Solidarity Syllabus: Black History Month

Written By UyenThi Tran Myhre

We’re excited to kick off an ongoing blog series here at BMP and SolidarityIs: the Solidarity Syllabus. It’s rare these days to have space for intentional learning and reflection. Many of us are navigating multiple crises in our communities, while also navigating a digital era that packages everything as neatly curated “content.” 

Our goal is to strike a different balance with this Solidarity Syllabus series. Each syllabus is an invitation to slow down and visit (or re-visit) movement stories, with a few resources and reflection questions to get you started. Unlike a traditional syllabus, there are no due dates or grades here - just a chance to spend some time with movement lessons, elders, ancestors, art, and stories that may offer wisdom and grounding in these uncertain times. 

When everything feels urgent, devoting energy to studying movement lessons may not seem like a priority. And yet, choosing to spend 10 minutes with a poem or 20 minutes once a week to work through an essay or book (perhaps with a friend or colleague - virtually or in person or even via voice notes and text messages) can be a sustainable way to deepen our political education. Practicing transformative solidarity requires us to move together, and continuing to develop our individual and collective political analyses - alongside the ongoing work of building relationships and organizing - can make our solidarity practice more possible and more durable.

At the Building Movement Project and Solidarity Is, we think of solidarity as a set of practices grounded in six core principles: Centering, Connections, Commonalities, Co-conspiratorship, Co-liberation and Capacity. For this inaugural post, which coincides with the start of Black History Month, we’ll be focusing on the foundational transformative solidarity practices of Connections and Commonalities. 

Connections and commonalities encompass the shared experiences, values, struggles, and liberatory visions that can bridge individuals and communities across diverse backgrounds. These principles weave throughlines between issues, geographies, communities, and movements. 

As part of organizations and coalitions, recognizing connections and commonalities can offer a step toward confronting division and building bridges. As individuals, studying connections and commonalities can help us clarify our present moment while also informing how we show up for each other. 

“Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.”
— Assata Shakur in her 1987 autobiography

For this Solidarity Syllabus, we offer an invitation to begin learning more about the life and work of Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who lived in exile in Havana, Cuba, from 1984 until her death this past September at the age of 78. Throughout her writing and her work, Assata taught us about connections. From her work as part of the Black liberation and anti-war movements to her abolitionist lens, Assata understood how U.S. state violence targets Black and brown people both within the U.S. and across the globe. 

We begin with these three resources. You may explore each of them first, and then return to this Solidarity Syllabus, or vice versa - read this post in full, and then visit each resource.

In the essay linked above, Wald points to the pattern of the U.S. government designating activists as “domestic terrorists,” in an effort to discredit and criminalize protestors. Wald notes that Assata was designated a “domestic terrorist” by George W. Bush in 2005 in the wake of 9/11, “prefiguring what the Trump administration is doing with pro-Palestinian protesters and others today” (also see: page 3 of our most recent Nonprofit FAQ). This pattern can also be seen in how water protectors at Standing Rock were investigated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and how supporters of the movement for Black lives were investigated by the federal government. Today, we see this pattern of discrediting movements and demonizing entire communities with the current administration - from using dehumanizing language about immigrants as a recruitment tactic to accusing legal observers and community members of being “domestic terrorists” and “agitators.”

While there are myriad connections and commonalities in how power coalesces to attack our communities and movements, where might we see the throughlines in our shared liberatory visions? 

In the clip from Democracy Now!, we hear Assata reading an open letter to Pope John Paul II during his historic 1998 visit to Cuba, after New Jersey state troopers requested that the Pope call for her extradition. In the letter, Assata reflects on the meaning of justice: 

The New Jersey State Police and other law enforcement officials say they want to see me brought to justice, but I would like to know what they mean by justice. Is torture justice? I was kept in solitary confinement for more than two years, mostly in men's prisons. Is that justice? My lawyers were threatened with imprisonment and imprisoned. Is that justice? I was tried by an all white jury without even the pretext of impartiality and then sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years. Is that justice? Let me emphasize that justice for me is not the issue I am addressing here. It is justice for my people that is at stake. When my people receive justice, I am sure that I will receive it too.

Decades before the uprisings of 2020, where “no justice, no peace, abolish the police” became a rallying cry in streets across the U.S., we can see how Assata challenged us to think more closely about what “justice” truly entails. In this piece at Prism, Tamar Sahai writes about how Assata was involved in political education and consciousness-raising efforts as a young person, and how her work continues to shape contemporary Black liberation movements today.

As we write this piece in late January from Minneapolis, we also notice how these lessons around safety and justice are threaded into how communities are understanding the ongoing siege from federal immigration and border patrol forces. We notice these lessons in statements that connect the common roots of injustice, as well as in the work of Indigenous organizers and neighbors who are “connecting the current landscape and Native experience with oppressive federal policies and actions – and the long history of Native responses” as they coordinate mutual aid efforts. 

Studying connections and commonalities opens up possibilities in how we show up in solidarity. For example, as NDN Collective noted in a recent blog post sharing lessons from Minneapolis: “We also see strong alliances that give us a lot of hope. This includes alliances with the Somali immigrant community and how we have organized in solidarity with them to protect and patrol neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, we also witnessed how strong our non-native allies are in general because they have the political analysis of what it means to be doing this organizing work on Indigenous land.”

To close this Solidarity Syllabus, we invite you to consider:

  • What connections and commonalities do you notice in struggles for justice today?

  • How does acknowledging connections and commonalities make our own solidarity practice more possible? In other words - how might recognizing connections and commonalities shift how we understand the roots of injustice - and how we build possibilities for a liberated future?

Additional related resources: 

Finally, we leave you with Assata Shakur’s poem “Affirmation” (which opens her autobiography).

More than a poem, “Affirmation” offers a grounding invitation that links personal survival to collective liberation. As you read the poem, we invite you to reflect on the throughlines that Assata names. You may already be familiar with the last stanza of the poem - here it is, in full:

Affirmation, by Assata Shakur

I believe in living.
I believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs.
And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.

I believe in life.
And i have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path.
I have seen the destruction of the daylight,
and seen bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted.

I have seen the kind become the blind
and the blind become the bind
in one easy lesson.
I have walked on cut glass.
I have eaten crow and blunder bread
and breathed the stench of indifference.

I have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if i know any thing at all,
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.

I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.

And i believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home
to port.

UyenThi Tran Myhre