Friends, comrades, partners, allies – we continue to be with you as we all collectively process the culmination of a challenging year. A year when political violence increased and our communities were too often under attack. Yet, we came through to the other side of natural disasters, a pivotal election, a rise in fascism in the states, and global turmoil.
In these challenging times, we turn to wise and prescient words from Pat Parker and Toni Morrison.
“I give you
a legacy
of doers
of people who take risks
to chisel the crack wider.
Take the strength that you may
wage a long battle.
Take the pride that you can
never stand small.
Take the rage that you can
never settle for less.”
-Pat Parker, Legacy
Toni Morrison first delivered these potent words below against fascism in 1995 at the Charter Day celebration at Howard University. They continue to ring true today.
Our left movements are only as strong as each of us; we need each other. May we all channel the doers and the risk takers to create a more just world together.
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:
- Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
- Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
- Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.
- Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
- Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
- Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
- Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
- Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its males and absolutely its children.
- Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
- Maintain, at all costs, silence…”