Pepper Spray and the Courage to Stay

Notes from the Long Arc offers a candid, narrative-driven look at the unseen mechanics, inherited myths, and emerging possibilities within philanthropy and wealth work. Through stories, analysis, and movement-grounded observations, Sadé Dozan examines how resources flow—or fail to flow—through our social change ecosystems, and what that reveals about power, belonging, and democracy.

The first time I was pepper-sprayed was at a nightclub in Brooklyn. My friends and I were out—a respite from the trenches of community organizing to reset with joy.

I was in my early twenties—young, queer, Brown, and living on the edges of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I’ve always believed—and still believe—that joy is critical to infrastructure. Even when our proximity to formal power is limited, joy allows us to practice freedom in small doses. Joy reminds us that our existence is not reducible to survival alone.

That night, we were at a queer party in a club that did not host us often. The promoters were friends, trying something different. Intentional, and we trusted them. We trusted that our presence could shift a room. Black and Brown queer bodies filling a space that had not always welcomed us. Dancing. Sweating. Becoming.

It felt small.

It felt enormous.

Then a group of neighborhood men entered and released pepper spray into the vents. My eyes burned. My throat tightened. The music cut midbeat, and bodies immediately moved to exit. Someone fell, someone else stumbled over them. After the initial screams, I remember thinking: Breathe. Get out. Just breathe.

The police took time to arrive. The EMTs took even longer.

I’ve always believed—and still believe—that joy is critical to infrastructure.

Outside in the night air—coughing and checking in on each other—we felt the absence of care, as my friend—who is trans—shook on the floor, struggling to breathe.¹ They were questioned before being assisted. There were disputes over ID. Over legitimacy. Over who we were and what we were doing in this neighborhood, our home.

Still today—long after the burn has subsided—I reflect deeply on what it means to build community in a place that does not want you, within a system that will respond to your harm with suspicion rather than care.

The first responder delay was a message in itself: Our distress was not urgent; our safety was conditional; our presence felt negotiable.

The Leaders We Learn From, but Don’t Fully Resource

Watching someone struggle to breathe while their eligibility for care was quietly debated is unsettling. When I think about the delay and callousness in the EMTs’ response, I see it not as an isolated failure, but as part of a broader pattern echoed throughout the systems we navigate—including the social sector.

That moment was not just about a nightclub incident. Over time, I learned that it served as a mirror, reflecting how systems are designed with established boundaries about who counts. Institutions often pause at the edge of urgency, deciding who is legitimate enough to help, who fits the criteria, who belongs inside the boundaries of care.

These patterns of institutional behavior are still evident today. I often see it in philanthropy, where response is often slowed by assessment, eligibility, and control—even in moments that require immediacy. Resources are finite, yes—but where we draw those limits is a choice.

We are living in a moment where democratic institutions are thinning, where hostility toward queer, Black, trans, disabled, and immigrant communities are not episodic but strategic and cascading. Philanthropic leaders—even the most well-intentioned—regularly turn to mobilizers within these communities for insight: how to organize under hostile legislation, how to protect communities when institutions fail, how to anticipate the next wave of strategy. And yet the work itself remains chronically underfunded.

Trans communities often experience the leading edge of backlash before it spreads throughout the broader public. What begins as legislation targeting trans people rarely stays there. The strategies expand, the narratives spread, the policy frameworks replicate. Which is why trans leaders frequently hold some of the sharpest strategic insights about how these political dynamics operate.

Their knowledge shapes coalitions’ strategy, messaging, and broader democratic defense investments. Yet trans-focused organizing remains among the most underresourced work in the movement ecosystem.

Philanthropy asks trans leaders to help the field understand the terrain, but we rarely resource the infrastructure required for their communities to sustain the work that enables this understanding. Then we look around years later and ask how democratic institutions became so vulnerable.

The Courage to Stay the Course Amid Adversity

Pepper spray is not always literal. It does not always come through air vents. Sometimes it arrives as legislation. Sometimes as funding withdrawals. Sometimes as narrative warfare designed to isolate communities until their survival appears politically inconvenient.

After that night with my friends, we all could have retreated. We could have stopped going to clubs and decided the risk wasn’t worth it. We could have let the night become the story of what happens when we try to gather and express our joy.

In the days after, some of us were still reeling. Some carried it quietly, eyes scanning rooms longer than they did before. Rage felt appropriate. For some, even necessary. If the system won’t protect you, the fire of rage and retaliation allows you to become the force it answers to.

But in neighborhoods like ours, escalation rarely lands evenly. The aftermath often results in more policing than already existed—crackdowns that do not distinguish between those who caused harm and those surviving it. All-consuming fire risked collapsing the fragile ecosystem we were still building. Rather than fracturing, we needed density.

Too often philanthropy funds movements just enough to endure crisis, but not enough to escape it.

So, we stayed. We were building community the way my people knew how: through gathering. Through collectivism, through care…through music loud enough to shake something loose inside your chest.

But staying is not romantic. It is expensive, slow, and exhaustive work. It is not without risk with irreplaceable costs. The toll of it is often invisible.

Whether on a Brooklyn sidewalk or inside the architecture of our democratic institutions, our choice to stay committed to protecting our freedom remains the same.

Ecosystems that Form: Infrastructure Supporting Movements

Too often, philanthropy funds movements just enough to endure crisis, but not enough to escape it. And who we decide is worthy of protection is always a reflection of where we are willing to invest.

In this way, philanthropy often quietly shapes which movements survive—I reflected on these observations while speaking with Carlo Gómez Arteaga, co-executive director of the Transgender District in San Francisco. Carlo and his co-director Breonna McCree have spent years building infrastructure for trans communities. This work exists in constant negotiation with systems not designed for their survival.

When movements are forced into permanent survival mode, they cannot build the infrastructure democracy requires.

Our conversation kept returning to a simple but difficult truth: Movements endure because ecosystems form around the people who choose to stay to improve their communities and advocate for systemic change.

At one point, Arteaga said something that stays with me: “Over time, you start to see who is organized to survive and who isn’t. Some leaders are resourced long enough to stay, long enough to continue to build. While others remain on the margins—even when they are closest to the communities most impacted.”

Mobilizers on the frontlines rarely survive this work alone. These leaders endure because networks form around them: people sharing skills, relationships, resources, and knowledge long before institutions decide their work is worthy of investment.

Mutual aid, shared skills, and collective care can keep movements breathing—but they cannot substitute for the stable resources required to build institutions, develop strategy, and sustain leadership over time.

Even after capital resources enter movements, when organizations lose funding due to philanthropic shifts, it is often those community ecosystems that keep the movements alive. But aliveness does not equate to capital. And capital—along with formal power—is what is needed to endure.

When movements are forced into permanent survival mode, they cannot build the infrastructure democracy requires. From this understanding, philanthropy must ask itself: What would it mean to treat survival of trans-led organizing not as a niche funding priority, but as a democratic infrastructure? Because movements require more than courage—they require fully resourced leadership pipelines, safety networks, legal strategies, and narrative strategies.

Fire and Foundation: What Sustains Movements

Movements are often sparked by the fire within, and they endure through resourced ecosystems and community networks that make staying possible.

Like so many before us, resourcing infrastructure durable enough to withstand hostility and violence can foster resilience in the face of opposition.

During the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, organizers understood that registering voters without cultivating full political education and belief would not sustain democracy. So, they built the scaffolding alongside the protest. They created Freedom Schools inside churches and community centers—teaching Black history, civic literacy, and political imagination amid violent repression.

That scaffolding required resources. National civil rights networks raised funds from Northern congregations and progressive foundations, many of which put themselves at risk of backlash for supporting civil rights organizing.

Years later, in 1977, disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco during the 504 Sit-in. They stayed inside for 28 days, organizing food deliveries, coordinating medical support, and drafting the policy language that would become the first federal disability rights regulations—regulations we are still fortifying today.

That work was supported through cross-movement solidarity that sustained the occupation. The Black Panther Party delivered hot meals. Donors moved dollars to support community infrastructure.

In the 1980s, during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, queer and trans organizers built care networks long before institutions responded. Activists within ACT UP and community health collectives organized treatment education, legal advocacy, and patient networks that ultimately shaped federal drug approval processes and expanded patients’ rights to clinical trials. Philanthropy eventually funded pieces of this work—but as so often happens, those investments came years after the community had built the infrastructure needed to survive, after so many lives had already been lost. How much faster would the crisis have been quelled if philanthropy had trusted these community leaders and resourced them sooner?

Philanthropy tends to fund the movements it can see—the protest, the crisis, the campaign—while overlooking the underlying ecosystems that sustain over time. The result is investment in visibility without equal investment in durability. The consequence: a sector trapped in cycles of scarcity—organizations competing for shrinking pools of capital, leaders forced to triage rather than build, movements surviving year to year rather than shaping the decades ahead.

What Staying Requires Now

In these moments of uncertainty and political regression, retreat can look like safety—but it is often an act of obligatory compliance and surrender.

If obligatory obedience is the architecture that hollows out our civic life, then disciplined staying is the blueprint for rebuilding it. Staying power requires doubling down. It requires risking more than you thought was feasible.

If we are serious about staying—and not tightening or shrinking—then staying in our work demands something different from all of us to create a level of change that meaningfully advances justice while preserving our human rights.

For philanthropy, that truth of what staying requires of our leaders demands a sometimes uncomfortable reconciliation. Decolonizing wealth in practice means redistributing not only dollars but decision-making with the intent to remove the barriers that keep communities closest to the work from governing the resources meant to sustain them.

For donors, staying means resisting the instinct to retreat when controversy rises. It means funding long-term—supporting movements beyond election cycles, protecting leaders during backlash instead of retreating when oppositional headlines intensify.

And to our mobilizers and nonprofit leaders, I am clear that staying does not guarantee safety. It does not protect you from backlash. It does not shield you from grief. And the weight leaders to carry while strategies recalibrate is enormous. Staying can require tending ground even in spaces that are openly hostile to our existence—because the work of democracy rarely happens on neutral terrain.

For all of us, staying requires being aware of who is already holding the front lines of democratic defense and leading with courage to support them amid uncertainty. So I ask you to sit with the discomfort that staying sometimes requires of us and answer honestly:

What ground are you willing to hold?

What institutions are you willing to fortify?

And what would it mean—for you—to stay?

Sometimes courage looks like disruption. And sometimes it looks like refusing to abandon the ground where we collectively stand. The question is not whether we can burn it down. The question is whether we are willing to build something strong enough to outlast the fire.

Note:

1. I did not have permission to disclose my friend’s name—but know they are quick-witted, a wonderful artist, and in well-health.

Founded by three Black trans women in 2017, The Transgender District is the first legally recognized transgender cultural districts in the world. Located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, the district works to stabilize and protect transgender communities through housing advocacy, cultural preservation, economic development, and policy change.

Support their work directly here: https://transgenderdistrictsf.com/donate