In the last two blogs, I have been writing about flattening: the habit of reducing living communities, histories, territories, and knowledge systems into categories that can be managed from a distance.

Flattening can happen through representation. It can happen when immigrant communities are treated as a presumed political bloc, when a community’s knowledge is converted into content, when a visible representative becomes the point through which institutions believe they can access an entire people, or when resources move without sufficient discernment about the worlds they are strengthening.

Flattening can also happen through time.

There is a way of speaking about change that I have become increasingly cautious about. It asks us to welcome collapse, surrender certainty, be undone, crack open, and let the structures that have organized our lives fall away. It tells us that disorientation may be the beginning of wisdom, that failure can be generative, and that the end of what we know may make room for another world.

I understand the appeal. Many of the structures governing our lives are violent. They have organized land, labor, race, gender, citizenship, knowledge, wealth, and belonging around domination. They have produced extraction, disposability, loneliness, ecological devastation, and the thinning of meaning. Some institutions have exhausted their purpose. Some arrangements must end. Some ways of living must be relinquished because they have made life less possible.

Yet there is a difference between refusing harmful structures and romanticizing further rupture.

For many people, being undone is not a spiritual invitation. It is an inheritance. It is what happens when land is taken, when a language is interrupted, when a family is scattered, when a people are displaced, when a community is criminalized, when a school erases its history, when an institution withdraws its support, when a funder changes direction, or when a practice is extracted and sold back to the people from whom it came.

For communities shaped by conquest, enslavement, migration, dispossession, state violence, institutional betrayal, and economic precarity, collapse does not arrive as metaphor. It arrives as the loss of what was needed in order to live.

These communities do not need another invitation to lose their footing.

They need conditions through which life can continue. They need land that can remain held, memory that can remain available, young people who can inherit more than rupture, relationships that can survive conflict and distance, and collective authority that cannot be withdrawn whenever an institution changes its strategy. They need knowledge that remains connected to the people, territories, lineages, and responsibilities that gave it meaning. They need material resources that do not disappear when attention moves elsewhere.

Collapse does not distribute its consequences evenly. For some people, destabilization can feel like an opening because they have mobility, credentials, savings, passports, institutional access, and the ability to leave. For others, instability means the loss of food, housing, safety, care, language, family connection, land, or political future. The same rupture that becomes meaningful for one person may become another layer of disposability for someone else.

There is also an orientation toward rupture that privilege can make possible.

People with mobility, savings, citizenship, credentials, professional networks, stable housing, healthcare, institutional recognition, and the ability to leave may experience destabilization as a threshold of growth. They may be able to surrender certainty, release an identity, leave an institution, or welcome disorientation because the material conditions beneath them remain intact. What feels like a spiritual opening or political awakening may rest on protections they do not have to name.

For people already living with dispossession, those same experiences do not arrive as chosen thresholds. They arrive as the loss of what was needed in order to live. A family cannot metabolize eviction as an invitation to become more porous. A community defending land cannot treat militarization as a creative opening. A person whose language, kinship, safety, or political authority has already been interrupted does not need another theory that asks them to welcome further loss.

This also matters for Terrenales. Terrenalidad names a structural position formed through the intertwined histories of Indigenous dispossession and Black enslavement across the Americas. In rupture-oriented spaces, Terrenal life can be romanticized as proof that fracture produces depth, creativity, adaptation, beauty, multiplicity, or wisdom.

But the conditions that formed Terrenal life were not chosen experiments in transformation. They emerged through conquest, enslavement, land theft, racial ordering, forced migration, and the repeated interruption of collective continuity. Our capacity to create relationship, memory, humor, beauty, political intelligence, and life under pressure does not demonstrate that dispossession was generative. It demonstrates what people have had to create in order to survive it.

This is a form of body snatching. It takes the lived consequences carried in Terrenal bodies—displacement, racial ordering, interrupted lineage, forced adaptation, and survival across fractured worlds—and turns them into symbolic material for someone else’s spiritual, political, or intellectual project. The body is no longer encountered as the site of a person’s history, obligation, grief, memory, and ongoing material consequence. It becomes evidence for an idea: that rupture is generative, that fragmentation creates wisdom, that instability opens possibility, that people can flourish through collapse.

The meaning of Terrenal life is then extracted from Terrenales and reassigned to the needs of others. Resilience, improvisation, beauty, hybridity, humor, and the capacity to make life under pressure can be admired as though they prove that devastation produces wisdom. The capacities Terrenales carry are not proof that dispossession was productive. They are evidence of what people have had to create in order to survive it.

The underlying demand becomes: your dispossession has something to teach us about how to welcome ours.

That is an intolerable reversal. Terrenal life does not exist to make rupture meaningful for people who still have the option to step back into protection.

This is also how a superclass of changemakers can reproduce extraction while believing it is advancing depth, care, or transformation. Through universities, publishing, philanthropy, leadership programs, retreats, healing spaces, media platforms, and international convenings, certain people acquire the authority to shape the interpretive weather: to determine which diagnoses appear sophisticated, which metaphors become aspirational, which forms of suffering become legible, and which orientations toward change are distributed as wisdom.

The problem is not that people with public authority should be silent, nor that communities carrying dispossession have nothing to offer one another. The problem arises when a particular orientation toward rupture is amplified as a universal horizon and then asks Terrenales, Indigenous people, Black people, migrants, and communities already carrying dispossession to make their embodied histories available as proof that fracture is generative. In that moment, the lives of people who have survived imposed rupture become material through which others learn to welcome their own instability.

This does not mean privileged people should avoid discomfort, grief, uncertainty, or the relinquishment of harmful power. It means they must be careful not to universalize the conditions under which their own destabilization can feel generative. The question is whether they are willing to use their protection, access, and institutional leverage to help create conditions in which others do not have to carry more rupture.

This is why I am cautious about any theory of change that treats being broken open as inherently transformative. A heart can open through relationship. It can open through safety, grief, truth, memory, accompaniment, and collective care. It can open because someone is held well enough to risk becoming more honest. Yet a heart that has already been broken repeatedly by violence does not need to become more available to loss in order to become free.

The question is never simply whether something should end. Some things must end. Some institutions should be dismantled. Some roles must be relinquished. Some practices must be grieved and released because they no longer serve dignity, relationship, or future possibility.

The ethical question is what happens to people when they end.

• Who carries the consequences?

• Who retains land, income, knowledge, authority, memory, and relationship?

• Who is left holding the work of survival after those with options have moved on?

• Who has the power to decide that an ending is necessary, and who has to live with its aftermath?

• What has been built so that an ending does not become another abandonment?

Coherence asks us to remain accountable to what is true: to conflict, memory, unequal consequence, grief, relationship, and responsibility. Continuity asks what must remain held—land, memory, relationship, knowledge, authority, and material support—so that an ending does not become another abandonment.

The work before us requires more than destruction. It requires us to end what must end without making already-dispossessed people carry more rupture. It requires transitions that protect collective life and institutions that take responsibility for the harm created by their exits.

I do not believe further breaking is inherently transformative.

For communities already carrying the consequences of dispossession, the ethical task is to interrupt the reproduction of rupture and build what can hold.

The future will be made through what we are willing to protect, reconstitute, and carry together.