Bridging as Leadership on Anti-Black Racism
The purpose of our project is to build the power of bridgers to transform systems and create a world that values the full humanity and dignity of Black people across the globe.
To complete this project, we will identify and interview 20-40 leaders who take the approach we describe as bridging, and ask them a consistent set of questions about their experience, including how they define the bridging work they do.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS:
To truly make progress on anti-Black racism, we need many types of strategies, approaches, and resources. We need people with lived experience to articulate the problems and define solutions; we need organizers to build collective power around those solutions; we need inside actors in government and other institutions to transform the institutions that can implement those solutions; and we need funders to invest in people who do the work.
However, too often, these assets are siloed and don’t interact in ways that could lead to increased impact. Money doesn’t find its way to Black and Brown leaders and organizers; expertise doesn’t inform new strategies; folks with large followings or ample relationships don’t have the time or expertise to leverage them.
In addition, cross-race and cross-partnership––critical to enable this kind of interaction––is difficult to forge. People who attempt to bring assets and people together face myriad barriers to success: lack of trust and support from communities on both sides of the bridge, constant vigilance to guard against co-option and dilution, maintaining authenticity across very different spaces, personal attacks, and more.
When bridgers are subject to isolation and trauma, our movements are deprived of critical fuel needed to advance the work, and the entire ecosystem is left weakened. We cannot build strong, healthy, and sustainable movements to combat anti-Black racism without supporting, visibilizing, and investing in bridgers.
Impact
We have three specific goals:
Refine our conceptualization of bridging/bridgers and possibly develop a new term/metaphor. Deliverables: literature review and a refined conceptualization of definition of bridging.
Visibilize the experiences of bridgers to other bridgers and affirm the importance of their role in advancing justice for Black people globally. Deliverables: Identifying other bridgers, documenting their perspectives and insights, and validating this critical role in the broader racial justice movement.
Build a community of bridgers that creates belonging, nourishes, and provide space for new bridging work to take root. Deliverables: a group of identified bridgers who are interested in deepening and maintaining connections with one another and possibly a convening of this group.
