Interview by Frank Barat in Paris (December 10, 2014)
The last time we spoke about Ferguson, the crime had happened, but the grand jury had not given its verdict yet. Following the death of another Black man, Eric Garner, at the hands of police, I’d like to talk about it again. Two Black men died and the cops are walking free. What needs to change?
First, I would point out that police killings of Black men and women are not unusual. Robin D. G. Kelley wrote an article recently, which you might find interesting. You can find it on the Portside website. The name of the article is “Why We Won’t Wait.” The article lists all of the Black people who had been killed by police, while we were waiting to hear the results of the Ferguson verdict.
These killings all took place in a couple of months?
Exactly—during the time the grand jury was in session listening to evidence. I think that we often treat these cases as if they were exceptions, as if they were aberrations. Whereas in actuality they happen all the time. And we assume that if we are only able to punish the perpetrator, then justice will have been done. But as a matter of fact, as horrendous as it was that the grand jury refused to indict two police officers for the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, had they indicted the officers, I don’t know whether anything would have changed. I’m making this point in order to emphasize that even when police are indicted, we cannot be certain that change is on the agenda.
There is a case in North Carolina, I believe, involving a young man by the name of Jonathan Ferrell, who was killed by the police after he had an accident with his automobile and attempted to get help by knocking on someone’s door. The person apparently claimed that he might have been a burglar and called the police, who immediately killed him. Now in that case the policeman was not initially indicted; however, the prosecutor persisted and eventually the grand jury did indict him. I guess the point I’m making is, we have to talk about systemic change. We can’t be content with individual actions.
And so that means a whole range of things. That means reconceptualizing the role that the police play. That means perhaps establishing community control of the police. Not simply a review of actions in the aftermath of a crime by the police, but community bodies that have the power to actually control and dictate the actions of the police. That means addressing racism in the larger sense. It means also, looking at the ways in which police are encouraged to use violence as a first resort and the connection between this institutionalized violence and other modes of violence. In relation to Ferguson, especially, it means demilitarization of the police as a demand that needs to be taken up all over the country.
So we are talking about a systemic change, right?
Exactly.
Deep down in the system.
Yes, absolutely.
You mentioned this Black man whose car had broken down, looking for help, and the people pretty much straight away thought he was a burglar or something. Do you think this has to do with stereotypes, the way that society and the media portray Black people as potentially dangerous, potentially criminal…creating this image in people’s minds, creating prejudice?
Yes, absolutely. And as a matter of fact, these stereotypes have been functioning since the era of slavery. Frederick Douglass wrote about the tendency to impute crime to color. He pointed out that a white man in Black face committed a whole range of crimes because he knew well that he would not be suspected by virtue of the fact that he was white. On the other hand all Black people were subject to the ideological link between Blackness and criminalization.
Racism, as it has evolved in the history of the United States, has always involved a measure of criminalization so that it is not difficult to understand how stereotypical assumptions about Black people being criminals persist to this day. Racial profiling is an example. The fact that driving while Black can be dangerous. Recently, one of the trending Twitter conversations had to do with “criming while White.” A whole number of white people wrote in and described crimes they had committed for which they were never suspected, and one person pointed out that he and a Black friend were arrested by the police for stealing a candy bar. The cop gave the white person the candy bar, and the Black person was eventually sentenced to prison.
This is true everywhere in a way. There is profiling in Paris, too. If you talk to someone who is of Moroccan or Algerian descent in Paris, they face pretty much the same stereotypes and fabrications as African Americans in the USA. Why do you think those stereotypes are fabricated? Is it a case of “divide and rule” strategy?
You know, racism is a very complex phenomenon. There are very important structural elements of racism and it’s often those structural elements that aren’t taken into consideration when there is discussion about ending racism or challenging racism. There’s also the impact on the psyche, and this is where the persistence of stereotypes comes in. The ways in which over a period of decades and centuries Black people have been dehumanized, that is to say represented as less than human, and so the representational politics that one sees through the media, that one sees in other modes of communication, that come into play in social interactions, have equated Black with criminal. And so it is not difficult to understand how they have persisted so long.
The question is, why there has not been up until now a serious effort to understand the impact of racism on institutions and on individual attitudes? Until we are able to address racism in that kind of comprehensive way, the stereotypes will persist.
What about Obama? He didn’t visit Ferguson, not yet anyway. How does he fit in the political picture at the moment?
Well I think that one explanation—one of a number of explanations for the rise of a very interesting foundation for a movement against racism and racist violence and police violence as we are witnessing at this very moment—has to do with the fact that the election of Obama was hailed as the possible beginning of a so-called postracial era. Of course it didn’t make a great deal of sense that the election of one person could transform the impact of racism on institutions and attitudes of an entire country. But I do think that the fact that there is now a sitting Black president renders the racism, the racist violence that people have witnessed, renders that violence more impactful. And no, Obama did not visit Ferguson. Eric Holder did, the attorney general, and as critical as I may be of that administration, I think it was important that Eric Holder pointed out, at least early on, that the militarization of the police was an important issue. Initially in Ferguson we saw the military garb, the military equipment. Interestingly enough during the last period we haven’t had visual images that emphasized the fact that the police had been the recipients of military garb, weaponry, technology, et cetera.
Anyway I don’t think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do. I think what is most important about the sustained demonstrations that are now happening is that they are having the effect of refusing to allow these issues to die.
You mentioned that one person will not change the whole system, so how is Obama constrained by the system that actually got him elected?
Well of course, there is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think that there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction.
Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements—from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements—anchored by women, incidentally—that pushed the government to bring about change. I don’t see why things would be any different today.
So do you think Ferguson can be the catalyst for a new movement? Could this be the tipping point?
I do think that movements require time to develop and mature. They don’t happen spontaneously. They occur as a result of organizing and hard work that most often happens behind the scenes. Over the last two decades I would say, there has actually been sustained organizing against police violence, racism, racist police violence, against prisons, the prison-industrial complex, and I think that the sustained protests we are seeing now have a great deal to do with that organizing. They reflect the fact that the political consciousness in so many communities is so much higher than people think. That there is a popular understanding of the connection between racist police violence and systemic issues. The prison-industrial complex has something to do with the CIA’s use of secret prisons and the torture that was recently revealed. So I think that we have a foundation for a movement. I won’t say that there exists an organized movement because we haven’t yet reached that point, but there’s a powerful foundation and people are ready for a movement.
Talking about the prison-industrial complex and the prison abolition movement in the US, what can movements nowadays accomplish? What lessons did we learn from the sixties and seventies?
Well, I think we learned in the sixties and the seventies that mass movements can indeed bring about systematic change. If one looks at all of the legislation that was passed, the Civil Rights Act, for example, the Voting Rights Act, that did not happen as a result of a president taking extraordinary steps. It happened as a result of people marching and organizing.
I can remember that in 1963 during the civil rights era, before the March on Washington that summer, in Birmingham, Alabama, there was a children’s crusade. Children were organized to face the high-power firehoses and the police, Bull Connor’s police in Birmingham. Of course, there were some who disagreed with allowing the children to participate at that level; even Malcolm X thought it was not appropriate to expose children to that amount of danger, but the children wanted to participate. And the images of children facing police dogs and firehoses circulated all over the world and that helped to create a global consciousness of the brutality of racism. It was an extraordinary step. And this is something that’s often forgotten, the role that children actually played in breaking the stronghold of silence regarding racism.
So I guess during the sixties and seventies we did really learn that change was possible. Not, ultimately, the kind of change we really wanted. I shouldn’t put it that way. I should say not enough change because change did occur within the sphere of the law, which was extremely important. But we did not experience the economic change and other modes of structural change that we will need in order to begin to root out racism.
That’s the thing. How can movements pressure even the most reluctant politicians?
Well, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was the president during that era—he was a reluctant southern politician who clearly assented to racism. But it was under his administration that important laws were passed. So I think movements can indeed force reluctant politicians to take steps. If one looks at the example of South Africa, who would have ever believed that de Klerk would take the position he ended up taking? That was because of the movements within South Africa, the South African movement outside of South Africa, and also the global solidarity campaign.
Staying on the US side, what’s the future of Black politics?
Well, I don’t know whether Obama played a major role in developing the future of Black politics within the US. But I think the real question is about the future of antiracist politics.
You touched on it before, the fact that Obama was elected maybe actually was a block somehow…
Actually, I think it’s important to conceptualize Black politics in a broader framework now. We can’t think about Black politics in the same way that we once thought about it. What I would say is that in many ways the Black struggle in the US serves as an emblem of the struggle for freedom. It’s emblematic of larger struggles for freedom. So within the sphere of Black politics, I would also have to include gender struggles, struggles against homophobia, and I would also have to include struggles against repressive immigration policies. I think it’s important to point to what is often called the Black radical tradition. And the Black radical tradition is related not simply to Black people but to all people who are struggling for freedom. So the future in that respect I think, has to be considered open. Certainly Black freedom in the narrow sense has not yet been won. Particularly considering the fact that huge numbers of Black people are ensconced in poverty. Considering the fact that a hugely disproportionate number of Black people are now in prison, caught in the web of the prison-industrial complex, but at the same time we have to look at Latino populations, and we have to look at indigenous populations, Native American people. We have to look at the way in which anti-Muslim racism has really thrived on the foundation of anti-Black racism. So it’s far more complicated now and I would never argue that it’s possible to look at Black freedom in a narrow sense. And particularly given the fact that we have the emergence of a Black middle class, the fact that Obama is the president is emblematic of the rise of Black individuals, not only within politics but also within the economic hierarchies. And that is not going to necessarily transform the condition of the majority of Black people.
I think that’s very interesting. I’m not sure how to put it, but do you think that when a group of people, and I mean the example of South Africa is telling as well, gets to high places in terms of politics or business, money then comes before Blackness or the fact of being Native American? I was in Chile recently and the Palestinian community in Chile is one of the largest in the world. There are something like 450,000 Palestinians in Chile…
Oh, I didn’t know that.
While I was giving lectures in Chile, I visited Villa Grimaldi, where Pinochet tortured and killed many people. People told me that about 60 percent of the Palestinian community in Chile, which is one of the wealthiest in the world as well, supported Pinochet during the regime. Not because Pinochet tortured and killed people, but because Pinochet was a neoliberal. They were interested in keeping their wealth and privileges. So before condemning the torture they were looking at their wallets. The same happened in South Africa…
It’s all very complicated and particularly during this era of global capitalism and neoliberalism. In South Africa the rise of a very powerful and very affluent Black sector of the population, a Black bourgeoisie if you will, the potential for which was never really taken into account, at least not publicly during the struggle against apartheid—it was assumed that once Black people achieved political and economic power, there would be economic freedom for everyone, and we see that that’s not necessarily the case. We have basically the same situation in the US.
I’ve been actually visiting Brazil frequently for the last period, and Brazil is now on the cusp of some major breakthroughs with respect to racism. I think that they have the opportunity to choose whether to follow the example of the US and South Africa…so it surprises me that Palestinians would have been supportive of Pinochet, but I don’t find it entirely unbelievable.
No, you said 60 percent, which is substantial. And I think it’s extremely important that over the last period we’ve seen the development of solidarity campaigns that have brought different struggles together. Palestinians who have been inspired by Black struggles in the US should inspire Black people to continue the struggle for freedom. But on the other hand, Palestinians perhaps can look at the problems inherent in the assumption that the rise of individual Black people to power can in fact change the whole situation. What is going to lead to freedom for the Palestinian people is going to be a lot more complicated than money.
What can Black feminism and the Black struggle offer to the Palestinian liberation movement?
I don’t know whether I would phrase the question in that way, because I think that solidarity always implies a kind of mutuality. Given the fact that in the US we’re already encouraged to assume that we have the best of everything, that US exceptionalism puts us in a situation as activists to offer advice to people struggling all over the world, and I don’t agree with that—I think we share our experiences. Just as I think the development of Black feminism and women-of-color feminisms can offer ideas, experiences, analyses to Palestinians, so can Black feminisms and women-of-color feminisms learn from the struggle of the Palestinian people and Palestinian feminists. So I think that the whole notion of intersectionality that has characterized the kind of feminisms we’re talking about, that we cannot simply look at gender in isolation from race, from class, from sexuality, from nationality, from ability, from a whole range of other issues that Palestinians, or people in the Palestinian struggle, have given expression to that and have actually helped people in the US imagine broader notions of intersectionality.
How has the Palestine struggle changed in the US over the last several years?
I feel some really important changes have occurred. For far too long the issue of Palestinian freedom has been marginalized. So much so that many people in the US have been progressive except for Palestine. And I take this from Rebecca Vilkomerson, who talks about PEPs, “Progressives Except Palestine.” Now this is changing. The impact of the influence of Zionism, which used to be pervasive, is losing its force. On college campuses, all college and university campuses, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has really grown and large numbers of people who are not necessarily Palestinian, who are not necessarily Arab or Muslim, have become active in the SJP groups. It is increasingly becoming, that is to say the issue of Palestine, is increasingly being incorporated into major social justice issues. And my own personal experience has been that in the past I could always expect resistance or challenges when talking about Palestine, but now this is become increasingly acceptable. And I think this has to do with what is happening in Palestine itself. It has to do with the rise of Palestine solidarity movements all over the world, not just in the US. It has to do specifically in the US with increasing numbers of people associated with Black, and Native American, and Latino movements incorporating Palestine into the agenda. I think I spoke in the last interview about the tweets of Palestinian activists used to provide advice for protesters in Ferguson, on how to deal with the tear gas, so that direct connection that has been facilitated by social media has been important as well.
I was in Sevilla recently for a conference, and Rahim Kurwa from SJP UCLA, which you know well, was there with me, and I told him I was going to meet you, and he had an interesting question for you in terms of student activism. He asked: “What is the role of student activism today, and how should students think about the relationship to the broader community and the movements that surround the campuses particularly in a time when universities are becoming increasingly elite institutions?”
Certainly, and historically UCLA has been the center of a whole number of struggles that are linked to the community. I can mention my own struggle at UCLA. But I think that now students who challenge the borders of the university and the attempt to establish universities as a stronghold of neoliberal elitism, those challenges are extremely important. With the case of SJP, linking campuses to BDS all over the country has not only had the effect of strengthening the BDS movement, but has opened up possibilities for students to challenge prison privatization, and of course on many of the campuses where there’ve been efforts to develop resolutions against corporations that profit from the occupation of Palestine, there have also been struggles for resolutions against companies that profit from prison privatization. So I think that these two are in many ways symbiotically connected. And that’s one example of many.
In terms of Palestine, again in the US, how are the narratives similar or different from the antiapartheid days?
There are a lot of similarities, precisely because BDS has chosen to follow the root of the antiapartheid struggle toward a hopefully more global sense of solidarity by using the method of mass boycott. I guess what is different is the existence of a powerful Zionist lobby. Certainly there was a powerful apartheid lobby, but it did not have nearly the influence as the Zionist lobby, which can be seen in terms of Black religion; its tentacles reach into the Black church, there have been direct efforts to, on the part of the state of Israel, to recruit significant Black figures. And I don’t know whether we experienced that level of sophistication during the antiapartheid era. Certainly the Israeli state has learned from that movement. But at the same time I think that we’ve never seen on a grassroots level the kind of affinity with the struggle in Palestine as we are witnessing today among activist groups. And my experience has been whereas once one would have expected perhaps restrained enthusiasm for the Palestinian struggle, now one can expect that audiences everywhere embrace this struggle. The American Studies Association passed an important resolution on Palestine solidarity. Recently I had the opportunity to participate on a panel of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference, and the NWSA has never taken a position on Palestine due to Zionist influences, I would say. In a large plenary gathering with perhaps twenty-five hundred people, during a panel on Palestine, someone asked whether we could take a floor vote, whether people there wanted the NWSA to take a strong position in support of BDS, and virtually everyone in the audience stood up. This was so unprecedented. There may have been ten or twenty people sitting down, but the sustained applause, it was actually a very exciting to experience.
These changes are crucial to bring about a bigger one. I think MESA as well, the Middle East Studies Association, has recently endorsed the BDS call…
…even Israeli academics said this was a major change.
Well, let’s remember that it was the Asian American Studies Association that first passed a resolution and then the American Studies Association that followed, and now of course…
MESA and…
…and Critical Ethnic Studies Association. Quite a number of academic organizations.
So it’s all great, but in your opinion, what could we do to strengthen the pro-justice movement even more, in the US? And the same question applies to the whole world I think.
Well, I think that we constantly have to make connections. So that when we are engaged in the struggle against racist violence, in relation to Ferguson, Michael Brown, and New York, Eric Garner, we can’t forget the connections with Palestine. So in many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality. Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation. That when we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine.
We talked about the militarization of the police; you see it in Ferguson, you also see it in the West Bank, in Gaza—you also see it in Athens, in Greece, right now. Police forces looking like “Robocops,” the fact that this is a global struggle becomes more obvious when you make those connections…
…But they’re shrewd, so we no longer see it in Ferguson because they have decided to make their militarization less visible, but even when we can’t see it, we have to make the point. And I think that’s perhaps even more important that people learn to see it through the efforts to render those military influences invisible.
Talking about connections, do you see a role for yourself in connecting anti-racist movements in the Arab world with Black consciousness and liberation movements in the US?
Well, I don’t know whether I would talk about a specific role for myself, an individual role, but certainly I would see myself participating in the efforts to make those connections, to render those connections more palpable and more visible. Oftentimes we learn from movements; that happens at the grassroots level and we should be very careful not to assume that these insights belong to ourselves as individuals or at least as more visible figures, but we have to recognize that we have learned from those moments and we want to share those insights. That is the role I would see myself playing.
Again, talking about Black feminism, what positive developments are you seeing in Black feminism in the United States?
Well, the embracing of the cause of Palestinian solidarity is really important. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who is a very important figure in the development of Black feminism, who teaches at Spelman College, which is one of the historically Black educational institutions…
Howard Zinn taught there…
Yes, he did. Alice Walker attended Spelman. It’s a small women’s college, but it is really important. And Beverly Guy-Sheftall was a member of the same delegation that I joined to Palestine. It was an indigenous and feminist-of-color, scholar-activist delegation to Palestine. And Beverly Guy-Sheftall is a very important figure who is so modest that she never claims any space for herself, but I would like to emphasize the importance of the role that she has played. Spelman College, which is a predominantly Black institution, has an SJP chapter, which is the only SJP chapter on a major HBCU and I think they’re giving leadership to the other historically Black colleges and universities. So I think we can hope to see a great deal in the future. Beverly has been really consistent and persistent in foregrounding the Palestinian struggle.
Have you seen the consolidation of feminism in your lifetime that has effectively challenged both patriarchy and white-privilege liberal feminism, if we can call it that?
I think that movements, feminist movements, other movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements. So that the radical feminisms, or radical antiracist feminisms are important in the sense that they have affected the way especially young people think about social justice struggles today. That we cannot assume that it is possible to be victorious in any antiracist movement as long as we don’t consider how gender figures in, how gender and sexuality and class and nationality figure into those struggles. It used to be the case that the struggles for freedom were seen to be male struggles. Black, male freedom for Black people was equivalent to freedom for the Black man and if one looks at Malcolm X and many other figures, you see this constantly. But now this is no longer possible. And I think that feminism is not an approach that is or should be embraced simply by women but increasingly it has to be an approach embraced by people of all genders.
In terms of change, what is the most significant change in Black politics since the end of the civil rights movement? Is it related to Black feminism as well?
Well, I think the interconnectedness of antiracist movements with gender is crucial, but we also need to do this with class, nationality, and ethnicity—I don’t think that we can imagine Black movements in the same way today as we once did. The assumption that Black freedom was freedom for the Black man created a certain kind of border around the Black struggle which can no longer exist. So I think that the Black radical tradition has to embrace the struggles against anti-Muslim racism, which is perhaps the most virulent form of racism today. It makes no sense to imagine eradicating anti-Black racism without also eradicating anti-Muslim racism.
Can there be policing and imprisonment in the US without racism?
At this point, at this moment in the history of the US I don’t think that there can be policing without racism. I don’t think that the criminal justice system can operate without racism. Which is to say that if we want to imagine the possibility of a society without racism, it has to be a society without prisons. Without the kind of policing that we experience today. I think that different frameworks, perhaps restorative justice frameworks, need to be invoked in order to begin to imagine a society that is secure. I think that security is a main issue, but not the kind of security that is based on policing and incarceration. Perhaps transformative justice provides a framework for imagining a very different kind of security in the future.
You’ve been an activist for decades. What keeps you going? Do you think we should remain optimistic about the future?
Well, I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle. So whatever I’m doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities and I think that this is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.