Today, we are coming together to honor students in our program who are graduating with a RUCCAS degree.  I was thinking about what it means to be a Rustin Urban Community Change Axis graduate. 

They will tell you in just a few minutes what it means to them, their philosophy statements or manifestos on liberatory community change work.

Here is what I am thinking as we near the close of 2025: liberatory community change workers are folks who have capacities to improvise a different story of humanity, collectively with others, through both their words and their actions.  We as a collective, folks like us are gonna change and save the world, and by that I mean destroy this world as it is and nurture the growing of new ones—Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas coined the slogan “Many worlds in one world.” Yes. 

This doesn’t mean we are superheroes, special and invulnerable. It means the opposite—our superpower comes from acknowledging vulnerability and interdependence.

To paraphrase one of my English Department seminar students: Racial, extractionist capital tells the story of itself to itself all the time.  You know that thing about “when people tell you who they are, believe them?”  Well, when a system tells you who it is, believe it.  The system as it is: a few thousand—mostly White men—scarfing down and amassing unimaginable quantities of resources for themselves, while insisting on precarity for the rest of us. This war against humanity and the Earth itself is the logic of a world-wide market, where everything and everyone is a thing to be exchanged for money.  And now they are not even hiding it under banners of neoliberalism, like “freedom” or “equality” or “democracy.”  What does this say? 

I’m going to assert it says they know the Worlding they built is collapsing, and they are desperate to be able to keep hoarding for later and making mistakes and messes now. Because their story of human “nature” is that anyone in their position would do what they are doing, and they are also terrified about what is beyond this Worlding (in that, I think I can safely say maybe we all are—we have never seen the next World, right? What if it is a nightmare?  Except this Worlding is already a nightmare.). They are also terrified that people will find out how mediocre their power has made them, and their inhumanity is actually a cover for this truth about them—they are not at all special. 

That they need us not just to produce stuff, but to allow them their humanity. Humanity means ultimately dying, and first making mistakes, being vulnerable, being interdependent. They cannot escape this reality.  None of us can. 

They have been part of a long game to try to escape this.  This mess didn’t emerge out of nowhere, though sometimes it might feel that way.  This has been pretty much nefariously planned for over 50 years—let alone the last 400 years.

So that’s awful. What is not awful is that we here in this room can be part of the long game too, doing our small part. Here at West Chester, in the university, we should not keep playing their game. We are, I would assert, preparing each other for the transition, for the Worlding emerging through the cracks of collapse, Worldings that have always been there, fugitively sustaining themselves in outrageous, scandalous, joyful plots of resistance and revolution. We create our own pockets of legitimacy despite their illegitimate brutality.  We inch toward struggling in love and rebellion and dreams.

These folks HERE have more capacities than when they started their respective programs to insist that we can do better as humanity, that actually the definition of humanity that is the main character of racial extractionist capital is not the protagonist.  There is and always has been a different main character. And we are her.  Are them. Are him.

I don’t know what story you all are going to tell in a moment, but I know that the capacities that RUCCAS is designed to develop—through hands on word, through learning theory, through studying history, through engaging specific examples of liberatory change—these capacities include

• the ability to face conflict,
• to enact emancipatory tactics and strategies, with others
• to ground yourselves in connection and solidarity, so you can sustain for the long haul
• to take risks and imagine wildly different futures, systems and relationships

—these actually, I believe, are essential to a vitalist humanity (a sense-making and soul shared by all living things on Earth), a vitalist humanity telling the story of itself to itself.  That is what we are about to hear in a micro version, from each of these humans.

With that, I want to say that I am so proud of all of us, and especially these folks coming to the end of their academic journeys with us—N. and S. and A., and really pleased to soon be calling you colleagues and seeing what you do with your minds.