Materiality and improvements are key---don’t let theory be a barrier for organizing. The end of the world is the endpoint of our solvency but action now is necessary.

Right now Black political organizing is in a crisis situation. The reason for that is because between 1970 and the early 1980s there is such a police crackdown on revolutionary forces that we’re now in a situation in which the election of Barack Obama has lit a fuse in the collective unconscious of the entire country. The people eight years ago or so thought: “Oh we’re going to elect a Black president and that’s going to show how we’re evolving in terms of our race relations.” Yeah, it showed that [laughter]. And what the election of Barack Obama has done is, it has liberated the unconscious anti-Blackness throughout the country that we are, thankfully, in a more fascistic mode than we have ever been in the past, and I thank him for that [laughter]. The question is, can Black political organizing in Ferguson and Baltimore and these places catch up with that, because unfortunately, we have a problem in that the country is so much more of a police state than it has ever been and you know that just by watching television. When I was in school, if you liked the American flag, if you liked the police, you didn’t have any friends. Now, I find young college students are very slow to say that they hate America, very slow to say that they hate the police. What we’re trying to do now is to infuse an antagonistic orientation in Black people who are white-collar people in college so that their intellectual skills can be enhanced by the orientation that is felt by Black people in the ghetto. If this doesn’t happen they run risk of being anointed and appointed (by the power structure) to manage the anger of Black people in the street, rather than relate to that anger. So that’s a hurdle that we have to overcome. You know, I’ve been doing political education workshops for Black Lives Matter in New York and Los Angeles, and probably will do more in Chicago. And what I hope to have people do workshop exercises around is this concept that I have called “Two Trains Running (Side by Side).” By that I mean, you can do your political organizing that will help us get relief from police brutality right now. We need that. We need that. But that work that we do should be seen as puny in terms of its philosophical and theoretical orientation so that we can educate ourselves politically to be against the police as an institution and against the United States as a country, even while we are working to reform police practices, because we do not have the strength right now that we had in the 1960s and 1970s to act in the way the Black Liberation Army did, or BaaderMeinhof, we do not have the strength to act in the revolutionary mode, but that lack of strength, that lack of capacity, should not contaminate our orientation. We should not feel that we have to accept the existence of police even if we’re working in reformist measures politically. Hopefully this idea of two trains running will pick up. Black Lives Matter has done a great job in opening up a new Black political organizing space. That’s great. Now let’s use that space for an educational project that is soundly anti-American, and soundly anti-police even if tactically, we have to work for police reforms.