“They like to pretend we didn’t fight back. We did: with obeah, poison, revolution. It simply wasn’t enough.”
- Michelle Cliff, If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire
On January 8th, the Black Radical Tradition Conference commenced with a march through streets of Philadelphia. Organized by the Black Radical Organizing Collective (BROC), a group of activists, scholars, educators, artists, and the like. The conference was held at Temple University, where people from across the country convened, from Jan. 8th to Jan. 10th, to learn about the significance of the Black radical tradition to modern-day liberation movements.
An intergenerational group of activist-scholars, from Angela Davis to Che Gosset, gathered to give lectures and participate on panels to discuss the Black radical tradition in regard to prison abolition, war, capitalism, and more. The conference’s goal was to map out revolutionary pathways to the future by anchoring these visions to a rich history of resistance.
Importantly, BROC placed this conference within a legacy of Black liberation struggle, a legacy which is often devalued, misunderstood, or erased. As forms of analysis, such as intersectionality, become more popular, the danger of positioning marginalized people, especially people who are multiply marginalized (women of color, trans people of color, etc.), as having no power or agency over their lives rises as well. Rather than understanding intersectionality as a method of examining dynamics of power, created by a Black woman to address the particular realities of women of color, some may come to believe intersectionality implies “being a Black women = lacking power and agency”.
Without downplaying the realities of poverty, microaggressions, and other manifestations of oppression/exploitation, it is imperative that we acknowledge forms of power we are able to utilize in community and as individuals. Recognizing and naming oppression are necessary if systems of domination are to be dismantled. However, implying that marginalized people are powerless is exactly what these systems aspire to do—strip power away, most often in the form of resources and representation, from marginalized people.
In her second book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, acclaimed Black feminist scholar bell hooks writes:
Women who are exploited and oppressed daily cannot afford to relinquish the belief that they exercise some measure of control, however relative, over their lives. They cannot afford to see themselves solely as “victims” because their survival depends on continued exercise of whatever personal powers they possess.
While speaking specifically about women in this passage, hooks’ insight can also be applied more broadly to include other groups of marginalized people as well.
However, as bell hooks warns against in Feminist Theory, narratives that position marginalized people, especially people of color, as “victims” lacking agency proliferate in liberal social justice discourse. White liberals, especially, only seem capable of engaging with the United States’ history of white supremacy if people of color are to be pitied and treated like helpless children. The white savior complex, when white people attempt to “save” people of color from racism and economic hardship, is a prime example of this patronizing attitude; the implication being that people of color lack the ability to transform their communities themselves.
Nigerian writer Teju Cole critiqued the white savior industrial complex, writing:
“How, for example, could a well-meaning American “help” a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives.”
As James Baldwin notes in Evidence of Things Not Seen, “The victim can have no point of view for precisely so long as he thinks of himself as a victim”. Therefore, to avoid being cast into the category of victim, histories of resistance, like the Black radical tradition, must be reclaimed.
In his article “We Are Not What We Seem”, historian Robin D. G. Kelley examines how members of the Black working-class during Southern racial apartheid regularly engaged in personal and communal acts of resistance against exploitative employers. An example being the Black women working in white people’s homes who would refuse to work, or threaten to quit, just before their employer’s held showy gatherings. Kelley’s article, alongside similar work by other scholars, preserves a history of macro and micro-resistances that would, otherwise, vanish.
As we move further into Black History month, laying claim to Black people’s history of resistance to white supremacy is crucial. From rebels to maroons, Black people have never collectively remained docile in the face of white supremacy. We have always fought back. We have always organized, constructed, and resisted. Placing present day Black liberation initiatives in this context will only bolster these endeavors, working as a reminder that the work of justice, as Billie Holiday sang, “will take a little while”.
