I thought the people concerned were concerned due to a perceived association with People's Programs and a desire to have a more private discussion with only Sudo members. (however no one had a problem when our friend from CCL dropped in)

I disagreed with this concern because of her association with Omni Commons.

At the same time, I do think that spending 40 minutes talking about it makes us look bad (editing my text to not say "like clowns"). I can see how it could be perceived as racist, and moreover I could see how spending 40 minutes on it makes us look generally disorganized and overly focused on kicking a brown person out of our meeting.

I want to affirm what Yar says that we exist in community with these people, and we do need to be mindful of how we are perceived. I want to encourage everyone to trust new people first, and only question that trust when we are given a clear reason not to trust that individual.

On Thu, Dec 28, 2023 at 4:10 PM Jemma Love via sudo-discuss <sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
Hello Yar,

Your message seems like an escalation of a situation from last night that we dealt with in the meeting. It was not everyone against any one individual, and we openly discussed members concerns there in the meeting. It's true we spent longer than we should have and there may be aspects of racism attached to that. However, my intentions from here on out are to deescalate those situations. This message is the exact opposite of that and I do not appreciate it. You have been an issue in discussing many of the topics we need to within sudoroom on several instances. Please, I ask you to focus on deescalation and that you also take into account that several people took a multitude of stances. Your message damages the good work that was done last night.

Emails like this do no one any favors and hold us back from having the difficult discussions that we need to have at this point.

Once again, please consider how your actions are affecting these conversations. How your presence is affecting our ability to move forward openly and honestly. Please focus on deescalation.

All the best,
Jemma


On Thu, Dec 28, 2023 at 3:41 PM Yardena Cohen via sudo-discuss <sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
At last night's sudoroom meeting, we were joined by omni's development director. We spent the first 45 minutes arguing over whether to kick her out of the meeting, because some anonymous person raised an anonymous concern.

What was the concern? Because her family members had worked with People's Programs. And because last time she raised a point about racial equity and someone felt that she was accusing people of racism.

It's incredible to me that people don't see how racist this is. How are you going to move to a community and then treat someone with SUSPICION for having personal ties to other people who grew up here???

No matter what you think of PP's politics on their blog and twitter, you have to accept that this group mostly grew up in Oakland, and people are going to know each other. Local ties and allegiances and face to face interactions are always going to be a counter force against Internet abstractions. That's one of the beautiful things about having a local community.

Someone literally offered this heuristic: we should only have people in the meeting who are "more connected to sudoroom than people programs". Really think about what this means. A decision making process needs to prioritize the voices of people whose allegiance is predetermined because they didn't grow up here?? And exclude everyone else?

I must beg this community to stop falling into these kinds of patterns of fear and insularity which DIRECTLY perpetuate white supremacy. At this point I don't care what anybody's intention was. It was an incredibly damaging path for sudoroom to be taken down.
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