The Movement Continues

The path over the past two years has taught me that there are always unexpected twists and turns along the way. From mountain passes to Sufi shrines, in the classrooms of the elite and protests in the streets, through the jungles of New York. Along dirt roads and crowded concrete. there has been heartache and victory, love, loss, and adventure, and at the end of it all a greater understanding of self. Two years. And on a sunny day in May upon the lawn of the “Ivory Tower,” we were already hailed as the champions of tomorrow.

While graduate school came to an end, the learning will undoubtedly continue. I shall return to my classroom before Columbia – rural villages, thick forests, and dusty trails. It will be on the soil, which for so many, is the single most important facet of daily life. Rural Liberia, the settler colony and nation-state once-carved in the image of the United States, will be where I search for answers.

Across the giants of Africa and Asia, vast tracts of land have been ceded by state governments for agro-industry and resource extraction. The justification is growth, progress, and development through direct investment in aspiring economies. Natural resources lie at the center of these projects from bauxite to timber to platinum. For those who reside in the countrysides, land, which has been passed down for generations, is often the most valuable resource: “the source of their sustenance, the site of their livelihoods, and the locus of history, culture, and community.” 

Land plays no small portion in the on-going struggles for sustainability, self-determination, and survival. It is often a complex, tenuous issue at the heart of conflicts. Yet too often, mainstream development discourse myopically focuses on simple economic expansion without paying due attention to the fibers that bind communities. What does development look like beyond the growth of capital and what do rights mean beyond the declarations of any state?

Beginning in the early 19^th century the American Colonization Society, sought to rid America of its’ blackness. Bolstered by the likes of Monroe and Jefferson, the “Back-to-Africa Project” believed that co-existence would never be peaceful, feared mixture, and were steadfast that a black homeland could not be established on the very land where slaves had shed their own blood and tears. There was also the danger a free black population posed to the institution of slavery. Thus a new civilizing mission to West Africa began, accompanied by the inherent hierarchies of identity that mirrored the superiority complex of white supremacists in the takeover of North America.

The result: a cycle of violence between indigenous and settler, where victim and perpetrator alternated roles over the next 400 years. Fast-forwarding to today, Liberia evokes connotations of civil war, profound loss, and amazing resilience. But alongside history and politics is the question of how can a country rebuild while respecting its rural realities? When land is at the heart of a conflict how can it be surrendered without the input of its inhabitants?

I am preparing for the challenge, the perspective, and the humbling that is sure to come. In anticipation I’m staying on my grind to be mentally sharp and physically fit. I try to picture the open expanses: the bright red of the mud, the black of the night, and the green of the trees. The inevitable tears will fall when frustration and loneliness hit hard. But I pack with me the lessons learned from solitude and service in the Himalayas. I draw strength from the wisdom of family, friends, and comrades, remembering to trust the process and having faith in the script that leads me forward.

And so the movement – for community ownership, against corporate domination – continues. In a handful of weeks my journey will take me to the forests of Liberia. The excitement and fear roll together as a creeping anxiety arises deep down from my core. And while it’s true we all must walk our own path; I continue to remind myself that we never walk alone.

Panther Baby/The Human Condition

I arrived at the party inspired, optimistic, and moved by revolutionary love. The gathering, however, was not what I hoped. It largely consisted of me shouting about the lecture I had just attended: a Columbia professor, and former Black Panther, speaking on the release of his new book documenting his coming of age with the black radical community-based organization.

I left the party fiending, unsatisfied, and alone. It was as if the entire evening I was searching for something that's time hadn't come. Quickly exhausting my options for a fix, I resigned myself to the fate of going home at 2 AM empty-handed.

Ahead was the public safety bus. At least I wouldn’t have to walk the short 12 blocks home. Accepting consolation in quick travel, I boarded the empty bus, greeted the driver, and took my seat.

Looking in her rear view mirror, she said, “Please flash your ID so I can see it.”

“Right on,” I said as I took out my ID from my wallet.

“Where are you going?”

“One-oh-six.”

“One-oh-six?”

“Right on.”

After some moments passed, she looked up and asked, “Are people saying that again?”

“What?”

“Is that something people are saying again? ‘Right on.’ Do a lot of people you know say it?”

“I mean, I say it all the time.”

“I know people from the ‘60s used to talk like that. I don’t hear people saying that anymore.”

I thought about what she said. I thought about what I had been shouting about all night –the need I felt to connect to the world around me. The fire I was trying to keep going in my own heart; the reminder that it was beating.

“Well you know, actually, I went to this event tonight,” I began. “I’ve been talking about it all night. You see, there’s a professor here and he just wrote this book. He was telling his story of how he joined the Panthers when he was 15 years old. After Dr. King was assassinated, sharing his grandmother’s tears. He spoke so beautifully about the struggle.”

She seemed to be listening. And I was just getting started. I continued on excitedly explaining the jewels of wisdom I had heard that evening. “There was an understanding of community and connection. It was about the breakfast programs and health clinics. In the face of infiltration and repression, the motivation was serving the needs of the people. It seemed so right –just before I graduate, to hear Jamal Joseph break it down tonight.”

She was silent. But by this point, I wasn’t expecting anything. After all, I had been telling the same story all night and except for a few friends, no one was really trying to hear me.
I stopped talking. She reached into her bag on the ground next to her and pulled out a book. There it was. The stories I heard and been trying to re-tell all evening. There in her hands I read the cover – Panther Baby.

“Were you there this evening?” I asked.

“No. I had to work,” she said.

As we sat there, parked in front of the gates of the University she asked, “How do you think you will translate what you heard tonight into your life?”

I talked about my student activist days and what the Ten Point Program meant to me when I was a teenager. How the journey that started somewhere with disrupting high school hallways took me to villages in India as a community organizer. I talked about how roots run deep.

And then, all of a sudden, I caught myself. All I had done the entire evening was rant and rave about human dignity and social justice and knowing history and where you are going. “What is your connection to all of this? Where does your interest lie?”

“The human condition,” she responded point-blankly as we drove down Amsterdam Avenue. “The way we choose to interact with each other.”

My stop had come. As we shook hands and exchanged contacts on ripped out pieces of magazine paper I realized what I had been searching for all evening had finally been willed into happening on a ten-minute bus ride.

Throughout our lives we attract certain people. Sometimes in order to reach out across the abyss of our alienation, to share the stories that were shared with us, we need the frustration, the struggle, the persistence to find what we are looking for. And when we have nearly given up, in the places we least expect to find it, there is a reminder of what it’s all about.

Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport

On a sunny afternoon in October, a student contingent that constituted one part of a critical mass of concerned citizens, stepped off from 116^th Street and the gates of the Ivory Tower. Downtown Manhattan was flooded. The drums provided the beat to the peaceful insurrection fomenting in the streets.

Last Wednesday, I joined tens of thousands of people near Wall Street in a beautiful display of direct democracy. Marching alongside the New York State Nurses Association, the message was clear: We the people – the students, workers, and teachers; the nurses, social workers, and veterans; the tired, fed up, and ignored – the 99% had joined hands in our common struggle. The gross concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a tiny class of elites was cause enough to take leave from whatever class we had, job we worked, or hectic life we lived.

A high school social studies teacher from Long Island, who took the day off to join the protests, explained, “This is the most exciting thing that has happened in this country in a long time. If there is going to be any change it’s in the hands of the youth. They have to make it happen.”

Downtown the air was electric, the optimism palpable. Organized labor was out in full effect. You know you must be on the right side of things (or things are just that bad) when you are marching alongside nurses, librarians and teachers. And from corner to corner, street to street, a plurality of voices had occupied every square foot of concrete.

But despite the strong showing, one critique I repeatedly hear in the halls and classrooms of the Ivory Tower is that the Occupy Wall Street protests remain unfocused and unclear. There are too many issues, too many voices, and no clear demands.

Really? Do we really need to kick the economics of it?

Over the past decade we have witnessed our taxpaying dollars being wasted on unnecessarily large defense budgets that have often been used for imperialistic misadventures across the globe. In turn, we have seen private contractors and private corporations profit through no-bid contracts, no accountability, and no end in sight.

We have been criminalized and attacked through a racist war on drugs that strains our justice system wasting significant amounts of time, energy, and money. And when our country faced a dire financial crisis many people felt large banking institutions were bailed out, while everyday Americans were sold out, as they lost their jobs, homes, pensions, watched their health care costs rise, and their (student loan) debt soar.

The Occupy Movement targets a system which prioritizes corporate interests over national ones, places profit over people and is inconsistent in upholding basic human rights. However, the concentration of wealth and power are bigger than bailouts.

We cannot look at the struggles for economic, racial, and social and political justice as separate. Each reinforces the other. Claiming a movement that identifies each of these interconnected issues is unfocused and without clear demands, is frankly shortsighted and unimaginative. And those who have worked hard enough to earn their seats and scholarships in the Ivory Tower cannot afford to be shortsighted or unimaginative. Without an imagination the whole history of human progress would be left abridged and obsolete.

Last Friday, I joined the Occupy DC movement and marched from Freedom Plaza to the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund – continuing to connect the dots for economic justice at home and abroad. In both New York and Washington there were more than some who could not help but draw inspiration from this year’s revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa.

Although others are hesitant to invoke Tahrir Square in fear of detracting from the struggles of those who overthrew repressive dictatorships, for me it was about drawing strength, and showing solidarity, with the struggles for human dignity and social justice that have resonated across oceans. While where to draw inspiration from is not limited to the post-colonial kids of Cairo, the movement is infectious. In the past few weeks alone, the Occupy Movement has spread to hundreds of communities across the United States of America.

What is striking about these protests that have captured the hearts and minds of everyday people across the country is that there is no allusion to any sort of mainstream political party (spineless or otherwise). Maybe we have simply learned that democracy is not a spectator sport. And who would have ever thought that tens of thousands of people resisting repressive regimes and struggling for human dignity on the other side of the world – the Arab Spring – would inform the American Autumn.

Despite police intimidation and city orders, the movement will continue. But not only through protests and marches. It will be the tough conversations and the community organizing on the most basic level. It will involve asking challenging questions and encouraging the individual and collective expression of our hopes and dreams. It will be with those who are tired but do not stop, for those voices are hardest to hear but still have something to say, for those who only have bones to show for their struggle.

So to all those in the Ivory Tower who see this latest manifestation of resistance as unfocused or unclear and continue to become paralyzed by the question, "But will any of this really amount to anything tangible?" You will never know unless you join in. And the truth is – it has to. The current system of unfettered consumption is simply unsustainable.

Our hearts are big, and so is the amount of love we have to give. On a sunny day in October, perhaps the collective feeling that pervaded Foley Square could be summed up in the sign that read, "This is the most hopeful I have felt in a long time."

Departing Harlem: Celebrating Malcolm X's 86th Birthday

“Malcolm! X! Malcolm! X!” As I walked up to 1-2-5 one last time before I left Harlem for the summer, I was quickly drawn to the chants and critical mass of marchers. After a year in Harlem studying international affairs and human rights “up the hill”, the opportunity to honor the legacy of an American civil rights legend seemed a fitting way to spend my last day.

The lasting impact Malcolm X has had on American society cannot be understated. Many a teenager reads The Autobiography of Malcolm X at one time or another, following the incredible transformation and development of a man fighting for dignity in a vicious society. Malcolm’s ever-evolving philosophy and the story of his struggle for civil rights, social justice, and human dignity is not only a story of the United States of America; it is one that characterizes the complex nature of the turbulent times that often surround revolutionary movements.

Malcolm’s own evolution from hustler to community organizer to political leader, and his eventual split from the Nation of Islam and later political vision, no doubt form many parts of a captivating narrative. Malcolm’s scathing critiques of the violence, racism, and hypocrisy, that pervaded his time have never failed to be thought-provoking, even decades after his assassination.

In the words of late Columbia Professor Manning Marable:

“Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism, and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual...”

Transitions often mark appropriate opportunities for reflection. As I followed the red-black-and-green flags through Harlem, and looked back at the past year, Marable’s assessment of Malcolm X seems more than relevant. Malcolm’s intentional efforts to connect the struggles of black Americans to the struggles of liberation movements in Africa and Asia embodied solidarity in the most practical sense. His commitment to emancipation and ability to understand the importance of connecting movements at home and abroad could not be more salient at the moment.

Today, Malcolm’s message continues to resonate with a diverse array of people: from high school kids in Harlem, to Black Panthers, to African storeowners, street vendors, random passer-bys (and at least one bougie grad student with his fist held high). To witness this plurality in celebration is both encouraging and endearing.

However, we also see Malcolm’s beliefs in basic human dignity, human rights, and freedom, across oceans. We see a similar fire in Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the revolt that literally shook the stones in Tahrir Square. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the continued uprisings, embody the potential of true people’s power.

In the words of (another) Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi:

“Egypt is now thought of as an exciting and progressive place; its people’s expressions of solidarity are welcomed by demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin; and its bright young activists are seen as models for a new kind of twenty-first-century mobilization. ... The Arab states have a long way to go to undo the terrible legacy of repression and stagnation and move toward democracy, the rule of law, social justice and dignity, which have been the universal demands of their peoples during this Arab spring. The term ‘dignity’ involves a dual demand: first, for the dignity of the individual in the face of rulers who treat their subjects as without rights and beneath contempt. But there is also a demand for the collective dignity of proud states like Egypt, and of the Arabs as a people.”

The Arab Spring in its most inspiring forms is a manifestation of the potential of collective action aimed at re-shaping societies in line with values of social justice, freedom, and dignity; as well as an unequivocal rejection of violently repressive, morally corrupt, and illegitimate regimes that, as Khalidi explains, hold their own citizens with contempt. The battles against oppression that are igniting hearts and minds across the world, are the same that Malcolm and many others before and after him have fought in this country. Malcolm’s message of solidarity to connect what is happening overseas to our struggles at home cannot be lost on us now.

Marching through Harlem, invoking the legacy of Malcolm X, reminded me of the days of our youth. It reminded me of the rallies we organized, teach-ins we set up, concerts we held, and indeed the marches in which we took part. But today with a large portion of the world on fire, and the first year of a graduate degree under my belt, it is those months leading up to the United States invasion of Iraq and the palpable despair following “shock-and-awe” that still burns vividly in my memory.

It was then that we recited many of the same chants echoed today about people’s power before our country illegally, immorally invaded Iraq and forever changed the way many youth in this country viewed their own government, and certainly how millions all over the world viewed the United States. Those days that were characterized by blatant lies, largely regurgitated by a spineless media machine, made many of us feel like the Bush administration viewed us with contempt. And we should remember, Malcolm X and Dr. King, and all those that opposed aggressive military interventionism, connected the struggle for racial equality at home with the movement against war in Vietnam.

As the chants of, “Power to the people!” “Black Power!” and “Shut it down!” echoed past the Apollo, I noticed that the whole street indeed had been shut down. In fact, from 1-4 pm every single store on 125 was asked to close to honor Malcolm’s legacy. (Yes, even the H&M and Starbucks complied). “How are we going to do it? The hard way!”

Maybe this is what we can take away on this 86^th birthday celebration. Our struggles for human rights such as universal health care, quality education, and affordable housing can be connected with other struggles at home and abroad. Just like Malcolm, just like Egypt, we are willing to do it the hard way.

On a sunny day in May, these are the whirlwind of thoughts I leave New York with to make my way to another world. Once again, I will be migrating briefly to the world’s largest democracy; a place where the values of social justice, freedom, and human dignity are in need of being invoked in the face of crushing poverty, gross inequality, and rampant corruption. Departing Harlem on Malcolm X’s birthday seems like favorable auspices to be leaving under. It is a reminder of the work that is still needed to be done, the plurality of perspectives to draw from, and the beauty of community-centered living. From New York to New Delhi, I personally wish to find within the strength, foresight, and heart necessary to continue to connect the dots.