dehumanization is not a social justice strategy

What does justice feel like to you? Does it feel like transferring your own feelings of shame & constriction onto another? Does it feel like exterminating people who you feel are trying to exterminate you? Is it a victory over others? Or does it feel like a stretching, a growing, a releasing... a believing into a future where we all belong, where the ends never justify the means, where we have the tools to process our trauma and the humility to play our part, where somehow against the odds we have all returned to love?

Personally, I used to only have access to the former: a feeling of long-awaited vindication over The Oppressors. But I could only chant “none of us are free until all of us are free” so many times until I realized that, oh shit, the “all of us” includes... All. Of. Us. And that those with material power were often spiritually bereft and in need of reconciliation & healing just as much as the rest of us.

I’ve been witnessing, and attending to, the fearful trauma drama of mainstream activism for many years. (Context: For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been an activist since I was 14 and have worked within many different movements for justice, in addition to training leaders and consulting on diversity and inclusion for over a decade.)

The instinct to turn on those who seem to be the problem and call them names, attack their character, and seek to extinguish their lives/livelihoods, is the programmed reaction if we feel deeply unsafe and subconsciously ashamed. It’s basic projection.

But I feel us all growing into a new way of being. I see my clients praying for the people who are attacking them. I see myself asking God to show me what it looks like to have honorable boundaries and a generous heart. I see the People of The Internet realizing that we cannot treat each other as disposable. I see our devotion to love calling us forward: stretching us into the willingness to consider a world where all wounds have been healed, where our bad guys are just guys, where unity includes sovereignty, where we are all free.