By Gwen R. and Jess B.
Thursday’s May Day rally and march in Oakland’s Fruitvale District, hosted by Oakland Sin Fronteras, revealed a face of the resistance that hasn’t been so apparent at the earlier Hands Off and No Kings rallies. Hundreds of people came out to show their solidarity with working people and immigrants on this 136th celebration of International Workers’ Day. While the familiar “Not My President” sentiment of the defend democracy movement was on display, the overall message was a deeper call for liberation and justice by a very diverse crowd of activists from the labor, immigration, prison abolition, socialist, and ceasefire movements.
It’s invigorating to engage in this broader coalition and to remember, as Indivisible National co-founder Leah Greenberg said on MSNBC back in January, “If there’s anything we know about successful movements to defeat autocracies around the world… it’s that they build broad coalitions, and the coalition may not be united by anything other than their opposition to what is currently happening.” Our movement must welcome everyone from disengaged nonvoters to activists on the radical left. The range of Fruitvale May Day participants offers one glimpse of just how diverse a coalition we are working to build.
The analysis offered up by many May Day speakers, banners, and chants was that the Trump regime’s cruelty and indifference is not a surprise, but rather the predictable evolution of a system rooted in exploitation and oppression. As Priya Prabhakar, a member of Critical Resistance Oakland, said to KQED, “Even though the conditions that we are living in are frightening and terrifying, a lot of our communities know that this is nothing new.” With this in mind, it becomes clearer why speakers at this rally didn’t focus on fresh outrage at executive overreach or call on the administration to respect the rule of law. From the perspective of these labor and immigration activists, the root problem is not the Trump regime itself, but rather the unjust underlying system in which some people are valued more highly than others.
It’s good to consider what coalition-building really means at this moment of crisis in our country. To be in true solidarity with low-income workers, undocumented people, trans folks, BIPOC people, and other marginalized communities, it’s not enough to defend our representative democracy as it was in 2024. Before Trump’s election, the U.S. was already a country where a full-time minimum wage worker lived below the poverty line; where people of color fared worse than white people across nearly all social determinants of health; where Black Americans were killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans; where the most people in the world are incarcerated. There is inherent instability in a system that immiserates so many people. To build an inclusive opposition to the Trump regime, and ultimately a society that is just and therefore stable, we must be willing to question our privilege, share power, and dedicate ourselves to creating a world that works for everyone, without exception. As the old labor slogan goes, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
