It was 15 years ago that a group of women of color activists, including five from Chicago, decided that something had to be done about the systematic and systemic social, political and institutional violence they faced in the United States which was then disregarded by most advocacy groups.
They came together to, according to the website, "organize a little conference" on the campus of the University of California Santa Cruz during which they tried to understand and actively confront the violence. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence was founded in the same year. Accomplished and celebrated activist, author and History of Consciousness Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz Dr. Angela Davis delivered the keynote address in 2000.
"I predict that this conference will be remembered as a milestone for feminist scholars and activists, marking a new moment in the history of anti-violence scholarship and organizing," she said.
The more than 1,500 people from across the world who attended what has grown in size and scope to become INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming and Trans people of Color* Against Violence's Color of Violence 4: Beyond the State: Inciting Transformative Possibilities conference at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place March 26-29 proved that Davis's words exceeded prophecy. INCITE!'s influence, nationwide chapters and affiliates, political work and community mobilization touching all aspects of U.S. life from the arts to the media has become a focal point for defiance, empowerment and, most significantly, action over mere discussion.
The organization's work combating among a vast range of injustices such as homophobia and heterosexism, assaults on immigrant and Indigenous people's rights, reproductive justice, hate crimes against queer and transgender women of color, institutional racism and the rise and exponential growth of the prison industrial complex has become so prolific that, during the opening plenary sessions on March 26, organizers took a moment to welcome agents from the FBI, CIA and National Security Administration ( NSA ) who did not stand to be recognized.
Davis did—to a prolonged and unbridled standing ovation as she delivered the keynote address to a room that transcended boundaries of age, gender and gender expression, identity and race. There was no sign of the fear and hatred that has separated women of color regardless of orientation or identity from justice and even the most basic human rights. Instead there was absolute unity in defiance and a determination that the conference's massive sphere of plenaries, workshops, forums, performances, exhibitions and roundtables would yield a prolonged and consistent response to what has become an undeclared war by American society whose casualties are untold numbers of lost and devastated lives.
"Let me begin by honoring the Indigenous people [on] whose land we convene this evening," Davis said. "We should seriously recommit ourselves to working in solidarity with Native Americans."
"If one looks at INCITE!'s impact on radical activism, radical scholarship [since 2000] it is difficult to imagine that it has been only fifteen years," she added. "INCITE! has been as much about radically re-envisioning the ideological space of progressive activism as it has been about recreating an anti-violence movement that refuses to allow the state to establish it's parameters."
Looking back on the first conference in 2000, Davis remembered that "in order to accomplish the ambitious agenda the organization was setting for itself, enormous changes were going to have to happen in the movement against gender violence, the prison abolitionist movement, the disability movement and the campaign against racist police violence," she said. "At that time such changes seemed more like utopian yearnings than real possibilities. [INCITE!] has begun to center ideas, analysis and strategic goals that were hardly perceptible at the time of the first conference. Unlike some organizations that remain myopically and possessively fixated on narrowly constructed single issues, INCITE! has expertly surfed the waves of history and has proved capable of producing precisely what we need today—the intersectionality of struggles for justice."
The historic panel of women who preceded Davis's address were living examples of that struggle and of raw, implacable courage in the face of the incomprehensible prejudice and abuses heaped upon them by American courtrooms for no other reason than that they were simply trying to defend their lives and the lives of their loved ones which were under immediate threat.
Marissa Alexander is a woman of color imprisoned for defending herself and her children against her abusive husband; her mother, Helen Jenkins, joined her. CeCe McDonald is a transgender woman of color who was imprisoned in a male facility for almost 20 months after fought back against a verbal and horrific physical assault by a group of white individuals while she and her friends were on their way to buy groceries.
Yvonne Swan is a Native American from the Colville Confederated Tribes who was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years for defending her 11 year-old-son from an attack by a convicted child molester. Renata Hill is part of a group of friends who became known as the New Jersey Four who fought back against an attacker in Greenwich Village, New York and were judged and sentenced not only in the courtroom but by frenzied and outlandish media deadlines such as "Attack of the Killer Lesbians."
The panel discussion entitled "The Fight of Our Lives: The Criminalization of Self Defense" had Mariame Kaba, founding director of the transformative justice organization Project Nia and a co-organizer of the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander ( CAFMA ), as moderator.
"This is a big night," Kaba said, referring to the panelists. "Marissa didn't want to see her case as a singular case—as one person fighting the system but that it was a long history of many people. It's not new. It's something that's been ongoing. People have been resisting for as long as we have been targeted as women of color and trans people criminalized for the use of self-defense. The movements to be able to support Marissa, CeCe, Renata and Yvonne were mostly brought together by women of color who understood that these women in particular were political prisoners. What does it mean that women of color, particularly Black women who are cis and trans, have no selves to defend?"
"I could not have imagined the kind of experience Marissa went through trying to defend herself but at the same time not take the life of someone else," Jenkins said. "I am very proud of Marissa and I said to her 'what you did most people would not have been able to do.'"
She added that, when under attack, no one has the luxury of time. "You have a few seconds and what [Marissa] was able to do in a few seconds was make a decision not to take a life but at the same time save her own life. One thing I can say to anybody that's going through anything is that you have to have faith and trust God."
Speaking via Skype, Alexander discussed how she kept that faith during her incarceration. "I just believed what our creator said and that He had plans for me that was not for me to be in captivity," she said. "I continued to remember and see the outside when I would be in the van being transported from prison to the court, I could always visualize being on the outside and what was to come."
"My mother groomed me to become a defender of the land," Swan said. "She always drilled into me and my siblings to take care of the land and stand with it. We as Native people are one with the land. In 1973 our Native people and supporters occupied the village of Wounded Knee to protest the mistreatment of our people. In that period, the nation and the world was told how militants took over and [we] were portrayed as barbaric."
It was in Spokane, Washington, during the period of the Wounded Knee protest that Swan was placed under arrest for defending her son. "I couldn't believe it," she said. "Before then I had faith in the justice system. After my conviction I said 'no! The creator gave me the ability to have children and I have the right to raise those children and if I don't defend myself they're likely to take my children away.' On small reservations Native women are murdered at ten times higher than the national average. The prosecutor in my case used the hype against Native Americans to prosecute me. There's stereotypes against Native people that leads to racism and racism kills our people."
"This is so significant in my life right now," McDonald said. "Marissa and the New Jersey Four were people that I had on my wall in my cell knowing that as women of color we were going through the system together and that we were all fighting our own battles but we were fighting them together, trying to combat a system that is constantly attacking women of color."
"It was amazing for me to not feel like I was a victim in my life," McDonald added. "To be proud of being black, to be proud of being Trans. I read about so many women who have been affected by the prison industrial complex. They wanted to prosecute me for being a survivor, for having the audacity to fight back. We have the right to defend ourselves. We have the right to stand up against oppression, racism, sexism, the rape culture, transphobia, trans-misogyny and misogyny."
The applause was as deafening as it was when Hill took the microphone. "This is a historic moment for us," she said. "When my case first happened I really didn't see everything coming to where it is now. The media dehumanized us and the system raped us over and over again. When I read the headlines and they focused on 'lesbian' and black' I was like 'why are they focused on just that? Why are they focused on the fact that we're lesbians? Why not just a group of women?' I couldn't understand why we were being punished for deciding to survive. We have the option to sit there and risk getting killed or we fight back knowing that we're going to prison."
"Even after so called 'being free'," Hill said. "You're never really free. I'm still not free."
For more information on INCITE!, visit www.incite-national.org/home.
