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":
