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Title: The Incomprehensible Black Anarchist Position Author: Hannibal Balagoon Shakur Date: November 3, 2012 Language: en Topics: black anarchism, race Source: Retrieved on 21 July 2013 from http://unflinchingantagonisms.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-incomprehensible-black-anarchist.html
Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i
hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is
Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A
Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all
forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies
empty-bellied. I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our
poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the
mindless, heart-less robots that protect them and their property.
–Assata Shakur
I was born into the flames of slave insurrection. My first recorded
ancestor was a runaway slave named Felix. In between him and me have
been several butchered half lives. My grandfather, the oldest ancestor
I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to interact with, was, as a young
man, captured and tortured with “electro-shock therapy” for months on
end as a consequence of his very material defiance and resistance to
this “constitutional violence” that Wilderson describes in “the
vengeance of vertigo”. As a result he was introduced to this
“performative contingent violence” forever carving into our family tree
the scars of his/our subjugation. In the same way that many families
pass down the stories of how grandparents met and the idiosyncrasies of
ancestors long past, I was passed a narrative, a framework for my own
identity, of pure unflinching antagonism. I can only imagine this is
part and parcel of the reason Michigan pigs pumped 40 bullets into my
cousin’s chest a few months ago or why my other cousin is serving a life
sentence. It’s difficult to make distinctions between Oakland and
Monroe, between prison and plantation when past and present meet in
these spaces and moments. What joins us, stronger than our own blood
even, are the subjective and objective vertigos.
A lot happened in 1986, some fascist doctor plucked me from my mother
and introduced me to violence at the same time my lungs introduced me to
air. He told my mother he wanted to break my collarbone to get me out
because I was too big and healthy. Assata Shakur was settling into her
new home, in exile, Cuba. Mutulu Shakur had been captured and charged
with helping her escape from a maximum security men’s prison. A month
and a half before I was born Winnie Mandela gave a historical speech
endorsing the political nature and necessity of mass guerilla resistance
to the apartheid state in South Africa. “We will dismantle the apartheid
state even if we only have rocks and boxes of matches”. A month after I
was born, the apartheid state declared a state of emergency. In 1985,
cocaine-related hospital emergencies in the US rose by 12 percent, from
23,500 to 26,300. In 1986 that figure then increased 210 percent, from
26,300 to 55,200, as the crack solution to the “panther problem”
unfolded in communities that were the direct site of insurrection, like
Watts and Oakland specifically, and all black neighborhoods in general.
Sadly, my namesake, Kuwasi Balagoon died in December of 86 in a torture
camp. His cause of death: the state… biological warfare. In Richmond, CA
unguarded trains full of US military firearms and explosives were
routinely left in the back of the North side neighborhood. I dodged my
first bullet likely from one of those guns in 89 when I was three but
that would not be the last. That was constitutional violence. When the
state decides they want to assassinate or grand jury summon me for what
comes next that will be contingent violence. –Hannibal Balagoon Shakur
If we are to survive this wave of repression, if Anarchy is to become a
vehicle of the people, we must direct our energy to the new
infrastructure. Programs that meet essential needs of the people must
meet them with the explanation of why they are necessary. Programs that
perpetually treat the symptoms of capitalism without feeding the mental
struggle of the people must be replaced by comrades who pull no punches.
We must show our friends and our neighbors that nothing can do more for
them than they can do for themselves through Anarchism. We must show
that “non-profits”, and NGO’s whose politics consist of liberal
obscurities and multicultural tokenism, will not put more food on their
table, put more homeless families in clean homes, will not put more
police terrorists to an end than Anarchism.
It is beside the point whether Black, Puerto Rican, Native American and
Chicano- Mexicano people endorse nationalism as a vehicle for
self-determination or agree with anarchism as being the only road to
self-determination. As revolutionaries we must support the will of the
masses. It is not only racism but compliance with the enemy to stand
outside of the social arena and permit America to continue to practice
genocide against the third world captive colonies because although they
resist, they don’t agree with us. If we truly know that Anarchy is the
best way of life for all people, we must promote it, defend it and know
that the people who are as smart as we are will accept it. To expect
people to accept this, while they are being wiped out as a nation
without allies ready to put out on the line what they already have on
the line is crazy. –Kuwasi Balagoon
It’s a shame that now the false media image of the white Anarchists is
going unchecked. It’s a shame that white “radicals” can think of only
themselves when they say the word Anarchist. New Afrikans are not free.
Our majorities lie within the pelican bay plantations and secret torture
camps that exist throughout America. Yesterday we were slaves and today
we are slaves. In the same vein that slave owners outlawed and prevented
slaves of the past from written communication, slaves today find their
correspondences disrupted and destroyed. As New Afrikans our political
formations are completely repressed. What is popular among New Afrikan
Anarchists will never find the same platform or footing as what is
popular among negro capitalists and negro reformists. What we have to
say, the voices that spring forth from the underworld of the plantation,
will not find the same attention among white radicals as nihilist voices
will. We will not find the same attention among the broader movement to
end capitalism. We are written out of existence by negro nationalists
who speak for “the black community” and white radicals who speak of
themselves as “the Anarchists”. This dichotomy has done nothing to
increase support from either side. White Anarchists want to speak for
all poor people and negro nationalists want to speak for all black
people. Neither formation wants to hear what we have to say. Comrades
have been dealing with these contradictions for some time. Sometimes I
fear those of us with our ears to the plantation are too few and far
between to influence the broader, “free”, population. This is in fact
the impetus for this communiqué. You say working class and think of what
you perceive to be the bottom, people working all day at minimum wage to
feed and house their families. This is working class but this is not the
bottom.
“Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a
Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s disparate relationship to
violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy.
The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he
resists (or is perceived to resist) the disciplinary discourse of
capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples’ subsumption by violence is a
paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be
constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously
by subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of a political
ontology which is radically different from the political ontology of a
sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by
violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive codes. When we
begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative
context, we find that Human revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and
lesbians, post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective vertigo when they
meet the state’s disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence
of the subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo. This is because
the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by the
struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over competing
conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American
Indian Movement’s demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.’s
desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberación Nacional’s (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs.
the U.S.’s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But for the
Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual
frameworks of suffering and dispossession which are analogic with the
myriad maps and frameworks which explain the dispossession of Human
subalterns.” -Frank B wilderson III
We must put into context comrades who have already lost their children
to the plantation state’s foster care system. These comrades, who are
subject to sensory deprivation, beatings and electrocution torture, work
for a measly few cents an hour. Not because they want to but because
they will be further isolated and punished if they do not comply with
the production demands of the plantation. These comrades, many of whom
have taken up arms against the banks and the slave catchers, are largely
invisible to us simply because we don’t see them at any events and we
don’t drink with them after the demo and they don’t come to dance
parties. What’s more is we have allowed, through sheer neglect, the
prison to become a factory that produces sociopaths who snitch on our
comrades to get freedom and then come and wreak havoc on our
communities. We have allowed that by our inaction. We have allowed rape
to become just another gadget on the pig’s utility belt. The brothers
know this intimately. Every time we see a pig we see ourselves being
raped. Current plantation trends are going largely unnoticed.
“Prison has always been the final gate in the repressive apparatus of a
state. It serves the purpose of social and political control, although
it manifests itself differently in different nation-states and in
different political periods. Nevertheless, the prisoner is, with few
exceptions, always a scapegoat and considered a deviant. Prison is not
only a class weapon; it is also an instrument to control “alien”
populations. In the United States, these “alien” populations are
formerly colonized peoples — former slaves, Native Americans, Latin
Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders — and they have all too often
been considered the internal enemy. They are the people most needing
control and are therefore the majority of those locked down in U.S.
prisons. The United States is the world’s primary example of a country
that deals with its social, economic, and cultural problems by
incarceration. But this is its history. Prisons are the logical outcome
of the country’s foundation on the genocide of Native Americans, the
enslavement of Africans, and the “manifest destiny” of imperial
settlerism — from sea to shining sea.” –Marilyn Buck
Do we still have the will of John Brown? Or that of Nat Turner and
Harriet Tubman? Are we still committed to abolishing prisons? Where are
our ties with slaves? Not individual ties but collective ties.
Fundamental ties. So long as the prison exists it’s inhabitants will
inevitably find themselves in a struggle to destroy it. That struggle
must not be isolated from that of the outside. It must not be isolated
from populist efforts. Critical infrastructure must be organized to
expedite the flow of information through the walls. Collectives must be
on standby to strike with direct action in retaliation for acts of
repression against prisoners. Prisoners must provide networks of
protection and support for anti-state guerillas that are captured. All
comrades must orient themselves to the eventuality of their capture. It
must be clearly understood that the struggle in no way ends when you
“get caught”. It only intensifies. In the same way comrades oriented
themselves to the infrastructural needs of the camp when we took Oscar
Grant plaza, things like food security and medical needs, we must orient
ourselves to the material needs of the broader community and prisoners
as integral members of that community. A genuine effort to keep
prisoners, individually and the prison population in general, up to date
on all current events is required here. I’ve heard comrades speaking of
the “patriarchal nature” of prisoner formations, how these things
preclude radical engagement of anarchism. This, coupled with the fact
that there’s no anarchist “set” at any level comparable to “nationalist
sets” within the prison system, has led me in search of a clearer
analysis, or at least one that fits my intended narrative that of the
seldom heard often felt incomprehensible black anarchist. Anarchism like
anything else finds a radical new meaning when it meets blackness. While
anarchists have an endless list of critiques directed at the culture
that permeates prisons, little is articulated in the way of actually
changing these cultures, as if these were inherent character traits
impervious to stimulation and engagement. There exists a fear even, of
prisoners, of the calcifying nature of their abject conditions.
“Well, we’re all familiar with the function of the prison as an
institution serving the needs of the totalitarian state. We’ve got to
destroy that function; the function has to be no longer viable, in the
end. It’s one of the strongest institutions supporting the totalitarian
state. We have to destroy its effectiveness, and that’s what the prison
movement is all about. What I’m saying is that they put us in these
concentration camps here the same as they put people in tiger cages or
“strategic hamlets” in Vietnam. The idea is to isolate, eliminate, and
liquidate the dynamic sections of the overall movement, the protagonists
of the movement. What we’ve got to do is prove this won’t work. We’ve
got to organize our resistance once we’re inside, give them no peace,
turn the prison into just another front of the struggle, and tear it
down from the inside. Understand? A good deal of this has to do with our
ability to communicate to the people on the street. The nature of the
function of the prison within the police state has to be continuously
explained, elucidated to the people on the street because we can’t fight
alone in here. Oh Yeah, we can fight, but if we’re isolated, if the
state is successful in accomplishing that, the results are usually not
constructive in terms of proving our point. We fight and we die, but
that’s not the point, although it may be admirable from some sort of
purely moral point of view. The point is, however, in the face of what
we confront, to fight and win. That’s the real objective: not just to
make statements, no matter how noble, but to destroy the system that
oppresses us. By any means available to us. And to do this, we must be
connected, in contact and communication with those in the struggle on
the outside. We must be mutually supporting because we’re all in this
together. It’s one struggle at base.” -George Jackson
If we really mean class war, we need all the warrior elements of our
class to be actively engaged. With the new developments of the Pelican
Bay Short Corridor Collective, we are witnessing a moment that possesses
great potential for the unification of our struggles. When people are
subjugated and oppressed at the level we see today, psychologically and
materially, we must orient ourselves to the undoing of that hegemonic
hold. We must orient ourselves not to weeding out people but to weeding
out of people injustice and oppression. We are, myself my close comrades
and hopefully you too, endeavoring here to transform the criminal
consciousness into a revolutionary consciousness and there already
exists a principle basis established by comrades like George Jackson and
Kuwasi Balagoon. Now is the time for us to aggressively push forward and
show the world we aren’t afraid to fight the fascist, to show them we
are prepared to make the same sacrifices that they already have.
It’s gonna be kill me if you can not kill me if you please!!!!
To My People by Assata Shakur
http://www.assatashakur.org/mypeople.htm
The Vengeance of Vertigo by Frank B. Wilderson III
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php
Anarchy cant Fight Alone by Kuwasi Balagoon
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/profiles/anarchy.html
The U.S. Prison State by Marilyn Buck
http://monthlyreview.org/2004/02/01/the-u-s-prison-state
Remembering the Real Dragon: an interview with George Jackson
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/jacksoninterview.html