Social Justice Walks

Social Justice Walks uses walks as a medium to dig beneath the surface of what people walking the streets of New York regularly see – and in the process we come to understand the incredible challenges New Yorkers have taken on, connecting with the city's proud and creative histories of resistance. We offer monthly public programs to local New Yorkers and visitors seeking to engage in radical, place-based, visceral and emotional self-education. Our intrinsic focus is on engaging people in critical dialogue about the past, present and future of our city from the perspective of both well-known and underappreciated social movements. And our ultimate aim is to assist in movement building; that is to spread information, expose injustice and highlight inequality in a digestible, understandable way to encourage thought and inspire action.

Our next upcoming in-person walk

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WOMEN'S PAID AND UNPAID LABOR
a walk led by Lucy Piccochi
SUNDAY September 4th
@ 1pm

On this walk we'll look at the many facets of women's labor, the history of the ways they organized themselves – from consumer strikes to rent strikes, job strikes, and women's strikes – and how the continuing gender inequality affects all workers.

Read the Labor Day Walk Description

Walking from Orchard Street up towards Union Square, we'll visit sites of protest and organization, as well as the residences of some notable women, and ask: How has work been both a liberation and a burden for women? What can radical solutions to gendered exploitation look like?

To most in the US today, Labor Day is simply a last chance for summer BBQ's and beach trips. Originally conceived in 1882 by union leaders as a "general holiday for the laboring classes", it became the tame, government legitimized alternative to the more radical International Workers Day on May 1st. But there is one laboring class for whom even a holiday still often requires them to work unpaid.

When capitalism began to put workers into wage labor and a monetary value on everything, women's labor – both in and out of the home – became devalued, excluded from unions, and not considered "real work". Though women have now been accepted into the paid work force they still are confined by gender norms which pay them less, limit their upward mobility, and often keep them tied to unpaid domestic labor for their families. This gendered exploitation became essential to the market economy, but the labor movement would have gotten nowhere if it wasn't for women workers recognizing this and fighting for their vision of a better life.
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Latest episode of Social Justice Tours Pandemic Podcast

Episode 4: In part two of our conversation about how Covid has affected reproductive freedoms in NY, we chat with Neelu Shruti. Neelu is a birth justice advocate in NY, and our conversation focuses on the challenges that pregnant and birthing people face, how their issues have been exacerbated due to insufficient action during COVID-19 and a vision for a better birth future.

Music Credit: Archduke Redcat, @ArchdukeRedcat on instagram/twitter/facebook

Social Justice Tours Podcast

Contagion: When Xenophobia is a disease that spreads
Episode 2: In this week's episode we discuss the ways throughout New York's history that disease has been placed in the bodies of certain populations to exploit racist or xenophobic ideas. We go back to the European colonists, move forward to the cholera epidemic of the 1830's and the backlash against the Irish, and discuss some implications for the Covid-19 pandemic of today.

Contagion: Xenophobia is a disease that spreads

"Xenos": from the Greek root, meaning stranger, guest, or host. Phobia: an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something. Panic: sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior.

Click here for access to our Digital Tour

Tour description

"Ask China", repeats the man who calls himself our President. It's a timeworn distraction tactic: Displace responsibility for your failures onto an "enemy-Other". There is nothing new, either, about his coded language: Viruses are a metaphor for so-called "foreigners", the body is a metaphor for the "nation", and our "body" is being invaded by "viruses". But what might be new, along with the comprehensive revelation of America's structural weaknesses, is the widespread realization that extreme xenophobia in America is not a thing of the past.

Our amnesia is subsiding. With the spread of the Coronavirus has come an emergent public interest in tracing the origins of xenophobia. But can we actually locate the origins of American xenophobia, the way we now locate the epicenters of mysterious diseases, and stay far, far away? The answer is not in tracing xenophobic tendencies to "other" parts of the country, but to look around and within. How have our own particular ancestral communities been impacted by, and/or implicated in, the xenophobia that spread alongside epidemics in the past?

The drive to trace the movement of incurable diseases with mysterious causes is a natural one. But when you decide to close off and protect your country, your state, your city, your tribe, your family, some issues that may have seemed settled, arise again: Who was "here first"? Who has a right to travel, and who has a right to remain? When Sioux tribes recently refused to take down their checkpoints in South Dakota, all this came up once more. When you decide to close your borders, whose borders are you really talking about, and where do you draw the line?

SJT walk leader Rebecca Manski offers you "Contagion: Xenophobia is a disease that spreads" as a kind of roadmap to that history, starting with Lower Manhattan. "

NYC Mass Rent Strikes, Past and Present; Interview with Lucy P.

Social Justice Tours Pandemic Podcast - season 1

Episode 1: NYC Mass Rent Strikes, past and present.
In this time of pandemic, millions of people across the country are feeling increased pressure to be able to make rent. In response, tenant organizers are organizing rent strikes. We talk with guide and activist Lucy P. about the history of rent strikes in NYC, and the women who led them, from the early 1900's to today.

Digital Tour: Tenant uprisings and the women who led them

A History Lesson for Today's Rent Strike Movement