I’ve seen more cops on my block in the past 24 hours than I have in months; a series of fights and muggings have brought them out in ever-increasing force, reminding me vividly that I have been wanting to write about violence, about crisis and trauma in communities, and all the ways we deal with those things. I’m thinking about this in the context of the US Social Forum and the Allied Media Conference on the horizon, the convergence of so many queer/POC/women-led groups doing powerful anti-violence work (lots of links embedded towards the end of this post), and also in the context of my own relationship to violence and safety as a white person, as a trans person, as a person with class privilege, as a person read as female, as a survivor. Continue reading “On crisis and community”
Community Reparations Now! Tyrone Boucher and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia Talk Revolutionary Giving, Class, Privilege, and More
Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia is the cofounder (with her late mama, Dee) of POOR Magazine, a grassroots arts and media-justice organization in San Francisco. Tiny and Dee were houseless for much of Tiny’s childhood, evading various systems that threatened to institutionalize, exploit, and incarcerate them. They survived and fought back by remaining fiercely dedicated to each other, creating independent microbusinesses to make ends meet, becoming underground avant-garde art celebrities, and creating POOR Magazine to make silenced voices of poor and indigenous people heard through media and art. Tiny tells their story in her 2006 memoir, Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America (City Lights). Continue reading “Community Reparations Now! Tyrone Boucher and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia Talk Revolutionary Giving, Class, Privilege, and More”
Notes From New Orleans
March 2008
Earlier this week I attended an amazing event put on by the Worker’s Center for Racial Justice here in New Orleans. In a chilly gym near the old St. Thomas housing development, a crowd of people gathered to celebrate victories. A group of organizers from the Congreso de Jornaleros (Day Laborer’s Congress) performed a play celebrating the victory of a group of Indian guestworkers who had been lured to the United States at huge personal cost, with false promises of permanent residency and steady employment. Instead of finding the anticipated American dream, they had been abused by an exploitative company, forced to sleep 24 to a room, prevented from leaving company premises, and threatened with deportation when they tried to organize.
Poverty Scholarship
by Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia
“Writing, reading, thinking, imagining, speculating. These are luxury activities, permitted to a privileged few whose idle hours of the day can be viewed otherwise than as a bowl of rice or a loaf bread less to share with the family.”
-Trinh T Minh-ha from Women, Native, Other
There are many things this poverty scholar can teach you, but in reality, no more or less than any of the poverty scholars you see, or more than likely don’t see, everyday. Homeless families, poor youth of color, migrant workers, panhandlers, sex workers; sitting, dwelling, camping, soliciting work, convening. I am them, they are me. Continue reading “Poverty Scholarship”
Privilege and Solidarity
I wrote this in June 2007. You can also print it out zine-style by clicking here: Privilege and Solidarity Zine PDF
HELLO.
I wrote this zine for a few reasons. When I was growing up, I knew my family had money but I didn’t really get the concept of “privilege.” Then I became an activist and started thinking about systems of power and oppression and how privilege played a role in them. I started thinking about my own privilege, mostly as a white person, and about how I could challenge the racist systems that gave me privilege while others were oppressed. Then I started thinking about class privilege, and about how I was raised with a lot of it, and about what that meant. Somewhere in the midst of that, I learned that I had a $400,000 trust fund and became incredibly self-conscious about it. Then I realized, mostly through the urging of smart friends and fellow activists, that it was useless (and counter-productive) to try to hide or otherwise not deal with my class privilege, and I started thinking about how I could take responsibility for it in ways that reflected my values as an activist. Continue reading “Privilege and Solidarity”