Reading “When Living on Tips Means Putting Up With Harassment” in the New York Times this week made me reflect on my own brief career as a waitress.

As a student in my late teens and early twenties I waited tables as one of the few jobs I could get. I always expected to do something else in the long term, but was glad to have a skill I could depend on in the future if I needed to. Having my own job gave me the courage and money to take risks – like focusing on my art and community organizing in college rather than the “practical” things my dad would have preferred, like engineering or business or medicine. Having my own job helped me show my mom, who had just divorced my dad after 19 years of marriage, that I would be able to make it, to support myself no matter what. Long after I moved on from restaurant work I continued to see waitressing as my safety net.

Waitressing was different for the women I worked with, women for whom waitressing was a career: They had kids. They were single and middle aged. The restaurant was key to their making it – or not. It wasn’t a launching pad for big visions and risks; it was economic survival for themselves and their families.

For all of us, pleasing the customer was central to the job, even when it meant erasing our own dignity or personhood. Getting “hit on” by customers was part of the job, something we’d laugh about when we could, trying to connect with each other and shed painful feelings of shame and fear.

Over the past five years I’ve worked with Move to End Violence (MEV), a collaboration of people from all corners of the struggle to end gender-based violence and violence against women and girls. Alongside the smart and caring people of MEV I’ve thought a lot about our culture of violence and the deep undercurrents that fuel it. I’ve also had the chance to connect my MEV work with that of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Caring Across Generations, United Workers Congress, Grassroots Global Justice, Movement Generation and others. All of them have helped me to see very clearly how our economy – how it’s set up and how we experience it, each other and ourselves in it – is the fuel that enables a full spectrum of violence to thrive.

Now, looking back, I can see how our sexualized treatment as waitresses – sometimes subtle, sometimes horrific — was part of a culture of violence that is deep and structural. While it was individual men who took advantage of us, it was the situation that made our sexual harassment possible: the reliance on tips, the need to please, the need to perform. As Ginia Bellafante explains in her article,

It isn’t just the notoriously sexist culture of restaurant kitchens that is at fault, but the economic structure that turns customers into shadow employers, leaving servers — so often women — vulnerable to the predations anyone picking up the bill might feel entitled to exercise.

Our culture of violence – alive in restaurants, public schools, and professional sports teams – thrives on shadow employers and shadow employees, on fear and oppression that lurk and loom powerfully beyond the structures that support them. Women, particularly women of color, are often the shadow workers who fall outside of the public eye, those whose humanity and dignity somehow don’t count: the domestic workers, the farm workers, the people without work who have to turn to street and informal economies, the people who work in the prison system and make pennies an hour.

All of us need to make the connections across the shadows and, most importantly, join with others to imagine and build toward the future we want, to understand what it would take to bring forth a world that supports everyone’s dignity, well being, and connectedness. To do this we must profoundly re-envision and redefine our economy, to bring into being what Ai-Jen Poo and others call a caring economy – an economy that supports the well-being and dignity of each person, an economy where there are no shadow workers or employers.

Building a new economy, a caring economy, offers us an alternative to our culture of violence. We can begin with small steps, such as ensuring a fair minimum wage for all workers, along with many other steps that lead us together towards a caring economy and world.

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Feature photo: ROC United

Strength. Dignity. Power.

These are words that come to my mind in the images from Ferguson October, the recent days of action protesting the August 9 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

From Ferguson October we’ve seen images of thousands of people marching with signs saying “We Are Human,” “From LA to Ferguson,” and “Hands Up Don’t Shoot”… images of young Black women chanting and carrying “Racism Kills” signs in a suburban St. Louis shopping mall … images of Black and White people standing up to sing the “Requiem for Michael Brown” to a stunned audience at the St. Louis symphony … images of a “Black Lives Matter” banner televised nationally as it unfurled on Monday night football … images of young and old people boldly defying police through civil disobedience.

And Ferguson October gave us the unforgettable image of Nigel, the little boy in the red cap, standing proudly in the street, pausing as the historic Ferguson march begins.

Like all photographs, the Ferguson October images are also about the moments behind the moments: the years (and years and years and years) of Black organizing in Black communities that keep tiny sparks of justice glowing when no television cameras are there to film it; the hours (and hours and hours) of listening and dialogue and reflection that build the trusting relationships that make collective action possible; the lifetimes of unsung leadership by people who step up every day for their children, their coworkers, their neighbors.

Like #Black Lives Matter, an on-line forum begun after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin (and deeply engaged in Ferguson), Ferguson October is “rooted in grief and rage” –the logical, healthy, and necessary responses to the daily brutality and inhumanity Black people face and that we as a society allow and perpetuate. Ferguson October teaches us how this deeply rooted grief and rage can be, in the words of #BlackLivesMatter, “pointed toward vision and dreams.”

As I await the reflections of those who gave over their hands and hearts and minds to make Ferguson October happen, I offer my first thoughts on some of the lessons that their work demands us to learn and remember.

• Black Lives Matter. At its core, Ferguson October is about defending the humanity of Black people, recognizing Black experience and leadership, and understanding that, in the words of Scot Nakagawa, “anti-Black racism is the fulcrum of White Supremacy.” “When Black people cry out in defense of our lives, which are uniquely, systematically, and savagely targeted by the state,” writes Alicia Garza, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, “we are asking you, our family, to stand with us in affirming Black lives.  Not just all lives. Black lives.  Please do not change the conversation by talking about how your life matters, too. It does, but we need less watered down unity and a more active solidarities with us, Black people, unwaveringly, in defense of our humanity. Our collective futures depend on it.”

• Organize Before the Moment. Ferguson October brought together local and state work by Hands Up United, Organization for Black Struggle, and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) with nationwide organizing efforts such as BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), a national training program developed “to help rebuild Black (African-American, Afro-Caribbean, African, Afro-Latina/o) social justice infrastructure in order to organize Black communities more effectively and re-center Black leadership in the U.S. social justice movement.” Before Ferguson October came the Black Lives Matter Rides which brought Black communities and organizations together in Ferguson to support the people there as an extension and strengthening of the work they are doing in their own communities. To state what has been said, and ignored, over and over by so many people: continuous and on-going organizing creates the possibility for moments to become movements.

• Creativity Over Control. Ferguson October was striking in the diversity of its actions: those who wanted to march could march; those wanted to pray could pray; those who wanted to sing could sing; those who wanted to shut down city hall could shut down city hall. While I’m sure this array of action was incredibly hard work and rife with the conflicts found in any collective human endeavor, the movement building message it sends is one of creativity, not control.

• Synergy Across Movements. Ferguson October received the endorsement of the AFL-CIO and SEIU, galvanized a climate justice contingent, and spawned the shut down of a local Walmart to underscore the connection with the police shooting of Michael Crawford III in an Ohio Walmart in August.

• Expand Possibility and Hope. When police shot Michael Brown and left his body lying for hours on a neighborhood street, the ceaseless and excruciating police killing of Black men, women, and children had already left many overwhelmed with outrage. “Ferguson is our breaking point,” wrote Professor Robin M. Boylorn in August:

The death of Michael Brown, emblematic of countless others, and the collective loss, grief and justified anger of people (of color and allies) who are tired of being terrorized and victimized by injustice requires that we say something.  But I don’t know what to say.  I don’t know where to begin.

Ferguson October gave many the support they needed to say something and the strength to begin again. As Peniel E. Joseph wrote today, “There’s a social-justice movement taking hold across the nation. Michael Brown’s death, which turned Ferguson, Mo., into a battleground this past summer, has helped catalyze a larger struggle for racial and economic justice in America.”

• Demand Support for Black Communities, Organizing, and Infrastructure. Ferguson October moved forward with an outpouring of small grassroots donations, but few significant donations and no foundation grants – at an extraordinary level of volunteer leadership and self-sacrifice. There are important lessons in philanthropy still waiting to be learned.

“We are in a movement moment,” proclaims Ferguson October and I believe it.

We have been here before, when Black communities have risen up with strength, dignity, and power to assert their basic humanity. “The Emmett Till case was a spark for a new generation to commit their lives to social change,” scholar/activist Robin Kelley observed in a documentary film interview. “They said, ‘We’re not gonna die like this. Instead, we’re gonna live and transform the South so people won’t have to die like this.’ And if anything, if any event of the 1950s inspired young people to be committed to that kind of change, it was the lynching of Emmett Till.”

Moreover, says Kelley, “Black people in Mississippi itself were the ones who were going to make that change. And the great thing is that the change that they made, the extension of citizenship to all people, is a change that affected all of America, not just black people, but whites, Latinos, Asian Americans. It extended democracy to the country when democracy had never been extended to everyone before.”

“We will gather in Ferguson,” says Ferguson October. “But the world will hear our call for change.”

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Feature photo by Koran Addo