Some of you have already noticed that the old articles from this site have moved over there (with search engine-friendly redirects, and comments intact). For those of you who haven't made the switch, here's a direct link to the RSS feed.

On this blog, I'll continue to post about some of the day-to-day activism I'm involved in, as well as art and politics, and my academic studies of third-party nonviolent intervention.

Feel free to follow Rootwork on Twitter, Slideshare or Virb. And do contact me if you know of upcoming projects with nonprofits or social change groups interested in web development, online organizing, social media or other "social change technology"!

"Hey, we don't need affirmative action, there's a black man in the White House!"

Right. Just like when FDR was elected, they stopped bothering to try to cure polio.

Update: Like, say, here and here and here and here.

At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day -- indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue -- the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.

RIP, Studs Terkel

One more great quote, relevant to this site, from the Sun-Times:

"I'm on a quest," he said. "I'm Don Quixote. Of course I want to tilt at windmills. I want to tilt at other things. It's the Don Quixotes of the world -- call them the seekers of the ideal -- who keep the juices going, give them pepper, the salt, change it for the good."

Convocation is when the president welcomes people to Drexel and talks about the glories and traditions of our fine academy. It's generally a boring waste of time. Instead Drexel Students for a Democratic Society hosted a hoppin' outdoor dance party to mobilize students for our campaign to END STUDENT DEBT! Students are facing our own economic crisis, so let's focus on organizing ourselves to fix our future!

Find out more about the Drexel SDS student debt campaign and how to get involved at phillysds.org/

Convocation is when the president welcomes people to Drexel and talks about the glories and traditions of our fine academy. It's generally a boring waste of time. Instead Drexel Students for a Democratic Society hosted a hoppin' outdoor dance party to mobilize students for our campaign to END STUDENT DEBT! Students are facing our own economic crisis, so let's focus on organizing ourselves to fix our future!

Find out more about the Drexel SDS student debt campaign and how to get involved at phillysds.org/

Convocation is when the president welcomes people to Drexel and talks about the glories and traditions of our fine academy. It's generally a boring waste of time. Instead Drexel Students for a Democratic Society hosted a hoppin' outdoor dance party to mobilize students for our campaign to END STUDENT DEBT! Students are facing our own economic crisis, so let's focus on organizing ourselves to fix our future!

Find out more about the Drexel SDS student debt campaign and how to get involved at phillysds.org/

Convocation is when the president welcomes people to Drexel and talks about the glories and traditions of our fine academy. It's generally a boring waste of time. Instead Drexel Students for a Democratic Society hosted a hoppin' outdoor dance party to mobilize students for our campaign to END STUDENT DEBT! Students are facing our own economic crisis, so let's focus on organizing ourselves to fix our future!

Find out more about the Drexel SDS student debt campaign and how to get involved at phillysds.org/

Convocation is when the president welcomes people to Drexel and talks about the glories and traditions of our fine academy. It's generally a boring waste of time. Instead Drexel Students for a Democratic Society hosted a hoppin' outdoor dance party to mobilize students for our campaign to END STUDENT DEBT! Students are facing our own economic crisis, so let's focus on organizing ourselves to fix our future!

Find out more about the Drexel SDS student debt campaign and how to get involved at phillysds.org/

A lot of people worry these days about the death of civil discourse ... [but] I mourn Matthew Shepard's actual death, caused by the unimpeachably civil "we hate the sin, not the sinner" hypocrisy of the religious right, endorsed by the political right, much more than I mourn the lost chance to be civil with someone who does not consider me fully a citizen, nor fully human. I mourn that cruel death more than the chance to be civil with those who sit idly by while theocrats, bullies, panderers and hatemongers, and their crazed murderous children, destroy democracy and our civic life. Civic, not civil, discourse is what matters, and civic discourse mandates the assigning of blame.

I start with that for two reasons: First, because I think that the policies embodied by Sarah Palin, John McCain and other high-profile Republicans mandate an assignation of blame for all sorts of real, actual deaths of people in the United States and around the world. (For the record, I think Democrats often aid and abet these policies and in numerous cases are even the originators of them.) The breadth and depth of these implicated policies are beyond what I want to discuss here, but suffice to say I think there's plenty of blame to go around. And I agree with Kusher that -- while I might personally believe that all humans are good and have the capacity for good -- a functioning democracy demands that we call out people and policies that harm, oppress and kill people.

The second reason for including Kushner is that I think I have some blame to assign myself here. Kushner was talking about the vile history of hate speech inciting crimes against marginalized communities. As a white, Protestant, able-bodied, tall, male-presenting person who often passes as straight, I encompass whole boatloads of unearned, inherited privilege. I can pretend that I don't benefit from that privilege -- that I don't get preferential treatment because I'm white, for instance, or that my ideas don't get taken seriously in part because I'm male -- or I can do my best to counteract it. In the past few years, I've decided personally that the most important political work I can do is within those privileged communities to try to bring people to a state of active anti-oppression, not simply awareness or sympathy.

But that's not the blame I'm talking about today. In this case, I helped to propagate a use of hate speech that I didn't fully agree with -- but secure in my male privilege, didn't really think too hard about, either.

On Saturday, Republican vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin came to Philadelphia. ACT-UP/Philly, among many other groups, called for an organized protest. I showed up and took some pictures. I even made a video of the protest (and on Facebook) of which I'm quite proud.

In wanting to represent the breadth of the protest, however, I took some pictures of people wearing shirts that attacked Sarah Palin using language demeaning to women.

You can see the original photo of these shirts here, but be aware the language used could be triggering.

I then uploaded these images to Flickr, without comment. Apparently my images were noticed quite quickly, because they started getting blogged about and the comments on this image in particular were quite extensive (the image is no longer on that page, but I left it up for the sake of recording the comments).

I made a mistake in propagating this language.

I want to be clear that I don't think there's anything at all wrong with treating elected officials who directly and indirectly harm others with contempt. There were some great other images of Sarah Palin "lookalikes" that I would proudly display. I think the pressure from elected officials to be "courteous," "respectful," "civil" and "civilized" is simply a way to disempower ordinary people and disconnect them from the prospect of real social change. William Greider describes it in this way:

In practical terms, the most dreadful consequence is the way in which ordinary citizens are silenced and demoralized -- made to feel dumb -- by the content of information politics.

Jeffrey Goldfarb, as quoted by Alexandra Bradbury in her study of the approach of college students in a fair labor campaign, puts it even more directly:

[T]he commitment to civil society and civil discourse, unquestioned, without disruptions such as those of Malcolm [X], becomes a force for the continued subjugation of the marginal, in the US particularly the continued functioning of racism.

Because the criticism of the photo that I posted often focused on the "incivility" of any criticism of Sarah Palin's beliefs, I want to be clear that I'm not arguing for a more "refined" discourse as a way to solve our problems. But treating someone who supports wars of imperialism or subjugating entire swathes of the population because of their citizenship status or love interests (for instance) with justified contempt isn't quite the same as invoking misogynist language against someone you disagree with.

And that's what I need to apologize for.

In trying to do work in active anti-racism as a white person, I've tried to keep in mind from the beginning that mistakes are inevitable -- it's whether I'm willing to be called out and check myself that matters. I think that's true in many sorts of anti-oppression work. I don't doubt the necessity of fighting to protect people's lives from a (new) murderous regime. But I do think that accusations framed in hate speech are a poor way to work for a better future.

I welcome your comments.

As someone who was quoted in the "Social Citizens" report and has written in the past about technology and social change, my answer to that question would certainly be "yes."

But I think the question is significantly complicated in the question from Allison Fine, author of "Social Citizens":

Is our tendency to connect only with like-minded people using our online and on land social networks a good thing for activism or a critical bottleneck to the effective scaling for causes?

Put another way I think it could be asked: Online activism is good for social change -- but what kind of social change?

Many nonprofits use social networks and online activism as a way to boost their membership rolls and donation levels. As I've written before, that seems less useful to me than focusing on empowering an effective movement -- whether or not people donate to your organization or sign up for your newsletter. This isn't to minimize the challenges everyone faces on how to support working for social change, both financially and emotionally. But it is to say that movements are bigger than any one nonprofit. Certainly, organizations can ignore that and focus on using MySpace to get new email addresses and Facebook to drum up donations -- but frankly, I don't think that has a lot to do with social change.

Only when the operational concerns are placed secondary to social change concerns do I see social change really being possible. It's not a secondary outcome; it has to be the primary concern. And that's true, in my opinion, whether you're talking about online or offline social change.

More than thirty years ago, sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward wrote in the introduction to Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977):

[D]uring those brief moments when lower-class groups exert some force against the state, those who call themselves leaders do not usually escalate the momentum of the people's protests. They do not because they are preoccupied with trying to build and sustain embryonic formal organizations in the sure conviction that these organizations will enlarge and become powerful.

More recently, members of the collective INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence published the scathing The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which excoriated the nonprofit system -- primarily foundations, but also the kind of institutionalized dissent Piven and Cloward explored above -- for perpetuating the social inequity they say they want to end.

In the 1970s and '80s, rising social inequality helped hasten a breakdown of both communities and community struggles. (We "Millennials" of which Fine writes were, of course, originally termed "Reagan Babies.") Poor people's movements Piven and Cloward explore were co-opted and defused by top-down organizers from large nonprofits. And family foundations, rooted back in the (first) Gilded Age and gaining power in the tech booms of the 1990s, helped professionalize the practice of dissent. Or as Patrick Reinsborough writes in an oft-quoted essay, "De-Colonizing the Revolutionary Imagination":

Just as service oriented NGO's have been tapped to fill the voids left by the state or the market, so have social change NGO's arisen to streamline the chaotic business of dissent. Let's call this trend NGOism, that terrifyingly widespread conceit among professional "campaigners" that social change is a highly specialized profession best left to experienced strategists, negotiators and policy wonks. NGOism is the conceit that paid staff will be enough to save the world.

Some nonprofits, older and more institutionalized, are wary of giving their members "control" of their "message" in the realm of social networks and social media. Mostly, I think that's nothing more than a fear of losing power. When you think you know how to change the world, it can be hard for some people to want to involve others -- or give anyone else the credit.

What's interesting is that this time around, there's a significantly higher ability for activists to self-organize. The message to nonprofits from the past few years seems pretty clear: Stand in our way, and we'll just go around you. The 2006 student walkouts for immigrant rights spread through MySpace without any "sponsoring" organization. As I explained in a presentation on Facebook, when the Genocide Intervention Network first arrived on the scene, we found dozens of existing groups and networks already active -- our objective was simply to connect them and provide them with effective tools for action. A participant in the protests over the Jena Six said, "I am so disappointed with the media right now. I live in Connecticut and I never even heard of this. Honestly if it wasn't for Facebook, I still wouldn't know."

So the question really goes to the nonprofits and other groups using social networks and social media: What kind of social change do you want? And are you willing to help facilitate even if you don't get credit/coverage/donations?

That doesn't mean that "big" nonprofits can't work for social change through technology, or that only unsupported volunteers can really make things better -- as Reinsborough puts it in the corollary to the comment above:

This is not to say that corporate campaigns and winning concessions is merely "reformist" and therefore not important. The simplistic dichotomy of reform versus revolution often hides the privilege of "radicals" who have the luxury of refusing concessions when it's not their community or ecosystem that is on the chopping block.

A more important distinction is which direction is the concession moving towards? Is it a concession that releases pressure on the system and thereby legitimizes illegitimate authority? Or is it a concession that teaches people a lesson about grassroots power building and therefore brings us closer to systemic social change?

I'm not as worried about whether, as Fine asks, the "tendency to connect only with like-minded people" puts limitations on what can be achieved. Most social change movements, including the US civil rights movement, are grounded in those sorts of communities, what's referred to as "affective ties."

But there is a larger question of the technology gap -- social movements in general might not be as confined by co-optation like Piven and Cloward describe, but poor people's movements without access or usable knowledge of such technology are still vulnerable to having their goals and struggles appropriated by the more powerful.

Moreover, as danah boyd explores in her fascinating research, these issues are played out in social networks themselves. "The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values," she writes in "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace."

So I think there are gaps in access, in knowledge, and in audience -- many nonprofits I've talked to seem to be more excited about organizing on Facebook for instance, because it seems more "natural" or "easy." But it may seem that way simply because it aligns with the class and social habits of people who staff nonprofits -- and as boyd documents, many subaltern communities of people (for whom nonprofits are often trying to speak) tend to use MySpace to a greater extent.

Tomorrow is Bloggers Unite for Human Rights (Day). The organizers assert that bloggers can "use their space to make the world a better place." And clearly, given what I do, I think there is a potential for social networks and social media to highlight and organize and empower. But I don't think we can get too far ahead of ourselves, and I think we need to be clear about just what it is we're reaching for. Working for social change means being committed to examining inequality and injustice in our world, and it's simply na]]> Thu, 15 May 2008 01:16:18 -0700 http://virb.com/quixotic/posts/text/617836 http://virb.com/quixotic/posts/text/597377 I went to a demonstration this afternoon in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Farmworkers Support Committee (CATA) based in South Jersey and the Kaolin Workers Union in Kennett Square. This part of rural (but increasingly exurban) southeast PA is a mushroom-growing area; it supplies 40 percent (!) of the United States' mushrooms. CATA and the Kaolin union are both fantastic worker- and immigrant-led organizations that, beginning with the Kaolin Strike in 1993 and culminating in successful unionization in 2002, have kept up the pressure both for workers' rights and migrant laborer and immigrant rights.

I forgot to bring my camera this year, but here are some photos from last year's demonstration:

This week, the Genocide Intervention Network was honored to be nominated by the NetSquared community as a 2008 Featured Project for our proposal to upgrade and extend the DarfurScores.org website:

The Genocide Intervention Network seeks to create a new website, modeled on our successful Darfur congressional scorecard, DarfurScores.org, tentatively named GenocideScores.org.

Our current plan for the site -- which could change as we explore different options and hear feedback from our members -- has four main components:

• Collecting together anti-genocide data, not only on Darfur but on each of our areas of concern. Instead of being limited to only legislative records, each state would list its status on other anti-genocide initiatives like Sudan divestment and genocide education.
• Provide clear illustrations of legislative status. Instead of just hearing about a bill when a member of Congress does (or doesn't) vote for it, we'll be tracking bills as they move through each chamber.
• Cross-index a bill's status with a member's location. When the latest bill on genocide prevention is up for a vote, anti-genocide activists whose members of Congress represent key votes on the legislation will be able to receive automatic alerts.
• Provide embeddable badges or widgets for activists to place on their profiles, blogs or websites. At a glance, both you and visitors to your website, blog or social networking profile will be able to see how your state and legislators are doing on the question of genocide. And when urgent action is needed, these badges will be automatically updated with a special link to take action.

Now, we want your feedback. If you have a chance, read through our proposal for DarfurScores.org and leave a comment -- tell us what you like, what you think could be changed, what we're overlooking. Remember that this is all about our core mission: empowering individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. We hope this project will result in a valuable new tool, and we'd love to have your input!

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