Monthly Archives: March 2017
A wider lens and some good advice from Richard Heinberg
In his 3-15 article “Disengage from the spectacle,” posted at http://www.postcarbon.org, Richard Heinberg describes the beginning of the Trump administration as “Empire’s End,” TV’s latest and biggest-ever 24/7 reality show, decades in the making, “with a budget in the trillions, a cast of billions, and a hero-villain more colorful and pathetic than Tony Soprano or Walter White.” He advises that “at least some of us are better off severely limiting our consumption of American national news right now. It’s not that events in Washington won’t affect us – they will. Rather, there are even more important things to attend to, over which we have far greater agency.
First Premise: We’re at the end of the period of general economic growth that characterized the post-WWII era. I’ve written extensively about this, and there’s no need to repeat myself at length here. Suffice it to say that we humans have harvested the world’s cheap and easy-to-exploit energy resources, and the energy that’s left won’t support the kind of consumer economy we’ve built much longer. In order to keep the party roaring, we’ve built up consumer and government debt levels to unsustainable extremes. We’ve also pumped hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and oceans, putting the entire biosphere at risk. Our current economic and political systems also require further, endless growth in order to avert collapse. Almost no one wants to discuss all of this, but everyone senses a change in the air: despite jiggered statistics, workers know their wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years, and members of the younger generation generally expect to earn less that their parents. This generates a persistent low-level sense of fear and dissatisfaction, guaranteeing the type of political shift we’re seeing.
Second Premise: The new U.S. regime is adopting an essentially fascist character. When empires decline, people often turn to leaders perceived as strong, who promise to return the nation to its former glory. In extreme instances, such leaders can be characterized as fascist, using the word in a generic sense to refer to authoritarian nationalism distinguished by one-party rule, the demonization of internal and external enemies (usually tinged with some form of racism or anti-Semitism), controls on press freedoms, and social conservatism. Once a nation turns decisively toward fascism, it rarely turns back, since fascist regimes ruthlessly destroy all opposition. It usually takes a foreign invasion or a complete economic-political-social collapse to reset a national government that’s gone fascist.
Those who get the second premise but miss the first tend to conclude that, at least until the new regime neutralizes significant opposition within the government, there are still things we can do to return life to ‘normal.’ But the end of growth ensures that, beyond a certain point, there will be no more ‘normal.’ We’re headed into new territory no matter what. Taking both premises into account, what are the likely outcomes?
It’s possible that the Trump administration will succeed in rooting out or suppressing opposition not just in Congress and the media, but also in executive-branch departments, including the CIA and FBI. In that case we may see at least a few years of authoritarian national governance punctuated by worsening financial and environmental crises against a backdrop of accelerating national decline. But thanks to Premise One, short-term success won’t lead to a stable regime over the long term. Eventually, no matter how vigorously it suppresses real or perceived enemies, the U.S. federal government will collapse as a result of war, economic crisis, or the simple ongoing erosion of biophysical support systems. At that point a possible trajectory for the nation would be to break apart into smaller geographically defined political entities.
The short-term success of the current regime isn’t assured anyway. It’s still possible that establishmentarian Democratic and Republican members of Congress, working with renegade CIA and FBI mid-level officials and mainstream media outlets, could mire the new leadership in a scandal too deep to survive. Or, if Republicans lose control of Congress in 2018, articles of impeachment could be brought against Trump. This wouldn’t guarantee a return to status quo politics in Washington though. Not only does Premise One guarantee that the old status quo is no longer tenable, but on its own terms the political system is now too broken and the nation too divided. In this scenario, pro-regime and anti-regime elites might continue to escalate their attacks on one another until the whole system crashes.
In either case, there’s no national team to root for capable of restoring the status quo ante Trump for long, if that’s even desirable. Under either scenario, competent local governance might provide significantly better living conditions than the national average, but the overall picture is pretty grim. A few years from now I expect that we’ll be in very different territory socially, politically, and economically. Nevertheless, what we do in the meantime could make a big positive difference to people and planet, both over the short term and also over the long term. Here are some specific things you can do:
Disengage from the spectacle. Learn what you need to know in order to assess immediate threats and general trends, but otherwise avoid spending long periods of time ingesting online, print, radio, or televised media. It’s bad for your mental health and takes time away from other items on this list. If you haven’t already done so, make a personal and family resilience plan in case of a temporary breakdown in the basic functions of government (everyone should do this anyway in view of our vulnerability to earthquakes or weather disasters). Are you growing any of your own food? Do you have other practical skills? Do you have stored food and water? Do you have cash set aside? Work to build community resilience as well. If and when national governance breaks down, your local community’s degree of social and biophysical resilience will make all the difference for you and your family. Biophysical resilience relates to local food, water, and energy systems. A socially resilient community is one in which people are talking to and looking out for one another, and institutions for resolving disputes are trusted. Identify organizations that are building both kinds of resilience in your community and engage with them. These could be churches; government and non-profit organizations; food, energy, and health co-ops; neighborhood safety groups; local investment clubs; or Transition groups. Get involved with existing organizations or start new ones. It takes time, but friends like these are more important than money in the bank, especially in times of social and political upheaval. Direct some of your resilience-building efforts toward long-term and nature-centered concerns. – also work that proceeds best in the company of others. Take time as well for the conservation of culture – arts and skills that are their own reward. Connecting with others in your community by enjoying or playing music together, singing, dancing, or making visual art deepens relationships and gives life more dimension and meaning. Participating in protests could enable you to get to know other members of your community or further fragment your community if it’s deeply divided politically. At certain moments in history it’s necessary to take a stand one way or the other on a particular issue, and in the days ahead some issue may require you to plant your flag. This historical moment is also one in which many real heroes and heroines engage in ways that aren’t scripted by any of the elites.”
In an earlier essay, “Traditionalism” through the Lens of Cultural Ecology,” published 2-27 (also on postcarbon.org), Heinberg discusses the political philosophies now vying against each other in Washington. “The common terms liberalism and conservatism have lost their usefulness in navigating these political waters,” he says. Traditionalism is a more useful term, representing “the recent rightward ideological surge in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world, but it remains widely unfamiliar and poorly defined. In this essay, I’ll explore the significance of traditionalism using a conceptual tool I call cultural ecology: an inquiry into the ways society shapes itself in response to geography, energy resources, and other environmental factors. My understanding of cultural ecology is derived from the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris, who investigated how societies were transformed by their shifts from hunting-and-gathering to farming, and how they adapted themselves to various geographies (geographer Jared Diamond also made important contributions along these lines).
In the last couple of centuries, a shift as profound as the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago occurred as societies came to base their economies on the use of fossil fuels. Now, as the fossil fuel era starts to wane, wrenching changes in the social, intellectual, political, and religious foundations of modern society should be anticipated. Fossil-fueled society came to full flower during the 20th century. With unprecedented amounts of energy available, economies grew rapidly, and the expectation of further and unending growth became a core feature of economic and political theory, along with the notion that unending progress was also to be expected in social, scientific, and political realms. Capitalism – the private ownership of what Marx called the ‘means of production,’ along with mechanisms for constant reinvestment in the expansion of those means – was never so much a coherent ideology as a set of cobbled-together agreements and institutions. Since capitalism’s tendency (as Marx observed) was to produce ever greater economic inequality along with worsening boom-bust cycles, efforts were made to restrain those tendencies through redistributive taxation and social programs, along with financial, labor, and environmental regulations (which were seen by many as signs of social and political progress). Immigration and globalization served to reduce labor costs, but were also regarded as evidence of progress toward a more egalitarian, multicultural ideal. The acceptance and resettlement of refugees from political strife or natural disasters represented a national expression of humanitarianism. This was the milieu within which liberal and conservative political discourse took place; that discourse questioned relative degrees of power and benefit enjoyed by social groups (e.g., workers versus managers versus owners of capital) but seldom challenged the shared allegiance to growth. Within a growing economy, there was always more for (nearly) everyone, even though some were able to obtain a much higher percentage of the increasing overall wealth.
The fossil fuel era is now failing. Even without climate change, oil, coal, and natural gas are finite resources extracted using the low-hanging fruit principle. While large amounts of these resources remain, each further increment extracted offers declining energy returns on the energy invested in production, an instance of the law of diminishing returns. The situation with respect to oil is approaching crisis: while production rates are high, costs to producers are soaring, and the higher prices needed to cover those costs can’t be sustained because they tend to frustrate economic growth and kill demand for motor fuel. The petroleum industry is between a proverbial rock and hard place, with debt increasing and profit evaporating. Alternative energy sources will need to be introduced at eight to ten times the current rate of solar and wind build-out to avert a climate or a depletion crisis. In any case, it’s highly doubtful that renewable or nuclear energy could support the consumer economy we’ve come to rely on. Since energy is the basis for all economic activity (a fact mainstream economists have been slow to grasp), the end of the fossil fuel era effectively means the end of growth.
Just as a growing economy encouraged the development of the ideological and social constructs of the 20th century, a stagnating or contracting economy is likely to favor a different and uglier politics whose main themes are: longing (and promises) for the return of a lost condition of abundance, blaming social or political groups for the current situation, and calling for the exclusion of others deemed to be competing with ‘us’ for increasingly scarce resources. This could be a description of what would, in ordinary political discourse, be termed far-right nationalist populism.
Insight into ideological Trumpism can be gleaned from the beliefs of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. According to the website Politico, his favored readings ‘tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. They tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone.’ One of Bannon’s influences is said to be blogger Curtis Yarvin, a leader of a movement called Dark Enlightenment that rejects egalitarianism and multiculturalism along with the progressive view of world history. Dark Enlightenment supports strong, centralized political leadership, libertarian economics, and socially conservative views on gender roles, race relations, and immigration. Another Bannon favorite is Nassim Taleb, author of the 2014 book Antifragile, which proposes managing systems in a way that benefits from random events, errors, and volatility.
The term traditionalism crops up in the work of Italian philosopher Julius Evola (1898-1974). A recent New York Times article explored Bannon’s fascination with Evola, ‘a leading proponent of traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.’ Evola’s book Revolt Against the Modern World speculated that the near-universal myth of a lost Golden Age is actually a collective memory of a time when religious and temporal power were united, and society was ruled by spiritual warriors. He believed that the modern world represents a serious decline from that society.
In my first book, Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (1989, revised edition 1995), I explained how the idea of a lost Golden Age has long been associated with various forms of millenarianism, the notion that the current world is degraded and approaching a cleansing crisis from which a revived paradisiacal condition will emerge. Millenarian movements (of which many variants of Christianity and Islam are clear examples) often spring up during times of secular decline or crisis, and typically take the form of a cult led by a charismatic visionary aiming to ‘make the world great again.’ Sometimes a benign character, the leader is more often malign — like Hitler. In my view, the myth of a Golden Age is a deep cultural memory of our shared origin in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, when we lived embedded in nature rather than separate from and dominating it.
To summarize, cultural ecology predicts that a historical moment of change such as ours would provide the ideal growth medium for social and religious movements that glorify a largely imagined past, anticipate a cathartic renewal (which they may seek to precipitate), and promise followers a privileged position in the coming order.
Some of the basic features of traditionalism are evident in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which went through an end-of-growth crisis in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR. In a 2013 speech at the Valdai conference in Russia, Putin warned, ‘We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They’re denying moral principles and traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual.’ In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, Steve Bannon called Putin a kleptocrat, but spoke approvingly of his philosophy: ‘We the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what Putin is talking about as far as traditionalism goes, particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.’ One of Putin’s influence is Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right Russian political philosopher and fan of Julius Evola. Dugin has asserted that, ‘Only after restoring the Greater Russia that is the Eurasian Union, can we become a credible global player.” He’s helped Putin forge alliances with nationalist movements in Europe, including Marine LePen’s National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Ataka Party in Bulgaria, and Hungary’s Jobbik Party. Putin’s friend Viktor Orbán, now prime minister of Hungary, has promised to turn his country into an ‘illiberal democracy’ modeled on Russia. He is virulently anti-Muslim, seeing Islam as a ‘rulebook for another world.’
Traditionalism demands an enemy, and the fear and loathing of Islam is a key feature of far-right populism in both Europe and the U.S. Here’s Steve Bannon on the dangers of what he calls ‘jihadist Islamic fascism’: ‘I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis. There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.’ The expectation of an ultimate cathartic clash between a traditionalist Christian West and jihadist Islam is of course shared by radical Islamist movements such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, which themselves represent brands of millenarianism. (The description of the relationship between Islam and the West as a “clash of civilizations” appeared first in a 1957 speech at Johns Hopkins University by British orientalist Bernard Lewis, and Harvard professor Samuel Huntington popularized the idea.)
Societies in decline or crisis don’t always elevate far-right leaders and social movements. The medieval Joachimites and Brethren of the Free Spirit (whose followers endured plagues and wrenching poverty), and the 17th century Ranters in Britain (where small farmers were losing their land to the wealthy) promoted a radically egalitarian vision of human relations. Much more recently, a period of economic contraction and crisis in the United States produced one of the country’s most left-leaning presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, it could be argued that Barack Obama was an FDR-like figure tasked to address the global financial crisis of 2008, but that his too-tepid response (or the fact that the crisis was too deeply-rooted to yield fully to Keynesian formulae) then opened the way for far-right Trumpism.
Traditionalism therefore characterizes only one phase of the cultural and political aftermath to the end of growth. While for the foreseeable future (and in certain nations or regions) circumstances may favor strong leaders who demonize racial or religious groups and promise a restoration of forsaken values, their regimes may disappear as quickly as they arrived on the scene. Polities may fragment, with formerly united regions choosing to follow separate paths. Currently, large swathes of America (accounting for over half its total population) are proving highly resistant to the Trumpist mental virus, and much the same could be said with regard to Europe.
A far-left millenarian movement could also arise, a form of militant egalitarianism like Bolshevism or Mao’s Red Brigades that could potentially prove as dangerous as any other brand of extreme millenarianism. But our future options need not be limited to competing brands of millenarianism. Individuals and communities can focus on practical efforts to bring the greatest good to the most people (and other species) over the longest time by rethinking and redesigning production and consumption patterns in anticipation of the failure of existing consumerist institutions. The word ‘good’ in the previous sentence is of course open to definition and redefinition, but even a meager understanding of ecology and psychology would suggest that it should point to values like diversity (permitting the flourishing of many kinds of species and cultures), happiness, health, autonomy, and sustainability.” Heinberg then gives the same recommendations as in his 3-15 post. He concludes: “Millenarianism is a collective psychological expression of stress and powerlessness. The antidote is to act. In a time of division, unite. In a time of demonization, reach out.” He then recommends a new Post Carbon Institute online course called ‘Think Resilience: Preparing Communities for the Rest of the 21st Century,'” available at education.resilience.org.
Famine imminent in four African countries
Climate change induced drought is sweeping across Africa, resulting in starvation and disease in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen. 20 million lives are at stake, and UN officials are billions of dollars short of being able to respond. The needed food and water are there, even within the affected countries, but people who have lost their crops and cattle are too poor to buy them, and/or unable to get to where they are because of distance and armed conflict. Yemen is being bombed and blockaded by the US-supported Saudis, determined to force regime change. In northeastern Nigeria, thousands of displaced people lacking clean water to drink and wash with are dying from preventable diseases as the battle grinds on between Islamist militants and the Nigerian military. In South Sudan, both rebel forces and government soldiers are intentionally blocking emergency food and hijacking food trucks, aid officials say. In Somalia, the Shabab militant Islamist group has banned Western aid agencies.
When rivers and other relatively clean water sources start drying up, as they are now in Somalia, people start to get sick from the slimy or cloudy water they’re forced to drink. They flee their villages, hoping to get help in the towns. Camps form, but they don’t have enough water either, and it’s hard to find a latrine or enough water for people to wash their hands. Shockingly fast, they become disease factories.
Water, of course, is less negotiable than food. A human being can survive weeks with nothing to eat. Five days without water leads to death.
Different helping strategies are being emphasized this time. One is simply giving out cash. United Nations agencies and private aid groups in Somalia are scaling up efforts to dole out money through a new electronic card system and by mobile phone. This allows poor people to get a monthly allowance and shop for food and water. It helps the local economy (importing food doesn’t), and people get help fast. The developed countries responsible for climate change owe this help to people who have done little or nothing to contribute to what’s killing them. And many more Africans may soon need it. Sweltering days and poor rains so far this year have also left Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania parched and on the edge of major food crises.
From a New York Times article, “Drought and War Heighten Threat of Not Just One Famine, but Four” by Jeffrey Gettleman (3-27-17).
Feminism for the 99%
Since today’s the day of the March 8th Women’s Strike and International Women’s Day, it makes sense to consider the thoughts of one of the strike’s organizers, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who was interviewed on 2-28-17 by Truthout’s Sarah Jaffe. As always, I’ve edited the interview for clarity and brevity.
SJ: The call to strike that you coauthored talks about building a feminism for the 99%. Can you talk a little bit about what that means?
K-YT: It’s partly a response to the idea that the last frontier for women to challenge are the glass ceilings blocking the ascension of women in electoral politics and corporate America. That isn’t the last frontier for ordinary and working class women. Feminism for the 99% is about rejecting that idea that women are only or primarily concerned with their role in the elite male world, and emphasizing that there are still basic issues such as wage differentials and access to reproductive health care. Black women make $0.63 for each dollar that white men make, for example. Which, of course, is lower than the usual barometer that people use, the $0.78 to the dollar that white women make.
In a sense almost all issues are women’s issues, as attacks on social programs, public education, and government-funded health care have a severe impact on women’s lives. There is also no publicly funded childcare. On a very basic level, we need a feminist politics that responds to these issues as the most urgent. The outpouring around the January 21st protest showed that there is actually vast support for a resurgent feminist movement on this basis. There’s also an understanding that the problems experienced by women today are rooted in an economic system that privileges the 1% over the 99%, a system that also relies on the free labor of women in the home to reproduce itself. Also, we now have as president a billionaire who’s made his money by exploiting loopholes in the system, a misogynist who’s abused women, so it’s not surprising that the first protests against his administration have been organized by women and mostly attended by women, and that women’s issues have become a focal point of the resistance movement.
SJ: You wrote a wonderful book about the Black Lives Matter movement (From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 2016), putting it in historical context. I wonder what your thoughts are on how that movement is changing and shifting under Trump.
K-YT: I think that Trump put Black Lives Matter and the activist organizations affiliated with it in the crosshairs early on. His entire posture around law and order was created in opposition to Black Lives Matter and what he called a climate that was “anti-police.” That’s had a particular impact; for the president of the United States and his supporters to refer to political activists as terrorists, which they’ve done around Black Lives Matter, means a particular thing in the security state atmosphere of the United States. It’s put activists on the defensive and created a situation in which people internalize – look inside of their organizations to figure out how to tighten things up and politically respond to Trump. That’s understandable, but I think we’re at a moment where we need to look outward and connect with other groups of people experiencing some of the same attacks. Police abuse and violence isn’t just an issue affecting African American communities, and Trump is trying to expand the powers of the police to put other groups in the crosshairs. Attacks on the undocumented and the attempts of the Trump administration to deputize police officers in the effort to round them up, and attacks on Muslims and Arabs also call on greater powers for the state and its armed agents. These create an almost natural alliance of people to stand up against policing and police abuse. What all of this means is that we need a bigger movement to confront the police – a movement that tries to connect the issues. I think there has to be a great effort among folks from Black Lives Matter and other organizations that have been fighting these things to make connections with other groups for the sake of expanding the movement, while also preserving the space and understanding that these policies continue to have a disproportionate impact in Black communities.
Notes on Chang’s book on race shortened
On February 24th, I posted my notes on “We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation” by Jeff Chang (2016), saying that it’s the best book on race in this country I’ve seen for awhile, and adding that if we don’t finally get race right, nothing will be right. I’ve redone those notes to shorten and clarify them, in the hope that more of you will read them. Apologies to Jeff Chang, whose book is definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I think I’ve gotten the gist of it, and better this than nothing.
Beginning with what he calls the “crisis cycle,” Chang says, “We’re living in serious times. Since 2012, the names of the fallen – Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, the list never seems to cease – have catalyzed collective outrage and grief. In the waning years of a Black presidency, we saw a proliferation of images of Black people killed in the streets and the rise of a national justice movement to affirm that Black lives matter. After the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the idea that there had ever been a post-racial moment has come to seem desperately naïve. Meanwhile, Donald Trump focuses the anxieties loosed by white vulnerability onto the bodies of migrants, Muslims, Blacks, women, and all the others who don’t deserve the gift of America. It seems clearer than ever that we as a nation are caught in a bad loop of history – from 1965 to 1992 to now. Race makes itself known in crisis, in the singular event that captures a larger pattern of abuse and pain. We react to crisis with a flurry of words and, sometimes, actions. Then the reaction sparks its own backlash of outrage, justification, and denial, leading to exhaustion, complacency, and paralysis. And before long, we’re back in crisis.
Inequity and injustice aren’t abstract things – they impact real people. In terms of poverty, annual income, wealth, health, housing, schooling, and incarceration, persistent gaps separate whites from Black, Latino, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, and American Indian populations. In the specific case of premature death – defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as death among persons under the age of 75 – the death rate of Blacks is over 50% higher than that of whites, and higher than that of all other major ethnic groups, except some American Indian cohorts. Only a small part of this statistic is attributable to homicide and that favorite digression of conservative pundits, ‘Black-on-Black violence.’ Rather, it’s the result of large disparities in access to quality food; regular and preventive health care; and diseases like cancer, stroke, and HIV. A shockingly large portion is the result of an African American infant mortality rate more than double that of white Americans, triple that of Swiss citizens, and five times that of Japanese citizens. Racism kills.
Extrajudicial police shootings have been the organizing spark of the Movement for Black Lives. But they’re based on segregation and resegregation, now mostly happening out of our sight. Whether through white flight, the optics of diversity, or metaphorical and actual wall building, the privileged spare themselves the sight of disparity, and foreclose the possibility of empathy and transformation. We live in a time when merchants of division draw us away from mutuality and toward the undoing of democracy. David Graeber proposes that their demagoguery isn’t different from schoolyard bullying. Trump, the silver spoon–fed child who as a second grader punched his music teacher in the eye, aspired ‘to be the toughest kid in the neighborhood.’ Graeber: ‘When researchers question children on why they don’t intervene to protect the bullied, the majority say they didn’t like what happened, and didn’t much like the bully, but decided that getting involved might mean ending up on the receiving end of the same treatment.’ Reactionaries don’t need to sustain the belief or the anger of the fearful; they need only the silence and complicity of the masses. The culture wars continue through justificatory innocence and willed inaction, allowing the structures that produce inequality and segregation to persist. If most Americans recoil from the kind of excessive, gleeful, cynical bigotry of someone like Donald Trump, they’re demobilized by denial (‘there is no problem’) or justification (‘there’s a problem but I can’t solve it’). Trump supporters are told that when demonstrators pour into the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, they’re supporting the killing of cops. ‘Black lives matter’ isn’t a call to end state violence against Blacks, and in that way to end state violence against all – it’s hatred of whites, a premonition of racial apocalypse.”
Ever since the Supreme Court decided in the 1979 Bakke case that affirmative action, an effort to redress hundreds of years of putting Blacks last was essentially anti-white, efforts at fairness have gone by the boards. The appearance of diversity on college campuses and culturally is just that, Chang says – a matter of what he calls “optics.” He also brings up an interesting point about free speech, noting that “racial attacks and hate speech, as well as the ‘anti-PC’ defense of them, are proof that free speech isn’t a neutral good equally available to all, because tolerance of hate speech isn’t tolerance borne by the community at large – it’s a psychic tax imposed on those least able to pay. On the other hand, protest, when it comes from those at the bottom, can often be a profound proposition about how to make the world better for all. Campuses, like the country itself, are seeing rising levels of hate and intolerance, the tragic result of over a quarter century of intensifying racial inequality and resegregation and a silence over these selfsame issues. Despite more and more diverse applicants, universities continue to admit fewer Black and brown students and provide them with less support. In 2012, a system-wide survey of over 100,000 students, staff, and faculty by the University of California found that one in four respondents ‘had personally experienced exclusionary, intimidating, offensive, and/or hostile conduct’ on campus.’ The most competitive Black and Latino students declined admission offers at places where affirmative action had been gutted, like the University of California and University of Michigan, and instead gathered at historically Black colleges and universities and private, elite universities that promised community and support.”
Chang also addresses “cultural equity,” pointing out that “culture, like food, sustains us and shapes our relations with each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people don’t have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas, and stories. To say that American culture is inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each other in our full humanity, making the creation of a more just society less likely. Cultural equity isn’t just about representation. It’s also about access and power. Who has access to the means of production of culture? Who has the power to shape it?” Much of this is an issue of funding. “Arts produced by diverse groups of people are socially valuable because they offer us ideas, technologies, and values that help us figure out how to live together. A vital, equitable culture offers us a sense of individual worth, bolsters our collective adaptability, and forms a foundation for social progress. In that sense, cultural diversity is just like biodiversity – at its best, it functions like a creative ecosystem. The final product of culture isn’t a commodity – it’s society. We’re far from that ideal.”
In the next section of the book, Chang describes how resegregation has taken place. “Americans are sorting themselves into new geographic alignments that will define political polarization in the coming decades. Cities are becoming wealthier and whiter. Aging suburbs are becoming poorer and darker, and being abandoned, policed, and contained the way communities of color in inner cities were for the past century.” Ferguson, Missouri, north of St. Louis, is an example of this. “Once a ‘sundown town’ where Blacks weren’t allowed after dark, between 1970 and 2010, it went from 1% to 67% Black.” Why? Because of the elimination of public and affordable housing in the former St. Louis ghettoes, a trend seen in many other cities during the 1990s and 2000s. Suburban communities, Chang says, are now either predominantly Black (and impoverished) or predominantly white and better off.
“Power in most of the municipalities outside of St. Louis remained in the hands of whites, and they reorganized their systems of policy-making, policing, and justice to exploit poor Black populations. Greater St. Louis remains one of the most hypersegregated regions in the country, alongside Baltimore, Cleveland, and Detroit, all key nodes on the map of the Movement for Black Lives. When the economic crash came in 2008, Blacks and Latinos were 70% more likely than whites to lose their homes to foreclosure, and the highest rates of foreclosure were in racially integrated neighborhoods.
Ferguson
At a minute after noon on August 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr. and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for jaywalking. Two minutes later,” a man on a nearby apartment balcony, took a photo of two policemen standing watch over Brown’s lifeless body. Soon people were congregating on the behind a police line, and words and images were spreading over the internet. It would be twenty minutes before police covered Brown’s body. Witnesses, including Dorian Johnson, told reporters that Mike had had his hands up when the cop shot him. Family members, including Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, and father, Michael Brown, Sr., were kept away from the body. Some nodded in agreement when McSpadden gave an interview to a local television reporter. ‘You took my son away from me. You know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many Black men graduate? Not many! Because you bring them down to this type of level where they feel like, “I don’t got nothing to live for anyway, they gon’ try to take me out anyway.”’ People began chanting, ‘Kill the police!’ Gunshots were heard nearby, and dozens more county and Ferguson cops, almost all white, were called. They arrived wearing bulletproof vests and brandishing assault rifles. They walked snarling police dogs up the driveways of the apartment complex, pushing people back toward their homes.
Hours after Brown was killed, his neighborhood resembled a war zone. On West Florissant, the street from which Brown and Johnson had been walking home, what residents would come to call ‘the tanks’ made their first appearance. County tactical operations units deployed Lenco BearCat vehicles, designed for SWAT teams to use ‘in hostile Urban Environments,’ outfitted with half-inch-steel ballistic armor, two-and-a-half-inch-thick windows, and eleven gun ports. Through it all, Michael Brown’s body lay under the burning sun. It would be more than four hours before his body was removed from the street. In the dimming daylight, firefighters hosed down the road and the police took down the yellow tape. The crowd followed Lezley McSpadden into the middle of Canfield Drive. Someone had given her a bouquet of roses. She removed the petals and gently dropped them to mark the spot where her son’s blood still stained the road. People placed flowers and lit candles.
Others, including representatives of the Organization for Black Struggle, one of the area’s oldest racial justice organizations, were making signs and talking strategy about how to get answers from the police. Back on Canfield Drive, a dumpster behind the apartments had been set on fire, and authorities moved in. Pushed back against the curb by growling police dogs straining at their leashes, residents and others who’d earlier gathered around the scene of the crime were now surrounded by police on all sides. Near the lamppost that had marked the edge of the yellow tape line, they held their hands in the air, chanting, ‘Hands up! Don’t shoot!’ One cop walked his dog over to the memorial that McSpadden had made for her son and let it pee on the flowers and candles. And after the rest of the policemen got into their vehicles to leave, they rolled over what was left of the memorial. In the days to come, these memorials to Michael Brown Jr. would be destroyed over and over, but every time they were torched or removed, people returned to put them up again. They were determined that this time the police wouldn’t get away with it. So began the daily protests in Ferguson against police brutality that continued unbroken for hundreds of days. It would become the longest rebellion in the history of the United States against police brutality.
Two weeks after Michael Brown was killed, the Arch City Defenders, a group of progressive St. Louis–area lawyers, released an influential white paper that exposed the link between policing, poverty, racial profiling, and city budget revenues. Throughout the county, Blacks experienced stops, searches, and arrests at much higher rates than whites. In 2013 the Ferguson court disposed of 24,352 warrants – more warrants than there were residents. Blacks, who made up 67% of the city and 6% of the police force, suffered 86% of traffic stops and 93% of arrests. Court fines and fees were the second-largest source of city revenue. A single violation – whether for a broken car taillight or failing to subscribe to the city’s garbage collection service – could set off a cycle of disaster leading to jail time, eviction, loss of child custody, and denial of loans and jobs. The Defenders called it a ‘modern debtors’ prison scheme.’ A Department of Justice investigation launched after the protests over Michael Brown’s killing found that Ferguson had implemented intentionally racist and unconstitutional practices in its policing and courts system. Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson’s jaywalking stop wasn’t unusual. It was routine. ‘From 2011 to 2013,’ the DOJ noted, ‘African Americans accounted for 95% of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94% of all Failure to Comply charges.’ The DOJ also stated bluntly that ‘Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.’ In one of its more stunning passages, the DOJ outlined how completely Ferguson’s system dehumanized its residents: ‘Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They’re inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence. Police supervisors and leadership do little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct. The result is a pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment; infringement on free expression, as well as retaliation for protected expression, in violation of the First Amendment; and excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.’ Black residents of St. Louis County had long lived with this.
On Sunday, August 10, 2014, inside the Ferguson Police Department conference room, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told reporters that Michael Brown had assaulted a police officer. He added that the officer had been placed on administrative leave, refused to give his name, and suggested that he might be returned to active duty. Thousands of demonstrators were in the streets, and armored Humvees and BearCat vehicles, riot-ready officers, canine units, and SWAT teams rolled down the hill into Ferguson. They swept people back toward the QuikTrip, which was looted and set on fire. After midnight, cops fired tear gas volleys all along West Florissant to clear the area.
By Monday, Day Three, the canine units had been replaced by snipers sitting atop armored vehicles equipped with ear-shattering acoustic riot-control devices and groups of paramilitary police toting tear gas launchers, training their night-vision goggles, their M4 carbines, and twelve-gauge shotguns on demonstrators. The burned-out QuikTrip had become a gathering place for the resistance. People distributed water and food and made signs. Street-theater artists performed plays. Buddhist monks prayed. Bands played. The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery wrote, ‘This was their Tahrir Square, their Tiananmen Square. The place each night where they would make their stand.’ Then police began firing tear gas canisters into people’s yards and at people’s cars, and over the loudspeakers the cops told people to go home. One woman stood on her lawn and yelled back, ‘This is my home. You’re the ones who need to go home.’
On Wednesday night, Day Five, the street clashes reached a climax. Police were pelted with rocks, bottles, bricks, even Molotov cocktails. Cops fired stun grenades, beanbag rounds, Stinger balls that worked like flash-bangs, and PepperBalls – ammo that someone described as ‘Pokémon balls that spit out gas.’ The next morning, Attorney General Eric Holder, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, and other politicians, left and right, decried the police militarization. St. Louis Police Chief Samuel Dotson pulled his officers back from Ferguson, publicly denouncing the county police’s warlike tactics. Even military personnel were outraged. When police pointed rifles at people’s chests, one retired army officer told the Washington Post, ‘That’s not controlling the crowd. That’s intimidating them.’ The journalist Radley Balko noted that the police seemed to have lost their mission: ‘The soldier’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy, to kill people and break things. A police officer’s job is to keep the peace and to protect our constitutional right’.” The same day, Governor Jay Nixon appointed Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, an African American resident of Florissant, to lead the command. Johnson met with Michael Brown’s family and marched with demonstrators. Thursday evening was the quietest of the week. But in the community, there was still a profound sense that police were protecting their own. On Friday, Day Seven, at QuikTrip, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson held a press conference to announce that the name of the officer who had shot Michael Brown was Darren Wilson. But before he did, Jackson described Brown’s August 9th robbery of Ferguson Market, immediately preceding his confrontation with Wilson.
Ferguson was now a national story, largely shaped by the people and the protesters. By the end of Friday, the Pew Research Center found, more than 7.9 million tweets had been generated under the hashtag #Ferguson. Social media fueled local and national interest, and organizing networks were forming. In the days that followed, Governor Nixon declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard, but demonstrations continued daily from morning to night. ‘This is civil rights 2.0,’ said young visual artist Damon Davis. ‘It’s not suits and ties anymore. It’s tattoos and dreads and queer women of color out here.’ Community meetings drew together over fifty different organizations to coordinate planning and training. In order to accommodate the needs of the growing movement, the St. Louis-based Organization for Black Struggle brought in leaders and organizers from Oakland, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Between August and October, they trained over 200 organizers in nonviolent direct action, and hundreds more in areas such as emergency response, medical support, crowd control, communications, and de-escalation.
Central to the national resistance was an organization called Black Lives Matter, started by San Francisco Bay Area organizer Alicia Garza, Los Angeles artist and activist Patrisse Cullors, and New York/Phoenix–based organizer Opal Tometi. On August 10th, as #Ferguson exploded on social media, so did #blacklivesmatter. The genesis of the idea had come the summer before after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. After the verdict was announced, Garza posted to her Facebook page, ‘I can’t breathe. NOT GUILTY.’ Her feed filled with posts from people who said they weren’t surprised. ‘That’s a damn shame in itself,’ she responded. ‘I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.’ She added, ‘Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.’ Cullors’s activism had sprung from the brutal beating of her brother by Los Angeles County jail officers. Garza also worried about her brother, in whom she saw Trayvon Martin. That night, the two women, who’d known each other for years through organizing circles, talked for a long time about Zimmerman, Martin, their brothers, and what needed to happen. Cullors put a hashtag in front of Garza’s refrain, posted it to Facebook, and suddenly a big idea cohered. The next day, the two contacted Tometi, a friend and communications expert, and a social-media campaign was born. ‘Black Lives Matter’ articulated their impatience with the politics of respectability – taking care in presenting oneself publicly to avoid saying or doing anything that would reflect badly on Blacks, reinforce negative racial stereotypes, or needlessly alienate potential allies…Obama-style politics, in other words. The Black Lives Matter activists were pro-queer feminists who worked with those on the margins of society: incarcerated people, domestic workers, and migrants. They thought of themselves as defiantly intersectional, and offered an expansive notion of what they called ‘Black love,’ a vision of radical diversity. Garza wrote, ‘Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black undocumented folks, folks with [criminal] records, women, and Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.’ Black Lives Matter challenged not only the content but the form of respectability politics – the traditional, charismatic Black messiah model that typically privileged straight male leadership and top-down, hierarchical infrastructures, such as the Black church. Instead, the movement drew on the methods and examples of Bayard Rustin, the gay man who led the mobilization of the 1963 March on Washington while eschewing the spotlight; Ella Baker, the woman who’d trained generations of organizers while strongly advocating modes of decentralized leadership; and Assata Shakur, the Black Panther activist exiled to Cuba who was still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and had written the lines they adopted as their mantra: ‘It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.’
Those who opposed the movement by arguing that ‘all lives matter’ couldn’t see the cold inhumanity of their stance. The systematic denigration of Black lives was inescapable, whether in shortened life expectancy or the growing list of extrajudicial murders. As always in the US, this conversation about race defaulted to a discussion about the needs of whites. But change would come only through a struggle to transform how everyone saw and treated Black lives. If Black lives mattered to all, then all lives really would matter.
The national network of organizations issued a set of demands, including the immediate arrest of Darren Wilson, the ending of police militarization, and reinvestment in resegregated, impoverished communities. To further these demands, organizers agreed to launch four days of civil disobedience they would call Ferguson October. But as the start of protests neared, the area was shaken by three more officer-involved extrajudicial killings. The first, just three miles away from Canfield Green and less than two weeks after Michael Brown was killed, involved the murder of Kajieme Powell, a mentally ill man who’d stolen two energy drinks from a store, then walked in circles taunting police. He has a steak knife, but hadn’t drawn it. Then, on September 19th, 21-year-old Kimberlee Randle-King was arrested in Pagedale, a small north county town. She’d been on her way to pick up her two children at her grandmother’s house, but ended up in a group of people arguing and tussling on the street. When she was taken in, police found Randle-King had seven ‘failure to appear’ warrants for traffic and vehicle violations and prepared to take her back to a cell. The police report said that she ‘became “hysterical,’ claiming she would lose her ‘job, house, and babies.’ Kimberlee then said, ‘I’m gonna die if I go back there.’ A half hour later, Randle-King was found dead in her cell, hanging by her own T-shirt. The last incident occurred on October 8th, two days before the start of Ferguson October. When VonDerrit Myers and some friends emerged from a night market after buying sandwiches, an off-duty cop who was working a nighttime security job in his police uniform stopped them on a ‘pedestrian check.’ The cop identified at least one of the group as suspicious and carrying a weapon. Myers and his friends ran, and the cop gave chase before losing them. Myers went up to his apartment, then came back down to the street, where he encountered the cop again. What happened next remains a mystery. There were no official witnesses. But when it was all over, the cop had unloaded an entire clip, and Myers had been shot seven times in the back. Police said Myers had been killed in a shootout and that there was gunshot residue on his hand to prove it. They noted Myers had been wearing a GPS ankle bracelet, a consequence of being out on bail for recent charges of unlawful use of a weapon and resisting arrest. The media was fed Instagram photos of Myers posing with guns. But in the days that followed, the police modified their account of the night’s events several times, talking about bushes that Myers had supposedly shot from that didn’t exist, and changing the make of the gun they said Myers carried. The officer, whose name wouldn’t be made public, refused to be interviewed by a prosecutor. Myers’s family argued that a gun had been planted on him, and that he had been executed. The prosecutor agreed that the bullets fired at him could have explained the residue evidence, and Myers’s DNA didn’t turn up on the gun that was found. Yet the prosecutor still decided not to take the case to the grand jury, stating that the evidence was inconclusive.
Ferguson October began on October 13th. In the dramatic week that followed, tens of thousands marched. Young Activists United occupied the St. Louis city hall rotunda. Bearing signs that said ‘Stop Killing Us”’ and chanting ‘Black lives matter,’ Millennial Activists United shut down the Plaza Frontenac shopping center. Protesters also closed Emerson Electric Corporation, and shut down two Walmarts and a Democratic Party fund-raiser. At the police station, dozens more were arrested, including Cornel West and other leaders. A student-led protest at St. Louis University led to a weeklong encampment by a group called Occupy SLU, resulting in a negotiated resolution that committed the university to more discussions about race, funding for Black student recruitment and retention, African American studies, and a community center committed to addressing inequality in the area, and a sculpture.
On October 4th, fifty ‘Artivists’ interrupted a St. Louis Symphony performance of Brahms’s Requiem, standing throughout the hall to sing a version of ‘Which Side Are You On?’ The original song, written by Florence Reece for the bitterly fought 1930s Appalachian coal strike, included the words ‘They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there.’ The Artivists changed the lyrics to ‘Justice for Mike Brown is justice for us all,’ and unfurled fifteen-foot-high banners that read ‘Rise Up and Join the Movement,’ ‘Racism Lives Here,’ and ‘Requiem for Mike Brown 1996–2014.’ Some in the overwhelmingly white crowd applauded, others could be heard saying, ‘He’s a thug.’ Most remained silent. On another evening the Artivists carried a funeral casket covered in cracked, mirrored glass to the front of the police line on South Florissant. ‘Look into the mirror,’ one of the protesters told them. ‘We’re human too.’
On November 17th, as the St. Louis area girded for Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s announcement of the grand jury decision, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared another state of emergency. Public schools in Ferguson and Jennings canceled classes. Police restocked tear gas, flex cuffs, and ‘less-lethal’ munitions. The National Guard was placed on alert. Stores throughout the city and county boarded up their windows. The grand jury announcement was still a week away, and already it felt like the worst hidden secret in Missouri was a coming non-indictment.
Damon Davis of the Artivists noticed that many of his friends were showing signs of stress and trauma. He wanted to create a work that would raise their morale, and lift up their message against the violence of the state and the media’s anticipation of tear gas and fire. The result was a project he called All Hands On Deck. Davis and others created 51-inch-high posters of the hands of local Black and white organizers and activists. Davis had photographed their hands on white tables or against the snow. ‘Hands are what you do work with,’ he explained, ‘and it’s time for you to get up and help work on this if you want it to be any better.’ He got permission from West Florissant businesses whose windows had been covered with plywood to paste the posters on the boards. All Hands On Deck tapped desires coursing across time and place – the 9,000-year-old black, red, white, yellow, and brown cave-art hand stencils at Patagonia’s Cueva de las Manos that shouted, ‘We are here!’; John Heartfield’s street poster, Five Fingers Has the Hand, taunting the Nazi party from Berlin walls during the 1928 Weimar election season; and the gloved hands that John Carlos and Tommie Smith thrust into the air on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, their fingers closed into fists. There was affirmation, defiance, and power here, but something else too – a radical vision of community. At the root of the pre-riot frenzy was the same kind of fear that had left Mike Brown dead in the street, that had driven a century of segregation and resegregation in the city and county. But these posters transformed the plywood from enclosing shields of fear into open walls that revealed the breadth of community: a child, a preacher, a barista, an activist, and others in Black-and-white. Authority demanded submission. But when people raised their hands together, they might be demanding recognition, defying injustice, or even reveling in collective joy.
On November 24th, St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced the grand jury’s refusal to indict Officer Darren Wilson, and the predicted clashes between demonstrators and police followed: television stations ran hi-def split-screen images of President Barack Obama urging calm in the streets as police teargassed Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson. In St. Louis, organizers and activists gathered at a bustling café at the edge of Tower Grove Park, not far from where VonDerrit Myers had been killed. Owned and run by a white radical named Mo Costello, MoKaBe’s had long served as a gathering spot for activists from the Occupy, queer rights, and Black Lives Matter movements. Two weeks before, Mo had announced on Facebook that she would keep the spot open 24 hours a day for activists. That night, the intersection at Grand and Arsenal in front of MoKaBe’s filled with paramilitary police and armored vehicles. Police issued clearance orders while the crowd mocked them. Protesters backed onto the sidewalk and filled MoKaBe’s. Dozens, including Amnesty International observers, parents, and children, gathered inside, drinking free cups of hot chocolate. When windows were broken along Grand, police moved to clear the corner, firing rubber bullets at people on the sidewalk, then shooting tear gas canisters onto MoKaBe’s patio and through the café’s front door. Gas filled the interior, and dozens of choking patrons fled into the basement. As the stricken were treated with eye drops, riot cops marched behind the coffee house to fire more tear gas into the residential neighborhood to prevent patrons from leaving. St. Louis University professor and civil rights lawyer Brendan Roediger negotiated with the police for a way for the patrons to leave. Finally, they filed out of the café one by one with their hands up, and walked slowly away from the police line.
Reverend Osagyefo Sekou had been at MoKaBe’s on the morning of the 24th to attend an urgent meeting about preparations for the grand jury announcement. The young organizers had received him with a warmth and deference that they showed only a handful of other members of the clergy. Back in the earliest days of the protests, mainstream clergy positioned themselves as brokers to the white elite. Then it became clear to the protesters that some of those same clergy were negotiating away their rights, and when the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson came to town, they received the cold shoulder from street activists. In October, at a massive interfaith gathering at St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena, the same activists grew tired of the empty talk from church and civil rights leaders. They began chanting to let young people speak. When Tef Poe took the stage, they cheered. He told the leaders he trusted the shirtless, bandanna’d boys and the young girls who’d gone truant to be at the protests more than the elders. ‘This ain’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement,’ he cried. ‘Get off your ass and join us!’
When Reverend Sekou heard, on the night of Tuesday 11-24, that hundreds of police had again massed at the corner of Grand and Arsenal in front of MoKaBe’s, he came to the café, mounted a table, and quieted the crowd. ‘We’ve already won,’ he said as he pointed back to the cops across the street. ‘They don’t do that when we’re losing.’ He asked the crowd, ‘What does a heartbeat sound like?’ Someone said, ‘You mean the way it’s going like boomboomboomboom right now?’ The crowd roared. ‘On a normal day, Sekou said, ‘your heart goes…’ And he hit his chest twice with his hand. The crowd joined him, pounding their hearts into a rhythm that could be heard across the street. Sekou turned to face the police. ‘You are on the wrong side of history, and we have already won,’ he told them. ‘We are peacefully gathered here in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. This multiracial gathering is possible because of nonviolence. And that is the heartbeat of democracy that you hear. And so whoever your captain is, stand down. Go home. We’ll be alright.’ All along the police line, stiffened backs seemed to wilt. Then the cops turned to the left in file, turned again, and marched silently away down Grand Street.”
Chang ends his book by saying that “if we are to undo resegregation and racialized exclusion, all of the forms of refusal, denial, and justification that preserve the structures of privilege will have to be undone to make room for the most marginalized. We often think of revolution as something to be won in bloodshed through war and the violent seizure of power. But as Grace Lee Boggs has put it, the next revolution might be better thought of as ‘advancing humankind to a new stage of consciousness, creativity, and social and political responsibility.’ Her revolution would require us to move away from finding new ways to divide and rule, and instead move toward honoring and transforming ourselves and our relations to each other.
We need to be roused to the inequity in our neighborhoods, our schools, our metro areas, our justice system, and our culture. Ending resegregation is about understanding the ways we allow ourselves to stop seeing the humanity of others. It’s about learning to look and never stopping. James Baldwin’s most revolutionary and misunderstood idea, notes the intellectual Robin D. G. Kelley, was that love is agency. ‘For him it meant to love ourselves as black people; it meant making love the motivation for making revolution; it meant envisioning a society where everyone is embraced, where there is no oppression, where every life is valued – even those who may once have been our oppressors.’ This didn’t mean that Blacks should capitulate before whiteness and systemic racism, but exactly the opposite. He wrote, ‘To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who think they hate us.’ Each of us is left with the question: Can we, given all the pain we’ve had inflicted upon us and that we’ve inflicted upon others, ever find our way toward freedom for all? Redemption is out there for us if we’re always in the process of finding love and grace.”
We got the numbers 