Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) - Columbus, OH discussion

Feel free to share your thoughts on chapter 1 here.

In this chapter, I really appreciated Davis's discussion of the election of Barack Obama. To those of us who are aware and knowledgeable about racial issues, it is common sense that the election of a black man did not represent the movement of our society into a "post-racial" era. However, Davis notes that despite that, the very election of a black man in and of itself was VERY important. It represented a milestone reached and the actualization of something that many people thought was impossible. It gave children a model to look to and to know that they COULD be that one day. In that regard, Obama's election was incredibly important. However, make no mistake that he was not the progressive, anti-establishment champion that we would have wanted him to be. In many ways, his presidency was disappointing and continued to support and prop up the same old oppressive, imperialist, capitalist, neo-liberal doctrines as every presidency before his. Despite that, as Davis points out, the place we really need to look for change is not the president him/herself, but organized movements. It is our social and political movements that will really achieve change. Without an anti-racist, feminist workers party, as mentioned by Davis, I don't think we'll ever truly achieve our goals. So we need to keep movement building, and we need to build political parties that truly represent our values and our goals, rather than relying on the establishment Democratic party to do it for us.