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Beyond Race Matters: a Paradigm Shift By Grace Lee Boggs Race Relations Panel Barnard College Alumnae Reunion New York, June 3, 2000 When I was at Barnard in the early 1930s there were only three students of color on campus: Grace Ijima of the class of 1934 and Louise Chin and myself in the class of 1935. Now there are so many students and alumnae of color that there is a special Reunion for us. (Later that day I was told by Kathryn Heavey, President of the Class of 1935, that Jean Blackwell Hutson, who is widely known for her work in developing theSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture into the world's largest collection of materials by and about people of African descent, hd also been in our class and had also received a Distinguished Alumna Award. Our class could boast of three honorees, Kathryn said proudly: Elizabeth Janeway, Jean Blackwell Hutson and myself). This tremendous increase in diversity - which blew my mind when I returned for my first and 60th reunion in 1995 - is primarily the result of the militant struggles against racism by African Americans in the l950s and l960s which triggered the women’s movement and the chicano, Native American, and Asian American movements. My involvement in these struggles began with the 1941 March on Washington Movement which forced President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense plants. One of the main things that has sustained my activism over the last sixty years is the dialectical thinking that I absorbed from studying Hegel as a graduate student in philosophy at Bryn Mawr after I left Barnard. From Hegel, whose ideas came out of the French Revolution, I got a concept of the history of humanity as a continuing struggle for Freedom which is not a thing but a concept that is constantly expanding as human beings struggle to become more advanced in the specifically human qualities of creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, political and social responsibility. From studying Hegel I learned that progress does not take place in a straight line, but requires the labor, patience and suffering of the negative. As a result, I have been challenged rather than demoralized by the new contradictions that emerge in the course of struggle, forcing me, again and again, to make a leap in my concept of Freedom - or what it means to be a human being. This dialectical thinking is especially necessary in grappling with something as deeply rooted in American institutions and values as racism. For example, when the civil rights movement began in 1955 with the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on the bus, the only issues seemed to be equal access to public accommodations and the polls. No one could foresee that by the late 1960s, black street youth all over the country would be erupting in urban rebellions, not only protesting against racism but also against being sent to die in the rice paddies of Vietnam and being made expendable by Hi-Tech. These are the questions that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was grappling with in the last two years of his life. In the wake of the urban rebellions, King,who called Hegel his favorite philosopher, recognized that the civil rights movement had come to an end as a movement and that henceforth the critical questions facing our country were those being raised by inner city black youth who were even then being called the "underclass." As a result, he began talking about a "new kind of revolution" that would combine a radical transformation in values with a radical transformation of structures and thus overturn what he called the "giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism." The war in Vietnam and the war on the streets of our cities had convinced King that it was no longer possible to separate out the struggle against racism from the struggle against materialism and militarism. Warning that "material growth had been made an end in itself," and that "our scientific power had outrun our spiritual power," King refused to accept the dictatorship of Hi-Tech which, he said, diminishes people because it eliminates the sense of participation "We have guided missiles and misguided men," he said. He was also trying to conceptualize a new social system that would go beyond Capitalism which he said was too "I-centered, too individualistic" and Communism which he saw as "too collective, too statist." Deploring the way that educators were trying to instill middle class values in black youth as the ideal in social development, he noted that "it was precisely when young Negroes (sic) threw off their middle class values that they made an historic social contribution. They abandoned these values when they put careers and wealth in a secondary role." And he called for programs that would involve young people in direct actions "in our dying cities" that would be both self-transforming and structure-transforming. We will never know what King might have done had he not been killed. What we do know is that in the last thirty years the "underclass" over which King agonized has become increasingly desperate because with Hi-Tech and the export of production jobs overseas our cities have been turned into wastelands - so that we can no longer separate out the struggle against racism from the struggle against global capitalism. What we also know is that with the immigration of millions of Latinos and Asians in the last thirty years we have to go beyond thinking of racial relations only in bipolar black/white categories. What we also have learned or should have learned from last winter’s Battle of Seattle is that a growing number of Americans of all ethnic groups and from all walks of life - steelworkers, small farmers, environmentalists, women, young people and public intellectuals - are questioning the values and structures of a global capitalism that is widening the gulf between the haves and have-nots (who are overwhelmingly people of color), devastating our communities, threatening our ecosystem and turning all our human relations into money relations. That is why I believe that, as we enter the 21st century, we should be making a paradigm shift, going beyond identity struggles to create new formations that concentrate on challenging the values and structures of global capitalism and on creating alternatives to these values and structures based on new concepts of respect and responsibility for one another and for the places where we live - in the process replacing the capitalist values that have made American racism, sexism and economic expansionism so virulent and tenacious. Because Detroit was devastated so early and so massively by the dynamics of global capitalism, and also because it is a movement city, we have been in the forefront of building this movement. Nine years ago we founded DETROIT SUMMER, a Multicultural, Intergenerational Youth Leadership Program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up. Currently I am also involved in the Detroit Agricultural Network which is based on the philosophy that we can only free ourselves by feeding ourselves, and Detroiters Working For Environmental Justice, founded on the 17 Principles adopted by the First People of Color Environment Leadership Summit held in October 1991. In the last ten years I have been delighted to find that in rural areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America, community people are beginning to create alternatives along the same lines. On January 1, 1994 the Zapatistas in Chiapas electrified the world by taking up arms to announce their struggle for local autonomy. Elsewhere in the Global South, in Africa and Asia, people in rural communities, having learned through bitter experience that their post-independence leaders, mostly male and mostly Western-educated, have the same approach to economic development as their Western counterparts, are struggling to achieve local autonomy by creating village granaries, local seedbanks, mini-dams etc. Everywhere women are in the majority and providing the leadership in these local struggles. Vandana Shiva of India and Wangari Maathai of Kenya are probably the best-known internationally. In Kenya alone it is estimated that there may be 15,000-20,000 of these groups, varying in size from 20 to 200. Out of these movements in the global South, according to Indian philosopher Ashis Nandy, there is emerging a Third World post-modernism, "a new theory of freedom which builds upon the civilizational perspective of those who have dared to reject the values of modernity (masculine achievement, productive work and technocratic expertise) and to protect and nurture, however clumsily, alternative concepts of compassion, freedom, justice and dissent." It is within this historical perspective that I believe we need to approach the issue of race relations. Instead of locking ourselves into debates and struggles around racism, we need to make a quantum leap to another plateau of struggle - to rebuild our communities, our cities and our country on these new anti-capitalist values. That does not mean that racism and sexism have disappeared. What it does mean is that we will be acquiring new human values to empower us in the struggle against our racism and sexism. As these movements grow, I anticipate that on college campuses across the country students will be demanding that their education prepare them to serve grassroots communities rather than the structures of global capitalism - with the same fervor with which they opposed the Vietnam War and identified with Third World struggles a generation ago. Every day it is becoming clearer that we need a new educational system that goes beyond "musical superintendents" and MEAP tests. *** Also on the panel were Abigail Thernstrom, Class of 1958, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of America in Black and White; and J.Philip Thompson, who is African American and a Barnard/Columbia Political Science Professor. We started with a ten minute introduction by each panelist, followed by two minute responses before answering questions from the audience. The discussion was very lively and a number of people told me later that they had been very moved by what I said. I spoke first. Thernstrom’s immediate response was to declare her support of American capitalism (because it provides "the highest standard of living in the world"), of "middle class values" like "hard work and discipline," of markets, and of "testing, testing, testing." In her presentation and responses, Abigail mostly cited statistics from opinion surveys showing progress on racial equality issues like inter-racial dating and white willingness to live next door to blacks. "The skills gap," she insisted, is now "the main civil rights issue" because it condemns black kids to "low wealth accumulation." "Only fringe people," she said, "disagree that the end of the struggle is racial equality." Thompson said that he was "outraged" by the identification of hard work and discipline with the "middle class. His parents who were far from middle class had worked very hard. "We academics," he said, "like to debate data," but it is hard to deal with education and environment without a "broader orientation." Thompson warned against falling back into black/white thinking. Race, he said, has always been complicated in the black community. Blacks have not always been "united" or "one thing." Most African Americans have always been mixed - with European and Native American ancestors. Race hasn’t gone away, but it has changed. We can focus on measuring one thing, e.g. interracial dating, and lose sight of other things, e.g. prisons. "Free markets," he said, "are corporate-controlled markets." He cited new struggles by low-income workers that link labor with ethnic groups in the community and suggested that labor (with its huge pension funds) and blacks "link up their values with their investments." I stressed that "I was not an academic" but a Movement activist; that the "gap" threatening our biosphere is not the skills gap but "the human gap" which had been the original driving force of the civil rights movement ("who wants to be integrated into a burning house?"). Instead of viewing our children as "cannon fodder" for competition on the world market, we need to revisit John Dewey who recommended that classroom learning be linked with communities and that our children be involved in and prepared for social change. After World II, Italians in Reggio Emilia, convinced that rebuilding their devastated cities had to begin with early childhood education, created new, more holistic philosophies and methods of education. Recommendations for fundamental changes in our approach to education are no longer "fringe." For example, my "Children's Miracle Needed to Solve School Crisis" is now on the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin website. _ |