Welcome back to the ARD! In our first publication of 2022, we wanted to hold space for our intentions for the year ahead.
We asked ARD team members and contributors to share their New Year’s resolutions related to creating social change throughout the upcoming year. And since action, intention, and commitment are what separate resolutions from dreams, we’re also sharing some ways that we can all support these resolutions being fulfilled.
What commitments are you making for this year? To yourself, your community, the world? Send us a message to share your New Year’s resolutions for social change!
Nicole Cardoza
Founder, Anti-Racism Daily
My resolution:
I want to embrace the role that imagination and dreaming play in creating new worlds. I feel we’re collectively cultivating an awareness of what must be dismantled. But after that dust settles, what then? I think that the communities most impacted by oppression have been most limited in their capacity to dream. And if we don’t cultivate the capacity to imagine our futures, we’ll never arrive there.
How to support:
Take time to allow yourself to dream. Practice envisioning a better future – for you, your loved ones, your community, strangers you do not know. Allow yourself to suspend disbelief, if only for a moment, to allow what’s possible to emerge.
Nia Norris
Author, “Compensate student-athletes,” “Learn the cost of college remediation.”
My resolution:
“I was privileged to write a few pieces for ARD about education inequities last year. When I wrote these pieces, I did not know that I would become an educator. I was offered a TA position as a graduate student, and I now teach college freshmen at a diverse university. My goal is to create a culture of equity in my classroom.”
How to support:
“Many of my students are from the Chicago area. You can learn about the Chicago Equity Education Project through Chicago Lawyers for Civil Rights who provide legal services to kids in Chicago who are facing barriers to education access due to racial bias in school discipline.”
Mordecai Martin
Author, “Distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism.”
My resolution:
“I want to embrace the contradictions that animate Jewish life and create Solidarity. I want to ask questions like: Where in the landscape of liberation can Jews help most? How can we address the ways the two largest Jewish communities, North America and Israel/Palestine, are complicit in/resistant to the settler-colonial states there?”
How to support:
“The ARD can support this work by continuing your great efforts at nuanced and approachable education on the way oppression and white supremacy have divided and attacked Jewish communities throughout history, and your readers can educate themselves on the links between the history of European anti-Judaism and how it combined with Islamophobia and the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans to form Modern Racism. We are all fighting the same struggle against whiteness!”
David Padilla
Author, “Support organizing beyond nonprofits.”
My resolution:
“Continue to highlight the damaging effects of white supremacy on all of us. The ongoing challenge is to understand that white supremacy has supporters in many places, but we also need to identify with people that are willing to oppose this regime. I hope we can be better at naming our adversaries as well as our friends as we create a different world.”
How to support:
“I think learning about the world we live in is one of the most fundamental things to do, and to act purposefully, we must understand how it all came to be. I encourage folks to read, listen, and research great Black writers like Cedric Robinson, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on their thoughts on freedom and building a new world. Talk to your friends and neighbors about ending white supremacy together.”
Andrew Lee
Managing Editor, Anti-Racism Daily
My resolution:
“This year, I’m recommitting to support of grassroots organizations and folks in the struggle for justice in the community where I live, both as an individual and as an editor for the ARD. As Grace Lee Boggs wrote, ‘We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.’”
How to support:
“I’d like to encourage us all to do our best at taking personal responsibility and performing direct action for social change. It could be giving a few hours a week to a community organization, giving money to people who need it, or finding ways to mobilize privileges and take risks in solidarity with others. Oppression doesn’t only appear on the weekends, so anti-oppressive work isn’t a hobby — it’s a way to orient our priorities and a modality in which we move through the world.”