SDS: A Look at the People Of Color Caucus

As the national convention of SDS approaches, Kasama is publishing a series of pieces on the politics of this important student organization. As always, our posting of these pieces does not mean endorsement of their analyses, but a presentation of materials for exploration and debate.

by Hegemonik (originally published on Hegemonik’s own blog)

For members of Students for a Democratic Society, this is that strange time of year when classes are finished but we start to hit the books with some renewed fervor. Yep, we’re in the lead-up to the National Convention once again! This go around with the SDS National Convention, there’s been some back and forth on caucuses and how they will work, attempting to sum up some lessons learned on what to do and what not to do.

With that in the back of my mind, I felt like writing at length about my experience with the SDS People of Color Caucus, from the period of SDS’s founding National Convention to the current day.

Bite your lip and take a trip

My most vivid memory of a caucus 2006 (Chicago) round, where (like everything else) the caucuses were chaotic: first they were all scheduled against one another (women’s caucus versus people of color caucus — as if there were no women of color); then caucus times were swapped around by the various constituencies; then the people of color caucus was accidentally locked out as the U. of Chicago wasn’t open at the time that had been scheduled.

Amid all this, there was some white chauvinist behavior going on. Common spaces such as the makeshift mess hall were monopolized by white crust punks who (without telling anyone at first) stocked it with dumpster dived food. The spaces for political discussions and debates of race (a panel on white privilege) were missing facilitators and participants. Mostly, these were pardonable mistakes of a rookie organization of young people, but they certainly grated on those who came to the caucus.

When we got around to holding a caucus – we ended up taking over a room mid-day – it went on in a rambling way. In the end, we reached a conclusion on two things. First, that our common gut reaction to what was transpiring around us wasn’t “just” a gut reaction – that it was a response to being in a situation where white subculture had de facto been favored.

More importantly, we concluded that unless we charged ourselves with the task of saying that this was wrong, folks were going to let that error slide, potentially into dangerous territory.

We ended up writing a terse statement, trying to criticize what was going on in a comradely way. It was read in the middle of some debate on national structure that wasn’t going anywhere – some folks were relieved that it had been interrupted – and then there was a back-and-forth on it.

Keep on pushing

I bring up events from some two years ago (might as well be an eon in student activist years), to show folks to see how far we’ve come since then. Back at the first SDS Convention, it was taken for granted that you had to be a crusty punk in order to be an SDS’er. At subsequent conventions and events, we’ve taken pains over how not to have anything associated with white subculture at events (sometimes to our detriment).

Witnessing SDS’s rapid expansion in the past few years, it is most striking that in having broken the chains that bound SDS’s organizational practices to white subcultural practices (dumpster diving, crustiness, etc.) energy was freed up for people of color to both join and latch on to the organization. The “SDS demographic” is much harder to pin down these days. We are becoming more reflective of college campuses’ demographics.

People of color in SDS have had to scrap and struggle to get ourselves and the organization this far. The Caucus had to weather white chauvinism and white guilt in equal measures at first, sometimes biting our tongues and sometimes ranting at length. Later there were the anonymous, pseudonymous, and pretty brazen accusations of acting as some conspiracy to import identity politics into SDS.

Eventually there were breakthroughs, solidarities and bonds formed with sympathetic white members of the organization. In short, we had to struggle in order to find an operating unity with SDS.

It is tempting to rest now. Mainly, I detect in SDS in general a certain tendency to classify caucuses as a sort of self-help circle; once people are no longer so aggrieved by the cultural tics of the organization at large, the caucus is somehow supposed to evaporate. The temptation for the caucus itself is to abide by this, and to narrow our mission to only being reactive to certain incidents of white chauvinist behavior in the organization.

If the fight against white supremacy has been a marathon, staying to this narrow mission is like running its distance on a treadmill – the exertion is the same but the progress is nil. We can stick to criticizing everything that is negative in the organization, and we only end up having wasted our time on people who aren’t going to give us the time of day anyway.
Our dreams are our only schemes

The cultural chauvinism surrounding SDS is contained at the moment. We will have to be vigilant to keep it in check, but it is time to move on. The new challenge: quit singing kumbaya and coming out swinging at white supremacy.

There’s two areas we have to address:

We first and foremost have to address questions of SDS’s orientation on the questions of race and nationality in American society. This is a strange era in which to be an activist. On the one hand, we are at a time when Left-based activism as a whole is relatively high. On the other, we are at a moment in which the grounding of the Left as a whole is no longer as rooted in the various struggles led by black and Latino forces against white supremacy.

In fact, we are at a time when many are willing to settle for pulling the crank for Barack Obama and declare their own racism functionally ended, even as they demand ridiculous denunciations of Rev. Wright.

Where does the People of Color Caucus help lead SDS in being a multiracial organization in this terrain? Why do we choose to work in solidarity with racially and nationally oppressed groups and organizations?

Second and subsequently: after the question of overall political direction, what are the strategies that the People of Color Caucus find that work toward advancement? How do we work in multi-racial and multi-organizational fronts and do so with mutual respect, without the sort of chauvinist missionary logic that provoked splits in the New Left era?

On the first area, orientation, this is not a matter of white supremacy as a singular issue. It’s also a matter of what principles we agree to abide by in our work in general. That is, beyond outright issues concerning race – the Sean Bell shooting, or Hurricane Katrina survivors fates – because white supremacy is so pervasive in society, because it is necessary to the functioning of American capitalism, we will need to be able to see where it operates outside of plain sight.

On the second matter of strategy, this could be described as a matter of applying orientation correctly: balancing the mandate of our politics against the harsh realities of the world. Who and what do we attack at the given period? Who and what do we support?

In all, we need to start thinking about what it means when the authority on race is still Dr. King, the dream he presented is still considered the ultimate program for racial equality, and yet what that dream was precisely has been so thoroughly co-opted as to become indistinct from any other marketing slogan.

Perhaps it is time not to just dream but also scheme

Do not obey, we must have our say, we can past the test

For this year’s convention, all caucuses have been asked to work in advance – set up facilitation, work out what needs to be done with those not in the caucus, and having an agenda that is more than just a list of complaints. It fits in properly with where we’re at in the POC Caucus, where those SDS’ers of color that I’ve spoken with are universally for holding a People of Color Caucus this year, and for moving beyond the territory we’ve already covered a couple times over.

I suspect this year, there have been some controversies in the Left outside of SDS that are going to come to our doorstep one way or another: the controversy of Seal Press, or the drama of clueless white anarchists talking shit about APOC. I don’t know if we’ll have time to address them, though perhaps through this blog I can get a teachable moment with folks.

I’ve told a few friends in the Caucus that I’ve got high hopes for it this year: for our role in SDS to shift toward making positive contributions for the organization, rather than having to use the caucus to halt something negative from the Convention floor; and internally transcending some of the pettiness of mainstream politics of Clinton v. Obama (the “every woman is white and every person of color is male”) to have our caucus be truly intersectional and put sisters in the center of it.

All told, I think this year may be a chance to actualize the People of Color Caucus so that we no longer have to worry about what people think we are, only that we are presenting ourselves the way we know we are.