The Black Scholar

Journal of Black Studies and Research

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Black Liberation and the Abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Rachel Herzing

September 6, 2016

This interview originally appeared in the independent, open-access journal Propter Nos.

True Leap Press (TLP): Hi Rachel, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. We are excited to have you as a contributor in this inaugural edition of Propter Nos. Our publishing collective thinks the specific timing of this issue is important to highlight, as it is set to be released in the closing days of Black August. Could you possibly explain what Black August is for our readers, and why it is so important for people to recognize today?

Rachel: Black August is a call for reflection, study, and action to promote Black liberation. Its roots go back to California prisons in the 1970s, during a period of sustained struggle and resistance against racialized violence against Black imprisoned people, especially those calling for Black liberation and challenging state power. Ignited by the deaths of Jonathan and George Jackson in August 1970 and August 1971, and honoring others who gave their lives including Khatari Gualden, William Christmas and James McClain, a group of imprisoned people came together to develop a means of honoring that sacrifice and promoting Black liberation. While August is significant because of the deaths of the Jackson brothers, it is also a month with many other significant moments in Black history in the United States including the formation of the Underground Railroad, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the March on Washington, and the Watts uprising, to name just a few. So there was an idea that this could be a time that imprisoned people in the California prison system could use for reflection, study, and to think about how to strengthen their struggles. During the month, people wouldn’t use radios or television, would fast between sun up and sun down, and practice other measures of self-discipline. Eventually the commemorations during that month were taken up outside of prisons, too. Malcolm X Grassroots Movement became the stewards of the commemoration outside prisons, although many people honor and celebrate this legacy and the roots of the practice. Black August is important to commemorate (and I hope that the variety of ways that people commemorate that legacy can be nurtured and encouraged), in part, because it connects imprisoned organizers and revolutionaries with communities outside of prisons that are struggling for similar things. It’s often the case that imprisoned communities are meant to be invisible, and essentially cut off from non-imprisoned communities, especially communities of struggle. I think that is an important reason to reflect, as well as to study and honor the sacrifices Black revolutionaries have made over centuries and recommit ourselves to the struggle. Black August provides one important vehicle for doing that. 

TLP: On this note, how did the contemporary prison and policing abolition movement emerge? What are some of the major theoretical and historical connections existing between abolitionism in its current iterations and these earlier articulations of the Black/Prisoner liberation struggle just mentioned?

Rachel: Well I think the periodization probably depends on who you talk to. So since you’re talking to me, you’re going to get something pretty specific [laughter]. I think it also depends on what you mean by “contemporary.” In my mind, there is a long through line of people fighting particularly for the abolition of imprisonment that goes back to Eastern State Penitentiary, which was the first modern day US prison. That was in Philadelphia, 1829. Almost immediately, the Quakers, who played a role in building this institution to encourage reflection, understood that this was a mistake. And Quakers ever since that time have been on the frontline of advocating for the abolition of imprisonment. So there is that old-timey version of it, which links back to the development and the build up of penitentiaries as institutions of containment and human control.

If you jump ahead to the 1970s and 1980s, you begin to see organizations that are fighting for a moratorium on prison construction, but also groups advocating actively for the abolition of imprisonment. For instance, there is a book that came out during this period called Instead of Prisons, originally published in 1976, by a group called Prison Research Education Action Project (PREAP). At that time, they were looking at a national prison population that was 250,000. They thought surely this is a tipping point, we need to take action now. And so, as we know, the imprisoned population in the US is now nearly 2.3 million. So this struggle dates back, then, to the seventies and eighties, and became somewhat quieter in certain periods, but never completely went away.

1998 is another important year: the founding Critical Resistance (CR) conference was held in Berkeley that year. That conference did some work to reinvigorate the concept of abolition, and not just as a thing to organize around intellectually, but to organize campaigns and projects around, as well. It also introduced the concept of the prison industrial complex (PIC) into a more popular consciousness. While that conference didn’t form some kind of modern abolitionist movement, it did reignite an energy that may have been less prominent or less active just prior to it. That conference was still very focused on imprisonment and it wasn’t until 2001, when Critical Resistance East happened that there was a really strong attention toward thinking about the abolition of the prison industrial complex as a whole. That was kind of at the forefront of what that conference was all about.

I think today, and since becoming an organization in 2001, CR plays a particular role in advocating for the abolition of the entire system—of the entire prison industrial complex—rather than just being a prison abolition organization. CR was really at the forefront in the early 2000s as an organization advocating for the abolition of policing, too. Nowadays you hear a lot more people talking about policing itself as something to fight, as opposed to resisting its function within the PIC or even just its relation to imprisonment. It is more common these days for people to think about ways to live without some idea that law enforcement is a kind of natural feature of our world.

So I think there is a through line there from early Quaker opposition to imprisonment to the contemporary movement for PIC abolition. And like all movements, there are some ebbs and flows to it, but those are some of the key markers that I would use to talk about its development.

TLP: What exactly brought you into the abolitionist movement? Do you identify as an abolitionist, or is this one aspect of a larger, overarching framework which informs your praxis?

Rachel: I think it is both. I definitely identify as a prison industrial complex abolitionist. I do that work because I believe in the liberation of Black people and I think that it is one of the foremost ways to see that broader goal fulfilled. Without the abolitionist movement and without a commitment to ending mass criminalization, containment, and death of Black people, I don’t think Black liberation is possible in the United States—or elsewhere, frankly. So I come to this work as a survivor of sexual harm and law enforcement harm who doesn’t believe the PIC makes me any safer, and as somebody who is committed to the liberation of Black people.

TLP: You alluded earlier to the differences between a politics of gradualist police and prison reform and a prison-industrial-complex abolitionist praxis. What are your thoughts on framing political struggle in terms of either “abolition” or “reform”? Are there not limitations to framing the conversation in this way?

Rachel: I don’t think it’s very useful to position those as binaries. I think it’s more about different end games. Back in the early 2000s, Critical Resistance started using a framework that a lot of people are using now, and almost never credit CR by the way (which I hope just means it has permeated the common sense and not that people simply don’t credit CR [laughter]). We started saying that the distinction between abolitionists and reformers (or people who either have abolition as their end goal or reform as their end goal) is that reformers tend to see the system as broken— something that can be fixed with some tweaks or some changes. Whereas abolitionists think that the system works really well. They think that the PIC is completely efficient in containing, controlling, killing, and disappearing the people that it is meant to. Even if it might sweep up additional people in its wake, it is very, very effective at doing the work it’s meant to do. So rather than improving a killing machine, an abolitionist goal would be to try and figure out how to take incremental steps—a screw here, a cog there—and make it so the system cannot continue—so it ceases to exist—rather than improving its efficiency. Whereas reformers, with criminal justice reform being their end goal, believe there is something worth improving there. So the groups have different end games.

I have never understood or participated in moves toward abolition that didn’t take steps of some sort. A reform is just a change, right? So there can be negative reforms and there can be positive reforms. You can make a change that entrenches the system, improves its ability to function, increases its legitimacy, so: a non- abolitionist goal. Or, you can take an incremental step that steals some of the PIC’s power, makes it more difficult to function in the future, or decreases its legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

I think the false distinction between reform and abolition assumes that there is some kind of pure vision that doesn’t require strategy or incremental moves. If it is possible to get everybody to open all prison doors wide today, fantastic! If it is not, then what can we do to chip away, chip away, chip away so that the PIC doesn’t have the ability to continually increase its power or deepen its reach and hold on our lives?

TLP: What do you see being the most significant overlaps between: the past two decades of abolitionist organizing, “Black Lives Matter,” and the movement for Black lives in its current phase? I know it’s a messy question, because there are folks at the forefront who are situated both ideologically and physically at the intersections between each. Maybe a better way to phrase it is: do you see any tensions or contradictions between the abolitionist work that has unfolded over the past two decades and the emergent Black-led political forms taking shape today?

Rachel: First off, I want to be very clear: I cannot speak for Black Lives Matter. I’m not a member of Black Lives Matter, I’m not involved in that organization, and do not have the ability to speak on their strategy or form. But I know there is a distinction between them and the Movement for Black Lives, which is a network of nearly sixty Black-led organizations across the US that came together to meet first in Cleveland, and then out of that, have continued to work together. And Black Lives Matter is one of those organizations. The Movement for Black Lives recently released this policy platform, titled A Vision for Black Lives, with more than thirty policy pieces in it.

I guess I would say a few things to this question: First, I think that what we are seeing emerge today—what I would loosely call a Black protest movement, which includes a lot of these organizations and formations just mentioned—would have actually been impossible to come out in the way that is has (to have the foundation to stand on and to have people move in the way that they have) if there hadn’t been growing movements against imprisonment and policing in the United States over the previous two decades. I don’t know if there is a single set of politics within Black Lives Matter (and I know it’s not true within the Movement for Black Lives) that compels an abolitionist orientation towards their work. I think there are some people who lean that way and I think there are some people who lean other ways and I think there are a variety of political perspectives and orientations that I’ve seen emerge from this broader network. I guess, at various points, I’ve been surprised that so little attention has been paid to the decades of work (well actually centuries of work, but recent decades in particular) done by Black people and Black organizations to fight the violence of policing in the United States; especially when the protest movement jumped off. I understand that people participating in that protest were fueled in no small part by outrage and in just complete disbelief at the scale and scope of the violence, and that people are being activated and drawn out for the first time. There are some who felt compelled to action right away and weren’t necessarily connected to those other organizations or movements.

I think as the past two years have unfolded I’ve seen, particularly in the Movement for Black Lives, some of that leadership and some of those organizations doing good study, thinking about other Black liberationist platforms, thinking about the histories of Black struggle around a variety of other issues and really broadening their understanding of the violence facing Black people. That is, not only issues surrounding the prison industrial complex, but also the economic, social, and political features of it. I don’t know that there is a direct relationship between the previous decades of work—and again, I mean prior work along the spectrum from abolitionist to moderate reform—and these new Black protest formations. I think there is probably overlap of people, probably some overlap of thinking, and probably some overlap of strategy. But I don’t know if they are in direct relationship to each other. I would say that while there can be no doubt that Black Lives Matter has had unprecedented cultural significance and impact on US popular culture (on US media and the cultural life of people in the states and globally), it is less clear to me what the organizing impact will be. And in a place like Oakland where I live, there are strong organizations with decades of strong organizing going back to the Panthers and before that set the stage differently than what might be true for other places that have a different history. So I think the longer term impacts of this most recent activism on the power of the prison industrial complex over Black lives (and the lives of people of color and Indigenous people more generally) has yet to be seen. That said, I think there has been a change in the conversation. I think there is no doubt that there is a really significant cultural impact, even though some of it is still in the making.

TLP: How do you understand the prisoner hunger strikes and other prisoner-led activisms that have occurred over the past decade in relationship to such mobilizations against policing and criminalization in the so-called “free world”?

Rachel: I think it depends on how you define mobilizations in the free world. I think there is a strong movement outside of prisons and jails. Sometimes it gets more attention and sometimes it gets less attention, but I think it has sustained. I don’t necessarily think that is the same thing as this Black protest strain. Again, there are overlapping people and overlapping players and that sort of thing, but I have yet to see (which again, isn’t to say that it couldn’t happen) an engagement or activism beyond direct action that has meaningfully connected to more sustained organizing around imprisonment.

So I’m not sure that it’s fair necessarily to say “they’re not doing a good job,” because I’m not sure that’s their goal, right? I think the goal is a much more media focused one. With that being said, I think there is what I would call (and this is me showing my age and crabbiness about social media) an overreliance on social media which has meant that a lot of people are just left out. I personally have the luxury to make choices about being on social media or not and the choice to opt out of certain types of feeds of information and conversations. But there are many people who are living in cages who don’t have access to social media. And even for those who do, they might not have access to it in the same real-time that people living outside of cages do. A lot of that organizing, a lot of that conversation happens over Twitter, happens via Facebook, happens via Instagram. So there are potentially millions of people who don’t have a voice in the conversation. Which is not to say that all imprisoned people are not finding ways to participate. There are many who are finding ways to engage. It’s complicated to organize with imprisoned people and there are all kinds of structural and institutional barriers to doing that. Like I was saying, the system is set up to make people who live in cages invisible and disappeared. So it’s not without all kinds of challenges. And again, I don’t know necessarily if that’s their intention or that’s what the mobilizations against policing are set up to do.

But to return to the movement that is meant to do that and is engaged in all of that: the 2011 and 2013 prisoner-led hunger strikes in California really re-energized the movement outside of prisons and jails and activated a lot of people. The strikes gave an injection of energy. Part of that was the inspiration of the leadership of people who are imprisoned in solitary confinement, living under the most excruciating conditions that human beings can imagine. They managed to study together, build bridges across the racial divides that are perpetually stoked by the prison regimes, and were able to engage people outside of cages to take up this call to end indefinite solitary confinement—to get people in conditions that they could actually live and fight from. The work of people imprisoned inside of Pelican Bay, Corcoran, High Desert, Folsom . . . wherever they are living and working, really, was a shot in the arm for the outside movement. And I think that’s sustained and spread. California isn’t the only place, and California wasn’t the first place. You also see Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Washington, and others. In these places you see imprisoned people using this last resort, their own bodies, to highlight just how excruciating and torturous these conditions actually are.

Pieces like the agreement to End Hostilities that came out of the California prison system and was then taken up by other communities across the state and nationally is an important organizing tool. It refocuses attention to the fact that people are always struggling inside. There are also imprisoned people who are behind the elimination of the use of sterilization on people in women’s prisons, working to increase visitation or organizing against prison and jail expansion or construction. Imprisoned organizers are important players in all of these campaigns and many more.

TLP: So, to shift gears a bit, how do you suggest we think about the relationship between struggles against the aforementioned aspects of state-condoned racist domestic warfare within US borders and the numerous declared and undeclared imperialist wars abroad?

Rachel: There can be no doubt that there is a direct relationship between war- making at home and war-making abroad. While I do not use the word “war” lightly in the domestic context (and I know its articulations are different here than in theaters of combat in places like Afghanistan or Iraq), I do think that it is an appropriate term to use regarding the genocidal practices at home—going back to the first attempts to exterminate Indigenous people from this land, to the ongoing structural and actual physical violence used to eliminate peoples’ access and opportunity to have meaningful, healthy lives. There are some concrete overlaps. There are overlapping technologies, for instance. The weaponized drone that was recently used to kill Micah Johnson in Dallas has been used in Iraq; surveillance technologies once tested out in such theaters of war are used regularly by domestic law enforcement; data collection methods used there are also used here; etc.

I think it is oversimplified to just say: “Oh, well did you know the military is giving extra equipment to law enforcement?” That’s true and that’s a scandal. But that is merely a sliver of where the overlap of interests and warfare practices is happening. The people who are designing war to take place in spaces outside of the United States are influencing the tactics of law enforcement here in the United States. I think you can look at the borders as one of those places where that stuff coalesces strongly. However this is also happening in cities, in counties, and rural areas across the country. There’s also a way that the logic of law enforcement in the United States is taking on an increasingly explicit war-making tenor. There are very clear examples of this such as the declared War on Drugs or War on Gangs. The enforcement of these wars uses a lot of the same tactics and technologies, but also is premised on a sense that there is an enemy that needs to be targeted and eliminated here at home.

One way this has played out dramatically is with the creation and growth of the Department of Homeland Security since September 11th and the fear-mongering around terrorism that’s used to clamp down on the domestic setting. One small example of this that we have been fighting in Oakland is a program called Urban Shield. It is 48 hours of war games simulations and trainings for SWAT and other special law enforcement forces. The scenarios are incredibly racist, really sensationalized, and millions upon millions of dollars of my county’s money go into these war game competitions. Simultaneously, they hold a trade expo, so you can go and get the latest night-vision goggles, the newest guns, the latest tracking softwares or stingray technology, or robots and drones. In terms of its cultural impact, in this period of increased public attention on the policing of protest you’ll also see things like t-shirts with things like images of protesters in cross-hairs for sale at these tradeshows.

TLP: While we are on this topic of repression, counterinsurgency warfare, and police spying, could you speak a little bit on the politics of movement security? I don’t mean this as a reiteration of criminological notions of security and securitization. I simply mean, are there certain principles, organizing strategies, or ways of collectivizing political labor that you suggest be embraced, at both organizational and larger popular levels, which can stave off intrusion from the state or the counterrevolutionary aspirations of liberal civil society?

Rachel: This is definitely not my area of expertise [laughter], but I’ll tell you what I think [more laughter]. I think organizers should always operate on the assumption that they’re being watched, that their communication is being monitored, and that they likely will encounter people intent on provoking people and sharing information to discredit and disrupt organizing, particularly organizing that challenges state power. That said, I think being smart and cognizant of that is different than being paralyzed and paranoid.

My sense is that strong organizations are a good line of self-defense. Strong organizations, strong coalitions, and strong networks. Trying to go it alone, as individuals or as a handful of people is always more risky than being connected to an organizing infrastructure and a base. But people make different choices about what their tactics require and what they think is strategic. I feel quite certain that when things get more powerful they get more closely monitored. That balance between moving forward toward political goals and using common sense caution is really important. I think calling out and not cooperating with law enforcement always makes really good sense to me [laughter]. Calling out visits by law enforcement, not cooperating, and then letting people know that it’s happening—those kinds of things are extremely important. Having consistency in how people get to enter spaces, when people get to participate in decision-making, those basic organizing guidelines used by many organizations for a long time, is also important.

TLP: So in the spirit of Black August, we have pulled three quotes from her autobiography that we hope to solicit your opinion on. The first is as follows:

I have never really understood exactly what a “liberal” is, though, since i have heard “liberals” express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as i can tell, you have extreme right, who are fascist, racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere in between these two points is the liberal. As far as i’m concerned, “liberal” is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard and money gets tight they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolph Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as along as they can maintain their own privileges.

What comes to mind after hearing this quote?

Rachel: I think it’s an interesting point. In the movement against the prison industrial complex we have struggled a lot with . . . umm . . . liberals [laughter]— some of the most stalwart reformers where reform is their end game. I also think there is some interesting wiggle room there. What is necessary to fulfill their commitment to justice, and equality, and human rights? I mean, if there is a kernel of that there, then part of our work as organizers is to amplify our shared interests, to compel them in that direction, and also to make that compelling. That doesn’t mean we always succeed or that their class interests, racial benefits, gender benefits or other sources of power they want to protect might not ultimately play them one way or the other. But thinking about where can we exploit that kernel of shared interest is interesting to me here, rather than just giving up and writing them off entirely. Of course we need to be cautious of what they are recommending and what they think is “practical” or “pragmatic.” But it’s our job now to push on that and to make other suggestions.

TLP: Here is the second quote:

Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, and not learn from them.

Rachel: Yes. I couldn’t agree more [laughter]. So yes, what Assata said [more laughter]. I worry a little bit, in this period, about a lack of intellectual rigor and lack of discipline, as well as accusations of working “too slowly” or “not understanding” the sense of urgency. You know, we saw this similarly around the rise of the anti- globalization movement which I also think is a direct antecedent of what we are seeing in terms of Black protest today. Similarly, I would say that about Occupy. I would call that a direct antecedent. I don’t think we would be seeing what we are seeing now without those previous movements.

TLP: Like a tactical antecedent? Or something more ideological?

Rachel: I think both. But I don’t mean a one-to-one overlap, or like: this led directly to this. But more in terms of some of the orientations towards organizing and the ideological parallels. So definitely not a one-to-one, but I think influenced by quite certainly.

I think in these moments where there is a heightened investment in direct action as the primary way to move, the pacing and the urgency and all that is required to keep up the pace sometimes makes it challenging to engage people in longer term planning, or study, or assessment. Because people are really feeling like there is no time to do that. That said, if you don’t engage with decades of previous organizing, if you don’t engage with where you are falling down, then you will make the same mistakes over and over. You will make mistakes made a month ago. You will make mistakes that were made ten years ago. You might make those anyways, but they might be more productive mistakes if you’ve made a commitment to studying movement history. The last thing I’ll say about this is that it’s also fucking hard. Nobody wants to confront the stuff they’ve messed up on, or the things they think they’ve done wrong, not to mention talk about their vulnerabilities. I think that also what Assata is describing is very different than a callout culture that’s like “you’re fucked” or “let me just describe all the ways that you’ve messed up.” I think what she’s talking about is a disciplined assessment and reflection within organizational settings on where we need to improve, where we need to tighten up, and where we need to be stronger and smarter.

TLP: This point on the pace and tempo of struggle is so crucial! I am glad you mention it. There truly is, as you say, this kind of militant presentism (and ahistoricity) unique to the so-called “Left” that is as troubling for movement-builders as the gradualist impulse of liberal antiracist reform. This point also makes for a good transition into our final quote from Shakur, which goes as follows:

Just because you believe in self-defense doesn’t mean you let yourself be sucked into defending yourself on the enemy’s terms. One of the [Black Panther] party’s major weaknesses, i thought, was the failure to clearly differentiate between aboveground political struggle and underground, clandestine military struggle. 

Rachel: I believe in self-defense. I think that self-defense and self-determination are really key concepts if Black people want to get free. But also for all people who want to be free. In my mind, there is a certain romanticism of a very fixed and narrow conception of self-defense that I think actually comes from, well . . . actually . . . reading Assata, for instance [laughter]. And that is not to criticize her or people who read her. It’s more to say, what does self-defense look like in 2016, versus in 1969 or 1973? In my mind, self-defense requires an understanding of shared fate. It requires an understanding of how what happens in El Salvador or what happens in Palestine or what happens in the Philippines impacts my ability to fight for my own liberation. Some of that has to do with the nature of US imperialism. Some of that also has to do with what we have learned, over many decades, about the power of internationalism generally, and Third World solidarity in particular.

What is required from our organizations or movements in relationship with these sectors internationally needs to be a determining force in how we shift power. Building a sense of how we defend our own abilities to live healthy, meaningful, powerful lives in relationship to people in similar conditions around the globe is a way of thinking about self-defense that I am interested in exploring further. That includes how we fight US imperialism, or how we fight for food security, or how we fight against large-scale gentrification and the march of capitalism. Toward that end, I think this idea of not being sucked into defending ourselves on the enemy’s terms is important. Building these networks I’ve been describing is one way of determining our own course. It allows us to be proactive instead of only defensive. It allows us to say: “this is what we want to build.” In a lot of ways an abolitionist vision is an example of this kind of proactive vision. It’s not just: “I want to eliminate imprisonment” or “I want to eliminate the cops.” It really is an affirmative ideology and practice. Affirmatively, this is the world I want to live in, therefore I need to take these steps to create the conditions that make that world possible.

The download link for the full issue can be found here.

Rachel Herzing lives and works in Oakland, CA, where she fights the violence of policing and imprisonment. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex and the Co-Director of the StoryTelling & Organizing Project, a community resource sharing stories of interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services. The following interview was conducted by the True Leap Publishing Collective.

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The Black Scholar Vol. 46.3: Blacks and Climate Justice

August 29, 2016

While we were preparing this unprecedented issue linking anti-racist struggle and environmental justice, the Movement for Black Lives, a collective of more than 50 organizations, published its platform which includes the following demand: “A Divestment From Industrial Multinational Use of Fossil Fuels and Investments in Community-Based Sustainable Energy Solutions.”  This demand merely echoes the sentiment that to think through or work on racial politics without some component of environmental activism or awareness is to amputate the struggle in advance of any political achievement.

Given how intimate are these struggles despite being rarely invoked together, we invited some of the people who spend a lot of time thinking, writing and acting on Blacks, racial politics and climate justice to submit their thoughts on the relationship between The Black Lives Matter movement and Climate Justice. Here’s what they had to say to us in this special forum:

Khalil Shahyd: Environmental Justice Advocate

            We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”

                                                                        — Martin Luther King Jr.

            Dr. King spoke those words to Harry Belafonte after the signing of the Civil Rights Act. He was speaking out of concern that integration of Blacks into American society without fundamentally transforming the structural nature of society would create new crises, in some ways more troubling than the segregation he and others fought to dismantle. The insight Dr. King expressed is made evident when we consider the persisting poverty faced by many rural and urban Black communities despite the growth of a substantial Black middle class since the bill’s passage.

Yet, perhaps there is an even more appropriate lens through which to view and understand Dr. King’s message. Today we are faced with the realization that the industrial society Dr. King and so many others fought to integrate us into is literally “burning the house.” As greater awareness to the causes and implications of climate change prove irrefutable we are likely to see increased vulnerability as livelihoods and ecosystems are disrupted or altered. While racial justice advocates have relied on a growing national economy to improve the living standards for minority workers, our national economy required larger and larger amounts of fossil fuels and materials to be consumed. The result is unsustainable levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that threaten to literally scorch the earth.

As the Black Lives Matter movement takes on the leadership of our collective advocacy for rights and liberation, addressing Climate Justice must be of the highest priority as the central focus of our modern “Civil Rights Movement.” The transition to a greener society will exacerbate racial inequality. The new technologies we are told to rely on for this transition are being developed and controlled by a minority of engineers, investors and entrepreneurs who are largely white. Further, these technologies, and the resources required to build them out, will be controlled by companies founded, financed and managed by mainly white people to whom knowledge and wealth will accrue as a result. The overwhelming majority of the profits earned from innovations designed to meet the climate challenge will gravitate to those with wealth, not those who need it, and the last great economic transition will proceed in a way that entrenches us at the bottom of the economic and political ladder.

Reverend Leo Woodberry: Pastor, Kingdom Living Temple

From the Federal Government to states to foundations, everyone supports the need for just energy transitions, equity and meaningful engagement for African Americans, in principle. One has to do no more than to look around the table at the decision-makers lack of melanin and paltry allocation of resources to African American communities to know that environmental racism is still in full effect in America — despite the fact that grassroots organizations have led the fight for environmental justice for years. Philanthropic and policy colonialists in air conditioned offices still view Blacks as unworthy, incapable denizens whose Black lives just don’t matter as much as others.

Tina Johnson: Policy Director, US Climate Network

The systemic racism that is decried by the Black Lives Matters Movement is the exact systemic racism that has permeated the struggle fought by the Environmental Justice Movement. Both of these movements are linked by the overabundance of evidence that Blacks in America are treated unjustly in such a way that their human rights and dignity are under constant attack by economic, social, racial, environmental and penal/judicial oppression.  This link is evidenced by statistics that reveal that Blacks are disproportionately impacted by environmental racism and an unjust criminal justice system.  Sixty-eight percent of Blacks live within thirty miles of a coal-fired plant, the distance within which the maximum effect of the “smokestack plum” occurs.  Blacks are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites.  It cannot be ignored or denied that if you are Black and poor that you will be polluted on, and shot by police. Black Lives Matter is connected to environmental racism because they are both borne out of the reality that systems that abuse the human rights of a community based upon its race must be stopped.

Adrienne L. Hollis, Ph.D.: Writer, Activist, Attorney

The environment is where we live, where we work, where we play, where we go to school, and where we pray. In these different environs, there is inequity in the way people are perceived and treated. Minority populations, people of color, disenfranchised and impoverished communities, indigenous peoples, those with lower socio-economic status – poor people – are all defined as susceptible communities to environmental problems. Historically, black Americans have suffered unjustly at the hands of those who pollute the environment. Climate justice recognizes that those same populations are the first to experience and suffer the negative effects of climate change. It seeks to find ways to lessen those effects – so that no group unfairly bears the burdens associated with changes in the environment, and increases access to clean water, clean air, fresh and affordable food, safe and healthy living environments, jobs and opportunity.

The burdens are more than just scientific data about the future of climate change.  For people of color, the future is now. Climate injustice means increased air pollution and asthma rate, and socio-economic burdens. Advocating for climate change means a person’s health should not suffer because of their zip code, race, or environmental conditions. That is its relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement. Climate justice and Black Lives Matter are both social movements. Both deal with the intersection between environmental insult and assault on populations of color and/or those of lower socio-economic status. These populations are the first to experience the effects of climate change, and the first to experience the effects of inequity in the criminal justice system or when dealing with police.

The connection between climate justice and Black Lives Matter – in my opinion – is the belief that basic human rights and civil rights matter and should be protected for everyone, including those historically disenfranchised – black Americans.

 Jameka Hodnett: Activist

The modern environmental movement has been and continues to be dominated by white hetero-patriarchy. Big Green organizations often co-opt movement narratives from predominantly black, brown, and front line communities, while continuing to benefit themselves from institutionalized racism and corporate capitalism. This is a troubling juxtaposition because black people are the ones who will be hit the hardest by climate change. Systemic racial inequality already leaves black people in a vulnerable position and the climate crisis will exacerbate those conditions. The climate crisis requires imagining a world without fossil fuels. It requires pushing our global economy in a fundamentally different direction. It requires an unwavering spirit and a true fight against oppression, and The Movement for Black Lives has all of these components.

The modern environmental movement is too comfortable to shake up the status quo. It’s time to realize that their marriage to incrementalism and political expediency will not be enough to fundamentally transform our economy with the urgency that we need to combat the climate crisis. On the other hand, the Movement for Black Lives understands the urgency of creating a fundamentally different world. They understand that an economy built on white supremacist capitalist patriarchy treats black folks as surplus labor, as something to be caged or discarded. It is not interested in half measures because death does not occupy a gray area.

The movement’s platform now has a component geared towards climate justice and fossil fuel divestment. They recognize that all systems of oppression are connected and at the heart is a deeply exploitative and violent system that rips up the earth just as violently as it does black and brown people daily. Freedom for black people is being able to live and thrive in an environment free from all forms of oppression. The climate crisis is one of the biggest opportunities to merge the urgency of two movements and now is the perfect time to do it.

Montina Cole: Attorney, Writer

The many facets of climate change disproportionately impact black lives and multi-faceted solutions to the climate crisis are needed, including voting rights reform.  We need to elect leaders who understand that the Black community is on the frontline of experiencing the negative health, environmental and economic impacts of climate change – we need leaders who will fight for climate justice.  But our ability to elect such leaders will be stymied unless politically disenfranchising New Jim Crow voter suppression tactics are rolled back and laws promoting full voter participation are passed.  The Movement for Black Lives has wisely recognized the need to fully exercise Black political power, including the right to vote.  Now is the time to make it so.

Kari Fulton: Environmental Justice Advocate and Community Organizer, Empower DC

It is critical to understand that a vision for Black Lives includes a vision for Climate Justice. Black Lives Matter is about more than police brutality against the Black community. The same system that hires and trains cops to racially profile African-Americans, also trains urban planners, developers and politicians. They are trained to place polluting industries in minority communities and to develop emergency management plans that protect affluent white neighborhoods, while destroying low-income minority communities.

Communities of Color are hurt first and worst by the impacts of Climate Change. We feel the damages of natural disasters. We are being pushed out to suburbs without adequate transportation, jobs or emergency support and we are also breathing toxins from polluting industries and development. The whole system is guilty and I am glad to see that there are many ways to infuse a strategic Climate Justice conversation into the policy platform laid out by the Movement for Black Lives.

Denise Abdul-Rahman,  NAACP (Indiana), Environmental Climate Justice Chair

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi moved our black lives into a deep societal, virtual and physical, conversation about how we matter, significantly.

The more inequality manifests, the more environmental injustice is perpetuated. The production systems run by the 1% accelerate carbon pollution and co-pollutants. These pollutants are hosted and burdened by black, brown, and vulnerable communities. The very same communities already burdened with environmental injustices, over policing, poverty, brownfields, toxic water, all of which are an assault on our health and wellbeing thus making us ill equipped to being climate resistant.

The movement demands change, equity and just systems.


Preview issue here. To receive both the print and digital versions TBS Vol 46., which includes our climate justice issue along with issues on Black feminism, Black dance, and more, please subscribe here.

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#BlackLivesMatter, Labor Unions, & Presidential Politics: A TBS Conversation With Adolph Reed, Part 2. By Jonathan Fenderson, TBS Associate Editor

August 26, 2016

In part two of our conversation with Adolph Reed, we discuss everything from #BlackLivesMatter, policing and labor unions to Black Studies and presidential politics. As expected, Reed delivers more of his devastating criticism, while advocating for a renewed commitment to union organizing as the only way forward.


 

Fenderson (JF): I want to stick with you on this question about neoliberalism, race and democracy and get your take on #BlackLivesMatter’s relationship to the Democratic candidates and the disruption that happened at the July 2015 Netroots Nation Conference. You said that you felt like the disruption suggested that the movement had some leverage or that it was, like what Bruce Dixon argued, leveraging itself for the authority within the Democratic Party and its neoliberal corporate political agenda.[1] How do you make sense of the presence and value or possible absences within Black Lives Matter, in general, vis-a-vis your idea of the kind of fraternal twins of Black authenticity and neoliberalism.

Adolph Reed (AR): Well, I’m going to say two things just to be clear. One is that when I saw Bruce’s argument, I wrote him immediately and thanked him for making it in public because I think he’s absolutely right. The other thing is I started to get involved around the edges of the Sanders campaign, and eventually became much more involved than around the edges. My main connection is through the Labor for Bernie thing but, to be clear, I’m not going to respond to this as an operative of the Sanders campaign.

JF: Okay.

AR: I don’t think much of Black Lives Matter, frankly. I’ve thought of it on the more positive end as a sort of Black Occupy Movement. At the other end of the continuum, I don’t like the politics of the people who have put themselves forward to speak in the name of Black Lives Matter. I don’t think there’s a movement there. I think there are episodic protests, and I think there are people who don’t even necessarily consider themselves to be hustlers but who have come to adulthood and to form a sense of themselves in the neoliberal environment, in which Black political discourse suffers from lack of careful and rigorous analysis.

So I’ve been struck, for instance, that Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors—I’m not so sure about Opal Tometi, but I think that she’s done it on other occasions, too—have seemed to, consciously or not, understand advancing a political cause as identical with advancing an individual brand. I saw an interview with Garza where she was insisting that it’s important for people not to change a hashtag. Her explanation to why it was important was incoherent, but you could track it back to the claim that these three women are the three people who started #BlackLivesMatter. That construct just says to me that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of politics. Like, who started the Black Power movement? Who started the Civil Rights Movement? Who started the CIO? Who started the Underground Railroad? Who started the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

I was on a panel in Chicago a few months ago where this came up, and I made the point that it’s in the nature of a 21-year-old to be stupid. I was stupid and took myself too seriously when I was 21, just like 21-year-olds do now. But the difference was that there were older activists around who were rooted in political work, and we understood we needed to learn from them. Actually the people who we’re talking about who are sort of claiming the mantle of Black Lives Matter aren’t 21-year-olds. Some of them are pushing 35. Someone like McKesson is a Teach For America [TFA] pimp; and is a proud TFA pimp. I’m not on Twitter, but people have sent me stuff that he’s tweeted. At one point a couple weeks ago he said some bullshit about how moments of social change can produce great innovations, and the two examples that he offered were the [Black] Panthers’ free breakfast program and charter schools.

One of the things that I’ve noticed for a long time as part of the atrophy of politics, is its become impolite to ask people what they represent and who they are actually speaking for. For me, that’s one of the most important things about the trade union movement. When somebody starts talking, you always know “who” and how many “whos” they actually have as a real constituency.

What I’ve been increasingly struck by with #BlackLivesMatter is that there’s no connection whatsoever. Their constituency is all about getting on TV. I did think, a couple things actually, [initially about] the moves against Sanders. One is it makes sense to go after Sanders because he’s the one whose politics would actually be closest to you and the one most likely to listen. The other thought was that they’re agents of the Clinton campaign, and I think there’s some of both things going on.

JF: I want to pick up on this point you were making about labor unions because obviously we’re in a climate where labor unions are always on the defensive and under attack. But at the same time, we’re in a climate where people are having these deep questions about policing, police violence and state violence. You also have this tension between Black elected officials and police unions. For example, Mayor Rawlings-Blake decides she’s not going to run for reelection, so it seems to me like there’s this tension between the Black political class and police unions. So I’m wondering how do those of us who are invested in labor wrestle with this question about the police unions. Of all the unions, the police unions are the only ones who have not been taking major hits. Their power has continued to amass during this neoliberal era while most unions are fighting for their lives in some way. So I’m wondering how we wrestle with this whole issue of police unions.

AR: Well, yeah, that’s a good question. I’d say first of all, in a lot of places police unions and firefighters have been taking hits. It’s funny; I got arrested in Atlantic City in the summer at a demonstration. Of course, the cops didn’t want to arrest us, but the Atlantic City Police Union is in their own contract negotiations, and the city is trying to take from them. The same with firefighters, who in a lot of states, by and large, have been on the cutting-edge of progressive politics. People who run police unions are fucked up in a lot of places, but I always say that it’s better to have a bad union than to have no union.

I think the challenge is to try to alter the culture of those police unions, and one way to alter the culture of the police unions is to alter the approach to policing that has become dominant in the last 40 years or so. Going to community policing models would be a big move in the right direction. To move as far away from that occupying army high-tech model that the LAPD pioneered, and is now the norm. Also to diversify police forces obviously has something to do with it, but it is not an answer. If you look at these killings it is just about as unlikely that Black and Latino cops will be found guilty as it is for white cops. In that sense, cop is a race basically. Fight the union when the union needs to be fought, but fight the union over the right things. Any union, and especially a union that’s a guild, is going to have as a default position the protection of its members. But the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers would not protect some incompetent electrician who causes a house fire. There needs to be an internal reform in police unions. That’s the only way it’s going to come, frankly, with a commitment to altering how the police function is interpreted and understood. That, obviously, has to mean real civilian control of police.

JF: One of the things that has unfolded here in Ferguson and St. Louis, and a lot of people don’t know this, is the base for a lot of the activity around Ferguson was stemming from the striking fast food workers in the Fight for $15 with SEIU.

AR: Ah, okay.

JF: In St. Louis, they were actually in many ways the people who were out there first and most frequently.

AR: Wow. That’s interesting. You sure as hell wouldn’t know that from the coverage, would you?

JF: Yeah, so my question to you is about the Fight for 15. I know you’ve written about living wages, particularly in Class Notes, and labor organizing has always been a central part of your political agenda, so what’s your take on the Fight for $15 and the fast food workers? Now they’re, I think, expanding it to other low-wage workers.

AR: Right. Yeah. Well, I’m not opposed to any of that. To be honest, my sense is that there’s—like with the Walmart campaign—there’s a fair amount of smoke and mirrors around the fast food campaign. The Fight for 15 is…yeah. I can’t oppose it, right?

JF: Right.

AR: And it would be a good thing to win.

JF: Let me add a caveat, too.

AR: Yeah.

JF: I’m asking this to you also based on knowing your experiences at UNC in the food worker strike.

AR: Right. Well, yeah, and I think that’s important. It’s funny, I went back to UNC in the mid ’90s to give a talk, and the same fight was still going on. Look, all workers need representation and need a voice at work. What a lot of people, especially young people, don’t get is that unless you’re covered by a union contract, the only rights that you have on the job are rights against discrimination. But enforcement of anti-discrimination law is so weak at this point that you may as well say that the only rights that you have on the job are connected with a union contract. Students sometimes get freaked out when they hear that the boss can just fire you because he didn’t like the way you look. He doesn’t have to have a reason. That’s what at-will employment means. In that sense, I certainly support those initiatives. I think the little bit of hesitation that you hear in my voice is that I’m not completely comfortable with a political approach that focuses activism on raising the standard of the really, really fucked-over workers up to the floor of the customarily not-quite-so-fucked-over. But I’m not saying that I would oppose it. This might help me make the point. When I did that article in Harper’s year ago, I had a back-and-forth with Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect about it.[2] What struck me about that was he was pressing the Fight for 15 and the fast food stuff as a way of making an argument that the Democratic Party had somehow changed radically behind my back since 2010. It’s just striking to me.

In a way, you can look at this as accepting a large-scale politics that has the impact of driving down the ceiling of working people’s expectations. And what we get in exchange for that is a commitment to patch up and maybe raise the floor a little bit. And for me the point is to figure out how to try to build a broad base. Starting out with and focusing on improving the circumstances of the worst off, while it’s a good and important thing to do, it’s kind of more like social work than it is like politics because you don’t get from there to building the broader base.

Now, I know there’s this ACORN/SEIU understanding of organizing. I think Frances Fox Piven believes this too, that fighting for the little things will somehow magically convert into the fights for the big things. I just don’t think it works that way, and I think the evidence is on my side. Nonetheless, I support those campaigns. I’m not going to criticize them. I do remember, though, about the Walmart campaign, there’s a guy, a long-time trade union activist who was a very sharp guy. I think he’s working for the West Coast Longshoremen, now the ILWU, who wrote a really interesting document about this that made the point. The Walmart campaign has gotten nowhere because it’s all flashy SEIU kind of public relations stuff. He suggested that they would probably have gotten more, not just bang for the buck, but more impact, if they’d targeted trying to organize a medium-sized regional supermarket chain, but that would not have been flashy in the same way as the Walmart campaign.

I guess the punch-line for me would be the efforts that have or pursue an institutional traction are going to be what will help us develop the kind of movement that we need to be able to do this stuff in a more systematic way.

JF: Let me shift to ask you a question as a political scientist, in the middle of election season. How do you understand these polls? Do they have meaning, or are they just simply fodder for 24-hour news stations?

AR: I don’t think they mean very much, except in the self-fulfilling prophecy sense, right. If you have good poll numbers it helps you raise money. It helps you to get volunteers, so it’s better to have the good poll numbers. I don’t think anything polls means anything, frankly. One thing I have been talking about—in fact, I talked to a local about this when I was down in New Orleans—is the logic of an election campaign and the logic of a movement-building organizing campaign are, in important ways, exactly opposite of each other.

At the trivial level, when you are working in an election campaign, door-knocking is a practice where you want to drop the literature and move as quickly as you can to the next building. So if the old lady comes to the door and wants to invite you in and give you tea and cookies and talk about her grand babies, you absolutely don’t want that to happen. But in an organizing drive, that is exactly what you want to happen, because it is all about building deep connections with people.

That also applies to how you think about the message. In an election campaign, once you file, the most important objective is to get as many votes as you can. It doesn’t even matter whether it is a protest campaign. The objective is still to get as many votes as you can. What that means is that the pressure is to appeal as widely as you possibly can, to connect with people on evanescent levels that don’t go into too much detail about the program, which is the kiss of death, especially if you are an insurgent candidacy.

With an organizing campaign you want to do exactly the opposite. You want to build relationships, explain the worldview that your effort is connected with and have a back-and-forth with people. What happens in efforts like the Jesús “Chuy” Garcia mayoral campaign [in Chicago] and to some extent the Bernie Sanders campaign is that those two approaches and sets of objectives co-exist and can bump heads.

What appealed to me about the Sanders campaign in general is that I obviously like the stuff that he is saying and what he stands for, but what got me especially interested in it to the point of thinking that I needed to get involved with it in some way is that it became a vehicle for bringing together the people in the labor movement, people with standing and who represent stuff in the labor movement who are themselves ready to try to, once again, push in a direction of creating some independent working class politics.

There is a Labor Party connection. You probably already may have seen that National Nurses United endorsed Sanders. I mean they were part of the Labor Party. The president of the Amalgamated Transit Union is on board. He was a Labor Party guy before he was president. Mark Dimonstein who is the president of the American Postal Workers Union is also a Labor Party activist. There are enough people around with that sort of commitment to building a working class politics.

The Labor for Bernie thing is bringing it together. There is a list of more than 30,000 trade unionists who have signed up for Labor for Bernie. No matter what happens in the campaign that is a base we can go back to. That’s what got me into it. I have always been an “in for a penny, in for a pound” kind of guy. I’ve never been the sort to join an organization at the top. I’ve always thought that standing and voice in an organization or an undertaking ought to be a direct function of the work that you do.

JF: This is interesting because I wanted to ask you about Donald Trump, and how he continues to tap into this interesting base. Some people would argue that he’s tapping into a right-wing populism in some ways. Somebody like a Ronald Walters would say, Trump is tapping into a sentiment of white nationalism. I know you are particularly surgical when it comes to dissecting Black intra-racial politics. I am wondering how you read the same kind of critique when it comes to the white working class and race or how you interpret this energy around the white working class.

AR: In the first place, I don’t actually know how Trump’s popular support breaks down. I know that he is definitely trying to make appeals that sound populist. I suspect that his base of support or his core base of support is the social base of fascism. That is like the downwardly mobile middle classes, basically, and people who are concerned with maintaining a sense of social respectability or whatnot. There is no shortage of people who will be susceptible to scapegoating. That’s true of the working class, that’s true in the white working class, it’s true in the Black working class, it’s true in the working class as much as it is anyplace else, because that is the nature of politics that people have come up in.

This is another reason that I think the labor movement is so vitally important, because the challenge, again, is to get an alternative interpretation and alternative message out there. I think there is a percentage or an element within the American society who are fundamentally committed to racism. There is also probably a bigger population that is open to racist arguments but who don’t necessarily set their clocks by being racist. I think it’s strategically important to recognize the difference.

I think the challenge or the objective for us is to build a base that is as broad and deep as we can get without giving up any principles. Especially in left circles that have their roots ultimately on a college campus someplace, there is an inclination to treat “the movement” like a frat. You have to show that you are worthy to belong, by embracing all of the right positions, or the correct positions, on a number of more or less arcane issues. Like not calling a transgender person, “tranny,” for instance, or not to use “Indian,” when the proper usage is “Native American.” To me that has always seemed like a “palace politics,” at most.

A lot of people expect a movement to look in its embryonic stages how it would look once its fully formed. But part of politics is bringing people along and altering people’s views through the solidarity of participating in a common struggle. In that sense, I see the importance of trying to find ways to appeal to people who have [different] views on any number of issues. There’s a need to find the points of solidarity and use the solidarity as a foundation for expanding a relationship to bring people along on these other backward views. Does that make sense?

JF: That makes perfect sense. That’s the nature of mobilizing people politically; finding the point of solidarity where you can move them to your side.

Let me shift the conversation to academia and Black studies. There is an emergence of cultural studies in the U.S. academy, which has arguably shifted from a discourse around Blacks to more abstract conversations about race and representation. Due to this we have witnessed a proliferation of attempts to engage or theorize race politics in cultures in ways that may delink the issues from the specifics of Black life. You are somebody who has always talked about material politics and race, so I am wondering what you make of this new academic discourse.

AR: That’s a good question, too. You know, going way back, some of us had the suspicion back in the 70’s that the turn to Pan African studies was a way for, I know this is going to sound tribal, a way for Africans and West Indians to get the Black studies jobs without having to know anything about the United States. I think there is an element of that going on in Cultural Studies too. Mainly Brits. So now you don’t need to know anything about the Black American experience. It’s like you’ve got a one size fits all kind of explanation. I have also been struck by the shift in the focal point of who Black Studies scholars think they are in conversation with.

I have been struck for quite some time now as well about the fact that so much of the scholarship in Black Studies hinges on a small handful of moves, that have to do with showing that Black people resisted and had autonomy, family and community. This is the reason that I have been finding it much more helpful to read stuff that was written in the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s because it was less likely to be connected to this pro forma, by the numbers interpretation. Because my question about that is “How about if you just assume that slaves resisted and sharecroppers resisted, under the principle that where there is oppression people will find ways to resist somehow. Or rather, how does the scholarly discussion look if you determine that you don’t need to prove the existence of group resistance anymore? That [also] opens up the other problem of what counts as resistance and what does not, and that’s what gets you to the cultural studies issues.

Or [how does the scholarly discussion look if we] don’t need to prove that Black people sought autonomy. Because in the first place, it’s not clear if they did. You are turning the population into a ventriloquist’s dummy, people sought a lot of stuff and autonomy is an abstraction, [as is] family or community. So there is a question as well, “Why does all of the scholarship keep trading on the same theme over and over and over?” One answer is, they do it because they do it. It’s like a bandwagon effect and it’s easier than thinking. It also stems from the sense that we are still somehow fighting against the Stanley Elkins “sambo” thesis, which is reactive among other things, and no reputable historian has retailed the Elkins thesis in nearly half a century.[3] The sexuality stuff gets stirred in and this other stuff gets stirred in so there is this element of giving props to previously unrecognized Black people who did important stuff that we should stop to honor. It’s like an awards convention. Again, the focus isn’t on trying to deepen knowledge and understanding of the complexities of the Black American life as it has evolved, in relation to its evolving context in the last few centuries.

I definitely think that the cultural studies turn is bullshit. I’ll just be blunt with it. I just think it is absolutely bullshit.

JF: It’s interesting too because I think that there’s this way that identity politics are a central part of this kind of cultural studies turn. The logic of let’s find the most marginalized aspect of one’s identity and raise it up is emerging in the scholarship in the same way that you see it emerging in the political discourse.

AR: I think that is absolutely right. I think it is the same because the practices are the same. That’s what drives me absolutely bonkers. Increasingly it seems that the people who are doing this stuff in the academy or in the academy pretending to be elsewhere understand that to be politics. In the same way that Alicia Garza and those others understand political action and self-promotion as being identical. I don’t think they are capable of seeing any difference. In that sense you talk about the cultural triumphs of liberalism. If everything is display of the self, then from one perspective that just seems like the neo-liberal utopia. I think you are right. I don’t think there is any difference.

I think intersectionality is part of it, too. Ken Warren, an English professor at the University of Chicago, told me that he is pointing out at the beginning of his grad courses that he doesn’t want to hear anyone talking about intersectionality because there is no such thing. And he’s right about that. There is no such thing. It’s another one of those alternatives to explanation that sounds like it makes sense at a level of abstraction that is high enough that you don’t have to think about what it would mean in concrete everyday practice. At that level it just sounds like a version of schizophrenia.

I think I made this argument in a couple of places, maybe in the intro to Class Notes, that the notion emerged as a way of trying to finesse the problem of essentialism in standpoint theory as people like Patricia Hill Collins articulated it. But it doesn’t resolve the problem, all it does is multiply the number of essentialized identities. It’s kind of like the mixed race notion or the idea of being biracial. Some people have actually advanced—probably not in a while, but when that stuff had its moment in the sun in the 90’s—that this was a way to get beyond racial thinking. No, all you have done is add more races to the mix.

JF: Let me shift really quickly, barring Black critics on the right like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, you have been one of the most prominent thinkers, maybe even the only one at your level, to explicitly critique what has been called the racial brokerage model, in much of Black cultural, political, and intellectual work and so at the least your criticism generates a necessary self-consciousness and at most an enduring crisis of representation, yet it is not entirely clear that this critique has been taken on and might in fact constitute an epistemological third rail in Black political and intellectual life, where do you see the Black intellectual or political world in terms of its collectivist assumptions or general self-consciousness of its place and role?

AR: It’s a very good and important question. I mean there are other people who are kind of raising that critique. I think I may know most of them. For instance, Ken Warren’s book, What was African American Literature?, was very smart. All of us who are doing this kind of work have the same complaint. It’s also an artifact of what the other side, I’ll just say for now, sees as its audience. I cut my spurs in politics in a different kind of tradition, but it seems to me to be a fundamental mark of a lack of seriousness and lack of principle, when you just pretend that the critiques haven’t been made and just keep rehearsing the same lame crap and over again.

In the 70’s I didn’t go see the Black exploitation movies that had the pretensions to be something. Every few months during that period, it would look like some film had come out that had plumbed a new depth for the genre, so I would just go and see one, sometimes with my friend Alex just to get a sense of how much worse the genre had gotten since the last time I looked. I think it bottomed out with something called, “The Black Gestapo,” but that just might be when I got to the point where I got with the Spike Lee movies and said, “Okay, I’ve done enough of this.”

I guess the sum line that I would draw under it is a lot of the stuff that’s going on in the field now is almost openly unserious intellectually. I guess to connect with your question, the chicken-shit aversion to engagement with actual intellectual debate is just … Even with what’s happening to the universities these days, these are still soft jobs that we have and it seems to me the one justification for having them is to do intellectual work with some seriousness. If they can’t do that…Truck pull up and just take them all to the cotton field.

[1] Bruce Dixon, “NetRoots Nation Confrontation Wasn’t About #BlackLivesMatter At All.” http://www.Blackagendareport.com/netroots-nation-confrontation

[2] Adolph Reed, “Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals.” Harper’s (March 2014); Harold Meyerson, “The Left, Viewed from Space.” The American Prospect (3 March 2014). http://prospect.org/article/left-viewed-space; Adolph Reed, “What Is Left: A Response to Harold Meyerson.” The American Prospect (3 March 2014). http://prospect.org/article/what-left.

[3] Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. New York: Grosset, 1959.

Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s and Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and our Retreat from Racial Equality and is author of The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics; W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism & the Color Line; Stirrings in the Jug: Black American Politics in the Post-Segregation Era, and Class Notes, a collection of his popular political writing and co-author of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought.  He has been a columnist in The Progressive and The Village Voice, has written frequently in The Nation. He served on the board of Public Citizen, Inc. and was a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party, and the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors.

 

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Milwaukee Revisited By Ashley M. Howard

August 17, 2016

Social movement scholar Charles Tilly once wrote “the oppressed have struck in the name of justice, the privileged in the name of order, those in between in the name of fear.”[1] While I have discussed the root causes of protest[2] and possible solutions to prevent uprisings,[3] recent unrest in Milwaukee provides the occasion to revisit an earlier uprising in the city, specifically the ways the state and its agents also utilized urban revolts as political tools.

Forty-nine years ago, on July 30, 1967, black Milwaukeeans took to the streets to protest the multiple layers of oppression in their lives. While most accounts of the uprising do not center around one specific catalyzing event, many cite an over-policed CORE dance in Garfield Park as the opening salvo. As the dance ended, around 11 p.m., a fight started between two teenage women.  When the police arrived, a crowd of 300 dance attendees remained, and police ordered everyone to disperse. As groups went home they moved down North Third Street and broke a small number of store windows.  Over the next three days participants caused localized property damage including lighting several fires and overturning cars, including one police vehicle. [4]

On Monday, July 31 Mayor Henry Maier imposed a swift and aggressive response, including a city-wide curfew for forty-eight straight hours.[5]  By the afternoon, 750 local police, 250 State police, and 950 National Guard sealed off an 840-square-block area in Milwaukee’s black enclave, the Inner Core. National Guardsmen held an additional 1,607 soldiers in reserve.  The city sealed off all roads in and out of Milwaukee and closed the airport. For the next twenty-six hours law enforcement prevented anyone from entering or leaving the city, except for medical professionals, the press, and emergency service providers. By midnight, the National Guard committed 2,357 men to the Inner Core area, either on active or reserve duty.  The next day, August 1, civil authorities committed the entire police force and placed 4,084 National Guard on reserve. This massive show of force by National Guard and police effectively stifled the small uprising but more importantly sent a powerful political message to participants and the broader black community.[6]

The State’s operational tactics during the uprisings reflected a conscious decision to shut down not only the physical uprising but also potential ideological awakenings. The actions that the State took represented not an overreaction; but a strategic and pragmatic response.  The State’s adaptations had to be effective not only in stopping the uprising, but also to psychologically deter participants from protesting in this manner again.  The establishment of riot zones and curfews effectively criminalized all members of the black community. Residents, though not illegally engaging in the uprisings, could be arrested and arraigned on riot-connected charges, by virtue of being outdoors in their own neighborhood.  Despite its small population, police arrested 1,700 people in Milwaukee during the uprising; of this number only 193 people were arrested for non-loitering offenses.[7]  Meanwhile, the curfew prevented the city’s black population from congregating, stifling the possibility of further mobilization.

Although municipal government explicitly applauded the hundreds of responsible citizens, such punitive arrests tacitly sent a message of black criminality to the broader white community. Despite this, Maier framed the curfew as a unifying measure. When the suburbs (which were all white because of residential red-lining) voluntarily implemented their own curfews, the mayor opined “there was a common identity in the metropolitan area…I hope the experience could bolster efforts to achieve a greater metropolitan sharing of the poverty burden in Milwaukee.” Maier framed this rebellion suppression tactic by tying it to ongoing pressure to pass open housing ordinances in Milwaukee. The Mayor and City Council refused to sign such initiatives unless they included the entire metropolitan area. In so doing, they effectively halted the measures, fully knowing that the segregated suburbs would never agree to outlaw racial covenants. By framing the curfew as a way of uniting Milwaukee, Maier cleverly pushed forth his own political narrative, presenting the central city and suburbs as ever wedded, facing the same obstacles. Contrasting the alleged unity of urban and suburban, in practice, Milwaukee police and National Guard only patrolled the black Inner Core neighborhood.

Perhaps the most egregious example of the power structure’s co-optation of the rebellions and authentic local grievances came from Mayor Maier’s disregard of the demands of black community leaders. On August 7, 1967, Common View, a black civic group, submitted a five-point statement concerning housing, employment, education, police-community relations, the court system, and recreation.[8]  Ignoring this grassroots presentation of grievances, Mayor Maier mandated top-down solutions to solve ghetto problems in consultation with handpicked advisors.  Maier’s apparent cluelessness in choosing his advisory board was not unintentional.  The Mayor had long been advocating for greater county, state, and federal support of the urban city. The uprising provided the rhetorical and political tool he needed to make further entreaties to the entities that could grant his wishes. The final product of his efforts was a 39-point plan that became known as “Milwaukee’s Marshall Plan.” Though it constituted broad sweeping hopes, it lacked focus and tangible action plans, containing no indigenously created demands.  Of the thirty-nine points, the Mayor could only directly influence six. Most disconcertingly, although working-class African Americans comprised the main participants in the uprising, Maier insisted that his plan was “not intended to help just one group, but to help all by making this a better city.”[9]

In the midst of an election year where protesters chant “Black Lives Matter,” candidates promise to “Make America Great Again,” and the news regularly broadcasts images of black suffering, we must be prepared for the ways in which the events unfolding in Milwaukee will be used as a political pivot in the rhetorical ramp up leading to November.  We must beware of the ways in which racial violence is used not only by activists but also state agents to advance their own individual agendas. We must not let co-optation silence the authentic demands of the people.

Notes

[1]Charles Tilly, “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” in Violence in America: Protest, Rebellion, and Reform, vol. 2, ed Ted Robert Gurr, (Newbury Park CA: Sage Publishers, 1989), 62.

[2] Ashley M. Howard, “Why Ferguson Isn’t the Tale of Two Protests,” The Black Scholar (blog) August 18, 2014, http:// https://www.theblackscholar.org/why-ferguson-isnt-the-tale-of-two-protests.

[3] Ashley M. Howard, “How U.S. Urban Unrest in the 1960s Can Help Make Sense of Ferguson, Missouri, and Other Recent Protests,” Scholar Strategy Network, November 2014 http:// http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/brief/how-us-urban-unrest-1960s-can-help-make-sense-ferguson-missouri-and-other-recent-protests

[4] “Reconnaissance Survey-Milwaukee” NACCD/E51, Johnson Presidential Library, 37.

[5] Henry W. Maier, The Mayor Who Made Milwaukee Famous. (Madison: Madison Books, 1993), 65.

[6] “Justice Department Weekly Summary Milwaukee August 4, 1967” NACCD/E33, Johnson Presidential Library,2. “Memo to Staff from Henry B. Taliaferro Subj Milwaukee trip 28-29 Aug 1967, 26 Sept 1967” NACCD/E24, Johnson.  “Disturbance in Vicinity of North Third Street, Milwaukee WI 1 Aug 1967” NACCD/E24, Johnson Presidential Library, 6.  

[7] Maier, The Mayor Who, 70. “Conviction Count-Milwaukee” NACCD/E2, Johnson Presidential Library.

[8] “Common View demands with Mayor’s response” NACCD/E51, Johnson Presidential Library.

[9] Maier, The Mayor Who, 89.

 

AMH

Ashley Howard is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans and The Black Scholar book reviews editor. Her research centers around African Americans in the Midwest; the intersection between race, class and gender; and the global history of racial violence. She is currently completing her book Prairie Fires: Race, Class, Gender, and the Midwest in the 1960s Urban Rebellions that analyzes the way identity played critical and overlapping roles in defining resistance to racialized oppression in Cincinnati, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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