HEADS UP COLLECTIVE
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The Heads Up Collective is a white anti-racist, anti-imperialist group in the San Francisco, Bay Area and a sister organization of the Catalyst Project. This is a collection of writing from Heads Up to be used as a resource for movement building. Heads Up is rooted in the global justice and anti-war movements. They developed through the mass actions that rocked the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and through opposition to the right-wing military advances of the U.S. government launched at home and abroad after the devastating attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001. The Heads Up Collective works from the foundation that all people have the right to housing, food, health-care, meaningful work and healthy communities. In short, we believe in the need for revolutionary change and the liberation of all people from the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism, the gender binary system and imperialism.
Articles:
Interview – Strategic Opportunities: the Heads Up Collective and White Anti-Racist Organizing
Heads Up Collective
Veteran organizer Suzanne Pharr wrote, “While the Right is united by their racism, sexism, and homophobia in their goal to dominate all of us, we are divided by our own racism, sexism, and homophobia.” In the days after September 11th, Pharr’s statement could be felt all around us. Those of us who would form Heads Up had been working to pro-actively take on these divisions in the global justice movement, focusing on anti-racism and multiracial alliance building.
Barriers to Justice – From Apartheid Walls to Security Fences.
Rahula Janowski
Since 2002, Israel has been building what has become widely known as the “Apartheid Wall” in Palestine’s West Bank. While Israel claims that the wall is a security measure, it is being built deep inside the West Bank, and once completed, it will have de facto annexed almost 50% of the land of the West Bank, making it clear that the wall is being used to steal more Palestinian land. In addition to separating Palestinians from their land, the wall also carves the West Bank up into discontinuous, isolated islands which residents are often unable to leave or travel freely between due to Israeli military control of the area. In the process of the wall construction, thousands of olive trees have been uprooted, entire cities have been completely enclosed by the wall, and countless Palestinians have been separated from their land and deprived of a livelihood.
Do The Minutemen Speak for You?
Jeff GiaQuinto
Once again, immigration and border issues dominate the media, and there’s a lot of bad news. In December the US House of Representatives approved HR 4437, a sweeping new immigration law that would make every undocumented person a felon, eliminate the right of due process for immigrants, and criminalize virtually anyone who provides services to undocumented people. Meanwhile, armed vigilante groups like the minutemen not only continue to terrorize border-crossers, they’re also now harassing and intimidating day laborers trying to make a meager living.
Justice, from Iraq to S.F.
Rahula Janowski and Clare Bayard
MARCH 20, 2003: thousands of antiwar activists and organizers shut down downtown San Francisco to protest the invasion of Iraq. Sept. 16, 2003: many of the same people celebrated as a year and a half of hard work and organizing paid off and the Board of Supervisors finally voted down Proposition N, Sup. Gavin Newsom’s attack on homeless people known as Care Not Cash.
For May Day and Beyond: White People Step Up for Immigrant Rights!
Catalyst Project and Heads Up Collective
In the past month, five million people, mostly immigrants of color, have mobilized for justice and are making history, flooding the streets in unprecedented numbers. Meanwhile, the most visible participation by white people is coming from the racist and right wing leaders who are defining and dominating the debate in the Federal government and in the news, radio and opinion pages. Where are the voices of anti-racist white people in this crucial moment, when the worst anti-immigrant legislation in decades is still poised to drop?
Prefigurative Parenting
Rahula Janowski
Although outright hostility towards parents and children in radical left spaces is uncommon, there is an undercurrent of hostility or at least ambivalence about parents and children in many radical movements in the US. Meanwhile, the radical left in the US is small, fractured, and struggling, and our communities of resistance are largely racially segregated, mono-generational, and unsustainable. One important way to build the strength of our communities of resistance, and through that build the strength of our movements for radical social change, is to develop multi-generational movement cultures that embrace and support parents, all kinds of families, and folks of all ages.
My Five Year Old Kid Vs. Their Five Year Old War: A Mom’s Call To Action
Rahula Janowski
This war has decimated an entire country. Iraq will never be the same after what we’ve done there, what US bombs and US soldiers and US mercenaries have done there. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, trillions of dollars spent, the environmental damage will last for generations, and the regional instability caused by the US war has so many repercussions.
