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e (they/them) @certificates.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

[Text from the Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba (from Mariame Kaba's introduction)]
"I came of age in New York City in the 1980s. I was incredibly lucky to find some wonderful touchstones. These people were patient with me, sometimes hard on me, but most important, they listened to my ideas. They were role models who taught me about the limits and possibilities of lifelong activism and organizing. Yet, I must admit that I write these words with retrospective admiration. When I was fourteen and fifteen years old, I didn’t appreciate these people in the way I do now. As a teenager, I thought that they were too cautious and lacked revolutionary zeal.
The truth is that I was being seduced by another group of people—I’ll call them the butterflies. These were the people who always had a ready quote by Fanon, Malcolm, Che, or Marx. Only men, of course. They carried around tattered books that I had not yet read. This would send me scurrying to the library or to Liberation Bookstore to find those exact tomes. These were the people in my life who spent the most time talking about revolution. In retrospect, I know that the reason I was so enthralled was because it was exciting to imagine myself as a revolutionary. My untested ideas were always brilliant around them. They were fun to be around because they rarely participated in the actual hard work of building organization, and they had a lot of criticisms of those who did that work.
While others were going door to door in Harlem to talk with community members about affordable housing, the butterflies were lamenting the fact that “the people” were not being sufficiently engaged in “our” struggles. None of them ever went door to door. We talked a lot about “new” models of engagement, even"