“I’d rather be angry than being sad.”
– Ulrike Meinhof, in a letter to her daughters,
from prison, 1972
It was someone else’s land before it was a sidewalk
I pass unhoused people every day in Montréal. On Avenue du Parc. On Rue Sainte-Catherine. On Saint-Laurent. Near the métro at Berri-UQAM. I slightly adjust my walk to make my way around them. I notice the other passersby doing the same. We all pretend. Because what can we do after all?
I should say first what street I am pretending on. This city is Tiohtiá:ke, unceded Kanien’kéha:ka territory, and the sidewalk I am about to make so much of is not a neutral surface. It was someone else’s land before it was a sidewalk, and the looking away I am about to describe is, among other things, the continuation of a much older looking away. The land I inhabit carries this history whether I name it or not.
Yesterday a rattling thought came to me mid-walk, or rather, a rattling connection, the kind that arrives in the body before it arrives in the sentence. The connection was that as long as this exists, as long as we keep passing, as long as we keep pretending the person on the sidewalk does not exist, there will be no liberation. Not here. Not in Palestine. Not in Congo. Not in Yemen. Not in Rojava. The unhoused person on the sidewalk and the word liberation are wired to one another, even if the wire is one we have spent a very long time pretending not to see.
The unhoused person on the sidewalk and the word liberation are wired to one another, even if the wire is one we have spent a very long time pretending not to see.
Liberation will remain a word we borrow when it is convenient and return when it is not. The suffering will be ranked. The sympathy will be conditional. The world will continue to have unequal grief.
And here is what shames me most. We cannot be angry at our politicians for their inability to mourn equally across ethnicities and borders, because we cannot do it ourselves, locally, either. If we are apathetic here, on this sidewalk, forget internationally. The ranked mourning of nations begins as the ranked mourning of neighbourhoods. Colonial violence, forced displacement, the tightening of borders, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. These are not abstractions arriving from elsewhere. They inhabit the sidewalk I walk on. They imbue who I see and who I refuse to see.
My walk is
political. It always
was.
Always is.
Forgive me, dear reader, I cannot help asking the economist’s question, even when I would rather not. What happened to our incentive to care? What happened to our connectedness and mutual interdependence? How did we get so good at looking away?
The discipline I was trained in has an answer ready. We are, it says, fundamentally self-interested. We are competitors before we are anything else. Cooperation is a strategy we adopt when it serves the self, and we abandon it when it does not. This story has been told so often, in so many seminar rooms and policy briefings and television panels, that it has begun to feel like description rather than ideology.
The defining characteristic of our species is not self-interest and competition. It is our astonishing capacity for altruism and for cooperation.
As I remind my students, the defining characteristic of our species is not self-interest and competition. It is our astonishing capacity for altruism and for cooperation. We built civilisations on it. We built languages on it. We built, against considerable odds and at enormous cost, the practices of care that allow most of us to make it through a single day. Something has gone horribly wrong, yes. But what has gone wrong is not human nature.
What has gone wrong is the story we have agreed to tell and teach.
What keeps us going—and the editor of this issue, Emma Haraké, asks the question plainly, so let me try to answer it plainly—is one another. It is the neighbour who notices. It is the friend who calls. It is the mother who keeps cooking. It is the stranger who walks you to the métro at night because she happens to be going that way. It is the small, daily, mostly invisible work of people refusing the story that they are alone.
We were trained out of this. Slowly, expensively, and well. Democracy was quietly narrowed to a ballot cast every few years. The city, the most immediate place where we could shape our lives together, the first place we encounter our common humanity, was stripped of our fingerprints.
We were told, politely and persistently, that governance is complicated and best left to professionals. We stopped being participants. We became audiences, and audiences do not liberate anyone.
One of the stranger features of modern political life is how much we tolerate from politicians that we would never tolerate from anyone else. Coercion in a relationship is no longer acceptable, and yet we celebrate it in a leader and call it strength. Hundreds of unrelated issues are bundled into a single vote, and governments then presume consent for all of them. We do not accept presumed consent in any other area of life. Why do we accept it in politics?
The vocabulary itself has been emptied. Freedom now mostly means the freedom of the rich to do as they please. Choice now mostly means choosing between near-identical products. Even community—and ecosystem—have been corporatized. The words were ours first. They were taken. They can be taken back, but only if we use them to mean something again: collective freedom, real choices for all, communities that include the persons on the sidewalk.
After decades of the disenchantment of politics by economics, how do we re-enchant politics?
That is the question I carry with me on my walks. The answer, like most honest answers, begins with what is right in front of us. And it begins with remembering that nothing in politics is permanent. No victory by the powerful is final, no matter how loudly they tell us it is. Political life is a perpetual struggle against oppressive power, and oppressive power is creative—under neoliberalism, under colonialism, the powerful found arguments to justify their dominance and hired the best minds they could buy to refine those arguments into doctrine. When challenged, they innovate. The moment we stop seeking new means of confronting that innovation is the moment our politics fails.
We are told we have no power. Oh, but we do. Yes, we may have a disadvantage due to lack of money and the institutional weight. But what we have, and what they cannot easily buy, is arithmetic. The world as currently arranged does not serve the great majority of people. I am not trying to be radical here; it is just arithmetic. Aligned with this, I cannot help but remember Zohran Mamdani’s remark: “socialist politics can flourish anywhere, because there is only one majority in this country, and that is the working class. It’s time we have a politics that puts them at the heart of what we’re doing, not in the appendix.” He may be referring to the United States, but he is also referring to all of us.
Better versions of our current reality have been done, are being done. Right now, as we speak.
Allow me to put on my scholarly hat briefly and point at what gets buried under the noise of electoral cycles and breaking news and the general theatre of politics-as-usual: better versions of our current reality have been done, are being done. Right now, as we speak.
Take Rojava, in northeastern Syria. After defeating ISIL, and as the Syrian government withdrew to fight its war elsewhere, the people of Rojava did something extraordinary under conditions most of us cannot imagine. They built their politics from the ground up. Popular assemblies, open to anyone in the neighbourhood. Delegates who could be recalled at any time. Power delegated upward from the people rather than handed down from a state. These assemblies grew into confederations—an alternative model of governance that prioritises local self-determination, ecological sustainability, and social justice over the objectives of any nation-state. It is by no means a perfect republic. But it is theirs.
Or Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, where for fifteen years residents decided how the city’s entire investment budget was spent. Fifty thousand people participated every year. Corruption nearly disappeared. Sanitation improved. Schools improved. The city went from failing to leading the state on the human development index. The more people engaged, the wiser and more long-term their decisions became. Short-termism—that chronic disease of representative democracy—was replaced by something rarer: collective thinking about the future.
94 people, many of them with lived experience of homelessness, sat down together and decided how a real harm-reduction and housing budget would be allocated…
Then Taiwan. Madrid. Barcelona. Lisbon. Brussels. Melbourne. Helsinki. Seoul. All experimenting in different ways with participatory governance, citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, co-created urban planning. And, closer to home, the Waterloo Region, where 94 people, many of them with lived experience of homelessness, sat down together and decided how a real harm-reduction and housing budget would be allocated—in what was appropriately named the People’s Purse initiative.*
The community’s priorities diverged from what the professionals would have funded. In the usual way of doing things, the divergence would never have been visible. It would have lived on as grievance, never as data. Treating the divergence as legible is itself a political act before it is a budgetary one.
So, these actively participatory initiatives do exist. Everywhere. They point at the same quiet truth. When people are genuinely given the chance to participate, they do. They show up. They engage. They make wiser, fairer, more generous decisions than any government acting on their behalf.
So why don’t we? Why, knowing all of this, do we still pass by?
Disempowerment is not an accident; it is a design.
Because the system has done its job well. It has convinced us of our own ineptitude. The culture wars whipped up by governments and media, fought bitterly between people who share the same economic interests, are only possible because we have been excluded from meaningful power for so long. Disempowerment is not an accident; it is a design.
Part of this design is isolation. Algorithms steer us toward homogeneous groups, toward people who look and think like us, who help us defend ourselves against “the Other.” And yet even fascism—and I do not use that word lightly—has an antidote, and the antidote is bridging. It is the deliberate and sometimes uncomfortable work of building communities across differences. Of sitting in a room with people who are not like us and deciding together how the budget should be spent, how the neighbourhood should be governed. Bridging is the politics of belonging in practice. It is the slow construction of a we that does not require anyone to be made invisible in order to exist or in order for others to exist. Only through building sufficiently rich and vibrant bridging communities can we hope to resist the pull toward walls, toward purity, toward fear.
“Participatory democracy has an extraordinary feature. It tends to work better in practice than in theory.”– Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed and Sean Geobey
Many of the obstacles critics imagine dissolve, because the process transforms the people who engage in it. You cannot sit across from your neighbour in a citizen assembly and then pretend they do not exist on the street. I think here of Edward Said sitting with the local aunties in a scene in The Shadow of the West; the most learned man in the room is visibly the one being taught.
Care is not the soft thing the discipline I was trained in presents it to be. It is the infrastructure itself. It is what allows people to keep going when the present feels unrelenting. It is what allows the assembly of us to exist at all.
Which brings me back to the sidewalk
The unhoused people on my street are not a separate issue from the wars and the occupations and the famines, and the ecological grief that gathers in from the edges of every news cycle. They are the same issue. The same hierarchy of whose suffering counts. The same practiced avoidance, scaled up to the level of nations and foreign policy and UN vetoes. When we learn to look away locally, we learn to look away globally. The ranked mourning is a single skill. We practice it everywhere. Until one of us stops. Then the other.
Hope, as the artist Sahara Romero reminds us, has two daughters. One of them is what made me write this. The other is what I am still learning, which is also why and how I teach, not just to deliver knowledge in colonial settings, but to swim against the stream and thereby learn together, in rooms where the asymmetry of who-teaches-whom is allowed to dissolve. The classroom and the sidewalk are the same room. I have not always managed to act as if they are. But I am trying.
The first daughter is a refusal—an insistence that things as they are cannot be allowed to remain as they are. The second is what the refusal asks of the body, here, on this sidewalk, with this person, today. Some days I manage a hello. Maybe I provide food. Most days I still pass. The honest thing is to say so. The hopeful thing is to keep trying.
Recognition, first. Everything else follows. The collective need not be an abstraction. It is, by simple arithmetic, the sum of individual moments of refusal—yours, mine, the neighbour we have not yet met. It begins here, on this sidewalk, with one person deciding to see.
It begins here, on this sidewalk, with one person deciding to see.
Participation in politics is not a gift for which we should beg. It is not a luxury reserved for those with time and credentials and the right kind of voice. It is our right. It is our only real defence against the world we are told and trained to continue to sleepwalk through. Against oligarchy.
Against the ranked mourning of human lives. Against a politics that would foreclose the possibility of mourning equally at all.
We have been told we have no power. Dear reader, we have immense power. We just need to remember how to use it. We need to remember the older story about ourselves—the one in which we are, despite everything, cooperators and carers, neighbours and bridges, the species that built its languages and its cities and its meals together. That story is not naive. It is older and better evidenced than the one we have been sold. It is what keeps us going. It is what the sidewalk is asking us to remember. Care locally to care globally. The rattling connection runs in both directions. You cannot tend to the far suffering if you have trained yourself not to see the near one. And you cannot tend honestly to the near one without admitting how far the wire runs.
My city is political.
My walk is
political.
My looking away is political.
And so is my decision to stop.
Locally first. Then everywhere.
* Note
The link for the Waterloo Region is to A Playbook for Community-Based Budgeting, written and led by Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed. Inside this playbook is the case study involving the Waterloo participatory budgeting called the People’s Purse initiative. The case study and the initiative were led by Sean Geobey and Gryphon Loubier.
