It’s easy to damn the realm of politics; it’s dirty; distrustful, and generally a rather greasy business. It is telling that the average politician today runs on the proposition that s/he isn’t a politician!
Among radicals and revolutionaries politics is seen as something that is unclean; even tainted.
But revolutionaries aren’t priests. They are often pushed to shatter barriers that have once constrained them, as when Dr. Huey P. Newton once opined that the Black Panther Party would never run for bourgeois electoral office, only to run himself for Congress several years later, as did other Panthers, like Eldridge Cleaver (who ran for President!), Elaine Brown, and Bobby Seale.
In Graterford Prison (Pa.’s Blackest concentration camp) only one candidate is able to enter and advocate for his DA candidacy (Pa. state prisoners can’t vote–but their families can!). Why can’t this process be open to all candidates who wish to run? How can race or religion bar anyone?
The answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t. Period. Politics truly is an ugly business. But when people are engaged and energized, they can bring change as seen when Black Lives Matter affiliates built movements that replaced several DAs who were unresponsive to Black needs and concerns over mass incarceration.
One of America’s greatest Black leaders, Frederick Douglass, said, “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, and never will”.
We, his people, his descendants, must make the demand.
Revolutionaries utilize whatever they can to raise issues that can lead to real social change. That should be the case in the DAs race in Philadelphia.
Rock the Vote!