Skip to main content
Lumos Transforms
Liberatory Thinking

We’ve Seen This Playbook Before—We’re Done Playing Along

By February 5, 2025February 7th, 2025No Comments
A hand holding an open book engulfed in flames, with its pages curling and turning to ash against a blurred outdoor background. The burning book symbolizes resistance, destruction of old narratives, or rejecting harmful ideologies

We’ve seen this playbook before. First, it was “critical race theory.” Then, “wokeness.” Now, it’s “DEI.” The words change, but the intent never does. This isn’t about policy—it’s about power. More specifically, it’s about keeping Black people from having it.

A blurred motion photograph of a person pressing their hands against their head, conveying a sense of stress, overwhelm, or mental distress.They want us to pretend these are separate conversations, each a good-faith debate about the best way forward. But if you listen long enough, the pattern is undeniable. The message isn’t just anti-CRT, anti-woke, or anti-DEI. It’s anti-Black. 

And yet, the media treats each new attack like a fresh argument to be unpacked, analyzed, and countered. We respond with careful explanations: “Actually, CRT is a legal framework, not a K-12 curriculum,” or “DEI is about removing barriers, not lowering standards.” But let’s be clear: the argument was never real to begin with. They don’t care about facts. They care about maintaining control.

We’re seeing this hypocrisy play out in real time. Trump hand-picked unqualified appointees while blaming any perceived failures on DEI initiatives. Let’s be clear: this isn’t about competence or merit. If it were, they wouldn’t be elevating people with no relevant expertise or experience. The message is unmistakable: loyalty to whiteness is the only qualification that matters.

A hand holding an open book engulfed in flames, with its pages curling and turning to ash against a blurred outdoor background. The burning book symbolizes resistance, destruction of old narratives, or rejecting harmful ideologies.

The Strategy: Overwhelm and Destabilize

And it doesn’t stop there. Day after day, it’s another audacious power grab, another egregious violation of norms or laws. They flood the zone—attacking DEI, dismantling essential programs, hacking into our data systems, rewriting history—until we’re too exhausted, too disoriented, too overwhelmed to keep up. This is the shock doctrine in action: destabilize people until they’re too drained to fight back.

But we see the strategy. And we’re done falling for it.

The Great Man Myth: A Distraction

A group of people in motion, slightly blurred against a bright white background, symbolizing movement, transition, or collective action."When we do look for a way forward, they’ve conditioned us to wait for a singular hero to save us. The Great Man myth is baked into our history books: MLK, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass. We’re taught about individual figures, not the movements they were part of. And so we wait—for a leader, for permission, for someone else to figure it out.

But we don’t need another great leader. We need leaderfulness—a movement of people who recognize their own power and take action, no matter how small those actions may seem.

How We Fight Back: Steady, Strategic, and Subversive

To break this cycle, we need to shift how we respond.

  • Name the Pattern: Stop getting lost in the distractions. These attacks aren’t about policy details or ideological disagreements. They’re about maintaining white dominance. Say it plainly. Say it loudly.
  • A small green sprout emerging from a crack in a concrete wall, representing resilience, growth, and hope in challenging conditionsRefuse to Collapse: Regulation is resistance. They want us reactive, disoriented, and hopeless. When we tend to our nervous systems—when we breathe, when we settle, when we reconnect to ourselves and each other—we reclaim our ability to think clearly, problem-solve, and act. (We can help with this. Here’s how.)
  • Embrace Creative Disruption: Resistance doesn’t always look like marches and megaphones. Sometimes, it’s subtle and subversive. A government memo bans pronouns in email signatures? Someone changes their font color to a rainbow. These acts may seem small, but they create ripples—reminding others that they’re not alone, that resistance is still happening, that there are cracks in their plans where possibility can grow.

We Don’t Need to Debate. We Need to Move.

So don’t keep debating. You will not be able prove anything. Don’t wait for a leader.

Steady yourself, and move. We’ll be there with you.

 

Leave a Reply