We need to talk about what it means to "fight"

Is there a role for "fighting" in work to build belonging?

photo by Jonathan Bachman/Reuters. Ieshia Evans confronting police in Baton Rouge at a Black Lives Matter rally protesting the killing of Alton Stirling, 2016

I’ve always had a negative association with the verb “to fight”; it lands in my body as aggression, as violence, as the kind of win/lose binary that I want with my entire being to reject and transcend. Part of this is my own embodiment: as the largest kid in my class, to fight was to be a bully: it was to enact domination. I want no part of that.

In addition to my principled perspective, I have strategic concerns. In our movements I fear fighting can lead us in the wrong direction: it elicits a defensive response (Newton’s third law); it activates our fear centers (and thus pushes people toward more conservative positions); it implies a winner and a loser (a zero sum mentality that triggers scarcity thinking); it feels destructive rather than creative; and it can lead to burnout/exhaustion (fighting as an energetic cannot be sustained).

And yet: it’s also a powerful call to action. What could be more foundational to movements for social justice than the idea of fighting for our rights? And what could be more important in this moment than fighting against authoritarianism? After all, right now Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders are rallying thousands around the banner of “fighting oligarchy.” Clearly we are drawn to the idea both of fighting for (something we value) and fighting against (a threat to what we value).

So today I want to explore how to orient to “fighting” in the work of building a world where everyone belongs.

Here’s what I’m coming to (TL;DR): the “fight” response is a natural human reaction to a threatening situation; it is one of our body’s instinctual mechanisms designed for survival. Yet there is an important distinction between the aggression of an animalistic “fight” response, and the equally fierce but non-aggressive energy of our innate drive to protect what we love.

The power of “fight” I want to invoke in our movements is not “fight” at all. Instead, it’s a combination of two energies: defend the sacred; and blend with the “other” to invite transformation. That is the only power I’ve encountered capable of moving us toward a world where everyone belongs… if we are courageous enough to accept the invitation.

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Fight is not only a trauma response: it’s a healthy response

I think part of where I’ve been hung up is in the trauma literature about fight / flight / freeze (and the many other variations: appease / fawn, etc.) Joslyn Reisinger explains:

A trauma response is an emotional or physical reaction to a stimulus that reminds you of a distressing event you once experienced. It’s a term that describes the way in which your body responds to a perceived danger or threat.

A “fight” trauma response is commonly associated with aggression, anger, hostility, and attack: not energies I aspire to. It turns out I’ve conflated a trauma response (ultimately maladaptive when it persists beyond the threat itself) with a stress response (the natural human response to threat): which also is fight / flight / freeze, etc. (I want to credit this insight to Emily Athena, helping spawn today’s newsletter).

But they are not the same: a stress response can be healthy and necessary, and done effectively in a supportive context need not lead to trauma. I like George Oldfield’s contribution that we can even develop capacity to transform our stress response into what he calls a “challenge response”: where we’re still primed for action, but less in pure survival mode (our body releases adrenaline and dopamine in the face of a challenge, rather than cortisol associated with a stress response).

Sam Dylan Finch offers the healthy definition of fight in the context of a stress/challenge response:

Fight is best understood as a surge of energy that prompts action, and encourages us to confront the threat rather than avoiding or disengaging.

That sounds like something I can get behind… and even sounds essential as an orientation in our movements for justice.

Fighting the good fight

Finch offers parenthetical definitions alongside the more common fight / flight / freeze: where flight is avoid and freeze is dissociate, fight is… approach.

Ahh… this resonates for me. I took a course on Somatics, Trauma and Resilience back in 2021 with the inimitable Staci Haines, and one of the exercises invited us to identify our conditioned tendency in the face of threat: fight, flight, freeze, or appease / dissociate. I didn’t identify with any, so I asked for help.

When prompted about what I do when faced with a threat, I had an immediate answer: I engage. I face up, address it head on. I always have. But not with aggression, or anger, or hostility, or an impulse to violence. The impulse for me is a combination of protectiveness (we protect what we love) and curiosity: what is the nature of this threat, how do I best defuse it.

When I tried to get in touch with this energy, I immediately thought of the iconic image that kicks off this post: Ieshia Evans confronting heavily armed riot police in Baton Rouge, at a Black Lives Matter rally protesting the police killing of Alton Sterling.

It’s a powerful image on so many levels, but for me I felt a visceral resonance. I love everything about her energy: calm. Poised. Not aggressive, not attacking. Resolute. Feet shoulder-width apart, balanced, ready. Standing her ground. Dressed for life, not violence. She radiates conviction, a commitment to justice. And while we can’t see her eyes, I imagine they are soft, open: an invitation.

Yes, that’s it. This is the essence of the fight energy I relate to… that I aspire to. I think there are two components... and both are hugely important.

1. Defend: We protect what we love

I launched this newsletter six years ago with this reflection: we protect what we love. (I also resonate deeply with the indigenous concept of “defend the sacred”: water protectors, land defenders).

I suspect that for most of us called to the work of social justice, this is the animating impulse. It is about preventing harm or destruction of what we love: it is a fundamentally defensive posture. In the image this is Ieshia standing her ground: refusing to allow injustice to persist.

There are many ways to achieve this narrow goal, including through the use of violence. But there is a second dimension.

2. Blend: the invitation to transformation

I’m not getting the words or sequencing quite right, but bear with me. I think the very first act at the moment of threat is engagement: turning toward. In the case of Ieshia, it is literally interposing her body between those she loves and those who pose the threat.

That act of engagement has two purposes. The first is protection: defend the sacred.

But there is a second impulse, one that I think Ieshia gets at in her embodiment: the invitation to transformation. This is the longer-term strategy: I don’t only want to stop the violence… I want to prevent it from happening again. This is the idea I was getting at with Bryan Stevenson’s concept of “stone catchers”: both things are needed.

I love this line from teammate and friend Kazu Haga (get his new book out today!):

We are in need of a truly nonviolent revolution, not just of systems and policies, but also of worldviews and relationships. We need to understand that people are never the enemy, that violence and injustice itself is what we need to defeat, and that the goal of every conflict must be reconciliation.

This. This is what fighting cannot do. Fighting might meet our short-term need for protection; it cannot meet our long-term need for transformation.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler draws on the aikido concept of “blending” to explain the subtlety of this move:

It’s using the energy of the attacker to neutralize their aggression, instead of neutralizing the person (read: go to war), bringing the confrontation into a harmonious reconciliation, instead of a zero sum game of winners and losers.

In the image above the riot police are primed for violence: they are ready to deal with rocks and physical force. To instead face a young woman standing in a non-threatening way in her own power… is to be presented with a mirror. To see themselves through her eyes. An opportunity for self-reflection. Engaging in that way creates an opportunity for transformation (not a guarantee, to be clear: Ieshia was still arrested).

But it honors the humanity of the other, and remains focused on what the “fight” is really about: not us vs them, but rather the systems of oppression that trick us into believing there is such thing as “us” and “them.”

Sweet surrender?

I want to introduce one more edgy idea before I close. I’ve been thinking a lot about the energetic of domination systems, and what it takes to sustain them. And reflecting on two metaphors that have emerged recently among social justice strategists and thinkers: Vanessa Andreotti’s concept of “hospicing” modernity (an intentional nod to Deb Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s pioneering work), and the concept of “composting” (I’m not aware of the lineage/origin there, but it has spread rapidly in my networks in recent years).

The common thread is the idea that an old system is dying (our present system is clearly no longer fit for purpose and incapable of responding to the intersecting crises we face): hospicing is about supporting the transition and alleviating suffering, while composting suggests that in the death of the old we find nourishment for the new.

Here’s my radical idea: I think the system wants to collapse. I think it takes such incredible force, coercion, violence, and toxicity to prop up domination systems, that they are desperate to crumble. I often illustrate this point with the somatic exercise of the clenched fist: it wants to relax. The energy of hate/fight/violence is exhausting to sustain.

This idea was planted in me a couple years ago listening to Luna Matata’s gorgeous and provocative podcast interview on what it means to “peg the patriarchy.” I was so inspired I bought a hat, shirt, and stickers brandishing that slogan… and it’s far and away the most misunderstood thing I wear. We are so conditioned into the oppositional response that even fellow students of patriarchy hear it as an an invitation to fight: something we do “to” patriarchy, with an angry energy. “Fuck the patriarchy!” No: pegging properly understood is an act of care done in trusting relationship. It is an act that requires gentleness, an invitation to sweet surrender.

Professional dominatrix Kasia Urbaniak explains the longing here beautifully:

People are deeply desiring the surrender and submission of being held in the attention of another person… To be witnessed there and guided to a place where they feel safe enough to release, be vulnerable, and be held and led.

There is something really powerful there, about that invitation to surrender. I resonate with it in my own experience, as someone conditioned into power: it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting being conditioned into domination. I resonate so hard with Lady Gaga’s lyric in Shallow:

Tell me something, boy

Aren't you tired tryna fill that void?

Or do you need more?

Ain't it hard keepin' it so hardcore?

Speaking only for myself (though I suspect many other men as well, who may not have language for their experience), this is the root of much of the anger I suppress: the pain and fury of being conscripted against my will into a system that forces me into domination. In this I resonate with the Jamie Tartt character in Ted Lasso:

To be clear, I’m not saying we surrender: our work and commitment to justice must endure. I am suggesting: if we cease to give it our fight energy, if we withdrawn consent from the oppositional response and instead focus on protecting and blending… might they choose to join us? This, as Kazu reminds us, is the all-important distinction:

In movements that are violent or simply use nonviolent tactics, the goal is victory, where victory is defined as “your” people beating “those” people to win your demands. The victory is over your opponents. But in a principled approach, there is no victory until you’ve won your opponents over. (emphasis in original)

It’s time to let go of fighting

While I mean this literally/linguistically (I work really hard not to use fight language or martial metaphors), I’m not so naive as to think we can drop the term right away. Instead I want to invite us to reimagine our relationship to it, to anchor in our commitments.

I recently landed on my new commitment, the one that will guide me in 2025 and likely beyond:

I am a commitment to embodying power without domination. I will bridge across differences, shining my light without insisting that others see it.

Most of us—myself included—have precious little embodied experience of power without domination. Yet if our aspiration is a world where everyone belongs (which must be a world without domination)… we must practice what we want to become. I will do this translation work: while I will not “fight,” I will vigorously defend what I love (and my love is expansive). I will blend with the threat, and invite transformation.

I’m encouraged to see a number of people reaching similar conclusions. Kazu’s new book is about “fierce vulnerability”: I think that’s right. Kai Cheng Thom, Valarie Kaur, and others talk about “revolutionary love.” PolicyLink recently launched a campaign calling for a Revolution of the Soul (hat tip to Uma Viswanathan for pointing me to it). And of course Dr. King, John Lewis, and many others invoked the invitation to “beloved community.”

It’s hard work. Michael McAfee and Ashleigh Gardere at PolicyLink explain:

Taking responsibility for all is an invitation to transcend reductive identities and oversimplified paradigms. It is an avatar of wholeness that does not reduce people to any least common denominator. It demands that we honor the personhood, dignity, and complexity of each of us. When we say “all,” we must mean everyone.

This adds another layer that feels important: the invitation to transformation is not just “out there.” It is not only “them” who need to change. This is deep inner work: we too must transform. That’s another thing I fear a “fight” orientation allows us to skip over: our own complicity in the very thing we oppose. Yes we want to “fight oligarchy.” But who doesn’t shop at Amazon, or use Google, message on WhatsApp or Instagram? I’m sure there are Tesla owners at these protests. We are all complicit in different ways and to different degrees in propping up the system: it is on us to transform together.

Kai Cheng and I are playing with a concept we are calling “Radical Bridging” (homage to Pat McCabe/Woman Stands Shining, who calls herself a “radical bridger”): it’s not for the faint of heart. I just haven’t seen anything else that actually leads to transformation. (More on this idea in a subsequent post).

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I’ll leave it here for today. I’m curious if this resonates, if you have different associations/connotations with “fight” energy. If you see something in the word worth retaining.

I want to close with another image that remains seared in our collective memory, a reminder that defending what we love and blending with the “enemy” is a deeply inspiring act.

There’s a reason we all still remember Tank Man: it’s a testament to the contagious power of courage, standing your ground in the face of injustice… and the threat of violence.

original picture by Jeff Widener, AP: an unidentified person confronts tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing 1989