Written by Josh Ishimatsu, Deputy Director of Strategy, SV@Home
Some reflections for resisting authoritarianism for those of us in the nonprofit sector: (1) Learn from those who have come before us and share what you learn; (2) Do more than your day job; (3) Do NOT “circle up the wagons;” (4) Take care of yourself and others.
We live in a time and a place where it feels like the walls are closing in. Or maybe it’s that the ground is crumbling beneath our feet. Or whatever metaphor captures the fear and menace and anxiety of the current moment. The impending sense that things are not good and that they could get much, much worse at any moment.
There have been worse times in our nation’s history. In this country, within our lifetimes and/or within the lifetimes of people we know and love, there has been Jim Crow, the Internment, and more. Amongst us and within our degrees of separation, there are people who have been through worse, both here and in other countries, and have survived. Even overcame. This is important to remember. Things have been worse before. People have gotten through it before. This doesn’t make victory automatic for us. But it should give us hope for what is possible.
And yet, it still feels like the ground could fall out from beneath our feet at any second. It already has for many people. People raided in their own homes, pulled out of their cars, shot in the streets, or thrown into cartoonishly named, poorly constructed prison camps (e.g., Alligator Alcatraz).
We are in scary, disrupted times where our normal, day-to-day routines are not good enough. Despite what we might tell ourselves.
It is hard to know what to do. In our hectic lives, it is hard to find the time and headspace to figure out what to do, let alone actually do the things.
I don’t know what to do, either. But I have some thoughts to share. Some of these thoughts are specifically for those of us in the housing and/or nonprofit sectors. But hopefully there’s enough that is also broadly applicable.
And I also want to shout out that this column was inspired by a conversation I had with Melissa Cerezo a few months ago and a lot of her thoughts and shared wisdom have been blended into this column.
Learn from Other People, Share with Other People
In times like these, I think it is important to learn from people who have been through similar experiences and who overcame. It’s for learning tactics and strategies. And it’s also about building/finding community, even if separated by time and space, even if the connection is through written words on a page.
In times like these, I think it is also important to share what we learn with other people. Leaning and sharing are important building blocks for communities of resistance.
To these ends, I want to share some writings from a friend (acquaintance?) whose writings have been really helpful – both inspiring and informative – for me in these difficult times. Scot Nakagawa’s substack The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook has been fire for well over a year now. Here are a couple of relevant examples:
- Managing Stress, Anxiety, and Hopelessness in Times of Crisis: Lessons from Immigrants, Refugees, and Activists Who Have Survived the Collapse of the Familiar
- Stories of Resistance: Narrative Strategies for Democratic Movements
- Why You Can’t Understand American Authoritarianism without Understanding Race
We Need to Be More Than Our Day Jobs
“Traditional advocacy focuses on single issues (healthcare, environment, civil rights) but authoritarians attack the entire system simultaneously. Issue-based responses are insufficient for systemic threats.”
-From the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook
In the vein of learning from elders, I want to share some of the wisdom of Gordon Chin, founding Executive Director of Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) in San Francisco. In the 60s and 70s, while co-founding the organizations that became CCDC, Gordon was a grassroots activist whose day job (my colleague Emily Ann Ramos calls her day job her “Bruce Wayne job”) was as a mail carrier. Gordon speaks eloquently about the need for nonprofit professionals to be movement activists above and beyond our day jobs (condensed from an interview with Gordon, here):
Successful organizations aren’t set up to advance a movement, to advance a big picture vision of the world. They’re set up to do stuff like create open space, develop affordable housing. So, to build a movement, it means sometimes that you have to do stuff outside of the organization. We still need to be movement activists.
Starting so many organizations did take some of the energy and vitality out of the movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But the needs side of the equation, providing services for people who need it, is also important, and you need organizations to do that.
How do you translate movement excitement into boring things that can be implemented on the ground? On the other side of it, how do you get nonprofit workers to go to marches and support movements that may not seem to be directly related to their issues? Like going to anti-war marches like we all used to do in the ’60s, even if our first issue was housing advocacy or Chinatown.
In some ways it was easier for activists who were forming organizations in the ’60s because there weren’t the organizations before. And we were activists from before, for a decade or more. It was the lifestyle. We came from a different place and it colored how we looked at the organizations. It’s hard to generalize; there were activists who formed organizations and then became engrossed in the narrow interests of the organization at the expense of the movement. But there were always those of us who knew that organizations come and go and we’ll always be part of the community and that the community will always be there. And for those of us who tried to do both organizations and movements, it was maybe a little bit easier to do both because it was what we were used to. We always had a foot in the movement. It’s not like now where you come up into an organization and you’re so specialized and professional and that’s all of what you do.
In these times, we need to be more like 60s and 70s movement activists and think and act more broadly than the interests of our organizations or the narrow confines of our organizations’ highest priority issues. I know this is hard to hear for those of us who feel that we give so much to our work that we have barely enough time to manage our own lives, let alone fight authoritarianism. But, maybe to make time and space for the bigger resistance, we need to step back a little from the immediate interests and issues of our individual organizations.
At this historic moment, I think we need movements more than we need organizations. Not that this is an either/or choice. It is BOTH/AND. It’s a matter of redefining priorities in the face of the current threats. In this moment, the needs of a broader movement should be setting the agenda, not organizational needs. And, in the context of our individual lives, we should be creating more time and space to participate in larger movements. If this means taking time and space from our day jobs, so be it.
It is NOT Time to “Circle the Wagons” (Use of the racist idiom is intentional, as referenced further below)
For those of us in the nonprofit space right now, because we are anxious, because we are in a time of increased scarcity and uncertainty, because we ourselves have been downsized and/or know friends and colleagues who have been downsized, we are in a constant state of worry and frenzy. This makes us more defensive, more likely to look out only for our own interests, more suspicious of our allies, more liable to read bad intent into what the people around us say and do. I feel increased levels of suspicion and distrust bleeding into all of our spaces.
Under the dominant values of our culture, hard times like these make us want to circle up the wagons. But, the idea that, in times of crisis, we should circle up and and protect only our own is a logic of white supremacy and colonialism. This is not a time to play at settlers and Indians. Instead, we should be coming together, we should be looking out for each other, we should be building structures of care and mutual support.
This is, of course, easier said than done. There are a lot of existing tensions and fissures within our spaces. But we need to set these aside and build trust quickly if we are to get through the chaos and madness that is likely coming (I hope I am wrong but I think things are going to get worse before they get better) over the next 2-3 years. This means we need to be more self-aware about our levels of stress and anxiety and be consciously/intentionally dialing back negative assumptions about those with whom we share common cause, be constantly regrounding our spaces into our shared values and visions, and to be more intentional and explicit about creating solidarity.
Self-care and Community Care
In order to show up in ways that are more kind and resilient, in order to build the solidarity that we need in this moment (and will need in the coming couple of years), we need to take better care of ourselves and the people in our lives. This is about self-care. And it is about community care. For communities at multiple scales. The mutuality of support, the ability to be vulnerable and accept help, the act of supporting each other – all of this will have the added benefits of knitting us closer together.
I think we’ve got at least 3 more years in this window of intensive risk/uncertainty/bad things happening. I don’t think any one election or event is going to dispel the harmful forces that have been unleashed. Like it or not, we’ve got a long haul. And we are not in it alone. Reach out to people. Break bread together. Go to a protest together. Bring somebody a meal. Or cookies.