Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

Dr. Taber's story is an example of why I've increasingly shifted my organizing work away from a focus on structures and started centering long term relationship networks grounded in trust.

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1289558288875401224

It's not that structures aren't useful or needed.

It's that I've found that when the structure is centered-- rather than longterm organizing networks-- it makes movement space and especially spontaneous, emergent movement space vulnerable to co-option.

Emergent movement means newness and messiness.

It's where energy and potential is often concentrated, but that also means there are a lot of folks who are new and naive and susceptible to toxic manipulation.

Good, experienced organizers are attracted to these spaces because they're spaces where change can be manifested, fast.

Good, experienced organizers also know better than to show up and center themselves, though.

Grifters and other bad actors, on the other hand, will usually show up and try and establish themselves as central before the newcomers to movement figure out the kind of people they are.

Good, experienced organizers emerge as leaders within movement space by walking the walk and doing good work.

When that happens, grifters start to see us as a threat and begin to try and undermine our position within that space by spreading rumors or threatening us with harm.

If we as organizers entered that space by ourselves rather than intentionally together, it becomes one person's word against the other.

That's a dynamic that grifters are experts at manipulating, leaving organizers committed to integrity and honesty at a strong disadvantage.

Time and time again, I've seen that moment come in emergent movement spaces as the movement began to gain momentum.

It's the moment when good organizers say, okay, this is not worth my energy.

It's the moment good organizers walk away.

Good organizers are the people who do the work and the glue that holds the movement together, so it's also the moment the movement collapses.

People tend to remember the collapse more than the moments the glue held, and our movement resumes start to look like graveyards.

When we focus on relationship-building, we're able to set our own terms for the kind of movement work we want to be a part of.

It means when we show up to movement space, we stop thinking in terms of whether that org or label is going to be a success, and start thinking in terms of who we see there that are people we want to build with.

Your energy expenditure starts getting structured less by "this is an org or label I'm invested in" and starts being guided by "this person or these people are folks I'm excited to change the world with, now and in the future."

Movement spaces are important and special.

They let us be in community with those people we want to build world-changing relationships with, and create opportunities for trust to grow quickly and get tested (and therefore more securely established) often.

When they are spontaneous and emergent, they are wonderful places where we meet and find new organizers and activists that often become our comrades for years and years.

Spontaneous, emergent movements are also catnip to opportunists, which is usually their undoing.

When we go into those spaces and think of them as opportunities to grow our permanent, trusting relationship networks, it's easier to let go of the idea of needing the spaces themselves to be permanent.

When the opportunists begin to leverage status in service of their immediate permanent self-interest, a relationship-focused approach makes it easier to come to terms with the fact that the space is beginning to self-destruct.

When we are able to say "the ultimate purpose of my presence here is/was to expand & leverage our longterm, values-based community organizing relationships in service of a shared value," you can witness that self-destruction without seeing it as ultimately proof of failure.

I walked away from Occupy post-eviction, when our meetings began to seem less like movement space and more like a room dominated by grifters determined to harvest the remaining cash for themselves.

I very much felt that we had failed.

Now, when I look back, I think about the fact that I'm still in a meaningful organizing relationship network with folks like @khadastrophic and @FoxSpeckled.

We may not see each other much or talk all the time, but I know if I see them in emergent space I can trust them.

I now realize that back then, we built those relationships and trust and did the work, and that (and thousands of other people across the country doing the same thing) is what put wealth equity on the map and made Bernie's candidacy and a host of other victories possible.

Occupy Philly crashed and burned spectacularly, but it also taught us who in Philly organizing we could trust, and which bad actors to avoid.

It absolutely failed as a structure.

As a temporary space to build and leverage long term, values-based organizing relationship network, however, it was an incredible success.

We dramatically expanded that network.

We leveraged it in ways that had long-lasting impacts.

Grifters and other bad actors who destroy movement space tend to have either deep privilege or deep internalized oppression.

The bad actors who grift most successfully are almost always the bad actors who walked in with a lot of privilege capital and leveraged it.

Bad actors who come from a place of very little privilege tend to be driven out of movement quickly, because they have very little capital and newcomers are predisposed to believe that people of little privilege are bad people.

The bad actors who stick around like a bad penny from movement to movement tend to be the actors who lean heavily into a privileged identity they have, leveraging that privilege capital against the word of the people warning against them.

For that reason, the serial bad actors are usually white and straight, and almost always able-bodied cis dudes.

In left spaces, they almost always work to cultivate a small group of oppressed supporters willing to offer token defense of the bad actor in exchange for a taste of the fame, the money, or both.

The central bad actor will almost always be privileged, but they will attempt to dodge those critiques by getting those supporters to leverage very shallow identity politics ("I'm x, therefore you are required to do what I say").

Privileged newcomers to movement trying to do the right thing but eager for a shortcut will almost always jump at the disingenuous "if you do what I say, I will give you an official Not An Oppressor card" offer, even if the "what I say" actually furthers oppressive dynamics.

If you're an experienced organizer that came to the movement and this happens, that's your cue to walk away.

Movements that allow oppression to be disingenuously leveraged in service of furthering oppression are reactionary, not liberatory, period.

Once the space is reactionary, it takes Herculean effort to shift the dynamic back to one of liberation.

Liberatory-minded folks leave, further concentrating the power of the reactionaries within the space.

At that point, your energy is almost always better spent elsewhere.

If a space is reactionary from the start, a privileged bad actor doesn't need a secondary token strategy to dominate it.

If a space starts out as liberatory, though, the tokens-advocating-oppression guilt manipulation strategy is their best option.

(Of course, once it works, those Serena Joy-type tokens inevitably find themselves kicked to the curb. Once the space turns reactionary, the bad actor can directly leverage their privilege to dominate it. Tokens become expendable.)

That's almost always the fate of emergent liberatory movement.

Its power comes from its liberatory nature and the work of liberatory organizers, that power gets co-opted by grifters who oust liberatory organizers with oppressive strategies, the power dissipates, and it's over.

The only spaces that ever stay liberatory are spaces that are grounded in a network of strong relationships rooted in trust and shared liberatory values.

Only shared experience can build those networks, so only organizers and activists with experience can exist within them.

That's one of the core paradoxes of movement.

A movement will die if its constituents don't invite and integrate new people into movement space, but it will also die if it's full of inexperienced, untrained people susceptible to bad actor strategies.

Emergent movement will always be messy, but there's a difference between good mess and bad mess.

A good mess emergent movement allows newcomers-- especially newcomers from oppressed identities-- to experiment, take risks, and learn to lead.

Good mess emergent movements are incredibly challenging for experienced organizers when we aren't clear on our role.

We're used to leading!

We know how to win!

We've made these mistakes ourselves before and saw what happened, why don't they trust our warnings?!

The appropriate role for experienced organizers in these movement spaces isn't to prevent newcomers from skinning their knees ever, though.

Our job is to keep the kids alive, and let them know that if they want to know the rules of hopscotch, we'll teach them.

Our other job is to keep the predators out.

Of course, the "kids" aren't kids.

Sometimes our age peers or even our age elders.

They have non-organizing expertises that we don't, they may have non-organizing knowledges and experiences that make them leaders and experts in their own fields.

The problem is, we still don't live in a world that honors organizing as a vocation.

The United States equates voting with organizing.

Everyone should vote, so everyone counts as an organizer, right?

So suggesting that expertise matters in organizing is "gatekeeping."

Emergent movement is absolutely supposed to be a lab space for new activists and potential organizers to make mistakes, so it's absolutely true that experienced organizers shouldn't be directing or micromanaging them.

We have to let good mess happen.

When a bad actor shows up, though, we have to have built enough trust to say, "listen, I love puppies too, but that windowless van they're supposedly in is bad news."

If we haven't built trust, we just end up sounding like puppy-hating killjoys.

That's the very deep problem I'm thinking a lot about now, as Nazis offer the spicy meme equivalent of puppies to Bernie-brought leftists, and some of them start to climb in the van.

I was so used to having a values-based trust network in Philly that I never stopped to think about how, without one nationally, I would sound yelling at people not to climb into that van.

I never thought about how without a national version of that network, it would be easy for the drivers of that van to tell the left that I'm some bitter, crazy lady that hates puppies and fun.

I'd been in the Bernie movement from the start, but for far too long I made the mistake of focusing on the structure-- the online left that rose around Bernie-- rather than focusing on building those trusting relationships with people within that movement who shared my values.

As Dr. Taber says, shitty men-- and shitty privileged people in general-- ruin liberatory movements.

If we don't hold those bad actors accountable and/or shut them out of movement spaces, liberatory movements will crash and burn over and over again.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to prevent that from happening (and to keep bad actors from weaponizing once-liberatory movements against liberation itself) is to refocus on building those values-based relationship networks.

It's a hard-won lesson that came at pretty severe personal cost, but it's a path forward and a vision towards a world where the shitty bad actors can't just keep co-opting & wrecking liberatory movement, where they stop managing to exile us from the movements we ourselves built.

It means walking away in the short term, but it means building liberatory permanency over time.

In the moment, it means letting go of the label, it means understanding the potential is gone, irretrievably misspent.

In the long run, it means hope in something much bigger.

Thank you, @SarahTaber_bww, for naming an exhaustion that I think experienced organizers and activists working in a lot of different movement spaces feel particularly deeply in this political moment, for naming a dynamic that poses a particularly existential threat right now.

When I hear it named by someone else, it's a reminder that I am not the only one struggling to reconcile the urgency Trumpian fascism imposes on us with the sense of despair that seeing this cycle of movement self-destruction repeating itself in supposedly liberatory spaces.

It's a reminder that even as we name that despair, we are identifying ourselves to each other as part of the solution, part of a potential community capable of naming, addressing, & ultimately overcoming a dynamic that sometimes feels like the left's self-imposed death sentence.

I don't think that healing project will be easy, but I believe it can and will be successful, if we hold onto our liberatory values and refuse to let go.

It will be difficult, complicated work; liberation and healing always are.

At the same time, I remind myself that muscles are scar tissue.

Weight causes micro-tears in the fibers of our flesh; muscles enlarge as those tears heal and scar tissue forms.

We only build strength when we lift things too heavy for us to bear.

I remind myself that usually when something seems like too much to lift, it probably is.

But I also remind myself that lifting what is too much is how we become strong enough for "too much" to become a manageable weight.

I remind myself we can spot each other in the meantime.

Here's hoping we keep spotting each other in the crowd and then spotting each other at the lifting bench, that we keep finding ways to become stronger together.

Here's to trust, hope, and the liberatory project.

Here's to solidarity.

Here's to finding our way to liberation by breaking these toxic cycles, once and for all.

The end. ❤️🖤