Ferguson – Within and Against Obama’s America

Interview with SAM ANDERSON - by LENORA HANSON and GIGI ROGGERO

The first question is about a general analysis of what is going on in Ferguson. Of course this instance of police brutality is not at all an isolated event, there are a lot of similar acts violence by the police and its larger apparatus of power against black and poor people. But what is exceptional is the great resistance and the revolt by the black community. If we see police violence happen all the time in the U.S., what could we say accounts for the difference in this uprising?

There are a number of factors that go into spontaneous uprisings. You have Eric Garner in Staten Island who was videotaped and shown in a chokehold, which he died from, and that happened just a couple of weeks before the Michael Brown incident in Missouri. And everyone in the world saw that, including the young folks in Ferguson. The conditions in Ferguson are exaggerated much more so than those in New York, however. Yes, New York has an overwhelmingly white police force that is brutal, but in Ferguson, which is a small community, there are only three black policeman and the white cops have a history of definite terrorism and brutality in the community, particularly among all the young folk there. And when the incident with Michael Brown happened, it was broad daylight, people saw the cop execute him, and then he laid there for three or four hours. When that happens and you have all those young folk out there, they get angrier and angrier and they can never get that out of their mind. And so you have this spontaneous rebellion. Then what exacerbates that anger even more is that the cops responded by being militarized, SWAT teams and tanks and otherwise, and that pushed things even further. So the youth were already alienated on many different levels and when the “black leaders” came in they could not relate, when they met in the church they didn’t even invite the young folk in, so things were already by day two and three already divided and the young folk were already enraged and ready to do something. And so those are some of the things that boiled over into this massive rebellion that is not going to subside, unless there is on one side, and that is on the youth side, more mobilization and organization and then the spontaneousness would subside. Or the state will allow the youth to run out of steam and wait it out. So those are the two alternatives left at this point. But it seems like the state apparatus wants to continue to provoke this by trying to contain, with military means, the rebellion and outrage. And that’s not going to work, that’s just going to escalate things. And it’s going to lead to more deaths and probably more spontaneous rebellions in other cities when they see that. That’s my sense of it.

You mentioned that one of the outcomes of this spontaneous uprising in Ferguson might be an organized form or response. Can you think of recent examples that set a precedent for what that might look like or do you think that kind of organization is going to be historic and novel from the perspective of the past two decades or so? And we’re thinking here about the way that many people have lamented the loss of a form of radical militant black organizing since the 70s or 80s.

The revolutionary center in black America is no longer among the youth. It’s among those of us who are literally 60 and over, those of us who were young people in the 60s and 70s, that revolutionary center and understanding of the need for revolutionary organizing and analysis, etc. etc. is not among the young people. That’s what has to be transferred in a complex, time-consuming process that can be accelerated by these kinds of incidences. The shooting of Trayvon Martin helped to pull together youth groups, but it’s a protest youth group that has not yet gotten its revolutionary, militant feet. It’s just a protest group. Of course, that group, the Dream Defenders, have representatives that are now in Ferguson. For young people this is a group that has a sense of militancy and that is going to interact with the people in Ferguson. You have locally the Organization of Black Struggle and that will likely try to develop some organization and radical militant base. The disadvantage is that in 2014, as opposed to 1974 or 1964, we have a large majority of black youth that are illiterate and not really interested in being literate. That was not the case 40-50 years ago; you had illiteracy but you had people who were willing and eager to learn the basics. So that’s a challenge that we have, in transforming young folks from looking at and understanding things from Twitter level sound-bytes to a little more extended analysis to help them build their movement. That is one of the major differences. But the other factor is that the youth now realize and see themselves as no different than the youth in Gaza, and that may be something we can work with and build upon.

From what you know, what is the class composition of the people in the Ferguson revolt? Can we say that the Ferguson riot is really class struggle?

It’s not a riot. The police riot, people rebel. The composition of Ferguson is part of a larger complex of St. Louis, which is primarily a working class community, made up of private houses and mixed public housing complexes. In terms of the black community in 2014 as the working class, you could say that they are in an economic depression or in a depressed community. And the youth unemployment rate there is about 60-65% for those between 18-25 or so. So you have a community that 10-12 years ago was a rising black, working class community that was trying to become a middle class community and then when the economic situation hit in 2008 or 2010, jobs were lost, homes were lost and it was devastating clearly. So that’s the reality of that community.

Can we say that this rebellion of Ferguson is a definitive end of the illusion of Obama in black politics?

Yeah, I guess you could say that. Like I said earlier, the youth are and were alienated there, so there might have been excitement about Obama in 2008-09 just as the first black president. But once he took office and things rolled on and they saw nothing, absolutely nothing coming to them except misery, unemployment and more police brutality, then they ignored whatever was going on with the president. Whatever he was doing then was not helping them in any way. And even before Obama’s announcement of the “My Brother’s Keeper”[1] campaign, his presentation to black men was only by chastising them. Whenever he spoke and made direct reference to them, it was about chastising and always putting blame on young black men. When “My Brother’s Keeper” was formed the core group that was invited to form it were not grassroots organizations in any of the communities in the U.S. that actually working with youth or black men and women. They were the polite and corporate types affiliated with private groups, the Urban Leagues, the NAACP and the safer groups. The other groups were not invited to be a part of this program. And the other thing to say in terms of the education component and the education crisis in the urban communities in black and Latino communities, is that the trend has been to corporatize and privatize public education and to ignore the reality that black teachers are disappearing, that there is less and less curriculum that deals with the history and culture of black and Latino people in the school system. And so young people are alienated at that level in public schools, so you have political alienation in terms of what Obama was presenting on a national level, and then you have the education alienation happening.

You were saying before that there is a lack of literacy or self-education on the part of youth in the U.S. today, and there was an interesting piece by Dianne Ravitch a few days ago commenting on the systemic failure of education in Ferguson. She describing it as such an impoverished community that there were only two graduation gowns that all the students had to pass around for graduation photos, and one of these students was Michael Brown. And as you mentioned, on top of that, you have widespread privatization of education of what used to be public education in the U.S. So on the one hand we have a severe depression of support for public education and on the other, as you are saying, there may be an internal depression of self or militant education around politics. How might we think about the relationship moving forward between knowledge and rebellion, or knowledge and the formation of a radical subjectivity in the U.S. given this context?

It’s the work of the radical forces to intervene in systemic and systematic ways. And I think it’s just beginning, particularly in St. Louis from what I can see, but it is a potential. And also it has to build nationwide and not just be isolated in terms of Ferguson, but right here in New York City we’re trying to do that same thing, to revitalize the radical and progressive movement of the black community by educating young people about the world and analysis. But Ravitch’s piece is on point. As I said, the goal of the U.S. Department of Education and the vast majority of the local departments of education now is to privatize and allow corporate types to “charterize”[2] everything and to bring in instant teachers, mainly white, from Teach for America, who are like the police, totally alienated from the young people the claim to try and educate. So it is a multi-layered struggle that we have to deal with at this point. And the other component which fortunately is not working in Ferguson is the more conservative, loyal opposition of black folk in the NAACP, the Urban League, Al Sharpton, all those people; they can’t contain it, the spontaneous rebellion cannot be contained and they can’t get young people to listen to them and to walk away. And the curfew was supposed to work, but they underestimated the level of outrage there and so they had to abandon that idea. And all the conservative forces, the churches and so forth, were telling people to abide by the curfew and that didn’t work.

Before you talked about he condition of black youth in relation to the condition of other youth in the world, for example in Gaza. In your opinion, what is the relationship between the rebellion and what has happened in the past years with Occupy?

Well, it is a stretch because the Occupy movement was started by mainly white, post-high school, college-level youth in New York City. There was a struggle to be more inclusive and that struggle as it spread across the country meant that there were movements that were affiliated that were movements by people of color, such as Occupy the Hood as it was called. Occupy the Hood moved across the country in Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburg, Boston, New York, and that came about for a couple of reasons. One, young people felt that the Occupy movement was a “white thing” and was not addressing some of the issues in the black and Latino communities. Secondly, the idea that there was no leadership isn’t true—there was a leadership, there was a semblance of white presence and leadership. And so that it was not a group that allowed for black and Latino people to participate in the same way that a young white person would come up and just walk in and join. Those two factors created those differences and one of the main reasons Occupy died was because of that. There wasn’t a concerted effort across the country to unite the two movements over time. There was a need for organization and structure because the forces coming against the movement was structured and there needed to be an organization structure, and there was that tension within the Occupy movement but the forces in the Occupy movement that were looking for more structure did not prevail. So that united front movement between Occupy the Hood and the Occupy movement did not gel in those months.

From your point of view, what is the future of the rebellion? That is to say, what is to be done in terms of organization and practices of struggle, and what are the possibilities of generalization of the rebellion in other parts of the country and the recomposition of other class sectors?

As I said before, we don’t have a black radical center among young people and that has to be developed. I think Ferguson can be a starting point to help to develop a progressive/radical movement among young people. Like I said, the Dreamers are represented there now, and I’m certain they’ll be discussing the organization of black struggle out of St. Louis, so there will be a lot of meetings and forums and conferences consciously trying to bring young people into a more radical formation. It’s going to take time and it also will happen on a national scale. The group that I’m a part of, the Black Left Unity Network, is talking about doing something in 2015 on a national scale and obviously the leading youth forces out of Ferguson and the Dreamers will be invited into this effort. But we have to build and rebuild, we have to start from scratch in a lot of ways to get a movement going. It’s not going to be instant. As I said before, there’s a lot of educational work that has to be done. Ferguson is an opening for this kind of radical reawakening and redevelopment and the forces on the ground there now will have to take it to the next level, and similarly in New York City and Los Angeles where there was another killing, and wherever else there are these instances that can be tragic but mobilizing and education building, we have to develop from there. The forces connecting with electoral politics is another thing. It seems that many people were neutralized by the Obama presidency in its first term, and now people who were neutralized are awakening to the reality that he was there to save and serve capitalism, and are working on trying to go beyond the Democratic party politics and look at something more to the left, and that will have an impact in a year or two on how the youth are being organized. And so we have to work on that level also.

You have talked about the importance of organizing a new, radical youth front in the U.S. It seems that within the past few years that both the media coverage and activity on that front has been in the space of the university, for instance in what has gone on in California this past year. But do you think it’s important that this event has not happened in the space of the university or higher education and what might the relevance of a radical organization of young people that is outside that space be?

That’s a good question. I think two things around that. One, the vast majority of youth are not in the university and the vast majority are working class and alienated from almost every aspect of society. Black, white, Latino, Asian. The vast majority. And I think the mistake that radical forces have made over the past few years with regard to youth in the U.S. has been to organize them into groups but not to integrate them into the leadership of the organizations. That is to say, for example, that in the 60s we did not see ourselves as youth for the sake of youths, we were fighting for the end of segregation, the right to vote, and so forth, and as black people that were not age-specific. The formation of the Black Panther Party was not the formation of a youth group, even though it was primarily young people, people from 14-15 up to 25 or 30 at the most. So it was not a youth group. It was a group of young people who saw themselves as part of the black liberation movement. That mindset we have to rekindle, that mindset of organizing young people to be the leading force within the black liberation movement and not to be just a student group or a youth group, as was attempted 15-20 years ago with the Black Radical Congress. That was an attempt to have a youth group and not to have the youth as part of the overarching leadership, but that’s a whole other story. But you understand what I’m saying?

That there needs to be a more, if not universal, then more general character to the aims of a struggle, ones that are not particular to youth or a particular thing like higher education?

Right. You can have youth organization, they are important, but it should be leading to the overarching adult or broader black liberation organization. You can be in this youth organization, but the leadership of this organization is also very much central to the leadership of the broader movement, not as an appendage or afterthought but an integral part of that overarching leadership.

We asked a question about organization in terms of political or general organization before. But we also have to talk about an organization in the streets and the confrontation with the strong military apparatus of the state. During the 60s the expertise of the anti-colonial movements and struggles was important, there was an important process of politicization of gangs and this was very important in terms of the concrete organization and practices of struggle. In your opinion, in the rebellion of Ferguson, what are the forms of concrete street organization to face the state apparatus and also what is to be done to improve this specific kind of organization?

Well some of them exist because the police allow them to exist. They are creations of the police dept to do exactly what they do, to avert young people away from political activity and org, so we have to be very specific about what “street organizations” are viable in this particular time. In other words, we don’t romanticize them. Like I said before, when there are politically conscious people on the ground doing the organizing, and have learned some of the lessons from the past, they are able to identify who is legit and who is not legit. It’s not about going in and trying to organize the street organizations, it’s a broader and bigger kind of effort. Those individuals coming out of the street organizations who may be genuine will be identified and will be worked with, but the orgs themselves have to be checked out to see who they are. The Bloods and the Crips are allowed to exist because they are antagonistic to each other and they are often times nurtured by local police departments with informants, with easy access to weapons and so forth. So we have to careful about that.

In your opinion is there an ambivalence existing in gangs or other forms of young street organizations in the U.S.? On the one hand those groups are used by the police to divide the black community; on the other hand, do you think it is possible to have a process that politicizes them?

There’s a number of questions to deal with there around the viability of street organizations in 2014. We have to ask whether or not they are too far gone as appendages of the police department, and therefore if we need new types of youth formations to come about and attract young people to those new organizations. I really feel that we need to do that. Those Bloods, Crips, and variations on those groups have been so infiltrated by the police that you could spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to neutralize the police influence in them and it may not be worth it. It may be better, given a situation like Ferguson, to have other groups on the ground to begin to form new formations within the neighborhood and community. And I think that happens to a large extent in the 1960s with the development of orgs like the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika where a lot of young people were attracted to joining them and many of them came out of the local gangs. The Young Lords is another example, which was a gang in its origins and but was attracted to the developments of the Black Panther Party and felt that it was important that Puerto Ricans have their own kind of parallel formation. But there were conscious elements in what they were doing and in those developments and we need to recognize that in 2014 and in Ferguson, L.A., wherever. We need those kinds of conscious elements to form groups that will draw young people who are involved in the more lumpen, police controlled groups, to draw them out into the more independent, radical youth formations.