Collaboration, focus on strategies for overcoming inertia

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Western culture’s fixation on copyright, branding, and ownership creates a toxic environment for activists. And it’s a mindset that activists often don’t know they have.

The most difficult thing to do is to get people to overcome inertia. Inertia is the gravity that holds people to the familiar, to the TV, to the job they have hated, and to the traditions of the past. As an activist, once you have managed to create a slight shift, a tiny movement can become an action by feeding that momentum.

I don’t want to ask for permission to take a step out of the movement and check in with branding. The mass is moving. It has started to flow… Don’t embolden the slogan? Don’t put a drop shadow on the logo? Put the logo on top of the banner? I am 4000 miles away from your global movement, and I have to wait for you to arrive at work on the other side of the globe to give me the OK. Even if I had to wait for 20 minutes… why?

Give me a visual element to rally around and leave it at that. It is so much more effective to have a visual element to rally around, to create around, freely. Think of the pussyhats at the #WomensMarch against Trump in 2016. (Next time, there should be more than one black pussyhat [only Madonna would wear the only black pussyhat]). The hats made the visuals unique, but all the banners, placards, and Facebook posts were creativity unleashed.

Case in point re sucking the energy out of a movement… everyone was knitting their own pussyhats, or knitting pussyhats to sell. Any one of you… yes, you, could have knitted your own black pussyhat, crocheted it, sewn up one out of material, or made multicoloured pussyhats to sell. Instead, complaints about lack of intersectionality were made, and the accusations were true, no getting away from the fact that White Western Women were thinking pink pussy. The pussyhat sellers should be ashamed, but so should the complainers who didn’t make multicoloured pussyhats and so unleash the power of black pussy and brown pussy and rainbow pussy. A rainbow-hatted march would have been a powerful sight to behold. Instead, the shared, joyful, active energy is sucked out of the room. It’s a mindset to bend yourself to a logo, a pussyhat. Don’t. Don’t ask for permission.

At the #TrumpVisitUK march in 2018, the visual element was a helium-filled Trump blimp that hovered above the marchers. Below, the banners and placards were rife with possibility, free with creativity. Not a logo in sight. 

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