From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The White Left Needs to Embrace Black Leadership
Date July 7, 2020 12:05 AM
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[While protesters hold up the simple message “Black Lives
Matter,” organizers in the Movement for Black Lives make clear that
this fight is as much about ending racial capitalism as it is anything
else. ] [[link removed]]

THE WHITE LEFT NEEDS TO EMBRACE BLACK LEADERSHIP  
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Barbara Ransby
July 2, 2020
The Nation
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_ While protesters hold up the simple message “Black Lives
Matter,” organizers in the Movement for Black Lives make clear that
this fight is as much about ending racial capitalism as it is anything
else. _

Kiara Williams holds up a megaphone as she talks to the crowd
assembled in the Occupy City Hall campgrounds in New York City., Ira
L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images//The Nation

 

We are seeing one of the largest uprisings in US history, and Black
leftist organizers and Black working-class people are leading it. The
video of George Floyd begging for his life and calling for his mother
as Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, kneeled on his neck for
eight minutes and 46 seconds made Floyd this generation’s Emmett
Till. When white Americans watched that scene of unchecked racism,
state power, and the toxic masculinity that permeates police culture,
they had a choice: to allow that cop to speak for them or to hit the
streets as part of a movement against white supremacy and police
repression. Millions across the world opted for the latter.

This is not like the 1960s. White people marched in civil rights
demonstrations, formed committees on interracial cooperation, and
joined with the Black freedom movement, but the fire this time is
hotter. We did not see this many simultaneous protests that were this
large and this diverse. We also see mass militancy and the willingness
of large numbers of people to take risks. During a dangerous pandemic,
people are facing down tear gas, rubber bullets, and police batons.
While protesters hold up the simple message “Black Lives Matter,”
organizers in the Movement for Black Lives make clear that this fight
is as much about ending racial capitalism as it is anything else.

The white left needs to understand that this is what class struggle in
the 21st century looks like. To deny that and reduce the protests to
an “identitarian” impulse is self-defeating to any serious left
project for systemic change. Black poor and working-class people
experience capitalism and white supremacy as intertwined: Police
violence, targeted mass incarceration, and social and economic
abandonment are linked. The left loses strength and credibility if it
pretends that there is a colorblind class experience.

In his 1991 book, _The Wages of Whiteness_, historian David Roediger
describes how the white working class evolved in juxtaposition to
enslaved Black labor. White supremacy was a part of the psychological
wage that was paid to buy the loyalty and shape the consciousness of
white workers in the antebellum period, and that legacy carried
forward. White workers might have been poor, but at least they were
not n_____s. White workers were given a kind of caste distinction with
material benefits and the social power to violate, harass, and kill
Black people. For much of US history, policing was a white man’s
profession, originating in part out of the slave catchers of the Old
South. The psychological wage of whiteness can be read into the face
of Chauvin as he looked at the cell phone camera while he murdered a
handcuffed, unarmed Black man in broad daylight. Unmoved,
unaccountable, and fearing no one, he projected the message: “I am
empowered to do this.”

Yet a sector of the white left remains in stubborn denial about the
centrality of Black struggle and Black leadership to any successful
and sustainable movement for radical change. There are two versions of
this argument. One clings to the notion that so-called identity
politics are divisive and that the left should focus on economic
platforms that can unite the entire working class. The second is an
updated version that argues that systemic racism did exist but with
the end of de jure racism that all changed. Supporters of these
arguments lump together all Black political voices as identitarian if
they foreground the fight against racism. They ignore the Black left
voices that have argued against narrow identity politics, bourgeois
Black nationalism, mainstream integrationism, and class-biased
representational politics. From the Combahee River Collective to the
Black Radical Congress to many of today’s organizers, Black
leftists, especially Black left feminists, have never pushed a
classless race analysis, or a raceless or genderless class analysis.

The failure to confront white supremacy as a defining feature of US
capitalism has consequences. The Bernie Sanders campaign is one sad
example. I offer this critique as someone who publicly supported
Sanders and who, along with others, tried to push his campaign to
advance a robust racial justice agenda. Nearly all the Democratic
presidential candidates showed up in Selma, Ala., to commemorate the
anniversary of the civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
At a time of increasing white nationalism, it was important for many
Black people that political leaders mark the fight for racial justice
in the South. Sanders, the most left candidate in the race, was
conspicuously absent.

Then, Sanders was supposed to go to Mississippi to give a speech on
race to coincide with his endorsement by Jackson’s radical Black
mayor, Chokwe Lumumba. Black feminist Barbara Smith was on a plane to
meet him and stand on the platform beside him. He never showed up.
Instead, he went to Flint, Mich., where again he was supposed to
deliver a speech on race to the African American community. Rather
than give that speech, he awkwardly moderated a panel of brilliant
Black activists teaching the overwhelmingly white audience about
racism. Still, Sanders’s platform would have materially improved
conditions for large numbers of Black working-class and poor people,
which is why many Black activists supported him. But his failure to
articulate a clear understanding of and commitment to fighting the
white supremacist underpinnings of racial capitalism may be why he
never garnered the Black support needed to win the nomination. There
were many strengths in Sanders’s campaign, but this may have been
its fatal flaw.

Another disturbing exemplar of the predominately white left’s
challenges with race is Democratic Socialists of America. On the one
hand, _wow_. Trump’s election fueled the organization’s
exponential growth, and subsequent electoral victories and campaigns
have emboldened it. By presenting candidates and demands that seem
common sense to many Americans, DSA has helped to reintroduce
socialism into mainstream political discourse.

That said, and despite a handful of brilliant leaders in the
Afro-Socialist caucus, DSA is largely devoid of Black leadership at
the national level. How can that be acceptable in 2020? Why isn’t
everyone in the organization worried about the implications, or at
least the optics? Why hasn’t DSA gone into a deep retreat to read,
learn, and then propose bold changes that will open the doors to Black
left leadership? If they were unsure who the fiercest anti-racist
organizers of this generation are, they need only to look to the
streets of Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York.

Can we lift this political boulder and build the principled solidarity
required to sustain a radical anti-racist left movement in this
country? There are some very hopeful signs. Hundreds of thousands of
white people waded into the streets of major US cities and small towns
to say no to racism. Anyone who thinks that is not a sea change in
racial consciousness has not been paying attention.

Second, there are Black and Latinx-led rumblings in the electoral
arena. The reimagined and more inclusive Working Families Party under
Maurice Mitchell’s leadership is a challenge to the mainstream
corporate Democratic Party, which has absorbed so many career-minded
Black politicians into its system of patronage and compliance. Justice
Democrats are also a breath of fresh air, unafraid to challenge
incumbent Democrats with more progressive alternatives.

Third, there is the growing visibility of Black-led social movements,
which have spent the last few years building power. There is a direct
link between the Black Lives Matter movement of 2012–16 uprisings
and the protests of 2020, between Ferguson and Minneapolis, and
between Mike Brown and George Floyd, both of them stand-ins for many
others, including many women and trans victims of police, vigilante,
and even intimate partner violence. The debates, local campaigns,
organizational infrastructure, relationship building, and
self-critiques that have occurred since Ferguson have prepared a new
cadre of leaders for the biggest battle of their lives.

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)—which emerged out of the
protests of the 2014 murders of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland,
and Michael Brown—is building broad-based support for a set of
policies coming out of the coalition’s own policy and research team.
It has updated the 2016 Vision for Black Lives document, which Robin
D.G. Kelley called nothing less than “a plan for ending structural
racism, saving the planet, and transforming the entire nation.” On
Juneteenth weekend, M4BL’s website boasted over 500 in-person
protests across the country.

In 2017, M4BL launched a multiracial formation of over 80
organizations called the Rising Majority. This alone is a reversal of
the usual practice of large white-led formations calling together
groups, framing the conversation, and then adding Black-led
organizations to the mix after the foundations are laid. Rising
Majority is anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and Black-, indigenous- and
people-of-color-led. It has worked to build unity with progressive
elected officials, holding a televised forum with Representatives
Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida
Tlaib at Howard University in February. It is also building solidarity
across movement sectors. In 2018, M4BL sent a contingent of activists
to San Diego to support Mijente’s #FreeOurFuture Day of Action
against immigration detention and ICE violence. More recently, it
cohosted a virtual teach-in with Angela Davis and Naomi Klein that
drew over 200,000 viewers.

Leftroots is another people-of-color-led socialist organization that
has been engaging activists in deep discussion and study over the past
few years. Finally, academics and intellectuals are organizing through
the Black feminist-led network Scholars for Social Justice (SSJ),
which has issued statements and op-eds supporting Black protest, held
teach-ins, shared curricula, and convened a working group on
reparations in higher education. SSJ hosted a major online teach-in on
universities and police during Juneteenth weekend. Given the
neoliberal politics that have dominated universities and the increased
corporatization of universities, SSJ is an attempt to step outside of
the constricting intellectual and political framework of the academy.

If the white left embraces this ascendant Black leadership, we will
all be stronger for it. This is a time for rigorous debate, principled
solidarity, and humble determination. And right now, I see more and
more of all of those things. In the middle of it all, challenges
notwithstanding, I am determined to have an “optimism of the
will.” Pessimism be damned.

 
_[Barbara Ransby is a historian, writer, and longtime political
activist. She is a distinguished professor of African American
studies, gender and women’s studies, and history at the University
of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where she directs the campus-wide Social
Justice Initiative.]_
 
 

_Copyright c 2020The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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