A few years back I was invited to a conversation about race, spirituality, disability and sexuality. I was excited: “Yeah, let’s go there!” I thought.

So there I sat, waiting for the forum to start when the facilitator asked us to introduce ourselves by giving our name, group affiliation and preferred pronoun. Hold the presses! What was that last one? I played it cool as everyone took their turn, but this was rocking my world. As the discussion went on my inner dialogue went something like this:

This is new. I’m really confused. Isn’t it obvious what I am? Is this yet another pretentious so-called progressive community one-upism move or just another way to prove my radical stripes? I’m so tired of that. Wait, what did they say? I need to take this in for a bit. Hum. I still don’t know if I’m down with this but I get that they are under attack. But what does this mean for me? Will I have to change? Where do I fit in?

Culture shock is a bitch. There I sat, not ignorant, but actually very aware of how the world around me views my gender. But binaries be damn, I was going to have to deal. And over time, I dealt. I listened, learned and got over myself. Yes, this was a valid, critical issue. And yes, it was also MY issue, my fight too! As a black woman I understood that the definition of womanhood has always been measured by a white, western standards. From my hair to the cadence of my speech, I was constantly doing battle with those standards. But if I was going to fight for a definition that fit the essence of my very being, as a Black ciswoman that fight wouldn’t be a just one if it in turn denied others that same sense of agency.

It’s painfully obvious that I am not the only one going through culture shock these days. The uptick in the militarization of local police forces, the hardening of immigration laws, and the mounting attacks on reproductive health care for women are merely the means to which systems are attempting to maintain themselves, to beat back cultural shifts that progressive forces are making in this county.

This is nothing new. There has been a fight around the identity of this county, the definition of citizen, for the prize of being on top of the social hierarchy since the birth of this nation. So the nation builders not only embedded their bigotry in laws, institutions and systems, but in the very culture of the country. It was neatly placed in the cakewalk of the mistrial, the vows of the wedding ceremony and the signs at the water fountain.

For better or worse, there are numerous lessons to be learned about cultural shifts and nation building from our allies around the world. In her article, A Paradox of Integration, Eve Fairbanks offers us a few of them through the lens of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. While Black students gained greater access over the years, white supremacy continued to dictate campus culture, from the curriculum to hazing traditions.

• Lesson One: Increased access and diversity isn’t enough. The mere presence of an increasing number of Black students did little to uproot the racism embedded in the institution. But integration and increased diversity rarely speaks to issues of power and validate the dominant culture’s voice. Strength in numbers alone, be it South African Blacks or Latinos in the United State, isn’t enough to break the hold decades of social conditioning and institutionalized ideologies has on the psyche of millions.

• Lesson Two: People cling to what they believe gives them comfort and power. Oppressive systems use that belief to maintain themselves. Cape Town University creative writing professor, Imraan Coovadia offers, “People are fine with racial difference as long as there’s no culture conflict.” Change, even when it’s thrust upon a socially savvy sister like myself, isn’t easy. When – not if – conflict happens, we are challenged to change our language, our actions, our mode of operation that the labor pains of justice will require us to keep on pushing. We can’t stop with holding the bigot, the homophobe or privileged party accountable. We also must uproot the tradition or policy that made that behavior the norm or it will be repeated by the next person indoctrinated by an oppressive culture.

• Lesson Three: Tell a new story. Students at South Africa’s University of the Free State have been engaging in conversations that challenge them to envision a new campus culture. We spend a lot of time and energy to prove 10 ways from Sunday how the status quo is evil and must go. But then what? A vacuum tries to fill itself. If we aren’t putting forth a new story, a new vision of a what justice looks like, we shouldn’t be surprise when the void is filled with a new and improved form of oppression.

Yes, we have to change laws, policies and practices. But we also have to change the conversations from the picket line to the Facebook newsfeed. Since culture is the story that we tell over time about they way things are and or not, we have to start telling a new story. We tell this story every day, through how we live our lives, how we run our organizations and especially through how we build our movement.

Whether it is flipping the script on how we define gender or who is a citizen, the nation-building task of storytelling makes cultural workers of all of us.

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Feature photo: M.A.R.C (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Last week I went to Voices of Our Nation, the week long program for emerging writers of color that co-founder Juno Díaz wrote about in his New Yorker article “MFA v. POC.”

A former VONA participant told me about the program a few months back. Standing by the buffet at a foundation reception for racial justice organizations, we got to talking about racial justice and cultural transformation and our own creative practices.

Of course it’s a good buzz any time you get to talk about writing. But it’s great buzz when you trust that the person you’re talking to is grappling with structural racism and hegemony and climate sirens going off in Richmond and a mom talking to her kids on skype because she just got deported.

So when I got home I put my daughter to bed and found the VONA website with all these gorgeous photos of writers of color. Then I read VONA’s values — artistic excellence, social justice, and empowering the community of writers of color — and who had founded VONA and why and I wondered how on earth I hadn’t heard of this amazing program before. With two weeks to go before the deadline, I decided to take the crazy leap — and pull a few all nighters — to polish up my short stories and apply.

In my application I told them that I hoped VONA would help me develop effective strategies for telling individual stories in their structural context, to surface — and create opportunities to challenge — the nuanced brutality of exploitation and oppression that shape our individual stories. I told them that I believed VONA would give me the opportunity to explore and reveal the experience of racialization and the construction of race with people who could challenge me to do that honestly and accurately. I told them that I wanted VONA to help me increase my capacity and responsibility to support other writers of color.

Then I got in.

And then I went, taking a week off from my social justice job to walk over to a dorm at Cal each day for my first-ever formal creative writing training.

What I got was Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously where she asks how we write for the reader facing oppression, danger, or death, who “finds the courage to open that book.”

What I got was M. Evelina Galang explaining that the literary world calls my stories “associative” not “linear” — and I understood right away what that meant (and why I had no trouble following the plot in 100 Years of Solitude, why I hated literature classes in high school, and possibly how my daughter learns math).

What I got was Chris Abani demanding that we go through our manuscripts and delete every adverb and adjective.

And, along with all the literary language, craft, and tough love I got, I also got movement building, “the long-term, coordinated effort of individuals and organized groups of people to intentionally spark and sustain a social movement.” This writing program explicitly rejects individualism and the myth of post-racialism, nurturing a loving multiracial, multigenerational community of people painfully wise in the ways of oppression and marginalization, skilled in the transformative practice of writing, and filled with the I-would-die-4-U kind of love that makes unimaginable change imaginable — and possible. Like Culture Strike, Creative Change, Zilphia Horton Cultural Organizing Project, MAG-Net (Media Action Grassroots Network) and others, this arts program is an essential part of the infrastructure we need for deep, powerful, and lasting social change.

The struggles I saw at VONA mirrored the struggles we’re going through in the organizing/activist world: How do we define our communities by our values, not our oppression? How do we heal individually and collectively in order to lead the whole of society? How are we in our bodies — not just our minds — as we do our work? How do we fuse together an analysis of race, gender, and ecology? How do we not just tell our stories, but teach people the way to read the book?

More Than We Imagined, a 2013 report based on interviews with 158 social justice organizers and activists around the country, found most are starving for political imagination,

.. frustrated by their own inability to express a holistic and systematic vision of their better world. Some participants suggested that “a better world” seemed so far off that they thought it was better to think about “winning” as building a strong movement, and a few said that “it’s so far away it seems almost silly to talk about it.”

“Renew Our Political Culture” was the report’s top recommendation:

Since the systems of oppression and exploitation permeate all aspects of our lives, we must also transform the culture in which we operate. This cannot simply be a task that we take on after we win.

I know I’m late to the arts party and I know I’m saying what my activist/artist friends like Anasa Troutman and Melanie Cervantes have been saying for years. But count me in as a born again cultural worker and supporter.

I may or may not get into VONA next year (but will bust my writer’s bootie trying). If I don’t I know I’ll still be standing up cheering the sisters and brothers who did. Because that’s what we do in movements. We help each other and we cheer each other on.

And I’ll be loving VONA always because, you know, the half-life of love is forever.

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Feature photo: urban_data, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I’m sitting at a corner window at Pico Taco, a mom-and-pop taqueria that’s been North Oakland for more than a minute. The area’s called Temescal now and somebody’s serving up a new kind of salsa a few doors down for a couple of bucks more.

This is my community and I love it. I love our annual block party where everybody brings their best dish and the musicians treat us to an impromptu jam session. I love Sunny, Da Mayor of 54^th Street, who keeps us up on the latest happenings. I even love the damn-tomato-stealing raccoons. Hey, the family’s got to eat!

It’s hard, but I’m trying to love the new folk too. The new folk who think that they just bought a little Oakland flavor, just blocks from the old Black Panther office. Over time we’ll have to figure out how to be good neighbors to each other. I have to love them too because I can’t live in a state of hate. They are here and so am I. I’m done declaring war on people.

I don’t want to study war no more. Decades of battle have gotten to me. From countless hours of opposition research, to poring over polling data about the impact of the opposition’s latest messaging campaign or critiquing the policy demands of beltway big heads, my soul has grown weary of it all. The gentrification of my beloved Oakland could be yet another cause to stock up on intellectual ammunition and storm the gates of the powers that be. But there has to be another way.

I want something different for myself and for others.

What I crave is community.

Yes, I intend to keep striving for justice. But I don’t want to fight anymore.

I wanted to laugh, to love, to dance, to live in ease with others and be happy. To get to that place I needed time to read, to listen, to talk to some people and experience some new things. I needed space to think about that I’ve learned. I needed to write, to test things out, to rethink my position, to pray and to make a plan to bring my offering to the world.

To my surprise, my community agreed. Then they went about opening doors for me, making space for me, writing checks, laughing with me, and telling me when I needed less talking and more dancing.

Step-Together-Step: An Art and Racial Justice Curriculum for Liberated Artists and Their Collaborators was birthed from my belief that justice is not the goal of our fights. Justice isn’t even the dismantling of old oppressive structures.

Justice is the careful crafting of our Beloved Community. This Kingian nonviolence framework says that at the end of the day, we must all work and live together. Therefore how we engage in the struggle is just as important as the attainment of justice itself.

Step-Together-Step asks what is the artist’s role in community building, and recognizes how art has the ability to spark resonance — and even dissonance — to the point of connecting us to each other. Then there is the challenge of leveraging that power as artists.

A week ago, over two afternoons, a small group of dreamers got together, squished Play Doh, ate chocolate and began to imagine a progressive movement that was not directed by what author Toni Morrison calls The White Gaze. We asked difficult questions, like was it possible to achieve a reconciliation that enables us to be accountable to each other while we heal. The question of how we develop that beloved community through art was central.

Yes. I want more of that.

More art. More community. More play. More justice.

Don’t you?

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Photo: bgreenlee, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In recent weeks, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed participating in conversations on twitter about diversity in media. This recent round began in March with the publication of a New York Times article by Walter Dean Myers citing a study which found that of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about Black people.

In April, the twitterverse responded to the massive lack of diversity in the speakers and panels at New York’s scheduled BookCon expo: 30 authors, all white. “There are more cats than people of color scheduled,” Jeff O’Neal, the founder of the website BookRiot, wrote soon afterward. In response, a group of 22 writers, publishers and bloggers launched the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, which went viral. While did it manage to bring a diversity panel to BookCon (some say too little too late), it also showed that there’s a passionate, active groundswell of readers, writers and industry professionals who want diverse books. People spoke about race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, mental health, and the need to see the diversity of the world represented in books. Around the same moment, Dominican author Junot Diaz wrote a piece in the New Yorker “MFA vs. POC” about the racism he and others had experienced in creative writing MFA programs.  Daniel  José Older also explored this theme in “Diversity Is Not Enough: Race, Power, Publishing” where he asserted, “The publishing industry looks a lot like these best-selling teenage dystopias: white and full of people destroying each other to survive.”

Yesterday, Hood Feminist co-founder Mikki Kendall started the hash tag #DiversityIsNot as she prepared to write about diversity in media. The hash tag elicited so many tweets about failed attempts at diversity, some quite well meaning. Whatever the intent to diversify, the impact is documented in the twitter conversation: the media in our society, at best pays lip service to diversity, but fails to produce it at a significant level in any of the above categories of diversity.

As I read through the tweets, I was struck by different categories of failure. The well meaning but incompetent. The outraged and defensive. If we saw diversity as a transformative process, perhaps there could be stages. It reminded me of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ powerful model of the 5 Stages of Grief. I learned the stages in my 20s and still know them by heart: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The stages have been applied to other things. Why not diversity? I began to tweet them out on Kendall’s hash tag yesterday.

While I do have a sense of parody and humor about this, the underlying sentiments are quite serious. In a conversation about lack of equity and access that’s been happening for decades, people are deeply frustrated. But I always like to lighten the mood a little while we gear ourselves up for the next round of battle to demand that the cultural institutions of the society accurately reflect our world.

The Five Stages of Diversity

1 Oblivious Homogeneity: Really? We’re all ____? Everyone? (looks around) I guess I never noticed.

The first stage is when someone inside a group realizes (or more likely someone from outside the group points out) that the group is deeply lacking in diversity. This can be an aha moment, but is more likely a huh? moment. Group members are often disoriented, as they have to reframe their community from “who we are” or “how it is” to notice that some form of elitism, exclusion, or exclusivity is at play. For those marginalized, particularly those who speak up, the transition of the insiders from obliviousness to foggy awareness is intensely frustrating. But we, by virtue of our exclusion, are acutely aware of the lack of diversity. In some cases, we feel it every moment of our lives. Other times, it’s just a hum in the background. We tune it out, except when we feel the fresh sting of a new exclusion.

2 Insensitive Tokenism: Look class we have a new student who is ___. Perfect for all your Qs about ___!

This is the first failed attempt to solve the problem. In the mind of the privileged, the systematic exclusion and subordination of various groups in society can get reduced to a surface mix up. No _____s in the group. Let’s just go get one! The facilitator from the dominant group, having failed to look deeper into the situation, views the newcomer through a lens of entitlement. Teachers, bosses, and other power holders are notorious for expecting the lone token to stand in for, and often speak for, the missing members of their group.

Yes, Miss _____. What do women want?

_____, what do black people think about that rapper _____?

_____, I guess all the gay people are happy today about _____, right?

_____, you’re Asian, what did you think of that martial arts movie?

This an insidious form of exploitation by the dominant group. In addition, for the lone individual who enters the previously exclusionary space, it is seen as a form of upward mobility. But their token status engenders isolation from their original community, and no peers to face a hostile environment.

3 Defensive Self-Righteousness: How dare you accuse me of ___ism? Some of my best friends are ___!

At some point, however, the balance tips a bit. What used to be one diverse person becomes several or many. These people begin to push on the institution and make demands. In this climate, the institution pushes back. We see this in the social media world, where demands for equity and justice are dismissed as “political correctness.” Also, in many cases the subordinated group has been subject to documented institutional discrimination over decades or centuries. However, these members of the dominant group are completely focused on the encroachment on their privilege. At times, they equate their recent and limited loss of complete privilege with historical inequality. At other times, they are completely preoccupied with their imagined victimization and can’t even see that the other group has any valid claims. In the above example from my tweet, the individual feels threatened and develops an absurd defense to prove their lack of prejudice. They position themselves as the offended party by virtue of the accusation of bias. However, in recent years, particularly in the era of the Internet, people are “embracing” their bias. Instead of a huffy denial, they fully claim the right to dominate. As such, they lash out with viciousness, verbal violence, and threats of physical or sexual violence.

4 Mindless Deference: Sure! Eldridge Cleaver sounds great for Black History Month heroes! (look it up)

This is another failed attempt to solve the problem. In progressive circles, sometimes members of the excluded group are invited into positions of leadership or influence. Overall, this should be an improvement. However, in too many cases, the group or institution lacks strong relationships with people in the marginalized group. They have low expectations or deep discomfort in having authentic discussions. Sometimes the person is unprepared to lead, or has toxic issues that poison their work. These situations are worse than lack of diversity. I wrote about an example in my first Let’s Talk post, where white institutions refuse to check African American men’s anger and sexism. The above example from my tweet has the same dynamic: Eldridge Cleaver is a former Black Panther who, at one point, believed that raping white women was an appropriate and effective strategy to combat racism (he “practiced” on African American women first). The last thing the African American community needs is anyone justifying sexual violence.

We need members of dominant groups to listen to members of our group, but not to be yes-men and women to every idea that any of us have, particularly the ones that are obviously dysfunctional or disastrous. Not only does this wreak havoc with our organizations and communities, the lack of oversight guarantees failure. Conservative forces recast the failure of their institutions to effectively implement diversity as a failure of diversity. See, that’s why we didn’t hire any _____ for all those years.

5 Conscious Partnership: between equals from under and overrepresented groups.

This is the final goal. There’s an acknowledgement of the history of inequality, but an intention to stand on footing that is as equal as possible. In this model, people work together to carry out the goals of their organization or company, as well as to address the ongoing challenges of diversity. The historically dominant groups take a step back and the historically marginalized groups take a step up. It works best if there’s more than one person from marginalized groups and their relationships are supported. During the token phase, there was only room for one from any group and competition between the formerly excluded has become all too common.

None of this is easy to accomplish. Prejudice is deeply ingrained in the minds and impulses of those in dominant groups. Internalized oppression is deeply ingrained in those from subordinated groups. But I have seen enough instances of true partnership across differences that I have begun to trust that it’s possible. Also, in spite of Internet trolls and the slow pace of institutional change, I see a groundswell of individuals reaching for diversity that includes connection and equality across difference. At the end of the day, I deeply believe that the drive for that connected equality is the truth about human beings.

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Feature photo: Michael McCauslin (CC BY 2.0)

In honor of poets and poetry, on pages or at microphones, celebrated or banned, this month and always, Let’s Talk offers movement building insight and inspiration from Martín Espada.  Now is the time. This is the year.

Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges,
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

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Feature photo: Forest Woodward