Mass Liberation Network is a political home for Black and BIPOC grassroots leaders who are directly affected by interweaving systems of oppression, including the criminal legal system. These systems harm the health of our people, their economic well being and also the planet. We develop transformational leaders and organizations who are healing their communities and are organizing to end these oppressive systems and to create new ones so we can have a world where Black people thrive and, thereby, all people can thrive.
There is a global move to undo collective gains made and a retrenchment towards white supremacy, racial capitalism and patriarchy. We are responding like we always do by building power with our people.
MLN is a space where our local leaders and their organizations come as they are for personal transformation, leadership development, organizing training and technical assistance. They also find joy, support, reconnection to lineage and culture and belonging to a broader community for personal transformation and grassroots organizing.
MLN began in 2019 as a project to address mass incarceration. Many of our leaders and their organizations are formerly incarcerated. Through their work, the harm of the criminal legal system against Black and BIPOC people is being mitigated, reducing the impact of state violence enacted through policing, courts and prisons. Because of this organizing work, many of our people have been freed from years of incarceration and punishment through changes won in local and state policies and through organizing to defend them against overzealous and often wrongful prosecution.
Today, our growing network of system-impacted leaders and organizations are becoming the spearhead of change in their communities organizing for change across all of the systems that have been negatively impacting their lives for generations, including workers rights, the economy, reproductive rights, healthcare, education, environmental regulation, the impacts of climate change and more. We have learned that as we gain liberation from the criminal legal system, it allows us to emerge as strong leaders in our communities ready to heal and to transform systems.
Trust Black Women: Black women have been unheralded liberators in our movement. At the Mass Liberation Project we endeavor to follow the grounded assessments, intuition and guidance of Black women as a practice of trust. As we fight back against patriarchy and white supremacy and trust Black women, we learn to do the revolutionary act of trusting ourselves.
Love Black Men: Boldly, intentionally, and without condition. This love calls us to confront and dismantle systems of oppression, patriarchy, and anti-black racism that equally devalue Black men’s lives, criminalize their presence and deny their full humanity. To love Black men is to make space for their healing, joy, complexity and vulnerability—not as a counterpoint to safety, dignity, or gender justice, but as essential to it. We call on ourselves and our communities to choose to build systems grounded in care, accountability, liberation and create spaces where Black men can thrive in love and be loved in return.
Gender Justice: People have the right to live into a chosen identity. In our organizations, we must commit to equity for non-male, non-hetero, non-cis people and protect them from harm, including being targeted by the criminal legal system. Without this work, we cannot build the communal trust and intentionality necessary for abolition.
Inclusion: Our struggle is not against other people, but against systems and structures which are made from cultural, political and economic institutions. We must not play into the politics of “othering” any other group of people, but instead seek liberation for all oppressed people. This is especially critical in these times where mass social media is being used as a ‘hate-machine’ to spread racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQAI+ fear within white nationalist movements in the U.S. in particular.
Movement Ecosystem: We build as part of an abolitionist ecosystem of many types of movement work. Overall, there are three big, interdependent transformations that must work together to achieve abolition: changing our relationships to ourselves and each other (personal transformation); Building enough people power to dismantle the entrenched interests and institutions of the criminal legal system (organizing); and creating new visions of our communities that have new norms, new institutions and new ways of responding to harm (building alternatives).
Transformative Justice: In abolition we practice a new way of accountability. We keep us safe by creating processes that remove the label of victim and perpetrator in instances of harm. Instead, we focus on supporting those who experience harm, hold those who have caused harm accountable, and turn our attention to creating conditions where that harm doesn’t happen.
Communities of Reciprocity: Our ancestors and current relations throughout the Diaspora lived in mutual relationship with each other and Mother Earth for a millennium by meeting each other’s needs through strong communities and cultures of reciprocity. We are reviving the concepts of communities built on deep connections and practices of giving, gratitude and mutuality.
