This is addressed to the white membership of DKos, particularly its white male membership. That being said, commentary from people of color and women is not only welcomed, it is invited.
The meme floating around these days is that white liberals and white radicals have failed to appeal to people of color, and to a lesser extent have failed to appeal to women. This is a problem. I am not sure that this meme is entirely true, but I suspect there is enough truth in it that we should pay attention. Certainly, much the same thing has been observed of my own city for years now, that the activist community is highly segregated, with the white side barely interacting with the black side.
I say this is a problem for two reasons. First of all, justice demands that the interests of women and people of color not be ignored; and second, the support and success of those groups will mean the success of the entire people.
It is not enough for us to assume that people of color and women will see our ideas and immediately applaud them. We must persuade them that our ideas will help them, and we must also ask them what they want, and what they need. We must help them where they are, in whatever situation they find themselves. Much of what could be called the “black establishment” (the black churches, most black politicians, black social and political organizations, etc.) seem to be gradualist and incrementalist in their outlook, and to have favored “respectability politics” over “revolutionary politics.” This is a fact on the ground, and no amount of wishing will make it otherwise. We should not blame the black leadership for having followed this cautious path; since the end of the Civil War (and for that matter, before and during the Civil War), bold leadership among African Americans has been met with threats, exile, and murder. While what white racists have done to African Americans in this country may not qualify as a genocide exactly, white racists have certainly shown genocidal inclinations against African Americans, and that genocidal inclination has been strongest against any leadership that rises up among African Americans, and the more outspoken the leadership is, the more likely it is to be met by violence.
So. We need to help black people. We need to help black people without any expectation of immediate support for our causes. Rather, we must make their cause our own cause, and work to create a society in which social equality and political equality have been achieved. The same goes for women. Mao Zedong was a reprehensible jackass, but even he knew what was up when he said “women hold up half the sky.”
I believe that the fight for social equality for women and people of color must go side by side with a critique of American capitalism. At the heart of it all, I see it as an assault on hierarchy and arbitrary power. There is a tension in American society regarding hierarchy and arbitrary power, and that tension has existed for centuries. Many Europeans observed that Native American societies were remarkably egalitarian and non-hierarchical. This shocked them. It was so alien to everything they knew that they projected European social norms onto Native cultures, referring to various tribes’ leaders as “kings,” when they were not kings in the European sense. The Iroquois Confederacy served as an example of democracy, and as a model for our own federal system. Whites and blacks could rise to positions of honor and influence in Native society, but no black or Indian could rise to a position of honor or influence in white society. When the Sons of Liberty went to dump the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, they came thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, out of admiration for the love of liberty and democratic spirit common among Native Americans and their governments. Tammany Hall, perhaps the longest-lasting political machine in the history of the United States, was named after a Lenape chieftain who was known for his love of liberty. This admiration is contrasted with the authoritarianism of the European governments — for instance, the exile by the Puritans of Roger Williams, for having the temerity to say that they had stolen the land that the Indians had rightfully owned.
This tension regarding hierarchy and arbitrary power persisted. The Declaration of Independence was a fierce claim against the arbitrary power of the Crown and Parliament, but it ignored the arbitrary power held over slaves and indentured servants. The delegations from South Carolina and Georgia explicitly voted out a denunciation of slavery from the draft of the Declaration, and the Declaration was widely mocked in England for declaring all men free and equal when many of the men who signed it owned other men. Some of the signers and others of the Revolutionary generation sought to not let their hands make liars of their tongues, and freed their slaves, either then and there, or in their wills. Others, like Patrick Henry, recognized and was troubled by the contradiction between his famous words — “give me liberty, or give me death” — and his action of owning slaves. He never freed his slaves, even after his death, but he never tried to justify his hypocrisy either. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, began their political lives opposed to slavery and in favor of abolishing the slave trade and slavery, and ended it supporting slavery’s expansion into new territory.
The tension is also visible in events like Shays’ Rebellion, in which impoverished, debt-ridden farmers and war veterans appealed for redress to, and later rebelled against, a state government that was not interested in listening to their concerns or aiding them in their difficulties, preferring instead to listen to the merchants, bankers, and shipping interests of Boston and the other coastal cities — in other words, favoring creditors against debtors.
The tension became sharply drawn in the conflict that resulted in the Civil War. The moral wrong of slavery — the total ownership of one human being by another — spoke to a less obvious but no less real difference between the North and the South. Prior to the Civil War, the North supported free labor ideology, which held “that the laboring man ought to be as independent as the capitalist,” while Southern whites “believed workers ought to be slaves.” Sadly, free labor ideology languished after the Civil War, and the view that workers ought to be slaves, or as close to slaves as possible, came to be shared by a large portion of the people of the North. White racism enjoyed a comeback, and black people gradually lost all the power they had gained as a result of the war and Reconstruction, culminating in a horrific reign of terror that brutalized African Americans for generations, and still is brutalizing them, in the form of police violence, unequal laws and unequal application of the laws, difficulty in finding employment, the school to prison pipeline, and so on. The problems are so numerous that they almost defy attempts to list and categorize them.
There were people from that era, Abolitionists and Radical Republicans, who were fiercely outspoken for all forms of social equality. Senator Benjamin Wade, who would have become president if Andrew Johnson had been impeached, supported women’s suffrage, trade unions, equality for African Americans, and was critical of capitalism. Representative Benjamin Butler, a former general, also supported women’s suffrage, an eight hour workday for federal employees, and a fiat money monetary policy that favored farmers, workers, and debtors. Wendell Phillips, the noted Abolitionist orator, supported not just equality for African Americans, but also women’s rights, universal suffrage, Native American rights, and the labor movement. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a supporter of women’s rights, dedicating himself to that cause when it seemed that equality for African Americans had been achieved and having for years previous been supporting it by giving a voice to Abolitionist women through his newspaper. Albert Parsons fought for the Confederacy, but later came to realize that slavery and the war had been wrong, and acted upon that belief by founding a newspaper that supported equality for African Americans and by stumping Central Texas for the Republicans. He married a woman of color (Lucy Parsons was of African, Native American, and Mexican descent, and may have been born a slave) and eventually relocated to Chicago, where he became a nationally known labor activist and anarchists. In the words of Eric Foner, his speeches “drew comparisons between the plight of Southern blacks and Northern industrial workers, and between the aristocracy resting on slavery the Civil War had destroyed and the new oligarchy based on the exploitation of industrial labor it had helped to create.”
There are many, many more idealists of that era that I could go over, but I will leave off for now and return to matters at hand. We must answer the call of all who suffer and are denied redress, all who are denied opportunity. We must make social equality our banner, and carry it proudly into the land of those who prefer hierarchy and arbitrary power, and fight beneath it. In so doing, we shall once more be taking up arms in the cause of the American Revolution. I do not consider the American Revolution to be over. The most obvious military phase of it ended in 1783, when we won our independence from Great Britain, but the revolution itself is still being fought, in the workplace, in the home, and in the streets. It is a revolution against hierarchy and arbitrary power. Perhaps this revolution will not be won in our lifetimes; certainly, it was not won in the lifetimes of those who went before us. Perhaps it will never be won. But whether or not it will ever be won is irrelevant to the worthiness of the cause, and so let us fight to win and plant the banner of social equality everywhere in our land. We may never live to see that daybreak, but we can continue to fight for the idealism of our Revolution, and to make it a reality in our own lives and in our communities.
Edit at 12:44 AM, 12/20/2015: regarding Benjamin Butler: I neglected to mention that he also was, of course, a supporter of equality for African Americans; in fact, blacks were appalled when he was voted out of office in 1874, viewing it as a great setback, with one black resident of Baltimore writing “that by your defeat… the colored people have lost one of their best men. You have been with us ever since the war commenced in regard to our liberty and equal rights.” Butler also embraced Irish nationalism and praised the Paris Commune, and was considered so radical by his contemporaries that he was frequently depicted with Karl Marx as an advocate of the “spoilation” of property. All in all, Butler’s position would be analogous to Wesley Clark having won a seat in the House of Representatives and lavishly praising Occupy Wall Street and the Kurdish anarchists in Syria while advocating for the break-up of the big banks and criminal charges being brought against the bankers by the Department of Justice. As it is, the closest modern analogue to Butler is probably Alan Grayson.
It’s been a couple days, but I’d like to thank whoever got this put on Community Spotlight. Thanks a bunch! — 6:07 PM, 12/23/2015