When I think of the term “Black Radical Imagination,” I think of that
force that has kept Black folks not only alive physically, but able to
dream of new and better worlds while their bodies dwelled in hell. It is
the Black Radical Imagination that also gave our ancestors the
fortitude to pull those better worlds out of the ether and painstakingly
build them into our lived realities.
I also think about the responsibility, right, and privilege those who
came before us claimed for us to do the same, to envision new just
futures, and then do the hard work of bringing them into existence. We
can’t build what we cannot first imagine, and so our survival is our
Black Radical Imagination time traveling, bringing us the resistance of
the past, bringing us the brilliance of the future. As was said in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, we are the dreamer and the dream.
I just went over to swim laps in the city pool, restored and
rebuilt with donations from people in the community because the city has no
money for such endeavors. It’s a kind of privilege. It’s not a private club but
it does cost $4 to get in if you don’t pay for a whole summer pass. And how
many people have time to go to the pool in the middle of a weekday? I did it.
Aside from what I generally refer to as the disaster that is my professional
life, I do have more time off in the summer than some. But that’s not what I
want to say. What I want to say is that at the pool, in this small but racially
and economically diverse city, white and black adults swam laps and did water
aerobics. Mixed race families and white and black friends brought their white
and black kids to swim in the pool together. While swimming laps, random
thoughts running through my head, I remembered some moments during or after
Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter hit the national media when I realized how
insidious and aggressive racism still was in this country. Before that, I was
not naïve. I knew that racism was still pervasive, insidious, discriminatory, personal,
and woven into social structures in ways it seems all but impossible to tackle.
But when Obama and Hilary were fighting it out in the primaries all those years
ago, racism was quiet (violent and destructive but quiet, compared to now at
least); it seemed people knew what they couldn’t really say out loud even if
they believed hateful things. I remember thinking (and maybe reading) about how
it was still so acceptable to be aggressively sexist and misogynist (Hilary
haters have always been loud and awful) but that the racism was less overt.
Obama’s presidency and so many events that have happened since have uncovered
the reality of the racism that has always continued to exist. One might argue
that if one doesn’t say terrible things out loud, maybe it’s because to some
degree they know it’s wrong (wrong to think it as well as to say it out loud). But
instead it has become acceptable to say and think violently hateful things
against many groups of people of color. Maybe it’s good to realize this reality
so that we can no longer ignore it. But one also has to ask if the violence is
being perpetuated and the seeming cultural acceptability encourages more people
who wouldn’t have participated otherwise? (consider people following Trump and
attending rallies, for example, that they may not have otherwise). Recognizing
the reality is important, and then fighting against the perpetuation is even more
important.
Before I went to the pool, I had been reading up on the
news. Articles about the Democratic and Republican conventions. Articles about
Black Radical Art and Imagination. Commentary and thinking about Michelle
Obama, her speeches, her role over the past years. In her speech at the
convention she stated how notable it is that she and her kids wake up in the
White House, a place built by slaves, every day. That, at one time, was a
radical kind of future only dared to be envisioned by some. It’s now a reality.
We have made progress. And there’s further to go. As Naomi Klein writes toward
the end of This Changes Everything,
we have not finished what the end of slavery and Civil Rights started, because change
has not happened beyond the social and legal realms. Our economic system,
capitalism, perpetuates exploitation of the poor and people of color. It
legitimizes exploitation of natural resources, social and labor resources, and
devalues and destroys educational resources in order to keep people from
gaining intellectual and political power. It seems clear that the global system
of neoliberalism that we are now in functions via exploitation. Some wonder why
we don’t make changes that we know would work to level inequalities among
classes and colors of people. We have plenty of information and resources to
fix public schools, educate people so they can have better jobs, make college more
accessible, etc. etc. etc. It’s not a matter of knowing what would work. It’s a
matter of certain structures and entities deliberately standing in the way of
change that would lessen injustice and level equality.
This morning I was thinking, as I often do during political
seasons, that the two conventions symbolize this divide so clearly. The sets of
values that each represent seem so clear. The democrats are interested and invested
in people: jobs, education, healthcare, equal access to resources, cooperation,
community, racial/economic/social/gender/ability equality issues, etc. the
Republicans seem more interested in perpetuating myths about individual
achievement, creating a divisive atmosphere by telling people it’s OK to
discriminate, to be prejudiced against others who don’t look like you, to get
mad that people of color are taking all of the resources (which is not true) or
using that kind of excuse to point outward and hate/fear others. That
convention and it’s philosophies says that only certain people are allowed in
the clubhouse, and that if you are rich and successful you deserve it and don’t
have to think at all about others, and if you’re not rich it’s OK to blame
others for all of the problems in society. The Individual vs. Social divide
seems more apparent than ever and is so visually and rhetorically aggressive in
the two conventions: the predominantly white circus act of fear and hate that
was the Republican Convention, the visual diversity that better represents the
actual makeup of the country at the Democratic convention, tied with stories of
fighting for justice and equality for all people not just some… schmaltzy maybe,
but we’re also talking about real people who need jobs, who need access to
education, who need to feel safe from violent hate pointed at them just for
existing in the world.
I am white and relatively privileged, relatively safe from
fearing for my life when I drive a car or walk into a party store, but I have a
responsibility not to ignore the discriminations and inequalities that are
structured into many of the institutional fabrics of this country, and I am
responsible to actively work toward changing those systems to the extent of my
ability. MLK said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”
and at least some #BLM organizers
believe that “when black people get free everyone gets free.” We are all
victims of an oppressive system teaching some to hate and maim and others to
fear and struggle. We are in an especially strange moment with Trump at the
front of media attention and running for President. Is Trump a racist? It sure
looks and sounds that way, especially when you see
it in print in the words of Nicholas Kristof but importantly also is to recognize
the relation between the personal/individual and larger structural forces perpetuating,
sustaining, allowing these kinds of racist attitudes even in our contemporary
world. And then I read Black
Art Matters: A Roundtable On the Black Radical Imagination and remember to
think more about the relationship or potential for art and political/social change…
the need for art… the ability to recognize that the struggle happens across a
variety of fronts and platforms… there’s no one leader, voice, no one way or
solution. It’s about diversity in form as well as content. Or as Robin D.G.
Kelley explains:
Embracing, acting on, and furthering radical thought is
never cooptation. No one should have a copyright on a radical critique of the world
and visions of how to enact that critique. What we think of as the Black
Radical Imagination or the tradition has not only informed other struggles
–Palestinians, Egyptians, indigenous movements, movements across Latin America
and Asia, as well as “radical white folks,” but one must also acknowledge that
those movements elsewhere have informed what we think of as Black radical
movements and thought. I can’t go into it now, but it is hard to imagine T.
Thomas Fortune, Lucy Parsons, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney,
Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, etc., without Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci,
Trotsky, or Che Guevara, or Rimbaud, or M. N. Roy and Sen Katayama. Consider
George Jackson’s identification with Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qaseem’s “Enemy
of the Sun,” one of several poems he wrote out from a book he read in prison? A
book, incidentally, published by the Black run radical Drum and Spear Press out
of D.C.? None of this is cooptation. This is called solidarity.
There’s not enough time in the day or a life to read and do
and work toward change as a single individual. But one has a responsibility to
do what one can do. And change will come through the accumulation of voices,
practices, art, politics, pushing ideas and expectations to the limits of what
seems possible and then getting real people in numbers to join in the effort.
Imagination is about possibility. And it’s radical if it seeks to change
oppressive histories and practices into futures that perpetuate actual social
justice and the reality of cooperative diversity in communities everywhere.
