Accidental lockout

This past weekend was one of the first times I had three continuous days in DC off, and as it happens, Elly was out of town with her pal Tyger going hiking.

I had my weekend pretty set to not do much of anything. Which for me means reading, catching up on blog posts, responding to email, and engaging in one of the thousands of research projects I like doing when left to my own devices with a fast net connection.

I set of Saturday afternoon to get my bike fixed (the tire blew) and go on a long-ish ride. Ruond 1: I set out, thrilled to have the bike working again, get four miles out, the tire blows again. Now, it was a slow enough leak that I could limp my way back to the bike shop (at this point it's raining, but at least it was warm) and hand-pump the tire ever so often. I return, the guy apologetically fixes it again and finds the offending piece of glass. Off again for the C&O canal trail, and the weather has cleared up.

After a leisurely break at a park along on the way, happily reading a book about Weather Underground that I'd meant to read ages ago, I decide to see how far the trail goes. Pretty far, I find out, as I wind up in Bethesda, then Silver Spring, and wind my way back dow Rock Creek Park to my house.

I approach the door to the apartment with Elly's keys and realize to my dismay that it's not a complete set. Whoops! I'm locked out of the apartment, having just ridden 36 miles on my bike. I'm hungry, pretty tired, and not real sure where I'll sleep. At least I had the presence of mind to call up my pals the Georgetown students, who let me crash on their sofa for a couple of days.

So instead of my grand internet plans, I hung out with Georgetown folks, and read a bunch (which was nice), and biked around. All told, I did pretty much what I set out to do, but without the luxury of daytime naps on my sofa. In some ways, it prevented me from staying home and cleaning too much, which is a weird habit I've acquired with old age.

Elly returned Monday afternoon, so I spent the rest of the day with her and Tyger after we all were able to clean up bit.

The big apple bday update

Hey folks,

I realize I leave you hanging a bit with my last both. Foolish moi! I had a lovely birthday, thanks to my pals Alicia GB, the infamous mollyjean jellybean, the long-lost Kris and of course my lovely partner Elly. Not only did my co-retreat-goers make a surprise vegan birthday cake, I spent a couple of evenings with low-key revalry...a local (to Brooklyn) political hip-hop show one night, and a down-the-block house party the next.

Sunday we were on a train and back to work for Monday, although neither myself nor my co-workers got in particularly early. In fact, I would up a bit under the weather and stayed home mostly. I've fought off a nasty cold that's going around here.

There will be pictures forthcoming, but I left my camera connector at my parents'. It's on its way to me as fast as the postal service will carry it.

Thanks to all who sent me birthday wishes!

Happy birthday to me

As I type, I'm on a train to New York. This year's birthday is celebrated on a coast I know not well with a present of an 8-hour portion of a retreat to help facilitate in New York. I'm trying not to be bitter, and part of me consented to it. The retreat itself is exciting - USAS's first-ever Alliance Building Committee strategy retreat. The ABC is the group that works on implementing anti-oppression work USAS-wide. It helps to be able to meet and strategize while doing that!

Tomorrow I turn twenty-nine, which I feel is a pretty unremarkable number. I question what I'm doing as an organizer with a student-run organization, but I think we both feel that I'm doing more good than harm, so hey, beats crappy nonprofit administrative work by tons.

Elly, Alicia, and my pal Molly will be gathering after the eight-hour retreat for a small birthday fete, that'll be fun. It seems like it would be hard not to have fun with a birthday in New York - so much happens all the time there! Heck, we could walk around and go to a bookstore and I'd be happy.

I've been something of a lug about my Taurean comrades' birthdays - Karl, Noah, Anju, Izzy - I owe ya somethin'. A little piece o' my heart.

Goin' back to Cali

Back from Pella, I had three days to get my affairs in order to leave for my rapid-fire trip to visit my parents. I say "visit my parents" because that's as much time as I had...I'd originally planned for a two-week, half-with-family half-with-Bay-pals trip. Oh, no. Perhaps I didn't heed my own schedule, sense, or anything like that. I had exactly five days, and then back to DC for a couple of big meetings and a retreat.

So off were Elly and I! I think ours was perhaps the fourth flight in the history of Independence Air to go to San Francisco...that made me nervous, but it was actually quite lovely. It was the pilot's birthday and the flight attendants made a big to-do about it, sending around paper for us to write birthday greetings, and I found that seriously endearing. Taurus solidarity! I feel as though I can't endorse them becaue I'm sure the flights are that cheap due to non-union practices**, but geez, they're cheap and good. No movies, though. Be prepared.

Mazzy graciously put us up the first night, and then Cathy Rion lent us her car for the trip up. Highlights include good food, chill time with the fams, hanging out with my dad after an ill-fated attempt to see Kung-Fu Hustle with them (have I ranted about how much I like that movie here? I *heart* it), and Elly seeing her first rural Northern California town's rodeo parade. I guess Silver Spring, Maryland doesn't have rodeo parades. Go figure.

Upon return to the SF, I had 24 hours to see people and no prep time to call. If you're reading this and thinking, "Hey, Max didn't call me, that #&*(%^*!" You're right. I'm a baad person, and I feel pretty guilty for not having called (<— not sarcasm, actually true). My consolation prize is that I'm planning a bigger trip in August, so if you'll still speak to me then, I'd love to see you. But I finally broke the cell phone lost in California trip, but didn't realize how much my parents' house (and the entire town of Sonora) is out of range. Not having had my phone up there previously, I had a heightened sense of cell-phone use grandeur that was soon dashed upon arrival.

**Not true, not true! I stand corrected. After an employee commented on my blog, there's a little CWA FAQ about them. Hurray for union cheap airlines!

A touch of Holland and white privilege

After London, where else could I have gone than the mysterious, retiring Pella, Iowa? My dear pal Chris Crass and the Catalyst Project, a small and dedicated group of anti-racism trainers from the SF Bay Area, invited me to be a panelist at the Sixth Annual White Privilege Conference. After the flight across the Atlantic I had to re-acquaint myself with small planes, but it wasn't too bad at all. It was a really great opportunity to meet folks from across the country centering racism, and institutional racism as that, as their primary political focus. I'd missed spaces like that.

It was majority white and older-people audience, but the young people there were awesome and a third of the conference. There were as many high school students as college students, and the youth track was entirely high-school students from what I could determine. There were good keynotes, a wide array of workshops, and I was put up in the hotel with all the guest speakers, so we all rubbed elbows with Peggy Macintosh, Paul Kivel, and Tim Wise and the like for breakfast. Mr. Kivel came out with a book about class not long ago, and was leading very good workshops about it; I attended one during the course of the conference. Our panels were pretty good, if I do say so myself. There was barely any room for audience participation (not good) and the groups were small, but younger and pretty excited to hear what we were saying. It was incredibly useful to articulate the ways I feel that the work USAS does as an organization is about challenging white supremacy in practice - which has challenges, and we've by no means worked it out. The work USAS does winds up being anti-racist by default, because the people with whom we stand in solidarity are ovewhelmingly low-income Women of Color. But our affiliates (and ourselves) aren't always doing this work ina consciously anti-racist fashion. Our concerns were pretty different from those of the older participants, many of whom work in what the People's Institute refer to as "gatekeeper" organizations - social services, education administration, nonprofit work. There the message was, "It's not that you have to quit your job, but you need to ask yourself who ultimately benefits from the work you do and do it in such a way as to conform to your principles". For us, as a movement-oriented student organization, we have different challenges: We get students for 3 years, maybe more if they become grad student rabble-rousers, but that's rare. How much can you do, how do you preserve wins and institutionalize work while retaining the democratic and student-driven nature of the organization and work, and with such high turnover, how do you create lasting accountable relationships? In a campus environment, students are temporary residents, often vastly economically and educationally privileged over their service-worker counterparts, often discovering political action and thought outside of the home for the first time. This is not an ideal setup for building long-term, lasting accountable relationships, but in some ways really similar to the big global justice mobilizations. For its part, USAS has done an impressive job rising to that challenge. Creating lasting relationships and establishing the Worker Rights Consortium, who can function basically as a global grievance procedure that communicates sweatshop abuses to a ready-to-mobilize constituency, is pretty darn smart. Establishing relationships with campus workers, campus unions, and being clear about the power univiersities have over their contractors and demanding ethical standards - that can firmly counter institutional forms of economic and racial oppression if done with the proper principles in mind. But of course, the organization has struggled for years with the changing reality of its foundation by middle and upper-class white college students. The thing that most impresses me is that the organization has undergone an anti-racist transformation process that's been slowly shifting who makes decisions, whether People of Color int he organization are in leadership positions and making organizational decisions, where scholarhsip resources go, how we develop leaders and whether there's an explicitly anti-racist training series available/mandated for students attending nationally-coordinated gatherings. We have a much-debated caucus and ally structure, and it continues to crete safe spaces for people experiencing forms of oppression to meet, set priorities, offer criticism, and shift the organization further. Hasta la victoria, siempre.

But I digress. My co-panelists were awesome, and here is the panel description and their bios (thanks to Chris, who fervently documents Catalyst's work)

Building Movement, Building Power: a panel discussion on lessons from younger generation anti-racists activists

We want justice. We want to build healthy, vibrant and sustainable communities that affirm life. We believe that white supremacy shapes the society that we currently live in and that white privilege has consistently undermined multiracial movements for justice. We believe that anti-racism is key to unlocking the power of our communities and our movements to build a free society. This panel discussion with younger generation anti-racist activists will focus on drawing out lessons from their experience. They will address the following questions: What are the goals you're working to meet both long-term and short-term? How have you put anti-racism into practice? What is your strategic orientation to your work? What are key lessons to share? What advice do you have other people who are trying to put anti-racism into practice?

Panelists: Cindy Breunig, Max Toth and Betty Jeanne Rueters-Ward Moderator: Chris Crass of the Catalyst Project

Cindy Breunig grew up in a farmhouse outside of Cross Plains, Wisconsin. She got involved in social justice organizing in Washington DC focusing on student activism, literacy work and Central American solidarity work. Her path to consciousness and action around institutionalized racism was profoundly shaped by relationships to families she worked with in D.C. for four years as a literacy teacher. Since coming back to Wisconsin she has worked to educate and organize other white people in her circle of influence, and support local work for racial justice. She is a Medical Spanish Interpreter.

Betty Jeanne Rueters-Ward grew up in a suburb outside Boston, Massachusetts and has been most involved in student activistm and anti-racism/anti-oppression efforts at her college in Ithaca, New York, and through various Unitarian Universalist communities. She currently serves as one of the Youth Programs Specialists for the Unitarian Universalist Association (the administrative headquarters for a liberal religious denomination), where she coordinates social justice resources and conferences for youth ages 14-20. Betty Jeanne's key issues of involvement have included struggling against student apathy and building community and solidarity among college activist communities, as well as promoting multicultural education reform as a social justice issue among high school, unschooled and homeschooled youth. Betty Jeanne is a trainer with the National Coalition Building Institute, a nonprofit leadership training organization based in Washington, D.C.

Ingrid Chapman is a young community organizer, direct action activist and core member of Catalyst Project. Her roots within radical left organizing began as leading member of the global justice movement in the late '90s. She was a founding member of "Active Solidarity; a collective for anti-racism education" and has led workshops with thousands of activists around the country. The last 2 years she has worked with Oakland residents in struggles for tenant rights, community safety and alternatives to incarceration and policing.

We spent a fair amount of time meeting and talkin' politics with various awesome. I met a former USAS coordinating committee member, who had been a part of a SAS group at U of Kentucky adn I caught her up on the last few years. We went in search of more exciting coffee and found a lovely cafe in town with many forms of latte I hadn't previously thoguth possible, like "Snickers Bar Latte" and "Mint Chip Latte". Hey, and free wireless!

Pella's theme is "A Touch of Holland." I'm not entirely sure why, but I should've asked - I assumed it meant that the people originally colonizing this bit of the US were Dutch. As a consqeuence, we were a week early for the famed Pella Tulip Fair, and boy, were there tulips in this town! People could be seen in the requisite little wooden shoes and pointy hats. There were Dutch bakeries, Dutch-processed chocolate, and lots of white people. The town is still getting used to the conference, but at least I felt welcome.

I left with an hour of sleep at about 10am. We were scheduled from 8am to midnight and asked to speak at more panels than we'd planned, so it was quite a packed schedule.