The past week has been one of mass exposure of the damage and violence of white entitlement and supremacy. The most gross being the role of the President in calling for white nationalist mobs to storm the Capitol in their shared feelings of having been wronged of their entitled power and privilege. The media, not surprisingly and consistent with liberal sensibilities, kept referring to these white nationalist mobs as anarchists and insurrectionists. It challenged those of us committed to radical transformation to be able to clarify the difference. The difference between Black Panthers and Puerto Rican Freedom Fighters or Occupy activists holding down federal buildings and white nationalists occupying them. Like debates around the difference between free speech, designed to protect oppressed peoples, and whether that “free speech” should extend to white nationalists and other fascists, we continually find ourselves trying to clarify that the difference is in the “who” and the “for what.” In addition to the national display of white supremacy, we had a closer unveiling within the NLG as it was revealed that former President Natasha Bannan misrepresented herself as Puerto Rican and Colombian and benefited materially and in terms of political leadership within the NLG, other social justice organizations, as well as in national and international solidarity movements (see link above for full statement with demands for accountability). She has inserted herself in international solidarity relationships as a Puerto Rican woman in joint struggle and led and presented on panels during delegations to Cuba and elsewhere on this premise. Within the NLG’s commitment to non-criminalizing approaches to harm while demanding true accountability, repair to those harmed, reparations for resources taken, and prevention of further harm through a shift in the conditions that allow such harm, we have to ask what accountability and transformation look like, individually and collectively, and what produces both. We need white activists, whether in the NLG or in the broader movement, to work with Natasha to meet demands for accountability and reparations as well as to understand her own motivations for undermining her stated commitment and actual contributions to social justice. Without taking further organizational or movement resources, it is a responsibility of white activists when another does harm (or of male activists when a cis-gendered male does, etc.). However, such support is only as useful as someone is willing to engage in accountability, and some engagement is often necessary to get someone to move from justification and into a process of accountability. This also seems to be the case so far with Natasha, whose responses have worked to justify her behaviors more than they reflect accountability. Genuine transformative justice rests on the premise that individuals will not change without a change in conditions - of relationships, of organizations, of movements, of the economy, of social and political arrangements - but conditions cannot change without individuals changing as well. People change through a combination of sanctions, accountability and consequences, but also through on-going support for transformation of self. Within our movements, accountability tends to be most successful when we center the experiences and demands of those who have been harmed and work directly with those who have done harm so that they can adequately respond to the specific demands of an accountability process. Moreover and as important, true accountability requires a collective, to be accountable to - otherwise it is an individualistic approach that leaves people isolated, and vulnerable to continuing harm whether against themselves, others, other organizations or our movements. So if we ostracize people and entirely remove them from our circles, we are unlikely to have a successful accountability process. Instead, it is likely that person will find a different place to “belong” and continue their behavior. As an organization and more broadly on the left, we need to investigate our own relationships to white supremacy and other forms of entitlement and oppression. We need sharper and more efficient protocol and processes of investigating concerns and claims, and clear and consistent consequences once confirmed. We need the same for genuine accountability and reparations, as well as, a process to offer repair to those harmed and the harm done to the organization and movement. To ensure that we come closer to relating, organizing and operating in ways that align, with what we say we are fighting for, and defending in the world. Moving into inauguration week, our community has witness the explicit white nationalism of the ever present but now more emboldened forces, that the federal administration has unleashed. Including the inside forces that have been literally and figuratively allowed into the Capitol, that the Republicans remain complicit in leveraging. During this time the NLG also needs to turn inward to investigate what abolition and transformative justice means (join us for January 20th membership meeting - see below) and our own relationship to power and harmful dynamics within the NLG (February workshops - see below). If we fail to do so, we remain vulnerable to divisions that gives those and, that which we’re up against, more power to defeat us. It is also true, that our ability to turn and face, and interrupt these dynamics will strengthen us and build relationships, organizations and movements that authentically convey what we are fighting for and as a result become much more powerful.
Looking forward to doing that together in 2021.
- NLG-SF Bay Area Team |
