So as Jess and I worked through more and more of what we wanted our collaboration to look like, being who we are, we began to itch around the questions–how can we make what we are doing political? How can we integrate it into a movement? How can we make it a part of an existing movement in a way that honors, builds on and respects the work done by women in the past as well as women in the future?
For me, to answer these questions, I had to work through several ideas first.
***
First, this idea of “movement making”–what does it take to organize a movement?
This is an intimidating question, while at the same time, often a misguided one. I say intimidating because many people think of ‘movement making’ as the massive earth shattering Civil Rights Movement or the anti-war movement of the 60’s.
We in the U.S., have been taught to think of those movements as their end products–the end of segregation, the end of a horrific war, the ‘end’ of racism. Only occasionally do we ever get to peek at the years and years of work that went into the end product–the infighting, the hours and hours worth of discussion, the patent irritation that is consensus voting.
And because the actual work of movement building is never talked about as “movement making,” what happens is that too many people who are organizing for the first time (or even for the last 45 years) get to their first (or millionth) fight/hard discussion/screw up, and they think they’ve literally fucked the whole thing up–and they jump ship. Forget ya’ll, I don’t need this shit.
Or they go the other way and become iron-fisted with their group. You will show up, you will do what you’re told, and you will do it because otherwise the world will not survive!
Although I have managed to stick with organizing for about six years now, I’ve also noticed a chronic pattern of mine–I am the person who jumps ship. I am the person who is terrified of letting people down and so often don’t even bother trying. I am the person who is often unsure about how to follow through on an amazing idea.
***
The other problem with thinking about “what does it take to organize a movement” is that on many levels, it is a deeply misguided question–although it is one that social justice activists ask almost daily. I, myself, have asked it over and over again, on my blog, in emails, in physical world organizing–I even majored in that shit!
But as time has gone on, I’ve grown to realize that I don’t really care about ‘movements’–or, more specifically, about putting together a march/rally/protest etc. To be clear, I find these actions to be vitally and deeply important, and I support all social justice minded folk who work their asses off to produce an event, a chain of events, a movement, that makes a mark. I view the work of putting together an event with almost a certain amount of religious reverence–because I’ve been in the middle of the organizational mess, I know the effort and time and devotion it takes to hold that shit together, and I know that I personally, am physically incapable of being a ‘leader’ in that type of situation. Give me some flyers to put up, and I can do it–have me create the logisitical outline as to where 45 hundred people will be sleeping for three nights and where they can all park their cars?…please observe me in my corner weeping.
So in saying that I don’t much care about ‘movements’, I am not saying that as a critique or as a way to put down the work that people are doing.
I’m saying it more as a way to say that when it comes to movement making, I’m more interested in grassroots basebuilding. Even more specifically, I’m interested in building a new world. One that I can tolerate, one that is safe for my kids. One that still exists should either of my kids choose to have grandkids.
And building a new world is something much different than building a movement. A movement is immediate, has a time frame which often *must* be achieved within a few weeks/days, and *generally* mostly involves people who are already a part of the movement itself. In other words, when you go to a pro choice rally, you can safely assume most if not all of the people at the rally or in the audience will at least have a working relationship with the pro-choice community. The speakers are more trying to rally an existing community together rather than convert non-believers to their ranks.
Grassroots basebuilding, or, building a new world, is different to me–it’s long term. It’s something that will not be done in my life time. Probably not even in my children’s possible children’s lifetime. It is starting with brick one–or starting by looking at the person next to you and asking, is that a brick? And then debating for five hours if it really is a brick–and working to find ways to pull other people into the conversation so that they can help you decide–is it a brick? It’s figuring out news ways to decide what a thing is, it’s figuring out who will have a voice, how and why those people will have a voice, it’s figuring out new ways to talk, new ways to hear, new ways to share. It’s figuring out how to get on the same page with the neighbor you hate–and who hates you right back.
There are many people who may not see much of a difference here. Or who think of “movement making” AS grassroots basebuilding. I understand that. I am making a distinction here that many people may not necessarily make or may even disagree with. But I’m making this distinction very intentionally–I think most people understand “movement” in the Civil Rights, Gay Rights, Feminist sort of way–fewer people understand “movement” in the ‘building new worlds’ sense. And honestly, it’s something I’ve struggled with a lot myself, working in a medium that is *so* immediate and instantaneous.
But to me, it’s essential to make the distinction for a few reasons–first and most centrally–I’m *good* at doing movement making that de-emphasizes organization/logisitics and emphasizes ideas, thoughts, feelings, and new ways. I think in many ways, far too many of us think that there is only one way to do organizing–and that way feels patently wrong and uncomfortable to us, so we don’t do it. For example, I’ve read many many people in the online world say that they really aren’t a part of a movement because they feel physically incapable of being around other people for an extended time–and so while they support a certain issue, they do not believe themselves to be a part of “fixing” that issue.
Because I’ve had that problem myself (knowing I can’t do something the way I’m told it’s *supposed* to be done so simply not doing it), I think it’s so important to expand the idea of “movement making” and really challenge what “activist” is and what it can be. I can be the person that hears a silence in the room–I can’t be the person that finds a place for 97 people to use the bathroom at the same time.
Another reason that I think that there should be a distinction between ‘movement making’ and building a new world is because, as Paula Rojas so expertly points out, a proven framework world-wide for dismantling structures of power (i.e. nation/states, capitalism, etc) that harm and violate the most vulnerable of people is to rebuild community driven structures of power that do not depend on nation/states, capitalism, etc in anyway. Violent overthrow becomes unnecessary because the needs of community are centralized.
We here in the U.S. find this idea to be almost patently quaint–I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read/heard/seen ‘activist’ type people dismiss building a new world as “undo-able” or not realistic. But communities outside the U.S. that have *had* to build a new world *have* done it and are succeeding where activists in the U.S. simply aren’t.
I am not the smartest person in the world–but I have, in my mid thirties, finally figured out that now is as good a time as ever to stop doing the same thing over and over again in hopes that *this* time, if I just work hard enough, it will actually work.
And so I think it’s important to differentiate between movement making and “building a new world” because it breaks the endless cycle in the U.S.–that if we just have a big enough protest, things will fix themselves. If we just call enough people, the world will right itself…
In short, what I am asserting here is that the question should not be “what does it take to create a movement” but “how do we build a new world”?
The focus should be a new world, the process of building, creating, restructuring, recognizing, remembering–in addition to or even *instead of* ‘the next rally is tomorrow.’
***
I began to grapple with the question a while ago, while wrapped in the arms of an amazing group of radical women of color. Jess’s response to my original post reminded me of my struggle. Jess said:
Also, I think of things like deadlines as commitments between people, and used to have a bad habit of feeling personally disrespected by every deadline (commitment) that went unmet.
For as long as I have been working through my “commitment phobia,” it wasn’t until I read Jess’s words that things clicked for me.
What Jess talks about here is not unusual. She’s not the first person who has told me that commitment to a job=commitment to her. When I told W* that I had pissed off a group of women because I had forgotten to answer emails, W* said before he could stop himself, “oh, I HATE people like you.”
Which of course brought instantaneous tears and wailing and profuse apologies which I most certainly did not accept until I had officially finished feeling sorry for myself. But as W* explained later, what he meant was exactly what Jess said–answering an email means commitment means commitment to W* personally. And as astonishing as this may seem, even *I*–the chronically late, absent, forgetful bfp, have gotten my feelings hurt because somebody I respected didn’t respond to an email of mine or because students missed class or because somebody who said they would call, didn’t.
Which all made me think–we express our love and humanity through work–or, through the very framework that we, as radical social justice inclined folks, are trying to dismantle (for the clueless, capitalism)! We tell people we love them by committing to each other through the economic structure that we all agree is problematic at best and destructive at worse! How else would I tell Jess I loved her, admired her deeply, feel slightly attached to her soul, and want to pet her dearly departed dead kitty and her exciting fierce new girl kitty, except by answering her emails–so that I don’t hurt her feelings? How else could Jess tell me the same thing except by asking me to write for her magazine or agreeing to collaborate with me?
And yet, here we both are, apparently deeply in love with each other, but unable to tell each other so except through modes of communication that exist as capitalistic created, supported and approved methods that are actually *taught* to students as a good way to get a job, get a promotion, etc. (the politics of ‘networking’ anybody?).
“Networking” as “love” is not something we often think about–but putting it into those terms makes me understand what I wanted to do with Jess, what I wanted our foundation to be built with.
Radical love.
Love as Radical.
Is there a way to build new networks of expressing love, of expressing dedication to community, humanity, each other–that actively subverts the “networking” paradigm of “love” that currently exists (whether it be the work of creating a movement, the work of writing a good essay, the work of ‘real’ job)?
Is there a way to radically reclaim love?
I think there is.
And so I returned to Jess. I told her that I was in a different place physically than what I was when I first approached her. I wanted to work on myself-being gentle and loving with myself–being accountable to my body. Learning how to hear my body when it was saying no (not just screaming no), learning how to dance a good rhythm with my body, and being able to acknowledge that I was out of breath and needed to sit on the sidelines for the next song–or just go home.
I wanted to work on being accountable, not to feminism, not to ‘the movement,’ not to some great sounding ideals or even other women of color. I wanted to be accountable to myself. I wanted to love myself, and through learning to love myself, learn to love, trust, care about, take care of, be strong for, and be in community with others.
So when Jess told me about a project she had heard of, a project of intentional walking, I was immediately intrigued.
What could we learn about ourselves, about each other, by thinking in a different way? By thinking with our bodies? And is there a way to think with our bodies, with each other, in an intentional way? In a way that helped us all define–what is a brick?
For the rest of this series, see here.
- Share
January 21st, 2009 at 3:36 pm #
Thank you for posting this. I’m delighted that so many of us are engaging with awareness and intentionality work, remembering the wisdom we possess when we listen and honor all of ourselves. We learn to coexist with all of ourselves – our intellectual analysis, our physical knowledge and our spiritual intuition – striving for balance, knowing even when we don’t get it “right” the point is that we tried and then try again. And so we begin to change the way we experience our world, the way we exist in the world, and so our world around us too changes. In loving ourselves, we renew our spirit for the long walk home.
The paths we will walk are many, I walk mine committed to never go against myself, all of myself; to recognize the limits of my perception and avoid making assumptions by reaching out to others when I have doubts; to remember we are all on our own separate and intertwined paths and to not let people’s choices interfere with the integrity of my own movement so that a world where many coexists can be; and finally to always do my best, because this moment may be my last, knowing that my best is always in flux and that it is also my all.
These commitments to myself in my life continue to liberate my heart and mind from the violence I’ve been taught to carry out upon myself. These commitments to myself have exponentially increased my emotional capacity to walk with joy in my heart and my political eyes wide open. This is radical love to me.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:10 pm #
ODDitite415–I *loved* reading your comment. It gave me chills–I can feel your power over here!!!
I especially noted this part:
it’s so interesting to me that you mention this, because this was actually something I specifically struggled through with Jess–she mentioned something in an offhand remark to me (I can’t even remember what) and almost immediatly–I went into hyper paranoid overdrive–does she not want to do this collaboration with me because I’m fat and out of shape and physically still recovering from years long sickness? Every evil bad thing I had been told about my body and why nobody would like *me* because *my body* was “wrong” came welling up–but for probably the first time in my life, I took a really deep breath and asked Jess to please clarify what she meant–when usually I would’ve just decided FOR HER what she meant and taken off and hidden again–following my pattern of hiding. I don’t know if it was that I was strong enough for once, to handle it if my worst fears were spoken out loud, or if I trusted her enough to know that she didn’t *really* mean it the way I took it, but I needed to hear it from her–I just don’t know.
But it felt really great to achieve that step–to be willing to jump into the deep end of the pool, because goddamn it, I’m going to finally recognize that I CAN SWIM.
January 21st, 2009 at 8:43 pm #
since we’re being so transparent all around about this process, i feel like i should mention in response to bfp’s last comment:
the remark i made that triggered bfp’s doubts was a question about why *she* wanted to do this particular work with *me* – i saw her doing this amazing thinking and action around women of color and health and bodies, and i was wondering whether i (a white person) was really an appropriate collaborator in that particular work. but i guess when i first tried to ask that, i didn’t articulate it very clearly (i.e., i know we started collaborating about one thing, and it morphed into a different thing, and now i’m not sure if my white self is really the right collaborator on this new path you want to take, or if i’ll be taking up space that i shouldn’t be occupying) – so although all that seemed clear to me as the implication of the question i asked about why bfp wanted to do this movement/body collaboration with me in particular, she read really different implications into it.
what i’m most grateful for about this project is that we then broke all that down and processed it together, believing in communication, relationship building, looking with trust and critical support at ourselves and each other …
January 21st, 2009 at 9:39 pm #
(my comment in moderation looks all weird, so i’m posting again. feel free to delete this if it’s just my browser being wonky.)
“I wanted to work on being accountable, not to feminism, not to ‘the movement,’ not to some great sounding ideals or even other women of color. I wanted to be accountable to myself. I wanted to love myself, and through learning to love myself, learn to love, trust, care about, take care of, be strong for, and be in community with others.”
yes, yes, yes.
this is so fucking important. not only for the sake of my own self-care, but ultimately: i want to be a part of a community/movement/world that is grounded in these principles, that encourages us to take of and love ourselves, where we don’t have to choose between “being a good activist” and self-care, where we’re applauded and honored for listening to our bodies & intuitions and giving ourselves what we need– and then by extension, the kind of love and support we can give to each other when we are not so depleted, exhausted, worn thin.
i’m rambling, but i really love what of this collaboration y’all have posted so far, & am so excited to read the rest!
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:34 am #
This makes me think about undoing systems of power rather than changing them to accommodate more options.
But I also wonder what happens when you/I recognize that you/I can’t swim — my hope is that that also is part of this process of “building, creating, restructuring, recognizing, remembering.”
Looking forward to this project!
Love –
mattilda
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:47 am #
So much of this I want to respond to, and am excited by, and rings bells of recognition for me, and makes me so grateful that whatever it is you and Jess are doing (I think it’s right-on-track for me to not fully understand it yet, since you are both talking about it in increments, true or false?), you are doing it “out here,” so to speak, so that I get to see it and connect to it how and where I want to and all of that.
Which, for the record, I feel connected to all of it so far, in deeply personal ways. Love you both.
Also, your website is one of the ones that for some godforsaken reason my work computer is blocking with some new filtering program that’s been put on our work network. (It’s new for it to block it – we’ve had the filters on there for a little while now – it just started denying access to “uncategorized” websites these last few days. All of which is to say, my BFP-absorption windows have been tinier lately, else I would have been enjoying reading and commenting days ago here.)
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:33 am #
Radical love.
What is a brick?
Intentional walking.
How do we build a new world?
The only thing I have to share in response is something I did two days ago that felt more right and love-ful than anything I’ve done as an “activist.”
One of my dearest confidants and friends is White. She is one of those woman who I feel validates my problems, affirms my opinions, and keeps my soul.
That kind of friend.
When I was in the beginning throws of learning about organizing within a beautiful group of radical women of color, I began to deconstruct what my new world was looking like – gorgeous faces of color, of life that I never had before – and began questioning the relationship I had formed with so many others who were becoming slowly confused as to my life direction – “feminism,” activism, movements, and justice.
And yet something felt off as I kept organizing and ignoring this tug in my heart that kept whispering, “This is good, but it’s not radical love.”
Radical love takes time to see. It takes this near superhuman experience to patiently wait and persevere through the shit that is impatience, NOWNOWNOW urgency, and panic that comes with the urge to DO SOMETHING NOW TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM, CHANGE THE WORLD, CHANGE THE MODELS.
I think the “now” of everything nearly killed me.
Radical love meant calling my best friend and crying my truth out…that I loved her despite all our differences, how much pain I was in because of my activism, and how much I needed her to understand that her *Whiteness* wasn’t the problem, it was my inability to understand what it meant now that I finally understood my own *Brownness.* And my indescribable drive to deconstruct “White” feminism and western concepts of privilege slowly began to fade and in its place was a small peace of green, a handful of grass meant to be planted for me, just me. And it filled me with a wind and softness that I haven’t felt in years.
It was time to admit that “activism” as I had come to know it was a wonderful but imperfect thing.
The racial point between me and my friend is not what is important. My point is that radical love takes us to the places we most resist to pick up the bricks over THERE, in the darkest terrains of our hearts, to build a new world.
It means somehow finding a way to let go of the parts of you that are in terrible pain because of activism and the truth that it will never fulfill you the way life alone is meant to. And it means that a nuanced way of being is in order.
Radical love and building a new world means building a new life for activists where our progress is measured by what we build, not by what we take down (as Obama iterated the the other day).
I agree with you, BFP, that this IS different than movement making. It’s LIFE making.
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:26 am #
@lisa–SUCH a beautiful comment. I am loving loving loving reading these comments. They are so powerful and so real and so based in the moment.
to stick with mattilda’s comment–I want to just point out (be a little clowd on the party), that I’ve had those same conversations you’re talking about lisa–and it didn’t go well. I’ve lost friends/family because of conversations like that–and I want to reaffirm, deeply deeply reaffirm that when experiences like yours are supposed to happen, they are SO beautiful and SO important and SO healing and deeply deeply radically about love.
But I also want to deeply affirm the many times that those conversations DON’T go well…that lots of times, they can destroy as well. Or you can be that person that, like i was and still am in probably most cases, still unable to swim in the deep end. still unable to handle that quiet pause before an answer or the vieled look. or who can finally handle it, and loses everything anyway.
This is so where jess and I wanted to go–into those deep dark places of reality–negotiating between the worst choice and the most awful choice. because that’s where liberation, radical love, building new worlds stems from–but they sure as fuck aren’t easy choices, and the way our system is set up now–it sure doesn’t *teach* you how to make those choices (or show you ways to navigate through the choices, at least)……
I am thinking very deeply right now, and I thank everybody for contributing their thoughts….
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:18 pm #
Thanks so much for this bfp… amidst protests against Israel’s war on Lebanon in ’06 that made me feel demoralized and powerless, rather than empowered or motivated (the bombing just went on and on), I went to play anarchist soccer one day and talked to Scott Crow, who co-founded Common Ground Relief… he talked about this thing called ‘dual power theory’ which guides his work – that some of us protest and campaign to tear down the old hierarchies, while others work on building new and just institutions from the bottom-up like you’ve described (and some of us do both). That framework has really helped me since then to not expect immediate results from any particular action, to respect different kinds of movement-/world-making… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_power
One thing I still struggle with though is trying to find a healthy balance of positive and negative motivation… Like you mentioned building this new world is a long-term project, that it’ll probably take place over your children’s or maybe their children’s lifetimes… I’ve thought about that too, and you’re probably right. I should be realistic, otherwise I’m setting myself up for massive disappointment, I’ve thought to myself.
But I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it if things aren’t drastically better by the tail end of my lifetime. I just can’t stand the thought of being 60-years-old and watching the destruction wrought by some US-backed army on the news. I can’t stand the thought of waking up one morning at that age and reading about another young man or woman being murdered by the police. I really, really want to live in something closely resembling this new world, not just to hope that my children can live in it after I die. Is it wrong to want that?
Sometimes it feels amazing to carry that passion into my work – I can get a lot of shit done when I know I’m making progress with others towards making this vision into a shared reality in our own lifetimes. Sometimes it feels like to let go of that vision would be to abandon people who are suffering right now, who obviously can’t wait for a distant new world. But more and more often this (selfish?) desire feels like a burden – it makes new outbreaks of violence, like the latest one in Gaza, or setbacks in movement-/world-making felt all the more strongly. It brings back those feelings of demoralization and powerlessness that sometimes push me into a temporary but total withdrawal from my own important work and activism.
I don’t see Scott or other wonderful organizers in my community get to that place, I admire them for it, and so I wonder if I should resign myself to not living in that new world after all – if at least in the present-day that would make me a more positive and effective person, or if on the other hand it might at times make me more complacent… or, and most likely, if this is a kind of false dichotomy I’m imposing on myself. There’s a balance, I think, that I just haven’t found yet…
(I hesitated for a long time to submit this comment here, since it feels like a personal, incomplete, and possibly selfish and nonsensical thought that’s not directly germane to the subject of the post… but on the off-chance it makes sense to some other folks, here goes.)
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm #
ansel, I don’t think at ALL that you were being selfish or nonsensical. I think you are being brave and admitting to the feelings SO many of us have–I mean, just in admitting that you felt that this might be selfish to write all this, I identified with you so much–that’s one of the things that I confronted in doing the work with Jess. Are we being too self-centered? Are we making our world, one of (relative) safety more important than the total hell of the people of gaza, the *mothers* in gaza who have seen their children destroyed?
Everything you’ve said here outside of that–i identify so much with. it seems like such a privilege to work on relaxing, being good to yourself, etc–but I wonder how much of that is 1. a sign of how violence has become so integral to our structure (really, what would the other choice be here, run yourself to the ground i.e. punish yourself for not being as punished as others are?–so while the government is busy punishing them, it doesn’t need to worry about *us*, because we’re doing it’s job *for* it) and 2. how taking care of yourself has been incorporated into the capitalistic system–that is, taking care of yourself is a ‘special treat’ that you get for ‘working hard’–taking care of yourself is something you buy, something you *earn* while showing your dedication to capitalism– NOT a human freaking right.
I mean–i’m speaking *very* generally here, because what *is* taking care of yourself? Is it taking a bath and ‘destressing’? Or is it making sure you get to a dentist? Or is it going for a walk? I think ‘taking care of yourself’ is *so* hard to define–but OUR structure tries to define it *for* us every single day–so that we can *buy* it–but maybe liberatory ‘taking care of ourselves’ is something different. maybe it’s something that can’t be bought, and so we have to work harder to find it–or maybe it’s *easier* to find it because it’s been sitting in front of us all this time…
I am SO rambling right now.
another connected/not connected thought. I am thinking of a comment that Fire Fly left at my blog one day–a long time ago. And she was talking about coming down from the stress of WTO protests that had happened in Australia–it had involved spying and surveillance and violence…and she talked about how the thing that felt most right to her and her friends was sitting around eating simple food and listening to a friend play guitar. There’s something in there, some truth in there that I can’t hear or see right now, but I know it’s in there, and I keep thinking back to it right now.
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:09 pm #
Thanks for this BFP. It echoes so many thoughts that have been bumping around in my brain/heart. We should meet up soon and kick it on the EMU couches. I miss our meeting-shittalking-giggle-time.
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:59 pm #
The dialogue is beyond deep, wow. I love it. We need this. Thank you.
It’s so interesting that I’ve been talking about listening to my body a lot. And many times refer to my body as the biggest intuition and play a close attention to my body to make certain decisions like whether I need to step back from something/someone.
I need to hear this, especially as I embark with grad school, blogging, full time work, mamihood, being co-chair of a group and other projects.
How in the world staying intentional and prioritizing accountability to self.
This is a let’s get on the road to heal ourselves conversation, and I’m walking behind you all.
xoxo
January 25th, 2009 at 3:36 pm #
Very insightful and i appreciate your frankness. I understand your point about movement building v grassroots basebuilding but maybe its the US – I don’t know for sure but my understanding of movements in Southern Africa is that they are about building a strong grassroots base and are ongoing – ongoing in a permanent sense not least of all because movement building is not just about one particular set of people, issue or events. So by that definition movement building is on going and most definitely not “event” or “situation” driven. IN short everything you describe as basebuilding is what I experience as movement building in say the South African Land Rights movement which is a struggle to build community brick by brick word by word and to work towards creating a different world and mindset. This is what African LGBTI activists are beginning to work out. So as I said maybe there are different ideas of what “a movement” is or is not based on how things work in different parts of the world but I have never thought of protest and rallying as the epicentre . Yes it maybe – will be necessary to protest but more importantly there has to be a great deal of work on figuring out what it is we want and how we can change our lives and work outwards from there.
I have to say I do have a problem with “organisations” working with people – so I hear you on that one to the point when I began to wonder about myself. But then I realised that it is the way people organise that is problematic for me in the sense that there tends to be an issue driven approach instead of a building block approach
January 25th, 2009 at 3:43 pm #
Just a brief additional response to accountability – this is exactly what is needed and first of all to ourselves because without that we cannot expect to be accountable to our communities etc. If we do not love ourselves it is very hard to love others – I have had a long term issue about loving myself and have had to work on a commitment to myself so that I can commit to others. As Che said – we must love the revolution we must love our comrades. So that is when I know this is where I need to be in my head at least.