Why I’m Leaving Lights For Liberty

Ed. Note: Kristin has since written an update, Why I Didn’t Go Quietly, about how her experience fits a common narrative in progressive spaces.

I am one of the five co-founders of Lights For Liberty (L4L). I was disappointed to see on the @Lights4Liberty Twitter feed last night that the other four founders have decided to turn L4L into a nonprofit. When we started L4L just a few weeks ago, the stated intention of everyone in the group was to amplify and uplift local organizations already doing the work. There are already a massive number of existing nonprofits doing incredible immigration rights and social justice work (coincidentally, I posted about a bunch of them yesterday morning). These orgs desperately need financial and other support, and by becoming another nonprofit, L4L diverts funds and takes up space in an already crowded arena.

I also find it very troubling that the four other founders, white women, do not appear to be divesting control of L4L to people of color (POC) and impacted people.

I also find it very troubling that the four other founders, white women, do not appear to be divesting control of L4L to people of color (POC) and impacted people. When we first came together in a group chat and started brainstorming, I didn’t realize that I was the only POC in the group, as it was one woman who’d brought the five of us together (so I’ll call her the lead cofounder or LC*), that woman has a daily broadcast called “Resistance Live” in which she regularly touts the importance of letting women of color lead, and we are all spread across the country and communicated only via chat and phone calls.

Because I helped grow this event, convinced others to participate, was a part of creating this platform, I do not feel morally right about leaving it in hands I consider potentially harmful to this space without sharing at least some of what has led to my concerns.

Here are a few examples of what occurred in the whirlwind 3 weeks or so leading up to Lights for Liberty:

• I was told that there were other POC including undocumented people who were joining/on the core team. Believing this to be true, I represented this as the case when talking to organizations considering endorsing the event. Other POC never showed up in our group chat or on the many calls I was on in which key decisions were being made.
• Names of many white celebrities were tossed around as potential speakers at these vigils. I suggested speaker lineups should be POC and impacted people. I was told it was fine to have big-name white celebrities as a “draw” and surround them with POC and impacted people.
• I asked to bring other people into national leadership, into the chat and the calls. I was told that the chat and the calls with just the five of us needed to remain because they were a “sacred place.” (They were not for me.)
• I had a friend in the organizing space join a call to talk about diversifying and divesting control over decisions including speaker lineup etc. After she hung up, I was reprimanded by LC for the call being a waste of time when she’d had actually important things to talk about and she already knew everything that had been said. No one argued with her. Some comforted her.
• The only other POC who had been on a group call with us by that point, a Black woman who has been in this work for 20+ years (“the lawyer”), primarily functioned as an advisor with only LC as her main point of contact. On June 28th, the lawyer learned she had been misled as to who was actually, functionally, on the leadership team, and she quit, citing tokenism.
• The same day, via email, I threatened to quit unless several key changes were made, including speaker lineups for our five anchor events being set by local organizations, POC and impacted people joining the national leadership team including access to the group chat, POC and impacted people being the ones doing media, and “assurance that feedback from POC from inside or outside L4L, especially about representation or messaging, would be welcomed and heeded, without personal feelings being brought into it.” I was told that they agreed with everything I said, and I watched as they indeed divested control over lineup and sent out invitations to POC in the space to join national leadership.

However, as the days passed, no one else was ever brought into our group chat where decisions were being made. Some decisions began being made without me, and I would find out about them retroactively, sometimes through social media. My requests or suggestions, typically of ways to increase the likelihood of the event spurring action beyond July 12th, were routinely ignored or dismissed. However, I felt I couldn’t walk away because too many great organizations were already working hard to put together really meaningful events that would connect them with new supporters and amplify important stories, and that it would all be over after July 12th. So by the last week or so I just put my head down and focused primarily on the DC event, which also allowed me to minimize contact with LC.

• I was surprised to hear from LC that she was back in conversation about Lights For Liberty with the lawyer who had quit. When I talked to the lawyer, it turned out her words/interactions had been very much misrepresented by LC in the group chat, including LC’s claim that the lawyer had said that LC’s speaking at a vigil “arm in arm with brown and black people” would “model what it looks like to be an ally,” which the lawyer did not say. This type of misrepresentation/weaponization happened twice including by another of the cofounders, at which point the lawyer emailed the group and told them to stop referencing her.
• I was removed from admin controls on Facebook (I never had it on Twitter or Instagram), lost access to our shared Google Drive and had a few key docs shared back to me, and was told to delete our entire Signal thread “and all screenshots” so they could start a fresh thread and had to send screenshots of my Signal screen to prove I had done so. I was told this was because of a hack. (I didn’t delete my screenshots.)
• The night of July 10th, I discovered that the demands had finally been posted — buried in the social media toolkit — in English only. There were no plans for translations. On July 11th, among lots of other prep work, I worked on getting translations done by native speakers. I only had time to get Spanish finished and formatted by about 3 am the morning of the event. The day of the event, I had to prod several times to get them posted to the website.
• On Friday night, after the event wrapped, I asked if we would be sending out an e-blast with calls to action the next day and offered to draft it. No one responded, instead sending congratulatory photos and messages about how we lit up the world.
• On Saturday, I suggested we reach out to various orgs to ask how we could be useful moving forward. Everyone said they were too tired. I do not have access to our email list.
• On Monday, I was on a call led by United We Dream with numerous other amazing immigrant rights’ organizations. I left with an understanding of how L4L could help promote two upcoming actions. I asked the L4L group about promoting them. No answer. I offered to reach out to our many event organizers in the areas of those actions through FB, if the “hack” was fixed and my admin status reinstated. I was told that the only person with admin access was LC’s personal assistant and that she deserved a break (she’d helped us significantly with posting throughout the previous few weeks).

When I pointed out it would take mere seconds to reinstate me and it might allow me to get a few hundred more people to these actions, I was told forcefully and by all four co-founders that my “guilt trip” was inappropriate, that the assistant had been being paid for her L4L work out of LC’s pocket, that “L4L is not that important,” “there are people with real problems,” and if I “want to be in action right now, do rapid response.” (I have a 2-month-old baby.)

• On Wednesday, I saw on Twitter that L4L is becoming a nonprofit. I see that there is an advisory board comprised of many amazing, experienced leaders in the immigrant rights and social justice fields. I hope they are the ones who make the daily decisions moving forward, that they are given more power than the national advisory board convened for the L4L event, which from what I can tell, primarily edited the L4L demands, but was never given a real seat at the table.

The white feminism, gaslighting, and weaponized fragility at work beneath the surface of Lights For Liberty does not take away from the fact that many inspiring, meaningful vigils took place that genuinely centered POC and impacted communities. The event mobilized many thousands of people who care deeply about kids in cages, family separation, immigrant rights, social justice, and many left ready to take further action. L4L’s greatest value, in my opinion, was that it created an opportunity to connect those people to existing organizations in their area, organizations that know how to harness people power to create change. I am hugely disappointed that L4L has not made use of its email list and Facebook events to make those connections directly.

I will obviously not be a part of the Lights For Liberty nonprofit moving forward. (The headline of this piece is a bit euphemistic considering I’ve basically been pushed out.) I hope L4L changes in the ways necessary to decentralize white power, put impacted people in the role of daily and strategic decision-making, and support the work and actions of existing organizations. I look forward to continuing the fight for justice and freedom for all in every way I can.

*Updating to clarify that LC is Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, as that is quite apparent from her own words in the public sphere.