interviews
When Voting Fails
by Dr. Martha Jones
July 9, 2020
This interview with Dr. Martha Jones, a Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Hi! I’m curious to know what’s on your mind right now.
Dr. Martha Jones | I live in Baltimore, Maryland. It's where I teach and where I live. When the spring 2020 protests began, for a moment my city was of interest to the national media. As uprising began to break out in other places across the country, the country recalled that we had had a major uprising here in 2015 after the killing of Freddie Gray. And still, in 2020 national gaze quickly turned away when Baltimore didn't comport, somehow, with expectations. The demonstrations here didn't look like Minneapolis. They didn't look like Louisville. They didn't look like LA or New York.
Media is essential to amplifying and projecting the voices of the disenfranchised. At the same time, the media is moved by the sensational.
There is something untenable for me about the view that we must rise to the sensational in order to be heard.
It's not just that we have to raise our voices. We have to raise them, and that spectacle must be sensational before journalists will deeply partner and become embedded in the scene.
What did Baltimore teach itself in the time between Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2020?
It's important to say I didn't live here in 2015, so I'm learning in real-time about my city.
The city had not only its own sense of outrage but its own vision for how to be. This comes in part from the roles played by seasoned community activists, folks who were part of the 2015 uprising who are still here and have remained deeply committed. In 2020, they have helped to shape an extraordinary series of demonstrations here in Baltimore.
In Baltimore, we were also getting ready to elect a new mayor in June, though with a limited capacity to get to the polls. Maryland had committed to mail-in voting without much debate or objection. But there were troubles with getting the ballots into people's hands and getting the right ballots into people's hands, so in-person polling places had to be opened up. People, in the midst of protests, in the midst of a pandemic, showed up here in Baltimore to cast their ballots. That evidenced another side of the civic culture here. People were tuned in to the fact that there was an election, and people came out for that.
Participating in democracy need not be an either-or proposition. We can simultaneously be in the streets, engaged in direct protest, a democratic tradition in this country, and we can show up to the polls.
That is what I saw happening in Baltimore, and it happened in the midst of a pandemic that encouraged us to stay home and to do nothing at all. Of course, that is complicated by important public health concerns. But I think an insistence that democracy is a participatory culture and not simply a set of principles or a structure, is an important part of what I play out here in real-time.
How does civil unrest and protest lend itself to more civic participation?
The story of the 1960s is instructive for me. It was simultaneously the scene of voting rights and the scene of uprisings. The two facets of that time may not often be told together. But they were not wholly antithetical to one another at all. Immediately in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of African American voters grew importantly and significantly. It is that context that we move into an era of uprisings in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles and New York. Part of what can be learned by voting, are the limits of the ballot. Yes, political power is embodied in casting a ballot and in electing a candidate. At the same time, harnessing political power requires more than showing up at the polls. Demonstrations are another way of being heard and influencing law and policy. I am an historian of Black politics in 19th century Baltimore, which may seem like a very long time ago. Still, that history includes important lessons in how people created their own power in an era, time, and place when they could not vote at all.
I'm interested in what we do when voting fails us, which it almost certainly will.
On this, I draw from the lessons of African American women in history. African American women have been engaged with politics for a long time, and for most of that time, they could not vote. They organized, they lobbied, they used men as surrogates. And when by a state constitution, or the 19th Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they received legally sanctioned political power, they were ready. When African American women got the vote, they were ready to use it as fully formed political actors because they had been constructing their own power for a very long time.
I want to talk more about the prominence of Black women through the history of protest and civil unrest in America.
One of the moments most well known to people during the civil rights movement is the march in Selma, Alabama. Among the best remembered of those marchers, is a young man who is today among our most venerated members of Congress, John Lewis. Lewis was among the scores who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the name of winning voting rights, only to be met with brutal police violence.
Behind the scenes was a Black woman named Diane Nash. She cut her political teeth organizing sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee as a student at Fisk University. She played a critical role in the work of the Freedom Rides in 1961 by sending young people from Tennessee further South to replenish the ranks of the Riders after many had been brutally attacked. It was Diane Nash who, long before Martin King and the SCLC assented to the strategy, came to Selma to wage a voting rights campaign.
Nash was an organizer, planner, and orchestrator, but we don’t see her photo as folks make that fateful march across the bridge. In those long moments, she was back in Selma making sure that there would be medics available when people are brutalized. To me, this is an example of a woman who taught us how leadership takes many forms. She taught that political leadership must embrace many forms of action. Nash never took the stage as a charismatic, upfront character. Still, she was someone who, when we look closely at the scenes in Selma, becomes critical to that story.
Contrast Nash with someone like Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer. The two were peers but worked very differently. Hamer not only understood, she deliberately looked to exploit the cameras to propel her image, and her message, and project efforts to win voting rights in her home state and transform Democratic Party politics nationally. The two women worked by way of different philosophies and differing styles. They adopted divergent tactics even. Taking the work of Nash and Hamer as two parts of a whole during the Modern Civil Rights Movement helps us think in expansive ways about how political power can be won and how it can be wielded.
Looking back is one style more effective than the other?
It's difficult to say, because they are parts of a whole. The thing that knits them together, in some sense, is violence. Nash is deeply committed to nonviolent direct action, the sit-in, the march – but she still sees violence as essential. There's an often-quoted moment when she speaks with federal officials from Washington who tell her to desist from sending young people to join the freedom riders: “You know, we understand that we are walking into a brutal scene. The young people had made their wills the night before they left.” Hamer also knew violence and had a defining moment early in her career when she was stopped, detained, jailed, brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by police after attempting to register to vote.
The women I write about are all, each in their own way, wrestling with the violence that is woven into American politics. They know that violence will be directed unashamedly at their very bodies.
That core insight, one that sits at the foundation of Black women’s political consciousness, extends back to confrontations between enslaved women and their enslavers. In our own moment, the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor is the latest example of how Black women's bodies remain the targets of a brutal politics of violence. This thread runs through Black women's political philosophy and their practice, across time.
African American women have always been plagued by a specific form of violence: sexual violence. So many of the Black woman activists who I write about eventually explain their confrontations with either sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence. This not only informs their tactics, but sets the goals for political power must accomplish. When Tarana Burke gave us the Me Too movement in the 21st century, she was echoing a long-standing critique. Black women aim to use their power to end the scourge of sexual violence, a story that has an origin in the history of slavery but doesn't end with emancipation. It continues until this day.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate having this conversation.
One of the dangers of a conversation like this is to leave the impression either that nothing changes or nothing can change. I struggle with that. History is a tough endeavor in that regard. It is possible to look across two centuries and recognize what hasn't changed.
And still, I am inspired. Black women have been the conscience of this nation since its inception. They have studied the lay of the land. They have thought very hard about our founding ideals. They have also set the bar when it comes to what liberty, equality, and dignity mean. They have shared their ideas, pointing us where the bar is. Listen and Black women will remind you of the ideals that we all should aspire to, individually and collectively. The women I write about say no racism, and no sexism. Period. They say that in 1820 and have waited ever since for us to catch up as a nation. I've watched Breonna Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, speak, and I think I recognize something familiar in that act. She is an African American woman, representing her deceased daughter, and at the same time speaking to all of us about the violence which, as a nation, we must not, cannot, and should not allow.
There is nothing enviable about this position in body politic. And it's not enough. Still, voices that speak fundamental truths, that hold up indelible principles, that insist upon equality and dignity for all are absolutely essential. Someone has to set the bar high in a nation that has been built upon countless indignities and injustices.
Someone has to remind us that ideals animate this country, not interests, convenience, or pragmatism.
Someone has to do that. Black women took up that mantle in the earliest days of this republic and they continue to bear that burden even today, in the 21st century.
interviews
An Interview with Dr. Patricia Parker
by Dr. Patricia Parker
September 27, 2018
This interview with Dr. Patricia Parker, Chair at the Department of Communication, Associate Professor of Organizational Communication Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and founder of the Ella Baker Women's Center, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank: Can you give us a bit of background on yourself. How you ended up where you are now?
Dr. Parker: There are many entry points to that story, but the one I think is most relevant to the work I'm doing now is my family history. I was born in rural Arkansas into a family of 13 children. I'm the youngest of the 13. I was exposed to an older generation that was very much involved in activism. One of my oldest sisters was the first African American students to enter the local liberal arts college that was just a few miles from the segregated town in which my parents and their parents were born and raised.
By the time it was my turn to go to college, that would have been in the late '70's, my sister and seven siblings had forged that path. My oldest sister, Jurlene, and her peers and the civil rights activists at that time had forged that path. That is something that stayed with me. When I went on to get my master's and PhD degrees in communication, I was introduced to some theories including Black feminist theory and other theories about power and anti-racist work.
I was always interested in organizing processes (perhaps because I was literally born into an in-progress organization that was my family!) and that brought me to critical organizational communication as a field of study within the larger discipline of communication. That solidified my interest in thinking about organizing processes and leadership.
At the time I was getting my PhD, there was a focus in the literature on women in leadership and it was very clear that the women they were talking about were particular women—White, middle class women. My dissertation research was focused on African American women executives who had made it to the top.
I did a study with 15 women across the country who were representative of the women who had made it to the top ranks including the women in the President's Cabinet. They connected their own success, as I did, with the communities they were born into and the influence of the Civil Rights movement and the role models there. That influenced the book that I wrote about African American women executives and thinking about re-envisioning organizational leadership from the perspectives of African American women.
It was a bold thesis, but my thinking was influenced by people like Peter Senge at MIT, and others who were thinking about organizing as a process that takes complexity into account. One argument was that leaders who are able to lead complex systems themselves need to to have the capacity to “see” complexity; they need to have engaged with complexity as a frame of reference.
That set me on this course of thinking about leaders and leadership and social justice activism as intersecting with that process.
Do you feel that the personal is political?
Dr. Parker: Absolutely. That is a foundation of feminism in general, but in particular after I finished my first book and I had done that historical study of thinking about the traditions of Black women's activism throughout history, I was thinking about precisely what you're asking. How are young women - how are contemporary girls able to make those connections in terms of looking at their personal context and being able to connect that to the larger structural conditions that might be shaping their lives. That's what my current work is and I think that it's absolutely crucial.
Doing that historical analysis was when I got introduced to Ella Baker, the human rights and civil rights activist whose work spanned 50 years starting in the 1930's. She's most well-known for being the advisor and really the catalyst that made SNCC happen, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that's iconic from the '60's in terms of youth activism.
That is, we need to find ways to connect with the knowledge of people who are already living with and through particular articulations of oppressive conditions. Interventions become possible where there is an analysis of how capitalism and racism, and white supremacy, and so forth, are intersecting through people's bodies, in their everyday lives. Ms. Baker said, "If you give people light they will find a way." She also said that, "Strong people don't need strong leaders." Her meaning there was, people are already living through the impacts of capitalism and some of these other oppressions and that as experts, people who are doing scholar activism who have a particular analysis, our job is to work alongside the people who are already fighting it because they have a particular angle or vision. They have a particular knowledge that can be brought to bear in terms of social change initiatives.
My work with girls of color right now is founded on Ms. Baker's principles of what I call “catalytic leadership,” the topic of my next book due out in 2020 by University of California Press. Her approach is often referred to as group-centered leadership that is highly participative, but it is also grounded in a tenacious belief in community power. In Ms. Baker’s philosophy, organizing for social justice means catalyzing community power. My current work is founded on the staunch belief that girls are in the know. They know what's happening in their schools. They see the disparities in school suspensions and access to opportunities. They know what's happening in their communities because they're living it. Through the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community Activism, my students and I work with girls and their allies in communities to create space for girls to see their own power and to do some of the amazing things that they're already doing, but also support them with resources and mentoring.
The current cohort of leaders developed a project to focus on intergenerational storytelling. They planned and organized a “Girl Power Summit.” They decided that they wanted to have an all- women space for their mothers, their aunts, their grandmothers, their sisters, anybody who's interested in girl power, to come together to talk about their expereinces. To prepare for the summit, we did some of our critical pedagogy work, and the girls worked with arts activist Kayhan Irani to facilitate the gathering of about 30 girls and women in thinking about and telling our stories. They were amazing. These beautiful women, these grandmothers and aunts who talked about when they were teenagers and young women and going through their careers and some of the things that they faced, and this resonated with the stories that the girls were telling in terms of what they face in their classrooms, and some of the sexism that they face, or not being seen. It was just a really powerful convening of intergenerational storytelling. The girls decided that they wanted to expand on the project, so they are preparing to collect stories from women and girls in their neighborhood to do a more extensive action research project.
The personal does matter and it provides a route toward this kind of contextual understanding. This is actually one of the main themes of the book I'm working on right now — mapping these personal routes toward collective consciousness about social justice activism.
I think it's really astute to recognize that the people who you are trying to help are probably capable of helping themselves given resources — especially if you believe in this idea of power within ones own body and mind.
What do you think the younger generation should be focusing on? How can they take the lessons of somebody like Ella Baker and use them in 2018?
Dr. Parker: You know, it's a great question. It's the question of the day, right, because we have such courageous activism happening right now. The Black Lives Matter movement. I was just in conversation with the southern regional director for Black Lives Matter, a young Black woman. I don't know how many people know the three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who created #BlackLivesMatter as a response to anti-Black racism. DeRay McKesson is sort of the face of Black Lives Matter right now, which is another story we can talk about that sort of harkens back to Ms. Baker and Dr. King. By many historical accounts, Ms. Baker was just as influential on the Civil Rights movement as Dr. King. She worked more with the grassroots, he more so at the grass tops. That's an oversimplification and I recognize the great work that Dr. King did, but it sort of gets to this idea of the context of social movements and the erasure of Black women’s labor. There are some things that don't seem to change.
Have you heard of misogynoir?
No.
Dr. Parker: When Leslie Jones, the wonderful comedienne from Saturday Night Live, was viciously attacked on social media in 2016 a lot of celebrities came out to support her and among them was Katy Perry, who used the term misogynoir to explain what was happening. It's misogyny but against black women's bodies in particular. The woman who originally coined the term back in 2008, Moya Bailey, is a queer Black feminist scholar who wanted to describe the particular form of racialized sexism that Black women experience, especially in online media platforms, but also in everyday life. Katy Perry’s reference sort of took it to this other level of visibility. All that to say, there are some things, like misogynoir, that seem to get reinvented in different contexts across space and time.
Black women figure prominently in keeping that narrative alive because it started in the time of enslavement in terms of having to have this violence against black women's bodies in order to justify chattel slavery.
With the advent of social media, there is more access... tools for people to connect.
I think that there are some foundational activist strategies that are grounded in anti-racist work that has happened, that are always emerging from indigenous communities. I'm thinking about the history of black women's activism. And indigenous women all over the world. These movements all over the world, really I think connect on a certain level to a fundamental strategy which is to have an analysis of structural power.
We have to start with analysis of how power is inserting itself into our everyday lives. For me, that has to do with these different dominating structures of power. But having that analysis, then we have to have the tactics of educating people about how that's happening in their communities.
When a girl starts to wonder, just asking a question, "Why is it in my school, Black kids are being sent to detention more than White kids?" I mean, it's just a simple question. When she is able to do that kind of research and then starts to ask those questions, that's a structural analysis. So having that structural analysis is important. And then it's a matter of asking what is the point of change? I think this is where we get some sort of divergence because I know that in the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been so much emphasis on direct action which is bold and courageous and in your face. I'm gonna shut it down, right? How does that strategy work over time in terms of change? It takes such an emotional toll to continue to confront these persistent restructuring of state violence.
On one level this gets to the importance of self care in activist work; but it is also about how are the tactics of direct action fitting in with the larger strategy for change? To me, that's the question that all of us have to engage.
This is where I think we have to come to bear, in terms of trying to determine what are the strategies. Where's the point of change? Is it in these direct action tactics, sort of the social media campaigns and so forth, or is there a larger political strategy? I think it's a complex combination of all of these, starting with a structural analysis and then educating people to empower people to be able to see that analysis and then mobilizing people according to particular strategies, whether it's campaigns, voting, direct action. So that's my take.
How do you sustain engagement and energy over time?
Dr. Parker: Well, that's a great question because it speaks to what I was just talking about in terms of what is the overall strategy. I am very clear about what my intervention is in the general project of social justice and social movements.
I think it's the foundation of our democracy — and I'm telling you that I have never in the ten years that I've been doing this work, I have never encountered a girl who wasn't excited about this project. Who wasn't excited about wow, I have a space where someone is going to see me. Someone is going to listen to what I think and what I think is connected to something bigger in the world. But that's the project. That is so important because so much has happened on a structural level that gives the opposite message.
Nothing against Anthony Robbins, but this is not about finding the giant within. This is about understanding your place in history and in a democracy. It's personal routes toward collective consciousness. I can't repeat that too many times because it is really recognizing how we're connected in this project of social justice and equity.
That to me is how we keep it alive. In that regard, it keeps hope alive. So that's part one. Part two is that it's highly contextual. Part of the project is to reclaim a set of commitments to our democracy. This is where my communication background fuels my work. I understand communication as helping us to really facilitate those conversations about, what are our agreements in this moment, and maybe in this moment in history, but just in terms of thinking about who we are as a country, for example.
As people say, "Let's stay woke." Let's understand what's going on. That's the structural analysis. Then I will fight to stay connected to you in this conversation—especially if we disagree. That's what's in it for me is to know what our commitments are and if I know that you're committed to the same thing that I'm committed to ... and to me those commitments have to do with our values as a democracy. What do we stand for as a free republic? I think we go to that level of commitment. It's also about decolonizing. There are commitments related to dismantling the structures of white supremacy embedded in our institutions, our laws, our policies. So it's a particular kind of commitment. Being tenacious about staying connected with all the people who are in that conversation. People who disagree, who might be radically opposed to each other but find productive ways to keep the conversation going forward.
Do you think there’s a danger now of people feeling like they're participating because it's so easy to like something or share something or post about something? The illusion of activism.
Dr. Parker: Again, I think it has to be highly contextual. With any social action, it's going to be within a particular context. I think people have to be aware of, what is a social media campaign doing in that moment?
You should do the work of making yourself aware of all the complexities that are creating a particular moment. I think education is the key. Having that education about a particular issue. For Ms. Baker, it was always about tilting the power toward the people who are most vulnerable. Not acting unless you are able to get the context from the people who are being impacted by that particular moment.
Her approach to social change was about teaching and learning. So in other words, people should be able to educate themselves and others in terms of how social media might be moving something forward. They should also be teaching and learning about traditional grassroots organizing. There is so much more to learn in terms of actually engaging with people on issues. Being on the ground with people and learning some of the approaches to social movements in terms of doing a direct action but understanding what you're learning about, how that is teaching you to build a particular muscle in social change.