Readers might well then ask, "Why did you take all this time to do this research? Why did you embark on such an exhaustive analysis?" Some of these readers (including a certain Aunt Tammy I know) may think they already have the answer from the general subject matter of my blog, and may tell themselves, "Oh, he's just a geek - he likes reading lots of books, and this particular subject just happened to catch his interest." But that would leave unanswered the question of why I spent over $2,000 and 15 weeks of my life in 2019 to take a distance course in community organizing from Harvard University. Upon finding out that I had taken such a step, some might say, "Oh, he's just an idealist - he's naturally drawn to activism. Let's see if we can figure out his Myers-Briggs personality type..."
But if you learned that I am an African-American, you might gain a few clues to the actual motivation for my study of strategic nonviolent resistance, and my attempts to organize it over the last few years among my people. You might also gain a few clues as to why I have chosen to try to be an organizer in the first place. In learning community organizing from the Harvard course, I learned that one of the first things an organizer needs to do is to tell his "story of self" to his audience, so that they might know what called the organizer to become an organizer. I haven't yet told you the full version of my story of self. Today you'll get to read it. However, according to the Harvard course, telling my story of self is supposed to take no more than two minutes, and the version I am about to give you will take slightly longer than that. (If you are a member of the Leading Change Network and you are reading this, please don't tell on me...!) One other note: on my blog is a request that commentary contain only clean, family-friendly language. For today's post and today's post only, I'm going to relax that policy just a bit.
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I still remember when my mom told me to go into the front yard and fight a kid who was bigger than me. It was on a summer afternoon between my 6th and 7th grade. Our family had moved into our house the year before, and the house was located in a very white part of Southern California, and that was in the days when blatant racism was the norm in American society, and we were a Black family. My dad – a military officer – had been stopped by the city police because he was walking through the neighborhood shortly after we moved into that house. At the school I attended, I was regularly hit or slapped by other kids whenever I dared to speak up. These kids openly called me a nigger to my face. I felt powerless because my attackers were many and in many cases bigger than me, and I was only one person. And most of the teachers were not helpful.
During that summer, some of the more aggressive bullies used to play baseball in the vacant lot next to our house, and they would come right into our front yard and freely drink from our water hose without asking. My mom knew who these kids were from my frequent complaints to my teachers and parents about them. On this particular afternoon, my mom heard these kids insulting me after she sent me out to put the water hose away. What she heard pushed her over the edge, and she told me to go outside and fight the biggest bully. “If you don’t fight him,” she said, “then I will whip you!”
I beat the kid twice – both the first time, and then after he had gotten his parents and his parents had gathered a mob of neighbors and they had come back to my house and my mom had come outside and hit his mom with a stick because she dared to put her hand on me. The incident became for me a snapshot of the United States – a narcissistic, thuggish nation that trashed (and still trashes) other people in order to “make America great!” And the fight showed me what I was capable of when I got really, really angry. I discovered just how tired I was of being treated like a punching bag.
When I became an adult, I thought those unpleasant days were behind me, because I was able to put myself through college and start a career as a technical professional. So it took me a long time – too long – to realize that the racism of American society had never really gone away. It had just gone underground. But six years ago the murders of unarmed Black victims by White cops exploded into the news. When I read of Michael Brown lying dead in the sun for three hours – and that Darren Wilson was not punished – I saw how little Black lives actually matter to the people who run present-day American society. I saw that there were worthless white supremacist bastards who had worked hard for decades to bring back the days when they could openly treat people of color as punching bags or as garbage, and who wanted us once again to accept being treated like garbage.
That has made me really, really angry – angry as hell. Once again, I am being pushed to fight. But this time I intend to both fight and win by building a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance among my people. [Note: I did not say "nonviolence"! Nor am I trying to be spiritual! Rather, I read some books that taught me that this is the best way to win.] Oppressed people begin to resist by building a new identity for ourselves based on our own self-determination. This is is why I have chosen to start organizing my people for our own self-reliance.
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So there you have it - my story of self. And there you have the reason why every time I've read of some pig cop or group of pig cops shooting yet another unarmed African-American and getting away with it, I am taken in my mind back to that grade school fight. Because that grade-school fight was typical of much of my childhood in this piece-of-garbage country known as the United States of America, this country which became great for a certain select group of people by trashing all the other peoples of earth. You might well say that the incidents of the last several years have been rather triggering for me. Those who suffer from PTSD will know what I mean. And there you have the reason why the study of strategic nonviolent resistance - especially as presented in the writings of Gene Sharp - has held such appeal for me. For Sharp's writings show how the power of oppressors can be disintegrated without the use of physical weapons. Indeed, strategic nonviolent resistance - skillfully applied - is capable of regime change, as seen in Chapters 5 and 9 of From D to D. I want to take strategic nonviolent resistance as far as I can possibly take it.
You may ask, Why? Why go to such a radical extreme? Because the events of the last decade have caused some irreversible tectonic shifts in the thinking of some of us who are members of communities of the oppressed. We learned in our grade-school histories that the United States has been guilty of some really evil things in its bid to make itself great - yet we also learned that from time to time, there were seeming moves toward repentance. The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation were such a move, the gains of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960's were another. But the last ten years or so have shown us that there is an irreducible, unrepentant core of ugly people within the United States who cling to their dreams of supremacy at all costs, people who will never be converted and with whom it is impossible to build "beloved communities" according to "Kingian nonviolence." Instead, our policy must be informed by the most up-to-date best practices for dealing with personality-disordered people. We know that those with malignant personality disorders will never change, so why build a strategy for coping with these people based on trying to change them? Rather, as blogger Anna Valerious once wrote, we need to "distance ourselves from those who won't distance themselves from evil deeds."
You may say, "How do you know these people can't be changed?" My answer: because they haven't repented. For true repentance, it's not enough to just shed a few tears. There's something the offender must also pay. When Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the murderer of Eric Garner, the murderers of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, of Breonna Taylor, of Elijah McClain, of Philando Castile, of Stephon Clark and of other victims like them are all taken off the street, rounded up and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, then it might become possible to say that the masters of our present society have changed. When the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE agents who tore Latino migrant children from the arms of their parents and threw them into cages during the Trump years are themselves thrown into prison with no way out, we might begin to say that American society has begun to repent. When the red-state Republican governments restore voting rights which they illegally took from people of color, then we might begin to believe that they are "bringing forth fruits in keeping with repentance."
Some last things. There are those from the dominant culture who have studied strategic nonviolent resistance and have seen how devastatingly effective it has been in toppling hard-core repressive regimes in the past. Some of the "scholars" from this group are now busily trying to screw up the teaching of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to cause the liberation struggles of the present and future to fail. Their strategy depends on a belief that we who are among the oppressed are stupid and gullible. They might wind up very disappointed. For there will emerge a world - sooner or later - which is shared equitably by all the earth's people, regardless of race, skin color or national origin, a world in which there is no one group of people which enjoys ungodly privileges compared to everyone else. You who are of the dominant culture can fight against the emergence of that world, and for a while it may even look like you've won - but the price you will pay is that you will go to hell. Read Luke 16:19-31.
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