Two newspaper cartoons from the United States neatly capture some of its current socio-political tensions. The first shows the lowering of a Confederate flag followed by the hoisting of the Rainbow banner associated with marriage equality; the second wryly compares the Confederacy’s cross-shaped pattern with the unpsoken but palpable divisions that often separate America’s privileged, largely-white zones of safety (expensive schools, gated communities) from the chaos and danger that encircle so many of its impoverished minorities.
The bravery, and perseverance, of the activists who have placed these issues at the heart of American life is extraordinary. Often they evoke, or continue, traditions that reach back into the tumultuous decades of the Civil Rights movement. Freedom Riders and Selma bridge-crossers of the 1960s would, for instance, immediately recognize Bree Newsome as one of their own. She recently climbed a flagpole outside the South Carolina statehouse and – while taking it down – denounced the Confederate flag as a harmful symbol of racial oppression. When police moved in to arrest Ms Newsome, she offered no resistance. Instead she recited the Twenty-Third Psalm. Afterwards she wrote that there is “no greater moral cause than liberation, equality and justice for all God’s people …[and no] better reason to risk your own freedom than to fight for the freedom of others.”
Equally inspiring, for those aware of their work, are the stories of Middle East human rights defenders and activists like the Iranian lawyers Shirin Ebadi, Nasrin Sotoudeh, and Abdolfattah Soltani and the bloggers in Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia who have given the region’s public sphere so much of its revolutionary momentum. Setting aside the West’s many foolish, self-congratulatory claims of tech-driven Facebook and Twitter “revolutions” in the Middle East and North Africa, one cannot fail to be impressed by the courage it took for 2 million Tunisians to post a revolutionary icon on their Facebook pages before the removal of their repressive dictator. In his “unfinished history” of the Arab Spring Marc Lynch writes that the personal bravery of the “human rights organizations, lawyers, academics and journalists [who] stepped forward to join protests and challenge a regime that had, for decades, kept them on a tight leash … cannot be exaggerated.”
Of course many similar stories could be told of progressive movements in Africa and Asia – and of their often disappointing outcomes. Every country inevitably faces a reckoning with modernity, an encounter that forces longstanding institutions to adapt, or perish. During these periods of revaluation, countries distinguish themselves by the intellectual capital they can bring to bear upon the challenges of interpreting and implementing these new freedoms. In the United States, for instance, an abiding reverence for the Constitution, will ensure that marriage equality will soon become, in practical terms, as assured and irreversible a victory as desegregation, or the right to access legal abortions or to burn an American flag.
Fifty years ago, West Indian intellectuals took stock of the postcolonial challenges their societies were about to face with commendable self-sufficiency. Moving well beyond their eurocentric educations, a whole generation of artists, writers and scholars engaged with fundamental questions of how the independent Caribbean should deal with the legacy of Western imperialism, confront the problems of racist plantation economies, and coordinate the region’s possible cultural and political futures. The failure of West Indian Federation gutted many early hopes that these debates would yield lasting solutions but the profound questions raised by members of the New World group (CLR James, Lloyd Best, George Lamming, et al) remain relevant, even urgent, to this day. What seems to have changed, especially as the Caribbean has fallen almost entirely under the sway of foreign media (at least in terms of our cultural and political bearings), is our willingness to articulate, and debate, homegrown answers to persistent dilemmas.
As activists in other parts of the world win victories for progressive causes, or wrestle concessions out of traditional and sometimes even reactionary institutions, we should remind ourselves how much ground we still have to cover when it comes to addressing, on our own terms, such basic questions as political power-sharing, drugs legislation and environmental protections, not to mention reforms that seek to provide social and economic justice or to end various forms of discrimination. If we cared to, we could look to our own creative class – just a few decades back – for inspiration on these matters, even though so many of us continue to look elsewhere.
