As I thought about the general psychology of violence and protest in our country - in relation to both my clinical work and the particular milieu of my academic life - one word seemed to capture it all: alienation. Whether in relation to the state, communities, institutions, working environments, families, spouses - even one’s sense of self - it appeared to me that South African protestors were raging against an abiding disconnect between internal desire and external reality, or a state of alienation written into both the objective conditions of life in the external world, as well as their internal, subjective experiences of that world.

More generally, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was a powerful reminder about how quickly authoritarianism can rise (as well as what can be done about it), and Václav Havel’s classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” changed my thinking about the impact a single individual could have in dismantling a long-established system. I hope he’s right.

One wrong move could be fatal and so no one makes a wrong move. It is the reason a stranger should never set out into the city without a native guide. Some cities have a plan, a diagram of the city before its founding, or a map, a schematic representation of the city as it now is. Not this city. The choreography that keeps it going would be amazing could it be seen in a single encompassing moment. That is not possible in a city which changes faster than it can be described and which tolerates cartography only on a scale of 1:1.

But on returning to the city he found it grim and was tempted to call it a post-traumatic landscape except that would have suggested the trauma was in the past. It is a city of unspoken sufferings: the wordlessness of the disappeared dissidents, the blankness at the other end of the blackmailer’s phone line, the hush after a lynching, the shiver after a beating, the abyss following child abuse, the stillness after a murder, the muteness after a rape, the long-held hopes that vanish as soundlessly as a drop of water on velvet.

We have been growing otherness, borders, separateness. And in all that division we have created layer upon layer of trauma and vengefulness, conditions for permanent war, practices that move us into a battle with the very planet we rely on for all life. The scale of division, conflict, racism, xenophobia, and hierarchical supremacy on our planet is overwhelming.

Finding the places of healing and transformation, moving towards a world beyond enemies, is work that has to be done for our survival. Which means transformative justice—justice that transforms the root causes of injustice—is necessary at every scale, but I am particularly focused on how it becomes the common orientation and practice of movements for social change, for peace, for liberation.

The Party understood the racialized lens through which Black Americans rightly viewed the world, but Newton knew that coalition and international politics were necessary elements of the revolution. To help make this point, Morrison helped him arrange the book to reiterate the idea that revolution is a process that must be practiced in a community with others, not just analyzed or theorized in relative isolation.