About
“How do we organize large numbers of white people to work for the liberation of all people that directly challenges the divide-and-rule strategy of white supremacy?” One of the key responses Catalyst has to this question is the need to develop anti-racist leadership in white communities rooted in collective liberation politics and guided by strategy based in love.
Catalyst believes the change that is needed involves challenging patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy along with all other systems of oppression. Therefore, for us, anti-racism necessarily means working against all forms of domination and working towards collective liberation.
Catalyst’s vision and work are based in need and desire. The need is material: racism needs to end for any and all of us to survive. Racism enables economic exploitation that drives down wages and drives up the cost of living, healthcare, education, and the basic needs that more and more people are unable to meet. Racism erodes safety and health for the people of color it targets, and then works on the rest of us. Racism causes environmental crises that impact communities of color first and worst, and are changing life as we know it for all of us.
Our work is also based on the desire for all of us to live into our full humanity. White supremacy locks up, deports, shoots, and impoverishes millions of people of color. We’re losing epic numbers of people and the brilliance, talents, and potential they’re not getting to nourish. Racism deforms the humanity of white people, by enlisting our participation in violence and by distorting our ability to understand ourselves and people of color outside of a lens of superiority and inferiority. We long for a different world, where people of color are not on guard in a daily war against their full participation in society. We ache for a world where we aren’t conscripted into being foot soldiers for the wars of the 1 percent, at home or abroad.
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White people are taught to understand racism just as prejudice, and to overlook the institutional power behind it. We work with groups to deepen their analysis of institutional racism, and to locate ourselves both in history and the current realities of racism
On Intersectionality:
…The idea that all systems of oppression are intertwined and depend on each other, and thus must be addressed in a holistic, interrelated way in theory and practice, in our hearts and in the streets;
Intersectionality complicates how we understand relationships of power and what’s needed to transform them, and helps us understand that we can’t organize people around one part of themselves and ask them to check the rest of their lives at the door.
Collective Liberation
Collective liberation challenges divide-and-control tactics by emphasizing how our fate is bound up with each other. With collective liberation as our goal, we seek to create a society where everyone has access to human rights, food, dignified work, housing, education, and health care. It means that “no one is free when others are oppressed,” and it means recognizing that oppression strips all of us of our humanity, keeping us disconnected and alienated from each other and the planet. Within a collective liberation vision, white people work to end racism not for or on behalf of the interests of people of color, but because our lives and humanity depend on the eradication of racism as well. We do this work in service of a liberated world where the 1 percent don’t fight each other for crumbs, where people, including white people, no longer ally ourselves with ruling-class elites who don’t have our interests in mind.
Collective liberation is a vision to move towards and a practice to help get us there. Love is crucial to a practice of collective liberation because it involves extending ourselves for someone else’s growth. As opposed to the traditional concept of solidarity, which can involve a rational calculus of interest between groups of people, love allows for an expansive generosity of spirit that opens the space for mutual transformation.
Feminism
move away from the past mistakes of white feminists who pushed for equal access to the power of white men as opposed to organizing for systemic transformation
Like many white anti-racists, we’ve made mistakes around applying intersectionality to our work; in some cases we organized white people as if they were a homogeneous
group, with identical relationships to institutional power and access to resources.
Organizing from a Place of Love
Traditional models of white anti-racist organizing have a sharp focus on what we are
organizing against. Organizing from a place of love means trying to practice and embody
what we are organizing towards.
On Leadership
….Social movements need leadership to win, leaders who can support more and more people to bring vision, strategy, and organizing skills to our struggle.
Leadership is always present, and when it’s informal, dynamics of entitlement often shape who steps into leadership positions, irrelevant of their experience or suitability for the role
For many of us who were politicized in anti-authoritarian political circles, we have
been schooled in the idea that “we don’t have leaders” and that we don’t need them. We
have been taught to see leadership as inherently hierarchical, and that in order to resist
hierarchy, we need to see our groups as flat and equal, with no leaders. There are several limitations to this culture of “leaderlessness.” First, it makes invisible the leadership that
does exist in our organizations, and the differences in political experience that are actually
a strength and a resource. Second, when we can’t talk about leadership, there’s less space for us to talk about real power differences in our organizations. For example, in male-dominated groups, we’ve had the experience of men using the pretext of “we are all equal here” to avoid being confronted about sexism. “ird, if we aren’t willing to recognize leadership where it exists in positive ways in our organizations and movements, then we are not able to develop a practice of leadership development that supports more people to build their skills and capacity to contribute meaningfully to political struggles.
a key responsibility and quality of leaders is developing more leaders
Key Lessons
- Help people locate their stake in the struggle for collective liberation.
We need white people to make lifelong commitments to anti-racism, not based on feelings of pity or charity for people of color, within the colonial models we’ve been offered of condescension and “the white man’s burden,” with its toxic and genocidal history. These commitments must be based on a longing in our bones, in the depths of our hearts, for a world that meets all of our needs - This work is complex and messy.
People of color do not have a unified set of demands for white people to line up behind. People of color span the political spectrum, and are not all advancing a liberatory agenda. And among people of color who are organizing for collective liberation, there is still no united banner. White activists need to take the best of what solidarity organizing offers, which is its challenge to internalized white superiority and emphasis on seeking and supporting the leadership of organizers of color with whom you have important political alignment. Not that you have to agree on everything—that is where it’s crucial to develop our own political compass in order to be able to navigate complicated realities of work on the ground. “at also necessitates building actual working relationships. “rough joint struggle, we forge relationships, trust, and dialogue. Sometimes as white people we want to come into an organizing situation and offer our critique and challenge before we’ve gotten our hands dirty doing some actual work. “at’s another function of privilege—deciding that our best role is to sit on the sidelines and critique everything that doesn’t meet our standards, rather than getting in there and offering our labor and skills. - Work with white people while staying grounded in multiracial organizing.
Who is going to work with white people on issues of racism if not other white people? . Organizing white people to collective action for justice cannot happen in isolation from the guidance and needs of people of color. Real change is going to take multiracial coalitions, and in order for that to happen, we need more white people who are ready to side with justice and see the deep connections they have with communities of color. - Anti-racist organizing is transformative organizing
It calls upon white people to transform ourselves, to make a lifetime commitment to healing from the ways racism takes us out of alignment with humanity. It challenges us to take collective action, to bring more white people into taking active responsibility to end institutional racism. Transformative organizing refers to the dynamic interplay of change on the individual and institutional levels—how as individuals, we are healed and transformed and grow through the process of transforming how we structure society.
Transformative vs Transactional Organizing
Transformative organizing offers a different model than the common “transactional” style of organizing, which suggests that we organize simply as a means towards a very specific short-term end—the idea that a campaign is built solely towards winning a particular concession. Transformative organizing refers to the dynamic interplay of change on the individual and institutional levels—how as individuals we grow, heal, and change through the process of transforming society. It’s transformative to offer our lives and hearts to the work of collective liberation. In the struggle, we come to find community in deep ways, sometimes after we’ve lost some relationships because of our political principles. It is profoundly powerful to know, deep down, what side we are on, to know where and with whom our interests lie, and to build the future together.
