One thing we talked about in the session on white supremacy is how it distorts white people's ability to envision liberation. On this session on Visionary Politics, we strengthened our muscle to vision a different world a bit by gaining some insight as to how organizers of color in the bay area are visioning beyond what is conventionally thought of as possible.
Like Loubna Qutami of the Palistinian Youth Movement which has brought together the Palestinian voices across the world to create a common agenda for justice and the right to return.
Or Rachel Herzig from Critical Resistance which is working from an abolitionist perspective - which sees prisons as a way to constrain, control and kill a certain part of society - to destroy the prison industrial complex, or the symbiotic relationship between private and public to maintain social and political control. She sees the practice of hope as a way to sustain the possibility of a new world.
Or Patty Berne from Sins Invalid which challenges societies assumptions about people with disabilities as asexual by creating a space for artists with disabilities, centralizing artist of color and queer artists, to create performances at the intersection of disability and sexuality.
Or Carla Perez from Movement Generation which - as explained by Gopal previously - works from a place of resiliance based organizing as to not look to the creators of the problem for the solutions. She talked about needing to escape the lies of our times - that credit equals money, that people are illegal, that a pill can be the cure. MG - and originally from the Zapatistas - envisions a world where many worlds fit.
Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan expands on this vision in her article Window to a New World: "The finale of the story of our victory will be a post-globalized world based on local democracies, driven to meet residents needs in an equitable way and deeply rooted in a relationship to ecological place. It will be a world where many worlds fit, where there are a million different solutions to the question of how we should meet our needs and a million different forms of local participatory economies that emerge to meet these needs"
In a break out session with Carla, she talked about how winning every time is not most important, but rather challenging current rule and the assumption of who has the right to rule who, that we must broadcast the illegitimacy of the laws. She talked about the idea of "translocal" - coordinated efforts at a neighborhood scale, for example a climate justice campaign bringing together struggles in Richmond, CA, Black Mesa, AZ and Detroit, MI. Because in order to create real solutions on a national level, demands must be based in local struggles and experiences, not some office in Washington. Carla is applying this in her own life, starting conversations with folks in her neighborhood around pressing concerns. People of all backgrounds have come together in a "pod" as they call it to create an emergency response plan and figure out who has what tools and expertise.
It hit me after the break out session with Carla how - as a result of white supremacy and working within the non profit industrial complex - constrained my brain is from truly imagining anything outside of our capitalist system which inherently perpetuates oppression and exploitation. These conversations got me thinking - what would it look like to create a translocal campaign against urban displacement that brought together local struggles in The Mission, SF, The LES, NYC, and Pilsen, Chicago - all historically immigrant communities that are slowly becoming yuppie havens. And what would it look like in the LES - where I organized for 3 years prior - to do broadbased local organizing around emergency response planning (the LES was hit pretty bad by Sandy) creating a sense of interdependence and trust between the diverse neighborhood residents? Can relationships formed through this kind of organizing prepare the neighborhood for an expanded definition of emergencies? Like the demolition of housing?
It was also good to understand PODER - the organization where I am volunteering while in the Anne Braden Program - in the context of visionary organizing. PODER does amazing things like grow food, run an urban campesino program for Mission youth, gain control of the development of land and lead community based planning processes. The project I've been most involved with is an emerging restaurant and catering cooperative started and run by members of PODER. This is such a clear manifestation of visionary organizing, folks out of work and/or tired of working for a boss who mistreats and disrespects them taking matters in to their own hands by creating their own establishment.
While sitting doing my readings for class at the restaurant on Thursday, I came across this in Steve Williams article "Name It & Claim It":
"There are important building blocks for us to take advantage of that have already been laid: workers coops, community gardens, community land trusts, local currencies, and time dollars. All of these experiments could be vital and vibrant parts of a powerful movement to challenge the dominance of capitalism, but alone, they do not represent a fundamental threat to capitalism. They are too easily assimilated into capitalism's logic as progressive window dressing. The left must understand and eventually be able to talk to people about how these projects are incompatible with capitalism and together are central features of a new, more desirable and more sustainable economic system."
Theory became practice when I translated the quote to coop member Enrique who enthusiastically wrote it down in his notebook and began to talk about how excited he was to engage with patrons of the restaurant - through art, through the menu and through conversation, about how what they are doing is different and how it and others modeled after it are vital to the sustainability of the community.
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