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Tag Archive for: Racial Justice

  • by Koran Addo

From Moment to Movement: Learning From Ferguson October

By Julie Quiroz   |  October 15, 2014
Reflections | 1 Comment

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.”

—

Feature photo by Koran Addo

  • by Tom Giebel, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Surveillance Kills: Racial Justice in the Age of Big Data

By Julie Quiroz   |  September 24, 2014
Reflections | 0 Comments

Surveillance kills people: we need to start saying what this is. This isn’t about the techies and Snowdens of the world; this is about our communities, our people, our lives.

– Lara Kiswani, Arab Resource & Organizing Center

At check and cash places, someone can file a suspicious activity report on you just based on how much money your check is for. If you’re a day laborer working in Beverly Hills and you show up for work ‘too early,’ apparently that’s suspicious too. 

– Mariella Saba, El Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California

The voices of Kiswani and Saba echo two themes which emerged in the 2014 Media Justice Knowledge Exchange sponsored by Center for Media Justice and Consumers Union.  According to the newly-released Knowledge Exchange report Digital Discrimination: Big Data, Surveillance, & Racial Justice:

  1. A veil of secrecy surrounds how and when information is collected and used, making it hard to gauge the depth, breadth, and impact of surveillance.
  2. Low-income communities and individuals who experience everyday acts of surveillance are operating within a culture of fear and shame that often prevents them from telling their stories.

Kiswani and Saba, along with 20 organizers and advocates, came together in this year’s Knowledge Exchange facilitated by MSC Innovation Fellow Liz Butler.

Begun as a bold experiment in 2007, the Knowledge Exchange has slowly nurtured relationships, collaboration and alignment between policy advocates working for media reform and organizers demanding media justice. The Wireless Bill of Rights and Voices for Internet Freedom were both born at the Knowledge Exchange.

Building on the work of the past gatherings – and using tools such as the Movement Pivots developed by MSC — the 2014 Knowledge Exchange focused on two core questions:

  • How can we connect currently isolated fights – such as constitutional protections, human rights in migration and criminal justice, and financial equity — into a movement capable of ending community surveillance and ensuring digital privacy?
  • How can we develop strategies for viable racial equity solutions in the age of big data?

Today, Digital Discrimination came out featuring the frontline observations of Kiswani and Saba and so much more. Reading through it, what struck me most deeply were the words that appear, quietly and powerfully, on page 13: the call to engage communities on the ground in deciding “what a surveillance-free future would look like.”

A future free of surveillance. Led by communities most targeted for discrimination, harassment, and violence.

That is a vision worth rolling up our sleeves for.

—

Feature photo: Tom Giebel, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

  • Photo: Steve Stearns

You v. Structural Racism: Rinku Sen’s Netroots Talk

Interviews | 0 Comments

This past July I went to Netroots where I was honored to attend powerful sessions like “The Resurgence of Black Feminism” and “Ain’t I an Organizer? How Women of Color are the Future of the Women’s Movement”, as well as the closing talk by Rinku Sen, publisher of Colorlines and director of Race Forward.

In the 5 minutes allotted for a Netroots “Ignite” presentation, Rinku challenged all of us to become more effective in our work for racial justice. Rinku listed three responsibilities everyone needs to consider:

  1. Accept yourself,
  2. Tell the truth, and
  3. Focus on structural inequity.

In this brief interview, I asked Rinku to share some highlights from her talk.

Julie Quiroz: What does “accept yourself” mean and why did you put it first?

Rinku Sen: In building cross-racial relationships, organizations and alliances, people can cause a lot of drama by not being clear about who they are and by not being okay with who they are. That kind of denial makes us defensive when we are challenged around those identities, like being an Asian person in the midst of a black or Latino community. Defensiveness closes doors rather than opening them. I think I’m much more effective cross racially now than I was in my youth because I don’t feel the need to deny or hide anything about who I really am.

At Race Forward we do a training called Identity Facets and Assets, which is geared toward imagining how every aspect of us — the oppressed and the privileged — gives us an asset in racial justice work. At Netroots I said that building bridges requires a strong foundation, and that foundation can’t come from anything outside of your self.

JQ: Telling the true story seems like what we’re all trying to do.  Where are we going wrong?

RS: My second principle for multiracial communities is to be explicit about our racial justice commitments so it’s clear that we have them, and to be explicit about who would be affected by them.

I especially note the need to name actual communities rather than using proxies like “inner city” or “disadvantaged.” There’s far too much fear of race talk that makes it easy for  the right wingers to control the conversation, partly by accusing those who favor racial justice of being the “real” racists.

If race conservatives are the only people willing to be frank, then the rest of us are talking around, across and over each other and the public. Also, we can’t use jargon that only makes sense to people who write grant proposals out of non-profits. If you want to reach everyone else, you have to talk in everyday language.

JQ: People often think that focusing on structural racism is really hard.  Is it?

RS: It’s really challenging talking about systems in our exceptionally individualistic society, so yes, it is difficult. But it is no more difficult than talking about systemic problems in unemployment, domestic violence or any other social issue.

One problem with a structural analysis is that it can really make people feel powerless to change anything. If things get decided thousands of miles away from me, or systems are churning along based on decisions made 100 years ago, then what is my role in making it different? Another problem is that it’s hard to hate a system the way you would hate an individual villain, or to love a system that’s working the way you’d love an individual protagonist.

JQ: How does Race Forward talk about structural racism?

RS: At Race Forward we work a lot to connect stories of individuals to systems, but we have to think about how to sustain an emotional resonance evoked by the individual through the systems portion of the story. Learning to talk about race is a creative, intellectual process. We need to learn what works by continuing to do it in as many different ways as we can and by taking time to reflect and pull out the lessons of each attempt.

Accept yourself. Tell the truth. Focus on structural inequity. Reflect. Repeat.

—

Feature photo: Steve Stearns

  • ST. LOUIS, MO - AUGUST 12:  Eighty-eight-year-old Creola McCalister joins other demonstrators protesting the killing of teenager Michael Brown outside Greater St. Marks Family Church while Browns family along with civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and a capacity crowd of guests met inside to discuss the killing on August 12, 2014 in St Louis, Missouri. Brown was shot and killed by a police officer on Saturday in the nearby suburb of Ferguson. Ferguson has experienced two days of violent protests since the killing but, tonight the town remained mostly peaceful.  (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Supporting Black Leadership for the Whole

By Julie Quiroz   |  August 21, 2014
Reflections | 0 Comments

Movement building demands leadership for the whole: leadership grounded in the strength of most impacted communities and able to lead the whole of society. Powerful movements need groups like The Organization for Black Struggle, a local organization in St. Louis with three decades of roots in the community.

The Organization For Black Struggle was founded in 1980 by activists, students, union organizers and other community members “in order to fill a vacuum left by the assaults on the Black Power Movement.” The vision of OBS is to “contribute to the creation of a society free of all forms of exploitation and oppression” and its vision is to “build a movement that fights for political empowerment, economic justice and the cultural dignity of the African-American community, especially the Black working class.”

OBS bases its work on the Black Freedom Agenda ratified by the Black Radical Congress in 1999: a comprehensive agenda that includes fighting for “the human rights of Black people and all people”, “a clean and healthy environment”, the abolition of “police brutality, unwarranted incarceration and the death penalty”, and the recognition of “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people as full and equal members of society, and of our communities.”

OBS currently operates with no full time stuff.   Donations to help strengthen OBS may be made at Color of Change.

—

Feature photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

  • Detroit Water Rights

Gentrification on Steroids: The Detroit Water Shut Offs & You

Interviews | 1 Comment

In the past four months, more than 15,000 Detroit households have had their water shut off, generating a crisis the United Nations calls “a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights.” “When there is genuine inability to pay,” says the UN, “human rights simply forbids disconnections.” Water rates have more than doubled over the past decade while the city’s poverty rate rose to nearly 40 percent, making the cost of basic running water unaffordable for tens of thousands of families.

Yesterday, as volunteers helped unload 1,000 gallons of water brought on a truck by West Virginians to support Detroiters impacted by the shut offs, the “hot mess” was turned over to the Mayor of Detroit because, in the words of Detroit People’s Water Board representative Tawana Petty, “thousands of people have embarrassed the [emergency city manager] and Governor Snyder by standing with the people of Detroit, protesting in the streets and rallying with Canadians who stood up for families in need.”

If you’re not freaked out by what’s going on in Detroit, you should be. The Detroit water shut offs are gentrification on steroids. (“Gentrification is a profit-driven racial and class reconfiguration of urban, working-class and communities of color that have suffered from a history of disinvestment and abandonment,” explains a recent report.)

The Detroit water shut offs are where all our cities are headed unless we wake up and see the larger pattern, take our own local action, and powerfully connect all our local action together.

To understand more about the Detroit water shut offs and what all of us can do, Let’s Talk spoke by phone with Tawana Petty, mother/organizer/author/poet/activist , representative of the People’s Water Board, and an organizer with the Boggs Center and for the upcoming New Work New Culture Conference in Detroit.

Let’s Talk: What created this situation in Detroit?

Tawana Petty: The water shut offs are part of an intentional, strategic plan by bankers and corporations to uproot poor, predominantly black people from Detroit. It is a direct result of emergency management, what Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management calls a “siege of financial dispossession, massive unemployment, elimination of basic welfare supports, and suspension of democratic rights.”

Criminalizing people is key to all this: we see it in how people who are behind on water bills are being treated. We see it our schools where state-controlled schools punish thousands each year with out of school suspensions.   Everywhere we turn we are being funneled into an increasingly privatized prison system.

LT: A 15-day moratorium on shut offs was announced last week. What’s happening with that?

TP: There is no moratorium. Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) is continuing to pursue 9,000 families whose water has been turned off during what they are conveniently calling a pause. Two days ago, they shutoff a 40 unit apartment complex, Historic Palmer Park Apartments, and were forced to turn the water back on after public and activist outcry. They are also using the media to paint families as criminals and accusing most people they intended to shut off of stealing water.

Additionally, they are co-opting the words of grassroots organizers and duping the public with “water affordability fairs.” DWSD set up a water hotline with very little staffing, which keeps residents on hold for over an hour before they reach an operator, then tells people they have to go into the office to get their water turned back on.

I recently did a radio program with Darryl Latimer, Deputy Director of DWSD, and I asked him how an 80 year old, disabled woman is supposed to go stand in line at the DWSD? He couldn’t provide an answer, because he has no solution.

LT: The water department had been controlled by the city’s Emergency Manager, but was turned over to the Mayor yesterday. Can you tell me about that?

TP: Because of the constant media scrutiny and the global spotlight on the inhumane treatment of Detroiters by the Governor and Emergency Manager, the DWSD was turned over to the Mayor. Many have celebrated this as a victory for Detroit, but those on the ground working tirelessly to prevent privatization of the city’s water under emergency management see through the sleight of hand. Our demands remain the same.

LT: What needs to happen?

TP: We need immediate restoration of water to thousands of Detroiters who have had their water service cut off.   We need an end to all the water shut offs.

We need immediate enforcement of the People’s Water Affordability Plan that was put forth by Michigan Welfare Right’s Organization in 2005 and adopted by the City Council in 2006. The Water Affordability Plan caps water rates based on income.

LT: What can people outside of Detroit do to help?

TP: People can sign on to the Color of Change petition: Tell Detroit to Turn the Water Taps Back On!

Organizations can sign on to the letter to Barak Obama and Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Mathews Burwell.

People can use social media like twitter to generate public outcry: #PeoplesWaterBoard #WageLove #StopTheShutoffs

And people can donate to the People’s Water Board Coalition!

LT: What gives you hope?

TP: If there was ever a silver lining to this, it has been the world’s opportunity to witness the resilience of Detroiters, as we combat the narrative of our city, and struggle to become more self-determinate. This has definitely been an opportunity to “grow our souls”, as Detroiter and revolutionary activist Grace Lee Boggs would say. And the support of national and international allies during this process has been invaluable.

  • Photo: Emmanuel J. Washington

My Voice: Youth Leadership & My Brother’s Keeper

By Victor Carter   |  July 25, 2014
Reflections | 1 Comment

I am a Youth Leader for the Youth Table that has come together to ensure the voices of young people are heard in My Brother’s Keeper and the new national initiatives for boys and men of color.

We, the Youth Table, are brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, neighbors, friends, members of our society. We have a variety of dynamic identities that shape our perspectives and experiences. We are African American, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and a variety of different peoples of color. We are men, women, transgender, heterosexual, gay, lesbian and everything in between and outside. We are young and old. We have dreams and passions. However, we experience pains, hardships, and traumas because of the inequalities that permeate our societies. We are targeted by media that spouts disparaging and inaccurate images and stories about us. We are funneled out of schools and into prison or deportation. We are faced with hateful ideologies — such as racism, sexism, ableism — that are perpetuated in the very systems in which we are told to put our trust.

Growing up in New Orleans as a young black male I faced — and still do — many odds that keep me and my peers from actualizing and achieving our true potential. Not only am I a person of color growing up in the South, a place with a deep history of marginalization and resistance, but I live in a place where murder and incarceration rates are among the highest not only in the nation but in the world. I have experienced discrimination based not only on my skin color or racial identity but also my age, my economic standing, my level of educational access, and where I live.

My family was poor. I grew up in a household of seven where our income was never above poverty level. My father struggled with a criminal record from his childhood that still follows and haunts him to this day. Finding stable work was always one of the biggest endeavors for him. My mother spent most of her time not only taking care of me and my four other siblings, but also her own sisters. Like me, she’s one of the eldest of sisters and serves as the backbone of their family. Finding work for my mother was no easy task either. And things weren’t much different for many of my childhood friends and classmates. There have been times where I’ve felt powerless and unable to affect the world around me because of society’s messages and images of me and my city.

Despite all of that, I’ve always been surrounded by people, like my parents and friends, who were motivated with integrity and compassion for moving themselves and their communities forward and creating a better life for the generations of people of color to come. They have created spaces and relationships to allow the communities they are a part of to grow, learn, and heal some of the effects of the inequalities that permeate our society. Things would have been healthier for my parents, my friends, and other people like me if we had access to not only education and work, but structural support from all sectors of society.

Myself and other youth all over New Orleans and the US are finding different ways to express the leadership that we’ve gained from our families, our peers and the community organizations that we are apart of. Back in middle school, in 2005, the city of New Orleans and surrounding areas were struck by one of the most devastating storms and floods to hit the US, Hurricane Katrina. The vast majority of people were displaced, homes were destroyed, and schools were forgotten. However, that didn’t stop us from keeping our feet firmly planted in a place we always called home. I joined Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools (“Rethink” for short) an organization myself, elders, and other young people started to ensure young people, born and raised in this beautiful city had a part in making their city the place it needs to be. As students, organizers, activists, educators, young adults, and elders, we work to promote leadership, and uplift and amplify the voices of young people in and from New Orleans as we fight various issues in creative ways that affect our schools.

Our work covers everything from ensuring that schools have access to healthy, local, and culturally relevant foods to having a part in rebuilding schools in ways that are youth and community friendly. To name a few of our successes, our designs for the 21st Century Green Bathroom and Cafeteria were incorporated into our city’s Facilities Master Plan to rebuild infrastructure. We’ve gotten school officials to incorporate gardens to plots to our schools, as well as signing agreements with school food service providers to incorporate locally grown produce twice a week. I’ve worked with Rethink for almost a decade as a student and organizer, an activist and educator.

Rethink has been a space for me to heal from the traumas our city is faced with and a way for me to develop my perspective as a young man of color as a part of a dynamic whole. I’ve worked closely with coalitions like the Alliance for Educational Justice and Power of a Million Minds, as well as organizations like VAYLA (Vietnamese American Young Leaders of New Orleans) and other young people across the country who know that true changes in our society starts with and comes from young people.

Working in these spaces has given me the skills I needed to communicate my stories and those of my peers to a broader community. I’ve been able to find where I fit in the world when it comes to my experiences and hopes for the future. My love for science and arts has been connected in such a way that I feel as though the things I’m trying to do have meaning and promise in my communities. Coming together with different youth groups and coalitions from across the country has given me a broader perspective about the world, a sense of my own power, and a space to actually act on that power. Being involved in youth organizing not only helped me as an individual to heal from traumas and grow as a leader, but it also allowed me to take a step back from the situations that I am in and find ways to dismantle the systems that create the inequalities that I face. This is why youth organizing is so important for young men of color.

The recommendations of the Youth Table must be acted upon. These recommendations were developed through distribution of surveys, conference calls, and online and offline brainstorming. Based on this research and outreach, we’ve created a set of recommendations that encapsulate what we know works. Here are two of the most important recommendations:

1 Seek out the engagement and perspectives of young men of color. The inclusion of youth voices is important because no one knows the problems in our communities and the solutions that will work like we do.

2 Address structural inequality. The problems that young people and men of color face (access to employment and quality education, exposure to the criminal justice system, etc.) stem from a long history of exclusion and discrimination that is embedded in our society that we haven’t dealt with. Mentoring isn’t the only thing we need. We need to address the systems that marginalize us in all levels of society — our schools, communities, businesses, and governments — and work toward dismantling and replacing them with ones that work equitably. This is exactly why it is critical to include youth in the dismantling and creating of these systems.

Youth organizing puts us in a position where we can deal with these inequalities for now and for generations to come. The Youth Table representing young people from all over the country has taken action to make these recommendations a reality. We call on policy makers, business owners, foundations, and community organizations and youth groups to join us.


 

The statement and full recommendations of the Youth Table are available at Movement Strategy Center & Funder’s Collaborative for Youth Organizing.

 

—

Feature photo: Emmanuel J. Washington

  • --

Drunk In Love & Political Imagination: My Week At VONA

By Julie Quiroz   |  June 30, 2014
Reflections | 4 Comments

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.

—

Feature photo: urban_data, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

  • Photo: Justin Baeder

Seven Ways Funders Can Support Racial Justice

By Julie Quiroz   |  June 27, 2014
Reflections | 0 Comments

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.

—

Feature photo: Justin Baeder

  • 1428

Soldiers NO MORE in the War Against Women: A Call to Men

By Chris Crass   |  June 6, 2014
Reflections | 0 Comments

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”.

Chris Crass on parenting and feminismWhile 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 and Brown Boi Collective

“Gender As We’ve Known It Is No More” — An Interview with Brown Boi

Interviews | 2 Comments

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.

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