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.

Putting the Eich in Eichmann

The rumblings about Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s donation to the campaign against gay marriage reached me through a facebook posting by my friend Sarah N.:

“So first I couldn't use Firefox to access the Obamacare website because it kept crashing. Then I couldn't use it to access OKCupid because OKCupid is protesting the Mozilla CEO's anti-gay stance. Time for a new browser, clearly. But I have not been able to find a good way to block annoying pop-up ads on Safari. Recommendations.”

Oh, no, I thought. My two least favorite issues – gay marriage and “free speech”, colliding – and in the middle of it all, I’m going to have to find a new browser?  (Though in the five years I’ve had an OKCupid profile, I’ve gotten exactly one date.)

You can imagine how relieved I was when Mozilla caved into the pressure and accepted Eich’s resignation.

Great.  Crisis averted.  I barely had to think about it, and now I could go back to using Mozilla searches to figure out why well-informed Americans can’t see the problem in trying to broker “peace” between Israelis and Palestinians while arming one side to the teeth. 

Then the media firestorm began.

It was not surprising that Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh launched into tirades about liberal fascists.  For better or worse, that’s their job.  I don’t think they even believe it any more.  They just do it because that’s what keeps the lights on in their mansions.

But when the liberal media joined in the condemnation of the “intolerance” of “the New Gay Orthodoxy”, I had to check back in.

Christian Science Monitor:  “The resignation was greeted with cheers among many in the gay community and beyond…But others are drawing a different lesson from what happened to Eich, likening the events to a “scorched earth” policy that’s antithetical to a society where tolerance for opposing viewpoints is a mainstay of the Constitution.”

REUTERS:  Tech workers in Silicon Valley debated on Friday whether Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich got the comeuppance he deserved or was himself a victim of intolerance when he resigned under pressure this week amid outrage over his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Andrew Sullivan appeared on Stephen Colbert, arguing that gay people got our rights by showing how nice we are.  Hey, Sullivan, that thing we commemorate every June wasn’t the Stonewall Ice Cream Social, it was a riot.

But again, Sullivan’s line wasn’t surprising – his claim to fame is that he’s the gay conservative.  More upsetting was that Colbert, reading between the lines of his conservative “character” to glimpse the real Colbert (who I don’t think will make it as David Letterman – but that’s another rant), seemed to agree with him.  So did Bill Maher, talking about“The Gay Mafia.” 

Sullivan’s argument, besides the “catch more flies with honey” baloney is that “when people in the workplace feel threatened for things they do completely outside of the workplace, their political views – I mean, in California, if you actually fired someone for a political view you disapproved of, it would be against the law.”   
He further expounded on his blog:

“When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance. If a socially conservative private entity fired someone because they discovered he had donated against Prop 8, how would you feel?”

 There are a few problems with Sullivan’s reason-ing and the liberals who are so comforted by it: 

• There is no such thing as “McCarthyism by civil actors.”  McCarthyism, by definition, was about a government conducting political interrogations and purges.
• This is why I hate discussions about “free speech”:  almost no one understands what it is.  Freedom of speech is supposed to mean one thing:  that we can’t be imprisoned for what we say (doesn’t always work – ask Sami al-Arian or Lynne Stewart).  Freedom of speech does not exist in the workplace.  I work for a corporation – I know.  They might not be able to fire me – in California – for voting Green but they sure could fire me for insulting one of their clients.  Refusing to do business with someone because I don’t like their politics is not violating their freedom of speech.  It’s exercising my right to choose who I want to associate with.  Drowning someone out in protest is not violating their right to free speech.  It’s just rude.
• OK Cupid pressuring Mozilla to get rid of Eich is not the same as AIPAC and CAMERA pressuring universities to fire professors who criticize Israel (or, in the case of Iyemen Chehade, showing an Oscar-nominated film that makes Israel look bad).  Those professors are not advocating that some people be denied equal rights; they’re advocating rights for people who currently don’t have them.  Moreover, they are not the leading face of the university.  For every professor who supports Palestinian land rights, there are ten who don’t – more’s the pity.
• Professors and teachers are fired, all the time, for their political beliefs, and I don’t recall Andrew Sullivan or Bill Maher springing to the defense of Debbie Almontaser, Ward Churchill, or Shannon Gibney.
• The CEO of a company is not a “worker.”  It’s not like Mozilla went and checked the political affiliations of the people in the mailroom.  The CEO is a symbol of the company.  Mozilla did not fire Eich for his opinion. They pushed him out because his actions made them look bad.  Here are a couple things that happened last December: 
• "Media company IAC has "parted ways" with company PR executive Justine Sacco over her tweet: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" 
• Lululemon CEO Chip Wilson resigns in wake of controversial remarks.  “In an interview last month, Wilson touched off a flurry of criticism by suggesting to Bloomberg TV that production issues may not be the only issue. “Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work for it,” he said. “It’s really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there.” 

I never heard of either of those people, and I doubt most of you did either.  So why have we heard so much wailing about poor Brendan Eich?

In the end, what our liberal friends are saying is, “Gay rights aren’t really that important.”  If Brendan Eich had donated $1,000 to the Nazis, I don’t think Frank Bruni would have written, “Something remarkable has happened — something that’s mostly exciting but also a little disturbing ... I’m referring to the fact that in a great many circles, rejection of the Nazis has rather suddenly become nonnegotiable.”

Remember Anthony Wiener?  Most of the liberal establishment supported Nancy Pelosi in forcing him to resign from Congress.  So apparently, it’s okay to fire someone for taking pictures of their dick, but not for being one.

Newtown, Occupy and The Book of Mormon

1.  When I first heard about the school shootings in Newtown, I didn’t have a particularly strong reaction.  I saw the headlines, I saw the number 20, then it became 26, but I didn’t read the details.  When a friend said on the phone, “That’s so sad,” I agreed without really thinking about it.

Friday evening I went to a meeting at a café.  The Palestinian owner served my wine.  I noticed he looked upset.

“How are you?” I asked and he said, “Not very good.”

I asked why and he pointed to the television.  Military guys were moving around ambulances and at first I thought something must have happened in Palestine.  But the words on the screen said it was Connecticut.

He has an 18-year-old daughter.

It was only then that I stopped to feel the news.

 

Omar al Masharawi, killed by Israeli shelling
in Gaza, November 14

2.  The mainstream media is nonstop funerals, speculation about the shooter, debates on gun violence, tedious interviews with the same law enforcement people and politicians.  The progressive media has moved on to speculations about how different the discourse would be if the victims or the perpetrator had been people of color, at home or abroad.  They remind us of all the deaths we’re not grieving, from kids killed by gun violence in Chicago (117) to kids killed by drones in Pakistan (168) to kids killed in last month’s Israeli bombing of Gaza (30) (read their names).

These are totally valid things to remind us of, fair and even necessary questions to raise.  Usually I’d be right there with them.  But the efforts at parallelism are making me uncomfortable.

I think that’s because it emphasizes the profound alienation we leftists feel from the rest of our society.  It feels like we want to wallow in our alienation and fling it in people’s faces.

And I can’t help feeling that wallowing in alienation is what brought Adam Lanza to the point where he could think it was right to kill 20 children and 6 women.

Aren’t drones the ultimate expression of the alienation our society promotes?  It’s a form of warfare that alienates the actor from their actions, the shooter from the target, the person from their compassion. I don’t want to encourage any more alienation, by seeming to criticize people for their emotional response to the suffering of other parents.

I know that’s not what my friends and fellow leftists are aiming for.  They want people to feel the same compassion for the parents in Gaza and Pakistan and Oakland that they feel for the parents of Newtown.  But I can’t help feeling that heaping negative information onto people’s consciousness will only encourage them to distance more, to dull their awareness of other people.

For years, I believed that if only people knew what was happening, knew the cost of our policies, they would care, and they would do something.  But the evidence is that it doesn’t work that way.  What it usually takes for people to change their positions or their actions is deep personal contact with someone who is hurting.

Would white Americans feel the pain of Palestinian parents if they could see a Palestinian father grieving for the families in Newtown?

 

3.  In my writing class on Saturday, we discussed the first few chapters of my novel, Murder Under the Bridge.  Most people found the American peace activist highly annoying.  (Everything I do to try to make her more sympathetic seems to have the opposite effect.)

A young woman said, “I knew a lot of people like her in college.  They all went into the Peace Corps.”

“Yes,” said the teacher, “people who go into the Peace Corps are usually annoying.”

“They’re idealists,” someone else said.  “And idealists are annoying.”

That’s true, I realized.  In our culture, idealists are considered very annoying.  Why?  Because their refusal to be suitably alienated makes us question our own alienation?

 

4.  A friend and I saw The Book of Mormon on Thursday night.  (Please do not ask how much we paid!)  It’s hilarious.  It’s also deeply offensive on so many levels: casually racist, sexist, making jokes about things that aren’t funny like AIDS and rape.  A lot of its comedy is mean-spirited, but it’s sharp and the music and dancing is incredible. I couldn’t decide which I was more ashamed of: enjoying it or criticizing its political incorrectness. I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s such a huge hit says something about how we can do such terrible things to each other, not to mention those we consider Other.  Cynicism has become our religion.  Idealists are annoying.  Alienation is our god.

 

5.  Karl Marx predicted that under capitalism, workers would “inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work.”  But Marx did not see capitalism continuing for this long.  He foresaw that the working class would rise up and reassert control over their lives through socialism.  Aren’t these mass shootings, at their most basic level, a response to the prolonged alienation of people from our labor, our environment and each other?

But a transition to socialism, whether by revolution or some more gradual means, can only take place if the alienation that separates us from each other is somehow lessened or challenged.

Occupy was the answer.  People were coming together, relating without the mediation of wages and commodities, representation and hierarchy.  That’s why it had to be so swiftly and thoroughly repressed.  It might also be why the crime rate in Oakland declined during the encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza.  But the repression succeeded.  The new manifestations of Occupy, smaller, targeted campaigns for foreclosure defense, debt relief, labor support, are great but they do not offer that broad, easy access to an alternative vision of what our society can be.

What the brief flame that was Occupy/Liberate/Decolonize did was cut through the cynicism that says that idealism is just annoying.  It made a space for ideals and the people who hold to them to be loved and cherished.

 

6.  Today is the Solstice, the End of the Mayan Calendar, The Great Turning.  Let it be a turning toward a world in which idealism is cherished, not annoying.