CYES 295:
In our neoliberal society, positionality has become a buzz-word for white people trying to escape the meaningful deconstruction of our privileged identities. My personal aversion to the word comes from my belief that it takes a creative, open, and compassionate heart to navigate our identity in the work towards social change. We must be brave enough to be humble, passionate and determined. A meaningful process with identity construction requires that we not only look at ourselves and what we find to be the most important aspects of ourselves, but also the institutions that we choose to spend time in and the ways that we are validated by our larger society.
In this paper, I want to outline my identity as a way to help my reader see how they can connect and relate to the work i have been doing. It is impossible for me to discuss my interpretation of social justice or systemic inequality without acknowledging how my identity constructs my perspective and vantage point.
As a white, jewish, queer artist, I am in a constant battle with myself to balance not only the magical clarity that comes from true solidarity and trust amongst a community with the on-going and burning question of: what are my blind-spots? In what ways can I push myself to be more intentional and inclusive to all identities in the organizing work that I do? How can I engage people in conversation that will push them to think critically about their surroundings and their abilities to make change? I think it is in this challenge that I find myself most comfortable, when in reality I need to spend a lot more time listening.
NOW:
For my praxis project, I focused on building sustaining collective cultural leadership in an organization I co-founded, Floetic Fridays, which uses cultural organizing to promote marginalized voices on campus and create a culture of social justice. In cultural organizing, people matter, and more specifically so does their positionality, and identity. As a community we ask our audience members to explore their personal history and journeys as a way to grow vulnerability and care. Unpacking my own identity and my history with community organizing has helped me to understand the issues that face Floetic Fridays’ leadership in many ways.
It reminds me of my time growing up at Jewish, socialist, hippie camp. Every year the Junior Counselors would plan what we called “Revolution.” Junior counselors would take over camp, and run a silly, fun, completely transformed world for 24 hours. As a young camper, I was completely transported, I was experiencing a reality that popped up out of thin air, and I saw nothing but the outcome. Years later, when it came time as a camp counselor to plan and run my own Revolution, it took weeks of planning, and serious leadership skills to pull it off with my fellow Junior counselor collective. It taught me, that not only did it take hard work and strategy to execute such magic and transformation, but it required group cooperation and a commitment to a shared vision of imagination and wonder. If the campers knew how much work it took to plan and execute this Revolution, would they want to do it themselves one day? It makes me think, if people know how hard social movement building and community organizing can be, would they want to put themselves in positions of leadership? What skills did we need as leaders, to embrace our vision and not only dream amongst ourselves, but communicate that vision to others?
In high school, I found a similar community rooted in justice and collective leadership, through helping to create my school’s Slam Poetry Team. It was with my team that I learned the power of creative expression for making change and building trust in a community. Through writing and performing our poetry, we challenged each other to rethink our role as youth in activism, and challenged our notions of reality by sharing our stories. We used our voices, our stories, and our art to inspire others to fight for justice and foster community. I learned tangible skills about group facilitation, performance, team-work, competition, popular-education, and by the time I graduated high school, I got really good at emceeing open-mics. It was through this learning experience I was able to see fully the impact that my identity had in terms of not only the power it had on others and my community, but the power it meant to me. I was no longer just trying to decipher my identity alone, I had an entire community of creative people that also wanted to learn about themselves through the stories of others. We would slam each other’s stories together, as a team, and in those moments, clarity of our selves would emerge. In this context, when I say together, I am referring to writing poems, line by line as a team and performing them in groups on stage in front of judges and an audience of kids our age. We memorized the poems of our team members, and gave feedback on each other’s work. We cared about each other’s stories, as though they were our own. The slam poetry team was a youth-led collaborative space built on care and love. We committed to using our art to resist systems of oppression.
During my first two years at Clark, I spent a lot of time thinking about my whiteness, organizing around dismantling white supremacy by facilitating popular education models to promote anti-racism amongst White students. Our group was called “Student Community For Unlearning Racism (SCUR) and we worked under the notion that we need to be as mad about racism as we are scared of seeming racist. The group formed from the analysis that People of Color (POC) student organizers were holding a lot of the weight in educating the student-body about institutional racism occuring on campus, and we felt it was time for white students to do their own learning and anti-racist work, without having to lean on the energy of POC students. This group set the foundation for me about what it meant to be working not only as a White organizer doing anti-racist work, but also as a student organizer in general.
I was able to gain insight in what it means to work in a collective decision making process and find ways to build partnerships with other student organizers. SCUR eventually lost steam, mostly due to a shift in needs on campus after President Trump was elected. Eventually many of the organizers from SCUR as well as POC student organizers worked together to run a campaign to fight back against racist hiring practices in the International Development department at Clark, in addition to conducting an oral history project of anti-racism organizing at Clark over the past 10 years. This early student organizing work is what brought me to find other students who would eventually become Floetic Founders with me. We were tired and needed to shift the focus away from reactionary direct action, towards cultural organizing which focused on community-care and art-based activism. We were seeking organizing that does not come from a culture of individualism but in fact creates change from strategic, planned, collective leadership, and relationship building.
Navigating my own whiteness as a student organizer has been important to how I work in Floetic Fridays. As an organization that specifically aims to center the voices of POC, we are intentional in how power can contribute to the kinds of roles and labor taken on by leaders. I worked to step back from the performative aspects of leading and do more behind the scenes work. However I am not sure I was entirely reflective enough in the ways in which my whiteness dictated which roles I was excited to take on. While I did work behind the scenes with set-up, clean up, and sound-tech, I also co-emceed for a few of the events. I began to try to intentionally stop emceeing the events in case my presence on stage created dissonance in the ways in which POC audience members felt represented or comfortable on stage.
As a gender-queer, Jewish visual artist, I often work around themes of justice, identity, play, and “constructing a new reality,” so falling into this role came rather naturally and it took personal accountability for me to find an ease in working logistically and structurally with the organization. Floetic Fridays demands that we investigate identity not only for ourselves, but to better understand how we impact and can change our community.