LF a WHO IS OAKLAND? Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation Croatoan, May Ist, 2012 CONTENTS I. The Non-Negotiable Necessity of Autonomous Organizing IL Institutional Struggles Over the Meaning of Antiracist Poli a. On the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), Again », Politicians and Police Who Are “Just Like Us c. Capitalism and the Material Reproduction of “Race” and “Gender” 4d. The Racialization of Rape and the Erasure of Sexual Violence IIL. The Limits of Contemporary Anti-Oppression Theory and Praxis a. Identity is not Solidarity b, Protecting Vulnerable Communities of Color and “Our” Women ‘and Children: The Endangered Species Theory of Minority Popu lations and Patriarchal White Conservationism c. On Nonprofit Certified “White Allies” and Privilege Theory IV. Occupy Oakland as Example a. Occupy Oakland, “Outside Agitators,” and “White Occupy” b. The Erasure of People of Color From Occupy Oakland V. Conclusion: Recuperating Decolonization and National Liberation Struggles; or, Revolution is Radically Unsafe I THE NON-NEGOTIABLE NECESSITY OF AUTONOMOUS ORGANIZING As a group of people of color, women, queers, and poor people com- ing together to attack a complex matrix of oppression and exploitation, We believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By “au- tonomous” we mean the formation of independent groups of people Wn - including but not limited to people of color, women, queers, trans* people, gender nonconforming people, QPOC. We also believe in the political value of organizing in ways which try to cross racial, gender, and sexual divi- sions, We are neither spokespersons for Occupy Oakland nor do we think a single group can possibly speak to the variety of challenges fac- ing different constituencies. who face specific forms of exploitation and oppre We hope for the diffuse emergence of widespread autonomous or- ganizing. We believe that a future beyond capital's 500 year emergence through enclosures of common land, and the enslavement, coloniza- and beyond the 7000 ‘or more years of violent patriarchal structuring of society along hierar- tion, and genocide of non-European populations chized and increasingly binary gender lines - will require revolutions within revolutions, Capitalism’s ecocidal destiny, and its relentless. global production of poverty, misery, abuse, and disposable and enslav- able populations, will force catastrophic social change within most of ‘our lifetimes - whether the public actively pursues it or not No demographic category of people could possibly share an identical set of political beliefs, cultural identities, or personal values. Accounts, of racial, gender, and sexual oppression as “intersectional” continue to treat identity categories as coherent communities with shared values and ways of knowing the world. No individual or organization can speak for people of color, women, the world’s colonized populations, workers, or any demographic category as a whole - although activists of color, female and queer activists, and labor activists from the Global North routinely and arrogantly claim this right, These “representatives” and institutions speak on behalf of social categories which are not, in fact, communities of shared opinion. This representational polities tends to eradicate any space for political disagreement between individuals sub- sumed under the same identity categories. ‘We are interested in exploring the question of the relationship be- tween identity-based oppression and capitalism, and conscious of the fact that the few existing attempts to synthesize these two vastly differ- ent pol More recent attempts to come to terms with this split between anti- oppression and anticapitalist polities, in insurrectionary anarchism for example, typically rely on simplistic forms of race and gender critique which typically begin and end with the police. According to this politi- cal current, the street is a place where deep and entrenched social dif- ferences can be momentarily overcome, We think this analysis deeply underestimates the qualitative differences between specific forms and sites of oppression and the variety of tactics needed to address these different situations, ical discourses leave us with far more questions than answers. Finally, we completely reject a vulgar “class first” polities which argues that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are simply “secondary to” or “derivative of” economic exploitation, The prevalence of racism in the US is not a clever conspiracy hatched by a handful of ruling elites but from the start has been a durable racial contract be- tween two unequal parties. The US is a white supremacist nation indel- ibly marked by the legal construction of the “white race” in the 1600s through the formation of a cross-class alliance between a wealthy plant- er class and poor white indentured servants, W.E.B. Du Bois called the legal privileges accorded to poor whites a “psychological wage": “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received 4 low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psycho- logical wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white, They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawless- Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small ef- fect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown to them.” We live in the shadow of this choice and this history. Ahistory which is far from over. I. INSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES OVER THE MEANING OF ANTIRACIST POLITICS a. On the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), Again Nonprofits exist to maintain society as we know it, Nonprofits often provide vital social services in the spaces left by the state’s retreat from postwar welfare provisions, s which keep women, queers, and trans people, particularly those who are poor and Wi color, alive. Post- WWII welfare provisions themselves were provided primarily to white families - through rediining or the racially exclusive postwar GI Bill for example, Social justice nonprofits in particular exist to co-opt and quell anger, preempt racial conflict, and validate a racist, patriarchal state. ‘These organizations are often funded by business monopolies which have profited from and campaigned for the privatization of public social services. This has been argued extensively by many who have experi- enced the limits of nonprofit work firsthand, most recently by INCITE! ‘Women of Color Against Violence Indeed, the exponential growth of NGOs and nonprofits could be understood as the 2st century public face of counterinsurgency, ex- cept this time speaking the language of civil, women’s, and gay rights, charged with preempting political conflict, and spiritually committed to promoting one-sided “dialogue” with armed state bureaucracies. Over the last four decades, a massive nonprofit infrastructure has evolved in order to prevent, whether through force or persuasion, another out- break of the urban riots and rebellions which spread through northern ghettos in the mid to late 1960s, Both liberal and conservative think tanks and service providers have arisen primarily in response to previ- ous generations of radical Black, Native American, Asian American, and Chican @ Third World Liberation movements. In the 2Ist century, social justice activism has become a professional career path. Racial justice nonprofits, and an entire institutionally funded activist infrastructure, Partner with the state {0 echo the rhetoric of past movements for libera- tion while implicitly or explicitly condemning their militant tactics. ‘The material infrastructure promoting these ideas is massive, en- abling their extensive dissemination and adoption. Largely funded by philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation ($13.7 billion), Rockefeller Foundation ($3.1 billion), or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun- dation ($37.1 billion), the US nonprofit sector has grown exponentially, often through the direct privatization of the remnants of America’s New Deal-era social safety net, This funding structure ties liberal organiza~ tions charged with representing and serving communities of color to businesses interested primarily in tax exemptions and charity, and completely hostile to radical social transformation despite their rheto- ric. In 2009 nonprofits accounted for 9% of all wages and salaries paid in the United States, generated $1.41 trillion in total revenues, and re- ported $2.56 trillion in total assets. One need only hear the names of these philanthropic organizations to realize that they are or were some of the largest business monopolies in the world, whose foundations are required to donate 5% of their endowment each year, while 95% of the remaining funds remain invested in financial markets. The public is asked to thank these organizations for their generosity for solving prob- lems which they are literally invested in maintaining, ‘With increasing frequency.” Filipino prison abolitionist and profes- sor Dylan Rodriguez argues, “we are party (or participant) to a white liberal ‘multicultural? people of color’ liberal imagination which vener- ates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to in- corporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. ..{T]hese orga- nizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1995-2001, whi tional hub of the progressive wing’ of the NPIC, I would name some of the organizations..here, but the list would be too long. Suffice it to say that the nonprofit groups often exhibit(ed) a political practice that is, to appropriate and corrupt a phrase from .. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, radical in form, but liberal in content.” is in many ways the na- b. Politicians and Police Who Are “Just Like Us” In California some ofthe most racist policies and “reforms”in recent history have been advanced by politicians of color. We are not interest- ed in increasing racial, gender. and sexual diversity within existing bi- crarchies of power ~ within government, police forces, or in the board- rooms of corporate America. When police departments and municipal governments can boast oftheir diversity and multicultural credentials, we know that there needs (0 be a radical alternative to this polities of inclusion.” Oakland is perhaps one of the most glaring examples of how people of color have not just participated in but in many instances led - as mayors, police chiefs, and city council members - the assault on poor and working class black and brown populations. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan speaks the language of social justice activism and civil rights, ‘but her political career in city government clearly depends upon satisfy- ing right-wing downtown business interests, corrupt real estate specu- lators, and a bloated and notoriously brutal police force ‘There is no more depressing cautionary tale of the fate of 1960s-era politics of “changing the state from within” than the career of Oakland Mayor Quan. Quan fought for the creation of an Ethnic Studies program aU UC Berkeley in 1969, and in 2011 penned a letter to Occupy Oakland listing an array of state-approved social justice nonprofits in order to justify mass arrests and a police crackdown on protesters attempting to establish a community center and free clinic in a long abandoned city ‘owned property. [1] In response to a season of strikes, anti-police brutal- ity marches, and repeated port shutdowns in response to police assaults, the state offered two choices: either the nonprofits or the police. Mayor Quan and other municipal politicians are part of a state ap- paratus that is rapidly increasing its reliance upon militarized policing to control an unruly population, especially poor people of color in urban, areas. Policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in gen- eral. A white supremacist decades-long “war on drugs” has culminated in a 2Ist century imperial “war on terror.” The equipment and tactics of “urban pacification” are now being turned on American cities and on the citizens and non-citizens who are targeted by austerity measures which have for decades been applied to the Global South. ‘This is as much the case in the liberal Bay Area as itis anywhere else. Recently “Urban Shield 2011,"a series of urban military training exer- cises for Bay Area police forces, was held on the campus of UC Berkeley in anticipation of raids on the Occupy Oakland encampment and other local occupied public parks. Israeli Border Police and military police from Bahrain, fresh from suppressing an Arab Spring uprising in their ‘own country, took part in these exercises beside Alameda County Sher- iffs and Oakland Police Department officers. We see clearly that in an era of deepening budget cuts and Amer- ica’s global decline, the white liberal consensus about racial inclusion is quickly becoming economically unaffordable, and in its place we see increasingly widespread public support for mainstream, openly white supremacist social movements. Armed paramilitary white nationalist organizations like the Minutemen patrol the US border, white suprema- cist media figures spout genocidal fantasies on the radio and television, and police killings of young black men and women have become so fre- quent that even the mainstream media has begun to report on it. At the same time, policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in general ‘As Jared Sexton and Steve Martinot argue, “Under conventional definitions of the government, we seem to be restricted to calling upon it for protection from its own agents, But what are we doing when we demonstrate against police brutality, and find ourselves tacitly calling upon the government to help us do so? These notions of the state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same coin. Narrow understandings of mere racism are proving themselves impoverished because they cannot see this fundamental relationship, What is needed is the development of a radical critique of the structure of the coin. [The police] prowl, categorising and profiling, often turning those profiles into murderous violence without (serious) fear of being called to account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the imagination is not the fact of impunity itsel people working a job, a job they secured by making an application at the personnel office. In events such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo, but the realisation that they are simply the true excessiveness is not in the massiveness of the shooting, but in the fact that these cops were there on the street looking for this event in the first place, as a matter of routine business. This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil of banality, namely, that the state assigns certain individuals to (well-paying) jobs as hunters of human beings, a furtive protocol for which this shooting is simply the effect ¢. Capitalism and the Material Reproduction of “Race” and “Gender” Establishing community mutual aid and self-defense against the violence of emergent mainstream racist movements, against the sys- tematic rape and exploitation of women, and against the systematic murder and/or economic ostracization of transgender, transsexual, and gender-nonconforming people; attacking ICE and police-enforced austerity policies which have historically targeted communities of color, naming and resisting the rollbacks of reproductive rights and access to healthcare as the patriarchal, racist attacks that they truly are; these are some of the major challenges facing all of us who understand that op- pression is inextricable from global capitalist crisis. We cannot separate what's happening in Oakland from a global wave of anti-austerity and anti-police brutality general strikes, occupations, and riots across the globe - from Barcelona to Tottenham, from Tahrir to Mali, and from Bhopal to Johannesburg. We do not believe that autonomous groups will be able to sustain themselves without creating non-state based support networks and without recognizing the mutual implication of white supremacy with capitalism and patriarchy. Undocumented immigrants confront a vi- cious, coordinated, and entirely mainstream ICE, police, and civilian as- sault which is, to be absolutely clear, a nativist anti-Latin@ movement committed to patrolling the borders of a nation understood as funda- mentally white. Intensifying anti-immigrant racism is not unrelated to capitalism, and just a national but an international phenomenon, fueled by the success of capitalist globalization, by the profits which could be realized through debt and structural adjustment programs, US agei- business subsidies, “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, and through multinational industries inevitably searching for lower labor costs through the fragmentation of global supply chains. Auster- ity means women, and particularly poor black and brown women, are being forced by the state and their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers to make up for the cuts in services and wages through additional domestic and reproductive labor they have always performed ‘As a recent W.A.T.C.H. communique from Baltimore puts it, “We know that economic crises mean more domestic labor, and more do- mestic labor means more work for women. Dreams of a ‘mancession” fade quickly when one realizes male-dominated sectors are simply the first to feel a crisis ~ and the first to receive baitout funds. The politics of crisis adds to the insult of scapegoating the injury of unemployment and unwaged overwork. And the nightmare of fertility politics, the ugly justification of welfare and social security reforms.” Saving America’s families,’ the culture war rhetoric that clings to heteronormativity, to patriarchy, in the face of economic meltdown. Crisis translates political- ly to putting women in their place, while demanding queers and trans people pass or else, And the worse this crisis gets, the more the crisis is excused by a fiction of scarcity, the more the family will be used to promote white supremacy by assaulting women’s autonomy under the ‘guise of population control. The old Malthusian line: it’s not a ei there’s just not enough ~ for them.” Capitalism can neither be reduced to the “predatory practices of Wall Street banks” nor is it something which “intersects” with race, gender, ‘and sexual oppression. Capitalism is a system based on a gendered and racialized division of labor, resources, and suffering. Violence and de- privation, premature death, and rape, are structural aspects of an eco- nomic system which requires that some work and some do not, some receive care and some do not, some survive, and some die. To say that poor people of color, queers, or immigrants are not interested or not profoundly impacted by the economy, and instead interested only in reaffirming their identities within existing hierarchies of power, is to work within a rigged zero-sum game for the liberation of a particular oppressed identity at the expense of the others. In the US in particular, the celebration of cultural diversity, the recognition of cultural differ- cence, the applauding of women and queers entering the workplace, and the relative decline of overtly racist or sexist beliefs among younger gen- erations, has not improved but instead masked a dramatic deterioration of the material circumstances of racialized populations. Massive accumulation through dispossession of native lands; racial- ized enslavement, murder, and incarceration; constant, intimate, and intensive exploitation of women’s unpaid “yy..4 arn labor, both in the home and as indentured —Loroegue University of usta domestic work, and always violently strat- a con ified according to race -- all of these form "ns INCQN