Lessons from the Conyers' sit in: Race does matter

A group of protesters, the overwhelming majority of them white, were arrested on July 23 for refusing to leave the office of Rep. John Conyers. The protestors were angry with Conyers, who is head of the House Judiciary Committee, because he doesn’t want to move forward on impeachment proceedings against Bush.

Larry Holmes speaks at a 2005 rally in New York in support of Katrina survivors. Photo: Alex Majumder

For starters, the main problem with this sit-in is that Conyers is African American. There are an endless number of white Democratic Party members of Congress, many more powerful and less progressive than Conyers, whose offices the protesters could have chosen to occupy. Why not target the offices of some of the Democratic Party presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden? What about the offices of Senate and House Leaders Jim Reid or Nancy Pelosi? If impeachment advocates had chosen any of these white politicians’ offices to make their protest, only those critics who insist that no Democratic Party politician be criticized would have had a problem with it.

It’s a mistake for white activists to act as though race doesn’t matter, because it does. But this is a mistake that honest and thoughtful activists can and should learn from. Indeed, the movement needs more people who are willing to go into a politician’s office and be prepared to stay until they either get what they want, or get carried out.

Conyers happens to have a certain progressive reputation, but it would be a mistake for whites to target even a lesser well-known Black member of Congress without Conyers’ record. To think otherwise is to live in a fantasy world where racism doesn’t exist and people of color have come to trust that white people will act in the interest of all, and not just in the interest of whites.

One of the leaders of the protest at Conyers’ office, Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., an influential and militant young African-American leader, certainly doesn’t have to be defensive about it. His actions showed a considerable measure of principle and courage. I only wish more African-American activists would have been with him. If that had been the case, the dynamics of the confrontation might have been completely different.

Cindy Sheehan was also a leader of the Conyers’ office protest. Sheehan has been so used, abused and betrayed by Democratic Party politicians, that while I disagree with her on targeting Conyers, it’s not difficult to empathize with the deep sense of frustration, even desperation, that she and others feel over how so many so-called progressive Democratic politicians have taken an express train to the right so as not to harm their party’s presidential quest.

Race is not only an issue here in the United States, but the central issue. The Conyers controversy begs the question: are we serious about knocking down the virtual walls of apartheid that permeate every institution and social movement in this country, including the anti-war movement? Before I write more on this, let’s discuss the impeachment issue. I am all for it, and all progressive people should be for it.

It is a healthy sign that a growing strata of the political movement is to the best of its ability trying to keep the fight to impeach Bush alive. Impeachment is certainly justified. Lying about reasons for the war, plus the constant assault on civil liberties, important as they are, are minor reasons to put the Bush regime on trial. The more substantial criminality of the Bush regime is its perpetration of genocide from New Orleans in Louisiana to Anbar province in Iraq. The impeachment demand has also opened another necessary fight that will further expose the top leadership of the Democratic Party for the hypocrisy of talking against Bush and the war, while supporting Bush and the war.

Any criticism of the demand for impeachment that is premised on pushing aside everything else in the interest of electing a Democratic president is tantamount to giving Bush, the Pentagon and both capitalist parties carte blanche to kill as many Iraqis as possible—and maybe some Iranians—over the next 16 months.

Which way for the anti-war movement?

The character of the impeachment movement makes a big difference. Preferably, it should be a mass movement, and a movement that engages and mobilizes the workers. If the character of the impeachment struggle is limited to Congressional proceedings, Bush and a few other people may fall, but it will amount to an exercise of the system sacrificing a few of its servants in order to conceal the reality that the whole imperialist system is a criminal enterprise. Once again the mass of the people will be fed the lie that they need not rise up because the system corrects itself.

This leads us right back to the question of what is needed to stop the war and the imperialist system that it serves. The anti-war movement is not only segregated, it is all too often lacking in the most elementary class consciousness.

As the most dynamic sectors of the working class are more and more Black and Brown, the racial divide and the class divide have become one and the same. A movement that is not rooted in the working class cannot stop a war, and most certainly cannot challenge or overturn the capitalist system. An anti-war movement that is either in reality, appearance or both, a white movement, and privileged in relationship to the poorest section of the working class, constitutes no threat to the status quo. Such a movement is at best a symbolic protest movement.

The anti-war movement as it exists today generally fits the description of a symbolic protest movement. The movement won’t move beyond its narrow status until organizing workers is more important than anything else. The political issues that are primary to the impeachment movement, such as violations of international and U.S. law, are very important issues.

However, these issues may not be the issues that are on the minds of many workers. If we want to close the class divide in this movement, we had better learn how to connect the broader issues to the things that workers are talking about, like how they’re being ravished by capitalist globalization.

How about impeaching Bush for pouring an estimated 2 trillion dollars into the occupation of Iraq while foreclosures are putting families out on the street and bridges are literally falling down? How about impeaching Bush for his complicity in mass genocide and gentrification in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast?

As bad as conditions already are for most workers, if the last few weeks on Wall Street turn out to be the beginning of a capitalist stock market worldwide meltdown, the anti-war movement will be even more irrelevant if it remains largely divorced from the class struggle and the struggle against racism.

It would be misleading to suggest that closing the class and racial divide in the anti-war movement is going to be either quick or easy. In truth it’s going to take unbreakable commitment and a lot of work on the part of all of us who take this question seriously. But first we must be clear on the direction that we need to move in.

We have to get it through our heads that the war abroad is in essence another front of the same war at home.

If the prevailing attitude in the anti-war movement is that Katrina, or the war that the police are waging against Black and Latin@ youth from coast to coast, or the government’s raids against immigrant workers, fueled by the racist demagogy spewed every day on CNN by Lou Dobbs and hundreds of right-wing radio stations is “not our problem,” then the divide will widen.

It doesn’t have to. It’s time to rescue the principle of solidarity from its present status as amounting to little more than rhetoric. Solidarity, revived as a living principle, becomes a prerequisite and a prescription for victory over imperialism. When we remember the Conyers sit-in controversy months and years from now, let us remember it as one of the things that compelled the movement to take solidarity seriously, and act on it.

The writer is a leader of the Troops Out Now Coalition.