The Audacious Vision of Liberation for All
Not All Liberation Minus One
A post in which I reflect on some thoughts and ideas that surfaced at PolicyLink Summit 2026.
Often when people talk about liberation for all, they really mean liberation for some. What's getting in the way of our audacious vision for us all to be free?
Text below:
Last week I went to the PolicyLink Summit 2026. The theme was “We Are the Founders,” writing the unfinished democracy for all—or something to that effect.
I was invited as a facilitator. It was really exciting, and it was a great opportunity. I learned a lot, I shared a lot, I connected a lot. I have a whole bunch of thoughts and ideas I'm working through, and I'll probably be talking about a lot of them over the next couple of weeks. But right now, I want to center on that theme: democracy for all.
First off, kudos to PolicyLink. I love that this was a core part of the framework. It was shared and repeated in so many spaces: in the conversations, the speeches, the banners, the water bottles, the t-shirts. Folks were really holding on to this concept, this word—“all.”
And while I love it as a key framework, I also want to name something. In the conversations afterward, in the hallways, even on the stage, I could tell: the frameworks people were using when they said the word “all” were still meaning some.
This isn't unique to this summit. Having done this work for over two decades, I see it in the classes I teach. When you ask, “who is freedom for,” people say “all.” Then you keep adding more and more people into that “all,” and eventually they start to tense up. A line gets drawn between all and some. Or it gets contingent: yes, everyone, as long as they do this, or as long as they don't do that—creating the conditions that allow people to be part of the all.
This isn't an individual failing. It's part of a systemic, pervasive ideology of supremacy: the idea that human value is contingent on how good or bad you're perceived to be. It's rooted in binary thinking: the belief that everything we can know is separated into this or that, that those categories aren't just separate but as far apart from each other as possible, and that they're in opposition to each other. Then we ascribe value: one is considered better than the other.
As soon as we do that, we create the conditions where something can fall below the line. If a line is drawn between this and that, then something can fall from the valued side to the devalued side.
So much of our social justice and liberation movements have been invested in framing not invested in liberation for all, but instead how do we get more of our people onto the good side? How do we get more of our people ascribed to the valued category? When we do that, we reify and reaffirm the valued category as a category at all, especially in opposition to a devalued one. We act as though goodness has to be ascribed, as though badness is allowed, rather than recognizing that we're intrinsically fine and good, and that there's no line to move across in the first place.
Moving folks from bad to good, from one side of the line to the other, only reinvests in the dynamic: there's a line, and there's a side of it to protect. Once we get to “good”, if we're on the devalued side, we want to get to the valued side. And once we're on the valued side, we have to maintain that value at all costs, which means we keep investing in “well, we're not as bad as those people,” “well, we deserve this more than they do.” That's the problem. It's not about who gets onto the good side. It's about not dismantling the dynamic itself: us versus them, winning versus losing, good versus bad.
All those ways binary thinking is infused in our movements need to be evaluated, so we can come to a liberation that doesn't mean for some—and I don't even mean for most—but for actually all people. Not all minus one. That's what lets us come to our full humanity, and do the healing we need to do to show up for our own full humanity, the place where we've done what bell hooks called “psychic self-mutilation,” which is what allows us to keep contributing to a dynamic of domination in the first place.
I want to be in that radical, liberatory place—where our humanity isn't contingent, where our engagements aren't rooted in fear or self-protection, but are actually loving, vulnerable, and connected, because we know others are engaging with us the same way, because there's no contingency to humanity at all. That's what I'm seeking. Those are the conversations I'm excited to get into. Are there challenges? Yes. Is there harm that needs to be addressed? Absolutely. But any other framework means we're not actually achieving liberation. We're just moving the problem onto another group of people.
These are the conversations I'm excited to have, and hopefully there's more coming soon. Let me know what you think: where do you find yourself, or your movements, running into this challenge? Where can you practice the beautiful, radical audacity of liberation for all.
Thanks so much!
