Cross-racial and cross-movement solidarity is the work of our time.
People need people.
It may be the oldest fact of our survival, yet one we often forget. Across generations and cultures, our strength has always come from relationships—the ties that bind us and remind us that our fates are interconnected.
But those ties are fraying. Toxic individualism has created a culture filled with fear, isolation, and loneliness. Though beneath it all is a shared desire to repair the bonds that people in power have broken and reclaim our sense of belonging to one another. Seventy percent of Americans say they feel a sense of responsibility to connect with people whose experiences and beliefs differ from their own. Our own research shows that when we braid stories of Black reparations and Indigenous Land Back together, support for both movements rises.
This leads us to conclude: the work of solidarity cannot be left to chance.
We must practice, nurture, fund, and cultivate it at the highest levels. True solidarity asks us to put something on the line, to move from shallow offerings toward a kinship that is deeper and resilient enough to withstand the oppressive systems that surround us.
It is with this in mind that we founded The BLIS Collective (Black Liberation-Indigenous Sovereignty). It began at a birthday party, during a conversation between two strangers. And in that unlikely corner, while people danced around us, we asked ourselves a question that has guided BLIS ever since: Why aren’t Black, Indigenous, and working-class movements, and our shared calls for reparative justice, more deeply bound together?
This question inspired our vision to build a space strong enough to hold the weight of history and expansive enough to cultivate the solidarity that can transform society. We created BLIS to help bring people together across movements and build shared narrative power, so that we may repair the harms done to Black and Indigenous people, and create a future where all people, regardless of their identity, can live freely and fully.
Building Collective Narrative Power
At BLIS, we aim to reverse inequities and build a culture rooted in values that see our true humanity, that remind us that we are bound to one another.
Achieving this will require a rigorous narrative and solidarity strategy. Race-based organizing, on its own, can further silo us while trapping us in zero-sum narratives. Similarly, class-based organizing, by itself, often fractures when it collides with the country’s deep racial hierarchy.
To move beyond this, we must come together around shared values and do the hard work of redefining what it means to belong to one another. Our identities, race, gender, sexuality, and religion shape how we see the world, but they are not the only things that connect us.
At BLIS, we cultivate solidarity at two levels:
- Interpersonal solidarity across our membership network, where movement and cultural leaders build deeper bonds across identities, issues, and differences.
- Solidarity narratives that connect struggles and solutions at the societal level.
When interpersonal relationships braid together with broader public narratives, they generate a ripple effect across culture, policy, and public imagination. By braiding solidarity narratives across society, we can create the conditions for transformative solutions to take root and reshape our economy and democracy.
Funding Radical Collaboration in a Time of Division
In our first year of work, we listened across movements, speaking with each of our members and with leaders in cultural and movement spaces, to understand the challenges of building solidarity. Again and again, we heard the same roadblocks:
- A lack of time and capacity to engage in cross-movement and cross-racial solidarity work.
- A lack of infrastructure to sustain relationships across movements.
- A lack of capital to support the growth and development of coalitions.
- Historical tensions and philanthropic incentives to compete.
Given this, philanthropy has a critical role to play in removing these barriers. We are encouraged by some funders who have begun to lean into this work, supporting efforts to strengthen solidarity, build narrative infrastructure, and resource the movements for reparations, Land Back, and solidarity economies that prioritize people and the planet over profit. But far more is needed.
To truly shift culture and power, philanthropy must broaden how it understands impact in narrative, solidarity, and cultural work. It will require measuring over long horizons, valuing contribution over attribution, tracking the reach and resonance of ideas, fostering relational trust and alignment across movements, and enabling collective actions and policy/cultural shifts.
This is disciplined, long-term work, but it must be a part of our path forward.
Liberation is Born Through Tension
“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous people be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” Professor Ned Blackhawk poses this question in The Rediscovery of America, noting that it “haunts America as it does other settler nations.” It also exposes a number of contradictions that we must confront.
What does it mean to promise Black people “40 acres and a mule,” on land already stolen from Tribal Nations? And what does it mean for a democracy to have broken every treaty ever signed with Tribal Nations? How do we reckon with an economic system that exploits working-class people across race, while race itself determines whose exploitation is deepest and most deadly?
These are not questions to avoid; they are the terrain of our collective work. At BLIS, we know that liberation is not found in the absence of tension—it is born through it.
We will continue to hold these tensions in our work, centering Black, Indigenous, and working-class people with a clear-eyed vision of a world where all people belong.
Join us in imagining this world and helping bring it into being.
