Black Feminist Roots of a Theory of Transformation

CHANGE ELEMENTAL

BLACK FEMINIST ROOTS OF A THEORY OF TRANSFORMATION ELISSA SLOAN PERRY

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“We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”

— Combahee River Collective Statement

I’ve always loved books. As does my mother. She read to me often as did my brothers, and she made sure I always had books even when I didn’t have jeans or sneakers. I learned through stories and was a voracious learner. At the same time, there are some things that I seemed to come here knowing.

One of my very early memories is an intuitive and somatic knowing of a wrongness about celebrating the Fourth of July. I’ve written about that here. When I was eleven and had outgrown what I had free access to and funds were low, I turned to my mother’s bookshelf. The first three books I read were The Bluest Eye, Sassafras Cypress, and Indigo, and The Color Purple. It wasn’t long after that I began exploring the bookshelves of her friends and used bookstores with the $2 an hour I earned babysitting. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and Home Girls A Black Feminist Anthology were how I kept some semblance of belonging to myself when I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere else.

“As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be. That is how I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

— Audre Lorde

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The words on the pages—fiction and non, poetry and prose—resonated with what my body and heart knew and brought my brain along. I encountered Pat Parker, Angela Y. Davis, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Alexis Deveaux, Jewelle Gomez, and Bernice Johnson Reagon to name just a few. And these favorite aunties and godmothers I never met (mostly anyway) gave me language and informed and evolved (and continue to inform and evolve) my understanding of the world and making the world we want. There was history and poetry, political analysis, and vampire stories, and among them keys to forgotten, destroyed, and/or actively suppressed ways of understanding, imagining, and moving into those imaginings— ways of getting and being free.

They were how I understood my work outside the classroom at my small liberal arts college in small-town Indiana, where I was the only Black, out, queer person on campus and an “only” in each organizing space I was a part of. They were how I knew I didn’t want to involve local Indiana law enforcement when I witnessed an act of violence among two Black classmates and was asked about making a report by a white women’s studies major who was on the campus judiciary and had heard about the incident. They were also how I knew when it was time to go after two years there.

A Black friend had been expelled for an alleged offense that was the same as that committed by a white person who had received only a warning. I was immediately escaping by whatever means necessary and they were how I knew I had to get out of there. That place was going to kill me.

"You've got to learn to leave the table when love's no longer being served."

—Nina Simone

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Yes, these texts helped in the campus organizing I led and was a part of but more importantly, at that time, they were teaching me how to survive.

“Attending to one’s wholeness of being is not self-indulgence but self-preservation, an act of political warfare. It is in fact a bad-ass move to take your love for yourself seriously. It is by taking care of, care for, care full of ourselves, through turning and returning to ourselves, uniting and reuniting with ourselves, by looking in upon and after ourselves, unbecoming and then re-becoming with ourselves - it is only through these radical acts (as far as I can tell) that—we have any chance at practicing freedom in this mess."

– Audre Lorde

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A few years after I moved to California I had the space and enough of a sense of safety to begin engaging with the writings in a different way. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks was endlessly influential in guiding my work in schools, afterschool programs, and youth-serving nonprofits and then to leadership focused on making the world a better place for young people and leadership for social and racial justice more generally. In preparing to be an “ethnic literature” and creative writing teacher at San Francisco’s Ida B. Wells Continuation High School, I had to write a 150-word philosophy of education. I was clear that I did not want their experience of the classroom to be a place where what’s expected is to learn “conformity and obedience to authority” as it had been for hooks and for much of my life in school. I wanted them to learn what they would need to get free, to love and appreciate themselves and each other, and to experience some healing. Not clear enough or brave enough yet to say that in a I-got-to-get-a-job-and-a-paycheck context, this is what I wrote:

Education is a constant process that should operate more by a process of eduction than inculcation—focusing on eliciting from the person rather than a systematic routinized depositing of information. The process must draw on and reinforce the knowledge and inherent worth in people of all ages recognizing that the relationship between student and teacher is a symbiotic relationship rather than a parasitic one, and valuing young minds for what they are not just for what they have the potential to be. Education and the systems and methods in and with which it operates should have their root the goal of inspiring questions, developing skills with which to ask these questions, honing the necessary skills to seek answers, and fostering the desire to do so.

Although this is what I meant:

"If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them."

— bell hooks

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By the time I was 29 with no advanced degree in education but lots of lived experience and my given and chosen ancestors at my back, I was a vice president for a national whole school curriculum model called Different Ways of Knowing. It was an arts-infused, action-learning, and community-problem-solving-based whole-school model of public education for elementary and middle schools. As a part of my work there, I ran a local afterschool program for middle and high school students based on the same curricular ideas and I got to evolve much of my thinking and approach and reaffirm that there was nothing “wrong” with the youth that many deemed problematic or troublesome or difficult or learning challenged.

What was wrong was all the adults and interconnected systems and structures around them that were failing them.

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”

— Combahee River Collective Statement

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Though I had been coaching teachers and principals through the Different Ways of Knowing model when No Child Left Behind was ushered in and our program which was 50% federally funded closed, that was when I turned my attention more squarely to leadership and how we lead and develop leadership for a different world. Fast forward a

dozen or so years to 2015 when Change Elemental began giving name to 5 Elements of transformative change (deep equity & liberation, complex systems change, shared leadership & power, innerwork, and multiple ways of knowing). It was the same year that I met Monica Dennis at an Art of Transformative Consulting training in Washington DC. Of course, some good, juicy stuff transpired and it was when we were next together the following summer that Monica’s frame of systems of oppression and pillars of liberation and my thinking about leadership, freedom, and ways of knowing and Change Elemental’s burgeoning thinking came together in what was a powerful mix for me. Getting to know the domains of source, body, emotion, and story as the core domains of our experiences, practices, and systems exploded my thinking, my intuition, and my somatic knowing, and brought it all back together again. It was as if a field of soil with a sprinkling of green shoots suddenly became a thriving, colorful expanse of richness, beauty, and possibility.

Indeed the two of us—tall Black feminists—standing back-to-back in our full length and dignity in one of the exercises for which we were paired, created a field where it felt like anything we dreamed was possible. It is that field that grew this theory of transformation.

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“…[P]oetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core-the fountain-of our power, our womanness; we have given up the future of our worlds.”

— Audre Lorde

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