I appreciated Ijeoma Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, for sharing what drives social justice activists, and how each of us can take action to support those movements.
What made this book particularly powerful for me is that each chapter contains multiple interviews with movement workers who share their engaging stories of what they faced that inspired or compelled them to become activists. They either experienced something themselves that convinced them to devote their lives to fight for change, or they saw some injustice so alarming they couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Their experiences were often awful, but instead of giving up, they chose to stand up and fight to make things better for the next person like them.
While those stories may make such activism seem unattainable, Oluo also ends each chapter with the call to “Be a Revolution”, offering ways in which the reader can contribute to the cause of justice in small but meaningful ways.
The book also helped me with greater insight into how all justice movements are inter-related. If we allow anybody to be treated as “less than”, as not being worthy of being treated equally to others, then we have opened the door for an artificial separation to be created between “us” and “them”, regardless of whether the separation is based on race, gender, disability, class, education, etc. All of the structures that create different treatment for people based on these biases keep some people in a position of power where they can exploit those who are “less than” them.
I loved these words from disability activist Alice Wong: “Imagine a world where all kinds of people can just be their full selves without having to scrape by. Without having to prove their worthiness. Without having to produce. Where they just have inherent value. And that they’re cared for, and that they care for others. I mean, that’s what I think liberation is. That’s what freedom is.”
That’s the revolution that Oluo and these other activists are working towards, one where we start from a fundamental assumption of human dignity and equality. Everything else follows from there. And we can each be part of that revolution by treating people with that dignity in each interaction, one where we first acknowledge our shared humanity rather than our differences.
More thoughts and quotes in my longer blog review at https://lnkd.in/g4BkZqBv