Down to Earth, No Astroturf
The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized
“It's funny how money change a situation
Miscommunication lead to complication
My emancipation don't fit your equation
I was on the humble, you on every station
Some wan' play young Lauryn like she dumb
But remember not a game new under the sun…
…Now you wanna ball over separation
Tarnish my image in the conversation
Who you gon' scrimmage, like you the champion?
You might win some but you just lost one…”
— Lauryn Hill, Lost Ones, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
There is a work in the world that cannot be claimed, curated, or distilled into images or phrases meant to signal virtue. It is a current that flows quietly through the hands of those willing to endure long, uncelebrated hours, the trembling moments when patience stretches thin and the heart bears the weight of hope in spaces not yet ready to receive it. It is carried, not announced, tended like soil that cannot yet bloom, nurtured like a flame that must survive wind and shadow, sustained by courage that is steady, tender, and unassuming; a courage that does not seek applause but persists because it must, because the work is alive and cannot be left unattended.
Some move through this world believing that dismantling a structure grants them authority over what comes next, that tearing down a wall makes them the sole doorway, that loudly declaring allegiance to justice is equivalent to living it. They mistake reflection for performance, arrival for presence, spectacle for substance. They sparkle briefly, arrange their gestures like ornaments, and perform courage without ever having felt the tremor of fear that comes with facing their own ego before shifting the blame outward. They do not yet know what it means to carry responsibility, to carry care, to carry liberation across spaces that cannot be owned, measured, consumed, or curated into content.
For those of us who have walked this path for years, who have borne the labour, heartbreak, and slow persistence of change, there is a recognition that some who are new imagine themselves first — after all, some people are so far behind they think they are first — that they see the ground as unclaimed because they have not yet walked its worn paths, that they speak as if they are pioneers when the soil has already been tilled and nourished by countless hands before them. They forget the people who shared resources, time, labour, and knowledge; the people who loaned the books, gave advice that came not from self-aggrandizement but lived experience, and shared their words and wisdom without ever being cited.
I have travelled this terrain for years, my hands soil-stained and my heart stretched, carrying the weight of labour that rarely earns recognition. I have witnessed my words borrowed, lifted, even rewritten, by those who have only just stepped into this work, as if the soil had lain untouched until yesterday. I have noticed in the last year how social media feeds have shifted to reflect the RootED vibe and tried to bite its flavour, promises to share generously are too often replaced with extraction disguised as appreciation, a reminder that the work itself cannot be contained in a hashtag or a borrowed phrase. I have offered guidance, books, histories, names of those whose courage blazed paths before us, strategies for carrying the work with care and integrity… and yet been dismissed, discredited, or rendered invisible by the very people who have profited either monetarily or through social capital from the paths so many of us helped clear.
There are those who reach out not to walk alongside, but to measure if the path still bends toward them: to see if access remains, if the space you occupy can still be borrowed without consequence. They do not seek deeper connection, understanding, or growth; they only seek affirmation that the bridge exists on their terms. True presence asks for reciprocity; mere measurement mirrors the very hierarchies the work is meant to dismantle. The moment you step into their presence, their carefully constructed confidence trembles, their performance falters, and the illusion they carry so proudly is exposed by your mere existence and presence. The energy that can only exude through lived experience — through decades spent in the ebb and flow, the quiet and the gore, the glow and the grind of advocacy — carries a weight that cannot be borrowed or performed.
This is the kind of presence built across years, sometimes stretching across generations, tempered by endurance, humility, and patience. The word community gets thrown around a lot these days, invoked casually in commentary, in posts, in curated images, as if the mere declaration can replace care, labour, and reciprocity. Yet when that same language is wielded to gaslight, to extract recognition while denying accountability, or to claim martyrdom while silencing others, it is revealed for what it is: a hollow performance that masks absence of true connection. Community is not signalled in the posts we make or the phrases we recycle; it is felt in the consistency of presence, the unglamorous tending of spaces, and the courage to bear what must be carried so that others may grow without fear.
I have been witnessing the troubling use of martyrdom as a tool of gaslighting, a subtle performance of suffering meant to signal that one’s pain makes them more “real” or authentic than others, that their work carries more weight, that their presence alone grants authority (and never considering that others also carry wounds from this work that they do not creep into transactional or para-social hot-wired connections). This is the subtle performance of suffering that positions one’s pain as proof of being “more real” or more committed than others, as if endurance alone equals authority. It shows up in movements as a competitive currency: who has suffered most, who has burned out most spectacularly, who can wield exhaustion or injury as a weapon of legitimacy. This kind of performance can distort the collective, narrowing the focus to individual wounds rather than shared care, making solidarity conditional on who bleeds loudest. It becomes a way of silencing others, dismissing their contributions, or extracting recognition without reciprocity. The irony is that many of us carry wounds from this work, deep ones, but have chosen to metabolize them into care, reflection, and relationship rather than performances of pain. When martyrdom becomes a stage instead of a site of reckoning, it shifts the work away from liberation and toward spectacle, turning movements into contests of credibility instead of spaces of care. This is a quiet tyranny, a small but insidious assertion of control that mirrors the very hierarchies we claim to dismantle (after all, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get tear-gassed on the frontlines for the cause just to swap one boss for another, thank you very much!). The labour of care and liberation is not about counting victories or coronating authority; it is about the work itself, which has always moved through us, not solely because of one of us.
There is the credential micro-fascism that dismisses lived knowledge until it’s stamped with degrees, the professionalism micro-fascism that polices tone and attire more than it nurtures care or justice, the compassion micro-fascism that cloaks delay in the language of patience, the ally-ship (…has sailed?) micro-fascism that demands your gratitude for the bare minimum, the pedagogy micro-fascism that claims to empower but only seeks to reproduce itself. These are not headline-worthy tyrannies but quiet ones, everyday suffocations performed in boardrooms, classrooms, activist spaces, feeds, threads, kitchens, and conversations. Micro-fascism is not always loud. It does not always wear a uniform or raise a banner. It often hides in gestures, in the shaping of spaces, in the quiet insistence that one way is the only way. It thrives in the small, repeated choices that shape our interactions: in the refusal to listen fully, in the subtle elevation of self above others, in the quiet calibration of who is allowed to speak, to act, to belong. It is a shadow in our own impulses, a tide that rises slowly in moments of fear, pride, or exhaustion, shaping the contours of our communities long before anyone notices.
Micro-fascism lives not only in institutions or ideologies, but within us: in the impulses to dominate, to silence, to claim the narrative, to extract rather than share.
As Gilles Deleuze reminds us, fascism is not bound to a party, a spectrum, or an allegiance; it thrives in the patterns we replicate unconsciously, in the acts that close doors rather than open them, in the insistence that one’s perspective, one’s suffering, one’s authority is the final measure of truth. Calling it out is not accusation; it is reflection, vigilance, and care, the act of tending spaces so that power is not hoarded but shared, and so that liberation does not die in the shadow of ego.
True engagement requires vulnerability, patience, and reciprocity.
In these encounters, you see clearly the difference
between those who cultivate
labour, love, and liberation,
and those who merely curate
the idea of it.
There is a strange heaviness in loving the work so fully that your generosity is mistaken for weakness, that your patience and guidance become tools for extraction rather than partnership. Those who arrive late, yet move quickly, may sparkle and perform mastery, quoting voices they were introduced to through others, echoing lessons shared years before, forgetting that the roots beneath them were planted long ago with care. It is a solitude peculiar to those who have tended the flame through storms: witnessing imitation and appropriation, yet holding steady because the work is bigger than ego, bigger than recognition, and must endure beyond the small hands that would clutch at its glory.
The moment we replicate the patterns we claim to oppose (in subtle silences, in acts of isolation, in refusals to reflect) the work becomes undone. Authoritarianism does not live only in institutions or hierarchies; it lives quietly within us, in the impulses to dominate, to control, to claim the narrative, to shut others out, and it flourishes precisely in the moments we forget to look inward, when ego eclipses reflection, when fear masquerades as principle. Liberation is only as real as the integrity with which it is carried, the patience with which it is tended, and the humility with which it bends toward others.
The truly profound do not need recognition. They do not seek to dominate the story. They soil their hands, carry burdens invisible to others, endure exhaustion, doubt, and frustration because they understand that the work transcends any single person, any performance, any fleeting glitter of applause or following. They know that transformation is slow, cumulative, and often invisible, and that the path of liberation cannot be claimed; it must be lived, carried carefully, tended constantly, and passed forward with generosity.
Do not confuse the mannequins for their makers.
There is nothing revolutionary in hoarding knowledge, in acting as though the wisdom you carry sprang fully formed from your own hands. To hide the sources, the friend, the teachers, the books, the histories, is to mirror the very extraction we claim to oppose: a miniature capitalism, a whisper of colonialism, a practice of claiming the labour of others as your own. The truly radical act is to lift the veil, to point to the hands that tilled the soil before yours, to name the guides who shaped your path instead of vaguely tearing them down or keeping them in the shadows, to share generously without fear that doing so diminishes you. Liberation grows when credit flows as freely as the care that sustains it, when the golden eggs are tended collectively rather than hoarded behind walls of performance. As someone who has jokingly been referred to as the goose with the golden eggs (one question: did anyone ever ask the goose what the goose wanted?), I’ve felt what it means when knowledge, wisdom, and care are treated as resources to be taken rather than shared. Extraction doesn’t just borrow; it hollows you out, leaves your spirit diminished, your generosity exhausted, a life lightened of its vitality. That isn’t justice; it isn’t care; it isn’t liberation. True justice, true abundance, arrives only when the gifts we receive are honoured, acknowledged, and tended, so they can grow again for everyone, without leaving the giver drained, diminished, or disposed of. Knowledge, wisdom, and the seeds of practice are not ours to clutch or claim; they arrive to us from those who came before and must be passed on to those who follow.
To name the teachers, to lift the veil, to share generously: this is the quiet, radical act that sustains the work.
Hoarding diminishes the soil; generosity ensures the garden thrives.
Those who sparkle in performance may shine briefly, but they do not carry the labour, the care, the long persistence of true liberation. The work endures in those who cultivate patience, who risk vulnerability, who invite collaboration rather than command obedience, who allow accountability to be a bridge rather than a blade. It endures in spaces that are tender, luminous, and alive with possibility. It endures in hands and voices that have been tempered in quiet reflection and in those spaces the work becomes sacred, luminous, and unassailable.
Tending the Work: Reflections for Consideration
Where have you seen patterns of ego, authority, or exclusion creeping into your own work, and how might reflection guide you to undo them?
How do you invite others into the work rather than claiming it for yourself, and what does that invitation demand of you?
In what ways does your liberation work thrive quietly, beyond recognition, beyond spectacle, and how can you honour that persistence?
How do patience, humility, and long-term perspective shape the spaces you inhabit, especially when others are still learning their first steps?
Who are the makers whose labour you inherit, and how do you carry that legacy forward with integrity, care, and courage?
How do you ensure that the patterns you oppose are not quietly reproduced in your own practice, and how can reflection and accountability prevent harm from replicating?
When was the last time you thanked the person who made it possible for you to enter into the work?
Even as we ask these questions, even as we hold ourselves to the quiet labour of reflection, the currents of care continue to move.
Each act of accountability, each moment of patience, each invitation extended rather than denied, forms a rhythm that carries forward beyond our own vision, beyond our own lifetimes. The soil we tend now is not ours to claim; it is a shared space, a place where roots intertwine and the work becomes larger than any single heart.
To walk this path is to recognise both fragility and persistence, to meet exhaustion with care, and to meet ego with humility. The work asks us to bend, to grow, to soil our hands and our hearts, to open spaces that shimmer quietly with possibility, and to understand that the light we cultivate in others is the truest measure of what we carry. In this holding together, in this tending, the work becomes luminous.
The currents we follow ripple outward, shaping shores we may never see, and in that sacred, slow motion, the liberation we dream of takes root, carrying with it all that is patient, enduring, and real.
And if you’re wondering where I’ll be, picture this: decades from now, hair silver, mumu flowing, walker at the ready, still headfirst into the work of justice, still showing up with care, tears, and laughter. I didn’t come here for money, glory, or applause…just for the real, messy, beautiful work that matters. Twenty-five years in and decades more to go, still learning, still tending, and still stubbornly refusing to slow down.
…And so the story of us goes.
…But only if we give others their flowers.
So we bend, but don’t break;
we soil, but don’t shame;
we shine, but don’t enshrine.
We remember why we got here in the first place:
not to claim a crown,
not to polish a pedestal,
but to keep showing up,
hands dirty,
hearts open,
and occasionally laughing
at ourselves
along the way.
The only ego-tripping we condone is Nikki Giovanni’s and De La Soul’s,
— Ms. K
