Partner Event: Kopkind 2008 Call for Participants

Date: July 19 – 27

Theme: The Politics of Everyday Life — or, What Happens After the Election Hangover?

Both mentors, deeply embedded in their communities, have been involved in numerous local justice efforts whose broader political and cultural ramifications they have explored over the years in their extensive writing and speaking. They are:

Frank Bardacke, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, the antiwar and GI Coffeehouse movement, has been a writer, agitator and teacher in Watsonville, CA, for more than 30 years. In the 1970s he worked in the vegetable fields of California for six seasons as a member of the United Farm Workers, and in the canneries as a Teamster and early member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He has been involved with local pirate radio, and has written about politics, culture, sports and work, primarily for the local popular press, but also, particularly on labor issues and the farm workers, for New Left Review and academic publications. With Leslie Lopez and the Watsonville Human Rights Committee, he translated the letters and communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, in Shadows of Tender Fury (1995, Monthly Review Press); and he is the author of a forthcoming sweeping history of California farm workers and the UFW.

Kevin Gray, a child participant in the desegregation of South Carolina schools in the 1960s, has been an activist, writer and political organizer in Columbia, SC, for more than 25 years. He coordinated Jesse Jackson’s South Carolina caucus victory in the 1988 presidential campaign, and later worked for the Rainbow Coalition. As a longtime member, and former president, of the state ACLU, he has fought on numerous civil liberties issues, from police brutality and due process to the state’s flying of the Confederate flag on the capitol dome to the prosecution of the Charleston Five dockworkers. He has been involved in various electoral campaigns, including, in 2006, opposition to a statewide anti-gay ballot initiative. He contributes regularly to Black News, to CounterPunch, the Progressive and SIRIUS radio’s “Live From the Land of Hopes and Dream,” with Dave Marsh; and is the author of two forthcoming books, includingThe Decline of Black Politics, From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.

For this session, we encourage younger people who have been at work for a few years as media makers or activists (or hybrids) to apply. (Generally the average age is about 28, with people older and younger than that, but for legal/insurance reasons we cannot invite people under 21.) The program is entirely free, including transportation. (The 19th and 27th are travel days.) There are seminars every morning for three hours, free afternoons, and evening discussions sometimes with special guests, two of which are free public events. People must be able to commit to the full week’s program.

The week’s discussion will focus on left politics in the context of the election year and beyond – when the issues of war and economic exploitation and questions of race, class and sex will no longer be welded to campaign season flimflam and candidate fast footwork. What is the relationship of left organizers and journalists to electoral politics, to the Democratic Party (particularly if there is a Democratic government after November), to the mission of telling it like it is when so much conspires against honesty and reason? How does the participants’ work in the lived reality of one place or one issue here, now, at this political moment, connect to the broader story, the broader project of making a better world – no matter who is president? How do we relate the current yearning for “change” to the dream that a different, popular-led “change is gonna come”?

Participants stay in individual cabin rooms, with all sheets, towels, etc. provided. We arrange for travel, as well as transport from airport or railroad station to Tree Frog Farm, as well as all meals, beautifully prepared and drawing on produce from Tree Frog’s lovely garden.

Interested applicants should send a letter of intent, telling us a little about their work, themselves and their politics, and explaining why they would like to come. They should also tell us how they heard about the project. Letters should be sent to me, JoAnn Wypijewski, atjwyp@earthlink.net. Letters of intent should include all the applicants’ contact information, phones and mailing address, and must be in by Monday, June 2, 2008.