By Wolfgang G. Bronner
So, is Kamala Harris Black? This has been one of the many critiques sent towards Harris and any Harris supporter. Born to a Jamaican father and an Asian mother, Kamala Harris does indeed carry the racial identity of Blackness (Jamaicans are Black, y’all); however, why has this been a critique launched at her? I believe in order to understand this critique, you have to look at how Kamala Harris interacts with the larger Black/New Afrikan community. As a lot of people say, “Black people are not a monolith,” and one of the places where this concept is most ignored is when we look at class. Not every Black/New Afrikan desires the same things; some of us desire to “be seen” while others are completely fine not being seen but desire improved material conditions, such as public safety, housing, education, etc. This desire is evident in regards to how Kamala Harris engages groups like the Divine 9 and working-class Black/New Afrikans who wish for a genocide to stop.
All transparency: I am a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, and one thing that I want to stamp is being a member of Divine 9 does not automatically mean that we know what is best for the Black/New Afrikan community. The only way we find that out is by deeply ingraining ourselves within our communities, not only during the times when we need to complete a national program but every single day, the way real organizers do. Briefly glancing at our histories, it is clear that the Divine 9 as a whole is very elitist, and this is seen in the ways we interact with our communities. Some of us refuse to even be in community with certain Black/New Afrikans because we look down on them, some of us refuse to engage with them when they have legitimate critiques, calling them ridiculous things such as GDIs, aka a Goddamn Individual, which completely strips them of their humanity and communicates to non-Greek Black/New Afrikans that because they haven’t “rose to our level,” they have no room to critique what we do, even if some of these Black/New Afrikans we are dehumanizing are actually in the community more than we are.
This lack of community shows when our national organizations put all this energy behind people like Kamala Harris,but lack that same energy for community initiatives/programs, for political prisoners, for alternative third parties, and most importantly, for Palestinians. This relates to what I said: some of us are worried about representation, while others are more concerned with material conditions. We have different interests, and the interest that is sought with Kamala Harris and the Divine 9 is representation, even if that representation will not change material conditions. What does it mean to support a Black & Asian woman who went to an HBCU and joined a Divine 9 organization when that same woman locked up thousands within her own community and is complicit in an ongoing genocide? It is important to note and struggle with these contradictions because they go against a lot of our values and principles.
We cannot allow ourselves to get caught up in representation. Just like how we did not represent the majority of Black students on college campuses, we do not represent the majority of the Black masses now! We should be using our positions to demand that Kamala Harris address the material conditions of the Black masses, especially if she and the Democrats are gonna walk around utilizing the fact that she went to an HBCU and joined a Divine 9 organization as some sort of familiar connection that will cause people to ultimately support her. It is not enough. Representation is not enough, and if this is enough for Black Greek Life members, then we have ultimately FAILED to pursue our mission and aims. We cannot allow our organizations to be utilized to further the conditions of domestic & foreign colonialism.
To conclude, members of Divine 9 must discard our liberal tendencies and remember that we have had revolutionary members in all our organizations. Martin Luther King Jr. told no lies when he said, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own Government, I can not be silent.” Coretta Scott King challenged us to see the connections between us and other oppressed groups: “Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it for others.” Both husband and wife understood that the country people celebrate now, is 100% responsible for the chaos in the world and that it is incorrect to place our “needs” over the world’s. Again, I repeat that representation is not more important than genocide. Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, knew this firsthand. He urged his party to stand in solidarity with oppressed groups around the world and domestically. The Black Panthers formed relationships with Palestinians, our siblings in Africa, China, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Algeria, etc. Huey Newton also spoke out against homophobia/transphobia, while our organizations today are banning those individuals. Every Black History Month, we celebrate what Carter G. Woodson gave us, but did we listen when he said, “When you control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told.” Lots of Divine 9 are controlled and have found their ‘proper place’, and that place exists in asking for breadcrumbs from the very people that continually subjugate the masses and never dare to struggle for more, never daring to struggle to win.