This workshop was designed after studying a long series of articles coming from communities of color regarding the occupy movement, as well as from our own frustrations about lack of safe spaces for ourselves, our friends, and people we care about in occupy pittsburgh.
The workshop was designed by Nai, Ursula, Rachel, Danny, Eric, and Joyce with input from various others.
Approximately 30-40 people attended and the workshop time allotted was approximately 2 hours (with about 15 minutes of flex time that we used for prep and wait time for stragglers).
Suggested Ingredients:
- A comfortable space
- Butcher Paper
- Markers
- Handouts (articles being mentioned)
- 20-50 occupiers
- 2-5 facilitators
Intros
Quick go around, everyone shared their name and their reason for attending the workshop
Communications Groundrules
Acknowledged that we could be having a discussion with some tension and had everyone contribute some discussion norms that would ease communication. It can be helpful for facilitators to make a suggestion or two to get things started.
The ones suggested and practiced in this particular workshop were:
- Speak from your own experience
- Respect for self and others
- Don’t deny the experience of others
- Don’t interrupt
- Step Up, Step Back
- Don’t make assumptions about anyone’s identity
- Understand that this work is everyone’s job
- Discuss ideas, not people
Background Information
Discussion of how the workshop came to be, excerpts from articles read in order to frame dialogue. Excerpt from blog about signs reading “Debt Slavery.”
note: The facilitators read the excerpts but in retrospect I think it would have been better to hand out copies of articles and ask for volunteers to read.
Activity One: Occupy Language
After reading the excerpt from the debt slavery blog, we asked participants to list/shout out language from signs, chants, and conversation while we wrote everything on butcher paper. The goal is to identify the common vocabulary of the occupy movement both in person and as represented in media.
note: depending on who attends the workshop it might be more productive to either specify that folks should identify mainstream materials, focus specifically on signs or chants, or have them identify things that they specifically find problematic. Our group had various levels of experience with organization and issues of oppression but most had some experience so we made our prompt fairly generic.
This was the list:
- Corporate Rape
- Ownership
- Pulling your own weight
- Speaking on behalf of others
- Why are you here?
- Solidarity
- What demands/leaders
- leaderless
- fixing a broken system
- nonviolence
- banks got bailed out, we got sold out
- mic check
- binary language
- bitch
- debt slavery
- come talk to us
- 99%
- occupy
- occupy to liberate
- this is what democracy loks like
- police are the 99%
- fuck the police
- consensus
- general assembly
- need to focus
- divisiveness
- brothers/sisters
- “over sensitive”
- safe space
- how can i help?
- deal with people as issues
- reinforcing stigma
- mislabeling
- wage slave
Next, take one example from the list. We chose debt slavery in part because we read about it and in part because it lends itself well to this exercise. We wrote the word SLAVERY at the top of a sheet of butcher paper and had everyone name the words that they associate with the word slavery. This was our list:
- property
- chains
- racism
- dehumanizing
- colonialism
- slave trade
- ancestors
- south
- rape
- prison
- systemic annihilation of people
- underground railroad
- united states
- de-culturing
- genocide
- n-word
- lunching
- nazis
- rebellion
- dividing families
- capitalism
- jim crow
- kkk
- forced migration
- 3/5 of a person
- reparations
- power/force/profit
- civil war
- death of untold millions
- sharks following ships
- disposability
- masters
- emancipation proclimation
- haitian revolution
- eugenics
- forced sterilization
- coerced labor
- farm/domestic labor
- total reproductive control
- cash crop
Conclude activity by pairing some words on the list with the original sign wording. In this case, discussion of how someone who is a white college student may have tens of thousands of dollars of debt but has never been legally 3/5 of a person, never suffered lynching, etc.
It is highly likely that the intentions of such signs and statements will be brought up. This is an excellent chance to discuss INTENT vs. IMPACT in order to reorient people’s focus from the first to the latter. In our group, someone also added the idea of individual vs. group and historical context, which was very helpful.
Activity Two: What Can We Do? – Creative Visioning
Engage participants in a discussion regarding what is needed at the camp and how we get there. The purpose of this is/was to get people to start thinking about removing barriers, but further discussions are necessary to grow these ideas.
note: it would be helpful to send around a sign up list for people interested in future meetings and/or a listserv of somekind.
Most needs were either subheadings of or related to SAFE SPACES. Safe spaces is an over arching need that many marginalized communities lack in a number of settings, so it’s important to encourage people to expand on what safe space means and looks like.
Some thoughts on that from our workshop were:
_note: these still required continued discussion and explanation
- actively anti-racist and anti-sexist
- deliberate dialogue
- public affirmations
- gender inclusivity
- no sexual advances (disagreement was raised and a significant discussion took place.)
- diversity training (it was suggested that this be mandatory, there was disagreement and discussion.)
- visibility
- it’s ok to make mistakes: oops/ouch tactic (love this!)
- inclusive language (i.e. language that allows people w/o experience in movements and/or organizing and activism to feel that they are a part of this movement aka cut it out with the jargon already!)
- recognizing harm and disempowerment are different than offense/hurt feelings
- intentional language and communities
- acces to resources
- encouraging a thought of the day, somewhere visibile
- model language
- appropriate space for regular workshops and activities and actively enforce and reinforce that space as “safe”, expand that culture outward from that center
- create identity/affinity groups at camp
- draw a line regarding acceptable behavior norms
- reclaim individual spaces
- orientation process that stresses these values
note: during our workshop we had pressure to close prior to a subsequent activity and had limited time. This would be a good moment to collect people’s information for continued discussion, etc.
