Leadership Moves with Mallika Dutt
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Leadership Moves with Mallika Dutt Episode 01: Digital Organizing for Movement Building with Rashad Robinson, Color Of Change Transcript Mallika Dutt: Welcome to Leadership Moves presented by INTER-CONNECTED. I’m Mallika Dutt. In today’s episode were speaking with the brilliant and strategic Rashad Robinson from Color Of Change. The topic: Digital Organizing for Movement Building. Mallika Dutt: I'm so delighted to welcome all of you incredible leaders from around the world to this first webinar that is part of the Interconnected Leadership Series for the BUILD community that is led by women leaders across the Global South and globally. We've been waiting for this moment for a while. We were supposed to start many months ago, and then of course the pandemic transformed all of our plans and we've all been doing quick pivots and adjusting. And I'm so happy to see all of you here. So as you know, today we're going to be having a conversation with Rashad Robinson, who is the president of Color Of Change. Welcome Rashad, good morning from New York. Rashad Robinson: Good morning. Mallika Dutt: From one New Yorker to another. So Rashad, I met you many, many years ago when you were still at GLAAD. And then I watched you build Color Of Change into this incredible force of nature, this organization that has taken justice for Black people as sort of the wedge issue to challenge injustice across the entertainment industry and the criminal justice system and corporate America, most recently with Facebook and the tech industry overall. And really this ability to use technology, to use the digital space as a powerful organizing space is something that Color Of Change has been showing us how to do with great innovation, great creativity. And so I just want to start out with asking you to share where the impetus for really honing on this as your strategy came from and what are maybe two or three key things that you've learned along the way. Rashad Robinson: Yeah. So first of all, it's great to see you even by Zoom. Hopefully we'll get to see each other in person at some point. And it's great to be with so many incredible leaders from all of these places that I want to be right now and visit. And so I'm just sending so much love and appreciation for freedom fighters and people who are building to fight for justice and freedom and liberation and working to build a more human and less hostile world. And so first and foremost, just a lot of respect and appreciation. Color Of Change was founded in the aftermath of a flood, which was Hurricane Katrina. And it was caused by bad decision makers and it turned into a life-altering disaster by bad decision makers. And I explain the origin story because it 1 really does animate sort of how we think about technology and how we think about digital sort of power. And so Katrina happens, the levies break, the flood moves in, right? Katrina illustrates things that people already knew, right? Black people are on their roofs, begging for the government to do something and are literally left to die, literally left to die on camera. But the things that were illustrated, people already knew; geographic segregation, generational poverty, the impacts of what we've done to our planet, all of the ways in which structural racism undergirds those things, animates it, gives it power. And at the heart of that, no one was nervous about disappointing Black people. And so you're asking me, so then how does that connect to the question? Right? And so it connects to the question is when no one's nervous about disappointing your community, you have to figure out what is the infrastructure I build to make that possible. What is the infrastructure I do to channel this kind of outrage that people are having and the fact that people are giving to the Red Cross instead of working for a systemic change. And so there was already... The United States is legendary for the sort of historic Black sort of political infrastructure, right? The legacy organizations that span now into a 100... A couple of them are 100 years old, right? And so there was a lot of organizations there, there was infrastructure, there were spokespeople, there were elected officials. Many people were speaking but they were not channeling that energy and that power into doing something. And the founders of Color Of Change at the time saw groups like MoveOn. Saw groups in the United States that were using digital technology, using digital tools and felt like there should be something here for Black folks that wasn't just part of these other organizations but was owned and operated. And so a single email was sent out to about 1,000 people asking them to join a new movement for change and really focusing on what does it mean to channel that energy and direct it in places that can have strategic impact. And so a couple of things that I think are important especially as you think about digital organizing, as you think about building power online is the first thing is, is that these tools and this technology will not save us. And that the tools and technology should be thought of as tools and technology. They're not our strategy. The late Julian Bond, who was the former chairman of the NAACP and was one of the key leaders of something called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, sometimes called SNCC. John Lewis who recently passed away was a leader of SNCC, folks like Diane Nash and others. And they were the student organizing sort of infrastructure during the 60s sit in, the lunch counter sit ins. And years and years ago as a young activist, Julian Bond told me this story that has stuck with me and really connects to why this sort of work is so important in terms of thinking about these things as tools is that back in the 60s, SNCC installed something called the WATS line in their Shaw University office. And WATS was the precursor to the 1-800 number. It actually allowed people to call from long distance. And during the time when you had to call long distance, they would transfer your call from operator to operator. So if you call from Howard University in D.C. to Tuskegee University in Alabama, and those two university student groups wanted to talk, the call got transferred a couple of times. And at the time in the South, all of those operators were controlled by the White Citizens' Council, the KKK. And for folks who live in other countries, you can probably think about how your ability to communicate might be compromised by forces who are sort of standing in their way. But they installed this WATS line and allowed them a more secure way to transfer information. 2 Rashad Robinson: The reason why I tell this story and why it's important, if SNCC did not have a theory of change, if they did not have a power analysis, if they did not have people who were in motion ready to follow them and put their sort of bodies and their interest on the line to make something new and make something better, it wouldn't have mattered what technology they had. And so part of what I constantly remind myself and remind my team is that the technology will not cover up a bad strategy. The technology will not cover up a plan that nobody wants to show up for. And so constantly recognizing in so many ways that presence and visibility and retweets and shout outs from the stage does not mean that we have power, power is power. And that in so many ways that we can't cut corners and think that technology is going to fix those sort of cut corners. Mallika Dutt: So that's a really important reminder, right? That you have to have a theory of change. You have to have an analysis of power, you have to have a constituency that's ready to mobilize itself and move forward. And that technology is not strategy. And I think we often make a lot of mistakes around just trying to get as much presence online as we can without paying attention to some of these underlying things. I mean, the other dimension of this, Rashad is that even with technology, we're often using the tools of the very system that we are trying to shift and change. And so there's an even greater reliance on that technology now that we're in the midst of this pandemic. We're watching the tech giants amass power in sort of an unprecedented way. And so there's that paradox, right? That we're also constantly dealing with around using the tools of the master to dismantle the master's house, if you will, With a nod to Audre Lorde at this moment. So I'm just curious about how you might describe perhaps the Facebook campaign or another one of the campaigns that you're currently deeply engaged in that is dealing with this paradox of the master's tools as we pivot in this pandemic to being even more reliant on technology and the digital space than ever before? Rashad Robinson: Yeah. I mean, the technology that can bring us into the future has so much potential to drag us into the past.