adopt the actual practical goal of trying to do something about the world outside of your affinity group, outside of the circle of people that think and move like you do, you necessarily have to take seriously some stuff that maybe objectively doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously or maybe people that you think don’t deserve to be taken seriously, but that’s the job, or else we’re just not doing the thing that we say we’re doing.

KH: I also think we need a lot more humility. As a Native person living in the United States, I have never seen clean hands or clean money, and I have met very few people in my life who I would say did not benefit from someone else’s suffering or oppression, and who did not move in ignorance or indifference to that oppression and suffering, at some point, and that includes me. I think that we had really better hope that people can be redeemed for the ways that they have been ignorant of other people’s suffering, benefited from other people’s suffering, and not really read into the consequences of their actions. We had all better hope that people can be redeemed, under those circumstances, because I don’t really know anyone in my day-to-day life who’s excluded from that.

We live in the heart of empire. There’s lots of accountability to go around and there’s a lot of mistakes that have been made. But I think that we really need to accept that any movement to make things better is going to be an amalgamation of flawed people operating on a really fucked-up terrain. It’s going to be about trying to make things happen that need to happen.

And in that process, in the waging of struggle, what we can learn about each other, what we can learn from each other about how to maybe make some things right, that’s not the pursuit of purity. It’s the pursuit of solidarity and really showing up for each other in ways that are meaningful and doing the work of collective survival in ways that a lot of people clearly aren’t ready for, but that I hope we are going to get ready for. Because, all of this disqualification, talking about why everybody and their brother isn’t good enough to be part of the struggle — that shit does not reflect the stakes. When it comes down to it, in a struggle for collective survival, you struggle with the people who are there and who are willing to lock arms. And I think imprisoned organizers understand that better than anyone, which is why we should be learning everything we can from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated organizers right now, because those folks know what it’s like to move under fascistic conditions.

And good labor organizers understand this, too, inasmuch as you have to be able to organize with people who aren’t of your own choosing. And if you can’t do that, then you’re really not going to get a thing done at scale.

OOT: Yeah, who’s in your apartment building? Who’s on your cell block? You didn’t pick those, but that’s who you have to work with. And just to that same point about humility, I don’t know, maybe some people … I actually have met some people that just seem to have, from birth, had good politics. Every now and again, I look at them like they’re aliens because there’s like three of them, but I am certainly not one of them. And I remember having not-so-good political opinions and habits and ways of talking. And I remember why I challenged those. And I’ll tell you in not a single instance was it me just reasoning from first principles and the delightful purity of my soul out of propaganda and years of socialization into a better outlook. I happened to meet someone who told me something or led me to an experience that made me challenge some belief that I had or some fucked-up way of talking that I had or some fucked-up way of treating other people that I had.

And in my case, at least, a lot of those connections and a lot of those experiences are direct results of privileges that I had. I went to school and I got to read something that I wouldn’t have gotten to read somehow else or I got to move across the country and I got to meet people that I wouldn’t have met in southwestern Ohio. And I had experiences that I wouldn’t have had over there. And so I think the honesty we should have about ourselves is one of the quickest routes, at least in my case, to humility, because whatever I’m getting right now, it’s not because I was ordained, destined to come to the right political opinion. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to think about something.

And so if we look out at the world, at our cell block, or at our shop floor, or at our apartment building and see people who didn’t luck into those particular circumstances, why have the opinion that this person is some irredeemably politically problematic person rather than holding out the hope that maybe this person just hasn’t chanced into the particular conversation that you chanced into that set you on your political trajectory. And why not also hold out the hope that you could be the person that sets them on a different political trajectory than they’re currently on? Your talking to them could be the conversation that leads them to think about something differently from how they had thought about it before. Why couldn’t it be you? Why couldn’t it be this thing that you’re doing with your neighbors or with your fellow workers or with the other people that owe money to the same institution you owe money to?

KH: Yes, and also, don’t be shocked if it doesn’t all come together in one conversation. In my experience, people’s views change over time, through ongoing dialogues, and through the experience of shared struggle. Most people aren’t responsive to someone walking up to them and saying, your politics are bad, use these instead. And people who are that impressionable are still going to be that impressionable when the next persuasive person comes along with a different view. So, I think this advice of yours, to think about our own growth processes, and how we’ve changed in our views and beliefs, is really important too. Most of us don’t arrive at better ways of doing and thinking overnight. There are people who were patient with us, and we probably really annoyed and frustrated those people at times. I know I did, and I try to remember that anytime I’m the one giving someone else room to grow. And I’m not saying it always works out, or that people will always come around to a better way of thinking or doing, but if we write each other off quickly and easily, it definitely doesn’t happen.

[musical interlude]

I also want to talk a bit about language and how the Trump administration has characterized a lot of the harm it’s doing. Many of the administration’s attacks on workers, on public services, and on programs that people depend on have been framed as efforts to root out the influence of DEI programs. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has become code for Black people, women, accessibility, and really any acknowledgement of the existence of marginalized people. It’s functionally similar to the way that right-wingers use the word “woke.” This puts us in a defensive position, but often, what we’re defending isn’t actually DEI, but rather, the truth of history, or the basic rights of marginalized people. We also know that DEI initiatives, as you recently wrote, often “wrapped corporate entities in a shawl of faux progressivism, donned to placate societal demands for civil rights, even while these same entities continued to oppose unionization and other efforts to meaningfully empower the workers whose diversity they were so eager to acknowledge.” So how do we navigate the demonization of DEI and defend what’s actually under attack? How do we reframe this crisis in a manner that reflects the reality of the situation?

OOT: I think what’s happening at the bottom is a direct assault on values, and it couldn’t be clearer from the fact that the administration itself is naming DEI, naming diversity, equity, and inclusion as its enemy. Now, they’re referring to it with an acronym and they’re using cleverly the faux progressivism that we were just talking about, the empty association with those values that corporations developed to make it seem as though their target is this corporate perversion of the values or their target is the bad faith allusions to those values.

But you can see from the patterns of who they’re firing from what they’re canceling that their target just is the values. And I think this is the thing that represents an element of confusion for centrist institutions like the New York Times. If you are in essentially a valueless ideological space and you don’t essentially believe in political values as an organizing feature of politics and political life, it’s very hard to parse the difference between the attack on corporate DEI and the attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those seem like the same thing from that political vantage point.

So I think what’s incumbent on the rest of us is to do the opposite of this constant refrain that we need to pivot to anodyne issues like whatever the economy refers to and get out of contentious politics and just talk about potholes and jobs. But, in fact, I think there needs to be an even more full-throated defense of the values that are under attack by the Trump administration. Certainly not corporations versions of those, but the real solidarity-based versions of those thoughts and values that I think are alive and well in our movement spaces.

KH: The language that gets used to describe what’s happening around us can really shape people’s responses. You mentioned the New York Times, and I was especially grossed out recently by NYT reporter Eric Lipton’s refusal to characterize Trump accepting a jet as a gift from a foreign state as corruption, because according to Lipton, corruption requires explicit quid pro quo. There are so many examples of the corporate press demurring or really doing the spin work you might have expected from Trump’s lackeys during the first administration, but this time around, the administration doesn’t feel the need to spin anything the president does. He’s just off in this realm of extremity and the legacy media is doing the spin work for them. Some people call it “sanewashing,” but I think what we’re really talking about is a laundering of fascist lies and a lot of preposterous behavior. Can you talk about that laundering process and what it means for our movements?

OOT: Yeah, I think my read … I don’t know Eric Lipton, but I also feel like I’ve met a thousand versions of this guy. So just judging from that statement where there’s a kind of person that just … It’s the caricature of a centrist. I don’t really know what I believe. I know what distance I would like to maintain between the people on the right who believe things and the people on the left who believe things. And that lack of a core set of one’s own political commitments does, I think, draw you inevitably to sanewashing, because at the end of the day, you need to believe that wherever politics has ended up is somewhere near what is normal and reasonable, even if it tilts slightly to the right of your ideal version of those ideas or slightly to the left, depending on who’s in office. But when the people to the right of you are fascist and you’re still doing that, then absolutely, I think laundering of fascism is as good a description of any of that centrist positioning in that historical context.

I think what it means for our movements is there is a deep communications challenge, there’s a deep informational challenge, that we have to take on because the institutions that are best positioned to rain alarm bells are effectively working for the other side. And I think that means we have to think seriously and strategically about what it is to develop an information architecture that is robust to the sanewashing of centrist legacy media. We have to develop other ways of not just getting information out, but getting … We have to develop ways not just of getting information out, but of sounding our own alarm bells, not just informing people, but rousing people to action.

And again, I’m going to sound like a broken record, but this is one of the functions of organizations. Not everybody in Alabama was probably tracking transit politics, but the people who were sent out the message saying what we need to do at this point in time is boycott the bus system. And so people did. Not everybody in a union is going to be equally well positioned to track what’s going on in bargaining, even if you have open bargaining in your union, but you’re going to have people on the committee who will be in the room and who can report back to everyone else saying, “Negotiations are breaking down. We need to authorize a strike,” something like that.

Whatever else our organizations are, they are information networks and they work best when other information networks like ideally functioning press, like people’s informal communities, people’s religious affiliations, people’s membership in clubs, people’s hangout spots are also a part of the effort to make sure people know what’s going on and people are in a position to do something about bad things that are going on. And we need to think really holistically about how we can set those up in a way that’s going to be compatible with resisting the machinations of the people in charge to take all of the wealth and power for themselves.

KH: I absolutely agree. And I’ve also seen you talk about the importance of supporting independent media, and I just want to emphasize to folks how important that infrastructure is going to be in the coming months and years. We need to fortify the cooperative and supportive networks of independent media that exist right now. The Movement Media Alliance is a very important project. And I also want to shout out the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism, which is part of our organization here at Truthout, and headed up by my good friend Maya Schenwar. The Center is currently mentoring six independent news publications, helping folks firm up their fiscal and legal structures, support their staff, connect with movement people, and explore what kind of stories and authors they should engage with during this really scary and uncertain time.

I get really frustrated when I hear about how we need a leftist Joe Rogan, or fucking whatever, when what we really need is to fortify the powerful longstanding work that people are doing, that already has a lot of reach, that has always been under-resourced, and has already helped elevate the voices and stories of our movements. The legacy media has capitulated, and the truth is its own front of struggle. There is no “saving democracy” without fighting on that front. The fabric of our shared reality is under attack. That’s something that we absolutely cannot surrender. And I really need people to understand that. I am at Truthout because I believe in what we do, and I hope people will support the kind of media they believe in, and that they want to see in the world in these times.

And speaking of meaningful projects, and what we choose to engage with or support, I also want to ask about a piece you wrote for Teen Vogue called “Donald Trump and His Allies Don’t Really Care What Kind of Leftist You Are.” In that piece, you wrote, “When you are recruited by people and projects to be a thing and others that want to do a thing, join the doers.” As we wrap up this conversation, can you talk about this distinction between being and doing and the kind of politics people should be wary of in these times?

OOT: Yeah. One thing that I’ve been through, especially as a baby leftist, was constantly flirting with these various ideological labels and groups. And I’ll just use classic commie ones just as an example, but it’s not something that’s particular to socialism or communism. Everywhere on the left has their versions of these, these schools of thought or possible identifications that you can make. Am I a Maoist or a Trotskyist or Leninist or do I belong to this theory or that theory? And the particular kinds of sectarian squabbles that you would see come up around these would not confine themselves to reading groups about particular texts or discussions about particular segments of 20th century leftist history. People would click up around actual organizing efforts.

I just remember thinking, “Wait, so the way that we’re supposed to try to confront the sheriff’s department here in Los Angeles, what the fuck does that have to do with whether or not I buy so-and-so’s criticism of the agricultural policy of 1930s Soviet Russia?” What is it that we’re actually accomplishing by having these kinds of disagreements and trying to identify ourselves as the particular leftists of this or that tradition? And the more I organized, the more I thought about these sorts of things, the more I suspected that, for some people, the goalposts had shifted somewhere along the line and being a proper Trotskyist or a proper Nkrumaist or a proper this or that was actually the thing that they were trying to do politically rather than get the sheriff’s department to stop collaborating with ICE, or rather than trying to defund the police department or rather than trying to retake over the school board.

And for some people, it was actually the other way around. Those struggles were in service of their goal of being the right leftist rather than trying to make any particular change to the world. And so it’s the long way round to the discussion we were having earlier about these subtle forms of political surrender, where people stop trying to at least primarily accomplish political changes to the world, and people end up nursing resentments or nursing these kinds of ego-driven identifying goals.

And I think it’s an unnecessary, unforced error that we should all do our best to try to avoid. I don’t think living up to any particular historical figure or any particular subset of any political thinking is the important thing that we’re doing. All of those, after all, were just ways of responding to the political problems of their times. And we should just do our version of that. Look outside, what is the thing you’re going to try to get done? Who do you need to get it done? What do you need to get it done? How do you need to move to get it done? Those are the primary questions. And where that sits you next to the long history of political activism is interesting. I’m a nerd. I study philosophy for a living. I’m not uninterested in how to draw the narrative line that starts at Fanon and ends somewhere in my apartment or whatever. But it’s not the thing that’s important about climate change activism or anti-carceral activism or anything else that we might be doing.

KH: That really resonates. And I think these conversations around being more focused on the politics we do than the politics we wear are really important. And I think this also ties back to what we were saying about protest and direct action earlier. A lot of protests that people get really hyped about are what we would call “expressive protests.” They can be energizing. They can allow us to express ourselves and our position, and maybe feel unified in that expression. And we do need that energy. But what we also need, and what we need a lot more of, are instrumental actions — protests that apply meaningful pressure to targets and attempt to reshape our social and political environment. That involves more than raising awareness. It’s about impact. The best protests are expressive and instrumental, but I want us to constantly keep coming back, in everything we do, to how effective our actions are, and what impacts we’re having.

Now, with all of that said, is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

OOT: The one other thing that I think goes nicely with what we were saying about the leftist media landscape and, just in general, trying to build a more hospitable system for ourselves to do politics out of, to organize out of, is we should not overlook the role of literal physical spaces in that. So what that’s going to look like is going to be different depending on where you’re at. Maybe there’s a friendly church that some of you meet at. Maybe there’s a radical bookstore in your city. Maybe there’s a coffee shop that is run by a workers’ cooperative that is down and that collaborates with some of the activists there. But whatever the spaces, the physical spaces, maybe it’s somebody’s house, maybe it’s somebody’s apartment, but I think trying to support those places is a big force multiplier. The more you can do to keep those places thriving and to keep the workers and the comrades who support them supported and healthy and secure, the better it is for everyone in the vicinity of those spaces. And so I think one of the concrete things that we can do to support progressive leftist, whatever, movements is to support the spaces, the places, the buildings that support them.

KH: That is such a good point. And by the way, if you’re someone who has a space that you can make available to movement folks, please consider doing so. I know that here in Chicago and in many cities where space is at a premium, we don’t have enough of these spaces where folks can meet and gather and do the work of community building. So, yes, let’s fortify and support those places where they exist, and let’s open up more space to do the work we need to do together.

Olúfẹ́mi, this has been such a great conversation. I’m so grateful you could join me today. You’re someone who I always learned so much from and I’m just so grateful to have had the chance to talk today.

OOT: Likewise. Thanks a lot for having me.

KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
• No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey
• Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis
• Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan
• Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open by Angela Hume
• Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade
• Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
• Get in Formation, the Vision Change Win Community Safety Toolkit
• Vision Change Win’s Risk Assessment Toolkit