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“Everything is related. I am related to the trees, to the oceans, to any other living being, regardless of race, class, gender,” Alexis Saenz says, so “one of the things that we say as youth is that we are the land defending itself.” Page 34
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FROM THE EDITORS
A New Social Justice
PHOTO BY DOUG DUR AN/BAY AREA N EWS GROUP/GETTY
PHOTO BY CAVAN IMAGES/ADO BE
Beloved YES! readers, much gratitude to you for your participation and support during our 25th anniversary celebration in October! We hope you enjoyed YES! Fest and were inspired by the progress we’ve made over the past two-and-a-half decades, and by the sampling of voices on transformative justice we’ll continue to bring to you in the years to come. Some of those voices and stories are also in the pages of this 100th issue of YES! Magazine you’re holding in your hands—a for-sure keepsake! The development of the issue’s theme, “A New Social Justice,” was inspired by the political earthquake of 2020, when we witnessed a paradigm shift toward racial equity and transformative justice on a massive and collaborative scale unlike anything we’ve seen in recent history. Movement spaces, grassroots organizations, activists, and non-activists—particularly those in historically excluded communities—and even governments, corporations, and philanthropic spaces all responded to the needs of the people during a global pandemic in which systemic inequities were laid bare. Then in the spring of 2021, during our YES! Presents event “An Ecological Civilization: The Path We’re On,” panelist and Soul Fire Farm founder and farmer Leah Penniman inspired our cover for this issue when she likened movement collaboration to a butterfly’s wings. Drawing from Grassroots Economic Organizing’s butterfly model of transformative social justice, Penniman described the four wings: Resisters: the people in the blockades, the protests, the work stoppages; Reformers: the folks trying to make change from within systems, including school teachers and elected officials, like those getting into the prosecutor’s office and working to get sentences lowered; Builders: those who create alternative institutions such as freedom schools, farms, and health clinics; and Healers: the conflict mediators, the therapists, the preachers, the singers, the dancers, the artists—“all the folks that are gonna make us well,” she said. This image aligned so well with YES!'s foundational belief that resistance alone is a losing strategy that we felt it was perfect to depict the cross-pollination happening now. You’ll read about The Third Reconstruction resolution and movement led by the Poor People’s Campaign to address poverty and its root causes—among them systemic racism and ecological devastation; the Wiyot Tribe’s LandBack movement and how to create just, Indigenous-led futures; what grassroots reparations can look like; wealth redistribution to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities; decolonizing philanthropy; as well as the environmental justice at the heart of climate activism. We hope this issue will inspire you, and we look forward to having you along with us for another 25-plus years of YES! Peace,
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Zenobia Jeffries Warfield YES! executive editor
Sonali Kolhatkar YES! racial justice editor
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Winter 2022 | No. 100
CONTENTS
SOLUTIONS WE LOVE INDIGENOUS FOODWAYS
A Moon-Inspired Menu Valerie Segrest 8
17 TOM WILLIAMS/GETTY
The Third Reconstruction New momentum in the continuing march toward a more equitable society.
SMALL WORKS
100 Things You Can Do to Help in the Climate Crisis Sarah Lazarovic 10 PEOPLE WE LOVE 14 THE PAGE THAT COUNTS
16
Anoa Changa and Zenobia Jeffries Warfield 17
Justice at the Heart of Climate Activism Breanna Draxler 30 Lending on Character, Not Credit Scores Chris Winters 38 Awakenings: Movements Adapt and Evolve Toward a New Social Justice Sonali Kolhatkar and Natalie Peart 43 Put Philanthropy on the Front Lines Edgar Villanueva 46 When Reparations Grow From the Grassroots Ray Levy Uyeda 49 The Healing Work of Returning Stolen Lands PennElys Droz 52
CULTURE SHIFT BOOKS + FILMS + AUDIO
A Bigger Picture Gives Our Ancestors Their Full Humanity Jared Spears 63 Tracing Addiction to Childhood Trauma Travis Lupick 66 Reverberations as a Generation Takes a Knee Alex Gallo-Brown 68 INSPIRATION 65
ALSO: READERS RESPOND 4 ABOUT YES! 57 REFLECTION 71 THE YES! CROSSWORD 72
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CONTRIBUTORS
Winter 2022, Issue 100
PAGE 17
Anoa Changa (she/her) is a Southern-based movement journalist. She has a deep history of working within the realms of advocacy and justice. She hosts the podcast The Way with Anoa, tackling politics and current events through a Black progressive feminist perspective. Changa received a B.A. in sociology and a master’s in city and regional planning from Ohio State University. She was awarded a J.D. from West Virginia University College of Law, where she was a W.E.B Dubois fellowship recipient.
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Edgar Villanueva is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. He is the founder and principal of Decolonizing Wealth and Liberated Capital. Villanueva is a nationally recognized expert on social justice philanthropy, previously holding leadership roles at the Schott Foundation, Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, and at the Marguerite Casey Foundation. He currently serves as the chair of the board of directors of Native Americans in Philanthropy. He is the author of Decolonizing Wealth.
COVER ARTIST
Molly Costello (they/them) is a White queer illustrator, food grower, beekeeper, and seed saver. Through their art practice they explore themes of interconnectedness, reciprocity, biomimicry, police and prison abolition, as well as our larger capacities for social transformation. Molly hopes that through the making and sharing of their artwork they can play a small role in our deep work of reimagining and reshaping our dominant culture away from patterns of supremacy, violence, and greed toward cultures of accountability, collective wellness, and abundance.
Journalism for People Building a Bet ter World Christine Hanna executive director Sarah van Gelder and David C. Korten co-founders executive editor Zenobia Jeffries Warfield Editorial
editorial director Sunnivie Brydum
senior editor environmental editor racial justice editor associate art director digital editor social media coordinator books editor copy editors fact checker editorial intern creative director
Chris Winters Breanna Draxler Sonali Kolhatkar Michael Luong Ayu Sutriasa Iman Mohamed Valerie Schloredt Bernadette Kinlaw Doug Pibel Miles Schneiderman Natalie Peart Tracy Matsue Loeffelholz
Business and operations
sr. director product and marketing marketing manager development director development manager finance and operations director bookkeeper finance and hr manager fulfillment manager customer service coordinator customer service coordinator it manager salesforce administrator
Matt Grisafi Natalie Lubsen Shelly Hunter Robin Simons Audrey Watson Kathy Murphy Yvonne Rivera Paula Murphy Kimi Mehlinger Lesley Rich-Smith Doug Indrick Lauren Valle
Reprints and permissions: See our online Reprints Page for easy steps to take when sharing our content: yesmagazine.org/about/reprints Newsstand circulation: Disticor Magazine Distribution Services, Attn: Melanie Raucci, 631-587-1160, mraucci@disticor.com
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YES! Magazine (ISSN 1089-6651) is published quarterly for $24 per year by the Positive Futures Network at 284 Madrona Way NE, Suite 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870. Periodicals postage paid at Seattle, WA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to YES! Media, 284 Madrona Way NE, Suite 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870. SUBSCRIPTIONS: $24 per year. CALL: 800-937-4451; 206-8420216 FAX: 206-842-5208 WEBSITE: yesmagazine.org EMAIL: yes@yesmagazine.org
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READERS RESPOND RESPOND READERS
Join our conversations! Send us your ideas and responses.
Email us at letters@yesmagazine.org
am not a farmer or someone who provides food (or other necessities) for our community or the larger citizenry. So I am beginning to feel that moving to a more urban area (not suburban) may help me walk my talk in a better way when it comes to living with “enough.” There is so much richness here in what we are all considering.—ayreÁnna a., Jamestown, California I thoroughly enjoyed your magazine about “enough,” but I was struck how the magazine insists on electricity as the energy source, but at the same time, getting rid of fossil fuels. How do you think wind and solar are manufactured and transported? (All the components are mined or transported using fossil fuels, and they are mined or transported to the USA or Europe using fossil fuels.) Many of the corporations that function in energy supply now are switching to focusing their attention on solar panels/arrays or wind turbines, which are very energy intensive. We need to focus on local and regional products, seasonal produce, and on human population. And passive solar: buildings facing south, etc. Why aren’t these things part of the conversation?—Maureen D., Southbridge, Massachusetts
Fall 2021: The “How Much Is Enough?” Issue
O
ur fall issue tackled the existential question that undergirds so many of our current conversations, be they about wealth, food, health, justice, climate, or war and peace: How much is enough? Writers, thoughtleaders, and organizers from across movements shared their visions for not only answering this question, but also for how to build a global community where everyone has enough. And we dove even deeper into this topic during a Sept. 9 online discussion with Brother Chân Pháp Dung, a Buddhist monk whose lectures on the beauty and joy of simplicity are worldrenowned, and authors Stan Cox and Chuck Collins. Nearly 600 people joined. Here is a selection of attendee feedback: There’s a perception that living with less is sacrificial—many times associated with getting a reward in the afterlife. But another way to look at it is living with less is a better way to live now. Less stress. Less anxiety.—Glenn B., Duluth, Georgia Capitalism is rooted in “free choice.” We need a global aspiration to use our free choice more wisely. We are in severe ecological overshoot, we cannot afford to continue destabilizing our ecology. We need to embrace minimalist consumption and expectations: Brother Chân Pháp Dung can teach us the way forward.—Barbara W., Oxfordshire, England As a White person who was born, raised, and lives in a rural area, I am deeply questioning the practicality of living here. Although my grandfather was a farmer (and entrepreneur), I
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Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1. Publication Title: YES! Magazine 2. Publication No.: 0018-0219 3. Filing Date: 09/30/2021 4. Issue Frequency: Quarterly 5. No. of Issues Published Annually: 4 6. Annual Subscription Price: $24 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: 284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher-YES! Media, Christine Hanna, Executive Director, 284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870; Editor and Managing Editor: Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, 284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870 10. Owner: Positive Futures Network, 284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1% or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None 12. Tax Status: The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes has not changed during the preceding 12 months 13. Publication Title: YES! Magazine 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data: 08/01/2021 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation:
Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 months
A) Total number of copies: B) Paid circulation: 1) Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 2) Mailed in-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 3) Paid distribution outside the mails through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other paid distribution outside USPS: 4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through USPS: C) Total paid distribution: D) Free or nominal rate distribution: 1) Outside-county copies included on PS Form 3541 2) In-county copies included on PS Form 3541 3) Copies mailed at other classes through the USPS 4) Distribution outside the mail E) Total free or nominal rate distribution: F) Total distribution: G) Copies not distributed: H) Total: I) Percent paid: a) Paid electronic copies: b) Total paid print copies + paid electronic copies: c) Total print distribution + paid electronic copies: d) Percent paid (both print and electronic copies:
No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date
52,109
49,978
31,957
32,057
0
0
3,351 0 35,308
3,343 0 35,400
2,622 0 0 3,461 6,083 41,391 10,718 52,109 85.30% 769 36,077 42,160 85.57%
2,748 0 0 4,009 6,757 42,157 10,485 52,642 83.97% 808 36,208 42,965 84.27%
16. N/A. I certify that 50% of all distributed copies paid above nominal price. 17. This Statement of Ownership is printed in the 11/01/2021 issue of this publication. 18. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete: Audrey Watson, Director of Finance. 09/29/21
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SOLUTIONS WE LOVE
Indigenous Foodways A Lunar-Inspired Menu | 8 Small Works 100 Things You Can Do in the Climate Crisis | 10 People We Love Fighting Back for Abortion Rights | 14 The Page That Counts | 16
13 Moons to Guide Us
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INDIGENOUS FOODWAYS
Valerie Segrest Illustrations by Herbert Shane Hartman
A Moon-Inspired Menu
E
arth’s first satellite. For the entirety of human its orbit. Lunar calendars have been carved into
WINTER SALMON MOON CHOWDER
animal bones and cave walls. Entire landscapes
Serves 6
existence, we have organized our lives around
were constructed and dedicated to the movement
of the moon dating back 10,000 years in Mesolithic
3 slices of bacon, diced
Scotland. Ancient hunters, harvesters, and farmers carefully
1 Walla Walla onion, diced
surveyed the waxing and waning ways of the moon and its
1 clove garlic, diced
close correlation with fertility, rainfall, tides, game migration,
3 green onions, chopped
and harvests. This information was interpreted into
3 Ozette or golden potatoes, diced
strategies necessary for survival. Our moon has mentored
3–4 cups low-sodium chicken stock
humanity for centuries, and the Ancestors formalized time
12 ounces smoked salmon
from its steady power. In these ancient traditions we receive the gifts and stories
In a large soup pot, sauté bacon until
of 13 moons that make up a calendar year. All Indigenous
just crisp, about 3 minutes. Add onions,
Peoples named their moons for locally abundant food,
garlic and green onions and continue
distinct weather, or important cyclical changes.
cooking until onions are translucent.
Following a lunar-inspired menu means eating seasonal and hyperlocal ingredients. Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, fall begins with
Add potatoes and chicken stock. Bring to a boil for a few minutes. Lower the heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Add salmon
the Moon of the Silver Salmon, and Elk Mating Cry, Falling
and cook an additional 8–10 minutes.
Leaves, and Dog Salmon follow. We eat Coho and Chum
Serve hot.
salmon, crisp-bodied shellfish, hazelnuts, Ozette potatoes, rosehips, and cranberries. These foods are at their peak nutrition and flavor during their moons. Syncing our lives and menus with the energy of the moons leads us to be more present in nature and to better engage with our own wisdom and the world in which we live. Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot) is a nutrition educator who specializes in local and traditional foods. She is a former regional director for Native Food and Knowledge Systems for the Native American Agriculture Fund.
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The 13 Moons of the Coast Salish Moon of the Windy Time (January/February) Moon When the Frog Talks (Late February/March) Moon of the Whistling Robins (April) Moon of the Digging Time (May) Moon of the Salmonberry (June) Moon of the Blackberry (July) Moon of the Salal Berry (August) Moon of the Silver Salmon (September) Moon of the Elk Mating Cry (Late September/Early October) Moon of the Falling Leaves (October) Moon of the Dog Salmon (November) Moon to Put Your Paddles Away (Late November/Early December) Moon of the Sacred Time (Late December/January) y e s ma g a z i n e . o r g
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PEOPLE WE LOVE
Natalie Peart
FIGHTING BACK FOR ABORTION RIGHTS As more states enact punitive laws restricting abortions, reproductive justice organizations look for new ways to regain ground and expand their movements.
Abortion-rights protesters gather outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin on Sept. 1, when SB8—which effectively bans nearly all abortions—went into effect.
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PHOTO BY SERGIO FLORES/WASHINGTO N POST/GETTY
ELIZABETH ESTRADA
TAMARA MARZOUK
NOOR Z.K.
National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice
Advocates for Youth
Cicada Collective
Advocates for Youth, a national organization based in Washington, D.C., centers youth and youth of color in conversations around reproductive justice. The nonprofit organizes people between the ages of 14-24, and its multiple initiatives include the Youth Testify program, which trains young people to share their abortion stories with the media. There is also the Youth Abortion Support Collective, through which 280 young people provide practical support for their peers. “We focus very specifically on the belief that everyone should have the right to bodily autonomy and the right to make their own decisions about their bodies regardless of their age,” says Tamara Marzouk, the group’s director of abortion access. Youth are often underrepresented in the reproductive justice movement. In 38 states, people under 18 have to involve parents or guardians in a decision to have an abortion, even when some don’t feel safe doing so. Marzouk says Advocates for Youth provides a safer setting for youth to engage in discussions about comprehensive sex education and bodily autonomy. “We’re really engaging in young people’s stories as well to highlight that young people know what they’re doing. They can make their own reproductive decisions and that bodily autonomy is just as important for young people,” Marzouk says.
In 2013, Texas passed a law which placed many new restrictions on abortion-seekers and providers, including cost-prohibitive mandates that forced many clinics to close. But out of those closures emerged the Cicada Collective, a volunteer-run North Texas organization that centers trans people in accessing reproductive health resources. “Reproductive justice is not just about the ability to get pregnant or choose to be pregnant, it’s about bodily autonomy in a lot of different forms,” says Noor Z.K., a co-founder who uses an activist pseudonym. “I would say that reproductive justice extends to anything that affects the human ability to move through the world freely and without being controlled by an oppressive force.” In the United States, nearly half of transgender individuals, and 68% of transgender people of color, have reported discrimination or mistreatment from a medical provider, according to the Center for American Progress. Part of Cicada Collective’s work is decentralizing the idea of binary gender and creating more inclusivity in providing services to pregnant people. The group also helps people obtain information about their reproductive choices and access abortions, and provides transportation and other advocacy for patients. Noor Z.K. says they have seen small but positive shifts. “I’ve really seen that change over the last 10 years where now it’s actually very commonplace for any organization that does abortion advocacy work to be sharing messaging actively about how any gender can have an abortion and to use gender-neutral terms.”
The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice is an organization whose work over the past few years has been dedicated to shifting the culture around reproductive justice and abortion access in Latinx communities. The group builds community movements by training activists to advocate for policies, and by exposing fake abortion clinics. Fake clinics, sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers,” are storefronts that pose as reproductive health providers, but instead spread misinformation and lie to pregnant people to convince them to not have an abortion. “There are more fake clinics than there are legitimate clinics in New York and all over the country,” says Elizabeth Estrada, the New York field and advocacy manager for the Latina Institute. “You’ll often see pictures of pregnant bellies in the window and that is a dead giveaway of a fake clinic, because historically abortion clinics or reproductive health clinics have been targeted for violence.” These clinics usually have a religious affiliation that often impinges on people’s right to selfdetermination and bodily autonomy. “The education around that never stops,” Estrada adds. “Once we think we’re having a grasp on people knowing about it, there’s so much more education to do.”
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THE PAGE THAT COUNTS
Miles Schneiderman Share of U.S. adults who “lack proficiency in literacy,” reading below the sixth-grade level: 52% [1] Share of adults with the lowest literacy levels who live in poverty: 43% [2]
Share of 12th-grade students who achieved “proficient” or higher in reading performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress in 2015: 37% [3]
Student score difference between low-poverty schools and high-poverty schools: 32 points Official 2020 U.S. poverty rate: 11.4% [4]
Poverty rate according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which incorporates government assistance: 9.1% Times the SPM rate has been lower than the official measure prior to 2020: 0
2020 SPM poverty rate without government stimulus checks during the COVID-19 pandemic: 12.7% Championships currently considered to be the most prestigious titles in World Wrestling Entertainment: 9 [5]
34 [6] Number of these wrestlers who are BIPOC: 22 Black wrestlers who held the WWE World Championship from 1963 to 2019: 1 [7] Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson,1998 Black wrestlers who have held the WWE World Championship from 2019 to 2021: 3 [8] Wrestlers who have won these titles in 2021:
Total construction time of the Panama Canal: 10 years [9] Total construction time of the Taj Mahal: 17 years [10]
Time it’s taken George R. R. Martin to publish the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series (the source material for Game of Thrones): 25 years (and counting) [11] Estimated number of eukaryotic species (species with complex cells) on Earth: 8.7 million Eukaryotic species that have been catalogued by humans: 1.2 million [12] Decrease in wildlife population sizes from 1970 to 2016: 68% [13]
Share of the world’s remaining biodiversity safeguarded by Indigenous peoples: 80% [14]
Share of the global land mass customarily managed by Indigenous peoples: More than 50% Share of the global land mass legally owned by Indigenous peoples: 10%
According to surveys of 1,388 heterosexual women, change in the number of women likely to casually date a man based on whether or not he’s pictured holding a cat: –2.8% Change in the number of women willing to consider a long-term relationship with a man based on whether or not he’s pictured holding a cat: –2.6% [15] Share of American women who own a cat: 33%
Share of American men who own a cat: 37% [16]
Sources: [1] National Center for Education Statistics. [2] National Institute for Literacy, via Literacy For All Fund. [3] National Center for Education Statistics. [4] U.S. Census Bureau. [5] World Wrestling Entertainment. [6] Cagematch. [7] Bleacher Report. [8] Bleacher Report. [9] History Channel. [10] UNESCO. [11] National Review. [12] University of Michigan, Center for Sustainable Systems. [13] World Wildlife Fund. [14] The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. [15] Animals journal. [16] Mintel Group.
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Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say, “Yes,” when they may be desirous of saying, “No.” And it is my hope that we will get together, and be together, and really stand up to gain power for poor people. Black people, Mexican Americans, American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian Whites all working together to solve the problem of poverty. —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Selma to Montgomery march, March 25, 1965. PHOTO FROM BETTMAN/GETTY
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THE THIRD
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RECONSTRUCTION New momentum in the continuing march toward a more equitable society. Anoa Changa and Zenobia Jeffries Warfield
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CALLIE GREER Greer, an organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign in Selma, Alabama, continues to fight for Medicaid expansion in Alabama and national health care, which she believes has the potential to eradicate poverty and the conditions that led to her daughter’s death.
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Venus Colley-Mims
I PHOTO BY NICK FRONTIERO/YES! MAGAZINE PREVIOUS PAGE: ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE/YES! MAGAZINE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES BY JACK DELANO, BETTMANN, CAROLINE BREHMAN/CQ-ROLL CALL, ANNA MONEYMAKER AND JEMAL COUNTESS/MOVEON
n 2011, Venus Colley-Mims found a lump in her breast. Unemployed, Colley-Mims didn’t have health insurance, so she went to the Baptist Health Center emergency room in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. Over a two-year period, she visited the ER as a form of health care for pain and complications from the lump, only to be sent home undiagnosed and with medicines that proved useless. Her condition had become so bad that on her last visit to the ER, the attending physician, noticing an odor in the room, asked, “What’s that smell in here?” Colley-Mims’ breast had become “rotten,” her mother, Callie Greer, recalls. The physician recommended Colley-Mims for treatment at a local cancer center, where she was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and immediately scheduled for surgery and chemo. But it was too late. Greer’s daughter passed away in February 2013, shortly after the pair had become involved in the fight to expand Medicaid in Alabama. The previous summer they had attended the SaveOurSelves (SOS): Movement for Justice and Democracy rally, as part of the effort to get Alabama’s then-Governor Robert Bentley to accept federal funding to expand Medicaid in the state. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, around 137,000 Alabama residents are still without insurance. Other sources, such as the Kaiser Family Foundation and HealthInsurance. org put that number much higher, at more than 200,000. Those residents would be eligible if the state expanded Medicaid. Such a change in policy would provide health care that could have saved Colley-Mims’ life—and the lives of so many others like her. “Venus should be here with us,” says Greer, who is now an Alabama-based organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign, which was revived in 2017 by yes ! winter
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The moment we’re in “demands a third Reconstruction to revive our political commitment to implement moral laws and policies that can heal and transform the Nation.” Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a North Carolina minister well known for his Moral Mondays protests. “Venus didn’t have health care, so she went to the emergency room, ’cause that’s what Black people do here in our community. That’s our doctor: the emergency room.” The original Poor People’s Campaign was started in 1968 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. The Campaign’s focus and goal, then and now, is to gain economic justice for all poor people in the United States. When Dr. King was assassinated, Ralph Abernathy, his friend and mentor, carried on the efforts of the campaign, organizing thousands of poor people from diverse racial backgrounds in Washington, D.C., for the Poor People’s March on Washington, where they presented a list of demands to Congress. The demonstration lasted six weeks. The new Poor People’s Campaign, called the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and led by Rev. Barber and his co-chair Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, is made up of 300plus partners and 22,000 people of all racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds across 47 states. By sharing her testimony often about her daughter’s health battle, Greer continues the fight for Medicaid expansion in Alabama—and national health care for all. THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION
In May 2020, Congresswomen Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Barbara Lee (D-CA), introduced the “Third
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Reconstruction” resolution, H.R. 438, written in cooperation with Revs. Barber and Theoharis. The resolution aims to address poverty in its entirety, from its root causes–capitalism and racism–to its systemic manifestations, like Colley-Mims’ story, and to create a more equitable society. Inspired by the “transformational history” of the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, 1865-1877, and the second Reconstruction of the civil rights struggles from 1948-1968, the resolution states that the moment we’re in “demands a third Reconstruction to revive our political commitment to implement moral laws and policies that can heal and transform the Nation.” Using research from both the Institute for Policy Studies’ report, “Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live” and the U.S. Collaborative of Poverty Centers, the resolution states that there are more than 140 million poor and low-wealth people in the United States today, 87 million people without health care or who are underinsured, 25-50 million people facing food insecurity, and 30-40 million people at risk of homelessness. The Population Reference Bureau estimates the actual number of unhoused people is from 600,000 to more than 1.5 million. Titled “Third Reconstruction: Fully Addressing Poverty and Low Wages from the Bottom Up,” the comprehensive legislation has been years in the making, says Rep. Lee. It began with the Majority Leader Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity, which she co-chairs and helped to establish in 2013 with current House Majority Leader Steny
THE REV. DOCTORS WILLIAM BARBER II AND LIZ TEOHARIS Revs. Barber and Theoharis have re-energized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s original Poor People’s Campaign as the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The massive movement is sponsoring “The Third Reconstruction” resolution, offering a broad framework for sustained economic investment to move poor and low-wage people from barely surviving to thriving.
PHOTO BY DINA LITOVSKY/REDUX
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PAM GARRISON Garrison, a West Virginia-based organizer with the Poor People’s campaign, grew up in a West Virginia coal camp and worked as a cashier most her life. The mines have taken a toll on the health of communities where she lives. Her husband, who worked for years in the mines, suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Both her parents died from cancer.
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PHOTO BY J. BRIAN FERGUSON/YES! MAGAZINE
Corporate agendas and preferential treatment get in the way of real change, with health care, for example. “That’s why we can’t have universal health care,” she says. H. Hoyer (D-MD). In 2019, the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, which Lee also co-chairs, held a hearing with people who live in poverty and representatives from the Poor People’s Campaign. “The people spoke to what should be included in this resolution,” Rep. Lee says. Following the hearing, she and Rep. Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, formed an alliance between the Poor People’s Campaign and the Progressive Caucus. So far, 30 of their colleagues in the House have signed on. “And it’s building,” Rep. Lee adds. “It really speaks to the issues that will protect our democracy and prioritize [the people’s] needs,” Rep. Lee explains. “It … really provides a lot of hope and dignity for people who have not been listened to.” The resolution is built on the premise that the moral authority for a third Reconstruction is within the nation’s founding values. It states: “This country is founded on the moral commitment to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.” The Third Reconstruction resolution provides not just stopgap measures until the next major crisis occurs but also a pathway to building a better quality of life for the long haul. From housing and jobs, to mass incarceration and state violence, to immigration and land rights, to defunding the military, to education and health care, and climate and environmental justice,
The Third Reconstruction resolution is all-encompassing and more timely than ever. Some of the legislation it proposes is new, and some is already in the works. “When you look at the resolution, we’ve included [some] legislation that’s already been introduced, like the $15 minimum wage, like the health care provisions,” says Rep. Lee. “A lot of it is in motion right now. Making permanent, for example, the child tax credit— that’s part of this.” Converging crises in the form of a global pandemic, economic downturn, and the escalating impact of white supremacy have raised fundamental considerations about how the nation should respond. And there’s a growing movement of people who argue that it is time for the federal government to adopt a new value alignment at the core of its decision-making. According to Rev. Theoharis, doing so is a priority of the current president’s administration. “When President Biden was still a candidate, he had come to a candidate forum that the Poor People’s Campaign held, and had spoken to how he was committed to bringing up issues of poverty and on all of these injustices,” explains Rev. Theoharis. “He joined [us] again, when he was still running … and made this pledge that if he was elected that ending poverty would be more than an aspiration, but a theory of change.” The Poor People’s campaign is still trying to work with the administration to meet with more poor and low-income leaders, economists, and yes ! winter
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“Never before have I heard—until the Poor People’s Campaign, until our Moral Mondays started with the Third Reconstruction—any language, even addressing poverty or us poor people.” clergy, Rev. Theoharis adds, to make sure that the campaign’s agenda, and many of the things that are included in the resolution, are priorities for the administration. Leading up to its scheduled June 2022 action in Washington, the Poor People's Campain is planning to reach, engage, and inform 30,000 people per state through social media, its Moral Monday assemblies, and other avenues to put the pressure on the administration and Congress. “If COVID had not hit [we] would be having a conversation about the mass Poor People’s Assembly Moral March on Washington that happened June 20, 2020, when hundreds of thousands of people descended on D.C. to demand action,” says Rev. Barber. “Because you know, in America, public sentiment and putting a face on the problem is what drives action.” But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the campaign held a virtual action. “Because poor and low-wealth people demanded it,” Rev. Barber says. “And 2.4 million people showed up online for just the first showing, which showed us that there is a great hunger in this country for an intersectional moral movement that brings together people of all races, colors, creeds, and sexualities to deal with these five interlocking injustices.” These are systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the false narrative of religious nationalism. People are tired of the silos, left vs. right and liberal vs. conservative, says Barber, posing the question, “What about right vs. wrong?” Moreover, he adds, “People are tired of [hearing] a
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moral agenda is not an economically sound agenda.” The economists the campaign has worked with have told the organizers, that “the moral agenda is the only way to have an economically sound agenda,” Rev. Barber says. And the people are “hungry for it.” THE PEOPLE
It’s often said that the people closest to a problem should be a part of the solution. And yet, individuals in power spend a lot of time putting their ideas before the lived experience and testimony of people like Greer in Alabama and Pam Garrison, a West Virginiabased organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign. A self-described coal miner’s daughter, Garrison grew up in a West Virginia coal camp and worked as a cashier most her life. The mines have taken a toll on the health of many in her family, as well as the neighborhoods and communities where she lives. Her husband, who worked for years in the mines, suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Both her parents died of cancer. Garrison says that corporate agendas and preferential treatment get in the way of real change, with health care, for example. “That’s why we can’t have universal health care,” she says. “We’ve got this patchwork here and there; that is not working.” But things changed for her when she heard Rev. Barber preaching on television. “Never before have I heard—until the Poor People’s Campaign, until our Moral Mondays started with the Third
Reconstruction—any language even addressing poverty or us poor people,” she says. “We don’t have big contributions. We don’t have the money to go in their pockets. We’re just poor. But I’ll tell you what we are: We are voters. We might be poor, but we are voters.” Referring to studies from the Collaborative of Poverty Centers and the Institute for Policy Studies, Garrison says the resolution is supported by extensive research and data: “This has been done by facts, by studies. This ain’t something we just threw together. This is real, actual solutions.” If one could find a sliver of promise in the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the clear case being made for massive investments in supporting workers like Greer and Garrison, and their families. The Third Reconstruction resolution is more than a realignment or a course correction. It is a fundamental change in how people are valued in the economy and in the creation of capital itself. “If we put people first in defining the economy, then we would have to consider metrics around how well-resourced people are in terms of income, in terms of their health,” explains Darrick Hamilton, a professor of economics and urban policy at The New School in New York. “Anytime you define an economy, it is values-based. What we’re talking about when we say a moral economy or an inclusive economy is values-based. But everything is values-based. It’s just owning up to the value you set out in a more honest way. And in a way that’s also centered on people as being the most important entity in our society.” As the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification,
and Political Economy, Hamilton asserts that the government’s “fiduciary responsibility is to its people,” supporting a framework of economic rights. “If we want people to have authentic agency, authentic freedom, it goes well beyond political and civil rights,” Hamilton says. There needs to be a recognition of economic rights, he says, whereby the powers that be acknowledge that people entering transactions without any resources or economic power are vulnerable to the whims of others, including others’ charity. Exploring the ways in which different people and entities engage in the economy can break through barriers that prevent transformative policies from being developed. Accepting a new economic framework could open the door to lawmakers passing direct relief to alleviate the intersecting challenges of hospital closures, housing access, and lack of affordable health care and child care. There is a lot the federal government can do to address economic inequality, Hamilton says, beginning with the tax code—for example, the recent monthly Child Tax Credit payments going directly to families. “America’s greatest fiscal tool is its tax code, and the concept of a tax subsidy or a tax deduction, as opposed to a refundable tax credit,” Hamilton says. He argues that the existing system values tax cuts, while a properly directed refundable tax credit “could promote a better society without [impacting] our federal spending.” LESSONS FROM THE PAST
Rev. Billy Michael Honor, a Georgiabased faith organizer, says the important part of the first Reconstruction was a fusion coalition. “These are Whites and Blacks that came together, like multiracial abolitionist movements, as well as sharecroppers, as well as people who … had a vested interest in restructuring society based upon more economic advantages for those who are disadvantaged.” The diverse movement-building that
happened in the past is a vital lesson for the present, Rev. Honor says. At the core of fusion coalition-building, he adds, is the moral value proposition of committing to uplift people without regard to partisan considerations. He sees the first two reconstruction periods as having significant moral turning points, and that is also true for the third. It’s clear that the tipping point has been the confluence of a global pandemic, racial justice uprisings, attacks on democracy and ballot access, and economic struggle. But even if the current Congress cannot be compelled to act in the moral best interest of the country, Rev. Honor says, it’s still worth fighting for, which is the message of the Poor People’s Campaign. “From the empirical work we’ve done to identify systemic poverty, systemic racism, ecological devastation, the denial of health care, the war economy, the false narrative of religious nationalism—they all exist because of policy, which means we created them, which means they can be uncreated,” says Rev. Barber. “None of these disparities come as a part of creation, they are created because of us. So as James Baldwin said, if we did it, we can undo it. ” To make these policy changes, there has to be a clear agenda. And for the Poor People’s Campaign that agenda is threefold, says Rev. Barber: 1. Change the narrative: For too long, the narrative has simply been about “middle class, middle class, middle class,” Rev. Barber says, which leaves 140 million people in this country not talked about. And that is a recipe for social and political depression. 2. Build and understand power: “Not only at the ballot box, but when you can bring White folk from the hollers of the mountains in Appalachia, together with Black folk from the hood, and maybe people on federal lands and Latinos—that fusion coalition of poor and low-wealth, Black, White, Brown, Asian, Native people is really the only power that can fundamentally shift the politics of this nation. Dr. King said that, and that’s why they killed him.
But that power is available to us. It just needs organizing.” 3. Make the Third Reconstruction law: “Ending poverty and building power from the bottom up are the policy solutions and the empirical data-driven answers to addressing the five interlocking injustices. If we don’t do this, the issue is not whether or not the Republican Party will survive or the Democratic Party will survive, but whether America will survive.” Rep. Lee acknowledges that the resolution is aspirational and visionary. “But we also have to be practical,” she says. “Not everyone’s going to agree on every part of the resolution, but where we find common ground, we’re gonna get this done.” Revs. Barber and Theoharis, Greer and Garrison, and the other tens of thousands of organizers with the Poor People’s Campaign now have their sights set on June 18, 2022, when a mass of poor and low-wealth people, along with others in solidarity, will assemble in Washington, D.C. “It’s not a march,” Rev. Barber says. “It’s designed to be a statement of commitment, where poor and low-wealth and religious leaders and advocates” will come together to urge Congress to pass the resolution. “A hundred years ago, all the things today we take for granted, were seen as impossible. And they weren’t won because of one action,” says Rev. Barber. “They were won because side-by-side in America, there will always exist, and has always existed, those who want to deconstruct, downplay, and disempower the promises of the Constitution, and those who want to ensure, engage, and enliven the promises of the Constitution. And that duality is always going to be there. And more often than not, the side of enlivening, and engaging, and empowering the Constitution wins!” y Anoa Changa is a Southern-based movement journalist and retired attorney. She hosts the podcast The Way with Anoa. Twitter: @TheWayWithAnoa Zenobia Jeffries Warfield is executive editor at YES! Magazine. Twitter: @ZenJWar
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JUSTICE AT THE HEART OF CLIMATE ACTIVISM Breanna Draxler
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The modern environmental justice movement understands the health of the planet and well-being of people are connected.
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hat comes to mind when hearing the word “environment?” A vast stretch of old-growth forest? A secluded mountain waterfall? Perhaps one of the 423 national parks of which the U.S. is so proud? The trouble with these visions of the environment—and the traditional environmentalism that so earnestly strives to protect them—is that the environment is made up of so much more. Awe-inspiring trees, yes, but also the branching underground networks of fungi they use to share nutrients and communicate. Instagram-worthy animals, yes, but also scores of microscopic organisms that coevolved to support them in the soil, the water, and their own guts. The environment includes the air, the land, the flora, the fauna, and yes, people, along with everything that comes into contact with them—our cars, our construction projects, and our trash. Indigenous communities and ancient cultures have always known this. And in contrast with earlier iterations of environmentalism, the environmental justice movement of today focuses on a similarly holistic understanding of what constitutes the environment. “The environment is not a place that is somehow separate from ourselves. It’s
Vivian Huang, left, of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network and Kiana Kazemi of Intersectional Environmentalist both work in networks that have an intersectional understanding of climate activism.
PHOTO BY AMY OSBORNE/YES! MAGAZINE
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not some faraway place in nature where you travel to to get away from home,” says Vivian Huang, incoming co-director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. “The environment is home. It is our workplace. It is the schools that we’re in. It’s our relationships to one another. It’s our communities. It’s us.” Kiana Kazemi, the head of community operations at Intersectional Environmentalist, a nonprofit founded in 2020, defines modern environmentalism succinctly: “Understanding the interconnectedness of people and the planet.” Looking at environmentalism through this lens, it’s no wonder that today’s movements take an active role in defining and fighting for environmental justice, rather than solely serving as preservers of natural splendor. This intersectional environmentalism considers advancing housing access, racial justice, and gender equity to be as essential to the movement as protecting clean water and air. In the past five years alone, new climate activism organizations like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future, many of them founded and led by youth, have brought environmental justice into the mainstream. Huang is quick to point out that “this idea and way of thinking about environment is not new.” She says, “the environmental justice movement really came together around this idea of an environment being very much rooted in people and in communities.” This organizing approach goes back decades and includes the preeminent research and campaigning in the 1980s against environmental racism by Robert Bullard, considered the “father of environmental justice.” The Asian Pacific Environmental Network, where Huang has worked for the past 11 years, came out of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. This seminal event in the environmental justice movement codified the 17 principles that have guided grassroots groups over the following three decades. Many environmental justice groups still hold true to these principles today,
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and new organizations and coalitions are making new commitments to these concepts. The Climate Justice Alliance, for example, continues to grow and expand principles of environmental justice in the context of a just transition. And these aren’t fringe efforts; the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour have become forces to be reckoned with in recent years, mobilizing young voters and influencing politicians to push for a Green New Deal and insist that Democrats prioritize climate justice in the federal budget reconciliation package. While these provisions haven’t passed, youth organizers have certainly moved the needle on what’s included in the political agenda. INTERSECTIONALITY ON THE RISE “Everything that happens to our planet is interconnected with everything that happens to the people of it, and those interactions aren’t always equal,” says Intersectional Environmentalist’s Kazemi. “They’re actually never equal, because [of ] systemic racism, white supremacy, the patriarchy—all of these are interconnected with a lot of environmental harms. And so as a result, [these interactions] impact people of color, women, queer, trans people, disabled people, very differently than they do people that aren’t within those communities and identities.” Countless climate and environmental movements of the 2020s hold these overlapping issues of justice at the heart of their organizing and activism work. As Nadia Nazar, founder and art director of Zero Hour explains, systems of oppression don’t just shape who is affected by the climate crisis. They are the causes of the climate crisis in the first place. “The people that hold the power in these systems that have been
Indigenous group joins a rally in Utrecht, Netherlands, during the Global Climate Strike in September.
“Everything that happens to our planet is interconnected with everything that happens to the people of it, and those interactions aren’t always equal.”
PHOTO BY ROMY ARROYO FERNANDEZ/NURPHOTO/GETTY
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“Things would change when you lead with the first caretakers of this land. And then from there you can move to the communities that are most affected.” exploiting the land, people, wildlife [for generations],” she says, “not only have these systems caused what’s going on, but they are causing the continuation of it.” So to work toward meaningful solutions, Nazar and her contemporaries argue the systemic issues of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy must be addressed in concert. Take pipelines, for example. “We can’t talk about them without talking about missing, murdered Indigenous women, [who] constantly are going missing due to the building of these pipelines,” says Alexis Saenz, the founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the International Indigenous Youth Council. With the oil boom in the Bakken region of Montana and North Dakota, for example, the industry established “man camps” for new workers to move into rural areas, including the Fort Berthold reservation. This coincided with a 70% increase in aggravated assaults on the reservation, whereas crime rates decreased in counties outside of the oil region. This is part of a much larger pattern of oil industry-related sexual violence against Indigenous women across the U.S and Canada. Data on these crimes is sparse, which exacerbates the
Alexis Saenz is founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the International Indigenous Youth Council. “One of the things that we say as youth is that we are the land defending itself.”
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PHOTO BY JON JIMENEZ
problem of their invisibilization, but the best available statistics show that American Indian and Alaska Native women are more than twice as likely to experience sexual assault or rape than other races. The majority of these crimes are committed by non-Native perpetrators, but tribes generally aren’t allowed to prosecute non-Natives, even on reservations. Federal, state, and tribal jurisdiction is hugely complex and varies by the type of crime and location, effectively resulting in impunity for many perpetrators on tribal lands. Saenz says the racism inherent in the stealing and sex trafficking of Indigenous women, children, and Two Spirit people is clear: The people building these pipelines are denying Indigenous sovereignty by taking over Indigenous lands—and bodies. That’s why the council’s activism goes beyond the confines of what “environmentalism” has traditionally entailed. The organization not only works toward the divestment of pipelines, but also defends and advocates for Indigenous sovereignty by organizing youth to become leaders, build solidarity, and take direct action. Since the establishment of the International Indigenous Youth Council at Standing Rock in 2016, the group has formed chapters in many states, including New Mexico, Minnesota, and Texas. And the group’s work isn’t limited to fossil fuel sites; it also targets injustices that occur in places like universities and on public lands. That’s partly because even the lands that have been set aside for preservation, like those beloved national parks, were never pristine to begin with. Defining these “wilderness” areas as being “untrammeled by man” erases the millennia of Indigenous land management that shaped them. It also fails to recognize that the establishment of these “untouched” wilderness areas was the product of colonization and genocide. Which is one reason why groups like the youth council are trying to reclaim the stewardship of these sacred lands. “Everything is related. I am related to the trees, to the oceans, to any other living being, regardless of race, class, gender,”
Saenz says, so “one of the things that we say as youth is that we are the land defending itself.” Overcoming the ongoing, overlapping injustices against Indigenous communities will require divesting from pipelines, yes, but Saenz says it’s also about centering different forms of power and leadership, like those of Indigenous and frontline communities. “Things would change when you lead with the first caretakers of this land,” she says. “And then from there you can move to the communities that are most affected. … That’s the order you should be working in, rather than starting at the top and all the privileged people trying to help everyone out.” BROAD BUT NOT DILUTED Some may argue that expanding the scope of environmentalism to include all these intersecting topics makes it unwieldy or too big to solve. But many climate activists don’t see it that way. The Asian Pacific Environmental Network is member-based, and Huang says that the lives of its members—like the lives of all people—are impacted by many intersecting issues. Members don’t just care about the air pollution impacting their health; they also care about economic opportunities, access to livelihoods, and addressing the racial injustice that they see, like the anti-Asian hate that spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s why Huang says the group’s agenda aims to get at the heart of what people really need. “When people are talking about siloed issues, they may not think of housing as, quote-unquote, an environmental issue,” Huang says, but “it’s very much an environmental issue.” From an environmental justice perspective, supporting people’s ability to stay in their homes without fear of eviction, gentrification, unaffordable energy bills, or unsafe living conditions demonstrates the many ways that racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice intersect. The network’s housing policy strategy is multi-pronged. In 2016, the nonprofit
pushed to pass a ballot measure for rent control in Richmond, California—the first nationwide in more than 30 years. Today, the organization continues to advocate for massive investment in statewide solar power, insisting that renewable energy be accessible to low-income communities, renters, and frontline community members. At the end of the day, Huang says true climate justice will come from affirming the rights of political, economic, and cultural self-determination for all peoples. Intersectional Environmentalist, too, works to foster community, though it’s a much broader, global community, primarily built online during the pandemic. To address the inequity in access to environmental education that especially impacts low-income people of color, the nonprofit launched “IE School.” The organization’s leaders invite nontraditional educators, who may be students or organizers or activists, to share the wisdom gained from their experience. “We amplify their voices and put them in those positions of teaching, when usually they don’t have that opportunity,” Kazemi says. “We’re creating free, accessible educational resources that come from the voices of the people at the front lines.” In this way, Intersectional Environmentalist is hoping to expand the movement to include not just self-identified environmentalists, but also housing advocates, food sovereignty activists, engineers, doctors, artists—anyone who cares about people and the planet. “I think those people are all environmentalists, whether they identify as that or not,” Kazemi says. “We all belong in this movement.” While the environments, needs, and communities will vary, at its core, environmental justice is about safety, Huang says. “And real safety comes from us having what we need. It comes from our communities having stable housing, good jobs, health care, connection—a cohesion with one another.” y Breanna Draxler is the environmental editor at YES!, where she leads coverage of climate and environmental justice. Twitter: @breannadraxler
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WE'VE COME SO FAR TOGETHER. Thank you for being part of the new social justice movement we’re celebrating in this, our 100th issue. You—our community of readers, writers, activists, and supporters—help create the solutions we have written about for 25 years. You provide the financial resources that make every YES! story possible. Together, we are spreading solutions to millions. This is the beginning of our critical fall fund drive. Please take a moment right now to make a gift of support. You’ll help ensure we can bring you all the important stories we need to tell in the coming year. Thank you! 20 36
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LENDING ON CHARACTER, NOT CREDIT SCORES Chris Winters
Conventional banking hasn't worked for businesses owned by people of color. But a new network is designed to get money flowing fairly to BIPOC economies.
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n the early months of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to put enormous pressure on the economy, Rodney Foxworth saw a parallel crisis emerging among businesses led by people of color. They needed capital and couldn’t get it. “Obviously this was a pre-standing issue prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Foxworth, the CEO of Common Future, a small-business support network based in Oakland, California. Traditionally, support for small businesses comes from organizations like Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs, which have long been seen as a way to invest in historically excluded communities. But CDFIs, many of which are federally chartered, are still part of the mainstream banking economy, which means they need to meet risk underwriting and reporting requirements, and often need to show returns, even if those requirements are less stringent than those at commercial banks. At the local level, organizations within communities of color often have better ties to local businesses, and would be in a better position to meet their needs, if they had the capital. Foxworth and his team saw an opening: draw on Common Future’s national network of businesses, funders, and support groups—many owned by people of color and especially women of color—to create a fund that could be disbursed to community support groups, who in turn could make low- to no-interest loans to local businesses that
ILLUSTRATION BY JANA FREDERICK SANDERS/YES! MAGAZINE
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Rodney Foxworth of Common Future says the new funding model would put the control back into the hands of communities and bypass much of the traditional financial system, with its credit scoring and extractive interest rates.
need them. This would bypass much of the traditional financial system, with its credit scoring and extractive interest rates, and put the control back into the hands of the community. “For Common Future to exert any power in the decision-making process, that completely negates that purpose,” Foxworth says. “We trust them, we’re putting the money where our mouths are.” A MATTER OF CHARACTER
Most traditional lending is based on credit scores: numbers derived from borrowers’ history of paying back debt, their income, the value of their assets, and other criteria. Credit scores are not racially neutral, however, as many borrowers of color do not have the level of income, assets, or inherited wealth to draw on that white people do. Even after setting aside cases of intentional discrimination, such as with auto pricing and loans, many busi-
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ness owners of color lack credit because their communities lack banks or other financial services, leaving people to be exploited by predatory institutions like payday lenders. That absence further translates into a lack of opportunity for entrepreneurs of color to build relationships with providers of capital. As a result, the entire financial system reinforces existing racial and gender inequities. Character-based lending aims to address some of these inequities. Broadly speaking, it’s the practice of issuing loans based primarily on the borrower’s character—their involvement in and ties to the community, or their reputation and track record therein—relegating financial criteria to a smaller role in decision-making. The Seattle-based Community Credit Lab has used character-based lending since 2019 to overcome systemic obstacles and create more avenues for people of color to obtain capital and credit. “A lot of what shapes why Community Credit Lab exists today is through a lot of conversations we’ve had in this ecosystem about how people are accessing credit—what are those barriers, as well as understanding what are those gaps in the system,” says Sandhya Nakhasi, the organization’s chief investment officer. Community Credit Lab works with community development organizations across the country to design lending programs that turn traditional risk analysis on its head, helping those businesses that otherwise wouldn’t be able to obtain affordable credit to do so. A century ago, there were more than 30,000 banks in the U.S., and personal connections formed the basis of the borrower-bank relationship. (The number dropped during the Great Depression, and then somewhat rebounded by the 1960s. A wave of mergers and acquisitions, especially since the 1980s, has left the country with just 5,000 banks today, according to the FDIC, plus another 5,100 credit unions insured by the National Credit Union Administration.) Character-based
lending puts the power and decision making into the hands of organizations already working within their communities. This isn’t a lack of standards, but a shift in emphasis away from a single numeric distillation of someone’s credit history to a more holistic assessment of a business’s tenure and value in its community. “The primary underwriting tool is the relationship [borrowers] hold with the people they work with,” Nakhasi says of the credit lab’s lending relationships. These lending programs are replicable and adaptable for many communities, says Ryan Glasgo, Community Credit Lab’s chief operating officer. But as a loan-issuing organization, the main bottleneck it faces is the amount of capital it can access to lend out. That’s where Common Future comes in. BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
In mid-2021, Common Future launched an $800,000 fund, raised from a combination of philanthropic organizations and its donor network, and designed a program to offer belowprime 0-3% interest loans through three nonprofits in Black and Indigenous communities. (Small Business Administration loans typically carry interest rates of 5.5% or more, based off the prime rate of 3.25%.) Community Credit Lab serves as the underwriting body; it designs and issues the loans. Foxworth says the plan is for the three community groups to issue the loans over the next year and a half to entrepreneurs in three Black or Indigenous communities. The key local partners are small groups who intimately know their communities, and will in turn make the financing decisions, while Common Future also provides many back-office functions, legal work, and the like, which are often out of reach for new businesses with tight budgets. One such local partner is the ConnectUp! Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota, a networking and business develop-
PHOTO FROM COMMON FUTURE
“Actually you can create wealth that takes care of everybody, and you’re seeing it in communities who have practiced wealth sharing and redistribution.”
The volunteer-led business development group Native Women Lead invests in Native-women-led businesses in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. “We’ve been testing character-based lending for four years,” co-founder Vanessa Roanhorse says.
ment group. Character-based lending is a natural fit for ConnectUp! because it builds on personal relationships within a community, much the way rural farmers would know their local bank manager in the town center, explains Elaine Rasmussen, the organization’s founder. In the U.S., that kind of relationship historically was restricted to white business owners. But globally, the concept isn’t novel. “It’s not anything new, particularly when you look at African countries and you look at the concept of sousou—shared funds,” she adds. What is new is the intentionality of focus on communities bypassed by traditional lenders. “It’s about undoing the harm of structural racism. It’s about getting
PHOTO BY JONATHAN SIMS
back to those roots.” ConnectUp!’s new partnership with Common Future targets what Rasmussen calls the “missing middle” of entrepreneurship: businesses that are 3-5 years old, no longer eligible for many startup support programs, yet not large enough to be able to pursue many traditional financing opportunities. The Census Bureau estimates there are about 124,000 Black-owned businesses with employees, making up 2.2% of 5.7 million total U.S. employer businesses. Yet as further data from the Federal Reserve and reported by NerdWallet revealed, Black and Indigenous businesses receive less funding, get smaller loans, and pay higher interest rates than white businesses.
With Common Future’s support, Rasmussen anticipates helping businesses get loans from $20,000-$100,000. ConnectUp!’s lending conditions include consistent revenue generation for 24 months. “It’s to be sure they’re truly running a business, as opposed to a side hustle,” she explains. “The heavy lifting Common Future did for us was to free us up to be able to do additional fundraising.” She anticipates making loans to 8-10 local businesses over the next six months. COMMUNITY STRENGTHS
Vanessa Roanhorse, a business consultant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is another participant in Common
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Future’s new pilot program. Roanhorse, a member of the Navajo Nation, is one of the co-founders of Native Women Lead, a volunteer-led networking and business development group that invests in Native-women-led businesses in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. The 4-year-old group invested $12,500 in nine businesses in 2020, and also recently ran a loan fund that issued $150,000 in 0% loans to 35 businesses. A third lending program planned for early 2022 is a $10 million integrated capital fund that will issue some combination of loans or grants ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. “We’ve been testing characterbased lending for four years,” Roanhorse says. “When Common Future and Community Credit Lab came up with this product, we were ready.” Women are breadwinners in twothirds of Native American and Alaska Native families, and are paid just 58 cents for every dollar paid to white non-Hispanic men. There are few, if any, banks in Native lands, and treaties prevent many Indigenous people from building equity in land. “Entrepreneurship is one pathway Indigenous women can use to close their own racial wealth gap,” says Jaime Gloshay, another of Native Women Lead’s co-founders. Indigenous women entrepreneurs, she says, bring a set of values to their businesses, because they are concerned about climate change, caring for children and elders, and not exploiting natural resources or other people. “Actually you can create wealth that takes care of everybody, and you’re seeing it in communities who have practiced wealth sharing and redistribution,” Gloshay says. But getting capital in the first place has always been a challenge. “What Native Women Lead recognized early on, in the first year, is that there was no safe place to get capital for women,” Roanhorse says. For many business owners she worked with, getting a loan through Native Women Lead was the first non-extractive loan experience they’d had. That’s similar to the case with Common Future’s third partner, Mortar Cincinnati, a business training academy focused
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mainly on Black and Brown entrepreneurs in the Midwest. “[The program] gives our folks an opportunity to have access to capital that they otherwise may not have,” says De’Marco Kidd, Mortar’s alumni manager. Kidd says that Mortar’s alumni network is built around maintaining those community relationships as the member businesses grow and become successful. The funding opportunity through Common Future, he adds, will allow those businesses to build their own capital to pay back the loan so that they later can approach traditional banks. That helps create a foundation of community wealth. “We have not been able to do that, especially in Black and Brown communities, as far as passing on business and financial wealth,” Kidd says. But these new programs give the entrepreneurs “more opportunities to create legacies for themselves and their families.” BECOMING SELF-SUSTAINING Common Future’s Foxworth says that the initial outlay to three organizations is just the beginning; the plan is to grow the program with capital obtained from repaid loans and from more philanthropic sources, to include other partner organizations who are best positioned to serve their communities. “The whole purpose of characterbased lending is in fact to strengthen the power and capacities of the folks in our network to maintain and build on these things themselves,” Foxworth says. “For Common Future to exert any power in the decision-making process, that completely negates that purpose. We trust them, we’re putting the money where our mouths are.” For Foxworth, success is not defined solely by the loan recipient’s ability to become financially independent and repay the loan. He wants Common Future to be a model for other investors. “Not only is it possible to do this,” he says, “[but] we should have the expectation that communities are able to do this.” y Chris Winters is a senior editor at YES!, where he covers democracy and the economy. Twitter: @thechriswinters
awakenings Movements adapt and evolve toward a new social justice.
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CHICANX MORATORIUM ACROSS THE GENERATIONS More than 50 years ago, tens of thousands of Mexican Americans marched in East Los Angeles for social justice and against the Vietnam War, proudly identifying themselves as “Chicanos.” Today, movement veterans are passing the leadership baton to young Chicanos and Chicanas, who in turn are adapting existing tools and strategies for modern-day racial justice struggles. Carlos Montes of the Brown Berets, an original participant of the 1970 march, has embraced the involvement of LGBTQI Chicanx people, and his younger counterpart, 23-year-old Isabel Gurrola, has learned that the secret to Montes’ longevity as an activist is to uphold unity while engaging in self-care.—Sonali Kolhatkar Read the full article at yesmagazine.org/builders
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ABOLITION THROUGH THE AGES
Originally called the National Chicano Moratorium Committee Against The Vietnam War in 1970, the group has since rebranded as the Chicanx Moratorium. Top, the Los Angeles anniversary event on Aug. 29, 2021. Bottom, a Los Angeles protest in 1970.
ABOVE, PHOTO BY JOEY SCOTT; BELOW, PHOTO BY DAVID FENTON/GETTY
“To reform or abolish police?” is the question facing racial justice activists—and slavery abolitionists grappled with a similar question. Organizations like Critical Resistance, which have for years taken an abolitionist approach to prisons and policing, are seeing a newfound interest in their work since the Black Lives Matter movement expanded. But, according to the group’s co-founder Dylan Rodriguez, police reforms have been tried—and have failed, since they are “counter-abolitionist.” Just as Black-led abolitionists demanded full racial justice and equality alongside an end to slavery, today’s abolitionist leaders are asking us to rethink the idea of safety and security by imagining a world without police and incarceration. —Sonali Kolhatkar Read the full article at yesmagazine.org/resisters
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The Portland, Oregon-based footwear company Keen Inc. has a brand that supports the environment and social justice initiatives. In 2017, it decided that child care was a necessary part of that.
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THREE COMPANIES CHANGE BUSINESS-AS-USUAL FOR EMPLOYEES WITH KIDS Patagonia’s on-site child care center at its Ventura, California, headquarters has been a valuable asset for both company operations and the Patagonia philosophy. The program goes beyond just having someone keep an eye on employees’ children. “Our child care is in business to raise children who care about our home planet as a complement to also taking care of children while their parents work,” says Tessa Byars, the company’s internal communications manager. Patagonia’s Great Pacific Child Development Center was established in 1983 to provide support for mothers, some of whom were still nursing, as they returned to work. The company, which provides both paternity and maternity leave, also encourages fathers to participate at the center. The development center has made a tangible difference for the 900 employees at the headquarters. Women now hold about half of company leadership positions. “If you’re a nursing mom, you’re really able to go nurse [your baby] any time throughout the day and be in their classes as
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much as needed,” says Byars, who also has two children enrolled in the center. COVID-19 saw the temporary closure of the center, and Patagonia responded with more flexible hours for parents. The center later reopened with expanded health services, including a full COVID-testing program. Home Depot opened its on-site child care program, Little Apron Academy, in 2012 for employees of its Atlanta headquarters and for a few nearby retail stores. The company closed its on-site child care due to COVID-19, but expanded its backup care policy, which provides all employees, including those at retail locations, with 10 days of child and dependent care. During the early days of the pandemic, as employees relayed that they needed to take time off to handle caretaking logistics, the company made these backup days unlimited before later reverting to the original 10-day policy. “This goes back to our values, which are the center of Home Depot culture and how we make decisions,” says Caitlin Watts, corporate communications manager for the company. “Those values are doing the right thing and taking care of our associates.” Home Depot also provides free access to its Sitter City database for employees, through which they can find care for their children, elderly family members, or pets. PHOTO BY PAUL DUNN/YES! MAGAZINE
“We walk to heal our minds, bodies, and to reclaim the streets of our communities,” says jewel bush of GirlTrek. “We walk to protest racism, police brutality, and white supremacy.”
the The Portland, Oregon-based footwear company Keen Inc. is a family-owned company with a philosophy of supporting people, the environment, and social justice initiatives. In 2017, it decided that child care was a necessary part of that. “This is just a manifestation of saying that if we truly have a family-oriented approach, we want to make working here as family-oriented as possible,” says Keen Vice President Erik Burbank. The Keen KidsCare Center (now called The Family Center at Keen) had to close temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Lauren Smalley, Keen’s benefits manager, says the company offered working parents more flexible hours. Keen also partnered with the organization Trackers Earth to create Camp Keen, a one-week summer camp for employees’ children. “We wanted all families, whether their children were enrolled or not, to be able to utilize the center as a resource knowing that we have subject matter experts on parenting, child care, anything kid-related,” says Smalley, whose own children also used the center. “Sometimes it is the little things that make such a big difference,” says Erica Waterman, Keen’s senior workplace experiences and services manager. “[The Family Center] has definitely changed the culture of our building and the environment. ... It’s a great support system for employees that need it.”—Natalie Peart
PHOTO FROM GIRLTREK
HEALERS
RADICAL HEALING AND SELF-LOVE ONE STEP AT A TIME “Have you ever practiced radical self-care?” asks Kamaria Blackett-Munir, a physical therapist in New York. “I have, and all I needed was a set of earbuds and some space to walk,” she says, referring to her journey of mental and physical fitness as a member of GirlTrek. Describing itself as a “movement of 1 million Black women,” GirlTrek promotes self-care and community through walking. According to chief of external affairs jewel bush, the organization faced the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racist police violence by building resources for members, such as “100 radical ideas for self-care,” launching a series of conversations on Black women’s health and wellness, and a Black History Bootcamp walk-and-talk podcast. “We walk to heal our minds, bodies, and to reclaim the streets of our communities,” bush explains. “We walk to protest racism, police brutality, and white supremacy.” And, as Blackett-Munir discovered, “The benefits of doing something for me eventually overflowed to my family.” Her husband and children now join her regularly on her walks.—Sonali Kolhatkar yes ! winter
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PUT PHILANTHROPY ON THE FRONT LINES How to decolonize wealth through reparations. Edgar Villanueva
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ur nation is very different now than when I wrote Decolonizing Wealth in 2018. My intention then was to provide a “loving” critique of philanthropy and effectively challenge the status quo of grant-making, particularly how philanthropic institutions and highnet-worth individuals used, or didn’t use, their money to address racial equity. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, the immense tragedies and hardships we’ve endured have altered the way our society sees the world and how we act. What we are experiencing, for the first time in my lifetime, is a vast collective suffering. Continued grappling with the pandemic, the surging of the delta variant, and more people dying are causing us to fear for our lives and for our families’ lives—we fear an uncertain future, and that we may never return to “normal.” In this time we’ve also witnessed social movements that impacted and shook the structures of power. Politicians in major cities were forced to commit to defunding the police and reinvesting in our communities. Large corporations
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were called out for not doing more to authentically respond to the Black Lives Matter uprisings and the continued conversations on white supremacy and racism invoked by the 2020 presidential election. After a decades-long outcry and organizing effort from Native American communities, the Washington, D.C., football team was forced to retire its racist name. And even in philanthropy, which has been so slow to embrace change, a transformation is happening. When I wrote my book in 2018, the framework I provided to decolonize the philanthropic sector—lifting the white gaze to leverage money as a way to heal—was deemed radical. Fast forward to today: This method of giving is now considered modern philanthropy at its best. There is now an appetite among legacy institutions and high-net-worth individuals to get to the bottom of why we really have disparities in this country and globally around race; and there are more conversations happening in philanthropy about redistribution of wealth to communities of color as reparations. Philanthropy can and should be at the forefront of supporting reparations,
considering the sector’s collective $1 trillion in charitable assets. That’s a lot of wealth, and it’s wealth that was accumulated following the directives of colonization to divide, control, and exploit Native Americans, African Americans, and low-wage workers (many of them immigrants). Private foundations are required to pay out just 5% of their endowments annually in the U.S., and funding that has supported communities of color has never exceeded 10% of foundations’ total giving. If we think about the wealth extracted historically versus what is currently given to support communities of color, you can see this is far from fair or enough to address the needs caused by centuries of colonization. The evolution in mindset, coupled with the successful philanthropic organizing of my Decolonizing Wealth Project, has unearthed new opportunities to support and scale efforts to actualize philanthropic reparations. My idea of 10% tithing to be redistributed to BIPOC-led organizations as a step to repair, seen as a pipe dream in 2018, has suddenly come within reach. I have been in touch with several foundations that are actively trying to figure out how to give 10% of their endowments to Black and Indigenous communities across the nation. The Bush Foundation, as an example, has explored how it has benefited from a legacy of colonialism, and is now using its resources to address the pervasive racial wealth gap. Earlier this year, the foundation announced a commitment of $100 million (equivalent to more than 10% of its endowment) to seed two community trust funds that will address wealth disparities caused by historic racial injustice. These trust funds will be owned and managed by Black and Native
Edgar Villanueva: “Philanthropy can and should be at the forefront of supporting reparations, considering the sector’s collective $1 trillion in charitable assets.” He’s photographed at Oko Farms in Brooklyn, New York. PHOTO BY VALERY RIZZO/YES! MAGAZINE
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American communities to provide money to build stability and generational wealth, improving access to opportunities such as education, homeownership, and entrepreneurship. A more well-known example is how MacKenzie Scott, who has publicly committed to giving away her Amazon wealth in her lifetime, has been approaching wealth redistribution. In 2020, without any self-congratulatory promotion, Scott donated an estimated $4 billion to leaders supporting antiracism work and organizations led by people of color, including by Native Americans. She donated an additional $2.74 billion in June 2021 to organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked. What is important about Scott’s actions is her self-awareness surrounding her wealth and privilege: “There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others,” she said. While giving at this scale and in this way is commendable, we must remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said that it must not “cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” The concept of reparations is big and nuanced. But there is an opportunity for all of us as individuals and institutions with wealth to take reparative action. Decolonizing Wealth Project, and our giving circle fund, Liberated Capital, recently announced the 23 grantees for the first-of-its-kind funding opportunity to support local, regional, and national BIPOC-led movement building and advocacy efforts for reparations. Our goal is for #Case4Reparations to be a multiyear, multimillion dollar initiative to support systemic and policy change efforts that return wealth to impacted individuals. And we must not forget that
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reparations have historically been a policy conversation. Earlier this year, H.R. 40, the federal legislation on reparations, advanced out of committee for the first time since it was originally introduced 30 years ago. There are also a number of local reparative efforts underway to address the historical and ongoing theft and control of land, with cities acknowledging reparations and taking action, including St. Paul, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Providence, Rhode Island; Burlington, Vermont; Chicago and Evanston, Illinois; New York City; and the state of California (particularly in the Bay Area). Portland approved as its top racial justice measure to lobby the U.S. government on reparations for Black and Indigenous communities harmed by federal policies and actions. Evanston, Illinois, is levying a tax on newly legalized marijuana to fund projects benefiting African Americans in recognition of the enduring effects of slavery and the war on drugs. In the San Francisco Bay Area, local residents and businesses can pay to help restore Indigenous land to Indigenous stewardship, as a land tax for reparations. So where does this leave us? My hope is that the rest of philanthropy moves toward this model of wealth redistribution and that H.R. 40 is passed in the near future—but I know this kind of radical change cannot happen in a vacuum, especially for the Black, Indigenous, and other people of color who have had white supremacy impact every aspect of their and their ancestors’ lives. Because communities of color continue to do the work to address racial inequities, it’s imperative that white communities, especially the philanthropic community, start to do their part to heal and advance the movement for repair: Leverage their power and influence to support people of color. White people in these spaces should speak up for these communities of color when in rooms that don’t reflect them, and use their position to help open doors and remove obstacles.
Commit to racial justice as lifelong work. America is almost 250 years old, with the harms of colonization and the stains of white supremacy starting before then. That kind of pain is generational, cyclical, and pervasive. White people need to commit to deconstructing the systems that continue to perpetuate disparities and racism and work alongside people of color to build new ones. Sometimes it’s about letting go of control. The cornerstone of white supremacy is the need to dominate and control, which is why so many industries are still white-dominated. This is where progress stalls, so white people need to think about relinquishing control if we as a society are ever going to have racial equity. Representation doesn’t translate into power. Diversity and inclusion in workplaces is a moot point if the people at the top are still white. Real power comes from appointing people of color into top roles, including by creating new roles or encouraging some leaders to step down and step aside. By shifting real power to people of color in philanthropic spaces, grant-makers are actively dismantling the power structures that marginalize millions every day. And if I wasn’t clear about this before, white people in philanthropy need to continue to focus their work on wealth redistribution and move more money to organizations led by people of color, including wealth-management companies and grassroots organizations. Honoring self-determination in how communities build wealth can create space and creativity for how we grow wealth, such as buying land and property. This can help create for-profit endeavors geared to create diverse and evergreen revenue streams for racial justice movements. That can allow us to realize a future where we don’t need to rely on philanthropy in the first place. y Edgar Villanueva is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. He is the founder and principal of Decolonizing Wealth and Liberated Capital. He is the author of Decolonizing Wealth. Twitter: @VillanuevaEdgar
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WHEN REPARATIONS GROW FROM THE GRASSROOTS Until federal reparations happen, local organizations across the country are stepping up. Ray Levy Uyeda
ILLUSTRATION BY GRACE O'NEILL/YES! MAGAZINE
n 2019, Joseph Thompson, the director of multicultural ministries and assistant professor of race and ethnicity studies at the Virginia Theological Seminary, signed on to a team of faculty and staff that would coordinate the institution’s reparations program. He understood two things: The payments would never account for the harm and legacy of enslavement, and the work wasn’t primarily about the money. “How can you determine how much money would really make amends?” Thompson asks. “It’s not just about the money. It’s about, for one thing, telling the truth about the seminary’s history … [and] it’s about developing a true and authentic and equitable enough relationship with the families and the descendants.” The seminary’s team of researchers has begun to make disbursements to 12 families, between 30 and 35 people, whom Thompson refers to as shareholders. The goal is to work with the generation most closely linked with individuals the seminary enslaved as blacksmiths, carpenters, or bricklayers, as well as those who held similar positions during the Jim Crow era. As part of the program, researchers will document oral histories of the descendants of those who were enslaved and collaborate with the shareholders to decide how the reparations should be disbursed. “Hopefully [through this work], people will realize that the seminary belongs as much to the descendants of the [enslaved] people as it belongs to the white people that everybody always thought the seminary belonged, to because they are an integral part of the story,” Thompson says. The seminary’s Office of Multicultural Ministries is just one team of many around the country, including those at educational institutions in Virginia, cities like Evanston, Illinois, and in the state of California, working to make amends for the harms of slavery and its many legacies. Demands for these kinds of reparative payments have been around since the practice of enslavement was legal in the United States, but today they’re gaining new traction on a national scale, offering a vision for a just and equitable future that feels more achievable than at any time in history.
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A HISTORY OF CALLS FOR JUSTICE According to Ashley D. Farmer, an assistant professor in the History and the African and African Diaspora Studies departments at the University of Texas at Austin, the first reparations claim was made in 1783 by a woman named Belinda, whose enslaver, loyal to the empire, left the United States in 1775. Belinda petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for payment for her labor as an enslaved woman. The government affirmed the petition by granting payment of 15 pounds and 12 shillings per year, though the annual payment was inconsistent, and Belinda would have to petition the legislature twice more to receive her due. Farmer says that large-scale reparations organizing wasn’t taken up until almost 100 years later, in 1869, by a formerly enslaved Black woman named Callie House. House was in charge of one of the country’s first Black-led reparations networks, known as the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association of the United States of America, which would eventually sue the U.S. Treasury in 1915 for $68 million in reparations. “The lawsuit claimed that this sum, collected between 1862 and 1868 as a tax on cotton, was due to the appellants because the cotton had been produced by them and their ancestors as a result of their ‘involuntary servitude,’” wrote archivist Miranda Booker Perry. A court of appeals in Washington, D.C., denied the claim on the grounds of governmental immunity—the idea that the government isn’t culpable for wrongdoing, even if the wrongdoing is illegal. In the aftermath of World War II, the reparations movement gained renewed momentum, Farmer says, aided by the Black Nationalist and Civil Rights movements. This time the drive was led by Queen Mother Audley Moore, known as the mother of the modern-day reparations movement. In fact, many of the proposals that movement leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X would later espouse came directly from Moore, who was a mentor of Malcolm X’s, Farmer says.
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In the 1940s and ’50s, this idea of repayment was brewing, both domestically and internationally, and Moore is the person who began to really advocate for Black Americans, Farmer says. Moore was adamant that reparations necessitated both a symbolic apology to recognize the wrongdoing as well as a material shift of resources and goods in order to address the systemic and sociocultural racism in America and “the mass amounts of inequality that have come from slavery through the present,” Farmer continues. As House and Moore sought justice from the U.S. federal government, both leaders were subjected to years-long efforts to criminalize their work. And while there’s now widespread acknowledgement that the legacy of slavery impacts the condition of life in today’s America, a 2019 Gallup poll put overall support for reparations at just 29% of the population. Each year from 1989 to 2018, Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers introduced a bill to study the need for repayment. After Conyers passed away, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, re-introduced the legislation in 2019. That year, it received a historic hearing, and in April 2021 the Judiciary Committee voted in favor of bringing the bill to the floor of the House of Representatives. Still, substantive federal action could be a long way off as the legislation hasn’t been called for a vote in the House, nor has companion legislation been introduced in the Senate. Even then, the legislation calls for the study of the need for reparative payments, rather than actual reparations. A GRASSROOTS CULTURE SHIFT FOR REPARATIONS Until federal reparations are actualized, grassroots organizations across the country are heeding the call to right these wrongs. “I felt, if I’m going to wait for the government to get on board with reparations, then how long am I going to be waiting?” says Sue Downing, who pays
monthly reparations to individuals in her community in western Massachusetts as well as to her local chapter of the national organization Showing Up for Racial Justice. When the chapter first started in 2014, organizer Kelly Silliman says, the group was focused on generalized work, such as showing up in solidarity to a protest or knocking on doors to educate white folks about white privilege. The chapter began educating its members on the importance of reparations and encouraged individuals to commit to monthly payments to three local BIPOC-led groups. The chapter’s accountability partners—a SURJ term for people of color, in this case Black, who volunteer to quite literally hold members accountable to their mission and goals—recommended that the organizers narrow their focus. With that in mind, the chapter committed to paying reparations to two Black queer and trans organizers who had previously experienced racialized housing insecurity. In January 2019, the group launched a reparations effort specifically aimed at overcoming racialized housing insecurity, starting with activities to educate its members. The chapter hosted racial affinity group “fish bowls” (in which one group converses while another observes the conversation without participating), plays about the impact of white supremacy on parenting, and intimate presentations at the homes of SURJ members to educate white community members on the importance of paying reparations. By June of 2020, the chapter and broader community in western Massachusetts had collected and paid more than $100,000 in reparations to the two Black freedom fighters, which they used to purchase their own house in Springfield, Massachusetts. Stickii Quest, one of the recipients of the reparations and one of the SURJ chapter’s accountability partners, says that they were housing-unstable their whole life and assumed that they and their partner, ShaeShae Quest, would always be renters. Stickii Quest says their mother “attempted to own a home, [but] that only lasted about four years,” and ShaeShae’s mother owned a home that was taken
through eminent domain. In a gentrifying neighborhood, where an increasing number of Black and Brown people struggle to keep their homes, the Quests weren’t sure their goal would be realized until they put in the offer. “To have a place that I know that the only time that I have to move is when I choose to, the only time that I have to worry about where I’m sleeping is when I choose to not be here anymore, [and] without the looming fear of a landlord or a predatory lending company [or] without having to worry about a mortgage payment, I can’t even express the level of stress that it took off my shoulders,” Stickii Quest says. LAND ACCESS IS AT THE ROOT OF THE ISSUE Housing felt like an important place for the SURJ chapter to start because so much racial inequity comes back to the issue of land access. The genesis story of the United States is one of land theft: land theft from Native peoples by Europeans starting in the 16th century and continuing into the 19th century in the name of Manifest Destiny; land theft in overturning General Sherman’s Field Order 15, which broke the promise of land redistribution for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War; and land theft through the forcible relocation of Japanese Americans during WWII to prevent the perceived threat of espionage. This unequal access to owning a home and the land it’s built on is the basis of what has built much of the generational wealth in the U.S.—and created the country’s racial wealth gap. “For me, this idea of land-owning as a contributor to wealth throughout generations was very important,” Downing says. “To look at my own family history and to say, ‘Yeah I can see how I have benefited from the fact that my family on both sides was able to purchase land in a way that was denied to formerly enslaved people.’” Through her own organizing, Downing found discussion of the racial wealth gap to be one of the more compelling reasons a white person might decide to pay reparations. Even Downing, whose
great-great-grandfather was a chaplain in the Civil War and who enslaved people, says that she doesn’t “think [family history is] a convincing argument for a lot of people. I mean, I don’t shy away from saying it, and it is an additional motivator for me, but I don’t feel guilt about it … I feel that it was reprehensible and wrong ... but guilt is not a particularly useful emotion.” This isn’t an uncommon sentiment: The generational distance from the country’s ordaining of slavery has proved an effective argument at the federal level for denying reparations. Farmer says that seeking reparations and demanding accountability for Japanese Americans interned during WWII was somewhat more straightforward because it was a contained instance of injustice. When President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act four decades after the end of Japanese internment, many of the internees were still alive. “You could trace exactly who went there. You can trace exactly their seizure of property very clearly,” Farmer explains. “Black people, I mean, where do you begin? We are so entangled in the founding of the nation, so entangled in white wealth, and now we are so far away from actual slavery. How would you even begin to try to create some sort of system for doing so?” Reparations are owed for more than 250 years of legalized slavery; reparative action concerns every sociocultural, political, and economic dimension of American life that slavery facilitated and that followed the 13th Amendment, which made the system of enslavement illegal, except as a punishment for a crime. Creating that system for change and satisfying the hunger for justice, the Western Mass SURJ chapter believes, must start from the ground up. “Part of the conversation we’ve had is building a will toward reparations,” says Misha Viets van Dyk, the network organizer at SURJ National. “I want to see reparations happen on a much larger scale in terms of policies changed and actual money paid out, but I think that reparations is not just about a one-time payment.” They add that an apology for past
wrongs is toothless if institutions perpetuate the legacies of those harms. For instance, Viets van Dyk says, “If you keep incarcerating so many people, specifically Black people, or continue these horrible predatory housing practices, then making a one-time payment” doesn’t repair anything. Viets van Dyk says that the organization is exploring ways to expand reparations and wealth redistribution efforts at the ground level, either through SURJ hubs or partnerships with national organizations like Fund Reparations NOW!, which describes itself as “the white ally initiative of the National African American Reparations Commission.” While a handful of SURJ chapters are dedicating themselves to targeted reparations campaigns in the ways that the Western Mass chapter did, most others are redirecting funds and donations toward Black and people of color-led organizations. Grassroots reparations strategies like those of the Virginia Theological Seminary, SURJ chapters, universities, and cities are gaining greater attention, and serving the dual purpose of compensating for historic and systemic wrongs while also building a “culture within our country that values the idea of reparations and understands why it’s important,” Downing says. Whether or not that cultural shift reaches the federal government remains to be seen. Farmer says the government making a concerted effort to make amends would be a substantial gesture, even if the amount of money would be incalculable and unimaginable. Perhaps the bigger challenge, she says, is the fact that the country would have to contend with the idea of what America really is. “This whole idea of the ‘land of the free,’ this idea of democracy and triumphalism, is false,” Farmer says. “So both on a symbolic level and a material level, it’s very hard to reckon with, because [making reparations] means undermining white supremacy.” And that is the true stuff this country is built on. y Ray Levy Uyeda is a Bay Area-based freelance writer who focuses on gender, politics, and activism. Twitter: @raylevyuyeda yes ! winter
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THE HEALING WORK OF RETURNING STOLEN LANDS The Wiyot Tribe regained its sacred island home after decades of unrelenting prayer and relationship-building. PennElys Droz
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Tuluwat Island in Humboldt Bay during a king tide.
PHOTO BY ALDARON LAIRD
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T
he ancestral home of the Wiyot Tribe, located in what is commonly known as California, is a strikingly beautiful land of marshes, rivers, redwood and spruce trees, inland mountains, and stretches of Pacific coastal beach. While it has long been a place of refuge for those who love the natural world, it has also been the site of the immense tragedies of the Gold Rush, which resulted in the attempted erasure of Indigenous life and livelihood by the genocidal policies of 19th-century California. Central to the Wiyot’s ancestral land is Tuluwat Island, a 280-acre island located within Humboldt Bay in what is today the city of Eureka, California. On Feb. 26, 1860, the Wiyot were holding their annual World Renewal Ceremony on the island. A gang of settlers attacked and massacred a majority of the Wiyot, effectively carrying out a genocide. The survivors dispersed themselves and eventually moved to Table Bluff Reservation in the southern region of their homeland. In the 1970s, Albert James, the son of Jerry James, a survivor of the massacre, had a dream of returning to the island. He approached the City of Eureka with a proposal to that end, but his request was ignored. His dream held power, however, and in the 1990s James’ nieces Leona Wilkinson and Wiyot Tribal Chairwoman Cheryl Seidner began to organize and act on the proposal. Wilkinson and Seidner began hosting open prayer vigils to honor what was lost and to rebuild the heart and power of Wiyot people on the island. These vigils brought intergenerational Indigenous people together with settlers who had truth, restoration, and justice in their hearts. Over the years, the vigils created widening circles of education, action, and understanding within the broader tri-county Indigenous and nonIndigenous communities of Northern California, becoming the seeds of the profound healing that can emerge from truth-telling and coming together with love to honor a place. During this time, the Wiyot discovered that a small part of the island was for
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sale. The tribe worked with the Seventh Generation Fund, an international Indigenous grant-making and movementbuilding organization located within the Wiyot homeland, to create the Wiyot Sacred Sites Fund. More than a simple fundraising effort, the Wiyot Sacred Sites Fund also sold T-shirts and art, hosted community dinners, concerts, celebrations, and maintained a consistent presence in the Eureka community year after year. After more than a decade of such efforts, the Wiyot were finally able to buy the small parcel of land to heal and restore, all the while continuing to build partnerships with friends and allies, and always carrying with them the dream of the return of Tuluwat. When the Wiyot received the title to the 1.5-acre parcel of land, they found it contaminated with toxins—paints, solvents, metals, and petroleum—left over from decades of industrial use such as shipyard operations. Undeterred, tribal members began a cleanup process with volunteer labor and resources. In 2004, as her uncle did decades before, Seidner approached the City of Eureka, and again requested the return of the island. At that time, the city council voted unanimously to return 45 acres to the tribe, but with title restrictions. The Wiyot people and their allies created unique partnerships with local businesses, organizations, and state and federal agencies to orchestrate a remarkable cleanup process that involved an extensive volunteer and partner network across community, city, state, tribal, and federal agencies, organizations, and businesses. The cleanup process was so effective and powerful that it garnered the EPA Excellence in Site Reuse award. The efforts benefited the entire ecosystem of plants and marine life, as well as oyster farmers, fishers, and residents. More importantly, in 2014 this work allowed the Wiyot to complete the World Renewal Ceremony that was interrupted in 1860, returning the heart of Wiyot presence and ceremony to the land. Also in 2014, three Eureka city officials—Mayor Frank Jager and Councilmembers Natalie Arroyo and Kim
At right: Wiyot Tribal Chairman Ted Hernandez and former Wiyot Chairwoman Cheryl Seidner celebrate Oct. 21, 2019, when the City of Eureka formally returned Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot. Left: During the ceremony, a chair was reserved for Wiyot people massacred in 1860.
PHOTOS BY ANDREW GOFF
It was the first time a city government had ever given land back to its ancestral caretakers, and it was a profound testament to the power of the organizing, strength, and vision of Wiyot people.
Bergel—committed themselves to work toward justice for the Wiyot. Arroyo and Bergel approached the Wiyot Tribe to ask what they could do to support them, and were told that the most important thing was to return the remaining city-owned portion of the island. By 2015, the City of Eureka unanimously passed a resolution to return the island. However, it took four additional years to do the administrative and legal work required for the transfer, including environmental quality assessments, appraisal, and the designation of the land as “surplus.” Finally, on Oct. 21, 2019, the city formally returned Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot Tribe.
It was the first time in the United States that a city government had ever given land back to its ancestral caretakers, and it was a profound testament to the power of the organizing, strength, and vision of Wiyot people. A small part of the island remains in private hands, but Seidner confirmed that those land owners are peacefully coexisting with their neighbors, saying, “We know how it feels to be taken away from our land.” Set against the backdrop of the violent and genocidal settler colonialist history of this nation, the movement to restore Tuluwat Island to its original stewards is remarkable.
FROM LANDBACK TO INDIGENOUS-LED FUTURE BUILDING The Wiyot are inspiring leaders in a worldwide movement dubbed #LandBack, to protect and restore ancestral lands to the care of Indigenous people. The LandBack movement is a movement born from work that has been done for centuries, and originated with our ancestors fighting to remain within their territories, and maintaining the right to hunt, fish, and gather through direct action and legal battles. It also involves the protection of our sacred sites and homelands from contamination and desecration by industry.
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The LandBack movement also includes Indigenous values-based governance of lands that cannot be restored physically, and Indigenous-led work to untangle the conflicting legalities resulting from colonization that restrict self-determination on reservation land. Justice and healing can emerge in powerful ways when Indigenous lands are in Indigenous hands. The Wiyot Tribe’s success with Tuluwat Island is a powerful example of the international Indigenous LandBack movement. Recently, that movement has manifested in actions like the Red Road to DC journey in summer 2021, aiming to bring awareness of threats to sacred places, and the direct-action work and legal struggle to stop the Line 3 oil pipeline from contaminating ecosystems in the Great Lakes. It has also resulted in political successes such as the introduction of the RESPECT Act in Congress, which would require federal agencies to follow the principles of free, prior, and informed consent by consulting with tribes before pursuing any activity or regulatory action that may have tribal impacts. Today, using the same model of Indigenous-led, place-based healing that resulted in the return of Tuluwat, Wiyot Tribal Administrator Michelle Vassel and Tribal Chair Ted Hernandez are working with David Cobb and Cooperation Humboldt, a longtime organizational ally, to build a visionary Indigenous-led “restorative economy” within Wiyot ancestral lands. A restorative economy is rooted in land stewardship, care work, equity, collaboration, and sacredness. Cooperation Humboldt was formed in 2017, inspired by Cooperation Jackson, a cooperative organization working to advance sustainable and equitable development in Jackson, Mississippi. Working since its inception with the Wiyot Tribe, the group recognized early that creating “economies of justice” for all beings begins with responsibility to the ancestral caretakers of the land. In 2009, the Seventh Generation Fund and Democracy Unlimited, a local political organization, created the
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Wiyot Honor Tax. The Wiyot Honor Tax is a voluntary tax from people who are “Wiyot homeland residents,” to recognize the history and acknowledge the tenure of the Wiyot people. Cooperation Humboldt initially committed 1% of its nonprofit revenue to the Wiyot Tribe, then realized quickly that a more integrated commitment was required in order to build a local economy based on justice and honoring the land. The group began reaching out to the Wiyot to offer support, listen, and build good relations. Hernandez, the tribal chairman explains, “The folks at Cooperation Humboldt just kept showing up ... and frequently and publicly called for other individuals and organizations to pay an honor tax.” He adds, “They worked with us to protect Tsakiyuwit [another Wiyot sacred site] and to begin planning a food forest on the College of the Redwoods campus.” Cooperation Humboldt went on to partner with the Wiyot Tribe to plan a form of cooperative governance for the tribe’s cultural center, and co-host workshops on Soulatluk, the Wiyot language. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the group also worked with the tribe to build an extensive mutual aid network involving 17 organizations. Today, the Wiyot Tribe and Cooperation Humboldt have come together to create Dishgamu Humboldt—Dishgamu means “love” in Soulatluk—a groundbreaking Indigenous-led community land trust off of the reservation. The trust forms a foundation for future culturally grounded regenerative development, which serves to regenerate the vitality of the land, people, and culture. The land trust is governed by a board whose structure ensures that the Wiyot Tribe has a decision-making majority. Dishgamu Humboldt is also set up to be able to receive donations of land, effectively becoming a vehicle for LandBack for the Wiyot Tribe. Building on their legacy of catalyzing partnerships for change, the team of the Wiyot Tribe and Cooperation Humboldt also brought in the values-based investment
firm Full Spectrum Capital, working together to create the Gouts Lakawoulh Hiwechk Investment Fund. Gouts Lakawoulh Hiwechk means “money that makes us well” in Soulatluk, speaking to its purpose of seeding an Indigenous, values-based, regenerative economy that benefits all those who live in the Wiyot homeland. Such an economic system is founded on ideals of healing the relations between people and with the land, and focused on restoration ecology, housing, regenerative forestry, food production and distribution, cooperative business development, and care and wellness. Dishgamu Humboldt and GLH Investment Fund are now, along with many other collaborators, in pre-development planning for initial projects, which include a beautiful 40- to 50-unit lowincome apartment building designed to enhance the ecological and community health. The project includes food production infrastructure and child care, a 47-unit “ecovillage,” and Dishgamu Innovation Center—a place for co-working and building community knowledge for a new economic future based on healing and care of the land and people. Dishgamu Humboldt is also working with Ikigai Physician Group to assist in financing a trauma-informed, community-driven health care model, and discussing the creation of a women’s and children’s hospital and birthing center to respond to the closure of a regional obstetrics unit. The story of the Wiyot Tribe’s LandBack journey continues to inform and inspire others; from the return of Tuluwat Island, to the restoration of the tribe’s care and guidance, to intercultural community development within its homelands. This is the unshakable foundation on which we can build Indigenous-led futures that honor the land, community, and our collective liberation. y PennElys Droz is an Anishinaabekwe mother of five, a program officer for the NDN Collective, and an active founding Board member of Sustainable Nations.
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CULTURE SHIFT Powerful Ideas Emerging
Books + Films + Audio A Bigger Picture Gives Our Ancestors Their Full Humanity | 63 By Tracing Addiction to Childhood Trauma, Can We Find Compassion? | 66 Reverberations as a Generation Takes a Knee | 68 Inspiration Amanda Gorman | 65 Reflection | 71 Crossword | 72
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BOOKS+FILMS+AUDIO
Illustrations by Frances Murphy
A Bigger Picture Gives Our Ancestors Their Full Humanity Jared Spears
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Graeber and david wengrow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
IN 1611, FATHER PIERRE BIARD, A FRENCH MISSIONARY assigned to colonial Canada, wrote home to complain about the locals. Apparently, the Indigenous Mi’kmaq didn’t think much of what they’d seen of European civilization: “They consider themselves better than the French ... they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other ... you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.’ They are saying these and like things continually.” Readers brought up on a certain kind of history may find this account somewhat surprising. To say the least, it is uncommon to read of Native Americans as social theorists probing into European settlers’ psyches. The Dawn of Everything, the new book from which this passage comes, offers many such charged moments. In it, archeologist David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, public thinker, and activist, confront deep assumptions about how human society developed from its humble origins. By turning the conventional history inside out, the book also manages to pose startling questions. The Dawn of Everything joins other popular history books which garnered global attention with sweeping versions of the whole human story, including Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005), Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011), and Steven
Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (2018). In The Dawn of Everything, each of these big-picture accounts of human history comes in for ample critique. The issue, according to Graeber and Wengrow, is that they rely on and reinforce a flawed framing. Once upon a time, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of huntergatherers. Then came farming, then private property, the rise of cities, and “the emergence of civilization.” In this meta-narrative of deep human time, societies require ever-more complex hierarchy, abstract administration, and state institutions as they scale, shedding primitive freedoms and fairness along the way. In the authors’ view, this narrow myth of progress functions in pernicious ways, mostly cropping up “when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess.” The Dawn of Everything aims to yes ! winter
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The authors plot in detail how the “myth of progress” inherited in the West emerged as a defensive, Eurocentric response to Indigenous critiques. produce new answers to those perennial lamentations. To do so, the authors strive toward a new synthesis of evidence emerging across archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines. They steer clear of traps that have ensnared similar endeavors, like the quest for the origins of inequality that either presupposes a “fall from primordial innocence” (Jean Jacques Rousseau and Jared Diamond), or holds that life pre-civilization was “nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes and Steven Pinker). Rejecting what they describe as essentially a theological debate, Graeber and Wengrow set out to tell a new story of social development, one capable of undoing the myth of the savage and restoring our ancestors to their full humanity. The authors plot in detail how the “myth of progress” inherited in the West emerged as a defensive, Eurocentric response to Indigenous critiques—epitomized in the writings of Father Biard— during the 17th and 18th centuries. Upon contact with Europeans, Native American groups like the Iroquois and Wendat had well-established democratic institutions, and individuals’ material needs were generally guaranteed among their communities. In the face of such radically different social arrangements, apologists for European systems rationalized their own structures by belittling Native Americans’ accomplishments as “savagery.” Whether based on production modes (such as hunting-gathering, farming, or complex urban specialization) or governmental arrangement (tribes, chiefdoms, and states), the resulting narrow models of social development remain more or less baked into history textbooks, right down to the present day. The Western Enlightenment view of social progress is not only chauvinistic but, as these two social scientists contend, is increasingly untenable in the
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face of mounting scholarly evidence. By ditching the “myth of progress,” Graeber and Wengrow are free to examine prehistorical and precolonial societies with fresh eyes. From the earliest bands of hunter-gatherers, to the rise of cities, up to major moments of first contact, the book brings together previously siloed academic evidence and little-publicized interpretations. Marijuana, we learn, was widely cultivated in prehistoric Japan. Centuries before Montezuma, Mesoamerican city-dwellers developed a precursor to urban social housing. The mini-revelations are each fascinating in their own right; together, they pose a serious challenge to both the Hobbesian and Rousseau-ite interpretations of the human past. The conceptual shift away from linear models of social evolution also bears profound implications for our present. The old framework offered too neat an origin story, distorting our understanding of the past. Too often, it merely served to make our current, rather dismal societal outlook—marked by state surveillance, extractive capitalism, dominating hierarchies, and ecological destruction—seem all but inevitable. An epistemological break with that meta-narrative offers a startlingly new picture of our shared past: messier and more complicated, flush with diversity, experimentation, and above all, freedom. The book’s emphatic insistence on a broader, deeper understanding of freedom than is typical recalls past works by Graeber, many of which inspired activists, anarchists, and slackers the world over. The “three primordial freedoms” he and Wengrow arrive at—the freedom to move away, to disobey, and to transform social relationships—encompass and fortify the dissenting positions expounded in Graeber’s books Bullshit Jobs and Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As much as any
one work can, The Dawn of Everything reads as a culmination of Graeber’s lifelong project, as well as a testament to the power of intellectual collaboration. Developing a renewed conception of fundamental social freedoms also brings the Indigenous critique full circle, with the Eastern Woodlands confederacies of North America as their exemplars. Crucially for Graeber and Wengrow, there was among these groups no obvious way to convert wealth into the kind of power over others that coerces or forces labor. Leaders were elected, but office holders “couldn’t compel anyone to do anything they didn’t wish to do.” We learn how, through generous social welfare provisions and consensus-seeking deliberations, groups like the Iroquois and Wendat self-consciously cultivated communal practices and institutions that vouchsafed human dignity without undue sacrifice of agency. Native American societies are once more cast as noble, but not as the pure, Edenic “savages” of Enlightenment imaginary. The rabble-rousing authors clearly side with those Mi’kmaq critics who jibed that they were richer than their French counterparts—not in material possessions or extractive technologies, but in “other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.” The point, as with the whole book, is not only to reevaluate our sense of the past. Readers are invited to weigh starkly unfamiliar societal arrangements against our own, and to feel the sting. “Something has been lost,” Graeber and Wengrow stubbornly insist. The Dawn of Everything begins a new origin story of human societies, one with a horizon beyond our present disillusionment. y Jared Spears is a New York-based writer whose essays on culture, work, and ecology have appeared in Jacobin, It’s Freezing in LA!, Society + Space, and elsewhere. Twitter: @ThusSpokeJared
INSPIRATION
Illustration by Dania Wright
“I can hear change humming In its loudest, proudest song. I don’t fear change coming, And so I sing along.” —Amanda Gorman from Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem Listening Library, 2021
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By Tracing Addiction to Childhood Trauma, Can We Find Compassion? Travis Lupick
“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A REBEL,” Gabor Maté says in The Wisdom of Trauma, a new documentary about the acclaimed physician’s groundbreaking work in mental health. “In communist Hungary, in grade six, my teacher wrote in my report card that, ‘You should watch it, because he incites the other students.’” Nearly 70 years later, although far from the playground, Maté is still doing exactly what his teacher warned of. He is at the forefront of conversations about the long-term effects of childhood trauma, inspiring colleagues to transform the way Western society responds to depression, anxiety, addiction, and other symptoms of deep-seated mental and emotional distress. His 2009 book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, is a seminal work on the subject. 66
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The Wisdom of Trauma Documentary, 2021 Directed by Maurizio Benazzo and Zaya Benazzo thewisdomoftrauma.com
ILLUSTRATION BY FRANCES MURPHY/YES! MAGAZINE
“We have a social structure that induces trauma in a lot of people. Therefore, it induces escapist, addictive behaviors.” “Trauma is an overwhelming threat that you don’t know how to deal with,” he explains. “Our job, as human beings, is to learn from our suffering.” It was also in Hungary that Maté had his own formative experience with trauma. When he was two months old, Nazi soldiers marched into Budapest. His Jewish grandparents were sent to Auschwitz and his father to a labor camp. His mother was left living in terror. Just before Maté turned one, she handed him to relatives who took him into hiding. For six weeks at this age crucial for development, Maté was separated from his mother— abandoned, in his infant mind—and surrounded by caregivers who had palpable fear for their lives. It wasn’t until Maté was in his late 30s that he began to process this trauma. As a successful Canadian physician, he was a workaholic, addicted to his patients’ constant needs for attention. With his beeper going off at all hours of the day, he didn’t have to think about his own life, and he felt needed. But the trauma remained and, finally, Maté began to understand that keeping the trauma buried through constant work also kept his mind closed to much of his true self and the people who loved him. For most of the past decade, I lived and worked as a journalist in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the same neighborhood where Maté got his start working with drug users in the early 1990s. In The Wisdom of Trauma, he describes it as, “North America’s most concentrated and most dramatic area of drug use, where there’s more people injecting and ingesting and inhaling more kinds of substances than anywhere else on the planet.”
It’s a dense population of poverty and mental illness where IV drug use is tolerated out in the open. There, I witnessed people go to dangerous lengths to hide from their pain. I saw women sell their bodies in dirty back alleys, young men rob and steal from one another, and people shoot so much dope that they overdosed and nearly died. I also saw a community in the Downtown Eastside, as Maté did when he first arrived to work at a supportivehousing project there. “I felt totally at home, right away,” he says in the film. Of his patients, Maté reports, “They all suffered tremendous torment as children, which also meant that their addictions were extreme. They were quite willing to sacrifice love, life, relationship, health, just for the next hit. They were that desperate to escape from reality, because reality had been so cruel to them.” Maté used his work as an escape. His patients escaped by using heroin and other drugs. “Trauma fundamentally means a disconnection from self,” Maté says. “Why do we get disconnected? Because it’s too painful to be ourselves.” In the Downtown Eastside, where so many people had gathered to hide from their pain, Maté helped them connect with the neighborhood’s community and reconnect with themselves. The film, produced and directed by Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo of Science and Nonduality, includes many interactions between Maté and his patients. It is remarkable to watch how quickly Maté connects with people, understands where their trauma originates, and begins to help them work through it to find themselves. In a therapy circle at Chrysalis Recovery House in Vancouver, a woman
recounts being kidnapped by a taxi driver when she was 16 years old. She was held in a motel room for six months and repeatedly sold off and raped. Maté’s first question for her is about what steps her mother took to find her. “My mom just thought that I had run away from home,” she replies. “She didn’t look for me.” He goes back further, and learns that, beginning when the woman was 5 years old, her father beat her violently with a belt. And again, her mother was not there for her. “Who did you talk to?” Maté asks. “Nobody,” she replies. “That’s the trauma,” Maté says. “By the time you were 5 years old, you were completely alone.” Today, Maté sees dislocation from self in every direction he looks, as well as its symptoms, both mental and physical. “We have a social structure that induces trauma in a lot of people. Therefore, it induces escapist, addictive behaviors.” Think video games, social media, unrestrained consumerism, compulsive eating, and the overdose crisis, which killed a record 93,000 people in 2020. People are hurting, he emphasizes. It’s a subject he discusses further in a book scheduled for publication in May 2022, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. “Our schools are full of kids with learning difficulties and mental health issues that are trauma-based. But the average teacher never gets a single lecture on trauma,” he says. “The criminal justice system has no understanding or even acquaintance with the concept of trauma. In fact, they often create policies that further deepen people’s trauma.” One of the more striking scenes in yes ! winter
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the film is a visit that Fritzi Horstman, founder of the Compassion Prison Project, makes to a maximum-security facility in California. She has dozens of inmates form a large circle and, standing in the center of it, asks the men, “If a parent or other adult in the household often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or threw something at you, step inside the circle.” Almost every one of them does. “If you often felt that no one in your family loved you, step inside the circle.” Again, almost everyone moves forward. Roughly 64% of American prisoners have experienced six or more Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, which health professionals count on a 10-point scale that quantifies a person’s trauma and, with it, their likelihood of developing ailments ranging from cancer to an addiction to opioids. Once Horstman’s circle of prisoners is much tighter than when the exercise began, it becomes apparent that these young men—musclebound, tattooed, and maintaining hard stares—are victims of childhood trauma. Instead of offering help, our system confined them to cages, severing their connections to friends, family, and society as a whole. The Wisdom of Trauma urges its audiences to ask why, collectively, we respond to trauma the way that we do in schools, hospitals, and the criminal justice system. “Childhood trauma is key,” an unnamed inmate says. “Because once you understand that, you know you were a child, and you didn’t have help. And if it’s about love, then why are we locking you up?” y Travis Lupick is a journalist and the author of Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (2018) and Light Up the Night: America’s Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting for Survival (January 2022). Twitter: @tlupick
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Reverberations as a Generation Takes a Knee Alex Gallo-Brown
I SWEAR I CAN’T HELP IT. During baseball season, almost every night at 7 p.m. (and 1 p.m. on Sundays and sometimes Wednesdays or Thursdays; earlier if they’re playing East), I follow the Seattle Mariners baseball team, a franchise that has not reached the playoffs in exactly 20 years, the longest drought of any team in professional sports. Still, I always think this might be the year they’ll finally make it. It’s an odd thing for me, being a baseball fan. Almost nothing about the sport (or really professional sports as a whole) aligns with my politics, values, or ideals. The winner-takes-all economics. (This is especially egregious in baseball, where stars can make tens of millions of dollars per season, while other players in the lower levels labor near or below the poverty line.) The alignment with military and law enforcement. (Just yesterday, I watched a Marine decked out in full combat gear throw out the first pitch, joining the parade of national security professionals celebrated during games.) The toxic masculinity. (During a recent game, my wife told me the first thing she wonders when looking at these players is how they treat women. It’s true that seemingly every year at least a few are suspended for domestic or gender-based violence.) And, of course, the racism. (In baseball, specifically, the number of African American players has declined over the decades, and it isn’t lost on me that this new iteration of Mariners, with the most Black players in the league, is still disproportionately populated by AllAmerican-looking White boys.) And yet I can’t help it. In a recent poem for The Believer magazine, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet
Ada Limón clarified something important for me about the enduring appeal of athletics, perhaps especially to someone like me, who hates myself a little every time I bring up the MLB app on my phone. “I’ve even high-fived and clinked/ my almost-empty drink with a stranger/ because it felt good to go through something/together,” Limón writes, “even though we haven’t been through/anything but the drama of a game, its players.” The poem’s closing lines depict her father and stepfather, two men entirely at odds except for their shared affinity for sports: “and from the backseat I swear they looked/like they were on the same team, united/against a common enemy, had been fighting,/all this time, on the same side.” For those of us who live in a society where different factions can’t even agree on basic facts, let alone what to do about health care, labor conditions, racial disparities, or the environment, there is something comforting about the simple drama of The Game, the knowledge that the person sitting next to you is wondering the exact same thing you are, namely whether or not this will be the year that the Mariners make the playoffs. Sports’ ubiquity within American culture and near-uniqueness as sites of
ILLUSTRATION BY FRANCES MURPHY/YES! MAGAZINE
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What I found most hopeful was not the change that these activist-athletes were able to bring to their sports; it was what their experiences of activism gave to them.
The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World Dave Zirin The New Press, 2021
social unification explain at least part of the excitement surrounding the events of 2016, when a certain quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice. In retrospect, Colin Kaepernick’s actions seem almost tame compared to what came next: the summer of 2020 and a bona fide “national uprising,” in the words of n+1 writer Tobi Haslett, after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. Police precincts were burned, retail stores were looted, and protestors took over whole swaths of urban areas as politicians, corporate executives, and other public figures rushed to declaim, with varying degrees of ingenuousness, their support for Black Lives Matter. Back in 2016, though, many of those voices were silent, and the collective response to Kaepernick was fierce: first controversy, then condemnation, and finally exile from the National Football League, where he’d excelled. If Kaepernick has become less visible over the past few years, that’s very much by design. Despite a proven
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track record of success, he has not been offered a contract since he first decided to take a knee. A new book by The Nation sportswriter Dave Zirin seeks to redress this wrong, not by returning the spotlight to Kaepernick, but by showing the impact that his actions have had on an entire generation of American athletes. The Kaepernick Effect draws from interviews with amateur and professional athletes from every region of the country, nearly all of whom are Black, and their stories follow remarkably similar trajectories: consciousness about the state of American racism instigated, at least in part, by the killing of Black men by police; inspiration to act from Kaepernick; backlash from the public, including, in many cases, death threats; and a renewed determination to pursue racial and social justice. The many young men and women featured in Zirin’s book (football players from Ohio and Michigan, cheerleaders from Georgia and Iowa, basketball players from Vermont and California) are notable not only for their courage in the face of adversity, but also for their commitment to collective action as an answer to widespread injustice. It’s possible, reading their words, to imagine an entirely different world of sports, where individual athletic excellence comes not at the expense of social justice but instead serves as a catalyst for it. If there are reasons to be pessimistic, however, they involve professional sports, where, with the notable exception of basketball, being “political” still often means kissing one’s career goodbye. Bruce Maxwell, the only Major League Baseball player to have taken a knee in 2017, suffered so much psychological stress during that time that he developed suicidal ideation, leading to an incident with a Postmates delivery driver and a gun that resulted in his arrest. He
hasn’t played in the major leagues since. Michael Rose-Ivey, a former star linebacker for the University of Nebraska, was once the 15th ranked player at his position in the country. After he took the knee for his entire senior year, he went undrafted by the NFL and was released by the Chicago Bears shortly after a tryout. Gwen Berry, an Olympic gold medalist in the hammer throw, lost sponsorships after she raised her fist on the medal stand. And Kaepernick still doesn’t have a job. In the end, what I found most hopeful was not the change that these activistathletes were able to bring to their sports or fanbases; it was what their experiences of activism gave to them. The former linebacker Rose-Ivey became an activist and mentor to Black youth in Kansas City. Janelle Gary, a former softball player at Seattle’s Garfield High School, helped found New Generation, which organized rallies, raised money, and hosted events within her community. Alyssa Parker, a cheerleader in Iowa, founded a Black Student Union at her college. Mi’Chael Wright, a basketball player at the University of California, Santa Barbara, went on to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Minnesota. Perhaps, then, to revise my thesis, what’s most interesting about sports is not their capacity to unify—their ability to temporarily paper over our political, ideological, and interpersonal divides. Instead, it’s the window that they provide into our social relations—our racism, sexism, and militarism, yes, but also our righteousness, advocacy, and desire to do what’s right. With a simple gesture, Kaepernick started a movement. Zirin’s book shows that movement has only just begun. y Alex Gallo-Brown is the author of Variations of Labor (Chin Music, 2019), a collection of poems and stories. He lives in Seattle. Twitter: @AlextheGB
REFLECTION
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THE YES! CROSSWORD
A NEW SOCIAL JUSTICE
Patrick Blindauer
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ACROSS Devours Bacon, say Confused state Any pyramid scheme, e.g. How beer may be served Guinness of Doctor Zhivago Soprano’s showstopper Lifted, in a way “Don’t quit ___ 6-Down!” Revenge seeker in a 1984 comedy Multicolored followers of Loyola? Word before paint or can ___-Cone (icy treat) Particularly unpleasant Disney queen with an Ice Palace Out of the country Initials of obligation Drug also called acid Spherical do Like JFK and FDR: Abbr. Sodas with the highest fruit content? Quaker ___ Bran Florida hoopsters Paycheck fig., perhaps 13th director DuVernay Canadian capital Russia, on old maps 2002 role for Hayek That guy over there Gift for an island visitor Good-lookers from Guadalajara? Crackle and Pop’s companion “Move along!” Bolivian capital Cabaret star Minnelli
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Cloverleaf feature Sinister grin Give a hard time to Fish that look like snakes Sites of some sales
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DOWN Unchained Memories narrator ___ Lee Browne Involve as a consequence Ring-shaped reefs The Sacrament of the Last Supper painter Design details, informally Regular gig Flowering succulent Father of Apollo and Athena Beige shade One who gets the sack every December Counterpart of Troilus Word before base or ball Satirical magazine first published in 1952 Trying to lose? Enclosed, as a pool
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Pool testers “How delicious!” Biopic starring Will Smith Worshipper of Haile Selassie, for short Frequently, in poems Antiquated Group of groupers, for instance Coffee, informally Team formed in New Orleans “Don’t let it get cold!” Shaq’s alma mater: Abbr. Tree in the beech family “My bad!” Piece of deli equipment Become furious Choral concert sights Bolivian capital Rumpled, as bedding The ___ of Cats (board game) Nursery rhyme dwelling In the 40s, say Charlie of commercial fame, for one Kind of 35mm camera Actress Vardalos
© 2021 by Patrick Blindauer. www.patrickspuzzles.com
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