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Title: Who is Oakland Author: Escalating Identity Date: April 2012 Language: en Topics: identity, police, queer, race, feminist, Occupy Wall Street Source: Retrieved 21 July 2012 from https://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/
This pamphlet – written collaboratively by a group of people of color,
women, and queers – is offered in deep solidarity and in the spirit of
conversation with anyone committed to ending oppression and exploitation
materially. It is a critique of how privilege theory and cultural
essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer
organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with
culture, and culture with solidarity. This conflation, we go on to
argue, minimizes and misrepresents the severity and structural character
of the violence and material deprivation faced by marginalized
demographics.
According to this politics, white supremacy is primarily a psychological
attitude which individuals can simply choose to discard instead of a
material infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across
society – from racially segmented labor markets to the militarization of
the border. Even when this material infrastructure is named, more
confrontational tactics which might involve the risk of arrest are
deemed “white” and “privileged,” while the focus turns back to reforming
the behavior and beliefs of individuals. Privilege politics is
ultimately rooted in an idealist theory of power which maintains that
psychological attitudes are the root cause of oppression and
exploitation, and that vague alterations in consciousness will somehow
remake oppressive structures.
This dominant form of anti-oppression politics also assumes that
demographic categories are coherent, homogeneous “communities” or
“cultures.” This pamphlet argues that identity categories do not
indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not solidarity. The
violent domination and subordination we face on the basis of our race,
gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a shared political
vision. But the uneven impact of oppression across society creates the
conditions for the diffuse emergence of autonomous groups organizing on
the basis of common experiences, analysis, and tactics. There is a
difference between a politics which places shared cultural identity at
the center of its analysis of oppression, and autonomous organizing
against forms of oppression which impact members of marginalized groups
unevenly.
This pamphlet argues that demands for increased cultural sensitivity and
recognition has utterly failed to stop a rising tide of bigotry and
violence in an age of deep austerity. Anti-oppression, civil rights, and
decolonization struggles repeatedly demonstrate that if resistance is
even slightly effective, the people who struggle are in danger. The
choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain
dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation,
and death. There is no middle ground.
As a group of people of color, women, queers, and poor people coming
together to attack a complex matrix of oppression and exploitation, we
believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By
“autonomous” we mean the formation of independent groups of people who
face specific forms of exploitation and oppression – including but not
limited to people of color, women, queers, trans* people, gender
nonconforming people, QPOC. We also believe in the political value of
organizing in ways which try to cross racial, gender, and sexual
divisions. We are neither spokespersons for Occupy Oakland nor do we
think a single group can possibly speak to the variety of challenges
facing different constituencies.
We hope for the diffuse emergence of widespread autonomous organizing.
We believe that a future beyond capital’s 500 year emergence through
enclosures of common land, and the enslavement, colonization, and
genocide of non-European populations – and beyond the 7000 or more years
of violent patriarchal structuring of society along hierarchized and
increasingly binary gender lines – will require revolutions within
revolutions. Capitalism’s ecocidal destiny, and its relentless global
production of poverty, misery, abuse, and disposable and enslavable
populations, will force catastrophic social change within most of our
lifetimes – whether the public actively pursues it or not.
No demographic category of people could possibly share an identical set
of political beliefs, cultural identities, or personal values. Accounts
of racial, gender, and sexual oppression as “intersectional” continue to
treat identity categories as coherent communities with shared values and
ways of knowing the world. No individual or organization can speak for
people of color, women, the world’s colonized populations, workers, or
any demographic category as a whole – although activists of color,
female and queer activists, and labor activists from the Global North
routinely and arrogantly claim this right. These “representatives” and
institutions speak on behalf of social categories which are not, in
fact, communities of shared opinion. This representational politics
tends to eradicate any space for political disagreement between
individuals subsumed under the same identity categories.
We are interested in exploring the question of the relationship between
identity-based oppression and capitalism, and conscious of the fact that
the few existing attempts to synthesize these two vastly different
political discourses leave us with far more questions than answers. More
recent attempts to come to terms with this split between anti-oppression
and anticapitalist politics, in insurrectionary anarchism for example,
typically rely on simplistic forms of race and gender critique which
typically begin and end with the police. According to this political
current, the street is a place where deep and entrenched social
differences can be momentarily overcome. We think this analysis deeply
underestimates the qualitative differences between specific forms and
sites of oppression and the variety of tactics needed to address these
different situations.
Finally, we completely reject a vulgar “class first” politics which
argues that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are simply
“secondary to” or “derivative of” economic exploitation. The prevalence
of racism in the US is not a clever conspiracy hatched by a handful of
ruling elites but from the start has been a durable racial contract
between two unequal parties. The US is a white supremacist nation
indelibly marked by the legal construction of the “white race” in the
1600s through the formation of a cross-class alliance between a wealthy
planter class and poor white indentured servants. W.E.B. Du Bois called
the legal privileges accorded to poor whites a “psychological wage”: “It
must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received
a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and
psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of
courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all
classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best
schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts,
dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to
encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while
this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect
upon their personal treatment and the deference shown to them.”
We live in the shadow of this choice and this history. A history which
is far from over.
Politics
Nonprofits exist to maintain society as we know it. Nonprofits often
provide vital social services in the spaces left by the state’s retreat
from postwar welfare provisions, services which keep women, queers, and
trans people, particularly those who are poor and of color, alive.
Post-WWII welfare provisions themselves were provided primarily to white
families – through redlining or the racially exclusive postwar GI Bill
for example. Social justice nonprofits in particular exist to co-opt and
quell anger, preempt racial conflict, and validate a racist, patriarchal
state. These organizations are often funded by business monopolies which
have profited from and campaigned for the privatization of public social
services. This has been argued extensively by many who have experienced
the limits of nonprofit work firsthand, most recently by INCITE! Women
of Color Against Violence.
Indeed, the exponential growth of NGOs and nonprofits could be
understood as the 21^(st) century public face of counterinsurgency,
except this time speaking the language of civil, women’s, and gay
rights, charged with preempting political conflict, and spiritually
committed to promoting one-sided “dialogue” with armed state
bureaucracies. Over the last four decades, a massive nonprofit
infrastructure has evolved in order to prevent, whether through force or
persuasion, another outbreak of the urban riots and rebellions which
spread through northern ghettos in the mid to late 1960s. Both liberal
and conservative think tanks and service providers have arisen primarily
in response to previous generations of radical Black, Native American,
Asian American, and Chican@ Third World Liberation movements. In the
21^(st) century, social justice activism has become a professional
career path. Racial justice nonprofits, and an entire institutionally
funded activist infrastructure, partner with the state to echo the
rhetoric of past movements for liberation while implicitly or explicitly
condemning their militant tactics.
The material infrastructure promoting these ideas is massive, enabling
their extensive dissemination and adoption. Largely funded by
philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation ($13.7 billion),
Rockefeller Foundation ($3.1 billion), or the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation ($37.1 billion), the US nonprofit sector has grown
exponentially, often through the direct privatization of the remnants of
America’s New Deal-era social safety net. This funding structure ties
liberal organizations charged with representing and serving communities
of color to businesses interested primarily in tax exemptions and
charity, and completely hostile to radical social transformation despite
their rhetoric. In 2009 nonprofits accounted for 9% of all wages and
salaries paid in the United States, generated $1.41 trillion in total
revenues, and reported $2.56 trillion in total assets. One need only
hear the names of these philanthropic organizations to realize that they
are or were some of the largest business monopolies in the world, whose
foundations are required to donate 5% of their endowment each year,
while 95% of the remaining funds remain invested in financial markets.
The public is asked to thank these organizations for their generosity
for solving problems which they are literally invested in maintaining.
“With increasing frequency,” Filipino prison abolitionist and professor
Dylan Rodriguez argues, “we are party (or participant) to a white
liberal ‘multicultural’/‘people of color’ liberal imagination which
venerates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of
contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then
proceeds to incorporate these images and vernaculars into the public
presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations.
…[T]hese organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and
marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against
members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while
continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical
revolutionaries. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from
1995–2001, which is in many ways the national hub of the progressive
‘wing’ of the NPIC, I would name some of the organizations…here, but the
list would be too long. Suffice it to say that the nonprofit groups
often exhibit(ed) a political practice that is, to appropriate and
corrupt a phrase from…Ruth Wilson Gilmore, radical in form, but liberal
in content.”
In California some of the most racist policies and “reforms” in recent
history have been advanced by politicians of color. We are not
interested in increasing racial, gender, and sexual diversity within
existing hierarchies of power – within government, police forces, or in
the boardrooms of corporate America. When police departments and
municipal governments can boast of their diversity and multicultural
credentials, we know that there needs to be a radical alternative to
this politics of “inclusion.” Oakland is perhaps one of the most glaring
examples of how people of color have not just participated in but in
many instances led – as mayors, police chiefs, and city council members
– the assault on poor and working class black and brown populations.
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan speaks the language of social justice activism
and civil rights but her political career in city government clearly
depends upon satisfying right-wing downtown business interests, corrupt
real estate speculators, and a bloated and notoriously brutal police
force.
There is no more depressing cautionary tale of the fate of 1960s-era
politics of “changing the state from within” than the career of Oakland
Mayor Quan. Quan fought for the creation of an Ethnic Studies program at
UC Berkeley in 1969, and in 2011 penned a letter to Occupy Oakland
listing an array of state-approved social justice nonprofits in order to
justify mass arrests and a police crackdown on protesters attempting to
establish a community center and free clinic in a long abandoned city
owned property.[1] In response to a season of strikes, anti-police
brutality marches, and repeated port shutdowns in response to police
assaults, the state offered two choices: either the nonprofits, or the
police.
Quan and other municipal politicians are part of a state apparatus that
is rapidly increasing its reliance upon militarized policing to control
an unruly population, especially poor people of color in urban areas.
Policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in general. A
white supremacist decades-long “war on drugs” has culminated in a
21^(st) century imperial “war on terror.” The equipment and tactics of
“urban pacification” are now being turned on American cities and on the
citizens and non-citizens who are targeted by austerity measures which
have for decades been applied to the Global South.
This is as much the case in the liberal Bay Area as it is anywhere else.
Recently “Urban Shield 2011,” a series of urban military training
exercises for Bay Area police forces, was held on the campus of UC
Berkeley in anticipation of raids on the Occupy Oakland encampment and
other local occupied public parks. Israeli Border Police and military
police from Bahrain, fresh from suppressing an Arab Spring uprising in
their own country, took part in these exercises beside Alameda County
Sheriffs and Oakland Police Department officers.
We see clearly that in an era of deepening budget cuts and America’s
global decline, the white liberal consensus about racial inclusion is
quickly becoming economically unaffordable, and in its place we see
increasingly widespread public support for mainstream, openly white
supremacist social movements. Armed paramilitary white nationalist
organizations like the Minutemen patrol the US border, white supremacist
media figures spout genocidal fantasies on the radio and television, and
police killings of young black men and women have become so frequent
that even the mainstream media has begun to report on it. At the same
time, policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in general.
As Jared Sexton and Steve Martinot argue,
“Under conventional definitions of the government, we seem to be
restricted to calling upon it for protection from its own agents. But
what are we doing when we demonstrate against police brutality, and find
ourselves tacitly calling upon the government to help us do so? These
notions of the state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the
unaccountable arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same
coin. Narrow understandings of mere racism are proving themselves
impoverished because they cannot see this fundamental relationship. What
is needed is the development of a radical critique of the structure of
the coin.
[The police] prowl, categorising and profiling, often turning those
profiles into murderous violence without (serious) fear of being called
to account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the imagination
is not the fact of impunity itself, but the realisation that they are
simply people working a job, a job they secured by making an application
at the personnel office. In events such as the shooting of Amadou
Diallo, the true excessiveness is not in the massiveness of the
shooting, but in the fact that these cops were there on the street
looking for this event in the first place, as a matter of routine
business. This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil
of banality, namely, that the state assigns certain individuals to
(well-paying) jobs as hunters of human beings, a furtive protocol for
which this shooting is simply the effect.”
Establishing community mutual aid and self-defense against the violence
of emergent mainstream racist movements, against the systematic rape and
exploitation of women, and against the systematic murder and/or economic
ostracization of transgender, transsexual, and gender-nonconforming
people; attacking ICE and police-enforced austerity policies which have
historically targeted communities of color, naming and resisting the
rollbacks of reproductive rights and access to healthcare as the
patriarchal, racist attacks that they truly are; these are some of the
major challenges facing all of us who understand that oppression is
inextricable from global capitalist crisis. We cannot separate what’s
happening in Oakland from a global wave of anti-austerity and
anti-police brutality general strikes, occupations, and riots across the
globe – from Barcelona to Tottenham, from Tahrir to Mali, and from
Bhopal to Johannesburg.
We do not believe that autonomous groups will be able to sustain
themselves without creating non-state based support networks and without
recognizing the mutual implication of white supremacy with capitalism
and patriarchy. Undocumented immigrants confront a vicious, coordinated,
and entirely mainstream ICE, police, and civilian assault which is, to
be absolutely clear, a nativist anti-Latin@ movement committed to
patrolling the borders of a nation understood as fundamentally white.
Intensifying anti-immigrant racism is not unrelated to capitalism, and
just a national but an international phenomenon, fueled by the success
of capitalist globalization, by the profits which could be realized
through debt and structural adjustment programs, US agribusiness
subsidies, “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, and through
multinational industries inevitably searching for lower labor costs
through the fragmentation of global supply chains. Austerity means
women, and particularly poor black and brown women, are being forced by
the state and their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers to make up for the
cuts in services and wages through additional domestic and reproductive
labor they have always performed.
As a recent W.A.T.C.H. communique from Baltimore puts it, “We know that
economic crises mean more domestic labor, and more domestic labor means
more work for women. Dreams of a ‘mancession’ fade quickly when one
realizes male-dominated sectors are simply the first to feel a crisis –
and the first to receive bailout funds. The politics of crisis adds to
the insult of scapegoating the injury of unemployment and unwaged
overwork. And the nightmare of fertility politics, the ugly
justification of welfare and social security ‘reforms.’ ‘Saving
America’s families,’ the culture war rhetoric that clings to
heteronormativity, to patriarchy, in the face of economic meltdown.
Crisis translates politically to putting women in their place, while
demanding queers and trans people pass or else. And the worse this
crisis gets, the more the crisis is excused by a fiction of scarcity,
the more the family will be used to promote white supremacy by
assaulting women’s autonomy under the guise of population control. The
old Malthusian line: it’s not a crisis, there’s just not enough – for
them.”
Capitalism can neither be reduced to the “predatory practices of Wall
Street banks” nor is it something which “intersects” with race, gender,
and sexual oppression. Capitalism is a system based on a gendered and
racialized division of labor, resources, and suffering. Violence and
deprivation, premature death, and rape, are structural aspects of an
economic system which requires that some work and some do not, some
receive care and some do not, some survive, and some die. To say that
poor people of color, queers, or immigrants are not interested or not
profoundly impacted by the economy, and instead interested only in
reaffirming their identities within existing hierarchies of power, is to
work within a rigged zero-sum game for the liberation of a particular
oppressed identity at the expense of all the others. In the US in
particular, the celebration of cultural diversity, the recognition of
cultural difference, the applauding of women and queers entering the
workplace, and the relative decline of overtly racist or sexist beliefs
among younger generations, has not improved but instead masked a
dramatic deterioration of the material circumstances of racialized
populations.
Massive accumulation through dispossession of native lands; racialized
enslavement, murder, and incarceration; constant, intimate, and
intensive exploitation of women’s unpaid labor, both in the home and as
indentured domestic work, and always violently stratified according to
race — all of these form the naturalized and invisibilized underbelly of
capital’s waged exploitation of workers. The cumulative economic impact
of centuries of enslavement, genocide, colonialism, patriarchy, and
racial segregation is not simply peripheral but integral and fundamental
to the nature of the global capitalist economy.
The US economy reproduces racial, gender, and sexual inequality at every
level of American society–in housing, healthcare, food sovereignty,
education, policing, and prison. And also endlessly recreated in these
very same sites are the categories “man/woman,” “normal/abnormal,”
“able/disabled,” “legitimate/illegitimate,” “citizen/‘illegal,’” and a
series of stigmatized populations who always interfere with the smooth
functioning of the national economy. The natural, “harmonious”
relationship between citizens, patriots, taxpayers, owners, workers,
rich, and poor, are disrupted by “illegals,” welfare queens, faggots,
freaks, careless promiscuous teens, and so on. The category of “race” is
materially recreated and endlessly renewed through these institutions
which organize the lives of the undocumented, the imprisoned, the
residents of aging ghettos which increasingly function as open-air
prisons.
Speaking of capitalism as though it were somehow separable from racist
exploitation, gendered violence, and the gamut of complex oppressions
facing us in this world, confines antiracist and antipatriarchal
struggle to the sphere of culture, consciousness, and individual
privilege. The current dominant form of anti-oppression politics in fact
diminishes the extent to which racialized and gendered inequalities are
deepening across society despite the generalization of policies
promoting linguistic, cultural, gender, and sexual inclusivity. Without
attacking the material infrastructure which agglomerates power in the
hands of some (a process whose end result is now called “privilege”),
the equalization of “privilege” and the abolition of these
identity-based oppressions in class society is a liberal fantasy.
Over the last year in California, the racist specter of potential rape
has been used to both delegitimize spaces of militant action – in parks,
streets, homes, or college campuses – and to erase the prevalence of
sexual violence throughout society. The figure of the black rapist is
routinely invoked to excuse police violence, retroactively justifying
the murders of countless black men like Kenneth Harding. The need to
preempt potential rape has been explicitly used to rationalize the
widely publicized pepper spraying of UC Davis students on November 18,
2011. We are tempted to say this incident is more about the need for
state bureaucracies to justify their own existence than it does about
epidemic of sexual violence in America, but the truth is that the
reality of rape and sexual violence along with rape’s deployment as an
ideological weapon are fundamental to the everyday functioning of the
economy and the state.
In recent interviews, UC Davis Chancellor Katehi and Vice Chancellor
Meyer, respectively, defend the police response to the Occupy UC Davis
encampment by invoking Occupy Oakland and the implicit threat of sexual
violence from the “outside.” Katehi claimed, “We were worried especially
about having very young girls and other students with older people who
come from the outside without any knowledge of their record … if
anything happens to any student while we’re in violation of policy, it’s
a very tough thing to overcome.” Chancellor Meyer was much more specific
about the hypothetical threats in question: “So my fear is a long-term
occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate student
and a non-affiliate and there is an incident. And then I’m reporting to
a parent that a non-affiliate has done this unthinkable act with your
daughter, and how could we let that happen.”[2]
These statements illuminate how gender and race are typically linked in
public discourse – here, Katehi, a woman in a position of power
attempting to justify an illegal police action, infantilizes women as
permanent victims and posits a tacitly racist specter of the criminal
rapist, coming from the “outside” to the “inside” of the campus
community. After the hypothetical rape, the rape survivor disappears.
The rape is regrettable; this regret is not articulated in terms of the
trauma of the rape survivor, but through the fact that the incident will
have to be reported to a parent. To say rape is “unthinkable” is only
possible from a position of privilege in which sexual violence is not an
everyday reality.
Considering the fact that rape occurs within every class and every
possible racial demographic, usually perpetrated by friends and family,
it is utterly fantastic to suggest that a large university campus like
UC Davis is a place where rapes do not occur and where rape culture
doesn’t flourish. Rendering rape unthinkable is absolutely essential to
its structural use as a tool of gendered subordination and exploitation,
and also as an ideological tool of white supremacy. The pepper spray
incident reveals how the specter of rape appears in state and media
narratives when it’s politically useful, and functions as a tool of
racialization and criminalization (two processes which converge on poor
black and brown populations) when in fact rape and sexual violence
affects every sector of society.
The locations which we are told to fear rape and sexual violence change
depending upon what is politically expedient, and it’s crucial to notice
which sites are emphasized and when – rape has occurred in Occupy
encampments across the country, but far, far more rapes have occurred in
American households, and yet media reports do not discourage us from
heterosexual marriage and co-habitation. When is rape ignorable, and
when is it unacceptable? Rape occurs frequently in dorm rooms, in
fraternities and sororities, in cars, on dates, amongst persons of like
age, ethnicity, and class. When the exclusion of police from public
spaces is represented by the media as an invitation to rape, we are not
at the same time informed that police themselves rape, sexually assault,
and abuse women, trans people, queers, sex workers and others with
stomach-turning frequency.
While these administrators mobilize the specter of rape to defend the
police response to the Occupy encampment at UC Davis, they take part in
a nationwide campus culture that sanctions sexual violence. A major
study on the topic found that colleges only expel persons found
responsible for sexual assault in 10–25 % of all reported cases. These
students were often suspended for a semester or received minor academic
penalties. Half of the students interviewed said that student judicial
services found their alleged assailants not responsible for sexual
assault.[3]
When sexual violence manifests in public organizing spaces, the subject
is routinely labeled “divisive” or “just personal”. In a disturbing feat
of capitulation to the state’s attack, ‘radicals’ will frequently
suspect that allegations of rape and sexual assault are in fact
inventions of state forces attempting to infiltrate communities of
struggle. Many radical communities have come to associate a focus on
addressing and attacking sexual violence with a politics of
demobilization or distraction from the “real issues.” Again, the result
is that the reality of sexual violence, not merely in one month
encampments, but in personal spaces, amongst persons from every racial
and ethnic demographic who know and trust one another, is methodically
erased. The silence around sexual violence sanctions it, just as the
spectacular outrage at isolated incidents of racial violence (e.g.
Trayvon Martin) marks the everyday police murder of black and brown
individuals as routine. The reality of sexual violence is that it is
silenced, evaded, and ignored, empowering primarily cisgendered men at
every level of society, and transforming conversations about sexual
violence into further justification for intensified racist segregation,
incarceration, and policing.
Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated
antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing
identity categories with solidarity and reinforcing stereotypes about
the political homogeneity and helplessness of “communities of color.”
The category of “communities of color” is itself a recently invented
identity category which obscures the central role that antiblack racism
plays in maintaining an American racial order and conceals emerging
forms of nonwhite interracial conflict. What living in a “post-racial
era” really means is that race is increasingly represented in
government, media, and education as “culture” while the nation as a
whole has returned to levels of racial inequality, residential and
educational segregation, and violence unseen since the last
“post-racial” moment in American history – the mid-60s legal repeal of
the apartheid system of Jim Crow.
Understanding racism as primarily a matter of individual racial
privilege, and the symbolic affirmation of marginalized cultural
identities as the solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the
dominant and largely unquestioned form of anti-oppression politics in
the US today. According to this politics, whiteness simply becomes one
more “culture,” and white supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of
a structural position of dominance reinforced through institutions,
civilian and police violence, access to resources, and the economy.
Demographic categories are not coherent, homogeneous “communities” or
“cultures” which can be represented by individuals. Identity categories
do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not
solidarity. Gender, sexual, and economic domination within racial
identity categories have typically been described through an additive
concept, intersectionality, which continues to assume that political
agreement is automatically generated through the proliferation of
existing demographic categories. Representing significant political
differences as differences in privilege or culture places politics
beyond critique, debate, and discussion.
For too long individual racial privilege has been taken to be the
problem, and state, corporate, or nonprofit managed racial and ethnic
“cultural diversity” within existing hierarchies of power imagined to be
the solution. It is a well-worn activist formula to point out that
“representatives” of different identity categories must be placed “front
and center” in struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. But
this is meaningless without also specifying the content of their
politics. The US Army is simultaneously one of the most racially
integrated and oppressive institutions in American society. “Diversity”
alone is a meaningless political ideal which reifies culture, defines
agency as inclusion within oppressive systems, and equates identity
categories with political beliefs.
Time and again politicians of color have betrayed the very groups they
claim to represent while being held up as proof that America is indeed a
“colorblind” or “post-racial” society. Wealthy queers support
initiatives which lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex
workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes
initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and
then offload reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers who
are predominantly women of color.
But more pertinent for our argument is the phenomenon of anti-oppression
activists – who do advance a structural analysis of oppression and yet
consistently align themselves with a praxis that reduces the history of
violent and radically unsafe antislavery, anticolonial, antipatriarchal,
antihomophobic, and anticiscentric freedom struggles to struggles over
individual privilege and state recognition of cultural difference. Even
when these activists invoke a history of militant resistance and
sacrifice, they consistently fall back upon strategies of petitioning
the powerful to renounce their privilege or “allow” marginalized
populations to lead resistance struggles.
For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege
and cultural recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political
framework has become synonymous with a refusal to seriously address
racism, sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and especially when
people of color, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to
this liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently
attacked as white, male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and
perpetuates the dominant praxis.
Children: The Endangered Species Theory of Minority Populations and
Patriarchal White Conservationism
The dominant praxis of contemporary anti-oppression politics
relinquishes power to political representatives and reinforces
stereotypes of individually “deserving” and “undeserving” victims of
racism, sexism, and homophobia. A vast nonprofit industrial complex, and
a class of professional “community spokespeople,” has arisen over the
last several decades to define the parameters of acceptable political
action and debate. This politics of safety must continually project an
image of powerlessness and keep communities of color, women, and queers
“protected” and confined to speeches and mass rallies rather than active
disruption. For this politics of cultural affirmation, suffering is
legitimate and recognizable only when it conforms to white middle-class
codes of behavior, with each gender in its proper place, and only if it
speaks a language of productivity, patriotism, and self-policing
victimhood.
And yet the vast majority of us are not “safe” simply going through our
daily lives in Oakland, or elsewhere. When activists claim that poor
black and brown communities must not defend themselves against racist
attacks or confront the state, including using illegal or “violent”
means, they typically advocate instead the performance of an image of
legitimate victimhood for white middle class consumption. The activities
of marginalized groups are barely recognized unless they perform the
role of peaceful and quaint ethnics who by nature cannot confront power
on their own. Contemporary anti-oppression politics constantly
reproduces stereotypes about the passivity and powerlessness of these
populations, when in fact it is precisely people from these groups –
poor women of color defending their right to land and housing, trans*
street workers fighting back against murder and violence, black, brown,
and Asian American militant struggles against white supremacist attacks
– who have waged the most powerful and successfully militant uprisings
in American history. We refuse a politics which infantilizes us and
people who look like us, and which continually paints nonwhite and/or
nonmale demographics as helpless, vulnerable, and incapable of fighting
for our own liberation.
When activists argue that power “belongs in the hands of the most
oppressed,” it is clear that their primary audience for these appeals
can only be liberal white activists, and that they understand power as
something which is granted or bestowed by the powerful. Appeals to white
benevolence to let people of color “lead political struggles” assumes
that white activists can somehow relinquish their privilege and
legitimacy to oppressed communities and that these communities cannot
act and take power for themselves.
People of color, women, and queers are constantly compared to children
in contemporary privilege discourse. Even children can have a more savvy
and sophisticated analysis than privilege theorists often assume!
“Communities of color” have become in contemporary liberal
anti-oppression discourse akin to endangered species in need of
management by sympathetic whites or “community representatives” assigned
to contain political conflict at all costs.
And of course it is extremely advantageous to the powers that be for the
oppressed to be infantilized and deterred from potentially “unsafe”
self-defense, resistance, or attack. The absence of active mass
resistance to racist policies and institutions in Oakland and in the US
over the last forty years has meant that life conditions have worsened
for nearly everyone. The prisons, police, state, economy, and borders
perpetually reproduce racial inequality by categorizing, profiling, and
enforcing demographic identities and assigning them to positions in a
hierarchy of domination where marginalized groups can only gain power
through the exploitation and oppression of others. The budget cuts and
healthcare rollbacks are leaving poor queer and trans people without
access to necessary medical resources like Aids medication or hormones,
and other austerity measures have dovetailed with increasingly
misogynist anti-reproductive-rights legislature which will surely result
in an increasing and invisible number of deaths among women. As
“diversity” has increased in city and state governments, and in some
sectors of the corporate world, deepening economic stratification has
rendered this form of representational “equality” almost entirely
symbolic.
We have been told that because the “Occupy” movement protests something
called “economic inequality” it is not a movement about or for people of
color, despite the fact that subprime targeting of Blacks and Latinos
within the housing market has led to losses between $164 billion and
$213 billion, one of the greatest transfers of wealth out of these
populations in recent history. And despite the fact that job losses are
affecting women of color more than any other group.
We are told that because the “economy” has always targeted poor people
of color, that increasing resistance from a multiracial cohort of young
people and students, and from downwardly mobile members of the white
working and middle class, has nothing to do with people of color – but
that somehow reclaiming and recreating an idealized cultural heritage
does. We are told that we are “tokens” or “informants” if we remain
critical of a return to essentialist traditional cultural identities
which are beyond political discussion, and of the conservative political
project of rebuilding “the many systems of civilization—economics,
government, politics, spirituality, environmental sustainability,
nutrition, medicine and understandings of self, identity, gender and
sexuality—that existed before colonization.”
We reject race and gender blind economic struggles and analysis, but we
do not reject struggles against what is, under capitalism, naturalized
as the “economy.” While the majority of Occupy general assemblies have
adopted a neo-populist rhetoric of economic improvement or reform, we
see the abolition of the system of capital as not peripheral but
fundamental to any material project of ending oppression.
Recent statistics give a snapshot of worsening racial inequality in the
US today: the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of
black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, the greatest
wealth disparities in 25 years. Over 1 in 4 Native Americans and Native
Alaskans live in poverty, with a nearly 40% poverty rate for
reservations. From 2005 to 2009, Latin@s’ household median wealth fell
by 66%, black household wealth by 53%, but only 16% among white
households. The average black household in 2009 possessed $5,677 in
wealth; Latin@ households $6,325; and the average white household had
$113,149.
To address these deteriorating material conditions and imagine solutions
in terms of privilege is to tacitly support the continual state and
economic reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies, and renew racist
and patriarchal violence in the 21^(st) century.
Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical
political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist, and
queer political program which white liberals can somehow become “allies”
of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color may claim
that they are in possession of such a program. This particular brand of
white allyship both flattens political differences between whites and
homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf of. We believe
that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, silencing, and
coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analysis and
field of action offered by privilege theory.
In one particularly stark example of this problem from a December 4 2011
Occupy Oakland general assembly, “white allies” from a local social
justice nonprofit called “The Catalyst Project” arrived with an array of
other groups and individuals to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, order to
speak in favor of a proposal to rename Occupy Oakland to
“Decolonize/Liberate Oakland.” Addressing the audience as though it were
homogeneously white, each white “ally” who addressed the general
assembly explained that renouncing their own white privilege meant
supporting the renaming proposal. And yet in the public responses to the
proposal it became clear that a substantial number of people of color in
the audience, including the founding members of one of Occupy Oakland’s
most active and effective autonomous groups, which is also majority
people of color, the “Tactical Action Committee,” deeply opposed the
measure.
What was at stake was a political disagreement, one that was not clearly
divided along racial lines. However, the failure of the renaming
proposal was subsequently widely misrepresented as a conflict between
“white Occupy” and the “Decolonize/Liberate Oakland” group. In our
experience such misrepresentations are not accidental or isolated
incidents but a repeated feature of a dominant strain of Bay Area
anti-oppression politics which – instead of mobilizing people of color,
women, and queers for independent action – has consistently erased the
presence of people of color in interracial coalitions.
White supremacy and racist institutions will not be eliminated through
sympathetic white activists spending several thousand dollars for
nonprofit diversity trainings which can assist them in recognizing their
own racial privilege and certifying their decision to do so. The
absurdity of privilege politics recenters antiracist practice on whites
and white behavior, and assumes that racism (and often by implicit or
explicit association, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia) manifest
primarily as individual privileges which can be “checked,” given up, or
absolved through individual resolutions. Privilege politics is
ultimately completely dependent upon precisely that which it condemns:
white benevolence.
When Mayor Quan and District Attorney Nancy O’Malley claim that Occupy
Oakland is not part of the national Occupy movement, they’re onto
something. From the start, Occupy Oakland immediately rejected
cooperation with city government officials, wildly flexible state and
media definitions of “violence,” and a now largely discredited arguments
that the police are part of “the 99%.” After the coordinated raids on
Occupy encampments across the country, the innumerable incidents of
police violence, and slowly emerging details about the involvement of
the Department of Homeland Security and its information “fusion”
centers, the supporters of collaboration with the police have fallen
silent.
The press releases of the city government, Oakland Police Department,
and business associations like the Oakland Chamber of Commerce
continually repeat that the Occupy Oakland encampment, feeding nearly a
thousand mostly desperately poor people a day, was composed primarily of
non-Oakland resident “white outsiders” intent on destroying the city.
For anyone who spent any length of time at the encampment, Occupy
Oakland was clearly one of the most racially and ethnically diverse
Occupy encampments in the country—composed of people of color from all
walks of life, from local business owners to fired Oakland school
teachers, from college students to the homeless and seriously mentally
ill. Unfortunately, social justice activists, clergy, and community
groups mimicked the city’s erasure of people of color in their analysis
of Occupy, when they were not negotiating with the mayor’s office behind
closed doors to dismantle the encampment “peacefully.”
From the beginning the Occupy Oakland encampment existed in a tightening
vise between two faces of the state: nonprofits and the police. An array
of community organizations immediately began negotiating with city
bureaucracies and pushing for the encampment to adopt nonviolence
pledges and move to Snow Park (itself later cleared by OPD despite total
compliance of individuals who settled there). At the same time, police
departments across the Bay Area readying one of the largest and most
expensive paramilitary operations in recent history. It became
increasingly clear that the city’s reputation for progressive activism
could not tolerate the massing of Oakland’s homeless, and the extent of
urban social damage, made visible in one location.
Oakland city officials and local business people stage an Occupy Oakland
counterdemonstration on the steps of City Hall.
The ongoing history of Occupy Oakland is a case study in how much
antiracist politics has changed since Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown
attempted to run for Oakland mayor and city council respectively in 1973
against a sea of white incumbents. Oakland’s current city
government—including the mayor’s office, city council, and Oakland
Police Department—is now staffed and led predominantly by people of
color. State-sanctioned representatives who claim to speak for Oakland’s
“people of color,” “women,” or “queers” as a whole are part of a system
of patronage and power which ensures that anyone who gets a foot up does
so on the backs of a hundred others.
Whatever the rhetoric of these politicians, their job is to make sure
the downtown property owners and homeowners in the hills are insulated
from potential crime and rebellion from the flatlands due to
increasingly severe budget cuts to social services, police impunity, and
mass incarceration. Increasing numbers of Oaklanders rely upon a
massive, unacknowledged informal/illegal economy of goods, services, and
crime in order to survive. In other words their job is to contain this
economy, largely through spending half (or over $200 million annually,
and $58 million in lawsuit settlements over the past 10 years) of the
city budget on the police department. When city politicians argue that
protests are the work of “outsiders,” they’re also asserting the city
government and the Oakland Police Department truly represent the city.
We do not believe that a politics rooted in privilege theory and calling
for more racial diversity in fundamentally racist and patriarchal
institutions like the Oakland Police Department, can challenge Oakland’s
existing hierarchies of power. This form of representational
anti-oppression activism is no longer even remotely anticapitalist in
its analysis and aims.
By borrowing a charge used against civil rights movement participants
and 60s-era militants of color like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown,
and even Martin Luther King Jr., as “outside agitators,” city residents
have been told that the interests of all “authentic Oaklanders” are the
same. The one month Occupy Oakland encampment was blamed by the Oakland
Chamber of Commerce and its city government partners for everything from
deepening city poverty to the failure of business led development, from
the rats which have always infested the city plaza to the mounting cost
of police brutality. An encampment which fed about a thousand people
every day of its month-long existence, and which witnessed a 19%
decrease in area crime in the last week of October, was scapegoated for
the very poverty, corruption, and police violence it came into existence
to engage.
If you believe the city press releases, “authentic Oaklanders” are truly
represented by a police force which murders and imprisons its poor black
and brown residents daily (about 7% of OPD officers actually live in the
city) and a city government which funnels their taxes into
business-friendly redevelopment deals like the $91 million dollar
renovation of the Fox Theater—$58 million over budget—which line the
pockets of well-connected real estate developers like Phil Tagami. In a
complete reversal of 60s-era militant antiracist political movements, we
are told by these politicians and pundits that militant, disruptive, and
confrontational political actions which target this city bureaucracy and
its police forces can only be the work of white, middle class, and
otherwise privileged youths.
A recent communique critiquing the Occupy movement states, “The
participation of people of color [in Occupy Oakland] does not change the
fact that this occupation of public space upholds white supremacy…. Some
of our own sisters and brothers have silenced our critiques in order to
hold on to their positions of power as token people of color in the
movement.” [4] The communique argues that people of color can suddenly
“uphold” white supremacy because they do not share the political
analysis of the document’s authors. People of color who do not agree
with the politics advanced by this group are labeled white, informants,
members of Cointelpro, or tokens. Often many of us are simply erased.
This is a powerful and deeply manipulative rhetorical tactic which
simply fails to engage substantively with any of the reasons why people
of color did participate in Occupy Oakland and equates critical
participation with support for rape, racism, sexism, homophobia, and
gentrification. Needless to say, the authors of the above-quoted passage
do not speak for us.
People of color who were not only active but central to Occupy Oakland
and its various committees are routinely erased from municipal and
activist accounts of the encampment. In subsequent months the camp has
been denounced by social justice activists, many of whom work directly
with the mayor’s office, who have criticized it as a space irreparably
compromised by racial and gender privilege. Racism, patriarchy,
homophobia, and transphobia were all clearly on display at Occupy
Oakland – as they are in every sector of social life in Oakland. None of
these accounts has even begun to examine how the perpetrators and
victims of this violence did not belong to a single racial demographic,
or track the evolving efforts of participants to respond to this
violence.
People of color, women and trans* people of color, and white women and
trans* people who participated heavily in Occupy Oakland have regularly
become both white and (cis) male if they hold to a politics which favors
confrontation over consciousness raising. And within white communities,
similar political disagreements are routinely represented as differences
between individuals with “white privilege” and those who are “white
allies.”
There is clearly a need to reflect upon how the dynamics of the
encampments quickly overwhelmed the capacity of participants to provide
services and spaces free from sexual harassment and violence. To
describe the participants of Occupy Oakland as primarily white men is
not simply politically problematic and factually incorrect – it also
prevents us from being able to look honestly at the social interactions
that have actually occurred under its auspices.
Struggles; or, Revolution is Radically Unsafe
Nearly fifty years after the dramatic upsurge of wars of national
liberation fought over the terrain of what used to be called the “Third
World,” there are few political tools for confronting emerging local and
global racisms between nonwhite communities, and the persecution of
ethnic minorities in former colonies by native, nonwhite elites. In the
US, this has taken the form of increasing antiblack, Islamophobic, and
anti-immigrant racism within “communities of color” and increasing class
divisions within nonwhite demographic categories.
National elites in decolonizing countries have frequently appealed to
idealized ethnic traditions and histories in order to cement social
cohesion and hierarchies of domination within dictatorial one-party
states. Appeals to a kind of authoritarian traditionalism often mobilize
components of indigenous traditions which justify caste or caste-like
social divisions. No longer requiring the force of occupying armies,
formal decolonization in newly “independent” countries from Senegal to
Vietnam has given way to neocolonial austerity, structural adjustment,
and debt imposed by the global north and administered by those who
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, famously called the native
“national bourgeoisie.”
As Maia Ramnath observes about the actually-existing history of formal
decolonization,
“In seeking to replicate the techniques of colonial rule by
institutionalizing states rather than abolishing them, the nationalist
goal diverged from that of substantive decolonization. If the colonial
regime’s structures of oppression were not simply to be reopened for
business under new local management, yielding a new generation of
authoritarian dictatorships and cultural chauvinists, a different logic
of anticolonial struggle was imperative.
…[T]he specter of stateness–the pressure to establish your own, or to
resist the aggression of someone else’s…calls forth the enforcement of
internal conformity, elimination of elements who fail or refuse to
conform, and relentless policing of boundaries, including those of
hereditary membership, for which task the control of female bodies,
sexuality, and reproduction is essential.”
The belief that communities of color in the US to represent coherent,
bounded internal colonies or “nations” working for self-determination
has been stretched to the breaking point by class divisions within these
communities. To be clear: we believe that wealth can only buy limited
protection against worsening racism, sexism, and homophobia. We desire
radical liberation, from what theorists have called the “coloniality of
power” and the institutions – the borders, the nation-form, the
churches, the prisons, the police, and the military – which continue to
materially reproduce racial, gender, class, and sexual hierarchies on a
global scale. And yet we believe that the political content of
contemporary decolonial struggles cannot be assumed in advance.
21^(st) century decolonization in the US would be unrecognizable to the
individuals who have fought for liberation under the banner of
anticolonial struggle in the past—a tradition which includes Toussaint
L’Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Lucy Parsons, Amilcar Cabral,
Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Robert F. Williams, Lorenzo
Komboa Ervin, the Third World Women’s Alliance, CONAIE, the indigenous
militants of Bolivia in 1990, the militants of Oaxaca in 2006, the
Mohawk people in the Municipality of Oka, Tupac Katari, Chris Hani,
Nelson Mandela (who led the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe),
Emiliano Zapata, Juan “Cheno” Cortina, Jose Rizal, Bhagat Singh, Yuri
Kochiyama, Kuwasi Balagoon, DRUM, Assata Shakur, and countless others.
Anticolonial struggles were violent, disruptive, and radically unsafe
for individuals who fought and died for self-determination. One cannot
be a pacifist and believe in decolonization. One cannot be horrified at
the burning of an American flag and claim to support decolonization. And
one cannot guarantee the safety of anyone who is committed to the
substantive decolonization of white supremacist institutions. The fact
that decolonial struggle has been reduced to state-sanctioned rituals of
cultural affirmation, and appeals to white radicals to stop putting the
“vulnerable” in harm’s way, reveals the extent to which contemporary
privilege politics has appropriated the radical movements of the past
and remade them in its own image.
We are told that the victims of oppression must lead political struggles
against material structures of domination by those who oppose every
means by which the “victims” could actually overthrow these structures.
We are told that resistance lies in “speaking truth to power” rather
than attacking power materially. We are told by an array of highly
trained “white allies” that the very things we need to do in order to
free ourselves from domination cannot be done by us because we’re simply
too vulnerable to state repression. At mass rallies, we’re replayed
endless empty calls for revolution and militancy from a bygone era while
in practice being forced to fetishize our spiritual powerlessness.
We are told that the victims of oppression must lead political struggles
against material structures of domination by those who oppose every
means by which the “victims” could actually overthrow these structures.
We are told that resistance lies in “speaking truth to power” rather
than attacking power materially. We are told that it is “privileged” to
attempt to practically interfere with budget cuts, foreclosures, teacher
firings, disappearing schools, hunger, or the loss of healthcare. We are
told by an array of highly trained “white allies” that the very things
we need to do in order to free ourselves from domination cannot be done
by marginalized communities because they’re simply too vulnerable to
state repression. At mass rallies, we’re replayed endless empty calls
for revolution and militancy from a bygone era while in practice being
forced to fetishize our spiritual powerlessness.
In a country where the last eruption of widespread political unrest was
nearly forty years when the police go to war and it is called “force.”
When business as usual is disrupted in any way, even by shouting, it is
labeled “violent.” In this upside down world militant protests across
the globe are characterized as heroic struggles for freedom while in the
US SWAT teams are deployed to clear reproductive rights rallies. As an
October 24^(th), 2011 letter from “Comrades in Cairo” published in The
Guardian puts it, “In our ownoccupations of Tahrir, we encountered
people entering the square every day in tears because it was the first
time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being
harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these
spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are
public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting and interacting –
these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and
the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or
dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and
just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to
build a better world, particularly for the marginalised, the excluded
and those groups who have suffered the worst.
[...]
Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the
horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and
even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their
tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission, 99
police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were
destroyed and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned
down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with
rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the
end of the day on 28 January they retreated, and we had won our cities.
It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our
desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take
what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the
tactics that we used when we shouted ‘peaceful’ with fetishising
nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been
overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew
that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and
allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured and martyred to ‘make a
point,’ we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to
defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because,
after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are
so very precious.” [5]
[1] http://www2.oaklandnet.com/oakca/groups/cityadministrator/documents/pressrelease/oak033073.pdf
[2] http://disoccupy.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/for-people-who-have-considered-occupation-but-found-it-is-not-enuf/]
[3]
http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/campus_assault/articles/entry/1945/
[4] http://disoccupy.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/for-people-who-have-considered-occupation-but-found-it-is-not-enuf/]
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/occupy-movement-tahrir-square-cairo