Written by Organizing Roots in Collaboration with Dignity in Schools Campaign California
October 2022
Nina Simone, Backlash Blues
inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem “Backlash Blues”
Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash
Just who do you think I am?
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages
And send my son to Vietnam
You give me second class houses
And second class schools
Do you think that all colored folks
Are just second class fools?…
…But the world is big
Big and bright and round
And it’s full of folks like me
Who are black, yellow, beige and brown
Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you
With the backlash blues
Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash
Just what do you think I got to lose?
I’m gonna leave you
With the backlash blues
You’re the one who’ll have the blues
Not me, just wait and see
From momentum to backlash
In our 2022 National Week of Action, our movement is facing a growing backlash.
The pro-police, pro-privatizing, and pro-prison forces are on the move to beat back our gains. For two years we have had the momentum and been winning breakthrough after breakthrough in community control of our schools and removing police from schools. But now they are taking the momentum back and are moving to reverse our victories.
How should we respond to this backlash?
Three Keys in Dignity in Schools Campaign California’s “Never Again” Statement
One of the most important things we can do during this year’s Week of Action is to revisit and reflect on our DSCCA’s “Never Again” Statement, written four years ago in response to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Miami suburban town of Parkland, Florida.
The “Never Again” statement gives us three essential tools that can help us navigate this current moment:
- Our wins came from our deep, long-term organizing—not solely from a George Floyd Revolt “moment.”
- We were always going to be against the racist counter-revolution tide, because we have a much deeper, more radical take from most people on where the school-to-prison pipeline comes from and what it will take to end it.
- We need to get back to organizing. As the recent backlash grows, the problem is, are we not organizing enough.
Two Reminders in the “Never Again” Statement
The first thing to notice about the “Never Again” statement is how it tells the story of our long-fought struggle. It exposes the myths put out by some pro-police forces and police officials who want to over-exaggerate the scope of the “defund” moment of 2020. The Never Again statement shows us that the important gains and victories we won in 2020 to remove police in schools in California were not spontaneous or a temporary “trend”—they were deliberate campaigns to educate and win over the community, win back control of our schools, and challenge the racist school-to-prison pipeline. In this story, it is important to note the heroic role played by the Black Organizing Project in Oakland and their “Police Free Schools 2020” campaign launched in 2016.
Second, the Never Again statement reminds us that the victories we fought for were never just about the simple removal or restriction of police in school. Those are critical stepping stones toward the broader vision we have to build transformative cultures of educational justice, care and support for students, families and school staff. Likewise, the statement defines our struggle not as a “single issue” pragmatic campaign, but as part of and parallel to the movement made up of many other organizations and communities who seek to end the criminalization and militarization of our communities. By taking on the school-to-prison pipeline and school policing, we are taking on the greatest human rights crisis facing Black, Indigenous, Latinx, immigrant and working-class communities–that being the police/prison ‘cradle-to-grave’ imperative that attempts to crush our present and future.
When we remember why we fought this fight and how we got here, we can see that this latest backlash is only the latest part of what many of us in the movement have called a 50-year counterrevolution against the victories of the Black-led Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s. We are fighting against the grain of history inside this homeland of settler-colonial racial capitalism and empire. Our whole purpose is to force this system to change in ways that it will resist to the bitter end. Our movement is built for this. We are built for this.
When we remember why we fought this fight and how we got here, we can see that this latest backlash is only the latest part of what many of us in the movement have called a 50-year counterrevolution against the victories of the Black-led Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s. We are fighting against the grain of history inside this homeland of settler-colonial racial capitalism and empire. Our whole purpose is to force this system to change in ways that it will resist to the bitter end. Our movement is built for this. We are built for this.
What Is Needed Now: Organize, Organize, Organize
This brings us to the third and most important reason to revisit the “Never Again” statement: organizing.
We know that the amount of social and emotional trauma and harm we all have endured creates uncertainty and nothing has an easy answer or solution. At the end of the day, we still must talk to real parents, real young people, real community members who are navigating all of this. That police are not the answer. We have to be more than willing to engage, to listen deeply and propose paths forward. There is no communications strategy, narrative/messaging campaign, advocacy play or insider leverage that will substitute for this essential work.
Part of our strategic vulnerability in this moment stems from the fact that some of the victories we won in 2020 were lifted by what our adversaries feared the most: millions of people took to the streets, of all races, genders, ages, and abilities who were in unison to question policing as we know it. In places where we leveraged this momentum without the underlying deep base building and community struggle, we won moral, mobilization, and message victories—not paradigmatic, terrain-shifting victories–that are now especially vulnerable to the backlash.
Our only real answer now is to organize and out-organize our adversaries. And to organize means to be in relationship to, to be in conversation, to be of service, to be in struggle with the community, and to win over our communities.
Many DSCCA members organizations and the communities in which they work and learn at have had first-hand experience in this new terrain. Some of the keys they are using in the organizing conversation include: to separate facts from fiction, look at the particulars and not speak in generalities, seek constantly to ground ourselves with what we are hearing on the ground, interrogate root causes, and propose and engage in solutions – all through deep community outreach and building strong organizations.
Backlash Blues in a Counterrevolutionary Era
We have to be clear that this struggle is going to be hard, we are going against the current of a heartless society that has come to believe that police are the only solution to all our problems. Many police officials, politicians, rightwing idealogues and liberal opportunists want to return to a school policing climate of racism, punishment, and push-out. Ultimately, they want to put Black, Indigenous, Brown and poor students and their parents back into their proper “place,” to put them back into the prison, low-wage-economy and social/colonial abandonment pipeline.
The DSCCA “Never Again” Statement reminds us that our collective work is to uproot the deeply ingrained U.S. punishment, pro-police and ‘lock them-up’ culture. Of course, let’s be clear that the “them” is us. And that the “them” is really the “other”–be that Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, Queer, and the poor.
The statement urges us to more profoundly interrogate what we understand as safety. For if we only measure safety as more police, then we will always be in a “deficit,” for those in power and their police spokespeople have embraced this mythology as a truth. We know that many in our communities have also been won over to this viewpoint. And it makes sense that some in the community would repeat this mantra because our communities have had to survive in a patchwork of socially orchestrated chaos that comes in the form of poverty, social neglect, racial oppression, and grossly unequal societies. It is our job to win over–through organizing and struggle–our communities to real notions of safety that are measured in dignified shelter, food, health care, better wages, free education, and, an end to war, racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination. And those can only be won by actually securing resources away from warfare, police and prison budgets.
In the face of this heartless society, we choose to take to heart the musical and political collaborative song/poem from Nina Simone and Langston Hughes, titled, “Backlash Blues.” Nina Simone, inspired by a Langston Hughes poem, reworked and built upon this poem into a protest song. Nina sings with conviction and power and a dazzling steady piano blues tempo, reminding her listeners that the white backlash against the Black-led Civil Rights Revolution was already in full swing by 1967. Yet the song refuses to accept a future of despair and destruction and reminds us that we cannot live in fear, we cannot shirk our power or our will to fight, we cannot forget that war and poverty are wrong and that the darker peoples of the planet are our allies in this fight. We cannot forget that we have a block, a community, a school, a city, a world to win–and that ultimately those backlash forces will be the ones left in the dust of hatred and ruin.