Fluent Essays

What are the politics of respectability? Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2963600 ARTICLE CLASS CONTRADICTIONS IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: THE POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY, DISRESPECT, AND SELF- RESPECT Harold A. McDougall* CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................45 I. THE ROLE OF NARRATIVE IN HUMAN HISTORY .............................46 II. RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES: NARRATIVE AND COUNTER- NARRATIVE ...................................................................................49 III. THE POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY ................................................50 IV. THE POLITICS OF DISRESPECT .......................................................56 V. THE POLITICS OF SELF-RESPECT ...................................................60 A. The Black Nationalist Project ...........................................61 B. Stories of Self-Respect ........................................................64 VI. FACING THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NARRATIVE DILEMMA: CONVERSATIONS WITH HOWARD LAW STUDENTS ........................67 A. Black Lives Matter ............................................................69 B. The National Association of the Southern Poor ................75 CONCLUSION .........................................................................................80 INTRODUCTION In 2014, nationwide protests over police harassment and brutality towards African-Americans surprised many, not only with their passion and broad base, but also by their general disconnection from the civil rights establishment. Similar to the student sit-ins of the 1960s, bright and passionate young people surged forward without the sanction—or even the knowledge—of established leaders. Much as their predecessors fifty years before,1 the establishment in 2014 sought * Professor of Law, Howard University. BA magna cum laude, Harvard, 1967; J.D. Yale, 1971. I presented an outline of this paper at the Duke Law School conference on the Present and Future of Civil Rights Movements in November 2015, and received welcome research supported from my Dean, Danielle Holley- Walker. Special thanks to Profs. Anthony Alfieri, John Brittain, Kevin Johnson, Gerald Lopez, and Shauna Marshall for helpful comments, and to my research assistants Monique Peterkin, Tabias Wilson, Ebony Johnson, and Brooke Oki, who did most of the heavy lifting. 1 See Harold McDougall, I Have A Dream: Bring Back SNCC, HUFFINGTON POST (Aug. 28, 2013, 2:12 PM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-a-mcdougall/sncc-civil-rights-movement_b_3828787.html. 45 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2963600 HOWARD HUMAN & CIVIL RIGHTS LAW REVIEW to get out in front of these young protesters, channel them into approved and controlled activities, minimize any damage to the establishment donor/patronage base, and exploit their energy to advance the establishment agenda.2 However, there has been pushback. These young people see their constituency as the poor and working class of the African- American community, the ghetto dwellers who occupy ground zero in conflicts with police, rather than the more affluent classes from which so many of them come.3 Moreover, a significantly larger number of today’s protesters and protest organizers are from the affected communities themselves.4 These latter participants are often suspicious of established civil rights leadership as well.5 This paper will explore class tensions that have bedeviled the civil rights movement since its very beginning, yielding conflicting narratives and patterns of activity, and ultimately resulting in the disorder we see today. This paper will also address how we might identify the best these narratives and patterns of activity have to offer, marshalling, and synthesizing them into a more productive approach. I believe the key is to develop “civic infrastructure” in the African-American community, so the raw energy of today’s protests does not ebb and disappear, leaving behind no fundamental improvement. The National Association of the Southern Poor (NASP), discussed in the final section of the paper, provides an example of the kind of civic infrastructure I have in mind. I. THE ROLE OF NARRATIVE IN HUMAN HISTORY Human beings of various species have been on the planet for approximately 2.5 million years. Our own species, Homo sapiens, has been here for only 200,000 years. All previous species, and our own until just 12,000 years ago, lived as hunter-gatherers. Our biological 2 See Harold McDougall, ‘American Spring’? HUFFINGTON POST (Dec. 10, 2014, 9:57 PM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-a-mcdougall/american-spring_b_6292942.html. 3 My research assistant Tabias Wilson provides an example. Tabias was one of the founders of Occupy Boston, and went on to help start various antiracist offshoots, such as Occupy the Hood. See Stacey Patton, Black Youth Respond to the Occupy Movement, BLACK YOUTH PROJECT, (Nov. 25, 2011), http://research.blackyouthproject.com/byp-presents/black-youth-respond-to-occupy-movement/. 4 See, e.g., Kellan Howell, Baltimore Riots Sparked not by Race but by Class Tensions Between Police, Poor, WASH. TIMES (Apr. 29, 2015), http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/29/baltimore-riots- sparked-not-by-race-but-by-class-t/?page=all. 5 Describing his work in Boston, Tabias Wilson experienced the “establishment, full-integrationist” civil rights leaders as overly concerned that the youth not “squander the moment” by their lack of “respect” and “respectability” vis-à-vis the white majority establishment. 46 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2963600 CLASS CONTRADICTIONS makeup, our DNA, evolved in congruence with this lifestyle6—few possessions, high levels of mobility, a spare diet, and living in small bands of about two dozen, bound together by empathic connection.7 This means our DNA programs us to trust people whom we know personally.8 The emergence of fictive language, of “narrative,” about 70,000 years ago (the “Cognitive Revolution”) made it possible for us to work together on slightly less intimate terms, knitted together by gossip into bands of about 150 people.9 This diminished our empathic connections somewhat,10 but our small-group DNA remained relatively undisturbed. Twelve thousand years ago, an even more radical change occurred in human society, the “Agricultural Revolution.”11 Humans domesticated animals and plants12 and narratives emerged rationalizing human dominance over nature.13 Interestingly, these narratives also rationalized the dominance of some human beings over others, dwindling empathic connection even more.14 These new narratives enabled us to work together in groups of thousands, and eventually millions. They also assigned specific roles to their adherents, dividing them by gender and work function. Typically, these assigned roles formed a hierarchy, pyramidal in character, with a large number of people at the bottom doing the “grunt” work and the small elite at the top doing the planning, thinking, and relaxing.15 First 6 PAUL SHEPARD, COMING HOME TO THE PLEISTOCENE (2004), http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Home- Pleistocene-Paul-Shepard/dp/1559635908 (“[O]ur essential human nature is a product of our genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and . . . the current subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today’s ecological and social ills . . . .”). 7 Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era, HUFFINGTON POST (Mar. 18, 2010), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-empathic- civilization_b_416589.html. 8 Id. 9 YUVAL NOAH HARARI, SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND 133 (2015) (Sapiens are distinguished by our ability to believe in fictions. The cognitive revolutions starts with the first set of hypothetical stories we allow ourselves to believe in whether they are true or not . . . Our fictions allow us to cooperate. They give us the imaginary order that is necessary for societies to act together. Amazon Customer Reviews: By Gary on Feb. 25, 2015). 10 HARARI, supra note 9, at 105 (“All these cooperation networks . . . were ‘imagined orders.’ The social norms that sustained them were neither based in ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths.”). 11 HARARI, supra note 9, at 48. 12 See JARED DIAMOND, GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL (1997), http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel.html. 13 HARARI, supra note 9, at 92-93 (describing means of subordinating and controlling animals, eerily reminiscent of later techniques for controlling slaves: “In order to turn bulls, horses, donkeys and camels into obedient draught animals, their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed.”). 14 HARARI, supra note 9, at 102. 15 See HARARI, supra note 9, at 81 (asserting that sedentary living begets cruelty and empathy issues). 47 HOWARD HUMAN & CIVIL RIGHTS LAW REVIEW came the theocracies,16 monarchies and patriarchy of early agricultural society.17 As time went on, feudalism, capitalism,18 nationalism, slavery, colonialism, racism,19 imperialism, and many others emerged. Whatever the prevailing narrative, our physiologically based empathic impulses20 must be suppressed by education, training or a force to support it.21 We are not allowed to feel empathy for those lower on the ladder in our own social narrative, or for adherents to a social narrative that rivals our own. This compromises our ability to find our way through personal association, or even gossip, so more and more, we take the word of our leaders in the social narrative—priests, kings, and eventually politicians—instead of relying on empathic connection. This makes us even easier to manipulate, as suppressed empathy creates social and human space for violence and mistrust.22 These narratives objectify us—by race, gender, class, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, and so forth.23 This objectification prompts us to ask our fellow human beings what they are rather than who they are, marking the objectification of us all. There is more. Not only must we ask “what meta-narrative describes you,” but also “where do you fit in the hierarchy it establishes?” Are you manly enough, womanly enough, black enough, white enough, rich enough, devout enough to stand at the top of the heap? If not, what lesser position do you occupy?24 What is your role in driving the social, political, and economic machinery—beliefs, customs and practices, institutions, organizations, laws—the narrative coheres?25 16 Id. at 218-19. 17 Id. at 172. 18 Id. at 352-53. 19 Id. at 134. 20 See, e.g., Harold McDougall, Empathy Depletion: An Environmental Hazard, HUFFINGTON POST (June 17, 2014, 2:53 PM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-a-mcdougall/empathy-depletion-an- envi_2_b_5436807.html. (citing JEREMY RIFKIN, THE EMPATHIC CIVILIZATION: THE RACE TO GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN A WORLD IN CRISIS (2009)). 21 HARARI, supra note 9, at 111 (violence needed to maintain the existing order). 22 Indeed, our biologically based empathic impulses can atrophy without real ties to others; their suppression by “imagined” narratives that privilege elites can lead to violence. See, e.g., Empathy Depletion, supra note 20. 23 Note the grounding of narrative classification in the first written languages, developed to count and classify in sedentary agricultural societies, about 12,000 years ago. 24 With real human connection, at the genetically appropriate scale—a dozen or two—we can still ask questions, but they are relevant to real life. What are your likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses? How can your particular talents be of help to me and to the ones I love? Can I trust you? (Note that 80% of human communication is still nonverbal, seriously handicapping us in age of increasing electronic communication. See Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, THE DIANE REHM SHOW (Oct. 19, 2015, 11:00 AM), http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-10-19/sherry- turkle-reclaiming-conversation-the-power-of-talk-in-a-digital-age). 25 See Harold McDougall, For Critical Race Practitioners: Race, Racism and American Law (4th ed.) by Derrick A. Bell, Jr., 46 HOW. L.J. 1 (2002) (citing Paul Costello, Racism and Black Oppression in the United States: A Beginning Analysis, 24 THEORETICAL REV. 11 (1981)). 48 CLASS CONTRADICTIONS Such is the nature of the narrative about race, particularly in the United States, with its foundations in the slave south.26 Despite the narrative’s southern origins, the institution of slavery and the narrative that rationalized it was so central to the political economy and social life of all Thirteen Colonies27 that they broke away from England rather than risk the abolitionism that was on the rise in the mother country.28 II. RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES: NARRATIVE AND COUNTER- NARRATIVE Race, class and gender narratives emerging in the ante-bellum slave south operated not only to support the institution of slavery itself, but also to rationalize the race, class, and gender hierarchies incidental to it.29 Characters in these narratives included the white southern gentleman and the white southern belle, the subservient and emasculated “Uncle Tom,” the “black mammy,” the “bad Negro,” the “black Jezebel,”30 and “white trash.”31 These characters and narratives assumed an importance beyond the Southern region. The South contributed a gendered and classed ideology of whiteness to the nation after slavery ended,32 becoming “ideologically dominant in shaping the narrative of national selfhood,”33 providing a Rosetta Stone for American racism nationwide. The Great Migration spurred the nationalization of the black characters and the narratives they occupy, bringing large numbers of blacks to Northern, Midwestern, and eventually Far Western cities as well.34 The 26 Cf. HARARI, supra note 9, at 140-43 (race divisions in the Americas). 27 Email from Professor Gerald Horne, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, Univ. of Houston, Texas to Professor Harold (Sept. 15, 2015) (on file with author). (“The US was a step forward from the religious axis of society that had bedeviled Europe but this was replaced with a different axis, ‘white’ vs. ‘non-white’—but more than this, perpetual punishment of the descendants of mainland enslaved Africans.”). 28 See Interview with Gerald Horne, “Counter-Revolution of 1776”: Was U.S. Independence War a Conservative Revolt in Favor of Slavery? Democracy Now, June 17, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/27/counter_revolution_of_1776_was_us (discussing Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, (2014); see also Somerset v. Stewart, 98 ER 499 (1772)). 29 See generally RICHÉ RICHARDSON, BLACK MASCULINITY AND THE U.S. SOUTH: FROM UNCLE TOM TO GANGSTA 232 (2007) (Kindle version). 30 See RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 59-60, 71; see also Taylor Gordon, Black Women in the Media: Mammy, Jezebel, or Angry, ATLANTA BLACK STAR (Mar. 4, 2013), http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/03/04/black-women-in-the-media-mammy-jezebel-or-angry/. 31 No matter how low on the social scale they might be, they were still superior to every black person in the Southern narrative, now nationalized to the entire U.S. See RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 125. 32 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 10, 67, 75. 33 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 56; see also id. at 232-33. 34 See generally Isabel Wilkerson, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA’S GREAT MIGRATION (2010); cf. RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 220. 49 http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/27/counter_revolution_of_1776_was_us HOWARD HUMAN & CIVIL RIGHTS LAW REVIEW nationalization of the white characters and their supporting narratives is more complex; in this paper, we will touch on that phenomenon only lightly.35 In short, Whiteness became a prized club to which only people of European descent could belong (if they played by the rules).36 III. THE POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY Some years after emancipation, middle-class black males began striving to create a “gentleman” persona,37 a counter-narrative to the prevailing slave stereotypes. Black women could not be “belles,” but they tried to be “ladies.” Elite black men and women thus sought to adhere to the rules of the “whiteness” club38 as closely as possible (or rather, as closely as they were permitted). Herein, the politics of respectability was born.39 Prof. Frederick C. Harris, Director of the Center on African- American Politics and Society at Columbia University, describes the politics of respectability as a philosophy first promulgated by “black elites to ‘uplift the race’ by correcting the ‘bad’ traits of the black poor.”40 Indeed, as early as the beginnings of the Great Migration, middle-class black organizations, such as the National Urban League, distributed pamphlets to poor and new arrivals instructing them on “respectable” behavior. They were not to use profanity or talk loudly in public, for example.41 “Respectability” role-players invented a model black citizen/class, but they required no concessions from the white ruling class. Indeed, they often played their roles in the shadow of white intemperance and violence.42 For black males, attempting to conform to the white narrative, despite this imbalance, meant “manliness” often had to take a back seat, 35 See. e.g., RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 9-10 (Birth of a Nation); see also id. at 74-75 (Southern “manly” military tradition incorporated into US Army). 36 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 69. Cf. Karen Grigsby Bates, The Whiteness Project: Facing Race In A Changing America, NAT’L PUB. RADIO (Dec. 21, 2014), http://www.npr.org/2014/12/21/371679777/the- whiteness-project-facing-race-in-a-changing-america. 37 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 75 (“[t]he class and cultural ambitions of some elite black men” were shaped by the ideology of white maleness, “even if it was premised on their very exclusion.”). 38 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 69. 39 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 28. 40 Frederick C. Harris, Rise of Respectability Politics, DISSENT, (Winter 2014), at 2, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-rise-of-respectability-politics. 41 See RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 77; see also id. at 144 (citing Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to similar affect.). Such approaches continued at least until the 1960s. See John McWhorter, It’s About Time Obama Stuck up for His ‘Respectability Politics’, WASH. POST (May 14, 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/14/its-about-time-obama-stuck-up-for-his- respectability-politics/. 42 Leland Ware and Theodore Davis, Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Time: The Black Middle Class in the Age of Obama, 55 HOW. L.J. 533, 535 (2012). 50 CLASS CONTRADICTIONS suggesting a certain level of weakness.43 The politics of respectability thus brought male practitioners dangerously close to the “Uncle Tom” stereotype,44 a stereotype many black men take pains to avoid.45 Black militants of the 1960s often perceived middle-class, “respectable” male civil rights leaders as “Uncle Toms” for precisely this reason.46 Today, practitioners of the politics of respectability seek advancement through communion with prevailing majority group structures of political, economic, and social power.47 They seek upper- middle class status within those structures by approximating white dialect, dress, profession and physical space.48 “Respectability” practitioners who succeed in these endeavors gain access to mainstream “sociopolitical capital”—the ability to infiltrate “institutions, government and other organizations.”49 Though respectability practitioners today have muted their overtly submissive response to white dominance, they continue to preach assimilation to white culture, apparently their only marker for true success. Blackness, on the other hand, is associated with laziness, with financially well-off black folks the exception to the rule.50 Respectability politics seems quite comfortable with the idea that “problems for [unsuccessful] African-Americans are rooted in absent black fathers and failures of blacks to do enough to help themselves.”51 Bill Cosby’s diatribes against the black poor provided a particularly unfortunate example of respectability practitioners seeking to find “interest convergence” with upper-middle-class whites.52 In his 43 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 6 (citing PHILLIP BRIAN HARPER, ARE WE NOT MEN: MASCULINE ANXIETY AND THE PROBLEM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY ix (1996)). 44 Harold McDougall, Guns, Machismo, Martin and Zimmerman, HUFFINGTON POST (July 17, 2013, 12:43 PM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-a-mcdougall/george-zimmerman-guns masculinity_b_3600456.html. 45 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 6 (citing HARPER, supra note 43, at ix). 46 RICHARDSON, supra note 29, at 49-52. 47 Ware and Davis, supra note 43, at 537-38. 48 Memorandum from Tabias Wilson for Professor Harold McDougall (Aug. 1, 2015) (on file with author); Ware and Davis, supra note 42, at 536-39. 49 Tabias Wilson cites black entrepreneurs, HBCU leadership, and federal political leaders as examples. Memorandum from Tabias Wilson for Professor Harold McDougall (June 30, 2015) (on file with author). 50 Memorandum from Tabias Wilson reflecting on Chapter 1 of BLACK BALTIMORE for Professor Harold McDougall, (July 8, 2015) (on file with author). 51 Jessica Washington & Perry Bacon Jr., How ‘Black Lives Matter’ Activists Are Shaping the 2016 Campaign, NBC NEWS (July 31, 2015, 5:00 AM), http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/how-black-lives- matter-activists-are-shaping-2016-campaign-n401146. 52 Cf. Prof. Derrick Bell’s “interest convergence theory,” which “holds that whites will support minority rights only when it’s in their interest as well. For example, [Bell] saw the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 school-desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, as a part of a Cold War effort to improve America’s standing among Third World countries.” Will Oremus, Did Obama Hug a Radical?, SLATE (Mar. 9 2012), 51 HOWARD HUMAN & CIVIL RIGHTS LAW REVIEW May 2004 speech at an NAACP event celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Cosby characterized poor black males as “knuckleheads [who are] walking around [not wanting to] learn English.”53 He scorned black vernacular speech as less than “respectable.”54 Michael Eric Dyson, one of Cosby’s critics and a person with working-class origins, identified Cosby’s screed as especially dangerous because it “aggressively ignore[d] [w]hite society’s responsibility in creating the problems he want[ed] the poor to fix on their own.”55 An important by-product of the politics of respectability is the spatial segregation of the black community by class.56 The 1968 Fair Housing Act allowed Blacks to access white suburban neighborhoods for the first time.57 “Black flight” ensued, as the black middle-class moved from the inner cities into suburban neighborhoods that better reflected their class position.58 Since this transition, the proportion of Blacks in the middle class has more than doubled.59 However, the number of poor Blacks living in extremely poor inner-city neighborhoods has also doubled.60 In fact, the disparity between the top and bottom fifth of the Black population in terms of income, education, victimization by violence, and job status is now greater than the disparity between the top and bottom fifth of the white population.61 A class divide has thus emerged, with poor and working-class Blacks on one side, and the Black middle-class on the other. William Julius Wilson, for example, argues that “[t]he economic advancement of the most privileged members of the black community and the ongoing subordination of economically disadvantaged blacks means http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/03/derrick_bell_controversy_what_s_crit ical_race_theory_and_is_it_radical_.html. 53 Steven King, Bill Cosby on Civil Rights, WASH. POST (May 23, 2004), www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/audio/2005/05/02/AU2005050201059.html. 54 Ms. Peterkin notes the irony of Cosby’s present crucifixion by the white media, exploiting the stereotype of the hyper-sexualized black male, placing Cosby outside the respectability politics he once preached. Memorandum from Monique Peterkin for Professor Harold McDougall (July 16, 2015) (on file with author). 55 Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, HARV. EDUC. REV., http://hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-76-issue-2/herbooknote/is-bill- cosby-right-_11. 56 Ware and Davis, supra note 42, at 562-67. 57 Karyn Lacy, Race, Privilege and the Growing Class Divide, 38 ETHNIC & RACIAL STUD. REV. 1246, 1247 (2015). 58 Id. at 1248. 59 See generally Zoltan L. Hajnal, Black Class Exceptionalism: Insights from Direct Democracy on the Race Versus Class Debate, 71 PUB. OPINION Q. 560 (2007); see Ware and Davis, supra note 42, at 533-35. 60 Hajnal, supra note 59, at 560. 61 Id. at 561. 52 CLASS CONTRADICTIONS that it no longer makes sense to think of blacks as one homogenous group.”62 Low income and working class Blacks often have conflicting objectives with middle and upper class Black Americans, despite middle-class, “respectable” black organizations’ claims to speak for all. Many middle-class Blacks are “[h]omeowners, concentrated in suburbia and financially stable, allowing them to provide their children with luxuries such as their own car when they turn sixteen and a prestigious private school education.”63 Middle-class Blacks who never resided in poor neighborhoods may not appreciate the experiences of poor and working-class Blacks.64 Poor and working-class Blacks face issues such as lack of educational resources, employment opportunities, and neighborhood violence, for example. Black flight from segregated, inner-city neighborhoods may have been a “necessary survival act for middle and upper class blacks.”65 At the same time, the Black elite’s increasing stake in American capitalism has prompted its “most vocal leaders to [take] up the role of policing the majority of Blacks left behind,”66 causing one author to postulate a “Black silent majority.”67 Another author calls those left behind “the Abandoned,” referring to them as “a large and growing underclass concentrated in the inner cities and depressed pockets of the rural South . . . [in danger of] permanent pathology and underclass status . . . .”68 In the wake of the “American Spring” protests around police violence toward members of the black community, “respectable” groups responded with myriad conferences, attended almost exclusively by establishment types.69 Their primary approach is to appeal to the moral 62 Lacy, supra note 57, at 1248. 63 Lacy, supra note 57, at 1249. 64 Susan Welch & Lorn Foster, Class and Conservatism in the Black Community, 15 AM. POL. Q. 445 (1987) (suggesting middle-class Blacks are more conservative in their views compared with poor-working class Blacks). 65 Wilson, supra note 50. 66 Petersen-Smith, infra note 72. 67 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Punitive Aspirations, N.Y. TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW (Sept. 27, 2015), … The Art of Protest This page intentionally left blank The Art of Protest Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle T. V. Reed University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London The companion Web site to The Art of Protest includes audio and visual materials, bibliographies, discographies, filmographies, and links to historical and current social movements, as well as a supplementary chapter, “Peace Symbols: Posters in Movements against the Wars in Vietnam and Iraq.” Visit the book’s Web site at http://www.upress.umn.edu/artofprotest. Lines from “A Poem about My Rights,” by June Jordan, are from Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989). Copyright 1989 by June Jordan. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Thunder’s Mouth Press, a division of Avalon Publishing Group. Lines from “Trying to Talk with a Man,” by Adrienne Rich, are from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950–2001 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973). Copyright 2002 by Adrienne Rich, copyright 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Wicazo Sa Review 16, no. 2 (2001): 75–96. An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared in Cercles 3 (2001). Portions of chapter 8 appeared as “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism,” in Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental Justice Reader (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003). Copyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reed, T. V. (Thomas Vernon) The art of protest : culture and activism from the civil rights movement to the streets of Seattle / T. V. Reed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3770-9 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3771-7 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Radicalism — United States. 2. Protest movements — United States. 3. Social movements in art. 4. Social movements in literature. 5. Radicalism in art. 6. Radicalism in literature. 7. Radicalism — Songs and music — History and criticism. I. Title. HN90.R3R395 2005 303.48'4 — dc22 2005011442 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 http://www.upress.umn.edu/artofprotest http://www.upress.umn.edu This book is dedicated to Ella Baker, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and the millions of political-cultural workers, past, present, and future, who march alongside them toward freedom and justice. This page intentionally left blank Beauty walks a razor’s edge — Bob Dylan This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii ONE Singing Civil Rights: The Freedom Song Tradition 1 TWO Scenarios for Revolution: The Drama of the Black Panthers 40 THREE The Poetical Is the Political: Feminist Poetry and the Poetics of Women’s Rights 75 FOUR Revolutionary Walls: Chicano/a Murals, Chicano/a Movements 103 FIVE Old Cowboys, New Indians: Hollywood Frames the American Indian Movement 129 SIX “We Are [Not] the World”: Famine, Apartheid, and the Politics of Rock Music 156 SEVEN ACTing UP against AIDS: The (Very) Graphic Arts in a Moment of Crisis 179 EIGHT Environmental Justice Ecocriticism: Race, Class, Gender, and Literary Ecologies 218 NINE Will the Revolution Be Cybercast? New Media, the Battle of Seattle, and Global Justice 240 Contents TEN Reflections on the Cultural Study of Social Movements 286 Notes 317 Index 345 All books are collective projects, but one of this scope is more than usu- ally indebted to a host of people who helped make it possible. The map that eventually became the territory of this book was first produced with the aid of a Mellon Fellowship at the Humanities Center of Wesleyan University. During my year there I was particularly grateful for the sup- port of Richard Ohmann and for the friendship of Paula Rabinowitz, the other “mellow felon” that cycle. At a crucial later stage in the project, I received similar support from the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Center co-directors Gail Hershatter and Chris Connolly provided a brilliantly stimulating environment, and Hayden White quite literally gave me the space to work. The Fulbright scholar program offered me the chance to work out some of the ideas in this book with a bright group of students and faculty at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. I am indebted to Margit Mayer and Bruce Spear for their intellectual stimulation and hospitality during my stay there at the John F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien. Among my many supportive colleagues in the American studies pro- gram and English department at Washington State University, I would especially like to thank Joan Burbick, Alex Hammond, Alex Kuo, Victor Villanueva, Sue Armitage, and Shawn Michelle Smith for their friendship and inspiring examples of committed scholarship and pedagogy. Among my friends in the Santa Cruz diaspora, I especially thank Katie King, Chela Sandoval, Barry Schwartz, Zoe Sofoulis, and Don Beggs. A number of graduate students at Washington State also gave support and insight xi Acknowledgments as the project evolved. I note in particular the influence of Christina Castañeda, John Hausdoerffer, Sarah Hentges, Azfar Hussain, Melissa Hussain, Jennifer Mata, Lori Safin, Allyson Wolf, and Tony Zaragoza; their scholarly activism and activist scholarship gives me hope for the future. Many of these chapters began as presentations at national meetings of the American Studies Association, my larger academic home, and I am grateful for the work of scholars Hazel Carby, Michael Cowan, Michael Denning, Paul Lauter, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Alvina Quintana, Jan- Michael Rivera, Vicki Ruiz, George Sanchez, Steve Sumida, and Robert Warrior, among many others, who make those conferences such stimu- lating intellectual sites. Lauter and Carlo Rotello also provided crucially important critical readings of the book in manuscript. A less direct but more fulsome debt is owed to hundreds of cultural workers for justice (of whom for me Bernice Johnson Reagon was the paradigm and remains the paragon), who created the committed “art of change” my work attempts to reflect and reflect on. This book is a trib- ute to these indefatigable cultural workers, in the hope that I have done at least partial justice to their brilliant, unceasing efforts. Closer to home, two people played an immense role in this book. Scholar-activist Noël Sturgeon, both as a model of engaged intellectual- political labor and as my most trusted consultant on the substance of this work, is owed an incalculable debt. Hart Sturgeon-Reed, who grew from infant to teenager during the production of this book, inspires me with his intellectual acuity, lightens my life with his wit, and reminds me constantly of why we must struggle to leave the next generation a better foundation from which to fight the good fight for social, economic, environmental, and cultural justice. I am deeply grateful to Noël and Hart for their love, and offer mine back to them along with the “acknowledg- ment” that they are the most important people in my world. The love and support of my sister Linda Ware, my mother Alice Reed, and my niece Michelle Spencer have also been a crucial part of the world out of which this writing has emerged, as has been my connection to a host of wonderful relatives in the Reed–Sturgeon network. Finally, many thanks to scholar-activist-editor Richard Morrison and all the other folks at the University of Minnesota Press who brought this book and the com- panion Web site out into the wider world. xii Acknowledgments This book hopes to prove useful to three main types of readers. For stu- dents and general readers new to the subject, it presents an introduction to social movements through the rich, kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and cultural expression. For scholars of social movements, it offers intrigu- ing observations on particular movements and useful insights into var- ious ways to think about the relations between culture and social change. For activists, it seeks to offer inspiration and a tool kit of ideas about how art and culture can further movement goals. These three sets of readers overlap, of course, in the form of scholar activists or activist students, but to the extent that they sometimes speak different languages, or have different interests, I hope that each type of reader will be patient when encountering portions of chapters that may speak more clearly to another of these audiences. Finding a style equally appropriate to all has been my goal, but no doubt I have not always succeeded. Social movements — the unauthorized, unofficial, anti-institutional, collective action of ordinary citizens trying to change their world — have shaped our politics, our culture, and our political culture as much as any other single force. Studying movements matters because they have played crucial roles in making national and world history. I have focused in this book on movements in the United States, but throughout I show how those movements have been connected to global changes. The United States was created through a social movement, the American Revolution, and social movements have helped make and remake our nation since. Social movements, as the term implies, have been a moving Introduction xiii force, one of the most dynamic elements in the development of U.S. so- ciety and the culture. In particular, I believe “progressive” social move- ments like the ones at the heart of this book have been crucial in taking the important but vague and still unfulfilled promises of “freedom” and “democracy” announced in the revolution’s best known manifesto, the Declaration of Independence, and given them more reality, more sub- stance, and wider applicability to the majority of people — women, people of color, the poor — who were initially excluded from those promises. More than fifty years of scholarly analysis has not generated an agreed- upon definition of social movements. But that is less of a problem than one might think, since both ordinary folks and ordinary scholars, though they may argue about borderline cases, know a movement when they see one. And seeing one may be precisely the point. One of the foremost scholars of social movements, Charles Tilly, argues convincingly that the essence of movements entails “repeated public displays” of alternative political and cultural values by a collection of people acting together out- side officially sanctioned channels.1 (It is because those official channels have failed some people that movements arise.) Movements, in contrast to their tamer, more institutionalized cousins, political parties and lobby- ists, seek to bring about social change primarily through the medium of “repeated public displays,” or, as I would put it, through dramatic action. I like Tilly’s definition because it plays to the prejudice of this book in focusing on some of the most dramatic movements of the past several decades. This book tells the stories of some key social movements in the second half of the twentieth century. While movements can be found across the political spectrum, I have limited myself to an interlinked set on the “progressive,” left side of this spectrum. Within these limits, I have chosen movements that I think have been especially important, but there are many other equally worthy ones that I have been unable to include. I make no claim to providing a comprehensive study of progressive movements since the 1950s. But I believe this book gives a good sense of major developments in a central tradition of dramatic protest, resistance, and change. I hope my book inspires readers to delve more deeply into movements and issues I can only touch the surface of, and into move- ments I have been forced by constraints of time to omit or only glanc- ingly mention. At the same time, I have sought in other chapters to make clear that as centrally important as dramatic, public action has been to social move- xiv Introduction ments, it is by no means the totality of their activity, or the sole source of their impact. I have tried to show that dramatic actions are them- selves the products of usually rather undramatic, mundane daily acts of preparation, and that the impact of dramatic moments is only as great as the follow-up forms of daily organizing that accompany them. In several chapters, most obviously in those on the women’s and environmental movements, I try to show that dramatic movement events happen in other, less celebrated spaces, including apartment living rooms, aca- demic offices, and classrooms. The particular movements I have chosen to focus on have played and continue to play a crucial role in expanding freedoms and giving greater substance to the American claim to be a democracy of, by, and for “the people.” In that sense, they are the movements that have, to paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, made America America, a place that has not yet been but one day yet must be a free and just society.2 These interlinked movements, from the 1950s through the early twenty-first century, built on ones that came before — from the revolution itself to the antislavery movement, populist farmer and labor movements, woman’s suffrage, and a host of others — and they built on each other as well. The movements chronicled in this book begin with the great African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement was not only of tremendous importance in itself, but it also created a master framework for protest that set in play key ideas, tactics, and forms of resistance for the many movements that soon followed. Indeed, many of these subsequent movements are also, among other things, “civil rights” struggles. They are struggles for the right to equal and fair treatment, and equal and fair access to the economic, political, and cultural goods of the society. The word civil means pertaining to the life we live in common, in community, and that is what these movements both assert the right to and attempt to practice in their own work. Many movements form strong cultures of their own, called “movement cultures,” which offer alternative models of what our collective civil and civic lives might be like, as part of their argument about the ways we have continually fallen short of creating a just, egalitarian community. This is the first book of comparative movement analysis to focus on the cultural dimension of movements.3 In focusing mainly on the cul- tural elements within and the cultural impact of movements, this book seeks to fill a gap: scholars of social movements have had too little to Introduction xv say about culture, and cultural studies scholars have had too little to say about movements. I use the concept of “culture” in three broad, inter- related ways in the chapters that follow. First, I examine social move- ments as sub- or counter-cultures to dominant cultures in the country. Second, I look at the production of cultural texts (poetry, painting, music, murals, film, fiction, and so forth) in and around social move- ments. Third, and most broadly, I examine how the cultural texts, ideas, identities, and values generated by resistance movements have reshaped the general contours of U.S. culture (in the sense of “whole way of life”). The study of social movements has been carried out by several differ- ent kinds of investigators. Academics, including anthropologists, com- munication scholars, historians, political scientists, and especially soci- ologists, have examined movements from the perspective of their own areas of expertise. Nonacademics, especially journalists and movement activists themselves, have also contributed greatly to our understanding of movements. Overall, sociologists have certainly produced both the greatest volume of studies and the most systematic work. This book owes a great deal to the many sociologists who have studied both the particular movements I examine and the processes of social movements overall. But as sociologists themselves have noted, until fairly recently they have neglected the specifically cultural dimensions of social move- ment activity. Social scientists have concentrated primarily on the ways in which movements have been forces of political change — changes in laws, legis- lation, voting patterns, government institutions, and so on. They have done a valuable service by subjecting movements to intensive and exten- sive study, but this work has been limited by a strong bias toward the most quantifiable elements of movements: numbers of participants, amount of money raised, laws passed in response, shaping of voting patterns, and so on. By comparison, social movements as forces of cul- tural change have been relatively neglected. One key reason for this is that culture is a messy business; it is a less easily measured object of analysis than Supreme Court rulings, congressional bills, or income pat- terns. But to ignore a whole terrain and its impact just because it is not easily quantifiable seems highly unscientific, if not downright strange. Movements are much more than the sum of quantifiable elements. Movements, especially the kind talked about in this book, are deeply transformative experiences for those who take part in them and deeply xvi Introduction transformative to those who are, sometimes quite indirectly or subtly but pervasively, shaped by the ideas, feelings, styles, and behaviors emerging from them. It takes nothing away from other important kinds of analysis to say that we need far more work on the cultural forms active within movements and the cultural forces movements unleash. Cultural studies scholars, as the name suggests, have focused strongly on questions of culture. But their prime target has been trends in popu- lar culture, and subcultures that do not take the directly political form I call “social movement cultures.” Much cultural studies work has offered brilliant interpretive readings of cultural texts (movies, TV shows, pop music, or fashion), but this work has not always been well grounded in relation to the institutions and structural social forces that shape and move through culture. In my view, the best cultural studies work has attended to three interrelated levels of analysis: cultural production, the texts produced, and audience reception of those texts. I will employ all three of these at points in this book, but I am particularly interested in movements as sites for the production and reception of cultural texts. When I do use textual analysis, I am generally less interested in the for- mal qualities of texts or in the attempt to read their larger cultural mean- ings, than in their relation to each other within social movements as part of the “cultural field.” French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term cultural field for the social space where cultural texts exist in relation to each other and in relation to texts in other social, political, and economic fields. Though not based in extensive new empirical research, this book seeks to encourage a body of work, sometimes called “social cultural studies,” that draws upon and synthesizes the best work from empirical history and social science with the interpretive tools of the cultural studies tra- dition.4 While I value formal textual analysis, and have done much of it in previous work, I think it has been overvalued in cultural studies to the neglect of meaning-making contexts. In this book, I have been more interested in social movements as sites for the production and reception of cultural texts than in the formal interpretation of these texts. Or, put differently, the texts I am interested in most are the movements them- selves, with their cultural productions as a means to that end. I have tried to be precise in characterizing the relations between cul- ture and the movements I explore here, but I am not interested in setting up a single, systematic mode of exploring the movement-culture dynamic. Introduction xvii Instead, I am interested in exploring a variety of ways in which culture matters to movements and movements matter to culture. Let me boldly assert here one of my key premises: that those forces labeled cultural may at times have a deeper and more widespread impact on most of our lives than political or economic forces. But my intent is not to argue for the greater importance of culture, just for its importance alongside and en- tangled with political, social, and economic forces that have traditionally gained more attention. These divisions — social, economic, political, cul- tural — are, after all, themselves cultural concepts, not real things neatly dividing the world. And giving culture a stronger footing in this list will allow us to better understand the interactions of all these interwoven forces. Chapter Outline This book consists of a set of interpretations of some of the key U.S. social movements from the 1950s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each chapter is designed to serve as an introduction to a move- ment for those who know little about it, but also to offer a new angle of vision to those who know the movement well. While I have been a par- ticipant in many of these movements, I make no claim to be doing the kind of work called “participant-observation.” And while I have done original research on several of these movements, I make no claims to having unearthed significant amounts of new empirical information. I am acutely aware that to talk about close to a dozen movements and as many different cultural forms borders on hubris. But while my range is ambitious, my claims are modest. My main goal has been to creatively reinterpret and synthesize elements from the large body of literature available on each of these movements in light of questions of culture. Relying on a great deal of rich secondary work by scholars and activists before me, I have tried to offer fresh readings and to place them in jux- taposition in mutually illuminating ways. This has meant incurring more than the usual amount of debt to other authors, whom I hope I have adequately thanked in my notes and acknowledgments. In addition to these forms of recognition, however, I have made this book a tribute to all the movement cultural workers whose texts and insights have made it possible. The movements I focus on are interrelated. I have emphasized a strand of movements sometimes called the “direct action” tradition. These xviii Introduction movements have relied heavily on such direct action forms as civil dis- obedience, sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, building or land takeovers, and other dramatic confrontations. One key theme I argue throughout, however, is that the “mobilizing” engendered by dramatic actions is only ultimately effective when matched by active, in-depth, patient “organizing” of peo- ple to take control of their own lives. This distinction, which I take from the great civil rights activist/theorist Ella Baker, means that surrounding the drama of social change there takes place much undramatic day-to- day activity that alone can consolidate the work of a movement’s “ritual public displays.” As I trace the particular features of each movement, I also try to show how a growing set of influences diffused from move- ment to movement, building a repertoire of ideas, tactics, strategies, cultural forms, and styles. The chapters are also intended to represent a range of examples of ways in which culture has mattered to movements. The examples both demonstrate how various art forms — music, murals, poetry, and so forth — have made particular contributions to movement cultures and social change, and raise more general questions about how culture works in and around movements. Each chapter is designed both to historicize the movement on which it focuses and to show that movement to be very much alive today. The chapters cover a range of kinds of culture, including folk culture (spirituals in the civil rights movement), high culture (poetry in the women’s and fiction in the environmental move- ments), and pop culture (rock music in the anti-apartheid movement, Hollywood films and the American Indian movement), though these categories are not mutually exclusive, especially in movement culture contexts where they are often radically transformed. Chapter 1 argues that music played a crucial role in virtually every dimension of the African American civil rights movement. It traces the rise and varied use of “freedom songs,” as activists transformed deep- seated black religious and secular musical traditions into a major resource for the struggle against racial injustice. Chapter 2 focuses on the black power phase of the African American liberation struggle, demonstrating that the Black Panther Party can be seen as engaging in a deadly serious form of political drama on the national and world stage. The chapter, like most of this book, challenges easy distinctions between culture and politics, in this case between literary dramas and the “theater” of poli- tics. Chapter 3 looks at the emergence and development of a new, radical Introduction xix wave of women’s movements beginning in the mid-1960s. Here I focus on the role of poetry as one site of feminist consciousness-raising action and as a resource in the formation of a variety of contested feminist identities rooted in differences of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality, as they have evolved up to the present. Chapter 4 treats the Chicano/a movement, focusing on the ways in which the thousands of murals produced in and around the brown power movimiento embody and reflect the political and cultural changes the movement generates in its efforts to bring justice to U.S. communities of Mexican descent. Where the first four chapters deal with cultural forms generated within movements, the next two chapters deal with relations between move- ments and mainstream popular culture. Chapter 5 focuses on the group that called itself the American Indian Movement (AIM), one of the key organizations in the wider Native American red power movement. This chapter examines the ways in which the movement’s story has been told through the widely circulated, if inevitably distorting, medium of the Hollywood film. Chapter 6 takes a look at the role played by pop and rock music in movements of the mid-1980s, especially the student-based anti-apartheid movement. Student movements, from the 1930s through the 1960s and the 1980s and into the present, have used popular culture as an organizing tool. In focusing on one of these waves of student activism, I try to show the important potential, as well as the limits, of using pop culture as a force in the promotion of social movements. Chapter 7 analyzes the brilliant use of graphic arts (posters, T-shirts, banners, stickers) by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the movement group at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS. I focus on how the group mobilized both the gay community and other affected populations through a direct action campaign illustrating how homo- phobia, racism, sexism, and class prejudice had created a deadly “epi- demic of signification” that stalled progress in saving lives. Chapter 8 directly addresses the relationship between academia and social movements, challenging the assumption that the former is all theory, the latter all practice. I complicate both sides of this image by reminding readers that academic culture is a site through which move- ments are practiced, and by suggesting that movements are theory- making sites just as surely as is academia. I consider the work I am doing throughout the book as support for the work of social movements, but this chapter makes this point in a more direct way by talking about an xx Introduction intellectual formation that has grown out of a movement context. The chapter does this by describing and arguing on behalf of an emerging trend in academic literary and cultural study that I call “environmental justice ecocriticism.” I argue for the need to expand this field in the ser- vice of the grassroots environmental justice …