Official Participant in the Youth Media Blog-a-Thon.

From Between Granite and Rainbow

By Vanessa Huang

I’m participating in the Youth Media Blogathon today, organized around the topic of violence. I’ll share thoughts in two parts, paired with a few related upcoming events and actions:

1. Five years have passed now since the U.S. invaded Iraq. While it’s been a few years since I’ve actively been engaged in strategies to challenge the occupation, and militarism and recruitment more broadly, I’m headed into SF this morning to join a snake march through the financial district downtown.

I was 19 on March 19 — and 17 on September 11. I can clearly recall sitting in high school physics class, watching the breaking news via a classroom TV monitor usually reserved for midi-tracked science videos that teachers screened and taught as modules in isolation from current events. I also recall — the summer prior, I’d interned with Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s district office via a Chinese-American youth political leadership program — before 9/11, my high school peers and relatives didn’t have much of a clue why I’d chosen to be placed in her office, or that she repped our district, but that afterwards — when she took a lone stance against authorizing Bush to use “all necessary and appropriate force” as a response t0 9/11 — I gained notoriety reinforced in coming high school years when in civics class, I partnered up with the few other radical kids in economics and civics class in anti-capitalist fashion and formation for exercises like a mock development/planning project and State Assembly session.

Now, 9/11 and March 19 seem simultaneously distant and lasting, enduringly influential. Definitely a marker along my journey as someone engaged with how power is organized and in the task of social transformation. Now looking back, new, or reemerging, questions come to mind:

* How has the violence enacted by the U.S. military industrial complex (invasion and occupation of Iraq, aid to Israeli occupation of Palestine, and beyond) influenced my generation’s emotional, spiritual, creative, political lives? our capacity to negotiate the creative political work we need to do, interpersonally and structurally, from a place of collectivity, trust, and compassion, rather than out of fear, aggression, and domination? * What have we learned about tactics and strategies, both from those before us and from this decade, and in the context of emerging and urgent questioning about the fact that so much of our movement work today exists in nonprofit formation? How has this impacted our collective power, resilience, and political imaginations?

*Upcoming: Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War will screen next Monday 3/24 at the Redstone Building in SF, on 16th Street between Capp and South Van Ness, and later on Saturday 4/19 at 484 14th Street in Oakland near Telegraph.

2. It’s International Women’s Month. Compared to where I was at four or five years ago, I’m much less attached to the identity category of “woman”, and much more wary of the violence this identity category has and can enact, including for trans women and female-bodied folks who don’t ID as women, whether via exclusion and/or assumptive labeling. As I’ve grown individually and collectively with people and institutions and networks over the last few years while exploring and experiencing the relationships amongst patriarchy, a gender binary system, and heteronormativity, I’ve moved from a place where in the past I’d found it hard to imagine abolishing the gender binary (”if we don’t have the labels of “men” and “women”, how will we challenge, and ultimately, end patriarchy?”) — even while being able to imagine a world without prisons — to a place where I see abolishing the binary gender system as intimately and vitally connected with my work to abolish the prison industrial complex: the two work together to help maintain a social order organized around transphobia, heteronormativity, and patriarchy, particularly for people of color and our families and communities. It’s inspiring to say the least to have in recent past participated in forming the beginnings of vital new alliances amongst trans and gender non-conforming people and non-trans women of color in challenging the violences our networks and communities face (*see U.S. Women of Color Demand Our Human Rights and Transforming Justice).

My political positioning and strategic choices in challenging sites of violence have evolved over the last five to seven years, since 2001 and 2003, from involvement from a congressional district office doing casework for im/migrants and people in military detention and engaging in solidarity work opposing U.S. occupation abroad to a more local focus, partnering with folks outside of the state to challenge imprisonment — via a variety of strategies, including decarceration, i.e. reducing imprisonment; facilitating a shift in resources from prisons to support community-led formations; and fostering non-harmful, i.e. non-policing, non-imprisonment, responses to interpersonal violence, be it child sexual abuse and intimate partner and/or transphobic, homophobic, and racist or other hate violence. Whereas seven years ago, the summer prior to 9/11, while interning with Barbara Lee’s, I’d had correspondence with people locked up in military detention centers, I understood the role of the imprisonment industrial complex on different terms than I do today: that policing and imprisonment today are fundamental pillars in maintaining oppression, and that a long string of attempts to “reform” the U.S. criminal legal system has ultimately expanded the reach of imprisonment and its harms onto communities of color, and onto growing targets, particularly in a post 1996 IRA-IRA and 9/11 context, and as the movement to end imprisonment has forced proponents of prison expansion into a place where expansion proposals are beginning to take on identities of “gender responsive” and “community-based alternatives.”

*Upcoming: This Friday 3/21, several local anti-trans violence and allied orgs are calling us to gather at 6 pm at the 24th and Mission BART station, in remembrance of Ruby Ordenana and all others we’ve lost to anti-trans violence, discrimination, and abuse. We’ll be demanding that the SF Board of Supervisors and Gavin Newsom that they reject proposed cuts to the Center for Special Problems (CSP) — which has provided mental health care for the trans community for decades — with and instead increase funding for programs like CSP that support the trans community.

Also, upcoming on Tuesday 4/1, All of Us or None and Critical Resistance are calling us to gather and speak out to ban the box from city jobs from 4 to 6 pm in front of the Oakland City Hall at the Frank Ogawa Plaza at 14th and Broadway. While Mayor Ron Dellums promised to remove the question about past convictions from apps for city jobs, the city has yet to implement such policy.