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.