Tag Archive: Liberation
April 18, 2021
The Food Solutions New England 21 Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge for 2021 is moving into its last week and shifting from the theme of “Reckon and Repair” to “Regenerate.” And it just so happens that the Revolutionary Love Conference happened this past weekend, providing amazing array of speakers, deep wisdom, inspiration and what feels like a rich transition that aligns with where the Challenge is heading (both thematically and in its encouragement of learning and action that takes its thousands of participants from 21 days to 365). This year’s theme of Revolutionary Love was “The Courage to Reimagine,” and while I was not able to attend all of the gathering, what I did catch was nourishing, and the social media stream (#RevLove21 on Twitter) was on the best kind of fire. What follows is a harvest of 21 quotes from the presentations and conversations.
“We have become a people who accept racism and poverty as conditions, when they are actually crises.” – Rev. Traci Blackmon
“We all know someone who is more outraged by Colin Kaepernick’s knee than Derek Chauvin’s… No one hates like a Christian who’s just been told their hate isn’t Christian.” – John Fugelsang
“Public confession without meaningful transformation does nothing.” – Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
“Too often, our framing of God prevents us from moving toward a just society—just as capitalism uses theological vocabulary but centers predatory self-interest.” – Otis Moss, III
“How can we retrain the eye to see all others as part of us, one human family. We can train our eyes to look upon the face of anyone and say, ‘You are a part of me I do not yet know. I will open myself to your story. I will let your grief into my heart.” – Valarie Kaur
“White people need to stop being white and start being ethnic again. When you leave the US no one is seeing you and saying “Oh hey you’re white!” They’ll want to know where you’re from, ethnicity carries stories – what is your STORY?” – Otis Moss, III
“I would like to get rid of words like inclusion and say democratization. I’d like for us to get rid of words like diversity and say democratization.” – Ruby Sales
“We must demand a society that will not withhold from others that which we would not want withheld from ourselves.” – Dean Kelly Brown Douglas
“I want white evangelicals to stop talking about reconciliation and talk about justice and repair.” – Robert P. Jones
“I want to stand as a bulwark that things can be different, even in the most stalwart, white supremacist, bigoted families.” – Rev. Rob Lee
“Change is possible when we stop seeing others as needy and start seeing each other as necessary.” – Rev. Traci Blackmon
“Speaking truth to power isn’t only about taking on the President or the GOP, it’s also about taming the power of our own ego.” -Irshad Manji
“Too often, our acts of moral courage go unacknowledged—even by ourselves. We don’t realize the impact we have on others who observe us, and benefit from small mundane acts of resistance in the face of unimaginable daily horror.” – Wajarahat Ali
“I love my enemies for purely selfish reasons. It moves me toward a cure for the life-denying disease of returning hate for hatred. Love may lead to defeat. It may lead to death. But it will not let hatred have the final word.” – Dr. Miguel De La Torre
“White relatives, we’re not asking for a handout of charity. This [reparations] is an invitation—a lifeline to your own humanity and liberation.” – Edgar Villaneuva
“This is a time of reckoning and reconstruction, and policy is my love language. . . . There’s been hurt and harm legislated for generations. Long before our pandemic, our nation was already in crisis.” – Ayanna Pressley
“What would you do? What would you risk, if you truly saw no stranger? How will you fight with us? … It is the practice of a community, and we all have a different role in the work at any given time.” – Valarie Kaur
“Love is always asking: How do I tell this truth and still stay in relationship?” – Krista Tippett
“Think of how much change we leave on the table when we assume that the other will never see things from our point of view, so we must get in their face and humiliate them. Think of how much social change we may be leaving on the table.” – Irshad Manji
“There are so many awesome people in every political party, every demographic of age, sexuality, gender, etc. – these awesome people have GOT to find each other.” – Van Jones
“Racism is a putrid, festering hole in our nation’s soul, and that will only change when we have the courage to love a different way. That love must become an everyday spiritual practice, like flossing or brushing our teeth.” – Dr. Rev. Jacqui Lewis
January 22, 2019
“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.”
The quote above has been cited every now and then over the past dozen years or so that I have been with IISC, including a later line – “The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace.” Some combination of these words seem to come to mind and lips more frequently as many of the organizations and networks with which we work are are dealing with oppressive dynamics of overwork and urgency, whether they identify as activist or not.
These dynamics are increasingly recognized as an aspect of white dominant and supremacist culture and hyper-capitalist fervor that reduces many people to “producers” in the workplace and extracts as much labor as they can give. In our race equity and social change work, we see this as part and parcel of the structures that must be named and addressed for justice, liberation and sustainability to be realized.
In a recent workshop with an organization we are supporting through a two-year race, equity and inclusion transformation process, we invited the predominantly white staff into a dialogue circle to unpack their self-identified culture of overwork and urgency, to look more deeply at what they are gaining from this (and who in particular gains most), what they are losing (and who loses most), and what it would take to do commit to creating something different. Here is some of what we have heard, aspects of which are being echoed in various other organizations, networks and communities (curious to know what resonates): Read More
September 28, 2018
At IISC, we are using guided meditations to spark transformation in the hearts and minds of participants in our facilitation and training rooms.
This is one I offered to thirty Black leaders brought together by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City this summer. They were asked by First Lady Chirlane McCray, wife of NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, to develop recommendations to increase the numbers of Black mental health providers. But our job in the end was so much more. It was helping them to discover ways to re-imagine mental health care for Black communities, and to encourage Black people to go into mental health fields to free Black people from the emotional and spiritual binds of pain rooted in systemic and historical injustice.
It was the deepest honor to create and share this meditation with the group as I lost my mother in 2002 to mental illness and the health care system that “treated her”.
Get comfortable
Anchor your feet and back
Breathe natural breaths at your own pace
See what’s on your mind about today
See your obligations outside of this room and let them float past you and away
Call on your images of your ancestors
See the faces of your family
Present
And Past
Think about the history of Black people
What images do you see of pain?
Of pain as they face hardship? As their mental health deteriorates?
Of triumph?
As they triumph over, and their mental health improves and sets them free?
What supports did they have to help them heal and achieve wholeness?
Who helped them?
How?
Who helped you in times of need? In times of mental burden and stress?
How?
Thank your ancestors
Thank yourself
Breathe once again those breaths of life
And come back when you are ready
November 20, 2017
“We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand.”
– URSULA K. Le GUIN
Image by Stephen Bowler, shared under provisions of Creative Commons Attribution license 2.0.
A note on the quotes below (and the Le Guin quote above): I am grateful for the beautiful piece by Evan Bissel, “Frames for Life, Liberation and Belonging,” which appears in the Othering and Belonging Journal. This piece lifts up some central elements of an emerging and humanizing narrative for our times, with focus on themes such as transition, liberation, belonging, commons, interconnection, abundance, sacred, curiosity, play, and place. I strongly encourage readers to check it out, to sit with the piece and let it soak in, and to share it.
This post follows the thread of a conversation that has been evolving across events I have been involved with the past few months, and a bigger and broader conversation that is clearly informing it. This is certainly not a new conversation, but there seems to be a renewed or perhaps more public vigor to it, at least in multi-racial and multi-generational social change groups and initiatives with which I have been involved.
It has cropped up in a network leadership program where a discussion about the difference between working for equity and working for justice pointed in the direction of the need to pursue liberation, and not simply inclusion and accommodation in fundamentally harmful systems. Read More
October 2, 2017
“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along those sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
– Herman Melville
2017-2018 NLI cohort members engage in a team building exercise focused on the dimensions of collaborative success.
Last week I worked with the Backbone Team of Food Solutions New England to launch the second cohort of the Network Leadership Institute (NLI) at Ohana Camp in Fairlee, Vermont. This initiative has grown out of FSNE’s commitment to cultivating both thought leadership and network leadership “to support the emergence and viability of a New England food system that is a driver of healthy food for all, racial equity, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities.” Another impetus for the NLI was a year spent doing system mapping and analysis that revealed four leverage areas for advancing a just, sustainable and democratically-owned and operated regional food system, including cultivating and connecting leadership (see image below). Read More
April 4, 2017
“You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it.”
– Toni Morrison
Once again, I’ve been re-reading Niels Pfleaging’s short book Organize for Complexity (and eager for the release of the English version of Complexitools) amidst the growing demand we are hearing at IISC from people who want to liberate their organizations and themselves to be able to intelligently respond to change and to come back to life! Here’s the gist – as things shift more, and more rapidly, some people’s inclination may be to try to exert greater control or dig in to what is familiar, but does not work. The more one does so, the worse things can get. As Pfleaging writes, we see a “high price for the illusion of control.” Within organizations this takes the form of various gaps – social, functional, and temporal – that make them increasingly irrelevant, ineffective and irresponsible.
Responding to complexity requires (to borrow a phrase from Eugene Eric Kim) new muscles and mindsets.
Read More
July 21, 2016
The tagline of the Black Lives Matter movement is “Free from violence. Free from oppression. Free to be our full selves. Free to love. Freedom Now.” Their rallying cry is a powerful quote from Assata Shakur. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
The past few weeks have reminded me that loving and supporting each other requires us not only to fight but also to mourn together. There are opportunities around us every single day. The recent shootings of police, alongside the seemingly endless list of black and brown civilians shot by police, seem to have awakened the nation in a new way. That is good, as long as we can “stay woke” long enough to do something meaningful. Still, I can’t help but wonder what hushed and gentle conversations we’d be having on television and in communities, workplaces, and houses of worship without the deaths of the police officers. Isn’t the almost daily murder of black and brown people enough to cause somber reflection? Aren’t the calls for action coming from grieving families, activists, celebrities, athletes, and everyday folks enough to make and sustain meaningful change?
Read More
March 12, 2015
“We add value to society-at-large when we dare to connect.”
This week I was in a conversation with someone who asked me what the difference is between “networking” and “network building.” I’ve been asked this before, and certainly do not purport to have the right answer, but it became an opportunity to deepen the conversation that has been evolving in my work and head about what it means to develop potential through and in networks. Here is what popped to mind as a response, actually in the form of a series of questions
Are you thinking about others?
Read More
August 12, 2014
In my early days many of my friends called me too serious because of comments I would make about the racism and sexism in a Disney film or the rampant misogyny and conspicuous consumption in popular music. My kids still think so. But having come to see systems of oppression, it’s hard for me to “un-see” them when I turn to entertainment. Spoken word poet Madiha Bhatti puts out a powerful message. Much better to listen to the whole thing, but check out the refrain to whet your appetite!
Read More
June 19, 2014
We continue to explore the power of love. Listen to Dr. Maya Angelou speak about the power of love to liberate the human spirit. She speaks of how her mother’s love liberated Maya to become her fullest self and how Maya’s love liberated her mother at the end of her mother’s life. She speaks of the unconditional love that frees a person to make their highest and best contribution to the world—a love that is at once personal and public, individually meaningful and essential to our collective lives.
“Love liberates. It doesn’t bind.”
Read More
April 15, 2014
At IISC we are orienting our selves towards the City. These are the places where most human beings will live. They are the theater of human struggle, and thus for liberation. And as Jen points out, they just might be the key to sustainability.
Inequality is tearing our society apart. Oligarchy’s global claw back has been relentless, and potentially self-destructive. We are governed by moneyed interests and the precariat have been abandoned.
Read More
December 24, 2013
“Transformation comes more from pursuing profound questions than seeking practical answers.”
– Peter Block
|Photo by Bilal Kamoon|http://www.flickr.com/photos/55255903@N07/6835060992/in/photolist-bpZtvb-8A6i9c-8p2AtP-do8Bez-do8JT3-7RiJTU-ao63dG-7Cjh9a-7Co7Fm-ihgH2m-9dXKU2-bgGa4c-8CkodQ-azGM3y-cBFFBS-8ChFDT-bX6EoZ-fPzNoo-9PBH3p-7GZn1X-9iKHnC-8nxop8-9tQh9o-9tMiYv-9tMj4F-7QpV8y-do8JVU-7Co7vW-7Gh8sv-8qQBZ9-eUDNUt-7Gh3sp-9ESmzs-8nAwhG-8nxom2-8nxonr-8nAwhf-8nAwgm|
Three of our IISC blogger-practitioners have been in conversation about 3 questions they are each carrying with them into 2014 to guide and develop their practice to support social change. We invite your reflections on and additions to these: Read More
