Assaulted. It is the living politics. [applause] say that wanted to next question,he one of the most interesting moments in my political education is when i came out of prison in 1999. That aber very clearly friend of mine talk to me about the privileges i had that i did not know i had. He was talking about rebuilding my life. I looked at him and got angry. I said, first of all i just got a prison. Im still on parole. Shut up about my perl urges my privileges. Explained to me, you know what, brother, let me talk to you about the things that you never knew or understood you have. It was a telling moment. He said, you have amle privilege. Male privilege. I said, what he is saying, man . Im fresh out of the joint. He said, what have you ever done to protect your self from someone raping you when you walk all midnight. You came here and became a citizen. What happens to you when you get arrested and go to prison, versus a person undocumented thrown in prison and not charge anything and cap there for an elongated. Period of time. I thought about these things. I thought about all the privileges i have it i thought about the way someone is landed to me. Tell me about that explaining process on the ground, because if there is a bullet and my arm and i put my hand in there and rip it out, you are going to think i am torturing you. That i am going to make a cut, take it out, so you, give you pals that is the difference of explaining the truth to someone and throwing the truth at them. Why . Youdnt you be angry if were sleeping comfortably and somebody shook you at 4 00 in the morning just to tell you the truth . Real quick, and then you jump in. Believe and live by the need to lead. Most impacted when, everybody wins. [applause] should be a vested interest just to use gender as a vestede there is interest for all people to be wanting to and gender oppression. The truth is, please murders are not just gender related, they are patriarchal. That, peopleabout saying here we go with that again. Those most impacted our women, queer folks, trans folks. If we begin to look at the movement around please murders and look at the question of as present asst the racial discourse, number one, we would have included more movement in the people in the movement. In terms of victims and police der, but we would always also begin to include other forms of violence committed by police on black communities. Violence you of hear about is violence that is considered masculine, the shot, the choke, the punch, the billy club. About sexual violence, forcing people to strip. So not only are we talking about ander impacting queer folks we have abut deep and vested interest in all that. I think people should get behind me because they like me. There is a selfish solidarity, there is an interest participate. Do what they said. [laughter] [applause] i believe we have time for one more. Just to get a personal understanding. I told a story about a time i experienced police were taught me when i was 12 years old and talked about people who are activists in a movement, on ongoing theme, people as activists and a movement not bread in a lab. Most of them were people who were just living their regular lives and they could not turn away from the injustices they saw. In majority of the people this room are here because when you turn on your television or read your paper or when you find your news however it may be on the internet, you see a world you want to change, that you want to help to become better. What would that be for the two of you . It does not have to be an active in the moment, maybe a collective moment when you decided this is my calling, this is who i am . I think for me i was raised in a beautiful, loving black community. Raised by my grandmother and her friends. Many of them could not write their names. Mrs. Was a woman named roberta. She worried as me to calm and read to me, boy. Everyone puts her hands together for the guy who is keeping our time together. As i was raised in a beautiful, loving black community that love to jesus and loved justice, a grandmother who taught me to read at four years old, a community of semiliterate people who placed an emphasis on the life of the mind. The other part in terms of how i arrived i grew up in st. Louis. I am from there. There was something about seeing nonprofessional organizers in the streets. So those images of kids with tattoos and sagging pants, these , they got a whole thing, but comprehension is not requisite for compassion. You may not understand it. I did not understand what was happening. I still dont. I knew that some young folks from a poor, workingclass community, highly police to, experiencing these major article masculine forms of violence, high levels of surveillance by the police forces, alienated and demonized by the black church, nonprofitsources, no industrial complex, al sharpton and their, just some poor kids who said im not going home. As a religious creature, we tend to be reactionary and conservative. Of a missionary trying to say christianity from itself. The braddock allergy of these clear braddock radicality of these youth in the streets. Streets in ap the different way. Street, i gotthe to be in the street. I was born in the streets of ferguson. I have seen the face of god. And god is queer. God is angry. God is a single mother. God said the police. And so what has happened for me a space topened up find my own radical voice in a different way that it forced me out of the pulpit. I resigned from my congregation. [applause] i moved back to st. Louis. Day chasing of my behind young papal people. Baby, dont do that. Baby, this is how you do civil disobedience. Baby, dont do that. Even when theyre wrong, i never say a word about them in public that they are wrong. I will always defend them. Now on going to cost them out when we get in the room. They are only children. For the white folks, particularly for the white left, right ideas dont lead to write behavior. Did not dominate european philosophy for a hundred years until hitler popped out. We are only going to win when every time they shoot a black baby down in the street, you bring your paper, you bring your body. [applause] everything they need. They dont need your revolutionary consciousness. They already got it. Way, ashow up in a Church Basement somewhere, with some everyday people and figure out how you can support them and stand with them, im telling you you might be born again. You y possibility for for us to win is for you to fundamentally believe that you have as much to risk and instate at stake in our trouble as black people themselves. That means show up and shut up. Right on. [applause] what they said. [laughter] [applause] up with a moral stronghold. My grandmother was in church more than she was home. Really and dr. David indoctrinated me. I grew up knowing it was wrong. Older and begin to , systemsferent things analysis, what ever, on top of that. Natural. T the really did it is in beginning, we played rock, paper, and scissors. If you are black, clear, poor queer, poor everything is against me. Status against me in terms of incarceration and freedom. Sexual violence, Domestic Violence being acted out. Everything around me says if you queer, this is what the state has for me. Paper, us didnt rock, scissors, and said if we do, we going to go fighting. I dont have a choice what choice do i got . This is the only way i know how to live. Can feelng you that i her. If i dont get out in the streets, i cant sleep at night. Isnt it more safe to run from the police that it is to stay here and do something, right . I have been in it ever since. [applause] i just want to say that this is a topic we have touched on before, the idea of faith playing a role in somebodys revolutionary mentality. You claim jesus as your personal savior or if you are muslin or jewish or hindu or ist ever faith you have, it not just enough to say that is what you are, right . If i say i am a martial artist and a child comes in here or i say i am a doctor and i cant do the heimlich maneuver, then im not really a doctor. Im not really aged just sue master. At the same time, if youre going to talk about jesus or revolution or revolutionary movements, then you have to walk in those steps of jesus to be a christian. You have to feed the poor. That theytell them cant get married to someone because of a line in a book. Withl be out in the street the prostitutes, the people so poor that they cant afford any other living so they are selling their hotties in the slum. Bodies in the slum. That we realize this conversation isnt just limited to the faith we have in a god that is supposed to separate us from our revolutionary politics. That is our heaven. Getting there is our journey. Is our guide. I thank you very much. Please give it up for the panelists and for yourselves. [applause] that was a great panel, right . [applause] all righty. We will transition into the second portion of our panel. Pretty coolave some folks who have been out on the ground. Hello. If you can grab your microphone. To think about everything that was being said, and i was having a hard time wrap up what was said. The best way to do that is to share the work i am doing in los angeles. Working with young people in front of the high schools i dont know if you all know los angeles is the epicenter of counterinsurgency and police suppression. Young people are faced with the nations largest to School Police department and some of which they receive some weapons through the 1033 program, which tanks, grenade launchers, everything we saw in ferguson. For a lot of the black young people we were working with, a lot of their questions and that our demands and seem to be centered around reforming the system that is trying to harm us. How do we have a broader conversation about a broader black plan. How do we fight against counterinsurgency . Every weapon we see inside our schools or in our community is a signal to us that the system is going to war with us. It is a system to young people that you are not going to be the. Ext malcolm we are trying to suppress that before you can even think that. I think that was the best way for me to think about some of the work about getting on the ground and fighting. Portion of the panel, we will be addressing the state and also talking about National Organizational politics situated radical lateral process. The first question i wanted to ask is would you share with us Movement Building and youre left political experience. Where is the nature of revolutionary organizations today . And dig deep and talk about ,ragmentation, alienation between revolutionary organizations in your own experience. Ill start. The clearest way to start with that question is to actually look to the past. When we are talking about the fragmentation of the left today or even the smallness of the left today, i think we have to look at that in the context of what happens to the left during the last black insurgency and during the last when there was a larger significant left at the end of the 1960s and 1970s. I think that there were a couple a things at play in terms of concerted effort to destabilize the left. In this case, i talk specifically about the black left. On the one hand, there was the unquestionable assault by the state to crush and obliterate black revolutionaries, and even the black radicalism, from the destruction of detroit and allowing detroit to end up in the situation that it is today, to the massacre of black panthers, to the incarceration of black panthers and other black radicals. I think that that was a clear, unquestionable, aspect of that strategy of the state in not just undermining the left, but really to obliterate any notion that you should fight back, that you should resist, that you should have a different conception of what society and life should be like. Other part of that, we have oppression the other part is cooptation and the absorption of a layer of africanamericans into the system to demonstrate that american capitalism could work, could be successful, and to also shifted the burden of governing black urban spaces at that time from white political machines to black political machines, with the hope that that would be able to help remove at least one of the antagonisms that was driving the black rebellion of the 1960s. In many ways, the left is still recovering from this very effortative concerted at destabilization in the 1960s and 1970s, but i think where the hope lies its very difficult to talk about the rebuilding of the left outside of the context of the rebuilding of social movements in general. So, i think we are in a situation now where for the first time in more than a generation, there is actually a living, breathing social movement unfolding right in our midst, right now, and that represents to me the best hope and possibility of the revitalization of the bride left, but also the revolutionary left as well. [applause] thank you. [applause] yeah, i think that is a great starting place. Organizinging out of around occupy, although that was not the first organizing that i did. I actually first worked with a group of africanamerican women as part of the antiiraq war movement. I later got involved in the occupied actually. I think one of the key aspects building a left or considering what a left might be or should be right now is something about how we look towards a shared political horizon and what that means, a shared vision for our future. I think of that probably a lot of the fragmentation that we see is because there is not really coherent, and even as we speak about it, we are talking specifically right now about black lives of matter and the audience is mostly a white audience. We have to sort of grapple with what that means and how is it of unfoldinge work and creating spaces in which a process can unfold where we are able to come to gather and develop a shared vision. I think that when we think about organizing, one of the key moments definitely was occup because we didnt do this well in spite of the other problems. We were very open and invited everyone in. That was problematic and allowed for opportunities for repression to destroy a burgeoning movement , but we learned a lot about what it means to organize. The work is not about organizing per se. It is about how we come together and understand and relate to one another fundamentally. I think in terms of a revolutionary movement , i think that is one of the starting places we would want to look at, creating spaces where we can come together and develop a shared politic, shared social horizon in which we transform and relate to one another fundamentally. One more thing about that, thatse i agree with all and would also add that we are talking about rebuilding a left that we need what is left of it to be a part of that process. It is worth saying that to me that that is an attempt to synthesize history and politics in such a way as to figure out how to move our struggles forward. Sometimes that history and politics doesnt just naturally arise out of the struggle itself. Would be, we probably a lot further along than we actually are today. The, you think about the black Panther Party at the end of the 1960s. I think it was 1968 or 1969, black panthers were selling their newspaper, 100,000 copies a week, right . Do ishat newspaper would reconnect the movement at the time with its history and tradition in a way in this country is so savagely ripped from us. People have no idea of what the history and traditions of our movement is, whether it is the black movement, people dont know the struggles of the 1930s, the struggles of the 1960s, and that knowledge and information doesnt just calm out of thin air. It comes from people in this room, like people who identify as part of a left and who have made it part of their job to reconnect with that history and learn and understand the history, who have the responsibility to not just transmit it in an artificial way, but to invest themselves in the existing movement and become organically connected to them, not in a cheerleading way even, but as an organic expression of the movement that exists. Part of the effort is to reconnect our rich history and tradition of struggle in this country aside from struggles that have gone on across the world and to reconnect the new to reconnect to the new generation of revolutionaries and radicals who arent is getting into the struggle. A role to play in that area that can look like many Different Things in different ways, but it is important to recognize the the left that exists right now and how do we build on it. [applause] that has been at andcore of revolution counterrevolution. Jim crow, apartheid. In ourh do you think society or the movement, people are cognizant or thinking about that . Are thinking about history . Im not sure of the answer. I think they are thinking about history. Thatss what i would say to come ofoncern i have the way we analyze the history and do not fantasize it. Particularly within the africanamerican committees, we fetish in of the civil Rights Movement. To say the least. Challenging because that does not allow us to have struggles. Tional we have a generation of people who pride themselves on the amazing work they did at a particular time. Generationr my and younger, we have seen less results from that. On the one hand, we have we need to look to that history. But part of that analysis needs to be what has changed. How have the dynamics of power fundamentally changed. What are we up against and fighting for . Imagining and envisioning for ourselves . History andand, anybody who knows the work i do, it is based on history. It is very important. On the other hand, we need a new analysis and Work Together think about how our manifest itself power manifests itself. Whether looking nationally is the most effective strategy. Since we have power constructs that are multinational. That morph and grow and are very flexible across borders. Thinking we of the need, to create spaces in which we can do that together. Not from the perspective of coming with a belief about how things were in the past or how they should be. More of a kind of collective grappling. Some kind of decisionmaking and action. Process that we can , start to manifest, what that future might look like. One thing we have seen and we were talking about before the panel, we had a great conversation. We said we wished we could be up there right now talking. The ways in which current politics, particularly having a black president , what an existential breakthrough that was for people in spite of the results of that. It is not one thing, it is multiple things at the same time. What has come out with the black lives Matter Movement is some kind of glimmer beyond this political system. Some kind of glimmer beyond capitalism. Ms. Taylor sort of what i was speaking to before, then need for people to understand what our history is. To be reconnected with that particularly the history of radicalism and struggle. So much work it goes into disconnecting us from that history. It is one way too thick about the schools crisis. Our youngonly robbing people of the basic education but we think about what passes for history in this country. It unde