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Title: The Making of "Outside Agitators" Author: Crimethinc Language: en Topics: insurrection, insurrectionary, CrimethInc., race, black bloc Source: Retrieved 8 October from [[http://crimethinc.com/texts/r/agitators/index.html]]
On August 19, ten days after police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, a slew of corporate media stories appeared charging that
“criminals” and “outside agitators” were responsible for clashes during
the protests. CNN alleged that “all sides agree there are a select
number of people—distinct from the majority of protesters—who are
fomenting violence,” quoting a State Highway Patrol Captain, a State
Senator, and a former FBI assistant director to confirm this.
Today’s militarized police understand that they are operating on two
different battlefields at once: not only the battlefield of the streets,
but also the battlefield of discourse. So long as most people remain
passive, the police can harass, beat, arrest, and even kill people with
impunity—certain people, anyway. But sometimes protests get“out of
hand,” which is to say, they actually impact the authorities’ ability to
keep the population under control. Then, without fail, police and
politicians proceed to the second strategy in their playbook: they
declare that they support the protesters and are there to defend their
rights, but a few bad apples are spoiling the bunch. In this new
narrative, the enemies of the protesters are not the police who are
gassing and shooting people, but those who resist the police and their
violence. When this strategy works, it enables the police to go back to
harassing, beating, arresting, and killing people with impunity—certain
people, anyway.
Sure enough, a few hours after these articles about “criminals” and
“outside agitators” appeared, the St. Louis police killed another man
less than three miles from Ferguson. Here we see how defining people as
“criminals” and “outsiders” is itself an act of violence, setting the
stage for further violence. You can predict police behavior at protests
with a fair degree of accuracy based on the rhetoric they deploy in
advance to prepare the terrain.
So when we hear them say “outside agitators,” we know the authorities
are getting ready to spill blood. All the better, from their
perspective, if people buy into this rhetoric and police themselves so
no officer has to get his hands dirty. This is often called for in the
name of avoiding violence, but self-policing returns us to the same
passivity that enables police violence to occur in the first place. How
many people would have even heard about Michael Brown if not for the
“criminals” and “agitators” who brought his death to our attention?
Self-policing also preserves the impression that we all choose this
state of affairs of our own free will, reinforcing the impression that
anyone who does not is an outsider.
What is an “outside agitator,” anyway? Deploying the National Guard to a
town of 21,000 people—isn’t that outside agitation? When Occupy Oakland
was in the news in 2011, there was a lot of rhetoric about “outside
agitators” coming to the city to start trouble with police, until it
came to light that over 90% of Oakland cops lived outside of Oakland.
Surely if anyone deserves to be labeled outside agitators—in Ferguson,
Oakland, or any other community around the US—it is the authorities.
But what about people who come from out of town to participate in
protests? TheCNN article claimed that “among those arrested are
residents of Chicago, Brooklyn, Washington, San Francisco, Austin, Des
Moines, and Huntsville, Alabama, according to jail records.”
This might sound like convincing evidence to middle class readers. But
anyone who has been poor and precarious knows that the permanent address
you give when you are arrested may not be the same as the place you
actually live. You might give a different address because you aren’t
sure your current housing will last, because the landlord doesn’t know
your place has more people in it than are named on the lease, or simply
because you don’t want local vigilantes to know where to find you.
Instead, you might give a more reliable long-term address, perhaps from
another state.
Still, let’s imagine that some of these arrestees who gave out-of-town
addresses are in Ferguson for the very first time. Wouldn’t that make
them outside agitators? Perhaps it would, if the issue was specific to
Ferguson alone and they had no stake in it. But in “Chicago, Brooklyn,
Washington, San Francisco, Austin, Des Moines, and Huntsville, Alabama”
the police have killed black men under identical circumstances. The
militarization, brutality, and systematic racism of the police are in
effect all around the country, not just in Ferguson. When people are
suffering the same forms of oppression everywhere, it makes sense for us
to come to each other’s assistance, to make common cause.
This is not outside agitation. It is solidarity.
So long as we understand the problems we face individualistically, we
will be powerless against them. Solidarity has always been the most
important tool of the oppressed. This is why the authorities go to such
lengths to demonize anyone who has the courage to take risks to support
others. Throughout the civil rights struggles of the 20th century,
participants who are celebrated as heroes today were tarred as “outside
agitators.” The term has a long history on the tongues of racists and
reactionaries.
In this light, it is ironic, if not unexpected, that one of the
corporate media stereotypes of the “outside agitator” is the “white
anarchist”—as if all anarchists were white. It’s no longer considered
decorous to call people race traitors, so the allegation is inverted:
white people who fight alongside black and brown people must not have
their best interests at heart, certainly not as much as the police and
corporate media do. Although declaring oneself an anarchist does not
magically free a white person of the racism that pervades our society,
it is racist indeed to attribute all the unrest in Ferguson to “white
anarchists,” denying the existence or agency of black and brown
participants.
This is the corporate media attempting to play a race card of its own,
in order to create divisions between those who struggle against police
brutality. It’s not surprising that the authorities would seek to create
discord along racial lines—one of the chief reasons race was invented
was to divide those who would otherwise have a common interest in
overturning hierarchy.
To emphasize this once more, we have to understand the deployment of
rhetoric about “outside agitators” as a military operation intended to
isolate and target an enemy: divide and conquer. The enemy that the
authorities are aiming at is predominantly black and brown, but it is
not just a specific social body; it is also an aspect of our humanity, a
part of all of us. The ultimate goal of the police is not so much to
brutalize and pacify specific individuals as it is to extract
rebelliousness itself from the social fabric. They seek to externalize
agitation, so anyone who stands up for herself will be seen as an
outsider, as deviant and antisocial.
This would be more likely to succeed if most people were integrated into
comfortable places in their power structure. But the problem with their
strategy, at this particular historical juncture, is that more and more
of us are finding ourselves outside: outside a steady workplace, outside
a recognized position of political legitimacy, outside the incentives
that reward people for keeping quiet. We are finding ourselves outside,
and finding each other. We are finding that it doesn’t make sense to go
on being docile, that our only hope is to stake everything on fighting
together for our collective survival rather than contending amongst
ourselves for a place in the hierarchy.
Next time, the authorities will be lucky if the disturbances are
confined to a single town, so they can accuse those who go there of
being outside agitators. The racism and police brutality for which
Ferguson is now infamous are widespread. The next conflagration could
spread everywhere, like Occupy did. Stop killing us, or else.