Zeno Swijtink
05-22-2010, 11:25 PM
Building Unlikely Alliances - Upping the Anti (https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/10-building-unlikely-alliances-an-interview-with-andrea-smith/)
Building Unlikely Alliances
Sharmeen Khan, David Hugill, and Tyler McCreary
Andrea Smith is cofounder of the national organizations INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and The Boarding School Healing Project. She is author of a number of books, including and Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. She also co-edited the celebrated collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. This interview was conducted by Sharmeen Khan, David Hugill, and Tyler McCreary in January 2010 while Smith was in Toronto giving a talk entitled “From Academic Freedom to Academic Abolitionism: Decolonizing the Academic-Industrial Complex” at Ryerson University.
You often talk about the need to have a broader vision that brings together the 95 percent of people not at the top of societal hierarchies. But that 95 percent is not homogenous. How can we negotiate some of the fractures that are tied to whiteness and class privilege?
Well, obviously it’s not easy. I find it helpful if you start from the framework that everybody is a potential ally. It changes the way you do organizing and it makes a difference.
I’ll give an example from when I was involved with the spearfishing struggle in northern Wisconsin. When the Chippewa had their rights to hunt and fish recognized by the state of Wisconsin, all of these local, white, racist mobs would gather around and shoot at them. They would say things like, “Save a fish, spear a squaw.” It was very easy to see these people as the enemy. And when you see them as the enemy, you are not trying to engage in dialogue with them, you are trying to defeat them. But one of the key organizers said, “Wait, they are not the enemy. They might be shooting at us now but ultimately the enemy is Exxon. Exxon is probably funding these groups.”
Previously, there had been a united Indian and non-Indian front against mining in the area, and this organizer thought that Exxon was probably funding these racist groups to divide the opposition so that no one would protest their mining ventures. So that’s why he developed a different strategy than I would have. He felt that we needed to de-escalate the violence because we wanted them to be our friends later on. He was right, and I was definitively wrong in that case, because doing it in that way enabled potential coalition building later on. And that’s precisely what happened when Exxon and other companies made a bid in the area. The people who used de-escalation did a huge grassroots organizing tour to reach out to the same people who had been shooting at them. They said, “Look, we are not the problem. Exxon is the problem.” And they got the support to pressure the governor – who is very pro-mining – to sign a mining moratorium.
At certain points you might be at an impasse in a conflict, but the way you deal with that impasse can be useful if you don’t assume that the other person with whom you’re in conflict will always have to hate you. An opportunity may come up where you are able to say, “look, we do actually have something in common.”
In my teaching, I find that when I talk about issues of racism – which are the most difficult to address – it is easier to talk about capitalism first. When everyone begins to see that they are not part of the five percent, it gives them the investment to start addressing the other privileges. They realize that addressing issues of class entails their own liberation too. This realization enables everyone to see that the reason they need to deal with racism is not so that they can be nice to people of colour, but so that they can dismantle a larger system that oppresses them too.
Where we go wrong with questions of privilege, I think, is that we tend to individualize them. I remember how, in the ’80s we used to have these circles where we all had to confess our privilege. What it ended up doing was making everybody feel bad. It would make people say “I wish I could be quadruply oppressed too.” What we didn’t realize was that these oppressions are about larger logics that make us all complicit. They need to be collectively, rather than individually, addressed.
The emphasis thus shifts to how the group addresses the question of who is being privileged. So, for example, if – in your group – the only people being asked to speak are people with college degrees, then you need to ask yourself if there is a different way you can run the group so that doesn’t happen. It’s not to make the person with the college degree feel bad. Rather, it’s to put a structure in place to hold that person accountable. When that happens you don’t feel guilty because you have privileges. Rather, you see a collective project to transform these conditions so that everybody has privileges, everybody has skills, and everybody has power to make decisions.
One problem that has tended to come up when we think about being less hierarchical is that we think this means being less structured, but the problem is actually the opposite. If you have a go-with-the-flow approach, then you tend to replicate the same hierarchies that already exist in society. If you want to change the hierarchies in your group, then you must have structures in place that address those tendencies. I think this helps with issues of privilege.
You’ve argued that there are three pillars of white supremacy: slavery and its legacy, genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism. You suggest that different communities of colour experience white supremacy in different ways, and that these various communities often have different and conflicting strategies of resistance as a result. Can you elaborate on this?
We had a major conflict at the Durban conference on racism.1 The African-descendent group said that they wanted reparations in the form of land in the United States. Native people said, “Look, you can have the mule, but the 40 acres are ours.”2 We had to lay a bit of a smackdown on them. Innumerable conflicts arise in people-of-colour organizing because many people assume we share a common oppression.
The idea underlying the three pillars of white supremacy is that in fact we are not commonly oppressed. White supremacy doesn’t operate through a singular logic. It operates through multiple logics. I offered three logics, but maybe there are ten, I don’t know. The point is to see that these distinct logics are related to each other – they intersect and inform each other – but they are still distinct. When these distinct logics of white supremacy are recognized, we can also see that our goal should not be to organize around a common oppression, but rather to organize around building strategic alliances based on where each one of us is situated in the political economy.
This understanding of the distinct logics of white supremacy also helps us realize that people-of-colour organizing can no longer be solely about organizing where we are oppressed, but must also involve organizing around where we are complicit in other peoples’ oppressions. These pillars don’t simply oppress you in whatever sphere of white supremacy you might be located. They also oppress you by making you think that the way to survive is to take part in the other pillars. So, for instance, Native peoples attempting to survive genocide often join the military and fight Orientalist wars abroad. People-of-colour organizing, therefore, must simultaneously be about organizing around complicities.
Can you discuss your involvement with the Boarding School Healing Project, and its relationships to the feminist anti-violence movement and the international reparations struggle?
I work with a steering committee of the Boarding School Healing Project. Our goal is to build a movement in the US to obtain collective reparations for boarding school survivors, that is, reparations that would be made on a collective basis, rather than on an individual basis, as has been done in Canada. In fact, we have looked at what’s happened in Canada, and individual lawsuits are not the model that we wish to follow. I am sure people will file individual lawsuits and that is fine. But that isn’t the process we want to promote. It didn’t seem to us that the process involved in filing individual lawsuits was empowering for Native peoples in Canada. Also, since the harms done by boarding schools happened collectively, the process of reparation should be collective too. Native communities have been completely unsettled by the experience of boarding schools; if someone isn’t a survivor himself or herself, then he or she is likely the descendant of a survivor. In other words, everyone has been affected. Boarding schools have changed the way Native communities work.
We have articulated this as a feminist project, but I have to say that feminist foundations don’t really get it. They say that this isn’t a feminist issue. But to me, it’s a different way to frame issues of gendered violence in Native communities. A lot of the time – particularly with issues of sexualized violence – people don’t want to talk about the experience of sexual abuse because there is so much shame attached to it. I think when you begin to articulate sexual violence as a continuing human rights violation perpetrated by the state, it puts the violence into a context that makes it easier to talk about. It helps us realize it’s not an individual problem but a collective problem.
Situating the experiences of survivors of boarding schools in the context of sexualized violence perpetrated by the state requires a collective strategy for people to openly address gendered violence as integral to colonization. The reason why we frame it as reparations – although we just had a critical reappraisal where we looked at some of the problems with this framework, and reparations can be a conservative strategy as much as a progressive one – is that…
Building Unlikely Alliances
Sharmeen Khan, David Hugill, and Tyler McCreary
Andrea Smith is cofounder of the national organizations INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and The Boarding School Healing Project. She is author of a number of books, including and Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. She also co-edited the celebrated collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. This interview was conducted by Sharmeen Khan, David Hugill, and Tyler McCreary in January 2010 while Smith was in Toronto giving a talk entitled “From Academic Freedom to Academic Abolitionism: Decolonizing the Academic-Industrial Complex” at Ryerson University.
You often talk about the need to have a broader vision that brings together the 95 percent of people not at the top of societal hierarchies. But that 95 percent is not homogenous. How can we negotiate some of the fractures that are tied to whiteness and class privilege?
Well, obviously it’s not easy. I find it helpful if you start from the framework that everybody is a potential ally. It changes the way you do organizing and it makes a difference.
I’ll give an example from when I was involved with the spearfishing struggle in northern Wisconsin. When the Chippewa had their rights to hunt and fish recognized by the state of Wisconsin, all of these local, white, racist mobs would gather around and shoot at them. They would say things like, “Save a fish, spear a squaw.” It was very easy to see these people as the enemy. And when you see them as the enemy, you are not trying to engage in dialogue with them, you are trying to defeat them. But one of the key organizers said, “Wait, they are not the enemy. They might be shooting at us now but ultimately the enemy is Exxon. Exxon is probably funding these groups.”
Previously, there had been a united Indian and non-Indian front against mining in the area, and this organizer thought that Exxon was probably funding these racist groups to divide the opposition so that no one would protest their mining ventures. So that’s why he developed a different strategy than I would have. He felt that we needed to de-escalate the violence because we wanted them to be our friends later on. He was right, and I was definitively wrong in that case, because doing it in that way enabled potential coalition building later on. And that’s precisely what happened when Exxon and other companies made a bid in the area. The people who used de-escalation did a huge grassroots organizing tour to reach out to the same people who had been shooting at them. They said, “Look, we are not the problem. Exxon is the problem.” And they got the support to pressure the governor – who is very pro-mining – to sign a mining moratorium.
At certain points you might be at an impasse in a conflict, but the way you deal with that impasse can be useful if you don’t assume that the other person with whom you’re in conflict will always have to hate you. An opportunity may come up where you are able to say, “look, we do actually have something in common.”
In my teaching, I find that when I talk about issues of racism – which are the most difficult to address – it is easier to talk about capitalism first. When everyone begins to see that they are not part of the five percent, it gives them the investment to start addressing the other privileges. They realize that addressing issues of class entails their own liberation too. This realization enables everyone to see that the reason they need to deal with racism is not so that they can be nice to people of colour, but so that they can dismantle a larger system that oppresses them too.
Where we go wrong with questions of privilege, I think, is that we tend to individualize them. I remember how, in the ’80s we used to have these circles where we all had to confess our privilege. What it ended up doing was making everybody feel bad. It would make people say “I wish I could be quadruply oppressed too.” What we didn’t realize was that these oppressions are about larger logics that make us all complicit. They need to be collectively, rather than individually, addressed.
The emphasis thus shifts to how the group addresses the question of who is being privileged. So, for example, if – in your group – the only people being asked to speak are people with college degrees, then you need to ask yourself if there is a different way you can run the group so that doesn’t happen. It’s not to make the person with the college degree feel bad. Rather, it’s to put a structure in place to hold that person accountable. When that happens you don’t feel guilty because you have privileges. Rather, you see a collective project to transform these conditions so that everybody has privileges, everybody has skills, and everybody has power to make decisions.
One problem that has tended to come up when we think about being less hierarchical is that we think this means being less structured, but the problem is actually the opposite. If you have a go-with-the-flow approach, then you tend to replicate the same hierarchies that already exist in society. If you want to change the hierarchies in your group, then you must have structures in place that address those tendencies. I think this helps with issues of privilege.
You’ve argued that there are three pillars of white supremacy: slavery and its legacy, genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism. You suggest that different communities of colour experience white supremacy in different ways, and that these various communities often have different and conflicting strategies of resistance as a result. Can you elaborate on this?
We had a major conflict at the Durban conference on racism.1 The African-descendent group said that they wanted reparations in the form of land in the United States. Native people said, “Look, you can have the mule, but the 40 acres are ours.”2 We had to lay a bit of a smackdown on them. Innumerable conflicts arise in people-of-colour organizing because many people assume we share a common oppression.
The idea underlying the three pillars of white supremacy is that in fact we are not commonly oppressed. White supremacy doesn’t operate through a singular logic. It operates through multiple logics. I offered three logics, but maybe there are ten, I don’t know. The point is to see that these distinct logics are related to each other – they intersect and inform each other – but they are still distinct. When these distinct logics of white supremacy are recognized, we can also see that our goal should not be to organize around a common oppression, but rather to organize around building strategic alliances based on where each one of us is situated in the political economy.
This understanding of the distinct logics of white supremacy also helps us realize that people-of-colour organizing can no longer be solely about organizing where we are oppressed, but must also involve organizing around where we are complicit in other peoples’ oppressions. These pillars don’t simply oppress you in whatever sphere of white supremacy you might be located. They also oppress you by making you think that the way to survive is to take part in the other pillars. So, for instance, Native peoples attempting to survive genocide often join the military and fight Orientalist wars abroad. People-of-colour organizing, therefore, must simultaneously be about organizing around complicities.
Can you discuss your involvement with the Boarding School Healing Project, and its relationships to the feminist anti-violence movement and the international reparations struggle?
I work with a steering committee of the Boarding School Healing Project. Our goal is to build a movement in the US to obtain collective reparations for boarding school survivors, that is, reparations that would be made on a collective basis, rather than on an individual basis, as has been done in Canada. In fact, we have looked at what’s happened in Canada, and individual lawsuits are not the model that we wish to follow. I am sure people will file individual lawsuits and that is fine. But that isn’t the process we want to promote. It didn’t seem to us that the process involved in filing individual lawsuits was empowering for Native peoples in Canada. Also, since the harms done by boarding schools happened collectively, the process of reparation should be collective too. Native communities have been completely unsettled by the experience of boarding schools; if someone isn’t a survivor himself or herself, then he or she is likely the descendant of a survivor. In other words, everyone has been affected. Boarding schools have changed the way Native communities work.
We have articulated this as a feminist project, but I have to say that feminist foundations don’t really get it. They say that this isn’t a feminist issue. But to me, it’s a different way to frame issues of gendered violence in Native communities. A lot of the time – particularly with issues of sexualized violence – people don’t want to talk about the experience of sexual abuse because there is so much shame attached to it. I think when you begin to articulate sexual violence as a continuing human rights violation perpetrated by the state, it puts the violence into a context that makes it easier to talk about. It helps us realize it’s not an individual problem but a collective problem.
Situating the experiences of survivors of boarding schools in the context of sexualized violence perpetrated by the state requires a collective strategy for people to openly address gendered violence as integral to colonization. The reason why we frame it as reparations – although we just had a critical reappraisal where we looked at some of the problems with this framework, and reparations can be a conservative strategy as much as a progressive one – is that…