As long as political order and authority have existed, they have always come to a point where they oppose the will of the masses; solidarity has been key in destroying or reconstructing said order and authority. Solidarity, however, struggles to materialize across the racial dimension owing largely to one very important truism:
We live in a world where the ruling classes weaponize the masses in order to iteratively craft stratified racial classifications that vary in their degrees of dissimilarity. One’s quality of life – and more gravely, their risk of being subjected to gratuitous state-sanctioned violence – is heavily determined by their membership to any of these classifications.
This makes multiracial liberation a temperamental conquest. It’s so beautiful, so necessary, yet so very painful; it’s the excision scar that remains after we’ve learned to struggle together.
In our endeavour to achieve multiracial liberation, we can start out by asking ourselves: how have different groups collated their resources and translated their subjective systems of rationality to achieve their goals? How have these groups made sacrifices and advocated for others at different points in history? In the vein of maintaining a modicum of terseness, we examine one example of a “successful” multiracial solidaristic movement.
The Rainbow Coalition, primarily consisting of the Illinois Black Panther Party, the Young Patriot Organization (YPO) and the Young Lords, showed us that what the youth lacks in experience, it makes up for in a higher density of cognitive matter unsoiled by the conditioning of bigotry and the trauma of oppression. The three groups that made up the Rainbow Coalition found the highly elusive and much lauded common struggle that our good friends at Jacobin are working tirelessly to promulgate to the masses. Emily Ann Wilson references an excerpt of a The Patriot (the YPO’s publication) article called “The Real Enemy” that states:
Poor and oppressed white people, like all oppressed peoples, have been blaming others for their poverty. The others usually have been other oppressed white people or peoples of color–black and brown, who are just as oppressed or more…By oppressed peoples fighting and blaming each other for their poverty, they never have the time or energy to fight the Real Enemy–the Power of the Rich.
Easy, right? The ruling class holds the capital; we must arrive at this truth, draft and disseminate the agitational propaganda, begin to organize our folks, and then the job is finished…right? Let’s take a step back. Who were the Young Patriots?
The YPO was a group that consisted of – and advocated for – poor Appalachians (in addition to some middle class folks). Essentially, they represented impoverished white people. Wilson goes on to explain that, “while middle-class whites faced a purely ‘abstract oppression,’ the Patriots lived the harsh reality of class exploitation, positioning them to create a much stronger alliance with Black revolutionaries based, not on intellectual or moral grounds, but primarily on common material needs”. There was a connecting thread here. These groups agreed that one another’s material needs were not being met.
When looking to the present-day left and the efforts towards strengthening racial solidarity that are in-progress, what can we say is the connecting thread? Is it the acknowledgment of those same material needs not being met? Possibly.
I can say, with a degree of confidence, that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) contains within its rank-and-file a high density of middle-class and upper-middle-class folks when compared to leftist movements of the past. I have folks in Tucson, AZ, who do not trust the DSA or the Party for Socialism and Liberation because they are seen as “white kids who just come around” trying to pass out literature without making an effort to spend any valuable time learning and exchanging ideas with those living in South Tucson – a low income area that is home to a majority of people of color. I can say that there are smaller groups here in New York City that doubt NYC-DSA’s commitment to even doing the “bare minimum” of labor organizing and were visibly relieved yet surprised when I assured them that, yes, some of that is going on.
So again, I ask: what is the connecting thread?
To find it, we have to look deeper again into the white corner of the triumvirate that made up the Rainbow Coalition. Wilson writes:
The Patriots used Civil War nostalgia and references to white nationalism in an attempt to relate to Appalachian migrants, and yet they refused to acknowledge the dark history of these symbols even when confronted by the people who understood their real-world harm.
In their refusal to reckon with their white supremacist imagery and lack of historical analysis on race and patriotism, Wilson argues that the Young Patriots did nothing to lay the groundwork for radicalizing and conditioning the poor white working class for solidarity. Instead, this refusal left a wound unattended – one that became infected as the protracted struggle for liberation continued. What became of this infection was a tradition that has devolved into the same tendencies that have signal boosted astroturfed movements such as the Tea Party and the MAGA movement: a constant yearning for the manifestation of a glorious, dignified and prosperous past.
When we look at DSA in regards to the goal of multiracial liberation, we must inspect the intersections and look at where we’re truly being solidaristic. It would be disappointing to repeat the past failures of those within the Rainbow Coalition, who did not take an honest look at how white supremacy was still extant in their rhetoric and imagery. We have come a long way from then and it would be hard to believe that many of our white comrades could commit such an atrocious oversight today. However, it can be argued that the oversights are manifesting in more nebulous forms – and more importantly, they are a product of distrust.
The resistance to trusting the lived experiences of the oppressed is something that is all too common in leftist organizing and activist spaces. We must come to the realization that DSA’s only national affinity caucus, Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus (AfroSoc), was necessary because we live under a system of global white supremacy that reifies global capitalism, colonialism and state-sanctioned violence. This was something that DSA could not properly address and we risked hemorrhaging our black and POC comrades if we didn’t create space for them to address their material conditions amongst themselves. We must trust that the people who have dispensed their knowledge, their energy, and their love into building AfroSoc are the foundation to strengthening multiracial solidarity within DSA. The members of this caucus are very aware of the reputation that DSA has within communities of color because the members of their respective communities never allow them to forget. The bottom line here is that our comrades within AfroSoc are making sacrifices and exercising humility in maintaining their membership to the DSA.
What R10: Make DSA More Diverse does, however, is reframe the amazing work being done and sacrifices made within AfroSoc as the actions of comrades who demand deference and rely on shame tactics to ascend to positions of authority. To draft a resolution with this type of language does nothing to strengthen the bonds that those in AfroSoc have been creating within and outside of the caucus. More broadly, this resolution does nothing to contribute to the tradition of multiracial liberatory struggle. Instead, it conjures a sick feeling that people of color in leftist orgs know all too well; distrust.
This distrust results from excluding any anti-colonial or abolitionist language in a resolution meant to address the lack of people of color in a leftist organization.
This distrust results from overlooking the efforts AfroSoc made in 2017 to address the same issues R10 is attempting to address.
This distrust results from ignoring efforts that AfroSoc has made to build a multiracial coalition within DSA with limited resources while the Multiracial Organizing Committee, the dormant committee that R10 intends to reanimate, has carried an ambiguous-at-best reputation within DSA nationally.
R10-A01: DSA For Multiracial Liberation, on the other hand, amends R10 in good faith and tethers it to reality.
This amendment draws on the effort, care and expertise that AfroSoc members have developed as the flagship group working towards building bridges between DSA and communities of color. As a result, this amendment rejects representation politics; centers membership development as opposed to solely leadership development; emphasizes decolonization, Black liberation and racial justice; and redirects much needed resources to AfroSoc so that the caucus can continue doing the essential work of making DSA a place where people of color feel like proper political protagonists.
We have a chance to build on our knowledge of the past and listen to our comrades of color. That requires an admission of ignorance, dismissiveness and maltreatment. Doing so requires an undertaking of humility and putting substantial thought into the issue of multiracial liberation. R10 is evidence that none of these requirements have been met within DSA. Comrades who actually care about achieving the goal of multiracial liberation would refuse to allow this type of haphazard work to be codified. Comrades of color have stood by and watched as our material conditions were reclassified on the Left as additional identifiers. We saw our people at home and abroad gratuitously subjected to inhumane conditions, and that the organization we see as our political home was not doing enough to address this. The redeeming fact is, though, that we are political protagonists that can pick up that slack because we care. You just have to trust us.
Pedro Mpanzu is a Kongolese panafricanist and follower of the black radical tradition. He believes multiracial class struggle and abolition are key to the liberation of all people. He also helps lead efforts within NYC-DSA to support existing local community-based orgs and is a member of the Emerge caucus.
