“Applause Without Liberation”

There’s a powerful moment from I Am Not Your Negro (the 2016 documentary by Raoul Peck based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House) where Baldwin has just finished speaking, and when he turns around the whole audience is almost entirely white people applauding him. The moment lands with a kind of haunting irony: Baldwin, a Black intellectual whose life’s work was to expose the brutality of white supremacy, is met with the approval of the very demographic whose comfort depends on its survival. They clap for him as if he were a performer, a spectacle. And yet the conditions he names, the structures he dissects, remain firmly in place.

Peck’s editing makes that contradiction unavoidable. Baldwin’s genius is recognised, even celebrated, but he is also isolated, on a stage, hemmed in, looked at. The applause doesn’t signify transformation; it becomes proof of how easily radical critique can be absorbed into the very system it condemns. White audiences could consume Baldwin’s words as culture, as performance, without taking them as a call to dismantle the order that privileges them.

And this is the thing. Too often, the applause itself becomes the end point. Something radical is consumed, appreciated, applauded, and left at that. But we must interrogate who the audience is, what they are doing with what they consume, and whether their engagement is dismantling oppressive systems or quietly shoring them up. A performance of solidarity is not solidarity.

This is why critique matters. Real critique disrupts the comfort of applause. It refuses to let recognition stand in for change. It insists that solidarity be measured not by clapping hands but by dismantled structures. And because of that, critique is unsettling. It breaks the illusion that applause is enough. It demands that audiences, whether they are governments, institutions, or even our allies, move from performance to transformation. That disruption is threatening because it calls people to account, and it asks them to give something up: their privilege, their security, their power, their illusions of innocence.

When this truth is named - when someone dares to interrupt the applause and ask whether the work is actually undoing anything - the one who speaks becomes marked as the enemy. But we are not each other’s enemies. The enemy is the state, the system that cages, kills, and disappears our people. That is what must be torn down. The real danger is not the ones calling out the contradictions; it is the power structure that thrives on our silence and our complicity.

What also happens, though, is that people who are not the ones living the reality insert themselves into the movement and then presume the authority to arbitrate critique. They position themselves as gatekeepers, deciding which critiques are valid and which are not, even when the critique comes directly from those who are most harmed. This is a dangerous dynamic: when the unaffected silence the affected in spaces that are supposed to centre them, they reproduce the very hierarchies we are fighting against.

And let’s be clear, when they police or suppress critique in this way, they are not neutral. They are siding with the state. They are reproducing carceral logics of control, containment, and silencing, even while claiming to stand in opposition to them. These are the people we need to watch carefully, because their presence can distort the work, shifting it away from liberation and back toward respectability and control.

We must learn to welcome critique, to see it as a compass rather than a threat. Movements grow stronger when they are tested from the inside. Communities are protected when those at the sharpest edge of oppression are heard, even if what they say unsettles us. To shy away from critique is to choose fragility over courage. And if we cannot withstand critique from our own people, how can we possibly withstand the violence of the state?

In this way, critique itself is a form of resistance. It is the refusal to let our struggles be commodified into spectacle, or our movements diluted into palatable performances. It is a reminder that the work is not applause, not recognition, not branding. The work is liberation.