Put Your Hands in the Mud I
In the first of a two part series in History & Politics, Tsitsi B looks at the disjunction between political and civil rights, and socio-economic status in the western nation state model and questions how protests would be shaped if they were as much about the racist economy as they are about racist political identities.
When Barack Obama ran for office the first time, Jay Z said: “Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Barack Obama could run. Obama’s running so we all can fly.” He spoke at a rally on 3rd November 2008, the day before Obama’s election. The popular imagination picked it up and mythologised Rosa Parks and Malcolm X as the ancestors of Barack Obama. Ancestors are people who have gone before. We inherit both their struggle and their template for survival as we fight for freedom.
This chosen ancestry shaped our understanding of where ‘progress’ in America came from, and what well of tradition the contemporary generation needed to draw from to go forward. The “Yes We Can” moment claimed that a tradition of peaceful protestors brought Obama to power, and asked him to become The Polite Black President.
Had Malcolm X or Assata Shakur been included in that popular lineage, the expectations for and possibilities of Barack Obama’s presidency would have been different. Today, as people in the streets shout “no justice, no peace,” a protest chant used against racial violence in the US since the 80s, Barack Obama the Nobel Peace prize winner and overseer of police violence and high incarceration rates for Black Americans, represents the opposite: peace for White people without justice for Black people.
When it comes to Black Lives Matter, and the contemporary American struggle against slavery, Obama is basically irrelevant. His template – ask politely – has not served Black communities. His calls for police reform reveal that his hope lies within the system. This is at odds with a movement where all hope lies outside of the system. As my sister Rhianna painted on our placard, paraphrasing W.E.B. Dubois, “a system cannot fail those it was never designed to protect.” Obama has not been imagined into the ancestry of Black Lives Matter.
In June, during Pride Month, many of us pointed to Marsha P. Johnson, the Black Trans leader of the Stonewall riots, as we spoke to protect and uplift Black Trans women who experience violence and death on an unparalleled scale, and are marginalised within both Black and queer communities. As we spoke, cis-het Black and queer White protestors recognised Black Trans people's inheritance of Marsha P.’s template for struggle and survival. Her template is of opposition to a system, of demanding rights, of urgency, sacrifice, of community and mutual aid, love and femininity against horror and violence.
Marsha P. Johnson’s ancestry is called on by Gen Z internet babies, women, Trans and non-binary folk, TikTokers and Netflix-watchers (notably, Netflix did a documentary investigating the deaths of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in 2017, which features in a lot of the ‘10 things to watch to become anti-racist’ lists). This is the new generation at the forefront of the protests.
Like those who imagined Barack Obama’s lineage, contemporary protestors have called on Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. This time around it’s for their tenacity and radical force (i.e. the duration of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: 5 December 1955 to 20 December 1956), rather than their peacefulness. Now, Malcolm X is included (in his self-sufficiency, support for Black business, upholding of Black worth by any means necessary, his flawed internationalism); and in the UK, British Black Panther Olive Morris (for her uncompromising and anti-capitalist leadership, “BLACK SUFFERER FIGHT PIG POLICE BRUTALITY”, and her community organisation with Black and Asian women).
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Last month, when J Cole (part of the older, misogynistic, respectability politics, Obama crowd – now overtaken) tried to put down Noname, a young woman rapper and Black Lives Matter activist, she answered back:
Yo, but little did I know all my readin' would be a bother
It's trans women bein' murdered and this is all he can offer?
And this is all y'all receive?
Distracting from the convo with organizers
They're talkin' abolishin' the police
And this the new world order
We democratizin' Amazon, we burn down borders
This a new vanguard, this a new vanguard
I'm the new vanguard
In this verse, Noname breaks from the template of racial empowerment that means boosting Black patriarchy into a middle-class life (*coughs* J Cole, Will Smith, Virgil Abloh). No: these protests are for Trans folk and for women. Oluwatoyin Salau, whose death had me in bed weeping and gasping between Zoom calls, is mentioned throughout.
Black women see things differently because of intersectionality (a concept theorised by Black woman lawyer and civil rights activist Kimberle Crenshaw). Black men can look at white men and think “I could be treated like you if only XYZ.” (As can cis White women). Black women know we will never be treated like white men. Black women know we must break the system because it will never stretch wide enough to include us. We are necessarily revolutionary. This applies doubly to Black Trans people, dark-skin Black people, Black people with disabilities. The more marginalised you are, the greater your natural understanding of the systemic violence of society and the deeper your need to challenge it. You see it more clearly. That’s why Black female-led, Black Trans-led protests are for revolutionary change, not for reform. Let’s hear it again: “police abolition”, “a new world order”, “democratizin’ Amazon”, “burn down borders”.
This isn’t a call for civil rights within a system, this is refusing the long-winded racist violence of the Western nation state model. Our policing and immigration policies, the exhaustive, extractive racist violence of capitalism and everything that is laid on top of those foundations. If protest in the late twentieth century was about political representation (I’m thinking particularly of Civil Rights, decolonisation and anti-apartheid movements), the protests of 2020 are asking us to fulfil this promise of equality with economic change. What are the police, immigration policy and extractive capitalism if not the unaddressed socio-economic inheritances of slavery and imperialism?
There is a deep disjunct between political and civil rights (e.g. voting rights, right to home ownership and renting, right to work) and socio-economic status (inherited societal and personal wealth from oppression/inherited poverty from oppression, financial power to buy home, food, health, likelihood of getting a job, ability to cross a border). It enables people to say, looking at political and civil status – everything is equal! You have enough! It’s not that bad! – while ignoring socio-economic reality, which is entirely racist and unjust.
It enables one country to extract all resources, capital and opportunity from another country, and then close its borders. It allows a country to differentiate between “asylum seekers” and “economic migrants”. It enables organisations and institutions to claim they are not racist because they do not overtly discriminate, despite premising entire business models and ways of working on exclusion and extraction.
So why did civil rights leaders not tackle this back in the last century? It wasn’t that these leaders – Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela – didn’t recognise the need for economic change. They just couldn’t achieve it. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers tried, passing on legacies of mutual aid, community redistribution and supporting Black business. Martin Luther King was never in government. One of Nelson Mandela’s first policies was to move wealth extracted under apartheid from White communities back into Black communities - he dropped it very quickly.
There is ongoing debate in South Africa about ‘Black Tax’, i.e. the money all Black people have no moral choice but to give away to look after poorer Black family members (read Niq Mhlongo’s Black Tax: Burden or Ubuntu?). It shows up in the West as remittances, where Black immigrants live poor in the country they have moved to and send money back home. Should the state not pay this, rather than further disinherit Black people, recognising the debt that Black and colonised peoples are owed? Shouldn’t all ex-imperial states pay reparations rather than continue to extract debts? Of course they should. But they don’t. We continue to live in a racist economy.
Do you recognise that these protests are about a racist economy, not just racist political identities? If so, where does that take us and how does that shape our action?