What Struggle Teaches: The Pedagogy of Resistance and Community

In A Litany for Survival, poet Audre Lorde writes for those “learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk.” While these early lessons are bitter and silencing, Lorde reminds her readers, who were “never meant to survive,” that it is “better to speak/remembering.” Despite potentially lethal consequences, those of us “who live at the shoreline” and who “love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawn” still fiercely seek “a now that can breed futures.” In her short, powerful paean to memory and telling, fear and struggle, Lorde describes and demonstrates the necessity of teaching communities of resistance, and of remembering and learning principled defiance. In our current political moment, as we again bear witness to the truths of our suffering and struggle, we must also remember, and learn and teach, that survival is key to collective resistance and is our only pathway.

Take one example, a snapshot among many: In 2015, activists in Chicago came close to shutting down Black Friday shopping in the luxury-class Gold Coast neighborhood. In our efforts to gain justice for Laquan McDonald, an unarmed seventeen-year-old Black youth who was brutally murdered in the street by a police officer in October 2014, we caused a 50 percent dip in sales, with our chanting, blocking store entrances with our bodies, sitting in the icy November streets, and demanding that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and District Attorney Anita Alvarez resign, and Chief of Police Gary McCarthy lose his job. Putting pressure on the business quarter was a powerful lever: After more than a year of protest, a majority of city residents believed the mayor should resign (Madhani); the chief of police was fired; and Alvarez was voted out of office. It took another ten months for charges to be filed against McDonald’s killer. Yet the community created by and through this struggle remains active, linked in purpose and, as we write in November 2016, poised to shut down post-Thanksgiving shopping for a second year.

Figure 1.

Black Friday banners by Marc Fischer (http://temporaryservices.org).

It’s especially important to look back at these incremental successes now because we have reached another hard juncture in the “afterlife” of US slavery, as Saidiya Hartman terms it. White supremacy was not dismantled, neither by the abolition of slavery nor the election of Obama, and this political moment, like many before, is part of a wide and long history of violence against people of color, women, and too many others.

We write just after the disaster of our presidential election, and are struck perhaps less by the results than by the fallout. The mainstream media expressed surprise that 42 percent of all women voted for Trump—how could women vote for the self-proclaimed “pussy grabber”? But, women didn’t create the president-elect, financially comfortable white women did: 53% of white women voted for Trump, and the median income of his supporters was $70,000 (Roberts and Ely), while 94 percent of Black women did not vote for Trump (Rogers). Approximately 45 percent of the total population couldn’t muster it up to vote for any candidate (Taylor). The results of the election remind us of what some women have known for centuries—from Sojourner Truth to Sylvia Ray Rivera. (Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the 1851 Women’s Convention demanded that liberation for Black people be a central plank of the women’s suffrage movement. Rivera, a transgender Latina and activist who was one of the founding members of the 1960s-era Gay Liberation Front, worked for decades to ensure social movements, including gay and lesbian organizing, did not erase transgender folks, sex workers, and people of color.) There is no one or given “community” of women.

The aftermath of this election uncovered more than the fiction of women’s uniformity or unanimity. American identity, always a loosely woven cloth, continues to fray. Muslim communities anticipate a police registry, immigration bans, and increased surveillance...