Healing Our Politics, Part 1
politics (n): The way that people living in groups make decisions; making agreements between people so that they can live together in groups.
heal (v): To make sound or whole; to restore to health.
political healing: a way of making decisions about how we live together that restores us to health and wholeness
Living through a global pandemic makes you think a lot about health, and what it means to heal. At minimum, it makes you more aware of the brokenness: of our healthcare system, our economy, our system of housing, our supposed justice system, our social infrastructure, and many other aspects of our lives. If our nation were a patient right now, our doctors would be wondering how we were even still standing up, or speaking, or breathing.
What does it do to us to live so long in a state of unwellness that we begin to believe it’s our natural and intended way of being? As an Afro-Latina trying to navigate through these difficult years in the world and in my own life, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the ways that I’ve been trained to live unwell. How I’ve been taught not to pay attention to my own needs or desires, because my historically, culturally, and politically assigned role is to serve the needs of others. How I’ve been taught that my only value is in what I produce, so needing rest becomes laziness and worthlessness. How I’ve been taught that I always have to work harder than everyone else to prove my worth, so I can never show weakness or vulnerability or struggle.
If you’ve spent time supporting loved ones who are dealing with chronic pain, you realize that constant pain makes every moment exhausting. The simplest actions are an enormous effort; more complex tasks are a heroic feat of strength. When as individuals and as a collective, we are walking around with unhealed trauma that has endured for generations, a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness can feel like the only possible outcome.
Like Fannie Lou Hamer, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. But more than that: I have a yearning for wellness that comes from the depths of my very being. If I’m going to stay alive, I want to do more than survive. I want to fight to be whole and thriving.
What’s the Point of Political Power?
As a political and electoral organizer, I was trained in the importance of building power: of rigorously, ruthlessly clarifying and pursuing mutual self-interest and gaining the ability to act on it as a collective. That idea tends to make a lot of us – especially those of us socialized as women, especially those of us in black and brown bodies – deeply uncomfortable. We’ve been taught that we don’t deserve power, but we’ve also been taught that power itself is an evil. It’s a false lesson designed to keep us from having the ability to shape and change our reality, yet at the same time it’s a lesson that feels very true to our experience. For most of us, we’ve experienced power as a thing used over us and used to harm us. It’s difficult to even envision healing power: power used to lift us up in the fullness of our whole and beautiful humanity.
In fact, many of us don’t even associate healing with organizing. Healing is something personal, something we do on our own time. In conventional organizing frameworks, we might talk about healing as a rhetorical device when we articulate our vision of the future. But in an organizing world that is still dominated by patriarchal and paternalistic norms, “love,” “care,” and “healing” are touchy-feely concepts that take a backseat to what you can count and write: the number of people at your action, the number of bills passed. In the nonprofit industrial complex where most organizing groups live, the measures of success are the same as the rest of capitalism: bigger, faster, more.
I believe that the sources of power are tangible: the number of people we organize and the amount of money and other resources we can deploy to meet our goals. The numbers matter. But the way we get there also matters. If we’re trying to build a new world, we can’t do it with the same methods and tools that we’re used to build the one we’re in right now. We need new tools and strategies designed for our new purpose and goals. We also need to be clear about our new purpose and goals.
And there’s the rub. We are so used to living unwell, unhealed lives that it feels almost impossible to conceive of anything else. We put enormous energy into tinkering at the edges of the system that keeps us sick; we fight tooth and nail for tiny wins. It’s not because we aren’t smart, capable, passionate, dedicated. But we’ve been trained for low expectations. Radically reimagining our world is considered impractical distraction, and we focus on “the art of the possible.”
I can’t keep doing that. We’re facing a repeat of the 2020 general elections where my choices are between a constantly-lying, racist, sexist, xenophobic insurrectionist and an active supporter of ongoing genocide who never supported the Black and Asian woman he used to bolster his ticket to actually take leadership as the first woman or Asian-American to hold the office of president in the United States (as well as only the second Black person). I refuse to believe that is all that is possible; I refuse to believe that is as good as I get.
I’m more interested in a different take on the possible: “It always seems impossible, until it’s done.” One hundred years before I first ran for office, the idea that someone like me could do so would have been laughable. In 1918, women were still barred from voting, and Black women were still fighting white leaders who wanted to deny their right to be part of the suffrage movement. A Black woman wouldn’t be elected to Congress for another 50 years; a wave of hundreds of Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color running for office wouldn’t occur until 50 years after that.
Even as I process my legitimate anger at how long these steps toward progress have taken, I’m also reminded that it was the dedicated belief in the possibility of a future we hadn’t yet seen that drove people to keep working for their realization. Someone – many someones – thought that something could be different, and kept going until it was, inspiring other people to become part of the vision along the way. So as I face yet another general election where the choices break my heart, I’m working to figure out how to grieve this moment and still see what’s possible.
How Do We Heal Our Politics?
We are in a moment of reconfiguration and transformation. These past few years revealed many systemic failings, but they have also revealed something else: that many things we used to say were “impossible” suddenly become possible when we decide they are necessary. We can allow people to work flexible schedules or work from home so they can take care of their families when they need to. We can find money to support people who are unemployed. We can put a moratorium on evictions or safely release people from jail for certain crimes. We can even do a pilot of universal basic income!
What does all that mean? It means that alternate solutions to these issues were always available to us, even before coronavirus. It means that we always had the capacity to help vulnerable people in our community, and to create systems and policies that don’t punish people for being poor or target people who are black and brown. What we didn’t have before was the understanding that putting those kinds of systems and policies in place makes the world better and more manageable for all of us – and the understanding that none of us are truly isolated from the devastating impacts of economic insecurity, ecological devastation, or social inequity.
Now that we know these things, we have a choice and an opportunity. We know from past experiences of disaster that the “temporary” systems we establish to manage crises very quickly become permanent ways of being. That means that we must be deliberate about what we choose to create in transformative moments – or as Octavia Butler says, we must shape change.
And this is where political healing comes in. In this electoral moment, we can develop ways of making decisions about how we live together that restore us to health and wholeness. We can decide that our collective well-being – the old term “commonwealth” still lives on in the official names of states like Kentucky, Massachusetts and Virginia – is the priority outcome and standard for our public policy decision-making. And we can decide that, since all of us are part of that collective and our individual health is intimately linked with our collective health, no groups can be left carrying the costs and burdens of our society while others profit from the sacrifice of their dignity, their freedom, or their lives.
It’s Time to Start Practicing for the World We Want and Need
As residents of the United States, we like to pride ourselves on the high rhetoric of our founding documents: that “all men are created equal” with an “inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We view ourselves as the beacon and defenders of democracy and freedom. The unfortunate reality of our country is that we’ve never really practiced what we preach.
Yet it’s also a reality that our country has always had people fighting to get us to live into the values we say we hold. And it’s because of those people – people of color, women, queer and trans people, and poor and working people – that our country ended slavery, won and defended the right to vote for women and people of color, established labor protections and the social safety net, and passed legislation banning discrimination by race, gender, and sexual orientation. We have to continue to fight for and defend these victories; we have a duty to fight for our freedom, and not to take it for granted. But what our forebears have shown us is that the arc of history does, in fact, bend toward justice.
Now, the responsibility for carrying justice forward is ours. But we will not be successful if we are not both strategic and intentional: if we do not carefully and diligently choose to push back against the systems of structural oppression that want to take away our humanity and our dignity. We have to model the world we want to live in, and bring healing to ourselves and others around the places where we’ve been battered and broken.
We have to be more than just progressives. We have to be political healers.
How can we be political healers? Stay tuned for part 2 dropping next week!
Brandy H. M. Brooks (she/ella) is the Founder & CEO of Radical Solutions LLC. Brandy is an Afro-Latina organizer, educator, and facilitator with 15+ years of experience in social and environmental justice, nonprofit management, and leadership development.