How to make a daily difference, for a lifetime
Micro Activism by Omkari Williams is a loving reminder for would-be activists that how we prepare ourselves is as important as what we end up doing
Three-quarters of the way through Micro Activism: How You Can Make a Difference in the World (Without a Bullhorn), I realized I had been hoping for something else. I had come to the book wanting author Omkari L. Williams to give me a map. I was impatient for advice, for her to give me ideas on what to do.
Instead, for a hundred-plus pages, I had heard about how to prepare myself. Page upon page about evaluating values, personality type, self-care, community and more. It took me, I’m ashamed to admit, until the last chapter to truly appreciate the review. The thing is, sometimes you pick up a book to learn something, but in reading it you realize that what you really needed to learn is to drop your assumptions.
Williams’ slim volume offers a practical guide for creating the conditions for lifelong, regular activism. It is about packing your bag for the journey, preparing your mind and body for the trip of a lifetime. The guidance I thought I was seeking does eventually arrive — but by that time even I could see that such particulars are the least important part.
The 175-page book is simple and declarative in its advice. It is, as the activist and author Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm says on the back cover, “exceedingly practical.” Yet its focus also carries an important message for people like me: learning how to prepare is perhaps more important than determining exactly where you are going.
Williams helps us dispense with societal notions of what an activist does and doesn’t look like. Out with the shaggy haired activist with placard and patchouli scent and in with… well, everyone. “What if there are as many ways of being an activist as there are people on the planet?” she writes. “What if an activist looks like … you?”
I loved that she noted that “mistakes are part of the process.” As I read it, I thought of a similar call I have heard in anti-racism trainings. Mistakes can be painful, yet they are all but inevitable. For me, learning to accept they may happen despite my best efforts has freed me.
The world would do well, I feel, to extend this sensibility also to expertise. Look back 20 years, and many of the strategies taken by the experts at the best-funded environmental groups (let alone in other fields) are now seen as mistaken. Polar bears are noble and worthy creatures, yet they and other charismatic megafauna were not the best focal point in arguing for climate action. I try to remember this as my knowledge about climate science and the movement grows.
“For any activist, the most powerful wisdom is shared with humility,” Williams writes. “Know-it-alls in activist work are just as unpopular as they are anywhere else.”
Sprinkled throughout the book are interviews with micro activists, offering glimpses of what such a practice looks like out beyond the pages of the book. I found these conversations some of the most thought-provoking segments.
One interviewee quotes American prison abolition advocate Mariame Kaba: “Hope is a discipline.” As the book lays out, so is activism. As the anti-racist author, Layla Saad, reminds us in the introduction. “For our activism to be consistent, it must also be sustainable. As in, for a lifetime, not just a season.”
After all, there is a hard reality hidden behind Williams’ relatively sunny book. A Savannah, GA-based activist she interviewed expressed it well: “There’s no such thing as winning or losing. There’s just work. It’s hard and it’s rewarding and it’s daunting. Incremental victories followed by less incremental setbacks equal success.”
That’s why Williams puts so much emphasis on self-care, community, understanding your own limits and finding your truest motivations. This is a lifelong journey. For micro activism to really succeed, it has to be automatic, something you cannot help but do.
As she puts it: “Like brushing your teeth.”
What’s next?
Look for a path. Reflect on your values, origin, motivations. Consider your constraints, your activist archetype. Consult your friends, your community. List your skills and strengths. Is the way becoming clear?
Seek guidance. Look around for a group that appeals to you. Or find a couple, or a dozen. Attend a meeting or two. Go back to the ones that feel like the best fit. Perhaps your path is with them?
Got experienc
e doing this? Feel free to share ideas for future editions.
Poem for South African Women | excerpt
And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for
Read in full at poets.org.