Principles

PRINCIPLES

Collective Terms:

Part of the work of TAS is to define and engage in culture shifting around what it means to commit to a praxis of allyship. Often the term ally is not used as we have defined it. It is important to therefore expand the lexicon to accurately name white folx along the speedy run of allyship as Albert Memmi does with Portraits of Colonizers in “The Colonizer and the Colonized.”.

Ally (political & social identity)= a colonizer who:

-recognizes that all Eurocentric systems have, are and will perpetuate anti-Blackness, 

-has adopted a praxis as defined by TAS that rejects those systems while still acknowledging that they benefit from the systems

-and commits to combating those systems by redistributing resources to dismantling of those systems as directed by the Black revolutionaries most equipped to do so. 

Bystander colonizer: A colonizer who only sympathizes with the colonized but takes no revolutionary political action. Within this context, “revolutionary” is defined as catalyzing transformative change that prioritizes equity as directed by those most impacted by anti-Blackness which is the life source of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. (Commonly referred to as a liberal, radical, and Democrat. Often mistaken for an ally. )

Appropriative colonizer: a colonizer who, having rejected systems of oppression, wishes to be loved by and adopted into the national and cultural identity of the colonized. This is impossible as long as the power dynamic between the colonized and the colonizer persists. (Commonly referred to as an appropriator. Often mistaken for an ally.)

What does that all mean? We are glad YOU asked.

REPARATIONS

A message from our the Ally Ship Member, Tara Chill: There is no path forward without reparations, and there is no path forward as long as ally organizations continue to isolate and segregate their efforts from the CLEARLY voiced needs of the black community. This only serves to denigrate community. The reallocation of gains ill gotten is the least we can offer, and yet it is the most vital of our roles as Allies for it affirms our deepest trust and knowledge in the truly equitable world that we have failed to support for many generations past.

“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

“Let’s say you’re driving down the street and someone rear-ends you…. The person who hit your vehicle gets out of his car, apologizes for the damage and calls his insurance company. Eventually, you receive a check for the harm done.

..for years, if not generations, your family and families like yours have been damaged by your country’s political and economic system…then the checks for the harm done would be called reparations.”

“…investing our money in healthcare alone has not and will not continue to push forward better health outcomes… The U.S. has lagged behind other developed countries in spending in public goods, to the harm of all of its citizens. Pursuing equity pulls us all up to becoming healthier citizens.”

SYSTEM ABOLITION

Learn more about the 400+1 system abolition position and read “The Purple-Pink Horizon” by Njera Keith (400+1 founder and Minister of Cohesion).

Anti-CAPITALIST

“What would a sustainable, universally beneficial economy look like? …how we can move countries out of the hole -- where people are falling short on life's essentials -- and create regenerative, distributive economies that work within the planet's ecological limits.”

“Whether it’s slavery, Jim Crow, or L’Oréal firing a transgender black woman for speaking out against racism, the capitalist system has and continues to create an environment in which inequality and racism continue to thrive, while simultaneously claiming to be the only safeguard against both.”

“Jani Leinonen is a Finnish artist and political activist. Leinonen is known for artworks criticizing capitalism by using the imagery and icons of corporate brands.”

pOLICE ABOLITION

They are only necessary because we are all too willing to hide behind our cowardice and not actually put forth the effort to create a better world. It’s too extreme… When I say, “abolish the police,” I’m usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always full social, economic, and political equality, but that’s not what’s actually being asked. What people mean is “who is going to protect us?” Who protects us now?”

“This explains, then, why black people in the United States, who use drugs at a similar rate as whites, are arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for drug offenses at widely disproportionate rates… Not to mention that their actions have resulted in the imprisonment of more than 1 in every 100 Americans, a prison population that now exceeds 20% of the world’s total.”

“In San Francisco, this story is told most clearly by looking at the numbers and demographics of the jail population – despite the rapid displacement of Black people in the City, now only 3%, Black people caged in the SF jail system has remained steady around 50% of the overall jailed population.”

pRO-PALESTINE

“Palestinian communities are split apart and their connection to the land weakened, while Jewish communities put down roots in territory meant for Palestinians….
Most international lawyers (including one asked by Israel to review them in 1967) believe settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of population into occupied territories.”

“The 1967 war which indelibly transformed the Middle East political geography in the context of a rising global tide against Imperial and colonial domination proved to be a watershed moment for black Palestinian solidarity”

“Despite the fact that these black Jews of Israel are citizens of the state which entitles them to equal protection under Israeli law and despite the fact that they serve in the Israeli army and speak fluent Hebrew they have long been the victims of systemic discrimination”

WOMANIST

“What we knew was that we were doing a necessary work. It was clear that our issues were not being addressed in the feminist movement and in any significant way.”

"The things that black women need to push for are quite different than what we think of as the mainstream feminist movement…Black women are more likely to experience violence, more likely to be paid less for their work and more likely to see fewer people who look like them in the media or holding political office. Even in feminist spheres in the past, black women’s stories were often co-opted.”

“I will never betray such pure hearts by voting for evil... I want something else a different system entirely; one not seen on this earth for thousands of years if ever… a way of life that honors the feminine. A way that acknowledges the theft of the wisdom female and dark mother leadership might have provided our spaceship all along.”

LGBTQIA AFFIRMING

“Black transgender women face the highest levels of fatal violence within the LGBTQ community and are less likely to turn to police for help… 38 percent of Black transgender people who interacted with police reported harassment; 14 percent reported physical assault from police and 6 percent reported sexual assault.”

“PrEP, which stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and that's for people who are HIV negative: it’s a pill that they take once a day that keeps them HIV negative, it keeps them from getting HIV. And what we're finding is, as prep continues to roll out, there are a lot more people who are white, who may not be as high-risk, who have access to PrEP. If you're someone for whom 85 percent of the billboards are targeting you, they have pictures of you on there, then you start to realize hey this is a message for me. We've had 35 years of messaging for white gay men…”

Anti-Imperialist

“If we understand colonialism to be the acquisition, occupation, and administration of external territories and people for the sake of the accumulation of wealth the increase of political power or even territorial expansion then it is incredibly difficult to argue that the United States of America is not a colonizer.”

“Today there are still well-meaning, progressive-minded people, in Europe and in Africa, who speculate as to whether democracy, the rule of law and human rights can ever properly take root in Africa. Such views are testimony to the power of history and the potency of the race idea.”

“Du Bois makes a tremendous contribution to the struggle for African independence in the early 1920s with his Pan-African Congress's, and what he says in effect is… if you want peace you have to dismantle the system of colonialism.”

PRISON ABOLITION

“Black men who were born in the late 1970’s, who are growing up through the American prison boom of the 1980s and the 1990s, the chances that they're going to serve time in state or federal prison, if they dropped out of high school, is about 70 percent. So, going to prison for that group of black men with very low levels of schooling, that's become a normal life event…”

““If you are doing x, y, and z that we find undesirable, why are you doing that, and what can we do to mitigate that? What can we do to support you in a different way so that you don’t go down this road?” …Often restorative justice is very much grounded in individual relationships between individual people, and solving individual conflicts in a way that would not rely on punishment but still afford people the accountability…”

“With more left Democrats echoing the call to #AbolishICE, we see how calls for abolition can quickly move from margin to mainstream. Thanks largely to the work of Black radical women such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Joy James, and Mariame Kaba… most of today’s racial justice activists identify as abolitionists.”

PRO-MIGRATION

“Black immigrants are some of the most educated people in America and contribute a vast amount of intellectual property, skill and entrepreneurship to the communities they serve. And yet, living at the intersection of xenophobia and anti-blackness, they are the most likely to be underemployed among immigrant groups.”

“The children, some still in diapers, were detained in wire-link cages inside warehouses, in tents hastily erected on military bases, or at private agencies as far away as New York City and -Seattle. Black mothers from Honduras and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were among those who recounted the agony of seeing their children snatched away.”

PRO-CHOICE

Making the Case for Reproductive Revolution by Njera Keith (400+1 founder & Minister of Cohesion)

“So, how can it be that police officers can burst in, drag a mother, just giving birth, in handcuffs and leg shackles, bleeding, told to sit on a towel, because she's still bleeding from the delivery, and haul her off to jail…we I could go on and on with all the deep contradictions that happen to black women that violate every principle that we're supposed to hold true in America.”

ENVIRONMENTAL
SUSTAINABILITY

“Even middle-income African Americans are more likely to live in more polluted neighborhoods. In fact, one study found that black Americans making $50,000 to $60,00 a year are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods than white Americans who make just $10,00 a year.”

““I think the ignitions need to stop I don't think that human life should be subject to a profit motive.” What chloroprene goes to make is the neoprene material that goes in wet-suits and laptop covers. It's more of a product that's made for people's recreation. “Well that's a that's a part of that humiliation have we suffered.””

“Anywhere that there's poverty you're gonna find contamination. And it's not only us, as a Ponca people, but it's the south side of town, where the lower income people live. And to me it's environmental racism, and what environmental racism leads to is environmental genocide, and that's what's happening to my people now.