Immediately after Roanoke producer & lyricist, Face Valyou, placed this Justice for Kionte banner and took this picture, two Roanoke County Police Officers approached him and threatened him with arrest
On Tuesday night, I attended a Board of Supervisors meeting for the County of Roanoke. I was there to support the effort for #JusticeForKionteSpencer, who was killed by Roanoke County Police on February 26, 2016. Kionte Spencer was 18 years old and a ward of the state of Virginia when he was killed by police.
The police department, as is too many times the case in situations like this across the country, believes that it is appropriate for it to investigate itself. We learned Tuesday night that the findings of this closed investigation would be released Wednesday morning at 11:30 in a closed press conference. Note the CLOSED aspect of both the investigation and the press conference.
Tuesday night, six people spoke, voicing concerns about the lack of transparency in the investigation and the traumatic impact that the killing of Kionte Spencer has had on local communities, especially youth and people of color. One speaker, an African-American woman with a 15 year-old son, emotionally explained how she has had to prohibit her son from playing with BB guns–although his white friends of the same age freely play with them with no fear of being seen as a threat.
Kionte Spencer, like Tamir Rice, was carrying a BB gun when he was killed by police. In both of these cases, any differences between them aside, I believe police responded with implicit bias. The public has also largely responded with implicit bias. If Kionte had been a white teenager, would police even have been called? Implicit bias does not indicate individual guilt or innocence; it indicates here a fatal flaw in the system. Or, as has been said countless times, “The whole damn system is guilty as hell.”
I did not expect the Board of Supervisors to respond in any meaningful way to those six speakers Tuesday night. And they didn’t. Yet even though I didn’t expect them to respond in any meaningful way, actually sitting there and experiencing what I can only describe as their mechanical and complacently bureaucratic reception of these six calls for justice, transparency, and some sense of conscience in local government–actually experiencing that left me feeling cold.
After being silent throughout the entire speaking session, even when direct questions were asked of them–and apparently that non-responsiveness is procedure–two of the supervisors did respond. But responses only came from those two supervisors who were scheduled to address other business after the comment time. Would they have responded if they didn’t have some business on the agenda? One of many questions. Supervisor Al Bedrosian told us: “There’s a process this goes through to make sure all the evidence, everything is brought forth. I’m not the police, we’re county supervisors so we have to trust in the process.” To me, that is completely tone-deaf, given what six people, speaking for many more, had just told him. From his statement I understand that Supervisor Bedrosian did not hear the clear message that had been repeated six times: We do not trust this process. Also: You are supervisors: supervise. Use your influence and insist on transparency and justice.
Why should we trust this process?
And yesterday, Commonwealth Attorney Leach and the Roanoke County Police Department did release their conclusions in a closed press conference: no charges will be filed. As they explained themselves to the press, four citizens stood outside in an area that police had directed them to and which had been cordoned off for “protestors” ahead of time. When one of those citizens stepped onto the grass to place a banner with the words “Justice for Kionte”, he was approached by police with hands on their guns and told to put his hands in the air. When he complied, he was directed to pick the banner up and return to the cordoned-off area or be arrested for “obstruction”.
Obstruction of what? Certainly not justice.
And we are expected to trust?
The area police cordoned off for the public
Flowers set in one of many orange cones police used to contain members of the public who wanted to witness the press conference
And, because bell hooks has made a career out of insightful cultural criticism and does such a great job articulating the structure of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, here she is:
Yesterday the Charleston City Paper in Charleston, South Carolina, ran a story about a planned protest on the Ravenel Bridge. According to the press release the paper published, protesters planned to block traffic until police intervened. The press release was later retracted and the protest cancelled.
The comments section of the article is full of white people who just don’t understand why activists would use this disruptive tactic. Reading the comments is an exercise in witnessing white privilege, ignorance, and outrage. There’s an accusation of reverse racism, as if that’s a thing that exists. There’s a lot of “don’t inconvenience me” sentiment, which seems callous given a man was murdered by a police officer. There’s also a lot of “this won’t do anything but piss people off and make them want to hurt you” sentiment, which is malevolent and dangerous, given that a man was murdered. One commenter suggests that police should “jump out” at the protesters, which is problematic because here is what a jump-out is. More than one commenter threatened to run protesters over. There’s this one:
Annoying. The murderer has been arrested and charged. There is no injustice here as there were in other cases. Standing in road during rush hour is asking to get run over.
What this man is saying is that the murder itself wasn’t the injustice. The only injustice would be if the officer wasn’t held accountable. That’s a fairly shallow reading of injustice.
It’s tiring, looking at this shit. And they all believe that their sentiments are rational. And I suppose they are, if your moral compass points directly at yourself and your family and whether or not you are inconvenienced, or if you really have failed to understand history.
Because here’s the thing. This extreme violence and dehumanization against Black Americans that’s being witnessed by the masses is not new. The United States was built on similar violence and dehumanization. Black people in the geographical space that has become the United States of America have been killed and terrorized by white authority and white populations since before the country was founded.
I don’t know what it’s going to take for middle-class white people to begin to empathize outside of their demographic. The standard response of white people who felt threatened by the protest is not only racist, but classist. It’s classist because, in its outrage, it fails to acknowledge the privilege involved in driving a car to and from work, or elsewhere.
It’s tiring, looking at this shit. Witnessing these reactions yesterday just drained vitality and joie de vivre from me. It emotionally exhausted me and left me feeling physically tired, my heart rate increased. And that’s white privilege working, too. See, my reaction is still rooted in naivete. I can’t say that I was surprised by these comments at this point, but I was shocked, in the sense that my nervous system jumped in the way I described.
I have no idea how a Black person would feel reading those comments. I can imagine that if I was a Black American, I’d be pissed as hell all the time, living with this white supremacy–because that’s what these comments are, you know. They indicate that middle-class white people have a normal standard that dare not be disturbed. If the standard, the routine, is disturbed, those responsible for the disturbance must be punished.
White supremacy is not an extreme in this country. The comments left by the people of Charleston yesterday are another clear indication that white supremacy is the norm.
“History is ending,” Terence McKenna raves, “because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley”, and while it’s easy to dismiss a man who preaches the merits of DMT, presents an end-time model based on the I-Ching and the Mayan Calendar, and rants gleefully about “self-transforming machine elves” to ecstasy-eating youths over a techno-digeridoo soundtrack provided by Spacetime Continuum, he may have a point.
Climate change is destroying the world we know. Industrial democracy, neoliberalism, global capitalism, white supremacy, whatever you choose to call it, is breaking down. Not so long ago, the fictive nature of money was unveiled, but our attention was hijacked from the Wizard-of-Oz shenanigans of our global economy by those who perpetuate inequality and fear, talking about “too big to fail.” But what if society is failing because it’s too big?
My Name is Chellis & I’m In Recovery from Western Civilization suggests that what we believe is democracy is an elephant that should have been a mouse; that is, democracy can only function in small-scale, participatory societies. Chellis Glendinning theorizes that real democracy–that is, participatory democracy where individuals can directly participate in collective life–can only happen within relatively small groups. She posits that domestication of nature and self, thousands of years ago, inflicted an original trauma on the human psyche that has been exacerbated and amplified throughout history.
We find ourselves, uber-grandchildren of the traumatized, afflicted by traumas on all sides. Climate crisis, militarization of the police, perpetual war for perpetual peace, economic inequality: all arguably the products of colonial white supremacy. Or, as Riane Eisler, Terence McKenna, and others look further back, these are arguably products of “dominator culture”. Glendinning looks further still: our intractable situation is the product of our original trauma, the split of the human psyche from the primal matrix brought about by domestication.
Specialization and Incapacity
Given the multitude of problems we face, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Recently I was approached by a new friend with an invitation to interview relatives of students murdered by state and drug-related violence in Mexico, the Ayotzinapa 43.
On Nov. 7, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam told the public that the students were shot, burned in a garbage dump and thrown into a muddy river in black plastic bags. His words were met with disbelief, anger, and indignation not only from the students’ families, but also by people throughout Mexico because they rely on the confessions of three drug cartel hit men, not conclusive evidence — human remains discovered near a landfill based on their information have not yet been identified yet.
But what does one ask? Say? In the face of such brutality, how do I, a stranger to the families and, until recently, a stranger to the murders, approach the trauma? Faced with such trauma, focused on the similar but different trauma of historic and contemporary state violence against Black people in the United States, what does one ask? Parallels can be drawn, but my unfamiliarity with the larger context of life in Mexico weakens my approach.
Language is an insufficient tool to bridge the gap of trauma, but it’s the best tool we have. Any tool can be abused, used as a weapon. Weaponized language is used by white supremacist society in subtle and unsubtle ways to subdue and destroy resistance. Language is a sharp tool. In an unskilled mouth, or crafted from the keys under unskilled hands, language can inadvertently wound. But we must proceed with language. We must communicate with each other.
I Assume That You Are Uneasy
Glendinning asserts that in nature-based, hunter-gatherer societies, human beings existed within a primal matrix of high attunement to the natural world. The consciousness of the hunter-gatherer differs in fundamental ways from our consciousness. The essence of the difference is the connection to and constant participation in nature. In Glendinning’s model, the human personality in a natural state is centered, but not ego-centric; the ego is integrated into the primal matrix. If we entertain Glendinning’s model to the extent that we take seriously the notion that human beings, for most of our million-year history on this planet, were integrated within the primal matrix, we may understand the context for our contemporary unease.
I assume, of course, that you are uneasy. You should be.
I Believe That the System Is Failing
Failure is an experience we all must accept, and this rhetoric of failure not being an option is the rhetoric of exceptionalism. We need to get over this notion of being exceptional, of being too essential to fail. We can fail. If our institutions are “too big to fail”, perhaps we need smaller institutions that allow for room for failure.
Humanity can fail. We are failing. The planet will survive the climate crisis. It will remain, life will likely continue in some form. Earth has undergone climate shifts before and life has persevered. Whether or not humans survive is an unanswered question, but we must begin to act like we want to survive.
For too long we’ve been acting like we don’t care about ourselves, about each other, as human beings. Whether that’s due to white supremacy, or dominator culture, or domestication is not irrelevant, and I think we could approach our existential dilemma acknowledging that all three theses are true and related. How we approach the struggle now, from our situs within a brutal culture that puts profit over people, must be informed not only by analysis, but also by will, by the belief, being articulated in the Black Lives Matter movement, that we can win.
I Believe That We Can Win
We need new systems. We need roots-oriented, community-oriented, on-the-ground democracies. And we need thousands of them, localized and decentralized. Believing that we can win is a process that is intertwined with understanding the monumental problems we face. Believing that we can win does not mean that we don’t believe that we can fail. Believing that we can win means acknowledging that failure is part of the process. Believing that we can win means, I think, being committed to transforming hegemonic, technological, exploitative society into heterogeneous, human, relational societies.
How can we get there? I recently attended a meeting of concerned citizens and community activists in my city. We met under the banner of a Communication Workshop on Racism and ostensibly focused on learning techniques of non-violent communication. What actually happened, though, was that all of us as individuals were trying to be heard, and in our effort to be heard, bypassed the techniques of non-violent communication being taught. So, from one perspective, we failed to learn about and practice non-violent communication with each other. But I don’t think that anyone attending that workshop would describe it as a failure. In a city and society that is still segregated, still separate and unequal, the act of white and Black and biracial and Latino people coming together to talk about race is itself a success. It’s practice, it’s a start for us here, and we should count it as a success. Because that is how we get to the better society we are longing for: by practice.
Practice
One thing I like about my local Buddhists in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh is that they practice. Every Sunday, they gather to practice sitting and walking meditation, to practice deep listening with each other. One person speaks at a time, and engaging in speaking/listening is intentional and respectful. Everyone sits in a circle. If you want to speak, you bow, state your name, and begin speaking. When you are done, you bow to indicate that you are done. This is usually followed by a moment of silence before someone else decides to speak.
This sort of respectful, intentional communication would have been beneficial as we talked about race at the Communication Workshop. It would be beneficial in our centers of government. It is a tool, one that we can use to create respectful, intentional spaces where we speak and listen.
Transformation
We must transform by engaging in a practice of community-building, of localization and engagement. This is bound to be messy. We are not always intentional or respectful; we may be confused or agitated. Our practice of democracy is not going to look like my local Buddhists. If we are serious about survival, if we want to thrive as human beings, we need to be serious about engaging with each other locally, about knowing each other.
This is a process of recovery; we are, or should be, in recovery from Western Civilization. We’ve been colonized, but not civilized. Civilization implies civility; the United States of America is not and never has been civil. But we can work on civility, locally. In order to come to terms with our trauma, our colonization, our dehumanization, we need to know each other as human beings.
One way that I can work in solidarity with those suffering from the excesses of Mexican state and extra-judicial violence is to focus locally. I must work to empower my community, so that we can work to achieve a new kind of power in America: a grass-roots, a people power in service to human needs.
The transformation we need is from exploited beings in service to a hegemonic, technological society into human beings participating in heterogeneous, relational societies.
FBI Director James Comey gave a speech at Georgetown University on February 12 that called Americans to face the ‘hard truths’ of racism in America. In a country where the majority is conditioned to ignore the complicated and systemic nature of entrenched racism by the silence of leaders, the speech by the FBI Director appears to be an anomalous challenge to work harder as a society. It appears to be a well-intentioned speech; however, even as he calls on all Americans to take “more time to better understand one another”, he shifts the focus of that endeavor away from law enforcement.
We need to pay attention to Comey’s rhetoric. Notice how he describes the deaths of Black American civilians as exactly that, simply “deaths”: “the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island”. Contrast that to how he describes the deaths of NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos: he labels these as “assassinations.” This, the beginning of the substantive portion of Comey’s speech, frames the deaths of two Black American civilians as events with no agents, but frames the deaths of two minority police officers as an event with an agent. Deaths happen. An assassination require an assassin. In this instance, the police officers’ minority status is eclipsed by their status as police officers. Whether or not Comey’s choice of rhetoric was intentional, it is indicative of the depth of systemic racism and authoritarianism within our society: the civilians died; the police officers–authorities in the system–were assassinated.
Comey’s speech acknowledges racial tensions and the historic violence and repression visited upon Black Americans by a white supremacist culture: “At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.” Note how that sentence focuses on the past, without acknowledging that law enforcement still enforces a status quo that is “often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.” He shifts the focus of racism in America back in history, onto notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his persecution of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also shifts the focus from law enforcement and implicates other social institutions: “But racial bias isn’t epidemic in law enforcement any more than it is epidemic in academia or the arts.” While racial biases do exist in people and professions throughout society, not all people and professions carry guns and are empowered to use them with impunity. Not all people and professions are privileged with a disproportionate level of legal protection from prosecution for misconduct and violence. Police officers currently are.
With his assertion that racial bias infects institutions across the spectrum of American life, Comey almost calls out the systemic nature of racism in America, but he does not proclaim that hard truth. In order to do that, he would need to shift his focus from an acknowledgement of society-wide individual racial bias, or prejudice, to the foundation of racism, a culture of white supremacy.
Comey’s speech is problematic because it appears moral and is ostensibly a challenge for all Americans to work harder to fight racism. But, as often occurs when mainstream institutions define the problem, the burden of the problem is shifted from those with access to power–in this case, police forces across the country–to those marginalized from power:
So many young men of color become part of that officer’s life experience because so many minority families and communities are struggling, so many boys and young men grow up in environments lacking role models, adequate education, and decent employment—they lack all sorts of opportunities that most of us take for granted. A tragedy of American life—one that most citizens are able to drive around because it doesn’t touch them—is that young people in “those neighborhoods” too often inherit a legacy of crime and prison. And with that inheritance, they become part of a police officer’s life, and shape the way that officer—whether white or black—sees the world. Changing that legacy is a challenge so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately, easier to talk only about the cops. And that’s not fair.
Changing the legacy of white supremacy is an enormous and complicated challenge that demands the engagement of all Americans. At the same time, acknowleding that those working within the criminal justice system have a specific role and special responsibility in transforming the criminal justice system is not unfair. Demanding accountability, which is what protesters are doing, is fair. What isn’t fair is the abuse of power that happens within various components of the criminal justice system–not only the cops, but the prosecutors and the prisons as well.
Comey’s speech works to indemnify law enforcement by emphasizing its dangers–without similarly addressing the dangers faced by Black and Brown people living in a white supremacist culture; to implicate other institutions that do not have the same responsibilities and power as law enforcement; and again shift the burden and focus to “communities of color”.
We are living in a cultural moment in which many people are waking to the reality that our representative democracy has failed in many ways. The perpetual wars we wage in the name of freedom are unjust, criminal, and draining. They do not further the cause of liberty at home or abroad. The criminalization of drug use and abuse has led to a historically unprecedented expansion of the criminal justice system into a conduit for the prison industrial complex. This moment is historically contiguous to the social justice upheavals of the 1960s. What we are witnessing and participating in is a revival of the Movement that was overwhelmed and stifled by reactionary forces in the 1970s.
We’ve been asleep to state oppression for far too long, blunted by fear of foreign terror, lulled by consumerism and the myth of individual exceptionalism–the notion that anyone, if they work hard enough, can enter the narrow confines of the capitalistic meritocracy. And the space at the top of that meritocracy is indeed narrow and confining, because extraordinary material success breeds a prolific nightmare of material wants, demands, and needs. To engage in the capitalistic dream of material success is to voluntarily enter a different kind of prison, one that is structured with the invisible bars and walls of insecurity, jealousy, and spite toward the less fortunate, whose poverty demands restitution. Intense material success, which is the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, cannot exist without deprivation. We see this clearly in the narrative of the 1% and the 99%, and the inequity of that system has been well-documented.
That narrative, the narrative of our lives–our reality–depends on a complex system of economics, legislation, cultural perception, mass media saturation, and miseducation. This complex system operates like a tangle of bindweed, also known as morning glory, an invasive species of plant that threads its way through soil to pop up everywhere as attractive little flowers. As an invasive species, it outcompetes other plants and has the potential to dominate the landscape. For simplicity’s sake, let’s label the invasive species in our cultural landscape as capitalist meritocracy.
We should acknowledge that part of the tangled root-system of capitalist meritocracy is the miseducation system. In 1964, a salient challenge to that miseducation system rose up in Berkeley, California in the body of the Free Speech Movement. The Free Speech Movement was rooted in the Civil Right Movement and focused on opposing the Vietnam War. It was made up predominantly of white students acting within the university system, so it may seem to differ from the current #BlackLivesMatter Movement. But with a close examination, we see that the two movements share similarities: they both are grassroots and participatory, critique systemic oppression, and call for change. The focus and impetus of Mario Savio’s speech–students being denied freedom of assembly at UC Berkeley–seems trivial compared to police violence and mass incarceration. In the larger context, we remember the FSM’s roots in organizing against oppression in the Deep South and against the Vietnam War. Note also that the FSM built relationships with the Congress of Racial Equality and International Workers of the World.
We recognize that denial of freedom of assembly is state violence in that it punishes citizens for practicing the First Amendment. Denial of freedom of assembly is very relevant to protest. One striking feature of Savio’s speech is that he is critiquing an education system that treats students as raw materials for a machine; yet at this point, our education system has become largely a process that molds raw materials into specialized products for capitalism. Watch his 1964 speech if you haven’t. See how outraged he is over the notion of that kind of education.
Does his outrage seem naive? We’ve been conditioned to accept work and career as our function in the economy. In our economic system, the notion that work should be personally fulfilling is not primary; it’s incidental. Work should be both personally fulfilling and serve a function in society. It should promote social cohesion and further social progress. But our vision of society has been deformed into one where public good is primarily economic, financial. Corporate. As if corporations were the vanguard of human progress, we’ve entrusted them with immense power over our lives. In many ways, corporations represent us in our representative democracy. This is a reason why direct action is important. We build social movements to hold representatives, whoever they may be, accountable, and to change that process into one of participation.
Yesterday, a group of students demonstrated outside of Morrill Hall at the University of Minnesota, demanding that the University meet the promises it has made to further ethnic and gender diversity at the University. After marching around the building and chanting, 16 protesters entered University president Kaler’s office with their demands. Thirteen of the protesters stayed into the evening and were arrested. The protesters were aware that their actions could lead to arrest; such is the price of civil disobedience, and they were willing to pay it.
We are making connections between the different forms of state oppression, and we will need to continue to do so in order to build a cohesive social movement that can challenge and uproot the invasive species of meritocratic capitalism. That species’ roots are violent. They crowd us out, they leave us no room to grow, so that our lives are stunted in an alarming variety of ways.
We must expect reaction, of course. We can either look to history or the contemporary landscape to see the reaction; the reaction is indeed part of the violence of the invasive species. Our culture is polluted by the ideals of competition and scarcity. The scarcity is artificial and can be alleviated by benevolent actions of collective human will. We must generate that action; the prevailing system of capitalist meritocracy has failed to generate it for us and will continue to fail. We must work from our places within that system and stretch out our benevolent roots, from root to root, linking roots, hands, engaging in creative resistance against the destructive hold that stunts our growth. In this engagement, our stance of resistance is predicated on the oppressive structures that bind us; we are responding to being stifled by the entrenched structures of capitalist meritocracy. Our goal is to, if possible, remediate and transform the invasive species into a fundamentally different species that is able to coexist rather than outcompete. If that is not possible, it must be rooted out and replaced.
As our resistance is predicated on the oppressive structures of capitalist meritocracy, our resistance will be transformed when the meritocracy is transformed. The result will be an unprecedented society of cooperation and mutuality. That is what we are fighting for.
We live in a society that would be absurd if it wasn’t tragic. Yet a majority of the society embraces the myths of its miseducation and, doing so, refuses to accept reality. To be fair, all of the systems and institutions of the society–not only the miseducation system–encourage people to deny reality in favor of dreams. The American Dream of individual and familial meritocratic success isolated from the larger context of society is the driving myth that permeates all the institutions of what has become a corporate-dominated plutocracy masquerading as the world’s leading example of democracy, freedom, and equality. This Dream is exactly what it advertizes itself as: a dream, a somnolent fantasy that we must forget as we move into wakefulness and the realities of the American, and international, day.
America is a product and America is a fantasy, but America is also a reality. Relatively few people are willing to see the reality of America. We live in a banal version of the Matrix. Once you wake up, you’re still where you were. There’s no Morpheus to guide you, no organization with answers. No violent struggle against tyrants in corporate suits will free us. No superpowers will be gained. No pills will point the way out. What you find when you wake up alone today in America, aside from a moral wasteland and a devastated environment, is a loose collection of individuals and organizations stretching out hands and wifi signals in an effort to reclaim a sense of humanity. Our task is to ignite consciousness and conscience so that the people will wake up–if not all the people, enough to claim the ideal of We the People for the 21st century and beyond; enough to actualize the American dream of freedom, justice, and equality for all.
Miseducation put me to sleep. That’s what it’s designed to do. It put you to sleep, too. Maybe you woke up. I see a lot of people here that woke up before me. I’ve been half-awake. Groggy. Disturbed by the cold out there, the lateness of the day. Lulled back to sleep by comforts, rising half-asleep to consume lies. Willingly consuming lies, not because I believed them, but because I could see no other option.
Sure, I fasted in protest. I abstained from the most horrific lies, refused to partake in fake religion and consumer patriotism. I read some Chomsky, a third of APeople’s History of the United States, Inga Muscio, Anne Moody, Derrick Jensen, The Conquest of Paradise. I was full-on awake for a while there. Publicly freaking, speaking out.
I got complacent. The reasons for my complacency are complex and irrelevant. What matters now is that I am awake again. Black Lives Matter woke me up. I intend to stay woke.
Miseducation shapes us. It stamps us with answers, stifles our questions. Generally, white people get ahead and get by by embracing our privilege and engaging in the parade of consumption-driven miseducation. The tests are multiple choice, memorization, or regurgitation of the white-washed historical party line–easy shit if you’re white and middle class. Go to college. Pass go, collect a job.
I stalled out. I’m ashamed to say that, despite stalling out, I repaired my jalopy ass–in the way that capitalist, white supremacist society recommended–and tried to get back on the road. But the road was a highway, people drive crazy, I’m overwhelmed by traffic, the damn radio is stuck on some white preacher delivering the news about the War on Terror and how Jesus approves, cut to commercial, and I got distracted, overwhelmed, stalled out again.
I’m built for back roads. I’m a jalopy. It’s good to be a jalopy. Sometimes I’m a bike. It’s good to be a bike. My favorite way to move is to walk, slowly and with awareness.
But the society is built for driving machines, real privileged BMWs and SWMs and SWFs. Career people with cars. Cars with career people. I’m an intentional, pensive guy driving a jalopy; rather be walking.
Miseducation directs us to a false life: the career embedded in capitalism. The goal of education in a capitalist society is not to draw out and nurture the human being, but to produce a worker-consumer for use in the economy. The goal of work in capitalist society is not to engage in meaningful and productive activity that nurtures the human being and human society, but to make money–ostensibly for yourself and family, but also for the perpetuation of the capitalist system. Engagement in meaningful work, a passion for your field, is incidental and a privilege. Capitalism doesn’t care about your passion. Capitalism doesn’t care. Capitalism is being driven to perpetuate itself and concentrate wealth. To work in this capitalist society is to channel wealth upward, no matter what your values, color, or creed.
And look at how that wealth is spent:
War. We work for war. No matter what we do, our tax dollars go to kill and maim, to destroy and drive to despair, to subjugate people to an economic system that is perpetuated by our miseducation, our labor, our passions. And increasingly, as we’ve seen in communities of the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised Americans this past year, that war is coming home.
How does one respond to this situation? By reaching forward, by pushing boundaries and defining the new. And by reaching back, embracing the work of those who have come before to push boundaries and define the new during their historic time. We are alive in history. History is a living thing, not a static page. We are alive within it, the vanguard, the representatives of not only ourselves at this moment in time, but also our ancestors in vital struggle and our children and grandchildren, the young, the just born, and the unborn.
Perhaps the miseducation system can be transformed from within into an education system. Valuable work is being done and will continue to be done from within the system–not only from within the miseducation system, but from within all the systems that are designed to perpetuate white supremacy and capitalism. Valuable work can also be done outside the system. The marginalized, the poor, the incarcerated, the disenfranchised and disadvantaged are increasingly forced to the margins or outside of the system and locked out of the economy. Against immense prejudice and odds, they rise and work. I discover organizations doing powerful, grassroots work–revolutionary work–in communities across America daily.
These organizations and the people that make them up move and inspire me. They call me forward to embrace a more authentic reality and a more authentic identity. Those of us who are overly privileged can work outside the system as well, if so inclined–or impelled. American capitalist society, white supremacist society, is not the inclusive entity it advertizes itself to be. That illusion is crumbling into transparent wreckage day by day, even as the willfully ignorant cling to it and claim it as reality.
No one knows what the future looks like. The image of the past that we have been miseducated to see and revere is an illusion, a socially-constructed lie that serves inhuman interests. Now is the time–the only time we have–to affirm or reaffirm our humanity and commit to serving human interests. When enough of us do, the inhuman will be deconstructed and transformed. With the scraps and wreckage of inhuman tyranny, we will recycle, renew, and rebuild reality. We will build a human society based not on dreams, but on the immense and beautiful potential of millions of human beings working together.
This is a vision. Far-flung, for sure. So far-flung that it seems like a dream. Yes. See it with me. Affirm it. And work toward it.
This is what it looks like: if you’re murdered by a police officer–who, you know, is supposed to protect and serve–and the state prosecutor wilfully neglects his duty; perverts his duty by overwhelming the grand jury with information and promoting the testimony of the officer he’s supposedly prosecuting, and allows someone who wasn’t at the scene to lie in testimony supporting the officer’s story, well, your civil rights haven’t been violated.
This is what white supremacy looks like: if you’re a white colonist in the 18th century, you can become righteously indignant over taxation without representation and wage revolution. If you’re an African-American in the 21st century, you can protest against extrajudicial executions, but you may get arrested, and you’ll most likely be disrespected by mainstream white society. And, of course, you may be extrajudicially killed and posthumously vilified by media, police, and the general population.
But hold on a minute. There are similarities between 18th century colonists who waged revolution against Britain and 21st century activists calling for a revolution of values in America. Sidney Lens opened his his 1966 book Radicalism in America with the following two sentences:
The role of the radical throughout the ages has been as an antidote to privilege. Whatever his failings and ineptitudes, he has tried to repair the balance between those who have too much and those who have too little.
He goes on to argue that the colonists who waged revolution against British injustice were radicals and that their ideals were co-opted and revised in the transformation of the 13 colonies into the United States of America. The narrative he creates is one of idealistic and moralistic men who were driven by notions of equality and social democracy that are in striking contrast to the corporate capitalism that dominates 21st century America. The democracy that they practiced and advocated was participatory and opposed to the aristocratic tyranny of feudal Britain.
In 1772, Samuel Adams revived his Committee of Correspondence in Boston to speak out against the tightening of British control in Massachusetts. This action spread throughout Massachusetts in the following months, and eighty towns held public meetings to discuss what they perceived as British abuses.
Similarly, the decentralized and participatory protests that began in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014 have spread throughout the nation, and many organizations are meeting to discuss structural racism and the failures of elected representatives, public policies, and institutions to provide equal treatment to all Americans.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Prisoner.
This past weekend, many Americans came together to discuss and act on the radical legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. These groups dismissed the sanitized, static image of King sanctified by the national holiday and embraced the radical that King had become before his death. King’s radicalization led to his murder by the forces of white supremacy in a society that feared the moral truth he preached when he spoke out against the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism”. King was calling on people to hold America accountable for its crimes and terror overseas as well as its crimes and terror at home.
Nearly fifty years after Martin Luther King was assassinated by the forces of white supremacy, white supremacy continues to perpetuate crimes and terror at home and abroad. American history is violent, racist, and intolerant. If we accept that revolutionary colonists were motivated by ideals of equality and participatory democracy, we must also accept that they were embedded in a culture of violence, racism, and intolerance. That culture persists due to the value of reactionary self-interest, which is also an American value, though not one that is openly professed.
We live in a society of contradictions, a complex society of individuals attempting to practice democracy. If we are sincere about practicing democracy, we must practice it on a deeper level than watching television news and voting. Democracy requires participation, just as progress and justice require action.
I don’t want to watch white supremacy work. I want to take it apart. We must engage with each other and enter into uncomfortable conversations in order to dismantle white supremacy. And we must go further than conversation. We must make ourselves uncomfortable by taking action against injustice. It’s likely to be frightening. We have to do it anyway.
American society suffers from a profound clash of professed values and actual practices. We profess the value of education, but criminalize our children with a school-to-prison pipeline. We profess a love of liberty, but imprison unprecedented numbers of people, most for non-violent drug offenses, and the majority of those we imprison are people of color. We profess equality and security, yet our police departments operate as judge, jury, and executioner in the most disadvantaged communities–the ones that most need police officers to serve and protect. Those communities also need social services, yet social services are routinely cut in favor of corporate profits and privatization, and so the professed rights to life and the pursuit of happiness are compromised.
Chicago activists protesting criminalization of black youth at Cook County Detention Center on January 15, 2015 (photo by @MinkuMedia) Click image to read “Willing to Live for Our People”, about the young students who led the Chicago action
The roots of this clash grow from a contradiction at the core of our nation. The “unalienable rights” asserted in the Declaration of Independence have been denied, in some way or another, to African-Americans for the entire history of our nation. Unalienable rights, denied: a contradiction between the professed philosophy of the nation and its lived experience, its history.
This lived contradiction is similar to the notion of cognitive dissonance, the stress experienced by an individual who holds two contradictory beliefs. America professes equality, but practices inequality; this mismatch creates stress in America’s image of itself and in our public discourse.
American practices violate American ideals in the realm of foreign intervention, as well. Throughout American history, the nation has violated the sovereign rights of other nations: Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, to name a few. While many apparently find it easy to dismiss military interventions as irrelevant to the unalienable rights of U.S. citizens, the professed philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is violated by foreign interventions that aim to subjugate populations to American interests.
make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
In 21st century America, King’s recommended revolution of values has never occurred. From the perspective of militarization and violent foreign intervention, our practices have changed little, and arguably worsened, since Vietnam. Our media is complicit. The propaganda drilled into the American people after 9/11 had a profound effect, obliterating the security that many Americans felt during the 1990s and replacing it with a climate of fear. The violation of reason, the lack of debate and a measured response perpetuated by the military-industrial complex after 9/11 created a climate hostile to democracy in America. The 21st century would be a very different time if, rather than rushing to war, the American people had been able to muster the political consciousness and will to approach the attacks with objective analysis, rather than reactionary patriotism. Questions could have been asked, foreign policy analyzed and revised; America could have wrestled with the contradictions inherent in a nation that has never been at peace with its professed values of equality and liberty.
In a country where King’s “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” have never been conquered, and at a time when the reasons he cited for their continued tyranny are equally, if not more applicable than when he gave his speech, our ability to see the roots of our stress and discontent is obscured. In the pursuit of justice both at home and abroad, America must renounce an economics of consumption for a life of engagement. We must engage in a critical assessment of the ongoing national failure to actualize the ideals of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” that we declared on July 4th, 1776. We must undergo, as King declared, “a radical revolution of values” in order to engage in a correction of course that is long overdue.
