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No Justice and No Peace: A Critique of Current Social Change Politics (3 of 8)
Ironically, many of the organizers and “leaders” of these events ask the same question “why aren't there more black people here, they should care about this issue!" or “how do we get more people of color?” Clearly, there is a difference in how this issue is addressed, and we'd like to suggest that the problem lies less with “black people not caring” and more with the priorities, messages and outreach strategies deployed by those organizers. Reliance on the internet (as if a vast majority of people have regular access to it) and posters pasted haphazardly on light posts don't count as grassroots organizing. In imagery and rhetoric, people in the global south are being used as the poster children to justify these mass mobilizations. Organizers of mostly white organizations say that they support marginalized people, but those people themselves are not centrally involved in the organizing.
So when you go to an anti-war march, you see Middle-eastern women and children propped up on poster board. When you go to an anti-globalization protest, you see the images of anguished faces of South and Central American families facing death squads. Perhaps when you walk down your street and see an advertisement for these protests, the ad has animated pictures of young folks of color holding paintbrushes set against a backdrop of phrases such as “We want our water back.” The implication here is that they have painted the slogans, graffiti style, in an act of resistance. But did they really? Or did someone use Photoshop to place the paintbrush in their hands and paste them against the white background with the words? Could there be a more classic case of white folks putting words in other peoples' mouths?
So this is when we begin our talk about privilege, because attending mass mobilizations as the main form of resistance is a privilege. And it makes us wonder if people with certain privileges can cause that much change? That topic would be a whole essay into itself, but we feel it is important to question the assumption that people with a high level of privilege are actually capable of giving most or all of it up for others, whom they may have a very tenuous connection to. Though that line of thought is very intriguing to us, we leave it for another time, and continue to consider the ways some are addressing their privilege.
Next > Limits of trendy anti-oppression training; fighting on the right side means personal immunity
