Preoccupying: Selma James

Selma James is an activist and a prolific writer on anti-racism and women’s rights, founder of the International Wages for Housework campaign, and current coordinator of Global Women’s Strike. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, co-authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, launched the ‘domestic labour’ debate. It posited that the work that women do – not simply the ‘role’ that they play – outside of the market produces (and reproduces) the whole of the working class and, by extension, the market economy. In 2012, she published Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning, a collection of her work spanning sixty years. Occupied Times sat down with Selma, Nina from Legal Action for Women and Laura from the English Collective of Prostitutes at the Crossroads Women’s Centre for a conversation which covered a wide variety of topics and struggles, the majority of which is reproduced here.

Occupied Times

As part of the International Wages for Housework campaign you demanded money from the state for women’s unwaged, domestic labour. The lives of women with families continue to be characterised by unwaged work, and many also have the added struggle of more traditional waged labour. Do you sense a re-emergence of the kinds of analysis and drive that led to this campaign in the 1970s? What lessons can we learn from its successes and failures, and how best can we continue to challenge the exploitation of women today?

Selma James

There is clearly a re-emergence of interest in Wages For Housework. I wear the badge now [points to badge] People ask me about it [WFH], they didn’t for a long time. And feminism – the wave of feminism that began in the late 1960s — was very hostile to WFH… That is not true today in the same way. Those who consider themselves feminists and who are spokeswomen or in other ways public as feminists, are not hostile to WFH in that way – and I have to mention the reasons for that. Women, in general, are much more interested in WFH.

Now, what happened with WFH was that it came out of the movement of the 60s. It came from single mothers who fought for welfare, who immediately turned onto WFH, when we talked about it, and who said that the state was paying them too little for the work that they were doing. What women would say from that movement is ‘I have money of my own and therefore I am financially independent of men. My next door neighbours are often jealous of me because I have more freedom than they have in spite of the fact that they have access to more money. They themselves have less money that is their own. All they have is the family allowance (now child benefit)’.

That was a very common view among single mothers. I’d also been kind of thrown in with the ‘welfare mothers’ in the US. One day in Detroit some friends called to tell me there was a demonstration of welfare mothers and would I like to go? And of course I went and I saw how they made a claim on the state which was also a claim against the military budget, because a lot of those women were fighting for their sons not to go to the Vietnam War – this is 1969. So, this stayed in my mind. And certainly when the women’s movement burst out here in Britain, I could see that the only thing to ask for – which was what women were already asking for – was money from the state, which meant that they could refuse the job outside the home they didn’t want.

Now, I had been a full-time housewife, but I had also been a factory worker, an office worker, a typist, and I wanted money so that I didn’t have to be a factory worker and an audio typist. I’d been my husband’s [C.L.R. James] secretary, I’d been doing all this secretarial work but I didn’t think of myself as a secretary. I was just doing the work. It was kind of the ‘family business’. And I was raising a child and then I was also helping to raise a stepchild. I was the caring side of the family.

I had also just finished reading, in a study group, Volume One of Capital and discovered that [Marx] speaks about labour-power as a commodity and I thought my comrades had really been remiss in not mentioning that women made the basic capitalist commodity. And of course they’d never made the connection between labour-power and women – as astonishing as that seems it took a mass movement for that to be clear. That’s true with mass movements; they clarify a lot of things.

Nina

There was a demand for 24-hour childcare

SJ

That was one of the first demands. I was not for that. I didn’t fight it, but I was not for 24- hour child care. It was enough that you had to give your child to the state when they were 4 or 5 years old, I found that intolerable. But I didn’t want to give my life to educating my children. I shut up and swallowed hard, but many of us believed that the children we have should not be handed to the state for its morality, its view of history, its view of discipline, for the state’s view of who you are and what you should be doing with your life – that’s what the schooling system was.

Many women were eaten up with the fact that they had to be as good as men in the waged workplace; otherwise they wouldn’t make their mark. So much was this true that when we fought for breastfeeding breaks at the ILO, we were opposed by women trade unionists.

Was it Sweden where they were a big advocate? Yes, they said, women should not have breastfeeding breaks, because then employers would not hire women. The idea that you should not be allowed to breastfeed when that is what children would thrive on because the job was more important than what your infant ate! This was insanity. There was no way in which we were not to be entirely at the disposal of capital, fundamentally.

That’s not so true now. People who oppose it [WFH] aren’t threatened in the same way.  Women have made their mark and have gone up in the society, like the women on the front benches who came in via the Labour party, and now the Tories, even they have a few feminists in front. They know they’re going to get some jobs, or they’re going to fight among each other over which one is going to get the job. But, there’s a job there for girls and so, they don’t feel as threatened. But, the grassroots women are different. Women felt they deserved the money, but they didn’t think they’d get it, and they didn’t see that feminism would’ve supported them getting it. And so, they decided, I’m going to go for a job. They went for a job because they wanted money of their own. Now, this is 30-40 years later, they’re tired. They’ve been there, done that, are fed up with the lot of it and they know they’re not going anywhere unless they make a struggle, and so they are interested in WFH and considering what their chances are and how they can organise for it. But they haven’t decided yet. You’ll know when they’ve decided it, because you’ll look out the window and they’ll be there, in some thousands. Until that happens, they’re still making up their minds, people are working it out…

The climate has changed in all kinds of ways. And WFH has changed, that’s the other thing. WFH has a much more international view, a much more comprehensive view of who’s doing the work and what work is going on. For example, justice work. Women are always defending men. Nobody noticed that it’s always women – mothers, daughters, partners, sisters, grannies, aunties, they’re all there when the police stop and search or whatever happens.

That is a crucial part of the caring work that women do and so the WFH campaign, which has expressed itself through the Global Women’s Strike from the year 2000, is constantly pointing out the work that women do in the course of the struggle which is still unseen, still unacknowledged, still crucial to the reproduction of the human race and still crucial to the movement. Yes, labour-power is part of it but the important thing is that women reproduce the human race and the Left hasn’t noticed! Marx said that capital can leave the reproduction of the working class to itself, and he begins to hint that reproducing the working class is rather a big job but he doesn’t go all the way because there wasn’t a mass women’s movement when he did his work. You know, a women’s movement would have clarified his views [clicks her fingers] immediately. That’s the kind of guy he was. That’s what he was looking to find out from. He knew where to look for information.

OT

In Revolution at Point Zero, Silvia Federici rethinks the Wages for Housework campaign, stating ‘the creation of the commons… must be seen as a complement and presupposition of the struggle over the wage’ and that the production of commoning practices are of crucial importance. Federici mentions new collective forms of reproduction and confronting divisions of race, gender, age and geographical location that have been forced upon us, whilst acknowledging that communal forms of living are central to reorganising everyday life and creating non-exploitative social relations. Do you agree with Federici’s assessment? If so, what do you believe the creation of the commons will require? What steps can women, and communities more broadly, take to transform everyday life in ways that will last?

SJ

I don’t know about the ‘creation of the commons’ but I do know that many people in the industrial world are trying to squeeze some forms of cooperation into their lives outside of production — community farms, communal childcare. In Africa, collective work is traditional, though much of this has been destroyed by imperialism. But the power of the state/industry/the market limits our time and resources even to begin most of the time, and they sabotage our every attempt to be independent of them.

Our centre tries to be a genuine collective, but it’s a struggle. Wages for Housework stands for women and men having the choices to live our lives with as much autonomy from the state as we can, but we have no illusion about building a utopia within capitalism. When we first demanded wages for all unwaged work some people said, we want services instead; we replied: we demand money, we are owed and we’ll make the services we want, that we collectively determine. Confusing wages for housework with this call for collective services is going backwards. It was hard enough to build collective services in Venezuela when there was a revolutionary government headed by Hugo Chavez. And they were wonderful. The neighbourhood women often ran them but they often didn’t get paid. There is no alternative to confronting their market, their repression, and organising to do that.

The big change in Wages for Housework is that we have been involved in grassroots struggles in a number of countries. That has transformed us into collective anti-racist organisers.

We are just about to issue an international petition for a living wage for mothers and other carers that is the product of years of careful work undermining the divisions of sex, race, age, nation, immigration status etc. Building a grassroots movement for money for those who work hardest and have least — women and children — is what’s needed and what Wages for Housework has been engaged in doing.

To believe that “the possibility of the commons is that it has the potential to create forms of reproduction enabling us to resist dependence on wage labour and subordination to capitalist relations” is a fantasy for most of us in the world who are struggling to survive. Are sexism and racism going to evaporate? Is it no longer necessary to address them or to address class power? The idea that we can remake society without overthrowing the state is classical utopianism. Yes urban gardens, yes collective childcare, if we can and when we can, but it cannot be an alternative perspective to undermining sexism, racism, every discrimination, in order to organise to overthrow capitalism. I found utopianism absurd – again for academics. For most of us struggling to survive it is a joke but not a funny one.

[On violence against women and rape]

SJ

[Women are] uncertain about whether they should organise as women, for many good reasons. But when they do organise as women the first thing they organise against is rape. Because that is absolutely intolerable and that is a woman’s fate unless we organise against it. The fury that women feel about rape — at our Centre you can see how strong that is — that fury against rape expresses the fury against all the other restraints that women suffer. But they feel that we can get through more easily on the rape issue because it is now morally indefensible: even the state says it’s wrong. Mind you, they don’t do much about it, and then you have to fight against them because the police will not investigate and then they’ll drop it and they treat you like hell. And then they finally get something together and the CPS gets some stupid lawyer to prosecute. And then the rapist gets a woman to represent him. It is widespread for women barristers to represent rapists. And they tell you that they do that, women barristers do that, because they say that they can’t get jobs defending people accused of other crimes. So for many at least, the only jobs open to them are defending rapists. And they behave just like any prosecutors defending a rapist: demeaning and destroying the victim.

[On academia and “the Left”]

SJ

You know, we had a demonstration at the Left Forum. In 2012 I attended the Left Forum because the anthology Sex, Race and Class was published so the publishers arranged for me to go. And the Strike [Global Women’s Strike (GWS)] had a workshop on prisons (I work with Mumia Abu-Jamal and edited his book ‘Jailhouse Lawyers’ which is really a good read, he did a wonderful job.) And so I met Victoria Law, who concentrates on women prisoners and she said “You know I’ve been trying to get the Left Forum to have childcare and they will not have childcare.” The GWS was there, we started a petition, we got signatures. 2013 we still agitated. In 2014, there was still no childcare. We met someone who was interested in having a demonstration and we said “YES!” And about 50 women, and there were some men and children in it, had a demonstration within the Left Forum and they watched us as we passed. I never saw anything like it. Some younger men applauded but very few came and joined us.

If you want to know about academia, that was a really good snapshot. And we were quite shocked. They have not acknowledged the work that women do except as an academic subject. They have not acknowledged that a crucial part of what keeps any working class movement together is the work that women do. They have not acknowledged the debt that the anti-police repression movement owes to women who have always been there in the courtroom, in the prisons — this is the work of keeping the movement together. This is the work of undermining repression. They have never acknowledged what it means, really, to reproduce the working class, what it means to be raising a working class kid. What a tragedy that is for women on a mass scale. All of these questions the Left has left out.

What people now see is not WFH as a demand – which indeed it is. It means we should have welfare, it means benefits and services should not be cut as they are doing. But the implications of women NOT being paid — people see that. They see that as they never saw it before. There is an increasing understanding and deepening of what the implications are. And it has taken the movement a very long time for these issues to be clear among those who consider ourselves the movement, as well as those who never did, but who very often are. We have the English Collective of Prostitutes, which is definitely about money and against police repression. We have rape, which is definitely about money – almost always the crucial issue. We have Single Mothers Self Defence.   The state wants to remove mothers from the family or remove mothers as the protectors for the young, and a ‘good’ mother is someone who goes out to a job. If you are not exploited, you are not a good mother. I think a lot of these issues are now on the agenda of the population.

[On Technology, Marx and Work]

SJ

The left is interested in a very 20th century idea of what production is about. Anybody who says ‘we want jobs’ is not addressing people today. Technology eliminates jobs but not work, and at the same time governments are eliminating welfare, so that, fundamentally, we will be threatened with starving to death or at least dying young. And there are so many ways they are killing us. The food industry is destroying our health and then Big Pharma is interested in giving us medicine to keep us alive until we keel over. They are into death. They are into culls of animals, and they are culling us too. People in the movement are not always clear about how much we are under attack. The Left have a great fascination with technology and think that “development” is the development of technology. Now, in that book I showed you [‘UJAMAA: The hidden story of Tanzania’s socialist villages’]: Nyerere, first President of Tanzania, said ‘Development is the development of people’. We haven’t heard that from anyone in a long time.

Towards the end of his life, Marx had understood that he had made a mistake about his emphasis. He also saw that societies which were not capitalist and that were collective, had to be protected and could be, what he called, ‘the fulcrum of social regeneration’. We don’t want to go back to doing everything by hand. But he knew, always, that central to production was people, and he said that’s the difference between us and the capitalists: their end and aim is not people, but their own wealth. And, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – they do it because the money itself requires them to make money, the whole economy is based on the necessity to increase and develop, increase and develop to compete. We are not interested in any of that – we are interested in whether people are developing, and that the technology is at our disposal. People don’t seem to know that about Marx. People on the Left seem not to mention that. They say we want jobs. We’ve never wanted their jobs, we wanted technology to eliminate those jobs so that we would have time, including to remake the world – it’s a crucial part of what you do when you have time, you remake yourself or your community! You have time to consider, if you’re not working for them all the hours that god gives. That’s part of what Wages for Housework stands for. Marx says that communism is the end of work. When I read that I said, well I am a Marxist!

OT

In thinking about looking for wages for domestic and reproductive work and trying to tackle this idea of capital accumulation at the same time, it’s interesting that you mentioned prophecy. Are we now in a time of a contradiction of capitalism where productivity is being squeezed so much with new technology, and labour-power strangled with redundancies, zero-hour contracts and so on? We have seen capital remould itself in times of crises, but after the last round in 2008, which we are still feeling the effects of from the state and in the labour market, how do you think capitalism will progress?

SJ

There is no capitalist crisis. There is a working class crisis. You know, they’re getting richer and richer – they’re not in crisis. We are in crisis because we have not worked out how to build the movement in a way which will not turn out to be the opposite of what we intended. That’s our crisis. Every single movement we have built, has turned into ‘a whip for your own back’. So that all of the movements are now headed by people who sit down and negotiate with the enemy and then, if they don’t, the media says the leaders are “irresponsible”. Irresponsible means you have not sold out your membership. We lost the miners’ strike because of the unions, because most of the unions scabbed, and the members of the union did not collectively say ‘no’. That’s part of the crisis that we face.

And then you have a situation where women have built an anti-rape movement, and most of so-called anti-rape groups seem to take money from the police or the Home Office, or other arms of the state, which ensures that they never insist that police be sacked if they don’t do the job, that the CPS has to stand with women of whatever race or class, or be replaced.

People are very tired; tired from over work and tired from not winning, tired from betrayal, and they do not want to go through all the things that you go through to build a movement – lose their jobs, even your life, go to prison, the children who don’t get food because their parents are fighting, and all the rest. And then what?! Lower pay, fewer benefits. That’s the crisis. Isn’t that known?!

[On Social Movements and Conflict]

OT

It’s known, but it’s not talked about – ‘public secrets’. We’ll all accept it, but let’s not actually do anything about it, let’s not struggle against it or call it out when we see it. That was one of the big problems we saw with the Occupy movement – this very same process which came from this overarching umbrella concept of some kind of popular uprising, but women were shoved out, people of colour were shoved out. Nothing which questioned the validity of the state was allowed, nothing that mentioned capitalism was allowed. It became a naked careerist thing for people to put something on their CV to show that they ‘do’ politics, to get jobs, to do PhDs, be PR executives etc. The rest of us were thrown back to the scrapheap to try again.

SJ

This is a really good statement of what happened with Occupy here in London. Different things happened in different places. What you are saying is that people came into Occupy because they thought of it as a career option, which is very common in organisations of the movement. It means a number of things. Police agents would be welcome because their purpose was the same as careerists: to ensure that the boat did not rock. And included are the vanguardists – which is another form of pursuing power for oneself. The only way to ensure that those types don’t dominate is to organise and ensure that the grassroots is in charge, and make a fight about the question of racism and the question of sexism even if it causes splits. There isn’t another way that I know about. If Occupy had been split some part of Occupy still might be going. But because it didn’t split good people were put off. I wasn’t directly involved in Occupy but women and men from our Centre did tell us about what was going on and your report of what went on there is much like theirs. In some places Occupy was much better than that because those who were determined not to be divided on race or gender or other lines, dominated because people who were very seriously anti-capitalist and not vanguardist dominated. And they were determined that people would have their say and Occupy would take the direction of the activist and the ones who were anti-capitalist from whatever sector and in fact every sector.

In general it has been difficult to stay autonomous because so many people want to take you over once you have organised a little power. The way we have done it in the Wages for Housework campaign is to be very disciplined among ourselves and to ensure that our principles are constantly before us judging what we do as well as what others do and listening hard to people in our network for what they think and what they are doing. We work on ourselves and our consciousness rather than on anybody else’s, and that consciousness is shaped by the fact that we have autonomous organisations — women of colour, queer women and men, single mothers, women and men with disabilities — there is a group of Payday men who relate to the Strike. And that ensures that these issues are always dealt with, always on the basis of the principles that we all agree about – autonomy but not separatism. Commitment but not careerism or egotism. And we also use “reliable testimony.” It’s the phrase that a yogi some hundreds or thousands of years ago in India used to describe leadership. That is, people who, when they speak, you trust their motivation, and everybody gives them a good hearing. They in turn use everybody as their points of reference so they are always including people rather than excluding them, and always bringing the principles of the organisation to the fore and seeing how they apply to what any of us is doing or has been doing. There is no other formula that I know about. It’s very hard to maintain yourself organising in this way. But I don’t know another. And ultimately, when you organise in this way you train others, and others train you, so that you can be of great ongoing use to the movement. Just one example is that when the hunger strikes began to take place at Yarl’s Wood detention centre for asylum seekers, it was Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women of Colour/Global Women’s Strike who advertised it, supported it, got media for it and especially let people know that it was happening and were constantly in touch with the women inside. The Strike did that job because we had been trained in all that we had been doing up till then. It was our job to support them in ways that would promote them rather than ourselves. That’s a big principle and everyone who is serious, politically, needs it.

Once you are organising in this way, police agents and careerists stand out like sore thumbs. They are very easy to identify if your political perspective leads you in a direction that is so opposed to theirs. Then you fight it out on that basis. If people are not ready to take a position that is principled and anti-capitalist, then you have to leave and call it from outside. I must add that each situation is different and once your principles are clear you have to sit down and discuss how you can be a strength for the most serious people who are the grassroots or speaking for the grassroots. Each situation is unique though the principles are always the same. So the question is how precisely to apply them. That requires collective discussion and determination.

OT

But that’s why they were successful isn’t it because they joined that, they didn’t get that, history records something else, and so the next wave thinks that the struggle starts at that point and you are sort of always working backwards until nothing can be questioned?

SJ

Exactly. Now they think they have reached an absolute. They say 5.5 million people have been killed in the Congo, although you can’t really be submerged by that otherwise you won’t be able to sleep at night. But they are going on as usual! They are talking – Angelina Jolie and this idiot the foreign secretary.

N 

They are talking about ending rape in war, but they are not talking about ending conflict. You should kill the women, just don’t rape them, just chop their heads off! We would have equality then!

SJ

Is rape the worst thing about war? It’s a bad thing, it’s not a good thing, but what about the killings, the displacement, the destruction, the fear, the justification of rape, torture and mass murder? They’re saying war should not rape; you think we could have something that says that war should not kill? It’s absurd. The reason the state likes rape as an issue is because they can pin it on individual men; it’s not about the society generally. Then this Nazi, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Hogan-Howe, said there was ‘unconscious bias’ in the police. How high does the unconscious bias go? Is it only on the ground or does it go all the way to the top? And, what happens when unconscious bias meets institutional racism? Now that’s a question that the Met might want to consider. So they have had so much of a pummelling from women generally and from, I have to say, Women Against Rape in particular, and Slutwalk played its role, that they now have to say this, that there is unconscious bias, because the figure of 6.5% conviction rate for reported rape are not tenable, that can’t be argued with. The police are disgraced constantly. It’s important to draw out the connections between the policing of rape, race, domestic violence, MPs, football fans, student protests, every protest . . .

[On building movements]

SJ

It is the challenge of building a movement. The movement, by its nature, must cross these boundaries, which means that you are always addressing the power relations among us and always in your struggle, whoever you are and wherever you are, you must seek to undermine these divisions. That’s what your job is. Your job is not merely to organise; your job is to – I hate to use the word now that it is discredited – ‘unify’. But unify in such a way that nobody’s demands are demeaned or ignored. They have to be all on the table so that our struggle, broadly, represents all the people who are working together, or whom you want to work together with. We do that all the time. It’s not even that difficult – people are in the habit; we don’t think of doing anything else. I think that intersectionality is a word that academia uses in order to draw the lifeblood out of the struggles to destroy the power relations among us. To overcome those divisions is really to win against capitalism.

[On History: Lenin and Vanguardism]

SJ

Ranged against you are the Tory party using China’s rate of exploitation as their point of reference. Then of course you have the other part, the Lib Dems, who are Tories lite, then there is Labour who are Tories-not-so-lite.

Lenin went through the 1905 revolution and was torn because the communist societies, the Obshchinas, in Russia, really fought after the working class in Russia was defeated. They kept fighting. Lenin was a fighter and he said, well let’s join them, but the Party said no, these societies are finished, they have to go through capitalism, and he seems not have pursued it. But by 1906/07, according to C.L.R., he had grave doubts about what he had written in 1902 (What is to be Done), calling for a vanguard of intellectuals. C.L.R. would say to me often, often because it was something that preoccupied him, that Lenin didn’t want What is to be Done spread about. He would ask, are you sure this is what we [the Bolsheviks] should be saying? Why are they reprinting it? Lenin didn’t know where he stood on What is to be Done because it is a very elitist view, and he had gone through a revolution, which changes you dramatically. It says only the intellectuals can have revolutionary consciousness, and that the working classes can only reach trade union consciousness. Can you imagine?!

The academics would agree with that entirely. By the end, 1923, Lenin wrote three important essays. One of them is On Co-operation. He was offering the population to take charge of production through co-operatives because he was turning away from the whole emphasis of a vanguard; he thought they could do it through their collectives now that they had state power. In this and other writings, he was trying to work out how the working class could take power. And this is the exact opposite to What is to be Done. Every Trotskyist and most other organisations of the Left, except the ones who are horizontalist, believe in What is to be Done. It’s over 100 years old, it’s mouldy, it’s reactionary, and it’s not Lenin any more. We know another Lenin.  The one who made the revolution could not have believed in that because the party would not take power and Lenin said ‘If you do not take power, I’ll go over your heads to the masses’ who loved him. He said, I’ll just push you aside, so they said, all right, we’ll take power. That was the great Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party. This is the party that was no good then, it was also anti-semitic and chauvinist against the nationalities.

They attacked Trotsky because he was Jewish. Stalin made jokes about him because he was Jewish and the Party laughed. You know, this is the real Vanguard Party. They never questioned the name ‘Russian’ Revolution’. I used it here, but it was a revolution of Russia and the nationalities, the colonies of Russia. When I said that to a woman who I met at the BBC — they never give credit to the nationalities, they even spoke different languages, she immediately said, ‘15’. So this was not a new question for her. They had figured out how many nationalities had been left out, and there were 15! When you say Russia, it exposes an imperialist view of the revolution. It was the Russian Empire plus colonies that made the revolution.  Like Lenin said, scratch a Bolshevik and you find a Russian Chauvinist! It’s another view.

[On Racism]

SJ

What has happened on race is crucial. People are against racism. Most white people don’t like racism. It doesn’t mean that they are not racist, but it means that you can win them over with a show of Black power which is compassionate and which is class-based, which means the poor are us and you and me, we belong together. In “Bulworth”, Warren Beatty sings that ‘white people got more in common with coloured people than they do with rich people’. You can work with anybody today in a way that would have been impossible, even in the sixties. Racism, sexism, and anti-gay etc, is discredited.

When a sex-worker began to talk at Slutwalk, the response of the audience made me think that they were all sex workers, but of course most weren’t; it was just that they don’t see a dividing line, a ‘I’m respectable and she’s not’ – there’s little or nothing like that any more, it doesn’t exist. Of course, it exists in pockets, and of course it can still be exploited by the State and employers, and of course people still use racist and sexist etc. language, but it has little credibility any more because most people don’t really like to identify with it.

If you look at any corner of Kentish Town, at the kids going past, there will be a white group with one or two Black people, or they’ll be a Black group with one or two white people. I’m talking about kids. They don’t want it any more. They haven’t entirely overcome it because the Black movement is weak, because it has been so sold out. But once the movement comes up, these prejudices will not be the problem they used to be. I wish it would hurry up and come together!

Piece originally pulished at Occupied Times | 
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