Welcome

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Last night this nation showed the world (and ourselves) who we really are—and who we’ve always been—as a people despite the myths we like to tell ourselves about being a democracy (I have long contended that it is impossible to be a democracy and an empire at the same time, and by that standard we were only approaching becoming a democracy from the 1965 Voting Rights Act until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013). Hell, even ostensibly “progressive” [sic] California voted to retain indentured servitude as punishment for crime in our constitution (n.b., that’s still a provision in the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), refused to raise the minimum wage, and restored longer and harsher prison sentences for certain drug- and theft related crimes. All of this to say that we must begin to prepare active resistance to the incoming regime.

I am sharing extended passages from Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism as he has much to say about carrying on courageous struggle in the midst of perceptibly unending oppression. While he was speaking about anti-Black racism specifically, the ideas translate across the various intersecting axes of oppression that underpin the social structures and relations of this nation, and they are necessary to get us into the frame of mind to organize resistance in our everyday lives. These passages are from the Preface (pp. xii-xiii):

“It was a quiet, heat-hushed evening in Harmony, a small black community near the Mississippi Delta [during the summer of 1964]. Some Harmony residents, in the face of increasing white hostility, were organizing to ensure implementation of a court order mandating desegregation of their schools the next September. Walking with her up a dusty, unpaved road toward her modest home, I asked one of the organizers, Mrs. Biona MacDonald, where she and the other black families found the courage to continue working for civil rights in the face of intimidation that included blacks losing their jobs, the local banks trying to foreclose on the mortgages of those active in the civil rights movement, and shots fired through their windows late at night.

“Mrs. MacDonald looked at me and said slowly, seriously, “I can’t speak for everyone, but as for me, I am an old woman. I lives to harass white folks.”

“Since then, I have thought a lot about Mrs. MacDonald and those other courageous black folk in Leake County, Mississippi, particularly Dovie and Winson Hudson. Remembering again that long-ago conversation, I realized that Mrs. MacDonald didn’t say she risked everything because she hoped or expected to win out over the whites who, as she well knew, held all the economic and political power, and the guns as well. Rather, she recognized that—powerless as she was—she had and intended to use courage and determination as a weapon to, in her words, “harass white folks.”

“. . .Mrs. MacDonald assumed that I knew that not all whites are racist, but that the oppression she was committed to resist was racial and emanated from whites. She did not even hint that her harassment would topple those whites’ well-entrenched power. Rather her goal was defiance, and it’s harassing effect was likely more potent precisely because she did what she did without expecting to topple her oppressors. Mrs. McDonald avoided discouragement and defeat because at the point that she determined to resist her oppression, she was triumphant. Her answer to my question reflected the value of that triumph, explained the source of courage that fueled her dangerous challenge to the white power structure of that rural Mississippi County. Nothing the all-powerful whites could do to her would diminish her triumph.”
                  And the following are from the “Epilogue: Beyond Despair” (pp.195-198):

“I am reminded that our forebears—though betrayed into bondage—survived the slavery in which they were reduced to things, property, entitled neither to rights nor to respect as human beings. Somehow, as the legacy of our spirituals makes clear, our enslaved ancestors managed to retain their humanity as well as their faith that evil and suffering were not the extent of their destiny—or of the destiny of those who would follow them. Indeed, we owe our existence to their to their perseverance, their faith. In these perilous times, we must do no less than they did: fashion a philosophy that both matches the unique dangers we face, and enables us to recognize in those dangers opportunities for committed living and humane service.

            “The task is less daunting than it might appear. From the beginning, we have been living and working for racial  justice in the face of unacknowledged threat. Thus, we are closer than we may realize to those in slavery who struggled to begin and maintain families even though at any moment they might be [196] sold, and separated, never to see one another again. . . .[197] Knowing there was no escape, no way out, the slaves nonetheless continued to engage themselves. To carve out a humanity. To defy the murder of selfhood. Their lives were brutally shackled, certainly—but not without meaning despite being imprisoned. [Emphasis in original]

            “We are proud of our heroes, but we must not forget those whose lives were not marked by extraordinary acts of defiance. Though they lived and died as captives with a system of slave labor, “they produced worlds of music, poetry, and art. They reshaped a Christian cosmology to fit their spirits and their needs. . .They produced a single people out of what had been many. . . .Their ordeal, and their dignity throughout it, speaks to the world of the indomitable human spirit.”

[198] “[We] can only delegitimate [the racism of the oppressor] if we can accurately pinpoint it. And racism lies at the center, not the periphery; in the permanent, not in the fleeting; in the real lives of black and white people, not in the sentimental caverns of the mind.

            “Armed with this knowledge, and with the enlightened, humility-based commitment that it engenders, we can accept the dilemmas of committed confrontation with evils we cannot end. We can go forth to serve, knowing that our failure to act will not change conditions and may very well worsen them. We can listen carefully to those who have been most subordinated. In listening, we must not do them the injustice of failing to recognize that somehow they survived as complete, defiant, though horribly scarred beings. We must learn from their example, learn from those whom we would teach.”

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on ’til victory is won.

Amandla ngawethu!—