Anti-Oppressive Fair Trade Organizing

For USFT, Fair Trade is about answering the core questions of who is at the table, who is heard, who has access, and who has power in the global economy. While we advocate for empowering alternatives to these questions on an international level through Fair Trade products and relationships, we know it is equally important to ask these hard questions in our organizing. Wrestling with the challenge of starting with ourselves and beginning to unlearn racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, and other learned systems of oppression. From there we examine our organizing model, where we critically examine how we do our work and how our class, color, culture, context, and character impact the way s we organize. We strive to create a space where we can analyze our work and struggle to innovate better ways to organize and be in relationship across difference.

We're eager to do this work with all of our affiliates at the grassroots, as we think it's one of the most important things we do! We do this through anti-oppression trainings regionally, workshops at the convergence, coaching with affiliate organizers, and a consistent support network of global justice organizers struggling to organize with integrity to our values. USFT encourages all our affiliates to participate in anti-oppression and group dynamics trainings and commit to challenging structures of oppression within their organizing so that we can model an empowering alternative of relationship s and group process.

In our experience, these principles and guidelines have been helpful in guiding groups to dig into anti-oppressive organizing more deeply.

Principles of Anti-Oppression

1. Power and privilege play out in our group dynamics and we must continually struggle with how we challenge power and privilege in our practice.
   
2. We can only identify how power and privilege play out when we are conscious and committed to understanding how racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of oppression affect each one of us.
3. Until we are clearly committed to anti-oppression practice all forms of oppression will continue to divide our movements and weaken our power.
4. Developing a anti-oppression practice is life long work and requires a life long commitment. No single workshop is sufficient for learning to change one's behaviors. We are all vulnerable to being oppressive and we need to continuously struggle with these issues.
5. Dialogue and discussion are necessary and we need to learn how to listen non defensively and communicate respectfully if we are going to have effective anti-oppression practice. Challenge yourself to be honest and open and take risks to address oppression head on.

Anti-Oppression Practice

• Promote anti-oppression in everything you do, in and outside of activist space.
  
• When witnessing or experiencing racism, sexism, etc interrupt the behavior and address it on the spot or later; either one on one, or with a few allies.
  
• Give people the benefit of the doubt. Think about ways to address behavior that will encourage change and try to encourage dialogue, not debate.
  
• Keep space open for anti-oppression discussions
  
• Respect different styles of leadership and communication.
  
• White people need to take responsibility for holding other white people accountable.
  
• Be conscious of how much space you take up or how much you speak.
  
• Be conscious of how your language may perpetuate oppression.
  
• Don't push people to do things just because of their race and gender, base it on their word and experience and skills.
  
• Avoid generalizing feelings, thoughts, behaviors etc. to a whole group
  
• Set anti-oppression goals and continually evaluate whether or not you are meeting them.
  
• Don't feel guilty, feel motivated. Realizing that you are part of the problem doesn't mean you can't be an active part of the solution!

We believe that social justice and recognizing structures of inequality is integral to our work, therefore, we must be mindful of and challenge the elements of privilege and power not only on a global and societal level, but also within our own organizational structures and ourselves. We strive to build a movement that struggles to understand and to actively combat racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism and other forms of oppression.