“No matter who wins the elections – All you community organizers, you’re going to wake up on November 5th and do the same work you’ve always been doing.”
That’s what spoken-word artist Walidah Imarisha (Bad Sista of duo Good Sista/Bad Sista) told a crowd in Seattle on Saturday night. She’s right, of course – the work of grassroots organizing is the same, and can’t be changed by the election of any politician.
Still, there is a new atmosphere this morning, I’m just not sure how to describe it. I went to sleep last night to fire works in the streets, neighbors talking and horns honking, and woke up to hear a political buzz like I’ve never heard – on the bus, in the hallways on campus, and, of course, in e-mails and on blogs. Someone calling me on the phone about other business immediately asked, “So what’d you think about last night?”
How to capture this? I don’t know. Here I don’t want to outline my own opinions. I only want to share selections – like Imarisha’s statement – that resonated with me. Some of them might contradict – if they do, that’s good. Those are tensions we need to work through.
- Selections from discussions among anarchists:
“Too often, anarchists are reflexively dismissive of electoral politics (something I’ve also been guilty of in the past), ignoring the implications of the mainstream political landscape and how it can shape organizing strategies on the ground. Despite Obama’s long list of corporate sponsors, hawkish foreign policy team, weak domestic policies, and overall centrist outlook, it is clear that his campaign has made a significant mark on the country and we should have a serious conversation about how to engage with Obama hysteria without compromising our principles.I have no illusions about Obama’s hope and change rhetoric, but as a community organizer and person of color who works with latino/a immigrants and lives in a prodominately black neighborhood, I think change is palpable already. If nothing else, it seems clear to me that his administration will have a considerable impact on race relations in the U.S., on a level we can’t possibley measure. I imagine the dominant conversation will take the shamefully shallow “post-racial society’ track, but amongst working-class people of color I think there’s a potential opportunity for a stronger black-brown alliance, particularly around labor issues–an arena where anarchist people of color can make inroads.”
I think U.S.-based anarchists, particularly of the white-male-middle-class variety–who seem to be the majority–tend to overlook the significance of Obama’s victory for working-class people of color. I don’t think Obama genuinely has the latters interests at heart, but I think his voice and image has legitimized the notion that real change comes from the bottom, and that we should seize the opportunity to remind people that he’s absolutely right and begin mobilizing folks–particularly around prison issues, labor, health care, and institutional racism.
I think it’s worth reading Obama’s memoirs. He is a great writer, no doubt about it. He’s also a grass roots activist and has been since his 20s. He also spent 5 years of his youth in Indonesia right after the coup and knows what despotism and poverty look like from the street up, rather than from the dizzy heights of power down. He’s also lived through a degree of structural persecution I will never understand and he spent most of his life trying to understand it.
He’s certainly middle class, and he’s certainly not a revolutionary, but he’s a damn site better than anything else on offer (not that you said otherwise of course). He’s also charged by ideals that many of us share even if we don’t think he’ll be able to realise them through the instruments of the state and capitalism. He’s also made his way through the political upheavals of the 60s in his own way and seems to have fairly standard Marxist views about history and power – at least that’s what he wrote 13 years ago.
What surprised me most about the campaign was that everyone tried so hard to keep race out of it, but as soon as he won it’s all anyone’s talked about. I think that’s inevitable, but I don’t think he’s inspiring because he’s half Kenyan (though it is also really inspiring); I think he’s inspiring because he’s a real person who’s really thought about politics and the people and has campaigned for most of his adult life on behalf of other people and against the odds and made it in the way he wanted to.
Bear in mind also that his memoirs were published 13 years ago, just after he got the presidency of the Harvard Law Review and well before he went into politics.
He’s an activist first and now he’s a politician. I think the worry for anarchists is how successful he’s been. I think the challenge for us is to hold him to account and to push the agenda without sacrificing our principles. ”
“The two funniest moments of the coverage on the BBC last night were:
a) an interview with a poor-looking woman in some gawdawful dump in the midwest – she was asked whether she expected great change and she replied “well they’re politicians and politicians are politicians and the president doesn’t have that much power anyway, so I don’t expect much change”. It just completely stunned the presenter.b) Ted Koppel being asked about the prospects for Obama’s presidency and responding about how this wouldn’t really affect the underlying racial problems and that Obama would have pretty much zero space to maneouver given the crisis and he would just be fire-fighting – he was interrupted by the presenter saying “er, this is no time for doom and gloom”.”
“It will be interesting to see how these people operate and see things now that the election’s over. The important thing is to engage and work alongside these people. We all know the underlying reality, and need for radical change, but there is no denying that this is a historic and significant moment in the US. Some elder comrades (people in their 60’s) have helped me understand that. I was at an eviction blockade in Mattapan (one of Boston’s majority Black working class neighborhoods). One of the organizers stated “we should be celebrating last night’s victory, but instead we are here, defending the home of a Black woman who continues to suffer. This is where we belong.””
In the UK this evening they had Dizzee Rascal on for his thoughts, alongside Baroness Amos (a Government peer) and he scored pretty highly too.
“No, one person doesn’t make change, people together make things change”. Plus he was moving around enough to leave camera shot.
- Dead Prez offer their opinion (the only hiphop track I’ve heard yet critical of Obama… at least until Dizzee cuts a track, I guess): Dead Prez – PolitriKKKs
here and elsewhere 