Why do we assume this would be an alien’s first question?
It is remarkable that Black Lives Matter, one of the largest and most potent uprisings of recent memory, has no apparent leader. No one person or group announced beforehand the massive eruptions that followed the murder of George Floyd, nor did any one person or group speak to the media on behalf of the entire movement. To be sure there were plenty of activists and organizers working hard to assist every individual demonstration, but there was and is no apparent central command.
To our culture — and I don’t mean here white European culture, but all of western civilization — this seems counterintuitive, if not impossible. In our world, no activity takes place until and unless someone has been put in charge. There are two kinds of people in our world: chiefs — CEOs, CFOs, COOs, presidents, generals, vice presidents — and the rest of us. For anything to happen, from a two-car funeral up, there must be a plan, a table of organization, and someone to tell everyone else what to do. It’s the only way to go.
Actually, it’s not. Like a lot of attitudes and viewpoints, this one is so well established, so far beyond discussion let alone challenge, that it is buried deeply in the culture of people who act like us. It is invisible.
But the fact is that during large portions of human history, over large swaths of the world, there was no such thing as a chief anything. I discovered with great difficulty in the course of writing two books about colonial history that this was true of the Native American cultures of North America. Why was it so difficult? Because when something is present but invisible in one’s own culture, its absence is invisible in someone else’s.
Native American society was clan-based — the clan being something completely different from the tribe — and matrilineal. Only a tiny handful of white colonials ever figured this out. A baby was born into its mother’s clan, lived along with its father with its mother’s people, and its upbringing was the exclusive responsibility of the mother and her siblings. In its entire life the child would have very little to do with its father. It would earn everything it needed to know from its aunts and uncles. Oblivious to this fact, white diplomats throughout the history of the destruction of the Native American people continually mystified them by asking them to respect and obey their “great white father” in England, later in Washington.
No one was in charge of a Native American village, or tribe. It was no one’s job to see that things were done, done on time, or done well. It was everyone’s job, and everyone knew and accepted that. Any decision affecting everybody was made by everybody. People had varying influence, of course, matriarchs were very powerful as were elder males. In the case of war, the council did appoint a war chief to have temporary coordinating authority over the operation, but the Indian Chief of virtually every western movie and book, not to mention history book, simply did not exist.
Our culture never got this about their culture. Ever. My favorite story illustrating this point is about what the British military did while trying to get the Delaware tribe (so named by the English, in honor of Lord Delaware) to yield some land the Ohio Company wanted to develop. Enormously frustrated because they could never be sure who they were negotiating with — it changed all the time — or whether that person had the authority to negotiate and enforce an agreement. The British decided to solve the problem by holding a lavish coronation ceremony and installing their own nominee as King of the Delawares. (Their nominee had better things to do that day and sent his cousin to stand in for him. The British didn’t realize for months they had given the crown to the wrong man.)
Offered an opportunity, at about this same time, to meet one of the most influential matriarchs of the Iroquois Federation, George Washington declined. Why, he wondered, would he want to meet with a woman?
Leaderless — in the only way we understand the term — Native Americans flourished in North America for ten thousand years. Our culture has been here for 600 years and has pretty much screwed everything up. Maybe it’s time for a movement such as Black Lives Matter to begin showing us the way back to the future.
“Why, he wondered, would he want to meet with a woman?”
That sentence is equal to a walk off homerun.
Thank you Mr. Lewis
At present, we have a “leader” who thinks he’s a leader, but isn’t really, and we have fifty states that are all handcuffed to each other. This situation looks like it was designed by a virus.
Three weeks ago I was pepper-sprayed at a downtown protest rally by a young Nazi masquerading as a police officer. There was no discernable reason for his action, but, as a veteran of several anti-war rallies during the Viet Nam era, I was not surprised – saddened but not surprised. What did surprise me, though, was that the crowd (much larger than I’d expected) was without visible leadership. This seemed true of the mayhem I witnessed on TV as well.
Back in our day, Tom, we had Jerry Rubin, William Kunstler, Jesse Jackson, MLK, Malcom X; the list goes on. There were functioning protest organizations too: SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, SNCC, just to name the big ones. There were even manifestos such as Eldridge Cleaver’s ‘Soul on Ice’ and Abbie Hoffman’s ‘Steal This Book’. Militant Troubadours like Dylan, Baez and Seeger roamed the concert halls and coffee houses of the land singing dark ballads of doom laced with strains of potential redemption.
It was at once all rather heady, romantic and nicely organized. The ad-hoc protest leadership structure was able to harness the vision and purpose of a young American population that still believed that things could change – that wrongs could be made right in the land of the free…That particular vision is absent from today’s hapless hordes of young rebels, brought up in an America of planes flying into buildings, financial struggle, idiotic national leadership and a culture rendered vapid of human sentiment by the creeping cancer of AI.
I believe that this is the problem with today’s protesters: They have no positive cultural models to work from. They have purpose but lack focus and leadership. How could they have learned leadership and organizational skills, and developed viable institutional approaches to massive social dilemmas, coming of age in a disfunctional country such as ours has become?…I ask you. They have neither compass nor rudder.
I certainly think what you say was true of the Occupy Whatever (sorry, I can’t think of it without adding the “whatever”) movement and the Womens’ something-or-other March (remember the pink vagina hats? So cute). But this one feels different. For example, I have often been impressed to see protesters forcibly shut down people who started to loot or destroy property — in one case dragging an instigator over to the police line and delivering him up for arrest — not because they were ordered to do it but because they knew they had to do it. Well, we’ll see. I’m not betting the ranch.
All well and good if BLM were a leaderless organization, but to our detriment has been hijacked into a corporate front for neoliberalism.
This is an interesting assertion. Can you say more about this?
I do hope everyone has not been living under a rock or merely seeing only what they wish to see. This link is to start. I also recall seeing a commercial spanning 8 minutes to mimic the death of George Floyd, begging the question of who has the cash for 8 minutes of airtime.
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/companies-donating-black-lives-matter/
Notice also the targets of the protestors that began with those hitting the system the hardest and making the most sense (the Treasury Department building, a Target store known for harassing residents, the police district that caused Floyd’s death, and later, luxury stores) to targets that make little sense and hurts the system the least (statues that include abolitionists and Jesus). Notice the J. Edgar Hoover building has kept its name as well.
I fail to see how the assertion is “interesting” when it has been in one’s face for this amount of time, but what I do see is a protest that began highlighting oppression based on class and quickly diverted to race relations by the media through gaslighting. As I noted previously, it would be all well and good if these protests had remained leaderless and organic, however, that has sadly not been the case.
Same colonialist and First Nations dynamic is going on in British Columbia. There are Clan Chiefs, or hereditary chiefs, and elected chiefs. One is cultural and the other political. Many elected chiefs are women.
See, the problem is when the British empire got as far west as BC they were pretty tuckered out and never got around to negotiating treaties. Probably because they could never figure out who was who in the first place. Not much has changed in 150 years.
Still frustrates the hell out of our political and corporate leaders than only understand hierarchy and white empire structures.