2015 Session 14 – Anti-Racist Strategies

Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program
2015 Session 14: Anti-Racist Strategies

Required Readings

  1. Anne Braden, “Black Power and White Organizing”. (4 page PDF: Braden Black Power White Organizing). (bio).
  2. Rural Organizing Project, “‘A Struggle for Our Lives’: Anti-Racist Organizing in White Rural and Working-Class Communities: An Interview with the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon” from  Chris Crass ed., Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy. (18 page PDF: Rural Organizing Project Struggle for our Lives). (bio).
  3. Catalyst Project, [Strategy Tools] “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats”. (1 page PDF: Catalyst SWOT Template).
  4. “Open letter to 1Sky from the grassroots”, Grist, 24 Oct 2010. (7 page PDF: Open letter to 1Sky; and on the web at grist.org/article/2010-10-23-open-letter-to-1-sky-from-the-grassroots).
  5. Rachel Herzing, “‘Tweaking Armageddon’: The Potential and Limits of Conditions of Confinement Campaigns”, Social Justice, forthcoming 2015 (5 page PDF: Herzing Tweaking Armageddon DRAFT).
  6. Kali Akuno interviewed by Eric Ribellarsi, “Lessons and attempts: Kali Akuno speaks from Jackson”, Threshhold Magazine, 2015. (14 page PDF: Akuno speaks from Jackson; also on the web at thresholdmag.org/2015/02/09/kali-akuno-speaks-from-jackson).
  7. Maria Poblet, “Revolutionary Democracy, Class-Consciousness, and Cross-Class Movement Building: Lessons from Amílcar Cabral”, Organizing Upgrade, 19 February 2014. (8 page PDF: Poblet Lessons from Amílcar Cabral; also on the web at organizingupgrade.com/index.php/component/k2/item/1016-lessons-from-cabral).
  8. Carlos Garcia, “#Not1More Means Not 1 More”, Puente Movement

Recommended Readings

  1. Ingrid Chapman, “Hearts on Fire: The Struggle for Justice in New Orleans”  (Catalyst pamphlet). (23 page PDF: Chapman Hearts on Fire). (bio).
  2. Ai-jen Poo, “Lessons from the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights Campaign in New York”. (6 page PDF: Ai Jen Poo Organizing with Love; also at www.leftturn.org/Organizing-with-Love). (bio).
  3. Zainab Amadahy, “A roundtable on relationship-building in indigenous solidarity work”  (8 page PDF: Amadahy Roundtable on Relationship-building).
  4. Eric Mann, “Transformative Organizing”. (5 page PDF: Mann Transformative Organizing). (bio).
  5. Vermont Workers’ Center, “The People’s Recipe” in “Vermont People’s Convention for Human Rights”. (1 page PDF: Peoples Recipe VWC).
  6. B Loewe, “White Anti-Racist Organizers in Working Class Communities of Color: an interview with B Loewe of the Latino Union of Chicago”, interview by Chris Crass. (11 page PDF*: Loewe White Anti-racist Organizers). (bio).
  7. Catherine Jones, “What I Wish I Knew: My Goals for Anti-Racist Practice”. (3 page PDF: Jones What I Wish I Knew; also at coloursofresistance.org/717/what-i-wish-i-knew-my-own-goals-for-anti-racist-practice). (bio).

Readings are provided free for use by participants studying in the Anne Braden Training Program for Anti-Racist Organizers, a noncommercial, nonprofit educational program. We encourage everyone to buy the works from which excerpts have been taken – please support these authors and publishers.

Author Biographies

Kali Akuno 

Zainab Amadahy,

Anne McCarty Braden (1924 – 2006) was an American advocate of racial equality. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in rigidly segregated Anniston, Alabama, Braden grew up in a white middle-class family that accepted Southern racial mores wholeheartedly. A devout Episcopalian, Braden was bothered by racial segregation, but never questioned it until her college years at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. After working on newspapers in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, she returned to Kentucky as a young adult to write for the Louisville Times. There, she met and in 1948 married fellow newspaperman Carl Braden, a left-wing trade unionist. She became an early supporter of the civil rights movement. She and Carl Braden co-founded the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Ingrid Chapman is a community organizer, educator, and carpenter who worked with Catalyst Project for 8 years. Her roots within radical left organizing began as a member of the global justice movement in the late ’90s. She was a student organizer and member of the Direct Action Network that mobilized thousand of people to shut down the WTO in Seattle. She has led trainings on direct action skills with the Ruckus Society and played a role in their anti-racist transformation process. As an organizer with Catalyst she has worked to support the struggles for the right of return and equitable rebuilding with several grass roots community organizations based in New Orleans. She also worked with Critical Resistance for 6 years with Oakland residents in struggles for community safety and alternatives to incarceration and policing.

Carlos Garcia,

Rachel Herzing,

Catherine Jones

B Loewe,

Eric Mann,

María Poblet is a queer Latina organizer and poet. She has studied poetry under the direction of June Jordan and Martín Espada. She served as Artistic Director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and taught poetry workshops at Mission Cultural Center, FCI Dublin Women’s Prison, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work has been featured in the SF Weekly, Revolutionary Voices, and the Street Sheet. She has been a community organizer in San Francisco’s mission district since 1999 working with St. Peter’s Housing Committee, fighting for immigrant Latino tenants’ rights. In 2010, St. Peter’s merged with sister organization Just Cause Oakland to form Causa Justa :: Just Cause, which works to build Black and Brown working class unity and power through economic justices struggles.  She agrees with Cape Verdean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral that culture is a weapon in the fight for freedom. She can often be found reading poetry through a bullhorn.

Ai-jen Poo helped found Domestic Workers United, an organization promoting justice for the more than 200,000 women involved in domestic work in the greater New York area.  She helped lead the campaign in New York State for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. In 2007 at the US Social Forum—and the first national meeting of domestic workers’ rights organizations—Ai-jen became a co-founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which now includes more than 20 organizations in 10 states across the country with over 10,000 members. Ai-jen began organizing at CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, where she worked with Asian immigrant populations in low-wage service industries.  She organized a citywide campaign called “Dignity for Domestic Workers.” From 1997 to 2000 she was a women workers project director, first conducting outreach and offering English classes to Asian women in the sex industry and later organizing Asian domestic workers.  She has been a member of the board of Social Justice Leadership since 2008.

Joshua Kahn Russell,

 

* Note: number of pages refers to pages within the PDF file to provide a sense of the download size, not the number of pages of readings included. Links to external web sites open in a new page.

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