Radicalized Through Failure: My Journey to Socialism and Beyond
The theater of my mind screens embarrassing memories on a predictable loop. Charting somewhere in the top ten of this list of shameful tales, I often recall how I told a classmate in high school that I believed her spirit would endure in hell after her passing because her conceptualization of Jesus missed the mark. Even if she herself were certain that such an afterlife did not exist, her expression displayed the harm I’d caused. Indeed, even if I believed hell constitutes literal “eternal conscious torment” for anyone who didn’t confess their sins and claim Jesus is Lord – and I really did – my vocalization of this was an act of violence, and I recognized it the moment my lips stopped. My shame won’t let me forget this harm, even as I fumble toward forgiving myself (thank god for therapy).
This interaction troubled my ability to cling to the religious tenet in question. A few years later, Brian McLaren’s writing opened my heart to the possibility that hell was better understood as a metaphor, a characterization that still drew from and respected the scripture I now realize was functionally holier in the tradition of my upbringing than the deity we claimed to worship. Rob Bell’s writing later convinced me through Love Wins, the text that exiled him from his parish. I would come to believe that the threat of hell was another weapon of white supremacy and colonization used to exploit and oppress people worldwide. I realized I was wrong and it radicalized me.
On another occasion in adolescence, my coworker and I drove past a Black boy riding his bike. I remarked aloud – and I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this – “you know, this is kind of racist, but whenever I see a Black person riding a bike, I assume they stole it.” Conservative as my colleague was at the time, he responded “yep, that’s pretty racist” and my heart sank. This memory has endured as an ulcer in my neck ever since.
Through discovering Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing among others, I would come to learn, of course, that racism is principally a structure or system, exerting the most harm through institutions, laws, and cultural norms. But interpersonal and intrapersonal racism perform these systems in everyday life in no less violent manifestations. Sure, what I uttered reflected the white supremacy of the water I was born into and through which I still paddle, norms interwoven in the fabric of our society for centuries, but my choices reinforced this oppression. It’s beliefs like these that generate literal murder of Black people all the time. I failed my cyclist neighbor that day and it radicalized me.
I arrived at Vanderbilt Divinity School fresh from undergrad, believing myself to have evolved to an impressive extent. Indeed, in 2008 I had voted for John McCain, fearing Democrats’ influence over the Supreme Court, but by 2012, Obama was too conservative for me, so I opted for Jill Stein at the ballot box. What a transformation! Thankfully so, given the prior story. But my shortcomings continued, if in subtler ways. Michelle Alexander’s writing taught me, for example, that mass incarceration of Black people constitutes a “New Jim Crow” era. I learned that the so-called war on drugs was conceived and executed as a war on Black people. In response, I promoted policies like “community policing,” espousing the notion that people are less likely to be incarcerated by law enforcement officers who share their ethnicity. We just need more Black cops, and maybe some body cameras and community oversight boards, I believed.
Encompassing but far surpassing academic analysis by rooting in lived experience, more compelling writing showed me that policing belongs to a broader industrial complex itself born from enslavement and colonization, enduring through capitalism. I found teachers in Derecka Purnell, Mariame Kaba, Andrea Ritchie, Patrisse Cullors, Rachael Herzing, Angela Y. Davis, and many others who pointed out that policing and prison do nothing to prevent nor heal harm and only exact more violence. I realized I had been wrong to think that reforms to policing were possible. It radicalized me.
If I were to predict the click rates at any given etymology website, I hypothesize that the word “radical” receives above-average attention. Such is the unoriginality of the point that radical stems from the word for root; think radish, the root vegetable. When I speak of radicalization, I don’t shy away from its additional definition pertaining to extremity, but I visualize a root system. Learning from my mistakes, especially when I have caused harm, nurtures my spiritual roots. When new knowledge matures into wisdom, I feel my roots deepening into the soil of my truest self, which is the same substance of humanity at its best. I feel more integrated into being itself. It’s not about becoming more “right”; it’s about connecting to ourselves and, especially for those of us who are non-Indigenous, to the ancestral wisdom capitalism has sequestered from us.
Still imperfect, but I contend that this provides a richer image than our conventional understanding of the span of political orientations. Few Americans’ political positions would situate them squarely at the poles of the Left-Right binary. Understanding this, we add terms like moderate to align some elsewhere on the spectrum. Within this so-called left of center, we are sure to differentiate liberals from progressives from leftists. I count myself among such leftists, but I dispute the term because the left-right spectrum is false. One person can contain far too many configurations of political positions than can be situated on a line; the geometry is a three-dimensional web, if anything. Moreover, the binary encourages uncritical groupthink, forcing people into categories that do not represent them and do not require their engagement. Indeed, this manifests in just two major political parties who take turns inhibiting substantive progress to any social-justice issue for which we organize, but that’s another article still in gestation.
In my favorite articulation, socialism avoids questions of the fidelity of our leftness, but rather casts many visions for a more just and loving society. My commitment to antiracism (even if originally inspired by alleviating my white guilt) led me to abolition: the more I studied, the more I was convinced that no vision for racial justice could abide carcerality nor its myriad manifestations of imprisonment and death-making. The best pathway to racial justice is abolition because it mobilizes us to destroy racist structures. Abolition exposed to me the artifacts that created and continue to perpetuate oppression and injustice. Socialism is abolition’s sibling, pointing to the formations we could conjure to foster the tenets of a loving society: where we have repaired harm and violence, where everyone’s needs are met, where the notion of wealth inequality might strike us as fictitious.
In a sense, socialism is to capitalism what abolition is to carcerality. A socialist analysis recognizes that capitalism exists to enforce inequality and a racial caste system through hoarding resources for the overwhelmingly white ruling class. Capitalism is how colonization and enslavement (which themselves go hand in hand) cemented and became more palatable as the economy itself. Because that’s true, it can never be made just. The best pathway to racial justice is socialism because it facilitates the means by which we repair the harms of racist violence and build a world of liberation and wholeness. I am radicalized by socialist dreams.
And so I found myself at Socialism2024, hosted by Haymarket Books, a publisher of texts that changed my life, as would the conference itself. The experience was both liberating and disruptive, affirming and challenging, invigorating and depleting. I found my people there, but also felt like an outsider. And my people disagree with each other, but in more generative and complex ways than any other political environment I’ve witnessed. Because we assumed familiarity and agreement on certain analyses, we could spend our energy excavating the nuances of more complex issues, encouraging and challenging each other in our commitments to liberation and revolutionary love. I had been worried that attendees would be dominated by white philosophy bros too eager to school others on Marxist-Leninism. But I was thrilled to perceive that the extent to which the sessions were academic was in the tutelage of radical scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Academics shared the stage with formerly incarcerated abolitionists, tenant organizers, union workers, harm reductionists, sex workers, clergy, unhoused people, trans activists, and many, many advocates for Palestinian liberation. It was the most intellectually and spiritually enriched environment I’ve ever witnessed. It radicalized me.
It is commonplace in my field to assert that while it is centrally a housing problem, homelessness touches every other social-justice issue we may care about. As a result, we know we need to educate ourselves and follow developments in other sectors, but it’s overwhelming to do so. As such, and for other reasons, the nonprofit industrial complex fragments into thousands of specificities, each claiming that justice in their issue is essential to success in others. Socialism, I suggest, offers us a pathway to weave these threads into the fabric of liberation where they belong, actualizing the maxim that my liberation is bound up in yours and yours in mine.
To paint an image of my spiritual roots growing deeper and stronger is not to suggest that I am becoming immutable. Roots certainly stabilize a tree, but they also absorb more nutrients; as it grows, the greater is its capacity to ingest more and to change. More complex root systems better connect me to the forest itself, facilitating my participation in a superorganism in which I am both valued and nonessential. And this community radicalizes me still. In ten years or whatever, my mindspace theater may project new embarrassing memories that have not yet come to pass. I may even shudder to remember this website as a narcissistic and navel-gazing endeavor. It is troubling to imagine what I’m wrong about in 2024 that I just don’t know yet. But I crave the learning that follows. And I’ll welcome the nutritious soil deeper roots will enjoy.
