How to Be Magickal: Working-Class Solidarity & Intersectional Community

Millicent
Jul 30
4 min read

Magick isn’t just spells and candles—it’s the soul-deep commitment to stand with each other, especially when life gets hard. Real magick is collective care, solidarity, and creating a world where everyone’s humanity is honored.

Solidarity Over Charity

Intersectional solidarity means building connections across differences—class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, immigration status—and acting in common purpose. It’s more than empathy: it’s shared power.

The Solidarity Is Practice Guide (Building Movement Project, 2024) emphasizes co-conspiratorship and co-liberation—actions that empower, rather than charity that reinforces hierarchies.

Why Charity Can Feel Like a Cage: My Own Story

I know firsthand how charity, even when well‑intentioned, can become a form of control.

When I was a teen mother (technically you never STOP being one even though I'm in my 30s now), people constantly told me things like, “You’re doing so well for a teen mom!”—as if my accomplishments only counted when framed against the stereotype of failure. At the time, I was raising my son while finishing my college degree, working, and even doing stand‑up comedy that allowed me to travel and meet incredible people. I didn’t feel like I was “doing well for a teen mom.” I felt like I was doing well, full stop.

But no matter what I achieved, my success was always diminished. I was still treated as less capable, less trustworthy, and somehow “lucky” rather than deserving. And after a while, that constant condescension gets in your head—you start to feel like maybe you really aren’t capable, even when your life proves otherwise.

The worst part was how people framed their “help.” Mutual aid—support offered in solidarity, without strings attached—felt empowering because it respected my agency. But charity? Charity so often came with conditions. People assumed that because I was a young mom, I must be desperate, that I’d take whatever I could get. They dictated what kind of help I received, when I received it, and under what conditions—as if they knew best what my life needed.

If I accepted, it often came with stress and loss of autonomy. If I didn’t accept, I was labeled ungrateful. And while people congratulated themselves for their “kindness,” they ignored the fact that their conditions, their judgment, and their control were just another way of putting me in my place.

That experience taught me that true solidarity is mutual, not hierarchical. It doesn’t treat someone as a moral project to be saved. It trusts that people know what they need for their own lives. It’s about agency, not pity.

Global Thinking, Local Action

Working-class struggle is often painted as local poverty—but the same systems undergird labor exploitation worldwide. Transnational intersectionality recognizes how colonial legacy, resource extraction, and refugee displacement intersect with class and race.

Magick here means amplifying voices from Haiti, Kashmir, Palestine, or the Sahel—working-class and marginalized people often erased in Western discourse. It’s about solidarity with migrant workers, not as charity recipients, but as fellow laborers facing global capitalism.

Even Within the Working Class, We Don’t All Start from the Same Place

Privilege isn’t just on Wall Street—it’s also within the working class. Middle-income progressives may face stress, but not eviction risk or systemic racism. The matrix of domination—a term coined by Patricia Hill Collins—explains how race, gender, disability, and immigration status intensify harm.

Building true solidarity means acknowledging these differences instead of pretending everyone faces the same struggles and refusing to participate in the "pornography of suffering" or the "who has it worse" contests. Those most marginalized often have the clearest view of how power works—what Collins calls standpoint theory.

The Soul Magick of Solidarity

Solidarity isn’t cute. It demands unlearning ego, rejecting performative charity, and sharing resources—time, translation, babysitting, legal help. It means opening space for voices that have historically been silenced.

Emotional labor is part of it too. Movements aren’t sustained by anger alone—they need care, grief work, and joy to survive (Gould, Moving Politics, University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Practical Magickal Actions

Action	Why It’s Magick
Support campaigns led by marginalized groups—like migrant farmworker unions or Indigenous land defenders	True power means following their leadership, not speaking over them
Share resources directly: mutual aid, rent strikes, community childcare	Community care is a spell stronger than any institution
Commit to non-performative solidarity—show up in ways that matter offline	Real solidarity beats an Instagram post every time
Educate yourself: Read Crenshaw, Hill Collins, Mohanty—learn the roots of global capitalist oppression	Knowledge is power that money can’t buy

Closing Spell

Magick isn’t just about candles or crystals. It’s about how we treat each other. It’s about saying no to systems that thrive on exploitation and yes to lifting each other up .

Real solidarity is the most potent spell we can cast—because when we stand together, no CEO, no politician, no empire can reduce us to pawns in their game.

When we lift each other, we rewrite the story from entitlement to empathy. And that, darling, is real magick.

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