Activists in Philly Have a Novel Approach to Help De-Oppress Society

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

This is an all-too-familiar example of systemic oppression, which the diversity, equity, and inclusion-based 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 instance, according to the Forbes piece “Gender Pay Gap Statistics in 2024,” on average, women earn 16 percent less than men. The article also states that “[w]omen of color are among the lowest-paid workers in rural areas, with rural Black and Hispanic women making just 56 cents for every dollar that rural white, non-Hispanic men make.” Meanwhile, Native American women receive an average of 59 cents for every dollar paid to white males.

A worker-owned cooperative called the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA) fights systemic oppression by helping individuals and organizations create equitable leadership models for all races, genders, and sexual orientations to enable them to achieve “social justice and a solidarity economy.” Established in 2010, this 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 founding members, explains that AORTA works with “organizations that have a sense of themselves as doing social change work,” such as progressive nonprofits, community organizations, student groups, and other worker co-ops. Its clients have included the American Civil Liberties Union, Sexual Assault Support Services, and Community United Against Violence.

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

As an example of the marginalization that queer, trans, and intersex individuals face, half of the 1,828 LGBTQI+ adults who participated in a Center for American Progress study experienced workplace discrimination in 2022 due to their “sexual orientation, gender identity, or intersex status.” This included being fired, denied promotions, and having their work 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 are attacking queer and trans people are the same forces that are attacking everybody,” in Boucher’s words. For instance, the “Christian nationalist right wing” that oppresses those communities also advocates book censorship, increased policing and incarcerations, immigration restrictions, and the reversal of reproductive rights, social services, and measures to roll back climate catastrophe, he adds.

Institutionalized White Supremacy

AORTA helps clients work through conflict effectively and healthily. To illustrate this, Boucher relates 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 2020 murder of George Floyd. A portion of this training focuses on how structural and governance problems within establishments can exacerbate preexisting inequity.

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

During an “Uprooting White Supremacy” training on Zoom, AORTA facilitators were describing structural and governance problems and tying 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 speech where I explained that. It was like a chill fell over the Zoom room. You could feel this division in the group: To some people, white supremacy looks like inclusive bias, discrimination, [and other] things we can easily identify, and then there were the people who felt [the dynamic of white supremacy] very deeply in the day-to-day, in their bodies, and their experiences at work.”

Boucher says that when this occurred, the training leaders “paused and made some space for folks 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 of work where we get that clear about [these issues].”

Combating Neoliberalism

AORTA’s website declares, “Decades of neoliberal policy have encoded the legacies of enslavement and genocide into the institutions of U.S. civil society. Movements that have long fought and resisted oppression are in a state of fracture and struggle to work in coalition. Today’s social movements need greater connection to local, regional, national, and global movement history in order to dispel a sense of isolation, alienation, and competition.”

Expanding on this idea, Boucher says, “The movements in our organizations are siloed and separated, and so much of that is because of the nonprofit industrial complex and the way that neoliberalism encourages our work to be single-issue. People have a tendency to feel like all the problems they have in their organizations are unique to them, and that is almost never true.”

He adds that AORTA’s team sees many mainstream efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion as “essentially a Band-Aid: saying, ‘Hey, we can address oppression and fix it by just looking at this organization or this workplace in a vacuum.’ Maybe they’re looking at people’s implicit bias or trying to stop microaggression—the right kind of thing, but they aren’t looking at changing things in a broader way.” By contrast, AORTA points clients toward mutual aid, antifascist organizing, and other forms of direct action.

Self-Accountability

Because AORTA is not a nonprofit, it is not beholden to funders. “Most of our funding comes from fee-for-service work, so we’re not accountable to a board that isn’t us,” Boucher notes. “Capitalism is something we all exist in and is inherently exploitative, but [for us,] there’s not that specificity of capitalist exploitation where the workers are generating profits for the business owner.”

He adds that AORTA is “horizontal in the sense that nobody is anyone else’s boss. We are all bosses. We get to make the decisions about what we want our policies and practices to be.”

This has allowed AORTA’s worker-owners to establish an equitable salary structure and a robust benefits package. “We can say, ‘Hey, we want to try this brand-new, unique thing,’ because we don’t have anyone saying that we can’t,” Boucher states. “So, I think being able to think outside the box is a huge part of starting a worker co-op or any kind of organization that reflects the liberatory values and structures we want to see in the world.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

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