By Marlena Gangi

Ever see color? Color in regard to one’s skin?

I ask because throughout my lifetime, I have heard many, many times from folks who I am in regular contact with that they do not see color. Their opinion is that we all live in the same world, and if everyone would just “not see color,” then gosh darnit, this ding dang world would be a grand ol’ place to be. Because, they say, color does not matter.

Something else that I have been witness to is the insistence from folks that because their European ancestors some thousand years ago were considered the “niggers of Europe,” they share my racist history of colonization. With this, I have had a number of cohorts say in all seriousness and without a hint of reality, “I understand your struggle, Sister! I understand because I share your oppression.”

Did I mention that the only people who have said these things to me are white skinned and therefore privy to all of the privilege entitled and contained thereof?

“When those who serve defer to the authority of the experience of the oppressed, social change is possible.”

I have taken this quote from fellow journalist Bonnie Tinker. While her statement speaks specifically to the experience of battered women and the need to create and support a movement that includes the leadership of victims and survivors of domestic violence, I am significantly moved by her statement. I am moved because this statement contains in its few words the message that all too often falls deaf on the ears of the white radical and Progressive Left.

A months ago I spoke at a pre-May Day event in Portland. Aimed at promoting community building, communication and solidarity within the Portland radical community, the gathering was overwhelmingly white, young, and included groups active in protecting the environment, supporting prisoners, publishers of alternative media, as well as organizations whose activism focused on anti-fascist and anti-racist struggles.

As usual, I was one of maybe two other people of color to attend the gathering of about 100. I touched on this when it became my time to speak. I began by thanking the other attendees for their work and then asked why it was that, when attending events organized by the radical Left, I always find myself asking, “Why am I the only person of color here?“

I then addressed one of the anti-racist organizations in attendance. “The folks whose oppression that you work to eradicate — why aren’t they here? Do they know about your work and that you would be here tonight?”

I was met with blanks stares.

I continued to talk about the need for interracial and intercultural dialog within the radical left, or more specifically the white radical left. I also said that in order to make real change possible, it is imperative that this dialog occurs as a first step in forming coalitions with radical people of color.

I have many, many times been asked by white social justice activists to explain how to best organize in Black/Latino/Asian/indigenous communities of color. My answer to this is, if you even have to ask this question, you’ve got no business in even attempting to organize in communities of color.

I remember attending a gathering about 15 years ago that had been called by Indigenous elders who were fighting to preserve sacred sites on Indian land. A young blond haired, blue eyed dread locked man asked one of the elders how he could best assist in the sacred site struggle. The elder answered, “Well, if you find that you absolutely have to be part of our struggle, I guess I would advise that you just show up, keep your mouth shut and listen.”

What I would add to this is, that as much as we all would like to believe that we all live in the same world, the fact of the matter is that we do not. As a colonized Chicana, I awaken every day and wonder in what form I will have to experience racism. Will it come in the form of cultural assumption? Will it arrive in the form of unfounded suspicion based on racist stereotypes? Or, will it be a blatant and direct attack based solely on the color of my skin? We do not all live in the same world. Unless you are, because of your skin color, the target of the 500-year-old undemocratic white supremacist oppression enacted by the 500-year-old dominant social structure, you DO NOT share my oppression. If you have white skin, you are privileged. And, please make no mistake, please understand; I do see color.

And, it fucking matters.

Via Mostly Water

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An excerpt from the Debunking White post:

On the issue of Critical Mass, PoC are more often targeted by police for participating in critical mass, as they are in all other areas of life. I do think the goal of Critical Mass, to make bikes more visible and to encourage people to get rid of their cars, does have a positive effect on communities of color, because of the necessity of bicycles for members of those communities, but also because of issues of environmental justice. This does not negate the fact that it is White Privilege that allows white people to take part in critical mass and break traffic laws en masse without significant repercussions.

Another example of white privilege in the cycling community is the response to the scraper bike video. It was pretty much viewed as a novelty or joke by the (majority white) cycling community, despite the fact that the group is heavily involved in the local community, advocating for green jobs and working against violence, and has taken part in Oakland critical mass. Despite that it was seen as a sort of internet one hit wonder. It certainly isn’t, it’s a deep community based movement that is local culture and a part of the cycling community.

Another major aspect of white privilege in bike culture is the majority white employment in bicycle industry jobs. I work in the warehouse at a fairly big bicycle and parts distribution company. The vast majority of the warehouse workers are not white, given the standards of the rest of the country where most of the white employees are from, whereas most of the non-warehouse employees are white. In my experience with bike shops there is a similar dynamic, the majority of employees are white. Most of the white people who work there are involved in the cycling community in one way or another, most of the PoC are not, even those who express interest. But, worse still is the fact that the white people who work in the warehouse, myself included, are seen as on a track to start working in the office area. I’ll admit that I would like to work in the office, I started working there with the hope that I’d move out of the warehouse. I’m not sure how to address the issues here, but I’m planning on bringing them up with one of the owners who I’m on good terms with.

Overall I think that the (white) cycling community is generally progressive and I hope they will be open to including more PoC, on their(PoC) own terms if approached in the right way.

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Capitalism is not collapsing. Nothing massively unexpected has happened. If the ‘economists’ who turned up on every news programme this Autumn really didn’t know there was going to be a crash at some stage they should think of changing jobs.

The financial markets have taken a hammering. Speculators (that’s a rich person’s word for ‘gambler’) lost incredible sums of borrowed cash in bets on everything from mortgage values to the possible price of wheat in 2011. Banks who lent out far more money than they actually had needed governments to step in with billions to bail them out. In some countries the state took them over.

Unfortunately, capitalism is not collapsing. Nothing massively unexpected has happened. If the ‘economists’ who turned up on every news programme this Autumn really didn’t know there was going to be a crash at some stage they should think of changing jobs.

Capitalism is definitely going into a slump. Production is slowing down, employment is falling, investment is drying up, wages are starting to fall behind inflation, less is being bought. We didn’t know exactly when the boom would end; we don’t know exactly how deep this slump will be – but we do know the boom/slump cycle is, and always has been, an integral part of that system.

Even if capitalism suffered a massive worldwide crash of such a magnitude that production almost ceased entirely (and there is no sign of that), it would not, in itself, mean the end of that particular system.

At the heart of the matter is the fact that capitalism is a social system. It is a way that people have dealings with each other in their everyday lives. There have been other systems in the past, like barbarism, slavery and feudalism. Nothing need be fixed for all time.

Today we live under capitalism, where the means of production and distribution are owned by a small ruling class, the capitalists. The driving reason for this class’s existence is to make a profit. Wage or salary earners, with our dependants, are the great majority of the population and make up the working class.

That is the dominant social relationship. The majority are used to make profit for a small minority. Unfortunately, most people are not yet thinking about ending this particular relationship, and no social system simply fades away because it’s unfair or just hugely inefficient. A social system gets kicked off the stage of history when it is physically overthrown and replaced by a different one.

Some would have us believe that capitalism can be gradually abolished through ‘public ownership’ or nationalisation. This odd idea possibly has its roots in the mistaken idea that either ‘old Labour’ or the Stalinist dictatorships represented some sort of socialism.

The relationship between workers and a state employer, like in the health service, does not differ in any significant way from the relationship between workers and private bosses. From the beginning of capitalism governments have tried to solve certain of the system’s problems through nationalisation, more accurately called state capitalism.

It does not change the essential structure of the capitalist system, of workers and bosses having different and opposed interests. Changing a social system is not about changing the people at the top, it’s about changing the relationship between people. So, state capitalism is in no sense a step towards socialism.

What then are we to replace the present set-up with? How about a system where production is organised to meet people’s needs, where it would be regarded as insanity to have building workers idle while others go without adequate housing, where the idea of paying farmers not to grow food while hunger is still a daily reality in much of the world would be seen as immoral. This can only work when the means of producing and distributing wealth are owned in common, by all of society. That’s the meaning of socialism.

How about a system that takes socialism and freedom to be of equal value? One where people can do as they wish so long as they don’t interfere with freedom of others? One where you can have a direct say in making the decisions that will effect you? One where control is in the hands of the majority through democratic assemblies and councils? That’s anarchism.

From Workers Solidarity 106, Nov 2008

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By David Solnit

What lessons can we learn from the shutdown of the 1999 WTO Ministerial in Seattle 9 years ago and from the last decade and a half of global justice organizing as we face today’s major crises under an Obama Administration? This was the question a group of organizers from different parts of the last decades of global justice organizing responded to last week at a forum in New York City put together by Deep Dish TV, an independent video/media pioneer. Here are my thoughts.

Nine years ago today: Tens of thousands of people from across the US and around the world rose up against the WTO’s meeting in Seattle, as movements demonstrated across the planet, we shut down the WTO with mass nonviolent direct action and sustained street resistance all week in the face of martial law, police and national guard violence, arrests, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. By the end of the week, the poorer countries’ government representatives, emboldened by the street protests and under pressure from movements at home, refused to go along and the talks collapsed.

Nearly 15 years ago: On January 1, 1994, people of Chiapas- calling themselves Zapatistas-rose up against the prototype free trade agreement, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement).

Nearly 14 years ago: Exactly one year later, January 1, 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO)-a brainchild of the annual ruling class World Economic Forum- was officially launched from out of the post-WWII General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT).

Four months ago: Last July, 2008, the WTO collapsed again, very likely for good. It was a desperate attempt to revive the WTO, using the pretense of the global food crisis in an effort to intensify the very policies that had caused widespread hunger and food riots around the world in the first place. Longtime global justice organizer Deborah James wrote, “When the history of the seismic shifts occurring today in the global economy is written, the failure in July 2008 of corporate interests and some governments to expand the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Doha Round will stand as a watershed moment.”

James explained, “It was in this lakeside town where negotiators threw in the towel on their seven fruitless years of trying to expand a particular, corporate-driven set of policies, to which the majority of governments have said ‘no’ time and time again (in Seattle in 1999, Mexico in 2003, and Geneva in 2006). WTO Director General Pascal Lamy attempted a last-minute push to conclude a Doha deal by calling for an exclusive, invitation-only mini-Ministerial of around 30 of the WTO’s 153 members in Geneva.”

In fact, the WTO had become so unworkable in recent years, it had blown off its 2007 Ministerial meeting which its own constitution requires it to hold every two years. The WTO now remains in a near-death coma-a tribute to the power of social movements around the world. But the global elites refuse to let go of their dream of the WTO as a vehicle to control the global economy…

Two weeks ago: The G20 (Group of 20) meeting of finance ministers from 20 top economies met in Washington DC November 14th to 15th in the wake of the US-led economic collapse. Again, they used the economic crisis to issue a statement that included, “we shall strive to reach agreement this year on modalities that leads to a successful conclusion to the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda.”

We face a series of major crises-financial meltdown (the financial institutions- hardwired to be unaccountable, anti-democratic- need to be destroyed, but the real crisis is the human and environmental suffering), climate change, and war (the US-led military empire with bases across the planet and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). What was said in the streets of Seattle 9 years ago-”casino economy,” “house of cards,” “doomsday economy”- has proven ever more true in recent months. The Direct Action Network wrote 9 years ago, “Their new strategy to concentrate power and wealth, while neutralizing people’s resistance, is called ‘economic globalization’ and ‘free trade.’ But these words just disguise the poverty, misery and ecological destruction of this system.”

Soon we will be organizing under a popular Obama Administration. Obama and his campaign captured people’s hopes and desires for a better country and world, and tens of thousands of people self-organized outside of the well-orchestrated Obama campaign. His election seems to lifted off the sense of despair that has grown since the repressive war-making aftermath of September 11th, 2001, and the following invasion of Iraq and Bush re-election. This is good for organizing- people step up out of hope, not despair. It has also left many of us radicals, revolutionaries and anti-authoritarians, who have a deep critique of Democrats, political parties, and politicians, conflicted or confused. Whether this becomes a new space for real positive changes or an era in which movements and resistance get co-opted depends on whether and how we organize- and perhaps if we learn key lessons from past global justice (and other) organizing and also understand how Obama’s campaign (and the self-organized independent efforts for Obama) communicated, organized and inspired.

Here are five of my own lessons, reflecting on the Seattle WTO shutdown and global justice organizing 9 years ago.

1) UPROOT THE SYSTEM
We can’t afford to just fight the numerous symptoms of the system or organize around single issues. We need to constantly articulate the systemic root causes of of those symptoms. The WTO and corporate globalization provided a clear anti-systemic framework for a movement of movements around the world to converge, take action and understand ourselves as a global counter-power standing up to global corporate capitalism.

The 100,000 color postcards and broadsheets that invited people to “Come to Seattle” each read: “Increasing poverty and cuts in social services while the rich get richer; low wages, sweatshops, meaningless jobs, and more prisons; deforestation, gridlocked cities and global warming; genetic engineering, gentrification and war: Despite the apparent diversity of these social and ecological troubles, their roots are the same-a global economic system based on the exploitation of people and the planet. A new world is possible and a global movement of resistance is rising to make it happen. Imagine replacing the existing social order with a just, free and ecological order based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.”

In the wake of Seattle, many used the concept of a single “movement” focused on the “issue” of corporate globalization to limit and contain the many varied movements that fight against the system of corporate globalization. This frame of a single movement is most often used by corporate media, but also by left writers, usually to contain and marginalize and to write articles declaring it dead every so often.

There is actually no global justice movement. “Global justice” instead is a common space of convergence-a framework where everyone who fights against the system we call corporate globalization (or capitalism, empire, imperialism, neoliberalism, etc) and its impacts on our communities can make common cause and make our efforts cumulative. This anti-systemic framework helps diverse groups and movements to come together for mobilizations or to support each other. This is the movement of movements that fights for global justice, often winning, and has become stronger over the last nine years.

Strategy trainer Patrick Reinsborough writes in his essay, Post-Issue Activism, that the crises call for “a dramatic divergence from the slow progression of single-issue politics, narrow constituencies and band-aid solutions. Too often the framework of issue-based struggle needs to affirm the existing system in order to win concessions and thus fails to nurture the evolution of more systemic movements.”

In the aftermath of Seattle, many globally-focused activists anchored their organizing in local struggles against the impact of the global system (like workers, environmental justice, anti-privatization fights) and local organizers re-framed their struggles within their bigger global context (anti-corporate or corporate globalization), allowing our various efforts to be complementary and cumulative rather than competitive or unrelated.

2) ORGANIZE STRATEGICALLY
When we shut down the WTO in Seattle (or the the San Francisco Financial District the morning after the US invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003) we had a clear strategy framework for that one city for that one day. Key elements that made the strategy framework work were: * A Clear What and Why Logic: We wrote at the time, “The World Trade Organization has no right to make undemocratic, unaccountable, destructive decisions about our lives, our communities and the earth. We will nonviolently and creatively block them from meeting.” * Mass Organization and Mass Training: hundreds were directly involved in coordination and making decisions, and thousands participated in trainings to prepare. * Widely Publicized: Both movement folks and the public knew what we had planned, when and where, allowing for thousands to join. * Decentralization: Everyone involved in organizing understood the strategy, groups were self-organized and self-reliant, and the action allowed for a wide range of groups to take action in their own way.

As movements, can we develop strategy frameworks for our region, nationally or internationally, not just for one day but over time?

Most who shut down the WTO in Seattle were involved in local groups and campaigns, but some who only participated in big actions and mobilizations and saw that as the movement were lost when mobilizations became less frequent or movements switched to other tactics. Organizing for one-time actions or mobilizations or repeating our favorite or most familiar tactic (marches, conferences, direct action, educational events, etc) without ongoing campaigns that have clear long-term goals as well as short term, winnable, along-the-way-milestone goals can lead to burnout and does not build long-term movements to make change.

This is essential as we push (or “give cover” to, depending on your analysis) Obama to bring our troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the planet and stand up corporations and their economic system driving the crisis. With Obama in office, the cutting edge of organizing for change is to clearly define and publicize very understandable goals. For example, it is not enough to say “end the war,” which Obama also says, but to clearly define what ending the war means (such as troop removal by the 16-month deadline he committed to in his campaign, bring ALL troops AND private contractors home, close all bases and stop pushing for the corporate invasion of Iraq, as in the case of oil corporations and the US government) scheming to control Iraq’s oil).

3) PEOPLE POWER
People directly asserting their power can win changes and shift the underlying power relationships; from the WTO shutdown, to its near death last summer, to anti-corporate victories like the Coalition of Imokalee Farm Workers recent victory over Burger King, or the Water Wars in which Bolivia’s movements drove out multinational corporation Bechtel, who had privatized their water. This means also creating directly democratic, participatory organizations and asserting our power from below to force changes or remove those who have taken power from above if they refuse to make needed changes.

If movements don’t articulate their own people power-based strategies to achieve changes, our movements will be demobilized every two or four years as people get drawn into the official, established channels for change, national elections. We saw this in 2004, when, lacking a viable well-publicized strategy framework to stop the Iraq war, many people instead worked to un-elect Bush. Whatever ones belief about elections or parties or politicians is, most would agree that it is always independent movements who force (or support) politicians into making positive changes either in conjunction with or in place of elections.

4) EXPERIMENT IN THE LABORATORY OF RESISTANCE
Nobody knows exactly how to change things. New forms of resistance, communication and organizing from experimentation have been key to the successes of the global justice movements. Alternately, when we repeat a tactic or rhetoric that worked once or fetishize and build our identity out of a a certain tactic (like parading giant puppets, reclaiming street parties, black bloc, vigils or Seattle-style shutdowns), they not only can be more easily repressed or co-opted, but the system can inoculate the people against them. Our actions are experiments in a laboratory of resistance. The value of any experiment is when we analyze and reflect together on what worked and what did not and why. Creating a culture of creativity, reflection and analysis is key.

5) TELL STORIES
The world is made of stories, and our battles for social change are battles of competing stories. Out actions can be our most powerful storytelling, like the Zapatista uprising, the Seattle Shutdown, or the Feb. 15, 2003, global antiwar protest of millions everywhere. The system fights back by trying to take control of the meaning of our stories and by telling its own stories, like the post-September 11 War on Terror. We need to be able become powerful storytellers, to fight and win control of the meaning of our stories. Many of us have been giving “Battle of the Story” storytelling skills trainings developed by Smartmeme.org to be able to better fight and win stories and have fun and keep engaged in the process.

My sister Rebecca Solnit wrote in her essay in the soon-to-be published booklet The Battle of the Story of the Battle in Seattle: “Official history is an accretion of acceptable versions. Before those arise there are great ruptures when the world actually changes and no one yet is in control of the meaning of what has happened or what kind of a future it will lead to. In these great pauses, much is possible, including a change of mind on a broad scale. November 30, 1999 was one of those ruptures. Before Seattle, the WTO had seemed indestructible, its agenda of taking over the world and creating the most powerful monolithic institution in history inevitable. What happened in Seattle mattered.”

Since then corporate media, cops and even a movie actor-turned-director have tried to assert control of the meaning of November 30th, 1999. That’s why we who are part of that history need to become historians and tell our own people’s history, because what people think happened in Seattle shapes what we think about capitalism, resistance and repression. It matters. That’s why a small group of us Seattle WTO shutdown organizers set up the Seattle WTO People’s History Project website, RealBattleinSeattle.org, and have invited people who were there to tell their stories, and invite everyone to read them.

Next November 30th will be the ten-year anniversary of the shutdown of the WTO. As I write this, a global network of climate justice groups is meeting in Poznan, Poland, to organize around their call for mass global direct action next year against the root causes of and false solutions to climate change. The call reads in part: “On November 30, 2009, exactly ten years after the historic WTO shutdown in Seattle, world leaders will come to Copenhagen for the UN (CAPS) Climate Conference. This will be the most important summit on climate change ever to have taken place, but there is no indication that this meeting will produce anything more than a green-washed blueprint for corporate control of the world. We have to take direct action against the root causes of climate change during the Copenhagen talks.”

David Solnit organized with the Direct Action Network in Seattle in ‘99 and currently organizes with Courage to Resist supporting GI resistance. He edited Globalize Liberation and has co-written/edited with Rebecca Solnit the forthcoming book The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press).

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Rod Bush takes a (good) stab at addressing the Obama election in the context of Black solidarity movements. It reads in part:

And of course there are some who want to use Obama’s success as an indication that the nation is overcoming its racial divisions. This is of course nonsense. Racism is systemic. And it is part of our commonsense. But I do think that the southern strategy is dead. Has been dying since 2000, but voter suppression has been used effectively to give us a sense that it is still in power. People of color are becoming too large a demographic to simply dismiss by demonizing Blacks, especially when Huntington and that crew are crying about the Hispanic threat, the Muslim threat, and the Chinese threat. The pushback against white world supremacy has been integral to the rise of oppressed strata throughout the 20th century. It is not separate from the increased power of working people, women, and increased opposition (or at least a relaxation of) hetero-normativity. The relations of force between the dominant forces and the subordinate forces within the world-system have been over the longue duree of the world-system has been altered in favor of subordinate forces.

Within the United States Black solidarity is a consequence of the systemic nature of racism which during the 20th century imparted an internal colonial status to the Black population (See Roderick Bush, “The Internal Colonial Hybrid: Reformulating Structure, Culture, and Agency” in this book)1 It is not a national question in the way that the Communist International and the CPUSA envisioned during the early half of the 20th century (here I agree with Cruse’s critique, at least 70%). It consists of a need for decolonization of the U.S. Empire both internally and externally. This thrust will continue, whatever Obama does. But his election is a consequence of the slow change in relations of force both internally as people of color increase their numbers within U.S. society, and their strength within the world-system.

Full essay here. Bush’s writing reminds people that anarchism is still struggling with what the Obama election means in the context of race and white supremacy. As comments over at the plantation (where so many seemingly unrelated conversations inevitably drift to race, how white everyone is, and how political people of color are largely insane, illogical nationalists) suggest, anarchism is considerably farther from an answer.

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Barack Obama’s ascendency to the U.S. presidency has been consistently portrayed as the culmination of the African-Americans protracted struggle for “equality” in America. In a sense it is, because all advancements secured by Africans in America have enhanced the rights of all people, but those advancements have seldom moved the majority Africans in America out of the economic and political doldrums. The brutal truth is this portrayal is both facetious and inaccurate.

While it is true that for the first time white Americans in significant numbers have voted for a “Black” man as President, it is of course inaccurate to say that Barak Obama represents or even reflect the historical or contemporary experience (legacy) of African-Americans who are connected at the Hip to White America. Afterall, with the exception of Tiger Woods (who has tried to invent a Race to match his background) how many Africans in America were raised in Hawaii by white Grandparents and went to Harvard Law school? Clearly those whites who voted for Obama voted for him based on the “American Story” version of “Dreams of My Father” rather than Nightmares of my Ancestors. Hence, it is facetious to claim the majority of white voters consciously voted for an “African-American” descendant of the slaves their forebears terrorized and exploited for centuries– they voted for an African-American without that baggage, perhaps trusting that he couldn’t experience a DNA induced flashback to the bull-whip days on the plantation and go buck-wild as commander-and-Chief because he had no cultural-social connection to that past. I think this was at the basis of the claim by many whites (especially from among “undecided” and neo-liberal Whites) that they “didn’t really know Obama or who he really was”. I am sure many will consider such distinctions “playa hating”, or another knock on a Black mans achievements. Quite the contrary. Such distinctions are often the strand of thread upon which history hangs in the balance. I know for a fact white lefties, Blacks of all classes are disconcerted by the above view. But those same lefties and Blacks wouldn’t express such disconcertion with a similar analysis of Roosevelt (whose diability was an important subjective factor in his political carreer) or perceive a critique of John F. Kennedy’s relationship to his Quasi-Gangster Dad and Clan Patriarch as inappropriate in ascertaining what influenced the character of JFK.

Clearly Obama is extraordinary individual and is to be commended for his success. His success has opened up plenty African minds to their own self-value. But just feeling good about ones self won’t stop others who don’t feel so good about you from pursuing their nefarious ambitions.

That the Obama campaign was able to effectively avoid entirely the influence of a Race based power paradigm in formulation of U.S. foreign policy in no small part was due to the McCain camp’s absolute lack of racist subtlety. The racist and reactionary Rightwing supporting McCain attacked Obama with excerpts from the sermons of his family Pastor Jeremiah Wright, an activist and Liberation Theologian, in an attempt to associate the ideology of Black Nationalism, the noble legacy of Black militancy with Obama and thereby frighten white voters into knee jerk racist apoplexy. Not a difficult task for a nation that has never confronted the true legacy of its history. As if “thinking Black, thinking African, or viewing history from the experiences of one’s own peoples was a form of subversive moral blasphemy. Perhaps it is. Michelle Obama (who does have the Bullwhip days in her family DNA memory) was attacked as “un-American” for saying “for the first time” she felt proud of America” – a sentiment shared by 90 % of African-Americans – when Obama received the Demorcatic nomination. To reassure White folks that African history in America was not his legacy, his basis of analysis and frame of reference, Obama renounced all association with Rev. Wright and defined Wright’s views as “divisive” rather than rather than worthy of challenge by American historians. Moreover, Obama didn’t take the Wright imbroglio as an opportunity to educate America about Race, instead he merely distanced himself from the issue and moved on to win the ultimate political prize in the land, the Presidency of the United States. To Many of course this was “strategy” after all, you can’t scare “white people” who believe they have an innate right to piss on the rest of the world while whistling the battle hymn of the republic and expect to win a national election. Only a monumental crisis that threatened everyone’s livelihood could shake up white folks more than the prospect of a Black President, and lo and behold, finance capitalism’s October surprise – economic meltdown. America woke up to the reality of debt based prosperity as the American empire tumbled into financial distress. Fannie and Freddie were on Viagra and the pharmacy wasn’t taking anymore credit. Of course this opportunistic view in itself is deprecating because it also presumes that White American are bunch of historically challenged and ignorant Hoogies and can’t be trusted to think beyond their narrow self interests. So the economy Gave Obama boost – but he probably would have won anyway.

Even if McCain had ran his campaign like the Clintons, he may have still lost, but he would have had a broader spectrum of undercover racist whites on his side, and conservative self-hating Negroes applauding his virtues. Indeed up until the Democratic convention disgruntled Hillary supporters were anti-Obama and mumbled their support for McCain ostensibly because of his “inexperience”. Hanoi Shorty tried to exploit this discontent among white female Democrats by appointing “Muffy” from Alaska, Sarah Palin as his running mate. She was a true political Palindrome – an air head spelled the same backwards as forward- an affront to any thinking woman, White or Black. Few could believe it! Obama couldn’t have chosen a better opposition to run against if he wanted too. The McCain – Obama contrasts were so stark and glaring that they could have illuminated Ray Charles way to Georgia were he still alive. Clearly the only way Obama could lose was if the Republicans “butched-off “ the elections as they did the previous two national elections. Of course the rest is “history” (his-story) and as George Will the erudite right-wing pundit explained, the Obama campaingn has relieved white America of the lode stone of race – “Obama is white America’s emancipation proclamation”. I would suppose George Will envisions a different reconstruction scenario from the one that took place at the end of the civil war.

The Obama rise to political imminence has given Bigots and White-supremacy a pass – straight to the gun shops. White supremacy is going back underground for awhile – to resurface in opposition to the grass roots struggles against racist cops; the war on urban communities financed by the government as “Drug Wars, and gentrification; domestic colonialism (subjugation of entire communities to Criminal Justice systems that feed Black flesh into the economic matrix of a Prison Industrial complex that enriches rural white communities) soon to be transformed by Obama and his Kool-drunk minions into “District Anti-Terrrorism Committees” under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security. “Now that we found love what are we going to do with it? Build more jails? Kill more Muslims? Gentrify culturally Black communities?

Weeks after the historic U.S. election we have some glimpse of the quality of “Love” we’ve just found by electing America’s first Black President. Not encouraging. It’s as though like most Africans in America, President Elect Barak Obama is looking for love in all the wrong places. President Elect Obama, advocate of a fresh approach to government, after his historical triumphe turns to former Clinton appointees to manage his transition to State power and fill out his cabinet. Least we be reminded by images of Black women from Harlem’s roughest projects singing “stand by your man” when Hillary appeared at Harlem’s historical Abyssinian Baptist church at the height of the Lewinski scandal, former President Clinton is considered by many wanna be middle-class Blacks as the first Black President in all but hue only. Clinton was a consummate manipulator of the Black gatekeeper class – those Blacks who derive income and status off of America’s race politics and exploitation of African-American marginalization. Clearly continuation of Empire cloaked in the rhetoric of change looms on the horizon not real change. Least we forget, it was both Democrats and Republicans that have presented us with this historical moment of global economic crisis, foreign interventionist wars, and collapse of urban infrastructures. To transcend the myopia of his social being and truly move America in a new direction President elect Barak Obama is going to have to be as “Black” he can, rather than as white as the position requires. An extremely difficult challenge made all the more impossible by Obama’s failure to educate whites to the simple notion that African experience in America could embrace both the “Rosseta stone” to the Republics salvation and the chronicle of its fall
In Search of One’s Identity: In the Land of the Blind the person with the one eye is King.

The overwhelming majority of African-Americans are descendants of the victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. At best it can be said that African history in the U.S., (the Black Experience in America) obliquely relates to Obama’s social existence – indeed it is probably the social and psychological disconnect that many offspring of mixed-racial unions experience and strive in their personal lives to reconcile that inspired Obama to settle in Chicago and do work in the Black communities there. Rather than the altruistic sacrifice of a brilliant Harvard Law graduate who shunned corporate (and hence a successful) law career as popularly portrayed. Perhaps Barak was trying to find his roots as a Black man. Only President Obama can honestly answer whether this is true or not, and how much political ambition flavored his reconciliation with his “Africaness”, for he has clearly renounced any connection to the ontological Black American experience when he denounced Reverend Jerimiah Wright to appease white bigotry. Again and again Obama, directly and indirectly insinuated that the “African” experience in America is in fact the “American” experience – hence there is no legitimacy to African-American claims of sovereignty – to sovereign thinking or Africans in America charting their own political destiny based on that experience. In an almost African soap opera twist, both the historical debt of post slavery reconstruction and emancipation, as well as the concept of post-industrial reparations have been neutered by the first successful Presidential campaign of a Black person.

Clearly jingoistic American nationalism has achieved its greatest victory over the ideology of African self-determination. It follows that because “race” is purportedly no longer a factor, (relegated to the dustbin of history by Obama’s election) there can be little legitimacy to the proposition that Africans in America constitue a distinct people who were culturally and socially traumatized by successive systems of chattel slavery, feudal share-cropping, wage slavery, and now the prison-industrial plantation system. Clearly, the Barak Obama success marks the absolute distortion of African history in America and its appropriation by the state and dominant white culture. It is as if during the centuries long horror of White supremacist domination, our struggles, sacrifices, and triumphs were really fought by Blacks to enrich the humanity of the White majority and burnish the imagery of the “American Dream”. When in fact we have always sought independence, self-sufficiency, dignity and freedom for ourselves in a world dominated by Europeans.

However, many will argue that Obama’s upbringing doesn’t mattter now Because people of all racial and class persuasions voted for the 44th President of the U.S. But it is precisely because Obama’s personal history rise that he has risen to political superstardom in this historical moment – when white America still infected with the ignorance of white supremacy is so frightened, fed-up, and hungry for change that they would throw their weight behind the vision of an extraordinary Black man for the chief-executive post of the Nation.

African history, once confined to the back of American textbooks, has now, in its revised and sanitized version become a major text of the great melting pot myth – that bouillabaisse of ethnic mingling that Newark mayor Corey Booker (himself a light-skin former law school whiz who moved to the Hood for political positioning, described as a “delicious” mixture of ethnic blending). Unfortunately the Black experience on America’s soup line was less like a flavorful meal and more like force feeding at Guantanamo.

African history in what was once the European settler-state of America conferred the experience of both de facto and de jure predatory discrimination, consigned generations of Africans to feudal share-cropping, discriminatory wage slavery, criminalization of culture, and predatory discrimination. All of this is what has brought us to this moment in time, and while we must not dwell in the past, we must understand it to inform the present and help prepare us for the future. Should we let go of our legacy, born of resistance and nurtured with the blood of countless African heroes and sheroes (of whom white America would define as terrorists and radicals). Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Malcolm, Marcus, were heroes of our cause as are Assat Shakur, Mumia Abu Jamal, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, and dozens of others – not the cause of white supremacist America. President elect Obama when asked did he think, if Dr. King were alive today whether he would have endorsed Obama for President; Barak wisely commented that he would probably have endorsed neither he or McCain, but would have been in the street organizing poor people. Perhaps Obama is more acutely aware of his real historical legacy than the millions of African-American who voted for him, and distilled their dreams and hopes in him. He does not so much represent the culmination of the Black experience in America merely because he’s dark skinned by European standards, as he represents the attempt of an entire culture, state, and economic system to redefine itself in the 21st century without being held accountable for its historic crimes. In a way President Obama is the bridge between the known and the unknown of that process – he stands astride the historic moment of global realignment between the powerful and the powerless, between the dispossessed and the rich, and he knows it.

His foreign and domestic policies will tell us exactly how powerfully he is influenced by the countless African bones at the bottom the Atlantic Ocean that have enriched Europe and the Americas, or how strongly he is tied to the very forces that have enslaved and exploited the African world and peoples of color around the globe. While the first Black President figures this out, we, poor people, ordinary people, activists, educators, opinion makers must not tip-toe around issues to burnish the image of the First Black President. This is no time for platitudes of shallow good will, but the time to organize a true peoples movement for change in America, a movement led by the millions of victims of Americanism. As Black Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote in the second sermon on the Warpland: “we are the last of the loud…..so have your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind”…..

Dhoruba Bin-Wahad
November 2008

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By David Graeber

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction—even of “progressives”—is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself.

The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market—to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed there appeared to be—at least for the moment—simply nothing left.

The effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ‘90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fifty years, whenever there seems to be any possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political life. In the late ‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly. None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere three or four years, the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free trade” ideologies would be considered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw at us—from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act—would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.

Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of this was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global resistance so effectively that the reigning institutions were first discredited, and ultimately, that those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call the bluff of the international financial system. Much of the reason the movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really considered we might win.

But of course there’s another reason. Nothing terrifies the rulers of the world, and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger of grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge—particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action—the reaction is the same; the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rights movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the global justice movement, by the “War on Terror.”

But at this point, we can see that “war” for what it was: as the flailing and obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition. If the rotten architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, it was at least in part because so much of the work had already been accomplished by a movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression after 911, combined with confusion over how to follow up its startling initial success, had seemed to have largely disappeared from the scene.

Of course it hasn’t really.

We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism—and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats.

All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone—and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance claims adjustors—that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much, and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a little less stupid and unfair.

This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-seeming alternative—even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s—can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis.

Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form—this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least five thousand years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt—this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or debtor’s cartel.

Perhaps so—but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions: to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism—its moral foundation—now revealed to be a collection of broken promises—but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offered by capitalism—that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

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By Black Workers for Justice

“Layoffs” at their highest point in years . . . . “Mortgage/ Credit Crisis” with Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac failing one day… today Merrill-Lynch and Lehman Brothers failing…tomorrow which one next? All help to point out the interconnection of the financial crisis to all sectors of the global economy. The CORPORATE-OWNED MEDIA and their profit-driven news outlets refer to it as a “financial crisis” instead of an “economic crisis” to give the impression that it is mainly a problem involving the banking system and not the entire profit-driven capitalist system that impacts all working people, their families, and communities. They are hoping that we working, poor, and oppressed peoples sit by silently. . . .wait and see how things work themselves out.

It shows how “profits before people” capitalism, without saying it, is not in the best interests of the majority of the peoples of the world. Events now easily allow us to examine how greedy capitalism concentrates the control of the economy in the hands of a small rich ruling class made up of the owners of big banks, corporations and financial institutions. With this continuing CRISIS we clearly see that the US government is controlled by this small and powerful “capitalist ruling class” of owners using their political influence to direct the government (through its “paid-for representatives”) to use money that should provide for healthcare, education, and jobs etc. to bail out the big powerful banks and corporations of the ruling class. They do this so that the capitalist system and profits for the super-rich are maintained at our expense as workers and oppressed people throughout the USand globally.

History reveals that the USand all capitalist governments will do anything to protect its system of profits for the super rich, including making wars for the control of oil and cheap labor markets. Or using the police and jails to protect businesses before rescuing people affected by disasters like Hurricanes Katrina. Or contaminating communities with disease-laden industrial dumping. Or fighting hard to stop workers from forming trade unions that unite and empower them to directly challenge the injustices of the corporations and government institutions that exploit working people and their communities. Just look at our long history as workers and oppressed people.

Workers are taught that this same capitalist system is the basis for freedom and prosperity. We all know from our history and direct experiences that the prosperity has not been for the working class whose income barely allows us to exist…to pay expensive medical bills, rent or own a home, buy enough gas to get to work. A prosperity that doesn’t even grant us workers, and retired or unemployed workers as well, a cost of living raise to keep up with rising living expenses. A prosperity which requires that we work longer hours and second jobs to have a relatively decent way of life but little time to enjoy it because we must always be thinking about how to get ahead and keep our heads above water.

When the government bails out these big capitalist institutions and their rich owners, it means that the resources and programs needed by the masses get cut. It means that workers are pitted against each other, competing for the scraps that are left, intensifying racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigration and religious intolerance to take attention away from the real source of the problem. Their tactics divide working people so that we cannot unite to challenge the rich capitalist power and control over governments and our lives.

Social movements of working and oppressed people fighting for quality education, decent jobs, affordable housing, universal healthcare, environmental justice, an end to unjust wars and for many other democratic and human rights must become stronger and more active as it involves more young people. Trade unions must contribute more to the broader social movements, seeing struggles at the workplace as a leading part of their larger struggles in society to build power for working people.

UE150 has an important role to play in building a fight-back workers movement against conditions, policies and powers that sacrifice decent working conditions, quality healthcare and public services, and denies worker and human rights on the job and throughout society. This movement must also struggle against unjust wars that continue the destruction of human life and countries and that divides the world¢s peoples. The Mental Health Workers Bill of Rights Campaign and the Workers Bill of Rights struggles in Raleigh and Charlotte cities are part of this fight-back movement that must be further developed throughout the state.

The strike of the Moncure workers in Sanford, the struggles of the, Freightliner, Smithfield and FLOC workers to build rank-and-file democratic unions must be developed and supported as part of this workers fight back movement. The struggle for collective bargaining rights for public sector workers is critical to empowering workers to challenge the shifting of funds and resources away from workers and human needs to bail out those who only want to make a profit. These struggles need to be united into a rank-and-file led workers alliance.

This crisis makes clear that trade unions must encourage and engage their members to use their organizations and resources to support the larger struggles of working people, to be active in struggles against oppression, to learn more about the economy and society and to be willing and prepared to challenge capitalism no matter what label the media, owned by the big capitalist corporations, give to those speaking out.

Barack Obama, who has has made change the cornerstone of his campaign, must be challenged and supported to speak out against this crisis and to put forth real alternatives that empower working people, place major restrictions and regulations on the use of government funds to bail out banks and corporations, oppose these unjust wars that, in addition to killing for profits, take major resources from the needs of working and poor people and communities in the US.

Unions that spend time making deals with the corporations and don’t engage their members dis-empower the workers. UE150, while small with limited resources compared to most other unions, has an engaged rank-and-file membership trying to find creative ways to challenge injustice and give voice to the rank-and-file. It is not mainly a lobbying organization with consultants spending most of their time wining and dining legislators, framing out legislation they hope would be acceptable to those in power.

The “social justice trade unionism” of UE includes a history of standing up against the forces of capitalism. We must learn more about social justice unionism and the history of struggle of unions like the South West Workers Union and UE. We must and will continue this tradition as we build the NC Public Service Workers Union UE-local 150 widely throughout North Carolinaand eventually throughout the South.

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Just a piece of the full article here:

I wonder how our Indigenous brothers and sisters feel? Is it enthusiasm for the fact that a person of color has reached the white house or is it sadness that a person of color is at the helm of an empire that wrought such pain and destruction among their peoples?

I say person of color deliberately to note that Obama’s African American-ness exist in another space than that of other African American’s who have sought the nation’s highest office (Chisolm, Jackson, McKinney, etc.). He is not marked with the north/south black/white paradigmatic binary we use to understand race in this country. He is not colored by the hallmarks of African American elite society like belonging to a Divine Nine fraternity or growing up in Jack & Jill. His Hawaiian, Midwest upbringing make him an exception to dominate codes of blackness which initially made black people suspicious and ultimately put whites at ease.

It was easier for me when the face of U.S. imperialism didn’t look like mine. Will this stem the radical left’s radicalness? Will we become complacent because Obama is the new president of the fundamentally illegal, stolen, and pilfered United States? I am worried because as bougie black folk celebrate and rejoice, there are still black people hurting. The “tragedy” in Jennifer Hudson’s family captures national attention, even presidential (now) condolences, but how often is that story true for countless other black families living in this country and how often is that story told as one of tragedy rather than a rationalization of stereotypes long held about the black urban poor? Structural racism depends on the exceptions (Obama, Oprah, etc.) to hide the rule that is inequity.

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