#antiracist

One of my favorite commissioned projects I got to work on this year. HP asked me to create coloring pages that centered around diversity and inclusion. They gave me 100% creative freedom to do what I wanted and paid me well to do it. Download the free pages here.

It is so important to see color because every color has power and meaning. From a young age we assign certain behavior to particular colors without realizing that it is harmful and something we must unlearn. For this reason, I will always put black women and girls at the center of my work. I understand that dark skin is far too often devalued, misrepresented, and overlooked.

BLACK LIVES MATTER

‘Mein Heimatland’ // Cornelius Oettle

“The opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is 'anti-racist.’ What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.”

—Ibram X. Kendi, from How to Be an Antiracist

Poster seen in Potsdam, Germany

Another prong of our strategy is to organize among the workers and other oppressed sections of society with a program that addresses their needs. As has been said, the Klan and Nazis recruit among certain social layers - overwhelmingly, white youth who are hard-pressed by the economic crisis. These people see Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Gays, women and radical movements as a threat. They are racist, reactionary and potentially very violent. Fearful that they will lose the little they have, they buy the myth that the problems is “those people” trying to steal their jobs, homes, future, etc., rather than the decay of the Capitalist system.

The Progressive Plantation: Racism Inside White Radical Social Change Organizations - Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Like the Anarchist and Progressive movements generally, it has not made any real efforts to connect with Black/POC neighborhoods in the cities that it has organized in, not raised issues in a fashion that make Blacks or peoples of color interested in the movement. For instance; it talks about international financial institutions like the World Bank, World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund and how they are forcing 3rd world governments to adopt austerity policy and starve their people. They also talk about those countries being victimized by IMF/World Bank banking policies that have plunged the countries in deep debt to Western bankers. But they don’t seem to realize that the same institutions are responsible for unemployment, homelessness, the shutting down of industries and massive poverty in the inner cities of the United States and other Western countries. They just don’t get it! They support economic human rights campaigns as long as it involves countries thousands of miles away, while ignoring those arising on their own doorstep.

The movement has to re-evaluate its political direction and should broaden its base by including the inner city poor and peoples of color, not just radical environmentalists, rank-and-file labour, students and Anarchist groups. Welfare mothers, prisoners, Black community organizers, poor people in the barrio, on Indian reservations and grassroots folks of all sorts, could take equal part, if this were deemed a priority by leaders and activists in the movement.

The Progressive Plantation: Racism Inside White Radical Social Change Organizations - Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Anarchism is probably the largest white radical tendency on the Left today, owing to its ties to punk rock music, and other white youth cultural trends, so it serves as a perfect example of internal racism in the radical social change movements generally, but I point out that this variations of this same kind of racism happens inside all white Left tendencies.

As I have stated, I have been a member of the Anarchist movement for over 40 years, but even so, there are some doctrinaire groups on the Anarchist scene, who actually refuse to accept myself and other Anarchists of color as being “legitimate.” It is as if there is an Anarchist “membership card” and since we can’t produce such a “card,” we should be barred at the door to the “club.”

There are apparently Anarchist groups still doing this type of racial exclusion, demanding prospective members denounce Black, Chicano or Asian nationalism to such an extent that they meet the group ideological litmus test. Now, it’s important to point out they don’t demand incoming women members denounce feminism or gay members denounce the Queer Liberation Movement, nor whites to even denounce racism, but they want to lay that burden on people of color sympathetic to Anarchism. It is as though they feel we are untrustworthy or politically unclean. Why else?

The Progressive Plantation: Racism Inside White Radical Social Change Organizations - Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Anarchists do not believe in revolutions by a Leninist party of elite revolutionary intellectuals “guiding” (and then ruling over) the downtrodden masses. We believe that it is the people who will make the revolution, not so-called leaders. Yes, white Anarchists must work with peoples of color, but they must be active in their own communities as well, if they will build the diverse movement we all desire. We must challenge and educate against racism and undermine fascist ideology in white communities.

The Progressive Plantation: Racism Inside White Radical Social Change Organizations - Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Although I am clear white people cannot lead an anti-racist movement, without being accountable to peoples of color; I also feel they must confront their own racism and that of white people generally within the movement for social change, through internal seminars, study groups and other forms of political education, but mainly through serious struggle internally. This should take place in every progressive and radical organization, but especially within Anarchist and anti-racist organizations, which have serious problems with diversity and racial exclusion. The questions of whiteness, white supremacy and white privilege must be ruthlessly dealt with among white people themselves and then they must be made accountable to peoples of color, instead of posturing as “anti- racists above racism” themselves.

The truth is that I have not known many white political activists willing to deal with internal racism inside their movements, instead they prefer to posture as being without any racist ideology and practice and then allege themselves to be a serious force to organize against external racist right-wing movements. This is a gross error, which they must resolve before they really constitute a force against racism. But looking within is a hard, serious task most white male-dominated radical groups avoid like the plague, preferring to feel in their arrogance and superiority that they have the answers to all of society’s problems and that everyone else should just listen and follow them blindly. This is dishonest and opportunist.

The Progressive Plantation: Racism Inside White Radical Social Change Organizations - Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Kick-starting 30 Days of Pride with Angela Davis, political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author, who has been involved in movements for economic, racial, and gender justice over many decades.