Back from Seattle

It was uplifting to meet up with so many legal activists of color as the NLG Law for the People Convention went down last weekend. Among others folks, I ran into Loyola New Orleans law student Adrienne Wheeler, who researched race and social movements while doing her masters degree. Adrienne dug up this short bibliography on the topic. "There are a number of sociological studies on race and social movements," she says. "There are compelling arguments that [people of color] put energy into local activism and that white folks put energy into 'saving the world.'"

Here's a mid-decade list:

Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. 2005. “Social Movements, and the Law: The Case of Affirmative Action.” Columbia Law Review, 105(5), 1436-1528.

Cable, Shery and Tamara L. Mix. 2003. “Economic Imperatives and Race Relations.” Journal of Black Studies, 34(2), 183-203.

Chong, Dennis and Reuel Rogers. 2005. “Racial Solidarity and Political Participation.” Political Behavior, 27(4), 347-374.

James, David R. 1988. “The Transformation of the Southern Racial State: Class and Race Determinants of Local-State Structures.” American Sociological Review, 53(2), 191-208.

Jenkins, J. Craig, and Michael Wallace. 1996. “The Generalized Action Potential of Protest Movements: The New Class, Social Trends, and Political Exclusion Explanations.” Sociological Forum, 11(2), 183-207.

McVeigh, Rory and Christian Smith. 1999. “Who Protests in America: An Analysis of Three Political Alternatives—Inaction, Institutionalized Politics, or Protest.” Sociological Forum, 14(4) 685-702.

Polletta, Francesca and James M. Jasper. 2001. “Collective Identity and Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 283-305.

Tsutsui, Kiyoteru. 2004. “Global Civil Society and Ethnic Social Movements in the Contemporary World.” Sociological Forum, 19(1), 63-87.

Winant, Howard. 2000. “Race and Race Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 169-185.

Seattle's DJ Daps1 will be breaking it down at our Breakin' Bread party 10/16

Big update on the TUPOCC Breakin' Bread event, scheduled for this Friday, Oct. 16, starting at 8pm. With the help of Prison Law Project's Ian Head and the generous support of the Hidmo restaurant, we will have DJ Daps1 on hand to make sure the night is fabulous.

To cover the cost, we will ask that everyone in attendance donate $5.

TUPOCC administrative matters will be squeezed into 8-9 PM. After 9, friends and allies are more than welcome to party down.

More info on the location and the event below.

You can check out Daps1's summer mix here.

TUPOCC Breakin' Bread, Friday 10/16 8pm

Each year at the NLG Convention, TUPOCC holds an "administrative meeting" where we vote for a new co-chair and discuss "administrative" matters pertinent to the committee. This year, we are doing things a little differently.

It's the five-year anniversary of the United People of Color Caucus. This Friday, as the NLG Convention really hits its stride, we are coming together not just to vote for a new leader to join the inestimable now-senior co-chair Tory Gavito, but also to really break bread together -- to have a great time in solidarity and companionship. We'll talk about what we really want to do five years after the birth of this project. Where is our mission going, how far has our vision come.

There will be cheap drinks and great food, as well as a local Seattle hiphop deejay (TBA!) on the decks. The locale is Hidmo restaurant on 2000 S. Jackson Street, accessible by bus (15 minutes) or cab (4 minutes). See map below.


View Larger Map

Also, updated TUPOCC Seattle Highlights schedule (download PDF from Google)

Where will the color be in Seattle?

As TUPOCC gets set to convene at the National Lawyers Guild convention in Seattle, we also mark our committee's fifth anniversary and the tenth anniversary of the "N30" WTO demonstrations in Seattle. We have the most opportune moment to re-examine questions that many of us, both whites and POCs on the left, were asking about anti-capitalism movements at the beginning of this decade.

Four months after N30, the anti-capitalism movement reconvened in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2000. ColorLines magazine asked, "Where was the color at A16?"

While Seattle is a relatively white location, D.C. promised a far better opportunity to mobilize people of color: its majority African American population has a long history of international action and other large East Coast populations of color are nearby.... Indeed, a significant number of people of color participated in the D.C. actions, as they had in Seattle. Still, A16 was probably proportionately even whiter....

Writing for the Village Voice, Andrew Hsiao captured the erupting class/race tension after N30 and A16, as the Republican National Convention loomed.

While the demonstrations electrified activists across the country, the fact that the ranks of protesters were overwhelmingly white has itself sparked protest. As radical black scholar robin d.G. Kelley, puts it, 'the lack of people of color involved in these demonstrations is a crisis.' *** [S]ome have groused that activists of color are missing the global point, or that their complaints are based in an identity politics that has been transcended by the all-inclusive politics of economics. Framing the issue this way, however, misses what's distinctive about new activism in communities of color.

I marvel at how that framing -- race politics doesn't get it -- continues to thrive. We saw it last fall, at the Detroit convention, when NLG members formed an ad-hoc "Marxism and the Law" committee. Following a pattern identified in Hsiao's July 2000 article, the predominantly white organizers of the "Marxism" committee never reached out TUPOCC -- or the Anti-Racism Committee, Anti-Sexism Committee, or Queer Caucus, for that matter. Why would they bother reaching out to the "identity politics" contingent?

For TUPOCC, coming into this convention, we can intuit that unless POCs raise the problematic issue of whiteness in anti-capitalism movements, it is doubtful our white "Marxist" allies will examine it. My doubts are not entirely borne of cynicism. "Where was the color" was a question never fully answered with respect to Seattle and the demos that came afterward. Bush v. Gore happened. September 11, 2001 happened. The invasions of non-white nations happened. Out of necessity, we shifted the object of the "where was the color" examination from anti-capitalist activism to anti-war activism. With the election of an African American president, neo-liberal corporate welfare and war continue to escalate. One cannot but assume that these trends add a certain myopic substance to the argument that "race politics doesn't get it."

If anything, this year's national convention should demonstrate that "race politics" does get it. TUPOCCers and other activists of color already know that race consciousness and class analysis have never been distinct politics. We also know that institutions that espouse anti-capitalism and other class analyses operate within immutable structural racism that only handcuffs their capacity to address economic justice issues. Often we only hope that our allies "get" these realities. At some of the events at the Seattle Convention, we will have the opportunity to speak to these realities concretely.

• The TUPOCC/ARC training Racial Justice and Equity will set the stage for a true reckoning between anti-racism and color-blind marxism as we establish an institutional assessment of racism in the NLG and work toward new visions for the NLG's anti-racist work.
• The major panel Police Occupation of Communities of Color also presents an opportunity to speak to the value of race conscious political organizing.
• The "hot topic" event Post-election Crisis in Iran: What Role for the U.S. Left? will likely explore the tension that arose this summer when anti-imperialist critics took issue with Iranian Americans' support for the reformist movement.

TUPOCC at the Seattle Convention: highlight schedule

Before you get to Seattle for the Law for the People Convention, be sure to download this PDF flier of TUPOCC's convention highlights.

TUPOCC Seattle Highlights (download PDF from Google or print from Scribd below)

You can download the full NLG Convention schedule and annotated schedule here

Announcing the People of Color Travel Stipend for the Seattle Convention

The annual NLG Law for the People Convention is coming up in October. The Seattle Chapter welcomes Guilders back to the sites of the 1999 WTO protests -- and now, as then, it's important for people of color to be there in numbers that truly represent our collective role in social movements. For that reason, the NLG and TUPOCC are happy to begin the application process for the 2009 POC Travel Stipend for the Seattle convention.

You can find the online application at http://bit.ly/travelstipend09 -- please share the link with anyone who might be interested. Every year we meet folks who had no idea there was a stipend available to help them attend the convention. Let's get the word out!

The stipend covers transportation costs only and is open to legal workers of color, law students of color and recent law grads of color. Is that unfair to white people who need funding, too? The NLG has recognized that it is problematic that, historically, so few people of color participate in the convention. The stipend is one way of changing that problem and plays a significant role in the NLG's commitment to ending institutionalized racism in this organization.

First plans for NLG Convention in Seattle

The annual National Lawyers Guild Law for the People Convention will be held in Seattle October 14-18, 2009. We just received a tentative schedule, including two workshops co-sponsored by TUPOCC. We are working with our comrades to present Deportation Defense: Representing Immigrant Detainees in Bond Hearings (co-sponsored by TUPOCC, NLG San Francisco Immigration Committee, and National Immigration Project of the NLG) and Women and Migration (co-sponsored by TUPOCC and the Anti-Sexism Committee).

Here are some highlights of the tentative schedule:

FRI October 16

8:30-9:45AM Workshops I

• Comprehensive Immigration Reform
• Out of Africa
• Counter Recruitment Strategies

1:30-2:45PM Workshops II

• Representing Immigrant Detainees in Bond Hearings

SAT October 17

1:00-2:15PM Workshops III

• Immigrants and the Military
• Transgendered and Incarcerated

2:30-4:00PM Major Panels

• Mass Defense: Police Occupation of Communities of Color

SUN October 18

10:45AM-12:00PM Workshops IV

• Responding to Immigration Law Enforcement Abuse
• Gaza
• Women and Migration
• Enhancing Right of Workers to Organize