"Toward the Heart of Justice" Speech Part 3

Yesterday, on March 24, I had the honor of serving as keynote speaker for the Women's Diversity Conference (note: my bio info isn't updated) at Adrian College. This conference is a rarity in a conservative, rural Michigan town, spearheaded by a few courageous female staff and faculty members whose roles at the institution and community are to inform, enlighten, and challenge. There was a subversive quality to this conference--it was cool to be connected to it. Enjoy!  

Part Three – Three Values

In January of this year, I joined 125 people to attend an event hosted by Project South and Southerners On New Ground called the Queer Peoples Movement Assembly. Here, a working definition for queer liberation was presented:

Queer liberation seeks liberation for all peoples through working for the recognition of our whole selves; the integrity of the relationships and families we embrace; self-determination in choices for our bodies in sexuality, gender, eroticism, disability, safety, and privacy; the dignity of our spiritual practices; fairness in our economic systems, our work and its compensation; full access to participating in and benefiting from society's institutions; human rights for all; and justice as a birthright for all.

This statement is powerful to me because it relates an affirmation—what a free world for queer and all people would feel like. Importantly, this definition is powerful alone because it was communicated at the Assembly. Even if you and I will never experience liberation, as defined here, we will know that this possibility exists, which I suggest to you is enough. Imaginative politics is the seed for our inspiration, and a roadmap for our work.

But, if we have opportunities to embody our visions then we should be courageous to do so. Queer Liberation, along with Hip Hop and Buddhism has yet again transformed my relationship with power in recent years. Queer leftists have shown me that it is possible to build a community based on the politics around love. Hip Hop introduced me the politicized poetry of critique and possibility. And Buddhism gave me a pathway through which to practice healing and shattering conditioned myths in my life. I am certain that each of you has or will bond with a freedom tradition, whether political, spiritual, artistic, or most likely the fusion of all of these things. In it you may discover that the power that you and we already possess is tremendous, and that the unification of our collective power is but a multiplier.

I briefly want to touch on three specific values from these traditions that have sustained me over time: embracing vulnerability, experiencing wholeness, and cultivating radical imagination.

Embracing vulnerability to me is living freely to recognize your and others unrealized power. The politics of control and domination are interrupted when we embrace our own fears and anxieties to transcend them. It requires intention, honesty, support, and above all, gentleness. In the VRRP work, this means that I openly explain to every group that I train that there is a great deal that I don’t know, but through sharing information I hope not only to learn, I want to serve as a repository so that I can share with others with whom I come in contact. I try not to worry about being perceived as inexperienced, lacking confidence, or ceding “authority.” In the end, I think that I am striving toward justice when I can shed my ego for the benefit of the work.

By identifying my fears and routinely practicing to overcome them, I find that I am creating an opening for experiencing wholeness. I try to be aware in my life when I am internally separated—when I am feeling “small” because parts of me are ignored, repressed or neglected. In the day-to-day grind that means remembering to live in my body, as I can get stuck living in my head as an intellectual person. With political work this often means avoiding spaces where all of my identities or experiences—happy or sad, neat or messy, known or unknown—are not welcomed. Whether I am in Black Baptist Church in the state capital, Richmond, Virginia or at rural county fair at the far southwestern tip of Galax, Virginia, I will have on gender ambiguous clothing and will publicly name Golden Girls as my favorite TV show of all-time, if I’m ever asked.  Experiencing wholeness is a barometer of the balance of power around me. The more free I feel, the closer I am to the heart of justice. 

And the ways in which we are able to shake away from our own ego-driven desires, burdensome expectations, pernicious myths, and senseless conventions, inside and outside of ourselves, the easier it is to live in the world that we imagine, the world that we are striving toward. Some dismiss radical imagination as the stuff idealistic kids chase vainly after. On the contrary, iconic feminist thinker, and progressive Buddhist, bell hooks, explained in a 1996 interview:

"...my mother in Kentucky always used to say, 'Life is not promised," in the sense that boredom is a luxury in this world. Where life is always fleeting, each moment has to be seized. For us children, that was a lesson in imagination, because she was always urging us to think of the imagination as that which allows you to crack through that space of ennui and get back going." 

bell hooks’ memory is not about childhood naivety or escapism. Rather, it is recalling a survival strategy against complacency, a way to remain steeped in realities that are exhausting and harsh. Possibility can be the present if we willing to call upon our hope to thrive as people. After all, in a traditional place like Virginia, there will be no reason to do the work for a freer democracy, absent a daring—audacious—imagination. For without the unthinkable there is no thought, and without the unattainable there is no spirit to endeavor.

Conclusion

In this room some of us will become public servants who will make decisions, big and small, that will affect our collective well-being in a political environment. Others will similarly make decisions affecting our collective well-being though perhaps in less formal and less public ways. Regardless of how we engage with powerful institutions, we maintain capacities to interact with people who make up these institutions, and to re-shape our relationships to their power and therefore, its power. For all of us, fleeting moments of choice, feeling, and imagination will define our course toward or away from the heart of justice.

Fully experiencing the “in between-ness” of living within but striving toward the heart of justice resonates with our present struggles and our manifested dreams. Power drapes our everyday outlooks, is sensed in our bodies, and resides in the recesses of our mind, which, upon acknowledgment is an opportunity to transform. We are much more than parts of a whole, we are power, and choose to either share it generously or hoard it selfishly.  I hope by sharing my own formative experiences with power, explaining the ways in which my current work engages with law and electoral politics, and offering values that have sustained me to live more freely so that I can resist and build, that you too can envision and embody a world where we practice supreme bigheartedness and love. Because while there is an infinite supply of power, our experiences as humans during our lifetimes are remarkably finite.

"Toward the Heart of Justice" Speech Part 2

Yesterday, on March 24, I had the honor of serving as keynote speaker for the Women's Diversity Conference (note: my bio info isn't updated) at Adrian College. This conference is a rarity in a conservative, rural Michigan town, spearheaded by a few courageous female staff and faculty members whose roles at the institution and community are to inform, enlighten, and challenge. There was a subversive quality to this conference--it was cool to be connected to it. Enjoy!  

Part 2 – Engaging Law & Politics  

So, what is it like to be a young, queer, Black, southern female lawyer working in Virginia on felon disenfranchisement (which I’ll explain more about shortly)? Well, it’s slow-moving, stressful, and humbling. It requires me to constantly adapt to my environment, navigate internal and external politics, and take well-calculated risks. Most of all, it forces me to deal with broader questions like whether and how engaging with power helps the people with whom I work, and systems which we need to collectively dismantle and re-build?

I want to address this fundamental question about strategically approaching powerful institutions in two parts to provide context to my current work. The first part is dissecting a myth prevalent in social justice circles. Often, it is posed this way—is it better to work on the “inside” or “outside” the system. I don’t think that this framing is complete.  The reality is that each of us exists within powerful institutions—we buy food within a capitalist economy, we make consumer decisions manipulated by the advertisement industry, we receive news generated by corporate media sources, and most important, we know and love people who not only wholeheartedly embrace these institutions, but we are closely connected to other humans who are integral to the perpetuation of these institutions—whom I call decision-makers and power-brokers.

Many of us are influenced, and exist within, powerful institutions even if we are actively resisting their forces. Some of us are re-shaping our relationships to these institutions by making intentionally choices that tip the balance of power. Therefore, the real issues that we encounter are not whether to work “within” or “outside” the “system.” Instead, the real issues are how we should we exist “inside” powerful institutions. To which degree should these institutions affect us? In my view, the existential problem for those who want to strive toward the heart of justice is how to engage with powerful institutions without being crushed.

The second part is how we can positively build alternative institutions, commonly described as “working outside the system.” Often this part is posed this way, lodged as a grenade against those seeking justice—“if you don’t like the current system and don’t have ideas about how to change it, shut up.” First, this rationale is nothing more than a silencing tactic that is designed to stifle critique and is no more productive in addressing problems that we face. Second, I want to defend speaking out, because expressing rage, sadness, grief, and excitement is important in itself, as serving as a mirror into the institutions that we create, and being healing to those who are airing their reactions.   

It is, nonetheless, critical that we work to build alternative institutions that more responsibly deal with power. And we have to remember that these alternatives are inspired by, and informed by existing institutions of power. Here, is where the most creative, fun, imaginative, and powerful work lives. We see people in the US doing this work all of the time—the Highlander Folk School that taught literacy and provided civil disobedience training during the popular Civil Rights Movement; the South Central Farm of the late 1990s, which was at a time the largest community garden and urban farm in the country, promoting greater and better food access; the explosion of Ithaca Hours and other local currencies in the last twenty years created to encourage neighborhood economies; and even the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which put democratic consensus  governance, an alternative to majority-rule governance, on the national map. This form of resistance is the site of many interesting cultural, social, economic and political experiments, equal in importance to resisting powerful institutions.

One of my favorite radical thinkers, Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, writes extensively about transformative possibility. In a 2010 interview, his interviewer asked why he has so much optimism about the future. 

Robin says, "It doesn't come from any abstract sense of hope. Nor does it come from any sense of denial about the political realities that confront us and the extent of power and how it works. It comes out of being a historian. There are so many historical examples of seemingly impossible circumstances in which we had these revolutionary transformations." 

Without vivid imagination, no positive future would ever exist.

I outline these frameworks because, like many other people, I try to work on both levels—intentionally engaging with powerful institutions, and affirmatively building alternative institutions that maintain healthier relationships with power. Likewise, my fellowship project tries to engage and build on these levels, creating possibilities beyond the law and electoral politics.

 Virginia is one of four states that forever strips citizens’ civil rights, including their right to vote, upon a felony conviction. This type of law is commonly referred to as “felon disenfranchisement.”In 2004, at least 377,000 people were estimated to be disenfranchised, or in other words, alienated from their natural civic and political rights borne from their status as US citizens. Most notably, disenfranchisement permanently carves out a fraction of the electorate, which is disproportionately people of color, working-class and poor, disabled, and likely queer/transgender-identified.  For example, about 55% of disenfranchised citizens in Virginia are African-American, which make up less than 20% of the state population.

In Virginia, the only way for disenfranchised citizens to restore their civil rights is through individual Governor petition. Only 1,000 people each year restore their rights, on average. There are ten eligibility criteria that eliminate or discourage many people from accessing the system. In the end, after jumping every hoop and climbing every ladder, the Governor may deny an application for any reason and no reason at all, with no appeal process.

Some criticize the system as being fundamentally broken, unfair, and inhumane. Others, like brilliant legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, argue that systems such as these are relics of bygone eras that expressly intended to deny full Black citizenship. I go even further to say that Virginia’s disenfranchisement system remains because powerful interests (cut across race and class lines) cannot maintain their democratic stranglehold if it is changed. I think that it is designed to silently kill the democratic dream.

My Equal Justice Works fellowship, the Virginia Rights Restoration Project, which I’ll call VRRP, is an initiative aimed at building long-term infrastructure to dismantle the existing system. VRRP’s specific goal is to engineer new, creative strategies toward the alternative of automatic restoration upon sentence completion, which was necessary after two hard-fought but lost campaigns to pressure previous Governors into changing the law.

The overarching strategy of the project is to “open the system up.” The prediction is the more it is forced to function the way it is purported to work, the harder it is to sustain, because as the system must accommodate to provide greater access, and more people can access it, the sooner its insidious discriminatory purpose becomes clear. It will transform—the uncertainty is merely when and how.

Specifically, VRRP has a three “micro-strategies” designed to add pressure to the system. They consist of direct service and direct-action strategies, disabling strategies, and dismantling strategies, though, in actuality, it is only the accumulation of these approaches that can lead to change. At nearly the six-month mark, community members and I have distributed over a 1000 rights restoration guides, setup rights restoration clinics and clinic programs across the state including at five colleges,  begun building a grassroots strategy with state organizers, forced the state government to surrender data revealing the law’s significant impact, facilitated greater access through document translation, and challenged long-standing beliefs through legal research that the only avenues to change is by Governor executive order or constitutional amendment. There is much more to do, particularly as we are in the midst of forming a litigation strategy to better position grassroots forces. Nevertheless, VRRP’s intention is to form a praxis, on which to aggressively engage the law and politics in our favor.

In a more concrete sense these strategies mean that I receive a lot of phone calls from people who need help, which I happily answer. I end up in various law libraries throughout the Commonwealth, digging through microfiche, which is fascinating.  I find myself facilitating webinar trainings on Saturdays, which I gladly do. And I come up with a dozen ideas about things to try each week, of which one might be worth looking into.

Sometimes I find myself doing unexpected things. For example, I’ve been assisting a person named Tony Suggs with a pardon application for several months. A pardon is a request to the Governor to officially “forgive” a person for a crime or criminal history. Tony had his rights restored in 2006, and helped my organization during our previous campaign. Now he hopes to work in the local school system as a coach to fulfill his passion to mentor young people headed toward the criminal system. Though a pardon far from guarantees that he can overcome the school system’s rigid rules about hiring people with felony convictions, it will greatly increase his chances.

Tony’s story is unique and the kind that receive “official forgiveness” from the state. He suffered from severe physical and sexual abuse as a young child. At age 10, his parents abandoned him and his younger brother in the family home, forcing them to go hungry. His father eventually put him to work packaging his dope, and soon he founded himself in the street life. But rather than being an anonymous addict, he evidently was a boxing prodigy. He became the top ranked boxer in the world (in his weight class) and favored to win Gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Throughout his ascent, he struggled to fight his addiction, and lost control upon losing his first child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He was a qualifying match away when he was re-arrested for probation violation, after he failed the mandatory drug test. In Tony’s mind, he lost everything. He voluntarily entered rehab after his jail stint, got clean, addressed his emotional pain with support groups and therapy, and lives very differently. For over twenty years he has been a devoted father of Little Anthony, surrogate father to his brother’s six children, an active church member, and community mentor. It has been important for me to learn Tony’s story, and work with him on his petition. Although I never intended to complete pardon petitions through VRRP, its personal meaning to Tony is a radically political act.     

But let’s take a step back for a moment to examine law as a powerful institution. Can the law really help disenfranchised citizens? [Why?] An underlying assumption of my fellowship project is that it can, yet it is an assumption that I question every day. Ultimately I believe, as many radical lawyers do, that the law can only play a limited role in its own self-correction.

Law, as an institution, is a difficult place to engage with power for numerous reasons. As legal scholar and activist, Dean Spade, Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law, explains how social movements are affected by their over-reliance on legal institutions, his essay, “For Those Considering LawSchool”:

“Most legal work maintains systems of maldistribution, it does not transform

them…Very often, legal change that emerges in these moments heavily compromises the demands of grassroots movements in ways that end up providing symbolic victory and possibly a small amount of material change to the least vulnerable of the group who the demands were about, but leave most people the same or worse off. US law is fundamentally structured to establish and uphold settler colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism---the legal system will not dismantle these things. The idea that people who want to make change will make the biggest impact by becoming lawyers and bringing precedent-setting lawsuits needs to be released in the face of what movement history reveals.  Once you let go of that idea, you can start to think about what role lawyers should or could have in social movements and evaluate whether you see yourself in those roles.”

Dean Spade is largely responding to decades of landmark civil right victories for LGBT people. For example, even as laws like the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 are enacted, LGBT and queer violence continues to be as ruthless as ever, particularly for queer/trans, working-class and poor people of color who are already systemic targets of institutional abuse by police, courts, and prisons. Law doesn’t solve these problems but can bolster the positions of broad-based movements that, as Dean Spade believes is historically effective, of making demands that exceed the law. His advice to understand our roles as people engaging with law-making institutions extends not only to prospective law students but to any person wishing to enter electoral politics.

Within the institution of law lies perhaps the most controversial institution at the moment: electoral politics.  The optics of electoral politics may seem counterintuitive to justice-seekers because it is about maintaining power with, and over others, without full acknowledgement that it is the very purpose of electoral politics. It can also be among the more challenging institutions to engage with as a person committed to collective justice because it is about individual, self-preservation of that power. It can prove difficult to align collective values with a desire to maintain a powerful position, from which a person can wield influence on the local, state, or national levels. I admire women and anyone else carefully trying to achieve this balance.

These tensions come up in VRRP. This year, for the first time, a white Republican lawmaker introduced an automatic rights restoration bill. I was excited because his interest in the issue changed the politics around a proposal that historically starts each year dead in the water. This lawmaker introduced a narrow proposal that would automatically restore voting rights for so-called non-violent offenders because, based on his calculations, it was the most politically palpable.  Before I learned about his bill I had “shopped” around the idea to other lawmakers about separating the two civil rights stripped by state law into separate bills. My rationale is if voting rights in the hot-button issue that stalled proposals year after year, then, why not sever the issues disenfranchised people could at least restore some of their rights, if passed. Sound reasonable? This was apparently an exceptionally bad idea. I was told that separating the issues would exhaust the limited political capital that existed for lawmakers to consider this issue. In other words, lawmakers would grow tired of making laws. The worst part was it was good advice, even though the bill died in subcommittee.

As a long-time legislative observer and one-time state lobbyist, I’ve seen legislators wishing to maintain a delicate balance between their self-preservation to maintain power and forceful advocacy to represent their beliefs. The entrenched political challenge of our time may be this: how do you peacefully and effectively govern diverse communities, states, and nations with others who hold fundamentally different values?

On one hand, there is the Barack Obama philosophy, which consists of forging consensus by finding common ground. On the other hand, there is Tea Party philosophy, which consists of abandoning all sense of self-preservation to govern according to rigid but sincerely-held principles. These philosophies are not left versus right—they are not even purely are purely ideological. I think that neither philosophy reflects the true nature of the problem because it is distorted by choices within a “winner-take-all” two-party system.

I believe that the main source of our present-day political tensions is between those who want to invest and nurture public institutions and those who want to demolish and undermine them. Developing a political agenda around protecting public institutions and organizing electoral support around this guiding principle has the potential to disrupt the prevailing status quo.   

My only other insight comes from popular education teacher and theorist, Paulo Freire, explained in his leftist classic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that the cure to oppression is our own humanity. The heart of justice resides within our institutions: people. If we humanize our politics, we have hope for better government. Let me be clear. Humanizing politics is more than civil discourse. We see, after all, how collegial lawmakers respectfully cooperate to pass devastating laws that hurt other people and our natural environment, often in the name of economic prosperity. These politics are a false choice. The choice to humanize politics, in my mind, means measuring your actions against your values to sustain our collective well-being. These are moral struggles, which are entirely burdensome to take on for public scrutiny, but are utmost essential.

People who not only engage with, but enter into, electoral politics must be vigilant in noticing to the degree which they are being changed by the politics and politics are changing them. What are my values? Do these values promote collective well-being? Do I feel as if I have some control? Is this the most meaningful contribution to the world that I can make? These are questions that I ordinarily ask as a lawyer and political player, working in one of the most conservative states in the country. I think any person intentionally engaging in law and politics must worry about the direction in which she is moving—toward her heart of justice, or more distant.

"Toward the Heart of Justice" Speech Part 1

Yesterday, on March 24, I had the honor of serving as keynote speaker for the Women's Diversity Conference (note: my bio info isn't updated) at Adrian College. This conference is a rarity in a conservative, rural Michigan town, spearheaded by a few courageous female staff and faculty members whose roles at the institution and community are to inform, enlighten, and challenge. There was a subversive quality to this conference--it was cool to be connected to it. Enjoy!  

Introduction

Let me begin by thanking Cari Massey, Idali Feliciano, Nathan Goetting, and the Women Studies and Multicultural Programs Office for allowing me to speak today. I appreciated the time it afforded me to reflect, and I feel that it is an incredible opportunity to share these reflections with like-spirited people. I am very grateful to have witnesses on this journey of mine.  

During our brief time I want to share some reflection about power. I chose this topic because I believe it aligns with this year’s conference theme of encouraging and preparing women to run for public office. I also believe that it fits within the conference’s tradition of bringing women together to discuss our diverse histories and visions, which I am proud to recognize enters its fifth year.

Power is at the center of all spheres of life. It is the force that I constantly investigate at all levels of my own life. And it is a quality that I experiment with, to learn our abilities to transform it toward the heart of justice.  In my experience with powerful institutions, the test is to learn who and what can change the most toward the heart of justice, or in many more cases, how can we become less distant from it? If we cannot permanently reside in the heart of justice, we live and strive in between where we presently are and where we dream of being.  It is my experience occupying the “in between” space—of living between but striving toward justice—that I know very well, and that I wish to share with you in my brief remarks.

I have organized my reflections in three parts. First, I want to share some formative experiences in my life that have led me to this point where I am speaking with all of you. Second, I want share about my current experience as a community-lawyer working in Virginia with disenfranchised people, as it relates to engaging powerful institutions—law and politics. Third, I want to share about three foundational values that have sustained me while living “in between” but striving toward the heart of justice: embracing vulnerability, experiencing wholeness, and cultivating radical imagination. Finally, I want to leave time for a post-remark discussion with y’all. 

Part 1 – Formative Experiences

I want to begin by telling you about formative experiences that help explain the ways in which my consciousness around power has been shaped. 

Like many of us I learned about power in my early life. I was born in Washington DC but lived with my great grandmother, great aunts, and second cousins in Columbus, Georgia for my first six months, as a favor to my mother. Though it broke my mom’s heart to separate from her first born, she later related to me that she had little choice after she left an abusive home, lived in her car, worked three jobs, and had two babysitters who threatened to take me from her. Before I was a year old I had witnessed at least four expressions of power: 1) my mother’s tenacity to survive, 2) her deep instinct to protect her child, 3) various social and economic conditions that diminished her choices, and 4) the reenactment of a devastating history of forced separation between Black mothers and their children.

I was directly confronted with racism for the first time soon after returning to my mom’s care, during which time she met my father and was pregnant with my little brother.  Our DC-family uprooted to Billings, Montana, for my father’s new work assignment, which was still Klan country during the late 80s and early 90s.

A couple of months into kindergarten I gathered the courage to ask another little girl why she always moved when I sat next to her for story-time. Her explanation was surprisingly simple: she didn’t want to sit next to me because I was a nigger. I was stunned and horrified. I immediately understood the power contained in this word because more than her act of uttering the word, I felt the contempt in her voice, which sprang from her lips like venom from a snake. At the same time, as a pensive five-year old I was equally confused—what did this have to do with story-time? Where did she learn that word? Did other children feel that way? What I understood the least was why this girl—herself as Latina—harbored such strong feelings about me?

Of course, after my mom heard about my day at school she fulfilled every angry Black woman stereotype. My parents went on to re-activate the town’s NAACP, appear in local newspapers about our experience with racism in Billings, and organize a diversity parade with indigenous, Latino, and other Black families. As many resistance stories go, my parents fought hard but were forced back to DC. We moved cross-country to Centreville, Virginia, an affluent suburb outside of DC, where my parents felt that if their children had to deal with racism, my brother and I could at least earn a good education in one of the well-regarded school districts in the country.

My beginnings in Centreville were more similar to Billings than not. While, I had fewer overt encounters with racism, I quickly detected the serious contradictions of privileged suburban life as an outsider.

I also held profound contradictions in my life at school and away from school. For example, in second grade, I waged a playground campaign so that I could play basketball with the boys who didn’t want me to play for no other reason than that I was a girl. I eventually won, beat many of them, and gained enough respect that they would become disappointed when I didn’t play, but it would become one of many battles to gain visibility. 

Away from school, I was self-aware that I was really drawn to girls, especially ones in flower dresses, in ways that most other girls were apparently not. More present with me, however, was being responsible for myself, my brother, and other little children on our block. I grappled with anxiety and shame as my parents struggled with addiction, despite our best efforts to maintain nothing-wrong, middle class front. At the same time, I remember similar plights of other neighborhood children, who, like all those who live with adults and therefore deal with adult problems, were experiencing hard things—from severe physical, sexual and emotional abuse to economic insecurity. Through all of these experiences, I came to appreciate who we are as humans—sympathetic, complex, and resilient.

My high school years were awkward. I transitioned from being a serious, multi-sport athlete to a card-carrying geek. I had loved sports because in playing I learned how to healthily exist within a team. However, I quit my primary sport, soccer, just before junior Olympic qualification trials, in protest of the team’s hyper-competitive culture. With much more time on my hands I accidentally found politics.

A few other geeky friends and I founded our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance with the naïve hope that we could have a space to identify other gay students and essentially talk about gay television shows. Apparently, according to numerous angry parents, we started the club to talk about our sexual fetishes and convert other confused teenagers into our sex cult. That would have been more fun. A handful of us stood up against fierce parental opposition, threats of violence, vicious rumors about inappropriate relationships with faculty members, and a Fellowship of Christian Athlete campaign to end our club. In the end, the GSA survived, and still exists, but I was tired of Centreville.  

I left as soon as I could to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Once I left, I understood both the attractive and ugly sides of privilege. On one hand, Centreville instilled an upper middle-class culture in me that has proved invaluable in giving me access to, and allowing me how to navigate powerful institutions. Yet, acquiring these qualities came at a high cost because I felt throughout my life that I was deeply misunderstood, harshly judged, and violently reacted to, not merely because I was an outsider, but because I was a non-conformist. I learned that genuine non-conformity is dangerous to dominant culture and institutions because it contains the power to uncover their fragility. Importantly, I found language to describe these experiences in college. There were even entire disciplines dedicated to studying these social forces that shaped my life for eighteen years. Classes in sociology, history, women and black studies, anthropology, and other programs impressed onto me a memorable theme: institutions exhibited as much power as we, as individuals, invest into them.

I also discovered my own intellect in college. It was not affirmative action that made me feel inferior to my rich, white peers—it was the consistent subtly biased messages that I was smart, but never the smartest, that I wrote well but never the best, that I was thoughtful but never the sharpest. At William & Mary, I found incredible female mentors who affirmed my abilities to read, write, and think. Not only did they reinforce that my abilities were among the best, but they challenged me to shed the lie to be afraid of my own power, which I had been imperceptibly taught. Their confidence in me fostered an understanding that I was simply seeing things and speaking in ways that were unfamiliar in my old environment. I finally developed a trust that my future could be driven by my own power, not merely depend on others’ shortcomings. 

At the same time that I was experiencing my own quiet transformation at school, I was introduced to community organizing as a means for collective transformation. I connected with a multi-issue organizing group, called Virginia Organizing Project, during my second year. I joined a statewide racial profiling campaign, local affordable housing campaign, and spent a summer organizing a new chapter for the group before I graduated. The model of undergoing a strategic group process to expose what is hurting a community, what will help, and create a long-term plan to address the harm is undeniably powerful. Issue campaign organizing transformed my beliefs about the origins of political change and scale of movement-building. I went on to become a staff organizer with Virginia Organizing Project (now Virginia Organizing) for a year after college.

My transition out of college was a seminal period. My politics evolved as I came to know different styles of organizing—community-building organizing and healing justice organizing—through a group called Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a queer liberationist group based in Atlanta, GA. I love SONG because they were the first organization to tell me that queers and other outsiders should stay and claim their homes in the South. And in this group, I found a home, where I did not have to privilege parts of myself to participate or compete for precious political space and resources. A place where laughing, eating, and forming deep relationships was the political work.

Discovering SONG and its sister organizations inspired an inner-revolution within myself, leading me to loudly resign from a board position at Virginia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocacy group, after a protracted battle over racism, trans-phobia, and wealth elitism within the organization. Interestingly, the board with which I separated myself was full of rich lawyers. I can partially credit them with my decision to attend law school, because I saw no reason why people like me and those close to me should not share the same levels of power as these other board members. So, I spent months emotionally and intellectually preparing to attend law school, and entered American University Washington College of Law in 2008.

Before moving on to share about my fellowship, I want to briefly mention two non-political events that transformed me before law school. First, I came to know Terrell Jackson through a pen-pal program, who was an amazing young man who was sentenced to death-row. We eventually called each other “brother” and “sister” after four years of being in each other’s lives. He was murdered by the state of Virginia in August 2011. Second, I discovered meditation, then Buddhism, which is teaching me about impermanence—the inevitability of separation; compassion—that which gives us the capacity to transform; and selflessness—revealing the self-imposition and self-censorship that reinforce the illusion that our interconnectedness is not real. These developments, and my law school experience, led to my political radicalization and current practice as a radical lawyer.

I share all of these experiences to demonstrate that they are not wholly personal. I hope that there was resonance with, or reactions that arose, based on your own experiences. I also intended for them to demonstrate our intricate, simultaneous relationships with power. Power is not a foreign force that controls us—it is a pervasive site of struggle that we control as people. 

Struggle with my Own Hilarity

I actually think that I am a very funny person. But, apparently, the joke is on me because when I ask my friends to list ten attributes that describe me, I can almost guarantee that my "witty, quirky sense of humor" is not one of them.

For a long time I assumed that closeted humor was related to the fact that I do a lot of serious things, therefore, I was seen as a very serious person. Parts of me definitely are. Identity politics & organizing are perceived as militaristically serious, especially among the folks who are engulfed in them, which may explain why I never was entirely home in either of those worlds (I'm generalizing, of course). Other parts of me though are very anti-serious. People who know me best never flinch when I say out loud that least of all I take myself seriously.

I'm learning a little more about this disconnect between my perceived seriousness and self-perception as the funniest person on Earth through my work with asterisk*. asterisk* is a project started by a friend of mine, which I've gotten involved in early on, that satirizes so-called "women's magazines" by creating a spoof one. (Launch party this Saturday, 3/3 at Local 16, 7pm, by the way.) I have helped with logistics, but my main role has been looking at articles, and writing a couple too. At last, I found myself at a coffee shop not writing law review articles about new world order (please, let me be with this even though some of y'all know that I was doing that tonight). The point was it felt good to try to be publicly funny. Or rather, self-indulge in my own humor and letting other people see it.

This weird thing--this warped image of myself when I look into the "hilarity" mirror--is really my own self-censorship. I do it a lot on an unconscious level. And it's much beyond not saying the funny things in my end; it even traces to my movement--where I go & when--and other entrenched patterns that I develop as a routine-driven Taurus. I'm my best self, as in, I like myself best when I can root out the inner-filters, and let it all flow out. I hope to be perceived as a funnier person because I am. asterisk* might be a vehicle for practicing against self-censorship.