Today and tomorrow graduate students at Harvard will vote on whether or not to form a union with the UAW. Harvard students will be the first graduate students at a private university to vote on forming a graduate student union after the National Labor Relations Board’s decision in August that teaching and research assistant are employees. I plan to vote for the UAW. I do so enthusiastically.

I do so for several reasons. This morning I offer three of them. The first is that having a union will allow graduate students to negotiate with Harvard collectively instead of as individuals. Without a union contract students who are teaching or working for a professor as a research assistant have no easy recourse when they are mistreated. I know of several students who have been paid egregiously late. In one instance, a student wasn’t paid for multiple months by an administrator he did work for. In another, a teaching fellow wasn’t paid for more than a month after starting teaching. I am confident that having a union contract at Harvard will put an end to such abuses.

Second, Harvard is the first of several private universities where there will be graduate student union elections in the next months. A union victory at Harvard will encourage graduate students at Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and other institutions in their efforts to form unions. By voting for a graduate student union at Harvard I am voting to improve the lives of graduate students not just at Harvard but at other institutions throughout the country.

Third, the election of President Trump will be likely mean that the labor movement itself comes under increasing attack. Voting to form a graduate student union at this time is a statement in support of the labor movement at time when it needs one. Unions have long been a force for fighting inequality. By supporting HGSU-UAW I will be standing with not just graduate students but workers across the country.

Improve the lives of Harvard graduate students, stand in solidarity with graduate students at other institutions, and fight for the wider labor movement, #UnionYes!

I write this as it becomes apparent that a xenophobe who has openly boasted of sexually assaulting women and been supported by white supremacist organizations is going to become the next President of the United States. Like so many, I am feeling a mixture of emotions: shame, anger, fear, frustration, paralysis… Already the political pundits are talking about what went wrong. Those of us on the left need to start talking about what happens next. But even more importantly than that, we need to start talking about what we are going to do.

There are 73 days until President-elect Trump assumes office. Once that happens it is pretty much anyone’s guess what will occur next. He has promised to round-up 11 million people. Elements within the FBI clearly support him and, my guess is, will probably launch some sort of intensified renewed version of COINTELPRO against Black Lives Matter, the water protectors in North Dakota, and other social movements. Whatever the case, we should expect increased white supremacist violence as Trump’s supporters go after the communities of color and others he has encouraged them to target.

The temptation in the face of this looming disaster will be give into despair and become defensive or isolate ourselves. We must not give into that temptation. Instead, we need to use the next 73 days to build a movement that cannot only protect the communities that will come under increasing assault but point a way forward. This movement must aim beyond recapturing the White House in 2020 or Congress in 2018. Instead, if it is to be effective, it must work to recast the political terrain, claim the moral ground, and, in the coming years, build institutions on the left that are powerful enough to challenge the resurgent white supremacist right.

I will not pretend to fully know how to do this. I can suggest some concrete actions. The first and most important comes from the recognition that we are far more powerful together than when we are alone. We humans are social creatures and we gain strength from each other. If you are not already part of an organized group, join one. If you can’t find one to join then form one. If you’re part of a group already then work to connect your group with others. The goal is ultimately to build a mass movement made up of many groups that can resist the coming Trump regime and push past the dawning national turn to the right.

Second, don’t give into despair. With despair comes immobility and inaction. What we need is action. Find something to give yourself a little hope. In far darker times than these people have dared to dream freedom dreams. Tomorrow, when all seems impossible, ask yourself what is your freedom dream? In it you will find a kernel of hope.

With these two things in mind, here is what I am going to do in the next few days. I am going to reach out to friends and comrades. I am going to let them know that I am committed to the work of movement building. I am going to share with them my freedom dreams and encourage them to share with me their own. I am going to encourage every person I contact to reach out to someone else and share a little of their vision. Perhaps in this way we might spark some of the hope and imagination that we need to get us through and move us beyond.

I will also ask my friends and comrades if they are currently part of a group. If they are not I will suggest that they consider visiting a prophetic religious community. I will make this suggestion not because I want to save their souls but because I understand that in the United States prophetic religious communities have played an important role in sustaining radical alternative visions in times of crisis. This weekend visit a Unitarian Universalist congregation, a radical church in the United Church of Christ like Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a progressive mosque, a Jewish Renewal synagogue, or a progressive Baptist church like Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland. I know my friends will find a little of the vision they need there and more than that they will connect with others looking for a way forward.

These are but first steps. Others, wiser than I, will offer further steps or, perhaps, point a different way that we must take. We have 73 days until President-elect Trump assumes office. That hour is late. The path ahead is dark. Let us begin. Let us dream.

* The phrase freedom dreams comes from Robyn Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

I will be returning to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford on January 22, 2017. They’re right down the block from where I live and I’m looking forward to worshipping with them again.

I will be back at the First Church in Salem, Unitarian on December 4, 2016. They’re a great congregation and if you’re in the area you should both check them out and come hang out with me. You can listen to the sermon while relaxing in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s old pew!

I will return to the Unitarian Universalist Society of Grafton and Upton on October 23, 2016. 

I just accepted an invitation to preach at the First Unitarian Church of New Bedford in New Bedford, MA on September 25, 2016. I will be preaching a variation of my sermon “While There is a Soul in Prison.”

I am pleased to announce a new preaching date. On February 12, 2017 I will be returning to Bell St. Chapel in Providence, RI.

I will be preaching at the Unitarian Church of Marlborough and Hudson in Hudson, MA on November 6, 2016. I am excited to be in a pulpit the Sunday before the election.

I will be preaching at the First Unitarian Church of Worcester on November 27, 2016. 

I am presenting a paper today, June 9, at the How Class Works conference at the State University of New York Stony Brook titled “To Grow Our Souls: Grace Lee Boggs’s Conceptions of Class.” The paper will hopefully soon be turned into a journal article. In the meantime, here’s the description I submitted to the conference organizers:

I examine how the philosopher and social activist Grace Lee Boggs conceived of class. Through a careful reading of published writings, private correspondence, and organizational records I argue that over the course of her long career Bogg’s shifting understanding of the nature of class drew from her experiences as highly educated Asian American woman in industrial and then post-industrial Detroit, her involvement in Marxist-Leninist organizations, her studies of Hegelianism, and her engagement with post-colonial and decolonial movements throughout the globe. Towards the end of her life Boggs came to understand the struggle for social change to be primarily a spiritual rather than class struggle.

Born in 1915, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency of the Workers Party, a grouping that included C. L. R. James. She spent more than eight decades involved in radical politics, along the way meeting with a diversity of activists that included autoworkers, black power organizers, environmentalists and proponents of liberation theology. A study of her life and activism underscores the contingent fate of class based politics in the United States and how an enduring core commitment to economic justice shifted while the world evolved.