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Tag Archive for: Racial Justice

  • Meia Lua de Frente. Photo: Alonzo Gonzalez

Three Ways Capoeira Upped My Organizing Game

By Jeremy Lahoud   |  November 18, 2013
Reflections | 6 Comments

“Capoeira é defesa, ataque, a ginga de corpo, e a malandragem.”
“Capoeira is defense, attack, the sway of the body, and deception.”
—Traditional capoeira song

Every organizer knows that awful moment, that slow stomach-churning realization that your campaign is about to hit a dead end.

I had that moment recently in my work with a coalition of local youth organizations fighting for Restorative Justice in public schools.  Unlike harsh and ineffective “zero tolerance” policies, Restorative Justice programs create a way for those who have committed harm to dialogue with those who have been harmed, to understand what happened, agree on a remedy, and build relationships that reduce the possibility of future harm.  Deep in our bones we wanted Restorative Justice and an end to the disciplinary policies that push out large numbers of African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander students every year.

Our formula seemed strong: expose incriminating school district data in a forum that would also feature students and parents giving powerful testimony from their personal experience.  But pretty quickly we discovered that we had no leverage. None of the school board members were willing to come to the forum. The Superintendent boldly asserted that the issue of discipline reform and our campaign proposals were “dead on arrival.”

We had to make a choice: stick with the moves we knew and escalate our current strategy (e.g., march on the school district headquarters) – or bust out some brand new moves.

We went for the new moves, and won a victory that – multiplied in communities across the country – could deal a serious blow to the school-to-prison pipeline.

The funny thing is, the moves we made weren’t new at all. They were moves that any capoeirista would recognize, moves that echoed the powerful liberatory cultural practice that grew out of the struggles of enslaved Africans and African descendants in Brazil.

Moves that I’ve been learning for eight years now.

Let me start from the beginning: I’ve been a consistent student of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira since 2005, when I joined the Omulu Capoeira group in search of a sense of community after moving from Chicago to the often isolating, urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles. As the only known martial art to emerge from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere, capoeira is now a global phenomenon. Capoeira is a cultural expression of survival and resistance with deep African roots grounded in a holistic conception of body, mind, and spirit – one much less fragmented than dominant Western concepts of the three as separate elements.

As a “total body workout,” capoeira demands rigorous training and uses movements that stretch the boundaries of human physicality. The improvised game of capoeira – played in a circle known as the roda in Portuguese – demands swift thinking and a strategy akin to chess, but moving at “100 miles per hour.” The songs and rhythms that serve as the heartbeat and energy for capoeira give the art form a distinctly spiritual foundation.

So what does capoeira have to do with social justice organizing?

While eight years is a relatively short time to practice capoeira, I’m starting to glean broader life lessons from the art.

Take the key campaign moment I mentioned, when the Superintendent of Schools had basically decided to boycott our long-planned community forum.  Our gut reaction was to escalate our tactics and organize a large rally outside the school board meeting.

Instead, we took some time to develop a more nuanced response, inspired, in part, by my experience with capoeira. We knew the school district practices a “top-down / bottom-up” approach to policy and administration. The Superintendent and Board set broad policies and give individual principals and schools lots of leeway in how to implement them.  We also knew several mid-level district administrators were open to the idea of Restorative Justice and concerned with the overuse of suspensions. Over the summer, our youth leaders and adult organizers met with these administrators to begin to develop a relationship, share students’ stories, and open a dialogue about common concerns. One meeting included an ally teacher who shared very positive experiences with the Restorative Justice pilot program at her school. We reviewed the School Board’s current policy on student discipline and shared our ideas for revisions.  Our campaign leaders worked with the teachers’ union and principals to promote Restorative Justice. Supportive City Council members helped us to draft a city resolution urging the district to support alternatives to suspension.

Looking back through a capoeira lens, I can name three key ways that we shifted our approach – three shifts that lay at the heart of our 2013 campaign win.

1 Turn Reaction Into Response

When I first began practicing capoeira, I would often react to attacks with an unthinking reflex, rather than respond to them. I would often flinch and barely escape a kick flying towards my head. As I’ve progressed in my capoeira skills, I now try to be much more responsive to attacks during games in the roda.  My responses are quick but thoughtful defensive or evasive moves that set me up for counterattack.  Responding in capoeira requires an immediate synthesis of thought and physical action.

In our original campaign plans we were set to throw aggressive, straight kicks – such as the martelo or “hammer” kick – at the head of a much larger, more experienced opponent.  Of course, we could have played the game that way, but it wouldn’t have been very wise. In the roda, this approach would have left us with hurt pride or hurt bodies or both.  Instead we regrouped and figured out a response to our target’s stubbornness.

2 Make Flexible Moves

Capoeira requires a great deal of physical and mental flexibility.  The best capoeiristas have an inspiring ability to change movements in mid-course all while maintaining a beautiful “flow” to their game. They almost instinctively choose from the capoeira “toolbox” of many different physical movements to lead or respond to the flow of the game in the roda. This flexibility connects to another concept of capoeira practice and philosophy: the ability to “fake out” your opponent and make him or her react to a move that you’re not actually going to use.

Flexibility is critically important in social justice organizing, as the landscape of power and policies is constantly shifting. Organizers and leaders must exercise a flexible strategy in order to take advantage of emerging policy opportunities or changing relationships between our institutional targets, opposition, and allies.

The shift in our campaign strategy demonstrated this flexibility. Taking the time to build relationships with district folks on the “ground level” and to surface shared values was akin to a capoeira game played on the “floor” that builds a good “flow” with your opponent. These weren’t the moves of surrender, but rather evasive and defensive moves that set us up for more proactive tactics. They were similar to the capoeira-like takedown moves and sweeps that allow a smaller or less physically strong capoeirista to bring down an opponent from the floor. While we didn’t actually use the famous capoeira tesoura – the scissors move you do with your hands down and legs up — building relationships with mid-level managers, the teachers’ union, and principals played to the district’s “top-down / bottom-up” approach.

3 Analyze With Cunning

Perhaps the most important shift in strategy was our attempt to understand the self-interest and motivation of the Superintendent and the district. One of the preeminent figures in capoeira lore is the malandro, which roughly translates to “trickster” or “street hustler.”  Similar to the malandro described in Nestor Capoeira’s book, Capoeira: Roots of the Dance-Fight-Game, we capitalized on our “ability to analyze people and situations with…cunning.”

The ability to feign physical movements, to put on an attitude or expression that will draw your opponent into a set-up for an attack or takedown is a quintessential skill of high-level capoeiristas and mestres (masters). As a relative novice in the decades-long trajectory of capoeira training, this skill is the hardest for me to grasp. But it has probably influenced my thinking about social justice organizing campaign strategy more than any other.

The Brazilian-Portuguese word malandragem, best describes this skill. Malandragem doesn’t easily translate into English. In his book, Nestor Capoeira offers this explanation:

…malandragem is one of the basic tenets in the philosophy of capoeira and is similar to the cunning of the Hunter (Oxóssi)… Closer to guerrilla warfare than the way of fighting of the traditional army. Closer to the way someone who is oppressed fights than do those in power… The Malandro works through his [or her] intelligence, seduction, charm, and a deep intuitive knowledge of life and human psychology.

Using this psychological “hustle,” we knew the Superintendent and district were interested in being leaders among urban school districts, especially in the areas of accountability, closing the achievement gap, and equity. We worked with the State Assembly’s Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color to plan a policy hearing about California’s new school accountability standards. One of these standards requires districts to address discipline issues, including the disproportionate suspension of student subgroups. In order to build a bridge with the Superintendent, we invited him to be a keynote speaker at the hearing. It provided an opportunity for him to highlight the ways the district is playing a leading role in new accountability measures and improving outcomes for students in need, especially boys and young men of color.

The Superintendent accepted the invitation, which allowed us to meet with him to review the agenda and plans for the hearing. In reality, our “hustle” wasn’t mean-spirited at all. Collaborating with the Superintendent opened up new opportunities for dialogue and relationship building.  Paying attention to the Superintendent’s perspective allowed us to “see” him in a different light, an awareness that’s critical to the call-and-response of great capoeira games.

To our surprise, at the end of a recent delegation meeting, the Superintendent informed us that the district would introduce a resolution on discipline policies and practices at the School Board meeting the following week. Poised to respond to the Superintendent’s move, the coalition mobilized 200 youth, parents, and community members for an energetic and positive rally outside the School Board. More than fifty campaign members attended the Board meeting inside to support the passage of the resolution.  A slew of student and parent speakers shared their perspectives and support during public comment.

Our capoeira-inspired strategy paid off.  The Board voted to unanimously pass a resolution that “urges careful monitoring… to prevent… a disproportionate share of suspensions from occurring at a given campus or within demographic subgroups of students” and “urges schools to build upon existing efforts to provide alternatives to suspension or expulsion, using multiple strategies…” including restorative practices.  While the resolution is not everything the campaign wanted to see, it provides a strong basis for students and parents to advance alternatives to suspension and Restorative Justice on campuses across the district.

Our win was certainly helped by the “top-down” pressure of new state and federal accountability requirements to address discipline and suspensions.  And our bottom-up pressure as a youth-led campaign was key, turning reaction into response, being flexible in our moves, and practicing our own strategy of malandragem.

Now if I could just get my own capoeira skills to progress that quickly!

—

Feature photo: Meia Lua de Frente – Photo by Alonzo Gonzalez

  • Whole System is Racist

How is Racial Justice Crucial to Transformation?

By Aya de Leon   |  November 3, 2013
Reflections | 10 Comments

From the Editor: Transformation — of people, movements, our world — can’t happen without the elimination of racism in all its forms: bias, inequity, violence, oppression. And we’ve still got a long way to go toward understanding, articulating, and practicing movement building that deeply maintains this connection. As Rinku Sen has said, ending racism is about “changing the course of human evolution itself.”

This is a big topic with big questions that we’re all responsible for answering. To begin this dialogue we offer the following post by Aya de Leon as the first in a series of guest posts exploring racial justice and transformation.  

Black Rage, Gender, and Allyship

Black people are angry.  Anyone who is going to be our ally in the fight against racism needs to understand that. Not every black person walks around angry, or is aware of their anger.  Fury looks and sounds and hangs differently on people of African heritage with differences of class, ethnicity, generation, geography, gender, sexuality, and trauma history.  But for many of us, we’re angry, and we have good reason after hundreds of years of slavery, racism, colonization, jim crow, neo-colonialism, exploitation, and degradation.  This is not an abstract, academic, intellectual racism; this is about hundreds of years of our ancestors bringing racist violence home.  In the US, slave masters beat us with whips and we beat our children with belts.  Slave masters raped and incested African women, and sexual abuse became epidemic in black families.  Slave masters worked us to death and now we work ourselves to death, and we are furious.  For hundreds of years, we have had to swallow the rage or risk getting killed by white people.  And we swallowed it, and killed each other and ourselves.  Men take the rage out on each other, on women and children, women take the rage out on each other and on children, and children take the rage out on each other, particularly those younger.  Shit rolls down hill.  We have a hard time loving ourselves and a hard time building loving, lasting relationships with each other.

In order to heal from racism, black people need hardcore healing spaces with a big, safe, container to do rage work, to get it out of our bodies.  It’s not about sitting and talking about it in a nice middle class therapist’s office, or going for a jog, it’s about finding a safe place to scream our voices raw, kick and flail, and let that beast out.  One black woman who does this work is Ruth King, author of Healing Rage – Women Making Inner Peace Possible.

Men need spaces to work on rage, as well.  My partner is an African heritage man who does healing work with black men. When I asked him to talk to me about black men’s rage, he said that black men are filled with sorrow.  But they are culturally prohibited from expressing sorrow, because such displays of vulnerability make them targets of violence and homophobia.  So the society has shown them that rage is their best option for pushing back against racism—the only option other than acquiescence.  So many of them take the only option that is offered.  He said that men need to work with other men to face these feelings.  Men have the breakthroughs when other men let them know it’s okay to be vulnerable and they can actually show and get in touch with the sorrow.  Women can be allies to this process, but the key is for men to be emotionally vulnerable with each other, not for women to be vulnerable.

Black rage is a response to racism.  White guilt is a response that many white people have to racism, and the two have a dynamic interaction.  White guilt doesn’t reflect a principled stance against racism, and a commitment to end it and undo its effects.  White guilt is more of a childlike uh-oh, we’re in trouble, where the white person goes around feeling bad and expecting/projecting some sort of anger or punishment from people of African heritage.  This can lead to fawning and accommodating behaviors in communities and relationships.  Again, this is not about a principled stance against racism, this is about an anxious wish to avoid conflict with an individual person of African heritage.  At other times, part of the racist gaze is to project anger onto black people regardless of their emotional reality at any given moment.

If you plan to be an ally to people of African heritage, you need to be able to handle black rage.  Big, heaping truckloads of it.  And by handle, I mean be able to keep thinking clearly and act decisively in the presence of rage.

This is precisely what did not happen last week at the Brecht Forum in Brooklyn at a panel titled “What Do We Mean When We Say Privilege, Ally & Comrade?  Exploring the Difficulty of Difference & Movement Building.”  I first read the account of one black woman panelist, Dr. Brittney Cooper, who challenged a black male panelist, Kazembe Balagun about his sexism.  He yelled at her, menaced her, and threw a glass of water on her.  An entire room full of people sat silent in the face of this gendered violence.

Here’s Cooper, in her own words:

Left to sit there, splashes of water, mingling with the tears that I was embarrassed to let run, because you know sisters don’t cry in public, imploring him to “back up,” to “stop yelling,” to stop using his body to intimidate me, while he continued to approach my chair menacingly,  wondering what he was going to do next, anticipating my next move, anticipating his, being transported back to past sites of my own trauma, traumas that have been especially fresh and difficult this Domestic Violence Awareness Month…

I waited for anyone to stand up, to sense that I felt afraid, to stop him, to let him know his actions were unacceptable…

I learned a lesson: everybody wants to have an ally, but no one wants to stand up for anybody.

Eventually three men held him back, restrained him, but not with ease. He left. I breathed. I let those tears that had been threatening fall.

One black man further berated Professor Cooper, and the biggest gesture of solidarity was when the third panelist, a white woman, silently inched her chair closer to Cooper.

Many others have expressed solidarity with Cooper after the fact.

By way of compassion, I suspect that the entire crowd was completely triggered and regressed to some childhood state in the face of black male rage unleashed.  White allies need to work on whatever childhood baggage they bring to the table.  Perhaps it is the terrified memories of their own parents’ rage.  Or maybe they are still stifled by the frequent middle/upper class prohibitions against strong feelings that meant their own childhood rage got shut down.  While I have compassion for anyone who is triggered, I hope that everyone in that room who can see clearly in hindsight that they should have said/done something decisive to intervene.  I hope they can tell that because they were far too scared to act in integrity with their values, they need to go seek some kind of emotional help.

But beyond the emotional shortcomings of the community, I want to challenge some of the underlying thinking that often allows this kind of thing to go unchecked.  White people feel guilty, and will refuse to take principled stands against expressions of black rage.  It’s one thing for black people to take responsibility for our rage and find an appropriate therapeutic or healing context (could be counseling, could be ritual, could be somatics, could be any number of things).  This is a situation where the person or group of people have agreed to be witness and container to the rage you are prepared to express in an attempt to heal yourself, that is rage with consent.  It is, however, a completely different proposition for black people to go around leaking and firing their rage at anyone in range, anyone who challenges them, anyone who is vulnerable, or anyone who unwittingly pushes the wrong button.  As Audre Lorde said, “use without the consent of the used is abuse.”

Starting with the Black Power Movement, some black men have had a narrative that black liberation is about their freedom to express rage.  So-called allies have co-signed this, from former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver writing about going around raping white women as a revolutionary act (he “practiced” on black women first, to get it right) to the Brecht forum allowing a black man with a history of verbal and physical raging to be on a challenging panel about allyship.  Our allies need to take a principled stand that rage is understandable, but rage needs to be healed and patterns of venting rage without consent need to be interrupted.  There is no noble political principle being served by allowing people to abuse others.  This doesn’t mean that all displays of anger need to be shut down.  It’s important to allow emotional space outside of white, middle class cultural norms (sometimes people get angry, and that can be a good thing) but it’s different for people to have a pattern of raging as part of how they work in community.  Our allies need to be able to tell the difference, offer resources, set limits, and hold lines against abusive behavior.

There is a particular historical dynamic that can happen sometimes with black men’s rage and white women’s guilt.  In this particular dynamic, black men express rage about racism and white women feel guilty, and offer themselves (sexual access, emotional caretaking, free labor) to black men in some sort of private reparations campaign.  Clearly there is no larger agenda being served about ending racism, but it’s easy for women’s training as caretakers and fear of violence to get ignited in these situations.  In reality, I have seen this dynamic happen in relationships between black and white women, and even occasionally between black women and white men, as long as the white person has strong childhood socialization to respond to rage by feeling responsible and offering caretaking.

So while the pattern is primarily one of black men, it is not exclusive to black men.  I have seen this same pattern run with powerful black women in white dominated organizations, as well.  Confused white leaders have been liberal with abusive patterns, convinced that it was somehow good for white people to be targeted with this rage.  Those same white leaders were somehow unconvinced that there was a problem with the raging, when the black women targeted black people, as well.

I have also seen black rage, particularly African American rage (from the people whose ancestors were enslaved in the US South) target other people of color or of African heritage, whom they deemed as somehow not black enough, not really of color, somehow closer to white people, deserving of being targeted with rage, disdain, dismissal, or disregard.  This rage has undermined or destroyed many coalitions with other people of color, not to mention destroying untold numbers of black organizations.

It is not allyship if white people think we can’t possibly control ourselves; white racism holds that this is the best we are capable of.  There’s a particular way that this liberalism and confusion works with regard to black women and men, that white people/organizations generally can’t manage to be allies to both black women and men.  Starting in the 70s, feminist organizations notoriously would ally with black women’s mistreatment at the hands of black men in a way that was a little too gleeful about black men’s monstrosity.  Or, like the Brecht forum, would tolerate black men’s rage in ways that left black women targeted and alone.

I have also been part of community organizations that are predominantly white and have trouble hanging on to black men.  Instead of addressing systemic racism in the organization, they use a strategy of placating and lowering their standards to keep black men involved.  No matter how unaccountable African heritage men in the community or organization may be (missing meetings, not communicating, thoughtlessly inconveniencing leaders), it seemed the bar could always be lowered, the expectations could always be revised, so no one expressed displeasure at this lack of accountability.  The black men meet a wall of complacent white compassion.  Leaving the black women in the community to be the bad cops, the ones who actually have some expectations.

In my personal life, I remember when my partner and I went to couples’ counseling.  We had a white, middle class, gentile therapist.  He and I are both physically big people and were quite emotionally angry.  I used to joke that we were 500 lbs of angry blackness on that poor white woman’s couch.  The therapist was completely frozen in the face of our black rage.  The two of us would sit in the sessions and fight, and she had very little to say.  We didn’t progress much until we started seeing a Jewish therapist, the child of Holocaust survivors.  She wasn’t even remotely scared of us.  She could think and act decisively in the face of black rage.  I celebrate her work with us, not only because it saved our marriage, but also because it helped us through our common trauma so that we could both become people capable of being loving to each other.

Coming out of these and other experiences, I have high standards for white allies.  In both of these spaces, I have met white people who can stand up to black rage, to black hopelessness, and to black sorrow.  If we aim to end racism, white allies need to start getting themselves in better shape.  Do the emotional work; never leave a sister unsupported in the face of such violence.  Interventions don’t have to be perfect, but they do need to happen.  Speak the truth.  Even if your voice shakes.

—

Feature photo: betto rodrigues / Shutterstock.com

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