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.
No comments:
Post a Comment