Organizations that are supposed to assist in liberating or improving the living standards and cultural fabric of a community must learn to be transparent, accountable, and able to accept critique. If your organization professes to put the needs and dignity of oppressed, marginalized, or directly impacted people at the center of their organization’s goals, then they should do so in a way that facilitates their direction, consultation, and experiences. It is contradictory, hypocritical, and an otherwise organizational form of gaslighting to continue to try to attract people to an organization that claims to help people with less power and privilege while simultaneously erecting barriers to their advancement, silencing them, doubting the validity of their concerns, and continuing to feign solidarity with their struggles.

I state these things as a privileged able-bodied cisgender white man. I state these things as a marginalized formerly incarcerated, currently unemployed (always precariously employed), pansexual identifying, depressed, anxious, recovering alcoholic, impoverished, and struggling divorced parent of two. I state what I’m about to as someone who definitely has caused harm and reinforced negative systems and institutions and I say them as someone who has certainly been traumatized, disenfranchised, and harmed like many other people. I state these following truths, that are relevant to my personal story and the issues I wish to highlight, having experienced privilege and oppression in a variety of ways and having struggled to mitigate the negative aspects from privileges I hold undeservedly. That being said, where are the rest of the predominantly white nonimpacted and privileged “social justice” organizations even beginning to make an attempt at fully owning up to, mitigating, and redirecting their power and privilege to better sustain and uplift the movements of those far more oppressed and under multiple intersections of oppression?

I understand the above is a tall question and order to ask and demand. It must be asked anyways. It must always be asked. A response to it must be given and it ought to be filled with more than just hollow apologies, claims of “we’ll do better” next time, or simply left unanswered.

The first and foremost solution to any issue of oppression is listening to understand and be led by those closest to the oppression. If a Black person tells you something is anti-Black, is upholding whiteness, is white privileged –it is your obligation as supposed activists, organizers, nonprofit employees, etc, to listen and be led by those comments. If a formerly or currently incarcerated person tells you that you are reinforcing negative stereotypes of people with conviction histories being “threats”, alienating them by manipulating complicated bureaucratic structuring and operation of organizations to silence them, and generally doing a poor job of checking-in on their well-being –then suffice to say, you’re organization must change to address these concerns or quit claiming it can. If a survivor of sexual abuse or assault tells you that an individual makes them unsafe you wouldn’t tell them things are going to “be alright” and then continue to work with their tormentor or act in ways that further disempower their abilities to address the person causing them trauma, would you? If your organization is effectively diverting people from other resources and organizations that could better assist them simply to bolster its membership then your organization is playing gatekeeper and is actively causing harm rather than preventing it. If your organization refuses to positively adapt when concerns are made by those more in proximity to a particular issue when their brought to light then the organization is engaged in what is commonly referred to as “saviorism”, or; the act of patronizing a marginalized individual or group of people by believing oneself or one’s organization to be a more trusted vehicle or platform from which to highlight another’s issue(s) and/or save said marginalized individual or group. Saviorism will never grant self-determination and autonomy for those suffering.

I come from a more radical background, I accept an identification as an abolitionist (slavery, prison, police, institutional, etc). It is difficult enough to be taken seriously in less radical/revolutionary spaces and organizations without having to also infight with comrades or remain quiet about the internal conflicts inside of so-called more militant organizations. Imagine being affected by a particular oppression and after consistently making suggestions for months to your comrades and organization about a potential risk to the population you are organizing with you are simply ignored, worse yet told by nonimpacted comrades that you’re exaggerating (in the “Me Too” era at that), and even worse still are effectively isolated, “badjacketed” (mislabeling of someone as a “threat”), and subsequently organizational procedures are weaponized in bad faith (meaning with malice or a conflict of interest) in a way meant to silence and disenfranchise the directly impacted person(s). Would you still suggest that an organization operating like the aforementioned, built on a foundation constructed by nonimpacted people, and which is actively causing harm and a lack of engagement from directly impacted people is a genuine benefit? Would you really consider that organization to be helpful? Would comrades really treat anyone like this? What kind of solidarity would this be?

To add insult to injury, what if the organization and nonimpacted/less-oppressed/more-privileged individuals in it would instead of addressing your concerns made would opt to ask you if you are up-to-date on your membership dues? Tell you that you are “virtue-signaling”? Or for that matter, consider a nonprofit employer terminating a marginalized individual while keeping other less impacted people on their payroll, fully-funded, and still in a position to make decisions that affect and impact those closer to the lived oppression they’re claiming to want to solve supportive of oppressed people? What do you call organizations that utilize impacted people only to exploit them and yet would throw them away and diminish them and their voice in an instant by subjecting them to classism, claiming them bringing to light their plight is “virtue-signaling”, or by simply canning them and leaving less impacted people pulling a paycheck to lead in telling the experiences of the oppressed? Is that “good organizing”? Or is it a co-optation of more marginalized people’s suffering to build social capital and/or actual financial capital for organizations and individuals that have far less stake in solving the issues being suffered by others? I choose to believe it is the latter.

All of these hypothetical scenarios posed above have occurred in real life to me (in just the last year at that). When issues such as these continue cropping up, again and again, and after being ignored, again and again –people stop asking internally (making suggestions or doing “call-ins”), stop being polite (since what they’re already experiencing is rudeness), and start to understand that maybe just maybe the organization they were involved in is only interested in using them and other oppressed people as tokens to fill some imaginary identity quota they believe to have to fill. This includes buzzwords like “diversity”, “inclusion”, and calls for “diverse representation” –all of which are really just dogwhistles to people experiencing more oppression that they should get involved with their organization. Few, especially predominantly white dominated, cisgender, heteronormative, allistic, and less-oppressed populated and driven organizations are going to solve the issues of the people experiencing them. Since when have people who’ve traditionally upheld the oppressive systems and who refuse to listen to those closest to the issues ever solved anything substantially for a more marginalized demographic? What could be hoped to be solved by an organization or individual that refuses to hear people with more experience have to offer? Even for active organizations filled with nonimpacted people trying to do good work –what happens when you construct upon a rotted foundation and refuse to shore it up? Collapse occurs.

For those who interpret this as part of “cancel culture” or “call-out” culture, I ask that you look to the roots of where “call-out”culture came from. It came from Black Queer Trans individuals. It came from necessity. It came from when people were silenced and disenfranchised and they had no other way of being heard internally. It comes from being ignored. “Cancel culture” and call-outs ARE necessary when you can’t use internal processes to get to an adequate solution. Do people not understand that call-outs, when done without ulterior motives, are very much akin to whistle-blowing? When something is wrong and goes unaddressed for too long in these organizations, eventually, that rotted foundation I alluded to in the previous paragraph gets overburdened with the toxic culture and actions that come from it being piled upon it. The negative aspects present in the structure and organizational culture reach a critical mass. Either people will leave and disassociate from an organization, sometimes without saying a thing about what caused it, or, they will fight for space and change within the organization. Many times to no avail.

There are only a few options which can solve an organization terminally unable to understand and be led by those closer to the issues 1) The organization listens and changes itself after receiving the gentler call-ins given, 2) The organization does not heed gentler call-ins and is called out and then changes itself, 3) The organization rejects all suggestions/demands and subsequently continues to conduct itself in misguided haphazard and dangerous ways eventually leading to collapse by being terrible at what they do and replicating systems of oppression in external society internally in their organization, 4) The organization refuses to change and those from more impacted positionalities are left with little choice but to distance their selves and tell others in their communities about the inherent dangers and risks of continuing to work with those particular organizations.

I do not want people to confuse these voiced potential outcomes with being threats to any organization(s) I may bear animosity with currently. Do not denigrate or diminish the content of what is being said here to that of someone lashing out in pain and anger at being alienated and left unsupported (although those are very common responses when people are being denied a voice and stake in issues that pertain to them). I say all of what I have here with the expressed goal of seeing some of these confused, privileged, and harmful organizations (and individuals) begin to do better and so that we all can grow and affect more positive change. I say these things to attempt to bring down barriers and facilitate more progress in bringing about grander wide scale societal change. I say these things because I give a damn and I don’t want to see organizing potential squandered. I say these things because I’m tired of watching people suffer as things become an endless cycle of reinforcing systems of oppression whether with intent or not. I say these things out of fear and out of love.

What I want to know, is what are you saying in these spaces? What are you doing to change the culture and structure of organizations that may currently be harming their own members or other community members? Have you yourself ever attempted to silence or prevent access to positions of decision-making and discernment to those more oppressed and marginalized than yourself? If so, what have you done to mitigate that? What are you doing to be held to account for those actions? Who is holding you to account? Are people closest to the issue informing you of your progress or neglect? Or are you simply plodding forward with an agenda created and directed by less impacted people with the real potential for harm to come to them lying on the horizon? What are you doing or not doing? Question everything.