Personal Manifesto
At a regional retreat with Resource Generation, I attended a workshop on building a testimony (typically in service of a campaign). I brought this practice to YEA Camp, where we now teach it as “Personal Manifesto.” You can write one, too. It involves:
1) The Personal Story (Growing up, I saw, I heard…)
2) Values, Peppered with Facts (Love, Solidarity, 80% of wealth is inherited…)
3) Final Statement: And That is Why I… (Support Prop YZ, Advocate Justice…)
This can be a dramatic speech, or a one-sentence response to a casual question at lunch (we tell campers to write both versions). The point is that the three pieces form a whole greater than their sum. Without the final statement, we are people with axes to grind but nothing to strike. Without the values peppered with facts, our positions on the final statement are dictated by personal experiences that could have just as easily turned out differently. Without the personal story, we devolve into abstract/theoretical arguments about values, with no concrete effect in people’s lives. With all three, we create an appeal toward action both grounded in reality and reaching toward meaning.
Notes:
Your story may be one of privilege, like mine. You may not have been arrested or harassed. But that is your story: You were not, while others were.
“Pepper” with facts, not “Stuff”: A flurry of data will not capture the lived experiences. We need data for scope. We need personal story for meaning.
My Story
I grew up in the occupied Lenape territory of what today are known as wealthy, White New Jersey suburbs. My parents instilled in me a strong sense of interpersonal fairness, but without a systemic analysis, I was isolated from realizing the full problem of White supremacy. Even moving into the diversity of New York City, also occupied Lenape territory, my own Whiteness, well internalized by then, continued to fog my full understanding of racism.
At age six, I had surgery to remove a chlosteotoma from my right ear. The doctors discovered that the benign tumor had wrapped itself around the anvil bone, and I needed a second surgery to replace it with a plastic one. While still climbing the rungs of the class ladder, my family was able to pay for the surgeries that would keep me able-bodied, and therefore better able to engage with the systems that would educate me. This pattern would repeat itself when I was found to need glasses and then later opted for LASIK surgery.
So disconnected I was from the food system as a child that during my brief flirtation with vegetarianism, I ate pepperoni pizza, not knowing that it was meat. I did not know that every year, more animals are killed by our agricultural system than the number of humans who have ever existed. I did not know that feeding operations pollute poor, neighboring Black & Brown communities, and slaughterhouses especially exploit undocumented workers of color to endure meager pay and dangerous work for their inability to seek redress. I did not know these things, because my wealth and Whiteness kept me far from the means of production, but not the products of their labor.
I remained fogged in Whiteness even as mass incarceration claimed a Black friend, contributing to the facts that a nation of 4.5% of the world’s population incarcerates a full 20% of the world’s inmates, and that Black males aged 20–39 are incarcerated at a rate of ten percent. My own friend served a short sentence without enforced labor, but I would later learn of the New Jim Crow, and its transformation into prison slavery.
I also opted into Toxic Masculinity. Though my adolescent flamboyance and distaste for sports disallowed me from the popular jock image of the boys’ club, I learned an intellectual contempt for the jock, without fully understanding that the problems of his culture still operated mine. Namely, the objectification of others, especially women. I took in the cultural motif that, if not athletics, women would serve as claims to status.
This retreat from athleticism into intellectuality, where I saw I could more easily prove myself, is the same that rendered me suspicious of emotional reactions to oppression. Never mind your lived experience of being treated lesser, of being claimed bodily through violence. I have not practiced being with my own emotions, so I do not like experiencing your anger. Appeal to me on my turf, on my terms, of theory and data disconnected from life.
My mom’s second marriage afforded me into the one percent. I never particularly desired the behind-the-park mansion, or the Columbus Circle apartment, so I did not see them as shaping my identity, though I see how they do today. But I always knew the value of expensive cultural enrichment around the world. Caribbean family vacations? Check. Solo travel among the world’s best food and experiential programs? Check. Good, privatized education, domestic and abroad? $300,000 Check. Student debt, as a means to control my post-grad labor? Not for me.
All this, while I was protected by the number one terror organization on the planet, my own government, whose wealth accumulated via the theft of land from Native folk and labor from Black folk. This corporate empire continues to overthrow democratically elected foreign governments of poorer, majority-of-color nations to install oppressive regimes more friendly to its economic interests — just as it did in its very founding, to thousands of indigenous nations.
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government, uses me and the cause of Human Rights, which I champion, as a cover to drop over 26,000 airstrikes on poor Black and Brown people in six countries every year. Mind you, that is multiple bombs per airstrike.
The criminal network most destructive to the biosphere, my own government, convinced me to unplug phone chargers and separate the plastic film windows from business envelopes at the recycling bin, while the US military “is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” and 62% of all greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution were emitted by just 108 producers, many supported by the US Empire.
This is not an expression of guilt, but a call from delusion into reality. The pathology of privilege is such that I could have lived a whole, seemingly full, life without this knowledge, of the disconnect between me and the lived experiences of the majority of people on Earth. Even having learned it, I could have shrugged, content in betraying their personhood for my own comfort. Without skin in the game, none comes off my nose.
I have seen the benefits of the ignorance and apathy afforded by privilege.
But I have also seen its costs: The rights and lives of the planet, women, LGBTQ, the poor, disabled, and folk of color.
I have also seen the benefits of solidarity: Connection. Community. Integrity.
And its costs are far less intimidating to me than complacency.
That is why I take no shame in being a warrior for justice.
That is why I support the call of Wealthy white folk to race and class treachery, though I reject the notion that fighting a politic of oppression is treachery at all.
That is why I teach on these subjects, that in learning their content and their spirit, we may better organize to save the unity of ourselves and each other.
And that is why I am an activist-educator, that in better understanding the bars of our cage, we may better dismantle it. And let grow, something new.
Pierce Delahunt (they/them) holds an M.Ed. from the Institute for Humane Education. Their research was a study of activist-education programs throughout the country. Pierce has worked with Youth Empowered Action, an activist-education summer camp, since 2014. They grew up in the occupied Lenape territory of New York and New Jersey, and currently live in a eco-van traveling the country and speaking at schools.
Pierce sees their own work as the union of social-emotional learning and activist-education. They most focus on outreach and education, with training in nonviolent communication and empathetic listening.
They work from the frame that individualist social-emotional learning is insufficient: Our capacity to have fulfilling lives and relationships cannot come at the expense of other communities’ abilities to do the same. If our peace, love, light, and whole-child education movements do not address systemic injustice, then they are none of those things.
