What We Believe

BlackOUT Collective believes that: 

    • Black people are taking action for their own liberation and justice.
    • Direct action creates instant accountability and the ability to quickly amass power.
    • Direct action is exercising your human rights and can facilitate personal learning and transformation.
    • Standing up to those that oppress you is healing and liberating.
    • We must constantly bring in, train and support the develop of new leaders.
    • If we can change the conditions for Black people, this will shift and change the conditions for other communities.
    • Direct action has a long legacy in Black communities.  Our approach is to decolonize direct action and re-center on our powerful ancestral knowledge and courage of African women, men and children that have been fighting back for generations.  Africans jumped from Slave ships to resist the brutality of chattel slavery, shipyard workers who shut down the transport of weapons to supply warships, the legacies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the youth uprisings in Soweto as part of the anti-apartheid movement are some examples of the long legacy of civil disobedience, disruption and direct action within Black communities across the African/Black Diaspora.

Our Core Framework: 

We believe it is key for Black people to be agents in creating systematic shifts in this county, and we believe that Black people engaging in direct action is a key tactic in creating this change.  

We view direct action in 4 frames because it reminds us that there are a diversity of tactics. We use the 4 R’s as a framework to understand our theory of change, so that people can see their work within a broader context. We assert that we cannot create real, lasting change without engaging all four strategies and more Practitioners being clear about where their strategies fit allows us all to be more strategic in our alignment.

We view direct action through four types of interventions:

  1. Rapid Response:  An action that immediately responds to an injustice, or that intervenes to stop it 
  2. Reform: An action that put pressure on your decision maker to meet your demands, usually within a grassroots campaign 
  3. Rebellion: An action that question the validity of the system by banging on it whenever
  4. Resilience Based Actions: An action that assert your fundamental right to something.