From Alice Walker:
Let The People Decide
Responding to the announcement of
Revolution and Religion: A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Bob Avakian
October 9, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
As a young Southern black woman I was deeply impressed and changed, in the Sixties, by the appearance in our local communities of SNCC, members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, whose mission was to transform the Apartheid/Jim Crow South. They were the first activists of color, with their white allies, that I saw who respectfully listened to poor black people—and to the poor white people who would allow it—and had as their guiding mantra: Let The People Decide. We are now in such dire straits as a planet that letting the people of the world decide our course is the only sensible option, “leaders” of various stripes having failed us completely; and who actually seem to enjoy making us feel afraid. Living as we do under surveillance, police terrorism, and the sweeping of our children into prison, if, in fact, they survive the perils of walking while black on any city street.
I am as leery as anyone of every single political system that has appeared on the scene, going back thousands of years. All male dominated and penis/power driven. But that does not prevent my understanding that if we cannot at the very least sit down like human grownups and talk to each other face to face, we’ll soon be reduced, as our politicians have been, to bombing people, in strange lands, we will never know. Before we are all covered completely in the blood of other people’s children, let us find other ways to be and do. This conversation with brothers West and Avakian will be an opportunity to explore other realms of thought, leading, hopefully, to other possibilities of Direction Change. For instance: the inclusion at the deepest and highest levels of consideration the voices of leadership that have been most thoroughly suppressed, that of Indigenous women and men; especially the wisdom and vision of Indigenous women.
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