In this conversation, acclaimed activist and scholar of the Black freedom struggle Donna Murch offers context for understanding the roots of these attacks—the better to fight them.
In This Moment: Fighting for Racial and Social Justice
An Interview with Donna Murch
May 16, 2025
THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED DAYS of Donald Trump’s second presidency hit like a gale force of reaction. DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives were axed. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was ramped up for deportations. Palestine solidarity activists were targeted. Thousands of federal workers lost jobs. At a moment like this, the Left needs deep historical reflection and strategic thinking as well as the capacity for emergency response. In this conversation, acclaimed activist and scholar of the Black freedom struggle Donna Murch offers context for understanding the roots of these attacks—the better to fight them.
What we have called Trumpism is often identified with the monstrous individual, rather than a larger social agenda that includes attacks on education, on DEI initiatives, migrants in the US, antiracist education, and the right to protest the genocide in Gaza. Could you talk about the larger social and historical context in which the new right agenda has taken shape?
There are grand historical continuities in the United States. My own position is that the United States is best understood as a settler colony. Although intellectually and politically, we always compare ourselves to Europe and other wealthy countries of the world, I think our history is better situated within that of other settler colonies such as Kenya, South Africa, and also Latin America.
Liberalism is actually very weak in the United States. We can go all the way back to the constitution with its three-fifths clause.1Editor’s note: the three-fifths clause of 1787 gave increased political representation to the US South by counting every enslaved person as three-fifths of a person. The historical parameters in which we operate in the United States involve the genocide of the Indigenous population, and then the use of the transatlantic slave trade as a form of economic development. And here we find the depth of anti-statism, the opposition to the centralization of power, with the Civil War of secession and its attempt to prevent a concentration of power in order to protect slavery. The history of the Right in different time periods is always operating within those historical parameters.
While I could go much further back in recent history, for me one of the single most important things was the transformation of the tax code in the 1980s under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. I was a teenager then, but I attended college starting in the late 80s. And it gave me an opportunity to learn about politics in relation to the elimination of relatively high taxes on the rich, both inheritance taxes and graduated income tax. That restructuring of the tax code has been crucial to the creation of these billionaires that we have now. What I see happening now is state capture by the billionaire class.
What has allowed us to end up with Elon Musk and billionaires in the cabinet with their right-wing populism? I see a direct line from Reagan. They are striking at the legacy of the New Deal in multiple ways. We know the New Deal was also incomplete, especially compared to European social democracies in the post–Second World War years.
Nevertheless, I had the privilege of giving a lecture at Salve Regina University some years ago, which uses lands and buildings—mansions, in fact—that were donated by millionaires because of the tax costs they incurred. All of this was rolled back during the Reagan era and its relentless attack on the government.
One of the things that is challenging now is also the nature of the Left. We have such a violent country in which both the military and the police state are extensive. So, many younger leftists that I know embrace simple anti-statism. Many of them come out of a decentered anarchist or autonomist tradition. It’s understandable.
I think people coming of age in the post–Civil Rights era see government exclusively as a source of so much pain and violence. But we have to be able to have conversations about the redistribution of wealth, and states matter for that. This is not only a question of left versus right. It’s also about the contempt within the American political tradition for granting economic powers to the state.
In this context of neoliberal efforts to reconfigure the state, could you discuss Trump’s attacks, particularly on higher education—and the corporate motives that are driving them.
If we go back to the 1960s and the 1970s, those became the years in which the university played an essential role in radical politics. We were stepping outside the very conservative and brutal American mainstream, and it wasn’t just the spread of ideas. The private universities were also a site of contestation, but the public universities, because of their scale and size—you know, your average person who attends college goes to a community college and lives at home—were critical. We always look to the very top, like Columbia University as the representative university, but in reality it’s more like Manhattan College.
During the Cold War and the competition with the Soviet Union, federal and state funding to universities grew enormously, as they were seen as at the core of economic development. You can look at the way that public universities are built. They are showcases—grand neoclassical architecture, beautiful green quads.
And in the 1960s and ’70s, the number of college students doubled. Working-class kids were getting access to the university, especially Black and Brown students, and women too were gaining access to the university. The university also became a huge incubator of the antiwar movement, as well as the Black radical movement. So, you have the Black Panther Party coming out of a study group at a community college but working closely with the multiracial antiwar movement in Berkeley, California.
And many of these students saw the universities as central to Cold War economic development and American militarism. Think about the opposition to the US war in Vietnam. You know, it’s the only war in American history that was stopped through sustained protest over years. I keep pointing that out to people with respect to Palestine. It took ten years. In the heat of the moment, it doesn’t always feel like a win. But from the point of view of the police and the military and right-wing portions of the government, Vietnam was seen as a devastating defeat.
So, the anger at the university goes back very far. And you had developments in New York involving the mobilization of especially Black and Puerto Rican students—and the creation of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. Political elites witnessed the universities becoming the site of radicalization like this. They were worried about both the race, class, and gendered effects of a democratized university. This had to do with the democratization of leftist ideas, but it was also about the social mobility of groups that had previously been excluded. And these worries crossed party lines.
There was a conscious attempt to try to prevent what happened in the 1960s and ’70s. We can see this in the writings of Samuel Huntington and others and with the Trilateral Commission in the mid-1970s.2
Editor’s note: the Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by elite political figures from both the Republican and Democratic parties, including David Rockefeller, Jimmy Carter, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. One of the biggest things they did was support eliminating free higher education. Imposing tuition at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the California university system played an essential role in this.
One of the most brutal examples is what happened under Ed Koch at the City University of New York. There was the institution, and then the increasing, of fees. One year after fees were instituted at CUNY, the Black and Brown student population decreased by half. Later, you have the rolling back of open enrollment, which was based on the principle that everyone should gain access to the CUNY system. You had something similar under the master plan in California.
The university just is a platform for the Left. If you want to produce radical ideas, then where do you recruit? Where do you have organizations that are being formed that exist outside the two-party system? I think the university is crucial. That’s why I went into the university. I started in the 1980s, and I thought of the university as one of the only places where one did not have to take a corporate job and could have a creative job with more control.
So, the attack on the university has deep roots. But the recent history involves Trump’s reaction to Obama’s first term and the backlash against the Movement for Black Lives. We have had a similar response by elites along the lines of their reaction to the 1960s and ’70s.
I’m actually surprised that this didn’t happen sooner. I expected it in the 1990s. I was a graduate student at Berkeley, which was ground zero for the attack on affirmative action in the University of California system, with the Bakke decision in 1978.3Editor’s note: in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the US Supreme Court ruled that colleges could not use racial quotas in the admissions process. So being a student at Berkeley in the ’90s, I witnessed this attack on affirmative action. And then came the attack on teachers and teachers’ unions under the George W. Bush administration. Around 2010 or 2011, when we had the mobilization of the Chicago Teachers Union—and then the other teachers’ groups that followed them—I remember seeing a teacher trotted out on CNN being attacked by the host as if she were a criminal.
This was around the time when the Newark school system was turned over to the Edison Project to create a private, for-profit system—which turned out to be a disaster. They were pushing to privatize K–12 education and to specifically attack the teachers and their union protections. But we haven’t really seen anything like the organized attack that is underway now.
What then is Trump’s battle plan in the education sector?
To start, I think that they want to damage and eliminate as many institutions as they can. We recently had a meeting at Rutgers about the National Institute of Health cuts. I didn’t realize how much of the university was federally funded because, when we’re trying to fight for state appropriations, it’s at the state level. But the federal government has been subsidizing university operations in all kinds of ways, by providing grants that cover, for example, the costs for staff and other material inputs in order to run a lab. So, at Rutgers, the expectation is that federal grants support 57 percent of the costs. And Trump’s gang has proposed a cap of 15 percent.
We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in shortfall. So, the first thing they’re doing is attacking fiscally. They’re going to the core of university finance. For the private schools, they’re talking about eliminating their not-for-profit status and taxing their endowments.
What’s so dangerous about this moment, therefore, is that you have interest convergence inside the universities themselves. You have a transformation of the university as it is taken over by MBA programs. More than just wanting to eliminate the federal government, this is also about wanting to extract from it and treat it as a source of revenue—looting the state while weakening the security of faculty and staff.
In both privates and publics, we’ve had an exponential increase in the number of administrators angry about the tenure system. They’re angry about tenured faculty, and they want to figure out how to eliminate labor protections and make all people inside the university contingent faculty so they can drive down wages and police both speech and the curriculum. Very few administrators are willing to stand up and protect their institutions from the assault by Trump and others. I think that many of these people who support a neoliberal university are going to welcome this as a justification for restructuring the university, including both grandfathering out tenure track jobs and more overt firings.
So, it puts us in a very difficult position because we already have hostile administrators inside our institutions. And then there is the issue of the Palestine solidarity, its depth of mobilization and the courage of young people who led this movement. There’s a fury at the universities that has brought together the far right with liberal Democrats.
That’s why we’re in so much trouble. Alongside the economic issues, there’s also elite anger at the university for being a site of political mobilization.
Let’s talk in this regard about the moral panics the right has whipped up around oppressed groups. As you point out, the fiscal attack is cloaked by attacks on DEI, trans people, and Palestine solidarity activism. Could you talk about the dynamics that the Right is using here?
The Right has really cloaked itself in the culture war; this fact has been a constant throughout my life. I feel like the culture war was in full effect in the 1970s and ’80s. In my early to late teens during the ’80s, Bill Maher’s show, Politically Incorrect, became one of its most important political expressions.
It’s an argument that goes a little something like this. You have coastal elites who live in urban areas and are completely separated from the heartland. They have no idea about ordinary lives. These coastal elites support forms of culture and politics that alienate them from the mainstream of the working class. This argument easily slips into both racism and antisemitism with language that identifies these elites as globalists.
This view of the “culture war” was Tom Wolfe’s argument in his awful book about Leonard Bernstein and the Black Panthers, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. But this is a longstanding racist (and sometimes antisemitic) argument that blames intellectuals and universities for being out of touch with the true values of American heartland. Right now, it’s Christopher Rufo, the right-wing opponent of critical race theory, representing the fight over “woke” culture and that fight’s implicit anti-Blackness.
‘Wokeness,’ after all, comes out of the Black vernacular of people talking about the Movement for Black Lives.
“Wokeness,” after all comes out of the Black vernacular of people talking about the Movement for Black Lives. It was a way for young people to talk about the importance of coming to consciousness. “Woke” often means antiracist. But it is used in so many different ways and, unfortunately, has been taken up by a number of liberals. But crucially, it indicates attempts to fight racism and fight state violence. So anti-Blackness has been key to this issue. And I think that it involves, again, some convergence of the kind I was talking about earlier. It’s not only the Right talking about this. It’s many, many people in this center—people who would identify as liberal.
I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, and I recognize that this is hardcore. I call it Trump for Trump. I grew up witnessing this in a city that was 95 percent white with a very tiny Black population that became a heartland for the Reagan Democrats. And it happened because working-class white people, and some lower middle-class and even suburban elites, were so concerned about the “undeserving”—meaning, primarily, Black people.
The real focus in the 1980s was on Black people. Now, we are seeing the shift towards the antimigrant piece. There are some continuities, but also some changes. But again, the fear and fury about the “undeserving” being given state benefits led people to support programs that divested the economic future of their children and grandchildren. And so, the culture war piece is taking away discussions about cause and effect. What will improve your life? Serious discussion of that is prevented by demonizing a population of “the undeserving.”
These demonologies are deeply satisfying to many people. I’ve thought about this issue in the union movement. Why is it so satisfying to blame individual people, often people in proximity to you, versus trying to talk about and understand what processes or structures look like? We have to figure out how to deal with this. Why are these arguments so satisfying?
It’s a psychological wage, like Du Bois talked about. It appears easier to kick down than to take on an all-powerful structure. So, let’s talk about the debate on the Left about how to deal with this targeting of oppressed groups. Some sections of the Left want to say, “good riddance to DEI. We need class politics.” This seems suicidal, especially because, as you said, “woke” is their code word for antiracism. They use DEI and “woke” as a substitute for the N-word. So how do you think the Left should respond to this divide and conquer strategy?
We have to be explicitly antiracist. And not just for moral reasons, for practical reasons. The core of this goes back to the origins of the United States, of us never having been a social democracy. It has to do with the reality that slavery was at the core of the founding of the United States and shaped its economic understanding.
At the same time, the countries that had social democracies also restricted citizenship. Germany has had a large Turkish population that for three generations didn’t have even a path to citizenship. So, I don’t want to romanticize European social democracies, especially in light of the “class over race” people, who often look to Scandinavia.
While antiracism has to be at the very center, we must appreciate that, the Left has to change as forms of racial capitalism change. There’s no transhistorical way to be on the Left. There are purists who want to go back to Marx and to treat Marx as dogma. Thinking through the leftist tradition is important. But we also have a whole long episteme that postdates Marx and looks different in different places.
While antiracism has to be at the very center, we must appreciate that the Left has to change as forms of racial capitalism change.
In a country like the United States, even liberalism itself is very weak. And I want to stress that. Because both the Right and the Left attack liberalism. And one of the reasons they do that is because it is so weak. I really see us as a country that’s more like a state attached to a military, and the bare-boned social welfare provisions that we have won took many years and incredibly hard work to extract. Why does the United States not have national health insurance? Well, because the southern states in the 1940s were concerned that if there was a big federal investment in the South, they’d have to dismantle their system of segregated hospitals.
One of the most obvious examples is that the United States was not a full electoral democracy until after 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. It’s not until you have the actual enforcement of the Voting Rights Act that you even have the Black population’s ability to participate in democracy. It’s very, very recent. So, antiracism is the core. In order to wage successful political struggles, you have to understand your own history and your own sense of possibilities.
And, to me, we need a “quilted” left that brings together multiple groups of people. So, you have certainly the Black population, but you also have immigrant populations. You have the women’s movement. You have queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming populations. You have neighborhood groups.
I wish that we could rewrite history by ignoring the United States’s core structure, which is rooted in racial disparities. But we can’t. We have to confront both the history and the present that we have and then figure out how to put together a large enough group of people to fight the enormous threat we face.
That leads to the next question, which is about in your capacities as a prominent antiracist educator, a union leader, and a Palestine solidarity activist. What kind of lessons do you draw from these experiences about how we should organize to resist Trumpism in the coming months and years? And what should unions in higher education practically do?
I guess I’ll just go in the order of how I’ve understood it over different periods of my life. I have considered myself an activist scholar for most of my life, which means that I was studying social movements. I wrote about the Black Panther Party and other forms of Black radicalism using oral history, sitting with people and listening to this generation of radicals that I never really learned about until I wrote my PhD dissertation. I literally learned about these histories from talking to people. And again, the importance of listening. Listening is extremely important; it’s the first thing I would start with.
As you know, the United States is an incredibly individualistic, competitive country. It is the culture. And this is where the real culture war lies. Trying to figure out how to have lived solidarity. In organizing, with unions and beyond, one of the biggest issues is how to get people to work in a collective. Social media has made things worse because, as a very smart friend said to me, with social media, you confuse audience with community. And that matters because audience is driven by enunciation—performative politics, in which, unfortunately, negative emotions like opposition and cruelty draw more eyes.
We need to work on ways to break down individualism in order to work with people. The truth is solidarity often comes from working together and living next to each other. It grows out of real human experience, getting to know your neighbors, people that you might normally have hated, but you live next to them over years and years. You learn about them. They learn about you. You know, humans are deeply gregarious. One of the biggest challenges is how to work together. And I think that requires being trained in organizing.
At the core of organizing is that you figure out how to have conversations with people beyond those you like and with whom you have shared identity. Those people will always be there for you. But you try to have conversations with people that are different and maybe even difficult.
At the core of organizing is that you have conversations with people beyond those you like and with whom you have shared identity.
In union organizing, we’re all defined by our job. That’s what brings us together. But that may be the only thing we have in common. That’s number one. For number two, there are lessons to be learned from the Panthers, from how they organized themselves. You know, they were a group of young people who witnessed what was happening in the Vietnam war. They’re migrants from the South. They’re gaining access to education. And they felt that the real interaction they have with government is with the police. The police are the US state. And so, they started a form of activism in which they took on confronting the police. They felt—and I think they were right—that the police were the biggest source of pain for the Black community where they were organizing in the East Bay area of California.
So, the second thing is supporting other people’s organizing within their own communities. Figuring out how to support an ally. The Panthers talked about the Rainbow Coalition. And the Young Lords were also operating within this framework.4Editor’s note: the Young Lords were a militant Puerto Rican group that emerged in the late 1960s to confront racism and poverty. I like that: the idea of uniting the colors of the rainbow and then figuring out how to create coalition versus the top-down model of having a universal that says we’re all governed by class in the abstract.
We can and should talk about class. Class is absolutely central, but we have to allow for how racial segregation has created communities that have their own shared histories that cut across class. We’re seeing this with Trumpism. They’re attacking Black people of all classes. They’re attacking naturalized citizens across the board.
The Black Panther Party was also anti-imperialist. They were also anti-domestic-state-violence. But, and this relates to Palestine, for the Panthers and many of the 1960s movements, military occupation was actually the core of how they understood the police. So, they saw the fight in Vietnam and Southeast Asia and other parts of the world as a fight against imperialism.
Today fighting imperialism and fighting US foreign policy is the third rail in American politics. Once you touch that rail, bad things happen. The reason the Panthers were so attacked had to do with their coalition politics centered on stopping US imperialism. Even people like Bernie Sanders avoid this in order to remain viable inside the American electoral system.
With the Republicans and Democrats, there are differences when it comes to domestic issues. But when it comes to foreign policy, they’re very aligned with each other. And so, it is so dangerous to touch it in terms of getting fired, blacklisted, or stripped of citizenship. Look at what happened with Paul Robeson.
Yet we’re spending such an enormous amount of money on our imperial foreign policy that the United States cannot support the most basic needs for its population—shelter, employment, education, and healthcare.
This takes us back to the situation in the universities once more. Because this unwillingness to criticize US foreign policy often leads university administrations to preemptive compliance. So, while it accelerated over Palestine—a critical issue of foreign policy and empire—it is now accelerating with the rush to shut down DEI programs and services, to roll back support for trans students, and so on. What does that mean for the union movement on the campuses? Not only in defending against these attacks, but also in changing the balance within the universities. Clearly Rutgers University is important because you have such a strong union tradition.
Often people look at Rutgers and they think, “Oh, they have such a great left union. How did they do this? How did they become strong?” That’s relatively recent. In large part it is a credit to Deepa Kumar, who was the union president and was organizing and recruiting new people (including me).
During Trump’s first term she recruited new people in order to transform our union from a service union into a political union. And the way she did this meant most of us were recruited. So, this is actually a real opportunity because there are a lot of people like me, the union had been trying to recruit me for years. I was like many academics. We focus on our research because the things that are most rewarded are research- and writing-based. So, academics guard their time, and it’s part of the culture of the tenured professor. It’s even the model—to get tenure and then use that tenure to produce research, whether in the humanities or the sciences, that will in turn enrich the country.
But when Trump was first elected, I was just devastated. And it made me see the importance of joining a mass organization. I’d been a part of different kinds of movement for Black Lives, convening and doing the work of an activist scholar—writing, listening, trying to figure out how to work on projects with others. But when Trump was elected and then Bolsonaro in Brazil, I just was like, “fascism is coming.” Most of the leadership of color entered the union at Rutgers during Trump’s first term.
Rather than being beaten down and feeling like it’s all for not, we learned that this is a time to recruit people. It’s a genuine opportunity. So, it was time to go out and have organizing conversations, look around your individual departments, see what’s happening, and have conversations with people that have influence with coworkers. Don’t feel cowed. This is the time to recruit and to build power. Listen and observe what’s happening.
Take sanctuary organizing for example. You figure out how to work with faculty already doing that, along with undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and people within the community. Alongside sanctuary organizing, we need a critical voice about university administrations on issues of race and affirmative action. These are all things that people care about deeply. Unions need to address all of this.
This is a time that people are going to look outside established structures because the established structures are doing so little.
So, this is not a time for the politics of the possible. This is a time to recognize that people are genuinely afraid and that they’re going to look outside established structures because the established structures are doing so little.
As I’ve said, I think university administrators agree with Trump. I got a front row view on this. Our first radical union contract in 2019 created a union diversity program and our administration created a committee that was half union and half administrators to talk about how to implement it. And a few years later, the general counsel and the university lawyers were coming to us and trying to preemptively stop us from even using the word diversity. The kinds of businesspeople running the university are completely and utterly separated from its academic mission.
There’s a joke that we make at Rutgers all the time about having overheard administrators say that Rutgers would be such a wonderful place if we could just get rid of the faculty and the students. They’re looking at the university as a hedge fund for real estate—infinite opportunities for subcontracting and real estate deals. They’re really driven by the business side. It’s been interesting with the firing of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, where people are really talking about their vision of a hedge fund attached to a school.
Some of them are Republicans. When we had our big strike at Rutgers, the person we were negotiating with was the former head of labor under Governor Chris Christie. Even though Jonathan Holloway (an African American historian) was our president, the people that were really running the university and that we had to deal with were from the Christie administration.
All of this was happening before the war in Gaza. They were already trying to limit the university’s educational and pedagogical functions. I mean, at Rutgers, they’re trying to defang and destroy the writing program. And this is one of the most important supports that we have for our student body.
Roughly a third of applicants are admitted to Rutgers. These students are smart, but they don’t always come from public schools or private schools that had a lot of individual teacher–student attention. And so, something like the writing program is one of the most important supports for them to succeed. It doesn’t seem like an accident to me that the administration is attacking the bread-and-butter service program for the undergraduates.
I do believe that we identify allies where we can, but I think in many ways, the interests of faculty, both tenured and contingent graduate students, staff, and undergraduates are quite different than the governing administrators.
You’ve written tons about the Black Freedom Movement in the United States. Are there particular lessons of the Black freedom struggle that are useful for us to draw on today?
This may sound strange, but I think having patience is incredibly important and I can give an example. You know, the mainstream views are that the Civil Rights Movement is bookended by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of schools in 1955. And that’s bookended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So, it’s ten years from 1955 to 1965.
But we consider the Civil Rights Movement as part of the long Black freedom struggle. That is, rather than bookending it by one court decision and one legislative outcome, we root it in a much longer and broader tradition. Some people start with Reconstruction. So, when writing about the history of the Black freedom struggle in the rural South, go back to places like Lowndes County, Alabama, where Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) said organizing work was practically futile.
Here you had a situation where nearly all the land was owned by whites, and Blacks were working as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. And the argument is that the struggles that happened in the 1950s and ’60s are a direct continuation of the struggles of the Civil War. They’re still fighting for the same things, the right to vote, the right of land tenure, the right to have representatives that look like you when you’re the overwhelming majority of the population. This makes me think, of course, about Elon Musk and how the prime attack is coming from a white South African.
Other people talk about the long Black freedom struggle with the founding of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1930s and the popular antifascist front and how important that was in parts of the labor movement. This is part of the history of the Black left that Ella Baker and Paul Robeson and others were part of. That’s why I’m saying patience.
Even with Palestine, we need to remember that it took ten years to stop the Vietnam War. And it was very, very hard. The things we’re up against are enormous. And you need to recognize that rather than attacking one another. I think there’s so much self-evisceration. And I think that we need to be kind to ourselves and work with different tendencies on the Left, even those we may not agree with.
Another thing is rooting ourselves in the most important struggles that exist inside communities. The Panthers chose to focus on police, while much of the more traditional Civil Rights Movement focused on expanding opportunity. And that’s understandable in a country with racial segregation. But expanding opportunity meant that there would be a portion of people who are positioned to rise in terms of social mobility.
But if you look at the totality of the Black population, there is a lot that’s lost. Even from the 1960s through the ’80s and ’90s. Black people’s wage rates had been converging with those of whites, but the employment rates were widening. The opportunities for Black working-class people were very different from those of Black people with college educations who are positioned for social mobility.
Always looking at the core of the population identifies those struggles that matter most because it’s the majority of the population. What’s sad is that we have Trump because of white people. We just need to say that since it’s never being said in the mainstream. This is one of the reasons we need a quilted left.
When I think of the United States as a whole, and the kinds of people that I grew up with, life is very hard. I think it’s harder for Black and Brown people, but for the white population too. I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and it’s just profoundly depressed. It has lost two thirds of its population over the course of my lifetime. And then there’s the difficulty of accessing basic things like clean water, healthcare, and schools.
The majority of people in the United States are living very difficult lives, even though we’re being told that we’re the luckiest people in the world. It’s challenging. With social media. More and more we see cause and effect are separated from one another. But I have to believe.
Struggles of the past show that the people have overcome enormous things, including being bought and sold as chattel. So, we can win. It may not be immediate, but we can win. But it requires long term sustained and patient organizing.
That’s a really important point. There was a meeting in which a Palestinian activist said that people are good at mobilizing, but they’re not good at organizing. And that makes a world of difference for our moment right now. Which leads to another question. What can an anticapitalist vision of social transformation contribute to our organizing efforts?
I think it should be the core right now. I think anticapitalism is key. But crucial to it is how we represent anticapitalism. One of my favorite Black Panther leaders was Emory Douglas. He was a brilliant artist. All those cartoons that he did transformed American culture, including that representation of police as pigs. Emory did that.
He was all about taking complex ideas and translating them into images and words that people could internalize—that would touch their hearts and their minds, and make them committed or angry, a whole range of political emotions. And Emory’s argument was that political art always roots itself in popular forms, even commercial forms, that you have to choose forms that people can understand.
So, it’s not like the Promethean vision of light brought from above and then gifted to the masses. It’s not that vision. It’s looking at ordinary people, people you want to mobilize, and seeing how they talk about things, how they understand things, what they are looking at. So, it’s really this work of rooting it in a popular vision versus a Promethean vision.
For example, an anticapitalist vision might have a cartoon that says, “Hands off my Medicare. Hands off my social security.” These slogans were being used by the Tea Party, if you remember. But, because of the separation of cause and effect, as Barack Obama is pushing a very corporate vision of healthcare drafted by Mitt Romney, people are thinking that it’s a direct threat to them receiving Medicare and social security. When you think about the Trump and the MAGA base, that tells you they are worried about their own economic survival.
So, I think this is a place where you need a broad popular vision. And to be honest, I think that what the United States needs is a left-wing economic populism. Too many people on the Left believe right now that they can move everyone towards socialism in Promethean fashion. I don’t agree with that. An anticapitalist and class-based vision has to be adapted in ways that people can understand.
In this regard, I am very proud of what we have achieved at Rutgers. There’s been a lot of mobilization around Palestine led by undergraduates and graduate students, but also by faculty. I’ve been very involved in the efforts around building solidarity for Palestine in our national union. Particularly in emphasizing the realities of scholasticide. I think it is vital to build campaigns against scholasticide that talk about the systematic destruction of educational institutions and how that is core to what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, and all of Palestine.
I would like to see more scholasticide campaigns. I think they’re a great way to win hearts and minds. I think we jumped immediately into questions of boycott and BDS. And that makes sense because that is the vision that has influenced all of us. But I feel like we’re in a moment when we need to figure out what we do about the destruction of an entire educational system. And I do think it has echoes and has resonance inside the United States.
I’ve never seen this much organizing in the university. Palestine has brought together people who have now become a movement.
We, of course, are not in any way facing the scale of what Palestinians are facing, but we are seeing a sort of a concerted attack on the university, because it’s seen as a site of all different kinds of radicalism, like racial justice. Solidarity with Palestine is also an opportunity to build a long-term coalition rooted in an anticolonial vision of opposition to the longstanding horror of US foreign policy. But linking it to other struggles, and I think that that resonates with me.
We’re seeing a level of organizing around Palestine solidarity that is incredible to me. We have a Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter; I’m on a million Signal threads. The phone is going off all the time. I’ve never seen this much organizing in my life inside the university. Palestine has spawned this kind of organizing. It has brought together people who were maybe adjacent or sort of liked each other but now have become a movement.
Let’s conclude with your thoughts on the anti-scholasticide campaign in the American Historical Society (AHA). That was a tremendous victory that was then blocked by the AHA Board. What’s your analysis of what happened there and the lessons from it?
The American Historical Association is the largest of historian’s associations in the United States. It doesn’t just include US historians; it also includes historians who study all parts of the world and many who work in other institutions like the national park service, the federal government. It has a membership of ten thousand people.
Last year, the Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPD) decided to put forward a scholasticide statement to the AHA annual meeting. HPD says that they organized far and wide. It’s not clear to me that that’s true. Regardless, they were having a vote on it in the business meeting and hundreds and hundreds of people showed up.
And the vote ended up being 428 for the resolution condemning scholasticide and 88 against. So, we won the vote by an enormous margin. Then we found out that this resolution had to be approved by the elected council. And that body vetoed the resolution.
It’s once again “the Palestine exception.” It’s devastating that a group of historians could not pass a resolution decrying the destruction of all universities inside Gaza. And meanwhile, they did issue a resolution about Ukraine. The Palestine exception is everywhere, and it links back to what I was saying about the danger that the university as a whole faces.
That’s one convergence between the hard right, the pro-Israel billionaires, and the liberal Democrats. I don’t think you can believe that Palestinians are human if you cannot endorse a resolution that condemns the killing, murder, and elimination of Palestinian university administrators, faculty, students, and staff. The only way you can’t issue a resolution about that is to deny Palestinians’ humanity.
But people are continuing to organize. Through the national American Association of University Professors (AAUP), we will be convening a webinar with Palestinian scholars about scholasticide. There’s a whole history of Palestinian activists naming scholasticide and then understanding it in relationship to the colonial project.
We will also be holding a Zoom conversation with the AAUP general membership with faculty, administrators, staff, and students from Palestinian universities. This is all part of the patient, persistent, long-term organizing I have been talking about. ×
Notes & References
- Editor’s note: the three-fifths clause of 1787 gave increased political representation to the US South by counting every enslaved person as three-fifths of a person.
- Editor’s note: the Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by elite political figures from both the Republican and Democratic parties, including David Rockefeller, Jimmy Carter, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
- Editor’s note: in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the US Supreme Court ruled that colleges could not use racial quotas in the admissions process.
- Editor’s note: the Young Lords were a militant Puerto Rican group that emerged in the late 1960s to confront racism and poverty.