from 2006:
Towards Theories of Healing, Loving and Dreaming
Lessons and Questions for Sustainable, Humane Movement Building
This dissertation began with a question. It wasn’t the ones that were
important in the elite white Marxists’ classes that I attended, such
as, why aren’t the masses rising up? And it wasn’t the one that comes
up in social movement theory: what accounts for the narrowly defined
“success” of social movements? Rather, it began from the point of view
of people who are in struggle, already. What are the questions that
emerge from people already involved in processes of social change?
What are our theories of the world and how to change it, if we look at
what we do as a sort of cultural formation? What ways of thinking and
doing do we need to amplify and proliferate in order to be able to do
movement building towards, justice, sustainability, and
self-determination, more successfully?
What I meant by the question is that inherently there is theory in
what we do and how we work together. Our ideas of how our worlds work
and how to make change inform the types of campaign strategy we take
on, the campaigns we take on at all, the tactics we use, the networks
we mobilize, and ultimately, over the long-term, the trajectories we
take as individuals and organizations and movements. And, to the
extent that one learns along the way and evaluates oneself and
actions, there are opportunities to do things differently the next
time. Alternatively, among my scholarly oriented friends and
colleagues, there is a way of viewing scholarship that is defined more
by the company you keep than the activities one engages in. You are a
scholar if you hang out with other scholars and if you look to them
for approval. That is, if you are insular. Go ahead, then, I’m cool. I
got my people and we’re working on something bigger than us. There’s
thinking, analyzing, reading, discussing and acting, writing, all
involved.
Organizers. we do what a lot of people who may not consider themselves
organizers do: work with people, try to make things happen, keep us
working together when we hit rough spots, help us think, hear, and see
ourselves collectively in ways that inspire us to keep on struggling
against the systems that fail us and to create alternative formations.
And scholars, we also do things that other people who may not consider
themselves scholars do: listen, read, write, think, observe, reflect,
talk. And those activities are all necessary, the one for the other,
in order to produce effective change that has a hope of lasting a
little while. For example, the people in a collective project called
Movement Generation, I think we are working on that combination of
study, reflection and thinking-together-that-informs-action, that may
build movement in the Bay Area for the long term. We are taking
seriously Laura Pulido’s recommendation that movements take seriously
the building of individuals’ capacity over time along with
organizational and movement capacity.
What I write about and participate in are struggles for environmental
justice. And in the environmental justice movement, we define
environment as where we live, work, and play, and pray, worship, and
all that. This definition arose out of the experiences of low-income
communities and communities of color who kept finding themselves
fighting the operation and placement of incinerators, hazardous waste
transfer facilities, toxic landfills, power plants, and other things
that harmed our communities, in our neighborhoods. We understood that
to be coming out of the long history of broken links between land and
culture and people’s survival. And we found that in the 1970s, we were
more often fighting elite white communities’ environmentalists than
those environmentalists were willing or able to help us, and that
actually those elites were decision makers precisely because they had
benefited from the moving and re-moving of our people from land and
culture over the last 500 years, if not longer. And we have been
beginning to understand that they themselves, some of them carry a lot
of guilt and shame as much as our communities carry the political
economic burden and deep psychological trauma from these histories. So
as a movement, we are realizing, especially the youth, and to
paraphrase Laura Pulido’s paraphrasing of Robin Kelley, that our
communities are in dire need of healing.
Our communities are in dire need of healing.
At the same time, our communities had developed new generations of
experienced leaders and politicized communities coming out of
formations like the American Indian Movement, the Chicano movement,
the Brown Berets, the Asian American movement, the Pilipino movement,
Third World feminism, Civil Rights, radical power formations, Third
World liberation struggles, and so on. Some of us had worked together,
and we also knew some allies with technical skills, and we were
starting to have our own people with technical expertise, that we
could use both direct action tactics from one era of movements and the
various technical routes to wage our struggles on many fronts. And
sometimes we win. So struggling, then, for us, is often a form of
healing the individual and collective psychological wounds that we all
bear from the entwining of capitalism and racism and all that. And it
may begin the process of dreaming – of articulating collective visions
for what the safe, healthy places we want to live with healthy
compassionate and loving communities.
Healing for communities of color may take the form of reclaiming
culture and tradition in a world that has erased and homogenized our
ideas of who we are, reduced Asian cultures and traditions to a
dragon, two lions, firecrackers and Chinese food. Healing is also not
accepting inscribed forms of harassment and difference, the authentic
used to divide our families into generations and to naturalize the
generation gap. Authentically Chinese, authentically American,
authentically Black, real live Native. In the scan of youth and young
people’s organizing in environmental justice, Native communities in
particular, and certain movement organizations rooted in Chicano
communities and movement, articulated this healing in terms of
community and family, love of family, love of community, broadly
defined, with all the warts, bumps, pimples and skeletons and ghosts
in closets. As we saw in the campaign with Pacific Renaissance, we –
CJWP – created this community that was all our people. Movement
elders, immigrant elders. All our people included high school students
who gave the last nickels and quarters in their pockets and
professional import-export businessmen who could write checks for
amounts we couldn’t conceive, from our brothers and uncles and friends
who work in social service provision and help people like our parents
find work, to the professional computer programmers and doctors who
don’t. All our people also encompasses those who grew up in “real”
Chinatowns to the ones who grew up in vanilla suburbs and the ones who
came via refugee camps in Malaysia and fifth generations from Hawaii
or Peru or Trinidad. This casting of a wide net is about the
revolutionary love that Che invokes, and the honoring of generations
past in finding and fulfilling our generation’s duties and missions.
Our communities, beloved communities, are like this. In the words of
Kiwi, LA and Bay Area based Pilipino hip hop artist, I spit for all creatures alien and human being
Whether you’re deaf dumb blind or all-seein’
Whether you Filipino Korean Black or Mexican
Whether you straight gay lesbian queer or questionin’ Young people are at the forefront of reclaiming but also adapting and
changing formations around race, gender, sexuality and identity, in
many ways realizing what was begun with the Black Panthers, the
Chicano movement and the Brown Berets, the Asian American movement
with its myriad formations shifting one into the other. Fusing
identity to liberation, an analysis of shifting modalities of global
capitalism to oppression of specific peoples in particular places and
times, and then linking those many identities into networks of sparks,
the one inspiring the other. Tssssssss …. Pop! And we’re off. Building
movement.
One form of healing may be do reclaim identities, cultures, and many
ways of being and doing that are fragmented or foreclosed through
capitalism, to proclaim and value wholeness, to reject the
encroachment of an economic way of thinking into the many spheres of
life. As Holloway writes about the concept of dignity articulated in
zapatismo, Truth is dignity, having the dignity to say at last the 'Enough!' that
would restore meaning to the deaths of their dead. Dignity is to
assert one's humanity in a society which treats us inhumanly. Dignity
is to assert our wholeness in a society which fragments us. Dignity is
to assert control over one's life in a society which denies such
control. Dignity is to live, in the present, the Not Yet for which we
struggle.
“Dignity is to assert our wholeness in a society which fragments us.”
The Zapatistas wrote, in the Sixth Declaration of June 2005, this
definition of neoliberalism”
neoliberalism is the idea that capitalism is free to dominate the
entire world, and so tough, you have to resign yourself and conform
and not make a fuss, in other words, not rebel. So neoliberalism is
like the theory, the plan, of capitalist globalization. And
neoliberalism has its economic, political, military and cultural
plans. All of those plans have to do with dominating everyone, and
they repress or separate anyone who doesn’t obey so that his
rebellious ideas aren’t passed on to others.
Healing takes daring intellectual honesty, creativity and practice.
So does movement. So does revolution. “It's about Che's Love. It's
about shaking boundaries of all kinds and even breaking them.” The
struggle is the blessing.
From all that work, that you’ve seen the pieces of in the past few
chapters, I wonder, don’t we need a theory of compassion and love that
would help us get through the rough times? It’s related to what Laura
Pulido (2005) tells us is a need to take seriously the work of
conflict resolution withi n our organizations, our coalitions, our
relationships, for our movements, our people, our families, our world.
As she writes, Many activists are skilled at waging conflict and challenging the
established powers, but those talents do not necessarily translate
into effective communication and conflict resolution within their own
colleagues. As a result, organizations may split, develop factions,
and self-destruct. Sometimes these tensions are due to genuine
political disagreements in which case a separation may be necessary.
But other times needless pain, rejection and humiliation result from
people's inability to communicate effectively and compassionately and
handle differences. .. It'll be difficult because they challenge one
of the fundamentals of activist culture: focusing on the long term
instead of the immediate crisis.
So here we are, and that’s as good a reason for needing to think and
talk about healing as part of a loving practice of enabling justice.
Towards Theories of Healing, Loving and Dreaming
Lessons and Questions for Sustainable, Humane Movement Building
This dissertation began with a question. It wasn’t the ones that were
important in the elite white Marxists’ classes that I attended, such
as, why aren’t the masses rising up? And it wasn’t the one that comes
up in social movement theory: what accounts for the narrowly defined
“success” of social movements? Rather, it began from the point of view
of people who are in struggle, already. What are the questions that
emerge from people already involved in processes of social change?
What are our theories of the world and how to change it, if we look at
what we do as a sort of cultural formation? What ways of thinking and
doing do we need to amplify and proliferate in order to be able to do
movement building towards, justice, sustainability, and
self-determination, more successfully?
What I meant by the question is that inherently there is theory in
what we do and how we work together. Our ideas of how our worlds work
and how to make change inform the types of campaign strategy we take
on, the campaigns we take on at all, the tactics we use, the networks
we mobilize, and ultimately, over the long-term, the trajectories we
take as individuals and organizations and movements. And, to the
extent that one learns along the way and evaluates oneself and
actions, there are opportunities to do things differently the next
time. Alternatively, among my scholarly oriented friends and
colleagues, there is a way of viewing scholarship that is defined more
by the company you keep than the activities one engages in. You are a
scholar if you hang out with other scholars and if you look to them
for approval. That is, if you are insular. Go ahead, then, I’m cool. I
got my people and we’re working on something bigger than us. There’s
thinking, analyzing, reading, discussing and acting, writing, all
involved.
Organizers. we do what a lot of people who may not consider themselves
organizers do: work with people, try to make things happen, keep us
working together when we hit rough spots, help us think, hear, and see
ourselves collectively in ways that inspire us to keep on struggling
against the systems that fail us and to create alternative formations.
And scholars, we also do things that other people who may not consider
themselves scholars do: listen, read, write, think, observe, reflect,
talk. And those activities are all necessary, the one for the other,
in order to produce effective change that has a hope of lasting a
little while. For example, the people in a collective project called
Movement Generation, I think we are working on that combination of
study, reflection and thinking-together-that-informs-action, that may
build movement in the Bay Area for the long term. We are taking
seriously Laura Pulido’s recommendation that movements take seriously
the building of individuals’ capacity over time along with
organizational and movement capacity.
What I write about and participate in are struggles for environmental
justice. And in the environmental justice movement, we define
environment as where we live, work, and play, and pray, worship, and
all that. This definition arose out of the experiences of low-income
communities and communities of color who kept finding themselves
fighting the operation and placement of incinerators, hazardous waste
transfer facilities, toxic landfills, power plants, and other things
that harmed our communities, in our neighborhoods. We understood that
to be coming out of the long history of broken links between land and
culture and people’s survival. And we found that in the 1970s, we were
more often fighting elite white communities’ environmentalists than
those environmentalists were willing or able to help us, and that
actually those elites were decision makers precisely because they had
benefited from the moving and re-moving of our people from land and
culture over the last 500 years, if not longer. And we have been
beginning to understand that they themselves, some of them carry a lot
of guilt and shame as much as our communities carry the political
economic burden and deep psychological trauma from these histories. So
as a movement, we are realizing, especially the youth, and to
paraphrase Laura Pulido’s paraphrasing of Robin Kelley, that our
communities are in dire need of healing.
Our communities are in dire need of healing.
At the same time, our communities had developed new generations of
experienced leaders and politicized communities coming out of
formations like the American Indian Movement, the Chicano movement,
the Brown Berets, the Asian American movement, the Pilipino movement,
Third World feminism, Civil Rights, radical power formations, Third
World liberation struggles, and so on. Some of us had worked together,
and we also knew some allies with technical skills, and we were
starting to have our own people with technical expertise, that we
could use both direct action tactics from one era of movements and the
various technical routes to wage our struggles on many fronts. And
sometimes we win. So struggling, then, for us, is often a form of
healing the individual and collective psychological wounds that we all
bear from the entwining of capitalism and racism and all that. And it
may begin the process of dreaming – of articulating collective visions
for what the safe, healthy places we want to live with healthy
compassionate and loving communities.
Healing for communities of color may take the form of reclaiming
culture and tradition in a world that has erased and homogenized our
ideas of who we are, reduced Asian cultures and traditions to a
dragon, two lions, firecrackers and Chinese food. Healing is also not
accepting inscribed forms of harassment and difference, the authentic
used to divide our families into generations and to naturalize the
generation gap. Authentically Chinese, authentically American,
authentically Black, real live Native. In the scan of youth and young
people’s organizing in environmental justice, Native communities in
particular, and certain movement organizations rooted in Chicano
communities and movement, articulated this healing in terms of
community and family, love of family, love of community, broadly
defined, with all the warts, bumps, pimples and skeletons and ghosts
in closets. As we saw in the campaign with Pacific Renaissance, we –
CJWP – created this community that was all our people. Movement
elders, immigrant elders. All our people included high school students
who gave the last nickels and quarters in their pockets and
professional import-export businessmen who could write checks for
amounts we couldn’t conceive, from our brothers and uncles and friends
who work in social service provision and help people like our parents
find work, to the professional computer programmers and doctors who
don’t. All our people also encompasses those who grew up in “real”
Chinatowns to the ones who grew up in vanilla suburbs and the ones who
came via refugee camps in Malaysia and fifth generations from Hawaii
or Peru or Trinidad. This casting of a wide net is about the
revolutionary love that Che invokes, and the honoring of generations
past in finding and fulfilling our generation’s duties and missions.
Our communities, beloved communities, are like this. In the words of
Kiwi, LA and Bay Area based Pilipino hip hop artist, I spit for all creatures alien and human being
Whether you’re deaf dumb blind or all-seein’
Whether you Filipino Korean Black or Mexican
Whether you straight gay lesbian queer or questionin’ Young people are at the forefront of reclaiming but also adapting and
changing formations around race, gender, sexuality and identity, in
many ways realizing what was begun with the Black Panthers, the
Chicano movement and the Brown Berets, the Asian American movement
with its myriad formations shifting one into the other. Fusing
identity to liberation, an analysis of shifting modalities of global
capitalism to oppression of specific peoples in particular places and
times, and then linking those many identities into networks of sparks,
the one inspiring the other. Tssssssss …. Pop! And we’re off. Building
movement.
One form of healing may be do reclaim identities, cultures, and many
ways of being and doing that are fragmented or foreclosed through
capitalism, to proclaim and value wholeness, to reject the
encroachment of an economic way of thinking into the many spheres of
life. As Holloway writes about the concept of dignity articulated in
zapatismo, Truth is dignity, having the dignity to say at last the 'Enough!' that
would restore meaning to the deaths of their dead. Dignity is to
assert one's humanity in a society which treats us inhumanly. Dignity
is to assert our wholeness in a society which fragments us. Dignity is
to assert control over one's life in a society which denies such
control. Dignity is to live, in the present, the Not Yet for which we
struggle.
“Dignity is to assert our wholeness in a society which fragments us.”
The Zapatistas wrote, in the Sixth Declaration of June 2005, this
definition of neoliberalism”
neoliberalism is the idea that capitalism is free to dominate the
entire world, and so tough, you have to resign yourself and conform
and not make a fuss, in other words, not rebel. So neoliberalism is
like the theory, the plan, of capitalist globalization. And
neoliberalism has its economic, political, military and cultural
plans. All of those plans have to do with dominating everyone, and
they repress or separate anyone who doesn’t obey so that his
rebellious ideas aren’t passed on to others.
Healing takes daring intellectual honesty, creativity and practice.
So does movement. So does revolution. “It's about Che's Love. It's
about shaking boundaries of all kinds and even breaking them.” The
struggle is the blessing.
From all that work, that you’ve seen the pieces of in the past few
chapters, I wonder, don’t we need a theory of compassion and love that
would help us get through the rough times? It’s related to what Laura
Pulido (2005) tells us is a need to take seriously the work of
conflict resolution withi n our organizations, our coalitions, our
relationships, for our movements, our people, our families, our world.
As she writes, Many activists are skilled at waging conflict and challenging the
established powers, but those talents do not necessarily translate
into effective communication and conflict resolution within their own
colleagues. As a result, organizations may split, develop factions,
and self-destruct. Sometimes these tensions are due to genuine
political disagreements in which case a separation may be necessary.
But other times needless pain, rejection and humiliation result from
people's inability to communicate effectively and compassionately and
handle differences. .. It'll be difficult because they challenge one
of the fundamentals of activist culture: focusing on the long term
instead of the immediate crisis.
So here we are, and that’s as good a reason for needing to think and
talk about healing as part of a loving practice of enabling justice.
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