The Uses of the Erotic by AUDRE LORDE

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision - a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. "What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?" In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic - the sensual - those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "It feels right to me," acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering, and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like the only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a black fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity - the abuse of feeling.

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be able that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.

The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before.

But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation.

Connected and Vunerable
Posted by: A.H.M.K. in Guest Blogging
I know Im not alone; Im not the only one thinking these things. Recently I read This Bridge Called My Back and I was so grateful to the women who exposed their frustrations, insecurities, and anger. Their words provided company in lonely places in my brain. I was so grateful that they were having thoughts and feelings then, that they are pertinent to me now. Over 21 years aren’t separating us at all.
Merle Woo’s “Letter to Ma” written in January of 1980 especially influenced me to make writing personal. It exposes Merle’s relationship to her mother:
I believe there are chasms between us. When you say, ‘I support you, honey, in everything you do…I know you mean except my speaking out and writing of my anger at all those things that have caused those chasms (140). I desperately want you to understand me and my work, Ma, to know what I am doing! When you distort what I say, like thinking I am against all ‘caucasians’ or that I am ashamed of Dad, then I feel more frustration and want to slash out, not at you, but those external forces which keep us apart. What deepens the chasms between us are out different reactions to those forces (141).
I found comfort in those pages- connecting with the intimacy the author. There are more layers and perspectives, though, than the ‘safe’ pages of This Bridge, and dwelling in the theories of it. We have to move forward.In the preface of This Bridge We Call Home Gloria E. Anzaldua addresses why it’s important to progress into another mind frame:
Twenty-one years ago we struggled with the recognition of difference within the context of commonality. Today we grapple with the recognition of commonality within the context of difference. While “This Bridge Called My Back” displaced whiteness, “This Bridge We Call Home” carries this displacement further. It questions the terms of white and women of color by showing that whiteness may not be applied to all whites, as some possess women-of-color consciousness, just as some women of color bear white consciousness…. Today, categories of race and gender are more permeable and flexible than they were…(2).
I, like many others, think thinks every day that im not proud of- things I would not say out loud because they are damaging and rooted in miseducation. But the embarrassing things I feel are useful to expose, I do. Why? Because I think about how much I respect those who speak their heart, mind, fears, weaknesses and biases.We have such a long way to go; the least we can do is not to be alone in our miseducation. There is a theory out there that encourages separating the person from her patterns, anger, disillusionment, distress, and all the other shit that futher separates us.
While, im not able to do make those separations all the time, I still believe in the basic idea that people are good and that our environment beautifully and seamlessly inlays division and mistrust of eachother.
If class doesn’t separate us, then race.If not race, then age.If not age, then sex.Sex, then sexuality.Sexuality, then gender. Gender then awareness.If not this, then that until I’m standing alone wondering why I feel so damn lonely.
Im angry. Angry with people who don’t understand what’s happening right under our noses,Angry with middle and owning classes unaware of privilege and luxury,Angry with people who don’t think their racist,(And because this just happened) Angry with people who trick me into eating meat when they know I don’t eat it!
Staying angry is a stagnant place.; it further solidifies separation between each other. I feel, though, that anger is part of the journey- that it allows passage into another place. This place allows one to see the separation of a person and the pattern- an opening beyond a ‘safe’ space for conscious women.
Later in the preface, Gloria Anzaldua addresses safe spaces and urges:
Staying ‘home’ and not venturing out from our own group comes from woundedness, and stagnates our growth. To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others….To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded(3).
I am completely on board, intellectually, but in daily practice, I loose stamina quickly. There is much work to be done. So let’s not be stagnant.
I hope these thoughts make sense to some one out there and gives the courage to feel less alone and continue making progress.
cross posted in Texas and Egypt

From http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/08/01/connected-and-vunerable/

Eliminating the Hurts of White Racism by Patty Wipfler

Racism is one of the key issues in our world today. The economic and cultural domination of people of Caucasian descent over people of color has infected cultures the world over. People of color of varying races and backgrounds must contend, in general, with fewer resources and more limited access to power over their environments than white people. They also must do battle with disrespectful and limiting stereotypes about them that are passed down from generation to generation among people of the dominant culture. We parents have an opportunity to preserve our children's interest and delight in people whose skin color and culture may differ from theirs. To make the best of this opportunity, we can begin by widening our view of who is hurt by racism. In this article, I'm not going to talk about the deep damage racism does to people of color. There are numerous excellent books and resources on this subject. This article is a quick introduction to the perspective that racism hurts white people, too.
White people world-wide have been hurt by white racism, a conditioning which limits their lives and locks them into the oppressor role vis-a-vis people of color. No white person ever volunteered to become a racist. These patterns of hurt and fear are set in place when they are quite young, after they have been intimidated and attacked by adults many times to teach them "their place" as children.
Children know instinctively that each person deserves respect. But when they see the people they love acting out patterns of white racism, they are generally unable to speak up or change the situation. They must collude with it in order to keep their parents' favor. The racist actions of adults stick in the child's mind, and become patterns of behavior which they themselves fall into when they are upset or afraid.
Each white person gets hurt by white racism in a unique way, through unique incidents. But the larger societal pattern, which plays itself out in individuals' lives and actions, has these main aspects to it. First, racism has as its backbone the economic oppression of people of color. Racism prevents white people from getting accurate information about other people, and makes white people afraid of great numbers of people. White people are also severely isolated by racism. It corrals them into a very narrow world, the boundaries of which are enforced by an automatic, unthinking "we are better than" or "we don't go near" attitude which flares any time a white person is afraid.
White people can help each other get free of racist patterns and habits of thinking. Listening and decision are the keys to the cell door. The listener's main job is to lift feelings of guilt around racism, so that the emotional tension (crying, laughter, trembling and perspiring) that keeps racist behavior in place can drain. Every white person feels guilty about times he/she has failed to interrupt racist behavior. That guilt prevents people from seeing their own ultimate goodness enough to cry and rage about being trapped in racist patterns. Decision to act outside racist isolation is also vital to getting free, and so goals need to be set in listening sessions, to help the person chart a less confined life.
This is a series of drawings that illustrate how patterns of racism get set in, and how we can help each other to eliminate those patterns.

The oppression of children forces them to witness and collude with white racism.When afraid, the child rehearses the mis-information, isolation, and "better-than" patterns he or she has witnessed.

The patterned behavior sticks to the child.

Feelings of guilt and helplessness keep the person from looking honestly at the fear underlying the pattern of racism.

When the listener encourages the person to notice that she is good, and never wanted to hurt anyone, the lid of guilt lifts and the person is able to laugh, cry, tremble, talk about her life, and to set goals for breaking out of racist confines. Here are some of the things we encourage white people to talk about in listening partnerships and groups, where they can get good listening and begin the process of building richer lives for themselves and their families. Remember to stick with any thought or direction that allows a person to laugh, cry, tremble, perspire, rage, or yawn. This is the undoing of the emotional tension that has nailed a racist pattern onto a loving person.
What is great, and what is hard about your own heritage? How have you been oppressed?
Take a direction of absolute pride in yourself and the people you come from.
What are your earliest experiences with people of color? Tell all the details you remember.
Take full power to get things right in any early incidents in which you were passive witness to racism. Speak up, from your heart.
Talk about the times you've interrupted white racism, or wanted to.
Talk about the details of making friends and good relationships with people of color in your present life. What's great about your friendships? What are you afraid of? Embarrassed about? Worried about?
Set goals. What will you do to act outside the confines of white racism?

For further information, we recommend the book Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, by Paul Kivel, New Society Press.

Our Movements and the Intersectionalities of Oppressions

Our Movements and the Intersectionalities of Oppressions

Blessings to all. I hope this message finds you with eagerness to keep on struggling and striving to end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others. For several years, I have been educated and reeducated, stressed and determined to find, create, and nurture solutions. Guided by the Women’s Movement, Civil Rights Movement, United Farmworkers Movement, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Movement, and the American Indian Movement, I am continually inspired by Survivors of Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others to be a social change agent from the inside out. Those who I have been privileged to dialogue with, read about, and learn from have mainly been Women in movements addressing oppressions or the “ism”. These “isms” include and are not limited to: sexism, racism, classism, ageism and all other unfair situations, states, systems, and processes which are the roots of our social brokenness.
As a recognized male ally, I was blessed to quickly realize a fundamental reality. The struggles for equality and collective healing of Women of Color are related to my own societal conditioning supporting Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others. But even more, their struggles are connected to my healing. While some men in the Movement to End and Prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others may believe their simple awareness to address this epidemic means they have some how “arrived,” it is quite the opposite for me. For numerous years, guided by dozens of Sisters and Brothers and other loved ones, I have come to know that men’s work -- my work -- within the Women’s Movements is a process.
For those who do not know me, I am a Chicano from Deep South Tejas (Texas). I am a Survivor of many oppressive situations and systems, some of which I have bought into as a man in a male-dominated society. My successes and challenges have molded me and continue to mold me into a passionate Community Activist destined to end and prevent oppressions. Sincerely, I am blessed to be given this level of consciousness and even more thankful to the many Women and Men of various walks of life who have so graciously entrusted me with tools. Tools I use every day to stop and prevent myself from being part of the problem. These assets include cultivating my spiritual life, checking in with my circle of accountability, committing to be proactive for and with my local community, and remaining vigilant to connecting our work with all work to end oppression. We have been dealing with basic Human Rights and we can not overcomplicate the solutions since this has prevented us from realizing how we, as people, have many more similarities than we have differences.
For those of you who do know me well. To that end, you are aware that my spiritual journey has and will continue to be challenging. During this path, I have run into thick walls as I have wrestled to redefine my manhood and find out what it truly means once layers of societal conditioning are taken away. For years, I have been part of solutions to end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others and today I can say wholeheartedly I have been guided here. Even though I have run into self-imposed and societal barriers, I have not gone around them. I have made a conscious decision to listen carefully to my elders, find out the root causes of my choices and actions, and commit not to make those choices or actions. I have gently been making the daily decision to choose nonviolence with help from loved ones. I must constantly dialogue with them and my community to continue my path of advocacy for the women who are most affected.
With this in mind, I am very concerned about the accuracy and precision of many of today’s solutions to end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others. Furthermore, I am worried about how difficult it is for others to stretch and connect the aforementioned movements to end and prevent oppressions to our work. If we are to sincerely engage in primary prevention efforts, we must be very open to studying the intersectionality of oppressions. You may have read the newspaper article, “America is Changed, but Falls Short of Martin Luther King's Vision of Justice” (www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/03/30/2008-03-30_america_is_changed_but_falls_short_of_ma.html?page=1) I shared on March 20, 2008, the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or an essay I wrote entitled “People of Color, and The Color of Love” (http://www.mrcforchange.org/coloroflove.html), published by Voice Male. The newspaper article spoke about where we are as a country in fulfilling the dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and every person that worked with him and around him to provide human rights. In my essay, I spoke about the importance of self-identity by saying we must “resist being defined only by our color, whatever that color may be.” I also indicated, “The grassroots are growing and sending you a message. . . . I am confident the movement will reach out welcoming arms to those of us who know they are more than a "colored person" drinking from one water fountain or the other. Let us all drink from the same fountain… the color of love.”
I have been struggling and striving to connect other oppressions to our work of ending and preventing Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others. To end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others, we must talk about the root causes. Am I asking for too much? Webster defines the word “radical” as “of or relating to the origin.” Nonetheless, some people see “radical” as a bad word. What is so bad about getting to the origin of Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others? Imagine what that would look and feel like…wow talk about bliss!
My Grandmas, Aunties, and Sisters of Color are still suffering and crying out in different ways, inside and outside of our shelters and crisis centers. They are the ones most affected by oppressions like Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others. How many e-listserves, conference calls, and trainings the half-day before national conferences do we need before we realize how simple our solutions are? Please do not misunderstand me. The foundation of my work has been built by Women who have blessed me by sharing their herstory. Indeed, I have been guided by national leaders in our movements, and I overstand the importance of e-listserves, conference calls, and trainings, and conferences. It is the content of these methodologies to End Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others that concerns me. Programs, initiatives, and projects are now burdened with extensive outcome measures, complicated technical systems, requirements to have degreed professionals, structured curricula, and other "red tape."
I am very grateful for my loved ones, especially my blessed Mom and other Women of Color who have inspired me and are now telling me I am in a position to identify these truths. Furthermore, I am now in a place in which I know I am qualified to take these conversations into community arenas so that we start building our solutions sooner rather than later. Through personal work, higher education, and professional development, I have come to earn the following titles: Family Violence Program Assistant, Sexual Assault Project Coordinator, Community Organizer-Prevention Specialist, Managing Director, and Male Group Co-Facilitator. Since 2003, I have been a consultant for national organizations at the forefront to end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others. While remarkable in their own way, none of the above titles have given me the insight, solid foundation, and, most importantly, the blessings to assert my qualifications to end and prevent injustices than the Women of Color I have been guided by. In the arduous, ongoing process of self-restoration, informed by loved Women of Color, I have come face-to-face with the unabashed reality of Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others. I am humbled and eager to take these conversations into the necessary community arenas so we can collectively begin our solutions sooner rather than later.
Today, I humbly declare I am prepared and very willing to share more in-depth the blessed gifts my Creator has given me. Since Sisters and Brothers from New York to California and South Tejas to South Dakota have been teaching me, it is time for me to be more available to you and others. As some of you know, I love and am fed by supporting others as we strive to self-reflect, dialogue, organize, and nurture solutions to end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others.
Personally, I continue to self-reflect, dialogue, organize, and nurture solutions to end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children and Other Marginalized Communities every day. I accept I am far from perfect. I am a “spiritual being having human experiences.” In my work as a Community Activist and now Co-Founder of Boundless: Con Amor y Paz, I will continue to be learning and unlearning and sharing widely what I discover to create and promote peace within our selves, homes, communities, and our country.
In January 2006, I was hired to be part of a revolutionary grassroots project. This was a dream come true since I had been preparing for a project like this for several years. We, two Community Organizers and a Community Organizing Coordinator, were charged with connecting with “traditionally marginalized communities” and work via Grassroots Community Organizing tactics.
For the next sixteen months, we traveled across the expansive state and instead of inviting people to the table, we went to their forsaken wards, underserved community centers, and blessed but struggling places of worship. We were very successful in less than eight months. We asked people, especially Survivors, what they were doing to stop Domestic Violence and what they knew was not working. They gave us extremely helpful details. We gave them tools: how-to information, action planning, books, DVDs, other written materials, micro-grants, and proactive technical assistance.
Fast forward – many more people, groups, and organizations invited us to their tables. We were supporting them with pretty much everything and anything they needed. Two groups of community members in particular touched me and continue to move me. They have overcome a lot of depressing situations which have changed the dynamics of their groups, but they remain eager to do the work to end and prevent Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others in three nations and three languages. These are the Migrant Farmworkers turned Advocates for Survivors who in 2002 showed me who I am and what I need to remain sharing and promoting, Grassroots Community Organizing.
This IS a solution to Men’s Violence Against Women, Children, and Others including sexism, racism, classism, ageism and all oppression. It is simple. Our people, groups, collectives, and organizations are on the ground, desperate for Grassroots Community Organizers like you and me. Are you ready for them? Do you want to get ready? Let’s do this for ourselves, our neighborhoods, our communities, and our movements. An empowered Hip-Hop Artist recently said, “No matter how hard they try, they can’t stop us now.”


Edited by several Sister and Brothers in our Movements especially Juan Cardoza-Oquendo, a youthful and
highly skilled Puerto Rican living in Decatur, GA.

We encourage the reproduction of this document, but ask that you please acknowledge
Boundless: Con Amor y Paz
http://sites.google.com/site/amorypazinitiatives

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ON REVOULTIONARY MOVEMENT BUILDING?

"I'm very much afraid of this 'Foundation Complex.' We're getting praise from places that worry me."
-Ella Baker, June 1963

"I want us all to be real creative about our tactics and strategies to dismantle the empire."
- Joo-Hyun Kang, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded Conference, 2004

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ON REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT BUILDING?

In this landmark collection, over 25 activists and scholars describe and discuss the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC)—a system of relationships between the state, the owning classes, foundations, and social service & social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.
Naming what some might call “the elephant in the room,” the contributors to this groundbreaking and thought-provoking collection critical assess the NPIC’s impact on the practice and imagination of the political left in the U.S. Of central concern is the emerging dominance of the 501(c)(3) non-profit, a model which some argue threatens to permanently eclipse autonomous grassroots-movement building in the arena of social justice.The Revolution Will Not Be Funded addresses the following questions:
What is the history of the non-profit model? What drove its development? How does it impact the form and direction of social justice organizing?
How has reliance on foundation funding impacted the course of social justice movements?
How does 501(c)3 non-profit status impact social justice organizations' relationship to the state?
How does non-profit status allow the state to co-opt and control our movements?
Are there ways the non-profit model can be used subversively to support more radical visions for social change?
What are the alternatives for building viable social justice movements? How do we resource our movements outside the non-profit structure?
What models for organizing outside the NGO/non-profit model exist outside the U.S. that may help us?
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence is a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue, and grassroots organizing. To learn more, please visit http://www.incite-national.org/.
Available in April 2007 978-0-89608-766-8 paper 272 pages $18

ORDERING INFORMATION:

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is available from South End Press.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, by Andrea Smith

Part One: The Rise of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

1. The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, by Dylan Rodríguez
2. In The Shadow of the Shadow State, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
3. From Black Awakening in Capitalist America, by Robert L. Allen
4. Democratizing American Philanthropy, by Christine E. Ahn

Part Two: Non-Profits and Global Organizing
5. The Filth on Philanthropy: Progressive Philanthropy’s Agenda to Misdirect Social Justice Movements and the Just Redistribution of Wealth and Power, by Tiffany Lethabo King and Ewuare Osayande
6. Between Radical Theory and Community Praxis: Reflections on Organizing and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, by Amara H. Pérez, Sisters in Action for Power
7. Native Organizing Before the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, by Madonna Thunder Hawk
8. Fundraising Is Not a Dirty Word: Community-Based Economic Strategies for the Long Haul, by Stephanie Guilloud and William Cordery, Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide
9. “we were never meant to survive”: Fighting Violence Against Women and the Fourth World War, by Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo
10. Social Service or Social Change?, by Paul Kivel
11. Pursuing a Radical Anti-Violence Agenda Inside/Outside a Non-Profit Structure, by Alisa Bierria, Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA)
12. The NGOization of the Palestine Liberation Movement: Interviews with Hatem Bazian, Noura Erekat, Atef Said, and Zeina Zaatari, by Andrea Smith

Part Three: Reformulating The Role of Non-Profits
13. Radical Social Change: Searching for a New Foundation, by Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida
14. Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts?, by Paula X. Rojas
15. Non-Profits and the Autonomous Grassroots, by Eric Tang
16. On Our Own Terms: Ten Years of Radical Community Building with Sista II Sista, by Nicole Burrowes, Morgan Cousins, Paula X. Rojas, and Ije Ude

2008 Republican National Convention Committee on Arrangements :: 2008 Republican National Convention Expands Outreach to Hispanics - (their website ge

The 2008 Republican National Convention today announced the launch of the Spanish language section of its official convention Web site. The Spanish section, www.gopconvention2008.com/enespanol, will feature Spanish versions of convention information, fact sheets and press releases. The section will feature regular updates in Spanish leading up to and during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
(Logo: www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080114/RNCLOGO )
“The launch of the Spanish-language section of our Web site is another important step toward creating a fully interactive online community to engage millions around the country,” said convention President & CEO Maria Cino. “It is our goal to carry the Republican Party’s message to all communities, so they may experience Sen. John McCain’s extraordinary leadership and his positive vision for America.”
As part of its outreach to Hispanics, the convention also announced today two new hires who will engage media leading up to and during the four-day event. Joanna Burgos will serve as Press Secretary and will lead the convention’s press operation for national media. Burgos previously served in various communications positions at the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security. She is a fluent Spanish speaker and native of Miami.
Yohana de la Torre will serve as Deputy Press Secretary for Specialty Media and will oversee outreach to several constituencies, including Spanish-language media. Also a fluent Spanish speaker and native of Miami, de la Torre is currently owner and managing editor of the Gulf Coast Times in Fort Myers, Fla. She previously served as a communications specialist for Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) and at the Republican National Committee.
For the first time ever, and in conjunction with its Official Live Video Streaming Provider Ustream.TV, the convention will stream live gavel-to-gavel coverage in Spanish on its Web site: www.GOPConvention2008.com. As has been done in the past, the convention proceedings translated into Spanish will be available free of charge via satellite on the second audio path (SAP).
Oprima aqui para leer en espanol:
tracking.smartmailer.net/?147-997-21666-9741
About the Republican National Convention The 2008 Republican National Convention will be held at Saint Paul’s Xcel Energy Center from Sept. 1-4, 2008. Approximately 45,000 delegates, alternate delegates, volunteers, members of the media and other guests are expected to attend the convention. Minneapolis-Saint Paul is expected to receive an estimated $150-$160 million positive economic boost from the four-day event. For more information about the 2008 Republican National Convention, please visit our website at www.GOPConvention2008.com and join our social network sites on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube.Website: ” title=”http://www.gopconvention2008.com/\”*
” class=”autohyperlink” target=”_blank”>www.gopconvention2008.com/”*

*From: http://sev.prnewswire.comTraducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

Unos ideas de Movimiento desde San Antonio Tejas / SOME MOVEMENT IDEAS FROM SAN ANTONIO TEXAS

SIGUE EN ESPANOL
**Free Speech Coalition Meeting
Tuesday, July 8 @ 6:30pm
at Esperanza
**

Fifty Coalition members attended the press conference and hearing last
Tuesday, where we updated Judge Rodriguez on the status of our case,
including the delay in receiving the SAPD's Standard Operating
Procedures, and held a press conference which included the first public
performance of our Teatro Callejero group.
* * <#BetitaMartinez>

JOIN US AT THE NEXT COALITION MEETING
Tuesday, July 8th at 6:30pm
at Esperanza Peace and Justice Center
922 San Pedro Ave. @ Evergreen
210.228.0201
In the last week, the City has filed to have the injunction against the
marching ordinance lifted, meaning that people in San Antonio will again
be required by the City to pay for our right to hold political marches
in the streets.

At this meeting, we will continue to plan and coordinate the work of the
many committees that have formed as a part of the Free Speech Coalition,
including:

1. *Cafecitos Committee* - coordinating informative meetings in people's
homes
2. *Teatro Callejero Committee* - creating and performing short skits to
get the word out to the larger community about the unjust marching
ordinance and efforts to repeal it
3. *Research Committee* - assisting in necessary research for lawsuit
and media plans
4. *Media Committee* - Writing letters to the editor, getting national
media contacts, writing press releases, and creating alternative media
such as YouTube videos

We are going strong and need to continue to work in preparation for the
November hearing, and toward our long-term vision of connecting the
Marching Ordinance to the many other violations of civil and human
rights we are facing, and to the commodification of public spaces in
general - not just the streets, but the schools, the prisons, the
aquifers, and even the spaces of our minds and bodies.

Bring your ideas, skills, and commitment to spread the word about this
issue throughout the San Antonio, South Texas, national, and
international community. For an update on the status of the Int'l
Woman's Day & Free Speech Coalition vs. City of San Antonio case, visit
www.esperanzacenter.org/freespeech.


** La libertad de expresión coalición reunión
Martes, 8 de julio @ 6:30 pm
a Esperanza
**
Cincuenta miembros de la Coalición asistieron a la conferencia de prensa y última audiencia Martes, en el que el magistrado Rodríguez actualizado sobre la situación de nuestro caso, incluidos el retraso en la recepción de la SAPD del estándar de funcionamiento Procedimientos, y celebró una conferencia de prensa que incluyó el primer público desempeño de nuestro grupo de Teatro Callejero.
* * <# BetitaMartinez>

EE.UU. se unan en la próxima reunión de coalición
Martes, 8 de Julio a las 6:30 pm
a Esperanza Paz y el Centro de Justicia
922 San Pedro Ave. @ Evergreen
210.228.0201

En la última semana, la ciudad ha presentado a tener la acción de cesación contra las marchando ordenanza levantarse, lo que significa que la gente en San Antonio de nuevo se requerirá de la ciudad a pagar por nuestro derecho a celebrar marchas políticas en las calles.

En esta sesión, vamos a seguir para planificar y coordinar la labor de la
muchas comisiones que han formado como parte de la Free Speech Coalition,
entre ellos:

1. * * Cafecitos Comisión - la coordinación de reuniones informativas en los pueblos hogares
2. * Teatro Callejero Comisión * - la creación y la realización de parodias a corto
obtener la palabra a la comunidad en general acerca de la injusta marchando
ordenanza y los esfuerzos para derogarla
3. * Comité de Investigación * - ayudar en la investigación necesaria para la demanda los planes y los medios de comunicación
4. * * Comité de Medios de Comunicación - Escribir cartas al editor, consiguiendo nacional contactos de prensa, comunicados de prensa escrito, y la creación de medios alternativos tales como los vídeos de YouTube

Nosotros vamos fuerte y la necesidad de seguir trabajando en la preparación para la
Noviembre audiencia, y hacia nuestra visión de largo plazo de la conexión
Marchando a la Ordenanza de muchas otras violaciónes de los derechos civiles y humanos derechos que nos enfrentamos, ya que la mercantilización de los espacios públicos en general - no sólo las calles, pero las escuelas, las cárceles, los
acuíferos, e incluso los espacios de nuestras mentes y cuerpos.

Traiga sus ideas, habilidades y compromiso de difundir la palabra sobre este
cuestión a lo largo del San Antonio, Sur de Texas, nacionales e
comunidad internacional. Para una actualización sobre la situación de la Int'l
Woman's Day & Free Speech Coalition vs Ciudad de San Antonio, visita
www.esperanzacenter.org / freespeech.

LOVE FIGHTS THE POWER

By Barry Boyce

For bell hooks, fighting oppression doesn’t require anger or conflict—just opening our hearts and speaking the truth fearlessly. Barry Boyce tells the story of this renowned feminist and social critic, and how she came to embrace activism without enemies and a visionary kind of love.

Bell hooks is a woman of many call numbers. If you search for her in the library, you’ll find her lurking all over the place: feminist studies, African-American studies, education, health, film, children’s books, and more. Waiting there to pounce, like a curious cat, she is likely to jump out at you from any of these shelves and strike you with a flurry of provocative ideas—about race, gender, class, domination, and liberation, to name a few.

But if you do go searching for her in the library, try to find her on videotape or DVD, because while bell hooks articulates beautifully in print, she really shines when you see her face and hear her voice embodying what she thinks and feels and sees. They say she is an “outspoken social critic, a visionary, a public intellectual,” but what comes across most if you spend some time around her is love. She loves to be herself and be by herself—without the need to be defined by others—but she also loves to love others and to communicate: about herself and to herself and to others, but above all with others. She loves dialogue. She’s a great interviewer. And should you ever have the pleasure of speaking with her, beware. She will probably interview you, to find out what’s going on inside and whether you’re ready and willing to talk about it. To bell hooks, an idea is like a basketball. She doesn’t want to hold it up to be admired. She says she wants to “throw it to you and let you experience it for yourself.”

When I tell a friend I’m going to interview bell hooks, she says, “lower case, right?” By taking a pen name that honors her maternal great-grandmother—and writing it in lower case—hooks hoped to decrease ego-investment and create some distance between herself and her work. Twenty-five books or so later, “bell hooks” has become a brand and an icon. But when I try to find the buzzer for her apartment in Greenwich Village, there is no bell hooks. In spite of all I have read by her and about her, in that small moment I find myself wondering who “bell hooks” really is.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, she grew up in the southwest corner of Kentucky, in the small city of Hopkinsville, in tobacco country about an hour and half drive north of Nashville, Tennessee. And when I make my way up to her apartment, that’s the first thing she wants to talk about: her return to the rural South, to home. She spent more than thirty years mostly in cities and big universities: she earned her B.A. at Stanford, her master’s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She’s been on the faculties of Yale, Oberlin, and City College. But in the fall of 2004, hooks returned to Kentucky to take a position as Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. Located in a small town just south of Louisville, Berea was founded in 1855 as the first interracial and co-educational college in the South. Its aim, the college says, is to promote “understanding and kinship among all people, service to communities in Appalachia and beyond, and sustainable living practices which set an example of new ways to conserve our limited natural resources.” It’s also smack-dab in the middle of the Bible Belt.

hooks refers to her modest Greenwich Village place, which she purchased when she taught at City College and returns to from time to time, as a pied a terre. But she makes very clear that her feet are now deeply planted in the terra firma of Kentucky. “It has been really sublime for me to return home,” she says, “to that Kentucky landscape, to a world of nature that I grew up in, where I was able to roam, and where I felt formed and very free.” hooks says she has also returned to the place that she escaped from, a difficult place of “dysfunction, madness, and trauma,” and a place where Buddhism is thought of as demonic by many, and where people ask fewer questions because the big questions have already been answered.

bell hooks 101 begins there, in Kentucky, where she struggled to find herself in the impoverished home she shared with a brother and five sisters, and in a racist world that had little to no room for a black girl who wanted to think critically and write for a living.

Bone Black, hooks’ chronicle of girlhood, as she likes to call it, is chantlike and elegiac. It proceeds in simple cadences and short chapters that do not try to lay out a Master Narrative. And there is no sense searching for one, or trying to tease it out of hooks. Her life is an open book—several dozen in fact—but she has no interest in putting it all together into something neat. What emerges is a series of vignettes and impressions, in no particular order, like real memory, and the picture they paint can make you laugh and cry.

“I must sell tickets to a Tom Thumb wedding, one of the school shows,” she writes. “It isn’t any fun for children. We get to dress up in paper wedding clothes and go through a ceremony for the entertainment of the adults. The whole thing makes me sick but no one cares. Like every other girl I want to be the bride but I am not chosen. It has always to do with money. The important roles go to the children whose parents have money to give… I am lucky to be a bridesmaid, to wear a red crepe paper dress made just for me. I am not thrilled with such luck. I would rather not wear a paper dress, not be in a make-believe wedding. They tell me that I am lucky to be lighter skinned, not black black, not dark brown, lucky to have hair that is almost straight, otherwise I might not be in the wedding at all, otherwise I might not be so lucky.”

Although she has not made a career of poetry, hooks has communed with poetry and written poetry from a young age, and much of her writing reads poetically. It sings and it breaks with convention. Her poetic tone in Bone Black enables her to present an agonizing tale without bitterness. Rhythmically, with underlying strains of empathy, she presents the tale of her oppressors. “We are not able to punish grown-ups for their lies,” she writes. “We are not even allowed to tell them they are lying. Once when I said, not thinking, not watching my every word, that so-and-so sure was a liar I was hit across the mouth. Sometimes the grown-ups could be heard talking about the preachers and how they stand right up there in the pulpit and lie. This makes the grown-ups laugh. It confuses us since we know that god loves truth. We do not understand why the good men of god who stand and lie are not struck down by a bolt of lightning or some other heaven-sent magic. It is confusing, strange and crazy making. Despite the confusion we try to be true.”

hooks often refers to the child she writes about in Bone Black in the third person, which she says is one of our modes of remembering. When her parents decide to move her to a more isolated room because of her strange and ungainly ways, she writes, “She is to live in exile. They are glad to see her go, they feel as if something had died that they had long waited to be rid of but were not free to throw away. Like in church, they excommunicate her.”

hooks’ girlhood is not unrelentingly bleak. She finds love in the gaps in people’s defenses, and she will build on that love later in life, when she champions a type of feminism—and liberation from oppression altogether—that does not need to demonize and create enemies. She also finds people to admire and emulate, older people who are connected to the land and to folkways that are not defined by what she will come to call, at the height of her critical powers, “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” These people do not buy into “dominator culture.” They define for themselves who they are. Prime among them is Saru, her grandmother. She writes, “Now that [Saru] is old she talks often to me about god. She tells me that believing in god has nothing to do with going to church. I love to hear her talk about the way she went to church and found that people were more concerned with talking about what you were wearing and who you were with and decided never to go again. She is a woman of spirit, a woman of strong language, a fighter. She tells me that she has inherited this fighting spirit from her mother, and that I may have a little of it but it is too early to tell.”


Stanford University, where hooks enrolled at age eighteen, was about as far from her “backwoods Kentucky life” as she could go. She does not feel that she was a rebel: she was pursuing an education, which was something her parents placed a high value on, despite their disapproval of her obsessive desire to read. It was at Stanford that she discovered the “open field” of the mind.

“The life of the intellectual was so exciting,” she tells me, “because it was a world of openness, radical openness, whereas my life growing up in a fundamentalist Christian home was a very narrow, confining life.” But, as she recounts in Wounds of Passion, the story of her intellectual coming of age, she was often very lonely at Stanford, where “there are not many black girls” and people had no understanding of the South, which was just an object of ridicule for sophisticates. At times, she wrote, “Sadness soaks my body like that moment when you are caught unexpectedly in a rain shower and are wet through and through.”

hooks’ moment of truth came in a feminist literature class, where her fellow students were “annoyed that I don’t seem to deal ‘just’ with gender.” She proclaimed that the world where only gender mattered didn’t exist. “The moment anybody black moves out into the world somewhere, away from segregation,” she writes in Wounds of Passion, “we always have to think about the ways that race matters, sometimes more than gender, sometimes the same as gender, but always in convergence and collusion.”

The interrelationship of different forms of oppression, all of which she subsumes under the label of “dominator culture,” would become a thread running through hooks’ work. She would always look at racial, gender, sexual, economic, and political domination not as separate topics for seminars, but as an interwoven web of influences that affect the behavior and thinking of everyone in a culture. Although she would write feminist scholarship that, by her own admission, is difficult to understand outside of the academy, the bulk of her attention would be on reaching ordinary people and helping them see the bonds that hold them and what they can do about it. She wanted to marry theory and practice, and when they started to slide toward divorce, as they are wont to do, she would bring them back together.

In time, hooks’ thought flowered and matured and branched in many different directions—became multi-dimensional—but she began her life as a public intellectual with a focused, searing critique of current feminist theory, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, a book she first drafted when she was nineteen. In her classes, she had become exasperated with white feminists who “romanticize the black female experience rather than discuss the negative impact of that oppression.” Conversely, she noted that black women of the day “did not join together to fight for women’s rights because we did not see ‘womanhood’ as an important aspect of our identity.” She found that black womanhood had been left out of the Venn diagram and almost all statements about women were about white women and all statements about blacks were about black men. For example, feminists frequently spoke about women needing to be empowered by entering the world of work, when in hooks’ observation, “Black women have always worked.”

Ain’t I a Woman takes its name from a refrain intoned by black feminist Sojourner Truth during a speech she gave at the second annual convention of the women’s rights movement in 1852. Truth stood up to present herself as living proof that women were the work-equals of men. hooks’ first book bristles with passion, but it is not a jeremiad. In 200 pages, she carefully outlines a history of black women, first under slavery, then under continuing conditions of patriarchy and racism. She ends with a call to revive the black feminist movement that emerged in the nineteenth century—not only for its own sake but also to become an integral part of “a feminist movement that has as its goal the liberation of all people.”

Although she penned the draft of Ain’t I a Woman in her early undergraduate years, she failed to find a publisher willing to take on such an outspoken work by an unknown. She put the manuscript in the closet in the early seventies and there it sat for a decade.

The seventies were a tumultuous and formative time for hooks. She hung out with Gary Snyder and attended all kinds of poetry readings and be-ins, and began to explore alternative forms of spirituality. Her interest in Buddhism endured and blossomed into a full-fledged commitment because, she says, “Buddhism allows us to embrace the complexity of the shadow self, the self that is not all smiley and have-a-nice-day, that is sorrowful, anguished, at times demonic. You get to work with that.”

During her school days, she says, she also enjoyed “chasing and vamping men—men of all sizes, colors, and shapes.” In fact, she sings the praises of the vamp, in Wounds of Passion, as an intelligent woman fully in control. In a number of areas related to sexuality, in fact, she breaks company with many feminists. For example, she does not believe that women in relationships with men of power are necessarily in a position of being dominated. For most of the seventies, she carried on a serious and at times very stormy relationship with an older black professor, who also served as a colleague and a mentor. Commenting on this situation, hooks tells me that there was “enough openness and sexual liberation and men engaged in feminism who were willing to teach you how to play. One often learns to play in a bigger sphere by engaging intimately with someone with more power. But those relationships broke down when we started to get more power, because those guys realized, ‘Hey, I actually don’t want someone who reads Heidegger as well as I do and would rather be reading it than fucking me, or making me dinner.’”

hooks and her partner spent over ten years together, during which she followed him around to various university jobs, made a home in each place, earned a master’s and a doctorate, and developed a writing life that mirrored his. But when she took Ain’t I a Woman down from the shelf, painstakingly polished it, and found an alternative press to publish it, their relationship seemed to deteriorate, as Gloria Watkins was giving birth to bell hooks. To her great surprise, and in spite of dressing rebelliously and behaving audaciously at her interview, she received an invitation to teach at Yale University, starting in the fall of 1985. Her partner declined to join her, and hooks began a pattern that would characterize many periods of her life: despite extreme attraction and desire to be in a relationship, her passion for ideas and a life of writing and teaching would leave her living by herself. As one ex-lover told her, “The next woman I’m with, I don’t want her to think.”


bell hooks is nothing if not a thinker. She firmly believes that well-considered and critically tested thought and theory is essential for any social movement to have real power. Beginning before Yale and during her time there, she began to develop a reputation as a key contributor to feminism’s way of thinking about itself. She is proud of what she calls “feminist movement” (declining to precede the phrase with the “the” that would identify it as a unitary institution rather than a phenomenon) for its thoughtfulness. “No other movement for social justice has been as self-critical as feminist movement,” she writes in the preface to the second edition of her second book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

In that book, she fulfilled her promise to broaden the debate started with Ain’t I a Woman, and argued that feminism needed theory that would “examine our culture from a feminist standpoint rooted in an understanding of gender, race, and class.” Her critique was as much strategic as theoretical. A feminism that was too one-dimensional would be a feminism that would remain at the margins of people’s lives, rather than addressing the central concerns of the culture. She also felt that feminist movement needed theory that “speaks to everyone, that lets everyone know that feminist movement can change their lives for the better.” In our conversation, she lamented that “most of our political movements on the left, whether feminism or black power or what have you, have gotten stuck, because they seem to most people in our culture to be unconnected to the practical realities of life in the community.”

Rather than write a series of books on a single topic before moving on to another topic, hooks will write a first work and then revisit the topic later on, after the ideas have been batted around and percolated a bit. Her body of work forms, then, a kind of quilt, something that Saru had taught her to admire as a child, something made of distinct pieces from different times and places that could nevertheless form a whole.

So, sixteen years (and about as many books) after From Margin to Center, hooks put out Feminism Is for Everybody, which had a cheery cover and a message intended to inform and uplift the uninitiated. hooks could point to many victories for feminism: “It has changed how we see work, how we work, how we love.” And yet she acknowledged that “most people have never spoken to an actual feminist, so they have no clue about visionary feminism. They have a one-dimensional view learned from TV and the movies,” where it is commonplace to “trash feminism.” As a result, no “sustained feminist revolution” has occurred, which places feminism’s gains in jeopardy. hooks feels, as she states in Feminism Is for Everybody, that feminism, the movement to end sexual exploitation and dominance, is “alive and well,” but it is not the mass movement that hooks has always felt we need it to be.

For feminism to move from outward gains to real spiritual gains, hooks believes, men and women alike need to understand how they are both bound and dominated by the strictures of a culture of dominator and dominatee. Each is trapped. But the difficulty seems to lie in the need to have an enemy for sustenance, which leads you away from discovering a deeper sustaining power. “Great moments for social justice have occurred, in civil rights, in women’s rights, and so on, but these movements have also been deeply flawed, in that they could not sustain themselves,” she tells me. “In the beginning, people push against an outward enemy, but once that push is over, things became like flat soda. What’s needed is a Buddha-like process of self-actualizing that spreads into the political world. Then you don’t have to fall into an abyss of despair, saying, ‘We failed. We didn’t achieve racial justice. Feminism didn’t complete itself.’ As we know from Buddhism, if we look for the end, we will despair and give up and not sustain our efforts. But if we see it as a continual process of awakening, we can go forward.”


When hooks began to teach at Yale in 1985, she had already found a stimulating home in academia, but she now discovered a love for teaching. At Yale, she has written, she found students who, like her, were “deeply committed to learning, to excelling academically, to doing rigorous work,” who were “a joy to teach.”

Despite her appreciation for “her Yalies,” and the African-American studies department’s desire to retain her, she felt isolated in the ivory tower amid the New Haven ghetto, and she published no books while living there. In 1988, she decided to continue her scholarship and her newfound love of teaching at Oberlin College in Ohio. Since it had bordered several slave states, Ohio had a unique and important connection with the South. One of America’s most progressive institutions, Oberlin was the first truly co-educational college in the United States. A stop on the underground railroad, its charter committed it to educating “people of color,” and it was the first college to graduate an African-American woman.

Oberlin seemed to provide a nourishing atmosphere for hooks, and during her seven years there she produced as many books: on feminism from her personal perspective, which sparked her love of “confessional writing”; on race and racism; on art and the power of images to form prejudices; on black womanhood. She also put out her first book on pedagogy, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, whose success propelled her into new and important territory. Many frustrated teachers in the academy liked what she had to say.

By the time of Teaching to Transgress, hooks had developed such a wide array of associations (reading a book a day for years on end) and ranged into so many areas, that she had become a unique thinker who nevertheless provided many external sources for her thought. In her first book on pedagogy, she paid homage to the Brazilian educator Paulo Friere and to Thich Nhat Hanh. Friere had taught her, from her earliest days in college, she wrote, to challenge the “banking system” of education, whereby a student was meant to store and spend what a professor deposited. From Thich Nhat Hanh she learned to think of the teacher as a healer, one who emphasizes wholeness, and teaching people as a unity of mind, body, and spirit.

Building on what she learned from these teachers, hooks encouraged teachers and students to “transgress” the boundaries that locked them into their roles as imparters and receivers of knowledge. The goal of education was not to be filled with knowledge, but rather to find “well-being.” Furthermore, to take part in the “engaged pedagogy” hooks advocated, teachers would have a responsibility not merely to be well-versed in their fields, but to have a commitment to their own well-being and self-actualization, breaking down—transgressing—the barriers between public and private, personal and institutional, educational and practical, even between mind and body. Otherwise, hooks posited, our schools would continue to be places where succeeding generations were schooled in the ways of dominator culture.

Just as she had done with feminist theory, hooks allowed the ideas in Teaching to Transgress to percolate before putting out her second book on education. By the time Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope came out in 2003, hooks had moved from Oberlin to become Distinguished Professor of English at the City College of New York, at 138th Street and Convent Avenue, in the heart of Harlem. As hooks recounts in Teaching Community, when she started at City in 1995 she went from teaching elite students in private schools to teaching “predominantly non-white students from poor and working-class backgrounds . . . , many of them doing the work of single parenting, working a job, and attending school.” She also found students who were increasingly being “educated” by media images, which fired her enthusiasm for teaching her students to think critically about the world those images conveniently invented for them.

hooks’ prodigious output continued during her time at City. She produced the autobiographical works about growing up quoted above, but she also began to turn her thoughts to the plight of black people in general and black men in particular. What she found teaching in Harlem was an endemic lack of self-esteem and a propensity for self-sabotage: fear of failure was a self-fulfilling prophesy. Her prescription, laid out in books like Killing Rage: Ending Racism and Salvation: Black People and Love, was to find within the rage that has arisen from repeated injustices a path to healing. From hooks’ point of view, this requires people to discover what it means to love—not just greeting card love or the love expressed in gestures, but self-love, and a love of others strengthened by justice. It is the deep “metaphysics of love,” where you learn to “bring to everyday life a sense, not just of doing things, but of being and meaning.”

What hooks means by this, she tells me, is that love is not possible when we are defined by images given to us by others, by the people and processes of dominator culture. Instead, we must be able to “self-invent,” to develop who we are from within. The same kind of thinking runs through her work on black men and masculinity, We Real Cool. “One of the big failures for black men,” she tells me, “has been a failure to imagine themselves beyond the terms of the existing culture. Feminism gave to black women and all women the ability to imagine themselves beyond patriarchal images. But black men have just continued to feel ‘I should be earning a certain amount of money.’

“I don’t necessarily feel the need for my partner to have a job,” she continues, “so long as he occupies his day with something that absorbs his imagination. But women will say to me, ‘Girlfriend, I would do nothing with a guy who didn’t bring in the money.’ So we see again there is no alternative vision of how black men who are unemployed could be leading their lives. And black men who have made it just see themselves as having won the competition. If you believe in competition, then you believe that those people who didn’t make it weren’t good enough. The whole issue is still framed within the existing hierarchy, and within the existing hierarchy, black men are doomed. Who cares about black men, the most ignored group in America? Black men need both regular literacy—they are the most illiterate group in the nation—and critical literacy. They need to critique the notion of patriarchal masculinity to save their own lives.”


bell hooks poured her heart into teaching in Harlem, but after a few years the challenges at City and the years of gargantuan output began to take their toll. In “Time Out,” a chapter in Teaching Community, hooks talks about her burnout, and how after years of being nurtured in the academy, she had to find a place “where teaching and learning could be practiced outside the norm.” A leave of absence evolved into a resignation and abandonment of the perks of senior professorship. She began to think of the world as the classroom and the community as both student body and faculty.

Some parents asked hooks why she worked only with students in their late teens and twenties, who already find it hard to unlearn the rules of dominator culture. hooks began to write children’s books about loving who you are and loving others, and to go into children’s classrooms. She likes “blunt speech,” truth-telling, and honest questioning, which she finds children are so very good at. She hates to see “the passion in the child repressed by those who are afraid of losing authority when they have difficulty answering the hard questions. Parents may pretend we’re all just people and race and class don’t matter, but children know what they see. But they are taught not to talk about it. They learn from a young age to stop giving a true account of what they see. And blunt speech becomes associated with anger, when it may just be speech that isn’t opaque.”

Her taking up children’s books coincided with her discovery of the need to bring out her “playfulness” more. It became important to her that she enjoy life and also be seen by students as enjoying life. Otherwise, they would think that a life of critical thinking is an unpleasant life. “When people used to ask me, ‘How do you write so many books?’ I would answer with a bad joke: ‘because I don’t have a life.’ I started to interrogate that joke and I saw that I had an unbalanced life, frankly, an unhappy life. The last year when I was really turning out work, I brought out three books in a year. My body suffered and my life suffered. It was the right time for those books, but there were whole other parts of life I needed to cultivate.
“The spark for going to Berea was that I had to change my life. Get away from being at the computer all hours, from people calling at all hours. I feel great now because I have more simplicity and more balance. I can move, but I can also be still.”

In addition to working on more children’s books about love, hooks is working on “little pieces about nature.” Returning home has caused her to “reflect on the restorative aspects of nature.” She has taken a strong interest in deep ecology, and the work of Wendell Berry, Thomas Berry, and Vedana Shiva. She is taken with the healing power of the land and the fact that “the agrarian roots of black people can be a place of hope and possibility.”

Buddhism is another important strain in hooks’ life. It has helped her and allowed her to help others. She considers herself a Buddhist, but she would never say that to some people down home, because it could be taken the wrong way in a culture that has no context for it. She says she is a “Buddhist nomad,” not a part of any group. “I shy away from a lot of group-oriented things, where power and pettiness often emerge in ways that really turn me off. If I go to something like a Thich Nhat Hanh event, I am much happier on the periphery.”

As a result, many people don’t consider her or her work Buddhist. That annoys her at times, but in the end, she enjoys her right to “self-invent” and not be measured by others’ yardsticks. She notes that Buddhism in the West has largely been white and very cerebral, and when she’s taken siblings to Buddhist events, they’ve said, “It’s really cold here.” But she is cheered by the fact that in recent years there has been “more talk about loving-kindness and service,” and in any case, she says, “I don’t care about the label. I care whether I can do the work of the dharma. I seem to be able to talk about mind and body and love and healing, and integrate Buddhism into places where Buddhism doesn’t normally go.”

hooks likes to talk about “seasons of life,” and help her students learn to make choices that are not absolute—I am a this or a that forever—but that go along with the season. So, what would bell hooks like to do with her next season, this season of balancing and appreciating the earth? “I would like to spend more time than I already am helping individuals resolve the difficulties in their lives through love,” she says. “I would like to bring the work of mindfulness and awareness to everyday struggles. The most important field of activism, particularly for black people, is mental health. Activism does not need to be some kind of organized ‘against’ protest. When my students say they want to change the world, I espouse an inward to outward movement. If you feel that you can’t do shit about your own reality, how can you really think you could change the world? And guess what? When you’re fucked-up and you lead the revolution, you are probably going to get a pretty fucked-up revolution.”
hooks loves houses. She likes to renovate them and make them beautiful, and when it comes to summing up what she’s about, that’s the image she chooses. “For a house to be truly beautiful it has to have a strong foundation,” she says. “For us, that means finding the ground of our being, the place where we discover ourselves. Our foundation of self-invention does not preclude community. In genuine community there is lots of difference. We all make our contribution from a place of difference, not sameness. It is difficult to find the place where difference can exist in a context of harmony, where it is not necessary to dominate, but that is our foundation, the ground of our being. It’s where we start.”

Love Fights the Power, Barry Boyce, Shambhala Sun, July 2006.

Shambhala Art

Genuine art tells the truth. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Shambhala Art is the essence of enlightened society, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Shambhala Art is a process, a product, and an arts education program. As a process, it brings wakefulness and awareness to the creative and viewing processes through the integration of contemplation and meditation.

As a product, it is art that wakes people up. Shambhala Art is also an international non-profit arts education program based on the Dharma Art teachings of the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of Shambhala Buddhism, Shambhala International, and Naropa Institute. He was an artist, poet, and author of over a dozen books on subjects ranging from psychology to iconography. Volume 7 of the Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche focuses specifically on his Dharma Art teachings. Shambhala Art is a division of Shambhala International and is presided over by his son and heir, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. The program is taught by trained and authorized Shambhala Art teachers.
To artist or non-artist, the creative process often seems mysterious and magical. How do we give a physical reality to some ephemeral inspiration and in turn communicate its essential nature beyond the limits of its container? Shambhala Art’s purpose is to explore the creative and viewing processes and the product we call art from the viewpoint of a meditative discipline. It is a viewpoint that encourages us to see things as they are, rather than just how we think or imagine they are. Shambhala Art does not teach a particular skill or technique such as painting, sculpture, or dance. It is about the source of inspiration, its manifestation, and how it speaks to us. Once a view and a path are established it can be put into practice within any artistic discipline.
Although the Shambhala Art teachings are inspired by Shambhala Buddhism, they are not in any way religious or about adopting a religion. Joining meditation and contemplation with art making and art viewing is pre-religion. They are about discovery and play, and the universal nature of the creative and viewing process and what the result communicates.

Without seeing things as they are, it is hard to create art. Our perceptions are obscured and our mind is not fresh, so making art becomes a troubled, futile process by which we’re trying to create something based on concept. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

The Five-Part Program

Part One: Coming to Your Senses
The practice of dharma art is a way to use our lives to communicate without confusion the primordial and magical nature of what we see, hear, and touch. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
First thought is best in art. Wm. Blake
Art has more to do with perception than talent. Without clarity, all we express is our inability to accurately perceive. The creative process requires that we first perceive our world as it is before we can represent it in an art form or use it as a launching pad for expression. Part One is the exploration of the nature of our perceptions and how our thoughts influence what we perceive. We learn through a meditative discipline the source of creativity and the meaning of pure expression, which transcends the limitations of self-referencing expression. As we learn to rest in “square one” where our mind and body is synchronized, our expression becomes vivid, possessing greater richness and accuracy by being true to things as they are.

Part Two: Seeing Things as They Are
The map is not the territory. Alfred Korzbyski
The truth of the thing is not the think of it but the feel of it. Stanley Kubrick
One eye sees, the other feels. Paul Klee
Symbol, in this sense, is not a “sign” representing some philosophical or religious principle; it is the demonstration of the living qualities of what is. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Part Two deepens our experience and understanding of things as they are. Seeing things as they are means perceiving things absent the influences of our prejudices, thoughts, ideas, and attachments. For many, we have little clarity regarding the difference between our thoughts about things and the things themselves. Perceiving this difference is fundamental to understanding the way art communicates itself. It is said that one of the things that makes art, art, is that it conveys itself through signs and symbols. From a contemplative viewpoint, signs have more to do with communicating information and symbols are about communicating experience. If we wish our art to convey a felt experience as well as information, then we need to clarify the vehicles: Symbols and signs.
Part Three: The Creative Process
“The eye of desire dirties and distorts. Only when we desire nothing, only when our gaze becomes pure contemplation, does the soul of things (which is beauty) open itself to us.” Hermann Hesse
There is such a thing as unconditional expression that does not come from self or other. It manifests out of nowhere like mushrooms in a meadow, like hailstones, like thundershowers. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
In Part Three we learn that the creative process is not unique to those who call themselves artists. The creative process begins with coming to our senses and facing a blank piece of paper, an empty stage, an idle instrument, or an unplanted garden. Out of that space inspiration can take form and build to a result that has a life and energy of its own. The creative process is only half of the equation; the balance is in the viewing process. Viewing is a not a passive activity where all the effort is supplied by the maker of the work. The viewer must be wakeful and aware to what is there to fully perceive it. The viewer, as opposed to the maker, begins with the completed form, the result. Yet, as if through magic, by the viewer opening up, the original inspiration of the maker can be glimpsed and shared.
Part Four: The Power of Display
The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. –Paul Strand
Things as they are appear in many shapes, patterns, colors, seasons, emotions and wisdoms. Cultures throughout history have developed systems to merge their intuitive experience with their collective knowledge and display it through their arts. In Part Four we focus on one of the most universal and comprehensive systems, the five elements: earth, water, fire, air (wind), and space, and how they form a Gestalt, mandala, or complete display. In learning the nature of these elements, we learn about ourselves and our unique means of expression and how in spite of all our differences, we do manage to communicate. In this part we learn how diversity and totality work together to create works of art that communicate far more than the sum of their parts.
Part Five: Art in Everyday Life
Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. Pablo Picasso
Some feel that if an idea or inspiration is clear, or pure, then whatever is produced will automatically be the same. However, the gap between inspiration and manifestation can be huge and filled with obstacles, negativity, and self-consciousness. These challenges can be worked with through a four fold process, or four actions: Pacifying which is achieved by clarifying, Enriching which is attained through imbuing presence, Magnetizing by way of assigning importance, and Destroying through the process of editing. The Dharma Art teachings of the Four Actions are used as the vehicles for true compassionate action and pure expression where obstacles become challenges and negativity is transformed into greater vision and truth. The Four Actions describe not only how to work with a challenging creative process, but how the final product we call art speaks to us.

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND HEALING FOR LATINA/OS/ Edificando y Sanando Communidad

SOME NOTES FROM MY INTRODUCTION: NOTAS DE MI INTRODUCION

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND HEALING FOR LATINA/OS
Edificando y Sanando Communidad para Latina/os

THE MOVEMENT / EL MOVIMIENTO

Everybody is waiting the movement to happen, not realizing we are the movement!
Todo nostros estamos esperando que el movimiento pasa, no realizando que nosotros mismo son el movimiento !

We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Somos la ultimos que hastamos esperando por.

The Emancipation of Mental Slavery /La Emancipacion de la Esclavitud Mental
Mental Slavery and a Liberation Movement
La Eclavitud Mental y un Movimiento de Libertad
Reclaiming a language for healing
Reclamando un lengua de curar
Listening, creativity and intelligence
Escuchando, la creativitad y la inteligencia
What is community?
Que es communidad?
Communication in unity= community
Communicacion en unitad= communidad

Internalized Opression
La Opresion Internalizada

Black History
Historia Africano
Chicana/o/Latina/o History
Chicana/o/Latina/o Historia

Interview with Favianna Rodriguez

Cover of Reproduce and Revolt

By Liam O’Donoghue
Favianna Rodriguez is from Oakland and she lives there today. She is the co-editor, along with Josh MacPhee, of Reproduce and Revolt: A Graphic Toolbox for the 21st Century Activist (Soft Skull Press, 192 pages, $19.95). On the eve of the book's release party, she recently spoke about the project's origins, forging connections between groups and the Bay Area's role in activist art.

SFBG: Even in the socially conscious art world, it’s usually men who get the most spotlight.So, first of all, I want to give you props for raising the profile of so many radical womyn artists with this book. Can you tell me about any challenges or goals specifically related to gender issues that you had with this project?

Favianna Rodriguez: I’m a first generation woman of color. My parents were immigrants. So it was very important to me for the book to represent not just women, but women of color. We’ve got lots of artists from Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Argentina in this book. My co-editor, Josh MacPhee, is a white male – he’s cool, very anti-racist – but he understood that with a project like this, which involves getting global artists to submit royalty-free art, it was very important to have a woman of color in a leadership position. Of course, the political art world is male-dominated, so some of the sections, especially the “war and peace” chapter, were overwhelmingly male, and we really had to work on creating the balance of perspectives that we wanted [throughout the book].But women of color aren’t the only ones that are generally under-represented – black men are another example. This book is just the first phase. We’re just getting started, because we’ve got a good selection of Latin American artists [featured in the book], but we want to expand to include more Asian and African artists with the next editions. It’s all about building networks.
SFBG: What inspired you to start this project?

FR: Josh was collecting graphics and I’d been talking with Bay Area women artists about doing something like this, so we decided to merge our projects. I wanted to make it a multilingual project and I brought in tech people so we could make this all happen online. This book was totally compiled and edited online. We did artist authorization documents and design and had political discussions online. The book has over 300 images from 12 countries, and the Web site that will launch on July 1 is also going to be bilingual. It’s going to have all the graphics in high-resolution, available for download, because nobody wants to scan images anymore if they don’t have to.
SFBG: Did anything unexpected happen when you were pulling all this together?

FR: The massive amount of world wide support -- especially [the support from] Mexico -- was really unexpected. Also, the impact that [the book]'s having on people the first time they look through it is really exciting. This collection shows how a lot of social justice issues that are normally in their own silos really intersect. I mean, there are graphics that show how immigration and border issues relate to being gender-queer or trans. There are images that connect veganism and corporate exploitation. As a whole, you get a view of the vast diversity of artists approaching all these issues. The Black Power symbol with the clenched fist takes on a new meaning when it’s next to a vegan graphic. A lot of diverse issues are represented and I think even some of the artists themselves are challenged by some of these connections. As artists, we’re the voices of these movements, so we really need to ask ourselves what that means.
SFBG: How does the Bay Area fit into the global scene?

FR: So many Bay Area artists contributed that we really make up a significant chunk of the book. In the Bay Area, visual graphics have played a big role in radical movements like the Black Panthers and Chicano struggles. Plus, there are local collectors, like Michael Rossman, who just passed away, who really helped keep those strong artistic traditions alive. California has such a great intersection of people – immigrants, food justice activists, the LGBTQ community, white artists who have a developed sense of white privilege and anti-racist perspectives – that we’re living in artistically fertile territory.
SFBG: Do you feel like the Bay Area contributors have a common style or theme that makes it obvious where they’re from?

FR: No, everybody is so different and it’s not like you can tell by looking at the issues they focus on. A lot of graphics supporting Palestine or the Zapatistas, for example, come from US artists. A lot of the graphics focusing on global trade are from Mexico and Central America, so you can’t tell by looking at an image where it’s from. We wanted the graphics to be very universal, so we stayed away from stuff about Bush or specific administrations, because they would get dated so quickly. We wanted to deal with the big issues that our generation is tackling, like corporate influence, water and resource justice, food activism and genetically-modified crops, privatization of prisons, immigration policy and media justice.
SFBG: What’s going to be happening at the release party?

FR: The San Francisco Print collective is going to be doing live print-making, which is key, because it can be hard to get people engaged with visual art. I mean, we’ve got a huge concentration of dance ensembles, for example, in the Bay, but it’s rarer to see groups of artists working together. I was born and raised in Oakland, and I want people from other places to know that they can be doing what we’re doing. The SF Print Collective and groups like JustSeeds exemplify what I like to see, which is artists working in collectives and engaging each other and their communities.These graphics can be used to mobilize people. Teachers and union organizers are using some of the graphics from the book already. Some of the images from the book were turned into posters for this year’s immigrants’ rights marches. There’s huge potential in open source art.
SFBG: You've said “Historically, political graphics in movements throughout the world have shaped our society. One of the languages of liberation is art and design.” Is that essentially what this book is about?
FR: The book is subtitled “A Graphic Toolbox for the 21st Century Activist,” but it’s really about building connections between different networks. There needs to be community and accountability attached to these images. Just because some kid has a Che poster doesn’t mean he’s going to act against the Cuban embargo. Some kid doing anti-Bush posters alone isn’t going to make a real difference. You need groups to have real social power. Look at images from Paris ’68 or the Black Panthers: the power of those images came from the power of the people, the movements. Images alone aren’t transformative; you need education and commitment to transformation.

From SFBG.com Posted by Johnny Ray Huston on June 11, 2008 05:25 PM

Building and Healing Community/Edificando y Sanando Communidad

Building and Healing Community:
Jumpstarting the Movement
For Blacks and Latina/os and their Allies
Free Classes in Little Rock, Arkansas
Classes will include topics such as Listening, Leadership, Forming Support Groups, Healing Mental Slavery, Racism, Internalized Oppression, Sexism, Homophobia, Men’s Oppression, Classism and Workers Oppression, Oppression of Young People , Allies, Creativity and Liberation and Blacks and Latinos
For more information please call Ari@ (512) 757-7003
arichagoya@gmail.com

Edificando y Sanando Communidad:
Lanzando El Movimiento
Para Africano-Americanos y Latina/os
y nuestros Alianzias

Clases gratis in Little Rock, Arkansas

Las clases incluirán asuntos tales como Esuchando, Apoyando los Lideres, Como forma Groups de apoyo en la Communidad, Curando Esclavitud Mental, Racismo, Opresion Internalizado, Sexismo, Homophobia, Oppression de Hombres, Clasismo y el Oppresion deTrabajadores, Oppression de Jovenes, Alianzias, Creativitud y Liberacion y Africano-Americanos y Latina/os
Para más información llame por favor Ari@ (512) 757-7003
arichagoya@gmail.com

Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”-Che

Love is the weapon of the next movimiento