Towards Collective Liberation

Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy

Chris Crass

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781604868470
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Defensa política

Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy is for activists engaging with dynamic questions of how to create and support effective movements for visionary systemic change. Chris Crass's collection of essays and interviews presents us with powerful lessons for transformative organizing through offering a firsthand look at the challenges and the opportunities of anti-racist work in white communities, feminist work with men, and bringing women of color feminism into the heart of social movements. Drawing on two decades of personal activist experience and case studies of anti-racist social justice organizations, Crass insightfully explores ways of transforming divisions of race, class, and gender into catalysts for powerful vision, strategy, and movement building in the United States today.

Over the last two decades, activists in the United States have been experimenting with new politics and organizational approaches that stem from a fusion of radical political traditions and liberation struggles. Drawing inspiration from women of color feminism, justice struggles in communities of color, anarchist and socialist movements, the broad upsurges of the 1960s and 70s, and social movements in the Global South, a new generation of activists has sought to understand the past while building a movement for today's world. Towards Collective Liberation contributes to this project by examining two primary dynamic trends in these efforts: the anarchist movement of the 1990s and 2000s, through which tens of thousands of activists were introduced to radical politics, direct action organizing, democratic decision making, and the profound challenges of taking on systems of oppression, privilege, and power in society at large and in the movement itself; and white anti-racist organizing efforts from the 2000s to the present as part of a larger strategy to build broad-based, effective multiracial movements in the United States.

Crass's collection begins with an overview of the anarchist tradition as it relates to contemporary activism and an in-depth look at Food Not Bombs, one of the leading anarchist groups in the revitalized radical Left in the 1990s. The second and third sections of the book combine stories and lessons from Crass's experiences of working as an anti-racist and feminist organizer, combining insights from the Civil Rights Movement, women of color feminism, and anarchism to address questions of leadership, organization building, and revolutionary strategy. In section four, Crass discusses how contemporary organizations have responded to the need for white activists to lead anti-racist efforts in white communities and how these efforts have contributed to multiracial alliances in building a broad-based movement for collective liberation. Offering rich case studies of successful organizing, and grounded, thoughtful key lessons for movement building, Toward Collective Liberation is a must-read for anyone working for a better world.

Section IV

“Love in Our Hearts and Eyes on the Prize”: Lessons from Anti-Racist Organizing for Collective Liberation

WHAT WE MEAN BY WHITE ANTI-RACIST ORGANIZING

Catalyst Project’s Strategy

While there are many different ways to engage in anti-racist work, this essay, along with other organizational interviews in this section of the book, explores anti-racist organizing in white communities. We need a wide variety of strategies to be effective. My focus is not an argument that this is the right way or the best way, rather that this work is a critically important component of our overall efforts to create systemic change for collective liberation. This essay looks at the strategy of Catalyst Project, where I was an organizer from 2000 to 2011.¹

Catalyst Project was formed during the height of the global justice movement to help make the most of the opportunities around us. In order to build the power of the movement, we believed we needed to simultaneously nurture its strengths and take on some of its key weaknesses. During that time in the early 2000s and since, Catalyst has engaged in anti-racist political education, leadership development, organization building, and organizing, with a focus on white communities. Through our experience, we strongly believe that moments when people are in motion for justice create enormous openings for transformative organizing, and this includes anti-racist work in white communities. These moments will always be complicated, challenging, rife with racism/white privilege, and also full of opportunity to advance our overall goals of bringing millions of white people to a collective liberation vision, culture, strategy, and practice.

Catalyst works to answer the challenge from organizers of color who, generation after generation, call on white people who are committed to social justice to work with each other and within white communities to uproot racism as part of a larger strategy to build powerful movements for broad systemic change. We believe that the only way to move this country towards equity, justice, health, and cooperative systems is for us to dismantle the systems of divide-and-control that keep the 1 percent calling all the shots. Central to this effort is the abolition of white supremacy.

Anti-Racist Organizing

Over years of working in white communities, Catalyst uses the shorthand “white anti-racist organizing” to describe our work. What do we mean by that? When we say “white,” we mean the historical and institutional development of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy in the creation of the United States, conditions which result in my now being a white person. The United States was created by the wealthy class to maximize private power and wealth through exploitation of the vast majority’s labor and oppression of the vast majority’s humanity. Wealth and power have been and are taken from the majority through slavery, genocide, colonization, indentured servitude, low-paying/high-profit-making jobs, and unpaid reproductive labor in the home and community.

Racism enables economic exploitation that drives down wages and drives up the cost of living, healthcare, education, and the basic needs that more and more people are unable to meet. Racism erodes safety and health for the people of color it targets, and then works on the rest of us. Racism causes environmental crises that impact communities of color first and worst, and are changing life as we know it for all of us.

But wherever there is exploitation and oppression, there is resistance. Alongside the history of oppression, there is a vast history of resistance and liberation struggle. Slave masters in the South faced widespread individual and collective resistance from enslaved Africans, and at times joint struggle between enslaved Africans and Native American nations as well as with indentured Europeans. Such uprisings of slaves and servants haunted the master class, which in response outlawed marriages between Africans and Europeans and outlawed gatherings of Africans and Europeans. They passed these laws because people were forming family and building community—not in large numbers, but in significant enough numbers to strike fear into the ruling class. They understood that bonds of love, family, and community across groups of exploited and oppressed peoples—the vast majority of the population—could be a foundation for joint resistance against the minority at the top accumulating and maintaining wealth and power.

Ruling classes, through hundreds of years of experience, developed sophisticated methods of dividing and controlling people to take land, enslave people, and create a politically docile and economically exploited class of citizens. In the United States, this method was white supremacy. In order to prevent a foundation of joint resistance from forming, a racial order needed to be constructed to divide people. While the vast majority of people were exploited to create profit, citizenship with limited (but significant) political rights became a category in society for “white” people. While these political rights were originally for land-owning European males, this expanded to include all Europeans with European women primarily having access to these rights through relationships to men.

The expansion of these rights came primarily as a result of the ruling class responding to resistance from oppressed peoples. For example, with massive resistance from formerly enslaved Black people in the late 1800s, alongside a growing radical working-class movement with millions of newly immigrated, not-yet-white Europeans participating, the ruling class responded with a classic divide-and-control tactic: Americanization (white citizenship) process for Italians, Jews, Irish, Germans, Poles, Russians, and other European ethnic groups, and Jim Crow apartheid for Blacks.

White Privilege

White privilege is the flipside of racial oppression. As a white person in this country, I have an economic, political, cultural, and psychological relationship of privilege to institutional power. Race is not a biological reality, but rather a position within a hierarchy of power based in one’s relationship to the state. The United States was created as a white nation, for white citizens. The devastation of New Orleans because of defunded levees during Hurricane Katrina, along with the federal government’s failure to respond, and the current criminalization of immigrants of color from Arizona to Alabama are two highprofile examples of this enduring reality.

“White” is not a category of who I am as an individual person. Rather, it is a historically developed social position into which I was born in this country. My relationship to the state and the economy shapes what I have access to, how society interacts with me, and how I understand myself in relationship to others. This is not just a relationship between myself as an individual white person and the state and economy. It is the accumulated experience of hundreds of years of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In short, white supremacy is internalized within me and has profound impacts on how I relate to the world around me. This internalized white supremacy is based on the material reality of political, economic, and social privilege that I and other white people experience every day as white citizens of this nation.

It is important to make a distinction here between privilege and power. Most white people in the United States experience economic, political, and/or cultural oppression based on class, gender, sexuality, and ability, as well as race-based privilege. Privilege generally refers to rights, norms, standards, and attitudes that should apply to everyone, but that many people are denied. For example, for most of the history of the United States, people of color were denied access to most jobs, legal protections, social services, civic participation, and neighborhoods (except to work in them). Additionally, violence against people of color has been socially and in many cases de facto legally sanctioned.

Another example deeply impacting the current economic system is the ability to accumulate wealth through inheritance, or debt and poverty through inheritance. For most communities of color, there is a long history of land, labor, and lives of family members stolen through slavery, colonization, and genocide. Hundreds of years of slavery generated enormous wealth for the plantation master class in the South and the industrial capitalist class in the North, while Black communities inherited poverty, enforced illiteracy, trauma of families brutally pulled apart, and so on. In short, while many white people have and do experience profound economic hardships, the economic hardships of communities of color have been and are far more devastating, brutal, and enduring as that hardship is part of an overall white supremacist capitalism that daily denies the full humanity of people of color.

Social Relationship of Power

So, when we say “white,” we are primarily talking about a social relationship of power to the state and in the economy that shapes the culture of society. This relationship has been created to privilege white people, oppress people of color, and accumulate the majority of institutional wealth and power to the ruling class.

By “anti-racist,” we mean engaging with white people to develop anti-racist politics, commitment, and practice as well as developing and strengthening powerful multiracial alliances and collaboration. We do this by taking action on issues impacting white communities, such as economic and environmental injustice, in ways that foreground white supremacy in the problem, and anti-racist/multiracial movement building in the solution, and by joining with or supporting similar struggles in communities of color. We also do this by joining organizing in communities of color and developing a strategy with organizers and leaders of color for bringing white people into such struggles in large numbers.

In almost all racial justice struggles, there are small numbers (from dozens to thousands) of white people involved in many ways—from leaders, organizers, educators, participants in events/demonstrations, volunteers, donors, supporters, and more. While we work to develop skilled, visionary organizers and leaders to increase the effectiveness and size of this small number, we also look for ways to bring in tens and hundreds of thousands of white people to participate in meaningful ways to end white supremacy, and advance collective liberation in ways that have both immediate positive impacts and long-term transformative impacts.

We also want to build up and expand liberation culture and practice that supports white people to bring these values and commitments into how they are building community, family and raising children, and how they can bring leadership in their places of worship, schools, community activities, workplaces, neighborhoods, and networks. We want to develop effective anti-racist leadership to help further profound solutions based in economic, racial, gender, social, and environmental justice to the problems our communities face.

Revolutionary Politics

Talking about white privilege, white supremacy, and anti-racism needs to be connected to a larger revolutionary politics of ending all systems of oppression and creating systems of liberation. This means not only challenging white supremacy in the United States but also challenging the role the United States has played in the world. We must understand the centrality of white supremacy in the relationship between the U.S. ruling class and the Global South, and in the relationship between the U.S. ruling class and communities of color in this country. This understanding helps unite anti-racist work in white communities in the United States to the visions, strategies, and experiences of powerful people’s movements around the world. This unity opens deeper possibilities for learning, solidarity, and collaboration.

Revolutionary politics means collective liberation, or a politics committed to the goal of liberation for all people from all forms of oppression. We see the goal of collective liberation as a long-term political commitment that guides our work, shapes our strategies, and helps us think creatively about our vision. This commitment to collective liberation takes shape as: 1) recognizing the exploitation and oppression in society; 2) understanding one’s relationship to that exploitation and oppression; and 3) working to form alliances between people who experience both oppression and privilege to transform this society, recognizing the centrality of oppressed people’s leadership in that process.

We think of collective liberation as a vision to work towards and as a strategic orientation to help us think about the work we do. We also look at white privilege as a way to unlock the white supremacist worldview that turns white people into individuals solely responsible for pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. As a white person, I see how white privilege distorts my relationship to history and my position in society. This individualism and distorted worldview are barriers to collective organizing; they negatively impact the relationship of white people to other people in general, and to oppressed peoples in the United States and around the world in particular.

White privilege undermines our ability as white people to see ourselves as part of a historical process. It locks down our imagination and narrows our understanding of freedom to that of a scarce commodity that only a few can access. We challenge internalized white supremacy in mostly white sections of the Left to push against the many negative impacts it has on the ability of white activists to positively relate to people of color-led collective action and collective organizing as well as multiracial collaborative organizing. The fact is, internalized white supremacy’s worldview of inherent hierarchy, domination, “us versus them,” fear-based competition for survival, ahistorical individualism, and self-blaming as opposed to systemic power analysis, negatively impacts white people’s lives and work for justice.

Power of Liberation

Anti-racism is a process of seeing the power of liberation as abundant and socially necessary for the physical, emotional, and psychological health of all people. White supremacy leads white people to believe that only certain people can have access to power and that those certain people constitute a ruling class made up, primarily, of white people. Anti-racism is a commitment to changing this worldview through struggles to transform the conditions in society. When we say “anti-racist,” we mean the work that makes those changes, and the process of political development white people must go through to actually believe that a liberated world is possible and that all people can—and must—have power over their lives.

By “organizing” we mean breaking the solidarity of white people to the ruling class, by breaking off any and all sections of white communities that we, as white anti-racists, can. History has demonstrated that key constituencies in white communities are more likely to break from the ruling class based on their own experiences exploitation and oppression and their struggles for equality and justice. People who are women, working-class, queer, transgender and gender variant, disabled, and/or Jewish have historically moved to the Left and have been anti-racist leaders in this country. We believe that powerful, dynamic movements can and will come from these constituencies, and that their leadership is key to moving significant numbers of white people to work in a multiracial movement for collective liberation.

We also believe that white anti-racist leadership and organizing in white communities for economic and social justice is necessary, and that such organizing can and must connect to issues in communities of color and create opportunities for solidarity, collaboration, and multiracial alliance building. But critically, this organizing needs to be done both to build broad white support for struggles in communities of color and to liberate white people from the soul-crushing, body-punishing, mind-distorting, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

The goals for white anti-racist organizing are to shift any and all sectors of white communities away from an allegiance to the ruling class and towards active solidarity with liberation movements coming out of communities of color in the United States and around the world. To do this, white anti-racist organizing needs to unlock the imagination of white consciousness to conceive of liberation and believe it is possible, and the best way to do this is through firsthand experience. The Occupy movement, the global justice movement, the struggles for immigrant rights, reconstruction in New Orleans post-Katrina, and so many other struggles, provide incredible opportunities for transformative experiences—not just participating in one event but being part of a movement. The job of white anti-racist leaders and organizers, then, is to think of the immediate goals of these actions and experiences, while also thinking long-term about developing critical consciousness and anti-racist leadership in white communities. This involves supporting people who participate in activism with political education, mentorship, reflection space to make sense of their experiences, and help planning next steps to continue their efforts, grounded in a vision and strategy of collective liberation.

For Catalyst, white anti-racist organizing is shorthand for how can we move as many white people in this country to a revolutionary agenda with a collective liberation vision, in solidarity and partnership with progressive and Left leadership from communities of color. We see white supremacy as one of the primary organizing principles of this country that shapes the class structure and political system. Strategically, then, white supremacy is a key part of the foundation that we can tear out from under the ruling class to upset this oppressive system and unleash the possibility of collective liberation.

1 The politics and strategy of Catalyst in this essay are the result of collective study, experiences, reflections, and synthesis. While I am no longer a member of Catalyst, the “we” throughout this essay, refers to Catalyst. As a founder and co-coordinator of Catalyst, my politics and the politics of Catalyst have a high level of unity. Current members of Catalyst provided feedback on this essay. Given that the strategy reviewed here comes from collective effort, it is important to recognize the incredible people who have been members and those who continue to be members of Catalyst collective. With love and gratitude to Alia Trindle, Amie Fishman, Ari Clemenzi, Betty Jeanne Rueters-Ward, Clare Bayard, Ingrid Chapman, Josh Warren-White, Kerry Levenberg, Missy Longshore, Molly McClure, and Rebecca Tumposky.

STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES

White Anti-Racist Organizing and Building Left Organization and Movement

An Interview with the Heads Up Collective

Grassroots organizer Suzanne Pharr wrote, “While the Right is united by their racism, sexism, and homophobia in their goal to dominate all of us, we are divided by our own racism, sexism, and homophobia.” In the days after September 11, 2001, Pharr’s statement could be felt all around us. Those of us who formed Heads Up had been working proactively to take on these divisions in the global justice movement, focusing on anti-racism and multiracial alliance building. We knew that an anti-war movement would emerge to protest the war the Bush administration would launch after 9/11. We knew that racial and economic justice organizations would work to build a movement against the war at home and the war abroad. We knew that a mostly white peace movement would become the most visible anti-war effort and that it would be largely disconnected from grassroots community organizing in working-class communities and communities of color.

We also knew that there was an energized, radical, mostly, but not all, white anti-authoritarian wing of the global just...