Recall with Malcolm a people who toiled generation after generation on this land for the organized thievery of landlords, merchants, and politicians, “in cahoots with the landlords and the merchants.” Many of us transformed ourselves into the people of Moses, collectively, subversively, transgressing against the might of Pharaoh. Hear Robeson sing it! Still for others, the role of warrior was more defiant, more audacious if not perilous.  Descendents of creative (critical) thinkers and warriors of strategies and tactics in the struggle for human rights in the U.S., we have witnessed what John Henrik Clarke calls the “greatest single crime ever committed against a people in world history” ignored. Now we face the “most tragic act of protracted genocide.” 

History calls upon us to question our condition in its totality to work in the process of radically transforming this society (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Critical Perspectives Series)). As we act toward the realization that work is required of us to fight against corporate imperialism, we act knowing that our work has always been the most subversive work ever done in U.S.  As subversive workers, we’ve defied the laws and many federal, state, and privatized “task forces.” We’ve made homes of shacks.  We’ve nourished our children, our community, from the Earth.  We’ve endured torture and brutality.  We’ve risked our lives and gave up lives. 

As bell hooks writes, we are a people who sustained the trauma of losing our leaders (Salvation: Black People and Love).  And we had little time to heal from these wounds when, sometime in 1980, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the American public allowed itself to be absorbed by pods! Worse, the Black privileged class abandoned the ship just when the boat needed rocking! They opted to die as a people! They swiftly “assimilation into the values of the dominant white mainstream,” writes hooks.  Black elite’s abandonment represented “an unprecedented context for collusion in their own oppression and exploitation.” Most important, this defection permitted the takeover of “poor black communities by a drug economy.” The war on drugs has been the domestic version of “shock and awe” for Black Americans.  The media went to work pitting privileged Blacks against the masses while people, following in the footsteps of Sojourner Truth, spoke out against the injustice, were singled out as she was for being, Peterson writes, a “crazy, ignorant, repelling” Black person. In the white backlash, Black consciousness-please-go-away era, our work now is more difficult and no less subversive than at any time in our past. 

The Founding Fathers' notion of “freedom” and “democracy,” already questionable as these terms excluded the enslaved Blacks, the poor, the lower-working class, and women, receives a face-lift every Republicrat administration in order to justify everything from pre-emptive wars to domestic spying (extended to all Americans now) for corporate interests. Carla L. Peterson reminds us that it was Sojourner Truth’s work not only to give “testimony on the state of the nation” but also to question and to “reconceptualize” notions of freedom, democracy, and, in particular the notion of the “brave.” She was particular keen on reaching audiences of the “brave.” And, of course, there’s good reason to reach the audience of the brave then and now. The brave aren’t fearful of the conclusions they reach as a result of questioning the Black condition in America.  Truth wasn’t looking for appeasers; she was seeking creative thinkers and warriors - doers of the word.  And the word in this crucial moment is - Movement! 

We didn’t wait for saviors, appointments, metals, or titles.  We sang in “personal protest” with Billie Holiday (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday) against the concrete racial injustice evident in hanging Black bodies.  Billie wasn’t a defector or an appeaser. On the contrary, she was a creative (critical) thinker.  I think of Ella Baker, described as “being tough and confrontational if she had to be” (Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Gender and American Culture)). “Baker’s struggle against racism was as much about standing up for herself as it was about lending her strength to struggles initiated on behalf of others.”  I can’t see an appeaser in Baker, the warrior.  We need to pick up the mantle from these America’s brave freedom fighters and resume the peoples’ protest movement, apart from the Republicrats and their corporate imperialist partners. 

We are creative (critical) thinkers, warriors, militants, about the work of saving ourselves (and through us, the country) before we have reached a point of no return. With all that we, as Black Americans, have endured; our best work is yet to come.  We, who are creative (critical) thinkers and warriors - revolutionaries, are in need of our Clearing, our space of protest organizing in living rooms, community centers, prisons, schools, and churches. Our voices should speak of “resistance, indignation, the just anger of those who are deceived and betrayed.” Our voices should speak, too, “of their right to rebel against the ethical transgressions of which they are the long-suffering victims.” This is our Freire speaking!

“Whoever is engaged in ‘right thinking’ knows only too well that words not given body (made flesh) have little or no value,” warns Freire. If our work is one of personal protest with the struggle of the oppressed against corporate imperialist values, then we will know it’s “right thinking” and aligned with the agenda of the Clearing (the genesis of our past movements).  It was forward and progressive, and we know this because, to use Peterson’s words, our work has always been “structured not according to a capitalist economy of exchange.” Nor did our work leave unquestioned the “hierarchies of class, race, and gender.”

Like Malcolm, assassinated 43 years ago, we are the Left in rage with the status quo.  If this is subversive, so be it! The work of a brave movement to transform the imperialist world order requires that we denounce the “process of dehumanization,” as Freire tells us, and announce “the dream of a new society.”

In the finally analysis, it’s ridiculous to speak of a dream without recognizing the conditions of the masses of people. A dream consists of what? The dream is always the dream of the people for an end to injustice and inequality - or what else is it? More to the point, whose dream is it?  Who will benefit from all this dreaming outside the peoples’ movement?

I think it’s more of that pod business.  Watch you don’t sleep and awake to a nightmare!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.