Pat Logan's response to "Justice and Unity's" Lisa Davis
by Pat Logan, independent candidate for LSB, 10-31-07
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Lisa Davis has written in part:
... the interesting thing about Pat Logan is that she claims to be working with the Committee to Support Juanita Young. Pat endorsed Albert. And Albert endorsed Pat. They are friends and Pat is also friends with most of the people who engage in racist attacks on the Board. Pat doesn't like identity politics. She says that people like me on the Board use erroneous claims of racism as a smoke screen to attack people who don't think programming should be based on identity politics (which is a code for progressive Black programming.)
I respond as follows:
WHAT FRIENDSHIP DOES AND DOES NOT MEAN
This is the sort of narrow, slanted, self-absorbed thinking and misinterpretation of the views of others which characterizes most of Lisa Davis' utterances, just the same old, same old tiresome thing. I would have ignored it but for the fact that she says I only claim to be working with the Juanita Young Support committee. This enraged me.
I was present for most of the court appearances connected with Juanita's first successful case in which the judge ruled that she did not trespass in her own apartment, as charged. I heard the summation in the civil suit against the cop who murdered her son, Malcolm. I was present for the last 2-1/2 days of the latest trial in which a jury awarded her $1,350,000 for the pain and suffering and civil rights violations inflicted on her by another policeman. I was one of those who assisted her in traveling to Atlanta to speak at the US Social Forum this past June.
The Support Committee exemplifies the best features of a progressive group. Its members are diverse in age, gender, race and political affiliation, yet we all recognize our common objective and are comradely toward each other.
I have known Juanita for over thirty years. We met at the Lighthouse for the Blind where we used to attend adult education courses and hang out with friends. She assisted me in getting through the first lap of my trip home after a hospital stay, a favor I will never forget. She is a wonderful friend and parent as well as an amazing role model of courage, perseverance, wisdom, and support for others, including other families devastated by police murders.
I love and admire Juanita. How dare Lisa Davis infer that I am not a valued member of the Committee or that my support for Juanita is not genuine!
And speaking of friendship, yes, I am friendly with Albert Solomon. He has helped me in many ways including, to give a specific example, assisting me in transporting some heavy and bulky items while I was moving. Does that mean that I agree with everything he says and does? Of course not. Do I agree with the way he worded his candidate statement? No! Do I concur with the charges he makes against a Board member, a J&U supporter and a Management person? Absolutely. They are completely factual. Does anyone reading this agree one hundred percent with the views or actions of any friend? It is impossible for such a thing to occur. Confering guilt by association is ugly and irrational and tells you a great deal about the person attempting to do it.
MY EVOLUTION BEYOND IDENTITY POLITICS
One belief that Lisa ascribes to me is absolutely correct. I do not admire prioritizing identity politics nor do I believe they accord well with the Pacifica mission. this belief arises both from my personal journey to overcome an overly narrow interpretation of my own identity and from my understanding of the tenets of revolutionary socialism.
From early childhood on I, like almost all other blind people throughout the world, was faced with a bewildering array of stereotypical attitudes, lack of understanding concerning my abilities and limitations, discrimination, condescending behaviors and outright rejection. Though, in my case, these did not come from the adults closest to me, when confronting the outside world my child's mind could conceive of only two possibilities. Either there was something dreadfully wrong with me which caused me to deserve this unpleasant treatment or there was something terribly wrong with those who conferred it on me. I took the latter stance and never consciously wavered from it.
In high school I made a few sighted friends. In college I made only one. I have memories of rejection which still bring tears to my eyes. I decided that, with very few exceptions, sighted and blind people were incapable of forming deep relationships of mutual trust and respect and that I would be the one to do the rejecting before "they" rejected me.
Some of my friends and I, many of us WBAI listeners, realized that these negative attitudes toward blindness were as prevalent in the agencies supposedly set up to assist us in our path toward independence as they were in the wider society. We formed the Blind Power Movement, a short-lived group which nonetheless was featured in a long "Village Voice: article and which held a demonstration that managed to create a good deal of adverse publicity for our chosen target, the Lighthouse For The Blind.
In 1977 came the first major WBAI crisis of which I was aware, the lockout ordered by the Local Advisory Board and the call by staff for listeners to come and support them outside the WBAI 'church,' the building the station then owned. I did not pause to think about rejection. I grabbed my keys and hurried to the bus stop. That was the first time I experienced a solidarity so pervasive that it began to transform me. Not only was I engaging in something very important, keeping the injunction from being served on the staff occupying the building, but I found myself accepted and I was amazingly proud and happy. I trusted the friends I made among the Friends Of WBAI and they respected me.
In 1980 I joined the National Federation Of The Blind, NFB, an organization which recognizes that blindness is merely a physical characteristic, not a huge handicap, and that it is the attitudes toward blindness which hold blind people back in education, employment and other areas of life. Knowing that this philosophy was shared by a large number of people constituting a nationwide support system gave me enormous confidence. Hearing about members who are employed by, socialized with and sometimes married sighted colleagues gave added weight to my positive experiences in the Friends Of WBAI and chipped away more conviction from my isolationist stance.
In 1990 when I read about Radical Women, a socialist-feminist organization, in a Braille feminist newsletter, I was ready to go and check out a meeting even though I expected to be the only blind person present. Soon I was attending study groups, learning more about the need for working class solidarity than I had ever heard on WBAI. All oppressed groups, including the blind, must work together to prepare the way for the revolution. I joined CISPES, Committee In Solidarity With The People Of El Salvador, warmly welcomed by people like Tibby Brooks, current LSB secretary. I had found a new family of sighted friends with whom I felt safe and accepted. they encouraged me to increase my participation and to learn new skills.
As I grew to know and was accepted by more and more activists I came to realize many things. A partial cause of the rejection I had experienced when younger were my own negative expectations which had influenced my behavior and the attitude radiating from me. I had to sufficiently value my common bonds with others in order for them to be recognized by those others. My identifications as feminist, atheist, socialist, singer, poet, adherent of alternative medicine, WBAI activist, etc. have become as important to me as my membership in the blind community. This has not diluted my identification with that community, made me less proud of the alternative techniques we use nor less willing to struggle for equal opportunity for all blind people. Instead, it has made me a better representative of and more convincing advocate on behalf of blind people because I am now a more well-rounded person.
Each of us has dozens of identities, all important to some degree. They form an intersecting web. People from very different cultures living in markedly different circumstances will still find points of common ground if they are open to looking for them. Identity politics encourages or sometimes even demands its adherents to adopt a narrow, limited view of identity which strongly militates against mutual understanding and working together.
What does this mean for programming at Pacifica? It means that, while issues of all oppressed people, including people of color, should be addressed at least as often as they are now, the strategy of how to address them and to whom they should bee addressed must change. Groups should not be divided into little boxes, each with their own program. The broader listenership must be invited and welcomed to learn about and participate in the fight to end various areas of oppression. They must be assumed to be part of the solution rather than attacked as part of the problem. Attacking people does not make them receptive to new ways of thinking.
"Earth Watch" was a superb example of this kind of Pacifica mission driven programming. Instead of urging that its brand of enlightened, inclusive humanism be emulated, Management fired Robert Knight. This is just one important example of why the Justice And Unity mindset must not prevail at WBAI.
As one speaker at the October 22nd rally reminded us, quoting a much older source -- and I may be slightly paraphrasing -- we must all work together or we will fall separately.
--Patricia Logan