At Equimundo, we recently had the opportunity to host a discussion with Hardy Merriman, an expert in non-violent responses to authoritarianism. We asked Hardy what works to push back and hold a democracy together in a moment when it is being attacked. Among his points, he named (1) a sense of how people can act individually and collectively to shift power, (2) networks of trust among different groups, and (3) a unifying vision of a democratic future.
The point about how we can act individually and collectively made me think about the beginning of Equimundo as a civil society organization. My activism work, and what led me to found Equimundo, began by engaging young men in breaking cycles of violence and being allies in women’s full empowerment. That work started in favelas in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1990s and was informed by colleagues who worked both with Paulo Freire and with Theatre of the Oppressed.
Both approaches – Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed – operate with the logic that engaging a group of persons who share a similar background of historical oppression through a consciousness-raising process to become aware of how power and inequality work is a key to driving collective, political action. It’s also the stated or unstated operating strategy behind some of the most powerful advocacy on the planet. I’m referring to feminist consciousness-raising and the advocacy that emerges from it.
In my work with young men in favelas in Rio de Janeiro – and in many settings since then – Equimundo engages men, together with women, in reflections about how power works, how we learn it and internalize it, our stake in repeating it and the harm we face because of it. And finally, and most importantly, what we can collectively and individually do about it.
That’s an oversimplification of how complex consciousness-raising approaches work, but that is the core of it – how to create and support informed citizens who become increasingly and acutely aware of how power and oppression work, and, equipped with that awareness, how to take action.
Those processes can be and have been the basis of political organization, of women’s collectives, of low income urban community activism globally, and of peace movements. In the case of our work with young men. It included engaging young people to dialogue with local public health services, helping the well-intentioned yet overworked staff understand how they could better listen to young men and make their spaces friendly to young men rather than perceiving them as threats. Like the US, Brazil too often sees low income young men of color as dangerous – and too often also assumes they are gang members.
One of our most visible actions of that community organizing involved protesting against the police for their violence against young men in the favela. We went together to attempt to dialogue with the local police delegation. The young men, keenly aware of how the police saw them, also proposed taking photos of men caring for children in the community. The idea was to show the police that their simplistic and racist views about men in the community were inherently violent and wrong. We supported the young men in taking dozens of photos of men caring for others and for children. We made poster-sized versions of those photos and hung them at the entrance of the favela where police passed on their way – too often to cause harm.
Did it work? It created a buzz. Pictures of men caring for children were not what police and other public officials were used to seeing when they came into favelas. Excessive police violence didn’t stop with that one political action. But it did have ripple effects. More communication was opened with the local police. Families felt more empowered to protest. Many of the young people involved went on to support other NGOs or participate in other forms of community organizing demanding rights. That work led to a greater number of critically informed citizens who took that experience into many other social justice movements.
That experience also informed the creation of our global MenCare campaign as an approach to highlight the way men already care even as we may too often overlook. That simple photo voice project led us to gather stories of fathers globally – including in settings facing historical racism and the effects of war.
Local awareness and what it requires to go nation-wide in a moment of democratic backsliding is a huge scale of difference. But there is a crucial lesson of what works: informed citizens with an awareness of how power works, a willingness to come together to take action and telling stories that go against harmful and false narratives that are used by authoritarians to justify their repression.
What will work to keep our democracy? What will work to guarantee and achieve rights and justice for women and girls, for immigrants, and for all of us in our sexual and gender diversity? In the short term, calling our members of Congress, marching, posting and reposting, making noise whenever we can, being loud about the injustices we see rather than remaining passive bystanders. And this part is key – being part of the long game of creating an informed, critical populace who can see oppression in all its forms.
Community organizers from favelas in Rio know that. Peace activists from around the world know that. And the women leaders who built the foundations of feminist activism knew that. We would do well to learn from them.