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Black liberation movements - Coggle Diagram

- - - - This later King has been supplanted by a glimmering hologram of bland obedience, beamed in instantly to vilify anything violent or simply rude.
        
        Nonviolence, once a tool, today glows with the power of a fetish. And, unlike King, many marchers seemed to believe that good manners would be repaid with gentler policing.
    - - The abolition of police and prisons has always been the ideological engine of BLM, an inheritance of the Black Panthers’ Ten Point Program: “We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails,” reads number eight
        
        But even they must have been astonished when, on the thirteenth day of the rebellion, the Minneapolis City Council made an unexpected announcement: it had voted to disband the city’s police.
        
        he effort has already hit a legal roadblock, as the department is protected — and given chilling autonomy — by a city charter from 1920. Faced with the enormity of the consequences, council members walked back their earlier pronouncements and reduced the 2021 police budget by a meager 4.5 percent
        
        From the start, some abolitionists feared that this attempt could even lead to an insidious sharpening of social control (as when the police in Camden, New Jersey, were disbanded in 2013) or to the city being taken over by the Minnesota State Patrol. Now it’s clear that a transformation on the municipal scale will take the continuing mobilization of the people in the streets — as well as a deepening of the conversation about what the police do and are. Scrapping departments isn’t enough; neither is closing prisons. Incarceration and policing have become the state’s annihilating reflex when confronted with murder and sexual violence, but also homelessness and addiction — the social disintegration that marks those lives consumed by poverty.
      - Vital to abolitionist thought is, as a first step, a redistributive mission. The extraordinary amount of money spent on punishment in the US should instead go to preventive and rehabilitation programs — a “nonreformist reform”
        
        Abolition,” Gilmore has said, “requires that we change one thing, which is everything.” It’s this position, which treats the struggles of race and class as historically and strategically linked, that’s sparked and revived debates within and beyond the left. The Panthers were armed socialists; Davis was a 1960s militant who’s been the Communist Party vice presidential candidate twice. And in Golden Gulag, Gilmore’s geographical study of the boom in California prisons — her argument is driven in large part by the Marxian conception of “surplus” — her Ten Theses on abolition appear in a chapter titled after Lenin’s famous pamphlet “What Is to Be Done?” Somehow this is the movement making strides in the United States of America.
    - - Black people were property. Any abolitionist will remind you that many US police departments grew from slave patrols meant to enforce this, raking the land for runaways and throttling black revolts. From forced labor to endemic joblessness, from hated ballasts of the economy to hated exiles from its present form: this road was paved with bloodshed and contempt enshrined as law. Lynching, segregation, the Great Migration, restrictive covenants, discrimination at work, exclusion from unions, and throughout all this the drumbeat of state violence in the street — the varieties of degradation are enough to make you fling a brick.
        
        Broken windows” theory — cracking down on minor infractions to deter more serious crimes — has drilled an armed state presence deeper into the lives of the urban poor.
        
        ric Garner was harassed repeatedly before his death in 2014; police even took his exhausted fury at this as pretext to throw him to the ground. “I told you the last time,” he begs in the video recording as officers close in, “please leave me alone!”
        
        Police plundered the black population because at bottom they knew they could. They knew that in the eyes of authority, the black poor are threatening monstrosities but also violable and devalued, available to be pulped. You can stalk them, prod them, punish them; feel free to take whatever you want from them. Those who didn’t pay their fines on time in Ferguson were slapped with warrants for their arrest.
    - - With little wealth to inherit, these families possess far less property than their white counterparts, and even that prosperity seems to vanish with mortifying frequency. “White boys who grew up rich are more likely to remain that way,” pronounced a study published in the Times in 2018. “Black boys raised at the top are more likely to become poor than stay wealthy in their own adult households.”
        For huge swathes of black America, Obama was a triumph and realized dream; for the middle class, he was a mirror.
        
        His centrist managerialism was cast as a triumph of civil rights; the old injunction to be “respectable” was softened by his much-touted love of rap. His speeches seemed to stream down from a place of unpretentious elevation, so he could lash out at poor black people and expect gratitude for his frankness. Drone strikes, deportations, and fealty to the banks were balanced by the moral prestige of the historical black struggle.
    - - Black professionals, after all, are the crown jewels of the liberal reformist mission: their presence on the campus or conference call performs a shining symbolic task. This is the only sliver of black America to feel the full effects of integration — so the shivering, conflicted existence of this minority within a minority stands as talismanic promise that the wound of history might be healed
        
        One of the most sensationalized early episodes from the riots concerned two lawyers in their early thirties who face decades in prison for their alleged actions in New York.
        
        This may or may not point to something rustling through the spring, when quite a few young black people placed within this rickety middle class chose to cross the mystic threshold between “respectability” and dignity: they went out to meet the riots
    - - Clattering with internal disputes and handed down for generations, the real black movement isn’t the nursery rhyme recited brightly in the public sphere, but a protracted battle against domination at its most naked and unconstrained — King, on the day he was killed, was to give a sermon called “Why America May Go to Hell.” So it’s possible that the death of Floyd reverberated so painfully because, under the delirious conditions induced by the pandemic, whole sections of the middle class seemed to walk through the political looking glass. In an instant they were poorer and even more insecure, their noses bluntly rubbed in their disposability to capital.
        
        covid
        
        The racist, decades-long program of mass incarceration accompanied austerity and stagnant wages, as the incomes of the vulnerable fell even further into perilous uncertainty.
    - - As the civil rights movement thickened into the militancy of Black Power, he knew that riots — the destruction of property and mass clashes with police — would be a routine feature of a society riven by racial hatred and that refused to feed its poor. The task was not to disavow the smashing clarity in the street but to build forms of collectivity that could outlast the days of rage.
        
        lthough he split with his mentor C. L. R. James, Boggs held to James’s belief that despite the fixation on “equal rights,” the vigorous challenge posed by the black movement proved that it was power, not the democratic ideal, that was being fought for and forfeited every second in the real world. “Rights are what you make and what you take,” he wrote in The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, published in 1963 — the high noon of civil right
        
        There was power in a riot, in its rippling, adaptable passions — power that might even express itself, at some point, by winning seats on city councils (as long as the movement knew not to deify this strategic foothold in the state).
    - - Officers looked on, powerless; within minutes, a whole row of vehicles had been fastidiously destroyed. These weren’t “outside agitators,” but dauntless outsiders, and there was something marvelous in their comportment, their light, balletic elegance as they slashed tires and popped car hoods to light fires on the engines. They moved with the evident, placid confidence that in that moment, they were winning. The camera zoomed in on one young vandal as he reached his arm through a smashed rear windshield. In an echo of those Antillean slaves who devised the J’Ouvert carnival to mock their masters, he retrieved a blue police cap and placed it rakishly on his head.
        
        “What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!” Marx gasped in a letter when news reached him that the members of the Paris Commune had repelled the imperial army and abolished the police; he said they were “storming heaven.” And a version of that thought — a degraded, baffled paraphrase — flashed to mind as I saw the masked children of New York slam their skateboards against police vans and throw themselves at lines of officers packing guns and shields and nightsticks; chanting the name of a dead man while sprinting with hundreds down an avenue
        
        Armed only with their psychotic courage, they were running, dancing, singing, smashing, burning, screaming, storming heaven: all rapturous varieties of Baraka’s “magic actions.” I
        
        listened to 19-year-olds talk nonstop throughout the night we spent in jail, as they howled insults at the officers and swapped stories of humiliation by police. It struck me that they were too young to have seen the initial phase of BLM. Though well-acquainted with power and violence, they were tasting “politics” for the first time. Whatever the fate of the movement, I suspect that much of their future thinking will be measured against the feelings that filled the nights of 2020: the vastness and immediacy, the blur and brutal clarity.
- - - - In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.
        
        You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
        
        I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation.
        
        We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo
        
        y friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
        
        We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
        
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