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Rebels & Rights

The Dispatch

Dispatches from the movement. Stories, strategy, and the occasional screed.

4 dispatches & counting

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How to Talk to Someone Who Disagrees With You (Without Losing Your Mind)

You've got a family member who shares conspiracy theories. A coworker who dismisses climate change. Here's the playbook organizers actually use. Deep canvassing. That's what it's called when trained volunteers have long, personal, non-defensive conversations with voters who disagree with them on high-stakes political questions — immigration, trans rights, abortion. Research on the technique shows it works, in the sense that matters most: it changes minds durably, not just in the moment. The conditions that make deep canvassing work are almost the opposite of what most political debate looks like. What Doesn't Work Facts, deployed as weapons. Studies, cited as evidence of your superior reasoning. Memes. Emotional arguments calibrated to win rather than to connect. Waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can make your next point. None of these approaches change minds at scale. Most of them entrench the person you're talking to. This isn't a counsel to abandon your positions — it's an observation about the mechanics of persuasion. People don't update beliefs because they've been logically defeated. They update beliefs when they feel heard enough to become curious. What Deep Canvassers Do Instead They ask about personal experience first. Before the issue comes up at all, they find out about the other person — their life, their family, their own experience of whatever's at stake. They listen without correcting. They share something vulnerable about themselves. They invite rather than argue. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, the researchers who studied deep canvassing most systematically, found that a ten-minute conversation with a stranger using these techniques reduced transphobia by a measurable, lasting amount. A political ad didn't do that. A debate moderator didn't do that. A ten-minute human conversation did. The Hard Part The technique requires that you actually be curious about the other person. Not performing curiosity. Actually wondering what their experience has been. That's the part that's hard to train and harder to sustain when you're angry — when the stakes feel too high and the other person feels like a threat rather than a potential ally. Organizers who do this work talk about the distinction between "getting" someone to change their mind versus "being with" them while they do it. The first treats the conversation as a contest. The second treats it as a collaboration. You're not always going to want to do that. Sometimes people say things that are so harmful that curiosity isn't the right tool. Protecting yourself and the people around you comes first. But when the relationship is worth preserving and the risk is manageable, the research is pretty clear: staying curious is the most effective political act available to most of us on most days. The Small Things Listen more than you talk. Ask about their experience, not their opinion. Share yours without demanding they share yours. Find the human thing underneath the political position — there's usually a fear, a loss, a need for dignity that the position is trying to address. Meet that, if you can. Wear the shirt. Start the conversation. The rest takes practice.

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What Is Intersectionality — And Why Does It Matter for Organizing?

You've probably heard the word. But the concept is more powerful — and more practical — than the discourse makes it sound. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 in a law review article about a discrimination case involving Black women at General Motors. The women sued on the grounds of both race and sex discrimination. The court dismissed their case — partly because the company employed Black people (in factory positions) and employed women (in secretarial roles). The discrimination the plaintiffs experienced, the court reasoned, didn't fit neatly into either category. Crenshaw's insight was precise: the discrimination these women faced wasn't just racism plus sexism. It was something that emerged from the intersection of their identities — something neither legal framework, alone, could capture. The word she gave us was a tool for seeing what the existing system couldn't. Why It Matters Now Thirty-five years later, intersectionality is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It's in corporate diversity trainings. It's in academic curricula. It's also routinely invoked without the precision Crenshaw intended — used as a synonym for "complicated" or "involving multiple identities," rather than as the specific analytical lens it is. In organizing spaces, this muddiness costs us. When we say "reproductive rights are a feminist issue," we're being accurate — but incomplete. Reproductive access in the United States is radically stratified by race, class, geography, immigration status, and disability. A white woman in a blue city and a Black woman in a rural red state face the same abortion ban on paper. In practice, they face entirely different obstacles. Intersectionality isn't an add-on to movement work. It's not "and also remember marginalized people." It's an epistemological tool: a way of asking whose experience is centered when we define a problem, and whose is rendered invisible. The Practical Work In concrete terms, intersectional organizing asks: Who's in the room when decisions get made? Whose needs are treated as complications versus baseline requirements? Which communities are expected to wait for the "main" issue to get resolved first? Organizations that have taken this seriously tend to share certain practices: leadership structures that center those most affected, not most available; issue framing that names compound harms rather than isolating them; coalitions built on shared analysis rather than shared optics. The Combahee River Collective — a Black feminist organization active in Boston in the late 1970s — articulated what would become the foundation of intersectional politics before Crenshaw named it. Their 1977 statement remains one of the clearest articulations of why you can't separate political struggles: "We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity." Wearing the Politics At Rebels & Rights, we design toward this. Our products don't reduce political identity to a single cause — they're made for people who know that the fight for reproductive rights and the fight for LGBTQ+ safety and the fight for immigrant dignity aren't separate. They're the same fight, wearing different faces. The royalties from every sale go back to artists who've lived this analysis. The cause contributions go to organizations doing the unglamorous work of making intersectional politics practical — legal defense, mutual aid, organizing infrastructure. None of this is theoretical. It's just what it looks like when the framework actually works.

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Diverse group stacking hands in solidarity
The Dispatch 3 min read

What Is Intersectionality — And Why Does It Matter for Organizing?

You've probably heard the word. But the concept is more powerful — and more practical — than most people realize. Where It Comes From Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, in a paper about Black women workers who experienced discrimination that neither "race discrimination" nor "sex discrimination" law adequately captured. Her insight: people hold multiple identities simultaneously, and those identities interact in ways that create unique experiences of oppression — experiences that existing legal frameworks made invisible. The classic example from Crenshaw's original paper: a group of Black women sued General Motors for discrimination. GM argued they couldn't have discriminated against Black women because they hired Black people (men, in factory jobs) and they hired women (white women, in secretarial positions). The court agreed. The Black women lost — because the law couldn't see the intersection of race and gender as a category worth protecting. That's not a quirk of 1989 law. That's the persistent failure of single-axis thinking in a world made of overlapping systems. Why It's More Than a Buzzword Somewhere along the way, intersectionality became a rhetorical punching bag — a word that certain corners of the internet treat as a synonym for "overcomplicated identity politics." That's a deliberate misreading, and it's worth pushing back on. Intersectionality isn't an ideology. It's an analytical tool. It asks: when we talk about a social problem, who does our analysis leave out? When the reproductive rights movement focuses primarily on cisgender women with financial resources and mobility, it leaves out the people most affected by abortion bans: poor women, women of color, rural women, undocumented women. When climate policy focuses on clean energy without addressing who bears the pollution burden, it misses the environmental justice crisis in frontline communities. When mental health advocacy centers on therapy and medication access, it often ignores how poverty, housing instability, and racist policing drive mental health crises. Intersectional analysis doesn't make these movements weaker. It makes them more accurate — and ultimately, more effective. What This Means for Organizing Here's the practical part. If you're doing any kind of organizing — whether that's running a mutual aid group, staffing a phone bank, planning a march, or building a coalition — intersectionality shows up in concrete choices: Who speaks and who's centered. If your march's main stage features only one type of person, your coalition reflects that. Who's invited to the table to help plan? Whose concerns shape the agenda? What demands you make. "Protect abortion access" is a starting point. "Fund abortion funds that serve low-income people who need to travel for care and don't have paid leave" is more specific — and more intersectional. The more specific you get, the more clearly you can see who you're actually fighting for. Who you treat as an authority. Frontline communities — the people most directly affected by the issues you're fighting about — should be leading, not consulting. This isn't just ethical. It's strategic. People closest to the problem are often closest to the solution. How you build solidarity. Single-issue organizing often creates fragile coalitions that collapse when circumstances change. Movements that understand how their issues connect to others — housing to healthcare, voting rights to criminal justice, immigration to labor — build broader, more durable power. A Note on Getting It Wrong Intersectional thinking is not a purity test. Every movement makes choices about where to focus, and those choices involve tradeoffs. The goal isn't to be perfectly all-encompassing in every campaign — it's to be honest about who you're centering and why, and to remain accountable to the communities most affected. You'll make mistakes. The movement has always made mistakes. The measure isn't perfection — it's whether you're willing to hear criticism, reckon with it, and adjust. Kimberlé Crenshaw didn't coin a word to police other people's politics. She identified a gap in how we see and address injustice. Filling that gap, however imperfectly, is the ongoing work. "If you can't see the problem, you can't solve it. Intersectionality just asks us to look more carefully." Where to Go From Here If you want to go deeper: Kimberlé Crenshaw's original 1989 paper is freely available online and more readable than you'd expect for academic writing. Her 2016 TED talk is a good 19-minute introduction. The African American Policy Forum, which Crenshaw co-founded, publishes ongoing research applying intersectional analysis to contemporary policy. And then: look at whatever you're already doing. Who is centered? Who is missing? What would it look like to include them — not as an afterthought, but as co-architects of the work?

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Two women in conversation — productive dialogue
The Dispatch 3 min read

How to Talk to Someone Who Disagrees With You (Without Losing Your Mind)

The research on what actually changes minds — and what makes things worse. A guide for anyone who has ever left a dinner table in despair. The Bad News First Most of the things people instinctively do when trying to change someone's mind don't work. Statistics make people defensive. Fact-checking in the moment tends to produce the "backfire effect" — where people double down on wrong beliefs when corrected. Anger, however justified, shuts down the part of the brain responsible for updating beliefs. Long lectures produce resentment, not conversion. If you've been in a political conversation that felt like talking to a wall, this is probably why. What Actually Works: The Research The good news is that political persuasion researchers have spent decades studying what actually changes minds, and they have some concrete answers. Deep canvassing. This technique, developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center and now used widely in progressive organizing, involves having extended (10–20 minute), non-confrontational conversations that focus on personal narratives rather than arguments. Studies have found it produces durable attitude change — the effects persist months later. The key elements: genuine curiosity about the other person's experience, sharing your own personal story, and not trying to "win." Motivational interviewing. Originally developed in addiction counseling, MI is built on the insight that people resist being told what to do but are often open to exploring their own ambivalence. Rather than making the case for change, you ask questions that help the other person articulate their own reasons for it. It requires genuine listening and suppressing the urge to argue. Finding shared values before disagreeing on specifics. Most political conflicts are actually conflicts about how to achieve shared values, not the values themselves. Most conservatives and most liberals want families to be safe, children to be healthy, and economies to be functional. They disagree intensely about how to achieve those things. Starting from shared values before moving to disagreements changes the entire tone of the conversation. Practical Tactics Ask more than you tell. "What made you feel that way?" gets further than "that's wrong because..." Acknowledge what's true in what they're saying. Most political positions contain at least a kernel of legitimate concern. Finding and acknowledging it — genuinely, not condescendingly — disarms defensiveness. Share your personal story. Abstract arguments bounce off people. Personal stories that explain why you care about something reach them differently. "I care about this because my mother couldn't afford healthcare" lands differently than a PowerPoint about the uninsured. Don't try to win the conversation. If you go in trying to defeat someone, they'll sense it and shut down. Go in trying to understand them — genuinely. You might not change their mind. You might change your own. Both are valuable. Know when to disengage. Not every conversation is worth having. Someone who is arguing in bad faith, who gets off on provoking you, or who is using hateful rhetoric is not a persuasion project — they're a boundary question. It's okay to say "I don't think this conversation is going anywhere useful" and leave the table. The Longer Game Individual conversations rarely produce dramatic change. What they do is move people slightly — and over time, in combination with other inputs, slightly becomes significantly. The research on how people change their minds politically is humbling: it rarely happens in a single confrontation. It happens gradually, when someone accumulates enough experiences, conversations, and information to make a shift feel safe. Your job, in any given conversation, isn't to get someone all the way from A to Z. It's to move them a half step, and maybe plant a question that they keep thinking about after you're gone. That's slow work. It requires patience and humility. And it's probably the most important organizing skill you can develop.

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