It's Your Grandkids' Civil Rights Movement

If Oprah Winfrey were not so in love with Hollywood, she would not say something as stupid as that the #BlackLivesMatter movement has no leaders and no concrete demands.

The people who say that stuff must have their quotes sitting in a drawer to pull out every time there’s a threat of a viable movement in the present, because legitimate social movements can only exist in the past, and insofar as they can be rendered suitably photogenic for a major motion picture.  If they’re too messy (read complex), they either (1) don’t exist, (2) have to be dumbed down, or (3) are insane.

In the case of #BlackLivesMatter, the widespread accusations of leaderless chaos and fuzzy principles of unity are hard to comprehend, because the movement has some very visible spokespeople and a five-point program.  In contrast to the all-demands-welcome Occupy culture, #BLM has explicitly requested that everyone who wants to support their movement refer to these five demands:

• We will seek justice for Brown’s family by petitioning for the immediate arrest of officer Darren Wilson and the dismissal of county prosecutor Robert McCullough. Groups that are part of the local Hands Up Don’t Shoot Coalition have already called for Wilson’s swift arrest, and some BLM riders also canvassed McCullough’s neighborhood as a way of raising the public’s awareness of the case.
• We will help develop a network of organizations and advocates to form a national policy specifically aimed at redressing the systemic pattern of anti-black law enforcement violence in the US. The Justice Department’s new investigation into St Louis-area police departments is a good start, but it’s not enough. Our ride was endorsed by a few dozen local, regional and national organizations across the country – like the National Organization for Women (Now) and Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation – who, while maintaining different missions, have demonstrated unprecedented solidarity in response to anti-black police violence. We hope to encourage more organizations to endorse and participate in a network with a renewed purpose of conceptualizing policy recommendations.
• We will also demand, through the network, that the federal government discontinue its supply of military weaponry and equipment to local law enforcement. And though Congress seems to finally be considering measures in this regard, it remains essential to monitor the demilitarization processes and the corporate sectors that financially benefit from the sale of military tools to police.
• We will call on the office of US attorney general Eric Holder to release the names of all officers involved in killing black people within the last five years, both while on patrol and in custody, so they can be brought to justice – if they haven’t already.
• And we will advocate for a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing and schools. This money should be redirected to those federal departments charged with providing employment, housing and educational services.

No leaders?  Alicia Garza, Ashley Yates, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Jameila White, Cat Brooks, Alexis Templeton, Brittany Ferrel, Zakiya Jemmott.  Maybe the reason Oprah Winfrey can’t see them is because they’re women?  Try Larry Fellows III.  Zachary Murray.  This is a leaderful movement.

BLM’s real offense is that they have embraced the slogan “This is not your grandparents’ civil rights movement.”  That ruffles a lot of feathers, because the grandparents’ civil rights movement has been cast as the gold standard of U.S. activism.  What the youth are saying may sound, to those who were part of the civil rights movement of the sixties (or want to believe or pretend they were), like a dismissal of their proudest accomplishments.  It’s not.  Millennial activists are not trying to deny the importance of what has come before; they’re just saying, “That was then, this is now, you did your part, we’re going to do ours our way.”

In the movie “Budrus,” about the Palestinian nonviolent movement, 16-year-old Iltezam Morar says, “All my life, I heard people talking about the First Intifada, the First Intifada.  This is my turn.”  Every generation of activists needs to make that break, find their own form of struggle.  In my day, it was all about affinity groups and six-hour direct action trainings.  I still think that’s a good idea, but it doesn’t fit so well with the quick click lifestyle.  Most younger activists are getting their training on the street.

The civil rights movement is a mythical yardstick for new movements.  It was never one thing.  As has been well documented in so many books and articles they would probably reach from New York to California, there were movements for Black freedom in hundreds of towns and cities in the fifties and sixties.  The “civil rights movement” included innumerable organizations, not all of whom liked each other, from the NAACP to SNCC to the Organization of Afro American Unity.  Many of the people who marched in Selma considered Ella Baker, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Diane Nash, Bob Moses and Ivanhoe Donaldson more significant leaders than Martin Luther King, Jr.  When Freedom Riders nicknamed Dr. King “De Lawd,” it was not out of respect.
 

People who suggest that the Black Lives Matter activists should be doing today what Dr. King did in 1965 ignore the fact that King and others founded Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, following a year of activism around the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which itself grew out of years of similar actions that failed to capture widespread attention and thus spark a movement.  By the time King was invited to the White House, he had been in jail numerous times.  In part because of the ability to spread information about actions quickly across distance, #BLM has been able to coalesce around its messages much faster.  In 1970, activists Carol Wilson and Patricia Jackson drove across country to spread literature and news about the women’s movement.  Now you can post a picture on Tumblr and the next day see someone across the world holding up the same image.

Mainstream critics like Oprah want #BLM to hurry up and institutionalize, get an office, rein in its brilliant semi-spontaneous unpredictability in favor of choreographed nondisruptive protests, and lobby for short-term policy changes.  If I thought there was any chance that would happen, I would lay out the reasons it’s a terrible idea.  But I’m pretty sure the movement is just getting started.  Hopefully, the skeptics are just about done.

What Else? Budrus and the Gaza Flotilla ...

It's intensely ironic to read my last post in light of what happened last weekend.

For some, the attack on the Mavi Marmara proves that when nonviolence fails, the consequences are deadly. For others, it's proof that nonviolence is useless against military force, that without armed self-defense, more people would have been massacred.

What I think is more true than either of those things is that in our violence worshipping culture, only those who are willing to use violence are taken seriously. And because of that, more than because of any inherent virtue in the tactics, violent confrontation often succeeds in creating an incident of global proportion where nonviolence fails to do so.

Consider the fact that last week's was not the first maritime convoy or even the second to try to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Eight previous missions set out for Gaza; two even made it through, which arguably, should have been the biggest news of all. Yet there was relatively little attention paid to those actions, especially here in the U.S. Hence very few of my coworkers, for instance, even knew about them. And that fact enabled the attack on the recent flotilla, because no one said, "Why are you treating these ships so differently from the previous ones." Especially since they have been building up to this - previous ships were rammed, disabled, sabotaged, towed, passengers arrested, all provoking very little outcry at any level likely to have any impact.

The difference? On all of those boats, the passengers adhered to strict nonviolence, what Americans always claim to admire the most. Yet when they did that, no one was interested in their story.

Another thing to consider: Palestinians were engaging in nonviolent resistance throughout the years of the Oslo process (1993-2000). There were tree plantings and attempts to block construction of settler roads; there were Israeli-Palestinian occupations of homes scheduled for demolition, some very dramatic; people sat in front of bulldozers just like Iltezam Morar and Rachel Corrie; Palestinians refused to carry permits and ID cards just like the activists in South Africa; thousands of people participated in these actions and no one heard one word about them. Came October 2000, a very few people blew themselves up in Israeli towns, and it was suddenly an "Intifada," all over the international media.

So you tell me: Do we really admire activists who use nonviolence? Or is that just another way to silence people whose militance we fear?

Is Failure the Chicken and Success the Egg?

(Thinking about chickens because of Nevada's new law that you can't wear a chicken costume to the polls.)



More reflections on Budrus, the Movie.

After seeing the movie, I went back and looked at my journals from those early days of action in Budrus. Here is a little bit of what I wrote after the first day:

After two hours or more, another group of soldiers arrived with two police jeeps. Ayad asked us to get in front. Ted and I did. The army commander came toward me and I pointed the camera at him.

He said, “You can put away the camera because I didn’t come to make a scene.”

“Why did you come?” I asked.
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I came here to build the Fence.”
“Well, I did know that, but I meant right now, why did you come?”
He said, “We both know the Fence is going to be built. We can do it today, or tomorrow we come in with hundreds of soldiers, we close the school, put the village under curfew. But my government wants to build the Fence, and I know and you know we are going to do it.”

I got a sinking feeling, because of course he is right. If they want it, they can do it. But I said, “No, I don’t know that.”

Reading that now, of course, I think, “I should have had more faith.” But nothing in my experience gave me reason to. And this is the little piece that I think doesn’t come through so well in the film: People did not go out there knowing or even believing that they could win. The villagers did not tell their kids to go to the fields that day instead of to school because they knew no one would be shot. Iltezam didn’t jump into the hole and sit there under the blade of a bulldozer, and her father did not stand there and encourage her to do it, because they knew the bulldozer would stop. Quite to the contrary, they knew that Rachel Corrie had recently been killed, in a situation not so different from theirs.

I can’t help wondering what international reaction to the film would be like if that were the story. (Of course, probably there would have been no film if that were the story.) Would Ayad and Naami be known, not as the brilliant organizers of nonviolent resistance who raised a brilliant daughter to follow in their footsteps, but as proof that Palestinian parents don’t value the lives of their children enough to keep them from sitting in front of bulldozers? What would all those people who say, “This film is so wonderful, these people are so brave, if only the Palestinians had used this nonviolence from the beginning, they would have won in a day,” be saying then? Presumably the same things they are saying about Rachel Corrie and Tristan Anderson, who were equally nonviolent and brave: they shouldn’t have been there. What happened to them was their fault, because they had an irrational hatred of Israel and the Jews.

I’ve said this before, but people have a tendency to read social movements through their outcomes. Working backwards, we make a coherent narrative out of their strategies and tactics, their power struggles and organizational styles, leading inevitably to their successes or failures. We subject both our own and other people’s movements to this torturous dissection, and we pretend that we are deciding what to participate in based on our clairvoyant ability to determine which movements are going to succeed. All of us would have stood with Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, but none of us would have been killed at Haymarket; all of us would have joined the French Resistance and none of us would have joined the Judenrat (the Jewish Councils in Nazi-occupied Europe, which cooperated with the Nazis in the belief that they would be able to help their people survive). A few years ago, I asked my friend’s son, who was 9 at the time, if when they taught him about Martin Luther King, Jr. in school they made it clear that the government, and many of its citizens, did not approve of what King was doing at the time. He said no, they teach that everyone always loved King. Okay, I said, then do they tell you that they put him in jail? Yes, he said, but I’ve never understood why.

The movements that succeed are not only a result of their forebears which succeeded. When we credit Gandhi’s march to the sea with helping to win India’s independence from Britain, we should also remember that he opposed the creation of Pakistan and that his hunger strike failed to prevent a bloody civil war.

The campus anti-apartheid movements in 1986 were no different from the ones in 1979. I was part of both, and I can absolutely tell you that. The 1986 movement didn’t succeed because it had better strategy than its predecessor. It succeeded because the movement of eight years earlier, along with so many other things, most of them in South Africa but some as far away as South Korea, had changed the conditions under which the students were struggling. And nonetheless, in 1987 it did not look like that movement was going to succeed in helping to dismantle apartheid.

My favorite book is Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy’s tapestry of interconnected stories of World War II. Toward the end of the book, one of the heroines, a captured resistance fighter, with her fellow prisoners is forced to watch the execution of inmates who carried out an act of sabotage at Auschwitz. She says, “No one cheered.” When I read that, I thought, well of course not. Why is she saying that? And then I realized that she meant they wanted to cheer, not for the execution but for the resistance. They were not standing there thinking, how stupid and reckless those women were to do something that could result in not only their own deaths but others’ too. It’s not that every act of resistance is the right one, but sometimes you don’t know which is going to be the right one until you’ve taken a few or many wrong ones.

Everyone loves a winner, and we especially do in this country. We don’t like to be reminded of our failures. But next time you hear an inspiring story of resistance and triumph, take a minute to think about how you would be feeling about the resistance if there was no triumph. Because most of the time, that’s likely to be the case.