Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Dr. Liza J. Rankow’s book, “Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path to Wholeness.“
The great warrior-poet Audre Lorde cautioned that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
She said, “In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action.”
Dominant forces stay in power not by convincing people their way is the best way, but by convincing us it’s the only way. Artists and visionaries are dangerous to the system because they conjure fresh possibilities and offer them as a sacred and subversive medicine, calling us beyond the status quo. Art, music, and writing have the power to transform consciousness, and that can transform the world.
Visionary Vanguard
Oakland is full of dynamic “artivists” whose work combines the arts and activism. Among them is Calvin Williams, a cultural creative, strategist, and young father. He is co-founder of Wakanda Dream Lab, producing immersive world-building and storytelling campaigns for social impact. World-building is a literary technique used in science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy to vividly construct the time and place in which a narrative unfolds. We actually engage in world-building all the time, but usually we are re-creating the same dysfunctional world over and over.
However, Calvin and his partners use this practice to imagine a whole and thriving world. Their anthology on gender liberation invited “fiction, art, and poetry that was vision-led, future-facing, revolutionary, and social justice oriented” from people across the gender spectrum. Another anthology expanded the possibilities for immigration justice by imagining “love-centered migration and belonging” as the foundation for “new strategies, tactics, and hope for transforming immigration.”
Visionary and speculative fiction invite us into a generative practice. Not necessarily imagining forward to what could be, but writing from the position of that future, describing what it’s like and how we got there. Such creatives form a visionary vanguard, dreaming new worlds into being and disrupting the dominant narrative.
Dreaming a Possible World
The United States, and much of the western world, is shaped by a patriarchal white supremacist colonial capitalist imagination. Since the arrival of the first European settlers—and before that on the European continent—governing bodies, the economy, and social infrastructure have been defined by owning class white men.
This is the dominant voice on the world stage today, but it doesn’t have to be. (And, indeed, it has not always been!)
We can activate our own imaginations. Not seeing the world we want to live in, and the self we want to be, as a far-off future destination, but embodying them as a present and ongoing practice.
What would you do differently in the world you are longing for that you might start doing now? What would you think differently?
One of the ways empire maintains itself is by stifling our ability to dream outside the margins of its prescription, yet it’s precisely this capacity that ignites change. A world without fossil fuels. A world without corporations. A world without prisons or police. A world without borders. A world without money. A world without enemies, weapons, or domination. Each of these is possible. When the extent of our innovation is how to modify inherently evil and abusive systems, something has been taken from us—by intention. But we can get it back. By upending what have been considered the “givens” of society, an array of alternatives becomes available.
What is the foundation of your activism? What are the assumptions you may not even be aware of making that limit and define your dreaming?
Grace Lee Boggs, whose activism spanned most of her 100 years of life, taught that we must reimagine everything—work, education, community, family, governance—even revolution. In a 2012 dialog with Angela Davis at the annual Empowering Womxn of Color Conference at UC Berkeley, Boggs said, “how we change the world and how we think about changing the world has to change.” She suggested we see every crisis as not only a danger, but also an opportunity to become more creative, “to become the new kind of people that are needed at such a huge period of transition.” This, she said, is visionary organizing.
Adapted by the author from Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness, Liza J. Rankow, November 2025. Used by permission of Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 10545. All rights reserved. www.orbisbooks.com
EVENTS
Dr. Liza will be the guest speaker for Sunday service for the East Bay Church of Religious Science on Sunday, Dec. 7. Service takes place 10:30 am to Noon. The service will be followed by a book signing and reception. The church is located at 4130 Telegraph Ave. More events are listed on Rev. Liza’s website.
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