Supporting Black Lives Matter
Members of LHV DSA passed this set of resolutions in order to support the Black Lives Matter Movement vocally and engage in building power with the movement. To get involved please check out our upcoming events on the Calendar, sign up on our email list, and reach out to hudsonvalleydsa@gmail.com to help lead the efforts. We need all hands on deck in order to best support the movement
Proposal for Next Steps for LoHud DSA’s BLM Work
Our work in the Black Lives Matter movement should be guided by three principles:
Seek to work in coalition with Black-led organizations and to support continued Black leadership in this struggle.
Prioritize actions that promote open, militant mass action as opposed to secretive and limited actions, whenever possible. There are thousands of people in our area who are ready to take militant action in support of BLM and we should focus on reaching as many of them as possible.
Use this opportunity to improve our collective understanding of the current BLM movement, how we got here, and what lessons we can draw. We must promote continued political education, discussion, and debate to guide our strategy moving forward.
A weekly bulletin. Chapter leaders should recruit volunteers to keep track of local protests and to put out a weekly email bulletin to our members and contacts about events. In general, we think it is better to support protests that are already being organized, or to work in coalition with other organizations to plan and build these events.
Explore joining the emerging coalition in Westchester to defund the police. A coalition of Black-led and other community organizations has formed specifically to work around defunding the police in Westchester. The steering committee should appoint a team of four to five members of the chapter to meet with the leaders and participate in its discussion. If we decide to join the coalition, we will develop a plan (to be approved by the Steering Committee) for how we can use the resources of our chapter to build it. Defunding the police should be the centerpiece of our work. Additionally, as part of our coalition work, we should seek to work with other organizations on other meaningful criminal justice reforms like limiting the police use of force and ending the qualified immunity. And we should explore joining the coalition in Rockland County to force Sheriff Louis Falco to resign after he posted a string of racist articles from sources including a Neo-Nazi website.
Housing not tanks in Peekskill. Comrades in Peekskill are leading a fight to prioritize affordable housing and to stop the city from obtaining an MRAP armored vehicle. An ad hoc coalition is forming to pressure the Peekskill City Council to stop the sale of public land for development contributing to gentrification and to address the dire housing inequities that already exist in Peekskill. This campaign presents us with an excellent opportunity to build coalitions, talk one-on-one with residents, engage in creative direct action, and amplify and connect demands for affordable housing and defunding and demilitarizing the police; we should deepen our chapter’s participation.
Defund White Plains Police campaign. The Defund White Plains Police campaign was recently started. It has gained a lot of momentum. They have begun to survey the community on defunding the police (to see where money should be reinvested), built out planning groups (communications, outreach, education/research, event planning), and plan weekly events in White Plains. Our chapter should support the campaign so we can share DSA resources such as Votebuilder for canvassing, social media for amplifying, and having a strong defund project we can all work on. We can start with supporting this White Plains campaign to defund and then shift to tackle other places in Lower Hudson Valley with our knowledge and resources created through White Plains.
Work with our new Congressperson to Promote a Third Reconstruction. Jamaal Bowman’s Reconstruction Agenda is probably the most radical platform of anyone in Congress, period. It combines a call for real racial justice with universal democratic socialist demands. We should seek to meet with representatives from Jamaal’s team to discuss how we can help promote his program, such as sponsoring socially-distanced community tabling to build support for the Reconstruction Agenda program.
Build the fight against Trump’s secret police/renew our call to #AbolishICE. Trump’s use of Homeland Security agents as secret police is a very troubling turn towards increased authoritarianism. First of all, we need to acknowledge that these tactics have been used for years to discipline immigrant communities. We should seek to join or initiate local protests against Trump’s secret police, and connect this struggle to the ongoing struggle to #AbolishICE. We must also continue and expand our work in support of local immigrant rights’ organizing initiatives.
Organize learning and discussion. The chapter should continue and expand our discussion of the current uprising, how it informs our thinking about the fight for socialism, and how we relate to it collectively as an organization. We suggest
chapter-wide reading and discussion series;
Invite leaders from groups doing BLM and Defund the Police organizing to speak on the work they are doing and where they see the future of the movement going
Invite speakers to discuss lessons we can learn from past uprisings/movements chapter- wide reading series of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s book: From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation