My favorite coffee shop is The Station, on Beacon Hill in Seattle. I love this place, not because of my 20 oz. latte, but because it is a hub of millennial grassroots energy. No, I don’t agree with a lot of the signs and T-shirts I see but I applaud the youthful energy and the call to see a change that affects us today. There always signs, T-shirts, and pamphlets promoting or denouncing someone or something along with a background of oud hip-hop or Latin music. Before the pandemic, there would always be a score of folk in discussions or study groups but I like young people who are serious. Recently I came across a bi-lingual pamphlet entitled, “Self Defense Against White Supremacy: Finding a path towards community-based self-determination”.
I read the English translation and found that it wasn’t saturated with socialist diatribe but the author stayed on point. The point is that all of us, regardless of our political stripe need to be more honest as we review our station in America and what and where change is/should come from. I’m not an organizer but maybe an agitator when I say that all future change of significance must come from the “grassroots” and not those who pander to the “grass-roots”. I thought the following except real telling:
“The only real contribution to social change by the institutional left is the non-profit industrial complex and the global NGO (Non Governmental Organization) phenomenon. The primary function of most non-profits and NGOs is to provide a false sense of peace, tranquility, and comfort, while never actually offering dignity, justice, and liberty.
Colonialism has always justified itself through ingenuous attempts at “saving savages” from themselves. The primary method of “saving” communities has come about through different types of acculturation and assimilation. The non-profit industrial complex locally, and non-governmental organizations globally, have been telling us that they are saving us, (mostly from our savage selves) without ever actually giving us the means for self-liberation, much less for self-determination and autonomy. Nowhere has this been more clear than in Haiti, where NGOs turned the administration of earthquake relief funds into big business. It’s time we start taking what is ours, and stop asking permission from anybody.
Arundhati Roy said it best in her book Public Power in the Age of Empire:
…It’s important to turn our attention away from the positive work being done by some individual NGOs, and consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context…
…Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance…
…in the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among.”
Except from El Enemigo Común
“NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among.” That was my first lesson as a 21 years old when I went to work for the Wichta Area Community Action Program, was to remember that soft money controls what an organization does when it asks for money. In that same vien “Foundational Black Americans” need to learn self defense. No one is going to take care of us and we need to stop acting as if someone will. Only when we have learned how to take of ourselve will we and the world around us change.