Marissa Johnson
Like most Sanders supporters, I was initially appalled and outraged that somebody had the temerity to shut down one of his speaking engagements. After learning that Johnson had been a Sarah Palin supporter who has recently compared herself to Jesus Christ, I was totally prepared to write her off as a religious kook who should immediately join the Mike Huckabee campaign. She is a discredit to the Black Lives Matter movement, the entire patronizing white left seemed to say in unison, and I was prepared to join in the chorus.
I no longer feel that way. Marissa Johnson is an amazingly bold, original, highly articulate young woman, someone whom I hope will lead the transformation of America into a more humane and just society, just as Martin Luther King did so many years ago. She is a leader, an innovator, an inspiration. She neither seeks nor wants white "approval" for her actions. Let's face facts: if she had disrupted a GOP candidate's rally, she would today be hailed far and wide as a hero by liberals everywhere. She could build a career on being a trophy for the white political elite. But Marissa did something far more subversive and necessary: by protesting Sanders, she instead has forced white liberals to look in the mirror and ask, "What have we done about racism in America? What has Bernie Sanders done about racism in America?" And if you answer anything besides, "Not enough," you would be lying to yourself. And Black America.
The truth hurts. "We have hordes and hordes of white liberals and white progressives (in Seattle)," she says, "and yet we still have all the same racial problems." In theory, Seattle should be a paradise of racial harmony, being the most liberal city in America.
Marissa begs to differ. I'm reminded of when King went to Chicago to protest for the first time. White northerners had been quite happy when he relegated his protests to the South, but became infuriated when he went off-script and took his protest North. And what did he find in Chicago? The most vicious racism in America, King said, even worse than anything he encountered in the South.
Johnson is a self-described "Christian radical." So was John Brown. So was King and many of the SCLC. She disrupted Sanders, as she has disrupted other political events in Seattle, because this system needs disruption. The system is the problem, will always be the problem, and tinkering with the system is not going to correct the system. It may bring some temporary relief. It may bring some superficial quasi-justice for a while. But the system cannot be corrected.
Hear what she says, in her own powerful words:
"Going after Sanders is super, super important because Sanders is supposed to be as far left and as progressive as we can possibly get, right? ... [In Seattle] we have hordes and hordes of white liberals and white progressives and yet we still have all the same racial problems. So for us, locally in our context, confronting Sanders was the equivalent of confronting the large, white, liberal Democrat, leftist contingent that we have here in Seattle who not only have not supported BLM in measurable ways but is often very harmful and is also upholding the white supremacist society that we live in locally... What we didn't know was that that idea—of the white liberal, the white moderate who's complicit in white supremacy—that that idea would resonate with people nationally and internationally and spur into this larger conversation.
"Part of it comes out of my personal politics, and out of BLM politics. Everybody keeps saying that black people need to be respectable, that they need to ask permission, that they need to work with the timetable that's been given to them. And I absolutely just rebuke and deny all of that... The un-respectability, and the tactic, the way we went about it—every single part of it was very intentional. ... Black people don't need to be respectable, black people don't need to go on your timetable, black people don't need to reach out to Bernie Sanders. If anything, Bernie Sanders should have been courting—before he went to any other major city—he should have been courting BLM.
"And so yes, I did run up there and confront Bernie Sanders because of my religious convictions, absolutely. Are they right-wing religious? No. But they're religious in the fact that my religion says you lay down your life for other people and the most marginalized, and so that's what I do. So I guess I am a Christian extremist.
" ... Even if I did hate white people, I don't have the political or social power to oppress white people. And it's verifiably false [that I hate white people]. So flip that. The question is actually, Do you love black people? To the extent that you are literally willing to sacrifice your life. Are you on some Underground Railroad type stuff, or are you not? Because that's the tip I'm on. So I think framing is really important.
"I don't have faith in politicians. I don't have faith in the electoral process. It's well documented that that doesn't work for us. No matter who you are. So my gaze is not toward politicians and getting them to do something in particular. I think they will change what they do based off of what I do, but that's not my center. My center is using electoral politics as a platform but also agitating so much that people continue to question the system they're in as they're doing it, and that we start to dismantle it. Because I refuse to believe that the system that we're in is the only option that we have. And so we hear people saying—Bernie supporters—"Well, he's your best option." It's like, If he's our best option then I'm burning this down. I think it's literally blowing up—this is why the respectability thing is so important—is that you blow it up so big, and so unrespectably, that you can show people the possibilities outside of the system that they're stuck in. And so that's why I do agitation work.
"So I'm not for any politician. But I'm definitely for anything that pulls people further left, anything that gets people asking more questions, and gets us closer to actually dismantling the system that has never, ever, ever, ever done anything for black people and never will. So I'm really trying to see my people get free by any means possible."
