“There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.”
- Ella Baker
In ten years of working with roughly over one hundred movement organizations, I have only ever fired two long-term clients. This story is about the second. It’s about our movements, and it’s also about class.
When people think about class conflict, they often think about for-profit corporations and labor strikes. They think about billionaires and minimum wage employees. They think about Wall Street, private equity, and corporate greed. They think about houses being bought up from underneath the families and communities that need them the most. And yes, those are all examples of class conflict.
But one thing they don’t often think about or talk about is how class conflict emerges inside movement organizations themselves. They spend even less time at the proverbial watercooler of life discussing what happens when institutions built to challenge oppression begin reproducing the same dynamics they claim to exist to dismantle.
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx argued that capitalism survives through constant disruption. Those with power continually reorganize work, relationships, and institutions in order to maintain their position, often requiring workers to absorb the uncertainty and instability that follows. More than 175 years later, that observation still feels relevant.
The movement leader who acts in bad faith is a movement leader who declares war on the movement itself, cannibalizing its ideologies and enlightenments and progress and the accumulated faith of their teams and peers in the name of being liked, being admired, being seated on the throne of the cult of personality.
I was working as a strategic planning partner to a progressive movement organization. Like many organizations operating in this political moment, they were navigating significant pressures and constraints. Staff members quietly expressed concerns. Deadlines slipped. The work continued moving forward, but often because I was carrying far more than should have been required of me. But I continued forward anyway because I believed in the work.
And that’s when it happened.
I was presenting an update on a strategic planning process to the board one holiday season. During the presentation, I noticed pings in the Zoom chat. One Board member was laughing about another Board member doing something “funny” on camera. Curious, I switched to participant view.
And there he was, a white Board member sharpening knives into his camera while I, a Black femme person, was speaking. And yes, other Board members saw it including the Executive director who laughed when it happened and did you know not a single person intervened?
I was a Black femme, queer, nonbinary, respected, published, established leader in my field surrounded by leaders who watched it happen and said nothing in my defense, not even a mere signal to this white person that what they were doing was at minimum questionable and at worst harmful.
So what do I do?
I wrote an email to three executive leaders on that call. I named what had happened directly in this email. I explained why the behavior was unacceptable. I outlined why it mattered, particularly in an organization that publicly claimed commitments to racial and gender justice. Then, I offered recommendations for how similar situations could be prevented in the future. I did not demand punishment nor cancellation, I requested change. Still, no one else in a position of leadership (of those copied on that email) deemed it important enough, deemed me important enough, to even acknowledge that I had said or sent anything at all.
Weeks later, I joined another call with the organization. This was not an attempt to be accountable for the impact. The Board member’s behavior was not being treated as the risk. Instead, it had been decided that me naming the behavior as unacceptable made me the problem. So, I fired them.
Current staff reached out. Former staff reached out. People I had never spoken with before reached out. Many thanked me for naming what had happened. Others thanked me for raising the issue directly with leadership before speaking publicly. What stayed with me most, however, was not their gratitude. It was how similar their stories were.
That was the moment the story stopped being about me.
The knife sharpening was not the revelation. The staff’s eerily similar experiences were. The people who reached out were not thanking me because I had discovered something new. They were thanking me because I had enough security to say out loud what many of them already knew.
What I initially understood as a conflict between myself and an organization began to look like something else entirely. According to USAFacts, there are nearly 2 million nonprofit organizations in the United States, including more than 1.4 million charitable nonprofits. Advocacy groups number in the tens of thousands, with roughly 75,000 501(c)(4) organizations, according to Business Initiative. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the sector employs approximately 12.8 million workers, nearly 10% of the private workforce.
As movement workers, we are often incredibly skilled at identifying the failures of accountability outside our organizations while struggling to build meaningful accountability inside them. We rightly challenge corporations that investigate themselves. We question police departments conducting internal reviews of police misconduct while the police who maim us and take our lives are put on paid vacation. We critique institutions that ask the public to simply trust that those with power will be honest and integral. Yet in movement organizations we often rely on remarkably similar logic when concerns are raised about leadership, especially when those questions are about leaders we like personally.
This becomes especially dangerous because many movement leaders arrive in positions of authority for good reasons. They may be visionary organizers, talented fundraisers, brilliant strategists, compelling communicators, or deeply committed advocates. None of those qualities automatically make anyone skilled at managing people. Yet movement spaces frequently promote individuals into leadership roles and then leave them largely without resources, education, or supervision. We assume that because someone has been effective enough to reach a position of leadership, they must possess all the skills necessary to remain there in good faith.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild famously described emotional labor as the work involved in managing emotions as part of one’s job. What many movement workers describe go far beyond that. They are not simply managing their own emotions under ineffective and harmful leadership. They are managing the emotions of leaders. They are softening feedback, anticipating defensiveness, cushioning difficult conversations, and carrying the emotional burden of helping powerful people avoid discomfort. In many cases, movement workers are being asked to perform emotional labor on behalf of supervisors who were paid significantly more than they are and possess substantially more organizational power.
Class warfare is often understood as conflict between groups with unequal access to power and resources. Inside movement organizations, it can look like movement workers being asked to absorb the costs of leadership failures while possessing little power to change the conditions producing those failures.
And we can do better.
Here are four places movement organizations and movement workers can begin:
1. Build Independent Accountability Structures
Leadership teams should not be the only people responsible for determining whether harm occurred, whether accountability is necessary, and what consequences should follow. Strong movements require trusted and independent pathways for accountability. That can look like third-party transformative justice aligned ombudspersons, worker councils, external facilitators, rotating governance committees, or other structures capable of creating distance between power and accountability. The goal is not punishment. The goal is ensuring that accountability remains possible even when it is inconvenient.
2. Refuse to Treat Leadership as a Permanent Identity and Lifetime Appointment
Let’s do away with treating leadership as something a person is rather treat it as something a person practices. We promote people because they are visionary organizers, gifted communicators, talented fundraisers, or deeply committed advocates. Those are important skills. They are not the same as managing people well.
Leadership should be understood as a role that requires ongoing learning, evaluation, support, and accountability. A person can be brilliant at building movements and still struggle to supervise staff effectively. A person can make extraordinary contributions to a cause and still need coaching, intervention, or even reassignment when patterns of harm emerge. We would never assume that a surgeon should stop learning because they completed medical school. We should not assume that movement leaders stop needing feedback because they reached a position of authority.
3. Follow the Labor, Not The Narrative
One of the fastest ways to understand whether an organization is living its values is to follow the labor. Pay attention to who is losing sleep. Pay attention to who is carrying work that falls outside their job description. Pay attention to who is constantly adapting to dysfunction, managing conflict, or performing emotional labor on behalf of people with more authority than they have.
Movement workers often experience the consequences of organizational problems long before leaders acknowledge those problems exist. When people are consistently exhausted, anxious, overextended, or spending more time managing leadership than doing the work they were hired to do, those are not merely interpersonal challenges. They are organizational data points. The labor is usually trying to tell us something long before a crisis arrives.
4. Measure the Cost of Staying
Many movement workers understand the cost of leaving. They know what it means to lose a paycheck, healthcare, professional opportunities, stability, or community. What we talk about far less often is the cost of staying.
We understand the concept of making our movements irresistible to those who work and live outside our ideological gates, but what would it mean to make our workplaces irresistible? What would it mean to make them foundations of rest, repair, boundaries, efficiency and accountability?
When people think about class conflict, they often think about billionaires, corporations, and labor strikes. They do not usually think about movement organizations.
But I believe that they should.