Stop Passing the Mic: Exploring Contradictions in Power Sharing

For over eight years, I’ve watched Tash Nguyen, a longtime abolitionist, use protest and policy to strategically disrupt the criminal justice system. Nguyen is executive director of Restore Oakland, a nonprofit they cofounded to build local relationships and organize community campaigns.

Interdependence is foundational to their approach. “You’re not winning any victories alone,” they say. “I don’t think any nonprofit is actually doing any of their work by themselves.” When I think of “passing the mic,” it is often to people like Nguyen.

But passing the mic is, at best, a first step in building a transformative politics rooted in an understanding of interdependence and collective power.

The Limits of Passing the Mic

I was 20 years old when I first heard the phrase “pass the mic.” At my first job out of college, at a queer and trans youth center, I would learn to utter it myself countless times in activist and nonprofit settings. It was humble and straightforward. The mic was also passed to me in rooms of White people, straight people, men, and the wealthy. Like those who taught me this practice, I believed it was the right thing to do.

Passing the mic is at best a first step in building a transformative politics that is rooted in an understanding of interdependence and collective power.

In his book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò labels these instigations “deference politics.” Deference politics ask us to amplify voices and people with less positional power. At face value, the “pass the mic” prompt is well-intended, particularly considering that 79 percent of nonprofit leadership is White. In nonprofit rooms, this means the proverbial mic would be handed to staff who are more diverse but hold far less power than their bosses. It is better to extend access to the mic than not to extend access.

Yet Táíwò is exceedingly clear about the pitfalls of deference. He says in his own experience, centering the most marginalized “has usually meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to whoever is already in the room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression—regardless of what they have or have not actually experienced, or what they do or do not actually know about the matter at hand.”

Deference politics risks directing the “little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues.” It is limited because it focuses primarily on redistributing individual power rather than building collective power. In the face of rising authoritarian threats and a racial capitalist system that shapes the nonprofit world, the practice of passing the mic has its place in ensuring all voices are heard but often feels glaringly inadequate.

The response to the racial justice uprising of 2020 is instructive in this regard. In 2020, in the two weeks following the murder of George Floyd, web searches for the terms “diversity officer” and “implicit bias training” reached a national apex. According to Candid, financial commitments to racial equity in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors similarly soared from $5.8 billion in 2019 to $16.5 billion in 2020. As many will recall, the response was portrayed in the media as the “summer of racial reckoning.”

During this period, many nonprofits attempted to shift the stubbornly asymmetrical demographics of their leadership and staff. Nearly a decade after the Black Lives Matter movement was formed in 2012, many turned inward—a trend that was most visible via a spike of interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion. The efforts themselves were worthwhile, but too often, such efforts would falter—in part because the pursuit of racial justice was treated as if it were merely a matter of individual behavior rather than collective, structural power.

The Constructive Politics Alternative

How can organizations move beyond deference politics? Táíwò poses constructive politics as the alternative, by which he means a focus on building collectively based liberatory systems and outcomes. At the end of his book, Táíwò points to a case study from Flint, MI—a stunning example of a community banding together to create democratic tools to reject state-sanctioned poisoning of their city’s water.

Conspicuously, Táíwò’s examples do not include organizational responses. Considering that most systems-impacted people will interact with a nonprofit long before they encounter an activist, this raises many practical questions for movement and nonprofit practice, as how these spaces conduct themselves and set goals is paramount. The challenge becomes how to transition away from the ineffective individualism of deference and arc back toward building common constructive power. 

From Theory to Action: The Case of Restore Oakland

Restore Oakland opened its doors in 2019, always with an eye toward becoming member-led. From the beginning, the focus was on building constructive power and fostering structural change. It was made clear in the group that people must build and work toward a common purpose.

Yet, consensus requires conversation from those who are historically silenced. For Nguyen, this is the preeminent challenge—one which is at once cultural, individual, and rooted in systemic realities.

“Sometimes they [members] even ask us as staff to help them decide. They’re like, ‘You get paid to spend eight hours, 10 hours, a day on this. You tell us what we should do.’ I do think that people are very used to giving up their power or resigning their power to others,” Nguyen says.

There are multiple and sometimes surprising layers of internal oppression that come into play when building a member-led organization. The foreignness of self-advocacy and leadership is endemic in communities from which agency has been systematically taken. In these settings, even the most obvious and seemingly fixable targets, like representation, come with unforeseen hurdles. It is an impossible shift to make alone.

A Broader Challenge

Nationwide, close to 80 percent of nonprofit board chairs and nearly two-thirds of board members are White. And that can be difficult to change, even when there is good will. I’ve seen this in my own consulting work. For example, in 2023, I was advising new board members of a local community land trust, whose largely White board was trying to recruit working-class and predominantly people of color members. In our initial meeting, they told me that nothing they did—from casting a wide net to door-knocking to personal invitations—was working.

Exacerbating the situation, the new board members were hyper-aware of their own White identities, and thus hesitant to try their own creative, self-engineered solutions. The situation illustrates just how knotty constructive politics can be. It can be seemingly impossible to establish a common purpose. Deference, it seems, is a necessary albeit limited first step. 

These challenges are ever present throughout movement spaces. Take the Asian Americans with Disabilities Initiative, based in Lawndale, CA, near Los Angeles. Dennis Tran, their director of partnerships, is a disability advocate. He’s worked in a variety of nonprofit settings as staff and as a consultant.

Tran questions how a group can even begin to discuss shared objectives without first meeting basic accommodations. Tran has encountered ableism from otherwise inclusive organizations that inhibit full participation from blind and/or deaf members. “When people don’t understand that, or understand me, it’s difficult [to be an advocate]” he says. Even organizations that have obviated deference politics altogether through their structure as member-led nonprofits can struggle.

The work is to hold multiple truths at once.

Yet another example is provided by Lisa Cuestas, the CEO of Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, CA, which is south of San Diego, just across the Mexican border from Tijuana. Cuestas says member staff often forgive serious inequities in order to carry out the mission.

“Staff put up with a lot because ‘it’s family.’ We recognized that we haven’t been paying livable wages, given the rents or mortgages our staff have to pay; now, we make sure our wages are not low-income wages. Our mission [now] is to enhance compensation,” Cuestas told NPQ a few years ago.

A family-oriented culture alongside a sense of pride in the mission has long enabled worker exploitation in the nonprofit sector. Even with the mic in the exact right place, with the exact right people working toward a collective aim, power remains an issue.

At Restore Oakland, Nguyen says the work is to hold multiple truths at once.

“We’re a group of organizers who are also transformative justice practitioners. We’re not building a membership so that they can have a transactional relationship with us. There’s a lot of healing and reciprocity in the process and it’s not like it’s not unidirectional or bidirectional; it’s multidirectional,” they say.

Nguyen is collaborating with external support for Restore Oakland’s transition toward member leadership. This involves working with a consultant to help them track and name the ambiguous connective tissue that tethers communities, like solidarity. While a common objective may be evasive or hard to identify, values and the potential of partnerships are not. Nguyen says, “So many people don’t recognize the power that they have.”