Labels saved me. Labels are also killing our movements.

⏱️ Reading time: 5 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for social impact professionals navigating power, career, and change.

I have a confession to make.

There was a time I called myself an activist. And then there was a time I stopped.

It started when I was fifteen years old, a week after the 9/11 attacks in the US at my high school in Central Valley, California. Our mosque was fielding hate calls. Families in our community were afraid to go outside. My mother was attacked in the street and told to go back to her country. A friend was assaulted and harassed in the school hallways. And somehow, I ended up leading a group of high school students - mostly of Pakistani, Afghan and Somali heritage - who felt compelled to do something, but had no idea what to do in that moment of great fear and change.

I didn't choose organizing. It chose me.

For almost a decade, through college and beyond, I did the whole thing — protests, voter registration drives, coalition meetings, workshops, lobbying days on Capitol Hill. I was proud of it. I believed in it.

And then, slowly, I started feeling something I couldn't name for a long time.

It wasn't burnout. It was closer to grief.

I was watching people I admired — brilliant, passionate, values-driven people — get so consumed by the fight that they seemed to lose sight of what they were fighting for. The joy curdled. The outrage hardened into rage. The tent got smaller. And anyone who dared to question tactics or tone got labeled a traitor, a sellout, "not radical enough."

I stepped back from activist spaces for a long time. Not because I stopped caring. But because I couldn't reconcile the world we said we were building with the way we were treating each other — and treating everyone outside our circle.

I've been thinking about this a lot this week.

The problem with the label

Let me say something that might land uncomfortably: labels have saved my life.

Knowing the word neurodivergent helped me stop blaming myself for how my brain works. Finding language for being non-binary gave me permission to stop performing a gender that never felt whole. Muslim, Desi, disabled, woman of color — each of these words found me at a moment when I needed a container, a community, a name for what I was already experiencing.

Labels are not the enemy.

But there is a way we use them that is quietly killing our movements.

When we lead with labels — when the first thing we do in any room is establish who holds which identity, who has the most oppressive experience, who is allowed to speak on what — we are no longer organizing. We are sorting. We are creating, almost without realizing it, a moral hierarchy where some people are in and others are permanently out.

Marshall Ganz, the organizer behind the United Farm Workers and the grassroots architecture of the 2008 Obama campaign, has spent decades studying why some movements win and others don't.

His answer always comes back to story. Not slogans. Not position papers. Story — the kind that moves from values to emotion to collective action. Who are we, what do we believe, and why does it matter right now?

Labels short-circuit that process. They are emotional shortcuts that tell people what category someone belongs to before we've heard a word of their story. And in doing so, they close off the very people we need to reach.

The labels that help us find each other can, wielded carelessly, become the walls that keep everyone else out. And the people we're keeping out? They're the ones we need.

The middle majority is who we're fighting for

Here's what I've come to believe: we are not losing because the right is better funded or better organized (though sometimes they are). We are losing because we have confused moral clarity with moral purity — and in doing so, we have alienated the enormous, movable middle of people who broadly share our values but don't share our vocabulary.

Loretta Ross, reproductive justice pioneer and one of the sharpest thinkers on movement culture alive today, calls this the "circular firing squad." Her distinction between calling out and calling in is one I keep returning to.

When you call someone out, you are performing accountability for an audience. You are placing them outside the circle of people worth reaching. It feels righteous. It often is righteous. But it rarely creates the change you're actually after.

When you call someone in, you are doing something harder and slower and more human. You are saying: I think you can do better. I'm willing to have this conversation. You are offering people a chance to think critically, to reconsider, to apologize — to be, as Ross puts it, as good on the outside as they believe themselves to be on the inside.

This is not naive. This is not tone policing. This is strategy.

Ross is clear that calling out has its place — particularly when people in power are causing harm and are not otherwise accessible. But turning it on potential allies, or inward on our own communities, is one of the most significant ways we undermine ourselves.

The people we need to win over are not the hard right. They are the enormous middle — people who care about climate, healthcare, dignity — but who flinch when they feel judged before they've even spoken. We cannot shame people into solidarity. We have to invite them.

That is leadership. Not the inspirational poster kind. The actual, strategic, relationship-intensive kind.

What the power workshop reminded me

This week inside Flourish, we ran our Power, Values & Leadership workshop. We did an exercise I've seen crack people open every time: mapping where you hold power and where power is held over you across the different dimensions of your identity.

One moment stayed with me.

A community member who moves between East Africa and the United States reflected on how completely her relationship to power shifts depending on context. The same identity, the same person — two entirely different power dynamics depending on which country she's standing in.

It landed like a stone in still water.

This is what we forget when we lead from fixed labels: power is not static. It is relational, contextual, constantly shifting. Being power-aware means holding that complexity — not collapsing it into a permanent hierarchy of who is always oppressed and who is always the oppressor. When we lose that complexity, we lose the ability to meet people where they actually are. And we lose the trust of the people we most need to bring along.

A closing thought

We are not trying to build a world where the left is on top. That would just be a new hierarchy. We are trying to build a world where power is distributed differently — where lived experience shapes decisions, where no one has to fight to be seen as fully human.

That world requires us to stop othering the people who are othering us.

It requires us to lead from story and values and love for the people we're fighting for — not from rage. Outrage is appropriate. It is the signal that something has violated our values and we need to act. Rage is what happens when outrage has no outlet and no strategy. One moves people. The other burns everything down, including the cause itself.

Loretta Ross says a group of people thinking the same thing and moving in the same direction is a cult. A group of people thinking different things and moving in the same direction — that's a movement.

We have always known this. We just have to act like it.

Tell me: Where have you been leading from labels when you could be leading from story? And what would it take to invite someone in — rather than call them out?

Maya 🧡

P.S. Our first free spring workshop is coming up on March 31 — save the date! More details soon. And if this piece resonated, it's a small window into the conversations we have every week inside Flourish.

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