cumberbatch and i'm the associate vice president of policy at the david rothenberg center for public policy at the fortune society and welcome to both sides of the bars a discussion driven show that examines the criminal justice system from various perspectives including those most impacted by the criminal justice system we discussed critical questions about how the current system works is intersections with social justice and highlight the efforts that are being made to improve the lives of everyone that is affected by it we ask you the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments with us on twitter at the fortune s o c today's show is titled wonder women the impact women have on social justice movements my guest today is carmen pereira's the executive director of the gathering for justice a non for profit founded by legendary artist an belafonte carmen has crossed the globe promoting peace through civil and human rights building alternatives to incarceration and violence and providing commentary and guidance for state and federal policy creation carmen also sits on the advisory board of rise to run an organization providing support and resources for progressive women running for office and she is a board member of the institute for asian pacific amazing person amazing advocates so tell our viewers here's carmen pereira is a woman who spans the globe does amazing work in communities in this country and all over the world tell our viewers how you got here like how did you get to this point in your life and your career doug give our viewers just a little bit of your trajectory i think that that's one of my favorite questions particularly because when people see whether it's the woman's march or it's justice league n y c or the gathering for justice they see somebody who is visible and i always want to remind people that i started when i was a teenager i started when i was seventeen years old after i had lost my sister she was killed in a one but he killer car accident and she was buried on my seventeenth birthday her and i were a day apart in two years she was two years older than me but my passion for criminal justice and fighting against police brutality and working on advocating for the rights of women had come way before she passed away my brother was in and out the system so i grew up with the duality of having somebody in the system and then having somebody taken a life taken an navigating the system through through victims and it was really my father who taught me what restart of justice was he had you know told the d a he didn't want to press charges and take another mother's child away and i thought that was so profound at seventeen adding get it right i'm a seventeen year old i lost my sister the person who i wanted to be just like but then as years went on and i really developed my passion those words always resonated with me and i grew up playing basketball in a farm community outside of l a caught off guard i grew up in a very diverse community with a lot of folks that were from the a p i community s know huge african american community and gunnell community so the work that i do around women's issues and intersectionality and showing up for black lives as an ally has really been a reflection of my childhood and really has led me to be intentional about my organizing but i started as a youth advocate i was a teenager working with young people that were impacted by the system creating job opportunities for them  alternately supporting them in developing their own voices to change some of the local policies in santa cruz county from there i went on to work in prisons and to organize cultural and spiritual ceremonies for lifers  through the mexican american culture committee and the african american culture committee at tracy d v i and i really found this connection to the people that were incarcerated as my mentor always says his name's  are relatives that are in there and they truly are whether there are blood relatives or not you know the people i learned so much and i was so young but my passion has always been working with people that are the most impacted  marginalized because that's really kind of who i was growing up i grew up in a community that was plagued by violence and gaming family members were gang members my father today in two thousand and eighteen is ninety four years old so you know when i say my childhood is a reflection of my current life you know harry belafonte who is my boss and my mentor is somebody who is ninety one and so i have the elder and the elder wisdom certainly the energy of the youth and understanding that we have to cultivate the next generation i have sixteen nieces and nephews that i love i think the oldest two are twenty eight the youngest is four years old and really he's the ring leader his name's kingston and i love him but i have older siblings and so again always being in a place where i was the youngest i studied psychology for south healing i always knew i wanted to help people i just didn't know how i also studied she got to feminism where i learned about the contributions that women made to our society to social justice movements to media  that were never really visible and so learning from a professor like i e the who and really being taught what intersectionality was is again the way in which i'm intentional about my organizing but i didn't show up and i wasn't carmen horizon there was a lot of times where i failed there's many times where i didn't know what i was doing but i led with my heart and i truly  that you know people really believed in me and there were times where i didn't speak for a long time now you see me very vocal with my fists up in the air and you see me on the frontlines in going against elected officials and fighting for  and you know speaking out rallies but a lot of who i was in my twenty's in my thirty's was just an observer somebody who was learning from those that were directly impacted also out how is it that i could build collective power with people who i respect and i love and that's really how i founded justice league as i knew i was in and get no any foundation to really give us money to do this type of work i had seen organizations that i had worked for and not being able to get funded because when you change lives that's not something that you can write in a grant proposal right how can you really measure success  and there's times in which the work that you're doing with individuals sometimes isn't you know a success story in the way in which they view it but we see it as success a success when you could get a young person not to use  month rye or when a young person is able to get a job or you're able to see men from different ethnic groups in a prison holding hands during the friendship dance to me that success but you can never ever you can never really write that on a proposal so i felt that it was important for me to identify people with different skill sets who i felt were impactful in their own  and for us to build collective power and so i feel you know again the work that i do is really a reflection of you know being able to be coached by somebody like pat bauer who was my basketball coach from the age of six all the way to college who really taught me life lessons and i really see myself in this role in whatever i do as a coach as a bridge keeper  somebody who could bridge the gap between the youth and their elders those i have access those that don't those that are incarcerated those you know are working towards liberation and so you know it takes time takes failing and it takes a your role in a woman's march and your view on what the role of women of color is in social justice movements what it has historically been and what the role of white women  is in that movement as well so my role within the women's march was and so i hope everybody knows that the woman's march was really ignited because a woman after the election of donald trump had a posted and sent a message to forty of her friends and she wanted to march on washington the next morning she woke up to tens of thousands of people wanting to march with her and i think within twenty four to forty eight hours there was a lot of pushback because it was originally called the million women march and erase seen the work that black women had done twenty years prior right during the million women march that had happened in philadelphia and so that's why it's important to have women of color in the space and i within the fifty something hour to make a mallory and myself were called on three way with two other white women that were talking about centering women of color in the space and by then they had already changed the name to the march on washington women's march on washington and you know i didn't have the right to say i was going to do it i don't need another title i'm the co founder of justice league n y c expanding to california which had just come off the cuff of building growing up lock down our three day juvenile justice conference in my childhood hometown had just done concerts in a juvenile detention center and  in the community so i thought i was coming home to rest i thought i was coming back to new york to strategize with my family but in reality i was coming back to pick up a different type of responsibility and so when i was asked i thought about w who else who else is going to be intentional about their organizing who else is going to be grounded in ideology that allows us to attack the forces of evil not people doing evil because you get rid of donald trump you understand that donald trump is just one of the symptoms to the reality that there is racism racism that exists in our country so we said yes particularly because i felt it was my responsibility to make sure that my community was involved in this march knowing that in every type of action that we do it's mainly white people that show they have the access to show up right and so we ended up being the women's march under the gathering for justice using the ideology of kenya nonviolence which we've been organizing around the country with we also were responsible for the administrative piece of the woman's march but more so the partnerships getting people to want to participate to want to partner with us and because of the work that we had been doing for twenty years and organizing and building across the country we were able to get some of our friends to contact their constituencies to also support the women's march so we brought honor myself and my team brought on about five hundred seventy partners within ten weeks of planning the women's march i co conspired with linda sarsour my sister in the movement to put together policy points and we thought well we can't just talk about reproductive justice one because we as women of color women are not monolithic right we are impacted by various issues i know myself i have a family member that's formerly incarcerated i have a mother who migrated here from a he go i have undocumented family members we grew up in poverty we grew up with violence in our face and our so again we needed to make sure that we created entry points for people to get involved and not make it about one issue but really make it about different issues and so if people wanted to show up for reproductive justice that's what they did right if people were supporting women who were incarcerated needed access to health care and not be shackled while giving birth and we invited that those women to participate so we brought together about twenty seven women gender nonconforming and trans women to create our points of unity document which is our policy platform that was called the most radical policy platform in the history of any march and so we also were responsible for to make myself clinton and several other women for the program making sure that some of our folks that we work with were also part of this display of unity and solidarity and so there were many roles that we played as women of color the strategy the program mean the partnerships the you know influence around table working for harry belafonte we made him one of the national co chairs of our one of the honorary national co chairs of the women's march particularly because he had been part of the original march on washington and had given us so much information about how it was important to make sure that we had a message it was important to include labor in the conversation it was important to include people from different walks of life and what we're going to leave behind to the people so there are moments when he would sit with us and he would give us this historical analysis about his time with dr king and all the organizers from from the original march and then we brought in gloria steinem who also took the time to sit with us and and really share with us what it was like during her time as a feminist and really on the front lines and people we had conversations with diane nash was part of the civil rights movement was another honorary co chair so we did a lot as the women of color and i will say that i feel that all the organizing that i did from the first time that i met a young girl was she was coming out of the detention center from the time i went into the prisons o organized and slept on benches and floors in columbus ohio or little rock arkansas really prepared me to be in the leadership of the women's march but i will be honest it really took our soul because there was criticism that this was a white woman's march a lot of women of color did not want to participate because they felt that you know maybe some of what was being shared online to not represent them and so we did our best to make sure that as we were having real conversations in the organizing space around racism and white privilege and white supremacy and intersectionality that we were having we were marrying those conversations online through facebook and instagram and it was difficult we constantly talked about courageous conversations and daring discussions and there were moments when we would have these major blow ups but all along what really kept us going was the fact that we kept our eyes on the prize and that was jan twenty first i was to ensure that people felt as though they were walk on into the space we said if you believe that women's rights are human rights and you are welcome to be part of the women's inauguration of course of course i think a lot of people saw the women's march as hope i mean i know for myself when i was riding back from washington d c after being on the roland martin show and we were hearing that donald trump was when me i thought about my mother because you know they talked about deporting people back to to their homeland in my mom although she's now a citizen you know i just kind of thought well how am i going to live without her and i called her and i was so angry because i also felt like you know we were silent sometimes are just anti mexican set sentiment that happens in this country and we were silent through his we thought he was a joke we didn't really think he was going to win and i know many people thought he was going to win but for me i remember this despair this and i think everybody in the country felt that right they felt this despair they fought a lack of hope it was very gloomy but the woman's march became the hope for them and so we're proud of the fact that yes there were four national co chairs but there were seventy national organizers there were four hundred state court meters there were seventy or ninety global meters that brought out five point two million people on january twenty first of two thousand and seventeen these people organized for ten weeks straight and again that is the power of women and that is the power of women dedicating everything that they have in order to create a atmosphere that allows us to dream again and to think bigger and i think that's why it's so important one to follow women of color and when you say follow women of color clarify that for our viewers like what does that really need because i think some people here that any say well i follow comment on twitter all the time right in like i'm between her stuff and i like her stuff on instagram all of the time and i appreciate that support  but i think it's really trusting our instincts trance teen our leadership you know there are times when white women who don't have the experience maybe myself to make on linda have we we all have twenty years of organizing experience and and some of you know to me go was a civil rights baby her parents were involved in the civil rights you know but we still get question and people see that this visibility that we have yet don't recognize the fact that we've been doing this work without visibility without resources and this visibility doesn't always bring positive attention it also brings death threats and you know there's a sacrifice to it i know i've been away from my family for twenty one years after my sister passed away i i went away and i never get to go to the birthday parties and because of this movement i sometimes miss thanksgiving are always missed thanksgiving  with the exception of maybe four years ago i miss christmas because there's an urgency and so i want to thank the contribution that women have made to social justice that has never really been a such obvious and yes we we hear about her now but during that time you know she had gotten a lot of criticism for her being on the front lines as a mother of many children so again i think one of the things that happens to  particularly women of color we get criticized often and there's this expectation to be this wonder human superpowered person right but we also appreciate the love and support that people give us and and you know we hope that we continue to cultivate the leadership of women and that's something that i've dedicated my life to from working with girls in santa cruz i created a program called the girls task force to provide and the response programming for girls working with girls in the system has been something that i've always really was really connected to my heart making sure that we weren't really traumatizing while were in the system but you know i think what i ask of white women is yes you could be an ally but being an ally sometimes isn't enough you know the safety pin is not enough i think and this is controversial anywhere we talk about coconspirators and we talk about accomplices and i think accomplices has always it's that's in a kind of like a criminal justice negative role but to me and linda are really my coconspirators they're my compas is you know at this moment we need people to show up on the front lines to you know to when we are getting attacked or protested against to speak up on our behalf to to you know take the blow for us because this work is an easy and it's not just enough to confront white women hood to identify what your own privilege is i think it's really important in that white women begin to organize back in poor white communities and begin to do the real deep healing work that we have done as women of color there's there's a way in which we are expected to show up where we're supposed to show up in a way that  know is not to emotional is not to loud reich so i have to go do the deep work from my childhood trauma in order for me to show up in a place and to be strategic and to think about how i'm not ties in people and i'm not showing up in a way that is taking away from anybody else i'm also expected as somebody who does racial justice work to work in solidarity with other communities and learn about their communities and be in community with them  know white folks show up in our in our workplace often and i don't ever hear that they're doing the work in their community to you know i do the work in my community because i feel it's my responsibility as somebody who has been able to make it out the hood who went away to college you know i wasn't locked up myself outside of protests and i not buried six feet under so there's this responsibility that i feel as i'm looking forward i also have to reach back and make sure that more members of my community are able to make it and so i hope that white people begin to organize and to shield themselves from some of the trauma that they have experienced and also that they perpetuate on to others a lot of people show up in our space with white privilege not knowing that they're taking up too much space i think we have these great talking points of like meet the people where they're at in some of us live by that because it's our ideology but they hear a so often that then they pick up on it as well and sometimes you know for me that's more dangerous than having somebody who's just plain ignorant and  particularly white women as allies need to make room for women of color or who is missing from the table and either you know scoot your chair over or give up your see somebody who considers herself an ally particularly to young people i know i sometimes to not be long at the table i also do that with you know there's recently a conversation that was being moderated by myself to talk about women in prison felt it was important that somebody who was a woman who was formerly incarcerated needed to moderate that conversation so sometimes it's important for us to also give up our seat so in in the less than two minutes that we have a felt like this went by like it was not what would you say right now to a young latina african american sister in these days and times with our current administration and all of the bleakness that is staring in front of them what will what would you tell us one of our young folks to encourage them so i have a sister by the name of sure brown who was part of justice league and i believe she lives either in and south north carolina or in d c but she's a powerful sister and i remember her looking at me and she her saying you are powerful you are loved and you are necessary and that's what i would tell our young people our young women is that you know look at me as an example of somebody who is dedicating my life to make sure that you could see yourself in the image of somebody who can can be in leadership and regardless of what you've been through through life you know no one can take away your story but it's important that we also make room for you to be successful for you to thrive and that's what we're going to dedicate our lives to do and so there's many of us that that are working hard for that thank you what would you tell how can our viewers learn more about your work where can they go to support the gatherings for justice and other work that you're doing so you could go to our website gathering for just a stop or women's march dot com i am at miss m s lady justice one on twitter our work awesome well thank you so much carmen for being my guest and thank you to the viewers tuning in if you're interested in finding out more about the fortune society please check us out on the web at fortune society dot