by Holly Roach
Emergent Voices
April 1st, 2013
It
wasn’t until recently I realized that I had somehow lost a bunch of
digital files off my computer. It was mainly photos and newspaper
articles from my activist work when I lived in the San Francisco/Bay
Area from the late 90′s to the mid 2000′s. That loss left me feeling
sick with the thought that a deeply formative part of my life was gone.
My experience with Occupy Movement organizing left me longing to
reconstruct what was good, strategic and expansive about our activism
back in the day and put those lessons back to work.
Sometimes the very thing that’s needed comes to being and luckily Chris Crass came along with his new book Towards Mutual Liberation: Anti Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis and Movement Building Strategy.
The
book came across my Facebook feed at the most incredible time. I had
been writing on intentional movement building and praxis in relationship
to the Emergence Christianity Movement. As a relative newcomer
encountering the Emergent movement as a non-evangelical with new age
Buddhist leanings, I had a lot to learn in just getting to know the
movement, its culture, language and friendships. Prior to this, I had
almost literally no idea that there was a thing called Progressive
Christianity in the United States. I had encountered faith-based groups
in organizing, but never knew the theology behind it. It’s been
incredibly life-giving for me and brought me back to the core of my
spirituality. So when I say that I am engaged in critiquing the way we
go about building our movement, please know that I am doing it from a
deep level of love and investment in the Emergent Movement.
This
book comes to us at such a lovely time, a time when we are asking
ourselves what collective potential we have to build a better world
together.We are asking ourselves if we are a conversation or a movement,
a network of talkers or doers, and some of us are getting impatient to
live out the call toward Justice that we feel compelled by our faith to
enact.
Rather than re-create the social movement wheel we can
look to the lessons and gains that movements who’ve come before us have
struggled towards. Chris does a beautiful job contextualizing the
movement culture that we activists inherited back in the 80′s and 90′s
and weaves a narrative that is both engaging and informative about the
things we learned. I first met Chris when I was organizing in the Art
& Revolution Collective and Chris was a Food Not Bombs organizer in
San Francisco. Our collectives worked together a lot, and we both ended
up at a lot of the the same protests and the 15-week Challenging White
Supremacy workshop with the brilliant Sharon Martinez in collaboration
with the People’s Institute’s Betita Martinez. Betita had just written a
provocative essay entitled “Where Was the Color In Seattle: Looking for
Reasons the Great Battle Was So White” written in response to the mass
protests in Seattle at the World Trade Organization Ministerial On
November 30th, 1999. She starts the piece off with a quote:
“I
was at the jail where a lot of protesters were being held and a big
crowd of people was chanting ‘This Is What Democracy Looks Like!’
At
first it sounded kind of nice. But then I thought: is this really what
democracy looks like? Nobody here looks like me.”
—Jinee Kim, Bay Area
youth organizer
This essay threw the progressive social profit
sector up and down the west coast into an upheaval of challenging
built-in white supremacist organizational structures and dynamics. We
witnessed numerous NGOs fall apart, completely deconstructing their
culture and process and starting over again. We saw a lot of progress
and experienced the shift in how our organizing was called upon to
evolve and become more focused around bridge building. So as I hang
around Emergent Movement conferences and hear that same call again from
people of color and white allies, I’m thinking, “Wait, we activists have
done this work, and we learned a lot that we can share!” And this is
where Toward Collective Liberation becomes an amazing tool for
progressive Christians in the U.S. Chris Dixon says it better than
anyone in his Introduction to the book:
“Transformative social
movements are always much more dynamic and intelligent than individual
organizers, no matter how reflective, tireless and courageous such
individuals may be. This is one of the amazing things about collective
struggle for justice. At the same time there are always individuals who
crystallize movement experiences, who distill and share hard won
insights and help to catalyze much needed discussions. Chris Crass is
one of these people. For two decades, he has consistently given
expression to the ideas, questions, and lessons of a generational cohort
of radical organizers and activists in the United States.”
In
his first essay, Chris does an amazing job of illustrating how anarchist
politics and organizing influenced our shared organizing culture.
Consensus-based organizing was the norm, many of us working in
collectives that practiced feminist, transparent, non-hierarchical
leadership structures but still manage to collaborate with more top-down
structured NGOs. I want to challenge us here not to dismiss the
strategic politics of anarchists organizing as the chaos and destruction
that language and media have portrayed them to be. Much of what we saw
in the Global Justice movement, the anti-war movement, and Occupy was
based in liberatory anarchist politics, which is a testimony to the
contributions of anarchist politics thought this century.
Chris
also does a really beautiful job of narrating why anti-oppression work
and challenging systemic racism is absolutely essential to movement
building. Chris Crass went on to found the Heads Up Collective and
anti-racism training collective called Catalyst Project. He has some
serious chops around this work, and we’re lucky Chris has a passion for
documenting our shared lessons and passing on the knowledge. He’s
written countless resources and made them widely available to Occupy
movements. Chris understands and rises to the responsibility of passing
on the gains that we have achieved in building movement cultures that
work.
Chris understands that social movements don’t only just win
gains from institutions on behalf of communities, they also embody,
live into and become those gains that better serve their community.
Let’s briefly look at some of the components of transformative social
movements:
Prefigurative Politics

One of
the things I’d like us to look at is what Chris has to say about
prefigurative politics. We talk about “living into” visions for what we
like to see for our lives, we quote Gandhi, and we sloganize his call
for us to “be the change you wish to see in the world.”
This
concept may come from other sources, as truth has a way of cropping up
in varied and multiple ways, but I think it’s good to unpack this
further. Prefigurative politics is the strategy of incorporating the
vision of the future society into the struggle to get there.
Chris writes:
“Social
change is not replacing one ruling class for another, but transforming
the social relationships of society away from domination toward
democracy and equality … Prefigurative politics challenges us to create
liberatory processes and practices in the here and now while we fight
for the future. This means bringing feminist politics into our daily
lives and organizations as much as we can, while recognizing that we
need to engage in long-term collective struggle against patriarchy as a
system of oppression. Similarly, we should work to understand
anti-racism as not only a politics against systemic racism, but for
anti-racist culture, strategy, and practice in our organizations and
lives that transform the ways we work for liberation.”
Straight to the Point
This
is the absolute crux of my critique of the Emergent Church Movement. I
feel strongly that if we are not prefigurative in our approach to our
collective movement work, we are simply acting out the dynamics that
keep people oppressed. If we wish to be a transformative force in our
work together, we must work together in a way that challenges all the
-isms and systemic means of oppression while working for the world we
wish to see some into being — the kingdom of God on Earth. Anything less
would be lacking integrity.
Movement Strategy Center
If
you don’t know the Movement Strategy Center, I highly recommend
checking out their literature. I can write a whole other essay just on
the work of their director Taj James. What I want to leave you with is a
quote from him that I feel deeply compelled by, and I hope you do to:
“There
is a deep cultural change underway in the progressive movement which is
radically transforming how we organize and work together. Ask not what
your sector of the movement can do for mine — realize that if we do not
unite, all of our movements will face continual defeats in the face of a
unified and ascendant right wing. The brave organizations and leaders
who are driving this change need support from the broader movements. We
are not asking for mere words of support but rather for concrete acts of
solidarity that demonstrate an embodied wisdom of our independence.”
Steps Forward Toward Mutual and Collective Liberation
I
am honored to be teaching on this material this weekend at the
TransFORM Southwest Regional Gathering in Fort Worth, TX, a gathering of
missional-minded practitioners. I would also like to invite you to take
part in a series of Open Conversations that we are having online around
the many facets of movement building. On May 7th at 8pm EST we will be
hosting another conversation online with Chris Crass, Anthony Smith,
Steve Knight along with other social movement folks and a few other
Emergent Movement folks, which will be able to be viewed on SOGO Media
TV on YouTube. Viewers will be able to chat in questions and comments.
The goal with these conversations is to move forward our collective
understanding of liberatory and transformative social movement building
in an open and transparent way. I hope that you join us.
Holly Roach is an activist, communications and development director, and artist currently living life in Santa Fe, NM.
