Speaking Out of Place

Getting Our Political Voices Back

David Palumbo-Liu

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781642596823
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique de l'éducation

Speaking Out of Place helps us find value and inspiration in others who have made change in the world where such things were not supposed to be possible.

From protests in sports arenas to sonic transgressions of racist boundaries, to protest camps and covert collaborations with imprisoned people, and environmental activism based on Indigenous notions of justice. We learn how to "re-place" education, circumvent pundits, and recall judges. And we learn to defend our home—the planet.

Speaking Out of Place asks us to reconceptualize both what we think "politics" is, and our relationship to it. Especially at this historical moment, when it is all too possible we will move from Trump's fascistic regime to Biden's anti-progressive centrism, we need ways to build off the tremendous growth we have seen in democratic socialism, and to gather strength and courage for the challenges, and opportunities that lie ahead.

CHAPTER 1

SPEAKING OUT OF PLACE

The year 2019 saw an eruption of protests around the world, each in response to profound social, political, economic, and environmental crises. As remarkable as the coincidence of these historical events was the fact that each one seemed to be predicated on similar crises. In a year-end “dossier,” the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research observed that the world “oscillates between crises and protests”:

We live in a time of protests: no country is immune from demonstrations that flood the streets and make demands upon structures that are deaf to the needs and aspirations of the people. Millions of people experience the pain and indignity of unemployment and cuts in State spending on education, health, poverty alleviation, and elderly care. The slogans are in different languages, but the meaning is the same: we refuse, we resist, we will not tolerate the plague of austerity.¹

In September 2019, journalist Ben Ehrenreich noted the geographic diversity of these protests: “In the last 12 weeks, protests have spanned five continents—most of the planet—from wealthy London and Hong Kong to hungry Tegucigalpa and Khartoum. They are so geographically disparate and apparently heterogeneous in cause and composition that I have not yet seen any serious attempt to view them as a unified phenomenon.” Ehrenreich made just such an attempt, asserting that much, if not all of this discontent, could be blamed on neoliberalism, which he described as

a globally applicable method for preserving the current overwhelming imbalance of power. It works microcosmically on a municipal level— think decaying public transit systems with an apparently bottomless budget for racist fare enforcement, while billionaires hop in helicopters from rooftop to rooftop—and macrocosmically on a planetary scale, in which national elites collude with multinational corporations and international financial institutions to keep labor cheap and wealth and resources confined into established channels.²

This book follows a similar trajectory in its analysis—from the level of towns and cities, and upward to the planetary scale. In each case we will be attending to the local, global, and planetary damage neoliberal and capitalist ideologies have wrought. Both ideologies drive the same message: of primary interest is the “individual,” which is regarded solely as an economic actor, and the “market,” which is thought of as a global system of exchange and profit making. Ideas on human and humane interdependence and shared welfare have been deemed mere fairy tales. Neoliberalism dismisses any notions of nonmarket value and humane interdependence; capitalism’s goals are to extract and exploit both nature and human resources for the good of a tiny portion of humanity. What the people who filled the streets were protesting was both the ground-level injuries to everyday life and the global harm that they witnessed with their own eyes and experienced with their own bodies. We now find ourselves at a pivotal moment in history, where the all-encompassing, self-interested values of neoliberalism, the exclusionary mandates of ethno-nationalism, and the rapacious logic of late capitalism have facilitated the spread of pandemics and the degradation of the environment.

Instead of seeing an ethos of the common good, we see immense wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a tiny number people, with those who do the labor getting less and less.³ Currently, the top 1 percent owns as much as the entire middle class and continues to accumulate tremendous wealth, undeterred by the COVID-19 pandemic; it is even finding ways to make money off it.⁴ When whistleblowers pointed out Amazon’s dangerous and exploitative work conditions during the pandemic, Bezos fired them.⁵ As Veena Dubal, a legal scholar and labor activist, told me: “Amazon, through its various subsidiaries, leverages every imaginable exploitative labor practice to minimize overhead and risk. They use independent contracting, subcontracting, piece-pay, and grinding automated quota systems to ensure that workers who produce value for the company have to work long and hard, for as little as possible. And in many instances, especially in the context of contracting and subcontracting, the workers also have to bear all the legal risk, without any basic safety net protections. Not all of these practices are legal, but that does not stop this company.”⁶ Indeed, when even the frail protections of laws and constitutions are shredded, the situation becomes nearly impossible. Thankfully, in global protests against police violence and racism, for the environment and the health of the planet, and in support of other struggles for liberation, we find sure signs that the human will for justice is far from depleted. But to fully realize our power, we must first disabuse ourselves of the constraints that have been placed on our ability to see our capacity to effect change.

We need to imagine and invent a new sense of the “place” from which we speak—one that urges us to take possession of, and to speak from, a place that we claim for ourselves as legitimate, as real, as vibrant, and most importantly, as politically necessary. When we do this, we are using our voices in places that have been thought of as unauthorized, illegitimate, bereft of value, anarchistic, and unruly.

For example, since 2016, when football quarterback Colin Kaepernick first took a knee in protest against police brutality aimed at Black bodies, the world has looked at sporting arenas differently. That is an immense achievement, and an unsettling one to many who feel that stadiums should be reserved for pleasure and entertainment only. But the so-called politicization of entertainment spaces is hardly new, nor is it the result only of dissent; as we will examine in detail momentarily, for many decades the National Football League’s owners have determined the ways football stadiums are used to promote militarism and patriotism. By taking a knee, players opposed such an exploitation of the playing field, demanding that their presence there be viewed not simply as paid labor. Thus, these battles over what can take place in these spaces of public congregation reveal the power relations that exist not so far beneath the surface of a supposedly “politics-free” space. And the debate over the use of place forces these historical contradictions to the surface in very powerful ways.

In 2017, in response to the protests launched by Colin Kaepernick, then–Houston Texans owner Bob McNair was alleged to have told his fellow owners, “We can’t have the inmates running the prison,” and from the other side of the line of management and ownership, LeBron James publicly called out the slave-owner mentality of NFL owners.⁷ Such disputes have the potential to serve as revelatory political moments that open new ways of seeing not only specific places, like the football field, but also larger areas of public life.

Indeed, these acts of protest in places believed to be politically neutral do something that street demonstrations do not always do. Take the example we saw in the introduction of the restaurant owners who refused service to Donald Trump’s racist advisors—the very people who were instrumental in thinking up and implementing inhumane immigration policies that affected, among many others, restaurant workers. This form of political protest was not supposed to “take place,” given that such a refusal of service conjures a political memory of Black people being refused a place in US eateries, and the lunch counter protests that followed. But when restaurant owners refused to serve powerful Washington figures, they completely inverted the historical model: when people speak out of place, the tables are turned, and even more so when customers, and a media audience of millions, applaud the act. That is to say, when acts of protest erupt in unexpected places, carried out by unlikely people, an opening for political activism and participation bursts forth, breaking the placid surface of managed life. They show the power of an imagination that rebels against the assignment of certain people to certain places, and the relations of power that reside in those assignments. Rich and influential customers are not supposed to be turned away, but in these cases the restaurant managers were acting in solidarity with their coworkers. And Black protestors taking a place at lunch counters and on buses—places they were not supposed to be—were challenging the given order of things, showing that the universe would not explode if they disrupted it by demonstrating their willingness to prove the wrongness of the given order of segregation. Each of the instances that follows serves as an example of people stepping out of their assigned roles and filling supposedly neutral, “apolitical” spaces with the political content of their choice. Each of these instances also shows people tapping into a political power they might not have thought they had—and when this happens, they model something for others to do as well.

A key word here is “unauthorized.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “authorize” means “to give official permission for or formal approval to (an action, undertaking, etc.); to approve, sanction.” But another, older definition gives us something more to work with: “To vouch for the truth or reality of; to attest.” In this sense, battles over authority can thus be read as battles over the truth, over reality, and, most importantly, over a vision for a reality to come. “Unauthorized” in this sense means to vouch for the truth or the reality of something without being given permission to do so. It is time to act in unauthorized manner—to raise our voices, informed both by a determination not to unquestioningly accept our conventional roles and by a radical imagination that recognizes the necessity of justice—of life over death. This is “speaking out of place” in ways that redefine what that place is, and it has important implications for the issue of protests on the playing field, and our understanding of their history.

Taking the Field

Despite the claims of sports “purists” who decry Kaepernick’s decision to take a knee rather than stand during the playing of the national anthem, American sports arenas have never been apolitical spaces, and one of the myths about athletes—that they have little authority to speak about anything besides sports—is likewise untrue. In one particular instance, one of the most famous athletes of the day was formally asked to make a political statement. In 1949, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) asked baseball star and public celebrity Jackie Robinson to testify as part of its hearings on suspected Communist activities. It was their hope that Robinson would condemn a speech that Paul Robeson had recently delivered in Paris at the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Conference.

Not only was he a world-famous singer, actor, and political activist; Robeson was also an accomplished athlete—honored as an All-America football player while at Rutgers University. In contrast to Robeson, who was criticized by the Right for his work against racial, economic, and political injustice, Robinson was regarded as the “good” Black athlete and public figure. One of the conditions to which Robinson agreed in signing a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947—thereby becoming the first Black man to play in the major league in the modern era—was that he kept silent on and off the field, regardless of what kinds of racist insults were hurled at him. He was explicitly unauthorized to speak, for the sake of what the owner and manager of the Dodgers, Branch Rickey, called “the great experiment” of professional baseball’s racial integration.

Besides his status as a sports celebrity, there was another reason HUAC chose Robinson to serve as a counterexample to Robeson: Robinson was an army veteran and a devoted Christian who was on record as opposing Communism—thus he seemed to be the perfect Black athlete to repudiate Robeson’s sympathies with anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist movements. What HUAC had not counted on was that Robinson had also experienced racism in some of its worst forms. In 1944, while stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, he had refused to move to the back of the bus when ordered to do so by the white bus driver—that is, he had refused to show that he “knew his place.” For that act of defiance, Robinson had been charged with insubordination and conduct unbecoming of an officer. Ultimately, he was found not guilty of all charges.

Given his recognition of racism in the United States, and the fact that, like Robeson, he had acted against that racism, what was the Dodgers second baseman going to say during his appearance? Would he condemn Robeson, or take his side? Doing the former would consolidate his “good Black” status in the eyes of the white American public; doing the latter would likely erase both his hero status and his career. In the end, he chose neither. Instead, in his testimony before HUAC, Robinson did something extraordinary—he reclaimed that congressional space as his by using the bulk of his time to denounce American racism:

White people must realize that the more a Negro hates Communism because it opposes democracy, the more he is going to hate any other influence that kills off democracy in this country—and that goes for racial discrimination in the Army, and segregation on trains and buses, and job discrimination because of religious beliefs or color or place of birth…. And one other thing the American public ought to understand, if we are to make progress in this matter: The fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges…. Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well.

As journalist Johnny Smith notes, “more than 40 years before Kaepernick started the ‘take a knee’ movement, Robinson wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, ‘I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.’”⁸

Jackie Robinson did not refuse to appear. But when he did, he delivered words that were not supposed to be uttered. He created an off-script moment that was never imagined to have been able to occur—he spoke out of place, in his own voice. HUAC knew then, as everyone else knows now, just how influential sports figures are in the American imagination. The episode helps us understand why in the eyes of some, athletes need to be silenced, or only authorized to speak on message. For when they go off-script, important things can happen. Along with the “race barrier,” Robinson broke the political speech barrier, too, and started a tradition that connects to the Kaepernick protests. But between Robinson’s 1949 testimony and the 2016 protests of Kaepernick and other professional athletes in support of #BlackLivesMatter, the world witnessed one of the most important acts of “speaking out of place” ever to occur on an athletic field. It happened during the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Among other things, it is significant because the protest was conceived as an indictment of both American racism and the violation of international human rights. Two Black athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, used the Olympic podium to make an international statement whose impact reverberates to this day.

The 1968 Olympics

As we will see, the actions of Smith and Carlos were roundly condemned as entirely out of place, inappropriate, and a terrible instance of politics contaminating the purity of the games, which were supposed to exist in an ideal world of sports competition, divorced from both financial and political interests. Yet an explosive 1999 article in the New York Times reported the discovery of documents that prove that not only politics but also dirty money have been present in the Olympics from as far back as the mid-1930s. Remarkably, the International Olympic Committee member implicated in that scandal, an American named Avery Brundage, also led the IOC in 1968.

The Times article presented evidence that Brundage, perhaps with help from the Belgian count Henri de Baillet-Latour, was involved in setting up illegal payments from the fascist German government via the German Olympic Committee: “Brundage’s papers at the University of Illinois include a 1938 letter from the president of the German Olympic Committee assuring him that his Chicago construction company’s bid to help build the German Embassy in Washington had been accepted.”⁹ The Times also discovered a letter from another IOC member, addressed to Brundage, which read: “It is too bad that the American Jews are so active and cause us so much trouble. It is impossible for our German friends to carry on the expensive preparations for the Olympic Games if all this unrest prevails.” So any talk about the “purity” of the Olympics can be set aside, given the rotten foundation of this early event, not to mention the dozens which have followed. Indeed, since the games’ inception, politics and money have been at their very center—in this case, fascist politics and money.

It was this mixture of support for authoritarian violence and the un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Speaking Out of Place
• 2. Rights to a Place to Live
• 3. Global Home
• 4. Planetary Home
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover