How We Fight White Supremacy

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Although Second Wave feminism declared that “the personal is political” and Black feminists did the work of expanding “the personal” to include people who were not White, straight, or middle-class, the idea that “I’m not free until we all are free” has always been a major one for us. This explains how both Blacks who were born free and those who became free acted as conductors on the Underground Railroad at great personal risk. How Black folks throughout the African Diaspora toiled to defeat the murderous system of South African apartheid. It’s our way of thinking, our cultural value, that provides the scaffolding for our drive toward universal equity.

As the Combahee River Collective put it in “A Black Feminist Statement” in 1977:

This belief that collective action brings about collective solutions underpins organizing in social movements. We are the informal and self-described strategists who refine tactics passed down from our previous tries at liberation, and we are the patient participants in the slow-going project of freedom. At our best and most holistic, we act as advocates for every Black person, regardless of gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, record of criminal charges, education level, quirk, or kink. As long as you don’t act all the way up and out, our instinct is to claim you. This is what pulls activists out of bed each morning—the way we instinctively understand that “Black Lives Matter” is a rallying cry, not a threat to the humanity of others.

There’s a reason you use your fists and not your individual fingertips to fight. From one of the minds behind Black Lives Matter, to a formerly incarcerated man working to restore the voting rights of others, to the woman who first encouraged survivors to say, “Me too,” the organizers featured in this chapter are knockout artists.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors on Why “We’ve Got to Tell a Different Story about Blackness”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors is best known for cofounding Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2013 in response to the exoneration of George Zimmerman, the White self-appointed neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida, who followed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin as he walked home from the store and fatally shot him. But Khan-Cullors was a Los Angeles–based artist and organizer long before then. Her award-winning work with the Labor Community Strategy Center and her performance piece “Stained: An Intimate Portrayal of State Violence” were early shots fired in a career that has focused on making the lives of Black people truly matter. Her first book, When They Call You a Terrorist, was released in 2018. Here she talks to Akiba about the genesis of her community organizing.

How did you get into organizing?

Aww, the good old days. Let’s see. I grew up in Van Nuys, a working-class suburb of LA made up of mostly undocumented Latino immigrants, some Black folks, and some poor White people.

I was very concerned about the environment in elementary school and middle school. I think I adopted a whale in elementary school, and I was concerned with animals going extinct. At the time, the environmental movement had the best stronghold on messaging around organizing and activism.

I learned my actual organizing skills at a social justice camp up in the mountains of California when I was sixteen. The camp was run by National Conference for Community and Justice. We had seven days of training in a “tolerance” curriculum. But I wanted an action component to that. At one point during my training as a youth leader, I asked a group I was working with, “Do you take on the police?” They said, “No, we’re an environmental justice group.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take it.”

Still, no matter how much I tell people I’ve been a skilled strategist for fourteen or fifteen years, people don’t see it. I think it’s because I’m a woman, am Black, and it’s a more exciting thing to imagine, “Oh, you popped up out of nowhere!”

People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out. That’s the most visible shit; we’re not putting our boring-ass meetings on social media.

How do you define an organizer versus an activist?

Organizers are strategists. We are a part of producing and building the campaign. Activists are showing up to the things that organizers plan, signing the petitions, going on social [media] to promote the action. Sometimes organizers are activists as well—they can be out front and work behind the scenes.

Can you talk about the importance of telling your own story?

As Black Lives Matter—the brand of BLM—grew, it didn’t follow us. God forbid Black women are behind something huge. So I made an executive decision when the Melissa Harris-Perry show did a panel about BLM without inviting me or [cofounders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi]. It was like, “Nah, that’s not going to work this time. We’re Black women; we know the story of being erased.”

We’re forty years in and just now really talking about Ella Baker. That’s no dis to MLK, but goddamn. Hundreds of Black women did work for the March on Washington. And after women did that work, [male organizers] decided that women weren’t going to speak. So I decided that this time patriarchy was not going to rule the land. Or at least we were going to compete with it.

Why do you think patriarchy is still so appealing to us?

We are wired for patriarchy. It’s how our bodies work. It’s not even in our minds. It’s in our belief system. We still believe in Black men more than Black women. That’s how you get a man as a “leader” of BLM. At least MLK actually was a leader! We need a culture shift.

How do you cope with being forward-facing when people take shots at your work?

This work takes an extreme amount of restraint, and it’s very lonely, very isolating. Sometimes I want to go on social media and go the hell off, but then I go call somebody. It takes community support, a commitment to what’s bigger. And I try not to feel sorry for myself. I literally have a centering practice, Jordan somatics. It looks like being able to wake up and sit on the edge of my bed, standing up and taking deep breaths and healing into the deepest parts of me. I remember that I’m human and doing the best that I can. I keep it in perspective by keeping my oldest homies close, people who aren’t a part of the movement. That gives me grounding and perspective.

What makes you proud about the work of BLM?

That we did something different than I would say the old guard did. We were talking about trans Black people, about police violence against Black women. We were looking at harm and violence inside of the Black community. For us, every victim is special and important, no matter their past. We’ve got to tell a different story about Blackness.

Redemption Song

For Christopher Rashad Green, organizing is about redemption.

He was sixteen years old the first time he was arrested.

“At fifteen, I was an honor roll student attending a college prep program on the campus of Rutgers University. On my sixteenth birthday, I was locked up. Six months. That’s how fast it happened,” says the Plainfield, New Jersey, native. “Looking back now, I still ask, How did that happen? Some of the members of my clique turned south, and I went south with them. Trying to fit in, I was making poor decisions, shooting heroin. And then I was locked up. Altogether, I’ve put about fifteen years in on this installment plan.”

After more than a dozen years in and out of prisons in New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia for a series of addiction-related infractions, he’d had enough.

On May 20, 2010, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, police took Green into custody, and he decided that it would be his last time behind bars. “I can’t explain it, but within forty-eight hours I just had this resolve. I just knew that I would never come back,” Green says of his last three-year bid. “I said to myself, My reentry program starts now. I’m not going to wait to get to the end of my bid, I’m going to start it right now.”

And so he did.

He connected with mentors, joined a rehab program, started journaling—anything to prepare himself for the task of getting out and staying out. As he worked on himself, one word kept coming back to him: “service.”

“I would only be successful in life if I served other people. That was the message I got. I didn’t hear any voices or anything like that. But that, within my studying, that was the word that jumped out,” he said. “I tried to dissect it, and it came to me. I would never be successful, anywhere in life, until I figured out a way to serve.”

These days, Green is an organizer with the progressive nonprofit New Virginia Majority. He first attended a meeting in the fall of 2015, just as he was toying with the idea of getting his voting rights restored. “I hooked up with New Virginia Majority, and they were addressing the restoration of rights. It was just a perfect fit,” he says. “From that point on, I became pretty much the face of restoration of rights for New Virginia Majority.”

After volunteering for two years, he was hired as an organizer, focusing primarily on voter registration and restoration of rights, which means he does everything from knocking on doors to lobbying the state’s General Assembly members. “The role seems like it was carved out for me,” says Green, who is now based in Richmond, Virginia. “It keeps me alive.”

He sees his biggest task as helping Black people in his community push back against the idea that they don’t matter. “So many people, when we try to register them, say, ‘It’s not going to change anything. My vote’s not going to matter.’ And I say, ‘No, it does matter, brother. Because it’s not just about voting. It’s about being involved.’ I share my story with them, try to encourage them to jump in,” he says. “And then look what happened here in Virginia last year: the balance of power in the General Assembly was decided by one vote. One vote.”