Control isn’t care

A friend sent me a Substack post by Canadian journalist Nora Loreto titled “Navigating Conflict in Activist Spaces.”

The timing was perfect.

I recently made the difficult decision to step away from a cause I deeply believed in. It wasn’t a choice I made lightly. But in the face of conflict—and a refusal by some to be accountable for their actions—it became clear that continuing would compromise my integrity and well-being.

This kind of rupture is all too common in organizing and movement spaces. We pour ourselves into the work, believing in shared values, only to find that when harm happens, too few are willing to do the hard, necessary work of repair and accountability.

Leaving was painful, but also necessary. It’s a reminder that even in justice-centred spaces, we must continually ask: are we practicing what we preach? Are we showing up with care, humility, and a willingness to be called in?

What we centre in our activism speaks volumes

I’m part of a few activist communities in Halifax and across Canada. Only one is rooted in the lived experience of Black people—specifically Black women. The others were initiated by white women. These latter groups make an effort to acknowledge their lack of diversity, often by inviting communities of culture into the space, hoping their presence will somehow fill the gaps (which I must acknowledge is a deeply harmful practice).

The difference between these spaces is night and day.

In the Black-led space, we’ve spent two years building real relationships. We talk openly, even when it’s hard. Our goal is always truth—disruptive, sometimes career-jeopardizing, uncomfortable truth. That doesn’t mean we’re perfect. We’ve lost people along the way. But we stay committed to justice, not just in theory, but in how we treat one another.

The white-led spaces are different. When you forget to centre racial justice—and by extension, the people most impacted by injustice—you forget to build trust. And without trust, everything falls apart.

In one of these spaces, the inability to have honest conversations, to critique each other’s actions, or even to admit fault, caused the whole thing to implode. Activism demands accountability—both outward, toward oppressive systems, and inward, toward ourselves and each other. If you can’t do both, you’re not doing the work.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: white women, in particular, struggle with conflict in activist spaces.

The white fragility. The martyrdom. The saviour complex. It creeps in slowly, wrapped in the language of structure and order. Suddenly, everything needs rules. Codes of conduct. Professionalism. Bullet-point lists about “appropriate behaviour.” What gets lost? Connection. Care. The messiness of being human and healing in community.

The irony? These same women claim to fight patriarchy and white supremacy while replicating its tactics within the very spaces meant to dismantle them. It’s not about collaboration—it’s about control.

I know, because I’ve been that woman.

I’ve micromanaged, policed tone, demanded perfection. I’ve imposed order where what was needed was vulnerability. I’ve done harm while trying to do good. I can critique it because I’ve lived it.

And here’s what I’ve learned: when white women don’t address their own trauma, they weaponize it. They become what a friend once called a sweet knife—soft on the surface, but cutting deep without warning.

Some of the harshest treatment I’ve received came from white women in nonprofit leadership—second-wave feminists who clawed their way up and now refuse to risk their standing for justice. They’ll support the cause until it threatens their position. Then they disappear, or worse, sabotage from within.

There’s a brilliant visual on Instagram by LeAndra Lee Baker, a Black feminist thinker, that shows patriarchy as a boot on women’s necks. These white women see the boot, but rather than helping remove it, they tell younger generations to get used to it. “It’s not that bad,” they say. “We survived it. You can too.”

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That is not liberation.

Until white women stop trying to fix the world without fixing themselves, they will keep doing harm. You can’t pour your unhealed trauma into activism and expect it to transform anything. You will simply replicate the violence you claim to resist.

Pain, as therapist and activist Prentis Hemphill writes, “is transmitted across a power grid.” If we don’t own our pain, we pass it downward—onto those with less power, onto the people we claim to stand beside. We become the systems we oppose.

Healing isn’t separate from the work. Healing is the work.

So I ask white folks in activist spaces: please stop looking for healing solely through activism. Go deeper. Build rich inner lives full of music, joy, love, and rest. Make space for softness. Do the ugly, difficult, necessary work of healing yourself so you don’t poison the spaces meant to heal the world.

Learn from the Black and Indigenous leaders who’ve been doing this for generations. Centre them. Follow their lead. Not for optics, not for guilt, but because we all lose when whiteness is the centre.

Liz LeClair is a gender-based violence advocate and activist based in Punamu’kwati’jk (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia). She is a member of the gender-based violence coalition.