Catalyst Project is a center for political education and movement building based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are committed to anti-racist work in majority white sections of left social movements with the goal of deepening anti-racist commitment in white communities and building multiracial left movements for liberation. We are committed to creating spaces for activists and organizers to collectively develop relevant theory, vision and strategy to build our movements. Catalyst programs prioritize leadership development, supporting grassroots fighting organizations and multiracial alliance building.
 
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Morgan Bassichis' Reflection

“Why Organize White People for Racial Justice?”

Morgan Bassichis


I waited until literally the last minute to submit my application for the Anne Braden Program. I was giving what Molly McClure calls “the lean” without even knowing it! I didn’t know if I was ready. I didn’t know whether I had it in me to do the work of bridging, translating, and engaging that would surely lie ahead in the course of the program. I didn’t know if I could handle having my wounds, triggers, and pit-falls reflected back at me. Looking back, I can’t imagine not applying, not participating in this program, not having my life transformed by the space that we created together.

I took some time to reflect on what it means to have participated in a program like this in a moment like the one we’re in. A moment when prison construction is being offered as a catch-all solution to pretty much any problem, when genocide and occupation across state borders are being hailed as democracy, when privacy rights are celebrated as freedom, and corporate nonprofits decide what count as legitimate forms of resistance. We are in a moment when empire is working furiously to shut out any memory of revolutionary possibility, any yearning for deep collective transformation. And still, we are all fighting, surviving, and building. We are in a moment of immense contradictions.

Under these conditions, why organize white people for racial justice? Why in the world would it make sense to put the words “white” and “leadership” together when it seems like the linking of these words has been one of the main ways we got into this long-term mess? Why orient white people’s work towards collective liberation rather than self-sacrificing solidarity, and towards relationships and practice over isolation and perfection? What does it mean to do this work for our own survival alongside the survival of everyone else?

I moved to the Bay Area two years ago to support organizations working to build the capacity of transgender and queer communities to end all forms of violence. This work showed me how hard we all struggle to be visionary and intentional in the wake of double-edged gains and ongoing crisis. This experience reflected my own struggles to be visionary and intentional as a white person when the participation of white managerial class people in social justice movements has also been a source of violence and contradiction, despite our best intentions. I was craving an opportunity to deepen my skills and practice to be a force for transformation, not an impediment to it.

The Anne Braden Program has been a transformative opportunity for me to engage the moment we’re in differently: to look at its contradictions as opportunities for new ways of thinking and organizing. Through learning and building with 33 dedicated activists, a visionary leadership team, a powerful mentor in Mickey Ellinger, and a fierce volunteer placement at the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee, I had the opportunity to hold the contradiction of my inheritance and my intentions.

I was able to situate myself as coming from a people who have been bought off. People whose pain has been strategically appropriated to justify the destruction of communities seen as disposable, negligible, and disappearable. The trauma of queer people, and particularly white queer people, being massacred by AIDS, state pathology, daily targeting, and a lack of love has been picked up to support the need for more and more cops in our streets, more beds in our prisons and people to fill them. The trauma of Jewish people, particularly white Jews, surviving centuries of extermination and scape-goating efforts, has been painfully used as reasoning for the ongoing occupation of land that is not ours and the murder of people who could be our comrades. I come from a people whose wounds we are told can be healed only through escalating violence, consumption, and a refusal to imagine something different.

But I also come from a long legacy of fighters, of revolutionary resisters and visionaries who refuse to be pitted against other targets of violence, a list that is longer than I’ll ever know--those who link arms with other dissenting and oppressed people as a way of life, and who build life-sustaining relationships and organizations to enact the kind of world they envisioned.

The Anne Braden Program gave me a unique opportunity to re-align my life and my work towards collective liberation, to engage head on the contradictions and traps blocking my ability to fully open myself to mutuality and movement as ways of life. In our current moment, we have a tremendous opportunity to deepen capacity to hold our contradictions, to understand how each and every one of us is necessary to organize transformation. It is with arms locked in embrace and a heart that is increasingly open that I recommit myself to this struggle alongside every one of you. Thank you for your partnership on this path.