Complicated
Times, Complex Organizing: The Black Radical Congress at 10
By Dr. Rose Brewer, PhD
BlackCommentator.com
Editorial Board
June 20-22, 2008 will
mark the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Black Radical Congress.
Surely the St. Louis, Missouri event will be a time of sober reflection
and celebration, as well as one of vision and strategy. It has been
a tough ten years. Yet, the organization survives, while facing formidable
challenges. As movement-building energies emerge globally and within
the U.S., the BRC must take a hard look at its analytical and organizing
strategies, as well as new possibilities. As a decade of BRC struggle
attests: the hopes might be high but social transformation is neither
simple nor easy.
On the eve of the 10th
anniversary, as a founding member of the BRC, I know that the political
terrain we face is messy and difficult. Even more daunting, I know these
things to be true:
1. This
is a moment of rapacious transnational capital, of intense privatization
and the global exploitation of human and material resources. The Black
worlds of the U.S., Africa and the African Diaspora are in the vortex
of these realities, facing intense economic, political, and cultural
vulnerability.
2. It is a moment in
which wealth is extremely concentrated within the U.S. and globally.
The rich, indeed, have gotten much richer. It is also a moment of
complicated racial/ethnic realities and gender divides. The immigration
issue looms large in the context of the need to build alliances.
3. It
is also a moment of talk-speak, act up, youth in resistance- youth and
not so young taking to the streets: Atlanta, GA for the first ever USSF,
fighting for Katrina survivors and the right to return, confronting
the murder of Sean Bell and the police face of state terrorism, facing
new images of nooses. Indeed, tens of thousands demand redress, accountability.
How to make common cause with the newly mobilized yet participate in
deeper level movement building must be on the BRC radar.
4. It is a gendered
moment - with Black women and women all over the world too often exploited
and impoverished - the U.S. no exception. These global realities have
different gendered consequences for men and women. Nonetheless if
we lift up women, women are taking charge, claiming leadership and
organizing for social change. We represent a tidewater
of movement building possibilities. Thus the next decade of the BRC
demands nothing less than a reaffirmation of our radical Black feminist
roots, actually building radical Black feminist sensibilities within
our communities. This is an imperative but unfinished agenda.
Concrete and immediate
issues that need to be addressed within the BRC include:
1. Reassessing
leadership within the organization and taking seriously the push for
decentralized models (popular in youth organizing) that have not sought
to invest a lot of leadership responsibility in a few key individuals
is key.
2. Strengthening the
on-line innovations the BRC pioneered with internet organizing, but
stepping up even more to the use of the internet to inform publicize,
mobilize, and analyze, to complement but not replace face to face
organizing is required.
3. Building
a new commitment to the arts and creative action as well as popular
and political education are in order. These have been missing pieces
in the work of the BRC during the past decade.
4. Giving visibility
to the environment in our political work must be considered. Indeed,
a new generation of younger Black activists has introduced important
discourses and actions on the environment and the consequences of
environmental racism for our people. Van Jones and the work of the
Ella Baker Center in Oakland come to mind as does Majora
Carter’s work with Sustainable South Bronx in N.Y. This environmental
issue was never fully vetted in the formation of the BRC. The next
10 years will demand it.
These are only a few
of the concerns core to the strategies and visions to be reflected upon
in ST. Louis, June 20-22. Come and give your voices and energies to
shaping the next decade of the Black Radical Congress.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Dr. Rose Brewer, PhD, is a professor of African
American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She is alsoa founding
member and leader of the Black Radical Congress. Her most recent book is the co-authored,
The
Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide,
The New Press, 2006.Click here
to contact Dr. Brewer.
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