How Do We Grow Grassroots Critiques of the State? A Close Reading of Triple Jeopardy from East Baltimore

Abstract

How Do We Grow Grassroots Critiques of the State?A Close Reading of Triple Jeopardy from East Baltimore Lenora R. Knowles (bio) When I sit with the images, concepts, and community voices of the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) in their Triple Jeopardy newspaper, I am struck by how this movement publication served as a key mechanism for the New York City chapter of the TWWA to grow leadership and critical consciousness of the racial capitalist U.S. state among their base of Third World women and Third World people more generally. In this first issue, the TWWA elucidates how members were teaching and circulating Third World political analysis and movement strategy, along with the meanings and values of Third World movement leadership. As a revised organic intellectual, organizer, and nepantlera,1 I find joy and possibility in the complex process of growing grassroots movement leaders struggling for broadscale social transformation. From its first issue through its last, Triple Jeopardy offers important considerations for doing the relational and processual work of political education and leadership development today. Below, I explore how writers of Triple Jeopardy utilized the rhetorical device of the question as a method for critical inquiry and political education. Moreover, I trace how they mobilized radical critiques of the state at multiple scales, ranging from global regimes of violence to everyday trauma, in order to build political unity. I suggest that these approaches provide invaluable tools for the grassroots base-building and leadership development that I attempt to practice while organizing in East Baltimore. To better understand some of what this first issue teaches us about leadership development, I provide a bit of context for the TWWA (see Springer 2005; Farmer 2017), the stakes of their organizing and theorizing within a Cold War context, and how they conceptualized the role of their [End Page 191] grassroots publication. The TWWA was a radical women of color organizing collective that first took shape in New York through the leadership of Black women organizers Frances Beal and Gwendolyn Patton. The organizational life of the New York–based TWWA spanned roughly from 1969 to 1977; during this time, they created an organizing program and collectivist organizational structure that centered a Third World woman of color politics that was anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-sexist. The collective's effort to develop a united front of Third World women necessitated multimodal work that was deeply personal, epistemic, collective, analytical, and embodied in nature. Their writings and organizing articulated a Third World women's consciousness among working-class women of color. They mobilized members around key local and international campaigns that promoted reproductive justice, opposed the Vietnam War, and resisted police and carceral violence. Their growing numbers demonstrated the resonance of the organization's intersectional analysis and its strategies for organizing among Third World women. In addition, their thriving base spoke to their increased organizational capacity. Thus, we might think about the TWWA's increased grassroots power in terms of its potential threat to the U.S. nation-state's stability and working-class women's allegiance to a U.S. status quo. By 1971 the organization expanded into the West Coast with the formation of the Bay Area and Seattle chapters. The national membership has been estimated to be somewhere around two hundred members. While the NYC chapter mostly organized among Black diasporic and Puerto Rican women, the West Coast chapter expanded the membership of Chicana and Asian American and Pacific Islander women alongside African American women. The NYC chapter mobilized women for the annual International Women's Day and supported local workers' picket lines, as well as protests spearheaded by groups like the Black Panther Party, La Union Latina, and the Campaign to Free Angela Davis. One of their first actions as a collective was participating in the 1970 New York women's strike, during which members publicly delivered a critique of the hegemonic white feminist organizations of the time (TWWA [1974?], 2). The organization challenged state and corporate violence domestically and abroad, most notably in their work to end the country's imperial intervention in Vietnam, state discipline of Black activists, and attacks on Third World Women's reproductive capacity...