resistance and liberation movements can create more separation and division

The frameworks of resistant and liberation movements are well-intentioned and informed, but they can also create more division and separation when paradox and nuance are not accompanied.

Colonizer mindsets have infiltrated not just the historically oppressed or marginalized groups, but even those that are actively resisting exactly what colonization has been historically rooted in: extraction, internalized superiority and domination.

⚠️ This might be a confronting take for some so if you’re not generally open to learning about multiple perspectives, can’t engage in discord with levity, and are just interested in validating your own ideas, I ask that you respectfully please move along with your day. ⚠️

This is just an observation based off of interactions and experiences I’ve had — as an immigrant multicultural child, an activist, a mother, a wife in a multicultural marriage, doula and educator. An opinion, a breakdown, a starting point to bigger conversations. An expression of an aspect that I have also had missteps in.

Take what you need, leave the rest. ~

A common denominator I’ve noticed working in activism spaces from education to animal and human rights (both professionally and interpersonally) is that often times the ones working for liberation, anti-capitalism and decolonization inadvertently inherit some of the traits of a colonizer when they are met with contrasting or contradictory ideals. Or when their influence isn’t adopted by others based on their own conditioning.

Resistant and liberation movements across the board are so passionately focused on the outcomes of their goals that they can often foster duality thinking, which creates more rigidity and less opportunity to engage in actual liberation.

These spaces are often a rift between right vs wrong with emphasis on who is more right or more wrong. Instead of focusing on what the collective goals are and what is already mutually aligned.

So many of foundational principles often miss the mark or end up recycling harmful rhetorics bc we’ve anchored definitions and concepts as universal truths instead of valuable inventory to work and build from presently with both our own unique and collective lived experiences.

For example, what liberation looks like to you might look something completely different to me. The practices you engage in might be something I don’t necessarily align with, and vise-versa. What feels intentional and meaningful for me might not translate that way for you. But there’s so much possibility here all the same! Regardless of being historically, culturally or politically informed.

Awareness is being weaponized instead of embodied.

When you live your truth so profoundly and authentically, you will acquire natural curiosity from those paving similar trajectories without having to perpetuate contempt for those who don’t follow suit. This is how I believe we can sustain the work without overexerting, overextending or overcharging ourselves to causes that ignite you. Because that is also by design. That ignition is there to activate parts of you that need to be utilized in the very unique ways you may have access to that in turn activates others. It’s basic symbiosis.

If someone simply expressing themselves in ways that are foreign or unaligned to you feels personal or like a threat to your nervous system/ideologies, then perhaps that is an opportunity to engage in what parts of your conditioning need to be addressed and liberated from the politically charged lens of the history you’ve inherited — AND your own personal history you’ve become imprisoned to but are calling it honor.

Or perhaps it’s just inventory not necessarily for you to process and to practice neutrality instead. This is all daily exercise and challenge for me as someone committed to allowing myself to evolve in respect to the cyclical changes we are all wired to.

How can we initiate, teach, and activate liberation on a collective scale if so many of us haven’t learned how to liberate ourselves from the preconceptions, generational traumas, systems, paradigms and definitions we cling to?

The more true it is for you, the more you perpetuate it as so. A part of true liberation work is that you get to decide, you get to have authority over your life and how much of that truth infiltrates it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you get to decide for everyone.

Especially during a time of so much expansiveness and contradiction, where all of our own individual roots overlap and cross each other like mycelium (entangled branching fibers of a fungus functioning as nature’s recycling system and communication network, breaking down organic matter to absorb nutrients and connects the root systems of other plant and tree species).

History proves how easy it is to regurgitate it so why do we insist on marketing it presently instead of using it to pave something completely new based on true mutual acceptance, respect and integrity?

Something that doesn’t undermine historical precedents and acknowledges it fully but that doesn’t identify with it so much that we unconsciously produce more of the same thing.

Regarding humanity as a whole multidisciplinary system created to showcase a diverse spectrum that calls on each of us to nurture, empower and restore what resonates. And move on from what doesn’t.

Now I’m not saying we just let evil or hateful shit passively slide and not stand on principle. However, somewhere along the way, we’ve taken our convictions to the extreme side of the spectrum and we override discernment for someone’s capacity to receive whatever you are offering, and instead we let it rip no matter the consequences or circumstances rooted in righteousness. Much like a… colonizer. Which at this point in time, we might as well admit that we all are complicit and play a role in — no matter how “woke” we believe we are.

But instead of getting fixated there or within the marginal conditions we rigidly subscribe to in tribute to history, perhaps we have to start working on recentering the values that we are trying to actively convey in our own corners of the interconnected web instead of assuming or insisting everyone has to do it exactly like you to induce momentum or change.