Conclusion: A New Politics Manual for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois’s challenge to us in this excerpt from Darkwater is to gather our courage and become active fomenters rather than passive supporters of social justice. After fifteen years of working with Millennial in a wide variety of capacities, I am convinced that they have the predispositions—from generally tolerant attitudes to often close-knit relationships with their family elders—that situate them well to make the change to work collaboratively toward the future. And yet the optimism of the 2008 election among Millennial and others counting on the presidency of Barack Obama to bring change to the country has been deeply chastened by the severity of Movement Backlash and Leapfrog Paranoia, as well as the daunting task of rebuilding the country following the Great Recession that lies ahead of us. In order to avoid feeling paralyzed by the need to end the Oppression Olympics, the major civic goal of this book has been to offer a path of deep commitment, which is accessible from the individual or group perspective. Quite simply I’ve argued that we can end the hegemony of the Oppression Olympics by analyzing politics with the paradigm intersectionality framework, which will light our way along the path to the deep political solidarity it will take to enable wide-scale social justice.