The late Kwame Ture in a talk at Florida International University in Miami in 1992 linked unity to organization and power. He made a clear distinction between mobilization– the general characteristic of the civil rights movement of the 20th century– and organization, which in my view, was what Malcolm X was trying to achieve with the OAAU before his assassination. On the side of mobilization, to paraphrase Ture, you have people who seek to achieve unity in what they are against while on the side of organization, you have people who seek to achieve unity in what they are for. He says, “Unity is not a feeling. Unity is not an emotion. Unity is a means of channeling the energies of the people towards given objectives within principles.” Ture clearly places organization and what he calls a unity of thought (where a unity of action is linked with mobilization) on the top shelf of the vehicle and thrust of revolution, and what so-called revolutionary movements have been lacking. And one could be quite convinced by this argument. By his analysis, what we are now seeing in the George Floyd rebellion is mobilization, unity of action, I would surmise. People unified against the police, against prisons. As “defund the police” struggles to escape liberalization and make the leap to “abolish the police”, at the same time we see all over the country, these spontaneous uprisings, unified actions in which police precincts have burned, stores have been looted, the white and black proletariat unified in action towards what they are against. And they aren’t stopping, they aren’t sitting down. Contrary to how Ture would characterize these mobilizations as spontaneity followed by a fizzling out, they don’t seem to be going anywhere. So there I see a challenge to his analysis. Not to mention, organizations give way to a different kind of power, stymied by a bureaucracy in which nothing, by design can ever be sustained.
I think Ture’s analysis holds up in other ways. Lately I’ve grown disillusioned thinking back on my old self in that I ever thought such a thing as “black and brown unity” was achievable. In the ways that I’ve had this term leveraged against me, I realized over time that this relationship or imagined scenario of unity could never exist, one because it is always a matter of a power imbalance, i.e. one party needing the other to be flattened to fit into their imagined ideas of unity, and two, because a true unity of thought could never exist between black and so-called brown people. I think often of my time in Oaxaca, a state in México where, due in part to its southern location and indigenous population, there are many people who have darker skin than I. And yet, those people, without a shadow of a doubt, know for certain that no matter how dark their skin color is, they are not black, and they will never be black. Women and children laughed at me my entire time in Oaxaca because they knew: I might be a prieto, but at least I’m not a negrito. And I think about these moments of racialization and anti-blackness as a black person who has traveled in Mexico as a way of cautioning me towards the flattening projects of dis(unity) rife within México already: mestizaje namely. Nasty shit it is really, and it spreads to chicanos here in the US, who are some of the most anti-black people I’ve ever met. Black people can have a unity in action with chicanos/Mexican people, sure: against ICE and the violence of the border which incarcerates and kills black and non-black latinx people, against the police, against US colonialism and imperial aggression. But this is where Ture’s words really hit me. What if we were to start thinking about what we were for? Would we find that a black and brown unity were possible or even desirable? The majority of chicanos are FOR Aztlán and some form of cultural nationalism for instance. The majority of Mexicans are FOR the cult of mestizaje, the eugenicist death project of black and indigenous denial. And the unity fucking disappears.
Are we forever trapped in a unity in action? Can this alone be the basis of a revolutionary movement? I fear that this thinking is too binaristic, or worse, dialectical. I fear that without a unity of thought, those contradictions that the communists are always going on about are gonna catch up to everybody, and no one’s gonna know what the fuck to do. It seems that only a unity of thought can happen along class lines. A global proletariat seeking to abolish its proletariat position and overthrow the ruling class. But there is no situation in which class just exists devoid of race. And so unity seems to me a dead-end.