Ive been home and in bed for the past 24 hours and in between sleeping, taking medicine, eating soup, reading, thinking, and bugging my friends via text Ive considered the following: 1. We need to rethink the categories we use to describe our expansive expressions in the world, which are really boxes used to commodify us and keep us at war with the wrong enemies. The activist. The public intellectual. The organizer. The academic. The whatever...are boxes used to determine who has value and who doesnt under capitalism. Who gets to be heard and who doesnt. Who gets paid and who will go broke. Those boxes seem so safe and rewarding that we fight hard to squeeze ourselves into them without realizing the cultures of violence it perpetuates. We end up beating each other down. And suffocating because we cant get free constrained. 2. The idea that somehow those who teach and write from within academe are disconnected from the lived realities and collective struggles of those without, is dangerously simplistic. Similarly, the notion that activists/organizers lack critical analysis, is equally problematic. The reality is the binary fails to articulate the fact that many of us, because we have to be, are thinker doers. We ought to honor that. 3. We can share a vision for a better, more transformed, black loving world, but we can get there via different tactics. We dont have to do things the same way. Some folk are great at producing and participating in civil unrest actions. Others are wonderful strategists. Some are skilled administrators, spoke persons, healers, etc. The desire to prove which of us are most radical is useless. We need to be asking folk to identify their gifts and do what works best for them. 4. I have started responding with as little detail as possible when folk ask me about my occupation or history. We should not have to list resumes to be authenticated as legitimate when we need all hands on deck. I have had to fight the urge to give details about my work in various communities--work Ive done since I was a kid--to be stamped approved. We have to make space so we can fight alongside/for one another. 5. Last thing, we protest, yes? But if we go out and return home without connecting to anyone we protested alongside we have more work to do. Movements are not without internal conflicts and error. The radical aspects are often not what we see on the surface but is the hard loving and forgiving and messy and complicated work that happens behind the scenes.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:23:50 +0000
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