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Title: Imaginary Enemies
Author: Nevada
Date: 11/21/2020
Language: en
Topics: George Floyd uprising, George Floyd, insurrection, uprising, Ill Will, not anarchist
Source: https://illwill.com/imaginary-enemies

Nevada

Imaginary Enemies

The following article from a friend in Minneapolis looks at the impact

in rebellions of what is known as the “fog of war”, or the strategic

problem of “unknowability.” In the case of the George Floyd rebellion,

the author argues that this unknowability played out particularly along

racial lines. On the one hand, the participation of white antagonists

helped the uprising to quickly take on a scale beyond anyone’s

comprehension, resulting in a situation that was both ungovernable and

unknowable in terms of the makeup of its partisans. At the same time, as

counter-insurgent forces fought to restore order, they too seized upon

this uncertainty by producing the mythological threat of the white

supremacist outside agitator. The unknowable represents a threat with

which all future rebellions will have to contend, especially in the U.S.

context.

---

Author’s note: The following is an edited transcript of a talk delivered

across the street from the burnt remains of the 3^(rd) Precinct on

October 29^(th) in Minneapolis, MN. The author wishes to thank those

present for the discussion, as well as the editors at Ill Will for their

feedback.

---

This past summer, I sat down to write a letter to my friends in the

international collective

Liaisons

about the uprising in my city of Minneapolis. This letter was inspired

news

of police in Richmond, Virginia accusing the participants of a July

Black Lives Matter demonstration of being white supremacist agitators in

disguise, intent on causing destruction—accusations that we had already

seen here at the end of May. More recently,

rumors

this effect

have circulated online about the unrest in Philadelphia after the police

murdered Walter Wallace Jr. at the end of October. My letter attempted

to illuminate how the state used the fictional or exaggerated figure of

the “white supremacist agitator” to perpetuate anti-Blackness and

capitalist property relations by facilitating the mass organization of

auxiliary policing groups. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis

Mayor Jacob Frey led an effort to cast rioters as white supremacists

coming from outside of Minnesota to destroy our cities. This

precipitated the mass, independent organization of auxiliary law

enforcement in the form of neighborhood watches and community patrols to

stop these supposed white supremacists.

As revolutionaries, we must ask ourselves why, at the height of what was

easily the largest rebellion in over half a century, much of the city

organized to assist the police in crushing it, often in the name of the

very anti-racism at its heart? My aim here is to assess the role of the

“white supremacist outside agitator” as a discursive figure in the

counter-insurgent strategy of the state, so that partisans may more

effectively counter it in the next uprising.

In what follows, I will analyze three elements that, although they arose

organically from the rebellion itself, nonetheless laid the groundwork

for the state’s narrative white supremacist agitation. These three

elements are, first, the visible presence of the far-right in the first

days of the uprising; second, white participation in the revolt; and

third, the way the revolt quickly assumed a geographic and political

scale that was beyond the comprehension of both observers and

participants. Together, these elements undermined the traditional

political narratives that framed what people expected to see from a

rebellion against racism and the police. This opened the situation to

competing narratives by which to make sense of white participation and

the presence of white supremacists, including one that held white

supremacists responsible for the violence of the rebellion. I explain

how this narrative divided much of the sympathetic base of the uprising

against it, which deprived rebels of popular support and allowed them to

be crushed by the National Guard, thereby preserving the very order that

was the enemy of the revolt.

---

Speculation on white supremacist involvement began already on the first

night of the uprising. A handful of Boogaloo Bois drove down from

suburbs like New Brighton to join the clashes that had been taking place

all evening on May 26 outside the 3^(rd) Precinct. This is not the place

to examine their ideology in detail, but suffice it to say that, despite

their far-right positions, some of them saw the murder of George Floyd

as the unjust action of a corrupt police department and affirmed the

uprising as a valid response to it. They photographed themselves with

their flag in the streets (their images were widely circulated online)

and then left soon afterwards. In the next few days, this group of

Boogaloo Bois received an upsurge of attention, starting with

anti-fascist activists who attempted to alert demonstrators of their

presence, marginal though it was [1].

Regardless of whether the Boogaloo Bois did in fact view the escalating

conflict in the streets of Minneapolis as a righteous cause, or merely

as a means to bringing about their “civil war” with the government, the

revolt exploded far beyond their narrow vision. Just as with the Yellow

Vests of France, the mass looting of shopping districts pushed the

movement tactically beyond where the far-right was willing to go. They

were thus given two options: to participate in an uprising that centers

Black liberation (and thus de-centers their own ideology) or to let

themselves be sidelined and left behind by the uprising [2].

[Boogaloo Bois and “Northside Patrol” pose together on a shift in

Minneapolis.]

By the second day of the revolt, many Boogaloo Bois had already

relegated themselves to defending private property in response to the

widespread looting. A

video

that circulated on social media from the second day shows a group of

them outside of GM Tobacco between the Target and the Cub Foods, walking

a tightrope on which they try to balance “supporting the uprising” while

protecting the store from the uprising. A week later, the narrative of

white supremacist rioters allowed social justice groups seeking to

defend private property to more easily navigate a similar tightrope.

This led to an ironic turn of events in the case of

Minnesota Freedom Riders

(also known as the Northside Patrol, made up of groups like the NAACP

and city councilor Jeremiah Ellison), which

collaborated with these same Boogaloo Bois

to protect stores from vague threats of white supremacists—despite

themselves being the only group visible on the ground associated with

these threats. Just as this irony was lost on most, so too was the

contradiction between the narrative of white supremacist rioters and the

facts of the matter, namely, that the most prominent far-right presence

in the uprising was engaged in the defense of capitalist property, not

its destruction.

---

Despite the centrality of Black liberation in the George Floyd

Rebellion, it cannot be said that the uprising was entirely Black.

People from every conceivable demographic and identity participated in

it. In his piece “How It Might Should Be Done,” Idris Robinson uses the

metaphor of an avant-garde to describe Black participation in the

revolt. He states “We were the avant-garde who spearheaded it, we set it

off, we initiated it. What ensued was a wildly multi-ethnic uprising.”

Skepticism or suspicion of white participants is understandable, yet was

relatively uncommon during the first few days of the revolt. However, by

the fifth night, it had become a dominant reflex, due to the emerging

paranoia around white supremacist involvement. White participants in the

streets who broke the law were assumed to be outside agitators–if not

white supremacists–without any other evidence than their skin tone. In

the midst of tear gas, shattered windows, and hails of rocks, people

were pressed to identify themselves and, in some cases, to give their

street addresses. Those who refused were even sometimes attacked.

As has been discussed elsewhere, to blame what happened on outsiders or

provocateurs robs the rebellion of its power, by delegitimizing it along

with its participants. And we should not forget the racist history of

the “outside agitator” as a tool of counter-insurgency, which was a

narrative originally used to explain slave revolts, as enslaved Blacks

were said to be docile until stirred up by white abolitionists from the

North [3]. Beyond disempowering rebels and reproducing racist tropes,

however, I want to insist on the legitimacy of white abolitionists who

decide to join the frontlines. The truth is that we all have a stake in

Black liberation. As Fred Moten once said, “I just need you to recognize

that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid

motherfucker” [4].

---

The revolt in May occurred on

an unprecedented scale

. As we know, the 3^(rd) Precinct was the epicenter of the first three

days of unrest,

before the police inside were forced to flee

, before the precinct was burned, and before the focus of the crowds

moved on to other targets, including the 5^(th) Precinct which very

nearly almost fell as well. However, even before the burning of the

3^(rd) Precinct, crowds flowed outwards from the epicenter and brought

unrest across the city, into Saint Paul, and even into the suburbs.

While the first crowds kept many officers pinned down at the precinct,

these swarms would assemble in other areas to loot and burn

stores—generally with the assistance of cars, where a group of people

would pull up, break in, grab what they could, and peel out before

police could respond. In other words, from the very start, the rebellion

was also a mass phenomenon of smash-and-grabs.

In attempting to make sense of the early stages of the rebellion,

inherited logics of both representative protest and of militant protest

fail us. From the perspective of representational politics, those who

were swarming and looting stores across the city were not “protesting,”

as their actions did not present a grievance for which they sought

recognition. That is, these actions were not only deviations from

“legitimate political protest,” they opportunistically took advantage of

such protests by using them for private gain. In reality, however, the

looters were directly abolishing property relations, which are

inextricable from the violence of anti-Blackness. Let us recall that the

order of private property is what killed George Floyd in the first

place. It is one thing to hold a sign that says “redistribute the

wealth;” it is another to decide that all that shit on the store shelves

is ours for the taking—and take it [5].

While it is commonplace to adopt the frame of representational politics

and to dismiss looting as opportunistic, when such looting and

destruction turned to stores that ostensibly identified with the cause

of social justice—primarily Black and other minority-owned

businesses—they were often deemed malicious, or worse. The crudest form

of identity politics involved postulating that these stores could not

have been targeted for any other reason than racist motivations. There

was often no evidence for this speculation; it was posited as

self-evident. In the most absurd of cases, corporate stores falsely

labeled themselves as “Black-owned,” either by writing it on plywood

boards like modern-day lamb’s blood, or by those protecting them to

legitimate their defense of property. But if we cease to view every act

of property destruction or looting as an expression of a grievance, this

logic begins to erode. It is not my intention to argue that

minority-owned stores should be targeted, but that such incidents do not

offer any insight into participants’ racial or ideological backgrounds.

Instead, I argue that this created a new division within the uprising

that helped to transform it into a “militant” protest movement. Here,

the classic dichotomy between the “good protester” and the “bad

protester” was replaced by the dichotomy between the “good rioter” and

the “bad rioter.” In other words, rioters were now divided into those

whose militant action can still be understood within the grammar of

protest (fighting the police or attacking a corporate department store)

and those whose actions exceed and escape this traditional

understanding.

---

After four days, the upheaval had spread far beyond what anyone could

have anticipated. Refusing to play by the rules of non-violence, it

escaped the trap of representational protest. Its composition was too

diverse to be neatly categorized by any demographic or political

affiliation. Then, on the morning of May 30, Governor Walz hosted a

press conference

describing the rioters as white supremacist outsiders who were out to

destroy the city. He was followed by both

Minneapolis and St Paul mayors

, who fabricated statistics to back up those claims—only to be quietly

retracted days later. Online rumors were amplified and misinformation

was circulated at truly dizzying speeds. In the midst of the chaos, they

offered a legible and understandable enemy to all of those who were

searching for stability, but could not be mobilized by the explicitly

racist rhetoric of “Black looters,” or the right-wing’s fear-mongering

about “antifa.” This fear would instead be ascribed to the face of evil

par excellence: the white supremacist.

Blaming the violence of the uprising on “white supremacists” allowed the

state to undermine the anti-police rage of the rebellion and resume its

prior role of protecting citizens against extremism. The state

intentionally shifted the target of people’s anger from the systemic

racism that murdered George Floyd (and countless others) to relatively

marginal actors. In my letter to Liaisons, I identified this as the

rhetorical figure of synecdoche, a movement from part to whole, or whole

to part. The location of white supremacy and anti-Blackness is displaced

onto an extremist part—a small assortment of bad actors—that only serves

to mask their true whereabouts in the heart of civil society as a whole.

This displacement made room for a new alliance between social-justice

advocates and anti-fascists on the one hand and vigilante law

enforcement on the other. While police were forced to retreat, this

alliance was forged with new neighborhood watch groups and citizen

patrols protecting against the lawlessness of the riots. Armed patrols

guarded businesses, while smaller roads were blocked by citizens who

performed ID checks. After curfew, citizens’ checkpoints allowed only

residents and police to pass, while many more stayed home in fear of

vague threats of indiscriminate violence. Frightened citizens called the

FBI to report out-of-state license plates, while others preferred taking

to social media to spread rumors and report “sketchy activity.”

Meanwhile, the National Guard had little trouble mass-arresting the few

who dared to continue defying the curfew.

These patrols varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, block to block.

They were also ideologically diverse, and while they might not have

directly collaborated with one another, they all effectively

accomplished the same goals. In some areas, white homeowners sat on

their porches and called the police on neighbors they’d never met whom

they deemed to be suspicious. There were of course many small business

owners who armed themselves to protect their stores, such as the owner

of Cadillac Pawn on Lake Street, who

murdered Calvin Horton Jr.

Majority-Black and Native American neighborhoods also set up their own

armed patrols, often with the help of nonprofits that considered

themselves an extension of the protests (or at least in support of

them). Examples include the Minnesota Freedom Riders that I mentioned

above (who collaborated with the armed far-right) and the American

Indian Movement (AIM) patrol near Little Earth, a majority-Native

neighborhood. The AIM patrol was celebrated for its role in protecting

property, including

the apprehension of some white teenagers

for looting a liquor store that had been broken into two nights before.

Patrols like these justified their actions along racial lines. However,

like AIM, they consistently helped protect white-owned businesses,

corporations, and banks. In some cases, these patrols inadvertently

ended up protecting racist property owners who just happened to be

located on their “beat,” but even in those cases where businesses were

truly owned by racial or ethnic minority groups, these patrols and their

valorization of property “structurally” aligned them with the forces of

civil order. As Idris Robinson observed, “whenever property is

protected, it is protected for white supremacist ends” [6].

---

The formation and alignment of racially diverse neighborhood patrols in

defense of private property was only possible by way of a

counterinsurgent, synecdochal displacement that identified violence with

white supremacy. This is the only way that such a massive project could

emerge so quickly and with such popular support. This counterinsurgent

initiative even cloaked itself in the language of police abolition, with

neighbors suggesting that they were “prefiguring” what would replace the

Minneapolis Police Department when it was abolished, with no concern for

the fact that they were assuming the enforcement of the very same legal

order here and now. Truth be told, they are not wrong. The type of

police abolition that has gripped the city’s imagination is merely the

same regime of law, only upheld by nicer faces. Instead of police, there

are to be “community security forces”—or the “office of violence

prevention” (which has recently emerged here in Minneapolis). The only

effect such institutions could ever have would be to integrate the

population ever more profoundly into the police operations that already

govern their lives today.

The figure of the white supremacist agitator does not simply tarnish the

memory and legacy of the revolt. It also illuminates the very stakes of

the movement itself and its call for abolition. It must be said that

revolutionary abolition does not simply mean the defunding of any

specific department, as many activists advocate today. Nor does

revolutionary abolition does simply mean doing away with the brutality

that police use to enforce the law, as offered by restorative justice

[7]. Instead, revolutionary abolition must mean the abolition of law

itself, along with the property relations that the law upholds.

In May, we witnessed a revolt of such magnitude and ferocity that it has

no equal in this country for at least half a century. We can see the

rubble from it still, all around us. To be sure, revolution consists of

so much more than merely burning and fighting, but it does involve these

actions. These actions were at the very heart of the uprising this

Summer. To condemn them is to condemn the uprising.

Just as we approached the precipice of total insurrection, stability and

order were reintroduced to the city, when nothing seemed less likely.

The next time revolt erupts in our streets, let us be prepared to resist

the reimposition of law and order, no matter how “radically” it presents

itself.

—Nevada

Minneapolis, November 2020

“What I think he meant is, look: the problematic of coalition is that

coalition isn’t something that emerges so that you can come help me, a

maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The

coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you,

in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for

us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit

is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker,

you know?”

“[W]hitey loves property. Property enjoys a special prestige in American

life, it has a special kind of sanctity. […] There is a very important

reason that property has this particular kind of sanctity in America, as

many historians are starting to confirm and argue. For most of its

history, the most important property in America was human property,

shackled and chained. We need to weaponize this argument, and say that

whenever property is protected, it is protected for white supremacist

ends. If property is truly the pursuit of happiness, in that trifecta of

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the existence of that

happiness and property is premised upon the negation of Black life and

the negation of Black liberty. So the protection of property is

something that we need to attack explicitly.” (Idris Robinson, “

How It Might Should Be Done

,” Ill Will, July 20, 2020.)

[1] In Minnesota, the state’s attention to Boogaloo Bois continued

months after the attack on the 3^(rd) Precinct. On October 24^(th), the

FBI charged a Boogaloo Boi for shooting his gun at the 3^(rd) Precinct

after it was surrendered by the police on May 28^(th). This relatively

minor act was magnified by news media outlets to falsely portray the

destruction of the police building as the work of white supremacist

agitators.

[2] This insight comes from the essay “

Memes With Force

.” The authors argue that, in the logic of Yellow Vests movement, there

lies a way out of the traditional political narratives to which I refer

here. Before going on to show how looting and vandalism marginalized the

influence of the far-right, they urge us to see “radical actions,” not

“radical actors”:

“Contemporary politics sees in action nothing but a conversation between

constituencies and populations in society. It is for this reason that,

when radical activity emerges in a way that is relatively anonymous,

that lacks a consistent author, and persistently refuses to answer to

our compositional (‘who are you?’) and projectual questions (‘why are

you doing this?’), it tends to be unrecognizable to political analysts

and activists alike. It is precisely this received wisdom that the

Yellow Vests have been laying to waste, week after week. What is

emerging today in France is a radical form of collective action that

does not rely on a coherent ideology, motivation, participant, or

regional location. Above all, it is not proceeding by means of a

dialogue with its enemy.” (Paul Torino and Adrian Wohlleben, “Memes With

Force: Lessons from the Yellow Vests,” Mute, February 26, 2019.)

[3] In Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward A Black Anarchism, Marquis Bey,

himself citing Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, also

meditates on this refusal of ideological exclusion:

“Upon a re-reading of The Undercommons, I was drawn, obsessively, to one

phrase, one that struck me at first as dangerously wrongheaded. But,

then, the revolutionary will always be dangerous. The revolutionary call

that Moten and Harney require and that I’ve been obsessed with is this:

they insist that our radical politics, our anarchic world-building must

be ‘unconditional—the door swings open for refuge even though it may let

in police agents and destruction’. As my grandmother might quip, what

kind of foolishness is this? But it is not foolishness precisely because

the only ethical call that could bring about the radical revolutionary

overturning we seek is one that does not discriminate or develop

criteria for inclusion and, consequently, exclusion.”

For further analysis of the “outside agitator” as a strategy of

delegitimation, with historical comparisons to the George Floyd

Rebellion, see “

The Anti-Black and Anti-Semitic History of ‘Outside Agitators’: An Interview with Spencer Sunshine

,” It’s Going Down, June 2, 2020.

[4] In an interview from 2013, Moten discusses Fred Hampton’s statement,

“White power to white people. Black power to black people.” Moten

follows:

[5] See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive

Planning and Black Study, edited by Erik Empson (New York: Minor

Compositions, 2013),140–141. On this connection, see Shemon and Arturo’s

article on the participation of white people in the revolt and its

significance. See Shemon and Arturo, “

The Return of John Brown: White Race Traitors In The 2020 Uprising

.”

I am building off of what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has proposed to

call a destituent power, which has influenced the writings of other

revolutionaries on the uprising, such as a piece that appeared in

CrimethInc. earlier this summer:

“Unlike protests, which employ a means (e.g., a march or a blockade) to

reach an end (e.g., sending a message or making demands), the events of

the uprising […] blur this distinction. They create a kind of

means-as-end, or means-without-end, in which the purpose is inextricable

from the lived experience of the event itself. To fuse means and ends in

this way, we have to move beyond the predetermined choreography of

protest to a more transformative paradigm of action. ‘I’ll never forget

that night’ reads the latest graffiti written on the barricades

surrounding the precinct, referring to the night of May 28 on which

unrelenting crowds forced police to retreat from their station and

established a brief yet real police-free zone—abolition in real time.”

(“

July 4 in Minneapolis: The Logic of Autonomous Organizing

,” CrimethInc., July 6, 2020.)

[6] Idris Robinson has argued that the attack on this inner connection

between race and property was at the heart of the George Floyd

Rebellion. He says:

[7] In her recent book, In Defense of Looting, Vicky Osterweil traces

the inextricable history of race, settler-colonialism, and property,

building off thinkers such as Cedric Robinson, who coined the term

‘racial capitalism.’ The thrust of what I have written here can be

summed up by the following passage from her book: “Not only is

capitalist development completely reliant on racialized forms of power,

but bourgeois legality itself, enshrining at its center the right to own

property, fundamentally relies on racial structures of human nature to

justify this right. Private property is a racial concept, and race, a

propertarian one.” Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous

History of Uncivil Action (New York: Bold Type Books, 2020), 36.

As Frank B. Wilderson has put it, “I’m not against police brutality, I’m

against the police.” See his 2015

interview

with IMIXWHATILIKE. On the crucial distinction between restorative and

transformative justice, see Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from

the Transformative Justice Movement, ed. Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi

Piepzna-Samarasinha.