{"id":20614,"date":"2020-06-12T03:16:08","date_gmt":"2020-06-12T07:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=20614"},"modified":"2020-06-19T12:47:36","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T16:47:36","slug":"usa-historian-robin-d-g-kelley-years-of-racial-justice-organizing-laid-groundwork-for-todays-uprising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=20614","title":{"rendered":"USA: Historian Robin D.G. Kelley: Years of Racial Justice Organizing Laid Groundwork for Today\u2019s Uprising"},"content":{"rendered":"
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EDUCATION FOR PEACE .<\/p>\n

Excerpts from a report on Jun 11 in Democracy Now<\/a> (The original content of this program is licensed under a\u00a0Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org.)<\/p>\n

AMY GOODMAN: <\/strong>For more on the mass uprising engulfing the U.S. and what protesters are demanding now, we go to Los Angeles, where we\u2019re joined by Robin Kelley, professor of African American studies at UCLA. He studies social movements, author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. . . .<\/p>\n

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\nvideo of full report<\/a>
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NERMEEN\u00a0SHAIKH:<\/strong>\u00a0Professor Kelley, I want to go back to something that you\u00a0 wrote\u00a0<\/a> immediately following Trump\u2019s election in November 2016. You wrote that the U.S. needs a multiracial movement committed to, quote, \u201cdismantling the oppressive regimes of racism, heteropatriarchy, empire, and class exploitation that is at the root of inequality, precarity, materialism, and violence in many forms.\u201d You\u2019ve just talked about how the demands of this movement are very different. Do you see what\u2019s happening now as what you wanted to happen in November 2016?<\/p>\n

ROBIN\u00a0D.G.\u00a0KELLEY:<\/strong>\u00a0Exactly. And not only that, but what I wrote in 2016 was actually a reflection of what was already happening on the ground. So, in some respects, remember, the Movement for Black Lives put out their policy platform in August of 2016.<\/p>\n

(Article continued in right column)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Question(s) related to this article:<\/div>\n
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Are we making progress against racism?<\/a><\/p>\n

(Article continued from left column)<\/p>\n

And one of the things we all have to acknowledge is that we\u2019re not here by accident. You know, this is not a spontaneous response to the pandemic, and suddenly white people are waking up and saying, \u201cOh, wait a second, Black lives matter.\u201d No, this is a product of enormous work, going back well before Trayvon Martin. But you think about all the organizing work, the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter, the women who organized Black Lives Matter, initiated \u2014\u00a0Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors \u2014 people like Melina Abdullah, Charlene Carruthers of Black Youth Project 100, all the scholar activists who have been working on this question \u2014\u00a0Barbara Ransby, Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore \u2014 and then, before that, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Copwatch, Dignity and Power, Critical Resistance, the African American Policy Forum. These were initiatives on the ground who did all this political education, all this organizing work \u2014\u00a0We Charge Genocide, Dream Defenders, the Rising Majority, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and also groups like\u00a0SURJ, you know, [Showing] Up for Racial Justice, which deals with white racism.<\/p>\n

So you have an infrastructure in place that has been doing this work for a decade or more \u2014\u00a0more than a decade. And that\u2019s why people are out here. That\u2019s why people can come out into the streets and simply roll off their tongues words like \u201cdefund the police,\u201d connect transphobia, homophobia, gender oppression, patriarchy to racial capitalism and to racial violence, connect these things in ways that I think are kind of unprecedented. But again, without the organizing work, we would not be here, you know? And I think it\u2019s very important to even go back and acknowledge how the foundations were laid by the Combahee River Collective, by people like Barbara Smith, raised by the Third World Women\u2019s Alliance, I mean, fighting around questions of connecting sterilization, abortion rights with racism. You know? So, these kinds of links, these connections \u2014\u00a0and also with war \u2014\u00a0are important. So, there\u2019s a long history that got us here.<\/p>\n

And the real question now is whether or not this can be sustained, because we know, throughout history, we\u2019ve had revolutionary moments, after Reconstruction in the 1870s, followed by backlash and by what we can describe as American fascism. We have the sort of Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, followed by backlash, the rise of the Klan, the tamping down on the strike wave in the 1970s, neoliberalism. And now we\u2019re facing another one. We have these forces trying to transform the world in a way that could actually bring safety and prosperity to all versus a president and a regime that asks, \u201cWhat happened to\u00a0Gone with the Wind? …<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDUCATION FOR PEACE . Excerpts from a report on Jun 11 in Democracy Now (The original content of this program is licensed under a\u00a0Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org.) AMY GOODMAN: For more on the mass uprising engulfing the U.S. and what protesters … Continue reading USA: Historian Robin D.G. Kelley: Years of Racial Justice Organizing Laid Groundwork for Today\u2019s Uprising<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,13,91],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-20614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-for-peace","category-human-rights","category-north-america","tag-north-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}