A review by ranjanireviewsreads
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba

hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

Let This Radicalize You helps build the gap between advocates and organisers, especially for those who have no experience with or exposure to organising. It shows how movements and efforts in the past have succeeded, yes, but it also notes where those efforts needed to change and why, and how adapting to new circumstances helped those movements survive. It preaches adaptability, which I think is crucial in this age, when so many mutual aid and community building efforts are focused on and achieved through social media such as Instagram and TikTok. Heyes and Kaba bring up the important point of how so many of us for whom advocacy started online don't know how to participate in these areas offline.

While they touched on many topics such as the military- and prison-industrial complex, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the genocide in Palestine, the main point Heyes and Kaba always kept in sight was the importance of community and support. All the stories they tell are of people succeeding not despite their community but because of it, because they chose to form groups and ask for help, because they chose to be kind and compassionate and just. In a world where the Western quality of individualism is seen as the goal, Heyes and Kaba remind us to remember the people around us, those who we will turn to if there is a crisis. They urge us to band together to fight capitalism and those who benefit from keeping us apart. If that isn’t the most beautiful message, I don’t know what is.

Read this if you are feeling cynicism or despair after pulling up the news. There’s always someone doing something. The world is not stagnant.