When I sat
down recently with longtime organizer Eric
Mann, I expected us to talk about movement
strategy. We did. But before we got very
far, Mann raised something more basic:
friendship.
"What’s the
point of trying to change the whole
country if we don’t like each other?” he
asked.
It was
vintage Eric—part political theory, part
personal reflection, and a reminder that
movements are ultimately made of human
beings.
Mann
has
been organizing
for more than six decades. His
political history stretches from
the Congress of Racial Equality
and Students for a Democratic
Society to years as an
autoworker and organizer in the
United Auto Workers. Today he is
co-director of Los Angeles’
Labor Community Strategy Center,
an rorganization that has spent
decades joining grassroots
organizing with political
education and movement strategy.
But what
has always interested me most about Eric is
something else: he is a white man who has
spent much of his political life trying to
understand what it means to struggle for
Black liberation.
That
became the starting point for our
conversation.
Learning to
See Race Differently
Mann traces
part of his political formation to
experiences he had as a teenager.
At 13, he
recalled, his father took him to
Philadelphia, where he helped prepare for a
large Black cotillion. Suddenly he was
working inside a predominantly Black
environment—cleaning, painting, carrying
things, taking instructions and listening.
What stayed
with him was not some grand political
revelation. It was the warmth of the
community.
"The joy and
the laughter and the love that was shown
to me was kind of shocking,” he
remembered.
Later he
encountered interracial couples and Black
communities that complicated the racial
assumptions of the America in which he was
growing up. He began noticing differences in
skin color without attaching the hierarchy
to those differences that American society
had taught.
Eventually
those experiences merged with political
organizing.
During
civil-rights work, Mann remembers knocking
on doors in Black neighborhoods and being
invited inside by people who would tell him
their life stories—stories that often
stretched through Jim Crow, slavery and,
sometimes, memories handed down about
Africa.
"I never took
that for granted,” he said. “I was still
a white kid who was being accepted in
the Black community.”
That
distinction matters.
Solidarity
is not the same thing as believing yourself
entitled to someone else’s trust.
From
Reconstruction to Resistance
I asked
Mann a question that often gets buried
beneath movement slogans:
If
the revolution succeeded, what
would it actually look like?
His answer
surprised me.
For years,
Mann said, he thought in terms of what he
called a “Third Reconstruction”—following
Reconstruction after the Civil War and the
Second Reconstruction associated with the
modern civil-rights movement.
Now he is
less certain that “reconstruction”
adequately describes what this moment
demands.
Twice,
he
argued, major advances toward
racial democracy were followed
by powerful counterattacks. So
today he increasingly describes
the immediate project as
building an anti-racist,
anti-imperialist
resistance.
"The key to
revolution now is resistance,” he told
me.
For
Mann,
that means starting with
concrete struggles: protecting
immigrants threatened by ICE
enforcement, challenging
policing in schools, defending
Palestinian rights, supporting
Black communities confronting
state violence, and building
institutions capable of
sustaining movements beyond a
single protest.
The
emphasis on resistance is not a retreat from
transformational politics. It is an
acknowledgment that movements cannot build a
new society while surrendering the ground on
which they are standing.
The Right
Built Institutions. Why Hasn’t the Left?
That
brought us to a question I have been
wrestling with for some time.
I
am old enough to have watched
the growth of the contemporary conservative
political
infrastructure
across much of my adult life.
The
1971 Powell Memorandum remains
one important document in
understanding that history.
Written by corporate attorney
Lewis F. Powell Jr. shortly
before his nomination to the
U.S. Supreme Court and sent to a
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
official, the memo argued that
the American economic system
faced a serious ideological
challenge and urged business
leaders to respond
systematically across
universities, media, law and
public debate.
I see the
memo as part of a longer arc through which
conservative organizations learned to build
institutions capable of carrying ideas over
decades.
Mann's
reaction was immediate.
“What it
teaches is long-term strategy,” he said.
That is the
point worth dwelling on.
Political
movements often obsess over the next march,
election, demonstration or legislative
battle. Institutions think in decades.
The Powell
Memorandum was methodical. Who teaches? Who
publishes? Who produces research? Who shapes
the courts? Who trains leaders? Who
influences public language?
Whatever
one concludes about the memo's precise
historical influence, the strategic
mentality is unmistakable.
Mann's
response was simple:
"We need
think tanks. We need publications.”
And, I
would add, we need institutions capable of
connecting them.
Race as
a Diagnostic Tool—and a Dividing
Tool
My
own
thinking about this question has
been deeply influenced by Lani
Guinier and Gerald Torres' The
Miner's
Canary.
Their
metaphor is powerful: just as miners once
used canaries to detect poisonous conditions
before humans could sense them, racial
inequality can reveal structural problems
that eventually endanger the entire society.
If race can
function as a diagnostic tool, however, it
can also function as a political dividing
tool.
That
matters because the American working class
has never existed outside race.
Organized
labor has repeatedly confronted the question
of whether workers will understand
themselves primarily through shared economic
interests or whether racial hierarchy will
fracture that solidarity.
My
concern
is that too much progressive
organizing
still
treats race as one issue among
many—as though we can talk about
corporations, labor, climate
change, housing, education and
democracy first and then add
race somewhere near the end.
I told
Eric:
"If you are
talking about corporations, or
education, or climate change, and you
are not addressing the need for a
multiethnic, multiracial coalition, then
you have a plan to fail.”
Race
is not another item on the
agenda.
It shapes
who is in the room, who feels entitled to
speak, whose problems are considered
universal, which constituencies trust an
organization and ultimately whether a
coalition can hold together.
Solidarity
Is Not Benevolence
This
leads
to a distinction I believe the
Left desperately needs to
confront: the difference between
solidarity
and
benevolence.
Benevolence
says:
I
support your struggle.
Solidarity
says:
Your
struggle
and mine are connected.
Those are
not the same thing.
It is
possible to donate money, issue statements,
attend demonstrations and still live almost
entirely inside racially segregated social
and political worlds.
I can drive
across Los Angeles and see a city where
legal segregation has disappeared while
enormous amounts of social segregation
remain perfectly ordinary.
Many white
progressives would recoil from belonging to
an explicitly whites-only organization.
Yet they
may live in overwhelmingly white
neighborhoods, socialize overwhelmingly with
white people and participate in political
organizations where almost everyone making
the decisions is white—and barely notice the
contradiction.
Mann
described encountering something similar
within Democratic Socialists of America. His
comments reflected his own experience in the
organization, not a description of every DSA
chapter. DSA itself has formally adopted
commitments to multiracial organizing and
reserves representation for members from
marginalized racial and ethnic groups within
its national leadership structures.
The harder
question is what happens in practice.
Mann
described white organizers doing serious
work around immigration enforcement,
Palestine and labor while nevertheless
struggling to place Black liberation at the
center of their political analysis.
That is the
contradiction worth examining.
An
organization can sincerely oppose racism
without making anti-racism fundamental to
the way it understands power.
Who Gets to
Speak?
For several
years I have participated in a multiracial
organization that established an interesting
rule for its discussions: Black participants
speak first.
That is
not because Black people automatically
possess the correct answer.
The
purpose is to interrupt a deeply embedded
cultural pattern.
In
predominantly white spaces, I have watched
Black people remain quiet while white
participants dominate the
discussion—sometimes without anyone
consciously intending to silence anybody.
Structures
matter.
Sometimes
equality requires more than announcing
that everyone is free to speak. It
requires recognizing that people entered
the room carrying different histories of
who was expected to speak and who was
expected to listen.
These
conversations also taught me another
lesson: difficult racial discussions do
not require cruelty.
We can be
direct without being gratuitously hurtful.
As I told
Eric, none of us created the society we
inherited.
But we
inherited responsibility for what happens
to it next.
Mann's
Challenge to White Progressives
Mann has
little patience for approaches that simply
shame white people.
His
method is more demanding.
He tries
to reach people who want to do the right
thing but may not yet understand what that
requires.
"You don’t
yell at them,” he said. Instead, the
challenge is something closer to:
Is
this how you want to end your
life—on the wrong side of
history? Don't you see what
Black people are asking you to
do? Come on. You're needed.
But you've got to change.
The
objective is not comfort.
"Your
existing consciousness is
unacceptable,” Mann said in describing
the argument. “I'm not here to make
you comfortable.”
But
discomfort has a purpose: transformation.
Movements
Need
Readers
One of
the most striking parts of our
conversation had nothing directly to do
with race.
It was
about reading.
"When we
started the Strategy Center, the
slogan was: ‘What are you reading?’”
Mann recalled.
Organizers
organized—but
they also studied.
They
read history, Marxism,feminism,
Black political thought and
international liberation
movements. They watched films.
They listened to music. They
debated theory.
Mann
worries that some contemporary organizing
has become narrower—that activists can
become extraordinarily skilled at
campaigns without developing a
sufficiently broad understanding of the
historical systems they are confronting.
He is now
working to strengthen book and film
programs around the Strategy Center for
precisely that reason.
Movements
cannot survive on outrage alone.
People
need intellectual tools that help them
recognize patterns across generations.
They need
history.
They need
theory.
And they
need places where ideas collide with
organizing experience.
"Changing
the
Country Is a Job”
Near the
end of our conversation, Mann returned to
something even more elemental: commitment.
"Changing
the country is a job,” he said.
Not a
hobby.
Not an
identity.
Not
something we announce through social
media.
Work.
That does
not mean people cannot have families,
careers, joy, rest or ordinary lives. But
durable political change has always
required people willing to devote
extraordinary amounts of time to building
organizations that may take years—or
generations—to bear fruit.
My
husband, Dick Price, joined the
conversation at that point.
For
years Dick and I have published
LA
Progressive every day. Even when
he underwent cancer treatment—37
rounds of chemotherapy and
radiation—he continued working
on the publication.
Eric
asked him why.
Dick's
answer was characteristically understated.
"I love
doing it,” he said. “It's my way to
contribute.”
That,
ultimately, may be the organizing lesson
beneath all the others.
There is
no shortcut around commitment.
Who is
missing from our movements?
Who is
speaking?
Who is
being heard?
Are
organizations changing their racial
composition without changing their
politics?
Are we
practicing solidarity, or benevolence?
Are we
building institutions strong enough to
survive disagreement?
And are
we willing to make anti-racism central
rather than ceremonial?
That
isn't the point.
The point
is to begin constructing the
relationships, political education and
organizing infrastructure that allow
people with different histories and
perspectives to keep working together.
Because
the Left does not simply need more people
who agree that racism is wrong.
It needs
organizations capable of understanding
what racial hierarchy does, how it divides
potential allies, how it reproduces
itself—and how a genuinely multiracial
movement can organize enough power to
overcome it.
That is a
much harder project.
It is
also the work.
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