What it Means for DSA to Embrace Black Leadership
Kevin Richardson, Kristian Hernandez, Maikiko James, Abdullah Younus, Hannah Allison, Sam Lewis, Beth Huang, Allie Lahey, Roy Zuniga, Chris Ottolino, Tim Zhu, Cathy Garcia and Nick Bunce
As the leadership of Socialist Majority, a caucus of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), we believe it is critical for our organization to develop an organizing program that advances the struggle for Black Liberation, diversifies our membership base as we continue to grow, and supports Black leadership. The historic uprising that has emerged in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder has the size, militancy, radicalism and breadth of support to upend U.S. society. We know that a multi-racial, majoritarian, working class movement against white supremacy, patriarchy, and racial capitalism will be the vehicle for our collective liberation -- a vision that now feels more within the realm of the possible than it has in decades. Right now, DSA can either rise to the occasion by supporting a new generation of working class Black leaders emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement, or we can make a devastating error by allowing ourselves to be irrelevant to a major development in the struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy and racial capitalism.
As we reflect on what it means for a majority white democratic membership organization to embrace the Black leadership of a still-emerging social movement, we know that there are no easy answers of the type supplied by “diversity consultants.” We look to the organizing and intellectual principles of Black Feminism and Transformative Justice to inform our vision for transforming DSA. The recent appointment to the DSA National Political Committee of three Black leaders who have shown deep commitment to the organization is a critical step towards ensuring DSA can be a political home for Black movement leaders, but we must continue to build on this decision and recognize that transformation needed in our organization is much bigger. We see six key areas of work that remain to be done.
Center Black Struggle in Our Politics & Demands
We believe that the vast majority of DSA members recognize that our organization must center the struggle against racism - and demands like defunding the police and abolishing ICE - alongside and within our fight for universal, redistributive demands. Anti-racist politics are not a distraction from class struggle. They should not be seen as separate, secondary, or worse, as a political liability. Because of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, anti-Black racism remains a defining polarization in our society that profoundly shapes our economy and the conditions under which we organize. As the Black Feminists of the Combahee River Collective identified more than four decades ago, we are “not merely raceless, sexless workers” - our politics are informed by our identities and experiences in a world profoundly shaped by intersecting social hierarchies like racism and sexism.
As socialists, we know that an injury to one is an injury to all, and that by organizing around the needs of the people living at the intersection of these oppressions, we can bring all people closer to liberation. The particular impacts of structural oppression set the context for how we should understand and define “universal.” The “universal” is not given, it needs to be constructed. A truly universal demand is one that stitches together particular demands from different segments of the whole working class, into a universal program. A demand that simply generalizes the needs of white men, who represent only a single segment of the working class, as the standard for us all is not truly universal.
Medicare for All legislation is an example of an attempt at a genuinely universal demand. Medicare for All doesn’t erase the particular ways our healthcare system victimizes oppressed people, rather it incorporates the long standing demands of those groups such as trans-inclusive care, long-term disability, a repeal of the Hyde Amendment and the establishment of an Office of Primary Health, with programs designed to address the racial discrimination Black mothers face at the point of care. A Medicare for All plan that did not specifically incorporate these particular demands would not really be “universal,” nor would we be able to mobilize the coalition necessary to achieve it if it excluded these constituencies.
The evolving mass movement against police violence and other manifestations of racism is not a side-show to the building of a united, fighting working class in the U.S. -- at this moment it is the main event. This is the other side of the universal-particular dichotomy, where, in society shaped by white supremacy and patriarchy, advancing the demands of the people most marginalized by those intersecting oppressions actually creates the space for all of us to get free. Defunding and abolishing the police is one such demand, where, by struggling against the police murders of Black people and the anti-Black racism inherent in the institution of policing and the prison industrial complex, we can also free all working class people from the tyranny of cash bail, the violence of evictions enforced at gunpoint and the trauma of rape and sexual assault committed by police officers.
The dehumanization of Black people under racial capitalism in the U.S. reveals the moral depravity of the entire system, and the struggle against anti-Black racism is key to the liberation of the entire working class. Significant layers of working class people, especially young Black people are mobilizing, organizing and radicalizing in great numbers and with widespread public support. If we are serious about building a unified, multiracial movement, we must be explicit in naming our anti-racist, socialist feminist politics and in prioritizing Black-led struggle.
Partner with Black-Led Organizations
There are a lot of abstractions in how we talk about who we want to bring into the sphere of the Left (e.g. the abstract notion of “diversity”), which must become concrete efforts to collaborate with other groups, both organized and unorganized, in relevant and strategic fights. We should partner with existing Black-led organizations, locally and nationally, whether around protests, labor organizing, issue campaigns or elections. Our collective work must be a partnership, not a transaction, and we should be deliberate in developing relationships and open and intentional about our desire to work in coalition. DSA has a lot to offer as an organization -- we have chapters in every state, tens of thousands of members organizing on the ground in their communities, and a record of building power through elections. Solidarity is our strength, so we must learn from the insights of Black-led organizations and seek to work with those groups whenever and wherever possible. We recognize that we can only move, as adrienne marie brown writes, “at the speed of trust,” in developing long lasting partnerships that move us toward our collective liberation.
Intentionally Recruit Black Movement Leaders to DSA
In the long term, our chapters should be consciously seeking to recruit Black movement leaders into our organization. While we build up our membership, we should also be thinking of ways to build it out beyond our own networks. We cannot expect passive recruitment alone will somehow lead to significantly more Black, Indingenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) joining DSA. Many of our comrades are in DSA because they were asked to join by someone they know. As we continue to support the uprisings, we should also be developing relationships with Black movement leaders, whether they are organizers with decades of experience or organizers who have just become active, and asking them to join DSA. Many leaders from the uprising are not part of any formal organization, and we hope that some will come to the same conclusion that so many DSA members have -- that joining a socialist organization for the long haul is worth a lifetime of commitment and sacrifice. We should be deliberate about inviting those leaders to join and strive to make DSA an organizing space where they can continue their work.
Support Black Leaders Already Organizing in DSA
Leadership in DSA is sometimes thankless and politically fraught and it is always unpaid work. Our Black members face the additional challenge of leading within a democratic organization whose membership is majority white. We must be unequivocal that we want Black people in leadership positions, while also cultivating cultural and organizing spaces where our BIPOC comrades can develop as leaders and organizers. At the same time, we must recognize that supporting Black leadership does not mean automatically deferring to Black organizers. Instead, it means sustaining and caring for Black organizers within DSA, being vigilant about preventing burnout, and combating tokenism and racism when it arises within our ranks.
Grow & Support AfroSOC
To that end, every large DSA chapter should have a local Afrosocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus, and every chapter should have access to resources to help them develop one. The work of BIPOC leaders in our nationwide AfroSOC Caucus has been crucial in developing BIPOC organizers in DSA and in the broader movement. The key conversations happening in the current protest movement are happening in spaces that are overwhelmingly non-white. For DSA to engage seriously with a movement that our Black leaders are part of but that is outside of our organization, we must create the spaces inside of our organization for Black members and other members of color to develop an orientation to it. Dedicated organizing and administrative staff time as well as dedicated funding for AfroSOC will be essential for continuing this work.
Transform Our Organizing Culture
Even if we prioritize anti-racist politics, develop partnerships with organizations that have more diverse membership bases, and deliberately recruit BIPOC leaders into our organization, we will still need to undergo a genuine shift in our organizing culture to become an organization that is truly representative of the U.S. working class. Working class BIPOC, especially women and other marginalized people, have justifiable reasons to hesitate to join an organization shaped by the culture of white professional class men. For one, these spaces don’t feel very good or liberatory for the rest of us, as those cultural practices often center the things we are organizing to be free from (like individualism, perfectionism, dismissiveness/rigidity and the centering of knowledge produced by formal education rather than our own experiences).
In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson identifies the prioritization of consciousness-raising and the transformation of collective habits of mind alongside the struggle to win external demands as one distinguishing feature of the Black radical tradition. Simply being in struggle together as BIPOC and white people is not enough, if we are going to transform our organization then we actually have to change the way white people participate in multiracial struggle. This means a continual evaluation of our shared norms and practices and the ways in which those practices sometimes uphold white supremacy. It means crafting shared agreements about how to interrupt the day-to-day instances of racism and internalized white supremacy in our organization. It means creating spaces of belonging for BIPOC--spaces that center the experiences, needs, values and dreams of people who are not white and not men. It means creating spaces where we relate to each through cooperation and collective transformation rather than supremacy and domination. As Barbara Ransby reminded us in a recent conversation, if anti-racism and internal democracy are to be our guiding principles, then our vision of democracy must be about opening the centers of power in our organization to BIPOC and not just about formal decision making through voting and procedure. We must imagine an organization full of people organizing to transform--to transform ourselves, to transform our communities, to transform the world--and then have the patience and commitment to build it.
If you are are excited about this approach to transforming DSA and want to organize with us, you can join Socialist Majority here.