This work is not for small vision or for vision rooted in what is allowable, permissible or probable.
Vision for anti-oppression work is rooted in:
What is necessary → based on observing suffering and marginalization.
What is imagined → even when not yet seen or experienced. It is real if it can be imagined.
What is possible → when we mobilize resources centered on progress, not comfort. (instead of what the status quo allows as “probable outcomes” (which we know already based on the history of the status quo is insufficient for liberation and justice for all).
The work of anti-oppression requires that our processes, thinking, analysis and tools are set free from the forces of oppression themselves – it is not only the outcomes, it is in the how we arrive there.
This big vision requires that we shake off the very forces of oppression that hinder big imagination. We must acknowledge all forms of oppression itself and shake them off – starting with letting go of starting with “me” and instead start with “we.” Big vision for anti-oppression work demands that are willing to build new tools, pathways, ideas, relationships, and language. We must so create and reimagine so that together we can get to the horizon, together.
Change our starting points from what is allowed to what is necessary happens because we have bore witness. What we know is necessary we know because we have see it, we have heard the stories. The question is simply: what can we do better because we know better?
Anti-oppression vision building needs to be an act of truth-asking and truth-telling about what is required of us to be in service of the collective. It is a vision of a horizon that has not yet been photographed or traversed.
But it awaits us if we move together.
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