Chris Crass speaks with Zoë Williams, who believes in the power of grassroots efforts to create meaningful change.
Author note: This post is part of a series of interviews with white racial justice organizers and leaders from around the country, to draw out examples of what white activists are doing and can do, along with insights and lessons born from years of experience. While white people need to be mindful of how white privilege operates, we must also be powerful for collective liberation, knowing that the time for us to rise against structural racism is now. Read more in this series here.
From Charleston to McKinney to Baltimore to Ferguson, the epidemic of anti-Black racist violence is screaming all around us, and white people in the millions are being pulled out of the indifference coupled with moral superiority built on empty platitudes of “being good white people” and are taking the red pill to wake up to the reality of institutional white supremacy.
In these Black Lives Matter movement on the move times there is a deep need for white people coming into consciousness about racism to have positive white anti-racist examples and role models to help them navigate the difficultly of taking effective action for racial justice, and developing a healthy self-identity rooted in collective liberation, rather then supremacy systems.
This is the seventh interview in a series I’m doing with white anti-racist leaders and organizers around the country who are engaging and moving white communities towards racial justice, as Black-led multiracial movement for Black Lives grows larger every day. These interviews are intended to help equip white people to listen to Black voices and leaders, while also finding the courage within themselves to rise up for racial justice. This interview is with Denver-based white racial justice leader, Zoë Williams.
From building campaigns for transit justice in multiracial working class communities to leading accessible and engaging political education about racial justice with white working class communities, Zoë Williams is a younger generation white working class queer, genderqueer, leader and parent in the Denver Metro Area, whose approach to organizing and movement building is rooted in love for their people and their belief in grassroots power to win structural change.
I first meet Zoë in 2001, when they reached out for support dealing with sexism in their activist community as a 15 year old femme queer who was fired up, but was getting shut out, rather then lifted up. I knew then that Zoë was the kind of leader we needed to build effective and transformational movements, and I’m deeply grateful for this opportunity to lift up their leadership to help guide thousands of white people coming into consciousness and looking to step up in these Black Lives Matter times.
Chris Crass: How are you working to move white people into racial justice movement in this time? What’s working? And what are you learning from what works?
Zoë Williams: My orientation in my community is to wear a lot of different hats. I work as a transit organizer for 9to5 Colorado, a women’s economic justice organization, building campaigns around transit justice and gentrification. In the Denver Metro Area we are seeing a lot of intense structural violence with communities facing transit fare hikes, cuts in bus service, rising rent costs, low wages, and high cost of living. We look to women who are people of color, immigrants, currently or formerly homeless, fleeing violence, and working low-wage jobs as leaders who define our issues and create our vision for change.
I am also a street medic trainer, first aid instructor, community health advocate, and folk medicine maker. Street medicine is where I learned many of my lessons in taking action against racism. My mentors in street medicine were elders in the community with experience going back to the Civil Rights Movement and Wounded Knee. It gave me a tangible space to practice solidarity alongside the American Indian Movement, immigrant rights struggle, and other local work. I don’t run as a street medic often anymore, but I offer trainings so that more folks can have access to that opportunity.
Recently healing justice activists like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha have created a really powerful model to mobilize healers, make care accessible, and support movements through health work. After participating in the 2014 Healing Justice for Black Lives Matter action, I’ve been exploring new tactics in redistributing healthcare, knowledge, and resources while supporting self care in my community.
One of my greatest passions is political education, and I have been providing trainings to groups ranging from middle school students and food justice activists to healthcare workers about white supremacy, solidarity, and allyship. The goal of these trainings is to get more language and analysis out to white people that may or may not view themselves as “activists” with a push toward action. I want to get as many people the skills or words they feel they need to enter into conversations about racism and bring their networks into anti-racist action as possible.
Over the past few months I have been working with a group that just formed as a SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) Denver chapter. We’ve been really focused on sharing principles, building process, and creating relationships in our community. Now we are ready for action!
Finally, and on a much smaller, more personal scale, I am a parent. My partner and I have dedicated our library to lifting up the stories and voices of people of color so that our children grow up language, tools, and stories to build their understanding of race. Another part of parenting is building relationships with other families and finding ways to bring racial justice into those spaces. Having lived and organized in the same space for most of my life, I really appreciate having a lot of different avenues and scales for action.
CC: How do you think about effectiveness and how do you measure it? Can you share an experience that helps you think about effective work in white communities for racial justice?
ZW: Efficacy is a tricky and subjective thing, particularly considering the communities my work spans. To me, it boils down to two things: movement and context. When we get people and power to move from the status quo towards a vision of a liberated future, we have been effective.
Sometimes that movement is small in the grand scheme of things. One example came from a friend attending a rally against police violence this spring. This person made a sign that said something along the lines of “End White Supremacy.” As a white person that was raised in a household and community where overtly racist language and ideology was the norm, they had never taken a visible stance in this way to publicly oppose white supremacy. However, after being inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and some organizing training, they took this step. That is worth celebrating.
On a larger scale, I look to some of the campaigns I have been able to work on with 9to5. As a grassroots organization, our leaders determine our issues, campaigns, and priorities. So far, I have worked on campaigns to bring bus routes back into service, fight fare hikes, and fight gentrification. Through our organization, we have been able to bring allies from larger organizations, faith communities, and labor to join in support and solidarity. I feel proud to see white people looking at their resources critically and dedicating them toward the issues that communities of color, women, queer people, people with disabilities, people navigating homelessness, poor and working class people define as important.
CC: What are the goals and strategies (as emergent, planned, messy, and sophisticated, basic as it is) you’re operating from?
ZW: One of the most important aspects of being a white person involved in anti-racist organizing is having accountable and lasting relationships. We need to be involved in accountable and lasting relationships with leaders, organizations, and communities of color. The way that white supremacy rears its head in the Denver area is going to look very different than Ferguson, Baltimore, or some of the other cities that have captivated the nation. When the stakes feel so high, it is easy to rush past the relationship step and try to take action. Our connections help me and my communities know when to show up to the work in ways that support local movements in a meaningful way. Also, as white people, we also need to be building long term relationships with other white people so that we can support one another’s growth.
A call from many leaders of color in the Denver Metro Area is for white people to participate in the redistribution of resources, so this has felt like a very important strategy to commit to. Money and resources have a deep connection with white supremacy. The poor and working class white communities I am from and live and typically work in have complicated relationships with money and resources. Answering this call has meant more than passing a hat or giving to a fundraiser. It has involved collective consciousness work around white supremacy, classism, and solidarity work.
With regard to some of the interpersonal and family based work I do, one of the biggest goals is to create dialogue and a feeling that we can do something. So many white parents are horrified that their kids could end up being Darren Wilson or the police officer that attacked the youth in McKinney. However, they are scrambling to find tools to have honest conversations about white supremacy at home or on the playground. Incidentally, those are some of the most powerful spaces to reach young people to take action against white supremacy.
After all, the spread of the information about the racist brutality at the pool in McKinney is due in part to video and witness statements of white teenagers who saw the police attacking and knew it was racially motivated. 15 year old Brandon Brooks took the now infamous video and told the media about his experience watching the police target youth of color while he continued to film the incident and stated, “They’re just going to discriminate against them because they’re black.” Other young white people lifted up the experiences of the young women of color and affirmed that the incident began when white adults began verbally abusing youth of color. These youth leveraged their privilege in brave ways to ensure that a white supremacist narrative did not prevail.
Our task is to raise more children to do that, and my goal is to make it easier through discussion groups, book lists, gatherings, and one-on-one support with the parents in my life to keep going to the hard conversations.
CC: What challenges are you facing? How are you trying to overcome them? What are you learning from these experiences?
ZW: In the wake of the horrific racist terrorist attack on Emanuel AME Church, there are a lot of white folks who want to do something, but they are afraid. The stakes feel really high, the reality is so painful, and people are going against a lifetime of teaching. It is important to create a space that is not taking take, resources, or energy from efforts led by communities of color that allows white folks to learn to move through fear. Sometimes all that takes is reminding people, “Yes, we are all going to make mistakes in this work, and that will be okay. We will also make amends. The risks of doing nothing far outweighs the risks of doing something imperfectly.” Other times it is reminding people what skills and talents they bring to the work so that they can see themselves as a strength and an asset.
After the attacks in Charleston, I was asking a friend what his faith community needed for support from allies. He told me, “We need less analysis and more action from our allies. Lead with your hearts. It is the part of you that is most free from the stains of white violence.” Particularly in our new SURJ chapter, this is one of our greatest goals at the moment. We are working together to get one another out of the analytical thinking space and into heart-centered action.
Part of the challenge is that a lot of work around white supremacy and white anti-racism is housed in academia. Most people around me were exposed to the concepts of white supremacy and white privilege in college. The language, theory, and process is very inaccessible and difficult to put into practice. After all, if you’ve spent two to six years writing papers about all of the bad things white people do, it is hard to come out the other side as a white person ready for action. Even more problematic is that many people don’t have access to higher education. Growing up in a working class town, most of my friends did not get to attend education outside of high school, and those that did couldn’t start until adulthood. That’s only thinking about class barriers to higher ed. Political education is incredibly valuable, but we need to move conversations from the Ivory Tower back into the hands of our communities.
Popular education is one of my favorite tools to create shared and evolving consciousness about race, white supremacy, and intersections with other identities. Popular Education workshops begin with the belief that people already know about these issues, they just need tools to break them down and take action. One of my favorite tools that has been passed down to me by many teachers is using a timeline of historic events, usually centered around an issue. When 9to5 first started pushing for affordable transit, many of our members and constituents felt that there was no hope in winning a campaign on the issue. We created a timeline with transit justice events starting with Rosa Parks that covered Civil Rights era actions, ADAPT and the disability rights movement that was so powerful in Colorado; and more recent organizing like the LA Bus Riders Union. People explored the timeline and put notes about what they were doing, or how they felt about different events. The first time I did the activity in a meeting, the notes were amazing. People wrote things like, “We are finishing our elder’s work,” and “I want to do something like this for my family.” Even when we have hit hard times, going back to that timeline has helped people power through the campaign. Recently the Regional Transportation District Board of Directors approved a fare hike, and our members said, “We just have to fight harder. This is not over. We won when we took over their meeting, and we will win again.”
CC: How are you developing your own leadership and the leadership of people around you to step up in these profound, painful and powerful Black Lives Matter movement time?
ZW: One of the amazing lessons that I have learned from the Black Lives Matter movement is the absolute vital importance of developing leadership from youth, poor, working class, women, gender nonconforming, femme, transgender, and queer people. This translates so clearly to white anti-racist work, and has become the crux of my own goals in finding leaders around me.
As a queer femme young person, I needed a lot of pushing to believe I could do the work that I ended up doing. My mentor once joked that he had to put four times the work into building my confidence than a middleclass straight man would have required, and that was just to get me to speak my opinion in a meeting. It’s important for me to remember that now when urging people to start hard conversations, or be willing to answer the call to take risks at actions. Because of the ways patriarchy, classism, heterosexism, transphobia, and other painful systems have impacted our lives, it can be hard to feel capable of leadership. That said, those experiences are all the more reason leaders with those experiences need to be invested in and given the resources to take powerful actions for change.
————
Zoë Williams is a queer and genderqueer parent, witch, community organizer, popular education facilitator, gardener, herbalist, and lover of cats. They have been organizing in the Denver Metro Area for over 15 years with a broad range of issues, campaigns, and coalitions.