A few days after 9/11, I attended a gathering of activists on the north side of Chicago. These were people I had chanted with at progressive protests and sat next to at workshops.
I went in fully expecting shattered people and solemn moments, maybe even prayers of healing for a nation that had seen 3,000 of its citizens burned in terrorist flames.
No such luck.
There were plenty of references to postcolonial theory, several comments about the rich bankers in the World Trade Center getting their due, and more than a few statements that America, because of its foreign policy, deserved to be attacked. The phrase “The chickens have come home to roost” was repeated several times.
That was the final straw for me.
My dad had been saying for a while, “Your definition of being on the left seems to be that you hate the system more than you love people.”
My retort was, “Where’s your power analysis?”
That night I realized that my obsession with doing power analyses had led me into a cul de sac with people whose reading of postcolonial philosophers Michel Fanon and Frantz Foucault had frozen their hearts. I realized my own heart needed a proper thaw and a long warming up.
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It’s clear that recent world events are causing a similar reckoning among some in the more progressive quarters of the social-change world.
Scoring Points
Last week, after the heinous Hamas attack on people in southern Israel, a number of progressives wrote essays with variations on the following theme: Can we just pause a minute to mourn the human suffering and maybe send a message of comfort to our friends before using the murders of Jews and Palestinians to score points for postcolonial ideology? Also, when did we lose the ability to call barbaric actions — whether in Israel or Gaza — barbaric?
Many of the pieces were by Jews whose families and friends had suffered unspeakable brutality.
Others were by Black leaders with impeccable progressive credentials such as the Reverend William Barber.
In part, they were responding to statements like Somali-American writer Najma Sharif’s tweet: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.”
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But they were also responding to the silence. Speaking Saturday at a Chicago Humanities Festival event at Northwestern University, political scientist and author Yascha Mounk noted that after years of issuing statements about any number of progressive causes, university presidents decided that the week of the Hamas attack was a good time to start a policy of neutrality.
Supporting Hamas is not by a long-shot mainstream progressive opinion. But here’s the thing: If you are constantly talking about resisting, dismantling, and decolonizing, if you choose as your favored symbol a clenched fist instead of, say, an open hand, should you really be surprised if some people take that language and those symbols both literally and seriously? What are fists for, after all, except to break things and hurt people?
In the mid-1990s, at the height of my own burn-down-the-system activism, I loved quoting singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco’s lyric, “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right” at progressive meetings. It was one of the surefire applause moments in my stock speech. One day, someone approached me after an event and asked, quite reasonably, “Why would we want to turn tools into weapons? Tools build things, weapons hurt people.”
Oh. Yeah. I had never thought of that. And yet it seemed so obvious. The goal of social change is not, after all, about a more ferocious revolution, it’s about a more beautiful social order. But the circles I was running in were so narrowly focused on dismantling oppressive systems that we barely put any thought into what it would take to build better ones.
We were like the character of Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones: obsessed with burning down the structures of oppression but completely unprepared when we got our chance to govern. As a result, we went looking for more structures to burn.
No small number of my friends who are professors and who taught some version of “turn tools into weapons” as a provocative perspective, have grown both alarmed and remorseful as they’ve watched a set of their students become the likes of Daenerys Targaryen, burning things down indiscriminately.
Time for Reflection
I wonder if there is a similar reflective moment happening in the world of philanthropy. Professors may well have charted the path by teaching a particular ideology, but certain quarters of philanthropy put the fuel in the cars, including those that drove to a destination some might consider dangerous and destructive.
I think there’s a hopeful ending here. After 9/11, the more responsible elements of the 90s-era social-change movement occupied the moral center, articulated an inclusive and inspiring vision, and developed a pragmatic mode. I had a ringside seat to its emergence in Chicago. Most people heard it for the first time when Barack Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention in August 2004.
I think a similar thing could happen now. Let’s start talking about what we’re building up rather than what we’re tearing down. And let’s start funding the builders.
Look for a continuation of this bridge-building conversation in the weeks ahead.
