- by Dayjha McMillan, RVC Fellow, Cohort 4
“Don’t let conflict turn you hard.”
—Renee Sills, Embodied Astrology, June 20, 2024
I like to think of myself as a values-aligned person. Someone who knows we get one life, so why waste it? In this one life I’m privileged to live, I make choices that bring me closer to my purpose, my inner Self, and Spirit. As I’ve fumbled and fought to find myself in a deeper relationship with my calling, I know it lies in being a student of transformative/healing justice and abolition.
My calling to this work is rooted in the care, intention, and love cultivated within transformative and healing justice spaces—spaces that allow grief to move more easily. It’s the community of folks who’ve dedicated their lives to this work—work that feels life-affirming, life-giving, and life-altering. I am drawn to this work because I am a dreamer. I want to live in a world where survivors can experience the freedom of voice. To be given the space to storytell, which, in my understanding, is healing. Releasing those silenced and stuck stories that eat away at us because we live in a society where abuse thrives on silence. I’ve found that when people are given space, they want to talk. It is a natural human response—to be in deep connection with one another. I believe that transformative/healing justice offers that: a place for communion. A place where folks can access their humanity by being cared for, respected, loved, and held through their pain—a place to access what I believe is a human right: to be loved.
Because of this, my North Star, ancestor, sister, auntie, best friend, uncle, and guide, Cece, directed me to Collective Justice (CJ). This direction was greenlit. I applied to their Heal2Action 2.0 cohort, a survivor organizing academy beautifully envisioned by Dashni (a friend, supervisor, inspiration, and goofball). This space profoundly influenced my personhood and journey. In the following months, I quit a coding bootcamp, left my KEXP radio internship, and walked away from a previous nonprofit job when it was no longer aligned with my values.1
“I believe a lot of this work begins in the home. I start this work by interrogating/healing my own home. Healing my home starts with healing myself and sharing my history—storytelling the pain of my lineage. I’d like to be able to hold space for others so that they may do the same.”
— Journal excerpt, November 16, 2022
After choosing myself, the Collective Justice opportunity arrived right on time. A Director role opened up, and I knew deep within my soul that I was meant to work at Collective Justice. So, I applied.
On December 19, 2022, the winter solstice — the most powerful solstice for me — I found out that I didn’t get the role. I was in the final two. On the phone, Dashni told me who got the job, and my jaw dropped in glee. Na’Quel had been my role model in high school for her organizing efforts. I couldn’t believe it was between her and me! That was — and still is — an honor. In my journal late that evening, I wrote:
“I want to work at CJ — however they have me. I want to build stronger relationships with Cece, Flo, and Dashni… people who feel like friends and guides to me.”
I entered 2023 the exact same way I entered 2022: unemployed and determined.
In January 2023, after a much-needed vacation, I came home feeling renewed and ready to find a new dream job. Then Dashni reached out, asking if I would join her team at Collective Justice as a member. Naturally, I said, “Hell yeah!” I noticed something after that first meeting—she seemed overwhelmed and exhausted.
Lightbulb moment.
I was in a fellowship (shoutout to RVC!) that paid my salary, and I just needed a placement organization. I reached out to Dashni and asked if I could join her team as a co-worker and support her at Collective Justice. After about six weeks of meetings with CJ, RVC, Dashni, and Flo (my coach), I was hired. By April 2023, my dreams came true — I was working with Collective Justice.
Return to the first paragraph and read it again.
One thing I’ve learned in my brief, frontally-developed-lobe years is that when any group of people shares space over a solid period of time, there WILL be conflict. People WILL shift into their conflict shape and fight. My conflict shape is to get small, quiet, anxious, detached. My purpose is to be in community with transformative/healing justice which means I must learn how to transform my conflict shape into something that brings me closer rather than pulls me away. I think this is a lifelong lesson. I have the opportunity to transform my conflict shape because I am alive. How special is that?
In my year at Collective Justice, I practiced being in a deeper relationship with conflict — my place in it, my values, and what/who I’m committed to. I am rebellious by nature — a rule bender. I look for loopholes and thrive in the chaos that emerges after conflict. I create infrastructure after things have been burnt down. I’m a disrupter and a builder.2 Rebellion is integral to abolitionist spaces. To me, rebellion is how I stay connected to my youthfulness and to young people everywhere. In some of my more powerful moments, I’ve channeled the disruptive spirit of abolition with others to try and build something new. In September 2023, chaos was present at our full collective retreat.
I hesitate to share the chaos that emerged because the point of this letter is not to shame — it’s to name the harm that I, many other Black folks at CJ, and Black folks within nonprofits experience regularly. It’s no secret that nonprofits:
- 1. Use Black folks’ stories and struggles for the literal creation of the organization.
- 2. Bring in Black women to clean up the anti-Black mess.
- 3. Do not retain Black women in leadership roles.
- 4. Struggle deeply with relinquishing power that is neither liberatory nor beneficial for Black folks within the organization.
- 5. Often perpetuate white supremacist values that bleed into the organization, structurally harming the Black (often, multiply marginalized) folks closest to the work.
In September 2023, interpersonal conflict among staff spilled into our retreat space, where we needed to address anti-Blackness. As a result, the facilitation was fumbled, leaving the Black folks in the room feeling compelled to advocate for our existence inside work that was fundamentally built on our existence. That was not only harmful but incredibly neglectful. And yet, beyond the harm and neglect, I saw magic. I saw the possibility to alchemize the chaos and create magic.
After day one of the retreat, I went home, wrote a letter to CJ, and did not share it. (Remember my conflict shape? I got small and scared about losing my job thus deciding not to share it.) Today, I’m choosing bravery– a sibling of rebellion. I hope it’s received well.
“I’ve never experienced a place like CJ — a space where we love, yearn for connection, and move with grace, kindness, integrity, and commitment to ourselves, our people, and this work. Yesterday, we were asked, ‘Why do we do this work?’ I gained a new answer to this question.
Our drive and heart can be seen right here, today. Yesterday, CJ felt special to many of us, and I presume it’s due to the magic of transformation. So many of us spoke of this magic — having space to heal, grow, and be loved for exactly who we are, who we want to be, and who we’ve been. We all care so deeply.
In my past organizing days, I used to dream of this — dream of love, healing, self-awareness, and joy being at the center. I used to believe that fighting for the world I wanted was a dream. The dream. Something to happen in another lifetime. I was deeply committed, but it felt worlds away. I name this to say that this specific “dream,” I’ve learned, exists today. In pockets of our lives where we fight for it because we know we deserve better. We deserve our whole humanity. Our dream world already exists — it’s right here.
CJ, in my opinion, is a beautiful place for transformation. Addressing anti-Blackness, as so many have named, is ongoing. We live in systems that require this specific harm to function (like being a nonprofit). Many of us, myself included, are grateful every damn day to be here. To be alive. To get the chance to love and to transform over and over again. My various identities within these systems don’t want me alive. Don’t want me to live a full life.
Yet here I am. Here we are. We, at CJ, are already defying the odds. To love one another through harm and past violence? To see each other as whole beings? That’s doing the ‘impossible.’ I’m asking us to do just that in regards to pro-Blackness. Why can’t we practice Black liberation? Why must we stop ourselves from dreaming of better worlds and making it happen the way we’ve done before? I know we can commit to moving away from white supremacist ways of working and relating. I’m asking us to lean into our values and do it humbly. We are not the first to enact anti-Black harm, but we could be some of the first to name it — out loud — as a means of being authentic, as a means of leaning into our humanity, as a means of embodying who we say we are and who we want to be.” — September 2023
I am forever grateful for Collective Justice. I’ve learned what it means to fight for who we love. To show up every day, even in conflict, because we love each other. We are all transformed by love, and transformation is love. If we say we believe in abolition, we cannot shy away from rebellion. To rebel as an abolitionist collective means resisting archaic ways of existing! Don’t let outdated methods of harm and violence — the silencing, the shoving away into dark closets, the sweeping of anti-Black harm under the proverbial rug — be our façade for moving forward. Truth will always set us free, and conflict is a beautiful vessel for truth to shine through.
“Don’t let conflict turn you hard.” I pray conflict keeps us all soft enough to shapeshift.
Dearly and sincerely,
Dayjha (one of your biggest cheerleaders)
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1 Prayer to self — I will ALWAYS be protected when I follow my heart and not the fallacy of “logic” under capitalism.
2 https://buildingmovement.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Ecosystem-Guide-April-2022.pdf