Amy Goodman interviews actor, activist, and YES! Magazine board member Danny Glover about his new documentary The Black Power Mixtape. Danny talks about the film, his involvement in the black power movement, independent film, and the current situation in Haiti. The interview takes place at the Sundance Film Festival and features archival footage of Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and Huey P. Newton.

Video courtesy of Democracy Now!

Interested?

• Danny Glover: Let's Reclaim Our Country
  Actor and activist Danny Glover on how the Social Forum is strengthening people's movements.
• Envisioning MLK's Dream in Today's World
  Grace Boggs: We must begin the radical revolution of values that King called for, against the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.
• Danny Glover: An Interview by Sarah van Gelder
  UNDP Goodwill Ambassador and actor Danny Glover talks about his lifelong activism.
  

I am not going to tell you where I live, or the names of any of the people in these images. I won't tell you the when or the why. However, I will show you that a Detroit exists—that it is a place where people are living, have been living, will continue to live.  

The press has descended upon Detroit, eager to tell the same story, over and again. There's the glorious "ruin porn," the urban farming, the $500 house. These stories essentially are written before the writer even gets here. The same success stories, singling out the people who have become the de facto faces of Detroit. And then there's the assumption that these reporters are doing us a favor, saving us by telling the world what is going on here. And then they leave, having written their Detroit story. Just like everyone else's Detroit story.  

I will not give you the short-cuts, the clichés, the blueprints to a carved-out niche. There’s more than one story happening in Detroit.

Because Detroit is not an easy place, there are no easy answers, no magic bullets. Unemployment is high and houses disappear when you aren't looking. The city burns our trash and can't afford to plow all the streets come winter. You may not understand this city any better after looking at these images, and in some ways, that is my goal. I want people to realize that the people of this city are not abstractions. We’re not all that’s wrong with America, any more than we’re all that’s right. We just are.

This is one of many Detroits. It just happens to be mine.

Click here to view the photo essay.

Photos and text, anonymous.

Interested?

• Seeding Small Business: 5 Ideas from Detroit: Detroit entrepreneurs are learning to rely on each other, finding the seeds of a new economy in resources discarded by corporate America.
• A Requiem for Detroit?: A new documentary illustrates a different kind of American Dream taking hold in Detroit.

• Freedom's Sacred Dance
  by Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding (from the Winter 2001 issue of YES!)
• Martin Luther King on Vietnam
  delivered on April 4, 1967 — written by Vincent Harding

Historian Vincent Harding

Over the holidays my old friend Vincent Harding, the African-American historian who worked closely with Martin Luther King during the 1960s (Harding drafted King's 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech) spent several days with me. When he couldn't make it to my 90th birthday party in June, Vincent explained, he resolved to visit me during my 90th year and before I might be leaving this life.

A lot of our discussion centered around how in the last three years of his life, King called for a revolution in values against the triple threats of racism, materialism, and militarism. Why do most King celebrations back away from or ignore this message? Is it because he was going where most Americans don't want to go — so that there was almost a sigh of relief when he was assassinated?

King's challenge was not only directed to white people. As Vincent put it ten years ago: "All we need to do is look around us and see how much over the past 15-20 years we black folks have decided (consciously or not) to fight racism by seeking equal opportunity or a fair share in the nation's militarism and materialism. In other words, we have chosen to fight against one of the triple threats by joining the other two." ¹

King was deeply affected by the rioting, burning, pain, anguish, fears of youth in the cities of the north. He felt these children were his. In 1966, the year after Watts exploded, he lived on and off in the Chicago ghetto where he knew "the grapes of wrath are stored."

Listening to young people, he concluded that the education we need "in our dying cities" is education that empowers youth to participate in creating change in themselves and in their surroundings. That is why we founded Detroit Summer.

One night we invited a few people, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, to dialogue with Vincent. In response to their questions, he shared these thoughts:

"The most profound thing I learned from Martin Luther King was that change does not come automatically. Things do not change. People who are committed to change, who are change-makers, have to decide what kind of change they want to commit to."

Jimmy Boggs was always teaching around the question, How do you become the human being that you have the potential to become? You are not born a human being. It is a journey that you have to make.

During the mid-60s, we were wrestling with the contradiction that the Vietnam War was LBJ's war and at the same time LBJ was the best friend blacks had ever had as president. But as the war continued, Martin recognized that there was no way he could remain silent and be human. The invitation from Clergy and Laity Concerned to speak at Riverside Church gave him the opportunity to take a stand in a setting that made clear what was involved was not just politics but the need for a revolution in values.

During his last few years MLK knew he was a marked man. When I told this to a group of middle school students, a 13-year-old asked, "If King knew this, why didn't he just chill out?"

While I was thinking through how to respond, a 12-year-old girl came up and said, "What do you mean chill out? He had work to do."

What people believe in their hearts is what I call faith. Martin believed that we are all one; that there is a fundamental commonness. "Because I am a Christian I am called to speak not only for the poor of this country but also for the poor of Vietnam."

Only after Malcolm X was assassinated and his autobiography — published only after King was assassinated — did we have the materials to recognize that there was a falsehood in setting up Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm. Malcolm decided that he couldn't continue Mr. Muhammed's non-involvement in the struggle. That is why he was killed.

Anger can get you out there, but as time goes on, it plays less of a role and we need to be clear about the vision, the spirit, the goal. Anger can add power to commitment to change, but there is also a danger in it.

Emma asked "How do you encourage students like those at my high school who are only interested in the latest gadget to truly honor King's birthday rather than just sleep in?"

Vincent replied, "You will probably have to push yourself by taking on more responsibility because you have had access to a new way of thinking... Maybe you could bring together a few of the people you hang out with and plan an event to commemorate King's assassination in April. You don't have to wait until next year."

A few days later Emma sent me an email saying:

"I loved going to the discussion. I was amazed at his level of enthusiasm about each question and it reminded me of what I love in teachers (particularly the good ones).

"Their amazing ability to make each person feel unique and that they are the only ones in the world who had ever thought of such a question; that you are a genius to think that way. I look forward to skipping homework on a regular basis and going to more discussions. Thanks."

 ¹Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero. Orbis 1996.

Grace Lee Boggs was born to Chinese immigrant parents in 1915. After receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy, in 1953 she came to Detroit, where she married Jimmy Boggs, an African-American labor activist. The two became deeply involved in Black Power organizing and left-wing politics. With race- and gender-based discrimination precluding an academic career, she dedicated herself to a lifetime of activism.

It took me years to finally read Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. And it wasn’t because I was lazy, or frightened, or particularly uninterested. I grew up in a family made up almost entirely of black women and often wondered about why my folks often got the shortest end of the stick. But for years, I thought the play’s significance had been appropriately summed up in my first visual introduction to it: a Kodak picture of my older sister, at 15, standing in front of the play’s poster.

Taken two decades ago, the picture catches my sister in a moment when she’s sporting a side ponytail with an oversized yellow t-shirt. She’s smiling, with her tongue out, and has got her brown arms on her hips and is rolling her eyes upward, playfully annoyed by the persistence of whoever’s behind the camera. Directly behind her is Shange’s poster, with a portrait of the playwright’s mournful face beneath a yellow head wrap, with the book’s title written above in vibrant rainbow-colored cursive.

The picture is ironic for several reasons, the most important being that my sister was shot and killed not too long after she took it. Suffice to say she chose the wrong night to walk down the wrong street with her best friend to the corner store, and got in the way of a kid with terribly bad aim. Her playful smile contrasts deeply with Shange’s knowing frown, but it’s an appropriate contrast, a tragic sense of foreboding on which to map some of my family’s history. In the photo, my sister couldn’t have known that her days were numbered, or that 1990 was a particularly bad year to be young and black in an American city. But there she is, smiling, skeptical, and, most importantly, alive.

It’s moments like these that I imagine have made Shange’s work so enduring over the years. Though I could barely pronounce her name and was largely unfamiliar with her exact words, I knew that it was terribly important to have nearly written into existence that colored girls often hurt in unimaginable ways, and are sometimes fortunate enough to live and tell their stories.

I didn’t finally read the play until last year, and while I skimmed through some, and wished at other parts to see it in all the movement and color that it was intended, there were other parts I couldn’t deny. When Shange writes, “Being alive, being a woman, being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I have not conquered yet. Do you see the point?” I do. And so do many others, because they live that dilemma every day.                          

That gets into why Shange’s original work is so important. It’s one of the first widely recognized treatments of the pain and beauty of being a black woman in this country. Much like the catalogue of work often associated with it—Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s Beloved immediately come to mind—it centralizes the beauty of black womanhood while powerfully arguing that pain and struggle are essential to it. What sets Shange’s work apart is its ambition, and dynamism. It’s a choreopoem, a work of art that relies equally on poetry, color, and movement to convey the complicated reality of life inside a black woman’s body. That form sets it apart in several ways, by at once making itself more accessible to large audiences and also working as a deeply political metaphor. The poems are meant to be seen, heard, and felt on the street, on stage, and on screen. It’s aggressively inserting itself into the literary cannon, haters be damned. Shange’s even written about the early days of performing the play for free in cities across the country with a constantly shifting cast of performers who each brought their own stories along. It was then, and still is, a work in progress.

So it’s not surprising that there have been so many different iterations. Tyler Perry isn’t the first director to bring the work to the big screen. In 1982, the Broadway Theatre archive released its highly dramatized version starring Shange, Lynn Whitfield, and a young Alfre Woodward as Lady in Red. The work was produced by Lindsay Law and directed by Oz Scott. And the soundtrack starred none other than Aretha Franklin belting out the words to Nina Simone’s classic “Four Women.” It’s a moving adaptation, undoubtedly popular. And it’s probably starkly different from its on-stage predecessor. For one, it’s largely missing the choreography. But, of course, it has to. Like many things, movement doesn’t translate as well across forms. And in the quest to popularize the work’s general sentiment to larger audiences, certain things inevitably have to be compromised.

That’s a tough pill to swallow. Sure, there’s laughter, and beauty, and light. But it’s a story whose dramatic arcs involve a back-room abortion, domestic violence, and beautiful babies being thrown from tenement windows. Anyone who can relate to those pains has understandably earned their right to be protective of it.

America: The Remix
In this issue of YES!, we bring you stories of the people and collaborations that are helping our nation finally accept its identity as a multiracial society.

There’s still something troubling about someone, anyone, profiting off of the pain of black girls. And it’s especially unsettling when that someone is a man who’s made a fortune masquerading as a badly decontextualized one. But whatever the critiques—and there have been many—the fact that we’re talking about this work 36 years later as a feature film, and possibly an Oscar-winning film, means something. It means that there’s a market, yes. But it also means that for all of the complaints that the work is melodramatic and too heavy handed, people still need to hear and see it. Black women have still got to fight to love themselves, and each other. Shange’s enduring legacy shows that it’s okay to celebrate that. And it’s also liberating for the world to acknowledge that battle still exists.

So while I’ll admit to sometimes proudly riding the bandwagon of Tyler Perry haters, a part of me can’t help but concede that his adaptation is an enviable, even necessary, part of a story that’s still being written, all in an effort to unravel the centuries-old myth that black women’s lives aren’t worth sharing. Those often painful stories are still being told because they’re still being lived, and no director—be it Perry or a female artist with 10 times more nuance—will have the final say.

Jamilah King is an editorial associate with ColorLines, an online magazine for journalism in service to racial justice.

Interested?

•  A New Generation Builds Beyond Racism: Youth take the promise of Obama and put it into practice.
• Faith Adiele: My Life in Black and White: Why memoir is the ultimate multicultural act.
• 100 Years of Progress: Poster: Milestones on the way to an inclusive, just nation.

What might Martin Luther King Jr. have said of the demonstrations in Washington two weeks ago?

This is a question worth exploring because King’s legacy was claimed by participants in both demonstrations: the massive, overwhelmingly white “Restore Honor to America/Turn back to God” rally at the Lincoln Memorial, promoted by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin AND the much smaller, mostly African American one in the football field of nearby Dunbar High School, led by Al Sharpton.

To begin with, I believe King would have made the same speech to both gatherings. The secret of his leadership was that he spoke to the humanity in everyone, regardless of race or class.  That’s why a national holiday has been named for him.

I also believe that in 2010, 47 years after King’s famous “I have a Dream” speech, given during the 1963 March on Washington, he would have talked mainly not about his and our dream for overcoming racial discrimination and segregation, but about the huge and unprecedented challenges, choices and responsibilities we face in the light of today’s grim realities:

• Our two lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we have not only killed and wounded thousands of Americans, but killed, wounded, and ruined the lives of millions of Iraqis; 
• The billions of dollars we have squandered on these wars of choice to the point that we are now forced to cut back on elementary domestic needs like fire stations, street lighting, and salaries for teachers and other public employees; 
• The floods and mudslides in Pakistan, China and Iowa that are the result of global warming, i.e., our refusal to acknowledge ecological limits to economic growth;
  
• The tens of millions of Americans who are unemployed and underemployed because we have allowed corporations not only to replace human beings with robots but also to export jobs overseas in order to make higher profits;
• The escalating violence against Latinos and Arab Americans as times get tougher.

These catastrophes have made it increasingly urgent that we Americans begin making the radical revolution of values against the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism which King called for in his 1967 “Time to break the silence” anti-Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church.

How do we begin this radical revolution?

I believe that MLK would have recognized that this crisis, like most crises, is not only a danger but an opportunity.

It is our opportunity to recognize that by giving priority to economics over community in the last 300-400 years we have deviated from the path that has enabled the human race to survive and evolve. 

In his projection of “beloved community,” King understood what historians and anthropologists (such as Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi, quoted below) have been discovering in their research, that down through the ages:

Man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production or that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests…. These interests will be very different in a small hunting and fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on non-economic motives.

Over the last 50 years, this passage from Polanyi's The Great Transformation, (Beacon 1957) has been part of who I am, in both my thinking and my community organizing.

The current collapse of our economic system is our opportunity to return to community or non-economic means to meet our economic needs. That is what Detroit’s de-industrialization has made both necessary and possible.  That is what has given birth to Detroit as a City of Hope.  That is MLK’s legacy to all of us.

Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography Living for Change.

Interested?

• More blogs from Grace Lee Boggs. 
• A Resilient Community: How to navigate an unsteady economy, a future without cheap oil, and unimaginable changes in the climate.
• 10 Ways to Solve the Jobs Problem ... While building a better economy.
  

Right now, if you do a web search of the words "racism" and "USDA," the majority of links will steer you to coverage of this week's Shirley Sherrod affair, in which the African-American U.S. Department of Agriculture staffer based in Georgia resigned after a conservative website reversed the meaning of a speech she gave last year to imply that she would deny farm loans to whites.

It's an astonishing development given the history of race relations at the USDA, an agency whose own Commission on Small Farms admitted in 1998 that "the history of discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture ... is well-documented"—not against white farmers, but African-American, Native American and other minorities who were pushed off their land by decades of racially-biased laws and practices.

It's also a black eye for President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who signaled a desire to atone for the USDA's checkered past, including pushing for funding of a historic $1.15 billion settlement that would help thousands of African American farmers but now faces bitter resistance from Senate Republicans.

Forced Off the Land

Any discussion about race and the USDA has to start with the crisis of black land loss. Although the U.S. government never followed through on its promise to freed slaves of "40 acres and a mule," African-Americans were able to establish a foothold in Southern agriculture. Black land ownership peaked in 1910, when 218,000 African-American farmers had an ownership stake in 15 million acres of land.

By 1992, those numbers had dwindled to 2.3 million acres held by 18,000 black farmers. And that wasn't just because farming was declining as a way of life: Blacks were being pushed off the land in vastly disproportionate numbers. In 1920, one of out seven U.S. farms were black-run; by 1992, African-Americans operated one out of 100 farms.

The USDA isn't to blame for all of that decline, but the agency created by President Lincoln in 1862 as the "people's department" did little to stem the tide—and in many cases, made the situation worse.

After decades of criticism and an upsurge in activism by African-American farmers, the USDA hosted a series of "listening sessions" in the 1990s, which, as ColorLines' Jessica Hoffman writes, added to a growing body of evidence of systematic discrimination:

Black farmers tell stories of USDA officials—especially local loan authorities in all-white county committees in the South—spitting on them, throwing their loan applications in the trash and illegally denying them loans. This happened for decades, through at least the 1990s. When the USDA's local offices did approve loans to Black farmers, they were often supervised (farmers couldn't spend the borrowed money without receiving item-by-item authorization from the USDA) or late (and in farming, timing is everything). Meanwhile, white farmers were receiving unsupervised, on-time loans. Many say egregious discrimination by local loan officials persists today.

Among those concluding that such racial bias persisted were the USDA's own researchers: In the mid-1990s, they released a report [pdf] which, analyzing data from 1990 to 1995, found "minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans."

Adding insult to injury, when African-American and other minority farmers filed complaints, the USDA did little to address them. In 1983, President Reagan pushed through budget cuts that eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights—and officials admitted they "simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them" until 1996, when the office re-opened. Even when there were findings of discrimination, they often went unpaid—and those that did often came too late, since the farm had already been foreclosed.

In 1997, a USDA Civil Rights Team found [pdf] the agency's system for handling civil rights complaints was still in shambles: the agency was disorganized, the process for handling complaints about program benefits was "a failure," and the process for handling employment discrimination claims was "untimely and unresponsive."

A follow-up report [pdf] by the Government Accountability Office in 1999 found 44 percent of program discrimination cases, and 64 percent of employment discrimination cases, had been backclogged for over a year.

Taking USDA Discrimination to Court

It was against this backdrop that in 1997, a group of black farmers led by Tim Pigford of North Carolina filed a class action lawsuit against the USDA. In all 22,000 farmers were granted access to the lawsuit, and in 1999 the government admitted wrongdoing and agreed to a $2.3 billion settlement—the largest civil rights settlement in history.

Georgia's Gone Organic
Cut off from federal assistance, the Southeastern African-American Farmers' Organic Network took matters into their own hands.

But African-American farmers had misgivings with the Pigford settlement. For one, only farmers discriminated against between 1981 and 1996 could join the lawsuit. Second, the settlement forced farmers to take one of two options: Track A, to receive an immediate $50,000 cash payout, or Track B, the promise of a larger amount if more extensive documentation was provided—a challenge given that many farmers didn't keep records.

Many farmers who joined the lawsuit were also denied payment: By one estimate, nine out of 10 farmers who sought restitution under Pigford were denied. The Bush Department of Justice spent 56,000 office hours and $12 million contesting farmers' claims; many farmers feel their cases were dismissed on technicalities.

The Politics Behind the Sherrod Affair

Shortly after coming into office, President Obama and his chief at the Department of Agriculture, Iowa's Tom Vilsack, signaled a change in direction at USDA. Vilsack declared "A New Civil Rights Era at USDA," and stepped-up handling of civil rights claims in the agency.

This year, Vilsack and the USDA also responded to concerns over handling of the Pigford case, agreeing to a historic second settlement—known as Pigford II—in April that would deliver another $1.25 billion to farmers who were excluded from the first case. As Vilsack declared:

We have worked hard to address USDA's checkered past so we can get to the business of helping farmers succeed. The agreement reached today is an important milestone in putting these discriminatory claims behind us for good.

But the Pigford II case was very much still alive when right-wing media outlets went after Shirley Sherrod this week. Sherrod herself had received $150,000 from the USDA last year as part of the original Pigford lawsuit, which has been bitterly opposed by Republicans and conservative media.

The settlement is also now a major political battle in Congress: President Obama had put aside $1.15 billion in May to cover Pigford II cases, which the House later approved. But Republicans stripped the money out of their bills, leaving the supplemental spending now being debated in the Senate as the final option to appropriate the funding.

Given the stakes of the Pigford II decision—which again affirms the present-day consequences of decades of racial discrimination—and the sharp partisan battle over spending in Congress, black farmer advocates don't think the attacks on Sherrod this week are a coincidence.

And given the history of racial discrimination at USDA, they can't help but note the hypocrisy. As Gary Grant, president of the 20,000-strong Black Farmers & Agriculturalists Association, said in a statement [pdf]:

The statement from Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, that USDA does not "tolerate" racial discrimination is a complete lie. Talk to almost any family member of a black farmer or check out ... the government's documentation of how USDA employees, on the local and federal level discriminated against black farmers, in particular. And nothing was ever done to penalize the all white officials bent on destroying a society of black farmers across the nation: not one firing, not one charge brought, and not one pension lost. Yet at the first erroneous offering by a conservative blogger that a black woman from USDA might have discriminated, she is immediately forced to resign.

Which begs the question: Where was the Republican and conservative concern over USDA "racism" before this week's swiftboating of Shirley Sherrod?

Chris Kromm is the executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, publisher of Facing South, where this article first appeared.

Interested?

• A Second Chance for Black Farmers
  Behind the USDA lawsuit: A story of land, discrimination, and the struggle for justice.
• New Crop of Farmers
  What does it mean to be a new farmer today?
• Everybody Eats: How a Community Food System Works
  It begins with small farms working with natural cycles and ends with fresh food and stronger communities.
  

Photo by U.S. News and World Report/Wikimedia Commons.

“We declare our right on this Earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this Earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”
— Malcolm X, 1965

Today I am reflecting on the meaning of "by any means necessary."

Yesterday was Malcolm X’s birthday, and I think of his voice saying those words. At the time he said it, I believe he meant it as it is commonly understood: That black people must be prepared to take up arms, if that is necessary, to defend our communities and liberate ourselves from the weight of white supremacy.

For me, the meaning has evolved as I experience more and more of this world and its layers of oppression. There are a plethora of internal and external dangers to the soul; it is so hard to keep your integrity intact—especially if you long for change—if the current world disappoints you or makes you furious.

I feel like it has become easy for us to occupy our rage without moving into action. It has become easy for us to get angry and self-righteous without really asking what is needed in that moment.

What if what’s needed isn’t sexy, intimidating or violent? What if what is needed is forgiveness? The kind of forgiveness that seems unimaginable, miraculous, holy, unattainable—like forgiving those who hurt you and hate you—like building relationships with those who kill your children? What if what is necessary is trusting people beyond their mistakes and shortcomings, trusting their best intentions? Are we strong enough to default to trust at a community level?

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How Pramila Jayapal finds the courage to take the immigration dialogue to talk radio.

What if what is necessary is learning to see family where you have seen enemies? What if what is necessary is not strategy, not plans, not dollars—just unconditional love? Are we able to be that militant? I want to be militant enough to admit I am changing and growing and don’t know the answers.

My sister is about to have her second child, which has me contemplating and researching birth and labor again. After the shooting of 7-year old Aiyana Stanley Jones by Detroit police last week, I was thinking of how quickly you can violently kill someone, versus how long it takes to create and birth someone. I find a small but awe-inspiring hope in the realization that giving life and love is harder work than taking it. Giving life and love and forgiveness and creating family—those are the behaviors to engage in to step into the miraculous.

As we strive to free ourselves, to uplift ourselves, to transform ourselves and our communities, let us consider what "by any means necessary" looks like in practice for us now—especially if the outcome is unknown, immeasurable, and unconditional; even if the means, at this moment, is militant love.

Adrienne Maree Brown is national coordinator for the US Social Forum, to be held June 22 to 26, 2010 in Detroit, MI. She also serves on the board of Allied Media, and is director of the Ruckus Society, a network of volunteers who support nonviolent community-based direct action.

Interested?

• Our Future as a Multiracial Society :: A racially-just, even loving, society is still possible.
• Generation Mixed :: How the under-35 set is breaking the race barrier, by Adrienne Maree Brown.

Pittsburgh's Chester Thrower was inspired by Van Jones' message about the green economy. He is in the process of building his own weatherization company, and now says: "Trust me, change is possible."

Photo courtesy greenjobsnow.com.

But across the country, a generation of young leaders of color is working at the local level to address the problems of structural racism. Building on the energy generated by Barack Obama’s campaign and election, members of Generation Y—the “Millennial Generation”—are finding ways to address America’s complicated history on their own terms.

Practice Makes Perfect

My generation—kids who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s—became the battleground on which America fought to free itself of its racial contradictions. The civil rights movement knocked open the doors for equality. Our generation is practicing how to make that promise a reality. There is no generation better prepared to take on the challenges of the day. For most of our lives we’ve been having the tough conversations.

Of course, tackling race head-on hasn’t been easy. I still have scars from my experiences of getting called “nigger” on athletic fields and school buses. But like so many from my generation, I gained from those traumatic incidents the tools to express my humanity, even in the face of continued oppression.

Long before Obama entered the national conversation, civic-minded young people were making their presence felt in the halls of power. Some of these folks, like founding member of the National Hip Hop Political Convention and green real-estate developer Baye Adofo-Wilson, have used art and creativity to change desolate communities. As the executive director of Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District, Adofo-Wilson is transforming a low-income neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, into an arts and cultural district.

Others, like Minneapolis’ Nimco Ahmed, have challenged the status quo by making sure that people from disenfranchised communities are involved in the civic process. A young leader in the local Somali community, she makes sure her community turns out to vote.

And when people told Pittsburgh’s Chester Thrower he couldn’t get financing for his weatherization company, he didn’t give up. A former cocaine dealer, Thrower was inspired by hearing Van Jones talk about the green economy. He got past numerous obstacles, including lacking the resources to pay for training; has completed several green certification programs; and is currently working with state agencies to secure funding for his business. “When I was in the streets, I never thought I would be working with the state of Pennsylvania—well, except only as an inmate,” says Thrower, who hopes one day to provide jobs for other young African Americans who have been shut out of the system. “Trust me, change is possible.”

You might not see these stories in the mainstream news, but we are having a transformative impact on our communities. Most importantly, we’re not waiting for anybody to give us permission to lead.

From Opposition to Proposition

Thrower’s case is admittedly unusual. Far too often, youth of color from inner cities aren’t able to overcome the obstacles facing them. But a group of us in Wisconsin hopes to break down the roadblocks preventing people of color from being stakeholders in society. We believe that young people of color have to be involved in all aspects of civic life if society is to become healthier and more productive.

In early 2009, a group of African Americans affiliated with my organization, the League of Young Voters Education Fund, began holding weekly roundtable meetings in Milwaukee with community residents who were interested in greening their neighborhoods. These precocious Millennials sent invitations to a diverse group of elected officials, traditional environmental activists, tradesmen, labor leaders, and local artists to come and discuss Milwaukee’s future. Most of those invited were older than the conveners. Energized by the potential promised by the Obama election, we brought together people who never even thought of working with each other.

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Bay Area Groups Broaden Fight for Tenants' Rights

At first the attendees were skeptical because they weren’t really sure if these young folks were serious. But after several meetings, naysayers started to become believers. The meetings were professional, focused on outcomes, and democratic. The skills learned while organizing young people came in handy with our older constituents.

Many of these discussions focused on the ways that racial discrimination, both individual and institutional, continues to shape Milwaukee’s economic climate. In a city where nearly 50 percent of all African American men are unemployed, these tough conversations uncovered how truly disenfranchised people of color feel. “We spent a lot of time talking about how black tradesmen have been treated unfairly,” says Wesley Carter, who helped organize the meetings. “People are mad, and they don’t feel like anyone is listening to them.”

But rather than dwelling on the historic problems caused by racism, the young facilitators pushed participants to believe that they could collectively come up with solutions for the community’s woes. They asked the group to talk about the ways that traditional, racialized, winner-take-all politics have gotten in the way of moving the city forward. The group realized that continuing on that path would make it impossible to build a green economy that would both save the environment and improve Milwaukee’s unemployment rate.

No longer focused on an oppositional agenda, nearly a year after the roundtable discussions started, this collection of community residents has transformed into a diverse alliance called the Making Milwaukee Green Coalition (MMGC). Today the group is tracking stimulus spending, teaching area residents about the green lifestyle, and helping small businesses write green business plans. Most importantly, the MMGC is building bridges into whiter, more affluent parts of the city and state.

Recently, when city officials began discussing privatizing this majority-minority city’s water, leaders of the MMGC helped organize a diverse, citywide coalition called Keep Public Our Water (KPOW) to protect the public trust. After weeks of heated debate on talk radio shows and nightly news, city officials agreed that they would not pursue the neoliberal policy.

Jayme Montgomery-Baker, MMGC’s lead facilitator (and my wife), chaired KPOW’s steering committee and facilitated the coalition’s meetings. “If it weren’t for the Making Milwaukee Green [Coalition] I don’t think my community would have been involved in that fight,” says Montgomery-Baker, who recently won an award for her work with KPOW.

MMGC is looking for more ways to involve young African Americans in green careers. This won’t be easy given the historic obstacles facing the segregated city. But the young leaders are looking for bridges over the traditional problems. “The only way Milwaukee can get better is when we all work together,” says Carter. “We don’t know what that looks like yet, but we are going to figure it out.”

Rob “Biko” Baker wrote this article for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Biko is executive director of the League of Young Voters Education Fund, a national organization that works to empower non-college youth to become winners and players in the political game.

Photo by Willie Davis.

Love was complicated for Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, an inter­racial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s. The pair was arrested for eloping, but rather than separate, they fled to Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court; the resulting ruling in Loving v. Virginia made it illegal for a state to enforce laws banning interracial marriage.

Graphic designer Ken Tanabe created Loving Day (lovingday.org) in 2004, after stumbling across online information about the Loving case. People around the world now celebrate Loving Day on June 12, the anniversary of the 1967 decision. The couple at left is attending the 2009 Loving Day festivities in New York City. 

Berit Anderson wrote this piece for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Berit is an editorial intern at YES!

See More Signs of a New American Identity:

Race Exhibit		Blended Nation		Loving Day, June 12		Tenant's Rights		US Social Forum		Colors Restaurant
Choosing Integration		The Hapa Project		Jen Chau, Swirl, Inc.		Teja Arboleda

“I have to be a healer … my ancestral colonizer’s blood runs through my veins.”
—Cara Page

Adrienne Maree Brown

Shadia Fayne Wood

I’ve never been into identity politics. I’ve long felt that people spent too much time analyzing the labels of past generations and too little time feeling part of the mystery and miracle of humanity.

I’m sure this is, in no small part, because I am biracial. My first experiences of race were of people asking me to choose a side, choose a parent. People telling me that in spite of the love, joy, and wholeness of my family, I didn’t fit, or offering me unsolicited judgment about who they thought my parents must be. These people showed no interest in my actual experience.

My parents fell in love in South Carolina in the 1970s, in a way that surprised both of them. Their experiences were poles apart—poverty versus wealth, black versus white, outgoing versus shy. My mother was disowned by her family for some time after she and my father eloped, and they faced deep racism throughout their lives. But they are still in love today—visible, stable, solid, sweet, dedicated love.

I spent most of my childhood in Germany on military bases, as an army brat surrounded by a lot of other racially and culturally mixed kids. By the time I arrived at a Southern middle school, where the kids segregated themselves into white and black, I didn’t feel beholden to any labels.

This isn’t a universal experience for mixed people.

Signs of a New American Identity

Artist Explores the Hapa Experience

In middle school, high school, and college, I met more and more mixed people who seemed confused, depressed, distraught, or insecure. They felt like constant outsiders or pretended to be solely one race or another. Many were children of divorces or separations caused by cultural differences.

For a while, I thought my experience was a fluke. Then after college I got paid and unpaid work as an organizer, first working with active drug users and communities impacted by HIV/AIDS; then, after that program’s funding got cut, with efforts to engage grassroots community youth in electoral politics. I began to encounter multiracial and multicultural activists who were confident and politicized.

Now I lead the Ruckus Society. We work in places like Oakland, rural New Mexico, and New Orleans, in communities that have been blocked from political power. We train people in those communities to make themselves heard—to stage nonviolent protests and to create their own media.

In these communities, I get to know people who teach me how to tell and share my story.

Now I tell my family story as a love story, my political roots grown deep in the soil of my parents’ audacious, risk-taking, healing love.

People around me, community organizers and young leaders, are starting to speak more openly about their full identities without shame. They aren’t just crossing racial boundaries. They’re working across cultures, abilities, classes, faiths, sexual orientations, and genders. Their leadership is facilitative, healing, listening, solution-oriented, and grounded in love.

“I fell in love with multiracial people, built political relationships with multiracial people, and began to see my identity as something I could choose to define as liberating. It takes a monumental effort to make that choice within a culture that defines ambiguity as loss, where you are neither Chinese nor white. Multiracial existence is a struggle for empowered ambiguity.”
—Jenny Lee, Allied Media Conference/Detroit Summer

Is it more comfortable to be multiracial because we have a black president whose candidacy, for better or worse, was more viable because of his white mother? Perhaps. Politics are cyclical. Our sense of morality and humanity is more interesting to me. Is poverty, inequality, or war ever acceptable? I believe injustice happens when you deny your relationship to an “other” who is also suffering.

Signs of a New American Identity

Jen Chau Forms Swirl,
Unites Communities

Whether we want to admit it, more of us are mixed race or cross-cultural than not. When we recognize our multicultural lineage, we become part of a transformation that’s emerging from every corner of society—from philosophy to complex sciences to environmentalism. Post-partisan, post-binary, we are starting to embody our whole selves. We are proof that contradictions can coexist, proliferate, and create rich, new possibilities. As we tear down the walls of colonization, a previously unimaginable future can become reality.

We must embrace our identities as strengths, see all sides, make moral judgments, and take big leaps in order to heal, especially when our heritage connects us to oppressors, colonizers, or practitioners of white supremacy.

If we repress any part of our histories and heritages, we do not receive the wisdom of how to be in relationship to each other and to the planet, and we contribute to the loss of cultural diversity. Displacement, slavery, rape, colonization, segregation, integration—“that is your indigenous story,” says my friend, Carla Perez, a racial and environmental justice organizer.

Those of us who have a white parent often benefit from the long-lasting effects of white supremacy. And if you grow up around white people, you may acquire a certain privileged know-how for getting ahead in today’s society. We have to acknowledge that privilege, and create a new vision in which survival is about wholeness. We have to work to ensure that we leave no part of identity or community behind.

“Gloria Anzaldua said … as long as we cling to our identity as the colonized, fighting against the colonizer, we … cement that relationship of power/powerlessness … social transformation depend[s] upon everyone seeing the power dynamic of colonizer/colonized playing out within themselves.”
—Jenny Lee, Allied Media Conference/Detroit Summer

We can only transform and love ourselves if we accept both the honorable and shameful aspects of our history and our humanity. Let’s not water down, whiten, or melt everyone’s identity into a false unity. Let’s use the vision of our cultures collectively to create solutions to the crises we face.

We have to shift the very goals of our generation. We can practice community in ways that are not defined by how well we succeed in white systems, but by how well we honor our lineages and our futures, learning from indigenous leaders to look seven generations into our collective past and future.

Multiracial leaders can be part of a pollination process. They can help all of us learn to collaborate, decentralize, and listen to voices at the margins.

I invite more people to tell their whole stories. I invite us all to step into our roles as healers. Race limits us—it is a concept designed to divide and conquer us. What really matters is expanding the capacity of communities to experience love.

“No one can use the framework of how brown we are to divide us—who we are comes from our heart, not someone else’s definitions.”
—Ron Scott, Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality

Adrienne Maree Brown wrote this article for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Adrienne is national coordinator for the US Social Forum, to be held June 22 to 26, 2010. She also serves on the board of Allied Media, and is director of the Ruckus Society, a network of volunteers who support nonviolent community-based direct action.

When I left my job as director of a multicultural social justice center and became a writer and teacher, I worried I was abandoning my commitment to social justice and turning a strength (my identity) into a liability. As it turns out, I’m still doing the same work.

I teach memoir, the intersection between story and reflection. What I love about memoir is that it democratizes storytelling. Official history is penned by power brokers, but the real stories are lived on the ground by ordinary folks. Memoir is the ultimate multicultural act.

The minute I enter a college classroom, my students make a judgment based on my body. But my true identity isn’t visible until I tell my story—my Nigerian-Nordic immigrant roots or the fact I was raised by a white single mother in small-town Washington, where we were the lone non-Christian Democrats and I the sole black girl.

It’s the first day of class at the University of Pittsburgh, and I explain the big project we’ll be spending weeks on—a personal history timeline I use to demonstrate memoir. “Your presentations will be graded on honesty and risk-taking,” I tell them.

One of my students, a college junior who introduced himself earlier as “white trash,” immediately launches into a story. He recalls a roller skating party where, during the “Sadie Hawkins” girl-ask-boy round, he was picked by the only African American girl. It’s not clear from his story if there was something “wrong with her,” like a learning disability. A few students start choking, but he plows ahead, telling us how he had to skate with the girl and how the entire student body laughed. By the time he got home, his grandmother had heard the news and teased him, winking, “So, you and the black girl, huh?” He chuckles, either channeling his grandmother or reliving his own embarrassment.

The silence in the room is palpable. The girls in the front row stare saucer-eyed at me, clearly concerned for my feelings. The boys at the back stare open-mouthed at him, clearly concerned for his life. I blink rapidly. This is one of those dreaded moments where the teacher-me requires more than the personal-me thinks she can manage. It doesn’t help that in my town, I was that girl.

Then suddenly I realize what has happened. In this student’s rural Pennsylvania town, where his former classmates spend days working in the factory and nights in the local strip club, he probably never met a black female authority figure. Am I the first? In his surprise and discomfort, he has blurted out his only other experience with female blackness.

“Um, exactly!” I say, fighting the urge to hug him. He has just embodied one of my fundamental goals for the class—creating an environment where we feel safe taking artistic risks and expressing different, but not necessarily “politically correct,” points of view.

“And if this is any indication of your honesty and risk-taking, it looks like we’re in for quite a ride!” I laugh, shaking my head. The room breathes; shoulders soften.

A few weeks later, the students’ presentations shine. They share their racial struggles, private goals, religious crises, family shames, class insecurities, personal falls from grace.

Each week they arrive early. They greet each other joyfully, laughing and arguing until the sound of the bell ­ushers them out again. The young man from Pennsylvania becomes a favorite, an eccentric honors student whose fanaticism for R&B earns him the nickname “Slow Jamz.”

 Four years later, he still sends me more e-mails than any other former student, always witty, updating me on his post-graduation adventures.

Coming of Age

I am asked to design a literature course, my first. I model it on an anthology that members of the social justice center gave me when I left: Coming of Age in America. I name the class “The Literature of Multicultural Identity.” The students at Framingham State College are primarily working-class, first-generation-college whites who, I’m told, aren’t enthusiastic about multiculturalism.

Adiele teaches a writing workshop in Accra, Ghana, for the Pan-African Literary Festival.

Photo by Grant Jones

On the first day we brainstorm questions they have about “the Other.” “Why do all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria?” is a favorite.

“Keep this list,” I advise, “to revisit at the end of the term.”

I create a four-page survey that quizzes them on the accomplishments of some famous queer and non-white Americans. “Don’t feel dumb,” I say once they’ve exhausted their individual and collective knowledge. “There’s a difference between ignorance and intelligence. How do you feel about your ignorance?”

“Angry!” they shout. “High school didn’t teach us anything!”

“Good,” I reply. “Let’s get to work!”

Their first assignment is to work in groups to deconstruct an American cultural myth. My teacher-self thrills, and my personal-self cries as I watch students realize how psychologically violent these myths can be—how shamed they feel for not achieving up-by-their-bootstraps middle-classdom; the perfect nuclear family; thin, white beauty; perpetual happiness through shopping.

When we start reading the literature, I realize my students don’t know the most common racial and cultural stereotypes. Thirty miles outside Boston, and so-called minorities and their histories are invisible. Why does this ­Chinese writer scoff at laundry? Why does this black author poke fun at switchblades on Friday nights? I find myself in the bizarre position of having to teach stereotypes in order to un-teach stereotypes. The students catalogue the stereotypes they’ve learned from children’s books, television, magazines, games, or online. For Arabs, everyone cites Apu, the Indian owner of the Kwik-E-Mart in The Simpsons.

Each class ends with a short imagining on an index card. “I wouldn’t have the strength to endure as a queer woman,” a straight man declares. “If I were a black man,” a white woman writes, “I’d be stronger than I am now, but America would try to crush that out of me.”

As the class progresses, formerly silent students become classroom authorities. A gay student comes out, then starts the first LGBT support group on campus. On Election Day, the class goes to the polls together, many for the first time. The class abandons old cliques, and new configurations of students sit together in the cafeteria.

Had they permanently rewritten their lives?” Fourteen years later a student e-mails to say that he uses what he learned “nearly every day.”

Traveling Shoes

Adiele visits siblings on the steps of their father's ancestral home in southeast Nigeria in 2006.

Photo courtesy of Faith Adiele

I visit my Anglo-Chicana goddaughters in their small college town. One of them books me a “show and tell” gig in her fifth-grade class. My topic: travel writing.

“I hope you have questions,” I announce as I take a stool at the front of the room. I’m unprepared for what my request unleashes. At every desk, children wave their hands wildly. One boy raises his quivering arm so high it looks like it could pop off.

“Where exactly on the world map have you been?” they want to know. “How many islands have you visited? Have you taken a boat trip? What is your favorite place?”

Many questions are what my father calls “Nigerian style,” merely opportunities for askers to testify about themselves. The fifth-grade version goes like this: “Have you been down the Nile?” Micropause. “I have!”

“Have you been to Michigan?” Arched brow. “I’ve been twice!”

“Tell me about you,” I respond, impressed.

They reveal international lives: “I was born in Mexico City.”

“I speak Farsi.”

“We’re taking a yacht to Brazil, where my dad is from.”

“My uncle adopted two kids from Ethiopia, and I got to see them. They’re really cute!”

“I didn’t know those things about the other kids,” my goddaughter will marvel afterward. “That’s not what we usually tell each other.”

They speak in short-story form, complete with the dramatic hooks and concrete details I beg my college writers to provide. “On November 20 at midnight, my family and I are setting out in a 12-passenger van for Seattle.”

“Every December we get out the box of decorations, and when we take off the lid, it smells like Christmas.”

“My dad visited Java, and they fed him a meal, and he threw up.”

My scheduled 20 minutes stretches to more than an hour. As I gaze out at the sea of hands, I imagine this is what it feels like to be a sports idol or rock star.

“Are you going to write about your visit to this class?” one kid inquires. I laugh, but why not? These kids embody the new multicultural story. My job is to show up and confirm that their narratives are part of the collective memoir we are writing.

As I inch toward the door, they rush toward me with autograph requests. I leave the class with their stories in my head, and they with my name scrawled on their notebooks. One boy asks me to sign his sneaker. Later, I smile as I think about a white kid from Northern California, strutting around with my Nigerian-Nordic-American name on his shoe.

Faith Adiele wrote this article for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Faith is the co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, which contains 24 international stories ideal for college and high school classrooms. A popular speaker and contributor to O and Essence magazines, Faith has appeared on NPR, on the Tavis Smiley show, and at universities around the world. She currently serves as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California and is at work on a social/cultural memoir about her Nigerian Nordic American heritage. www.adiele.com

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I’m feeling relieved. For a while it seemed like the historic election of our first African American president would give legitimacy to the idea that we live in a “post-racial” America. The idea that race is no longer a part of people’s daily experience is not merely false. It’s potentially dangerous when a majority of people are struggling to understand what’s happening to them economically.

What people are experiencing is exactly what’s supposed to happen to them under capitalism and its current variant, neoliberalism. That economic system is grounded on the idea that society must have winners and losers. It has convinced people that those categories are based on race: that people of color are, in the natural course of things, losers; and that white people, regardless of class, are supposed to win.

When hard times hit, as they have recently, people who are losing their grip on their middle-class status—or those who were already poor and are getting poorer—look for someone to blame. They fall back on the official story: White people’s troubles are caused by people of color; the troubles of people of color who were born in this country are caused by immigrants. It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy that keeps people who are natural allies on a class basis from looking at who’s really causing their trouble: the people who run the capitalist system.

This moment presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to get people with shared economic interests working together—to get them past learned racial divides. As long as poor and working-class white people remain convinced that they win by keeping people of color on the margins, all workers will continue to lose economic ground. The opportunity is to use this economic crash as a way to find common ground among those who are the real losers—regardless of race—in the existing system.

The Current Jobs Reality

The United States is at the edge of a cliff—economically, financially, and ecologically. For many in this country—especially people of color—there’s never been anything but a cliff. After all, losing homes, not having enough food, and being unable to find work was a reality for millions across the country before the great crash of 2008. That reality has not changed, but many more people are now experiencing it.

Over the last 30 years, the faces of those standing at the edge of the economic cliff have changed. No longer are they just people of color, immigrants, and people without an education. Today, educated and middle-class whites are joining the ranks of those on the brink, and many poorer whites are already off the cliff.

A group of progressive organizations, including my employer, Jobs with Justice, recently released a report entitled Battered by the Storm: How the Safety Net Is Failing Americans and How to Fix It, which illustrates that point. It finds that, in the current recession, unemployment has risen by 4.5 percent for whites, by 6.9 percent for Latinos, and by 6.8 percent for African Americans. As has always been the case, communities of color are disproportionately affected by job losses, especially since they started with higher levels of unemployment.

In spite of a common interest in challenging a system where the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, people continue to buy into the stories that divide them along racial and identity lines. Working people are all working harder and producing more than ever before, yet most have not seen gains in their wages or benefits.

Organizing on Common Ground

Progressives—those who promote social justice, defend self-determination, and share collective responsibility for creating a more just world—cannot miss the opportunity to use this time of economic hardship to break down racial barriers. The economic crisis puts progressives in a position where we can challenge structures, like racism, that cause natural allies to work against one another. Should we choose to sit it out, we will allow reactionary forces to continue to use economic problems to split us along race lines. Working-class people, searching for answers to their economic realities, will move to attack what is depicted as the face of the problem.

The union Unite Here has succeeded in bringing workers together in their “Hotel Workers Rising” campaign. Hotels are places where race, gender, and language play a divisive role in the workplace. Mike Hachey, a northern Virginia organizer with Unite Here, notes that race and gender do indeed come into play in hotels. Latina and immigrant women, for example, form the backbone of the housekeeping department, and as a groundbreaking study recently showed, are much more likely to get injured at work than workers who are either male or of another race. The same study showed that men disproportionately hold hotel jobs as banquet servers, cooks, and dishwashers.

Unfortunately, workers in different departments often don’t talk to one another on the job beyond a greeting and tend to self-divide during breaks. The challenge for the union was building a collective movement that could bring together housekeepers, front-desk workers, and servers to improve wages and working conditions, despite race and language barriers. Unite Here helped workers find common ground on which they could relate. The union identified workers from each department who wanted to improve working conditions and built strong, worker-led committees to be the face of Unite Here. Then they asked the workers to take a variety of actions to help grow the organization and put the power structures in clear view of everyone. Those actions included sitting with new people, reaching out to different departments, participating in meetings between management and workers and their supporters, and stating their pro-union views to their peers. This strategy ensured that workers had a chance to relate to one another and realize their shared interest in winning a union contract.

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Similarly, SEIU’s “Stand for Security” national campaign did a phenomenal job moving workers to connect along class lines, particularly in Los Angeles, where it re-engaged the African American community (once a large segment of the city’s labor). SEIU acknowledged rocky experiences in the ’80s and ’90s, when the black community was bleeding jobs in the union’s janitorial division. But the campaign guarded against racial divisions by showing that the real culprits behind low wages and benefits were not other ethnic groups, but building owners and property managers. Union organizers—black, Latino, and white—educated and mobilized security officers to join them as they knocked on potential members’ doors. They reminded workers that Fortune 500 companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in leasing agreements, yet the security workforce protecting the building did not earn enough to provide for themselves or their families. They asked workers if they found it acceptable that property managers spent more money on the flower arrangements in the lobby than on raises for the security officers. The message became more powerful as workers learned that many of the same security companies, property managers, and building owners that operated a non-union workforce in Los Angeles were also operating union workforces in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

Signs of a New American Identity

Colors in New York: A Restaurant Cooperative

In Washington, D.C., a new Jobs with Justice campaign called “Take Back DC” is working to bring together public-sector workers, teachers, and low- to moderate-income residents to take back economic ground they’ve lost in the last decade. These are people who are at times divided by education, class, and race. But they share the burden that privatization places on working-class people. Teachers are dealing with a local administration that invests in charter schools, even as it claims lack of resources and fires public-school teachers. Low-income parents are dealing with the loss of low-cost city day cares, which are being replaced with private ones that are less concerned with the neighborhoods than with making a profit. The day-care workers who once held those publicly funded, union jobs have not been permitted to reapply for their former positions.

Take Back DC is using the same organizing principles that worked for Unite Here and SEIU. Rather than point fingers at one another, members of these disparate groups are seeing the cuts in education and social services, increased privatization, and the attacks on unions as a threat to all of them—the people who make the District work. Their work together is building understanding that issues that traditionally affect working-class communities and communities of color also present a challenge for all of D.C.’s residents. Take Back DC is educating members about the impacts of privatization on the city, and putting people into action confronting the powerful interests, like developers and unscrupulous politicians, who profit from the privatization agenda. As Take Back DC builds the campaign, there is growing recognition that only by working together can these groups hope to win back valuable public services and jobs that make the city work for everyone.

In all three organizing drives, the key was bridging racial divides by highlighting workers’ class interests. In order to do so, the unions had to directly involve workers and put them into action to build a sense of solidarity that could move them beyond artificial divides.

Moving Forward, Together

Despite the constant use of race as a wedge, and perhaps as a result of it, young people today are turning away from old racial divides and leading the way in creating a multicultural America. Data from a 2003 Gallup Poll showed that 82 percent of white 18- to 25-year-olds disagreed with the idea that they “don’t have much in common with people of other races.”

Spaces like the US Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit serve as opportunities to advance the discussion of building alliances based on class rather than race. The USSF expects more than 25,000 progressive activists and organizers to come together to share their work in areas as diverse as education, stopping the criminalization and incarceration of youth, bringing an end to unjust wars, bargaining collectively for better wages and benefits, attaining reproductive justice, and protecting the environment and Earth’s well-being.

But the overarching theme of the USSF is how we can build a larger movement that addresses not just racism, but the many structures that are impeding people from pursuing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Working people of all races are looking for movements or vehicles through which they can express their self-interest. We cannot allow the right wing and corporate elite to co-opt the anger that is out there, as they have with the “Tea Party” movement and the growing resentment against immigrant workers. Progressives can change the direction of our country for the better by helping working people join together, regardless of race, to be their own champions.

Carlos Jimenez wrote this article as part of America: The Remix, the 2010 Spring issue of YES! Magazine. Carlos was raised in a working-class immigrant family in Los Angeles and currently lives in Washington, D.C. He organizes at Jobs with Justice, is a proud union member, and is working to educate and mobilize young workers to win social and economic justice.

Carl Anthony is the founder of Breakthrough Communities, based in Oakland, CA.

Read more:
THE CITY WE ALL WANT TO LIVE IN

Carl Anthony: I believe that the biggest change would be the changing of our imagined community. The Eurocentric view of the world rests on a story that goes back probably five centuries. The fact is, everyone has ancestors that go back 200,000 years. The opportunity is to actually develop a shared story that includes everybody and also includes the Earth.

Carlos Jimenez: We’d have an opportunity to break free from chasing a false expectation about who we’re supposed to be. A lot of people go through self-denial in order to conform to the image of white European society. We start looking down on our own cultures, traditions, and practices.

Biko Baker: The other day I noticed on Twitter that many women of color are using Barbie as their status name. It struck me as horrible because white women can’t live up to the Barbie standard and African American women definitely can’t. I see self-hate on a daily basis in the communities where I work.

But, as Malcolm X highlighted, people of color aren’t the minority—the world population is brown. If we can truly represent what’s going on in this world and not let the Westernized image get in the way, I think we will see a growing self-confidence. But I don’t think this is going to come easily.

Robert Jensen is an author, organizer, and journalism professor at the University of Texas.

Read more:
WHAT WHITE PEOPLE FEAR

Adrienne Maree Brown: Obama’s election brought a black man into office, but does he bring black culture with him? How do we carry culture forward along with biological race—which is not even a scientific reality? How do we learn the lessons from our history of displacement, slavery, and colonization, and discover each other and all the cultural history that we carry?

With the ecological situation we’re in, it’s ancestral knowledge that we especially need to connect with. Then we can access the secrets for taking care of the planet that we’re on.

Grace Lee Boggs: We need to understand the diversity emerging in this society not only in terms of race. For example, people with physical disabilities are giving us insight into a culture of the heart and of the spirit that can help us evolve.

Carl: I think a pivotal point in our story is the period of European expansion and colonization, which touched every single person on the planet and brought about the changes that we’re struggling with today. All our social movements since that time have been a response—the anti-colonialism movement, the struggle against slavery, the labor movement, women’s movement, the ecological movement.

I don’t necessarily agree that this is going to be difficult to topple. With the emergence of India and China, as well as other developing countries, we will be shocked at how swiftly things change in the next century. Nobody thought that the Soviet Union would disappear, but it did.

I think we need a new story and we need it to be an inclusive story that has all of these dimensions in it: race, class, gender, generations, as well as our relationship with the natural world.

Sarah: Do you see signs of this new culture and this new story emerging?

Adrienne Maree Brown leads the Ruckus Society and coordinates the US Social Forum in Detroit.

Read more:
GENERATION MIXED: BREAKING THE RACE BARRIER

Carlos: I agree about restoring wholeness. At the last World Social Forum, the indigenous Aymara people from the Andes brought the concept of buen vivir, which is about living life in harmony and equilibrium among men, women, different communities, and above all between humans and the natural world.

I was blown away. And when I talked with folks from different countries, with different economic, political, and social realities, we discovered that we have a shared agreement of where we want to go. We will take different roads, but ultimately, we have a shared idea about harmony and equality.

Carl: Wholeness also means taking responsibility for directing and leading society. As long as we just protest against somebody else governing, we run up against limitations. In Afghanistan, for example, it’s no longer sufficient to be anti-war.

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Sarah: Let’s look at the generational divide. What strengths can each generation contribute to the creation of a new American story?

Rob "Biko" Baker is a Milwaukee-based organizer and national mobilizer of young voters.

Read more:
A NEW GENERATION BUILDS BEYOND RACISM

While the progressive movement is doing a lot to tackle the contradictions of race, the lived experience of people of color, especially black males, hasn’t changed much. That’s a testament to how deep structural racism is, and it’s why I do not believe that the new world that we’re trying to build will come easily. It will be a struggle.

Also, my generation is increasingly worried about the future because of the impact of climate change. I’m young, but I’m worried about dying.

Carl: I have to support what Biko said. As an African American man now turning 70, it has been painful to watch the proliferation of progressive, social movements over the last 30 or 40 years that have forgotten African American men. You see people facing homicide and going to prison. These survival issues have been marginalized in the public conversation about progressive causes.

Grace: In Detroit, we have ex-cons coming back to help who had been part of the crime and crack epidemic. Some are coming back in order to redefine family. They remember Malcolm X, and they realize that carrying on the legacy of Malcolm means transforming themselves and transforming their communities.

That’s the sort of thing that we are doing in Detroit, and that’s the sort of thing that we have to begin spreading so that people see that there’s an alternative to this disgraceful and shameful corporatist government.

I like this discussion, because in the movement we’re very privileged to have intergenerational interaction. I think of my own experience, for example, with young people in their 20s—the Millennial Generation—and with the generation that came out of the ’60s.

The 20th century was a fantastic century. It started with the Russian Revolution and in the middle had the Montgomery bus boycott and then ended with the WTO protests in Seattle. We have such an enormous opportunity to share those experiences and make clear that this is an intergenerational movement.

Adrienne: I just want to put in a plug that I moved to Detroit because of the intergenerational dynamics I saw here. They’re so powerful.

One of the things that my generation brings to the table is that we are more and more comfortable with a post-divided world. I’m seeing the walls breaking down. We’re beginning to see the whole picture and how our work is interrelated—as opposed to, “I’m just a race person,” or “I’m just a this person. …”

One of the things I’m learning in the US Social Forum process is that the ease of travel and electronic communications makes it easy for the younger generation to forget the hard work of on-the-ground organizing. It’s helpful to have elders in our lives to remind us what it was like when the work wasn’t about conference calls and going to meetings. Most of your work took place in your city. That way of organizing is something that we need to return to because our planet is demanding that we relocalize and not be traveling all over the place. It’s not aligned with our values to be constantly on a plane.

Many national struggles have to be won at a local level first. It’s going to be hard for us to get the kind of health care we want nationally if we don’t have local, intergenerational struggles all over the country.

Biko: I think our generation is much more willing to go from opposition to proposition. It’s not taking power, but it’s making power. We have to come up with solutions. We can’t just be angry for the sake of being angry.

Carlos Jimenez directs the Young Worker Project at Jobs With Justice in Washington, DC.

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UNITED BY HARD TIMES

Sarah: Many of us witnessed in horror last summer’s media attack on Van Jones, the White House green jobs advisor. When spurious right-wing attacks forced him to resign, many asked what we should have done to support him. Is there something we can learn from this?

Biko: I think the attack on Van was a response to an attack on Glenn Beck and FOX News with a strategy that wasn’t based in love. [Editors’ Note: Color of Change convinced some of Beck’s key advertisers to withdraw their support for his show after he accused President Obama of being racist.]

When you push someone into a corner, you’re going to get scratched. As progressives, we need to embrace nonviolence because if we’re going to push our vision of the world into society, we can’t be attacking people, even people as problematic as Glenn Beck.

The other thing is Van and people like him are human beings, and they need our love. As a progressive movement, we need to be more honest with each other and stand up for each other. Maybe it’s because I come from a street background, but you just can’t let your people be attacked like that without stepping up.

Grace: To look at the question of Van Jones in isolation from the general paralysis in relationship to Obama would be a mistake. We haven’t discovered yet how to struggle seriously with Obama, like, for example, when he failed to stand up to the attacks on Van.

Carl: The people who attacked Van are vicious; they made up arbitrary lies about him. But the fact that they got away with it reveals as much about the weakness in the progressive movement as it does about their viciousness. This was an attack on Obama, and the progressive movement has not built the base to sustain the energy that put Obama in office.

Adrienne: Van was attacked in part for the activist work of his youth. If we have a political culture that’s comfortable with multicultural space, then we’ll be comfortable with all of the politics brought to the table and with the whole story. So someone like Van could say, “That’s who I was when I was younger, and I’m not ashamed of it.” And Obama could say, “I met Fidel, and I’m not ashamed of it.” Because we are in this country that is a democracy, and we’re supposed to have a diversity of political opinions. That’s how we’re going to survive.

Sarah: What is it that we still don’t get about how to work together? Why are wedge issues still able to divide us?

Grace Lee Boggs has been a Detroit-based movement activist and theoretician for nearly 70 years.

Read more:
GRACE LEE BOGGS' BLOG

Robert: It’s not surprising that we have trouble overcoming differences. We live in a society based on hierarchies that are deeply woven into the fabric of our identities. As someone who’s white, male, and belongs to the professional class, I bump into these hierarchies all the time. We are told that they are inevitable and difficult to overcome. But when people commit to common struggles, overcoming them is easier.

In the end, our ecological crises will compel us to overcome our differences. It’s possible that the planetary ecosystem could become unable to sustain human life as we know it, not in some science-fiction future but in our lifetime. We are up against something that real, that scary. Recognizing the depth of the ecological crises has not made me despair; it’s helped me commit to the difficult work of crossing boundaries.

Biko: I agree with all of that. The only thing that I would add is that talented organizers can get caught up in the cult of personality. I’ve seen that in my own career as I’ve gone from the grassroots to the national level. There aren’t enough leaders who are challenging their own privilege. It’s something that I’m trying to get better at, and I think it’s something we all need to do.

Carl: Our social movements are all struggling for a moment in the sun and for our viewpoints. We need to understand that we’re all coming out of a common matrix related to that pivotal moment of European expansion.

All the ecological, human rights, and economic issues that we are facing every day came out of a common matrix: that a few pirates and a few so-called kings managed to conquer the whole Earth and turn it to their own private use. Getting the story right is really important, because if I start asking whether black people are more important than indigenous people, or whether the women’s movement is more important than protecting the Earth—those kind of arguments get really dumb.

Adrienne: There are three things that we need to get. First, none of our issues or our identities exist in a vacuum. The moment we struggle against each other is the moment we weaken our movement. Colonization wasn’t color-blind, so the long-term result of that cannot be color-blind or class-blind; race and poverty go hand in hand.

Second, we need to learn to listen to each other’s stories. People are developing new solutions, but we’re not actually listening to each other enough to develop trust in those solutions.

Third, we need to understand that we’re not moving toward some end goal, some win-or-lose point that will make or break our society. This is something I’m learning from Grace. Instead we’re involved in a process, and we need to continue to improve ourselves and evolve.

Sarah van Gelder moderated this panel for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is executive editor of YES!

Dennis Brutus was a South African poet, educator, and activist. He passed away in December, 2009.

Shirin Shirin: Perhaps you could start by telling us about your experiences growing up and becoming an activist in apartheid South Africa?

Dennis Brutus: I grew up in a segregated ghetto in Port Elizabeth on the east coast near Cape Town and went to a segregated school, of course. I ended up at Fort Hare, a college where many black students went. In 1948, I started teaching at Fort Hare and also started working in the community. The apartheid government came to power just as I started teaching. What was called segregation was now being replaced by a much more vicious system. The big difference was that it was enforced very strictly by law. Before that, in the old days, it was rather like the American South, I think. It was racism and segregation by convention and by general acceptance. It wasn't legal. But when segregation becomes legal, you have a much more severe system to combat.

As a teacher, I was doubly influenced, for it meant separate education for blacks and whites and browns. Housing was segregated and shops were segregated. I found myself in conflict with the system. I ended up being served with an order making it a crime for me to teach. I was banned from teaching. But, there are always different ways to challenge injustice. I began challenging the apartheid through sports. At the time, all the teams were exclusively white, although they were supposed to represent South Africa. When I challenged that, I got into real trouble, which led to my arrest. I tried to escape and was shot in the back at point-blank range. Before I could recover fully, I was sent to Robben Island. There I spent time in the section with [Nelson] Mandela. My time on Robben Island was quite short. It was part of a 16-month sentence out of which five months were in solitary confinement. When I came out of prison in 1965, I was put under house arrest for five years, but after one year I was allowed to leave the country on the condition that I never return.

I based myself in London in St. Paul's Cathedral and started working for political prisoners. I made presentations on behalf of political prisoners. I exposed, for instance, the conditions of Robben Island by appearing before the United Nations. I also exposed the U.S. corporate support for the apartheid regime, testifying before the U.S. Congress and other bodies.

Shirin: Skipping ahead a few years, what appealed to you about the movement for global economic justice, coming from the long campaign against apartheid?

Brutus: One of the things that struck me profoundly was that as we emerged from the terrible oppression of the apartheid, we were suddenly confronted with a new oppression on a global scale. The apartheid was essentially racial, but it also had an economic component to it in the form of labor exploitation. The global oppression came from organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank, the Bretton-Woods organizations, and of course, subsequently, the WTO.

What had been happening in South Africa—where you had a kind of privileged elite while the masses were oppressed—was really happening on a global scale, specifically through mechanisms like the repayment of debt. The poor countries were being bled dry. The little wealth they had was being transferred to the wealthy countries by various mechanisms—like aid, where you could put a billion dollars into Africa and take out several billion. In other words, these so-called "developmental projects" that were supposed to help the poor countries were only making sure that the investors were making huge profits. They were taking out far more than they were putting in. When I understood that this was in fact what was happening in South Africa, and also globally, it was very easy for me to make the transition. It was really a replication of the problems I had seen before, but now I was seeing them on a much bigger scale.

Shirin: And how do the social forums fit into this movement for global justice?

Brutus: They are at the heart of it, both in the case of Africa and in the United States. And of course a lot of the energy came out of Brazil. I think we must give them credit for that, especially to people like Chico Whitaker, one of the principle thinkers who helped set up the World Social Forum.
But beyond that, there are two other elements that I see as very important. One was November 1999, in Seattle, when for the first time people took the streets, and confronted corporate and political power. With Bill Gates there and Microsoft, George Soros, Bill Clinton, Jaques Chirac, and the other heads of state that were all there, the WTO was set to meet, and talk of writing a trade agenda for the whole world. It was billed as a new round based on the decisions they had taken in Uruguay. We were out in the streets with the 50 Years is Enough network, and other groups marching to our chant: "No New Round, Turn-A-Round." We rejected the notion of the corporate powers writing the agenda for the whole world. We took them on. We paralyzed them. There was no meeting of the WTO; there was no new round. I think a lot of the energy that we saw in the World Social Forums, whether it was in Porto Alegre or in Mumbai, came from Seattle.

I should add one other credit. I think that the action of the Zapatistas in Mexico, when they announced their opposition to the attempt to create the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) was important as well. This was the meeting with George W. Bush, Vincente Fox, and others in Quebec City where many of us were tear-gassed in a protest. So energy for these movements comes out of Brazil, but it also comes out of Seattle, Mexico, and, in fact, it comes out of grassroots people everywhere. Whether they're fighting for jobs or housing or water or electricity, or better roads or better schools, there is a global movement with many components. The difficulty is pulling all those energies together and mobilizing them to demand change, and then defining clearly what changes we want.

Let me just add one footnote on that issue. It seems to me that at the heart of the present system of exploitation and oppression are the concepts of private property and profit. Sooner or later we're going to have to grapple with that issue. If we don't, I think that we cannot say that we are serious about changing the world.

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Shirin: I'd like to move us towards the U.S. but before we get there, perhaps we could spend a little more time on Africa. With the rise of the G20, South Africa has taken on more regional significance—almost a regional superpower. Can you comment on what that means for the southern African region, and for Africa as a whole?

Dennis Brutus, during a 16-month incarceration on Robben Island for challenging the legitimacy of white-only sports teams, shared jail space with Nelson Mandela.

Image by Carlos Latuff.

Others are saying that this is not a sub-imperialist role that we're describing, that instead this is an imperialist role. But, in my view, that's much too ambitious. It also extends the present resources of South Africa far more than what they really are. But I don't exclude the possibility that South Africa might play an imperialist role in the future, especially if South Africa finds it convenient to become very cozy with China. At the moment China is very busy penetrating Africa, whether in the Sudan, looking for oil, or whether it's Zimbabwe, looking for an alliance with Mugabe.

My current analysis is that presently South Africa is performing a sub-imperial role, which is related to its relationship with the United States. Especially since the United States is now budgeting for an enormous expansion of military expenditure in Africa, and an increase in the number of military bases in Africa. It may reflect some of the U.S.'s insecurity about what is happening in the Middle East. They find Saudi Arabia an unreliable ally. They've had a disastrous adventure in Iraq, where they've ended up in a quagmire. Even the Israelis have taken a beating when they tried to penetrate Lebanon a couple of years ago. So to sum up, I would say that South Africa is functioning both as a corporate extension and as a military extension of U.S. power and its imperialist agenda.

Shirin: I want to now take us across the Atlantic, but perhaps now would be a good time for you to share one your poems.

Brutus: All right, if I can find an appropriate one. There's one I wrote which has been used very widely, but it's rather odd because it's actually based on what I call a "found poem." I took some lines from Yasser Arafat's speech to the UN and turned them into a poem. So maybe I'll just read some lines from that one:

I am a rebel and freedom is my cause
many of you have fought similar struggles
therefore you must join my cause

my cause is a dream of freedom

and you must help me to make my dream reality

For why should I not dream and hope?
Is not revolution making reality of hopes? 

Let us work together that my dream may be fulfilled

That I may return with my people out of exile to live in one democracy in peace

Is not my dream a noble one worthy to stand beside

freedom struggles everywhere?

Shirin: You've lived now for many years in the United States, and I wonder if you could share with us a little about your experiences in the U.S. and with the people in the United States in general.

Brutus: Well, I've clearly had negative experiences, but there are other encouraging ones. I was arrested in California protesting banks that had lent money to South Africa, and I was arrested on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington protesting the death penalty on behalf of Mumia Abu Jamal. We can return to those if you wish, but in addition the U.S. government served me three times with a deportation order. One time I was to be deported to Zimbabwe; another time I was to be deported to South Africa; a third time to Britain. Each of the deportation efforts failed and eventually I was given political asylum.

So clearly I didn't always have it easy in the United States, but I should mention that there was also the positive side. I was called to appear before the U.S. Congress to testify about corporate support for apartheid, I also appeared before the UN describing conditions on Robben Island, (which I think led to some improvements in the conditions there), and I was able to form what has become probably the most important African literature association in the world when I was a visiting professor down at the University of Texas. I've lectured at many universities and was a tenured professor at Northwestern University in Chicago and chair of Black Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and tenured there as well.

So when I look at the big picture I come up with a rather curious notion. It seems to me that in the United States you have a very peculiar mixture of repression and freedom, which leads to people thinking that they live in a democracy but in fact it's only a democracy for some people. And in fact Gramsci used to talk about the "soft power" of the United States, and how the U.S. could persuade the world that it was really a very free democracy—the land of the free, home of the brave, etc—when in fact not only is there great repression inside the United States, but the U.S. is guilty of enormous repression in other parts of the world. Yet people go about their lives complacently. Not only were they complacent, but they would be relieved that they lived in a democracy—some of them would describe it as the greatest democracy in the world. It seems to me that nobody has really examined the degree to which that deception—partly self-deception—has been effective in the United States.

Periodically they break out of that kind of coma. We've just seen it now in the rejection of John McCain in the recent elections, which were not only a rejection of George W. Bush, but also a rejection of the war in Iraq. These are very hopeful signs that the climate is changing politically in the United States, though perhaps we shouldn't be too optimistic because the Democrats are as compromised as the Republicans and many of them are invested in the enormous war machine which is running so much of U.S. politics today — the military-industrial-academic complex.
So these are some aspects of it. One reason that the U.S. government can maintain control the way it does is because of this illusion of democracy. It pretends to be a democracy, nearly all of its residents believe that it is, but it isn't a democracy, at least not for all. It certainly doesn't tend to support democratic regimes—consider Saudi Arabia or even Israel, which has carried out a 40-year occupation. I realize that this is a controversial point and I'm bound to get some criticism for it, but I think it's worth discussing at least.

Shirin: Some of us have the impression that organizing in the United States is at a very primitive stage when compared with organizing in parts of Africa or Latin America or Asia. Do you have any insights as to why that may be the case and suggestions as to how organizers here can improve?

Brutus: Well, you're right about that. In some cases, people think that the protest movement in the United States is nonexistent, which shows how uninformed they are. But you're quite right in the sense that the development of the movement in the United States has been backwards in relation to other parts of the world. In Latin America, I think—Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, even Mexico—the degree of political sophistication is much higher there. By comparison the United States development is very primitive.

Weapons of Mass Democracy
Why nonviolence is the most powerful tactic against oppressive regimes.

It's a long story. There have been periods in the United States when radicalism was very strong particularly through labor, trade unions, and at times you've had a real respectable left in the United States. But you're right that at the moment: a) it's really rather backwards, and b) it's not well known outside the United States. Now that's a problem because it seems to me that the media is deliberately not covering activist events. I'll give you one example. I served in New York on the commission which found the Bush administration guilty of crimes against humanity. We not only announced the verdict, we announced it at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. We also delivered the verdict at the White House, where in fact it was received with tongs—but that's a separate story. What I'm saying is that when we are taking significant action against government, the media does not cover it or they will bury it somewhere. This to me says that the media itself—or the mainstream media—is so much in the pocket of the corporations that we cannot get the information out to the people of the United States. Even more seriously, we cannot get it out to the people of the world, all of whom should know that there is a very lively, active and caring center of people in the United States who are engaged in protest against the wars and in demanding social justice, both in the U.S. and internationally.

Shirin: You've lived through World War II, through the Cold War, you've been part of the struggle against apartheid, you've seen that regime come and go, you've seen many American presidents come and go, and yet throughout all these years—you're now in your 80s—you've managed to keep a sense of optimism. What gives you hope?

Brutus: Well, it certainly helps to be able to have a sense of humor, so you survive various catastrophes with a laugh or two. Secondly, I think we're always winning small victories. They're happening all the time. Here in Durban, we challenged the city council because they've cut off people's water because they can't pay. There are always grounds for at least a little cheerfulness and a little optimism. If you have a sense that there is this global struggle going on, where one is winning little victories in a number of places, then the real question in my mind should be how do we combine all these successes and develop them into a powerful force. But it certainly seems to me that the mere fact that one is occasionally winning a few victories, however small they might be, it is one way to keep going.

The other way is the World Social Forum itself, which for me is the basis for great optimism, even though I recognize it may take a wrong turn, it may betray us, it can always fall apart. But when I flew back from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and arrived in Jo'berg in the darkness, with little lights burning where people were reading and so on, I felt in that enormous space, that there was so much hope, so much optimism, that people had a vision that an alternative world was possible. And I felt so good about it that I wrote a poem:

At Night, After Porto Alegre

In South African Airways 747

In this dim-winged cathedral
soaring above oceans of silvery cloud

far beyond Atlantic's tumultuous heave

we move, star-girt, distant

from greed's debris, genocides, calcined bones

curled in our own private shrines

or bent over light-pooled pages

we move to a new world, a new earth, where finally

our dreams can be fulfilled.

Shirin Shirin is a freelance journalist, activist, and analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus. Her work includes using popular education to campaign against religious violence and promote the rights of women, workers, minorities, and dalits throughout South Asia.

American Girls

I should have told [my Tibetan Buddhist teacher] the truth when he’d first asked; should have blurted out that I suffered; that I was often frustrated and angry; that slavery and its legacy of racism had taken their tolls on me; that I had come seeking help in coping with feelings of inadequacy, unworthiness, and shame.

—Jan Willis, Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey

Faith as child with Lady.

… My mother wouldn’t let Barbie in the house. It wasn’t just that she wouldn’t be caught dead spending money on a Barbie doll—no gift Barbies were permitted either. “Horrible, sexist creatures,” she would shudder when questioned. “Lord knows it’s hard enough to raise a healthy girl without constant propaganda from the toy box!” Barbie’s blondeness didn’t help.

Eventually I did get a Skipper, chest flat as a board, with a cloud of blonde hair and dusting of brown freckles across her pert nose. I suspect this semi-shift in policy was due to Skipper’s size—perfect for the log cabin my uncle built me. Someone had to stoke the wrought iron stove, after all, and sleep in the painted Dutch bed. Besides, she resembled Cousin Heidi on the Swedish side.

When I was five and Diahann Carroll became the first Black American woman to star in her own television show, my mother broke down—wasp waist, torpedo breasts and permanently high-heeled feet be damned—and got me a Julia doll. It didn’t escape me that Julia was just Barbie with milk chocolate skin, a white nurse’s uniform and a short cap of straightened hair. Instead of learning to love myself, I suspect that I learned a complicated equation: Flat Chest (Skipper) > Blonde (Barbie); Brown Skin (Julia) > Unrealistic Body Type (Barbie).

Mornings I waited for the school bus at my grandparents’ house, and if she had time, Mummi sat me down before her large, round vanity mirror, surrounded by tubs of blue and pink Dippity-Do, and set my hair in ringlets à la Cindy Brady or Buffy from Family Affair. I quivered with anticipation as she wrapped my soft black curls into large spiky rollers set vertically around my head like shells in an ammo belt. The resulting cylinders were wispy and short-lived.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I heard my mother whisper one morning on her way to work.

“She begged,” my grandmother whispered back, her blue eyes soft, pink plastic hairpins poking out the side of her mouth. “She’s just a little girl.”

My mother sighed and hugged me good-bye. Her hair, long then, fell in a curtain around us. “Who’s my beautiful, beautiful pun’kin?” she said, peppering my nose with kisses. She liked to tell the story of how all the nurses oohed and aahed when I was born. I had such big brown eyes, such a perfect rosebud mouth, a full head of curls! Then there were the strangers who stopped us on the streets whenever we went out and plied me with gifts—shiny coins and candy. Biracial babies were rare in 1960s Seattle. Everyone wanted to touch me!

Junior high society in Sunnyside, however, required the impossible: Farah Fawcett hair, a tousled mane of blonde highlights, and a curling iron. My grandfather bought me the iron—a sleek, lavender rod that I heated up lovingly and snapped in anticipation—but there wasn’t much we could do with it until my mother (after much pleading on everyone’s part) finally relented and let me straighten my hair, just this once! Racial self-loathing surely couldn’t take root in a single incident.

Instead of falling to my shoulders in bone-straight, shining tresses (as the photo on the box had led us to believe!), my hair poofed around me, thick and unruly as shrubbery. I looked like the biracial kids I would later hear black students talking about at college:

“You can always tell who has a white mother,” a girl bemoaned freshman year, as an interracial graduate student couple and their two kids entered the dining room. The little boy had a close natural, but the girl’s hair billowed out in a wiry, chaotic cloud caught at the end with a rubber band. “They have no idea what to do with their black children’s hair.”

The table mmm-hmmed its agreement, and a second girl protested, “You think they’d ask someone! Even they must notice that you don’t see kids with black parents running around all wild and bushy-haired like that.”

A third girl sounded mournful. “It hurts. I just want to go over there and say, ‘Please, can I just braid your poor child’s hair?’”

In the Freshman dining hall, I’d been overcome with shame and rage. Shame that I still didn’t know how to work my hair, that my own body was foreign to me, and rage to learn that as a black baby, I had indeed come with an instruction manual—only it was missing! And let us not forget pain, of course, pain for the little girl about to tread in some very painful shoes with the protection of a mother less vigilant than mine.

No one in my family, no one in the entire town knew what to do with my straightened hair. My uncle’s girlfriend spent hours shaping and curling, but each time I turned to see my uncle’s face, his pursed, painted smile, I started to cry.

Later, in Middle School, when I negotiated full authority over my body from my mother, when haircuts and make-up and clothes came entirely within my jurisdiction, I shaved an inverted V into my forehead and fired up the curling iron, creating two little wings above my brows like fat black caterpillar larvae.

Despite the fact that every single black woman straightened (or, as they called it, permed) her hair—all of which seemed to end up in slicked-back buns fastened with scrunchies, bobby pins and barrettes, a veritable ammo belt of accessories—college turned out to be less about looks and more about class, along with academic or extracurricular specialization. And so I scraped by. I was the traveler, the cultural chameleon, the adventuress, the empath. I could advocate on behalf of Southeast refugees and homeless Americans, interview Latino immigrants, teach English to the illiterate. I could pass through the inner city unscathed, dress for black-tie affairs, scrap from Burma to the tip of Singapore, crossing borders with a single bag and no reservations. I passed, I passed.

Faith Adiele is the co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, which contains 24 international stories ideal for college and high school classrooms. A popular speaker and contributor to O and Essence magazines, Faith has appeared on NPR, on the Tavis Smiley show, and at universities around the world. She currently serves as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California and is at work on a social/cultural memoir about her Nigerian Nordic American  heritage. www.adiele.com

This excerpt from Meeting Faith, which won the 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir, was reposted with kind permission.

Interested?

• Watch clips from My Journey Home, a PBS documentary featuring Faith Adiele.