A further thought about Natalie Moore's book

 

Written in my journal shortly after starting The South Side:

 

In the process of reading the chapter headed “separate but equal” in Natalie Moore’s The South Side, I felt the need to place her biographically in a context that made sense to me. As it turns out, she will be 44 sometime this summer, which makes her about three and a half years younger than my son Nate and a little more than two years older than my daughter Julie. This mattered, at least in part, because in reading her personal stories of growing up on the south side, I needed to understand the period of her growing up in some sort of relationship to my childhood and youth in the South Shore neighborhood some 30 years earlier.

 

Having reached that point in the book, less than halfway through, I felt a growing anger at the city’s municipal government, and at the Chicago Public School (CPS) system, for policies and decisions that drove, exacerbated, and accelerated the inequity, inequality and injustice that have so thoroughly plagued the lives of Chicagoans these past 100 years and more. Those feelings developed in reaction to Moore’s thorough historical indictment of the white supremacist political regimes of former mayor Richard J. Daley and former CPS superintendent Benjamin Willis (and the fundamentally similar political leaderships that followed).

 

Nevertheless, that anger was also accompanied by a feeling somewhat like awe at Moore’s ability to conjure far more benign descriptions of the Chatham neighborhood of her growing up and of her high school years at Morgan Park on the far south side, and her clear descriptions of the positive effects her experiences had on her life and career since. Into the bargain, I also felt a kind of shock that I could be so fundamentally unaware of the actual existence of neighborhoods in Chicago like Chatham, and schools like Morgan Park, that nurtured their own in such positive ways, not by accident, but by the deliberate design and action of African American communities that existed and persisted, and thrived despite the neglect and exploitation of a system designed to destroy whatever they built.

No Time to Waste: White folks need to come to grips with the real history of African Americans

    Two books, Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name and Natalie Moore’s The South Side, outline both the torture and the resilience of African Americans in the US in the 150 years since the collapse of reconstruction. What we know as the “Jim Crow” period in the south, should be rebranded as “the Age of Neoslavery. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on U.S. society—its intimate connection to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end—can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life,” Blackmon writes.

 

            For the average white American, including but not limited to those alarmed by new revelations about conventional American history’s venerated (white) icons, Blackmon’s book details the continuous subjugation and exploitation of black Americans living in the southern states from the collapse of Reconstruction to the end of World War II. The book’s lessons about our buried past that must be exhumed and examined, if we are to come to any consensus understanding of what most black Americans already know.

 

            It is a certainty that many of us who are not resistant to obvious facts might note that the end of World War II does not in any way mark the end of the oppression of African Americans. But Blackmon’s history comes to a definitive end with the series of presidential executive orders, congressional legislation and court orders that made neoslavery in all its many forms illegal.

 

The conclusion that best matches the evidence he presents is that the defeat of the Confederacy and the brief Reconstruction period that followed was not the end of slavery, but a brief interlude before a reinvented form of slavery developed and prevailed in the South for another 75 years. The book tells a detailed story of the greed, inhumanity and hypocrisy that indicts Americans of the period, both in the South and the North. That indictment remains open today, to the extent that the truth told by the book continues to face fierce resistance.

 

To propel its vividly real story, Slavery by Another Name documents the lives of numerous southern blacks who suffered under Jim Crow, were arrested on charges both minor and bogus, and sentenced to hard labor in private enterprises of all descriptions, including major industrial operations that would one day become corporate behemoths, like, say U.S. Steel. In most cases, those sentenced to such hard labor would find themselves whipped, shackled, starved, driven to escape or to madness, and resentenced after any act of resistance. Blackmon describes the lives of former slaves and their descendants who found themselves re-enslaved and often worked until, sickened, maimed and broken, they could work no more; their bodies burned in kilns and coke ovens and buried in unmarked graves.

 

Though Blackmon’s book is driven by the partially resurrected histories of numerous African American men and women in the south who labored and struggled and resisted during the period, neither the federal government nor northern commercial interests fall outside of the book’s indictment of their complicity and failures. By and large, most northern whites not directly complicit in the southern regime were either ignorant of or untroubled by the inhuman treatment of black Americans in the south.

 

Of course, most northern whites were equally indifferent to the way segregation and racism plagued the lives of African Americans living in the north. Such indifference transformed itself into something more malignant when racism and white supremacy meant that African Americans who migrated northward in the hope that they could live more viable and comfortable lives found themselves crammed into substandard housing, attending separate and unequal schools, shut out of a wide range of well-paid jobs, and brutally policed by forces that didn’t look like them and feared them.

 

Natalie Moore’s The South Side, A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, turns out to be a great read to pair with Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name. To begin with, Moore didn’t have to unearth histories buried in unmarked graves. A native Chicagoan whose grandparents arrived in the city in the first wave of the Great Migration, Moore, a reporter with public radio station WBEZ, combines both family stories of life on the south side with a precise, journalistic look at the segregation, redlining and disinvestment that have plagued the lives of African Americans in Chicago over the last 100 years.

 

I’m a native Southsider myself. I graduated from all-white O’Keefe Elementary in 1961 and graduated from nearly all-black Hyde Park High in 1965. I’ve been in and out of Chicago for all of my adult life, living in Bridgeport (a notorious anti-black Irish Catholic enclave during most of the 20^th century) from 2000 to 2007, and am back again now, living for the last four years in Bronzeville (known as the Black Metropolis from the first wave of the Great Migration until the end of World War II). I also drove a cab here in 1968 and 1969. But despite my real familiarity with parts of the south side, Moore’s book shared stories of thriving south side neighborhoods and high-quality public schools about which I had no clue because my whiteness and a relentless media preference for north-side-good-south-side-bad stories blinded me to the good things the black community could create and maintain in the face of disinvestment, segregation and white supremacy.

 

Moore’s book maintains an effective contrast as she alternates chapters about growing up in the all-black Chatham neighborhood, rich with black-owned businesses and professional services, and her graduation from the high-performing, far south side Morgan Park High School. Other chapters provide a detailed historical account of the way redlining and public policy decisions devastated so many south side neighborhoods.

 

Moore includes the histories of familiar political figures, like the first Mayor Daley, who in his early years was a member of the Hamburg Athletic Club, a major source of mob action during the 1919 race riot in Chicago, and three decades later he was the decision-maker behind building the Dan Ryan Expressway as a barrier between the South Side Black community and Bridgeport, the then all-white Irish Catholic neighborhood in which Daley was born and raised. Daley was also the driving force in building the high-rise Robert Taylor Homes on South State street, which housed the largest population and highest density of low-income Black families in the country. Daley’s appointed head of the city’s public school system, Benjamin Willis, played a key role in the era of white flight, keeping expanding Black student populations in under-funded, majority Black schools and barring them from transferring to below-capacity white schools. That Chicago remains the most-segregated city in the country is the enduring legacy of Daley’s reign.

 

Arguably, I have overstated the extent to which “buried” African American history is revealed in Slavery by Another Name or The South Side. Numerous carefully researched histories and memoirs telling the same stories have been written and published at an accelerating rate for the last 100 years. But, as any casual review of a list of banned books, especially books banned by southern states and cities, would reveal, the truth told by such books has been actively resisted over that entire period.

 

The recent controversies over the New York Times’ 1619 project and about Critical Race Theory are just two more examples of how far people will go to suppress the true history of African Americans. The good news is that a majority of Americans, both black and white, are no longer willing to wait for the truth to be heard. The Black Lives Matter movement has become a multi-racial and multi-cultural movement. The covid pandemic has taught the country a further and most emphatic lesson about the consequences of poverty, inequity and racism in health care. And climate change is beginning an almost daily course in new lessons about the price we will all pay, if inequality and white supremacy continue to divide us and throw away the human resources that will be essential in securing our collective future.

 

There’s really no time to waste. Opening our hearts to the truths that we have never been fully able to accept and understand is part of moving to aggressively fix that which is broken. Believe me, reading Slavery by Another Name and The South Side will help.

The Fall of White Supremacy

The January 6 attack on the Capitol is

one more sign that equal justice draws nearer

I started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, with two particular thoughts in mind. First, having absolutely loved her previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns, I was certain that my investment in reading Caste would be repaid several times over. Second, it goes without saying that I, and virtually every other white person in America, need to be repeatedly schooled about the African American experience and how white supremacy has imposed relentless and almost overwhelming burdens on Black people since the first Africans were transported in chains to colonial America. Indeed, that white supremacy has not led to the complete genocide of African Americans is due largely to the vitality, endurance and resistance of Black people in the United States.

 

Without a true understanding of the struggle of African Americans to survive systemic inequality and to achieve equal rights under the law, it is too easy for white people to assure ourselves that the fight to dismantle white supremacy is not ours. But to understand that white privilege includes the assumption that Black people must fight their own battles, one only needs to consider how many times we hear whites claim that they are colorblind, or that their immigrant heritage absolves them of responsibility for the racism that took root in American life centuries ago and endures today.

 

Trump voters are perhaps the best examples of whites who have been made impatient and angry by the very notion of #Black Lives Matter and by last year’s regular demonstrations protesting police killings of people of color. But the persistent demonstrations are both a marker of fatigue with 400 years of oppression and exploitation and an increasingly powerful mobilization against the system that maintains those conditions. Those who are tired of that very visible resistance to inequality and discrimination need to recognize that though such mass activism doesn’t happen every single day, it will persist, and it will increase, until the very idea of whiteness has relinquished its hold on the white majority.

 

It is that reality, and the losses that throwing away lives and talent, impose on all of us that white people need to understand. In our iniquitous world, my white privilege is a constant. And though I cannot change the color of my skin (or my class background or my gender or my gender identity or my sexual orientation), if we are to prosper together in a world in which all lives do, in fact, matter, then we must separately and collectively reject what has been imposed on us. As Wilkerson writes,

 

“The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things that we cannot change; a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry—superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside.

 

“The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not a collective will to maintain them.

 

“A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist—in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be (pgs. 379-380).”

 

A first consequence of such “truths,” faithfully believed by the vast majority of white Americans for centuries, is the exclusion of people of color, and the loss of much of the energy, creativity and brilliance they would have brought to bear on the American project. Together we might have built a United States of America that at this point in time had come much closer to fulfilling the promise expressed in the nation’s foundational documents and by our most celebrated visionaries. Neither should we overlook the fact that so many of those visions of a better America were first articulated by Black voices, like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others.

 

Why a discussion of caste?

 

Before I had gotten very far into the book, I had a number of conversations with people, both black and white, who wondered why anyone would bother to examine the impact of caste when race seems to be the root cause of so much that is wrong in American society. The book’s subtitle, “the origins of our discontents,” clearly signals Wilkerson’s intent to persuade us that we should see the characteristics of caste systems as the foundational problem that must be addressed by efforts to promote comprehensive social change. But in 2020, the year in which events supercharged the notion that Black lives matter, the odds rose dramatically that a significant number of Americans, perhaps a majority, would be inclined to say that race, not caste, is the origin of our discontents.

 

Still, Wilkerson asserts that race is the mechanism that orders the underlying caste system in the United States. “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive,” she writes. “They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place (pg. 19).”

 

Caste itself is such a rigid and comprehensive mechanism of social control that understanding it in detail is necessary to the work of dismantling it. In pursuit of that understanding, Wilkerson identifies the Indian caste system, which has endured and evolved for 2,000 years or more, and the fleeting, but ferocious treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, which expropriated Jewish labor and wealth before moving on to the almost complete extermination of European Jewry, as the two closest analogs to the caste system in place in the United States. Writing about the similarities between the three distinct structures, Wilkerson defines “the eight pillars of caste.” These pillars uphold “a belief system, the piers beneath a caste hierarchy. As these tenets took root…it did not matter whether the assumptions were true.” It only mattered that people came to assume that they were true.

 

“These are the pillars of caste, the ancient principles that I researched and compiled as I examined the parallels, overlap, and commonalities of three major caste hierarchies,” Wilkerson writes. “These are the principles upon which a caste system is constructed, whether in America, India, or Nazi Germany, beliefs that were at one time or another burrowed within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant, in order for a caste system to function (pg. 99).”

 

A new nation is being born

 

Early in the book, Wilkerson writes that

 

“…in the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that, by 2042, for the first time in American history, whites would no longer be the majority in a country that had known of no other configuration, no other way to be.

 

“Then, that fall, in the midst of what seemed a cataclysmic financial crisis and as if to announce a potential slide from preeminence for the caste that had long been dominant, an African-American, a man from what was historically the lowest caste, was elected president of the United States. His ascension incited both premature declarations of a post-racial world and an entire movement whose sole purpose was to prove that he had not been born in the United States, a campaign led by the billionaire who was now in 2016 running for president himself (pg.6).”

 

It doesn’t take much imagination to connect the prediction that whites, and white supremacists, would be outnumbered by people of color by 2042, to a number of other markers that link to the attack on the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. That list includes the hardships that working class Americans, southern and rural white workers among them, suffered in the economic collapse that exploded in the fall of 2008; the election of Barack Obama that followed; Donald Trump’s birther campaign to delegitimize Obama’s presidency; Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s six-year effort to obstruct Obama’s leadership; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement; and Trump’s 2016 election victory (and 2020 defeat). The extremist mob on Jan. 6 might not have been explicitly aware of the details of the coming demographic change, but they surely sensed in the political tensions and economic difficulties of the last decade that the consolations they once obtained from whiteness were in serious jeopardy.

 

For some poor whites who live in isolated white communities, not being black has meant that come hell or high water, they were still white and not sentenced to life at the bottom of the American caste system. The teachings of caste, the pillars of caste, as outlined by Wilkerson, had long ago persuaded them that someone other than themselves were deservedly ranked lower. They may not see the end of the caste system coming, but their panic and hysterical fears of stolen elections and welfare queens and masses of refugees camped out on our southern border are a sign that they feel the fragility of white supremacy in their bones.

 

 

If the majority only knew…

 

White Americans, Nazis, and Brahmin elites imposed a structure on their own people and culture that divided their own populations for the purpose of stealing wealth and labor, with the goal of maximizing their own comfort and ease. Wilkerson elaborates insights from Erich Fromm, a German Jewish refugee who, in the process of writing about fascism and racism in 1964, eerily describes the president who Donald Trump (and Trumpism) has been these last four years (pg. 271):

 

“Fromm well knew the perils of group narcissism from both his training in psychanalysis and his personal experience,” Wilkerson writes. “He saw firsthand the Nazi appeal to the fears and insecurities of everyday Germans in the lead-up to the Nazi takeover.

 

“If one examines the judgment of the poor whites regarding blacks, or of the Nazis in regard to Jews,” Fromm wrote, “one can easily recognize the distorted character of their respective judgments. Little straws of truth are put together, but the whole which is thus formed consists of falsehoods and fabrications. If the political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorifications, the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences.”

 

Comparing the American and German supremacist systems, Fromm observed that people marginalized by poverty, unemployment, lack of education and low-paid labor are nevertheless elevated by caste. A person in this group might be persuaded that despite their individual difficulties, “I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world—'I am white;’ or ‘I am Aryan,’” Fromm wrote.

 

“The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own,” Wilkerson writes, crediting Fromm with the insight.

 

I think it’s telling that Wilkerson begins the book quoting James Baldwin and Albert Einstein. In tandem, the two quotes speak volumes about Wilkerson’s intent.

 

Baldwin: “Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they know what I said was true.”

 

Einstein: “If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long.”

 

Actually, what Baldwin was in the habit of saying was clearly understood and known to be true by a healthy percentage of the people who took the time to read his work, African Americans, especially. Nor was he the first to make similar points; he was one in a distinguished line of largely Black writers who have been speaking truth to a white-dominated country for generations. What has historically gone missing in that equation was an audience of white believers large enough to change the perspective of the majority; to persuade white people that the dream of a community characterized by inclusiveness and equity offered something to whites that surpasses the consolations of caste. Hence, Einstein’s wish that the indifferent majority come to understand the root of the evil with which we all live.

 

Clearly, Wilkerson set out to write the book that would define that unacknowledged reality thoroughly. It follows that if the end of white supremacy will grow out of the continuing activism of African Americans and other communities of color, and the growing numbers of white Americans who have been schooled by Black Lives Matter, by the disproportionately black and brown casualties of the pandemic and now, finally, by Isabel Wilkerson’s book, then Einstein’s prediction that we are on the road to a cure will finally become the reality of our collective lives.

 

 

Underway: The collapse of white supremacy

 

Though Wilkerson does not say so, reading her book has caused me to rethink my own understanding of American history. In particular, I am persuaded that 22^nd century historians will identify the hundred-year period from the end of World War II to the middle of this century (1947-2042, say) as the final phase of the 400-year long struggle against white supremacy. Tim Black, the oral historian of the Great Migration as it manifested in Chicago, and, for more than 60 years a progressive political activist in the city, told me once (he was my high school history teacher) that returning World War II veterans, both Black and white, came back to the city on fire with the belief that they could lead the city and the country toward racial justice and equity.

 

Though the Great Migration provided little relief from white supremacy, it did expand the space in which newcomers to the north were free to join organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League. The return of World War II veterans moved by the same spirit that motivated Tim Black added momentum to the struggle. The NAACP, itself, grew from 90,000 members in 1919 to 600,000 members in 1946.

 

A partial list of the advances against white supremacy that followed those years would have to include the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. By 1968, the expanding community of black activists and their allies experienced exponential growth with the development of Black Power, the Black Arts and African American Studies movements, and new allies in the anti-war, feminist, Chicano, American Indian, gay liberation and environmental movements.

 

These movements did not always move forward in unity, or adopt common strategies, but even when they disagreed or followed a separate path, they educated each other, identified areas of common struggle and widened the space for social change. In many instances, leadership passed from one organization to another. Groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society contributed new energy and fresh critiques of entrenched elites. But at no time was the path ahead of the liberation movements ever clear of obstacles. Some victories were unsustainable in the face of the forces moving against them, forces aimed at maintaining and reinforcing the white supremacist system.

 

The loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs that began in urban areas in the Midwest and Northeast in the ‘70s initiated a dramatic increase in poverty rates in minority neighborhoods. That in turn set the stage for the growth of the carceral state in America. Prison sentences began increasing even for non-violent offenders as states began passing three-strike laws. With the Reagan-era development of the War on Drugs and a boom in prison construction and private prisons, the process accelerated.

 

“The term ‘welfare queen’ became a not-so-subtle code for ‘lazy, greedy black ghetto mother.’ The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let ‘some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,’ while ‘you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.’ These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it,” Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow (pg. 49).

 

Promises to beef up policing and expand the prison system were often only a part of a larger strategy that cut federal budgets, starved aid programs of sufficient funding, and proposed privatizing Social Security. These, too, were racialized attacks on the common good and were most often aimed at creating political advantages for Republicans. But in the 1990’s, Democratic President Bill Clinton launched his own version of the Republican agenda, cutting benefits and time-limiting welfare eligibility, endorsing the passage of a federal three-strikes law, and announcing “the end of big government.”

 

All of these changes added up to something more than reinforcement of a white supremacist system that had been severely shaken by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. They were also a direct assault on the well-being of minority communities, forcing the energy of liberation efforts to refocus on mitigating emergencies in those same communities and on defending them from the relentless assault of the carceral state.

 

The War on Terror launched by the Bush administration following the September 11 attacks (2003) had the added effect of further diverting funding from domestic needs and drove minorities to seek employment in the military and, ultimately, into an expanding war effort in which people of color would account for the overwhelming majority of casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the face of the economic downturn of 2008, the worst since the Depression, African Americans turned out in unprecedented numbers to elect Barack Obama as president. Despite years of Republican electoral and policy victories, Obama’s election created new anxiety about the strength of the white supremacist system. Donald Trump and a number of other right-wing opportunists launched the birther movement which claimed that Obama wasn’t even an American.

 

But the liberatory energy that had been diverted and suppressed so effectively during the previous four decades of right-wing counterattack manifested anew in 2013 as Black Lives Matter, which became both a leadership organization and a symbol of the revitalization of a movement to deconstruct white supremacy in the United States. None of this proves decisively that the history of the last seventy-five years can be framed as the final confrontation between the growing and increasingly effective mobilization of African Americans and their allies against the tottering edifice of white supremacy in the United States. That would take a much more detailed investigation of the flow of events since the middle of the 20^thCentury. But it seems clear that the struggle to liberate the United States from racism and white supremacy continues to gather momentum and support.

 

Nothing, certainly not victory, is promised to the multiracial, multicultural, multigenerational movement outlined here. But the pandemic, and its disproportionally devastating effect on communities of color, has persuaded a growing number of white Americans that equal justice and equity must be a first priority, that racism and the caste system cost us all more than we can bear. Making the most of this moment in which it is suddenly clear that white supremacists also see the fragility of the racialized caste system that sustains them will require an extraordinary attention to the details, to deconstructing the pillars of caste.

 

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander outlines the challenge: “If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice today than assuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last (pgs. 18-19).”

 

It is time to give Isabel Wilkerson the last word:

 

“In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying acrobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto-Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute—all of those feats should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

 

“In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world, raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is setback from the progression of our species.

 

“A world without caste would set everyone free (pg. 388).”

 

The Time Is Now: White Supremacy and Climate Change

As winter approaches, it is clear that Joe Biden will be our next president. But a remarkable number of people, led by our current president, are still arguing with the evidence and our political divisions threaten to fuel a rocky and unproductive, if not outright dangerous, transition from one administration to another. We, Americans, whoever we voted for, are almost universally suspicious of and alienated from most of the partisans who disagree with us.

 

But the truth is, we’ve been living in that divided country for quite a long time.  Arguably that estrangement began developing with the Vietnam War and Watergate, but it has additional roots in political controversies that followed. The Reagan-era and a partisanship that waged war on both the safety net and on imaginary “welfare queens” accelerated our discontents. So did Iran-Contra and US-subsidized mercenary warfare in Central America. The divide grew larger with the misogyny of both Bill Clinton and his political opponents, the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the bipartisan expansion of the carceral state, and “the end of big government.” The excesses of the Trump administration and the failure to manage the pandemic merely added new material to the top of the mountain between us.

 

With each decade since the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the divisions have gotten wider and more obvious until this moment in time when it is next to impossible to identify a political figure with the ability to bridge the chasm across which some of us stare at each other with stunned incomprehension, if not with pure loathing. Regardless of what other detail we might add to our list of divisive issues and events, the energy that powers our divisions is rooted in the racism and white supremacy, the misogyny and machismo, and the homophobia and xenophobia that have been a part of our history since the first Europeans invaded the Western hemisphere.

 

 

The struggle ahead

 

But today is the day after, in the most fundamental sense. Everything we have to say about what we think our country is, and how it became what it is now, surely matters. But it is only at dawn on the day after that we can begin to do something about making the United States what we want it to be.

 

That work should begin with ourselves as individuals, with accepting that recent events may be discouraging, that recent defeats may have blunted our faith in what we can accomplish both individually and collectively. But we must begin by recognizing that whatever it is that lies in our individual capacity to achieve, our collective mental health depends on affirming our belief in what is possible for us to achieve together.

 

We must take on the small myriad challenges directly before us. We have to rebuild our communities, our cities and our states, and we must do so while also focusing on the challenges that loom the largest. And of all the very large challenges, the ones that threaten us all and that will get far worse in the absence of unity, climate change is the most severe, the one that will track us all down, wherever we are, and teach us that the old fantasies of the good life are pipe dreams and distractions. There is no express train to ride to a better life, no flight path to safety.

 

 

The urgent work of managing climate change

 

The exact date of the beginning of the climate crisis that the world and that the United States are living with now will be a matter of historical debate for some time to come, perhaps for generations. At some future time, the when, how, and why of the crisis itself will be the basis for a whole new field of historical study.

 

Regardless, climate change is upon us full blown. The continuing effects on less-developed countries as coastlines are submerged, as once arable land turns to desert, and as tens of millions of climate refugees continue their forced migrations, will get much worse. And the politics of our time threaten to  grow even more tumultuous than they already are.

 

So far, the vast wealth of the United States and its residents has empowered many of us to ignore climate change. Polling responses make clear that as much as half the adult population have somehow been able to ignore the starkest proofs that the climate crisis is upon us. Five years ago, Republican Senator James Inhofe brought a snowball into a Senate session as a way of demonstrating his complete rejection of any evidence supporting the claim that the world is getting warmer, like, for instance, the fact that the year before, 2014, was at the time, the hottest on record. But the climate emergencies, like enormous forest fires and devastating and frequent hurricanes keep accumulating.

 

Small-scale climate migrations are already occurring. People in the hundreds of thousands who have been repeatedly displaced by coastal flooding or forest fires these past few years are finally deciding not to rebuild their homes and not to return to devastated communities. Indeed, one recent report estimated that more than one million US residents moved from environmentally unstable areas in 2018. And we know beyond any doubt that flooding, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat emergencies, and more will get more frequent, more sustained and more destructive.

 

The hundreds and thousands making decisions to leave areas where they have lived for decades, if not generations, will most often be making the cheapest and most convenient changes they can. But southern Californians moving to Arizona or Nevada will be moving from fires to frying pans, moving to areas where climate crisis in the form of droughts and heat emergencies will get much worse; those effects on ecologically fragile environments multiplied by population pressures increased by their own new arrival.

 

Northern Californians and Oregonians are also beginning their own migration, trickling further north along the Pacific Coast to places where drought, flooding and forest fires will also get worse. Perhaps, long-term, they will all end up in British Columbia, where, hopefully, a far-sighted Canadian government will move forward in the next decade or two to put in place the kind of infrastructure that will mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the Northwest.

 

Miami, FL, regarded by many climate scientists as the most endangered coastal city in the world, will be the eventual source of a significant stream of climate refugees, a stream that will be further swollen by tributaries of refugees moving north from other Florida communities. The wealthiest of those refugees may not seem like climate refugees, at all. Their wealth will allow them to move further up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas as they wish, maintaining their high-maintenance quality of life as they go, creating new and photogenic spreads for magazines and TV shows highlighting the lives of the rich and famous.

 

But the poor and middle-income families living in threatened areas will find themselves forced to move, their property devalued, their resources exhausted by multiple emergencies. And because no one can predict the if and when and where the migrations can and should stop, it is past time for all of us to begin preparing to live lives that will be consistently more challenging than many Americans have ever been forced to live. It is time to begin recognizing that we are about to become a nation of migrants on a scale not previously reached by earlier migrations.

 

 

 

Ending white supremacy is key

 

The claim that the lives we will be living will be more difficult for many of us than our lives before the escalating climate crisis needs qualification; it is important to note that for African Americans who have always had to negotiate life in a white supremacist country, hardship and challenge will not be a new experience. That people of color and the poor will bear the burdens of global climate change sooner and more extensively than the wealthy and more securely situated is not news.

 

White supremacy, itself, is the scaffolding for all the arguments that divide working people and the poor against each other, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of their political mobilizations. This leaves our collective fate in the hands of the very people who profit from our social divisions. It is also the basis for arguing that the first step toward managing climate change should begin with a multi-racial and multi-generational movement to dismantle white supremacy.

 

It can be done, with enormous difficulty, of course, but demography may finally be on the side of such a movement. After all, Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generational cohort in US history. And though no generation is ever a cohesive whole, it seems obvious that a significant fraction of that cohort is far past fed-up with the status quo, and already mobilized in pursuit of sweeping change.

 

In her recently published book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the African American slave who may have been the first American to introduce the notion of vaccination as a means to controlling an epidemic.

 

“Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and lay scientist in Boston and had come into possession of an African man named Onesimus. The enslaved African told of a procedure he had undergone back in his homeland that had protected him from [smallpox]. People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person. Mather was intrigued by the idea Onesimus described. He researched it, and decided to call it ‘variolation.’ It would become the precursor to immunization and ‘the Holy Grail of smallpox prevention for Western doctors and scientists,’ wrote the medical ethicist and author Harriet A. Washington.”

 

Wilkerson’s account details the outrage with which Bostonians greeted Mather’s attempts to promote inoculation as cure for the smallpox epidemic that raged in Boston in 1721. “They feared it could spread smallpox all the more,” she writes, “and they also wanted nothing to do with a practice that had come from Africa and had been suggested by an African slave.”

 

But Onesimus’ suggestion was a cure. One in seven Bostonians died from smallpox, but out of 240 people who were inoculated by a single local doctor who believed in “variolation,” only one in 40 died. The otherwise disastrous consequences of the smallpox outbreak in Boston, Wilkerson notes, was the absolute consequence of a caste system built on the notion that those at the top are inherently superior, those on the bottom are inherently inferior, and, by definition, are incapable of the intellectual brilliance necessary to advance development and solve social problems. “The investment in the established hierarchy runs sufficiently deep [in the United States],” Wilkerson concludes, “that people in the dominant caste have historically been willing to forgo conveniences to themselves to keep the fruits of citizenship within their own caste.”

 

That point ought to be among the most important arguments for dismantling white supremacy. Climate change has been creeping up on us all since the Industrial Revolution; it has been gathering mass and velocity at an accelerating rate since the middle of the last century, and it has become the most global of emergencies in the history of humankind. We cannot begin to manage that emergency in a society that throws people away from birth, that denies opportunity for human talent to develop, and that continues to foster inequalities of every description. We need to mobilize and fully employ every human talent that manifests itself in time to turn us toward a sustainable future.

 

 

A few proposals for action

 

The failure of presidential leadership over the last four years underscores the argument that the exclusive leadership of wealthy, white males is a recipe for disaster. We have waited far too long to open the way to the leadership of women and people of color. We are moving forward now in a nation that cannot depend on the leadership (or celebrity) of the newly elected president. We can hope that he will be a competent steward in a period of epic social and political transition, but the heroes of the effort to transform our world, with roots in previously excluded communities, are already stepping forward everywhere.

 

So, if the challenge is to dismantle white supremacy on the way to building an effective nationwide movement to address climate change, how do we do it? Where do we begin?

 

Building on the success of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump by a record-setting voter turnout seems like one of the more obvious places to start. Register more voters. Register millions more voters. Choose Stacey Abrams to lead the Democratic National Committee and to organize the largest and most effective voter registration effort in American history. This will accomplish two things. It will continue to build a multi-racial coalition capable of advancing an electoral and legislative attack on white supremacy. And it will acknowledge the leadership and accomplishments of an African American woman who has already directed the effort to turn Georgia, a deep-south red state, purple.

 

Here in Chicago, we need to act directly and relentlessly to confront developers and political leaders who have persuaded themselves that downtown and upscale and high-rise office and housing developments serve the interests of the city’s residents. In fact, not only do such subsidized developments fail to serve the interests of the vast majority of city residents, they fail to acknowledge the role that African American and Latinx labor has played in creating wealth in the city. Indeed, the continuing denial of educational, housing and career opportunities for people of color has forced minorities to compete for low-wage and dangerous jobs that expropriate the wealth generated by their own efforts (and exposes them disproportionately to health risks and to environmental toxins). The solution for Chicago begins with prioritizing development in the south and west sides of the city and in requiring all development projects to employ workforces that reflect the city’s actual population.

 

On an even more local level, we need to recognize that our homes and our neighborhoods are not ready to weather climate change. We should be retrofitting to make housing community-wide as energy efficient as possible. Moreover, we must advance green-energy development in the form of small-scale solar installations, green roofs, wind-powered generators, and neighborhood-based energy co-ops. Housing and building codes should be changed to guarantee that both developers and landlords play an appropriate role in improving energy efficiency.

 

While we are initiating and moving forward locally and globally, we should recognize that the two Senate runoff races in Georgia represent an opportunity to dethrone Mitch McConnell and to begin building a Senate that will not stand in the way of progressive legislation. To do so will be a sustained, multi-step effort. Long-term, it will mean electing senators who bring a more profound understanding of class and race issues to the work of legislating, but we must not neglect the immediate opportunity to elect two Democratic senators from Georgia. We have only two months—the runoff elections will be held January 5—to mobilize a Mississippi Summer-type intervention in Georgia aimed at electing Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. Winning either seat will be a challenge, but the urgent task is to win both. It’s time for the most energetic and adventurous among us to head to Georgia for an adrenaline-fueled election campaign that must end in a critically important victory.

 

And while volunteers head to Georgia, the demands for local action, including confronting police violence and misconduct, and building up anti-violence networks in our neighborhoods remain a priority. So, too, are organizing efforts that build capacity in Chicago neighborhoods and address continuing needs like hunger, made worse by the pandemic.

 

One nonprofit in Chicago, Just Roots, began development and operation of a community farm on 45^th Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood. In just three years, the Legends South Farm has distributed 20,000 pounds of produce grown at the farm and provided 1,000 hours of education and training for community farmers. Just Roots, in partnership with St. James Catholic Church, also established a second community farm this past summer at 29^th and Wabash. This model for community self-help could be replicated many places across Chicago with support from the city; another political challenge that local activists could take on.

 

The possibilities for action, for projects that will promote the changes we desperately require, are nearly infinite. Every individual, every family, every neighborhood, every community can work up a list of the possibilities. There will be dissenters, people who will not share in the tasks ahead; some will even stand in the way. But obstacles are not enemies. We must focus relentlessly on building a movement capable of flowing over or around whatever is in the way. 

 

 

Implacable forces have been building the world to come

 

The pandemic, itself an outcome of globalization and climate change, has taught us a lesson about traditional expectations and the pace of social, environmental and existential change. We live now in a world in which it is no longer reasonable to assume that tomorrow will be essentially the same as today. That means, in general, that everything about our personal lives, our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities, needs to be carefully reexamined. If we as a country are to dismantle white supremacy, manage and mitigate climate change, and successfully adjust to a new world in which our old assumptions about life trajectories are merely baggage we will have to discard, we are going to need to reeducate, retrain and reimagine ourselves. That will be very hard work. Mistakes are inevitable. We must get started now.

Lessons in Empathy from Lovecraft Country

Racism and horror fantasy bleed into each other

In an episode of Lovecraft Country (an HBO series that blurs the line between classic horror fantasy and the reality of white supremacy in the United States), Leti, who is pregnant, travels back in time to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 1921. Once there, Leti witnesses the destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” by a white mob that beat and murdered hundreds of African American residents and destroyed property worth tens of millions of dollars in what was, at the time, the country’s wealthiest Black community.

 

In one of the most striking film portrayals of empathy that I have ever seen, Leti, who is protected from harm by a magic spell, stays with the woman who will be (or already is) the great-grandmother of Leti’s baby, holding her hand as she perishes in agony in the fire set by the mob. A young African American from 1950s Chicago, Leti already knows all she needs to know about the horrors that racism and white supremacy daily visit on Black people and Black communities. She does not need the further education that bearing witness to the Tulsa Massacre provides. After all, she has already seen the brutalized body of Emmett Till laying in an open casket in a Chicago church, survived repeated confrontations with a racist police commander who is one of the leaders of a secret order, and imagined or dreamed nightmarish visions of lynchings and murderous assaults.

 

Arguably for African Americans, it is no more possible to hide from empathy than it is to hide from the deliberate and casual brutalities of life in a racist society. Black folks do not need to watch Lovecraft Country to learn lessons that they already know. But white folks need to watch Lovecraft Country and open their hearts to everything it teaches.

 

The Grim Weather Ahead for Palestinians

 

Thomas Friedman’s recent piece (Aug. 13), in the New York Times, “A Geopolitical Earthquake Just Hit the Mideast,” is an almost complete survey of the various effects of the Israel-United Arab Emirates on featured players in the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Just go down the scorecard, and you see how this deal affects every major party in the region,” Friedman writes, “with those in the pro-American, pro-moderate Islam, pro-ending-the-conflict-once-and-for-all camp benefiting the most and those in the radical pro-Iran, anti-American, pro-Islamist, permanent-struggle-with-Israel camp all becoming more isolated and left behind.

 

“It’s a geopolitical earthquake.”

 

Well, maybe, but I’m thinking a geopolitical earthquake would be something more like a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement that included the creation of an independent Palestine sharing open borders with Israel. And a few other minor clauses that would redeem Israel’s biblical claim to be a light unto the nations of the world.

 

Ironically, Friedman’s scorecard showing winners and losers barely mentions Palestinians. Oh, yes, they dodged any further annexations of Palestinian territory for the moment.

 

Congratulations, all you lucky Palestinian exiles and refugees. It’s status quo for now. Worse, later, but I’m sure Thomas Friedman will get back to you about that.

 

Oh, wait. Friedman does assert that the UAE-Israel deal will force the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas to the “negotiating table.” Friedman is not clear about what will be served to Abbas when he gets to the table, but it’s probably more of the same old, same old. So, again, not a win for Palestinians, but nothing ever is for a people yearning to be free, right?

 

Anyway, Friedman’s scorecard does grind on, but ends in a happy place. “The UAE and Israel and the U.S. showed—at least for one brief shining moment that the past does not always have to bury the future, that the haters and dividers don’t always have to win.

 

“It was a breath of fresh air. May it one day turn into a howling wind of change that spreads across the whole region.”

 

Wait. What?

 

Oh, this just in. It’s not a geopolitical earthquake. It’s the eye of a hurricane. And it’s coming through Gaza and the West Bank.

A Universe Is Gone

I originally posted this poem, in July 2009 on my blog, In and Out with Jeff. At the time, I hadn’t yet set up Outdoor Poetry Season, my poetry blog. But a recent traffic report on In and Out shared the news that “A Universe Is Gone” had been visited by a viewer. I couldn’t remember what the poem was about, so I became its second viewer over some long, lonely, unseen, unread, unheard isolation.

 

It became immediately obvious after visiting the poem that I had not invested any energy in explaining why I had chosen “A Universe Is Gone” as the title. But the “why” of that choice is part of the message of the poem.

 

A Palestinian boy is caught in a crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian guerillas. He dies, the poem says. If it had pursued that fact further, the poem might have added, more crudely, his life is snuffed out. He is collateral damage.

 

And his father, Abu? He has lost everything. He holds his son’s limp body, but everything the boy was is gone. Every version of the older boy, the young man, the father, the old grey head that he might have become is also gone.

 

Two thousand years ago, during the heyday of rabbinical Judaism, some rabbi from yeshiva nestled in the hills around Jerusalem, interpreted a biblical passage to mean, in plain English (or plain Aramaic, anyhow) that whoever saved the life of an individual saved an entire universe. 

 

How’s that for an ethical principle? It means that to the Jews of the Rabbinical period the range of what any given person might achieve during a lifetime was pretty near infinite.

 

And so, when a Palestinian child is gunned down…

 

 

A Universe Is Gone

 

Remember the Palestinian child

caught in a crossfire, in a lethality of rage?

Crouching behind his father?

Crying with desperate faith

 

in his abu, his shield?

Moments later, the caption said,

the boy was dead,

his father forlorn

 

with wounds that will never heal.

Each day dawn comes with new grief.

Neither the garrison state

nor the tender virgins console Abu.

White supremacy is the original cancel culture

John Kass’ column on June 26, “One wrong ‘like’ will get you canceled by cancel culture,” suffers from both a narrow and short view of history.

Kass cites Joe McCarthy’s right-wing assault on speech and ideas. He needs one such example to balance a column that lingers over the repeated transgressions by “the new thought police” who routinely attack liberals and conservatives alike, but “praise Black Lives Matter” and “appreciate antifa.”

This is thin stuff, but it might have been strengthened if Kass had dug a little deeper into the history and roots of “cancel culture.” What, after all, would you call centuries of attacks against Native Americans, betraying treaties, uprooting them from tribal homelands, forcing them into schools run by the Interior Department and prohibiting them from speaking their tribal language? A long running episode of “cancel culture” initiated and sustained by Euro-Americans?

Or consider, perhaps, the reasons why there is a moment and a movement in which Black Lives Matter very much. Is it too much to suggest that such a movement grows in response to 400 hundred years of “cancel culture?”

One other long view might help here. In the Red Scare and the witch hunts of the ‘40s and ‘50s, in which Joe McCarthy played only a short and fleeting role, university presidents, corporate CEOs and, even, panicked union bosses, fired or denied employment to tens of thousands of people. But it would appear that Kass is quite willing to “cancel” thoughtful consideration of that history.

A Time to Make Change

As happened in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, the way is opening for fundamental social change. Police reform is in the air, but so much more is possible. We should be aiming at the defeat of white supremacy, and organizing for a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights that will frame domestic and global policy and programs for the next 25 years. It is a fight we can win.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, I was living in Toronto. I was 20 at the time, just a couple months shy of my 21^st birthday.

A hot, personal anger over the Vietnam War had derailed my college career during the previous two years. I had turned toward a lifestyle based on occasional anti-war activism, confrontational politics fueled by adrenaline, part-time jobs, hours of playground basketball and regular use of marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs. In the process, I had quit school, burned my draft card, and regularly demanded that my draft board halt their complicity with the war crimes inherent in invading Third World countries.

Not surprisingly, they were unreceptive to my demands and hot to punish me for my insolence, so they drafted me. Believing that resistance to the war included refusing to acknowledge the authority of the board to draft me and of the state to prosecute me, I went to Canada.

King was shot at roughly 6 p.m. on April 4; but absorbed with the trivia of my life in somewhat voluntary exile, I knew nothing about his death on the day that it happened. When I woke up the next morning, I was stunned to hear that King was dead and cities, including Chicago, my hometown, were burning.

The Moral Authority and Visionary Leadership of Dr. King

I believed then, and I believe now, that King was the most important American leader in my lifetime. I also believed that racism was the original sin in American history and that the Vietnam War was the most extreme example of how militarism destroyed lives, shaped policy, and robbed the country and the world of the resources necessary to build a society based on reconciliation, redemption, equal justice and equity. King, I believed was the person who might lead us to such a benign place.

On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination, King delivered a speech at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC) at Riverside Church in New York City. The speech, which King titled “A Time to Break Silence,” was the first time that he publicly announced that the pursuit of civil rights in the United States required firm opposition to the Vietnam War.

As he spoke King noted that the gathering at the church was “…surely … the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”

But while celebrating the stirring of conscience as a new and positive factor in national politics, King was not kidding himself or his audience about the country’s failure to address the desperate needs of the poor. In explaining why he would no longer separate the struggle for civil rights from opposition to the war, he told his audience that, “there is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America.

“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle,” he said. “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both Black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

There were others around at the time who were speaking out against the war and framing it as a very specific threat to African Americans. World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was drafted and refused to fight in the war, famously saying “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

The white radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), many of whose own youthful leaders were themselves schooled in their activism by the civil rights movement, routinely connected the destruction of Vietnamese villages to the ongoing destruction of African American neighborhoods in the United States. But no opponent of the war could bring to bear the combination of celebrity and eloquence that King could.

“We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor,” King said at Riverside Church.

King’s address to CALC on that April day was heavily covered by the mainstream media and earned him new celebrity and unusual criticism from both longtime allies in the civil rights movement who rejected his broader focus, and from high-level national politicians who greatly feared the possibility that the civil rights and anti-war movements might join forces in an all-out attack on the status quo. Undaunted, King was relentless in articulating a comprehensive critique of US politics and policies that mobilized overwhelming force against developing countries, denied fundamental human rights domestically and globally, and distributed social benefits unequally.

Welding evidence, economic analysis, history lessons and moral perspective into continuous teaching on what the country could become, his persistence was an inspiration and a consolation for activists of all sorts. He reminded us all to stay the course and of the new world we could build.

The Elements of Movement and the Obstacles in the Way

Waking up to the somber reports of King’s death and the images of cities on fire shattered me emotionally. I made my way to a pay phone on a corner near my basement apartment. In tears, I called my father.

He and I were often at odds politically and would continue to be in years to come, but it was my father’s love for Chicago, and his refusal to live anywhere else, that shaped my own strong feelings for the city. I don’t remember much of what he said to me. It is my own incoherence and uncontrollable sobbing, the images of burning cities and the abject misery I felt, that stands out in my memory. What was I doing in Toronto while King died in the struggle for a cause I believed in? And what would we do without him?

At the time, I was too inexperienced and too unversed in the history of the United States to recognize that the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965, of which King was the most prominent leader, had been arguably the most successful organized effort to rollback white supremacy in all of United States history. And even though I was demoralized by King’s assassination, I did not yet grasp that by that time the radical movement for social change that began with a decade of civil rights activism and was promising to grow into a force that would radically transform the culture and the economy had already come undone.

After all, as King reflected at Riverside Church, the poverty program, an effort to finally begin addressing the most severe examples of income and wealth inequality in the United States, was already “broken and eviscerated” by a government decision to spend a billion dollars on the “War on Poverty,” while simultaneously appropriating 50 times as much on weapons and expanding military capacity. That disparity guaranteed that the poverty program would stagger forward to swift failure. The War on Poverty lost almost at the same moment it had been declared.

Further, John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 had made Lyndon Johnson president. I will make no argument here that Kennedy might have pursued a more radical political course in the latter part of his presidency, but despite Johnson’s decades of political experience, he became deluded by his own power. On his way to absolutely routing conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in his reelection campaign, Johnson also engineered the defeat of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in its struggle to be seated at the 1964 Democratic convention as a replacement for the old school Mississippi Democrats who for years had blocked full participation by African Americans in Mississippi politics.

Such outcomes were the very beginning of the 50-year counterattack by both corporations and the right against the victories of the civil rights movement and the liberation movements that followed. Yes, the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act would pass a year later, but they represented the furthest advance of the movement and would be undermined and undone in numerous ways in the decades to follow.

Small Victories and Unfinished Business

By August of 1968, Johnson’s miscalculations had saddled him with responsibility for an unpopular war. Reelection was out of his reach.

Meanwhile, I was back in Chicago, unpursued by a government that could not corral the thousands who had refused to serve. But I felt a new call to action in the anti-war organizing effort aimed at confronting delegates to that summer’s Democratic convention as they gathered to nominate Hubert Humphrey as their standard bearer against Republican Richard Nixon. Accordingly, I showed up to join the crowds that massed in Grant Park and Lincoln Park in preparation for a number of actions, including a massive protest in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where many convention delegates were housed.

But the protests deteriorated into a police riot when cops beat and chased protesters throughout the downtown and the north side. Unable to effectively express the rage we felt against the escalation of the war, many of us threw ourselves into the pitched battles with the police, or into smashing windows and setting cars on fire through the downtown. Though the escalation of the use of force by police had already become a common element in confrontations with protesters in Chicago and in other cities across the country, few white protesters were prepared for such brutality. It was, however, just a taste of the police brutality that African Americans experienced in their own neighborhoods on a daily basis.

But all the assassinations, the police beatings, the political counterattacks—like the passage of right-to-work laws in many southern states (undermining the power of the big industrial unions), the institutional obstacles to voting rights and ballot access, and the increasing limits on women’s right to control their own bodies that swept through various states—have failed to erase all the gains of the 50s and 60s. Grassroots understandings of fundamental human rights denied, of the unrealized promises of democracy, and of memories of movement mobilizations endure, even if such persistent awareness was not enough on which to base successful resistance to the right-wing counterattack.

As SDS founder Tom Hayden wrote in his essay “The Way We Were”: “The idea [of participatory democracy] was to challenge elite authority by direct example on the one hand, and on the other to draw ‘ordinary people,’ whether apathetic students, sharecroppers, or office workers into a dawning belief in their own right to participate in decisions.

“This was the method—call it consciousness-raising—of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which influenced SDS, the early women’s liberation groups, farm workers’ house meetings, and Catholic base communities, eventually spreading to Vietnam veterans’ rap groups and other organizations. Participatory democracy was a tactic of movement-building as well as an end in itself. And by an insistence of listening to ‘the people’ as a basic ethic of participatory democracy, the early movement was able to guarantee its roots in American culture and traditions while avoiding the imported ideologies that affected many elements of the earlier left,” Hayden wrote.

I do not mean to suggest that there were no real and unreversed achievements of the ‘60s and ‘70s struggles for full human rights for women, working people, African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, lesbians, gay men, immigrants and others. However far voting rights and choice have been rolled back, the record shows that some changes are irreversible.

The Radical Mission to Reclaim a People’s History

One milestone has been the field of African American Studies, which did not exist as anything but an activist vision in the early ‘60s but is now institutionalized as a fully accredited course of academic study at most universities and colleges across the country. Perry A. Hall described the decades of collective activism and relentless scholarship it took to fully legitimize African American Studies in his book In the Vineyard, Working in African American Studies.

“The issue of whether to work within or outside of ‘the system,’ intensely debated among militants and activists in the 1960s, resolved in the 1970s to a commitment to change from the ‘inside.’ Our aim was to make the system work for us rather than against us—that is, to make it function more legitimately by broadening its foundations to include African Americans,” Hall wrote.

In beginning the work of agitating for curriculums in white universities that acknowledged the social and cultural contributions of African Americans as an equal and fundamental element of American history and culture, Hall and his peers were following in the work of the civil rights movement, in the footsteps of King, Malcom X, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and others. And they, too, would permanently advance the struggle for human rights in the United States.

Writing about his experience as acting director of the Black Studies Center at Wayne State University in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Hall notes that “the established faculty [of the university] denied the center the ability to grant tenure to its own faculty. Structurally, it was neither a real department nor a real field of study in institutional terms … Later it presented serious career problems for those who became more than nominally involved with the development of African American Studies. The competing interests created by the ‘contradiction of double aims’ presented the alternatives of either marginalizing oneself within an established discipline or ignoring, deferring, or subordinating the objectives of the new academic enterprise.”

Hall, of course, neither marginalized himself nor compromised the work. When he died this past April, he had spent the last two decades as a tenured professor in the African American Studies department at the University of North Carolina. He also lived to see the publication of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a comprehensive history of African American achievement and struggle against 400 years of white supremacy in the United States. 

And, just as Hall and his colleagues had built on decades of civil rights struggle and the spirit of Black pride and Black power to create and solidify an entirely new field of scholarly production, the 1619 Project owes its ability to tell a coherent and comprehensive story of oppression and resistance to their scholarly efforts to “mainstream” the study of African American history and culture. The lessons that the Black studies movement taught over the last 50 years will never be unlearned.

[I tell my story of a lifetime of adult friendship with Perry in “Perry Hall, Restless Seeker,” and in “The Spirit of Phyllis Hall.”]

The Gathering Elements of a New Movement

Now, in 2020, we are living once again in a period of open rebellion that bears real similarities to the ‘60s; similarities that include the continuous outrages of police brutality toward and police murders of African American men and women, and mass expressions of political rage and, sometimes, violence. Many more protests are guaranteed as is the possibility of further and, even, premeditated violence.

But there are welcome and important differences between the two eras. Perhaps the most important is the role that Generation Z will play going forward. Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generation in American history, eclipsing the Baby Boomers in both size and diversity, and is just now coming of political age. I am not suggesting that a majority of that cohort is done with the status quo, ready to resist white supremacy, and to carry the fight for social justice and equity forward; but the Boomers were by no means united in support of civil rights or opposition to the war in Vietnam, either. And history (including polling data) does suggest that a far larger percentage of Gen Z is ready for an entirely new social contract.

Into the bargain, the percentage of older white folks who recognize that white privilege has been a major cause of the unfair distribution of the fruits of the country’s great wealth is growing. Covid and the higher infection and death rates in black and brown communities connected to the fact that so many people of color are essential workers, are underpaid and often uninsured, has highlighted the costs of white privilege.

The Shifting Media Environment

Fifty-two years ago, an overwhelming majority of seniors voted for Richard Nixon in a decisive repudiation of the liberal social agenda. Yes, many of them voted for Donald Trump four years ago, but polls now suggest they are increasingly disenchanted with Trump’s divisive political style and his failure to productively address the pandemic we are suffering through now. Moreover, it seems that many no longer believe that occasional vandalism and looting destroys the credibility of the protests. And though somewhere around 40 percent of poll respondents (most of them white, to be sure) continue to support Donald Trump, contrast this to the fact that 61 percent of poll respondents opposed the Freedom Riders in 1961.

And with the exception of Fox News, no major networks or prominent publications are using their influence to effectively terrorize moderate voters into applauding Trump’s law and order rhetoric. On the contrary, it has become a commonplace to hear both politicians and talking heads defend the legitimacy of protest even when they are condemning looting and vandalism.

Activists annoyed by the media’s coverage of, say, Black Lives Matter, should contrast the refusal of major media to blanketly condemn the current protests to Life Magazine’s major two-part coverage of “the critical new phase of the Negro revolution” in June 1966. The second issue in that series featured a lurid cover headline: “Plot to Get Whitey: Red-Hot Young Negroes Plan a Ghetto War.” Of course, there are plenty of legitimate critiques to aim at reporting on contemporary activism, but coverage today is downright tame compared to the headlines that helped to transform white Americans into “law and order” voters in 1968.

From the mid-50s through the end of the '60s, there was an infrastructure of progressive social organizations, most particularly civil rights groups. That infrastructure was key in developing strategy, mobilizing resources and sustaining momentum for the long fight. There were also a variety of liberation movements that developed in the '60s, but not many that built solid or enduring organizations to carry the work forward.

Though it is far from clear which organizations will grow in stature and the capacity to lead and sustain a movement against white supremacy and economic injustice, there are groups, like Black Lives Matter, that are direct descendants of the liberation movements of the 1960s. The North Carolina NAACP, the second largest NAACP chapter in the country, led by Rev. William Barber, has organized and sustained a network of 93 activist and advocacy organizations across the state. As a result, the NAACP’s  110-year history of struggle and long reach are available to help sustain a new movement capable of taking on the challenge of this moment.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with roots in the ‘70s, has grown recently into an organization capable of electing its own members to Congress and swinging substantial weight in the Democratic party. And though some labor unions played critical roles in getting the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed in the ‘70s, they will need the changes a new movement can achieve to restore the right to organize and the strength they once had. DSA and other groups will play necessary roles in moving the Democratic party out of the way, if not into becoming reliable allies of a new movement for social change.

I have neither the knowledge nor the ability to come up with a comprehensive list of the broad range of organizations that could provide significant leadership in what is shaping up to be a historic struggle; but the point is that every movement must rely on a variety of organizations to help it to grow and mature, gather resources, develop strategy, and capture hearts and minds. In the ‘60s and ‘70s some of those critical organizations exhausted themselves, SDS for example; others, like the Black Panthers, came under withering attack from police and the FBI and found themselves struggling to survive. And many big labor unions found themselves shrunk by a declining manufacturing base and legal assaults on the right to organize.

The Counterattack of Capital

But one other factor is critical in assessing the opportunity to make fundamental change: The role of capital and the capacity of capital and major corporations to drive the counterattack against any significant gains by a social change movement.

In the ‘30s capital was unable to effectively resist New Deal programs that created Social Security, jobs programs, income subsidies, and new areas of social investment. It took a war to finally restart the economy, but the New Deal persuaded ordinary Americans for the first time that government could work for them.

Capital’s capacity to fight back was far less limited in the ‘70s. The early part of that decade was characterized by something of a stalemate between capital and labor, but the big corporations in major sectors of the economy had the wealth to whether that standoff. By the end of the decade, the purchasing power of the average wage had eroded considerably, and factory jobs were disappearing or beginning to move to right-to-work states in the south. It was at that time that big cities in the north, where working families had been supported for almost two decades by wages and benefits earned in union jobs, began experiencing a decline in their standard of living that has lasted into the new century.

But Covid, which has revealed the high cost of white privilege, has also unbalanced significant sectors of the economy. Working people, of course, will suffer the consequences worst and first; but if an electoral strategy develops that focuses on turning red districts purple and purple districts blue, a more progressive majority in Congress could help the developing movement fight off the counterattack of capital.

Five Factors That Open the Way

These five factors:

1.     A new generation agitating for realizing the promise of democracy, and

2.     Older generations woke to how damaging their privilege has been, and believing that a new social contract could improve their quality of life as well as the lives of the exploited and left behind, and

3.     The development of new organizations and the revitalization of older organizations with a commitment to fundamental social change and the capacity to sustain a movement, and

4.     A national media that is actually showing signs of a new commitment to journalistic integrity,

5.     And fundamental weaknesses in capital’s ability to fight back,

suggest that we have arrived at a moment when a movement can build a new society organized around equity and equal justice. Such a thing cannot possibly be achieved instantly. It will take time. And energy. Patience. And a strategy that mobilizes millions.

Imagine the Democratic Impact of Elections in Which Everybody Votes

It would seem that in the United States that any strategy that could dismantle white supremacy and fundamentally change governance must include democratic elections. And not the familiar kind, in which somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of eligible voters show up to vote. But a strategy that aimed to get, say, 70 percent of all voting age adults invested in the real value of participating in the electoral process, organizing, registering, educating, voting, holding elected officials accountable, and engaging each other constantly, would be elections with outcomes far different than the ones we live with now.

Over time, elections like that could be the force that dismantles structures like the Electoral College and the US Senate, institutions created to limit democratic governance by a constitution that specifically declared that African Americans were only 3/5 of a person and only white men of property could vote. How to get to such a place? Again, such a thing cannot possibly be achieved instantly. It will take time. And energy. Patience. And a strategy that mobilizes millions.

So, even if we are talking of changes years in the making, we are also talking about a country shaped by 400 years of racism and dominated by wealth and privilege. Getting there in our lifetimes would be a monumental achievement and would honor the patience and struggle of the 20+ generations that preceded us.

It’s worth noting that the Left in the United States has been divided for decades over whether the Democratic party can be a vehicle for social change. A significant percentage of white leftists has sat on the sidelines during national elections, including the 2016 election, which ended with the catastrophic victory of Donald Trump. Many of those on the sidelines have argued that only a third party, a true workers’ party, can change a system that favors capital over labor, and victimizes especially communities of color and low-wage workers. But it seems clear that Trump is among the worst presidents in American history and that his presidency has been a disaster for every group that a left-wing third party might aspire to organize and serve.

In any case, dreams of building a third party do not make a strategy. But a mass movement for social change that endures could also create educational and organizing structures that pursue vastly increased participation in elections and provide a means to push elected officials to enact legislation that invests in underserved communities, ends the unequal distribution of income and wealth, and invests in universal health care, quality public education, affordable housing and ending poverty. Such a movement could easily transform the Democratic party into a political force that serves the vast majority of Americans. The movement that gets there must necessarily set goals that include 70 and 80 percent participation in elections by all voting age adults in the United States, not the kinds of elections we are familiar with now in which records are set if the participation needle reaches 50 percent of registered voters.

And when the opportunity develops to secure equity and equal justice for everyone, enduring as long as those who came after us continue the struggle to maintain that happy state, we could pass a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights that would serve as a declaration of permanent intent and would guide policy and program both domestically and globally.

What would a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights look like? Well it might look like the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, which was passed in 1948.

The first one on the last is “Innate Freedom and Equality,” elaborated this way:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

The declaration outlines 30 basic (and unalienable) rights altogether. The twenty-fifth is “The Right to an Adequate Standard of Living,” which is described this way:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”

By this point, it is likely that most people who read this will have concluded that such goals are too idealistic and beyond our collective reach. But the notion that such goals are unachievable, it turns out, is a measure of the true genius of our wealthy, white founding fathers. They designed a system that would hold up for hundreds of years against the work of individuals and movements who struggled for more and better.

But if there were not flaws in their design than the slave regime would not have been brought down, women would not own property or vote or hold office, and everyone would not have the right to marry and raise children. Of course, there is so much more to do. And it is a very heavy lift. But we are at a moment of opportunity. A moment where we might collectively be the instrument for realizing the dreams of the liberation movements whose work got us this far.

The Earth Itself Is Waiting For Us

How urgent is the work of this moment? So urgent that without equity and equal justice, we will not be strong enough to do what comes after the revolution—the challenge to save a planet from the worst of climate change and the damage that populations world over, especially poor communities and countries of color, are and will sustain.

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