Abstract
One of the most significant books to come out of the US last year has passed without comment here in the UK. Making All Black Lives Matter: reimagining a freedom movement in the twenty-first century is history, context and manifesto all at once. Its author, Barbara Ransby, is Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but, more importantly, she is an unflagging activist and determined feminist. In her previous books she ‘retrieved’ the lives of two key black US women – Ella Baker and Eslanda Robeson. 1 What she does in her latest oeuvre is to situate Black Lives Matter/the Movement for Black Lives coalition (BLMM/M4BL), wearing not her academic cloak but in the gilet and hoodie of a black organiser, as an organic part of the Black Radical Tradition in the US.
But there is of course no one Black Lives Matter movement. As Ransby told us at a small seminar held at the Institute of Race Relations last year, ‘the M4BL is a larger rubric under which there are about fifty organisations, most of which have signed off on a document that came in August 2016, called “A Vision for Black Lives”’. 2
The book, which tries to do justice to a wide cross-section of those organisations, falls into three parts – Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are about political building around specific police killings of black young men: Trayvon Martin’s, in Florida, 2012; Michael Brown’s, in Ferguson, Missouri, 2014; Freddie Gray’s in Baltimore custody, 2015. In the middle section, Chapter 5 is on political formation and contradictions (for example, thrown up by social media, across generations, dealing with movement sexism, acknowledging class issues) and how they are resolvable (if sometimes partially) on the ground. Chapter 6 looks at state violence against organisers in M4BL; and Chapter 7 examines in detail ‘the political ecosystem’ of Chicago (the author’s stomping ground) and the achievements of the movement there. Four more general chapters on organising top and tail the book. Admittedly, the more general the chapters become, i.e. distanced from the local detail, the easier it is for us outside the US to relate to their contents.
Ransby is at pains not to rerun the accounts already available in so many books on Black Lives Matter, to which she pays homage. 3 She focuses instead on political organisation, and on how political organisers emerged (with whom over two years she carried out numerous interviews and attended countless meetings and rallies). Instead of ‘rags to riches’ tales, here we have tales ‘from armchair to activist’. She concentrates on delineating the political trajectory of individuals, mostly women, who have led the recent fights over racialised police killings, turning them from local cases to national cause − Ransby’s (unspoken) riposte to an empty politics of identity.
But it is the opening and closing chapters where she analyses more generally, away from the dissection of the hurly burly of the street, that we find the profound political wisdoms that make this book such an important read – yes, even across the Atlantic. Hers is always a political take, but also a hugely humane one, in which she picks her words carefully. In the first page of her introduction she asks how a social media hashtag in 2013 became ‘the battle cry’ of a ‘generation of Black youth activists’ and ended up resonating ‘as a moral challenge, and as a slap in the face to the distorting and deceptive language of colorblind and postracialism’ in the US, following Obama’s election in 2008.
Her book then looks at ‘the forces’, ‘the individuals’, and ‘the underlying ideas that have animated, nurtured, and sustained this movement’. Though she says the answers are complicated, she comes down quickly on certain truths: ‘Black feminist politics have been the ideological bedrock’; the movement has addressed racism and violence experienced by LGBTQIA communities; ‘organizers have enacted a Black feminist intersectional praxis’ (and this intersectionality is a practice rather than something learnt through textbooks). Furthermore, the movement has ‘also patently rejected the hierarchical hetero-patriarchal politics of respectability’, giving primacy not to the so-called ‘best and brightest’ but ‘emphasizing the needs of the most marginal and often-maligned’.
‘This is the first time in the history of US social movements’, she writes, clearly with some pride, ‘that Black feminist politics have defined the frame for a multi-issue, Black-led mass struggle that did not primarily or exclusively focus on women.’ And black people are represented within all the oppressed of the US – the poor, migrants, the disabled, the working-class, Muslims, and so on. ‘So to realize the liberation of “all” Black people means undoing systems of injustice that impact on all other oppressed groups as well.’ For Ransby, the 2016 M4BL document ‘is not just about black issues in some narrow sense, but includes environmental justice issues, feminist issues, labor issues’. BLMM/M4BL is ‘at its heart, a visionary movement calling not only for reforms but for systemic and fundamental change’.
Where did it spring from? Of course, it did not spring out of thin air, explains historical materialist Ransby. It had its roots way back: in the 1990s in the way Black gay men and women had to organise against the HIV/AIDS epidemic; in the 2005 hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans and the way it and its aftermath affected its ‘Black folk’; in the launch in Chicago in June 1998 of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) – ‘a coalition of Black left organizers and intellectuals responding to the devastating impact of neoliberal policies on the Black community, and to the dearth of responsive Black leadership’. The BRC, of which the author was a part, signalled ‘the re-emergence of a new Black Left’ and its feminist caucus ‘represented a coming together of an amazing intergenerational group of Black feminists’ many of whom became mentors, teachers, advisers and supporters to M4BL organisers in the 2010s. And there were two other organisations led by Black women and Women of Colour activists which strongly influenced the ‘new’ movement – the prison abolition movement Critical Resistance (CR) founded by Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Rose Braz in 1998 and INCITE, on domestic and state violence. As mass incarceration of black people signalled the aptness of CR’s description of the Prison Industrial Complex, black Americans had also become painfully aware that having black policemen, black mayors, or even a black president did not protect poor black young men on city streets. And then, outside of black politics, there was the Occupy Wall Street movement which challenged the tyranny of the super-rich and capitalism overall, and revived tactics of direct action and civil disobedience.
What is so stimulating about the book is that it is introspective in a completely fresh way, inward-looking of organising, and, without ever betraying people and issues, it draws out universalist truths on everything from dealing with movement contradictions to taking on state power. In that sense it is almost a toolkit for the new organiser. Chapter 8, for example, examines the roles played by Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Blackbird and the Black women-led BlackOUT Collective in providing ‘modern maroon spaces’ where organisers can come together, fortify themselves and forge new levels of trust and consensus. ‘None’, she concludes, ‘are base-building or mass organizations’, but they provide the essential connective tissue to bind the different pieces of the movement into a whole – they are ‘the political quilters’.
Where now? Heeding a warning from Ruth Gilmore, Ransby argues that M4BL, a ‘Black-led class struggle – informed by, grounded in, and bolstered by Black Feminist politics’, has to resist attempts to narrow its goals or ‘to decontextualize them from the larger political landscape of racial capitalism’. There is, she adds, a symbiosis between ‘US and European capitalism, empire, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy’. And this is in fact a basis for unity not fragmentation. If the white-led Left and labour organisations could internalise the connections and truths emerging from the new movement, ‘the political possibilities would be enormous’.