Category: Blog

It’s been hard not to feel somewhat elated during the past few days. I’ve been soaking up the euphoria on the streets of West Philadelphia where I live, the joyful tears of civil rights leaders on the news, the energy and exhilaration everywhere I turn. Although I expect no more from Obama that from any other moderate liberal in the two-party system, it’s definitely been exciting to watch the election of our first president of color – a man who did not grow up owning class, who worked as a community organizer, who talks explicitly about race, who says thoughtful and intelligent things on a regular basis, who (despite his selective denunciation) has as a mentor a radical Black reverend who vocally critiques the racism and imperialism of the U.S.

I also know that this victory by no means symbolizes an end to racism, let alone imperialism, injustice, and exploitation. And I know that Obama never could have been a serious candidate if he posed any opposition to corporate and imperial power.

Continue reading “Excitement and critique go well together”

On Tuesday I went to a funders briefing/panel discussion hosted by the Beyond Prisons Fund, which my friend Jamie set up with money he was given by his family. His goal was to use the money to fund prison abolition (almost unheard of in the philanthropy world), and he worked with a board of grassroots organizers to grant all of it out. Angela Davis was the featured speaker at the briefing, accompanied by a panel of folks from Critical Resistance, Generation 5, and Creative Interventions. Everyone was brilliant and nuanced and inspiring, and it was especially amazing to be there so soon after CR10 and feel such movement momentum around abolition.

This particular event was amazing and unique due to the kick-ass speakers and the presence of a lot of activists and organizers along with the funders and donors. Usually, though, I hate going to donor briefings because they tend to be so uncritical of philanthropy as a system. I sometimes find myself at them anyway, as part of my work with Resource Generation – the idea being that as a person with access to those types of spaces (because of class privilege and being a major donor), it’s useful to get involved and push them in a more radical direction – or at least towards funding more radical things. It’s part of the whole “leveraging privilege” strategy that Resource Generation is really good at, and because I know how powerful my access to those spaces and resources is, I try to push past my discomfort with the hors d’oevres and suits and detached professional atmosphere and bring a social justice analysis with me into the philanthropy world. I struggle with it a lot though; lately I’ve been thinking about an essay by Emi Koyama that I read a couple years ago in The Color of Violence, in which she describes her work in the domestic violence social service industry. As a former patron of those services, she enters the work vowing not to perpetuate the type of abuse that she experienced from social workers in the shelter system – but she ultimately concludes that the system itself is so institutionally abusive that anyone who functions as its agent is forced to perpetrate abuse just by holding a position of power within the system.

Continue reading “Philanthropy and abolition”

I’m still coming down from CR10, which was huge and great and filled with more amazing things than I could have possibly absorbed. I ended the conference feeling inspired and tired and reminded of how important it is to incorporate prison abolition into all the social justice work we do.

There were a lot of highlights, but a big one was the opening plenary – which had an amazing lineup of speakers and performers including Andrea Smith, whose speeches always feel like a really good chiropractic adjustment for my brain (everything coming back into alignment with really intense sensations but it feels SO good); and Destiny Arts, who RULED the stage so hard with their tight dance moves after Andrea Smith’s amazing talk that I was kind of having an out-of-body experience from the excitement of it all. Also Miss Major made me so proud of queer and trans social justice organizers everywhere and Suheir Hammad made me (and everyone around me) cry.

Continue reading “CR10 and creating alternatives”

Thanks to Emily Nepon for sending me this link last week (which I forgot to post in the craziness of economy drama and CR10):

Money to Movements: Distributing Class Action Funds to Global Justice Projects

Protesters arrested in Seattle during the 1999 WTO protest created a fund to donate the settlements they received to social justice organizations.

David Solnit, A co-founder of the Direct Action Network and an organizer of the nonviolent direct action shutdown of the WTO’s opening day said, “These funds were won from a struggle for global justice. We wanted to make sure that a portion of those funds were put back into those struggles.”

Check out this response to Representative LaBruzzo (the rep I wrote about yesterday who wants to sterilize poor women) from the New Orleans Women’s Health and Justice Initiative and the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic. (affiliates of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence) It breaks down the scapegoating of Black and poor women as a distraction from the real issues that force people into poverty in the first place:

Even if sterilization is voluntary, POVERTY IS NOT! Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of sustainable livelihood can cause a woman to consider this aggressive sterilization incentive a viable option.

LaBruzzo talks about poverty as though it were an infectious disease as though poor people will eventually make everyone poor rather than a condition people are condemned to by Louisiana’s lack of investment in education, employment, affordable housing, and quality health care programs, services, and resources.

LaBruzzo uses a myth of scarcity to argue that if economic resources are shared with everyone, no one will have enough. The reality is that if the lion’s share of our economic resources stopped being used for unnecessary military spending and corporate welfare, such as the Wall Street bailout, then all our communities would have access to the resources and opportunities they need to survive and thrive!

Continue reading “INCITE! on LaBruzzo and the economy”

I’m in California tonight for the Critical Resistance conference that starts tomorrow, preparing for this amazing event while also consuming a ton of media trying to understand what’s happening with the economy right now. 

I’ve found useful resources and action alerts on United For a Fair Economy and United for Peace and Justice, and I’ve been thinking about how important it is to understand our economic situation. The media is telling us that the circumstances leading to this massive corporate bailout are too complicated for us to grasp and trying to scare us into going along with the Bush administration’s incredibly unjust plan. There’s a lot I want to learn about how all this went down – but corruption, theft, and increasingly extreme inequality are simple enough to understand.

Continue reading “Welfare for corporations, eugenics for poor people”

Check out the new piece we just posted over in the articles sections – Reflections from a Homownersexual: Buying and Selling a House with Anti-Capitalist Intentions, by Emily Nepon. Nepon writes about the process of co-purchasing a house in a Black, working-class Philadelphia neighborhood as a white radical queer, living in it collectively with a rotating group of friends for several years, and then later selling it; and explores the challenges and contradictions of doing it all with anti-gentrification and anti-capitalist intentions.

I wanted to follow up on the last post I wrote – particularly the part about funding grassroots organizing in New Orleans – by sharing a really cool experience I had this week.

Continue reading “A grassroots response to support New Orleans evacuees”