You deserve a political movement that cares about you

What we owe each other beyond our shared anger

Desmond Tutu (center) jogs along a Whites-only beach with a crowd of supporters at the Strand in South Africa in 1989 as church organizations continued their campaign of defiance against apartheid laws. Adil Bradlow/AP

TOP NOTES:

This is an article about supporting each other in our efforts to build a better world. If this newsletter (or the work I do over at Barnraisers) has been useful for you, thanks in advance for supporting it financially, sharing it with friends, sending me nice emails, etc. By that same token, if there’s ever anything I can do to lend you a hand, let me know. I’m at garrett@barnraisersproject.org.

Also, long-time readers (and Barnraisers alums) will definitely recognize some of these themes. This is my beat, I suppose. I hope that there’s still some new wrinkles in here even for White Pages long-haulers.

There is a particular Desmond Tutu story that I come back to a lot. Growing up as a child of liberal White Protestantism, it was the kind of story that was just always in the ether; now as an adult, I have passed it on quite a bit myself. If you’ve heard me tell it before, you may be eligible for compensation for redundancy-inflicted injuries, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell it again.

As the story goes, Tutu was preaching to anti-apartheid activists at the Cathedral of St. George’s in Cape Town when the South African Security Police invaded the building. They circled the walls, doing the full-on tough guy intimidation thing and (understandably) laying a thick blanket of tension over the crowd. Without missing a beat, Tutu addressed the cops and soldiers directly, saying “You are powerful, very powerful, but I serve a God who cannot be mocked! And since you have already lost, I invite you today to join the winning side!”

The congregation erupted, first in cheers, then in dance. They danced out of the cathedral and into the streets, where they came head-to-head with an even larger crowd of security forces. The cops, not expecting to be met with a joyfully defiant street party, retreated.

Desmond Tutu was always doing this. Dancing. Laughing. Defusing.

One day, the apartheid government hired a crew of unemployed Black South Africans, gave them pre-printed signs, and sent them to Tutu’s house to make a scene (his large Archdiocese-issued residence was in a tony White neighborhood— the perfect setting for a potential gotcha-optics moment). Before the press could arrive, though, Tutu had already served tea and cookies to the protestors and everybody was just hanging out in the lawn, having a great time. He was a hard guy to hate, even when you were being paid to hate him.

What Tutu understood was, if the choice is between the forces of fear and anger and “the winning side,” that’s not really a choice at all.

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There are a number of ways to describe the contemporary conservative movement. If you are sympathetic to it, you might say that it is principled or misunderstood or liberty’s last line of defense against woke tyranny. If you are not sympathetic to it, you might say that it is authoritarian and hurtful and morally reprehensible. That’s all Rorschach test stuff, though. Is conservatism calculated or cynical? Tenacious or mendacious? Freedom protecting or squashing? Most of us already locked in our answers long ago.

I can’t imagine that even its staunchest defenders could say that contemporary conservatism is optimistic or joyful, though. That’s not a cheap pot shot from the left. Conservatism isn’t aiming for optimism and hope! Its goal is to react to a changing world— to identify and counter perceived threats to a way of life that its followers value. That’s an inherently fearful and angry stance. It requires its adherents to remain on constant alert to the dangers that populate our world— politicians who wish to confiscate guns and money, intolerant activists who will police their language, schools that will indoctrinate their children.

I am, of course, not particularly sympathetic to this ideology. In fact, I think that it is incredibly dangerous— not only because of the ways that it leaves its believers more isolated and fearful, but because of its particular taxonomy of what constitutes a threat vs. what needs to be protected. A state legislature committed to solely passing legislation for the benefit of its wealthiest, Whitest, straightest constituents? Worth protecting. A trans member of that body attempting to speak to her basic human rights? A threat. A corporation who would like to employ children to work in dangerous jobs? Worth protecting. A woman trying to access reproductive health care? A (child-hating) threat. An older White male homeowner? Worth protecting, ideally with a gun. A Black boy who accidentally rings his doorbell? A threat.

All anger is not the same, of course. Anger directed at vulnerable populations is different than anger at systems and institutions that hurt people. Anger at those human beings who reinforce systems of domination is different than projected anger at those whose only crime was suggesting that we reconsider our relationship to those systems.

Back when I was in college, I worked summers at a Methodist church camp in Northeast Ohio. There were a few of us there from the Desmond Tutu story-repeating branches of Christianity (that is to say, bleeding heart divinity-school-adjacent smarty-pants), and we did our best to sprinkle in our undergraduate understanding of liberation theology in between acoustic guitar praise song sing-alongs. One week, my best friend Andy (a fellow bleeding-heart) took a kid under his wing— a big middle-school-aged guy who had a tough home-life and who channeled his rage into walloping the hell out of other kids. Andy and our large angry camper had a bunch of after-school-special style hearts-to-hearts together (if after-school specials were directed by Noam Chomsky and bell hooks) and by the end of the week, the kid had a new mantra he was repeating: “Fight crap, not other people.”

I don’t know how long that mantra stuck for that particular young brawler, but it’s stuck with me.

I bring that memory up in case I’m being unclear: This essay isn’t an exhortation— from a straight White cis guy, no less— that rage has no place in left-leaning social movements. Of course it does! There are a lot of reasons to be angry (and full of grief! and fear!) when you and/or the people you love are under attack! There are so many reasons to want to burn it all down! There is, in church camp friendly terms, a lot of crap out there to want to fight!

I recognize that assurance may feel perfunctory when I lead off with a saccharine story about a jolly South African archbishop dancing in the street while White supremacy’s armed thugs continued their reign of terror.

The thing is, Desmond Tutu wasn’t just a lighthearted rodeo clown distracting from the funereal work of more radical activists. He had plenty of ire for the apartheid state, for global conservatism, for capitalism. Far from a political moderate, Tutu was a lifelong socialist who would eventually break with the ANC when that party made its unfortunate turn towards free market economics. After Ronald Reagan tried to claim him as a kindred spirit, he excoriated both that President and the nation he led (“America and the west can go to hell,” said the joyful Archbishop). Nor was he a stranger to state oppression. He was regularly targeted by South Africa’s security forces. Activists with whom he worked closely were jailed and killed. His own wife was arrested without cause.

That’s all to say, Tutu’s joy should not be misinterpreted as unseriousness or naiveté. And while it’s easy, I suppose, to dismiss his constant delight as stemming from some magical source that is unavailable to the rest of us (“well, he was super religious, and I’m not” or “yeah, but he was just such an anomaly”), his was a deliberate and cultivated joy. He fed it through constant re-connection with the people he was struggling with and for. He was a collector (and sustainer) of pen pal relationships. He regularly returned to the same home for the elderly over and over again— first as a volunteer and then as a friend. He was intentionally disciplined (as somebody with a recognized addiction to validation from others) about the mix of daily rituals (prayer, meditation) and indulgences (cricket, music and literature, samosas and marshmallows) that might help balance his most self-centered impulses.

He lived in difficult times, and his joy was a strategy.

We, too, live in difficult times. Capitalism is still a cruel and death-causing system. Wherever reactionary conservatives hold legislative or judicial power, that power is being used in cruel and frightening ways. There are too many guns, and too much senseless killing with those guns.

All that is true. And yet, there are increasing signs that the typical pattern of left-leaning resistance (short-term outrage followed by sorrowful resignation) is being broken. Fed-up workers are slowly but steadily turning back to labor unions after decades of decline. Protests over guns aren’t just popping up and disappearing, as they so often do. Instead, parent and student activists across the country— from Washington to Colorado to Tennessee— are actively strategizing on how to keep their momentum going. In my home state of Montana, a cruel legislative session that culminated in the literal silencing of that body’s first trans woman legislator (Rep. Zooey Zephyr) has ignited a level of protest activity rarely seen in our state. And in Nebraska, the pro-trans filibuster led by Senators Machaela Cavanaugh and Megan Hunt is currently rolling into its eighth straight week.

When I hold both those truths in my hands at once— that the world continues to be immensely cruel and that it is such a blessing that so many people want to change it— I am left with only one conclusion: We must not take any of this momentum for granted. If we want a better world, we need to make our movements the kind of places that, as adrienne maree brown put it in We Will Not Cancel Us, “people come running towards… expecting that they will be welcomed, flawed and whole.”

We need to do everything we can to keep each other in this work. We must believe that we can build the world of our dreams, but that we can’t do it tomorrow. We need to act like we’re welcoming each other onto the winning side, even if that victory feels generations away. We need to be curious about the worker who stopped attending the union-planning meeting not because of ideological differences, but because the meetings themselves were boarish and cliquey. We need to care about the parent who— frightened and enraged by another mass school shooting— nervously attends their first protest. When they show up, do they find a community that is glad to have them there, that is curious about them as a person and wants to help make it easier for them to come back again?

I recognize that I’m not saying anything particularly trenchant here. Just about anybody who has ever built up the courage to show up to an organizing meeting has a personal testimony about how left-learning political spaces are a slog at best and and a toxic, energy-draining pit of performative in-fighting at worse. All political spaces are human spaces, which means that they will be limited by both our individual human fallibility and all of the dynamics of hierarchy and oppression. We are all weirdos, us human beings, and so, of course we are often weird to one another.

I feel a need to repeat this not-so-trenchant message, though, because I really want us to build a better world, and that means we need more of us staying in the fight so much longer. That doesn’t mean that our spaces need to just be silly joyful dance-parties that ignore pain and suffering. Toni Cade Bambara’s oft-repeated exhortation to “make the revolution irresistible” doesn’t mean that we’re only eating samosas and marshmallows and giving each other high fives. Sometimes a spreadsheet just needs to be filled out, and there's only so much joy you can put into cells A5 through F7.

What it does mean, though, is that our outrage and anger at systems of injustice can and should co-exist with a legitimate gratitude and delight that other people have chosen to do this work with us.

This past week, I received a call from our local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. They are currently working on a pretty cool-sounding campaign— an effort to replace our private power utility with a city-run system. The very kind person who called me asked a fair question (“we’re having a rally on Friday- will you come?”). I thanked him for the call, was vaguely noncommittal about whether I’d attend, and then (of course) I didn’t show up.

I didn’t come on Friday because that was the first call I’d gotten from that group. They never called me to ask why I joined their mailing list, or what motivates me politically, or what barriers might hold me back from attending their meetings. If they had, I would have been able to share that their spaces don’t really welcome my kids, that their podcast and newsletter often felt more judge-y than inspiring, and that I have some hesitation about being one more White guy at what I sense (perhaps correctly, perhaps unfairly) is mostly a bearded White guy social club. I would have shared the kind of things that I would be motivated to do for them, and perhaps they would have gotten a sense of why I’d be a delight to have around.

Because that call never happened, my assumption was that they only cared about me as another body in the crowd— a means to their end. I worried that, had I gone to the rally, I would have found people who were very pleased by their own correctness, united by the foil they had come to oppose, but not by the art of building and maintaining human community.

Now, that assumption may have been unfair, but it wouldn’t have taken a joyful laughter-filled dance party to disabuse me of that notion. All I would have needed was a few questions, a bit of interest in who I was as a person, and some transparency about how well their space is or isn’t functioning as welcoming community right now (and what they would love to do about it).

We don’t all need to be Desmond Tutu. Thank God, because we aren’t all Desmond Tutu. Some of us can bring laughter and joviality. Others are incredible at remembering our neighbors’ faces and stories. Others bring the gifts of stridency and the ability to connect-the-dots between systems of oppression. We need all of those gifts, and many more.

It is urgently important, in a world full of pain, that we cultivate a fiery opposition to injustice in all its forms. The question is, will we care just as much about how we keep each other’s fires burning as we do about our own righteous flames? That’s the difference between burn-out and sustainability. That’s the difference between movements that flicker and movements whose warmth and brightness can enlighten the darkness. That’s the difference between being alone in our fear, and dancing together on the winning side.

End notes:

Song of the week:

Let’s stay in South Africa, especially if it means spending some time with a synth-bass riff I think about at least once a month. It’s Brenda Fassie time, which means its “Vuli Ndelea” time.

[As always, you can check out the collected song of the week playlist on Apple Music or Spotify].

This week’s community discussion for paid subscribers:

We’re multi-tasking! The primary discussion will be an old White Pages favorite: “Recommend Literally Anything!” where we endorse a single [something] that has made our life slightly better lately (that could be a consumer good, a piece of media, something to eat or drink, a daily ritual, a pleasant thing to think about or a nice tree you saw once … you know, whatever).

In the meantime, voting will officially be open for “White Pages Most Annoying Corporation Award” (we made these nominations in the thread last week; now it’s time to narrow them down).

Want to hang out with us but can’t afford a subscription? Just send me an email at garrett@barnraisersproject.org and I’ll comp you, no questions asked.