“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)
Each Sunday, we focus on a small selection of papers, articles, and essays published in various publicly available sources that reflect political change already happening or that we think ought to happen or ought not to happen in 21st Century America. Our goal is to spur people to read these pieces with an open-minded but critical focus and engage here in an interchange of ideas about the issues raised in them.
On Monday, February 12, thousands of fast-food cooks and cashiers will walk off their jobs in two dozen cities across the mid-South and in dozens of cities across the country. On this 50th anniversary of the historic Memphis sanitation workers strike, 1,500 people will trace the same route that the sanitation workers marched from Clayborn Temple to Memphis City Hall. The action is organized by Fight for 15 and you can find more details about local events if you sign up for updates.
The action is supported by The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. This organization, founded by Rev. William Barber aims to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality. It is modeled on the original Poor People’s Campaign. In a recent interview, Rev. William Barber spoke about his approach to opening eyes across the country:
Most pastors say they preach the truth. The Rev. William Barber also delivers sermons on another topic: "the trick."
The trick is Barber's term for something that he describes as a weapon of mass distraction. It stymied the leaders of the populist movement in late 19th century. It vexed union leaders who promoted workers' solidarity. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died trying to beat the trick.
The trick is when white politicians persuade poor white working class people that the source of their pain is people of color, immigrants and other scapegoats, says Barber, who rose to national fame after helping lead Moral Mondays, a social justice movement formed in North Carolina.
"You have to show them the trick," says Barber, his rich, baritone shifting into preaching mode when asked how he would address this challenge.
"The majority of people in this country who are poor are white people. You have to undermine the trick and say, 'Listen, you want a living wage, but the people you voted for don't want a living wage. You're upset that you don't have health care. Guess what, black and Latino people aren't your problems. It's the people who are voting against health care.' " — www.cnn.com/...
This intersectional, solidarity based approach has a long and proud history.
There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. — Audre Lorde: Learning from the 60s
Unions are increasingly at the vanguard of the pursuit for racial and economic justice. The CWA union has developed an innovative training program to educate its members on how to pursue solidarity:
In the union, we aren’t divided by race – I shouldn’t even say ‘race,’ because that’s not real – okay, ethnicities, gender, etc. We are all equal,” Joe Tarulli, a Communications Workers of America (CWA) union member, boomed in front of a room of fifteen other union members.
It was 9 AM on a cold Monday morning in lower Manhattan. Everyone was gathered, with coffee and donuts in hand, for an eight-hour political training called “Runaway Inequality,” on Wall Street, inequality, and institutional racism. The group was a mixed crowd — a handful of white men who lived in Long Island and worked as field technicians for Verizon, along with around ten black men and women who lived in Brooklyn and worked for the city government. They all were members of the same union, CWA, whose members were facilitating the training for them. [...]
But CWA had a challenge before them: the union’s membership is racially diverse, and in certain pockets, predominantly white. Thus, according to Runaway Inequality’s program director, Margarita Hernandez, CWA knew that it had to frame racism in a way that would help white working-class people realize that they too have a “stake in the fight against racial inequality.”
— www.jacobinmag.com/...
As Amazon, Foxconn and other employers pit local governments against each other in an effort to win tax breaks, workers are organizing themselves and charting a new path forward using co-operatives:
Yet across the country, many of the nation’s most disenfranchised are writing a different story. In dozens of cities, worker-owner cooperatives are establishing new enterprises based on joint decision-making, dignified work conditions and fair pay. Utilizing their existing skills and harnessing new ones, these groups are leveraging their labor on their own terms, with a vision to change their industries and the economic landscape. And in this rising movement, people of color, immigrants and women are leading the way. [...]
For Bautista, every step of cooperative-building offers a chance for political training, too. “Everything we do is rooted in social justice,” she explained. “We not only teach workers how to plan and execute a business, but we also teach them about the ways capitalist systems are at work out there, so they don’t replicate the same oppression. We ask them, what kind of world do you want to see? And then we help them build that.” — inthesetimes.com/...
There are many subterfuges employed to undermine worker’s solidarity, and the present administration has mined all of them. The White House has loudly touted recent bonuses paid by some companies, claiming they are the result of its regressive tax-cut bill. Undeniably, these bonuses mean a lot to many underpaid and overworked workers. However, these bonuses represent a tiny fraction of the tax benefits showered on the wealthiest Americans. For most of us, the tax-bill grudgingly delivers a thin “trickle-down”.
Here’s what makes these bonuses even more of a scam. The administration is often touting bonuses paid to people who’ve worked 20 years for one employer.
Worse yet, these are one time payments, not a permanent raise. In contrast, the tax cuts for the 1% and the largest corporations are permanent. A clear sign that the Trump administration believed the most well-to-do, the richest, deserved permanent benefits, while the rest of America should get some “trickle-down”.
The current Republican administration is possibly the most anti-worker administration in many decades. It is also the most corrupt and self-dealing administration we’ve seen in many a year. Both these traits are exacerbating the already extreme levels of inequality in America. Despite deep-rooted racism, Americans know the score. A YouGov survey in 2016 found deeply racist attitudes towards public assistance/services among the American population. 46% of Americans believed black people “take more than they give to society”, the result of a long campaign by the right to demonize black/brown people. Yet, this survey also found that Americans know who is eating their lunch. A significant majority, 55% believe the upper class “take more than they receive”.
On Pod Save America, former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor explain how we should frame our argument (at 22 minutes):
We said during the eight years of Barack Obama and he said this all through his re-election too, that income inequality and stagnant wages are the defining challenge of our times. That has not changed, it has gotten worse, Trump has made it worse with a 1.5 Trillion dollar tax cut that goes mostly to corporations and his rich donors. [...]
It’s a great thing, that companies are giving a tiny amount of the wealth Trump just gave them, back to their employees. But that is the nature of trickle-down. We just gave a huge pot of money to the richest and most successful people, to the least struggling in our country. And they said, here’s a tip. — crooked.com/...
I want to highlight a speech Dr. Barber gave at the SEIU convention in June 2016. He connects our extreme militarism and war-making with the systemic oppression that vulnerable Americans face at home. This was well before Trump’s election, but the advice Rev. Barber offers about mobilizing is still valid. So is his analysis of how the Southern strategy serves to undermine both economic justice and racial justice (at 14 minutes):
The US has more people in prison than any other country. Over 2 million people are currently in prisons and jails. Our judicial institutions have several built-in biases that result in black/brown/poor being treated unjustly. What’s unfathomable is that in the ‘land of the free’ we cavalierly take away the freedom of millions, without any compelling public safety reason.
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law issued a crucial report that was three years in the making. They study’s authors took a comprehensive look at 1.46 million prisoners and found that nearly 40% (576,000 people) are incarcerated with no compelling public safety reason.
The authors advocate for alternatives to incarceration for many non-violent offenses. Their approach is designed to reduce recidivism and minimize harm.
This report proposes a new solution, building on these past proposals. We advocate that today’s sentencing laws should change to provide default sentences that are proportional to the specific crime committed and in line with social science research, instead of based on conjecture. These defaults should mandate sentences of alternatives to incarceration for lower-level crimes. For some other crimes that warrant incarceration, they should mandate shorter sentences. Judges should have discretion to depart from these defaults in special circumstances, such as a defendant’s criminal history, mental health or addiction issues, or specifics of the crime committed. This approach is grounded in the premise that the first principle of 21st century sentencing should be to protect public safety, and that sentences should levy the most effective, proportional, and cost-efficient sanction to achieve that goal. It aims to create more uniform sentences and reduce disparities, while preserving judicial discretion when needed. — www.brennancenter.org/...
In his foreword to the study, Cornell W. Brooks writes:
Many of the grave inequalities we fought decades ago still persist, more than fifty years after the Civil Rights Act. The single greatest injustice that threatens our safety and hinders our progress? Mass incarceration. People of color bear the brunt of our criminal justice system in disproportionate and devastating numbers. This is in part because racial disparities exist at all stages of the system, which relies on corrosive practices that harm people of color. Our communities have already suffered from historic and systemic economic injustice and racially targeted criminal justice policies. These wounds have not healed and have been aggravated by the staggering number of people trapped in prisons over the past forty years. Today, an estimated 2.2 million people are locked inside jails and prisons. African Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population but 37 percent of the nation’s prisoners.1 People with dreams and aspirations suffer in airtight cells of prison and poverty. But the injustice does not end there. More than half of formerly incarcerated Americans are unemployed a year after release. Communities of color are over policed, over-prosecuted, over-incarcerated and yet underemployed. — www.brennancenter.org/...
Money bail, unequal legal representation and a rigged criminal justice system all play a role in why black people are incarcerated at 5 times the rate white Americans are. Zaid Jilani explores this dreadful trap at The Intercept, in an article titled: Class is a a better predictor of incarceration rates, but this is driven by race.
“One aspect might be that this is where we would see the culmination of the race effect. That is, the study doesn’t find a ‘statistically significant’ racial effect for any of the other outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one there, just that it’s probably a lot smaller than most people think,” he said in an email. “If there is a small racial bias each step of the way (i.e. arrest rates, to initial incarceration rates, to sentencing terms), a study like this wouldn’t find it to be statistically significant at any given step, but when added together, as it is in the last question, we could see a significant effect, both in the technical sense and the common sense.” — theintercept.com/...
Additional reading:
- Julianne Hing at The Nation write about the resilience of Dreamers, despite being Shoved Aside Again, DACA Activists Keep Fighting.
- Rachel Bryan writes in The Baffler about young immigrants who have had their Dreams Deferred.
- Elizabeth Gillespie McRae wrote in the NY Times about The Women Behind White Power, reminding us that some of the most effective activists for segregation and white supremacy were women. It’s worth remembering that many of the people who kindled the fight for equality in the 50s and 60s are still with us:
ACTION ACTION FEBRUARY ACTION ACTION
• February 5 to 11: Peace advocates are organizing a number of actions this against the military-industrial-congressional complex this month. The campaign to divest from the war machine kicks off from February 5 to 11 highlighting the economic cost of war.
• February 23: A global day of action against the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo Bay and the continued presence of the military prison on the island is being planned for February 23, the 115th anniversary of the U.S. seizing Guantánamo Bay through a “perpetual lease” forced upon the Cuban people under the Platt Amendment.
• February 24: Working People’s Day of Action, Thousands of working people and their allies will stand up for worker freedoms. You can find local actions at the link. The organizers’ agenda: Fight for the freedom to come together in strong unions. Fight for equitable pay. Fight for affordable health care. Fight for quality schools. Fight for vibrant communities. Fight for a secure future for all of us.
• February: United We Dream along with other immigrant rights groups is organizing to have Congress pass a clean Dream Act. You can find an event close to you, or connect with organizers at United We Dream.