Becoming Otherwise After Violence
A Mid-week reflection on violence
Dear Becoming Ones:
I did not plan to write today.
But something in me would not let this pass in silence.
Midweek, when the body is tired and the spirit is stretched thin, I was sitting in Peter’s office, working through the ordinary labors of the day, when a message came through: Have you seen the news?
I opened it.
And there she was—Dolores Huerta, 96 years old, a living archive of struggle, of dignity, of movement memory.
And alongside her image, a revelation that fractures the myth we have been taught to hold: that she experienced sexual violence at the hands of César Chávez, violence that resulted in pregnancies.
I sat there, stunned—not because violence is new, but because it keeps arriving through the very figures we have been taught to revere.
And I am tired of pretending that our movements are innocent.
I cannot unsee the violence.
Not in the Movement.
Not in the Church.
Not in the Academy.
These spaces that promised liberation have also been sites of harm—quietly, systematically, sometimes even righteously justified.
And if I am honest—if I am practicing the kind of radical honesty that repair requires—I must say this:
I have been shaped by these violences.
Conditioned by them.
I have carried them forward in ways I did not always recognize.
There are ways I have participated in harm.
Ways I have reproduced logics I now seek to undo.
This is the part we do not like to say out loud.
But as James Baldwin reminds us:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
So I am facing it.
What we are witnessing, as more survivors tell their stories, is not a series of isolated incidents.
It is a pattern.
A structure.
A haunting.
Violence is not an interruption to our movements—it has been braided into them.
And that is a devastating truth.
Ta-Nehisi Coates teaches us that story is not ornament—it is the architecture of reality.
The stories we tell about our heroes shape what we are willing to excuse.
The stories we refuse to tell shape what continues unchecked.
So what happens when the story shifts?
What happens when we tell the truth—not the polished narrative of progress, but the complicated, painful, human truth?
What happens when we let the story indict us—not just them?
And here is where I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa, who reminds us that transformation happens in the borderlands—the painful, disorienting spaces where identities fracture and reform.
This moment—this revelation—is a borderland.
A nepantla.
A tearing.
And also, potentially, a threshold.
If we can stay.
If we can resist the urge to retreat into denial or hero-worship or despair.
Because the question before us is not simply: How could this happen?
The deeper question is:
What do we do now that we know?
I have inherited trauma.
Through lineage.
Through culture.
Through institutions that taught me, subtly and overtly, that domination is a form of leadership.
Violence has made me.
And it has unmade me.
And still—I am here, trying to become otherwise.
So how do we tend this rupture?
How do we move—from rupture, to repair, to Our Collective Becoming?
We begin where all real work begins:
At home.
In the body.
In the story we tell about ourselves.
Repair is not a branding exercise.
It is not a statement.
It is a practice.
A daily, embodied, often uncomfortable practice of:
telling the truth
listening without defensiveness
relinquishing power where we have hoarded it
learning new ways of being in relation
And here, I want to bring in bell hooks, who insisted that love is not sentiment—it is a discipline, an ethic, a way of being that must be learned.
She writes:
“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
And elsewhere, she reminds us—especially men—that love requires self-acceptance, self-interrogation, and the courage to unlearn domination.
We cannot build movements of justice if we have not learned how to love—
not romantically,
but ethically,
relationally,
accountably.
So I am asking us—gently, but urgently:
Can we imagine another world?
Not as abstraction.
But as practice.
Can we become people who do not need violence to feel powerful?
Can we build movements that do not sacrifice the vulnerable for the sake of the cause?
Can we learn to be with one another—slowly, truthfully, without coercion?
Because if we do not undo the violence we are tethered to,
it will undo us.
Today, I am not offering resolution.
Only an invitation:
To begin again.
To tell the truth.
To practice repair.
With ourselves.
With one another.
With the stories we have inherited—and the ones we are brave enough to tell differently.
Repair begins at home.
And from there—
perhaps, slowly—
we become.
RCE+