I can be categorized as someone who is on the radical left in terms of my socio-political ideology. I have been a member of many leftist and progressive groups since I was a teenager. I was organizing against racism and oppression at 13 years old. I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X at 11 and had moved on to Zinn and Diop by the time I was 12.
I used words like "struggle" and "power" and "oppression" before I ever truly understood how these played out in my own life as a black woman. I have been committed to movement-building and community organizing for my entire adult life. Yet in the past five years, I started experiencing a deep sense of malaise. I became increasingly disillusioned and impatient with my old friends. I wasn't able to put my finger on what was ailing me. But I decided to throw myself into establishing another new organization. This had become a pattern for me. In the midst of this new undertaking, I got a call from a friend in January 2007. Barack was going to run, she said. We need your help.
I have always had a hate-hate relationship with electoral politics and yet as an organizer I have often supported friends who have run for local political office. I had volunteered for Barack's congressional and U.S. senate campaigns. He'd always been a stand-up person. I knew that he was a pragmatist and that on some issues was very progressive. He'd always been strong in addressing police accountability issues in communities of color for example. I'd seen how he'd worked with us locally on this issue.
Let me state up front that I didn't think Barack would win. I just did not. This country was simply too racist and too oppressive to elect a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama as its president. Yet in spite of my deep seated misgivings, I said that I would help and threw myself into organizing for the campaign. My emotions were all over the place. Yet, I was heartened by what I was seeing on the ground. Volunteers were given REAL responsibility and were given autonomy. For years, those of us who who considered ourselves organizers had been talking about "movement-building" and "taking community organizing to scale." Yet none of our issue-specific campaigns were successfully mobilizing enough "ordinary" people to actually effectuate any changes. It had become discouraging to be in rooms populated with mostly academic leftists who kept "TALKING" about mass mobilization and organizing. Yet our campaigns were stale and were not truly engaging enough "new" people from key constituencies to be successful.
I was viewed with much suspicion by many of my friends for my involvement in the Obama campaign. Somehow, this was not revolutionary change. I could hear the snide mental comments: sell-out... I didn't care and I pushed ahead. I noticed that the loudest critics of the campaign were also the ones doing the LEAST amount of work to support Barack's candidacy. This was not surprising to me. I had been dealing with this throughout my organizing work.
After Barack won, a friend told me a story about a committed progressive who we both respected. He was asked about Barack's victory and about what advice he would give him for governing. The person responded: "Well, why would he listen to my advice? If he had listened to me two years ago, he never would have run and he never would have won!"
This brought me up short. It captured a truism about my community of friends and colleagues. So many people had been so negative over the past 15 years that nothing could grow on the soil that exists. Movement-building is impossible if negativity is always the default position.
Yesterday I read an essay by Tim Wise (one of my favorite thinkers) which gave expression to my malaise. Do you know how it is when you feel understood? Well, his brilliant essay "Enough of 'Barbituate' Left Cynicism" helped me to put words to my feelings. So many of my old friends have tried to "steal" my joy over the past three weeks since the election.
At first, it was easy to ignore but soon it became clear that their negativity and pessimism was taking its toll on me. I felt condescended to and I was insulted. Wise diagnoses the problem:
[F]or the sake of ideological purity few within the professional left expressed any joy about life, or any emotion whatsoever that wasn't rooted in negativity. They were like the political equivalent of quaaludes: guaranteed to bring you down from whatever partly optimistic place you might find yourself from time to time.
Wow, there it was in black and white. My friends were like "quaaludes." They could only point out that Barack's election had changed nothing for the millions around the world who were living in abject poverty and suffering under oppressive systems. I thought to myself, yes this is in fact true but something "profound" had happened with his election nonetheless. I am still trying to sort through its significance and yet I know that it is monumental.
Tim Wise makes it even more plain:
The humorlessness of the far left -- to which I remain connected ideologically if not organizationally -- has always struck me as one of its greatest weaknesses. People like to laugh, they like to smile, they like to be joyful, and an awful lot of hardened leftists seem almost utterly incapable of doing any of these things. It's as if they have all taken a pledge that there should be no laughter until the revolution, or some such shit. No positivity, no hope, no happiness so long as people are still poor and exploited and being murdered by cops, and victimized by United States militarism, or performing as wage slaves for global capital, or eating meat, or driving cars. And they wonder why the left is so weak?
Emma Goldman once said that she didn't want to be part of anybody's revolution if she couldn't dance. In the past four years, it has been my personal mission to embrace this idea in my own life and work. Joy is a motivator and necessary to organizing. Anger and rubbing the sores of discontent can only take a movement so far. So many of my friends are committed to social justice and yet they lack joy and seem not to have any faith in people. I have to admit to getting sucked into that often and having to shake it off in order to remain effective.
Now, in the wake of Barack Obama's victory these barbiturate leftists are back in full effect, lecturing the rest of us about how naive we are for having any confidence whatsoever in him, or for voting at all, since "the Democrats and Republicans are all the same," and he supports FISA and the war with Afghanistan, and all kinds of other messed up policies just like many on the right. Those of us who find any significance in the election of a man of color in a nation founded on white supremacy are fools who "drank the kool-aid," unlike they, whose clear-headed radical consciousness leads them to recognize the superior morality of Ralph Nader, or the pure "scientific wisdom of chairman Bob Avakian," or the intellectual profundity of their favorite graffiti bomb: "If voting changed anything it would be illegal."
He adds a key insight about the value of optimism and joy in movement building.
The simple fact is, people are inspired by Obama not because they view him as especially progressive per se (except in relation to some of the more retrograde policies of the current president, and in relation to where they feel, rightly, McCain/Palin would have led us), but because most folks respond to optimism, however ill-defined it may be. This is what the Reaganites understood, and for that matter it's what Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement knew too. It wasn't anger and pessimism that broke the back of formal apartheid in the south, but rather, hope, and a belief in the fundamental decency of people to make a change if confronted by the yawning chasm between their professed national ideals and the bleak national reality.
I am thinking a lot about how my friends on the radical left plan to mobilize movements for social change since so many of them seem to hold ordninary people in such low esteem. The contempt that I have heard at recent gatherings as people talk sarcastically of "Obama supporters" as mindless naifs is beyond disconcerting. It strikes me as counterproductive to actual movement-building.
To me, the most salient part of Wise's essay is as follows:
At some point, the left will have to relinquish its love affair with marginalization. We'll have to stop behaving like those people who have a favorite band they love, and even damn near worship, until that day when the band actually begins to sell a lot of records and gain a measure of popularity, at which point they now suck and have obviously sold out: the idea being that if people like you, you must not be doing anything important, and that obscurity is the true measure of integrity. Deconstructing the psychological issues at the root of such a pose is well above my pay grade, but I'm sure would prove fascinating.
I am of course angry at the persistent injustices that exist all around the world. Yet, I also need to hold on to my joy. I will continue to hold on to my skepticism without succumbing to cynicism. I want to help build an inclusive movement that embraces many different types of people and that invites people to bring their "FULL" selves to the table. The Obama campaign has provided a template for those of us who are serious about movement-building and community organizing in the 21st century.
Last year, I finally launched an organization that supports young leaders who are committed to education for liberation and to movement-building. One of my primary goals is to infuse that space with optimism, joy, and to emphasize "wellness" for these budding young activists and organizers. Unfortunately, I have realized that I will have to say goodbye to my old friends in order to maintain my momentum and to hold on to my joy. That is beyond SAD!
Here is Tim Wise's full article. It is well worth the read.
http://www.alternet.org/...
Update...
Some of you have asked about the organization that I co-founded last year. It's called the Chicago Freedom School and you can find information about it at www.chicagofreedomschool.org. Thanks for your interest in the work
Update #2...
Some are interpreting my diary as a part of the right wing conspiracy to destroy the radical left... All I can say is... Honestly what can I really say to this? This is a diary highlighting my own journey and my own circle of friends and colleagues. To those who see something here that resonates with their own experience, I say great. To others who have a different perspective, I welcome that too. Thanks for putting the diary on Rec list.
Finally, I LOVE DIALOGUE and I value dissent. I think that folks should continue to speak out about Barack's policies and his choices. Those are good things. If some interpret this diary as wanting to shut down criticism of Barack, then you are very much mistaken. I have and will continue to hold Barack accountable to the issues that I care about but I can also appreciate the monumental aspect of his election and do see the potential for continued movement building that his campaign offers.