Everything Else Keeps Going: Women of color and the tentacles of abuse in movements

by Amber Butts

How many Black and Brown women have been asked to hold something so everything else can keep going?

Nightmares—living ones—are why many do not come forward, especially in movements that keep the abuser’s name, knowingly or not, as part of how the work understands itself. What was done stays, and the weight of it is handed back to the person who experienced the harm.

There is always a reason ready to keep the truth from being said, and it rarely sounds cruel when it is spoken. 

“The work is too important.”

“The stakes are too high.” 

“This will give them something to use against us.” 

“People are already under too much pressure.” 

“We can’t afford to lose ground.” 

In a world that trains women to give themselves over across every form of labor—corporate, grassroots, domestic—being asked to carry this is nothing new.

Nothing is untouched by this. Not the work. Not the spaces that call themselves liberatory. Not the state. Wherever something needs to maintain itself, what should stop it is moved aside.

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Black and Brown women recognize that moment immediately. No one has to spell it out because it has already happened before—in churches, kitchens, campaigns, union halls, community meetings, green rooms, family calls. It comes wrapped in care, in urgency, in loyalty, in the language of survival, often from people who believe what they are saying, people trying to protect something they think cannot withstand disruption.

On Wednesday, March 18, Dolores Huerta, a grassroots organizer who helped build the farmworker movement, released a statement naming her abuser as Cesar Chavez.

She said she stayed quiet for sixty years because she believed telling the truth would damage the movement she helped build. She said she kept that secret because the movement was the only way to secure anything for farmworkers, and she was not willing to let anything get in the way of it.

Huerta described being pressured into sex by Chavez, her boss, the face of the movement, someone people were taught to trust. She described being forced and the abuse resulted in two pregnancies, where Huerta raised his children elsewhere. 

A life arranged so none of it would interfere with the work, and the work continuing, expanding, being celebrated, taught, carried forward with her still inside it.

She said she can no longer stay silent. Sixty years are still there. Sixty years of being fixed inside a story that had no place for what was done to her. The movement didn’t do this. He did. Reverence makes room for harm. When power goes unchallenged, it makes room for abuse. Organizing spaces are not outside of that. And what she is naming does not undo the work. It places what was done to her inside the work, where it never left.

What gets carried is what was done—it decides who is protected and who is asked to keep quiet.

Abusers thrive in contradiction. Where the work names liberation but cannot confront what is happening inside it, they move through meetings, decisions, and relationships without answering for what they’ve done.

These are people with authority inside the work—leading meetings, shaping decisions, controlling access—using that authority to smooth over what they do. The work has to be able to name that without coming apart, and without collapsing survivors into the harm—without taking their dignity, their full lives with it.

This is a fight beyond individual abusers. It is about the conditions that carry what they do and keep it from being confronted.

So many Black elders have told me about the sexual violence they experienced, often times as children or young women. They tried to speak and were turned back, made to doubt what they knew. Some waited until the end of their lives to say it. One moment of telling. A lifetime of holding it.

So the question is not: why is she speaking now? . It’s why were the conditions never made for it to be said before? Why was she never safe enough to share the truth? To say it clean?

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Maybe our ancestors are weeping, but singing too—not because any of this was worth it, not because it balances out, but because something is finally being said that was kept quiet for too long. Not all at once. Not clean. Just enough to be heard. There’s an insistence there now. A refusal to keep holding it alone. A need to be witnessed, even now.

Generations of women have made that choice. For their livelihood. For their safety. For their children. For their families. Because the cost of speaking does not stay with them alone.

It holds because someone is made to carry what would otherwise bring it down. Nothing here asks for repair. Nothing here asks anyone to answer for what was done. It only asks that it continue.

The state runs on this.

We are living through it now. We see what happens when people who have abused others are protected by the state and given power within it.

Jeffrey Epstein abused young girls for years with the protection of wealth, access, and institutions that refused to stop him. His network did not exist in secret. It existed in plain sight. The names around him were known. The pattern was known.

What has been said about Donald Trump has been public. The allegations were not hidden. They were absorbed. Debated. Weighed against power.

The same logic held in the last election. Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexual assault. He denied it. The allegation remained, but it was absorbed—debated, weighed against what was at stake. Survivors were still asked to choose.

That is not accountability. It is training.

And when records threaten that arrangement, they are buried. Access is restricted. Files are dismissed as irrelevant. The state does not forget by accident. It manages memory. It decides what can be known and what must be made harder to reach. And still, people keep records. They archive. They pass information hand to hand. Not because the state will act, but because they know what happens when memory is left in its control.

This is not about individual failure. It is about a system that requires harm to be absorbed in order to function.

Power gathers and relationships form around it. Harm is routed through those same channels until people learn how to move around it instead of stopping it. It shows up in who is believed, who is protected, what gets delayed, what gets reframed, what gets folded into the pace of organizing spaces.

If a movement asks people to live with that, something is wrong in how that movement is built.

The question is not only whether a movement continues, but who inside that movement is left to live with what that movement refuses to confront.

Sixty years. A lifetime inside a movement that had no room for what was done to her, even as that same movement asked her to build it, defend it, and sustain it.

What was done does not stay with the person who caused harm. What was done stays with the person who experienced the harm—lived with, adjusted around, carried in the body—while everything built around that power moves on.

If movements do not change how they respond to harm, they will reproduce the same conditions they claim to oppose.

Grassroots organizing that does not confront power and patriarchal violence preserves those conditions.

A world that runs on this cycle is not worth preserving.

Amber Butts is a Black mama, abolitionist, and advocate for collective freedom and self-determination. Rooted in Oakland, she moves through worlds of play and repair, treating tenderness, nuance, and joy as abolitionist strategies of survival and transformation. Her role as an organizer is guided by expansive, nuanced visions of Blackness that refuse constriction and one-dimensionality. Her work—through cultural strategy, storytelling, and grief practice—carries forward traditions of mutual aid, imagination, and struggle across generations. Amber’s favorite freedom practice is observing how non-human beings organize to confront power and protect one another, lessons that shape her abolitionist commitments and her vision for interdependent futures.