Review of Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education

Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education by Luke Rosiak is a journalistic account of a network of radical political activists, unions with leadership captured by leftist ideology, bureaucrats that value their own interests above that of their constituents, and philanthropy organizations that use racist rhetoric to fundamentally upend the American education system and to indoctrinate students with political views which are empirically false. The stories about people across several school districts illustrates how powerful national and regional interests have captured local government and used their power to implement busing systems that was neither desired by residents nor benefitted students academic performance, to promote lesson plans that promote leftist ideology, to alter government’s border lines to financially benefit housing developers, and to transform the personal dysfunction of mentally troubled individuals into a social contagion. At the core of these efforts is a push towards “equity” and “anti-racism” – which Rosiak masterfully demonstrates are floating signifiers that can be mobilized for contradictory and counter-productive policy changes that are often passed due to most citizens being uninformed and disempowered actors in a local political setting.

Race to the Bottom covers numerous professional organizations and consultancies such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA), PolicyLink, Pacific Education Group (PEG), and the National Education Association (NEA) and how they work in collaboration with teachers’ unions and the Democratic Socialists of America

Chapter One, Cheating Math, shows how school districts across the country were engaged in deceptive practices to artificially inflate the test scores, passing rates, and enrollments numbers of students while also lowering the standards involved in demonstrations of subject area mastery to ensure that they had statistics which made them appear to be “highly effective”. Students in Montgomery County, Maryland that had failed the state-mandated exams to pass were not just given an alternative project to complete as an equivalent but were given worksheets filled out in advance so they had to do nothing. At Ballou in Washington D.C., students that were truant for more than three months – which meant according to district policy that they should be automatically failed – nevertheless still graduated. In Los Angeles, out of school suspensions decreased by 1/3 over a seven year period – leading to a major jump in the rate which teachers quit and in-class time was disrupted by small groups of poorly behaved students that knew discipline options were limited. The sections on the elimination of standards requirements, the alteration of their calculation, or the reduction of their importance were also disturbing. In the name of restorative justice and equity, the denominator for “good academic work” was drastically reduced.

Chapter Two, The Mathematician, is framed with a concerned parent seeking data to help him understand why the school district – and those around him – that his child was in was doing so poorly and getting stonewalled by the state Department of Education. This shows to highlight how the vast educational bureaucracy operates together to hide what’s actually going on in the classroom and the board rooms which decide what is “accomplished” and what is “proficient” from parents. Close examination of the minutes of labor union resolutions hints at the extent to which these groups have transitioned from being organizations concerned about workplace conditions to political bodies directed by the radicals that have captured the leadership positions. An example of this is found at the annual NEA conference in July 2019:

“…one of the first actions union delegates took was voting down a motion to “rededicate itself to the pursuit of increased student learning in every public school in America by putting a renewed emphasis on quality education.” Instead, it approved motions to “involve educators, students, and communities in the discussion around support for reparations”; to blame the United States for destabilizing Central America, therefor causing a flood of immigrants, and to “incorporate the concept of ‘White Fragility’ into NEA trainings/staff development”.

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-002

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-025

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-118

https://ra.nea.org/business-item/20109-nbi-011

The reason why so many teachers might be ignorant of these developments is hinted at in an earlier section of this chapter. The results of aggregate test results show that those seeking graduate degrees in education had the lowest math and verbal reasoning scores.

Chapter Three, School Board, focuses on how down-ballot elections for school boards that received little media coverage were targeted by individuals that frequently had no children, were funded primarily by outside individuals and groups, were leftist/progressive/Islamist activists that employed by activist organizations – such as Media Matters or New Ventures Fund, and sought to change established educational standards towards indoctrination.

Karl Frisch, Elaine Tholen, Karen Keys-Gamarra, Abrar Omeish, Rachna Sizemore Heizer, are just several of those shown to pursue a political agenda. Heizer is even described as carrying a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States when she was sworn into the school board in December of 2019. While the funding comes from outside networks, so too does the campaign infrastructure for their election. Rather than engaging parents of students going door to door for outreach regarding candidates that they believe would be best for their children, unions, gay pride clubs at nearby college campuses, and national interest groups funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg became involved. Once empowered, these activists show themselves to be incompetent, self-serving, and political in a viral manner: people that are competent and serve the students and community resign rather than follow orders which will not offer meaningful learning experiences for children. They sought to cut advanced academic programs – even when racial considerations were resulting in black students being placed into higher-level classes in which they were underperforming. Their election also becomes a way to promote activists whose work and policies aligns with their worldview rather than what’s best for children. One example of this is Ibram X. Kendi receiving $20,000 from school board funds for a one-hour Zoom speech. The most disturbing example shown, however, is how these activist school board members and the teacher’s unions united against the CDC guidelines that suggested schools reopen and used refused to use funds intended to go to PPE to promote the notion that the DOE was “underfunding” schools. While clearly not a comprehensive picture of all educational labor union activity – it’s clear from the accounts shared here how they’ve turned into highly politicized instruments of power rather than an organ for collective bargaining between employer and employee.

Chapter Four, Riots, highlights Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Education Group – an educational consulting group that “has made millions implanting radical ideas into K-12 school through his trademarked Courageous Conversation programming (Rosiak 64). The costs of his training and the extent to which this company is able to impact lesson plans and hiring decisions is shocking – with some principals at schools quitting in protest rather than allowing what they see to be a toxic set of principles to be disseminated in their schools. In St. Paul, Edina, and other locales disciplinary rules change to ensure disruptive students face no repercussions for their behavior and academic standards are lowered and redirected to topics that openly promote leftist indoctrination within the student body.

Chapter Five, Don Quixote, opens with a journalistic account parsed from court documents about Tracy Hammond. She starts off as a housewife who, after numerous online exchanges with a convicted child molester who she eventually marries turns into a masochist, an anarchist and radical atheist who claims a Hispanic heritage that her parents say is fabricated would come to wield immense power in the Seattle School Board system. The power she wields, notably, continues the trend mentioned above: a heightened focus on ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ issues – such as the creation of ‘math ethnic studies’ – and the decreased ability of students to pass standardized exams required to demonstrate subject area mastery. Rosniak chronicles the life of this morbidly obese activist who was the Regional Teacher of the Year up until she was later deemed a racial fraud like Rachel Dolezal and fired from her job. He shows how the small network she formed was able to build a significant footing within the school bureaucracy, to link up with outside funders (the NAACP), and then push for changes oriented to her vision of “social justice” while at the same time attacking anyone that questioned the value of these equity initiatives. Reports published by the educational think tank Brightbeam, notably, came to show that the more progressive the policies the worst the achievement gap.

Chapter Six, Critical Race Theory, provides an account of how Critical Race Theory was repackaged as equity and how activists were successful in clandestinely adding its tenants to school curriculums in several school districts – such as Loudon County, Virginia. Michelle Thomas, who would become the NAACP brand president in Loudon in 2018, was the “pastor” leading the charge in her district. Pastor is in quotations as while she wore the collar of someone in the clergy, she has no theological training and despite claims of a connection to American slaves – she is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. It’s these people – with tenuous connections to the racial communities they claim to serve which act in a manner that could be categorized as over-compensation and that have dubious ethics (The ‘black owned’ business which Thomas once ran sub-contracted out all of the work to white-owned firms, i.e. was a mere intermediary, and she previously had an arrest warrant for her arrest for passing bad-checks). During her leadership a poorly researched report written by Kenya Savage, the leader of a group operating in the school system called the Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee, ispromoted by Katrecia Nolen, Wendy Caudle Hodge, Lara Profitt, Zerell Johnson-Welch, and other pro-CRT activists which is then used to demand the district to pay over $500,000 for school staff training. Some of those advocating for the necessity of the training, notably, were heads of companies that received money from these and related contracts.

This training sought to promote the view that “whiteness” was inherently “anti-black” and is noticeably silent about Hispanic students – despite being a demographic that was nearly double the population of blacks in schools. These equity projects, in essence, exploited administrators’ and school board members’ fears of being deemed “racist” for not supporting an initiative to fill the pockets of themselves and their friends. This allowed activists to promote force the school district to promote ethnic studies that, essentially, promoted the notion that capitalism was inherently racist, that it ought to be overcome, and that liberal notions such as the neutrality of law were nothing more than a sham to perpetuate racial injustice.

The following nine chapters continue with similar accounts as those described above. The details of educator organizations that have been captured by radicals, how these groups partner with activist cliques seeks to change school policy as well as private firms which rely upon such actors to change regulations to their benefit or obtain contracts are truly disturbing. Rosniak traces how many of the people now pushing for these changes have long histories of radical activism which goes back to the New Left and who now receive funding from people like Michael Bloomberg, whose wealth is in large part a product of his connections to the Chinese Communist Party. The section on government-funded lobbying – wherein groups are paid to train students to essentially function as the radical activist wing of the democratic party – is also worth further examination. While this book does not apply intelligence analysis to develop a larger picture of all the efforts of those described, the book does present a compelling series of accounts of the extent to which radicals are seeking to lay the groundwork for Cultural Revolution-style changes in the U.S. and is thus highly recommended.

Review of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution

The first chapter of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution titled The Founding v. Slavery, author Mike Gonzalez presents a summary refutation of several important claims linked to the 1619 Project. This rebuttal citing numerous subject area experts and primary sources highlights how the overarching argument put forward by texts which were later disseminated along with lesson plans to schools was a weapon with which to indoctrinate and not a historical work with which to instruct honestly about the past. This section contrasting Commentary and History sets the tone for subsequent chapters, highlighting how the former is often shaped for use as a weapon by the left and the latter is an aegis with which to defend society. While Mike Gonzalez does overlook several important elements about BLM, this book is truly a masterful accounting of how much of the rhetoric used as a cudgel by BLM activists are variations of what was said before by Soviet-inspired Communist activists in the U.S.

The second chapter, The Soviets’ Failed Infiltration, details the period following shortly after the 1917 Revolution in Russia. During this period of cultural renaissance for Blacks in Harlem, efforts were made by Communists to claim themselves as the true representative of the political interests of Blacks. Communists and fellow travelers defined themselves in opposition to other popular, capitalist movements, such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Associate. And yet they repeatedly sought to infiltrate it and gain control over this organization and others like it. This strategy along with many of the policy positions – such as the separation of the Southern portion of the United States under a separate government called New Africa – taken by these groups often originated from deliberative bodies in Moscow.

As Harold Cruse details at greater length in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, these were not tactics and policies able to mobilize many rank-and-file workers or activists. Outside of a few committed bodies of radical cadres that better established black civil organizations shunned, it merely had the effect of – to paraphrase Cruse – aesthetically and intellectually castrating many potentially brilliant minds. Gonzalez continues by highlighting the close relationship between organizations such as the Black Liberation Army and International Labor Defense, a Communist Party front organization, and Cuba – which was actively collaborating with the Soviet Union. The goal of these groups was to foment racial strife and dissension in manners that would benefit the interest of both of these parties (Domestic and international Communist Parties). From a regional perspective Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression describes this politics in more detail – and how leading up to and during the Second World War the Soviet Union discouraged this behavior so that the Communists were recognized as “supporters” of the fight against Nazi Germany.

The third chapter, Then The 1960s Happened, covers the period after the War and the end of the Popular Front. It shows a political return to anti-racist discourse, as well as a new focus on anti-sexism and anti-imperialism, understood to also relate to the experience of blacks in America. Stockley Carmichael, former leader of SNCC, and a pan-African communist, is invited to Cuba after promoting this view in London and later tells audiences in Havana that they are preparing urban guerrilla forces.

Highlighting the intellectual linkages between these events from the 1960s and the present, Gonzalez cites SNCC’s letter which functioned to pass the torch from them to BLM and highlights how: “Opal Tometi, known for touring Caracas and praising Nicolas Maduro’s dictatorship in exchange for his support, is hardly the first radical black leader to tour the Caribbean in search of like-minded dictators.” (Gonzalez 63). After highlighting how the Cuban Revolution was a model which inspired the Weathermen Underground leftist terrorist group, how the Cuban government provided assistance and sanctuary to Black Liberation Army members that were wanted for major crimes, and how members of these organizations have since turned from armed conflict to subversion, the reader enters the near-present.

At 25 pages Chapter 4, titled BLM, is the book’s shortest chapter. It does, however, highlight how BLM is part of a decentralized transnational network of activists who seek to develop revolutionary conditions within the U.S. through policy initiatives, organized conflict, and positive media coverage. Gonzalez cites  Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) and Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) research which shows that BLM was involved in 95% of the then 633 incidents recently coded as riots in the U.S and claimed they were one of the main factors for the “heightened risk of political violence and instability going into the 2020 election”. Brief biographies are given of the founders and a few leaders of BLM, along with their background on their religious upbringing and family history. Gonzalez describes how Opal Tometi, who comes from a Liberation Theology background, wrote “something akin to a manifesto titled “Black North American Solidarity Statement with the Venezuelan People” (Gonzalez 85). Several other examples showing BLM’s linkages to the international Communist movement are also shared.

This section is where my main criticism of the book emerged –  there is no identification of the fact that these individuals and many of the groups Gonzalez cites – i.e. Causa Justa, FRSO, PUEBLO, etc. – participated in the United States Social Forum. It’s one thing to say that these are people for whom “Maduro is a model to follow in the United States” (Gonzalez 94). It is a whole other thing to use intelligence processes and products to highlight how these people participated in organizational and strategic knowledge transfer events that were first ideated in Caracas at the World Social Forum and that had multiple Venezuelan government officials in attendance at these events.

This is important as it enables verification and expansion of significant conjectures made by Gonzalez – such as his claim that “given the great assortment of small and large Marxist associations that the three would call on [to promote BLM], we can quickly figure out how the hashtagged message was amplified and by whom.” (Gonzalez 95). Given Venezuela’s sympathetic view toward BLM, and Venezuela’s alliance with China and Russia, and that all three have social media operations to influence Twitter – this means that three states antagonistic to the U.S. government have the means, motive, and opportunity to support BLM in their online operations. This means that all the other groups which were part of the Social Forum had the means, motive, and opportunity to claim the BLM flag as their own. Both of these factors can be used to explain BLM’s “virality”. Regardless of this criticism, further relevant details of the official BLM network and its affiliate’s connections to the pan-Africanist movement are described, which then serves to transition to a discussion on the money involved.

Chapter 5, titled Follow The Money, illustrates how the fiscal sponsors of the movement have ties to long-established foundations and financial support networks which are led by people with past or present associations with Communist regimes in Beijing, Caracas, Havana, and Managua as well as older liberal organizations that have seemingly been captured. The citation of numerous amounts of money distributed is at times shocking. There are, however, no charts that show this and it’s not clear the methodology used – meaning there could be gaps between what’s said and what is actually raised. Because of this lack of charts and network maps – and this is a systemic problem within the subject area literature on leftist groups in the U.S. – it decreases the effectiveness of the intuitively correct claims made about how these networks are classifiable as 4th generation warfare actors. It also explains why criticism of BLM is more difficult than that of their primarily white allies, Antifa.

Chapter 6, How Antifa Became the Safe Space, highlights several issues such as elected politicians running interference in criminal investigations and district attorneys refusing to prosecute political cases. The examples given show that the Network Contagion Research Institute’s claim that “The need for regular, reliable and responsible reporting with methods such as those used in this briefing with similar computational techniques is now imperative.” is perhaps an understatement (Gonzalez 139). After all, without a comprehensive account of what’s going on at a national level, journalistic accounts are such “local” stories that can’t provide a full picture of how these financial and political support networks are able to impact society. Antifa, because of its lack of a clear organizational leadership structure, is able to be criticized because it’s not able to politically mobilize according to methods traditional to representative democracy.

Chapter 7, Schooling the Revolution, is very insightful for showing how it is that activists have been able to incorporate radical communist and race essentialist perspectives into instructional material. Through the use of networks affiliated with the Zinn Educational Project, and Black Lives Matter at School National Steering Committee, teachers are forced to go through training sessions skin to the Red Guard struggle sessions in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the curriculum transitions from subject area knowledge to the creation of “proper” political views. Gonzalez highlights “Former Weatherman Bill Ayer’s stomach-churning praise for Hugo Chavez’s communist indoctrination of Venezuelan children at a 2006 meeting in Caracas” and highlights how the promotion of sexual libertinism to children matches the work of George Lukacs, the former Educational and Cultural Commissioner of Soviet Hungary – but unfortunately doesn’t unpack this even more to cover how so many of the policies that he cites are verbatim those that have been implemented in Venezuela (Gonzalez 160).

On the whole, the book is very insightful in presenting a picture of the actual strategies, tactics, techniques and aims of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The scope of it’s organization isn’t holistic nor is the extent of its network affiliates and efforts fully mapped. However, as an advanced account of the organization and its affiliated activity, it’s a worthy contribution to the literature.

Notes from Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

While I highlighted far more from Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party than the below, I decided to limit myself to posting here issues related to changing perceptions of the Panthers following the dismantling of Jim Crow, issues linked to Marxism issues, and international relations.

(121)

But by 1968, even in “Bloody Lowndes,” the political dynamic had changed. As the Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow through the mid-1960s, it ironically undercut its own viability as an insurgent movement. Whereas activists could sit in at lunch counters or sit black and white together on a bus or insist on registering to vote where they had traditionally been excluded, they were often uncertain how to nonviolently disrupt black unemployment, substandard housing, poor medical care, or police brutality. And when activists did succeed in disrupting these social processes nonviolently, they often found themselves facing very different enemies and lacking the broad allied support that civil rights activists had attained when challenging formal segregation. By 1968, the civil rights practice of nonviolent civil disobedience against racial exclusion had few obvious targets and could no longer generate massive and widespread participation.

(122)

In this environment, Lil’ Bobby Hutton became a very different kind of martyr from King. He was virtually unknown and ignored by the establishment. Hutton had died standing up to the brutal Oakland police; he died for black self-determination; he died defying American empire like Lumumba and Che and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had before him. Unlike King in 1968, Lil’ Bobby Hutton represented a coherent insurgent alternative to political participation in the United States—armed self-defense against the police and commitment to the revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party.

(123)

A Panther press statement said that in addition to support for the “Free Huey!” campaign and the black plebiscite, the Panthers were calling upon “the member nations of the United Nations to authorize the stationing of UN Observer Teams throughout the cities of America wherein black people are cooped up and concentrated in wretched ghettos.” After meeting with several U.N. delegations and talking with the press, the Black Panthers filed for status as an official “nongoverning organization” of the United Nations. While the notion of the black plebiscite was intriguing to many, it failed to gain traction.

(130)

At SNCC’s invitation, student antiwar activists came to see themselves as fighting for their own liberation from the American empire. The imperial machinery of war that was inflicting havoc abroad was forcing America’s young to kill and die for a cause many did not believe in. Young activists came to see the draft as an imposition of empire on themselves just as the war was an imposition of empire on the Vietnamese.59

SDS leader Greg Calvert encapsulated this emerging view in the idea of “revolutionary consciousness” in a widely influential speech at Princeton University that February. Arguing that students them- selves were revolutionary subjects, Calvert sought to distinguish radicals from liberals, and he advanced “revolutionary consciousness” as the basis for a distinct and superior morality: “Radical or revolutionary consciousness . . . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed— and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.”

The speech marked a watershed in the New Left’s self-conception. Coming to see itself as part of the global struggle of the Vietnamese against American imperialism and the black struggle against racist oppression, the New Left rejected the status quo as fundamentally immoral and embraced the morality of revolutionary challenge. From this vantage point, the Vietnam War was illegitimate, and draft resistance was an act of revolutionary heroism.

(300)

In their move to take greater leadership in organizing a revolutionary movement across race, the Black Panthers sought to make their class and cross-race anti-imperialist politics more explicit. They began featuring nonblack liberation movements on the cover of their news- paper, starting with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese. They began widely using the word fascism to describe the policies of the U.S. government. Then in July 1969, two weeks before the United Front Against Fascism Conference, the Panthers changed point 3 of their Ten Point Program from “We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community” to “We want an end to the robbery by the CAPITALIST of our Black Community”

The Black Panther Party held the United Front Against Fascism Conference in Oakland from July 18 to 21.

At least four thousand young radicals from around the country attended the conference. The delegates included Latinos, Asian Americans, and other people of color, but the majority of delegates were white. More than three hundred organizations attended, representing a broad cross-section of the New Left. In addition to the Young Lords, Red Guard, Los Siete de la Raza, Young Patriots, and Third World Liberation Front, attendees included the Peace and Freedom Party, the International Socialist Club, Progressive Labor, Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Socialist Alliance, and various groups within the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Bobby Seale set the tone for the conference, reiterating his oft-stated challenge against black separatism: “Black racism is just as bad and dangerous as White racism.” He more explicitly emphasized the importance of class to revolution, declaring simply, “It is a class struggle.” Seale spoke against the ideological divisiveness among leftist organizations, arguing that such divisiveness would go nowhere. What was needed, he said, was a shared practical program. He called for the creation of a united “American Liberation Front” in which all communities and organizations struggling for self-determination in America could unite across race and ideology, demand community control of police, and secure legal support for political prisoners.

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The main outcome of the conference was that the Panthers decided to organize National Committees to Combat Fascism (NCCFs) around the country. The NCCFs would operate under the Panther umbrella, but unlike official Black Panther Party chapters, they would allow membership of nonblacks. In this way, the Black Panther Party could maintain the integrity of its racial politics yet step into more formal

(311)

The Black Panther Party’s anti-imperialist politics were deeply inflected with Marxist thought.

The Party’s embrace of Marxism was never rigid, sectarian, or dogmatic. Motivated by a vision of a universal and radically democratic struggle against oppression, ideology seldom got in the way of the Party’s alliance building and practical politics.

he asserted that unemployed blacks were a legitimate revolution- ary group and that the Black Panther Party’s version of Marxism transcended the idea that an industrial working class was the sole agent of revolution.

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Nondogmatic throughout its history, the Black Panther Party worked with a range of leftist organizations with very different political ideologies—a highlight being its hosting of the United Front Against Fascism Conference in July 1969.10 The unchanging core of the Black Panther Party’s political ideology was black anti-imperialism. The Party always saw its core constituency as “the black community,” but it also made common cause between the struggle of the black community and the struggles of other peoples against oppression. Marxism and class analysis helped the Black Panthers understand the oppression of others and to make the analogy between the struggle for black liberation and other struggles for self-determination. While the Marxist content deepened and shifted over the Party’s history, this basic idea held constant.

(313)

 

. One of the Panthers’ early sources of solidarity and support was the left-wing movements in Scandinavia. The lead organizer of this support was Connie Matthews, an energetic and articulate young Jamaican woman employed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Copenhagen, Den- mark. In early 1969, Matthews organized a tour for Bobby Seale and Masai Hewitt throughout Scandinavia to raise money and support for the “Free Huey!” campaign. She and Panther Skip Malone worked out the logistics of the trip with various left-wing Scandinavian organizations, enlisting their support by highlighting the class politics of the Black Panther Party.

 

(342)

In noninsurgent organizations, established laws and customs are assumed and largely respected. Maintaining organizational coherence may be challenging, but transgressions of law and custom are generally outside of organizational responsibility. Within insurgent organizations like the Black Panther Party, law and custom are viewed as oppressive and illegitimate. Insurgents view their movement as above the law and custom, the embodiment of a greater morality. As a result, defining acceptable types of transgression of law and custom, and maintaining discipline within these constraints, often poses a serious challenge for insurgent organizations like the Black Panther Party. What sorts of violation of law and custom are consistent with the vision and aims of the insurgency?

 

(343)

By the fall of 1968, as the Party became a national organization, it had to manage the political ramifications of actions taken by loosely organized affiliates across the country. The Central Committee in Oak- land codified ten Rules of the Black Panther Party and began publishing them in each issue of the Black Panther. These rules established basic disciplinary expectations, warning especially against haphazard violence that might be destabilizing or politically embarrassing. They prohibited the use of narcotics, alcohol, or marijuana while conducting Party activities or bearing arms. The Party insisted that Panthers use weapons only against “the enemy” and prohibited theft from other “Black people.” But they permitted disciplined revolutionary violence and specifically allowed participation in the underground insurrectionary “Black Liberation Army.”

 

(344)

 

The Black Panther Party derived its power largely from the insurgent threat it posed to the established order—its ability to attract members who were prepared to physically challenge the authority of the state. But this power also depended on the capacity to organize and discipline these members. When Panthers defied the authority of the Party, acted against its ideological position, or engaged in apolitical criminal activity, their actions undermined the Party, not least in the eyes of potential allies. The Panthers could not raise funds, garner legal aid, mobilize political support, or even sell newspapers to many of their allies if they were perceived as criminals, separatists, or aggressive and undisciplined incompetents. The survival of the Party depended on its political coherence and organizational discipline.

As the Party grew nationally and increasingly came into conflict with the state in 1969, maintaining discipline and a coherent political image became more challenging. The tension between the anti- authoritarianism of members in disparate chapters and the need for the Party to advance a coherent political vision grew. One of the principal tools for maintaining discipline—both of individual members and of local chapters expected to conform to directives from the Central Committee—was the threat of expulsion.

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Hilliard explained the importance of the purge for maintaining Party discipline: “We relate to what Lenin said, ‘that a party that purges itself grows to become stronger.’ The purging is very good. You recognize that there is a diffusion within the rank and file of the party, within the internal structure of the party.

As the Party continued to expand in 1969 and 1970, so did conflicts between the actions of members in local chapters across the country and the political identity of the Party—carefully groomed by the Central Committee.

(346)

 

The resilience of the Black Panthers’ politics depended heavily on sup- port from three broad constituencies: blacks, opponents of the Vietnam War, and revolutionary governments internationally. Without the sup- port of these allies, the Black Panther Party could not withstand repressive actions against them by the state. But beginning in 1969, and steadily increasing through 1970, political transformations undercut the self-interests that motivated these constituencies to support the Panthers’ politics.

(351)

 

Cuban support for the Black Panthers also shifted during the late 1960s. When Eldridge Cleaver fled to Cuba as a political exile in late

1968, Cuba not only provided safe passage and security but promised to create a military training facility for the Party on an abandoned farm out- side Havana. This promise was consistent with the more active role Cuba had played in supporting the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States in the early 1960s, when it sponsored the broadcast of Robert Williams’s insurrectionary radio program “Radio Free Dixie,” as well as publication of his newspaper, the Crusader, and his book Negroes with Guns. But, as the tide of revolution shifted globally toward the end of the decade, security concerns took on higher priority in Cuban policy. Eager to avoid provoking retaliation from the United States, Cuba distanced itself from the Black Liberation Struggle, continuing to allow exiles but refraining from active support of black insurrection. The government never opened a military training ground for the Panthers, instead placing constraints on the political activities of Panther exiles.34

As the United States scaled back the war in Vietnam; reduced the military draft; improved political, educational, and employment access for blacks; and improved relations with former revolutionary governments around the world, the Black Panthers had difficulty maintaining support for politics involving armed confrontation with the state.

More comfortable and secure with the ability of mainstream political institutions to redress their concerns—especially the draft—liberals went on the attack, challenging the revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party.

(352)

 

Many Panthers hoped that Huey would resolve the challenges the Party faced and lead them successfully to revolution. But his release had the opposite effect, exacerbating the tensions within the Party. Some rank-and-file Panthers took Huey’s long-awaited release as a pre- lude to victory and a license to violence, and their aggressive militarism became harder to contain. Organizationally, the Party had grown exponentially in Newton’s name but was actually under the direction of other leaders. His release forced a reconfiguration of power in the Party.

Paradoxically, Newton’s release also made it harder for the Party to maintain support from more moderate allies. It sent a strong message to many moderates that—contrary to Kingman Brewster’s famous statement three months earlier—a black revolutionary could receive a fair trial in the United States. The radical Left saw revolutionary progress in winning Huey’s freedom, but many moderate allies saw less cause for revolution.

(359)

 

The Panther 21 asserted that the Black Panther Party was not the true revolutionary vanguard in the United States and hailed the Weather Underground as one of, if not “the true vanguard.” In line with the vanguardist ideology of the Weather Underground, the Panther 21 argued that it was now time for all-out revolutionary violence that they believed would attract a broad following and eventually topple the capitalist economy and the state

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Dhoruba Bin Wahad explained his decision to desert the Black Panther Party as a response to the increasing moderation of Newton, Hilliard, and the Central Committee and their efforts to appease wealthy donors. In a public statement in May 1971, Dhoruba wrote,

We were aware of the Plots emanating from the co-opted Fearful minds of Huey Newton and the Arch Revisionist, David Hilliard… . Obsession with fund raising leads to dependency upon the very class enemies of our People. . . . These internal contradictions have naturally developed to the Point where those within the Party found themselves in an organization fastly approaching the likes of the N.A.A.C.P.—dedicated to modified slavery instead of putting an end to all forms of slavery.67

(391)

 

To this day, small cadres in the United States dedicate their lives to a revolutionary vision. Not unlike the tenets of a religion, a secular revolutionary vision provides these communities with purpose and a moral compass. Some of these revolutionary communities publish periodicals, maintain websites, collectively feed and school their children, and share housing. But none wields the power to disrupt the status quo on a national scale. None is viewed as a serious threat by the federal government. And none today compares in scope or political influence to the Black Panther Party during its heyday.

The power the Black Panthers achieved grew out of their politics of armed self-defense. While they had little economic capital or institutionalized political power, they were able to forcibly assert their politi- cal agenda through their armed confrontations with the state.

The Black Panther Party did not spring onto the historical stage fully formed; it grew in stages. Newton and Seale wove together their revolutionary vision from disparate strands.

(392)

Nixon won the White House on his Law and Order platform, inaugurating the year of the most intense direct repression of the Panthers. But the Party continued to grow in scope and influence. By 1970, it had opened offices in sixty-eight cities. That year, the New York Times published 1,217 articles on the Party, more than twice as many as in any other year. The Party’s annual budget reached about $1.2 million (in 1970 dollars). And circulation of the Party’s newspaper, the Black Panther, reached 150,000.3

The resonance of Panther practices was specific to the times. Many blacks believed conventional methods were insufficient to redress persistent exclusion from municipal hiring, decent education, and political power.

(395)

The vast literature on the Black Liberation Struggle in the postwar decades concentrates largely on the southern Civil Rights Movement. Our analysis is indebted to that literature as well as to more recent historical scholarship that enlarges both the geographic and temporal scope of analysis.5 Thomas Sugrue in particular makes important advances, calling attention to the black insurgent mobilizations in the North and West, and to their longue durée.This work, however, fails to analyze these mobilizations on their own terms, instead seeking to assimilate these black insurgencies to a civil rights perspective by presenting the range of black insurgent mobilizations as claims for black citizenship, appeals to the state—for full and equal participation. This perspective obscures the revolutionary character and radical economic focus of the Black Panther Party.

(398-399)

The broader question is why no revolutionary movement of any kind exists in the United States today. To untangle this question, we need to consider what makes a movement revolutionary. Here, the writings of the Italian theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci are instructive: “A theory is ‘revolutionary’ precisely to the extent that it is an element of conscious separation and distinction into two camps and is a peak inaccessible to the enemy camp.”17 In other words, a revolutionary theory splits the world in two. It says that the people in power and the institutions they manage are the cause of oppression and injustice. A revolutionary theory purports to explain how to overcome those iniquities. It claims that oppression is inherent in the dominant social institutions. Further, it asserts that nothing can be done from within the dominant social institutions to rectify the problem—that the dominant social institutions must be overthrown. In this sense, any revolutionary theory consciously separates the world into two camps: those who seek to reproduce the existing social arrangements and those who seek to overthrow them.

In this first, ideational sense, many insurgent revolutionary movements do exist in the United States today, albeit on a very small scale. From sectarian socialist groups to nationalist separatists, these revolutionary minimovements have two things in common: a theory that calls for destroying the existing social world and advances an alternative trajectory; and cadres of members who have dedicated their lives to advance this alternative, see the revolutionary community as their moral reference point, and see themselves as categorically different from everyone who does not.

More broadly, in Gramsci’s view, a movement is revolutionary politically to the extent that it poses an effective challenge. He suggests that such a revolutionary movement must first be creative rather than arbitrary. It must seize the political imagination and offer credible proposals to address the grievances of large segments of the population, creating a “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will.”18 But when a movement succeeds in this task, the dominant political coalition usually defeats the challenge through the twin means of repression and con- cession. The ruling alliance does not simply crush political challenges directly through the coercive power of the state but makes concessions that reconsolidate its political power without undermining its basic interests.19 A revolutionary movement becomes significant politically only when it is able to win the loyalty of allies, articulating a broader insurgency.20

In this second, political sense, there are no revolutionary movements in the United States today. The country has seen moments of large-scale popular mobilization, and some of these recent movements, such as the mass mobilizations for immigrant rights in 2006, have been “creative,” seizing the imagination of large segments of the population. One would think that the 2008 housing collapse, economic recession, subsequent insolvency of local governments, and bailout of the wealthy institutions and individuals most responsible for creating the financial crisis at the expense of almost everyone else provide fertile conditions for a broad insurgent politics. But as of this writing, it is an open question whether a broad, let alone revolutionary, challenge will develop. Recent movements have not sustained insurgency, advanced a revolutionary vision, or articulated a broader alliance to challenge established political power.

In our assessment, for the years 1968 to 1970, the Black Panther Party was revolutionary in Gramsci’s sense, both ideationally and politically. Ideationally, young Panthers dedicated their lives to the revolution because—as part of a global revolution against empire—they believed that they could transform the world. The revolutionary vision of the Party became the moral center of the Panther community.

(401)

While minimovements with revolutionary ideologies abound, there is no politically significant revolutionary movement in the United States today because no cadre of revolutionaries has developed ideas and practices that credibly advance the interests of a large segment of the people. Members of revolutionary sects can hawk their newspapers and proselytize on college campuses until they are blue in the face, but they remain politically irrelevant. Islamist insurgencies, with deep political roots abroad, are politically significant, but they lack potential constituencies in the United States.

No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foot-hold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time.

Quotes from Alicia Garza’s The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart

The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart by Alicia Garza provides an autobiographical accounting of one the founders of Black Lives Matter. The following are Excerpts from Alicia Garza’s book The Purpose of Power, with a thematic description of the text above it.

On Black Lives Matter and Movement Building

“Even though I’d been an organizer for more than ten years when Black Lives Matter began, it was the first time I’d been part of something that garnered so much attention. Being catapulted from a local organizer who worked in national coalitions to the international spotlight was unexpected.”

“I’ve been asked many times over the years what an ordinary person can do to build a movement from a hashtag. Though I know the question generally comes from an earnest place, I still cringe every time I am asked it. You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Hashtags do not start movements—people do. Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves than they are like light switches. Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them. We inherit movements. We recommit to them over and over again even when they break our hearts, because they are essential to our survival.”

“You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Only organizing sustains movements, and anyone who cannot tell you a story of the organizing that led to a movement is not an organizer and likely didn’t have much to do with the project in the first place.

Movements are the story of how we come together when we’ve come apart.”

On Activists and Influencers 

“The emergence of the activist-as-celebrity trend matters. It matters for how we understand how change happens (protest and add water), it matters for how we understand what we’re fighting for (do people become activists to create personal “influencer” platforms or because they are committed to change?), and it matters for how we build the world we want. If movements can be started from hashtags, we need to understand what’s underneath those hashtags and the platforms they appear on: corporate power that is quickly coming together to reshape government and civil society, democracy and the economy.”

On Revolutionary Theory

“FRANTZ FANON SAID THAT “EACH generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” This is the story of movements: Each generation has a mission that has been handed to it by those who came before. It is up to us to determine whether we will accept that mission and work to accomplish it, or turn away and fail to achieve it.

There are few better ways to describe our current reality. Generations of conflict at home and abroad have shaped the environment we live in now. It is up to us to decide what we will do about how our environment has been shaped and how we have been shaped along with it. How do we know what our mission is, what our role is, and what achieving the mission looks like, feels like? Where do we find the courage to take up that which has been handed to us by those who themselves determined that the status quo is not sufficient? How do we transform ourselves and one another into the fighters we need to be to win and keep winning?”

“Before we can know where we’re going—which is the first question for anything that calls itself a movement—we need to know where we are, who we are, where we came from, and what we care most about in the here and now. That’s where the potential for every movement begins.

We are all shaped by the political, social, and economic contexts of our time. ”

On Revolutionary Practice

“Our wildly varying perspectives are not just a matter of aesthetic or philosophical or technological concern. They also influence our understanding of how change happens, for whom change is needed, acceptable methods of making change, and what kind of change is possible. My time, place, and conditions powerfully shaped how I see the world and how I’ve come to think about change.”

The Interpretation of History that Shaped her Worldview

“By the time I came into the world, the revolution that many had believed was right around the corner had disintegrated. Communism was essentially defeated in the Soviet Union. The United States, and Black people within it, began a period of economic decline and stagnation—briefly interrupted by catastrophic bubbles—that Black communities have never recovered from. ”

“The gulf between the wealthy and poor and working-class communities began to widen. And a massive backlash against the accomplishments won during the 1960s and 1970s saw newly gained rights undermined and unenforced.

But just like in any period of lull, even in the quiet, the seeds of the next revolution were being sown.

Many believe that movements come out of thin air. We’re told so many stories about movements that obscure how they come to be, what they’re fighting for, and how they achieve success. As a result, some of us may think that movements fall from the sky..”

“Those stories are not only untrue, they’re also dangerous. Movements don’t come out of thin air.”

Political Ideology and Strategic Frameworks

“In the United States, “right wing” usually refers to people who are economically, socially, or politically conservative. What does it mean to be “conservative”? I’m using “conservative” to describe people who believe that hierarchy or inequality is a result of a natural social order in which competition is not only inevitable but desirable, and the resulting inequality is just and reflects the natural order. Typically, but not always, the natural order is held to have been determined and defined by God or some form of social Darwinism. ”

“One component of the successful religious-right strategy included building out an infrastructure of activist organizations that could reach even more people and influence the full range of American politics. ”

“The religious right developed the wide, more geographically distributed base of voters that the neoconservatives and the new right needed to complete their takeover of the Republican Party. These factions had many differences in approach, long-term objectives, overall vision, values, and ideology. The corporate Republicans wanted deregulation, union busting, and a robust military-industrial complex. The neoconservatives wanted to fight communism and establish global American military hegemony and American control over the world’s resources. The social conservatives wanted to roll back the gains of civil rights movements and establish a religious basis and logic for American government. And yet, even amid their differences, where they are powerful is where their interests align; they are able to work through those differences in order to achieve a common goal.”

[…] 

“Under Reaganism, personal responsibility became the watchword. If you didn’t succeed, it was because you didn’t want to succeed. If you were poor, it was because of your own choices. And if you were Black, you were exaggerating just how bad things had become.

Reagan declared a War on Drugs in America the year after I was born. His landmark legislation, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, enacted mandatory minimum sentences for drugs. This single piece of legislation was responsible for quadrupling the prison population after 1980 and changing the demographics in prisons and jails, where my mother worked as a guard, from proportionally white to disproportionately Black and Latino. ”

On Regan 

“Reagan stoked public fears about “crack babies” and “crack whores.” The Reagan administration was so successful at this manipulation that, in 1986, crack was named the Issue of the Year by Time magazine.”

“Reagan led the popular resistance to the movements fighting against racism and poverty in the Global South that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, he alluded to protest movements in the United States being used as tools of violence by the USSR, playing on widespread fears about a communist takeover of the United States and abroad. He also used fears of communism to authorize an invasion of Grenada, a then-socialist Caribbean country, to increase United States morale after a devastating defeat in Vietnam a few years prior, and to increase support for pro-U.S. interventions in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Reagan also supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

“The War on Drugs had begun to morph into the War on Gangs. Economic policy shifts meant that white families moved out of the cities and into the suburbs. Television news programs and newspapers were swelling with stories of crime and poverty in the inner cities. Since there was little discussion of the policies that had created such conditions, the popular narrative of the conservative movement within both parties blamed Black communities for the conditions we were trying to survive. More and more pieces of legislation, written under the blueprint of the conservative movement but extending across political party lines, targeted Black communities with increased surveillance and enforcement, along with harsher penalties. None of these legislative accomplishments included actually fighting the problems, because this movement had created those problems in the first place.”

On San Francisco Activism

“I volunteered at an organization to end sexual violence called San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR)”

“My volunteer duties at SFWAR felt more aligned with my emerging sense of politics, but they also helped shape my understanding of my own identity: Most of the staff was queer and of color. Being in that environment helped me explore my own sexuality, as I found myself attracted to and attractive to dykes and butches and trans people. During our training as volunteers, we learned about various systems of oppression—much as I had in college—but this learning was not academic; it wasn’t detached from our own experiences. We were seeing how those systems functioned on the ground, in people’s real lives—in our lives.

SFWAR was going through a transition: It was trying to move from a one-way organization that simply provided services in response to a pressing need to one that had a two-way relationship with the people who received them—both providing services and learning from, adapting to, and integrating the recipients into the process. This shift brought with it some upheaval, internally and externally. There wasn’t a clear agreement internally about which direction to head in. Having taken on a more explicitly political stance, SFWAR was being attacked from the outside—and the work itself was hard enough without the added stress of death threats coming through our switchboard or funders threatening to withdraw.”

[…]

“My time at SFWAR was coming to a close, and one day I received a notice on a listserv I belonged to advertising a training program for developing organizers. They were looking for young people, ages eighteen to thirty, to apply to participate in an eight-week program that promised “political education trainings” and “organizing intensives.” Each person selected would be placed in a community-based organization for training, and many organizations were inclined to hire the interns if their time during the sum”

On Community Organizing

“Community organizing is often romanticized, but the actual work is about tenacity, perseverance, and commitment. It’s not the same as being a pundit, declaring your opinions and commentary about the world’s events on your social media platforms. Community organizing is the messy work of bringing people together, from different backgrounds and experiences, to change the conditions they are living in. It is the work of building relationships among people who may believe they have nothing in common so that together they can achieve a common goal. That means that as an organizer, you help different parts of the community learn about one another’s histories and embrace one another’s humanity as an incentive to fight together. An organizer challenges their own faults and deficiencies while encouraging others to challenge theirs. An organizer works well in groups and alone. Organizers are engaged in solving the ongoing puzzle of how to build enough power to change the conditions that keep people in misery.”

Working with POWER

“In 2005, I joined a small grassroots organization called People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) to help start a new organizing project focused on improving the lives of Black residents in the largest remaining Black community in San Francisco.

I’d been following POWER for a long time. It was founded in 1997 with the mission to “end poverty and oppression once and for all.” POWER was best known for its work to raise the minimum wage in San Francisco to what was, at the time, the highest in the country, and for its resistance to so-called welfare reform, which it dubbed “welfare deform.” POWER was unique among grassroots organizations in San Francisco because of its explicit focus on Black communities. That was one of the aspects that attracted me to the organization’s work. POWER was everything I was looking for in an organization at that point in my life—a place where I could learn, a place where I would be trained in the craft of organizing and in the science of politics, and a place where I didn’t have to leave my beliefs, my values, and my politics at the door each day when I went I went to work.

Joining POWER would change how I thought about organizing forever.”

“We had a robust network of volunteers who would be willing to help gather the signatures needed. We’d begun working closely with the Nation of Islam, environmental justice organizations like Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice and the Sierra Club, and other faith-based organizers who would lend their support. After talking with our coalition partners, as well as the membership that POWER had built in the neighborhood, and debating the best approach, we decided to give it a shot.”

“Shortly after we qualified for the ballot measure, our coalition started hearing “may be safe to say that Black communities want to see a better world for themselves and their families, it isn’t accurate to assume that Black people believe that all Black people will make it there or deserve to. While some of us deeply understand the ways in which systems operate to determine our life chances, others believe deeply in a narrative that says we are responsible for our own suffering—because of the choices we make or the opportunities we fail to seize. Some Black people think we are our own worst enemy.

 

On Working as an Organizer 

“As organizers, our goal was to get those in the 99 percent to put the blame where it actually belonged—with the people and institutions that profited from our misery. And so, “unite to fight” is a call to bring those of us stratified and segregated by race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and body, country of origin, and the like together to fight back against truly oppressive power and to resist attempts to drive wedges between us. More than a slogan, “the 99 percent” asserts that we are more similar than we are different and that unity among people affected by a predatory economy and a faulty democracy will help us to build an unstoppable social movement.

Many of the organizations that I helped to build between 2003 and today upheld the principle of “unite to fight” before “the 99 percent” was a popular phrase. This orientation is not just important for the potential of a new America; it is important for the potential of a globally interdependent world.”

On Political Strategy

“When I began working at POWER in 2005, our organization had an explicit strategy that involved building a base of African Americans and immigrant Latinos. In fact, our model of multiracial organizing was one that other organizations looked to for inspiration on how to build multiracial organizations. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, where I currently work, is a multiracial organization comprising Pacific Islanders, Black immigrants, U.S.-born Black people, South Asians and others from the Asian diaspora, immigrant Latinos, Chicanas, and working-class white people. My organizing practice and my life have been enriched by having built strong relationships with people of all races and ethnicities. I’ve had the opportunity to interrupt stereotypes and prejudices that I didn’t even know I held about other people of color, and interrupting those prejudices helps me see us all as a part of the same effort.

Capitalism and racism have mostly forced people to live in segregated spaces. If I stayed in my neighborhood for a full day, I could go the entire time without seeing a white person. Similarly, in other neighborhoods, I could go a whole day without seeing a Black person or another person of color. ”

The United States Social Forum

“In 2007, I was still working with POWER. That June, we helped organize a delegation of thirty people for a trip to the United States Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia. Half of our delegation was Black—some of whom were members of our Bayview Hunters Point Organizing Project—and the other half were immigrant Latina domestic workers.”

“I’d been a part of many national and international efforts by this time, including the last United States Social Forum, a major gathering of social justice activists that had taken place in Detroit a few years before. While those experiences had taught me a lot about how to build relationships with people with different backgrounds and agendas, that kind of work is also difficult. When you’re an outsider, it’s hard to build trust.”

“In 2007, I attended the United States Social Forum, where more than 10,000 activists and organizers converged to share strategies to interrupt the systems of power that impacted our everyday lives. It was one of my first trips with POWER, and I was eager to prove myself by playing a role in helping to coordinate our delegation of about thirty members, along with the staff. One day, the director of the organization invited me to attend a meeting with him.”

“The meeting was of a new group of Black organizers from coalitions across the country, joining to work together in service of Black people in a new and more systematic way. I was excited about the potential of what could happen if this meeting was successful. I was becoming politicized in this organization, learning more about the history of Black people’s efforts to live a dignified life, and I yearned to be part of a movement that had a specific focus on improving Black lives.

When we arrived, I looked around the room, and out of about a hundred people who were crowded together, there were only a handful of women. Literally: There were five Black women and approximately ninety-five Black men.

An older Black man called the meeting to order. I sat next to my co-worker, mesmerized and nervous. Why were there so few Black women here? I wondered. In our local organizing, most of the people who attended our meetings were Black women. The older Black man talked for about forty minutes. When he finally stopped talking, man after man spoke, long diatribes about what Black people needed to be doing, addressing our deficits  

“as a result of a sleeping people who had lost our way from who we really were. That feeling I used to get as a kid when my dad would yell to my mother or me to make him coffee began to bubble up inside me. Nervous but resolute, I raised my hand.

“So,” I began, “I appreciate what you all have had to say.” I introduced myself and the organization I was a part of, and then I continued: “I believe in the liberation you believe in, and I work every day for that. I heard you say a lot, but I didn’t hear you say anything about where women fit into this picture. Where do queer people fit in this vision you have for Black liberation?” I had just delivered my very own Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, and the room fell silent.

It was hot in there. The air hung heavy in the packed room. People shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Some of the men in the room refused to make eye contact with me. Had I said something wrong? In the forty minutes the older man had spent talking, and the additional forty minutes the other men took up agreeing profusely over the liberation of Black men, not one mention was made of how Black people as a whole find freedom.

 It was as if when they talked about Black men, one should automatically assume that meant all Black people. I looked at him, at first with shyness and then, increasingly, with defiance. He started to talk about how important “the sisters” were to the project of Black liberation, but by then, for me, it was too late. The point had already been made. And there my impostor syndrome kicked in again. Who did this Black girl think she was, questioning the vision and the leadership of this Black man?”

On Revolutionary Theory and Practice

“Political education is a tool for understanding the political contexts we live in. It helps individuals and groups analyze the social and economic trends, the policies and the ideologies influencing our lives—and use this information to develop strategies to change the rules and transform power.

It comes in different forms. Popular education, developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, is a form of political education where the “educator” and the “participants” engage in learning together to reflect on critical issues facing their communities and then take action to address those issues. I once participated in a workshop that used popular-education methods to explain exploitation in capitalism, and—despite two bachelor’s degrees, in anthropology and sociology—my world completely opened up. I’d taken classes that explored Marxist theory but had never learned how it came to life through Third World liberation struggles, how poor people in Brazil and South Africa and Vietnam used those theories to change their governments, change the rules, and change their conditions. Had I learned about those theories in ways that actually applied to my life, my context, my experience, I probably would have analyzed and applied them differently. Because the information had little context that interested me, I could easily dismiss it (mostly because I didn’t totally understand it) and miss an opportunity to see my world a little more clearly.”

On Education

“In this country, education has often been denied to parts of the population—for instance, Black students in the post–Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, or students today in underfinanced and abandoned public schools. Given our complicated history with education, some people involved in movements for change don’t like the idea of education or political education as a way to build a base. 

This form of anti-intellectualism—the tendency to avoid theory and study when building movements—is a response to the fact that not everyone has had an equal chance to learn. But education is still necessary.

For those of us who want to build a movement that can change our lives and the lives of the people we care about, we must ask ourselves: How can we use political education to help build the critical thinking skills and analysis of those with whom we are building a base? We cannot build a base or a movement without education.

On Gramsci, Hegemony and Cultural Marxism

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher and politician whose work offers some important ideas about the essential role of political education. Gramsci was born in 1891 in Sardinia, Italy. He co-founded the Italian Communist Party and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. While he was in prison, Gramsci wrote Prison Notebooks, a collection of more than thirty notebooks and 3,000 pages of theory, analysis, and history.

Gramsci is best known for his theories of cultural hegemony, a fancy term for how the state and ruling class instill values that are gradually accepted as “common sense”—in other words, what we consider to be normal or the status quo. Gramsci studied how people come to consent to the status quo. According to Gramsci, there are two ways that the state can persuade its subjects to do what it wants: through force and violence, or through consent. While the state does not hesitate to use force in pursuit of its agenda, it also knows that force is not a sustainable option for getting its subjects to do its will. Instead, the state relies on consent to move its agenda, and the state manufactures consent through hegemony, or through making its values, rules, and logic the “common sense” of the masses. In that way, individuals willingly go along with the state’s program rather than having to be coerced through violence and force.

This doesn’t mean that individuals are not also coerced through violence and force, particularly when daring to transgress the hegemony of the state. American hegemony is white, male, Christian, and heterosexual. That which does not support that common sense is aggressively surveilled and policed, sometimes through the direct violence of the state but most often through cultural hegemony.”

“Hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense, is mostly developed and reinforced in the cultural realm, in ways that are largely invisible but carry great power and influence. For example, the notion that pink is for girls and blue is for boys is a pervasive idea reinforced throughout society. If you ever look for a toy or clothing for a newborn assigned either a male sex or male gender, you find a preponderance of blue items. If boys wear pink, they are sometimes ostracized. This binary of pink for girls and blue for boys helps maintain rigid gender roles, which in turn reinforce the power relationships between the sexes. Transgressions are not looked upon favorably, because to disrupt these rules would be to disrupt the distribution of power between the sexes. To dress a girl-identified child in blue or to dress a boy in pink causes consternation or even violence. These are powerful examples of hegemony at work—implicit rules that individuals in a society follow because they become common sense, “just the way things are” or “the way they’re supposed to be.”

Hegemony is important to understand because it informs how ideas are adopted, carried, and maintained. We can apply an understanding of hegemony to almost any social dynamic—racism, homophobia, heterosexism, sexism, ableism. We have to interrupt these toxic dynamics or they will eat away at our ability to build the kinds of movements that we need. But to interrupt these toxic dynamics requires that we figure out where the ideas come from in the first place.”

“We have to dig into the underlying ideas and make the hegemonic common sense visible to understand how we can create real unity and allyship in the women’s movement.”

“There are examples unique to this political moment. Since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, hegemonic ideas have slowed our progress. One piece of hegemonic common sense is the idea that Black men are the central focus of Black Lives Matter and should be elevated at all times. The media rushed to anoint a young gay Black man as the founder of the movement, even though that was not the case. This same sort of prioritizing of Black men happened all over the country: young Black men elevated to the role of Black Lives Matter leaders, regardless of the work they’d actually put in. Why were they assigned these roles without justification? I believe it’s because hegemony in the United States assigns leadership roles to men. In Black communities in particular, leadership is assigned to Black men even when Black women are carrying the work, designing the work, developing the strategy, and executing the strategy. Symbolism can often present as substance, yet they are not the same. This is a case where an unexamined hegemonic idea caused damage and distortion.”

“They felt left out not just because of the undue influence of the corporate class and the elite but also because they perceived that the wealth, access, and power promised to them were being distributed to women, people of color, and queer people. Trump’s campaign relied on the hegemonic idea of who constituted the “real” America, who were the protagonists of this country’s story and who were the protagonists of this country’s story and who were the villains. The protagonists were disaffected white people, both men and women, and the villains were people of color, with certain communities afforded their own unique piece of the story.”

“Stripping away political correctness can also be seen in the campaign’s promised return to the way things were—a time when things were more simple and certain groups of people knew their place. These ideas are called hegemonic because they are embedded and reproduced in our culture. ”

“Culture and policy affect and influence each other, so successful social movements must engage with both. This isn’t a new idea—the right has been clear about the relationship between culture and policy for a very long time. It is one of the reasons they have invested so heavily in the realm of ideas and behavior. Right-wing campaigns have studied how to culturally frame their ideas and values as common sense.

Culture has long been lauded as an arena for social change—and yet organizers often dismiss culture as the soft work, while policy is the real work. But policy change can’t happen without changing the complex web of ideas, values, and beliefs that undergird the status quo. When I was being trained as an organizer, culture work was believed to be for people who could not handle real organizing. Nobody would say it out loud, but there was a hierarchy—with community organizing on top and cultural organizing an afterthought.”

“To be fair, some cultural work did fall into this category. After all, posters and propaganda distributed among the coalition of the already willing weren’t going to produce change as much as reinforce true believers.

When culture change happens, it is because movements have infiltrated the cultural arena and penetrated the veil beyond which every person encounters explicit and implicit messages about what is right and what is wrong, what is normal and what is abnormal, who belongs and who does not. When social movements engage in this arena, they subvert common ideas and compete with or replace them with new ideas that challenge so-called common sense.

Culture also offers an opportunity for the values and hegemony of the opposition to be exposed and interrogated. The veteran organizer and communications strategist Karlos Gauna Schmieder wrote that “we must lay claim to civil society, and fight for space in all the places where knowledge is produced and cultured.” By laying claim to civil society, we assert that there is an alternative to the white, male, Christian, heterosexual “common sense” that is the status quo—and we work to produce new knowledge that not only reflects our vision for a new society but also includes a new vision for our relationships to one another and to the planet.

It is this challenge, to lay claim to civil society and to fight for space in all of the places where knowledge is produced and cultured, that movements must take on with vigor, just as right-wing movements have tried to lay claim to those places to build their movement. Culture, in this sense, is what makes right-wing movements strong and compelling. It is what lays the groundwork for effective, sustained policy change.”

On Political Education

“Political education helps us make visible that which had been made invisible. We cannot expect to unravel common sense about how the world functions if we don’t do that work. Political education helps us unearth our commonly held assumptions about the world that keep the same power dynamics functioning the way they always have. It supports our ability to dream of other worlds and to build them. And it gives us a clearer picture of all that we are up against.”

On Political Strategy

“Building a movement means building alliances. Who we align with at any given time says a lot about what we are trying to build together and who we think is necessary to build it.

The question of alliances can be confusing. We might confuse short-term alliances with long-term ones. Or confuse whether the people we ally with on a single campaign need to be aligned with us on everything. But here’s the truth of the matter: The people we need to build alliances with are not necessarily people we will agree with on everything or even most things. And yet having a strategy, a plan to win, asks us to do things differently than we’ve done them before.”

[…]

“Popular fronts are alliances that come together across a range of political beliefs for the purpose of achieving a short-to-intermediate-term goal, while united fronts are long-term alliances based on the highest level of political alignment. The phrases are often used interchangeably but shouldn’t be.”

“A lot of activist coalitions these days take the form of popular fronts and come together around achieving a short-to-intermediate-term objective. ”

San Francisco Rising Alliance 

“We spent time together doing organizing exchanges, studying political theory and social movements, learning from one another’s organizing models, and taking action together. After about five years, this alliance grew into an even stronger one, known as San Francisco Rising—an electoral organizing vehicle designed to build and win real power for working-class San Francisco.”

On Political Strategy

“United fronts are helpful in a lot of ways, including being really clear about who is on the team. In some ways, united fronts are what we are working toward, why we organize: to build bigger and bigger teams of people aligned in strategy, vision, and values. But if I had to guess, I’d say that the next period will be characterized by a greater number of popular fronts, and I think this is a good thing.

Popular fronts help you engage with the world as it is, while united fronts offer the possibility of what could be. United fronts allow us to build new alternatives, to test new ideas together, because there is already a high level of trust, political clarity, and political unity. Popular fronts, however, teach us to be nimble, to build relationships across difference for the sake of our survival.

Popular fronts are important tools for organizers today. They match today’s reality: that those of us who want to see a country and a world predicated on justice and equality and the ability to live well and with dignity are not well represented ”

“among those who are making decisions over our lives. We are a small proportion of people who currently serve in the U.S. Congress, a small percentage of people who are mayors and governors, and a small percentage of people moving resources on your city council or board of education.

We are not the majority of the decision makers, even though we likely represent the majority in terms of what we all want for our futures. It is tempting in these times to double down on those closest to you, who already share your vision, share your values, share your politics. But to get things done, we are tasked to find places of common ground, because that is how we can attain the political power we lack.

Many people are uncomfortable with popular fronts because they are afraid that working with their opponents will dilute their own politics. I agree that popular fronts without united fronts are dangerous for this exact reason—without an anchor, without clarity about what you stand for and who you are accountable to, it can be difficult to maintain integrity and clarity when working with people who do not share your values and vision.”

On Creating Black Lives Matter 

“When Patrisse, Opal, and I created Black Lives Matter, which would later become the Black Lives Matter Global Network, each of us also brought our own understanding of platforms, pedestals, and profiles. At that point, we’d all spent ten years as organizers and advocates for social justice. Our platforms and profiles, and perhaps even pedestals, come from the relationships we have in our communities, the networks we are a part of, and the work we’ve done for migrant rights, transit justice, racial justice, economic justice, and gender justice. For nearly a year, we operated silently, using our networks and our experiences as organizers to move people to action, to connect them to resources and analysis, and to engage those who were looking for a political home. Our work was to tell a new story of who Black people are and what we care about, in order to encourage and empower our communities to fight back against state-sanctioned violence—and that meant our primary role, initially, was to create the right spaces for that work and connect people who wanted to do the work of organizing for change.

But when a well-known mainstream civil rights organization began to claim our work as their own, while distorting the politics and the values behind it, we decided to take control of our own narrative and place ourselves more prominently in our own story.”

On Political Strategy

“When I was being trained as an organizer, social media forums were not yet as popular and as widely used as they are today. Debates over strategy, outcomes, or even grievances took place in the form of “open letters,” often circulated through email. At the time, that world seemed vast and important, but in retrospect—compared to the global reach of social media—it was very, very small.

Yet even in my small corner of the world, there were those who went from being relatively unknown grassroots organizers to people with more power and influence. And I saw how the movement could be ambivalent toward its most visible members when those individuals were seen as having gone too far beyond the movement’s own small imprint.”

About the National Domestic Workers Alliance

“When Ai-jen Poo, currently the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-director of Caring Across Generations, built a profile and a platform based on her success leading domestic workers to win the first ever Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, it caused quiet rumblings within the movement that grew her. People were unsure if it was a good thing that her fame had outgrown our small corner of the world. When Van Jones remade himself from an ultra-left revolutionary into a bipartisan reformer who landed in the Obama administration as the “green jobs czar,” the movement that grew him quickly disavowed him. Even when Patrisse Cullors began to grow a platform and a profile beyond the work I’d known her for at the Bus Riders Union, a project of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, I received a call from one of her mentors questioning her ability to “lead the Black liberation movement.” In one breath, movements in development and movements in full swing can become antagonistic to those who break through barriers to enter the mainstream, where they can expose the movement’s ideas to new audiences.

Throwing Shade at DeRay Mckesson

“DeRay Mckesson is often credited with launching the Black Lives Matter movement along with the work that Patrisse, Opal, and I initiated. However, Mckesson offers a sharp lesson on pedestals, platforms, and profiles—and why we need to be careful about assigning roles that are inaccurate and untrue.

Mckesson is someone I first met in Ferguson, Missouri, a full year after Patrisse, Opal, and I launched Black Lives Matter. How we met matters. Patrisse and Darnell Moore had organized a freedom ride whereby Black organizers, healers, lawyers, teachers, “and journalists gathered from all over the country to make their way to Ferguson. I flew to St. Louis to help support another organization on the ground there. The freedom ride coincided with the time I spent in St. Louis, and as I was being given the rundown on the landscape during my first few days there, I was told about a young man named DeRay Mckesson.

Mckesson played the role of a community journalist on the ground in Ferguson. He and Johnetta Elzie had started a newsletter called This Is the Movement, and I remember Mckesson approaching me at a meeting convened by what has since become the Movement for Black Lives and asking if they could interview the three of us about Black Lives Matter. ”

“He was criticizing Black Lives Matter, which was, at that time, fending off attacks from right-wing operatives who were trying to pin on us the actions of activists who had begun to call themselves Black Lives Matter but had not been a part of the organizing efforts we were building through a network structure that had chapters. These activists had led a march where people in the crowd were chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” The news media had been stirred up like a beehive over the comments, and our team was working furiously to clarify that not everyone who identifies as Black Lives Matter is a part of the formal organization. ”

“I cannot tell you how many times I have been at events where someone will approach me to say that they know the other co-founder of Black Lives Matter, DeRay Mckesson. ”

“One could argue that it’s difficult to distinguish, particularly when there are so many people who identify with the principles and values of Black Lives Matter. But those of us who are involved in the movement know the difference—we know the difference because we work with one another. We share the same ecosystem. We know the difference between the Movement for Black Lives, and the wide range of organizations that comprise that alliance, and the larger movement for Black liberation.”

“I explained to her that while Mckesson was an activist, he was not a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

I wish that these were innocent mistakes, but they’re not. Characterizing these misstatements as misunderstandings is gaslighting of the highest degree. Mckesson was a speaker at a Forbes magazine event, “Forbes 30 under 30,” and was listed in the program as the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, yet he wasn’t in a rush to correct the mistake—and certainly didn’t address the mistake in any comments he made that day. There was an outcry on social media, which forced Mckesson to contact the planners and have them change the description. But had there not been an outcry by people sick of watching the misleading dynamic, there wouldn’t have been any change.”

“Tarana Burke wrote an article about this misrepresentation in 2016 in The Root, a year before the #MeToo movement swept the country, criticizing Mckesson for allowing his role to be overstated. She cites a Vanity Fair “new establishment” leaders list on which Mckesson is No. 86 and accompanied by the following text:

Crowning achievement: Transforming a Twitter hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, into a sustained, multi-year, national movement calling for the end of police killings of African-Americans. He may have lost a bid to become Baltimore’s next mayor, but he is the leader of a movement.”

“Some will be tempted to dismiss this recounting as petty, or selfish, or perhaps more a function of ego than the unity that is needed to accomplish the goals of a movement. The problem with that view is that conflicts and contradictions are also a part of movements, and ignoring them or just pleading for everyone to get along doesn’t deal with the issues—it buries them for the sake of comfort, at the expense of the clarity that is needed to really understand our ecosystem and the wide range of practices, politics, values, and degrees of accountability inside it.

Movements must grapple with the narration of our stories—particularly when we are not the ones telling them. Movements must grapple with their own boundaries, clarifying who falls within them and who falls outside them. Movements must be able to hold conflict with clarity. 

“When in his book Mckesson credits a relatively unknown UCLA professor with the creation of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, he doesn’t do so for the purpose of clarity—he does it to unseat and deliberately discredit the roles that Patrisse, Opal, and I, along with many, many others, have played in bringing people together to take action and engaging our communities around a new theory of who Black life encompasses and why that matters for our liberation. And in many ways he does it for the purpose of attempting to justify the ways in which he inflates his own role in Black Lives Matter.”

On the Movement for Black Lives

“I met Charlene Carruthers, the first national director of the Black Youth Project 100, when I was still the executive director at POWER in San Francisco. I had no idea that the Black Youth Project would establish itself as a leading organization in the Movement for Black Lives until nearly two years after they were founded. As we were launching Black Lives Matter as a series of online platforms, the Dream Defenders, with which I was unfamiliar, and Power U, with which I was very familiar, were taking over the Florida State Capitol, demanding an end to the Stand Your Ground law. I met the director of the Dream Defenders, at that time Phillip Agnew, at a Black Alliance for Just Immigration gathering in Miami in 2014, just a few months before Ferguson erupted. I remember being in Ferguson when a young activist asked me with distrust if I’d ever heard of the Organization for Black Struggle. I had, of course, not only heard of them but sat at the feet of a well-known leader of that organization, “Mama” Jamala Rogers. Our reality is shaped by where and when we enter at any given moment.

“We have allowed Mckesson to overstate his role, influence, and impact on the Black Lives Matter movement because he is, in many ways, more palatable than the many people who helped to kick-start this iteration of the movement. He is well branded, with his trademark blue Patagonia vest that helps you identify him in a sea of people all claiming to represent Black Lives Matter. He is not controversial in the least, rarely pushing the public to move beyond deeply and widely held beliefs about power, leadership, and impact. He is edgy enough in his willingness to document protests and through that documentation claim that he played a larger role in them than he did, and yet complaisant enough to go along to get along. He does not make power uncomfortable.”

“We have to start crediting the work of Black women and stop handing that credit to Black men. We can wax poetic about how the movement belongs to no one and still interrogate why we credit Black men like DeRay Mckesson as its founder, or the founder of the organization that Patrisse, Opal, and I created.”

“It’s ahistorical and it serves to only perpetuate the erasure of Black women’s labor, strategy, and existence.”

“I used to be a cynic. As I was developing my worldview, developing my ideas, working in communities, I used to believe that there was no saving America, and I had no desire to lead America.

Over the last decade, that cynicism has transformed into a profound hope. It’s not the kind of hope that merely believes that there is something better out there somewhere, like the great land of Oz. It is a hope that is clear-eyed, a hope that propels me. It is the hope that organizers carry, a hope that understands that what we are up against is mighty and what we are up against will not go away quietly into the night just because we will it so.

No, it is a hope that knows that we have no other choice but to fight, to try to unlock the potential of real change.”

Black Futures Lab

“These days, I spend my time building new political projects, like the Black Futures Lab, an innovation and experimentation lab that tests new ways to build, drive, and transform Black power in the United States. At the BFL, we believe that Black people can be powerful in every aspect of our lives, and politics is no exception.

I was called to launch this organization after the 2016 presidential election. After three years of building the Black Lives Matter Global Network and fifteen years of grassroots organizing in Black communities, I felt strongly that our movement to ensure popular participation, justice, and equity needed relevant institutions that could respond to a legacy of racism and disenfranchisement while also proactively engaging politics as it is in order to create the conditions to win politics as we want it to be. ”

“For the majority of 2018, the Black Futures Lab worked to mobilize the largest data project to date focused on the lives of Black people. We called it the Black Census Project and set out to talk to as many Black people as possible about what we experience in the economy, in society, and in democracy. We also asked a fundamental question that is rarely asked of Black communities: What do you want in your future?

We talked to more than 30,000 Black people across the United States: Black people from different geographies, political ideologies, sexualities, and countries of origin, and Black people who were currently incarcerated and who were once incarcerated. A comprehensive survey such as this had not been conducted in more than 154 years. We partnered with more than forty Black-led organizations across the nation and trained more than one hundred Black organizers in the art and science of community organizing. We collected responses online and offline.”

On Morning Rituals

“Every morning when I wake up, I pray. I place my head against the floor and I thank my God for allowing me to see another day. I give thanks for the blessings that I have received in life, I ask for forgiveness for all of the ways in which I am not yet the person I want to be, and I ask for the continued blessings of life so that I can work to get closer to where I want to be. And in my prayers, I ask my God to remind me that the goal is not to get ahead of anyone else but instead to live my life in such a way that I remember we must make it to the other side together.”

 

Layla Brown-Vincent: Portrait of a Venezuelan Academic Propagandist

Abstract:
This article first provides an overview of Layla Brown-Vincent’s public record relations with Black Liberation Movements and Revolutionary Socialist Parties that have avowed active committments of political solidarity with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

It then defines cimmarron pedagogy, a concept introduced to Brown-Vincent via Jesus “Chucho” Garcia. Following this it examines two academic works in the historic ethnographic vein written by Layla Brown-Vincent in light of her avowed committment to pan-Africanist revolutionary struggles.

Based on these examples of her writing, a clearer definition of cimmaron pedagogy is made: Academic publications within this rubric of scholarship is characterized by the use of loaded language, the making of claims that are unsupported by evidence, the provision of explanations that have relevant facts omitted and the use of unreliable sources all in the service of furthering personal political committments.

Keywords:
Disinformation, Political Manipulation, Subversive Academic Networks, São Paulo Forum

The Revolutionary Black Academic and Cuba/Venezuela Axis

Layla Brown-Vincent currently teaches at the University of Massachussetts Boston as an assistant professor of Africana Studies in the college of Liberal Arts. She recieved an M.A. and Ph.D from Duke University in Cultural Anthropology and according to her biographic description her areas of expertise are “Pan-Africanism, Black feminism, Blacks in Latin America, radical social movements in the African diaspora, autoethnography.”

Her undergraduate degree came from North Carolina Central University – where black liberation and Hands Off Venezuela activist Ajamu Baraka hosts national assemblies and the same university that graduated Tamika Thompson, a member of the Workers World Party – an organization that has for over ten years allied itself to political action networks allied to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s vision of a covert Fifth Socialist International modeled on network principles.

As is evident by the text and photo connecting her with Lamont Lilly in this article about the National Moment of Silence, Layla Brown-Vincent was also one of the co-organizers for this Workers World Party cultural front organization that sought to unite potential activists via appreciation of performance poetry and social justice following the justified shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

According to the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and her PhD thesis (more on this below) she and her uncle Bob Brown have travelled together multiple times to Venezuela as All-African People’s Revolutionary Party delegates. As you’d expect given their name, they are “a revolutionary Pan-Africanist socialist party“. According to the Boston-Cuba Solidarity Coalition Layla’s also travelled to Cuba with the assistance of the African Awareness Association.

In her doctoral thesis, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela, she identifies herself as a trans-generational revolutionary and describes her attendance at the Network of Afro-Venezuelans organized Fourth Encounter of Afrodescendants in the Americas and the Caribbean for Revolutionary Transformations in the Framework of the International Year of Afrodescendants in Solidarity with Haiti as being a major production with a seemingly large budget” and described multiple encuentros with Jesus “Chucho” Garcia.

In her article Seeing It for Wearing It: Autoethnography as Black Feminist Methodology she describes her engagement with activists connected to the Bolivarian Revolution: “Not long after I completed coursework and began to conduct fieldwork, my interlocutors in Venezuela would often ask me about what kind of political work I was engaged in at home.” She openly avows that these Bolivarian activists had a directive force on her political engagement, stating that her “attention was drawn back to my place of birth, the United States of America, largely as a result of the chiding of my Venezuelan comrades.”

Defining Cimarron Pedagogy

Layla Brown-Vincent came to my attention over a year ago during my investigation into academics that had engaged with Jesus “Chucho” Garcia – an ambassador to the U.S. from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and member of the communist-oriented Venezuelan Revolutionary Party, that was ejected from the United States. While no specific reason was ever publicized, charting his public activities one finds a significant number of him interacting with various socialist and black ethno-nationalist organizations such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference.

The above images come from this interview with Chucho and in it one learns of his and his academic comrades strategy of promoting revolutionary educational activities via educational institutions sponsored by Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil when Lula was President and UNESCO.

Before starting the research for this article I knew nothing about UNESCO but I can now understand why it was that President Donald Trump recently withdrew the United States from it. Bivol, a multiple-award winning investigative journalism outlet from Bulgaria who focuses on corrupt practices have highlighted a number of UNESCO scandals.

By reading Bivol’s coverage of UNESCO I’ve learned that the director of the organization during the period that Jesus “Chuco” Garcia refers to above was Irina Bokova, and that she was the daughter of “one of the ideologists of the communist regime of Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov and editor-in-chief of the official print newspaper of the Communist party Rabotnichesko delo (Workers Actions), where he published his own glorifications of Stalin” and that before her role in UNESCO she was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party. This fact is interesting in light of Layla Brown-Vincent’s avowal of an multiple-generational socialist lineage by iteself. But it is all the more so given that Audrey Azoulay, a member of the French Socialist Party, was elected to Bokova’s former position and provided her with diplomatic immunity via a $1 (yes, one dollar) consultancy contract seemingly intended to halt ongoing criminal investigations into corruption.

One of the concepts transmitted via her encounters with Chucho’s intellectual ouevre and activism – one that clearly has become influential given UNESCO’s support of it –  is cimarron pedagogy. 

Given that Brown-Vincent describes cimarron pedagogy in her doctoral thesis as “a weapon of history, a method of bearing witness to methods of resistance, struggle, freedom and dignity passed down from enslaved ancestors to present communities of African descended peoples struggling for freedom” and that she descibes “auto-ethnography” as an area specialization she clearly identifies strongly with this. But what all does this description entail? In his article Afroepistemology and Cimarron Pedagogy Jesus “Chucho” Garcia exapands on this and describes the idea as follows:

“to preserve those cultural codes expressed in the touches of the different rhythmic cells of the drums, in the codes of ethics (human values), cuisine, hair styles, among others, a technique, a methogy was needed to transmit all those codes. That is what we call Maroon pedagogy, and we say Maroon for having traversed the times and obstacles that the dominant sectors placed on the road.”

While this succint quote may give the appearance that Chucho’s intellectual project, and thus Layla Brown-Vincent’s is just about preserving cultural norms and values, which is not problematic, but it is not. It is the promotion of a categorical negation of all “non-Afro” modes of thought, i.e. civic laws and the institutions which enforce them, and it’s replacement with an unarticulated vision of “racial memory”.

The book On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh provides the best summation of the concept I’ve read thus far, this time from Afro-Ecuadorian scholar Juan García Salazar. There we learn that:

“in his conception of cimarronaje, or marronage, as a pedagogy for the new urban generations, García underscores the ways that marronage can be used as a sort of theoretical and memory-based anchor, conceptual analytic, and decolonial code and tool to reread official history and to contribute to it with a new and “other” reading. “This is a cimarrón attitude: to always distrust the word written by the dominant other, . . . to closely go over this word and history and compare it with our own, . . . to recuperate elements of the memory of resistance that is born in the cimarrón being . . . and to reconstruct a new memory,” that is, a history otherwise. Entailed here as well is a learning to unlearn in order to relearn, a central component of decoloniality in/as praxis.”

Putting aside the fact that Chuco and Salazar are engaged in their own form of African Orientalism based on poor historiography – according to Ethnologue Africa is a country of 2,143 languages, making claims that it is “a people” and not a continent worthy of derision, especially in light of the fact that the transatlantic slave trade would not have ever been as large as it was if it not for the fact that various tribes profitted from it – it’s here that it’s practical applications comes to light: Afro-epistemology and cimarron pedagogy are justifcations solely on the basis of social or economic positionality for the belief that every claim made by “the dominant other” is worthy of distrust and resistance. 

For someone that works in an institution invested with authority based on adherence to sundry traditions of intellectual labors – I found it strange that Layla Brown-Vincent would avow such committments. So having depicted Layla Brown-Vincent’s network connections to members of pan-Africanist Revolutionary organizations and Venezuelan political actors that promote this mode of thinking I’ve now defined, I’ll examine two example of her academic productions to see if those that meet the standards of cimarron pedagogy match the standards of “Western” professional academic standard.

Why Cimarron Pedagogy is Academically-Styled Propaganda Part I

The United Socialist Party of Venezuelan – thinks so highly of Layla Brown-Vincent’s academic productions that she was invited  to attend a conference on pan-Africanism in Caracas, Venezuela hosted by Nicolas Maduro.

The African-American Intellectual History Society has a section for contributors called Black Perspectives and one of Layla Brown-Vincent’s articles, titled (Anti)Blackness, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and Guaidó’s Attempted Coup, is hosted there. Because the format of it’s publication makes it easy to include my comments side by side with the article I’ve posted an Ariel Sheen annotated edition of Layla Brown-Vincent’s article (Anti)Blackness, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and Guaidó’s Attempted Coup, to show all of the instances which confirms my hypothesis that “cimarron pedagogy” is not compatible with the code of ethics outlined in various professional academic organization standards – in this case the American Anthropological Associations Code of Ethics. This is evident in that fact that this academic work in the cimarron pedagogy tradition is characterized by:

  1. Extensive use of loaded language.
  2. Extensive use of government sources (i.e. Venezuela Analysis).
  3. Extensive use of unreliable sources (i.e. GreyZone Project).
  4. Multiple claims unsupported by evidence.
  5. Multiple claims to have facts important to the context ommitted
  6. Multiple claims fail to examine or even consider counterfactuals.
  7. Several claims could be construed as racist.

The specific violations of the Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics in this case are Layla Brown-Vincent’s not “mak(ing) good-faith efforts to identify potential ethical claims and conflicts in advance” and not doing “mak(ing) clear the empirical bases upon which their reports stand, be(ing) candid about their qualifications and philosophical or political biases, and recogniz(ing) and mak(ing) clear the limits of anthropological expertise.” [quote altered to make the verbs infinitive]

What would an ethical iteration of her article look like?

First it would include the fact that she is – in her own words – not qualified as an expert on Venezuela. The below exerpt where Layla Brown-Vincent admits this comes from her article Seeing it For Wearing It:

“Even now, after having completed my dissertation, I am still hesitant to claim expertise about Venezuela as a country. My work is the product over just over a year of research in a particular urban area of Venezuela, among a particular subset of Venezuelans who self-identified as “Afro.” To claim, or even the desire to claim any level of expertise over a people whose identities, politics, and ways of being are constantly in flux is a product of the hubris of the colonial institutionality of Euro-American Ivory towers that I vehemently reject”

Secondly it would include the fact that she has recieved goods and services from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Lastly, it would include the fact that she has avowed a political committment to pan-African revolutionary activity.

What would this “good faith effort” to inform readers of conflicts thus look like? Layla Brown-Vincent should have opened her post with something to these effects:

“I write this article as someone that is not an expert on the country that I here write about, I have previously recieved goods or services from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and my personal political committment to pan-African revolution leads me to believe everything their intelligence services tells me.”

This would be an honest statement of fact, and it would also allow potential readers of Layla Brown-Vincent’s to see that she has – in essence – an uninformed opinion that can be ignored as propaganda that probably ought not have been published in the first place.

Why Cimarron Pedagogy is Academically-Styled Propaganda Part II

Screenshots of Layla Brown-Vincent’s Twitter account showing (top to bottom) her support for the Workers World Party, the Ferguson Uprising Spectacle, Bree Newsome (who was brought to national attention by Venezuela via Fitzgibbon Media), and Nicholas Maduro.

Layla Brown-Vincent’s article in The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence entitled This Ain’t Nothing New: Contextualizing Black Responses to Trump’s America is available for free to view via’s Google Books. I’ve posted screenshots of it at the end of this article, but haven’t made an annoted copy as I did with the above due to formatting reasons.

The purportedly historical essay is unusual given the extensive irony which punctuates it that Layla Brown-Vincent, seemingly, is unaware of.

Having read it I’d claim it’s inclusion in this collection of essays titled “anti-racist scholarship” is the most humorous as there’s little in Layla Brown-Vincent’s article that qualifies as scholarship.

She claims that President Donald Trump has passed “a number of draconian, racist, sexist, and classist policies” and not only does she not name a single one of these policies, she justifies the claim by referencing Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Talents as Andrew Jarrett, a presidential candidate in the book, uses “Make America Great Again” as his slogan.

She uses phrases such as the “school-to-prison” to demonstrate her familiarity with Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” – despite the fact that this particular historical account was proven false by a Barry Latzer, an emeritus professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, by John F. Pfaff, a professor of law at Fordham. Even those on the left have pointed out it’s many flaws. In an article on LibCom – short for Libertarian Communist – Greg Thomas, a Professor of Global Black Studies and hip-hop scholar, has written that there is “literally next to nothing to be learned from The New Jim Crow”.

She claims that Trump is a racist when Andrew J. Stein, the former president of the New York City Council and a former president of Manhattan Borough that has known President Trump since 1973, has provided a character reference that he is not a racist and  data analysis shows that those who voted for him weren’t either. And yet despite these facts and that President Donald Trump’s family arrived in the United States 22 years after the Emancipation Proclimation, Layla Brown-Vinent describes as “the product of insitutionalized racism” that has “waxed and waned” since the arrival of the first slave to the U.S.

She then follows this up with the claim, sans any explanation or citation of an expert opinion proving this is so, that his election was due to a “backlash” against the Blackness of Barack Obama and is evidence of “white supremacist logics”. The phrasing and sentiment is notable as it matches that of Van Jones, an avowed communist who has travelled with Deborah James – who used to be the director for the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s public relations organ the Venezuela Information Office. In the context of the criticisms of the academic/activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a former member of the Internationalist Socialist Organization who clams that President Barack Obama categorically failed black people, this is another example of irony. All the more so given that polls show that black people have ever increasing approval rates of President Donald Trump.

Later in the article Layla Brown-Vincent describes her participation in a South Carolina protest wherein Bree Newsome took down a flag, and omits the fact that this obtained national media coverage because of promotional services providedby FitzGibbon Media, a public relations firm that has been contracted by the Venezuelan government and the Ecuadorian government under President Rafael Correa.

In light of all this – the most evocative irony in Layla Brown-Vincent’s essay is her claim that the FBI’s monitoring of Black Identity Extremists “signals a revitalization of anti-Black genocide in the form of state-sanctioned espionage”.

Even if we could rationalize such an absurd claim as a rhetorical flourish, which I don’t think is appropriate as it is a patently false and polarizing proposition, there’s a shocking lack of self-awareness in this statement from someone who openly identifies with foreign state powers and is the member of a revolutionary party that works in coordination with foreign activists claiming that U.S. national security services shouldn’t engage in vigilance practice on those whose advocate for secession and revolution. Given that it is this political class of people that have, historically, been most likely to engage in subversion, espionage and collusion on behalf of foreign powers it is an entirely sensible proposition that such people be monitored and why the law allows for it.

Closing Summary on Cimarron Pedagogy and Professional Academic Standards

Having brought together all these public documents regarding Layla Brown-Vincent’s engagement with foreign revolutionary movements – both in the political and epistemological sense – and reviewed her academic work it becomes clear that  cimarron pedagogy is wholly incompatible with codes of ethics described in professional academic associations.

What is most fascinating about reading Layla Brown-Vincent’s academic work is that this is, seemingly, completely lost on her. I found this particularly strange given that describes her colleagues expressing criticism for her particular line of research. Rather than viewing their words as expression of care and concern about her not being able to meet what academic tradition dictates are the prerequisites for becoming a doctor in a subject area, she stated the belief in Seeing it for Wearing It that these subject area specialists  just wanted her to become “good colonial anthropologist” and claims that “the liberal individualism of the American academy rendered my intellectual preoccupations illegible to many of my so-called colleagues and professors.” As laudable as research is that is “in part a utilitarian search for liberatory alternatives for myself and my people” – based on the above analysis it should be clear that cimarron pedagogy leads to the wrong answers and ought to be excluded from practice in the academy as it is – at base – not an appropriate method for discerning the truth.

This Ain’t Nothing New by Layla Brown-Vincent

 

Trigger Warning and the Radical Atlanta-Caracas Axis

Before the episode in which Killer Mike illustrates 21st Century Socialism in action, he states his identification with Fela, a musician who is also revered and endorsed by former Bolivarian Republica of Venezuela Ambassador Jesus “Chucho” Garcia.

I can’t think of a better connection to illustrate the validity of my previously written article hypothesizing that Trigger Warning staring Killer Mike was Venezuelan propaganda than cultural activist Jesus “Chucho” Garcia holding up a CD of Fela. I wonder, did they ever meet?

This is a pretty dope album to listen to front to back. I get why they dig em.

New Biography of Lucy Parsons Released

The New York Times now has an interview up now with the author of the book Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical in their book sections.

I’ve not read much about her besides her character’s speeches in Martin Duberman’s novel Haymarket, but from Jacquelin Jones description of her as a historic person:

“She was very well known throughout the United States, especially when she began to launch her own speaking tours in 1886, when her husband was in prison. Her name was really a household word. She was never happier than speaking in front of large crowds, riling them up. Her politics were very radical, quite outside the mainstream — then and today. But workers loved her rhetoric. She condemned the employers, the capitalist machine, the corrupt two-party system. She knew that undercover detectives covered every one of her speeches.”

she seems like someone worth getting to know more about.

Racial Controversy in Advertising and How To Avoid The Need For Apologies

 

I was waiting for another “advertisement campaign gone wrong” news story to happen to contrast the way in which the messages in traditional magazine style graphic ads differ with what can be done with content marketing and sure enough Dove does me the favor of running an ad that many are calling racist and is now facing a boycott of their product.

In this article I’m not going to judge the intentions of the people involved in this Facebook-based advertising campaign, but I will defend their intentions by stating I believe the screen grabs below that spread like wildfire across Twitter misconstrue the nature of the ad – which isn’t nearly as direct in implications as this.

Instead, I’m going to show why it is that people claim it is racist; touch upon some of the ways in which a marketing messaging can be engaging and controversial but not offensive; and finally present a brief content marketing proposal that Dove could have instead done which would provide more value for their current and would be customers.

Racism in American Skin Care Marketing

   

Controversial marketing can be very effective, but if not done properly it can also lead to undesired press. Because of this it is important to always keep in mind the perspectives of the people being depicted or implicated in advertising.

One need not agree completely with all the views of prominent African American cultural commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates as to the power of whiteness to recognize that in the United States whiteness has been lauded as an definitive quality for culturally dominant standards of beauty and truth; legitimate political power and authority; etc. Additionally, one need not agree completely with Malcolm X to recognize that the media has a huge impact in how communities perceive themselves.

In this sense we can come to understand that the brouhaha is less about the manifest content – a skin cream that whitens – but the latent content, or social context, in which it is promoted.

To put it another way the issue at stake, pardon the pun, is not black and white but is specifically about what many people see as a culture that continuing to reinforce a social and economic order that denigrates and exploits black people. Because of this, these these types of advertisements are seen as ideologically supporting such a structure and why Proctor & Gamble’s ad is so celebrated for being the opposite.

Cultural Sensitivity in Polarized Times and What Stays With Consumers

   

Skin whitening creams aren’t the only type of product and services whose communications run the risk of being labelled racist and alienating customers.

Surf pulled a number of ads like the one above, which is especially ironic given criticism over roles and awards given to black actors in Hollywood films. In the wake of controversy over the defending hate groups prior to demonstrations in Charlotesville and their subsequent Twitter post shown above, the ACLU has changed their position on defending all groups right to free speech and apologized for their posting. State Farm’s Twitter account briefly became

What these and the Dove ads miss is cultural sensitivity that would allow them to see how how black people and their allies could feel that such marketing messaging contributes to a culture that denigrates blackness.

While not speaking on race but sexual preference, Dan Cathy of Chick-Fil-A’s reflection on the comments he’d made regarding gay marriage summaries provides a good insight in what companies should consider when approaching their messaging:

“Consumers want to do business with brands that they can interface with, that they can relate with. And it’s probably very wise from our standpoint to make sure that we present our brand in a compelling way that the consumer can relate to.”

If a consumer feels that a company is attacking them in their advertisement, intentional or not, it puts th consumer relationships at risk.

Great Content Marketing That Deals With Controversial Content

The problem with addressing or depicting controversy in advertisements is not necessarily that it gets attention, but what further message is then transmitted from it. Though many people purchase products such as bleaching creams or Surf detergent in order to get their skin or clothes whiter, the underlying message of “Darkness is undesirable” leads to wasted ad buys and time spent on handling criticisms. It’s for this reason that content marketing is particularly effective.

This is one of the reasons why Zillow and NerdWallet’s Content Marketing is doing such an amazing job. Not only are they both producing functional tools for people to used, but they are also coming out with reports like: Rising Rents, Stagnant Wages, And the Burden of Unstable Housing and Seeking Medical Debt Relief? Crowdfunding Rarely Pays Off the Bills.

Hiding Controversy in Plain Sight

   

Chances are as you read what my good examples of controversial choices for marketing content was you may have thought the following contentions:

  • These don’t deal with race.
  • These aren’t controversial.
  • I’m comparing apples and oranges.

Regarding the first point you are absolutely right. I will, however, provide an example of what good content marketing that deals with race looks like below so I hope you’ll overlook this. As for them not being controversial let me explain how they are.

Your friends, if they’re good friends, will certainly give sympathy for expressing anxiety and frustration over your income and how your daily struggles wouldn’t feel so burdensome if you just earned just a few percentage points in your salary and some level of support. Your employer, who holds the power in making such a determination, is less likely to be as welcoming to such expressions and less likely to offer support – though this is changing.

The future of health care in America is so highly contested by a variety of actors that have stakes in saving and losing money that protests and coordinated movements to sway legislators have erupted all over the country. Regardless of one’s view of what is to be done, information is power and this goes to show that private philanthropy is not doing nearly enough to prevent people from death or life-changing debt.

As for the third contention, that’s a partial truth as they are different in format but as they are at their root marketing messages such a distinction is spurious and only gives heft to the claim of many advertising professionals today that content marketing is king. Unlike the visual-only ads, these content marketing projects do not veil the conditions of American political economy but make unveiling it their purpose. The value-proposition of Zillow and NerdWallet’s content marketing is educational rather than mere single grahpic attention grab whose only message is: “This lotion will whiten your skin”.

What Could Dove Have Done to Raise Brand Awareness Instead of Publishing An Ad the Replicates Racist Tropes?

Like many other people,  I Feaking Love Science. Like many publishers, I also love survey based projects. Not wanting to go into too much details, it was with this in mind that I thought of some alternatives that Dove could have developed instead of the racially insensitive ads.

Were Dove to take a content marketing approach instead of the traditional single graphic ad for their campaign they would have had their marketing team produce content that educates about skin and race via an aesthetically engaging depiction and explanation of the science of skin color.

Were Dove to take a content marketing approach they could have presented the findings of a survey asking about perceptions of whiteness that combined analysis of their results with that of previous studies in an engaging manner. There a lot of them on race in relation to aspects of American society and such a study that examines original research (Legal, psychological, etc.) along with the number produced, their findings and analysis of other qualities over time would contribute to the national conversation instead of being seen as just more evidence for one position or another.

Controversial Content, But Without The Baggage

One of the reasons content marketing is such an amazing field is that the value it creates is not as ephemeral, being more than a mere image, but also as it can be continuously updated, and parts of it can be repurposed. Like solely visual advertisements it seeks to gain a consumer’s attention, but because of the format it is able to do so without the baggage and and in a more organic manner.

If you want to assure that your company’s time is not wasted by apologizing for an insensitive advertisement and are interested in learning more how controversial content can help your marketing, reach out to me, Ariel Sheen, and ask about how I can help build up on-site material or how I can build you a content marketing campaign.

Not only do I have a track record of successful content marketing campaigns, but my extensive studies in America’s history and culture means you won’t end up with lots of press about how you inadvertently promoted racially insensitivity.

Review of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual

I’ve been meaning to review The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse for quite some time. With it’s depth and breath of evidence and a forceful analysis it’s no surprise that following it’s publication it was a cultural touchstone amongst the cultural and political elites of the early 1970s. Truth is, whenever I’ve sat in front of an open Word document with the intent to respond to it’s arguments and evidence, I start to feel a bit overwhelmed. This despite the fact that I’ve had some pretty extended conversations on this book.

Thankfully, one of the Facebook groups whose posts I follow, the Society for United States Intellectual History, recently curated a Roundtable on the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Rather than provide you with my thoughts on the matter, I decided I’d share these instead:

 

Along with two other insightful PDFs:

and some random other links:

Beyond the Color Line: Jews, Black and the American Racial Imagination