BroadSnark

You are not better than anyone else.

I don’t care how aware you think you are or how many books you have read on anarchism or racism or sexism or whatever. I don’t care what ist you are. I don’t care if you can quote Marx or Judith Butler. I don’t care if you eat animals or don’t eat animals. Whether you spend all day feeding the homeless or all night binge drinking. Whether you go to church every week or don’t believe in god. Whether you live in a penthouse or a group house. Whether you have a Rolls Royce or ride a bike. I don’t care if you have a closet full of Chanel or knit your own clothes from organic hemp that you grew on your commune.

None of those things makes you better than anybody.

Even if you disagree with everything a person thinks, hate the way they live, would die fighting against everything that they stand for – that still doesn’t make you better than them. I guarantee that you are wrong at least as often as all those people you feel superior to. Because we are all human and damaged. None of us has control of where we started in life. All of us are formed within the same oppressive systems. All of us have internalized the prejudices, the violence, the insecurities, and the fucked up desires – including the desire to find something that makes us feel superior to other people.

It is impossible to get it right. I don’t even know how to define what right is. How do you know how much of what you want is socially constructed? How do you know when you are acting purely in opposition to something and thus still letting yourself be defined by it? What magic is going to tell you that your mind is officially free and you can now judge everyone else by your standard?

I’m not saying we should not have opinions or try to live by our values. People should say what they feel. They should fight for whatever they think will make things better. But it is possible to do that without having the kind of contempt and hubris that I see too often from people who like to pretend that they have worked way more shit out in their heads than they actually have.

This piece over at Cubik’s Rube reminded me of something I have been wanting to write about for a while. James is worried that the atheism+ idea that Blag Hag wrote about, and that I linked to on Wed, will be just one more divide in a movement that already has plenty of “splits, schisms, and dichotomies.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about big tents and factions since the group I was working with disintegrated. I think one of our core problems was that we tried to be too much of a big tent, or at least we went about it the wrong way. We knew that people in the group had different political views, theories of change, and ways of working. We had different backgrounds and life experiences – age, gender, race, class, religion. And rather than tackling those differences head on, we avoided talking about them. It was a huge mistake. And we ended up bleeding people anyway.

If you spend any time studying social justice movements from the past, you will soon learn how many of them fell apart or were co-opted because different groups sold each other out. White workers threw black workers under the bus with the unions. Black men threw women under the bus with voting. White women threw women of color under the bus with the feminist movement. Trans people got thrown under the bus by the GLB community. And on and on.

And in the end, while there may be a few beneficiaries here and there, we all lost. We find ourselves fighting the same battles all over again. Clearly, we can’t just all break off into little affinity groups that only think about ourselves. Our liberation is tied together in a very real way.

At the same time, whenever you get people together that have wildly different backgrounds, privileges, interests, communication styles… you are going to spend a huge amount of your time just keeping the group together. If you don’t spend the time, you will lose people. But if you spend all your time dealing with those things then people will feel like you aren’t moving toward your goal. And you will lose people that way too. Not to mention that the most marginalized people will be FUCKING EXHAUSTED trying to beat their heads against everyone else’s blindnesses.

And let us throw in another conundrum while we are at it. In that atheism+ post, she inserts a long quote about how many of the people who have gotten involved in the atheist movement are people who are not affected by any other type of prejudice/oppression. Being an atheist is the one little speed-bump on the otherwise smooth road of their lives. And they are wholly uninterested in having their other privileges questioned.

It is pretty much impossible for me to work with anyone who can only see their little corner of the universe and stay willfully blind about everything else. That doesn’t mean I won’t talk to them. I just can’t work with them. But as infuriating as it is for me to deal with people who can only see the one thing that affects them, it would be so much worse if they were coming in to white knight on some issue that they have not experienced and do not understand.

As (I believe it was) @manowax said at the Words, Beats & Life teach-in, ”You have to have a vested interest to make change.” If atheist prejudice is the only thing that those people can see that they have a vested interest in, then that is what they should focus on. It is when something isn’t just an “issue” but your everyday life that you will see it through to the end. What choice do you have?

It reminds me of the beginning of this civil rights roundtable when they ask the participants to talk about why they are there. James Baldwin talks about being “born a negro.” Poitier says, “I became interested in civil rights struggle out of a necessity, to survive.” Belafonte talks about inheriting the struggle from his parents and grandparents. But Brando talks about Rosa Parks and Heston about talking to people at cocktail parties. Balwin, Poitier, and Belafonte spent their lives struggling for their rights as human beings. Heston went back to cocktail parties and shilling for the NRA.

So there is nothing wrong with spending your time on the things that affect you, but somehow we also have to find ways to help people see how all the different struggles are connected. At the very least, we need to figure out how to stop throwing each other under the bus.

I should say here that I don’t think there is anything wrong with getting involved in a struggle where you are not the most affected. But I do think we need to understand how that struggle is connected to our own. We should be very careful about how we get involved and realistic about how dedicated we are to the issue, to the people, to the community. We can’t just drop in for a year and then skip out to a masters program, patting ourselves on the back the whole way.

So where does that leave us?

I think we should stop trying to have big tents. We need to focus on understanding our interests and how they connect. We should be building small, close-knit groups and a lot of little bridges.

In other words, stop seeing different experiences, backgrounds, and struggles as divisive and start seeing them as connective. Blag Hag is a bridge between feminists and atheists. Not all atheists are going to examine their other privileges. Not all feminists are going to examine theirs. But many will understand. That bridge is the beginning of how we are going to stop throwing each other under the bus.

We don’t need to worry that our movements will be divided. Large organizations only erase differences that shouldn’t be erased and grow hierarchies that shouldn’t be seeded. Successful social movements of the past have usually been made up of small, tight-knit communities and groups. They have been made up of people with long relationships and a lot of earned trust and respect. It wasn’t a thousand people who started the freedom rides. It was a handful. But that handful sparked something and others followed.

I think it is o.k. if we work on the issues that most affect us and with people that we like, understand, and respect. But we all have to take on the work of pushing to understand how the struggles are connected. And we have to make sure that we aren’t taking the easy way out by avoiding the uncomfortableness that comes from working with people whose cultures, experiences, marginalizations, etc. are difficult for us. We need to constantly be confronting ourselves.

The good news is that most of us are a part of many communities and struggles. So we can all be bridges. We can all work on the things that most affect us. We can all help each other to understand how those struggles are connected. We can work towards the same thing from different angles. Our work will be stronger for it.

I’m reading this book called Freedom’s Children right now. I only just started it, but it relates to all the thinking I have been doing about motivation and participation in activism. The author interviewed thirty people who were children or teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s.

Maybe one of the reasons we find it hard to stay motivated with activism is that sometimes we think too big. We don’t always have to be aiming for thousands at a march or the total collapse of the banking system tomorrow. We need a culture of resistance that can build over time.

When I read about nine-year-olds who poured water on soda fountain counters when faced with discrimination or teens who removed the “colored, do not sit beyond this board” signs from buses, I feel oddly motivated. All those small acts seeded something.

Focusing on small acts won’t just motivate us who are already involved. It might also help more people to get involved – people with limited time or resources. I’m not talking about buying some greenwashed product. I mean small acts that challenge the system, but that are part of everyday life and don’t require spending 3 hours at a meeting every week.

More importantly, I love that this book focuses on young people, often very young people. One of the ways we fall down horribly in the activist community is making spaces unwelcoming for people with kids, or just impossible for caregivers to participate. That’s not just a problem because we lose those caregivers. It is also a problem because we lose those kids.

The first person to refuse to give up her seat was not Rosa Parks. It was a fifteen year old named Claudette Colvin. There was a children’s crusade where elementary schoolers marched and were firehosed and attacked by dogs. Imagine the power behind that and imagine what kind of person you become when you are in the struggle starting at eight or nine.

I’m not sure exactly how this plays out in the day to day – how my behavior needs to change. But I am definitely going to start paying more attention to small acts and small people.

 

Sadly, most people don’t seem to be paying much attention to all the prisoner strikes that have been happening across the country. In Georgia, two prisoners went without food for more than 47 days. You really need to watch this video.

One of the things that struck me about that interview was the part at the end where Bruce Dixon talks about how it is not just race but also class that increases a person’s chances of being in prison.

African Americans, who are one eighth of the nation’s population, make up over forty percent of this nation’s prisoners. Latinos, who are another one eighth, make up an additional thirty percent and their numbers are climbing. So that means that between blacks and Latinos, who make up one fourth of the nations population, are three fourths of its prisoners…

Back in the days of Jim Crow, Jim Crow was inflicted on all black people regardless of class.  The enormous numbers of African Americans who are in prison now are not your African Americans who have been to college. A college educated black man now stands perhaps one third the chance of going to prison than he did 25 or 30 years ago. Whereas a young black man who is a high school dropout has six times the likelihood of going to prison than he did 30 years ago. So the prison state visits its afflictions upon us not just based on race but by a combination of race and class. The prison state targets lower economic class blacks and Latinos.

In The South it is a little different too. I should say. I’m from Chicago, from The North. When you go to the criminal courts building in Cook County in Chicago you hardly see a white face. In The South they actually do

lock up white people – poor white people – but there is a significant percentage of whites in the prisons in Georgia. Lastly I should say too that there are white prisoners among the leaders of this prison strike and the hunger strike. The prisoners standing up for their rights are black, brown and white –  something which is the opposite of what we hear or think of when we think of prisons in the United States. Prisoners are standing together across those lines.

At one of the events I was at about mass incarceration, someone asked how to get white people to care. Of course, by white people, they meant a certain kind of white person. Michelle Alexander responds to a similar question during this talk as well.

As an advocate, I had thought of my job as how do you persuade kind of those mainstream white voters to think differently. And much of advocacy has been geared towards (civil rights advocacy I mean) has been geared towards how do we make that group of people think differently and care about our issues, our concerns, and our needs. Well I think at this stage of movement building, my own view, is that the first order of business is how can we get our communities to care about each other. That the first order of business is consciousness raising and developing a sense of care, compassion, and concern within the communities most affected by it before we really even begin to address kind of those mainstream white swing voters that we are ultimately going to have to persuade through our advocacy work. And I say this in part because one of the things that I have been really struck by in my own work on these issues is that, with Jim Crow, African Americans were stigmatized, but they had their own businesses. They had their own churches, theaters, workplaces. There was a sense of solidarity within the community. There was a degree of racial solidarity and community. Well mass incarceration has turned the black community against itself, has turned communities of color against itself. And I think we first need to begin to build unity and a common understanding of the nature of this system and kind of an agreement of what must be done about it.

She goes on to talk about lessening the stigma in communities and working with former prisoners and their families. I agree with her for the most part. But I’m not sure that Alexander focuses enough on class when she is thinking about what needs to be done. What I mean is, she does not say that there is a class divide that needs to be bridged when you are talking about getting communities of color to care.

She also completely misses talking about what people in prison can do, are doing, and have historically done. And just like in that Attica uprising in 1971, the Georgia prisoner strike cuts across racial divides. All white people are not middle/professional/managerial class swing voters. There are a lot of “poor white trash” out there that are directly affected by the system. When people talk about how to get white people to care, they seem to write those people off. We’ve been so convinced that poor white people are hopeless.

We should be paying attention to these prison strikes. They are a very important part of how we are going to end the prison state. We also need to be careful when we talk about the most affected. We need to consider that those people are going to look different in different places, that class is a major factor in incarceration, and that classism is a major obstacle to ending it. We shouldn’t just write off the poor white people who are targets. And we sure as hell shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that those liberal, white voters are going to be more likely to tip scales in the right direction. I think they are – for the most part – going to be dragged kicking and screaming.

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More info on the Black Agenda Report

I’ve been thinking a lot about why more people don’t get involved in activism. Which means I have been thinking a lot about what compelled me to get involved.

I’ve known that things were fucked up since I was a tween. I may have more data and a different analysis now, but the sense has been there for a long time. That sense didn’t lead to activism for me. Seeing so many of my young friends die and so many older people live miserable lives just led to drugs, angst, and a compulsion to have as much fun as possible before I died too.

I had no real conception of how things could be different, much less the steps that I would take to make it so. Over time that changed. Over time I began to have vague notions about how I wanted to live and how I wanted other people to be able to live. And I began to believe that it was actually possible.

It wasn’t how fucked up things were that compelled me to act. It was the unbearable dissonance between how things are and how things could be that compelled me.

Radicals often find ourselves preaching to the choir. The same faces show up for meetings, events and protests. We are constantly focused on educating people about the details of the great fuckedupedness. And we wonder why we can’t get more people interested. Do people not care? Do they not know? Are they scared?

Perhaps the problem is that the details are necessary when you are trying to figure out what to do. But if a person needs to reach the unbearable dissonance first then the details come later. The details are for people who have already decided they can’t live with things the way they are, people for whom activism is survival, people who already have some vision of what they want things to be like.

Which means the starting point is sparking the vision.

We can’t talk about prisons without talking about conflict resolution, restorative justice, and ways of living that wouldn’t push so many people into drug abuse, violence… We can’t talk about the economic system without talking about alternative ways of managing resources. People need something to fight for and not just something to fight against.

It also means we need to be very conscious of what kind of world we seem to want. When I looked at the occupy camps I always had mixed emotions. I appreciated that many people were discovering different ways of making decisions and interacting. But I couldn’t help wondering what people on the outside thought about a camp as a model. Most people in the world are trying not to have to live in tents without running water.

I feel equally ambivalent about blueprints of how we could live. I appreciate many of the ideas of participatory economics, but I also find the detail oppressive. Instead of blueprints or a visual representation of something that many people will not identify with, we should be like good writers.  A novelist doesn’t list every item in a room. They provide a few details and let the reader fill in the rest with their imagination, experiences, desires.

Once you have a vision, once you reach the unbearable dissonance, you really have no choice but to seek out the information you need. You are going to find ways to deal with fear and take risks. You are going to seek out the people that have similar visions and are confronting the same obstacles. You’re going to do something.

One of my most deeply held beliefs is that people shouldn’t just jump into things without spending a lot of time understanding the situation. And that goes a bazillion times more when we are talking about the actions of activists who are working on issues that affect others more than themselves.

Perfect understanding is impossible. We can’t be paralyzed by our lack of it. But if you find yourself imagining how the most affected people might feel, pondering how to get them involved, or fretting about why those who were involved are not any longer…

For fuck’s sake! Stop what you are doing!

Yet, as deeply as I believe that, I found myself caught in rescue mode, providing life support for a group that no longer had any of the things that drew me to it to begin with. I’m ashamed that I didn’t see it sooner.

I’m still processing all the things that went wrong, but it is clear to me that we tried to skip right to the action part and neglected to build the communication and understanding that would have made it work. It’s always a difficult balancing act. The problems are so huge and so urgent that they just scream for action. And it is working with people that builds the kinds of relationships where communication, understanding and trust become possible. That pull towards a certain kind of action is hard to fight.

But we really need to fight it. Doing something is not always better than doing nothing. And building relationships is not nothing. In fact, it is the core of what we need to do – an almost impossible task when so many of us have been brought up isolated, segregated, mistrustful, and socially retarded.

In short, I fucked up and I am sorry. I’m particularly sorry to those people who have been waiting for me to fulfill commitments I made and then dropped because I was trying to rescue something that I shouldn’t have been.

Live and learn.

The problem with people who focus on reform is that they don’t seem to understand how reform actually happens. They want to focus on influencing the people in power by gaining access. That almost never leads to change, or at least not the kind of change that we need. Reform happens in one of two ways:

1. You find an insider who agrees with you and they perceive that they can do something without suffering any political consequences. That is incredibly rare. And the only things that don’t lead to political consequences, like a loss of political contributions, are things that are not going to significantly change our lives.

2. The people have already decided to ignore or challenge the rules and reform becomes self preservation. If enough people decide that they are not going to bow down to the powers-that-be then the powers have two options. They can increase repression or they can change the rules to reflect what the people have already decided to do. Otherwise, their power is completely delegitimized.

My aim is to delegitimize the state. If the state wants to make some reforms in order to hold on to power a little longer, and those reforms help some people, that’s cool. My aim doesn’t change. And since my aim is not reform, I am not going to stop pushing when reform happens. Reform is not an end, but a delay. That doesn’t mean we vilify reformists for delaying the evolution. The only way to ensure that we don’t replace a horrible system with an even worse one is to be patient enough to have most of the people on the same page. That takes time.

But reformists need to stop vilifying radicals as well. That isn’t only because of their misunderstanding of how change happens. It is also because they are not appreciating how much the uncompromising rabble-rousers outside help them. The more radical we are, the more reasonable they seem. The more reasonable they seem, the more access they have. Without us, the people who want to use “insider strategies” aren’t going to get a foot in the door.

Lets take the civil rights movement. The minds of people had changed. And the people most affected by racism decided that they were no longer going to obey. There were sit-ins, bus boycotts, freedom rides. And because so many people’s minds were already changed, many joined those first few. Now, not only was the United States embarrassed on a worldwide scale (claiming to be a beacon of freedom while attacking peaceful protesters with dogs and hoses), but they risked a complete breakdown of authority. So the laws changed. Do not kid yourself that they changed because of the huge heart of the people sitting in the Whitehouse. Perhaps other leaders would have chosen the full-scale repression route, but ultimately it was self preservation.

What’s more, the existence of more revolutionary groups pushed the state to work with the part of the civil rights movement that was asking for justice within the current structure (as opposed to the part that wanted to bring the whole thing down). While you could argue that the Civil Rights Act had serious political consequences for democrats, ultimately it legitimized the state. If you don’t believe me, try having a conversation with a liberal about social justice and why it was direct action and not something LBJ signed that ended segregation.

So next time some reformist gives you crap for being “unrealistic” or “not serious” or “naive” or some such bullshit just say “you’re welcome.”

 

I am one of those people who would rather be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.  I am also one of those people who takes a while to get to know someone, especially when I’m thrown into a whole group of new people. The result of those two things is that I am often “encouraged” to speak more in groups or on panels…

While I sometimes kinda sorta appreciate the sentiment behind it, mostly I get pretty fucking irritated.

Much of this “encouragement” comes in the form of “we need more women’s voices,” as was suggested to me in the context of the criminal (in)justice committee. That’s true.  But women aren’t interchangeable. We don’t need just any woman’s voice. We need the women who are most affected by the issues we are talking about.

There are women out there who have been in prison. There are women out there who have been taking care of their kids, their brother’s kids, and their neighbor’s kids while everybody else is in prison. And they have been doing it making poverty wages, living in low intensity conflict zones, and completely erased from the public eye – unless it is to vilify them as crack whores or welfare queens.  Those are the women who need to be heard and who probably have a damn good idea of what needs to be done.

And even when people are seeking out the women who can actually speak to the issue in question, their participation is just a diversity box that people are checking off.  It is infuriating when someone suggests that “gender balance” has been addressed by having one woman on a panel full of dudes, as someone I was working with recently claimed.

Admittedly, even under circumstances where I should speak more, I don’t do it. I realize that is a problem. And while there are plenty of men out there who also hate being the center of attention, it seems to be something that the women I know struggle with more.

We are socialized in a way that encourages men to  expect to be center stage and women to expect to be invisible. There are a lot of women who are brought up to be housewives and secretaries, to do invisible work, to be “the woman behind the man.” Not to mention how often visibility means a whole lot of unpleasant attention.

And all of us are brought up to believe that the only people that count are the dudes that make pretty speeches. That’s why everybody knows who MLK was and almost nobody knows who Ella Baker was, much less Diane Nash or any of the other women of that era. What I would really like to know is – Who typed MLKs speeches? Who kept track of all the vehicles that drove people around during the bus boycotts? Who brought the food to the nightly church meetings so that entire families could come out and plan direct actions?

Speeches are inspiring. But speaking is not doing.

The challenge for a lot of us women is that the expectation of being invisible often leads to wanting to be invisible.  That’s a problem. But I think the challenge is even more difficult for those people who not only expect to be center stage, but don’t even seem to see all the invisible work that the charismatic male leader is just a symbol of.

We don’t need to be checking gender boxes. We shouldn’t be falling into the trap of thinking that center stage means more important.  And we damn well shouldn’t be “encouraging” people to play symbolic roles.  What we should be doing is thinking about what our role should be in a given context and then stepping up or stepping back accordingly.

A little while ago, I was watching this video of Michelle Alexander. In it, she talks about how struck she was by the silence within the communities most affected by mass incarceration. House after house in these neighborhoods had family members in prison. But people weren’t talking about it. And a big reason for that was shame.

Not long after, some of the people from the housing committee of Occupy DC were telling us how they had a hard time finding people willing to admit that they were being foreclosed on. People were too ashamed to admit it publicly. The shame was so great that they would rather lose their home.

It is incredible to me how we have all been shamed into silence. We are ashamed of being targeted by police. Ashamed of being taken advantage of by shady mortgage lenders. Ashamed of being poor. Ashamed of what we look like or who we have sex with. We are just inundated with shaming for so many things that we have no business being ashamed of.

Meanwhile, I’m researching Wells Fargo and their investments in private prisons. And I’m thinking about these mutual fund managers who shamelessly  sit at their desks buying stock in private prisons that torture people. Then they go home to their McMansions or posh condos and bask in the glory of having all the things the rest of us are shamed for not having.

There is a lot of talk about redistribution of wealth. But I think maybe we need to start with a redistribution of shame.

 

Organizing for radical change means building relationships and networks. It is natural that we start building with the ones we already have. We don’t need to start from scratch. And connections built on years of shared experiences are probably going to be stronger than ones based just on philosophical beliefs or political aims.

The thing is, in a world that is so divided by gender, age, race, religion, class, culture, geography, and so many other things; our networks are often filled with people very much like us.

Sometimes that’s o.k. I don’t think it is a huge tragedy that a punk collective is mostly white dudes. And sometimes homogeneity is absolutely essential. An organization of people returning from prison is going to reflect who is targeted for criminalization. A day laborer collective is going to be made up of day laborers. If those kinds of organizations are run by a bunch of people who don’t have those experiences, then they are guaranteed to turn into a shit show.

But if you are trying to do something bigger, you can’t be in an echo chamber.

I posted a comment in my last Things You Might Have Missed about the amount of white dudes in ZNets new International Organization for a Participatory Society. I was going to leave it at that and never think about the organization again. But someone tweeted me that I should tell people about it because “more diverse membership is essential.”

Yes. If their aim is worldwide revolution – if they claim to be “anti-sexist” and “anti-racist” and “bottom-up” – then they should have a membership that actually reflects the world. When they got together and saw that their limited network didn’t get close to bringing in even a teeny sampling of perspectives, they should have Stopped Right There. Because they are clearly not ready for the project they are trying to take on.

This isn’t just about “diversity” as some feel good, warm fuzzy bullshit. It is that each of us has experienced the world in a very different way. And if you are trying to do something on the scope of worldwide revolution, you better damn well make sure that you are hearing and speaking to as many different experiences as possible right from the start.

It does not matter how many books they read or how much internal work they have done to combat their inner racist or inner sexist. It is next to impossible to create an organization that will reflect or attract people who they don’t really understand. It isn’t just that I look at all those dudes and roll my eyes. It is that their limited experiences do not give them the tools to create something that is going to make me want to join them.

That would be fine if they wanted to start a punk collective or Kropotkin reading group. It isn’t fine for this.

This isn’t the first time I have criticized organizations for this kind of thing. Invariably, there is somebody who tells me that I should jump in and make it better. So I shouldn’t be surprised that I was asked to publicize this project so that they can get more diversity.

Not going to happen.

I don’t believe something that starts off fundamentally wrong can be fixed so easily, probably not at all. More importantly, I am sooooooo tired of people asking for those of us who are not white dudes to spend all our precious time fighting through their organizations. How come you think you get to sit around planning the revolution, but my time is supposed to be spent making your shit more “diverse?”

That isn’t how I am going to spend my time. I’m going to be here working through my own limitations and privilege. I’m going to work on strengthening the networks I have and building relationships across all those divides. Maybe someday, with enough patience and humility, I might be able to think about taking on something with the kind of grandiose goals that IOPS has.

Any of you who want to step out of the echo chamber and join me are more than welcome.