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Title: Next Time It Explodes Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 13, 2015 Language: en Topics: revolt, repression, Ferguson Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2015/08/13/feature-next-time-it-explodes-revolt-repression-and-backlash-since-the-ferguson-uprising
A year has passed since the murder of Michael Brown, one of over 1100
people, disproportionately black and brown, killed by US law enforcement
in 2014. The movement against institutionalized white supremacy and
police violence has spread and escalated, gaining leverage on the
authorities and the public imagination despite repeated efforts to coopt
it. At the same time, we are seeing extra-governmental white supremacist
violence reemerge as a force in the US, as it always does whenever state
strategies for imposing white supremacy reach their limits.
The illusion of social peace is evaporating. Over the past year, the
National Guard has been called out three times to quell anti-police
rioting. White racists have retaliated with church burnings and murders,
while raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support murderers in
uniform. The lines that are being drawn may determine the geography of
racialized conflict in the US for a long time to come. How did we arrive
here from the first demonstrations in Ferguson? And how should we
position ourselves in these struggles?
The racialized poverty that forms the landscape of Ferguson and so many
other predominantly black districts is not just a consequence of the
recession of 2008. The costs of capitalism have always been inflicted
first and worst on black people, from slavery and Jim Crow to the
contemporary phenomenon of “surplus humanity” for whom there is no place
in the economy. And since the beginning, this has engendered black
resistance.
Fifty years ago, white America faced powder keg of civil rights
movements, militant black organizing, and urban riots. Because the 1960s
were a time of comparative abundance and economic growth, the United
States government could afford to stabilize society by integrating some
people of color into more aspects of political and economic life. But
even those concessions took place at a price: while a minority of black
people were offered conditional access to the middle class, the more
militant organizers and the majority of black communities were
ruthlessly repressed. Since then, some of the leaders of the black civil
rights movement have become successful politicians, while Black Panthers
remain behind bars along with a million other black people.
This is the dual operation of repression: kill or imprison the ones who
won’t or can’t compromise, while integrating the more tractable into the
power structure.
Today, in the age of global austerity, there are few resources available
with which to strike bargains with the excluded. The rhetoric from
politicians and pundits condemning protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore
is a military operation intended to make it possible to use force
against them without blowback, but it also shows that the conflict
between the two sides is irresolvable: no one in power has any idea what
to do about our society’s racial and economic inequalities. Leaders on
the left are doing their best to obscure this in order to buy time. When
they bought time in the 1960s, that time was used to build the jails and
prisons that hold nearly two and a half million people today, to set the
stage for the gentrification that is currently demolishing entire
communities of color.
This is why in 2014, neither the repressive force of the state nor the
receding lure of economic success were enough to contain black rage. No
wonder Ferguson exploded.
Consult the appendix below for a timeline of the Baltimore uprising.
The post–1960s strategy of integrating black leaders into the structures
of state power has also reached its limits. We saw hints of this in the
2009 uprising following the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, a city
whose political elite includes civil rights veterans who now oversee
police that behave the same as ever towards the black and poor.
Although Ferguson was a classic example of a black majority terrorized
by a violent white elite, the power structure in Baltimore includes a
number of black authority figures. That extends even into the police
department: three of the six officers arrested for the murder of Freddie
Gray are black. Yet putting black people in positions of state power
hasn’t done away with poverty, police killings, or other forms of
structural racism in Baltimore. Black politicians may have been able to
ameliorate the situation to some extent, but in the end it took the
riots with which people responded to the murder of Freddie Gray to force
the issue of white supremacy.
People of any background can maintain white supremacist institutions.
Despite media handwringing about Ferguson’s disproportionately white
police force, we don’t just need affirmative action among those who
impose structural oppression; we need to make it impossible for these
institutions to dominate people in the first place.
After the initial explosion, chief prosecutor Marilyn Mosby succeeded in
averting further confrontations by announcing the filing of charges
against Freddie Gray’s murderers immediately ahead of the demonstrations
scheduled for May Day weekend. Her decision to press charges was
exceptional and courageous, but most of those charges would never have
been filed if not for clashes like the ones she was trying to forestall.
It is a mistake to turn people from means of protest that interrupt the
status quo back to ineffective strategies that rely on the institutional
channels of redress. Even if the officers responsible for Freddie Gray’s
death are found guilty, that will not prove that the system can police
itself, but rather that it takes a full-scale uprising to impose even a
modicum of consequences on those who maintain it. Rather than setting
out to reform the court system one riot at a time, it would make more
sense to ask what these uprisings lack to become steps towards
revolutionary change.
In response to that possibility, those who have the greatest cause to
fear change—the authorities, the corporate media, and representatives of
the middle class—set out to frame the uprising in Baltimore as
pathological and puerile. The curfew that was imposed in Baltimore on
April 29 along with the National Guard occupation was an extension of
the curfew that had already been in place,[1] for young people in that
city all year. In effect, the April 29 curfew signified the
infantilizing of the whole adult population of Baltimore, an
intensification of the function that the state always plays in pacifying
and sidelining people.
This is the light in which we must understand the corporate media
narrative about the mother who hit her son for masking up and throwing
rocks on the premise she didn’t want him to become yet another Freddie
Gray.[2] That narrative individualizes blame for police violence—in
fact, Freddie Gray was not committing any sort of crime when he was
arrested. There is no individual solution for the structural violence
directed at Freddie Gray and countless young people like him—and likely
no solution that involves obeying the law or waiting for it to take its
due course. Waiting on the courts is yet more infantilizing: hush up and
let the adults take care of this.
But that sort of sidelining is becoming less and less feasible. In
Ferguson and then in Baltimore, we saw children throwing rocks because
their parents had already been incapacitated or imprisoned, just like in
Palestine—and because, as in Palestine, they knew that there would be no
payoff to behaving themselves. There has been a lot of rhetoric about
fatherless children, and indeed a shocking proportion of men have been
kidnapped from black communities in places like West Baltimore. But the
truth is that black youth succeeded in forcing the issue of police
violence where everyone else had failed. In interrupting the functioning
of a system that has no place for them, they are the ones opening the
possibility of real change, not the black leadership of the previous
generation.
From Ferguson to Baltimore, the cycle of revolt accelerated and
intensified. The arc of events that took a week and a half to unfold in
Ferguson played out much more rapidly in Baltimore. Large parts of the
city were in flames within two days of the first confrontations, and the
National Guard was deployed almost immediately; Mosby filed the charges
that effectively concluded the uprising just four days later. Despite
the speedy quelling of the riots, it seems possible that the state had
nearly reached the limit of what it could do to impose white supremacist
inequality by main force: with the prisons packed, once the National
Guard is deployed, escalating to a higher level of repression would mean
declaring open war on the population.
If multiple uprisings were to occur simultaneously in the same region,
control might break down completely. Hence the authorities’ scrambling
to mollify people they had been ignoring for years.
A week before the murder of Freddie Gray, a police officer had murdered
Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in North Charleston, South Carolina,
shooting him in the back as he fled. The killing was caught on video,
and within three days the officer was charged with murder. Even in the
birthplace of the Confederacy, the specter of uprising forced the
authorities to impose consequences on the police.
Yet whenever governmental enforcement of white supremacy reaches its
limits in the United States, independent white supremacist activity
picks up. The classic example of this is the emergence of the Ku Klux
Klan and similar organizations like the White League and the Red Shirts
after the abolition of slavery. In many cases, it was the same sheriffs,
judges, and legislators who enforced racist laws on the books donning
robes and hoods to pick up where the laws left off.
In recent months, we’ve seen a resurgence of autonomous white
supremacist activity, including a spate of church burnings that began in
Ferguson immediately after the decision not try Darren Wilson for the
murder of Michael Brown. But that could be only the tip of the iceberg.
In response to the uprisings of the past few years, we are seeing
police—and the subset of middle-class America from which many of them
are drawn—beginning to conceive of their interests as distinct from the
rest of the state structure. In 2011, during the peak of Occupy Oakland,
Mayor Jean Quan wrestled with the Oakland Police Department, which
repeatedly asserted a contrary agenda. Something similar occurred
between the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City last winter,
when New York City police carried out an unofficial strike demanding
more unconditional support from the government—in effect, demanding the
freedom to employ violence with impunity. After the Baltimore uprising,
there was a lot of grumbling among Maryland police who blamed their
superiors for not permitting them to use more violence against
demonstrators.
This kind of frustration could give rise to new racist movements that
will understand themselves as needing to take the law into their own
hands in order to maintain law and order and defend private property.
Something similar has occurred in Greece with the emergence of the
fascist party Golden Dawn, which now counts a great part of the
country’s police officers in its ranks. That makes it especially ominous
that the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization of former policemen
and soldiers, have made repeated appearances at demonstrations in
Ferguson.
Autonomous movements of all stripes have an advantage today, when
government is widely discredited. Like anarchists in contrast to
liberals, autonomous white supremacists are more effective than
garden-variety racists because they are prepared to use direct action to
achieve their goals. What is at stake here is what autonomy will mean in
the public imagination: freedom and resistance to oppression, or
unchecked racist violence. The discourse of autonomy is strategically
precious territory; whoever is able to occupy it will be able to
determine the frame within which people conceptualize social change.
For the state, the intensification of extra-governmental white
supremacist activity is an opportunity to change the subject. Such
activity enables the government to present itself as protecting people
from racist violence, directing attention away from all the normalized
ways that the state imposes such violence. The image of the National
Guard holding back white vigilantes during integration in the South gave
the federal government decades of credibility, even though the same
National Guard put down the riots of the late 1960s. If anything like
Golden Dawn or the KKK of the 1920s gets off the ground in the US today,
many people currently involved in movements against police and prisons
will line up behind the government again, legitimizing those
institutions as necessary tools against white supremacists even though
in the long run they will always be used chiefly against the black,
brown, and poor.
So far, we have yet to see a surge in organized group violence from
fascists or rogue police officers. Autonomous white supremacist violence
has remained the province of lone wolves like Dylann Roof, who carried
out a racist massacre in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015,
reportedly with the intention of catalyzing a race war. Photographs
showed him brandishing a Confederate flag and other racist insignia.
In response, activists renewed their appeal to the state legislature to
remove the Confederate flag from its official place on the grounds of
the state capitol. In 1961, Democratic Governor Ernest Hollings had
initiated legislation to raise the Confederate flag on the capitol
grounds as a symbol of resistance to the civil rights movement. Despite
the end of legal segregation, the flag stood, defying an NAACP tourism
boycott since 2000.
On June 21, days after the Emanuel Church massacre, “Black Lives Matter”
graffiti appeared on Confederate monuments in Charleston and elsewhere.
On June 27, Black Lives Matter activist Brittany Ann Byuarim Newsome was
arrested and charged with “defacing a monument” after climbing up the
flagpole at the state capitol and removing the Confederate flag. Less
than two weeks later, lawmakers voted to remove it from the State
Capitol.
This demonstrates the power of direct action. The tourism boycott had
been ineffective; so long as the state perceived no internal threat to
order, it could afford to shrug off a few lost tourist dollars and the
indignation of activists. But when uprisings elsewhere around the US
dovetailed with local outrage, the willingness of a few individuals to
break the law hastened a process that otherwise could have dragged on
decades longer. The spectacle of a state claiming to oppose racism
arresting an activist for removing an officially sanctioned symbol of
racism from the headquarters of the state left the lawmakers no
choice—especially after the Ku Klux Klan scheduled a rally at the
capitol for July 18, threatening to create an additional spectacle of
explicit racists outside the legislature allied with filibustering
Republicans within. On July 9, the legislators voted to take down the
Confederate flag, rebranding themselves as anti-racists. As in Ferguson
and Baltimore, direct action had shifted the terrain, compelling
officials to scramble to catch up.
Yet by focusing attention on removing the Confederate flag from the
state capitol, activists had displaced rage against the racist murders
in South Carolina onto a symbolic issue that legislators could address.
The role of the Ku Klux Klan here aptly illustrates how
extra-governmental white supremacist activity can be advantageous for
the state.
This was the context in which Klansmen and women, police, and protesters
attending a black-organized counterdemonstration converged upon the
state capitol grounds of Columbia, South Carolina on July 18, 2015. The
Klansmen hoped to attract the attention of angry whites who felt
victimized by recent victories against white supremacy; if they could
present themselves as the sole remaining defenders of a flag and a
tradition abandoned by the authorities, they would win new adherents for
extra-governmental white supremacist organizing. The authorities hoped
to preserve order, showing that they could control opponents of the
state on both sides, in order to keep the state itself central for all
seeking social change. The protesters, as usual, were divided between a
variety of goals and methodologies; they ran the gamut from religious
pacifists to black separatists to predominantly white anarchists.
The day ended in a rout for the Klan, with a multiethnic crowd including
anarchists chasing them back to their cars and pelting them with
projectiles as the overextended police struggled to protect them. More
Klansmen went to the hospital than protesters went to jail. The
demonstrators had prevented the Klan from asserting an image of
strength, hopefully discouraging dissatisfied white people from joining
them. At the same time, compared to the events in Ferguson and
Baltimore, the police had ceased to be the chief subject of the
demonstrations; Dylann Roof, the controversy about the Confederate flag,
and the Klan rally had shifted the subject away from policing and other
normalized and fundamental aspects of the white supremacist power
structure, towards exceptional and symbolic expressions of white
supremacy. As social conflicts polarize and more and more people on both
sides break off from state-based strategies, it will be especially
important to continue confronting the institutionalized white supremacy
of the state.
The police in the St. Louis area have continued their pattern of killing
someone every month or so since the protests there last August and
November. The police in Baltimore and South Carolina will surely
continue killing, as well, even if they are more anxious about the
consequences; apparently, it requires this level of perpetual violence
to preserve the current social order. It will take more than reforms,
more than individual uprisings, to put a stop to police murder.
Over the past seven years, we have seen a slow, steady escalation in the
tactics that protesters in the United States feel entitled to employ. In
2008 and 2009, only the most radical student groups went so far as to
occupy universities; in 2011, Occupy became the watchword of an entire
mass movement. During the Occupy movement, only the most radical groups
went so far as to blockade anything; during the Black Lives Matter
protests of November and December 2014, people around the United States
employed blockading on a regular basis. During the protests that spread
from Ferguson in 2014, only the most enraged participants engaged in
vandalism, arson, and looting; yet protesters in Baltimore escalated to
vandalism, arson, and looting as soon as their demonstrations escaped
police control. All this illustrates the value of pushing the envelope:
demonstrating new tactics, however unpopular they may be at the time, so
that they enter the public imagination for future use.
This escalation has been matched by a shift in popular discourse. During
the flashpoints in Ferguson and Baltimore, some media outlets published
daring editorials explaining the riots as acts of desperation, or making
arguments for why people had given up on nonviolence. We have not seen
such a public validation of militant tactics in the US for decades.
Yet there is a big difference between validating and participating.
These pundits seem to have obtained all the credibility of endorsing
militant tactics without any of the inconveniences of employing them.
All of these editorials are concerned only with explaining and
legitimizing what they essentially treat as exotic phenomena; the
implication is that the rest of us might accept what the rioters are
doing from a distance, but certainly not participate in it ourselves.
Other aspiring allies arrive at the same conclusion from a different
direction, being so careful not to usurp the agency of the most affected
communities that they end up standing aside entirely or putting their
weight behind lower-risk initiatives.
But it is dangerous and unethical to leave the greatest risks to the
most vulnerable people. If it makes sense for the most marginalized and
targeted to risk their lives to interrupt the functioning of the system
that is killing them, it makes even more sense for the rest of us to do
so. It’s not a question of understanding the uprisings, but of joining
and extending them in order to render them unnecessary. That doesn’t
necessarily mean invading others’ neighborhoods: the next time a
Ferguson or a West Baltimore erupts, it might be most effective for
those who wish to show solidarity to initiate actions elsewhere, in
order to overextend the authorities. Nor should it mean centralizing
ourselves in the narrative: solidarity means taking on the same risks
that others are exposed to—nothing more, nothing less.
The precarious rapport de force that has lasted since the Baltimore
uprising will likely persist until another demographic enters the
conflict. It’s not clear how much further the state can go to maintain
the current order by means of pure force. If uprisings occurred in
multiple cities in the same region at the same time, or if a much
broader range of people got involved, all bets would be off.
But as intimated above, the next demographic to enter the space of
conflict might well be a reactionary force. South Carolina is not the
only place in which struggles against state violence have shifted
seamlessly into struggles against autonomous white supremacists. Some
anarchists and fellow travelers have glibly invoked “social war” or
“civil war,” without fully grasping that such wars usually end up
playing out along ethnic and religious lines in the most reactionary
manner.[3] As the tensions in our society increase, it is up to us to
render it possible to imagine other lines of conflict. The Dylann Roofs
of the world and their equivalents within the halls of power want
nothing better than to see society split into warring racial factions,
with poor whites joining police and other defenders of the middle class
to suppress the rage of the black and disaffected. White people must not
countenance this division, even out of a wrongheaded desire to stand
aside out of respect for black autonomy. That would spell doom for the
most marginalized people in this struggle, however much good liberals
might applaud their courageous efforts from afar. Rather, we have to
produce a narrative of multiethnic struggle against white supremacy and
capitalism by participating directly in the clashes that are occurring
right now—both so that it will be impossible for white supremacists to
convince potential converts that the important lines dividing society
are racial, and so that those who are more racially and economically
marginalized than us will not have cause to conclude that they have
indeed been abandoned.
Fighting white supremacy in this context means spreading the clashes
with the authorities, while crushing autonomous racist initiatives
wherever they appear. It means confronting fascists—an essentially
rearguard battle—but it also means taking the initiative in attacking
capitalism and the state, intensifying the struggles we are already in.
Only by foregrounding anarchist solutions to the problems of poor
people, including poor white people, can we make it impossible for
racists to recruit from the ranks of the poor, white, and angry.
In short: class war, not race war. We may have less time than we know.
“That left was too lost in delusions of success almost within their
hands, delusions of maneuvering together a majority, to bother even
really understanding fascism coming up fast in their rear view mirror.
The urgent need was to organize a working minority to counter fascism in
a much more radical way. Not by trying to defend liberal bourgeois rule.
All the real things that had to be done by scattered German
anti-fascists later after the Nazis were put into power—such as to
survive politically, to significantly sabotage the war effort, to rescue
Jews and Romany and gays, to build an underground against the madness of
the Third Reich—all these things were attempted bravely but largely
unsuccessfully, because they had to be done too late from scratch. This
is a much larger subject, too large to dive into now, but it is on the
horizon, like the smoke of a distant forest fire.”
— J. Sakai, “When Race Burns Class”
from an interview US anarchists answered for the Greek anarchist news
service, Apatris
officer. He was intentionally injured in police custody while being
transported to jail, and denied proper medical care. He passed away on
April 19 as a consequence of these injuries.
afternoon. It concluded with a march in which participants vandalized
police cars and clashed with drunk, racist sports fans. The police
created a control perimeter, but inside of this space, demonstrators
reportedly were free to destroy property for some hours. The police had
lost control.
school students via social media calling for a “purge” that afternoon at
a mall in Baltimore: a reference to a Hollywood movie in which laws and
policing are suspended. The mall in question is a major transit center
for kids traveling to and from school. Baltimore doesn’t have school
buses; kids use public transit. Police preemptively shut down the mall,
flooded the streets with officers in riot gear, and shut down public
transportation, stopping buses and forcing everyone off of them. In this
tense situation, with nowhere to go, youth began to clash with the
police. In at least one instance, police officers were documented
throwing rocks back at children.
By nightfall, there were riots and fires all over the city, including
some of the whiter neighborhoods. Over a hundred cars were set on fire,
including many police cars, and over a dozen buildings were burned, most
famously the CVS at the intersection of Penn and North. Corporate media
played live footage of looting from helicopters, the newscasters wailing
and wringing their hands about the loss of property while describing the
people below in pejorative terms. Looking down uncomprehendingly at the
people they said were “burning their own neighborhoods,” they offered
the perspective of the state—the same perspective as the drones sailing
over Pakistan.
The mayor declared a state of emergency, called in police from around
the state along with the National Guard, and announced a seven-day
curfew to go into effect Tuesday. The overwhelmed court system was not
able to keep up with all the arrestees, some of whom were eventually
released without charges.
you could hear people bragging about what they’d looted, mostly basic
necessities. Witnesses reported a feeling in the air to the effect that
“We did what we had to do.” Community organizations sponsored cleanup
activities, as in London in 2011, and “peacekeepers” were out hoping to
prevent more fighting and rioting from breaking out.
It’s important to emphasize that because so much of the population of
Baltimore is black, there were black people involved in all of these
different responses—black politicians, black peacekeepers, black police,
black community organizers, black business owners, black rioters.
On Tuesday, since schools were closed, Red Emma’s (the primary anarchist
space in town) provided a place for kids who weren’t in school and for
homeless youth from a shelter that had been destroyed in the rioting.
Free food was collected and distributed through organizations in other
neighborhoods—largely church organizations, which play a role in
Baltimore politics, including radical politics.
The intersection of Penn & North, where the CVS had been burned, became
the default space for protestors seeking conflict to gather—similar to
the QuikTrip that was burned in Ferguson. The curfew was enforced
violently at 10 pm; people fought back against police, but nothing like
what had happened on Monday.
the state of emergency banned all public gatherings; these marches were
all granted permits at the last minute, acknowledging the leverage
protesters had gained against the state. The resulting march, led by
black and brown youth, was the largest anyone had seen in Baltimore for
a long time, though it was dwarfed by the marches that followed on
Friday and Saturday. The march conceded to police demands not to stay in
front of City Hall, and made its way back to Penn Station, dispersing
around 9 pm so people could get inside by curfew. More fighting ensued
after curfew at the intersection of Penn and North.
expected to draw people from nearby cities and likely become
confrontational again. But on the morning of Friday, May 1, state’s
attorney Mosby announced that six police officers would be charged with
crimes as a result of Freddie Gray’s death; one of them is being charged
with murder.
There were unpermitted marches around the city all day and late into the
night. Most people gathered downtown at City Hall and McKeldin Square,
the “free speech zone” where the authorities usually try to keep
protestors. The march drew something like 5000 people and proceeded
eleven miles, during which it picked up and lost people constantly; some
sources estimated 10,000 or more participants altogether. The atmosphere
was joyous. Police were not numerous enough to contain the
demonstrators, but kept them from taking highways and protected certain
targets. In the jail district, prisoners joined in the chanting from
behind the walls, mostly “All night, all day, we will fight for Freddie
Gray.”
Pickup trucks overflowing with people joined the march in West
Baltimore. It headed back downtown, then slowly dispersed around the
time of curfew. However, at City Hall, 50–100 people stayed past curfew
and at least 13 were arrested, many of those arrests violent. There was
more curfew violence at the intersection of Penn and North, as well.
the energy had shifted towards seeking amnesty for arrestees, many of
whom faced severe charges. For example, one young man who smashed the
windows of a police car, whose parent had convinced him to turn himself
in, was being held on $500,000 bail.
Saturday night saw the broadest anti-curfew organizing. A mostly white
group met in a mostly white neighborhood; police showed up in force, but
gave warning after warning to disperse and pleaded with the group not to
get arrested. People agreed to disperse, since jail support resources
were already spread thin. Police reportedly offered to drive people home
afterwards. Meanwhile, at the intersection of Penn and North, police
beat and pepper-sprayed and arrested people, especially black
protestors. A fairly large number of medics and people organizing jail
support were arrested at the jail for curfew violation.
responding to complaints from business owners. Things had calmed down.
[1] The 2014 article linked here blithely reassures the reader of the
good intentions of the police enforcing the curfew: “The Baltimore
Police have recently been trained on dealing with youth. To emphasize
that those caught violating curfew are not considered criminals, the
city says most children out late will be transported in vans—not in the
back of police cars.” Indeed, Freddie Gray was fatally injured in the
back of a van, having been arrested for no criminal activity whatsoever.
[2] The counterpart of that narrative is the mother who persuaded her
son to turn himself in for his role in vandalizing a police car, only to
see him held on $500,000 bail—afterwards, when it was too late, she
regretted telling him to entrust his fate to the authorities.
[3] While 19^(th) century France saw a series of civil wars fought along
class lines, it is telling that the only civil war in the history of the
United States was initiated by those who wished to preserve slavery.