I Won't Perform My Grief for You: An Invitation to Intersectional Integrity

Someone recently called me a 'normalizer and genocider' on social media. Their charge? That by not posting about the dominant crisis in the prescribed way, I proved I didn't care.

Let me be clear: I am not those things. But this exchange wasn't about care. 

It was about performance.

And it laid bare a toxic pattern that hijacks our justice work: the demand for public proof of pain, the weaponization of solidarity, and the purity politics that force us to rank humanity. 

This is the exact machinery of the systems we claim to fight.

The Core Inquiry

This is where I invite you in. Before we go further, let's sit with the questions this moment raises:

• When have you felt pressured to perform your values or grief publicly? What did that demand feel like in your body?

• Where do you draw the line between legitimate accountability and performative purity policing?

• Think of a time you stayed silent on an issue. Was that silence complicity, or was it complexity, learning, or a commitment to action in other forms? How do you know the difference?

The Irony & The Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us of ‘the danger of a single story.’ When we flatten global suffering into a single narrative—the one with the most social capital—we don't practice solidarity. We practice selectivity.

And this selectivity, which demands others center one crisis while ignoring the silence on others—especially those impacting Indigenous and African peoples on the land we occupy—isn't intersectionality. It's a replication of the harm."

What Solidarity Actually Is vs. The Tools of the Master

Audre Lorde taught us ‘the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' So, let's name the tools we've inherited:

• Purity politics? A master's tool.

• Public shaming? A master's tool.

• Demanding proof of care? A master's tool.

• Policing other marginalized people? A master's tool.

We cannot use these to build liberation.

My Commitment & An Invitation to Yours

So, here is where I stand and how I choose to show up, off the timeline:
I believe in the sacredness of all life and the liberation of all peoples. I hold it all at once.
I refuse to prove my care to strangers who've already decided I'm complicit.
My work happens in the quiet spaces of inner examination, hard conversations, resource sharing, and staying in relationship across profound difference.

This is my integrity: caring deeply without ranking, working in ways that don't fit into posts, and being accountable to my community, not to the court of public opinion.

From Performance to Practice: Resources for Relational Accountability

If the master's tools won't dismantle the house, what tools will? The work is in building relational accountability—a practice rooted in seeing each other's full humanity, staying in dialogue, and committing to repair.

This is not a passive 'live and let live.' It is an active, rigorous practice of building the world we want, within our interactions. Here are a few entry points that guide my thinking and practice:

On Relationality & Complexity:

• adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy and We Will Not Cancel Us: For reimagining justice as rooted in adaptation, relationship, and transformative justice instead of punitive call-outs.

• Michaelson, A. (2023) The Accountability Map: A practical framework that moves beyond binary "call-outs" to map our spheres of influence, responsibility, and modes of engagement (called in/called out/called forward).

• The Concept of Right Relationship (from Indigenous and Quaker philosophies): The idea that our interactions should be reciprocal, respectful, and sustain the wellbeing of all.

On Moving Beyond Purity Politics:

• Tema Okun's work on White Supremacy Culture characteristics: Specifically, to identify how traits like perfectionism, either/or thinking, and defensiveness show up in our "activist" spaces.

• Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: For embracing complexity, kinship, and messy coexistence instead of seeking pure, simplistic solutions.

On Intersectional Solidarity in Action:

• The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977): A foundational text that reminds us "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression."

• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice: For models of care and community accountability that center those most impacted, without performance.

These resources aren't checklists. They are companions for the long haul, helping us build the muscle of integrity over innocence—where the goal is not to prove we're good, but to do good, in complex, connected, and human ways.

A Closing Invitation & Reflective Prompts

If this resonates—if you're exhausted by the performance, tired of being weaponized against, and yearning for a justice practice rooted in substance—this is my invitation to you:

 Let's sit with this together.

1.  For your reflection: Where in your life or work are you being asked to perform rather than to be? Where might you be inadvertently asking that of others?

2. For your practice: This week, notice one moment where you can choose integrity over performance. It might look like: educating yourself on a crisis not in the headlines, reaching out to someone in your community directly instead of posting, or pausing before calling someone 'in' or 'out' online.

3. For our collective work: How do we build communities and movements that value sustained, intersectional action over performative, single-issue posts? How do we hold each other accountable without replicating the violence of the systems we oppose?

I am not here for perfect performance. I am here for the messy, difficult, and sacred work of true solidarity. If you are, too, you are not alone. The real work is in relationships. Let's begin there.

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