A Change Gonna Come?

Call me Ebenezer Scrooge, but I just gotta bah-humbug all this blissful basking in the sun of our future salvation as orchestrated by the Democratic presidential candidates–particularly Barack Obama. (Sorry for my unseasonal allusions. Are you as depressed as I am about the long, frigid months between the marathon consumer-mas season and the glory of drinking outside in the summertime? Well, now you are, I bet.) Although the simmering tensions over the racialized and gendered realities of the candidates and what they represent have finally begun to bubble through the surface, liberals are still fawning over the idea that supporting Barack Obama absolves them from the guilt of their complicity in white supremacy. I’m particularly irked by the idea of a President Obama as a beacon of colorblind goodness who would whitewash over our historical and contemporary reality of institutional, systematic, deeply embedded, pervasive racism and provide the ultimate justification for falsely declaring racism as effectively dead and buried.

There have been some refreshing blips in the overwhelmingly fawning portraits of Obama. Kenyon Farrow blogged about his own conflicted feelings as a Black radical. Ari Melber wrote about the significance of Obama’s candidacy in relation to persistent educational inequalities. Grace Lee Boggs straight up says: “Neither Obama’s ethnicity or Hillary’s gender is enough to earn my support. Neither is calling on the American people to confront our materialism and militarism or challenging and proposing alternatives to corporate globalization.” These opinions shine light on the devastating gulf between the symbolic value of Obama’s potential presidency and the realities of the immensely complex formulations of oppression waged in our country. I do believe we’ve got to be informed about and engage in electoral politics in some way or another. But what bothers me is that all the noise created by presidential candidates who spout the rhetoric of change further squelches, muffles, silences the multiple ways in which people have fought, and must continue to fight, for change.

Throughout this mess, I see change being relegated, confined within the pens of the almighty in power. Change is being defined not by the collective movements and sacrifice and unglamorous, steadfast, daily organizing by people who have had no choice but to do so in order to survive, but by policies assigned and imposed from above. In following the race, there’s a mix of excitement and fear that we are constantly being trained to believe our role, as citizens, in making change is limited to that moment within the voting booth (or, if you’re really proactive, stumping for the person whom you would eventually vote for in the booth. After all, one of the anti hunger-strikers at Columbia seemed to see voting as the ultimate opportunity to express one’s voice, making other methods unnecessary.)

But in talking to my youth and residents of Sunset Park during anti-gentrification/pro-low income housing organizing efforts, this emphasis on change from above enforces the lack of agency that most people (of color, LGBTQ, young, female, poor) feel crippled by in terms of making change. It kills me that my youth and others are so convinced of their inability to transform the situations that cause them, their families, their communities pain. It kills me that they believe the only way to change things is to become wealthy and use money and capitalism and consumerism as a bandage. That’s why I’m rejuvenated by Grace Lee Boggs’ view of change and active citizenship. It reminds me that we can’t be silenced by all this hullabaloo over candidates who will only continue to champion the forces that attempt to dehumanize us and shackle our communities.

-May

Check out this interview with Grace Lee Boggs: