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Title: Our Culture, Our Resistance Author: Ernesto Aguilar Date: October 2003 Language: en Topics: black anarchism, Anarchist People of Color, race, class, gender
Over the last decade, Third World peoplesâ movements against
globalization, neoliberalism and related issues have captured the
imagination of the world. From the militancy of street protests to the
fight for autonomy advocated by the Ejércitio Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN, also known as the Zapatistas), radical politics led by
people of color is quickly evolving. We are hearing less of old top-down
strategies and more about popular education and grassroots organizing.
A small but growing movement of people of color is developing a new
conversation that advocate anti-authoritarianism and anarchism as
solutions to our collective struggle. Such a movement is largely led by
youth, and such advocacy is a departure from the old-guard politics
espoused by revolutionaries of color. Many of these people of color met
in October 2003 in Detroit for the first Anarchist People of Color
conference. Others continue to organize, agitate and act to find
bottom-up answers to the freedom movementâs most perplexing questions.
Our Culture, Our Resistance: People of Color Speak Out on Anarchism,
Race, Class and Gender is the first compilation of writings by people of
color covering the concepts of anarchism, race, class and gender. The
purpose of this book is to contribute to the ongoing dialogue among
people of color and others as we strive toward freedom.
ISBN 0-9759518-0-7
Ernesto Aguilar, editor
This book is dedicated to people of color around the world and our just
fights for consciousness, justice, land, freedom and liberty.
Thanks to the authors; to Heather Ajani for tremendous support; and to
AK Press for its work, but also for rejecting this book and inspiring
independent people of color publishing.
The white fathers told us, âI think, therefore, I amâ and the black
mother within each of us â the poet â whispers in our dreams, I feel,
therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and chart
this revolutionary demand.
â Audre Lorde
Here we are, and the APOC phenomena continues. From the Detroit
Conference to the build-up for the Republican convention and onward,
folks of color with anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics are making
a presence. And it couldnât happen at a better time!
If I may pull my age card for a moment: I am a very proud product of the
1960sâ Revolution. It was that time when all things seemed possible,
like Revolution in the very belly of this beast. It was in the air and
folks from all walks of life were joining up. Some movements in
particular were grounding the charge. The âAmerican Indian Movement,â
the Chicano Liberation Movement and the Black Liberation Movement. And
why do I say âgrounding?â Because without the recognition of these
movements having to deal with the very structure of the Empire of the
U.S., the anti-war movement would only fight for reform and reform would
mean the wholesale selling out of those of us at the very bottom for the
interest of well-meaning white folks. It would be just another version
of selling out folks of color as throughout the history of our struggles
from the moment of European invasion. For the same reason, folks of
color decide that it is necessary to close ranks, so to speak and figure
out how to ensure our different freedoms.
Living in the â60s and â70s meant living at a time when modern
technology, especially the revolution in communications and
transportation, meant that the âworldâ got smaller. A teenage boy in New
Jersey could turn on the TV set and watch his folks in that Black Nation
called Down South get water- hosed and beaten by rednecks because they
dared protest for the right to be free from racism and terror. It also
meant that we got to see televised accounts of the U.S. invasion of the
Vietnamese people and sometimes even an African revolutionary diplomat
speaking eloquently on a newly independent nation or liberation struggle
on the verge of victory. Come to find out that your very own
revolutionaries here, like Robert Williams, Malcolm X, Stokeley
Carmichael, the Panthers and even folks like Maya Angelou had been
traveling overseas to visit and learn from these other kindred
struggles. Cuba, Vietnam, China, Algeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria.
Folks were reporting back new information before they could even get
back. And folks here were just moved. It was the true beginnings of the
anti-globalization movement. But folks of color revolutionaries here
werenât hoping from one revolutionary uprising to another like it was
fun, and no doubt it was exciting. But folks belonged, for the most
part, to organizations on the ground level who needed, wanted to know
what thinking and organizing styles seemed to be working for others
around the world so that we might incorporate them, like in jazz
improvisation, into our movements and move forward. Communications and
transportation technologies were being used by the slaves to hook up
with other revolutionary slaves around the world in the hope that we
would all be on the same page in bringing down The Beast. The Babylonian
Monster.
Interesting about this â60s period that is so instructional for those of
us today who are bringing anarchist and anti-authoritarian revolution to
our communities, is that â60s revolution began as a rejection of old
revolutionary thinking and styles of organizing. When we research that
early period we find that young folks, regardless of racial background,
were tired of the various communist and Marxist parties, and the liberal
organizations. They were not lonely, led by old folks but displayed such
a rigid, Catholic adherence to dead white male revolutionary thinking
that it felt like parents.
It felt like parental rule that upheld hypocrisy and materialism and
individualism and willful blindness to racism, war and class privilege.
So, on their own, young folks were searching for more egalitarian,
communal and spontaneous ways of just being in the world and of making
revolution in the US in concert with other struggles around the world.
France, May 1968. Mexico, 1968. The Congo, 1964âŠ
In this early period, the anti-authoritarian spirit was dominant. It was
organizationally expressed in early Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) and Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was
expressed in terms of vision in terms of creating a âBeloved Community.â
Revolutionaries like Elder Ella Jo Baker was able to impart to young
folks in the South to look to themselves for leadership and to help
Southern communities raise up their own indigenous leadership instead of
relying on the privileged ministries and old liberal guard to guide
them. SNCC, as just one example, took Ellaâs advise to heart and was
able to help build a dynamic revolutionary movement for voter
registration and community liberation like the racist, fortress South
had never saw. And when we look further into this period, we can see
that as long as folks kept to egalitarian, participatory democratic and
grand visionary politics, the movements kept a vibrancy and growth. But
as we go further, we also see that at the same time the more rigid
liberal and revolutionary influences had not given up their religious
fight to lead the movements. Black, Native American, Chicano, Asian,
Puerto Rican and white âworker.â
As the battle for ideological leadership, organizing style and
revolutionary âagencyâ grew, folks were hitting normal growth
roadblocks. They had to do with membership growth, the constantly
changing picture of the system we were up against and its fascism
against us, questions of allies, weapons of fight-back, etc. Folks
needed answers. The pressure was on. Revolution now. Seems like quick
fast solutions were needed and folks were leaning more to the more
âscientificâ approaches coming from the Marxists, communists and Third
World revolutionaries. And the Third World revolutionaries were taking
on more Marxist and communist ideas. Eurocentric ideas. Scientific
ideas. Modern ideas of making a revolution in their respective nations.
And being that the liberation movements were succeeding so quickly in
kicking out their imperial masters, then it seems to make sense that we
take on that kind of thinking and style. We did.
As our movements here became more Marxist, we will see that they also
became less inclusive, less spontaneous, less democratically
participatory. One did not continue to pursue the Beloved Community; one
now increasingly talked about âscientific socialism.â One did not try to
discover new ways to deepen the has meant for us participatory democracy
which âtook too longâ or contained too many different ideologies; one
went for the more serious âvanguardâ small, tight-knit organization of
the more brilliant speakers, theoreticians and organizers who knew what
to do, because they had read more, traveled more and spoke more. The
Women Uprising within SNCC and SDS and other organizations would be
stifled because, I donât care how you look at it, this new revolution
would boil down to men shit. And though it may have been a blessing in
disguise, because a womenâs revolutionary movement would seriously take
off at this point, the overall movements would fragment in a not-good
way while the Monster would recover and its Counter Intelligence Program
(COINTELPRO) shored up its fascist work. In this sense, though a lot of
great resistance was waged under the growing
Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist- Maoist direction of grassroots movement,
overall, it killed our spirit, our spontaneity and our faith in our own
indigenous knowledge production.
Within the Empire, be we folks of color, workers, students, we have
histories and herstories of resistance nurtured by visions of freedom.
We have ways of knowing and figuring things out that have allowed us to
draw from Iroquois to Franz Fanon and Herbert Marcuse.
Why I originally said that all this was instructional for us today is
because it was that anarchist and anti-authoritarian spirit of the early
â60s that gave that period its revolutionary dynamism, its, originality.
Folks were so inspired by international movements but mores by our own
folks of color movements here in the belly. But we lost it. All of us.
And in many ways, their ainât been a comparative movement of movement
since. By the early â70s, for all intents and purposes, we were not able
to sustain our growth to effective challenge the Empire and COINTELPRO,
and the mass media wrote the rest of the story.
But then out of nowhere, seemingly, comes Seattle and the WTO battles
and we begin to hear faint sounds of revolution again and some of them
voices are ours. Ours. Folks of the Tribes, indigenous to Turtle Island,
here by way of the slave ships, here by southwestern wars of U.S.
annexation, World War Two koncentration kamps descent and then our more
recent immigrant communities of color who take their turn at becoming
the latest fall-guys diverting attention from the real empire designs of
world domination.
Our anarchism has meant for us a return to something old yet so new, Not
only in terms of our peopleâs ancient stories of stateless times but
just being here now knowing that even within the resistance stories
there has always been the spirit of freedom, direct action direct
participatory democracy and communalism. We, like the Zapatistas, are
both ancient and new, embracing cutting edge thinking on our own terms,
i.e. not slavishly. We will use both the drum and the Internet, the
sacred prayer and the gun; and we will be as grandly and wildly
visionary in drawing new worlds as we wanna be.
Folks wanna know what anarchism is? Itâs freedom, itâs creativity, itâs
culture. Itâs people and peopleâs diversity. Itâs people finding
themselves right now from all walks of life here in the belly of the
beast and not giving a damn about how we got here via the Empire but
deciding that it is gonna be here where we plot the Empireâs demise.
Fuck ya bourgie-ass white rights, borders, patriotism, their weapons of
mass distraction and destruction. On to the return of an old family
grandchild to home: Revolution anarchist-style, communal, earth-loving,
dancing, throwing bricks, squatting abandoned building, creating
quilombos. In the hands of your soulful playmate, we APOC are here. Let
the games begin!
Ashanti
Anarchist Panther
PS â Thank you for letting an ole man hang with yâall. Because of you, I
still believe that with the torch in your hands, we can kick ass and
help make this world of worlds ⊠free.
Behold, I am Funkadelic. I am not of your world. But fear me not. I will
do you no harm. Loan me your funky mind and I shall play with it. For
nothing is good unless you play with it.
And all that is good, is nasty!
ââWhat is Soul,â Funkadelic, 1969
GOOD MORNING, REVOLUTION, you nasty cat you!
Sorta Langston Hughes, uh-hun.
It is difficult to write about a topic like anarchism, which is already
controversial enough, to people who are familiar with its theory and
practice without being intensely judged and questioned about what is
written. Not that questioning is wrong. It is necessary, but in my
opinion, it is unproductive if it lacks respect for someoneâs ideas,
thorough thinking, reflection, and constructive feedback. That is why I
ask that you, the reader, to please just read, think and reflect about
what I am expressing here. It might not be a perfectly written
composition but it is not meant to be one, it is simply my experience
with anarchism.
I first learned of âAnarchism,â the kind known to most activists in the
United States, through literature given to me by a friend who had
traveled to Washington State for the anti-World Trade Organization
actions in Seattle of 1999. My curiosity about the subject led me to
research more about it. I never read entire books by Proudhon, Bakunin
or Emma Goldman for lack of time, so I read articles, zines and excerpts
of books instead. Through this literature I learned of an anarchist
conference.
This first anarchist conference I attended left me perplexed, for I had
read about anarchism as the theory and practice towards the abolition of
authority, hierarchies, practicing collectivity and active organizing.
The feeling I got from that conference was uninviting, dry, alienating,
extremely sub-cultural and life-stylish. I could not understand many of
the things people were talking about in discussion circles. I could not
understand why several of them had re-named themselves after plants and
animals. I did not understand why they wore no deodorant; and it seemed
weird to me that nobody bothered asking others how they were doing, if
they needed anything, or even took the time to offer a greeting or a
smile. I did not enjoy the conference but still remained interested in
anarchism telling myself, âIâm sure this isnât all thereâs to it.â
Once I got in contact with a self-defined anarchist group in my region
that was holding weekly meetings, I decided to check them out. The way I
was received by the people in the group was not any different from what
Iâd experienced at my first anarchist conference, except that after the
conclusion of the meeting a couple of women in the group approached me
to ask my name and how I was doing and invited me to their next meeting.
I did not stay in that group long. I never spoke up because I was afraid
of saying something wrong, something outside the âanarchistâ terms they
understood, and I did not want to be the center of attention if anything
I asked became controversial, for I felt none of that âsolidarityâ and
less of that âcollectivityâ that anarchism is supposed to generate.
Though some people were very nice, others were very arrogant,
unapproachable and plain intimidating, so I moved on.
While visiting âanarchistâ groups every now and then, I was
simultaneously involved in anti-sweatshop student activism, not because
it was the âthing to do,â but because my mother, uncles, aunts and
myself had worked in clandestine garment sweatshops before. From this
student activist work, I met a woman who introduced me to her
collective, the Zapatista Committee of Los Angeles.
That day was the beginning of a life-changing experience.
Nobody in any activist or typical anarchist organization had greeted me
with honest handshakes and looked at me in the eye with interest of
knowing who I was or what I had to say like the people in this
collective did. I was once again confused because this group was not
self-defined as anarchist, but they based their practices on
non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian politics, they did practice
collectivity, held weekly reading circles, and most importantly they
were organizing events, not just shows â these were based on
accomplishing truly radical and practical goals. And I for the first
time felt these actions were building a true sense of community.
As I became to know each and every one of the people in the collective,
I was not surprised to know many of them were in fact self-defined
anarchists who had simply felt the need to work with a group of people
who could produce and provide what mainstream anarchist circles had not.
Upon experiencing anarchism through those events, groups and people, I
constructed this view about todayâs many types of anarchists: the
self-defined image anarchists, the read-only anarchists, the underground
and non-self-defined working anarchists, the anarchists who are a
combination of all these, and others.
At this point I had understood that the anarchists I had initially met
did not necessarily comprise what the theory and practice of anarchism
was, as I understood it. It was like understanding that in the world
there are nation- states and then there are the people living in them,
two different entities. It was also at this point that I openly
acknowledged that I was not wrong for being one of the few women and
people of color walking into a predominantly-white anarchist book fair,
but that is was in fact this homogenized âmovementâ of anarchists that
had unfortunately allowed things to be structured this way.
This homogenization has unfortunately built boundaries that mark what
kind of issues are of priority, what kind of actions are
ârevolutionary,â the kind of workshops to be given at a conference and
so on. It was difficult for me to feel connected to these anarchists;
our realities and priorities had nothing in common. Anarchist literature
circulating in the majority of anarchist groups today speaks mainly of
European (and European descendantsâ) anarchistsâ history and present.
Iâm sure that is not on purpose, yet the beginning of this trend led to
the simplification of ideas, such as that of Europe being the
âbirthplaceâ of anarchism and this information was used to simplify
another idea, that supposedly anarchism later âreachedâ Latin America in
the mid-1800s. I saw how this was not questioned often or ever by
mainstream anarchism. Was it never considered that other people, whose
histories just never made it to books, could have been practicing
anarchism?
Understanding the importance of rescuing other anarchist histories has
led to the emergence of materials about Cuban anarchism, African
anarchism, Argentine anarchism, etc. At the same time a growing number
of anarchists â including myself, a non-white person â have started
identifying as anarchists of color in order to rescue and expose (to
everyone, not just to main- stream anarchists) our struggles and those
fought by historic individuals like Luisa Capetillo from Puerto Rico,
Lucy Parsons from the United States, Julia Arévalo from Chile, Maria
Angelina Soares from Brazil and others.
Being part of this is my attempt to break up this standardization of
anarchismâs current Eurocentric tendencies that, in my opinion, could be
causing some of the stagnation of its theory and practice; and to use it
as a supplement to the gradual dismantling of racism and similar
hierarchies of power that unfortunately exist in mainstream anarchism.
I keep mentioning, âmainstream anarchismâ because in the United States,
the only anarchism recognized is that which is externally visible, while
it is in fact being âactively and seriouslyâ taken into practice in
other parts of the world through struggles that are simply not getting
the amount of solidarity an all-white-boy black-block âactionâ gets. I
am certain that the anarchist activity taking place right this minute in
Magonista communities in the Mazateca Highlands in Oaxaca (Mexico), and
in the Bolivian region are not the type of anarchist âscene,â we are
accustomed to see, for these movements include bloody confrontations,
tears, death, mutual trust and hope, and most importantly constant
struggle as a priority to survival. The realities for U.S. anarchism are
others, and so the responses are going to be different, that is
understood. Yet, this mainstream anarchist movement in the U.S. lacks
understanding and consideration for the realities lived by
non-privileged anarchists in the same region. Mainstream anarchism in
this aspect lacks the solidarity, the convivial feeling needed to work
with each other, to learn and unlearn from each other, and most
importantly to build trust to back each other up.
I was fortunate enough to participate in an amazing event where these
elements of respect, solidarity, inspiration and revitalization were
experienced.
The Anarchist People of Color Conference in Detroit boosted up my hope
for anarchism. This was an event that became controversial (to
mainstream anarchists) from the very beginning, as many considered it
exclusionary, âracistâ and every other negative thing possible. I did
not pay much attention to this drama, as I knew we were not gathering to
plot a battle against white anarchists, we were simply in need to meet
and share ideas with each other. It felt humiliating to have to explain
to some white and non-white anarchists why we wanted to meet. We wanted
to meet for the same reason anarchist women gather separate from
anarchist men: to empower themselves; we gathered, with similar reasons
to those anarchists break away from authoritarian nation-state
governments: to change things that were going wrong, to change things in
the system. To me this conference meant meeting people who had
experienced the discrimination I had lived within mainstream anarchist
circles. It also meant meeting individuals who were highly interested in
developing and carrying out projects, not just for those in the âsceneâ
or in their cliques, but mainly with those in their communities
(community meaning neighbors, co- workers, families, etc.), projects
that could truly exemplify the ideals of anarchism rather than simply
spending time theorizing about them.
This conference did not produce a separate anarchist group, as that was
not our purpose. We created a different understanding of its practice
and theory.
To us, anarchism meant something diverse, since we all came from
different communities and with different psychological, emotional and
spiritual experiences. We stressed on the importance of having serious
commitment on building relationships with our community rather than
encircling ourselves in a subculture that unconsciously excludes others
around us. We also planted that this anarchism we were talking was non-
vanguardist, non-elitist, non-arrogant, respectful, humble, honest,
loving, gentle and accountable to others. As revolutionary anarchist
people of color, we understood our communities need non-traditional
anarchist projects that could be constantly assessed to see if they are
indeed creating solidarity, mutual-aid, self-determination,
self-sufficiency and autonomy.
Experiencing anarchism to me has not been what books say it is. It has
meant how my actions can in fact produce it effectively.
Over the past few years, my involvement in movements against police
brutality, globalization and other political movements led me on a path
to understanding how race works and how it affects me as a woman of
color.
Over the years, I have studied race theory, womenâs liberation
movements, the criminal justice system, classical and contemporary
political theory, as well as drawing from my own experiences. It is
because of these academic exercises and personal growth processes that I
write this article. I learned a lot about myself over the past three
decades, figuring out why I am angry, why the way I feel has a bigger
context than just my being and that as a brown woman in America I am
forced to feel a duality wherever I turn.
There is a lot of debate about the political versus the personal. The
debate started hitting mainstream activism during the second wave
womenâs movement. The argument boiled down to whether the personal
experiences we had belonged in political debate, more easily analogized
as taking a more professional approach in our activism, checking
personal problems at the door. To me this argument plays into the
colonization of thought we struggle against each and every day. We use
it and other terms to stifle each other and ourselves, including when we
need to be accountable for our actions.
There have been times in history when the most beautiful revolutions,
revolts and uprisings have been sparked because of the personal. Such
examples include the abolitionist movement, civil rights movement and
even motherâs movements such as the Argentinean group, âLas Madres de
Plaza de Mayo.â Some of the most successful movements are borne of
passion in one respect or another and that personal drive, commitment,
self-discipline and self-determination, or whatever is at the base of a
revolutionaryâs heart is balanced with the political context of their
environs.
These movements are sparked by fires that burn the very foundations of
the people involved, threatening their identities, who they are, leaving
them with their backs against the wall.
As a person of color, activist, organizer, agitator, anti-authoritarian
with strong anarchist leanings, I have often been accused of being too
emotional, too critical, or too truthful. I canât say that Iâve always
displayed the best behavior when confronted with these paternalistic
statements often bestowed on women in radical circles, but I have tried
to hone those accusations into something I can reclaim in a more
principled way. The pain I feel when I hear these accusations and when I
think of the way that these statements become internally oppressive it
makes me wonder if what we give each other leaves us empty handed.
In my journey to developing a political and personal praxis, I have come
to an understanding that my oppression comes from a system that depends
on the privileges of a few and the oppression of those who are denied
those privileges. This oppression eats people of color alive, depends on
false dichotomies, hierarchies, systematic genocide through the
continual colonization of non-whites, the perpetuation of capitalism and
unholy alliances between workers and bosses. I have also wondered if it
is possible to have the passion necessary to combat these social and
political ills without emotion, self-criticism and truth.
In All About Love, bell hooks stresses the need for openness (i.e.
honesty,) nurturing, self-discipline, justice and love as a means for
social and political change. In a recent project, I had the opportunity
to speak with several elders who had taken part in movements such as the
Black Panther Party, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and
others.
Most stressed the need for spiritual and political balance, stating that
often times the connections between mind, body and spirit are ignored in
lieu of personal gain. In another, more locally based project in
Houston, this reality took another turn as I asked people why commitment
to political organizations/movements waned. Often times the answer was
simply that there is a lack of passion for what we do. The balance
between the personal and political is necessary to successfully create
revolutionary potential. How do we seek to build a better world when we
canât deal with ourselves or each other? How do we set examples for our
dreams, our goals, or our visions without the internal healing that
needs to take place?
We need passion to make change. We also need political direction and
unity. In order to do this we must find the balance between the personal
and the political worlds we live in. Sometimes we need to take our
personal experiences to build a political analysis while understanding
that political change canât successfully occur until we are left without
those personal choices. I often quote one of my favorite people in the
anarchist people of color movement, Ashanti Alston in saying, âchange
doesnât come until you are made to feel uncomfortable.â
Drawing upon what I know, I will use the struggle of women as an
example.
Due to racial oppression, struggles of women of color have not focused
on women as women, but against various oppressive systems. Often in our
struggle, women of color experience issues of tokenism, stereotypical
oppression, as well as blatant exposure to sexist behavior. We are not
only subject to our identities as women, but also as women of color.
Theorists often refer to this identity as âthe other.â Another term I
prefer is the âthird world womenâ (AnzaldĂșa, 64). This term encompasses
the need for decolonization of the oppressed in our communities, the
need for self- empowerment and -determination and knowledge of the
history of people of color in this country. We are part of a system that
seeks to destroy us, we are the âdevelopingâ and âwar tornâ peoples
within Amerika, we continue to be colonized through lack of education,
healthcare, employment, decent housing, child care and decent food. We
have been taken from our lands and our lands have been taken from us and
we continue to experience this displacement through modern day Jim Crow
systems such as the police and prisons. No matter what, the culprit is
the same. It is our common enemy and the only way that we can fight it
is by addressing our issues, finding solutions and developing political
unity in order to build and strengthen social movements.
Before we can go on to developing a theory for freedom, we need to
recognize and understand power. Power is often defined as the capacity
to exercise control over another. Power is also the ability to perform
or act effectively. At a womenâs studies conference in 1981, a group of
women who were part of a consciousness-raising group for women of color
con- cluded that they needed to define a common ground for how power
worked within the United States. This model has four categories and
signifies a hierarchy from which power flows. It begins with the idea
that freedom in the U.S. is most easily achieved by the reality of the
white, capitalist male.
Next in line is the white woman, who achieves her will to power through
her whiteness and though she is objectified by white men, she still
bears the privilege of whiteness and draws on that privilege
objectifying people of color in order to gain a solid sense of self. Men
of color or âthird worldâ men do not benefit from racial hierarchy, but
do utilize their identities as males to confront their oppressions,
which leaves women of color in a place where they are neither white, nor
male (AnzaldĂșa, 64).
Even when trying to understand power as something that is interconnected
through race and gender, it is important to think in terms of political
change, where the weak spots are. Though power has been displayed in
terms of hierarchy above, there is a need for a common goal, not just
against whiteness and patriarchy, but against the weak spot in the
system that divides these struggles. For critics of capitalism, it is
class, but beyond that, what has historically divided struggles against
those in power in the United States? Power differentials in the U.S.
have been dependent on a system of white privilege. This privilege has
separated movements of womenïżœïżœs liberation, labor movements and hinders
self-determination of the poor and oppressed. Whiteness as a system
determines who goes to the best schools, who lives where, employment,
healthcare, and allows for an alliance between the bosses and the white
working class. Whiteness keeps people of color from meeting basic needs
and the power differentials that white privilege creates keeps the
entire working class and sectors of the poor from resisting en masse
because of the benefits it creates for those who identify as âwhite.â
This benefit for whites is sometimes referred to as the âwages of
whitenessâ (Roediger).
We need to recognize this system of domination that we live under if we
are going to struggle against it. It is also important to understand
what we go through on a personal level and how the wages of whiteness
often times affect us. In a discussion session held amongst women of
color at the 2003 Anarchist People of Color Conference in Detroit, a
decision was made to discuss how we were made to feel as women of color
and what we saw as solutions to those problems. We made this decision in
order to start a dialogue amongst ourselves that started with a healing
process, so we could gain strength in fighting our oppressions. When I
look back upon the following list, I feel empowered because I no longer
feel alone in system of oppression and domination that often sparks
self-hatred and identity crisis among many women of color.
We came to many conclusions as to how we are oppressed, internally as
well as externally. One was that women of color are often tokenized.
Women of color (and our brothers) are often looked to by whites for
answers and opinions about their [whitesâ] race politics, how they are
working within a community, etc. When a cultural or racial question
comes up, many times whites have a tendency to look towards the people
of color in the room to view their reactions. This is not to say that
whites should disregard the opinions of people of color, but that we
shouldnât be asked for our opinions simply because we are non-white. A
twist to this problem is when whites start to pontificate about our
struggles as people of color.
Sometimes whites will say, âif you all did thisâŠâ or âif you did thatâŠâ
Why would a white person know my struggle better than me? Why would I
listen to a white person when all the white people in my life have said
something either intentionally or by slip of tongue denoting that I am
less than deserving: things like I am not fit for school, I shouldnât
have kids, that they wish that I could stay and take care of their kids
and help around the house, reinforcing that I am subordinate in one way
or another?
Often women of color experience tokenization by whites in various ways;
one is that we are exoticized for our unique qualities and physical at-
tributes. There is more than one tale of a black sister walking into a
room where a white woman wants to feel her hair. Other forms of
oppression include unconscious sexist behavior amongst women,
competitiveness, communication problems (not getting heard, getting
talked over), being put into caregiver roles (we are called upon to be
the secretaries, the organizers, the errand runners, the nannies and the
mammies) and there are times when we fear for our personal safety
because women of color are often perpetuated as whores by the corporate
media. After each of us at the discussion brought up an issue, we
finished our sentence with what we wanted in order to address the issue,
so we were problem solving as we went along. Some of the solutions we
came up with were: healing our- selves, finding balance, defining our
boundaries, taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions,
developing respect for ourselves and for others, and building
communication skills. These solutions clearly spelled out the need to
deal with the personal as well as the political in building strength
among the women in that room.
We need to build solidarity amongst each other through sharing our
experiences, recognizing our differences and building support for each
other. True solidarity creates awareness amongst oppressed peoples, and
helps them to recognize the need to forge political unity. Because our
identities as third world peoples are multiple, this means defining who
we are and at the same time, redefining what it means to struggle for
liberation by building on our commonalities. The struggle for liberation
should seek to end the subordination and domination of oppressed peoples
and create a shift in power differentials that concentrate on a weak
spot within our current power structure.
This means that we need to deal with who we are personally (both
politically and spiritually) in order to be able look beyond ourselves
and truly see how we as oppressed peoples are affected as a whole. This
does not mean that we stop at struggling against our own angst, or for
equality and individualismâthis means that we use our consciousness of
self to begin to collectively envision a society without domination by
white, capitalist males; that we need to challenge what whiteness means
in terms of actual privileges and to bankrupt that system so that it
does not provide wages to those who draw on their identities to oppress
others. We also need to create spaces that help to develop and empower
ourselves and others. We need to understand that without our own fires
we cannot spark the creativity, desire, and strength needed to struggle
effectively against our oppressors.
Anarchist People of Color Conference. âWomen of Color Discussion.â
Detroit, MI. October 3â5, 2003.
AnzaldĂșa, Gloria. Making Face, Making Soul.
hooks, bell. All About Love.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class.
NOTE: the title of this article is not of my imagination, it is taken
from a friendâs former band, Bully Rag, a.k.a Fucking Thunderâs CD,
which ironically they put out before he was unfairly replaced. Anyway,
to make a long story short, they consequently suffered as a result of
their bad decision. Solidarity with friends, oh yesâŠ
Anti-War Movement by Tiffany King
Reflecting on my own participation as a person of color in the 2003
protest marches of the anti-war movement, I am now aware my presence is
being manipulated and abused. I have been rendered a puppet for white
liberal pageantry. Any time I have attended a march I find I subject
myself to objectification, marginalization and exploitation. Beyond the
personal offenses I have incurred, I now truly believe the presence of
people of color in anti-war and other so called âglobal justiceâ protest
marches led and organized by whites legitimizes tactics that undermine a
true pursuit for justice.
On February 15, 2003 grappling with my own frustration, anger and
feelings of impotency as our country charged towards war; I attended a
protest march. The march was organized by the usual suspects,
A.N.S.W.E.R, Not in Our Name, Unite for Peace and Justice and the other
white led coalitions here in Philly. As the Bush Administration moved
closer and closer to dropping the first bombs on Iraq, I caved in and
decided I had to go regardless of who organized this thing. I thought to
myself, that if there was ever a time to momentarily get over the racism
of the white left and past scars from previous interactions, it was now.
My justification for my attendance was we were facing war, and at least
the illusion of a collective and unified voice would be âmore powerfulâ
than the efforts of isolated communities of color or my own for that
matter. In that moment, I had just given into white supremacist systems
of domination. White supremacy asserts its own agenda by absorbing,
subverting and negating any dissent and resistance to its domination.
The structures of white supremacy demand submission by professing to be
both the norm and alternative.
In the book, Black Anti-Ballistic Missives, activist, author and poet
Ewuare Osayande argues white supremacy is the critical component that
the anti- war movement fails to address, thus rendering it irrelevant.
The racist anti- war movement is devoid of any self-critical process to
acknowledge or address how white supremacy contributes to the oppression
of people of color within the movement, so how could it possibly have an
analysis of how white supremacy oppresses people of color around the
world?
Given the reality the anti-war movement does not address white
supremacy, it is to be expected that people of color would be
objectified and exploited at one of its protest marches. On February 15,
the people of color contingency I attended the march with decided to
create a feeder march that would join the larger march on Broad Street.
I assume this was an attempt to empower the POC who would be
participating that day. We would temporarily march on our own terms,
citing white supremacist imperialism as the true evil. Momentarily, I
had the feeling that we would reclaim the political act of protest as a
relevant and meaningful tool used by self-determining people of color
around the world who have and continue to resist white supremacist
imperialism. Yet I realized once I got to the march that this would not
be possible.
We would chant Black, Latino, Muslim, Asian and... so forth to evoke a
feeling of camaraderie and equal partnership. Yet the unequal
distribution of power and privilege amongst people of color, which
played a part in determining the convening groups ability to organize
this very effort, stared us in the face and was left unaddressed. Still,
we feigned a content and empowered united front and proceeded to Broad
Street to meet up with the rest of the protestors.
As soon as we approached the sea of white folks and they became aware of
our presence we became a sideshow. White people started to clap and
cheer as if we were the long awaited people of color parade float they
could awe and point at. They appreciated our presence and danced to our
drumming as long as we were their entertainment. However, as soon as
members of the contingency started to pick up our bullhorns and speak to
the white supremacist imperialism that murdered people of color they
became offended.
We were suddenly the recipients of annoyed stares, shushes and
interruptions because we were talking over the âslatedâ speakers.
We kept on speaking, however our attempts to define and adhere to our
own agenda did nothing. We did not create self-determining space that
would allow our particular analysis of the war and white supremacy, as
the global terrorist, to challenge the shallow, racist analysis of the
white activists and organizers. We were not even able to make the white
folks aware of their own racism at the protest itself. We became a pawn,
a mere prop, one of those larger than life puppets (often rendered to
depict oppressed people of color) that white groups make for âprotests.â
I donât know how many times I saw and heard white people look at us and
say⊠âItâs sooo good to finally see some color here.â I could see them
patting themselves on the back for the good work they had done to reach
out to people of color and educate us or make us feel welcome to join
them.
Our presence only legitimized the work of whites, which is to stay in
positions of power and control the discourse, action and direction of so
called progressive politics. By participating we allow them to delude
themselves that, 1) their particular analysis of the war and imperialism
is a legitimate one and 2) the power and resources at their disposal to
lead âsocial changeâ movements are legitimately earned. Our presence at
the march made the statement that we support the white supremacy of the
left.
Many non-white critics of white leadership within the âglobal justice
movementâ have challenged the analysis of whites who have reframed and
distorted issues of justice. Whites conveniently impose an anachronistic
time period on imperialism, with a NAFTA obsessed political analysis,
that places the start of multinational corporate imperialism in the
early 1990s.
Whites on the left also relegate the issue of accountability and blame
to that of the corruption of a select few corporate executives and their
Washington DC cronies. They conveniently ignore their own culpability in
reinforcing systems of white supremacist capitalist imperialism.
I actually heard white people saying things like, âWeâre all French nowâ
and âLong live the French.â How can a credible and legitimate global
justice movement congratulate a country that actively engages in the
white supremacist, imperialist exploitation of people of color all over
the globe? French multinational corporate monopolies are currently
fueling conflict and repression in the Ivory Coast and West Africa. The
French are white supremacist imperialists just like the U.S. The tyranny
of Franceâs white supremacist imperialism is a present day political
reality people of color all around the world are suffering under and
resisting. This lack of analysis of French imperialism and global
repression is lost because of the racist analysis of the white
leadership that dominates the current âglobal justice movement.â
In the past, like many others, I would be inclined to engage in the
ongoing discussions of Where was the Color in/atâŠ, in order to try and
address the lack of participation/leadership by people of color at
anti-globalization marches and other mass mobilizations. So often these
discussions lack a sound analysis of the structures of white supremacy
and itsâ impact on why mass mobilizations look the way they look. These
arguments frequently end up placing the burden on people of color to
explain why they are not present at an event or protest. In her
introduction to the essay
Whereâs the Revolution? Part II, activist and author, Barbara Smith
critiques the racism of so-called âprogressiveâ movements in general and
the LGBT movement specifically. In speaking about the state of
progressive movements in general, she states, âThanks to racism and
elitism, progressive people of color are barely allowed to share
movement leadership, let alone control it. Rest assured if we did get to
decide movement agendas, they would be a lot different from what they
are now.â (Smith, 1998)
Some people of color are challenging white leadership in the global
justice movement by acknowledging people of color need to organize on
their own terms without the presence of whites and then bring our own
platform from the margins of the global justice movement to the center.
People of color are absolutely right that we need to organize ourselves
on our own terms without whites. However, when we come back to the table
have we done anymore to challenge the power structure that marginalizes
us? This strategy was attempted on February 15 at the anti-war
demonstration in Philly, but as people of color we still found ourselves
marginalized and exploited.
An even better example of how the racist power structure of the white
left marginalizes and then kills acts of self-determination is the more
recent October 25, 2003 Anti-War March. As early as summer of 2002,
Black Voices for Peace, The Black Radical Congress and other people of
color led organizations were planning a Black led mobilization in
October of 2003 to resist the war in Iraq before the first bombs even
dropped. There was no mention of A.N.S.W.E.R. or any other majority
white groups playing even a supporting role in the effort. This Black
led mobilization which was acknowledged by the White left almost from
its inception interestingly enough would be reduced to a feeder march
and side show for the larger mass mobilization orchestrated by
A.N.S.W.E.R. The Black March for Peace became a mere âfeederâ march that
ended up feeding into the white supremacy of the White Left.
I am no longer frustrated or disturbed by the often failed attempts to
mobilize Black people and people of color in the numbers that white
people are mobilized for protest marches. We need to begin to question
the value and relevancy of the protest march for people of color,
particularly as they are currently conceived and organized. The protest
march has become nothing more than a vapid cultural product of the White
Left used solely as a means to attract media attention and funding to
sustain its elitism and racism. I struggle less and less with answering
the question of âWhere are the People of Color?â
Ewuare Osayande, who I have cited earlier, has offered an alternative
view on the question of where people of color are in the anti-war and
âglobal justiceâ movements. âWhite people will start to see people of
color when white people start doing the work that people of color have
always been doing. The question people of color ask is: Where are the
white people?â
White privilege so often positions whites outside of the very oppression
that they speak about resisting. Revolutionary movements do not
willingly permit oppressors or collaborators to lead movement struggle.
White leadership in the anti-war movement has resulted in the
development of an analysis and tactics that are far removed from the
daily reality and revolutionary struggles of oppressed people of color.
The racist analysis and the misguided tactics of the White left have
resulted in exploitative âprotest artâ inspired by a vicarious
objectification of the lives of oppressed people of color and shallow
symbolic media events like the protest march/pageant.
Oppressed people of color, on the other hand, are engaged in daily acts
of resistance that appropriately place white supremacy at the root of
injustice. This work is being done on the margins in communities of
color, without the prodding of the white left or in front of the glare
of media cameras. This work is rarely ever acknowledged or is more often
dismissed by the white left as not being real âsocial change.â People of
color who have a clear commitment to resisting all white supremacist
systems of domination will not be found organizing protest pageantry and
they will definitely not be featured as the premiere puppets of these
spectacles.
There are many discussions happening around the purpose of conferences.
Often, people feel tired and frustrated at such gatherings. While
serving as connection points â where isolated people can find a sense of
safety for a few hours, or even days, long-time comrades can meet and
catch up, and networking occurs â conferences can also be points of
frustration. Critical observations were made at the DC APOC conference,
where people felt that certain issues were not being addressed. In the
spirit of constructive criticism, I wanted to share my experiences. I
hope that in my sharing, it opens up spaces for other critical and
necessary discussions to occur.
More and more, I question the ability of weekend-long, or any length,
confer- ence to really act as a place of sustainable connection. Much of
the connect- ing often occurs in the hallways between workshops, where
people find the time to, as Ashanti talks about in his zine, âunmaskâ
what has been kept hidden from the majority of people that one might
interact with in a given day.
It is difficult to find places where vulnerability can be risked, and
that difficulty is proportionate to the joy one experiences when a sense
of safety is attained, however briefly. I am not criticizing nor judging
that safety.
The general feeling I received from previous APOC gatherings, whether in
Detroit, or in the regional organized gatherings since (and prior to)
then, was that these spaces felt safest to share experiences, as well as
organizing. In that collective spirit of shared vulnerability, beautiful
spaces are created. I experienced that while in the queer and trans APOC
workshop.
One person stated that they âfelt at home.â However, that collectivity
is difficult to create and maintain. It can happen spontaneously, but
itâs not inevitable, nor is it magic. Creating that sense of community
often means unlearning and actively challenging internalized ideas of
charismatic personalities, and learning to be critically aware of
judgment and criticism â oneâs own and that directed at other people.
Now, if you bear with me, I will make a contradictory statement. In
light of what I said about charismatic personalities, I will reference
Ella Jo Baker, who cautioned against singling out a single person as
spokesperson, in her speech which came to be remembered as, âMore Than
Just a Hamburger.â Her belief is that people must not look for a
(s)(z)(h)ero; rather, people must believe and love and empower
themselves, with collective help, to âlead,â that we are all leaders,
and that this can be taught and passed on. Ellaâs work with young
people, and her own life experiences, gave her insight into thinking
about the ways in which peopleâs internal fires are extinguished when
they are silenced, overpowered, or seen as less exciting than another
personâs.
We have all, in one way or another, been silenced in our lives. Popular
culture, revolutionary culture, cultures, whet us (and I use the âusâ
with caution) to the idea of celebrity. It is romantic and deeply
compelling. But, it is important to think about what one is seeking in
such aggrandizing of another person over and beyond oneâs own power.
There is a quote by Julius Lester, from his fictional novel, âAnd All
Our Wounds Forgiven,â where he talks about the dislocating
positionalities of both the âadmirerâ and âadmiredâ:
I donât watch much TV anymore. I found myself on constant emotional
overload because in the course of an evening I would have fifty
relationships, intensely liking this one, disliking that one, wondering
what this actor and that actress was like, that politician or that
celebrity without portfolio. It is psychically disorienting having
powerful emotions about people you know only as images. But television
seduces us into trusting image as reality. Daily I watched people
approach him. There was always an instant when they realized that all
the love and emotion they had for him was not reciprocated, that he had
been in their homes and had not known it, that his existence was crucial
to their lives while they were nonexistent in his. They had no
alternative but to make themselves known to him because they had been
forced into a relationship with him.
I want to think about forced relationships, forced ways of relating, and
habitual ways of connecting that may or may not be connected with
liberation, trust, and mutual growth.
I am Korean, and have been living in North America since age six. My
experiences as an Asian yellow womon are complicated as, I am sure, all
peopleâs experiences are. One thing I notice consistently among other
Asian womyn is a feeling of competition. Often, when I am in a room, I
will notice the eyes of other Asian womyn, and there is a feeling of
endanger- ment. It is as though we are in competition against each
other. I think that competition between womyn has many origins, but I
think there are specific racialized, gendered, and heteronormative
reasons why womyn, including Asian womyn, see each other as competition.
I want to state that, as a personal belief, womyn are not endangered as
a people. In stating that, I am not erasing or ignoring the realities of
sexism, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, intersex
phobia, classism, ableism and the numerous oppressions that people of
color face. These oppressions also seem to be places of solidarity. But
I think itâs important to think about how that solidarity can occur even
though the most challenging conversations do not take place, precisely
because the connection itself, so desperately sought, suddenly overrides
the desire to actively decolonize and liberate oneâs self, oneâs
desires, oneâs body and oneâs politics. That, in fact, those challenging
conversations become places where the connection, so desperately forged,
becomes endangered through the idea of it being in crisis and precious,
fragile. That is a dangerous place to be. It is my belief that
connections should not be places where difficult conversations cannot
occur.
Part of why people attend conferences has to do with the idea of
wholeness. It is possible that certain people, through their activism,
seek to find that sense of wholeness, but it is difficult. There are
powerful connections made at conferences, even lifelong friendships,
lovers, partners, creative erotic movements. Audre Lorde defines the
erotic in the following way:
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is the power
which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The
sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic or intellectual,
forms a bridge be- tween the sharers which can be the basis for
understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessons the
threat of their difference.
Much dispute exists around whether or not there is an APOC âcommunityâ
per se. From what I heard, many people feel that APOC, like the concept
of queer, is an ambiguous, fluid concept. It is visionary, an idea(l).
With vision comes spaces, pushing and pulling of limitations, expansion
and stretching of internalized self-robbings and robbings of each other.
Likewise, APOC is heterogeneous, multi-level, and multidimensional. It
is never one thing, and it never remains the same. Can we, as APOC, and
as people and individuals in our communities, experience the erotic with
people without it devolving into heteronormative ways of relating with
each other?
People are different and complicated, come from different places, both
geographically and psychically. There are critiques of the phrase,
âpeople of color,â which is also, for lack of a better word, inadequate.
But it is a ratchet, a visionary ratchet from where movement can begin.
There is always creation of languages during times of connection and
vulnerability. I am wondering how people of color, and people who
identify as womyn, can employ Audreâs definition of the erotic to think
about the ways in which APOC people (donât) relate with each other. As a
queer Asian womon, I struggle with heterosexism, both internalized and
in my interactions with people and institutions â whether family,
school, health care, and the like. I think heterosexism occurs in many
of my interactions with Asian womyn, not because they âknowâ I identify
as queer, but because of the ways in which gender and sex have been
conflated as one and the same. Fear is a product of heterosexism, as is
competition. When I see an Asian person in a room, I do not assume that
we will have things in common. Part of this comes from experience. As an
adopted Korean womon, I have often interacted with Korean North American
folks who regard me with pity or unmasked disgust when they learn I do
not speak Hangul, the official spoken language both in the Republic of
Korea (southern Korea), and the Democratic Peopleâs Republic of Korea
(northern Korea). Many people have experienced similar separations and
experienced the pain of what Gloria AnzaldĂșa refers to as âexisting in
borderlands.â
But, when I get the endangered, or what I refer to as the
âheteronormative fearâ glance, it is painful. Heterosexism operates in
tandem with misogyny and patriarchy, in that womyn are meant to compete
with each other, in the service of men. It is for their benefit that we
are kept separated from each other, we being womyn, queer folks, femmes
and all people. I want to ask, is the separation worth it? Or, rather,
what do we gain from competing with each other? Where is the fear coming
from? And how is the interesting mental health idea of self-esteem, or
the anarchist idea of self-management (which I heard a lot this weekend)
bolstered by this fear?
At this conference, I went up to a person because I knew that if I did
not approach them, we would never end up talking. This is not coming
from a place of forced interaction, but a place where I sensed
competition and in order to bridge that fear and that separation, I
moved to correct it and started a simple conversation, at the level of
small talk. I do not think this person was necessarily queerphobic. I
simply think that this had to do with heterosexism and the competition
that often occurs between Asian womyn. I want to think about why I feel
it, and what it reinforces.
We are traumatized daily. We struggle with differences. It is not the
call of political and self-revolution to perpetuate that trauma through
fear, indifference and its product, inaction. And it is also not my
intent to reduce my experiences and observations into rhetoric. I want
to think about trust and fear, connection and political engagement. I
also want to think about the beauty in the ordinary, and the challenges
and also the necessity of having difficult conversations. I think
another word for difficult conversations is âordinary.â Isnât that true?
That the status quo, though perhaps indifferent, monotonous, is also
challenging, that which so many people rail against, so that it becomes
un desafio, a challenge? June Jordan, in her poem, âOn A New Yearâs
Eve,â talks about the ordinary:
let the world blot
obliterate remove so-
called
magnificence
so-called
almighty/fathomless and everlasting
treasures/
wealth
(whatever that may be)
it is this time
that matters
it is this history
I care about
the one we make together
awkward
inconsistent
as a lame cat on the loose
or quick as kids freed by the bell
or else as strictly
once
as only life must mean
a once upon a time
I have rejected propaganda teaching me
about the beautiful
the truly rare
(supposedly
the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
supposedly
the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
is beautiful
for instance)
but
the truly rare can stay out there
I have rejected that
abstraction that enormity
unless I see a dog walk on the beach/
a bird seize sandflies
or yourself
approach me
laughing out a sound to spoil
the pretty picture
make an uncontrolled
heartbeating memory
instead
I read the papers preaching on
that oil and oxygen
that redwoods and the evergreens
that trees the waters and the atmosphere
compile a final listing of the world in
short supply
but all alive and all the lives
persist perpetual
in jeopardy
persist
as scarce as everyone of us
as difficult to find
or keep
as irreplaceable
as frail
as everyone of us
And Alice Walker also writes about this in her poem about loving what is
abundant more than what is scarce.
In the spirit of the deep love and affection I have for people of color,
in the spirit of thinking about joyâs proportionality to pain and my
acknowledgment that I have responsibility for the pain that other people
in the world experience, in the spirit of healing, I offer my thoughts.
I do not identify as anarchist. I am still learning about this political
visioning ideology / way of life. As such, I draw from numerous living
philosophies and ideas.
I appreciate this space for engagement.
Alston, Ashanti Omowali. âChildhood and the Psychological Dimension of
Revolution.â The Anarchist Black Panther Zine. Summer/Fall 2002, Vol. 4
: 59â70.
Lester, Julius. And All Our Wounds Forgiven. New York: Harvest Books,
1996.
Lorde, Audre. âUse of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (excerpt).â Cries
of the Spirit: A Celebration of Womenâs Spirituality. Ed. Marilyn
Sewell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
See her essays in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color. Ed. CherrĂe Moraga and Gloria AnzaldĂșa. Watertown: Persephone
Press, 1981. Also see AnzaldĂșaâs Borderlands = La Frontera: The New
Mestiza, San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).
Pavi. âOn A New Yearâs Eve.â Online Posting. 10 Oct. 2002. Minstrels. 20
January 2002. <
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1102.html
.
Walker, Alice. âWe Alone.â From the speech, âWhat Can I Give My
Daughters, Who Are Brave?â Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writerâs
Activism. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. 92.
Self-Determination and Anarchist People of Color by Ernesto Aguilar
I first began writing for Our Culture, Our Resistance on anarchist
people of color and the conversations I believe we need to get started.
During that process, very kind individuals offered up much help in ideas
and structure, but at some point, the work became academic. So, stepping
back, I realized that, to be compelling and motivate change, starting
any conversation has to be fluid and open, but also geared at
accomplishing something. I took a step back and returned to the roots of
my piece, of the conversations we need to get started if we are going to
grow and politically advance ourselves as revolutionaries of color. And
here we are.
When people visualized the emergence of a tendency of anti-authoritarian
people of color, no one believed it would grow at the pace and direction
it has. It is sprouting up and fostering awareness in ways few people
envisioned, which has been fantastic. At the same time, we are at a
critical point; where many see our organizing must evolve. We need to
create a space for our unity, culture and identity, but also our
politics.
We need to be clear that advocacy of rights and roles for people of
color, while certainly needed, permits the state and white-led movement
to institutionalize and mediate our struggles. Fighting racism and white
supremacy, when included at all, are problems typically regarded as
line- items for social change. Even among anarchists of color, the
attraction is strong to build own our anarchist movement, made up of
people of color, or to demand greater respect from the white-led
movement. In the process, weâre failing to ask critical questions about
the viability of the white-led movement or our own loyalties.
For people of color who identify as anti-authoritarians, bringing us
into the clearest solidarity with oppressed people around the world
should be our primary focus. We need to give respect to those whoâve
come before us by building on their successes and learning from their
mistakes, while bringing the anarchist people of color tendency to the
next level.
Ask someone what they think of when they consider racism, oppression and
white supremacy. Youâll likely get many answers. What does oppression
mean to you as a person of color? I believe that, in order to find
answers, itâs important to know what weâre dealing with when we talk
about such broad concepts.
Francis Cress-Welsing argues that racism is white supremacy. That
distinction alone is significant. Some whites and a few people of color
are confused by the word racism; theyâll sometimes fall into traps of
terms popularized by the far right, or take the word literally, thinking
it to be a prejudice of any race by any race. Historically, however,
racism has always meant white supremacy and collusion with institutional
power.
Race was, in many instances, a line of distinction separating Europeans
from non-whites. Cress-Welsing states racism consists of âpatterns of
perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and
emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people
activity (economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics,
religion, sex and war).â Cress-Welsingâs definition grasps the totality
of racism/white supremacy, and how it shapes our own views, as well as
that of white people, virtually from birth. Cress-Welsingâs clarity
makes us think about how we got into the global mess we face. In truth,
Europeans have waged military and cultural war against people of color
for nearly a thousand years. Such exercises were never a means of
dividing rich and poor, but to unite the white masses to fight for the
moral, political, social and/or economic superiority of their way of
life over other races.
Addressing the social and political realities of white supremacy
requires a strategy. In my view, that approach must make
self-determination for oppressed people a basis of unity for looking at
the world, among those professed anti-authoritarian people of color and
all others. Our first stand must be with people of color worldwide
fighting for room to breathe. Our first prerogative must be freedom for
all oppressed people, by any means.
At its core, self-determination is an opportunity to finally be free, to
determine oneâs own political, social and economic destinies. For North
American radicals of color, this kind of idea can be a leap; we live in
a society of relative privilege, where corporate corruption,
globalization and other movements compete for our hearts and minds.
Occupation and oppression arenât harsh and in our faces as, for
instance, in Palestine. As such, weâre conditioned to think about our
struggles related to what weâre against, rather than that for which we
are fighting.
Clearly, itâs on us to start thinking about how we make efforts if we
are to be self-determined. One of the beautiful things about anarchism,
many people tell me, is that it is fluid and open; flexible enough to
respond to social and political conditions, but strong enough in its
anti- authoritarianism to stand up against dictatorship of any kind.
However, all of us get frustrated in the roadblocks that come before any
movement. I submit that we need think about our tactics and our unity.
It is crucial that we start looking at our politics with a nod to what
we, as revolutionaries, hope to create of this world. We know what weâre
against, but how are we getting to the world we want to create? And, as
importantly, what actions do we need to make to get there? What is a
fundamental call from which our movements emanate?
Although I have spoken out frequently on the need to locally organize, I
respect that not everyone is an organizer. It can be intimidating for
even experienced people. In reality, I am an advocate of the growth of
our movements on many levels. Whether you are an organizer, somebody
just looking for answers, someone fed up with how the system works, or
an intellectual, what you are about and what we as a movement stand for
needs to be out front, fearless, imperfect and courageous.
Some ideas that touch on tactics and unity, no matter who you are:
short-term goals? What are the process goals (i.e. building cultural
consciousness among members) in reaching the objective?
trying motivate to action?
to peopleâs sense of justice, and which to their self-interest?
should deliver the message? Who is credible to the audience, and how do
we equip spokespeople with information and comfort levels?
As one example, I wrote a missive on tactical politics, focusing on
lifestyle politics. Also called conscientious consumerism, lifestyle
politics (and other forms of reactive activism), have come to the fore
as leading trends in social action. Boycotts; buying green, fair trade,
et al.; and voluntary simplicity are everywhere. The failure of these
kinds of strategies is in vision. Writer Angus Maguire argues that, at
its worst, lifestyle politics âoveremphasize the importance of white and
middle-class buying habits while marginalizing the work of communities
of color around the world to gain power in struggles against the same
injustices our buying habits are supposedly addressing.â And I concur.
But the ensuing responses from whites as well as a few people of color
failed to offer a vision about how such consumerism connects with our
program for advancement. Many people are not ready for a discussion
about a âprogram for advancementâ or much of a program for anything, but
we need to be. Time and conditions require we stop spinning our wheels.
We need to see a strategic vision for our work as part of an explicit
and comprehensive program for reaching political, social and economic
self-determination. Lifestyle politics is perhaps an easy target, but
this instance demonstrates our need to analyze tactics.
Unity is perhaps one of the most curious roads to navigate in this
respect, because once you find out what youâre for, your allies become a
little clearer. Itâs vibrant, for sure, and presents opportunities for
us.
I donât want to open the conversation with the typical us-versus-other-
ideologies rhetoric, but nudge you to consider priorities. Herb Boyd
writes in a revised edition of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying that ideologues
on various sides of the political spectrum had, âpolitical positions so
bitterly opposed in the 1970s that it disrupted the remnants of the
Black liberation movement, thereby ending any possibility of operational
unity.â Anarchists of color get caught up in that too; some of us see
our internal contradictions as people of color as more important than
the external contradictions of white supremacist-engineered society out
to do us all in. Weâve been sold the line that joining the white-led
movement serves âhumanity,â when humanity canât speak for itself in
struggle in which it doesnât lead. Some of us eschew other people of
color as being anti-white, et al., but fail to see who is served by our
divisions. By no means am I saying to ignore our differences. I donât
believe paper unity serves anyone. I encourage all my people to consider
who you unite with, why and the interests it serves.
Whether we unite with white anarchists is a tough question. While I
believe broad-based work presents unique opportunities, I am very
passionate in feeling itâs not our job to hold white folksâ hands, make
them feel empowered, good about their politics, not downplayed, etc. The
white-led movement should provide that to them, since itâs theirs and
whites should be demanding more of other white progressives. But the
subject of allies is altogether different.
When the Anarchist People of Color listserv began, some of us came to
the table with the idea that weâd have this open space for ourselves to
create a more visible presence of people of color in the âanarchist
movement,â essentially the white-led movement. Undoubtedly, our at-first
unpopular little crew has now gotten more support from whites who see
this effort as important.
However, while most anarchists of color still participate in white-led
organizing, our collective analysis is slowly evolving to a place where
we are standing on our own, and what such unity means for us in the long
term.
Thereâs an equal amount of work around the question of anarchism, and
how we can grow it to meet the needs of communities of color. Not a few
people of color observe that the contemporary anarchist scene, if indeed
itâs embodied by testosterone-pumped white boys and Anarchy magazine,
relates to a minuscule fraction of the populace. How do we make the
ideas of anarchy relate to those who are not pissed off Caucasians and
grad students? Such a question doesnât even get into the troubling
failure in anarchism to adequately address white supremacy, e.g.
Bakuninâs anti- Semitism, Emma Goldmanâs advocacy of eugenics and modern
anarchismâs denial of the centrality of race in the dialogue. Anarchism,
looked at objectively, should be applied as a model of social
organization.
North American trends in anarchist thinking have advocated anarchism as
an ideology, philosophy or lifestyle choice. Yet the fault of such
application is that many assumptions made by anarchists deliver firmly
Eurocentric values in their introduction.
Just to be clear, when I say Eurocentric values, I mean values that have
become a little more complex than merely âwhite values,â but concepts,
through the system of white supremacy, capital and subjugation, that
have become part of mass consciousness. The rise of modern Eurocentric
values can be traced to the rise of capitalism, and embody ideas which,
despite pretensions to the contrary by their most radical carriers, are
intended to serve white supremacy and capital.
Calling individualism, liberalism, the rule of (natural, structural or
other) law, democracy and free markets (e.g. free trade, fair trade, et
al.) Eurocentric values denies the rightful link people of color have to
them. In fact, Eurocentric values mean a sense of power, and of moral,
political, social and/or economic superiority to other cultures, with
the mission of assimilating them. For hundreds of years, European
scholars have bemoaned the failures of âotherâ people as a means of
talking up the superiority of their own belief systems, and assimilating
them into Eurocentrism. All of us fall into the trap sometime; as people
of color, weâve been indoctrinated to tacitly accept the superiority of
whites over us, while whites have been taught to assume their values are
right. The âunite and fightâ abstraction, at its core, is aimed at
winning people to its philosophy and assimilating all struggles into
âone.â In another example, you regularly hear proponents of anarchism
rejecting community cohesion and religious faith, but failing to grasp
that, to many people, such things are important and can, in some
historical examples, be an organizing spot. Even notions of consensus â
an organizing model developed by white, middle-class anti-nuclear
activists where a tiny group of people, often with many of the same
values, get together and mutually agree to something â are an illusion
aimed at reinforcing the values of a small group to the contrasting
values of outsiders. Proponents of North American anarchism too often
look to bring allegedly superior lifestyles and belief systems to the
fore, and oppressed people, directly or indirectly, can be the victims.
I do think a revolutionary movement will take root, and that it will be
broad- based. However, the mindset of many is a rush to idealism â that
social justice is âall one struggleâ and that we all need to be united
to defeat fascism. I put forward the conversation that the rush to
idealism will be our demise as a movement. The white-led movement should
answer for its internal racism, and people of color should understand
what we want, how we plan to work, and be conscious and organized as a
struggle enough to fight this battle alone, if necessary. That kind of
conviction is important in this undertaking. We should not make
concessions to our demand for self- determination to win anyoneâs
support.
Another issue on the unity tip is the anarchist romance with class. As
we forge a new path of oppressed peoplesâ politics, as well as anarchist
theory and practice, we must take a critical look at class. Are we
surrendering our self-determination in the name of unity?
Within white-led anarchism, there is a subtle, and occasionally overt,
competitiveness between race and class. For example, in âRace and Class:
Burning Questions, Unpopular Answers,â a member of the North-eastern
Federation of Anarcho-Communists brings arguments such as âracism is an
excuseâ and that racism is prevalent among people of color.
These ideas are presented to show class is the primary issue we should
unite under. âThereâs an overwhelming amount of class-privileged âpeople
of colorâ spearheading this movement, creating a culture that is class
reactionary to all working class people of all races in the United
States,â the piece notes. âThese people are also quick to react to what
they see as âclass trumping race,â and find the common class struggle
between people of different races to be not as important as what they
share in common with the community in question.â
Similar points are made in a far cruder fashion. Most white radicals,
and some radicals of color, have adopted old Marxist notions of class,
class struggle and, most importantly, class solidarity. There are dozens
of names people of color get called â from ânationalistâ to âreverse
racistâ to âprivilege pimpâ â for pointing out the obvious importance of
self-determination, racism and the historical fallacies of class unity.
Although I do agree with familiarity with how capitalism functions is
appropriate, my concern is many class-unity concepts are based on two
fundamentally false ideas: 1.) that âthe working classâ (meaning the
white working class and workers of color, in the United States and
internationally) can unite to fight; and that workers of color and the
white working class have common interests, from the workplace on down.
Even most anarchist intellectualism stakes positions to which the two
misconceptions as their foundation. While there are indubitably surface
commonalities (i.e. workplace, housing, etc.), history demonstrates that
working-class solidarity between white workers and workers of color does
not exist. History further demonstrates that white workers, in almost
all cases, side with the oppressor and against workers of color. Iâm
sure there are isolated examples of unity. Does that mean I believe
people of color should take such cavernous leaps of faith? Not without
their eyes open and minds sharp.
J. Sakai, author of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, has
been one of the hardest critics of the white working class. In an
interview I conducted with him, Sakai explained he researched history
and put his findings bluntly âI figured out that actually there wasnât
any time when the white working class wasnât white supremacist and
racist and essentially pro-empire.â Those who ad hominem dismiss Sakai
ought to follow up on what he says. From colonization to ongoing wars
and the dismantling of Affirmative Action, how many mass movements of
white workers (or whites altogether) were there, compared to instances
where white masses either stood with the elite, actively or passively?
100-to-1? 500-to-1? Herein lies the dirty secret of class politics. If
we have a few hundred years of history to look upon, in which the white
working class has consistently and in most instances actively sided with
oppressors and sold out people of color, what is the basis for
solidarity? If working-class solidarity were more than a slogan,
wouldnât the racial discrimination and even profound racism within the
ranks of white workers have been obliterated years ago? If white workers
have rejected significant demands supporting people of color, what makes
them different now? Theyâre not. As Sakai points out, and deftly
illustrates, the white working class and people of color have divergent
interests. White workers just side with their own interests and the
empireâs.
Another conspicuous issue is the history of cross-class alliances among
people of color in fighting colonialism. Read the histories of Algeria,
Mexico and other countries and youâll discover the internal
contradictions of class become far less important when faced by the
external contradiction of an occupying army. Itâs the kind of history
that swims against North American radicalismâs beliefs that classes
donât or canât unite. Moving forward as anarchist people of color means
understanding our allies, as well as our enemies, and what that means
for our freedom.
One of the beauties of self-determination is the fact that it draws
lines of opposition, contradictions and prompts us to consider
privilege. Not simply the (still important) roads typically hewn by
activist-types â gender, sexual orientation and class â but looking at
one another and acknowledging the privileges of people within this
movement, and navigating that in hopes of being honest as possible.
Being self-determined requires such.
For people of color who were raised in or politicized by white-dominant
spaces, concept of self and oneâs relationship with non-white-dominant
spaces represent one point of privilege worth exploring. In no other
instance is the difference between anarchists of color bigger than
between white-acculturated persons of color, and those socialized by
their respective cultures. Relational views; concepts of autonomy/people
of color spaces, racial experience, overall objectives for empowerment
and more are thus profoundly varied. In many cases, being raised in
white-dominant spaces is not a choice, although voluntary involvement
is. In both cases, participants must recognize that, historically, such
spaces impart values that, while dressed in democratic language, are
intended to further white supremacy; create confusion and division; and,
as a means of self- perpetuation, can make white-acculturated people of
color unwitting agents of white supremacist ideology. How internalized
marginalization and oppression function are critical considerations.
Very honestly, there are internal struggles being waged by conscious
people of color all around us. The sense of estrangement from
communities is real, as is the indignation some people of color feel
when whites assume that people of color have no other interests but
race. We need to be actively supporting one another through these
explorations, exhibiting care and knowledge. Internalized oppression for
people of color, manifested as guilt or defensiveness, helps no one, and
we need to see these issues of privilege as collective issues for all of
us in the movement.
Similarly, itâs important white-skinned people of various cultures and
ethnicities to understand the dynamics of race. This is a challenging
segment of privilege to steer, but itâs necessary. Light skin versus
dark skin is a demonstration of our internal struggles, as well as the
debates within our own colonies. As one person put it well: âHow has
your light skin operate like white privilege among people of color? How
have used your light skin to pass as white in the dominant culture? How
has your light skin been used as a way to separate yourself from people
of color? Do you use it to separate yourself from other people of color
but not from people of your ethnic group? How does the collusion of your
light skin give people of color the impression that you are not in their
camp, but only come to their camp when excommunicated from the dominant
culture not wanting to have these privileges is not the point here. The
point is this: the fact that you do have light skin privilege in this
racialized society, it is important to be racially responsible with it.â
Talking about collective freedom through self-determination also
requires we have a discussion about individualism. Individual freedom is
one of the reasons we fight, and it is one of the highest ideals,
although the ultra- competitive society fostered by capitalism has
turned the idea of individual conscience on its head. Our objective as
anarchists is not to emulate what the media tries to make of us, as
self-involved monsters bent on greed and serving ourselves. Autonomy
doesnât mean that our politics are defined by our moods or interests at
the moment, but by study, struggle and discovery. Individualist politics
are an exercise in privilege. Many Americans exercise that privilege
every day by passively supporting the empire. Some anarchists of color
get swept up in the moment, and start defining our politics by whatâs
exciting at the moment, rather than realizing we donât have that many
moments to lose.
Lastly, it is critical to recognize that the need for respecting each
other and organizing ourselves collectively. Iâm regularly surprised by
the lackadaisical approach some people of color bring to anarchist
people of color spaces. From small things like showing up late to
gatherings to major things like exclusionary organizing, the message is
one of power dynamics and privilege. Sometimes itâs unconscious.
Sometimes people came up in a lazy political culture or one that didnât
have to consider what starting a meeting 45 minutes late, for instance,
might do for a poor personâs bus ride or parentâs time with their kids.
Yet these examples are matters of privilege that mirror what is already
going on in white anarchist milieus. This needs to be examined clearly.
Think about Adidas. Its purpose is to sell expensive shoes. But nobody
in their right mind will buy $200 sneakers. So Adidas has to evolve from
selling shoes to selling a lifestyle. The baller of the moment rocks a
pair of signature shoes as a hot track bumps in the background. Adidas
is flexible; it grows its campaigns as the tastes of potential buyers
evolve.
Now think about a movement. Making signs and sweating in the hot sun
doesnât sell well. Who in their right minds wants that, verdad? So we
need to evolve as peopleâs media-savviness and minds evolve; the problem
is not that people donât believe what we believe, but that anarchists
can seem completely uninspiring doing what we do. Why would anyone care
for a lifestyle of protests, long meetings, drum circles and getting
arrested?
Maybe those pissed-off Caucasians or grad students I mentioned earlier,
but thatâs all.
We all want movements that are flexible and can respond to social
conditions. We also need to work tirelessly to keep political goals like
self-determination and tactics for getting there relevant to everyday
folks. No, we donât need a movement led by Adidas, but we need to look
at, without bias, the world our people live in, and how our messages can
speak to them. Iâve heard âwe canât go to such-and-such because itâs
corporateâ as proclamations of peopleâs individualist politics twice as
much as Iâve heard âwhere do people hang, and can we go talk with them
about such-and-such campaign?â If Adidas can have legions of cats
wearing their $200 gear, theyâve tapped into what we need to get a dose
of, and quick. A few points that came out of the âBuilding an APOC
Movementâ workshop at the 2003 APOC conference, in terms of organizing:
take where people are and build from that. We have more to learn from
people than they do from us;
each other-working from our strengths; and
organizing.
And in terms of networking and resources:
building trust; and
We also resolved on a few ideas related to points of unity:
process.
Four key points of anarchist organizing:
cooperative forms of organization;
illegitimate authority, racism, sexism, and capitalism. Creating
alternatives to the dominant culture; and
of informal association, support services, and contacts that enable
people to survive in spite of the negative influences of government and
its bureaucracies.
Five criteria covered at the conference for measuring success:
exert control over their lives;
collectively; rotating tasks, sharing skills, confronting racism, sexism
and hierarchy;
problems they personally face through the organizing work;
so that the authority of government, corporations, and large
institutions is replaced by extensions of decentralized, grassroots
authority; and
collective effort.
These arenât gospel, but theyâre a start in moving towards the
conversations we need to have â whether youâre an organizer or not â
about self-determination, tactics, allies, privilege and more. As with
anything, we need to treat each other with compassion and empathy; donât
let hostility, resentment or a quest for âaccountabilityâ color your
efforts. Tearing each other down as people of color for perceived
transgressions is never acceptable under any circumstance. Weâre not the
military, and nor should we strive for that. We have serious discussions
to have, and hopefully more learning, caring, fighting and loving in the
future.
Siu Loong means âLittle Dragonâ in Cantonese.
But Siu Loong herself isnât Cantonese. She isnât even one hundred
percent Chinese. Through me, she can claim to be Hakka, Suzhonese and
Shanghainese. From her father, she can claim to be Finnish, Hungarian
and Jewish. But she is also an American living among American
anarchists, where none of this supposedly matters.
Before motherhood became a consideration, I paid little attention to the
lack of color in the New York City anarchist âscene.â So what if no one
looked like me? Werenât we all struggling for the same thing?
Pregnancy made me sit up and look around at the demographics of the
anarchists around me. Yes, I had followed (but not participated) in the
short-lived discussion on white privilege in Seattleâs protests against
the WTO. Yes, I would confront my fellow anarchists about their
internalized racism. But I never really went further and questioned why
there were so few people of color-never mind people of color like me-in
the anarchist movement.
Motherhood forced me to open my eyes. Before the recommended six weeks
of postpartum rest were up, I was up and about on my various projects.
Virtually everyone was supportive of my new role as mother and on-call
cow. However, I started noticing small things that bothered me about my
(mostly white) activist circles.
For starters, no one could pronounce my daughterâs name correctly. It
was pronounced, âSue Long,â âSiu Long,â âSue La,â any which way except
the way it was supposed to be pronounced. If people didnât have trouble
making a small circle with their lips to say the word âsiu,â they
couldnât remember that âloongâ had two âoâs. One person tried to shorter
her name to Suzy. I very firmly put a stop to that.
Before Siu Loong could even remember her environment, I looked at the
young children who made up the anarchist scene. Who would she be playing
with when she grew old enough to interact with other kids?
Most anarchists do not have children. Whether this is a political
statement or a personal choice, the face remains that anarchist children
are few and far between. On the Lower East Side, the anarchists who
choose parenthood and had enough support to remain somewhat involved in
the movement tend to be white.
It bothers me that Siu Loongâs companions are almost all white. I do not
want her growing up in an all-white (or predominantly white)
environment. I do not want her to wonder if she is somehow incorrect for
not having blond hair and blue eyes as many of her peers do. When I have
brought this up with other anarchist parents, they dismiss my concerns.
Of course they do not have to worry about whether their child will feel
as if she does not belong. Their children, even those who are of mixed
parentage, have white skin. They do not have to worry that their child
may feel as if she is not as good as her lighter-skinned, lighter-haired
friends. They do not have to worry about the fact that our small
community sometimes mirrors the racism and ethnocentrism found out in
the larger world.
Sometimes I wonder if I obsess about race too much. I buy her books that
emphasize her Chinese heritage and, more importantly, have characters
that look like her. When she began Early Head Start, I was secretly
thrilled that there were no white children in her class. When she
entered Head Start seven months later, I was delighted that ten of the
fifteen kids running around were Chinese and that all spoke Cantonese.
No one mispronounced Siu Loongâs name, not even the non-Chinese
teachers.
However, the parents and caretakers of these children are not ones with
whom I share anything except an ancestral homeland. For the most part,
we do not share the same language and thus cannot talk with each other.
Some of them do not return my tentative or âJou sahnâ when we pass each
other in the hall or wait for the elevator together. I do not know their
politics and opinions. After seeing my punk rock babysitter, they may
have guessed mine, although this did not prevent them from electing me
the chairperson of both the Class Committee and the Settlement Houseâs
Policy Committee. But because we have virtually nothing in common, we do
not arrange for our children to see each other outside the classroom.
Perhaps because their children are full-blooded Chinese, often raised in
a community of other full-blooded Chinese, they do not see arranging
play dates with the other Chinese children as a concern. Or perhaps they
already do, but because my Cantonese is limited to ordering food and
asking for prices, I am left out of the invitation loop.
In addition, despite my visible pleasure at Siu Loong being around
children who share the more neglected half of her heritage, I feel as if
Iâm compromising some of my anti-authoritarian beliefs by placing her in
a school-like atmosphere. She not only picks up the odd Cantonese phrase
but also the seemingly senseless rules and regulations found in all
classrooms.
One evening, as I sat and talked with a friend, Siu Loong grabbed my
legs.
âPut your feet like this,â she commanded, attempting to bend my legs
into a cross-legged position. Then she grabbed my hands.
âPut your hands like this,â she demanded, intertwining my fingers and
then folding my hands.
This was not a comfortable position for a grown woman in a chair, so I
promptly uncrossed my legs and unfolded my hands.
Siu Loong tried to reposition me again.
âThis isnât comfortable,â I protested.
âIt is comfortable,â she insisted, trying to bend my fingers.
âYou need to sit like that so I can read you a story,â she added.
That was when I realized that, for some unknown and probably nonsensical
reason, Siu Loongâs teachers were having their charges sit for story
time with folded hands and crossed legs.
The logic of this escapes me. Isnât it enough that the kids are seated
and quiet? Why impose a needless rule? Especially one that she will
parrot and annoy me with?
Often, I feel as if my life is split. If I want to be around people who
think as I do, who believe and are willing to fight for the same things,
they will not look as I do. They will not share the same culture or
upbringing. I will have to explain certain aspects of my life and
sometimes have these aspects be misunderstood or distorted. If I choose
to be with those who share my culture and collective history, I risk
having my individuality misunderstood or ignored. During high school, I
chose to be with other Chinese. We shared nothing except a common
ancestry. In that circle of friends, my needs and wants as an individual
and as an emerging anarchist were ignored. As an adult, I have been
asked why I choose to be around so many white people, why I do not
choose to be around âmy own.â In this circle, my needs and wants as a
woman of color are ignored.
Sometimes I wonder if Siu Loong feels the split as acutely as I do. I
wonder if she notices that, around white people, virtually anything is
okay.
She can run and climb and laugh and shout. She can even take all of her
clothes off. No one will chastise her. The most that will happen is that
the grown-ups will laugh.
However, among those who look more like she does, whether they be
schoolmates or relatives, such behavior is not only not laughed at, but
actively discouraged and chastised.
When I try to talk with my anarchist friends about this split in my life
and hers, they donât get it. Why is it important that I send Siu Loong
to âschoolâ? Why am I subjecting Siu Loong to regiment and restrictions
at such an early age? Canât I find an alternative source of childcare
for her-one that does not reinforce models of hierarchy and oppression?
And why am I so hung up on race? One anarchist described my concerns
about race and ethnicity as ânationalistic bullshit.â
How can I raise a baby anarchist of color if my choices lay between a
white, color-blind movement or a gathering of those who can identify
with her looks and heritage, but little else?
Iâm still struggling to find some sort of balance between these two
extremes. Itâs hard to think of solutions when those around me-both my
peers and the parents of Siu Loongâs peers-do not acknowledge that there
is a problem. This reflects a larger issue-white anarchistsâ refusal to
discuss race, racism and exclusivity in the movement. Knowing this
doesnât make it any easier. I am still struggling alone with this
concern.
and Bruce Little
Bruce and Rivka Gewirtz Little met in Texas and now reside in New York
City. Some may remember Bruce as a founding member of the Federation of
Black Community Partisans, the predecessor to many APOC groups. Rivka is
a great organizer in her own right. This interview focuses on parenting
and how being parents has changed the lives to two kickass
revolutionaries.
political development?
Bruce: Being an introvert, I had a lot of political influence from
books, TV and music. As a teen when I was in junior high, I read a lot
of books on the Vietnam War and the international insurgent movements
during that time period. I remember looking at CNN during the days I
skipped school and recognizing the kind of military build up in the
South and Central Americas as being somewhat identical to the kind of
U.S military buildup that took place in Vietnam. Being a working class
black male at 14, I knew for sure that I was gonna be drafted. Later, in
my twenties, I read Malcolm Xâs speeches and got involved in peace and
justice coalitions in Houston.
Rivka: The â80s affected my political development. I grew up in a
lesbian- parent household in upper Manhattan. Crack hit like a ton of
bricks, addicting or helping to jail many of my lifelong friends. AIDS
hit even harder, with many of my motherâs friends dying. Gentrification
eventually claimed the apartment I grew up in. Marshals evicted my
mother, throwing 25 years of our shit on the street and dragging me out
kicking and screaming. Yet I hated the left and all that it embodied. My
mother (a Jewish woman) and her partner (a black woman) forced me to
canvas for the Rainbow Party and I had been to more patchouli-smelling
sing-ins than any kid could handle. I didnât see anything concrete being
done. I tuned out as much as possible. Thank god for that blip of a
conscious era in hip hop. I put my thinking cap back on and began to
organize around issues in college and later as a journalist focusing on
criminal justice issues. Can you talk about how having your daughter has
changed your lives, and what you want out of life?
Bruce: Having Navah has definitely added on more consideration to how we
used to function as activists before we became parents. We still strive
to work for the transformation of our communities, but we do have to
work through child care issues and âswitchingâ to make meeting s or get
to certain protests.
Rivka: Having grown up in a severe state of urban emergency, affecting
change has always been part of my MO. However, as N grows, my political
work has taken a much clearer and more solid form. I am now desperate to
work for underground education, cooperative child care and other
services for children that function outside the oppressive laws of the
system. If there is any sanity to be maintained for me on a Saturday
night when my daughter becomes a teen, I know that I need to expose
police corruption and exploitation of youth of color now. I know there
needs to be an attitude that every kid in the âhood could be my kid and
therefore is my responsibility. My goals are very defined.
Bruce: I was made more aware of issues like education and social
services since we had been thrust into dealing with them first hand. All
last year we were playing survival games with the State in trying to
keep our daughter in affordable child care. In a situation like that,
you almost have to be living on the street to qualify for these kinds of
services.
And you have to be in a single parent situation as well. I was
unemployed and R was working, but that wasnât enough. The State wanted
me out of the picture altogether in order for N to be qualified to
continue to get childcare services. We wanted to look at certain daycare
programs that were started by grassroots activists back in the day
because we knew that they had progressive learning curriculums for
toddlers. But as funding for alternative grassroots based schools become
scarce, they get swallowed by the State and hence the classist
guidelines.
Rivka: Again, instead of looking at all the issues all the time, I have
really begun to focus on whatâs happening to inner city kids. Being
involved with children all the time thrusts it in our face. Right now
the scariest part seems to be the prison state we have created for urban
youth in public schools, which later transfers into the prison
industrial complex. But then itâs also terrifying that mothers on
welfare are forced to deposit their newborns into the hands of strangers
so that they can meet welfare guidelines. There are so many issues it
seems overwhelming â so the thought of having to organize around
something like globalization (though I know its crucial) seems to dilute
my efforts on any front. Maybe in 18 years, Iâll start to branch out
again.
Bruce: I believe it can be, but it really comes down to the parent. What
are they willing to live with or live without as they raise a kid up
under capital- ism? There are networks of alternative health care
providers although small and scarce that anti-authoritarians can turn to
if they do not want to go to take their child to a ârealâ doctor. There
are alternatives to public schools and you can even squat or choose a
primitivist lifestyle in a remote setting. What Iâm saying is that
radical parents throughout the years have chosen to live lives where
they raise children âunpluggedâ from the dominant culture and it can
work. I just see it as a âYour Mileage May Varyâ kind of thing. There
shouldnât be rules on how to build a family under an oppressed state. I
follow my instincts and common sense along with Rivkaâs consul as a
partner. We may choose a medical doctor for Navah based on the
individual and how they practice medicine. Do they blindly prescribe the
medicines of the industry when there are alternative medicines to
consider? Are they open minded to holistic alternatives?
Do we as parents decide if we want to give our child those medicines
when we know based on our own research that that medicine may not be
good for Navah? I think being a conscious and thoughtful parent leads to
practical decisions.
Rivka: Itâs totally possible, though hard. To me its all about
collaboration and cooperation. If you want to keep your kid out of the
system by way of doctor, school, etc, it takes a group of people who are
willing to chip and in cooperatively provide services. For example, the
only way for parents without cash to get daycare without going through
the state is to come together with a group of other parents to form a
daycare collective. I think the hard part is making the connections with
other people who have committed themselves to raising their children in
that environment. Once you make the connections, I believe it to be
possible.
Rivka: I have spent a lot of time thinking about this very issue. Is it
possible to raise a kid that questions and bucks authority while
instilling âdisciplineâ in the home? In other words, how do you tell a
kid to challenge the state and existing laws and then tell them to shut
up and listen to your rules? On the other hand, four-year-olds donât
necessarily have the capability to know that playing with the stove
could kill them-hence the clear need for rules: âHey kid, stay away from
the stove, or else!â Ultimately, as a mother, my job is to extend the
womb for as long as possible until my child doesnât need the support
anymore. The womb provides boundaries that make a fetus feel safe. On
the outside world, toddlers seek instruction to feel safe in a big scary
park, for instance. The trick is to provide rules for safety, while
teaching kids to question rules that seem bogus â including their
parents. Oddly, the safety and security that comes from a disciplined
home can empower kids to be- come adults who are strong enough to fight
the system. Of course, Iâm talking a lot of shit right now. What am I
gonna say if Navah heads out the house in a hoochie skirt to the club at
16 and âchallenges my authorityâ on going ⊠Hmmm âŠ. ass whoopinâs all
around!
Bruce: Although I kid around the house about passinâ out ass whoopinâs
and I also make threats if Iâm caught in bad mood, I have realized how
my upbringing instilled that âfear of getting in troubleâ as a kid and
how we track that same fear into adulthood in the work place or at a
protest dealing with cops. I donât want Navah to fear other people, just
respect other people who respect her. So I take my cue from Rivkaâs
ideas on discipline, which means talking things out with her, not
bargaining. But also pointing out the consequences of your actions: if
you donât clean up and take care of your shit, itâs not gonna be any
good to you in pieces if someone steps on it or it gets lost, or if I
get tired of picking it up all the time and it âdisappears.â
particularly when the push for assimilation is so intense for youth of
color, especially young girls.
Bruce: We started getting white Barbie dolls for gifts from some
relatives when Navah was like, one. Granted we did not lay ground rules
to our peoples not to give us Barbies of any color, but regardless, we
always knew that we had our work cut out for us to counter
indoctrination of white supremacy and negative body image via Barbieâs
marketing.
Barbieâs blond looks and body image are targeted to girls Navahâs age
and it can have that effect of self hating of a child of color hating
their brown skin and dark unruly hair. I think of the old Whoopi piece
she used to do portraying a young black girl with a yellow towel on her
head pretending that it was blond hair. We counter this in a couple of
ways like telling her how she and other kids that look like her are
beautiful too. As she gets older it will be easier to explain that there
is an industry out there making mad dollars off of people of color who
have been tricked to hate themselves and in turn will want to look like
someone they are not, or kill themselves trying. I would hope that she
will make her own conclusion that she should love her natural self.
Rivka: I think the way to impart culture is to provide it without
ramming it down your childâs throat. In other words, surround the house
with cultural books, and avoid the typical childrenâs crap, have parties
in which people are naturally wearing cultural dress, instill values of
your culture in simple ways like focusing on community and story
telling. However, I donât think itâs helpful to start some sort of
counter indoctrination. I was raised with a little of that and had a
severe rebellion. I am hoping that if the parents love and are proud of
their cultural heritage and fill the home with ceremony and other folks
living the same way, the child will incorporate that in their way of
being.
confusion about who they are and being accepted. How are you encouraging
your daughter to honor her many cultures and feel confidence in that?
Rivka: I have a very unpopular take on this issue. I am all about Navah
honoring her many cultures, i.e. Black, Jewish, etc. But at the end of
the day, when the police stop her ass driving a car, she will be a Black
woman and they will treat her as such. While that officer is beating her
ass for whatever sick reason he finds, he wonât be asking her if she is
a quarter French â know what I mean? My feeling is you provide all the
beauty of culture in the house in a positive way, but you let your kid
know the ropes on the outside world â bottom line. If there is some
confusion or refusal to accept at some point â well hey thatâs normal.
As someone who comes from a multicultural home, I have gone through my
periods of self-doubt and even hatred, but it all shook out in the end.
curiosity and spirit going in a school system in which conformity is
most pressing?
Rivka: Provide examples of alternative ways of being on their free time.
Go to plays, free art exhibits and concerts, libraries, etc. I think it
takes providing alternative perspectives to keep kids away from that
conformist thinking. No kid will remain a conformist when they know
there are cool alternatives. And if they do, that will all change in
time.
Bruce: Deprogramming at home is the key. First you need to know the
school your child is attending. Who are the teachers, what are they
teaching, etc. Then ask your kid what they are being taught. It will be
the usual shit, like the first Thanksgiving where the first colonizers
partied with the indigenous Americans. Here is the opportunity to arm
them with tools like A Peopleâs History of the United States by Howard
Zinn. It provides an alternative to conforming to the reactionary
historical perspective of the school system.
But you also have to be active in countering the stuff being taught in
schools by speaking out when you attend school board meetings, or yes,
even PTA meetings.
Most importantly encourage the child to satisfy their curiosity by
challenging the school authorities on the stuff they are teaching.
What behaviors â conscious or unconscious â need to be more actively
checked when it comes to welcoming parents?
Bruce: Political meetings and workspaces can improve with the increased
involvement of politically conscious parents. Building the APOC movement
means reaching out across class and age lines. If there are more parents
involved in radical community building, I believe that will improve
child- friendliness at meetings. Parents could organize themselves to
switch off in the child caring area from meeting to meeting so it just
wonât be any particular personâs âjobâ to watch the children.
So far I have been to meetings that have offered childcare, but I have
never really used that resource because Rivka and I usually plan ahead
of time when it comes to managing our time to attend meetings. As for
what kind of behaviors that needs to be checked, I can only say that
hopefully you can work with people who are patient and understanding
with children who cannot or will not sit through a four hour meeting
patiently.
Rivka: Take them, take them, take them. We had a scary experience at one
of the anti-war demos here in New York where police on horses were
trampling folks without regard to age or physical stability (including
seriously old folks). Navah and her cousin (also a toddler) were pinned
against a wall on our shoulders, just watching the horses charging
people and we couldnât move and could barely breathe. It was terrifying.
However, both girls remember the experience with love and they remember
all the chants. They still joke â1, 2, 3, 4, we donât want your stinkinâ
war. Thatâs part of âimpartingâ culture and politics. It would be good
for parents to work in cooperation so that when scary things happen,
there are parents who can take over and get the kids out of the crowd or
help form shields around the kids so they donât get injured.
Bruce: Yes, the parents definitely need to be organized, networked to
come to a demo and form contingency plans for when the police begin to
riot and break up a demo.
There is also the school of thought that you should be more selective
about what kind of demos you can take your children to. But in light of
the police assaults in some of the most peaceful actions that took place
in Florida around the FTAA, I donât really know how selective you can
be. The police are defiantly following a decree to break up actions as
quickly as possible and as they see fit. Still some common sense and a
heightened sense of when things go wrong could be a parentsâ best tool.
Rivka: Not. Itâs all about instinct. My big fear there is that she will
come to think of MTVâs pimp and whore culture as her own urban culture.
I really want to help her get around that bullshit that so victimizes
women and criminalizes youth of color for the fun of white kids.
tell her?
Rivka: We have the utmost love and respect for you and all that you
embody.
Not4Prophet
What role does an artist play? What role does a politically conscious
anarchist artist of color engaged in community organizing play? And a
bigger question, what social responsibility? Not4Prophet, voice for the
Puerto Rican political band/collective Ricanstruction, speaks with
Walidah Imarisha, the bad half of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista,
about anarchism, art, creation and the different ways of struggle.
Walidah: Right now we are seeing the birth of an anarchist people of
color movement here in the United States, which is really exciting to
me. I think that artists have a role to play in that movement, because
art occupies a unique space in social struggles. In fact, the members of
Ricanstruction came to anarchism partially through the art you were
creating together, right, rather than through reading about it in books?
Not4Prophet: Well, I donât know so much if we came to it through art or
if we just started interpreting it through art once we started engaging
in âart.â
As I said before, the quest was always to find your own way, but not
because we were trying to adhere to, or create any kind of lifestyle or
ideology. Fact is, that when we came to the realization that we werenât
really meant to exist within this shitstem that was created and
engineered by our conquerors, then we came to overstand that we were
already, for hundreds of years, resisting it in order to continue to
exist, and that we were in the process of finding ways to live outside
of this shitstem in order to survive it. So the idea of the necessity of
living an autonomous lifestyle was already in effect. It was just my
âintellectualizingâ of the shituation that had to get a late pass. So by
the time we became âartistsâ we were already engaged in a battle for
autonomy, a struggle for freedom, so the art just became a reflection of
that and another beautiful, raging and vivid outlet for that necessity
for freedom and autonomy. I donât think we could have come to it through
books, because the quest for freedom is not something the slave has to
be taught. Itâs something we live everyday.
W: Right, and itâs that real life struggle that is the focus. Anarchism,
or any political ideology or movement, canât just rely on art or
subcultures or youth rebellion to give it life in communities of color,
as it often has in white communities. I think a lot of the difference
for political artists of color and activists of color is that connection
to the community, being strongly rooted in where you came from. And
while in idealist terms, both for myself and other APOC folks, thatâs
true, I know a lot of us in the APOC movement are middle class, and that
affects the way we approach anarchism, art and community-based
organizing. I know your experience has been different.
N4P: Yes. In the case of Ricanstruction, we were Puerto Ricans from the
barrios of Nueva York, whose parents came to the U.S. as exiles fleeing
a colonial condition, only to enter into a neo-colonial condition.
Babylon hasnât been kind to boricuas. When you gotta dumpster dive or
beg and borrow to eat, and be homeless in the dead of winter or live in
condemned buildings waiting for a knock at the door at midnight (if
thereâs even a door), and you get stopped by the ghetto occupying forces
we call pigs on the daily because you âfit the description,â then youâre
always trying to find a better way, a better place.
Speaking personally, Iâve been a gang banger, a nationalist, a Marxist,
a rasta and a santero, all in search of something better than this. It
took me a long time to realize that there is nothing better than this,
unless we create it ourselves. It was when I came to this realization
that I began living what some might characterize as an anarchist
lifestyle or perhaps an outlaw culture, which is just another way of
saying you are existing outside the laws that have been created by the
shitstem. I started trying to create not just a counter culture but also
an autonomous culture. And I stopped discussing how we need to reform
the police force, and instead began talking about abolition. And instead
of discussing our right to food, shelter and clothing, I began stealing
food and clothing and squatting.
But of course, police brutality, hunger, homelessness, a corrupt
government are problems that affect all ghetto dwellers; these are not
specifically anarchist issues. Whatâs âanarchistâ is what you do about
these things. Yeah, I do think that APOC will have to deal with issues
of class and privilege if we are really gonna get anything done on the
streets, which is where it counts. We canât just assume that we are all
in the same boat because we are all pocs. Some of us may have a boat
with a hole in it, and some of us may not have a boat at all. Maybe a
tire, if weâre lucky.
W: What tie do you think art has to community organizing? Is it
important in reaching out to folks, or are the more immediate concerns
of food, housing and clothing what matter most? I think itâs really easy
for middle class folks to lose focus of those basic survival needs while
getting caught up in the lofty ideals of making art, or on the other
side, itâs easy for them to think that working class and poor folks only
need their physical needs met, while neglecting the soul. So how
important is art to community organizing?
N4P: For us, itâs been very important because art is used by downpressed
cultures as a tool of resistance against the enslavers, the
âauthorities,â and itâs everywhere; in the streets, the barrios,
ghettos, shanties, prisons, churches and mosques. We use art to
communicate, to resist and to rebel, so itâs importance canât be denied
or minimized. Thereâs music in the domino players slapping the dominoes
down on the table, the baby crying cause mommaâs got no more milk to
give, the brother preaching on the corner of 125^(th) and Lenox Ave.,
our feet as the tap the sound of the calle as we run from the cops
across 110^(th) Street. The revolution may not be televised, and it may
not make it on to the radio (unless itâs pirate radio), but it damn sure
will be seen and heard on the streets. For us, we have mostly tried to
make our art another part of the resistance struggle, the
anti-authoritarian struggle, the struggle for freedom. We create
political resistance murals on âprivate property,â outlaw art, and we
encourage the passerby, the ghetto dweller to join us, even if all they
feel that all they can do is paint the red line on the Puerto Rican
flag. We show films on the sides of buildings while abuelitas sell
cuchifritos that they made at home.
We always overstood the need for the people to take back the streets
from the authorities, to not allow them to have authority over us, so we
tended to utilize our art in this capacity. We would set up our
instruments on the street, plug into a light pole for power, start
jamming and encourage others to join us. Those who couldnât play musical
instruments could draw on the walls around us or dance and sing, jeer at
the pigs as they rolled by. What could they do? The people had created a
TAZ {temporary autonomous zone) and the pigs feared turning a
ârevolution partyâ into a âriot,â and the sense of liberation is so
deep, so thick in the air itself that the people can feel their own
freedom.
Art is only effective as a tool of community organizing when it is as
real and honest as the people and their quest for liberation; if it
doesnât engender the peopleâs rebellion, quest for autonomy and ultimate
freedom, then itâs just entertainment waiting to be swallowed whole by
babylon, regurgitated and wrapped up in pretty ribbons or punk patches,
and sold back to us, revolution in Nike kicks and gap jeans. Art is only
worthy of the peopleâs struggle if it, as Amiri Baraka said âscreams
poison gas on beast in green berets and cleans out the world for virtue
and love.â
W: Do you have a problem calling yourself an anarchist when you do
community-based artwork? For me, it feels tricky when you are trying to
reach folks in the community who know about anarchism through main-
stream media, who think of anarchist as black mask wearing white punk
kids who throw rocks and start fires but who donât do any work. I know
in the community organizing I do, mostly work with prisonersâ families
and hip hop organizing, I donât necessarily introduce myself as âWalidah
Imarisha, anarchist poet activist.â I have tried to find a balance by
instead incorporating anarchistic ways of working; consensus and mutual
aid, into the work I do, without expressly calling it that. I feel it
bypasses the stigma, and gives people a chance to experience what
anarchism is really about, without getting caught up on titles.
N4P: Personally I am not down with any titles, tags, or designations.
Iâve spent most of my adult life trying to find ways to do away with
genres and borders and envelopes, so I think we are always better off if
we donât label ourselves or allow anyone to label us. Anarchy or
anarchism is really something we seek and live and struggle for, so it
doesnât matter what we call ourselves (or donât) if we are in the midst
of action doing it.
At the same time, we do live in a world of designations based on our
perceived politics. Socialist, communist, Marxist, nationalist,
capitalist, terrorist, and often these tags are overstood by the people
better than some amorphous non-definable non-title. So I think,
sometimes these ânamesâ are just a way of giving some kind of clarity
(to others) as to what we are doing or trying to do. It could be easier
to say to someone on the street, âWe are anarchists and hereâs what we
want,â then âI donât want to be labeled and neither do any of my
companer@s, but hereâs what we want.â
I think also a lot of âactivistsâ are afraid of scaring the âpeople on
the streetâ or confusing them, so they donât want to use any terms that
they feel might be misconstrued by âthe people,â but I think you gotta
give the âpeopleâ more credit than that. So, really, putting an A in
front of POC is really just a way of defining what we want to others and
to ourselves. But I tend to tell folks not to sweat the A in apoc. It
could mean anything: Anarchist, anti-authoritarian, autonomous,
activist, armed, angry. I like that one. Angry People of Color.
W: That idea of giving people on the street more credit is a really
important one. It goes back to the class issues we were talking about
before, because whatâs being implied is that folks on the street arenât
sophisticated enough to get what you mean, so you have water it down for
them. N4P: The hip-hop artist Jay-Z recently copped to the idea that he
âdumbs downâ his lyrics and message for his audience so he can continue
to sell a bunch of records. This, to me, is a really sad premise, that
you would perceive your audience as a bunch of dummies that you have to
step down to talk to. It would be even worse if those who consider
themselves activist or soldiers in the struggle felt that it was
necessary to âdumb downâ our struggle politics in order to âreachâ the
âpeopleâ or the sufferahs.
W: That speaks to the larger dilemma of doing political art that I know
I have experienced; how do you keep it fresh and interesting, not let it
turn into propaganda, while at the same time still making sure that your
music expresses the politics you believe in, so youâre not watering it
down?
As a poet, the politics of my art are pretty overt, because all I have
are words to make my work. But Iâve also felt a trend as a poet to
produce art that is personal, and, not to trout out a worn cliché, prove
how the personal is political. But I have realized that none of my poems
are expressly anarchist in nature. Iâm not even sure what an anarchist
poem would look like. And Ricanstructionâs music is obviously extremely
political, but I wonder, do you consider anarchist? And if so, what
makes it that way?
N4P: Weâve always tried to avoid the clichĂ© or propaganda or the
âpolitical songâ by simply writing about what is important to us,
regardless of what we are talking about. If we feel strongly about it,
we write about it. So we are firm believers in the idea that the
personal is political. Fact is, a song about fucking in the back seat of
a Lexus is no less political than a song about dropping bombs on
innocent people. Just different reasons⊠or maybe not. Just because I am
not interested in writing about big pimping doesnât mean that the person
who does is not making some kind of political statement, for better or
for worse. A lot of people make the mistake of believing that if you are
talking about so called âpoliticalâ issues than you are a political
artists. But that means everyone else gets to be just a straight up
âartist,â regardless of what they talk about or donât talk about. If we
are âpolitical artists,â then everyone else are âa-political artists,â
but then what does their A mean? If we are âanarchist artists,â then
everyone else are audio slaves I guess.
I donât imagine that there could be such a thing as an anarchist poem
unless it were totally free. But once itâs committed to paper it ceases
to be free. Weâve called our music revolution music at times, and other
times weâve just called it music, but we try to make it at least free
and flexible and, I guess you could say anarchistic. Beauty and harmony
within the chaos.
W: Thatâs such an important point, that everything is political. If you
arenât conscious of what you are promoting, then you are promoting the
same ole mainstream politics, which are still intensely political.
Sometimes, I feel like the artist in me and the organizer in me are at
war, with the organizer saying, âWell, why are you writing about love or
heart- break or relationships, when there are real issues to write
about? You should be writing a political poem.â I know that the two
sides arenât opposed, and that how we love is political, and therefore a
love poem is a political poem. Like you said, âAll Ricanstructionâs
songs are love songs.â But still, I do find myself trying to walk a
line, because even if love poems are political, there are still bombs
dropping on babiesâ heads around the world, hungry bellies growling,
nightsticks beating tender flesh, over 2 million people in this country
going to sleep in a prison cell. So then do we start rating the issues
we discuss in our art in terms of social relevance, do we ration out one
relationship poem to two police brutality poems? How do you keep that
balance?
N4P: Well, we are still trying to figure out exactly what part does art
really play in this struggle at all. Is there such a thing as an
anarchist poem, and, if so, what the hell is it for? Is art a tool for
revolution? Does it lead us any closer towards an ideal? And, if so,
how? Is arts power in itâs lyrical message, or is that yet another
straight jacket? Maybe its power is in its sense of freedom. When we
first formed the group of artists that we now call Ricanstruction, many
people automatically expected us to play a specific kind of music based
on where we grew up, our ethnicity, our race. So we made sure that the
music would instead be a fusion, a not-necessarily describable amalgam
of everything that ever inspired us, everything we ever heard in the
air. We didnât want to be pigeon-holed, so we made sure that one person
would say, âTheyâre a punk band, âand another, âTheyâre a hip hop group,
âor âTheyâre a salsa orchestra,â or a âjazz combo.â We used to say that
revolutionary music should sound like everything youâve ever heard
before and nothing youâve ever heard before. So I sometimes feel that in
this quest for revolution music, and how it works as a toolâ that the
sonics are more âimportantâ than the words because you can only go so
far with language.
But then of course, itâs not so simple because the words are still
important and they are the easiest way to communicate, short of throwing
a molotov cocktail at an appropriate target. The words are no less
important then Malcolm preaching on 125^(th) street, or George Jackson
writing from prison, or Che writing Guerrilla Warfare, or even Abbie
Hoffman writing Steal This Book. Or for that matter, Nina Simone writing
and singing âTo Be Young, Gifted, and Black.â I think itâs easy and
expedient for the shitstem to write art off as being nothing but some
sort of entertainment, which serves as a way of declawing art so that
they can then commodify it and put it in a pretty wrapper and sell it
back to us as packaged âpolitical album.â But as artists who are engaged
in the struggle, itâs important that we not get caught up in âbiznessâ
and start second guessing ourselves.
W: Yeah, thereâs always that questioning process going on inside you,
and we often put limits on our art. Which in a way is a very good thing,
to be very aware of what youâre putting out in the word and how it will
be interpreted. But at the same time, sometimes it becomes more about
the right language and the mechanisms of intent, rather than creating
something powerful and beautiful and terrible, all at the same time. I
have written pieces that I love and feel are some of my best work, but I
would not put them out in a book or read them at a performance, because
of some of the language I use, and mostly the fear that what I have
written is vague enough that it can be misconstrued in a way contrary to
what I intended. So you try to create work that is art and not just
propaganda, make it wide enough for other people to immerse themselves
in it, to put your poem on and call it their skin, while at the same
time making it narrow enough that they canât pull at it and stretch it
large enough to clothe whatever they want to.
N4P: Which I think is also the beauty of art. It is not something that
can be straight-jacketed unless you let it be. It is not a political
speech. Itâs not an ideology or a party line or a ten point plan. Itâs
free to talk about fighting or fucking, freestyle or funk. Yes, people
can stretch it and clothe themselves, and stay warm in the winter or
cool in the summer, or bulletproof on the frontlines. The language can
be raw, âreal,â or revolutionary. Redemptive like a Bob Marley song or
Bad like the Brains. It can call us to fight the power, encourage the
people to get up, stand up, or go to sleep. In the end it can be madder
than Malcolm. Or not even matter.
W: Which is the all important question, that keeps political artists
awake at night: does it even matter? Does all the thinking and agonizing
and debating I put into my work really make a difference in the grand
scheme of things? I have to believe it does, both as a poet, but also as
a person who has been moved by art. Itâs not the revolution by any
means, and people sometimes get it so twisted, thinking that spitting
radical rhetoric on a stage is the extent of their responsibility and
obligation.
But art is salve for the soul, and we all need that to continue in the
lifelong struggle we were born into (and born to win, as the hip hop
group The Coup says). We can all remember a song, a poem, a single word
even that moved us beyond measure, that gave us the strength to get back
up and push forward. Historically we can see that at the center of
almost every fight for freedom and justice was some form of art to carry
peopleâs spirits when their bodies were too tired to stand.
Whenever I think of the question of is art important, I think of Nikki
Giovanniâs poem âFor Saundra,â where she is asked by her neighbor is she
ever wrote happy poems, and so she tries to write a tree poem, or a
beautiful blue sky poem, and she canât because of the despair and
destruction she sees out her window. She writes:
âso i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldnât write
at all
but clean my gun and
check my kerosene supply
perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all.â
For me, this was so incredibly moving, because itâs what I think all the
time. Franz Fanon once said something like, âA poet must learn that
nothing can replace the unequivocal picking up of arms on the side of
the people.â Itâs such an important reminder, that these words, this
art, is part of a larger struggle we must be engaged on many different
levels. But I think the fact that Nikki asked that question in a poem
shows that there is some purpose, because it reached mine and many other
peopleâs eyes and hearts. There is some sort of redemption after all.
In the early 1990s, under the name âGreg Jackson,â Greg Lewis eas the
editor of Black Autonomy, the first Black anarchist newspaper in the
United States. Lewis, along with Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, became the most
high-profile members of the Federation of Black Community Partisans, a
Black autonomist formation. Today, he is a self-defense and fitness
trainer still living in the Seattle area. We talked about his history,
the trails blazed by Black Autonomy and Copwatch 206, and struggles
today.
One thing just led to another. All my life my mother struggled to feed
us and keep a roof over our heads. Welfare used to send her on jobs that
didnât pay a living wage. But she was required to go, or else we would
be cut off for good. But, if by some miracle she made any money, it
would be deducted from her monthly check and they would threaten her
with prosecution or being cut off for making too much money. Every year
I had to take a form to the school to fill out and send to them to prove
I was in school. One more reason other kids had to pick on me.
The day she died, she was a college grad, Phi Theta Kappa, with a
bachelor of arts in journalism; but she was working at a fast-food
restaurant because local newspapers refused to pay her a living wage or
didnât hire her at all.
When I was a teenager, I was on the bus going to work as a dishwasher at
an upscale restaurant when a group of white police stopped the bus and
ordered all of the black people off, accusing us of shoplifting at a
local mall. I glanced at one officerâs badge as I got off, he saw me do
it, and said that he would be more than happy to put a third âeyeâ in my
forehead. Years later, I was confronted by neo-Nazis in the University
District, and I successfully defended myself against them. At the time,
I was a trained kick-boxer who fought ring matches regularly; they never
saw it coming. I later found out that I wasnât alone; there was a
âmovementâ of punk rock homeless kids, gangster types and weed dealers
who were doing their part to run them off the Ave also.
It wasnât until I read Revolutionary Suicide and The Autobiography of
Malcolm X that I began to get a clearer picture of what I was dealing
with. Later, some of the homeless kids turned me on to Marxist and
anarchist writings.
I drifted from one struggle to another. First, there were the protests
due to the police raiding a squat. At the same time, the former City
Attorney, Mark Sidran, was pushing for an anti-sitting and
anti-panhandling ordinance. Then, the neo-Nazis returned and stabbed a
black man on a bus on the Ave on Christmas Eve. It was shortly after
that the homeless kids got organized and marched to Broadway 100 or so
deep to confront them Then the first Gulf War happened and the large
protests shutting down the freeway, and finally the beating of Rodney
King, which led to two nights of riots, fires, and fighting the cops
downtown and on Broadway. All of these things happened one after the
other with very little time in between events.
It was in this climate that my politics began to expand and change.
in that development would you say anarchist ideas became most real to
you?
What drew me to anarchism was not so much the theory or the ideal, but
the way the anarchists did things. The Maoists were around in greater
numbers back then, but they seemed a lot like religious people seeking
converts. And they would get mad if you didnât agree with them. Some of
them would actually challenge you to fight!
The anarchists did things. They took over buildings and lived in them,
they chased the Nazis off the streets, they would go to community
meetings and blast the so-called âexpertsâ on homelessness or youth
issues, and they would share whatever they had with you without asking
for anything in return except for your opinion on whatever subject.
I used to call myself an anarchist, until one day an older activist, now
a political prisoner, Omari Tahir (he was convicted of hitting former
Seattle mayor Paul Schell in the face with a bullhorn; it took them two
trials to get the conviction), said to me, âI know what youâre against,
but what are you for!?â He also warned against letting others put you in
a box by of labeling yourself in way that is alienating to others.
To me, all âismsâ out there are a form of ideological and social prison.
Like Bruce Lee said in The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, âAbsorb what is useful;
discard what is not. Use no way as a way.â
If I am to be labeled, hereâs the box to put me in: life-long black man
in amerikkka of mixed racial background, a so-called âperson of color.â
I am a certified personal fitness trainer, and professional martial
artist and instructor. I am for reparations (for chattel slavery, for
genocide of indigenous people and the theft of their land, and for
police terrorism/murder of people of color; white people should also be
compensated for being assaulted by cops or losing loved ones to police
violence), self-determination (individual and collective), direct
workers control of community institutions by those within that
particular community, and an economy based the equal distribution of
wealth and resources. I am for freedom, justice, and equality for all
the human families of the planet. I am a revolutionary.
a lot of movements today â Seattle Copwatch and the Federation of Black
Community Partisans. Can you talk about those groups and what, in your
mind, made them significant?
The Copwatch was significant since it was the first one in Seattle since
the Black Panther Party did their patrols in the 1960s. We were the only
group at the time that monitored the police directly on the street. We
defiantly got the attention of the police department, the local media,
and attorneys on both sides of the police accountability issue. I donât
think the FBCP was all that significant; it wasnât widely supported.
drop some knowledge on the FBCP formed?
I honestly donât know. Lorenzo was the common contact we all had. It
basically came about from discussions I had with him, and discussions he
had with black activists in the various cities he spoke in.
Do you think that kind of dynamic â where one person was the conduit and
leader, for lack of a better word â hurt the organizing generally? And
being who you are, one could guess you were not comfortable with such a
communication flow.
For me, the problem was more of a lack of numbers locally. I got calls
and emails from other folks involved with the project all the time. I
had plenty of allies locally, but the organization itself wasnât
growing. Another problem was people not following through on what they
said they would do on a consistent basis.
framework of todayâs Anarchist People of Color movement?
I do believe it gave a voice to what many folks were already thinking.
Beyond that, itâs hard to say. Usually itâs the white anarchists that
come up to me talking about how moved they were by the newspaper, how
they were inspired by what Lorenzo had to say in their town, etc.
would you have done differently if you knew then what you do now?
It barely even started. It was really a formal organization in name
only.
People werenât interested in a formal organization. I received very
little help in funding or publishing Black Autonomy or in building an
organization.
To do it all over, I wouldnât have done it at all had I known that
peopleâs word was not bond and that I would be used and abused for my
work ethic. Or maybe I would have published it as a more of a personal
âzine. Lately, people have been asking me if I ever thought about
starting it up again. I donât know. It was a lot of work and most
people, even so called âconscious activists,â donât have the discipline
for the tedious work that it was.
disparities on several levels. Could you break down your experience for
newer activists to avoid similar pitfalls? And do you think what
happened with FBCP could have been avoided?
When I was doing the newspaper, I didnât even own a computer. I had to
arrange to use other peopleâs gear or go to Kinkoâs or to a college
campus. That took planning and organization in itself. Then, I had to
assemble the graphics and pictures. That meant lots of cutting,
photocopying, scanning and re-scanning. Then I was forever waiting on
people to send their articles and letters, especially FBCP comrades who
were doing work in the streets. People had a really hard time with
deadlines. And all of that had to be spell-checked and edited for
length.
Once that was done, I had to send the hard copy to a printer down south,
since printing is so expensive out here. After that, distribution took
up more of my time. And I still had to go to work, do my own local
activism, answer mail, maintain accounting, train in karate, teach the
occasional self-defense seminar, and stay current on what was going on
in the world.
I think the way to avoid those kind of pitfalls is to be prepared to do
it all yourself, no matter what anyone promises. Plan ahead prior to
trying to put the paper together. And be sure that you have a way for
the newspaper to make money, because with publishing you will usually
lose money. In the four years that Black Autonomy came out, I never
broke even.
Lack of money. Political hatred from other local anti-police brutality
groups.
Eventual burn out. No non-profit funding agency will give you money to
really and truly solve the problem of police terrorism. They, like the
paid activists, are too tied to the system. Without the problem, they
wonât collect a paycheck. They donât grasp with real depth that
capitalism and white supremacy are necessary components for keeping âthe
American wayâ alive and well. And because of that, they are generally
more a part of the problem than the solution. Another Copwatch exists in
Seattle, born out the WTO protests, but they focus more on the large
demonstrations and confronting the city council on police accountability
to the public.
and how those differed from others at the time, and even now?
Our job, as we saw it, was to âpolice the policeâ and educate the public
on what their rights were under the law. Our slogan was âCopwatch 206:
the REAL civilian review board!â We even considered conducting citizenâs
arrests of police officers, but decided that would be inviting death
even more so than we already were. As it turned out, the people werenât
ready for that; it was all we could do to get them to share information
with us.
We advocated for an independent civilian review board with broad legal
power, with a well funded over sight patrol, the copwatch, as the âeyes
and earsâ of the board. We would use the investigative tactics of the
police against them. A brother by the name of Diop Kamal, who heads the
Police Complaint Center in Florida, is already doing it. He, along with
the Black Panther Party, was our inspiration.
The line that the rightists like to use is âwell, if you arenât doing
anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.â This what we would say
to the police when they would pitch a fit about us filming them.
I cannot talk specifically about our tactics, since some of them are
still in use by Copwatch volunteers throughout the world. I would advise
folks to learn the law, learn how to use a camera under pressure, get in
shape and stay in shape, fix any legal contradictions you may have
before you go deal with their contradictions (pay your fines, do your
time, etc), learn the investigative techniques of the worldâs law
enforcement agencies, surround yourself with lawyers and media people,
read (and re-read) Sun-Tzuâs âThe Art of Warâ or Maoâs âOn Protracted
Warfare,â and plan, plan, plan. And be prepared to be killed in action;
Copwatching is serious business and is not to be taken lightly.
Every Copwatch is different in every city. I believe that over time a
uniform standard will develop. For me, the current standard of service
to the people has been firmly established by the Police Complaint Center
(
). Ultimately, itâs a question of what a cop watch actually does day to
day and what community a cop watch actually serves. If it is limited to
just the large demonstrations involving the âusual suspects,â then its
obviously not keeping it real. If itâs only a cop watch in name, limited
to informational forums, harassing politicians, and doing its own
demonstrations, then its not keeping it real. All of the above are
important, however the cop watch is most needed and effective when it
serves the interests of people of color, primarily, in a real and
tangible way.
As I see it, the real test of a Copwatchâs validity is measured by how
many beatings and killings of the most directly affected are actually
prevented. If the people the cop watch serves and the organization
itself can look back after a year and say, âsee, because of our
vigilance in the streets, in the courts, in the media, and in the halls
of government, no one has been hospitalized or died at the hands of the
police in the past year!â or, âbecause of our vigilance in the streets,
in the courts, in the media, and in the halls of government, not one
police officer has gotten away with assaulting or killing anyone in the
âhood or on the campus!â then all will have to bear witness that the cop
watch is real, is revolutionary, and is effective.
going tactically and politically?
Tactically, the Police Complaint Center is the current model that
activists need to study, dissect and improve upon. Diop Kamal and his
team have been instrumental in successful lawsuits and convictions
against abusive police officers and their leadership. Study the methods
used by the great reactionary law enforcement groups of the world, FBI,
CIA, Mossad, MI5, etc; and use their investigative and spy tools against
them. Just donât kill anybody, like they do. It might be a good idea if
some folks actually went to school to learn how film making,
criminology, police science and other skills, at a professional level,
to make Copwatch that much better.
Something else that we found in our time doing it was that Copwatch was
also an effective deterrent to crime; no one wants to look stupid on
camera, and no one wants to get caught on tape.
One thing that progressives donât usually get involved in is the
neighborhood watch programs. At the very least by being involved
progressive forces will know intimately well who the reactionaries are
in the community, what they are up to, and be better able to deal with
them before they get anymore out of hand than they already are.
In addition, the police are very open about the fact that they cannot
operate effectively in a neighborhood without the help of civilian
auxiliary organizations. I wonder how would they would operate if the
neighborhood watch or the local police reserve unit in a particular area
was dominated by radicals and the local copwatch was on a first-name
basis with just about everybody who lived in the âhood and all the
activists on both sides of the color line and the language barrier?
Oh boy, here we go; you had to ask the âmillion-dollarâ questionâŠ
Well, first of all, I believe that the term Autonomous People of Color
movement is a more accurate description of whatâs really going on today.
I canât speak for everybody, but Iâm sure there are others who feel me
on this.
Letâs face it, we are separate from, yet at the same time allied with,
the main anarchist movement, the left, and the various struggle-based
tendencies (anti- globalization, anti-racism, Palestinian independence,
reparations, police brutality, tenant rights, homelessness, religious
freedom/post 9â11, etc) that call themselves movements. We may do work
with individuals and organizations within these circles, but I can
almost guarantee that we are a new breed of activist; a new type of
people, based on how we see ourselves, how we see the rest of the world,
and how we see ourselves in the world.
We may agree (or disagree) with some aspects and concepts that are
espoused by the various anarchist/anti-authoritarian groups out there in
the world, or we may (or may not) take positions on other subjects that
casual observers may label âMaoist,â âIslamic,â âChristian,â
âIndigenous,â etc. Our political, cultural, and, for some of us, even
our genetic influences are diverse. Our needs, wants, and desires
transcend mere political struggle; we are outside âthe box.â There are
spiritual dimensions to all of this, regardless of whether we pray to a
God (or Gods), donât believe in a God, or call ourselves âGod.â
The one common ideological thread I saw at the conference with those I
spoke to and the discussions I heard in workshops was that no one was
down with a leadership clique, a messiah or savior leading âthe massesâ
to the promised land, or individuals doing what they pleased with no
regard for others. People were for collective decision-making and the
idea of leadership by personal example. I think thatâs what makes us all
âanti-authoritarianâ and ârevolutionary.â
Right now, my advice would be for everybody who was at this historic
event to stay in contact with one another. Organize similar APOC
affinity groups in your city. Attend the next conference if you can and
bring as many people as you can. Go to the APOC website (
) and review the notes that were posted from the various workshops. Dis-
cuss what happened with other people in your community, especially the
youth. And read this book. Twice. And discuss it in your community.
I feel that the way forward is through all of us, in our own way, making
a conscious effort to contribute to the (r)evolution of popular culture
from that of consumerism and backwardness to that of intelligence and
popular resistance. Many of the artistic types (emcees, spoken word
artists, DJs, etc) are already doing it. This means more networking,
this means making communication between groups and individuals easier.
This means building more bridges between artists, street activists,
certified professionals in various fields, academics, and the âaverageâ
brother or sister on the block.
This means being careful not to reinvent oppressive social relationships
(we must get rid of fear, hate, greed, and jealousy in our own heads,
amongst each other, and amongst our respective peoples; all of these
things breed reactionary ideas and actions) since this kills activism
and popular struggle from within, and allows COINTELPRO-type operations
to kill it from without. Out of that will come trust; then tighter, more
formal organizational structures; necessity is the mother of invention,
and I believe this is how it will occur. This is how we will build our
power.
Power consists of four main elements: knowledge, wealth, violence and
unity.
Together, we possess more than enough knowledge collectively to do great
things; the wealth and unity will come with the proper utilization of
the knowledge we all have. If violence can be avoided, that would be
great; but if our enemies want to box, then we will have to defend
ourselves.
âVanguardâ: A Critical Look at the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,â
your article and analysis on the RCP. Some people â mostly whites but
even a few people of color â allege the piece was divisive. But most
really feel it and say itâs time opportunist elements like the RCP get
called out for how they target people of color. How do you respond to
the critics of that piece, and whatâs your take on that piece now?
To the critics I ask, âIf you canât criticize them while they do not
hold state power, what happens if or when they do have state power and
they are criticized?â This question also applies to any other
organization jockeying for a position of leadership in âthe movementâ;
claiming to be a vanguard or whatever. Are the critics saying that the
RCP and/or other organizations are above criticism? Are the critics
saying that they themselves are above criticism as well?
I agree that criticizing allies or potential allies should be done in a
way that is constructive and doesnât purposely hurt them, but at the
time this was written the RCP was doing things to directly hurt groups
and individuals outside their party, and the movement generally; and
either didnât know, or didnât care, or didnât care to know.
I was under the impression that they didnât care, since conversations
around various issues (some brought up in the pamphlet, some not) with
local RCP members always degenerated into shouting matches, veiled
threats from both sides, routine vandalism upon their bookstore and
occasional violence.
It was to a point where other organizations were calling for âparty
disciplineâ from the national RCP leadership. Some actually attempted to
contact the RCPâs central committee with their concerns. I was one of
them. At one point (around 1997) some black activists ordered them out
of the Central District (a historically Black neighborhood in Seattle)
because of how they treated oppressed people.
I donât know about other cities, but the Seattle RCP behaves
considerably better now. I believe they have a clearer understanding of
their role in local politics and realize that they too cannot afford to
be alienated anymore than any of us already is.
In all reality, that piece was written in the spirit of Maoâs principles
of âunity-criticism-unityâ and âlet 100 flowers bloom, let 100 schools
of thought contend.â And this, despite any personality conflicts that
activists may have with individual RCP cadre, is precisely what
happened.
The October 22^(nd) event locally, which was for years exclusively an
RCP event, is now more diverse and powerful. Many activists are still
critical of their overall political line, but they do make an effort to
involve as many people as they can reach out to. They attend all the
major political events out here. They make an effort to encourage people
to pack the courtroom for every police shooting inquest and activist
trial, and they sent members to both of my trials (criminal and civil)
around the events of September 1998.
I have no beef with the RCP or its supporters at this time; they know
perfectly well what I think, they know where I stand on important
issues, and what I am willing and capable of doing. They may not like me
as a person, and this could be said for some of the anarchists out here,
but Iâm pretty sure they respect me as activist.
portrayal of people of color in its paper and literature, when the
organization is white-dominated?
Although the argument could be made that having images of people of
color protesting and speaking out is good, it also comes off as
ultra-liberal and even pimping the images and histories of the
oppressed, particularly when the RCP is against decolonization and other
issues.
There is not one white-led organization out there above criticism for
racist practices, no matter how ârevolutionaryâ they claim to be. This
one of many reasons this APOC network exists. Some groups are better
than others.
The only way this will change as far as the RCP goes is when the people
of color within the party or those who support the party make that
change occur. I notice that top-down leadership type organizations tend
to improve when the rank and file either leave or force the leadership
to leave.
advocate of self-defense awareness. How important is self-defense in the
lives of people of color?
Self-defense has been extremely important in the life of this particular
person of color. My journey in the martial arts began due in large part
to being regularly attacked because of how I look, how I speak, how I
used to dress, how I was a klutz and had asthma, the fact that my dad
was not around, and my mother was white. To this day, there are people
who hate on me for some of the same reasons.
What I teach is more rooted in the real living struggles of the
oppressed, rather than any ideological posturing. Historically,
traditional Okinawan karate was refined in the struggle of peasants
against Japanese invaders and the sell out king who disarmed them in the
1600s. Later, Japanese- adapted karate was used by some elements of the
population against G.I.s during the U.S. occupation of Japan after World
War II.
In this country you have the legacy of the Deacons for Defense, the BPP
â as well as the Brown Berets, Puerto Rican Independence Movement, AIM,
etc â and the Black Liberation Army. Most of them, probably all of them,
taught some form of unarmed self-defense to anyone willing to learn. And
then thereâs the reality of domestic violence; this is something Franz
Fanon actually touched on indirectly when he wrote about how the
oppressed will attack each other if they are unable to attack their
enemies.
This goes on amongst men and women daily in this country, regardless of
sexual preference. People of color are the targets and victims of
violence more often than white people are; often at the hands of other
persons of color; people who look like us and speak our language(s).
Sad, but true.
The reactionaries are light years ahead of the forces of progress on
this subject. There is an entire industry devoted to teaching middle
class white America, both civilians and cops, how to fight back against
terrorists, car- jackers, thugs, serial rapists, etc.
Thankfully, there are small groups of progressive folks like Home Alive
in Seattle and Girl Army in Oakland who teach self-defense in a way that
is not about patriotism, racism, xenophobia, or personality cults around
a fighting style or teacher.
Many of those who are progressive, anarchists in particular, often fail
to deal with âwhat isâ and try to leap directly to âwhat they wish to
be.â Some progressives grew up bourgeois and sheltered, and never have
been placed in a situation where their lives were truly in immediate
peril (until they got involved in radical politics). Or they got their
first education in the concept of self-defense from someone who used the
words and the overall concept to justify targeting them for abuse.
There are still those out there who subscribe to the ideology of
âredemptive suffering,â a pacifist politico-religious doctrine advocated
by Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi; that
somehow those who do evil to the most defenseless segments of the
population will finally âcome to their sensesâ or ârepentâ for their
sins against humanity because of the willingness of a few nonviolent
martyrs to be brutalized. Those who advocate non-violent resistance have
been jailed and killed in numbers equal to or greater than those who (as
Malcolm X put it) âstop singing and come out swinging.â
Proclaiming yourself to have sole ownership of the âmoral high groundâ
or âthe truthâ in a situation only leads to alienation from those around
you and execution at the hands of your enemies, with help from those
around you who are now alienated from you. Jesus is a prime example.
I believe in self-defense by any means necessary, but what I specialize
in is unarmed self-defense and the use of improvised weapons. In an age
of tighter control on handguns, knives, and specialty blunt force
weapons (sap gloves, brass knuckles, etc) and longer prison sentences
for their use (even if its justified), it makes more sense in my
opinion. At the same time, it is good to be well rounded in the use of
tools other than your bare hands and I study in that direction.
Philosophically, I believe as Gichin Funakoshi (the founder of the
Shotokan style of Karate) did, that âkarate is for the development of
character.â If you can control yourself, then no one else can control
you. If you cannot control yourself, then someone else will control you.
Author and interviewees in alphabetical order
Ernesto Aguilar is based in Houston, Texas. He started the Anarchist
People of Color listserv in 2001, and the APOC website shortly
thereafter. He edited Our Culture, Our Resistance and works on the
monthly APOC publication Wildfire. You can reach him at
apoc@illegalvoices.org.
Heather Ajani recently moved to Houston to focus on community level
organizing amongst people of color and to finish her oral history
project, âBlack Star Rising: People of Color and Resistance in the New
Millennium.â Over the past six years, she has written several articles
and has been involved in various forms of organizing around issues such
as labor, immigration, prison support and abolition, and police
brutality.
Ashanti Alston, presently the Northeast regional coordinator for
Critical Resistance, is a former member of both the Black Panther Party
and Black Liberation Army, and was a political prisoner for over 12
years. Currently, he is a member of Estacion Libre, a people of color
Zapatista support group, as well as a board member for the Institute for
Anarchist Studies. He also authors the zine Anarchist Panther.
Walidah Imarisha is a spoken-word artist (part of the group Good Sista/
Bad Sista) and helped to edit Another World is Possible: Conversations
in a Time of Terror. She works with the crew of AWOL as well. More
information on AWOL is at awol.objector.org.
Tiffany King lives in Wilmington, Delaware and is currently working with
P.O.W.E.R. People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism
Victoria Law has been a self-identified anarchist since she was sixteen.
Since then, she has participated in various collectives and anarchist
endeavors, learned photography, been published on-line and in print,
made zines, traveled overseas and become a mother. She and her daughter
will be visiting her great-grandmotherâs former house in Shanghai in
January 2004 between the Western and the Lunar New Years.
Greg Lewis writes, âI was born December 2, 1970 to a white mother and
black father. I was raised mostly by my mother. I became politicized
largely due to being targeted for racist violence by white kids in my
neighborhood, along with being on welfare from birth until I was 17.
This also helped jump off my journey in the world of martial arts,
starting with boxing. Today, Iâm a certified personal trainer, karate
instructor, and I serve the people as minister of information for the
RBG hip-hop liberation group dred-i.â
Bruce Little is an anti-authoritarian of Afrikan descent living in New
York City. He works on technology volunteer projects that are focused on
bridging the Digital Divide. Rivka Gewirtz Little is a New York
City-based freelance journalist, who focuses on issues in criminal
justice and urban education.
soo na is an activist, student, and writer. She believes in articulation
of the possible, which is desire. In the past, she has organized
community dialogues on women of color and sexual health; worked with the
online website for young women of color and sexual health, MySistahs;
and co- founded the D.C.-based Coalition Against Rape and
Re-victimization (CARR), which first took to the streets on 13
September, 2003.
Not4Prophet is with the band Ricanstruction. You can learn more about
Ricanstruction at
Sara Ramirez Galindo writes, âI was born in the southeastern Mexican
state of Puebla, migrated to the U.S. at the age of 11 and grew up in
Compton, California. I started taking part in leftist political activism
& organizing while in high school. Today Iâm part of the collective at
Casa Del Pueblo Cooperative in Los Angeles. My âformalâ institutional
education is being completed at UC Santa Cruz with a focus in Community
Studies and Latin American Studies; the informal education Iâm learning
comes from everyday people like my family, the CDP collective, and the
children, señoras and señores who make up the Casa Del Pueblo Housing
Cooperative, who like me are âsoñadores, seeing, thinking and acting for
dignity, community, âconvivencia,â and autonomy.â
Our Culture, Our Resistance: People of Color Speak Out on Anarchism,
Race, Class and Gender, First edition, published September 11, 2004
Disclaimer: This work has been edited for typographical errors and
formatting. Authorsâ structure and flow, for the most part, has been
left intact, so to support people of colorâs efforts to speak in their
own words as they wished. This work may not be free from editing faults,
however.
Note on what you may have paid for this book: Our Culture, Our
Resistance has been first distributed electronically, with active
encouragement that distributors print out their own master copies and
share with the public. The editor has requested distributors charge
fairly for the book, as the authors and the editor are not being paid.
Buyers are encouraged to scrutinize what theyâre charged, and whether
any profits are being disbursed to (and to which) movements of people of
color. By all means, support independent distributors â and encourage
them to support communities of color.
Over the last decade, Third World peoplesâ movements against
globalization, neoliberalism and related issues have captured the
imagination of the world. From the militancy of street protests to the
fight for autonomy advocated by the Ejércitio Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN, also known as the Zapatistas), radical politics led by
people of color is quickly evolving. We are hearing less of old top-down
strategies and more about popular education and grassroots organizing.
A small but growing movement of people of color is developing a new
conversation that advocate anti-authoritarianism and anarchism as solu-
tions to our collective struggle. Such a movement is largely led by
youth, and such advocacy is a departure from the old-guard politics
espoused by revolutionaries of color. Many of these people of color met
in October 2003 in Detroit for the first Anarchist People of Color
conference. Others con- tinue to organize, agitate and act to find
bottom-up answers to the freedom movementâs most perplexing questions.
Our Culture, Our Resistance: People of Color Speak Out on Anarchism,
Race, Class and Gender, Volume Two is the continuation of writings by
people of color covering the concepts of anarchism, race, class and
gender. Released simultaneously with Our Culture, Our Resistance, the
purpose of this book is to contribute to the ongoing dialogue among
people of color and others as we strive toward freedom.
ISBN 0-9759518-1-5
Ernesto Aguilar, editor
This book is dedicated to people of color around the world and our just
fights for consciousness, justice, land, freedom and liberty. This
volume is also dedicated to the memory of Houston activist Olaniyi
Labinjo and all anarchists of color fighting the good fight everywhere.
Thanks to the authors; to Heather Ajani for tremendous support; to Erika
for her help; and to AK Press for its work, but also for rejecting this
book and inspiring independent people of color publishing.
My great-grandfather was the type of man who refused to get out of bed
unless there was breakfast waiting for him. Since he wouldnât get out of
bed to go and work, there was never any breakfast waiting for him. It
was a cycle that did nothing to alleviate the familyâs poverty.
When he grew old enough, his son, my grandfather, left the small village
to seek work in Shanghai. He found it and spent the next year shoveling
manure for a living. He worked his way up to become a jewelerâs
apprentice, eventually opening his own jewelry store. He returned home
to build the villageâs largest private house for his mother, who had
long endured the ridicule of her neighbors and acquaintances. When the
Communists won the Civil War, confiscating both the house and the
jewelry store, he started again in Hong Kong, this time with a family of
six and a wife who loved the latest fashion. One year, he held the
traditional Chinese New Yearâs party.
It was packed with fellow entrepreneurs. The next year, his business
crashed; their doorway remained empty. The visitors of yesteryear, who
had eaten all his snacks and drank all his liquor, had found more
lucrative families to call upon.
My other grandfather was the unsuccessful owner of a factory that made
burlap bags. Rarely did these bags yield a profit and so my motherâs
strongest childhood memories are of eating salted peanuts one at a time
to make them last. Her younger sister died of hunger. One of her older
sisters had to be given away.
Despite these inauspicious beginnings, both of my parents had attained
middle-class status by the time I was born. They had come to the States
to go to college. Both were the first generation in their families to
attend, let alone graduate, high school. They owned their own home in a
predominantly white area in Queens. Both parents worked white-collar
office jobs. I have no childhood memories of material want.
This last fact has been used against me when I bring up race and racism.
There have been more than a few occasions when white anarchists quickly
shift the conversation from my discomfort at being the only non-white
face in the room to class issues. I had a middle-class childhood. How
dare I complain about, or even question, the lack of racial diversity in
any given anarchist project when I have never experienced material
deprivation? It does not matter that I grew up to become a single mother
making less than fifteen thousand a year. The fact that I grew up
privileged invalidates anything I might have to say about
discrimination-whether it be based on race, skin color, gender or even
my status as a parent-both in and out of anarchist circles.
In their attacks on my well-to-do childhood, white anarchists overlook
some deep-rooted cultural differences. For instance, I grew up with a
series of amahs. In pre-1949 China (and in post-Revolution Hong Kong),
Chinese parents rarely cared for their own young. Instead, they turned
them over to amahs, who acted as wet nurses, babysitters and maids.
Most amahs remained with the family until all the children were grown
and continued to maintain close ties with their nurslings. For the
poorer families, like that of my maternal grandfather who could not
afford to hire a woman, the elder children took responsibility for the
younger. In earlier times, the son was married off-at the age of two or
three-to a preteenage girl whose role was more that of surrogate mother
than wife.
American culture has nothing that resembles the amah. Wealthier families
may have nannies, which is what I suppose the average American anarchist
envisions when I talk about my childhood. Because many of them have
grown up in places that encourage ethnic and cultural segregation and
because Chinese culture discourages unnecessary interaction-
particularly more intimate interaction-with other cultures, they have no
frame of reference for my stories. I am seen as having grown up with the
privilege of having had servants. There is little attempt to probe
further into the culture and understand that amahs, while technically
employees of the household, had more intimate relationships than an
American familyâs maid, cleaning lady or dog walker.
Perhaps this refusal speaks to the internalized notion that only
American heritage and tradition matter. If an experience comes from
someplace else, it doesnât count.
It is not just the differences in culture that cause misunderstanding.
What many self-proclaimed working-class (white) anarchists fail to
understand is that having money did not insulate me from the insults
American society heaps upon its children of color and its girl children.
The fact that my parents held white-collar jobs did not prevent me from
encountering grown men who believed it was within their right to
approach a ten-year-old girl and quietly say, âNice pussy.â My parents
owning their own home did not protect me from other children pulling
their eyes sideways and taunting me. Living in a well-to-do neighborhood
did not shield me from the history teacher who looked at me and the
Indian girl in his sixth-grade classroom and said, in all seriousness,
âItâs too bad that you come from inferior cultures.â
Such closed-mindedness is not limited to anarchists focused on class
struggle. Although all anarchist groups and projects proclaim, âWe
welcome all who agree with our mission statement, regardless of race,
sexual orienta- tion, etc.,â what many of these groups fail to realize
(or perhaps donât care to realize) is that their mission statements and
their ideal visions often fail to address, or even acknowledge, the very
different realities we come from.
Their mission statements may sound good on paper, but often fail to take
into account that many people of color do not feel comfortable in almost
all- white spaces. They refuse to acknowledge that we may have had bad
experiences with predominantly white groups both in and out of the
anarchist movement. They refuse to understand that we automatically
notice when we are the only ones in the room. They refuse to comprehend
that we are tired of being touted as the groupâs (sole) member of color,
of being accused of being overly sensitive to skin color or of having
our concerns ignored altogether.
They refuse to see that overthrowing the capitalist system will not
automatically address the institutional and internalized racism, sexism
and other forms of discrimination that we experience every day.
Last winter, I went to a meeting of anarcha-feminists. The flier offered
childcare â a rarity in the anarchist scene. That alone made me hope
this would be different than other meetings and groups Iâd attended in
the past. After all, the organizers, neither of whom were parents,
understood the need for childcare.
They might be more open-minded about other issues as well.
After dropping my daughter off in the childcare space, I entered the
meeting room. A circle of chairs had been set up. As the room filled, I
noticed every face except mine was white.
A few years ago, this would not have bothered me. I had entered the
anarchist scene in high school and hadnât cared much about racial
diversity or differences. I was just glad that no one made fun of me
because I looked different or acted different or actually cared about
what went on in the world. As I grew older, I began to notice my
difference more and more. I noticed that people sometimes treated me
differently, as if they were going out of their way to welcome the one
woman of color and prove that they were not racist. In high school, I
was invited to a Love and Rage meeting.
Love and Rage was a closed collective; more than a few older white
anarchists in the scene were surprised that I, a girl so new to
politics, had been asked to participate while they had been ignored by
the group for years. I arrived to the meeting late. The discussion was
going full force.
The topic? How to bring more people of color into the organization.
That day, I was acutely aware I was very unlike the others in the
circle. My discomfort lessened only slightly when another woman of color
entered.
Throughout the meeting, I struggled with the prospect of bringing up the
groupâs lack of diversity. I wondered if my concerns would be dismissed
or even ridiculed. I wondered if I would be accused of being divisive or
of distracting from the ârealâ issue of womenâs status in the anarchist
movement.
At the end of the meeting, as a sign-up sheet was being passed around,
another woman â one with blond hair and blue eyes â saved me the
discomfort. âBefore I agree to be on any sort of listserv or be part of
any kind of network, I want to ask about future outreach. Iâm not
interested in being part of a predominantly white group.â
All eyes divided between darting towards me and towards the other woman
of color on the far end of the room. I was glad that a white woman had
brought up the subject. However, since half the people in the room were
looking at me and no one at all was speaking, I decided to add my
thoughts. âI think the term anarcha-feminist might turn away some women
of color who share the same politics but donât explicitly identify as
anarchist. Maybe the next flier can drop the term.â
As I spoke, I remembered past conversations with radical women of color-
women who shared anti-authoritarian ideas and beliefs but who didnât
want to be identified with a movement that they saw as white brick
throwers. I thought about the woman of color who had attended a few
different anar- chist meetings and been turned off by white male
anarchistsâ dismissal of race issues. I thought about the woman of color
who had posted the article, âWhere was the Color in Seattle?â Her
concerns had been dismissed as unimportant; what really mattered were
class differences. I thought about the radical women of color who had
the perception that anarchists were either unwashed, smelly white punk
kids or white academics. Both had the option of renouncing radical
politics and rejoining the mainstream world. This was what the word
anarchist conjured up for them.
Why would they want to get involved with any group that labeled itself
that?
There was an uncomfortable pause. After some hemming and hawing, an
organizer suggested perhaps instead of directly trying to reach out to
women of color, this group could do fundraisers and donate the proceeds
to women of color organizations âthat are doing good work.â
I felt as if Iâd been smacked. I wondered if the woman realized how
patronizing and racist her suggestion was. In my mind, I could see
Charlotte Mason giving money to the black artists she deemed âprimitiveâ
enough. Only, instead of the 1930s heiress who demanded her artists sit
at her feet and call her âGodmother,â these were post-millennium
anarchists deciding which women of color were anti-authoritarian enough
to receive their money.
The other organizer had a different suggestion, one which also
circumvented the possibility that they would have to reach out to women
other than the same old (white) faces. She suggested that the group work
around issues facing women of color, such as the prison-industrial
complex. Although she didnât outright say it, I felt that her suggestion
was that this predominantly white group speak for and act on behalf of
women of color rather than actively trying to get them involved or even
find out what their main concerns were.
Later I learned that one or two of the attendees had felt offended on my
behalf. How dare someone bring up race and the lack of non-white faces
with Vikki sitting right there? Is she blind? Doesnât she realize that
Vikki is a person of color? Is she implying that Asians are not really
people of color? They refused to see her question as anything other than
an attack on me. I tried to explain that I was glad that a white person
had broached the subject because, frankly, I was tired of being the one
who always had to. Instead, I began to understand that many white
anarchists are unwilling to talk about race. They would rather dismiss
it as a social construct that does not apply to anarchists and, thus,
ignore the issue altogether.
The next time I saw this woman, I thanked her for bringing up the
subject. I wanted to let her know that I was not angry or offended by
her observation.
âYou shouldnât have to always be the one to bring it up,â she stated.
Since then, I have not had a white ally in other projects to pipe up and
point out the obvious. It has fallen to me-the woman of color, often the
only woman of color in the room-to point this out. The responses have
ranged from un- comfortable silences to lukewarm acknowledgments to
outrage. Whatever the tone, the common defense is always, âWe donât
discriminate against people of color.â What is left unsaid is, âSee? We
welcome you. Thatâs proof that we donât discriminate.â
I now understand why so many people of color are wary of working with
whites. When I first encountered the suspicions and wariness of people
of color towards white anarchists, I dismissed their concerns. âHey,
theyâre doing good work,â I defended. âWho cares what color they are?â
I now see that it is not that white anarchists are white. It is that
many of them are unwilling to try to understand the needs, concerns and
experiences of those with different skin colors.
As an anarchist of color, this disturbs me. I am tired of always being
put in the position of explaining racism and race issues to white
anarchists, sexism and gender issues to male (and sometimes female)
anarchists, or some form of discrimination to virtually everyone I
encounter. I am tired of the prophecy that in an anarchist society,
racism, sexism and all other forms of discrimination will magically
cease to exist. Such explanations no longer appease me. Instead, I see
them as white anarchistsâ way of not confronting the problems and issues
within our own movement and within themselves.
It starts with a story:
My grandma, worried that her 3-year son had not spoken a word yet, had
him chase down a grasshopper. Diligently, without complaint, the boy did
and returned with a smile. Open she said; confused and scared, he did.
She shoved it in and closed his mouth. Hablas, mijo, hablas. He spit it
out crying. Crying and yelling. He has not stopped either since, she
says, and smiles thinking of her now 50-year-old son talking his time
away in a New Mexican state penitentiary.
This is not make-believe. This is how we find our voice. This defines
our language.
Here is my story. Or the start of it. My name is Tomas Ignacio Aragon;
everyone calls me Tom. This I know for sure. I come from families of
lies, of stories to deceive you, to deflect discovery. As a bicultural
child, I was not comfortable in nor completely accepted by either side
of my families. In the white world of my working class mother, I was the
visible mistake, the dark stain on the family name. White working class
military folk, dealing with the daughter who runs away to find her
place, to save the world in the late â60s, and comes home struggling to
save herself and feed her two year old son. With her, I was raised to
avoid declarations of race, of difference, trying not to discuss my
brown skin and brown hair in a family of blonds and blue eyes,
forgetting my Spanish, speaking English only. I hid my shame with my
silence.
On the Chicano side, I was the product of typical male weakness, the
sign of my fatherâs co-option and ultimate demise by white women come to
save the poor, the natives. He was seduced by her presence, her
education, her future. And those things he loved about her, she used to
leave him when he found his place in el pinto, the typical educational
facilities for poor Chicanos in New Mexico. His anger at her transferred
in to his abandonment of me. No letters. No contact. My father running
from the law, running, running, knowing the inside of a cell more than
his son. Wait. This is not a story. This explains nothing, so I create
my own explanations.
I started writing to find my color, saying on paper in black indelible
ink what I couldnât to my classmates, to my first few lovers, to my
mother and members of my own family: I am Mexican. I am white. I am.
âFight one bean you fight the whole burrito.â I remember this saying as
a warning white kids said about fucking with Mexicans in Ventura,
California.
I remember the sound that they made on the school bus, slapping hands,
laughing, all building a solidarity of whiteness or non-brown-ness when
one kid calls out âsmells like beansâ as the Mexicans leave the bus,
walking down the aisle. At 15, I couldnât stand it any more. I stood up
and hit the kid in front of me with my backpack breaking my connection
to them. I wanted to be the burrito. I am Mexican; I am not white. But
in the end I was wasnât welcomed. I am the one who had to find trouble
rather than it finding me. It has been the same ever since. I walk the
borders of cultures, the too white to be brown and too brown to be
white. Sometimes hassled by both sides and sometimes passing into each.
Sometimes seen as one of the boys, sometimes the affirmative action
product. I enter college deciding to claim, to rename, to embrace and
revel in my contradiction, my displacement, my ambiguity, my absence of
certainty.
MEChistAs in college scoffing about my lack of Spanish and complaint
that meetings were in held only in Spanish. âChale, man. Whatâs up with
you?â Because I was raised by a English speaking white mother. Awkward
silence.
My teacher asked why the absence of Mexican American writers in a
California literature class bothered me. Because I am one. Awkward
silence.
This is the only way I can speak to you. I am an academic and I am not
afraid to talk that talk â the hybrity of myself causes these
contradictions that I embrace like old lovers knowing how to soothe each
one, how to excite and comfort. I was freed in theory and abstraction
finding voice in books by Moraga, Anzaldua. Finding fathers in Acosta,
Reechy. Finding heart in the radical acts of violation and violence like
Tijerina at the New Mexican courthouse, Murrietaâs refusal to bow his
head, Los Crudosâ demand for an uncompromising politic, Rage Against the
Machineâs connection to difference and abhorrence of authority. I became
a bicultural, Chicano with no respect for authority, no time for lazy
assumptions about race, culture, politics, class, sexuality. I found
myself in the refusal to singularly define myself.
Wait. This is a lie. These words. Stories.
How do I claim myself: how to separate what I feel as a Chicano, as a
male, as a person of privilege. How do you claim anything when you canât
claim the authenticity of your own voice? Remember: speak clearly, be
careful if your pronunciation is off, if your skin fades too pale in the
winter, present you color in your movements, your clothes, your lovers.
In a world that wants singularity, I choose both. In a culture that
wants uniformed sexuality, I choose to embrace bisexuality. In a society
that denies authentic autonomy, I found myself in anti-authoritarian
histories, in the romance of clandestine organizations. I was seduced by
the pen and the gun, by non-monogamist lifestyles, by radical, dissident
Chicano nationalism, by the feminist rhetoric to reclaim our selves, our
lives, our sex, our religion, our consciousness. This has defined me and
hurt me. I tend to be the problem, the one who asks too many questions,
who is never comfortable with the way it is. With the way I am.
But now I refuse to be silent or shameful or half-hearted. I tried to
avoid it for a while, but if I wanted to find and meet other anarchists
in the East Bay, I needed to go to the Long Haul, an anarchist infoshop
in Berkeley. So I took a deep breath, opened the door and entered,
trying to free myself of my previous feelings, my stereotypes, my love
and hate for the anarchist com- munity; and yes, I know it ainât one
homogeneous thing, but regardless, my experiences with it have been
fraught with good olâ revolutionary angst.
Let me explain.
I have never been into the punk scene, I am not white, I became a father
at 20 and had to think about changing diapers, not just about changing
social structures. I remember being chastised by someone trying to get
us to go up one summer to the logging protests and when I reminded him
of my responsibilities, he snapped back: âwhat was more important.â I
wanted to punch him, to make him see his ignorance, the elitism of
privilege, the typical dismissal of people with children, with jobs to
pay for food and rent.
Yet, this has happened over and over. Meetings at 6 p.m. or reading my
child a bed time story? How to choose? It felt as if I could never fully
commit, never be as dedicated as the people I met â mostly younger,
white, students, who were mobile, who could survive on a fluctuating
income. Now there is nothing wrong with this, but this was not me, not
my experience, not my culture. But I knew that the anarchist views more
closely resembled my views about how life could be lived than anything
else, so I tried as much as I could to find that community. I brought my
kids to meetings; I swapped childcare with other parents on my block (a
nice way of realizing it truly does take a neighborhood to raise a
child). I tried to figure out how to balance riding bikes with my kids
around the block versus riding in critical mass, which is right at
dinner time.
I realized I needed the anarchist community after years of trying to
compartmentalize the seemingly disparate aspects of my life â the
non-monogamist, the self-schooling parent, the activist, the Chicano
academic, the fuck-the-police poet. But how I got to this point is
another story. Is in fact many stories.
Let me start at the beginning. I began noticing the glaring
discrepancies in my life; I grew up on hip-hop and could see it being
co-opted into cheap fronting and frivolity. This was not the community I
was a part of, dressed in hand-me-downs and learning to break on ripped
up sections of linoleum.
I simply couldnât handle the growing consumerism, the value placed on
objects, after having lived in poverty, after scoffing at and detesting
the symbols of wealth for so long (yes, out of envy and jealousy at the
time perhaps). Yet, I desperately needed to believe in the
anti-authoritarian politics of NWA, Public Enemy, Freestyle Fellowship
and others, for I was not hearing it from anyone else nor in any other
way that spoke to me.
It continued in undergraduate classrooms in which I was appalled at the
refusal to engage in anything but what was deemed âpractical and
possible realties.â After being told that Republicans and Democrats held
the only legitimate and viable worldviews, I wondered how the hometowns
I grew up in â Las Vegas, New Mexico, Kailua, Hawaii, Ventura,
California â were included in anything we discussed. How did these
âviableâ political choices account for the poverty, the single mothers,
the drugs, the lack of choices available? There had to be another way.
And when I did make my way to an anarchist study group. I seethed at
peopleâs unwillingness to even attempt to connect anarchy with issues of
race and privilege. There had to be other ways. Other places. Others.
So I retreated for a while into my own experiences, creating and
nurturing a lifestyle that embodied the values I couldnât find
elsewhere. I found connections with my imprisoned father and prison
issues that introduced me to Attica, to my fatherâs penitentiary, to
political prisoners. I reveled in becoming a father and was soon
horrified as disciplined behavior became the primary learning objective
in my sonâs school. What could I do, where to turn? I refused to
participate in the privilege of private schooling so that was out. And
then I found The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and we created our
autonomy, but struggled to connect with others who chose to homeschool
for reasons of liberation rather than Christian bullshit and racist,
classist fears about public education. Where were the other parents?
People fuck, so I know people reproduce.
Moving to the East Bay from the city did help me meet more people with
similar values. While attempting to create a relationship based on free
choice rather than social coercion, my partner and I met another young
parent questioning the rigid social definitions of what relationships
could be. With the inspiration from Emma Goldman and the practical
advice from The Ethical Slut, we began to embrace non-monogamist freedom
to explore our own sexuality, our growing identities, our interests. But
even here we felt out of place: we werenât 50-year-old hippies
reminiscing about free love, nor were we new age converts trying to fuck
while rubbing crystals and engaging in tantric poses. We were in our
late twenties, we were looking for others more like us.
All these interests and choices of my life culminated in the tear gas of
Seattle. Studying globalism as an advisor to student clubs on the campus
I taught at, we decided to participate in the WTO protests, not
realizing the dramatic and liberating events that we would be a part of.
So after the smoke cleared from Seattle and then DC and then Quebec, I
realized that I could no longer chase the revolution, that I could no
longer compartmentalize the different aspects of my life. I needed a way
to synthesize them all. After ten years of making half-hearted attempts
to connect with people who looked and lived so differently it seemed
than me, I decided to toss aside my ego, my attitude, and my fears and
both find and help create the community I wanted.
In the three years since I have made this commitment to be involved in
the anarchist community, I have met some powerful and inspirational
people; I have learned to see that resisting the oppressive and
seemingly undefeatable social world we live in can be practiced in so
many minute, marvelous and meaningful ways â in fucking, in gardening,
in punk, in slumming it, in cooking. Perhaps even in crystals. Iâve been
a part of RACE (Revolutionary Anarchists of Color), been to and
participated in the anarchist conference, started a zine, boxcutter,
with a few others to explore aspects of personal liberation. I even
staff a shift now at the Long Haul.
With each step I try to bring my stories and my experiences with me. I
want to be a part of something that combines theory and praxis, that can
talk the talk and walk the walk, I want to work with people that I can
learn from, that inspire me in my own efforts of teaching, parenting,
living my daily life. I want to try and fail rather than remain safe in
stasis. And yet, at times I still feel like an outsider to the
radical/anarchist community. But now I know that I am apart of it, and
so I have a responsibility to it, to help shape it. I am writing to
engage myself in this process that will force me to embrace more of it,
to be more involved in it, and to welcome other people like me â
marginalized from the mainstream, yet not quite the typical anarchist â
to join this discussion. I know many more people are out there, many
more stories, and I hope we can start sharing them.
Anarchy is the radical approach to life of not simply living a fair
equal and free life for yourself, but making the connection and working
for the liberation and equality of everyone. It is anti-authoritarian;
it is non-coercive; it is based on the principles of active involvement,
of direct action, of a radical faith in diversity. Now this doesnât
imply that the struggles of all communities are equal. Therefore, it is
imperative to recognize, within ourselves individually and within our
individual cultures, the points of privilege we may have access to and
benefit from. It is crucial in anarchist thinking to understand the
workings of white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege and
so on, and to work to destroy these forces. And one of the first things
to realize is that the state in all its aberrations must go. We need to
radically imagine new ways to relate to each other within communities of
our devising â until then, police will always be an abusive presence of
control and white privilege, behavior will only be tolerated that works
to reinforce the status quo.
I am tired of anarchist thinking that only serves intellectual exercises
and academic notions of social discourse and I fear generally white male
punk violent angst against private property that serves only the
transitory pleasure of the actor while serving to marginalize poor
communities and heighten the repression of difference by condoned state
terrorists â the cops. I also am tired of isolated individual anarchist
practices that serve only the development and liberation of the
individual who has access to and time for these pursuits such as
veganism, voluntary simplicity and conscious social marginalization.
There is another way.
People of color and the anarchist tradition are now set to revitalize
that. I came to anarchy through sex and Seattle; and now that Iâm here,
now that Iâve plundered my way through the âclassical or canonicalâ
texts (how ironic that so many fight for these labels as if this
provides some authority to these anti-authoritarian texts), Iâve come to
fuck it up, to shake it down and push it forward into the multicultural,
diverse pedagogically flexible revolutionary philosophy it is. No longer
will I be told that real anarchy is not related to struggles for
national liberation, not about the praxis of living a life defined by
radical honesty and trust, not about coalitions and communication.
For me anarchy must be linked to the individual only in relation to the
communal, whether that community is lovers, or family, or children, or
employers, or neighbors.
I cannot separate my political growth from my personal growth. Nor will
I even try. I knew there must be something out there, something to
validate what my partner and I felt but could not articulate â that true
commitment, true respect and love was not linked to ownership,
possession, fear, and distrust. After years of working hard to âmake
it,â to be successful, good, liberal citizens, we looked around and
realized there must be more than what we have been striving so hard
for,. We rejected marriage, but were unable to articulate a
philosophical reason yet, we had kids, but refused to become the
conservative self-centered parents we saw other new mothers and fathers
becoming, we were political in all the condoned ways â liberal Democrat,
wanting taxes to go to public schools and senior centers.
All wasnât perfect; we each wanted things, but we wanted to be together,
we each had attractions to other s but know it was wrong, we each
understood that after working so hard raising three kids, a few years
away from out thirties, that we had to change something or choose this
path forever. And then came Emma and Andee.
Emma Goldman hit us like a ton of bricks â non-monogamy, freedom to do
and love who you want, to choose to be together rather than to have to
be together. The essays spoke deeply to our own unspoken philosophy.
Let me tell you a story:
At 20, I hitchhiked from Las Vegas, New Mexico down the highway to see
my father face to face. To try to find some answers. He tells me he
fucked up.
He should be out there with me, working with me, living life with me.
Because, he says, I realized Iâm a slave in here. And now I can only
fight against other slaves. Out there, when I realized I was a slave, I
coulda done something, I coulda fought back at least. Somehow. In here,
itâs just fucked up.
My father explained that in jail, pencils are like daggers, you can
write and you can stab. âMira, â he points to his arm, âhere are the
pencil tips that I cannot get out.â
This is not a metaphor. This is a warning.
Rights Movement in the U.S. by Puck
Abortion is not and has never been only a âwhite issue.â Although few
people today realize it, women of color have been involved from the very
beginning. Women of color have played and continue to play a crucial
part organizing for and shaping the struggle for reproductive freedom in
the US. Who Gets Abortions?
Currently, Latinas are two times as likely as white women to have an
abortion; black women are three times as likely. Black women obtain 24
percent of abortions in the US. Indeed, polls show that over 80 percent
of African Americans support family planning, yet few are members of the
prominent reproductive rights organizations.
Why? A look into our recent past shows that people of color have valid
reasons to suspect the motives of predominantly white groups advocating
for the single issue of abortion rights.
During the last century, the pro-choice movement, or the family planning
movement, often dismissed or ignored concerns of women of color when
they werenât problems for white women as well. Devastatingly, the
reproductive rights movement of the past at times allied with
eugenicists and other white supremacists in opportunistic political
coalitions meant to further the abortion rights movement.
Being pro-choice or a feminist today means having to acknowledge and
transcend the racist legacy of collaborations between white feminists,
conservatives and eugenicists who shared common ground on parts of the
abortion issue. How we fight for reproductive freedom today must be
informed by the reality that for many women of color, abortion is just
one fight in a larger struggle of class and racial oppression. Unlike
for some white or middle class women, the lack of access to reproductive
freedom that many women of color face has more to do with the
limitations placed upon them by their ethnic and class background than
by the actual legal status of abortion or geographic availability of
abortion clinics.
Early on, the Black community saw reproductive control as being an
essential key to liberation, and they have fought for it since the times
of slavery. Black women have been underground providers of safe and
affordable abortions. Later, African American women organized with other
women of color and brought tens of thousands to participate in rallies
demanding an end to forced sterilizations.
Then and now, many feminists of color challenged white feminists who
framed abortion rights as a womanâs issue that was unconnected to other
social injustices.
As Black feminist and activist, Loretta J. Ross explains:
Many Black women still do not see abortion rights as a stepping stone to
freedom because abortion rights do not automatically end the oppression
of Black women.
Sadly, the vital participation and intellect brought to the reproductive
rights movement by women of color are noticeably absent from many white
feminist accounts of history.
Until recently, mainstream and preeminent pro-choice organizations have
promoted a narrow view of reproductive liberty that focuses on the
âright to chooseâ abortion. This can come across as sounding trivial and
consumeristic. The language of abortion rights politics can also be
culturally insensitive and alienating to recent immigrants and women who
come from religious backgrounds- even those who support and get
abortions.
Women of color have also been subjected to controlling and coercive
reproductive policies and, as a result, many continue to distrust public
health services and are more apt to view family planning programs with
apprehension.
As Brenda Romney, an African American activist, explained:
âWhen our children were [white menâs] property, we were encouraged to
have children. When our children are ours, we are not worthy parents.
Those are the messages, the background and the context of health care in
general.
This is some of what Black women bring with them when they seek health
care information or abortion services.â
Therefore, many women of color feel that it is more central to their
needs to demand for economic justice and healthcare- including
reproductive rights- instead of focusing on the aspects of âchoiceâ and
availability regarding abortion and birth control.
Abortion was not openly discussed in the Black community because other
survival issues were key.
â Lois Smith, an African American member of the Jane collective (a
collective that provided safe and sliding scale abortions before Roe v.
Wade passed)
Eugenicists promote the idea that essentialist traits such as
intelligence and criminality are biologically determined and can thus be
eliminated or emphasized through the selective breeding or elimination
of âpureâ races.
The ideology of eugenics became applied public health policy in the U.S.
during the 1960s and â70s. Industrial tycoons like the Rockefeller
family funded it; prestigious universities studied it, and governors
introduced legislation proposing the compulsory sterilization of Native
American, black and poor women in order to âfight the war on poverty.â
In truth, these policies were aimed at decreasing the explosive
political potential of minority populations and pacifying white fears of
social unrest during a time of increasing militancy in the struggle for
civil rights.
During the 1960s, family planning services became accessible for large
numbers of poor women of color through federally subsidized programs
like Medicaid. Although this was seen by most feminists as a victory, on
the flip side, the government also began coercing Native American and
black women on public assistance into getting State-sponsored
hysterectomies by threatening to revoke their welfare benefits if they
refused.
During the 1970s, it is estimated that up to 60,000 Native American
women and some men were sterilized. Indian Health Service had a âcaptive
clientele,â since Native women often lacked access to services other
than those paternalistic public ones located on reservations. In 1975,
for every seven babies born, one woman was being sterilized. Shockingly,
the IHS sterilization campaign was paid for entirely with federal
funding.
Puerto Rican women were also sterilized at astronomical rates by U.S.
tax dollars. During the same time, several Mexican American women were
sterilized at a County hospital without much explanation or information.
A national fertility study conducted by Princeton University found that
20 percent of all married African-American women had been sterilized by
1970.
Given that experience, it is no surprise that in the communities of
color targeted by government-controlled depopulation programs, birth
control and abortion were equated with genocide for years to come. Many
poor women of color felt that they had been âtrackedâ toward
sterilization and were outraged at having been denied the opportunity to
have children in numbers of their choosing.
âWhile birth control was demanded as a right and an option for
privileged women, it became an obligation for the poor,â Ross recalled.
When women of color organized successfully for laws requiring the
âinformed consentâ of patients undergoing hysterectomies in an effort to
cut down on forced sterilizations, they had to so often without support
from mainstream white abortion rights groups- who were then too obsessed
with their own narrow self-interest to see the broader feminist struggle
at hand.
Access to abortion and birth control do not exist free of social values.
White people of all political motivations have supported abortion when
it suited their interests and set the stage for years of racial tension
and mistrust in the arena of reproductive rights policy. Today, eugenic
ideas like âoverpopulationâ and biological determinism continue to
influence public health and social policies that blame poverty, crime
and pollution on the rising population growth of brown and black people-
ignoring the root causes of social ills: unequal distribution of
resources in a society deeply segregated by white supremacy.
A recent example of this phenomenon was the Norplant controversy during
the 1990s. Norplant is unusual because it is a contraceptive that is 99
percent effective and can last up to 5 years after its initial
administration.
However, it requires the insertion of six matchstick-sized capsules
under the skin of a womanâs forearm. Although Norplant is expensive and
can cause negative side effects including depression and irregular,
heavy bleeding, public subsidies covered the costs for many poor women
of color.
Politicians framed the initial cost as an expenditure that could save
millions of dollars nationally in the welfare costs it would take to
raise the children of âirresponsible women.â
Several states wanted to require mothers on welfare to use it as a
condi- tion of receiving their benefits. Debates ensued in the national
media: âCan Norplant Reduce the Underclass?â
Commonly, women who suffered negative side effects and asked for their
Norplants to be removed were denied and had to endure paternalistic,
bureaucratic and controlling service providers.
During the 1980s, feminists of color clamored louder than ever to be
heard.
Women of color gained in numbers as well as prominence within mainstream
pro-choice organizations, and some assumed leadership positions.
Reproductive rights groups put more energy into reaching out to people
of color. Health activists of color broke through the âconspiracy of
silenceâ surrounding abortion in their communities, framing reproductive
rights as a human rights and healthcare issue. The first âMarch for
Womenâs Livesâ was organized in 1986. Ross, who worked with the National
Organization for Women (NOW), was employed to find organizations of
women of color to endorse this first national march dedicated to
abortion rights. She reflects on the changes in the years since:
In 1986 Black women were skeptical about joining a march for abortion
rights sponsored by what was per- ceived as a white womanâs
organization. Although all the leaders of the Black womenâs
organizations I contacted privately supported abortion rights, many
perceived the issue as marginal, too controversial, or to âwhite.â
By 1987 NOW was responding more clearly to the voices of women of color.
By 1986, the annual march was endorsed by 107 organizations of women of
color, and by 1989, âmore than 2,000 women came together to form the
largest delegation ever [at the time] of women of color to support
abortion rights.
Women of color were responsible for expanding the focus of the abortion
rights movement. Their influence can be found in the shifting language
used by mainstream groups â from one centered around abortion to one
emphasizing reproductive rights. The work women of color had been doing
all along in their communities to support reproductive freedom slowly
began to be recognized and at times supported by mainstream feminist
groups. Most importantly though, women healthcare activists of color
continued to push for more and more justice- for more social justice in
the pro-choice movement and more feminism in their communities.
Here in the year 2004, at the eighth March for Womenâs lives, letâs
reflect on the mistakes of the past and the injustices of the present.
We still have a long way to go. Let us constantly strive to bring about
more instances for increasing numbers of people to experience
self-determination, true democracy and justice in their lives. We must
not let our vision of liberation be obscured by political compromises
that promise only a few of us legitimacy and victory. We must all be
free simultaneously, or none of us can truly be free.
I see it all around me in my neighborhood â the people who I claim to be
fighting for; the people whose oppression fuels part of me; the people
whose rights I want increased. The young people I want to join in
struggling with, to ally. But wait, thereâs something wrong. I donât see
them struggling; I see them conforming. They have no meaning or idea of
what oppression is, even though theyâre enacting it and internalizing it
in public.
Every time I walk past them, theyâre loitering on the streets, on street
corners, on the bumpers of cars, in clusters, like gangs. They look at
me with my pale skin, smooth, silky dark hair, colorful clothing and
piercings and give me long stares. They hoot and catcall at me.
Sissy-ass white/ honky fag wanderinâ in the wrong âhood. They have no
notion or idea of âthe struggleâ or âthe movement.â For them, politics
means whoâs the best gangsta on the block; whoâs got the coolest clothes
and chains; the most money and pussy.
A few weeks back, I walked into this Russian-run jewelry/piercing place
on Broadway and 145^(th) to get a third piercing on my ears. The guys
who run the place, two slightly built, pale Russians, have already
exoticized me in my previous visits by directly associating me to the
Kama Sutra and wanting to know whether I have a copy, only because I say
Iâm from India, even though according to them I donât look it. Once you
say youâre from somewhere else, thatâs all that matters. These guys
basically make a living by pawning and selling jewelry to the aspiring
young would-be gangstas of the neighborhood, apparently ripping most of
them off and cheating in the process. Their mannerisms are very
deliberate, exaggerated, and put-on, from the constant use of âmy
brotherâ to the gangsta embrace and the hand on the heart. Of course,
they deal with even their most trusted customers through bulletproof
glass and an entrance door that must be buzzed to open. So anyway, as I
was getting my piercings done, which were $10, there were other
customers negotiating the price of gaudy gold chains in thousands of
dollars, in a community where I wonder who can genuinely afford that. In
walk in a group of young teenagers, mixed sexes, but definitely in their
younger teens. They all crowd around a showcase to my left that has more
gold chains displayed and one of them starts exclaiming, âOh, man!
Thatâs gangsta! Thatâs gangsta!â So few words, yet revealing so much.
Obviously, theyâve learned from somewhere or someone at a very young
age, that being a gangsta is something to look up to, aspire and revere.
I wanted to scream at them, shake them and tell them how they were
perpetuating their own oppression and how the establishment wants them
to be gangstas precisely so that it can lock them up in jail for the
rest of their adult lives. But something stopped me; something said,
theyâll have no idea what youâre talking about, theyâll laugh at you;
look at how theyâre already giving you weird looks with your long hair,
multicolored clothes and multiple piercings. All these feelings and
signals leave me heartbroken and not knowing what to do to help the
people I claim to be fighting for.
Please. This is not some pissed-off white liberal guilt. Neither is this
an attempt to say that minority folks, particularly Blacks and Latinos,
have themselves to blame for the oppression they suffer. This is not
some grandiose attempt to generalize and categorize every youth in
Harlem. These are just observations I make, walking to and from home,
every day.
Even though Iâve been living here for more than a year, I hardly know
anyone even in my own building, other than polite greetings. But when
Iâm walking around outside, or doing stuff within the building like
laundry, even if I donât interact, Iâm always observing. My eyes and
ears are always perked. I guess little pitchers have big ears, right?)
The youth I describe, again, do not represent a gross generalization
that the reader might think Iâm attempting to make. What they do
represent is the visible face of the youth of their community, what an
âoutsider,â whoâs not âinâ or âdownâ with them might see as (s)he walks
or drives through the neighborhood. The fact that they do represent the
visible face is something very important, especially for all the youth
of the community who arenât so visible.
They portray variations of what is commonly known in American popular
culture as the gangsta mentality. If they do not seem to quite succeed
at it, they certainly do not have any lack of aspiration or enthusiasm
to become gangstas. Here is the point that must be made â their
visibility has everything to do with their aspirations to gangstahood.
These youth are visible and become the de facto representatives of young
Harlem because American popular culture, the mass media, and the
establishment have made the gangsta identity. They have created it,
seizing on certain alternative politico-cultural trends in the
African/Latin-American communities and forging this identity of the
gangsta, simultaneously elevating it on a very high pedestal, one that
is near impossible to reach for the youth it calls to. They have then
made it acceptable for this identity to be portrayed in their own
channels as being representative of all minority urban youth. So one
channel is spewing lyrics and images glorifying murder, rape, drug
dealing, looting and lavish wealth as somehow being the only path to
success for these youth; another channel is simultaneously reporting how
âgangsta rapâ is encouraging violent and delinquent behavior amongst
these very same youth, and the apparently pressing need to âcrack downâ
and âget toughâ with these kids. It wouldnât be uncommon for these
channels to have common owners, stockholders, financiers, backers and
investors. But what is the effect it is having on these kids? On one
hand, they are constantly told that the only way they can be successful
in life is to become a gangsta or a gangstaâs bitch; on the other hand,
as they become more and more deeply immersed into this culture, the very
same establishment starts enforcing draconian laws and regulations on
them, and criminalizes them without ever trying to show them that one
can be successful and happy in life without being either a gangsta or
Colin Powell. The cops and the judges will listen to our whining and
tell us they donât criminalize the kids; they are already criminals and
need to be dealt with before they get out of hand. The news producers,
MTV execs, rap artists and record producers, etc will tell us theyâre
just doing whatever makes the most money for them for the longest time.
The result is that the kids who are perpetually loitering outside are
objects or pawns being kicked around in a power game, seen as criminals
in the eyes of the rest of the world. One never sees any cops stopping
and telling these kids to go buy a book, or guide them toward more
meaningful social interactions, or just talk to them. One neither sees
any cops ordering them to disperse immediately, even though there are
âNo Loiteringâ signs in bold around most buildings. This isnât a
coincidence. They are allowed to loiter perpetually and hang around, so
that they can self-affirm their identity as gangstas to the cops, who
will then trawl the streets in their police cars and go around âbustingâ
random people, subjecting them to humiliating searches and arrests in
public on mere suspicion of behavior or activity associated with the
gangsta mentality. The same cops will then go home and find their kids
being drawn to the same thing.
And what about the faceless masses, those youth who refuse to accept
this manufactured criminalization that looks so cool, who refuse to
conform? We must remember that thereâs no black and white, no two
distinct groups here necessarily, but shades. There could be kids in the
gangs who long not to be there, who long to be productive, creative, and
successful, but are just afraid of the backlash by the cool ones for
daring to be different. There could be kids forcibly kept at home by
paranoid, scared parents who donât want to see them spend the rest of
their lives in jail under racist Rockefeller drug laws, who are
nevertheless blinded by the gangsta illusion. And then, somewhere, are
my crowd â the friends Iâve never met, but whom I talk to all the time.
I hope my Black and Latino friends and comrades, especially those in
Harlem, will read this and try to understand my perspective. I hope they
will understand that Iâm not being racist here and not at all attempting
to stigmatize. I am trying to find reasons for the perceived image of
young people of their communities in popular culture as being
unreformable delinquents and criminals; why that path looks so seemingly
attractive and how it has so much to do with what the media and the
establishment creates; what it says is OK and what it says isnât; how it
can say both about one thing simultaneously for its advantage and to
oppress. I hope these comrades will give me their feedback and point out
any places Iâm incorrect or going wrong. I will be the happiest of all
if my analyses based on my own perceptions are proved to be
categorically wrong and incorrect.
If they are, it shows the media and the pigs havenât got to absolutely
everybody. If they arenât wrong, then Iâm afraid that we as far left
radical people of color, have a hell of a lot of work to do, and as our
respected Anarchist Panther comrade says, a lot of painful growing,
learning and changing ahead as well.
I what? You what? Feeling lonely? Trying hard to find polemical analysis
to figure out why youâre feeling lonely in a suite with 9 other people?
The closer you are to them, the more isolated you feel?! How does that
make sense? Me, the seasoned New Yorker with all the older friends, the
older ladies, suddenly on campus and with her (I will stubbornly use the
pronoun of my choice) age group â feels lonely. Feels jealous as she
sees clumps of excited, giggling happy teenagers walking, no bouncing,
past her. It acutely touches on that nerve that has always been so
sensitive inside you, babe, that nerve that holds companionship and
abandonment and friendship and partnership. You know inside you that
youâre years more mature than them, that you made not just a fist of it
alone in Harlem for a year, but a stable home.
Are the most brilliant of us destined to be alone? Why does everyone
seem to have bosom buddies already that theyâre hanging out with all the
time? It touches on all those memories that can never be erased, the
memories of abuse before awakening, through suffering, when as a
frightened little girl inside a boyâs body who understood things too
well for her own good, you looked around you and everyone seemed to be
coping, everyone seemed to be stable and connected to each other except
you.
You established yourself in a world outside of this gated campus when
this gated campus seemed to big and complicated a world for you. And you
never knew then that in a year, you would be a blooming, beautiful
flower of a boy-girl becoming man-woman in the infinitely bigger world
of the whole city. Youâve combated racism both inside and outside of
you, expunged the colonialism and casteism from within, and not so
politely alerted the rest of the world of much of the same present in
it. You found out about Orientalism and Eurocentrism and dealt with
those, no sweat. Those are serious characteristics in oneâs mindset to
deal with, babe, and you did it with no problems.
You learned the hard way how to deal with problems that manifest
themselves in the form of people. From the racists to the establishment
pigs, to the infatuations to people who needed to be avoided but tempted
you so much. The people who hurt you when they wanted to nourish you;
the people who broke your heart and nearly broke your spirit. But
nothing broke you. You realized that there is no heteronormative idea of
a woman â that you were the woman who broke that notion that occupied
your mind â you made yourself the woman who can be smooth and sensitive
and soft, and at the same time, tough as nails and durable through the
roughest weather. You broke the barriers that heteronormativity had set
up between male and female, masculine and feminine, and showed by your
own example that there could be the woman who could fight for herself
without losing any of her femininity.
Now suddenly, you feel small, young, and fragile again. The thought of
classes tomorrow and a schedule scares you and makes you feel weak, when
the racist pigs of the NYPD couldnât do that after even having you
cornered and alone. Itâs just the memories, babe, itâs just the memories
of when you were young. In recalling, you regress into the past, leave
the present and thatâs why you start feeling crumbly again, because the
little boy-girl lives in you only as a memory, not as a current and
tangible reality.
That makes it a little more scary and harder to grasp, but it being a
memory as opposed to an existing identity makes you safe from
vulnerabilities, but you are not that person anymore, so that little
child will not think for you, and its weaknesses will never affect you.
Definitely, you will get upset when you think of how much you suffered
as him/her, and the memories will be vivid and frightening like
nightmares, but you will never be her ever again. Sometime, when I feel
like it, when I feel ready, I will write in detail and specifics about
my suffering. The incidents, from the earliest to the latest to the
ongoing; the abusers and predators (with special mention to brainless
children in all the schools I was put in and the bitch who appointed
herself as my mother/colonizer); the mistakes I made; and all the trauma
I went through. Itâs too much right now â the thought of delving so deep
into the filthy muck makes me shake and unable to type.
People tell me come on, Suneel, everyoneâs suffered, everyoneâs been
hurt, and so, and therefore, thereâs nothing special about your pain and
your pain. Wrong. There are people out there whoâd have suffered less
than me, more than me, or as much, in similar ways or different. But the
fact that I choose to express them, the fact that I have the ability to
write about them like this, analyze them, and not just stuff them under
my exterior until I explode and injure everyone around me, like I see
most others do, is special. And if others choose to do so as well, then
thatâs special too.
Donât believe what the capitalists and the pigs and the wolves tell you.
There is room enough on this earth for all of us to be happy,
successful, well off, and well known. Because if we all know each other,
and understand each other, weâll all be famous and weâll all feel weâre
getting enough attention from each other. And there is no such thing as
the human face of socialism, because socialism is all human, all one
hundred percent of it, and anyone who thinks otherwise and still calls
themselves a socialist are only living a more contrived and subtle
version of machismo and militarism.
I didnât mean for this to touch so much on my sexuality, and my sexual
awakening, but it is so present in everything I think and do, from my
daily existence to my radicalism and sociopolitical thought to the way I
relate with friends and with lovers too.
Iâve endured the taunts and the doubts. My dad telling me that feeling
like Iâm a woman inside is just another source of confusion, and that
Iâd do better with less confusion in my life. Wrong, dad. Iâd do worse
if I tried to be something I know I wouldnât be happy being. The worst
combination of my grandmother and my stepmother telling me that with my
current identity, straight girls would be turned off because they want
men, gay men likewise, and lesbians too because they want women who have
womenâs bodies (I might still have one yet!), and that Iâm sexually
frustrated! Turns out she doesnât know all the girls out there. My
womanhood endures.
Often Iâm plagued by self-doubt â am I doing this just to attract
attention? Am I taking being a stage-whore too far off the stage? I
answered it myself when I expressed these doubts to my friend Erica
(thank god for her) and she asked me the most fundamental question of
all: what does being a woman mean to you? I thought for a few moments
and answered: being a woman means simply that. Being a woman. Itâs a
feeling, a sense thatâs hard to express in words, because to me, being a
woman means having an identity that is feminine, but without any
preconceived notions, ideas, or mindsets about what a woman is or what a
woman should be. In any sense, be it in terms of looks, actions, habits,
social roles, or anything else. Everybody feels like there is some kind
of âidealâ man and an âidealâ woman too. Well I reject that. I am a
woman with no conditions and no strings attached. And no presumptions
too. You may find me rather androgynous, deviant, and genderbending. I
like to dress up, be pierced, and be âeffeminateâ or âgirly.â But those
are just tastes and habits, like preferring cookies ân cream above
butter pecan and not to be confused with my sexual identity and
preferences. Yes, I am all those things, or rather, I possess all those
qualities. But I claim the right to choose my ultimate sexual identity
beyond my traits, looks, qualities and features, even if it is different
from the sexual organs I possess. And whether thatâs feminine or
hermaphrodite or my desired blend of masculine and feminine is my
choice. You can love it, be OK with it, be uncomfortable with it, be
revolted by it, or leave it. But itâs my choice. Being a woman means
being a woman.
So just ride through the fear and the sense of isolation, babe. Youâve
settled in a world much bigger than this. And nobody says you have to
settle here. Just like dad (thank god for him too) said, youâre not here
to socialize, youâre here for an education. And those who party nonstop
and think theyâre being really bad/causing lots of trouble donât know
that theyâre playing the exact moronic role that the system wants them
to. You and your friends know what causing real trouble means. And you
know itâs a good thing, something to be proud of, feel noble and just
about. Look beyond the social butterflies and the people who pretend so
much that theyâre just pretenses of themselves. Youâre about to grasp
knowledge, analysis, understanding, and ability. And with it will come
your destiny, and the revolution.
Ewuare Osayande
The following is the edited transcript of the keynote address given at
The Climate Control Conference, February 21, 2004, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA.
Since we are dealing with the question of environmentalism I thought it
might be appropriate to introduce my sharing with you by quoting from
the most celebrated scientist of the previous century, being that
environmental- ism relies heavily on science. The person being Albert
Einstein who himself was not just concerned with theories of relativity
but was a committed socialist and used his popularity and influence to
speak out against oppression. He says, âA human being is a part of the
whole, called by us â universe. A part limited in time and space where
we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something
separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our
consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us
to our personal desires into affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures in the whole of
nature in its beauty.â
The struggle on the part of the environmental movement is the struggle
to free itself from that delusion that separates itself from the rest of
the struggles against oppression on the planet, as well as the rest of
the planet itself. This optical delusion, this way of viewing the world
through rather white, western and elitist eyes ⊠this is more than a
call for inclusion. It is a call for making the movement contextually
aligned with the ideology and the ideologies of oppressed peoplesâ
struggles for liberation.
There is a profound reluctance on the part of activists in the
environmental movement to embrace a social justice platform that is
accountable to the lived reality of people of color worldwide who live
in poverty and under oppression due to the legacy of European
colonialism and American imperialism.
According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the
World Health Organization, Global warming is already responsible for the
deaths of some 160,00 persons a year already. The study concluded that
children in developing countries are the most vulnerable to the impact
of global warming. So here at the outset of our conversation I want to
make it clear that we are already dealing with a circumstance that the
environmen- tal movement is prepared to address if it would only heed
the call.
Malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition, from droughts and floods are all the
result of climate change brought on by the industrialized efforts of the
West. Robert Watson, former chairperson of the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated, âAlmost any change
in climate will reduce agricultural productivity in the tropics and the
sub-tropics. Climate change is a developmental issue, not an
environmental one.â
In other words he is saying that, given the way in which global warming
impacts the planet, the areas of the world that get impacted the most
and experience the greatest chaos, crises and disaster as a result are
those areas are all too often underdeveloped. We are not talking about
Europe. We are not talking North America, Canada, Russia even. We are
talking about the tropics and sub-tropics, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin
America. Nations that are under-developed and thus donât have the
infrastructure to respond to the threat of global warming. And so
disease is rampant.
Malnutrition, diarrhea, all of these issues that in developed nations
all you got to do is go to the hospital and get a pill.
For this reason social justice cannot be an afterthought for
environmentalists. For in truth it lies at the very heart of the
movement itself, of the struggle to save the planet. Save the planet
from what? Save the planet from whom? From what? The answer could be
from global warming, from the effects of what occurs in what is called
the greenhouse effect. From whom? From multinational corporations who
pollute our air and govern- ments that allow these corpses to get away
without restrictions in most cases particularly when they set up shop in
communities of color.
The question becomes and the question that lies at the heart of the
environmental movement is how did this occur? How did multinational
corporations gain access to the lands and lives of so-called Third World
peoples over the globe? This is a question of colonialism. This is a
question of the history of conquest on the part of Europe. Those people
are still oppressed. They still suffer the legacy of colonialism and
national oppression.
But here is the problem. See we can talk about theory and ideology but
when the rubber meets the road, when we really get down to it â the very
corporations who are involved in some of this mess fund many of our
organizations in the environmental movement.
So the question becomes if you are really about doing the real work then
you may in fact end up sacrificing a large part of your funding. Iâve
had conversations with a number of activists over the years. I have been
involved in this struggle for some decades now, and over the years we
activists understand and appreciate that if you are going to deal with
truth, if you are going to deal with the root causes of oppression and
suffering then you are going to need to find alternative sources to fund
your work.
And history speaks to this. I will share how. Earlier I spoke about
Robert Watson, who was the former chairperson of the UN
Intergovernmental Group on Climate Control. He was removed from his post
by an alliance between Exxon, Mobil and the US government because of his
outspokenness, because of his willingness to place the issue on
development. He was ousted because he went on record stating that the
people experiencing the heaviest impact on global warming are poor and
oppressed.
The question for the environmental movement is: Are we going to try to
cooperate with corporations? Or are we really going to begin to try to
challenge the corporate structure in a way that truly redresses the
problem toward the benefit of the majority of people who suffer, not
just those of us who live in the most privileged generation in the
history of the planet.
The corporate response is often to kill the messenger. For activists of
color all over the globe the term kill here is not meant as a metaphor.
That is actually what happens. The threat of death and the terrorism
witnessed and visited upon communities of color that seek to respond to
the reality of corporations coming into their communities, setting up
plants, polluting the air, the soil is real.
I want to share two examples of this. Just for the sake of time we just
got to deal with two. There are plenty more. Many people are aware of
the activist Ken Saro-Wiwa of the Ogoni people in Nigeria and how he was
executed in â95 for representing the interests of his people. Many folk
are aware of the activist Chico Mendez from Brazil who was also killed.
Both killed by corporations. Both killed with the backing of their
respective governments. Both killed with the funded support of the US
government.
There is a connection here that we as activists canât get around. Their
lives become the litmus test. I am not saying that we have to put
ourselves in front of bullets or put ourselves in the hangmanâs noose.
But at the same time what about their lives becomes instructive for how
we ought to be engaging this work?
The sad thing is and this is my personal criticism. It ought not take
somebodyâs death to cause that communityâs struggle to gain access to
the media. It shouldnât take someone having to be imprisoned for years
before activists in the West catch wind of the worry and begin to talk
it up.
Thatâs a problem again of the lack of network, the lack of an
international outlook on the part of activists in the West who are the
ones with the most access, no doubt, no question. When you listen to
their stories, when you read their writings, youâll understand that for
people of color throughout the world, those in so-called third world
countries, particularly, the environmental struggle is not simply about
saving trees. Itâs about saving people. Itâs about freeing the land.
Itâs about liberating the land. There is an acute awareness on the part
of activists throughout the globe outside of privileged nations that our
land has been robbed from us. That is why the pollution is occurring. We
lack control over the very land we live on. And understanding that,
walking with that analysis, we realize that we will never change the
condition of our environment until we are able to liberate the land,
until we are able to get these corporations off our land.
That is why in the case of the Ogoni in Nigeria they tied their struggle
against Shell with their struggle to political rights. It was not simply
about getting Shell out of Nigeria. It was also coupled with the
struggle to gain parody politically within the structure. But those of
us here in the West who take what we believe is democracy for granted,
we donât understand and appreciate that.
In Brazil the struggle was about gaining land rights. These were small
time farmers. These were people who lived in the forest. They had no
contact to the world per se. They were comfortable with that. They were
fine. Along comes some cattle herders and they wanted to tear down all
the trees so they can make land into pasture so their cattle can eat. So
Americans can buy beef.
I read a study just recently that said that the fact that people buy
beef has had a greater impact on global warming than humans themselves,
than human consumption itself. Meaning that cattle eat more than we do
and their waste contributes more to global warming that ours does. And
they are being fed so we can feed on them. Because of our consuming
drive there are whole populations of people in South America who are
being removed from their land. And are being killed if they refuse to
get off.
We got to make the necessary connections. It is not enough to call for a
boycott of Shell. It is not enough to stop eating meat. When their
blood, Ken and Chicoâs blood comes all the way back to the White House.
We can talk about the corrupt Nigerian government.
We can talk about the corruption in the Nigerian government. But who
made the corruption in the first place? What does US foreign policy have
to do with any of this? Plenty. And so our struggle as environmentalists
here has to be about charging the government responsible for the crimes
and atrocities that occur all over the globe wherever American interests
are present. And we have to support the indigenous peopleâs struggle to
liberate their land.
Malcolm X, who was assassinated this night back in â65 himself gave a
number of addresses here at Harvard, stated in his speech, âMessage to
the Grassroots,â that, âRevolution is based on land. Land is the basis
of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice and
equality.â The environmental state of the Ogoni people, the
environmental state of the Mapia people from whom Chico Mendezâs folk
come from in Brazil will not fundamentally change until they receive
justice. And that justice cannot occur ultimately until they are able to
liberate their land. We have to understand this. We have to understand
that there is a relationship between Bushâs war in Iraq, Bushâs
so-called axis of evil when the evil starts here at home.
See what many fail to understand is that if you donât have money you
have little to no defense in our times. And that can be made in a very
general way even in terms of what I am talking about here about
oppressed peoples across the globe. If you are poor you have no defense.
And the sooner that we who are more privileged begin to understand or
appreciate that fact and create a movement in alliance with that reality
to remedy the same, the sooner we will begin to see true progress. Until
that occurs weâre in trouble.
This next quote I am going to share with you is from Ken Saro-Wiwa. He
is talking about Shell and its relationship to whatâs going on in
Nigeria. He said, âShell has waged ecological war in Ogoni since 1958.
And ecological war is highly lethal, the more so as it is
unconventional. It is homicidal in its effect. Human life, flora, fauna,
the air fall at its feet and finally â the land itself dies. Generally
it is supported by all the traditional instruments ancillary to warfare
â propaganda, money and deceit. Victory is assessed by profits. And in
this sense Shellâs victory in Ogoni has been total.â
Over the 39 years of exploitation at the hands of Shell some 30 billion
dollars in profit Shell has accrued in the Ogoni region alone, which is
only 3% of the total oil production in Nigeria. Thatâs a billion dollars
essentially a year since Shell has been in Nigeria. Yet, in spite of all
this production and profit, the condition of the Ogoni people remains
ridiculously sad. No running water. No electricity. Yet the corporation
can come in and make that much money and not have any obligation to the
people whatsoever.
Shellâs profit motive is largely responsible for the repression of
Nigeriaâs democracy. It is that factor that leads to the corruption of
the government and the denial of democratic rights. See, here is a clue.
We donât need to look overseas. We donât need to go over or across our
borders to see the corruption cause it is happening right here. In
America those who are the poorest and not white, it is in their
communities that corporations set up their toxic waste dumps and
pollution centers that produce major respiratory problems for the poor
and of color in our own country. The term environmental racism coined in
1982 grew out of the learning that the most significant factor in the
siting of hazardous waste facilities nationwide was race. Ask yourself
where do the corporations in this community dump their trash? Where does
Harvard dump its trash?
Just as in the case of the Ogoni people, the Mapia people and other
oppressed peoples, majority Black cities like Camden in New Jersey and
St. Louis, Missouri and others, have been robbed of their political
rights due to state takeovers. The argument made by state governments
used to justify this anti-democratic, in fact fascist act, is that the
political structure in those cities have been corrupted. No one bothers
to ask how those structures got corrupted.
The same stuff going on in Nigeria is going on here. So people get
denied political rights because corporations have corrupted the
politicians. And then you get other corrupt politicians coming in saying
we are going to take over. Why? Not so that democracy can be
reestablished but so that more corporations can come in and set up shop.
Thatâs what is going on right now in Camden. It is what is going on in
St. Louis and other places throughout the country where the majority
populations are Black and Latino and poor.
The struggle is about the land. The struggle is about the political
struggle and rights, self-determination of oppressed peoples. Whoever
owns the land determines the quality of the air, thus the quality of
life. According to a recent study done forty of the worldâs poorest
countries face losses of more than a quarter of their food production as
a result of global warming by the year 2080. Those forty nations are
home to 2 billion people on the planet. That is about one third of the
worldâs population. The future is now!
Here is another example. I just happened to hear this on NPR one night
about the Inuit of Alaska and how they found large quantities of DDT in
the breast milk of the women. Now most folk would ask the question, âhow
did they get that stuff there?â The scientists were dumbfounded. They
would think that these folk farthest removed from the sprayers that go
over crops would be the last people to be at risk. But it is due to the
wind patterns. They had higher quantities of DDT than Canadian women
because of the wind patterns and the climate in that region around the
North Pole.
So people who donât even have a hand in the exploitation suffer as a
result of our desire to live comfortably. Something is wrong. Something
is wrong I tell you. There is a growing divide between rich and poor
nations, between the industrialized and the underdeveloped nations,
between the West and the rest. The question for the environmental
movement is: What side are you on? You must become radical. You must
radicalize your movement to place it in alliance with those who suffer
the most. Theyâre not looking for a handout. These arenât people who are
ignorant of the issues. These are folk who are very aware, who live in
the reality youâve researched.
The environmental movement at its most authentic state is an anti-
imperialistic movement, is an anti-racist movement. So if you as an
environmentalist are not demonstratively resisting and fighting
imperialism, if you as an environmentalist are not demonstratively
resisting and fighting racism then I question their commitment to
environmentalism.
I am going to leave this on your head and hearts. I have worked with a
number of groups represented here and others. And the issue always comes
up and hopefully may come up during the Q and A about diversifying
membership. Many predominantly white organizations want to make
themselves more aware of the issues and concerns of people of color, to
make your organizations more friendly and cooperative, but are
experiencing trouble. It doesnât seem to work. Your initiatives arenât
making progress. I challenge you to study, to reconsider your ideology,
the way in which you go about movement, the way in which you go about
struggle, how you develop propaganda, the kind of language style and
usage that you use.
Because I am telling you and I am telling you the truth. There are
people of color who are prepared. There are people of color who are
already engaged in this very work. They may not consider themselves
environmentalists.
They consider themselves mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, living
in urban wastelands, concerned about the lived reality of their people.
They donât need a title. They donât need an organization. They are doing
the best with what they got which ainât much. I challenge you to
reimagine your movement not in leadership but as following the direction
of these activists of color who exist on the frontlines of the movement
itself.
The problem is that all too often is that white activists tend to
believe that they know best, tend to believe that you all know better
how to engage struggle than people actually living it themselves.
The number one thing, then I am going to bring it to a close. The number
one thing you can do for the environment this year is to beat Bush. I am
not aware of how many people here are a part of the Green Party, or
whatever your politics are, whether you are Republican, Democratic,
Independent or Libertarian or whatever. But I am thankful that Nader
decided not to run for president this year. [Within a few days of this
address, Nader would announce that he was again going to campaign for
the presidency; this time as an independent â go figure!] Not just
because we have a better chance of getting Bush out of office cause that
vote now will hopefully go to the Democrat to make sure that happens.
But it is also because there is a greater issue here. And itâs an issue
that is going to stay with the Left or the movement, if you will, until
we remedy it. And that is this: When Nader ran in 2000, there was a
split between the progressive vote that partly enabled the fiasco that
led to Bush being appointed the president. My point is that had there
been some kind of coalition among progressives that cut across race and
class lines we might have been able to avoid that. The problem with the
Green party is no different than the problem with the environmental
movement and other majority white movements in this country. That it is
bogged down by a racism that even the most enlightened, the most
concerned still have trouble addressing. Given that, we all lose out.
We have to begin to enter into dialogue as different organizations, as
different communities, as people just concerned about the future of not
just our country but the world. We have to do that with the same amount
of fortitude and passion that we engage our particular issues. That is
our only solution. Me personally, I believe that we need to radicalize
the Democratic Party. No, I do not suffer from the delusion that we will
be able to wrestle it from the clutches of the corporate structure. But
if we were able to develop a progressive radical wing that is vocal,
that is clear on the issues, that knows how to use the media to our
advantage, then weâre better able to capture the imagination of the
American people. And that could be the starting point for the
development of a third political party that truly represents the
misrepresented and those of us that are not represented at all in
government. The Green Party is not that kind of party. The propaganda
machine of the Republican Party is well money and very sophisticated but
it is not undefeatable.
So Iâll close up with this little thought. You know, the people
responsible for why global warming is such a problem is the rich. Not
just because they own the corporations that pump pollution and toxins
into the air, but also because they eat the most and thus have the most
gas. All those bad emissions in the air arenât just coming from the
smokestacks but from the asses of the upper classes.
My goal in writing this is to help expand the movement for human
liberation which many of us understand ourselves to be a part of. First
Iâll explain a bit about the vision that drives me in my social change
work. Next, I will offer one key practical idea for movement-building. I
will follow the idea with a concrete example of how I and some comrades
have put the idea into practice. Then, I will share some key concepts
useful not only for explaining the practical idea, but also for
developing and evaluating virtually any tactical plan for mass
liberation that movement-builders might consider.
The ideas I present here are not new. I am a synthesizer; I like to take
disparate ideas and fashion them into a synthesis that is my own. Feel
free to take the pieces you desire and synthesize them in a way that
makes sense for you.
The title of this piece was inspired partially by a leaflet I created a
couple of years ago called âMobilize like kittens, not sheep,â and
partially by the notion that culture is fundamentally about patterns of
activity that we continually (re)create. But Iâm getting ahead of
myself. I hope the title makes sense by the time you finish reading
this.
A world where everyone understands that they are creators of social
reality, rather than spectators... a world where everyone feels worthy
of the best in life, and no one feels subordinate or less worthy than
anyone else... a world where our interactions bring out the best in us,
rather than the worst... a world where our institutions are nurturing
and life-affirming, rather than domineering and life-negating... a world
where our hopes overcome our fears.
(Note that in describing my vision I do not mention the usual list of
âismsâ that so many of us rightfully oppose: capitalism, racism,
heterosexism, patriarchy, adultism, elitism, etc. I believe these
dehumanizing social patterns are really symptoms of more fundamental
problems: We are unconscious of our own power, and we are ruled by fear.
To the extent we realize that we do not merely inherit the world but
that we shape it, these destructive and fear-based patterns will be
replaced by creative and hope- based patterns â at every level, and in
every facet of our lives.)
Growing up in an underclass Black family in Los Angeles, I experienced
the effects of racism and classism â external and internalized â around
and within me. (I call my family underclass and not working-class, cuz
most of the time nobody had a job â it was mostly welfare and petty
hustles.) Seeing my older brother marginalized for being gay, and seeing
my single mom have to hustle and get money from her boyfriends for us to
survive (âCan you throw me down some change this month?â), taught me
about heterosexism and patriarchy. Also, seeing people risk jail-time
just so they could have something that looked nice taught me about the
power of conformity and internalized oppression in peopleâs lives.
Seeing (and much later, experiencing) drug addiction taught me about the
often self- destructive power of escapism.
Success in school shaped me to be a young elitist â the kid who was
gonna make it out of the ghetto. That same success got me a scholarship
to an elite boarding school in New England where I began to see the
levers of elite power close up. I realized that the people in power were
no more deserving than anyone else. Eventually, time spent as an
exchange student in Brazil helped me see the global nature of class
society, patriarchy, white supremacy and the other âismsâ I had come to
despise, as well as the crucial role America plays in the global system.
The people I met in Brazil also reminded me of the amazing power of the
human spirit, and our capacity to create connections and joy even under
miserable social conditions. It was in Brazil that I realized that I
could not escape from or ignore the problems of the world, but that I
had to live my life fighting them.
When I was in college I met people who called themselves anarchists. I
saw that we had the same basic attitude on a lot of things â especially
challenging authority and conformity â so I realized that I was an
anarchist, too.
Letâs do a thought experiment. Two actually. Ready?
First, imagine a mass action in your favorite city. Itâs a march/rally.
Five hundred (or 5,000) people gather in a park. Youâre there with them.
While people stand around waiting for the action to begin, organizers
circulate around with extra signs, chant sheets and whistles. You all
line up and walk along a route â maybe a mile or two â where city
officials make sure traffic is cleared. Or, maybe you couldnât get a
permit and youâre walking along the sidewalk. Along the way folk are
chanting, singing, drumming, waving signs, a few even passing out
leaflets to lookers-on. After an hour or two of marching, you reach the
destination point. There is a rally. Great speakers, rousing performers,
old acquaintances, drums and chants. You even spot a reporter or two
from the local media. You and your friends go home, confident that you
did your part for the movement for peace and justice today.
Now, change the channels.
A second mass action. Same city. Five hundred (or 5,000) people gather
in a park. Youâre there with them. Organizers circulate around with
handouts on how to approach strangers and talk politics in public and
suggested locations. People share leaflets, surveys, stickers,
street-theater scripts, chalk. You all form teams of 2 to 5 people. The
teams â hundreds (or thousands) of them â fan out to locations all
throughout the city. (Supermarkets, gas stations, post offices, shopping
centers, laundromats, bus stops and movie lines are among the favored
spots.) At these locations the teams talk to people about the issues,
ask questions from a survey, hand out stickers and leaflets to those who
are down with the cause. A few even perform theater or create chalkings
on busy sidewalks. After an hour or two of connecting with people on the
street, you all reconverge for a rally.
Folk share stories about how it felt to engage with the public â the
challenges and the breakthroughs. Great speakers, rousing performers,
old acquaintances, drums and chants. You even spot a reporter or two
from the local media. You and your friends go home, confident that you
did your part for the movement for peace and justice today.
Questions for you to consider before moving on:
between the mass actions?
message out?
takes to build a movement among the people who participate?
Any other differences you think noteworthy?
The second mass action is the practical tool â a tactic â that I
promised to offer in this essay. I call it the kittens action. I choose
this term because of what it evokes. Kittens (cats) are different from
sheep in that, because they are not herd animals, their movements are
not easily controlled or constrained by those who would domesticate
them. If youâve ever lent an ear to a frustrated meeting facilitator,
school teacher, or soccer mom â or if youâve ever been one â you will
probably recognize the phrase âItâs like herding kittens!â
The kittens action follows a very simple recipe:
Step 1. Converge.
Step 2. Form teams, share materials for outreach.
Step 3. Spread out.
Step 4. Engage the public.
Step 5. Reconverge.
Step 6. Share stories and celebrate.
The kittens action is similar to what some people call an organizing
blitz, though blitzes usually have organization â specific goals (like
signing up new members), and Iâve never seen this sort of tactic used at
a mass action level involving people and groups with diverse interests.
Also somebody told me once that in Mexico City they did something
similar with teams called brigadas.
There was a gathering of diverse organizers and activists in December
2003 to discuss community and autonomy in LA. The event was organized by
folk whoâd been inspired by their exposure to Zapatismo, such as the
people at Casa del Pueblo. At the end of that meeting one of the
requests was for a way for the diverse people and organizations present
to continue to connect and work together. I suggested putting together a
monthly kittens action, perhaps with a different theme each month, so
that various forces around LA could come together on a more regular
basis and do concrete work together.
Many were in agreement, so some of us organized the first event, called
POP! the Revolution (POP= People Organizing & Partying), to happen in
January. Here is the email announcement we sent out:
Ready to see LA-area activism taken to the next level?
Ready to connect with diverse activists working on various fronts in the
struggle for social justice?
Ready to stop feeling angry and start celebrating and building the
culture of resistance?
Then you are invited to:
P.O.P.! the Revolution Party
People Organizing & Partying
against us â we simply need to activate those already on our side
center
Saturday, January 17^(th), 2004, 2 p.m.
Echo Park Methodist Church
1226 Alvarado, just north of Sunset
Sounds intriguing... In a nutshell, what is it?
Activists from all over LA coming together to join forces for a day of
schmoozing and organizing in the community, to turn traditional protest
into community engagement, and to have fun. A new way to help the LA
left feel more connected.
agenda in brief:
2:00: PREPARE â welcome to the community, intros, brief training, form
street teams
3:00: OUTREACH â street teams fan out to surrounding grocery stores, gas
stations, connect with the public, ask critical questions, share
resources
5:30: PARTY â food, music, open-mic, performance art, share experiences
This is the first of what will become a monthly event, held at different
locations all throughout LA, highlighting our various struggles
If you are interested in teaming up with us, or to help make this and
future events successful, then spread the word, and join our email list!
At that first event about 50 people showed up. Many of the people
present were not regular activists; just progressive folk who were fed
up with feeling powerless and wanted to do something.
After intros we did a training on how to talk to people, on how to
approach strangers to get their attention, on what to expect in terms of
people turning you down or ignoring you, on how to focus your efforts on
people willing to dialogue and not waste time debating people who wanna
be haters, etc. We gave everyone a list of questions to ask people about
community issues, and a stack of informational leaflets with alternative
media and community resources.
Next, people went out in teams of two to five. Some went to
supermarkets, others to gas stations, and others to bus stops. People
were out for about an hour. (From the agenda we put in the email you can
see weâd planned for a longer time outreaching, but, shockingly, we were
behind schedule.)
When the teams returned we had a debriefing session. The energy was
palpable. Folk talked about how exhilarating it felt to approach total
strangers in the streets and talk politics. Folk talked about some of
the amazing and interesting people theyâd met â for example, one guy who
is not a typical âactivistâ but who organizes his buddies every year to
donate SUV-loads of food to homeless folk on Skid Row. Folk talked about
how most of the people they met were actually pretty open to chatting
and happy to receive info on alternative media. One guy mentioned how he
realized how difficult it was to judge people by the way they look or
dressed â an older guy who heâd assumed would be a Bush-lover was
actually pretty critical of the war and complained about all the tax
breaks going to the rich. One woman said how now she feels more
confident, so that next time sheâs in line at a grocery store sheâll be
less afraid to talk to people in line next to her.
We did another POP! the Revolution event the following month, with
similar experiences reported by a new set of participants. One complaint
was that our leaflets didnât have enough info on local resources to help
people in need of specific help: How to move more from talking to
action?
Although the POP! the Revolution event was more like a workshop than a
mass action, it is essentially a mini-kittens action. With more
participants â hundreds or thousands instead of a few dozen â a mass
kittens action would likely include many forms of outreach to engage the
public, from various sorts of leaflets and surveys to street preaching
to street theater and interactive art. My hope is efforts like POP! will
help popularize the idea of the kittens action, so that more mass action
organizers will think in terms of getting folk they mobilize to be
organizers, outreaching in the community, not just warm bodies to fill
the streets or hold one sign in a sea of signs. Imagine the impact of
5,000 activists spending an hour or two throughout the city having
conversations with 50,000 or 100,000 people!
One criticism often leveled at anarchists by certain segments of the
left â in particular Marxists â is that we are all tactics and no
theory. I vehemently disagree with this criticism. The reality is that
anarchist practice usually has strong theoretical underpinnings. The
problem comes with articulating those ideas in a way that non-anarchists
can understand.
Before we continue, there is a term that I use that may be unfamiliar to
many readers. Itâs that weird term that appears in the title of this
essay: meme. (It rhymes with seem.) It was coined by zoologist Richard
Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. It was taken from a Greek
root meaning âimitate.â Memes are units of cultural information such as
recipes, ideas, songs, social conventions, fashions, gestures, rituals
and sayings.
Memes are to culture what genes are to biology. Like genes, memes
replicate, mutate, spread and die out. Just as genes powerfully shape
the form and function of biological organisms, memes shape the form and
function of cultures and societies.
In the rest of this section I will give you a sense of the theoretical
basis for and the visionary implications of the kittens action. I will
do this by explaining five key concepts â five powerful memes that,
taken together, may serve as tools to shift how we think about and do
social change work. In explaining these memes I will show that the
kittens action is not merely a tactic as itâs commonly understood â a
choice of action to be used or not as expedient. The kittens action
carries within it both a strategy â a long- term plan of action and a
vision â a place we want our strategies to take us to. I also hope to
show that whatever one thinks of this particular tactic, there is a sore
need for anarchists in particular and progressives in general to create
and promote tactics whose long-term effects are similar to those of the
kittens action if our vision for a more liberated and just world is to
be realized. What exactly the long-term effects of the kittens action
are will be clearer as we proceed.
Whatâs the connection between tactics, strategy and vision?
Maybe itâs because my first intellectual passions lay in the sciences
and mathematics, but I often find useful metaphors for thinking about
how people, social groups and society work coming from fields like
mathematics, biology, and complex systems theory. For example, Iâve
found the biological cell with its semi-permeable boundary â selectively
and flexibly allowing in some but not all outside influences â useful in
thinking about how an evolving culture or social group interacts with
other groups or cultures.
In thinking about how society as a whole functions, one useful metaphor
is the human brain. Like society, the brain is made up of multitudes of
specialized yet adaptable, highly interconnected, dynamically developing
yet historically shaped, semi-autonomous units. In the brain these units
are neurons, while in society they are people.
In a complex system such as the brain (organisms and ecosystems are
further examples of these sorts of systems), there are various levels at
which one may examine the systemâs dynamics. These levels fall along a
spectrum from the micro â the realm of individual parts â to the macro â
the realm of patterns and relationships among parts. For example, in the
brain there are neurons (micro level) and there are concepts (macro
level).
Whereas small numbers of neurons may be involved in a processing a
particular sense datum (for instance, recognizing the color green),
large collections of neurons are involved with more emotional or
conceptual work (for example, appropriately recognizing a green traffic
light).
The standard view of the philosophy of reductionism is that a whole can
be understood simply by understanding its parts. Classical physical
science is the child of reductionism â for example, the search in
physics for the smallest building blocks of matter. In reaction to the
limitations of reductionism, holistic approaches to knowledge emphasize
relationships and wholes â parts only can be understood in a particular
context or environment.
Feedback â everywhere is the idea that reductionism and holism are both
true, but only partially. Parts create the whole and the whole shapes
the parts. There is mutual influence between the various levels in a
complex system, a dialectical cascade between the micro and the macro.
For example, it turns out that in the brain not only do the things we
sense, perceive, or experience inform our concepts, and shape our moods,
but that our concepts and moods in turn shape what we perceive. Have you
ever misinterpreted a friendâs innocent remark? Then you know what I
mean.
In the social realm these contending perspectives â reductionism and
holism â play out in debates between rugged individualist
âconservatives,â and social constructionist âliberals.â (A lot of
contentiousness in our society actually seems to arise from these same
clashing views on the relationship of individuals to groups.)
Feedback-everywhere allows us to transcend this duality: not only do
individuals create society, but society creates individuals.
As I mentioned before, a common criticism of anarchists is that we are
all action without theory, tactics without strategy. A corollary of the
feedback â everywhere principle provides adequate response to this
criticism: the unity of tactics, strategy and vision. Although it is
axiomatic among folk who wanna be smart planners that vision determines
strategy determines tactics, it is rarely recognized that the chain of
effect runs in reverse as well: what we do today (a tactical choice)
shapes our path for tomorrow (strategic possibilities), and the
unfolding of that path shapes our evolving vision. This corollary of
feedback- everywhere â the unity of tactics, strategy and vision â is
embodied in the classic anarchist understanding that our means
(tactics/strategy) must harmonize with our ends (vision).
Thus, the kittens action is not only a tactic for mobilization, to be
used or not as expedient, but it also implies a class of compatible
strategies for transformation, and a class of compatible visions of the
society its practitioners would like to create. Again, the kind of
strategy and vision implicit in the kittens action will be made more
clear as we look at the five other memes.
How do we fight the/for power?
Power exists only in the interaction between people. Although the power
relationship may imply different roles-the âpowerfulâ and the
âdisempoweredâ â that relationship only has reality because of the
participation and the acquiescence of each participant.
This principle has been recognized by generations of diverse social
theorists and social actionists (e.g. Hume, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Foucault,
and Biko, to name just a few) who have long argued that the power of an
oppressive regime rests on the peopleâs obedience to that regime. In the
words of Steven Biko, âThe most powerful tool in the hands of the
oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.â
Despite this long tradition of nuanced and dialectical thinking about
power, many people, including many on the left, still tend to think in
absolute and static terms when they ponder the nature of power: the
elite or the privileged are âpowerfulâ while the oppressed and the
marginalized are âpowerless.â Power for them becomes like a scarce
commodity: some people have it while others donât.
Why is this way of thinking so pervasive? There at least three reasons
for the popularity of this idea of power: 1) It provides a kind of
rationalization for resignation-âWe have good reason to feel hopeless!
Weâre powerless for chrissakes!â; 2) It results from internalized
oppression-resistance becomes inconceivable when we see ourselves as
powerless; 3) Our concepts work metaphorically. The commodity concept of
power arises via metaphorical extension: Power is something we desire
and that we negotiate in social transactions, and thus it is like a
commodity.
The problem with this scarce commodity concept of power is that it can
lead people to make bad strategic choices in their social change work,
and it can lead to perceived and therefore manifest powerlessness. For
example, radical social actionists often criticize liberal reformists
for solving social problems in a way that reinforces the power of the
oppressive social forces that cause the problems to begin with. By
begging the master to throw you a bone, you affirm the masterâs power
over your life. To the extent this criticism is true, it is the liberal
reformistsâ assumptions about the âpowerlessnessâ of the people they
want to save that is to blame.
A thought experiment I like to give people when it seems like their
understanding of power is too absolute or commodity-like is this:
Imagine you could get rid of the top 1,000,000 power people in the
world- you know, the CEOs, the high-level officials, the presidents, the
generals, the corporate boards of directors, the biotech wizards, the
movie moguls, etc. Imagine you could just snap your fingers and boom!
they would all disappear without a trace.
After their twinkling eyes tell me theyâve gotten the picture, I then
ask:
Ok. So the rulers of society are gone. Now what happens next? Social
liberation? The struggleâs over? We won?
After some moments of consideration, they usually will say something
like, âNaw, it wouldnât make much of a difference. Other people â the
middle managers, the staffers, the lieutenants, the assistants, etc â
-would all just move up to take their places. What would need to change
is the system, the consciousness.â
To fight the power (and win), it is not enough to get rid of the people
who are privileged. We must change the consciousness that the current
power relations reflect. Iâm reminded of the marvelous title of an
anarchist pamphlet Iâve had on my shelf for the longest but that Iâve
never gotten around to reading: You Canât Blow Up a Social Relationship.
A characteristically anarchist approach to taking action to challenge
power relations is direct action. Direct action means taking action to
directly address a problem or get your needs met, without asking the
powers that be to do it for you. Direct action means fighting power by
asserting your own power, as opposed to asking that others with power
treat you kinder or gentler. Although many activists donât emphasize
this, direct action isnât just about fighting power: itâs also about
changing consciousness. People who take direct action to improve their
lives end up by having a greater sense of control over their own lives.
By taking action they change the world, and by changing the world they
change themselves. (This is another example of feedback-everywhere.
Also, see Meme 5 for more on the role of action in shaping our sense of
self.)
Some people confuse direct action with civil disobedience, especially
after the dramatic protests involving mass arrests that weâve seen in
the global justice movement since Seattle. Though direct action and
civil disobedience can overlap, they are not the same. Civil
disobedience means breaking a law in order to get justice â either
directly in the moment or indirectly through a moral appeal to other
people. Direct action means doing what it takes to get immediate justice
â whether the action is legal or not. Consider the issue of police
brutality. An example of a civil disobedience response would blocking
the streets in order to highlight the issue for the public. An example
of direct action would be forming a Copwatch group to show up and
closely observe whenever folk get stopped by the police.
Since any tactic has implications for strategy and vision (cf. feedback
â everywhere), when evaluating a tactic we should ask ourselves: Does
the tactic (or its related strategy) work to change power relations and
consciousness in a fundamental way? If the answer is yes, great. If the
answer is no, time to rethink our tactics.
How does the kittens action work to change power relations and
consciousness? In some ways the kittens action is closer to direct
action than the typical march-rally.
At a march, most participants do not directly engage the public; they
are merely part of a crowd passing by waving their signs. The immediate
target of a typical march-rally is actually the media, and only
indirectly the public.
Organizers draw media attention in the hopes that the media will then
communicate their message to the public. In contrast, at a kittens
action, the participants interact with the public directly; they become
the media themselves and take their message directly to the people.
Also, participants at a kittens action (kittens for short) must think
and make decisions on the spot â where to go, who to engage, what to
say, how to respond â whereas few such decisions need to be made by
marchers following the crowds on a pre-planned route. And these
interactions happen involving many, many more members of the public than
the relative few who happen to see a march go by. Their autonomy
combined with the widespread nature of their action means kittens pose a
greater challenge than marchers to the taboos about how to behave in
public.
Finally, kittens interact with lots of people who may not automatically
agree with or be as passionate about the issues as them. Thus they work
more than marchers in challenging their own fears of rejection. They
become stronger organizers.
One visionary implication of the kittens action is thus revealed:
building a society where everyone sees themselves as creators of social
reality, with lead-not just supporting-roles to play.
There are other ways I believe the kittens action fits within a larger
vision of consciousness change. Iâll explain more below.
What needs to change in our culture?
Political structures and economic structures not only shape culture, but
they arise out of culture (cf. feedback â everywhere). Social
transformation of the kind people like us wanna see will require more
than a changing of the guard-it will require a shift in our culture, a
shift in our everyday habits of thinking and acting.
In what ways does our culture need to shift? There are many, many ways I
can think of, and Iâm sure you can, too. Iâll list a few here that are
of particular relevance to the kittens action.
First, mainstream U.S. culture has a bizarre taboo against talking
politics in public. Our media primarily focus on personalities, trivia
and tragedies. Social reality is mainly a show â one with us as
spectators, and whose key events seem beyond our control.
How can people see themselves as creators of social reality?
Second, we have a dominant culture that squashes dialogue on deeper
levels. For most people in our society, it is not cool to seem ignorant
or confused, so asking questions is uncool. It is not cool to show a
need for help or a reliance on other humans. We strive to be
independent, so we tend to repress, not express, many of the feelings
that arise from our basic needs. Hence, for these reasons and others,
instead of communication, dialogue, and understanding, we have
advertisements, announcements, and arguments.
How can we create dialogue that deepens our understanding of ourselves
and each other?
Furthermore, our economic system actually depends on people feeling
disconnected and unable to rely on others: individually wrapped
lifestyles make us bigger consumers and more fearful workers. Ways of
relating that are about mutual aid and interpersonal connection outside
scripted roles â insofar as they are not marketable or commodifiable,
and insofar as they interfere with workplace discipline â get
deemphasized in our corporate- mediated culture. (The historical loss of
the commons has been well- documented, and continues to play out in
contemporary struggles over privatization.) The acceptable roles â
consumers, workers, sports fans, et al. â get scripted for us. As we
spend our time wearing masks not of our own creation, we feel less in
control of our own lives, and a sense of powerlessness (or alienation)
becomes pervasive. The alienation leads to greed and fear: Greed to beat
out our competition (i.e., fellow humans), and fear that the competition
will beat us out. The business and the government elites use greed and
fear to increase the power they wield in our lives. And the alienation
growsâŠ
How can we stop this cycle of alienation, fear, and greed?
Finally, most forms of collectivity in our society â teams, companies,
public agencies, etc. â are organized as clear hierarchies, with bosses,
managers and followers. Very rarely do we have opportunities to work in
groups that are organized in an egalitarian way, where the experiences
of each participant are equally important. Thus, we get used to seeing
collectivity as requiring a weakening of our individuality. We come to
see individuality and collectivity as locked in a zero-sum competition.
To be a âstrong individualâ means to ignore the collective, and to be a
âgood team- playerâ means to efface oneâs own needs.
How can we create social groups that both enhance and feed off of the
power of the individual members? How can we create liberated forms of
collectivity?
In reaction to the pervasive hierarchy that informs our social groups,
and because they cannot think of alternative structures, some anarchists
espouse doing away with complex forms of social organization altogether.
Some pine for an idyllic past where everyone lived in small egalitarian
bands and complex divisions of labor did not exist. However, the
majority of thoughtful anarchists make a distinction between the
legitimate authority of experts who we choose to listen to for advice or
situational leadership, and the imposed authority of bosses, rulers and
elites.
But knowing in theory that legitimate and non-coercive leadership is
possible doesnât mean that itâs always clear how to make it work in
practice. A huge stumbling block for efforts to create egalitarian
social arrangements is that the vast majority of peopleâs socialization
has occurred primarily through hierarchical groups and institutions. One
of the powerful and far-reaching impacts of the global justice
movementâs mass mobilization efforts has been the exposure of many, many
people to effective egalitarian forms of decision-making (e.g. affinity
groups). These people certainly take their experiences into other
aspects of their lives and their social change work.
A question to ask about any tactics (or strategies) for social change is
this: to what extent do those tactics (or strategies) help prefigure or
bring about a desirable and necessary change in the way we live our
lives, a desirable and necessary shift in our culture?
The kittens action promotes a culture-shift on all the fronts Iâve just
mentioned.
First, it gets folk to transgress the taboo about talking politics in
public. The demise of this taboo would have deep and far-reaching
consequences in our society. No longer would the American public be
content to limit its sophisticated analyses and passionate debates to
sports, pop stars and movies. No longer would our roles as consumers or
workers eclipse our roles as community members, as citizens (documented
or not). When social reality ceases to be a trivial show, when social
reality is something that we have important things to say about, then we
can move from being spectators to being creators.
Second, by breaking through not only the taboo against politics but the
taboo against purposefully engaging strangers in dialogue, kittens renew
their sense of interdependence and connection with the real people who
make up the real society around them. Conversing about heartfelt stuff
with people outside our normal circles makes it hard to reduce people to
tokens in a theory, it expands our sense of our own humanity, and it
moves us out of alienation.
Third, the kittens action â just like other anti-authoritarian forms of
mass action (e.g. affinity group convergences) â engages participants in
a form of collectivity where every individual is a key actor and
decision-maker, and where the power of the group is directly dependent
on the power of the individuals, and where the power of the individuals
is directly connected with the power of their team and indirectly
(especially at the final reconvergence/sharing stories step) connected
with the power of the overall action. We learn to create liberated forms
of collectivity through practical experience.
How do we move from the margins into the center?
Anarchists who are into organizing are often critical of those who
represent anarchism largely as a subculture or lifestyle. Anarchist
organizers argue that lifestylist anarchists marginalize themselves in
their safe subculture niches and thus become invisible and irrelevant in
the wider movement.
The marginalization anarchist organizers worry about is not just a
problem for anarchists â itâs a problem for the left as a whole. (N.B. I
know some of yâall donât like the word âleft.â Sorry for any semantic
inconvenience. What I mean by âleftâ is very broad: the people who
believe we need more social equality, more sustainability, less hatred,
and more liberation in the world.)
For most of us on the left, the longer we see ourselves as part of the
left, the more we feel estranged and distant from regions of culture
that used to be familiar to us. We spend more and more time with other
progressives and activists, and less and less time with that
âconservative brother-in-law who just doesnât get it.â We shift our
sense of community as we shift our sense of self. This is quite normal.
However, if we on the left are going to win the public to our side of
the struggle, we gotta do more than complain about the people who donât
know what we know, or the people who arenât activated like us. We gotta
figure out how to teach people what we know, and we gotta figure out how
to activate people. In short, we gotta organize.
A lotta people assume that organizing means organization-building.
Perhaps this comes from the (correct) notion that systemic change
requires institutional change, and the (incorrect) notion that
institutional change requires mass organizations. Or perhaps it comes
from Marxist- Leninist party-fetishism. Who knows?
When I talk about organizing I donât mean getting people to join an
organi- zation, although that can be a part of it. By organizing I
simply mean doing what organizers do â getting people to do something,
getting people to take action. Ultimately, it doesnât matter if someone
joins a particular organization, as long as that person is doing work to
expand human liberation, and as long as they understand that their work
is part of a larger tapestry of transformation, a tapestry that includes
the work I and people like me are doing.
This is a critical point so let me take time to be clear here. The
impact and legacy of left social movements (e.g. the civil rights
movement, the anti-nuke movement) cannot be measured simply by the
policies that are passed or by the organizations that get created. After
all, policies can be subverted and organizations can ossify. The main
value of left social movements comes from the transformative actions
they inspire from millions of unnamed and unaffiliated people, people
whose lives are changed by something they are a part of, people who take
what they learn into the rest of their lives. The main value of social
movements comes from the way they deepen our consciousness and shift our
culture.
Any tactic or strategy connected with a vision for liberation must say
yes to the following question: Does this tactic or strategy lead to
transformative action? Does this tactic or strategy organize?
It is clear that the kittens action, like any mass action, does organize
people, at least its participants. Participants step outside their
normal scripts of silence and anonymity in the face of the culture of
complicity, and they do something about the ills they perceive. Further,
by directly engaging the public, kittens can organize many, many others
as well.
More on this to come.
How do people learn? What makes people change?
What makes people change? This is the fundamental question facing all
organizers (and teachers). This question should be on the mental front
burners of anyone who cares about changing the world.
There are essentially two views on the problem of getting people to
learn or change. One view is that learning happens primarily through
symbols â words, texts, stories, images, etc. The other view is that
learning happens primarily through experience â things that happen to us
and things that we do. (These two views are really part of a more
complex continuum. For instance, consider role-models, people in our
lives that serve as examples for us to follow. Are they experiences? Are
they symbols? Both? Neither?)
Organizers (and teachers) who take the symbolic approach focus on making
convincing arguments, telling compelling stories, showing people
evocative images. Symbolic learning is the dominant approach taken in
traditional schooling, and it serves important functions â the
memorization of facts, the communication of the experiences of others.
Also, within organizing symbolic work serves a vital function-background
knowledge, raising critical questions.
The experiential approach to learning focuses on hands-on projects,
field trips, apprenticeships, experiments, student-centered learning.
(One example of student-centered learning is Paulo Freireâs liberation
pedagogy: it is all about privileging the âsubjectiveâ experience of the
learner over the âobjectiveâ official knowledge of the teacher.) In
organizing, the experiential approach focuses on helping people reflect
on their own experiences, and pushing people to have new experiences-to
expand their understanding of an issue and their relationship to the
issue.
Although formal schooling is dominated by symbolic learning,
experiential learning is almost universally recognized among educators
to be the most powerful approach.
Pause for a moment to think about your most powerful and memorable
learning experience. Did it happen because someone made an especially
convincing argument to you, or told you a particularly compelling story?
If youâre like most people, chances are your most powerful learning
experience was precisely that â an experience, something that happened
that you were a part of.
In the realm of social change as well, the symbolic approach has
limitations. One weakness of the symbolic approach to social change can
be seen in the diluted and in some cases reversed. Policy victories of
the civil rights movement, for instance; although Brown v. Board of
Education (and following rulings and legislation) ended de jure
segregation in schooling, de facto segregation continues. Fifty years
after Brown the racial gaps in education persist, mainly because the
racist attitudes of whites in America have not changed that much.
Another weakness with symbolic approaches to change as compared to
experiential approaches has to do with long-term vision. Is our vision
to continue a culture where politics is a spectacle, a parade of
rhetoric and images, controlled by an elite minority of privileged and
highly-trained image-makers, story-tellers and symbolic analysts (be
they from the left, center or right)? Or do we want to create a culture
where politics is not seen primarily as something you watch, read about
or listen to, but rather as something you do, something you experience?
This is a really difficult thing to imagine. It is perhaps a universal
of human culture that the leaders and chiefs tend to be the ones who are
the most verbally astute. Throughout human history â and evidence
suggests even in the days when we were all hunters and gatherers living
in small nomadic bands â political life has been disproportionately
influenced if not dominated by those who were the most adept at words
and images. Is it even possible to have a political culture that doesnât
have this sort of built-in status hierarchy?
(Additionally, personality typologies such as the Myers-Briggs and
learning theories that look at multiple intelligences and learning
styles suggest that symbolic-oriented learners â as opposed to
concrete-experientially- oriented learners â form a privileged minority
within our schooling system, especially at the secondary and
post-secondary levels.)
Recognizing the problematics with this kind of power is difficult,
especially as many of us, including me, have found a kind of power to
fight oppression through our facility with language and symbols.
Yet there is a paradox. On the one hand, we want people to take action
and take charge of their own lives, and not be led by whatever images
theyâre fed by the elites, or whatever myths theyâre told by charismatic
people around them. On the other hand, the most ready tool for social
change many of us have is our own influential voice (be it spoken or
written or performed or illustrated). (Eugene Debs, socialist
presidential candidate in the early 1900s, illustrated this paradox when
he said, âI donât want you to follow me or anyone else. I would not lead
you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in,
somebody else would lead you out.â )
It is essentially the question of how to promote revolution without
promoting oneself. This question must be recognized and grappled with
those of us who envision a society without elites of any kind.
The history of revolutions for social equality creating new elites and
ruling castes shows the difficulty of overcoming this conundrum.
Clearly, in these instances, symbolic revolution, articulated by
revolutionary elites, won out over experiential revolution grounded in
the unique perspectives of all members of society. Top-down won out over
bottom-up.
Perhaps the conundrum can be canceled by an approach that combines
actions with symbols in some sort of dialectic or transformation? To the
extent both the actions and the symbols are controlled by each
individual, elitist divisions of labor between those who instruct and
those who follow instructions could be overcome. (I once chatted with a
woman who was a self-made life-planning counselor. She told me a bit
about neurolinguistic programming-a self-improvement approach that uses
individually chosen gestures to symbolize moods or mindsets that we want
to reinforce in ourselves. Something for further studyâŠ)
So weâve considered some weaknesses with symbolic approaches to social
change. What about experiential approaches?
An example of the power of action and experience in personal
transformation comes from the field of social psychology.
There was study conducted by a team of social psychologists in a
suburban neighborhood. They posed as âcommunity workersâ and asked the
residents whether they would be willing to place a billboard in their
front lawns as a public service. The billboards would say âPlease Drive
Carefully.â Of course, the vast majority of them said âhell no!â to the
request â 85% of the people in the studyâs control group in fact refused
to do this public service. In the test group, however, in the same
neighborhood, with demographics exactly the same, 83% said âyesâ to the
âcommunity workersâ strange request.
One group was 85% ânoâ while the other group just the reverse, 83%
âyes.ââ
Why such a dramatic reversal in response between the two groups of
residents? The only difference between the two groups was that, two
weeks previously, another set of âcommunity workersâ had visited the
test group, with a smaller and much easier request: Would they be
willing to place a 3- by-3 inch card in their front window with the
words âPlease Drive Carefullyâ? When given this token request, the
almost all of the people said âyes.â
Because the people in the test group had already done a token action
supporting the cause (placing the card in their window), they were much
more likely to do a bigger action (putting up a billboard in their yard)
for the cause later on. By taking a small action peopleâs sense of
themselves had changed, and they were much more likely to do other and
bigger actions in the future, consistent with their changed sense of
self. (This study and similarly interesting results from social
psychology can be found in Robert Cialdiniâs Influence: the Psychology
of Persuasion and Eliot Aaronsonâs The Social Animal. )
This notion of getting people to do small things in order to make them
more likely to do bigger things later on is known as baby-steps by
organiz- ers (and foot-in-the-door by sales people). It is a powerful
example of the power of action in transformation.
The kittens action applies this notion of baby-steps on two levels, at
the level of the wider public and at the level of the kittens
themselves.
Firstly, in a kittens action, because the kittens are engaging the
public, and not just holding signs or chanting in a crowd, they can get
the people they meet to do things like write letters, sign petitions,
put stickers on their cars, wear buttons, swear oaths, and a host of
other token actions that will get the people who are not activists to
move one baby-step in the direction of becoming activists.
Thus, the movement becomes bigger.
Secondly, by helping kittens have a baby-step experience as organizers
directly and personally engaging the public to promote their cause, the
kittens action helps the participants to see themselves as organizers.
Thus the kittens action help create more organizers, more people who
will be active and effective over the long-term at expanding the
movement.
These individuals will not only interact with the people they meet that
particular day; they will go on to be more likely to interact with
others they meet in the future-in their workplaces, in their
neighborhoods, in the supermarkets. In this way, not only does the
kittens action do like any mass action and organize the people who
participate-the kittens action spreads the meme of organizing to create
more organizers!
Thus, the movement becomes deeper.
With the help of baby-steps, we can see how the kittens action provides
a powerful application of the meme of experience over symbolism, and a
powerful tactic in helping us build a bigger and deeper movement.
For me, as an organizer and as a teacher, the biggest question I face
everyday is: What can I do to get people to have experiences that
transform and enrich their sense of possibilities? One of the things
Iâve learned (and relearned many times!) is that this question is
equivalent to the question: What can I do to transform and enrich my own
sense of possibilities? As a religion teacher I had in college named
Thandeka once told me, The inner and the outer are one.
On some days or at some moments I see the light and feel inspired, at
other times itâs enough just to get through the day without seriously
wanting to hurt somebody or myself. Such is life.
Besides self-care, like walking or playing or staring at stars or fun
personal stuff like that, one thing that renews my hope in a heartbeat,
that allows me to smile and say things like âGeorge Bush is good for
Americaâ to my friends and not feel like Iâm telling a sick joke is
this: remembering that I am just but a single thread in a huge and
unfolding tapestry of liberation.
Every single person on this planet has a role in weaving that tapestry.
And everybodyâs got a unique thread to weave. The best and only thing I
can do is weave my thread and get out of the way of people trying to
weave theirs.
The revolution is now. The revolution is all the time. Welcome to the
revolution.
Capitalism by Kapila
Letâs put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed,
too, by sexism â the lie that there can be such thing as âmen
liberationâ groups. Oppression is something that one group of people
commits against another group specifically because of a âthreateningâ
characteristic shared by the latter group â skin color or sex or age
etc. The oppressors are indeed fucked up by being masters (racism hurts
whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not
oppressed. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism
or racism â the oppressed have no alternative â for they have no
power-but to fight. In the long run, Womenâs Liberation will of course
free men, but, in the short run, is going to cost men a lot of
privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is not the
fault of women; kill your fathers, not your mothers.
â Robin Morgan
I look at their faces, I see reflection and masks that sometimes repeat
my own in a strange cyclic pattern of power. Because in here, I am but a
wage- slave, condemn sweating and hurting for eight bucks an hour,
forced to smile and accept condescend behavior from the all-smiling,
ever merry elite of the capital. Out there, they might call me a
brother, an equal. We are not.
The system of class and the European system of white dominance and
colonialism fused to became one single straight brute force, a giant
juggernaut that tramples over the working-class worldwide and its two
legs are racism and sexism.
Let us be realistic.
While I work at Stanford University, serving food for the sons of the
elite and the future elite, it is increasingly strange for me to realize
that this elite sometimes has skin darker than mine, accent thicker than
mine, visible cultural roots sometimes more apparent than mine. The
strength in which this realization affects me cannot be easily described
â it is an eye-opener and is a mind narrower, it is both an epiphany as
it is of such an obscurity.
This multicolored, multicultural bourgeoisie is always the enemy and
sometimes the most unexpected and always undesired ally, which forces
its âdiversityâ and its âoppressed situationâ down my throat, in an
obscene mockery of the plight of the workers of the world.
Let us be realistic.
Racism â white dominance â is not an American phenomenon. The âwhite
raceâ supports a global system of racial inequality and prejudice where,
worldwide, the white male has a hegemonic dominance. It is the new
capitalist model, and it is the old. Imperialism is a stream that never
dried because it is vital for the World Capitalism.
The capitalist globalization process that everyday kills and destroys
the lives of millions and millions of people around the globe serves the
political, social and economic agenda of a very well structured global
elite. This global elite is composed essentially of capitalist white
males, power- hungry and with no desire whatsoever of relinquish or
divide power. It is paramount to their institutions of power to ensure
the security of the âinvisibilityâ of the fact that the elite of the
world is composed of one class, one race and one gender. This elite
controls the levels of government and the levels of business. They are
the church (the moral authority) and they are the creators of culture.
They are the philosophers, the educators. They are too the most
pernicious and dangerous group of people.
This elite has across the centuries used the divisions and social
inequalities in society. In fact, they are the creators and the
maintainers of this oppressive structure, and the sole beneficiaries of
it. Through a structured and systemic misogynist, racist, homophobic,
brutal capitalist protocol, they ensure the maintenance of their global
empire and especially, the maintenance of their privilege domain over
the majority of the people on earth.
It is, it always was, in the interest of that elite that we, the people,
do not understand their affairs and could have no access to their
domains. The institutions of race, class and gender are notably set to
the advancement and comfort of these people and the exploitation of
others.
This elite maintains nowadays a global system of exploitation, a
structure that interlocks racism, sexism and âtraditionalâ capitalist
exploitation, which, for lack of a better word, I shall call World
Capitalism.
Traditional Marxist and class struggle analysis have always had a very
bad understanding of the race and gender â the concept that those two
systems of exploitation were a âfruitâ of capitalist society and would
be eliminated when the class struggle is resolved fails to analytically
criticize a culture based in racism and sexism â both of which came into
the picture way before capitalism was around â and how the power
structure of privilege does not have to be ratified by the police, the
capitalists or even the State. Culture alone can be a catalyst of
exploitation and submission, and the change and the complete revolution
in the bourgeoisie social fabric cannot be done by simply taking the
bourgeois out of the picture.
The understanding of the concept of privilege and how privilege imposes
itself is necessary to understand why is that racism and sexism are so
strong in our societies, why is that we to fight for the ârightâ of
getting jobs (not goods jobs, just jobs in general), why it is two or
three times scarier for us to walk at night, why is that, even when
economically would make sense to alleviate the tension around race and
gender â our society is adamant in keeping those tensions alive and
burning.
This elite benefits threefold from the system of World Capitalism â the
system devised, planned and structure around the white male bourgeois
privilege, a system that connects the different levels of exploitation
in one single machine.
Different from others, I firmly believe that the structure of the World
Capitalism could not do without racism and sexism. The reasons for the
existence of this two can be slightly different but the end result is
the same â the submission of the oppressed levels of the people to the
elite of the capitalist society.
For the purpose of this analysis, racism and sexism shall be broadened
to comprehend a multitude of other correlated subjects that are
intrinsically tied to and share the same roots of those concepts.
Racism, in this essay, refers (unless noted) to race dominance and
privilege, national identity, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism and
cultural repression. All those share a basic identity of a dominating
ethnic/national group and a subordinated one.
To understand race and capitalism in a broader sense of the American
concept of race, it is paramount to us to analyze race in its historical
context.
Racism in Europe started before Capitalism. The feudal lords and the
crown of Spain (absolutist and mercantilist) already obsessed over the
concept of âlimpieza de sangre,â the purity of blood. This concept
became strong in Spain in the 1400s, when the Spaniards fought against
the Moors invaders. A national liberation struggle, if you like.
These concepts of race and the purity of blood, however, were deeply
ingrained in European culture. Europe was a continent driven by conquest
and tribal wars. The Romans regarded the tribes of Germans and Francs to
be barbarians, brutes of low intelligence and destined to be submitted
to the rule of the roman fasciae.
Examples run back in history ad nauseam, in demonstrating a racist
culture and a racist system as an integral part of the European culture.
Why should we be shocked that they, when spreading their empire, spread
too their racist system?
It is sometimes a fairly common misconception that other cultures had no
racist background until the arrival of the Europeans. That is not true.
The African tribal wars that to this day plight the people in that
continent are a living proof that race (identity) has been an issue long
before Capitalism. What seems then to be the purpose of racism? In
classical dialectical materialistic analysis, the constant struggle over
power between forces of society shapes the format of the future and the
present of the said society.
In the case of the disappearance of race and gender in our society, the
only struggle to be faced would be the class war â and against a united
working class, the capitalist are bound to lose. The need of a different
struggle, the need of race and gender inequality for the capitalist is
to engage the working class in different battles, to divide and conquer
it.
Based on that, one could argue that, in the long run, racism has always
been a structure designed to maintain the power of a certain class over
another by creating a platform of âequalityâ of sorts, making them
âbrothersâ of the oppressed class. This definition of racism carries
more weight than we can initially imagine, but it fails to recognize
that racism can outlive class oppression â and be still the source of
power to a few that would dominate the hierarchy that from that would
emerge.
Racism and Sexism are more culturally rooted in the world than
Capitalism, more than the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. Some cultures are feudal systems, other monarchic
dictatorships (But I deny the Marxist evolutionism of societies in the
sense of feudal-to-capitalist-to-communist-to-free-socialist as being an
evolutionary process that is absolute to any society). Racism and Sexism
are two paramount structures of domination with which the world dominant
class maintains its power, and, without them, the structure of World
Capitalism would collapse.
It is part of the strategy of the global elite to actively support and
maintain white dominance worldwide.
The idea that white supremacy is an American phenomenon, that it is a
national issue to be dealt nationally, and that racism in the U.S. have
origins in American Capitalism is, in essence, a very American idea. At
the same time, the complex aspects of race in the U.S. and the current
debate on racism and classism might be the catalyst for the change in
the perception of race and white dominance.
Global white dominance appears in two different aspects: privilege and
de-facto ruling.
The privilege of the white race is an absolute in the worldâs politics
and economics; nowhere in the face of the world are people of European
descent the oppressed minority (or majority) to an elite of color. The
âwhite raceâ enjoys a privilege that does not falter by geographic
means.
The white colonial/imperial power stretched itself through the process
of capitalist globalization. The consolidation of global capitalism is
not only rooted in racism but dependant on it. From Brazil to India to
Mexico, the lighter skin carries a lighter burden and occupies the
higher place.
The de facto ruling of a white elite that controls the global capitalist
state enforces the privilege of the âwhite race.â Transnational
corporate forces are massively concentrated in the U.S. and Europe and
so are the powerful nation-states. The âwhite raceâ enjoys a position of
privilege in these two segments.
Token gains on race and gender are not so much to pacify race and gender
struggles, as it is to foment further struggle. The idea is to give the
exploited a little taste of what they could get, but to make it clear
that would have to carry a certain burden in order to get it. Just like
a mule that tasted a piece of the carrot once is bound to want to eat
the whole carrot, and will work with all its strength to reach the
unreachable carrot, and carry the weight of the cart in its back. But,
apparently contradicting themselves, the capitalist class shows its
contempt by race and gender equality by openly attacking any form of
improvement in the situation of the oppressed genders and races. This
makes the structure, in the eyes of people of color, a racist one,
instead of a purely classist one. It is necessary to keep people
thinking that a) gains can be achieved inside the structure and b)
racism is everywhere (which is true, but it needs to be really thrown at
peopleâs faces all the times). The objective of this exercise is to
demonstrate both that power is in the side in the elite; and that the
oppressedâs situation can improve if only they submit enough so the
elite do not seem them as a threat, but as something they can thoroughly
control. At the same time, they need to keep the distance between those
that have privilege, and those who do not.
It is interesting to see that the elite of color too benefits from the
racist structure, and if racism were to simply be wiped out of the whole
scenario, they would be in bad waters. It is of their interest that the
white elite dominates â that would eagerly try to take over if they
thought that they could do it without tearing the fabric of social
control that the white capitalist elite maintains.
The racist structure of the system allows the elites of color to
maintain their power and give them other possibilities. Imperialism has
been used as a shield by every single dictator that had power threatened
by the bigger shark, from Castro to Hussein to Milosevic. This dragged
into direct or indirect the defense of their oppressive regime millions
of people of color, working class people and anti-imperialist militants.
This is not a justification to the U.S. actions, but an example of how
the racist structure benefits not only the white elite and therefore
supports directly or indirectly by the elites worldwide. It is a case of
opportunism, where oppressors assume an âoppressedâ mask to defend
themselves against the taking of dominance against another.
A very concrete example of that is the role that Brazil plays now in the
FTAA meetings. Lula and the PT (Brazilian Workerâs Party) have been
repeatedly trying to sell this image of a defiant Brazil, which is
concerned with the imperialist role that the U.S. would play in South
America in case the FTAA gets approved. What they are concerned about is
that Brazil might lose its hegemonic dominance over the South American
market; and then, if the U.S. does not open its market to Brazilian
products, the Brazilian elite of landlords would lose power. They are
not concerned with the effects of the FTAA on labor, environment and the
people. It is just very convenient that those issues show up so they can
rally public support.
This pattern repeats itself around the globe. Besides, the majority of
this âelite of colorâ are actually descendent of Europeans. Just look at
South America, the diversity and richness of races and cultures in it â
then look at the elite of South America, a very white and European class
of bourgeois. The elites of Africa, while not European in skin, are
mostly educated and raised in Europe or the U.S. The pattern repeats
itself.
In maintaining the white supremacy, the elites of color try to escape
guilt- free. In the fight for racial and gender equality, the working
class remains bound. It is not that these fights are not important; if
anything, alongside with class, they are the most important ones. It is
only that, without the fall of the capitalist system as a whole, any
fight becomes just filler.
Other parts of the elites of color take a more aggressive position in
the defense of the interests of the world capitalist elite. The elites
of Japan thrive over the complete subjugation to the American empire.
Make no mistake: this is hardly a submissive elite â they were imperial
forces for centuries and held an elitist racial position over their
neighbors. However, in this game they play, the subordinate elite
because is very much in their interest to keep the status quo, and the
rest is inconsequential. Japan, defeated on WWII, is reborn as a global
potency. But in submission to the white empire. Their pop culture, their
dream, their means of production â everything about modern Japan cries â
slave, but this condition of slave to the elite of world capitalism
asserts its hegemony and dominance over other nations. More than that,
it asserts the dominance of the Japanese elite.
The left worldwide have, for decades now, struggled with race and class
and gender â which liberation should take precedence over another â
without realizing that if any take precedence, the whole fight in itself
is almost a moot point. Racism is not only a pillar of class oppression.
It is one of the single bases of oppression itself.
In this essay, when referring to sexism, the concept, unless noted,
incorpo- rates issues like womenâs rights, womenâs position in the
bottom of the scale of the capitalist society, homophobia and male
violence against women.
Sexism â male dominance â is the less addressed and consequentially the
most widespread system of oppression in the world. The roots of sexism
in societies cannot be easily traced and I will not even attempt to
dwell in its history to avoid any fallacy. However, in this essay, we
shall analyze sexism in its relationship with global capitalism and the
struggle for liberation.
The revolution of the capitalists was an economic and political
revolution â not social. The French Revolution, the fall of the
Absolutists in Europe, the social changes that followed were design to
enforce the rule of the bourgeoisie and strengthen the influence and
power of this rising class against outside forces. Representative
democracy, liberty and freedom and all the other promises that the
revolution made to the people were designed according to which form
would create a favorable atmosphere for the establishment of capitalism.
It is interesting then to notice that the revolutionary leaders were
quick to crush the womenâs movement that was born during the revolution.
The establishment of Capitalism could not allow the development of such
a movement, especially since, in order to satisfy what those women were
demanding, a distribution of power was necessary. One pamphlet
distributed by those women during the revolution was called Request for
Women to be Admitted to the Estates-General, and had the following
quote: ââMan is born egotist... he reduces us to managing his household
affairs and to partaking of his rare favors when he feels so inclined.â
Nothing could be more true and it exemplifies the relationship between
the elite and women â the relationship of power and the need of a
structure that âjustifiesâ and maintain such a relationship.
The strained relationship between capitalism and women has a lot to do,
in a modern setting, with the fact that the elites of the world are â no
matter their âcolorâ â an oppressive majority of males. The male
dominance is not only a âcultural traitâ as it is one of applying a
simple rule of power â those hoe have power will not give it up for
free. Concentrated power is limited â the more you share the less you
have and the elites of the World will not relinquish power for women.
The relationship of power between men and women needs to transcend race
and class in other to be effective. Although one could argue that this
is just another classist plot of the bourgeois to keep their economic
rule over the working class, it is very interesting to notice that
misogynist thinking is part (in different levels) of a multitude of
cultures, even before they got in contact with each other. âPrimitiveâ
societies had their good share of misogyny â they were hardly the utopia
that certain people picture them to be. The dominant gender in our
societies has been exploiting womenâs work and women in general for
millennia after millennia. Sexism is not a capitalist invention. It is
not accident that the bourgeoisie power is composed essentially of
males, this is merely a consequence of the fact that even when the class
struggle between the nobility and the bourgeois aristocrats was being
fought, in one thing they agreed â that was a fight between men, to see
which men was going to be the ruler. It is obvious then why the views of
women like Olympe de Gouges were so threatening to them that she was
guillotined in 1793 as a reactionary loyalist.
Robespierre, Marat and the men of the Revolution were most certainly
terrified of losing their power to a woman who advocated not only the
necessity of full legal equality between the genders, job opportunities
for women, schooling for girls and the creation of a national theater
were only plays written by women could be performed, but the creation of
the National Assembly of Women, emphasizing the need for women of self-
governing and equal power.
Gouges understood that â because the culture of sexism â a structure
that âembracedâ men and women as âequalsâ would do nothing to actually
satisfy womenâs need and desire for liberation. It would be a token act.
The need of self-organization for women came from the realization that
in a social structure, every single relationship is one of power, and if
men constructed the social structure, it would be inherently sexist.
Only women could devise a structure that would really beneficiate women.
Sexism always had a condescending tone to its rhetoric, a view that
menâs subjugation of women was actually a necessity for the welfare of
women.
What is interesting is that this view is deeply ingrained in the social
fabric of our society, and too ensure this, it is necessary that all men
participate consciously or unconsciously in terrorizing women â much
like the State, the function of manhood is to terrify women into
accepting menâs âprotectionâ for the price of their total submission. As
Susan Brownmiller puts it, rape âis nothing more or less than a
conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a
state of fear.â Domestic violence, violence against women and rape are
forms of intimidation and bullying through which, firstly, male
dominance is imposed, and second, male âprotectionâ is made ânecessary.â
Culture reinforces the dominant role of the male and its âneedâ of
violence.
The cult of violent behavior by men, against women and against each
other, is more than just assertion of power against the recipient of
violence. It is part of the engine that feeds of the terrorizing of
women to keep them submissive.
Is the double use of the rod â it can beat you up or beat someone else
to protect you. And, as Susan Griffin notes in the book Rape: The
All-American Crime, âif the professional rapist is to be separated from
the average dominant heterosexual [male], it may be mainly a
quantitative difference.â The level to which dominance and violence are
exerted to the domination of women may vary in quantity, but not in
substance.
The idea of our social fabric reinforcing gender roles of
violence/passivity is to create an atmosphere of fear so overwhelming
that the mere presence of the male becomes threatening. Male attitudes â
tone of voice, way of sitting, conversation, clothing â everything is
designed in order to keep women guessing and consequentially, afraid.
Why is it then surprising that our movement and our spaces are normally
male dominated if why do not critically analyze the balance of power in
the attitudes and presence of men and women inside the movement.
A woman in a room full of men, no matter how strong, outspoken and
determined she is, and no matter how much the men are determined to
treat her as an equal â is definitively in a position of less power and
thus will not have the same weight in her voice. And with the
institutions are not conscious of this power imbalance and do not work
actively in reverting this situation â the maintenance of the status quo
is inevitable.
The oppression of women by the working class males is a phenomenon that
can be traced back to almost every single culture. To see the feminist
struggle as separate and a âdivision of forcesâ of the working class is
a ludicrous statement â a reflection of a poor understanding of the
nature of oppression and the nature of the working class.
Indeed, to separate these three fights is to divide the working class,
but to set priority in any of them and have the others as a tag along is
to destroy any hopes of liberation that the working class might have.
The gender-based oppression serves a political purpose too. It serves
the elites that women have no political power for the same reason that
it serves the elites that people of color do not enjoy political power.
There is, however, a difference between the gender elite and the elite
of color. The male-dominated elite of color is, globally speaking,
fairly stronger and definitively more aggressive in its pursuit of power
than the gender-elite. The gender-elite lives in a much more subordinate
position (to their male counterparts) than the elite of color â thus
putting them in a closer position with the women of the working class.
An abused woman will identify with the plight of another one â
independent of class or race; a queer person can identify with
persecution and prejudice.
It is however, very important to notice that, empathy and de facto
equality are a far cry from each other, and while the bourgeois women
might have in common with the working-class women their subordinate
position, they are enemies of class and therefore not allies.
The union of the working class in one fight will not happen without the
acknowledgment of the levels of oppression inside the working class
itself and the actual facing and destroying of the power imbalance in
the movement that proposes to change the reality of oppression lived by
the working class nowadays. A forced union of the working class, with
disregard of the real issues of gender and race except in a superficial
way is bound to fail.
A world revolution is necessary â a complete change of structure, a
social, economic and political revolution that destroys class, gender
and racial oppression.
I disagree with the idea that the class struggle should take priority
over the race and gender struggle. This centralist and elitist view of
disregarding the concerns of women and people of color have been seen
thousands of times before, and we have been betrayed and stomped on
enough to realize that those with power will not relinquish it, it must
be taken from them. Only the oppressed can liberate the oppressed, and
it is vital that we understand people of color, women, queers and all
the other oppressed people inside the working class have not only this
motto repeated in their heads like a mantra, but that they actually need
to exercise that line inside the movement and draw their own conclusions
of where they want to go and what needs to be done.
I too disagree with the idea that race and gender should be taken a
priority over the class struggle â the simple idea that race and gender
issues could be solved inside the capitalist system in any frame is
simply ludi- crous. Inside the capitalist system, we have no real say in
the affairs of business and very little (in the most optimistic of the
views) in the affairs of the government. A feminist or a race movement
that did not have as priority to smash the capitalist system would fall
sort on its legs â gender and race justice are impossible inside the
capitalist system. The capitalist system is not only a system based on
class dominance, but one too that maintain women and people of color
inside that class and oppressed inside of it.
The means must be coherent with the ends. A movement that disregards any
of the oppression-systems is bound to be limited and to create a society
based on elitism. Unless the movement is committed to be one that will
be addressing those three issues seriously and not sidestepping it with
âwe are all equalâ condescending behavior, its range is going to be
limited and it will turn off people that see themselves as not only
working- class, but feel other pressing form of oppression crushing
them.
It is time to reevaluate the movements approach on issues of race,
gender and sexuality â it is good to see there is a movement of people
already working in that direction. It is time for us to have a
revolution in ourselves to change our perception on what a real
liberation of the people means.
I see their faces â their smiling brown faces â and there is nothing of
me in there. We shall build a different world.
âRamseyâ Muniz
âI covered my face with my hands as I was shackled and chained,
beginning three years of solitary confinement in the belly of the beast.
I sat still in pure unconsciousness, neither hearing nor feeling, nor
knowing in the darkness of the dungeons of America, like the deep of the
sea, with no time and no world. In the depths that are timeless and
worldless, it was then that the revolutionary spirit of Ricardo Flores
Magon reached into the depths of my heartâŠâ
Into my second year of solitary confinement, in the mode of darkness, I
was informed by the forcing oppressor that seventy four years ago, our
revolutionary brother Flores Magon had been confined in the same cell.
Even before the latter information, his revolutionary spirits would
appear at any given time or day. Fortunately, with the support of family
and others, I was able to receive various books written on the life,
history and death of Flores Magon. The most vivid and profound statement
has made months before his death here at Leavenworth USP is the
following:
âMy dream of beauty and beloved visions of a humanity living in peace,
love and liberty⊠will not die with me, while there is on Earth a
painful heart or an eye full of tears. My dreams and visions will liveâŠâ
â March 16, 1922
His visions, his dreams and his revolutionary spirituality are very much
alive tonight. Even though I have been condemned by the oppressor to a
death sentence, it is my tonalli (destiny) to continue with the visions,
dreams and liberation of all humanity, especially the oppressed people
of color. It is in the dungeons of the oppressor where I have found the
truth and direction that we as oppressed people must take in order to be
free once again.
During my confinement in the hole, if I would wish to communicate in my
dreams with my brother Flores Magon, I would concentrate for days on his
spirituality and writings. Within a few days, he would appear in my
dreams, not only sharing his inner thoughts, but, most importantly, what
we must do to rise again and remove the chains that our people bear in
the present.
His most profound statement was, âMy brother, you must reach into the
ancient past, reach into the roots of our hearts, reach into the
strength of our revolutionary spirituality.â I will never forget how I
would rise from my sleep and immediately begin to write the essence of
our conversations.
Yes, he is very much alive!
Our Mexicano spirituality is alive and throughout all Aztlan and in our
Holy Land (Mexico). In fact, it is more alive than those so-called
leaders who pretend to represent the masses of our people while, at the
same time, compromising and making political deals with the same
oppressor that continues to tighten the noose of the rope of oppression.
In a letter to his attorney, Flores Magon said he would rather die in
prison than abdicate his ideals. âI prefer this to turning my back on
the organizers and having the prison doors opened at the price of my
honor.â Flores Magon wrote. âI will not outlive my captivity, for I am
already old, but when I die, my friends will perhaps inscribe on my
tomb, âhere lies a dreamer,â and my enemies, âhere lies a madman.â But
no one will be able to stamp the inscription, âhere lies a coward and
traitor to his ideas.ââ
It is our duty and responsibility as liberators to pass on our oral
traditions of struggle, sacrifice and freedom. From the medieval mazorra
of this oppressor, we reach out of the voices of the mountains in
Chiapas, where our brother Marcos continues to liberate our sisters and
brothers from the same oppressor that rules here in America. And in this
world of conflicts, that fire of spirituality continues to rise
regardless of the genocide wrought. Everywhere throughout the world, the
oppressed, people of color, are rising. It seems as if the entire
universe is reaching into its ancient past for the answers of tomorrow.
We of the sixth sun, Mexicanos from Aztlan, have reached and embraced
the enlightenment of our spiritual, cultural and historical pasts for
the last five hundred years. We have lived in a mode of darkness and
ignorance. The oppressor has, with malicious intent, destroyed and/or
refused the right for us to be exposed to the beauty and power of our
ancient past. A race without a history or past is a race of
non-existence.
In conclusion, it is with pride and honor that I share this by Flores
Magon. It represents the purpose of this book on culture, resistance and
anarchism:
âIt is necessary to educate our people, to teach them the real causes of
their misery and slavery⊠This is why our hands, instead of being armed
with muskets, are armed with pens, a weapon more formidable and far more
feared by tyrants and exploiters.â
â 1916
Presently, we of Aztlanahuac are in the midst of rising, with a power of
resistance and liberation like never before in our history. The silence
has now become our new fire ceremony of liberation, justice and land. We
must all come with clean hearts and be prepared to sacrifice, because
without sacrifice, there will never be freedom.
Author and interviewees in alphabetical order
Kapila is an artist, organizer, writer and poet born in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, in January of 1981. Started working with the Centro de Estudos
Libertarios Ideal Peres â CELIP, a anarchist study group, and the
Resistencia Popular (Popular Resistance). Came to the U.S. at the age of
21, and started to get involved in student organizing, joining Students
for Justice, a group of mostly community college based activists, and
was part of the process which created a federation of the different
Students for Justice chapters in the San Jose area (Silicon Valley, in
California). I am part of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a young workers and
artists self-managed media and organizing collective. I joined the IWW
and have been part of the effort of starting a branch in San Jose.
Currently I am working on a book about art and revolution and am part of
the Furious Five anarchist collective in San Jose.
Victoria Law has been a self-identified anarchist since she was sixteen.
Since then, she has participated in various collectives and anarchist
endeavors, learned photography, been published on-line and in print,
made zines, traveled overseas and become a mother. She and her daughter
will be visiting her great-grandmotherâs former house in Shanghai in
January 2004 between the Western and the Lunar New Years.
Shawn McDougal is a Black man whoâs been an anarchist since before he
even heard the word. He was born and raised in LA, but has spent time
living in New England and abroad (years in Brazil and China, months in
Spain and Argentina). After dropping out of grad school and moving back
to LA in 1997, heâs spent most of his time working as a community and
issue organizer andâmost recentlyâa public school teacher. His dream is
to start a community center that promotes the sharing of resources,
skills, and knowledge across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and class,
and help people learn through experience their power to shape social
reality. TomĂĄs Moniz has been living, loving, fighting, writing,
teaching and parenting three kick ass kids in the bay area for the last
12 years. Comments questions concerns, can go to Moniz at
tom_moniz@riseup.netâ
Suneel Mubayi, 18, born in NYC, grew up mostly in New Delhi, India, came
to New York last June after finishing high school in India to study at
Columbia. He started writing poetry and stories at the age of 14, and
studied theatre for two years in school. After initially writing mostly
love and emotional poetry, he began to explore political arenas as
muses, and was inspired by post-9/11 and the war. At some point in time,
around the age of 16, he realized that he wasnât really a he inside,
despite being birth- assigned female, and Suneelâs political
revolutionization has been closely intertwined with her shedding of
gender boundaries and categorizations. She has since pursued spoken word
performance and theater acting fairly successfully all over NYC and is
learning how to trash the system from the belly of the Ivy League beast.
Ramiro âRamseyâ Muñiz is a political prisoner remembered for his
leadership role during the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s.
As an attorney, Muñiz defended the rights of Mexicanos whose
constitutional rights were constantly violated. In 1972 and 1974, Muñiz
was a gubernatorial candidate in Texas for La Raza Unida, a political
party established and developed solely by Mexicanos to articulate an
independent political vision. Muñiz garnered six percent of the vote
and, during the campaign, spoke widely of Mexicano political power and
potential. He is now serving time in Leavenworth. Info on his case visit
his website at
, or write him at Ramiro R. Muñiz â 40288â115, P.O. Box 1000,
Leavenworth, KS 66048â1000.
Ewuare Osayande (
) is a political activist, poet and author of a number of books
including his latest work Black Anti-Ballistic Missives: Resisting
War/Resisting Racism. The former chairperson of the Philadelphia chapter
of the Black Radical Congress, he is the co-founder of P.O.W.E.R.:
People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism. The Quarterly Black Review
has called Osayande âone of Black Americaâs newest insurgent
intellectuals coming to the table with enough mental firepower to be a
David Walker for our time.â He currently resides in Philadelphia, PA.