In each issue of The Progressive, we pose just one question to a panel of political and social justice organizers, thinkers, and leaders. For December/January, we asked: how can local activists counter the conservative assault on rights and liberties? Here are their answers:
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, Executive Director of Voces de la Frontera
We can counter that by continuing to promote a culture of organizing, and by organizing in different ways around different needs, such as among working people at their workplace or industry. But we also need to organize in schools. In Milwaukee, where Voces de la Frontera has chapters, for example, the universal free school lunch program is under threat and students are organizing to keep it going.
Crucial to organizing is making people aware of what’s happening, forming alliances, and pushing for accountability with local elected officials. Our biggest challenge in the United States is keeping the culture of organizing alive and growing. An encouraging awakening [has] happened, in part out of necessity. Engaging in collective action and decision making are, to me, a critical part of anything that we take on.
There has been a lot of cynicism recently, within the Latinx community, around voting. We’ve seen that before, too, when the Obama Administration and later the Democratically controlled Congresses failed to pass the DREAM Act.
The way we’ve been addressing that this year is to deepen our networks, both local and virtual, and to simply highlight the threat being posed by the far right. We highlight how the Republican Party has now become an unapologetically white supremacist party, with the targeting of immigrants and refugees at its heart.
But voting drives are only one of the ways we’ve been deeply involved in the midterm elections. We represent a community that, when it shows up at the voting booth, can tip the results in a favorable direction. And if we keep turning up, it sends a message to anyone that they cannot run on an anti-immigrant platform. More than any particular election, we are interested in movement building, cultivating an ongoing organizing mindset that focuses on talking to people in the community and providing the opportunity for people who are isolated to join others in mutual actions. In that way we can provide folks with the alternatives to affirm our own humanity, our own worth, and build alliances with the majority of people who share a common cause and share common needs.
Katie Redford, Executive Director of Equation Campaign
As the injustices of the climate crisis intensify, oil and gas companies are facing increasing pressure from activists who are working to stop them from expanding their operations at a time when we must be winding them down. Fueled by their enormous profit margins and the politicians to whom they donate, fossil fuel companies are weaponizing law and litigation against scientists, NGOs, activists, journalists, and local communities in an attempt to silence them. Since 2016, twenty states have enacted laws with language about “critical infrastructure” that increase criminal penalties for people working to stop harmful fossil fuel expansion.
Equation Campaign funds lawyers for people across the country that are fighting fossil fuel projects running through their homelands. While legal support has helped them to keep fighting for our planet and their homelands, we can’t do it alone. We need more funding and activism at the state level to stop the proliferation of anti-protest laws.