Justice Mondays

Last year, after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, I was so ready to become more active and vocal as a white ally in Black Lives Matter.  But then shortly after, Micah Johnson murdered five police officers in Dallas, and I retreated back into my mind.  Would the people I grew up with consider my activism as incitement to violence?  Would protesting against the shooting of Sterling and Castile (and so many others) be disrespectful to and inconsistent with the mourning of the Dallas 5?  

Even though it is not actually a zero-sum game, I nevertheless possess a dualistic mind and live in a dualistic nation.  We feel like we must pick one side, and thus because we cannot embrace all victims of violence, we embrace none of them.  

I have been a member of the People’s Organization for Progress (POP) in Newark, New Jersey for several years.  Last year, as I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, I came across a passage where he was, rightfully, calling us good-intentioned white folks out:   

I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are "proving" that they are "with us." But the hard truth is this isn't helping to solve America's racist problem. The Negroes aren't the racists. Where the really sincere white people have got to do their "proving" of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America's racism really is—and that's in their own home communities; America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.    

Yes, most of the anti-racist work needs to be done in white minds and in white communities.

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Every Monday, between 4:45 and 6:00pm, POP rallies in front of the Rodino Federal Building on Broad Street in Newark to demand that New Jersey police officers who have shot unarmed black people in recent years be held accountable for their deaths and that the U.S. Attorney start official investigations and potentially bring civil rights charges against these officers.  Yesterday, POP held its 75th consecutive “Justice Monday.”  

Of the 75 Mondays, I’ve made it to only five or six myself.  There are many practical reasons I have not been a regular attendee.  I just couldn’t make it this or that day.  Some Mondays, however, I convince myself not to go: They will be there next week…What good does it really do?… Yes, the U.S. Attorney is in the building, but it’s preaching to the choir on Broad Street… I care but it’s not ‘my main issue,’ so I’ll go to POP’s meeting with the guest speaker next week to make up for it.

And yet still other times, it is my suburban upbringing and my lack of courage which subconsciously get the best of me and convince me not to go.  That is, when I look at the macro-picture, I can see so clearly that blacks are unfairly targeted and discriminated against at all levels of the criminal justice system.  Thus, I am a supporter of the movement for black lives.  However, in particular cases, I sometimes find myself second-guessing the movement’s specific calls: Well what if he just listened to what the police officer said initially?... What if he wasn’t selling loose cigarettes?... What if he just dropped the toy gun?  Those thoughts are obviously the product of my white-privileged upbringing.  The assumption is if you follow the law, you’ll be fine.  All of my interactions with police officers, including the ones I ran away from in Ingleside, Texas (and got caught by), have been positive.  Both the past and the present prove that black people should not make those same assumptions and same positive associations.  While there are no police officers in my family, my family’s background is closer to that of most police officers than to that of the victims of police shooting.  Because of these doubts and these associations, I have often lacked the courage to speak about racial injustice and police brutality in white audiences, which despite current residency in Newark, is my actual home audience.  

Meanwhile, the police officer who shot Philando Castile in Minnesota was found not guilty.

Yesterday, as I was listening to a panel from the United National AntiWar Coalition’s conference and thus settling into “my main issue” of war/peace/demilitarization, I was delightfully surprised to find Larry Hamm as the last speaker on the panel. (The whole panel is good, but I especially recommend Larry at the 1:20:00 mark and also David Swanson at the 52:00 mark).   Larry is the chairman of POP and is always an encyclopedic-yet-inspiring speaker.  Many years after Malcolm called us out, Larry rightfully called us out:   

Today, more than ever before, we need a peace movement.  The threat of war, wars abroad, and world war is greater than it’s ever been.  But, the peace movement will not rise to the level that it needs to rise unless it is closely and directly connected to the black liberation struggle in the United States of America.  And let me say this, the black liberation movement will not be able to achieve its aims and goals unless we are connected to the peace movement and the other movements that exist here in the United States of America.  And it is this dialectic that has bedeviled us for decades and continues to bedevil us, and it is so important that somehow we struggle to navigate this contradiction and overcome the differences that have kept our people’s movements apart.  At critical times, we’ve come together and in those times we achieved success.  But we have not been able to build that glue to hold us together long enough so that we could in fact reach not just a quantitative change in our movement but a qualitative change also….  Consistency is key.  No one protest in one week in one year is not going to do it, but we have to assail the doors of oppression with the battering ram of protest until those doors are broken down….  This is so important that we link these two struggles….  And the peace movement: See, it’s one thing to invite black people to a conference.  It’s one thing to invite prominent black authors and writers and speakers to speak at gatherings, but the real question is what happens at the local level when these conferences are over.  I’m going to tell you what happens.  Black people demonstrate against police brutality and the white people who demonstrate for peace don’t show up at those demonstrations and that practice has to come to an end, brothers and sisters. And likewise, I say to my black comrades here in this room, we can’t look at the peace movement as a white thing.  It’s a people’s thing, if war destroys everybody.  And, I get this in my community—“well, we’re not going to go to this, that’s the white people’s thing.”  No, if you’re a revolutionary, you got to fight on all fronts….  We have to have multidimensional thinking….  This is a multi-dimensional system that oppresses us in a myriad of ways….  Let us struggle to find ways to bring our movements together, not just at the conference, but bring these movements together in the streets….       

Larry’s unexpected morning admonishment was enough to get me to the afternoon’s Justice Monday.  The work continues, in hearts and minds and on streets.