By Emery Wright
Emery Wright is the Co-Director of Project South and a native of Atlanta. This article is based on a keynote speech Emery made at Alternate ROOT’s Annual Meeting in August 2015.
As the scholar and activist Scot Nakagawa has written, Blackness is the fulcrum of White Supremacy. In other words, Blackness and the violent attack on Black bodies is the hinge from which White Supremacy swings. White Supremacy is used to degrade, divide, and confuse people and attempts to justify a world where only a small few, less then 1%, globally exploit the rest of the world, its people, and life itself.
“No matter who we are, no matter what our struggle is, no matter what racial group we belong to, the struggle to eliminate white supremacy is our collective responsibility and part of our collective victory.”
The Movement for Black Lives – emerging in this political moment specifically and in a broader sense – is a Global call to action that we must embrace in our hearts and find ways to support in our actions.
I was born in 1976. By the time I turned five years old I knew how much the phrase Black Lives Matter did not reflect the world into which I was born. From 1979 to 1981 in the City of Atlanta, hundreds of Black children went missing. Some were later found murdered. Often in the bushes by the roadside, by the rivers, behind school buildings. Young children, ages seven, eight, nine years old were the Missing & Murdered Children of Atlanta.
Like all instances of mass disappearances, the larger community was terrorized and traumatized. Parents, like mine, stopped letting their children play outside, as all children love to do. Some families, like mine, gathered in the evening around the little black & white TV in the family room to watch the evening news. Parents held their breath in hopes there was not another missing child. All of us watched glazed-eyed at officials explained the ongoing investigation that went nowhere for years and ended abruptly in a conviction that did not make sense.
National figures, from James Baldwin to Toni Cade Bambara, have written books about this case and pointed out holes in the official story. Although the case was never fully resolved in the hearts of many Atlantans, Atlanta moved on, but my first memories of what mattered in this world were never forgotten.
I came of age as an organizer in the 1990s. I was part of youth leadership programs and like any oppressed group learning community leadership skills, we began to ask: Where’s our opportunity to lead? What actions can we take right now?
As a youth organizing movement was birthed, the anti-globalization movement emerged, targeting anti-democratic and anti-human global trade agreements. These movements connected trends of violence, surveillance, and social control with militarized police forces around the globe. I began to get interested in what was happening to Black people in other parts of the world. I studied the history of the Caribbean, heard stories about Black people and indigenous people fighting for their liberation in South America, and was even able to travel and build relationships with people working for social justice on the continent of Africa.
Working with community organizers and movement leaders, particularly in East Africa, sharpened my ability to see both what we are up against and how we can fight back. In terms of what we are up against, I saw first hand how colonialism was a global phenomenon that affects all people fighting for justice on this planet. From Appalachia to eastern Kenya, the imprint and impact of colonialism is visible and still needs to be undone. White Supremacy is global. White Supremacy is central to exploitative power and oppression in the U.S. and globally. I come from a region that helped invent White Supremacy and a region that was very much part of the colonized world historically. Coming home to Atlanta I asked myself: How are we living with the history of colonialism in the U.S. South today?
Project South is strategically located in the U.S. South to anchor social movement leadership and growth that can contend with and eliminate the root causes of White Supremacy. Gender oppression and capitalism in this country as expressed in both poverty and genocide.
Since its inception, Project South has been a Black-led, multiracial organization that works across multiple forms of oppression. The denial of Black leadership has been fundamental to the power and oppression that dominates global history and the current landscape in the United States. The denial of Black leadership reinforces the fulcrum of White Supremacy.
Project South believes that social movement development that is rooted in the U.S. South, centered in Black leadership, accountable to indigenous sovereignty, and committed to working across race, class, and gender boundaries is a strong formation to contend with the history and current reality of oppression.
“By the time I turned five years old I knew how much the phrase Black Lives Matter did not reflect the world into which I was born.”
“From 1979 to 1981 in the City of Atlanta hundreds of Black children went missing.”
“Some were later found murdered. Often in the bushes by the roadside, by the rivers, behind school buildings, young children were the Missing & Murdered Children of Atlanta.”
We recognize that there are times when we have to struggle directly against the actions of our oppressors. That struggle is part of our ability to survive. Growing movements across the globe are also building the world they want from the bottom up and not asking these racist, greedy, colonized, gender oppressors for permission or authority from the top down. We build community-based governance practices. We organize using the Peoples Movement Assembly. Inspired by global movements, Project South and the University Sin Fronteras have developed this Peoples Movement Assembly process as part of our work to develop social movements with decision-making power at the grassroots of our communities.
The great Kenyan writer, thinker, and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has said that if colonialism is fundamentally about breaking apart – breaking apart people, breaking apart land, breaking apart our bodies – then decolonization is fundamentally about putting back together what has been broken apart.
In today’s Southern Freedom Movement, we build connection across communities that have been broken apart and connecting ideas across struggles that have been separated from one another. We think about how our bodies, our communities, and our people are all sites of both struggle and power. Black leadership is essential to our organizing, social movements, and decolonization work.
In the U.S. South, there is a growing social movement, rooted in our fierce history of Black and multiracial resistance, that seeks to build power towards a radical democratic vision. Connected to and learning from movements in places like Senegal, Kenya, Haiti, Kurdistan, Bolivia, and Mexico, we are breaking from old forms of organizing to build autonomous, self-governing, and radically democratic movements with the power to confront corrupt politics and raise strong communities. We come together in the Southern Movement Assembly, at the community level, within our diverse fronts of struggle, and across struggles to build the power to demand our visions of social, economic, and environmental justice for all.