The Colours of Resistance Archive is a collection of analysis and tools for liberatory organizing and movement-building.

About Colours of Resistance

Welcome to the archival website of Colours of Resistance! We offer this collection of articles and resources as a contribution to documenting our movement history and helping to advance contemporary analysis and organizing.

Colours of Resistance (COR) was a grassroots network of people in the U.S. and Canada who consciously worked to develop anti-racist, multiracial politics in the movement against global capitalism. This network existed from 2000 until about 2006.

While the COR network was active, members:

  • produced a zine, a website, and published articles
  • shared ideas through local meetings and email discussion lists
  • and facilitated workshops and events across Canada and the U.S.

Through this work, COR members aimed to help build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, multiracial, feminist, queer and trans liberationist, anti-authoritarian movement against global capitalism. COR members were also committed to integrating an anti-oppression framework and analysis into all of our work.

The original Colours of Resistance statement:

Colours of Resistance (COR) is a grassroots network of people who consciously work to develop anti-racist, multiracial politics in the movement against global capitalism. We are committed to helping build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, multiracial, feminist, queer and trans liberationist, anti-authoritarian movement against global capitalism. We are committed to integrating an anti-oppression framework and analysis into all of our work.

Colours of Resistance is both a thinktank and an actiontank, linking the issues of global capitalism with their local impacts. For us, this means working locally on issues such as anti-war, police brutality, prison abolition, indigenous solidarity, affordable housing, healthcare and public transportation, environmental justice, racist immigration policies, and many more. Colours of Resistance acts as a network for us to share support, ideas, and strategies with one another across our diverse communities.

Colours of Resistance fights global capitalism with the goal of eradicating all systems of oppression that capitalism feeds and needs. We are dedicated to addressing oppressive power dynamics in our organizing. This means noticing, and changing when necessary, dynamics that may include whose voices are heard, which priorities are chosen, what actions are taken, who does the work, and who gets the credit. As one step towards this, we aim to have our network organizing collective made up of at least 2/3 people of colour and 2/3 women, and we seek to go beyond mere tokenism by recognizing the leadership of women of colour in particular.

We recognize that both organizers of colour and white organizers have roles in our work, and that these roles may be distinct from one another. For example, resisting white supremacy is not the sole responsibility of people of colour – white organizers have a responsibility to confront and challenge racism in white communities while working in solidarity with organizers of colour. Solidarity does not mean being paternalistic white ‘saviours’ but working alongside, and looking to the leadership of organizers of colour.

Our collective work as a network includes but is not limited to producing a zine, a website and published articles, sharing ideas through local meetings and email discussion lists, and facilitating workshops and events. While we use the internet as a networking tool, we believe that real resistance comes from real communities and are committed to rooting our work in community-based organizing.

Colours of Resistance first emerged in North America as a response to our growing feeling of a gap between what has been labelled as the ‘anti-globalization’ movement in the ‘West’ and the day-to-day organizing efforts in communities of colour to resist the impacts of global capitalism. We share a common critique of the lack of power/privilege analysis among predominantly white and middle-class anti-summit protests in the ‘West’ and are building a network of people who understand anti-oppression work as integral to any progressive movement building.