So is what’s happening now.

And people organized their way back before.

Hey, friend.

The hardest thing about this week’s theme — for me, anyway — is sitting with the knowledge that we’ve been here before, and that “before” didn’t end well. Reconstruction was one of the most radical democratic experiments in American history. Black men served in Congress, as governors, as sheriffs, as judges. And then it was dismantled. Violently. Deliberately. With the complicity of a federal government that chose not to intervene and sometimes aided the process.

I don’t tell you that to be discouraging. I tell you that because the historian Eric Foner, who has spent his career studying Reconstruction, says this: “Alone among the societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, for a moment, offered the freedmen a measure of political control over their own destinies.” And because it happened once, people know how to build it again. Not the same way, not with the same people, but with the same understanding that democracy is not a condition you inherit — it’s a practice you maintain. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “My heart is moved by all I cannot save: / so much has been destroyed / I have to cast my lot with those / who age after age, perversely, / with no extraordinary power / reconstitute the world.” That’s the work. That’s always been the work.

BTW, you didn’t get an email from me last week because I was recovering from an emergency room visit the Sunday before, when my back siezed up so badly I couldn’t walk. This week I’ve finally gotten to the point I can sit up for short stints and do a little writing! I’m really lucky: when the ER sent me home even though I couldn’t sit upright, the social worker found a “gurney van” to take me. Since I could not yet climb the stairs to my partner’s apartment, my in-laws, who live in an apartment with an elevator, gladly took me in, where I’m doing my rehab now! My physical therapist said I’m making great progress and might be able to move to outpatient care by next week! Now back to our regularly scheduled content:

This week: Reconstruction, democracy, and what happens when we choose wrong — or let others choose wrong on our behalf.

The History We Should Have Learned

In the years right after the Civil War, the United States had Black senators, Black congressmen, Black state legislators across the South. P.B.S. Pinchback became the first Black governor in American history. There were Black sheriffs, Black judges, Black school superintendents. For a brief moment, this country tried.

That period is called Reconstruction. And what happened to it was not some natural fade. It was a deliberate, violent counter-revolution. White supremacist groups terrorized Black voters, murdered elected officials, and systematically dismantled every structure of Black political power. The federal government, which could have stopped it, chose not to. By the end of the 1870s, it was over, and in its place was what we call Jim Crow.

And you and I know, it wasn’t the end of the story. For decades, Black people and some allies fought and resisted, and built the NAACP, and built youth-led movements and learned from elders, and risked their lives and safety, even when it seemed like Jim Crow would always reign in terror.

Progress is not a straight line. It is a choice. I am grateful for our forebears who fought to show us what equality could look like; it helps me imagine what it could look like today.

For more:

Philip Dray’s Capitol Men (This is where I learned this story. It seems to be out of print now, but check out your library or used bookstore!)

Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution

What’s Happening Right Now

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the primary nationwide protection against racially discriminatory voting systems. Justice Kagan wrote in dissent that the decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

The immediate consequence: Louisiana suspended its ongoing primary election — after more than 100,000 voters had already cast early ballots — so the Republican-controlled legislature could draw a new map expected to reduce Black representation. Alabama has moved to reinstate a map a federal court had already found intentionally discriminatory. The two Black congressional representatives Louisiana elected under the VRA-compliant map — the first two Black members of Congress from Louisiana in history — may lose their seats.

For moer:

NAACP LDF — naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais

ACLU — Supreme Court Strikes Down Louisiana Map and Destroys Key Voting Rights Act Provision

Center for American Progress — americanprogress.org/article/the-supreme-courts-callais-decisions

Campaign Legal Center — campaignlegal.org/update/us-supreme-court-has-eviscerated-voting-rights-act-whats-next

A Saint You Should Know

Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper on a Mississippi cotton plantation when she went to her first voter registration meeting in 1962. She was 44 years old and had never heard that Black people had the right to vote. When her boss found out she’d tried to register, he told her to withdraw her application or leave the plantation. She said: “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went down there to register for myself.”

She was evicted. She was shot at. She was beaten so severely in a Mississippi jail in 1963 that she suffered permanent kidney damage. She never fully recovered. She never stopped organizing. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she said. She meant it as a war cry.

For more:

How Fannie Lou Hamer Challenged a Nation | National Museum of African American History and Culture

National Women’s History Museum — womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/fannie-lou-hamer

And if you’ve never heard the speech she gave from the floor of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, you really need to.

Good Trouble in Action

Los Angeles’ REPAIR initiative allocated approximately $8.5 million across nine neighborhoods specifically identified as having faced institutional and systemic racism. In two participatory budgeting cycles, community members voted directly on how to spend those funds — and chose job training, rental assistance, services for unhoused people, worker-led urban agriculture, and medical services. This is participatory budgeting: instead of elected officials deciding how to spend public money, residents vote directly. Since 2009, it has spread to over 50 U.S. cities, moving more than $400 million into community hands.

At a moment when federal democracy is under threat, local democracy is being built.

For more:

Resilience.org

L.A. REPAIR

Solidarity Is Already Happening

Here is a story from Galveston County, Texas that almost nobody outside of voting rights circles knows. In 2021, the county’s Republican commissioners court redrew their precinct maps and eliminated the one district where Black and Latino voters — together — had been electing a representative of their choice. Not Black voters alone. Not Latino voters alone. A coalition. For years, those two communities had enough combined strength to elect a commissioner who served them both. The new map broke that coalition apart deliberately.

The voters sued. A federal judge — a Trump appointee — found the map unconstitutional, called it “mean-spirited” and “egregious.” Then, in August 2024, the full Fifth Circuit reversed him, overturning forty years of its own precedent to rule that the Voting Rights Act simply does not protect coalitions of different minority groups voting together. Six judges dissented, writing that the majority had “finally dismantled the effectiveness” of the VRA.

But here is what I want you to know: the Black and Latino voters of Galveston County are still fighting — their constitutional claims of intentional discrimination are still active in court. And their case is part of why the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act matters so much. That bill — introduced in March 2025, co-sponsored by every House Democrat, supported by over 140 organizations from the NAACP to the Native American Rights Fund to the League of Women Voters to labor unions to disability rights groups — explicitly restores coalition protection as part of what the Voting Rights Act covers. Because the people who wrote it understood what Reconstruction taught us: multiracial democracy has always been the target. And protecting it requires communities showing up for each other.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said it plainly: “Those in power see the rise of a multiracial democracy as a threat, and they are doing everything they can to silence it. But we won’t be silenced.”

The Black and Latino voters of Galveston County refused to be divided. They built something together, and when it was taken, they kept fighting. That is the Reconstruction spirit. That is what this week is about.

Find the Campaign Legal Center’s work on this case at campaignlegal.org, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act at civilrights.org.

For more:

campaignlegal.org/update/galveston-voters-are-still-fighting-fair-maps-and-equal-say

texastribune.org/2024/08/02/voting-rights-act-race-redistricting-5th-circuit-texas-galveston/

Civil Rights Coalition Urges Senate to Pass The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act - The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

BTW, if you’re a Supreme Court nerd, your radar may have gone off when I mentioned the Fifth Circuit Court, famous as the place right-wing cases can go in order to get their case on the Supreme Court docket, to test how far right they can go. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s an article with a little bit more about the Fifth Circuit.

Fannie Lou Hamer went down to register for herself — and then spent the rest of her life making sure everyone else could too. The Black and Latino voters of Galveston County built a coalition district together, watched it get taken, and are still in court—and in the streets. The people and groups pushing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act have been at it for decades and are not stopping. This is what it looks like to refuse the Reconstruction ending — to insist that the deliberate dismantling is not the final word. You are part of that insistence every time you show up, every time you pay attention, every time you refuse to let a story like Galveston just disappear into a legal footnote. I know this week is heavy. I also know you’re carrying it anyway. Thank you. So much.

Peace,
Sandhya

Hey, friend.

Here’s something we both know but that I sometimes forget because things feel uniquely bad right now: organized hate is not a new phenomenon, and neither is organized resistance to it. What varies is the scale, the tactics, and — crucially — whether hate is operating at the level of street violence or state policy. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had millions of members and controlled governments across the country. They were poised to win the Presidency. They lost, not because they ran out of hatred, but because communities organized against them… and because their own corruption eventually destroyed them from within.

The civil rights leader Ella Baker said: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” She meant that the goal of organizing isn’t to find a savior; it’s to build the kind of community that can sustain resistance across time, across leadership changes, across setbacks. The Klan came to South Bend in 1924 and were met by the force of a very specific type of student activism. Rabbis and imams are hosting joint Shabbat and Iftar dinners. The specific forms change, but the principle doesn’t: organized hate has always had to reckon with organized community. And sometimes the community throws potatoes.

This week: organized hate, organized community, and who shows up when the Klan comes to town.

The History We Should Have Learned

Quick question: why are Notre Dame’s teams called the Fighting Irish? Here’s the actual story.

In May 1924, the Ku Klux Klan — which at that point had millions of members, including the governor of Indiana — decided to hold a rally in South Bend specifically to intimidate Notre Dame, one of the most prominent Catholic institutions in America. (The Klan terrorized Black people, but they were also anti-immigrant, and immigration and Catholicism were deeply intertwined in the Klan’s own birtherism narrative.) The president of Notre Dame asked the students to stay indoors to stay safe, since he knew the harm the Klan could wreak.

What happened instead: approximately five hundred Notre Dame students stormed the rally, ripped off Klan hoods and robes, chased members through the streets, and spent over an hour throwing potatoes at a glowing red cross the Klan had erected, knocking out one light bulb at a time until only one stubborn bulb remained. Quarterback Harry Stuhldreher reportedly knocked out the last one to cheers. Three years later, in 1927, the university officially adopted “The Fighting Irish” as the team’s nickname.

That same year, the Indiana Klan collapsed — largely because its leader was convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer. The students won. The Klan lost.

For more:

Todd Tucker’s Notre Dame vs. The Klan — I have not read this one, but I’ve read interviews and articles about it, and I hear it is a good read.

Timothy Egan’s Fever in the Heartland —- this is where I first came across the story, and it reads like a novel even though he is a reliable researcher. It covers, I believe, a broader swathe of history than Tucker’s. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Notre Dame’s alum magazine has an article on this moment and on the exhibit at the university.

What’s Happening Right Now

The Southern Poverty Law Center documented a significant rise in active hate groups and white nationalist organizations between 2020 and 2025. But more concerning than street-level organizing (and not unrelated) is what is happening at the policy level.

The president has described immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country; it was a major talking point during his 2024 campaign, and recent changes to immigration policy reflect this worldview. The Department of Education’s civil rights enforcement division has been dramatically reduced. DEI programs — which exist specifically because documented discrimination persists — have been eliminated across the federal government.

The SPLC’s 2026 Intelligence Report documents specific incidents of harassment, intimidation, and violence tied to the documented rise in organized hate groups — including incidents targeting Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and immigrant communities. Their report is at splcenter.org. And the connections between hate crimes and violent policy are vivid—my whole 2024 series on Project 2025 illustrated that point.

The connections between dangerous political rhetoric, an increase in hate crimes, and a hostile legislative landscape might not often be discussed, but they’re well researched, and they’re very much in evidence today.

For more:

Politics of Belonging: Anti-Black Racism, Xenophobia, and Disinformation - Harvard Law Review

How hateful rhetoric connects to real-world violence - Brookings Institute

When politicians use hate speech, political violence increases - The Conversation

Share Joy In Justice

A Saint You Should Know

In 1954, a white couple in Louisville, Kentucky — Carl and Anne Braden — bought a house in an all-white neighborhood and transferred the deed to a Black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, who had been unable to buy there themselves. Within weeks, a cross was burned on the lawn. Then a bomb destroyed the house. The Bradens were charged with sedition — accused of being Communists trying to stir up racial unrest. Carl went to prison. Anne wrote a book about it while being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. She could have stopped. She didn’t.

Anne Braden grew up in a segregated Alabama family. She spent the rest of her life building interracial solidarity in Appalachia, insisting that white Southerners had a particular responsibility to dismantle the system their ancestors built. She was called a Communist, a traitor, and a race traitor. She called herself a Southerner who finally understood what the South had done. She’s a familiar name to a lot of my white friends who have delved deep into the stories of movement ancestors who could offer them models for how to do anti-racism work, and yet she’s unfamiliar to most Americans.

Her work is carried forward today by the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee — the same institution that trained Rosa Parks and ran the Citizenship Schools Septima Clark built. In 2019, a fire destroyed the main building. In 2020, amid a surge of support, the center rebuilt. It is still running today, training organizers across the South, at highlandercenter.org. She was an extraordinary human and also a very regular one, and someone who worked to bring other extraordinary, ordinary people together for the fight, which is why I wanted to include her story this week.

For more:

Check out this bio from the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville

or this bio from Americans Who Tell the Truth

Good Trouble in Action

I’ve shared that going back to school in this period has been painful, and one of the most painful parts has been watching my and many other institutions of higher education actively seek to pit Muslim and Jewish students and faculty against each other in order to avoid letting students and faculty of many faiths (and of no particular faith) come together to oppose genocide. That’s why for this week, I wanted to share this story in order to remind myself of how often communities actually show up for each other, and show up together for others — even when the politicians and power brokers want to convince them to hate each other.

On February 11, 2025, more than 150 people representing 25 different congregations — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Quaker — came together at Temple Beth Emeth in Ann Arbor to launch the Interfaith Fund for Immigrant Justice, raising $100,000 for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. Jewish congregations, a Quaker meeting, a Muslim community, Christian churches — all of them recognizing that their faith calls them to protect their neighbors, regardless of where those neighbors were born. They raised that money through Kugel Fests and Euchre tournaments. I love this country sometimes.

Source: Interfaith Coalition Rallies to Defend Immigrant Rights in Michigan - thejewishnews.com

Solidarity Is Already Happening

In January 2026, the Interfaith Alliance (where I got my first full-time advocacy job many years ago) hosted a Congressional briefing on Jewish-Muslim solidarity, naming something important: that Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans are both experiencing record levels of hate-motivated violence, both being scapegoated, and that the response has to be solidarity, not competition for victimhood. Jewish congregations standing outside mosques during Friday prayers after targeted harassment. Muslim communities raising $238,000 for Tree of Life shooting victims. Rabbis and imams hosting joint Shabbat and Iftar dinners. The Interfaith Alliance was explicit: we have real differences, and we can show up for each other when we are under attack.

That is the same logic as 1924. The Klan came to South Bend to divide — to make Catholics feel isolated, to make everyone who wasn’t white and Protestant feel like they were standing alone. The students who fought back were saying: you are not alone, and we will not be divided. Jewish and Muslim communities standing together in 2026 are saying exactly the same thing.

For more:

Jewish-Muslim Solidarity: Moral Witness in Pressing Times - The Interfaith Alliance (via Religion News Service)

Whether we show up with housing deeds, euchre tournaments, or potatoes, we have brought organized community to the battle convened by organized hate, and the outcome has never been predetermined. What determines it — what has always determined it — is whether enough people decide to show up together. You are showing up. That counts for so much. I’m grateful for it.

— Sandhy

a

I planned out this series without thinking about today being Juneteenth, but it feels important, since Juneteenth is about people trying to withhold information in order to retain power, and Black people claiming both that knowledge and that power, as part of a seemingly constant cycle.

Black Wall Street didn’t fail. It was burned. The racial wealth gap didn’t emerge from some neutral economic process.* It was engineered, maintained by law, and is still being actively enforced through biased appraisals and predatory lending practices that continue today. When we talk about repair, we’re not talking about fixing something that broke on its own. We’re talking about addressing something that was broken on purpose.

The poet Lucille Clifton wrote: “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have made of a world / that did not ask me to be.” The people of Greenwood rebuilt in tents in winter. Lessie Benningfield Randle is 109 years old and still fighting. That is not resilience in the passive sense — the kind that gets applauded because it lets everyone off the hook. That is refusal. Determined, principled, exhausting, ongoing refusal to accept that what was taken cannot be returned.

As you know, this is part of a twenty-week series on the stories that get told about us and the stories we can tell…and the stories we can create. It’s on reels you can follow M-Sat on facebook, instagram, linkedin, bluesky, and tiktok, but this newsletter is the weekly round-up where you (a) don’t have to see my endless collection of t-shirts and saris, and (b) can find the sources I used for the reels.

As an aside, this “history we should have learned” section was the second-most suggested when I looked for ideas from friends on facebook. (The most suggested is coming in week 19.)

This week: Black Wall Street, reparations, and the fight to repair what was deliberately destroyed.

*The racial wealth gap is the difference in average Black family wealth (assets minus debts) compared to the average White family wealth. In 2022, the Federal Reserve Bank calculated that Black families on average had 15 cents of wealth to White families’ dollar. If you leave Asians as a single group instead of looking at subgroups, they hold even more wealth; Latine, Indigenous and other groups come in at a little higher than Black families.

The History We Should Have Learned

In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma had one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States. The Greenwood District had Black-owned hotels, hospitals, law offices, newspapers, movie theaters, and hundreds of businesses — so prosperous it was called Black Wall Street. On May 31st and June 1st, a white mob aided by the city police and the Oklahoma National Guard burned it to the ground. Thirty-five square blocks. Over a thousand homes. Every church, every school, every business. As many as three hundred people killed. Ten thousand people made homeless. And for decades, it was just — not taught. It was also not the only case where the Black community lived apart and created an economically viable community which was then decimated because white people and leaders could not tolerate “separate but equal” resulting in decent conditions for their Black neighbors. The town of Rosewood experienced the same violence in Florida two years later — something I learned from the John Singleton movie in 1997. A lot of my friends learned about Tulsa’s race massacre because of the TV show Watchmen in 2019, including friends who grew up in Oklahoma schools.

But here’s what I really want you to know: the people of Greenwood were not passive victims. Black World War I veterans — men who had just come home from fighting for a country that didn’t protect them — armed themselves and held off the mob for hours. One family, the Williamses, defended their home through the night. And when it was over and the city refused to help, the community rebuilt largely on its own within months — in tents, in winter, and sometimes under cover of dark because the mayor and other city leaders tried to wield permitting processes against them. One Black citizen even sued the city for trying to stop him from rebuilding, and won.

Greenwood came back and thrived for decades after this horrific violence. And then “urban planning” placed four highways through the community to destroy it again, this time with federal funding in the late 1960s.

Their descendants are still fighting for recognition and reparations today. That fight is still in the courts in 2026.

For more:

Rebuilding Tusla, With or Without Reparations, Resilience magazine

Decades After the Tulsa Race Massacre, Urban ‘Renewal’ Sparked Black Wall Street’s Second Destruction, Smithsonian Magazine

Greenwood Trust

What’s Happening Right Now

The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the last reparations lawsuit — brought by the final surviving witnesses to the massacre — in 2024. Congressional bill H.R. 40, which doesn’t even authorize reparations but just offers a study to figure out what reparations might look like, has been introduced in Congress every year since 1989 and still has not passed.

Lessie Benningfield Randle was the last known living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre; she died in late 2025 at the age of 111. Her family home was looted and destroyed. She spent years in the legal fight. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed her case. And yet she and civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons kept fighting. In 2025, Tulsa’s first Black mayor, Monroe Nichols, endorsed a proposal called Project Greenwood, calling for compensating Randle and establishing a scholarship program for descendants of victims.

To learn more:

Justice For Greenwood Foundation

Black Tulsans still feel effects of Greenwood neighborhood's 'second destruction' | KOSU

A Saint You Should Know

It’s a mistake to talk about the history of building wealth in the Black community without talking about Booker T. Washington.

Washington was born into slavery in a one-room dirt-floor cabin in Virginia around 1856. He didn’t know his exact birth date. He didn’t know his father. He was given no last name. After emancipation, he walked five hundred miles to attend school, working as a janitor to pay his way. (In fact, his admission exam was cleaning a room to stand up to a “white glove” test; what?!). He founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881, building it literally from the ground up with his students. His partnership with Julius Rosenwald eventually led to nearly five thousand schools for Black children across the South. (More on that in a future newsletter.)

I’ll be honest; I used to think about him, DuBois, and Garvey as representing three unreconcilable strategies for Black liberation in the US, and a lot of the anti-Blackness I had been trained into shaped how I saw those paths. I’m still a DuBois stan, but now, knowing more about Greenwood in Tulsa and Rosewood in Florida, I better understand that while Washington might have seemed like an assimilationist, his goal of “leave us alone and we’ll be ok over here on the other side of town” was just as threatening as Garvey’s Back to Africa strategy and DuBois’s intellectual socialist civil rights strategy. (That’s why Teddy Roosevelt tried to disavow having invited Washington over for dinner at the White House, because a lot of White southerners let him know how outraged they were; check that story out in the History Channel article linked below.)

So yes, Washington’s politics were complicated — he publicly accommodated segregation in ways historians still debate. But his personal story — of a man who had nothing, named himself, and built institutions that outlasted him — is about refusing the limits placed on you at birth. And more than that, his story is about knowing the power of one’s community if they are resourced adequately. The communities of Greenwood and Black Wall Street were built by people who believed the same thing: what you build together cannot be taken. And even when it is — you build again.

To learn more:

Booker T Washington National Monument (U.S. National Park Service) — this one includes his most famous speech, which is FASCINATING and a really important document in studying Black liberation efforts in the US.

Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee University

8 Things You Might Not Know about Booker T. Washington — The History Channel. (I definitely learned some new things here, including the story about Teddy Roosevelt!)

Good Trouble in Action

In Evanston, Illinois, reparations are already happening.

Kenneth Wideman was born in 1945 in a segregated hospital. He attended segregated schools. His neighborhood was deliberately suppressed by city zoning policies for decades. In 2025, he received $25,000 from the City of Evanston’s Local Reparations Program — the first municipal reparations program in American history — funded by a cannabis sales tax and a real estate transfer tax. More than 200 people have now received payments totaling over $5 million. The program is under legal challenge. Evanston is fighting back. Reparations Committee Chair Robin Rue Simmons said at a recent meeting: “This has become part of our lives, like it’s almost routine for us now.” Routine. A city routinely paying reparations.

The Evanston Local Reparations program was built by a coalition. Robin Rue Simmons brought together Black residents who had experienced housing discrimination with faith communities, civic organizations, and city council members. The funding mechanism — a cannabis sales tax — was itself a coalition achievement: it required the city to commit that the revenue from a newly legalized industry would go to the communities most harmed by the war on drugs.

Now the program is deepening. A genealogy testing program is helping descendants trace their family roots. A Student Democracy Program pairs high school and college students with reparations recipients to interview them and preserve their stories. This is solidarity made institutional — white residents voting for a tax that primarily benefits Black residents, young people sitting with elders and asking: tell me what happened to you, so that it can be documented, so that it cannot be erased. It is imperfect. It is underfunded. It is contested. And it is routine. That is what repair looks like when communities commit to it.

To learn more:

How reparations to Black residents are changing lives in Evanston, Illinois, NBC News

Reparations - Evanston RoundTable

Evanston Local Reparations - City of Evanston

PS—I was particularly interested in this story because I was so impressed by the work the CA Reparations Task Force had done in 2022, but I didn’t know what had resulted from their solid work. It turns out a number of their recommendations were proposed in the state legislature and passed. Gov. Newsom proposed the process, and he signed some of the laws into being…but one of the most interesting, about restitution for eminent domain, he vetoed based on fiscal concerns. Because, yeah, taking away Black business districts and homes back in the 1960s resulted in a LOT of wealth taken away by the government. Anyhow, if you’re interested in what’s happening in CA, I hadn’t realized some of these bills, including an increase in firefighter pay that I talked about in a recent newsletter, were part of the reparations task force’s work. Here’s a great summary.

Solidarity Is Already Happening

Historically, Indigenous and Black communities have been deliberately turned against each other — by colonizers who used division as a tool of dispossession, and by enslavers who understood that solidarity between communities was the greatest threat to the system. The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust is organizing to repair that rupture directly.

NEFOC runs a program called Braided B.L.I.S.S. — Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty in Solidarity — a long-term convening space for Black and Indigenous land stewards to build relationships, develop shared governance, and work toward both reparations and Indigenous sovereignty simultaneously. Their Reparations Map connects farmers and land stewards across the country with projects working to return land and wealth to communities that were dispossessed of it. Their explicit premise: you cannot advance reparations for Black Americans without honoring Indigenous sovereignty, and you cannot honor Indigenous sovereignty without addressing the dispossession that made the theft of Black labor possible. The two are braided together.

This is repair as solidarity — two communities that power worked hard to divide, choosing each other instead. Find NEFOC Land Trust at nefoclandtrust.org.

For more info:

Article in YES! Magazine

NOTE: I got really excited about this story, and as I poked around a little, it may have been a limited time project that has drawn to a close. I wanted to note that, and also to note what an incredible vision this has, which I’ve certainly seen in other Black land trusts and Black farmers’ collectives.

It would be easy to read this week’s newsletter and be frustrated or even heartbroken that we keep fighting for justice, and when we win, it gets burned down or eminent domained or vetoed out of existence. As Colson Whitehead described America in his book The Underground Railroad, this nation was formed by the combination of stolen land and stolen labor. As long as we can’t reckon with that formally and collectively, as long as we pretend that past does not shape our future, we will continue to have our efforts at justice dismantled.

And yet, I think about the generations of students who went through Booker T Washington’s schools, the decades of citizens of Greenwood who benefitted from a courageous and successful lawsuit to force racist city leaders to let them rebuild, the people in places like Evanston whose lives are materially better because of the fight for reparations. Their lives matter. Their joy matters. Their contributions to moving us in the direction of being a people grounded in justice, dignity and love, that matters.

Repair is slow work, and most of us won’t live to see it finished. That’s hard. But the last survivor of the Greenwood Massacre fighting—and winning—in court at the age of 110, she’s proof that people keep doing this work anyway, across generations, because it is the right work. You are part of that continuity. Your attention to this, your refusal to let it be forgotten, your willingness to stay engaged — that matters. Thank you for being in this with me.

— Sandhya

Share Joy In Justice

Welcome back to my twenty-week series about how we reclaim our stories, tell the stories that matter, and create together the story of what can be. It’s M-Sat in reels you can follow on facebook, instagram, linkedin, bluesky, and tiktok, but every Friday I pull all that content together in one place — this newsletter, with citations. :)

There’s a pattern I keep running into as I research these newsletters, and this week’s theme is maybe the clearest version of it: the government decides it won’t do something — feed children, house people, provide healthcare — and communities build what they need anyway. Then sometimes the government sees what communities built and takes it over, claims it as policy, and scrubs out the names of the people who actually invented it. And then sometimes, generations later, the government decides to cut that program, and communities have to build it all over again. (I wrote a while back about why some folks choose the political strategy of anarchism — different from anarchy — and this right here is why.)

It’s exhausting. It’s also — and I mean this — kind of amazing. The sociologist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written that Black radical politics have always had to reckon with “the tension between working within the system and working outside of it.” What this week’s stories show me is that the most durable community institutions often started outside the system entirely, out of necessity, and were built by people who didn’t wait for permission. Mark Twain reportedly said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. I’d add: sometimes the rhyme is so close you can barely tell it from the original.

SNAP just lost $187 billion. Food bank grants have been cut. And communities are doing exactly what they’ve always done. And I know that the imposed scarcity by wealth hoarders and their friends in office cannot physically be replaced by volunteerism, no matter how generous we are. (If you’re involved with responding to human needs in our community, you already know that, and all the data backs it up.) That’s why we need government that works well. We need to keep fighting for that. But I love the ways we will not give up on each other even when forces outside of us play games with our lives and communities like they’re doing now.

This week’s theme: mutual aid, community feeding, and the long history of communities caring for themselves when the government won’t. (As always in this series, featuring history that helps us understand the present, a policy horror of the present, and what folks are doing to create a different world.)

The History We Should Have Learned

Quick question: what do you know about the Black Panther Party? If you’re like most of us, you were taught they were a militant, scary organization that the government eventually shut down. Here’s what you probably weren’t taught.

The Black Panthers ran free breakfast programs for children in cities across the country. By 1969, they were feeding twenty thousand kids a day before school — in nineteen cities. The administrator of the U.S. National School Lunch Program admitted that year that the Panthers were feeding more low-income children in California than the State of California was. J. Edgar Hoover called the breakfast program — and I am not making this up — the most dangerous of all the Panther programs. Not the guns. The eggs and orange juice. Many of those programs were eventually adopted by the federal government. The School Breakfast Program, which today feeds nearly thirteen million kids every single day, started in a church basement in Oakland.

This is particularly significant to me because a lot of the folks in my community today benefited from those programs (which the party called “survival programs”). For our joint bachelor party in August, my partner and I and some friends went on a walking tour of Oakland led by Panthers, and they showed us a list of programs they ran, many of which continue in our community, administered by schools or city officials, to this day. One of the tour leaders said she benefitted from the school breakfasts as a first grader, and the Panthers also taught her how to advocate for herself; her school assumed she wasn’t smart, instead of that she had a learning disability — and the Panthers taught her to fight for her right to a good education.

The Panthers were strategically and intentionally decimated. Their programs were so constructive that they became federal policy anyhow. And then we were taught to be afraid of the people who created them. I hope we’ll tell the more complete story.

For more:

The Black Panthers’ Public Health Legacy: Think Global Health

The Black Panther Party: Challenging Police and Promoting Social Change: The National Museum of African American History and Culture

The Black Panther Party: How It Actually Worked: How it was supposed to work

(and my personal favorite, because it highlights the women, and I got to see it at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland with so many people shaped by the Party): The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution: PBS.

PS—Elaine Brown, one of the original Black Panthers, has recently built affordable housing in West Oakland, despite many other developers failing to get their projects off the ground!

What’s Happening Right Now

The “Big Beautiful Bill” (which I believe Rev. Dr. William Barber called “The Big Ugly and Death Dealing Bill” because he has too much dignity to call it what it was: The Big B***s*** Bill), signed into law on July 4, 2025, cut SNAP — food stamps — by $187 billion over ten years. Between the law’s enactment in July 2025 and January 2026, more than 3.5 million people fell off the SNAP rolls nationwide. Arizona saw a 42% drop in SNAP participation — hunger advocates are clear: that is not because 42% fewer people need food. At the same time, the USDA terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in food bank grants in April 2025, affecting 40 states.

Work requirements suddenly changed, often without warning for those impacted, and taking food out of the mouths of people who couldn’t work or whose families would suffer significantly were they to go to work, or who live in regions where work is scarce. A lot of the changes hit during the summer, when children are also losing free school meals that kept them fed even when resources ran thin at home. All of this in addition to skyrocketing gas prices and inflation causing everything to be more expensive.

At least 3.5 million people have lost food stamp access as Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ cuts take effect, analysis finds: CNBC

The Families Going Hungry under the Big Beautiful Bill: NBC.

SNAP Tracker: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

A Deliberate Policy Design for Decline in SNAP Participation, and the Consequences We Are Already Seeing: Food Research and Action Center

PS: If you’re trying to talk with someone who thinks food banks should be enough and the government doesn’t need to be involved, this article from Forbes might be helpful.

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A Saint You Should Know

Martin Luther King Jr. called her “the Mother of the Movement.” He took her to Oslo when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. And almost nobody knows her name.

Septima Poinsette Clark was a schoolteacher who refused to resign from her position after South Carolina passed a law banning state employees from belonging to the NAACP. She was fired after nearly 40 years of service and lost her pension. Forty-one teachers stood with her and lost their jobs too. She went to the Highlander Folk School and designed the Citizenship Schools — teaching literacy, voter registration, and civic engagement to Black Southerners across the South, in people’s kitchens, in beauty parlors, under trees. More than 800 schools. An estimated one million new voters. She called out the SCLC men’s treatment of women as one of the greatest weaknesses of the civil rights movement. She was right about that too. “Literacy means liberation,” she said. She meant: when people know their power, nobody can take it from them.

Check out the King Institute’s summary of her contributions HERE.

Good Trouble in Action

Feed Durham is a mutual aid collective in North Carolina that runs a community fridge network, a community garden, a weekly market, and a community kitchen. What makes it distinctive: the people who receive food are also invited to grow it, cook it, distribute it, and help make decisions about how the collective runs. “Dignified food,” Civil Eats called it. Not charity. Not pity. Food with dignity, distributed by people who understand what it means to need it — because they do. At a moment when SNAP benefits have been cut by $187 billion and food bank funding has been slashed, Feed Durham is building something the government didn’t bother to build: a community that feeds itself.

Source: Civil Eats

Solidarity Is Already Happening

In Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood — one of the densest and most predominantly Latine and Black communities in the city — the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization has been building something that refuses the charity model entirely.

LVEJO’s Farm Food Familias program is a mutual aid collaboration between LVEJO, the Getting Grown Collective (a Black-led urban farming organization), and a rotating group of community chefs representing Puerto Rican, Latin American, and African American culinary traditions. Together they source produce from Black and Brown-owned urban farms on Chicago’s South and Southwest sides and deliver culturally specific, restaurant-quality meals to families in Little Village, Englewood, and South Chicago — communities that are majority Latinx and Black and have faced decades of environmental and economic disinvestment. The people receiving food are also invited to grow it, cook it, and shape how the program runs. In December 2024, LVEJO was awarded the national Food Sovereignty Prize for this work — recognition that what they’re building is not a stopgap but a model.

As LVEJO food justice organizer Yasmin Ruiz put it: “It’s not just you being on the receiving end, but giving back. It gives a sense of empowerment to people in the community, and allows us to take direct action to immediate needs we see.”

This is what it looks like when a Latinx environmental justice organization and a Black farming collective decide their neighbor’s hunger is their problem too — and build something together that neither could build alone. Find LVEJO at lvejo.org.

Sources: Civil Eats, Civil Eats AGAIN (I know, but this one is a convo with Feed Durham AND LVEJO! Plus I just discovered this site and am way into it), Borderless Magazine

I think the hashtag that’s big right now is #EverydayResistance or something along those lines, and I love it. Also, I love the ways folks are engaged in #EverydayCreation and #EverydayCare. Thanks for who you are and what you’re up to.

The breakfast programs started in church basements. The mutual aid networks started with a group text. Everything starts somewhere small. I’m grateful to be starting things alongside you. Thanks for helping reclaim the narrative and reclaim what’s possible.

— Sandhya

I want to extend a little sympathy up top: when the news is this relentless and the stakes are this high, it can be hard to know what to do with the information we’re taking in, or whether taking it in is even worth the cost to your nervous system. I think about that a lot.

That’s why I keep coming back to history: not because it makes the present feel smaller, but because it makes me feel less alone in it. The people who came before us were not superheroes. They were tired, scared, underfunded, and often unsure whether what they were doing would matter. And they kept going anyway — not out of naive optimism, but because they were embedded in communities that made it possible. As the writer Rebecca Solnit puts it: “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.” [Hope in the Dark, 2010] In other words, hope is a critical element of strategic resistance, not a thing that functions separate from that resistance.

As you know, much like two years ago, I’m doing twenty weeks of reels you can follow on facebook, instagram, linkedin, bluesky, and tiktok, but every Friday I pull all that content together in one place, this newsletter (and provide source citations—see, I really am in school and developing better habits!). It covers history, current realities, who’s fought these battles before, and who’s fighting them now. (The one exception is Wednesday’s reels — those are weekly affirmations with a moment to breathe, which don’t translate as well to newsletter format; I’ll try to post the videos on substack notes, but you can also find all the clips on the socials.)

This week’s theme is one I want to hold through the whole series: nothing that looks spontaneous actually is. Every uprising, every boycott, every moment of resistance that gets remembered as a turning point was built — deliberately, quietly, over years — by networks of people who showed up for each other long before anybody was watching. And the people in power have always understood this, which is why the first thing they attack is the infrastructure of solidarity: the right to organize, the right to assemble, the right to show up together in public and say: not like this.

Here’s what this week looked like.

The History We Should Have Learned

So here’s what most of us were taught: Rosa Parks was tired one day in 1955, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, got arrested, and that started the civil rights movement. Sweet story. Also not really the whole story.

Rosa Parks was not tired. She was the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. She had just come back from training at the Highlander Folk School. She had been doing this work for twelve years before she got on that bus. The Women’s Political Council — a group of Black women who had been planning for exactly this kind of moment — had flyers printed and distributed across Montgomery within hours of her arrest. That is not spontaneous. That is an organization that was ready. The boycott that followed lasted 381 days and nearly bankrupted the bus system, held together by thousands of Black Montgomerians who walked miles to work rather than ride a segregated bus.

Because the incorrect story had already become treated as fact during Parks’s lifetime, she famously said to set the record straight, “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Rosa Parks wasn’t tired. She was ready. And so was her whole community.

For more: Parks, Rosa | The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

What’s Happening Right Now

The right to protest — to assemble, to make your grievance visible — is foundational to American democracy. The founders put it first. And yet since 2017, 36 laws restricting protest have passed in 20 states. The Advancement Project found that since January 2024, 103 bills criminalizing protest have been passed or introduced. Anti-protest laws now exist in 45 states. Many of them expand the definition of “riot” so broadly that a peaceful protest where someone else commits an act of violence can expose every participant to felony charges. Some elevate blocking traffic to a felony — which would have made the Montgomery marches illegal.

At the federal level, proposals introduced in 2025 and 2026 would raise penalties for participating in a “riot” to ten years in prison and use RICO — a law designed to prosecute the mafia — to target organizations that fund or coordinate demonstrations.

The International Center for Not-For-Profit Law maintains a real-time US Protest Law Tracker at icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker.

Sources:

Advancement Project report — washingtoninformer.com/advancement-project-report-on-protest-laws|

ICNL US Protest Law Tracker — icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker

Lawfare — lawfaremedia.org/article/state-anti-protest-laws-and-their-constitutional-implications

A Saint You Should Know

On March 2, 1955 — nine months before Rosa Parks — a 15-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery. She was handcuffed, dragged off the bus, and jailed. “It felt like Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other,” she said later. “I couldn’t get up.”

Civil rights leaders initially considered building their case around her arrest. Then they found out she was pregnant. She was set aside. But Claudette Colvin didn’t disappear — she became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal lawsuit that actually struck down bus segregation in 1956. She won. Then she moved to New York, worked as a nurse’s aide for 35 years, and was largely forgotten. She spent decades trying to have her juvenile record expunged. A judge finally granted it in 2021 — 66 years late. She died on January 13, 2026, at 86. Her name was Claudette Colvin. Say it.

Sources:

NPR obituary — npr.org/2026/01/13/g-s1-105927/claudette-colvin-obituary-montgomery-bus-civil-rights

National Geographic — nationalgeographic.com/history/article/claudette-colvin-montgomery-bus-boycott

Good Trouble in Action

In February 2024, a group of LGBTQ teenagers who met at a church in Park Ridge, Illinois asked if their church could help put on a Pride event. The Rev. Carol Hill said yes — but told them it needed to be bigger than cookies on the lawn. Five churches from different denominations came together and organized the first Pride in Park Ridge. Despite a torrential downpour, more than 200 people showed up. The mayor spoke. Food trucks came. In June 2025, they did it again — with a full drag show in the town park outside City Hall. The churches stayed mostly in the background, by design. “The church has not always been a place where LGBTQ people are welcomed, celebrated or loved,” said Rev. Hill. “The position of the churches needs to be a lot more gentle and in the background.” They weren’t there to take credit. They were there to make space.

Source:

Religion News Service, June 2025 — religionnews.com/2025/06/10/parkridge-pride

Solidarity Is Already Happening

And this one I want you to carry with you into the week: in Chicago in 1969, the Black Panthers under Fred Hampton built something called the original Rainbow Coalition — not just with other Black organizations, but with the Puerto Rican group the Young Lords and the Young Patriots Organization, a group of white Appalachian migrants who had moved to Chicago seeking work and found poverty and police violence instead. If uou saw the movie Judas and the Black Messiah, you know that the Young Patriots wore Confederate flag patches. Fred Hampton went to their meetings anyway. They broke bread together. They built free breakfast programs, health clinics, and police accountability efforts together. The coalition changed the Young Patriots — not because the Panthers told them to change, but because solidarity changed them. If you get a chance to read Hillbilly Nationalists, you’ll get some insight into how that coalition turned some of them into active antiracists. (I checked it out on Libby from my local library!)

The FBI murdered Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969. The coalition fractured. But its model echoed forward — through Harold Washington, through Jesse Jackson, into our present moment. In a week when we’re talking about the right to organize and assemble, that story is not history. It is instruction.

Sources:

The Conversation — theconversation.com/chicago-1969-when-black-panthers-aligned-with-confederate-flag-wielding-working-class-whites-68961

Jacobin — jacobin.com/2017/05/black-panthers-young-patriots-fred-hampton

Young Patriots archive — yporc.org

Knowing is the first step. Acting is the second. And you are not doing any of this alone — even when it feels that way. When you pay attention, when you carry these stories with you, when you show up in whatever way you can, that is a critical part of how we change the story we’re living in. I’m genuinely grateful to be doing this work alongside you.

— Sandhya

PS: If you’re looking for resources on how to make change, you might enjoy my book Transforming Communities: How People Like You are Healing Their Neighborhoods. If you’re trying to make sense of your own ancestors as you seek encouragement for the work, you might enjoy my book Rebels, Despots, and Saints: The Ancestors Who Free Us and the Ancestors We Need to Free.

PPS: When I was looking up those links, I discovered that Chalice Press has both of those books in their summer sale, so now’s a good time to buy them as well as Liberating Love (also on sale), if you’re into progressive devotional content. :)

[OH, AND MAKE SURE TO GO TO THE END; I HAVE A RELATIVELY SIMPLE BUT REALLY IMPORTANT ASK OF YOU IN RE: ICE]

In 2024, I did a months-long series on what was at stake for democracy and basic liberties. It was on multiple social media platforms as well as here on substack.

I’m taking another swing at the same idea this summer, fwiw.

You’ll be able to follow this series in the form of reels on facebook, instagram, linkedin, bluesky, and tiktok.

Here’s what I’m up to (and thanks to those who had the bandwidth to contribute ideas, and complete sympathy to those who did not have that kind of bandwidth!):

• Highlighting some history you may not have learned in high school (Mondays)

• Talking about how current policies are affecting real people (Tuesdays)

• Taking a moment to breathe together (Wednesdays)

• Celebrating the folks doing something about those crummy policies (Thursdays)

• Lifting up ancestors who took on problems this hard and harder (Fridays)

• Celebrating the ways folks are showing up for each other right now (Saturdays)

And every Friday you’ll get a summary of the week’s content (with source links) right here on substack.

Subscribe now

My main goals in this series are:

• to encourage and inspire us about what’s happening in the resistance

• to remind us that throughout history as well as today, people in power try to divide us, but throughout history as well as today, some of us find ways to join together and fight back, across all the divisions they try to sow

• to invite us to stay informed and also curious at a time that can be hard to do

• to get some encouragement from the folks who came before us and can show us a way forward.

I hope you enjoy the content in the coming weeks. You offered both affirmation and insights about the series two years ago, and I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts, responses, and additions to this one.

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For those of you who are paid subscribers, I’ll also be sending you some updates on my dissertation research about once a month (you’ve been so gracious about the limited content so far).

I think that’s all the news for now!

This has been a hard season. Voting rights, continued ICE assaults and detentions, severe limitations on food access, a war devastating so many people and families, ongoing violence and theft of land, so many real costs. I am grateful that we have each other as we not only fight back but also cast a vision for a better world than the one we’re currently inhabiting.

with gratitude,

Sandhya

HERE’S A THING I’D LOVE YOUR HELP WITH THIS WEEKEND!!!

I just learned this week that the federal government is trying to repurpose a closed detention facility in the Bay Area of California to repurpose for ICE detentions.

The city of Dublin, California, has raised environmental issues that mean the public (anywhere in the US) can submit comments BEFORE JUNE 1 (Monday).

The community fought really hard to shut down this specific detention center because it was a hazardous, dangerous place. They succeeded in closing it in late 2024. And by early 2025, the federal Bureau of Prisons was talking about re-purposing it for ICE.

I submitted comments, and this toolkit (put together by some amazing organizers) made it so easy. They provide the email address (and ask us to bcc the group organizing the campaign so it doesn’t get lost), as well as the information you need to provide about yourself in order for your comments to be accepted, and some possible talking points.

I mentioned that I was proud the community had already stopped that facility from being used due to the environmental harms, and that the community stays safer and healthier without ICE’s expanded presence. But you can write whatever feels appropriate to you. There’s even a template to make it easier.

Thanks so much for taking a few moments to do this if you can.

Share Joy In Justice

I’m plugging away at the dissertation and making some good progress but also panicked at how little time is left to get it done. I also, possibly like you, am a mixture of devastated by the continued violence, hatred, and war happening across our country and across the globe in our name; while also inspired by so many people stepping up and speaking out and fighting back and building something better right where they are. Thanks for what you’re doing in your corner of the world.

Before I get to my main ask, here’s an ask for a smaller subset of folks: If you’re in Oakland and have free time Thursday at 1, I’d love to see you at this film screening:

A friend suggested me for this panel on the film The Bengali. The film is about a mixed-race woman (Black and Bengali) in New Orleans. She goes to Kolkata to learn about her Bengali grandfather, whose stories live large in family legend, but whose descendants had never visited his homeland. It is powerful, and it is universal even though it is about one person’s journey. I’m really looking forward to the conversation and would love to see you there if you’re in the area and not working on Thursday afternoon! Here’s the info from the Laney College website:

Join Laney College for The Bengali, a film that explores the history of early South Asian immigrants who formed families and communities within African American neighborhoods in the United States. Presented as part of the Under Our Sun Impact Campaign, the event highlights the shared histories that connect our communities.

The program includes a film screening, followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A with featured speakers, and concludes with a reception.

Schedule:
1:00 PM – Screening
2:15 PM – Panel & Audience Q&A
3:15 PM – Reception

Open to students, faculty, staff, and the community. RSVP here.

OK, and now on to my main ask!

What would you like to see me do in my upcoming e-news and video clip series?

In the summer of 2024, I did a series of videos and newsletters, and I had fun doing them! I want to do a reprise of them, but I wanted to get your input.

I’m sharing here a google form I’d be so grateful if you’d fill in for me.

I’d love your ideas on things you’d like me to talk about on these subjects:

• More to the Story Mondays - what’s a historic event that folks don’t know a lot about? If there’s something you’ve learned in the last ten years that wasn’t the way you learned about it growing up, that would be the perfect suggestion! (For example, I learned recently that somewhere between 100,000-150,000 white southerners fought on the side of the union, which changes the “heritage not hate” narrative — because there were a lot of folks whose heritage was fighting against slavery, and that included a lot of members of Robert E. Lee’s family.)

• Truth-Telling Tuesdays - what’s a local, state, or federal policy (law) that’s having a serious impact on a particular community that we should highlight? The more concrete the better.

• You Are Worthy Wednesdays - a way to affirm those of us trying to make the world a better place, and to give us a moment to breathe

• “Thriving Together” Thursdays - what’s a group or a person you know who’s making a difference in their community, especially in contrast with what’s going on in the three branches in DC?

• Family Tree Fridays - a story of an everyday hero from history, just as a source of inspiration and encouragement.

• Solidarity Saturdays - A specific thing we can do for different groups of people currently under attack.

If I do all summer, that’s about 16 of each! So you can see why I’m coming to you!

I’m doing it as a google form so you can share as much or as little, on any one of these categories or all of them! Thanks in advance for your help, and I’m sorry to make you click on a separate link to give me that feedback.

HERE’S THE GOOGLE FORM; THANKS AGAIN!!!

WAYS TO RESIST [waves hands vaguely] ALL OF THIS:

I got to have lunch at a Thai place in my neighborhood yesterday, and as I had lunch, a couple of senior women came in and asked to speak to the manager. They made sure to say they were volunteers, and they had information for customers and staff about how to respond when ICE shows up. They also told the server a couple of helpful hints from the materials.

It reminded me that there are lots of different places people can show up based on their capacities as well as the needs of the moment. Most lists are from early 2025, so I asked Claude to help me pull together some active links on the many things out there. I tried to include “here’s how to do it yourself” and “here’s how to plug in with folks already doing it,” based on where you are and what you’d like to learn more about. Let me know which ones I missed in the comments!

1. Letter-Writing Campaigns

Write to elected officials using templates and coordinated efforts.

• How to Mount an Effective Letter-Writing Campaign – Sogi Campaigns

• Guide to Organizing a Letter-Writing Campaign – Resource Centre

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Vote Forward – Send Letters to Voters

• Amnesty International – Global Write-for-Rights

• Stand With Minnesota – Volunteer & Advocacy Hub

2. Mutual Aid Networks

Support neighbors with food, supplies, and care.

• How to Start a Mutual Aid Network – Resilience.org

• Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit – AFSC

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Mutual Aid NYC – Find or Start a Group

• LA Forward Institute – Mutual Aid Resources

• Win Without War – Immigration Mutual Aid Directory

3. Digital Activism

Use social media, hashtags, and online organizing to amplify impact.

• Digital Activism 101 – Number Analytics

• Empowering Change: How to Start a Digital Activism Campaign

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Museum of Protest – Digital Activism Guide

• Change.org – Start or Join a Petition

• MyCivicWorkout – Connect with Online Activists

4. Art & Creative Activism

Use murals, music, and performance to inspire change.

• Start an Art Collective in 2026 – The Mansion Press

• EmptyEasel: Starting a Local Arts Collective

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Groundswell NYC – Youth Art for Justice

• UCLA Activist-in-Residence Program

5. Resisting ICE

Protect immigrant communities through rapid response and legal support.

• CODEPINK ICE Watch Toolkit

• How to Respond to ICE Raids – Next City

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Indivisible – Halt the ICE Terror Machine

• Colorado Rapid Response Network – Join ICE Resistance

• Organized Communities Against Deportations – Chicago

6. Pro-Democracy Work

Fight voting rights rollbacks with local organizing and litigation.

• 15 Ways to Fight for Democracy – The Contrarian

• Pro-Democracy Organizing Assessment – Commons Library

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Brennan Center for Justice – State Campaigns

• Southern Coalition for Social Justice – Voting Rights

• League of Women Voters – Local Chapters

7. Supporting Independent Journalism

Counter misinformation by sharing and funding credible, investigative outlets.

• Best Ways to Support Journalism – Matt Pearce

• How to Support Local News – Reddit Guide

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

• LION Publishers – Local Independent News

8. Rest & Joy in Resistance

Sustain the movement by prioritizing care and community.

• Teen Vogue: Self-Care for Activists

• The Nap Ministry – Rest as Resistance

And here’s some folks already doing the work:

• Audre Lorde Project – Healing Justice Programs

• One Colorado – Activism as Hope & Connection

Leave a comment

with gratitude as always,

Sandhya

I got back last week from three weeks in India with my partner, to introduce him to my family and show off my favorite places in Kolkata as well as going back to my family’s town and ancestral villages. More on that down the road, I promise. We came home to two new cats (friends had to re-home their two kitties because of severe allergies; they were heartbroken, but they at least know their beloved cats will be loved in their new home, too), and after a week at home, I headed back east to get back to my studies in Philly. I don’t have coursework, but it’s good to have facetime with my advisor and other faculty and colleagues to keep me focused on the end goal.

That said, I might end up on the picket line instead of in the lab. The graduate student union has been negotiating with the university, and the negotiations have ground to almost a halt. A week from today, if we haven’t made progress, graduate student workers will leave their labs and be out on the streets instead. Important research will be put on hold, and students will have to find ways to resource each other (and be resourced by the union) as funding is stopped for the duration of the strike. Here’s hoping that the negotiations move forward for the sake particularly of immigrant students and students with families who are most vulnerable if we can’t come to fair terms in the contract.

One other quick thing I wanted to share. I’m a really big fan of - her podcast is “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” and her substack is . I got to teach a lot of incredible students from the Twin Cities when I taught a course on social enterprise at United Theological Seminary. I know a fair number of people showing up SO well for their neighbors in Minneapolis right now, and Killjoy is the writer I thought best captured the essence of why Minneapolis’s neighbor culture has positioned them to show up well for each other in the wake of George Floyd’s as well as Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s murders. Her article “Our Neighbors in Minneapolis” is well worth the read.

Now, without further ado, the subject at hand.

About fifteen years ago, I was on a date with a union organizer. A very cute union organizer I had seen at more than a few workers’ rights protests. We were having a lovely meal, and he said something about “as an anarchist…” and I stopped him. “Wait, what do you mean anarchist? You’re a labor organizer,” I said, puzzled. I suspect he wasn’t surprised by the question, because he knew a lot of people like me thought anarchists were people who wore masks and threw bricks through shop windows.

He very kindly explained to me that actually, anarchism was a philosophical or political position—like socialist, conservative, etc. As he explained it, anarchism was based on the belief that hierarchical government wasn’t built for people on the margins and would never serve them, and the best form of governance was local, collaborative, and voluntary. Years later, I realize that this is actually what a lot of people I know already practice with each other, because in fact the current government structures do not serve them.

I eventually realized that a lot of my own work lives in that tension. My friends in the interfaith worker movement want laws that better protect workers, who often risk their safety and health for their employers and for us as consumers.1 At the same time, we know that even the best governance we can fight for will never protect people who are most vulnerable in our society. So we also support worker cooperatives where workers keep all their earnings and shape organizational policy collectively. We support mutual aid programs (which have very old roots within the disability community as well as others) where we make sure each others’ needs are met based on what we each have to contribute. We look for ways to support each other through addiction and other crises so that the criminal justice system won’t get pulled in.

So a number of years later, I had begun to think that maybe anarchism was a helpful framework for what seems to work for the people not served by the current government, and I used the word with an old friend. Just like me, she had been raised with the term meaning “people who break windows with bricks,” and she reacted the same way I had on that date years before. I was not as gracious as my date had been, but I did my best to explain what it meant as a philosophy. She said curtly, and by means of educating me, “you’re gonna need to find a new term,” because the word anarchist was inextricably tied to people breaking windows with bricks as far as she was concerned.

It was frustratingly good advice. It’s a word that, even if it’s almost always being misused, is attached to the negative reference point more than to its actual definition. And that makes sense, since the word anarchy came first, and it does mean chaos due to lack of order or structure or governance. (Apparently Thomas Hobbes coined the term—he’s the guy who wrote “the Leviathan” in the 1600s to warn people they needed a tyrant to rule them because they couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves.) Anarchism came about in the mid-1800s, when people looked around and realized that what Hobbes had suggested was not actually making life good for them as peasants and poor folk and working folk—maybe the thing he called “anarchy” was actually collectivism and localized democracy which would serve them better than monarchy and totalitarianism. So anarchism was kind of turning the word anarchy on its head…but most of us didn’t get that memo. And of course we didn’t—who was going to send it to us, the people in charge?

This article might seem out of the blue. In fact, it kind of is out of the blue.

Last week I had the privilege of meeting with some students in a year-long certificate program. I was teaching the module on social justice and leadership. They were all brilliant and gifted and committed to building a better world. During the discussion, one of the students mentioned being inspired by a recent justice movement but being disappointed when he went to the protests by the anarchism he saw — people setting a car on fire. That wasn’t a moment it would be helpful to say “hey—that word you’re using the way pretty much everyone uses it? It means something completely different that you might actually be into!” And I sat with that dissonance the rest of the day, thinking about how it was a chance encounter that taught me about a different philosophy that I had just thought of as property destruction, and that while I don’t often use the word anarchism myself, I’m kind of throwing under the bus the people who practice it best and do use that term.

And I thought, in this particular moment, I suspect more of us who think of anarchism as a philosophy or political strategy are going to be rubbing elbows with, and hopefully collaborating with, people who think of anarchism as people throwing bricks through windows. So I wanted to take a moment for anyone who, like me, didn’t realize it was a potentially useful worldview, in case this is helpful as we build community together across diverse experiences and reference points.

Which is why, on another night of waking up at 2am last week (I feel like half of my friends who are my age and were assigned female at birth are dealing with insomnia these days), I was struck by a fascinating tangent on JRR Tolkein and his anarchist beliefs as I listened to an old episode of my favorite podcast (which I hesitate to name because it has pretty strong language and pretty irreverent takes).2 I think I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least four times the whole way through between 8th and 12th grades, and I always liked to think his politics were the same as mine—although so did a lot of very conservative evangelicals and Catholics, so I wasn’t 100% confident. And it turns out his politics don’t map onto anybody’s in particular, but I still found it fairly striking.

For context, the host, Robert Evans, was mercilessly critiquing a very bad book by Ben Shapiro. He mentioned that Shapiro had quoted far superior writers like JRR Tolkein and even then misinterpreted them.

I’m going to pull a few germane quotes from the podcast (borrowed from this link to the transcript).

That’s not really true. And I think it’s worth discussing J.R.R. Tolkien’s personal politics here. Because like most peoples, they are complex and not entirely consistent and sometimes incoherent. For an example, Tolkien on a number of occasions, described himself as an anarchist and described himself as an anarchist in ways that are like relatively like recognizable to modern day anarchists. He talked about his hatred of power. He expressed a disgust for industrialism that is very much in line with how some anarcho-primitivists talk today, right? Not entirely so, but his fundamental dissection of why he was an anarchist is very much, like, relevant to modern-day anarchists. He thought people were not fit to hold power over people, right?

…And at the same time, Tolkien was, for example, not an uncritical, but a supporter of the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War, largely because he was horrified at the killings and what he saw as the unjustified murders of nuns and priests and whatnot by, in some cases, anarchists, right? …Like most people, J.R. Tolkien’s political beliefs were not entirely coherent or consistent... However, what I can say is that J.R. Tolkien was not at all in alignment with Ben Shapiro’s politics and would have been disgusted by them. Tolkien was a firm anti-Nazi. He was also very anti-Stalin….

Again, you know, you can find Tolkien had some issues with, like, feminism, like, or what he saw as feminism, but he also, he hated, like, American capitalism. He was disgusted by, like, advertisements. He was disgusted by the culture of consumption, and he was disgusted by the flattening of culture, by the idea that everyone would need to speak, you know, English, by the idea that American culture would flatten the world, right? He found this personally horrifying and disgusting, which is like the opposite of Ben’s politics. And he was not pro the British Empire. He was in fact deeply critical of the British Empire…. He hated the flattening of cultures around the globe under burgeoning capitalism and was disgusted by the domination of peoples around the world by foreign powers. The beliefs he most consistently expressed throughout his adult life where a sort of anti-capitalist, anti-industrial sentiment based around a hatred of pollution and the destruction of the natural world. But he was clear in his letters to his son and others that he saw America and Americanism as the central culprits in this.

Evans also referenced a letter Tolkein wrote to his son Christopher in 1943 while Christopher was serving in the Royal Air Force during WWII. I looked up the letter. He wrote “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy.”3 You’ll notice that even then, he was trying to distance himself from the already established notion that anarchism was scruffy dudes blowing things up. Ironically, he goes on to say (and I share this with you knowing I am personally dedicated to nonviolence for any act of resistance with which I am involved), “There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal.”

I largely wanted to share this because it reminded me that the movement I didn’t know about 15 years ago, which has in fact been plugging along and actually creating healthy and thriving communities when it takes root is maybe bigger and more widely held than I had realized. Many of us have watched the Lord of the Rings movies or read the books, and we maybe found some resonance in the humble figures consumed in this massive struggle. I found it significant that the author of those books also believed in a political worldview that he had to explain even to his own son was about self-governance and less hierarchy, rather than “whiskered men with bombs.” So this confusion goes back a long time. But so does the movement.

I don’t want you to think I’m telling anyone to change their politics. I have friends in the movement who are socialists, anarchists, communists, capitalists, and Democrats — quite the collision of philosophical, political and economic positions. And yet we’re figuring out together the kind of world we want to build and how to build it.

I just suspect that if you opened this email, it might have been because we’ll be bumping into each other a lot more in these coming days as the people who believe in the innate value and dignity of all people join together to move forward that agenda (and to fight the agenda that wants a world where some people are on top and everyone else is beneath them). And if we have a clearer reference point for each other, it might help us build coalition.

And if none of this is actually news to you, I hope you had fun learning a little bit more about the guy who wrote LOTR.

In fact, to close, I want to share some words of encouragement that JRR Tolkein shared during an awards ceremony in Holland many years ago, courtesy of the unlikely source the Imaginative Conservative (linked in the final footnote below). Apologies if you didn’t read the books or watch the movies, because it is definitely relying heavily on the original texts.

“I look East, West, North, South, and I do not see Sauron. But I see that Saruman has many descendants. We Hobbits have against them no magic weapons. Yet, my gentle hobbits, I give you this toast: To the Hobbits. May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees.”

Thanks for your work to build bridges and communities in this moment, without grandstanding or seeking glory. Thanks for protecting your neighbors. Thanks for being a reminder that we practice tolerance and inclusion, but that we will not tolerate violence and harassment in our communities.

with gratitude,

Sandhya

And with that, on to today’s content! (ALSO, if you’re in the Bay Area, read to the end—there’s a great non-cooperation training you should consider attending if you can get time off.)

This summer I went to the Socialism 2025 conference to meet some folks outside my network whom I could hopefully interview for my dissertation when the time came. This meant I went to a lot of workshops on reproductive justice and on labor. And one of the labor workshops is something I have quoted in at least half the podcasts and speaking engagements I’ve had since — especially anything with a Q&A section on how to handle our current moment.

I want to share a lot of broad strokes from that workshop, but stick around til the end, because that was the thing that has carried me the six months since, which I want to carry with me into this new year.

(I also want to note that you, like me, might have grown up with the idea that socialism was a bad word. I think that by now we know socialism is compatible with democracy (and unfettered capitalism in a global economy, it turns out, is ultimately incompatible with democracy, because by design it concentrates power and wealth and reduces options for consumers and workers alike). We can probably think of really good examples of socialism (public roads, public health, public transit). A lot of Californians dealing with fires and blackouts because of an energy monopoly might be wondering whether public utilities would be a much better option than what we have right now. And even so, I know the word can create a little bit of anxiety. So if that’s the case, I want you to know I’m sympathetic; I got that same training. Nonetheless this issue will treat socialism as a political belief system that creates greater justice. You and I can totally debate that at some point if it’s not where you are, but I’m not doing much explaining of it as a worldview here and I didn’t want you to be startled.)

So the workshop was called “The Use of Political Education in Union Campaigns,” and I went more to see who was talking than because that title got me fired up. As you may have noticed, I’ve spent the past few years increasingly wrestling with how folks on the left think we can educate people into doing the right thing, while over and over the world keeps reminding us that strategy isn’t necessarily a winning one. (It’s why I joined this year’s Othering and Belonging Institute’s learning cohort — for political engagement on the right, a sense of belonging tends to precede political thought and then action. I suspect the same might be true on the left, in different ways.)

You would have been SO inspired by the panel that was there, though. It reminded me that actually political education — helping people learn about the systems at play that are why we are working longer hours for less pay, and what we can do about that — can be done in ways that cultivate belonging, if we’re intentional about it. The panelists were active in efforts to unionize Amazon workers. The facilitator of the panel was a longtime organizer out of Detroit who had been active in a group called the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which was active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in response to how Black workers were not adequately represented by the union that was supposed to represent them (the United Auto Workers).

The facilitator commented that the young men on the panel had so much in common with him, despite a 50-year difference in age. He had been working a low-wage job (at a car wash) trying to figure out what to do with his life, and ended up in the military, and came back with all the pain such an experience gave him. The difference, he noted, was that when he came back, he landed in a job in the auto industry. Two of the panelists had the same story, except they landed in a job at Amazon, which is “not a family-raising wage,” he said. Something else he said, about the value of political education, is that “the main reason to do political education is to make you a better organizer. If you understand the world better, you can put your workplace in context and organize effectively in that place.”

Here are a few highlights from the panel discussion. If you’ve ever been in a union or have heard a family member share their experiences in a union, I suspect some of this will make a lot of sense. If you’ve ever tried to motivate regular folks to sacrifice their limited free time to make the world a better place, you’ll likewise probably nod your head at some of this.

• The lead worker/organizer intentionally took a job at Amazon in order to help workers unionize. He had previously worked somewhere else that had unionized, and he wanted to help the rest of his field (logistics workers) be better protected. Amazon workers face high injury rates, high rates of mental health challenges, and high surveillance relative to other working environments.

• The organizers kept iterating their political education content. When his first effort, a book group, dwindled to him and one other guy, he tried a documentary, then tried to do political education at union meetings (which doesn’t happen as much as you might think if you’re not in a union), then created a pamphlet to make it easier for people to explain what a union is. He got a group of eight people together to delve into readings on class struggle, and they kept refining the readings so they’d make sense and be relevant. They discovered ongoing groups worked best (10 sessions for now), with a mixture of people who already had some political education under their belt and workers who were new to it—including recently fired workers. They learned that compensating workers for their time in the sessions was important ($50 a session, which is respectful but doesn’t generally yield participants who are just in it for the money). They solicit feedback every time and keep refining the content.

• One big learning I found helpful was “it works to get people used to ‘we start meetings with learning.’” That means the articles have to be manageable, but learning is baked into the culture of the shared work. The worker/organizer also talked about a cookout with a reading circle on the technical skill of how to do a good one-to-one conversation in order to get new people involved. A combination of practical and fun is also a great strategy.

• In the places where they’ve done good (and constantly evolving) political education, they’ve had the highest levels of participation in organizing. In the places with no political education (or no socialists), union busting by the corporation was most effective.

• One thing that breaks people out of a silo, they learned, is doing something TOGETHER before getting into political education. This learning excited me in particular because towards the end of my time at the Oakland Peace Center, I began to realize that if we wanted to do effective neighborhood organizing for peace, we had to build in a step before that, of helping us realize we really are a neighborhood. We had just begun doing that (and I had only begun educating funders about this missing step) when the pandemic hit. As one of the workers noted, “Amazon knows how to keep people focused on just themselves.” That’s what the organizers are up against.

• One of the workers noted, “listen, I used to watch Fox news” and got a lot of other sources of conservative content in his daily life. He said political education helps people realize there are a lot of ways to come at the issues we face, but he was also indicating that good organizers and educators don’t automatically write someone off because of the fact that that person is not already fully aligned with their views. He shared that one time, a fellow worker who was a committed socialist gave him a 20-page article by Karl Marx and said, “read this before the next meeting.” I’m in a cohort of 6 PhD students, and all of us struggled to understand the readings by Marx we were assigned, so I felt his pain. We’re all lucky he stayed involved despite that!

• His fellow panelist noted that “there’s a lot of content pumped into us online that are anti-socialist, and most people are too busy to reach across differences.” The reason he found the sessions helpful was there weren’t buzzwords, the presenters weren’t putting their ideas first but prioritizing worker perspectives first, and the content wasn’t explicitly Marxist or socialist, but it DID help him understand the broader questions of “what work is doing to us.”

“People are tired. They’ve been tired. Political Education gives you a chance to learn you don’t have to accept what was forced on you growing up.”

• The worker who had gotten the other two into the political education sessions agreed, saying, “theory alone isn’t enough—it’s actually going to lead to teh wrong solution. Changing society on the basis of theory doesn’t lead to good solutions.” I’m not sure whether it was him or the facilitator, but someone evoked a quote by Amilcar Cabral: “Every practice defines its own theory.” To me, that means that a theory is only as good as how it can be practiced in real life.

• One fact that shouldn’t have startled me was that Amazon turns over half its workforce every year. Imaging trying to maintain leadership and momentum in those circumstances. As the worker/organizer noted, “for leaders to stick around, they need to understand the bigger picture.” And what that means is they have to choose to stay in a crummy situation in order to seek to make it better. From his perspective, this is why political education is actually critical to the task of organizing workers in a place like Amazon.

I got to support some of the workers seeking to unionize fast food restaurants, and it was a similar challenge. I had a good friend who intentionally stayed in fast food work so she could show other workers their rights, like the fact that they were allowed to demand sick leave and family leave. She was a thorn in the side of management, and she wasn’t earning a living wage. She was a key leader in the “fight for fifteen,” which is how we became friends. And I’m not sure I could have put up with the hostility she faced (and the lack of enthusiasm from fellow workers who were just trying to get through the day with the least grief) when there were potentially other, less hard options. A lot of employers rely on high turnover to reduce the likelihood of worker organizing. It is an additional barrier for the folks trying to create better working conditions for the people who are in important but undervalued and badly treated, badly compensated fields of work. As the worker/organizer on the panel said, “you need people who are willing to lose and lose and lose before they win.” That’s not everybody. And when you find those folks, don’t take them for granted. (They didn’t say those last two sentences. They just practice them.)

Before I get to the big thing from this panel I wanted to share, here’s something else I think is really important to our work—yours and mine, across all its differences. The guy who came to Amazon specifically to organize? He came not just to do labor organizing, but to do it from a socialist context. That means he doesn’t just want better capitalism (which some unions want); he wants a different system with more robust protections for all people. So when workers ask him why he’s doing so much off-the-clock work to organize, he tells them it’s because he’s a socialist. He said, “you might need to hide your politics from your employer, but be up front with colleagues.” It creates space for conversations, and it avoids reinforcing the idea that socialism is something to whisper about or be ashamed of. He also said three things I want to share, because they’re relevant to our work:

• Inoculate. Don’t let them think one petition will constitute a big win. Don’t let them think one politician will solve the problem. That action, or that person, is not the movement. “WE are the movement.” That action or that person is critical to help the movement, but they aren’t the movement.

• Self-criticism is key. (Ouch.) The folks on the panel spent five years of experimenting to get to their current formula. But things can always be better, and their context is always changing. Openness to critique makes the work better.

• “What works in your struggle will COME from your struggle. Borrow from others, but only keep what resonates.”

So here’s the thing I wanted to share, the thing that lightened my heart so much that I’ve been sharing it all over the place. It was a passing comment during Q&A. It was 8 months after the 2024 election, and a LOT of folks had been doing post-mortem on why the Democratic party had taken a bath in November. A very popular belief at the time was that “identity politics” had taken priority over the needs of working-class voters. “Identity politics” in that conversation was short-hand for Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and Gaza. (A more recent autopsy published by Common Dreams found that corporate donors, lack of opposition to genocide and alienation of younger voters played a larger role.)

So one of the audience members asked a version of that question—are workers’ rights being compromised by all the focus on trans rights and other non-economic issues. (Truth be told, this was what I had been worried would be the dominant perspective at a socialism conference. In the false binary of race versus class, I’ve known a few socialists who felt like if I stopped talking about race we would finally get workers’ rights and race would no longer be a problem. If that were the case, the League of Black Revolutionary Workers wouldn’t have had to be created in the first case.)

The person to respond was the panelist who said he used to watch Fox News. I was (maybe unfairly) nervous when his first sentence was “I’m so sick of this issue.”

But then he continued, “trans people are not the 1% of the population making our lives worse.”

There’s a line in maybe the second Hunger Games book where the main character is fighting against other teenagers to survive this horrific game they have to play as punishment for rebelling against the capital. Her mentor had told her “remember who the real enemy is.” She was just about to kill a girl who was trying to kill her when she remembered his caution, and she did something to instead bring attention to what the capital was doing to all of them. (I could be wrong, but I think this was the point of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie The Running Man, too.)

My guy was saying that all the blaming of trans people that was coming from the left was a red herring, meant to distract from the 1% of people who actually are making our lives worse. Most of us understand that the right’s attack on trans people is also an attack on cis women whose bodies are increasingly policed is also an attack on cis men who are not performing masculinity in the way that a certain subset of folks have decided it should be performed. We might also recognize that anything having to do with gender has also been used in harmful ways against non-white people (whether they be Olympic boxers or service workers or any number of other folks). But his comment was such a helpful reminder that progressive folks have been encouraged recently to see our rights as being in competition with each other, and that when we are afraid our rights are under attack, we want to distance ourselves from people on different margins, lest they pull us down with them.

I was really grateful for the reminder that other people seeking justice are not the enemy. I want to hold onto that in 2026, because I know some of my non-enemies are going to frustrate the heck out of me. (And I know I frustrate the heck out of some of the folks who work alongside me—possibly you sometimes, or much of the time!)

Our work is creating a world where working people can live in relative peace and safety, with enough resources to not just survive but to encounter joy and not just constant exhaustion, and enough time they get to be a part of their community, too. And where people who can’t work are afforded those same possibilities, and where that is a world for people of all races and cultures and genders and cultures and races, and where the land and all of creation enjoy those same possibilities, too. There are a lot of people we can invite into dreaming of and creating that world with us. We have a lot fewer enemies than we’re being told we have. To me, that’s great news for the new year.

BTW, if you’re on social media, you might enjoy following the Instagram page of the Logistics Workers League, the network that sponsored the panel and is doing some remarkable organizing work.

Thanks again for being on this journey with me—all fifty years of it.

peace,
Sandhya

I mentioned up top that if you’re a Bay Area person who can afford to take a Saturday off, there’s a great training on noncooperation happening. It’s part of Bay Resistance, and I know they’re hoping for all sorts of people, including people of faith (so they’re asking folks to promote it at their mosques, temples, synagogues and churches, but also share it with your book group or neighborhood group or men’s group or rugby team or dog park buddies!). It’s on 1/24 at First Unitarian in Oakland. Here’s the flyer and link.

I try to provide you with useful content, with citations and links and stuff like that, or with helpful tips on how to do little pieces of justice in your workplace or community group or family. I try not to go into personal stories any more than absolutely necessary (although you’ve been so supportive of my grad school adventures that I love updating you periodically on that stuff!)

But I did a class with some students the other week and shared a story that they found really moving, and it crossed my mind you might find it helpful or resonant or just interesting.

I’m sharing this partly because I’ve been sad to watch people I know absorbing a lot of right-wing narrative about trans rights without necessarily realizing how harmful those narratives are to trans folks and also to cis women and also ultimately to all people. Sometimes they even think they’re being progressive.

There are a lot of important conversations to have about those issues. This post isn’t that. In fact, even though it only happened a couple of months ago, it’s a little bit of a throwback to the days when more people were curious to learn more instead of determined that they already understood everything they could possibly need to know.

A few months ago I was having a conversation with a social justice elder that I know from my days at the Oakland Peace Center. She has done so many important things to make the world a better, more just place, and she brings so much humility to her work that it’s really striking.

As an aside, at the end of a conversation, she mentioned someone we both know and clarified that the person’s pronouns were they/them. She paused and said, “So, you use they/them pronouns, and you look like a woman. [That person] uses they/them pronouns, and they look like a man. Would you mind, if you’re comfortable, sharing your journey to using those pronouns?”

I was really moved by that framing, because it brought curiosity instead of judgment or assumption. In fact, that framing was why I brought up this story with my students—it was an example of cultural humility, which they were trying to think through in their workplace contexts.

If you’ve known me for a while (like this movement elder has), you may have noticed how I went from she/her pronouns to she/they pronouns (somewhere around 2017? I remember writing it on my nametag at a denominational gathering as a “solidarity” action), and then sometime in the pandemic (I want to say 2021) to they/them pronouns. I didn’t make a lot of noise about it, and I didn’t really try to correct people, but if people asked my pronouns, I was happy to tell them, and if they asked why, I was happy to have the conversation. (In fact, I’ve done a couple of newsletters on that, but so long ago I can’t link to them because they’re not on substack.)

So here’s what I shared with my friend. It may be stuff you already know, and also every person’s story varies a little.

I started out by saying “so it’s really important for me to say that people who identify as nonbinary have LOTS of reasons, so mine are probably not the same as [person we had just mentioned]. Some people feel like neither gender really speaks to them, that they’re in a different category. Some people feel like the way gender has been constructed is really harmful to everyone, and this is their way of creating a different path. I know some people who actually chose they/them pronouns after the last election as a sign of solidarity with trans people whose gender is being treated as a threat. There are a lot of reasons, rather than a single one.”

I can’t remember if I shared with her how one of my best friends from high school and I talked maybe ten years ago about how we loved that young people were using they/them pronouns, because that fit both of us better, but we were too old…and then when the pandemic hit and everyone was on zoom, it was a chance to reset how at least our work colleagues would identify us going forward. Without discussing it with each other, we both made the change, and then found out about it at least a couple of years after the fact (since we weren’t on zoom with each other that much).

I went on, “for me, it’s more about the whole range of gender expressions fitting me. I mean, you’ve known me for over ten years. You’ve seen me exhibiting what would be called masculine traits and you’ve seen me exhibit what would be called feminine traits. I really love a term I heard [another mutual colleague] use: ‘gender-full.’ It’s not so much that none of the gender identities fit; it’s that they all do.”

She lit up immediately. “Yes! That makes so much sense! I’ve seen you preach and speak and facilitate and all the different gender expressions show up!” Then she said, “why didn’t anyone explain it THAT way before?”

I think the answer to that is that people navigate this question so differently. I have friends who have medically transitioned and use different pronouns than the ones they were assigned at birth, and they also see themselves as “gender-full” or nonbinary; they’ve just found reference points that are right or easier for their public expression, and they’re more comfortable in their bodies. I have friends who use the pronouns they’ve had their whole lives who believe that bringing what I would call “gender-fullness” into their assigned gender is important, and it fits them better. And I have friends who use pronouns they feel fit them better but for whom surgery isn’t necessary or urgent.

My high school friend and I used to joke that we spent our lives just not doing “woman” correctly, and it was really freeing to realize that label might not be right for us. But I have friends who had the same experience growing up, for whom it is really important to show that there is no one right way of being a woman, or a man, and they are examples of another way of inhabiting that gender.

I think sometimes the subject of nonbinary identity can be sticky for me, because I have friends whose lives are at risk because of their visible trans-ness. I have friends whose security is at risk because they’re being forced to put the wrong gender on their travel documents, which has already resulted in harassment and physical harm to trans people going through airport security. My travel documents still say female, and it is definitely because the moments I want to talk about gender identity are not when a police officer pulls me over for a broken taillight or a TSA agent mistakes the books in my bag for something else. I absolutely benefit from what is called “cis [or cis-passing] privilege.” So it can feel a little indulgent to talk about this when much greater dangers to other trans friends are on the table right now (and have been for much of history).

But a friend of mine said the one advantage of talking about things like this in a moment like this is that it’s a reminder to other people that they get to be fully themselves, whatever that looks like.

So I wanted to share this story partly because you might have been curious and hadn’t known how to ask. You may not have thought to ask or figured you probably already knew (and you might have been right!). You might not have cared (in which case, the next newsletter will probably be more interesting!). Or you might have been trying to think through your own questions about gender identity.

But the main reason I wanted to share this story was because I was moved by the framing of the question I was asked. In this moment of the pressure to dig in, it is noteworthy when someone instead chooses to be open and curious. And not only curious about our opposition (a curiosity I feel often only goes in one direction), but curiosity about our friends. Relationships can deepen, and so can understanding, when we are curious about each other. It’s a lesson I keep needing to be reminded of, because I tend to think I know more than I do about my friends, and I have so much still to learn from and about them.

If you have thoughts on these questions, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Or, if they’re private, please feel free to respond to this newsletter and it will come just to me. I will do my best to respond.

I think you’ll get something from me before the end of the year, but in the mean time, happy Chanukah, happy solstice, happy Christmas, and happy Festivus to those who celebrate. <3

peace,
Sandhya

Liza chose this particular reflection because it’s aligned with the things you and I share in common: a desire to create a politics of inclusion, justice, and joy; an interest in what can give us the energy to create it; and a little grounding in ancestors and spirit as the foundations of doing that work sustainably.

Before I share her piece with you, a quick update: on November 7, I defended by dissertation proposal. (Not the actual dissertation, just the thirty pages of “here’s what I want to do in my dissertation.”) Basically, I plan to research how leftist activists are responding to this current moment of right-wing takeover of the political system.

The committee gave me a pass, which means I am now officially a “PhD candidate.” I thought I already was, but it turns out that term apparently means someone who has passed their qualifying exams and defended their dissertation proposal. All I have to do now is write my dissertation! :) The committee’s main advice was that before I plunge into interviews and surveys and focus groups, I should slow down, REALLY read what the field of movement studies has to say about what I’m researching, and get clearer about the theories I’m using to interpret the thing I’m researching. If you know me, that recommendation is not surprising: I tend to be more comfortable with breadth than with depth, and with moving a little too fast sometimes. That’s part of why I went back to school—to learn other ways of doing the same work.

I will confess I’m itching to get to the interviews, though, partly because of a couple of conversations I’ve had recently, where activists have said, “Oh good! I’m up to some really cool stuff I’d love other people to get to hear about!” So I’ll keep you up to date as that unfolds, too.

And if you follow me on social media, you probably know that for the last two weeks I was with clergy colleagues in Vietnam (thanks to a grant that allowed us to spend a year doing vocational discernment work together, particularly driven by how we connect with our ancestors and our work around racial justice). Particularly moving was hearing from social service leaders who are working with Indigenous communities in the mountains on issues like climate resilience, sustainable farming, and entrepreneurship. They gave me some of the green bean tea their farmers grow and sell, and I’m excited to try it!

Without further ado, I hope you find this message from one of the most deeply interfaith, justice-oriented, and spiritually impactful people I know, Liza Rankow. Again, the link to her brand-new book, Soul Medicine, is here (and as a fellow author, I want to encourage you to post reviews on Amazon and Goodreads; it is at least as helpful to an author as buying the book)!

Reimagine Democracy: A Revolution of Values

By Liza J. Rankow

I have always been somewhat cynical about democracy-talk. Mostly because in the United States, despite our rhetoric, we don’t actually have a democracy—have never had one. So when I was invited by Faith Matters Network, an organization I love and respect, to be part of their webinar series on Reimagining Democracy, and particularly to address “healing our democracy,” it gave me pause. What could I add to that conversation? It turns out that Spirit and the Ancestors had an answer. (Of course, right?)

My cynicism was based on the flawed institutional structures of governance in this country, but democracy is actually a profoundly spiritual idea, rooted in the principle of the inherent and equal worth of all. This is the ideal that our elders in the Southern Freedom Movement were seeking to advance as they worked not just for civil rights, but a spiritual revolution, what Dr. King called “a revolution of values.”

If we truly believed in the principle of equal worth, it would lead to a system of governance that values the dignity, safety, and belonging of all people. And I would add all of Life, because we are not separate from Earth and our more than human kin.

Trauma often results in the rupture of one or more of those—dignity, safety, belonging. Healing relies on their restoration. This is true for the collective as well as the individual. If we’re attuned to our own worth and dignity, and the worth and dignity of everyone else, if we feel our deep belonging to the wholeness of Life, we are less vulnerable to the manipulation of fear and divisiveness that is weaponized as tool of domination. From this perspective, healing is not only crucial for our survival and well-being, it’s also a practice for upending the strategies of oppression.

Without personal and collective healing, we as a people don’t have the maturity to live into the demands a true democracy. The practice of genuine democracy requires us to do the hard inner work of cultivating wisdom, compassion, patience, empathy, commitment, and willingness. It invites us to dream beyond the confines of the current institutions.

Simply reforming a system created by capitalist colonialism and white supremacy is not enough. Yes, harm reduction is essential. Things like doing away with the electoral college, eliminating corporate and mega-donor financing, and instituting ranked choice voting would all move us in the direction of democracy. But in order to realize enduring systemic change, in order to expand our vision of possibility, the consciousness that underlies the system must also be transformed.

In a 1952 sermon Dr. Howard Thurman—who was deeply influential to the Southern Freedom Movement—said, “the point at which democracy lives or dies is in the human heart and the human spirit.”

So, who do we have to become to create and live into a reimagined democracy? What would it take for us to become those people? I believe that healing—personal, collective, historical, ancestral—is a key part of that becoming. Healing is fundamentally about restoring wholeness. And social justice is a matter of restoring wholeness to individuals and communities where systematic and state-sanctioned harm has been done.

Democracy—like healing, like growth, like liberation—is an ongoing embodied practice. It’s a transgenerational collective project that didn’t begin with us, and won’t be complete during any of our lifetimes. Each of us is called to make our unique contribution. The only way through all that lies before us, is together.

**

This post originally appeared on Liza’s substack here:

Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism

Reimagine Democracy

I have always been somewhat cynical about democracy-talk. Mostly because in the United States, despite our rhetoric, we don’t actually have a democracy—have never had one. So when I was invited by Faith Matters Network, an organization I love and respect, to be part of their webinar series on…

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2 years ago · 11 likes · 12 comments · Liza J. Rankow

Many of these ideas are explored in her new book, Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness. Learn more:

https://soulmedicinebook.com

But I started listening to a podcast during a morning bout of insomnia (shout-out to the folks who aren’t going back to sleep if you wake up any time after 2:30am) and I got to work late because I could not stop listening to it. And while it’s about a religious community, I think it’s useful to all of us.

By means of context, in the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, my congregation gathered on zoom to talk about how we would make it through. One of the elders who had been part of the LGBTQ community during the 1980s told us about the ways they showed up for each other during the AIDS pandemic, the ways they extended care to people dying and people who were sick and provided relief for caretakers, and they also fought hard for their basic human rights. It was a time when people who considered themselves good and generous were not showing up for a community in crisis. That community figured out how to show up for each other. And during that zoom meeting in early 2020, we saw the lessons there for all of us in that moment—we needed to figure out how to care for each other. (As an aside, if you haven’t read Dean Spade’s book Mutual Aid, it is available for free online and is a great resource if you’re looking for some How To’s.)

We’re in a different moment of crisis right now, but as I listened to the first four episodes of “When We All Get to Heaven” this morning, I kept thinking about the lessons of that moment for the pandemic in which we find ourselves right now, where people are once again withholding resources from people they think of as lesser: poor people, Black people, immigrants and refugees, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people without children, people with too many children, people who are housing insecure despite working multiple jobs, people who are housing insecure because they cannot work for pay, people who are too old, people who are too young, people who are the wrong religion or do the right religion the wrong way, people who believe genocide is wrong, people who don’t grieve the right way or grieve for the wrong people…you get the idea.

The podcast When We All Get to Heaven is about the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCCSF) in the 1980s and 1990s. Let me make two appeals for why you should listen to it:

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Non-religious reason to listen: This podcast is a masterclass in how to build community and show up for each other when you have been abandoned (by your government, by your community, by your family). It talks about isolation and its antidotes. It talks about fighting back. It talks about building coalition across a lot of differences…and how hard that can be, and how necessary it can be. To me, these are all lessons that are urgent in this moment when our ability to build real connections, to build real relationships, are our best tool. Additionally, I often tell students in classes I teach about how critical it is to shift from charity to solidarity in order to create sustainable and meaningful change at a community level. Well, over and over in this podcast I was reminded of how community can show those around them how to practice exactly that: solidarity, not just charity.

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Religious reason to listen: There’s a moment in episode one where a congregant is so scared about whether she can really take care of this friend from Bible study who’s dying of AIDS, and she prays for courage so she can be of service. She’s someone who left her parents’ church not because of their condemnation of HER, but because their condemnation of homosexuality was a vicious lie about who God is. And she wasn’t sure there would ever be a church for her, but she ended up helping make MCCSF what it became. Also, I can think of few podcasts that really illustrate what applied but very intentional theology looks like. Now, I think that will look different in different religious contexts, but when you get to the story about the Easter worship service in episode 2, you’ll think, “oh…that’s what it looks like to really embody what you believe about God.”

I also have a personal reason for recommending this. I have a pretty fundamental criterion for friendships: I’m only friends with people seeking to make the world a better place, in a million different ways. I could probably write a newsletter about every one of you through that lens. But this podcast gave me a chance to remember why my friend and colleague the Rev. Jim Mitulski is one of the foremost among the world-changing people in my life. He’s featured in the podcast multiple times, and I was struck by his heart, his deeply rigorous intellect, his humility, and his strategy. One of the stories in episode four is so profoundly uncomfortable and also important, related to how to accept the people who show up for you even if you can’t accept all of what they believe, and how hard that journey is to navigate—especially when it’s not just two people but two communities of hundreds of people. And Jim recognized that while there was much to critique about the other community, it was his job to help his community wrestle with their own issues and challenges. What a critical lesson for us all to wrestle with right now as we figure out who to show up with, when, and why or why not. I just felt a little extra grateful to know Jim as I listened to the show, and I think if you do, you’ll maybe feel like you know him, too.

I hate for this newsletter to just be me saying “hey—I’m giving you multiple hours of homework; enjoy!” But I really do think you’ll find this podcast series meaningful, whether you listen to it on Apple podcasts, spotify, or on your computer.

There’s still six episodes to go, but I’ve preached at that church and I know quite a few people connected with it, so I’m pretty confident it won’t have a surprise twist in the middle.

I’m grateful for your patience with my less regular newsletters recently as life has life’d. And I’m grateful, as always but especially now, to be in the struggle with you.

-Sandhya

On Wednesday, I got to march with my fellow graduate school employees at the University of Pennsylvania. It took a year to get the union certified (my first year), and now it’s been a year of stalling on the contract. So on Wednesday, the union—GET UP (Graduate Employees Together at UPenn)—organized a “practice picket,” a one-hour march to show the administration we could actually muster hundreds of people if they couldn’t negotiate in good faith and we had to actually strike. It felt good to do some of the classic chants.

What do we want? A fair contract!

Whe do we want it? Now!

If we can’t get it, Shut it down!

My first labor action was almost 30 years ago, and it was also for university employees—the custodians and food hall workers and others who weren’t getting a living wage at the college I went to. It was a big deal for me to get to march, to get to write for the school paper about the campaign (and the VERY shady ways the trustees were trying to get away with underpaying the workers), and to see them win.

I’ve done a lot of marching with a lot of incredibly brave workers going up against some very shady employers. And I’ve also stood at the sidelines of some much more mundane campaigns. And I’ve gotten to support workers who weren’t yet unionized.

What’s disgusting?

Union busting!

What’s appalling?

Any stalling!

But this was the first time I marched for a union I could be part of. The denomination I’m a part of has notoriously poor pay (and pretty rapid congregational decline). I’ve occasionally floated a half-hearted balloon about whether we should unionize in some fashion; other denominations have better structured protections for their clergy. But it was kind of moving to be chanting the same chants I’ve been using for years and have them be for a campaign that could benefit me.

It was also a particularly big deal for me as someone who grew up in Akron, because our campaign falls under the United Auto Workers. In fact, during the march, I saw someone wearing a shirt that said Uniting Academic Workers, which I loved.

Everywhere we go [repeat], people wanna know [repeat]

who we are! [repeat] So we tell them, [repeat]

We are the union, [repeat] the mighty mighty union, [repeat]

fighting for justice, [repeat] and a living wage. [repeat]

Growing up in Akron in the 1980s and then working for the Congressman from Akron in the 1990s, I was aware of the impossible task the UAW faced in trying to protect its workers from globalization and deindustrialization and what I now have been taught to call neoliberalism—the decades of policies and political rhetoric that have removed the social safety net, removed constraints on corporations that protected worker well-being, and the narratives that suggest that all the struggles you face as an overpaid, overworked, underinsured worker are your responsibility and your fault. They were my heroes and also my real-life Don Quixote figures: they were tilting at windmills, trying to protect jobs at a time the one political party they were counting on was actively shifting to an embrace of the corporations taking away their jobs.

So it means a lot to me to wear their logo, because now they’re tilting at equally insurmountable windmills for me and with me.

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The reason I call this campaign a bit Quixotic is that the last time the graduate employees tried to organize was in 2016, and it felt like the university administration dragged out the process in the hopes of a less worker-friendly administration coming into the White House, and sure enough that shift in administration allowed them to stall out the process. Which is why the union tried to move faster this time, on the heels of another nearby university having a big win. But negotiations stalled during a similar time period and call me cynical, but it sures feels like an almost identical tactic. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think any university wanted an anti-intellectual and anti-learning administration to take power, even if they didn’t realize said administration would gut funding for research in a country that does an overwhelming amount of the world’s much needed medical and epidemiological and other critical research. But it sure hasn’t felt like the bargaining has been in particularly good faith.

UPenn, UPenn, you can’t hide!

We can see your greedy side!

I’m really grateful to have my education paid for. I actually have much better health coverage than I have in a while because for many years I’ve had to decide what level of coverage I can afford and then hope I don’t have any major health concerns, like most Americans. But when I’m at school, there are so many more resources at much more affordable rates thanks to being at a world-class medical institution. And I also understand that I’m not just getting a stipend in order to study the things I want to study. The stipend requires 15-20 hours a week in research for a research lab or faculty member, or teaching/TA’ing. (I got lucky there, too—I get to be a part of the SAFELab, which researches the intersection of digital space and things like youth violence, Black grief, Black joy, queer joy, and other critical issues.)

But compensation varies for grad student employees and researchers from school to school. Because I got a Presidential fellowship, I get almost a Philadelphia living wage. My classmates don’t, even though our school is one of the more generous, and research fellows at almost no other school at the University do, either.

So the union is advocating for fair wages, a guaranteed number of years of funding (my school provides four, but it is more exception than rule that people can complete their fairly rigorous and robust research in less than five), health coverage for dependents, better support for international students (especially in the current political climate), and to me maybe the most important right now: protection of free expression.

GET-UP! Get down!

Philly is a union town!

(this one was actually a new one for me, but I love that it references the union name, and that some of the more athletic folks were literally grooving their bodies up and down to the beat AS WE MARCHED. Young folk! What can’t they do?)

Honestly, as universities cave to anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, anti-democractic, and inherently corrupt demands, I do not anticipate many faculty far less students will get that protection, or that it will be enforced if accepted. In fact, when some of us were sharing with a professor what our demands were, he said, “ohhhh: you want what we want.” And I don’t think he meant “what we have.”

With the world on fire, I have moments I wonder whether this is the best place to spend my time. But I said something to you back in February that I still believe to be true: right now, it is ok to choose AN important thing to focus your energies on. You cannot take on all the things, but if you take on one and trust others to take on others, and if you support each other and cheer each other on, that is a way to build real, robust, resilient power. And this is the campaign right where I live. Plus, I already know all the chants!

grateful to be in the struggle with you,

Sandhya

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My partner recommended the book How To Win an Information War after listening to an interview with the author on the podcast “Our Opinions Are Correct.” As you may already know, I’m low-key obsessed with how we move the ambivalent to the ally in times of crisis such as this, and the book is such a fascinating example of how it worked in one instance, and what we might learn from it. (The subtitle is: Sefton Delmer, the Genius Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, in case you need incentive to keep reading.)

Peter Pomerantsev studies propaganda and disinformation, and he starts the book saying that during his talks, people ask with no small amount of desperation what they can do to stop it—often because they’ve lost family or friends to disinformation campaigns themselves. Generally he only has examples of things that haven’t worked, but here’s one remarkable example of what did work in a specific time and place, with some valuable insights for our time and place.

The book is very much worth a read (or a listen—I’ve done both, and it’s engrossing enough for the audio version to hold up if you’re not using it for research purposes). I’ll try to stick with just the highlights.

Sefton Delmer, raised in Austria but made aware of his outsider status during World War I, is a massive character in and of himself. I won’t get into the details here, but he was someone whose outsider status helped him think outside the box and also left him an outsider for most of his life, despite his massive achievements with Britain’s propaganda campaign during WWII.

Pomerantsev looks to French philosopher/sociologist Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book Propaganda as a helpful lens to understand Sefton Delmer’s work. Ellul wrote about several forms of propaganda such as political and what I would call culture-creating, and he called sociological. Pomerantsev described that section in the following way:

“Sociological propaganda cuts deeper, the television shows and movies, the art and literature that help integrate people into the common myths that keep society together. The United States, for example, argued Ellul, was a nearly impossible experiment of different creeds, languages, and religions that had to be integrated together through movies and sitcoms around underlying “myths” such as “the American way of life” or “the pursuit of happiness” or “progress.” Any propaganda that went against these myths was unlikely to be effective, for it would go against the grain of how people understood the world. When these myths were swallowed unthinkingly, uncritically, they could turn toxic, casting anyone who questioned them as an enemy.” (p11)

And then he drops the most significant Ellul line, indicating that this is not to be taken lightly: “Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.”

Delmer had a ringside seat to the German elite between the world wars as a journalist who was embedded in circles who attended both extravagant balls with mountains of caviar and gritty cabarets that featured all the people the elites would soon blame for the downfall of Germany. When Delmer finally realized that the small and tacky charlatan he had dismissed was going to run Germany, he covered the stormtroopers from within at the request of Ernst Röhm, who wanted the British to know he was running a disciplined force. Another British journalist, Roger Money-Kyrle, saw the same rallies and saw their power as rooted in grievance as the opportunity to externalize feelings of failure. (This is a common analysis among scholars today.) Pomerantsev noted that both journalists saw something in common, that “Hitler’s power stemmed not so much from his ability to win people over with clever arguments, but from his articulating the feelings that already lay within them and taking them on an emotional journey from feeling humiliated to humiliating others.” (p 42)

By 1940, Germany had a robust English language radio project in place to convey propaganda and disinformation. Its most popular show garnered as much as 1/6 of the British population and was popular for its sardonic wit. Some of their shows promoted pacifism or Scottish nationalism while also blaming the war on Jewish people. Britain’s German language radio initiative was much less effective, described as bland, uniform, and lacking warmth. (Insert your favorite joke about the English here.)

Some German socialists and conservatives who had fled the Reich had set up anti-Nazi propaganda radio stations targeting different segments of the German population, and the primary conservative had fallen ill. The British government tasked Delmer with reviving that station, still focused on that constituency. His MI5 contact gave him one last note: the German station had particular success with their “Worker’s Challenge” show because of the foul language. Old ladies, he said, loved “to count the ‘Fs’ and ‘Bs.’” He continued, “Well, my Minister thinks we should reply in kind, and as he is a Socialist, he thinks a right-wing station would be the appropriate one to carry the filth.” (p81)

Delmer was taking on a propaganda-obsessed regime. As early as 1929, Joseph Goebbels had said people were “mostly just a gramophone record playing back public opinion. Public opinion…,in its turn, is created by the organs of public opinion such as the press, posters, radio, school, and university and general education. But the government owns these organs.” (pp83-84) Delmer had to acknowledge and take on the elements of Hitler’s rhetoric that resonated so effectively with at least a portion of the German population if he wanted to avoid speaking only to people already in agreement with him. I’m going to say that again a little more loudly, because it’s the part I need to hear:

Delmer had to acknowledge and take on the elements of Hitler’s rhetoric that resonated so effectively with at least a portion of the German population if he wanted to avoid speaking only to people already in agreement with him.

The radio landscape was still relatively new and the informal rules of its effective use were still being written. That matters as we think about a very different communications landscape today, where we ask who owns the organs of public opinion and what that means for our own communications strategies. That new landscape gave German propagandists the opportunity to re-frame the war as a great (and low-risk) drama with huge rewards for the nation, downplaying German deaths and celebrating deaths abroad. But Delmer knew that even among active supporters of the Nazis, few were motivated by ideology; most were motivated by self-interest. That self-interest was what Delmer sought to tap into, under the guise of German patriotism.

Many of the people in Delmer’s department were committed to the “Good German” strategy of appealing to the listeners’ better angels. (And here’s the part that was depressing for me.) With the exception of the Roman Catholic station, none of the stations with that focus had the traction of Delmer’s crass, drama-laden station with its focus on the hypocrisy within the party, which built on existing discontent and took the shine off of Hitler’s cronies, creating the greater likelihood of listeners disobeying the Reich in ways small and large. They used actual information about actual local and regional Nazi leaders initially garnered from refugees but over time also from prisoners of war. Thus people might hear about someone they knew directly, making their frustration more specific, more concrete.

Psychologist Henry Dicks, working for British Intelligence at the time, made an assessment of the German population similar to how the best leftist political analysts in the US today understand our landscape:

Although some Germans were a psychologically ideal fit for Nazi propaganda, not all were. He calculated that 10 percent of German soldiers were “fanatical” Nazis and a further 25 percent were “believers with reservations.” As the war neared its end, Dicks was most worried about this 25 percent: their Nazism was mixed with a more general admiration of German militarism, and they could easily blend in as good patriots in the Germany of the future without changing their underlying authoritarian predilections. The largest group of German soldiers was the 40 percent of “unpolitical men.” They were largely indifferent to the type of regime as long as it gave them “order and security.” “Passive anti-Nazis” made up 15 percent; 10 percent were active anti-Nazis. (p196)

Pomerantsev went on to show how Dicks thought this information applied to a messaging strategy targeting those Germans:

Although some soldiers loved how the army allowed them to give up the burden of personal decision-making, others were upset at the constant “starvation of private interests, the injury to self-esteem” that can “lead to a re-activation of private needs.” Indeed, the more pressure the army applied to break people, the more individualistic they could become in contrast. Even the ones who yearned for a “strong hand” simultaneously resented it. But “playing up that latent rebel” needed to be done carefully, with “sympathetic, insightful emphasis of the soldier’s grouses” while stressing how “yes-men” and “party smart-Alecs” were being promoted in the system. The soldier needed to be reminded of the real emotional bonds he shared with his loved ones and relatives, which were stronger than connections to an abstract “Volk.” (p197)

Delmer tapped into the discontent among the soldier-supporting Germans, who were wearying of ideological rhetoric and platforming of Nazi party bureaucrats. And he did it with flair. Recruiting German actors and cabaret performers who had been pushed out of their country to play the roles of certain radio hosts and reporters, Delmer’s programming gave listeners a large dose of lascivious coverage that would titilate while simultaneously allowing them to cover their prurience with a hefty layer of indignation: “can you believe such-and-such regional party leader lectures us on German morality while he gets up to X, Y, and Z thinking we won’t find out?” And generally these actions were placed in contrast with the good German soldiers who were sacrificing their lives for these ungrateful, greedy, corrupt politicians in an increasingly unwinnable war.

Pomerantsev, born in Ukraine and living in the US, has spent a fair amount of time in Russia and Ukraine, and he noted throughout the book the similarities between Hitler’s early rhetoric at a time of crisis and national humiliation and the same strategy (along with almost caricatured exhibitions of masculinity) used by Putin leading up to the invasion of Ukraine. Both relied on grandiose narratives related to purity and also to gender roles (which is why both demonized LGBTQ+ people). Both got further than expected because critics saw their rhetoric as so blatantly untrue that it couldn’t appeal to the reasonable middle. (We’ll come back to that theme in a future newsletter.)

Delmer observed Nazi propagandists’ war on the truth and their effort to make truth far less important than emotions, particularly grievance. He was betting on the idea that with the right kind of programming, he would help listeners want to think for themselves, to reconnect with the desire to know the facts, the truth. The specificity of his attacks and his ability to communicate not as someone morally superior talking down to the audience but as if from among the audience were critical to his success. And when Goebbels pivoted in response (from “we’ll win soon and with no costs!” to “the British think we’re gonna punk out. Are we gonna punk out?”), Delmer had to adapt his messaging strategy as well.

There are a few key lessons I want to take away from Delmer: who is our audience, and what will work on them? And what are our actual, reasonable goals? Because there are actually a number of segments we can concentrate on, and most of them can in fact be moved. But they can’t all be moved to the same place or the same thing. And different types of messaging speak to different types of people. So getting clear on those details is pretty important. Also, some of what it takes to be effective might not align with our ethics. Delmer used some horrific messaging that I don’t think I could recommend even if it were effective, and that some of his colleagues found absolutely unforgivable. And yet I’m glad, I think, that he did it. I’m not sure what to do with that. Finally, there remained for decades a question about whether Delmer’s strategy had actually made a difference, since the war only ended when the final German soldiers were forced to surrender. Pomerantsev believes, and I agree with him, that the work of corroding public trust in authoritarians is hard to measure. Benchmarks of success in culture shift work are very hard to quantify. And yet ignoring culture shift work comes at a huge cost, especially to progressive movements. (Let me know if any of these takeaways are relevant in your work. I’d love to hear about that as I think about messaging strategies in the think tank I’m hoping to launch in the next few years.)

There’s an interesting subtheme throughout How to Win an Information War: Sefton Delmer actively sought out the opportunity to serve Britain in the war. His fluency in German, his understanding of what would be read as funny or outrageous or emotionally freighted there, the fact that he had been born British but born in Berlin, were all reasons he was perfect for the job, along with his very well-known satirical capacities. (Pomerantsev once describes him as a proto-Borat with some of the hijinks he got into prior to the war.) And they were also the reason he was kept at arm’s length by British intelligence, who constantly sent undercover agents to trick him into revealing his double agent status. Most of his life he was kept at arm’s length and not celebrated. I wanted to note that detail even though it’s not specifically about our messaging strategy because it’s something to sit with as we figure out how to build coalitions of resistance. Keeping ourselves safe and prioritizing a critical sense of inclusion sometimes feel as if they’re at odds, even though often they are not as much at odds as we think. So, as always, I wanted to throw in a miscellaneous “this got me thinking” piece at the very end.

Thanks so much for your continued work for a better world,

Sandhya

PS: If you’re interested in the 17-minute TED Talk Pomerantsev gave on his research, it’s probably shorter than this newsletter! :)

It turned out I was on a panel with Jeff Sharlet, most famous for his Netflix docuseries The Family (which we covered when I was a co-host on the Heretic Happy Hour podcast), and Obery Hendricks, a legendary Black biblical scholar. And while you can’t see it in the video, Cornel West was in the audience—and he was such an engaged and supportive presence!

I have to spend this week and weekend refining my dissertation proposal abstract, so you’ll get more personally written content next week, but I thought you might really enjoy this discussion, and particularly the wisdom of the fourth panelist, who is the pastor of the only LGBTQ+ affirming church in Kenya, at no small amount of risk to her safety. It was a balance of radical wisdom (Hendricks), hope (me), reality checks (Sharlet), and deep philosophical wisdom (Caroline Omolo) plus brilliant facilitation from Bishop Joseph Tolton.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on it. Also, you can find Dr. West’s presentation from day two at the same youtube channel.

with gratitude,

Sandhya

I’ve been meaning to write a newsletter about trans rights since before Sarah McBride, the first trans woman to serve in the US Congress, talked in this interview with Ezra Klein this spring about her perspective on what caused the decline in support for trans rights in recent years after an uptick in support.

It was a pretty heartbreaking interview at the time. I recently revisited it and was reminded a few things she said that were less “blame the activists” than I remembered; she noted this is part of a larger attack related to gender with the hardest impact being on trans people, and she noted the decline in support for gay marriage and women’s rights as well. She said up front: “Candidly, I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years. We’re not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds — rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support. We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.” (ital/bold mine)

But she did say that support for trans rights was “soft” and, from her perspective, driven by (a) “well, T’s part of the acronym so I guess I support trans rights,” and (b) fear of being wrong about trans rights in the way they had been wrong about marriage equality. And that those of us involved in LGBTQ+ rights work thought we didn’t need to keep doing the hearts and minds work that had gotten us this far. (She used the phrase “overplayed our hand” in reference to our efforts to shift the culture away from assuming a gender binary instead of focusing on winning specific rights—asking people to use their pronouns made it about them as cis people instead of about the rights of other people, she argued.)

McBride has a job to do that involves a broad array of policies and constituents; trans rights is not the only issue on her docket. In an interview with the New Yorker in December, she talked about right-wing Congresspeople’s efforts to ban her from using the women’s bathroom in the Capitol and noted that wasn’t where she wanted to spend her political capital. She said she would fight for her trans constituents—and for working constituents, and senior constituents—but that she wasn’t going to fight for herself as an individual.

Obviously she is allowed to determine her own place in the policy arena and in relationship to trans rights, particularly in conversation with her constituents. I do think her bothsidesism2 is a dangerous myth perpetrated by right-wing media that has been absorbed in unhelpful ways by moderates and even the left. I disagree with her argument that the art of persuasion is and has always been the only means by which just policy has been enacted (and I believe that argument is most often used against people of color after decades of us doing exactly that). But her job isn’t to shape our collective strategy about protecting trans people and trans rights or about shifting the culture regarding trans inclusion. The problem is, for a lot of folks who care about trans rights and aren’t directly plugged into activist spaces, she’s going to be one of the most substantive voices they hear.

I worry about this because McBride’s concerns echo the talking points of so many moderate Democratic pundits (and also many of us) immediately after the 2024 Presidential election; Democrats lost, they said, because the party had ceded their focus on working class people in favor of promoting pronouns and trans people in sports.3 Don’t get me wrong—I agree that the Democratic party has largely ceded their focus on the working class, and that’s been happening since the 1970s or so. But those aren’t mutually exclusive efforts—no matter what the opposition wants to train us to believe, particularly in light of the fact that almost all trans folks want to see more robust worker protections, and no small number of trans people are working class.

So I wanted to take a moment to share some of the information that’s been helping me think about what tools have been pushing for the elimination of trans people (and no, that’s not hyperbole; it’s a stated goal and desired outcome for those most active in anti-trans activism), how they’ve been using those tools, and why (that’s the book report piece). And finally, a little about what I think is a foundational aspect of the success of anti-trans activism that we don’t include in our analysis.

The what, who, how and why of anti-trans tools (on the right and on the supposed left)

The thing McBride alluded to but didn’t focus on was who’s behind the anti-trans agenda and what they’ve been doing. To me, this feels like important content as we assess the landscape in which we work for trans protections and trans rights. Here are a few of the moving pieces I wanted to share (and please add more in the comments—I’d love to revise this to make it more inclusive if that’s helpful).

In 2023, the 5-4 podcast featured a tremendous interview with trans rights expert and journalist Erin Reed—you should definitely listen to it, and here’s the transcript with links at the top to listen. In the interview, Reed talked about the ways in which the Right had been playing whack-a-mole with anti-trans legislation to see which issue (bathrooms, sports, youth, legally mandated gender binaries) would get the most traction with the public. At the time, “parents’ rights” was the hot strategy—children couldn’t ask to go by different pronouns without their parents’ consent.4 Some of the episode captured the moment that led to our current moment. This information by Reed is particularly significant:

“In 2015, early 2016, we had the very first bathroom ban. It was... I always, whenever I deliver talks in this law schools and stuff, I always mark this as the beginning of the modern anti-trans legal movement. This was off the back of the Obergefell decision. Gay marriage had just been won and they had to pivot to a new group of people that were in the LGBTQ community to focus on trans people were the main people. And so HB 2 in North Carolina was passed that banned trans people from bathrooms. It never was fully allowed to go into effect. It went into effect, but got challenged, got paused, and there was an outcry because immediately on its passage, NBA All Star game pulled out. PayPal pulled out, Deutsche Bank pulled out. The state lost $3.76 billion over this bill, and no other state wanted to deal with that. And so for four years we saw a complete rejection of anti-trans bills. They tried things, they tried birth certificate bans, more bathroom bans that all failed until around 2020, 2019, 2020. And what we saw is a group of organisations and people essentially get together and plan, they had a new strategy. The American Principles Project was one of the major ones.”

I want to pause here to note that the map of anti-trans legislation and who was driving it came on my radar maybe a couple of years after the beginning of this legislative assault—around late 2022, maybe. That was also when the Alliance Defending Freedom came on my radar, thanks to a major exposé in a posh magazine. I can’t remember it for sure, but here’s a similar article from the New Yorker in 2023 bringing attention to how they were pulling the strings of anti-trans and anti-drag legislation in states across the country with almost identical language. (Reed points out in the 5-4 podcast that you could see the language evolving in subsequent state legislation as earlier versions faced various legal challenges.) The ADF, as a reminder, is from whence House Speaker Mike Johnson emerged. Among their many foci was advocating for sterilization of trans people in Europe.

Reed continues,

“Terry Schilling [of the American Principles Project] actually, you can look up interviews that Terry Schilling had with CNN as well as the New York Times. They don't keep any secrets about this. They monologue it like bond villains. They explain how they're gonna basically eradicate trans people and they tell you exactly how they plan to do it. And so what Terry Schilling had said is that they started with sports and they also started with business-friendly states on the new attempt because they saw what happened in North Carolina. Bathrooms were too far for people. And so if they could get you to accept an asterisk on trans people as their gender identity for one thing, then it's no longer a matter of are you a woman? Are you a man? Period. It's woman with an asterisk or man with an asterisk. And then it's all about taking that asterisk and applying it to a lot of other places in life until all of a sudden you've erased all legal rights for trans people. And so that was the idea. He essentially said that, we're gonna start with sports and sports are an easy way to get the foot in the door.”

Reed also talks about the fake medical organizations created in order to legitimize bad medicine and bad science, which you can check out in the podcast if you’re interested in that aspect of the strategy.

So that’s some of the strategy laid out in a tidy fashion. But I had mentioned that sometimes we have been co-opted into that campaign, with seemingly progressive outlets doing the ADF’s and the APP’s work for them. In May of 2023, journalist Tuck Woodstock was a guest on the “You’re Wrong About” podcast. The title of the episode was “We Need to Talk About the New York Times.”

In it, the host (Sarah Marshall) introduced the subject this way:

[F]or better or worse, the New York Times arguably is the paper of record for the mainstream and left of center United States. And their handling of trans issues, and really gender and sexuality generally, has been consistently horrible. My summary of their discussion of trans rights is basically, “Should trans people exist? Or, should they exist to such an extent? Experts disagree.” And you're just like, [sighs]. That's how I feel about it.

Woodstock jokingly responded,

Yeah. You're totally right. The one thing that I would add is when you're like, “Experts disagree on whether trans people should exist”, it's not really even experts so much as “we found a woman on a forum called, I Hate Trannies.biz, and she says that trans people shouldn't exist.”

When Woodstock was interviewed, he noted that other newspapers have actually put in the effort to doing better in their trans coverage, while the NYT remained (remains) deeply committed to their current practices while denying that they have a negative influence on the discourse regarding trans rights. All of this while NYT articles are regularly quoted in Supreme Court cases to justify curtailing trans rights. I wonder what type of retrenchment Woodstock has observed as the media has struck agreements with the current administration.

Woodstock wanted to bring attention to this particular newspaper, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, many of us tend to defer to the Times as a reliable and responsible reporter of the facts. Secondly, the Times has a repeated pattern on this subject in particular of interviewing someone who is pro-trans and someone who is anti-trans without including actual trans people in the article, and without needing the anti-trans person to come from a particular area of expertise relative to trans healthcare or mental health. This is not a standard they would use on other medical or science-related coverage. Regarding the need to include anti-trans voices for the sake of “representing all sides,” Woodstock said, “What if you were writing a profile on someone named Janet and I was your editor. And I was like, ‘I'm sorry; for balance find someone who wants to kill Janet.’ It's just not how you do things.”

I wanted to share this because it’s important to be aware that in our hypervigilance to be fair and balanced when the right says we’re not, we forget what objectivity and balance actually is, and instead use a measure that was created for us by the right (who are not using the same measure themselves). As a result, the news sources we rely on can do the right’s work for them.

I think Woodstock highlighted why this matters incredibly well with this quote (and I’ll talk more about this in a different newsletter on the need for a free press and the dangers of a less-than-informed press):

The concept of objectivity and balance is noble in a vacuum, but it's being used in manipulative ways to dodge accountability and shield against critiques of power, and just maintain the power of the status quo.

So while we think about who’s shaping the messaging, it’s also important to be aware of who’s carrying it, which is not only sources like Fox News and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

It’s a culture war, and they’re the invading force

At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference, Michael Knowles of conservative outlet the Daily Wire stated that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” When people and organizations such as Rolling Stone magazine demanded a retraction because the language was genocidal, he responded on his own show that their accusation was wrong, because he wasn’t calling for the elimination of people based on their genes (which Rolling Stone pointed out isn’t how anyone defines genocide); he was demanding the end to coddling a delusion.

I recently heard someone say (possibly Larry Wilmore when he was a guest on Audie Cornish’s show The Assignment but I’m not 100% sure) that policy lives downstream of culture. That’s part of why the strategy of the Right against trans rights has worked on two different fronts. Trans people are estimated to make up between 1 and 3% of the general public (although as more youth recognize gender as a spectrum and identify in gender-diverse ways, that may be a slightly larger number as we approach Gen Alpha). But that means we are less likely to have a lot of direct experiences with trans people and rely more on popular media to help us create a narrative. And our lack of relationship with trans people (according to Paula Ramos, less than 45% of Americans know a single trans person, and one trans person is not enough for an adequate sample of diverse experiences) means we don’t get as many counternarratives from the people most affected by these policies. That creates lots of space to shape the culture that shapes the policies.

The Defectors

Paula Ramos recently wrote a book called The Defectors, in which she studies why certain segments of the Latine community have begun shifting to the right, including the extreme right. As a visibly queer person, Ramos notes that in her research, she has been aware of the discomfort people from her community experience in her presence. She sees this as an effective leverage point regarding the trans community:

“I believe that when the colonized Latino mind contemplates LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans folks, it can become deeply unsettled. People may feel threatened by the disruption of a patriarchal system that has been a source of comfort and pride for centuries. The economy, politics, immigration, racism, and other external factors may be outside of Latinos’ control. But the colonial patriarchal system—with its rigid, fixed, and binary norms—has offered countless Latinos in the U.S. a minimal sense of order and power. The world outside your home may denigrate and disrespect you, but inside you can feel like the man of the house or like the ultimate patriarch. That’s a powerful feeling. The unapologetic presence of queer people in U.S. society produces a sense of loss among some Latinos who feel like the structure they’ve come to expect and depend on is waning.” (p121)

In her second chapter on “the culture warriors,” Ramos lays out how, in the immediate aftermath of the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in 2022, a local trans activist there learned from other community members that they were being bombarded by Spanish language flyers about how the Biden administration was “indoctrinating your children to make them believe that biological sex is not real” as well as other flyers with even more horrific lies about forced genital removal and more, as well as Spanish language radio ads with similar anti-trans propaganda in specific Congressional districts. Ramos talks about how on its face the strategy is about gaining a religious voting bloc, but to her mind it is more wrapped up in the reaction of disgust that stops any conversation before it starts.

Here’s the paragraph that has stuck with me since I first read the book several months back:

“Microbiologist and science writer Bryn Nelson argues that attacks like the Club Q massacre and other abuses suffered by the LGBTQ+ community amount to stochastic terrorism, which is uniquely driven by messaging and propaganda that dehumanizes and vilifies a person or a group. Put simply, stochastic terrorism is different from other forms of terrorism in that it is provoked by a gut, visceral feeling and not necessarily by a calculated effort. “At its core,” Nelson wrote, “stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.” Nelson has spent years studying disgust, even writing a book about poop to better understand the emotion and psychology of disgust. He argues that disgust is “even more powerful than fear.” I found this fascinating.” (p136)

Ramos notes that the combined messaging of Moms for Liberty, Proud Boys, Gays against Groomers, and all the Christian nationalists contribute to the dehumanization and contempt and ultimately disgust that creates the landscape for the waves of anti-trans legislation and stochastic terrorism in our midst, and also people’s apathy towards it—the greater the disgust, she learned from scientists she interviewed, the further the person feels from their objects of disgust.

I suspect you have already heard the solid logic and science disputing the right-wing policies around trans bathroom bans, trans athletes, trans youth health access, access to correcting gender markers on legal documents, erasure from history, and gender-exclusionary science curricula. (And if you haven’t, those links take you to the pro-trans cases on each issue in case you’d like more context. I had to use “The Wayback Machine” for the history link since the National Parks were forced to remove trans-inclusive content.)

But disgust short circuits a lot of that information.

Because Ramos is focused on the Latine community, she connects disgust to colonization, and she lifts up organizations like Laboratorio para Vatos, which work on decolonization, and reframing gender and masculinity in healthier ways. For many of us, having conversations about why certain constructions of our gender and expectations and limitations are a place to start, if we’re working to help individuals build out their capacity for compassion. The fine balance, though, is that there are many places we need to confront lies (which is why GLAAD’s journalism fact sheets are so helpful), and that work is different than the small group or individual work to help people escape the web of disgust-reliant messaging that has shifted or hardened people’s tolerance for anti-trans violence (physical, cultural, and legislative).

McBride is right that bridge-building is actually important. Stories are important. Talking to people across difference is important. Treating people who don’t agree with us as potential allies rather than enemies is important. But it’s also important to distinguish between (a) people who are not aware they’ve absorbed right-wing narratives that play on their instincts rather than their reason and (b) the people creating and profiting from those narratives. I believe the information above helps us to do that, without placing an impossible burden on the shoulders of trans people specifically.5

Sarah McBride said, “We decided that we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready. And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and, frankly, social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place.” I wish she could have heard Rinku Sen at the 22nd Century Initiative conference when she said, “don’t apologize for having won when you’re accused of overreaching.” (You can read more about that talk in an earlier newsletter.) In fact, Sen may have been responding directly if not by name to McBride’s much-discussed interview.

Here’s what I think, when it comes down to it: it is always important in our organizing and policy and culture shift work to evaluate what worked and what didn’t, and what we should try differently. So as we look back and note how easy it has been to overturn some trans legal protections and stop others from going into place, we should absolutely ask why, and how we should adjust our strategy in order to change the culture and the policies.

But when people who pretend they are on our side but say our mistake was in winning, then those aren’t necessarily our partners in organizing. They may be people we need to persuade. They may be people we need to help confront their non-rational disgust reflex. They may be people we need to organize around so that they don’t get in the way of the work either intentionally or because they think they’re being helpful. We need to assess that. But we don’t necessarily have to treat their recommendations as a guiding force for our work. And too many of us (myself included) have been sucked into that trap, especially in the days immediately following the 2024 election.

One or two concrete actions:

This issue calls on us to do two different things: get unstuck from the framing that folks like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Daily Wire have imposed on us, and start talking with folks who don’t realize they’re functioning out of that same framework, and who maybe don’t see why trans rights are connected to their rights. Also, for those of us with a voice in staff meetings or parents’ groups or religious organizations or other group spaces, we need to learn how to help people wrestle with the cognitive dissonance between their apathy, or their ick-response, and their actual beliefs about basic human rights.

Alec Karakatansis, whose has recently become a book, notes that the people most susceptible to things like “copaganda” (the subliminal messaging in the media that promotes support for increased surveillance and incarceration) are middle class liberals, because we rely on the news to inform us more than other groups, we have been trained to have opinions about things, and we believe ourselves to bring more critical analysis to what we read than we actually do. (Guilty on all three—and it’s worth noting he says the first two are not bad things, but we need to get better at the third one.) In a subscriber-only edition of the 5-4 Podcast, Karakatansis also noted one of the best ways to build out our critical analysis about dominant narratives in the news: discussing what we read in groups. This may sound simple, but it’s important to build out our critical thinking skills in relationship to things like copaganda and also, it turns out, things like trans inclusion. The reason this works is that a group can often surface more than two ideas—and getting beyond the either-or can get us unstuck in our thinking and analysis. (I particularly love this in light of the fact that people who don’t identify as male or female—nonbinary folks—technically fall under the trans umbrella, and we are kind of the symbols of a third way of thinking. :) )

Karakatansis also noted the important role of long-form news that provides greater context instead of soundbytes. This is part of why for information on trans rights, I follow ’s substack—Erin is considered one of the best journalists on trans issues in the US. (I quoted her earlier in this newsletter.)

There’s certainly more, but this newsletter is already way too long (and I’m doing a separate newsletter on the media. I hope you’ll include additional thoughts and resources in the comments.

I want to close with the best short-form strategy I’ve heard so far about (and this will be part of a future newsletter). This summer I got to learn from some amazing folks with the Amazon workers’ campaign. During Q&A something came up about trans rights. One of the workers was ex-military and formerly a FOX News viewer before getting political education as part of the worker campaign. He said, “I’m sick and tired of this.” I braced myself for the same thing I’d been hearing from pundits and politicians and even friends, about how trans issues had taken the place of worker justice and that was the problem with the left. Instead he said, “Why are people trying to force me to get mad at 1% of people who are doing me no actual harm when there’s a different 1%, billionaires, who are actively ruining my life?” And as far as a quick response to a massive wedge issue, I’m 100% here for it.

Grateful we get to figure this stuff out together,

Sandhya

Praveen said if he had more energy and time, he would share more about the history of ACT UP (if you use your public library’s online video services, Kanopy carries the incredible documentary United in Anger, or you can watch it on youtube), and he would also note how this calls us all in the US to deeper solidarity with the aid flotilla bringing medical resources and also medicine such as food and water to Gaza, so I wanted to make sure to note that here also.

If you have ideas on how to bring attention to the very human impact of this crisis, Praveen is looking for people who can help amplify the message through any form of media. Their family is also grateful for any prayers or spiritual support you can send their way. Thanks for taking a moment to read his post below and sharing wherever possible. (And if you want to reach out to Praveen directly about helping promote the story, you can find him on facebook. The original post is here.)

This is me and my mom after hot yoga. She’s battling lung cancer—fatigued, barely able to walk—yet still determined to keep showing up.

My mom has a rare cancer mutation. Chemo would devastate her. But there is a treatment, Afatinib, that shrinks tumors in 60% of patients like her. In the U.S. it costs $50,000/month. Overseas, it’s $500–$2500.
Every day without this medication, the tumors grow.

Yet because of Trump’s tariffs, international suppliers have stopped shipping here. And because her mutation is rare, insurance has denied coverage.

We are asking for help:
* Connections to media, nonprofits, or lawyers who can amplify this story, and support exploring injunctions or legal strategies to challenge these barriers.
* Any ideas, people, resources, support, technology, prayers or magick spells that can help my mom’s health and well being at this critical juncture.

This isn’t just about my mom. How many other American families are right now being denied access to lifesaving medicine because of tariffs and insurance loopholes? We need to show up in solidarity across the country and demand that this blockade to medicine ends.

My mom is a brave woman—a physicist, engineer, and chemist—who sacrificed much to serve. For over 25 years she taught math and science to kids in New Mexico, shaping countless lives. She still has so much more to give our communities. She deserves a real chance at a cancer-free life.

In love and solidarity,
Praveen.
#ACTUP #healthjustice #cancerawareness

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So I kind of love that my final post from the 22nd Century Initiative (22CI) conference focuses on the role of culture and the arts. Because despite my reputation in certain circles, I spend a lot of time on strategy, and some time on data analytics, even. And I also suspect you and I share the awareness that if there is in fact a culture war, we’ve been losing it. Think tanks, communications strategies, and the shifts in campaign finance practices all contribute to that. But a lot of it has to do with what George Lakoff calls “framing,” the creation of the framework within which we discuss everything else. We can discuss labor policy with rigorous data, but whether the nation takes for granted that wealthy people are “job creators” or whether those same people are “vampires” (draining workers and consumers and the land itself of its life force) means our policy debates will look very different, even if we all believe we want workers to be safe.1 (Those frames are often the difference between legislation with incentives for employers and legislation that creates rigorous enforcement mechanisms around environmental, worker, and consumer protections.)

During the panel on the arts at 22CI, there were three speakers who really stuck out to me. I’ll share the first two briefly and the third at length. I think you’ll appreciate all three; I definitely did.

The first speaker was Jane Sapp, a musician and music ethnographer who collected music and cultural artifacts throughout the Black South for a project with Bernice Johnson Reagon (of Sweet Honey in the Rock) for the Smithsonian. At one point, she asked if we knew the Audre Lorde quote “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Then she said, “Culture is us using our tools.” She followed this with a quote from 71-year-old poet Malkia Mibuzi Moore:

Here is why you need us, the artists:

What we do is help you see further than you ever could.

This resonated with me because I often say something similar about why I remain committed to doing social justice work with spiritual communities despite the many challenges of that. The prophetic witness of spiritual communities involves casting a vision bigger than any other community of which I can think. What Dr. King called “Beloved Community” is a world none of us has inhabited, and which most people say is impossible. Artists and spiritual visionaries don’t care if it’s possible. They care if it is imaginable. And that’s because we cannot go any further than our imaginations will allow. And we need more of that imagining.

The second speaker was Nikita Yogaraj, a community artist who told us about a block print community art project she did in Baltimore, where she taught people to do block printing, then helped them figure out the general theme they wanted and put each of them in charge of one block. The final product was large poster sized and available for limited purchases to raise funds for charity.

Her focus was on showing us something manageable and replicable, so she laid out the steps she took (based on my not very full notes):

• made sure to keep it at a scale she could manage (a local project with a set number of spots; selling the art generated money for Anera for Gaza relief)

• Used local resources (the tool library for tools and a community center for space)

• Made a rough film to make a promo reel (it was bumpy and not professional, and it got tens of thousands of views)

• Offered virtual workshops to allow the project to scale.

This is a helpful reminder that whatever gifts or skills we have, they are enough to bring people together to create something meaningful. It’s also a helpful reminder that if we have an idea but don’t know how to execute it, chances are there’s someone in the world who can teach us how, even if it’s via a youtube video. (If you knew my work at the Oakland Peace Center, you probably remember how often we didn’t know what we were doing but gave it a try anyhow.)

Finally, I wanted to share a little about Alan Jenkins. He’s the creator of the comic series simply called 1/6. (BTW, if you click the link, scroll down and find the place where nonprofits and advocacy groups can get free copies, although I paid for mine and it was worth every penny.)

Dr. Jenkins is a professor at Harvard Law School, and he had a lot of thoughts about the legal and political ramifications of the January 6th coup attempt in 2021. He said, “I could have written a law review article about it that would be read by tens of people.”2 Instead, he got together with an artist friend to create a series of comic books about what would have happened if that coup had succeeded. (The first three were written before the 2024 election. I am curious to see how the fourth comic reads now that so many things they predicted have already happened.)

Dr. Jenkins’s goal was to write something that would be more broadly accessed. He noted that there were key elements he wanted to include in order to reach an audience that wasn’t automatically on his side:

• It should be character driven.

• It needed a narrative, a story.

• People had to be able to see themselves in it

• It needed to cultivate empathy

• It needed to engage, persuade, and provide a call to action.

He and his team such a good job accomplishing those goals that San Diego State University developed a classroom curriculum to accompany the graphic novels, since they are such an accessible resource to address foundational issues of democracy and justice.

The main reason I’ve been excited to get to this particular newsletter, though, is a story he shared that day that I keep coming back to. Dr. Jenkins has gone to a lot of comic book conventions since these comics came out. It allows him to reach an audience beyond the usual suspects. He was tabling at one convention when a man and his son came up and flipped through one of his comics. “This is really accurate-looking! Were you there?” Dr. Jenkins said he hadn’t been there in person but had done a lot of research to make it as true to the moment as possible. “Well, I was,” said the man, who went on to talk about what it had been like, why he had thought he should go, and how he wasn’t sure now that it had been such a good idea. They talked for a while about that. He bought a copy, and he and his son walked off, and Dr. Jenkins and his wife breathed a sigh of relief.

Ten minutes later, the man came back. Dr. Jenkins kept his eye on the exit just in case, but it turned out the man had skimmed the comic and had circled back to get it autographed.

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I wanted to share that story because I know a lot of us are trying to navigate the balance of feeling so betrayed by people who voted differently while also knowing that we have to broaden the base in order to protect our people and creation. Dr. Jenkins said he didn’t know whether the man he talked with read those comics and was transformed, but he did know that if he hadn’t been intentional about trying to create art that spoke to people like him, he would not have found himself in a conversation probably anywhere else in his life with someone who had gone to the coup attempt and was trying to make sense of it in its aftermath, and that felt really important.

It also connected with some of the wisdom I picked up during a Black Panther Party tour in Oakland last week. One of the original party members, Dr. Ned Satu, told the group about how important the BPP’s house band was for the movement; this KQED article referred to it as the “Trojan Horse” of the BPP, which is such a great metaphor except that the band (called the Lumpen) was smuggling in liberation instead of conquest. :) But having cultural connections that are fun or compelling is a critical element of our work. It will look very different than what the Right is doing, which is about creating a culture of fear rather than possibility, but it will nonetheless require attention…and it will also allow us to play in the midst of our own work. Win-win, I think!

For the next few weeks I’m going to be writing up a few reflections on books I’ve been reading before I get back to telling you more about what I learned at other conferences. :) This is the last in the series of newsletters based on the 22nd Century Initiative’s anti-authoritarian organizers’ conference in Atlanta in June. Since I got the ridiculous honor of going (and using research funds to do so), I felt like these newsletters were a tiny way of paying it forward or paying back all the support you’ve provided that led to an opportunity like this.

with gratitude,

Sandhya

PS—You’re reading this as I hang out on the beach with my boo on our “mini-moon,” a term my friend Jessica taught me for when you take a very short trip right after your wedding. Labor Day weekend provided such an opportunity. I promised at least one friend/reader pics from the wedding; so here’s one showing off our outfits and traditional Bengali topor and mukhud (the very fragile headwear I hand carried from India last summer, which did not entirely survive the wedding). I wish all of you could have been there, but the fire department is glad we didn’t invite you all. :)

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