When I was a student, we used to sit around discussing whether a particular end justified a particular means. On the assumption of everyone from Marx or Machiavelli, I thought that was the question. Whatever means you use become an organic part of the ends you achieve. Even if they are given certain paper rights at the end of the process, they may remain too weak to use them. Strength comes from process.
Process is all.
Intelligence without character is dangerous, but character without intelligence only slows down a good result. Politics is not just what goes on in the electoral system, or in Washington. Politics is any power relationship in our daily lives. Anytime one human being is habitually powerful over another, or one group over another, not because of talent or experience, but just because of race, or sex or class, that's politics. So when we look at the fields of your state and mind, and see that one color of human beings owns them, and another color works on them as migrant labor, that's politics.