The life of an activist can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. When you're dedicated to fighting inequality and injustice, you're signing up for a battle with the very forces that produce them -- and it's a battle not easily won.
When I chose to become an activist for the lives of black people, I didn't realize just how much it would require of me. By December 2015, when a grand jury declined to charge the Cleveland police officer responsible for killing 12-year-old Tamir Rice, the harsh reality of this work hit me especially hard -- the weariness, hopelessness, powerlessness. After protesting, organizing and lobbying, black children will still have their lives stolen, and no one will be held accountable.
It's not just me -- these feelings are widespread among those who give so much to the movement and get so little real change in return.
"We need to rekindle the spirit of radical imagination that fueled so many black activists before us."
That became especially clear after Feb. 8, when Black Lives Matter activist MarShawn McCarrel took his own life on the front steps of the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. While we can't assume a single cause for someone's suicide, McCarrel's death sparked a conversation within the activist community about the depression and anxiety that come with this work.
Where can we find hope? How can we maintain the resilience needed to keep the movement for racial justice going?
I believe we need to be more steadfast in looking toward the future -- envisioning the world we want to see, and taking concrete steps to create it. We need to rekindle the spirit of radical imagination that fueled so many black activists before us.
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We can trace radical imagination back to historical movements, like the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the best examples. His celebrated "I Have A Dream" speech is the epitome of finding a dream in the midst of weariness, as both an activist and black person living through injustice:
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream ... This is our hope.
The revolutionary and even idealist nature of King’s speech cannot -- and should not -- be understated. Although we celebrate his words without hesitation today, many of King's peers "deemed it hackneyed to the point of cliché" at the time. Even the most “radical student activists were dismayed to hear a black leader dreaming of a far-off future."
"Dreams can have transformative impact, if we put in the work."
King's dream was too big and too distant for a lot of people to understand and accept. But he didn't allow their lack of imagination, nor the dark conditions of the present, to prevent him from envisioning a brighter future.
Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of American history at UCLA and author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, emphasizes the power in our collective dreams.
"Oftentimes dreaming gets reduced to the individual process of envisioning something different," Kelley tells Mashable. "Dreams can have transformative impact, though, if we put in the work."
In the preface to his book, Kelley writes:
Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us.
I fell victim to the very mindset Kelley writes about -- knocking down but never building. I exhausted all my energy fighting, but never took the time to remind myself what I was fighting for.
Protesting, organizing and educating are all essential to activism, but they're not the entire story. To be most effective, Kelley argues, we must also create spaces to cultivate collective "freedom dreams."
I exhausted all my energy fighting, but never took the time to remind myself what I was fighting for.
"It's in those sorts of spaces -- protected spaces, enclosed spaces -- not so much in the streets themselves, that people are able to articulate why they’re in it," he said in a 2008 interview.
This isn't a new or necessarily innovative idea in the black community at large. In fact, black artists seem to have embraced it more than anyone.
Artists have long used Afrofuturism in science fiction, comics, music and art as a way to make their radical imaginations tangible. Take Octavia Butler, who dreamed of and created worlds in her books Kindred and Fledgling, where black girls and women were centered and could be multidimensional, complex characters. Today, there's Janelle Monáe, who's revolutionizing the future of music, art and culture with black artists and "androids," with protest lyrics to accompany them along the way.
In contemporary activism, this kind of radical dreaming hasn't exactly taken root. We're more easily crushed by the realities of oppression, and often find it difficult to move past them.
"To be truly revolutionary, we need to create spaces built on love and solidarity."
"We live in a society where destruction has become the dominant culture," Kelley tells Mashable. "To be truly revolutionary, we need to create spaces built on love and solidarity."
Kelley has observed that a strength in the modern movement is the recognition that "when we talk about structural change, we're not tweaking a system, but completely destroying it and replacing it with something new."
We've mastered the art of destruction; now we need to decide what we're replacing the system with. As Kelley wrote in his book, progressive social movements "transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society." In the fight for social justice in the 21st century, it's crucial to refocus on these ideas of transportation and imagination.
And there are already great examples. Campaign Zero, the platform of comprehensive solutions to end police violence in America, is the direct result of radical imagination from activists Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, DeRay Mckesson and Sam Swey.
Packnett tells Mashable the four met in Ferguson, Missouri, and had worked on the We The Protestors newsletter and Mapping Police Violence project together after noticing the consistent hunger for information around police violence. Mckesson eventually asked, "What does a world look like where police don't kill people?"
This was the critical question that created their vision, leading to a thorough list of policy demands for criminal justice reform, and a system to track the positions of candidates running for president.
"Campaign Zero is the result of us coming together, using our skills to make this vision tangible and clear for everyone," Packnett says -- with "everyone" being the operative word.
"The more well-read and imaginative we become, we start to use grandiose terms that aren't accessible to some people. Liberation is for everyone, so we have to make sure that things are translated in a way that will have immediate and long term effects. The dream has to be accessible," she says.
"The dream has to be accessible."
"Hope can be fuel if we let it be," she adds. "It matters a great deal to our ability to be resilient in the face of opposition."
Resilience is a vital part of activism -- but a long, difficult road doesn't mean we should be weary of taking it on, or be willing to settle for less.
To create a revolution that turns systemic racism and institutionalized oppression on their heads, we must first dream, and then put in the work. Packnett, for example, doesn't see Campaign Zero as a final goal, but a step "on the road to that radical and revolutionary ending."
If we would all be bold enough to take a step on that road, think of how far we could go. We have the capacity to dream -- and we have the power to turn those dreams into plans and policies that can completely change the world.
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