A note during these days of rage and mourning
(Please read the below message from Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell to WFP supporters.)
Dear WFP family,
I’ve been struggling to find the “right words” to share with all of you. I started and deleted this message many times over the past week because I failed to find them.
What I’m left with today is the realization that there are no “right words” and there is no “right reaction” to something so deeply wrong.
The wrong I’m talking about spans four centuries and has had genocidal impact. I am referring to white supremacy and racial capitalism. The modus operandi of our global order. The wind beneath the wings of the American project.
The other day, a Trump administration official referred to U.S. workers as “human capital stock.”
What was so jarring about that quote is the fact that we — our Black bodies — were the “capital” in “capitalism.” Our ancestors were the original “human capital stock” that financed America and transformed feudal European nations into capitalist global colonial empires. Indigenous genocide and the transatlantic slave trade are the founding atrocities that birthed the modern era.
Although it was traumatic, I chose to watch the video of George Floyd’s final moments. There were many things about that video that will stay with me. One of them being the cool, mechanical indifference of the police. That cool indifference to Black suffering, the mechanical dismissal of Black life permeates our society and captures everything in its presence. It is born from the commodification of Black bodies centuries ago.
The ability to buy, sell, trade, and dispose of people like “human capital stock” doesn’t end with proclamations of abolition or legal prohibitions. Instead it mutates, metastasizes, and colonizes the body politic — evidenced in the promulgation of snuff videos like the one many of us watched this week. And to further cement the point, these same videos are then trafficked on social media as “content” to be monetized by monopoly capital.
Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man jogging in Georgia stalked and lynched in broad daylight.
Nina Pop, a trans Black woman stabbed to death in Missouri.
Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot dead in her own home by police searching for someone else.
Christian Cooper, a comically urbane Black birder who had police called on him for respectfully asking a white woman to leash her dog.
The thousands of Black people dead and ill from COVID 19 related maladies.
They all were people with complex lives, stories, families, failings, regrets, and desires.
Though their stories and direct causes of death were different, what connects them is the ultimate perpetrator: not individual police officers or racist vigilantes or indifferent political leadership, but white supremacy itself, perfected over generations, and racial capitalism in all its forms.
It is deadly. It always has been and always will be. What else can we expect of an ideology that seeks to render people into things to be used and discarded as things often are?
We know racial capitalism does not simply target and surveil Black folks. We all — although not equally — are subject to its indifference.
It places targets on the backs of immigrants of every race. It visits the doors of poor and working people — including poor and working white folks who relate more to the white billionaires who deprive us all than their Black, Latinx, and Native neighbors. It visits people of color of all ethnic and racial backgrounds who are cognizant of racial caste and where exactly we may fall within its hierarchies.
Many times, our survival under racial caste is an occasion for disunity rather than a common point of solidarity. Forging this kind of unity through political struggle is the hope and promise of the Working Families Party. And I am so proud to be in that struggle alongside you.
Each of us will respond to this week’s events and the many reminders of the structural violence at its core in different ways. There is no “right” way to respond, and there is no one way to heal through these experiences. There are many ways we can show compassion, grace, patience, and kindness. The sliver of hope in these dark times is in us.
We do not have to sit idle while more of our family and community members become hashtags and as our elected officials twiddle their thumbs and offer lukewarm condolences or outright indifference to our deaths. If you’re in Minnesota, Georgia, or anywhere else, and you are feeling the need to take action, here are some things you can do right now:
- Call the Mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey today and tell him to cut the police budget.
- Donate to organizations organizing and providing direct support to communities on the ground. Those include Black Visions Collective, Minnesota Freedom Fund, and Reclaim the Block in Minnesota, and Just Georgia, a coalition of organizers and community organizations on the front lines fighting for the Arbery family and reforms to Georgia’s justice system.
- Make sure you are registered to vote. In many places, who serves on juries comes straight from the voter rolls.
- Go to jury duty when called. We don’t need to depend on others to recognize our humanity when we can intervene directly.
- Join us to help elect more progressive elected officials into the criminal legal system. Right now, the Working Families Party is mobilizing a national initiative to recruit, elect, and retain progressive prosecutors, sheriffs, and judges who will not be afraid to seek and defend justice.
These are immediate actions. The ultimate work is the long term organizing and movement building we need to make a daily practice. Our commitment is to build the deep democracy and self-determination that will ensure our safety. We will be coordinating closely with leaders in the Movement for Black Lives as things develop, which brings me to my final point.
Remember that this is a long arc. The fight for a more just and equitable world covers centuries. The struggle for Black freedom spans generations. This work is our inheritance. You don’t have to watch every video, or any video. You don’t have to follow each breaking headline. Take time away to connect with loved ones or do things that bring you joy — that too is a form of resistance. We’ll be here, ready to do the hard and necessary organizing when you get back.
With Love & Solidarity,
Maurice Mitchell
National Director
Working Families Party
