JEDI 2.0: Justice, Equity, Decolonization & Intersectionality

Fierce Allies is gestating JEDI 2.0 in service of it becoming an independent organization, decentralized movement, and platform.

New website and more details coming soon. Stay tuned!

THE JEDI 2.0 INVOCATION

The JEDI 2.0 Invocation was inspired by the global inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial justice uprisings of 2020, the We Will Dance with Mountains: Into the Cracks! course led by Bayo Akomolafe, Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, and The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth by The Red Nation.

This prayer was initially, and continues to be, an interactive piece of curriculum used by the Fierce Allies Community of Practice. It has since matured into this living document, being co-nurtured by a much larger body of participant-facilitators and co-conspirators. We call it JEDI “2.0” to both highlight the ways this reflects a wholesale upgrade from JEDI 1.0’s current frameworks and priorities, and to emphasize that this framework will have a limited lifespan and come to be replaced by something we are not yet able to imagine.

Ultimately, JEDI 2.0: Justice, Equity, Decolonization & Intersectionality will be a decentralized, national movement to disrupt capitalist competition within the DEI field and establish intersectional decolonization as the field's prevailing vision and approach. The JEDI 2.0 resource hub will offer a versatile suite of training and organizing resources, build a web of JEDI 2.0 Communities of Practice (CoPs), and position practitioners to build mutual aid systems that: 1) liberate us from capitalist codependence, 2) mobilize collective power, 3) adapt and synchronize our respective efforts, and 4) collectively evolve and spread the JEDI 2.0 vision and framework.

In order to translate this framework from theory to embodied practice, we are collaboratively generating the JEDI 2.0 Invocation as a joint statement with key leaders within the equity and justice ecosystem. We are assembling some of these leaders into the JEDI 2.0 Council to inform the gestation of JEDI 2.0, and serve as its pilot JEDI 2.0 Community of Practice in which we can learn, make mistakes, leverage tensions, and midwife ourselves into a model for the kind of justice, equity, decolonization and intersectionality we aspire to create in the world.  

Below is excerpted text from the JEDI 2.0 Invocation. To read the full Invocation, enter your email address at the bottom of the page!

 

“As a queer, gender nonconforming parent and descendant of Black and Indigenous people of Turtle Island, my heart aches when I attempt to imagine what an equitable and just future could look and feel like for my people. It is painful to breathe life into the seeds of those imaginings, knowing that they are being birthed into a context that is literally designed to kill them. Devastatingly, it is equally painful to accept the current rate of change. To choose the pain of the latter is to choose suffering. To choose the pain of the former is to choose life and dignity. With this JEDI 2.0 Invocation, we invite you to join us in the courageous and necessary prayer walk of choosing life and dignity for all.”

— J. Miakoda Taylor
Founder and Lead Steward of Fierce Allies and the JEDI 2.0 Invocation

 

WHY AN INVOCATION

We are exquisitely aware that human-centric, universalist, ableist, white-supremacist, cis-hetero- patriarchal, imperial, and capitalist systems are so ingrained in our everyday lives, thoughts, speech, and actions that we can not see all the ways in which we are participating in and shaped by them. As such, none of us are liberated enough to generate a vision for a decolonial future that is not, in some way, tainted by the colonial present.  

We are also humbly aware of the absurdity of generating a decolonized framework in the colonizer language of english. We are also deeply present to the inadequacies of conveying this Invocation in solely written or visual forms.

And, we must start somewhere. We believe the best place to start is in humble reverence to all that we do not know, all that we can not see, and all that we can not imagine. We believe the best way to initiate such an endeavor is with prayer.  

 

“the universe is counting on our belief


that faith is more powerful than fear”

- Naima Penniman
Co-Creator of Climbing PoeTree

OUR PRAYER

We, the DEI practitioners advancing JEDI 2.0, know that the more connected we are, the bolder we’re able to be. We hunger for space to courageously pursue our wildest visions. We also are clear that the JEDI/DEI industry’s current reform-oriented goals of diversity and inclusion are inadequate and obstructive to the larger cause of justice and equity. These goals will never produce the radical, “from the roots” change necessary to rectify the impacts of human dominance, global oppression, and climate chaos. 

We believe these goals must be replaced with JEDI 2.0: Justice, Equity, Decolonization & Intersectionality. Intersectional decolonization is the most viable, effective, comprehensive, and inspiring path towards liberation for all of life. As such, we call in ALL leaders, consultants, organizations, change-makers, and thought-leaders in the equity and justice field to join us in advancing JEDI 2.0, and demanding intersectional decolonization as the absolute baseline for our work.

JEDI 2.0: Justice, Equity, Decolonization & Intersectionality is an evolving, adaptive and responsive framework for:

  • Rectifying history, repairing harm, rematriating land and resources, and restoring Indigenous sovereignty in the name of Justice

  • Creating Equity by tangibly resourcing, uplifting, protecting, and deferring to severely impacted communities.

  • Replacing reform-oriented goals with Decolonized actions that abolish the systems that harm our human and other-than-human relations. 

  • Intersecting the movements and solutions that heal our bodies, relationships, and the planet.

WHAT IS NEEDED

To advance JEDI 2.0, JEDI/DEI leaders must stop:

  • “Brokering neoliberal transactions” (Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures, 2020) that theorize about justice (J) without producing tangible forms of accountability, reparations, or rematriation; 

  • Commodifying black and brown bodies to achieve diversity (D), without significant structural changes and equitable redistributions of power;

  • Encouraging severely impacted people to pursue equitable (E) inclusion (I) in the very structures that systemize their own oppression, dispossession, and genocide; and

  • Participating in capitalist competition with one another.

“Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an ‘and’. It is an elsewhere.”

— Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Authors of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”

Instead, JEDI/DEI leaders must steward their institutions and clients to do the following:

  • We need to re-member ourselves to the truths that: 1) we are nature, 2) the laws of nature are the most just, wise, accountable, adaptive, holistic, and essential laws available, and 3) the rights of nature must be honored and protected.

  • Our bodies are one of our most powerful and essential places from which to advance intersectional decolonization.

  • Decolonial solutions require an intersectional systems approach to reweaving our human selves and dreams into the fractal, spectrumed, complex, paradoxical, and nuanced realities of life.

  • Efforts to advance equity, decolonization, and intersectionality, without attending to historical harms, are doomed to fail.

  • Global decolonization requires an equitable intersection of leaders representing ALL beings severely impacted by colonization, two-legged or otherwise. Local decolonization must prioritize and resource the Indigenous leaders of that land.

  • Simultaneously, and before severely impacted beings can effectively assume equitable leadership, they must be afforded the time and resources necessary to heal from systemic oppression.

  • White two-legged kin need to heal from brutal intergenerational trauma that produces the dissociation and disembodiment necessary for one human to kneel on the neck of another human, for nine minutes.

  • Everyone, and especially minimally impacted people, must disentangle their lives from perceived colonial entitlements, absorb an equitable redistribution of the pains, burdens, and insecurities involved in destructing the current system, and assume appropriate leadership roles that leverage one’s relative power and privilege in service of actualizing the visions of severely impacted leaders.

  • Time and time again, capitalist systems and the state have failed to meet the needs of the people. And time and time again, communities have risen to meet these needs through grassroots organizing and networks of mutual support. These are the legacies upon which we must root our work as JEDI 2.0 stewards.

  • Destructing and abolishing the colonial, capitalist, and political system requires strategies that integrate leaders and tactics operating from inside and outside of the current colonial, capitalist, and political system. That said, organizing people outside of the political system must be prioritized over mobilizing people to participate in the systems we intend to dismantle.

  • We must choose our media carefully— investing in, protecting, and circulating media that reflects the perspectives of severely impacted beings, and divesting from media that protects and amplifies the voices of human-centric, ableism, universalism, white-supremacy, capitalism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, harm, and hatred.

  • We must dare ourselves and inspire each other to dream our future, as well as our present and past. We must birth non-linear narratives that reflect coexisting multiplicities of realities, challenging stories rooted in domination and scarcity, and far exceeding the reasonable possibilities of our current imaginations.

  • We must prioritize investment in the dismantling, divesting, defunding, abolishing, and destructing of the current system’s harmful structures, and in the rematriating and repairing of equitable access to resources.

  • Being involved in edge-pushing, discomfort-arousing, uncharted work that is urgently needed to actualize decolonization is a choice. We must be fully accountable for this choice.

READ THE FULL INVOCATION

In order to gain access to the full JEDI 2.0 Invocation and receive information on how to support the process to actualize Justice, Equity, Decolonization, and Intersectionality at the physical, psycho-spiritual, global, and galactic levels, fill out this form. 

JOIN US IN ACTUALIZING AND EMBODYING THE INVOCATION

We are 100% certain this document will never be done. We call it JEDI “2.0” to both highlight the ways this reflects a wholesale upgrade from JEDI 1.0’s current frameworks and priorities, and to emphasize that this framework will have a limited lifespan and come to be replaced by something we are not yet able to imagine.

The question we engage most when discussing JEDI 2.0 with current and potential collaborators is, “how do we actualize this not-yet-imagined future?” We currently have multiple interdependent responses:


IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING 

The ideas shared in this Invocation are not original to the Conspirators co-authoring this document. They are reflections of the many living examples of decolonized alternatives already taking root across Turtle Island and the globe, as well as in each of our backyards. Join us in finding, studying, evolving, documenting, amplifying, replicating, and actively participating in these radical forms of resistance.


DECLARE DECOLONIZATION AS THE ABSOLUTE BASELINE OF OUR WORK 

This Invocation is a joint statement, reflecting the collective demand of the many Conspirators and Endorsers listed below, that the JEDI field abolish the neo-liberal goals of diversity and inclusion and root all future equity and justice work in a commitment to actualize intersectional decolonization. If you align with this as the minimum standard for equity and justice work, and want to lend your name as an advocate for the actualization of JEDI 2.0 in the world, please complete this brief survey to be listed as an Endorser of this Invocation.

FORM INTERSECTIONAL JEDI 2.0 COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

In order to keep this Invocation vital and relevant we must expand and variegate the types of communities of practice and members within them that are accountable for and to this bold prayer. In these practice spaces, we must commit to cultivating and applying our collective and ever evolving decolonized thinking to our work in the world, including our transition to a grassroots movement, and in service of generating an even more audacious vision for the future. Our forthcoming article: “Leveraging Tensions into Trust: The Power of Communities of Practice in Advancing  Justice, Equity, Decolonization & Intersectionality” will provide more thoughts about the essential intersection of JEDI 2.0 and Communities of Practice. Sign up for the Fierce Allies mailing list to receive this article when it is published.

HELP US CONTINUALLY EVOLVE THIS PRAYER

The 2.0 framework must be continually questioned, re-evaluated, and challenged so that it can consistently evolve. The same goes for the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors of those putting this forth. If you want to be listed as an Endorser of this Invocation AND are willing to advocate for other folx in your network to engage with JEDI 2.0 AND/OR want to collaborate in developing the Invocation content, please complete this brief survey, and look forward to hearing from us soon.

RESOURCE THIS PRAYER

The actualization of JEDI 2.0 cannot be done without various forms of support. If you are positioned to, please make a large or small tax-deductible donation today – every dollar counts. If you have other resources or connections to contribute to this work (visual art, connections to funders, podcast and media outlets, or other amplification platforms, etc.) let us know.

Thank you for your generosity and partnership.