1.5: Liberation Theory

As we engage in community organizing, we need to be clear about the goals of our work. Having an understanding of the major forms of domination at work in society will help you understand the deep systems in place that anchor the problems we are fighting against. People don’t just have trouble affording housing because they don't manage their money well. There is not enough housing available at the prices people can afford. There are deep problems in how our society is organized that have to do with imbalance of power, which make housing unaffordable for many people. Understanding these deeply entrenched systems will help us to see where to put our energy to change society to work for all of us.

Note

The following are short excerpts from the book Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change by Cynthia Kaufman

Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change 

Section 1: Introduction to Ideas For Action

When I went to my first meeting about the growing wars in Central America, I was nineteen years old and had never been involved in a political group before. At that time, my reaction was a simple humanitarian horror that people were being murdered and that my government was on

the side of the murderers. Before I knew it, I was being recruited to form a chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador in the area north of Los Angeles where I lived. I had no idea what I was doing, or how to go about forming an organization. Fortunately, I was put in touch with a few other young and inexperienced people from the local community college who had already begun to organize. They had just arranged an educational forum on El Salvador. One of the speakers lived in my community and had been very involved in the movement to stop the Vietnam War. As I listened to his stories of doing social change work back in those days, I realized how much our group could benefit from the involvement of people with more organizing experience.

Through this work, I got to know many people who had been involved in the radical social movements of the 1960s and others who had come directly from the revolutionary movements of Central America. I felt fascinated by the ideas and histories that appeared to be second nature to more seasoned activists. They had a whole vocabulary of historical events, famous people, and political positions that I had never heard of. They talked about the Russian Revolution, Emma Goldman, mysterious countries I didn’t know existed; they argued over violence and pacifism; people would be dismissed as out of touch, with labels such as “sectarian” or “Maoist.” At first I found it all very intimidating. How could I be a part of this movement if I had no idea what they were all talking about?

As I became more involved, my understanding of the world was completely shattered. Where I had once believed that the US government was democratic and that it promoted democracy around the world, I began to see it as controlled by evil forces and wreaking havoc on the world. In order to make sense out of my new awareness, I began to read. I read books about anarchism, Marxism, the Spanish Civil War, and feminism. My reading was scattered, and the more I read the more, I realized, I still had to learn. The most important thing I gained from all of this reading was a new framework for understanding the world. I no longer saw the United States as a benign force for good, nor did I see it as simply a force of pointless evil. I began to gain a new, fairly coherent picture of the world that included concepts such as imperialism, colonialism, corporate influence over the media, and ideology. These concepts were crucial for forming a new sense of meaning.

At the time when I became involved, there were many people around me who had been involved in the movements of the 1960s. And though many had come to see limits in what they had accomplished, they nevertheless had seen some major social transformations—the end of the eight years- long Vietnam War, for one—happen before their eyes and as a result of their actions. As that time recedes into history, and textbooks and TV movies portray ’60s activism as nothing more than naïveté and a bad fashion statement, the possibility that social movements can make a positive difference is increasingly hard to believe.

Mainstream media rarely represent social movements without distorting them—and the theories associated with them—beyond recognition. Still, when activism becomes too widespread to ignore—as it did in 1999 when tens of thousands of protesters shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle—popular dissent and the possibility of making a difference becomes obvious even to the mainstream. Yet the intellectual tools needed to turn this discontent into a plan for action remain virtually inaccessible. Those interested in reading about politics find few contemporary theorists whose writing is easily understood. In meetings as well as in written materials, newcomers encounter people who use information and political jargon as a weapon to gain social status and intimidate others. And they see how intellectuals sometimes put themselves above people with less education. One easy response to all this is to become anti-intellectual, yet the fact is that we are always using ideas and theories. If we don’t reflect on them, we are likely to be using ideas that will not serve us well.

As people begin their engagement with movements for social justice, they often struggle to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Without some basic literacy in social theory, it is easy to be confused about what sorts of issues one should be working on, how this work will ever end up making a difference, and how the things one doesn’t like in the world are related to each other. Confronted with the corporate corruption of our government and declining avenues for democratic change, many people choose to drop out of politics altogether. Popular media portray cynicism as cool. The majority of Americans feel hopeless, ineffective, or both.

Understanding the issues from a historical point of view and using theory to analyze them can be very empowering. If we know the places where people’s thinking has gotten stuck in the past, we are less likely to repeat their mistakes. If we understand the references people are using, we are more likely to challenge and question, and less likely to be intimidated into agreement. If we understand the underlying issues in a given political situation, we are in a better position to analyze it for ourselves and to understand what should be done.

When I first began to study radical ideas and history, I had to remind myself that I was never going to know about everything. I needed to get used to the situation of knowing that there was a lot I didn’t know, and many theoretical issues about which I wasn’t sure of my opinion. That is a lesson I carried into the writing of this book. The book presents issues that I’m still wondering about and great debates that I can see both sides of.

There aren’t any simple answers to political questions, but there are tools and points of reference that can enrich our understanding of what is going on. I hope this book offers a coherent analysis of the issues and theoretical innovations of current US social justice movements and encourages you to investigate further. People can disagree about important issues and still be on the same side politically. They can accept some ideas from a thinker while rejecting others. When activists use a black-and-white framework, with theorists already pegged as either good or bad, they don’t push themselves to do the hard but rewarding work of putting the world together in a way that makes deep sense for themselves.

There are habits of mind that I think are important for a healthy engagement with the political world. One of the most important is openness. When we think we have all the answers, it is easy to become dogmatic and authoritarian. The other is humility. By this I mean holding on to a sense that no matter how much we know, other people have experiences and perspectives that we have much to learn from. This openness to complexity can also serve us well in political situations, where we learn to value the multiplicity of perspectives that different people bring to a situation.

If I believe that there are simple political truths, then I am likely to make judgments about other people before I have really listened to their perspectives. A vision of the world that includes the possibility for change requires a major reorientation in how we see the world. The biggest reorientation we need is one that enables us to see the ways that ordinary people, when they work together, can make huge changes in their society.

We are encouraged to see history as being made by amazing individuals, by the inevitable flow of things, or by government action. The fact that ordinary people acting together to achieve goals is a crucial part of the history of human society is rarely part of the picture we are given. Yet if we look at the positive changes that have been made in the recent past, almost all were the result of collective struggle.

Women didn’t just get the vote in modern electoral democracies when the time for it was inevitable. Rather, thousands of ordinary women, and men who supported their cause, in countries all around the world, organized and agitated to get the vote. The elementary school version of the civil rights movement is that Martin Luther King Jr. made it all happen through the sheer force of his personal morality. What’s too often left out is that King himself operated in the context of a broad popular movement made up of many ordinary people pushing for what they believed was right. The movement made King as much as King made the movement.

We can see these distortions in the way that Rosa Parks’s story is told. Many people learn in school that Rosa Parks was an African American woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who was so tired coming home from work one day that she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider. She was jailed for her action, which led to a boycott of the bus system that lasted more than a year until segregated seating was abolished.

What we aren’t told is that Parks was an activist who had gone through organizer training at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, that she was a member of the NAACP, and that King and his organization were looking for a case to draw attention to the issue of segregation. While it wasn’t especially uncommon for African Americans to resist giving up their seats— conflicts over segregation happened all the time—what was special about Parks’s case was that she was part of a movement to challenge segregation.

Rosa Parks was not an amazing individual when she took action. She was a person of conscience acting as part of a movement. When she refused to give up her seat, she didn’t know how the situation would play itself out, but she knew she could count on the movement to back her up. When we’re in the heat of a movement, we often don’t know the importance of what we’re doing. Partly that’s because it really is unpredictable how our actions will add up to lasting social change. But we also lack the most basic information about how the actions of those working for change in the past have added up to many of the things we take for granted in our lives.

The eight-hour workday was one of the major goals of the labor movement from the nineteenth century when the struggle began until it was enacted in the twentieth. In contrast with the US Labor Day in September, people throughout the rest of the world celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1, to commemorate the May 1886 demonstration for the eight hour day in Chicago’s Haymarket Square and the four anarchists, whom the Illinois authorities hanged for their alleged association with a bomb that exploded at that demonstration. The Haymarket incident was just one of the many events that took place as thousands of ordinary labor movement activists fought to achieve the eight-hour workday. Surprisingly few people in the United States have any idea that it was the labor movement that enabled us to have some reasonable time off from work.

Probably most of the people involved in the movements that have shaped our lives for the better doubted their abilities to make a difference and were ridiculed or persecuted for thinking that they could make a difference. Yet ordinary people acting together for common goals have accomplished incredible amounts. There is nothing magical about making social change happen. What is required is a sense of hope that it is possible to make a difference, and some understanding of the world that helps orient our choices about what kinds of actions to take.

It is easier to see how our actions can make a difference when we can see how the actions of others have made a difference in the past, and when we can understand activists as ordinary people like ourselves.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. How does it feel to you to think about being involved with social change?
2. What do you find intimidating about it?
3. What do you think about how Rosa Parks is taught about in school?
4. What do you relate to or find interesting in the Introduction to Ideas for Action?

Section 2: Capitalism, Freedom, and the Good Life

In 2002, I was involved in a struggle in Oakland, California, where I lived, to protect the rights of tenants. For the previous decade, the economy in the Bay Area had been booming. Despite the collapse of the computer and internet-related industries, a lot of money had poured in, and many people who had lived here for generations were displaced by well-heeled newcomers.

In Oakland, we had a moderate form of rent control. The landlord could raise our rent only about 3 percent a year, but whenever an apartment went vacant, he or she could raise it to whatever the market would bear. My landlord evicted one of my neighbors, then turned around and rented out the apartment for $600 more a month. African Americans were leaving the city at an alarming rate, many returning to the South.

The organization I worked with, Just Cause Oakland, passed an ordinance that made it illegal to evict people unless they had done something illegal or destructive. As I talked with people on the street about the issue, the tenants eagerly grabbed the petition out of my hands. They were angry and afraid of losing their place to live. But many people I gave the petition to felt differently. They rented out property, and they’d say, “It’s my property, shouldn’t I be able to do what I want?”

I found it difficult to counter those arguments in a way that made sense to property owners. Belief in the rights of property owners runs deep in this society. Many of the landlords claim that if tenants want more security they should buy their own homes. They also argue that rent control is the problem. If we were to just let the market work, there wouldn’t be such a difference between the rents people pay now and the amount a new tenant would pay. And they believe that if the market were able to do its work, then, somehow, there would be homes available at the prices people could pay.

This is Adam Smith’s theory of “the invisible hand of the market”: when markets are allowed to operate, resources appear where they are most needed as if put there by an invisible hand. In the housing market, this theory assumes that some landlords will always choose to rent their properties more cheaply than others.

Yet Smith himself knew that markets could accomplish only some social goals. Markets will not provide goods to people who have no money. They won’t make it profitable to provide decent homes for the poor, at least not when the wealth gap is as extreme as it currently is in the United States, when the wealthy are willing to pay incredible sums for center-city condominiums.

And markets will never promote forms of life that have nothing to do with buying and selling.

The reaction to Oakland’s anti-eviction petition was the clearest example of a class difference that I had seen in years. You could predict with incredible accuracy what viewpoint someone held by knowing which class position he or she occupied. The experience also reminded me of how intensely the dominant view of freedom is mixed up with capitalism.

For the landlords, the law we were trying to pass would indeed limit their freedom. To them, freedom means the ability to do what they want with what’s theirs. Landlords believe that the tenants are free to buy homes if they want. And if they can’t afford homes, they are free to get a job or go to school to get a better job so that they will be able to do so in the future.

One of the amazing things about the views of freedom that develop in a society dominated by capitalism is that those views focus on the freedoms of those with power. The freedom to live in your rented apartment without fear of eviction somehow doesn’t count. That’s because people thinking according to a capitalist logic associate freedom mostly with largely the freedom of property owners to dispose of their property as they please. This is supposedly fair because everyone has the right to own property. So we are all equal. This way of thinking hides the mechanisms that make it easy for some people to own property and harder for others. And it hides the ways that other sorts of freedoms are limited by this primacy of property.

Those of us brought up in a society dominated by capitalist logic are taught from an early age that capitalism equals freedom, that a free-market economy is the only way for society to produce wealth. We are surrounded by a dazzling array of efficient machines and cool products. We are told that capitalism allows anyone—with effort—to have everything he or she dreams of. And we are told that the alternatives involve poverty, stagnation, boredom, and a police state.

Capitalism has led to an unprecedented development of useful machines, technological abilities, and an endless supply of desirable consumer products. No one in the nineteenth century could have dreamed of the things we now take for granted, from smartphones to Botox, prosthetic limbs to chicken nuggets. The idea we are generally taught is that capitalism is the magic machine that has given us all of these things, and freedom, too. Capitalism means a free market—and, somehow, a free society.

Early ideas about capitalism and freedom

People didn’t always associate capitalism with freedom. When it was first coming into being in England in the seventeenth century, many people saw capitalism as taking away their freedoms. For them, members of the rising capitalist class were thieves. While many people worked as serfs under brutal conditions of feudalism during this time, peasants who lived outside of the feudal estates could be relatively self-sufficient. Those living on land known as the commons, which officially belonged to the king, were permitted to build cottages, gather firewood, hunt, and even farm. With the rise of capitalist agriculture, these common lands were increasingly fenced or otherwise enclosed by the aristocracy and entrepreneurs. Deprived of their farming and grazing land, the only option left to the poor was to sell their time for wages. Working for wages was an entirely new arrangement, and the formerly independent and largely self-sufficient laborers resented it tremendously.

According to David Mulder, “Vulnerable to fluctuations in price and wage, dependent on seasonal work, housed in rude one-room cottages, shunted to the fringes of the manor, landless wage laborers had no stable niche in the rural economy.”1  Gerrard Winstanley was one of the most renowned anticapitalists of this early period. He was a writer and organizer and a founder of the movement known as the Diggers. Winstanley had a vision of a society in which everyone had access to the resources each needed to have a decent life. He saw capitalism as taking away this access and forcing people to be even more dominated by the wealthy than they had been before. In 1648, Winstanley and a group of thirty to forty people decided to take back the land they believed to be rightly theirs. They occupied a piece of unused land called St. George’s Hill in the town of Cobham, building huts and planting crops. They intended to set up a communal society in which everyone would work the land and share what they produced. They hoped that the idea of “digging” would spread to all of England and that people would begin to see the error of private ownership.

Winstanley was a religious thinker and saw private property as sinful. “In the beginning, the great Creator Reason made the Earth to be a common treasury.” He believed that the wealthy landowners were only able to have their wealth by forcing others to work for them, and he thought that digging would undermine the whole system of capitalist wage labor. Winstanley addressed the landowning class when he wrote,

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword.

Just as the Diggers’ crops were beginning to bear fruit, English soldiers, supported by local landowners, went to St. George’s Hill and destroyed the encampment, injuring several, destroying the huts, and trampling on the crops. At the time of the Digger resistance to capitalism, there was a threeway battle going on in England between the old feudal aristocracy, the rising capitalist class, and the poor. In the English Civil War, the aristocracy had largely sided with the monarchy, while the rising capitalist class sided with the parliament. They wanted to overthrow the monarchy in favor of a parliamentary system that would act in their interests. In order to have the power to overthrow the monarchy, though, they needed the help of the poor.

Many poor people joined Oliver Cromwell’s pro-Parliament army because they were told that they were fighting for liberty and access to land for all. At every step of the way, though, the wealthier members of the movement ended up betraying the interests of the poor people’s organizations.5 

One of the most brilliant theorists of nascent capitalism was John Locke. Locke was born in 1632. He was trained as a medical doctor, but made his living for much of his adult life as assistant to the Earl of Shaftesbury—one of the important leaders of the English Parliament. He spent many years in France in exile because his ideas were seen as undermining the power of the monarchy. Locke is most famous for developing theories of natural rights and individual freedom.

And yet, he was an investor in the transatlantic slave trade and helped write the constitution for Carolina, a document that included slavery.6 As advisor to Shaftesbury, he advocated for the “enclosures,” which threw poor people in England off their land, and he advocated for the expropriation of the lands of indigenous peoples.

From around 1600 through 1850, many European thinkers were interested in ideas of freedom, democracy, individual rights, progress, and politics based on reason rather than traditional authority. This period, called the Enlightenment, has been seen as the birthplace of much that is good in the European tradition. Until very recently, social justice advocates have mostly seen their work as extending the values of the Enlightenment.

Yet anticolonial thinkers have long pointed out that there is a deep contradiction between Enlightenment values and the practices of the very thinkers who espoused them. Many of the same people who supported capitalism and Enlightenment ideas also supported colonialism and slavery. During the Enlightenment, Europe was engaged in some of the most brutal practices in its history: slavery and colonialism. The rise of capitalism in Europe also exacerbated brutal forms of inequality and poverty. As a result of the enclosures, large numbers of previously independent peasants were thrown off their land. Even with the increasing destitution, there remained a shortage of people willing to work under the conditions offered in the new factories. This is one of the reasons England developed the poor laws that effectively outlawed not working for a wage. Poor people were routinely picked up by the police for sleeping outdoors, for not having any obvious means of support, and for vagrancy. They were turned over to poor houses where they were forced to work.

In Locke’s work, we can see all of the complexities and contradictions of a proslavery Enlightenment. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke makes a powerful argument against the legitimacy of monarchy and feudalism. In the process of making that argument, he lays the foundation for a justification of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. What is amazing about

Locke’s work is that he justifies these things all in the name of freedom. Locke constructs his argument by asking us to imagine we are in a “state of nature” in which people are “all equal and independent [and] no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”7

This state of nature is what philosophers call a “thought experiment.” Locke makes no claims that it ever existed, rather, that we can know our true state by imagining this possibility. Locke argues that this state of independence is our natural state. He wants us to think of ourselves as individuals first and as members of families and of society second. This undermines any sense of social solidarity and mutual obligation and challenges the idea that the world belongs to all of us to figure out how to use and share. In his justification for private property, Locke argues that although God gave us all the Earth to share, those who make the most of God’s gifts deserve them the most.

In England in this period, there were many landlords interested in “improving” their property—in making it more profitable. New agricultural techniques made this development possible, and new class relationships allowed these wealthy landowners to rise to political power. Locke was a part of that “improving” class.

In her book The Origin of Capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood points out that the word “improve” in English comes from a French root that meant doing something for profit.8 According to Locke, the indigenous people of the Americas did not have a right to their land because they were not generating excess for the market. The same could be said for the poor in England. The land belongs to those who can make the most profit from it or to the capitalist landlords.

Locke’s theory of natural rights is another aspect of his argument that helps support the domination inherent in capitalism. He claims that those with reason will all be in a state of nature with each other—meaning that they will all respect each other’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Some people, however, cannot be expected to use their reason to come to this conclusion. These people are like lions of the forest and cannot be trusted. Because of this, these people are in a state of war with the rest of humanity, and “reasonable” people can do whatever they want to protect themselves.9

It was this argument that Locke used to justify slavery. The idea that some people are rational and to be treated with respect, while others who think differently cannot be trusted, is a  fundamental part of the ideology of the Enlightenment.

Locke wants us to see society as an aggregation of independent, reasonable people, all with their own land, entering into contracts voluntarily, as all parties desire them. We are to see these independent people as meeting in an imagined state of nature. By asking us to think in this way, Locke is asking us to wish away history, and he is helping us develop the habit, very important as capitalism develops, of not seeing the complex realities of social relations.

Locke’s philosophy, by positing the state of nature, encourages us to look at people as if they had no history. According to his view, people chose to enter into and exit from contracts. In reality, people are often forced by circumstances and by the law into situations that they do not choose. This habit of making history invisible and supposing that we are all born free and equal is another important part of capitalist ideology. When people complain about inequality, we are told that everyone has the same chance to become wealthy and that wealth is based on our ability and desire to work hard. This leads to the idea that those with wealth should be able to do what they want with the wealth, without any obligations to others. Of course, those without wealth are also free to do what they want with their wealth, never mind that they don’t have any.

The vision of society as an aggregation of individuals with no history is, of course, a myth. Even in a society with a large capitalist sector, there are networks of relationships that bind us together. What is unusual about life in such a society is that these interconnections are erased by the dominant ways of thinking. We end up not seeing the social mechanisms that give some people more opportunity to succeed than others. And we end up not noticing the ways that we are all coerced to compete in a particular set of economic relations that we do not choose. Nor are we encouraged to see the ways in which people cooperate and help one another in all spheres of life.

An Enlightenment belief in progress might encourage us to think that Locke and his capitalist class made the world better by overthrowing feudalism. This view, however, would leave out the fact that at that time in England there was a far more radical alternative: that of the Diggers and many other radical anticapitalists.

According to the British historian Christopher Hill, There were, we may oversimplify, two revolutions in mid-seventeenth- century England. The one which succeeded established the sacred rights of property (abolition of feudal tenures, no arbitrary taxation), gave political power to the propertied (sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of prerogative courts), and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property—the protestant ethic. There was, however, another revolution, which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic. People who were a part of this second revolution knew full well the problems with capitalism; they saw members of the emerging capitalist class take their land.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. How do you think capitalism has impacted your life?
3. Do you think capitalism increases or decreases your freedom?

Section 3: Theorizing and Fighting Racism

On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking to his father’s fiancée’s home where he was staying, in Miami Gardens, Florida. He was on the way back from a convenience store where he had bought iced tea and candy. Martin was confronted by George

Zimmerman, who was a neighborhood watch leader. Martin was African American and the neighborhood was largely white. Zimmerman called the police and was told to leave Martin alone. Zimmerman decided to follow Martin anyway. He challenged Martin’s presence in the neighborhood, shot and killed him, and then claimed he had done it in self-defense. Police accepted Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense and did not arrest him. Outrage around the injustice of the situation ignited protest and other forms of mobilization all around the country. Local officials were pressured to indict Zimmerman, and eventually Zimmerman was brought to trial. That trial resulted in a verdict of “not guilty,” setting off another wave of protest.

In the following years, the country began to focus on what had been a largely silent epidemic of black men being murdered by police and their deaths not being taken seriously by the legal system. When Michael Brown was murdered by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, that town’s legal system came under federal scrutiny. It became clear that not only were the police able to murder black men with impunity, but the local government was engaged in systematic harassment of the local population by charging high fees for the smallest of infractions, so that the poor people of color were largely funding government services. A few months after Brown’s death, Eric Garner was put into a chokehold by New York City police. He died, shortly after saying “I can’t breathe.”

Responding to these and several other horrific high-profile cases, Alicia Garza used her Twitter account to communicate with friends. She started #BlackLivesMatter, which became a slogan for a movement to challenge police violence, and other injustices in the legal system, including mass incarceration.

Why was it that many whites could empathize with Zimmerman’s concern that Martin was in the neighborhood? How did it come to be that almost one African American person a day was killed by police? How did the country move from having a very successful civil rights movement in the middle of the twentieth century, to a situation where the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with over 40 percent of those incarcerated being African American?

Just before this time, many people in the United States had begun to claim that our nation was “postracial.” Having elected an African American for president, and seeing many famous and powerful people in the public eye of all races, some had begun to think that racism was a problem on its way out, and that the best way to deal with it was by not talking about it.

For as long as racism has existed, there have been people working hard to challenge it, and many of those challenges have been successful. From the movement to abolish slavery to the movement to allow Chinese immigrants to become citizens, people of color have achieved major victories in this struggle. And, while people of color have usually been the ones leading these struggles, many whites have also dedicated their lives to challenging racism.

Mab Segrest is one such activist. In Memoir of a Race Traitor, Segrest tells the story of her work fighting the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis in the 1980s. Born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, her antiracist politics were forged in family battles over the civil rights movement. In sharp contrast to the rest of her family, she empathized with the black kids who desegregated her high school just as she entered ninth grade, and with the four girls killed in a church basement by racist bombers that same month in Birmingham, Alabama. After moving to North Carolina for college, Segrest realized that she was a lesbian and recognized the way that this difference from the mainstream further estranged her from the oppressive politics she had been raised to uphold.

In 1984, Segrest helped found North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence and became its first staff member. For many years, Segrest drove all over the state investigating acts of racist violence and or ganizing to challenge them. Looking back at that period in her life, Segrest writes, “What I uncovered in North Carolina in the 1980s will be our legacy into the next century, unless we intervene. The racism, the homophobia, the hatred of Jews and women, the greed accelerate, and they sicken us all. . . .There is a lot to be done, but how we go about it is also important. Because all we have ever had is each other.” Reflecting on the title of her book, Segrest writes, “It is not my people, it’s the idea of race I’m betraying.”

The idea of race

As we have seen in previous chapters, racism has been and continues to be an important part of the US political landscape. Yet, race has not always been an important social category. People’s consciousness of the distinctions between their group and others on the basis of physical differences has developed over time, and the values assigned to those differences have been determined more by politics than by science or common sense.

The concept of race has had such powerful effects on our social system that it is hard to imagine a world without racial categorization. The idea of the human species being divided into biologically distinct races goes back only about as far as the conquest of the Americas. Before that, people hated one another on the basis of all sorts of differences, but the nature of those dislikes was not centered on the idea of race.

We often think of race as the description of the natural differences that resulted from human beings evolving in different parts of the world, but biologists do not accept that popular concept of race. People who believe in race as biological fact have never come to agreement on how many races there are or how they are divided. Where on the globe do people stop being Asian and start being white? Are Arabs white or Asian or African? Aren’t Native Americans from Asia, and what about Jews and biracial people? Which physical differences mark someone as white as opposed to black? Although we usually refer to race as being marked by skin color, many “white” people have darker skin than many “black” people do. Our racial designations are built upon a complex mixture of skin color, hair texture, eyelid shape, lip shape, noses, family histories, geographic accidents, and political ideology.

All of these complications lead Michael Omi and Howard Winant to assert that race is a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race invokes seemingly biologically based human characteristics (so-called phenotypes), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process.

To say that our popular ideas about race are not based in biological truths does not mean that race does not exist as a social reality. Race has become one of the most important axes of social power in the modern world.

Racial formation in the United States

The “discovery” of the Americas by English, Spanish, and other adventurers created such a cultural, economic, and physical dislocation as to produce the first “racial” formation in human history. Linked by their common goal of economic exploitation, the competitive English, Spanish, Dutch, and other explorers all began to see themselves as on the same side in one sense. Omi and Winant argue that at the time of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, 

the “discovery” signaled a break from previous proto-racial awareness by which Europe contemplated its “others” in a relatively disorganized fashion. The “conquest of America” was not simply an epochal historical event—however unparalleled in importance. It was also the advent of a consolidated social structure of exploitation, appropriation, domination, and signification. Its representation, first in religious terms, later in scientific and political ones, initiated modern racial awareness. It was the inauguration of racialization on a world-historical scale.

Although the eighteenth century in Europe saw the rise of ideas of natural rights, it also saw Europeans increasingly involved in practices of colonialism and slavery. The contradiction between belief in equality and their desire to treat others unequally necessitated the development of increasingly sophisticated systems of justification. The idea that human beings can be divided into fundamentally different types helped solve this problem. Thus, Thomas Jefferson, while arguing for equal rights for “all men” simultaneously argued that there were natural differences between people that should determine how we treat them. “Will not a lover of natural history, then, one who views the gradations in all the animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of Man as distinct as nature has formed them?” The gradations between European and Native American “man” was an essential distinction for those who wanted to expand their fortunes in the American colonies.

From its very beginning, the Anglo-Saxon occupation of North America was in the form of settler colonies. This distinguishes it from colonies in which the conquerors go to a place and set up a system of government with the sole purpose of extracting wealth from the indigenous population. The fundamental premise of a settler colony is that the indigenous people are to be eliminated, and a satellite of the original society is to be set up. The rationale of racial superiority was seen as an adequate excuse for the wholesale slaughter of any indigenous inhabitants.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. How has racism impacted your life?
3. How might it matter if race is a social construct or it is natural?  

Section 4: Theorizing and Fighting Gender-Based Oppressions

I grew up with uncles who were baseball players and had my own left-handed glove since before I can remember. When I was in the fifth grade, I wanted to play baseball at school. At my school, there was only one girl who would hang out around the baseball diamond. She was there because she was the girlfriend of one of the boys. The rest of us were not allowed there.

Something important was happening on the baseball diamond that required that girls not be there, except as admiring onlookers. Since we weren’t allowed to play in the game that was using the real diamond and the school’s equipment, I brought equipment from home and my friends and I played by ourselves. Our teacher didn’t make the boys let us play. The most we could get out of her was to let us store our gear in the classroom and not tell us we couldn’t play in our own game. At the time, I thought the teacher and the boys were being mean to us. It was only much later that I came to understand that our exclusion from the game was part of a much larger picture.

At that time, girls were not supposed to be athletes; we were encouraged to use our bodies as objects of admiration rather than authors of action. And we certainly weren’t supposed to compete with boys. Having girls in on the game would have interrupted the rituals the boys were engaged in, such as bonding around common goals and ranking themselves according to skill.

And at that time, if a girl played sports, calling her a lesbian was part of the teasing to get her to conform.

Since that time, the relationship between women and sports has changed dramatically. Now girls are expected to play soccer, and colleges fund women’s sports, and a few women’s professional sports leagues have even had some successes. Women who play sports are less likely to be called lesbians as a form of harassment, as more high-profile gay, lesbian, and transgender people have become accepted for who they are. What caused these changes in the world of sports—and in the world’s expectations for girls and women in all life spheres? One of the main forces forging this change was feminism, the other was the queer liberation movement.

At least since the late 1800s, women and men have organized to demand a better life for girls and women. Women’s rights activists worked hard to get the population as a whole to see women as more than mothers, low-paid workers, and sex objects. They pushed for a change in consciousness, for women to be recognized as full human beings—active participants in the game of life, players and not just observers of someone else’s sport. Along with early demands for suffrage and other civil rights, feminists critiqued corsets and invented bloomers to make physical activities possible for more girls and women. Among many other strategies developed over decades of organizing, the women’s movement worked hard to pass Title IX in 1972, the federal law that outlaws discrimination on the basis of gender in educational institutions that receive federal funding. Ever since Title IX, schools have been under pressure to equalize the way they fund male and female sports.

But feminism has not just been about women finding a way into male games. Many feminists have had a deeper critique of society and have argued for more far-reaching changes, such as an end to hierarchy, competition, and war. Feminist movements have always included a range of perspectives. 

For much of the twentieth century, gay men and lesbians worked for equal rights in the system as well as for deeper transformations of the gender system. Many activists, in what John D’Emilio has called the homophile movement of the 1950s, were intent on arguing that gays and lesbians are just like everyone else, except in terms of what they did in their bedrooms and in social places such as bars and clubs. And what they did in these places should be no one else’s business. An important exception to this tendency was the Mattachine Foundation in Southern California, which theorized in 1950 that gay men and lesbians offered fundamentally distinct and valuable diversity to the culture as a whole. The next flourishing of radical queer organizing coincided with the broader social uprisings of the late 1960s.

Many people date the beginnings of the current more radical gender liberation movement to the riot that took place at the Stonewall Inn in New York on June 27, 1969. That night, police engaged in what they thought was a routine sweep of a bar where transgender people, gay men, and lesbians, many of them people of color, found community and freedom. The difference that night was that the patrons resisted. According to an article that appeared in the Village Voice at the time, 

Suddenly, the paddywagon arrived and the mood of the crowd changed. Three of the more blatant queens—in full drag—were loaded inside, along with the bartender and doorman, to a chorus of catcalls and boos from the crowd. A cry went up to push the paddywagon over, but it drove away before anything could happen. . . . The next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle—from car to door to car again. It was at that moment that the scene became explosive. Limp wrists were forgotten. Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows, and a rain of coins descended on the cops. 

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were two of the transgender women of color who were instrumental in starting the riot. Stonewall was not the first or the last high-profile attack on a gathering of queer people. But shortly after it the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations decided to commemorate the attack in annual pride marches to be held in June. Those annual pride marches have been an important part of the movement since that time, and have spread to be celebrated all around the world.

Stonewall marked a major phase of radicalization in the movement. As Dennis Altman put it, “No longer is the claim made that gay people can fit into American society, that they are as decent, as patriotic, as clean-living as anyone else. Rather, it is argued, it is American society itself that needs to change.” 3 As gay men and lesbians became more radical, they began to look at the ways that sexuality is organized in society and how important a part of the social structure sexuality is. As these movements developed and became more radical, gay men and lesbians went in very different directions for a number of years, with gay men moving toward more open and unrestricted sexuality, and lesbians becoming more involved in the women’s movement and interested in overthrowing patriarchy.

One of the challenges to changing the gender structures of society is that unequal gender roles seem natural and normal to most people. When I think back to my early example of sexism on the playground, I am struck by its everydayness. The roles society sets up for boys and girls are learned through routine interactions. I remember my own childhood experience with some anger, but also with a bit of doubt—it can’t have been so bad; these things happen to girls every day. Part of the problem lies precisely in the fact that there was nothing brutal or outrageous in what I experienced. I accidentally bumped up against the walls the society had constructed for gender roles. I pushed against them a bit. But, in the end, my friends and I learned how we were supposed to behave, and eventually we gave up on playing sports.

Our sense of self develops by learning these expectations and taking them into account as we make our life choices. For some of us staying in these boundaries happens with only a small loss to our personal integrity and happiness. And we can resist with only small amounts of personal risk. For others the loss involved in conforming is huge, and many people have pushed hard against those expectations. And that harder push leads to reactions, often violent ones, from those trying to maintain the gender system. People who don’t conform to the gender systems encounter tremendous levels of ostracism and violence.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. How has gender based oppression impacted your life?
3. What do you think of the idea that queer liberation is important for everyone’s liberation? 

Section 5: People, Nature, and Other Animals

When Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, it got a lot of people to take climate change seriously. In the popular imagination, it became clear that on the horizon of our existence horrific things were going to happen. The polar ice caps would melt, coral reefs would die, hurricanes and droughts would become more severe, and the oceans would rise. Gore ended his film with a list of things one could do to address this catastrophic problem: change the kind of light bulbs you use, drive less, write your congressperson. There was something deeply disturbing to many of us who do social justice work about the end of the film. Were those solutions really enough to deal with a problem of such apocalyptic proportions?

Many people in the environmental movement feel that their job is to ring the alarm bells and get everyone to see the depth of the problems. The hope is that people will be shocked into action. It turns out that the opposite is the case. Most people know climate change is a serious problem, and the more they get a sense that the things they can do are tiny compared to the scope of the problem, the more disempowered they feel. This all leads to a sense of paralysis that looks like apathy and denial.

I shared in that general sense of paralysis that followed that film, until I read George Monbiot’s book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. In the book, Monbiot shows that the kinds of changes needed to solve the climate crisis are challenging, but within reach. He argues that we need policies to push a shift toward massive investments in public transportation, policies that invest in new energy infrastructure, policies that get people to make their houses more energy efficient, and serious investments in renewable energy. The main takeaway I got from the book was that there are enough resources for everyone to live well on this planet in sustainable ways, and that the actions needed were more political than individual.

Many people are working on cheaper and better sources of renewable energy, more sustainable processes for making things, and better ways of organizing our cities. Even with existing technical knowledge we could build a world in which everyone has a comfortable life and we stay within our ecological limits. But we won’t be able to get there simply by each of us being green consumers. Rather what needs to happen is the development of policies that promote the use of renewable energy and efficient ways of doing things. That is a political problem. Once I realized all of that, I became a climate change activist.

Currently, I am working to get institutions to divest from fossil fuels. The idea behind the fossil fuel divestment movement is that the main thing blocking a move to the kind of things that are needed to make this massive shift is the power that the fossil fuel industry has over our political systems. And there are reasons for them to push for things to stay the same. If we are to stay within safe levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, then more than 75 percent of the assets of fossil fuel companies will need to remain unburned. 2 Those companies have a lot to lose, and they are some of the most powerful entities in the world, with economies larger than most countries.

In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein writes that dealing with the climate crisis is in alignment with a set of practices necessary for building a more socially just world. She argues that as she came to understand the things needed to solve the problem of climate change, she 

began to see all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding of local economies: to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect indigenous land rights—all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them.

For much of the twentieth century, environmental politics were on a different path from the rest of the world of social justice. Many environmentalists had argued that people were the problem, and that nature was something to be kept pristine and separate from people who were seen as a scourge. Others were convinced that if we each changed our personal consumption habits the problem would go away. Klein is part of a growing environmental justice movement that sees the deep connections between environmental problems and other problems in the social world.

Within the environmental movement, there are different approaches to the most basic question of what is causing the problems the movement is trying to solve. Are environmental problems caused by ignorance? By individual irresponsibility? By too many humans? By a separation of people from nature? By racism and capitalism? Each of these has been given as an answer by major sectors of the environmental movement. And each rests on a different theory of the nature of the environmental crisis. Understanding these differences can help us understand more fully the implications of what people say when they talk about environmental problems and it can help us see what kinds of action are likely to lead to a better world.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling.

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. What do you think of Klein’s idea that the environmental crisis is rooted in capitalism? 
3. What do you think needs to change to address the environmental crisis? 

Attributions

"Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change, 2nd Ed” by Cynthia Kaufman, taken with permission from the author and publisher.