What’s next? Put simply, the great question asked by all movements for political liberation is, “How do we best get what we want for our people?” How is obviously a key word – we need to know what course of action to take. But also, best is an important concept to keep in mind, with respect to efficiency, ease, morality, and group satisfaction of the means. By group satisfaction, I mean, is everyone in the group satisfied with the results or the goal? As Chris Crass stated in his keynote at the 2015 White Privilege Conference, an antiracist educators’ conference in Louisville, Kentucky, “No step is 100% liberatory.” Still, what steps are most liberatory for the majority of people? And, cue the series of questions:
How do we avoid being divisive, especially in black communities? How do we make sure efforts towards black civil rights don’t just benefit the self-interested and eponymous black bourgeoisie portrayed in Frazier? How do we fight for African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants while also capitalizing on the powerful narrative of black as native in the U.S.? How do we act strategically essentialist in our needs to unify blacks without reifying the very oppressive constructs of race? How do we fight for racial equality without marginalizing the millions of black women, womyn and others? How do we, as DuBois encourages in his Souls of Black Folk, protect and defend the threatened institution of the black family without marginalizing the queer black American (intellectuals like Baldwin, hooks, Hughes, Lorde, and Walker) who force us through their very queerness to reconsider our definitions of families? How do we advocate for the rural black and the urban black? How do we #StandWithAhmed at the intersection of Islamophobia and antiblackness while criticism and holding entirely accountable the lunacy of Ben Carson? How do we end racial inequality? How do we best get what we want for our people?