About Brick 13
Our JEDI Work
Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (JEDI) work is not singular in focus, nor is it linear, simplistic, or easily contained within one specific framework. JEDI work is about humanizing, historicizing, and healing all peoples within a context of dehumanizing structural and systemic oppression, manufactured and erased histories, and mass cultural traumas that have created and perpetuated acute and long-term soul wounds (Duran, 1998). It is about deeply reflecting upon, questioning, and transforming the structures, policies, practices, and procedures of our organization from the most minute to those with the greatest reach and impact. And it is about healing ourselves and each other as we begin to shed the legacies of our participation in or targeting by systemic inequity.
13 is queer. I was born with a bent and fire for justice and equal ignorance to match. I grew up in a small town in southern Oregon. Grants Pass, nestled in the Rogue Valley in the Occupied Lands of the Takelma, Tolowa Dee-ni', and Cow Creek Umpqua Tribes, like much of 20th century Oregon was racially homogenous, a town for White people by White people; including me. We were part of the upper-middle class in an area with a polarized class structure, doing what is sometimes referred to as neo-colonization, the 1970s back-to-the-land movement by white hippies. AND, also, it was indeed the 70s and 80s and I was a little person, who felt justice in their bones but understood it only fractionally. I knew that I was not a girl, was not going to grow up to be a girl, not going to marry a boy and that I would resist and defy each and every gender expectation at every possible turn. I did not have words for or know how to understand my gender. I worried about it every day as I walked the dusty mile home from my school bus stop. All the boys with whom I played football, basketball, baseball, and every other sport under the sun, ridiculed and shamed me even as I struck them out. I thought I was aberrant. I thought I was not what a woman should be, disgusting, and therefore broken. I thought I was what I had been socialized into believing without even knowing it was happening. A good part of my brain space was occupied with worry about growing up and being forced to be the thing that I feared even more than my confusion, being a woman. All of this led me to be a fighter for the underdog, if not yet for cultural transformation.
13, has a superstitious history and at the time a lot of folks thought of it as bad luck. Not me, I claimed 13. I was born on April 13th. And 13 was mine. This odd number was the first way I claimed my queerness, my politic as a white person actively working moment-to-moment to be anti-racist in thought, feeling, action, and deed, a person who consistently aligned myself with whoever and whatever was held as culturally dangerous, transgressive, “not the norm.” 13 is a signifier of my commitment to listening to, believing, and co-conspiring for the truths of those that have been whitewashed, minoritized, and otherwise shoved to the cultural margins. It symbolizes my life path's fundamental work: championing equity and justice, frequently as that means I am not central to the movements, my ongoing commitment to and advocacy for the Movement for Black Lives, and for the liberation of all people.
This is why I am Brick 13.