Building A Pro-Black World

Forms: A New Theory of Power

Cyndi Suarez

You've probably noticed that social change practitioners often replicate the structures they, or we, seek to oppose. One of the reasons I wrote The Power Manual is that I often couldn't tell the difference between my activist peers and the people they were organizing against. Oh, sure, we had different goals and maybe even different values, but we used the same structures and were surprised that we often unwittingly re‐created the same challenges.

I recall a young woman of color who contacted me a few years ago. She was hired by an organization that had undergone a racial justice change process. It was now led by a Black person and had a primarily people‐of‐color staff. But they realized they were still a white supremacist organization. She was using my book as a guide in redesigning toward a liberatory organization and was inquiring about any help I could provide. Her story is a perfect example of why diversity doesn't work to shift power. Eventually, we have to consider the forms we inhabit, which oftentimes are the source of so many problems in our work.

The conversations I've had with readers of my book have had a theme: How do leaders of color redesign historically white organizations—or away from white supremacist culture?

Organizations are working on their own trying to figure out how to restructure themselves, as they are also taking on more complex work, often with a philanthropic field that is steps behind them. Thus, this ...