She who stumbles

The next CORA will be hosted by Elle, PhD, and the theme will be radical history:

Inspired by the wonderful M…

“Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”

That is, according to my limited research, an African proverb that I first encountered at nubian’s site. But as a historian who minored in world history (with a focus on west central Africa) and specialized in the U.S. since 1945, I knew it to be true. Despite all that I learned in my African history courses, the Africans and their descendants whom I studied in my U.S. courses had no history, no background, no lives. They just appeared one day in Jamestown to serve English settlers. That was what the hunters’ history emphasized.

That is just one of the many reasons that for the sixth edition of the Carnival of Radical Action, Vox and I want you to explore making radical history. How do we create and participate in radical history? And how do we chronicle it? (This is a question that dominates my mind as I continually reflect on my long-term goals as a historian.)

Some food for thought:

• How do radical activists incorporate history into their activism?

• What are the processes involved in forming radical, history-shaping movements in our day and age (i.e. how do we initiate, shape, translate into action our responses to injustice and violence against and within our communities)?

• How do we learn from the past and incorporate radical themes in our work?

Vox and I are co-hosting the carnival here. You may submit posts here, use the Blog Carnival submission page, or contact Vox or me. The deadline for submissions is November 29, 2007 and the CoRA will be posted in early December.

So keep it in mind this month while you’re all acting in solidarity with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, and community responses to sexual assault!

My thesis is finished, making me a free agent (almost) now!

I’m very slightly burnt out on academic writing, but I do have some stuff to say Re: the thesis, knowledge production, race and academia. I’ll probably get around to writing that later in the week.

Also, APEC is coming up. I will be busy.

I need to get back into the swing of the blogosphere. Right now my intellectual and political interests aren’t very current-affairs-y and not neatly fitting into blog post formats. Hopefully that’ll change once I catch up on blogs.

Meanwhile, Blackamazon put together a fantastic edition of the Carnival Of Radical Action: Back to School - Knowledge as Radical Action. Go check that out!

Sudy of A Womyn’s Ecdysis is hosting the next CORA!

But for now I’ll do a little dance of freedom! {dance}

Welcome to the second Carnival of Radical Action!

This month has been full of ups and downs, so promoting and writing for this carnival hasn’t been a huge priority for me. But a handful of dedicated people have made wonderful submissions — this edition of the CORA is about quality, not quantity!

The theme of this edition of the carnival seems to have been “community” by default. The physical spaces that people live in and the things they do in those spaces, amongst their existing networks. The radicalism of people changing the way they relate to others.

Strategy

First up, there has been some discussion about long-term strategies and methods — the overall character of social movements. How they work from the inside, the kinds of activities that need to be co-ordinated in democratic and inclusive ways in order for social movements to be just and effect change.

Bfp’s post about grass-roots organising went into depth about the core of grass-roots organising:

Incite! has built its organizing strategy with the brickwork laid by hundreds of groups and organizations that came before it and organize alongside it. And one of the fundamental ideas that strings through all of the groups is that violation has been so ingrained into the bodies of the members of our communities, that “change” must come at the cellular level. That is–”change” does not mean “no more X”–it means living, thinking and breathing, *differently*. “Change” in this sense comes from the realization that no law will stop a war, a rape, a murder, a violation from happening. The only thing that can stop any of these acts is the person who is committing the act, and the person that is subjected to the act.

“Change” in this sense does not center an act–it centers a person.

My own submission to the carnival contrasts the ways that socialists organise with people-based organising:

Shortly after my break with the anti-war movement, I started to learn more about community-based fights against neoliberal imperialism in the Third World. The subjects of these conflicts were the revolutionary subjects — a global labouring class — that socialists always rabbited on about, but they weren’t organising in the ways that socialists prescribed. This occurred just after the anti-corporate globalisation movement was getting its act together for the Cancun conference in the Doha round of WTO talks.
Rather, these subjects were organising on a community-based level, around injustices occurring in their own lives which didn’t map neatly into the teleology of socialist critiques of capitalism. Issues like land reform, energy, food security and housing as well as workers’ rights have dominated the agenda of this global movement, and have done so in ways that defy the socialist orthodoxy yet warm the cockles of my little anticapitalist heart.

While not submitted to the carnival, the discussion at Bfp’s earlier this month about the G8 summit protest in Heiligendamm, Germany raised a number of questions about the privilege and oppression manifesting in protest tactics:
violence erupts in G8 protests:

I’m not sure what the general racial/gender/class etc. make up of anarchists is outside of these protests, but from what I have seen *at* the protests, it is usually a bunch of hyper aggressive young white males–and they smash things up and confront the police looking for a thrill–meanwhile, the marginalized communities that I am involved with and cover and *already have* a huge police presence monitoring them, don’t really need or want these confrontations.

In police brutality, anarchism, europe, feminism, labyrus asks:

And I’m trying to think - how did the various non-violent, vulnerable communities cope with this in anti-globalization contexts where there was a strong culture of diversity of tactics? How did communities of colour that participated in the Seattle demonstrations in 1999 deal with these issues, I’m wondering? What did they think of the (mostly white, actually not all that disproportionately male but the media would tell you different) anarchists there?

How do we create communities of resistance where people of colour are equal players but where we also don’t start drawing lines between “acceptable” and “unnacceptable” dissent, and in doing so play into the divide and conquer tactics of police?

Change

Secondly, the specific methods and tactics used to effect change have been explored, in the context of work people are already doing.

Kim at Bastante Already talks about the logistics and difficulties inherent in implementing the idealistic plans that many come up with, such as volunteer carpooling to provide lifts for low-income people:

Back to the suggestion. The volunteer ride base might work with the DV population as most folks have sympathy for this group (natch, they would not be permitted to go to the secret location of the shelter, but then there are meeting places, so I could work. As long as the woman doesn’t have too much to carry back to the shelter from the meeting place.)

I don’t know how well it would work with my other group, the plain old homeless/non-DV group because society has Ideas about The Homeless.

Sokari over at Black Looks shares the story of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement struggle in South Africa:

The Abahlali baseMjondolo movement is living proof that when the the organized poor start speaking for themselves it creates a serious crisis. No one not the NGOs, the Government or various middle class left sects want the poor to speak for themselves. NGOs overtly and or covertly try by all means to undermine movements of the poor and co-opt the struggle for their own selfish purposes to the point where you find that there is little difference between them and the State itself.

Devious Diva at THIS IS NOT MY COUNTRY shares the struggle of the Roma of Votanikos, Athens in her Roma Series. A guest article by Panayote Dimitras of the Greek Helsinki Monitor tells of recent actions to prevent the forced eviction of the Roma:

There was a crew preparing a documentary on the recycling of metal scrap filming the Votanikos Roma last week. They got notice that a cleaning operation was being prepared for Friday 4 pm in the second Votanikos Roma settlement. Indeed at that very time they called us to say that nine trucks and the related equipment and crew from City Hall had come to “clean” but then went to the Roma trying to trigger a new “voluntary departure” as the one that took place on 2 June in the other settlement. Papers were put in front of the Roma to sign and money was offered, the crew told us. We told them to keep one of the papers which is attached and is a garbage removal order of the municipality of Athens.

DD also has ongoing coverage of the struggle of the Roma in Votanikos; head to her blog for more!

Finally, for our fundraising plug, Rainbow Girl has developed a comic called Rainbow Girl Stars in SEXY WAR to raise money in support of the Umoja Women’s Village in Kenya:

My 38-page feminist cartoon romp, Rainbow Girl Stars in SEXY WAR, is now available for online purchase. It is an international grassroots fundraiser with all proceeds donated to Umoja Uaso Kenyan Women’s Village, a formidable group of women in Umoja, Kenya who are escaping and stopping domestic violence and sexual assault in their lives and community.

It’s available for $US6 per copy, and ALL of that will go to the Umoja!

Aaaaaaand, that’s all, folks!

This has been a great carnival to run, despite hiccups and bumps in the route. The next carnival will be a special edition, with a collection of posts about the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Michigan (USA). Nadia of No Snow Here will be hosting that edition over at her blog. Head on over to show your support, and let any bloggers who went know about this edition of the carnival!

In the past month I haven’t blogged much because I’ve been focusing on assessments, the Big T, and activism. While I’m not as overcommitted as some of my collaborators, I’m definitely finding it difficult to balance all these projects as well as regular social and family life. As my theoretical adventures became more thesis-oriented, my political adventures got a bit more hands on, and I found myself heavily preoccupied with concepts in radical organising (caucusing, open spaces, facilitating, strategy, etc. etc. etc.).

I’ve been reluctant to write about the latter because recently police and intelligence agencies have made it clear that they are watching us and trying to infiltrate our organising. It’s suspected that these actions are part of a co-ordinated campaign to intimidate protesters in the lead-up to the APEC protests.

But I’m also apprehensive of the interpersonal consequences I might face if someone in the local activist community found this blog, because what I have to say about it isn’t terribly flattering.

When any group of people gets together and does anything in close contact, norms and orders develop. Ad-hoc hierarchies that people take for granted, not because that’s “the way things are” but because they know the reasons for it from the inside. Established methods become custom and then habit. Ideas attach themselves to one another for people to make sense of all these goings-on. I’m going to call this “orthodoxy,” cos that’s what I’ve been calling it in my mind for the last couple of weeks. You can call it something else if you like.

I hate orthodoxy. I always have. It’s part of the reason I don’t get along with popular people, or feel comfortable in social groups; and it’s part of the reason I’m feeling very anxious about getting involved in activism again.

In the long break I took from activism I spent a lot of time reflecting and thinking about politics. My politics changed a lot. Outside the influence of activists, I was able to critique both their politics and their methods. I’m gonna focus on talking about methods in this post, so that I don’t stretch things out too much and because that’s what the carnival is about.

I had a long talk with a couple of women about strategies and approaches after a protest, and it was wonderfully cathartic to be able to speak our piece about the effects of socialist activity in our social movements. What they’ve said has interwoven with my ideas, so I just want to mention that I don’t come up with this stuff all on my own and they have great ideas too!

We started by criticising the sorts of things they organise — large demonstrations, and only large demonstrations. Other activities, like forums, public meetings, film screenings, concerts, etc. are organised in such a way as they support the building of large demonstrations. And it’s always white men who lead these demonstrations, who are given the opportunity to speak, and who set the agendas.

These means of engaging can be really alienating for lots of people. Speaking at demonstrations involves loud, angry invective — talking at people, not to or with them. Inevitably they engage in every other conversation this way as well. Speaking to them is very one-sided (and that’s a criticism I’ve heard from people both within and outside the activist community), which makes it difficult to work with them or to get one’s priorities represented at organising meetings where the real decisions get made.

The reason they behave like this is because they get a sense of entitlement from their ideology. One of my interlocutors compared it to evangelical Christianity: aside from the need to evangelise (recruit), there’s also a single book/prophet (Marx, who has canonical interpreters), a teleological view of human history that will end in a single protracted moment where everything will be set right (in Christianity it’s the Second Coming, in socialism, it’s Revolution), inability to acknowledge any problems other than the ones they prescribe (e.g. patriarchy), and an inability to analyse with any other perspective (e.g. environmentalism).

Because there’s such a time-lag between our efforts and the proposed goal (revolution), their methods need to be aggressive, unilateral, and macho. “Building for the revolution” is proscriptive — it involves “radicalising” social movements by injecting their ideology and priorities into them. There’s no learning or change that goes the other way. In fact, socialist groups are so creepy because they never change, they only undergo divisive schisms over points of ideology.

That said, I also have to say that socialist ways of organising and approach to social change has been very influential for me, and it’s not all bad. Not only because I have found Marxist political economy to be the most sense-making and radical of all schools of economic thought, but also because I spent so much time around socialists that their methods rubbed off on me. See, I joined a socialist organisation when I was 14 and spent a whole lot of time reading things from a socialist perspective (even if I didn’t really understand how all the theory and practice hung together until I came to University), and I learned all about the Russian revolution in my latter years of high school.

While I’ll elaborate on this in Part 2, I definitely think that my structural and materialist approach to social injustice and conflict comes from that socialist background, and I definitely think it’s a positive thing. In a socialist frame, social problems are the result of an unequal distribution of power, which is based on an unequal distribution of resources. The solution to social problems is to equalise power and equip people to take care of things themselves.
While there’s a lot of other theoretical baggage that socialists carry along with that assumption, as a basic starting point, I haven’t been able to find better.

Where it goes wrong is that unilateralism — a belief in a single Prime Mover for all injustice, and a single solution to it. That used to be very compelling for me, when I was 14. I think I stopped believing in it the year I turned 20. I don’t think that the aggression and rage that motivates socialists is really a sustainable source of motivation for me, or a lot of other people, even if I do feel enraged at injustice. It’s not the kind of energy that I want to put into my activism, or into the lives of oppressed peoples. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s particularly effective.

Shortly after my break with the anti-war movement, I started to learn more about community-based fights against neoliberal imperialism in the Third World. The subjects of these conflicts were the revolutionary subjects — a global labouring class — that socialists always rabbited on about, but they weren’t organising in the ways that socialists prescribed. This occurred just after the anti-corporate globalisation movement was getting its act together for the Cancun conference in the Doha round of WTO talks.
Rather, these subjects were organising on a community-based level, around injustices occurring in their own lives which didn’t map neatly into the teleology of socialist critiques of capitalism. Issues like land reform, energy, food security and housing as well as workers’ rights have dominated the agenda of this global movement, and have done so in ways that defy the socialist orthodoxy yet warm the cockles of my little anticapitalist heart.

I’m not sure that I see a clear logic in these kinds of movements, but they do present a powerful alternative to the kinds of organising that socialists engage in. While socialists built the Cancun convergence as an end in itself, the Zapatistas organise indigenous communities in Mexico to empower and to make lives better.

It’s a distinction which Bfp hit on perfectly in her carnival post: between centring people and centring a more abstract goal. It’s a plague in most student organising; crippled by its own class privilege.

Socialists don’t centre people, so they don’t engage well and haven’t been able to build effective change. They have no space in their teleology for communities — the only legitimate social bonds according to socialists are those of class solidarity, sometimes a frightfully abstract thing. Yet this kind of radicalism — relentlessly pursuing a bare, almost metaphysical version of justice — is compelling because it doesn’t make the kinds of compromises that might lead to injustice. It will fight the power and fight it to the end.

It’s just a bit mistaken about where that power lies, which is why socialists can be up in arms about injustice overseas but ignore the injustice in front of them, when they talk over everyone in a meeting, and declare that racism or sexism in social movements aren’t their problem — without addressing how their organisations will become anti-racist once the war ends or the government is thrown out of office. Instead, they have abstract discussions about unionism and party organisation, which are supposed to stand in for real alternatives to capitalism and domination. It’s theoretically, politically, emotionally, socially and economically weak.

It leads to a kind of “anti-racism lite” on their part. They can bleat hard about the racism of anti-terror legislation but not be bothered to talk to the families of people arrested under it. They can condemn the racism of white rioters in Cronulla but not engage in self-criticism when they shout over young women of colour. Ultimately, it’s the same strategic hypocrisy that any other privileged group of people engage in: irresponsible buck-passing.

Focusing more on these kinds of issues has really facilitated by other women of colour, who link them into broader structural processes of oppression. Bringing the voices of woc to the table isn’t about quantitative representation, it’s about the qualitative character of a movement, how it functions, what it aims for, what it does.

I’m struggling hard to overcome ingrained socialist norms in my activism, though others seem to hold them, and to bring into it some of the priorities I’ve learned that I share with other woc bloggers. Sometimes it’s really difficult to adhere to my central priorities, while so many others don’t share them. Other times my willingness to self-criticise leads me into an unsustainable spiral of doubt and disillusionment. Blogging really is helping.

This is an absolute last call for submissions to the second Carnival of Radical Action!!!

Please submit. I’ve only gotten 3 eligible submissions so far and if I don’t get more I might have to cancel the carnival altogether.

There are still a couple of weeks to go before the second Carnival of Radical Action goes up! And it’ll be hosted right here at She Who Stumbles. The first one was so great that we want to do it all over again and bring you another… and another, and another… and many more to come!

Here are the guidelines from the first carnival:

The Carnival of Radical Action

Most of us are organizers or activists in our real lives. Or at the very least, we think about it an awful lot and wish we had the skills and/or knowledge to organize. But contrary to the images of protest that make front pages and cause our hearts to swell–actual organizing is not as easy as it looks–nor is it very glamorous.

More often than not, the process it takes to actually get to the glamorous protest part is boring, tedious, filled with infighting, or done by one or two overburdened people who haven’t quite figured out how to say no.

And yet, the organizing part is so vitally important to achieving liberation (whatever that may be). It was through tons and tons of grass roots organizing and hard work that the right managed to come to power in the U.S. the way it has. The Zapatistas and the U.S. based Civil Rights movement both also have a history of achieving goals towards liberation through grassroots organizing.

So how does one go about doing this grassroots organizing?

That’s what this carnival is all about. I will be accepting any posts/submissions that have anything to do with organizing on a grassroots level. Some topic ideas that you might feel inclined to think about:

How do you do radical leftist organizing in the Midwest [or wherever you are]? How do you confront racism/sexism/disableism/homophobia/classism etc within your group? How do you work with a community instead of on a community? How do you confront accessibility issues (that is, you’re all working class mothers and there’s rarely a time to meet or the site where you meet is not wheelchair accessible etc)? What’s been the major problem/setback your group has faced? How did it over come it? What has been a successful tactic in your organizing (for example, you found that taking pictures of violent cops and posting them online is more successful in stopping the abuse than reporting them to their superiors)? If you’re a life time activist, what are some problems you see today with organizing compared to when you first started? Or, if you’ve never organized before, write about why you never have.

This carnival will be about sharing strategies more than finding a “right” answer. In the world we face today where there are so many intersecting forms of oppression, one answer will not fit every community. But something that worked for one community might work for another if they alter it and adjust it to suit their own needs.

I’d like to add that we don’t have a fixed definition of “radical” here. By radical we don’t necessarily mean revolutionary, and we don’t exclude revolutionary action either. Rather, I would say that this carnival is about an emergent definition of radical that comes out of the organising and activism that people undertake, rather than a pre-existing definition that can be applied across contexts. This is about elaborating the process of change, and empowering people to take part in it through blogging. (In that sense, what I’m doing right now is radical too!)

Unfortunately this means we do have to exclude some things. There are fine lines to be drawn between individual action and collective action. One person can make a difference, but we’re talking about intervention into broad social processes that affect a whole range of people, especially oppressed people. Talking about those processes isn’t enough either — we want to know how to change them!

Moreover, this carnival was started by women of colour who have a strong commitment to empowering woc through blogging. This blog is a safe space for woc, and I have a responsibility to other woc to keep it that way. As such, anything that is implicitly or explicitly harmful to woc interests won’t be accepted.

The deadline for submissions is June 21st.

I live in Australia, which makes the time difference tricky. Sydney is 13-15 hours ahead of most places in North America. So the carnival deadline is June 21st, but the carnival will go up a day or two later, according to local time here.

I know quite a few people are going along to the Allied Media Conference, which is from June 22 to 24. I chose the date to give everyone who’s going a chance to submit something to the carnival before they leave. We’re hoping to organise a post-AMC edition of the carnival that rounds up all the live-blogging and conference reports that people write! (If you want to volunteer to host that edition of the carnival, let me know via email.)

You can email me with your submission or use the BlogCarnival.com submission form.

Looking forward to seeing all your posts!

Since The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum has closed, Sylvia has asked me to re-post the first Carnival Of Radical Action (CORA) here.

Welcome to the first Carnival for Radical Action!

Fire Fly and I are pleased to dedicate this carnival to the phenomenal WOC blogger BrownFemiPower. This carnival idea is her brainchild. Fire Fly’s encouragement, along with these excellent submissions, gave it wings. So we thank her and all of you, first and foremost.

There are many reasons that people may choose to hit the pavement, the group meeting (whether as small as the local PTA or as large as the United Nations), the netroots, the writing pad, or the telephone. For example, what do you do when you notice a white male colleague acting extremely out of line with a young black female student, like in Miss Profe’s situation? Do you speak out? If so, how? What do you say? How do you say it?

Conversely, what if you know what to say and how to say it, but your support system is lacking? Like the dynamics in VJack’s situation, you need to organize and coordinate large groups of people who hold different views under a generally agreed-upon umbrella issue. How do you recruit and get some action started? Do you choose advocacy? Coordinated letter writing? Rallies? Create your own organization?

For the duration of this carnival, bloggers from across the ’sphere will offer answers, experiences, and encouragement for instituting radical change. From writing a letter to your local newspaper to coordinating a large rally with multiple organizations, there’s a little something for everyone who wants to learn about making a substantial impact. So let’s get started!

Methods of Organizing

Bloggers have offered their wisdom and experience to explain some of the nitty-gritty details of organizing campaigns, organizations, and events. These wonderful bloggers emphasise clear and effective communication both within the organizing group and with the rest of society.

The incomparable BFP offers, along with some great anecdotes, a comprehensive introduction to organizing from her experience with Incite! Women of Color Against Violence:

I wanted to post the national chapter of Incite!’s guidelines to organizing. It is a very very basic “how to” guide–it doesn’t tell you how to confront people’s hurt feelings after a major fuck up, for example. But it does give you a good place to start. One of the biggest mistakes newbie organizers make is starting too quick. The euphoria of finally deciding you have the power to make change is amazing and exhilarating. But ultimately it’s unsustainable. Recognizing that you have the power to change the world is necessary to get yourself into organizing–but recognizing that you personally aren’t going to change the world in your life time is also necessary. Thus, what you do needs to be done with that in mind–how can you lay a strong enough foundation such that your daughter, your granddaughter, your great granddaughter, can continue to build upon your work?

I offer Vox offers guidelines for groups and individuals who want to increase the public profile of an issue in the news media:

Political action that is mainly unknown or doesn’t toe the established party line goes mainly unreported unless there’s a proven demand. Smaller papers that could establish that demand are mainly limited to covering local issues with their own staff and whatever runs on the AP wire for everything else.

The thing is, though, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of ways to get important issues into the mainstream press; they just need proof that there will be reader interest.

The Organizing Experience

Activist organizing takes both skill and good organization. Radical bloggers have written about their impressions of organizations, and their effectiveness, inclusivity, and structure on all levels — from small reading groups, to large-scale social movements.

Petitpoussin talks about the co-operative skills she needed to run a successful reading series:

Over time I’ve become more and more interested in the idea of collaborative or collective projects — and I’m excited to see them developing on the blogosphere, through various carnivals, sites like AfroSpear, Ally Work, and arts and cultural projects like Birds of Lace press or make/shift magazine. When I read and think about community among activists, it’s not just about some realpolitik conception of critical mass to create change on a point. It’s about experiencing change in our daily lives, with the people we love and respect, as opposed to working ourselves ragged towards change as the ideal.

In a comment to this blog, Nena Lopez offers insight into the key questions for grass-roots organizations:

Coordination and organization of activists for a grass root operation is extremely tough.

[…]

We began by taking a poll of who wanted to assist in a leader & activist position while changing the issues throughout the nation. We had a meeting (teleconference)
First discussion, Are we a campaign or are we an organization? If we are an organization we must comply within the laws of our state and become organized. We established leaders by state, through a meeting (someone must always take meeting notes). This was the first tier at a corporate level.

In an older post at her (oldschool!) Blogspot blog, BFP posted about a number of principles and issues generated out of communities involved with Incite! Women of Color Against Violence efforts at community-based anti-violence strategies:

How do we incorporate justice into community accountability strategies? If we do not rely on the state to adjudicate cases of gender violence, then how do we ensure justice and fairness before holding perpetrators accountable? How do we ensure that we do not turn into vigilante groups? If we do develop processes do judge cases within a community context, will we just replicate a mini version of the oppressive state apparatus within our communities?

And another older post from Ideas for Change discusses the relative effectiveness of authoritarian and non-authoritarian organisational structures:

There is a problematic history of coercive, authoritarian and inadequate approaches to activist and citizen learning and political practice in Sydney, that is ingrained in many of our activist cultures.

You cannot really point the finger and make accusations, because it is actually very difficult to overcome the authoritarian cultural obstacles to useful and liberatory activism. There is a fine line between having an efficient operation, and excluding members from decisionmaking.

Micropolitics of Organizing

Once in the midst of taking action, sometimes it is hard to keep up the initial momentum. Either the initial problem is more complicated than expected, the supporters do not arrive as readily, or the chosen method falls short of the anticipated goals. Either way, there’s an obstacle. How can these obstacles be confronted? Here, bloggers speak of their experiences with obstacles and activism, and they share some insight on how to perceive them and how to keep moving along.

Fabi shares her personal experience and insights about how to prevent discouragement and unsustainability while working as an activist:

But what I want to focus on are my thoughts on radical actions specifically personal contributions to a organizing project and the feasiability, effectiveness and sustainbility of change and activism. Especially as a mother and full time worker, I divide the two becuase all mothers are working mothers, most of the time and energy is constrained so I always ask myself how is this {fill in the blank} organizing?

Sudy lays out Donna sends out a rousing cry for people to get off their asses and warns against accepting the “wait your turn” mentality:

I can see a day coming when the crowd at the bottom is going to overwhelm the few at the top. The majority of Americans are already discriminated against or oppressed in some way, but this is as it has always been. The difference is that today there are more of us discontented, alienated, and unrepresented since the turn of the century. Many of us are people of color and it’s time for us to come together and shove each other to the top and pull those behind us up too. I’m tired of us vs them in every discussion. I’m tired of people saying to each other, “I must have my important issues first, then we will get back to you”, and always it isn’t enough.

And in this post, Fire Fly discusses the impact that agitating for social justice can take on mental health in a personal and enlightening way:

The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and activism — is very confronting for me. In the discussions at university, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, and I’ve been in and out of the mental health system since I was very young. For me, depression is still something I treat as private, almost secret, and a matter of managing my own time and energy. This is because I’ve felt an intense amount of stigma around it from a lot of circles, especially left activist circles.

Organizing: The Aftermath

You’ve recruited. You’ve organized. You’ve planned. You’ve laughed. You’ve cried. You’ve called and written and photocopied and mobilized. What does the final product look like? Riversider has given us an example of how organizations and volunteers all meshed together in a joint effort on May Day. It’s a photoblog journey of the day’s events, so be prepared to absorb thousands of words in a blink of an eye about activism!

Thanks so much to everyone who submitted to this carnival!
We absolutely couldn’t have done it without you!

This is a fantastic example of how networking across the internet can inspire and empower people to work together for liberation. If you can spare some money, BFP has a list of bloggers who are raising funds to go to the Allied Media Conference next month who could really use your help. We support all kinds of online organising and radical collaboration!

We hope the carnival has a long life ahead of it, empowering many more in the months and years to come. Please spread the word far and wide, and start thinking about what you’ll submit to the next carnival!

The next carnival will be hosted at Fire Fly’s blog She who stumbles. Look out for more details!
Sylvia’s Note: I’ve already set up the newest submission form for entries to be sent to Fire Fly here.

UPDATE: Fire Fly has posted a call for submissions; the deadline for carnival submissions is June 21st. If you are interested in hosting future editions, please let me know by e-mailing me at sylviasrevenge [at] gmail [dot] com.

Much love,
Sylvia and Fire Fly

It seems like most bloggers I read are also heavily active in campaigns for political and social change. My own involvement in activism has been so sporadic that I feel like a fraud claiming to be an activist. I’m not nearly experienced enough with activist work to feel entitled to the appellation, although activism is something I desperately want to do.

When I started working on my thesis I strongly believed that theory could be empowering and support social change…. now I’m not so sure. I’m well aware that the class and caste privilege I enjoy underwrites whatever manage to think, understand, or express politically. There are times when I feel that the intellectual pursuits of studying, discussion, and theorising are a waste of my time, and I should be out there working hard for social change. But I’m also well aware of the obstacles to my doing that.

A few weeks ago I went along to a mental illness discussion group at university. Student campaigning around mental illness has been pretty much non-existent, which is something people are addressing now. The discussion was led by a woman who’d been diagnosed with a mental illness, and recently had a very nasty experience with the mental health system.

The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and activism — is very confronting for me. In the discussions at university, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, and I’ve been in and out of the mental health system since I was very young. For me, depression is still something I treat as private, almost secret, and a matter of managing my own time and energy. This is because I’ve felt an intense amount of stigma around it from a lot of circles, especially left activist circles.

My latest bout of serious depression began in 2003, a few months after the USA invaded Iraq. I was heavily involved in campaigning against the invasion, doing something almost daily, which stirred up a lot of intense emotions. One of those was frustration at the way the campaign was organised.
As an independent activist working with people belonging to socialist parties, I had very little say in campaign strategy. At the same time, I was tokenised as a woman of colour in a white-dominated movement; I was urged to make speeches at rallies and forums, but because I wasn’t part of their organisation I couldn’t contribute at the caucuses where each faction determined how they’d vote. The parties that trumpeted loudly about justice used me personally — they’d assign a member to make friends with me to woo me into their organisation, or at least into voting along party lines. Yet most of the work I did was handing out leaflets and putting up posters.

Ironic that the period of time that I was most heavily involved with politics was also the time when I felt most pressured, alienated and dehumanised. A few months later I was in the grip of some of the most intense lows of my life.

Since then I’ve dallied with the mental health system again, and ultimately rejected it as a means of defining or addressing my mentality.

These are experiences that have led me to really doubt that thinking is such a magnificent thing that ideas can transcend social boundaries and set humanity apart from everything else. Part of my middle class (although not wealthy) upbringing was a belief in the power of good ideas to make a difference, and to overcome material obstacles to their realisation. Like most ideologies, it operates in such a way as to deny its material underpinnings. It underlies a liberal humanist model of agency that marginalises anyone who doesn’t have the means to realise their ideas: women, people of colour, working-class people, peasant-class people, disabled people (including the mentally ill), queer people, trans people, and anyone else whose oppression markedly reduces their ability to access and use resources.

I think mental illness, in some ways more so than race and gender, breaks the liberal humanist model of agency in fundamental ways. Agency, according to the liberal humanist model, is based on rationality, the cornerstone of consciousness. Mental illness is by definition the evacuation of the capacity for rationality in a human being.

Internet discourse about itself holds that the internet is a sphere of pure ideas, where inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc. don’t matter. What matters are the quality of your ideas, evaluated by rational minds all made equal by freedom of speech and equal access to the means of communication. In an environment like this, emotions are unnecessary. In many ways, this is the same belief academia has about itself.

Women of colour know it’s different.

Now I’m going to discuss some things that came up in the recent conflicts over Jessica Valenti’s book Full Frontal Feminism. I do not want to discuss the book, and any comments criticising me for my position Re: Valenti or the book are neither welcome nor relevant. I have nothing to say about either of them. I do not read Valenti’s site, Feministing, and I have not read the book. That’s because I live in Australia, where the book is unavailable, and I find Feministing too US-centric to be worth my internet time. I realise how debate about the book has spanned several blogs, posts and threads, but I do NOT want it to be brought here. Comments about it will be edited for irrelevant content.

Moreover, this is a safe space for women of colour to talk about their concerns. Specifically, the way that subtle racism and sexism marginalise us and affect our mental health. Comments that aren’t about this topic will be closely scrutinised.

Recently a number of women of colour have talked about the hurtful effects of internet discourse about this book on them. The ways that woc have been positioned draw on the ideology of the rational liberal humanist agent and relegate the concerns of women of colour to a space outside that model.

The fact that this has been accomplished through doublespeak, contradiction, evasion, and outright ignoring woc doesn’t affect the integrity of the model. By nature, the dualism of the model ensures that criticism mostly travels in one direction, and the material inequalities behind that duality are ignored.

What does this mean for woc?

For activism, it means a lack of discursive space in which to raise concerns and have them addressed.

But discursive spaces reside in minds. Minds which have a personal, emotional, mental, and neurochemical substrate, all of which are affected by discourse. Not having any language or concepts to express one’s concerns leads to a chronic lack of hope. And hopelessness leads to depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses.

Recently Jenn of Reappropriate and Vox Ex Machina (amongst others) posted about this CNN article on Asian American women’s suicidality. The article takes a social perspective on the relationship between race, gender (although not class or sexuality), and mental illness, subtly bringing to light the inadequacy of individualised models of mental health care which do little to address the needs of Asian American women.

While some women in her study did seek help through counseling and prescription drugs, most of her subjects were ambivalent or even negative about counseling. “They felt the counselor couldn’t understand their situation. They said it would have helped if the counselor were another Asian-American woman.”

These women found help through their religious faith, herbs, acupuncture, or becoming involved in groups that help other Asian women.

This brief quote doesn’t do justice to the resourcefulness of women of colour in dealing with the emotions, and the durable effects of oppression on our mentalities. Leaving behind completely the dualistic model of rational agency, I’ve found that women of colour have much more practical, grounded and holistic ways of conceptualising and dealing with social problems. For women of colour, both political consciousness and personal life are not separate, and it’s not possible to be disinterested or detached from them. Instead, woc have a reflexive and measured understanding of our own lives and can move between high theory and daily practice without compromising ourselves on the grounds of lacking objectivity or rationality.

And by that I mean that we can do, and do do more with our brains than thinking along abstract lines or evaluating evidence according to abstract criteria. For woc, emotions aren’t a sign of intellectual deficiency. They’re a tool for creating social changes that make our lives better. As such, they aren’t outside the realm of what can be worked on progressively. Emotional skills are part of creating social change.

That compares pretty poorly with the ideology of rationalist supremacy, by which I thought I could defeat my demons with good ideas.

For me, my depression transformed after I started the reading for my thesis. Being able to critically evaluate the reasons I’ve been made miserable by other people through a lens of race has helped my self-esteem and sense of myself in the world. And in that time I’ve rigorously rejected the individualistic models of mental illness that the mental health system produces by re-evaluating how certain experiences I’d had in the mental health system were indicative of a kind of violence done to people to make them fit into therapeutic models.

When I was young I went to an extremely racist school. Unfortunately, it was also a very small school. Racist slurs were de rigueur — children have a habit of picking up on any difference and bring rather nasty about it. But the school administration and the mental health system were complicit in that racism. It’s not only that experiences of racist ostracism were ignored by the counsellors and therapists years later, but that counsellors were called in to assess me while it was happening — because I was being disruptive — while the bullies were left untouched.
Later, when I was a day patient at a youth psychiatric centre, another patient — a loud boy who had an anxiety disorder — called me a “curry muncher” and I was assigned to an anxiety therapy group (with the same boy) when I lost it and yelled at him for it. The reason his comment was problematic wasn’t, as the (all white) psych nurses framed it, because it hurt my feelings. It was problematic because it underscored the racial and cultural alienation I felt in Australian society, and the double shame — of being brown among whites, and of being mentally ill amongst Indian people — that caused me.

To be fair, the mental health system isn’t as vested in a model of rational agency as other parts of society. But it has its own models of pathology that marginalise the concerns of women of colour and do violence to them (through aggressive medication that saps the capacity to act, and by restraining and restricting freedom of movement and association).

The disempowering effects of the mental health system compounded my depression, leaving me unable to confront the challenges I needed to meet in the past few years. I called it “activist burnout” but that was just one of many things that combined to make me nigh useless for two and a half years.
And because of that long hiatus from activism I don’t have the experience I need to fulfil all the responsibilities I’m taking on in my new activist projects.

But even though I feel so negatively about the mental health system, I still feel ashamed about my mental illness (which is why it’s taken me months to finish this post!). Because I’ve rejected the models of the mental health system, I don’t have clear guidelines on how to judge my capacities to deal with stress or get work done. Activism involves tensions and exhilarations that overwhelm me, and just the emotional rollercoaster could lead to mental exhaustion and depression. I’ve had to abandon easy, predetermined answers to my problems for a process of groping around in the dark to get my bearings (let alone navigating with success). This is possibly why I write about this topic so much!

Although I’m combating the elitist ideology that all problems can be fixed with good ideas, it’s good ideas that have helped me feel more empowered; it’s the ideas of women of colour that have supported me and inspired me to get to work on the anti-racism collective. While the doctrinaire belief of Trotskyists that a final revolution will solve all the problems of the world, ever, fuelled my passion for activism before, now it’s the practical relationship-building skills that women of colour have fostered that are helping me the most.

That’s why I read the blogs I do, and am doing the things I’m doing. And, selfishly, why I wanted to start the carnival. Because I’m learning from amazing people and we can change the world.