Everyone loves to quote James Baldwin: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
But few people place that line in its full context. In the interview where Baldwin said it, he insisted that this act of love must be a two-way street. It is not enough that I hold you accountable; I must also hold the willingness to be corrected, to be edified, to be changed. Love is not a weapon of enlightenment but a mutual discipline.
For Baldwin, humility was the heartbeat of moral intelligence. His words deserve to be read completely:
“The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover. If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once. One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult. Many people cannot recognize it at all, that you may also be loved; love is like a mirror. In any case, if you do love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love.
Now, that’s a two-way street. You’ve also got to be corrected. As I said, the people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people. And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like. That’s how people grow up. An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.”
Baldwin was describing a love that is terrifying because it demands equality in vulnerability. To love someone is to risk discovery of one’s own blindness, to accept that you are incomplete, to meet the other as a mirror rather than as a pupil. The lover must also be the learner. This reciprocity, this willingness to be corrected, is the moral foundation of any movement that claims to seek justice.
Yet the landscape of activism today has forgotten that two-way street. Many speak the language of accountability but rarely of humility. Many call for justice but resist correction. The mirror has been replaced by a spotlight.
We now inhabit an age of name-brand activism, where followings are mistaken for movements and charisma for clarity. Activism has become, for too many, a form of self-marketing. The goal is no longer liberation but recognition. Attention becomes a substitute for transformation.
This archetype is easy to recognize. It speaks fluently about important issues but always with itself at the center. Its energy is directed not toward collective emancipation but toward personal elevation. It performs moral outrage as spectacle and measures influence by the number of eyes watching.
Such figures treat activism as an aesthetic, a career path, a genre of self-expression. They craft a persona of radicality that operates much like a corporate logo: instantly recognizable, emotionally charged, but detached from any real community of accountability. Their words sound revolutionary but rarely outline how revolution might be built through shared labor, democratic struggle, or mutual sacrifice.
Their performances thrive on self-importance. Each public posture, each curated statement, is designed to confirm their own virtue to an audience already inclined to admire them. The appearance of moral elevation becomes their proof of sincerity. Yet this constant performance of righteousness replaces real moral work. Posture becomes a shield against introspection.
This behavior usually unfolds within small, insular circles, micro-environments where the performer can reign as a moral authority. Within these spaces, they construct miniature fiefdoms of virtue, surrounding themselves with people who affirm their moral license and defer to their self-appointed expertise. Their authority depends on remaining inside these controlled habitats where dissent can be punished and where the illusion of purity can be maintained. These are not communities of practice but stages of control, each one arranged to preserve a hierarchy disguised as radical intimacy.
In this way, their activism becomes not merely misguided but counter-revolutionary. By converting movements of solidarity into spectacles of personality, they drain collective energy away from organizing and toward admiration. They reproduce, within movements for liberation, the same hierarchies of domination they claim to resist. They replace revolutionary imagination with celebrity logic. Every struggle becomes an opportunity to be seen, rather than an obligation to serve.
The result is a new kind of narcissism that hides behind the vocabulary of liberation. It is not always committed consciously. Many of these individuals genuinely believe they are serving justice, yet their deeper motive is a hunger for moral authority. They seek, often without realizing it, to become arbiters of righteousness, to wield anti-oppression as a credential that places them above others. In this psychology, activism is no longer a collective duty; it is a ladder to superiority.
This dynamic mirrors the very hierarchies justice work is meant to abolish. It transforms the language of emancipation into a method of control. The activist becomes an overseer of virtue, issuing decrees about purity, worthiness, and belonging. The oppressed are turned into props for the performance of empathy, and solidarity becomes a stage on which moral distinction is displayed.
Persona is theatre. It is pageantry that mimics conscience. The performative radical cloaks shallow analysis in the costume of profundity, borrowing the imagery and cadence of genuine revolutionaries while remaining unrooted in any collective practice. They employ evocative language to stir emotion, but the aim is not structural change; it is reverence. The spectacle ends where the applause does.
The unconscious desire at work in this archetype is not merely the pursuit of fame but something subtler and more corrosive: the need to feel superior through the posture of moral purity. It is the intoxication of being the one who knows, the one who sees what others cannot. This craving for authority masquerades as virtue, but its true function is domination. It reproduces, within the language of anti-oppression, the same psychology of the oppressor -- the will to command, to instruct, to stand above.
When activism is driven by this impulse, it loses its capacity for communion. Dialogue becomes lecture, and solidarity becomes hierarchy. The conversation that Baldwin imagined, a mutual awakening between equals, degenerates into one-way pronouncements. Love’s mirror becomes a pulpit.
The pursuit of justice cannot survive that transformation. Justice is a collective verb; it exists only in relationship. To demand liberation while seeking supremacy is to empty the word liberation of meaning. What masquerades as radicalism becomes simply another form of control.
True radicalism begins not in the will to dominate but in the courage to share power. It recognizes that no single person, however informed or impassioned, can embody every perspective or contain every truth. It understands that the wisdom required to transform the world emerges only through dialogue among the incomplete.
This is why Baldwin’s two-way street remains the essential moral compass. Love, consciousness, and justice are inseparable precisely because they are reciprocal. To love is to correct and to be corrected, to see and to be seen, to build a community of people willing to learn together rather than compete for moral supremacy.
The true activist does not seek authority. The true activist seeks understanding. They know that movements are not built by monologues but by shared labor, shared humility, and shared humanity. They do not use the suffering of others as a mirror for their own virtue. They build mirrors that face both ways.
If we fail to practice that reciprocity, we risk reproducing the very hierarchies we denounce. The greatest obstacle to liberation may not always be the cruelty of the oppressor but the self-righteousness of the would-be liberator. To love, as Baldwin wrote, is to make others conscious of what they cannot see. But it is also to accept the painful truth that we too are 'blind' until another helps us see.
The Illusion of Purity
No one is omniscient. No one monopolizes knowledge, thus no one holds the panacea for which strategies will lead to global justice.
No one embodies every oppression or understands every context in which power wounds the world. The variabilities of human existence and the infinite gradients of privilege and pain make absolute authority impossible. The honest response to that reality is humility. The dishonest one is hierarchy.
Yet humility alone is not enough. What must accompany it is the recognition that no one is without complicity in some form of injustice. Every one of us, even the most conscientious or “woke,” underestimates not only our proximity to oppression but our active participation in it. We mimic the hierarchies that have wounded us. We reproduce domination in our speech, in our friendships, in our silences, and in the ways we use others as instruments for our self-image. We consume what exploitation provides and rationalize our consumption as necessity, even when our purchases fund the very corporations that displace the poor, gentrify neighborhoods, and extract the lifeblood of the Global South. We enrich monopolies that pay starvation wages to workers in factories and to farmers whose land is poisoned for our convenience. We benefit from financial systems that launder the profits of war, that convert genocide into GDP, and that stabilize our comforts upon the wreckage of other peoples’ sovereignty.
None of us in the West are innocent. None of us are as morally-pure as our shame-based, brow-beating approach to 'moral correction' of others implicitly suggests we are.
We are inhabitants and beneficiaries of an empire whose foreign policy relies on proxy wars, sanctions, coups, and blockades that starve and bomb the very nations we claim to “save.” We vote in systems drawn by gerrymandering and enforced by police forces whose lineage traces to slave patrols. We pay taxes that underwrite mass incarceration and drone warfare alike. Even our silence -- the choice to “stay out of politics” -- is a contribution, because silence is what oppression most desperately requires.
We repeat prejudices that privilege us, even as we denounce privilege. We speak of liberation while practicing control, of equity while performing competition. We live upon lands whose histories we rarely name and within economies whose violence we prefer not to see. The refusal to confront these active continuities of domination does not purify us; it preserves the illusion that oppression is something done to us rather than something we also help sustain. True awareness is not self-exoneration but self-interrogation.
Assata Shakur once described her “revolutionary maturation” as a process of evolving from a “wide-eyed, romantic young revolutionary” into someone tempered by struggle, humility, and love for her people. Her words capture what many fail to realize: that revolutionary growth is not the hardening of conviction but the softening of ego. To mature politically is to recognize that justice requires tenderness, that clarity demands listening, and that revolution without self-transformation simply reproduces the world it seeks to overthrow.
When movements forget this, they begin to imitate the structures they were born to resist. Authority reappears, not in uniform or title, but in tone. It manifests in those who speak as if they alone possess the blueprint of liberation.
The hallmark of this impulse is the belief that purity equals credibility. The activist becomes a moral bureaucrat, policing infractions, distributing condemnation, and guarding the gates of righteousness. Correction replaces curiosity. They mistake rigidity for integrity and domination for discipline. In doing so, they abandon the radical humility that makes collective growth possible.
The culture of “call-outs” grows from this soil. Calling out injustice is necessary when it confronts harm, exploitation, or deceit. But when it becomes the only mode of engagement, when a person’s entire contribution to political life is accusation, the practice decays into performance. Outrage becomes a currency, and the movement becomes a market.
This form of moral purism is seductive because it promises clarity in a world that is complex and painful. It feels powerful to divide people neatly into guilty and innocent, oppressed and oppressor, clean and contaminated. But reality resists that simplification. Every one of us carries both complicity and capacity. Every one of us has been harmed and has harmed others. Refusing to acknowledge this duality does not make us righteous; it makes us dishonest.
Without self-awareness, the individual begins to imagine themself only as the educator and never the educable. They assume the role of the moral instructor and exclude the possibility that they might still have something to learn from people they believe they know more than, especially from those they have grown accustomed to correcting. The finger that points outward never bends inward. They wag it at others so often that its movement becomes reflexive. This reflex is not courage but fear -- the fear of being taught, of being seen, of being wrong.
Once the individual believes themself beyond correction, dialogue collapses. The other becomes an audience, not a partner. What begins as a politics of liberation devolves into a pedagogy of domination, where some speak and others listen, some correct and others are corrected. That hierarchy, though clothed in the language of justice, reproduces the logic of the oppressor: that some are born to instruct and others to obey.
The hyperfixation on purity therefore fragments communities that should be united by shared struggle. People become afraid to speak, to ask, or to err. Dialogue dies, replaced by surveillance. The horizontal relationships that make liberation real are flattened into vertical arrangements of judges and defendants. Movements that once promised collective awakening devolve into tribunals of perpetual accusation.
This is how moral absolutism becomes counter-revolutionary. It converts solidarity into suspicion and transforms comrades into competitors for moral rank. It replaces the labor of organizing with the theater of condemnation. Each new denunciation provides a brief feeling of power, but nothing is built, healed, or changed. The structure of oppression remains untouched, while the energy that could dismantle it is spent policing each other’s tone, vocabulary, or perceived impurity.
We must name this for what it is: a spiritual mimicry of the very systems we oppose. The logic of the carceral state -- the urge to isolate, punish, and publicly shame -- reappears in miniature inside activist spaces. We condemn the prisons of stone yet construct prisons of language. We reproduce domination at the level of discourse, even while speaking of liberation.
The alternative is not silence about harm but a transformation in how we respond to it. Accountability must be relational rather than retributive. It must arise from the desire to restore rather than to display. To correct someone should never be to annihilate them. To be corrected should not feel like exile but like invitation.
This is the moral shift Paulo Freire described when he wrote that education must be a dialogue among the unfinished. The moment we imagine ourselves finished -- perfectly woke, perfectly righteous -- we cease to learn. We close the circuit that allows growth. Freire called this the banking model of morality: the idea that the enlightened deposit truth into the ignorant. Its opposite, problem-posing, treats every person as both knower and learner, every exchange as an act of mutual creation.
Problem-posing education affirms [humans] as beings in the process of becoming -- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not historical, people know themselves to be unfinished; they are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation.
The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity. Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become. Its “duration”…is found in the interplay of the opposites permanence and change. The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary; problem-posing education -- which accepts neither a “well-behaved” present nor a predetermined future -- roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary.
Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and, as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of humankind. Hence, it affirms [people] as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the movement which engages people as beings aware of their incompletion -- an historical movement which has its point of departure, its Subjects and its objective.
To organize for justice is to adopt that same orientation. It is to understand that no revolution can survive the arrogance of certainty. The power of a movement lies not in its ability to punish error but in its ability to transform it into insight.
Humility is the only solvent strong enough to dissolve that structure. Humility is not self-abasement. It is the recognition that truth is collective, that insight is rotational, that we depend on one another to see what we cannot alone. Without humility, justice becomes theater; with it, justice becomes practice.
To live this principle is difficult because it demands emotional discipline. It requires that we pause before condemnation and ask: Is my correction an act of love or an act of dominance? It requires us to ask whether our desire to expose is rooted in care or in the thrill of superiority. It forces us to recognize that every “call-out” which lacks love simply replicates the violence it condemns.
A movement cannot thrive on fear. A community cannot heal through humiliation. A revolution cannot be led by those who refuse to be led in turn.
We must therefore cultivate a new kind of courage -- the courage to be unfinished. To admit incompleteness is not weakness but wisdom. It acknowledges that liberation is not a sermon delivered by the enlightened to the ignorant, but a conversation among equals struggling toward clarity.
In that light, the true radical is not the loudest accuser but the most persistent learner. The truest revolutionary is not the one who appears unblemished, but the one who turns every mistake into a bridge of understanding.
Our task is not to perform purity but to practice growth. The point is not to be seen as right but to become more whole together.
This is what Baldwin meant when he said love is a two-way street. It is what Freire meant when he described human beings as beings in the process of becoming. Justice, then, is not a possession we guard; it is a horizon we walk toward, hand in hand, aware that we will stumble, aware that only in stumbling together will we learn to move as one.
The Rise of a Priestly-Class
When movements lose humility, they do not vanish; they mutate. Authority returns wearing the language of liberation. The old hierarchies find new homes in the hearts of those who believe they have transcended them. Out of this mutation emerges a familiar figure dressed in new robes: the priest of moral purity.
They are not activists. They are priests.
A new priestly-class has arisen within movements for justice. Fluent in the vocabulary of liberation yet anchored in the psychology of domination, they convert struggle into spectacle. Their power comes not from building collectives but from performing righteousness. They speak as if moral clarity were a crown to be worn rather than a light to be shared.
This priestly-class confuses persuasion with command. They sermonize instead of organize, moralize instead of mobilize. They preach from digital pulpits and classrooms, collecting followers who equate eloquence with wisdom. Their congregations gather in comment sections, conferences, and collectives, where confession takes the form of public apology and redemption depends on popularity.
They do not build movements; they build micro-empires of reverence. Within these small domains they occupy the highest moral rank, turning their social circles into private fiefdoms where their word is law and dissent is blasphemy. They cultivate dependence among their followers by presenting themselves as the sole interpreters of justice. Their validation becomes currency; their displeasure, punishment.
The danger is not simply hypocrisy but inversion. What begins as an effort to dismantle domination becomes domination performed in the name of its abolition. The priestly-class reproduces the architecture of the oppressor by creating castes of the “pure” and the “impure,” the enlightened and the fallen. Instead of liberating conscience, they police it. Instead of awakening dialogue, they enforce conformity.
Every epoch of power invents its own clergy. Today’s clergy is secular and self-anointed, claiming revolutionary authority through cultural fluency rather than divine sanction. They curate moral personas with the same precision that corporations curate brands. They understand that outrage attracts attention, and attention is the new capital. Thus, they perfect the aesthetics of radicalism while remaining untouched by its risks.
Their tools are accusation and performance. The call-out becomes their ritual; the denunciation, their sermon. Each spectacle of condemnation reinforces their status as gatekeepers of virtue. The crowd cheers, the algorithms reward them, and the machinery of spectacle replaces the machinery of change.
Such behavior is not revolutionary. It is counter-revolutionary. It drains movements of solidarity and replaces it with hierarchy. It shifts attention from systems to individuals, from structures to personalities. It converts collective energy into admiration and fear.
They speak of accountability but practice humiliation. They invoke compassion but weaponize it into coercion. They claim transparency yet conceal their hunger for dominance beneath the language of justice. Their authority grows through fear of exclusion, not through trust in shared humanity.
What makes this phenomenon so perilous is its sincerity. Many among the priestly-class begin with genuine conviction. They are often people once wounded by injustice who have mistaken trauma for insight and pain for permission. In their quest to never be powerless again, they recreate the power they despised. Without realizing it, they become administrators of the very cruelty they survived.
Many who fall into this priestly archetype are not oppressors in the conventional sense. They do not belong to populations with majority or structural power. They often come from histories and identities marked by deprivation, subordination, and humiliation. For much of their lives, they have seen power only as something imposed upon them, as domination. They have known power chiefly through its cruelty and through the feeling of being made small beneath it. Within their new micro-environments of activism or conscience, they unconsciously seize the opportunity to reverse that dynamic. They discover, often without realizing it, the intoxicating sensation of standing above others in moral rank. Their instrument for doing so is moral correction: the authority to judge, to accuse, to define purity and sin. In this posture, they become the moral police of their peers, reproducing in social spaces the same surveillance, suspicion, and punitive logic once imposed upon them by the state. Through this inversion, they find momentary relief from the lifelong imprint of weakness and subjection by exercising the same logic of control that once wounded them.
This pattern is not born of malice but of injury. It reveals how unhealed trauma can disguise itself as self-righteousness. As Paulo Freire observed, the oppressed may internalize the logic of the oppressor, mistaking domination for freedom. That is "oppressor consciousness". To decolonize the self, therefore, is not only to resist external structures of control but to unlearn the reflex to dominate in turn, especially when that domination arrives clothed in virtue.
Their rhetoric and oratory are often convincing. They rise in social rank by mastering the grammar of outrage, speaking with a performative urgency that masquerades as depth. Their cadence is moral, their tone prophetic, their confidence unbroken. Yet beneath the surface of conviction lies a dependence on the very hierarchies they claim to dismantle. They do not seek equality, but elevation. They do not cultivate dialogue, but obedience. Their moral theater depends on an audience, and their authority survives only so long as others accept their script.
The priestly class performs virtue as spectacle. Their activism is not a movement toward humanization, but a performance of moral superiority. Like the clergy of empires past, they consecrate the language of liberation while quietly reinstating the structure of domination. They manufacture reverence. They sanctify hierarchy. And in doing so, they turn the struggle for justice into a church of control.
The priestly-class endures because it satisfies a universal temptation: the desire to be right without being responsible, to condemn without self-reflection, to feel radical without taking risk. It allows one to inhabit the appearance of revolution while remaining comfortably within the order that revolution threatens.
And so movements decay from within. The priestly-class converts the space of mutual education into a tribunal of moral inspection. Those who dissent are not engaged but expelled. Those who question are not answered but silenced. The collective imagination that could build new worlds is consumed by anxiety about transgression.
This internal authoritarianism mirrors the external one it claims to fight. Both depend on obedience, spectacle, and fear. Both rely on the same psychological architecture: the belief that purity is attainable and authority is deserved. The difference is only aesthetic.
The antidote is not cynicism but clarity. We must learn to recognize priestly behavior in ourselves and in our movements before it hardens into institution. True leadership is measured not by control but by its capacity to create leaders out of others. True authority is the ability to distribute power, not to hoard it.
A movement that cannot question its own priests will eventually serve them. A community that confuses charisma with conscience will repeat history’s oldest tragedy: the replacement of one hierarchy with another.
To resist this, we must return to humility as a collective discipline. We must create cultures where correction is mutual, not punitive; where disagreement is an act of faith in each other’s humanity. We must replace performance with practice, competition with cooperation, moral exhibition with moral endurance.
The revolutionary does not seek worship but understanding. The measure of one’s politics is not how fiercely one condemns others but how deeply one transforms the self in the pursuit of becoming a vehicle of liberatory social transformation. The purpose of justice is not to create saints but to build societies capable of compassion.
Only then can we escape the cycle in which yesterday’s oppressed become tomorrow’s overseers. Only then can we remember that liberation is not achieved by the purity of a few but by the shared humanity of the many.
The Machinery of Empire Lives Inside Us All
The architecture of domination within movements is not unique to them; it mirrors the logic of the state itself. Every empire is a perfected priesthood, armed and industrialized. Like the self-righteous activist who cannot admit error, the state cannot admit its own incompleteness. It must present itself as whole, infallible, and eternal. This denial of incompleteness, the refusal to recognize its dependence on those it governs, is the psychological root of authoritarianism.
From this pathology grows the modern machinery of empire: the police, the prison, the military, and the corporation. Each operates upon the same premise of totality, the belief that power must never confess its limits. The state demands obedience and calls it order; it demands silence and calls it peace.
The police are the local expression of empire. They perform domestically what armies perform abroad. Both claim to preserve stability, yet both exist to preserve hierarchy. The uniform changes, but the function does not: to protect property, to discipline dissent, to extract compliance through fear. The prison then receives those whom the police select, transforming poverty and protest into crimes, and supplying cheap labor to the same industries that fund their construction.
These institutions are not isolated. They form an ecosystem of coercion, linked by shared technologies, ideologies, and profits. The same companies that build surveillance systems for the Pentagon sell them to local police departments. The same defense contractors that arm foreign wars provide the equipment for domestic crowd control. The same logic that justifies occupation abroad justifies militarization at home. Empire is not an event overseas; it is a way of life.
The denial of incompleteness is what allows this machinery to function. The state must believe that it is complete, that its violence is rational, that its borders are natural, that its victims are collateral rather than human. Any admission of dependence, of vulnerability, of fallibility, would unravel its myth of necessity. The empire survives by insisting it has no alternative.
In this way, empire colonizes not only land but also imagination. It teaches the governed to see domination as destiny, and consumption as freedom. It convinces inhabitants that their comfort depends on others’ misery. It transforms injustice into routine and then conceals the routine beneath the language of progress.
This is why the struggle for justice cannot be national alone. Domestic liberation cannot exist apart from global liberation. The police that murder the poor in one country are trained by the armies that occupy the poor in another. The corporations that evict families through gentrification are financed by the same banks that profit from war. The same economic order that cages children at the border extracts lithium from Indigenous land and bombs villages across oceans.
If we speak of abolition, it must be abolition in the fullest sense: not only the abolition of prisons or police, but the abolition of empire itself. Abolition is not destruction for its own sake; it is the recovery of human completeness. It is the recognition that our survival depends on one another, that we are unfinished beings who must build systems of care rather than systems of control.
The moral courage to confront empire begins with the same humility that Freire described: the awareness that we are incomplete, that we can learn only through relationship, and that the refusal of dialogue is the first act of dehumanization. The state fears dialogue because dialogue decentralizes authority. Conversation is a form of equality. Listening is a form of revolution.
Empire, by contrast, depends on monologue. It speaks, and we listen. It commands, and we obey. It defines, and we repeat. Its language becomes the air we breathe: “security,” “development,” “democracy.” Each word conceals a weapon. Each slogan replaces a thought.
To dismantle this machinery, we must unlearn the habits that built it. We must replace the impulse for domination with the practice of relationship. We must recognize that power, when shared, multiplies rather than diminishes. The future belongs not to those who command but to those who cooperate.
We cannot revolutionize society until we revolutionize our selves.
If we fail to understand this, each movement will remain a mouse climbing the same elephant. The mouse may shout, may scratch, may even wound, but the elephant moves on. The elephant is empire: vast, armored, unreflective, yet sustained by our belief in its permanence. The mouse is the isolated movement, righteous but small, moral but divided. Only when the mice recognize one another across boundaries of race, nation, and ideology do they become more than prey.
To challenge empire is to abandon the fantasy of purity and embrace the practice of solidarity. It is to replace the pursuit of innocence with the pursuit of maturity. It is to understand that liberation is not achieved by perfection but by cooperation.
We are incomplete beings, each of us as individuals, and therefore we need one another, not as ornament or comfort, but because relationship itself is the condition of becoming human. Freire meant that human beings are unfinished beings who grow only through dialogue and work with others. Completion is not a solitary achievement; it is a shared process of transformation.
True relationship is horizontal. It rejects hierarchy of intellect or virtue. It asks for the humility to be corrected, the courage to correct, and the faith that both are acts of love. Yet we enter these relationships carrying wounds and contradictions. Each of us bears the imprint of the systems that have shaped us, the traumas that have disciplined our emotions, and the hierarchies that have taught us how to see and value one another.
The oppressor’s blueprint lives within us, often silently and unconsciously, guiding how we speak, organize, and even love. To humanize one another, therefore, is not to pretend purity, but to recognize that we are each traversed by what we seek to abolish. Our task is to bring these internalized structures into the light of relationship, where they can be named, challenged, and healed through reciprocity. True relationship is not a contest. It is not a competition of virtue or intellect. It does not turn the space between us into an arena of domination. It requires what might be called revolutionary graciousness: the strength to confront without degrading, the willingness to be confronted, to correct without humiliating, to lead without possessing, and to learn without fear.
Our growth depends on our willingness to participate in each other’s development, to listen without presumption, and to speak without domination. Isolation is the logic of oppression; reciprocity is the logic of liberation. Our completion exists only in the shared labor of creating a world where no one teaches or learns alone, where every encounter becomes a lesson in how to be more human than we were before.
The Discipline of Solidarity
Paulo Freire warned that “the oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination: the earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time -- everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.”
This is the essence of dehumanization: the conversion of subjects into instruments. It is also the thread that binds empire, capitalism, and the narcissistic activism that mistakes control for care. Whether through armies or through words, through prisons or through social media, the same mentality repeats itself. It seeks to command rather than to relate, to own rather than to understand, to use rather than to learn.
Freire’s warning reveals the moral foundation of our time. The oppressor consciousness does not disappear when the oppressed rise; it mutates. It hides in the desire to dominate even the struggle for liberation. It tempts activists to use others as props for their virtue. It teaches us to treat disagreement as blasphemy and solidarity as obedience. To resist it, we must practice a new ethic: a discipline of solidarity grounded in reciprocity and humility.
The most visible machinery of this consciousness is the military-industrial complex. It is the global altar upon which the modern world sacrifices both human life and ecological stability. Factories of death call themselves industries of defense. Budgets written in blood are praised as fiscal responsibility. From the Pentagon to the prison yard, violence is industrialized into a profession. The police are its domestic branch; the military, its foreign arm. Corporations build its body, and the myth of “security” animates its soul.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw this system clearly when he broke his political silence on Vietnam. He understood that the same nation that denied justice to Black Americans also denied humanity to Vietnamese peasants. To denounce one injustice while remaining silent about another was, in his words, a “betrayal of the poor.” He recognized that selective opposition to injustice -- condemning racism at home while excusing imperialism abroad -- is moral cowardice disguised as strategy. He was assassinated within a year of naming that truth.
Selective opposition persists today. Many activists champion causes that pose no threat to their careers, reputations, or national comfort. They denounce what is already unpopular and remain silent where conviction demands risk. In this way, the language of liberation becomes a form of self-protection, a script that replaces transformation with performance.
The antidote is solidarity, understood not as sentiment but as discipline. Solidarity is the practice of building together what none of us can build alone. It is what Karl Marx called the “association of free beings,” and what Angela Davis describes as “the shared recognition of each other’s struggles and need for collective liberation.” Solidarity is therefore not empathy alone but organized mutuality. It is not charity but co-creation.
Reciprocity is the lifeblood of solidarity. It is distinct from transaction, for it does not mean “I help you because you helped me.” It means “your liberation is bound up with mine.” Reciprocity is both an ethic and a method. It requires the humility to learn from those we claim to serve, and the willingness to let their insights transform our own. It rejects hierarchy in favor of dialogue, suspicion in favor of trust, and competition in favor of cooperation.
Through reciprocity, activism becomes education in Freire’s sense: a mutual process of humanization. Each person is both teacher and learner, wounded and healer, incomplete and completing. To humanize one another is to admit that we are shaped by the same histories we are trying to overcome. We are all marked by systems that taught us how to dominate and how to fear. Liberation begins when we enter relationship conscious of these scars, willing to correct and be corrected, and courageous enough to practice what might be called revolutionary graciousness: the ability to confront without degrading, to lead without possessing, and to build power without reproducing hierarchy.
Dehumanization, by contrast, is fragmentation. It reduces people to their single traits, their worst moments, or their best slogans. It inventories the “good” and “bad” of a person while erasing their wholeness. It treats people as objects of moral accounting rather than subjects in a shared struggle. Humanization restores totality. It insists that justice requires seeing others in their full, contradictory humanity, not as instruments for our redemption.
Solidarity must therefore extend beyond the borders of identity. Within the United States, no single group holds the demographic power or institutional leverage to dismantle white supremacy alone. The population itself testifies to the necessity of coalition:
- Latin American 18.5 percent
- Black 13.4 percent
- Asian 5.9 percent
- Indigenous 1.3 percent
- Arab 1.1 percent
- Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander 0.2 percent
- Two or more races 2.8 percent
- White approximately 59 percent
If each community fights in isolation, every effort becomes a mouse climbing a mighty elephant. The elephant is empire -- vast, armored, unreflective, yet dependent on the small creatures it crushes. Only through coordinated, interracial, and international solidarity can the mice move together and force the elephant to reckon with its own weight.
The same logic applies globally. The police who occupy poor neighborhoods are trained by the soldiers who occupy foreign nations. The same corporations that gentrify American cities displace Indigenous farmers to mine lithium and gold. The same banks that fund prisons finance wars. Oppression is coordinated, and so must be our response.
Abolition, then, must mean more than the closure of prisons or the defunding of police. It must mean the abolition of empire itself, the dismantling of a global order built on domination. Abolition is not destruction for its own sake. It is the re-creation of a world in which the human being, not the hierarchy, is sacred. It is the refusal to measure worth by productivity, or belonging by obedience. It is the courage to imagine care as the organizing principle of society.
Angela Davis and Malcolm X both reminded us that liberation confined to national borders is only another form of nationalism. “You cannot understand what is happening in Mississippi if you do not understand what is happening in the Congo,” Malcolm said, because every local oppression is a chapter in a global system. Each act of resistance, likewise, becomes a spark in a shared constellation of freedom.
To practice solidarity is to reject the worldview of the oppressor consciousness. It is to refuse to see the world as a hierarchy of value, or people as objects of use. It is to dismantle the fantasy of innocence and replace it with the discipline of relationship. It is to understand that human beings are unfinished creatures who must grow through one another, not above one another.
True solidarity requires patience, humility, and revolutionary graciousness. It demands that we confront power without imitating it. It asks that we transform conflict into dialogue and guilt into accountability. It invites us to imagine movements that do not compete for purity but cooperate for wholeness.
Humanization is both the method and the goal. Freire called it the process through which we “become more fully human,” not by withdrawing from struggle but by entering it with love, courage, and reciprocity. It is what turns resistance into creation, and justice into community.
If we wish to abolish the oppressor consciousness, we must first abolish it within ourselves. We must refuse to use others as instruments of our righteousness. We must replace domination with dialogue, and purity with participation. We must build movements where correction is mutual, where leadership is shared, and where justice is indistinguishable from love.
The world we seek will not be granted by any institution or priesthood. It will be created by ordinary people learning, again and again, how to see one another as whole. That is the discipline of solidarity. That is the beginning of freedom.
Toward a Human Future
James Baldwin taught that love is the act of making one another conscious, and Paulo Freire taught that consciousness itself is born in relationship. Both understood that freedom is not a possession but a process, a continual becoming through each other. We are unfinished beings who grow only in the presence of others, and the measure of that growth is the degree to which our awareness turns into care.
To love, then, is not to soothe but to awaken. It is to help another see what they could not see alone, and to allow ourselves to be seen in return. It is the daily labor of reciprocity, of building relationships that refuse domination and choose transformation.
Solidarity is love matured into politics. It is love made public, disciplined, and organized against the machinery of dehumanization. It is the courage to act on behalf of one another, across the borders that empire draws, in order to recover what empire denies: the shared dignity of the human being.
To be human is to be incomplete, and to be incomplete is to need one another. In that need lies the possibility of a new world, not ruled by the oppressor consciousness, but guided by the humble art of mutual becoming.