Carmen Perez-Jordan

There is a moment in every movement when the call must shift from resistance to reclamation, from punishment to transformation. Calling In by Loretta J. Ross offers such a moment, a radical reimagining of feminist accountability that demands we rethink what it means to build power. As someone who has been “called out,” or rather “canceled,” on a global scale for organizing one of the largest mass mobilizations in history, the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, I approach this book with an intimate understanding of both the pain and necessity of this discourse. I have lived through the weaponization of call-out culture, endured coordinated misinformation campaigns by foreign operatives, and emerged not unscathed but more deeply committed to nonviolence and justice. This is why Ross’s work matters. This is why it matters now. 

Ross speaks to a critical fracture within the feminist zeitgeist, one that reflects both the strength and fragility of modern intersectional organizing. The feminist movement has always been a contested space, particularly for women of color, who are expected to lead the fight but rarely granted the grace to stumble. This dynamic is not new. Throughout history women of color have been instrumental in shaping feminist struggles while simultaneously being sidelined or erased from mainstream narratives.  

During the suffrage movement, Black women like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrel fought for voting rights but were often excluded by white suffragists who prioritized their own political gains over racial solidarity. Latinas such as Jovita Idár advocated for both women’s rights and racial justice, yet their contributions remain largely overlooked in mainstream feminist history. And the list goes on and on. Today, these tensions remain evident. Many white women claim to want women of color to lead and to join the movement yet often unconsciously assume ownership of it, acting as gatekeepers rather than equal participants in a shared struggle.  

My own experience with the Women’s March exemplifies this. While attempting to build an intersectional, intercultural, intergenerational movement rooted in liberation, I was subjected to relentless scrutiny, false accusations, and ultimately, a global erasure. Although the attack was orchestrated by a foreign intelligence agency intent on destabilizing American democracy, it was white women and a few women of color, many within the Women’s March itself, who weaponized these falsehoods to push us out. The revelation that my cancellation was not simply the result of ideological rifts but of both external interference and internal betrayals forces us to question the structures we have built for accountability. Are we truly dismantling patriarchy and white supremacy, or are we merely replicating their tools in different hands? 

Ross argues that calling in, as opposed to calling out, is an act of strategic resistance. It is a choice to build rather than destroy, to educate rather than exile. This approach is not about absolving harm but about refusing to engage in the kind of disposability politics that so often mirrors the very systems we claim to oppose. As a practitioner of Kingian Nonviolence, I recognize the resonance of her call. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood that transformation required confronting systems, not just individuals. The goal was never revenge but redemption. This does not mean ignoring harm; it means addressing it in ways that move us toward justice rather than feeding the spectacle of outrage. 

This was also the path I had urged members within the Women’s March to take—to truly model what the Beloved Community should look like for the world. To shield us from hate while simultaneously calling us in with love to repair the harm we were accused of causing. There were several opportunities to do this, but they chose otherwise. 

So why this? Because feminist organizing is at a crossroads. We are at risk of becoming a movement that punishes before it teaches, that isolates rather than includes. We have lost too many brilliant minds to cancellation, too many movements to ideological purity tests. Calling In offers a way forward, a feminism that is less about expulsion and more about reclamation. Ross challenges us to recognize that true justice does not come from the immediacy of public shaming but from the long, arduous work of transformation. 

Why now? Because our enemies are watching. The Russian disinformation campaign that targeted the Women’s March was not an isolated incident. It was a strategy, a blueprint for dismantling progressive movements from the inside out. And it worked. The feminist movement spent years eating itself alive while the real threats—fascism, white supremacy, and the erosion of reproductive rights—gained ground. We cannot afford to keep making the same mistakes. If we do, we are handing victory to those who would see us silenced. 

What does this say about the state of the feminist zeitgeist? That we are in a battle not just for equality but for the soul of our movement. That we must decide whether feminism will be a force of liberation or another form of carceral logic, doling out social exile with the same efficiency as the prison-industrial complex. That we need a feminism that can hold nuance, that can distinguish between accountability and annihilation, between harm and irredeemability. 

I have felt the sting of exile. I have witnessed how quickly a movement can turn on its own. But I have also seen the resilience of those of us who refuse to be silenced, who choose to rebuild rather than retreat. Calling in is not an easy ask. It demands patience in an era of immediacy, grace in a culture of punishment. But if feminism is to survive, if it is to be the transformative force we claim it to be, then we must answer that call. We must build a movement that does not simply seek to be right but seeks to be just. That is the work ahead. And that is a feminism worth fighting for. 

I initially wrote my book Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel as a love letter to the human rights movement while simultaneously calling out the fascists who hijacked the Republican Party. In the editing process with my publisher, Simon & Schuster, I was correctly advised to choose an audience – was I scolding the Right or the Left? And was scolding the appropriate tone for either?

I reworked the book to prioritize the Left, my spiritual and political home, and offer a transparent accounting of my life when I thought calling out was the most powerful tool oppressed people had. I wanted to share lessons learned from my many mistakes. This political biography is for upcoming and experienced activists, not to tell them what to do but to carefully consider the consequences of the choices we make.

Calling in requires conflict competence—learning how to disagree without punishing others. As Paulo Freire warns, the oppressed risk becoming the oppressors if our motivation is individual power or revenge. Of course, in the attention economy, calling out is noticed more, particularly if high-profile people are targeted. But is attention the goal, or justice? Even high-profile people are people with feelings; should we ignore their humanity and the possibility for redemption simply because they are distant to us? Having patience for the fact that people can stumble, instead of seeking immediate gratification by telling them off, is particularly important for people of color, who are never offered a chance to fail forward like mediocre white people.

The reaction from some folks on the Left has been predictably skeptical. Many consider calling out the most powerful tool the “chronically devalued” have, to quote Meredith D. Clark. In my book, I acknowledge that the human rights movement has always called out governments, corporations, and individuals who intentionally cause harm without being held accountable. But I also point out that seasoned activists use this as the tool of last resort, not the first, because calling out forecloses opportunities for constructive dialogue. Calling out is for when you don’t want to be further engaged. Calling in is another way to achieve accountability that also preserves the option for future conversations by avoiding the shaming and blaming that cancelling inevitably produces.

Another of Clark’s critiques, the possibility that liberals and centrists may coopt the calling-in framework to chastise progressives, is the least of my worries. First of all, they already accuse us of overusing grammatical and ideological purity tests, and they are often right. Furthermore, if we fear correctly diagnosing our problems simply because others might exploit our weaknesses, that rather makes my point because our movement risks being dismantled from the inside out.

Calling out and cancelling prioritize punishing others rather than teaching them, and this cannibalistic behavior pushes people away rather than inviting them in. As many educators know, punishment does not make a bad child good, but it can make a good child bad. The same is true for adults. Learning to fear us rather than dialogue with us is not a desirable outcome when we want to build our collective power rather than weaken it.

I agree with Clark that I wish this book had been published several years ago, but the publishing timeline was beyond my control. Perhaps we could have avoided the disastrous outcome of the 2024 presidential election if people opposed to Trump had not prioritized their particular issue over the obvious danger of reelecting a white supremacist fascist. It wasn’t like we didn’t know what he was and what he would do. But I don’t agree that the Left is the wrong audience. Calling in is strategic resistance in action, as Carmen Perez-Jordan points out. Blocking Trump’s desire to repeal the twentieth century while building our strategic power is our best strategy, as Maurice Mitchell‘s analysis shows.

The half the book about the Right ended up on the cutting-room floor, awaiting another opportunity to write about the fascist movement. Culled from the course “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump” that I teach at Smith College, this half was my desperate attempt to explain why it was urgent to educate young people about Trump’s threat to. As a Black feminist and an antifascist researcher, I understand that America is in fact Amerikkka; if it wasn’t, Trump never would have been elected.

At first, I was concerned that I would be loading bullets into the guns of the Right when I critiqued the self-righteousness we eagerly display. Immoral people hungry for power and wealth sneer at what they call our naiveté. I soon dismissed those predictable critics, since they already mock the empathy that drives our human rights movement. They don’t understand why we choose to care about people we don’t know and who don’t know us. Caring for others because of our own integrity seems beyond their understanding.

Calling In asks us to be clear about our motives and not seek to humiliate others simply to prove that we’ve been hurt. Destroying our own movement organizations with political purity tests is strategically self-destructive, particularly when we’re vulnerable to being manipulated by hostile outside forces and social media algorithms. This happened to Perez-Jordan when she was pushed out of the leadership of the 2017 Women’s March by both alleged allies and foreign provocateurs.

Jo Freeman wrote the first significant feminist essay on this pattern in 1976 in her must-read article “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.” At the time, I thought her article would help the women’s movement course correct, but in the nearly fifty years since then, social media has worsened the problem as people step over the bodies of their allies to seek power and influence. Turning potential or problematic allies into enemies by calling them out is neither strategic nor representing our human-rights values.

We have to go beyond quoting Audre Lorde and bell hooks and instead believe them when they demand we responsibly temper our radical politics with radical love. Practicing our passion with compassion requires us not to forsake our humanity while using complex empathy to hold accountable those who don’t honor our desires to be heard, to be significant, to live lives that matter.

I knew that writing such a revealing book would be like walking down the street naked and inviting strangers to comment on my body. But not being controlled by our fears is precisely what this political moment requires. Fascism needs us to be divided, cowered, hateful, and vengeful.  We have no reason to follow their playbook, to forget the human bonds necessary to save us from their malicious ambitions.

Stephanie M. Ortiz cautions us to prioritize emotional work and labor to identify and challenge exploitation, especially internalized oppression. Emotions are how we are bound to each other and calling in offers us a chance to change the “emotional tones that structure the work that we do.” These are skills we needed to learn as an early age. Instead, as children we often experience fear and shame that traumatized us. So whether we are called in or out, we lack the skills to admit we can make mistakes and not succumb to defensive denial when we are held accountable. She is correct, however, in pointing out that I did not devote a lot of space to emotional theory in my book. Not only am I ill qualified, but emotional intelligence in movement spaces is covered in many other places, most notably Sarah Schulman’s insightful book Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair.

I chose instead to focus on perspective. One of my dearest mentors, Leonard Zeskind, died April 15, 2025, while I was writing this response and trying to live up to his timeless advice: “Fighting Nazis should be fun. It’s being a Nazi that sucks!” Lenny knew that fighting for human rights requires fierce joy and resolute hope. It’s the belief that we have the power to change ourselves to change the world. While we are mourning, we are also honoring his memory and fierce determination to fight for justice and human dignity for everyone, even those we want to cancel.

Calling In helps us learn how to go forward, to take practical steps towards building the world we desire and deserve. Like every revolution, it starts in tiny places. In the relationships we didn’t think we need. In the conversations we didn’t want to have. In the emotions we didn’t think we could manage. In those places in our heart that are still healing, while we offer respect and grace to others who are also hurting.

Love does conquer hate. That’s just not a slogan but a way of fully living in the world. Call yourself in first and become the resistance that is unstoppable.