While investigating systems of oppression and marginalization, it is worth noting the empowering and self-defining work happening in and and around many communities. Some steps to empowerment include: understanding barriers to change; seeking to transform, not only transact, knowing and stating your purpose in this work, creating space for reflection; and promoting “shared power” vs. “power over.”
Resources
Listen to Leila Fadel’s NPR series where she reports on the increasingly diverse mosaic of Muslims across America.
Check out Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system.
Developed by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Care Package is a collection of works by artists, writers, and scholars offering a range of approaches to addressing uncertainty, anxiety, and grief through vision, reflection, and healing.
The Detroit People’s Platform advances racial and economic justice by organizing with community residents and community leaders to build grassroots power and transform systems and structures that make real the vision for a more racially just Detroit.
This article by David Wilcox from the Auburn Citizen notes the Cayuga Nation’s reclaiming of one of the few properties the council owns in the nation’s ancestral homeland of 64,000 acres surrounding northern Cayuga Lake. The property has helped the Cayugas preserve their traditions and language, and has been the site of ceremonies like an annual peach tree planting that symbolically redresses the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779 that destroyed hundreds of the trees and dozens of indigenous communities.
Reflection
What does power mean to you?
Who do you feel has power?
What are some ways you empower others in your community?