Collective Liberation: The Time is NOW

Take Em Down NOLA is a multi-ethnic, multi-generational coalition of organizers committed to the removal of ALL symbols of white supremacy in the city of New Orleans including but not limited to school names, public parks, street names and monuments. This struggle is a part of the greater struggle for racial and economic justice in New Orleans.

Some wonder why, amidst all the social injustice, we choose to focus on symbols. Well it’s simple. Not only do we recognize white supremacy as the binding glue of all forms of modern systemic oppression, but we also believe in the ancient Hermetic wisdom that teaches us, “As above, so below.”

In New Orleans, what hovers above us are countless schools named after white supremacists like John McDonogh, one of the biggest slave-owners in Louisiana history whose namesake brands the most prominent historically Black co-ed high school in the city, amongst many others. What lingers below are major streets like Claiborne, Bienville and Iberville, all named after slave-owners and white supremacists.

We look back up only to see Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, as his monument sits on high on a street also named after him. We look up to P.G.T. Beauregard, a Louisiana lieutenant in the Confederacy, sitting atop his horse in front of the New Orleans Museum of Art. We look up to Andrew Jackson mounted atop a horse in the most prominent square in the city, one bearing his name in the heart of the French Quarter. We look up to a 12-foot statue of Robert E. Lee atop a 60-foot pedestal in the center of the city towering above us all. Talk about being under the gaze of white supremacy. New Orleans is literally inundated with it at nearly every major corner.

And what lies below the heavens governed by antebellum war criminals? Well here are the descendants of those that they once governed, still mired in the misery of post-traumatic slavery disorder. Many of us—in ways all too literal—still bear the shackles that our ancestors fought to shake off. New Orleans is the number one incarcerator of its people per capita in all the world’s history. What havoc does that reek on our communities? Well it translates into a 52 percent unemployment rate for Black men whereby undocumented income or more criminality becomes their only means of survival. This of course leads to more incarceration as the sick cycle continues. This translates to Black women shouldering an inordinate amount of the financial burden in many single parent homes; where 50 percent of Black children live below the poverty line.

The whole dynamic isn’t a far cry from the days of slavery and Jim Crow when Black men and women were violently separated from their families. One starts to sense a pattern here, as though none of this is by mistake. It’s not. The system is working exactly as it was designed.

Case in point: on December 17, 2015, when TEDN successfully pressured New Orleans City Council to vote 6-1 to remove four monuments to White Supremacy, Coun-cilwoman Stacy Head was the only member who voted to keep them up. One of the four was the Liberty Place monument, which commemorates the Battle of Liberty Place where in 1874, the Crescent City White League slaughtered Black and white police officers in a racist massacre. The erection of the obelisk was partly orchestrated by the Regular Democrats Organization, also founded in 1874. The RDO endorsed Stacy Head’s campaign. It’s obvious whose narrative the councilwoman has internalized.

Likewise, it’s very clear why our city and country are where we are. People internalize messages projected upon them. Those messages become part of belief systems that create the social and political systems that govern our lives. When we allow ourselves to be complicit with those systems, when we fail to resist them at every turn, we perpetuate them.

After over 150 years of relative complicity with oppressive systems by the oppressed, it’s only natural that we find ourselves living in an environment where tyranny is possible. Where a man named after two of the vilest white supremacists of our past — Jefferson Beaur-egard Sessions—can be elected the U.S. Attorney General. Where the son of a Ku Klux Klan supporter can be elected Commander-in-Chief.

So what’s our duty in this moment? We must impeach from our hearts all the toxic beliefs that systemic oppression has taught us. The centuries-old backwash of white supremacy and its subordinates, racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, Islamophobia, transphobia, all phobias, and fear must die now.

There can be no silos in our liberation, because if one of us is in bondage, we’re all guilty. Each of us is each other’s responsibility. The time for collective liberation is NOW.

– Michael “Quess?” Moore

This article originally published in the February 13, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.