Black Activist Quotes

Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.

The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt

What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.

Judicial activists are nothing short of radicals in robes--contemptuous of the rule of law, subverting the Constitution at will, and using their public trust to impose their policy preferences on society. In fact, no radical political movement has been more effective in undermining our system of government than the judiciary. And with each Supreme Court term, we hold our collective breath hoping the justices will do no further damage, knowing full well they will disappoint. Such is the nature of judicial tyranny.

Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be prepared to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women and children.

All lives matter” is an empty retort designed to shut down conversations about black people and the issues they face. I think the “all lives matter” folks know that—they just refuse to admit it. Comeback: “It’s okay for a movement to be focused on a specific group or cause. ‘Save the rainforest’ doesn’t mean ‘Fuck all the other trees.

Part of activism is finding yourself in a new space of confusion, allowing yourself to step into new conceptual terrain. When you abandon commonly held oppressive beliefs, you might not exactly know what to do afterward, and that's where more activists need to be.

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.

Dealing with white people faux pas as a black woman is tricky: if you get upset, you can be quickly be labeled as the "angry black girl"; if you're too passive, it seems like you're give permission, or letting racism slide.

We like to see a man calling himself a feminist, but we’re kinda scared when women do. We like to hear white people talk about racism, but we find black activists a bit too aggressive. Or we like to hear business leaders telling us that climate change is crucial and that we need to give up fossil fuels when environmental activists have been saying the exact same thing for years and years. Well, AOC is trying to do the same thing here. She wants billionaires to say TTR because when working-class people do, nobody cares. AOC wanted to use that system to her advantage. She wanted to gain power within that system and the dichotomy between fighting against the system, but using the means of that very system is at the origin of all the criticism she got.

From Mary Magdalene to Waldensian women, Ursuline nuns, Moravian wives, Quaker sisters, Black women preachers, and suffragette activists, history shows us that women do not wait on the approval of men to do the work of God.

We middles see the world in shades of grey rather than in the clear blacks and whites of committed animal activists and their equally vociferous opponents

Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too’, as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist.

Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the “get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.42

be they lawyers soldiers princesses prostitutes actors activists or acrobats on five continents in dozens of countries in the world the women are lying down for the men the men of many museums (in ‘At the musée de l’homme’)

Being radical is a choice, and it takes work. A person with a marginalized identity can engage in conservative, oppressive political work, and activists, organizers, and intellectuals living under capitalism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and patriarchy require years of unlearning or decolonization.

Today, I know the vocabulary word to explain exactly why “Shit Black Girls Say” made me uncomfortable: misogynoir. The term, coined by activist Moya Bailey, describes the unique interplay of racism and sexism that black women face.

It was an accepted fact among black people that the leaders who were most revered and respected were men. Black activists defined freedom as gaining the right to participate as full citizens in American culture; they were not rejecting the value system of that culture. Consequently, they did not question the rightness of patriarchy.

Black feminists and LGBTQ activists are labeled “hijackers” and said to be divisive or co-opting or distracting from what is important, and what is “important” is the mainstream narrative propped up by patriarchy and misogyny (straight-up hatred of women).

A society that begins by banning words will end by banning books, and ideas themselves.

America is one of the most prosperous countries on earth because of the freedoms Americans enjoy.

It is now July 2015, the midpoint of a summer that feels like no other in Supreme’s memory. Two weeks earlier, a white supremacist had gunned down nine Black worshippers at a historic church in Charleston. The country seems ripe for another civil war, with a cohort of white Americans defending their Confederate flags while Black activists mount a movement that has enshrined Eric Garner’s name. In Texas public schools, new social studies textbooks have minimized the role of slavery in the Civil War, while a geography book depicts slaves as “workers” who came by way of “immigration” from Africa.

Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.

In the media, an avalanche of negative images of an Africa quickly sinking into anarchy so soon after independence overwhelmed him. Horror stories were broadcast with glee and broke the resolve of so many black activists.

So secure was his power that rumblings of discontent had finally surfaced within his own base, among black nationalists upset with his willingness to cut whites and Hispanics into the action, among activists disappointed with his failure to tackle poverty head-on, and among people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.

Hatred has engulfed the politics of the Left. Socialists hate the financially successful. LGBT activists hate fundamentalist Christians. Black Lives Matter hate police officers. Fat people hate skinny people, like me and Ann Coulter. But none of these groups hate with the PMS-fueled pettiness of feminism.

Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.42

THESE MANIFESTATIONS OF BACKLASH—against family breakup, illegitimacy, welfare, crime, riots, black activists, anti-war demonstrators, long-haired hippies, government programs that favored minorities, elitists, liberals generally—exposed a major development of the mid-1960s: rapidly rising polarization along class, generational, and racial lines.

Antifa...does not propose any affirmative ideology. Rather, it is a negative reactionary movement. In a void, anarchism would still attempt to organize society. But Antifa cannot exist without “fascists” to oppose. It therefore claims to see fascism everywhere, even where it does not exist. Ultimately, Antifa is a dumbed-down branch of radical politics.

I once heard the activist John Perkins say, “You don’t give dignity, you affirm it.

Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as “the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept. —Angela Davis, American political activist, philosopher, academic, Marxist feminist, and author

Nixon was clear to the men assembled that, in his view, “Rockefeller handled it well” because, as the president put it, “you see it’s the black business…he had to do it.”43 To a one, these men felt strongly that this rebellion was of a piece with the revolutionary plots that had recently been hatched in the California system by black activists such as Angela Davis, famed leader from the Black Panther Party. All

It’s a racist narrative trick we always do when we talk about Christianity in America. When we say “Christian” we mean white people. When we talk about great Evangelists in American history, we mean Billy Graham, not Martin Luther King. King is a black activist. But Graham is allowed to be for all. This is the narrative trick being pulled when people tell me to disregard Chicago. It’s the erasure of othering. As if centuries of struggling together and against one another hasn’t left us all deeply and irrevocably changed. Chicago’s story, like the story of St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Iowa City, is a Midwestern story. The story of the black Evangelical church is the story of the Evangelical church. These stories might not fit the narrative we want to tell about ourselves, but they are as essential to the meaning of who we are as any other story.

In the opening essay of his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell neatly summarized some of these findings: The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists.26 Most whites have of course abandoned this behavior, and have risen socioeconomically as a result. How ironic that so many blacks cling to these practices in an effort to avoid “acting white.” And how tragic that so many liberals choose to put an intellectual gloss on black cultural traits that deserve disdain. The civil rights movement, properly understood, was about equal opportunity. But a group must be culturally equipped to seize it. Blacks today on balance remain ill equipped, and the problem isn’t white people.

Many people assumed that phrase began with Weinstein. But the Me Too campaign had been around for over a decade. It was originated by black civil rights activist Tarana Burke, in 2006. None of this was new. It was just that nobody paid much attention, until now.

Many of us didn't choose to become activists. We were activated. We could not stand to sit on the sidelines while our people were brutalized so needlessly. At some point, we choose to accept police violence, or we don't. Where will you stand? (8/23/2020 on Twitter)

In fighting to help this country, this world. To be one that is worthy of the beauty of your life, you will undoubtedly experience pain – the normal pain of life and the pain of struggle. But pain is not who you are. You are, and have always been, more than your pain.

In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator. Why this sudden clarity becomes utter fog when the subject is an Arab child torn to shreds by shrapnel or a Black motorist shot dead in a traffic stop or an Indigenous activist beaten at a pipeline protest is a function of preemptive deference to power.

This unintended consequence of performing unity exemplifies the ways in which people can mean well and still do absolutely wrong. Best-case scenario, the black square shows your network that you at least care about black people enough to post a photo, which I should note is free and easy. Unfortunately, worst-case scenario, this insignificant action can set forth a tidal wave of trouble for the grassroots activists on the ground doing the work. Performing solidarity is inherently selfish. Its very point is to virtue-signal that you are a good person, because it matters to you that people know you are a good person.

Full voting rights for American citizens, funding and additional resources for quality schools, and policing and court systems in which racial bias is not sanctioned by law—all these are well within our grasp. Visionaries, activists, judges, and politicians before us saw what America could be and fought hard for that kind of nation. This is the moment now when all of us—black, white, Latino, Native American, Asian American—must step out of the shadow of white rage, deny its power, understand its unseemly goals, and refuse to be seduced by its buzzwords, dog whistles, and sophistry. This is when we choose a different future.

Yet even as women are the majority in most black churches and even though black women’s oppressions, especially with regard to sexual assault, have been the impetus for the Civil Rights movement,264 the black church has failed on any significant scale to be an activist for gender inclusivity and sexual orientation.

Every step of the way throughout my life as an athlete and activist, I felt my father’s large hand on my shoulder guiding me down a path of service and justice. When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him. -Bayard Rustin

Themselves the leading slave traders of the eighteenth century, Europeans nevertheless became, in the nineteenth century, the destroyers of slavery around the world—not just in European societies or European offshoot societies overseas, but in non-European societies as well, over the bitter opposition of Africans,Arabs, Asians, and others. Moreover, within Western civilization, the principal impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists—people who would today be called “the religious right.” Clearly, this story is not “politically correct” in today’s terms. Hence it is ignored, as if it never happened.

Voting rights activists who had been trying to register voters for years stepped up their efforts. In Selma, Alabama, Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, but the city’s voting rolls were 99 percent white. White law enforcement officers regularly harassed and arrested activists.

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Callie's, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC’s Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots.

What can Black feminism and the Black struggle offer to the Palestinian liberation movement? I don’t know whether I would phrase the question in that way, because I think that solidarity always implies a kind of mutuality. Given the fact that in the US we’re already encouraged to assume that we have the best of everything, that US exceptionalism puts us in a situation as activists to offer advice to people struggling all over the world, and I don’t agree with that—I think we share our experiences. Just as I think the development of Black feminism and women-of-color feminisms can offer ideas, experiences, analyses to Palestinians, so can Black feminisms and women-of-color feminisms learn from the struggle of the Palestinian people and Palestinian feminists.

This should not be the only book you read by a fat person about fatness and anti-fatness. Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more. Whether you’re new to thinking critically about anti-fatness or a longstanding fat activist, be sure to locate this book, accurately, as just one of many fat perspectives available to you. Writers who aren’t fat have made substantial contributions here too. Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic. Each of these works offer vital analysis of the mechanics and history of anti-fatness. And each will deepen your thinking about anti-fatness and your clarity in countering anti-fatness.

Historically, blacks and Latinos were routinely “carded”—denied admission—to white gay clubs; today, segregated socializing is less pronounced but an expansively “welcoming” atmosphere remains uncommon, and for trans people all but nonexistent. Lesbian activists, comparably, have been subject through time to gay male chauvinism so pronounced that they’ve felt the need periodically to form separate organizations.

It's scary, and downing, that I make my best music when I'm going through my depression... At that moment, all i can see is black, darkness and shadows, but in the bigger picture.. it's a blessing. When I look through all my work, my art, I wouldn't change or take away my depression and anxiety for ANYTHING.. because when i get those days of rainbows, and colors.. i know deep down, i'm only honest when i'm at the deepest of the oceans.. so it's like listening to a different side of my mind, that i never realize exists, until i get that little peek through the blinds, and finally see the sunlight.. THEN on those simple moments, even if they only last a few minutes, i know deep down... maybe i do have a talent. Maybe I have got something, a "gift", that some people call... So really, if it wasn't for my depression, i would never, truly believe I have anything worth giving. So I will NOT sit back and wish i wasn't clinically depressed, I will learn to embrace it, live with it, and talk my brain into believing, and fully knowing, I HAVE A GIFT. I AM WORTHY. I DO HAVE SOMETHING TO GIVE THE WORLD. I will not let my depression or anxiety control me. They can live here(in my mind), but they best know, I AM STILL, AND WILL ALWAYS BE IN CONTROL. .. BUT This is my home, and you're just living under it.

This is an unusual language for academics to write in: to boast that a particular collection of academics and teachers are, in fact, academics "with an activist dimension." And as for the admission that CRT seeks not just to understand society but to "transform it"? This is the language of revolutionary politics, not a language traditionally used in academia. But revolutionary activists were exactly those involved in GRT turned out to be.

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles... But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred... If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to invent problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.

There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism,48 that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation,49 that views research as the production of totalizing meta-texts of colonial knowledge,50 or that confronts France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts.

So I’m just proposing that we level the playing field and make those woke shareholders, like BlackRock or Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bear the same liability as any ordinary social activist when they engage in ordinary social activism through the companies that they invest in. Limited shareholder liability was never meant to protect well-heeled woke investors from the consequences of their actions during PR stunts at woke parades.

a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.

You may come or not to walk beside me, I won't stand still in silence while the oceans burn and the sun turns dark - I will either right the wrongs or perish in the attempt - and even if I burn to ashes in trying to humanize my surroundings, those ashes of mine will still smoke inclusion, equality and humaneness - I am not born a human to crawl as an indifferent vermin, I am born a human to embrace death for the values, the principles, the virtues that ought to be the foundation of human civilization - I am sleepless and I will stay sleepless till all the children of earth can sleep in peace with a full stomach and a happy heart, without worrying about guns and bombs, without worrying about prejudice and phobia, without worrying about discrimination and deportation - I will stay sleepless till the whole world becomes a family, not in theory, not in philosophy, not in argument, not even in futuristic vision, but in reality and practice.

(Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern Director of the ACLU in 1966, upon seeing conditions in the Jefferson County jail): ...I knew that [Southern whites] would have annihilated blacks had they been more literate and less useful. In Hitler's Germany armbands identified Jews. Those with black skin could have been annihilated more easily. But they were the labor pool with which to break strikes. They served as the pickers of cotton, the diggers of ditches. They emptied bedpans and cleaned the outhouses of our lives. Uneducated, property-less, disenfranchised, and excluded from justice, except as defendants, they were no threat to whites. While they remained useful and didn't get 'out of line,' their lives were assured, for no matter how worthless lower-class white folks said blacks were, the rich, well born, and able upper-class whites knew that they and black folks were really the only people indispensably required by Our Southern Way of Life. (188)

There is something about a woman,' said comedian and activist Dick Gregory. “If you look at all the suffering that black folks went through, not one black man would dare to sing ‘Mississippi Goddamn.’ Not one black man would say what Billie Holiday did about being lynched [in “Strange Fruit”]-they wasn’t lynching women, they was lynching men, but it was women that talked about it, and nobody told them to talk about it. No manager going to tell you to talk about this, it’s just something inside them.

In June 1994, Ross was among twelve Black feminist activists attending a pro-choice conference in Chicago who felt that the healthcare agenda presented by representatives from the Clinton administration was too concerned with avoiding Republican opposition and did not adequately address concerns of Black women around sexual and reproductive autonomy. These issues included maternal mortality, evidence-based sex education, and whether women could afford abortions or preventative reproductive healthcare.

A week later fifty-four sit-ins were under way in fifteen cities in nine states in the South.60 It was obvious from the way that the spark of protest jumped from place to place that black resentments, which had somehow failed to ignite other sit-ins between 1957 and 1959, had exploded. The sit-ins of 1960 arose, as did the civil rights movement in later years, from the collective efforts of unsung local activists: they sprang from the bottom up. Many later leaders, unknown in 1960, jumped into action.

When Nixon resigned over Watergate, it provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators who were determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, the victorious Communists killed more Indochinese than had been killed on both sides in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war.

A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.

My parents were in high school when Johnson’s war on crime mocked his undersupported war on poverty, like a heavily armed shooter mocking the underresourced trauma surgeon. President Richard Nixon announced his war on drugs in 1971 to devastate his harshest critics—Black and antiwar activists. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” Nixon’s domestic-policy chief, John Ehrlichman, told a Harper’s reporter years later. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Where did the idea that interracial relationships are incompatible with the fight for equality come from? My white husband doesn’t make me any less black, or any less dedicated to the fight for racial justice—just as being married to a man doesn’t make me any less of a feminist or passionate about women’s issues. Perhaps some forget that interracial marriage was at one time, not so long ago, a civil rights issue; it was illegal in many states until 1967, when the landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia determined that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional

And so, with their first public action on Halloween of 1968, the feminist activist group called W.I.T.C.H. was born. Its members donned witch costumes, replete with brooms and pointy black hats, and did a public ritual performance of hexing the New York Stock Exchange. Did it work? Well, as Gloria Steinem wrote about the incident in New York magazine, “A coven of 13 members of W.I.T.C.H. demonstrates against that bastion of white supremacy: Wall Street. The next day, the market falls five points.” (The glue that the witches added to the locks of the NYSE doors also added a bit of whammy, no doubt.)

this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of

Stay Woke, Stay Human (Sonnet) BLACK is Brave, black is Leaderly, Adventurous, Conscientious and KINGly. LATINO means Loud, Loving And Tenacious, latino means Ingenious in Obscurity. WOMAN is Wonder Obstinate, woman is Miracle Awake, and Nature-incarnate. PRIDE means Passionate and Resilient, Indefatigably Daring in Endearment. MUSLIM is Merciful, muslim is Unbending, Sincere and Lively, Insightfully Magnetic. ASIAN means Amiable, asian means Strong, Inquisitive, Ambitious and Neighborly. Hateless, Undivided, Mindful And Neurodiverse - that's HUMAN. Mind carries its own detergent, stay woke and stay human!

Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the “get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.

In times of crisis you either deepen democracy, or you go to the other extreme and become totalitarian. Our struggles for democracy have taught us some important and valuable lessons. Over a million citizen activists of all ethnic groups, mostly young people, made history by going door to door, urging voters to go to the polls and send Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. We did this because we believed and hoped that this charismatic black man could bring about the transformational changes we urgently need at this time on the clock of the world, when the U.S. empire is unraveling and the American pursuit of unlimited economic growth has reached its social and ecological limits. We have since witnessed the election of our first black president stir increasingly dangerous counterrevolutionary resentments in a white middle class uncertain of its future in a country that is losing two wars and eliminating well-paying union jobs. We have watched our elected officials in DC bail out the banks while wheeling and dealing with insurance company lobbyists to deliver a contorted version of health care reform. We have been stunned by the audacity of the Supreme Court as it reaffirmed the premise that corporations are persons and validated corporate financing of elections in its Citizens United decision.

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

Hoping to defuse the community’s anger, Black leaders in Selma planned a march. They would walk the fifty-four miles from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and to voter suppression. On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat voting rights leader Amelia Boynton unconscious.

Obama spoke of being inspired by the courage of Black civil rights activists and freedom riders, who faced dog attacks, fire hoses, and police brutality, and “who risked everything to advance democracy.” Yet under his watch, private security working on behalf of DAPL unleashed attack dogs on unarmed Water Protectors who were attempting to stop bulldozers form destroying a burial ground; Morton County sheriff’s deputies sprayed Water Protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures, injuring hundreds; and police officers and private security guards brutalized hundreds of unarmed protestors. All of this violence was part of an effort to put a pipeline through Indigenous lands.

Meanwhile, real African American heroes—blacks who fought and won the battles for civil rights—don’t figure largely in Zinn’s account. The significant achievements of black labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, for example, are obscured by Zinn—perhaps because Randolph was an anti-communist who quit the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it “had fallen under the control” of Communist Party allies.32 There are only three mentions of Randolph in A People’s History—two of them quotations that have no bearing on what Randolph accomplished and are adduced simply to support Zinn’s picture of the black population “in the streets” and spoiling for a socialist revolution.

During the racial confrontations of the 1960s, An American Dilemma encountered rising criticism from activists and scholars who disputed Myrdal's optimism about white liberalism, as well as his negative statements about certain aspects of African-American culture. In the mid- and late 1940s, however, the study received virtually unsparing praise. W.E.B. Du Bois, the nation's most distinguished black historian and intellectual, hailed the book as a "monumental and unrivaled study." So did other black leaders, ranging from the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, whose criticisms of lower-class black culture influenced Myrdal's arguments, to the novelist Richard Wright, whose bitter autobiography, Black Boy, appeared in 1945.

There are black-letter lawyers and lawyers who bring a greater measure of inventiveness to their task. There are activist lawyers and those who believe that the law should impose as little as possible on human affairs. There are instinctive believers in legal solutions and instinctive sceptics. The intensely deliberative nature of judicial decision-making, at any rate at the appellate level, usually irons out the grosser personal idiosyncracies. However, most of the problems with which lawyers have to deal are not about law at all. They are about fact and evidence. Lawyers are formed by experience to analyse complex factual issues in which they have no pre-existing expertise, often concerned with arcane scientific, economic or statistical concepts. It is a valuable discipline.

There is absolutely nothing surprising about a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma. Psychologists have long observed that when people feel hopelessly stigmatized, a powerful coping strategy–often the only apparent route to self-esteem–is embracing one's stigmatized identity. Hence, 'black is beautiful' and 'gay pride'–slogans and anthems of the political movements aimed at ending not only legal discrimination, but the stigma that justified it. Indeed, the act of embracing one's stigma is never merely a psychological maneuver; it is a political act–an act of resistance and deviance in a society that seeks to demean a group based on an inalterable trait. As a gay activist once put it, 'Only by fully embracing the stigma itself can one neutralize the sting and make it laughable.

You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy." "Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.

Equal protection under the law is not a hard principle to convince Americans of. The difficulty comes in persuading them that it has been violated in particular cases, and of the need to redress the wrong. Prejudice and indifference run deep. Education, social reform, and political action can persuade some. But most people will not feel the sufferings of others unless they feel, even in an abstract way, that 'it could have been me or someone close to me'. Consider the astonishingly rapid transformation of American attitudes toward homosexuality and even gay marriage over the past decades. Gay activism brought these issues to public attention but attitudes were changed during tearful conversations over dinner tables across American when children came out to their parents (and, sometimes, parents came out to their children). Once parents began to accept their children, extended families did too, and today same-sex marriages are celebrated across the country with all the pomp and joy and absurd overspending of traditional American marriages. Race is a wholly different matter. Given the segregation in American society white families have little chance of seeing and therefore understanding the lives of black Americans. I am not black male motorist and never will be. All the more reason, then, that I need some way to identify with one if I am going to be affected by his experience. And citizenship is the only thing I know we share. The more differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel outrage at his mistreatment. Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. There is no denying that by publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans the movement mobilized supporters and delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. But there is also no denying that the movement's decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American society, and its law enforcement institutions, and to use Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence (most spectacularly in a public confrontation with Hillary Clinton, of all people), played into the hands of the Republican right. As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same. Those who play one race card should be prepared to be trumped by another, as we saw subtly and not so subtly in the 2016 presidential election. And it just gives that adversary an additional excuse to be indifferent to you. There is a reason why the leaders of the civil rights movement did not talk about identity the way black activists do today, and it was not cowardice or a failure to be "woke". The movement shamed America into action by consciously appealing to what we share, so that it became harder for white Americans to keep two sets of books, psychologically speaking: one for "Americans" and one for "Negroes". That those leaders did not achieve complete success does not mean that they failed, nor does it prove that a different approach is now necessary. No other approach is likely to succeed. Certainly not one that demands that white Americans agree in every case on what constitutes discrimination or racism today. In democratic politics it is suicidal to set the bar for agreement higher than necessary for winning adherents and elections.

MAN AS “NIGGER”? In the early years of the women’s movement, an article in Psychology Today called “Women as Nigger” quickly led to feminist activists (myself included) making parallels between the oppression of women and blacks.29 Men were characterized as the oppressors, the “master,” the “slaveholders.” Black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s statement that she faced far more discrimination as a woman than as a black was widely quoted. The parallel allowed the hard-earned rights of the civil rights movement to be applied to women. The parallels themselves had more than a germ of truth. But what none of us realized was how each sex was the other’s slave in different ways and therefore neither sex was the other’s “nigger” (“nigger” implies a one-sided oppressiveness). If “masculists” had made such a comparison, they would have had every bit as strong a case as feminists. The comparison is useful because it is not until we understand how men were also women’s servants that we get a clear picture of the sexual division of labor and therefore the fallacy of comparing either sex to “nigger.” For starters . . . Blacks were forced, via slavery, to risk their lives in cotton fields so that whites might benefit economically while blacks died prematurely. Men were forced, via the draft, to risk their lives on battlefields so that everyone else might benefit economically while men died prematurely. The disproportionate numbers of blacks and males in war increases both blacks’ and males’ likelihood of experiencing posttraumatic stress, of becoming killers in postwar civilian life as well, and of dying earlier. Both slaves and men died to make the world safe for freedom—someone else’s.

Authentic and sustainable solidarity efforts must be premises on this broader understanding of why Black lives matter, why they have not mattered historically, and why they still do not matter today as they should. Centralizing Black communities in the current moment is how genuine solidarity begins. South Asian, Arab, and Muslim activists have been a careful not to co-opt or expand this premise by applying it to their communities - by stating “All Lives Matter” or “South Asian Lives Matter,” for example. This stems from the knowledge that when Black lives actually matter, when Black people are not seen as disposable commodities, then all lives will truly matter. In other words, when Black people, who are at the bottom of America’s divisive racial ladder, are free, it will be impossible for systems and policies to engage in discrimination and racism against other communities of color.

Juneja had noticed that the white activists were very focused on rules. “They ask questions I’ve not ever heard from women-of-color organizations, like ‘Do we need permits to canvas?’ They are very hierarchy-oriented, very rules-oriented in a way I have not seen when organizing with people of color.” She suggested that one of the reasons the town-hall format had caught on in 2017 was that “white people, even white women, have faith that if they voice their opinions to their representatives, that they will be heard, that they will have influence, that they have a political voice to which officials will be responsive.” Black and brown people, Juneja said, know that they have representatives, and know how government works. “But there is no faith that politicians will see that there is any cost to disappointing black and brown people. But these women believe that you work through making calls and going to town halls because you assume that they will care what you have to say.

With extraordinary bravery, civil rights leaders, activists, and progressive clergy launched boycotts, marches, and sit-ins protesting the Jim Crow system. They endured fire hoses, police dogs, bombings, and beatings by white mobs, as well as by the police. Once again, federal troops were sent to the South to provide protection for blacks attempting to exercise their civil rights, and the violent reaction of white racists was met with horror in the North. The dramatic high point of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in 1963. The Southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating peacefully at one lunch counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the twentieth century. Between autumn 1961 and the spring of 1963, twenty thousand men, women, and children had been arrested. In 1963 alone, another fifteen thousand were imprisoned, and one thousand desegregation protests occurred across the region, in more than one hundred cities.32

Lieutenant Thomas R. Gilligan, thirty-seven, was off duty and out of uniform, checking out TVs in an electronics store. He went to investigate the commotion and stopped James Powell, a ninth grader who had joined the mob of angry students. Powell was unarmed, according to witnesses. Gilligan maintained that the boy flashed a knife. He shot him three times. Two days later, Harlem erupted. Pierce told Carney, "You have the people who are angry. Justifably so. And then there's the police force. How are they going to defend this shit? Again! And city hall and the activists. And in the way back of the room, you can barely hear a little voice, and that's the family. They've lost a son. Somebody has to speak for them." "They're going to sue?" "Sue and win. You know they ain't going to fire the bastard." Sermon crept into his voice here. "What kind of message will that send--that their police force is accountable? We'll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.

To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His 'color-blind' rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states' rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi - the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 - he assured the crowd 'I believe in states' rights,' and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar - arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language.

In the same way I had managed to overlook the truth of my state’s history in the rosy optimism of my worldview, I never really had cause to notice my whiteness. I didn’t have any impetus to until November 8, 2016, happened. I thought that I understood privilege; I’d studied it in college and pushed against injustice where I saw it. I volunteered for organizations like Planned Parenthood, argued in the face of conservatives who rolled their eyes at Black Lives Matter, and marveled in my gorgeous awakening. But my whiteness, up until that day in November, had allowed me to believe we were ultimately moving forward. Yes, people of color were being shot in the street, conservative lawmakers were trying to push anti-LGBTQ legislation in other states and on the national level, but we were waking up. We had a black president and the recognition of same-sex marriage, and my little activist heart, in all of its whiteness, just believed that things always get better. Because in whiteland, that’s the way it goes. The bad guy will always lose. But then we elected the bad guy, and everything I’ve ever believed to be fundamentally true was incinerated and pissed on. —Sarah Saterlee

The methods and limitations of Garrisonian abolitionism reflected the movement’s reasonable public relations concerns. Still an embattled minority in the north, white antislavery activists believed that the ultimate triumph of their cause depended on the gradual conversion of their neighbors to it. For them to rail against northern prejudice and the plight of free blacks in their own communities or to encourage slave revolt would only alienate the moderate whites whose support they hoped to enlist. But it was not only strategy that wedded most white abolitionists to peaceful moral appeal and made them willing patiently to await the blessing of Providence on their efforts. Intellectually, religiously, their opposition to slavery was genuine, even fervent. Yet slavery remained for them an abstraction, an emblem of evil rather than a lived human experience. Black people remained an abstraction, too, a collective object of pity and, inevitably, of condescension. For white antislavery activists, abolitionism was a campaign to save others: to save an alien race that suffering, simplicity, or natural passivity rendered helpless, to save the souls of slaveholders from eternal corruption by greed. It was not, however, a struggle to save themselves

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

Obama benefited from Saul Alinsky’s transracial strategy to assemble an effective coalition. Alinsky’s goal was for the activist to reach America’s white middle class because, as he put it, “that is where the power is.” Alinsky had nothing but contempt for left-wing activists who treated the white middle class as a bunch of square, sexually uptight, gun-toting, small-minded racists. Yes, Alinsky wrote, the middle class is mighty screwed up. But it has become that way because it’s desperate; its economic condition is deteriorating and so people turn to guns and religion to give them consolation. (Sound familiar?) Alinsky advocated that a successful activist must not disdain the middle class but rather join it. Certainly he wasn’t calling for an embrace of the provincial values of the middle class. Rather, he urged that activists adopt the style and attitude of the middle class. If the middle class is “square,” then be square. Don’t wear the black leather jacket and the hippie bandana; wear a suit and tie. Don’t come across as an angry misfit; come across as a nice young man who is only upset because of manifest injustice. Smile a lot; smiles are a great way to disguise rage and contempt. In this way, Alinsky argued, the activist could build a rapport with ordinary Americans and mobilize them on behalf of radical causes.10

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and he came to the Court ready to implement it.

Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America in 1967, including many persons of goodwill, proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap—essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it. Most of the abrasions between Negroes and white liberals arise from this fact. White America is uneasy with injustice and for ten years it believed it was righting wrongs. The struggles were often bravely fought by fine people. The conscience of man flamed high in hours of peril. The days can never be forgotten when the brutalities at Selma caused thousands all over the land to rush to our side, heedless of danger and of differences in race, class and religion. After the march to Montgomery, there was a delay at the airport and several thousand demonstrators waited more than five hours, crowding together on the seats, the floors and the stairways of the terminal building. As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood. But these were the best of America, not all of America. Elsewhere the commitment was shallower. Conscience burned only dimly, and when atrocious behavior was curbed, the spirit settled easily into well-padded pockets of complacency. Justice at the deepest level had but few stalwart champions. A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.

If we truly seek to understand segregationists—not to excuse or absolve them, but to understand them—then we must first understand how they understood themselves. Until now, because of the tendency to focus on the reactionary leaders of massive resistance, segregationists have largely been understood simply as the opposition to the civil rights movement. They have been framed as a group focused solely on suppressing the rights of others, whether that be the larger cause of “civil rights” or any number of individual entitlements, such as the rights of blacks to vote, assemble, speak, protest, or own property. Segregationists, of course, did stand against those things, and often with bloody and brutal consequences. But, like all people, they did not think of themselves in terms of what they opposed but rather in terms of what they supported. The conventional wisdom has held that they were only fighting against the rights of others. But, in their own minds, segregationists were instead fighting for rights of their own—such as the “right” to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the “right” to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps most important, the “right” to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government. To be sure, all of these positive “rights” were grounded in a negative system of discrimination and racism. In the minds of segregationists, however, such rights existed all the same. Indeed, from their perspective, it was clearly they who defended individual freedom, while the “so-called civil rights activists” aligned themselves with a powerful central state, demanded increased governmental regulation of local affairs, and waged a sustained assault on the individual economic, social, and political prerogatives of others. The true goal of desegregation, these white southerners insisted, was not to end the system of racial oppression in the South, but to install a new system that oppressed them instead. As this study demonstrates, southern whites fundamentally understood their support of segregation as a defense of their own liberties, rather than a denial of others’.

As it happens, the term “white skin privilege” was first popularized in the 1970s by the SDS radicals of “Weatherman,” who were carrying on a terrorist war against “Amerikkka,” a spelling designed to stigmatize the United States as a nation of Klansmen. Led by presidential friends, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather terrorists called on other whites to renounce their privilege and join a global race war already in progress. Although their methods and style kept the Weather radicals on the political fringe, their views on race reflected those held by the broad ranks of the political left. In the following years, the concept of “white skin privilege” continued to spread until it became an article of faith among all progressives, a concept that accounted for everything that was racially wrong in America beginning with its constitutional founding. As Pax Christi USA, a Catholic organization, explained: “Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because white male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.” This is the theme of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the most popular book ever written on the subject, and of university curricula across the nation. Eventually, the concept of white skin privilege was embraced even by liberals who had initially resisted it as slander against a nation that had just concluded a historically unprecedented civil rights revolution. This was because the concept of white skin privilege provided an explanation for the fact that the recent Civil Rights Acts had not led to an equality of results, and that racial disparities persisted even as overt racists and institutional barriers were vanishing from public life. The inconvenient triumph of American tolerance presented an existential problem for civil rights activists, whom it threatened to put out of work. “White skin privilege” offered a solution. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.” In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.

In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.

institutional racism,” they were using, whether they realized it or not, a formulation coined in 1967 by Black Power activist Kwame Toure and political scientist Charles Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. “Racism is both overt and covert,” Toure and Hamilton explained. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals….The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts.

Sociologists Doug McAdam, Nella Van Dyke, and Brenda Wilhelm, among others, have argued that participation in the social movements of the 1960s caused activists to question and critique the ways that societal norms governed their personal lives.

My mother, who somehow managed to stay politically active while raising four children, roped me into canvassing door-to-door for Tom Bradley, Sam Yorty’s opponent for mayor, in our precinct in Woodland Hills. Bradley would be, if he won, the first black mayor of L.A., so it felt like a historic election. Bradley polled well in our precinct, and we were optimistic. Then Yorty won the election, and the precinct breakdowns showed that our neighbors had evidently been lying when they told us canvassers that they would vote for Bradley. It was a well-known phenomenon, apparently, among white voters, these voting-booth reversals. Still, I was outraged, and my cynicism about organized politics and the broad mass of what I was learning to call the bourgeoisie deepened. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, as everyone knows, on the night of the 1968 California primary. I watched the news on a small black-and-white TV, sitting cross-legged on the foot of my girlfriend’s bed. Her name was Charlene. We were fifteen. She was asleep, believing I had left after our evening’s usual heated, inconclusive cuddle. I had stopped, however, to watch the TV after I saw that Kennedy had been shot. It was after midnight and Charlene’s parents were out watching the voting results with friends. They were Republican Party activists. I heard them pull in the driveway and come in the house. I knew that Charlene’s father, who was an older man, always came in to kiss her good night, and I knew, well, the way out her window and how to catfoot it down to the street. Still, I sat there, unthinking yet cruelly resolved, until the bedroom door opened. Her father did not have a heart attack at the sight of me, calmly watching TV in my underwear, though he could have. I snatched up my clothes and dived out the window before he said a word. Charlene’s mother called my mother, and my mother gave me a serious talk about different types of girls, emphasizing the sanctity of “good girls,” such as Charlene, who belonged to some debutante club. I was embarrassed but unrepentant. Charlene and I had never had much to talk about.

I did not, and could not, know when writing this book that our nation would soon awaken violently from its brief colorblind slumber. In the final chapter, I did predict that uprisings were in our future, and I wondered aloud what the fire would look like this time. What actually occurred in the years that followed was, to paraphrase James Baldwin, more terrible and more beautiful than I could have imagined. We now have white nationalist movements operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks. We have a president who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people—calling Mexican migrants “murderers,” “rapists,” and “bad people,” referring to developing African nations as “shithole countries,” and smearing the majority-black city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities. And yet, in the midst of all of this, we also have vibrant racial justice movements led by new generations of activists who are working courageously at the intersections of our systems of control, as well as growing movements against criminal injustice led by those who are directly impacted by mass incarceration. Many of these movements aim to redefine the meaning of justice in America. A decade ago, much of this progress seemed nearly unimaginable. When this book was first released, there was relatively little racial justice organizing, and “mass incarceration” was not a widely used term. Back then, the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as most civil rights organizations, did not include criminal justice issues among its top priorities. Little funding could be found for work challenging the enormous punishment bureaucracy

Quoting page 85: The OCR [Office for Civil Rights] in the early 1970s in effect experienced an internal capture shift. The black agenda activists who had dominated the office between 1965 and 1970 were joined and to some extend displaced by a new cadre of Latino activists. Not content with the transitional model of bilingual education, which used native-language instruction as a bridge to English language proficiency, the Latino nationalists called for Spanish-based cultural maintenance programs of indefinite duration. La Raza Unida’s 1967 founding statement captured the Chicano spirit of cultural nationalism and linguistic ethnocentrism: “The time of subjugation, exploitation, and abuse of human rights of La Raza in the United States is hereby ended forever,” the manifesto proclaimed. “[We] affirm the magnificence of La Raza, the greatness of our heritage, our history, our language, our traditions, our contributions to humanity and culture.

One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.

whenever activists—especially black activists—challenged discriminatory or abusive policing or questioned state and federal budgets that shifted billions of dollars away from education, public housing, welfare, or drug treatment to brand-new, high-tech prisons, someone would inevitably interrupt the conversation to raise the subject of violent crime—especially “black-on-black crime.” This discursive maneuver was often performed casually in an offhand manner; yet it proved to be a stunningly effective way of refocusing attention on a relatively small number of individuals who cause harm, thus shielding from critique an entire system that inflicts incalculable harm on millions.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive. At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators. Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto. With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools. In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.

Jimmy and his activist friends were there to tell Bobby about the suffering that had scarred each black person in that room; that had scarred or killed people they loved; that had buried their communities in poverty; that had withheld their right to vote; that had lynched their grandfathers, raped their grandmothers, set the dogs on their children, called them “nigger” for daring to sit at a lunch counter; that had tried to deprive their children of education, their mothers of dignity in domestic labor, their fathers the dignity of being called “sir” and not “boy” at the age of 60. Bobby did not want the responsibility of bearing witness to their pain and their rage. Witness often exposes the unspoken claims of whiteness—its privilege to hide, its ability to deflect black suffering into comparatively sterile discussions of policy that take the heat off of “me” and put it on “that.

After it was revealed that the Miami Police Department used images of Black men for target practice, a movement of clergy and other activists initiated the hashtag #UseMeInstead circulating their own, predominantly White photos. In another form of subversive visualization, activists called out the way media outlets circulate unflattering photos of Black youths murdered by police or White vigilantes. They used the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and asked the question “Which one would they use?” with dueling photos of themselves looking stereotypically “thuggish” (e.g. not smiling, wearing a hoodie, throwing up hand signs, smoking, or holding alcohol) and “respectable” (e.g. smiling, wearing a graduation gown or suit, playing with a baby, or wearing a military uniform).

If Tivo marks the beginning of the shift from the Brand Age to the Product Age, the summer of 2020 saw the Brand Age’s end. The killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests briefly displaced the pandemic in the front and center of our national consciousness, making obvious the passing of the Brand Age into history. Seemingly every brand company did what they always do when America’s sins are pulled out from the back of the closet where we try to keep them hidden: they called up their agencies and posted inspiring words, arresting images, and black rectangles. Message: We care. Only this time, it didn’t resonate. Their brand magic fizzled. First on social media, then tumbling from there onto newspapers and evening news, activists and customers started using the tools of the new age to compare these companies’ carefully crafted brand messages with the reality of their operations. “This you?” became the Twitter meme that exposed the brand wizards. Companies who posted about their “support” for black empowerment were called out when their own websites revealed the music did not match the words. The NFL claimed it celebrates protest, and the internet tweeted back, “This you?” under a picture of Colin Kaepernick kneeling. L’Oréal posted that “speaking out is worth it” and got clapped back with stories about dropping a model just three years earlier for speaking out against racism. The performative wokeness across brands felt forced and hollow. Systemic racism is a serious issue, and a 30-second spot during The Masked Singer doesn’t prove you are serious about systemic racism. That’s always been true, about ads on any issue, but social media and the ease of access to data on the internet has made it much harder for companies to pretend.

When activists argued that choke holds were proving to be unnecessarily deadly force, Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates actually said this about how blacks and Latinos responded to choke holds: “We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.” Normal people. That was ten years ago, and he’s still the police chief.

Uncle Tom’ did not originate in fiction. Nor did he die with the Emancipation proclamation. He is perpetuated and immortalized in the type of leadership that sells the Negro for a few ‘sound American dollars.

Racism wont end. When the elders or parents lie to their children about other races to extend the hate.

Racism wont end. When the elders or parents lie to their children about other races to extend the hate. Tell their children. Don’t say those words or do those things in from of them. They will hate you, beat you, judge you or prosecute you. They don’t tell them that the reason they should not do, think or say those words or things it is because those words or actions are harmful, bad, inhuman, discriminating, antagonizing, degrading ,hateful, wrong and evil. Because you are different or more privileged than them. It doesn’t mean you are superior to them. We are all the same.

The first time I picked up James Baldwin, I finally saw myself. It occurred to me that I could be an activist from my own source of power—words. It can only make our journey toward justice more robust, more beautiful, when we offer a diversity of paths, a more expansive vision of action. This is not new. This is Detour and Hiero Veiga's graffiti art resurrecting Black faces slain by the police. This is Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry creating collective sleeping experiences to reclaim the justice and liberation in rest. This is even, to some degree, some of the words you'll find in this book. Written in holy defiance of what is, and in imagination of what should be. If writing is a calling, I have a responsibility to demand justice in my writing as much as in the streets. When we expand our imaginations for activism, we enter into practices of lament and rage with more particularity, and we begin to realize more nuanced paths to justice.

A mentor and friend once said to me, If there is someone who is both activist and contemplative and who does both well, I have not yet met them. I silently accepted the challenge. He was articulating a very credible tension between the heart of the contemplative and the heart of the activist. At first strike, they appear inherently in conflict. The contemplative, some pillar of stillness, tasked with thinking and asking enduring questions that require a kind of slowness and pause. The activist, a beacon for the movement, committed to the doing of justice and mercy—not later but now, which does, as the name suggests, require action. But what if what we take as stillness is not always inactivity as we perceive it? Can there be a form of contemplation that is at once stillness and movement? Some might say the beginnings of Christian monasticism were, in part, a defiant protest against the elitism and centering of the upper class in the faith. And today, activism tells the truth about what is and imagines what should be. This imagination for justice requires contemplation.

Petunias The mind filled, littered and polluted by black petunias The horror of the naked decaying sun over our heads Graves crumbling, hills erecting, mountains sinking The stinking, smelling melodious melodies Yarrows growing in my heart Rage on my body Anger on my soul Darkness of all the hate Manifesting Xyris the abandoned beauty Eyes dogged and damned!

went to great lengths to enforce it. In the early 1950s, when Cincinnati agreed under pressure to allow black swimmers into some of its public pools, whites threw nails and broken glass into the water to keep them out. In the 1960s, a black civil rights activist tried to integrate a public pool by swimming a lap and then emerging to towel off. “The response was to drain the pool entirely,” wrote the legal historian Mark S. Weiner, “and refill it with fresh water.

Trump barely won the election, but his victory felt like he had split the land in two, and whatever was released from below sucked up most of the oxygen. For many, the far right had taken hold of the reins of government. Trump refused to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Tried to ban Muslims from entering the country. Turned on “enemies” within and without. He embraced draconian immigration policies—separating children from their parents and building tent cities to hold them—and declared the so-called caravan of refugees at the southern border a carrier of contagion (leprosy) and a threat to the security of the nation. Contrary to what he declared during his inaugural address, Trump did not stop the “American carnage.” He unleashed it. As the country lurched to the far right and reasserted the lie, Black Lives Matter went relatively silent, or it was no longer heard. Activists scattered. Many had suffered the

In 1933, as the Third Reich began its reign of terror, Black American writers and activists were quick to draw connections between Nazi dictates and American race laws. It was a proven and commonly held belief that Hitler saw America’s approach to the Jim Crow laws as a model for his own eugenicist agenda.

As a matter of principle, I didn’t believe a president should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters—it’s what you signed up for in taking the job—and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism. More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.

Paul Hawken here in The Embassy—in 1965 he was an outstanding activist, sweat shirts and blue jeans and toggle coats, went on the March from Selma, worked as a photographer for CORE in Mississippi, risked his life to take pictures of Negro working conditions, and so on. Now he’s got on a great Hussar’s coat with gold frogging. His hair is all over his forehead and coming around his neck in terrific black Mykonos curls. “I take it you aren’t too tight with CORE any more.” He just laughs.

When everyone tows a popular line, the truth itself becomes unpopular. And unfortunately, truth is never popular.

It is about representing the unrepresented. Because their pains are my pains. Their perseverance, my perseverance. And their pleasure, and small triumphs, when they do have them, are mine as well.

Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminist activists from the 1970s

You are preaching black conscious now ? Where was your black conscious, when you raped and murdered another black person. Where was your black conscious, when you abused and assaulted another black person. Where was your black conscious, when you lied and accused another black person. Where was your black conscious when you shamelessly stole and looted money from black people . Where was your black conscious, when you deceived and manipulated black people. When your actions are being questioned. You say they are targeting you, meanwhile you are the one who is targeting black people. To break , extort and to enslave them.

So-called activists on the extreme left have moved from their safe spaces and the basements of their parents’ houses out into the streets, usually clad in black hockey pads and carrying weapons. Sometimes they call themselves antifascists, or Antifa, but most of the time, they don’t know why they’re there or what they even believe. All they know is hate and anger. Time and again, these people try to shut down speakers with whom they don’t agree. They attack journalists in the streets and threaten anyone who doesn’t go along with their twisted sense of social justice and equality.

The idea for the Green New Deal began with a group called the Sunrise Movement, started by recent college graduate environmental activists who drew inspiration from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Some even say their roots can be traced back to Saul Alinsky, the gift to the right who keeps on giving. Alinsky, as you might remember, wrote a book back in 1971 called Rules for Radicals in which he cited Lucifer as the father of the radical movement. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both idolized Alinsky.

In 1949, the African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois visited Warsaw, where he saw the ruins of the ghetto the Nazis had established there and then completely destroyed after suppressing the uprising. Three years later, Du Bois wrote a short article a recounting his trip called “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”: “In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind as a separate and unique thing, as I had so long conceived it. It was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery…. The race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status, and was a matter of cultural patterns, teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.» [...] Moving beyond a conception of his own experience as “a separate and unique thing”, Du Bois comes to an understanding of race that is instead multidirectional. […] Du Bois’s post-Warsaw vision brings black and Jewish histories into relation without erasing their differences or fetishizing their uniqueness. Proximate pasts are neither “separate and unique” nor “equal”; rather, a form of modified “double consciousness” arises capable of conjoining them in an open-ended assemblage.

Black people on earth will be annihilated by 2030 down to 24% left on earth able to live with the basic necessities while others have already died out or died from starvation. AI will be the ones who will destroy the black and brown people to create its own robotic lifestyle, and its means on earth.

By 2025 December AI will have taken over 45% of our resources and the people will have to rely on its tools.

We live in this world, where humanity is tested. AI is controlling the test, and we are not fighting back.

Next, I went undercover—really!—in Dothan, Alabama, to expose segregated schools that were trying to evade integration. Posing as the young wife of a businessman who had just been transferred to the area, I visited the all-white private school that had just opened in town and received tax-exempt status. When I started asking questions about the student body and curriculum, I was assured that no black students would be enrolled. Marian used the evidence that I and other activists gathered in the field to pressure the Nixon administration to crack down on these so-called segregated academies.

In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune, an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil-rights activist traveled through her home state of Florida to encourage women to vote, facing tremendous obstacles at every step along the route. The night before Election Day in November 1920, white-robed Klansmen marched into Bethune’s girls’ school to intimidate the women who had gathered there to get ready to vote, aiming to prevent them from voting even though they had managed to get their names on the voter rolls. Newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware, reported that the numbers of Black women who wanted to register to vote were “unusually large,” but they were turned away for their alleged failure to “comply with Constitutional tests” without any specification of what these tests were. The Birmingham Black newspaper Voice of the People noted that only half a dozen Black women had been registered to vote because the state had applied the same restrictive rules for voting to colored women that they applied to colored men.

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

These scholars, whose influence far outweighs their numbers, generally trained or work in elite Western academia and operate according to a densely theoretical framework that originated in France and proliferated in the United States and the United Kingdom. Their work is of very little practical relevance to people living in previously colonized countries, who are trying to deal with the political and economic aftermath. There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism,48 that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation,49 that views research as the production of totalizing meta-texts of colonial knowledge,50 or that confronts France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts.51

After finding no record of the marriage, French reporters doubted the story, but American papers picked it up with headlines proclaiming that a young black woman from St. Louis had become a countess. The June 22, 1927, issue of the Milwaukee Journal headlined: JOSEPHINE BAKER, BLACK DANCER, WEDS A REAL COUNT. They quoted

Joséphine as saying: “He sure is a count. I looked him up in Rome. He’s got a great big family there with lots of coats of arms and everything.” This was good news for black Americans who still faced racial prejudice in the United States. Probably the most surprised person was Willie Baker, who read the story in the Chicago

The black and brown communities will suffer the consequences of the AI system more than any other community.

No, what makes abortion difficult is not some fancy lawyering from the right, but the near refusal to defend it from the left. The hard sell is almost always left to women and “abortion activists,” while men scramble around trying not to piss off a diner in Ohio. I can turn over a rock on Twitter and find some person with no legal training able to passionately explain why segregation is wrong, or why the death penalty is immoral, or how “love is love.” But ask people about abortion and it’s all, “Well… I think the important thing is that women get to choose for themselves! Retweet if you agree!” Don’t get me wrong, “choice” is great. It’s a fine frame. It’s a language designed to appeal to people who have a genuinely held religious belief about when life begins, and even the word choice should remind those adherents that not everybody shares their choice of God either, and yet we co-exist. But the better legal frame is “Forced birth is some evil shit that can never be compelled by a legitimate government. The end.” Hell, if you don’t like my Eighth or Fourteenth Amendment arguments in defense of abortion rights, I could give some Thirteenth Amendment arguments. Because the same amendment that prohibited slavery surely prohibits the state from renting out women’s bodies, for free, for nine months, to further its interests. Forced labor is already unconstitutional. 

Politicians don't have race, politicians don't have religion, politicians don't have nationality. You may think, this is a good thing - well, in this case, it's not. You know why? Because their race is self-interest - their religion is self-interest - their nationality is self-interest. Politicians can be white, black, brown or martian - but once a moron, always a moron. Some monkeys are white, some monkeys are colored, but inside they are not white or colored - they are politicians - which means, they are all monkeys. And the exception to this norm often comes from not so popular parts of the world - for example, South Africa. Which only proves that, you don't need to be a so-called geopolitical superpower to do what's right - you don't have to be a superpower to be a peacemaker. In fact in most cases, the so-called superpowers are the most morally bankrupt states in the world. Because guess what - governments don't exist to do the right thing, governments exist to do whatever keeps them in power. And the day the politics of self-interest comes to an end, there will be no longer any need for activists, humanitarians and reformers.

Don’t be fooled by their hypocrisy and double standards. They have no honor, moral standards, ethics, principles or integrity. It is never about right or wrong, but it is about which side they are on, who is paying them and who is also on the payroll. When it is one of their own who does wrong or who commits crime. They will never call them out. Prosecute, judge, arrest, cancel, confront, expose, seek answers or humiliate them. They wont comment or make any statements . They will be silent like nothing happened because they protect each other and protect their interests. When it is not one of their own. All hell will break lose. They would have 24/7 coverage on every news channel or newspaper, on the front pages. Having their own sketchy, bias headline, analysts, experts, professors, influences, investigators, journalists and witnesses. They would even blow it out of proposition. Making remarks and statement seeking answers. Challenging the court ,government and the people. They are all puppets and there is someone pulling the strings. They are all owned by the same master.

As iconic scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis tells us, prisons serve as “a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.”43

I had come to a realization that most people if no tall who say and claim that they are fighting for black people actually they the ones fighting the black people. They are the hinderance and are fighting everything and everyone who tries to better the lives of the black people. They are stealing from black people. Actually black people the reason they are suffering, poor and their lives not improved or developed. It is because of them .

a wide range of activist groups, including the Debt Collective and the Movement for Black Lives, along with thinkers like Fantu Cheru and Jeffrey Williams, have long noticed the disciplinary function of student, medical, and credit card debt.56

Even Lincoln started off as a backboneless traditionalist, who was prepared to do whatever it takes to save the union. But in time he corrected himself, and became an ally of abolition. If you cannot be an activist, be an ally. If you cannot be an ally, be silent. There is always something you can do, if not, try not to be an inhuman burden.

Most NYPD officers generally treated Malcolm X's murder case not as a significant political assassination, but as a neighborhood shooting in the dark ghetto, a casualty from two rival black gangs feuding against each other.

[W]hat is historically new is the alliance with the cultural left. Back in the 1960s, many economically minded New Deal liberals and even socialists wanted nothing to do with the cultural warriors of the New Left, thinking them shallow and feckless. No more. There is today not much distance between the postmodern cultural leftists and the democratic socialists like [Bernie] Sanders who want to focus mainly on economics. The two sides can run afoul of each other, as Sanders did at a Netroots Nation conference in July 2015 when black activists shouted him off the stage. But these disputes have more to do with different priorities than with ideological divisions. Philosophically there is not much daylight between Sanders and the hard-core cultural warriors of the post-modern left. The same is true for Hillary Clinton. She, in fact, tries to appeal to both sides at the same time. She sells herself not only as a postmodernist feminist candidate who will be the first female president of the United States, but as a classic fighter for the economically downtrodden. The fusion has been the strength of her candidacy, because is represents the broadest appeal to all the constituents of the Democratic Party.

Reflecting a long-standing schism within the profession, which persists into the twenty-first century, RASSW argued that “a dichotomy exists within NASW between” social activists and clinical practitioners, which is exacerbated by the promotion of licensing. When all social services are threatened by the conservative political and ideological climate, a focus on licensing undermines the profession’s efforts to fight for “the survival and well-being of millions” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 3). Citing the opposition to licensing by such groups as the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), RASSW asserted that efforts by NASW to promote licensing contradict its stated intent to fight racism within the social service field and were destructive of professional unity. Promoting licensing, in lieu of uniting around this struggle “is to fiddle while Rome burns” (p. 3). The paper also disputed the linkage between licensing and service quality. It added an interesting twist to the growing debate over professionalization by arguing that “under current political conditions licensure may actually decrease the accountability of social workers to their clients” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 5). The paper concluded that licensure neither protected nor improved service quality; rather, it divided workers and undermined their job security, as the recent attack on public education in New York City had demonstrated. Instead of fighting for licensure, RASSW proposed an alternative strategy that focused on building worker-client-labor-community coalitions and combating racism in social service agencies and other institutions.

It was there, during the 1960s, that his evolution into a firebrand revolutionary began. He became a vocal leader in the emerging Chicano movement. He joined black student activist Larry Gossett, Native American leader Bernie Whitebear, and Asian American leader Bob Santos to create multiracial coalitions for justice in education, policing, immigration, and other issues. Together they became masters of organizing and direct action. The so-called Four Amigos were bonded by personal chemistry. But they also recognized that in predominantly white Seattle, they were stronger together.

As an Asian American woman within black radical circles, Grace surely was anomalous, but this raised no significant concerns or barriers to her participation in various black organizations, struggles, and movements. While she never attempted to conceal her ethnic identity, Grace developed a political identity as a black movement activist—that is, an activist based in a black community and operating within black movements. Living with Jimmy in a black community in the 1950s and immersing herself in the social and political worlds of black Detroit, she solidified this political identity through her activism. By the early 1960s she was firmly situated within a network of activists building organizations, staging protests, and engaging in a range of grassroots political initiatives. By mid-decade, when the Black Power movement emerged, Grace was a fixture within black radical politics in Detroit and widely known in movement circles nationally. Together, Jimmy and Grace helped to build a vibrant local black protest community in Detroit, the city that served not only as their home and political base, but also as a catalyst for new ideas about social change. They formulated their theories through grassroots activism in the context of—and at times directly in response to—the tremendous urban transformation experienced by the Motor City during the decades following World War II. Alongside their local efforts, the couple forged an ever-widening network of activists, artists, and intellectuals across the country, engaging multiple spaces of black activist politics. A diverse group of younger black activists from Detroit and across the country visited their eastside Detroit home—“ the Boggses’ University,” as one of them labeled it. 2 Each received theoretical training, political education, and a sense of historical continuity between past and future struggles. Through their extraordinary partnership James and Grace Lee Boggs built several organizations, undertook innumerable local activist initiatives, produced an array of theoretical and political writings, and mentored a generation of activists.

Some former Bush officials, however, believed that the Justice Department's failure to pursue the New Black Panther Party case resulted from top Obama administration officials' ideological belief that civil rights laws only apply to protect members of minority groups from discrimination by whites. Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler denied any such motives. She asserted that "the department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved". But an anonymous Justice Department official told the Washington Post that "the Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor [a white police commissioner] were hitting people like John Lewis [a black civil rights activist], not the other way around". The Post concluded that the New Black Panther Party case "tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race". The Office of Professional Responsibility's report on the case found that several former and current DOJ attorneys told investigators under oath that some lawyers in the Civil Rights Division don't believe that the DOJ should bring cases involving white victims of racial discrimination. The report also found that Voting Section lawyers believed that their boss, appointed by President Obama, wanted them to bring only cases protecting members of American minority groups. She phrased this as having the section pursue only "traditional" civil rights enforcement cases. Her employees understood that by "traditional" she meant only cases involving minority victims.

What are you complaining about? If they don’t want you over here, why don’t you go over on Hastings Street and get yourself something?” This led to the following exchange: DAC members: We don’t want to eat on Hastings. We want to eat here. Police officer: Well, the man said he don’t want to serve you. DAC members: Yes, but the law says he has to serve us. This could lead to “an argument with the police officer, but he eventually would write up the case.” After securing an agreement from the restaurant that it would now welcome black patrons, and then sending a DAC team to ensure that African Americans did indeed receive service, Jimmy and his fellow activists still might face resistance and hostility. “We’d have lots of people that didn’t want us in there,” he recalled. “Even the customers in there would say, ‘we’re going home, get our guns, and run these niggers out of here.’ ” Indeed, Jimmy recalled confronting hostile responses at various locations and in multiple forms. At the Hotel Detroiter, for example, the DAC team received service, but the food “was full of salt,” while other establishments would “deliberately break the glasses up in front of us to let us know they wasn’t going to eat out of something some nigger ate out of.” 94

Grace regarded her participation in the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in Chicago as “the turning point in my life” because, as she told Horace Cayton years later, she had come to Chicago searching for the basis of a “new civilization” and found it “in the Negroes mobilizing themselves for the March on Washington. I shall never forget the transformation that took place in them with the call for the march.” 17 As a young, emerging radical, the sense of political possibility embodied in the MOWM made a considerable impression on her thinking. Specifically, it gave her a workable model and clear vision of a mass movement. Furthermore, it gave her an appreciation for the potential of grassroots politics not only to confront social injustice but also to effect individual and community transformation. Finally, the MOWM cemented Grace’s commitment to black political struggle. “The March on Washington changed my life,” she wrote more than half a century later. It “taught me lessons that have shaped my activities ever since.” One of these lessons was “that a movement begins when large numbers of people, having reached the point where they feel they can’t take the way things are any longer, find hope for improving their daily lives in an action that they can take together.” Even more important for her own political trajectory, she “also discovered the power that the black community has within itself to change this country when it begins to move. As a result, I decided that what I wanted to do with the rest of my life was to become a movement activist in the black community.” 18

In a post-Ferguson world, young black activists were eager to work outside the system. “I voted for Barack Obama twice,” Tef Poe said that evening. “And still got teargassed.” A seat at the table, the new generation of black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.

A seat at the table, the new generation of black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.

Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the “get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.42 While

When activists claim that poor black and brown communities must not defend themselves against racist attacks or state violence, especially not through the use of illegal tactics, they typically advocate instead the performance of an image of "legitimate" victimhood for white middle-class consumption. "Communities of color" have become in contemporary liberal anti-oppression discourse akin to endangered species in need of management by sympathetic whites or community leaders assigned to contain political conflict at all costs. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

No individual or single organization can speak for nonwhite people, women, the world's colonized populations, workers, or any demographic category as a whole--although nonwhite, female and queer, and labor activists from the Global North routinely and arrogantly claim this right. Black liberation, civil rights, feminist, labor, and decolonization struggles clearly reveal that if resistance is even slightly effective, THE PEOPLE WHO STRUGGLE ARE IN DANGER. The choice is not between danger and safety but rather between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of a world with no future. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.

At one point in the 1970s every member of AIM was targeted by COINTELPRO or tied up with time in court and prison.[89] The case of FBI actions against AIM and the Black Panthers is especially important, because it exposes governmental willingness to destroy and even kill family members of activist communities who are deemed “social dynamite.”[90] Many imprisoned from this group constitute the “political prisoners” about whom the state had a particular concern, and to whom the most onerous and

At one point in the 1970s every member of AIM was targeted by COINTELPRO or tied up with time in court and prison.[89] The case of FBI actions against AIM and the Black Panthers is especially important, because it exposes governmental willingness to destroy and even kill family members of activist communities who are deemed “social dynamite.”[90] Many imprisoned from this group constitute the “political prisoners” about whom the state had a particular concern, and to whom the most onerous and long term of sentences and repression were meted out.

The dissertation concluded with an epilogue pessimistically predicting that the ban would continue into the indefinite future, citing several factors. Crucial was the canonical status accorded Joseph Smith’s scriptural writings representing “the core of basic Latter-day Saint theology.” From the late nineteenth century on, Church leaders utilized the Pearl of Great Price as essential proof text affirming blacks as the literal descendants of Ham—the accursed son of Noah who had been “cursed as pertaining to the priesthood.” Also discouraging the ban’s removal was that it affected “only a few” individuals—given the stark fact that a mere handful of African-Americans had cast their lot with the LDS Church. A final factor was the potential for backlash against activists calling for change—this coming from Mormon leaders and rank-and-file members. Such was reflected in a 1972 poll which found that 70% of Utah-based Mormons opposed lifting the ban.

To make matters worse, riots erupted in the summer of 1964 in Harlem and Rochester, followed by a series of uprisings that swept the nation following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The racial imagery associated with the riots gave fuel to the argument that civil rights for blacks led to rampant crime. Cities like Philadelphia and Rochester were described as being victims of their own generosity. Conservatives argued that, having welcomed blacks migrating from the South, these cities “were repaid with crime-ridden slums and black discontent.”40 Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the “get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.42 While many civil rights advocates in this period

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.' 

This was the clarion cry taken up by the GOP in the aftermath of the Civil War. Virtually all the black leaders who emerged from that era were Republicans who supported the GOP’s call to remove race as the basis of government policy and social action. Historian Eric Foner writes that black activists of the antebellum era embraced “an affirmation of Americanism that insisted blacks were entitled to the same rights and opportunities that white citizens enjoyed.”3

her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.

While dramatic progress was apparent in the political and social realms, civil rights activists became increasingly concerned that, without major economic reforms, the vast majority of blacks would remain locked in poverty. Thus

In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.42

It didn’t help when Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael made his notorious comment to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: “The position of women in SNCC is prone.

In order to pressure the government to change its approach, however, Alinsky urged black activists to dress in African tribal costumes and greet government officials flying into Chicago from Washington, D.C. This action, he said, would dramatize the “colonial mentality” of the antipoverty establishment. I learned about this particular Alinsky caper from Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley College thesis.18 Alinsky

On another occasion, Alinsky was working in his home base of Chicago to force Chicago’s department stores to give jobs to black activists who were Alinsky’s cronies. On this issue of course Alinsky was competing—or working in tandem, however we choose to view it—with Chicago’s number one racial shakedown man, Jesse Jackson. Jackson mastered a simple strategy of converting race into a protection racket. He would offer to “protect” Chicago businesses from accusations of racism—accusations that the businesses knew were actually fomented by Jackson himself. The businesses would then pay Jackson to make the trouble go away, and also to chase away other potential troublemakers. In return for his efforts, Jackson would typically receive hundreds of thousands in annual donations from the company, plus jobs and minority contracts that would go through his network, and finally other goodies such as free flights on the corporate airplane, supposedly for his “charitable work.” Later Jackson would go national with this blackmail approach. In New York, for example, Jackson opened an office on Wall Street where he extracted millions of dollars in money and patronage from several leading investment houses including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber, and Prudential Securities. On the national stage, another race hustler, Al Sharpton, joined Jackson. For two decades these shakedown men in clerical garb successfully prosecuted their hustles. Jackson was the leader at first, but eventually Sharpton proved more successful than Jackson. While Jackson’s star has faded, Sharpton became President Obama’s chief advisor on race issues.

he had watched these networked technologies—filled with so much potential for solidarity, increased understanding, and new forms of internationalism—turn into tools of aggressive surveillance and social control, with Big Tech collaborating with repressive regimes, governments using ‘kill switches’ to black out the internet mid-uprising, and bad-faith actors seizing on out-of-context tweets to slander reputations and make activists markedly easier to imprison.

Antifa is not an organized group. It is an ideology and a set of tactics, namely, violently confronting the right wing. Antifa is short for “anti-fascist.” The name is borrowed from World War II–era German anti-Nazi activism. Here in America, the antifa movement became an increasingly large feature of the political scene after Trump’s election. Alt-right groups like the Proud Boys also saw a surge in membership during this time. The two factions brawled in the streets at protests. They fed off each other. Trump and other Republicans spent the second half of 2020 criticizing violence and vandalism from antifa and Black Lives Matter activists during the civil rights demonstrations that erupted around the country after the police killing of George Floyd. Then January 6th took place.

Humans and animals all are welcome in my house, but not fundamentalists and nationalists.

Standpoint theory often finds itself criticized for essentialism—for thinking something like “all black people feel like this.”27 This isn’t quite wrong because it rests, in a way, on a concept we’ve encountered before: strategic essentialism, wherein members of an oppressed group can essentialize themselves (or, here, the authenticity of their lived experience in relationship to power) as a means of achieving group political action. Its advocates don’t defend it that way, however. They generally get around this accusation by arguing that the theory does not assume all members of the same group have the same nature but that they experience the same problems in an unjust society, although they can choose which discourses they wish to contribute to. Members of these groups who disagree with standpoint theory—or even deny that they are oppressed—are explained away as having internalized their oppression (false consciousness) or as pandering in order to gain favor or reward from the dominant system (“Uncle Toms” and “native informants”) by amplifying Theoretically dominant discourses.

Mapping the Margins,” Crenshaw critiques two ways of understanding society: (universal) liberalism and (high-deconstructive) postmodernism. Mainstream liberal discourse around discrimination, Crenshaw felt, was inadequate to understand the ways in which structures of power perpetuated discrimination against people with more than one category of marginalized identity. Because liberalism sought to remove social expectations from identity categories—black people being expected to do menial jobs, women being expected to prioritize domestic and parenting roles, and so on—and make all rights, freedoms, and opportunities available to all people regardless of their identity, there was a strong focus on the individual and the universal and a deprioritization of identity categories. This was, to Crenshaw, unacceptable.

An important example is the debate around Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and All Lives Matter. Can you believe that black lives matter and also care deeply about the well-being of police officers? Of course. Can you care about the well-being of police officers and at the same time be concerned about abuses of power and systemic racism in law enforcement and the criminal justice system? Yes. I have relatives who are police officers—I can’t tell you how deeply I care about their safety and well-being. I do almost all of my pro bono work with the military and public servants like the police—I care. And when we care, we should all want just systems that reflect the honor and dignity of the people who serve in those systems. But then, if it’s the case that we can care about citizens and the police, shouldn’t the rallying cry just be All Lives Matter? No. Because the humanity wasn’t stripped from all lives the way it was stripped from the lives of black citizens. In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens in the hearts of those of us who have consciously or unconsciously bought into the insidious, rampant, and ongoing devaluation of black lives. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery. Is there tension and vulnerability in supporting both the police and the activists? Hell, yes. It’s the wilderness. But most of the criticism comes from people who are intent on forcing these false either/or dichotomies and shaming us for not hating the right people. It’s definitely messier taking a nuanced stance, but it’s also critically important to true belonging.

A school shooting takes place, only to have the survivors hijacked by gun control activists looking to jam through their policies in a time of high emotion. A black man is killed by a police officer, and his image is used to further the narrative that white cops are murdering black men for sport. Over and over again, somebody else's real pain and tragedy are reduced to media talking points to further a political agenda. Emotions are elicited and concern is feigned until a bigger story comes around

We now have white nationalist movements operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks. We have a president who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people—calling Mexican migrants “murderers,” “rapists,” and “bad people,” referring to developing African nations as “shithole countries,” and smearing the majority-black city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities. And yet, in the midst of all of this, we also have vibrant racial justice movements led by new generations of activists who are working courageously at the intersections of our systems of control, as well as growing movements against criminal injustice led by those who are directly impacted by mass incarceration. Many of these movements aim to redefine the meaning of justice in America.

Standpoint theory can be understood by analogy to a kind of color blindness, in which the more privileged a person is, the fewer colors she can see. A straight white male—being triply dominant—might thus see only in shades of gray. A black person would be able to see shades of red; a woman would be able to see shades of green; and a LGBT person could see shades of blue; a black lesbian could see all three colors—in addition to the grayscale vision everyone has. Medina refers to this as a “kaleidoscopic consciousness” and “meta-lucidity.”25 Thus, having oppressed identities allows extra dimensions of sight. This gives the oppressed a richer, more accurate view of reality26—hence we should listen to and believe their accounts of it.

In my experience, whenever activists—especially black activists—challenged discriminatory or abusive policing or questioned state and federal budgets that shifted billions of dollars away from education, public housing, welfare, or drug treatment to brand-new, high-tech prisons, someone would inevitably interrupt the conversation to raise the subject of violent crime—especially “black-on-black crime.” This discursive maneuver was often performed casually in an offhand manner; yet it proved to be a stunningly effective way of refocusing attention on a relatively small number of individuals who cause harm, thus shielding from critique an entire system that inflicts incalculable harm on millions.

Citizen Justice (A Sonnet) Boldly comes justice, Not just in color blue. Boldly comes justice, To make this world anew. Boldly comes justice, To defend the fellow innocent. Boldly comes justice, Upright, rational and fervent. Boldly comes justice, Crossing race, religion and gender. Boldly comes justice, To confront humanity's offender. Justice on earth is no legal matter, If one soul is hurt all must rise together.

President Richard Nixon announced his war on drugs in 1971 to devastate his harshest critics—Black and antiwar activists.

To take showers, one needs to heat water in a bucket by using two induction cables, which are either connected to a socket or plugged directly into a power generator. If this method sounds dangerous, rest assured, it is. One time, I touched the water while my cousin was warming it for his shower. The electric shock threw me back.

A century on in 1984, black feminist, activist and poet Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches: ‘Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimist's right but an activist's indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done (xxxiv).

Ezra Rothschild Johnson was one of a family of black activists who helped runaway slaves find refuge on the whalers of Fairhaven and New Bedford.

Blacks were “not yet freed from the bonds of injustice,” Kennedy observed. They were “not yet freed from social and economic oppression.” Then he added an insight that Black abolitionists, civil rights activists, and organizers had advocated for centuries: “And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

The idea of affirmative action looms large in the white imagination and has been a passion among conservative activists. Some white people even believe that black people get to go to college for free—when the reality is, black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their lifetimes because they don’t have the passed-down wealth that even poorer white students often have. And in selective college admissions, any given white person is far more likely to be competing with another white person than with one of the underrepresented people of color in the applicant pool.

the solution to America’s race problem—a problem analyzed and discussed for decades by armies of sociologists, politicians and activists—is internal, not external.

the solution to America’s race problem—a problem analyzed and discussed for decades by armies of sociologists, politicians and activists—is internal, not external. It is inward, not outward; personal, not social; individual, not political.

That free time is one of the biggest barriers to activism was, in a way, proven in the summer of 2020, as the protests over George Floyd and the slew of other Black lives lost became the most attended protests in American history. Up to twenty-six million Americans participated, a number that would be unthinkable were it not for the converging COVID-19 epidemic and the unprecedented amount of free time that accompanied it.

modern city-dwellers, surrounded by hot, baking concrete, imagine the environment as something pristine and paradisal, like a French impressionist landscape. Eco-activists, even more idealistic in their viewpoint, envision nature as harmoniously balanced and perfect, absent the disruptions and depredations of mankind. Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague. We don’t fantasize about the beauty of these aspects of nature, although they are just as real as their Edenic counterparts.

Most narratives of the movement for gay equality exalt an uprising by the patrons at a New York City bar, the martyrdom of a San Francisco city councilor, and the activism against an orange juice spokeswoman in Miami. All of these played a significant role. But the spark for the revolution was lit, and its flame was tended, in Washington, DC, by a motley procession of once-secret people beginning with a stubborn astronomer who fought back against government discrimination by appealing to the country’s founding documents; an obese albino pornographer who won for his fellow gay men the same freedom to read that their heterosexual countrymen enjoyed; the African American civil rights leader who refused to let a powerful segregationist dictate the terms of his citizenship as a man who was both Black and gay; the lesbian presidential aide so deeply closeted that she never came out yet who organized the first meeting of gay activists at the White House; and the thousands of clerks, managers, secretaries, legislative directors, technology specialists, cryptologists, speechwriters, legal counsels, librarians, and other ordinary people who chose to live their lives honestly. Like

And yet vile as it was, the fugitive slave law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists, both black and white, because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet.

When Antifa activists fail, publicize it. Because when its failure is broadcast, Antifa begins to lose support. These attacks were once rare, but unfortunately they are becoming more and more common, and they are being perpetrated against innocent people.

Aşkistani: Citizen of Love (The Sonnet) Listen you all peddlers of hate, Hard as you may blow the horn of tyranny. To jeopardize all your stone-age stupidity, You'll always be confronted with an aşkistani. We won't let your children come to harm, Nor will we strike you back in vengeance. But when you vilify the sanctity of human life, Rest assured we'll restrain you without violence. Violence may be your childish habit, You may practice it all you desire. We are the revolution of conscience, That incinerates prejudice by sheer willpower. We are not here to peddle any ideology. All we ask is come let's be one family.

When he was alive, Marlon Riggs, activist, scholar, and filmmaker, used to insist in conversations with me and Essex [Hemphill] that “black men loving black men was the most revolutionary act.” To Marlon this statemen t was an affirmation of the importance of self-love. He believed that a self-hating individual black male, irrespective of his sexual preference, would never be able to love another black male. While I agree that anyone mired in self-hate cannot love anyone, I used to tell him that the “most revolutionary act” black men could make was to deal psychoanalytically with their childhoods.” For it is in childhood that so many black males, gay and straight, come to fear masculinity and manhood. This fear is often based on painful and abusive interaction between fathers and/or male parental caretakers and sons.

When his mother told M.L. he was as good as anyone, she implied that there were others who didn’t think so and raised an issue that would shape her son’s life, as it would shape the lives of many others. Why am I defined and categorized? Why am I judged? “I was greatly shocked,” he wrote, “and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person.” His story was hardly unusual. “Every black child in the South has an experience of racism that shafts his soul,” wrote James Farmer, the civil rights activist, who was nine years older than Martin Luther King Jr. and had his own such story. “For the lucky, it is like a bolt of lightning, striking one to his knees. For the others, a gradual dying, a sliver of meanness working its way to the heart.

The state has to adopt an activist role in rehumanizing vast swaths of human beings that it made into psychotic and irrational racists into moral creatures. This activist role was achieved by state intrusion into the sphere of property ownership by white individuals. Property rights are not absolute; they are contextual.

The welcome and support Cuba offered these and other Black radicals from the United States, however, was not extended to its own Black activists

You know what Black means? BLACK means Brave, BLACK means Leaderly, BLACK means Adventurous, BLACK means Considerate, BLACK means Kind. You know what Woman means? WOMAN means Wonder, WOMAN means Original, WOMAN means Miracle-worker, WOMAN means Affectionate, WOMAN means Noble. You know what Pride means? PRIDE means Passionate, PRIDE means Resilient, PRIDE means Indefatigable, PRIDE means Determined, PRIDE means Equal. You know what Muslim means? MUSLIM means Magnanimous, MUSLIM means Unbending, MUSLIM means Sensible, MUSLIM means Luminous, MUSLIM means Inquisitive, MUSLIM means Mindful. You know what Asian means? ASIAN means Amiable, ASIAN means Strong, ASIAN means Independent, ASIAN means Articulate, ASIAN means Neighborly. In short, you know what Human means? HUMAN means Harmonious across Hate, Undivided through Diversity, Mindful amidst Mindlessness, Amiable amidst Apathy, and Neighborly amidst Nonchalance.

I ain't your nigger, I am your trigger - trigger for revolution whenever there is oppression - trigger for ascension whenever there is assumption - trigger for assimilation whenever there is discrimination.

Lord I am just another activist in silence. Let my books speak what lacerates deep into my spirit.

Under the influence of activists like Jim Fouratt these alliances extended (though were not limited) to domestic movements like the Black Panthers and foreign ones such as the Viet Cong, Mao’s regime in China, Castro’s Cuba and more. The fact that these movements were explicit in their varied opposition to homosexuals (Mao’s China, for instance, being willing to publicly castrate ‘sexual degenerates’) was merely one of those contradictions that needed to be got over.