WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
|
Homepages: |
|
|
Racism & the Peace Movement
By Mandy Carter
As you know, there’s no money, it’s all volunteerism, most times, whoever’s raising their hand, we’re just happy to have you. But I think we need to go a big step further. It could be much more strategic, so when it came time for the press conferences and when it came time for the images of the rally of 7000 people on the steps of the state capitol in Raleigh, it looks like what we wanted. And that made a difference. So it’s not as if it can’t happen. It can. The question is, are people willing to make a commitment? Are people willing to be serious about it, and are people willing to have hurt feelings because, “Gosh, I raised my hand, and I didn’t get called on”? So I think sometimes that it’s a struggle. But that same coalition is still there now, so whenever the next thing that comes around, or whenever the next mobilization’s going to happen, we don’t have to start from square one. It didn’t come easy, believe me, but I think it’s just an example of how it can happen, especially in a movement that counts on volunteerism so much, as much as this one does. Justice
When there was this effort to have the Millennium March on Washington a couple of years back, and they wanted to one more time bring gay people onto the streets of DC, with no disrespect, we said, “Is this it?” We have all these other issues we could be connecting with: race, class, culture, gender, and sexual identity. So we said, No, the question of the day—this to me is the question of the future—are we about justice or just us? We have common defined issues or a common defined agenda, and a common defined—I’ll use the term—enemy, if you will, the President-select that’s sitting up there in Washington, DC. What I’d like to leave for the future, as we go on, as a person of color that has been actively involved in WRL from Day One is this. I know there’s sometimes drama around predominantly white organizations, whether WRL or not, but I’d just like to do a reality check—each one of us has to make a decision of where we choose to do our work. I am a firm believer in bridge-building—have been, always will be—and sometimes you have to do a reality check, if you’re a predominantly white group, then realize that’s what it is and just say that’s what it is. Maybe the way to make it work is to have an autonomous people of color movement. I don’t want to have all of my people of color being gobbled up in white institutions, if it turns out that ends up being a bad thing. Not that there don’t need to be people in groups like WRL. I’ve been there all my life too. But at the same time, maybe the way we work it is through coalition; finding out how we work with each other, and not feeling as if we’re always in a kind of under position. That might be a way to move us forward. So we have a tremendous opportunity, WRL still has a very important role, and it will continue to be my home for as long as I live. Contact: SONG—Southerners on New Ground, P.O. Box 268, Durham, NC 27701; (919)667-1362; info-song@southnewground.org; www.southnewground.org. Former WRL/West and WRL/Southeast staffer Mandy Carter is on the staff of Southerners on New Ground. By Sam Diener
We have encountered situations in which some principals have sent home students who wear turbans, for example, or girls who wear traditional Muslim dress. The administrators say they’re doing it to protect them from student harassment. I wanted to clearly label that as an act of discrimination that the school district is responsible for stopping and send a signal to the whole school that that’s our responsibility as a community. Yet, this campaign was very controversial within the organization. There were folks who said, “Well, that’s going to be controversial among principals, who might get defensive, and maybe the principals were just motivated by keeping folks safe.” It was necessary to spend many hours arguing with some people and bringing in allies, including people from organizations like the Sikh Education Council and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee to educate some of our white colleagues so that we could name the fact that racism exists. Contact: ESR, 23 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138; (617) 492-1764; educators@esrnational.org; www.esrnational.org. Sam Diener is a member of WRL’s National Committee. |
WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
live in Durham, NC, where we organized actions that would be coordinated
with the February 15 “The World Says No To War.” We had already organized
Durham Peace Committee, and one of the first things we did when we got
in the room to start putting ourselves together, we raised the question
from Day One: Is this committee going to try to reflect the diversity
of North Carolina? When people were forming into whatever (you know how
these ad hoc things come together), it wasn’t just whoever raised their
hand first. It was more a very calculated, careful process of let’s go
around and make sure we have it around age, around race, around gender,
around sexuality, around ablism. Then when it came time to talk about
what the rally would look like and about which faces and voices would
be on the media, we had already shaped the very thing we wanted it to
reflect. So when decisions were being made about who would speak at the
rally, who would do the press conference, who would be out there, we already
had a pool, if you will, of folk that really wanted to represent the diversity.