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Title: Looting Back Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 9th, 2019 Language: en Topics: Ferguson, identity politics, riot, rebellion, police Source: Retrieved on 2020-12-05 from [[https://crimethinc.com/2019/08/09/looting-back-an-account-of-the-ferguson-uprising]]
Five years ago today, police officer Darren Wilson murdered Michael
Brown, a black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. Police officers kill
young black men every day in the United States, but that day, people
rose up to police and white supremacy. It’s important to revisit the
Ferguson uprising today, to try to distinguish between the events as
they occurred and the ways they were mythologized afterwards, and to
inquire about what they still have to teach us.
To observe this anniversary, we are publishing the complete diary of an
anarchist from St. Louis who participated in most of the major events of
the uprising. This is a valuable historical document illustrating the
contradictions and tensions within the movement from the outset and
posing important questions about what it means to act in solidarity.
There are countless perspectives from the struggles that emerged in
Ferguson. In the future, we hope to publish other accounts, from other
vantage points. Also, be warned that this text includes a tremendous
amount of violence and tragedy.
In one passage, the author describes a harrowing scene on August 16 in
which a friend was hit by stray gunshots. The text does not describe
what happened to the friend afterwards, so we will do so here. For days,
a bullet remained lodged in his heart as he lay in the hospital on life
support at the threshold of death. Miraculously, he survived. He owes
his life, in part, to the courage and generosity of strangers who helped
to make sure he reached the hospital, as well as to all the friends who
supported him through the arduous recovery process.
Others were not so fortunate. Six people who played an active role in
the uprising have passed away in the five years since Michael Brown was
murdered. Deandre Joshua and Darren Seals were both found shot inside of
burned cars. MarShawn McCarrel shot himself outside the front door of
the Ohio State House. Edward Crawford, Jr., made famous by a photograph
showing him lobbing a tear gas canister back at the police who shot it,
committed suicide. Danye Jones was found hanging from a tree in his
backyard. Bassem Masri, a Palestinian American, is the only one among
the dead who was not a young black man.
Some of these deaths took place under suspicious circumstances, but
there is no need to seek a secretive conspiracy. The conspiracy is out
in the open: it is the all-too-familiar workings of a society that
dehumanizes, impoverishes, incarcerates, and kills youth of color by a
wide variety of interlocking mechanisms. We remember these six people
not as victims, but as fighters who joined hundreds of other people of
all ages, genders, and ethnicities in making it possible to recognize
this as the tragedy that it is and begin to take action to change it.
The struggle continues.
---
The world is fire: a sun, hot, elusive, exploding and yet constant at
the same time.
The world is water: carving millions of pathways through the land and
our bodies, distinct and subtle, converging and diverging.
Confounding all algorithms, it violates all commandments, moralities,
and religions, contradicts all political ideology, and constantly defies
description.
---
Conversations blended together. Stress was more than a feeling; it was
bullets ripping through someone’s precious body, a vigil, gunfire,
flames, police, a riot, tear gas, a mob, an argument, racial tension,
and a pre-existing interpersonal problem, all of it boiling over at
once.
We lived moment to moment through those times. By day, we took over the
streets in ways we had thought impossible. At night, we lobbed back tear
gas canisters, threw rocks, fought off police and the activists who
attempted to control us. At times, the cops, the preachers, and the
activists lost all authority over what was going on; that was what
opened the way to something bigger. It was a chance to confront all the
people and systems that maintain a stranglehold on the world.
It was all so short, but it went on long enough to burn deep scars in me
and in so many others. These are both a curse and a blessing.
The people who filled the streets of West Florissant, South Florissant,
and Canfield after Mike Brown was murdered were driven by too many
different motivations to summarize. We came out for Mike Brown, for
ourselves, for a world without police and racism, for and against
“whiteness” or “blackness,” for freedom, for reform or revolution, for
the riot and the loot, for the hell of it. It all depended on who you
asked.
What follows are my observations of the events and the dynamics at play
during the uprising. Much of this is derived from personal experiences
during the first week and a half after the murder of Mike Brown in
August 2014. I recount my participation in the rebellion from my vantage
point, including my white racial coding and my anarchist commitments.
Without a doubt, there are differences in perspective and lived
experience that distinguish me from many of those I met—but there were
also many things that connected us across race and experience. In many
ways, our lives exceed the confines of racialization and political
identity. In other ways, they don’t, and many believe so fervently in
those categories that they will use violence to enforce them.
Throughout history, people have responded in a variety of ways to
different forms of control and domination—to colonization,
racialization, slavery, and more. Some respond by making peace with
their oppressors and cooperating with them. Others hide in the hills,
making themselves inaccessible to those who seek to assimilate or
enslave them. Others resist, collectively or individually. The point is
to figure out what you want to do and find others who are doing the
same. People who experience the same form of oppression will not
necessarily react the same way.
I shared a multitude of enemies and struggles in common with many of the
people I met. However, our experience of these enemies as well as our
place in these struggles was often very different. Repeatedly, black
people who were unafraid of the consequences of throwing down chose to
go much further than I did.
My experiences with the police and the world they enforce are often
structured differently because I am defined by part of this world as
“white.” But I have my own reasons to fight. I don’t only want to fight
for freedom for others, but for myself as well. This perspective feels
more genuine than claiming to fight for a large racialized group of
people, people who have equally numerous and possibly antagonistic
perspectives that I can’t speak for or homogenize.
It’s easier for academics, politicians, media figures, and other
dominant mouthpieces to speak for those who have been killed precisely
because they cannot speak for themselves. At the same time, the creative
ways that ordinary people resist in their daily lives are not given much
attention. When this daily resistance becomes a mass rebellion, those
who are afraid of losing their power or money seek to kill it. In an
uprising, people come alive against the limitations and separations that
are forced on them in their day-to-day lives. An essential function of
the repression of rebellion is to enforce the boundaries that keep
things the way they are.
Mike Brown’s name was used both to disparage the uprising and to support
it. Lots of people wanted to speak for him, to expand their platforms or
suppress others’ narratives. In doing so, they obscured the fact that
people fight for a diversity of reasons, whether motivated by personal
experience, or frustration with authority or oppression, or the
realistic fear that what happened to Michael Brown could easily happen
to them or their children. We didn’t need to know Mike Brown to know
that what happened to him happens daily.
It is not only the police who kill. The police are just the last line of
violence and repression. School, family, capitalism, the church, and
race itself produce most of the daily battles that people fight long
before the police get involved. Often, the police enter the scenario
when someone is perceived to be violating some kind of barrier.
The exploitation and murder of black and poor people built the
foundations of much of what is called civilization today. We should not
forget this, nor the prolonged and powerful resistance to it. This
resistance often takes forms that are not considered part of the sort of
“fair and civil discourse” in which we talk things out with those who
oppress us. A classic example of civility is voting for those who
oppress you. Those who control all the land and capital would prefer
that we debate them peacefully than ransack the wealth they have—wealth
they gained from our labor and the labor of people like us. The
proponents of civility remain the greatest slave masters in the world.
In Ferguson, resistance to exploitation and murder took avenues that
challenged the false peace of the “social contract” of civil society,
the supposed agreement that we’re all willing to live peacefully
together in exchange for the supposed security and liberty provided by
police and other state institutions. This contract was not created for
poor people, but to protect those with power, capital, and property.
I am at the ocean. I don’t know how it works, but sometimes the water is
so cold and then, for some reason, it’s warm. Sometimes I find pockets
of warmth. Something about the wind blowing either from the ocean or
from the land heats the water, or so I hear from my favorite uncle.
Today was one of the warm periods.
St. Louis lies across the country in another time zone. I’m avoiding the
city, like I usually do in the summer. There are no beaches to swim at
there, really no water to swim in unless you want to feed the
flesh-eating bacteria. The air itself is toxic. If you ride your bike
around, you’re liable to encounter various horrible smells from
off-gassing factories. Cancer calls your name. Not far from my home,
there is a smoldering underground landfill fire that is heading toward a
buried cache of uranium from the Manhattan Project.
It’s hard to comprehend the ocean, this expanse of both nothingness and
voluptuous life that flows and ebbs right in front of me. It’s beautiful
and I can’t help but stare into it as far as I can. It makes me
contemplate what’s out there and then, inevitably, wonder about myself.
This water has life beyond my imagination. The waves crash over and over
upon themselves, feeding the next one and the next one and the next one.
The water never tires.
---
We gather our things and leave the beach for the day. At my aunt’s
house, I read the news from home. Mike Brown, another black kid, has
been gunned down by police. My mind races through the countless posters
we have made and wheat-pasted about people murdered by police. I think
about all the times cops have fucked with me, arrested me, beaten me. I
think about all the times my friends and I held demonstrations to
support people—friends or comrades or strangers—who were beaten, locked
up, or murdered by the state. I think of all the bullshit we’ve had to
deal with from the police, never getting a chance to stick it to them.
We’ve written letters to prisoners, yelled outside the jails, supported
struggles inside prisons, broken things. Sometimes it was fruitful, but
often it felt like a mere whimper. It always felt like we were yelling
at a brick wall. Often we were.
I go on with my day, but first, I make sure to ask friends back in St.
Louis about the killing. They have heard the news; they are going to a
vigil that has been called in response. Hours later, they tell me how
they stood around a bloodstained patch of asphalt with hundreds of
people, many crying, trying to figure out what to do. The gunfire of
angry people kept the police away for many hours. Eventually, in a show
of force, the cops brought out the dogs.
---
Black nationalist leaders Anthony Shahid and Zaki Baruki seek to pacify
protestors on S. Florissant so that Ferguson Police Chief Jackson can
speak. They fail and the chief leaves the stage. The police station is
located on S. Florissant; this is where peaceful demonstrations, civil
disobedience, and press conferences organized by activists and
non-profits are happening. The two crowds—the W. Florissant rowdies and
S. Florissant organizer types—are often at odds with each other.
My emotions run wild, exaggerating and extrapolating. This ocean is an
abyss that only grows darker once you stare into it. Now it strikes me
as an endless expanse of cold water, a powerful force that could kill me
with little effort.
The world is beautiful, or it could be, but it all just feels like a sea
of misfortunes. On land, we’re like an ocean of bodies, moved by waves
and tides, a crowd in a space that is too tight. We push and pull
against one another. Some of us eat; many starve. We all breathe, or try
to. But there’s not really any unity beyond this. Some people profit off
others’ deaths, and they breathe like the rest of us. Many of us
struggle against it in our own ways, collectively or individually. But
we tire easily—history runs its tide right over us and washes everything
away. Is there no escape?
---
Later that night, texts and calls come in. The streets of Ferguson are
exploding. An unruly crowd is disobeying calls for peace. The police and
the usual political organizations are at a loss. The police bring in
reinforcements. They bring out the dogs like it’s the 1950s in the
South.
The old world of past black rebellion that we saw in black and white
photos is in front of our eyes in full color. It never disappeared; it
only morphed into something more powerful—the new ghettos, overflowing
prisons in which slavery is legal, police murders, wage slavery,
speeding tickets, gentrification, evictions. It’s hard to imagine life
in the 1950s. The 1950s days of fire, the 1950s water cannons, the 1950s
dogs barking and mauling protestors, the 1950s lynchings: we think of
them all in black and white, relegating them to the past. “You wouldn’t
understand the troubles back then. Things weren’t as vivid then as they
are now.” I can’t imagine the world before, but I know that people saw
as vividly then as they see now. They fought tooth and nail. We will
too.
The media talks about a vigil turned “violent.” A friend calls me, in
shock, describing what he calls a riot. People are angry. It’s not a
protest so much as a release. Cop cars driving through crowds while a
gauntlet of people throw things and kick them. Friends tell me that some
people in the crowd are firing guns, which has the effect of warding off
the police. Everything is getting smashed. Stores are getting looted. A
chasm has been crossed, but from *what* to what I’m not sure. The local
established black activist political organizations are perplexed and
scared, ready to disown it. For a while, they will find people to blame
for the riots, for going beyond the usual respectable protest methods.
This world is experiencing a moment of rebellion. The endless,
monotonous waves of salt water are not so oppressive now. Before there
were no exits; now some are opening up. But they aren’t in the form of a
designated exit door. They’re more like rugged gaps in that unbreakable
brick wall we have been knocking our heads against. You’re free to leave
now, if just for a moment. Leave! This is a moment, an opening, before
our enemies kill, suppress, poli-trick, disperse, or arrest us. Hurry!
The old world is behind you!
Cops mobilize to protect property and capital. Liberals scream about
police militarization. The reality is that cops were attacked and a gas
station was looted and burned. It should not surprise us that they react
this way. Cops uphold class society; they are the first line of defense
when we directly attack capitalist and state property.
I’ve walked into something and I don’t even know.
I will soon learn that lots of people are here to rebel. We’re all
taking advantage of the situation, because this situation doesn’t happen
every day. The demands of day-to-day life—bills, raising kids, rent,
police, and the grind of work—are hard to challenge. We rarely get a
chance to fight back.
Those who speak about “outsiders” alienating the “community,” including
those who talk the radical talk about the “colonization” of such moments
by outside forces, are often seeking to erase the inevitable conflict
between those who want peace and dialogue with the state and those who
want something else. A diversity of experiences and actions create mass
rebellion. For some, anyone outside of Ferguson is an outsider. For
others, anyone outside of North County (the conglomerate of suburbs
around Ferguson) or outside of St. Louis is an outsider. For still
others, anyone who is not black is an outsider.
There is something to explore in all of this. Is this moment the product
of one “community”? Is Ferguson the only place, the only “people” who
experience the police and the misery they enforce? There is no wall
separating Ferguson from other places; the police do the same thing
everywhere there are poor people. Ferguson is not a tight-knit family
with a singular character; it’s an alienating suburb where people are
just as atomized by capitalist and state relations as they are in any
other suburb.
Even if people start off as outsiders, spatially or racially, that isn’t
necessarily permanent, either. Outsiders can meet each other.
“Outsiders” can be just as rightfully agitated as those who are
“inside.” They can learn from each other. And some who are assumed to be
outsiders aren’t outsiders at all. For instance, take white teenage kids
who go to school in North County, many of whose friends are black. They
might go to the streets of Ferguson for shared reasons; they might go
there for their friends and even for themselves. Or take someone of any
race who lives miles away, but shares family ties with someone who lives
in Ferguson and is affected by the same police and the same racism that
killed Mike Brown. There surely are differences in experiences and
histories, but this doesn’t make one an entirely an outsider. All
political geography that designates “inside” and “outside” is about
control.
For many people, from all around St. Louis and the US, what is happening
in response to the murder of Mike Brown is an opportunity to finally
seek justice, or to get even with the police or another enemy, and
everyone has their own methods for how to do that. It is insulting to
reduce all this to mere opportunism.
---
I meet some friends and we head up to Ferguson. It’s a ten-minute drive
from my house. The summer heat is at full blast, turning my mind to
sweaty mush. We walk around; a friend recounts the events of August 9
and points out the places where things went down. We run into some
people they knew from the previous days. There’s some talk about the
coming night and what’s going to go down. My friend tells me stories
about tear gas, about small crowds of people fighting what sounds like
urban warfare.
Later, after the sunset, the atmosphere is tense. Not surprising,
considering that folks collectively looted and burned the QT a few
nights before. Some are terrified of the repercussions of the riot a few
nights ago. They are looking for someone to blame because they are
worried about what the police are going to do if we riot again.
We drive from the QT to a church on Chambers where Al Sharpton is
speaking. The police are lurking in the shadows, blocks away—and
possibly within the crowd—and there’s a mostly male security force of
Nation of Islam members (NOI), New Black Panther Party members (NBPP),
and others out to contain the unruly crowd. They’re trying to calm
people, arguing with the ones who don’t want to follow their rules. This
is compounded by the fact that Sharpton is speaking inside the building
50 feet away from us. So no, there won’t be any riot outside.
Still, where I am, there’s got be 500 to 1000 people on the street. It’s
getting dark and I’m not clear exactly where I’m at geographically.
Down the street, a group of kids are setting off firecrackers. People
are chanting the now-familiar “Hands up, don’t Shoot!” The later
oft-heard “Black Lives Matter” chant has not made its appearance yet. It
won’t for a while, not until things calm down and become more palatable.
At one point, the former leader of the NBPP, Malik Shabazz, gets up and
calls out, “Hands up! Shhhoooot back!” The “shoot back” is almost a
whisper, if you could even do such a thing on a megaphone, and it’s
pretty perplexing, not knowing who this man is.
There aren’t a lot of white people around. In the first days, most of
the woke white people left after dark or didn’t show up in the first
place. For the more politically sympathetic, it was because they felt it
was not their place. Still, while not a majority, there are white people
around, though not many of the easily definable or “respectable” white
people.
Among supposed anti-racists, there’s a lot of people re-invoking
“whiteness” as a justification not to participate. This framework
obscures the ways that a homogenous or reified notion of “whiteness”
breaks down under scrutiny. The desire for a strict definition of
“whiteness” is strong.
There’s a group of men who have it in for my friends. They see us as
instigators of the rioting, of the arson. One of them, Tef-Poe, has ties
to the mayor of St. Louis and a column in a weekly tabloid. Every pale
face they see is not welcome. This might be enough to make us want to
leave. But the confusing thing is that this contradicts many of the
other interactions I’ve already had in this big crowd, where my color,
still forever present and distinct, does not necessarily mark me out as
unwelcome, even if things are occasionally uncomfortable.
Who should we listen to? The people from the political intelligentsia
trying to keep the peace? Or the people who are rowdy and have none of
those connections?
A white friend is confronted by these men and accused of starting fires.
A contradictory crowd forms; some people defend him, while his accusers
surround him, pushing him and yelling. He leaves. Tef-Poe is yelling:
“If you’re an anarchist, get out! We don’t want you here!” It’s hard to
know what to do. An unruly crowd is not the best place to discuss
nuances. Yelling matches do not offer us much when it comes to
understanding each other.
It’s a rare thing to be in a crowd that is not seen as legitimate.
Unlike a concert, a sports event, or the bustle at a shopping mall,
where our experience is centered around consuming or spectatorship, this
is a situation in which anything can happen. This seems to dismay those
who want peace or a throwback to 1960s-style disciplined black
militancy. The crowd is rife with anger, trauma, sadness, power plays,
whims, and dynamics that I can never really understand.
The people who were yelling were erasing the mostly black folks who
engaged in the rebellion. They are worried about the media portrayal
that will re-entrench racist stereotypes of the black looter and the
violent black criminal; this is why they feel the need to conceal the
reality of what happened. Instead of challenging this stereotyping and
describing the looting and fire according to a different narrative—for
example, critiquing the structural violence of capitalism and property
rights or pointing out that the same laws that protect property once
protected the authority of slave masters—they blame the acts of
rebellion on someone else or downplay them completely.
---
Later in the night, at home, some of us argue with one another. The
experience of being kicked out, of being singled out because of our
whiteness and our anarchism, sparks a whole array of strong emotions.
What are our motivations? Are they “pure” or are we just in it for
adventure?
What is happening is real, it calls so much into question; it’s more
real than anything I have ever felt. We want to fight back against the
police because that’s what many of us have been doing for most of our
lives. When others are fighting back, we can’t just stand back and
watch. We want to engage in social revolution, but this moment isn’t
something we can romanticize with shallow rhetoric. Our own limitations,
our differences, our bad dynamics come out among ourselves for us to
confront. *And we should confront them.* This scares me because it’s not
something I’ve ever really seen in my friends. In me. There’s yelling, a
temporary schism, then cooling off.
We confront age-old oppressions and personal insecurities: the nightmare
of racialization, the alienation people feel on account of being left
out or because of their assigned gender or lack of experience. It feels
both horrible and necessary to open these wounds right now. This moment
is not pure or glorious. It’s the result of yet another vicious police
murder that brings all the oppressive underpinnings of this society to
the surface. It’s no surprise that this brings up the real tensions that
exist among my friends. Power and oppression rear their heads in every
situation.
Later, I hear that police and rebels clashed once again in the night.
---
The next day, I feel pretty hopeless.
If this is all that will happen—roving patrols of police imposing order
from outside while a mix of old-fashioned leftist and black nationalist
(NOI, NBPP) political organizations enforce it from within—I’m not too
interested. They might as well be working with the police. Case in
point: later, I see people posting photos of my friends on Instagram
alleging that they were looters and arsonists on the night the QT burned
and calling for people to report them to the police. Some of the people
in the photos weren’t even in town that night.
We hear on the news and on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media
about the “outsider agitators” or “white anarchists” from St. Louis who
started all this. People talk about it is as if it’s an organized group
with a leader; in fact, some make allusions to a supposed leader. I read
about black and white “community members” and police telling anarchists
to get out, to check their privilege.
Those who seek to rule would rather treat us like children, would rather
see us remain downtrodden and scared, easily rallied against invented
enemies.
In moments like this, it’s powerful to see people become much more than
the usual identities that are imposed by the state, politicians, and
even revolutionaries according to assigned race, gender, and ability. By
taking action in such moments, people are refusing to be defined
anymore. This is not to say that those imposed identities or
(dis)abilities completely disappear—but a difficult path away from them
can emerge, at least for a moment.
This is why many cannot admit that the rioting and looting is coming
from groups of black, non-black, and white residents from Ferguson and
beyond. Some of these, you could argue, are “community members”—but they
are not the ones who matter in the eyes of the commentators, because
they don’t have any economic or social sway, or else because they don’t
fit into a preconceived conception of what an “oppressed identity” can
do. Those commentators, be they liberals, black nationalists, white
anti-racists, or old-fashioned leftist organizers, seem to see struggle
as a matter of being victimized, in which we cower and look for an
authority figure to save us—someone whose voice is heard more clearly
than ours in the halls of power.
Whereas in Ferguson, in fact, struggle means an amalgamation of people
(including a few anarchists) refusing to be victimized, defending
ourselves, and sometimes taking the offensive against the police.
If there were never anarchists in Ferguson, the police and political
cults would have to invent them.
---
It only took a day or two after the QT was burnt for the town to be
invaded…
Every wingnut political cult one could imagine is here—from the RCP,
Socialist Alternative, New Black Panthers, Scientologists, anarchists,
and Christian mime troupes dancing to inspirational music to militia
groups like the Oath Keepers seeking, so they say, not to suppress
protest but to protect “free speech” and private property. Alongside
them, representatives of every media outlet are here spewing lies.
I learned a long time ago to rein in any assumption that I can manifest
revolt merely on account of my political position. The flowery words I
speak do not manifest revolt. Usually, my political cult has little
influence when actual rebellion starts—and the same goes for all the
other cults. This doesn’t stop the others from inflating their agency as
they vie with each other to get in front of any struggle that surpasses
them. That includes many well-worn political organizations with
“revolutionary” pretentions.
The script plays out like this: politicos look for the revolutionary
subject to harness in this moment—or else, in some cases, the reformist
subject. For some Marxists, it’s the (black) working class; for some
anarchists, it’s the (black) lumpenproletariat; for liberals, it is just
(black) people regardless of who and where they come from. But none of
them ever actually find this subject, let alone “organize” it, because
you can’t find an abstraction. Historically, they seek to discipline and
mold these “subjects” to their wills, whether via mythology disguised as
theory, concentration camps, policing, propaganda, or violence. And if
history is any indication, they usually fail miserably, though this does
not stave off the resulting misfortune.
Looking around at the scene, it’s immediately apparent how problematic
most of the other pre-existing political and religious formations are;
they are all so quick to tell people what they should be doing. Dozens
of groups from diverse racial and political backgrounds have descended
on Ferguson to “help” or “save” people. It feels like a political and
religious market economy, with everyone competing to be heard. There are
groups getting into megaphone-powered arguments with each other, forcing
us to listen to their competing tirades, each of which is really just
someone’s glorified inner monologue.
---
police siege of a suburb .
Scenes from Ferguson are starting to have the effect of delegitimizing
the police. A debate about the militarization of police is raging among
politicians and in the media, both locally and nationally. Liberal
patriots are outraged: “This is America, not Iraq.”
In a PR move, the Governor reins in the county police and temporarily
hands over control of policing the protest to the Missouri State Highway
Patrol. The St. Louis County and Ferguson police forces are comprised of
mostly white officers. The Governor chooses a black highway patrol
sergeant, Ron Johnson, to head the operations. Ron Johnson is from the
area around Ferguson and is an incredibly nice guy—or would be, if not
for his being a cop. Unlike the St. Louis County and Ferguson police,
Johnson promises to allow people to protest, to heal, and to gather.
This works like a Jedi mind trick on some people, but it doesn’t quiet
other people down. Instead, it creates a slippery slope, a situation in
which anything goes because Johnson wants people to “freely” express
themselves, to have space to heal together. Little does he know that the
way many of us choose to express ourselves and heal involves breaking a
lot of laws.
W. Florissant, the main drag just a block away from the site of Mike
Brown’s murder, looks something like a victory parade. The QT serves as
a meeting point for people. There’s a large barbeque pit going. People
are taking selfies in front of the burnt out QT. Kids are chalking
anti-police graffiti into the parking lot. I see little kids with FTP
painted on their faces. Everyone and their grandma is wearing a mask of
some kind. People are dancing, there’s a drummer busting beats between
obsolete gas pumps covered in graffiti. People are drinking, smoking
weed. Cars overloaded with people inside and out are honking their horns
unrelentingly, blasting music.
The crowd is huge. A vast cross section of black St. Louis is here, as
well as a diversity of non-black folks.
---
I wander through all of this, mostly on my own. Every few feet,
something new is happening, unrelated to the last thing. It feels like
an out-of-control party, a release after so many tense nights, like
anything festive goes. “We burnt this shit down and we want to be heard,
don’t fuck with us anymore… or else.” Today, the police have momentarily
ceded us some territory. Conversations are taking place. I can’t count
the number of times someone, probably alluding to my whiteness,
innocently asks me why I am there as I wander around the vast crowd.
Every conversation is rewarding, a temporary melting of racial barriers.
There are soapboxers soapboxing, but they’re on plastic milk crates… and
instead of unamplified voices, they have megaphones—that oft-used tool
of counter-insurgency—to yell over us plebeians. Crowds are listening to
them. Some compete for listeners; I wander from one to the next. The
Revolutionary Communist Party, the Nation of Islam, preachers, others I
don’t know. It’s odd and kind of comical, in our atomized and digitized
world, to see people doing real-life 1900s-style agitating.
---
I get into an argument with a RCP member who tries to give me a paper.
He’s so damn beguiling it’s creepy.
“Y’all are just vultures, a cult coming here to recruit for your party.
It’s sick!”
In a way that sounds charismatically cultish he lays it out for us, “We
aren’t a cult. We need people who study revolution. When you are sick,
you go to a doctor who has studied medicine. When you need revolution,
you go to those who have studied it for us!” So their leader, Bob
Avakian is like a revolutionary doctor you call when you’re sick. Like a
doctor, he has *the* solution to your ill. It’s particularly creepy but
it also describes a lot of political ideology—theoreticians who are
basically business managers who study human movement from above, in
order to move us around like chess pieces.
I counter:“When I’m sick I usually don’t go to the doctor. I have
friends or family who can take care of me, I have a tincture that clears
my throat, I can rest, I have all these people and methods and much
more! It doesn’t take just one person to heal you. They might make some
contribution, but they are among many who help me. This is like what’s
happening right now.”
He can only give me an eerie smile. The conversation ends there.
Later, I run into some of the younger RCP people and we get into a
similar conversation. It seems like they are a little more disgruntled
now. I mention how odd and cultish their group is. Both of them are
black. They tell me that they don’t worship anyone, especially not a
white European man. In my head, I’m hoping this means they’ll quit the
party.
Regardless, the RCP is useful in some ways. Unlike the conservative
groups (like the NBPP or the Nation of Islam), they allow anyone who
wants to speak to use their megaphones. They don’t shame people for
wanting to fight the police. They add to the chaos of it all. But fuck
them and their cult all the same.
---
At some point, a contingent of New Black Panther Party members walks
through the crowd in a military line and takes the median of the street
in front the QT. Some of them are trying to direct traffic, which is
pretty useless because people aren’t following their guidance at all.
It’s literally bumper to the bumper. It all seems like an act. They’re
dressed in garb straight out of the 1960s and ’70s: berets, combat
boots, flak jackets, leather jackets. They line up in military formation
and march in place. They raise their fists and chant “Black Power!” over
and over. Some people chant it back, but most people just stare. I see a
few others laugh. I get the sense that a fair amount of the crowd is put
off by how out of place this group is. The clothing style and
revolutionary discipline seem like a caricature. It feels fake, like
they’re fronting in a crowd that is much bigger in scope than they will
ever be.
The NBPP and the Nation of Islam have an “organized” approach that aims
for some kind of strict discipline. They aspire to have authority in the
crowd. Beneath their militant rhetoric, they maintain a conservative
agenda. They preach homophobia, anti-Semitism, patriarchy, and racial
separatism, and they aspire to black capitalism. They want black people
to serve as cannon fodder for their cause. In this moment, all these
authoritarian groups can do is scream into a void that no one can fill.
Years later, when they appear in documentaries or run for office, they
will be able to talk about how they organized during the Ferguson
rebellion. For now, the cacophony of everything overpowers the
possibility of a disciplined force. Still, these groups are tenacious.
The useless effort to direct the traffic on West Florissant feels like a
ploy to show that they have some semblance of control when they really
don’t. The people in the cars aren’t even listening to them. Basically,
they ultimately aim to do state and capital better and be more just.
They are in this scene to show people that they can do it better. The
hope is that they will recruit people who will become enthralled by
their discipline. In the days coming, their lack of influence will
become much more apparent.
There are many, many others who are part of this vast crowd that are
doing something totally different. They might not even be aware that the
NBPP is performing for us because they are physically somewhere else
where they can’t hear or see them—this crowd goes for blocks. It’s hard
to pin people down or define them, because unlike the political cults
that seek to distinguish themselves with fashion, banners, and insignia,
most people are not in strict groups. There are some loosely defined
groups—friends, family, relatives, crews—but most people aren’t holding
their own political banner hoping to make a name for themselves. This
does not mean people aren’t political, that they aren’t arrogant, or
that they have totally “pure” intentions. Maybe if some had the chance,
they’d try to form something similar.
---
Media tents are everywhere. I see some famous news anchors whose faces I
recognize, even if I don’t know their names. Is that… Anderson Cooper?
They’re reporting live. I try to photo bomb them. Large groups of people
are surrounding their tents. We’re watching TV in real life. Some big
media outlet is interviewing Ron Johnson while we yell at them. He’s
good with words, but whatever he says is not the answer to the questions
and feelings we have. What could he answer to our satisfaction? He’s
literally the badge and the gun that holds it all together. I can see
the August sweat dripping down his face, and it’s especially shiny in
the bright lights of the media cameras. He’s *really* trying to be a
good guy. I saw Jesse Jackson walking through the crowd earlier, a large
entourage following him. Later on at home, I see a video taken earlier
at the McDonalds parking lot down the street of some guys confronting
him, yelling at him to get out, to take his exploitative shit somewhere
else.
There are uniformed police in the crowd; they are all black and seem to
be only higher up officials. For the most part, they prowl around safely
and get in conversations with folks. One black police lieutenant talks
about how there’s a need for more black-owned businesses, that if black
people controlled their own economy, they’d be fine. They’d stop killing
each other, blah blah blah. He makes some racialized generalizations
about other ethnic groups he considers more business-minded. *“The
Arabs, they run a tight ship. They’re quiet. Now the Asians, they work
hard, and when they leave work to go home, they keep to themselves. You
never see them! They don’t do crime; It’s like, where do they even live?
You don’t even know where they live because they are so quiet and
unobtrusive. It’s because they have something to do.”* People are
laughing at his racial tropes.
Every once in a while, people yell at the police or throw something, but
it’s pretty chill. Not entirely a lawless zone.
Over the last few days, on of the most interesting developments is the
number of people wearing masks. Unlike the fashion of the NBPP, masks
seem to resonate with a lot of folks in the crowd. The facelessness of
the moment, the lawlessness of the situation, and the feeling that what
happened to Mike Brown could happen to many people here makes the masks
come across as a statement against being easily defined and corralled.
The range of ages of people wearing masks is broad. Little kids, old
people, moms, teenage kids. It’s crazy.
---
Night falls. I’ve been here for hours and it seems like it will never
end. I’m starting to tire and lay down on the sidewalk to rest. A
helicopter flies overhead and shines its spotlight on us. A lot of us
flip it off and yell at it. A black guy laughs at the white
kid—me!—flipping off the ghetto bird with his bird and offers me his
blunt. I take a few drags and, and, and… whoa… The scene takes on a
whole new atmosphere.
We talk a bit about this whole scene, bonding a little over our
annoyance at the helicopter and how happy we are about the wildness of
this night. Eventually, he gives me the rest of the blunt and heads off.
I’m walking through the crowd. The cars are still honking—they never
stopped; it’s pretty unnerving, amplified in my haze. Large groups of
people are everywhere. A sound system is playing from a box truck
reading “No Shoot! No Loot!” I read this as a subtle expression of
support for the looting: if you don’t shoot, we won’t loot. People are
dancing to hip-hop radio songs. Every once and awhile Lil Boosie’s “Fuck
the Police” comes on. The music keeps cutting out because people are
streaming it from the internet. Every time it cuts out, the crowd goes
wild jeering at the DJ.
I wander and stand around, soaking in all the impossible moments. I’m
stoned: *“I’m in this historical vortex and, man, I can’t even conceive
of what this time or space is. It’s so vast!”* Eventually, I meet up
with friends. We go to the car and think about leaving. We are sitting
in the trunk of the hatchback, talking about the scene, when a bunch of
people in a car—well, inside and on top of it—stop in front of us and
start to serenade us with some song that I don’t know. It sounds
amazing. We all laugh and smile. It’s beautiful.
As the night wears on, the Nation and the NBPP try to impose their
people’s “curfew.” It’s a pathetic attempt at “community policing,” and
it doesn’t work very well. They drag some cones in the street, tell
people to go home, announcing that the party is “over.” *You’ve had your
fun, now go to sleep.* Lots of arguments ensue. Usually, in the end,
people just drive around the cones. At one point, a man gets out of his
car and throws the cone on the sidewalk and drives through. These
wannabe police, just like the other ones we’re fighting, don’t really
want us to dance.
---
This moment was inconceivable days ago, but now it isn’t. Black and poor
people are not given space or attention in this part of the world.
People are finally getting some power in their own way, in their own
words, unapologetically, with a middle finger to the law, refusing to be
just another #hashtag or death for activists to use. Instead of
listening to the preachers and revolutionaries telling you to go home,
instead of getting locked up, policed, or killed for being who you are,
you should be able to be who you are. How terrible that it takes a
combative moment for many simply to be.
---
No matter what the police do, it just enrages us.
Today, it’s clear that the more PR-savvy police higher-ups are battling
to regain the legitimacy they’ve lost over the past few days. Like
yesterday, they continue to walk through the crowds and mingle. Some
cops even have the gall to say that we can police ourselves—that this is
a space for grieving and the police should back off. They’re admitting
their lack of legitimacy, but also are *still* policing us by proxy by
deputizing those who want to volunteer. By “policing ourselves,” they
mean letting political and religious cults like the NBPP and the Nation
of Islam police us.
Ron Johnson makes an appearance later that day and we surround him. In a
surreal scene, many people are singing his praises while many others are
doing the opposite. We’re screaming at him to get us some kind of
justice. I can see that endless sweat rolling down his forehead. He’s
nervous and it is hot out, too. He can’t answer any of our questions.
The police killed Mike Brown, they murdered him, and now they want
people to be calm and civil, to wait—to wait for something we all
already know: that the cop who killed him will get the benefit of the
doubt.
We’re the crazy ones, the irrational, emotional ones calling for blood.
The police are cold, logical, and legalistic. “I can’t answer that. It’s
a process. You’ll have to wait, let justice take its
course—please—please—be patient until the grand jury is over,” he says
to us. Soon more people surround him and he starts to walk briskly back
to his car. He’s hot, he’s stressed, but not angry, just scared—the
longer he’s here, the more incensed we might get. He’s trying to keep
our anger from spreading. We surround the car for a moment and its
sirens buzz at us. Some of us continue to shout insults, asking him to
release the name of the cop who shot Mike Mike, while others yell about
how they want the cop put in prison. Some call for his death, for the
cops to “bring him to us.”
Contrary to the panned chant that one hears at certain
demonstrations—“this is what democracy looks like”—this is definitely
not what democracy looks like. This is a firm challenge to it. The
democratic state has voted in and enforced some of the vilest acts in
recent history, including the genocide of native peoples and chattel
slavery of black people. Democracy and the avenues of political change
it offers us have never really served anyone except those who own
everything—including, in the past, those who legally owned many of the
ancestors of people in this crowd.
Mob-like, we are asking for the head of the cop who murdered Mike Brown,
saying that if we don’t get an indictment, we’ll shut everything down.
There’s a veiled threat of arson and gunfire implied. There is something
very powerful about this. If the supposedly neutral justice system
doesn’t deliver, many places might burn. They tell us to let justice
take its course, but we know it’s just us in the end.
It’s amazing to be in a situation in which the police and those in power
can’t do anything right. Right now, it’s dangerous for them to think on
their toes, because they can’t do anything rash, even if they’re getting
attacked. They can’t fight back in the ways that would be effective,
even if they want to. They’re being forced to follow a chain of command.
In the crowd, we don’t have one of those, at least not formally, so it’s
hard for them to manage us. They seek a leader to groom who could calm
us down, a disciplined and predictable formation to stand off against,
but they can’t find someone to calm us down nor a uniform formation to
strategize against.
This conflict cannot be stopped right now because there are too many of
us. Without a doubt, this gives us some advantage. They must move slowly
in this situation so as not inflame us. But they can’t help but inflame
us simply by being there.
So today, they plead with us to wait for all the facts, to let justice
take its course, to calm down, to engage in productive conversation.
They tell us that they understand our sadness, our anger, our lives.
What a trick: they’re the ones with their fingers on the triggers that
put some of us in coffins, the ones with the keys to the jail cells we
find ourselves in so often. All the solutions they propose lead us right
back to… them.
Last night was festive, but it was still tense. No one forgot that Mike
Brown was gone. They’re letting us congregate, letting us process our
emotions in this space, but it’s not enough to bring Mike Brown back.
The police don’t yet know how combative some of us want be. We can never
be satisfied because they really can’t give us what we really want.
They might have to bring back the tanks and tear gas.
---
Around noon, the Ferguson police release surveillance footage to the
media of Mike Brown supposedly shoplifting cigarillos from a corner
store, *Ferguson Market and Liquor,* blocks from where he was murdered.
The grainy footage shows him slipping over the counter and grabbing
something. The storeowner seemingly confronts him, but Brown pushes him
away. Alongside this footage, they release the name of the cop who shot
him: Darren Wilson, a man who lived a pretty uneventful life before
this. The name doesn’t make anyone happier, especially because of the
release of the footage.
Tonight, the police are guarding the market…
The shopkeeper alleges that he didn’t know the police were going to
release the footage. He’s surely afraid of getting his market looted
again and maybe this time burned entirely. When they release the
footage, the Ferguson police say that Darren Wilson had no idea about
the “robbery” when he stopped Mike Brown on the street. He had merely
stopped him for walking in the middle of the street. It’s clear that the
release of the footage is meant as defense measure for Wilson, a way to
delegitimize Brown.
Mike Brown was not an angel. No one is. Angels don’t exist. People do
what they want regardless of what the law says. Some of it might be
reckless. Some of it might be for survival. Of course, it’s hard to say
what his motivations were. Whether he stole the cigarillos means nothing
to me. If he did, more power to him—I value life and theft more than I
value a capitalist business.
We surround the Ferguson Market, where the parking lot is filled with
police. They’ve become used to us not confronting them over the past few
days. All of a sudden, we surge towards them and they scurry away. We’re
chanting at them, yelling at them to get out. Some of them come to a low
fence and they’re climbing over it, scurrying to their cars. We’re
putting them in a place they’re rarely in—it’s comical to see. At some
point, the chain-link fence pole breaks from the weight of their bodies.
I laugh at the terror they feel. We’re about to surround them, there’s
so many of us. They rush to their cars and speed off.
A minute later, in the distance, I see that the whole street ahead of me
is now lined with police tanks full of riot police advancing towards us.
They come closer and tumble out as quickly as they can in their full
riot gear. Then, from the riot van, a piercing continuous BEEPING noise.
Prepared, I put my earplugs in. I’d never seen—or rather, *heard*—these
before. It’s a Long Range Acoustic Device—LRAD, as they call it in
police jargon. With earplugs, it doesn’t sound too bad; anyway, no one
is that fazed by it. It really just makes us more pissed and we just
yell louder.
Ron Johnson’s false peace is coming to an end. After all, some of us
don’t want peace. *As long as we are here, they are going to need police
to put this rebellion out.* Riot police line up in front of us on
Ferguson Road and W. Florissant. We’re yelling at them, throwing things
at them, charging them. An RCP member is either reading something or
soap-boxing. It just adds to this chaotic moment.
Media photographers stand between us; there are so many cameras flashing
that it’s blinding. Most of the photographers are white, most of their
subjects black. Fleeting thoughts rush through my head: is this really
how these people participate—voyeuristically, through a lens? Their
photos make good riot porn; maybe they do this to illuminate the
problems of the world—but that’s what every fence-sitter says! In the
end, whether they like it or not, they act as a seeing eye of the state.
Where do they draw the line? Will they ever put down the camera and help
in the fight? Or are they in it for the prize, the prestige? And what
about all *their* riot gear? Their new gas masks and the bulletproof
vests that let them stay in the fray with fewer consequences. We need
those more than you do, you fuckers! In hindsight, there should be more
people who take their things.
People are posing for the cameras. No one knows what’s going on; the
police are flustered. We could get tear gassed at any moment, but it’s
like we’re on the red carpet surrounded by riot paparazzi. Souls are
being stolen for the perfect shot. But we’re not movie stars, we’re
nobodies to be forgotten, stored on a memory card, identified by the
police to arrest us later, maybe put in a random clip in some
documentary, a coffee-table book or some DOJ report.
Still, the presence of these voyeurs acts as a physical buffer between
the police and us. Liberals are freaking about how the media is being
suppressed; this is one of the reasons why the police have been hesitant
to take the steps they would need to take to control the crowds. (This…
and how many people are carrying.) At some point, the riot police tell
media to leave the area. This is a sure sign that they’re going to gas
us. Considering their PR image, they probably don’t want to gas
“neutral” reporters. Some are leaving and going behind the riot line,
but a lot of them are staying and it’s making the police hesitant to
shoot. Goddamn, they really must want that photo.
---
People are throwing water bottles. Glory be, from the anti-oppression
heavens, a white ally is screaming:
“STOP THROWING SHIT! The community doesn’t want this! They’re gonna kill
us all! They’re gonna shoot us all! STOP IT!”
They’re really distressed. I want to tell them to go home if they are
scared, and that it’s totally fine if they are, I’m scared too. Right
now, it’s not helping anyone. It doesn’t help to scream at us like we’re
children. This is a tense situation. There is indeed the real potential
that one of us could get hurt. Some people know this, but others might
not because they are caught up in the moment. People are acting
recklessly. Sometimes when we act recklessly, we open up new avenues…
and new traumas.
A black man standing near me scolds the screaming white ally. He asks:
“If you’re not ready to die, then why the fuck are you here?”
It knocks me out. It’s not something I feel entirely, because I want to
live on my feet, to follow a path that leads to collective joy, not
collective death. But what he’s saying is real. People will be harmed in
a struggle for joy, for a world without chains, and there will be death.
Needless to say, it shuts the white ally up.
I’ve overheard people talking about death and talked with so many people
over the past few nights about it, about confronting police, about
spilling blood, about feeling pain. As far as I can tell, none of them
are politicos, none of them claim membership in any cult. I don’t know
who they are. But they are people who have chosen to be out here and I
want to be around them right now.
---
the police.
We’re in a standoff with the police. Wearing gas masks, they are
pointing their assault rifles at us. Clips that are usually full of
metal bullets are now full of—please god—rubber bullets. The
peacekeepers are trying to calm us down. Black nationalists Anthony
Shaid and Malik Shabazz, St. Louis City Alderman Antonio French, clergy,
the NBPP, and the NOI are among them. They are making a human chain, but
they’re not facing the police, they’re facing *us,* trying to fend *us*
off from the police. Exasperated, they are yelling at us to go home, to
get on the sidewalk, telling us that if we want the police to leave, we
should go home. People are yelling back at them: “Leave? Why should we
leave? We were here first! We want the police to leave first!”
There’s a segment of the crowd that is not complying with anyone who is
telling them to calm down, be it the police or the elected officials,
the clergy, the obsessive anti-racist liberals and social media radicals
who blame white anarchists for rioting, the so-called revolutionaries
who are physically blocking our way to the police. The practical-minded
fools, surely trying to save our undisciplined souls, are preaching
their political or religious dogmas like broken records. They are
telling us that we are endangering ourselves, that we are asking for it,
that now’s not the time, that we need to calm down because the community
needs to heal and they don’t want a riot. They always invoke their
fictitious “community.”
When groups like those blocking us can’t get through to us, when we
resist their pleas for calm, they redline us—our rocks, our violence,
our trauma, our screams, our personality—out of history like a
speculator who bought stock in uprisings years ago and is now reaping
all the social and political capital that they can. Now they’re trying
to flash their power, trying to sell, sell, sell because the market is
right and they have a good chance of coming out on top with more
recruits and social capital, but some of the stock is still
unprofitable, robbing them of extra profit. They need the epic black
freedom fighter story, but not with the unrepentant non-homogenous
blackness and crassness that comprised it.
On the internet, on the streets, on the news, people resort to the usual
racial tropes: the black people in this crowd are criminals, thugs
fulfilling stereotypes of lazy welfare recipients. Or, from a more
liberal angle, black people are just standing there and the police are
shooting gas for no reason—the outright desire for destruction and the
acts of violence against the police is only represented by a couple of
people.
Both an innocence narrative that pities black people and the revulsion
with which people respond to unapologetic black rebellion are
perspectives that resort to racial tropes. One perspective separates
“bad” criminal black people (the insurgents, the ones who loot, the ones
who aren’t “protestors”) from the “good” black people. The other
portrays an eternally victimized and homogenous black people who can’t
take the initiative and fight for themselves, who therefore are swayed
by anyone, especially white people. White people have no place in this
struggle unless they accept black leadership—specifically, the black
leadership in front of us forming a physical and mental human chain to
stop us from attacking the police who keep the world the way it is.
Not surprisingly, the police have picked up this discourse, too,
leveraging both the criminal and pity narratives to their advantage.
It’s laughable. Ron Johnson, at one point, blames most of the violence
and gunfire on the “Canfield Boys,” a possibly mythical gang of black
kids who live on Canfield Drive. The infamous St. Louis city police
union spokesperson, Jeff Roorda, will later write a book called
about the “anarchists” who supposedly brought guns for people in the
streets to use. It’s laughable, that as an ex-cop, he ignores that this
is St. Louis, where getting a gun—legally or illegally—is easy for most
anyone. He also writes that white anarchists taught black people how to
burn down buildings in a way that leaves no trace. There really is very
little distance between the supposed anti-racists and the police.
It’s scary that, in this situation in which people are fighting against
race and class society, even those who are sympathetic to the fight want
to re-impose the material and ideological controls of racialization and
class. They will go so far as to re-victimize or criminalize those who
are resisting the very institutions that make them victims and
criminals: race, capitalist property relations, the church, the police.
It’s as if they don’t want things to change.
---
There’s a sense of urgency that I feel. I fear that if we lose this
space tonight, we may very well disappear again back into the world of
daily miseries. It’s like we’re being sucked down a drain in a whirlpool
and we don’t have anything to plug the hole.
---
After a long period of tense negotiation, the police start to leave. We
cheer, telling them to fuck off.
Now we’re celebrating. They’re pulling away, but before they’ve all
loaded up, one of the pigs walking backwards to the van slyly rolls a
tear gas canister and a flashbang grenade towards us. He grabs on to the
van as it peels off. The grenade explodes and we scatter. We’re all
screaming. “What the fuck!” It was like a firework sending sparks every
direction. My ears are ringing.
I run to a parking lot with a friend. Fifteen feet from us, I see a man
put a gun out of the window of his car and shoot it up in the air. I
hide behind another car. I come upon a mother and her crying child. He’s
shooting all the rounds in his clip. Interspersed, I hear the mother
screaming—pop! pop! pop!—into a phone, terrified—pop! pop! pop!—of the
shots, telling whoever to come get—pop! pop! pop!—them, get them the
fuck—pop! pop! pop!—out of there. It scares me, too.
I’ve never been this close to gunshots on the street before. I hear them
almost every day in my neighborhood, but they always seem far away; I
don’t usually stop to think about them. This man shooting is terrifying
a lot of us, but it’s probably making the police think twice about
coming back.
Some people are making fun of others for hiding: “He shot up in the air,
it isn’t no big deal, y’all!”
A voice of reason responds: “I don’t know what you’re sayin’ man,
bullets *do* come down!”
---
As the police leave, some kids are smashing out store windows. The first
to go is a beauty store. (The next day, I will see a news story that
interviewed the owners of the store. Befuddled, they’ll remark, “We
wondered why people were buying so many handkerchiefs.”)
Boards are coming off of other stores. A lot of people are getting
excited.
A middle-aged black man catches my eye and starts to talk to me. He
laments that people are looting again. He seems pretty lost about what
to do. I tell him that I think this is all for the best. A woman behind
me is screaming about how much she hates this place:
“Ahhhhh, hell yeah! Fuck this strip!
Burn it all down,
I honestly don’t give a fuck,
it’s all a
buncha fuckin’ bullshit anyway!”
The Ferguson Mart gets it, but not without an internal struggle. The New
Black Panther politicos and their allies—who media outlets later called
“gang members”—are guarding the store, physically stopping people from
getting in. One of them definitely has a gun. He’s brandishing it around
and people are running from him. This asshole values this snitch
business for some reason. But like the true customers that we aren’t,
we’ll take our business elsewhere, thank you very much! A few stores
down, people are breaking into another liquor/convenience store, Sam’s
Meat and Liquor. The exasperated and outnumbered NBPP & crew are too
busy guarding the Ferguson Mart to notice the crowd moving to another
place.
Too scared to go in—also, I’ve neglected to bring a mask—I stand
outside. Crowds are coming in and out of the place; some people are
carrying more bottles of alcohol than I ever thought a person could
physically carry. One of them falls right next to me. I consider
drinking it, but, unsure if the police will raid this area at any
moment, I decide I don’t want to risk being caught with it. Little did I
know they would never come that night.
The media are taking photos of those who are looting, getting their
money shot. Friends go up to them and scream at them to stop—their
photos are going to help the police make arrests. One member of the
press talks about the First Amendment; another is shocked that we’d want
to defend anyone’s “right” to loot and commit felonious acts! The
photographers don’t want to leave. At some point, one of the people
looting threatens to pull a knife on one of them. After that, they leave
quickly.
For hours, people loot and drink. I see cars pull up, fill up, and
leave. Some even return. I’m yelling at anyone I see who is not wearing
a mask to put one on. Most people smile at me and pull their collars
over their faces. It’s not just young people or people that would fit
the stereotype of “criminals” or “gang members,” as the media and police
want you to believe; it’s a large cross section of people, both young
and old. At some point, my friends and I cross paths encounter some
middle-aged guys and share a drink. One of them asks me what time it is,
then stops me: “No, don’t tell me! Fuck, I have to go to work so soon…”
The riot seems to stop time.
I was hungry and thirsty. I had a few drinks, ate some chips, gave some
food and drink to other people—all from unknown locations, of course.
Later on, the turn lane on the street will be lined with empty liquor
bottles.
---
It’s 4 am and I’m starting to get tired. Someone has tried to set fire
to the Sam’s. I watch a small flame burn, grow a bit, then die down,
then grow again. I start to think it might be a good time to go home.
The crowd is small and I certainly don’t need to be standing near a
burning building—bad optics. Some activists might click a random blurry
picture of me smirking with—if you cross your eyes ever so slightly—what
appears to be a lighter in my hand. But before the fire can spread, the
NBPP and an alderman, Antonio French, put it out with some soda.
After a while, the small crowd starts what sounds like a protest chant,
but it’s not like any I’ve heard before. “WAL-MART! WAL-MART! WAL-MART!”
As people chant, we get into our cars. Many speed off really crazy and
another car nearly hits ours. Surely many people are wasted. And like
that, the strip of W. Florissant is cleared. I never learn whether
people made it to the Wal-Mart.
---
The release of the footage of Mike Mike allegedly stealing from the
Ferguson Mart inflamed a lot of us. The hands-off policing policy that
had been instituted the day before the video was released has backfired.
The festiveness of the last two days helped us gain more numbers,
emboldening us—even though it’s hard to know who this “us” is, anymore.
This strategy of letting people blow off steam failed. It didn’t stop us
from doing what we wanted to do. The community police force who blocked
us from the police last night failed to stop people from taking over the
street, attacking the snitch business, and looting goods. I can imagine
the hawks on the police force wanting blood now, chiding the more
liberal-minded cops for not coming in guns blazing, for being naĂŻve.
Today, the police hold their press conference and hang their heads,
stern, poised, and befuddled all at once. They’re disappointed in us.
They are at a loss as to how to discipline us. They emphasize that no
one’s life was lost last night. It’s the only victory they can claim:
they didn’t have to kill someone. They kill and imprison people every
day and then scold us about the value of human life.
Later, there is a march organized by Mike Brown’s family. Thousands are
there. We march to the Ferguson police station. It’s a long walk and the
heat and humidity is too much for some to bear. When we get there, the
police have already amassed to guard the station. We’re yelling at them
with all we can muster. People are calling the black cops Uncle Toms,
saying how they’re often worse than the white cops. For what seems like
hours, we stand in the hot sun, sweating and getting burned, yelling at
lines of stoic cops.
Tonight, the police want to impose a bedtime on us. Midnight curfew. At
the press conference, Ron Johnson and crew thank the Nation of Islam and
the New Black Panthers for trying to keep the peace last night. Governor
Nixon is there, too. He authorizes the deployment of the National Guard
if anything gets out of hand.
A few organized political groups, including Missourians Organizing for
Reform and Empowerment (MORE) in particular, call for people to violate
the curfew, citing the fact that the police are violating our right to
free speech. The state of Missouri declares that they are going to call
in the National Guard.
---
clearly doesn’t want us to be here.
People talk about a gentle loving god and a jealous vengeful god—a god
conflicted about giving us free will, because he is already aware of
what will happen if he lets us act freely. We will violate his
commandments. The last few days have demonstrated that. The gentle god
wants to keep us safe—maybe using the rain to give us soggy clothes, to
force us to go home so we can sleep in our blessed beds in the comfort
of our homes, if we are lucky enough to have homes. God might tell us
that we’re fighting the good fight, but we need to do it with
forgiveness, patience, peace, and love, or other keywords people use to
signify civility. When we don’t listen, he becomes both angry and
pitiful. He deploys the representatives of his will against us. He
threatens us with eternal guilt, purgatory, hell, sin, death, fear,
thunder, lightning, prison, rubber bullets, tear gas, arrest, traffic
tickets.
Talking about God’s will used to be one of the ways that people
justified genocide, slavery, Manifest Destiny, and submission. This sort
of religious repression is waning in some parts of the world, but it is
still very strong in others. In the US, the state and its laws are no
longer described as representing the iron will of God. Instead, God
controls us through self-imposed discipline.
The law and the various secular ways that it is enforced—police, drones,
surveillance cameras, ankle bracelets, helicopters, prisons—are directly
descended from the religious pursuit of purity and control. Like God,
the law is above us, objective, with the cold and calculating formality
of legalese. It can be both oppressive and repressive, depending who you
are and how you act against it. It is born from fear, from the desire to
direct the infinite possibilities of life into a few well-worn paths.
The law comes from the same tradition as the Lord, a set of rules
intended to dictate behavior for the benefit of those who rule us—those
with the most guns, the most votes, the most money. The law stands
behind the police, warning us, using the velvet glove and chiding us in
a language that alludes to our “safety.”
“Safety” is Orwellian doublespeak for violence. Tonight, the riot police
warn us about the consequences of not following the curfew. If you do
not leave, you will be subject to chemical munitions and arrest. You can
be here until midnight, and if you want to leave just before that, here
are the routes you can safely take.
---
Malik Shabazz is here again tonight to keep the peace. He’s telling us
to go home, roaming the crowd with his posse, trying to calm the people
who react to his words. Shabazz is a lawyer. He’s good at debating.
Over and over, he aims his megaphone at the individuals who are staying:
“We cannot guarantee your safety tonight. Come on, black man, go home,
we aren’t strong enough to fight them now! If you stay, they will arrest
you and you won’t get bailed out. You will spend 90 days in jail for
this.”
What? We can’t guarantee your safety? Do we even know you? Who asked you
to guarantee our safety? Are you sure you don’t belong on the other side
of the police line?
The aforementioned MORE has called for people to violate the curfew. For
a while, the organizers argue with each other over their megaphones.
Sadly, MORE eventually capitulates and starts telling us all to go home,
as well.
The supposed revolutionaries and progressive politicians who claim to
support the demonstrations pontificate and lie. They want us to go home,
just like the cops want us to go home. The way they talk, they act as if
they are the ones who brought us out here in the first place. They are
used to managing the crowds at the demonstrations that occur in their
activist bubbles. They see any crowd as a mass of bodies to direct.
“Go home. Gone. Get. Git. Skedaddle. Beat it. It’s not time for you to
be here yet. We need to get all backroom deals, all the theatrics ready
before you can come out and be part of the production. It’s not the time
yet.”
They rain continues and a lot of people leave. The crowd before was
huge, now we are fewer. But there are still a lot of us. The clock
strikes midnight and nothing much really happens. The NBPP party leaves,
but not before saying, “This is your last chance, we warned you!” The
representatives of MORE have either left or stopped speechifying. A
crowd of us are ready for whatever. I’m talking with a few random
people, asking what we’re going to do next. Should we stay or go? Should
we act like we’re going to stay and then leave at the last moment before
the police tear gas us?
The crowd moves back and forth towards the police line and away from it,
throwing rocks here and there. The police intercom on their bearcat tank
tells us that we have to leave or else we will be subject to arrest.
Everyone is like, “FUCK YOU!”
I see a lone cop car come up from behind us. Its lights are flashing. Or
else, I think they were—memory gets mixed with trauma and adrenaline at
this point. Other people notice the cop car. “They’re coming from the
back, they’re coming up on us from the back!” A lot of people start to
run. I run back and meet up with a friend. I say that we should probably
run for it and we take off down the road.
---
Someone in the crowd starts to shoot toward the police car—
I see my friend I think we’re going to be fine just keep running don’t
look don’t look just run I don’t know where the bullets are coming from
I just know we gotta run and take cover for a minute and then we can be
OK we can all go home and rest and eat and sleep and love each other
struggle snuggle more fight our battles and see another day laugh until
we grow old remembering the moments the things we were proud of the
things we regretted the ways we contributed to this beautiful ugly
moment the ways we wish we could have but alive alive hearts beating
breathing breathing still working forever to defy gravity
We’re running he’s right in front of me five steps away I hear his
scream he’s on one leg hobbling the other one in the air collapsing
burning forever into a deep memory falling to the ground his stomach on
the sidewalk screaming for an instant and then silence an inert body
collapsed fetal position in pain shock a bullet to the heart
The gunfire is still happening I can’t tell the line of fire I run over
grabbing him the shots are firing still shots fired shots shots shots
toward the police car fuck fuck get low get low over him turn into the
smallest ball I can please don’t hit me too hit the police hit them not
me
On the ground covering him putting my mouth to his ear shocked not sure
why but I’m whispering whispering in shock like I don’t want to startle
him asking what happened what happened are you OK please are you OK are
you OK no response a moan I grab his arm shake it I look over and see
muscle coming out of his leg an exit wound no blood but he’s not
responding not moving no blood anywhere
They run out of rounds I don’t even notice
People surround me friends come up to me I say he’s shot my friend asks
by what was it a rubber bullet I look him in the eyes about to burst to
lose it no a fucking bullet I want to cry to scream but I stop myself I
can’t lose it right now in this moment if I do he might die but I don’t
even know what to do
A protest medic comes up to me my name is I don’t remember is it David
Phil John Adam he says you’re going to be OK can you tell me what’s
wrong can you hear me can you see me I focus on the medic I cant imagine
he’s ever been in this position he’s probably only dealt with tear gas
Maalox pepper spray rubber bullets but he’s helping me center myself in
the chaos that is what I need right now to lose composure could mean
losing my friend I hear him moan what’s wrong what’s wrong we haven’t
stopped trying to get him to talk to us my stomach my stomach
The human need to help everyone wants to it’s powerful it’s meaningful
but it’s too much it’s like we all want to help but we are all talking
over each other we are all scared for my friend who is on the ground in
pain dying
People are grabbing me pushing me telling me to do things I can’t do I’m
overwhelmed they’re in the way everyone is talking at once I can’t hear
them all at once I can’t tell how many people are around now they
encircle me the medic my comrades and my friend who is passing away
right before us the crowd wants us to move to get him out of here
A man yells at me he’s pacing back and forth he yells over and over no
ambulance is gonna come we gotta do this ourselves we don’t need no
fucking police we gotta do this ourselves we don’t need no fucking
police we gotta do this ourselves we don’t need the police
I’m telling everyone get back get back give us some space please please
please the medic is lost this is out of his league a car pulls up behind
us I ask him what should we do should we lift him is that OK will that
kill him what should we do what should we do the medic doesn’t know but
he tells us to lift him we grab him the man who was screaming about the
police pushes me away from my grip I fall to the ground the man grabs my
friend and rushes him to the car with others
Another friend arrives in her car she screams put him in my car put him
in my car no no no that’s my partner that’s my partner put him in my car
no no no no put him in the fucking car a struggle ensues for his body
and the man who was screaming is pushed away from our friend he ends up
in her car the car speeds off the car leaves
Everything is amplified we are all pacing running around I wander inside
myself lost what just happened to us our beloved friend it’s OK there
wasn’t really any blood it’s it’s it’s OK he’s OK please no no no I just
saw that I just saw I just saw I just saw that I can’t get rid of that
stop stop stop go away please please
But I can’t have any privacy or safety in my trauma a police tank pulls
up loud a monster blinding lights revving engine with pigs pointing
their guns at us from the top I think you did this you did this all this
fucking pain with your bullets tear gas batons jails prisons death I
want it all to burn for it all to go down in flames with you all inside
tortured for all the bullets you fire at us to explode to backfire into
your mechanical hearts I hate you and the law you protect what you
really are now is bare your gloves are off and some rebels in the haste
of it all albeit with a lack of skill want to shoot back and give you
back some of what we feel
A friend’s car pulls up the doors fly open everyone I came with climbs
in and now I’m sobbing sobbing body shut down we don’t know where to go
we don’t know where to go in this place where is he going where did our
friends go with him
---
I sit for hours crying alone and with friends terrified about what could
happen you might die and I might have been one of the last people to
talk to you before you went under I can only stare into space not
thinking replaying over and over
I remember in the hours before how inspiring it was to be in this zone
the police and us some of us in the back watching some throwing rocks
some pontificating or scolding us
What are we doing what’s the next thing we gotta do to make this
rebellion go on forever
We talked minutes before you were shot I remember you were on top of a
utility box one of those boxes that regulates stop lights you were
talking to old friends new friends up there telling us what you saw the
police were telling us to go home over and over we mocked them and
thought about our exit strategy
The crowd moving back and forth relative to the police line I was a
little bit scared but most everyone else was too so I didn’t feel alone
you comforted me from up on your vantage point we joked about the curfew
with others how we were going to stay like we were never gonna leave put
up a front like we got this you can’t make us leave but really we’re
gonna leave because we only have rocks
Is it better to lose valiantly with a little bit of bravado or courage
than immediately to admit defeat
---
I can’t go back today.
I have never cried so much. I’m surrounded by friends who are doing the
same. We all assemble at his house, sleeping in a pile together and
crying, hoping that everything will be OK. We’re trying to shake out the
emotions and the moment the bullets were flying. It replays over and
over in my mind, and all I can see is someone just a couple of steps
from me falling to the ground. In shock, I stare into space, withdrawn
from the world. I guess this is what it means to process trauma, to
struggle to get back to some kind of equilibrium so I can navigate in
this world.
Trauma builds inside of us and we don’t get to work it out in a healthy
way. Whether it’s because we don’t have a support network of caregivers
or we don’t have time to deal with it—something else comes along to
knock us out again. Trauma also becomes normalized, making it easy to
lose empathy for others because it feels like the world is full of
traumatic histories and situations.
Later, I watch TV and see that people are attempting to attack the
staging area of the police and National Guard. Folks are breaking up
cement blocks to make smaller rocks, throwing Molotov cocktails. The
police later describe this as one of the most intense nights they faced.
---
The political power that comes from a barrel of a gun is not something
to take lightly. The person famous for that turn of phrase, Mao, helped
to bring about the deaths of millions of people. Yet leftists and
radicals still rally around the cult of the gun. Guns are often seen as
the strongest means of resistance—rather than just one tool in the vast
toolbox of resistance that requires collective power, not cadres of
revolutionaries.
In response to the events in Ferguson, there has been a call by some to
take up arms, to militarize the struggle, to build an army, to get all
the “lumpen” black people to be disciplined armed soldiers for the
cause. This would give the state a more legible struggle, one involving
generals and soldiers. This is exactly how the state organizes to defend
its power every day—in militarized formations. We often see this
strategy employed by people who want to wield state power over others
themselves.
It might be necessary to employ guns for self-defense in the process of
building the world we want. It might be inevitable. It is important to
know how to use them in collective struggles, to get comfortable with
them, just as it is important to learn how to steal electricity, how to
work together to grow food or produce propaganda. We have to be
multifaceted, to develop a wide variety of skills. But any effort to
militarize armed struggle around the sole use of guns will immediately
end in failure, because in a militarized war, the state and its lackeys
have more firepower.
I don’t want reckless gunfire in which my friends and other rebels are
shot by our own. Nor do I want disciplined military formations with
their patronizing talk of defending “the people” as if they are
something separate from us, above us, and we (“the people”) should watch
from the stands as they play revolutionary army. The “people” are not a
mass to protect; we are active, creative, and smart in ways that do not
always fit into the prescriptions of ideology or military strategy. Many
of us defend ourselves every day without need of formal protectors.
History shows those protectors are often more dangerous to us than the
things they are supposed to protect us from. Cops are the perfect
example of this.
Rather, we should seek to nourish individual and small group defense so
it can grow into something bigger, acknowledging the diversity of ways
people take action. Rebellious situations like the one in Ferguson help
us to see each other. Some of us might bear arms to defend ourselves,
but mostly the power of such a moment emerges from our shared
determination to keep this space alive.
This struggle is populated by many different groups of people who are
meeting each other and figuring out what it means to be in this space
together as some of us learn how to defend it from police, how to
sabotage capitalist infrastructure and carry out attacks on property.
Some folks do have guns, but the police do not know who does, and that
seems better than them knowing, because this makes it harder for them to
pin down their adversary, predict our response to their actions, or plan
the best way to repress us.
The police really want this to end. They’re trying every means at their
disposal in their press conferences. They have a pastor awkwardly
praying for it to end, they have Ron Johnson giving lectures about the
value of peace and patience, and then—shaking their heads—they show the
table of seized evidence from last night: Molotovs made from 40-ounce
bottles, handguns, chunks of concrete, bricks.
Governor Nixon declares a State of Emergency and calls in the National
Guard to protect the police command center. The police announce that
they will not allow crowds to assemble, that all protesters will be
forced to continue moving along the street or be arrested. However, the
curfew on the city of Ferguson is lifted. Police block off W. Florissant
to cars and set up checkpoints at both ends of the strip. Many of the
side roads through the neighborhoods that lead down to the strip are
also blocked off. This new tactic is aimed at those who had previously
used the side roads to flood onto W. Florissant and escape once things
got too hot.[1]
Early in the afternoon, the rapper Nelly arrives on the scene to tell
people they have options besides rioting. Someone in the crowd shouts
back: “You have options, you’re rich!”
As darkness approaches, the crowd swells and people begin to march in
the streets defiantly. A standoff with the police line develops; rocks
and bottles fly through the air. In response, peace marshals link arms
and form a line between the crowd and the police, attempting to push
people back off the streets.
Despite the efforts of the peace police, some continue to confront the
police throughout the night. One woman rips a “DO NOT ENTER” sign from
the ground and carries it into the road to face off with the police,
occasionally setting it down to go back into the crowd to check on her
baby. The police are almost enjoying this. They start to use their
intercom to try to get us to disperse. As someone tries to pull another
sign out of the ground, they warn: “IF YOU ARE DESTROYING OR REMOVING
STREETS SIGNS, YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO ARREST!” People respond with
laughter. “IF YOU ARE HOLDING CITY PROPERTY, YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO
ARREST!”
---
In the midst of it all, I’m sitting on a curb watching the scene with
some friends. A black woman who happens to be holding a knife is
speaking her piece to a part of the crowd watching and it’s powerful.
I’m sitting with some friends, a little group of white people. She comes
up to us—still holding the knife—and starts to talk to us about how we
all bleed the same blood. Over and over, we all bleed the same blood. If
she cut us, she yells, if she cut us, we’d all bleed the same fucking
blood. As she says this, she makes a cutting motion with her knife.
This discourse is so unlike what I have seen on the internet or in
guilt-ridden activist circles. Sure, the truth is more complicated. The
rich, the poor, the black and non-black bleed the same blood—but
depending on your circumstances, you might bleed or get cut down a bit
less or slower than the others. Still, some of these identity
descriptors don’t necessarily tell us that much about people and what
they’ve been through or what they feel. In the midst of an active police
state, this woman is not trying to create sympathy for the police or
rich; she’s talking about those of us who have chosen to be out here.
What is one to do with such comments? It’s clear that white supremacy
does not melt away just because a black person says we all share the
same blood. The important thing is that a comment like this suggests the
possibility of a fissure in the reifying category of “race” itself,
which is a framework that gives more centrality to concepts and roles
than experiences. In many political circles, the current racial analysis
seems based on a totalizing political rhetoric that does not present a
real challenge to the institutions that maintain a racialized society or
the way of seeing the world that those institutions promote.
That discourse paints over the joyful or traumatic details of all the
stories that people have around resisting those institutions. When I
look at people, I have no idea what they have been through on an
individual level; this reality can undermine nationalisms and ideology.
These simple historical constructs we are given or forced to use to
describe ourselves do not serve us. This is not to deny the existence of
all the forces that privilege some people over others based on identity
or ideology—it is to emphasize that we must be irreconcilably opposed to
those forces, that we have to struggle against a world order that
depends on imposed identities to go on enslaving and exploiting.
Racialization has created a nightmare that has origins in a
nationalist—and therefore ruling class—understanding of the world.
People are divided into supposedly homogenous groups under the banner of
a state or an identity. The racialization and color-coding of people
serves the same function—and using class as identity is no different.
On the one hand, we see the oppressive ways that the narratives and
institutions of power have imposed race, constructing and privileging or
disempowering different identities and relegating them to certain areas
of activity. On the other hand, we see the glorification of race from
those who have bought into racial nationalism—be it white nationalist,
black nationalist, or nationalist in general. This mythology makes gross
generalizations about everyone according to their “historical” ethnic
roots, whether those are the “white” European civilizations of Rome and
Greece or the “black” African ones of Egypt or Nigeria. The reality is
more complicated. Most European societies are not really descended from
Rome and Greece, and “whiteness” and “blackness” are very recent
inventions. Most “European” or “African” serfs must have had little
interest in being seen as Roman or Nigerian or for that matter “white”
or “black.” The ones who identified themselves with those constructs
were usually the ones who lorded over, enslaved, and exploited the
others, colonizing people and forcing them into an enclosure of
nationhood.
Civilizations write their narratives in the blood of those they rule
through conquest and enslavement, a process that whittles down our being
to the categories they force us into. The rulers of previous
civilizations oppressed their populaces according to frameworks similar
to “race,” but distinct from it. They too enslaved people and forced
them to do their bidding, to work their lands, to build their
infrastructure and pay their patronage, effectively forcing people to
become something other than they were, eliminating their potential to be
what they wanted on their own terms. We do a disservice to our ancestors
when we look for nationalist or cultural roots in these bloody stories.
We might be able to find regional identification, perhaps, but the
problem of *history* is that it reduces us to what our masters say we
are—not our actual lives and experiences. What they say we are is what
creates the unrest we feel within ourselves, because we aren’t reducible
to it and we *can’t help but not be even when we try.* Repressing these
inherent contradictions requires police and prisons. It’s what they are
for.
Taking all these details seriously is the opposite of all ideology.
Creating an alternative political framework would be a vast undertaking;
it would threaten all politicians who seek to represent. Not to be able
to define large groups or give a narrative to “history” would undermine
all political projects. What is the solution?
We aren’t history. We are caught in the crossfire of feuding factions;
the rhetoric of some the anti-racists makes this clear enough. It is
another re-imposition of being that appears different, but really isn’t.
---
Allegedly in response to a rumor of shots fired, the police eventually
fire a barrage of tear gas into the streets. People fearlessly throw the
gas back, but the quantity of gas in the air makes it nearly impossible
to stay on W. Florissant and we fall back towards Canfield. More
canisters are fired, more tear gas fills the air, and some in the crowd
work together in an attempt to set Red’s barbeque joint on fire with
Molotov cocktails and gas. Some people are throwing Molotovs, but rather
poorly. A kid gets one from a friend and throws it, but it’s an awkward
throw and only flies 10 feet. We all laugh, like, damn, nice throw.
Someone runs up to the building and throws one in, but the fire goes
out. I see someone else running to Red’s with a container of what looks
like water. He gets to the broken window and pours it in and the fire
goes whoosh! Actually, it’s gasoline, not water.
A friend and I strike up a conversation with two people. They must be 18
or 20 years old. They’re asking us what our deal is. They tell us
they’re gonna be out here tomorrow, that they hope to see us later, that
we gotta get more organized, that we should all get gas masks and keep
fighting.
The police are still telling us to leave. They drive up in their
Bearcat, the equivalent of a Brinks armored car but bigger. They beam
the lights of the Bearcat at us, but then someone shoots at it. We all
scatter. As we go home, remembering the nights before, some of us yell,
If you’re gonna shoot, shoot straight!
To add to the misery, another black man by the name of Kajieme Powell,
who is mentally ill, is killed by police in the Riverview neighborhood
of St. Louis City. He went into a store and allegedly stole some drinks.
A video comes out, showing him armed with a knife. The police arrive and
shoot him dead within 20 seconds. Powell was more than 20 feet from them
and the motherfuckers shot immediately. There are the usual calls for
calm. Antonio French, the alderman whose ward is nearby, once again
encourages us to let justice run its course. He even goes so far as to
congratulate the STLMPD for being transparent and releasing the video
immediately, in contrast to the Ferguson PD. This has the effect of
placating a lot of people.
Finally, on August 21, for the first time since they shot Mike Brown,
the police and their political counterparts succeed in imposing order.
The number of arrests coupled with their slow learning curve has finally
caught up with us. The cops have blocked more and more of the suburban
side streets that gave us a tactical advantage.
Despite the intimidating police presence, we continue to demonstrate our
anger and sadness by marching up and down the street. The police have
parked their cars along the sides of the streets, creating a barrier
that makes it impossible for us to get in the road. They’ve basically
created a circle we have to stay in. Members of the Nation of Islam,
church leaders, and liberal activists are helping them to enforce this.
They are shouting and pushing people onto the sidewalks and away from
police lines. Some small conflicts erupt, but none of them get out of
control.
A young black kid is yelling at the clergy. “Y’all oldheads have been on
this peace and love shit for forever and it’s got us nowhere! The 1950s,
you were on it! The ’60s, the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, you’ve been on it, look
where you’re at now!”
The eventual and inevitable exhaustion has finally arrived. During the
next weeks, until November 24, there are a few notable flare-ups, but a
general peace compared to those hot August days. The passion, anger, and
power many felt has not disappeared entirely. But those of us who have
to hustle, who can’t be in the streets forever, are forced to return to
work, to school, to childcare or eldercare, to coping, to whatever it is
we do to scrape by. Unfortunately, this leaves an opening for those
whose role in society is to handle management, reform, and
representation. The narrative of the rebellion is increasingly taken
over by non-profits, politicians, clergy, and some new activist
organizations that have emerged over the past few months. Many of them
have resources in the form of social networks or finances with which to
continue and represent the fight that initially got ahead of them. The
narrative becomes simpler. Much is erased. It’s inevitable.
This is not necessarily malicious. Some will charge that these groups
are getting rich off “the struggle” or mismanaging their funds. There
were non-profits that were literally getting hundreds of thousands of
dollars to spend to build their names. And yeah, some of it was George
Soros money—he does fund organizations that counter unfettered
rebellion. But those resources were not reaching random people on the
street.
It was counter-insurgency in action. But this isn’t a conspiratorial
critique. This is about the role of non-profits and money. Most of us
will never see any of the Ferguson money because money is finite and
there will always be too little. Because there is too little, these
groups rarely invest in anything or anyone that won’t give them results
and more brand power—which is to say, in *most of us,* with our plethora
of problems: poverty, debt, prison, trauma, un/employment, eviction, and
so on. From a purely capitalistic standpoint, we are not a good
investment. Inside any economic model, our appearance doesn’t make
people with political power feel safe, whether it’s because we’re black,
poor, were not educated in a respectable institution, or speak in a
language that doesn’t compute within the system. Often, what we say is
alienating and seems unstrategic to those who learned their sense of
strategy in a university. We’re full of passion, a multitude of voices
that cannot be commodified or compressed into a neat political
constituency or issue.
In any real rebellion, there is no center to find, no center to fund.
There is no coherent narrative, no single legitimate voice that
represents the identity in question, no “most authentic” voice from “the
frontline,” no one who can speak solely in the name of “community.”
Even when a lot of people know each other and have some sense of
community or collectivity, there are still the usual challenges and
atomization imposed by capitalism, racialization, policing, class
status, the state and its politicians, and the day-to-day challenges of
individual survival. This seems obvious, but it’s useful to remember,
because when things cool down and the professional activists become “the
movement,” when they make their documentaries or write their books, you
might wonder what happened to all the combative folks that you shared
this moment with.
You might not be able to find us because we don’t all meet in one big
room. Nor do we often make it onto camera or into publications.
---
September 10 — Organizers call for the shutting down of I-70 in
solidarity with Michael Brown and to put pressure on the prosecutor to
indict Darren Wilson. Police respond with an overwhelming show of force,
with roughly 300 officers deployed. A crowd of protesters gathers in the
street and boldly marches towards the police line in an attempt to break
through and shut down the highway. The police succeed in stopping
protesters from reaching the highway, but they are unable to calm the
crowd; bricks and bottles are thrown at them. Police make a few arrests
but fail to catch some of the culprits, who escape through the crowd
into the surrounding neighborhood. One middle-aged woman exclaims to the
crowd, “Start saving your shit, put it in a plastic bag and throw it at
these motherfuckers!” and “Now is a good time to rob a bank!”
September 23 — Mike Brown’s memorial burns in the early morning.
Residents blame police or white supremacists. Throughout the day,
supporters clean up and rebuild the memorial. Meanwhile, tension builds
as word spreads about its destruction. When night falls, the streets are
once again filled with people, this time without “peacekeepers.” Police
are met with bottles and rocks as they force people off the streets and
into the neighborhood. After a brief standoff on Canfield Drive, which
the police are still too scared to enter during protests, shots ring out
as someone fires towards the police. In the morning, two high-ranking
officers complain about having to dive behind cruisers to avoid being
hit.
September 28 — A large crowd of protesters throws bottles and rocks at
officers outside of the Ferguson Police Department.
October 2 — Police evict a protest encampment that had been occupying an
empty lot on West Florissant in protest of the murder of Mike Brown.
October 4 — Protesters briefly disrupt the St. Louis symphony, singing
“Which side are you on?”
October 8 — Just before dusk, an off-duty police officer working for a
private security company in a wealthy area of the Shaw neighborhood
shoots and kills 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers. Within a few hours,
hundreds of people have gathered at the intersection. Police offer the
usual story that the kid had a gun and shot first. Many witnesses and
friends claim that the “gun” was actually a sandwich Vonderrit had just
purchased. The crowd’s anger grows. People begin to surround the nervous
police officers, shouting abuse and taunts. The police, realizing that
they are outnumbered and the situation is beginning to be unsafe, try to
leave the area in their cruisers. People surround the cars, smashing out
their taillights and the breaking the window of a detective’s car as he
drives off.
One officer, as he hastily retreats, realizes one of his fellow officers
is missing. “Where’s Joe? We’re missing Joe,” he shouts over and over to
replies from the crowd that, “Joe’s dead, man, we can’t find him
either.” After the police leave the area, protesters take to the street
and block traffic on the major boulevard in the area, Grand Avenue. A
few minor scuffles happen throughout the night, with police attacked any
time they approach the march. It is a sign of the climate in the city
that when officers’ cars are attacked, they flee the area rather than
calling in backup. The city is clearly scared of escalating events and
having a “Ferguson” on their hands.
October 9 — For the second night in a row, a large crowd gathers at the
intersection where Vonderrit Myers was killed. The crowd marches down to
South Grand and proceeds to shut down the on- and off- ramps for highway
I-44. The police keep a safe distance from the crowd, trying to
de-escalate the situation. Eventually, the crowd starts to march down
Flora Place after one woman points out that it is the wealthy residents
of that street that pay for the private security guard who killed Myers.
As the crowd approaches Flora Place, the energy starts to grow—people
bang on cars, scream at the residents, and blare air horns. Protesters
steal American flags off of front porches and a few houses receive
bricks through their windows. The crowd gathers in an intersection and
burns the collected flags. The crowd marches back towards Grand Avenue,
weaving through the neighborhood along the way. When protesters reach
the main intersection, three cops boldly run into the crowd. The
officers are immediately surrounded and shoved out. Within minutes,
roughly 100 officers flood the area to rescue the three officers,
spraying the crowd with mace.
Brief scuffles follow, but the crowd is mostly dispersed by the large
police presence.
October 12–14 — Under the banner “Ferguson October,” activists call for
a weekend of disruption in memory of Mike Brown and to push for an
indictment against Darren Wilson. The weekend is full of demonstrations.
During the day, protesters shut down or disrupt various events including
political campaign rallies, the Rams game, and multiple Wal-Marts, to
name a few. At night, people gather outside of the Ferguson Police
Department.
The events of the weekend, while relatively peaceful, do achieve the
goal of disrupting the normal flow of life in St. Louis and bringing
attention to the case.
November 17 — Ahead of the announcement about whether Darren Wilson will
be indicted, Governor Jay Nixon preemptively declares a State of
Emergency. National Guard troops move into the area and guard 43
locations across the city, including electrical substations, police
stations, shopping malls, and government facilities. An eerie tension
descends on the city as residents await the verdict while the National
Guard drives the streets in armored cars.
November 21 — Two members of the New Black Panther Party are arrested
for allegedly buying pistols under false pretenses. It’s an FBI sting
operation. In the investigation that follows, police accuse the two of a
plot to murder the prosecutor, the governor, and blow up the St. Louis
Arch.
Later, they each pled to four federal felony charges and were sentenced
to 84 months.
November 23 — While people are still waiting for the verdict, protesters
depart from the site where Vonderrit Myers was killed and march through
South St. Louis. The march shuts down major intersections and disrupts
traffic throughout the city.
The days are tense leading up to the announcement of whether Darren
Wilson will be charged. The city is on edge. It’s easy to strike up a
conversation on the street about the topic with anyone. In the
courthouse, paying a traffic ticket, you might run into a guy who talks
to you about strategy and what we should do next—“Idiots, don’t tell the
police you’re gonna block the highway, just do it!” At a medical study,
you might hear from the phlebotomist, who happens to be Mike Brown’s
aunt, “We as the family didn’t go out there, we’re didn’t want to give
any support or appearance of support to what went down.” Or just walking
around your neighborhood, it isn’t uncommon for some random person to
yell, “Justice for Mike Brown or nah?” All you have to do is put your
hands up and that is enough.
I am a little lost. It feels like years have gone by; my eyes are dry of
tears, my head and body are still full of shock, my hair is even
starting to grey. Organizers have brought in many people from out of
town, but where are all the rowdy people I ran with? The ones who
defended themselves, who threw rocks and looted stores? They seem to
have disappeared, the same way I had for those months. The trauma of
what has happened is not lost on me. We do have to sleep sometimes. For
a while, I don’t expect much to happen when the decision comes down,
because much of what has happened between August and November has been
in the framework of civil disobedience; many have sought to scrub the
riots from the narrative completely. But I am prepared for anything.
In the days before the announcement, Ron Johnson was on the news talking
about how he had met with “gang members” who said they would keep the
peace. He told the reporter confidently: “I think you’ll be pleasantly
surprised at what’s going to happen.” Indeed.
A coalition of activist groups forms to issue “rules of engagement,”
demanding safe spaces from police, that police should not wear riot
gear, not use tear gas, or have rifles. The most problematic demand is
individual lawbreakers will be arrested.“Kettling” and mass arrests will
not be used.”
Part of me hopes that this rules of engagement thing is a trick to make
the police as unprepared as possible, that our “safe spaces” would
actually be bases for us to prepare our next moves against the police,
if they agreed to our rule of no riot gear or rifles. But obviously, it
isn’t a trick. It seems odd to expect the police to comply with demands
that are about keeping us safe. Why would they ever do that?
The disparity of their force relative to ours is not to be ignored. But
we shouldn’t be groveling and begging. Compared to them, we have few
ways to defend ourselves, but the reality is that the state needs
weaponry to protect its wealth and power because without them, things
could easily spiral out of control. In August, people were shooting at
them, throwing rocks, burning things, tearing things apart, and it could
grow.
What is going on is not just a matter of over-militarization. When the
police needed more military force in past rebellions, they just called
in the National Guard, who sometimes fired live rounds—for example, in
Detroit in 1967.
What we’re seeing here now is a two-pronged attack, in which the police
and their reformist sympathizers create rules and demands that separates
“good” protestors from “bad” protestors. Intentionally or not, these
“rules of engagement” serve to conceal the reality of the situation. The
police have tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot gear for a reason: we are
a real threat to the wealth and supremacy they protect. This fight is
dangerous. It can result in trauma, arrest, and potentially death. Many
of us were more than willing to take that risk. We are ultimately safer
when we confront this reality and support those who want to engage in
combative actions.
S. Florissant, Ferguson Police station
I go down to the Ferguson police station to be there when the verdict
dropped. No one in the crowd expects Wilson to be indicted. We have
known what will happen from the very day the grand jury started. It is a
stressful to wait for something you already know.
Eventually, the moment comes. The prosecutor is reading the verdict.
Someone has rigged up a PA system to broadcast the speech. It’s cutting
in and out. I can barely hear it.
I see people shaking their heads. The verdict is clear: no indictment.
Word is spreading through the crowd. Folks start to yell at the police
line guarding the station. Mike Brown’s stepfather is screaming for
people burn the police station down: “Burn this bitch down!”
Some people throw things at the police. I heard later that the first
thing thrown at them was a bullhorn. This has all sorts of meaning if
you think about it. We yelled at you for too long, this thing has proved
to be useless. The time for talk is over! At this point, there are only
something like a dozen riot police there. Some of them start to back
away frantically, almost tripping over each other. It is nice to see the
righteous terror inspired by a crowd of angry people.
A woman comes through the crowd, sobbing. I try to comfort her. She
screams, “We’re so far from ever getting any justice! Why?” We hug.
Another woman comes up and holds her. I let go just as CNN comes over to
record this moment. I get in front of the camera and yell at them for
being vultures, for not letting this woman have this moment in peace.
They eventually leave. The antagonism towards the media is pretty
strong. Earlier in the night, some media figures had been robbed and
others had been threatened with violence.
Suddenly, gunshots ring out and people surge over to where they are.
People run towards the gunshots. Windows start breaking all around us.
Some peace police are trying really hard to guard the businesses. It’s
impossible.
While that is happening, a large part of the crowd is marching to a
formation of riot police down the street to confront them. People start
to break up blocks of paving stones, concrete, anything they can find to
throw. The sound of rocks hitting riot shields is constant.
A cop car is parked about 15 feet in front of the line of cops, where
most of the crowd is. Folks start to trash it. Windows are smashed and
anything loose in the car is grabbed. I hear later that someone popped
the trunk and took an AR-15 out of it. No one is stopping anyone; if
anyone wanted to, they’d be outnumbered. Nearby, I hear two young girls
yelling expletives at the police. One of them, embarrassed, says, “Oh,
I’m sorry! I don’t usually cuss. I go to church every Sunday!” They
laugh, pick up rocks, and throw them at the cop car. There are numerous
cameras around and they aren’t wearing masks. I try to warn them, but
they just shrug.
The police yell over the intercom “PLEASE STOP THROWING ROCKS! YOU WILL
BE SUBJECT TO ARREST AND/OR OTHER MEASURES! STOP IT NOW!” People start
to rock the car to try to flip it. “PLEASE STOP TRYING TO FLIP THE
POLICE CAR, OR YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO ARREST! STOP NOW!”
The cops are firing rubber bullets and pellets. Beside me, there’s a man
yelling; suddenly, he screams and covers his eye. A pellet has hit his
eye, blinding him. As more pellets fly, we’re rushing to pull him away
to safety while he screams. Some people grab the man and rush him to the
hospital. Later, I hear that he lost his eye.
At a loss, the police fire tear gas and beanbag rounds. As we run from
the gas, I see an older black man asking younger kids if they’re
leaving.
“You all leaving already? Or are you just taking a break and gonna go
back for more? Yeah, take a break, but don’t leave! Keep your strength.
Go back for more.” Sage advice.
People wait until the tear gas dissipates and come back and throw more
rocks at the line. The cop car is totaled and there is nothing really
left for people to do but to try to flip it again. In response, the
police shoot more tear gas, this time a whole choking lot of it.
Finally, the crowd disburses into neighborhood as the police advance
towards the police station, firing gas into the side streets. Some folks
loot a BoostMobile store and other shops. Further away from the police
line, a trashcan is on fire. I run into some folks who are looting
pricey hair extensions and getting into a car. I warn them about
covering their license plates and they give me a smirk from under their
masks: “This isn’t our car, we’re good.”
My group decides to circle back to the police line where our cars are
parked. We walk through the neighborhood. Someone near us pops off a few
shots in the direction of the police, pretty nonchalant. In return, the
police fire more gas. We loop back to S. Florrisant, where the cop car
is now on fire. It is a beautiful and rare sight. Later I hear that
another police car behind it was set on fire too.
---
We get to our car and drove to West Florissant. As we pull up, people
are looting everything. All the boards have been taken off the
businesses.
As usual, photographers are taking photos of those looting. Some folks
go up to them and tell them that they should stop for their safety. Two
of the three stop, very nervous. I tell them, “Don’t pull that shit
where I leave and then you’re back taking photos! We don’t want people
to get arrested later for this. This is for your safety and for the
safety of everyone.” Terrified, they leave. The other guy looks like he
could hold his own against us. He tells us he isn’t a snitch.
We walk down the street. Lots of alcohol flowing. Lots of consumer goods
no longer being consumer goods. A group of what seems like middle-school
kids comes up to us and asks if we want any candy, because their purses
are too heavy. In return, someone offers them some fancy cognac and one
of them yells that they are underage—and yeah, give me some!
We had distributed masks and gloves earlier. Spray cans are being passed
around for anyone to use. Food and liquor are shared, fires are blazing.
People are getting drunker and drunker. Cars are starting to get a bit
more wild and out of control on the streets. It seems like as people go
from one store to the next, fire is following.
I’m standing in the crowd. The fire is blowing up the night. The police
and fire department can only wait until we get tired and those with guns
move on or run out of bullets. Pop-pop-pop-pop! I hear the noise and
scan my surroundings. I watch the fires burn. The flames are so high.
What is normally a sterile and controlled reality is transforming into
its essence: toxic smoke. The material that is burning came from the
earth, violently extracted to feed capitalism and transformed into
bullshit strip malls. We frequent these places, we shop and shoplift
there; they hire us, they exploit us, they take our money. Now, it’s a
billowing cloud permeating the air. I remember the woman in August
screaming for people to burn all this shit down. Her demand has been
taken to heart tonight.
The police slowly move in as folks run out of things to loot. The cops
are not doing anything other than protecting the fire department, who
are not able to put out the fires on account of all the gunfire. Our
group decides to leave and go to the south side of St. Louis, where
other protests are going on. But the thing is… our car is the now
blocked off by the police line at the Ferguson Mart. Too sketched out
and maybe too incriminated to walk past them, we try to sneak through
the neighborhood, wondering if we can make it through the line some
other way. We find a street that might work, stash any stuff that might
get us popped, and walk slowly towards the cops. They immediately tell
us to turn around and fuck off. Our next option: *sneak across a train
bridge that goes over to the other side of W. Florissant.
We sneak through people’s yards and run up the hill to get to the
tracks. On one side of us, there are homes; on the other, a grocery
store guarded by the National Guard. We walk behind a fence overgrown
with vines that give us cover. As we walk, tiptoeing, avoiding rocks,
stepping on the ties, trying not to make too much noise, we hear the
soldiers talking among themselves. Eventually, I hear one of them
interrupt: “Hey… did you hear that? Sounds like there’s something over
there.”
Fuck. They’re pointing in our direction. We all freeze, hoping they’ll
think it’s just the wind or the general cacophony of gunfire and
explosions. Finally, we start to walk, but again, we hear them murmuring
about a noise on the tracks. Realizing how sketchy this all is, that we
could easily be perceived to be making an attack on the grocery store
and the police command center, we decide to head back to the
neighborhood and figure out something else.
We meander around the neighborhood. There are really only one or two
exits to the main street and cops with assault rifles are guarding them.
We walk past a house with people outside; they warn us that there’s a
cop up the way. Generously, they invite us inside. As we all drink
liquor together, we thank them for their hospitality and talk about
what’s going on. The television is on, showing helicopter footage of W.
Florissant totally on fire. We see footage of the two cop cars on fire
on S. Florissant. One of the people in the house is singing the
iLoveMakonnen song “Tuesday,” because it’s Monday and he’s wondering
what’s going to go up on Tuesday.
Next, we see footage of people blocking Highway I-44 down on the south
side of the city and then, later, footage of people looting the pawnshop
on South Grand, which is more of a bohemian neighborhood. Most notably,
someone comes out with a crossbow. The South Grand protests have had a
different character; they’ve been more peace-oriented. Some folks who
are familiar to us from the previous months in Ferguson are there,
including the box truck that reads “No Shoot, No Loot” on it. A friend
tells me later that they are among the first people to propose looting,
yelling and pointing at the pawnshop. They’re in the wrong space, sadly.
Later, I hear from friends that activist organizer types were going
around attacking anyone breaking things or trying to loot.
Eventually, friends with a car find a way to get us. We cram into their
small car and head to the city via a very long route. When we get to
South Grand, it’s general chaos. The police are driving Bearcats around,
shining their lights on small groups and tear-gassing every intersection
in all directions. They’re trying hard to get us to disperse.
We run into eight or nine teenage kids, one of whom I met in Ferguson in
August. Some of us shared some chips together on one of the nights the
stores were looted. Initially, we sketch them out, but eventually the
person I met months ago remembers me and we’re cool. Invincible as
children, they really don’t give a fuck; it’s kind of crazy. They talk
about whether to loot a clothing store down the road, but I had seen
lots of National Guard in the parking lot when I had driven by it
earlier in the day. We convince them that it is a really bad idea. They
agree and thank us for the heads up. I ask them where they are from and
they all respond, “North County.” They kind of regret coming out here;
they wish they had stayed in Ferguson where things are still happening
and the cops aren’t doing anything to stop it. But it’s pretty amazing
that they decided to make the trip out here to express their rage.
Some of their folks start ripping up metal trashcan lids and throwing
them at the nearest windows they can find. Luckily, when the police
drive by us, they miss this, because they are so busy dealing with the
crowd down the road. But after ten minutes, they pop out on us and we
all run.
We head back down South Grand to where most people are. Lots of people
have now taken shelter in a coffee shop that has been an organizing
epicenter for the protests in the city. It is also one of the “safe
spaces” that activists asked the police to respect. The police are now
standing outside of it firing tear gas onto the patio. There’s something
like a hundred people inside and the gas is seeping in.
It’s absolutely terrible, but it’s not surprising that the police are
not concerned about safe space.
Tonight, there is another rally outside the Ferguson Police Department.
The crowd is much smaller than last night. It makes sense; a lot of
people were up late and lots went down. But people are still angry and
confrontational. The police and the National Guard have increased their
presence in front of the police department. They are largely able to
maintain control, rushing into the crowd and attacking people every time
a bottle or rock is thrown.
Down the street, there is a presence of mostly white, armed militiamen,
presumably the notorious Oath Keepers—comprised of former cops and
military. They’re hiding on the roofs of businesses, wearing armor and
sporting assault rifles. I join some folks in yelling at them, asking
them what they’re up there for.[2]
After we spend a few hours standing off with the police, someone yells
that we should go down the street to Ferguson City Hall. We quickly
depart, leaving the surprised police behind. Having marched a few
blocks, protesters round a corner and approach the unguarded city hall
building. There is a lone empty cop car parked in front of it.
Immediately, people begin to attack the building and the police cruiser.
People break the cruiser’s windows and attempt to flip it over and set
it on fire while others break the windows of city hall with whatever
they can find. By the time the police arrive with their armored vehicles
and cars, the crowd has moved back towards the main street, South
Florissant. A few cruisers have their windows smashed out as the armored
vehicles shoot tear gas into the air.
As protesters make their way back towards the police station, there is
talk of going to the mall to shut it down. Some protesters do that later
in the night. The night is much calmer, but mostly because the National
Guard is preemptively guarding stores, unlike the previous night.
---
climbing dead bodies so you can get to heaven
Long lines of symbols like the ones you’ve been reading are often used
to obscure flesh-and-blood bodies. Written and spoken words have been
used time and time again to deceive and hide. The first writers were an
elite class who helped the ruling class to keep records of their slaves,
grains, armies, money, sovereignty, and power. Much of what is known
about past states comes down to us from these scribes who kept records
of state and religious affairs but not much about the day-to-day affairs
of ordinary people. There aren’t very many autobiographies of enslaved
Egyptian pyramid builders, or of peasants in Africa, the Americas,
Europe, or Asia—and there are relatively few from African slaves in the
Americas. Scribes helped to carve economic records, laws, commandments,
declarations, and myths into stones that many of our ancestors couldn’t
read, which were ultimately used to victimize them. The Word was sacred
and people were punished if they sinned against it. A fictitious god who
saw and drecorded all, another kind of historian keeping tabs on us,
often played a role in these stories.
The world used to hold a vast multitude of different human traditions in
countless different languages. We’ll never know what that was like. Was
it better? I don’t know. The dominant languages that exist now are
dominant because of a few power structures that wiped out other
languages and cultures. It could be argued that the languages we speak
are not ours—that in some ways, they are opposed to our interests, the
products of a long history of whittling down. But being stuck with them,
we also subvert them all the time, changing the definitions of words to
become freer or elude the authorities.
Our stories can easily change with time and perspective. Memory is
foggy, days and moments can get mixed together or split apart. Sometimes
we discover crucial new details—possibly years later.
It’s become hard to say “Ferguson” anymore, seeing this name invoked by
so many different people to make so many different points. Everybody
wants a piece. The state, the police, activists, anarchists, black
nationalists, Maoists and other political cults, they all have their
interpretations. Most of these highlight a few spectacular, exaggerated
elements and downplay the others to fit their framework, often from a
very self-important perspective.
The legacy of the events in Ferguson has put some activists and leaders
on a pedestal to be looked up to. There is widespread pressure to prove
yourself in activist circles—and, to some extent, in anarchist circles,
as well. How many battle scars do you have? How many civil disobedience
arrests or media appearances? How victimized have you been? These are
among the ways that some have built their militant cred. In August, some
of those same people were out on the street trying to stop the looting,
discourage defense measures, and suppress the general combativeness of
those outside their circles. It’s not uncommon to hear some people use
the fact of having been in Ferguson as clout, to speak positively of
burning cop cars—without referencing their own repressive actions—in
speeches at universities like Harvard where no one can challenge them.
I’ve seen yelling matches between demonstrators in which both sides were
shouting “I was there from day one!” in reference to August 9, 2014. How
petty to try to climb to the top over the thousands of others who
participated in the rebellion—people who didn’t make the media sound
bite, had no activist safety network, who were not non-violent, whose
voices were a little too quiet or whose language was not comprehensible
to those who wield institutional power. The truth is that there never
was a coherent frontline. People look for names and organizations to
build a story around, but that’s not what the story is.
Ferguson has become a symbol. In reality, it’s just one more place among
many where fucked up shit is happening. It’s a small suburb of 20,000
people tucked into a sea of 30 different municipalities on the edge of
St. Louis City. Strip malls, segregation, suburban roads, flat and
boring. It could be anywhere in the US. There is no defining spirit that
you can attribute to this place. It’s not a rebel territory that is
constantly defended; there is no well-established collective culture of
resistance. For some, it’s just another hashtag. For others, it became a
struggle laboratory.
For the state, what went down in Ferguson has become a workshop for the
study of “race relations,” crowd control strategy, and reform. The same
thing seems to happen after every uprising in recent times—a federal or
state report is put out about what happened and what could be done in
the future. Reading the narrative of the police can be funny and useful
because often, it frames the situation more realistically, although they
still get so much wrong. If nothing else, they’re not trying to conceal
the combativeness of those who attacked them in the way that many
“radical” politicos do.
For many academics and revolutionaries, what happened in Ferguson is
something to shoehorn into grand narratives about a revolutionary
subject, Marx, or anti-blackness. How frustrating it is when they use
their incomprehensible jargon to speak about a situation in which many
people passionately fought and we can’t even understand it! It’s as if,
even though we were there, we weren’t there in their narrative: we
become chess pieces in someone else’s grand theory, to be moved around
only when it suits the player. If some of us don’t fit the theory, the
thinkers just erase us.
Some of their analysis might be useful, all the same, but it’s odd how
inaccessible it all is considering how seriously some of these folks
take “white supremacy” and “anti-blackness.”
Distrust of the police and the state has led some to develop conspiracy
theories about why the rebellion ended. For instance, some people,
including some anarchists, believe that some of the people who died in
the years after the rebellion were revolutionaries murdered by the state
or white supremacists. It is arguable whether most of those who have
died would have called themselves revolutionaries. It might be more
accurate to say they were people who were caught up in the rebellion but
also had past lives that eventually caught back up to them.
St. Louis is a violent place, full of intergenerational trauma that can
follow you for your whole life. When I’ve talked with (usually working
class) people my age from here, it’s not uncommon to hear about how much
they want to get out of this place. There are always stories about a
friend or family member dying from gun violence or drugs. There’s a
legitimate fear of being the next victim of the police and the street.
The story about revolutionary freedom fighters being repressed by
secretive enemies distracts people from examining daily life in mass
society. In our own ways, we all suffer the daily indignities of living
in a highly racialized capitalist order, in which interpersonal
violence, work, repressive family relations, homophobia, drug and
alcohol addiction, depression, and desperation are widespread and often
much more deadly than the police. Daily life is killing us, quickly or
slowly. The police are often not the most dangerous threat we face. The
fight is against daily life.
Death is not always the absence of heartbeat. It’s not always a bullet
tearing your soul apart from your body. It is not always something
physical. Another form of death is never being seen or heard because
your existence is too obscure or complicated to be incorporated into
anyone’s social or political program.
Yet, to me, this is ultimately a strength. We should not be in a hurry
to help anyone identify or oversimplify us. We confound every great
narrative, every program. That’s the struggle, in my view: to resist
categorization, to build relations without trying to measure up to
anything other than the measures we make ourselves.
After the whirlwind, the record slowly becomes set and fixed. Our
enemies—the activists, academics, preachers, police, and
politicians—recuperate the story they have so desperately been trying to
own. The story that exceeded their grasp. They have all the time they
need to do this—it’s their job to repress and package rage into
something palatable. Some are actually paid to do this; that part is not
a conspiracy theory. For those excluded from this show, time passes,
memory fades, bills need to get paid, kids need to be raised, the hustle
continues.
The documentaries and books are written, with notable figures quoted. It
hurts to watch. It’s like the twilight zone: in the first part of the
episode, we’re at war with the ones who decried the rioting, but later
on, they’ve rewritten themselves as the new “frontline” militants. We
know the secret, but it’s no use trying to express it, the events are
too confusing and the megaphone voiceovers are too loud. The reoccurring
memory of many of these people standing with their backs to the police
telling people to go home haunts us. It’s hard not to feel like a bitter
broken record.
In the end, a disconnected “movement” was born, but it is smaller, less
proletarian, and limited to theatrical slogans, specialized roles
(activist, organizer, politician, white ally or “accomplice”), and
trainings that ultimately lead us back the same terrible chasm. Many
people recede because the drama and the false sense of community in this
scene are not worth it.
I am often tortured by the past. I find it harder and harder to believe
in what I remember in my heart. Those sleepless August nights, the
overwhelming and inexplicable moments, only reside in a deep memory that
is difficult to access. Still, it waits to re-emerge. When? Tomorrow?
Next year? Decades from now? Never again? What was all that really for?
In left political circles, it is customary to celebrate the recorded
militant ancestors, to look back on radical movements and rebellions, to
name names, to highlight organizations, to tell the great story. But
these stories are only told because they are visible, and useful to
those who tell them. *History* is the overpowering voiceover, the scenes
cut or exaggerated to serve political purposes. Everything else below is
a mumbling you can barely hear.
Still—what those days in Ferguson did to everyone who lived them is
deep. It comes up in countless ways that will never be reduced to
documentaries or tweets. All the stories from the people I’ve
encountered in court rooms, at parties, shows, protests, or randomly on
the street—people who have unrepentantly claimed that they or their
friends started a fire, that they were the first ones to bust through
the QT door, that they looted the Foot Locker first, threw the first
stone, or just that they were there. This sort of folklore is much more
powerful than any book or written account.
It is only fitting that this has all become a sort of folklore. History
is written from above and far away, seeking to synthesize a moment into
some kind of grand narrative. Folklore, though it is also limited, is
much more personal. It is often spoken, poetically and bodily—and the
places we usually tell our stories are not in the halls of power or in
front of cameras. Folklore resists the efforts of scribes whose job is
to translate our stories for academic or state research. The memory that
is both collective and individual is powerful, because it exists in the
depths of our bodies—not merely as words, but also in our trauma, our
power, our laughter, our love and rage.
In times when individual alienation seems to be ever increasing, when it
is hard to connect with others, it feels crucial to find that collective
memory, to resist the institutions that seek to frame what we
experienced according to their own interests. In times of revolt, the
fog of memory lifts, giving us a chance to remember our bodies and our
agency, our ability to act, to break with the roles we have been given,
to do and be the things we are told we never could.
[1] This part of Ferguson does not conform to a grid, making it
difficult for police to patrol and giving demonstrators the upper hand.
The streets are generally dark and confusing, and the residents of some
of them are outright hostile to police—particularly Canfield Drive, the
street where Mike Brown was murdered. When the police tear-gassed
demonstrators, it was possible to retreat to the neighborhood. Some
could just go right home because their yards were right behind the strip
of stores.
[2] I’ve been having an internal debate about these Oath Keeper folks
since I first saw them mingling in the QT lot in August. It’s clear that
they are fucked up, but they aren’t entirely the Nazi-white-supremacist
kind of fucked as much as they are USA Constitutionalists. They prefer
to promote the commandments of the slave-owning founding fathers of this
country. Most notable is the Oath Keeper line about the protection of
private property and the “right to protest” that doesn’t destroy said
property. This line has traction among many people in this country. I
have seen these mostly white militia folks spouting this line in largely
black crowds and it has worked quite well on some folks. Later the
following year, some of the members call for a hundred black men to
march armed through Ferguson. In the end, the Oath Keeper leadership
purged those who called for it. They still had the march, but it was
just a couple of wingnut and conservative black militiamen standing in
the rain. It’s worth exploring the institution of private property and
how it functions as the foundation of the class and race relations
around us. It is clear enough when you realize that the institution of
private property was one of the complex mechanisms that made it possible
for slavery to be systemized and rationalized. The slave owners who
wrote the Constitution surely had this in mind.