The town of Middletown is under attack. Rocks are falling from the sky, and killing and injuring residents. A group called Emergency to the Rescue forms to respond to the situation. They set up medical relief. They send search parties to look for bodies trapped on the rocks. They create shelters for those displaced by the situation. They set up counselors for those traumatized.
At the same time another group forms trying to address the underlying cause of the falling rocks. College students in the area also come together to try and see what they can do to help.
After some time, it is discovered that a corporation in the town up on the hill is paying residents to throw rocks off the cliff, and that the corporation is part of a huge sceme to get rid of the Middletown residents in order to build a luxury tourist destination.
This was a simulation we did leading to a conversation about the balance between organizing to stop the root causes of injustice and meeting people's immediate needs.
Three interesting questions came out of this conversation for me:
1. How do we take care of basic needs in a way that changes conditions? Some great examples of this:
-The Panther's Breakfast program: provided kids with breakfast - serving 10,000 daily at one point - and creating a strong foundation in the community for organizing. The magnitude of this program was so powerful that the federal government was shamed into creating free breakfast programs.
-Tierra y Libertad's Greening the Hood program in Tuscon, Arizona: supports families, schools, and community group in growing their own food, meeting the need of providing healthy fresh local food, creating a basis of relationships from which to organize, and also decrease dependency on corporate food chains.
-Migrant Justice movement's Know Your Rights campaign: supporting families in creating plans in the case that someone in the family is detained or deported. Many organizations within the migrant justice movement, especially in Arizona, have successfully organized to get members and their family members out of deportation by putting pressure on the powers that be, thus meeting immediate needs while at the same time working to change policies that are deporting families in the first place.
2. What is crisis?
Natural crises are given more attention by the masses but there's crises happening every day right in our neighborhoods that are often not seen as so urgent - landless and homeless people without a place to call home, kids going to sleep without a sufficient dinner, undocumented folks scared to leave their homes. These are serious crises. Then why, we asked ourselves, do people come out in the masses during environmental crisis? Beyond the fact that it's sudden and tragic, there's a lot to break down here. Surely one reason is that natural disasters often have no direct target, no one direct person or corporation to blame. There is no side to choose. This also has a lot to do with race and class - when we begin to come in to relationship with people without homes, people without food, people terrified to leave their homes, we have to recognize our own privilege, and that we have these basic needs met largely because of our skin privilege. For a lot of us, this brings up feelings of guilt or shame, which are real feelings that often paralyzes us from doing the work that needs to be done. A good friend of mine once told me the saying, "it is not our fault, it is our responsibility." How can we keep this phrase in mind when thinking about the every day crises we see in our communities? And keep in mind all of the crises hidden from our view.
3. What is lost when we don't work from an anti-oppression framework?
In the case of the falling rocks, my group was the Emergency to the Rescue team. We were focused on saving lives, no time for talking about how this situation fits in to the bigger picture of white supremacy in our society, or what it meant for a group of white people to be leading the work. So we began to think about what is lost as a result. And maybe this isn't the best example since it's made up, so lets think about Hurricane Sandy relief in the Lower East Side. Over the four days I was there helping coordinate volunteers, over 3,000 volunteers came through the doors. While they came from far and wide, many were white, and many were from the surrounding "East Village" neighborhood. As an organizer in the Lower East Side for three years, I can tell you that this demographic has not historically been knocking down our doors to help save buildings from getting torn down or to stop families from being evicted. But here they were, by the thousands, waiting patiently sometimes for hours to get sent out in to the community. This was a huge moment and opportunity - in these four days, we must have knocked on each of the 15,000 public housing apartments in the community at least once and often 2 or 3 or 4 times. To my knowledge, never in the history of our organization have we reached so many doors in such a short period of time. And when is the last time thousands of middle and upper class white people entered public housing developments to connect with residents? In these days we functioned in mega crisis mode, working 14 hour days with little food or sleep. There was little time for conversation on privilege, the history of public housing, the history of racism and gentrification in the lower east side. This brings up two questions for me:
1. What did it feel like for the residents of public housing - majority people of color - when a bunch of white folks showed up at their door? Did people show up with a savior mentality? Were their instances where people said some racist shit?
2. What potential for white solidarity/allyship within the public housing movement and the movement against displacement in the lower east side was lost by not talking about these issues?
I seem to be leaving you with more questions than answers. Luckily there are three months to go. Also, many of these questions don't seem to have one true answer, but a complexity of solutions that I have not yet completely unraveled.
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Some good quotes on organizing from our weekly readings:
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limites to tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
-Frederick Douglas
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
-Ella Baker
"People have to be made to understand that they can not look for salvation anywhere but themselves"
-Ella Baker
"You and I have in our hearts a future to build. They only have the past to repeat eternally"
-Subcomandante Marcos
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