The World That Woke 2.0 Seeks to Build

In my previous essay, I argued that Woke 1.0’s central failure was not its analysis or the conclusions it drew. The failure—what proved to be its undoing—was its inability to convert that knowledge into durable institutional power. 

In the face of reactionary pressure and anti-democratic assaults on not just the gains of Woke 1.0 but all the gains of the Civil Rights era, it is clear that new, more vigorous institutions are needed in response. Thus, I closed that essay with a question I deliberately left unanswered: what does the world that Woke 2.0 seeks to build actually look like, and how shall we build it? Form follows function: we cannot specify how these institutions are built—their legal vehicles, their funding structures, their governance—until we have settled what they are for.

My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li, in What Is Woke 2?, defined Woke 2.0 as “Woke 1 with an honest relation to power.” Woke 1.0 produced new understandings of the world, especially of how marginalized groups relate to the world within previous unstated social hierarchies. But this never reliably converted into rigorous, disseminable knowledge, and what knowledge that was produced was never converted into durable power. That conversion is the work we must do. An honest relation to power is fundamentally about institution building—about building power, and making it tangible. And institutional projects require specificity: what are we building, and what must it do?

There is a tendency in progressive spaces to treat institution-building as a concession to the enemy, as an embrace of hierarchy, of formality, of the bureaucratic apparatus we are supposed to be dismantling. Thus those on the left often insist on distributed leadership, horizontal structures, and so forth. But many of our greatest victories have been through institutional organizing. Yes, the Heritage Foundation is an institution. But so was the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Black mutual aid organizations, and the Black church. The difference is not institutional form; it is purpose.

The Black institutional tradition before 1964 is not merely a metaphor or an inspiration. It is a proof of concept within living memory. This has already been done, here, under far more arduous conditions, and we can do it again.

The lessons of Black organizing

Between Emancipation and 1964, Black Americans lived under a formal and informal system of discrimination that excluded them from the full economic and civic life of the nation. And Black people responded not merely by moral suasion or dramatic protests, important as these were. We constructed a parallel ecosystem to support the lives and livelihoods of oppressed Black people: the Black church, Black educational institutions (now HBCUs), Black-oriented press outlets, Black-owned banks and insurance companies, Black mutual aid networks, Black professional associations, and Black-oriented legal infrastructure, most notably that of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

These institutions formed a mutually-supporting network. The Black church was not only a site of spiritual life, but encompassed economic mutual aid, political organizing, and community governance. Black educational institutions provided academic pathways that were otherwise closed to Black students. They also offered professional pipelines, they generated knowledge that still informs the world’s understanding of the Black experience to this day, and they created opportunities for leadership development. Meanwhile, Black-owned media produced not merely news relevant to the day to day life of Black people, but also served as advocacy platforms and community organizing tools. 

History has focused on the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, literally burned to the ground in 1921 by a white supremacist mob. What has been underplayed amidst the tragedy and horror of this event is how it demonstrated that marginalized communities could build autonomous economies of extraordinary complexity and resilience. These institutions served overlapping material and political functions for overlapping needs.

Make no mistake—the Civil Rights Movement could not have happened without this institutional infrastructure. Protest didn’t build the institutions; institutions built the protest. The organizers of the Civil Rights movement were deeply embedded in those existing Black organizations, particularly educational institutions. The March on Washington was, more than anything else, an event that was organized. Bayard Rustin, a queer Black man and a brilliant logistician and organizer, leveraged these institutional networks, both within Black organizing and within the labor movement. It was not just brilliant oratory, but brilliant organizing that made the great civil rights victories of the 1960s and 1970s possible. It was organizing and institutions that made them resilient in the face of constant attacks.

As powerful as MLK’s oratory was that day on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, there is no oratory without the organization.

What the institutions must do

So now it must be asked—what should our institutions do, exactly? Many of the movements we need already exist. There are groups doing good work on feminist grounds, on immigration justice grounds, on civil rights grounds, on gender inclusivity grounds. So what is missing, exactly? Simply put: cohesion, knowledge production, and scale. 

Knowledge production

Lived experience has gotten a bad rap in recent years. There has been a harmful idea that the lives of marginalized people, our experiences, our struggles, are somehow counterposed against the use and invocation of empirical data. This is not merely wrong, but dangerously wrong. The reality is that experiences of marginalized communities contain epistemic and empirical content  that  can be measured and converted into knowledge legible to the world outside. And regardless of whether the world is sympathetic, skeptical, or even hostile, there is a gap. The institutions of the future must take on that gap.

The task is to convert the lived insight of marginalization into rigorous, empirical, and transmittable knowledge. We can never again be blindsided by a Cass Review; we can never be without the empirical data that can defend remote-working arrangements against vibes-based perceptions of “lowered productivity”; we must be able to have hard data withstand a congressional hearing, whether hostile or friendly. 

The defeat of gender-affirming care in public discourse was not a scientific defeat, because science overwhelmingly favored our position; it was an institutional defeat. We didn’t have a network of institutionally legible organizations to present this science to the public and policymakers in a way that shifted discourse, not until it was too late. While HRC, GLAAD, etc., still exist, and engaged in this work in the past, they are very much of a different time, with in many ways antiquated communications and engagement strategies, which are not fully adequate to the kind of real-time, rapid-response, aggressive institutional advocacy we need. There was no organization with the appropriate tools, and appropriate buy-in from the community, to speak with unified, credentialed authority in real time, to engage traditional media, to coordinate and disseminate expert response, to fund litigation, and to generate and propagate counter-narratives to reactionary narratives through disciplined communications infrastructure. 

The blatant misuse of empirical data and empirical methods by reactionaries has led some on our side to reject empiricism entirely, in favor of anecdote, of testimony, in favor of not engaging with science or empirical methods entirely. Meanwhile, others have taken to denying the reality of lived experience entirely, to assert that unmeasured or not-fully-measured means unreal, and thus not worthy of comment, let alone acknowledgement. In both cases, the response to bad science is…more bad science.

The answer to bad science is good science. We must be able to produce knowledge that adheres to rigorous standards, but is not deaf to the voice of the people that knowledge-producing institutions can often miss.

That means supporting or building research institutes, policy shops and think tanks that are explicitly and publicly aligned with the political project of uplifting the marginalized. Not pretending to be neutral. Not hiding in effective secrecy like the Democracy Alliance—an organization meant to counter the Heritage Foundation, but lacking the ability to influence the conversation the way Heritage does. The new institutions of Woke 2.0 must build and fortify credentialing pipelines that bring those of us from marginalized communities into positions of epistemic authority—more feminist researchers, more immigrant lawyers, more trans doctors. Not merely for the sake of diversity, but because diversity is a means of converting lived experience into knowledge.

Intersectionality grew into a research program that generated testable empirical claims about how overlapping systems of oppression produce compounding material harm. And make no mistake, it has produced supporting empirical data backing this claim. The wealth gap is documented. The disability employment gap is documented. The trans mental health outcomes under care suppression are documented, as are the improvements in those outcomes when care is granted. Woke 2.0 institutions must convert this knowledge into policy papers, congressional briefs, media statements, and advocacy journals, and it must do so in volume.

Political organizing and pressure

The institutions of Woke 2.0 must be sites of organized political pressure within democratic coalitions—not merely protest and demonstration, which is necessary but insufficient as a demonstration of mobilizational power, but organized electoral and legislative power.

What does this mean? We can learn from the Civil Rights Movement, but we can also learn from its opposition. Look to the Heritage Foundation. We must do at the local level what Heritage has done nationally. Identify and shape races that are winnable through messaging and comms. Build endorsement and accountability structures. Train candidates. Generate model legislation. Create the kind of long-horizon political infrastructure that makes individual elections less decisive because the underlying power base persists across electoral cycles. Organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America are doing some of this work, but the issue at play is scale—it has to be done bigger, faster, and with more institutional backing.

Thus, our institutions must shape the battlefield to compete and win everywhere. The local school board. The city council. The state legislative committee. In many cases, the local and state level is where policy and law affect the individual citizen directly, ranging from bathroom bills to restrictions on bodily autonomy. The local, municipal, and state levels of governance are where law is made and unmade, where policy templates are workshopped and propagated, and where connections with lawmakers and policymakers are formed and solidified, especially when many legislative staffs are overworked and overstretched. It is at these levels where a reputation for policy rigor and institutional responsiveness can be built, and with reputation comes leverage.

When we talk about model legislation, we cannot avoid mentioning ALEC—the American Legislative Exchange Council. This model has been devastatingly effective at propagating model legislation across state legislatures, because it effectively gets around the scale problem. Because of its centralized, institutional infrastructure, it was able to convert a single piece of policy work into law in multiple states almost simultaneously, or at least into bills under consideration in state legislatures in a coordinated fashion. With a strong drafting, coordination, and dissemination capacity, this process becomes highly resource- and time-efficient. ALEC, across the 2010s, was able to move the baseline of multiple states notably to the right—to reverse this effect, we must replicate it.

But making this change happen requires discipline—not merely to avoid being disruptive outsiders, hoping nothing more than to signal disgruntlement and dissatisfaction, but also to  avoid being loyal, pliable subordinates, willing to concede principle and leverage to the false siren song of “electability.” Like the labor and Civil Rights movements before us, our institutions must act as organized pressure groups within the liberal-left coalition—negotiating with built leverage, and building leverage via disciplined organization. 

Integration and scale

The third function is, in some ways, the most urgent: Woke 2.0 institutions must function as integrators and force multipliers for work that is already being done. Once again, it is important to understand that there are countless organizations doing this work, on many levels. But we face a national crisis, and we must respond on a national scale.

Many of these organizations are doing incredible, extraordinary things with almost nothing—mutual aid networks, legal clinics, political training programs, rapid-response networks, community health centers. The problem is that they operate as a patchwork: without shared infrastructure, without coordinated messaging, without pooled legal resources, without visibility to the broader networks of institutional philanthropy and labor-movement money that often goes unused or misdirected. An organization may do excellent work in Oakland, but that work doesn’t get carried over to the fight in Las Vegas. Minneapolis rapid-response did heroic work in response to the invasion of that city by ICE, but can it be the nucleus of a national pro-immigration consensus?

It’s important to emphasize that this framework does not aim to replace existing work, or supplant existing organizations, but augment that work and scale those organizations. New institutions must function as platforms for this existing work, not competitors to it—connecting, resourcing, and amplifying what already exists, and identifying where the gaps remain.

In cold hard dollars and cents, there are enormous sums of money available in the liberal organizing realm, institutional philanthropic realm, and labor movement realm that currently flow either to long-shot vanity campaigns or to siloed causes with limited coordination. In both cases, this limited scope results in limited impact. Institutions that provide an integrative role for existing work can both attract resources by demonstrating coordinated impact, occupying mindshare, and redirecting existing resources more efficiently. Money is of course not sufficient—once again let’s note how much the Democracy Alliance has spent—but in conjunction with a coherent, transformative vision, it can change the social and political landscape of America. 

Mutual aid

Finally, our institutions must, as the old organizations of civil rights and labor organizing once did, deliver real material benefits to the marginalized populations they serve. There is work being done in these areas, and here again the problem is scale and reach. Access to broader philanthropic and institutional resources is critical, for existing mutual aid networks simply do not have the reach by themselves to adequately serve the populations they need to help. 

Marginalized people face unique challenges and barriers, as the hard data shows. From unemployment rates among disabled people, to poverty rates among trans people, to struggles by immigrants navigating a byzantine, confusing process, marginalization is not merely theoretical—it is real, material, lived experience that requires a material response. But how accessible are existing sites of mutual aid? How dependent are they on existing, often informal social and reputational networks, and how vulnerable do those networks make people to abuse? To what extent does existing mutual aid have access to resources, and can broader integration alleviate that issue? 

So we need not only connect the people we serve with existing resources, but fill in gaps where they exist. That may mean creating work connections or hosting job fairs for unemployed queer people, or connecting immigrants with free legal aid, or providing emergency housing for a trans refugee escaping an unsafe state. It may entail providing local, institutionally accountable community to marginalized people facing social isolation—community that dodges the harmful incentives of social media and encourages healthy interpersonal connections. Having a legible, credible institution as a site of mutual aid opens up access to those institutional resources that informal mutual aid networks often lack.

Intersectionality as institutional design

There is a thread that runs through all of these functions, and it is worth making explicit: they are all expressions of institutional intersectionality.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational insight was that systems of oppression are not parallel and additive but overlapping and mutually constitutive. Being Black and a woman is not simply “Black” plus “woman” but a distinct intersection that generates its own specific vulnerabilities and experiences that neither category alone can describe. Woke 1.0 used this as a framework for critique and analysis. Woke 2.0 must use it as a framework for an institutional design that is built to attain power in the real world.

An institution designed around intersectionality does not silo its services by identity category; its constituents face overlapping material harms that require coordinated responses. The trans woman who needs housing assistance also needs job placement and legal support and healthcare access; serving her means providing a network of services, resources, and community, just as the old Black mutual aid organizations did. This institutional model recognizes that the communities it serves share interests that can be mobilized collectively, as people of differing marginalizations face different expressions of the same structural dynamics, and organizing along those lines is the key to building the coalition needed to build power along those lines.

And the knowledge production function is not separate from the political function, nor is either of them separate from the service function. The research that documents compounding harm provides the empirical basis for the policy demands. The service provision that addresses the compounding harm builds the survey base for the empirical research. The policy demands give the political organizing its specific content. The mutual aid network generates the trust and the material stakes that sustain political commitment over time, as well as preventing diversion into performative activities that achieve little or nothing except sound and fury. These functions are mutually reinforcing, equally vital parts of a coherent whole.

The urgency

I am a Black trans woman in America. I do not have the luxury of treating this as an intellectual exercise. Neither do millions of people whose lives have become materially worse, and in some cases genuinely dangerous, because the institutions that should have been built were not built. People like me are in the midst of a historic refugee crisis because much of the country, as well as our federal government, was engineered to be hostile to, among many others, those like us.

The conservative institutional project took fifty years. We do not have fifty years. We must close a fifty-year gap in five years, which means we must be ruthlessly strategic about where to start, willing to take institutional shortcuts that normally feel uncomfortable, and honest with ourselves about the difference between politics as a means of personal expression and politics as a way to build power. Certainly we are not going to post our way through this. 

Building power is unglamorous. It is bylaws and board meetings and grant applications and strategic plans and staff retreats. It is building the infrastructure that ensures upper-middle class liberals send money to you as opposed to a doomed Senate campaign with a cool ad in a R+20 district. Progressive political culture has systematically undervalued this work—it has elevated the prophet over the project, the vision over the organization—and we have paid for it in rollback after rollback of gains that were never institutionally secured, while Project 2025 moves ever closer to full completion.

The Heritage Foundation understood something that we have failed to: that the work of building institutional capacity is itself political work, and that doing it openly, publicly, and with explicit ideological commitment is how political power is built. You cannot build a movement by hiding from the public. Heritage did not hide. Neither can we.

The good news? Power, strategy, and organizing capability can be used for good as much as it can be used for evil. The task is, as it has always been, is to build power to build a better world. A world where no one has to fear hunger or homelessness. Where structural violence is the exception rather than the norm. Where the overlapping harms of racism, patriarchy, queerphobia, ableism, and economic exploitation are not reproduced generation after generation because we have built a world that might, at last, stop that reproduction.

We are the ones who must build that world. And building that world requires organization and organizations. Organizations require resources, governance, accountability, and long-term strategic commitment. And it requires the will to build in public, with the courage to name our vision and fight for our vision of a better world.

Featured Image is a 1956 image of the four most active leaders of the NAACP, by Al. Ravenna