Another Reflection on Being Co-opted

My last post shared a haunting yet illuminating word about popularity, personal development, and co-optation. Hermana Thenjiwe McHarris’s word bears repeating.

[I]f your popular gains outpace your own development, your own understanding, your own depth and deepening, it will be co-opted. And it will become something that will be used against you as opposed to what’s in service of you [and] what your community needs and the earth needs.

While reading bell hooks’ essay “Remembered Rapture,” I encountered a similar observation. Sister hooks writes:

Dissenting critical voices are easily co-opted by the longing to be both heard and admired, our words longed for and affirmed. Subculture stardom can be as seductive a distraction as speaking in the interests of mainstream cultural politics of domination…. No insurgent intellectual, no dissenting critical voice in this society escapes the pressure to conform. This is especially true of any dissenting voice that remains within a hierarchial [sic] institution founded on structures of domination where rewards and benefits are awarded in relation to service rendered. However, irrespective of our locations, we are all vulnerable. We can all be had, co-opted, bought. There is no special grace that rescues any of us. There is only a constant struggle to keep the faith, to relentlessly rejoice in an engagement with critical ideas that is itself liberatory, a practice of freedom.

McHarris and hooks have my attention. And comparing their insights has me wondering: Is it easier to keep the faith when you regularly engage in Freirean-style dialogue like that which McHarris had with hermana Clelia Rodríguez? Though not fail-proof, perhaps this communal practice is sacramental—a vehicle through which promoters of liberation receive divine grace that empowers their efforts to avoid co-option and stay the narrow path. By raising this option, I suggest that we interrogate the individualistic register of hooks’ insights and consider how an insurgent intellectual’s struggle to keep the faith is inherently communal—something impossible apart from a societas criticae.