seattle indymedia center

Malik Rahim Speaks to Northwesterners of Unity, Preparedness, Faith

author: Amy L. Dalton
Mar 19, 2007 07:22

Tour plants seeds for regional "satellite" Common Ground organization.

Malik Rahim -- one-time Black Panther organizer, Green Party member, and founder of the New Orleans-based Common Ground Collective -- spoke to several hundred Northwesterners at a half-dozen churches and community centers in Olympia and Seattle earlier this month. He was flanked by Joan and Bernadette Berniard and Lee Flemming, survivors of Hurricane Katrina who settled in Seattle after their lives were turned upside down in the aftermath of the August 2005 storm. Fleming and the Berniard sisters are the founding organizers of the Seattle Common Ground Collective, which seeks to unite the three to five thousand refugees of Hurricane Katrina that have settled in the Puget Sound region.

"Solidarity not charity" is the call that Common Ground sounded less than five days after the western edge of Katrina blew through New Orleans. Since then, the volunteer and donation-driven network has coordinated life-saving relief to over 140 thousand individuals and drawn thousands into cooperative, community-led reconstruction efforts -– including a health clinic, food distribution centers, and a youth and community center, and a land trust project based on developing environmentally sustainable systems, including detoxification and wetlands restoration initiatives.

Common Ground Seattle's work focuses first in protecting the refugee population's right to return to their homes in New Orleans. This right is endangered due to the material difficulties that survivors face where they have settled, as well as the lack of habitable conditions in the poorer areas of New Orleans and the pressure from banks to "redevelop" these areas instead of restoring them for the use of the displaced residents and homeowners. Even if survivors do own a home to return to, it is likely in danger of being repossessed based on unreasonable timelines and standards for repair – criteria that were set without the consultation of the owners, and in many cases without their knowledge.

Common Ground Seattle moved to address this reality last August by organizing a group of Katrina survivors and allies to share costs in making a trip back to New Orleans. The group included one family who decided to stay, and several families and individuals who were able to tend to business and retrieve personal items that had been put in storage. They also worked on mold abatement, and participated in the events commemorating the one-year anniversary of the storm.

Now the group is gearing up toward another caravan this August. Linda Warren, an ally working with the survivor-led group, says that they are especially motivated to make the trip this August because of the plans underway for the second annual Survivor's Assembly. "We didn’t know about the first one," she explained, "but now we are definitely ready to get involved in the political voice that is going to come out of this August's gathering." The Survivors Assembly is being coordinated by the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Council.

Joan Berniard says she is not sure if her family will return permanently to New Orleans, but the ability to maintain connection, to keep the option of returning open, and to be a part of the rebuilding of the city is deeply important. "We just want to get everyone home," she said. "I don't know if I'll stay, but New Orleans is on my heart; its part of me."

In his comments, Rahim spoke of the spiritual level of this process of return -- which he described repeatedly as a collective opportunity to reconnect with the core of who we are as humans. He called Americans a people "drunk on prosperity," whose selfishness has progressively obliterated our sense of civic responsibility and commitment to each other. The invisible public square inside us is an abandoned ghost town, literally: "We founded Common Ground as a direct response to the total abandonment of New Orleans," Rahim explained. "We come to you because of an absence."

And yet, the crisis can become an opportunity: with Katrina, that reality was made material -- and we were given a chance to respond. "The name 'Katrina' comes from a Russian word that means 'cleansing,'" said Rahim. "Now, I don’t believe the Most High would do anything without giving us a warning, and I truly believe that this is what God is doing for us now. This is our chance to clean up our act."

Rahim wants Common Ground Seattle to step up to the task of rebuilding our public square before a disaster hits, not after. "We are cursed that we lost our community," he said. "But we are blessed in that now we have a chance to rebuild it in sustainable ways. And you -- you are blessed [that we had this chance], because we could come up with these ways and try them in New Orleans … because we need to."

Rahim has been dialoging with organizers about forming a similar regional network in New York, where he will be speaking on March 19.

When expressing his vision, Rahim repeatedly credited his experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party as providing him with the skills necessary to lead this effort. He said their motto was the 5 Ps: "proper planning prevents poor performance." However, often what stands in the way of this preparedness is a simple ignorance of who our neighbors are. "You need to know how to access the resources that are there in your community. You need to be able to say… here’s the group of volunteers with shovels who are gonna start clearing the streets -- before you start clearing your house! Because you know where the priority is."

It is this combination of being prepared and being in touch that will enable us to survive and rebuild. Rahim gave effusive appreciation to organizations such as Veterans for Peace and the Longshoreman’s Union who he said responded quickly and intelligently to CGC's needs. "If we had a parent organization, it would have been Veterans for Peace,"Rahim testified, after Howard Harrison from Seattle VFP introduced him to the gathered crowed at Carnation, WA. "They brought order to chaos."

CGC’s work has relied on an outpouring of support and volunteer labor from organizations around the country, including student groups from over 200 campuses. This embrace of outside labor has come under criticism by allied efforts in New Orleans, who say it is disempowering for the local community to rely so heavily on outside relief workers -- especially since a majority of the volunteers are white, and the population that is experiencing material need is almost entirely people of color.

In his comments, Rahim acknowledged the importance of different styles of organizing, but defended the worth of the outside volunteers, calling them “my true heros” and objecting to the labeling of them as drifters and hippies. He also defended the underlying philosophy that drives his work, which is at heart about the efficiency and creativity that is possible in collaboration. "Think of what the 75,000 students [who live in this region] could to open up one of those highways?" he asked. He went on to tell stories about brewing vats of detoxification tea and creating super-sized washing machine by rigging a tub to a bicycle -- knowledge that volunteers brought through their travels and interactions with other sorts of communities, such as the Zapatistas.

However, Rahim took care not to discount the importance of other modes of organizing, and called above all for a remembering of the unity. "We have to remember that we all want the same thing; we all are trying to get to the same place," he said. "Since I’m a spiritual person, I say: I want to get to heaven. But I don’t need to get there in a cadillac. I like vans, so I want to get there in a van. You might want to get there in a volkswagon. You might want to get there in a taxi. Someone else might want to take public service bus. Someone else might want to go by bicycle. The point is, we all trying to get to that same destination."

The van is an fitting metaphor for Common Ground’s work, as many a volunteer and donation shipments have arrived via van. Additionally, one of Common Ground’s volunteers, the late Meg Perry, is remembered fondly for the work she did to renovate an old schoolbus into “a vegetable powered mobile community space.”

Most fundamentally, Rahim sees this willingness to come together is necessary in order to bring order rather than chaos out of situations of disaster. He emphasized that Katrina would look like childsplay with reference to the amount of people who would be effected were a major earthquake to hit this region -- whereas approximately 2 million people were affected by Katrina, over 40 million people live along the Pacific Rim in the US. "We have to start planning now -- you<.i> have to start planning now!"

But though he spoke severely, the warning was somehow delivered with joy. And received in kind: from the Miller’s Community Arts Center to the People's Institutional Baptist Church, Rahim's call not just registered, but resonated -- and people joined him in magnifying it. At the tour's close -- in a lavender clapboard bar-turned-church called the "Oneness Center" -- four women from the Total Experience Gospel Choir sang a closing song to raise the roof: "God, bring your people unity."

Please contact me for permission to reproduce this article ~ ald[([at])]riseup-dot-net

add a comment on this article