Did This Radicalize You? Really??

Beyond the Book: Getting from Awareness and Activation to Radicalization

“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair” - Mariame Kaba

In 2020, we saw millions of people take to the streets for Black lives. It was a level of protest most of us hadn’t seen before in our lifetimes. As more and more people became aware of more of the realities of police brutality towards Black people in the United States and more people began to find that brutality unbearable, many were excited (and perhaps even more were terrified) of what was to come from these worldwide demands for change. During that summer, I was asked variations of the same question countless times by reporters and news outlets: “What makes these protests so revolutionary?”

And my response was always a variation of the same: “Ask me in a few years if it was revolutionary at all.”

I do not have to tell you that it was not very revolutionary - at least not politically. By the end of the summer, protestors had gone home, COVID restrictions had relaxed, sports were back on television, promises made by besieged politicians and CEOs were already beginning to be rolled back, and many in white America set out to make sure that such a widespread protest would never be quite so effective again.

And here we are in 2024, with Cop Cities being built all over the country, with police budgets restored and even increased, with Democratic political candidates promising more “law and order”, with protestors met with pepper spray, handcuffs and even bullets this time instead of empty promises.

And now, even as our “left” political party is in power and actively funding a genocide, pulling millions of us to the streets once again - this time for Palestinian lives - it doesn’t seem to be enough to really make a difference. Not even a difference in us.

For those wondering why, why we seem to be forever on this rollercoaster of horror-protest-promise-relief-betrayal, I invite us to investigate the difference between activation and radicalization.

Activation is the process of making something (or someone) active or operative. We have experienced many politically activating moments in our lives. These moments drive us to, well, act. They have us calling our representatives, sharing posts, donating money, making signs, going to protests. These moments make us want to do something.

And it is vital that we do something. Right now, as people are being slaughtered with our tax dollars, it is vital that we march, call, write, disrupt. It is vital that we do what we can to stop the killing. But I’m going to say something that is a really shitty truth: we can organize and march and get a ceasefire, we can get a peace deal - and this genocide, and so many others, will continue long after our social media feeds stop paying attention.

It will continue until we are radicalized.

When we are simply activated, we are driven by an event. An event that we want to stop, an event we want justice for. More specifically, we are often driven by feelings that we want to change or go away. We are horrified and we want to be soothed. We are scared and we want to feel safe. We feel helpless and we want to feel empowered.

While activation is good for getting people out in the streets right away, it’s not good for keeping them there. And while it’s good for being able to quickly get the message out about what we need right now, it’s not great at defining or motivating people on what we need long-term.

In 2019, I shared a textbook example of the limits of activation in a piece I wrote:

“I was reminded of one of the very first panels on race I had participated in. A black man in Seattle had been pepper-sprayed by a security guard for doing nothing more than walking through a shopping center. It had been caught on camera. A group of black writers and activists, myself included, were onstage in front of a majority-white Seattle audience, talking about the incident. Fellow panelist Charles Mudede, a brilliant writer, film-maker and economic theorist, addressed the economic mechanisms at work: this security guard had been told that his job was to protect his employers’ ability to make a profit. He had been told that his job was to keep customers who had money to spend happy and safe. And every day he was fed cultural messages about who had money and who didn’t. Who was violent and who wasn’t. Charles argued that the security guard had been doing his job. In a white supremacist capitalist system, this is what doing your job looked like.

Well, at least he was trying to argue that point. Because halfway through, a white woman stood up and interrupted him.

“Look, I’m sure you know a lot about all this stuff,” she said, hands on hips. “But I didn’t come here for an economics lesson. I came here because I feel bad about what happened to this man and I want to know what to do.””

Being scared won’t radicalize you. Being angry won’t radicalize you. Radicalization, real radicalization that lasts and can create real change, requires both learning and unlearning. It is the ideological result of a process of learning and growth. And it’s vital that we seek it out and cultivate it, instead of hoping that it just happens on its own.

Now, please, if you are nervous about how I use the term “radical” and “radicalize” so casually, when every major news outlet would have you think that to become radicalized means that you’ve become a violent extremist or joined a cult, let me reassure you some.

Here is the definition of Radical from Brittanica.com:

radical, in politics, one who desires extreme change of part or all of the social order. The word was first used in a political sense in England, and its introduction is generally ascribed to Charles James Fox, who in 1797 declared for a “radical reform” consisting of a drastic expansion of the franchise to the point of universal manhood suffrage.

If we want to get to the point where our governments and systems can’t keep committing these atrocities against us, we need to radically change those systems. We need to demand and create systemic change in order to be able to experience that change in our lives. Otherwise, we will just be marching out every few months to try to extract the same meaningless promises from the powers that be every few months for eternity.

I know it’s not that simple. Radicalization isn’t that simple. It often requires a lot. Here are some of the often necessary elements:

• desire for change

• education on how systemic oppression works

• education on how systemic oppression is tied to the issue(s) that activated us

• education on how we interact with systems

• education on how we have been miseducated and even programmed by systemic oppression to aid that oppression

• support for the emotional difficulty of that education

• education on liberation theory and praxis

• space and support for growth, learning, and mistakes through this process.

Basically, it’s not enough to know that something has to change. We need to know the root cause of the problem we’re facing, what other problems that root cause may be causing, how the problem and it’s root cause are impacting us, how the root cause may be acting through us to strengthen itself, what tactics might stop the problem and address the root cause, what we want instead of this problem and the system that caused it, and how we can act in a way that honors what we want (instead of just reacting to what we don’t want).

I cannot take y’all through all these steps. Even if I had all the knowledge (which I don’t, I’m currently on my own radicalization journey as well), I don’t have the space or time and I don’t think it’s possible or advisable for one person to be your personal guide to radicalization - at least not in a way that doesn’t end up being a cult.

But we are all in different places on our journeys, and we all have different knowledge and skill-sets. And it’s time that we started taking a good look at were we are politically.

Are you ready to demand a new world? If not, what is stopping you? Do you need to know a little more about how our current systems work? Do you need to know more about tactics? Do you need to know a little more about what we could build to replace the current systems we have? Do you need to know who you would be building with and why? Are you not sure if it’s the right time?

These are questions that we not only need to be asking of ourselves, but of our movements in general. And we need to be filling these gaps. When people say that progressive movements aren’t welcoming, they aren’t lying. We aren’t very good at getting people from A to Z, but we are really good at discarding people for being at G instead of at X. But how do we get someone who is going to their first protest to not only come to more, but to use that experience as the beginning of a journey to a deeper understanding of the issue they are protesting and how they can be a part of systemic change? Right now, while it’s an emergency (because it will always be an emergency), how are we planting seeds of empowerment and revolution in every person who is just now beginning to see that maybe these here systems don’t have their best interests at heart?

Y’all, I’m tired. I’m tired of trying to cling to moments of peace and joy in between the near constant atrocities committed by powers that want to keep me too tired to be able to do more than write or march. Many will try to say that more isn’t possible, or that it risks too much. But I know deep in every fiber of my being that every step toward liberation, no matter how hard or scary, is better than the horror that we’ve always known. I want more from this life. I want more for all of us. I want us to know that we are building something better. And I know we can. These systems were built by people. They can be torn down by people. And we can build something so much better in their place. We just have to want it, and envision it, and trust in ourselves and each other that we can do this work together.