Category: Subverting Empire

So Long

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A blast from the past from James Boggs (November 1963).

Now I did not come here to comfort you. I came here to disturb you. I did not come here to pacify you. I came here to antagonize you. I did not come here to talk to you about love. I came here to talk to you about conflict. I say this at the outset because the American people have lived for so long under the illusion that America is an exception to the deep crises that wreck other countries – that they are totally unprepared to face the brutish realities of the present crisis and the dangers that threaten them. The American people have lived so long with the myth that the United States is a Christian, capitalist, free democratic nation that we can do no wrong, that the question of what is right and wrong completely evades us.

The Salvation of Western Interests

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An excerpt from James Baldwin’s Open Letter to the Born Again (September 29, 1979).

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

A Revolution of Value

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An excerpt from Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own (2020).

In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe. I am aware that this is a radical, some may even say, dangerous claim. It amounts to “throwing away” a large portion of the country, many of whom are willing to defend their positions with violence. But we cannot give in to these people. We know what the result will be, and I cannot watch another generation of black children bear the burden of that choice…

Our task, then, is not to save Trump voters nor is it to demonize them. Our task is to work, with every ounce of passion and every drop of love we have, to make the kingdom new! The first step involves what I called…a “revolution of value.” This involves telling ourselves the truth about what we have done. It entails implementing policies that remedy generations of inequities based on the lie. It requires centering a set of values that holds every human being sacred. All of this will be made possible by grassroots movements that shift the center of gravity of our politics…Our task involves shaking loose the warm “swaddling clothes” that secure us in our prejudices and prevents us from confronting our fears. Our task means speaking truth to power and looking the darkness of our times squarely in the face without the security of legend or myth, and without the comforting idea that black people will save you.

The White Liberal

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Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to write a play produced on Broadway. After she became famous, she participated in a panel on race relations with black activists and white liberals. It was the mid-60’s and they were attempting to address the growing tension between the two groups.

As the Black freedom struggle moved to the streets, most of the white liberals pulled back their support. On the panel, Hansberry spoke plainly about their ultimate goal in gathering together: “We have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.”

Sixty years later, perhaps this task has gotten even more challenging. This is what the Black revolutionary Assata Shakur, writing from exile in Cuba, famously said about the situation.

Redemptive Solidarity

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An excerpt from an unpublished sermon of Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon at Faith + Work Firist Unitarian Church of Orange, NJ

When we attend to the tears of a grief-stricken activist, we enact the collective mourning work which transfigures into what Robert Sember names “redemptive solidarity.” The wrenching pain of mourning is the affective antechamber to the possibility of joy and collective forward motion. Our tears are the salt of history that leaven more human futures. Thus, what we at first cognize as interruptions to liberating works are the intervening enabling conditions for the materialization of our deepest desires for social and spiritual transformations. Sember alerts us to the alignment of the “poetry of feeling” and “immanent freedom”: they share a homeplace in the soul work that our times require.

The Same Struggle

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From Stefanie Fox, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace.

This election cycle suggested that the fight against fascism at home is separate from the fight against genocide abroad. But we know it is the same struggle. There is no way to fight for real, radical, multi-racial democracy in the U.S. without working toward Palestinian liberation. And there was no way to defeat MAGA in this election by fully writing off this movement and the needs of working people. It’s never been clearer that the survival of all of our communities is bound up together. Fighting for freedom for Palestinians is inseparable from the work of liberation everywhere, including for our immigrant, Black and brown, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, trans and queer communities here.



A Disposition of Collective Refusal

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An excerpt from a Biko Mandela Gray tweet yesterday. Gray is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at Syracuse University and the author of Black Like Matter (2022).

This is a moment to reflect. It is also a moment to unlearn American theology—by which I mean, it is a moment to absolve ourselves of the idea that presidents are salvific figures. They aren’t. To think this way is to embrace white supremacy.

Anarchy is the move now. And yes, that might include a certain kind of direct action. But more than this, anarchy is a disposition of collective refusal. It is a praxis of collective engagement that is indifferent to institutions and institutionality.

A Scalawag

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Highland County, Virginia

By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his weekly Substack newsletter

In the months after police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, I joined counter-protesters at the “White Lives Matter” rally in front of the pier in Huntington Beach, a former sundown town in Southern California. One of the white men who mattered was toting a two-story pole with three flags: the stars-and-stripes, the 18th century “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake and a “Trump 2020: No More Bullshit” banner. He wore a shirt that said, “I stand for the flag and kneel for the cross.”

As I digested his message, I scrolled through all the memory verses stored away in the recesses of my post-evangelical mind. The only passage in the bible that even remotely resembles kneeling for the cross is in the second chapter of Philippians.

The verse from Paul’s letter to a little house church in the Roman colony says that in the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is lord. Context matters. The passage subverts the patriotic supremacy of its day. Back then, every knee bowed to Caesar and every tongue confessed that Caesar was lord.

The first Christians pledged allegiance to Something Else.

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