By ROBIN D.G. KELLEY
I am at a crossroads. I spent more than half my life writing about people who tried to change the world, largely because I, too, wanted to change the world. The history of social movements attracted me because of what it might teach us about our present condition and about how we might shape the future. When I first embarked on that work, nearly 20 years ago, the political landscape looked much clearer: We needed a revolutionary socialist movement committed to antiracism and antisexism. Buoyed by youthful naiveté, I thought it was very obvious then.
Over time, the subjects of my books, as well as my own political experience, taught me that things are not what they seem, and that the desires, hopes, and intentions of the people who fought for change cannot be easily categorized, contained, or explained. Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they "succeeded" in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations it sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely those alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.
How do we produce a vision that enables us to see beyond our immediate ordeals? How do we transcend bitterness and cynicism, and embrace love, hope, and an all-encompassing dream of freedom, especially in these rough times?
Rough times, indeed. I witnessed the World Trade Center go down from my bedroom window. Bombs have rained down on the people of Afghanistan and unknown numbers of innocent people have died, from either weapons of mass destruction or starvation. Violence will only generate more violence; the carnage has just begun. Now more than ever, we need the strength to love and to dream. Instead of knee-jerk flag-waving and submission to any act of repression in the name of "national interests," the nation ought to consider Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision and take a cue from the movement that proved to be the source of his most fertile ideas.
The civil-rights movement demanded freedom for all and believed that it had to win through love and moral suasion. Those committed to the philosophy of nonviolence saw their suffering as redemptive. The very heart of the movement, the extraordinary Southern black folks who stood nobly in the face of police dogs and water cannons and white mobs and worked as hard as they could to love their enemy were poised to become the soul of a soulless nation, according to Dr. King.
Imagine if that soul were to win out, if the movement's vision of freedom were completely to envelop the nation's political culture. Democracy in the United States has not always embraced everyone, and we have a long history to prove it, from slavery and "Indian wars" to the 2000 presidential election. Indeed, the marginal and excluded have done the most to make democracy work in America. And some of the radical movements have done awful things in the name of liberation, often under the premise that the ends justify the means. Communists, black nationalists, third- world-liberation movements -- all left us stimulating and even visionary sketches of what the future could be, but they have also been complicit in acts of violence and oppression, through either their actions or their silence. No one's hands are completely clean. <SNIP> See, http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i39/39b00701.htm