BYP100 No Longer Has a ‘Mecca’ Chapter
by Julian Akil Rose
A letter to community by The Former BYP100 Atlanta/Mecca Chapter
Greetings from Atlanta to our comrades nationwide, and Happy Black Futures month to everyone.
We send this note to make our comrades and community aware that we are officially disaffiliating from the national structure of BYP100. We plan to continue organizing with one another grounded in a politic, accountability, and relational structure that enables us to show up for our communities in Atlanta. To show up in the most relevant, crucial, and dynamic ways that we are able.
We send this note with radical love, radical honesty, and many mixed emotions. We send this letter with the strength to hold our contradictions.
Our chapter was forged in the summer of 2019, and since then, we have faced many of the challenges that new organizing bodies face. We’ve overcome personal illness and loss, abrupt transitions in leadership and membership, and of course, the pandemic that has changed so many of our lives and threatened to derail our momentum before it was ever built. From November to now we’ve participated in the national internal conversation among BYP100 members about harms, hurts, ways of moving with each other, and critiques of the organization, with hopes of transformation. Our hopes were met with unresponsiveness and action far too delayed from national leadership.
We stand in solidarity with our DC comrades and our sentiments echo many of theirs regarding the distance and misalignment we feel with the national structure. Many BYP100 chapters are comprised of long-tenured members — our challenge is the opposite. Eighty percent of our current 15-person membership joined our chapter in July of 2020 as the national and global uprisings prompted Black people to find political homes. For a group of organizers inspired by the ideals and history of the organization, and eager to contribute to the legacy, we’ve been disappointed and conflicted in discovering, step by step, that this structure may not support or symbolize the ways we strive to organize and be in community, struggle, and the pursuit freedom with one another.
Dr. Bettina L. Love assures us that to want freedom is to welcome struggle. We welcome the struggle. But regarding the rhetoric and actions of the national body, we dissent, in principle. We seek a better way. We believe there is one.
Principled Struggle
The Atlanta Chapter of BYP100 has voted unanimously to leave BYP100, effective immediately on this day, February 28, 2021. This decision is inspired by not only the many harms suffered at the hands of BYP100 national leadership and staff, but also their slow, disingenuous and insufficient responses to the many concerns brought to light by local chapters, including but not limited to concerns of neglected patriarchal violence and institutional abuse. The treatment of our comrades previously and currently on staff has modeled the disposability and silencing of the anti-Black entities, corporations and industries we need to tear down. Lastly, as BYP100 National holds our funds, we have experienced exceptional and inexcusable difficulty in accessing resources for mutual aid and direct action. The steps required to “request” funds that WE raised, in combination with the unresponsiveness of national finance staff, proved to be more of a hindrance than a resource, which had undeniably dire consequences as we attempted to support the Atlanta community in rapid response to multiple crises and uprising.
Leadership of BYP100, including the BYP100 501c3 Board, has seemingly become cozy and indulgent in their embrace of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. The NPIC is directly in conflict with our commitments to end racial capitalism and the exploitation of all Black people, a struggle in many ways exacerbated through the use of nonprofits to quell and extinguish the flames of Black radical movement. When concerns around this financial structure were raised, leadership showed an insulting disinterest in principled struggle, despite the clear truths all abolitionists hold. It has become clear that BYP100 will not be moved, nor will it change demonstrably, meaningfully, or in a timely fashion, and an organization that is both lost and immovable by their membership is not worth the energies of Black radical organizers, at the very least not this group. It took quite laborious dissent and multiple influential members leaving the organization to even get leadership to consider the malignance of their ways, signifying a much deeper mass of challenges that we no longer have the energy or patience to excise.
What does it mean to be “member-led” when members cannot shift the direction at any time? What does it mean to be “member-led” but to exclude or coerce the membership regarding decisions of finance? What does it mean to be “member-led” when only a few members make decisions on the hiring and firing of staff, in a pandemic which impacts all of us? In the way BYP100 has been moving, it seems as though these important, value-based assessments went unconsidered far too long.
In summary, our grievances are as follows:
Concentrated and hoarded power amongst leadership (National Leadership Staff and Board Members)
Mishandling of pervasive institutional, patriarchal violence
Previous use of non-disclosure agreements on our formerly-staff comrades
Inaccessible and unresponsive financial infrastructure and processes
Malignant expansion of nonprofit stature and the NPIC embrace of capitalism
Inefficient, reluctant, delayed responses to criticism and principled struggle
Our Comrades & Community
Now, we grapple with these questions, inspired by the maleficence and misdeeds of BYP100, as we try to build independently and anew. It is worth it to note that there are many organizers in the BYP100 formation with deep integrity and rich histories of impactful work. We are in support of our comrades, many of whom may remain affiliated with BYP100 and labor to create a better organization, even if we do not agree on the path moving forward.
Our Decision
The former Atlanta Chapter of BYP100, colloquially known as the Mecca Chapter, did not come to this decision without immense deliberation amongst all of our members.
There were a few all-member calls in November 2020 and successively December 2020, where BYP100 attempted to tell its membership, of over 400 folks locally (~150+ were on the call), their new staff structure and other related financial decisions. These decisions were made amongst national leadership and the non-profit board, without consultation of local membership. Further, during these convenings, members uplifted concerns around the recent firing of a comrade in the formation, alongside severance pay being attached to non-disclosure agreements. How could the organization be expanding its staff, while firing someone due to undisclosed (non-harm-related) reasons? Because the Atlanta Chapter is relatively new, we were surprised and disappointed with these practices, among other concerns raised by more seasoned members, and we waited in anticipation of changes and/or process to bring about these changes, and account for the harm caused to many.
We are still waiting to see what these changes will be, but we simply cannot continue moving with folks who saw no issue with consolidated power, mishandled patriarchal violence and abuse, and expansion which models non-profit structures, funded by institutions and groups deeply vested in electoral politics. Based on the learnings from our ancestors, thought-leaders in radical Black Queer Feminism and abolition, as well as our own sensibilities, we know these behaviors will not get us free. We do not have faith that current leadership will be able to radically change their ways of working. After several individual and group conversations about the aforementioned grievances, we used a consensus-based decision making process to come to the unanimous decision to secede from the national structure.
Moving Forward
Our new formation will move with an anti-capitalist, abolitionist, Black Queer Feminist lens. Our organization will prioritize democratic processes for decision-making and non-hierarchical structures for moving work. Our work will be Black-autonomous and primarily, if not completely, outside of the State and outside of the grasp of electoral organizing, because we will instead operate in the generative, sustainable space of world-building and mutual aid. We will fix our own streets, bringing about public safety and land autonomy. We will use artivism to shift cultural attitudes towards policing and prisons, to inspire abolitionist visions, and to deliver political education. We will feed the hungry of Atlanta and lend our energies to free Atlantans from incarceration, while supporting the families of incarcerated folks in the process. We will make abolition our commitment using a multi-pronged approach of direct action organizing, political education and mutual aid.
Parting Offerings
We publish this with the immense awareness of our imperfections. We open ourselves up to criticisms, scrutiny and accountability from our community of organizers and Black people more broadly. We dream of safety, peace, healing and joy for all Black people, and thus we wish BYP100 success in all of their endeavors where harm is not being normed, perpetuated and/or ignored. We realize that liberation will require multiple campaigns, strategies and tactics coming from unique formations, connected formations, and formations that will inevitably rise and fall.
Through all of this, our hope is that in the eyes of our ancestors and descendants, we do right by Black radical tradition.
With radical love,
The former BYP100 Atlanta/Mecca Chapter