How do we know that we’re doing the right thing? What are our politics? A group of us decided to do our own political education…
How do we know that we’re doing the right thing? What are our politics? A group of us decided to do our own political education to help inform our demands. Once we started reading, debating, reshaping, and reformulating our demands, we realized that some of the things we had been fighting for didn’t move us much closer to liberation. Some were good and important, but we could fight for something much more transformational. That’s why political education is indispensable to anyone doing freedom work. And every organizing space I’ve been in since already knew that lesson. Look at Action St. Louis or the Dream Defenders. These are organizations that have committed to political education. Look at their demands from when they started to do some of their abolitionist campaigns. You can see that change. What it means for them to read and study Du Bois as an organizer. To figure out, what does abolition democracy mean to our movement today versus when Du Bois wrote about it in Black Reconstruction(1935) over eighty years ago. That’s indispensable. And it’s not something you do to just get smart or get woke or have arguments. You’re reading to figure out what tradition you’re in and how to keep moving toward liberation.
– Demanding Justice for the Living, an interview with Derecka Purnell in Boston Review.