Note:
BlackCommentator.com is pleased to welcome Wilson Riles
as a columnist.� His work will appear on a regular basis.
Political movements and more narrowly targeted social change
projects go through relatively natural evolutions. These
dynamics vary depending on the depth of fundamental
change sought, the skills and resources available to
all sides, the available communications technology including
language facility, the social-change-history of the
community of concern, and the context and social psychological
environment of the contemporaneous time. These are many
and powerful variables; they can mask the similarities
that might otherwise be visible in the dynamics of social
change.
When
the 99% �leans forward� from multiple circumstances
while being open to our multiple identities by offering
solidarity to those pushing against inequity from one
or more of their circumstances that we understand, we
will all progress.
Perceived scarcity of resources (whether real or imagined)
and cultural conflicts are most often the crux of political
struggles. Continuous generosity and continuous equity
or continuous inequity internal
to community rarely erupts into significant political
struggle. If folks believe that things are as they have
been and as they always will be, folks rarely struggle
for change. Cultures rationalize, teach, and massively
maintain the status quo.� Even when alternative view
points and understandings appear on the scene, most
are slow to penetrate individual and/or community consciousness.
New patterns of thought are often derived from cultural
contexts that are so different�that how they would fit
in the present context is very difficult to decipher.
That is the way our minds and hearts work; we are in
many ways inseparable from culture and community [in
the broadest sense]. �No man is an island.� No person
is truly an independent individual.
Our emotional �buttons� have been tuned and connected to
the �strings� of existent culture.� We are praised for
our loyalty and service; we are given authority and
a tiny slice of resources above that of others; we may
be promised greater equity and inclusion some day if
we are �good;� we have generally learned to accept the
ongoing cultural rationalization for our inequitable
circumstances. Almost always we fear the ambiguity and
mystery of new unknown circumstances where there is,
also, no guarantee of improvement. We have little direct
experience of a better situation actually working out.
These thoughts and behaviors are natural and rational.
In the history of political struggles, change agents are
frequently rejected insiders, outsiders, and/or the
children of the elite. Outsiders can bring a compelling
alternative vision and examples of different structures
and different intra-community relationships that are
said to work. The rejected and the elite�s children
generally move from a more individual, personal centered
core. All human youth go through a largely natural phase
of human maturation that is characterized by juvenile
efforts to push conventional boundaries and rebel from
parental restrictions (except where this is mitigated
by rites of passage ceremonies).� Participants
in movements led by outsiders and youth are seduced
into a �trust the leadership� scenario which is little
different from the subservient positions they want to
escape. Such groups tend to be cultish and authoritarian.
Movements internal to the community and led by consensually
derived goals and tactics which have been internalized
by most participants are more sustainable. This community
centered dynamic is the insight and importance of Paulo
Freire�s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed.
In
the history of political struggles, change agents are
frequently rejected insiders, outsiders, and/or the
children of the elite.
Like the Civil Rights Movement, most movements start out
with the goal of equitable acceptance into the current
structure � integration without fundamental change.
Often this slides into substituting another group into
the subservient role and applying or switching the rationalization
or intensifying the rationalization for inequity onto
the new subservient group. Because of the �mark of Cane�
� indelible dark skin � this phenomenon has never worked
for blacks. It did work for the Irish, the Italians,
the Catholics, and others to the extent they were willing
to relinquish most of their cultural markers and to
the extent that they accepted the rationalization for
continued forms of inequity toward others. This is a
dynamic process in the women�s movement where integration
into the power elite for some has led to continued inequity
for mostly women of color. The LGBT movement lingers
in the phase where integration without fundamental change
is sought. Latinos are being thrust into a caste system
by being marked with an illegal alien identity classification.
This effort is attempting to substitute de jure
designations for de facto skin color designations
with similar rationalizations for inequity. Blacks preceded
Latinos in a similar fashion. The African American civil
rights struggle stalled when confronted with economic
inequity and the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr.; we are being confronted with a �wholesale� re-designation
into the criminal complex caste � huge numbers of mostly
black males are marked at their times of youthful-rebellion
with a criminal record specifying lifelong classification
as a target for inequity. [Blacks can no longer avoid
taking on the fundamental economic questions that maintain
US racist society.]
Humans have multiple identities contained in one person.
We have gender, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
and social economic and generational identities among
many more. The movement politics and/or political projects
associated with each of these identities are at various
stages of development and unfolding. One aspect of our
being may experience partial positive integration into
the status quo society while another aspect may be generally
rejected. Modern movements are fractured, twisted, and
isolated by the swirling vagaries of the different movements
with which we are associated. We are confronted with
being against militarism while supporting the right
of gays to serve in the military. We can deeply experience
the distastefulness of historical and contemporary occupations
while embracing �the occupy movement.� We are grateful
that unions contribute big campaign money to politicians
� barely holding a small corner in comparison to big
corporations � but still oppose the buying and selling
of our elections. The moral certainty of our political
positions are compromised and complicated; it is hard
to find the emotional power of righteousness (community
supported righteousness) some have experienced in the
past.� We mistake the emotion of �unit� camaraderie
for community righteousness.
We can bring this power of community back if we all �lean
forward� together, now. We all need to �lean forward�
against the inequity that is salient for us. When the
99% �leans forward� from multiple circumstances while
being open to our multiple identities by offering solidarity
to those pushing against inequity from one or more of
their circumstances that we understand, we will all
progress.
�No
man is an island.� No person is truly an independent
individual.
The 1% cannot stand because they depend on our un-harmonized
fractured personalities, our juvenile reactionary habits,
our emotional buttons, our ignorance, and our lack of
imagination. When we turn our attention and behavior
towards supporting greater equity for everybody, the
1% will be carried along but no longer setting the framing
from �above.� There will be no �above.� Know that social
change is �a path� not a destination. For the sake of
community health and personal sanity, know what some
of us have learned: constantly lean forward except for
those instances when we must stop to breathe, research,
and reflect to throw off the inhibitory cultural memes
of the imperialist cultures of the past. We can find
the where-with-all by rediscovering the cultural memes
from harmonious egalitarian traditional societies and
by building new cultural memes that offer equity for
all � for the whole of who we are and for the human
community in total. This is the meaning of decolonize.
Lean forward.
For
Mr. Riles, the following is an explanation of the meaning
of the Swahili term �Nafsi ya Jamii":
