An ode to being radical
by Nani Jansen Reventlow
In this edited extract from her book Radical Justice, human rights lawyer Nani Jansen Reventlow teaches us that we have power to change the course of history.
‘We are living the imaginaries of those who have been long gone. We are living the world they wanted. And therefore we can expect that others will be inhabiting a world that we imagined… inhabiting a very new world that is impossible if we do not engage with the kind of activism required today’. — Angela Davis1
If this were an exam on how we’re doing as a society, we would be failing miserably: Our climate is on the brink of irreversible collapse. We failed to make necessary changes when the Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the structural inequalities in our societies, and we never delivered on the promise of the 2020 racial justice uprisings. We are quietly consenting to letting genocide unfold in Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, China, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those within the borders of Europe aren’t necessarily getting a much better deal – more than one in every five persons were at risk of poverty and social exclusion in 2024.2
But since life is actually not an exam, we don’t have to score a perfect 10/10, get everyone to agree with us on all points, and have precisely mapped out steps on how to build change. In philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s words: ‘We don’t have to agree on every aspect of the new world we’re building to agree on ways to improve the justice of our current arrangements.’3 We can move forward making our vision for a better world a reality without having a perfect plan or having every single person on our side – we’d be much better off using this energy in different ways.
What all change does start with is envisioning what you are going to create. And if there is anything that has a chance of persuading others to join your cause, it is exactly that image of hope and being able to see that things don’t have to remain the way they are. ‘You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow’ – Anand Giridharadas quotes political messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio in The Persuaders.4 So instead of continuing to meet the keepers of the status quo on their turf, engaging with their conversations, we need to start our own. Share the vision of what a world underpinned by equity, social, racial, and economic justice looks like. What that means for everyone in practice. This is not fiction: the data is there. Research has shown that presenting people with a picture of what the alternative looks like will make it much more likely for them to relate and engage.5 Instead of mobilising fear and shame, we need to garner hope. Thomas Coombes, who is putting the science into practice with the Hope-based Communications approach, writes: ‘We need to show people a credible vision of what a world where human rights are enjoyed by all looks like. At first, this will feel naïve. But why would people join us if we do not tell them what we are for and not just against?’6 This is what powerful movements and campaigns can and need to do. Radical thinking is all about that: imagining new worlds and possible futures and willing them into being. As adrienne maree brown put it: ‘the future is not an escapist place to occupy. All of it is the inevitable result of what we do today, and the more we take it in our hands, imagine it as a place of justice and pleasure, the more the future knows we want it, and that we aren’t letting go.’7
When Indigenous communities first proposed to extend legal rights to nature, most people had no idea what nature rights were, could not fathom how a river could have legal personhood, let alone imagine a legal system that would recognise it. But these first initiatives inspired a global Indigenous-led mass movement to recognise the rights of nature – the recognition that our eco-systems, not just humans, have rights – everywhere. Since 2017 the movement has garnered landmark rulings in India, the US, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Canada, and Spain.
Change can also start small. For years, communities and activists across the world have been reclaiming the topography of their cities: changing street names from the names of colonies, slave holders, and historical racist figures to those of revolutionary anticolonial leaders, battles and protests, and liberatory moments in history. Because to imagine a different future where we feel safe, seen, and heard is to inhabit it – literally. From North America to Europe, street names are being contested and re-appropriated as sites of resistance to imperial narratives and the whitewashing of history.
Civil rights activist, writer, teacher, and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara said ‘As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.’8 We need to organise and build a mass movement around our vision for a community, a country, a world built on a foundation of human rights and racial, social, and economic justice. This means letting go of our fear of confrontation and ‘polarisation’. If standing up for a vision of a world in which Black lives, trans lives, the lives of any marginalised and racialised group matter is deemed extremist, we should take that as a badge of honour.
WHAT YOU CAN DO NEXT
LEARN
• Jemma Egan, Layla Gatens, Elizabeth Graham, Amal Khalaf, and Alex Thorp (eds), How We Hold: Rehearsals in Art and Social Change (2024)
• Sadiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2021)
• Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021)
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2020)
• Robin D.G. Kelly, Freedom Dreams (2002)
REFLECT
• If you could change the way one system currently works, what would it be and why? What would you change? Framed differently: can you imagine what that system would look like if it had not been built by colonialism and white supremacy?
• What systems interconnect with the one you are reimagining? What effect does your reimagined ecosystem have on those other systems? How does it further impact structures and beliefs that are related to it?
• Now imagine living your day-to-day in your dream system. What are you doing? What are you not doing? Who and what are you engaging with and how? How does this make you feel?
ACT
• What of this could you start doing now?
Nani Jansen Reventlow is an international human rights lawyer. She is the author of Radical Justice: Building the World We Need . She is the founder of Systemic Justice, which advocates for marginalised communities through strategic litigation. Politico named her one of society’s great visionary tech leaders for her work on digital human rights. She has also been honoured with awards from Harvard, Oxford and Columbia Universities.
References:
1. Angela Davis, ‘Angela Davis: Women in a Post-Trump Era’, posted 11 March 2017, by Southbank Centre, Women of the World Festival, YouTube video, 1:40:09, www.youtube.com/live/lBgdzK3jfEg?si=Um3bvUk3Vu_u3qMZ.
2. EUROSTAT, European Commission, ‘Living Conditions in Europe: Poverty and Social Exclusion’, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Living_conditions_in_Europe__poverty_and_social_exclusion.
3. Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 173.
4. Anand Giridharadas, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 231.
5. International Civil Society Centre, Hope-based Communications: Innovation Report 2019, Amnesty International, http://icscentre.org/innovationreport/2019/portfolio-item/hope-basedcommunications.
6. Thomas Coombes, ‘Hope not Fear: A New Model for Communicating Human Rights’, Medium, 10 December 2017, https://medium.com/@the_hope_guy/hope-not-fear-a-newmodel-for-communicating-human-rights-d98c0d6bf57b.
7. adrienne marie brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chicago: AK Press, 2017), 164.
8. Toni Cade Bambara, ‘An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara: Kay Bonetti’, in Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, ed. Thabiti Lewis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 35.