This starts with naming, as bell hooks always did, the systems that have carved out the Shadow Lands, deemed them erasable, disposable: capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy. It requires teaching those words, and their true meanings, to the people in our lives, so that the next time someone tells them that their suffering and burdens are all the fault of child-stealing globalists, or job-stealing immigrants, or well-meaning teachers, or the Jews or the Chinese or the drag queens at the library, they will know better. And they will be able to fight better. "We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people," says the civil rights scholar john a. powell. That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures.

XREF: Connects to bell hooks' pedagogy of naming, and the john a. powell dichotomy between being hard on structures but soft on people — contrasts with the author's broader theme of displacement and scapegoating.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 1073