Susannah

by Josh Carrera

The Mayday Festival of Resistance took place at Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn, NY on Saturday, April 28, 2018. Pictured from left to right: Sandy Nurse, Josh Carrera, Nitty Scott, Zyad Hammad

In all shapes and sizes, beauty is recognized
Goddess and queens is what we use to describe
Now Michelle Alexander wrote the new constitution
Beyoncé made the music for the revolution
Imagine it, a world more compassionate

Common, The Day Women Took Over

One of my favorite rappers, Common, has a song titled ‘The Day Women Took Over’ where he describes a day in the life of the U.S. after women take over the halls of power, society, and culture. On this day, “women get paid as much as men do” and we see “Monuments in Washington of Fanny Lou Hamer.” I get excited chills thinking about what kind of America we would have if Michelle Alexander, civil rights activist and author of The New Jim Crow, rewrote our constitution like Common imagines. It would mean the end to mass incarceration and legal slavery as we know it. Ella Saltmarshe writes in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that “we can use story to create immersive scenarios of the future that engage people on an emotional and intellectual level”. The power of Common’s song lies in his ability to paint a picture of a utopia that seems very plausible in our lifetime because of his references to modern day women, like Beyoncé, already creating this more just and perfect world.

Mayday, also known as International Workers Day, is a day in New York City where we celebrate the resistance led by immigrant communities and undocumented workers. And I wonder what a song titled ‘The Day Immigrants Took Over’ would sound like. What victories and celebrations would undocumented workers and children of immigrants, such as myself, include in our song?

Listening to Common’s song, I imagine how story, a core practice in my work at Center for Whole Communities, can be used as a tool and practice of liberation. I imagine how my story is one of liberation. Being raised by a single mother who had to overcome her struggles in the face of racism and sexism gives me insight. On Mayday in Brooklyn, I look to her story to imagine The Day Immigrants Took Over.

My mother first arrived to the U.S. in 1985 when she was 23. She came to NYC and did not speak any English, hadn’t finished high school, and didn’t know how she would establish a life for herself in America. She worked hard selling leather goods in lower Manhattan while training to become a home care nurse. When I was born, despite the fact that she had an incredible work ethic, she was a single, working-class mother with broken English and no formal education. This meant that the intersecting oppressive systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism would result in multiple job losses, poor pay, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination. Growing up, these issues would never go away and impacted our struggle to survive. Even worse, I spent a significant portion of my childhood believing that our struggles came from personal or character flaws that were just part of who we were.

As I write this blog post, I wonder how much of what I internalized at a young age was because of the dangerous story we were being told about people of color and “bad” immigrants. Why wasn’t I told about the beauty of our survival in the face of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism? It wasn’t until I got to college and became involved with my school’s center for students of color and the Women’s Center that I would come to appreciate and understand the interlocking systems of oppression shaping my upbringing. Practices such as story and working across difference, core to our work and theory of change at CWC, helped me uncover a narrative of resistance and perseverance in my upbringing. I discovered in my story that despite the interlocking systems of oppression in my mother’s life, she protected us at all cost to give us a better life down the road. In some small and intimate ways, her protection of me and herself already represented a day in which immigrants took over. Her battles for dignity and protection of us were a fight against white supremacy. That’s what my mother did for me every single day of my life. Our love for one another was birthed in that struggle for survival.

“The Day Women Took Over” by Common is a beautiful song painting an Afro-futuristic vision of what our country would look like if those at the margins of society had power, agency, and self-determination. I don’t think that my version would be too different from his. My song, “The Day Immigrants Took Over”, would fight the illegitimate stories being sold and fed to us every day of immigrants being “dangerous” and “scary.” We would no longer have I.C.E. raids and detention centers would be transformed into social justice organizing hubs led by the people. The gender wage gap would cease to exist and borders would be no more. Common’s version calls for “a world more compassionate.” At the core of “The Day Immigrants Took Over” would be a reclaiming of our story and a narrative of collective liberation.

“The Day Immigrants Took Over” would be a celebration of working across difference and humanity. It would be the perfect remix to a revolutionary song and the official anthem to Mayday festivities.

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Josh Carrera is a proud New Yorker that grew up in Brooklyn to a first generation Ecuadorian immigrant family. During his years in college and graduate school, Josh’s interests led him to study sustainable development and international relations in Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil. More recently, Josh has been involved in local environmental and housing issues in his native city. One of Joshua’s proudest accomplishments has been organizing a six-day volunteer event where New Yorkers planted close to 8,000 trees over six days at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Josh is a founding member of Mi Casa No Es Su Casa: Illumination Against Gentrification, an activist project which uses art as a form of protest against the rapid neo-colonization of Brooklyn neighborhoods. Josh is a proud collective member of Mayday Space – a social justice movement space where he is working on building a radical library that values truth, critical thinking, and justice. In his free time, Josh loves to take salsa and bachata classes or photograph the newest city he is visiting.

by Josh Carrera

If emotions and intellect were currency, I may soon be going broke. As a person of color from a working class background, I feel like I often pay an emotional or intellectual tax when I am engaged in social change work with those that claim to want change but show up half-heartedly, especially in predominantly white institutions. This tax is a result of the contradictions of trying to enact change within the existing system and leaving the hard work to folks from marginalized backgrounds. The tax increases as I am asked to be involved but never given any real power to create structural change. The most recent example I have is dealing with the unintended consequences of organizational white culture at a previous job.

On November 9th, 2016, the country woke up to a historic election in which a large portion of our country chose racism, misogyny, and xenophobia to represent us at the highest level of government. By midday on November 9th, various people in positions of power and leadership sent emails out to staff saying that despite the shocking electoral news, the organization would work across the aisle with the new administration on issues that were mission relevant. I was hurt and devastated that the place where I worked would agree to work with a new administration keen on using hate to divide us. The willingness to overlook the hateful rhetoric from the campaign signaled to me that major institutions led by those with privilege would begin to normalize the dangers of the new administration. I remember showing up to work feeling depressed and hopeless in our ability to fight and resist. At that moment, I needed a workplace that was nurturing and supportive. Instead, the message in my workplace immediately represented complicity by washing over the very real threat this new administration posed.

So for those of us with identities that hold less privilege, in my case being a person of color in predominately white institutions, why do we exist in spaces of contradictions that tax us? How should we engage in our work and what should we ask of our colleagues and friends with more power and privilege?

It’s an interesting curiosity that those of us in the social justice field find ourselves holding space for power and privilege and working within systems that thrive off oppressive cultures. I suspect that we choose to exist in spaces of contradictions and unequal power with our oppressors because our vision of liberation includes them, too. Feminist bell hooks captures this thought when she writes ” forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

One suggestion for this transformation has been allyship – “a lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups of people.” Allyship is a very important first step but I don’t think it’s enough for two reasons. First, allyship has been critiqued on the basis that it focuses too much on what an individual can do and not enough on the structural and systems level changes needed to dismantle oppression. Second, I want and need more than allyship, I want the power to make change.

Power helps facilitate change because it allows us to change the rules of the game. I remember being encouraged to join a previous institutions’ committee on diversity and inclusion to make a difference. Not only did it sometimes feel like there was an element of tokenization in my participation but I never had any actual structural power to create change. A question I continue asking myself is: how do we transform organizations embedded in oppressive cultures promoting white supremacy or capitalism? I would argue that the problem starts when we go in the direction of ‘diversity and inclusion’ instead of cultural and systemic change. The former is intended for assimilation or improving efficiency and the latter is transformative.

In order to relieve the emotional tax some of us pay, organizations and individuals need to embrace work that is intended to be transformative and not push assimilation. However, what can those of us, in particularly people of color, coming from marginalized identities do to protect and heal ourselves in that process? We could benefit from an allyship that centers liberation by shifting the emotional and intellectual labor of anti-oppression work and proportionally distributing it to the power and privilege each of us hold. This could potentially show up as caucusing by identities and leveraging the power of each respective group to be in solidarity with one another.

Let us embrace forgiveness and compassion in our social change work like bell hooks suggests. In that process, my hope is that we’ll remain in touch long enough see each others’ humanity. However, let us also consider, to quote Frederick Douglass, that “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

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Josh Carrera is a proud New Yorker that grew up in Brooklyn to a first generation Ecuadorian immigrant family. During his years in college and graduate school, Josh’s interests led him to study sustainable development and international relations in Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil. More recently, Josh has been involved in local environmental and housing issues in his native city. One of Joshua’s proudest accomplishments has been organizing a six day volunteer event where New Yorkers planted close to 8,000 trees over six days at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Josh is a founding member of Mi Casa No Es Su Casa: Illumination Against Gentrification, an activist project which uses art as a form of protest against the rapid neo-colonization of Brooklyn neighborhoods. Josh is a proud collective member of Mayday Space – a social justice movement space where he is working on building a radical library that values truth, critical thinking, and justice.

by Melanie Katz

The Buddhist strategy of liberation finds its foundation, on one level, in the strategic tension between concentration and mindfulness, which is to say the relationship between suppression and investigation, control and exploration—dynamics that are equally fundamental to our work for social change.

Mental concentration creates the fabricated conditions under which defilements are repressed and mindfulness can operate without impediment. When we focus our attention on the breath, for example, to the exclusion of all else, a cocoon of protection allows the investigative work of mindfulness to do its job without distraction. It is in this relationship of whole-hearted interest where the mind comes to understand the nature of the body, of the clinging, angry, and delusional heart, and through this understanding is liberated by wisdom.

But this relief from defilements through control is itself addictive, and the suppression can be used to merely reinforce the strength of our cocoon without taking the risk of the deeper, and inevitably more disturbing, investigation inspired by mindfulness. Concentration cannot be enforced forever, and when the energy that maintains it drops away, we are faced with an uprising of all the unattended rage, fear, and craving we had been keeping at bay. Concentration and control can create supportive conditions for our practice, but they themselves cannot uproot ignorance or greed or hatred. Only understanding, propelled by mindful investigation can do that.

On the collective level, we are engaged in a constant battle about who will control the conditions of our social development. Right now, many of us on the losing side of that battle wonder what went wrong and how we might protect our interests during this next era while still attempting to deepen the movement toward liberation on a social scale.

During the previous epoch, when relatively liberal forces had a modicum of control, effort was made to restrict the most severe impact of our most egregious social defilements, but perhaps precious little was put into developing relationships of deeper understanding across the wider spectrum of our society with whom it would be necessary to foment a deeper solidarity that could undergird a broad alignment for social progress. Instead, this meager dose of fleeting social power might have enticed us into efforts to reinforce our control, to deepen that concentration, while neglecting the work of investigative relationships across lines of difference. Perhaps that power did not feel stable enough to risk a jump into investigation. Could it ever? While we never attained the degree of control we longed for, we nevertheless may have paid the price of social concentration without social mindfulness as we have seen in the explosion of the repressed elements in our society whose pains were left unattended.

Now we find ourselves at the other end of the power spectrum, with very little capacity to enforce the protection of our social concentration, and in that are subject to growing fears of the potential ravages of liberty without wisdom, freedom without compassion, capitalism without constraint.

Fortunately, we can practice mindfulness without concentration; we can deepen the exploration of values and fears and concerns without the protective suppressive container of power and control. It is harder. It is not ideal. It is undeniably more dangerous. But the benefits are that we meet anger face to face, we meet despair on its most powerful terms, we meet confusion and unknowing everywhere we turn our gaze. There is nowhere that the call to deeper wisdom and greater compassion is not beckoning us into the furthest reaches of our hearts.

Over the long term, we need to examine our strategies for the times when we have power and make sure that we use it not only to maintain control over longer periods of time, but to do so by investigating, addressing, and uprooting the underlying dynamics that still require us to enforce that power. But in this era and under these conditions, we will need to find safety, at times, in retreat. It is the only choice for the outmaneuvered, the outnumbered, and the outgunned. It is an existential necessity to create protective conditions wherever we can and to use those spaces as sanctuary and as a base of operations for the deeper work. I believe that Center for Whole Communities is uniquely capable of doing this, of furthering this work of understanding by creating spaces and cultivating skills that can help people investigate their deeper and shared values and visions that will help us move forward together, across profound lines of difference, and in powerful and as yet unknown ways. Their practices of dialogue, story, working with difference, and fostering creativity, among others, provide a powerful set of techniques to deepen the ability for groups to engage in this work successfully. This capacity for authentic relationship is rare in the world and is our only hope for the creation of a peace that is not mere suppression, for a justice that requires no enforcement, for a liberty that is motivated by the wisdom and care arising spontaneously from the deep and tempered heart of a liberated people.

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Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey is a teacher of Vipassana (insight) meditation within the broader context of the Theravada Buddhist tradition. His teaching aims to inspire the skills, determination, and faith necessary to realize the deepest human freedom and an exploration of the relationship between ethics, insight, and action. Jesse is a student of Michele McDonald and was trained by her to teach in a method rooted in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma. He is the resident teacher for Vipassana Hawai’i and when off-island teaches mostly in the US and Canada.

Check out his schedule, teachings, and writing at www.dolessforpeace.org

by Melanie Katz

We are excited to welcome a group of 20 artists, designers, facilitators, professors, visionaries, and changemakers from all across the country for our Whole Thinking in Practice Retreat from Oct 14-19, 2016 in California.

Working in fields as varied as environmental justice, education, cultural competency, performing arts, youth empowerment, and coaching, these thought-leaders will unplug and spend 6 days in the beautiful oak-madrone forested hills of Boonville building relationships and dropping in to our core Whole Thinking Practices: awareness practice, dialogue, story-telling, creativity, and working with difference.

Some of the organizations represented include:

• Balanced Rock Foundation
• Climbing PoeTree
• Culture Shift Agency
• Education Outside
• Metro, Regional Govt, Porland OR
• The Million Person Project
• NPS Stewardship Institute
• Puget Sound Clean Air Agency
• Rethink New Orleans
• Tree People
• UMass-Amherst
• Yale University

Together we will:

• Re-think our work together in terms of whole systems and in terms of addressing root causes as opposed to symptoms;
• Initiate value-based inquiries to better understand and communicate the values that hold us together and inform better strategies and tactics;
• Explore the roles of race, class, power, and privilege in our work, and how to address injustices;
• Rejuvenate our strength and wisdom through nurturing, reflective, and creative practices that open the door for more authentic relationships, deeper dialogue, and new ways of leading.

If you couldn’t make it this time, keep an eye out for our next Whole Thinking in Practice Retreat coming to the east coast in the spring of 2017!