Inconveniencing White Liberals
http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2015/8/10/inconveniencing-white-liberals
Let me tell you a story I heard at the Westlake Rally for Social Security last Saturday. A story about paper-thin commitment to the struggle, and politics as spectator sport.
It was still early in the afternoon. The rally had moved from opening music to speeches, and those promised to go on a while. We’d been there 20 minutes, and my daughters were getting restless.
“When is this going to be over,” one asked. “I’m bored,” said the other. A rally to celebrate 80 years of Social Security is only so exciting to 12-year-olds. So far, the outing had fallen short of the “witnessing of history” I’d promised.
We were about to wander away for a bit when Steve Lansing appeared.
Steve is a “retired” labor organizer who always manages to be everywhere at once, so I wasn’t surprised to see him. He told me about a conversation he’d had a bit earlier with a man who had no patience.
He was helping at the stage when this guy walked up demanding to know when Bernie Sanders would speak. Steve explained that after the music, there was at least an hour of other speakers coming first.
“I came here to hear Bernie Sanders,” the guy harrumphed. “Not some saxophone!”
The moment we were waiting for became something different.
Steve read this as a parable for our times. If this reflects our movement’s commitment to justice, we’re screwed. I thought about that as the girls and I headed off for lunch.
When we came back and settled in, the crowd was bigger and more focused on the speakers. And then, the moment we were waiting for became something different.
Senator Sanders, coming on more than an hour later than planned, got out his first sentence and was stopped by two women who took the stage in the name of #blacklivesmatter.
The next 16 minutes tell us more than anything the senator from Vermont could have said about the state of America.
The protesters weren’t polite. They called the audience “white supremacist liberals,” and said they were shutting the event down unless they heard some accountability. People got mad.
Sanders was fine. His campaign has been working to get ahead of charges of race blindness after the NetRoots conference incident a few weeks earlier. He gave a well-received speech on race in front of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference the week before.
The charges that the Sanders campaign was unresponsive to #blacklivesmatter, as an overflow crowd of 15,000 would hear from Sanders himself a few hours later, weren’t exactly true.
But that wasn’t really the point. The point is that black people are being shot, tased, targeted, profiled, and imprisoned, and they don’t get to decide when to pay attention.
Social movements are not comfortable things.
The activists at Westlake were out to interrupt our sense that black lives can matter whenever we get around to it.
And some of us resent that. We think that things are supposed to happen in their time and place. We weren’t there for the black thing, and are upset about all the anger and rage and unreasonableness of it all.
I posted this because it really clarifies what helped drive the Westlake disruption.
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