learning tools for collective liberation

I’ve been spending the past couple of days processing things at the Social Forum, and trying to make sure to remember things I found important. I thought I might talk about what turned out to be the highlights of my time there.

First, on the first big day of workshops, I attended trainings on nonviolent direct action with the Ruckus Society. This was really good, just in having a space to reflect a little bit on direct action, its usefulness and purposes. I think the idea of implementing direct action was really complicated for me (which is a good thing). Also, there was some training on how to respond the police intimidation, which was helpful. And I met and had some good conversations with people who have been involved in more action than I have myself, including folks working to prevent deforestation and strip mining in Appalachia.

Part of what Ruckus does in one of its trainings is a human spectrograph. They read off possible direct actions, and everyone finds a spot in the room based on how violent/nonviolent they see the action being, as well as how effective/ineffective. Disagreement on whether or not an action is violent seemed to really crop up around two issues: 1) actions that are nonviolent themselves but are known to provoke others, like the police, to violence; and 2) destruction of property. I knew about this exercise ahead of time, and had been doing some thinking on the question, so the spectrograph activity became the place for me to really publicly question for the first time whether harm to corporate property should count as violence. I do think it’s a really complicated question, and depends a lot on how a specific action effects individuals. Is there any risk that people will be hurt? Even if there is not risk of direct harm, is there risk that individuals not responsible for the problems you’re interested in stopping will be harmed because of your tactics? I really think, that just logically, it should not count as violence to challenge the property of corporations, which are only legal fictions, especially if it’s in the interest of real rights for actual human beings. But unless you make sure that there are safety nets in place for real individuals who might suffer (say, raising support to help workers who may be put out of a job if you prevent a logging operation from going through) then you should consider other tactics. Of course, this is all just in theory now, seeing as the only direct action I’ve really ever been involved in is considerably more limited in scope, and nowhere near as involved in directly challenging corporate power.

Friday the best workshop I attended was “Promoting Black Environmental Thought and Action,” sponsored by a group called AfroEco. I’ve always felt slightly uneasy about participating in environmental groups that are largely white, especially when trying to talk about issues on environmental justice, and especially being located on Chicago’s South Side. When the Religion and the Environment Initiative was trying to regularly hold an eco-justice reading group during the winter, I had tried to do some outreach through the minority students’ office, but didn’t really feel like I had any common ground on which to meet people to talk about their perspectives on the environment. So I attended this workshop largely to listen, and I feel like I learned a lot. I experienced a really big shock when the presenter asked two really striking questions: “How many of you, when you think of a tree, still associate it with lynching?” and “How many of you, thinking about ‘the land,’ and farming, think ‘our people aren’t ever going back there’?” Hands were raised around the room for both questions. Such thoughts had just never occurred to me, even when viewing things like the Without Sanctuary photo exhibit. This is a really big shift, to understand that trees, which to me symbolize life, might instead be associated with death for a significant number of people in our society.  Something that I also heard in this workshop, which I have rarely seen addressed in predominately white environmental groups, is an emphasis on strengthening one’s family connections and community through participation in the environmental movement, rather than being forced to sort of throw one’s entire life into environmental action without thinking of how it is improving social bonds and community.  I think this is a really important point that many social movements need to incorporate into their work.  How do we create change without adding to the general trend of isolated individuals in the U.S.?  And can we even work effectively if we aren’t strengthening one another’s social bonds at the same time we are attempting to change our own communities?

This workshop, along with recommendations from folks at DUHC, steered me towards the Catalyst Project’s Saturday session called “‘Battle for the Hearts and Minds’: White Anti-Racist Organizing Vision and Strategies.”  The presenters from Catalyst were absolutely amazing, particularly in their ability to address complex issues with not only intellectual but emotional depth.  The message of the workshop is captured well by the name of Catalyst’s website: “collective liberation.”  We cannot win our other struggles (to save the earth, to have real human rights for both women and men) without addressing the divisive structures of race that have been entrenched in our society.  I’ve been learning a lot about the creation of the ideas of race in the U.S. – a tool developed by the wealthy elite to help quell rebellions where indentured European servants and African slaves were teaming up together to fight for their rights – and hopefully will post more on this later; I feel like I need to do a little bit more reading and reflection first.  But at the moment I am convinced of the need for whites to take a lead in actively organizing against racism in their own communities.  A speaker from Oregon’s Rural Organizing Project, who presented with Catalyst, spoke of the need for ‘inoculation,’ by which she meant that we can’t just cry out when racist slurs show up around us, or when racist anti-immigrant groups like the Minutemen start taking action.  We have to organize before this, so that when others in our communities are subjected to arguments from racist groups, the arguments don’t make sense; people have already learned to consider immigrants as members of society, and thus can’t so easily dehumanize them.  “Everyone is either a potential Freedom Rider or a potential Minuteman,” she said.  So the question is, how do we work to turn people into Freedom Riders, and prevent them from becoming Minutemen?  A member of the Heads Up Collective from San Francisco also spoke, and touched on some themes which were repeated throughout the conference, namely, the links between racism here at home (particularly as exemplified in the response to Hurricane Katrina) and U.S. imperialism abroad.  Again, this is something I want to do a little more reading and thinking about, but will hopefully post about later.

The same goes for what I learned about at the one big plenary session I attended, “Liberating Gender and Sexuality: Integrating Gender and Sexual Justice Across Our Movements,” which was also definitely a highlight.  I don’t think I’ve ever been somewhere before where justice for the LGBT community, and for women, was not just a matter of political correctness but of true concern to the majority of people present, or where the recognition of hetero-sexism and patriarchy were fully recognized as existing and as needing to be overturned.  But I definitely felt like this was the case at the USSF.

Other highlights: the stressful, but meaningful, People’s Movement Assembly on Sunday morning, and all sorts of activities which I participated in surrounding the “Solidarity Economy.”  But the fog has finally burned off here in Humboldt this morning, so I’m afraid it’s time to be outside rather then here at my blog.