[sudo-discuss] Re: [omni-consensus] PROPOSAL: BIPOC and Oppressed Gender Safe Space Committee (BOGSS)

Agreed with Imma - our current safe space policy is not enough. In practice, there are significant social obstacles to people feeling like they have the power to invoke it. There need to be structural changes to empower people to advocate on behalf of bipoc and non-men. Most orgs have simple hierarchies of power, so they can solve problems quickly. They have either a central authority or strong bureaucracies. Omni doesn't. The bogss proposal is an attempt to get some of those benefits but still enable us to mostly operate with our existing anti-authoritarian structure or lack thereof. Thanks for this. I was ignorant of those terms! I see how you got there now. But I would still caution against extrapolating too much from their use of the term. There are many forms of socialism which may use some of the same language as Stalin without being Stalinist. Conflating all forms of this intellectual tradition with Stalin and Mao would not do justice to anybody. Have YOU read it? The most obvious and glaring oversight of this policy is the question of *WHO* is enforcing it at any given time and *WHO* gets to ultimately exercise their judgement. It was written in 2014 by a group called "challenging dominant cultures" - I was part of that group. We were naive. We didn't have clear structures about who could join or claim the name, and over the years it became fraught with disagreement and uncertainty and withered away, to the point where now when you even say the name of the group many of us just grimace. Yet to this day, our policy still claims that questions are to be resolved by "the CDC working group" - this is totally broken! https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Safer_Space_Policy The bogss proposal answers this question by creating a committee to do just that, and a process for forming that committee. Most of the verbiage is towards exactly that end. You can think of this as an edit, but it needs to be more than minimal because that was a huge omission on our part in 2014. Personally I'm a materialist feminist and I believe everything is about power. But in this case, it's not about anybody's personal desire for power OVER others. It's about making sure that critically underrepresented perspectives are given more weight in our currently white-dominated board & delegate meetings. Indeed, the proposal's authors have written in no guarantees that they will ultimately be on the committee. These will be elected representatives who get their power from the entire congress of bipoc and non-men at omni and if they abuse it, they will be recalled. I think it's really harmful to invoke metaphors between this and our armed, genocidal police+prison system. Nobody's going to get shot or locked up here. Nonetheless, I think that edits geared at making the committee seem less "cop-like" would be warmly received.