In June,
the Springfield Immigrant Advocacy Network finished its last 2025 Healing
Illinois funded antiracism trainings –this is an initiative of the Illinois Department of Human Services in partnership with The Field Foundation of Illinois
and United Way of Central Illinois. Our workshops focused on learning how to identify
and interrupt anti-Black, anti-Immigrant prejudice, bias, and policies,
and how to build critical mass and inclusive civic participation.
SIAN’s desire
was to engage participants in a transformative praxis that centered liberation
and built inclusive communities. A key workshop component was learning how
to recognize the manifestations of racism in our work and our organizations
as well as ways to mitigate harm and deliberately provide equitable
services. We also discussed the current harmful policies that affect Black
and immigrant communities, and we presented inclusive models to encourage
multicultural, intersectional participation and organizing. This was a six-hour
training session based on a teaching pedagogy that combined presenting, group
work, trauma-informed practices for emotional regulation during challenging
modules, building community through table discussion and analysis, tools for
democratic organizing, resource sharing and an excellent lunch.
The
deliberate choices my partner and I made to design this specific curriculum looked
at three major truths:
·
History
is traditionally taught in school through curricula that excludes the stories, experiences,
history and major achievements of Black, people of color and immigrant
communities;
·
History
is taught mostly by the dominant group. White instructors have traditionally held
many history teaching positions in high schools –they get to be represented in curricula,
in the facts and all aspect of the materials taught, thus, history curricula
centers whiteness;
·
Our
antiracism training centers the achievements and lived experiences of Black, brown, and immigrant communities, along with an analysis and critique of the
structural, systemic, and institutionalized tools utilized for their persistent
oppression, i.e: legal, economic, citizenship and naturalization, social
services, educational, science and medicine, housing, banking and political
systems are covered, among others.
Along with
the realization that teaching this curriculum only once a year is not enough,
and consistent funding is needed for this brilliant program to be taught at
least monthly, the following are the main lessons learned from SIAN’s
antiracism and anti-xenophobia workshops:
·
Teaching
antiracism is not only a practice of freedom (and we are here committed to the
liberation of all oppression), it is also a crucial organizing tool.
·
Antiracism
is a praxis and commitment for life. It is a verb, not an adjective.
·
Critical
mass doesn’t come from a sole intellectual engagement, an academic exercise, or
from learning things from a fact-only approach. Honoring and learning from peoples’
lived experiences, shared humanity, from our devastating losses as well as our
most heart-warming triumphs and acts of hope and resilience, change minds and
hearts. And when this happens, we must also organize.
·
We do not center or teach the
history of Black, brown and immigrant communities often enough and it must be
taught. Throughout history, we see that at times of great social change when
grave moral injuries are being inflicted, communities and people have the
courage to engage in efforts of political resistance and organizing work.
What have
been our major teaching and learning realizations? Here are the most important
learnings we want to promote:
·
When
working for any justice, equity and anti-oppression causes, we must learn to
follow the leadership of people of color, and, especially, the leadership of
Black and women of color who lead all our luchas.
·
In
the same way that we teach and learn in community, we need to also engage in dreaming and imagining together. We can’t built what we have not imagined. A
different paradigm, approach, methodology, and system is possible if we put our
creativity and our entrepreneurship to work from places we have never even
thought possible. Community imagining and dreaming is essential.
·
Impact
analysis has to drive the work that our community organizing does: malice is
not required for bad outcomes, ill intent and poor results. Intentions are
usually flawed when the impact analysis is absent at the organizing table. Who
is not at this table?
·
For
success, cohesion, and just relations, our organizing partnerships must be multicultural
and multiracial: our diverse leaders successfully build through tables that are
as representative and inclusive as the people who build them. If not, the
potential for causing harm is too high.
As bell
hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, where she expressed a desire to teach without reinforcing systems of domination,
and viewed her commitment to engaged pedagogy as a form of political activism,
we too believe in the same lessons. As hooks would say, “The classroom,
with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility… to educate as the
practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn.”
I leave
you here with one of the best models to organize, lead movements, and build in
community that the environmental movement has gifted to us: the 1996 Jemez
Principles for Democratic Organizing,
which centers on #1 Be Inclusive, 2# Emphasis on Bottom-Up Organizing, #3 Let
People Speak for Themselves, #4 Work Together in Solidarity and Mutuality, #5
Build Just Relations Among Ourselves, and 6# Commitment to Self-Transformation.
We are happy
to engage in conversation about this wise organizing model. Reach out! Our
communities deserve it.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2025.
