The Golden Rule boat / credit: Screenshot from video
Editor’s Note: The following is a first-person account.
I’m a Mayan Calendar keeper without a fixed place to stay, so my Veterans for Peace (VFP) activist friend graciously allows me to stay with him when I have medical appointments in Minneapolis. This past August, he told me about the VFP Golden Rule Project, a year-and-a-half long sailing journey promoting the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It is going around the “Great Loop”: The Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, the Saint Lawrence seaway and the Great Lakes.
The story about the renovation and rebirth of the Golden Rule boat that “set sail in 1958 to stop nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands” moved me deeply. I wanted to at least take a picture of such a piece of history and learn more about its noble cause. I was told the Golden Rule would be in Stillwater, Minnesota, which happens to be another place I live from time to time. Unfortunately, I could not find the location of the vessel and I had to travel to the Black Hills for a conference. Upon my return, I learned the boat was no longer in Stillwater. I figured it had left on its journey and I was very disappointed to have missed it.
Later that week, while in the Minneapolis home of my VFP friend, he informed me that the crew of the Golden Rule would be arriving at his house. I could not believe the turn of events! Now I would get to meet the crew and possibly see the vessel.
I got to meet Helen Jaccard, the administrator of the project. We had a long conversation and she asked if I would be part of the crew for the next year and a half. Such an offer shocked me! After some thought, I agreed to be part of the crew for about a month, and that is how my journey began.
Captain Kiko Johnston-Kitazawa, a Hawaiian native and First Mate Stephen Buck are wonderfully understanding and skilled in how to train and sail with inexperienced sailors like me. Dozens of others also have boarded the vessel over the years, as guests, crew or visitors. Currently, we are a crew of four: The captain, first mate, Mary Ann Van Cura from Minneapolis and me.
The Golden Rule is a wood-plank boat built over a sawn frame, which is when wooden pieces are cut together in a shape. It is 33 feet long with a full-length keel that needs 5 feet of water to sail in. It is steered with a tiller, which is a lever attached to the rudder that helps steer the boat. It has 580 square feet of sail with triangular fore and aft sails, while the main sail is a gaff sail. It has four sleeping berths for up to four crew members. Captain Kiko describes sailing in the Golden Rule as “bumpy, wet, cold and fun.”
The boat set sail on September 26. Everywhere we’ve stopped in Minnesota and Wisconsin—Saint Paul, Redwing, Wabasha, LaCrosse—we’ve been welcomed by many supporters.
But nothing compares to what happened in Dubuque, Iowa. The town has over 800 residents native to the Marshall Islands. As soon as we passed Lock and Dam #11 on the Mississippi River, just north of Dubuque, people waved and cheered from nearby docks.
Upon arrival in the Dubuque marina at twilight, we were joined by a crowd of Marshall Islanders and their descendants, who have suffered the consequences of the inhumane deployment of 67 nuclear devices in their homeland. As if losing their home was not enough, Marshall Islanders suffer the nuclear legacy of cancers and birth defects. And now, because of global climate change, catastrophic sea rise is forcing those who remained to emigrate.
Dressed in traditional clothes, the Marshall Islanders sang and played music in honor of the little boat. They also expressed gratitude to the original four crew members who, in 1958, sailed the vessel to stop nuclear testing, risking everything for the good of the planet and the protection of human beings. Undoubtedly, they were also grateful for the new run of the vessel that reminds the whole world of the madness of keeping nuclear arsenals ready to go at any second.
Observing such sincere manifestation, I had to turn my face away. I was crying, feeling this is what a true human being should be doing for all the people and our planet. I was not alone. The crowd was elated. I wish with all my heart every human in the world emulate those four original crew members. Our planet would then be safe from the impending debacle we face. It may happen sooner rather than later, the way we are going.
At a stop in Burlington, Iowa, the mayor presented us with a proclamation welcoming the Golden Rule and calling on residents to meet and learn more about the project.
The journey continues down the Mississippi River. A major problem is the low water level. The boat has been stuck in the muck at least nine times so far. But thanks to the ingenuity of Captain Kiko and First Mate Steve, solutions have been found to continue. Because of these drought conditions, we will not follow the lower Mississippi River but instead will divert to the Ohio, Tennessee and Tombigbee River system.
You can follow the journey of the Golden Rule here. If you’d like to join as crew at any point in the journey you can fill out this application.
Cover of The Radical Book Store: Counterspace for Social Movements by Kimberley Kinder
The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements by Kimberley Kinder. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2021.
In the final hours of 2008, I moved to Philadelphia. George W. Bush was still president, as Obama began assembling his team of neoliberal economic advisors to bail out the banks that had just crashed the economy. Before I was able to find a wage job during the height of the recession, I picked up a volunteer application at the local anarchist bookstore. By early 2009, I had finished my training shifts and was quickly given keys to the Wooden Shoe.
Storefront of Wooden Shoe Books and Records in Philadelphia / credit: Matt Dineen
Founded in 1976, Wooden Shoe Books and Records is an all-volunteer collective where all decisions are made by consensus at monthly meetings open to all staffers. When I joined, the lease at its location on Fifth Street was about to expire, so I participated in the process of moving to its current location on South Street. It was an exciting time get involved and a perfect way to find instant community and camaraderie in a big city where I had never lived before. I stayed in Philly for over 12 years and was involved with the bookstore for most of that time; the only constant in my life there.
In her new book, The Radical Bookstore, University of Michigan professor Kimberley Kinder studies spaces like the Wooden Shoe and the role they continue to play in movements for social justice and transformation. She highlights the importance of brick-and-mortar “counterspaces” that help sustain organizing and movement building in between bursts of protest activity in the streets.
The criteria for the 77 bookstores, infoshops and community centers she researched was limited to “print-based movement spaces.” They are all public-facing physical venues that include a focus on print objects and their missions are oriented toward radical left activism. They all “approach their business primarily as social movement tools.” (Infoshops are autonomous, typically anarchist spaces. They tend to include do-it-yourself zines from the community and provide space for activist meetings and events. Some have less of a retail component, and might offer a free library and other mutual-aid services.) Kinder calls this “constructive activism,” a term she adapted from feminist geographers like Daphne Spain, which “highlights the material base of social organizing.” With a focus on mechanisms over particular issues, the book explores the crucial contributions of such durable spaces in the ongoing struggle for a better, more just world.
Logo for Wooden Shoe Books and Records in Philadelphia
So, it made sense that Kinder reached out to the Wooden Shoe in April 2017. She had visited the store the previous summer and was interested in speaking with a member of the collective more in depth, so she could include us as a case study for the book. I volunteered and we spoke on the phone for about an hour about my experiences with the Wooden Shoe and to fill in some of the blanks beyond the information included on our website. We discussed some of the political goals of movement-oriented spaces and our aim, as anarchists, “to challenge structures of domination and oppression.” We also talked about how the Wooden Shoe is volunteer-run and how that has played a big role in sustaining the business for over 40 years. I explained, “If we were depending on paying ourselves, we probably would have [closed].” I also compared our success with other similar collectives that had recently gone out of business: “They had at least some members that were being paid and depending on that space for their livelihood.”
The author of this review, Matt Dineen, hosting an event at Wooden Shoe Books and Records in Philadelphia. Dineen was quoted in the book, The Radical Book Store / credit: Matt Dineen
The two I had in mind were Food for Thought Books in Amherst, Massachusetts, which shut down in 2014, and Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, which managed to stay open only a couple years longer after a decade struggling to compete with corporate online behemoths like Amazon. I had the privilege of volunteering at Rainbow from 2004 to 2005 and, even back then, the staff collective was struggling to find creative ways to encourage students to buy textbooks from their local cooperatively managed, worker-owned shop, instead of ordering them online from a chain store. “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” exclaimed Rainbow’s posters across the University of Wisconsin campus. But by 2016, Rainbow could no longer afford to compete.
In The Radical Bookstore, Kinder briefly traces this history of “activist-entrepreneurs,” favoring the independent bookstore model in the 1960s and 1970s. This was an effective strategy not only for disseminating radical ideas, but for creating alternative spaces for movements to build and grow by tapping into the consumerist impulse permeating across the United States. The financial effectiveness of this model began to dwindle in the 1990s when two-thirds of all indie bookstores went out of business as a result of economic restructuring policies. Despite more recent examples, like Food for Thought and Rainbow, Kinder cites a slight resurgence of independent shops since the year I began staffing at the Wooden Shoe, 12 years ago. She argues this is a result of some “reformatting as events-oriented, nonprofit hybrids” and also because of “trends like ethical consumerism” that involve supporting local businesses.
Curbside sign outside the Lucy Parsons Center in Boston / credit: Matt Dineen
Despite the grim reality of increased corporate consolidation, gentrification, and the ubiquity of digital media dismantling so much of this thriving network of radical bookstores and other “print-based movement spaces,” Kinder argues that analyzing the “constructive dynamics provides an important antidote to the usual narratives of decline.” Even though it is more difficult now to replicate the business models of the past, she explains, “Focusing only on the postmortem of victims misses an equally important opportunity to study why some places survive and thrive.” Adding that, “By looking at stories of resilience and innovation, scholars and activists can potentially find the nuggets of a blueprint for emerging business models that make independent spaces viable, even in a corporate, digital age.” (page 79)
Nearly 45 years after it was founded, the Wooden Shoe is just one of many counterspaces that have managed to survive and thrive. This has particularly been the case in recent years as increasing numbers of people have become radicalized through the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, in addition to the election of Trump and the subsequent rise of the fascistic “alt-right.” During this period, I helped organize and host dozens of in-store events that brought all kinds of people into the space, from author talks and panel discussions to film screenings and potlucks. And more recently, the COVID pandemic has reminded us how important autonomous, physical space for organizing truly is, as we collectively struggle with the isolation and alienation of the past 16 months.
This past April, I left Philly and moved to Boston. My new apartment is walking distance from an even older anarchist bookstore: The Lucy Parsons Center. Like the customers Kimberley Kinder met there during her research, I often visit the infoshop, founded in 1969, “to find a sense of camaraderie.” And now that I no longer host events through Zoom for the Wooden Shoe, perhaps, one day, I’ll start volunteering there, too.
Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Boston. He has written for Toward Freedom since 2005.
A demonstration took place March 18 in Washington, D.C., that coincided with the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq / credit: ANSWER Coalition
WASHINGTON, D.C.—An estimated couple of thousand of people to “several thousand” marched on March 18 in downtown Washington D.C., calling for an end to the U.S. imperialist project that they hold responsible for 20 years of a “War on Terror” on millions of people. The weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
U.S. interference in the form of military invasions and other types of activities since 2001 have caused the global displacement of 38 million people and the death of at least 900,000 people, according to the Costs of War Project. Those are conservative estimates.
The demonstration aimed to link the lack of funding for people’s needs in the United States with the diversity of tactics the United States uses to perpetuate wars on people around the world.
“The proxy war in Ukraine has already taken hundreds of thousands of lives, plunged the world into crisis, and will cost the people of the U.S. at least $113 billion in public money,” Press TV reported. “Over the past year, Washington has supplied Ukraine with military equipment worth more than $50 billion, excluding other types of assistance worth tens of billions of dollars.
Rally speakers representing a diverse cross-cut of U.S. society, ranging from students and Filipino migrants, to internal U.S. colonies like African and Indigenous peoples, as well as Wikileaks Publisher Julian Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, gathered in front of the White House for a 1 p.m. rally. Toward Freedom Board Secretary Jacqueline Luqman also spoke, which can be found here, here and here.
Then a mile-long march kicked off that stopped briefly at the Washington Post headquarters.
“The corporate media has decided to boycott the American ppl when they speak up against the war machine. CNN, NBC, ABC, all the corporate networks are just echo chambers for the Pentagon — nothing else.”
Activists spoke out against the newspaper—now owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—because it spread information that helped build the U.S. government’s case for the invasion of Iraq. A U.S. Senate intelligence committee report later found the war was based on false information.
Happening now in front of the Washington Post: “Whether it’s the war at abroad or the war at home, you can count on the Washington Post to be a liar and a warmonger!” —@EugenePuryearpic.twitter.com/m6fi8aSvm7
— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) March 18, 2023
“Thousands of anti-war protesters stretched for blocks without a corporate camera in sight yesterday,” tweeted independent journalist Chuck Modi, who has documented protests in Washington, D.C. “In pre-cell phone age, you wouldn’t even know it happened.”
Activists on Saturday carried coffins wrapped in the flags of countries that the United States has either invaded over the past two decades or that the United States has helped fuel a conflict inside of through the shipment of arms and funds.
Growing numbers are condemning the US/NATO for fueling the war in Ukraine and blocking peace negotiations. On March 18, the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, protesters carried mock coffins to the White House and demanded “Money for People’s Needs, Not the War Machine” pic.twitter.com/gs3yrujlfK
More than 200 organizations demonstrated against the United States funding and arming the war in Ukraine, and called for the United States to not interfere in peace negotiations. They also spoke out against a possible military conflict with China and decried the U.S./EU sanctions regime that prevents food, fuel and medicine from reaching one-third of the world’s population.
Plus, the call was raised to close U.S. military bases around the world and U.S. military commands, such as AFRICOM. Some estimates have ranged from as little as 800 bases to thousands of bases, according to U.S. military veteran and psychologist Monisha Rios. She claimed at the International Women’s Alliance conference, held March 4-5 in Washington, D.C., that activists have used a figure based on a calculation that undercounts U.S. military installations.
People leading the march held banners that read, “Remember Iraq: No More Wars Based on Lies” and “Fund People’s Needs, Not War.”
‼️You definitely didn’t hear it on on Tucker Carlson or the Washington Post, but several thousand marched in DC this weekend against endless U.S. wars.
After the march, a teach-in was held at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, just a few blocks from the rally site. There, professor Noam Chomsky, as well as representatives from the U.S. colonies of Guam and Hawaii, gave remarks.
Activists like Asantewaa Nkrumah-Ture of Philadelphia, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace, spoke out against the international wars as well as the domestic war on the people of the United States. That includes the most recent federal government move to eliminate Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to hungry families. “Roughly 60 percent of those households have children, and more than half include older people or adults with disabilities,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s editorial board writes.
“More and more ppl are against this war because their conditions are worsening. They’re cutting food stamps; it’s harder to pay rent; wages are stagnant. This must change. We must fight back!”
The protest was noted for how it was led by people who bear the brunt of U.S. imperialism.
“When the interests and positions of colonized people are respected, the turnout to mobilizations look different,” tweeted the Black Alliance for Peace, an anti-imperialist organization led by African people in the United States. “Perhaps the March 18 demonstrations signal a shift is taking place: That an anti-imperialist movement led by young African and other colonized peoples is rising.”
When the interests and positions of colonized people are respected, the turnout to mobilizations look different. Perhaps the March 18 demonstrations signal a shift is taking place: That an anti-imperialist movement led by young African and other colonized peoples is rising. https://t.co/W2O8fHr8HU
— Black Alliance for Peace (@Blacks4Peace) March 20, 2023
Many commented that a renewed movement for peace was emerging with this demonstration. About 11 million people protested the U.S. invasion of Iraq 20 years ago. An ANSWER Coalition representative did not reply to this reporter in time to confirm the number of marchers on March 18.
“Here we are again, 20 years later, because imperialism persists,” Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley told activist group Popular Resistance. “As long as that is true, the location of the war will change, the people waging the war will change, but we will still have wars. Our goal is to end imperialism.”
Besides in Washington, D.C., demonstrations were held in dozens of cities across the United States.
Dan Kovalik’s book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (2021)
Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, by Dan Kovalik (Hot Books: New York, 2021)
Academic and activist Dan Kovalik’s new book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, was written on the frontlines of the twin struggles of our time, the class struggle and the fight for Black liberation. Reading it brought me back to so many magical and contradictory movement moments that I could not resist writing a review.
‘White People Go to the Back of the March’
On the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in 2017, thousands of protesters took to Fifth Avenue and the frigid streets of New York City to demand criminal charges against the police who murdered Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; and hundreds of other unarmed Black and brown men. Some Black Lives Matter march marshals had determined that Black and brown families and activists—presented as the only real victims and fighters—would march in the front. White people—presented as all equal benefactors of white supremacy and white privilege—were assigned to march in the back, separated from the youthful, militant front. It was a strange scene. Forty-nine years after the U.S. state assassinated Dr. King for risking his life to organize a multiracial movement against white supremacy—and in his final months, a Poor People’s Campaign against the capitalist system—surely he would find it curious we no longer needed outright white supremacists like Bull Connor or George Wallace; we were now capable of segregating our own marches.
Malcolm X’s only meeting with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on March 26, 1964, during the U.S. Senate debates regarding the (eventual) Civil Rights Act of 1964 / credit: Marion Trikosko
So many questions leapt into my mind as my eyes traced the 10-block-long protest. Where did poor whites belong? Veterans? Whites who had been through the prison system? How about Black students who had both parents in a position to pay their tuition out of pocket at NYU or Columbia? They had all earned the front? Then there was my Ernesto Rafael, my son, half Dominican, half poor-white, harassed by the police too many times in the Bronx. Where did he “belong,” according to the marshals?
This was but one example of the new racial dynamics on display across the country in the BLM movement from Oakland to Boston, and everywhere in between. For class conscious revolutionaries throwing down in the heart of this mass movement, it represented a series of fresh, unique challenges.
When I picked up Kovalik’s new book, I was intrigued by his biting class analysis of the similar experiences he had. In chapter 2, “Cancellation of a Peace Activist,” he writes directly about being a participant on the frontlines of the BLM movement in Pennsylvania, ducking and dodging police batons as organizers collectively figured out their next strategic moves. Kovalik, a union and human rights lawyer and professor, based out of Pittsburgh, dives deep into the contradictions he and so many others experienced. Kovalik slams both the arrogance of isolated white anarchists whose faux militancy puts all protesters at risk, as well as the bullying tactics and racial reductionism of some radical liberals. This took me back to the explosion of protests following the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, which brought millions of people into the streets to denounce the epidemic of police terror in Black and brown communities. Millions were in motion and different political tendencies vied for leadership. Kovalik examines key lessons to be drawn from the almost decade of collective experience we have as a movement in what came to be known as “Black Lives Matter.” This is but one must-read chapter in Kovalik’s exciting new book.
Woke Capitalism
Kovalik’s book is an expose of Woke Capitalism and the cancer of cancel culture.
While millions took to the streets to stop President George W. Bush from invading Iraq, the peace movement was eerily silent when Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, became “the drone-warrior-in-chief, dropping at least 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone.” (pg. 109) He critiques the peace movement for going quiet every time a Democrat is (s)elected to the oval office.
Dan Kovalik’s book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (2021)
This page-turner exposes today’s liberal establishment, which touts “racial equity” without ever questioning the underlying structure that intensifies white supremacist control of society’s institutions. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is but one example of a liberal who bloviates over the U.S. Capitol rioters and their violent methods. Yet, he advocated for the bombing, sacking and recolonization of Iraq. (pg. VIII) The book exposes corporate and campus departments that pay hefty salaries to “experts” to lecture on “racial justice” without ever touching the structures that buttress white supremacy and racial and class segregation. These defenders of racial capitalism—from the academy to the pressroom—give political cover to hucksters, who make a killing by bullying white liberals into forking over money, lest they be labeled racist. As one class-conscious scholar sarcastically asks in Black Agenda Report: Do we really “wonder why these rural voters didn’t just go to their local Barnes and Noble to purchase a copy of How to Be an Anti-racist before the election?” Are all of the books that have emerged from the White Privilege Industrial Complex reaching that mass of “deplorables,” whom Arlie Hochchild refers to in her monumental sociological exposé as “strangers in their own land”? (“Own land” as in stolen Indigenous land).
Kovalik takes on the Frankenstein-esque outgrowth of cancellations in academic institutions and beyond, asking what are the political forces behind them? He offers the real-life example of the canceling of Molly Rush, an octogenarian peace activist who reposted a quote that took on a life of its own. Instead of speaking with her face to face to clear the air, internet activists dragged her down and expelled her from the movement, like a group of pre-teens playing a game of Telephone. (pg. 13) Kovalik surmises that many keyboard warriors who have never stared down police lines or even handed out a flyer don’t want dialogue and growth. They want to score woke points and “likes” to the detriment of other comrades.
Liberal bully politics short-changes us all. Kovalik takes a big leap to the international realm to examine the West’s arrogant dismissal of Cuban medical internationalism, the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine and China’s success controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. China had two deaths in 2021. Kovalik concludes:
“It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain. In so doing, they have taken ‘cancel culture’ to the very extreme, and they may get us all canceled, permanently, in the process…” (pg. 139)
A sit-in protest on July 8, 2016, in San Francisco in response to the Alton Sterling shooting / credit: Pax Ahimsa Gethen
We Never Give Up on Our People
It’s a new era. One tweet-turned-Twitter-game-of-telephone can ruin a comrade’s life.
How does the state operate online? How do anarchists operate online? When do they intermingle? Any anonymous account can start a smear campaign against any public figure.
This book invites us to ask: If we cancel every last screw-up, addict and lumpenized scroundrel, who will absorb the body blows needed to bob and weave forward in the class struggle?
When in history has another social class organized, led and defended a revolution? The petite-bourgeoisie blows with the wind. Who will be left? Who is willing to put in that work? Who knows hell well enough not to fear it? Nicaraguan national hero Augusto Sandino said, “Only the workers and peasants will make it all the way.” Kovalik is not turning his back and giving up on the potential cadre of the future. Will you?
A Boston police mug shot of Malcolm X, following his arrest for larceny in 1944
As Marxists, revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, we believe nothing is permanent; everything is in a state of flux. The watchwords are growing through contradictions among the people, healing and restorative justice. We don’t have the luxury of discarding comrades. There has to be a path back or we risk cannibalizing and condemning our own ranks. Who would Malcolm X have been if everyone had given up on him in his 20s, when he was imprisoned? How many young Bobbies, Hueys and Assatas are sidelined right now? How can we be less judgemental and give people opportunities to learn from their mistakes?
The Other White America
Black and Brown people in the United States, and those in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement, have every right to be angry. But angry at whom?
Most white people are not CEOs or members of the ruling class; many more are National Guard soldiers, correction officers and other reactionary rent-a-cops, the overseers of a society divided between the haves and the have-nots. But the racial portrait of state repression is more complicated. Fifty-eight percent of the Atlanta police force is Black. Over half of Washington, D.C.’s police force is Black.
A liberal portrait of white privilege fails to tell the full class story in the United States. Seventy million people received Medicaid in 2016—43 percent were white. Of 43 million food stamp recipients that year, 36.2 percent were white. Over 100,000 overdoses took place in the past year. The overwhelming majority of opioid overdoses occur among poor whites, roughly 72 percent. Are these cast-off layers of our class our enemies?
A demonstrator raising awareness of the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in April 2015 / credit: Voice of America
Kovalik points out that similar to white people, “the top 10 percent of Black households hold 75 percent of Black wealth.” (pg. 96) Is every brother your brother?
Given the complex class and racial terrain, do we cast poor and working-class whites away as “a basket of deplorables” or do win them over to defend their class interests? Wouldn’t sticking all white protesters in the back of marches with more yuppified layers only alienate them more? Is the movement a “safe space” for them, or more importantly a revolutionizing space?
Cancel This Book refuses to give up on the other white America—the poor, forgotten and de-industrialized “oxy-electorate” (writer Kathleen Frydl’s term for white people who live in the U.S. Rust Belt, where OxyContin addictions are on the rise). Those white people are full of disappointment and hatred for this system—between the tens of millions who refused to vote for another neoliberal Dixiecrat like Hillary Clinton, and the tens of millions of others who were duped into believing a spoiled, trash-talking, billionaire, real-estate mogul hoax and punk with infinite air time was their white knight.
As Malcolm X taught: “The truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it is against the oppressor.” We can win over workers who have only ever known the american-dreaming chauvinism they have been fed. Bursting with ideological perspicacity and revolutionary hope, this book pushes us not to get caught up in the liberal webs of identity politics and call-out culture.
Kovalik also challenges the white liberals who unknowingly acted as “masochists at the protests.” This constructive critique is not meant to take away from anyone’s hard work and real contributions. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was one outgrowth of these liberal politics, which relegated many well-intentioned, liberal, student and petite-bourgeoisie (“middle-class”) whites to cheerleader positions. Is this the militant mass-movement that is going to stand up to the State Department, the Pentagon, the police and the intelligence agencies? When Malcolm held up white abolitionist John Brown’s life as an example of real struggle to follow, he was challenging these liberal politics.
Amidst the ever-evolving dialectics of our movement, Kovalik’s book comes as a breath of fresh air. It is a clarion call about the damage we are collectively doing to our movement if we do not center class politics next to the need for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people.
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.