We Cannot Sacrifice Each Other in the Name of Progress

We don’t say it out loud, but at the center of movement-building there is a pyre. Our conversations around tradeoffs - what we are willing to give up to get what we want - don't often focus on impact, culture, and money, but instead who gets burned, over and over again. Who is the acceptable sacrifice. The answer is usually women. Black people. Disabled people. Children.

Dolores Huerta - someone I have admired my entire life, whose image lives on my office wall  - shared her experience of being assaulted by Cesar Chavez. Her story is one of many unearthed in an investigation by the New York Times into his sexual abuses. Abuses that involved pedophilia, pressuring women colleagues to sleep with him, and abusing his power over vulnerable people in the social movement he helped birth. 

I’m broken knowing that she carried that truth for decades. And that she spent decades having to celebrate a man who harmed her out of fear that telling the whole truth could ruin social progress. What immense and tragic pressure.

The truth is that we uphold misogyny inside our movements while launching fights against oppression outside of them. 

The NY Times story has a graph I keep coming back to over and over again.

“More than 10 years ago, members of a private Facebook group for longtime Chavez organizers and supporters were stunned to read a post from Ms. Rojas that she wrote in a fit of anger as they prepared to celebrate the holiday in his name.

Her post read, in part: “Wake up people. This man u march for every year molested me.”

Ms. Rojas deleted the message days after posting it and was accused by some who saw it or heard about it of jeopardizing all that had been accomplished by not only Mr. Chavez but her parents and those they marched alongside.”

We ask women to give everything. We give our time, our talents, and even our bodies to bring about the liberation we want to see in the world. The very moment when women stop being perceived as “in service” we save our most righteous wrath for them. Even when what they are trying to say is - wake up - we are celebrating the wrong things.

I have watched over and over again when women in our movements, especially women of color - especially Black women – start to become decision makers, history definers, and narrative creators we question whether they should have power. We question whether they should have decision making rights at all and imply the mere existence of their decision making rights  is oppression. We then question whether the very act of having power makes them malicious or nefarious. 

I have spent the last 6 years thinking about how we make our movements resilient, what it takes to keep us from being brittle and ineffective.

Movements that require people to absorb harm in order to advance are not movements that can sustain liberation.

It is one that will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, mirroring the same logic of disposability that this country was founded on and what we claim we want to change. 

In order for our movements to be sustainable we must examine the internalized notions this country gives us about women with power. We must understand that we are not exempt from the country-wide dysfunction that keeps 50% of the population from having consequential decision making rights across so many sectors. 

In order for our movements to be sustainable we must examine our need to have lone heroes we put on pedestals. The politics of representation has long kept us from looking at systems in favor of a face that looks like ours and promises by its very presence we too could have power someday. This has often allowed many people –- especially men — to talk about liberation but deliver on scraps.

In order for our movements to be sustainable we must examine why we have so many systems to hold people with less power accountable and few to none that hold people with more power accountable. Leaving social derision as the only lever people with less power can pull to get any level of accountability for hurtful and/or harmful behavior.

When I work with movement leaders, I tell them that they are not the acceptable sacrifice for progress. That their health, their bodies, their lives are not to be burned to keep the movement warm. There is sometimes relief but often surprise. So many of us have accepted that this kind of self-immolation is necessary or change will never happen. It is not. I'm tired of us pretending otherwise.

We must create beauty outside of the pyre.

We must soak the pyre with so much love and cherished community that it can never be lit again. We must create a public history that warns us of the pyre and tells stories of how wrong we were to ever believe the act of creation required such dehumanization. We have that in us. I know we do. I’ve seen it. I’ve been held by it. I’ve rolled around in the compassion and love of it all. 

I know many of us are mourning today, one of the few heroes that Latiné people have had has been uncovered as a violating menace. However, it is not just his legend I desire to smother; it is the conditions that allowed him to flourish that I am determined to eradicate. I hope you will join me in that. 

And if for some reason, Dolores ever reads this – your humanity is tied to our collective humanity. You have led with loving us in your heart for over half a century. You deserve us to hold you as you have held us. You are not exempt from the promise of liberation. We love you.