"We Have to Diminish the Spaces Between People"

Unprocessed grief is a major fault line in our movements and in our society at large. Tragedy and loss abound, and yet, we often lack the tools – or the willingness – to hold space for our personal and collective pain. Last weekend, I joined Sarah Jaffe, Eman Abdelhadi, and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs on a panel at Socialism 2024, marking the upcoming release of Sarah’s book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. It was an emotional conversation and, according to a number of people who attended, a necessary one. (You can watch the panel here.) While we shared a great deal during our talk, I left the conversation feeling like there was much more to say. So, this week, I continued my conversation with Sarah and Eman about Sarah’s book, the role of grief in our movements, how leftists are treating each other right now, and how activists should navigate a daily barrage of painful news and information.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kelly Hayes: Sarah, I could see that our panel at Socialism 2024 was a very emotional experience for you, as I think it was for all of us. Can you talk about what it meant to have this conversation and to introduce this book to the world?

Sarah Jaffe: Thanks so much for asking and for being part of that panel. I have been, in a lot of ways, dreading having this book out in the world – I’m not used to writing about myself for this kind of audience, and it’s terrifying to be that vulnerable. And the left is often, I think, susceptible to the kind of thinking Lydia was talking about on our panel: less tears, more action. It’s easy to think that our feelings just don’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things, and we should shove them aside or back down inside and get back to the work. Except the work will break us if we don’t make space for them. 

I had no idea how the book was going to go over, and I was really overwhelmed by the response. There were so many people who showed up ready to talk, listen, and hold space for all of our grief and vulnerability. 

This is why, I think, we do this work, at the end of the day: we are the kinds of people who can’t simply go through the world unhurt by all that is going on around us even if we, at a given time, have managed to insulate ourselves from being materially damaged by it. We see what is happening in the world, from Gaza to our own neighborhoods, and it hurts. We might have the best political analysis in the world, but we got there because we cared about the world around us. 

KH: Eman, can you speak to what it means to engage in conversations about grief right now amid the devastation in Palestine?

Eman Abdelhadi: So many of us are feeling an enormous amount of survivor’s guilt. We don’t feel like we’re allowed to grieve when our homes are safe, and we have food on the table. And we feel urgently compelled to action by the unrelenting destruction. Grief feels at once self-indulgent and like a luxury we can’t afford. Unfortunately, grief has its own logic and time, as Sarah eloquently discusses in the book. Grief will show up on your door, and it will shout and bang louder and louder the more you try to ignore it. All the grief we have been trying to ignore is showing up as burnout, as rage at each other, as nihilistic impulses that destroy both ourselves and our movements. So we have to address our grief, not just for ourselves but for Palestine, for the work we’re trying to do.

KH: Eman, during our panel conversation, you brought up some posts I wrote on social media about how leftists are treating each other in this moment. In those posts, I wrote, “Many people feel powerless. We haven't had a sufficient impact on the people who are causing the genocide, so when feelings overflow, folks will often let loose on people who are actually vulnerable to their words, which usually means other people who are against the genocide.” Obviously, conflict can be generative, and sometimes, our disagreements will be passionate. However, a lot of what I am seeing lately reminds me of trauma responses that I’ve seen play out in direct action spaces. People who get traumatized by police violence during a protest cannot punish the state for its violence. So, a person who is hurting sometimes zeroes in on a fellow activist, who may have said or done the wrong thing during the action, and that activist gets the full weight of the traumatized person’s rage. I feel like I am seeing this dynamic on social media every day right now, as people attack other leftists whose positions don’t perfectly align with their own. Hurting those people has no strategic upside, but it can offer people a dose of satisfaction on a political terrain where they are presently getting none. Could you speak to how you see these dynamics playing out, why they are harmful, and how we could interrupt them? 

EA: Huey Newton gave a speech in 1970 addressing the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Networks. I think about that speech nearly every day. In it, he says: 

Friends are allowed to make mistakes. The enemy is not allowed to make mistakes because his whole existence is a mistake, and we suffer from it. But the women’s liberation front and gay liberation front are our friends, they are our potential allies, and we need as many allies as possible.

Newton and other members of the Black Power struggle recognized that movements need allies and that the way you treat a friend who has made a mistake should be fundamentally different from how you treat an enemy. 

I would extend this to say that we need to understand that within our own movements, individual groups have different roles to play. The most successful social movements often have radical, progressive, and moderate flanks. We need to recognize our own strategic advantages – where are you best suited to fight? To the streets or to the workplace or local office? Find your work, do it, and do not fight your enemies in other flanks. Yes, we should hold each other accountable and try to have democratic forms of disagreement. However, the way to do that is not through public cancellations or social media pile-ons. The way to do that is through conversation and good faith engagement, one that starts from recognizing that we have some of the same goals.

Unfortunately – and I don’t think social media helps with this – folks are racing towards the purest ideological position and deriving their political lines from that rather than from the facts on the ground. The reality is that ideology alone won’t save us. We have to actually spring into action on the basis of our ideals, and those actions have to be calculated on the basis of what’s feasible and the material realities around us. We have to keep our eyes on the revolutionary horizon. We should never accept small, incremental changes as the end of our struggle. But we can work towards them if they’re going to have a material impact. 

Ceasefire is a great example of this. We coalesced around a ceasefire not because it’s the absolute horizon of Palestinian liberation but because it felt like a winnable goal with immediate consequences for Palestinian lives. We know that once we achieve a ceasefire, we will still have a lot of work to do for Palestinian liberation, and we will shift strategies and tactics accordingly. Our coalitions will reshuffle at that moment. That is all normal, but we cannot put the cart before the horse. The logical conclusion of an all-or-nothing politics of perfect ideological purity is to sit at home (usually while continuing to benefit from this fucked up system) and await the revolution. Or worse yet, to sit at home and deploy social media to discredit the work of those who are on the streets or in their workplaces organizing. We need to start thinking of ourselves as political actors in the world whose actions and words matter. We need to apply a filter that asks: what am I doing for the movement when I write this post, or when I yell at this person, or when I draw this line? Am I attacking a friend or an enemy? Should this be a DM? Is this actually about me, or is it about the movement? Do I need a break from social media today? 

SJ: I love that Eman cited Huey Newton on this subject. I’ve been having a lot of conversations along these lines lately about knowing who our friends and enemies are – about understanding that none of us have all the answers and, in fact, we need, at this point in time, to be experimenting more and allowing one another to fail and to learn from that. This feels counterintuitive when things are so urgent when the need to stop genocide is all-consuming. But we don’t know the answers – I certainly don’t – and so we need to try more things. Rodrigo Nunes, in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, writes of vanguard functions rather than vanguard organizations: of different groups testing out theories of change and strategic wagers at different times and being willing to take risks and potentially fail. Failure, rather than a betrayal of the broader movement, is a gain for the movement because we learn something. We can formulate better attempts next time when it’s our turn to take over that function. 

KH: I would like to talk a bit about fascism and how fascistic politics encourage people to delight in other people’s pain. This topic came up briefly during our panel discussion, but I know we could have said a lot more about it. I also want to mention that this concern is much bigger than the people who we readily identify as fascists. Scapegoating and the idea that If I have it bad, and I have done nothing to deserve that, why shouldn’t someone I view as having done something wrong suffer horribly – these ideas are not going to be confined to the MAGA crowd in the coming years. Public executions fell out of fashion as standards of living went up, and I think we have to be realistic about what deteriorating conditions could mean for public empathy or a public desire to see others suffer, which is perhaps another manifestation of that craving for satisfaction among those who feel powerless. How do we address this in our movements? What do we offer people in lieu of the cheap satisfaction they might derive from the punishment of scapegoats? And how do we prepare people to counter these tendencies in themselves and others as they arise?

SJ: Years ago, the wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich – presente! – sent me to Indiana for a story about a comrade of hers who ran the Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne. His name is Tom Lewandowski, and I think a lot about a thing he said to me: 

Bad bosses and totalitarians create spaces between people. Donald Trump is probably both. It is no different than in a workplace. When you have a bad boss who is playing one off against another, it is the same thing. First shift versus second shift. Shipping and receiving versus the tool crib. It is always the same dynamic. We have to diminish the spaces between people. We have to have people understand each other and work together.

He said that in a world where most people don’t have actual representation, Trump offered emotional representation. That he offers people a way to feel something, to feel good in a world that doesn’t feel good most of the time. Trump mocks people cruelly, and his policies are worse. But I also think about the way that liberalism also offers that kind of emotional cruelty. I don’t remember who it was that basically said retired coal miners deserved to die of black lung because their state had voted for Trump. 

And on the flip side, but not really flip at all, Kamala Harris is offering to stick with Biden’s policy of arming and materially supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and just offering us some thoughts and prayers, basically. She feels their pain but won’t acknowledge that she could stop it. Neither side at this point is offering to make anyone’s life better; they’re just offering a different set of vibes and a different pace to the bordering and deporting and imprisoning and bombing. Do you like your genocide with crocodile tears or without? 

So, back to Tom. How do we diminish the spaces between people? How do we connect to each other? We talked about social media above, and that is both a help and a hindrance on this issue, I think: we can see and connect with people in Gaza living through and dying in the ongoing assault and feel closer to them than ever, but we can also dehumanize each other, reduce other people to “accounts” and every conversation to an act of one-upmanship.

I am a labor reporter, so it’s not a surprise that I return to labor organizing, but I’m also thinking a lot about tenant organizing these days because these are the places where we have to organize across difference. We have to organize with the people that capital has chosen for us – our bosses, our landlords – rather than the people we choose. Organizing within the prison is similar. We do not choose the people we are thrown next to, and we have to figure out how to communicate in those spaces, to articulate our common interests with one another and against the boss, the landlord, and the prison. It’s in those spaces that we learn how to change minds and to let ourselves be changed. 

And then, to return to the subject of our panel, we need to build spaces in the movement that hold people’s pain, hurt, and trauma. Spaces that aren’t just the organizing meetings, which to a degree need to be about action rather than tears. But spaces like our panel, where we can talk about what has happened to us, to the people we love, to the strangers we see on our smartphones, and let ourselves connect to our humanity. We won’t beat the fascists by hardening ourselves just like them. 

EA: Unfortunately, social media pile-ons have become today’s public executions. It has been sickening to see folks who have worked for Palestine their whole lives get completely publicly excoriated over one badly worded tweet. Again, we need to recognize that impulse in ourselves as well as hold each other gently accountable for participating in these public executions. Let’s call ourselves into something better.

I think in-person and virtual spaces of actual interaction can be a great antidote for these impulses. They humanize us to each other and remind us that we are all actual human beings trying our best under terrible circumstances.

KH: Someone at the conference approached me and asked me how I navigate all of the topics that I research, write about, and organize around on a psychological level. I take that question quite seriously because, while we are obviously not suffering to the degree that so many people are suffering in Gaza and in many other places where extreme violence and environmental collapse are destroying lives and communities, we are being inundated with an awareness of suffering and catastrophe that is genuinely unprecedented, across other eras of human experience. We are steeped in an awareness of atrocity, catastrophe, and collapse – and the flow of that information is endless and multi-directional. We are grappling with our obligations with regard to these atrocities while also wrestling with what they mean for our own futures and the futures of the people we love. Some people respond to the enormity of that equation by shutting it all out and simply clinging to normalcy as they understand it. Some people absorb other people’s trauma relentlessly and feel guilty if they look away. Still others try to balance our awareness with action and with the other feelings we need to sustain our sanity, like joy. Can you offer any loving advice to activists and organizers struggling to find that balance right now? How should we care for ourselves and each other?

SJ: I’m always struggling with this – I’m struggling with it as I put this book out into the world. Does my pain even matter when things are so much worse for so many people? How can I justify taking time for myself? And yet, we have to do this work for the long haul – it’s not going to get easier anytime soon. So, we have to figure out how to live sustainably in a time of multiple apocalypses. 

One bit of advice, though, is to figure out what parts of your media consumption are necessary and what parts are simply turning a fire hose on your own face. I listen to a lot of advice podcasts – and now host one – and I have heard so many varieties of the question: my partner is on Twitter 24-7, and when I ask them to take a break, they say no, they are doing activism. And look, most of the time, when we are on social media, we are not doing activism at all. It can be a tool, but most of the time, we are just making ourselves bleed while Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg profit.

Ellen Bravo, one of my movement aunties, who comes out of 9to5 (the women’s office workers union that the Dolly Parton movie was based on), once told me that one of her mottos was “We’re all special and none of us are indispensable.” That meant, to her, building a movement where people’s needs were valued: their responsibilities and their own needs to be cared for. Where they could step back when they needed to, and there would be space for them to return once again when they could. Take breaks! Please! Eat real food and rest! Spend time with the people who love you! Make new friends! We have to be in this for the long haul, and we need to be able to have livable lives while we are in the struggle. 

EA: I couldn’t agree more with the advice to limit social media consumption to what's absolutely necessary. We need to take our organizing into the real world (and yes, that can include virtual meetings) and see social media as a tool, a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

I have found it helpful to be gentle with myself, to recognize that these are abnormal times and that I have no appetite for certain things. I used to love to dance and listen to upbeat music. I haven’t done either in eleven months, and I can’t imagine being in a space that feels festive in these times. That’s okay. We don’t have to pretend we are okay. We can adjust to these times. 

Speaking of which, Palestine has liberated me from ever having to say “I’m fine” when I’m not. I have cried openly when asked how I was doing. I hope it’s at least given others permission to do the same. At the very least, I think it’s a rejection of the way capitalism compartmentalizes our lives. I am still a person at work, a person watching my people get murdered every day.

I have also come to see certain human needs as non-negotiable, even while my organizing workload has doubled and tripled. I have to shower every day. I have to eat food and drink coffee. I have to incorporate some movement into my day. I am simply not effective without that. What are your non-negotiables? 

KH: I love this advice, and Sarah, I really appreciate your emphasis on creating spaces where we can be held in our humanity. So many of us come to this work from a place of pain, and organizing meetings are not going to heal us or make us whole – and the expectation that they will can become toxic. In the same way that activists sometimes lash out at their allies because they know their comrades care enough to be hurt by their words – or can be bullied in ways that we might wish we could bully our oppressors – we can also bring that energy to organizing spaces, expecting them to be everything that the rest of the world is not. Sometimes, people show up ready to burn the whole organization down if it doesn’t embody their every expectation for justice or how they may want a space to make them feel. This is really destructive, and it’s a feeling that can also be rallied by people with bad intentions. 

I think we need to build the spaces we need, in order to be held in our humanity, to rehearse our values together, and to make space for our practice of grief. We need productivity spaces that are task-focused, and we also need spaces that are about our relationships, growth, and how we survive together. We need to make space for what’s sacred to us, the way we have in Understory – a virtual gathering space that I co-facilitate with my friend Tanuja Jagernauth. We need space for fellowship and to inhabit our values and our emotions together, and if we don’t have that, people are going to burn out and lash out, because our grief and our pain will find outlets. We can either choose those outlets thoughtfully, or we can lose control.

Lastly, I just want to reiterate something I said during the panel, which is that we have to nurture the tender parts of ourselves. As you said, Sarah, our regard for the world around us facilitates our analysis and the actions we take. These things are not separate. I was so saddened to hear from young people at the conference who had been shamed for their feelings or for wanting to create spaces to process their grief by people who insist that we have no right to “center” our emotions while so many people are dying in Gaza. It’s so counterintuitive to me to shame the very emotional responses that make people inclined to act in the first place. For most people, hardening emotionally is not going to make them better activists. It’s going to make them more like the rest of society – all of the people who are tuning out what’s happening and going about their lives. We do not need more people who are immune to each other's pain. That's a recipe for more atrocity.

People who refuse to ignore what’s happening or who are unable to do so are going to feel pain as a result, and that pain has to be reckoned with. We all need a practice of grief and a practice of care that allows us to air out what we’re holding inside and to offer comfort to others. That’s how we keep those soft parts of ourselves intact, and we need those parts of ourselves because that softness isn’t weakness; it’s connection. Connecting to something terrible is painful, but it allows us to live in the recognition of our shared humanity and to act in the name of collective liberation and collective survival. So, don’t ever let anyone shame you for hurting or for needing a place to express that hurt in solidarity with others. The strategic organizing we need is not going to happen or be sustainable unless we figure out how to navigate our pain together.

Organizing My Thoughts is a reader-supported newsletter. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today. There are no paywalls for the essays, reports, interviews, and excerpts published here. However, I could not do this work without the support of readers like you, so if you are able to contribute financially, I would greatly appreciate your help.