The Master's Tools Keep Showing Up in Our Group Chats

(And No, We Can't Just Log Off)

There's a conversation happening in leftist spaces right now that's really quite frustrating.

"Too much AI."

And look, I'm not saying that a person is wrong to flag it. They might have real concerns about labor, about data scraping, about the environmental cost. Those concerns are valid. I share them.

The problem I see is that response didn't ask anything about how the video was made. Didn't ask what tool, what model, what trade-offs. Just a blanket rejection. End of conversation.

And that pattern, the outright rejection without inquiry, is becoming a way to avoid the work.

I understand the harms. I really do.

• Harm to artists and writers whose work gets scraped without consent.

• Harm to Black communities, predictive policing, biased hiring algorithms, medical misdiagnosis, surveillance.

• Harm to the planet, water, energy, e-waste, all of it. AI data centers are increasingly located in Black and lower-income communities, consuming massive amounts of electricity and water with little local input or benefit.

An EAGER member sent this study the other day: "AI reduces human persistence and independent performance." Important. Real. Worth talking about. (The study found that even brief AI interactions, about ten minutes, made people significantly worse at performing tasks without AI and more likely to give up.)

Photo by Markus Winkler

I'm not willing to let any of that become an excuse to stop organizing against white supremacy.

Because that's what this is starting to look like. Another purity test. Another reason to reject someone's work as not good enough. Another way to point outward instead of inward.

The work is inside yourself

If you're constantly scanning other people's tools, other people's videos, other people's choices, are you doing the work? Or are you finding a reason not to?

I'm not saying raise no concerns. Raise them. But raise them in service of the work, not in place of it.

Voice-to-text is AI. Auto-captioning is AI. Small grassroots organizers using free tools to translate flyers or clean up audio because they're exhausted and under-resourced, that's also AI. You're upset Educators are using AI? I don't know how they're using it. Neither do you. We can make assumptions all day. But assumptions aren't organizing.

At the end of the day, our job is to end white supremacy. We are not going to do that by constantly focusing on this one thing and using it as a reason to reject each other's work.

I've been here. I've done this.

I've wrestled with this myself. Still do. Every single day. Just like I wrestle with everything else.

Do I turn the lights on?

What groceries do I buy this week?

Who makes the floor cleaner?

I know you're looking for a way not to perform white supremacy. Not to participate in the culture. You're a white body person moving through white supremacist structures, and you genuinely want out. I get it.

The hard truth is you can't fully opt out.

And if you can't, then you can't expect anyone else to either.

That doesn't mean give up. It means stop pretending purity is possible. Stop using your own guilt as a measuring stick for other people's work.

What you can do is self-reflect.

Not to perform. Not to announce. But to honestly ask yourself:

How can I reduce my usage of white supremacist culture today? Not eliminate. Reduce.

Tema Okun, who wrote the groundbreaking essay "White Supremacy Culture," names "either/or thinking" as one of its core characteristics—simplifying complex issues into binary categories and ignoring nuance. That's exactly what we're doing when we say "AI bad" or "AI good." The real work is in the messy middle. We don't just do this with AI. We put organizing in that neat little either or box too.

Because here's what they designed:

The wealthy, the systems, the infrastructure, the tools, the supply chains, their job is to make us dependent. On the lights. On the grocery store. On the floor cleaner that comes in a bottle from a company nobody trusts. On the AI that runs through data centers burning water.

They built it so that even our resistance has to pass through their hands.

That's not a personal moral failure. That's a trap.

So stop expecting yourself or anyone else to have clean hands.

Do the work anyway.

Reduce where you can.

Organize to build alternatives.

And when you see someone else using a tool you wish didn't exist, don't reject them. Ask: What would help you need less of that?

Because the answer isn't shame.

The answer is collective power to build something else.

What To Do Instead Of Outright Rejection

You can have valid concerns and still do the work. How?

Ask before you reject.

Instead of "too much AI," try: "What tool did you use? How did it affect your process? Did you consider the labor/environmental cost?" That's a conversation, not a shutdown.

Separate the tool from the person.

Critique the infrastructure, not the comrade trying to move work forward under it. The problem isn't that an educator used ChatGPT. The problem is that we don't own the infrastructure, the data wasn't consented, and the resources are being extracted from Black communities. Say that.

Redirect your critique upward, not sideways.

Your energy belongs aimed at the companies building this extraction machine, not at the organizer who used auto-transcription to write a flyer after a 14-hour shift.

Do the internal work first.

Before you comment on someone else's AI use, ask yourself: Am I doing my own work right now? Or am I finding something external to critique so I don't have to look inward? As the University of Michigan's anti-racist pedagogy guide puts it, dismantling white supremacy culture "requires us to be aware of its characteristics in our internal, interpersonal, and institutional lives."

Offer alternatives, not just rejection.

If you don't want people using a particular tool, help them find another one. Small, open, low-carbon, community-owned options exist or could exist, if we built them. Don't just say no. Say "here's what we could use instead" and then help make it happen.

Know when to hold and when to fold.

Not every battle is the main battle. White supremacy is the main battle. If you spend all your energy fighting AI use in a solidarity video or a classroom, you're not fighting the thing that's actually killing us. Choose your fights like your life depends on it—because it does.

A note on Audre Lorde

I referenced her earlier, and I want to be precise. In her 1979 essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," Lorde was speaking specifically to white feminist scholars who were excluding Black women's experiences while using the same oppressive structures they claimed to oppose. She wasn't saying "don't use anything made within systems of power." She was saying don't be surprised when tools built on exclusion produce exclusion.

The AI we have was built on extraction, anti-Blackness, and environmental violence. Using it won't dismantle those systems. But pretending we can simply refuse it while the systems keep running isn't resistance. It's performance.

Lorde also wrote: "Your silence will not protect you." Refusing to engage isn't safety. It's silence.

I'm not saying ignore the harms. Name them. Fight them. Build different tools. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Australian Human Rights Commission have both called for regulation, transparency, and safeguards specifically to protect Afro-descendant communities from algorithmic discrimination. Support those efforts.

But don't use AI as an excuse not to do the work. And don't reject someone else's work just because you saw pixels move in a way you didn't like.

The house is on fire. The master's tools are poisoned. And we still have people to save.

Sources Cited

1. Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1979/1984) — collected in The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (W.W. Norton, 2020) and Your Silence Will Not Protect You (2017)

2. Liu, G., et al. "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" — arXiv:2604.04721 (April 2026)

3. Climate Justice Alliance — educational resources on AI data center environmental justice impacts, particularly on frontline Black communities

4. Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies — op-ed on AI data centers as environmental burden for Black communities (Essence, January 2026)

5. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) — press release on algorithmic discrimination against Afro-descendants (March 2026)

6. Australian Human Rights Commission — thematic report on AI and racial discrimination (September 2025)

7. Tema Okun, "White Supremacy Culture" (1999/2001) — characteristics including either/or thinking; anti-racist pedagogy guide from University of Michigan