Dialogue Description:

In our next dialogue coming up in July, we are excited to continue and evolve the discussion from June (but you are welcome to come if you were not at that dialogue!) that looked at our visions for the abolition of racism, white supremacy, sexism, and heterosexism, by looking next at WHO is visioning the world into being. As artists, writers, activists, movie directors, narrative and meme spreaders, designers and communications professionals share potential future visions that have a powerful impact on what futures are created, we want to ask, who are these people? How has their imaginations been enclosed by capitalism or mediated by white privilege and gender oppression? When we state and live towards our visions – how does internalized oppression and privilege shape those visions? What world could we create if we were “unbound”? What if we listened to and acted on the visions of marginalized and frontline communities instead of our own?

Sound interesting to you? Here are some readings to get you inspired and maybe angry in preparation for our dialogue:  A Vision of the Future from those likely to invent it, contrasted with Zapatista visions of the future. At the recent Allied Media Conference that some of us attended, there was an amazing presentation by Octavia’s Brood, a collection of radical science fiction women of color, in which they argued “all organizing is science fiction: how else can we imagine a world without prisons, for example?”

Then here are some really interesting reads that give an overview of the politics of imagination and visioning: Crisis of Imagination, Crisis of Power, and Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination.

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

Introductions and what drew you to this dialogue:

Excited to learn, thinking about how privilege numbs rage

See what comes up from this dialogue

Expectations for what change is, what change can be expected, the organization I’m a part of is crumbling, and is maybe crumbling because I pushed too hard, trying to build anti-capitalist future, is it actually my role to be pushing for this change in this community?, Inspired by the Zapatista movement – stop with the politics of demand and start living as if we have won

What are the ways I’ve become tame/domesticated in some places, especially in thinking about solidarity and risk, thinking about a recent teaching experience, facing institutional risk, how to develop courage to be less domesticated to be in solidarity, i.e palestine

Really feel my domestication, the ways I act in accordance with capitalism to avoid consequences, feel torn between solidarity with the impacted communities I work with (who just want me to show up to work) and with more politicized impacted communities (who want to break down the buffer zone), what is out there that I can’t even see/hear/imagine

Feeling multiple scales of the ways I have been enclosed, feeling anxiety, need for success, recognizing protestant work ethic and need to work, recognizing that we are in the age of anxiety, precocity and surveillance, feel the need to perform my life, internalization of the need to perform my life, police myself, thinking about the limits of my imagination, watched American Revolutionary (Grace Lee Boggs), can imagine living in a time in which revolution felt imminent, accepting what you can’t know and can’t imagine, breaking out of a fog, numbed rage

Feel held back from working on structural issues and have been working on internal self, want support around leadership, think about past leaders who worked with respect rather than revenge, happens on all levels – internally, interpersonally and structurally, noticing how the internalized sense of ownership and propriety affects my relationship with the person I live with – she has to feel the same respect from me that I want to get from her, Mandela said “I am still angry, but I know that if I continue to operate out of my anger, then I am still imprisoned,” courage feels easier from a place of non-reactivity, how do I live with an undefended heart in a world that is so defended?

Shortly after 9/11, I had a dream about a future run solely by Bush/Cheney politics – all art/expression was outlawed and I worked with kids and we found a portal that could take us anywhere we imagined – we ended up in a giant walmart filled with candy corn – because they had lived up in this limited world and could not imagine anything else/more, the question of how capitalism encloses our imaginations feels real, because we are in an era in which we can’t imagine a world much better than the one we live in, really respect SciFi writers who are strategically expanding our collective imaginations, yet the futures that we are being shown in media are of despair and devastation with non-revolutionary endings, currently developing curriculum for a majority white liberal middle-age climate change organization – exciting, but it’s concerning to me what are the limits of their imagination based on their lifestyles and how will that affect their vision

Deepest despair/hopelessness for me right now is issues around Israel/Palestine, I know that the solution to that requires us to imagine something beyond the limits what we think is possible, and how can we have interpersonal dialogue that doesn’t shut people down, feels scary, we have to imagine a reality that has yet to exist

Appreciate this space, I feel like I’m not doing meaningful work, seems like we have evolved into non-profits doing charity/fake solidarity work, excited to envision a future where that no longer exists (charity, etc)

Looking at our narratives

Returning to theme of privilege as numbing

Hunger Games as interesting revolutionary narrative that broke through into mainstream with this stunning image of poverty/hunger vs privilege/never hungry – but many consumed this story without recognizing the subtext

Feeling like I had been window shopping through life, my privilege was telling me stories about how I was safe (i.e. I wouldn’t be killed traveling abroad) because my life was “meaningful”

Max Haven – Crisis of Imagination article – the enclosure of our imaginations is not individual, it’s collective – therefore re-visioning also needs to be collective

Visioning Exercise

Everyone has a home, often communal, intergenerational, simple

Home more because working less, people volunteer for community needs

Alternative energy – biking, solar

Everything slower

Some urban, some rural, some in deserted spaces, but usually food sources close

Humans not centered and/or connected to land more

No profit and/or no money and/or no waste

People comfortable with each other, curious, generous, interdependent

More dance, music

“Outrageous things” included: no rent, no wages, no stock market, everyone trades jobs and does every kind of work, no humans, no wars, no arms trades

What felt limiting or how did our socializations affect our visions?

A world without violence and militarization felt abstract because of privilege of not living in war-torn land

My vision felt like a gentrifying hipster Brooklyn because of where I come from – some might find it boring because a lot is missing

Experience of being in spaces of other cultures celebrating influenced what I could imagine as possible, felt integrated

In my world, there was a lot of collective “process” because of my positive experiences in these spaces – to what extent is that personal or gendered?

Felt difficult for me to do the visualization because I had a hard time thinking about the end, because we never get to the end, it’s all about the process, I felt pulled to the reality of what does it mean to be change agents – threatening to power. Would love to do the visioning again about the process of change

Thinking about the process as an important part of the vision, if I want all my neighbors t band together and stop paying rent, I have to get to know them and forgive them their roles in gentrification/capitalism to reduce isolation

Imagining a world without violence felt gendered, imagining a world in which there was no wealth but everyone had a home – feels like a white vision because it requires everyone to have what I have without me giving anything up (entitlement) and everyone with more than me (wealth) giving that up

Sense of utopia feels uncomfortable – grew up in activist family and part of the struggle felt unsettling

Afraid that the anger/impulses of resistance feed the system through relying on it as a target of anger/revolution

Didn’t address what it would look like to work in support of visions of frontline/more heavily exploited communities, though there are elements of that within our visions.

Plug: This coming Monday on 91.7 KALW 7-8pm About climate justice locally – 3 speakers looking at local living economies, Our Power Campaign, and community democracy