binaries be damned: part 1
or: there is no good protester or bad protester
“…long-standing systems of control, exploitation and dispossession metamorphosed into economic, technological and political infrastructures mobilized to inflict mass violence and immense destruction.46 Entities that previously enabled and profited from Palestinian elimination and erasure within the economy of occupation, instead of disengaging are now involved in the economy of genocide.”
- Francesca Albanese, From economy of occupation to economy of genocide
Dear Beloved,
I stumble on how to write this newsletter to you. As I type on my digital soapbox, I struggle in the space between despair and hope. There is a rage inside me that is kindled by the small cruelties I see in my day-to-day. There is a relentless bruise blooming in my consciousness, absorbing community traumas I see and hear and read and watch.
Walking through my daily life, in the quiet plains, in a trembling world, I exist in two different realities. I hold the unnamable in a clenched fist, swallow, and keep moving.
This newsletter is small and one of millions. My words are digitized, filtered through machines and wires and stored in strangers’ data centers, but they are for you.
I write only for you.
Are you safe, Beloved? Have you eaten? When was the last time you drank water? Have you prayed today, and if you have abandoned prayer or never really been one for it, have you connected with something larger than yourself? Larger than us? Has someone held you? Have you held someone, too, and carried them? Do you know that you are loved, that you exist because of love, that love is all that carries us in this life and will be what saves us in the end?
I write for you, Beloved, and I cry for us both. And we keep going for the generations after us. We have a new world to build for them.
Going Too Far? The Myth of Good and Bad Protesters
In his 1927 essay, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, Mao Zedong addressed the complaint of peasants “going too far” in their revolt against landlords and the wealthy gentry.
First, the local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords have themselves driven the peasants to this. For ages they have used their power to tyrannize over the peasants and trample them underfoot; that is why the peasants have reacted so strongly. The most violent revolts and the most serious disorders have invariably occurred in places where the local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords perpetrated the worst outrages.
The peasants are clear-sighted. Who is bad and who is not, who is the worst and who is not quite so vicious, who deserves severe punishment and who deserves to be let off lightly--the peasants keep clear accounts, and very seldom has the punishment exceeded the crime.
Mao’s 1927 essay resonates with 21st-century struggle and speaks to the false binary of “good protests” and “bad protests.” Our 2020 uprisings were largely non-violent, where only 5% of protests had demonstrators use violence, Black Lives Matter movement was (and is still) characterized as overtly violent and one of riots. Despite our nonviolence, the state’s violence has increased: Since George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis cops, killings by police have only risen. Under Biden, whose presidency was realized because of BIPOC votes, police budgets increased. Those militarized police were weaponized against protestors - “good” or “bad” - speaking out against US-Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.
The state does not recognize good or bad protestors. Any who speaks out against the state’s violence, with or without violence, is a target. As far as the state is concerned, the only “good” protester is a crushed one. Yet the myth of the good protester persists in our movements.
[Insert action] makes the movement look bad.
If we resist our oppressors by [insert action], we are as bad as they are.
No one will take us seriously if we [insert action].
[Insert appropriated Martin Luther King, Jr. quote.]
They’re just going too far.
Comparing violent demonstrations against the state to the state’s violence ignores key differences: Demonstrators’ violence is reactive to harm done to communities. Violent resistance is what happens when the state gives us no other option - it’s after petitions, after peaceful marches, after pleading with uncaring representatives. Meanwhile, state violence is always, always unprovoked and without just cause; state violence is about profit and control.
Violent resistance transforms. State violence is to conserve its already violent status quo.
The false binary of good and bad protesters is a divisive one, fracturing our collective and weakening our response to outrageous tyranny. It allows the state to continue its death-worshipping policies. Worse still, it has evolved.
This divisive rhetoric opened the gates to untrained, unnecessary, and dangerous “peacekeepers” in 2025’s protests, collaborations with the police, and self-designated neoliberal movement police.
Now, a brown man is dead in Salt Lake City, and another brown man was wrongfully accused and jailed for his death. A hired “peacekeeper,” a white man named Matt Alder, aimed his gun at Arturo Gamboa because Arturo, too, brought a gun for protection. Arturo pointed his own gun at no one. However, Alder saw it within his right to assert his will against a brown man and demanded that Arturo put down his own gun. Alder shot at Arturo in a crowded protest and injured him. While trying to harm one brown man, Alder killed another brown man - Arthur “Afa” Folasa Ah Loo.
Then Salt Lake City police did what police do best and fucked up, arresting Arturo because he was the brown man with a gun. Already injured by Alder, Arturo was jailed without bail.
"His [Arturo’s] own gun had no bullets. He once had a legal conceal carry permit. He was lawfully open-carrying. He has zero prior criminal history. He is so severely shackled in the jail that he cannot move his hands or legs. He has a visible entry wound and exit wound from the bullet that hit him in his back," shared Greg Skordas, Arturo’s lawyer.
With community support, Arturo has been released from jail, but not without conditions. The judge stipulated that Arturo turn in his passport - during a national sweep of brown people by ICE - and relinquish his Second Amendment rights by not possessing any firearms.
While Arturo continues to navigate a legal system stacked against him, Alder walks free. As Afa’s family grieves the loss of a husband and father, his killer has not been arrested.
What makes a protester good or bad? Both Arturo and Alder attended the same “No Kings” protest. Both brought a gun. One was there with and for the community - an actual resister. The other collaborated with the state, and for that, should not qualify as a protester at all.
There is no good or bad protester. You’re either a protester or you’re not. Resistance is not a two-fold binary but a spectrum of action, commitment, and risk tolerance.
Disclaimer because this is the internet: This essay is not an endorsement of accelerationists. It is a lazy, cynical strategy that magnifies harm. The stronger our collective, the more violent the state - we must take care of each other, not do the oligarchy’s work for them.
“What comes next depends on all of us, and I truly believe that together we can make it. It’s not a question of if, it’s just a question of when.”
- Francesca Albanese
Back to Mao’s 1927 essay: Prior to its writing, there were mixed, unreliable accounts about the peasant uprisings in Hunan. As someone from Hunan and recognized as an expert on peasants, Mao was sent to investigate. He spent a little over a month in Hunan and returned to publish the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan
Mao heralded rural peasants, the poorest of the poor, as the foundation for revolutionary change. This echoes modern-day necessity to center the most marginalized in our communities, relying on their leadership and perspective, to fully realize systemic change. After all, how can someone who has benefited from this system, afforded privileges denied to most, be the one to reimagine a new one? How can they
Change will come when land is returned to her Indigenous stewards and their cultural practices. Change will come when we all decolonize ourselves and pull away from the supremacy culture’s insidious call. None of this will happen until we build relations with each other in a good way.
I pray that you are well, Beloved. I pray that you have cool, clean water to drink. I pray that you told someone you love them and that someone holds you tonight. I pray that you find peace. I pray that you find resolve.
I pray that one day, I’ll meet you and take your hand in mine.
Selah.
Reading Recommendations
the myth of a free press
wrote an incredible piece about empire’s “free” press, namely how Zionism infiltrates newsrooms, and discusses the myth of neutrality. She shares about her own experiences in journalism school, including censorship at her university’s newspaper where an editor forbade the word Zionism or calling an apartheid state an apartheid state. This is an essay that I can easily see being read in future journalism ethics courses, as forthcoming generations will have to wrestle with our generation’s complicity in a livestreamed genocide.Wisely, rimsha calls for two actions: The first, boycott The New York Times for peddling Zionist talking points and dehumanizing Palestinians. The second and most important, amplify Palestinian journalists and publications.
we are tethered.
Empire’s propaganda is prevalent in our media, but there is good propaganda that seeks to combat capitalism and supremacy culture. In her newsletter radical love letters,
recently wrote a nuanced piece about propaganda as tool for good and bad. I loved her analysis on aspirational propaganda and, comparatively, propaganda that is a bit more grounded in reality. Her examples include one that I myself have repeated because - surprise - the propaganda is effective: We take care of us. None of us are free until all of us are free.“This is what I’m thinking about on this terrible holiday. I hope you are indulging the kind of propaganda that gives you strength for another day, words that motivate you to not check out or give up. I hope you are finding the balance of sober confrontation and also aspiration.”
People are in motion, everywhere.
Mariame Kaba at
gifted us another much-needed piece last week when the budget bill passed. In it, she spoke of loved ones’ grief and the expressed desire to give up. Wisely, Mariame asks us to look to movement ancestors and shared an interview Shirin Shirin did with South African writer and activist Dennis Brutus.Brutus lived through World War II, the Cold War, and South Africa’s apartheid. Because of his anti-apartheid work, the South African apartheid government banned Brutus from teaching, writing, publishing, attending social or political meetings, and studying for his law degree. He refused, and the apartheid government imprisoned him for 18 months.
Decades later, Brutus kept a sense of hope and optimism for the future. His poetry lives on. In her newsletter, Mariame shares “Somehow We Survive.”
Somehow we survive and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither. Investigating searchlights rake our naked, unprotected contours; over our heads the monolithic decalogue of fascist prohibition glowers and teeters for a catastrophic fall; boots club the peeling door. But somehow we survive severance, deprivation, loss. Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark hissing their menace to our lives, most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror, rendered unlovely and unlovable; sundered are we and all our passionate surrender but somehow tenderness survives.
Mutual Aid
Support Afa’s family in this difficult time. He was taken from his wife, Laura, and their two children. Funds donated help Laura with funeral expenses and to ease the immediate financial burdens she now faces.
The funds raised from this campaign will support Arturo and his family with legal expenses as they fight forArturo's freedom and clear his name of all wrongdoing. They have a long and arduous fight ahead of them, and will need as much help as possible to fully recover from this tragic event.
Join
’s giving circle, which disburses funds to mutual aid efforts. Mariame keeps open records on how much is contributed to the giving circle and where funds go each month.Seeds of Change
Sanctuary Streets created these easy-to-print ICE observer guides. Print and disburse! Put copies in a neighborhood tiny library, between books at the library, and share them at community tabling events.
Print copies of Seven Steps to Stop ICE and wheatpaste it in your neighborhood.
Watch The Commodification of Self Care: Consumerism Gone Rogue
Subscribe to the Electric Intifada.
Form a study group for An Indigenous Abolitionist Study Guide, a curriculum designed by the Yellowhead Institute.
Find some inspiration from the Neighborhood Anarchist Collective. They created (and updated) a free resources guide for their city. Identify resources in your local area and make a zine to about them.
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thank you so much for your consistent and brilliant words 🌟
What a wonderful collection of resources/reads. Honored to be included, thank you!