Reimagining Revolution: Q&A with Grace Lee Boggs

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From Hyphen Magazine:

Boggs, 96, may not be as well-known as other activists, but has more than seven decades of activism and grassroots organizing experience, including the labor, Civil Rights, black power, feminist, Asian American and environmental/food justice movements.

She lives in Detroit, MI and was married to late husband James Boggs, an African American autoworker, activist and philosopher. Along with other community members they co-founded Detroit Summer, a program that has helped rebuild the city from the ground up. In 2012, Detroit Summer will celebrate its 20th year.

She recently published The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-first Century, written with Scott Kurashige. A documentary, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs by filmmaker Grace Lee (no relation) is in the works. To read more about her visit to the Bay Area, read the article I wrote for this week’s East Bay Express. Boggs also wrote about her most influential books for Hyphen’s Action issue in 2009.

I asked her about activism today and her experience as a Chinese American in a mostly black movement. Below is an edited version of the interview.

What advice would you give to a young activist?

I would say to a young activist, ‘Do visionary organizing. Turn your back on protest organizing and recognize how that leads you more and more to defensive operations, whereas visionary organizing gives you the opportunity to encourage the creative capacity in people and it’s very fulfilling.’

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  • KayWhitlock

    She’s amazing, and has been an influence on my own activism for decades.  I  lespecially love this part of the interview:
     
    QUESTION:  What advice would you give to a young activist?
     
    BOGGS:  I would say to a young activist, ‘Do visionary organizing. Turn your back on protest organizing and recognize how that leads you more and more to defensive operations, whereas visionary organizing gives you the opportunity to encourage the creative capacity in people and it’s very fulfilling.’
     
    —–
    I’m not sure I would turn my back on protest organizing altogether, but in the past decade, I have come to agree with Grace Lee Boggs that protest organizing tilts more and more into defensiveness and, I would say, reactivity. 
     
    And that’s not nearly strong enough.