Category Archives: Across Color Lines

Across Color Lines, Billionaires, Democracy, Health and dignity, Organizing, The War on the Poor

The Problem with the “Hands Off” Protests Is Not What You Think

April 7, 2025 Nijmie Leave a comment

First off I just want to say that this is a stressful time for almost everyone. This is not an easy period that we are living through – whether we’re accustomed to ongoing crises or we’re more recently waking up and feeling it. My heart and love goes out in solidarity to all of us who are experiencing fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, disillusionment, and many other challenging emotional states and real life consequences resulting from the crisis in the capitalist system.

But there is “hope”, many say, as evidenced by participation in the April 5th protests around the United States, broadly cast as “anti-Trump and Musk”.

My socials are filled with folks proclaiming how “hopeful” it is to see so many people take to the streets in these symbolic protest actions. And along with that “hope” comes the withering criticism of those of us with a “critique”.

We’re just so naive/misguided they say. “How can anyone sit there and criticize folks who are getting activated for not being “correct” or “radical” enough? We have to meet people where they are!”

And to that – I completely and unequivocally agree! My criticism is not with the people who showed up for this rally. That would be ridiculous. We need masses of people taking action together, now and always!

But I don’t believe that the turn-out is in and of itself a beacon of hope. It’s an indication of possibility, but it will take much more to turn that possibility into real hope. Just as faith without works is dead, hope without clear, connected, competent and committed leaders is empty.

Do you remember, or have you ever heard or read about what happened on February 15, 2003? 6-10 million people worldwide took to the streets to protest the Second Gulf War. The largest protest in human history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Wall Street interests prevailed, the war proceeded, slaughtering 1,000,000 Iraqi people in the course of the war and its aftermath. The U.S. service members who were forced to wage this war were crushed by Gulf War Syndrome, depression, and PTSD, as well as chronic health conditions from toxic exposures.

On November 4, 2023, the largest protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people took place around the globe, with estimates of more than half a million in the streets. The Israel-led and U.S. backed genocide rages more ferociously than ever. One child is killed every 30 minutes in Gaza.

In the course of the summer of 2020, an estimated 26 million people participated in protests connected to the George Floyd uprising. 4,600 people were killed by the police in the U.S. during the Biden administration. White people comprise the largest number of those killed by the police, while Black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by police with figures for Indigenous people ranging from 3-7 times more likely.

In his important book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution”, journalist and author Vincent Bevins examines the global wave of protests between 2011 and 2021, asking the critical question: Why have the upsurge of protest movements around the world not resulted in serious and lasting change?

Which brings me back to my point – what exactly is my criticism? Do I stand against “hope”?

Of course not!

And yet, I do believe that our hope must be based in reality, not fantasy.

Our hope must be based in each other, not the misleaders who have kept us on a treadmill of hope and despair, mobilization and demobilization, lying to us about the source of why things have gotten steadily worse across the entire working class in this country for the last 50 years.

Our hope must be based in each other, not the party that the ruling class used to continue to degrade the position of the working class through NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement (1993) which resulted in massive industrial job loss; Welfare Reform (1996) which replaced a social safety net with market-driven “workfare”; the Telecommunications Act (1996) which led to the rise of media monopolies and the age of disinformation; financial deregulation and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999) which led to the 2007-2008 financial crisis; the Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008), or the bailout of Wall Street at the expense of the working class, and the Affordable Care Act (2010) which preserved, expanded and protected the private insurance system that profits off our sickness and death.**

These are among the policies that helped pave the way for the degradation of our living conditions such that we now count 140 million people in the ranks of the poor or those of us one healthcare or housing emergency away – nearly half the country.

Just like we can’t expect an engine that runs on fossil fuels to belch out anything but polluted air, we can’t expect an economic and political system that runs on systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation and militarism to produce anything but more of the same.

So I’m here for the big tent – believe me! The tent I’m building is big enough for 140 million people – and guess what – those people are hurting – across the color line, the party line, and the urban/rural divide. I’m not here to listen to anyone speaking from the podium who says that the problem is chiefly or exclusively Trump. I don’t want to go back to the normal of 2023-2024, when 25 million people were kicked off of Medicaid in this country. We need to go forward.

I’m here for the big tent – but my tent does not include the billionaires and Wall Street – the economic forces behind the two party system in this country.

I’m here for the big tent – but I refuse to be operationalized and co-opted by one section of the capitalist class in order for another section to prevail. We’ve been there before – we went from the period of Reconstruction after the civil war to the backlash of the Redeemers. We went from the upsurge of independent working class organization in the wake of the Great Depression to the New Deal Coalition which saved capitalism from itself. I refuse to set the table for the capitalist class to continue to eat while we starve.

The nationwide rallies can be hopeful IF:

The people attending and organizations turning out their members demand of the official sponsors that no politicians be allowed to speak from the podium. The primary task of these figureheads is yoking us to a hamster wheel of 1) mobilization, 2) demobilization and 3) voting for the bad or the worse because they are yoked to a system that puts profit over our lives and planet. Here’s a great example of what it means when poor folks take the stage.

They become moments to raise class consciousness, unite across issue silos, and talk about the fundamental problem. We are not a compendium of identity groups who need “allies”. We are a diverse working class trying to survive a war being waged on us by Wall Street, whether we currently know it as such or not. We need to get together, desperately, and see our common problems. We need people from the ranks of the organized poor to grab the mic, teach the historical and economic roots of this current crisis, shift the focus away from “experts” and “VIPs” and help the poor and dispossessed to understand ourselves as the only people capable of unsettling this society and putting us on a path of transformation. Here’s a great example from the Rev. Joe Paparone in Albany, NY.

We use them to bring people into the politically independent organizations of the poor and dispossessed. Many people are ready to mobilize, but not yet ready to organize. However, we need to train thousands of leaders NOW as we prepare for much bigger eruptions and outbursts that will inevitably result from the unsustainable organization of and relationships that govern our global economy. Those upswings and outbursts will not as easily be led, co-opted, and directed by the powers that be. As we raise the consciousness of the people turning out for “Hands Off”-style demonstrations, we can immediately begin to help those who gravitate toward us to see themselves as PART of the working class, not simply the “middle class”. This is the beginning of the journey for many folks getting mobilized right now. The work of member-led, staff free networks like the National Union of the Homeless and the Nonviolent Medicaid Army point the way forward.

Thank you for all that you do every day to put people first.

Some more helpful reading:

Why We Make The Struggle A School: Identifying, Developing, and Uniting Leaders

Program of the University of the Poor

It’s Not Enough to Be Angry

**[For further reflection: For those of us who voted for this party that has pursued these policies for the last 50 years – have we been voting against our own interests? Should we be held accountable – as everyday people with no property and power to speak of – for the massive social dislocations, hollowing out of our industrial base, depression of wages, culture of misinformation, out of control healthcare costs, the opioid crisis, deaths of despair? Are these things our fault for voting this way? Or were we simply making the best choice we felt we had at the time?]

Across Color Lines, Organizing

How did we get here? A story.

March 8, 2025 Nijmie Leave a comment

Hold onto your beenies folks.

Our story starts 60 years ago. The civil rights movement gave way to the Watts uprising in 1965. The Watts uprising shook the foundational assumptions of the civil rights movement and called into question its gains.

Let’s revisit what MLK said to musician, actor and activist Harry Belafonte, shortly before his (MLK’s) assassination: “I have come upon something that disturbs me deeply. I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid America may be losing what moral vision she had. Until we assure the underclass has justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation.”

And at the Mason Temple in Memphis Tennessee on April 3, 1968, speaking to striking sanitation workers the day before he was assassinated [chills] King said “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”

What King is speaking to here is the failure to resolve the problems of the “underclass” – which in King’s time he counted as 40 million and which today constitutes the 140 million people in the United States that are poor or near-poor. It was the poor and dispossessed that rose up during the Watts Uprising, not the Black petite-bourgeoisie of nearby Baldwin Hills. The co-optation and diversion of the civil rights movement by the powers that be paved the way for a comparatively small segment of Black people to ascend into higher echelons of the state and the public and private sectors. The contradictions of the class structure in the United States remained unresolved.

Address Delivered at the National Conference on New Politics August 31, 1967

Source: Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

Let’s let MLK bridge us into another piece of context for how we’ve gotten here today. The automation of the 3rd Industrial Revolution – the invention of the microchip and the adoption of computerization across the economic system resulting in the ability to offshore/outsource production and create global supply chains.

From a presentation on the economic crisis by Chris Caruso

The third industrial revolution began to displace large numbers of workers and heralded the shift from an industrial workforce to a service economy. At the same time, as a consequence of this increasing automation, the ruling class rolled back social welfare programs. Not as many workers needed = not as much support needed to keep workers alive. Less incentive on the part of the capitalist class for social investment into workers’ healthcare, housing, education and overall well-being. Remember, the capitalist class sees our class (their labor force) as a cost of production. Therefore, the retrenchment of the state and social programs. Therefore –

In the shadow of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, computerization, the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy, and the retrenchment of social welfare programs we get (drum roll please) NONPROFITS TO THE RESCUE!!! Now, the nonprofit sector is varied and includes everything from the United Way and the American Cancer Society to PETA and other things. I’m going to focus here on the “social justice” side of nonprofits. These are the organizations that get funded by the wealthy to make change in society (as long as that change does not involve taking the wealthy out of power and reorganizing society in the interests of the poor and dispossessed). A lot of great work has been produced about the nonprofit industrial complex.

I want to summarize some fundamentals as someone who has been part of, adjacent to and working in and around this sector for about 20 years now. And this is not to completely foreclose on the possibility of real potential human and material resources coming out of these formations. However, how we’ve gotten to this place in our “resistance” is important to understand.

Here are 3 foundations of the social justice sector of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex:

The right way to make our society more “just and fair” is for each identity group to fight for its own version of diversity, equity and inclusion. Each group has a unique set of interests that it needs to fight for on its own.
Creating [insert identity group]-ONLY spaces is what leads to people feeling “safe” and “comfortable” and is the right way to organize. People would be “harmed” by having to be around others who are not part of their identity group.
The backdrop of the blood-soaked, ill-gotten gains of the ruling elite is white washed through this process and they co-opt an entire layer of BIPOC “leaders” from the working class who rep them. (Conservative billionaires = bad, liberal billionaires = good) even though both sets are bound and determined to keep this dumpster fire capitalist system going for as long as they possibly can. This is not the same as rich people throwing their lot in with the working class – quite the opposite.

So here’s what we’re left with:

Class struggle has taken a back seat. The entire “social justice sector” precludes class struggle because it compartmentalizes each grouping of people (largely on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, gender, gender identity, immigration status and ability) and pretends that “liberation” is possible for each of these groups independent of a struggle to take the ruling class out of power which is necessarily a CLASS struggle.
The cornerstone of the ruling class’ strategy is divide and conquer. The “social justice” sector plays right into the ruling class’ hands (being as its owned and controlled by ruling class resources and strategists). There’s no way that the liberation of any specific group can take place in the context of a society based on exploitation that is well underway to structural unemployment heralded by the 4th Industrial Revolution we are living through today.
Demands for human rights are summarily dismissed as being “not specific enough”. There’s an accepted maxim that “people of color and marginalized people have always been thrown under the bus when we try to work in coalition” but that’s largely based on what W.E.B. Dubois called “the propaganda of history”. Numerous examples like Reconstruction, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, The Bonus Army, The Original Rainbow Coalition, the Original Poor People’s Campaign, National Welfare Rights Organizing, labor history and others provide a blueprint for how our ancestors came together across the color line and changed what was politically possible. The false propaganda of history is devoured by these loyal opposition forces who largely take their cues from the academy (particularly elite institutions) and then regurgitate it to train up new generations of miseducated yet often well-meaning leaders and organizers.
White people are written off as un-organizable, not worthy of being organized, reactionary, backward, etc. Because of a faulty, flawed and idealistic understanding of reality, the assumption is either that “all white people are rich” or “no white people have a stake in changing society because they have privilege and benefit from the way things are”. This is bullshit. All this line of thinking has done is pave the way for the ruling class to develop the kind of politics of resentment that got Donald Trump elected and keeps the working class deeply divided. If people don’t see themselves in your picture of reality they will find another story to believe in. Remember the 66 million poor white people from the graphic above?

We don’t have to wonder how we got here. One of the reasons we got here is because “friends like these” are actually operating at the behest of our enemies, whether they know it or not. Many don’t know, but some certainly do. Many people are asking questions and looking for answers at this critical time. Welcome those who are.

Across Color Lines, Organizing, Proletarian Internationalism, The War on the Poor

5 confusions to leave behind as we enter 2025

January 2, 2025 Nijmie Leave a comment

The capitalists are in crisis. There hasn’t been this level of polarization within the capitalist class since the civil war. When the capitalists get the sniffles, we get long Covid. Their infighting will result in the increasing polarization of the working class as long as we are weaponized against each other instead of them. However, those who are clear on the true face of state power, which is that the state is a tool of the class that rules, can avoid being pitted against each other and instead build a movement to end poverty led by the poor – the only possible solution to the “polycrisis” bed that the capitalists have made. Faith in every single institution is breaking down – because those institutions have brought humanity to perpetual war and ecological collapse. We, the 140 million who are poor or near poor, don’t need pity, or charity. We need to know that we are the people who can find a way out of this mess because we are the first to wake up. The position of the poor and homeless today is the position of the so-called “middle class” tomorrow. We are at the forefront of understanding that there is no “going back” – any narrative that invokes the idea that we can go back (whether to the New Deal or to the post WWII “American Dream era”) is false. We must move forward, using all of the productive capacity of humanity to end poverty for all – everywhere. This is now possible for the first time in human history, and it’s about 3,000 billionaires up against the interests of 8 billion of us.

Fascism is a cruel right-wing break with the existing social, political and economic order. FALSE
- The F word is going to be all the rage in 2025 and certainly for the next 4 years. But remember, we live in an anti-intellectual and ahistorical culture where the working class is purposefully miseducated. Let’s not throw this word around while misunderstanding its history and what it really means.
- Fascism can be described as an “open terrorist dictatorship of finance capital”. It is not the exclusive territory of one of the parties of Wall Street or the other. It is not embodied in a single person. It is an outgrowth of capitalist democracy in decay. It’s a solution for the crisis of the capitalist class when their version of limited “democracy” for the rest of us is inadequate to ensure their profit-making. Don’t perpetuate distracting falsehoods about fascism. Fascism and Social Revolution by R. Palme Dutt is a highly recommended work on this topic.
The working class has nothing to complain about – everything is fine! FALSE

Please don’t share memes about how great the stock market is, or how busy stores are, to reinforce ruling class narratives that the working class is doing okay and has nothing to complain about. Wages have been practically stagnant for the last 50 years. We are mad, and we should be! Fighting mad – not at other workers – from anywhere in the world, but at a system that controls our lives and labor and then denies us all the basic necessities of life, because our wages aren’t enough to buy them. That’s why 800 people are dying every day from poverty in the richest country that’s ever existed in the history of the world.

So with that being said, anyone who is part of or who wants freedom for the working class should JUST SAY NO to things like this:

**Victim-blaming much? Seriously stop with the Stockholm Syndrome.**

3. Well, it’s all fine and good to talk about ending poverty, but to meet everyone’s needs or bring the entire world to a decent standard of living we would need additional planets, or there will be total ecological collapse. It’s just not possible! FALSE

The world that global capital has made is one in which technological capability and productive capacity is not used to meet human needs, but to produce unlimited commodities for the market. This anarchistic production for unlimited drive for profit results in war and devastation for people and the planet. The technology and productive capacity we have today is the result of the creative genius of hundreds of years of working class labor and millions of workers all over the world who deserve our undying love and respect. Yet, because the working class doesn’t own and control what we’ve produced, its used to emiserate and kill us. This excellent research shows that economics planned around human needs would drastically reduce unnecessary over-production and production for commodity exchange. Living standards can be raised for all people when we leave behind the insanity of anarchic production for profit.

4. Okay, but after all there is a Global North and Global South and poverty in the US is nothing like poverty elsewhere. Our role is simply to be “allies”. FALSE

As Jae Hubay of the Ohio Nonviolent Medicaid Army has brilliantly shown in these visualizations, the poor of the U.S. are much closer in position to the global poor than to the billionaire class that is holding the planet hostage.

Comparing the global poverty measure to the U.S. poverty threshold to Bill Gates’ daily income

Visualizing this in distance, starting from the Wall Street golden bull in New York City a person living on the daily income of the global poverty measure can get about a foot away from the bull. A U.S. person living in poverty can get across Broadway.

A billionaire can get all the way to the Bean in Chicago. We’re much closer than we’re taught to think. Workers of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

5. But with this new administration coming in, I can’t even! Life is over. We’re about to face never-before-seen attacks. FALSE

The attacks that we’re about to see are a CONTINUATION of the war on the poor that has been intensifying over the last 50 years and has reached new heights in the “Great Recession” of 2008 and since the Covid 19 pandemic. Since April 1, 2023, more than 25 million Americans have lost their healthcare. The Supreme Court has now made it legal to criminalize us for not being able to afford housing. Deportations under Biden just last year surpassed those during Trump’s first term in office. Don’t fall into the trap of being weaponized against other working class people because of the polarization in the ruling class.

I could go on… I thought about adding a 6 or 7 but 5 is a good number for now. Bonus confusion to leave behind is that acts of individuals are enough to save the day. They are not. The ruling class has the power of the “pen (media), the purse (money) and the sword (military)” to quote Frederick Douglass. What we have is our numbers, and our numbers mean little without organization. Organization requires “intelligent and unselfish leadership” (W.E.B. Dubois). And leaders must be clear, committed, competent and connected. (Willie Baptist). So let’s get clear and let’s get organized!!

** Top image is unsold Tesla inventory, visible from space.

Across Color Lines, Health and dignity, Housing, International, Organizing, Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, Public Education

Nijmie 101: Get to know me

February 10, 2018 Nijmie Leave a comment

Here are some snapshots from my organizing over the years in terms of some of the issues and campaigns that I’ve worked on, and the trajectory of my political orientation and theory of change.

Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

A New Poor People’s Campaign on the Dig (audio)

History of the Poverty Initiative (Kairos Center -) one of the two national co-convening organizations of the Poor People’s Campaign

Ending Poverty: Immersion in the Mississippi Delta (article)

Katrina: Poverty, Race and Ethics (article)

Healthcare is a Human Right

On building a diverse working class movement on the Dig (audio)

The Strategic Significance of Healthcare as a Human Right with Sarah Jaffe (article)

Revolutionary Common Sense on Hack the Union (video)

Education is a Human Right

Campaign for Nonviolent Schools (article)

https://mediamobilizing.org/mmptv-episode-6-no-education-no-life-preview/

Housing is a Human Right

Supporting the Community Leadership Institute in Philadelphia (article)

Community Preservation Network (article)

International Human Rights

International Women’s Peace Service (article)

The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (MST) (article)

Co-founder:

Media Mobilizing Project

Put People First! PA

Restarted and Former Executive Director

Philadelphia Student Union

Across Color Lines, Organizing, Vision

How to keep the political revolution going in PA

May 5, 2016 Nijmie Leave a comment

When I posted this on Facebook the morning after the PA primary. . . .

“Bernie Sanders won 30 counties in PA. Primarily the rural counties. The counties people disdain as “Pennsyltucky”. The counties young people move out of because there is no work. The ones most people in Philly or Pittsburgh have never heard of. They may not identify as liberal or progressive. They do not use the phrase “white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy” on a regular basis. Yet they voted for a platform of breaking up big banks, making healthcare a public good, and free higher education. Is that sinking in? They understand that everything that Wall Street has is ours because Wall Street owns us, it owns the people we elect; and all of our taxes, rent, fines, interest, fees, energy, water, land, and bodies go in service to it. They can see it even more clearly than a lot of us in Philly. The places that capital has abandoned are the ones where something else is taking root.”

I had no idea it would resonate so much with people here in PA and around the country, with over 600 likes and 274 shares.

I think for many folks it was an interesting twist on what they initially felt as a disappointing election result. So I wanted to follow up and share some strategy thoughts for people who want to continue on with making an actual political revolution here in PA, that outlasts any one election cycle. These thoughts are based on 25 years of history and current experience with people’s struggles, which I have been involved in since the age of 14.

We need permanently organized communities. That means we need everyday leaders who live near each other and who are connected to each other and committed for the long haul. These cores of leaders then must be connected to other cores locally, regionally, statewide and beyond. Building the power to make the kinds of changes that we need to put people before profits is not going to happen overnight. Mobilizing even large groups of people to one or multiple actions is insufficient to the task of shifting power in society.

We have an unprecedented opportunity to unite poor and dispossessed people across racial lines and all other lines of division; and we need to understand racism and gender oppression One of the most interesting things about my FB post is that although I was critiquing the kind of politics that privileges language learned in elite educational spaces over material conditions and lived experiences, the phrase “white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy” was nevertheless shared hundreds of times. Which is not a bad thing. We who believe in freedom need to understand that the range of different ways poor and dispossessed people experience day to day life in our system are a living legacy of the harmful divide and conquer strategies that began on this land in the 17th century and continued to evolve at the hands of elites from there.

A critical mass of people is rejecting the idea that poverty is a moral failing and realizing that our system itself reproduces poverty. There is tremendous power in finally ridding ourselves of the pox of shame and humiliation that comes with not being able to meet our basic needs whether that’s a new experience or not.

The left/liberal and right/conservative boxes are killing us. At the ground level, the two major political parties use poor and working people at the ballot box and then largely abandon us when the vote is over because they do not actually represent our interests. Spending all of our time faux-fighting people on the “left” or on the “right” is a distraction from understanding that our world is much more oriented toward “top” and “bottom”. We need independent politics.

Study and education are crucial.We have a tendency in our culture to leap before we look and shoot before we aim. We rush into trying to change things before we understand what’s been done before, and what lessons have been learned. If we are serious, not just playing around or tinkering around the edges, then we know what an awesome responsibility it is to try to change the course of history. Would you trust that responsibility to someone who knows nothing of history?

Transforming human relationships through practice. Our society is currently set up to keep people who are dealing with a lot of the same problems in isolation from each other. Not to mention that we have a long history of segregation along lines of “race” and color, we speak different languages, and we have different customs and cultures. Yet we have to manage to get together, not at some fictional point in the future, but as soon as possible. And working together, being together, creating strategy together and taking collective action, is not simple given how fractured we are. It has to be a conscious leadership practice that brings marginalized people into the center, cultivates deep trust and relationship, and helps expand each of our individual circles of concern beyond our immediate family or people who look like us.

For more information on organizations working to be vehicles for these kinds of practices and approaches see:
Put People First! PA
A New Poor People’s Campaign for Today

Across Color Lines, Health and dignity, Organizing, Refugees, Vision

Refuge, Reason and Resolve

November 25, 2015 Nijmie Leave a comment

Pictured: My mother’s maternal grandparents, immigrants from the Levant (at the time known as “Greater Syria” including what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel), pre WWI

There is a petition circulating right now in Pennsylvania asking Governor Wolf to reject Syrian refugees. Over 70,000 people have signed it. One of the most frequent reasons petition signers give for their position is that there are hundreds of thousands, millions even, of people in our state who are suffering, and who don’t have what we need. If you signed this petition you may have real concerns about your neighbors, friends and even family members who are trying to make ends meet and dealing with unemployment or underemployment, challenges around housing, healthcare, education or childcare, or caught up in the system in some way.

And you’re right that there are altogether too many people here in Pennsylvania who are struggling. One fifth of our children are living in poverty. We have over 15,000 homeless people, and 50,000 thousand people locked in cages due to mass incarceration. The number of our homeless veterans increased by nearly 50% in the last six years. Nearly one and a half million Pennsylvanians live in poverty. That’s over 1 million/10% of whites and 28.7%/370 thousand African-Americans. A full-time, full-year minimum wage worker earns $15,080 annually, an amount still below the poverty line for a family of four.

However, we have to ask ourselves, are the Syrian refugees the source of these problems? Will not admitting refugees fleeing war and poverty solve the problems that we as poor and working people have in Pennsylvania? Will refusing refugees help homeless veterans? Will it house those who need housing? Will it provide medical care to those who need it? Will it feed the people who need fed? Will it educate the students who need education?

Not only will refusing refugees fail to make any of these situations better, it also won’t create more resources for any of these things – because as we can see, we are already don’t have them. The only way to get what we need is to stop blaming each other and come together. By doing this, we can begin to understand how we got here and what we need to do to change it. We only get what we are organized to take and we aren’t asking for anything but the basics that we need to live. You are right to sense that the priorities of the powers and principalities are not working in your interests. But the refugees are not to blame.

Let us not allow ourselves to be motivated by fear. Let us now allow ourselves to be motivated by despair. Let us not be fooled into thinking that there isn’t enough to go around. Love knows no boundaries and no borders. Let us feel and be motivated by love. And in doing so work for a world in which the last, whomever and wherever they are, shall be first.

Discussion Questions:

Pennsylvania has a flat tax system meaning that whether your family makes $15,000 or $15,000,000 dollars, we are all taxed at the same rate. Do you think that is fair? Why or why not?

Has anyone in your family/anyone you know ever held a job that hurt/polluted themselves, other people, or the air, land, and water? How do you feel about the choices that we have to make to survive?

What is the history of your family? How did your ancestors come to be in the US? Were they brought here by force as enslaved people? Were they immigrants? Refugees? Are they Indigenous people?

Have you or someone in your family gone to war? How did it impact you/them? What were the stated reasons for the war? What were the real reasons?

Sources and further reading:
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2010/03/living_below_poverty_in_pennsy.html
http://www.spotlightonpoverty.org/map-detail.aspx?state=Pennsylvania
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/philadelphia/62343-despite-national-trend-more-veterans-homeless-in-pennsylvania

Across Color Lines

My Own Private Vigilante

July 21, 2013 Nijmie 2 Comments

It was the spring of 2007 and my students were amped about the US social forum in Atlanta. I was the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Student Union and also organizing at Sayre High School in West Philadelphia. My students were so excited and I committed to taking a group of about a dozen students to Atlanta, and then had to set about figuring out how to do that logistically and monetarily.

What began with those students resulted in PSU effectively organizing the bus from Philly to Atlanta for the whole city that would enable us to go. We had to figure out everything and transportation, food and accommodations for all the students and staff members that came along was not easy.

Through some friends I was able to secure housing for all of us in an apartment complex where the residents were going to be away during the time of the forum. We got in to Atlanta, had to carry our bags to the restaurant where the person with our key was, then truck out to the where we were staying.

It was a trying trip. A dizzying array of workshops and activities; the Georgia summer heat; I believe I was approached by some kind of undercover agent who started questioning me about Philly groups and people (strange because at the time I was not wearing a social forum badge); and a notebook of mine went missing. Being right in downtown Atlanta meant that my students’ attention was constantly drawn to the kaleidoscope of tricked out cars with rims, hydraulics, and candy coated gloss constantly riding by on the strip.

One of my student’s birthdays fell during the forum and we got him a cake to celebrate. We were all back at the apartment around midnight, singing happy birthday (quietly I remember, because we were being thoughtful about how late it was) when I heard a knock on the apartment door. I thought at first that one of the students was pranking me when I looked through the peephole and saw no one there. I opened the door, looked outside and to my shock saw an armed white male in plain clothes off to the left of the doorframe with his arms extended. In his hands was a gun pointed toward the ground like you see when cops are getting ready to barge into a situation, and his finger was on the trigger.

I immediately closed the door to put a barrier between him and the young people. I was thinking about the students circled in the living room on the other side of the door, eating cake and laughing and how I had a duty to protect them and would do so at any and all cost. Thinking about my body language and tone and not wanting to escalate the situation I began to engage him. I wanted to be calm yet extremely firm. “What is going on?” “You can’t be here right now,” he said. I explained that we had permission from the residents of the apartment to use their space for the week. He said, “This is a private apartment complex and you are not allowed to have so many people staying here.”

We went back and forth for a couple of minutes during which time he put away his gun. I remained insistent that we were within our rights to be staying in the apartment and made it clear that under no circumstances was he coming inside. When I asked why he was profiling us he said that someone who lives in the complex had called him. I think that I remember him saying that he was an off-duty cop. He ended by telling me that the residents would get a citation and possibly get evicted for having us stay in the apartment.

After he left, I went back into the apartment, shocked and numbed. I had to tell the young people that a man with a gun had just been standing right on the other side of our front door. I told them what had happened, that presumably, someone or several people from the apartment complex had called this off-duty cop/vigilante on us because they felt that “we didn’t belong there”, and he took it upon himself to come over and check out what was going on.

I was so angry and made no effort to hide this from the students. We had to come up with a plan, some kind of response. After checking in for a few minutes, we decided to go outside. If they think we don’t belong here, we should show ourselves to them, to contest their cowardly actions, right here right now. We’re going to show them that we’re not afraid. So the 12 or so of us, went outside, and stood there. There was a light rain coming down and it was after midnight, but we stood there, daring the people watching us from inside their apartments between their blinds to come out themselves and meet us, or do something else about it. But we weren’t going away.

I was angry about the whole situation. I was angry that we had been referred to stay in a place where that would happen to us. I was angry that the folks who rented the apartment didn’t warn us or give us any concept of what the people living there were like. I was angry that a vigilante came to our door and came within feet of my students with a fucking gun!

There is no doubt in my mind that we were profiled because of the racial fears of the folks in the apartment building on seeing a group of Black youth in “their” space. The thing that makes me the angriest and saddest is that not one of those people who were looking at us, watching us, made the effort to introduce themselves or to talk to us and ask us directly what we were doing there. Instead, they called on an armed man to intervene for them.

I’m glad that I was there physically in between the vigilante and my students. In my (to some) racially ambiguous skin perhaps I was able to elicit a different reaction from this man than if someone else had been at the door. There is no neat and tidy ending to this story, only an ongoing fierce commitment to act every day on the conviction that #blacklifematters and to consciously dismantle the barriers that keep us from being able to see each other as full human beings.

Super/Human