Black Freedom and White Supremacy

• In Event: 52.035 - Contemporary Youth Activism: Advancing Social Justice in the United States

Abstract

Black Lives Matter! (BLM) has changed the political landscape across the US and globally, challenging police systemic violence against Black and Latino people with a creative, imaginative, and bold, ethical activism. BLM has aroused and sharpened consciousness about the profound inequality of state violence. BLM demands an end to the impunity, secrecy, and militarization of policing and exposes the vast discrepancies between the human need for safety and the terrorism of an armed, occupying, military force that targets young people of color. This radical struggle for justice and love has laid bare the fabric of white supremacy. In the process, it challenges white people to organize against inequality, to radicalize consciousness, and to demand excellent schools for every community, full health care for all, meaningful work with a living wage, and community control and participation in the decisions that affect peoples’ lives.

For white radicals, BLM requires an analysis of how the systemic racism at the core of US life impacts every struggle for justice: gender equality, permanent war, climate change, mass migration, economic justice. BLM stretches the possibilities of practicing solidarity: for rejecting special status, for taking responsibility for what is being done in our name and with our tax dollars, for speaking up and standing up for human dignity, for insisting that every person beaten, shot, harmed, or jailed is an unacceptable blow to all. Allyship is one step for white radicals, intellectuals and educators, and an important concept that recognizes privilege and a history of domination. But becoming a social justice activist, a revolutionary, requires full engagement with all aspects of the struggle: naming and analyzing this historical moment, mobilizing others, and acting on what the known demands.

Authors

• Bernadine Dohrn, Northwestern University

• William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago