My name is David Dean and this is Toward Solidarity, a substack where I write essays on race, class, and building the powerful coalitions our movements need to be victorious.
I am a political educator, writer, and speaker who believes that all of our freedom is interdependent and that when we can bring this wisdom into the center of our organizing, we will be unstoppable. You can learn more about my work at davidbfdean.com.
As an independent trainer and a former Associate Director of White Awake, I have taught racial and economic justice education courses for over 5000 individuals and trained members of political organizations throughout the US. While much of my work involves supporting white people to engage effectively in multiracial movement-building (and while Toward Solidarity often includes important insight on the topic of whiteness), this substack is a resource made for people of all backgrounds with a yearning to build political power through solidarity.
Monthly articles (in written and audio form):
As a subscriber, you will receive a new article from me each month (that’s always the goal, anyway!) written and read aloud to help you gain the historical insight, political analysis, organizing skill, and inspiration needed to do the hard work of cultivating transformative alliances across lines of race and other forms of difference. Articles may take the form of interviews with activist-scholars, windows into hidden histories of resistance, descriptions of specific forms of movement strategy, practices for emotional resilience in the work of social change, and more. Each one is sent to your email inbox and posted here.
In addition to monthly articles, I also send subscribers periodic announcements about online courses I’m holding and other updates on my work.
My hope for this substack
Toward Solidarity is built in response to the reality that we live in a society of divide-and-rule racial capitalism. The 99% has been stratified into a racial hierarchy (as well as many other forms of social hierarchy), directing immense harm toward the most marginalized while weakening our collective capacity to challenge the corporate domination of all working people and the earth itself. If anything can save us, all of us, it is solidarity. Solidarity can be hard. It requires learning and unlearning. But it is liberatory. It is the very thing that we’ve been so aggressively dissuaded from by the powerful because it is the only thing strong enough to create the life-affirming world we so desperately need. It’s my hope that Toward Solidarity can expand your capacity to help bring this world to be.
