When Allen and I met in 2008, we almost immediately began de- and re-constructing movement building in the context of the Harm Reduction Movement, which had been my home for more than a decade by then. I met Tuesday in 2010, a few days after I was broken open by a personal trauma. At that time my foundation was so profoundly shaken, I could no longer trust what I thought I knew about the world. Since then, I have not only survived, but have grown wiser and more strategic thanks to these two and other friends.

"..our project becomes less of one based on self-improvement or even collective self-improvement, and more about the creation of new worlds and futurities for which we currently have no language."
                                                                                                                                            -Andrea Smith  

The healing began the day before Tuesday, three other colleagues and I were to begin co-hosting a three-day Art of Participatory Leadership training in NYC. I confided in a wise friend and activist Lisa Caswell that I was going to step out, because I could not function as a facilitator while in this state of shock and grief. Rather than consoling me, Lisa offered a profound way to continue. She told me of a Native American teaching where people in mourning are welcomed to bring their grief into community and wisdom councils; to show up with this human experience as an offering to the whole.

With this invitation to find and offer the wisdom that arises from personal trauma, I went forward as a co-host and was able to invite space for the grief that is in our hearts, communities, families and institutions.  I named my quest during our opening circle ~ What does it take to invite our grief and loss in a way that serves our transformational work?  During the following two and half days together, a transgender man and a Native American woman spoke to the nature of this quest from their particular experience in a way that expanded our group’s ability to welcome, hold and be with the grief that is present when we show up as whole human beings from many different experiences in America.

This was the first time that Tuesday and I worked together. It is also when we started a conversation about how the stuckness that we found in our respective social justice organizing spaces had catalyzed us to find and study new ways of being, thinking and strategizing together. After about a year of conversations and, often getting lost together, we co-hosted the transformative gathering where Allen entered this conversation. Coincidentally, the same week that we invited people to join us in this “three-day intensive exploring participatory practices for inviting and hosting game-changing conversations in our groups, organizations, communities and movements” Occupy Wall Street was hatched. 

I joined the Facilitation Working Group of Occupy completely humbled by the General Assembly process. The first time that I attended a GA, the Declaration Work Group was asking for GA consensus approval of their draft so that their Solidarity Declaration could go to DC for the opening of their first Occupy camp the next day. A white anarchist guy in leather and Mohawk spoke to the Assembly “brothers and sisters, this is everything that I believe, but I am here to be part of the 99%, not another pedantic lefty group. Can we make it more accessible?”  This was followed by a South Asian women’s collective offering to help with some of the language “so that we can stand by it,” which was immediately approved GA consensus style among the 300+ people in attendance. 

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.
                                                                                           - Naomi Klein to the General Assembly, 2011

Needless to say, I fell in love with the movement. I had found my new true home. That is, until it regressed to the business as usual organizing tactics and behaviors that Allen spelled out in his blog. In the simplest terms, the hopefulness that arose from finding each other was not enough to hold us through the getting lost and innovating that would be necessary to become the kind of movement that is needed now. 

The concept of coming together as a broad base of the 99% was born of the emerging social network/living systems era, which too many experienced activists tried to organize and centralize with industrial age tools. Spaces for ‘brother and sister’ and learning and teaching each other were the first to be sacrificed to analysis and prescription. Instead of looking each other in the eye with curiosity, we spent many hours debating a 5-page Anti-Oppression White Paper that one affinity group proposed would set the rules of engagement for the 99%.

My heart was broken again. Even so, as the tendencies to control and centralize escalated, I remained a voice of dissent in the Facilitation Work Group declining to facilitate the approved ‘consensus’ and ‘spokes council’ formats as my new friends burned out beside me.

Eventually, a few of us who had joined the Racial Justice Framework sub-group of the Facilitation Work Group (charged with studying ‘how to facilitate from a racial justice framework’ with RaceForward and bringing recommendations back to the Facilitation Work Group) began to host Open Space gatherings where we did not apply the 'progressive stack' that was used in all other OWS settings in order to ensure that white people and men did not dominate the dialogue. 

During an early OS gathering, the first people to step forward and invite others into conversation were young, black and brown. They led their own session, produced a harvest and shared it with the Racial Justice Framework sub-group. This led to our primary recommendation to the Facilitation Work Group = do more Open Space. It never scaled however, as the revelation happened at about the same time that the wobbly center of Occupy Wall Street imploded.

"We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of ‘critical mass.' It's always about critical connections."
                                                                                                                              - Grace Lee Boggs 

While there is no longer a vibrant, recognizable center to the Occupy Wall Street Movement, there remains a living system of spaces ~ projects, collectives, cooperatives, friendships ~ that continue to grow and develop like the innovations that Allen blogged about and that are weaved together by invisible threads of connection. In fact, the originators of Open Space added, for the first time in many years, a new OS Principle as a result of noticing what was happening with the Arab Spring and Occupy Movements:

Wherever it is, is the right place...reminds participants that space is opening everywhere all the time. Please be conscious and aware. – Tahrir Square is one famous example.                                                                                                - Open Space Technology

This blog is yet another space open for finding each other.  Tuesday, Allen and I are calling this conversation, opening this space, inviting others on life’s journey to think together and beyond what we know about social justice organizing. If you are intrigued by the possibility that it’s time for innovation and, rather than adapting to and regulating the old system (that never loved us), to build a new understanding of both healing and power, please engage.

Please offer your thinking, stories and inquiry here on this blog. Some of the questions in our hearts are:

What will it take for us to give up all we know in service of creating the world we want?


What does it really take to work for transformation rather than regulation and what are the next strategies that move us in that direction?

What is our shared work together now? What is the next level of our work to liberate ourselves and each other?

What would it look like to organize towards our liberation from systems that are causing us harm while creating new systems that sustain our well-being?  

Also, please join us in person in New York City on November 20 & 21 when we enter a two-day exploration into lessons from system change work that has been driven by core teams and a deep practice of community/constituent engagement.

The debate of whether you can transform systems or whether you can only alleviate the pain of failing systems, and abandon them to create a new and better one was the beginning of my journey of getting lost when Tuesday, Kelly, and I met.  I was figuring out how I wanted to show up in my leadership as an organizer trying to address complex issues in systems that were creating harm for black and brown communities nationally. These issues looked like addressing the criminalization of poverty and homelessness among a transient population in Newark, NJ to addressing the disproportionate rate of black and brown folks who were being profiled, stopped, identified, frisked, and in too many instances killed by the police in Brooklyn, NY.

I have known Kelly since 2008 through my participation in a fellowship program through People for the American Way Foundation. I met Tuesday at a participatory leadership three day training in September of 2011. During that training was also the start of a movement moment – Occupy Wall Street.  I could only attend two out of three days due to a work obligation, but those two days changed my life in how I was organizing and forced me to revisit why I was organizing in the first place. Building my relationship with Tuesday and with Kelly in that moment allowed me to re-think my purpose, intentions, and vision for what a world would look like without institutionalized racism, health disparities, and social inequity.  I found out that we were all in the same conversation trying to figure out what was the next level of conversation and action that we needed to have. What were the new processes we needed to be practicing to truly embrace the emerging complex issues of our time with a new perspective?

In my organizing circles I was tired of feeling like I had to have all the ‘right’ answers, analysis, or feeling like I couldn’t say anything if the idea was ‘half-baked’ or not well developed or thought out. I was fearful that people would attack it and/or discuss how my politics weren't sharp, because I didn’t have the ‘right’ solution right away to save the black community. The funny thing about this fear though is that it was something that I did to other people as well.  The hypocrisy of calling people out on their politics and ridiculing them for what they did not know, or even worse posturing with a guise of knowing when come to find out they didn’t know much of anything either was not unfamiliar to me in my organizing world and working in the non-profit sector. 

By the time Occupy Wall Street was happening I grew tired of this pattern that kept showing up in organizing meetings, planning sessions, and the staff meetings with meaningless report-backs and agendas that would have staff on their cell phones or falling asleep. I was ready to drop this bad habit, because what I found happening was that we were replicating the very same behavior patterns, practices, and long lists of punitive rules that mirrored the very systems we wanted to change.  We want a system where racial profiling and police brutality are non-existent, yet we commit acts of interpersonal, institutional and domestic violence, heterosexism, and misogyny. We use the same behavior and practices that the system uses to profile and brutalize black communities and for some reason we expect that our liberation from the systems harmful ways will happen this way. Well guess what? The system never loved us! 

The legacy of this debate showcases this hypocrisy of maintaining failed systems that are not serving our best interests. This legacy is held among our ancestors such as, Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X. Martin Luther King towards his death, as recounted by Harry Belafonte states, "And I'm afraid that even as we integrate (into a burning house), we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation." Here King feels that there is a duty among us to save and transform our failing systems, (represented by the burning house). Malcolm X talks about in his speech “The House Negro and the Field Negro”, that integration has left us worse off in our collective self-determination, because we have not spent our time to hospice the dying systems that have failed to create new systems that can better serve us.

Malcolm X believed that the saving of the ‘burning plantation house’ resulted in black people working against our collective self-determination to eliminate institutionalized racism and in turn has continued to support white power and privilege in this country. He references this dynamics to the behavior of slaves who worked in the plantation houses. These houses and the operation of the plantation are symbolic of the control and power that white masters had over black slaves. Plantation house slaves saw themselves as better off than the slaves who worked out in the plantation field gathering crops, because the slaves in the house felt they were closer aligned with whiteness, which was considered to better than those slaves who worked in the field. Whiteness was associated with the ability to have power over people.  In this case, Malcolm X felt that a system that existed with these cultural dynamics did not need saving.  In fact, he felt failing systems that were not serving and supporting black communities that were disenfranchised needed to end and new ones need to be created that would support and sustain their well-being. He states, “If the Master’s house were to catch on fire, the Field Negro would pray for a strong wind to come along.”

Where I have landed in my journey, that is reflective of this debate is that I have found it extremely difficult to step into systems and try to transform them when there is distrust, a lack of shared work, collective accountability, acknowledgement and support of leadership, and coordination.  If I had to share with folks a guide of lessons I have learned to date in holding the space to have strategic conversations about how to hospice dying systems that are failing us, while creating new systems that better serve us, I would use the current situation in Ferguson, another movement moment, as a living case study in sharing my learning to-date. Let’s use the system of law enforcement as the ‘burning plantation house’:

1.       Everyone may not agree, nor may see that the burning house needs to burn to the ground. AND THAT’S OK!  I have come to acknowledge that it’s not that people have ultimately failed at connecting the dots in trying to convince all of the American public that our policing practices and law enforcement system has failed. Some will believe you when you tell them that a million dollars exists behind door number 3 and some will not. If people are not provided with a visceral experience of what it means to experience racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, class discrimination, etc. they will be more likely to never know that experience and less likely to be in solidarity with you. If the visceral experience confirms their fears of what oppression is they will remain stuck from experiencing the trauma of oppression -working from fear, deficit, and cultivating environments that produce an oppressive culture most likely filled with toxic stress. Meaning that if they find out in this game that you promised them a pipe dream about a million dollars being behind door number 3, more often times than not people will begin to distrust you, work in their own in their silos, and contribute to divisiveness. The unfortunate part is that they won’t even know it. They will continue to blind and bind themselves to various patterns of oppression, and be perpetrators, victims, and saviors of the oppression they seek to change. Harriet Tubman said it best, “I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”


2.       There are roles for everyone to play who are invested in hospicing a dying failed system and envisioning creating a new one. The reality is there will be hurt and pain involved. Some will even be afraid to pray for a strong wind to come, while others will have the courage to illuminate what the future has in store for us.  What would it take to create a new system of influence where we create a new normal that is healthy for black communities? We have to name the people who are innovating alternative ways of public safety that are improving the quality of life for black communities. We need to fund, support, train, cultivate, and connect the movement -based grassroots leadership in our communities, so that our relationships are strong and grounded in love, health, wealth, happiness, and understanding. We currently exist in a system that kills our black brothers and sisters, because our law enforcement agencies are based on a belief system that views us as expendable. We need to practice this new way of being that will exist in this new system together, and heal from the trauma we have experienced through our oppression and be empowered collectively. If we don't practice differently around how to be together better, it will be harder to actualize what the new normal will be in our communities. 

 
3.       We have to build strategy and organize with creativity, innovation, zeal, adaptability, and long-term visioning with seventh generation thinking, so that our children and children’s children can benefit from the sustainable changes we have implemented. Short term wins are important, AND we should honor our short-term wins by giving ourselves space to imagine a vision for the long-term. What would it look like to not have racial profiling happening in our community? What would it take for us to make that happen? Who is best positioned to begin to support the dismantling and hospicing of the failed law enforcement system? How can we illuminate opportunities for alternative public safety practices, so that those in the failed system who see the opportunity in restorative justice can transition out of the failing system and support those of us who are connecting the dots and creating something better?

Tuesday

I wrote this essay a few years ago to express my own sense of uncertainty and inadequacy in the face of what felt like overwhelming racial and social injustice.  At the time, I wrote it to give myself permission to be lost, to stop pretending I knew the answers, and to give myself over to new ways of thinking and responding to what was happening in our world.  As I shared this with a few friends - Kelly McGowan and Allen Frimpong - and we began to see the possibility of being lost together.  And we decided to share what we're learning as we're lost through Power and Privilege 2.0.

I think weʼre lost, friends. I think we donʼt know what to do. I think we thought we knew what to do, but we didnʼt. And now rather than owning up to the fact that weʼre lost, we keep trying to do what we thought worked. We just keep doing it harder.

We keep having the same conversation. Espousing the same ideals. Making the same plans and then wondering why they didnʼt work this time.

A lot has changed for us in the past 15 years, but oppression is not less pervasive. We have had some major victories, but we havenʼt won the war.

And maybe the fact that weʼre at war is the problem. Weʼre acting as if there are enemies and good guys. Weʼre mobilizing and arming ourselves with data and statistics to go out to fight the good fight. But maybe weʼre not really at war.

Maybe weʼre just lost.

All of us.

Maybe itʼs time to “abandon ourselves to lostness” and change the way we experience the world. Maybe we need to hold loosely our precious ideals and just see what works by putting one foot in front of the other, linking arms with others.

And maybe the “others” need to change. Weʼve all been in workshops where weʼre told to find the person least like us and have a conversation with then. Well, what if we found people not like us at all, linked arms and tried to figure a way forward together?

Of course, this will lead to major discomfort. Do I link arms with the corporate strategist who has no idea about Triple P bottom line? Do I link arms with the police officer who has been arresting my people? Do I grab the hand that has hit my mother or led me to a lynching?

Well, if I was lost and I thought you were too, I might. If I thought it might get me out of here, I might.

And actually, this isnʼt an essay saying letʼs make friends with our enemies. Itʼs an essay asking us to consider why they are enemies in the first place. Or maybe not even that. Perhaps itʼs asking us to look at the person next to us, across from us, beside us, or in another city or country and simply ask them if we can get un-lost together.

What would it take for us to do this? What would we have to give up? What could we possibly gain?

If we see ourselves in a familiar landscape but hold some curiosity about it, what might be possible? If we look at an event from - not a different perspective - but as if we have never seen the event at all, what could we do about it?

What is the gift of being lost?

For one, we can stop pretending we know what to do. Which is incredibly liberating. We can stop trying to convince people that we know the way out of this mess that has taken the whole lengthy history of humanity to create. We can open our eyes, and say, “Whatʼs next?”

Being someone who is just as lost as everyone else, I think I can say for sure “whatʼs next” is not “whatʼs been”. Itʼs not even “what is” today.

I think whatʼs next is a new conversation about how we are different from each other. And how we are the same. And how we are both and neither. And how the old conversations about difference and commonality are not the worthy conversation anymore.

The we have a “common humanity” conversation is no longer viable. And yet it is true.

The “speaking truth to power” and “ you must acknowledge and understand my difference” conversation is no longer viable. And yet it is also true.

What is the new conversation that holds these truths and simultaneously lets them go while still moving us forward?

What is itʼs language? What is itʼs texture? What is its substance?

What is the conversation that is not in denial of either our common humanity or of our differences? What is the conversation that can hold, hold, hold us as we do work together?

What would we be saying if we admitted that we were lost and none of the rhetoric that we know has gotten us to the place that we want to be? What would we begin to notice about ourselves and each other?

What would we want to talk about?

What is the aching in each of us that calls us to leave the directions and landmarks of what we know and move into a completely unknown landscape? I think we do want to move there. I just think we donʼt know how.

Weʼre lost.

So what if we just embraced it? Said I donʼt know where weʼre going, but letʼs take a first step - letʼs have a first conversation - and try to figure it out.