Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth to Power, Finding Power in Truth

by Meizhu Lui
April 6, 2002

On June 6, Representative Barbara Lee of California spoke out against Bush's "war on terrorism" to an audience of several hundred. Her address was given at the historic League of Women for Community Service, an African American women's service organization that has been in existence in the Roxbury section of Boston for nearly a century. The event was sponsored by the Community Coalition for Peace and Justice, which includes groups like the Black Radical Congress and the Massachusetts Rainbow Party. Other speakers included Mel King, long time activist whose mayoral campaign used the term "Rainbow Coalition" before Jesse; Gloria Fox, State Representative from Roxbury; and Chuck Turner, Boston's radical African American city councilor. Judy Roderick from the Boston BRC was the moderator.

Meizhu Lui, who delivered this introduction, is a leading member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Truth to Power

Congressperson Barbara Lee is an awesome sister. She has singlehandedly restored for many of us the faith that our Congresspeople can make a difference. And this is time when not just peoples of color, but mainstream US citizens have lost faith in their leaders to the point that a majority do not even bother to vote! So even though Barbara Lee stood alone – a woman of color, a woman of courage, an African American woman – in that sea of white men, she accomplished more for democracy in that one minute than all of the rest of them put together.

But it is not surprising that it would be an African American woman that would speak out.

September 11, everyone says, united everyone in sorrow and fear. But the sorrow and fear that people of color felt was not the same as the sorrow and fear felt by whites. For the first time, whites realized that they were not invulnerable, that – oh, how could this be?! – “some people hate us!”, they said with real surprise. For people of color, we always feel vulnerable, and know all too well that some people hate us: people not only with hatred in their hearts, but power in their hands. Yes, we felt sorrow for the families of the people killed in the World Trade Center, many of them immigrants, people from every race and class. We also felt sorrow for those we knew would soon be killed in retaliation – people abroad such as Afghanis, Arabs, and who knew who else in the handy catch-all net of “terrorists,” – and people at home. We felt fear not just because we too might have been in the WTC, but because if we look in any way similar to those involved in attack on the WTC, our neighbors might turn on us as well. My mother, who is Chinese, was a student when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Not having heard the news yet, she was sitting in the library when a gang of white students came running toward her, and luckily, one of them asked her, “Are you Japanese?” She still shudders to think what might have happened had she said yes. My first thoughts after September 11 were about the internment of the Japanese during WWII, and wondering if Arab Americans would be the next to experience democracy, US style.

For whites, their fears of further attack have not yet come true, except for an attempt by home grown terrorists who sent out anthrax laced letters. But for people of color, our sorrows and fears have indeed come true. We still do not know how many civilians were killed in Afghanistan. We do know that Muslims, peoples of Arabic descent, and South Asians have been killed, harassed, beaten, and disappeared. Somali friends here have said they are missing many members of their community, simply do not know where they are, for how long, under what conditions. And Somalia is not even listed in the “axis of evil!”

And it is not surprising that it was a woman who stood up against the use of violence to solve our problems. It is our men folk, fathers, husbands, lovers, sons, who go off and get killed, leaving the women behind. There have been a million movies about men in war – especially now, movies glorifying men in war – but the heroic efforts of women to survive and to preserve their people and their culture – are left unnoticed. Women are the ones left behind, to grieve, to rebuild, to resist rape and robbery, to raise their children – and if necessary, to migrate to other parts of the world seeking safety. Not acts of shooting and killing, but the daily acts of living and loving it takes to beg borrow or steal a little food, to keep the children warm, to care for the elders, to keep memory and hope alive, to be the keepers and perpetuators of your broken culture. A decade ago, we talked about the “feminization of poverty,” as women and their children began to dominate the ranks of the poor as unions were busted, men lost jobs, and poor mothers were denied reasonable help from their government. Today, we also have the “feminization of migration,” as more and more women, displaced by the effects of war and the globalized economy, are leaving their homes. War sets them in motion, not just to the US, but to wherever they can find shelter. These are mostly women of color, women of courage.

It’s not surprising that it was specifically an African American who urged restraint against people in the global South and who stood up to the President. African Americans in particular understand the mentality of the US in relation to the world’s darker peoples. They know that the founding fathers had no problem with trafficking in human beings, in considering Africans as less than human, as cargo to be packed and shipped like bananas, it was only to be expected that some might rot or die along the way. And today the US doesn’t have to engage in the slave trade to treat Africans as expendable. Now the trade in products achieves the same effects. Knowing that HIV/AIDS had become a pandemic there, our government still wanted to protect the “free” trade rights of US pharmaceutical companies to deny affordable drugs to African nations, a blatant example of the priority of US profits over African lives. And it was Barbara Lee that challenged our government on that issue as well.

Barbara Lee – a woman of color, a woman of courage – spoke for me. She spoke for us. She spoke truth to power.

Power in Truth

And now, her “truth” has become self-evident. Barbara’s “moral compass” was pointing in the right direction when she refused to rubber stamp the use of violence to end violence: the actions of the United States both at home and abroad have indeed “spiraled out of control.” Other legislators have looked the other way as our democracy has been dismantled and as violence escalates abroad. But now, it is without joy and without malice that we can say with Barbara Lee, she told you so. Often, the truth lies within the minority, and that truth ripens and grows until it comes to fruition as the view of the majority.

We must stand up with Barbara Lee, we must give her our support, we must add our voices to hers. When we speak truth to power, we find power in the truth.