NONE of US ARE FREE UNTIL ALL of US ARE FREE a Thesis
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NONE OF US ARE FREE UNTIL ALL OF US ARE FREE A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of A S the requirements for the Degree £ETV\ S"T Master of Arts In Ethnics Studies by Alicia Nicole Schwartz (Garza) San Francisco, California May 2017 Copyright by Alicia Nicole Schwartz (Garza) 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read None o f Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free by Alicia Nicole Schwartz (Garza), and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Dawn-Elissa Fischer, PhD Associate Professor, Africana Studies Dorothy J. Tsuruta, PhD Professor, Africana Studies NONE OF US ARE FREE UNTIL ALL OF US ARE FREE Alicia Nicole Schwartz (Garza) San Francisco, California 2017 This study explores the impact of salient essays that have influenced the ways in which societies ideate Black lives and related liberation efforts. #BlackLivesMatter is contextualized and historically situated within the traditions of Black liberation theory, writing and freedom movements. #BlackLivesMatter, thus, has implication for how movements make the global local. In the current political moment, the significance of the Black radical thought, “None of Us Are Free until All of Us are Free,” is central. I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Chair, Thesis Committee ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Written for Mami. Thanks to Malachi. TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on Language............................................................................................................. vii Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 Part I: Context......................................................................................................................7 Chapter One: Towards a Vision for Human Rights, #BlackLivesMatter in Context 8 Chapter Two: Disposable Domestics.....................................................................32 Part II: Vision.....................................................................................................................39 Chapter Three: None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free............................ 40 Chapter Four: The Fire This Time, Reflections on Ferguson............................... 48 Chapter Five: Women’s Funding Alliance............................................................58 Chapter Six: Do We Care for the Black Women Who Care for Us?.................... 63 Part III: Strategy.................................................................................................................67 Chapter Seven: Civic Collaborative Keynote........................................................68 Chapter Eight: The State of the Black Community in a Far from Adequate Union 77 Chapter Nine: Clintons and Black Girls Hush.......................................................81 Chapter Ten: Black Love—Resistance and Liberation........................................ 85 Concluding Remarks......................................................................................................... 94 References........................................................................................................................ 101 NOTE ON LANGUAGE Each chapter is organized according to sections and is meant to be self-contained as well as part of this holistic endeavor. As such, text varies according to poetic style and purpose. The chapters reflect original articulations in the political moment as much as possible, so that each text intentionally reveals temporal and linguistic meanings, ranging from signifying practice to hypertext, as the social movements that are narrated necessitate. Quotations, italics and paragraph form are not bounded to singularity or convention. 1 INTRODUCTION I’m often asked “How does it feel to have started a movement? Did you have any idea that Black Lives Matter would become as big as it has?” I usually give two answers. First, it’s important to start at the assertion that we (Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and myself) did not start this movement. And of the various ways that movement is defined, understood, and experienced, it’s important to acknowledge that the Black radical tradition is long, complex, intergenerational, and international—and much older than any of us participating in it today. When I helped to start the Black Lives Matter Network, I already considered myself a proud, card-carrying member of the Black Freedom movement—as dormant as it felt at that time, I knew that I had dedicated my life to the pursuit of Black freedom. One of my earliest memories is asking my mother about a poster that she had hanging up in the apartment we shared with my uncle (my mom’s twin brother), a cat and a bird. There is a beautiful Black woman in that poster that looked just like my mother—so much so that I would ask her regularly whether or not it was her. Casually wrapped in a goldenrod head scarf, the woman gazes out into the distance under the words, “For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf,” a play by Ntozake Shange. I didn’t know anything about the choreo-play, but I had a sense then, as I do now, that there was something unique about the experiences of Black women in a society that 2 fetishizes Blackness while it despises Black people. I recognized the sadness in the eyes of the woman in the poster as the sadness in the eyes of my own mother. I first became aware of “the movement” when I was twelve years old. I am the daughter of a single mother who had me at 26 years old, before she’d planned to or even thought about having a family. I was raised with almost daily reminders that sex makes babies, that Black people have less access than other people, and that Black women carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. I became politicized around the fight for reproductive justice. Among her many colloquialisms, one of my mother’s favorites was “Sex makes babies.” For her, the practice of talking about sex was important to the well-being of her Black daughter. She never used phrases like “the birds and the bees” or “down there.” There was no stork that brought a baby in a bundle to a house that wanted one. In my house, I would sit at the kitchen table late into the night while my mother would buzz around like a hummingbird. “I can’t stand how white people sugar coat everything,” she would say. Buzz. “It’s not the birds and the bees; it’s sex. Ain’t no damn stork. And sex makes babies.” Buzz. Our time together, me at the kitchen table, Mami buzzing around prepping everything for the following day, was when we would talk about such intimate topics. At the kitchen table, we would talk about consent. Mami would tell me that I never had to hug or kiss anyone I didn’t want to, even family members. She would urge me to tell her or another adult if someone touched me in a way I didn’t want to be touched. We would run drills in the kitchen where she would show me how to disable someone who was attacking me. 3 Mami would say, “Okay Baby Girl, let’s go over it again. What do you do if someone tries to grab you from behind and chokes you around the neck?” Dutifully, I would reply, “I’m gonna drag my heel down the inside of their shin as hard as I can, stomp on their feet, and run as fast as I can.” “That’s right Baby Girl. Don’t try and kick them in the balls. They’ll be expecting that.” Consent, choice, agency, pleasure, access to information and access to contraception, up to and including abortion, was how my early politics were formed. In a rudimentary way, I knew that Black women specifically but Black people generally were denied access to these things. As I would get older, I would layer my experiences working in the reproductive justice movement to help me understand race and class, as well as gender and sexuality. Angela Davis, bell hooks, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins and others would teach me about the Black women’s burden in the United States. Later I would come to understand that Black people were engaged in struggle around the world. I would learn about revolutionary movements in Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, South Africa, and Kenya, as well as the struggle for dignity and humanity here in the United States. My mother was not an avid revolutionary. Like many Black Americans, she often would exalt the courage and strength of revolutionary leaders and yet question their tactics, their strategies, and their vision. She left home and joined the Army to escape what she considered to be a way too conservative community in Toledo, Ohio. After being honorably discharged from the Army, she was one of the first Black women to integrate the prison guard’s union, working as a guard first at Soledad Prison and then at San Quentin. As my luck would have it, she was working in the prisons at the same time 4 that many Black American revolutionaries were being imprisoned for their political activities. She was dating another guard while working in the prison, and got pregnant with me while she was a guard at San Quentin. As a result, my upbringing was such that I often say that I was raised to be like conservative former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and yet when I found the movement, I was encouraged to be someone different (though my mother’s worldview is far more inclusive that that of Rice’s). My worldview is informed by my experiences—growing up both working class in a low income community of color, raised by a single mother and her twin brother, and growing up in an affluent, white community as a result of the marriage of my mother to my dad (by marriage but who has since become like blood) who grew up as a part of San Francisco’s elite; being raised to believe that everyone deserves a good life and to believe that some who don’t have what could be considered a good life don’t have what they need due to their personal choices (rather than systemic factors) impacting their life outcomes.