Horizontal Leadership as Black Feminist Praxis
Leadership! That’s where one person tells everyone else what to do right? Well maybe sometimes… But there are plenty of ways of building power that are more nuanced and less understood than that. Horizontal leadership, also known as decentralized, nonhierarchical, shared, and group leadership or as participatory democracy, is loosely defined, but generally means that anyone can be empowered to take on responsibility without amassing permanent power. In this model, everyone is equal, (though not identical) and no one is in a structural position of power over anyone else. In this way, horizontal leadership pushes back against hierarchies so that social movements do not perpetuate or recreate the systems of oppression that rendered them necessary in the first place.
Horizontal leadership uses lots of tools that encourage participation and empowerment within the group. One such tool is coming to consensus. Activist, writer and legal researcher Harsha Walia describes in the book Beautiful Trouble that, “Contrary to popular belief, consensus does not necessarily mean unanimous agreement. This misconception causes us to wrongly view dissent as a distraction or obstacle, and increases the pressure toward homogenizing opinions” (116). Consensus methods allow ideas to change, grow, be built upon, or discarded entirely based on the collective imagination and brilliance of the group. In general, increased participation opens up more radically creative space and provides support for people as they take more risks. The book Resource Manual for a Living Revolution adds that “Everyone has a stake in implementing a decision because all have participated in its formation” (Coover, 53).
The Black Lives Matter movement has sometimes been criticized for its horizontal structure. People say the goals aren’t clear or even that there are no goals. Some people say without clear leadership nothing gets done or that lack of structure leads to chaos! Anarchy! First of all, that’s not the definition of anarchy. Second of all, horizontal leadership is actual highly structured. It’s not about having no leaders, but is actually about empowering more people to be leaders and recognizing the leadership in everyone.
Black Lives Matter activist Patrisse Cullors described the commitment to horizontal leadership in an interview with The New Yorker saying,
The consequence of focussing on a leader is that you develop a necessity for that leader to be the one who’s the spokesperson and the organizer, who tells the masses where to go, rather than the masses understanding that we can catalyze a movement in our own community” (Cobb)
The tradition of shared leadership has long been present in Black liberation movements in the United States, especially amongst women who are often erased by a focus on charismatic leaders (who are often defined as charismatic because of privilege and socialized perceptions of power). We see such erasure with activists such as Fannie Lou Hammer, Angela Julia Cooper, and fierce advocate of shared leadership, Ella Baker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML3WaEsCB98
Biographer Barbara Ransby described how “Over the years, [Baker] had arrived at the conclusion that political participation was not mainly about high-powered leaders like [Walter] White or [W.E.B] Dubois but rather about the ways in which ordinary people could transform themselves and their communities. This process was both profoundly political and deeply human” (113). This informed her work with the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She believed that human relationships were “the building blocks that led to solidarity and collective action” (114). Horizontal leadership aims to center these relationships and allows them to inform the direction of the movement.
In this way, horizontal leadership is strategically effective and profoundly grounded in the communities it aims to help. In contrast to a top down model which is accountable to whoever it pleases, Baker’s “group leadership” centered what Patricia Hill Collins describes in her 1989 article The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought the “Black women’s standpoint”. Baker’s model prioritized accessibility and the empowerment of the community. It’s success was not defined by national media coverage, but by its ability to meet the needs of the community itself, something the community itself would best know how to do.
Groups like Black Lives Matter are following a tradition that opens up space for movements to have more agency, more specified, but coordinated actions, more creativity, resilience, and collective strength. They have a unique capacity to prefigure society without hierarchy and to live more democratically in the present. Like any leadership method, it sure to have it’s challenges (like making sure things get done and that people recognize implicit power dynamics), but it’s exciting to see where this commitment to genuine grassroots empowerment will lead!
