No Kings, No Lessons Learned: When White Liberalism Mistakes Marching for Movement

Credit where it’s due: rallying millions of people under one banner is no small achievement.  The logistics, the momentum, the digital organizing… it’s all impressive on paper.  But we’ve seen this before.  Ten million people in the streets, fists raised, hearts full and by nightfall the empire still sleeps soundly.

Because the truth is: the state does not fear your marches.

It fears your withdrawal.

Nothing was learned from the first No Kings protest.  Not because the people didn’t care but because white liberalism refused to listen.  Black and Indigenous organizers warned from the beginning: visibility without leverage is vanity.  Decolonization is not a vibe, it’s a practice.

The first No Kings rally was supposed to be a statement but statements don’t shake empires.  We said then, and we say now: symbolism without strategy is performance.  Marches that begin and end on schedule do not threaten systems that thrive on control.

If the empire can plan traffic routes around your protest, it’s not afraid of you.

The last time millions gathered, the ruling class barely blinked.   There was no economic disruption, no refusal of labor, no material consequence for ignoring the workers.  It was a moment of collective catharsis but not collective power.

And here’s the hard truth: catharsis doesn’t free anyone.  It makes the oppressed feel heard while the oppressor continues to profit.

White liberalism mistakes performance for power because it has never truly faced the cost of resistance.  It has never been hunted for land defense, never been surveilled for feeding its community, never been exiled for speaking truth to empire.  For Black and Indigenous people, resistance has always been more than a march, it’s been survival.

Our ancestors didn’t just march.  They walked off plantations.  They refused to till stolen soil.  They built mutual aid networks in the shadows of governments that wanted them dead.

They didn’t need permission to act.  They understood that liberation required consequence.

When we say white liberalism is killing us, we’re not being dramatic.  We mean it literally.  White liberalism kills by co-opting our movements into safety campaigns that protect no one.  It kills by watering down radical ideas into slogans that fit neatly on tote bags.  It kills by platforming reform over revolution, by prioritizing comfort over consequence.

Liberals will march for hours but they won’t risk a paycheck.  They’ll post a square but they won’t redistribute wealth.  They’ll quote Audre Lorde but they’ll never ask why Lorde called the master’s tools what they were.

We’ve seen this pattern too many times: performative solidarity with no follow-through, emotional allyship with no material support and the endless recycling of “movement moments” that generate headlines but not healing.

If ten million people truly united not for a day of action but for a lifetime of refusal, the empire would tremble.  If ten million people withheld their labor, stopped paying into oppressive systems, redirected their resources into mutual aid, cooperatives and community defense, this entire structure would begin to collapse under its own weight.

Because the ruling class already knows we’re angry.  They simply don’t care.  Because our anger doesn’t cost them anything.  Until we organize to make their wealth unspendable, their power ungovernable, their profits unsustainable, we will keep being “seen” but never free.

We cannot march our way to liberation.  We must BUILD it with hands that plant, cook, strike and defend.

At Tending Futures, we are no longer interested in symbolic resistance. We are cultivating material power:

🌾 Mutual Aid: feeding families when the state withholds care.

🌿 Herbal and Ancestral Medicine: healing bodies when systems profit off illness.

🪶 Community Defense: protecting our people when law enforcement exists to harm.

🌍 Land Stewardship: remembering that freedom was always rooted in the soil.

We organize not to be seen but to be sustained.  We gather not for spectacle but for strategy.  Because empire does not fall from hashtags.  It falls when the people it exploits stop participating in its survival.

From Africatown to Borikén, from the bayous to the Blue Ridge, from the Gulf Coast to the Caribbean, our resistance is not new.  It is ancestral.  It is the hum of survival that has carried us through enslavement, genocide and occupation.

Our people have always known that no king, no president, no party will save us.  WE SAVE US.

And if those who claim to stand beside us still refuse to listen, if they insist on repeating the same mistakes in the name of “unity” then let this be known: we will not follow them into futility.

We are building something they cannot ignore, something they cannot police, something that will outlive the empire itself.  Because the revolution will not be commodified.  The revolution will not be co-sponsored.  The revolution will be grown from the ground up.

The work begins long before the streets and continues long after the cameras leave.  Here are a few ways to turn energy into endurance:

• Join or start a local mutual aid network.  Feed your neighbors, not the system.

• Support strike funds and workers organizing at Amazon, Starbucks or your local grocery store.  Class struggle is land struggle.

• Buy from and fund Black and Indigenous organizers, healers and land projects.  Reparations are not symbolic, they are economic.

• Divest from corporate banks and invest in community credit unions and cooperatives.

• Study and unlearn together.  Build a political education circle around texts like The Red Deal, Joy James’ The Captive Maternal, Assata: An Autobiography, and We Do This ’Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba.

• Prepare for collective defense. Learn first aid, digital security and land-based survival skills.  Safety is communal.

We’re done performing resistance.  We’re practicing it in body, in spirit, in soil.  From the Gulf to the Appalachians, from the wetlands to the highlands, our hands are building what marches never could: the infrastructure of freedom.

Because liberation isn’t a day of action.  It’s a lifetime of tending.