Fluent Essays

First, summarize readings 15 and 16 and the documentary Whose streets? by paying special attention to the main arguments. Then, I want you to answer two questions: (1) What are some of the connections that are evident between anti-Indian racism and anti-Blackness and what may be some of the differences? (2) Of the 21 affirmations that the authors identify, take up at least two and show how you can implement them or work for them in the context of your own life. Note that all affirmations may not apply to you based on your identity. So choose the ones that do. I am looking for real strategies that can be used to implement them. Please ask at least one question pertaining to the material. post should be at least 250 words. https://youtu.be/ocMoJHor-TY Decolonization:  Indigeneity,  Education  &  Society   Vol.  1,    No.  1,    2012,      pp.  1-­‐40     2012 E. Tuck & K.W. Yang This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), permitting all non- commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.   Decolonization is not a metaphor   Eve Tuck State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego Abstract Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non- white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space- place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances. Keywords: decolonization, settler colonialism, settler moves to innocence, incommensurability, Indigenous land, decolonizing education 2        E.  Tuck  &  K.W.  Yang         Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. -Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36 Let us admit it, the settler knows perfectly well that no phraseology can be a substitute for reality. -Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 45 Introduction   For the past several years we have been working, in our writing and teaching, to bring attention to how settler colonialism has shaped schooling and educational research in the United States and other settler colonial nation-states. These are two distinct but overlapping tasks, the first concerned with how the invisibilized dynamics of settler colonialism mark the organization, governance, curricula, and assessment of compulsory learning, the other concerned with how settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives - repackaged as data and findings - are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures. We are doing this work alongside many others who - somewhat relentlessly, in writings, meetings, courses, and activism - don’t allow the real and symbolic violences of settler colonialism to be overlooked. Alongside this work, we have been thinking about what decolonization means, what it wants and requires. One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice. Settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights based terms, seemingly to signal both an awareness of the significance of Indigenous and decolonizing theorizations of schooling and educational research, and to include Indigenous peoples on the list of considerations - as an additional special (ethnic) group or class. At a conference on educational research, it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or “decolonize student thinking.” Yet, we have observed a startling number of these discussions make no mention of Indigenous Decolonization  is  not  a  metaphor    3       peoples, our/their1 struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization. Further, there is often little recognition given to the immediate context of settler colonialism on the North American lands where many of these conferences take place. Of course, dressing up in the language of decolonization is not as offensive as “Navajo print” underwear sold at a clothing chain store (Gaynor, 2012) and other appropriations of Indigenous cultures and materials that occur so frequently. Yet, this kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it recapitulates dominant theories of social change. On the occasion of the inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, we want to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym. Our goal in this essay is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization - what is unsettling and what should be unsettling. Clearly, we are advocates for the analysis of settler colonialism within education and education research and we position the work of Indigenous thinkers as central in unlocking the confounding aspects of public schooling. We, at least in part, want others to join us in these efforts, so that settler colonial structuring and Indigenous critiques of that structuring are no longer rendered invisible. Yet, this joining cannot be too easy, too open, too settled. Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict. There are parts of the decolonization project that are not easily absorbed by human rights or civil rights based approaches to educational equity. In this essay, we think about what decolonization wants. There is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples making moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization. The too-easy adoption of decolonizing discourse (making decolonization a metaphor) is just one part of that history and it taps into pre-existing tropes that get in the way of more meaningful potential alliances. We think of the enactment of these tropes as a series of moves to innocence (Malwhinney, 1998), which problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. Here, to explain why decolonization is and requires more than a metaphor, we discuss some of these moves to innocence:                                                                                                                           1 As an Indigenous scholar and a settler/trespasser/scholar writing together, we have used forward slashes to reflect our discrepant positionings in our pronouns throughout this essay.   http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/29/us-navajo-urbanoutfitters-idUSTRE81S2IT20120229#http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/29/us-navajo-urbanoutfitters-idUSTRE81S2IT20120229 4        E.  Tuck  &  K.W.  Yang         i. Settler nativism ii. Fantasizing adoption iii. Colonial equivocation iv. Conscientization v. At risk-ing / Asterisk-ing Indigenous peoples vi. Re-occupation and urban homesteading Such moves ultimately represent settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation. Actually, we argue, attending to what is irreconcilable within settler colonial relations and what is incommensurable between decolonizing projects and other social justice projects will help to reduce the frustration of attempts at solidarity; but the attention won’t get anyone off the hook from the hard, unsettling work of decolonization. Thus, we also include a discussion of interruptions that unsettle innocence and recognize incommensurability. The  set  of  settler  colonial  relations   Generally speaking, postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality attend to two forms of colonialism2. External colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first world. This includes so-thought ‘historic’ examples such as opium, spices, tea, sugar, and tobacco, the extraction of which continues to fuel colonial efforts. This form of colonialism also includes the feeding of contemporary appetites for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material, cadmium and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External colonialism often requires a subset of activities properly called military colonialism - the creation of war fronts/frontiers against enemies to be conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into military operations. In external colonialism, all things Native become recast as ‘natural resources’ - bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel. The other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality is internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of                                                                                                                           2 Colonialism is not just a symptom of capitalism. Socialist and communist empires have also been settler empires (e.g. Chinese colonialism in Tibet). “In other words,” writes Sandy Grande, “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all” (2004, p.27). Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects. Racism is an invention of colonialism (Silva, 2007). The current colonial era goes back to 1492, when colonial imaginary goes global.   Decolonization  is  not  a  metaphor    5       particularized modes of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white3 elite. These modes of control, imprisonment, and involuntary transport of the human beings across borders - ghettos, their policing, their economic divestiture, and their dislocatability - are at work to authorize the metropole and conscribe her periphery. Strategies of internal colonialism, such as segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization, are both structural and interpersonal. Our intention in this descriptive exercise is not be exhaustive, or even inarguable; instead, we wish to emphasize that (a) decolonization will take a different shape in each of these contexts - though they can overlap4 - and that (b) neither external nor internal colonialism adequately describe the form of colonialism which operates in the United States or other nation-states in which the colonizer comes to stay. Settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony. For example, in the United States, many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their homelands onto reservations, indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the form of colonization as simultaneously internal (via boarding schools and other biopolitical modes of control) and external (via uranium mining on Indigenous land in the US Southwest and oil extraction on Indigenous land in Alaska) with a frontier (the US military still nicknames all enemy territory “Indian Country”). The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments. Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain. Thus, relying solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of coloniality that ignore settler colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization must take in settler colonial contexts. Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage.                                                                                                                           3 In using terms as “white” and “whiteness”, we are acknowledging that whiteness extends beyond phenotype.   4 We don’t treat internal/external as a taxonomy of colonialisms. They describe two operative modes of colonialism. The modes can overlap, reinforce, and contradict one another, and do so through particular legal, social, economic and political processes that are context specific.   6        E.  Tuck  &  K.W.  Yang         In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there. Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts (Tuck and Ree, forthcoming). At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel slaves5, whose bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the slave’s person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land, the slave’s very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror. The settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as holding dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups or species. The settler is making a new home and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because civilization is defined as production in excess of the natural world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world). In order for excess production, he needs excess labor, which he cannot provide himself. The chattel slave serves as that excess labor, labor that can never be paid because payment would have to be in the form of property (land). The settlers wealth is land, or a fungible version of it, and so payment for labor is impossible.6 The settler positions himself as both superior and normal; the settler is natural, whereas the Indigenous inhabitant and the chattel slave are unnatural, even supernatural. Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous                                                                                                                           5 As observed by Erica Neeganagwedgin (2012), these two groups are not always distinct. Neeganagwedgin presents a history of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in Canada as chattel slaves. In California, Mexico, and the U.S. Southwest under the Spanish mission system, Indigenous people were removed from their land and also made into chattel slaves. Under U.S. colonization, California law stipulated that Indians could be murdered and/or indentured by any “person” (white, propertied, citizen). These laws remained in effect until 1937.   6 See Kate McCoy (forthcoming) on settler crises in early Jamestown, Virginia to pay indentured European labor with land.   santhoshchandrashekar Highlight Decolonization  is  not  a  metaphor    7       laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations (See also A.J. Barker, 2009). Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as an empire - utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization simultaneous to the settler colonial project. This means, and this is perplexing to some, that dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous land through other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include enslavement, as discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-wage labor recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn by U.S. wars or devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces. Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of imperial wealth by the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing imperial wealth is inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion. Likewise, the promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated ‘third-world’ wealth). Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features of settler colonialism in the US context - empire, settlement, and internal colony - make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires7. Decolonization as metaphor allows people to equivocate these contradictory decolonial desires because it turns decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track towards liberation. In reality, the tracks walk all over land/people in settler contexts. Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity. “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone.                                                                                                                           7 Decolonization is further fraught because, although the setter-native-slave triad structures settler colonialism, this does not mean that settler, native, and slave are analogs that can be used to describe corresponding identities, structural locations, worldviews, and behaviors. Nor do they mutually constitute one another. For example, Indigenous is an identity independent of the triad, and also an ascribed structural location within the triad. Chattel slave is an ascribed structural position, but not an identity. Settler describes a set of behaviors, as well as a structural location, but is eschewed as an identity. 8        E.  Tuck  &  K.W.  Yang         Playing  Indian  and  the  erasure  of  Indigenous  peoples   Recently in a symposium on the significance of Liberal Arts education in the United States, Eve presented an argument that Liberal Arts education has historically excluded any attention to or analysis of settler colonialism. This, Eve posited, makes Liberal Arts education complicit in the project of settler colonialism and, more so, has rendered the truer project of Liberal Arts education something like trying to make the settler indigenous to the land he occupies. The attendees were titillated by this idea, nodding and murmuring in approval and it was then that Eve realized that she was trying to say something incommensurable with what they expected her to say. She was completely misunderstood. Many in the audience heard this observation: that the work of Liberal Arts education is in part to teach settlers to be indigenous, as something admirable, worthwhile, something wholesome, not as a problematic point of evidence about the reach of the settler colonial erasure. Philip Deloria (1998) explores how and why the settler wants to be made indigenous, even if only through disguise, or other forms of playing Indian. Playing Indian is a powerful U.S. pastime, from the Boston Tea Party, to fraternal organizations, to new age trends, to even those aforementioned Native print underwear. Deloria maintains that, “From the colonial period to the present, the Indian has skulked in and out of the most important stories various Americans have told about themselves” (p. 5). The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants. (Deloria, 1998, p.5) L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz) famously asserted in 1890 that the safety of white settlers was only guaranteed by the “total annihilation of the few remaining Indians” (as quoted in Hastings, 2007). D.H. Lawrence, reading James Fenimore Cooper (discussed at length later in this article), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and others for his Studies in Classic American Literature (1924), describes Americans’ fascination with Indigeneity as one of simultaneous desire and repulsion (Deloria, 1998). “No place,” Lawrence observed, “exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until the old … 6 Twenty-One Affirmations for the Twenty-First Century When we wrap up a semester-long course on race-related issues, we frequently find that our students feel a bit overwhelmed by all that they have learned. Most are so troubled by the extent to which structural racism pervades US society that they feel almost paralyzed. They want to be part of the solution, but they don’t know where to begin. Before closing, we offer instructive encouragement and some final food for thought to help you grow the movement for racial equality. — 1. We Are Leaderful The contemporary Movement for Black Lives has been critiqued as leaderless and thus unorganized and unsustainable. These critics are missing the mark on more than one account. First, movements of the people are built on and sustained by collective activity. Movements are not like group projects at your school or job, where “the work can still get done” by one ardent member while others slack off. This movement will be sustainable so long as a critical mass of people come together in any variety of ways to publicly advocate for the value of Black life. Second, we’ve been hearing since at least the 2003 protests against the US invasion of Iraq that movements were starting to look disorganized because seemingly disparate issues would take the stage together at a single event. That is, at an antiwar march, we might have seen environmental conservationists critique the United States’ dependence on oil alongside socialists castigating Halliburton and other corporations for making money off noncompetitive wartime contracts. What some people fail to understand is that social movements are rarely, if ever, focused on one single issue or goal. What may be different in contemporary social movements is the conscious strategy to publicly articulate the connections among racism, patriarchy, disregard for the planet, capitalism, and the industrial complexes of prison and war. The willingness to incorporate these strands into a narrative for social change is in no small part due to the growing resonance of the politics of intersectionality. These movements are not unorganized because there is more than one message; on the contrary, the multiplicity of messages is what is being organized. The politics of intersectionality does not compel one to discipline speech or behavior so that only one issue gets addressed at a time. One is instead disciplining oneself to be mindful of the “matrix of domination”1 and to keep that mentality when countering police brutality, gentrification, and budget cuts to subsidized school lunch programs. Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Lastly, there is no one way to lead; we must dispel this myth. Not every leader is an orator or a natural in front of the camera. Leaders are people who motivate, who organize, and who do grunt work so that collective activity has momentum. Leaders make contributions and share ideas. Dependence on the presence of charismatic figures subliminally suggests that there are few leaders among us, but this is not true. The misguided belief that leadership is scarce entrenches elite representatives who either are addicted to power and looking for any justification to continue to wield power or would like to walk away from power but are afraid that their efforts and accomplishments will be squandered if no one steps up to shepherd them to the next level. We can teach children how to be leaders, and we can mentor adults to become more influential and cooperative. One of the most important things we can do as leaders to ensure the progression of this social movement is to train the next generation and follow confidently behind. Children out front, 2006 Chicago May Day March / Day Without an Immigrant. (Photo by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi) — 2. Racism Is Tyrannical, and Democracy Is Fragile Democracy is a radical concept because it asserts that we are all entitled and expected to participate in governance. This precious idea, that every person should have a voice in the political sphere, took millennia to cultivate. The United States of America, however, only became a robust democracy in 1965, when the federal government began to actively enforce Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . the law of the land through the Voting Rights Act. This policy called for almost every adult citizen, regardless of race, to exercise the right to vote as guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment, which was written into the Constitution ninety-five years earlier. Up until that time, white supremacists at the state and local levels resisted the extension of the franchise to African Americans at every turn. Their idea of democracy was a herrenvolk democracy,2 one in which the population is stratified, with only the white majority treated as “equals,” and everyone else excluded from participating in a government of self-rule. Nevertheless, people of color resisted and taught the next generation to believe in and act on their natural right to be counted alongside everyone else. Democracy is also very fragile. When we form majorities and coalitions, it is often our inclination to make decisions that are best for those who are on our team, but this cannot come at the expense of oppressing others. As we write, we are troubled by the idea that this country is slipping toward new iterations of herrenvolk democracy. Indeed, the Noble Prize– winning economist Paul Krugman declared that it is not “economic anxiety” that poses the greatest threat to US democracy today; it’s “white nationalism run wild.”3 If the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency is not evidence enough for you, consider the efforts of many state legislatures to further disenfranchise citizens of color now that an important feature of the Voting Rights Act has been eliminated. We must resist this inclination and instead find ways to make decisions that neither infringe on the rights of others nor require us to make compromises that undermine the creation of a more equitable society. — 3. Progress Is Not Inevitable Frederick Douglass famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”4 These are the words spoken by someone who intimately knew the culture of white supremacy against which he advocated the freedom and franchise of Black people and women of all races. Relatedly, people often point to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assertion, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”5 When people today echo this part of his speech, it concerns us that they interpret it to mean that progress is inevitable and guided by providence but that the speed at which it progresses depends on the push of human agency. This may very well be what he wanted us all to hear. But when we listen to his speeches, we imagine something else: a man galvanizing the spirit of social justice because he believes that the free will and conduct of women and men is what makes our world a moral one and that our human souls are capable of such good things. King, Douglass, and many other egalitarians were passionate about getting people activated for social justice because they believed work and commitment over time were necessary ingredients of social change. (Even physicists have shown that power = energy/time.) They did not trust that the momentum of any one era would carry on to the next or that the agenda of one administration would proceed naturally to some next coherent step. (Physicists also remind us of inertia.) Waiting around for white supremacists and their acquiescent partners to change their mind was not acceptable. There was no “right time”— Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . they made their own time. This is our time to push for new ways of valuing one another, for investing in one another, and for being more humane with one another. There will never be a time riper than right now. — 4. We Don’t Need to Be Perfect. We Need to Be Political. For unfortunate reasons, antihegemonic movements in the United States tend to center their campaign for rights and equality around people who they believe are virtuously above reproach. Granted, this strategy has afforded different movements some successes, but it has consistently left those who are considered “deviant” at the margins of society. This movement is our opportunity to change this unreasonable standard. We are not perfect, and we should not have to be perfect in order to have our basic rights recognized. People of color and poor whites are often expected to conform to middle-class white norms in order to be deemed acceptable or sufficient or simply to belong. Well, here’s a radical statement: We all belong here! We all have rights, and nothing should compromise our entitlement to those rights. If we are Black, we have rights. If we are poor, live in housing projects or trailer parks, we have rights. If we have same-sex sex, we have rights. If we apply for welfare benefits, we have rights. If we are single mothers, we have rights. If we use and/or abuse substances, we have rights. If we had an abortion, we have rights. If we wear hoodies, we have rights. If we sag our pants, we have rights. If we play our music really loud when we drive by in our cars, we have rights. If we are Muslims, we have rights. If we are atheists, we have rights. If we are fat, we have rights. If we wear turbans, we have rights. If we cannot make bail, we have rights to due process. Believe it or not, if we are in this country without proper documentation, we still have some rights that must be recognized. If you say you stand for justice and cannot envision yourself defending the civil and human rights of society’s most marginalized people, then you need to rethink just what it is that you stand for, because it isn’t equality. It’s all of us or none of us. You need not be an angel to either be an agent of change or to be regarded with dignity, respect, and humanity. — 5. Interrogate Meritocracy I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. —Stephen Jay Gould6 It is high time that we realize that while hard work and talent are important ingredients for opportunities and advancement, there are many individuals with mediocre skills and personal characteristics who hold advantaged positions. Moreover, there are many folks whose hard work and talent will never be recognized, and by no fault of their own. When people explain Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . racial inequality in terms of hard work, discipline, talent, and other virtues, they are touting a myth. The racialized myth of meritocracy empowers people to claim that whites work harder, are more responsible, value education more than others, and inherently possess the kind of values that make for good leaders, good home owners, good students, good police, and good Americans. This is a dangerous belief system. We are not saying that we shouldn’t value hard work or that we shouldn’t want to apply ourselves in order to achieve our goals, be they ambitious or modest. Instead, we ought to realize that there are other factors that inform the life chances of Americans, and many of them have nothing to do with who people are as individuals. The circumstances of your birth, the social networks that are made available to you, the kinds of schools you go to, the financial status of your family—these all inform whether and what kind of opportunities become available to you. Be proud of your hard work and be proud of the talents that make you who you are. But bear in mind that this is not all that matters in the calculus of your success and that many people enjoy the best material and political standing in our society by little, and sometimes no, effort of their own. — 6. Children Are Our Barometer There are a lot of ways to measure how well a society is doing. When gauging the egalitarianism of our society, we’d like to encourage you to ask how the children of our country are faring. Remember, children do not get to choose the circumstances of their birth and childhood. They don’t get to choose the financial status of their families or where they live. They do not get to pick their ascribed race or gender, even though many people will treat them on the basis of these characteristics. Children do not get to vote and do not get to make decisions about who should represent their interests. They have little say in the culture that they are born into. They are not allowed to legally work, and many of them, given their age, cannot literally speak for themselves. Advocating for the equitable well-being of children is one of the most effective ways to make an argument for racial justice; so many of the rationalizations of and justifications for inequality are predicated on the myth of meritocracy, and this logic gets entirely thrown out the window once we start talking about children. How can they possibly be held accountable for the realities they have been immersed in? They have not realized their full potential, though the political choices of adults widen or narrow the path for them to do so. As adults, we should be making decisions that best support the growth and possibilities of our society’s children. Indeed, it is our responsibility to do so even if we do not have children ourselves. If we want to know how our society is doing, take a look at statistics about children. You’ll learn where we are and, perhaps more importantly, where we’re headed. How many kids are born into poverty, and who are they? Are babies of a certain racial group living to see their first birthday at a higher rate than those of another? How many words are in their vocabulary? Which languages do they speak, and are they authorized to use them in the classroom? Who is attending public schools, and are all public schools meeting the needs of Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . the children? Are the kids at the private school getting a leg up? How many young citizens are denied access to developmental resources because their parents are undocumented, deported, locked up, formerly incarcerated, or dead? To what extent are adolescent behaviors legislated into adult crimes? How many children are behind bars? How many young people go hungry over the summertime and during school breaks? Do our children ever meet people of a different racial background? How many people under eighteen years old have lost a family member, friend, or classmate to gun violence? How many are allowed to preregister to vote before their eighteenth birthday? Have they all been empowered to make positive change in this world? — 7. Reappropriate the Language of Morality It is reprehensible that racial identity is an indicator of well-being in the United States. It is unacceptable that the law provides substantial room for police and citizen vigilantes to shoot and kill unarmed Black people without major legal repercussions. It is unconscionable that majority Black and Brown public schools are underfunded and overcrowded. It is shameful that politicians are more excited about being “tough on crime” than they are about being “serious about education.” It is downright deplorable that a nation such as the United States has the greatest military on earth but has neither universal pre-K nor universal health care. It is reckless to act with sloth-like reflexes, or no reflexes at all, to ensure that the water being delivered to a town and its schools is not full of lead. It is downright immoral not to care what happens to whole groups of people—children, poor people, Black people, women, LBGTQ+ people, justice-involved individuals, refugees, and so on. Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Twitter: Black women’s values. The contemporary Movement for Black Lives is a moral movement because it asserts that the lives of those who have been marginalized the most should be valued as much as the most privileged members of society. By virtue of simply being alive, they should matter. Each person’s life is so unique, precious in possibilities, and finite in its existence here on earth, and that is not to be trifled with. We who advocate for policies and practices that protect the freedoms and enhance the well-being of marginalized people need to use the language of morality with full conviction. It is, after all, the native tongue for those who want to do the most good for the most people. By virtue of free speech, racial conservatives can invoke morality when they defend the reckless behavior of unprofessional police or rationalize the stinginess of public funds that could be used to help those who are in the most need, but we must not allow them to monopolize it. — Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . 8. Read Widely These days it is easier than ever to immerse ourselves in an echo chamber. Hearing one’s own voice and the familiar voices of others again and again is incredibly comforting, but it can also give us a false sense of consensus and power. One simple way to resist this encroaching insularity is to make time to read beyond the headlines of a news outlet that you wouldn’t ordinarily look at. What topics does it believe are worth bringing to your attention? How is it framing the major issues of the day? What arguments is it making, and do you concur? Standing in the cotton field of Mrs. Minnie B. Guice near Mount Meigs in Montgomery County, Alabama, this woman reads the Southern Courier, a newspaper dedicated to reporting the stories of the civil rights movement, 1966. (Photo by Jim Peppler; Alabama Department of Archives and History) Be intentional about reading the stories and analyses of people who have a different racial identity than you do. What can you learn from them? Does their point of view on a certain issue cause you to call your previous understandings into question? Despite the differences of Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . your racial experiences, are there places where your ideas converge? If we are to strive for a more inclusive society where the lives of Black people matter fully, we must be attuned to the many types of perspectives that shape discourse about Black life. Let’s do more talking and engaging with and less talking at and past one another. — 9. Beware of Woker-than-Thou-itis! Striving to be educated around issues of social justice is laudable and moral, but striving to be recognized by others as a woke individual is self-serving and misguided. So, to those of you who are making a competition out of racial consciousness and progressive politicking, please get over yourself! You know who you are. Go on now and be useful to the causes you believe in by taking all your woke knowledge and making it translatable to working with others. Sometimes working with others means “meeting people where they’re at” to see if you can have a meaningful conversation in which you speak your piece and attempt to understand where the other person is coming from. Who knows, you might actually learn something from them. Speaking down to someone or trying to outperform your fellow allies by being the first person to “call someone out on their privilege” or by striving to write the most searing quip on your favorite social media platform to gain “likes” is ultimately an ego- enhancing activity. Any activist or any social creature is susceptible to trying to best even those people whom they value the most. Let us all (Candis and Tehama included) orient ourselves to advocate passionately, compassionately, and in the spirit of the collective. If in our efforts to speak and act effectively we achieve some level of eloquence and are given praise, we can be grateful for those kind words and sentiments, and we should convey our praise and appreciation to others when so moved. First and foremost, however, let us ask ourselves how, when, and where we can do the most good. — 10. Yield Silently to Those Who Are Seldom Heard We can transform relationships of power by transforming how we relate to one another. One of the ways we can do this, according to the political theorist Vince Jungkunz, is through “silent yielding”—or an intentional restraint of speech coupled with active listening that “encourages participation from historically oppressed voices, and participation from historically inept listeners.”7 Possessors of privileged status commit a kind of identity suicide when they discipline themselves from speaking first, longest, loudest, and repeatedly in order for those of lesser social status to be heard and considered. By taking a position of “political and epistemological humility,”8 the yielder creates new opportunities to differently understand and relate to the marginalized speaker. This practice is not meant to dispossess the yielder of having a role in a conversation or decision-making process; rather, the purpose is to transform the role and relationships that that yielder has with others in their shared social Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . context. By undoing the discursive colonialism of whiteness, maleness, and other hegemonic identities, silent yielders can help create more democratic and egalitarian relationships. At times, it may not be clear who has a more privileged status; in these circumstances, people should do their best to hear from all who are present. For those underrepresented people who want to speak, please speak for yourself; everyone else, please understand that they are speaking for themselves and not as ambassadors for their race, their gender, or their economic class. — 11. Second-Class Citizenship Must Be Eradicated Over 700,000 people in the United States are denied substantive representation in the United States Congress and are required to seek congressional approval before their local government adopts budgets and laws simply because of where they live: Washington, DC. Crazy, right? What’s even more absurd is that there are more people living in Washington, DC, than there are in Vermont or Wyoming! For centuries, Americans have largely accepted this disenfranchisement as a quirky state of exception. But let’s think about this irony. Why should anyone be denied full rights as an American citizen as a function of calling the nation’s capital one’s home? We should furthermore be outraged that power is being denied to a jurisdiction whose largest population has been and continues to be Black (about 47 percent; lest gentrification completely change these figures in favor of whites). In 2016, 86 percent of DC voters cast ballots in favor of statehood. The people have spoken, but Republicans and Democrats refuse to treat the matter as a priority. A more complicated matter that is worth being critical over is the status of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam (which sometimes finds itself under threat of bombing due, in part, to the forty-fifth president’s tweets), the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa, among other territories. The matter of these citizens’ vote is more difficult to advocate for given the lack of unanimity as to whether these jurisdictions should become states. These regions are vestiges of a colonial empire, and they remain in a state of disenfranchisement because of the complacency around their state of exception. If they want to become states, they should. If they want to be fully represented in Congress, they should.9 We must also remember that many of those who have been convicted of a felony, depending on where they live, may never get their voting rights back. There is nothing inherent in US law, history, or ethos that says it must be this way. Also remember that those who are in prison or jail at the time of the census are counted in the district of the prison or jail in which they are incarcerated and not from their hometown or place of residence before incarceration. Since most prisons are located in majority-white, rural areas, this means that communities of color are being underrepresented in Congress and that white communities are being overrepresented. If this doesn’t sound very different from the Three-Fifths Compromise, which enhanced the representation of white people in the antebellum South, it shouldn’t. The white privilege of redistricting just got a makeover. Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49. C op yr ig ht © 2 01 9. N ew Y or k U ni ve rs ity P re ss . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . In this 1899 cartoon, “School Begins,” the artist editorializes the expansion of the United States’ territories as a necessary extension of civilization to an otherwise-uncivilized world. The pouty new pupils in lessons of self-government are the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. The …