From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

To many of us, #BlackLivesMatter is a movement we reflexively support. Police brutality and other functions of systemic racism need to be opposed, our nation needs to be transformed from one that adheres to the assumption of white superiority to one of justice and egalitarianism among all people.

Which is all very easy to say, but many of us also seem confused on how to get there. Do we buy Nike shoes to show solidarity with Kaepernick? Do we post Now This videos on social media? Do we show up to anti-racism rallies? Is simply educating ourselves enough? Is this allyship?

To Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, destroying white supremacy means liberating ourselves from the systems that most utilize it. She contextualizes the #BlackLivesMatter movement in a way that illuminates what ideologies and methods have hit their limits and which ones can work to dismantle institutions premised on white supremacy.

While From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation reads more like a history book than an instruction manual, it is a very insightful text to guide one towards the sort of activist work that needs to be done. Taylor is a Marxist so the activism she promotes will be steeped in that tradition. However, this is because, as Taylor goes on to discuss at length, the efforts of liberalism (you can just forget about conservatism) have failed to unroot white supremacy and, in many cases, only served to sustain it.

There is a lot of sharp discussion on the concept of "black faces in high places" and Barack Obama. Here, Taylor demonstrates that without radical vision, the liberal ideation of diversity becomes a mere platitude. What could changing the race of the machine operator do if the levers being pulled only produce more racism? Taylor's ensuing chapters are more complex and well evidenced than that, but the point rings true.

Taylor also takes aim at our ability to address systemic white supremacy through merely changing the culture or the law. Communities ravaged by the power of racism are designed to keep people down regardless of how hard the individuals within that community work. Further, even when one accepts the racist premise of a prescriptive, "good" culture, an individual succeeding despite obstacles does nothing to dismantle the obstacles themselves, which would not be true liberation.

Discrimination is illegal in the United States, but clearly still practiced. While it is good to have the law on the side of justice, clearly it has its limits as well. In many cases, now that we have civil rights legislation, the goal is to make the law colorblind. This too is a failure, since the enforcement of laws are subject to the enforcer's biases, and therefore communities of color are more aggressively policed, as we've seen. Taylor's chapter on the country's move from civil rights to color blindness is among one of the most informative things I have ever read.

So where do we go when all the mechanisms for change we were taught in high school civics classes have reached their limits? Taylor's book is so vital a read that I don't want to risk giving you an excuse not to read it by taking a crack at what she feels the movement demands. I will say that it has a lot to do with solidarity over the universal issues of democracy, labor, and dignity in life. If you consider yourself someone who cares about ending racism in this country you have no excuse; you need to read this book.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

"In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in electing between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting"

While reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses on vacation a few of my friends laughed at the title. Having never heard of Cormac McCarthy, they could only assume I was reading a book that a 12-year-old girl with a Lisa Frank folder would be reading in middle school.

This is actually very fitting. Everything about All the Pretty Horses is about managing expectations. Set at the dawn of the age of the cowboy, the protagonist - John Grady Cole - sets out to Mexico with his best friend Rawlins. They hope to work as ranch hands and live like frontiersmen in an age where automation and industrialization have squeezed out the last semblance of a Wild West.

All of which McCarthy refuses to spoon feed you. He is less interested in describing the motivations of his characters than the brutal landscapes they traverse. Employing his excellent craftsmanship as a writer not in bald sensory details, but rather in describing an essence; the very things that inhabit the landscapes themselves. Just read this sentence:

"When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives"

One sentence. Not grammatically correct of course, but crafted as such. Leaving a lot of the picture up to the imagination McCarthy only allows his readers what is absolutely necessary to see.

John Grady and Rawlins have a classic and predictable adventure with just a sprinkle of brutal realism. Throughout all of it are horses. The horse comes to represent the vehicle through which our heroes live out their fantasy (without including any spoilers, any time these characters get into an automobile nothing good is about to occur). When you've come to suspect you're reading a classic, maybe even boring adventure novel, McCarthy shakes you awake with a firm reminder that the world does not have any patience for dreaming.

Class Action by Jacobin and the CTU

Today, wildcat teacher strikes are popping up across the nation; particularly in states with the most consistently underfunded schools. These schools have lost even the most basic and essential tools for learning and the legislature is still cutting teacher pay, benefits, and budgets. Austerity in public education seems to be the new rule, particularly in the most vulnerable, low-income counties, but not exclusively. Teacher pay has stagnated nationwide and now there is a growing teacher shortage crisis as class sizes grow and bureaucratic testing standards strip any joy out of curriculum writing.

Most Americans understand this is happening. Most Americans, regardless of their politics, love their public school or they at least love the public school model. It is a model we know works when it’s given the proper tools to succeed. Which prompts most Americans to wonder why they aren’t given those tools. The answer is simple.

Capitalism hates your public school.

The public school model as we know works (just look at how our adequately funded and supported school districts compare globally) is one completely devoid of a profit motive. To a political economy that requires constant, unsustainable growth, models with no profit motive are seen as investment opportunities. This is why our nation’s politicians and powerful business leaders have waged a secret war against public education since the early 1990’s.

Anyone can go read about the expansion of for-profit charter schools, the application of corporate methodology to the classroom, slimy educational technology deals, the trojan horse Teach for America, and the proliferation of standardized test supply companies. But nothing comes close to the importance of Class Action, a tight, little booklet published as a joint venture between Jacobin Magazine and the Chicago Teachers Union.

What makes Class Action so important is its willingness to lay the blame entirely on capitalist forces. Doing so is necessary because, as Class Action also demonstrates, the only strategy that can effectively save our schools is one that resists efforts to inject a profit motive into the model. Although it’s short, it’s packed with the context and history of school corporatization as well as winning strategies for resistance as exercised by the CTU in their 2012 strikes.

Americans need to know that the seemingly benign “solutions” pushed by business opportunists are part of the overarching strategy of breaking the public school model. Class Action is a good read for fostering this awareness, but it also offers strategic insights on building coalitions of parents, teachers, and community leaders.

The best news is that you don’t have to be a card-carrying socialist to read this book, it won’t burn your hands.

A People's History of the United States

When you play “arguing with anti-leftist”* Bingo, you should always have a square that anticipates their view that, because you were educated in public schools, you are brainwashed by the liberal/Cultural Marxist agenda.

It’s hard not to kind of see their point. Teachers are generally left-leaning (although I’m fairly certain my 8th grade history teacher was alt-right after I recall entire lesson plans where he justified the treatment of Native Americans because they were so “savage” to settlers), academia is generally left-leaning and they write the textbooks, and tolerance - something they try to teach you  in school - is almost a left-leaning concept by default (another square in the bingo game could be the phrase “and I thought liberals were the tolerant ones”).

At any rate, you always tend to think you’re not brainwashed. You were taught a pretty accurate history in high school and college. I’ll admit that I thought this. Then I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

It almost seems incredibly cliche’ to say that a book has transformed your worldview as an adult, especially an adult that believes himself in the welterweight category of heavy readers, but there is no other way to describe reading A People’s History.

Zinn takes his reader from the beginning of this nation to 2001, just after 9/11. What makes the historical perspective he documents interesting can be summed up well in this quote from the book:

“All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizens to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in Vietnam, Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is alright, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose moong saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions”

Zinn introduces you to a whole range of historical figures who were ordinary American citizens that organized movements. Zinn zeros in on the aspects of history left out of public school lesson plans, namely that every ounce of progress America made towards a thriving democracy was driven by people whose only power was a collective one.

It seems repetitive and boring and obvious to talk about the ramifications of this book today. And it would be if all you talked about was how America used to be really oppressive and we seem dangerously close to getting back to some of those points. But if you take the key lesson of this book it is possibly one of the more important things you could possibly read in Trump’s America.

Why? Because this history squares everyday citizens as the chief catalysts for change. It does not demonstrate a resistance parade of late night TV shows and personalities, the liberal celebrity brigade, or a diverse corporate boardroom. Your favorite people in power are not giving any more of it to you no matter how much they hate the other people in power. This includes politicians, even good ones, so stop fetishizing your vote and get involved in a campaign to end gerrymandering or something!

If you’re feeling helpless and burned out in the face of Trump and corporate Democrats and the limits of electoral politics I couldn’t recommend a more empowering book.

__________________

*An anti-leftist is a term I am trying to popularize. It’s basically someone who holds almost incoherent and highly contradictory conservative views simply to ‘trigger the libs’. Things like hating big government but loving Trump and the wall, hating crony capitalism but advocating charter schools, supporting the troops but being prepared to shoot them should they come for our guns, distrusting Muslims but valuing Trump’s deals with Saudi Arabia, loving what Trump or Reagan or Bush did/does but hating those exact same things when Clinton, Carter, or Obama did them.

And Yet.... by Christopher Hitchens

I picked up a collection of essays titled “and yet” to see if the compiled writings of Christopher Hitchens went deeper than my previous experiences with his work. As of this moment, 4:45 pm on Saturday, March 11th, I am completely comfortable with coming to the following conclusion: I don’t care for Christopher Hitchens, may he Rest In Peace. “And Yet…” Having no experience with Hitchens outside of his essay eviscerating Mother Teresa and near ubiquitous YouTube presence, I felt it was time to actually sit down and read a body of his work. My experience with Hitchens seemed to be more in an attempt to like him when the truth was I felt his world renown, biting wit was lacking. Hitchens always had a good grasp of his debate opponent’s argument, he could quote hypocritical verses from various religious texts from memory and could cite all of the major events and characters in historic/current events. All of which is remarkably impressive but not necessarily grounds for fandom. After all, a full grasp and understanding of a subject will certainly help you make a well-rounded argument, but should not be taken for one. I’ve always felt the Hitchens' snark and depth of knowledge was aimed more at domination than a fostering of understanding. It was almost Socratic. Crushing his opponents in debates or making a fool of network news hosts, Hitchens often won an audience to his side by proving the fallibility of the person opposite him. Even in the few pieces, I’ve read, the topic he chooses is given a thorough lashing but by the end of it, I don’t feel like I’ve been brought anywhere. It isn’t that Mother Teresa is somehow undeserving of getting the Hitch treatment (no one calls it that FYI) and it is an important alternative analysis of popular history, but from my understanding that isn’t really why people read it. At the end of the day, Hitchens assumes the reader will concede to his muddied point on the grounds that he’s made someone look thoroughly stupid. So I picked up a book of his at Barnes&Noble. Just grabbed it off the shelf and bought it. This was a mistake. “And Yet…” is a series of essays published posthumously and chosen by virtue of not being selected for Hitchens' first (massive) compilation of Essays titled “Arguably”. This makes them second-rate essays by default. It’s obvious why. A good selection of these essays is book reviews. A.N. Wilson, Salman Rushdie, Mikhail Lermontov, Ian Fleming to name a few of the authors visited. Maybe Hitchens writes in-depth deep dives into books, but it seems that these are plot summaries followed by a hasty endorsement (and yes, I realize I’m no expert, but I always don’t have fans...or readers). The rest of the essays in “And Yet..” can be safely categorized as frivolous musings. Some of these observations are interesting, Ohio’s election numbers looking spotty in “Ohio’s Odd Numbers” or Hillary Clinton’s long history of PR follies in “The Case Against Hillary Clinton”. Others seem downright useless, like Obama’s likeness to a feline in (ready for it?) “Barack Obama, One Cool Cat” or how middle America has a diverse level of difficult to understand idiosyncrasies in “My Red-State Odyssey”. Ultimately though, most of the pieces in “And Yet…” are well-written thoughts that the reader is expected to enjoy because Christopher Hitchens wrote them in his Christopher Hitchens voice. It’s important to remember that Hitchens made his living as a writer, by definition there have to be pieces he wrote because he needed to collect a paycheck. It seems, with a few notable exceptions, that “And Yet…” is entirely composed of these types of tidbit essays. So it seems I need to give Hitchens another chance, but having only experienced his body of work in what is essentially a last ditch effort to profit off his peripheral thoughts, I can say I’m not yet sold on the “greatest polemic of our time”

The Case for Socialism by Alan Maass

Local elections on Nov 8th, 2017 yielded 15 candidates endorsed by or direct members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Many of these candidates unseated Republicans in territory rarely ceded to Democrats. Organizations like the DSA and PSL have seen a staggering rise in involvement. If you find yourself increasingly curious about socialism, Marxism, Communism, etc you are evidently not alone. That makes it a good time to read up on the subject. I’ve been reading a number of soft introductions to Democratic Socialism since Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign really put it on my radar. The Case for Socialism by Alan Maass is probably the least of which I would recommend.

Bernie Sanders may have endeared me - as well as a large swath of young people - to Democratic Socialism and he might identify as a Democratic Socialist (along with people like Howard Zinn, Hellen Keller, and Martin Luther King Jr.), but he isn’t necessarily so. As Noam Chomsky said, “Bernie Sanders is a good man, and I supported him, but his views were closer to a new deal democrat; they would be very familiar to someone like, say, Eisenhower”. This is exactly why colloquial, accessible, and introductory texts are needed. Otherwise, we have a bunch of millennials out there thinking FDR was a Marxist.

This isn’t to say Alan Maass doesn’t address misconceptions about Socialism (the idea that Denmark or Finland or China represent shining examples when none of these states are run by the people/laborers was a particularly well-written section). It’s just that a lot has been written on this subject and if you want to bring people into the fold of your ideology there are a number of things you need to do that Maass doesn’t.

The most important thing is coherence. When someone comes looking for a text to introduce them to a subject they want to be immediately enthralled by a compelling and straightforward argument. I should know, as someone who has gone to a number of texts portending to introduce socialism to the masses I am often astounded by the lack of organization in some of these pieces. Maass suffers from overtly passionate and tangential political writing; the rate at which he switches topics from the Russian Revolution, to Obama, to the nature of war, to the ‘08 recession can be measured in sentences. He ends up talking a little bit about a lot of things while lacking in substantial discussion of any one subject.

The Case for Socialism bills itself as, well, as a “case”. For doing so, it doesn’t imagine a world in which socialism has fully replaced capitalism. I don’t understand this. Anyone is capable of criticizing the state of the world while drawing express connections to capitalism as the primary reason. Liberals and Social Democrats do this extensively, it is, in fact, part of the very fabric of their political philosophy. Socialists are not seeking to mitigate the effects of capitalism, they are trying to replace it. For newcomers, it is difficult to imagine what socialism would look like (Scandinavia? Cuba?). Maass is particularly remiss in his scant covering of the role democracy will play in socialism. While his critiques of capitalism and its effects are biting they largely overshadow his solutions. His explanations on labor’s ability to get us to a socialist utopia are sporadic and focus on how terrible our current system is. The question of practicality plaguing socialism as it does, it is a shame Maass doesn’t take more time to address it.

Finally, an introductory text should not try to stand on its own, it should...well...introduce you to other works! The Haymarket Books edition puts an addendum to the book titled “What Else to Read” (which is a testament to Haymarket Books, not Maass). In it, Maass freely admits that the book is devoid of sources and that he isn’t remotely interested in citing them. While this end section has some more to read on certain subjects, in-text citations help the reader build a crucial relationship with other texts in the context of your arguments. Not only that, but if your reader doubts your numbers, statistics, or historical accounts for a second you could potentially drive them to sources explicitly seeking to discredit your ideas!

Ultimately, Maass does craft some good arguments. He has very convincing sections on what Socialism is or isn’t and some fairly imaginative sections on what Socialism could look like. I wouldn’t recommend this book to someone curious about Socialism, but who hasn’t quite bought into the idea. I’d rather push the ABC’s of Socialism put out by Jacobin Magazine or Danny Katch’s Socialism Seriously. If you’re sold on Socialism and you're already trying to satiate your endless hunger for better arguments, you should consume the whole of The Case for Socialism if only for the few morsels to be found there.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

On the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation James Baldwin sits down to write two letters; one is to his nephew and the other to no one in particular. These two searing essays are combined into one brief collection titled the Fire Next Time. In it, Baldwin ruminates on the nature of freedom and the imperative task of confronting white supremacy, suggesting there can be no true former without the latter.

“My Dungeon Shook”, Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, could read as a shorthand form of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Aside from the brevity, the major difference is Baldwin sees white supremacy something to combat with constant struggle, Coates sees it as immutable. While there is certainly plenty of foreboding language, Baldwin ultimately entreats his nephew to “make America what America must become” (which is a great counter phrase to MAGA). And what America must become is free; no longer dependent on oppression. His tone is hopeful and his candid yet elegant conversation with his nephew is nothing short of heartwarming.

“Down at the Cross” reads like Marx’s brief critiques of religion, except where Marx sees religion and nationalism as a way to cope with the atrocities of capitalism, Baldwin sees them as a way of coping with white supremacy. The piece has two focal points; Baldwin’s own religious upbringing and his brief run-in with the Nation of Islam. Early in his life, Baldwin would come to choose between falling in with the church or with the streets, since these were the only choices America gave him. Baldwin loved the church, but ultimately its insistence on living for the afterlife and perseverance was too passive an approach and did not deal with reality. Baldwin was also unable to rationalize the existence of a higher being in the face of such stark inequality. The Nation of Islam seemingly juxtaposes the church with its fiery rhetoric and call to action (the segregation of an all-black society), but Baldwin effortlessly argues that civilization itself cannot accommodate even the most utopian of segregated societies because the toxicity of white supremacy demands the destruction or subjugation of the inferior. As the title implies, America cannot continue to survive while white supremacy still courses through its most sacred institutions and there is no true freedom until the decadence of America is no longer built on the backs of others. If we (Baldwin demands action from both whites and blacks, men and women) continue to fall into organizations that do nothing but distract from the painful realities of white supremacy or if we continue to do nothing but live our daily lives, then America will forever be a place that depends on suffering.

I recently read a Facebook exchange between two high school classmates. Evidently, someone they went to school with is currently an active member in an unabashed white supremacist group. This individual is a fourth-grade teacher. One classmate was of the opinion that this person needed to be outed, preferably fired, but certainly exposed for their beliefs. The other classmate felt this was bullying, that it would only drive the individual further into their hateful views and that we shouldn’t take action until we know their views are causing real harm. It is important to note that many Americans likely agree with what they imagine is the level-headed response of the classmate advocating the cautious approach to the white supremacist teacher. It is also important to note that these Americans are trying, perhaps (and even most likely) unknowingly, to preserve a country built on racism. To them, a rational society must tolerate viewpoints, even intolerance itself. The Fire Next Time serves as a warning should we decide not to confront this very thinking. If we ever want the abolition of racism, we can never allow it a moment's comfort.