We are honored to be featured in Onelife Institute’s Newsletter on Spirituality and Social Transformation this month, check out the article!
The Path to Urban Peace
By Nicole Lee
Director of Urban Peace Movement
Homicide and street violence continue to plague urban communities throughout the United States. According to the Department of Justice, in 2005 over 18,000 people were murdered in the US — 12,352 were the result of firearms. In my hometown of Oakland, California the numbers are grim. In the last three years there have been nearly 400 homicides in a city with a population just over 420,000 — 70% of those being under the age of 35 and overwhelmingly African American and Latino males.
The impact on those who live in the communities hardest hit is palpable. For many young adults in the “flatlands” of Oakland, violence has become a normal part of everyday life. You cannot walk more than a block in East Oakland without seeing a makeshift memorial or without noticing scores of young people dressed in t-shirts adorned with photos of loved ones recently lost to violence.
2006 was a particularly bad year for Oakland, with nearly 150 homicides in that year alone. As a community organizer, I had to ask what role might a movement for social justice have to play in what is taking place in Urban America, and was there something that I could do to intervene in this situation.
I had started out back in 1998 as a union organizer for workers in the hotel industry and eventually went on to work on economic justice issues more broadly. In 2001, I began an eight-year stint at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights which, at that time, was under the leadership of now famed environmental advocate Van Jones.
It was during 2006, when I was with the Ella Baker Center, that I really started to take serious consideration of this question of urban violence from my perspective as a community organizer. I began by looking beyond the social justice community and into the Oakland community more broadly, and I had conversations with people, mostly younger people, about the violence in our neighborhoods. For understandable reasons, many community members and friends of mine from Oakland expressed a level of numbness or despair when I asked them what they thought could be done. My own feelings about the violence in Oakland, especially after the tragic loss of the 21-year-old son of a member of our organization, bordered on depression.
Luckily, by the Grace of God, I had just been introduced to what I would now describe as “mindfulness practice” at a training that I participated in. It was at this training that I first encountered the concepts of “being” and “possibility,” which were strange concepts for me to take in as someone (a community organizer, at that) who was very focused on “doing.”
From the framework of “being” I saw that I was holding a hopeless way of being. And I realized that if one were to add my “way of being” up with the other feelings of numbness and despair that I heard from people around me, and multiply that by the 420,000 people in Oakland, then peace really had no chance at all.
I felt called to confront my own hopelessness and create space for another way of being, and so I created the possibility of courage. As someone who is nearly obsessed with checklists, organization, and getting things done, I was kind of at a loss for what to “do” next! Courage was great and all, but it didn’t come along with a work plan or a set of goals to accomplish. So I waited.
One day very soon after this, I was driving down the street and happened to pass three intersections, each with a small peace vigil calling for an end to the war abroad. The vigils were very simple and attended by a small number of mostly white activists. I was moved by the simplicity of the act and the feelings of solidarity that the vigils evoked. And I thought to myself, “Why don’t we do the same thing for the violence happening here in our own backyard, just with younger, browner folks and in a way that’s a little more ‘hood-friendly’?”
I went back to work the next day with a proposal to coordinate three simultaneous “Silence The Violence” vigils in the flatlands of Oakland. We set out to accomplish what we thought would be an ambitious goal with this event, and put the word out to others in our network to join us. Within a three-week period the event grew to 21 vigils in five Bay Area cities with over 2,000 people attending, a radio broadcast on one of the largest Hip Hop stations in California, and the cities of Richmond, Oakland, and San Francisco declaring it “Silence The Violence Day.”
At the point at which this happened, I had been organizing for many years, and I had even worked on various campaigns that ended in victory. But I had never witnessed something with as much velocity as this event. It was as if this Silence The Violence Day had a momentum and a life of its own. This experience revealed to me, first hand, what is possible when “doing” is empowered through “being.” It showed me what is possible when we, as human beings, begin to confront our own despair and resignation and pick up courage instead. It was a life-altering moment. And it led me to a new theory of social change.
This new theory is what I had heard my mentor, Van Jones, once describe as “three dimensional” social change. Conventional models of social change hold up two dimensions: a ‘Top-Down’ approach including things like legislative change, electing politicians who will carry your agenda, and traditional policy advocacy; and a ‘Bottom-Up’ approach, which includes things like grassroots organizing and direct action. A “three dimensional” approach adds the third element of ‘Inside-Out.’ It acknowledges the relationship between “inner” transformational work and its impact on the “outer” world. And the presence of this third dimension, along with the other dimensions, creates a space in which things that may not have been possible in the two-dimensional model become possible — a space where breakthroughs and innovations occur.
I realized that prior to this breakthrough in my own organizing work, I had only been operating in two dimensions. We can live an entire lifetime in two dimensions, but three dimensions gives us a full range of motion, where things that at one time seemed impossible can happen with simplicity and ease. I’m not suggesting that there are no hurdles or challenges in the work that I do now, but I have access to a level of power that I wasn’t even aware of before. And I have experienced the way that “inner” practice can impact the “outer” world that the social justice community desires so deeply to transform.
And now, when I look back at some of the most powerful social movements in history, I can see the presence of this third dimension. The actions taken by Civil Rights activists, for example, were acts of deep faith from the ‘Inside-Out.’ They were standing for what was possible in the face of bleak circumstances and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Dr. King expressed that faith so eloquently when he asserted, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” There is a rich legacy of social activism fueled by transformational work for us to inherit. And for that I am so grateful.
