When Protest Feels Like Privilege...

What We Prioritize and Practice is also POWER.

Last year, in July 2025, while I was struggling to pack up my life into a storage unit in Michigan, forced to move back home to North Carolina with family, I posted a vulnerable message on LinkedIn and ended it with a reflection about protest, practice, and the small radical actions that shape how we live. I stated that beyond protest; these times call for deeper intentionality around what we are practicing. What we practice can also be a form of protest. Each small radical action matters to the collective of others daring to do the same, no matter how hard or isolating it may feel. We are never alone.

Ten months later, that truth still lingers but with another layer. The latest rounds of protests have actually felt like a privilege. One I can’t afford. I made a decision to stop feeling guilty about it, which is difficult for me to admit because I believe in protest and collective action. I’m committed to disrupting systems, taking up space, demanding change, and refusing silence. I have a history of showing up, speaking out, organizing, facilitating, educating, challenging, questioning, and being on the frontlines in the ways my life and labor have called me to be. Even when it has cost me. Many times, it has (seemingly) cost me quite a lot.

My lack of desire to participate in public protest right now is not rooted in apathy. It’s not because I don’t care or because I’m indifferent to injustice and disconnected from the urgency of this political moment. Point blank, survival mode has me in a chokehold.

As I move beyond a year and a half of one of the most daunting experiences of my life and career, a relentless, exhausting, demoralizing job search, the thought of joining a protest has been mostly nonexistent in my mind. Again, not because the issues don’t matter, but because every day, I’m just trying to figure out how to keep going with so much uncertainty and instability plaguing my every thought.

I’m trying to find work, trying to rebuild and expand a small business that has been devastated, trying to preserve my dignity while depending on my family for housing, food, and financial support, and honestly... just trying not to drown in the shame that comes with being an independent, driven, ambitious person who suddenly feels like a burden to the people I care about the most. It’s a blessing and at the same time we don’t come from generational wealth. My family members have their own families and responsibilities, on top of being Black in America. The emotional and mental turmoil; the guilt I feel, is relentless. It gets heavier by the day.

When protests demand that people don’t go to work, I feel the contradiction in my bones because I can’t even find employment. I understand the political strategy. I get the symbolism. I know that withholding labor has historically been one of the most powerful tools available to people fighting exploitation. But what happens when you don’t have labor to withhold in a capitalistic society that demands that you pay to live? When you’re already economically displaced so much so that you can’t see a way out? When your unpaid labor is the endless application process, networking, the tailoring, the interviewing, waiting, rejection, the emotional recovery, and then starting over again? What if you’re already outside the systems people are being asked to interrupt?

That is the struggle-toggle. I can believe in protest and still not have the capacity to participate in it.

I care deeply and also… still need to prioritize my own survival. I’m committed to collective liberation and also… still in a season where my most urgent act of resistance is not abandoning myself.

That doesn’t make me a hypocrite. It makes me human.

We need more room to talk about the contradictions we hold and the conundrums they create because there can be a quiet guilt that comes with not showing up in the most visible ways. There’s often a pressure to prove your politics through your public participation.

There’s an unspoken hierarchy of resistance where marching, protesting, and being physically present are seen as the highest or most legitimate forms of commitment even if people ONLY participate in a protest here and there and don’t change any of the habits that uphold the very things they’re pushing back against.

Resistance has never existed only in the streets.

Sometimes resistance is in how we refuse to internalize the systems trying to destroy us, or how we rest when capitalism tells us our exhaustion is proof of our worth. It’s in how we tell the truth when silence would be safer. And how we spend our money, share our resources, build relationships, care for our people, protect our peace, choose our language, question what we have been taught, and refuse to perform productivity as proof of value.

Sometimes resistance is simply deciding that our minds, bodies, spirits, and dreams will not be fully colonized by the systems we’re trying to dismantle. My very existence is resistance. In a historical, embodied, ancestral way. Black people were never meant to survive the institution of chattel slavery. We were never meant to remember or love ourselves. We were never meant to build families, futures, cultures, movements, scholarship, strategy, joy, and whole worlds from the fragments of what was stolen.

And yet, here we are.

My way of life matters. What I practice is important. What I pay attention to has impact. Who and what I pour into and where I allocate my time, energy, gifts, labor, care, creativity, and resources is intentional pushback. adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy encourages us to embrace that “small is all” and “what we pay attention to grows.” Those ideas have resonated since I first read them in 2018 because they challenge the belief that only large, visible, public actions count. Transformation is also built through patterns and choices. Through relationships and repeated practice, and the small things we do over and over again to cultivate new pathways.

That’s where I’m locating my resistance right now.

Individually, I don’t have significant control over the blanket policies, practices, and procedures that impose upon my access, opportunities, livelihood, and freedom. I can’t single-handedly change the systems that have made employment precarious, DEI and equity efforts disposable, Black women overworked and under protected, and survival so very expensive.

But I can choose mental liberation every damn day.

I can and will keep de-socializing and decolonizing my mind, and interrogate the beliefs I inherited from white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, respectability politics, and grind culture. I can and will notice when I’m measuring my worth by my income, job title, productivity, or proximity to institutional validation.

I can and will refuse to believe that unemployment makes me useless and to let rejection rewrite my identity. I can and will refuse to let systems that were not designed for my freedom become the final authority on my value. These, too, are all protest.

It may not look like a march or come with a sign, chant, crowd, or a hashtag, but when I choose to live in alignment with my values and I root my decisions in pro-Black humanitarianism... when I prioritize love, liberation, and truth-telling, I am still resisting.

Every decision that challenges hierarchy. Each refusal to worship productivity. My choice to try and practice interdependence in a society addicted to individualism, and my very commitment to build something more humane… IS DISRUPTION.

In seasons when we cannot show up everywhere, we need to stop confusing capacity with commitment. Right now, my capacity is limited. My care is not. I may not be marching but I’m still choosing. I’m purposeful about where my attention goes and what I practice. I’m very deliberate in my decision not to abandon myself to prove I care about the world. I’m choosing to believe that survival, when rooted in truth, love, and liberation, can also be sacred resistance.