Hi,
Today’s newsletter will be covering four separate topics:
1) Our director Paul Cienfuegos’ regular essay to our 4,000 subscribers;
2) An invitation to become a beloved volunteer - scroll down to see our enticing list of opportunities! Or click
HERE;
3) An invitation to consider joining our working Board of Directors - scroll down for details;
4) The latest news and analysis about the Community Rights Movement.
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We’re sending out our latest newsletter during
one of the most extraordinary moments in our nation’s history
. I honestly thought the Covid crisis facing our world was the big immediate-term emergency that we were now going to have to collectively face as a species for at least the next few years, changing almost everything at breakneck speed, no matter where we lived on the planet. But no! There was more!
Virtually overnight, the public has gone from massive quarantine to some of the largest US and global demonstrations in world history, as white people are finally waking up en masse to what our black brothers and sisters have been experiencing for more than 400 years. For so many of us, it was as if their peril was hidden in plain sight. Which of course it wasn’t.
I and other white-identifying folks were overwhelmingly just not paying attention, seeing racism as just another serious single-issue crisis piled on top of all of the myriad of other serious single-issue crises.
Our white privilege shielded us in ways we were to a large degree entirely unaware of. There is no excuse for this at all. But it’s still true.
I have been joining Portland, Oregon’s extraordinary and massive still nightly marches and rallies a couple of times per week. With each day, the Black Lives Matter local group -
Rose City Justice: A Civil Rights Collective
- has led with ever-growing confidence and wisdom. Each night, we get to hear local family members share how police violence led to their loved ones' deaths. The stories are always heartbreaking and deeply moving.
The Portland Police Dept is one of many large city police agencies under Justice Dept oversight, due to a long history of violent policing, although it’s not clear whether this has had the desired effect. And it has continued to operate in a disgraceful manner, night after night, reacting with great violence to our anti-police-violence demonstrations.
In more recent nightly marches, for every block or so of marchers, there’s a pickup truck with big speakers mounted on top. Every so often, the truck will stop, and we’ll stop behind it. And then, in the middle of the street, there will be a teach-in of some sort for 10 or 20 minutes. Or songs to sing together. And then we’ll start marching again. Each truck leads its own block-long crowd of mostly young and overwhelmingly white allies, hungry to become better informed and more active in the struggle to finally begin to dismantle white supremacy. And
what a joy it has been for me - as someone who has devoted most of my life to social change work - to witness tens of thousands of young people now leading the rest of us!
And these marches are already having dramatic impact on law-makers. The most dramatic win took place in Minneapolis on June 12th when their city council voted unanimously (12-0!) to pass a "
Resolution declaring the intent to create a transformative new model for cultivating safety in our city
." To in effect dismantle the entire Minneapolis Police Dept, and rebuild from scratch with the focus on community safety. I hope you will take a few minutes to read the entire resolution
HERE
and the city's press release
HERE
. And then contemplate how you could mobilize people in your own community to insist that your local elected officials pass something similar and soon!
Is there a unique role for the Community Rights movement to play in this extraordinary moment
- to offer our expertise and passion most impactfully? As you can imagine, I think about this all the time! The specific thing that we offer is help to local community groups to conceptualize and then to organize local campaigns that launch widespread community support for passing locally enforceable Community Rights ordinances (laws).
Twenty-six states
allow residents to run their own ballot initiative campaigns (at the state and/or local level) to make law directly via public votes. Oregon is one of those lucky states. In the other 24 states, your only option is to convince your local elected officials to pass the laws you want.
And yet here is an example of where multi-racial mass action in the streets may very well be sufficient - at least initially - to force local governments to commit to fundamental structural change in how policing happens
. If mass social movement can achieve the dismantling of entire police infrastructures, could it also achieve the dismantling of the structures of law that ensure that large corporations get to control virtually all aspects of our society? Of course it could!
But as we can now see more clearly from these past weeks, it will take sustained commitment from thousands of us working together, across race, class, and ideology.
I think two-time Super Bowl champion
Malcolm Jenkins
hit the nail on the head when he told Trevor Noah a few nights ago,
“We’re not willing to just inch forward with small reforms. I think everybody’s ready for true systemic change in not only what we do in our policing, but what we do in our criminal justice system, what we do with education, and even the health care system. And so I think it’s important for us to continue to push that envelope, because right now is the most enthusiasm I’ve seen in the movement for a long time.”
We at CRUS couldn’t agree more!
Over the next few months, I will be putting forward numerous ideas for local Community Rights ordinance campaigns, but just to get the ball rolling, here are two ideas for local laws that could be drafted and campaigned for where YOU live, starting ASAP:
• A local ban on the use of
Qualified Immunity
by your local Police Dept. This ordinance would nullify state or federal authority to ban local qualified immunity law-making. (You can sign a petition today to end qualified immunity for cops
HERE
. But online petitions such as this one will have minimal impact until much bolder actions take place - most likely starting locally and building up.)
• A local Housing Bill of Rights that would offer new locally enforceable protections to three classes of people: the houseless, endangered renters, and homeowners who are being fraudulently thrown out of their homes by dishonest banks. The pandemic is about to cause Depression-era homelessness. We need to mobilize quickly on this one.
• And what about the majority of small businesses that will likely never open their doors again because of the pandemic, even further consolidating corporate control of business properties? How can We The People tackle this crisis locally?
We would love to hear YOUR ideas for local law-making. Ideas that have the potential to fundamentally alter the playing field in order to give We The People much more decision-making authority over laws and budgeting. Especially specific ideas that would contribute towards the structural changes we so desperately need in this country to finally begin to dismantle institutionalized white supremacy - and corporate rule - once and for all.
Allow your mind to break free from the colonizer conditioning that we all swim in. Think big. Think bold.
Talk to us
!
Until next month,
Paul Cienfuegos
