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Title: American Radicalism Author: Joel Olson Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: radicalism, United States of America, immigration Source: Retrieved on 15th November 2021 from https://joelolson.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/American-Radicalism.pdf Notes: Joel Olson is the author of The Abolition of White Democracy (2004) and a member of the Repeal Coalition.
I’m a member of the Repeal Coalition, a group building a grassroots
campaign to repeal all anti-immigration laws in Arizona. In the process,
we are trying to build an alternative politics of immigration. Rather
than the nativists’ attempt to hate, harass, and blame all undocumented
people and their allies for all of Arizona’s woes (and we’ve got a lot
of woes right now), we insist on the right for all people to live, love,
and work anywhere you please, regardless of documentation.
To the Minutemen, Teabaggers, Sheriff Joe Arpaio supporters, and other
nativists, our politics are un-American. “America needs to defend its
borders from the illegal alien invasion!” they practically spit at us.
“If you don’t love this country, then leave it!” (The hypocrisy of their
position is that they are trying to make many undocumented migrants who
do love the U.S. leave it. Such a strange patriotism!)
I used to have a knee-jerk reaction against this patriotism. “If these
people represent what it means to be an American, then I don’t want
anything to do with America,” I would grumble. But the more I think
about it, the more I’ve come to believe that nativists don’t represent
what it means to be an American.
It’s true that, as Frederick Douglass said in his famous 1852 “Fourth of
July” speech, the United States is guilty of “gross injustice and
cruelty.” Douglass is right to blast, “your national greatness [is]
swelling vanity; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence;
your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”
But as Douglass himself recognized, this is only part of the story.
Slaves, for example, believed in the American principles of liberty,
equality, and democracy more than the citizen. Aren’t they more
“American,” then? Undocumented people often believe in these principles
more than the nativist, too. Nativists tend to see freedom as a
privilege for some, to be denied to others. But those who have been
excluded from American democracy, from slaves to indigenous peoples to
the undocumented, see it in a much more expansive and radical light.
They are not afraid to follow these principles to their logical
conclusion—such as the right for all people to live, love, and work
where they please.
The revolutionary C.L.R. James (1901–1989) has influenced my thinking on
this. James was Black, Latin American (he was born in Trinidad) and
himself an “illegal alien” (he moved to the U.S. in 1938, stayed after
his visa expired, and was deported in 1953 during the Red Scare). He was
also a radical who loved America. He opposed elitist distinctions
between “art” and “popular culture,” “intellectuals” and “the people,”
and “politics” and “everyday life.” In the U.S. he saw these things
brought together by a creative, hardworking, freedom-loving working
class and a culture that truly believed in the intelligence and capacity
of ordinary people.
But James also feared there were dark forces “making for totalitarianism
in modern American life.” These forces—racial discrimination,
capitalism, and an increasingly powerful federal government—produced
isolation and alienation and a loss of freedom among Americans. If they
became too strong, James predicted, they could undermine the democratic
ethos of America. Supporters of civil and immigrant rights today can
easily see similar forces at work today.
James didn’t hate the U.S. because of this tension between freedom and
totalitarianism, nor was he a blind patriot. Rather, he believed that
the working class needed to recognize this contradiction in order to
defeat the dark forces. In other words, we need to redefine the U.S.,
not reject it.
This is a difficult lesson for radicals today, who see the U.S.
exclusively as an imperialist, racist, sexist force. They believe that
the only way to build a free society is to reject America. But the U.S.
is also native resistance, abolitionism, radical Reconstruction, the
Wobblies, SNCC, Black power, the Brown Berets, feminism, Stonewall, and
May 1, 2006. These are every bit as American as Sheriff Joe or Abu
Ghraib.
In the U.S., liberty has come with slavery, equality has come with
racial and gender tyranny, democracy has come with the lynch mob. We
beckon other nations to “bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled
masses” while demonizing people as “illegals” for taking us up on the
offer. But this contradiction is an opportunity to transform the U.S.,
not an excuse to reject it. It’s an opportunity to see undocumented
migrants, waving American and Mexican flags alike, as expressing a new
vision of freedom, one that goes beyond the narrow confines of the
nation state. Like others before them, these folks are struggling to
transcend the very meaning of “American.” It’s a struggle I want to be
part of.