Who Is Oakland?: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation

1/2 sized ⦁ 34 pages

This pamphlet was written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women, and queers – and is offered in deep solidarity with anyone committed to ending identity-based oppression and exploitation materially. By “materially,” we simply mean that we do not believe that consciousness raising or vague changes in personal attitudes can disrupt, delegitimate, and ultimately dismantle systems of domination.

The fact that we must specify our identities in advance before making our argument is an index of how powerful, widespread, and largely unquestioned is the premise that arguments always reduce to identity positions. While 21st century anti-oppression politics in the US is an evolving, ad hoc patchwork of theories and practices, we argue for the necessity of identity-based organizing while criticizing how dominant forms of anti-oppression activism have been incapacitated by an unquestioned rhetoric of checking individual “privilege,” by a therapeutic idealization of “culture” and communal origins, and finally by the assumption that identity categories describe homogeneous “communities” of shared political beliefs. We argue that left unquestioned these practices minimize and misrepresent the severity and structural character of identity-based oppression in the US.

✿all sales of this zine are redistributed to Black queer/trans mutual aid efforts✿