POWER
Description
What does it actually mean to build power in the belly of a beast?
As conditions worsen, I’ve witnessed a broader pattern within U.S. leftist organizing narratives and culture: political practice becoming increasingly shaped by moral expression, emotional catharsis, and what feels politically correct rather than analysis grounded in material conditions. We turn to slogans like “all power to the people” to produce hope and mobilize an unorganized people, while leaving the question of how people develop the organized capacity to actually build and wield power unanswered. Power has become encapsulated as spectacle and solidarity as sentiment: leftist narratives mistake visibility for power, moments for movements, and the expression of political commitments for the relationships, resources, labor, and institutions required to materialize them.
This conversation brings together organizers to critically examine how power is understood, practiced, and built within the neo-settler colonial u.s. Through personal experience, collective reflection, scientific analysis, and practices of criticism and self-criticism, we’ll explore what this historical moment demands of those committed to liberation—and what it will require of us to build something capable of winning.
Featuring poetry by Sarah O'Neal, this discussion is an attempt to practice that reckoning together: to confront our own contradictions, be vulnerable enough to be challenged, and engage criticism and self-criticism as practices through which we become more capable of building real power.
Come through Thursday, September 3rd, from 5-8pm @CURYJ’s office (1150 35th ave, Oakland CA) and be prepared to interrogate what our practices are producing, and what they are failing to produce.
Lineup
Darius Simpson
Darius Simpson is a New Afrikan writer, educator, farmer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry must be used for the positive social, political, and economic development of the majority of society. He is the recipient of fellowships from Poetry Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and others. His book, Never Catch Me, is out now and available at buttonpoetry.com. Darius believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of Africans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People! Free The Land!
Keala Uchôa
Keala was born and raised in the Bay Area. She is a campaign communications specialist, writer, community organizer, and educator building and dreaming at the intersections of abolition and environmental justice. She specializes in refinery decommissioning, Indigenous land demarcation, and anti-carceral campaigns. She has also served as an international correspondent in Ecuador, Brasil, Mexico, and Cuba. She directs communications at the Black Organizing Project, a Black-led abolitionist organization in Oakland, CA. Keala attended Northwestern University, earning her B.A. in a self-designed academic program in Critical Race Environmental Justice Studies and a minor in Legal Studies. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with a 4.0 GPA as a first-generation college student with ancestral roots in Brasil. She is passionate about critical pedagogy and adult literacy, and is currently earning her M.A. in Education at San Francisco State University. Her community participatory research centered the experiences of currently incarcerated comrades at Cook County Jail during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work was featured in the anthology Latinas: Gender, Race & Class -Struggles in 21st Century USA, Vol. 2, published by Red SugarCane Press (2024). She has shared her wisdom at panels and guest lectures at Northwestern University, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Santa Clara University, as well as many community events throughout the Bay Area. She produces episodes for La Raza Chronicles on KPFA, plays Cumbia at Eastside Arts Alliance and organizes for Cuban and Third World Solidarity movements.
Gopal Dayaneni
Gopal (he/him) has been involved in working for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980’s. In addition to being a lecturer in Race and Resistance Studies, Gopal is also part of Climate HQ at SFSU and co-coordinates the Climate Justice Internship Program. He is a co-founder of Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project, which inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. MG is rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and Black, Indigenous & communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies. MG is a founding member of the Climate Justice Alliance. Gopal also supports movement building through his work with organizations including The Climate Justice Alliance, ETCgroup, NDN Collective, the Center for Story-based Strategy, People’s Solar Energy Fund, Grassroots International. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and Occidental Arts and Ecology CenterLinks to an external site., among others. He was a Fellow with the Center for Economic Democracy. from 2019-2022. Gopal is a trainer with the The Ruckus Society. and The Center for Story-based Strategy. and is a member of Asians4Black Lives and Bay Area Palestine Solidarity. Currently, he serves on the boards of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, ETC Group and Frontline Catalysts. He has recently served on the boards of The Center for Story-based Strategy and The Working World. He is also on the advisory boards of the Catalyst Project , The Sustainable Economies Law CenterLinks to an external site., and The Center for Political EducationLinks to an external site.. Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy, ending extractivism & empire and the cultivation of commons and community. Gopal has been a campaigner for Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition on human rights and environmental justice in the high-tech industry and was the Oil Campaigner for Project Underground, a human and environmental rights organization that supported communities resisting oil and mining exploitation around the world. He has been active in many people powered direct action movements, including the Global Justice/Anti-Globalization Movement, Direct Action to Stop the War, the Climate Justice movement, Take Back the Land, Occupy, as an ally with Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Sovereignty struggles and the movement for a Free Palestine. Gopal was an elementary and early childhood educator, working formerly as a teacher and also as the co-director of the Tenderloin Childcare Center, a community based childcare center supporting children and families forced into homelessness. He has worked in teacher education and education organizing in the US and in India.
Aniya Butler
Aniya Butler is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, organizer, and seed grown in Oakland CA. Aiming to provide principled interventions on the ways we understand and shape the world, nourished by New Afrikan resistance and lineage, her work blooms at the crossroads of generational trauma, memory, environmental healing and sustainability, stewardship, and resistance—all influenced by the historical conditions of displacement, genocide, and refusal to be erased. She is currently a student at Wesleyan University studying medical anthropology, deepening her understanding of the intersections of health, the environment, and systems of power to reveal and define what health and thriving looks like to oppressed communities who have systematically been denied them. Aniya believes in the total liberation of all oppressed peoples and earth, centering the necessity of reclaiming land, body (labor), spirit, harmony, and connection to each other and earth - a return to sacred. Catch Aniya plotting to steward baby menaces, reading alongside natural wombs of memory, and on IG @a.alchxmist and substack @tmrsseeds
Sarah O'Neal
Sarah O’Neal is a writer and artist born and raised in the Bay. Her writing has been featured in The Nation, KQED, and Bandcamp. When she is not writing, you can find her scheming on the end of empire, swimming laps, or on IG @atayqueen and Substack @sarahadbiboneal
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