My Political Awakening
Or, the story of how I went from sitting on the couch to sitting in front of the PG&E parking garage with my arm locked into an oil barrel.
A year ago, I was living my ideal life. I worked ten hours a week as a freelance software engineer to pay my living expenses, and used my free time and flexibility to focus on the rest of life: my dance practice, my relationships, spending time in nature, traveling. I lived in a camper van parked outside an intentional community to lower my costs. I didn’t buy into the standard illusion: work hard your whole life and save money so you can eventually retire and finally enjoy yourself. I had designed a lifestyle where I could put in a little work and keep the enjoyment rolling. Best of all, I didn’t have to wake up to a beeping alarm!
Something nagged at me though — some impulse that lay dormant in the back of my mind. I still wanted to do some good in the world. When I graduated college in 2013, I moved to San Francisco to work at an education technology startup, thinking I could use my tech skills to help schools. After four years, I had lost faith in the idea of a “mission-driven company.” You couldn’t really have a “double-bottom line” — when push came to shove, the drive for profit always trumped the desire to have a good impact. So I quit. I decided to divest from the profit machine and focus on art.
Then one day, exactly one year ago, my ideal life started to crumble. I came across a recording of a webinar about class privilege from an organization called Resource Generation. I was familiar with the concept of privilege — at the time I considered myself an intersectional feminist and a general scholar of social justice literature. I had even done a lot of activism around diversity and inclusion in my tech company days. I even blogged about it.
And I certainly knew a bit about class. It was impossible to walk around San Francisco while earning a tech salary and not realize the scales were seriously tipped in my favor. I felt pretty uncomfortable about making so much money when people on the streets were asking me for spare change every day. And always running in the back of my mind was that question: Am I contributing to gentrification just by being here? But hey, that was part of the reason I moved into the van. One less renter, right?
As I watched the webinar, I realized I had never really looked at my class privilege before. My plan around money had always been to save it until… until… well, I would figure out something really impactful to do with it down the road, once I had a bigger pot of money. Maybe I’d help start an art space or an intentional community somewhere. As I started to think about it more deeply, I realized that my “plan” was really just an excuse I had created to mask my latent fear around money — fear that I wouldn’t have enough. The more money I accumulated, the more anxiety I felt around tending that money, keeping it safe and investing it well. Meanwhile, my friends in the dance community were living paycheck to paycheck with no savings. Aside from some occasional stresses when cash ran low, they seemed less worried about their financial future than I was. How was that possible?
Resource Generation offered a different framework: they said if you have excess wealth that you don’t need, give it away to social justice movements now — right now.
Woah. What the fuck? I couldn’t give away my money. Sure, I sometimes gave $20 to a friend’s fundraiser. But give away all my extra money? I needed that money for the future. At least that’s what conventional wisdom taught me, what my parents taught me, what my schooling taught me, what my class background taught me.
As I processed this challenge to my fundamental approach to money and life, I turned to my number one resource for life advice: books.
From Decolonizing Wealth, I learned that money has the potential to be used as medicine. It can be used to heal racial and economic injustice, if we redistribute it consciously. But traditional philanthropy is a racket that the ultra-wealthy use to continue to hoard their money and avoid paying taxes. So I committed to joining Resource Generation and redistributing my wealth.
From Winners Take All, I gained an analysis that helped me understand my intuition about why working at mission-driven companies wasn’t bringing me fulfilment. I had always thought the government was an inefficient bureaucracy and politics a polarized catfight, while startups were nimble and more impactful. I learned that my generation had been inculcated to think that by growing up in a world steeped in free market economic values. In reality, the government, while not as “efficient” as the market, is the main tool we have in our society to create equity. And politics, maddening as it can be, is how we citizens influence the government. So I quit my freelance job and decided to focus on politics.
From Hegemony How To and This Is An Uprising, I learned that grassroots community organizing is the way to build the power needed to influence politics. That we can’t shy away from power just because the elite wield it corruptly. That there is another kind of power that masses of people can wield justly. And the main technique to building this kind of power is putting boots to the ground and talking to people. So I started volunteering with grassroots organizations and political campaigns.
From The Divide, I learned that the United States is an imperialist power that has been sucking resources from the Global South to fund our “developed” way of life. That the “aid” we give to “developing” countries is just a pittance in comparison to the amount of wealth that we (and the rest of the Global North) extract. And that our economic practices are leading the world towards climate collapse. So I joined Sunrise Movement, a youth-led movement for climate justice, to use my power as a US citizen to try to stop our extractive practices.
From Assata: An Autobiography, An Indigenous People’s History of The United States, Towards Collective Liberation, White Fragility, and honestly pretty much everything I read, I learned that racism has been used systematically throughout history to prevent a unified uprising of the masses against the ruling elite. I investigated my lineage, and learned that my ancestors were themselves fleeing racial oppression in Russia when they migrated to this country. Once here, they assimilated and became white in order to make a life for themselves. My wealth and security are a product of this whiteness, and are maintained by it. So I committed myself to learning and practicing anti-racism, and took an internship at Catalyst Project, a collective that builds the leadership of white people to take part in anti-racist organizing.
These explorations have led me to a full slate of organizing work and political commitments. I’ve been challenged to go outside my comfort zone and do things I never thought I’d do a year ago. Looking back, I’m pretty proud of the things I’ve accomplished in this year:
- With the support of my community in Resource Generation, I redistributed $10,000 of my savings (about 5% of my net wealth) to grassroots social justice movements led by poor/working-class folks and people of color.
- I engaged in civil disobedience with hundreds of other young people in Sunrise Movement, disrupting DNC meetings, risking arrest to shut down PG&E (hence the arm in the barrel), and taking part in the biggest climate action in history at the September climate strike.
- I fundraised $4,000 from my friends, family, and community for Critical Resistance, a prison abolition organization.
- I volunteered with the campaign that elected criminal justice reformer Chesa Boudin as the new District Attorney in SF.
- I engaged in anti-racist work within my dance community, taking part in a Summer Leadership Institute with Urban Bush Women and performing in Dismantling with NAKA Dance Theater.
I don’t name these things to brag, but rather to demonstrate some of the concrete ways that I’ve been able to make meaningful contributions to the movements I care about. And these are just the high profile, visible wins. What’s harder to see is the way that these movements are growing in power as we build our numbers and influence.
The key thing to note: I haven’t done any of these things alone. If there’s one main thing that’s shifted for me in the past year it is this: I now believe in the power of my individual contributions because I am acting as part of a collective.
When I look back, the main thing that held me back from redistributing my wealth, participating in protests, or generally being politically engaged was that I was stuck in an individualist mindset. I only had one vote, one body, one relatively small pot of money, so what difference would it make?
Looking through that lens, it was easy to get discouraged and feel powerless. This feeling of powerlessness kept me stuck in political apathy, despite my core values telling me I should act. I didn’t see a path to actually making significant change, so my mind used denial (e.g. of the urgency of the climate crisis) and fear (e.g. of not having enough money) to protect myself.
This year, I’ve been opening myself up to the possibility that collective action can radically change society, and that I can personally play a part in it. This reorientation process hasn’t consisted purely of inspiration, optimism, and kumbayas though. I’ve experienced deep depression and terror when facing the reality of where we’re at. I have spent days on the couch crying as I peeled back layers of denial and fear, letting myself feel my true reactions to the state of the world without interference from these mental protections. I began to open up emotional capacity that had long laid dormant, despite having spent the past decade trying to deprogram the repressive aspects of my masculine socialization. It’s almost like I had to numb parts of myself in order to maintain my existence in my privileged bubble.
As I explored the sadness I felt at the suffering and injustice in the world, I found I was equally moved by the hope offered by the movements I was becoming a part of. I would cry not just when reading about extreme inequality, but also when watching video of a protest. My overall capacity to feel has expanded on both ends — towards sadness and towards hope. I feel more human.
I feel a deep sense of fulfillment these days, knowing that I am part of a community of people working towards a vision of the future that is in line with my values. I still enjoy hedonistic pleasures. I still find grounding in art and nature, same as I did a year ago. It’s just that this year I have discovered my core purpose — the work that ties it all together. I have had a political awakening.
What’s next? An experiment…
In going through this transition, there have been many moments when I felt like I was late to the party. There were so many pieces of my worldview and analysis missing. How could I have discounted the importance of politics? Why did I never think deeply about my class? How could I have overlooked learning about economics for so long? (I know the answer to that one: I fell asleep the one time I tried to go to an economics class in college.)
Even now, I feel there is still so much to learn. But I take comfort in the fact that these feelings are entirely self-imposed. Nobody I’ve met on this journey has ever scolded me for not jumping in sooner. It’s never too late to join this party.
While watching that one webinar was the inciting incident for this particular transformation, I know that my political development has been a process that has spanned my entire life. There wasn’t actually one webinar or book or conversation that radically changed everything by itself. The tinder had to be in place for the spark to catch.
I decided to share this story in the hopes that it might serve as a bit of tinder for others — that it could become a small piece of your political development. I don’t necessarily expect you to agree with my analysis (I know the world is much more complicated than any political analysis makes it sound). Nor do I expect you to want to take the same steps I’ve taken.
That being said, if something in here does resonate with you, I’d like to offer a next step: find an organization to join.
The movements you care about need you. We can’t do this alone.
