About
Us

This site was birthed from conversations and discussions about the current structural, social, and psychological injustices around race, colonization,class, and gender on the Coloured Mentality social media platforms. (https://www.facebook.com/colouredmentality, @colouredmentality)

Sarah Summers & Kelly Eve Koopman are a coloured queer couple who created Coloured Mentality and Until We Remember while seeking for themselves. Coloured Mentality is rooted in the ethics of the ‘So-called’ manifesto”

WE ARE HERE

If you, your parents and broader family suffer from dispossession and dis-inheritance and you require guidance, inspiration or common ground to build trust and community that honours our experiences, our terrible, triumphant histories and our incandescent dreams, then this is for you.

A “SO-CALLED” MANIFESTO

A guide to compassionate disobedience

1. WE ARE ALIVE

We are not defined by our work or our labour. We reject a social framework that treats us like we are only worthy of survival, and that this survival is dependent on our ability to produce and be exploited. Our right is to exist in harmony with the living ecosystem. Our lives are far greater than what the governing systems of structural oppression would have us believe. These forced social agreements continually profit from our suffering, fear and erasure. We understand that these systems were built to cement our suffering, at best we are asked to survive within them, but they are certainly not built for us to be alive in. We push back against narratives of survival and “obedient”, subjugated existences. We are alive and we are awake. We deserve to live in the fullness of who we are.

2. WE MOVE TOGETHER

We are in solidarity with all those who have been oppressed, othered and rendered invisible. We all have unique histories and experiences that require us to actively listen to each other, learn and account for the ways we cause each other pain. We do the difficult and satisfying work of being united as true co-conspirators fighting against our collective oppression. This does not mean that we are the same or aspire toward sameness. It means we are together. Real solidarity resists the entrenched inhumane systems that ensnares all of us. Building a critical and critically equipped resistance that harnesses the power of our complex intersections is essential to tipping the imbalances of injustice. Movement means building, it means change and growth. We hold these innate complexities and we commit to both building and growing together.

3. WE HOLD MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

We are free to be whoever we express ourselves as. We are in solidarity with everyone who has been forced into oppression, even where we experience difference. We understand ourselves in many ways, we respect each other and take accountability for the consequences of our behaviour towards people that we identify with or recognise as oppressed by unjust institutions and systems. We know the systems of injustice do not accept us. We do not force anyone to identify in a way that is reductive or that brings harm. We can be queercolouredblackindigenoussurrealistanarchist all at the same time, without these having to be placed in prescribed hierarchies, and with each part carrying equal weight. We have been historically defined and squashed into the narrow margins, dissected as only parts of who we are. It is our reclamation to demand that all of us are held, understood and seen.

4. WE ARE ACCOUNTABLE, INFORMED, CONSCIOUS AND LEARNING

We realise that while we have experienced violences we can also perpetrate and be complicit in violences. We hold ourselves and each other authentically, effectively and lovingly. We are balanced and whole. We have shadows, weaknesses and flaws. We make mistakes. As we age, grow and experience life, we learn about ourselves, life and each other and respond from a place of shared values. We move beyond self hatred and internalised violence toward an acceptance of our own propensity to cause harm and a commitment towards consciousness and unlearning. We commit to a renewed process of learning to build personal and collective consciousness that pushes through the ways we have been estranged from ourselves and each other.

5. WE COMMIT TO HEALTHY CONFLICT

We commit to agreements and accept disagreement, as long as this disagreement does not result in oppression of each other and ourselves. We work things out with a frank kindness that has space for rage and vulnerability, meaningful apologies and shared accountability. We are gentle with each other.. . We honour ourselves and our uniqueness, our differences, our flaws and our talents, in as much as we honour the nuance of the collective. We know that sometimes the curses of our collective trauma need to be broken, and the work of black sheep strengthens the whole. In creating a compassionate and brave environment for disagreement and contradicting behaviour, we hold each other in safety.

6. WE ALLOW OURSELVES REST, FORGIVENESS, FUN AND JOY

Joy and rest are essential human needs, not luxuries. We know that there are always times of struggle but that our lives should not be defined by struggle. Playfulness, imagination, joy, sleep, the ability to mess up, to process, to be lazy, to adventure and muse, to do nothing -these have all been framed as products of privilege rather than as essential to life. If our radical thought, and movements do not make space for these joys – the worlds we create will not encompass them either. It is our right to thrive. Our processes can be gentle and joyful and our outcomes can be abundant.

7. WE IMAGINE, DESIGN AND CREATE THE WORLD

Our collective histories and what we are supposed to think of ourselves and each other have been designed and force- fed to us by people who actively profit from our oppression. We do not need to adhere to the archaic and oppressive premises of a world built from systems we never agreed to and which have never served us. It is in our power to exist within worlds of our choosing. We build worlds that allow us to realize our purpose, potential and exploration. Resistance is a necessary step in building this world. We reclaim the past, present and future. We are more and will build the expansive worlds that will hold us, in spite of and despite systems of oppression. Our power to protect these worlds builds as we grow as a collective.

8. WE BUILD JUST SYSTEMS

Our thoughts and actions are symbiotically linked. We engage in critical dialogue so that we can build strategic, bold and creative action that invokes justice. By allowing ourselves and each other to live in our fullness we strengthen our connection and our collective resistance to oppression. We build systems that hold all of us in our entireties. We do not accept our place within existing systems that offer liminal and temporary space as long as we play by the rules. We reject a copy-pasting of entrenched power systems that are defunct in their architecture. We are not accountable to any laws, rules, regulations, norms, states, statutes, policies and codes of behaviour that were actively manufactured to limit us. We reject obedient subjugation. We boldly welcome and design kind, just and expansive alternatives, and see ourselves as agents that can reshape ourselves, our communities and our worlds into something far more beautiful.

9. WE CARRY THE POWER OF EMPATHY

We care for ourselves, our families, communities and our collectives. We create larger societal structures that manifest greater care. We commit to activities, stimuli and processes that support our own fulfillment and growth. We value care work in our homes and shared spaces. Networks of care nurture social frameworks that value and protect the sanctity of life, allowing us to act in principled, kind and justice orientated ways.

10. WE COLOUR IN THE ERASURE

In the absence of the family tree – there is still the ‘wild seed’. The root alone does not bear the fruit. We grieve and work through the sense of erasure, amnesia and cultural dispossession that colonisation and historical violences have forced us to endure. The unanswered longing for heritages and belonging will be met, even if we manifest it from our own spirits. We celebrate all the ways we have come to make, unmake and remake ourselves – the ways we have taken the loose threads of who we are and made a tapestry, stitched together with the awesome power of our lives. Our lives hold infinite power for possibility and we claim it. We allow our imaginations to re-colour and reclaim our histories and to become the designers of our multiple futures.

11. WE EXPRESS THE CHAOS OF OUR NATURE

We are not easily defined, understood or controlled. We may behave in unexpected and powerful ways. We change, develop and evolve and that may not always be predictable. We trust ourselves and our connections to hold our wildness.

12. WE DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN THE VIOLENCE OF HATRED

We are committed to practices of learning and relearning, enquiry and exploration. We do not condone any of the following in our own spaces and the spaces we move within: anti blackness, colourism, queerphobia, xenophobia, sexism, ethno – nationalism or bigotry masquerading under any other kind of hate- driven ideology. It is our intention to contribute to our collective experience of life with the force of our principles. We have no qualms protecting our boundaries as our principles expand. The communal dignity, compassion and infinite possibility of all who suffer the consequences of oppression is held among us who have not been allowed to exist.

About Us