Articles / Articulos
Spirit Rising - Spiritual Activism Resurges
by Michael Nagler
In the spiritual folklore of India, there is a recurring image of Mother Earth, unable to bear the sufferings caused by human beings, going to Lord Vishnu to beg for relief. This image was invoked years ago by Ammachi, one of the most popular of India's living spiritual teachers, when she warned that the abuse of the Earth by modern economies would soon lead to a backlash if we did not learn to live sensibly—that is, lightly—on the planet that bore us.
Then came Katrina. At every level—from the global warming that likely increased the severity of the hurricane, to the ecological devastation that caused the flooding, to the shocking abandonment of the city's poor, to the severity of the deluge—this is a human-made disaster. And not the last. Bill McKibben now warns that “New Orleans ... very much resembles the planet we will inhabit for the rest of our lives.” You cannot fault him for this pessimism; people who seem to be intoxicated with their own reckless folly have unleashed a wrecking ball of greed and violence against the miraculous life-support system that is our Earth, already causing damage at every level, from our DNA to the weather.
Like most myths, the story of Mother Earth going to Vishnu for help contains wisdom that can be translated into modern terms: When things get this bad, the story is saying, only spiritual energy can save us. There is evidence that many of us feel that way.
In July, 2005, Tikkun's Rabbi Michael Lerner, along with myself and many others, convened a gathering of more than 1,200 participants for a Conference on Spiritual Activism. The number would have been larger, but we had to close registration two weeks early because we filled the space.
The enthusiasm is not hard to understand. It was partly a pent-up reaction to the highjacking of Christianity by the Religious Right to support policies that are, in fact, condemned by the wisdom traditions of all cultures?—not the first time this has happened to that otherwise fine religion. As Evangelical minister Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and a featured speaker at the Conference on Spiritual Activism put it, “When they're stealing your faith, you fight back.”
But there's a deeper and more positive reason, and that's the growing hope that “spiritual activism” might just be the missing ingredient, the lightning rod, to galvanize the progressive movement and help it radically turn things around.
What is Spiritual Activism?
Spiritual activism arises from awareness of the inter?connectedness—for some, the unity—of all life. This awareness may have little to do with your formal religious affiliation.
A powerful example is Third Party Nonviolent Intervention (TPNI), in which volunteers go into conflicts to intervene among, and, if need be, interpose themselves between, conflicting parties. There you will find explicitly faith-based groups, like Christian Peacemaker Teams, Michigan Faith and Resistance, and the Muslim Peace Teams recently formed in Iraq, working alongside secular ones like the venerable Peace Brigades International. But they are all doing the same, very spiritual thing: risking their lives for “strangers.”
People across a wide spectrum of political and religious belief have been moved by an experience of interconnectedness; a U.S. Marine who was handing out food to tsunami victims in Banda Aceh said, “I've been serving my country for 34 years, and never got anything out of it like I'm getting today.”
When the progressive movement learns how to harness the power of this vision, watch out. Because spiritual activism tends, among other things, to unite where religious identities divide, thus offering a “way out of no way” in today's often sterile debates between “Left” and “Right.”
A Hundred Flowers in Search of a Garden
In fact, most progressives are already acting out of a sense that life is an interconnected whole. Take economic justice projects, for example. People who work on microlending, fair trade, and such efforts work from, and make manifest a profound sense of solidarity with their fellow human beings.
Further, those who are involved in simple-living experiments, intentional communities, local currencies and barter systems are not just redistributing wealth, but redefining it. Instead of defining their personal wealth in terms of what they own, they are calculating their wealth by the quality of their relationships and their experiences of meaning. These are all spiritual activists in the sense just defined, and so are those working on progressive projects in many other areas.
Why isn't their collective energy prevailing?
Because, I believe, we still lack a frame (á là my colleague George Lakoff) with which to embrace all these projects and give them meaning and coherence. But I don't think we are far from finding one.
If you read Gandhi's classic Satyagraha in South Africa, you will come across a deceptively simple remark from the very beginning of his politico-spiritual career in 1894: “The question of internal improvement was also taken up.”
In other words, even as he was mobilizing his fellow Indians to resist exploitation by the European-based Natal government, he saw that there was constructive work to be done within his own community. So was born the famed “Constructive Programme” that informed and empowered his 30-year struggle to make the British give back the jewel in the crown.
Imagine it Gets Real
A Network of Spiritual Progressives has grown out of the July conference, with chapters in two dozen cities and groups of youth, professionals, and members of the Democratic and Green parties forming caucuses.
The Network is also developing a campaign to identify and label products that are healthy for people and the planet, produced in ethical ways. And a group is forming to counter “Consumption Frenzy,” especially around the holidays.
Now imagine if we were to take the next step. Imagine if, instead of saying, “Get the troops and corporations out of Iraq now,” we were to say “Get the troops out of Iraq in X months or face massive civil disobedience.” In other words, imagine getting real.
Envision spending those intervening months in intensive training for civil disobedience, including outreach to uncommitted—or even hostile—parties to explain our alternative. And now imagine that we actually realize that alternative, that we build sustainable lives with spiritual relationships among ourselves and the world, based on contact with our own deeper selves; economic justice; food security; restorative justice; a healthy tax base that draws on the resources of those who can afford it; “off the margins” experiments like non-money exchange; decentralized media and real communities; microlending and community banks; community supported agriculture; demilitarization; decommercialization—all the projects that are reported in the pages of this magazine.
We would be doing nothing more nor less than recreating Gandhi's famous movement. We would combine Constructive Programme—for him, village uplift, cottage industry, women's empowerment and the 15 other projects humming like his spinning wheel behind the threats and obstructive actions taken when the occasion demanded—with Satyagraha, or definite obstructive action. Seen in this light, an environmentalist saving forests and an activist “crossing the line” at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning are already part of the same movement. The time has come to be more aware of this. The knowledge of the interconnectedness of our work has power.
But something else has to happen if we are to capture the spiritual energy we want and keep those two modes of action in balance. Those involved in both obstructive and constructive work need better links with the overtly spiritual practitioners among us. These include the people of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, who have been active in prison work and against the death penalty since the group was founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in 1978; the young people of the more recent “new monasticism”—evangelical suburbanites who, inspired by students from Eastern University who joined 40 homeless families being evicted from a Philadelphia church in 1996, have begun to form intentional communities to counter materialism, living with the poor, themselves; even the meditators in their closets—or their ashrams, or their sanghas, or their “prayer of silence” retreats out in the desert. We should now understand that even when not engaged in outward action, these people are changing the world, if only by helping to keep our activism nonviolent and our constructive action relevant.
We are, in some ways, close to this kind of movement already. We only need to be more coordinated, even (dare we say it) organized, so that we can not only get over our mutual distrust, but also decide together when to take part in Constructive Programme, when to invoke civil disobedience, and when to engage both modes.
In the kind of spiritual progressive movement we seem to be groping for, we would be “joined at the heart” not only by our sense of common purpose, not only by the overview that we would be able to articulate, but by our rootedness in a new spiritual vision (which we could also articulate) of what it means to be human and alive on this planet.
It is this movement which—in the words of Arundhati Roy—we can almost hear breathing in the spiritual activism trying to be born around us.
I believe we can make it work.
It's not like we can afford to fail.
Michael Nagler is the author of Search for a Nonviolent Future, Inner Ocean, and Our Spiritual Crisis (Open Court).
This article first appeared in the October 31, 2005 issue of YES! Magazine.
by Michael Nagler
In the spiritual folklore of India, there is a recurring image of Mother Earth, unable to bear the sufferings caused by human beings, going to Lord Vishnu to beg for relief. This image was invoked years ago by Ammachi, one of the most popular of India's living spiritual teachers, when she warned that the abuse of the Earth by modern economies would soon lead to a backlash if we did not learn to live sensibly—that is, lightly—on the planet that bore us.
Then came Katrina. At every level—from the global warming that likely increased the severity of the hurricane, to the ecological devastation that caused the flooding, to the shocking abandonment of the city's poor, to the severity of the deluge—this is a human-made disaster. And not the last. Bill McKibben now warns that “New Orleans ... very much resembles the planet we will inhabit for the rest of our lives.” You cannot fault him for this pessimism; people who seem to be intoxicated with their own reckless folly have unleashed a wrecking ball of greed and violence against the miraculous life-support system that is our Earth, already causing damage at every level, from our DNA to the weather.
Like most myths, the story of Mother Earth going to Vishnu for help contains wisdom that can be translated into modern terms: When things get this bad, the story is saying, only spiritual energy can save us. There is evidence that many of us feel that way.
In July, 2005, Tikkun's Rabbi Michael Lerner, along with myself and many others, convened a gathering of more than 1,200 participants for a Conference on Spiritual Activism. The number would have been larger, but we had to close registration two weeks early because we filled the space.
The enthusiasm is not hard to understand. It was partly a pent-up reaction to the highjacking of Christianity by the Religious Right to support policies that are, in fact, condemned by the wisdom traditions of all cultures?—not the first time this has happened to that otherwise fine religion. As Evangelical minister Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and a featured speaker at the Conference on Spiritual Activism put it, “When they're stealing your faith, you fight back.”
But there's a deeper and more positive reason, and that's the growing hope that “spiritual activism” might just be the missing ingredient, the lightning rod, to galvanize the progressive movement and help it radically turn things around.
What is Spiritual Activism?
Spiritual activism arises from awareness of the inter?connectedness—for some, the unity—of all life. This awareness may have little to do with your formal religious affiliation.
A powerful example is Third Party Nonviolent Intervention (TPNI), in which volunteers go into conflicts to intervene among, and, if need be, interpose themselves between, conflicting parties. There you will find explicitly faith-based groups, like Christian Peacemaker Teams, Michigan Faith and Resistance, and the Muslim Peace Teams recently formed in Iraq, working alongside secular ones like the venerable Peace Brigades International. But they are all doing the same, very spiritual thing: risking their lives for “strangers.”
People across a wide spectrum of political and religious belief have been moved by an experience of interconnectedness; a U.S. Marine who was handing out food to tsunami victims in Banda Aceh said, “I've been serving my country for 34 years, and never got anything out of it like I'm getting today.”
When the progressive movement learns how to harness the power of this vision, watch out. Because spiritual activism tends, among other things, to unite where religious identities divide, thus offering a “way out of no way” in today's often sterile debates between “Left” and “Right.”
A Hundred Flowers in Search of a Garden
In fact, most progressives are already acting out of a sense that life is an interconnected whole. Take economic justice projects, for example. People who work on microlending, fair trade, and such efforts work from, and make manifest a profound sense of solidarity with their fellow human beings.
Further, those who are involved in simple-living experiments, intentional communities, local currencies and barter systems are not just redistributing wealth, but redefining it. Instead of defining their personal wealth in terms of what they own, they are calculating their wealth by the quality of their relationships and their experiences of meaning. These are all spiritual activists in the sense just defined, and so are those working on progressive projects in many other areas.
Why isn't their collective energy prevailing?
Because, I believe, we still lack a frame (á là my colleague George Lakoff) with which to embrace all these projects and give them meaning and coherence. But I don't think we are far from finding one.
If you read Gandhi's classic Satyagraha in South Africa, you will come across a deceptively simple remark from the very beginning of his politico-spiritual career in 1894: “The question of internal improvement was also taken up.”
In other words, even as he was mobilizing his fellow Indians to resist exploitation by the European-based Natal government, he saw that there was constructive work to be done within his own community. So was born the famed “Constructive Programme” that informed and empowered his 30-year struggle to make the British give back the jewel in the crown.
Imagine it Gets Real
A Network of Spiritual Progressives has grown out of the July conference, with chapters in two dozen cities and groups of youth, professionals, and members of the Democratic and Green parties forming caucuses.
The Network is also developing a campaign to identify and label products that are healthy for people and the planet, produced in ethical ways. And a group is forming to counter “Consumption Frenzy,” especially around the holidays.
Now imagine if we were to take the next step. Imagine if, instead of saying, “Get the troops and corporations out of Iraq now,” we were to say “Get the troops out of Iraq in X months or face massive civil disobedience.” In other words, imagine getting real.
Envision spending those intervening months in intensive training for civil disobedience, including outreach to uncommitted—or even hostile—parties to explain our alternative. And now imagine that we actually realize that alternative, that we build sustainable lives with spiritual relationships among ourselves and the world, based on contact with our own deeper selves; economic justice; food security; restorative justice; a healthy tax base that draws on the resources of those who can afford it; “off the margins” experiments like non-money exchange; decentralized media and real communities; microlending and community banks; community supported agriculture; demilitarization; decommercialization—all the projects that are reported in the pages of this magazine.
We would be doing nothing more nor less than recreating Gandhi's famous movement. We would combine Constructive Programme—for him, village uplift, cottage industry, women's empowerment and the 15 other projects humming like his spinning wheel behind the threats and obstructive actions taken when the occasion demanded—with Satyagraha, or definite obstructive action. Seen in this light, an environmentalist saving forests and an activist “crossing the line” at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning are already part of the same movement. The time has come to be more aware of this. The knowledge of the interconnectedness of our work has power.
But something else has to happen if we are to capture the spiritual energy we want and keep those two modes of action in balance. Those involved in both obstructive and constructive work need better links with the overtly spiritual practitioners among us. These include the people of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, who have been active in prison work and against the death penalty since the group was founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in 1978; the young people of the more recent “new monasticism”—evangelical suburbanites who, inspired by students from Eastern University who joined 40 homeless families being evicted from a Philadelphia church in 1996, have begun to form intentional communities to counter materialism, living with the poor, themselves; even the meditators in their closets—or their ashrams, or their sanghas, or their “prayer of silence” retreats out in the desert. We should now understand that even when not engaged in outward action, these people are changing the world, if only by helping to keep our activism nonviolent and our constructive action relevant.
We are, in some ways, close to this kind of movement already. We only need to be more coordinated, even (dare we say it) organized, so that we can not only get over our mutual distrust, but also decide together when to take part in Constructive Programme, when to invoke civil disobedience, and when to engage both modes.
In the kind of spiritual progressive movement we seem to be groping for, we would be “joined at the heart” not only by our sense of common purpose, not only by the overview that we would be able to articulate, but by our rootedness in a new spiritual vision (which we could also articulate) of what it means to be human and alive on this planet.
It is this movement which—in the words of Arundhati Roy—we can almost hear breathing in the spiritual activism trying to be born around us.
I believe we can make it work.
It's not like we can afford to fail.
Michael Nagler is the author of Search for a Nonviolent Future, Inner Ocean, and Our Spiritual Crisis (Open Court).
This article first appeared in the October 31, 2005 issue of YES! Magazine.
Occupying the Imagination, Cultivating a New Politics
By: Vijay Prashad
Published: November 23, 2011 on Left turn magazine.
My heart makes my head swim - Franz Fanon, "Black Skin, White Masks"
Part I: Bare Life
Reports and rumors filter out of government documents and family distress signals to locate precisely the ongoing devastation of social life in the United States. Unemployment rates linger at perilously high levels, with the effective rate in some cities, such as Detroit, stumbling on with half the population without waged work. Home foreclosures fail to slow-down, and sheriffs and debt-recovery paramilitaries scour the landscape for the delinquents. Personal debt has escalated as ordinary people with uneven means of earning livings turn to banks and to the shady world of personal loan agencies to take them to the other side of starvation. Researchers at the RAND Corporation tell us that absent family support, poverty rates among the elderly will be about double what they are now. In other words, economist Nancy Folbre’s “invisible heart” is trying its best to hold back the noxious effects of the “invisible hand.”
Swathes of the American landscape are now given over to desolation: abandoned factories make room for chimney swallows and the heroin trade, as old farmhouses become homes for meth-amphetamine labs and the sorrows of broken, rural dreams. Returning to his native Indiana, Jeffrey St. Clair writes, “My grandfather’s farm is now a shopping mall. The black soil, milled to such fine fertility by the Wisconsin glaciation, is now buried under a black sea of asphalt. The old Boatenwright pig farm is now a quick lube, specializing in servicing SUVs.” Into this bleak landscape, St. Clair moans, “We are a hollow nation, a poisonous shell of our former selves.”
What growth comes to the economy is premised upon the inventions and discoveries of a fortunate few, those who were either raised with all the advantages of the modern world or who were too gifted to be held back by centuries of hierarchies. Bio-chemists and computer engineers, as well as musical impresarios and film producers – they devise a product, patent it, and then mass produce it elsewhere, in Mexico or China, Malaysia or India. These few collect rent off their inventions, and hire lawyers and bankers to protect their patents, and to grow their money. Around them, in their gated communities, exist a ring of service providers, from those who tend to their lawns to those who teach their children, from those who cook their food to those who protect them.
Those many who would once have been employed in mass industrial production to actually make the commodities that are invented by the few are now no longer needed. They have been rendered disposable – unnecessary to the political economy of accumulation. These many survive in the interstices of the economy, either with part time jobs, or crowded into family shops, either with off the books legal activity or off the books illegal activity: the struggle for survival is acute. Only 37% of unemployed Americans receive jobless benefits, which amounts to $293 per week, and only 40% of very poor families who qualify for public assistance actually are able to claim it. Strikingly, the new recession has hit low-wage service jobs with no benefits, which are mainly held by women, the hardest. In recession times, these women, with those jobs, stretched their invisible hearts across their families. Now, even this love-fueled glue is no longer available.
The few luxuriate, the many vegetate: this is the social effect of high rates of inequality, the trick of jobless growth.
The political class has no effective answer to this malaise. It has drawn the country in the opposite direction from a solution. Rather than raise the funds to build a foundation for the vast mass, it continues to offer tax cuts to the wealthy: the average tax cut this year to the top 1% of the population was larger than the average income of the bottom 99%. Furthermore, the political class has diverted $7.6 trillion to the military for the wars, the overseas bases, the homeland security ensemble, and for the healthcare to the veterans of these endless wars. There is no attempt to draw-down the personal debt that now stands at $2.4 trillion, and none whatsoever to tend to the $1 trillion in student debt that remains even if after a declaration of bankruptcy. Our students are headed into the wilderness, carrying debt that constrains their imagination.
Part 2: Dates
By 2042, the country is going to become majority minority. Or, to put it bluntly, more people who claim their descent from outside Europe will populate the country. This worried Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who wrote in an influential Foreign Policy article in 2004, “The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream US culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves -- from Los Angeles to Miami -- and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.”
Globalization hollows out the core of the nation’s manufacturing, devastates the social basis of its culture, and threatens the integrity of its people, and yet, it is the migrant who bears the cross. Illusions about the social glue of Anglo-Protestantism, which whips between the Declaration of Independence and chattel slavery, provide the only outlet for Huntington’s frustrations. There is no authentic cultural project to attract the new migrants, to encourage them to find shelter in these Anglo-Protestant values. Huntington knows that these have run their course, or were never such strong magnets in the first place. Huntington’s fearful panic can only be mollified by the prison-house of border walls, the Minutemen, the Border Patrol agents, SB1070, English Only ordinances, and so on. Force alone can govern Huntington’s vision. It no longer can breed mass consent.
2042 is far off. Closer still is 2016. It is the date chosen by the International Monetary Fund in its World Economic Outlook report from 2011 to signal the shift for the world’s largest economy: from the United States to China. We are within a decade of that monumental turn, with the US having to surrender its dominant place for the first time since the 1920s.
By 2042, the country will be minority majority. By 2034, it will be as unequal as Mexico, with an economy shrinking and formal unemployment steadily rising. By 2042, people of color will inherit a broken country, one that is ready to be turned around for good, not ill.
The collapse of the US economy is a “sign of autumn,” as the historian Ferdinand Braudel put it; our autumn is China’s springtime. Linked to this 2016 date is yet another: 2034. The US governmental data shows that by 2034 the United States will have a rate of inequality that matches Mexico. The United States today is more unequal than Pakistan and Iran. The rate of inequality has risen steadily since 1967; it is going to become catastrophic by 2034.
By 2042, the country will be minority majority. By 2034, it will be as unequal as Mexico, with an economy shrinking and formal unemployment steadily rising.
By 2042, people of color will inherit a broken country, one that is ready to be turned around for good, not ill.
Part 3: Conservatism
In his new book, Suicide of a Superpower, Pat Buchanan bemoans the decline of the United States and of white, Christian culture. What is left to conserve, asks the old warrior for the Right? Not much. He calls for a decline in the nation’s debt and an end to its imperial postures (including an end to its bases and its wars). These are important gestures. Then he falls to his knees, begging for a return of the United States to Christianity and Whiteness. Buchanan knows this is ridiculous. He makes no attempt to say how this return must take place. His is an exhortation.
But Buchanan is not so far from the general tenor of the entire political class, whether putatively liberal or conservative. It is not capable of dealing with the transformation. It is deluded into the belief that the United States can enjoy another “American Century,” and that if only the Chinese revalue their currency, everything would be back to the Golden Age. It is also deluded into the belief that the toxic rhetoric about “taking back the country” is going to silence the darker bodies, who have tasted freedom since 1965 and want more of it.
The idea of “taking back the country” produces what Aijaz Ahmad calls “cultures of cruelty.” By “cultures of cruelty,” Aijaz means the “wider web of social sanctions in which one kind of violence can be tolerated all the more because many other kinds of violence are tolerated anyway.” Police brutality and domestic violence, ICE raids against undocumented workers and comical mimicry of the foreign accent, aerial bombardment in the borderlands of Afghanistan and sanctified misogyny in our cinema – these forms of routine violence set the stage for the “a more generalized ethical numbness toward cruelty.” It is on this prepared terrain of cruelty that the forces of the Far Right, the Tea Party for instance, can make its hallowed appearance – ready to dance on the misfortunes and struggles of the migrants, the workers and the disposed. The pre-existing cultures of cruelty sustain the Far Right, and allow it to appear increasingly normal, taking back the country from you know who.
The Right’s menagerie sniffs at all the opportunities. It is prepared, exerting itself, feeding off a culture that has delivered a disarmed population into its fangs. They are ready for 2034 and 2042, but only in the most harmful way.
Part 4: Multiculturalism
Obviously multiculturalism is the antithesis of Buchananism. But multiculturalism too is inadequate, if not anachronistic. Convulsed by the fierce struggles from below for recognition and redistribution, the powers that be settled on a far more palatable social theory than full equality: bourgeois multiculturalism. Rather than annul the social basis of discrimination, the powers that be cracked open the doors to privilege, like Noah on the ark, letting in specimens of each of the colors to enter into the inner sanctum – the rest were to be damned in the flood. Color came into the upper reaches of the military and the corporate boardroom, to the college campus and to the Supreme Court, and eventually to the Oval Office. Order recognized that old apartheid was anachronistic. It was now going to be necessary to incorporate the most talented amongst the populations of color into the hallways of money and power. Those who would be anointed might then stand in for their fellows, left out in the cold night of despair.
The same politicians, such as Bill Clinton, who favored multicultural advancement for the few strengthened the social polices to throttle the multitudinous lives of color: the end of welfare, the increase in police and prisons and the free pass given to Wall Street shackled large sections of our cities to the chains of starvation, incarceration and indebtedness. Meanwhile, in ones and twos, people of color attained the mantle of success. Their success was both a false beacon for populations that could not hope for such attainment, and a standing rebuke for not having made it. There is a cruelty in the posture of multiculturalism.
When Barack Obama ascended the podium at Grant Park in Chicago on November 4, 2010 to declare himself the victor in the presidential election, multiculturalism’s promise was fulfilled. For decades, people of color had moved to the highest reaches of corporate and military life, of the State and of society. The only post unoccupied till November 4 was the presidency. No wonder that even Jesse Jackson, Sr., wept when Obama accepted victory. That night, multiculturalism ended.
When the economy tanked in 2007-08, the victims of the harshest asset stripping were African Americans and Latinos. They lost more than half their assets, which amounts to loss of a generation’s savings.
It is now exhausted itself as a progressive force.
Obama has completed his historical mission, to slay the bugbear of social distinction: in the higher offices, all colors can come. Obama’s minor mission, also completed, was to provide the hard-core racists with a daily dose of acid reflux when he appears on television.
What did not end of course was racism. That remains. When the economy tanked in 2007-08, the victims of the harshest asset stripping were African Americans and Latinos. They lost more than half their assets, which amounts to loss of a generation’s savings. As of 2009, the typical white household had wealth (assets minus debts) worth $113,149, while Black households only had $5,677 and Hispanic households $6,325. Black and Latino households, in other words, hold only about 5% of the wealth in the hands of white households. The myth of the post-racial society should be buried under this data.
Even Obama knew that it was silly to speak of post-racism. Before he won the presidential election Obama told journalist Gwen Ifill for her 2009 book The Breakthrough, “Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that the African Americans experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our racial history. We have never fully come to grips with that history.” What was meant in the jubilation of Obama’s victory was that we are in a post-multicultural era. Racism is alive and well.
Multiculturalism is no longer a pertinent ideology against the old granite block.
Part 5: Occupy
In 1968, just before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”
It is now dark enough.
Out of the social woodwork emerged the many fragments of the American people to occupy space that is often no longer public. It began in New York, and then has spread outward. The demand of the Occupy Wall Street movement is simple: society has been sundered into two halves, the 1% and the 99%, with the voice of the latter utterly smothered, and the needs of the former tended to by bipartisan courtesy.
Why there is no list of concrete demands is equal to the broad strategy of the movement: (1) it has paused to produce concrete demands because it is first to welcome the immense amount of grievances that circle around the American Town Square; (2) it has refused to allow the political class to engage with it, largely because it does not believe that this political class will be capable of understanding the predicament of the 99%.
Occupy is not a panacea, but an opening. It will help us clear the way to a more mature political landscape. It has begun to breathe in the many currents of dissatisfaction and breathe out a new radical imagination.
Two more reasons to discount the ideology of multiculturalism: Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, one of the founders of Asian American Studies; San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, one of the main fighters in the I-Hotel struggle in 1977. One sent in the police to run riot through Occupy Oakland, and the other threatened the same in San Francisco. The passion that is pretended is only to obtain advancement.
Occupy is not a panacea, but an opening. It will help us clear the way to a more mature political landscape. It has begun to breathe in the many currents of dissatisfaction and breathe out a new radical imagination. In Dreams of My Father, Obama relates how he was motivated by the culture of the civil rights movement. From it he learnt that “communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens.” Social life does not automatically emerge. It has to be worked for. The social condition of “commute-work-commute-sleep” or of utter disposability does not help forge social bonds. Communities, Obama writes, “expanded or contracted with the dreams of men – and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large.”
Out of the many struggles over the past several decades – from anti-prison to anti-sexual violence, from anti-starvation to anti-police brutality – has emerged the Occupy dynamic.
This new radical imagination forces us to break with the liberal desires for reform of a structure that can no longer be plastered over, as termites have already eaten into its foundation.
It has broken the chain of despondency and allowed us to imagine new communities. It has broken the idea of American exceptionalism and linked US social distress and protest to the pink tide in Latin America, the Arab Spring and the pre-revolutionary strivings of the indignados of Club Med.
This new radical imagination forces us to break with the liberal desires for reform of a structure that can no longer be plastered over, as termites have already eaten into its foundation. It forces us to break with multicultural upward mobility that has both succeeded in breaking the glass ceiling, and at the same time demonstrated its inability to operate on behalf of the multitudes. Neither liberal reform nor multiculturalism. We require something much deeper, something more radical. The answers to our questions and to the condition of bare life are not to be found in being cautious. We need to cultivate the imagination, for those who lack an imagination cannot know what lacks.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. In 2012, three of his books will be published: Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, Spring), Uncle Swami: Being South Asian in America (New Press, Spring) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, Fall).
Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was little discussion of the outsized power of Wall Street and the diminishing fortunes of the middle class. The media blackout was especially remarkable given that issues like jobs and corporate influence on elections topped the list of concerns for most Americans. Occupy Wall Street changed that. In fact, it may represent the best hope in years that... “we the people” will step up to take on the critical challenges of our time.
Here’s how the Occupy movement is already changing everything:
1. It names the source of the crisis. Political insiders have avoided this simple reality: The problems of the 99% are caused in large part by Wall Street greed, perverse financial incentives, and a corporate takeover of the political system. Now that this is understood, the genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in.
2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want. We can create a world that works for everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%. And we, the 99%, are using the spaces opened up by the Occupy movement to conduct a dialogue about the world we want.
3. It sets a new standard for public debate. Those advocating policies and proposals must now demonstrate that their ideas will benefit the 99%. Serving only the 1% will not suffice, nor will claims that the subsidies and policies that benefit the 1% will eventually “trickle down.”
4. It presents a new narrative. The solution is not to starve government or impose harsh austerity measures that further harm middle-class and poor people already reeling from a bad economy. Instead, the solution is to free society and government from corporate dominance. A functioning democracy is our best shot at addressing critical social, environmental, and economic crises.
5. It creates a big tent. We, the 99%, are people of all ages, races, occupations, and political beliefs. We will resist being divided or marginalized. We are learning to work together with respect.
6. It offers everyone a chance to create change. No one is in charge; no organization or political party calls the shots. Anyone can get involved, offer proposals, support the occupations, and build the movement. Because leadership is everywhere and new supporters keep turning up, there is a flowering of creativity and a resilience that makes the movement
nearly impossible to shut down.
7. It is a movement, not a list of demands. The call for deep change—not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms—is the movement’s sustaining power. The movement is sometimes criticized for failing to issue a list of demands, but doing so could keep it tied to status quo power relationships and policy options. The occupiers and their supporters will not be boxed in.
8. It combines the local and the global. People in cities and towns around the world are setting their own local agendas, tactics, and aims. What they share in common is a critique of corporate power and an identification with the 99%, creating an extraordinary wave of global solidarity.
9. It offers an ethic and practice of deep democracy and community. Slow, patient decision-making in which every voice is heard translates into wisdom, common commitment, and power. Occupy sites are set up as communities in which anyone can discuss grievances, hopes, and dreams, and where all can experiment with living in a space built around mutual support.
10. We have reclaimed our power. Instead of looking to politicians and leaders to bring about change, we can see now that the power rests with us. Instead of being victims to the forces upending our lives, we are claiming our sovereign right to remake the world.
Like all human endeavors, Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of variations and spin-offs will be imperfect. There have already been setbacks and divisions, hardships and injury. But as our world faces extraordinary challenges—from climate change to soaring inequality—our best hope is the ordinary people, gathered in imperfect democracies, who are finding ways to fix a broken world.
The Importance of Occupy and How It Is Already Affecting the Future, and What's Next.
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