BLACK LIVES MATTER DC
THEORY OF CHANGE

(link with grapics https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Om6DWUPnMDbpiGuYSDbFKSHsylOz8g8gbxxwOsan4p4/edit?usp=sharing)

Our shared intention as a collective is to free Black people from every system of oppression that binds us and in so doing bring about collective liberation. This means creating an economy that puts people over profits, eliminating the state’s control of our bodies and minds, removing the lies that whiteness=goodness and blackness=evil, moving past confining ideas of gender and sexuality and building a world in which femme folks are supported and free. This means overthrowing capitalism, dismantling white supremacy, abolishing the state, smashing the patriarchy and removing systems of alienation and lovelessness from our society.

We realize that the only way to do that is through parallel processes of evolution and revolution ([r]evolution). We understand that a revolution can take many forms but it is essentially a people taking responsibility and power over their own lives and dismantling any system that prevents them from wielding that power. Evolution is an on-going process of adaption and growth in which we change the ways we relate to ourselves [mind-body-spirit], each other [transforming our relations] and the world [living in alignment with the universe]. We also understand that while evolution is constant and on-going, revolutions take careful preparation, years of organizing, a commitment to personal transformation and mass spontaneous unrest to come together. Therefore we seek to prepare our Black and allied communities for a [r]evolution that will birth a peaceful, just, and equitable society with political, economic, cultural, sexual and spiritual democracy and self-determination.

BLM DC sees its unique role in preparing DC for the [R]Evolution by erecting movement infrastructure, healing ourselves and our community, building more active support for Black liberation while cultivating a culture of strategic collective action, & creating critical connections between activists, organizers, artists and community leaders while inventing and distributing tools for building the world we want. 

We believe that the keys to preparing for [r]evolution can be expressed in two equations. The first equations is Collective Strategic Action + Continual Healing & Self Actualization + Consistent Spaces for Grounding in Black Joy.

This equation is simple but powerful and is the core of our programing. We believe we must act together to get free. We must realize who we truly are and what we were put on earth to do in order to work together effectively. We must center joy to remember why we fight and remind to head towards the light. Together, we believe these actions build liberation.

 We believe that liberation is state of wholeness in which we are nurtured, satisfied and loved. It is both a noun meaning a place or world we are building and an adjective describing a state of wholeness, satisfaction and being loved as you need to be loved. We believe that we can access liberation at any moment and that liberating ourselves means building a world in which we are liberated at every moment and with every breath.  Liberation is when the electric slide comes on at a family reunion and we all forget our petty beefs, the bills that we have to pay and concerns about tomorrow and groove to the beat with our loved ones. It is a feeling of flow. It is the feeling of being held by a community and supported while supporting others. It is the feeling of being truly and deeply loved.

There are things: work schedules, encounters with the police, rent payments, medical bills, stress and disrespect at work, childhood trauma, lies that other people say about us that we come to believe, sexual assault in our communities, hunger, lead in our water etc that prevents us from feeling liberated at every moment. Thus, we organize to remove those external obstacles, we center healing to remove those internal obstacles and ground ourselves in joy to remind us why we fight while sustaining us in the struggle.

The other side of this equation is one we have borrowed from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. It is a similar equation of Building + Blocking + Being.

Build: An analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives.

Examples: freedom schools, restorative justice, cooperative economics, autonomous spaces, liberated zones, solidarity economics, consciousness building groups, cop watch, intentional communities, time banks,

BLM Programs that Build: M4BL Steering Committee, Black Organizer Dinner, Emotional Emancipation Circles, #KeepDC4ME, Black Joy Sunday, Re-Envisioning Masculinity Workshops

Block: Actions to slow damage to beings, communities and the earth itself

Examples: blockades, whistle-blowing, survival programs, boycotts, lobbying/protesting, work-stoppages/strikes. Withholding tacit consent to our oppression in ways that make the wound visible.

BLM Programs that Block: #KeepDC4ME actions [occupations, highway shut downs, disruptions etc], Non-Profit Accountability Campaigns, Solidaritrees Actions, Weeks of Action.

Be: The reason that we Block and Build. Shifts in consciousness and new paradigms that are embodied individually and collectively before, after and during blocking and building actions in order to increase sustainability, effectiveness and trans-formative pre-figurative capabilities [the ability to bring bits of the future world we want into the present]. The underlying view point that encompasses why you want to Block something and how you go about building.

Examples: Unapologetic Blackness, Spiritual Practices, Religious Services, Emotional Emancipation, Differential Consciousness, methodology of the oppressed, Black love politics, humanist/evolutionary Marxism, Liberation Theology, Differential Autonomous Transformation [DAT]

BLM Programs that Sustain and Elevate our BE: Emotional Emancipation, Men of Color Consciousness Building Groups, Black Joy Sunday, Black Organizer Dinners, Solidaritrees visioning sessions, Well Examined Life analysis building.

At our best we tie Building/Blocking/Being into our equation of Organized Resistance + Healing + Centering Space for Black Joy. Our organized resistance BUILDS campaigns to dismantle systems of oppression while BUILDING liberated spaces, our healing spaces BLOCK oppressive beliefs and racial trauma while BUILDING resilience, our centering of Black Joy reminds of way we fight and lets us BE resilient and free together thereby making us stronger BUILDERS.

We recognize that a small group of organizers cannot do this alone. Thus we seek to build networks or ecosystems of other groups that we call PODS. Each pod we support has a shared habit or praxis of healing, action, reflection/study and action that guides their work. Praxis means a habitual cycle of acting, reflection on the results of that action and then acting again, putting the wisdom we have learned into practical use. Additionally, each pod exist in transformative networks of other pods and grassroots institutions firmly embedded in an emerging liberated culture.

To be clear, when we say Transformation we mean a process of changing the world around us while changing how we engage with the world so that we can achieve our greatest good. Transformation is changing ourselves while we change the world. Central to our belief in transformation is the role of transformative love. Transformative love is the belief that we must love each other and that love is a political act. When you love someone you are compelled to do what’s best for them.  It compels you to not only transform yourself to live up to the way your beloved sees you, your greatest self, but it also compels you transform the context in which your relationship exist. Anyone who wants Black liberation must hold and foster a transformative love of Black people.

A transformative pod is one in which people come together to change the context in which they live, in other words they organize where they are at to transform society. Black Lives Matter: DC is one such Pod that we have built. Within pods, we strive to practice mutual aid and encumbrance; learning to support each other and becoming stronger together. We believe in the value of Ubuntu, that the individual is inseparable from the community, that we are all an individualization of a communal experience. We seek to abolish hierarches of authority and power over each other within our community so that we can all be fully powerful together. This means building and acting according to shared values and having processes for accountability and reconciliation when act outside of those values. We believe that relationships built on mutual aid and shared values are the essential to the transformative connections necessary for community self-determination.

We also understand that no human being is perfect and that even the best of us falls out of alignment with our values from time to time. Thus we believe that accountability is a gift because it gives a chance to rebuild transformative connections and come back into alignment with our greatest selves.

We believe these transformative connections and ecosystem are built in equally transformative campaigns and communal celebrations and events. A transformative campaign is one that either weakens aspects of state or corporate manipulation while empowering disregarded communities or creates empowering alternatives from the bottom up. Communal celebration and events are crucial as they allow us to be invigorated with communal energy and thus make our movements sustainable while normalizing the practice of loving each other.

We believe that truly grassroots institutions should be hubs of our transformative networks. They should build community survival programs, healing spaces or traditions and political education programs that can expand as crises in the state and the economy cause folks to look for alternatives. We believe these grassroots institutions should be funded by grassroots fundraising, worker cooperates where profits are shared [dismantling capitalistic social relations] and emerging forms of the solidarity, care and mutual aid economies.

Transformative campaigns should also create space for, protect and grow these institutions. The best example of this is the M4BL Steering Committee that BLM:DC created. The steering committee works to coordinate the actions of M4BL groups in DC while also providing a space for new people to join to movement and bring resources to the movement. To build the steering committee BLM:DC first had to connect with existing ally groups, support new ones that were self-organizing and build the Black organizer dinner to build relationships between Black organizers in the city. Then BLM:DC called spokescouncils together to put on weeks of action. These weeks of actions we are forms of organized resistance comprised of both building and blocking actions that seek to transform participants into future leaders in the process.

These spokescouncils also provided spaces for connections to be built which would be instrumental in creating groups like Melanin Uprising and #KeepDC4Me. Later, both Melanin Uprising and #KeepDC4Me would play crucial roles in larger spokescouncil actions showing how transformative networks are generative and help build power.

We believe that the goal of these grassroots institutions like the M4BL steering committee should be the creation of and the intellectual, material and spiritual development of transformative pods within and between marginalized communities. We also believe that there is a role for allies [both white and non-Black POC] in supporting Black Liberation once they firmly understand how their liberation is tied to Black Liberation and can envision their communities after white supremacy is abolished.

“The mandate is to control Black bodies.

The need is to have the constant specter of the other.

When the other exists, it strengthens your need to belong.

Your belonging is necessary for compliance.

Your compliance maintains the system.

You are policed, too.

You are policed by your need for belonging.

Your need for belonging requires control of the other

…Or at least the illusion of it.

You are policed through the control of our bodies.

You are policed too.” Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Radical Dharma

We call this Solidarity 3.0. Rather than blindly following the leadership of a Black organization, we call on every community to open up their own fronts against oppression. We believe in creating multiple front lines against the systems that stop us from being liberated and free people that are led by the people most directly affected by those systems. We believe that white people and groups who are racialized as “model minorities” are policed by their need to assimilate and belong.  We also believe that while non-Black people of color may not face the same extremes of racial violence that Black people face in America, other systems including settler-colonialism and imperialism directly affect them and their communities in America and around the world. 

We believe in using systemic intersectionality to map the terrains of power and our individual and communal relationships to resources, economic production, political power, cultural cache and historical narratives.  These maps of power are just that: maps. They are useful fictions for navigating the world, not the truth. We know that identity is not destiny. Thus every individual person and community’s path towards liberation is unique but can all work together through intersectional solidarity and struggle to undermine the systems that bind us. Ultimately, we believe that we must be in the world but not of it. We must remember that our identities are politically constructed and must be politically deconstructed in order for us to be liberated.

This same principle of Solidarity 3.0 works to overcome the power, resource and identity divides within the Black community. Therefore, we believe that to build out these networks every pod or formation should focus on organizing [either in coalitions or as a separate organizing body] in 4 directions as pictured below. Thus we can build a transformative network of groups that are accountably Building/Blocking/Being for Black Liberation rooted in visions of collective liberation by collective action, consistent healing & self actualization and centering our Joy.