There have been many rumblings—on Facebook statuses and Tweets, for example—that the current movement, the current antagonist vibration that finds one strand of its genesis in Ferguson, Missouri, is movement and vibration without strategy. Hashtags like #BlackFridayBlackout, #BlackLivesMatter, #HandUpDontShoot, #ICantBreathe, #NMOS2014, #RaiseTheWage have proliferated, have found their way through various kinds of critical conversations. Marches and boycotts have been organized with technology. Arguments between friends and enemies have ensued. Defriending, unfollowing, blocking. All because of the current moment of political organizing, a type of organizing that seems to lack leadership, that seems to lack strategy. And it is the seeming lack that has led to various dismissals of the possible efficaciousness of such choreographic and sonic resistance. Hashtags are dismissed without attending to the ways such technologies allow for otherwise gatherings of thoughts, of persons. I have read too many make claims, for example, asserting that though marching can have positive effects, that those effects are not long-lasting, they are not strategic in terms of long-term organizing or thought. Disrupting a highway might make for a good spectacular event, but it’s not sustainable. Where is the strategy? The call for “strategy” implies that what is lacking most in this current movement is the hard work of critical thought, of making plans for the future. One of the most public calls for strategy and leadership came from Oprah Winfrey: “What I’m looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say, ‘This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we’re willing to do to get it.’” And yet… Calls for strategy, on the one hand, do not take into account the ongoing organizing that has been taking place both before Ferguson’s August 9 murder of Michael Brown—with the Organization for Black Struggle, Black Youth Project 100, Dream Defenders, We Charge Genocide as examples—and how new alliances and forms of movement have flourished since the irruption of protest in his name, because of love. On the other hand, calls for strategy are an effect of the very order we seek to obliterate: the western tradition of rationality that degrades and denigrates blackness as an unwieldy, destabilizing force. Perhaps the organizing that is taking place—an otherwise than strategy—is operating out of a different set of concerns altogether, fundamentally about not assenting to current configurations of power and authority, but about creating new lines of flight, of force, for operation, for action. That the demands of various organizations have come from a decentralized black leadership is important given the ways the voices of black folks are often drowned out of such conversations about possible otherwise ways to be in the world. We all remember the Occupy movement and its difficulties with considering race. That a primarily black woman-led movement that takes seriously the lives of queer people, that continually makes connections to various forms of state violence is being dismissed as lacking strategy should give us pause. Perhaps what is being uprooted in this current moment is not simply the ways people think about policing and violence but, more fundamentally, the theoretical grounds that set such policing and violence into propulsive motion: white supremacist heteropatriarchal thought. And though similar to other decentralized leadership movements like Occupy, what is different is foregrounding loving black folks, of blackness, in this movement—the ways black is not a secret, not an appendage to thought, but is the excess that constitutes thought, movement, resistance itself. Perhaps, then, this otherwise than strategy—this planning, this choreographic encounter that is not about pasts and futures that assume linear, forward moving, progressive time—feels unstable because it does not reproduce singular charismatic leaders. Al Sharpton, of course, is sad about this. But what is being implied and sometimes stated explicitly in the so-called lack of strategy is the idea that the movement, folks in this movement, lack the practice of critical thought.The word strategy is used to marshal in the dominant framework when we seek an otherwise. Attention to black social dance gives us the language to refuse: asking for “strategy” ain’t nothin but asking for rationality, ain’t nothing but suppressing the radical movement and thought currently enacted. One would need assume that thought has not already taken place in any of the planning. This, of course, is a ruse. But the categorical distinction of strategy from generalized unthought movement needs to be thought otherwise. Day 29: Brittany Gray, Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price, LaTrina Johnson, Vera Wynn
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 13:06:09 +0000
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