Rising Up For Justice: Organizing for Peace and Justice

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FEATURING MEDEA BENJAMIN - Our nation and our world is overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, Medea Benjamin, one of the founders of the leading antiwar organization, CODEPINK joins us. Medea has also cofounded Global Exchange and several key antiwar initiatives, including the Peace in Ukraine Coalition and Unfreeze Afghanistan. With 50 years of experience, she is recognized as “one of America’s most committed fighters for human rights.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So first let's talk about the organization's origins. You and I have spoken so many times over the years about the current work that Codepink is doing. Often it's anti-war work. But this conversation, seeks to look at the organization in its entirety. And I remember when Codepink was founded, because I've been doing this long enough, and I remember there was a time when it was called Codepink Women for Peace, or something to that effect, when it was first, founded. 

Medea Benjamin: Yes. Well, I go back more than you do, Sonali. But you do go back to the time of the 9/11 attacks, and that was really the origin of Codepink, where there was that George Bush color-coded alert system that, of course young people don't know, but there was that yellow, orange, red alert to keep people constantly in this state of fear and to justify the unprovoked war in Iraq and justify the invasion of Afghanistan. 

We came together as a group of women. We were originally an environmental group that came together, and it was during this conference we had that we were talking about ending wars and saying, "You know, we gotta do something about it, and maybe we should come up with our own color-coded alert."

And that's when we came up with a Code Hot Pink, because we were just not pink, we were a hot pink. But that was a URL that was taken by a porn site, so we couldn't be Hot Pink, and we became Codepink.