|
 The
Organizer
Grassroots movements are nothing new for Kirti Baranwal '98. While
thousands of people demonstrate against international financial
bodies that force cuts in social services overseas, Baranwal fights
similar cutbacks in Los Angeles, starting with the middle-school
classroom where she teaches math, science, and art. Some L.A. classrooms
are crammed with 70 students, and many of Baranwal's pupils arrive
late to school, having been bypassed by two or three overstuffed
public buses in their low-income neighborhoods.
Anti-corporate globalization activists talk
at length about needing to build local, community-based movements,
but Baranwal has been at it for years. Environmental studies classes
at Oberlin taught her the history of environmental racism and that
it can devastate working-class communities of color; they didn't
cover the practicalities of how citizens could fight the placement
of polluting industries in their neighborhoods.
Her interest was not only academic; it was rooted
in her upbringing and identity. "As an Asian American woman
from a working-class background who had the privilege to get to
college, it was very important for me to ask, 'How do I put my skills
to work, changing the material conditions for people in working-class
communities of color?'" she says.
She eventually found some answers at Oberlin, where
Eric Mann, director of the Labor-Community Strategy Center (LCSC)
in Los Angeles, spoke once about the multiracial coalitions he had
worked with to fight environmental racism and transportation inequities--all
with an underlying analysis of how institutional power works across
the board.
As Mann spoke, Baranwal's future materialized. "I
was floored," she says. She took a leave of absence from Oberlin
and spent seven months at the LCSC's School for Organizing, where
she studied a philosophy of community organizing that emphasizes
thoughtful strategy in combination with action. "You have to
have a theory about how to change things," she says. "It's
not just about feeling good about yourself. The goal is to see if
we can build a multiracial, antiracist, social movement that can
really win things."
Returning to Oberlin with a new focus and purpose,
she joined Third World Co-op and moved into Third World House, where
she later served as an RC. She brought speakers to campus and worked
on building a sense of community for students of color and from
low-income backgrounds.
After graduating, she moved back to L.A. to work with
the Bus Riders Union, the flagship project of the LCSC. The organization
was on a roll, having recently celebrated a high-profile victory
against the Los Angeles Mass Transit Authority. A federal judge
had ordered the MTA to reduce overcrowding on the buses, implement
reduced-fare passes, and introduce less-polluting natural gas buses
onto the fleet. The MTA would appeal the decision several times
over the next five years, but the Bus Riders Union, employing a
mix of legal avenues and street action, repeatedly came out on top.
As a full-time organizer, Baranwal was an exception
among her college friends. Many of the Obies she knew from Third
World House and Co-op had graduated under onerous loads of debt
and had moved home with their parents. For them, the life of an
organizer, with its 60-hour weeks and minimum-wage salary, was not
an option. Other alumni, including those from low-income backgrounds,
preferred taking their activist skills and resources back to their
hometowns.
After two years as a staff organizer with the Bus
Riders Union, Baranwal switched to teaching middle school. She organizes
after-hours with the Coalition for Education Justice, a group of
L.A. teachers, parents, and students pushing for smaller class sizes,
bilingual education, and an end to high-stakes testing and police
presence at schools. And she still loves the way a skillful organizer,
armed with compassion and good theory, can use a single issue to
get people talking about how institutional racism operates, how
to challenge government and business leaders, and how the civil
rights struggles of the past 50 years are all interconnected.
"Fundamentally, my organizing is a work of love,"
she says. "It helps me acknowledge how much beauty and strength
there are within communities of color and the working class. It
gives me peace in a world where there is violence in many forms.
And, in this society, which creates very negative and horrible things,
it helps me to create beautiful things."
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