Intro to Capitalism & Black Liberation Struggle

My Mindset
Just for context: I came into this session feeling super hectic. I had spent the morning in a harm reduction/conflict resolution training at my house, which I hadn't exactly known about or planned for. But it was fun & useful (although it also, totally surprisingly to me, spark an emotional journey over the next few days into looking at the violence in my childhood.) Then I needed to make food for the session, and figure out how to transport it, and squeeze in a phone date that I had been looking forward to being long and leisurely, but in the end I just felt rushed. So that's how I walked into session. I only had a brief moment of that Sunday afternoon emotional vulnerability that has characterized my entering of the Braden program room.

Black Liberation
Anyways, this week we were looking into slavery, capitalism, and the struggle for black liberation. I, for one, when I hear of the "Black Liberation Struggle" tend to think narrowly just of the 60s' civil rights and black power movements. The readings, and the workshop with guest presenter Akua Jackson, really reminded me that the struggle started the day Africans began being taken as slaves, and continues today. It's all been about black liberation.

Slave Resistance
The readings illustrated the continuous acts of individual and group rebellion during slave times, often remembered only for a couple of revolts and runaways. It specifically talked of maroon communities, which often included native and poor whites alongside runaway slaves - communities which not only served their own needs for freedom, but acted as beacons of hopes, inspiration, and encouragement for slaves (and thus threatening to the slave-based economic system and white supremacy), as well as actively working to free other slaves and destroy oppressors.

There was an awesome poem, "a raging of tears" by ewuare osayande that really put the post-katrina disaster side by side with slavery. I know this connection has often been made, but this poem helped me identify just how closely the lived experience was.


Ideology of Inferiority
One of the hardest things to wrap my mind around, was really how did people ACTUALLY BELIEVE that a certain group of people, in this case Africans or Native Americans, were truly designed to be treated as animals and held violently as slaves. This is key. People really believed that blacks were created to be exploited. That is how "good" people could do such brutal things to another group of people. Blacks had to write manifestos, using the language of the American Revolution, saying that they had the same faculties as white men and the Creator, that there was no reason to believe they were morally destined to be slaves. Whites were shocked and confused about why Africans were rebelling, why they were fighting so hard for their freedom. Where did this ideology come from???

We also looked at different leaders of black liberation and evaluated their approaches and historical contexts: from integrationism, cultural nationalism, militant separatism, and Back-to-Africa-ism.

Capitalism
The readings on capitalism felt blaise to me, I guess because I know a lot of this theory, and also somehow that I kind of turn off whenever Marxist theory is discussed. Communism/Marxism/Leninism seems so stuffy and male and white, so academic, I can't take it. I don't know if that's fair of me, but that's how it is. Even Marx himself said he is "no Marxist." Anyways, I would to like to hear about Marx's theories from a woman of color, maybe she'd be able to spin it in a more palatable light. Curious as to how communities of color see those theories/theorists.

In session, our talks were more productive. I realized that for USAmerikans, capitalism is so normalized, I can't even really conceive of another economic system. One friend, who recently visited Cuba, said that it was the first time that she was able to see capitalism, how it infected every way we relate to ourselves and each other. Maybe I've had that experience, but I feel pretty infected by capitalism and unable to see another way (other than some airy theory). Like one thought, when we spoke briefly of people fighting for the Americans with Disabilities Act, about how I think, of course, if someone physically can't work, it makes sense that they can't get a job. But how do I envision them supporting themselves/being supported? Do I think that disabled people don't deserve to live? No, but capitalism doesn't really leave a plan for incorporating people who can't work a job, including elderly, diabled, and homeless. Another way of thinking would have a plan (or so I'd like to think). State violence (e.g. police) often gets used to extract work and wealth out of unwilling/unable people (turning homeless/jobless folks into prisoners, who either work in the prison labor system, or provide jobs to guards and prison staff.)

Connections
General things that stood out for me in session:

• Whites had to learn how to become slaveowners. Willie Lynch (where the term "lynching" came from), came over and gave workshops on how to "break" a slave using the same strategies as "breaking in" a horse.
• When slavery was abolished, it specifically excepted convict labor. I knew this, and I knew prisons were the mutation of the slavery system, but I really didn't think about how explicitly this was legally created. I really want to learn more about prison labor within Florida. For my jail zine, I tried to do some research on that, but it was hard to find (and I wasn't that dedicated at the time.)
  
• That the May Day immigrant marches of 2006, which was an amazing day in Lake Worth, saw the largest number of people take to the streets in protest across the United States ever. The numbers of people in Lake Worth were certainly unbelievable, but I didn't know how special it was nationwide.
• That housework is so often depicted (in actual visual imagery as well as theoretically) as the realm of white women, (certainly visioned as so by middle class white feminists in their struggle), but the reality is that women of color do the majority of housework in this country.
• That at some point of time, there was an idea of a "family wage" which took into account that an entire family needed income, not just the individual worker. This didn't necessarily seek to pay women for their work, but somehow backhandedly it acknowledges that women were doing necessary work in support of the male worker, and the wage needed to cover everyone's financial needs.
• The idea of the underclass as a necessary element of society - that capitalism wouldn't function without an underclass of desperate workers keeping wages low- yes, i've known that part. But that industry wouldn't be able to pollute and destroy the earth without that same underclass, was a new spin. It is only because there are oppressed people whose land can be stolen, abused, dumped on, and polluted without political repercussion, that we have been able to enter ecological crisis.
  

Well, I think that gets at a lot of what I took.