lots of thoughts on this! i will try to bullet-point. but first, if there's anything of real value to share in this email, it's this link, which outlines some of the less talked-about aspects of white supremacist culture and antidotes to help organizations + individuals become aware of them and work toward alternatives. it's actually a good resource for a groups' daily operational kinds of things, real practical stuff.

anthony, in response to your email:

1. i agree with you that balance must be kept. in bay area community exchange, we are usually so busy getting basic shit taken care of (or at least attempted), we ignore engaging in some of these deeper questions together. it is actually very powerful work to look internally as a group. but it is also scary. in my experience, the external receives the prime focus all the time, which is not a balance. then we are scratching our heads saying, wow why is there such a concentration of white leadership here? and following that, non-white groups and individuals see clearly that it is not their group. to be clear, i'm not advocating collective catharsis on how terrible are those of us who are white and privileged individuals. but people should be engaging in some basic "racism 101" on a regular basis. a la this pdf that came out of of occupy, or some links listed here.*

*special note: white people engaging in racism awareness is like the bare minimum, and it shouldn't be about making white people feel good, a pat on the back, being smug in knowing anti-racist stuff.

2. the first article link you shared... it actually states the opposite of what i have experienced and read and heard and basically how i think. blaming the failure of this group on the "divisiveness" argument is one that oppressed groups face all the time, and it is weak. sometimes things fall apart because a movement is still building a solid center. or because the leadership was too white and/or too male. have to be honest. not honoring and understanding divisions is a mistake. when people are asked to "table" their groups' needs for the greater good, guess who always has to do the sacrificing? this has been documented heavily in feminist histories, for example. it's especially clear when looking at white-led feminist movements, where everything from abolition of slavery to islamophobia to forced sterilization to the racial wage gap is "divisive" and somehow impeding the advancement of the cause (i.e. those who would most benefit, those likeliest not to threaten white patriarchy entirely). right now, it seems, is never the right time for raising a "back-burner" issue, one that might mean life or death for people in a movement's "subgroup." also when looking from a woman's perspective at many liberation movements that came to be dominated by males, similar stories emerge. women's needs are always sidelined, "single-issue," and of course "divisive." add to this the fact that we are all socialized to act in accordance with our identity locations, so yes people act out their proscribed role in group dynamics very often, even when there is an awareness of what's going on. engaging with this and learning from it regularly is medicinal.

3. the info on boyd was interesting. i don't think that looking at oppression internally as individuals and in groups is divisive from a strategic military standpoint. no. we are already divided. we are divided and don't even know our enemy. without incisive critique of capitalism's personal monster, white heteropatriarchy, how do we really describe our common enemy?---the force that has been dividing us all our lives, dividing us since european contact here, dividing us throughout history and empires, as you point out. but in our current situation, i don't see how working as groups to understand racism connects to this. i see trying to "look past" (i.e. ignore) our differences, be "colorblind," and just try to gain numbers for mass uprising as a strategy that falls more into boyd's vision. because that's a sure way to have our divisions eat us alive, by not addressing them. a larger movement rooted in collective liberation, the self-determination of racial groups and oppressed/marginalized groups, and the people who can really truly fight for it---this vision requires a lot of internal strength, difficult work, consciousness and love. we are not there yet. the things that catalyze us, we cannot usually control. but there are things that keep us from being ready when that time comes, and i know that fear of looking at "the enemy within" is a huge one.

so much for bullet-pointing. anyway, yes to get back to the main conversation, talk about inclusion needs to also talk about solidarity. also, who is doing the "including" and why? and not falling into a target-marketing mentality around the issue of multiculturalism. multiculturalism isn't enough anyway, groups of people, not just individuals of non-white identities, need to feel safe, represented, understood, and with unimpeded access to power and decision-making.

definitely more on this later, and i would love to hear more and brainstorm answers to marina's questions (what are the conditions that contribute to us currently not meeting our inclusivity goals and what can we do to start meeting them? what can we all be doing to make the space more inclusive and welcoming?)

add'l questions: what are the current goals? and is there a recommended spot for any of the links from this email on the wiki?

okay, time for dinner!

-amber

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 7:48 PM, Anthony Di Franco <di.franco@gmail.com> wrote:

These are very interesting points, amber, and like Max I learned a lot from that video for reasons like his, and the emphasis it put on working together in collaboration is something I appreciate very much and it informed me in reading the rest. Thanks for sharing!

I also look forward to more about your idea of using the timebank in sudo room.

I noticed in a point in your notes, the passage, "it is definitely the most effective tool, because it turns our attention inward," which reminded me in a concerning way of two things that I would like to share in the discussion.

The first is an account I was recently reading and discussing in another context about the experiences of the Northeast Student Action Network, a large, ambitious, and promising attempt at radical organizing that collapsed quickly, according to the author due to issues with excessive and unnecessarily confrontational inward focus: http://www.openmediaboston.org/node/2182

For the second, first some background. I lived briefly in Washington DC during the time when the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were new and vigorous debate was still happening around all aspects of them. A friend of mine worked at a liberal think tank advocating military reform and scaling back of imperial ambitions, and we both opposed the invasions and often discussed much deeper aspects of the invasions and the context around them than are often found in the media in hopes of finding viable political approaches to opposing them. I learned a lot from him in these discussions about many things but the one relevant here is the military's doctrines of counterinsurgency.

Counterinsurgency is military jargon for techniques useful for undermining effective opposition in invaded areas and keeping subject populations in check. Recent, especially post-cold-war military doctrine focuses heavily on this question because it is the bulk of what the military does without any other superpowers around to oppose. A theorist by the name of John Boyd is very influential in a major school of thought on counterinsurgency and in modern military theory in general. Boyd did his major work during the post-Vietnam-war and post-civil-rights era when major political and military concerns were avoiding the same kind of defeat experienced in Vietnam and the same kind of widespread, effectively organized civil disobedience as in the civil rights movement. His ideas have also become prominent in business and other areas where adversarial and/or adaptive behavior are involved.

One of Boyd's key ideas is that of tempo, according to which the main goal is to disorient and confuse the enemy so that their focus will "collapse inward" and they will be incapable of effectively engaging with their environment. Once the enemy is focusing inward, according to the theory, they are incapable of resisting and easily dealt with however the aggressor chooses.

Another of Boyd's key ideas is that of moral warfare, summarized in wikipedia as "the destruction of the enemy's will to win, disruption of alliances (or potential allies) and induction of internal fragmentation. Ideally resulting in the "dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole [organization] to exist." (i.e., breaking down the mutual trust and common outlook mentioned in the paragraph above.)" It is a development of the idea of divide-and-rule that has been a very effective, documented tool of empire and oppression since ancient times and on into the present.

All these suggest to me that a careful balance must be maintained between inward focus and outward focus on mutual collaboration towards the goals that brought the people in the organization together. A group with revolutionary aspirations that allows an excessive or divisive inward focus to undermine pursuit of the group's goals inflicts on itself a condition that militaries and empires past and present have used as a main tool of oppression and subjugation and to prevent effective resistance from forming. The main strength of the oppressed may be the strength in numbers and cooperation is the means of nurturing this strength and using it to effect meaningful change for good.