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Tag Archive for: Racial Justice

From Enough to Abundance:  To My Black Brothers & Sisters from a (decolonizing) Indigenous Latina

By Ana Perez   |  July 11, 2016
Reflections | 1 Comment

It is not enough for me to tell you how brokenhearted I am

It is not enough for me to know that your liberation is also my liberation

To move to abundance, I will hold at the forefront of my heart the wisdom of our ancient cultures and will conjure the place where our ancestors meet and bring forward loving memory

It is not enough for me to tell you that I see and honor your full humanity and that I can not imagine the anger and pain you feel right now

It is not enough for you to know that I will challenge anti blackness in every space and with all people – especially with my own

To move to abundance, when we meet I will remember In Lak’ech/ Ubuntu … you are the other me

It is not enough for you to know that I will always see, listen and believe you, especially in moments when the world scapegoats you

It is not enough to reassure you that your passion in uplifting the injustice on black people does not make my people’s struggle invisible

To move to abundance, I commit to fight for your children as fiercely as I fight for my own, because indeed our children’s innocence is worth fighting for

 

It is not enough for me to lift up and make visible the African legacy present in Latin America and push for black Latin Americans to be included

It is not enough for you to know that as I fight for reparations for indigenous communities in the Americas, I will also fight for reparations for all formerly enslaved Africans

To move to abundance, I will stand and walk with you through the fire, knowing when to follow and when to lead

 

It has been 524 years since this land, my land, began to be colonized, and 324 years since the first African was brought to this land enslaved

And this country is an infant at 238 years old, when we hold thousands and thousands of years of our people’s collective knowledge

We have enough time to turn this around but only if we turn from the US to a We

Vision Beyond Violence

By Taj James   |  July 9, 2016
Reflections | 2 Comments

What if we had a system of community care and safety organized around the values of dignity, wellbeing, safety, restoration and love?

What if we thought about the application of care before we thought about the use of force?

What if care was the central organizing principle for the way we generate community safety?

To create communities of care and safety we need to move simultaneously to end racialized and gendered inequality. The anti-black/anti-human violence at the heart of our police and military is there to defend and maintain our system of economic inequality. Ending violence and inequality must happen together.

We need to send the police home and start over. These institutions can not be incrementally reformed. They need to be disarmed and disbanded. Community needs to take charge of community safety.

What do we do when the real solution is clear but seems impossible?

We turn to movements to make the impossible possible.

In one place.

Then in many.

Then everywhere.

‪#‎RevolutionInValues
‪#‎DisarmThePolice
‪#‎DismantleThePolice
‪#‎WeAreAllBetterOffWithoutThem
‪#‎CommuntySafteyThroughCareAndCommunitySolutions

Vision Beyond Violence Readings & Resources

Below is a preliminary list of readings and resources grounded in the vision needed at this time.

Black Lives Matter Leaders Respond to Dallas Police Shooting, Colorlines

Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World, José Martín, Rolling Stone.

Big Dreams and Bold Steps Toward a Police-Free Future, Rachel Herzing, Truthout

Demilitarize the Police, Demilitarize America, Greenlining Institute

Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality, Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation.

Asian Americans are crowdsourcing a letter to explain Black Lives Matter to their families

4 Self-Care Resources for Days When the World is Terrible, Miriam Zoila Pérez, Colorlines

This is what white people can do to support #BlackLivesMatter, Sally Kohn, Washington Post

Resource Links*

Color of Change’s petition calling for justice for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile

Showing Up for Racial Justice (link to Black-led racial justice organizations you can support)

Black Lives Matter

Campaign Zero – Solutions

Color of Change’s petition calling for justice for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile

Cut50.org (founded by Van Jones)

Showing Up for Racial Justice (link to Black-led racial justice organizations you can support)

The ACLU Mobile Justice App

 

*Thanks to Democracy for America for original list

  • Photo: (edited) Stephen D. Melkisethian, Licensed under CC BY 2.0

Am I Happy the Cop Was Fired?

By Julie Quiroz   |  October 29, 2015
Reflections | 0 Comments

Am I relieved that the cop was fired?

Yes.

Am I happy the cop was fired?

No.

Do I worry that people think this was an isolated incident, rather than a widespread, daily reality for students of color?

Yes.

Do I worry that people think firing individual cops (or teachers or whatever) will solve what are larger policies and practices of criminalization that all of us have allowed to happen?

Yes.

Do I worry that people are more interested in firing cops than in taking responsibility for their own (subtle but damaging) racism and misogyny?

Yes.

Do I participate, passively or actively, in maintaining an education system grounded in competition and fear?

Yes (working on it but yes).

Do I participate, passively or actively, in maintaining a culture of racism, misogyny, and violence?

Yes (working on it but yes).

Am I thinking right now that we should close every single school and start all over with love, healing, and restorative justice at the center?

Yes.

  • Aparna Shah (Mobilize the Immigrant Vote) and Beth Glenn (Education Justice Network) connecting at MSC

Parenting for Liberation: My Practice & the MSC Transitions Lab

By Trina Greene Brown   |  August 19, 2015
Reflections | 3 Comments

I am raising a young Black boy in a society that is set up to set him up for failure.

This means I am often in protection mode: protection against educational inequity, unfair discipline practices, preschool-to-prison-pipeline, stereotypical accolades, and most importantly, his own self-hate and internalized oppression (don’t get me started on my 5 year-old-telling me he wanted to “be white”).

This is the daily battle I try to prevent my son from dealing with, the daily battle where I try to be the buffer between him and the real world.  I imagine myself as Super Mama, a powerful, badass mama with one hand holding a massive shield blocking my son, and the other, a powerful fist raised in resistance.

But in all of my fighting, resisting and protecting, I now realize that I have been blocking my own heart: my hands have not been open to nourish and nurture my son. I see more clearly that I have been parenting from fear.  I know that I must transition from parenting for protection to parenting for liberation.

My practice commitment is simple and affirmative: “saying yes.”

Yes to liberation.

Yes to freedom.

Yes to self love.

Underneath all of these affirmative statements is an internal struggle against a fearful and safe “no.”

After an amazing three days at the Movement Strategy Center’s Transitions Lab in July, with brilliant leaders working across distinct but intersecting movements, I am metabolizing and distilling the lesson from the foundational question of our Lab exploration: “How do we transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of interdependence, resilience, and regeneration?” As a movement maker and staff of Move to End Violence, I am familiar with thinking about the “movement pivots” we need to make in order to go in a new direction. Now, as part of the MSC Transitions Lab, I am digging my heels deep into the “transitions” we want to make.

Transition is defined as “the process or period of change from one position or condition to another.” As a social justice movement leader, I have spent a lot of time focusing on the first part of this equation. Reflecting on my work in the violence against women movement, I know I expended a lot of energy naming the current period and existing conditions. This focus is present in the traditional names of our organizations.  Much of our language and framing is issue-based (what we’re fighting against). We’ve become so skilled at naming the problem it’s become hard to name the solution.

The key word in the definition of transition is “another” — not just focusing on the issue but also transitioning in order to experience and create another circumstance or condition. My past work with young people was filled with opportunities to envision solutions. Young people (I know this sounds cliche) are the future and therefore have the capacity to vision a different world.  A violence prevention curriculum I wrote with young girls was entitled “Be Strong” and spoke affirmatively from a strengths-based method for ending violence.

At the Transitions Lab, MSC guided us to think and vision a new world. We explored examples of movement strategies that employ visioning as a core element, such as my work with Move to End Violence, Octavia’s Brood, and Black Lives Matter. In each of these social justice leaders are supported to think differently about their work.

I invite you, too, to spend time visioning, looking toward the horizon, and sharing ideas of the world you hope to create.

Online for Power? Shifting Our Movements Toward the Future

By Julie Quiroz   |  August 13, 2015
Reflections | 0 Comments

Last year, as the uprising in Ferguson and the movement for Black lives sparked direct action all across the country, many of us turned out on the streets – and actively spread the word to others via the Internet.

On our organization’s Facebook page we planned to broadcast information about actions as far and wide as we could, using “boosts”, a click that allows you to pay a few dollars for Facebook to proactively place content into the feeds of your followers and their followers, boosting visibility for important things.

But, when I went to boost these calls to action I found that for the first time in my short Internet career, my boosts were denied. Thinking it was a glitch I tried again and again, until it was clear that boosting any #BlackLivesMatter action would be denied – an experience I confirmed with other people trying to do the same.

Of course a denied Facebook boost is minuscule and embarrassingly unsurprising, especially compared to really dangerous things like government surveillance and white supremacists breeding violence online.

And of course #BlackLivesMatter has always (in the words of co-founder Alicia Garza) used “social media and online platforms to expand people’s consciousness about the lives of Black people” and “create a space for Black people to organize.” With great care #BlackLivesMatter has built real relationships online and off, so the trust and momentum and communication was deep and ready for action when the moment demanded it.

Blackfreedom.org t-shirt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The movement for Black lives was powerful enough. But my moment of Internet struggle was real and maybe a little too familiar for a lot of us, reminding me how limited and vulnerable our ride on the Internet is, and underscoring the findings of a report released today:

Unlike mainstream media, which is moderated by external gatekeepers, [social justice] groups see the Internet as a platform they control – the effect of the corporate ownership of the Internet is less visible to them.

The report, The Digital CultureSHIFT: From Scale to Power – How the Internet Shapes Social Justice Movements and Social Justice Movements Are Shaping the Internet was put out by Center for Media Justice in partnership with ColorOfChange.org and Data & Society and analyzes results from interviews with 22 progressive social change leaders (folks from places like from Presente.org, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Jobs with Justice, #BlackLivesMatter, and CREDO Action). DigitalCultureSHIFT found that:

  • 100% of those interviewed said that digital strategies and platforms provide a voice when mainstream media ignores issues.
  • The vast majority widely uses digital platforms to catalyze action, but say over-reliance on these tools can limit relationship building.
  • The Internet is changing the meaning of membership and forcing social change leaders to re-think the forms of organization. More than 80% of respondents indicated that Internet was helping to shift national organizations from centralized to de-centralized, from geographically specific to geographically diverse, and from hierarchical leadership to multi-level leadership.
  • Targeted surveillance is a top concern, particularly for organizations working with communities of color, migrants, or poor communities—but the vast majority of leaders interviewed felt that the movement for digital privacy did not include their voices or their visions for change. Still, digital rights groups are finding common cause with legacy and emerging civil rights groups to counter the discriminatory collection and application of data.

These findings make it clear: there’s a lot at stake.

Nonetheless, says DigitalCultureSHIFT,

The use of the Internet to drive strategies for racial and economic justice remains disconnected from fights to promote and preserve digital rights and access. This separation reduces the effectiveness of each, and weakens overall movement strategies for change.

DigitalCultureSHIFT asks an important question:

As activism for police accountability, fair wages, just immigration, and more takes center stage– social justice movements of the 21st century are using technology to achieve greater scale and reach wider audiences. But, are these digital strategies building power for long-term social change? Or helping maintain the status quo?

How can we, as movements, shift so that our digital strategies build power?

Recommendations put forward by DigitalCultureSHIFT include things like:

  • New approaches in both the field and philanthropic organizations, in which digital strategies are driven by values, focused on equity, rooted in a long-term social change vision, supported by universal digital access and rights.
  • Changing the platform to change the issue. The more open and democratic our systems of communication are, the more those platforms will drive a healthy and participatory public debate on social issues.
  • Scaling up successful projects like Van Jones’ Yes We Code, or the Open Web Fellows program to inject digital experts with best-in-class algorithm skills into social movements.
  • Changing the way we “do change”: those in social justice fields and in the philanthropic organizations that fund this work must develop new approaches that trust and support organizers, fund at intersections, and invest in shared infrastructure, multi-level stakeholder collaboration, and digital leadership development.

The moment is urgently now, writes Color of Change’s James Rucker in the introduction to DigitalCultureSHIFT, for our movements to engage with the Internet as both a tool and as arena for change:

As the nation emerges from a decade-long fight to keep the Internet open into a period of extraordinary contest for the role digital technologies will play in the lives of Black Americans and others, missing this opportunity would empower the forces that benefit from a corporate-controlled media: large, incumbent corporations and those who currently enjoy disproportionate power.

“After years of progress bridging the gap between technology, Black representation, and social justice, writers Rucker, “this is a cost Black communities – and all those pushed to the margins of both democracy and debate – just can’t afford.”

  • BLM

365 Days After Ferguson: Vision More Than Ever

By Aisha Shillingford   |  August 8, 2015
Reflections | 1 Comment

One year after Michael Brown’s murder and the uprising in Ferguson, we need vision more than ever.

As a Black woman, I know that we must aggressively imagine what it looks like when we are free, that there must be a prize to set our eyes on, a promised land…a mountain top.

Even as we resist the #worldasitis we must envision the #worldasitshouldbe.

Our movement must become sophisticated enough to put up a fierce resistance in the streets while at the same imagining a new economic paradigm that is based on racial equity and the empowerment of communities that have been disenfranchised for centuries. We must work to shift policy that chips away at the current system until it topples, while dreaming up a new system to take its place.

We need resistance and alternatives.

We need to practice and prototype alternatives in pockets of safety created by the breathing room that small wins affords us.

We must structure our movement so that direct action is holding the line while others are shifting narrative, others are prototyping prefigurative alternatives, others are shifting policy, others are providing the sweet relief of good, healthy food, dance, love, pleasure, massages, hugs, and smiles.

Our movement needs all of us and we need to come in to it with an ever expansive love that sees the value in all our approaches.

More than ever we need to work on our personal spiritual development, ground ourselves in unshakable certainty and truth, develop our own discipline and sense of focus, know how and when to soften and harden our hearts: soldiers by day, monks by night.

More than ever we need to create perspective based on our movement’s past, our current context and our future.

More than ever we need to read, learn, teach.

More than ever we need to truly learn to love and support each other. Far beyond the rhetoric we need to know what love and support really, really means. What does it mean to love each other only because we are in this together and our liberation is tied up in each others?

More than ever we need to know what changes in society after we win.

More than ever we must value simple, beautiful things that make life worth living. We must take it easy on each other, and practice radical forgiveness.

We must re-imagine the value of labor and the role of the human in the economy, particularly the human of color.

We must re-articulate our purpose and put humanity at the center.

We must think what is beyond mattering and beyond survival.

We must believe in what happens when #BlackLivesAreFree.

#SurvivalandBeyond

#BlackRenaissance

 

On Sunday, August 9 at 11:55 AM CST, the exact time of the death of Michael Brown Jr, the Brown family has asked for a national moment of silence.  Throughout the day, commit collective acts of remembrance, mourning, healing, and resilience in response to the violence and harm inflicted on Black women, men, and children.

Solutions Emerging from the Movement for Black Lives

By Julie Quiroz   |  May 13, 2015
Reflections | 2 Comments

I am an ally in the movement for Black lives, so social and alternative media are my required reading. It’s there – not in the shamefully racist and sensationalistic corporate media – where I find reporting from the streets and movement perspectives from progressive Black leaders. Even if I’m far away from a particular struggle, social and alternative media help me connect the dots to wherever I am. Whether I’m in the grocery store or at a family barbeque, I need to be  grounded and hopeful as I engage people around me to support this powerfully important movement.

I’m always glad when I get asked, “Is there anything that could really make a difference?” because there is so much coming from the movement for Black lives.

Looking at the published principles, platforms, and demands of groups leading the movement for Black lives helps me to keep track of the solutions emerging. I can see that, like any movement, different communities and organizations offer slightly different solutions that reflect different situations and perspectives. While each statement has its own emphasis and nuance, there is an organic similarity among solutions rising across this movement moment, an opportunity for deep and lasting systemic and cultural change, with words and ideas echoing among people who may have never even met each other.

Reading through eleven different statements I found common themes, as well as distinct perspectives and exciting differences. The statements I looked at were put out by Ferguson Action, the delegation of young people called to meet with the White House, Color of Change, Center for Social Inclusion, African American Policy Forum, Hands Up United, Safety Beyond Policing, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Organization for Black Struggle, Freedom, Inc., and the Boggs Center. I’m sure there are more statements I haven’t seen yet, so if you know of other published principles, platforms, demands, or proposed solutions from Black-led organizing for Black lives, please share them in the comments. [Note: This blog post was updated on May 21 to include information from the newly-released report SayHerName: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.]

In these written statements, I found immediate and practical solutions for ending police violence and demilitarizing the police – all presented as part of a much larger vision. For example Ferguson Action’s “Our Vision for a New America” puts forth police-focused solutions as part of a broader call to end all forms of discrimination and fully recognize human rights, for an immediate end to police brutality, for full employment and decent housing, to replace the school-to-prison pipeline with quality education, and to end mass incarceration.

Within the different statements I found a range of police-focused solutions including:

  • Document and collect data on ongoing and widespread policing patterns and practices.
  • Condition federal funds to police departments on their ending discriminatory policing and adoption of Department of Justice best practices.
  • Establish Community Control Over Police (not review boards or community policing) with the power to set priorities, policies and enforce the proper practice of those mandates.
  • Provide reparations for victims of police violence (which just became reality in Chicago)
  • Release people in pre-trial detention whose bail is below $1,000.
  • Release/don’t prosecute individuals who have exercised their rights to assemble and protest.
  • Stop the use of policing to fund local governments.
  • Cease the power of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) to collaborate with local law enforcement agencies.
  • Pass the End Racial Profiling Act of 2015, which for the first time, includes a ban on racial profiling based on gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and urging local police departments to adopt and enforce a gender and sexuality inclusive racial profiling ban.
  • Enact and enforce a “zero tolerance” policy toward sexual harassment and assault of members of the public by police officers.

The solutions articulated in these statements often challenge the systems and institutions of policing by calling for public budgets that transition resources away from policing and toward community needs. Specific proposals I read include:

  • Repurpose law enforcement funds to support restorative justice programs and community based alternatives to incarceration, youth jobs programs, public housing resident associations, and other key investments.
  • Create Peace Departments.
  • Make public transit free (which we should just do anyway but also so people aren’t criminalized for unpaid transit fees).

Voices in the movement for Black lives also include economic and ecological sustainability in their vision. The Boggs Center statement includes solutions such as training local residents to use technology to create sustainable, self-determined communities, creating place-based schools, and investing in fresh food co-ops and community gardens in Black communities. As Movement Generation wrote in 2014, “The current rebellion in the streets of Ferguson begs the question: will we continue to uphold, participate in and suffer the consequences of this violent extractive economy? Or will we completely dismantle the extractive economy while re-building local, living economies that restore & repair our relationship to earth & each other?”

Solutions emerging reflect the new organizing strength of queer and trans Black communities, Black immigrant communities, and of young Black women and girls, all of whom are playing a leadership role in the movement for Black lives. The African American Policy Forum’s report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected, particularly looks at the role of schools in criminalizing Black girls and points toward school-based changes, while the AAPF’s most recent report, SayHerName: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,”sheds light on Black women’s experiences of police violence in an effort to support a gender inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally.”

The statement of the Black Alliance for Immigration Justice calls for action such as the reunification of Black immigrant families “separated by deportation, unjust profiling in law enforcement practices and also by discriminatory immigration practices.”  Freedom Inc. works “in ways that are language-gender-generation and culture-specific to wimmin, gender non-conforming, and youth, in African American and Southeast Asian families– that bring about deep social, political, cultural, and economic change.”

I know that the solutions emerging today reflect the experience, wisdom, and action of those who have collectively sought change for decades even when the national spotlight was not on them. In direct response to the outrage in Ferguson, for example, the St. Louis city council passed a law last month creating a civilian oversight board with the power to review claims of police misconduct, a change St. Louis activists have called for since the 1940s.

I know that specific calls for change in Ferguson have resulted in victories beyond Ferguson, even before the Department of Justice released its horrific report. For example, in the last months of 2014, arrest warrants for minor traffic violations were lifted for 220,000 people in St. Louis. Following suit,  the Missouri Legislature just approved a statewide bill removing any municipality’s ability to jail someone for a minor traffic infraction. The collective outrage from Ferguson has led directly to action, to public outcry against using “justice” systems to make money, and to growing demand for solutions that abolish the patterns and practices of structural racism.

I know that the solutions emerging from the movement for Black lives are stepping stones toward a world where Black lives matter.

When I am asked, “Is there anything that could really make a difference?” I tell the white woman in the check out line, or my Ecuadorian-American cousins, that the movement for Black lives is sparking new visions for the future and a bold path to get there.

I tell them that Black communities are coming together to demand local and national changes that end the state violence, criminalization, and disinvestment that destroy Black lives and families.

I quote Alicia Garza of #Black Lives Matter who wrote, “When Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide reaching and transformative for society as a whole.” And, “When we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free.”

When I am asked, “Is there anything that could really make a difference?” I know the movement for Black lives is generating powerful answers.

  • By xddorox licensed under CC BY 2.0

#Black Lives Matter: “It’s about how we are together”

By Julie Quiroz   |  February 12, 2015
Reflections | 0 Comments

Editor’s Note: With great love MSC offers this excerpt from our newly-released publication Love With Power: Practicing Transformation for Social Justice.  

Collective transformative practice is not some hippy dippy thing.  It’s about how we are together and how we are successful as movements.  This is how #Black Lives Matters thinks about transformative practice: It’s about transformative relationship building. It’s about practice as ritual.

– Alicia Garza #BlackLivesMatter and National Domestic Workers Alliance

In early October 2014, Alicia Garza arrived in Ferguson, Missouri. Less than two months after Ferguson Police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, the community of Ferguson was under siege. In the wake of Brown’s death, grief and rage enveloped the city like dense smoke. Centuries of pain from racism, alive and embedded in schools, jobs, neighborhoods, and endless police harassment, rose to the surface. Police and white city officials responded to community protests with brutal force, trampling on the most basic aspects of human dignity and rights.

National and international media descended on Ferguson, turning the spotlight on every corner of residents’ lives. As national organizations arrived—often removed from local relationships and experiences—residents reeled. The chaos of the moment and the trauma of witnessing and experiencing police assaults and murders left them not only angry, but disoriented and deeply mistrustful.

With the backing of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Garza traveled to Ferguson to support local organizing, collect the stories of women on the front lines, and participate in the #BlackLivesMatter Freedom Ride. Garza hoped to engage Black communities in “building a movement to transform our nation.”

One year earlier, Garza and two other women, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, had conceived “Black Lives Matter” as a vision and response to Trayvon Martin’s murder by George Zimmerman in Florida. At the heart of Black Lives Matter was a message about humanity and human rights, shining a light on one question: what are all the things that stand in the way of humanity and valuing Black lives, all Black lives, in this country? Black Lives Matter was clear: police violence is a crucial focus, and just the tip of the iceberg. In a communication from Ferguson, Garza wrote:

Every 28 hours, a black woman in this country loses her child to police or vigilante violence. When a child is killed by police or vigilantes, we all fall short in upholding the values that connect us all—care, love, respect and dignity. In a democracy that protects all of us, no child should have less of a chance at a future because of the color of their skin.

Garza, Cullors and Tometi had deepened their personal and political relationships with each other for over a decade. During that time, they cultivated transformative practices, including building a practice community together through Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and applied these practices to organizing. They honed their vision for a changed world. When the outrage at Michael Brown’s death erupted, they were able to move into the moment — ready or not — with new ideas and the sense that they wanted to support family in the biggest sense of the word.

Garza spent her first few days in Ferguson listening and getting to know people. She wondered how local organizing could be strengthened in this excruciating time, particularly given the deep suspicion of outsiders, like her. Bringing the skills and politics she had developed in her 15 years of organizing, Garza knew that focusing on building authentic relationships and shifting people’s way of being together could transform everything else.

My personal practice helped to ground me and reciprocate compassion, love, understanding even when I was faced with “who the hell are you?”

Seeking to bring out the best in themselves and others, the Black Lives Matter team began to explore questions that people could connect to from the heart, asking, “Why does this movement matter to you? What does “black lives matter” mean to you? What is your biggest hope for this movement?”

My work in Ferguson training organizers was about cultivating a practice of taking care of each other.  When someone got a job they had been waiting for we celebrated. When someone else couldn’t be with us because her mother was dying we made sure to call her and share the love and let her know her spirit was still there with us. When someone was fired from his fast food job for talking about organizing, we all came together, giving him love and telling him how brave and courageous he was. He came in upset but left feeling held.

These practices helped Garza build authentic relationships with the local organizing team relatively quickly. They were then able to return to the community and engage community members with that same spirit.

We went door to door simply trying to connect with people, finding what they need and where we share purpose and vision.

While they only spent two weeks together, Garza and the community of organizers she worked with found a rhythm, established practices that grounded their work in purpose, and built deep and authentic relationship with each other.

At the end of each day together we would come back and share food and experiences. Then we’d end with a chant or a song or a prayer. These rituals are really important.  They ground us in our bodies and remind us how we got to this place. They remind us that all our ancestors did some kind of ritual. We were only together for two weeks in Ferguson but the people I connected with are still family.

Alicia Garza’s story from Ferguson is complex and still unfolding. It is a story of Black communities rising up to say no to the daily inhumanity of structural racism. It is the story of Black communities seeking to build from purpose and love. It is a story of movement builders nurturing transformative practices within social justice, then, stepping up and into a movement moment.

The future depends on building these moments of high quality presence, clarity, insight, and heart-felt love. “Together,” says Garza,“ we are organizing to build a new democracy and a society that values and protects all of our work and, all of our families, and embraces who we truly are as a nation.

Alicia Garza’s story from Ferguson leaves us with many important questions: How can we develop the collective strength and insight needed to transform a culture and an economy built on racism and domination? How can we cultivate our readiness to engage with extraordinary challenges—even when we don’t feel ready? What aspects of our social movements will continue to serve us, and what do we need to leave behind? How can we respond to a world of injustice and violence with the love and power we are just beginning to imagine?

How can we embody the world we want and need — right now?

 

 

Check out two new publications on transformative movement building! MSC’s Love With Power: Practicing Transformation for Social Justice and TRANSFORMING LIVES, TRANSFORMING MOVEMENT BUILDING: Lessons from the National Domestic Workers Alliance Strategy – Organizing – Leadership (SOL) Initiative from the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity.

 

Feature photo by xddorox licensed under CC BY 2.0

  • Remember Trans Power by Micah Bazant

Remember Trans Power – Fight for Trans Lives

Interviews | 0 Comments

November 20 marks Trans Day of Remembrance, a day to honor the many who have been killed by violence aimed at transgender people. Let’s Talk commemorates this day with art created by Micah Bazant for Trans Day of Remembrance 2014, as well as an interview with the artist.

Let’s Talk: How did you decide to do this poster?

Micah Bazant: There’s a political group run by and for trans people of color called TransJustice, that’s part of the Audre Lorde Project in NYC. We had talked about collaborating and they contacted me looking for art for their Trans Day of Remembrance event. We agreed to sell the posters as a benefit for Audre Lorde Project (you can buy them online here!) and to share the art with other organizations. Strong Families – a national network of reproductive justice groups – has been growing their trans justice work, and doing a lot of work with trans and queer youth of color. They were incredibly supportive, and shared the art with all their partners and supporters.

Trans women and trans feminine people of color were the mothers of the LGBTQ liberation movement. As a trans person, I owe my life to people like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and so many other elders and ancestors who took so much shit and were on the frontlines of the struggle for decades. But even though trans women of color helped win so many victories for other LGBTQ folks, today they are still facing an epidemic of violence, and their leadership usually goes unrecognized.

It’s important to me to create art through relationships, to try and make sure I represent people in ways they feel awesome about, and then to offer and leverage the art to support organizing, and to materially contribute by donating from sales of the work.

LT: You also released a Trans Day of Remembrance poster last year. Can you tell us about that?

Image of CeCe McDonald by Micah Bazant with the headline "Honor Our Dead and Fight like Hell for the Living"

Free CeCe by Micah Bazant

MB: Last year I did a portrait of Cece McDonald, a young Black trans woman in Minneapolis who fought off a racist, transphobic attack – she stabbed her attacker and he died. Although it was a clear case of self-defense, CeCe was sentenced to 41 months in a men’s prison. Throughout her ordeal, she was very clear that prisons and police do not serve or protect trans people, and will never create more safety for us.

The poster showed CeCe in prison, with her hand on the visiting room window glass. I feel especially emotional about the image right now because the art was based on an actual photo of CeCe and Leslie Feinberg – another trans revolutionary – touching hands and supporting each other. We actually just lost Leslie this week – hir early death was at least partly due to anti-trans bigotry and inaccessible health care.

CeCe and Leslie

CeCe and Leslie

It’s interesting to reflect on how much has changed since last year and how much hasn’t. CeCe is out of prison now and is a movement leader and a public speaker. But, like a lot of our leaders, she is still struggling to cover her basic needs. And other trans people, like Eisha Love in Chicago, are serving prison time for self-defense, but their cases haven’t received any attention.

At the same time, celebrities like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock are changing the media landscape. And I see more movements and cultural work actively including trans people of color, like #BlackLivesMatter and CultureStrike. There is so much organizing led by trans people of color that is doing incredible work with practically no resources – groups like the Trans Women of Color Collective, El/La Para Translatinas, Casa Ruby, Black Trans Media, Breakout, and so many more. But the average life expectancy for trans women of color is still 23 years and criminalization and discrimination are still daily events.

LT: How do you describe your gender?

MB: I identify as trans and also as timtum, which is one of six traditional Jewish gender categories. It’s a non-binary, fluid category that refers to someone whose gender is not a man or a woman and is not immediately identifiable.

About 15 years ago, when I came out as trans, there was radically less trans awareness in general and also very few models of non-binary trans existence. I was cut off from my family of origin and really having a spiritual crisis, so I began reconnecting with my Jewish culture and learning Yiddish, which was my mom’s first language. I came across the word timtum in a Yiddish dictionary one day and it was defined as an insult. I became obsessed with learning about this and found that like most traditional cultures, ancient Judaism had more than two genders.

I think a big part of trans liberation is decolonizing ourselves from the enforced gender binary, which I see as a fundamental tool of colonialism and white supremacy. Part of my work is reclaiming and reimagining my own culture as anti-racist, anti-zionist, and trans-fabulous.

I’m excited that gender non-conforming people are creating more space and language to describe ourselves, especially in culturally specific ways. The U.S.-dominated narrative of “trans” as a “new” phenomenon can also become a vehicle for cultural imperialism. Just like we are facing a global crisis of extinction around different languages, seeds and species, and we need that biodiversity to survive, I believe we need a cosmos of different understandings and stories about gender.

LT: What are you hoping to communicate in this poster?

MB: TransJustice and I decided we wanted to create an image that centered trans feminine people of color and that showed trans people loving each other across differences in age and gender expressions. We also wanted to keep shifting the narrative around Trans Day of Remembrance, since so many observances of the event had become really problematic. Often you’d have a bunch of mostly white trans masculine people or white cisgender people reading off the names of trans people who’d been murdered. The list of people murdered would be all Black and Latina trans women of color. It was like the one time of year that trans women of color were acknowledged and then only as victims. We do need to honor the dead, but we also need to fight side-by-side with the living.

Janet Mock wrote a great piece on this:

We can’t only celebrate trans women of color in memoriam. We must begin uplifting trans women of color, speaking their names and praises, in their lives. We do this by making their work more visible, by investing resources into their daily organizing, by hiring them in organizations that fight for gender justice, by ensuring that we not only speak the names of the fallen, but of the active.

We want to remember trans power and push people to take action for trans lives all year round.

LT: How do you think about the role of art in social change?

MB: I think artists have always played a crucial role in social justice movements, and I see many artists and organizers trying to figure out more powerful ways to work together. I love that movement artists are building our own networks and ways of sharing our work, that don’t rely on elite art world institutions, and can have a much broader reach than those institutions.

At the same time, a lot of organizers are unsure about how to work with artists or about the impact that art can have on their work. As an artist I used to feel like it wasn’t my place to suggest that. But after seeing how some of my art was shared by thousands of people and had a big impact on grassroots campaigns, I’ve started being more pro-active, with really great results.

If you are an artist and want to contribute to any social justice struggle, I really encourage you to reach out to people working on that issue and suggest your ideas. As artists we want our work to have a life in the world, to have passionate relationships with people beyond our sketchbooks. Organizations can help make that happen, and our work as artists can help make social change look irresistible.

—

Feature photo: Remember Trans Power by Micah Bazant

  • M.A.R.C (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Race & Culture Shock: 3 Lessons from South Africa

By Tammy Johnson   |  October 27, 2014
Reflections | 0 Comments

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.

—

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

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