A powerful 6-page guide for organizers to build alliances and overcome divisions caused by institutional oppression and fear. Includes great working definitions for terms related to oppression.
Alliances are crucial to creating any kind of sustainable change. History has shown that different groups have been played against each other by those in power to keep us separated and unable to threaten the status quo.
A little story about our divisions
When the United States was beginning to form, there was a hierarchy of oppression that kept everyone subservient to someone above them. The King of England demanded goods from the Jamestown white elite who exploited and controlled the white frontiersman who, in order to appease the elite with money and land, slaughtered Indigenous people and brutalized African slaves. Many whites joined Indigenous and African rebellions. The white elite worked to stop this because they knew such an alliance would become too powerful and would succeed at overthrowing the control that the elite and the King had. So in order to separate the whites from everyone else, they started giving more privileges (land and better treatment) to the white servants. This worked. The working class whites effectively abandoned the movements for change and to this day these groups have problems working together. (Zinn, 1980).
