As a collective, we need to move beyond just acknowledging that chai tea activism exists & start actually working against it.

It’s become a trend in the mainstream diaspora discourse spaces to recognize that hyperfixating on pointless shit is harmful but the conversation doesn’t aim to change anything about it.

What are we doing about it? How are we organizing/mobilizing?

For instance, one of the biggest examples we tend to highlight when discussing the harm in pani puri politics is that there is a lack of solidarity for other marginalized peoples. Our discourse centers our own victimhood.

& Of course this is true. But what are we doing about it? How are we showing up for the people we need to stand with?

We need to start putting our theories into praxis.

Recognizing a problem is the necessary first step but we have a new world to build & simply acknowledging the existence of these issues and stopping there will not directly help anyone let alone bring us a revolution.

I’m newly navigating my own position still. I also can’t point you to the role you’re supposed to play but I can tell you that your activism shouldn’t be curated around being on a moral high ground.

There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Allyship must be unconditional and continuous.

oppression isn’t a metaphor.

survival isn’t either.

liberation isn’t a metaphor.

resistance isn’t either.

Cops are a form of police but not the only form of policing that exists. We tend to forget that to erase the harm of policing we must eradicate it on all of it’s fronts.

Being someone who is trying to find their place in the loopholes within the field of psychology, I’ve been reflecting on mental health professionals and the role they often play & how they too, can be a form of police.

In the West, psychotherapists base their framework largely in individualism, uphold the carceral system, & center institutionalization. Medical treatments such as therapy are not only inaccessible for those pertaining to additionally vulnerable identities but oftentimes also ineffective.

When professionals act as though a person’s issues are entirely within their locus of control and refuse to see the other factors that contribute, (e.g. for many folks of marginalized identities, there are generational traumas at play that are deeply tied to their current struggles) they aren’t able to see a person’s trauma for what it is and fail at truly empathizing with their clients.

The mental health professionals who fail to acknowledge how functional systems of oppression are subordinating an individual and that their issues are tied to a much larger problem are harmful & agents of the state.

How are you supposed to truly heal from trauma that is still actively traumatizing you?

It’s clear that the ultimate solution to our mental health crisis isn’t therapy, it’s liberation.