Disrupt the Disconnection
Disruption on a micro level
The Disruptive Leadership Immersive is a comprehensive six-month offering designed for forward-thinking executives and emerging leaders who seek to challenge conventional leadership paradigms while maximizing impact within inequitable capitalist systems.
As we in the Liberation Nexus Lab get ready to kick off our inaugural cohort for the Disruptive Leadership Immersive, it seems necessary to actually outline what ‘disruption’ is. Later on, Erin will talk about disruption on the larger scale macro level; in this piece, I’m going to talk about disruption on the individual and micro levels. What does disruption look like in your everyday life?
In 2015, I found myself on the front lines of a few protests and marches for the lives of Black Americans that had been slain by state sanctioned violence. Philando Castille and Alton Sterling (and numerous others) had been murdered by police and their final moments had been caught on camera and put on display for the entire world to see. During that time, I made sure that I was at every meet-up and protest and gathering that was looking to disrupt the daily activities of every and anyone. How could people be going on with their lives as Black folks continued to be subject to the cruel and barbaric violence of the United States? I knew that I couldn’t just press on through it - so I started disrupting the everyday lives of people in my community. In marches, we often blocked roads and highways, barricaded ourselves in rooms and buildings, and took over town hall and mayoral conversations. There was a boldness that I held because I knew that others across the country (and world) were active in the same types of direct action.
What really started to shift for me, was noticing how my actions in (what my husband likes to call) my small ‘c’ community (those who I am in direct community with like neighbors, other parents at my kids’ school, colleagues, etc.) was what was really radical and changing the every day lives of people, for the better.
That’s not to say that I don’t believe large scale disruption for the big ‘C’ community isn’t necessary, because it is necessary. What I’m hoping to convey here, is that disruption into revolution must happen at all levels of existence. I started doing, what I considered, small things for those in my small ‘c’ community. I started driving a colleague home from work, who lived across the street from me, because ‘why not’? She needed a ride, and we were in the exact same directions each way. So, what did it actually cost me to do something kind or someone else? I started packing extra snacks in my eldest daughter's lunches to share with a particular friend who was always a little more hungry because she was never really able to bring in snacks from home for snack time. I didn’t ask questions about it, but I knew instinctively that this child needed care. We would even pull the garbage tins around to the front of the street, each week, for the elderly couple who lived next door to us. All of these actions - each of them - felt really insignificant in the grand scheme of what was happening in the world at large, but I noticed that these types of actions were a real disruption in everyday life is what we’ve been divorced from.
It’s taking me a lot of years to understand this point. Understand that much of the violence that we are experiencing at the hands of the ‘powers that be’ is to keep us divorced from one another, especially in the Western world; we’ve even been made to feel bad about living in multigenerational households. I firmly believe that disruption is us strengthening all the ties that bind us to one another. All the ties that keep us in community and relationship. To reject the modernity of social media as it continues to create a facade of connection while growing wildly uncontrollable due to our isolation and loneliness. Our role is to disrupt the capitalist priority of keeping us from one another, keeping us from helping and resourcing each other, from caring for those who are unhoused or struggling with drug misusage, or just simply falling behind because of the violent systems we are forced to operate through.
Disruption can look a lot of ways. Some folks think you have to be getting arrested and pepper sprayed by police (and yes, some folks will be out in the streets disrupting in that way), but disruption is also volunteering at your local school for a student play, offering to babysit for that single mother in your building once a month, walking your immigrant neighbors’ kids home from the bus stop so they don’t have to put themselves in danger, or picking up the prescription of your elderly neighbor. Disrupt our disconnection. That’s what’s going to save us. That’s how we liberate all of us.
Really thought provoking and actionable piece. Thanks for posting!