the assumption that the lives, dignity and rights of some people are more worth defending than those of others.
In dialogue with diverse voices, Witness Against Torture pieced together this skeletal analysis linking Ferguson and Guantánamo. The next step was to take it into the streets, the US Capitol and the DC jail. The group decided not to speak out on behalf of an abstract, universal humanity, even as it invoked universal rights. Instead, it chose to acknowledge its status as a mostly white group working to break white silence and to invite other whites to do the same.
This effort to link issues and movements comes with familiar risks. One is a real or perceived opportunism, wherein partisans of a particular cause enter into coalitions primarily to enhance the prestige of their ‘own issue’. Another is that making connections between oppressions can blur important, qualitative distinctions between them, diminishing the autonomy of individual struggles.
Related to this, viewing all problems as horribly systemic can lead to the conclusion that the whole system must come down for anything to be solved. The push for sensible goals and urgent imperatives (like grand jury reform or the speedy release of more men from Guantánamo, whatever the final disposition of the prison), recedes behind the cosmic goal. Finally, white protestations of anti-racism can easily become mawkish displays of self-righteousness serving to elevate whites.
Aware of these perils, the anti-torture activists making trouble on a rainy January day in Washington, DC, did not feel stopped by them. Singing as they marched through the city, the protesters shifted from the lyrics memorialising victims of police violence to those of another of Luke Nephew’s songs: “We’re gonna build a nation/That don’t torture no one/But it’s gonna take courage/for that change to come.”
Excerpted from: ‘Fighting Racism and Torture from Ferguson to Guantánamo’.
Courtesy” Commondreams.org