Chris Crass
Hello, my name is Chris Crass and my work is dedicated to building powerful working class-based, feminist, multiracial movements for collective liberation. Throughout history everyday people have come together to take on the most pressing challenges of their time and through collective organizing and struggle they have envisioned a better world, made large scale changes, won important victories, and passed on lessons to the next generation. Around the world and here in the United States, we see people’s movements doing the same thing today. I believe in our ability to learn from the past, organize for tomorrow, and practice our visions and values today. I believe in our ability to work for systemic change, while simultaneously building beloved community and supporting one another’s personal transformation in the process. I believe in collective liberation and I believe in our ability to win. I believe a better world is possible for my son and the younger generations.
I give talks and lead workshops with organizations, schools, congregations and communities around the country. My talks and workshops focus on themes of anti-racism, social justice organizing, feminism, creating healthy activist culture, and spiritually grounded leadership for liberation. You can learn more about my speaking tour and my book, Towards Collective Liberation: anti-racist organizing, feminist praxis and movement building strategy, here. You can also find information about how to bring me out to work with your community, school, congregation or organization. Let us be rooted in our vision, act with love, and be powerful in our work for collective liberation.
Posted on July 29, 2016 by orosco
By Chris Crass (July 28, 2016) White working class anti-racist leadership is rising all around us and points us towards the work that must be done to unite white communities away from the death culture of racism and into the life-affirming, liberatory mass movement for racial justice and Black Lives Matter that is all ..
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Posted on July 19, 2016 by orosco
(July 19, 2016) Phoenix Calida: So um, I get all the jokes about Melania plagiarizing. But can I please just point out that the speech in question was about the moral and ethical superiority of capitalism and boot strapping? And both white republicans AND white liberals couldn’t stop jizzing themselves over the greatness of the ..
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Posted on July 12, 2016 by orosco
By Chris Crass (July 12, 2016) Rather then the standard in media of asking Black people about their forgiveness of the police who killed their babies, or asking if they are anti-police, and the standard of nearly every Black person in the country needing to hold a press conference expressing that they aren’t calling for violence ..
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Posted on June 17, 2016 by orosco
By Chris Crass (June 17, 2016) To all the members of the rebel alliance against the empire of white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy, I love you. When I was a teenager at an anti-war protest, a right wing jackadoodle got in my face and called me a “pinko, commie, insert homophobic word, n word loving, Jew ..
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Posted on June 16, 2016 by orosco
By Chris Crass (June 16, 2016) I remember the hurt of feeling my male friends pull their hand out of mine, as we walked in public. And I remember why they did, as people yelled homophobic slurs and gave us looks of disgust. I remember how much anger, threats of violence, and slurs, my public, ..
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Posted on March 19, 2016 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (March 19, 2016) The continuing adventures of anti-racism at the Nashville YMCA: “They should all go to Russia or China if they don’t like it,” shouts the woman in her 70s behind me. We’re both on running machines, and my pace quickens. She goes on about how angry those people make her. ..
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Posted on March 10, 2016 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (March 10, 2016) For white people who believe in, and work for, racial justice on any and all fronts, the point of reading analysis and reflections on the racism in the #BernieSanders campaign, is not to then sit back and say: “See, that’s why I don’t #FeelTheBern“.
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Posted on March 3, 2016 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (March 2, 2016) In the post-Super Tuesday analysis, my comrade Rev. Osagyefo Sekou wrote on his Facebook wall: “White folks who are Sanders’ supporters are far more dangerous than Trump supporters when it comes to race because they think they have all the answers on the question which is politically dishonest. Trump supporters ..
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Posted on February 24, 2016 by anarres1
By Chris Crass ( February 24, 2016) One of the ways that white supremacy hurts white people is that it teaches white people they have nothing to learn from the histories of people of color.
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Posted on February 14, 2016 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (February 14, 2016) Walking through the mall, one hand talking on the phone with a fired up young activist man about an awesome project he wants to do interviewing men about feminism, healthy masculinities and bringing down patriarchy, and the other hand feeding August his bottle.
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Posted on December 11, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (December 11, 2015) One of my closest friends was a white supremacist skinhead when we first met as teenagers in high school. He would have cheered at Donald Trump rallies with each call to deport Mexicans and ban Muslims from entering the country. He would have agreed with Trump that ..
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Posted on December 9, 2015 by anarres1
December 9, 2015 Two Anarres Project contributors reflect on what needs to be done today to respond to a fearful social environment.
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Posted on November 11, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (November 11, 2015) Notes to a white student who wants to get involved in growing racial justice movements on campuses around the country, but is nervous, scared and confused
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Posted on November 6, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (November 6, 2015) My goal isn’t to be a great ally. My goal is the abolition of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and the building up of multiracial democracy, economic, gender and racial justice for all and a world where the inherent worth and dignity of all people and the interconnection of ..
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Posted on November 3, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (November 3, 2015) If by diversity we mean striving to get individual people of color into a handful of highly visible positions that serve to mask and obscure the systematic devaluing, degrading, and brutalizing of communities of color, then no, that is not the diversity we are striving for.
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Posted on October 20, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (October 20, 2015) While the #BoycottStarWarsVII is easy to laugh at, and the diversity = white genocide people help expose the white supremacist roots of white fears and resentment of multiracial democracy, there are two key points to remember:
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Posted on October 15, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (October 15, 2015) I talk to people all over the country who simultaneously talk about the “small things” they can do, like make donations, volunteer here and there with a local social justice effort or are “only involved at their faith community ” or “raising their kids” and over and over ..
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Posted on October 6, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (October 6, 2015) I feel confident in saying that the guy who did this and his racist friends would not only righteously declare “they aren’t racists”, they would likely make the argument that it’s the politically correct who can’t take a joke, who are the real racists. We must understand the ..
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Posted on September 25, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (September 25, 2015) Don’t let anyone sell you a pack of reactionary moderate whitewashing about who #DorothyDay and #ThomasMerton were, two of the Catholic leaders named by #PopeFrancis. Day was an anarchist socialist founder of the Catholic Worker movement that both feeds the poor and actively opposes the capitalist system that creates poverty. Day was a ..
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Posted on August 20, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (August 20, 2015) “What shoes do you want to wear to school?” River responded, “The kids at school said I can’t wear my Elsa (Frozen) shoes, because I’m a boy and they said they are girl shoes.”
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Posted on July 22, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass (July 22, 2015) 1. Know that dealing with people talking badly about you, dealing with the heartache of movement building, feeling despair – these are all part of the process of being an effective activist/organizer for liberation.
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Posted on July 16, 2015 by anarres1
For all who, understandably, feel fear after a terrorist attack happens, from 9.11. to the Boston bombing. By Chris Crass (July 15, 2015) Imagine now that these kinds of terror attacks happen regularly, persistently, for hundreds of years in your community, and the people in official power in the city and country you live in, ..
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Posted on June 18, 2015 by anarres1
Several Anarres Project writers respond to the brutal shooting in Charleston, South Carolina and what it means in the context of US history and politics at this very moment.
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Posted on June 17, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass “It will be investigated as a hate crime” committed at nearly every level of U.S. society. This is a mass murder that screams throughout the history of this racist country. A mass murder of Black people at a historic Black church rooted in Black liberation struggle.
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Posted on June 14, 2015 by anarres1
By Chris Crass Notes to a faith-based organizer on a proposal to their majority white denomination on ways to step up in these Black Lives Matter movement times:
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