On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Mario Bruzzone
<mario.bruzzone@gmail.com> wrote:
I think Krista's on the right track. One of the tenets of community organizing and activism--and I believe strongly that everyone in the community bike shop movement is engendering social change--is that you can't address every injustice in a community at one time. You pick your first battle, learn from it, and apply the lessons from the struggle to the next battle.
That said, shops ought to proscribe behaviors, not attitudes. Our proscribed behaviors are shaped by our politics, obviously, but our reach and ability to foment substantive change in our community cannot be limited to the narrow group of us who both share a common ethos and worldview *and* feel empowered enough to act. This applies even at the most basic level of most of our shops as a change in the economics of transportation; and moreso for shops whose mission, stated or otherwise, reaches broader.
In a practical sense, it means that you do outreach to both the gender-disempowered community and the Latino community at once--but not as if they are the same community. LGBTQQI folks in our shops are not allowed to condescend to non-English speakers or persons of color, nor to make them feel unwelcome; Latinos in our shops are not allowed to make homophobic statements nor to practice other sexist or discursively violent behaviors. Hell, LGBTQQI folks are not allowed to make homophobic statements, and Latinos are not allowed to condescend to others based on English-speaking ability, color, or national origin. (Both happen.) Part of having a safe space is making it safe for people who do not share our politics to be *exposed* to our politics, so long as they do not through action or attitude create atmospheres that reinforce the systems of privilege that our shops are, at current, actively working to oppose.
Within the situation that Josh described briefly before, if you have a core group working on a specific space-safe night for the gender-disempowered, *and* the shop or this group feels that the night is under-utilized by Latino women, that group needs to work hard to make their night accessible to the Latino community without changing the underlying value that drives the space on that night: You make flyers in Spanish that speak to Latino women in your community; you have Spanish-speaking mechanics *every* week; your website has information in Spanish; you have sensitivity to differential gender dynamics in the Latino communities that you want to link up with. You repeatedly encourage and invite your repeat patrons to become involved in operating the shop. You do *not* make any certain groups of women or trans folk feel unwelcome on the night that is there to combat gendered power-knowledge. People of any and every ethnicity will come to your shop and never come back because you don't match the conception they had of you in their heads, and that is ok.
Finally, it is imperative that when incidents do occur--and they will--that the people in the shop be able to explain, in non-accusatory and non-violent methods of communication, why certain actions aren't acceptable at the shop. Not just that they aren't, but *why*--even people who practice discursive violence are adults, and it does little good to lecture or harangue or condescend. I feel strongly that as long as people are willing to abide by shop rules, they are welcome in the shop. Again, it's not attitudes or politics that we proscribe, not people, but behaviors.
Mario Bruzzone
San Francisco
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