Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was – 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within – internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.
Kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.
I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.
I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.
But at the same time you can’t assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.
And I guess what I would say is that we can’t think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can’t necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation.
I’m involved in the work around prison rights in general.
It’s true that it’s within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it’s not going to solve the problems.
I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.
As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.
When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he’s referring to.
Yes, I think it’s really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.
I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.
First of all, I didn’t suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
I’m suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.
Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.
In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.
It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.
The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs – it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
Everyone is familiar with the slogan “The personal is political” – not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.