Know Your Rights vs. Exercise Your Rights: A Distinction that Makes a Difference
The scenes out of Minnesota have been terrifying, and inspiring. In response, many of us have become more familiar with our rights, learning the difference between observation and obstruction, and distinguishing between administrative and judicial warrants. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save our neighbors. To truly honor the sacrifices of the guardians we’ve lost, we must meet the moment with not just awareness, but concrete action. We need to do more than know our rights, we need to actively exercise them. The task is certainly daunting. For many of us, especially queer and trans people of color, law enforcement is a source of real, material fear. We’ve had negative experiences with the state and abstract legal framing doesn't necessarily help us assert ourselves when we’re afraid. So how do we honor both of these realities, our fear and our sense of community, especially when we’re scared?
I’m Talking About Practice
Ted Lasso jokes aside, the first step is practice. We need to prepare ourselves for the real situations happening in LA, Chicago, Minnesota, Maine and perhaps our own neighborhoods next. We need to put ourselves in possible scenarios in order to figure out our responses. How does an Exercise Your Rights Training help?
In a Know Your Rights training (KYR) a facilitator explains what the law says and what rights people are entitled to in specific situations. It often includes:
Foundational constitutional and statutory rights (e.g., free speech, due process, legal observation)
What police or government officials can and cannot do
Common myths versus legal realities
Participants leave KYR’s with a clearer understanding of the legal landscape and the language of rights. And that’s great and necessary! But, the gap between knowing and doing is where many people get stuck. Knowing a right doesn’t guarantee someone can assert it under pressure or while afraid.
Someone can recite their rights perfectly and still:
Panic during an encounter
Escalate beyond their own comfort zone
Forget what to say
Comply out of fear or confusion
Fear retaliation or escalation
Exercise Your Rights trainings (EYR) acknowledge a crucial truth: social mores, pressure, power dynamics, trauma, language barriers, and even basic personality differences all shape how—and whether—people can assert their rights. By practicing in advance, participants are better equipped to make intentional choices in the moment, even when situations are stressful or unpredictable.
A New Set of Skills
Exercise Your Rights trainings are experiential and focused on doing. Our goal is to develop knowledge and the confidence, skills, and muscle memory needed to assert rights in real situations.
Exercise Your Rights trainings center a different skill set including:
Understanding our fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses
Developing easy to use individualized scripts and decision trees
Personalized risk assessment
Tools for trauma informed de-escalation and decision making
In our sessions we focus on role-playing common scenarios (e.g., traffic stops, workplace conflicts, street protests) to support participants in identifying exactly how they might respond to stress. We build confidence and preparedness to normalize asserting rights as a skill, not just a concept. Put simply, Exercise Your Rights trainings answer the question: “How do we protect our rights?
It’s definitely still scary, but we’ve faced these fears before. During the Civil Rights movement, organizers with the Congress of Racial Equality would train for sit-ins. The photo above is of one such training the group hosted in Virginia in 1960. They screamed at each other, throwing food and hurling slurs to prepare for the hatred and violence they knew they would face. But they weren’t just readying themselves for what others would do; they trained themselves to act in the face of their own fear, too. Every time we have faced law enforcement it has been scary. But we’ve been trained by stalwart organizers and teachers to stand in that fear and act with conviction. And we’ve done so all over this country whether as a protester, legal observer, police liaison, de-escalator, or crowd security. Exercise your Rights sessions reflect this dedication: to preparedness, discomfort–and–enduring resistance. Reach out to learn more.
By: Kim Tran and Krishna Desai
