by Deva Jones | Sep 30, 2015 | Racial Justice
This post was written by Annie Hanley-Miller and originally posted on Blue Boat.
Building Community Overcomes Difference
by Annie Hanley–Miller
I brought back many things to my home community from my experience at Activate NOLA. It was an intense week and I learned a lot about race, poverty, Hurricane Katrina, and global warming. I also learned a lot about forming and being in community.
During the week, I talked with so many unique people who all helped me to gain new perspectives on all kinds of things. It was interesting to meet both people from the New Orleans area and from around the country. The lectures on racism, poverty, Hurricane Katrina, and global warming were helpful in understanding the interconnections of all of these issues. I plan on using my understanding to support social justice work at my home community.
Another thing that really impacted me during the week was interacting with all the strongly connected communities. We went to panels, lectures, and workshops and the community behind every place we went to was so close knit. Communities knew how to support one another and were able to have different opinions and calmly discuss them. Even we, the youth participating in Activate NOLA, were able to create a functioning community with no judgments. I plan to use what I learned about strong, welcoming community and apply the strategies to my own community.
While at Activate NOLA, there were also lots of opportunities for us as youth to step up and assume leadership roles. A few youth volunteered to be in charge of our touch groups which would meet and discuss our day as well as plan a service for the end of the week. Other youth would step up and look out for other youth when it was needed or would take charge of a situation to help it run more smoothly. I was inspired by how willing everyone was to assume different leadership roles. I hope to try to help my home community create more leadership opportunities for youth like the ones available at Activate NOLA.
Over the next year, I plan to share and discuss everything that I learned with my home community, especially my youth group. I hope that others will be inspired to seek out more information such as I did. I gained so much knowledge, perspective, and experience from participating in Activate NOLA and I am thrilled to be able to share all of that with my home community.
Annie Hanley-Miller is a member of South Church in Portsmouth, NH. She is a junior in high school and has a strong interest in social justice work.
by Deva Jones | Sep 28, 2015 | Immigration, Youth
This post was written by Jack Spector-Bishop and originally posted on Blue Boat.
“What do you do when you come head to head with the very evil you are working against?”
“The ants crawl under it, the birds fly around it, the sky connects over it.” This is what I wrote in my journal while I sat in the shade of the US-Mexico border wall, near Douglas, Arizona. The wall loomed behind me, constructed of massive, two story high rusty metal beams and stretching as far as I could see. Poles with floodlights and cameras were everywhere, along with trenches, barbed wire, and fences. All of it seemed so arbitrary. It was weird a place to be — it was just an inanimate, sterile wall and yet I felt a suffocating atmosphere of pain. Even though we were in an empty desert, it felt like a place of violence.
I traveled to the wall during the UUCSJ’s Activate Southwest Border program, in which around 20 youth (mostly Unitarian Universalsists) from around the country met in Tucson, Arizona for 10 days to learn about immigration issues in the borderlands, and receive training in social justice organizing. I and my fellow travelers had countless moving and informative experiences (including witnessing Operation Streamline, and working with the We Stand with Rosa campaign), but our visit to the border wall still sticks in my mind as the most memorable. As our group began trudging up a hill, we saw a fast approaching cloud of red dust in the distance take shape as a U.S. Border Patrol squad car. We had no reason to be afraid — the public does have access to the pathways along the border, but it still made us a little anxious. This anxiety only increased as the car pulled up alongside us, parked, and the Border Patrol agent began getting out and talking to us. Part of me, deep down, hoped that he would be one of the “good ones”. That this was just a job to him. That he was a decent guy trying to bring dignity to a cruel institution. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. As he chatted with us and asked us what questions we had for him, it became clear that he fit exactly the stereotypes of his profession. I’m not going to repeat what he said — just turn on Fox News or watch the GOP Presidential debates and you’ll hear the same things. It was ugly, hateful racism, spoken in the most casually self-righteous manner you can imagine. What do you do in that situation? What do you do when you come head to head with the very evil you are working against? As I pondered these questions over the following days, scripture came to mind, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers” (Ephesians 6:12). That border patrol agent was not the enemy — he was just flesh and blood. It became clear to me that the enemies we are fighting are the institutions he stood for. We are fighting Border Patrol, we are fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and we are fighting the legislation that makes the persecution of undocumented citizens legal.
Jack Spector-Bishop is 17 and attends the Countryside UU Church in Palatine, Illinois. He is currently serving on the Midwest district’s Northern Area Youth Council and this is the second UUCSJ program he has attended. He is passionate about art and social justice, and hopes to someday work for the Unitarian Universalist Service Commitee (UUSC).
by Deva Jones | Sep 25, 2015 | Environmental Justice, GROW, Young Adult
This post was written by Amelia Diehl and originally posted on Blue Boat.
I am so grateful to have been able to attend the Unitarian Universalist College of Social Justice‘s Grounded and Resilient Organizer’s Workshop Climate Justice Training in Chicago, IL and feel connected again to a community and to a movement. I think I might have learned more about myself and climate change in that weekend at the GROW training than my few years or so of calling myself an environmentalist, and in ways I could never have predicted. The space created for group reflection allowed me to learn a lot about what it means for me to be involved in the movement, and also to forget about myself at times.
Earlier this summer, I interviewed a local climate activist who told me that according to one study, by 2030 we would know if we hit the two degree celsius temperature change, a crucial tipping point. That in fifteen years we would pretty much know how much we were screwed. While these types of doomsday scientific reports circulate regularly and the exact numbers are debatable, somehow hearing it in the context of his personal investment hit me deeper than before. Since that conversation, I’ve felt desperate, frantic and apocalyptic – but also revolutionary, that something big would have to change. I felt a renewed purpose and urgency in my climate work, which until then had felt distanced; I paid attention to news, read Naomi Klein and went to major protests, but didn’t really feel like I could commit as much to the movement as I’d wanted.
About a month later, one of my friends, a woman of color, said she didn’t like the environmental movement. When I asked why, she laughed and said because it’s so white. I agreed, but was frustrated, because even though I was white, I resented the reputation of whiteness in a movement that I know to be more intersectional and that I want to be more explicitly intersectional because it needs to be. I tried to argue that it’s more than protecting trees and water, and that climate change affects us all.
For now, it seems lik![photo1[5]](http://blueboat.blogs.uua.org/files/2015/08/photo15-300x224.jpg)
e my front-line is my campus. The brand of environmentalism at our campus – a small liberal arts college in the mid-west – is as white as a blizzard. Our environmental club, though popular, mainly goes on week-long backpacking trips during semester breaks, and lacks a divestment movement. The administration touts sustainability efforts just like the next college, but there is an overall lack of discourse around climate change, and especially around justice. People care about it, sure, but most people get too overwhelmed and feel like we couldn’t do anything about it, or that it isn’t relevant, and often get stuck in “save the Earth” thinking.
Looking back at when I started to care about environmentalism and climate change about ten years ago, I recognize that my early investment lacked a critical analysis of power systems. Like many Unitarian Universalists in climate work, I resonate deeply with the seventh principle, the interconnectedness of all things. I often envision our planet in space, and think about all of us sharing this home. In a social justice context, this also means that my liberation is tied up into yours. But I don’t think we – as a movement – are there yet, as someone at the training expressed.
One example, among many: a reasonable critique of vegans and vegetarians, many of whom are white (including me), is that they seem to care more about the health and safety of animals than for other people. Changing consumer choices in the context of capitalism is relatively easy compared to critically looking at how I am implicated in a white supremacist (capitalist, patriarchal) society.
I realized that my values of caring about climate change led me to critically look at systems of power and societal inequalities. In other words, I admit that while I cared about social justice in a very white middle class liberal way, it was climate change that got me to understand the complexity and depth of power systems, and my own privilege. To care about climate justice is to care about anti-racism, feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-injustice and anti-oppression, and to fight for liberation. Climate change is only the latest symptom of these oppressive systems. Of course, it is still a choice to engage in anti-oppressive work, and not all climate work means climate justice, and climate justice does not mean simply adding “justice” to the end of it.
It is important to remember and understand each of these anti-oppression movements have different histories and are not the same. Anti-racist work cannot always be lumped with climate justice work. Yet it is crucial to make the connections between the movements.
One of the most impactful parts of the training came after looking at different definitions of climate justice, and one of our facilitators asked us to reflect on how, or if, our goals dismantle the master’s house, and how, or if, our tactics are accountable to the environmental justice principles. I know that this question needs to be considered continuously throughout any work, and I know that the work being done on my campus is not there yet. After the GROW training, I understand more than ever the urgency to challenge this white, privileged environmentalism and bring in a climate justice framework, and, importantly, I feel more prepared to do so.
I am determined to bring this awareness and analysis back to my campus. We’ll still go backpacking, and I will make sure we talk about the master’s house in the context of climate justice principles. I suspect many a college campus are stuck in white environmentalism, though many have been struggling for divestment from fossil fuels. I also want to start a divestment campaign, though this feels like a lofty goal at this point for where my campus’s values lie.
I know that this awareness is not enough, that there must be action. Yet it is a concrete step forward, and I know I will keep learning. As a participant said, we are responsible for collective learning.
Along with organizing skills, the GROW training gave me a space to truly examine and express my despair over climate change, the deep kind I felt at the beginning of the summer. It is easy to become fixated on the dystopian projections of extinction – of other species and possibly our own – destruction, and loss of the life we are used to, and to focus on climate change as an urgent crisis. Yet the problem with this is that this apocalypse has been real and remains urgent for so many for centuries. It is not about oppression olympics, or a hierarchy of despair, but it is about urgency.
The face of the climate movement may still be very white. Yet the crucial part is making sure front-line communities take the lead, and that those with privilege take the time to critically examine their positionality, and remain accountable to climate justice principles. As a facilitator said, we need to struggle together and resist collapses, and it’s up to us if there’s to be justice on the other side.
Amelia studies Environmental Communication and Arts at Beloit College in Wisconsin. Originally Quaker, she joined her local UU congregation in high school. She’s interested in how art is used in social movements, and in particular writing and photography. In addition to her environmental activism, she leads an interfaith student group organized for incarceration justice.
