We Are Indivisible by Leah Greenberg & Ezra Levin

Author:Leah Greenberg & Ezra Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

1. The original Tea Party was literally a group of white people who dressed up as American Indians to get away with causing mayhem in support of businesses. So actually it was a pretty good fit for an Obama-era white grievance movement!

2. Intersectionality, a concept developed by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the recognition that our various identities—race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, and more—intersect with each other to shape our experiences with systems of power and oppression.

3. You’ll also notice that we talk about privilege in this chapter in a privileged-people-talking-to-other-privileged-people sort of way. That’s intentional! We’re white people who drew on a ton of privilege to build up a new organization in a nonprofit sector that has historically devalued and underfunded the leadership of communities of color—a complicated reality that we think about every day and that shapes every part of how we show up in the world. We generally find that our biggest contribution is talking to people with privilege about how we can all do better, so that’s where we’re going to dig in.

4. This is of course an homage to the great Shirley Chisholm’s saying: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

5. This one is not just on Senate Republicans. The Senate could have successfully passed the bill in 2010 if all the Democrats had held together in support of the Dream Act. They didn’t.

6. We can’t help but note that his very name is practically a relitigation of the “War of Northern Aggression” (known as the American Civil War outside neo-Confederate enclaves). Jefferson is from Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Beauregard is from P. G. T. Beauregard, a leading Confederate general who oversaw the first shots of the war at Fort Sumter.

7. The 2013 effort was prompted in part by the wide-scale losses of Republicans in the 2012 elections. The official election autopsy report released by the Republican National Committee blamed its stance on immigration for the loss of Hispanic votes and asserted that “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” It turned out to be a pretty good prediction.

8. You may remember Brat from Chapter 3, where he was last seen complaining about all the new lady protestors in his district.

9. This serves as a helpful reminder that Trumpism is not just Trump. Here we have Republican attorneys general from across the country threatening to sue Trump if he didn’t move more quickly to end protections for Dreamers.

10. Leah: In a great example of how not to be a good ally, I burst into tears while trying to talk to our team immediately after the press conference. I still regret it: there were members of our team present who were much more directly impacted by Trump’s war on immigrants, and I should have been creating space for them, not taking up space with my (not-directly-impacted) feelings.

11. Ezra: I took notes during the meeting and wrote them up afterward.

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