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wetdirtreads 's review for:
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Initially, I wasn’t sure I’d finish this book. The first contribution, ‘The Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex’, was so dry, inaccessible, and impenetrable. (Kind of ironic since it critiqued the academic industrial complex.) It was so bad, in fact, that there was one sentence I counted that was more than 300 words long! It made some good points when I could tell wtf it was saying, but honestly, I have no idea why this piece was put first.
The book gets significantly better after the opening piece. However, there are some gaps in its analyses that I was left desperately craving consideration of.
For e.g., I would’ve loved to see a stronger disability justice lens applied. There’s one contribution with a disability focus, ‘Pursuing a Radical Anti-Violence Agenda Inside/Outside a Non-Profit Structure’. In it, the author raises that accessibility is a) rarely prioritised, and b) often very expensive, meaning access-focused collectives are regularly having to choose between pursuing funding, or sacrificing access.
I think this is an important point, and I would’ve loved to see it taken further. What are the broader implications of this for disabled communities and organisers? How does this play out in other contexts, e.g., in disabled folks being forced to rely on (or more often, being denied access to) state resources for supports they need to survive? How do we reconcile some of the expectations of community organising with the fact that some people, particularly multiply marginalised disabled people, have less of a choice in divesting from the state than others?
I still found this book invaluable, though, and don’t expect it to cover all ground. It’s a fantastic starting point, and is not meant to be the be all/end all of NPIC analysis.
One final observation: While I’ve always had some awareness of it, this book gave me a much broader and deeper understanding of how I’ve been groomed for the buffer zone my whole life. It was an important learning, but a very confronting one, nonetheless. I think Run the Jewels put it best when Killer Mike said, “you really made it or just became a prisoner of privilege?”
(Review originally posted on Instagram)
The book gets significantly better after the opening piece. However, there are some gaps in its analyses that I was left desperately craving consideration of.
For e.g., I would’ve loved to see a stronger disability justice lens applied. There’s one contribution with a disability focus, ‘Pursuing a Radical Anti-Violence Agenda Inside/Outside a Non-Profit Structure’. In it, the author raises that accessibility is a) rarely prioritised, and b) often very expensive, meaning access-focused collectives are regularly having to choose between pursuing funding, or sacrificing access.
I think this is an important point, and I would’ve loved to see it taken further. What are the broader implications of this for disabled communities and organisers? How does this play out in other contexts, e.g., in disabled folks being forced to rely on (or more often, being denied access to) state resources for supports they need to survive? How do we reconcile some of the expectations of community organising with the fact that some people, particularly multiply marginalised disabled people, have less of a choice in divesting from the state than others?
I still found this book invaluable, though, and don’t expect it to cover all ground. It’s a fantastic starting point, and is not meant to be the be all/end all of NPIC analysis.
One final observation: While I’ve always had some awareness of it, this book gave me a much broader and deeper understanding of how I’ve been groomed for the buffer zone my whole life. It was an important learning, but a very confronting one, nonetheless. I think Run the Jewels put it best when Killer Mike said, “you really made it or just became a prisoner of privilege?”
(Review originally posted on Instagram)