Social movements today and the de-oppressive society

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In 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reported that one in every 1,000 black men in the U.S. is killed by police. Statista reports that between 2015 and August 2024, black American residents were fatally shot by police officers at a rate of 6.2 per million residents per year, compared to 2.4 white Americans per million per year.

This is an all-too-familiar example of systemic oppression, which diversity, equity and inclusion-focused software company Develop Diverse defines as “the mistreatment of a social, ethnic or racial group perpetuated by governments, schools, health care systems and other socioeconomic structures.”

Systemic oppression can take many forms. For example, according to the Forbes article “Gender Pay Gap Statistics in 2024,” women earn an average of 16 percent less than men. The article also states that “[women]of color are among the lowest-paid workers in rural areas, with Black and Hispanic rural women earning just 56 cents for every dollar that white, non-Hispanic rural men earn.” Meanwhile, Native American women are paid an average of 59 cents for every dollar paid to white men.

A worker-owned cooperative called the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA) combats systemic oppression by helping individuals and organizations create equitable leadership models for all races, genders, and sexual orientations so they can achieve “social justice and a solidarity economy.” Founded in 2010, the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based team of facilitators offers strategy meetings, coaching, political education, and training on anti-oppression value systems.

Roan Boucher, one of the group’s six founders, explains that AORTA works with “organizations that feel like they’re doing social change work,” such as progressive nonprofits, community organizations, student groups, and other worker cooperatives. Clients include the American Civil Liberties Union, Sexual Assault Support Services, and Community United Against Violence.

Boucher says he and his colleagues help organizations democratize and “make their practices, processes, and decision-making more participatory, transparent, and clear. When we’re not intentional, clear, and purposeful, systems of oppression are the path of least resistance. Who feels silenced? Who feels marginalized? All of these larger things often tend to run along lines of race or genderqueerness.”

As an example of the marginalization faced by queer, trans, and intersex people, half of the 1,828 LGBTQI+ adults who participated in a 2022 Center for American Progress study experienced discrimination in the workplace because of their “sexual orientation, gender identity, or intersex status.” This included being fired, denied promotions, and having their hours reduced.

An AORTA training called “Liberation for All of Us: Queer and Trans Liberation as Collective Liberation” is designed to show how “the forces that attack queer and trans people are the same forces that attack everyone,” in Boucher’s words. For example, the “Christian nationalist right wing” that oppresses those communities also advocates for censorship of books, more policing and incarceration, restrictions on immigration and rollbacks of reproductive rights, social services and measures to reverse the climate disaster, he adds.

Institutionalized white supremacy

AORTA helps clients work through conflict effectively and healthily. To illustrate this, Boucher recounts an incident that occurred during a training called “Uprooting White Supremacy in Organizations,” which the group developed around the time of the uprisings surrounding the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Part of this training focuses on how structural and governance issues within institutions can exacerbate pre-existing inequities.

Boucher notes that “the people who are most negatively impacted by those issues are the people who have the least power in the organization because of their role in the supervisory chain, their racial identity, or their gender identity.” He adds that AORTA staff often notices a racial skew in hierarchies in the workplace. “The organization can be 50-50 white people and people of color, but the leadership is almost entirely white.”

During a “Uprooting White Supremacy” training on Zoom, AORTA facilitators described structural and governance issues and connected them to systemic oppression. “A white person jumped in and said, ‘These are all good ideas, but what do these things have to do with white supremacy?’” Boucher recalls. “He must have missed the talk where I was explaining that. It was like a shiver went through the Zoom room. You could feel this division in the group: for some people, white supremacy looks like inclusionary bias, discrimination (and other) things that we can easily identify with, and then there were the people who felt[the dynamics of white supremacy]very deeply in their daily lives, in their bodies, and in their experiences at work.”

Boucher says that when this happened, the training leaders “paused and made space for people to share what that brought up for them and what their experiences were. It’s rare to have a moment in the day-to-day where we’re so clear about (these issues).”

The fight against neoliberalism

AORTA’s website states: “Decades of neoliberal policies have encoded the legacies of slavery and genocide into the institutions of American civil society. Movements that have long fought and resisted oppression are in a state of rupture and struggling to work in coalition. Today’s social movements need a greater connection to local, regional, national, and global movement history to dispel a sense of isolation, alienation, and competition.”

Boucher expands on this idea, saying, “The movements within our organizations are siloed and separate, and that’s largely because of the nonprofit industrial complex and the way neoliberalism encourages our work to be focused on one issue. People tend to think that all the problems they have in their organizations are unique to them, and that’s almost never true.”

He adds that the AORTA team sees a lot of mainstream diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts as “essentially a Band-Aid: saying, ‘Hey, we can address and solve oppression by just looking at this organization or this workplace in a vacuum.’ Maybe they’re looking at people’s implicit biases or trying to stop microaggressions — the right kind of thing, but they’re not looking at changing things in a broader way.” Instead, AORTA points clients toward mutual aid, anti-fascist organizing, and other forms of direct action.

Self-responsibility

Because AORTA is not a nonprofit, it does not rely on funders. “The majority of our funding comes from fee-for-service work, so we are not accountable to a board that is not us,” Boucher notes. “Capitalism is something that we all live in and it is inherently exploitative, but (for us) there is not that specificity of capitalist exploitation where the workers generate profit for the business owner.”

He adds that AORTA is “horizontal in the sense that no one is anyone else’s boss. We are all bosses. We get to decide for ourselves what we want our policies and practices to be.”

This has allowed AORTA’s worker-owners to create a fair wage structure and a robust benefits package. “We can say, ‘Hey, we want to try this brand new, unique thing,’ because no one’s saying we can’t do it,” Boucher said. “So I think being able to think outside the box is a big part of starting a worker co-op or any other organization that reflects the liberatory values ​​and structures that we want to see in the world.”

This article is produced by Local peace economy.