It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.
Black history is indeed American history, but it is also world history.
As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.
The freedom movement was expansive. It was about transforming the entire country. It was not simply about acquiring civil rights within a framework that itself would not change.
Being Black ensures there will be struggle; it doesn’t guarantee the tools to fight back. One myth down. Three thousand to go.
I’m part of a righteous people who anger slowly but rage undamned. We’ll gather at his door in such a number that the rumbling of our feet will make the earth tremble.
Progressive struggles – whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues – are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.
During the commentary on Ferguson, someone pointed out that the purpose of the police is supposed to be to protect and serve. At least, that’s their slogan. Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.
Moving beyond merely responding to partner violence and sexual assault, this more expansive approach led to the inclusion of immigrant rights, Indigenous treaty rights, and reproductive justice, as well as the violence of incarceration and militarism.
In Victoria, prison and police officers are vested with the power and responsibility to do acts which, if done outside of work hours, would be crimes of sexual assault.
The more appropriate question was how to understand the intersections and interconnections between the two movements. We are still faced with the challenge of understanding the complex ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability are intertwined – but also how we move beyond these categories to understand the interrelationships of ideas and processes that seem to be separate and unrelated.
The labor that slaves performed for their own sake and not for the aggrandizement of their masters was carried out on terms of equality. Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations.
The convenient omission of household workers’ problems from the programs of “middle-class” feminists past and present has often turned out to be a veiled justification – at least on the part of the affluent women – of their own exploitative treatment of their maids.
Margaret Sanger offered her public approval of this development. “Morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends” ought to be surgically sterilized, she argued in a radio talk. She did not wish to be so intransigent as to leave them with no choice in the matter; if they wished, she said, they should be able to choose a lifelong segregated existence in labor camps.
To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce.
If we expand our definition of punishment under slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual relations between slave and master constituted a penalty exacted on women, if only for the sole reason that they were slaves. In other words, the deviance of the slave master was transferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized. Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners.
Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.
Deprivation of ancestry affects the present and the future.
Just as the struggle to end South African apartheid was embraced by people all over the world and was incorporated into many social justice agendas, solidarity with Palestine must likewise be taken up by organizations and movements involved in progressive causes all over the world.
Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.
The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.