Movement for Black Lives

I'm a founder of Utopian Visions and Experiments for Good.

I have served in leadership capacities of a lot of different frontline movements, including the Movement for Black Lives.

And yeah, long story short, I'm a missionary Baptist preacher's daughter and a Black Panther party member's daughter.

And I am just trying to win and live in a world where we have healthy, sustainable and equitable communities and don't have to fight this damn hard.

Maurice Mitchell is the national director of the Working Families Party.

He's also a longtime organizer and a leading figure in the movement for Black Lives.

In this episode, we discuss how Democrats lost working people, we dig into the tech oligarchs who are running the country now and what they actually believe, and we discuss why Maurice thinks this moment is the moment for real political transformation, both in the US and beyond.

And towards the end, we have a discussion about purity politics on the left that I really appreciate.

Doing is becoming and our collective becoming is the transformation.

So now I wanna turn to a second passage of sacred scripture for me that comes to us from the Movement for Black Lives.

It is a video that was produced after the Freedom Summer of 2020 and it's called The Ode to Freedom Summer by the Movement for Black Lives.

I want us to share this clip and then we're gonna come back and unpack it a little.

Freedom

and yet something so deep and quantum on the inside of me.

This video casts a radical vision.

First of all, the Movement for Black Lives dared to imagine a future.

These investigations added further fuel to the fire of the movement and gave empirical, quantifiable evidence of the systemic harm that had been inflicted on the Black community in Ferguson for years.

Today, a coalition of more than 50 organizations make up what is known as the Movement for Black Lives.

This coalition looks to eradicate white supremacy and build local organizational power in order to intervene in the violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

In explaining how they came to be, the organization says it, quote, to debate and discuss the current political conditions, develop shared assessments of what political interventions were necessary in order to achieve key policy, cultural, and political wins, convene organizational leadership in order to debate and co-create a shared movement-wide strategy, under the fundamental idea that we can achieve more together than we can separate.

Sometimes, Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives can be used interchangeably.

Sometimes, in reference to the specific organizations, and sometimes in reference to the larger movement.

Either way, what's true is that the Movement for Black Lives has consistently increased general awareness of the state's sanction and extrajudicial violence inflicted on Black communities every day.

Another thing this coalition does that is especially important is making sure that, in the fight for racial justice, they are fighting for communities within the larger Black community.

you know, the understanding, first and foremost, that the war on terror could not exist if there was not racial terror in this country and on sort of mass incarceration and criminalization there.

I think when at Muslims for Just Futures, you know, when we kind of learned about the abolitionist framework, obviously, because of M4BL and the great work around around policing and Mariam Kaba, right, all these incredible like black women leaders who have actually like shaped the way around abolition.

It actually was the only mainstream opening where you could actually talk about the entirety of a state infrastructure and say, OK, we want it all dismantled, but we don't just want it dismantled.

We want it to be redirected into communities and communities of care.

So working alongside the American Muslim Community Foundation is the first organization that called attention actually to this de-platforming of UNRWA from these mainstream deaf providers.

That galvanized a lot of organizing within our coalition, which included Movement for Black Lives, Empower Change, Adult Justice Project, and many, many other formations to start to amplify what was happening around the cutting of this funding precisely at the moment where the flower massacre was intensifying the hunger, the famine, the starvation tactics by the Israeli state.

And this moment of real attention and need to get basic resources to the people in Gaza.

So with this campaign, we were able to mobilize our donor base to have them sign on to letters.

They are in several organizations.

They're in organizations affiliated with the Movement for Black Lives.

And many of those cadres in the Movement for Black Lives are also union members and leaders.

So Marsha Howard, for example, who was one of the leaders of George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, is also the vice president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.

in addition to holding down George Floyd Square, was able to lead two successful strikes on behalf of teachers and paraprofessionals in that city.