Hayes & Kaba created this book for activists and organizers. Let This Radicalize You provides genuine stories, personal reflections, and practical guidance to inspire, encourage, and educate. We receive gentle reminders not to idolize certain activists and let our egos dominate our activism. Instead of focusing on criticizing others’ activism, we’re encouraged to channel our efforts into building the future we want to see.
In the Introduction, Mariame Kaba describes her fascination with a group she called the ‘butterflies’. This group (primarily men) always had reading recommendations and spent time speaking of revolution without putting in the work. Despite this lack of work, they were quick to criticize those who were doing the work. Kaba utilizes personal stories to show us that activism isn’t simply reading the right books or saying the right things- but taking action through a myriad of different ways.
Organizing: The process of building collective power as a group and using this power to create positive change in people’s lives and shift existing power relations. Organizing involves building people power, constantly bringing new people into the struggle, challenging systemic injustice and inequity, and giving people who are directly impacted by injustice a sense of their own power and a way to exercise it.
Activism: The many ways that people fight for justice, including through advocacy, research, canvassing, fundraising, attempting marches or meetings regularly, and using other skills in service of a cause or campaign.
Our goal as organizers and activists is to bring people together and it is vital that we build a culture that allows people to be imperfect, seek growth, and one that does not recreate the same structure as the oppressive systems we currently work within. We are reminded of the importance of incorporating healing into our activism. Hayes and Kaba warn us against treating activists as ‘unpaid labor, bodies to arrange for photo ops’ which ultimately results in burnout.
“We can only win by building something entirely different that offers people something the oppressor cannot.” (pg. 38)
To work together effectively, we must accept that perfect ideological alignment is not feasible. Similar to the sentiments expressed by Loretta J. Ross in Calling In, we’re reminded that our tendency to require such perfection hinders the growth of our movements. While the oppressive forces will always work together to maintain capitalist systems and white supremacy, we provide them with an advantage by continuously shrinking our movements down to only those we completely align with.
How do we contend with this?
– Create frameworks for navigating trauma and discomfort.
– Learn to listen.
– Allow for room to grow.
– Practice patience.
Mobilization: Fighting Fear & Rejecting Individualism
In Let This Radicalize You, we are advised that facts are often not enough to mobilize people into action. Further, fear alone will not hold people’s attention nor does it inspire them to act. While we may find this disappointing and find ourselves inclined to deem them good or bad based on this- we instead find what does mobilize them. To mobilize we must interrupt the narrative.
Present facts within the framework of transformative demands and a fresh perspective on the future. Connect with people and create engagement through storytelling, communication, education, and inspiration. How can you show people that they have a meaningful role within the story you (the organizer) are telling?
“If spitting horrifying acts at people changed minds and built movements, we would have overthrown the capitalist system a long time ago, because the facts have always been on our side.” (pg. 23)
We’re given two examples of why fear and facts alone do not work, as stated in The Psychology of Pandemics by Steven Taylor.
Blunting: a behavior involving the distraction from and minimizing of threatening information.
Unrealistic optimism bias: the belief that they are more likely than others to evade harm and experience positive outcomes.
It is further explained to us that it is vital for us to offer a ‘vision of how things could be’ and that our gift as organizers is an ‘invitation to participate in a transformation worth experiencing and fighting for.”
As we live in a capitalist society where power and wealth are horded by the elite, we are reminded that those elite are invested in making us believe that it is our peers who are the danger. It is of great benefit to them to enforce the belief that the system that keeps our needs from being met is ‘inalterable, inevitable, and final’ and that by doing so they reinforce the idea that everyday people are an ‘existential threat to control, contain, and manage.’
Why is this so important? Capitalism is maintained through a ‘disposable’ class of people and therefore requires us to feel that our liberation can only happen at their expense. For example, consider the current genocide in Palestine. If we take the time to look, we can see that our government actively supplies weapons to a rogue state which uses them to murder civilians. In turn, their soldiers train our police force with tactics that are used on our marginalized communities.
“It is the grandest illusion ever created: in a world where corporations and governments worldwide are poised to annihilate most life on Earth, we are made to believe that other disempowered people are the greatest danger we face” (pg. 31)
These ‘illusions’ of a disposable populace are often what prevent us from acting against these harms.
Manufactured Fears
– Fear of what would happen if the system no longer managed our lives.
– Fear of being ‘devoured’ by the system ourselves.
– Fear that we cannot win.
– Fear that we cannot do any better than this.
Let This Radicalize You emphasizes the importance of building relationships with one another multiple times in the book. If the capitalist colonial systems encourage us to focus on individualism, I feel this is the obvious solution they hope for us to never see. Consider how often we feel isolated, alone, and without community? This is by design. If we are isolated, we cannot work together to imagine and bring a new future to fruition.
“When we are no longer ruled by a manufactured fear of one another, we experience a form of liberation. It is not a total liberation, as the structures that oppress us are, for now, very much intact, but we experience a kind of unshackling that allows us to begin the process of dismantling individualism- a violent ideology that has siloed us and stifled our collective potential.” (pg. 33)
Care is Rebellion
Let This Radicalize You prompts us to consider the ways in which we show up for one another. Applying this to the book community, we can consider the Pages4Palestine readathon built by @rocio.reads and @ashleeerin_reads. The readathon was a way for us to raise funds for Palestinian evacuation campaigns and show support for our community. It resulted in reaching the fundraising goal for Palestinian bookish creator, Hala (@bookish.forlife).
Mutual Aid: Collective and community-based practices and efforts to meet people’s needs, independent of state systems and other hierarchical, oppressive arrangements. Mutual aid is grounded in reciprocity and solidarity rather than charity, and builds shared understandings of the systemic failures that make community care for survival necessary. Mutual aid is a form of political participation that allows us to build relationships and formations that make the conditions we face more survivable and strengthen our ability to take collective action.
Fundraising isn’t the only way we can express care and build community. We can also work together to prioritize the safety of our community through the distribution of supplies, utilizing our skills to meet the needs of our community, and providing shelter or refuge for our community. In doing so, we are directly defying the system that would punish us for simply not having the basic necessities of life.
“The state has the capacity to help us all survive- and even thrive- but in its current form, it is actively opposed to doing so.” (pg. 59)
Further, it builds systems that cannot be so easily stripped away from us. In Let This Radicalize You, it is noted that our collective capacity for care ‘does not reinforce state hierarchy.’ The same hierarchy that would place you into the prison system before providing you with housing.
This collective care also allows us to sustain the movements necessary to bring our dreams to fruition. In our fight for liberation, we often lose many activists due to burnout. If we put systems into place that provide those same activists with space for healing, we are actively working to sustain our movements. Failing to do so not only hampers our progress, but also strengthens oppressive systems.
Hayes advises us to build relief teams and mechanisms that reinforce our sense of community and treat organizers as ‘human beings whose lives will sometimes interrupt their labor, rather than batteries to be drained.’
How do we provide relief systems?
-Split organizing work into shifts that allow people to take care of themselves and those they care for.
-Provide support such as cooking, childcare, or running errands.
-Asking questions such as, “Hey, can I take something off your plate?”
“We have to intentionally build a culture of belonging that embraces the time and space for healing work as part of that culture.” -Lisa Fithian (pg. 38)
Education is Resistance
Segregation in formal education perpetuates unequal access to quality education for marginalized communities due to funding disparities. Formal education, however, is not the only form of education withheld from us. Hayes and Kaba express that we are not simply ‘missing out’ on education, but that we are being robbed of it. By participating in a capitalist system that wears down our bodies, disregards our basic needs, and controls our time, we are prevented from accessing opportunities to learn.
An uneducated population is one that is easier to control. People who do not understand the system cannot take effective action against it. Thus, we can consider the current movements to dismantle our education system as well as the continued surge in book banning that works to erase history and stifle the stories of those deemed most expendable by the system.
Therefore, it is vital that we not only educate ourselves (and others) but encourage questions and problem solving that go hand in hand with building a new culture. When we understand HOW the system works to oppress us, we can then work to fight it.
For example, let’s consider a situation in which many people may vilify a person for situations created by the capitalist system that controls our lives.
After four years in animal welfare, I cannot tell you the number of times I heard a coworker utter the sentence, “I hate people!”
These often came from staff after an owner surrender or perhaps an elderly citizen who had their animals taken from them in a hoarding case. But did these workers ever consider the root cause of how this happened? That the same system that isolates us from one another and marks us as disposable has made it harder for these people to care for their pets?
Pet deposits, pet rent, skyrocketing costs of pet care supplies, and the inaccessibility of vet care have often resulted in the surrender of beloved pets. Further, many hording cases were often people who started out with the intention of doing good but had no support for their own health- physical AND mental. If there were resources available to these people, it’s likely we would’ve never taken on their animals.
If we look harder, people may begin to question the cogs in the machine.
The question of “How is it that landlords get away with charging not only a pet deposit, but pet rent?” may lead us to “Who does this keep out of their buildings?”
The question of “Why did no one see this elder needed help?” may lead to the question of, “Why was his family too busy to check on him?” which may lead to the question of, “Why are we working multiple jobs and therefore prevented from spending time with family?”
And from there, one may move towards questioning the system as a whole. One may then work to find solutions for these problems that cannot be controlled or exploited by corporations seeking to make profits.
But careful… asking these questions may have you deemed violent.
They will call you violent.
“- under capitalism “peace” is the maintenance of violence on the state’s terms. Organized efforts to disrupt those harms will always be characterized, by any necessary stretch of the imagination, as violent.” (pg. 115)
As of now, many of us are not unaware that when one opposes an oppressive system that same system will work to discredit you through claims of violence. When protestors block a highway to demand divestment from the apartheid state? That is violence. Yet somehow, the genocide of Palestine is considered ‘self-defense’.
Let This Radicalize You warns activists and organizers against the ‘fetishization’ of violent vs. non-violent protests with the reminder that, as stated by Martin Luther King Jr., “There is no greater purveyor of violence in the world than the US government.”
We are reminded that to many, the word ‘violence’ is one that can and will take many shapes depending on who is using it and that it is quite often utilized to vilify those who challenge the status quo. Have you seen this used against you since October 7th? Has Meta perhaps given you a warning for ‘incitement’ or ‘threats’ when condemning the actions of the apartheid state of Israel? Maybe you’ve been banned from social media for defending yourself against white supremacists. These are, of course, more minor examples. But I believe them to be rather insidious when we consider the amount of Zionist, supremacist rhetoric that is allowed to remain and flourish on these same apps.
| ACCEPTABLE | UNACCEPTABLE |
| – Evictions and subsequent loss of belongings – Businesses destroying food while people go hungry – Police brutality – Denial of healthcare – Bombing innocent civilians – Execution of innocents to maintain the ‘justice’ system | – Protest and subsequent damage to businesses – Providing free food to those who need it – Condemnation of white supremacy – Blocking highways during protest – Murals/graffiti – Existing in a Black or brown body – Reproductive care – Gender affirming care |
“Conditions that the state characterizes as ‘peaceful’ are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of healthcare. And many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating.” (pg. 111)
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Attorney Statement: Missouri Governor Denies Clemency to Marcellus Williams (innocenceproject.org)
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