Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)
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Americans of all backgrounds, Cornell Belcher argued, shared certain nationally defining values: freedom, fairness, opportunity, equality. “However, this is the problem with equality,” he said. “In certain groups, it triggers a conversation that goes like this: ‘They’re trying to get equality, which means I’m losing something.’”
“You have to be very careful about triggering this fear of ‘us versus them,’” he said. “I can’t answer [the question], ‘How do you address this issue of inequality without having the race part of the discussion?’ That is what’s not easily reconciled now in our politics.”
From Getting It All Together, published 1972. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.
April 4th, 1968 by Nikkolas Smith. 2013. Courtesy the artist and Creative Action Network.
CHAPTER 15
WHO WE BE
DEBT, COMMUNITY, AND COLORIZATION
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
—Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Can We Dream Together?
—Dream Defenders slogan
In the March 1957, fifteen months after the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, five after the Atlanta airport episode, Martin Luther King Jr. was among those invited to witness Kwame Nkrumah declare Ghana’s independence from Great Britain.
King was impressed that Nkrumah had chosen not to wear to the ceremonies fine garments suggestive of new royalty, but instead appeared in his old prison cap and coat. After Nkrumah’s speech, King heard the children and elderly in the crowd crying, “Freedom! Freedom!” It reminded him of a spiritual he loved: “Free at last! Free at last! Great Thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”
The next day he saw Nkrumah dancing with the Queen of England’s representative, the Duchess of Kent. “Isn’t this something?” King remarked to a friend. “Here is the once-serf, once-slave, now dancing with the lord on an equal plane.” To him, the scene contained a lesson on nonviolence.
“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation,” he continued. “The aftermath of violence, however, are emptiness and bitterness.”1 True democracy was not just about representation and transformation, it was about forging diverse communities rooted in equality and mutuality. Every democracy needed to habitually ask its subjects anew: What do we owe to each other?
When King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, he argued, “[W]e’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.” In the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, America had created “a promissory note … that all men, yes, Black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’”2 The nation itself was, the intellectual David Graeber wrote, “a moral debtor … freedom [was] something literally owed to the nation.”3
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published during the germinating summer between the appearance of the indignados in Madrid’s public square and the Occupiers on Wall Street, Graeber offered a rethinking of the idea of indebtedness. King’s call for America to redeem its promise exemplified the thrust of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and identity liberation movements to address what Graeber called “the crisis of inclusion.”
But by the late 1970s, a new era had begun. As wages began to stagnate dramatically in relation to productivity, popular movements shifted from claiming the rights of national citizenship to claiming access to capitalism. Neoliberalism meant the financialization of everything, including notions of credit and debt, resistance and freedom.
If one could only ask the question of what we owed each other in the context of endless war or unbridled capitalism, what would be the answer? We might owe each other protection against enemies, real or conjured. We might owe each other lower tax bills. We might owe some the reduction of restraints on doing business. But this would leave us a much narrower notion of freedom than the one King had proposed.
As it turned out, for much of the half-century following King’s speech, Americans chose to answer the question of what we owed each other in those narrower terms. Addressing national debt pertained less to the discharging of a social obligation, such as reducing inequality, but to the paying down of an economic obligation caused by government spending. In 1980 President Reagan ran on the platform of addressing the latter, especially when that spending was going to social safety-net programs. During the twelve years he and President George H. W. Bush led the country, the federal deficit increased at the fastest rate in history, through a combination of tax cuts and huge increases in military spending.
To be sure, the national debt was not at all like personal debt. The U.S. government was never in danger of foreclosure. Indeed the postwar debt had played a central role in the long boom, and expanding tax revenues had rendered national debt irrelevant as an economic and political problem. Yet extremist free market ideology prevailed.
* * *
Graeber wrote,
Financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money—and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. It introduces moral perversions on almost every level.4
Capitalism aspired not only to be the law, but morality, too. Freedom meant being free even from responsibility or empathy. All values would bow before economic value. Redemption would be redefined. Consumption would set the terms of the social. Creditors ruled everything around us. Debtors—a category that included almost everyone—were parasites. Capital and the state debased fundamental human relations.
Politics could be reduced to a depersonalized transaction concerned less with forging equality but finding equivalence, the right price. We might come together only to the tasks of increasing the military budget, reducing the national debt, and cutting taxes, the better to be able to spend time and money on ourselves. But beyond these moments of exchange, we would owe each other nothing. Graeber wrote, “[I]t’s sociality itself that’s treated as abusive, criminal, demonic.”5
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech had been turned inside out. Graeber wrote, “[W]here-as the first postwar age was about collective claims on the nation’s debt to its humblest citizens, the need for those who have made false promises to redeem themselves, now those same humble citizens are taught to think of themselves as sinners, seeking some kind of purely individual redemption to have the right to any sort of moral relations with other human beings at all.”6
Financial indebtedness narrowed notions of citizenship. It fostered cynicism and isolation. Graeber wrote, “In fact, it could be well said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.”7
Perhaps we really had entered what Rich Nichols, the manager/philosopher of the hip-hop band the Roots, had called the “post-hope era.” In the wake of the bank and corporate bailouts and the Tea Party revolt against even minimal foreclosure relief, hopelessness had even swallowed the colorized image of Obama, which had so inspired the young, dispossessed, and marginalized. Judith Halberstam seemed to capture the moment in a book called The Queer Art of Failure, which began, “We are all used to having our dreams crushed, our hopes smashed, our illusions shattered, but what comes after hope?”
In this context, Graeber ventured that the global economic collapse might mark the beginning of a new era of popular movements. The problem would be one of imagination:
[T]here seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its fut
ure horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged.9
A bitter old radical joke, attributed to Jameson and refined by Žižek, had begun to recirculate in certain circles—that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Indeed it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of racism, the possibility of people learning to get along. Hollywood’s dream machine had already begun milking the end-of-days genre, characterized by the $200 million film 2012. In such dreams things could only end badly.
A FLASH OF INSIGHT
For over two decades, a collective of creative folks in Vancouver and Berkeley, led by an Estonian immigrant to Canada named Kalle Lasn and a biracial postgrad named Micah White, had been plugging away in a far corner of the revolution. Along with their crew of culture jammers, they had been distilling subversive ideas about consumerism, prisons, environmental collapse, global financial crisis, and global insurrection. Their main provocation was a bimonthly magazine called Adbusters, featuring these ideas in short essays and pithy pull quotes alongside well-designed images and witty fake ads.
We lived in the era of the image. Culture was the battlefield. In his manifesto, White wrote:
We live in a world where a constellation of cognitive illusions—that infinite growth can be sustained on a finite planet, that consumerism can make us happy, that corporations are persons—are dragging us into an ecological apocalypse. These cognitive illusions won’t disappear because they’ve been proven false—they must be overcome at a deeper level. We need something other than rationality, statistics, scientific thought … we need something more, even, than what has passed for activism thus far. We must spark an epiphany, a worldwide flash of insight that renders our blind spots visible once and for all.10
Both Lasn and White seemed to think of change in almost mystical ways. Lasn once said that his experience as a young war refugee had taught him, “World wars, revolutions—from time to time, big things actually happen. When the moment is right, all it takes is a spark.”11
By the summer of 2011, the wars, the recession, and the breathtaking uprisings of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria; the Spanish indignados; the unionists in Madison, Wisconsin; the aganaktismenoi in Athens, Greece; and the students in California and Chile had made the Adbusters collective restless. In a July blog post, they addressed their network of “90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals,” asking them, “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?”
They cited Spanish political scientist Raimundo Viejo, speaking about the large acampada that had taken over Madrid, Barcelona, and dozens of other Spanish cities that June:
The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people.12
In their magazine they included a poster of a ballerina delicately balanced en pointe on Wall Street’s bellicose bronze Charging Bull sculpture, while in the background masked protestors surged through a tear-gas fog. The poster had just four lines:
WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND?
#OCCUPYWALLSTREET
SEPTEMBER 17TH.
BRING TENT.
Within days, the meme had spread across the net and excited activists and artists. On September 17, after months of meetings, more than a thousand protestors showed up at Bowling Green Park to find that New York police had already barricaded the Charging Bull sculpture. Instead they moved up the street to their backup target, an open expanse of concrete, planters, and polished stone tables called Zuccotti Park. It was a public space owned by Brookfield Properties and therefore, the organizers knew, not subject to curfew restrictions. Zuccotti’s symbolism seemed even more conceptually rich—originally the park had been named Liberty Plaza, but was renamed for the corporation’s chair.
That night their encampment became the occupation seen around the world. Within a month an encampment of hundreds had multiplied into hundreds of encampments dotting the globe. At the movement’s peak the sun would never set on Occupiers.
A grand revelation had preceded Occupy. After the 2008 market collapse, governments had facilitated the bailout or repudiation of billions in bank and corporate debt while allowing the debt of common people to be pursued with an almost moralistic fervor by many of those same banks and corporations. Now, as the new slogan went, here came everybody. Suddenly everywhere were rabbles of student debtors; invisible artists; foreclosed homeowners; collegiate freethinkers; everyday laborers of the material and immaterial; the unemployed and the underemployed; the displaced and the homeless; the silenced of every flag, religion, and identity.
The Occupy movement did not begin from the old protest politics. It began as a cultural move, a call to the imagination. It was not about locating hope in a symbol but in each other, a notion embodied in a simple slogan designed by David Graeber and others: “We Are the 99 Percent.” It was not a top-down, centralized process. It was about coming together horizontally to retake space, reestablish the commons, discuss the undiscussed, and hammer out a new understanding of community.
By design Occupy was not led by a vanguard, but by direct democracy. Decisions were made in—some complained, frustrating and interminable—General Assembly meetings, with extensive protocols to allow for minority voices and to build consensus. As another popular slogan went, “This Is a Process Not a Protest.” Listening and commitment were the minimum of what we owed each other.
But identity and race became one of the first issues Occupy Wall Streeters had to address. They had begun with a language of denial. Their September 17 declaration began:
Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution.
We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed.13
Debate over these lines immediately took up heated discussions in the General Assembly. First, what about that word itself: “occupation”? In an influential blog post called “An Open Letter to the Occupy Wall Street Activists,” Nishnaabe teacher JohnPaul Montano gently raised the historic meaning of occupation for indigenous Americans. “I believe your hearts are in the right place,” he wrote. “It just seems to me that you’re unknowingly doing the same thing to us that all the colonizers before you have done: you want to do stuff on our land without asking our permission.”14
Why, some ask, why wasn’t the Occupy movement linking with working-class movements, such as those led by immigrants in nearby Chinatown, or the anti-foreclosure movements in largely Black and Latino urban neighborhoods? If we were building a community, some argued, we owed it to each other to recognize each other’s struggles.
We also owed it to each other to see each other in their fullness. Many of those who had joined the encampments had come from people of color, women’s, and GLBTQIA movements. If this was a people’s uprising, why should people be denied the right to name themselves, to present themselves as they wished to be seen?
Decolonize Wall Street by Ernesto Yerena, Ricardo Lopez, and Orlando Arenas. 2011.
By the evening of September 29, the General Assembly had unanimously approved a “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” brought on behalf of “one people, united,” and noting the fact of “inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.” Printmakers Ernesto Yerena and the Dignidad Rebelde collective made and circulated posters that read, “Decolonize Wall Street,” which soon appeared around the country. A Tumblr blog called We Are the 99 Percent revealed a rainbow of thousands articulating the crisis of debt and inequality through their stories of anxiety, sorrow, shame, and rage.
Stories were the raw material from
which empathy, community, and democracy were molded. They were gifts that bound the giver and receiver in a virtuous cycle of values. The intellectual Ronald Takaki had once said, “In the telling and retelling of our stories we create a community of memory.”15 For Takaki each story was a musical note that found harmony with others, joining together to create what Lincoln called in his first Inaugural Address “mystic chords of memory” in “the chorus of the Union.” But of course these new sounds, sights, and stories also easily traversed national borders, sparking explosions around the world. Occupy became something of a global image and story machine, pushing toward a new imagination.
For the second time in three years, a creative explosion had accompanied a social uprising, as artists, designers, and printmakers organized themselves into collectives and working groups. Theater and carnival-like parties filled the streets. Pop-up printmaking shops and open-source design and art Web sites proliferated.
As the winter approached, Occupy’s critics, including many sympathizers, became impatient with the movement’s apparent disinterest in forging a “list of demands.” Increasingly the critics’ language—“Just tell us what you want!”—sounded like that of an abusive relationship. Occupiers suspected that what lurked behind the demand for demands was dismissal or reversion. When asked, “What do you want?” many began answering, “Everything.”
The claim sounded audacious as long as the physical encampments hummed along, but naive when, as the cold drew in, impatient local governments began routing them and dispersing the gathered into the windy night. In the end Occupy certainly was better at process than protest, symbolism than strategy. It was best at stirring the busy cacophony of democracy, the noise of waking collective dreamtime.