Issue 02 — What a Co-Conspirator Actually Does

Before We Begin

Last issue, we named the word that stopped fitting.

Ally.

And we watched the pivot. The move from accountability to self-protection that happens so fast most people don't notice it as a choice.

This issue, we go one step further. We name what becomes possible when you stop performing solidarity and start sharing risk.

This Issue

There is a word that lives in the glossary of this community. It was introduced last issue without a full definition. That was intentional.

Co-conspirator.

It is not a reward. It is not the next level of allyship. It is a fundamentally different orientation to the work. Allies help from a position of safety. Co-conspirators accept that if anyone in the community is harmed, they are harmed too. That is not a feeling. It is a commitment that changes behavior.

This issue is about what that commitment looks like in practice. Not in theory. In the moment. When someone is in pain and everything in you wants to do something useful with it.

Spot the Pattern

Two weeks ago I shared something personal. The weight of watching the same harm repeat itself with new faces and the same mechanics. The exhaustion of doing this work from inside the conditions it is trying to change.

And a response came in asking: what are three things I can do to help?

Sit with that for a moment.

Not: I hear you. Not: I am here. Not even silence, which would have been more honest. A request. A to-do list, assigned to me, asking me to generate the action items for the person reading about my hurt.

Watch for this. It is everywhere. It is in your comment sections, your staff meetings, your group chats. The moment someone expresses pain, watch how quickly the people around them convert that pain into a task, or, particularly if they were part of causing the harm, how quickly they become defensive instead. Watch whose comfort is being centered in either response.

What are you noticing about who does the work of making pain useful?

Name the Cost

Now turn it inward.

Think of a time you responded to someone's expressed pain by asking what you could do. Or by offering a solution. Or by sharing a similar experience of your own.

Notice what you were protecting in that moment. I do not believe in empathy as anything beyond a theoretical framework, because it is impossible to ever know how someone else feels, even if you believe you have felt something similar. The insistence on empathy often makes situations worse, because it centers your feeling of the other person's experience rather than their actual experience. Compassion and sympathy do not require you to put yourself in anyone else's shoes or feel what they feel. They only require you to stop causing pain, or to want to support someone, without needing to inhabit their experience to do it.

Notice what it cost the person you were responding to. To have their pain become your action item. To have the conversation shift, however briefly, from their experience to your response to their experience.

That cost is real whether or not you intended it.

What were you actually protecting?

Try This Instead

Before you ask someone what you can do, ask yourself what you already have access to.

The same internet that holds my pain also holds years of my writing, my frameworks, my analysis, and my recommendations. With the slightest good faith and curiosity, you could find at least three things to do without asking. The information is there. The question is whether you are willing to sit with the discomfort of white guilt long enough to find it yourself, or whether you need the person in pain to make it easier for you.

That discomfort is not a signal to reach out. It is the work.

Co-conspirators do not wait to be assigned. They do not turn to the harmed person and ask for a syllabus. They use what is already available, they act on what they find, and they report back only when they have something real to offer.

This week, when you feel the urge to ask someone what you can do: search first. Read what they have already written. Find what they have already pointed toward. Do that before you open your mouth.

What have you already been told that you haven't acted on yet?

From the Field

Thirty years ago I did not have language for what I was watching.

I watched people respond to harm by making the harmed person responsible for their education. I watched movements fracture because the people who claimed to support them needed too much hand-holding to stay in the room. I watched the same pivot happen in every space, in every decade, with different language and the same mechanics.

I knew something was wrong. I did not have the framework to name what it was or build anything to address it.

Two weeks ago, the same things happened. Someone responded to my pain by asking me to generate their action list. Two white content creators, who have no problem being paid well for their own work, devalued a Black woman's work in plain sight while questioning her ethics for finding ways to be paid for the same things they do. A white entertainer claimed proximity to Black culture as a credential for legitimacy while other white folx have spent decades profiting off that same culture without acknowledgment.

None of that is new. What is new is that I now have language precise enough to name exactly what is happening and why. I have a framework that explains the mechanism. I have a community learning to practice the alternative together.

The conditions have not changed. My capacity to address them effectively has.

That is what thirty years produces. Not immunity. Not the end of the harm. The ability to name it without being undone by it, and to build something that helps others develop that same capacity faster than I did.

You have guideposts now that I did not have. That is still the whole point.

The Glossary

Terms that live in this community, defined on Kim's terms.

Co-conspirator: What ally becomes when you stop performing solidarity and start sharing risk. An ally helps from a position of safety and can leave when it gets uncomfortable. A co-conspirator understands that if anyone in the community is harmed, they are harmed too. That understanding is not a feeling. It is a commitment that shows up in behavior, especially when the behavior is costly.

The pivot: First introduced last issue. The move from accountability to self-protection. This issue adds a dimension: the pivot does not only happen in the person being held accountable. It also happens in the person witnessing. Converting someone else's pain into an action item is a pivot. Becoming defensive when you are implicated in the harm is a pivot. Both move the conversation away from the harm and toward the comfort of the person causing it. Worth learning to spot in yourself first.

New terms added each issue.

One More Thing

There is one more thing before you go. People ask me why all the time. Why this work. Why this structure. Why now. The answer has never fit inside a post or a two-hour event. So this season I am writing the book that holds it. Volume 1 of the LBTSM encyclopedia — the full argument, the personal history that started all of this, the proof that it works. It publishes November 27. And because this newsletter is where the work lives in real time, you will watch me write it here, in these pages, over the next eight months. More soon.

Before You Go

The snake does not ask the earth for instructions before it sheds.

It already knows what to do.

The journey to life beyond, Kim Crayton