Meyer’s reflections on the need for a new, intensified solidarity consciousness and accountability among white folks provide a provocative and urgent challenge. These essays—some coauthored by Black Lives Matter and Ferguson Truth Telling leaders Natalie Jeffers and David Ragland, Puerto Rican professor Ana López, Muslim interfaith activist Sahar Alsahlani, and Afro-Asian cultural icon Fred Ho—offer up-to-the-minute insights. Read on, and get ready for hope in the context of hard work.
Meyer’s reflections on the need for a new, intensified solidarity consciousness and accountability among white folks provide a provocative and urgent challenge. These essays—some coauthored by Black Lives Matter and Ferguson Truth Telling leaders Natalie Jeffers and David Ragland, Puerto Rican professor Ana López, Muslim interfaith activist Sahar Alsahlani, and Afro-Asian cultural icon Fred Ho—offer up-to-the-minute insights. Read on, and get ready for hope in the context of hard work.
White Lives Matter Most: And Other "Little" White Lies
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White Lives Matter Most: And Other "Little" White Lies
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Overview
Meyer’s reflections on the need for a new, intensified solidarity consciousness and accountability among white folks provide a provocative and urgent challenge. These essays—some coauthored by Black Lives Matter and Ferguson Truth Telling leaders Natalie Jeffers and David Ragland, Puerto Rican professor Ana López, Muslim interfaith activist Sahar Alsahlani, and Afro-Asian cultural icon Fred Ho—offer up-to-the-minute insights. Read on, and get ready for hope in the context of hard work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781629635408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PM Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 112 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, mother, professor, and lecturer on black culture and literature, women’s liberation, peace, and racial justice. Sonia is the author of more than sixteen books.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Little White Lives
The title of this book is intended to provoke.
Its simple assertion is neither original nor fully my own. It is an observation that any progressive person living in or observant of the empire we call America should assume, almost a priori, when thinking about the USA. That we don't take action based on this assumption — that we can still be surprised, challenged, or even offended by the idea that maybe Black lives should matter, too — is one of the monumental problems facing our twenty-first-century times.
That we can't all agree that the USA has always meant (and continues to mean) "white lives matter most" is the great, big "little white lie" at the center of our little white lives.
Recognizing the truth of that fact, becoming truth-tellers about the way we value some lives and invalidate others, is the urgent task of this era. But it is not a new task. And it is not simply about race.
I recently returned from the Howard Zinn Book Fair, where the latest of my anthologies received a special spotlight. Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions, which I coedited with my New York City–based teaching colleague dequi kioni-sadiki and coauthored with original members of the New York Black Panther Party Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Jamal Joseph, Shaba Om, Sundiata Acoli, and others, was called "more relevant than ever" in a starred review from Publishers Weekly. This is high praise for a history book, especially whencoming from such a mainstream source. Zinn, the preeminent radical historian of the last century, became an iconic figure based primarily on his People's History of the United States, which is used extensively in high school and college classrooms across the continent. But when I challenged the engaged and already conscious group of attendees at our session at the book fair to name the title of the work that most cogently reflected on white lives and race in U.S. history, no hands went up.
So many know A People's History of the United States (or Howard Zinn's version of it). Yet few have even heard of J. Sakai's Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern, the stunning work that meticulously charts the growth of the U.S. economy and political organization through the essential lens of race. It is not so much that everything in Settlers is correct or holds true for all time; many critics, including Sakai himself, have written eloquently on the complicated confluence of race and class. The point is, even as another generation comes to terms with the inequity and inequalities of our times, the major intellectual work of the past generation looking to break this cycle has hardly even been considered.
I've worked my entire adult life as an educator, and at no point have I felt more frustrated about the idea that education — at this moment — will hardly be enough. Now is a time for action.
The last school I worked at was named after arguably the greatest mind produced in the U.S. during the last century. W.E.B. Du Bois was not merely a profound educator and author, he is widely recognized as the founder of modern sociology. He was also, of course, one of the founders of the oldest ongoing civil rights organizations in the country, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and considered himself a socialist, communist, and Pan-Africanist. As the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University, he was aware at an early age of the power of words and pronouncements — but had no problem prophetically asserting in 1903 that the greatest challenge of the twentieth century would be "the color line."
More than one hundred years later, Du Bois seems more correct today than ever.
More than one hundred years later, the top Department of Education administrators assigned to the school had little or no idea in whose hallways they were working, regularly referring to it as "the web school," as if named after some studious spider.
Our little white lives continue to take up spaces we barely know exist.
CHAPTER 2America Has Always Meant White Lives Matter Most
Most conscientious people in the U.S. today know that Black Lives Matter — or the Movement for Black Lives — may have started out as a Twitter hashtag but has grown into something much greater than that. Whether or not, in the era of Donald Trump, it has reached anything close to the potential some have seen for it is a matter of debate, both within and outside of the Black community. On the one hand, some elders of the Black liberation movement suggest that the upsurge of activities following the Ferguson, Missouri, police murder of Michael Brown and the many reports of deaths at the hands of law enforcement since have still not coalesced into something worthy of the moniker "movement." On the other hand, racist constructions — like the slogan "Blue Lives Matter," which flaunted police power in an age of unprecedented police militarization — set back the conversations substantially.
In the interest of creating space for genuine dialogue across the generations, political tendencies, and geographic distance, a private retreat was organized in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the spring of 2016, bringing together many grassroots Black Lives Matter organizers and a few key founders of the sixties era Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and others. Out of forty or so participants, a small handful of "white folks" — from the new group Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and the San Francisco–based Catalyst Project, who have become known for their annual organizer trainings held in the name of white civil rights icon Anne Braden — were also included, mainly to serve as supportive listeners. Young folks from the Dream Defenders of Florida, from the Justice League of New York (one of whom went on to co-coordinate the massive Women's March at the time of Trump's inauguration), and many others came out for the frank conversation. Though little known because the gathering was more about internal relationship / alliance building and long-term strategy than about self-aggrandizing publicity or statements of intent, the Amherst gathering served an important intermediary goal of looking at how best to build broad unity in disjointed times. More work along these lines must surely be done.
As part of the weekend of private conversations, one public event was held for the students, staff, and community of Western Massachusetts. This region, after all, was the base for many SNCC workers, and the University of Massachusetts / Amherst — whose W.E.B. Du Bois Library (holding most of Du Bois's papers) is the tallest academic research library in the world — was home to James Baldwin, Julius Lester, and many others. The event included presentations from Ferguson's passionate Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, from Cal State's Pan-African Studies chair Melina Abdullah, and from yours truly — representing a "white ally" point of view.
Black feminist icon Dr. Gloria Joseph, in Amherst in part to promote The Wind Is Spirit: The Life, Love, and Legacy of Audre Lorde (chronicling Joseph's and Lorde's lifelong partnership), paid me the highest compliment at the close of my talk. "Matt, you need to get that published!" she exclaimed. It appears here for the first time.
Over Easter weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1960, Ella Baker helped bring together some student leaders and some movement elders, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born. Just six years later — after both dramatic defeats and astonishing victories — several key leaders of SNCC's Atlanta Project put out a position paper that, to this very day, remains little read and even less understood. When, in 1966, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) took over as chair of the organization and popularized the call for Black Power, the die was cast for a myth that has confused movements for decades since.
If we are to truly build more effective movements of the future, we must move beyond the myths of the past.
The first and biggest myth is about white people.
Essentially, the mistaken story goes, SNCC and Stokely kicked out all of the white people in a separatist move that split the movement. The truth is, as whites flooded the offices and membership of the main national Black youth group, a critique developed — based on the principles of self-determination and on an analysis of what SNCC needed to do to more effectively build within the Black community. Whatever good work individual white folks did and whatever deep friendships developed across the color line, several basic organizational problems remained, and the Atlanta Project position paper articulated the problems brought about by a fully integrated infrastructure:
• Attitudes of superiority or paternalism that whites consciously or unconsciously bring to Black communities;
• the unwillingness of whites to deal with the roots of racism that lie within the white community; and the fact that
• whites, though sometimes liberal (or even radical) on an individual level, are still collective symbols of oppression to many in the Black community — due to the collective power that whites have over Black lives.
A solution seemed clear: allow and empower the Black student leaders to have full control over SNCC and press for supportive white allies to do the also necessary and not easy work of dealing with the roots of racism that lie within the white community. Whites would continue the vital work of dealing with the white supremacist and paternalistic realities that existed at all levels of society and could work alongside (but not always or primarily within) the same groups as Black comrades, colleagues, and friends.
In coalitions, united fronts, and strategic campaign spaces, folks could always come together for mutual aid and solidarity. But not every group at every moment of its life would work as if being mixed or multiracial was the only way to move forward for social change.
Today, fifty years after the call for Black Power, fifty years since SNCC's Atlanta Project set down this challenge for whites seeking to be antiracist, many of us sadly believe that — for the most part — white progressives and radicals still Have Not Been Moved to tackle white supremacy head on.
Anyone, Black or white, who ever met Kwame Ture knew that his basic call for all people — his greatest lesson and most consistent talking point — was that before one could begin to discuss building united fronts and coalitions (and Kwame was a great believer in coalition work), one must do "three" essential things at whatever level one was able: organize, organize, and organize!
It could be in a local church subcommittee or on the central committee of a grand vanguard party; it could be in a regional self-defense association or in a national secular nonviolence group. But wherever one was, whatever else was happening in one's life, no positive change could ever take place — no unified campaign could ever be successful — if we weren't working within an organizational framework and if we weren't working to build our organizations.
This leads me to a second myth that is often the cause for debate and division. There are those who argue that it is clear that armed struggle didn't work or could never work in the U.S.; others argue just as vehemently that nonviolence has been an utter failure, resulting in liberalism and passive movements without teeth. In fact, however, we've seen pacifists and Panthers strategizing together, with many saying that it is time we refuse to choose between the legacy of Martin or of Malcolm — that those two men and the movements they led may have had many differences, but they also had many points of convergence: both were becoming increasingly internationalist; both were concerned with the connections between economic and racial issues.
We do not now have to repeat the fights of past generations; we do have to resist the absolutist arguments that some white folks make about not getting too militant, too rowdy, too Black, too strong — and remind those folks that being militant is not the same as being militaristic, that being confrontational is not the same as being violent.
We must be more militant, more creatively confrontational, and our only absolute must be that we will not become absolutists, not inflexible ideologues for any notion that suggests that there is only one correct way to build for radical change.
Finally, we must move beyond the myth about what the U.S. is and what it can be. It may be true that some reforms are both good and necessary in the struggles against racist police violence and mass incarceration. It may be true that we must fight the good fight to push back the vicious privatization of education, health care, and community services that make clear that the U.S. is not committed to democracy or justice for all.
But it is surely also true that America is doing more than simply locking up people of African descent at a rate reminiscent of apartheid South Africa; America is doing more than warehousing political prisoners — especially from the Black liberation movement, Black Panthers, and others — for thirty, forty, fifty-plus years of torture behind bars. If we understand that racism is a combination of prejudice plus power and that power comes from concrete structural sources, most especially land and capital, then we must face the institutional realities of white supremacy well beyond interpersonal dynamics.
It is clear that if we are to examine the history of the U.S. from before 1776 till today, from South to North and Hawaii to Puerto Rico, from occupied Mexico to what some call New Afrika, if we are to look at the U.S. less as a nation and more as an empire — an imperial power in deep economic decline — if we are to look sharply at the empire we live in, we cannot help but conclude that the United States of America is a prison house of nations.
That is why it has been so hard to move beyond the historic calls for new ways to engage in struggle.
That is why, when the cry "Black Lives Matter" is proclaimed, so often we hear the confused retort, "But don't all lives matter?"
To this we must simply and clearly say:
* America has always meant White Lives Matter Most.
* From the genocidal policies of the Middle Passage and Manifest Destiny, America has always meant White Lives Matter Most.
* From the days of Jim Crow lynching to the police-Klan realities of "blue cap by day, white hood by night," America has always meant White Lives Matter Most.
* When we learn today that some prisons in the Deep South are being built at a rate directly proportional to the low test scores obtained in predominantly Black public schools in standardized tests administered to third and fourth graders, we know that America still means White Lives Matter Most.
* America has always meant White Lives Matter Most.
Black Lives Matter must mean an end to the entire institution of white supremacy and thus an end to the U.S. empire as well.
So what are we to do?
The lessons are in a history without myths.
* * *
Recently, some white organizers have begun to once again take up the call for rigorous work in white communities. We have white organizers who are working to Show Up for Racial Justice and more, from the simple act of putting a sign on your lawn (for those who can afford lawns and whose houses won't be burned down when displaying such a sign), to beginning grassroots neighborhood conversations about why we still must assert that Black Lives Matter in a post-Obama era. There are white activists who are struggling to be catalysts for radical change, training organizers in the tradition of Anne Braden and working to understand that only a successful Black liberation movement will mean collective liberation for all.
And we have organizers who are looking to the examples of Marilyn Buck and David Gilbert, self-criticisms and all, who proudly worked with the likes of Black Liberation Army combatant Sekou Odinga (out of prison after more than thirty-three years behind bars as an unacknowledged U.S. political prisoner) and with many other Black Panther leaders who still languish in U.S. prisons. Some of those folks established organizations that worked directly and structurally under the leadership and control of organizations within the Black liberation movement. There are some organizers who understand what Minister Malcolm X meant when he said that "if we want some white allies, we need the kind like Old John Brown." Who understand that behind the scenes, Captain Brown, who took his leadership directly from General Harriet Tubman, received a lot of financial and logistical support from the Quakers of his day.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "White Lives Matter Most and Other "Little" White Lies"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Matt Meyer.
Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Forward: Organize Sonia Sanchez xi
Little White Lives 1
America Has Always Meant White Lives Matter Most 4
If Mental Illness Is the Problem, America Is Mentally Ill Matt Meyer David Ragland Natalie Jeffers 13
Refusing to Choose between Martin and Malcolm: Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and a New Nonviolent Revolution Matt Meyer David Ragland Natalie Jeffers 17
Toward a Maroon Society: Working Together to Build a New World Fred Ho Matt Meyer 26
Strategic Alliance Building: A Change Is Gonna Come 41
Redefining Revolution and Nonviolence: Reimagining Solidarity across Race, Class, Gender, and Generations 48
Oscar López Rivera: America's Mandela and His Movement Face the Future Ana López Matt Meyer 52
From Charlottesville to North Korea, White Supremacy Feeds Endless War 67
Extreme Solidarity 71
Looking at the White Left Historically 77
Conclusion: Removing Our White-Colored Glasses-Facing Reality and Fighting against Empire 91
About the Authors 99
Index 104