APRIL SELF STUDY - DOM MCLENNON
My name is Dom McLennon, the Organizing Fellow for the 2025 Autonomous Fellowship Cohort at Mutual Aid Hartford. I’ve been given the privilege to share some personal journaling from our April Self Study, Coalition Politics: Turning The Century by Bernice Johnson Reagon, an excerpt from HOME GIRLS — A Black Feminist Anthology Edited by Barbara Smith.
At the 1981 West Coast Women’s Music Festival, Bernice Johnson Reagon would speak to lay out a scene that serves as a brilliant reality check, taking an honest look at unraveling what decisions and compromises need to be made in order to effectively live in the work of coalition and intersectionality. I personally love how relevant her commentary from over 40 years ago still rings into our modern age of information, with overstimulation and social environments that treat attention as a commercial resource.
An insight that immediately struck me was when Bernice speaks on how, “With the coming of all that technology, there was finally the possibility of making sure no human being in the world would be unreached. You couldn’t find a place where you could hide if somebody who had access to that technology wanted to get to you.” It’s interesting to see these thoughts so succinctly placed before the dystopian surveillance state that has become social media and modern technology.
There truly is value beyond the novelty of no human being in the world being unreached, although the utility and intention of how we reach one another has become something I personally spend a lot of my days thinking about. I often aspire for a safer way to share the information I need to express with my peers and the world because our impact becomes supervised — technology and creativity blend with culture in so many ways that inspire and also create a deep existential dialogue about where to balance the collective desire I find people have to be seen, while also being aware that the desire to be seen can be unsafe by nature.
A large reason why I joined this fellowship was to create an opportunity to find more formal education and understanding of the infrastructural practice of social movement work through an organization that is aiming to support artists, and share my thoughts as an artist in what has been a protected space for us to cultivate and develop our skills. For most of my adult career, the arts and specifically the entertainment industry has become what Bernice would refer to as my “barred room.”
She says, “in that little barred room where you check everybody at the door, you act out community. You pretend that your room is a world…Of course the problem with the experiment is that there ain’t nobody in here but folk like you, which by implication means you wouldn’t know what to do if you were running it with all of the other people who are out there in the world. Now that’s nationalism. I mean it’s nurturing, but it’s also nationalism.” My aspirations with making change may not always be in alignment with making friends, and quite frankly that's been a really difficult pill to swallow over the last four or five years based on the world I spent a lot of my teens and twenties dedicated to.
I’m immensely grateful for all my peers and comrades, equally so for the ones gained and lost along the way. Something about making a more intentional effort to decolonize myself from the systemic abuse in my work led me to having to remove the things and people who have interfered directly with that effort. A lot of Bernice’s words really resonated with me, specifically how she communicated what the illusion of community can feel like when the ideology and reality of being like-minded doesn’t match up with the reality of staying intentional about keeping the work intersectional.
Bernice continues to say, “Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition, they’re looking for a home!” As I’ve come to have a better understanding of paternalism, capitalism, and hyper individualism in society, I see Bernice’s words exacerbated in where a lot of my artist peers lose sight of the bigger fight once they find the barred room they’re allowed and accepted in — the coveted table seat.
The work truly isn’t easy, and there’s only more to do and more work to discover, Bernice continues to speak directly to the importance of creating that home and establishing a base to fill your cup when the work empties it, because it will if it’s done correctly, and it’s not the responsibilities or the spoils of the work that will do the refilling for you. It’s you. I’m grateful for this piece serving as a candid reminder to what it means to be in spaces like these, along with this Autonomous Fellowship providing footprints from folks like Bernice Johnson Reagon to study and identify check points on the path together defining my world as an Artist, Organizer and beyond.
