A few months ago I spoke to Eva Paterson, president of the Equal Justice Society, who described “disturbing trends in some national foundations; a pulling away from race where they seem to be adopting the notion of post-racial America.”

“What,” asked Patterson, “is going on?”

How far have we come from 1993 when — a year after the LA uprising — “diversity and inclusion” were considered cutting edge ideas in philanthropy?

That’s what I wrote about in a recent article that appeared in Moving Forward on Racial Justice Philanthropy, a new report from the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity.

“Racial justice has been strengthened when individuals in foundations took a chance on movement building,” answered Gihan Perera, executive director of Florida New Majority (FNM) and former executive director of Miami Workers Center. “Right now people are impressed with FNM as a multi-issue, multi-ethnic statewide power that wins campaigns,” he continues. “But none of this would be happening without the decades of experience we spent building racial justice unity on the ground.”

“While Black/Brown unity is now accepted as an important approach in organizing,” says Perera, “10 or 15 years ago we couldn’t talk to funders about it. We couldn’t talk to funders about the real work – the political education, the leadership development, the relationship building – that multiracial unity involves.”

Just this past week Jee Kim of the Ford Foundation took the bold step of publicly putting out a movement building theory of change – and asking everyone what they thought of it. Kim is asking philanthropy to recognize the power of social movements, to honestly and thoughtfully examine how and why they succeed or fail, and to strategically and proactively engage in supporting them. That feels to me like momentum other funders can build upon.

What else can funders do?

Drawing on conversations with other racial justice organizers and activists, here’s how I summarized steps that funders can and should take.

1 Fund Organizing as Core to Racial Justice

I can’t believe we still need to say this but we do: To effectively support racial justice, foundations must prioritize the day-to-day work of community organizing as part of a larger theory of change. But that’s far from a no-brainer in the funding world.

“There’s a lack of an effective change model,” says Makani Themba, executive director of The Praxis Project. “Funders lack a clear understanding of where base-building fits in.” Scot Nakagawa of ChangeLab, agrees. “Funders are concentrating on ‘funding to scale,’ on larger organizations and less on smaller groups,” he says. “But policy is the end of the discussion and not the beginning. The beginning is the work of smaller community-based groups who deal with the most directly impacted.” Maria Poblet, director of Causa Justa/Just Cause, “No one wants to fund the infrastructure of organizing. That’s one of the core ways that racial inequity plays out in the world.”

The recent launch of the collaborative LGBTQ Racial Justice Fund is a powerful step in this direction. This effort – which seeks to engage LGBTQ funders and other progressive funders — is central for LGBTQ communities and for building a stronger progressive movement.

2 Make A Long Term Commitment

Again, hard to believe it needs to be said, but does it ever. According to Kalpana Krishnamurthy, policy director at Forward Together, “A variety of different sectors within philanthropy have tried to move more resources to organizations of color, in particular to reproductive justice. But the funding pattern is short. How do you get to structural change if you are only getting a few years of funding?”

3 Stop Perpetuating Structural Racism

The way foundations design and conduct grant-making often reinforces racial inequities, and favors organizations that have benefited from White privilege through a history of White leadership. My co-worker Taj James breaks it down: “As a country, the less White we get, the more decision-makers distrust democracy. This plays out in philanthropy where we can now hear conversations like ‘Is democracy good or bad in Detroit?’ Like the country as a whole, philanthropy is turning away from democracy and toward a ‘technocratic’ approach that reflects and reproduces structural racism.”

4 Tell True Stories of Racial Justice

It’s important to do good work, but also to build a “bigger we” of people who understand the work in the context of the change model, feel connected to it, and speak and stand up for it. “We need to tell our stories of the strengths of the racial justice movement,” says Judith Browne Dianis, director of the national multiracial civil right organization Advancement Project. “We are sometimes too busy doing the work to tell the story.” Themba makes a similar point. “The dominant theme is that explicit work on racial justice is hard to do and can be divisive. But we are winning, talking about race and racial justice,” she says.

“The framing and story about the work shapes whether there are resources or not,” concludes Taj. “Valuable and successful work can be going on but not getting resources. The same work can have a new story and frame, and the resources come back.”

5 Make the Connection Between Racial Justice and Everything Else

“Success is happening where an intersectional approach is being supported alongside a racial justice movement,” says Cathi Tactaquin, executive director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Themba notes there has been progress on this front. “A small but growing group of funders are working to integrate support for explicit racial justice work into their issue-based portfolios,” says Themba, who nonetheless cautions that “We need a ‘both/and’ approach that doesn’t marginalize racial justice” such as the Edward W. Hazen Foundation’s “both/and” work on education justice.

Monami Maulik of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) described a shift away from racial justice. “Except for growing race/class framing in policing and youth criminalization funding, I’m hearing the same message now that I heard in the post 9/11 era: that we should not be about race. It pretty explicitly happened in immigration funding.”

6 Support Multi-Racial Connections

Perera gives credit to the handful of funders who saw the value in naming the tensions and potential between Black and Latino communities, invested resources in this work, and provided thoughtful leadership that legitimized multiracial organizing to other funders.

Perera observes that small foundations like the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock and medium-sized foundations like the Public Welfare Foundation “seeded cutting edge work and invested appropriately for their institutions.” He also believes large foundations such as Ford made a difference by supporting organizing infrastructure and signaling the value of the work to other foundations. But Perera believes the key lesson for funders – that creating space for multiracial constituencies (between and within strong organizations) to come together toward a common agenda – has gone largely unlearned. “The breakthrough in understanding has not resulted in real shifts in funding,” asserts Perera.

7 Organize racial justice leaders in philanthropy.

“A core cadre has emerged of individual program officers and donors committed to racial justice,” observes Taj. “They have the potential to have broader influence on the field of philanthropy overall.” Malkia Cyril, director of the Center for Media Justice, comments on the importance of alignment among organizers and advocates in shaping philanthropy. “We need more peer-to-peer conversations on how money moves; what outcomes we want.”

Work such as that of the Bay Area Justice Funders Network and their Harmony Institute may hold the seeds of a philanthropic shift toward more honest conversation (Check out BAJF’s powerful recent piece from Cathy Lerza). This candid dialogue can lead philanthropy away from an obsession with what Taj James calls things “small enough to measure but not big enough to matter” and toward a commitment to solutions that remake systems that truly work for all.

At a time when race continues to shape every aspect of our lives — from access to healthy food, treatment within schools, safety from violence, to our very recognition as human beings — all of us, including philanthropy, have a responsibility to step boldly forward.

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Feature photo: Justin Baeder

Fifteen years ago, when Alex Rivera came up with the premise for his award-winning science fiction film Sleep Dealer, the idea of telecommuting was futuristic. Since then, we have become accustomed to the idea that the web and telecommunications can connect workers to customers and headquarters anywhere in the world. The film originally premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, offering a near future dystopic vision that simply takes current technology to the next level. In Mexican factories, workers are literally plugged into machines with wires that make them appear to be marionettes. Through the technology, their motions are mirrored by robots in the US who pick fruit, build skyscrapers, and even nanny children.

The film got great reviews that included The New York Times and WIRED, plus a distribution deal. But the distributor went under in 2011. Since then, Rivera and his team have been working with Sundance Artist Services to re-release the film on iTunes on June 17th of this year. According to REMEZCLA, a cutting edge Latino culture blog, Sleep Dealer offers “an inspirational narrative about second chances in which trailblazers like the Sundance Artist Services continue to fight for the future of independent film.”

Sleep Dealer digitally re-released today.

The original version of this post appeared in Earth First! Newswire.

There is a war against women, and men and boys are trained every day to be the soldiers. Misogynist violence isn’t the biological imperative of men. Misogyny, the worldview that engenders, validates, and normalizes violence against women, is beaten into boys and woven into the fabric of “successful masculinity”.

While very few men consciously choose to be horrible to women, the reality is, every day “respectable” and “acceptable” norms of how men interact and treat women are infused with male entitlement and male privilege. Together, these norms contribute to a culture of misogyny, rape, assault, and emotional abuse. A hallmark of this culture is the tragic indifference of men to women’s lives, leadership, dreams, needs, wants, and futures. Everyday sexist norms include constant interruptions of women speaking, catcalls on the street, regular comments about women’s appearance rather then their contributions and character, communicating in subtle and blatant ways that men see women as there to serve men’s needs, zoning out when women speak so as to formulate your own thoughts or to sexualize them, ignoring women’s ideas and then repeating them back later as your own ideas, and taking up emotional, verbal, energetic and physical space in ways that silence and push women out.

And when women complain about any aspect of the enormity of patriarchal culture or daily threats and realities of violence, such as the recent explicitly misogynistic and racist mass murderer in Santa Barbara, men overwhelming respond in a chorus of “but not all men act that way”, rather then expressing a profound sadness for the reality of patriarchal culture and violence, followed by a commitment to learn more and take action to change it. Fear of being implicated, in any way, is greater for far too many men, than fear of what the reality of patriarchal culture and violence means for women in their lives. But just like soldiers, men aren’t born this way. They are trained.

In workshops on “Men and Feminism” with thousands of men around the U.S. and Canada, I often use an exercise developed by Paul Kivel and the Oakland Men’s Project. I ask men, “Who here has been told ‘act like a man?’” Almost all the hands go up. What does that mean I ask? Typical responses include: “don’t cry,” “always be in control,” “suck it up and be tough,” and “don’t be emotional.” When I ask what emotions men are allowed to express, I hear: “anger,” “jealousy,” and “resentment.” I then ask what the men are called when they step out of the “act like a man box,” and a long list of slurs intended to degrade men and boys as either gay or feminized is given.

This training to “act like a man” is intended to turn boys into soldiers – soldiers deeply detached from their emotions, except violent rage and anger, and to internalize misogyny and homophobia as a basis for their masculinity. I then ask men to raise their hands if they were ever beaten up by male family members or by boys in school for “not acting like a man.” At least half of the hands go up. “How many of you have ever experienced depression, anxiety, or low self-esteem?” I inquire; almost all the hands go up. Nearly every hand is raised when I ask, “How many of you have been afraid to tell anyone?” The exercise ends with a few additional questions. How many of you have used drugs or alcohol to escape? How many of you have used violent or dangerous behavior to escape? How many of you have contemplated suicide? I raise my hand for many of these, including the last one.

This is the nightmare of patriarchy in the lives of men, and it is a nightmare we perpetuate in subtle and profound ways. This is the training of soldiers in the war against women, and it is pervasive. But this is not how it has always been. Throughout the world, throughout history, there have been societies and cultures that were far more egalitarian, without the strict gender roles, where misogynistic violence wasn’t the norm. To understand why boys are trained to be soldiers, we must look at the other wars they have been trained to be part of.

Misogyny has been and is a weapon of colonization against Indigenous peoples and nations – not only attacking the power of women in Indigenous societies, but forcing patriarchy into those societies to divide and conquer them. Gender violence was central to the development and organization of the Atlantic slave trade and the system of plantation slavery on the South – using rape to both populate the slave system as the child of a slave is born into slavery, but also again, to dehumanize enslaved women to and further suppress the power of women and fracture the overall community. Misogyny was and continues to be central to the development and expansion of capitalist economic relationship. Across the globe, communities were uprooted from the land, and gendered divisions of labor hardened: men forced into paid labor to make someone else rich, women into unpaid, unvalued reproductive labor at the same time as men were granted social permission to unleash the rage and misery of their own exploitation and disempowerment on their wives and children.

Learning this history is key for men to help end the war against women. From Andrea Smith’s analysis of sexual violence as a tool of genocide, to Maria Mies and Silvia Federici’s writing on violence against women as a tool to divide European peasant and working class communities to construct capitalism, to Angela Davis’s formulation that women in enslaved African communities and in all oppressed communities have been at the forefront of resistance and liberation struggles and therefore, “the slave master’s sexual domination of the black woman contained an unveiled element of counterinsurgency.”

Today, the war on women is the massive number of women who are raped and assaulted. It is the fact that domestic violence support services get more then 75,000 requests for assistance on a typical day; that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury for women between the ages of 15 and 44, and the leading cause of death for Black women of the same ages. It is the crisis of over 1,200 missing or murdered Indigenous girls and women in Canada over the past 30 years. It is the disproportionate amount of violence transgender women face from street harassment to police violence.   It is African-American mother Marissa Alexander currently serving 20 years in a Florida prison for firing a warning shot, in which no one was hurt, to scare away her abusive husband –while George Zimmerman was found justified in killing unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin based on the same legal argument.

The war on women is the U.S. government’s forced sterilization of Indigenous, Black and Latina women over hundreds of years, with sterlization continuing to happen to incarcerated women. It is the austerity measures of the U.S government gutting publicly funded institutions such as schools, welfare, food stamp programs, and early childhood learning programs, while redistributing money, via tax policy, from working class, poor, and middle class communities to the richest people on the planet. Austerity measures further put the burden of unpaid labor of maintaining life and society on the backs of women, particularly women of color. Along with colonization and hundreds of years of the Atlantic slave trade, the unpaid reproductive labor of women is the foundation of capitalism. The war against women is the gender-based violence of husbands, boyfriends and the state to maintain the structures of unpaid women’s reproductive labor.

While men, in general, reap a wide range of male privileges (with access to those privileges differentiated unequally by race, class, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and nationality), it’s time for men in the millions to declare that we will no longer be the soldiers in the war against women. That we will no longer perpetuate sexist attitudes, cultural practices and public policies that undermine women’s leadership, dignity, and power in society. That we will work against the long term impacts of white supremacy, colonization, homophobia, and economic exploitation in society and all of our communities.

Throughout history and today, women have resisted. As men, we must learn from and join with feminist movements to redefine what it means to act like a man, so that we can act like many kinds of men – or other genders entirely. Some of us can build on our ancestors’ traditions of different kinds of masculinities. In many cases we already have models of masculinity upon which we can draw and find inspiration. But we must collectively, along with women and people of other genders, redefine masculinities in ways that replace misogyny and homophobia with love and compassion. We must collectively redefine masculinities in ways that center visions and values of economic, racial, gender, disability and environmental justice. As men, let us work to heal from the training we’ve received to be soldiers in the war against women, let us look to feminist women’s leadership for vision and guidance of the society we want to live in, and let us join with people of all genders to end the violence and exploitation of all of these wars. Beyond the nightmare of patriarchy is a world of possibility. Let us be courageous, and go there together.

For Further Reading:

• Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks
• Men’s Work: How to Stop Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart by Paul Kivel
• The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love by bell hooks
• Boys Will Be Men: Raising Our Sons for Courage, Caring and Community by Paul Kivel
• Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith
• Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis
• Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by Maria Mies
• Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

Note: Thank you to Andy Cornell, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Jardana Peacock, and Chanelle Gallant for feedback.

Erica Woodland works with Brown Boi Project, an organization seeking to transform the way people of color experience gender and to create healthy models of masculinity. Erica has worked for more than a decade on issues of gender and gender-based violence, including her earliest work with men and women in prison in Maryland and her current role leading the Brown Boi Project’s middle school program for boys of color in Oakland. Let’s Talk asked Erica to help us understand this moment in gender and gender justice.

Let’s Talk: The past few weeks have been filled with public discussion of gender. What should we make of that?

Erica Woodland: I think people are ready for a new kind of discussion. Gender as we’ve understood it is no more.

There’s an explosion of conversation about gender right now, with lots of activity on Facebook and Twitter, especially from young people.

It’s been amazing to see Laverne Cox on the cover of Time, not just because she’s a trans woman of color but because her analysis of race, class, and gender is pushing us all to look at this moment in its political dimensions. The Time cover happened in the same week as the letter to President Obama from 200 Black men calling for inclusion of girls and women in My Brother’s Keeper and pushing for a more complex conversation on gender.

We’ve also witnessed terrible recent atrocities related to gender and the hatred of women and girls in our society. We’ve seen the murders at UC Santa Barbara and the assault of two black trans women in Atlanta who were stripped and beaten while others watched and took video of the incident.

These incidents – and so many others that never make the news — ask us all to look at the role we play in supporting a culture that hates femininity. We see this hatred in the way we treat women and girls, including trans women and girls. We see this hatred in discrimination against men, straight and queer, who embody femininity. We hear “boy’s don’t cry” and “man up” and wonder why men of color struggle to heal.

The big incidents dominate public consciousness for really short periods of time. We get angry or excited and share something on social media, but what are we going to do after the buzz subsides? How are we going to do the proactive day-to-day work of transforming ourselves, our relationships and our culture?

LT: What does the day-to-day work of transforming gender look like?

EW: At Brown Boi Project we offer space to create the relationships necessary for deep conversations about masculinity and power. Brown Boi has developed leadership circles engaging more than 150 young people of color nationally; these leadership circles have included young people across the masculine spectrum from masculine of center womyn to trans men to queer men to straight men. We have reached hundreds more young people of color in the circles we have held at universities and conferences.

Brown Boi has helped spark bold conversations about gender and race in unlikely places. In 2012, we brought three of our high school leaders from Los Angeles to facilitate a training with faith-based leaders open to the work of Brown Boi and gender justice. The youth identified as either queer or trans and were concerned that the faith-based leaders would judge them for their gender expression and sexual orientation. One gender non-conforming young person even considered wearing a dress to make the folks in the training feel more comfortable!

Despite their worries the youth shared their experiences as young queer and trans people and the challenges they face in their communities and from their families. The faith-based leaders got the opportunity to build relationships with young people which helped them to understand how everyone gains from exploring gender, to work more effectively with queer/gender non-conforming people in their congregations, and to begin to imagine programs that would make gender justice a real part of their work.

People often only see the work of the Brown Boi Project as LGBTQ. But everyone is affected by gender, race and power in our culture, not just queer and trans folks.

LT: How can people get involved with gender justice?

EW: Everyone can show some love for gender justice!

First, support organizations and work led by and for women of color, especially trans women of color in your community. At the Brown Boi Project we have a commitment to donating money and sharing relationships that can be used to leverage resources to work led by women of color.

Second, own our privilege as people of color. For all of the challenges we face, there are always others in our community who need our support. Make a commitment to step up in situations that reinforce violence and hatred towards women and girls, queer and trans people, people of color, poor folks and people with disabilities. Gender justice cannot exist without racial, economic, LGBTQ and disability justice.

Third, accept that we are all learning and growing and will make mistakes. Cultivating the practice of gender and racial justice is an on-going process. The moment we think that the work is done, we are faced with our own blind spots and unconscious prejudice. Be open to feedback and doing things differently in these moments — they are a gift.