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.

Tense shifts in a racial moment

The phrases "history in the making" and "this historic day" are going berzerk right now. What does it mean to have one foot in history and the other in there here-and-now? Does it mean that we have permission today to recognize racism as a hallmark of the past? Does it mean we are recognizing that race matters even now, in the present?

It's interesting that we are hearing these phrases so abundantly and with virtually no reference to race at all.

Finding Rev. King

Dr. King didn't just have dreams. He had strategy.

With Selma and the voting rights bill one era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and cup of coffee?

SleptOn.org:

[The] portrayal of Dr. King has been mass marketed as an accommodationist figure and is now so pervasive in our schools, media, etc. that it threatens to neutralize and placate the most ambitious, daring and challenging of King's critique along with his struggle to confront and organize against not only racism, but economic exploitation and militarism-imperialism as well.

New Study Finds Race Not Deciding Factor on Prop. 8 same-sex marriage ban

via RaceWire... any interesting parsing of the Prop. 8 vote and subsequent uproar that people of color tipped the scale against the more egalitarian white communities of California. basically, the academics are saying it's not race, it's religion! this sounds obvious enough, if you care to look at how homophobic politics are propagated. unfortunately, a lot of disheartened folks chose not to look that deeply. challenging religious institutions, rather than blaming othered people of color, is a more unifying and pragmatic strategy.

New Study Finds Race Not Deciding Factor on Prop. 8 same-sex marriage ban | RaceWire

Terry Keleher
New Study Finds Race Not Deciding Factor on Prop. 8 same-sex marriage ban

A new study released this week finds that neither African Americans nor any other ethnicity were disproportionately in support of Proposition 8, which amended California’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Some of the key findings of the study, co-authored by Patrick Eagan at New York University and Kenneth Sherill at Hunter College and released under the auspices of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, include:

• The way someone voted on the ballot measure was influenced mostly by the person’s age, religiosity, party affiliation and general political ideology.

• Though post-election media reporting pegged African American support for Prop. 8 as high as 70 percent, this study found the actual number to be between 57 and 59 percent.

• The level of support for the initiative by African Americans exceeded that of white and Asian American voters, but the study attributes this to religiousity more than race because 57 percent of African Americans attend church at least once a week, compared with 42 percent of whites and 40 percent of Asian Americans.

The study may take some of the edge off of the racial wedge, but it doesn’t lessen the necessary work that lies ahead for building a lot more bridges across LGBT, racial and religious communities--starting especially with where these communities already intersect.

In response to the study, the Chicago Tribute reports that the Rev. Mark Wilson, of Oakland, a former pastor of Berkeley's McGee Avenue Baptist Church and currently the outreach coordinator for the African-American activist group And Marriage for All said it's time to "redouble our work with people of faith" and suggests building long-term relationships between African-American churches and the LGBT community.

Download the Egan-Sherrill study

Blaming POCs for Prop 8 is not progressive politics.

Sometimes you catch yourself just waiting for someone out there to print and publish that bewilderment you've been having but can't seem to express very articulately or persuasively. Robert Chlala helps out:

Beyond Black vs. Gay: A Wake-Up Call to Gay Marriage Activists in California

I’m not quite sure when the mainstream gay rights advocates adopted George W. Bush's "you are either with us or against us” mantra, became obsessed about exit polls, and started to believe that it's OK to marginalize people of color, but here we are.

Caught this on RaceWire -- 'hat tip'!

Facing Race

Responding to a call by TUPOCC founding co-chair Renée Sánchez, and organized by USF 3L and NLG-SF Student Vice President, Aliya Karmali, about ten TUPOCC members and our friends attended the Applied Research Center's Facing Race: A National Conference in downtown Oakland, California this past weekend.

Attending plenary panels and workshops from Thursday's opening keynote by Sherman Alexie to Saturday's closing plenary on Race and the Global Economy, TUPOCC was present and representing radical "queer, colored" legal activism, as we connected with our friends and allies from other organizations dedicated to interracial justice, as a critical dimension of the people's intergenerational movement toward social justice.

While there were many interesting panels and workshops, I found two workshops particularly helpful to my interests in helping us build TUPOCC and creating community in Oakland.  

BYOB: Build Your Own Blog was led by Liza Sabater of CultureKitchen.com and Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen.  Beyond an introduction to blogs and blogging, Liza and Chris provided great information about technologies that could substantially help us represent our racial justice work like Utterli (mobile audio/video sharing) Shoebox (photo management) and Drupal.

That last software, an open source package (as in GNU and the free software movement) seems particularly promising in helping us build TUPOCC's infrastructure beyond our previous and present attempts with Yahoo! Groups, the TUPOCC website and our Legal Activists of Color blog.  Liza particularly indicated that Drupal has a module that can realize my idea of literally mapping TUPOCC's membership, by integrating Google Maps with a membership database that we could create based on the 141 folks in our Y! group.

While I have yet to download Drupal and likely won't start learning it until mid-December, I am very excited about its potential for TUPOCC and the several other organizations for which I volunteer, e.g., Latina & Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc., the East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association, the Berkeley Law Foundation and the National Latina/Latino Law Student Association (NLLSA).

It's been a while since I've focused my energies on non-law and non-text learning and culture making, and I miss photography and film-making a great deal.

The second workshop I attended, Creating a Culture of Racial Justice, was powerfully synergistic.  Moderated by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde and Taller Tupac Amaru, this workshop also featured Favianna Rodriguez, co-founder del mismo taller, Tumi's Design and the Eastside Arts Alliance; and DJ Phatrick and Samantha Chanse -- popular educators, community builders and radical cultural workers of color who are (or in the recent past were) based in the SF Bay Area.

Melanie's prompts and questions were particularly stimulating and merit mentioning three of the most memorable:

• How do people create a racial justice culture to support social justice movement(s)?
• How do folks who have become artists inspire and materially support others who desire to make art but feel unable to do so vis-a-vis their racial subordination and other forms of oppression? 
• How can artists serve as visionaries for the racially just world we want to create?

By themselves these questions may not seem revolutionary to some, but witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha share how they have made their lives and their art into living visions of racial, immigrant, gender and sexual justice was deeply inspiring.

I have lived, loved and worked hard to develop mi conciencia (a radical racial, political, sexual and spiritual awareness of my place in people's history), but to study law I stopped making photographs and films, dancing, journaling and writing poesía.  While I tried to remain aware of the importance of "in xochitl, in cuicatl, flor y canto, flower-and-song" (art, poetry, dance, singing), my daily practice of making art basically stopped, as I focused on learning the law, reading critical legal scholarship and organizing students.

Witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha, reminded me of the crucial necessity to make soul and face as our elder compañera Gloria Anzaldúa and other radical lesbian Chicana poetas, artistas, scholars y filósofas have written.

While directly serving the people as a community lawyer in West Oakland's Homeless Action Center is a powerful practice of transgression against class norms and teaches me daily about solidarity across the many dimensions of power and identity (especially interracial and gender justice), Creating a Culture of Racial Justice reminded me that I also need to regularly practice love-inspired art-making -- in order to feel joyful and strong enough to serve nuestra lucha por justicia para el pobre (our struggle for justice for the poor), as the old La Raza Law Students Association slogan goes.

I have a lot more to write but more has already been reported.

I will end by mentioning four mujeres with whom I spoke briefly on the last day of Facing Race.

First, I briefly saw Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, the fierce and fearless poverty scholar and co-founder of San Francisco-based POOR Magazine / Poor News Network.  Tiny mentioned that POOR is on the move to the Mission District, after having resisted its threatened eviction, naming "development" for the 21st century colonization that it recapitulates and organizing the people to take back the land by holding a ceremony that calls upon the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

I also caught a glimpse of Evelyn Sanchez of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC), whom I spoken with briefly at Friday afternoon's plenary on The Race Debate: Challenging Colorblindness with Race Conscious Solutions.

Next, I took the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, who was book-signing at the AK Press table and whose sixth book, 500 Years of Chicana Women's History / 500 Años de la Mujer Chicana, was recently published.  

I first read Betita's work while surviving law school: as I did at least once a semester, I left campus and got lost until I found myself in a bookstore, seeking words to nurture my spirit against the profound alienation of formal legal education.  

In San Francisco's Mission District, I came across De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century, which introduced me to Betita's profound writings on mujerista and youth activism from New Mexico a California and across much of the twentieth century.  I had most recently seen Betita across the table during La Raza Centro Legal's 35th anniversary dinner earlier this year, and when I mentioned it, she told me that she recalled how I was sitting to her right and asked about my work in West Oakland and the meaning of my middle name, Tizoc.

As she carefully composed the brief inscription she wrote on the book's frontispiece, I waited, kneeling before the table and feeling ever more deeply the significance of our brief momento conjuntos.  I thought of my dad y abuelitas and my mom y tías and knew I was exactly where I should be.  

Afterwards, thanking her and moving on, I was pleased to share the book con alguna de nuestras compañeras, Teague Briscoe (an El Paso homegirl and president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter).

Finally, I had the fortune of seeing Tommy Escarcega, another El Paso Tejana and long time community activist who was organizing in support of the voting rights of people in county jails this past election.  

We first met four or five years ago when she knocked on the door of La Raza Law Students Association at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), saying she had heard there were Raza law students and asking for our support of her work in Proyecto Common Touch, which she founded to protect the due process rights of convicted women on parole or in custody.   

Since then I've seen La Tommy a few times over the years, like when her project was based at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland's Fruitvale District.  We spoke briefly about her recent work on the voting rights of people in jail, and I introduced her to other TUPOCC xicanas as the conference ended.

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As I've tried to show, the ARC's Facing Race was a powerful meeting of what Liepollo L. Pheko, of The Trade Collective, dubbed "the manys" who remain committed to the compact for racial justice.  I encourage you to read more reporting on Facing Race.

Muchismas gracias a Renée y Aliya for motivating and organizing TUPOCC to represent at Facing Race.  We did good outreach work in identifying allies and nurtured relationships con nuestr@s compañer@s across the law / non-law divide.

As Betita wrote, "Thank you for your good work, ¡Adelante juntos!"