What matters is that we do not let moments like this pass without thinking. Hard. What matters is that we question what happened and notice what didn’t, make connections to histories, between movements. If we’re surprised, we can ask if there was anything we missed, and why. If we’re not surprised, we must, I think, brush away cynicism, which is the enemy of action. In moments like this we need to figure out what we need to figure out, then act on it any way we can.

The turn of the year is a few days away. This year, “good riddance” is everywhere. I think that may be a mistake.

Punishment is not working. It is not keeping black and brown people safe from police shootings. It is not keeping first responders safe from violence. It is not supporting loving families, housing and food for children. It is not keeping disabled and trans people safe from beatings and worse. It has not made the lives of victims of violence more whole.

…there is another kind of witness to consider, the kind of witness that works against forgetting, that requires us to scrutinize our lives for their impact in the world. This other kind of witness is defined by its staying power and its consequence. This kind of witness is weighted by strong imagery, so it shows up in stories and poems, in dance, music and visual art.

Attacking the fearful strengthens fear. Strengthening fear easily hardens into hate, hate too often extends to violence, and reinforces systemic injustice. So it stands to reason that attacking fearful people is antithetical to liberatory change. As a friend of mine, a long-time labor organizer, said to me once, it’s just bad strategy.

Too often in history people in power, no matter their politics, have demanded allegiance to answers built on ideas they believe in as much as I believed in those stones. They might be right, and their answers may deliver what they promise, but they are just as likely wrong, or they were right at the time but like the ground under my woodshed, things changed. Still, many have died simply for questioning somebody’s idea of a solid stone.

We ignore others’ complexity at our peril because complexity reflects our full humanity, and no one who claims the cause of liberatory change can with integrity diminish that light in anyone.

Race is not real in any biological sense. Racism is very real, dangerously so. In order to be in loving family with each other, multi-racial families must live in that complexity, seeing each other as fully human, transcending race, while at the same time acknowledging racism and our very different experiences of it.

Welcome to the ILI community. With this first newsletter, we're "going public" with our work and our mission to create opportunities for change-makers to meet at the intersections of thinking, action, and connection to experiment and learn together and generate strategies for a more just future. We're glad you're here to think with us.

Resistance to the changes called for in these weeks is already fierce, on the street, on social media, in the highest levels of national leadership. If this is simply a panic brought on by a killing that was finally unspeakable enough for white people who had remained on the sidelines before, will it stand up to a well-organized, determined and powerful resistance?

I’m suggesting that the knee-jerk response of naming a person who commits a racist murder as singularly evil will do nothing to undermine -- and arguably feeds -- racism. That defeats the purpose of the work of anti-racism, which is to insistently, persistently starve racism out. To that end we need to be focused, disciplined and strategic, and inviting violence is just strategically unsou

Serious work for change has always required disciplined commitment. This moment is no different, and it begins with disciplined personal behavior. Undisciplined action will not advance equity and non-violence.

The work of the Institute is focused on liberatory social change rather than liberation. The difference is significant.