Distillations/Constellations #9: liberatory (digital) movement building
Last week, I had the huge honour to be among a group of 60ish people invited to Sarajevo for Weaving Liberation's inaugural retreat. It was held at a hotel in the mountains, bringing together people from different movements, community spaces and sectors across Europe, to build connections, centering liberatory practices and practitioners.
In their words, Weaving Liberation is:
...dedicated to supporting and resourcing a digital justice ecosystem, and will do so primarily by coordinating the implementation of “A vision for digital justice organising in Europe”, a programme of activities that will help create the conditions for communities to work towards anti-colonial and liberatory digital futures. read more on their blog
What I'm taking away from this week is a mixture of deep gratitude and rest in my heart and soul – a feeling of solidarity that really does help to heal wounds that have been caused so deeply over the past year in particular – and a number of thoughts and questions that I hope will inform my work moving forward. Here are some of those:
The role of grief in healing our societies: Tobi Ayé, a somatic practitioner and grief worker, joined us at the retreat and held two truly incredible grief circles. Their words explain it best: A Society That Doesn't Grieve Looks like Germany. It was simultaneously heartening – in the sense that, it made me feel like I'm not alone – and disheartening, to see how many people last week were struggling with Germany as a society and a place to live, a place we thought was home. Tobi's piece explores an angle I've only arrived at in recent months – that the German response to Palestine is, yes, rooted in racism and Islamophobia, but at a deeper level, rooted in their own trauma. Grief can be a tool to bring us together, in the same way that trauma splits us apart – and if we let the trauma split us apart, we end up seeing (and treating) others as less-than-human.
Stop centering whiteness: Almost all of the diversity, equity, inclusion work that I’ve come across inherently centres whiteness and patriarchy: it asks, how do we stop people from causing harm – as if that harm is inevitable. But there's a very viable alternative, which the Weaving Liberation retreat embodied in so many ways: what if we focused our resources on supporting people who are hurt by those oppressive structures, to heal? What ideas might be dreamed up, what dreams might become reality, if marginalised people were trusted and supported to heal and thrive, rather than by-default have to cope with other people’s reluctance to confront their own internalised oppression?
What is the role of white (=single-issue) feminism in actually supporting the conditions for fascism? In the past, I’ve thought of white feminism as a distraction or a frustrating, performative action that takes away from the real intersectional work that we want to be doing. But it's more than that – in many ways, single-issue "feminists" are doing the work of oppression, just not of people who look like them. How can we be more explicit about those harms in a way that encourages and creates the conditions for people to think in a more intersectional and solidarity-infused way? I'm thinking of "feminist" groups whose internal work practices have been proven time and time again to be harmful to BIPOC communities; individual "feminists" who refuse to engage with current conflicts, and more.
The importance of grounding – the first morning at the retreat was spent watching a documentary called Crveni vez // Red Embroidery – a storytelling collection of personal testimonials and political accounts of 12 feminist, anti-war and LGBTIQ+ pioneer activists across former Yugoslavia. We had a (too short) panel discussion with feminist activists and artists from the region afterwards, to tell us more in person. Taking the time to listen, learn and really engage with the political reality of the place we were in felt like an essential step to do before we were really able to do the rest of the work we wanted to together. It also struck me as a stark contrast to the (often, but not always) performative Land Acknowledgements that are increasingly done at events and conferences.
Fascism not as a binary or future or past: Fascist, or not fascist? It's never that simple. We talked about how fascism can show up in tiny ways in our lives – from people who stay silent in 'uncomfortable' situations where they know racism and/or homophobia and/or oppression is being inflicted upon others; to people who will be performatively political and be prepared to take off that 'political' hat in other situations where it doesn't serve them. It reminded me of field work I did in Libya in 2011, where someone told me: it's not so easy to get rid of Gaddafi's influence here, there's a Gaddafi in every family now – meaning that the power dynamics of a dictator were replicated on the family level, thanks to 42 years living under a dictatorship.
Fighting for, not fighting back. There has to be more than just reacting to harms. We have to imagine what we're fighting for and fighting towards – not just because it's a more compelling narrative and set of actions, but also because otherwise we give away our power of defining what we want for ourselves. Every amazing thing in the world started with an idea or a dream.
Abolitionist advocacy. How do non-reformist (= abolitionist steps) and reformist reforms fit into an abolitionist agenda? If you're not sure what I'm talking about, I've come back to Critical Resistance's excellent diagram on this so many times over the past couple of years. In short, it's a framework to consider how short-term interventions might, despite best intentions, actually contribute to strengthening policing or militarism. Of course, ideally we would only do abolitionist steps to get where we want to, but acknowledging the systems we're living within means also working within those systems to get what we want and need in the long run.
The dangers of shortcuts. We're all so much more than our skin colour, our gender, our sexual orientation and all the things we get reduced to. I'm not going to get into identity politics here, but I will say this: particularly for those of us working internationally, we must take into account that in many parts of the world, whiteness is not the (only) enemy in our fight for liberation. Systems of exclusion are upheld by powerful people of kinds, and reducing those fights to binaries of, for example, white vs BIPOC does us all a disservice. Internalised racism and oppression can show up in anyone. (That said, our experiences are inherently informed by who we are, and if people happen to be in bodies that are deemed more worthy by the societies we're living in, it feels like a reasonable bet that those people will – unless they work hard! – likely replicate those structures... and we do live in times of white supremacy.)
Individualism -> collective structures of care. In so many ways, the shift to individualism – of being self-sufficient, and thinking solely or primarily of oneself (or one's immediate family) – is at the heart of so many problems that we see today, on so many levels. The framing of seeing everything solely through an individualistic – rather than collective – perspective, is something I continue to be unlearning. One of the best things I've read about this is Sophie Lewis' Abolish The Family which made me rethink the ways in which I create and take part in community.