From anti-apartheid protests to renegade skateparks and guerilla gardens: what radicals miss about institutions, and how we evolve them.
Radicals dream of change; true strategists build it.
Utopia is fantasy; it doesn’t exist, whereas protopia (the opposite of dystopia, and meaning “a state that is better than today than yesterday”) is rooted in reality.
When I studied political science, I learned from a great professor a fantastic way of expressing the problem (and the opportunity) space:
Q: Do the outcomes match the preferences? If not, you might need to institutionalize your preferences.
Many people don’t understand the process of institutionalizing your preferences. They think it’s too hard, too complicated, too difficult.
Unsurprisingly, those same people are inclined to think the answer lies in destroying the institution.
This is absurd.
“Destroying the institution” is escapist fantasy because an overwhelming majority of people seek the deterministic comfort of institutional continuity.
In other words: you’re not going to “overthrow the system” because most people prefer a known thing over an unknown state of endless possibilities.
(Aka: a chaotic post-institutional state)
I don’t argue with anyone, really. In my later years I’ve come to realize that arguments accomplish nothing.
And there’s no margins in entertaining the bad faith arguments presented by the pro-revolution radicals who call everyone a fascist, primarily because these self-claimed “radicals” will immediately ordain themselves the new conservatives if they were ever successful.
(They won’t be)
It’s an old cycle. Black Marxist radical George Jackson saw it coming.
George Jackson
The radicals become the new conservatives if their revolution succeeds, and their first act is to destroy the liberals.
The radicals deny it, but George Jackson predicted precisely this outcome in a series of letters he authored prior to his killing in the 1960s, and behavior among the most outspoken radicals proves that he was correct.
He observed that radicals cannot find fertile soil among conservatives, so they pragmatically curry the favor of liberals, and in time the liberals provide cover, thus allowing their radical beliefs to take root.
He went on to observe that once the radicals are successful, they immediately destroy the liberals because they have learned a hard lesson of how the liberals will entertain and even protect the emergence of a fifth column.
Once the radicals take over, they become the new conservatives.
Get it?
That’s a big reason why these modern “radicals” are completely against protopia (incremental improvements in living standards), and are for the imaginary revolution.
And more to the point: this is why the radicals attack those who lend assistance to the poor.
Let’s talk about Fred Hampton, because he’s a great example of a man who led by example, and was killed as a consequence - literally murdered in his sleep by the very institution he threatened.
I invite you to challenge modern (fake) revolutionaries with the example of Fred Hampton.
Fred Hampton
Fred Hampton was a gifted organizer, speaker, and revolutionary who, by age 21, had become chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Born in 1948 in Chicago, Hampton rapidly distinguished himself through his leadership in community-based initiatives that provided direct material support to the poor.
Most notably, he helped create the Free Breakfast Program for children, which fed thousands of kids each week and inspired similar efforts nationwide. He also launched free medical clinics and education programs in underserved neighborhoods.
Hampton’s vision was radical in the truest sense: he sought unity across racial and class lines. He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together poor Black, Latino, and white communities - including rival groups like the Young Lords and Young Patriots - under a shared banner of economic justice and self-determination. This cross-racial solidarity terrified the powerful.
The Young Lords, a Puerto Rican organization, focused on community empowerment and liberation, while the Young Patriots, a working-class white group, emphasized class struggle and critiqued the capitalist system. Hampton brought them together under a shared vision of lending assistance to the poor.
His charisma, clarity, and success made him a target. On December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton was assassinated in his sleep by the Chicago Police Department, with coordination and support from the FBI under its COINTELPRO program. He was 21 years old.
Despite his short life, Hampton’s legacy endures - especially in the principle that community care is a revolutionary act.
Kent: what’s with the references to black marxist revolutionaries? Are you a commie?
I’m not a communist.
In the early 1980’s my brothers and I were moved to our father’s, and was immediately repelled by his brutal authoritarian discipline, which was not correlated with any logic. The man seemed to enjoy humiliating others, and I did what most kids do when confronted with such authoritarian cruelty: I became defiant.
The man was overtly racist against Blacks and Jews, and as a consequence: I snuck out of my basement bedroom and attended anti-apartheid protests in downtown Portland in the early to mid 1980’s.
I was taken in by boomer-era radicals who had cut their teeth during the civil rights movement, and in time I found myself among them, smoking weed and listening to music as they educated me on the icons of their era’s movement as my dad and my stepmom slept.
40 years after my graduate-level education at the feet of these boomer-era giants, it remains fascinating to consider that, from one perspective: the brutal institutional response to the civil rights movement served as a rude repudiation of our Constitutional ideals, and from another, equally-valid perspective: the history illustrates what happens when activists allow a foreign nation-state government (the USSR) to usurp their movement in bad faith.
As a result: men and women of great promise were assessed by the institution as fifth columnists, and were targeted as enemy combatants, and the institution’s loyalty to our Constitution was put to the test.
It was in this manner that I learned of the work of Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Marcus Garvey, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, the latter of whom discernibly refined and expanded Mr. Jackson’s revolutionary lens.
Angela Davis
My introduction to Angela Davis was organic and radically transformative. Bear in mind that I was in my late teens, and here’s how I encountered her influence:
I was reading Soledad Brother and her influence flowed into George Jackson’s writing like a sneaker wave. In that era it was not possible to put the book aside and look her up on the Internet, indeed I had to hide these paperbacks from my dad and stepmom, because they were constantly “inspecting” my bedroom,” so it took some time for me to figure out who she actually was.
Angela Davis’ influence upon the work of George Jackson can be described in the following manner:
Strategic Framing: From Rage to Revolutionary Discipline
Early in Soledad Brother, Jackson’s tone often reflects unfiltered rage and nihilism toward the system. While entirely understandable given the brutal conditions he endured, this energy wasn’t always strategic; it burned hot, but without clear direction.
After connecting with Angela Davis, who was both a trained philosopher and a Communist Party organizer, Jackson’s letters begin to reflect a more disciplined analysis of power and strategy. He starts to think more about coalition-building, internationalism, and long-term systems change, rather than spontaneous rebellion.
For example: in later writings, Jackson echoes Davis’s clarity on the state as an apparatus of repression, but now fused with his firsthand understanding of prison as a political weapon. His rhetoric begins to serve not just catharsis, but mobilization.
Angela taught him to aim the fire, not just light it.
Intersection of Personal and Political: Gender & Collective Struggle
Angela Davis brought an analysis of gender, class, and race that helped deepen the Panthers' and Jackson’s framework. Jackson’s early writings were male-dominated and militaristic, often reflecting the hyper-masculine culture of prisons and resistance movements at the time.
Davis, with her background in philosophy and experience as a radical Black woman, brought feminist and Marxist theory into direct relationship with the Black radical tradition. As their collaboration grew, Jackson’s later communications, particularly in Blood in My Eye, began to show greater recognition of women’s roles in struggle, of solidarity as more than just discipline, and of revolution as something cultural and relational, not just armed.
Kent you keep referencing black communists. This makes me nervous.
Why does it make you nervous?
Study the lives of these people, and it’s my hope that you are inspired by how they responded to hardship. They took the grief of their lives and transformed it into a gift for others.
I disagree with their contention that “communism” is the answer, although I may be persuaded otherwise if one could make reference to a single example of where and when it has proven sufficiently effective.
Adam Smith articulated the foundations of capitalism in the 1700s, and originally it was conceived to be a system by which a community of stewards may utilize capital to bring benefit to their communities. Only later did the legal and financial framework get modified to resemble its current form, and it’s my contention that in its current form: capitalism isn’t flawed. It’s insufficiently optimized, and resembles a poorly-tuned engine.
Well, as a car guy: I’m more comfortable tuning an engine than I am discarding an engine that can run for an engine that’s only been started a few times in a small variety of small-scale pilot tests.
Let’s talk about Adam Smith
Adam Smith is considered the father of capitalism, and he lived in the 1700s.
As is frequently true, the more subtle and nuanced aspects of his vision have been removed such that he wouldn’t likely recognize his own child, so to speak.
Consider this:
“And hence it is, to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their full grace and propriety.
As to love our neighbor as we love ourselves as the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor.”
Of empathy:
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively matter.
That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others as a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, it by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility.
The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not all together without it.”
Corporatism is not the same as capitalism, at least as capitalism was originally conceived.
Ambrose Bierce observed:
“Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.”
It’s popular to claim that capitalism is flawed, but I prefer to see this differently:
Capitalism in its current form is insufficiently optimized, resulting in the unsustainable and unhealthy disease of resource accumulation by the few, to the detriment of the many.
Having worked for most of my career inside of large corporations, and I can assure you that the “few” who are delivering the least value are those at the top; typically a risk-adverse cohort who employ the rhetoric of action, risk-taking, and accountability, without doing any of those things.
In effect: the most egregiously ugly aspects of “capitalism” (untuned corporatism) resemble the worst perceived aspects of a system that’s never really been run in the first place (communism).
I don’t give a shit. I’m a car guy. I like tuning old engines, and that’s what I aim to do.
Returning to the fake radicals you will eventually encounter
The modern radicals don’t really track with any of this logic.
They prefer to see the world through the polarizing lenses of “haves” and “have nots,” making reference to conflict theory - a sociological frame attributed to Marx. There are two other schools of thought in the domain of sociology, but the radicals are either unaware that they exist, or they don’t care.
You could pause your own efforts to help them get re-rooted in the solution space, but it may be a waste of time and effort. I’ve squandered years trying to get them to listen and have mostly given up; too many of them are as close-minded and ossified as the institution they hate, and are therefore immune to learning anything.
It’s time to talk about sociology
Sociology is the the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society, and proper application of sociology is to apply three complementary lenses for assessing societal dynamics and interactions:
Structural functionalism
Conflict theory
Symbolic interactionism
Structural Functionalism
This perspective views society as a complex system with interconnected parts that work together to maintain stability and order. It focuses on the functions and dysfunctions of social structures and institutions, such as family, education, and government.
Think of it as comparing society to a human body, where each organ (social institution) has a specific function to keep the body (society) alive and healthy.
Conflict Theory
Attributed to Marx, this perspective emphasizes the role of power, inequality, and conflict in shaping social life. It argues that society is characterized by competition for resources and that social structures are often used to maintain the power of dominant groups.
Conflict theorists are interested in how social inequalities and power imbalances lead to social change and conflict.
Symbolic Interactionism
This perspective focuses on the meanings individuals assign to symbols, signs, and gestures in social interactions. It emphasizes how these meanings shape individual behaviors and social interactions.
For example, a red light can symbolize stop, while a green light can symbolize go, and these symbols influence how people interact with the traffic. Symbolic interactionism also explores how individuals create and maintain their own identities through social interactions. Those interested in the theory of memetics find much academic currency in the domain of symbolic interactionism.
As noted: modern radicals are either unaware of the domain of sociology, or they don’t care.
For them there is only rich vs the poor, blacks vs the whites, haves vs the have nots.
It’s all smash, and no collaboration.
What about day 2?
For the modern radicals, there are no margins in between for protopia, only destruction, and the most annoying thing about them is that they have no coherent plan for “day 2,” which is when we’d be required to feed our children and our elderly once they’ve toppled the institution.
If they were more like Fred Hampton, they’d understand “day 2,” but they aren’t.
Modern radicals are so radically incompatible with people like Fred Hampton and Angela Davis that they may as well be feds, indeed I believe the “sad commie egirl” phenomenon is so brutally effective at assaulting morale among “comrades” that it has to be a fed op.
So when you’re out in the world, aspiring to effect change as you “institutionalize your preferences,” you can expect to come up against people who believe themselves to be radicals.
It’s highly likely that they are, indeed they are resisting your attempts to effect change because they aspire to become conservatives in the “new system” they don’t even understand.
They will attempt to drag you into the mud. My counsel is to ignore them. They seek to destroy anyone who attempts to make things better, and are therefore of no consequence.
Refreshing the screen: protopia vs utopia
So once a person has decided to step away from the utopian fantasy of institutional destruction, one is invited to return to the original problem/opportunity statement:
If you take your preferences, and you run them through an institution, what are the outcomes?
There’s a fair possibility that the outcomes will not precisely resemble the preferences, and that’s understandable. It takes time to institutionalize your preferences.
I learned a lot about this as a skateboard advocate, which served as a primary endeavor for over 40 years.
Pier Park v 1.0
It took us years to get a public skateboard park built in Portland, Oregon, and the first one was a piece of shit built by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, who had cut their teeth building concrete dams on one of the largest rivers on the planet.
The skatepark had 18 inches of concrete when 4 inches would have done the trick, and meeting ill-applied ADA requirements (like unnecessary handrails), even where these concessions made little contextual sense.
I made a visit to the old Pier skateboard park with Mark Scott prior to the park’s destruction and replacement, and a kid asked if we were skate park inspectors.
Red said: “yes, and we give this part five thumbs down.” 👎👎👎👎👎
Triple-Dipping my Experiences to become more effective
As shared elsewhere, I don’t have credentials and I don’t come from a “good family” (eg: a reputable family name), so I’ve had to learn everything on the job, and all I have is my reputation, and so I triple-dipped my military, corporate, and activist experience in an effort to make up for what I perceived to be lost time.
I took what I learned in the military, and adapted the same methodologies in the corporate space, and both of these experiences informed my endeavors as a skateboard advocate.
These experiences helped me learn how to more effectively “institutionalize our preferences,“ which helped me realize that people inside of government are not really “the enemy.”
If you’ve ever watched the television show, Parks and Recreation, you will get an appreciation for how difficult it is to satisfy the public, because the public, in practice, often behaves irrationally.
That doesn’t mean everybody in the public is crazy, it’s just that when you run a requisite outreach program, you tend to only attract the cranks, and holy shit.
Inevitably, there’s one or two individuals who will bring the entire system to its knees, so they are not inconvenienced in one tiny bit, and these are the things that contribute towards a culture of extreme risk aversion.
Well, I had learned a thing or two about a culture of risk aversion because I spent the first decade or so of my career in Fortune 1000 companies.
People don’t make right choices, they make safe ones
They employ the empty rhetoric of action, accountability, and risk-taking, while doing none of those things.
This dynamic is made worse when you realize that the senior executives negotiate their exit package before they even start their jobs, so why would they incur risk when they are overwhelmingly compensated for staying the course?
Fortunately, there are many methodologies that support a person’s aspiration to rapidly evolve an institution, which I consider to be the more appropriate framing for the word “revolution.“
Naomi Klein detailed one such methodology in her book entitled “The Shock Doctrine,“ but there are other methods.
She observed that strategists will employ scripted acts of “disaster capitalism” to effect large-scale change to the benefit of the few (to the detriment of the many).
Proponents of this approach argue on behalf of its perceived effectiveness, but they overlook that assaulting the system into compliance only serves to render it more rigid and ossified, thus contributing to a state of institutional brittleness.
There are other ways.
Productive tools for effecting positive change
For instance, if policy makers are dis-incentivized from incurring risk, then we can work with them by taking on that risk within pilots that help them evaluate their hypotheses without incurring direct risk.
In the context of public skateboard parks, we made a policy of building an archipelago of innovative facilities in smaller towns which surrounded a larger municipality.
Advocating for free public skateparks was fun, because it’s actually this: modifying a city’s master plan for recreation, on behalf of a constituency that does not vote and does not pay taxes.
If a facility was well designed and properly implemented, it became a multiuse recreational amenity, and according to typical Parks & Recreation KPIs these projects delivered the highest rates of ROI, as quantified by usage relative to ongoing maintenance.
The delivery of a successful public skate park is extremely similar to that which is required for a farmers market, and there are a wide variety of stakeholders that are necessary for the project to succeed. One of those is law-enforcement, and skateboarders have a notoriously conflicted relationship with “the cops.”
Best way to achieve victory over a foe is by becoming his friend
There is a design methodology called “crime prevention through environmental design,” and it’s basically this: help the officer do their job without having to leave the car, because everybody deserves to go home safe each night.
The CPTED design methodology helped grease the skids regarding institutional endorsement, and all we needed to do as advocates is get off our high horse regarding our strained relationship with law-enforcement, so we could “rapidly evolve” the institutionalization of our preferences.
The radicals are completely against this
There are an extremely small percentage of radicals who are 1000% against any such collaboration, and you can expect them to emerge as your greatest foes, indeed so loud is their clamor that you will perceive them to represent the majority.
The good news: they represent an infinitesimally small minority of the most extreme minority.
They will oppose you, they will attack you, and it’s not because they want to destroy the institution.
It’s because they want to create a new institution upon which they will serve as its conservative reactionaries, but none of them will admit it. It’s why, for instance, they are so good at “canceling” a critic, but less good at actually doing anything that brings about positive change.
They are conservative reactionaries, and they lack the wisdom to realize it; they would realize it if they acted more like Fred Hampton, but why bother when it’s easier to cancel everyone from behind a Twitter account?
And that’s what this is all about: effecting positive change in a culture that resists change and avoids risk.
Solution: reach into the past to prepare the future
My fellow skateboarders and I get a lot of props for building our renegade DIY park under that bridge, but a less-told story is how boomer anarchists taught me renegade DIY ethos during late night “guerrilla gardening” missions planned and carried out with military precision.
One example was when we’d wear all black carrying satchel bags filled with wildflower seeds, and we’d ride bikes through Portland’s redlined district late at night seeding empty and abandoned lots.
Their ethos was “you can’t hit us if you can’t see us,” and we were in and out without a word, through districts that at the time featured pretty terrible violent crime.
But drive through six months later and those lots had transformed into fields of native flowers, and you could see kids playing among them, like it was some kind of miracle.
These boomer-era anarchists taught me a lot about how my white skin can help me navigate this world, into places they cannot go without being recognized, and as they attracted more whites their methods became more bold.
For instance: over time I was invited to participate in the deployment of a true “guerilla garden.” I learned how to stage the materials necessary to deploy a “renegade DIY garden" in the back of an old pickup, with the license plates removed. Once a location was chosen, we’d roll in, late at night, deploy and build the garden without a word spoken, with one or two sentinels listening for law enforcement, and a few minutes later we’d vanish.
Months later, the neighbors would find…a garden, and more often than not: they’d adopt it as their own.
As another example: on one occasion we all separately approached a busy intersection in downtown Portland, each of us carrying a small bag of fresh grass clippings. We converged upon the intersection from different directions, and at the light change entered the intersection, dumped and spread our grass, and transformed it into a park.
For about five minutes we blocked traffic as we lay on towels, looking at the clouds as they pass overhead, or some threw a frisbee, and when five minutes were up, we left in different directions, changing our shirts and vanishing into the crowd.
These are people I met during anti-apartheid protests in the early 1980’s and I’d like to think people of their ilk are still out there.
Maybe those people are us, yourself included.
My grandfather and our skatepark
The Black and Jewish activists I met in the 1980s helped me understand how my white skin served as a cloak of invisibility, enabling me to do things that they could not.
I’m using that language on purpose: all of us possess a cloak of invisibility, all we have to do is to say what people want to hear and they will ignore everything else. This is because most people listen to respond rather than listen to understand.
For instance, my father and my stepmother cannot fathom that I am anything but an idiot, so what are the margins of me trying to convince them otherwise?
I gave them what they wanted, and they rolled their eyes, folded their arms, and walked away, and at night I would sneak out of my basement bedroom, ride my skateboard downtown, and receive another graduate-level education from people who had cut their teeth a generation prior during the civil rights era.
But they were not my only educators.
My paternal grandfather was well placed within the institution; he served as the regional personnel director for Burlington Northern Railroad, and railroads are a pretty big deal out west.
I was my grandfather’s eldest grandson, indeed my first name is the same as his: Roy.
We enjoyed our relationship that my grandfather did not have with my father, and he counseled me on the nuances of how to navigate the institution he natively understood.
His counsel and insights greatly assisted our efforts to institutionalize a DIY skateboard park originally built without permission.
We spent five years trying to find the right alchemy of location, building, materials, and timing, and eventually we settled upon what used to be one of the worst places in town: beneath the east end of Portland Burnside Bridge.
But for the prior “five years of failure,” by grandfather coached me on how to “beg for forgiveness” as we evolved our model.
Taking in account all that we’d learned from the boomer-era activists and counsel from my grandfather Roy, we began to deploy what we originally called a “pool of the month” effort, which was often just some renegade DIY, deploying marginally-skateable infrastructure into a city that had criminalized skateboarding.
Eventually a few of the “pool of the month” cohort settled upon the seedy east end of the Burnside bridge, and we got to building, and with my grandfather’s counsel, we learned how to employ the lost art of statesmanship to curate a politically unstoppable coalition that included parents, clergy, the business association, the neighborhood association, law-enforcement, and skateboarders.
Our renegade DIY project was formally endorsed a year later, and it will celebrate 35 years of autonomous self governance this coming October.
This effort worked because we chose a location that was blighted with crime, conflict, and destruction, and we improved the area’s material conditions by introducing ourselves as stewards, working in concert with our neighbors.
This act helped break the spell of inaction regarding the implementation of free and legal skateboard parks, and we were not the only such effort, but it made a difference, and soon afterwards cities were building these facilities by the thousands.
This greatly informed my insight that it is possible to institutionalize our preferences, not working against the system, but working in concert with it, not unlike how a skilled jazz musician plays within the margins of perceived chaos to deliver art.
In this video, a collection of jazz musicians seamlessly incorporates the alarm to create a wholly-new composition. So it is with community development.
So how will you begin?
You’re reading this because you want to make a difference. The problem seems so large, and maybe it seems impossible.
You have preferences, and the institution seems so rigid and impossibly resistant to change, but you want to make a difference.
Where will you begin, and with whom?