Call to Creative (Critical) Thinkers and Warriors – Represent Our Resistance

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.

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.