3rdSpace 330

As I was reading your first writing assignments, I decided that in return I wanted to write my own essays to share with you, that at the very least I owed you that!

For some reason, I've had a lot of trouble mustering the concentration or courage to sit down and write (this). I can maybe chalk it up to the whole process-over-product thing that I've got going on. I don’t deal very well with finality, or some thing being a Thing.

But anyway (now fully disclaimed):



I. Letter to loved ones: On being the space between two brackets, on being the brackets

Like I've mentioned, doing this class was an experiment. It is—among many other things—a test of how powerful, deep, and accountable a space for “real” work can we create here in (this) institution(s). Like Max says about liberation, this test is a path, not a destination. I also felt it significant as a test for myself. I came off the summer feeling stuck, really paralyzed about organizing as I have been knowing it, what the hell my role is, what the hell we think we’re doing anyway (see II, below).

What I wanted to share is: I’ve been feeling blessed. Full. In a creative and fertile place that I’ve been craving. Lucky to do this as my paid work. Waiting for the honeymoon period to be over. Then realizing the honeymoon IS over and the class is still all of the above, and that’s really something. Inspired to have the chance to work with all of in you this way.

Here is some of what I celebrate:

I am a placeholder. It seems that part of my work is contributing to the opening of (third)spaces like we have in this class. Making space. This is interesting, because I have always gravitated toward the word ‘placeholder,’ sometimes in self-blaming—never finished, indecisive, drawing a line to hold a blank for a concept, word, understanding, story, sense of power, commitment to fill in later. Constantly making resolutions, expressing intentions, making lists, using parentheses.

I think I’m learning to acknowledge that placeholding is important. We need containers for the powerful interactions, deep learnings, honest questions, and growing relationships that have emerged in our discussions as a class as well as in our projects. For other people to fill in the blanks. Being that container is a huge gift and a huge responsibility.

Here are my fears:

That what we learn is on the backs of other people. That what we learn is (necessarily) on the backs of other people? I’m scared to death of being what I’ve seen professors, researchers, and students be to some of the organizations I’ve worked with, some of the very same we are working with. I’m sensitive to any sign of possible impatience of sense of burden—and that’s in both directions. I remember being anxious the day that we did the community panel at Bayview, the same kind of anxiety that you feel when you are having a party and inviting friends from different places in your life, all dearly loved, but we love them in different ways and with different languages. We are different versions of our selves in the safety of different communities and spaces. How are they going to interact, who is going to annoy whom, who is going to say the wrong thing? How will all of that reflect on me? I am a certain way and in a specific kind of power when I’m with you all in class, and another certain way and specific kind of power when I’m working with the groups. I have embraced “code-switching,” but also I think it’s a true test of accountability and sincerity when our spaces and communities collide.

I’m also afraid of losing my grounding in grassroots work, of becoming just another “cool (enough)” professor existing in a middle-class professional oblivion.

Tracy says that, if nothing else, we are training people to do good justice work wherever they go next. And, boy, is there a need for that! I think also that we are going to learn a lot about the process of doing this work, the kinds of consciousness and tools alike that it requires. But I worry about this all happening without being able to offer back to our partners more than they give us. They have urgent and immediate needs that are happening right NOW. And there are some very real limitations shaping our work:

Time! A semester is really no time at all. Time moves differently on campus than in the community. There are different pressures to these senses of time.

With regard to our projects, sometimes the community partner doesn’t really know what they want or need. Sometimes, part of our job is to do the muddling around that helps them decide that (but then it’s difficult to be in the position of doing the muddling). Other times, what a community partner really wants or needs, we can’t do.

Communication. As I wrote in response to one students’ essay: “One of the binaries I'm working and learning to challenge and exist in between is urgency and patience. ‘Urgency’ maybe speaks for itself. I think the patience piece is a principled, deliberate patience—patience with the work of making the strong relationships that the work is grounded in, patience with learning decolonized cultures like learning new languages, and patience with yourself as you make mistakes, try stuff out, push your boundaries, and redefine (and acknowledge!) your victories.” Add: Patience in waiting for clarity, direction, and email responses.



II. Domestic work: Patriarchy, revolutionary caregiving, and the gendering of our justice work

Think about who does the domestic work in your life. In your current living situation, in your family growing up, in your community and its economy, in dorms, in classrooms, in offices, on the streets, in organizations. What does that domestic work consist of? What does it feel like? Are the people who do it recognized and rewarded for it? Who traditionally and historically has done that work?

A sequence of things happened over the last six months that has me asking these questions. May 2010 was a month of action for the National Take Back the Land movement, during which Operation Welcome Home supported a partner organization, Take Back the Land-Madison, who liberated two vacant foreclosed homes with an eye to move homeless families into them (www.tblmadison.wordpress.com). OWH and other allied groups did a lot of community education, outreach, and media work around these liberations. The month was incredibly exciting, and it felt like a long time coming in planning, strategy work, fundraising, and mobilization. It also took a lot out of us. I won’t speak for others or for OWH, but I personally felt worn thin, unprepared to deal with the range of policy possibilities that we were suddenly faced with (the last chapter of Take Back the Land resonated a great deal with me, although we didn’t get as far into the institutional realm that they did), and really starting to withdraw—not only from Operation Welcome Home but from my involvement with other orgs. I realized that I was showing up to meeting after meeting, but not bringing my heart with me.

At the root of this, I was fundamentally questioning what the hell we were organizing for. Part of it felt like I was struggling to connect powerful tactics and analysis to actual demands and incremental institutional changes, and not understanding how it all fit together (wondering if it really did). The other part came with questioning my own involvement in the work. I felt like I was trying to step into a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right, trying to be the organizer, the strategist, the spokesperson, a Leader with a capital L. And maybe didn’t have the models I needed to draw from, in spite of having spent the past three years working with and learning from Operation Welcome Home and Freedom, Inc, who buck the dominant cultures around community organizing. Certainly, the month of action necessitated scaling up the work in ways that we had only dreamed of before. We had a serious lack of real mentors and elders around us, and proceeded in seriously self-taught ways. For the most part, this worked. But I was also tired. I felt like I wasn’t doing accountable work. Maybe I was burning out?

The second thing I want to mention is that, in the midst of questioning my role in justice work, I went to the second US Social Forum (www.ussf2010.org) in Detroit, and had a difficult time finding the sustenance that I needed there, when the first USSF (Atlanta 2007) was so transformative for me (introduced to Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and a serious turn into what would become the core of my ally work). I was in Detroit as part of a loose collective of people supporting an entire busload of young and new activists. Perhaps I had trouble finding deep experience in Detroit, because I was busy helping make sure people were fed, addressing conflict, facilitating communications and day-to-day decisions, getting people from place to place, etc. More being tired.

During the very last workshop slot, I found myself in a talking circle in a workshop called “Revolutionary M/Others and Community Caregivers.” It was a room full of mostly female-bodied individuals, mostly mamas, mostly people of color, some doulas, some members of radical childcare collectives, some aspiring parents. It was an amazing, powerful, inspiring space where these people were (re)claiming space. The stories they shared were about recognizing the political power and potential of motherhood and caregiving work—both at the family level and at the community level. TK Karakashian Tunchez, the workshop facilitator, describes this so much better in this video she did with Mia Mingus, on her blog (newmythosproject.wordpress.com).

This space tore me wide open, stirred me up, shook a lot of clarity into me. I cried, and I hardly ever cry publicly (not for lack of wanting to, but for lack of being able to let go enough to). I suddenly understood that a lot of what I have to give and love to give in justice work is the “domestic work.” Caregiving. Opening and holding spaces. Taking care of people. Facilitating understanding. Meeting basic needs. Finding lost people. Giving rides. Giving hugs. Listening. And that this work is so under-appreciated, de-politicized, invisibilized, in many of the same ways that motherhood is. Even when we do recognize it, we say that we acknowledge its important “so that the real work can happen.”

This is also why I felt like I was wearing other people’s shoes when I was doing more traditional “Organizer” (capital O) work. I recognize to myself that it’s not necessarily that I don’t have skills and talents for it (certainly I have enough mild Type-A tendencies, analytical obsession, and ability to use an ‘outside’ voice [vs. our 6-inch, inside voices] to hold it down). But I think the models I had to draw from (or was unconsciously drawing from) for doing that work were very masculinized ones. If not masculinized, certainly coming out of dominant cultures.

When organizing, in an authentic and raw and deeply powerful sense, IS about caregiving. And that work IS powerful and political.

I’ve been holding this tension in me, and the sets of questions that emerge from them, for the past couple of months, trying to decide where to go with it. Recognizing it has me able to come back into meetings and sessions with my heart in place and able to weather the contradictions and daily frustrations that arise from working always in tension and in between spaces. It is also the reason that, as I began these writing saying, this class experiment is so important to me.