This piece has been a long time coming. As a young person, I spent years interviewing women involved in the Black Power movement, reading their letters, poetry and essays. I was researching their experiences and the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder on their lives. Later on, I realized that I was searching for a way to be involved with movement work in which my spirit, personality and hope could remain intact. I've learned that part of that work is mine alone. But part of it is a shared endeavor: It is about how we treat each other.
My vision for 2018 is that we dedicate ourselves to addressing harm and repairing relationships within social justice movements. I spent most of 2017 traveling around the US, supporting groups organizing against intense political threats. Some were directly confronting white supremacists, others addressing violence against LGBTQ communities, supporting communities under threat of deportation, or working within Black communities facing state violence. Much of my work with these organizations was highly confidential crisis management.
During these repressive times, people assume that most of the crises in activism and organizing are external. Instead, I was working with groups where their relationships were so fraught that their political work had come to a standstill -- organizations where people had stopped talking to each other, where people were being abusive and bullying each other, where issues of violence and theft had arisen. In some cases, folks in the same collective were criticizing each other or their organizations on social media, but refusing to name these critiques in person.
[For more on this story by Ejeris Dixon, go to http://www.truth-out.org/opini...oritize-them-in-2018]
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