If you don't see the video above, click here.
Mae Jackson is a New York City based writer, poet, dreamer and doer whose record of activism on behalf of her people stretches back to SNCC. A founder of Art Without Walls, an art program for the children of imprisoned women, she is well acquainted with the difference between surface change, and fundamental, revolutionary change.
Here are a few minutes of her address to the crowd at May 31, 2009 event memorializing the early 20th century Harlem activist Hubert Harrison, in which she lays out a clear understanding of whose lips move when our First Black President speaks. Referring to some of Barack Obama's widely acclaimed orations at the Democratic convention, atop Lincoln's tomb, and other places, she tells us
“..those wonderful speeches made by the young man from Chicago were actually crafted, that's written, by three young white men 25, 26 and 31 years old. We got the unfortunate opportunity once again to see the world through their eyes. Obama was the spokesperson. Same as when you buy a painting, that doesn't make you the painter...”
She explains how the establishment turned took the politics out of activism, neutralizing and de-politicizing young political activists by turning them into “community organizers."
"For an ICU VA Nurse" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
The grassroots resistance against data centers is about more than zoning and community benefit agreements. It is the latest front in America’s war against the people over land, sovereignty, and who…
To understand the violence of contemporary immigration enforcement, one must trace its lineage directly to the antebellum slave patrols — a system founded on racial terror and complete state control.
The arson attacks that engulfed the protected forests of he Andean-Patagonia region serve as a reminder that Western conservation models, which dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands, are…
When political energy is channeled into opposing an individual, that energy is diverted from the work of building the popular power needed to challenge the empire he represents.
