Rad Geek People's Daily

Going after Sanders is super, super important because Sanders is supposed to be as far left and as progressive as we can possibly get, right? … [In Seattle] we have hordes and hordes of white liberals and white progressives and yet we still have all the same racial problems. So for us, locally in our context, confronting Sanders was the equivalent of confronting the large, white, liberal Democrat, leftist contingent that we have here in Seattle who not only have not supported BLM in measurable ways but is often very harmful and is also upholding the white supremacist society that we live in locally… What we didn’t know was that that idea—of the white liberal, the white moderate who’s complicit in white supremacy—that that idea would resonate with people nationally and internationally and spur into this larger conversation.

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[On why she didn’t call the Sanders campaign in advance and ask to be a part of the Westlake event:]

Part of it comes out of my personal politics, and out of BLM politics. Everybody keeps saying that black people need to be respectable, that they need to ask permission, that they need to work with the timetable that’s been given to them. And I absolutely just rebuke and deny all of that… The un-respectability, and the tactic, the way we went about it—every single part of it was very intentional. . . . Black people don’t need to be respectable, black people don’t need to go on your timetable, black people don’t need to reach out to Bernie Sanders. If anything, Bernie Sanders should have been courting—before he went to any other major city—he should have been courting BLM. And even at that point, I haven’t seen any politician that’s done anything for black lives. I don’t have any need to meet with them, period. I haven’t seen anybody really willing to step it up. So, there’s a lot of ways that politicians are trying to get activists swept up in rhetoric, and sitting around the table, sitting around the table to do nothing but repress movements, and so the work that I do in particular is agitational work. Is agitating the political scene, so that people are having these conversations and politicians are forced to do their own work, and do their own reforms, because of work that I’ve done on the ground.

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I don’t have faith in politicians. I don’t have faith in the electoral process. It’s well documented that that doesn’t work for us. No matter who you are. So my gaze is not toward politicians and getting them to do something in particular. I think they will change what they do based off of what I do, but that’s not my center. My center is using electoral politics as a platform but also agitating so much that people continue to question the system they’re in as they’re doing it, and that we start to dismantle it. Because I refuse to believe that the system that we’re in is the only option that we have. And so we hear people saying—Bernie supporters—”Well, he’s your best option.” It’s like, If he’s our best option then I’m burning this down. I think it’s literally blowing up—this is why the respectability thing is so important—is that you blow it up so big, and so unrespectably, that you can show people the possibilities outside of the system that they’re stuck in. And so that’s why I do agitation work.

So I’m not for any politician. But I’m definitely for anything that pulls people further left, anything that gets people asking more questions, and gets us closer to actually dismantling the system that has never, ever, ever, ever done anything for black people and never will. So I’m really trying to see my people get free by any means possible.

–Marissa Johnson, Seattle #BlackLivesMatter activist, quoted
From In Her Own Words: The Political Beliefs of the Protester Who Interrupted Bernie Sanders,
Eli Sanders, The Stranger (2015-08-11)