Speech given in St. Louis, Missouri (June 27, 2015)
Kudos to Pastor Cori Bush and Dr. David Ragland for their brilliant work on the Truth Telling Project. I deeply thank you for inviting me to participate in this gathering of Ferguson protesters and other activists in the St. Louis area. It is an honor to join you as you ponder the permanence of violence in America and as you explore old and new meanings and long-standing but unacknowledged truths about the vicious racism that has plagued our world since its beginnings. We know that the historical process of colonization was a violent conquest of human beings and the land they stewarded. It is thus essential that we identify the genocidal assaults on the first peoples of this land as the foundational arena for the many forms of state and vigilante violence that followed. Moreover, the violence of European colonization, including the slave trade, constitutes the common history of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the American hemisphere. In other words, there is a longer and larger history of the violence we witness today. Our understandings of and resistance to contemporary modes of racist violence should thus be sufficiently capacious to acknowledge the embeddedness of historical violence—of settler colonial violence against Native Americans and of the violence of slavery inflicted on Africans. Our work today is evidence of the unfinished status of planetary struggles for equality, justice, and freedom.
I thank all of the presenters for their truth-telling presentations, including my sister Fania Davis, who has been working with this project since her first trip to Ferguson. It has been almost one year since the protests last summer following the police killing of Michael Brown. This morning my sister and I touched the ground where he was slain and followed the path of the protesters through the Ferguson community. I know that there are many Ferguson protesters among you and I want you to know how honored I feel to be here in this place at this time. Like everyone else who identifies with current struggles against racism and police violence, I have uttered the words “Ferguson” and “Michael Brown” innumerable times. Both inside and outside the country—for me as for people throughout the world—the very mention of Ferguson evokes struggle, perseverance, courage, and a collective vision of the future.
Let me share a story about the global resonances of your perseverance. Last September when I traveled to Savona, Italy—a town of about sixty thousand people in northwestern Italy near Genoa—where I was invited to speak on the Cuban Five, the people there were eagerly following the Ferguson protests. The group to which I spoke had been working for many years to free the five Cubans who were arrested by the US government in 1998 for attempting to prevent terrorist assaults on Cuba. As you may know, the last three were released this past December in a prisoner exchange. As we gather here this evening, the city of Johannesburg is celebrating the Cuban Five as heroes who represent the collective determination generated by people throughout the world and the uninterrupted sixteen-year-long struggle for their freedom. The point that I want to make is that when I arrived in Savona, the people were also enthusiastically waiting to hear about Michael Brown and Ferguson. They interpreted the actions of the protesters in Ferguson as a blow for freedom all over the planet, including freedom for the Cuban Five.
My primary reason for being here this afternoon is not to offer you leadership or to impart advice as to where to go from here. While I would be happy to engage in such discussions, that is not why I am here. I am here simply because I want to thank you Ferguson activists, because you refused to drop the torch of struggle. When you were urged to go home and go back to business as usual, you said no and in the process you made Ferguson a worldwide symbol of resistance. At a time when we are urged to settle for fast solutions, easy answers, formulaic resolutions, Ferguson protesters said no. You were determined to continue to make the issues of violence against Black communities visible. You refused to believe that there were any simplistic answers and you demonstrated that you would not allow this issue to be buried in the graveyard that has not only claimed Black lives but also so many struggles to defend those lives. So I join the millions of people who thank you for not giving up, for not going home, for staking our claim for freedom on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, with such great power that Ferguson has become synonymous with progressive protest from Palestine to South Africa, from Syria to Germany, and Brazil to Australia.
I am especially moved to be here where it all began. When Mike Brown was killed almost a year ago, Ferguson activists proclaimed that they were standing up not only for this young man whose life was needlessly sacrificed, but also for countless others. If it had not been for Ferguson, we might not have been compelled to focus our attention on Eric Garner in New York and eleven-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. If it had not been for Ferguson, we might not have remembered Miriam Carey in Washington, DC, Rekia Boyd in Chicago, and Alesia Thomas in Los Angeles. Had it not been for Ferguson protesters, who also pointed out that Black women and people of color and queer communities and Palestinian activists were targets of officially condoned racist violence, we might not have achieved such a broad consciousness of the work that will be required to build a better world.
We might not have experienced the terrible tragedy in Charleston in ways that have brought together people all over the world, who recognize that racism is indeed alive and well fifteen years into the twenty-first century. We might not have recognized that we have to focus our attention beyond individuals and symbols in order to develop a fluency capable of apprehending the persistence of structural racism even when legalized segregation has been declared historically obsolete, even when individual expressions of racist attitudes are not so easily condoned. Of course it is a good thing that the Confederate flag is finally on its way out. After more than fifty years of openly symbolizing resistance to civil rights, resistance to Black equality, and anti-Black and anti-Semitic violence, the Confederate flag finally seems to be finally disappearing from our official political landscapes. But the question confronting us is how to identify and challenge structures as well as symbols of racism.
It is quite interesting that in the very last period of Obama’s presidency, the Pandora’s box of racism has been unbolted. But many are rushing to close it again. In 2011 when Troy Davis faced capital punishment, we desperately tried to build a movement strong enough to save his life. But public understandings of the centrality of the death penalty to the persistence of structural racism were not strong enough to create a collective demand that could not be ignored. In 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed, the cry “Justice for Trayvon Martin!” awakened people to the urgency of building antiracist movements. But we focused somewhat too sharply on George Zimmerman, the individual perpetrator, to be able to identify the structures of racist violence and specifically the links between vigilante violence and state violence. But when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, the movement refused to disband. Even when the police used military technology and tactics to subdue the protesters, they refused to be restrained. Palestinian activists, accustomed to police attacks with tear gas, tweeted advice and encouragement to Ferguson protesters. When some people’s rage led them to respond in ways that may have been counterproductive, the movement did not capitulate and refused to disband. Even when people tried to discredit the protesters, the movement refused to disband. When various public figures asked, “Where are the leaders?” the movement said we are not a leaderless movement, we are a leader-full movement.
Your movement announced that we do not now need the traditional, recognizable Black male charismatic leader. We definitely love Martin and Malcolm and deeply appreciate their historical contributions, but we need not replicate the past. Besides, this is the twenty-first century and by now we should have learned that leadership is not a male prerogative. Women have always done the work of organizing Black radical movements, so women should also be in the leadership. Within the Black movement, we have engaged in these struggles around gender from the beginning of the twentieth century—and especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally we see a movement that values radical Black women, that values radical Black queer women. When Black women stand up—as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.
But, as activist historian Barbara Ransby has emphasized, we cannot romanticize leaderlessness. She recently pointed out that:
Those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker’s words, “Strong people don’t need [a] strong leader.” Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her fifty-year career working in the trenches of racial-justice struggles, but what she meant was specific and contextual. She was calling for people to disinvest from the notion of the messianic, charismatic leader who promises political salvation in exchange for deference. Baker also did not mean that movements would naturally emerge without collective analysis, serious strategizing, organizing, mobilizing and consensus building.
New organizations such as Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100, Justice League NYC, and We Charge Genocide are a few of the new-generation organizations that have developed new models of leadership and that acknowledge how important Black feminist insights are to the development of viable twenty-first-century radical Black movements. These organizations understand the clandestine racialization and gendering of putatively universal categories. They recognize, for example, that those who counter the slogan “Black Lives Matter” with what they assume is a more all-embracing slogan, “All Lives Matter,” are often embracing a strategy that glosses over the particular reasons why it is important to insist quite specifically on an end to racist violence. I understand that Hillary Clinton spoke at a church in Florissant, a few days ago, some five miles from Ferguson, where she insisted that “all lives matter.” Does she not realize the extent to which such universal proclamations have always bolstered racism? More often than not universal categories have been clandestinely racialized. Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history the very category “human” has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male. I wonder if Hillary Clinton is familiar with the book All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.
If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim that “Black Lives Matter.” Or, as we discover on the BLM website: Black Women Matter, Black Girls Matter, Black Gay Lives Matter, Black Bi Lives Matter, Black Boys Matter, Black Queer Lives Matter, Black Men Matter, Black Lesbians Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Black Immigrants Matter, Black Incarcerated Lives Matter. Black Differently Abled Lives Matter. Yes, Black Lives Matter, Latino/Asian American/Native American/Muslim/Poor and Working-Class White Peoples Lives matter. There are many more specific instances we would have to name before we can ethically and comfortable claim that All Lives Matter.
In this context I want to take issue with one of Obama’s points in his quite amazing eulogy of Reverend Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, South Carolina, yesterday. I want to take issue with what he said when he exclaimed that if we want to be successful in our struggle against racism we cannot say that we need more conversations about race. Rather we should say that we need action. Certainly we need a great deal more than talk, but it is also the case that we need to learn how to talk about race and racism. If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.
The call for public conversations on race and racism is also a call to develop a vocabulary that permits us to have insightful conversations. If we attempt to use historically obsolete vocabularies, our consciousness of racism will remain shallow and we can be easily urged to assume that, for example, changes in the law spontaneously produce effective changes in the social world. For example, those who assume that because slavery was legally abolished in the nineteenth century, it was thereby relegated to the dustbin of history, fail to recognize the extent to which cultural and structural elements of slavery are still with us. The prison-industrial complex furnishes numerous examples of the persistence of slavery. There are those who believe that we have definitively triumphed in the struggle for civil rights. However, vast numbers of Black people are still deprived of the right to vote—especially if they are in prison or former felons. Moreover, even those who did acquire rights that were not previously available to them did not thereby achieve jobs, education, housing, and health care.
The mid-twentieth-century campaign for civil rights was an essential moment in our struggle for racial equality, but it is important to develop vocabularies that help us acknowledge that civil rights was and is not the entire story. Such an analysis of racism would be helpful to those who are celebrating yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on marriage equality as if the final barrier to justice for LGBTQ communities had been surmounted. The decision was indeed historic, but the struggles against homophobic state violence, [for] economic rights, health care, et cetera, continue. Most importantly if the intersectionality of struggles against racism, homophobia, and transphobia is minimized, we will never achieve significant victories in our fight for justice. This is yet another reason why it is essential to develop richer and more critical vocabularies with which to express our insights about racism.
The inability to understand the complexity of racism can lead to assumptions, for example, that there is an independent phenomenon we can call “Black-on-Black crime” that has nothing to do with racism. So, the development of new ways of thinking about racism requires us not only to understand economic, social, and ideological structures, but also collective psychic structures. One of the major examples of the violence of racism consists of the rearing of generations of Black people who have not learned how to imagine the future—who are not now in possession of the education and the imagination that allows them to envision the future. This is violence that leads to other forms of violence—violence against children; violence against partners; violence against friends…in our families and communities, we often unconsciously continue the work of larger forces of racism, assuming that this violence is individual and sui generis.
If the popularization of more complex analyses of racism, especially those that have been developed in the context of Black and women-of-color feminisms, can assist us to understand how deeply embedded racist violence [is] in our country’s economic and ideological structures, these ways of talking about racism can help us to grasp the global reach of our struggles. Palestinian-Americans’ involvement in the Ferguson protests was complemented by expressions of solidarity with Ferguson from Palestinian activists in the West Bank and Gaza. The Ferguson struggle has taught us that local issues have global ramifications. The militarization of the Ferguson police and the advice tweeted by Palestinian activists helped to recognize our political kinship with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and with the larger struggle for justice in Palestine. Moreover, we have come to understand the central role Islamophobia has played in the emergence of new forms of racism in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.
Deep understandings of racist violence arm us against deceptive solutions. When we are told that we simply need better police and better prisons, we counter with what we really need. We need to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them. We will say demilitarize the police, disarm the police, abolish the institution of the police as we know it, and abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. But we will have only just begun to tell the truth about violence in America.