I knew The Movement for Black Lives was preparing a new platform for release this summer, and this morning I found news of the launch in an email. It's really awesome. I hope folks will check it out and endorse the platform as an individual or group. You can access the platform, policy briefs, booklet (in English or Spanish!), list of organizations involved, platform endorsement form, and all kinds of images for use on blogs and social media here or using the link in the sidebar.
Recently I changed the name of this blog (and another one at WordPress) from Raising Cain to Resurrecting Abel.
In my world view, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel is, in part, an allegory related to a specific episode or enactment in the early spiritual history of mankind on Earth. In particular, it encodes some specific information about ancient patterns of relationship that became anchored so tightly into the fabric of planetary life that we, as a human race, continue to struggle with it. This relational pattern is — for the human collective — as enduring as what we might call a personality trait at the level of psychological development and expression.
And we see it every day. We know the pattern by many names: master-slave, racial caste systems, haves and have-nots, privileged and oppressed, structural racism. How those relationships play out, and the efforts of peace and justice activists to transform them, have been the focus of this blog.
What is it that draws people to justice work? For me there is no one answer, but, certainly, the notion that we are accountable to one another in some fundamental way seems to be at the heart of it. And with that idea has come a question: if we are accountable to each other (and to other species) how are we to be, know, and act in our lives to bring harmony for all life on Earth?
Hexagram 43 of the I Ching has some clues, I think...at least I seem to come back to it almost every time I ask myself this question. A major idea here is that one must "fight without quarter" if good is to prevail over evil. Then follows a pretty significant "however":
In a resolute struggle of the good against evil, there are, however, definite rules that must not be disregarded, if it is to succeed. First, resolution must be based on a union of strength and friendliness. Second, a compromise with evil is not possible; evil must under all circumstances be openly discredited. Nor must our own passions and shortcomings be glossed over. Third, the struggle must not be carried on by force. If evil is branded, it thinks of weapons, and if we do it the favor of fighting against it blow for blow, we lose in the end because thus we ourselves get entangled in hatred and passion. Therefore it is important to begin at home, to be on guard in our own persons against the faults we have branded. In this way, finding no opponent, the sharp edges of the weapons of evil become dulled. For the same reasons we should not combat our own faults directly. As long as we wrestle with them, they continue victorious. Finally, the best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.[1]
I have long been curious how (specifically) ancient Cain consciousness won out ("Cain slew Abel"), setting the pattern for modern structural oppression. It seemed to me that knowing the details might be useful in very practical ways for justice work. When I put the question out to the universe, I got the sense that the original dynamics were in fact being re-enacted in ordinary affairs of humankind. So, for the past few years I've been looking at American politics -- as a ripe example -- to see what details are hidden in plain sight.
I'll tell the long story in future posts.
But here's the short story, and the reason I renamed my blog: Hexagram 43 is, for me, a blueprint for the core practice of justice work in a new Earth that is emerging -- cultivating awareness, intention and skillful means for making energetic progress in the good. And one thing this means for me is to focus on resurrecting Abel consciousness rather than raising Cain's.
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has a new report on how suggestions (see related article links below the clip) to expand the US guestworker program to ensure plenty of cheap labor may take us to a place we really don't want to be:
In the debate over comprehensive immigration reform, various policymakers and business groups have suggested that Congress create a new or expanded guestworker program to ensure a steady supply of foreign workers for industries that rely on an abundance of cheap labor.
Congress should look before it leaps. The current H-2 program, which provides temporary farmworkers and non-farm laborers for a variety of U.S. industries, is rife with labor and human rights violations committed by employers who prey on a highly vulnerable workforce. It harms the interests of U.S. workers, as well, by undercutting wages and working conditions for those who labor at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. This program should not be expanded or used as a model for immigration reform.
Great article from Imara Jones at Colorlines today for those of us trying to raise up impacts of our colonial ancestry:
Much hullabaloo has been made recently about slavery as entertainment in movies like “Django Unchained.” But lost in the discussion is slavery as history, and the simple fact that it was an economic system which seized the economic know-how of Africans in order to construct unimaginable wealth in North America, Europe and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Wealth from the slave trade took Western Europe from being one of the world’s poorest regions to its wealthiest and most powerful in under a century.
Though sadistic and macabre, the plain truth is that slavery was an unprecedented economic juggernaut whose impact is still lived by each of us daily. Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.
I might also point out that the Idle No More movement is helping descendants of European colonials in Canada to discover untold, untaught history about oppression of First Nations citizens. I could really identify with some of the comments in this excellent OpEd by Heather Mallick yesterday in the Toronto Star, in particular her discovery of how oppressed peoples become invisible in the eyes of the privileged groups:
Most of Canada’s native people live in a misery we don’t even see
because we’d rather not know. It’s one of the many drawbacks of living
on the reserve, far away from the southern cities that Canadians cling
to. There’s no one to hear you scream, as the Irish writer Edna O’Brien
once said about rural child abuse in her own country.
If you don’t like Indians getting uppity, try this. Look at the
gorgeous, hopeful faces of their children, who don’t yet know they’re
headed for a life of blank despair thanks to our idleness.
But we don’t look because we don’t have to. They don’t live where we
do. We don’t consider them until they block our passage on road and rail
and then we just spray them with the same idle anger we show to other
drivers, cyclists and people not inside our own little vehicle.
I found this great article from Steven Newcomb the other day. I think it's an important one because he talks about how "patterns of racist and dehumanizing reasoning from the distant past continue to colonize and dominate the present". Anyone who cares about racial justice eventually has to locate and study patterns of oppression in their own being, ancestry and their own nation. The case that Newcomb refers to is interesting reading as well because it links early history of the United States and Canada to Indigenous rights issues in both nations today.
Obviously, there are many issues that the Original Nations and Peoples of Turtle Island in that region of the continent are attempting to address with the Canadian government. These range from the hundreds of murdered and missing Aboriginal women in British Columbia, and the Keystone XL Pipeline, as well as the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and territories, not to mention the extinguishment process that is being wrongly called a “treaty process” in British Columbia, the thousands of Indian children who continue to be put into the culturally assimilating milieu of non-Indian foster care.
In my view, however, all these pressing issues are the direct result of the history of dehumanization that the Original Nations and Peoples of Turtle Island have been subjected to for many centuries. I am fascinated with the conceptual roots of the existing idea-system that has been and continues to be used against the Original Nations and Peoples of the vast geographical region now called Canada.
That a leader of one of the Original Peoples of Turtle Island feels it necessary to go on a hunger strike for twenty days in an effort to win a meeting with Canada’s Prime Minister is, in my view, evidence of the phenomenon of dehumanization and disrespect.
An interesting view on Idle No More from Winona LaDuke:
“Idle No More” is Canadian for: “That’s Enough BS. We’re Coming Out to Stop You.”
Canada often touts a sort of “ better than thou” human rights position in the international arena. And it has, for instance, a rather small military, so it’s not likely to launch any pre-emptive strikes against known or unknown adversaries. And it has often sought to appear as a good guy, more so than it’s southern neighbor. More than a few American ex patriots moved to Canada during the Vietnam war, and stayed there, thinking it was a pretty good deal.
That attitude is sort of passe, particularly if you are a Native person. And, particularly if you are Chief Theresa Spence.
Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Therese Spence is now on her 16th day of a hunger strike. Spence says her strike is ultimately about respect: for treaties and for aboriginal peoples. As such she thinks she deserves a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Harper, as well as the Queen's representative in Canada. Here's an interview she gave on December 21st, 2012:
White supremacy is a low-level assumption about characteristics that white people allegedly have which transforms inequality between them and everyone else into something natural. It often masks itself as fairness and goes unquestioned as a result. Using this definition, our current tax code is a work of white supremacy.
The fact that we’ve arrived at this point on the watch of the country’s first black president is an irony too large to ignore. Mostly victim, partly complicit, Obama is not fully to blame. Yet, economically speaking, the stubborn fact remains that the country is at a moment of racial injustice not seen in more than a generation. In the last four years, that injustice has only expanded and calcified.
Earlier this week I shared this photo on my Facebook profile:
I found this as I took several actions in support of workers and unions in protests against Gov. Rick Snyder and Michigan's "Right to Work" Law which was passed by the state legislature last week. I re-posted the MLK photo and quote partly because I was not aware that the "right to work" rhetoric had been around so long, and thought I would like to know more about it.
While Michigan's momentous decision has received widespread media attention, little has been said about the origins of "right-to-work" laws, which find their roots in extreme pro-segregationist and anti-communist elements in the 1940s South.
Interesting article on environmental disasters, community dislocation and how those impacted can become invisible...
Hurricane Sandy not only failed to arouse a heightened sense of moral
outrage and call for justice, it has quickly, if not seamlessly, been
woven into a narrative that denied those larger economic and political
forces, mechanisms and technologies by which certain populations when
exposed to a natural catastrophe are rendered human waste. One reason
for this case of historical amnesia and ethical indifference may lie in
the emerging vicissitudes of an era eager to accommodate rather than
challenge global warming, an era in which freakish weather events have
become such commonplace occurrences that they encourage the denial of
planetary destruction. These days Americans are quickly fatigued by
natural catastrophe. Major natural disasters and their consequences are
now relegated to the airborne vocabulary of either fate or the
unyielding circumstance of personal tragedy, conveniently allowing an
ethically cleansed American public to ignore the sordid violence and
suffering they produce for those populations caught in the grip of
poverty, deprivation and hardship. It gets worse. Catastrophes have not
only been normalized, they have been reduced to the spectacle of
titillating TV. Rather than analyzed within broader social categories
such as power, politics, poverty, race and class, the violence produced
by natural disasters is now highly individualized, limited to human
interest stories about loss and individual suffering. Questions
concerning how the violence of Hurricane Sandy impacted differently
those groups marginalized by race, age, sickness and class, particularly
among poor minorities, were either downplayed or ignored.
