171b.-g-floyd-reader-2.pdf
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![Part 2. Belligerent Identities and
other Theories
on Insurgency
HOW IT MIGHT SHOULD BE DONE
Idris Robinson
‘August 15, 2020
https. com*howw-t-might-should-be-done
The following is a transcript of a talk delivered
in Seattle on July 20, 2020, lightly-edited by
the author for readability. A video recording
produced by Red May is online,
1 want to begin with a shout-out to what
happened here last night, and to the working
class of the city of Seattle, o the rebels of the
city of Seattle: I really iked what | saw, that's
why I'm here, you know, to feel that vibe. 1
would also like to send my solidarity to
comrades in Greece. It was they who allowed
‘me to experience insurrection for the first time
in 2008, The lessons Ive leamed and the
experiences | had there have been so valuable
this time around, even though we are in a
much different social context, Moreover, a
comrade was recently killed at the hands of the
police there. To the fallen comrade, Vasilis
Maggos, | want to say: rest in power.
My title demands a litle bit of explanation. Itis
a reference to Chernyshevsky [1], and to the
novel he wrote from inside a Czarist prison.
Lenin borrowed the title for his 1902
pamphlet, What Is to Be Done? (2), which
provides answers to what he calls ‘the
uring questions of our movement’: what
does it mean to constitute a vanguard party?
how do we spread consciousness from this
vanguard party to the working class? how do
we move beyond strikes to a full-on
revolutionary political struggle?, etc. Later, in
2001, a text entitled “How It Is to Be Done”
appeared in the journal of the French
collective Tiqqun. [3] Rather than stating what
our goals or objectives should be, Tiqqun
sought to shift our focus to the means and the
techniques of struggle. Instead of thinking
about ends, they thought about the means
that we should employ.
My aim here is far less ambitious. As for the
‘grammatical construction, "might should”, from
the southem dialect—I tied to Blackify the ttle
a little bit. But its also serious, because these
are in fact tentative theses and proposals: I'm
perfectly okay with being completely wrong
about every single thing | put forward today,
just so long as it creates a further deeper
discussion on strategy. What I really want 10
do is open up this discussion, and | want to
leave it, for people to engage with it as they
‘want to, and to push it further. At the same
time, 1 want the dialogue to be honest. There's
kind of prevailing posture of cynicism,
nihilism, and democratic moralism that holds
back insurrection, And | think now is the time:
‘we are experiencing an uprising on a scale that
many of us have never lived through. Even it
we compare present events to Greece, this
thing has gone much further. There are far
more martyrs in this struggle than there ever
were in the Greek uprising. The time has
atived for strategic thought and reflection
It’s of course weird to find myself saying this in
‘America, the most anti-counter revolutionary
place on the globe. But we must reorient
ourselves, and take these questions seriously.
‘The stakes have been raised to the next level,
theyre extremely high nove. Its time for us to
think seriously about them.
1. A militant nationwide uprising did in fact
occur. The progressive wing of the
counterinsurgency seeks the denial and
disarticulation of this event.
18](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 19.png)
![‘The obvious is not always so obvious,
We all saw it. We all saw what happened after
the murder of George Floyd. What occurred
was an extremely violent and destructive
rebellion. It was a phenomenon the likes of
Which we have not seen in America in 40 or 50
years. Very few of us have experienced
anything of this magnitude: a precinct was
immediately torched in Minneapols, after which
entire cites went up in flames—New York,
Allanta, Oakland, Seattle. Comparisons were
duickly made with the riots after Martin Luther
King’s assassination. However, | think that
We've gone further in this case, that 2020 went
harder than 1968, and we're not even done yet.
Despite al ofthis, the reformers have had the
audacity to claim that all of this never actually
hhappened. They are trying to make the burning
cop cars disappear, to extinguish fram memory
the police stations on fire, as if it didn’t happen.
‘Again and again, | hear the same scrip
someone comes on the news, a political
activist gives a talk, and we hear them say
something like, "the protests were peaceful
land non-violent, they stayed within the bounds
of law and order.” No: cops being shot at in St
Louis is not within the bounds of law and order.
Theyre doing their best to make the event
disappear. One has to to wonder what planet
they are on that a torched police station
appears within the bounds of elvlty
This delusion is something that we need to think
about. Utimately, its more than a delusion. It
Unites veritably all the progressive liberals who
Chatter on about whats been going on over the
past summer. From the Biden democrats to
Virtually all of the mainstream media not
affiated with Fox News, to the Black Lives
Matter™ people, the agenda pushed by all
these groups is the claim that the insurrection
did not take place, | even read a recent study by
‘some sort of consulting firm that sought to prove
through quantitative means that there was a
very civil nature to the protests. [4]
‘The fact is, whatever data or graphs they draw
19
up, nothing will erase the fact that police cars
were on fire in dozens of American cities. So
Why do liberals feel the need to jump through
such incredible hoops in order to erase this,
insurrection or this uprising? Why is it that the
most violent wings of law and order—eg.,
Attomey General Wiliam Bart—are today the
only audible voices willing to acknowledge that
the uprising occurred? We need to think this
through.
What is at issue is more than just a momentary
lapse of sanity: it is a strategy of denial, a
counterinsurgent strategy of reform par
excellence.
LUnconsciously, liberals do recognize that an
insurrection occurred. They can't ignore the
shattered glass that occurred in the streets of
Seatle yesterday. But what they want is to
downplay the significance of these events that
mean so much to us, and that we are
Continually tying to push forward. They want to
reassert and reafirm them, but ia a different
direction. Ultimately, what they want is to block
the possibilities thatthe revolt has opened up, to
dissuade us from going further in this uprising
AAs with all democratic liberal reformists, what
they're tying to do is exploit the outburst in
forder to make it so that things change, but only
justalitle—which isto say, not at al.
There's a moral component to this as well, a
deep ethical problem. This wing of the
counterinsurgency is just one more way that
those in line with the system have found to
‘manage and to exploit Black death, It must be
recalled (and | will return to this below) that
there are scores of young Black children who
lost their lives in the uprising, and that activists,
‘woke’ journalists, progressive poltcians of all
siipes, and even so-called BLM activists are
profiting off their death. This is a continuous
narrative in American society, and it will not
stop now unless we do something about it
By denying the event, they seek to obscure the
revolutionary truth that was ushered in through
the streets. They want to extinguish the
present that we brought about. They want to
‘sap our energy while they propose superficial](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 20.png)
![palliative adjustments to preserve the system.
The history of America is the history of
attempts 10 reform race relations, I they
haven't gotten it right by now, they never wil
‘Whatever they do, whatever slight changes
they make, there will always remain an
insatiable drive to brutalize and kill Black
people. Anyone who profits off this change is
complicit in that murder. if you block the
revolutionary trajectory of the rebellion, you
have blood on your hands. Anyone who
remains complicit with the system is the
enemy, tout court.
By contrast, the Right has adopted the
‘opposite approach to the event. Besides us
revolutionaries, they are the only voices today
that acknowledge that the rebellion occurred.
‘There's an illuminating honesty to what Wiliam
Barr says. Think of it this way: before he can
forcefully smash and eventually suppress an
insurection, he must first acknowledge that
fone did, in fact, occur. In this way, there's an
honesty to Trump’s words. Trump and his
entire Fox News crowd, all those who are
calling for law and order, have no choice but to
acknowledge the existence of the uprising
precisely because they want to crush it. Just
Today, Trump declared on the news that he
intends to send federal stormtroopers not only
to Portland but to New York, Philadelphia, and
Chicago. [5] To justify such a choice, he must
acknowledge that the uprising did in fact
happen, These are the two sides into which
ur opponents may be divided, the Janus face
of the State we confront today.
‘What is more, the rebellion shows the liberals
what it means to defund the police halfway,
instead of abolishing and outright destroying
them. if anyone thinks it suffices to undertake a
series of small measures and quick fixes, or
that they can refform] and preserve the police
a a force while simply shrinking it—well, the
result is what is happening right now in
Portland. Let that be an example to liberals. On
the other hand, those who recognize that a
change really did occur, and who now seek 10
stomp it out are typically more aligned with
fascist trajectories and politics, since they are
‘ypically the same people who feel the need to
dream up and defend a sort of immutable,
etemal, and transcendental idea of law, order,
and white supremacy. Whatever deviates from
the ideal, this fascist side of order will seek to
annihilate. For this reason, it is compelled 10
refuse those same reforms that the liberals
attempt to push through. For instance, this is
why Trump is so upset about changing the
ames of military bases. The issue itsell
doesn't actually matter, but the sort of power
he represents cannot stand such changes, and
seeks instead to crush and flatien the event
itself in its tracks.
There's only one way to deal with this fascist
wing of the state: they operate with violence,
and we return with violence that's more
powerful. However, as concen the other, more
Feformist side that aims to deny the event in
Corder to incorporate it into their own objectives,
we need to be a litle bit sharper in how we
handle them. We need to be deceptive, lke
Machiavellis fox. Honesty isn't their mode of
operating, They have always sought to deny
wihat lies right before our eyes. Deception and
subversion is how we are going to have to play
them: we need to deceive them twice aver.
‘When it comes to these two sides of state, ! do
rot wish to claim that either one is any more
nefarious than the other, but simply that these
are the two sides that we have to contend with,
and ultimately to defeat
2. While spearheaded by a Black avant-garde,
this largely multi-ethnic rebellion managed to
spontaneously overcome codified racial
divisions. The containment of the revolt aims
at reinstating these rigid lines of separation
‘and policing their boundaries
To begin with, it must be said that former
Airican slaves and their ancestors have been
the avant-garde of everything in this county
‘There's no culture in America, in this American
wasteland, without us. There's no classical
music; there's jazz, and that was invented by
Us. And besides that, America has nothing 10
20](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 21.png)
![Privilege: | think we all know, or we can all
admit, or we should admit, that privilege has
become a purely psychological concept.
There's a long history to the notion of white
privilege. It dates back to WE.B. Du Bois, to
Theodore Allen, to Noel Ignatiev, to Harty
Haywood. For each of these authors, what was
in question was a theoretical construct whose
aim was to incite white workers to strike
alongside Black workers. Somehow in the
{wists and turns that are American politics, the
notion became psychological, a way to make
white people feel good about their guilt If you
look at, for instance, Peggy Mcintosh’'s
definitive text on white privilege, she taks
about the privilege of being able to chew with
your mouth closed. | don't give a fuck about
chewing with my mouth closed. [6]
As for intersectionalty: | did a talk at Red May
so I won't go into this too deeply here, but as
John Clegg and | tried to show, the
presuppositions that intersectionality holds are
becoming empirically false. [7] What the data is
beginning to show is that, for instance, there
are more Black women prison guards than
there are those going into prison. This doesn't
discredit the struggle and plight of Black
‘women, but as a construct, intersectionality is,
showing its limits. In fact, there are more white
women being incarcerated today than Black
women, oddly enough, AS for Black men, we
all know they just sit in jail and stay in jail
‘Whatever intersectionality once wanted to do is
no longer feasible or viable as a guide for us. In
my talk with Red May, | suggest that we get
back to the roots of Black feminism. We need
categories that understand the Black feminist
struggle beyond the oppression that the system
inflicts upon them. | cited Toni Cade Bambara's
book called The Black Woman (1970), in her
excellent preface, she refuses to define what a
“Black woman” is, She does not say that a
Black woman is the intersection of two
oppressions; she does not say that Black
women are in the margins of two different
systems of hierarchy. What she argues, rather,
is that Black women are an open possibilty to
be further understood through their
revolutionary activity. In place of intersectionalty
as a discourse of systemic oppression, what we
heed to do is to bring back the idea of Black
feminism as a discourse of struggle
Finally, by opening up this definition of what
Black women are and who they are, what Toni
Cade Bambara was saying that Black women
cannot be tied down by any static identity
imposed upon them. Of course they are
something more. And if we look at the history
of Black folks in this country, we're always
something more than what has been hoisted
upon us,
Identity poles, intersectionality, and social
privilege discourse: all are modalities of the
police,
What's more, and above all, is that each of
these discourses ignore the morbid and
terrifying libidinal poltics that undergirds race
in this country. It took someone as courageous
fas James Baldwin to say this, and everyone is
siill afraid to repeat it, if you read his
phenomenal shott story, “Going to Meet the
Man," [8] you can see the dynamics of racism
inthis country acutely. To briefly summarize the
story: it starts in the bedroom of a white
heterosexual couple. The white man is
struggling with impotence. How does he get
over his impotence? He remembers back to a
time as a child where he was brought to a
lynching. At that lynching the corpse was not
only mutilated, it was sexually mutilated, and
he was given the genitalia. Once he
remembers being handed the genitalia, he is
able to become erect.
This is deep stuff. No one likes taking about it
But this is the core of racism that we need to
reach. Whats more, | think no one wants to
touch this part of the race problem because we
are all implicated in it. It is obvious that white
liberals get off on videos of Black murder. tis
leven more obvious that there are Black liberals
Who are more than happy to sell these videos of
Black death for their own careerst goals, So long
fas we fail to take into account these libidinal
dives within racism, we will not be able to
22](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 23.png)
![We always get these calls for the Black
leadership from white liberals whenever the
windows stan to crack. 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. [9]
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, itis protected for white supremacist
ends. If property is truly the pursuit of
happiness, in that tifecta 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 propery is
‘something that we need to attack explicitly
6. The current crisis derives from a
contradiction that proceeds from the two
Janus-faced sides of post Cold War
‘American governance: an_ inconsistency
between the demands of the sovereign
imperial State and globalized biopolitical
security, As a result, the metropolitan center
hhas begun to experience the sort of chaos
and the instability that it has classically
‘sewn within the colonial periphery.
This dynamic captures the situation that we are
living in today, and which we have been
experiencing acutely over the past few months.
On the one side, we have state sovereignty,
the classical notion of the state. Following
Schmitt, but most importantly following
Agamben, the paradoxical foundation of the
state proves to be important to the way it
operates. In order to define the state, the state
must employ extradegal and extajuridical
measures in order to found itself, Every time
the state founds itself, it must go outside the
law that it seeks to create. What has occurred
classically, and we have a lot of historical
examples of this in America, is that whenever
there's a crisis, the state imposes some sort of
state of exception in order to create the order
that it needs to reassert itselt,
‘As we saw, for example, in the American Civil
War, in the two Red Scares, and most
recently in the War on Terror, the executive
branch of the government has. continually
mobilized itself beyond its formal legal
parameters and confines.
We see this today especially with Trump.
Trump is using and abusing his executive
powers, but itis better to say that he is using
them in the way that they were set out to be
Used, What was originally the province of the
legistative branch has now been taken over by
Trump himset.
This component of the U.S. asserting itself has
also shown itself in its foreign wars. We need
to keep in mind, and | will come back to this,
that—and for some reason this fact has been
downplayed in the past 20 or 30
years—America is the one imperial power in
the globe, and it serves itself aggressively
around the world. After the collapse of the
[Soviet Union] and the Cold War, we have
seen the United States become the police
officer, oF the storm trooper, of the entire Earth
This is one side of governance
Itis important to contrast this with another form
of governance, which is typically called
biopolitical discipline, or biopolitcal security. The
later ditfers trom the enforcement of the law
carried out by the classic state. Rather, it names
the management of lives. If the state kil,
biopolitics is concerned with the protection of
those lives—for its own ends, of course.
‘The most recent regime of biopolitical control is
what is known as "security". What "security"
does is it allows an event to happen, so as to
then manage that event. These events are
varied. They can be something lke pandemics,
like the COVID-19 pandemic we're going
through today; these could be famines, or
disasters like Katrina; and they could also be
insurrections like the one we are hopefully
fomenting right now. What the state does in
these instances is to make a statistical
calculation and try to find acceptable terms
within which it can allow events such as
pandemics to accur, while keeping them within
neatly circumscribed boundaries. 24](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 25.png)
![In addition to the paradox of the state that we
ssee in the state of exception, there is also a
strange biopoltical paradox of preparedness
that we are experiencing right now. The paradox
typically goes like this: after a disasters—say, a
ppandemic or a famine—there is a drive within
the security apparatus to begin preparing for the
next disaster to come. After SARS in the 2000s,
there was a big push to be prepared for the next
coming pandemic. This over-preparedness then
's put on the back burner when it comes to light
that the next disease is not going to appear
when we expect it to appear. The famed
‘medical anthropologist Andrew Lakof drew
attention to this paradox, which we have seen
again recently, There has been preparedness
for pandemics, but the preparedness was then
put on the back bumer, so that when the
COVID-19 pandemic came we were stil not
ready for it, We are dealing at once with two
different types of paradox here: one that must
venture outside of itself in order to found itself,
and the other a cycle of preparedness that
consistently generates unpreparedness,
There is the legal side and the statistical side
of the state, the nation state in its classic form
land this more global operation of security, |
would like to argue that these two directives
are colliding with each other and forming some
sort of crisis.
Legal means to an ends have been in a
Constant state of crisis: Trump just cant do
anything ight. Whatever he does seems to
backfire, and it does not seem to aways be
the worst thing. Trump and his own deluded
‘mind has become an agent of anarchy. {10}
Now of course he doesn't think he is-it is up
to us, when this chaos reigns, to utlize this for
four own ends. What I'm saying is that we
need to inhabit this chaos that the state is
inflicting upon itset
Unlike liberals and reformists, we are not here
to reaffirm and reassert law and order. We are
rot here to transform America into one big safe
space, We are here to make the chaos and the
disorder more terrible than it has ever been,
25
We must do what revolutionaries have always
done: we must make the contradiction
imolerable.
7. As the rebel-slaves did with the periodic
‘outbreaks of yellow fever in Haiti, there is a
idden partisan knowledge to be uncovered
surrounding the novel coronavirus,
pandemic that also can be exploited and
Weaponized against established power.
In the Imaginary Pany’s best book, entitled To
Our Friends [11], the authors ‘mention a
pamphlet issued by the CDC in 2012 on the
subject of disaster preparedness. [12] It is a
part American Tiqqunists tend not to mention.
In order to make disaster preparedness
pertinent and hip to the youngsters, the CDC
invokes the example of preparing for a zombie
apocalypse. Their basic argument was that if
people can prepare for a zombie apocalypse,
they will be able to prepare for a natural
disaster such as a flood, a storm, a pandemic,
fr even an insurrection.
The Invisible Committee argue in their book
that this fear of zombies has a long and
racialized history, linked in no uncertain terms
to the fear of the Black proletariat. And the
other side of this fear that doesn't want to be
‘mentioned, that refuses to be mentioned or is
repressed, resides in the paranoia of the white
middle class over its own worthlessness,
It we look back aver the history of zombies, the
figure of the zombie appeared within the
voodoo utlized during the Haitian Revolution.
There was a person by the name of Jean
Zombi who ended up taking the name because
he participated in the massacre of slave
‘owners. What | think is particularly instructive
for our purposes today is that the Haitian
insurgents were perfectly aware that they could
Use the yellow fever pandemic against their
former masters and against the army, whether
this be Napoleon's army, or the party of order
more generally. The insurgents waited until the
yellow fever outbreak took hold. They knew
that their former slave masters’ army would be
devoured by the pandemic, and they also knew
that they had built up an immunity to that](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 26.png)
![pandemic. So they waited until the army had
been decimated by yellow fever, and then they
launched their guerilla attacks.
‘What | am arguing for here Is something very
similar, We all know that Black people and
brown people were disproportionately affected
by the COVID pandemic. This is a medical
problem. But it is much more than a mere
medical‘scientfic problem, it is a political
problem, We must reject the sort of sanitized
Niberal politics of safety that is afraid of the
pandemic, that is largely a sanitary discourse
around masks, distancing, etc. | know this is a
political issue now. But, on the flipside, I'm nt
defending rightwing conspiracy theorist ideas
that the pandemic does not exist, or that itis
just a flu, ec... What I'm proposing here is that
‘we develop a kind of partisan knowledge—our
‘own knowledge about the pandemic—to
exploit the pandemic for our own good, and to
use the knowledge of the pandemic as a
‘weapon against our enemies.
8. The insurrection will involve precise
coordination from within the constellation of
riots: the paradoxical organization of
disorder beyond any measure of control
Accordingly, the problem of insurrection has
equal parts social and technical dimensions.
‘What | am advocating is a paradoxical ordering
of disorder, an Organized Kontusion (for those
who remember the rap group). To do this, we
‘must read up on tactics: we must look into what
exactly was smashed; what exactly was looted:
and how and why the accupations were effective
oF ineffective. We need to think strategically
about the chaos that we inflict the streets,
‘What is more, we also need to anticipate new
forms of tactics, struggles and strategies that
will emerge, so as to intensity these struggles
and tactics. We can anticipate that occupations
and rent strikes are going to occur in the near
future due to the looming threat of eviction that
is occurring in al of our heavily gentifed cities,
But | think we need to go beyond these
defensive struggles and to be more creative
and to initiate tactics that go on the offensive.
In fact, what | am advocating here is employing
the whole arsenal of proletarian strategies and
tactics-from riots, to strikes, to blockades.
But we need to be creative in our tactics and
strategies. As we have seen in the recent
Twiter hacks, these are just as_ important.
What's important is that we be creative in how
we deploy these strategies and tactics.
What is the modern equivalent of the
telephone exchange in Barcelona that was so
savagely fought over during the May Days in
11937? What is the modem equivalent of the St.
Petersburg rail line that the insurgent workers
fought so hard over in revolutionary Russia?
We have a unique problem, in that we lve in a
huge country. We need to figure out creative
ways to break this distance and ultlize it for our
own ends, Le., as pure means.
9. Materialize the ever-present specter of
a second, more balkanized, civil war by
fragmenting the fragments of a crumbling
empire.
At least since Trump was elected and took
office, the archetype of civil war has been
looming over this country. There are historical
reasons for this. Since American Civil War was
for some the most traumatic experience this
country has ever collectively undergone, and for
others the most liberating, it stands as a figure
that is continually recalled within the collective
imaginary. But, | think there are also structural
reasons. The fundamental operation of the state
works by warding off the ubiquitous threat of
cull war, The State as such can be thought of
as that which blocks and inhibits civil war. What
is unique about this county is our singular
emancipatory tradition, which is itself bound up
with our understanding of civil war.
| would othenwise here cite Kenneth Rexroth’s
excellent autobiography, where he explains
that the radical abolitionists who took part in
the Civil War gave birth to children who
became the first era of the American socialist,
anarchist, and communist labor movement.
[13] But | think the best example comes from
26](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 27.png)
![Du Bois's classic book, Black Reconstruction.
[24] It was the proletarian general stike of the
ex-slaves that truly put the final nail in the
Coffin of slavery. It is precisely this lineage of
an emancipatory, liberatory, but nonetheless
violent, civil war that needs to be updated for
its second coming. Another important
precedent is Harry Haywood's “Black-Belt”
thesis. As a member of the central committee
fof the Communist Party USA, Haywood argued
that revolution in the United States of America
would involve an independent Black state in
the South. | think this is no longer feasible, but
| think what he was grasping at, and was tying
to deal with, was the problem of revolution in a
‘country that is simply massive,
‘The revolution here presents a problem of
sheer scale for us. This is, | think, why
Haywood argued for the breaking apart of
‘America. We have no historical precedent for a
revolution in such a large, industrialized, and
‘modern state, 50 we have a unique problem to
‘grapple with
| do not know exactly what this looks lke. What is
Certain is that this county is already beginning to
bbreak and fracture, and itis upto us to break and
fracture it further, into so many pieces that it can
never be put back together again.
Revolution, here more than anywhere else, will
involve the messy task of division. Here too, we
hhave a unique problem, for we must avoid the
rather aggressive, ugly, and dangerous
nationalism that occured in other cases of civil
war that we have seen over the past forty years.
| am not advocating another series of Yugoslav
wars, nor am | advocating what has occurred in
Syfia. Nonetheless, we must hasness civil war
as an emancipatory liberatory power. The
fundamental goal is to break apart America into
‘a constellation of federated communes.
10. The fulfillment of the revolutionary
project is ultimately an inescapable ethical
obligation that each of us have to the dead
and the exploited.
27
‘At the isk of sounding naive, | sincerely
believe that the riots that we have all
Witnessed, and hopefully participated in, this
summer have opened the window 0
insurrection and even a full-blown revolution. It
is possible that | may be miscalculating the
potentialities that have emerged. Sitil, it is
entirely impossible for anyone to have
participated in the current uprising without
having the fundamental core of their being
tunalterably changed. As for myself, and | know
for many of you, we feel the revolution deeply
within our souls, and it changes our very
outlook, the approach to how we live our lives.
Al the pervasive cynicism, all the rational self-
interest, all the nihilism, all that is constitutive
of the typical American citizen is slowly being
worn away by the insurrection and the uprising
What this shows us is that the revolution is truly
beyond us, truly beyond each and every one of
us here. I surpasses all the boundaries thrown
up by American individualism. it forces us to
finally look beyond ourselves and recognize that
‘America has wreaked havoc as an imperial
power around the globe for a century
‘And the fight is not only forthe living, but also for
the dead. We owe the revolution tothe milions of
slaves who never knew a second of freedom.
What the long list of martyrs who have fallen
during this uprising deserve from us is nothing
‘other than the completion ofthe revolution.
Pasolini wrote an essay about a trip to America
What really took him was one of the phrases
that no one says anymore but was a big part of
the Civil Rights movement: ‘we need fo throw
‘our entre bodies into the struggle." [15]
The dead of the struggle scream out for
vengeance, and we must avenge their deaths.
As Benjamin famously put it, “not even the
dead will be safe from the enemy if he is
Victorious", [26] Tonight is the night to begin to
settle accounts once and for all, to end their
Victorious reign upon the globe, and to allow
the dead to finally rest](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 28.png)
![the economy, work, etc.
provide their last name.)
ley decined to
For many Black anarchists, a commitment to
radical politics also means putting community
and care at the center of their own personal
definitions. Makayla, an organizer from
Philadelphia, tells Mic, “[Being a Black
anarchist] Is working to develop non-
hierarchical communities and building: mutual
aid outside the colonial white supremacist
structures. It is finding ways to heal people
from state violence and leaming ways to
sustain ourselves as a people.
Similarly, Tina, who is located in Dallas, Texas,
says, "I think being a Black anarchist can
mean many things. But for me, it means having
my cake and eating it, too. It means as a queer
Black woman that my liberation is everything
and that | am willing to die for that no matter
the cost. Because | love liberation more than
my own life." Both women declined to provide
their last names,
Black anarchists are not surprised by Trump's
Continued baiting. For Tina, itharkens back tothe
Red Scare that grew particularly intense in the
‘1940s and early 1950s. During that period, the
label “communist” was thrown around as
haphazardly as Trump's use of “anarchists” with
former Sen. Joseph McCarthy even forming the
House Un-American Activities Committee to
investigate communism within the United States.
McCarthy campaign dealt devastating blows 10
the Black freedom stuggle
“Trump labeling protesters as anarchists. is
another form of white supremacy at work," Tina
said. "Blackness is alteady anarchy in white
foks’ minds. | dont think a Black person
necessarily has to call themselves an anarchist
to be one, because in the land where whiteness
is law and order you are already one.
Riley says its to0 early to know the full effect of
Trump's targeting, but"! know for sure there is
going to be an intense crackdown on
anarchists, probably on a level we haven't
seen since the [Earth Liberation Front] was
active in the early ‘90s and 2000's. Grand
juries, federal indictments, house raids,
informants, the works.” However, Riley pointed
fut that on the streets, Trump's commentary
may actually inspire a pro-anarchist side effect,
similar to what happened in Spain in 2015:
‘Altera counter-terrorism operation against
anarchists prompted public backlash, people
30](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 31.png)
![Used the viral hashtag #TooAMAnAnarchist to
express solidarity
Trump's logic of anarchists being
troublemakers also relies on the popular
“outside agitator" narrative. The phrase came
up early in the summer with Hennepin County
officials in Minnesota blaming unrest in their
city on people who live outside of the state
Later, an investigation by the local NBC affiliate
station found that the vast majority of those
arrested were, indeed, Minnesotans.
‘The “outside agitator" narrative isnt troubling
just because of a few instances where officials
were obviously wrong in deploying it, but also
because it has roots in queling dissent
throughout history, from plantation owners in
the South to massive corporations and beyond.
‘The Twitter account Midwest People's History,
fan “ongoing chronicle of moments when
ordinary people got organized and made
history." wrote, "Though the specific term
‘outside agitator’ didn't become popular until
the Civil Rights Movement, its sentiment was
felt in the Antebellum South. In the wake of
slave uprisings, ‘outsider accusations were
often used by paranoid white slave owners to
soothe their shaky nerves.
The presence of Black anarchists complicates
31
the notion of an “outside agitator” — to
describe anarchists as random white people
outside of Black and otherwise oppressed
communities is to erase Black anarchists — as
Well as the “peaceful” protester narrative that
others ty to conjure to oppose Trump. But why
is there an obligation to be peaceful if you are
dying? The realty is that there afe Black
anarchists who burn and loot, and itis not the
timate sin some have tried making it out to
be. Following the protests in Ferguson,
Missouri, in 2014, Vicky Osterweil wrote “that
for most of America’s history, one of the most
righteous antiwhite supremacist tactics
available was looting. The specter of slaves
freeing themselves could be seen as American
history's first image of Black looters.
In addition, Osterwell noted the problem with
prioritizing “and defending “property” in the
United States. Namely, as Raven Rakia said
the term is raciazed: "When propery is
destroyed by Black protesters, it must always
bbe understood in the context of the historical
racialization of property. When the same system
that refuses to protect Black children comes out
to protect windows, what is valued over Black
people in America becomes very clear.”
‘ts with this poignant reminder in mind that one
should read a statement from Acting Homeland
‘Security Secretary Chad Wolf earlier this month,
where he said that “the city of Portland has
been under siege for 47 straight days by a
Violent mob. .. Each night, lawless anarchists
destroy and desecrate property, including the
federal courthouse, and attack the brave law
enforcement oficers protecting it
While Wolf makes strong claims, they do not
capture the entire picture. Makayla identifies
Black anarchists as “[being] on the front lines
since day one,” assisting other protesters by
teaching useful organizing tactics. For example,
fone common — and vital — protest skil
associated with anarchists is street medicine.
These skils are vital during protests when the
state is often the one harming people and
calling 911 for medical assistance is no longer
an option. Makayla added, "Even before the](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 32.png)
![STEALING AWAY IN AMERICA
Zo¢ Samudzi
‘June 10, 2020
hips:/jewishcurrents.org/stealing-away-in
americal
Since the murder of George Floyd by a
Minneapolis police officer on May 25th, the
‘country has been seized by protests against
police brutality. In addition to peaceful marches
‘and demonstrations, there have also been
ramatic scenes of looting and property
damage: for example, the burning of
Minneapolis Third Precinct, which was
preceded by looting of shops in the surrounding
neighborhood, including a Target. These
scenes—and similar ones in clies across the
rnation—have prompted the return of familar
‘arguments about looting that have periodically
arisen for years—including, in recent memory,
during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in
2005 and the 1992 LA riots that followed the
police assault of Rodney King.
This debate was also reactivated six years ago
at the beginning of the Ferguson uprisings, after
the murder of Michael Brown, when many
pundits and lay commentators praised the
peaceful protests against police brutality while
forcefully condemning looting as misguided or
even counterproductive. In response, Vicky
COsterweil published the essay “In Defense of
Looting” in The New Inguiy. In the essay,
Osterveil refuses the moralistic distinction
‘between “non-violent protesters” and “looters,”
wanting that looting actually reveals ‘precisely
hhow, in a space without cops, property relations
‘can be destroyed and things can be had for
free." She also pushes back on common
objections 10 these tactics, such as the claim
that rioters are engaging in self-defeating
‘behavior. She quotes a viral video in which one
Ferguson rioter says, "People want to say we're
destroying our own neighborhoods. We don't
‘own nothing out here!" Osterweil writes, "This
‘could be said of most majority black
45
neighborhoods in America, which have much
higher concentrations of chain stores and fast
food restaurants than non-black neighborhoods
How could the average Ferguson resident
really say its ‘our QuikTrip?" She goes on to
argue that liberal critics of looting are often
hypocritical. “The same white liberals who
inveigh against corporations. for destroying
focal communities are aghast when rioters take
their critque to its actual material conclusion,”
she writes,
Now, Osterweil has expanded her essay into a
book, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History
Of Uncivl Action, out this August. In the book,
COsterweil has developed the original essay into
searching examination of the origins and
evolution of policing, race, and property rights.
Ultimately, Osterweil demands we not only
‘overcome the respectability politics animating
four desire for “peaceful protests,” but that we
work f0 abolish the racial capitalist logics at the
heart of American empire—iogics that, she
argues, are contested by the very act of
property damage. In light of the resurgent
Conversation about whether to divide the
“Tooters” from the “peaceful protesters," | spoke
to Osterweil about her book and its view of
property damage as essential to the erosion of
the racist property relations that uphold white
supremacy—and the often fatal police violence
that enforces it.
This interview has been edited for length and
clarity,
Zoé Samudzi: Can you describe the
etymology of the word “looting” and how that
informs its present racialized usage?
Vieky Osterweil: The word “loot” was taken
from Hindi by [British] colonial officers. It frst
appears in English in an 1845 colonial officer's
handbook. From the very beginning i's this
really racializing word that contains the idea
that black and brown people were obsessed
‘with plunder—that they had a deviant
felationship to property, as opposed to the](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 46.png)
![proper ownership embodied by the colonizers.
This connotation persists today, which is why
people are so reactive and defensive against
the word. It really is a classic dog whistle
When Trump says, “When the looting starts the
shooting starts,” we know he's not talking
about the white protesters who might be
helping and participating. He's talking about
murdering black people.
ZS: In your book, you explain the relationship
between property rights and the evolution of
white supremacy and racial suctures. You write,
"Many historians have shown that strong, explicit
racist ideology does not appear in the historical
record in America unti the revolutionary period,
when the rights of man (and itis indeed man)
became the defining philosophy of US politics. IF
the rights to liberty and propery are inalienable,
then what to do about all these people who are
very clearly not in possession of liberty, or the
capacity of property ownership?” To solve this
‘conundrum, the colonists enforced the structure
and hierarchy of race in America by designating
white people as owners and black people as
things to be owned, therefore joining racial
identity and citizenship to property relations. How
‘can we think about looting in the context of what
you are describing as the racial roots of
Property?
Vo: [The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist]
Syivia Wynter talks about this in her essay “No
Humans Involved: An Open. Letter to My
Colleagues,” about the way LA police were
referring to a black criminal underclass using the
phrase "No Humans Involved," or “NHL” She
Uses that as a jumping-off point for her project
‘about the construction of the human: how the
idea of humanity itseff is buit on the denial of
[human] status to black people. This project of
Tights and legal bourgeois subjecthood is being
built on a definition of humanity that necessary
has an outside: That outside is always African
‘and Indigenous populations,
The enslaved—who were not only excluded
{rom property ownership, but were themselves
defined as property—understood innately that
the concept of property made no sense. They
‘would call just having a meeting “stealing” the
‘meeting, and they would call escaping “stealing
away.” Once you have been made into property
by a society, then you recognize that any
freedom you're going to have has to be stolen,
ZS: You write, “This specter of slaves freeing
themselves is American history's first image of
black looters.” realy love the way you play with
time, revoactively applying the word “Iooters”
land connecting it 10 contemporary usage. It
really allows us to connect the sheer magnitude
of the state's theft, traficking, and enslavement
of African people to its present fear of the black
looter destroying and stealing in return.
Vo: For centuries, black thinkers have been
arguing that slavery didn't actually end [ater
abolition and emancipation]. Frederick
Douglass was making that claim in the 1880s,
Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe talks
about how we have to understand the entire
capitalist world as living in the wake of the
techniques and modes of living that were
produced in colonization and the slave trade. |
think understanding that is really vital to
breaking out of the progressive narrative that
things have been getting better. In 1892, fewer
People were getting lynched than are being
killed every year by the police in America,
which means there are more police lynchings
now than there ever were at the height of
Iynching as a white fascist movement. None of
these problems have gone away. There have
been moments of uprising and resistance when
they have been pushed back: Reconstruction,
the Civil Rights Movement, even LA in 1992
But the fundamental structures never shift
ZS: | often find thatthe real objection to property
damage is about the fact that there's always a
caveat for the preservation and maintenance of
black life, a set of specific conditions under
‘hich most white people feel comfortable about
allowing black people to exist. You write that the
“specter of slaves freeing themselves,” the fear
of black looting, is really the white fear of and
‘objection to black people choosing terms of
existence beyond white law and order. Its a kind
of deep-seated existential objection—one that
we just dont see, for instance, in respongpes](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 47.png)
![even condemnatory ones, to white people
rioting and setting things on fire after a big
‘sports victory
VO: | think there is a desire on white people's
behalf to deny the existence of the anti-Black,
White supremacist state that we live in. They
don't want to believe in i! They live their lives,
‘organized around not believing in it even as
they benefit rom it.
Legal scholar Cheryl L. Harris, in her very
important text "Whiteness as Property,” argues
that the ultimate property in society is
whiteness. And for many white folks, especially
in this country in 2020, [whiteness] may be the
fonly property they own. Part of why so many
have come out to the street this time is
because they realize that the wages of
whiteness have gotten really low. Its important
to understand that whiteness and property are
inextricable from each other: Without one there
cannot be the other. We tend to think of
property as tangible things or commodities, but
't also. includes rights, protections, and
customs of possession passed down and
ratified through law. Whiteness emerges as the
race of people who are neither Indigenous nor
enslavable—national identities are increasingly
collapsed around the distinctions of slaveltree
and blackhwhite
‘So when back folks rise up and attack property,
they'te also attacking whiteness. That is an
Understanding that goes back to the plantation:
When you attack your status as property, you
attack whiteness as domination over you,
ZS: It's so interesting to think about the slogan
We often see: Being pro-Black isn't antiwhite
But i youre supporting black people in the street
protesting the police, if you're supporting white
people protesting against the violence of the
police, you are necessarily opposing whiteness,
VO: Yes. Whiteness only exists as the
condition under which you can oppress black
and Indigenous people. That's the identity of
whiteness. There is nothing [else] there. The
47
peace of whiteness is a peace of the grave. It
heeds to be abolished—and it we're taking
about abolishing whiteness, we'te also talking
about abolishing the police. Police evolved trom
slave patrols, slave catchers, colonial overseers
(in the Caribbean as well as Ireland), and as
antriot forces designed to control new urban
‘non-white populations. The earliest modem
police force in the world was in Charleston,
‘South Carolina: the City Guard. It existed mostly
to control and terrorize the quarters where
hired out" enslaved people lived at some
remove ffom their plantations and ensiavers,
and thus represented some small amount of
autonomy, and the possibility of rebelion or
organization—which was a threat to the white
establishment, Further, one of the main [original]
tasks of the NYPD, the earliest police force in
the North, included enforcement of the Fugitive
Slave Act—kidnapping ffee black people and
sending them back into slavery—and putting
down the antislave catcher riots that were a
major part of the abolition movement in
antebellum New York
In other words, from the very beginning, police
exist to prevent black people from unsettling
their status as property and threatening
property itself, as well as to repress other
Unruly proles who might riot, refuse work, and
otherwise attack property and its systems,
ZS: In discussions about looting, people
sometimes categorize survival theft—for
example, stealing food or baby formula when
you need it—differently from what's seen as
‘opportunistic, joyriding theft. Do do you think
that particular distinction realy matters?
VO: No. | don't think so. Many people would, in
moments of peace, encourage opportunism:
They would tell you that you're just not working
hard enough, you just need to get a better jo,
you need to better yourself. But when people
who have been denied those legal “proper
routes toward wealth take an opportunistic
moment to act, then suddenly opportunism
becomes a ctime. Then opportunism reveals a
sort of villainous or lazy disposition. This
distinction ignores the law of value. If you were
really broke and you go into a department](171b.-g-floyd-reader-2 48.png)
George Floyd Uprising Reader
PRS rea ed +
eS Lem
INTRODUCTION
Thank you for opening this reader.
‘A group of anarchists and autonomists
in the Bay Area/ occupied Ohlone land
collected writings animated by the
2020 uprisings that ignited the so-
called United States after the police
murder of George Floyd. Our intention
is that this reader inspires people
everywhere to engage in deeper
conversations about all aspects of the
uprising, including its significance and
context to the US Black Liberation
struggle. We believe these discussions
are vital to shaping ongoing and future
struggles, improving tactics, and
rendering ineffective the insidious
narratives that aim to crush our
collective power.
We have organized these selected
writings into two volumes:
Volume 1: Insurgency and Beyond
shares on-the-ground accounts from
various sites of struggle; the
challenges faced, victories won,
analysis sharpened, and lessons
leamed. Each writing, specific to its
physical and cultural landscape,
affirms the necessity of insurrection
while grappling with its impermanent
nature and the questions of how we
move forward together from such
eruptions.
Volume 2: Belligerent Identities in
the Face of Counter-Insurgency
examines identity politics, Black
anarchists’ role in the uprisings, the
racialized nature of “looting”, among
other dynamics. The concept of
Belligerent Identities is taken from the
Latin Bellum Gerere which translates
as "to wage war’, a term for guerrilla
soldiers used by the state. If a
belligerent identity is that of the enemy
combatant, then we seek to reclaim
and weaponize this term. The writings
in this volume speak to how the far-
right, police, state, media, and liberals
use everything from live ammunition
to tired rhetoric to douse the flames of
rebellion and diffuse the potentials of
solidarity
As non-Black anarchists and
autonomists gathering and framing
writings about an uprising that is
centered around Black liberation, our
positionality lends itself to a
possibility of missing important
elements and __ perspectives.
However, we hope that you find this
reader thought-provoking. Through
critical analysis and fierce practice,
may the fire in our hearts burn
brighter as we love stronger and fight
smarter in our collective struggle for
liberation,
For feedback, questions, or comments please email
GeorgeFloydReader@protonmail.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume Il: Belligerent Identities in the Face of Counterinsurgency
Part 1. Counterinsurgency in Practice
3..... Counterinsurgency: Dousing the Flames of Minneapolis
8..... They Came For Us in the Morning: What Prison Officials Don't Want You
to Know About the Raid on 200+ Incarcerated Black People at Soledad
Part 2 . Belligerent Identities and other Theories on Insurgency
18 .... How It Might Should Be Done.
29 .... How Black Anarchists are Keeping the Protest Movement Alive
33 .... On the Black Leadership and Other White Myths
34 .... On The Limits of Identity Politics
39 .... Fuck Identity We Need Solidarity
45 .... Stealing Away in America
SOME QUESTIONS TO FRAME
YOUR READING
The radical origins of identity politics
(as put forth by the Combahee River
Collective) has often been co-opted
by the state and liberalism for the
purpose of reinforcing division
between people. How do we use
identity as a starting point for
understanding and connection while
fighting back against the ways it is
used against us?
How do the state's strategies of
counterinsurgency reveal its greatest
vulnerabilities?
Who is choosing belligerency in the
face of white supremacy and the state,
and what role could people's identity
play in this choice?
How do we foster true solidarity without
flattening differences and lived
experiences?
Given the history and current reality
of white supremacy and anti-
Blackness, what are the most
meaningful ways for _non-Black
anarchists and autonomists to
participate in the fight for Black
Lives?
How do we engage in struggle in a
way that prioritizes those most
impacted without falling into
tokenization and essentialism?
Part 1. Counterinsurgency in Practice
COUNTERINSURGENCY:
Dousing the Flames in Minneapolis
Peter Gelderloos
‘June 4, 2020
hutps:/anarchistnews.org/content/counterinsur
‘gency-dousing-flames-minneapolis
*We wanted to acknowledge that the word
‘bind is used in this section in some places in
an ableist way. We urge everyone f0 examine
how ableism is often prevalent in our language
{and spaces), and to do better at incorporating
disability justice frameworks into our politic
‘The uprising that has spread across the United
States since the police murder of George Floyd
on May 25 in Minneapolis has, like any
rebellious movement, met with — police
strategies for counterinsurgency. It is well
documented how moder police forces
systematically use _counterinsurgency
strategies against their own populations.
‘The most visible counterinsurgency measure
so far has been the campaign of
brutal repression: the
straightforward
thousands of people arrested and injured by
police and National Guard across the country,
as well as the handful of Black people who
have been murdered since May 25, shot to
death by cops or white vigilantes,
Nonetheless, people have courageously held
their own, staying in the streets, redistributing
Wealth through looting and mutual aid initiatives,
supporting one another with horizontally
organized first aid and legal support, disabling
police vehicles and infrastructure in order 10
physically remove cops’ abilty to cause harm,
and destroying many of the businesses that led
to gentrification, exclusion and police violence in
the fist place,
Needless to say, this is an incredible feat.
‘Amidst such a dangerous, — brutalizin,
potentially traumatizing situation, collective
strength is what gets people through. That is
Why itis the other side of counterinsurgency,
the one that divides movements against
themselves, that is the most pernicious at
times like these — especially since itis often
movement participants who enable and
reproduce such measures.
Nonviolence
‘Since British colonial wars in Kenya and India,
police strategists have identified the need to keep
resistance movements arrested at the level of
‘nonviolence or simple verbal dissent. This is a
fundamental function of counterinsurgency:
treating society like a hostile population and
keeping it from rising up.
In eater rebelions against police murders,
mayors, police chiefs and would-be protest
leaders were united from the very fist hours in
declaring that only symbolic protest was a
legitimate response, This happened in Oakland
after the murder of Oscar Grant, and ithappened
in Ferguson after the murder of Mike Brown.
Fortunately, we have come a long way. People
have seen that the only time cops get charged
for kiling is if people riot. And we have also
recovered histories of struggle that the dominant
institutions had tamed and manipulated,
Now, we once again remember that nearly all
‘our victories in the past, whether in the labor
‘movement, anti-war movements, or even in the
Civil Rights movement, came from riots,
rebellions and wildcat actions, specifically
those moments when we were uncontrollable.
For the first few days ater the murder of
George Floyd, hardly anyone was openly
advocating nonviolence, because of how
Clearly that would sound like putting property
over Black lives. Even the mayor of
Minneapolis, after block stores and a police
station was burnt down, claimed to empathize
with the anger of rioters.
To pacify this movement, subtler strategies
were needed. In came the outside agitators.
Abolitionists and Criminal immigrants.
The concept of the outside agitator is a very
old trope. Some of its first uses were to
delegitimize the rebellions of enslaved people,
suggesting that Africans would not want to
rebel on their own or would not be smart
enough to do so, and were instead led into
rebellion by nefarious white abolitionists from
the North, Another early use was against
anarchists, who were frequently immigrants,
especialy in the US movement, and as such,
subject to xenophobic prejudices.
The trope of the outside agitator is a
psychological operation meant to suggest that
those wiho rebel have no legitimacy. Those who
‘come from outside threaten the closed, localized
system of oppressor and oppressed. The
outsiders are imputed with evil ulterior
‘motivations, whereas the authorities are simply
motivated by a desire to protect that closed
system, And of course they want to protect it: as
the oppressors in the closed system, they are the
‘ones who benefit from it Solidarity and collective
power are discouraged, as people are impelled
to distrust anyone who does not come ftom
within avery small circle, family member or
immediate neighbor. Obedience is. normalized
ile rebellion is porayed as something sinister
Another disturbing element of the trope is the
suggestion that white people are being
irresponsible if they also want to fight against
slavery, and people born in other countries are
suspect if they also claim to suffer under
capitalism, The racist, classist implications
translate well to the modem uses of the
provocateur bogeyman,
‘The logic of counterinsurgency is spread
across the political spectrum: everyone who
has an officially recognized right to comment
fon the unfolding rebellion, everyone given a
bulhorn by the mainstream media, has been
‘warning about outside agitators. Trump does it,
‘most police chiefs do it, Democratic mayors do
it, even the progressive wing of the Democratic
Party like than Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez do it. The right wingers add the
obviously anti-Semitic suggestion that George
Soros funds these agitators, the “professional
anarchists,” but all of them, nonetheless, are
Using a trope that is imemediably racist,
4
Working for the Cops
‘The most common iteration of this conspiracy
theory that circulates among people who
actualy participate in movements against police
brutality suggests that the outside agitators are
actualy the police themselves, agent
provocateurs. How could blaming the cops for
the violence possibly play into their hands?
This is in fact one of the most effective and
also pernicious iterations of counterinsurgency
discourse, precisely because people who
spread it do not realize that they are favoring
pacification and doing the cops’ work.
IV it is just media and politicians claiming that
‘our movements are invalid or our methods too
extreme, that actually does not matter a lot,
because in order to make a revolutionary
change in society, we need to be strong
enough to go against the media and the
‘government anyway. Itis when the movement
turns against itself that we lose.
‘As | documented in The Failure of Nonviolence,
signaling protesters as infitrators, even when it
's done by pacifist, exposes them to violence. It
's a signal to the crowd that the person singled
‘out is a threat, and also an unreasonable force:
they are not who they say they are, Rioters can
infact be both reasonable and polite. It is not all
uncommon, in the midst of a riot, bonfires
blazing, to hear people say things lke, ‘don't set
that one on fire, i's a cheap model, that's not a
rich person’s car," or “hey, let's grab those tire
extinguishers, there are apartments above this
bank office and we don’t want the fires getting to
big.” Of course, more often than not, such
conversations happen non-verbally, but
‘commoniy, part of the beauty of the riot is that
strangers take care of one another.
However, when someone is accused of being an
infltrator, a false protester, dialogue becomes
Impossible because, a prior, honest
communication is precluded by who they
supposedly are. Those who spread this kind of
‘accusation are actually hoping the crowd wil ely
5
fon the uglier methods it has available to protect,
itself, beating up the supposed provocateur, and
handing them over to the police.
This was exactly how the politcal parties
imposed nonviolence on the Catalan
independence movement in October 2017,
using their massive resources to spread the
rumor that police infitrators were planning on
committing violent acts in the protests, The
degree of doublethink was undeniable: in the
name of nonviolence, people assaulted those
who began to carry out property destruction,
proving that they did not logically believe such
protesters were actual cops, or they never
would have beat them up. Rather, the
accusation of being a provocateur converted
those protesters into homo sacer, people with
1 legitimacy or right to bodily integrity
Ironically, those who engage in this kind of
snitchjacketing are doing something very
similar to what Amy Cooper did in Central
Park, calling the police and lying about being
threatened, knowing full well that the target of
her accusation faced police violence,
‘And we have already seen how protesters in
various cities have assaulted demonstrators and
sven them aver directly tothe police for damaging
property, once again valuing captal more than
human life, which is the very kind of thinking that
dives us police murders in the first place
‘Another problem with this discourse is how it
distracts from the greater violence. Honestly,
who cares if someone is smashing a Target of
looting a convenience store? People are getting
murdered, Black foks have to Ine every day
Under the threat of sudden death. Those who
focus on property destruction should be shamed
for having their prottes so out of ine.
Yes, rioting can be done well and it can be
done poorly, in a way that endangers others.
However, social media is not the place to air
those criticisms, especially since we can never
know ifthe criticism is coming from someone
‘who was actually there, nor is it possible to
know what is left out of the video they are
sharing as proof of their accusation.
Often exicisms are shared in the moment of the
protest itself, and this can be effective if people
Start communicating on a good faith basis.
Sometimes, however, you cannot communicate
well in the chaos of a demo under full police
assault. But serious social movements have
ther spaces jn order to talk about conficts like
this and to educate newer folks on the best ways.
to engage in protests, Accepting that social
media is a terible place for such conversations
‘would make it much easier to shut down the
rumor mill before it stars,
There is yet another problem with the
provocateur trope: it spreads the idea that the
police need a justiication to attack
demonstrators and kill people. That is the
common element to this conspiracy theory,
ater all. Way are police supposedly smashing
windows or leaving an empty patrol car for
protesters to bum? So they can have a
justification for breaking up the protest.
‘When have police ever needed a justification?
Itis an absolute whitewash to claim that police
leven pretend to be reactive, only breaking out
their arsenal when there could feasibly be the
perception that they have a good reason to do
so, What planet are these people ling on?
How many unarmed Black foks need to be
‘murdered, how many peaceful protests have 10
be attacked by visibly sadistic cops for folks to
get this notion of “justification” out of their
heads? The idea that police are reactive, even
if tis in a nefarious way, runs directly counter
to the struggle to abolish the police,
Conspiracies that Undermine Action
This kind of conspiratorial thinking also
spreads the idea that we do not have agency,
that the cops are the all powerful puppet
masters and anything we do plays into their
hands. This view decenters our own choices
for how to respond. The most important
question is not, what do the cops want us 10
do? The most important question is, how do
the people most affected — Black and brown
folks — need to respond to this systemic
violence? And secondariy, what strategies do
ther folks have to support them, and to also
push back against forms of state violence that
do affect lighter-skinned people, given the
‘complex intersections af oppression,
The cops are not infalible, They do use
Inflrators. Most often to gather information,
sometimes to carry out arrests, occasionally t0
pprovoke an action that can entrap people.
Even if cops do engage in property destruction,
this pales in comparison to all the times they
Urge protesters to be nonviolent. And when
they inftrate, they are hardly omnipotent
puppet masters. Cops are often not all that
Intelligent. In fact, the 1905 Revolution in
Russia was triggered in part by a police
informant who got carried away. We need to be
focusing on our own choices, our own needs,
and our own strategies.
Without losing sight of our own goals, it helps
to have an awareness of the enemy. It is
probably no coincidence that progressive
politicians, rightwing politicians and police
chiefs all want us to be nonviolent. This does
not mean we should blindly do the opposite of
What we think they want, but neither should we
be blind to what they are trying to do to us. The
point of a counterinsurgency strategy is to
pacity a rebellion that would be too dificult oF
too costly to annihilate through pure military
force. Our goal should be to allow these
rebellions to grow and express themselves
freely, attacking oppressive structures and
prefiguring the world we want.
To do that, it is necessary to raise awareness
‘about how counterinsurgency strategies work
Ina digital age, one of the most vital areas for
improvement is to teach one another how to
recognize conspiracy theories, and how to
apply basic standards of evidence,
Just because someone on social media says a
video is from a certain place or time, or shows
a certain thing, does not mean this is true. In
fact, social media ‘evidence’ is extremely
prone to suggestion. As documented here, the
tumor that a black bloc protester was
unmasked as a cop went viral after a 2012
6
protest in Madrid. It did not matter that in the
video, one can see that the cop is not actually
wearing a mask, and not dressed in typical
black bloc fashion. The simple fact that the
‘message accompanying the video made a
claim about the cop's appearance changed the
perception of the hundreds of thousands of
people who saw it,
It needs to become standard procedure, when
people start spreading rumors based on flimsy
evidence, to call it out and shut it down,
We will be in a much stronger place once
everyone recognizes that conspiracy theories
fare a rightwing tool, even when they seem
subversive. Who can forget the 9-11 Truther
movement. What could be more subversive
than accusing the government of murdering
‘almost 3,000 of its own citizens? Over time, the
rightwing bent of the conspiracy movement
became undeniable: the theory promoted anti-
‘Semitic confabulatons, it was based on a high
valuation of North American lives and absolute
apathy oa much greater number of Iraqi and
AAighan lives los, it distracted trom the antiawar
‘movement, and it led to the creation of a "Deep
State" paranoia that Trump and similar right
wingers use constantly.
=
7
The Struggle is Right in Front of Us
There is no hidden tuth to discover. The reality
is right in front of us. Police murder Black and
bbrown people every day. They murder trans
people. They murder folks with mental health,
problems. They murder homeless people.
They enforce inequalities that allow some to
amass insane amounts of wealth, leaving
many more with no access to good healthcare
‘or decent housing
The movement that is fighting back against this
reality is legitimate. The methods it is
developing are legitimate,
There will be conficts, there will be differences,
bout that is okay. What we cannot do is aid the
counterinsurgency strategies that help the
slate divide and pacity this movement. The
‘most important victories will be accomplished
in the streets, in moments of confict and in
moments of creation. But how we talk about
the movement, the stories we share, the
narratives we create and the enemies and
allies we identify, will determine whether the
struggle becomes isolated and divided, or
whether it continues to grow.
{mn prison, Talib Williams is known as “the student” ~ always studying, learning and teaching.
THEY CAME
FOR US IN
THE MORNING:
What prison officials don't want you to know about the
raid on 200+ incarcerated Black people at Soledad
‘Talib Wiliams
September 2, 2020,
hitpsJ/sfoayview.com/2020/091they-came-for-
us-in-the:morning-what-prison-offcials-dont-
‘wart you-to-know-about-the-raid-on-200:
incarcerated-black-people-at-soledad!
Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys, the Central
Park 5, and the list goes on. The
Famiications of being falsely accused of a
crime in America can be, and often have
been, deadly for Black people.
Since the horrors of the European capitalist
economic enterprise known as the Atlantic
Slave Trade, Black people ~ prmarly Black
men — have been Wynched, bumed alive,
castrated and subjected to every other form of
torture imaginable, as a result of being falsely
accused of a crime. On the sutace, these
accusations seem to be rooted in fear and
ignorance, but when investigated, are proven
to be rooted in nothing other than a device on
behalf of the dominant capitalist, white
supremacist or patriarchal culture to maintain a
postion of power
Not too long ago, we witnessed an attempt at
jeopardizing the life of a Black man in Central
Park. Just hours before George Floyd was
murdered by four Minneapalis potce officers,
this man, who was birdvatching, palitely asked
fa white woman to leash her dog, Her hostie
call to police came not out of fear or ignorance,
but was due to a boldness provided by her
knowledge of how Black men in particular are
viewed now and historically in this country.
Her altempt on the fe of this Black man
reveals the ever-present reality of what it
means to be Black in America: to ive in fear of
being hunted. Media outlets immediately noted
that things could and likely would have been
drastically diferent had the incident not been
caught on camera. Protesters and activists
throughout the world held up and continue to
hold up signs asking this very question about
the latest string of televised crimes against
Black people, “How many weren't caught on
camera?” But what about places where there
‘Asan incarcerated person, | immediately
began to reflect on my present reality and what
those who are incarcerated know all too well
namely that what occurs in public throughout
‘America has been taking place in the darkness
fof America’s prison system since its inception.
“The prison is the place where state power is
pethaps more forcefully experienced and
publicly legitimized without being seen,” writes
Dan Berger in "Captive Nation.”
“in other words, the prison is an example of
state power at its most violent extreme, as wel
fas an example of the way that power cloaks
itself in invisibiliy” he writes,
‘The lens through which we have been allowed
to look into California's prison system is the
darkest opaque. Oltentimes, takes a major
incident for light to be shone on prisons: a riot,
stabbing, major contraband bust, anything to
slant public opinion against the incarcerated.
But when something takes place that puts the
integnty of correctional officers, and ultimately
the entie system itself into question, silence
abounds,
In the aftermath of the violent 3 am, raid on
approximately 200 incarcerated Black people at
Soledad State Prison on July 20 ~ ft wasnt for
the tireless effort of my wife, Tasha Wiliams,
8
whose article in the San Francisco Bay View
first alerted the world to what happened here at
Soledad, as well as the tireless effort of
countless wives, family members and loved
fones sharing her article and the stories of their
incarcerated friends and family who were
‘bnitalized, the world would, without doubt, stil
be in the dark about what happened tous.
Prison officials, on the other hand, waited an
lente week before releasing a statement, and
sill it was only after and in response to receiving
thousands of phone calls and emails from across
the country culminating in protests in front of the
parison that the spokesperson for Soledad State
Prison released a statement to the publi
The statement denied the injuries, denied we
were targeted because of our race, and most
telling of all, that statement would not have
been released had it not been for the
Continuous pressure from both inside and,
‘more importantly, outside organizers against a
system that thrives in silence, The prison’s
silence was an attempt to ‘cloak itself in
invisibly,” and yet their public statement was
an attempt to do the same.
The following is a detailed first-hand account
and contextualizing of what really happened in
the early morning hours of July 20, 2020, at
Soledad CTF (Correctional Training Faciity),
{as well as the events that followed.
When | was violently snatched out of my sleep
and slammed into the wall head fist off the top
bunk, I thought | was dreaming. | didn't know
what was going on; all heard was yelling and
felt hands grabbing my arms and legs. With a
knee in my back, my hands were zip-tied and
was forcefully snatched up by my throat and
dragged out of the cell
‘As soon as my eyes were able to adjust
enough to glance to the right, | heard my cell
mate, a SS:year-old man with degenerative
disc disease in his spine, a chronic shoulder
injury, and who is a diabetic, crying out that
they were hurting his arm, 1 could see what I
9
believe were two men wearing helmets,
equipped with night vision, wearing fatigues,
with black marks covering their faces entirely,
doing to him what had been done to me.
| was carried out of the housing unit barefoot,
‘wearing nothing but boxer briefs, forced to
‘walk on a fthy floor down the central corridor,
towards the dining hall, Along the way | could
see and hear the same thing happening in
every Unit we passed, officers yelling “drag
him’ refercing to people who had already been
ripped violently from their sleep.
The atmosphere was filed with fear and
Uncertainty, To my surprise, when we tumed
ito the dining hall, | saw close to 200
incarcerated people looking as shocked as |
was. Shocked that it was so early in the
morning, and at the fact that we were raided in
away never before seen at Soledad.
Never has a group of people who haven't been
involved in any disruptive activity — and who
haven't even been arrested for committing a
crime ~ been raided the way we were. Even
when someone commits a crime, they are not
raided the way we were raided
have been in prison going on 19 years and
have never seen or heard of a group of people
hhaving been raided the way we were. But
walking out of the dark housing unit, into the
brightly lit corridor, | noticed patches across
officers’ chests that told me this wasnt a
normal raid
This was an inter-agency operation, a joint
team or special ops, security squad officers —
SSU_ (Special Services Unit) and IGI
(institutional Gang Investigators) ~ from both
Soledad CTF and neighboring Salinas Valley
State Prison, as well as CDCR Sacramento,
Office of Correctional Safety (OCS), and
‘Special Services Unit Gang Intel Ops (SSU).
But even more than that, we were shocked at
the fact that every single person sitting there in
the dining hall was Black. Every age group
from early 20s to late 70s. Nobody knew
anything. Everyone was complaining about
their injuries and the way we were raided,
Zip-tied, sitting on stainless stee!_stoo's,
practically naked in a freezing kitchen during
the worst pandemic to hit the world in over a
hundred years, we soon realized something
that was clearly not the concern of whoever
was in charge of this operation: We were
sitting next to each other without our masks.
‘We immediately began to demand that we be
provided face masks, but just like our demands
for medical attention, we were ignored,
We sat there in anger, frustration, fear and,
possibly more than anything else, confusion.
No one could make sense of why" Why, after
the prison’s Black population was
congratulated and praised by the warden on
institutional television for helping maintain a
peaceful and positive program, were we being
treated so inhumanely?
But the longer we sat there, a troubling picture
began to emerge; people spoke to being told
by masked officers, "Black lives don't matter.”
Listening to everyone's experiences, | thought
to myself, "This can't be happening!” at which
point | heard an officer tell one person who
‘was complaining about the fact that we were
crammed next to each other without masks: “I
hope you motherfuckers get COVID!
‘The environment was hostile; an officer was in
the guntower pointing his rifle at us, which led
to an uproar and chant of “Black Lives Matter,”
which resulted in Black buddies being carried
away. It was around this time that one brother
from my building, Bemard Harris, told me my
hands were purple - | was so cold that |
couldn't feel that my hands had lost circulation
due to the tightness of the zip-tie.
| immediately walked over to an officer named
Brown and showed him my hands and he
helped another officer, who looked horified, cut
off the zip-ies and replaced them with a looser
pair. Tis was the only relief | experienced wile
siting in that dining hall and I don't believe this,
could be separated from the fact that Brown
was the only Black correctional officer present
during our entire ordeal in that dining hall
Brown is a regular correctional officer, not part
of the Security Squad — Investigations Services
Unit (ISU) and IGI - oF the extraction team,
which also included members of the Security
Squad, as well as Sacramento's Special
Services Unit Gang Intel Ops (SSU), all of
whom were either white or of an ethnicity that
possesses an inroad to whiteness,
‘While there are cries throughout the world of
“defund police” and diversify the ranks of police
forces, making them more “racially inclusive,”
‘what happened in the early morning hours of
July 20, 2020, here at Soledad begs the
question: How much more humanely would our
Black bodies have been teated had there
been more Black officers present?
‘When | returned to where | was seated, almost
every other individual in that dining hall had to
have their zip-ties cut off due to loss of
circulation, We sat in that cold dining hall
shivering for six hours, some of us zip-tied the
entire time,
‘When we raised hell to use the bathroom, we
were walked to the back of the kitchen to a
secluded part of the prison one at a time,
forced to walk barefoot in the officers spit on
an already urine-covered bathroom floor. | was
forced to strip naked and when | complained, |
‘was told, ‘You shouldn't have been Black.”
Every time | tried to get a glimpse of an
officer's name tag, there was none, oniy
patches that read “CTRISVSP" and “police.”
(One officer, who came over to where we were
waiting to go to the bathroom, however, was
recognizable as Third Watch Building Officer
Martinez, a known racist with multiple
complaints against him for making racist
comments and attempting to incite hostilities
between the Black and Latinx populations,
It stil remains unclear as to why he, a regular
correctional officer, was there dressed as a
member of the extraction team. Had he been
fone of the officers who violently extracted
incarcerated people (while sleeping) from their
beds in the very building he's responsible for
10
‘managing five days a week? Is this why they
‘covered their faces and wore no name tags?
But Martinez wanted to be seen. Like a sadistic
predator circling back to see its victim, he
couldn't help but show his face. However, his
presence raises another question: During a
pandemic that has forced COCR officers and
Officials to take a 10 percent pay cut due to the
{governor's budget and be prohibited trom
working overtime, per their agreement, how is it
that he was able to work overtime coming to
Work during non-work hours to play "Army"?
This wasn't just my experience alone. Every
other Black person in that dining hall early that
‘morning had a similar,
door was pulled open while me and my celle
‘were asleep. We were attacked and assaulted by
ISU Squad members. was violently snatched off
the top bunk by masked CDCR employees. |
injured my arm, head, neck, and hip.
"Several officers jumped on my back and legs,
‘while one put his knee on the side of my head. 1
‘was cuffed in, ziptied and dragged out the cel.
Not one ISUIOCS Task Unit officer had an
identification name tag. | was putin dining hall #1.
with no socks, no shoes, no shirt, and no mask.
"Iwas over 100 Black inmates, all ziptied and in
‘almast no clothes without masks. We were placed
Side-by-side and the wall was ined with CDCR
employees who wore
and some an even CDCR officials can’t wrap their \su biack patches with
worse experience. One heads around the fact that
incarcerated Black people
Harris, 125610 - was throughout the entire state of
pulled violently oft his California aren’t involved in
top bunk, dragged out any STG gang activity.
person who
Vietimized =
Enwin
of his cell, zip-tied and
pushed down a flight of stairs. He had to be
taken to medical in a wheelchair
‘Another person victimized, Eric Frazier, C62189,
also had to be taken to medical in a wheelchair,
hhaving been dragged violently out of his cell
despite teling his captors he had a pre-existing
back and hip injury. He was met with racial slurs
while his seemingly lifeless body ~ according to
fone eye-witness who wishes to remain
‘anonymous - was dragged to the corridor, when
finaly a wheelchair was requested.
‘Another person victimized, Ronald 93.
‘Smallwood, C15171, wrote, "At approximately
3:39 am, | was awakened by several
individuals which | later found out were IGI,
ISU and OCS. | was snatched out of my cell in
‘my underwear and NOTHING else. | was then
handcuffed with zip-ties and escorted 10 the
chow hall. | sat there for five hours in zip-tes.”
‘Another person victimized, Derrick Porter,
‘ABBB49, wrote: "On 7-20-20 at 3:30 am my cell
11
CTFISVSP logos and
ro name tags. These
unnamed officers
were coughing and
sneezing in the dining
hall with us int, SVSP
staff came from a
prison that has a COVID outbreak amongst staff
and inmates. | was scared.”
‘Another person victimized, Marcelle Franklin,
1365015, wrote: “At 3:30 am on 7-20-20, | was
awakened by unknown individuals wearing
helmets and face masks, later identified as
CTFISVSP ISU IGI and OCS. | was forcefully
slammed to the ground, zip-tied, and dragged
out of my cell by multiple ISU officers, then
placed in dining hall #1 without a mask, in
‘nothing but my underwear for over five hours.”
‘And lastly, in direct contradiction to what the
warden said in an email the following day,
attempting to distance himself trom having
knowledge of our condition, Marcus Harts,
(009716, wrote: “On 7-20-20 at about 3:00 am,
1 was ‘awakened by my cell door being
slammed open and being physically snatched
‘out of bed by some unknown persons. | was
taken down to the Central Facility dining hall,
hhandcutfed, with nothing on except underwear,
and was made to sit on metal stools with no
jacket, shoes, tshirt, or mask for about five
and a half hours.
when | asked to see a doctor, | was told ‘No.’
‘After about five hours, the warden came in and
sarted to give officers ‘high fives, telling them
"Good job’ | stood up and said, ‘How are you
going to give them high fives and tell them
{good job for messing over a bunch of innocent
Black people?"
But it wasn't over, We were then escorted out
of the dining hall, stil vitually naked, once
again down the central corridor, stil zip-tied,
officers and free staff now clocking in to work
looking at us as if we were animals. We were
led one by one into what used to be the
counselor's office at the end of the west
Corridor, where we were interrogated by plain
clothed OCS officers,
‘When we get near the entrance, an OCS officer
asked my name and CDCR number before
handing the officer escorting me a packet that
had my picture. In red letters was the word
“Target” below which was a paragraph of which
| was only able to read the frst line, which said,
His father is Millon Hayes, a validated
associate of the Black Guerilla Family.”
If you know me or have read my most recent
blog post, “Crying Out From Soledad: An Open
Letter to a Lawyer then you know that this is
fan Issue about which | already have two
pending lawsuits for retaliation, racial and
religious discrimination against CDCR officers
and officials for harassing me since 2011 for
being in contact with my father
They also single me out for my writing and
journalism against this racist system,
‘Soledad Correctional Training Facility ~
Photo: The Salinas Californian
particularly my article in the San Francisco Bay
View entitled, “Soledad prison guards refuse 10
wear safety masks amidst COVID-19
pandemic” for which | was raided less than a
week after it was published, and more
specifically my last book, “Soledad
Uncensored,” the forward of which is being
published as a series of articles, also in the
San Francisco Bay View, entitled, “Soledad
Uncensored: Racism and the hyper-policing of
Black bodies,” the entirety of which speaks
directly against what was happening to us
these early moming hours of July 20, 2020.
Had my writings contributed 10 my being
included in this roundup?
| was led to a room where two OCS officers,
fone wiite, one Black, were waiting. They told
ime to face the wall while they cut off my zip-
ties and honestly | thought they were going to
beat me, or worse. ! was so nervous my mouth
instantly became dry
Bul, frustrated that 1 was once again — based
‘on what I was able to read from the description
below my picture ~ being harassed because of
my father's past, | asked, "What the hel is going
fon? This is how you guys are getting down
‘now?! Snatching people out of bed at 3:00 in
the momning?! You have been harassing me
since 2011 because of my father!”
That is when the white officer asked, "Why
‘would you say we were harassing you because
of your father?". "Because that's what is says
fon the paper you just set aside,” | responded,
roticing the look on his face change when the:
Black officer chimed in saying, “We're not
harassing you. We just want to ask you some
questions about Black Lives Matter.
“How do you feel about what happened to
George Floyd? | know what the one cop did
was wrong and he deserves to go to all, but all
cops aren't bad,” he said. That's ironic,
considering the fact that here we were, having
this conversation about police brutality rooted
in racial biases, after approximately 200 Black
men were violently snatched from their beds
hile sleeping — by police. 12
‘The premise upon which they sought to base
the conversation was disrespectful. We had the
\Whole “a few bad apples” conversation before |
{got tired and asked them, "So you mean to tell
me yall did all this to ask us about George
Floyd and Black Lives Matter?!" when again the
Black officer said, "Honestly, you have some
tatoos on you that indicate you're BGF!”
| shot back: “m not BGF, tke | said when | first
came in. Y'all have been harassing me since
2011 for being in contact with my father who,
according to you, is a validated associate of
the Black Guerilla Family, To me he's simply
‘my father who went to prison in ‘89 and had
been out of my life until my sister found him
sill incarcerated in 2008.
"have every letter he's ever writen me and
rot one of them is criminal in nature, They are
letters from a father trying to mend a broken
bond with his son, And about the tattoo you
‘guys have been harassing me about since
2011, everything about itis Islamic." | tuned
round to show them my back tattoo, which is
fa dragon with a huge crescent moon and star
in the center of it flanked by the sword and
staff of the prophet Muhammed, with a verse
from the Qur'an over itn Arabic Script.
"What about the dragon is Islamic?” they ask.
‘At which point I give them a detailed
explanation of a hadith mentioned in S.V. Mr
‘Ahmed Al's commentary to chapter 96, verse
67, of the Holy Qur'an about an enemy of the
prophet Muhammed attempting to harm him
while he (Muhammed) was praying, but turning
back in fear because he saw that the prophet
Muhammed was being protected by a dragon,
After explaining my tattoos for the 20th time, as
well as explaining to them how racist it is to
assume that a Black person in prison with a
tattoo of a dragon - or a gorilla or snake, for
that matter — is a member of a prison gang that
hhas used such symbols ~ | further explained
‘my point by saying that “| was Asian and had
a dragon tattoo it wouldn't be an issue!”
‘They replied, “But you're not!” and when | asked
13
affmatively, “So it's because I'm Black?" they, to
‘my surprise said, “Yes.” After they “apologized!
regarding the misunderstanding of my tattoo,
saying, ‘We hope you can get that cleared up
‘about your tattoo,” they told me | could go.
When | returned to my cel, sill confused as to
why we were kidnapped in the middle of the
right just to be questioned about Black Lives
‘Matter, George Floyd, and a prison “gang”
the ‘70s, | was shocked even further by the
way they trashed the cell. Everything was
thrown all over the place.
My cellmate, who had returned to the cell
before me, was busy separating his remaining
property from mine when | noticed that every
single piece of paperwork, writing paper,
envelopes, every letter, picture, photo album,
phone book and book was gone. In the midst
fof my remaining property was a "Security
‘Squad Receipt” that said the only thing taken
was “paperwork.
Later that morning, when everyone was let out
oftheir cells to set up like we do every morning
for “cell reading,” everyone was shocked that
‘we weren't on “scheduled program,” which is
the normal protocol when there is a threat,
especially one that necessitates a raid. The
first step of a ‘modified program” due to a
threat is for the officers to conduct a “threat
assessment’ by interviewing everyone in the
prison one by one, voluntarily.
The fact that they weren't conducting a threat
assessment didnt make sense. Obviously,
something wasn't right. In the process of
leaning up and preparing for breakfast,
Someone found paper tags presumed to be
place markers used during the raid. One had
the words ‘property team,” ‘tag 1, receipts” and
*Chartie” printed over a watermark on the SSU
seal. The other has the words, “Charlie wing"
Which is the unit where the tags were found, as
well as the unit "'m housed in
At the top of this particular tag, however, were
words that would explain everything
“Operation Akili" The name of this operation
was a Swahili word that means “inteligence,”
which comes from the Arabic word “Agi,
having the same meaning. They were on a
fishing expedition, a dragnet — intelligence
gathering ~ which explains why the only thing
they took was paperwork, letters, books,
Pictures and phone books.
There was no threat, Not only did the name of
their operation indicate that there was no threat,
but the raid itself tuned up no weapons, no
Fotes referring to any type of threat or STG
(Security Threat Group, the new term for
“gang’) activity. The realy is, there has been no
Black STG activity here at Soledad whatsoever.
Infact, ask CDCR and Soledad CTF officials 0
release a report stating how many weapons
Black incarcerated people have
been found in possession of and
how many STG related incidents,
in the last 10 years have Black
incarcerated people been
involved in, and | guarantee the
answer wil shock you.
|_was able to obtain every single Program
Status Report (PSR) from 2017 to 2020 and
hot one single report refers to a single STG
activity involving the population of incarcerated
Black people, not even in the days surrounding
the raid, But herein ies the reason why: COCR
officials can't wrap their heads around the fact,
that incarcerated Black people throughout the
entire state of California aren't involved in any
STG gang activiy,
‘As I've been highlighting in my writing these
past couple of years, the criminal mentality of
ld that most people have been conditioned 10
associate with prison does not exist.
Incarcerated people throughout California
realize that the days of languishing in prison
Unt one is useless and unable to contribute 10
society are over.
Even people who entered the prison system as
gang members no longer glorfy gang culture oF
the culture of violence. Not only are "selt-help”
groups being created by incarcerated people
themselves to challenge ideas of toxic
masculinity and the culture of violence, such as
“success stories" which was recognized by the
violence that make
prisons obsolete.
Calfomia Legislature, but laws are being passed
‘that have taken into consideration the work that
‘we are in here doing, which gives incarcerated
people hope lke we've never had before
‘And with the passing of Assembly Concurrent
Resolution No. 186, introduced by
‘Assemblymember Kamlager, that “the
Legislature recognizes the need for statutory
changes to end extreme sentencing,” which
disproportionately subjects Black people.
It says, "The Black community is,
disproportionately subjected to extreme
sentences, representing less than 15 percent
of the national population, but comprising 48.3
_ percent of people
Itis incarcerated people serving lite
who promote non- sentences, 55,
percent of people
serving virtual life
sentences, and 56.4
percent of people
serving life sentences without the possibility of
parole” and that “research has shown that long
sentences do not deter future crimes and that
there is no reliable evidence showing that any
deterrent effect is “suficienty large to justify
the cost of long prison sentences
“In 2018, only 2.9 percent of people serving life
sentences were released and only 0.3 percent
of people serving third-stike were released, and
Cut of 988 people convicted of murder who
‘were released from California prisons over a 20-
year period, only 1 percent were arrested for
new crimes. None of the 988 people were
rearrested for murder and none of them went
back to prison over the 20-year period examined:
Understanding this, incarcerated people know
that i is counter-productive to commit acts that
justly one's incarceration, Not only are
incarcerated people polticaly aware of the
effects of violence, but thanks to Black resistance
authors such as Bell Hooks, we are aware of the
effects of violence in a more holistic way to
where non-violence becomes a lifestyle as well
asa rock to be used against a system that bases
is very existence on our dstncton. ty i
incarcerated people who promote non-violence
that make prisons obsolete,
CDCR officals are aware of this as well
Budgets are already being cut, Prisons are
bbeing scheduled to shut down, and employees
of these insttutions are going to have to find
new jobs. However, a certain segment of
CDCR have become so accustomed to this
sadistic enterprise that they cannot imagine a
world without it, They will go to imperceivable
lengths to ensure its continued existence,
Since they can no longer use the ‘violent
crimina” as a justification, they have resorted to
criminalizing the very existence of incarcerated
people, This becomes even more troubling
\Wwhen racism enters into the equation. We know
the effects of systemic racism in the police
departments and judicial systems, but what
many people aren't aware of, by design, are the
effects of systemic racism inside the prison
system. Guns don't exist in prison (except
strategically placed guntowers) so you aren
going to have “officer involved shootings" of
‘unarmed Black and Latins people.
Prison is a different kind of monster; the
weapon of choice in prison is and always has
been “documentation.” Michael Foucault wrote
in his famous “Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prisons,” "it must be possible to hold the
prisoner under permanent observation; every
report that can be made about him must be
recorded and compared.”
He continues, “No detail is unimportant, but not
so much for the meaning that it conceals within
it as for the hold it provides for the power that
wishes to seize it” Departments of
‘Corrections’ arent concerned with the
accuracy ofthe information about you so much
as they are concerned with how they can use
that information to control every aspect of your
existence in order to maintain their position of
dominance. Their sole concemn is to create, on
paper, a perpetual criminal, thereby justifying
the perpetual existence of prison.
15
Just two days after the raid, we received our
property back. Well, almost all of it. Almost
feveryone who was raided got a receipt notying
them of certain items not retuned “pending
investigation.” Guess what these items were?
Books, newspapers, pictures and quotes trom
Black historical figures. DOCUMENTATION.
They kept my book “Soledad Uncensored,"
quotes from George Jackson used for research
‘on my book, a picture of Dr. Angela Davis and
Jonathon Jackson protesting in front of
Soledad in the '70s ~ also used for my book ~
and a letter to a journalist about COVID-19 and.
ant-Black racism in prison
‘Their reason for keeping these items, written on
the receipt, was: "The aforementioned items will
be retained for further investigation into your
suspected involvement with the Black Guerilla
Family (BGF) Security Threat Group-1 (STG-
41)" Everyone else who received a receipt had
hhad the same exact words written on it, tems
taken from them include newspaper anicles
about George Jackson, pictures of the San
Quentin 6, and even sheets of paper with book
titles written on them: "Blood in My Eye,” “The
‘Spook Who Sat By the Door"
This is what we're dealing with, and it can’ be
described as anything other than racist. Every
facet of existence of incarcerated people is
ciiminalized, especially if youre Black
Everything from the books we read to our
hairstyles are criminalized
Hairstyles aren't seen as an attempt to express
our ‘individuality nan environment whose
iment is to strip us of anything unique, or that
points to our being individuals in any way.
Instead, our hairstyles are seen by certain
elements within CDCR as expressions of
gang culture,” despite the fact that in the
history of American street gangs, there has
never been a single hairstyle associated with
an expression as one's affiliation. Even stl,
young Black men are harassed and even
Chased down to be given “verbal warnings” for
having designs shaved into their heads.
Don't get “caught” with a book by Angela
Davis, Marcus Garvey or Malcom X, and you
damn sure better not get “caught” with a book
by George Jackson ~ all of which aren't on any
official list of prohibited books and are all
allowed into the prison through order from
‘Amazon Prime, or any other bookseller. But
once an officer sees you with one, you will ~ if
you'e Black — immediately be under
investigation as a member of the Black Guerila
Family, an organization formed in the 70s in
prison that today, in 2020, is virtually
nonexistent, except in the minds of correctional
officers intent on living in the past.
‘So what you end up with is young Back men
who are afraid to study their history for fear of
being labeled, while those who muster up the
courage ~ being dedicated and committed to
non-violence ~ seeking to understand the pitas,
ofthe past in order to contribute toa society they
once took part in destroying, by preventing
others from teading the course of violence,
through knowledge, they are criminalized
Before recent events, | thought this targeting
‘was simply because correctional officers didn't
Understand Black culture, but like the white
lady in Central Park, correctional officers aren't
acting out of ignorance, but in fact are tapping
into the very anti-Black racist ideas that
underpin American society,
They know we are not members of the Black
Guerila Family, but they also know that, in a
society so deeply connected to racist ideas
concerning prison, that incarcerated Black men
are seen as perpetually criminal, and thus
labeling us as BGF places a stigma on us that
will last throughout the duration of our
incarceration, and becomes a barrier in the
way of our release. These are the lengths they
will go to.
Two days after we received our property, people
began to receive "validation packets,” a process
to becoming validated by CDCR as a member
oF associate of a Security Threat Group. It was
only after this point that the spokesperson for
Soledad CTR released his statement to the
public that the people who were raided were
members of a Security Threat Group. They
‘were tying to cover their asses,
People were being labeled everything trom
“chet financial officer for BGF" to "BGF foot
soldies” | told a friend of mine, "Watch these
| have something t0 do with
when lo and behold! That same
day | received my validation packet saying that
| was “the Minister of Education for BGF," but
that was only the beginning.
‘They said the pictures of George Jackson on my
Instagram page managed by my family to
advertise my writings, was “EGF. propaganda.”
They even went so far as saying about my
crescent moon and star tattoo: “It (the star)
contain five outer-pointed and fve inner-pointed,
with each point representing one point of the 10-
point party platform of the Black Panther Party
(GPP), which is part of the BGF constitution.”
But if you thought it couldn't get worse, they
had the nerve to say that the Arabic verse from
the Qur'an (79.14) on my back “translated into
English as ‘Assaulter, attacker with alertness.”
couldn't believe what | was reading. The
officer who wrote it was B. Barron,
He wrote: “While conducting photographs of
his tattoos (on 4-27-20) specifically on Willams
Upper back above and below the black dragon,
| discovered Arabic writing. | was unable 10
translate the Arabic writing, therefore, 1
questioned Wiliams on the meaning of the
tattoos. Willams became defensive and stated,
"You can figure that out. Do your job.”
Based on my training and experience, | know
‘williams becoming defensive about his tattoos
means they are indicative of gang
membership. Upon discovering the Arabic
writing, | contacted the OCS, Correctional
Ineligence Task Force (CITF) and Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s (FB!) Terrorism Task
Forces (CT2) to translate the Arabic writing
discovered on Wiliams’ tattoos,
“Upon receiving the translation from OCS, the
‘Arabic writing ansiated to English as
16
‘Assaulter, attacker with alertness’ and
“Tajdeed,” This Arabic writing is significant to
the BGF also meaning he will conduct assaults
‘on behalf of the BGF. The Arabic writing is also
indicative to the membership of the Radical
Islamic Group "Tajdeed UL-Islam (TU).
| couldn’ believe what | was reading, “Tajdid,”
Which is on my lower back, is a concept in
Islam that refers to returning back to the
original humanistic teachings of Islam,
Popularly known as Surism. To associate such
‘aterm with “radicalism” is disrespectul
They gave me 72 hours to respond to the
allegations in writing, and since they were tying
to validate me as a member of BGF, that's what
| focused on, saving everything else for the
lawsuit, What 1 wrote in response to the
allegations mentioned above (in part) was: "I
find it strange that B. Barron only pointed out
the star, attempting to link it with BGF via the
Black Panther Party. When pictures were taken
‘of my back tattoo between 2015-2019, First Lt.
Officer Pearson (2) immediately recognized the
crescent moon and sta,
“B. Barton's failure to recognize the crescent
moon shows that he had his mind set on
associating me with BGF. When | said to B.
Barron, concerning the Arabic writing on my
back, "You can figure it out. Do your job.” | said
that out of frustration, having already explained
my tattoos at least five times before, and not
because B. Barron said, "They are indicative of
‘gang membership.”
‘The Arabic writing across my back is Verse 14
‘of chapter 79 of the Holy Qur'an that translates
into English as, “Then behold they will be upon
‘a wide expanse.” Which is a reference to a
‘scene on the Day of Judgment when humanity
will be standing “upon a wide expanse” of
‘earth, awaiting God's judgment.
Whoever was responsible for the OCS
Correctional Inteligence’s Task Force (CITF)
needs to be re-trained. B, Barron stated that
the Federal Bureau of
Investigations (FB!) Terrorism Task Force (CT-
2) to translate the Arabi writing” but only used
“the translation from OCS," which according to
them “translated to English as ‘Assauiter,
attacker with alertness.” According to B.
Barron, “This Arabic wnting is significant to the
GF also meaning he will conduct assaults on
behall of BGF.”
‘The reason B. Barron omitted the translation
from the FBI is because they told him it was a
vverse from the Qur'an, and therefore didn't fit
his narrative, just lke the huge crescent moon
and star didn't ft is narrative, so he omitted
mentioning the moon. This is giving him the
benefit of doubt.
‘What | believe is that B. Barron never sent a
Picture of my tattoo to the OCS or the FEI, but
that he himself "translated" the Arabic, “and
therefore must be investigated for falsifying
documents, because there is no way that an
expert would have come up with that translation,
This is what racism looks like inside Soledad
State Prison, You will be raided in the middle of
the night and assaulted by officers, and when
media attention is placed on the officers’
actions, those same officers will falsity
documents in order to cover their asses,
‘And because we live in a society where
incarcerated people are viewed as perpetually
criminal, who knows how far into the future,
and to what lengths, officers wil cary these
allegations. Will our families be targeted next?
#BLACKINCARCERATEDLIVESMATTER
¥EREETHEMALL
#EREETALIB
‘Send our brother some love and light
Talib Wiliams, V63247,
CTF cw-121,
P.O. Box 689,
Soledad CA 93960.
And visit his website,
‘www.talibthestudent.com,
Part 2. Belligerent Identities and
other Theories
on Insurgency
HOW IT MIGHT SHOULD BE DONE
Idris Robinson
‘August 15, 2020
https. com*howw-t-might-should-be-done
The following is a transcript of a talk delivered
in Seattle on July 20, 2020, lightly-edited by
the author for readability. A video recording
produced by Red May is online,
1 want to begin with a shout-out to what
happened here last night, and to the working
class of the city of Seattle, o the rebels of the
city of Seattle: I really iked what | saw, that's
why I'm here, you know, to feel that vibe. 1
would also like to send my solidarity to
comrades in Greece. It was they who allowed
‘me to experience insurrection for the first time
in 2008, The lessons Ive leamed and the
experiences | had there have been so valuable
this time around, even though we are in a
much different social context, Moreover, a
comrade was recently killed at the hands of the
police there. To the fallen comrade, Vasilis
Maggos, | want to say: rest in power.
My title demands a litle bit of explanation. Itis
a reference to Chernyshevsky [1], and to the
novel he wrote from inside a Czarist prison.
Lenin borrowed the title for his 1902
pamphlet, What Is to Be Done? (2), which
provides answers to what he calls ‘the
uring questions of our movement’: what
does it mean to constitute a vanguard party?
how do we spread consciousness from this
vanguard party to the working class? how do
we move beyond strikes to a full-on
revolutionary political struggle?, etc. Later, in
2001, a text entitled “How It Is to Be Done”
appeared in the journal of the French
collective Tiqqun. [3] Rather than stating what
our goals or objectives should be, Tiqqun
sought to shift our focus to the means and the
techniques of struggle. Instead of thinking
about ends, they thought about the means
that we should employ.
My aim here is far less ambitious. As for the
‘grammatical construction, "might should”, from
the southem dialect—I tied to Blackify the ttle
a little bit. But its also serious, because these
are in fact tentative theses and proposals: I'm
perfectly okay with being completely wrong
about every single thing | put forward today,
just so long as it creates a further deeper
discussion on strategy. What I really want 10
do is open up this discussion, and | want to
leave it, for people to engage with it as they
‘want to, and to push it further. At the same
time, 1 want the dialogue to be honest. There's
kind of prevailing posture of cynicism,
nihilism, and democratic moralism that holds
back insurrection, And | think now is the time:
‘we are experiencing an uprising on a scale that
many of us have never lived through. Even it
we compare present events to Greece, this
thing has gone much further. There are far
more martyrs in this struggle than there ever
were in the Greek uprising. The time has
atived for strategic thought and reflection
It’s of course weird to find myself saying this in
‘America, the most anti-counter revolutionary
place on the globe. But we must reorient
ourselves, and take these questions seriously.
‘The stakes have been raised to the next level,
theyre extremely high nove. Its time for us to
think seriously about them.
1. A militant nationwide uprising did in fact
occur. The progressive wing of the
counterinsurgency seeks the denial and
disarticulation of this event.
18
‘The obvious is not always so obvious,
We all saw it. We all saw what happened after
the murder of George Floyd. What occurred
was an extremely violent and destructive
rebellion. It was a phenomenon the likes of
Which we have not seen in America in 40 or 50
years. Very few of us have experienced
anything of this magnitude: a precinct was
immediately torched in Minneapols, after which
entire cites went up in flames—New York,
Allanta, Oakland, Seattle. Comparisons were
duickly made with the riots after Martin Luther
King’s assassination. However, | think that
We've gone further in this case, that 2020 went
harder than 1968, and we're not even done yet.
Despite al ofthis, the reformers have had the
audacity to claim that all of this never actually
hhappened. They are trying to make the burning
cop cars disappear, to extinguish fram memory
the police stations on fire, as if it didn’t happen.
‘Again and again, | hear the same scrip
someone comes on the news, a political
activist gives a talk, and we hear them say
something like, "the protests were peaceful
land non-violent, they stayed within the bounds
of law and order.” No: cops being shot at in St
Louis is not within the bounds of law and order.
Theyre doing their best to make the event
disappear. One has to to wonder what planet
they are on that a torched police station
appears within the bounds of elvlty
This delusion is something that we need to think
about. Utimately, its more than a delusion. It
Unites veritably all the progressive liberals who
Chatter on about whats been going on over the
past summer. From the Biden democrats to
Virtually all of the mainstream media not
affiated with Fox News, to the Black Lives
Matter™ people, the agenda pushed by all
these groups is the claim that the insurrection
did not take place, | even read a recent study by
‘some sort of consulting firm that sought to prove
through quantitative means that there was a
very civil nature to the protests. [4]
‘The fact is, whatever data or graphs they draw
19
up, nothing will erase the fact that police cars
were on fire in dozens of American cities. So
Why do liberals feel the need to jump through
such incredible hoops in order to erase this,
insurrection or this uprising? Why is it that the
most violent wings of law and order—eg.,
Attomey General Wiliam Bart—are today the
only audible voices willing to acknowledge that
the uprising occurred? We need to think this
through.
What is at issue is more than just a momentary
lapse of sanity: it is a strategy of denial, a
counterinsurgent strategy of reform par
excellence.
LUnconsciously, liberals do recognize that an
insurrection occurred. They can't ignore the
shattered glass that occurred in the streets of
Seatle yesterday. But what they want is to
downplay the significance of these events that
mean so much to us, and that we are
Continually tying to push forward. They want to
reassert and reafirm them, but ia a different
direction. Ultimately, what they want is to block
the possibilities thatthe revolt has opened up, to
dissuade us from going further in this uprising
AAs with all democratic liberal reformists, what
they're tying to do is exploit the outburst in
forder to make it so that things change, but only
justalitle—which isto say, not at al.
There's a moral component to this as well, a
deep ethical problem. This wing of the
counterinsurgency is just one more way that
those in line with the system have found to
‘manage and to exploit Black death, It must be
recalled (and | will return to this below) that
there are scores of young Black children who
lost their lives in the uprising, and that activists,
‘woke’ journalists, progressive poltcians of all
siipes, and even so-called BLM activists are
profiting off their death. This is a continuous
narrative in American society, and it will not
stop now unless we do something about it
By denying the event, they seek to obscure the
revolutionary truth that was ushered in through
the streets. They want to extinguish the
present that we brought about. They want to
‘sap our energy while they propose superficial
palliative adjustments to preserve the system.
The history of America is the history of
attempts 10 reform race relations, I they
haven't gotten it right by now, they never wil
‘Whatever they do, whatever slight changes
they make, there will always remain an
insatiable drive to brutalize and kill Black
people. Anyone who profits off this change is
complicit in that murder. if you block the
revolutionary trajectory of the rebellion, you
have blood on your hands. Anyone who
remains complicit with the system is the
enemy, tout court.
By contrast, the Right has adopted the
‘opposite approach to the event. Besides us
revolutionaries, they are the only voices today
that acknowledge that the rebellion occurred.
‘There's an illuminating honesty to what Wiliam
Barr says. Think of it this way: before he can
forcefully smash and eventually suppress an
insurection, he must first acknowledge that
fone did, in fact, occur. In this way, there's an
honesty to Trump’s words. Trump and his
entire Fox News crowd, all those who are
calling for law and order, have no choice but to
acknowledge the existence of the uprising
precisely because they want to crush it. Just
Today, Trump declared on the news that he
intends to send federal stormtroopers not only
to Portland but to New York, Philadelphia, and
Chicago. [5] To justify such a choice, he must
acknowledge that the uprising did in fact
happen, These are the two sides into which
ur opponents may be divided, the Janus face
of the State we confront today.
‘What is more, the rebellion shows the liberals
what it means to defund the police halfway,
instead of abolishing and outright destroying
them. if anyone thinks it suffices to undertake a
series of small measures and quick fixes, or
that they can refform] and preserve the police
a a force while simply shrinking it—well, the
result is what is happening right now in
Portland. Let that be an example to liberals. On
the other hand, those who recognize that a
change really did occur, and who now seek 10
stomp it out are typically more aligned with
fascist trajectories and politics, since they are
‘ypically the same people who feel the need to
dream up and defend a sort of immutable,
etemal, and transcendental idea of law, order,
and white supremacy. Whatever deviates from
the ideal, this fascist side of order will seek to
annihilate. For this reason, it is compelled 10
refuse those same reforms that the liberals
attempt to push through. For instance, this is
why Trump is so upset about changing the
ames of military bases. The issue itsell
doesn't actually matter, but the sort of power
he represents cannot stand such changes, and
seeks instead to crush and flatien the event
itself in its tracks.
There's only one way to deal with this fascist
wing of the state: they operate with violence,
and we return with violence that's more
powerful. However, as concen the other, more
Feformist side that aims to deny the event in
Corder to incorporate it into their own objectives,
we need to be a litle bit sharper in how we
handle them. We need to be deceptive, lke
Machiavellis fox. Honesty isn't their mode of
operating, They have always sought to deny
wihat lies right before our eyes. Deception and
subversion is how we are going to have to play
them: we need to deceive them twice aver.
‘When it comes to these two sides of state, ! do
rot wish to claim that either one is any more
nefarious than the other, but simply that these
are the two sides that we have to contend with,
and ultimately to defeat
2. While spearheaded by a Black avant-garde,
this largely multi-ethnic rebellion managed to
spontaneously overcome codified racial
divisions. The containment of the revolt aims
at reinstating these rigid lines of separation
‘and policing their boundaries
To begin with, it must be said that former
Airican slaves and their ancestors have been
the avant-garde of everything in this county
‘There's no culture in America, in this American
wasteland, without us. There's no classical
music; there's jazz, and that was invented by
Us. And besides that, America has nothing 10
20
offer the world and it never has.
However, | used the term avant-garde in a
more specific sense, There were no leaders.
We were not leaders of the revolt. We were the
avant-garde who speatheaded it, we set it of,
We initiated it. What ensued was a wildly multi:
ethnic uprising, and the reformists will do
everything in their power to make it so that
this truth is erased, If you were out on the
stieets, you know you saw people of all
different kinds. Different bodies, different
shapes, different genders, manifested
themselves in the streets together.
‘There's a lot of talk about how to end racism,
especially within corporate and academic
circles. We saw how to end racism in the
streets the first weeks after George Floyd was
murdered
It was only after the uprising began to slow
down and exhaust itself that the gravediggers
and vampires of the revolution began to
reinstate racial lines and impose a new order
fon the uprising. The most subtle version ofthis
comes from the activists themselves. Our
worst enemies are always closest to us. You've
all been in these marches, these ridiculous
marches, where it's, “white people to the front,
black people to the center’—ths is just another
way of reimposing these lines in a more
sophisticated way. What we should be aiming
for is what we saw in the first days, when these
very boundaries began to dissolve.
‘The most devastating example of how the racial
lines and boundaries are reimposed comes
from the example of Rayshard Brooks’ long-time
partner, Natalie White, who offers the most
blatant example of this racial policing seen so
far. White was called out by so-called “woke”
‘Twitter activists for her involvement in the
protests in Atlanta over her dead partner.
Eventually, they implicated her in the burning of
the Wendy's where Rayshard was killed. tis up
to.us to never reinforce these sort of bourgeois,
constructs of gui or innocence. Whether she
had a hand in the destruction or not, | don't
21
judge her either way. That is not up to us, we
stand in solidarity no matter what. But ! do hold
accountable, | do place blame on the wanna be
ddo-gooders, these "woke" Twitter activists who
implicated her in what occurred, | lay the blame
solely on those activists, and Rayshard Brooks
lays the blame on them from the grave.
Order neatly defines collections of people —
these are the prerogatives of prison guards, of
the police. We should remember the example
of John Brown, who was often criticized by his
so-called allies and friends for relating to Black
people in a way that they deemed
Unacceptable. if you saw the way John Brown
related to Black people in his time, you might
think he was being cfiticized for relating t0
Black people as human beings. Every time we
cross over those racial boundaries and meet
each other as human beings, this is when we
will be ciicized, especialy by the most
advanced parts of the counterinsurgency. John
Brown was heavily criticized for his advocacy
of militant tactics, and Frederick Douglass was
‘among his most vocal critics of his advocacy
for insurrection. Douglass would come around
later, but history would prove Brown right: the
only way to abolish slavery is through violent
insurrection. History has now redeemed him to
some extent. But what I want us to think about
is this: if John Brown was alive today, what
would he be like? How would he behave? John
Brown would be in jail alongside Natalie White
for crossing over those boundaries.
3. By avoiding the morbid libidinal core of
white supremacy, identity politics,
intersectionality, and social privilege
discourse comprise the most sophisticated
sector of this police apparatus.
We've all come in contact with it at some point,
particularly it we have been involved in politics
for some time. We all know that identity
polities, this talk about “white privilege” and
what people call “intersectionality'—all it does
is reinforce the racial lines that we're tying to
overcome. If it ever had any use or goal, the
Uprising has superseded it at this point. Let me
‘work through these ideas one by one,
Privilege: | think we all know, or we can all
admit, or we should admit, that privilege has
become a purely psychological concept.
There's a long history to the notion of white
privilege. It dates back to WE.B. Du Bois, to
Theodore Allen, to Noel Ignatiev, to Harty
Haywood. For each of these authors, what was
in question was a theoretical construct whose
aim was to incite white workers to strike
alongside Black workers. Somehow in the
{wists and turns that are American politics, the
notion became psychological, a way to make
white people feel good about their guilt If you
look at, for instance, Peggy Mcintosh’'s
definitive text on white privilege, she taks
about the privilege of being able to chew with
your mouth closed. | don't give a fuck about
chewing with my mouth closed. [6]
As for intersectionalty: | did a talk at Red May
so I won't go into this too deeply here, but as
John Clegg and | tried to show, the
presuppositions that intersectionality holds are
becoming empirically false. [7] What the data is
beginning to show is that, for instance, there
are more Black women prison guards than
there are those going into prison. This doesn't
discredit the struggle and plight of Black
‘women, but as a construct, intersectionality is,
showing its limits. In fact, there are more white
women being incarcerated today than Black
women, oddly enough, AS for Black men, we
all know they just sit in jail and stay in jail
‘Whatever intersectionality once wanted to do is
no longer feasible or viable as a guide for us. In
my talk with Red May, | suggest that we get
back to the roots of Black feminism. We need
categories that understand the Black feminist
struggle beyond the oppression that the system
inflicts upon them. | cited Toni Cade Bambara's
book called The Black Woman (1970), in her
excellent preface, she refuses to define what a
“Black woman” is, She does not say that a
Black woman is the intersection of two
oppressions; she does not say that Black
women are in the margins of two different
systems of hierarchy. What she argues, rather,
is that Black women are an open possibilty to
be further understood through their
revolutionary activity. In place of intersectionalty
as a discourse of systemic oppression, what we
heed to do is to bring back the idea of Black
feminism as a discourse of struggle
Finally, by opening up this definition of what
Black women are and who they are, what Toni
Cade Bambara was saying that Black women
cannot be tied down by any static identity
imposed upon them. Of course they are
something more. And if we look at the history
of Black folks in this country, we're always
something more than what has been hoisted
upon us,
Identity poles, intersectionality, and social
privilege discourse: all are modalities of the
police,
What's more, and above all, is that each of
these discourses ignore the morbid and
terrifying libidinal poltics that undergirds race
in this country. It took someone as courageous
fas James Baldwin to say this, and everyone is
siill afraid to repeat it, if you read his
phenomenal shott story, “Going to Meet the
Man," [8] you can see the dynamics of racism
inthis country acutely. To briefly summarize the
story: it starts in the bedroom of a white
heterosexual couple. The white man is
struggling with impotence. How does he get
over his impotence? He remembers back to a
time as a child where he was brought to a
lynching. At that lynching the corpse was not
only mutilated, it was sexually mutilated, and
he was given the genitalia. Once he
remembers being handed the genitalia, he is
able to become erect.
This is deep stuff. No one likes taking about it
But this is the core of racism that we need to
reach. Whats more, | think no one wants to
touch this part of the race problem because we
are all implicated in it. It is obvious that white
liberals get off on videos of Black murder. tis
leven more obvious that there are Black liberals
Who are more than happy to sell these videos of
Black death for their own careerst goals, So long
fas we fail to take into account these libidinal
dives within racism, we will not be able to
22
explain how and why Ahmaud Arbery was killed.
It had nothing to do with the police. it had to do
with what is diving American society as such,
4. The insurgency cannot be confined
within any well-circumscribed sociological
category. By necessarily exceeding all
classification, it is an excluded remnant
detaching itself from all that binds together
the American wasteland. Consequently, this,
‘combatant formation can only be defined in
terms of its movement and its development,
as that which emerged during the first
weeks of the revolt and which will dissolve
itself upon the full completion of the
revolutionary project.
‘As | said eatlier, every conceivable kind of
person participated in the revolt. This can be
confirmed by anyone who participated in the
revolt itself. There is no category that can sum
up all of who was there. The best we can say
is that what we saw was the inclusively-
excluded, or the part of America that has no
pat in it, and that wants nothing to do with this
place. Such a formation can only be grasped
by how it is moving, outside and against the
current state of things, that can only be traced
by way of its trajectory: against the state and
capital, against American society. What is now
up to us is to deepen and strengthen this
‘spontaneous organization, so that we come up
with something together that is even more
terrible, even more powerful, than what we saw
last night. Something that splits American
society in hat.
5. The so-called the Black leadership,
therefore, cannot and does not exist. It is a
chimera to be found exclusively in the
white liberal imagination.
You hear it everywhere. Ive heard it from
every city, every friend who texted me. If |
called a friend and said, “Hey, what happened
ln NOLA7", or "What happened in Chicago?" If
there were rots, if people got busy, there was
no mention of @ Black leadership. If things
stopped, if things were stultfied, all we heard
23
about was a Black leadership.
The thing is, | have never in my life actually
seen a Black leader. Why? Because they don't
exist, If there are Black leaders, they're dead
like Martin and Malcolm. If you're worth your
salt, you will be killed. If there are Black
leaders, they are in jail with Mumia and with
‘Sundiata, If there are Black leaders, they are
fon the run with Assata,
There is only one category of people who
speak of Black leaders, and we know them as
white liberals. The Black leadership is nothing
other than a figment and hallucination that
exists solely in the imagination of the white
liberal's mind. The odd thing about it is that
somehow white liberals have more contact with
Black leaders than | have ever come across in
my entire if. itis as ifa channel extends from
the Black leadership directly into their head.
‘There have been reasons proposed as to why
the classical formation of Black leadership no
longer exists. One argument, which can be
derived from many of the new sociological
studies (there was a big report about this in the
New York Times as well), asserts that to
develop a firm hegemonic leadership of the
sort we saw in the past typically requires a
substantial middle class. But if you look at the
data trom the past 40 years, the Black middle
class has been under constant threat
Hopefully it stays like that, honestly. But itis
very hard to define what exactly the Black
middle class is. if you do say there is this well
defined group, and if youre able to
circumseribe this well-defined group, they
'ypically exist within the white community. Just
to speak a litle bit more personally trom my
experience in New York, | am hard pressed to
think of ever meeting a Black middle-class
person growing up, oF of ever even hearing
their rhetoric and their nonsense. But it's not
really a thing anymore
Why does the white liberal need to hallucinate
and invent a Black leadership for him or
herself? Ultimately, it is because whitey loves
property. Property enjoys a special prestige in
‘American Ife, it has a special kind of sanctity.
We always get these calls for the Black
leadership from white liberals whenever the
windows stan to crack. 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. [9]
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, itis protected for white supremacist
ends. If property is truly the pursuit of
happiness, in that tifecta 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 propery is
‘something that we need to attack explicitly
6. The current crisis derives from a
contradiction that proceeds from the two
Janus-faced sides of post Cold War
‘American governance: an_ inconsistency
between the demands of the sovereign
imperial State and globalized biopolitical
security, As a result, the metropolitan center
hhas begun to experience the sort of chaos
and the instability that it has classically
‘sewn within the colonial periphery.
This dynamic captures the situation that we are
living in today, and which we have been
experiencing acutely over the past few months.
On the one side, we have state sovereignty,
the classical notion of the state. Following
Schmitt, but most importantly following
Agamben, the paradoxical foundation of the
state proves to be important to the way it
operates. In order to define the state, the state
must employ extradegal and extajuridical
measures in order to found itself, Every time
the state founds itself, it must go outside the
law that it seeks to create. What has occurred
classically, and we have a lot of historical
examples of this in America, is that whenever
there's a crisis, the state imposes some sort of
state of exception in order to create the order
that it needs to reassert itselt,
‘As we saw, for example, in the American Civil
War, in the two Red Scares, and most
recently in the War on Terror, the executive
branch of the government has. continually
mobilized itself beyond its formal legal
parameters and confines.
We see this today especially with Trump.
Trump is using and abusing his executive
powers, but itis better to say that he is using
them in the way that they were set out to be
Used, What was originally the province of the
legistative branch has now been taken over by
Trump himset.
This component of the U.S. asserting itself has
also shown itself in its foreign wars. We need
to keep in mind, and | will come back to this,
that—and for some reason this fact has been
downplayed in the past 20 or 30
years—America is the one imperial power in
the globe, and it serves itself aggressively
around the world. After the collapse of the
[Soviet Union] and the Cold War, we have
seen the United States become the police
officer, oF the storm trooper, of the entire Earth
This is one side of governance
Itis important to contrast this with another form
of governance, which is typically called
biopolitical discipline, or biopolitcal security. The
later ditfers trom the enforcement of the law
carried out by the classic state. Rather, it names
the management of lives. If the state kil,
biopolitics is concerned with the protection of
those lives—for its own ends, of course.
‘The most recent regime of biopolitical control is
what is known as "security". What "security"
does is it allows an event to happen, so as to
then manage that event. These events are
varied. They can be something lke pandemics,
like the COVID-19 pandemic we're going
through today; these could be famines, or
disasters like Katrina; and they could also be
insurrections like the one we are hopefully
fomenting right now. What the state does in
these instances is to make a statistical
calculation and try to find acceptable terms
within which it can allow events such as
pandemics to accur, while keeping them within
neatly circumscribed boundaries. 24
In addition to the paradox of the state that we
ssee in the state of exception, there is also a
strange biopoltical paradox of preparedness
that we are experiencing right now. The paradox
typically goes like this: after a disasters—say, a
ppandemic or a famine—there is a drive within
the security apparatus to begin preparing for the
next disaster to come. After SARS in the 2000s,
there was a big push to be prepared for the next
coming pandemic. This over-preparedness then
's put on the back burner when it comes to light
that the next disease is not going to appear
when we expect it to appear. The famed
‘medical anthropologist Andrew Lakof drew
attention to this paradox, which we have seen
again recently, There has been preparedness
for pandemics, but the preparedness was then
put on the back bumer, so that when the
COVID-19 pandemic came we were stil not
ready for it, We are dealing at once with two
different types of paradox here: one that must
venture outside of itself in order to found itself,
and the other a cycle of preparedness that
consistently generates unpreparedness,
There is the legal side and the statistical side
of the state, the nation state in its classic form
land this more global operation of security, |
would like to argue that these two directives
are colliding with each other and forming some
sort of crisis.
Legal means to an ends have been in a
Constant state of crisis: Trump just cant do
anything ight. Whatever he does seems to
backfire, and it does not seem to aways be
the worst thing. Trump and his own deluded
‘mind has become an agent of anarchy. {10}
Now of course he doesn't think he is-it is up
to us, when this chaos reigns, to utlize this for
four own ends. What I'm saying is that we
need to inhabit this chaos that the state is
inflicting upon itset
Unlike liberals and reformists, we are not here
to reaffirm and reassert law and order. We are
rot here to transform America into one big safe
space, We are here to make the chaos and the
disorder more terrible than it has ever been,
25
We must do what revolutionaries have always
done: we must make the contradiction
imolerable.
7. As the rebel-slaves did with the periodic
‘outbreaks of yellow fever in Haiti, there is a
idden partisan knowledge to be uncovered
surrounding the novel coronavirus,
pandemic that also can be exploited and
Weaponized against established power.
In the Imaginary Pany’s best book, entitled To
Our Friends [11], the authors ‘mention a
pamphlet issued by the CDC in 2012 on the
subject of disaster preparedness. [12] It is a
part American Tiqqunists tend not to mention.
In order to make disaster preparedness
pertinent and hip to the youngsters, the CDC
invokes the example of preparing for a zombie
apocalypse. Their basic argument was that if
people can prepare for a zombie apocalypse,
they will be able to prepare for a natural
disaster such as a flood, a storm, a pandemic,
fr even an insurrection.
The Invisible Committee argue in their book
that this fear of zombies has a long and
racialized history, linked in no uncertain terms
to the fear of the Black proletariat. And the
other side of this fear that doesn't want to be
‘mentioned, that refuses to be mentioned or is
repressed, resides in the paranoia of the white
middle class over its own worthlessness,
It we look back aver the history of zombies, the
figure of the zombie appeared within the
voodoo utlized during the Haitian Revolution.
There was a person by the name of Jean
Zombi who ended up taking the name because
he participated in the massacre of slave
‘owners. What | think is particularly instructive
for our purposes today is that the Haitian
insurgents were perfectly aware that they could
Use the yellow fever pandemic against their
former masters and against the army, whether
this be Napoleon's army, or the party of order
more generally. The insurgents waited until the
yellow fever outbreak took hold. They knew
that their former slave masters’ army would be
devoured by the pandemic, and they also knew
that they had built up an immunity to that
pandemic. So they waited until the army had
been decimated by yellow fever, and then they
launched their guerilla attacks.
‘What | am arguing for here Is something very
similar, We all know that Black people and
brown people were disproportionately affected
by the COVID pandemic. This is a medical
problem. But it is much more than a mere
medical‘scientfic problem, it is a political
problem, We must reject the sort of sanitized
Niberal politics of safety that is afraid of the
pandemic, that is largely a sanitary discourse
around masks, distancing, etc. | know this is a
political issue now. But, on the flipside, I'm nt
defending rightwing conspiracy theorist ideas
that the pandemic does not exist, or that itis
just a flu, ec... What I'm proposing here is that
‘we develop a kind of partisan knowledge—our
‘own knowledge about the pandemic—to
exploit the pandemic for our own good, and to
use the knowledge of the pandemic as a
‘weapon against our enemies.
8. The insurrection will involve precise
coordination from within the constellation of
riots: the paradoxical organization of
disorder beyond any measure of control
Accordingly, the problem of insurrection has
equal parts social and technical dimensions.
‘What | am advocating is a paradoxical ordering
of disorder, an Organized Kontusion (for those
who remember the rap group). To do this, we
‘must read up on tactics: we must look into what
exactly was smashed; what exactly was looted:
and how and why the accupations were effective
oF ineffective. We need to think strategically
about the chaos that we inflict the streets,
‘What is more, we also need to anticipate new
forms of tactics, struggles and strategies that
will emerge, so as to intensity these struggles
and tactics. We can anticipate that occupations
and rent strikes are going to occur in the near
future due to the looming threat of eviction that
is occurring in al of our heavily gentifed cities,
But | think we need to go beyond these
defensive struggles and to be more creative
and to initiate tactics that go on the offensive.
In fact, what | am advocating here is employing
the whole arsenal of proletarian strategies and
tactics-from riots, to strikes, to blockades.
But we need to be creative in our tactics and
strategies. As we have seen in the recent
Twiter hacks, these are just as_ important.
What's important is that we be creative in how
we deploy these strategies and tactics.
What is the modern equivalent of the
telephone exchange in Barcelona that was so
savagely fought over during the May Days in
11937? What is the modem equivalent of the St.
Petersburg rail line that the insurgent workers
fought so hard over in revolutionary Russia?
We have a unique problem, in that we lve in a
huge country. We need to figure out creative
ways to break this distance and ultlize it for our
own ends, Le., as pure means.
9. Materialize the ever-present specter of
a second, more balkanized, civil war by
fragmenting the fragments of a crumbling
empire.
At least since Trump was elected and took
office, the archetype of civil war has been
looming over this country. There are historical
reasons for this. Since American Civil War was
for some the most traumatic experience this
country has ever collectively undergone, and for
others the most liberating, it stands as a figure
that is continually recalled within the collective
imaginary. But, | think there are also structural
reasons. The fundamental operation of the state
works by warding off the ubiquitous threat of
cull war, The State as such can be thought of
as that which blocks and inhibits civil war. What
is unique about this county is our singular
emancipatory tradition, which is itself bound up
with our understanding of civil war.
| would othenwise here cite Kenneth Rexroth’s
excellent autobiography, where he explains
that the radical abolitionists who took part in
the Civil War gave birth to children who
became the first era of the American socialist,
anarchist, and communist labor movement.
[13] But | think the best example comes from
26
Du Bois's classic book, Black Reconstruction.
[24] It was the proletarian general stike of the
ex-slaves that truly put the final nail in the
Coffin of slavery. It is precisely this lineage of
an emancipatory, liberatory, but nonetheless
violent, civil war that needs to be updated for
its second coming. Another important
precedent is Harry Haywood's “Black-Belt”
thesis. As a member of the central committee
fof the Communist Party USA, Haywood argued
that revolution in the United States of America
would involve an independent Black state in
the South. | think this is no longer feasible, but
| think what he was grasping at, and was tying
to deal with, was the problem of revolution in a
‘country that is simply massive,
‘The revolution here presents a problem of
sheer scale for us. This is, | think, why
Haywood argued for the breaking apart of
‘America. We have no historical precedent for a
revolution in such a large, industrialized, and
‘modern state, 50 we have a unique problem to
‘grapple with
| do not know exactly what this looks lke. What is
Certain is that this county is already beginning to
bbreak and fracture, and itis upto us to break and
fracture it further, into so many pieces that it can
never be put back together again.
Revolution, here more than anywhere else, will
involve the messy task of division. Here too, we
hhave a unique problem, for we must avoid the
rather aggressive, ugly, and dangerous
nationalism that occured in other cases of civil
war that we have seen over the past forty years.
| am not advocating another series of Yugoslav
wars, nor am | advocating what has occurred in
Syfia. Nonetheless, we must hasness civil war
as an emancipatory liberatory power. The
fundamental goal is to break apart America into
‘a constellation of federated communes.
10. The fulfillment of the revolutionary
project is ultimately an inescapable ethical
obligation that each of us have to the dead
and the exploited.
27
‘At the isk of sounding naive, | sincerely
believe that the riots that we have all
Witnessed, and hopefully participated in, this
summer have opened the window 0
insurrection and even a full-blown revolution. It
is possible that | may be miscalculating the
potentialities that have emerged. Sitil, it is
entirely impossible for anyone to have
participated in the current uprising without
having the fundamental core of their being
tunalterably changed. As for myself, and | know
for many of you, we feel the revolution deeply
within our souls, and it changes our very
outlook, the approach to how we live our lives.
Al the pervasive cynicism, all the rational self-
interest, all the nihilism, all that is constitutive
of the typical American citizen is slowly being
worn away by the insurrection and the uprising
What this shows us is that the revolution is truly
beyond us, truly beyond each and every one of
us here. I surpasses all the boundaries thrown
up by American individualism. it forces us to
finally look beyond ourselves and recognize that
‘America has wreaked havoc as an imperial
power around the globe for a century
‘And the fight is not only forthe living, but also for
the dead. We owe the revolution tothe milions of
slaves who never knew a second of freedom.
What the long list of martyrs who have fallen
during this uprising deserve from us is nothing
‘other than the completion ofthe revolution.
Pasolini wrote an essay about a trip to America
What really took him was one of the phrases
that no one says anymore but was a big part of
the Civil Rights movement: ‘we need fo throw
‘our entre bodies into the struggle." [15]
The dead of the struggle scream out for
vengeance, and we must avenge their deaths.
As Benjamin famously put it, “not even the
dead will be safe from the enemy if he is
Victorious", [26] Tonight is the night to begin to
settle accounts once and for all, to end their
Victorious reign upon the globe, and to allow
the dead to finally rest
Notes
1. htps:farchive.org/detailsicu31924096961036
2. hitps:dimw.marsists.orgfarchivellenin!
‘works!1901/Witbd!
3. https:ivoidnetwork.g/2012/07/18/how-
is.t-to-be-done-by-tiqqun!
4. _hitps:/iwww.usatoday.comistory/news!
poitics/2020106/10/george-floyd-black-ives-
Imatter-police-protests-widespread-
peacefuilS325737002/
& https wwipsos.comfen-us!
knowledge/society/Protests-in-the-wake-of-
George-Floyd-kiling-touch-all-50-states
5. hitpsifien.wikipedia.orgiwiki2020_
deployment_of_federal_forces_in_the_United_
States
6. hitpsAwwracialequitytools.org!
resourcefilesimcintosh pdt
7. https:flyoutu.be/MHMeYtYHikM
8. _hitpsywww-cristorey.nevuploaded
‘Academics/2019-2020/Summer_Reading!
James_Baldwin_Going_To_Meet_the_Man pat
9. hitps:facobinmag,com/2019/08/how-
slavery-shaped-american-capitalism
& hitpsitiwww.cambridge.orgicore/journals!
enterprise-and-societyaticle/siavery!
EAF17228A77186082A074503D149A48
10. See, Marten Bjork, “Phase two ~ the
reproduction of this ite"
https:/wwwu tilfalighet orgitilalighetsskrivand.
elphase-wo-the-teproduction-ol-this-lfe
11, hitps:/Mheanarchistibrary orgfibrarylthe-
invisible-committe-to-ourriends
12. https: shwww cde. govleptizombiefindex him
13. _hitp:/iwwwbopsecrets.orgirexrothy
autobiofindex.him
14, _hitpilivwvwavebdubois.orgiwdb-
BlackReconst html
15, Pasolini, In Danger: A Pasolini
Anthology.
416." hitps:www.stu.ca/~andrewt!
CONCEP T2 him
28
HOW BLACK ANARCHISTS
ARE KEEPING THE PROTEST
MOVEMENT ALIVE
Vanessa Taylor
July 29, 2020
hnttps:siwwywmic. comip/how-black-anarchists-
are-keeping-the-protest-movement-alive
30140067,
With a series of uprisings gripping the United
States, President Trump has not hidden his
disdain for protesters. Beyond his threats to
Minneapolis protesters and questionable
executive orders, Trump has time and time
again directed his ire at one particular group:
‘anarchists." Trump's constant invoking of
anarchists to describe all protesters generally
's a calculated attempt to delegtimize ongoing
struggles — that much can clearly be seen in
fone of Trump's tweets from earlier this week,
Where he wrote that protesters in Portland and
Seattle were “actually .. sick and deranged
anarchists and agitators.”
The immediate knee-jerk reaction to Trump's
baiting is to often argue that the people taking
to the streets in Portland — a city that has
been under siege by mysterious federal agents,
— and Seattle are merely “protesters” and not
‘anarchists." But remember the old saying: A
bbroken clock is right twice @ day. Trump may
not be honest in his portrayal of anarchists,
and he certainly does not have a clear view of
the ongoing protests, but to deny anarchists’
presence altogether would be just as bold of a
lie as the presidents,
Anarchists have been involved in protests
‘across the counity since the current social justice
‘movement began in May. Rather than deny that
‘anarchists exis, i's more useful to acknowledge
that in the middle of an insurrection summer best
defined by a pursuit for Black liberation, Black
anarchists are key to sustaining many of the
29
ongoing uprisings. And while Trump may be out
to Scapegoat anarchy, Black anarchists are not
allowing the president to scare them away trom
the work that has to be done,
Part of Trump's invocation of anarchism
depends on the broader American public's
ignorance of the term overall. Often, people
are only familiar with anarchism in the form of
entertainment ike V for Vendetta, or imagine
"anarchy" just as something that disaffected
white people do. In the American imagination,
anarchy is nothing more than chaos for chaos’
sake, detached from any political analysis or
‘meaningful struggle for liberation.
But in Teen Vogue, labor journalist Kim Kelly
defined anarchism as "a radical, revolutionary
leftist politcal philosophy that advocates for the
aboltion of government, hierarchy, and all other
unequal systems of power" What it means to be
fa Black anarchist can look different from person
to person. But Riley, who is part of Salish Sea
Black Autonomists “and organizes between
Seattle and Olympia, Washington, said it has
helped them articulate what is going on in the
‘world in order to better confront it.
"The anarchist critique gave me the tools and
language to better see and understand my
‘enemy and understand why and how the world
is structured against me and my people,” Riley
tells Mic. "But more importantly, anarchy gives
me weapons and says, ‘Don't wait for some
future utopia, but live and fight right here and
Fight now. It tells me not to be the capital or
foot solaier for another's project.
Riley continued: "To me, being a Black anarchist
is about fully embracing the life that is denied to
us and living it in total conflict with the forces
and structures that subjugate, exploit, and kill us
— the state, the police, borders, capitalism and
the economy, work, etc.
provide their last name.)
ley decined to
For many Black anarchists, a commitment to
radical politics also means putting community
and care at the center of their own personal
definitions. Makayla, an organizer from
Philadelphia, tells Mic, “[Being a Black
anarchist] Is working to develop non-
hierarchical communities and building: mutual
aid outside the colonial white supremacist
structures. It is finding ways to heal people
from state violence and leaming ways to
sustain ourselves as a people.
Similarly, Tina, who is located in Dallas, Texas,
says, "I think being a Black anarchist can
mean many things. But for me, it means having
my cake and eating it, too. It means as a queer
Black woman that my liberation is everything
and that | am willing to die for that no matter
the cost. Because | love liberation more than
my own life." Both women declined to provide
their last names,
Black anarchists are not surprised by Trump's
Continued baiting. For Tina, itharkens back tothe
Red Scare that grew particularly intense in the
‘1940s and early 1950s. During that period, the
label “communist” was thrown around as
haphazardly as Trump's use of “anarchists” with
former Sen. Joseph McCarthy even forming the
House Un-American Activities Committee to
investigate communism within the United States.
McCarthy campaign dealt devastating blows 10
the Black freedom stuggle
“Trump labeling protesters as anarchists. is
another form of white supremacy at work," Tina
said. "Blackness is alteady anarchy in white
foks’ minds. | dont think a Black person
necessarily has to call themselves an anarchist
to be one, because in the land where whiteness
is law and order you are already one.
Riley says its to0 early to know the full effect of
Trump's targeting, but"! know for sure there is
going to be an intense crackdown on
anarchists, probably on a level we haven't
seen since the [Earth Liberation Front] was
active in the early ‘90s and 2000's. Grand
juries, federal indictments, house raids,
informants, the works.” However, Riley pointed
fut that on the streets, Trump's commentary
may actually inspire a pro-anarchist side effect,
similar to what happened in Spain in 2015:
‘Altera counter-terrorism operation against
anarchists prompted public backlash, people
30
Used the viral hashtag #TooAMAnAnarchist to
express solidarity
Trump's logic of anarchists being
troublemakers also relies on the popular
“outside agitator" narrative. The phrase came
up early in the summer with Hennepin County
officials in Minnesota blaming unrest in their
city on people who live outside of the state
Later, an investigation by the local NBC affiliate
station found that the vast majority of those
arrested were, indeed, Minnesotans.
‘The “outside agitator" narrative isnt troubling
just because of a few instances where officials
were obviously wrong in deploying it, but also
because it has roots in queling dissent
throughout history, from plantation owners in
the South to massive corporations and beyond.
‘The Twitter account Midwest People's History,
fan “ongoing chronicle of moments when
ordinary people got organized and made
history." wrote, "Though the specific term
‘outside agitator’ didn't become popular until
the Civil Rights Movement, its sentiment was
felt in the Antebellum South. In the wake of
slave uprisings, ‘outsider accusations were
often used by paranoid white slave owners to
soothe their shaky nerves.
The presence of Black anarchists complicates
31
the notion of an “outside agitator” — to
describe anarchists as random white people
outside of Black and otherwise oppressed
communities is to erase Black anarchists — as
Well as the “peaceful” protester narrative that
others ty to conjure to oppose Trump. But why
is there an obligation to be peaceful if you are
dying? The realty is that there afe Black
anarchists who burn and loot, and itis not the
timate sin some have tried making it out to
be. Following the protests in Ferguson,
Missouri, in 2014, Vicky Osterweil wrote “that
for most of America’s history, one of the most
righteous antiwhite supremacist tactics
available was looting. The specter of slaves
freeing themselves could be seen as American
history's first image of Black looters.
In addition, Osterwell noted the problem with
prioritizing “and defending “property” in the
United States. Namely, as Raven Rakia said
the term is raciazed: "When propery is
destroyed by Black protesters, it must always
bbe understood in the context of the historical
racialization of property. When the same system
that refuses to protect Black children comes out
to protect windows, what is valued over Black
people in America becomes very clear.”
‘ts with this poignant reminder in mind that one
should read a statement from Acting Homeland
‘Security Secretary Chad Wolf earlier this month,
where he said that “the city of Portland has
been under siege for 47 straight days by a
Violent mob. .. Each night, lawless anarchists
destroy and desecrate property, including the
federal courthouse, and attack the brave law
enforcement oficers protecting it
While Wolf makes strong claims, they do not
capture the entire picture. Makayla identifies
Black anarchists as “[being] on the front lines
since day one,” assisting other protesters by
teaching useful organizing tactics. For example,
fone common — and vital — protest skil
associated with anarchists is street medicine.
These skils are vital during protests when the
state is often the one harming people and
calling 911 for medical assistance is no longer
an option. Makayla added, "Even before the
uprising, Black anarchists have been making
‘sure the needs of the community are met while
those needs were being ignored elsewhere,
Riley offers a similar sentiment, crediting older
trans anarchists with providing them housing
when they were homeless after leaving an
‘abusive situation as a teenager. The broader
anarchist community also offered them food
and clothing and helped them find a job. "I try
to return the favor when | can, but if it weren't
{or the anarchists 'm sure I'd be dead by now,”
Riley says,
‘After the coronavirus pandemic began, many
anarchists provided necessary aid to their
neighbors to help them endure. Riley says that
the community "stepped up to distribute food,
masks, and hand sanitizer, as well as
continued to do needle exchange.” They also
tell Mic that anarchists have been “continually
writing to and supporting prisoners, bailing
people out when we can, and of course
pushing protests to be more conflictual”
‘Summer is far from over, and it seems that the
same can be said for the uprisings. The work
may look different depending on the city, but at
the end of the day, Black anarchists are
striving for a liberation that requires the total
Upheaval of social order as it stands now. And
while Trump is likely to embark on many more
social media trades against anarchists,
Makayla hopes people come to understand
that anarchist tactics “require communication,
trust, and compromise.
‘3 about building community and
transformative justice models so that people
actually heal and become better,” Makayla
sald. "We are more likely to want to bake
cookies than light things on fire, but laying
down to fascism and racism is complicit
32
ON THE BLACK LEADERSHIP
AND OTHER WHITE MYTHS
‘The We Stil Outside Collective
June 4, 2020
bttps:sitsgoingdown orglon-the-black-
leadership-and-other-white-myths!
‘The following editorial comes from from a black
alfnity group and critiques the concept of
“black leadership," and how it connects with
liberal and reformist approaches.
What they call, “the black leadership," does not
exist, Let's be serious: what they are talking
about is nothing more than a figment of the
White liberal imagination. That is, if these so-
called black leaders even exist a all, then they
can only be found shucking and jving a “woke”
white person's head
Isn'tit interesting how progressive whites seem
to have a direct line of communication with
black leaders, while everyone else in the street
falls to suffer from the same delusional
schizophrenia? What's all the more odd is that
the voices that they hear from these magical
negroes always manage say the same things:
"Everyone should peacefully protest on the
sidewalk, because unmediated black rage
makes others uncomfortable.” “Don't strike
bback at that cop even if he wants to kill you
and everyone you love.” "I know the manager
follows black kids from aisle to aisle, but stil,
his store shouldn't be looted." In other words,
the message relayed from the sounds on
repeat in a white liberal's head is to end the
black revolt and conduct civil disobedience in a
manner that is appropriate for Karen and
Ethan, not Jamal and Keisha.
It is worthwhile to note that black people,
ourselves, never refer to any mythical black
leadership. This is because we know, full and
Well, that all of our leaders, since Martin and
Malcolm, have been killed. Even our potential
leaders, like Trayvon and Tamir, are gunned
33
down before they can share with us their
vision. What's more, if they are not brutally
‘murdered, then they’ are locked away forever
with Sundiata, Mutulu, and Mumia, That is, we
know that if you speak with truth and move
against oppression, then the only way to avoid
the pig's bullet or penitentiary, the modern-day
cracker's whip or plantation, is to go on the run
like Assata Olugbala Shakur! In fact, any black
person that says otherwise should be exposed
for what he or she is: a poverty-pimp!
After half a century without a figurehead in the
front, the black youth has shown the whole
country that they are more than capable of
setting their own path and directing their own
intiatives. They have demonstrated to us a
dynamism that can never be reduced to a
homogeneous mass following of anyone one
authoritative voice. Paradoxically, it is the
entire spectrum of the black revolt in the
streets that can be identified as leaderless
“leaders,” since they have shown everyone
else what it means to free yourset.
To paraphrase James Baldwin's stil apt
observation, we black people are more aware
of the inner workings of our pale-face
antagonists than they are of themselves.
Consequently, the diagnosis of woke whitey's
psychological condition is quite simple: this
James Earl Jones, Carl Winslow, or Rafik from
the Lion King voice, which bellows off the walls
of their skul, is a defense mechanism against
their inability to completely repress their own
‘white superiority complex. Whats also
abundantly clear is that the only way to fully
Work through this hang up is to gain even a
small percent of the courage of a black
adolescent and overcome their white guilt with
a fist, a stone, and a Molotov cocktail
= The We Sill Outside Collective
PS. Fuck 12!
ON THE LIMITS OF IDENTITY
POLICITICS
Brazo @ Tumer
October 27, 2020
https:fitsgoingdown.orglimits-of identity
politics!
‘Since the beginning of the George Floyd rebellion
‘on May 26tn, 2020 we have seen an enormous
‘wave of national and international support forthe
‘prising, even inthe face of milions of dollars lost
to looting, expropriations, and property
destruction around the US. This uprising has
been marked by the 3rd police precinct in
Minneapolis being turned to ash, the construction
ff the Capitol Hil Autonomous Zone in Seattle,
and the burning of the Department of Corrections
building in Kenosha after yet another shooting of
‘an unarmed black man named Jacob Blake. The
repressive apparatus of the State has returned
the volley in this social war wth thousands of
protesters ofall cifferent stripes facing long prison
‘sentences, and of course, the federal occupation
of the city of Portland,
There are a myriad of different ways one could
choose to analyze, ciitique, and understand
what has happen in the past few months, for us
itis important to choose a method that reflects
‘our politics, Unlike historical, sociological or
Marxist texts that use the scientific method in
order to generalize a “grand narrative” of past
events, we hope to create one story among
many for use in the liberatory project. We
attempt to do this by using specific examples
from peoples subjective experiences both past
and present, as well as more abstract
analytical tools that are specific to the US
context. Since rebellions around the world are
fon the rise it has been a trend to attempt to
draw translatable conclusions from Hong Kong
to Argentina, from Lebanon to Greece, and
While there are some generalizable
characteristics, they are, by and large only
tactical. Each rebellion has its own particulars
that make it blossom, Routine generalization
for sake of scientiic accuracy masks more
than it reveals, and is part of the academic
imperil and colonial project.
(One monumental point for understanding the
specificity of the US black liberation struggle
and race relations in general is articulated by
Hannah Arendt when she says, "The US is not
@ nation...This country is united neither by
heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by
language, nor by origin.” The early slave ships
and native concentration camps are a case in
point, Arendt was a Jew in Germany during the
fise of Hitler and after being arrested by the
Gestapo fled Germany and eventually ended
Up in the US. Her experience helped shape her
lunderstanding of the US and its statecraft
being significantly different than other
European countries which had some type of
commonality before the formation of the State
itself, The criterion for citizenry in the US is the
simple consent to the constitution. We are
constantly reminded by the State of the
sacredness ofthis scrap of paper.
The US is a country “ruled by law, not by men’
and this important dynamic illustrates both the
liberal and conservative obsession with law
and order, itis the only thing holding together
‘American society. For the US, the State is the
Unifier and is the commonality. This order is
‘one shaped by capital's necessary exploitation
of labor and the racial hierarchy it requires.
The war the US government has waged on
different groups: indigenous people against
State sponsored genocide, or slaves and
aboltionists against slavery (culminating in the
Civil War) has never ended, with the continued
seizure of Native lands for extraction projects
like Standing Rock, or the continuation of slave
labor with special clauses in the 13th
amendment, allowing for slave labor as long as
the person is classified as a “criminal.” Thus
the modem slave catchers known as the police
continue their raids in our communities, and
34
fare met with our resistance. What we have
witnessed during this rebellion is not new, but
the residual conflicts that make up the fabric of
US society, Furthermore we can see that in
order to permanently rupture this relationship
‘of domination and violence we must attack the
state and allow for our own more Uberatory
relationships to take its place.
While spearheaded by a black avant-garde,
this largely multi-ethnic rebellion managed
to spontaneously overcome codified racial
divisions, The containment of the revolt
aims at reinstating these rigid lines of
;paration and policing their boundaries. *
“How it Might Should be Done” by Idris
Robinson
Of the many counterinsurgency tactics used to
shut down the uprisings, the increased policing
of identity during demonstrations has been an
important method used to pacify our
‘movements towards liberal and reformist ends.
Motivated by white quit and identity
authoritarianism, performative activists
demanded "white people to the frontine,” as it
their privilege can stop rubber bullets, or the
‘more nullifying demands of self-appointed
black leadership to only use non-violent tactics
to accomplish all poltical goals. The liberal
post civil rights era mythology has constructed
an archetype of the authentic political actor.
This actor is modeled after the most palatable
people for the State, non-violent resisters who
seek reform. Henry David Thoreau and Dr.
Martin Luther King in the US context are the
back bone of this modeled form of acceptable
political action. In Thoreau’s words, "Under a
{government which imprisons any unjustly..the
ttue place for a just man is also a prison.” Both
Thoreau and King in practicing no-violent civil
disobedience accept the logic of the State and
Ws prisons. identity polics has muddled the
water between identifying with a systematically
‘oppressed group, and prescribing what actions
should be taken to end that oppression. There
| no inherent relationship between who you
are, and what you do, this is an act of wil
35
The current use of identity politics is policing
identity (who can and cannot act based on who
they are) and by extension police what
acceptable political action looks like. This
explains why those who act outside those
uunds of behavior are labeled white” or
side agitators," regardless of who is
actually carrying out these actions. Raoul
Vaneigem succinctly observed “the role is a
mode! form of behavior...Access to roles is
ensured by identification, The need to identity
is more important to Power's stability than the
models identified with.” The policing of identity
is a crucial part of reitying roles within power.
Before Oakland's first night of major upheaval
(on May 29th, the self appointed black leader of
Cakland, Cat Brooks (who is actually from Las
Vegas) denounced the protest via Twitter
before the demonstration even happened:
Let me be CLEAR: white people DONT get
to use Black pain to justify living out your
fiot fantasies. What's happening in
Minneapolis is BLACK LEAD Rebellion.
‘That can't be manufactured and we ain’
{going back in time in Oakland. Please don’
make me come off this mountain,
These sentiments have been spread by
authoritarians and recuperative state leaders
during the rebellion in every city in the US. Had
Cat been on the ground and not “on the
‘mountain’ the first day of the rebellion, she
would have witnessed what we have been
seeing on the street since the Oscar Grant
rebellion. A muli-ethnic multitude coming
together like a match and gasoline, the college
student and the project resident standing side
by side overcoming spontaneously, all divisions
imposed on them by society, to light a fire that
never goes out.
The following night after heavy rioting the
leaders tried to reinstate peace and control by
calling for a sit in demonstration at 14th and
Broadway. Thousands flooded the streets and
satin an intersection for aver an hour listening
to speeches and eventually went home, The
‘correct order had been restored,
‘While itis true that the “multi-ethnic rebellion
managed to spontaneously overcome codified
facial divisions’ during the first days of the
rebellion, it is worth exploring further, the types
of insurgent aboltionist relationships in US
history to give us examples on how it might be
done, and what long term multi-ethnic rebellion
is capable of. The last movement for abolition
in the US escalated into a civil war, with former
slaves and abolitionists leading the charge.
This is best personified in the relationship
between Harriet Tubman and John Brown.
Meeting for the Ast time on April 7th 1858 10
plan the raid on Harpers Ferry, which sought 10
take over a West Virginian military arsenal in
order to arm slaves in the south to start a slave
insurrection, Their first encounter noted by
historian Philip Thomas Tucker is exemplary
“important on a number of different levels was
the fact that the expertise of the black radical
‘world ~ in the form of Harriet Tubman in this
case — was coming together at the right time
and the right place with the radical white world
(leading Northen abolitionists as best,
personified by John Brown).
By the time the two had met, they had already
known each other through reputation, Harriet
Tubman having treed over 200 slaves through
the underground railroad, and John Brown at
that time known for freeing slaves in Missouri
with use of guerilla tactics and most notably
the murder of 5 pro-siavery settlers in the
Kansas Territory. Their relationship created “a
deep bond...one of the most unique
relationships in all America consisting of two
remarkable individuals... A white man and a
black women were thoroughly united as one in
a single spirit in regard to their holy war and
mission, which overcame racial and gender
differences in an entirely unique and symbiotic
relationship that was extremely rare in America
in 1858." Without both of these individuals the
aboltion of slavery in the US would not have
been possible, both black and white together
for the same goal: abolition
‘A more contemporary example of multiethnic
rebellion can be drawn from the modem
plantation system, the prison. In California at
the Pelican Bay state prison in 2011, the Short-
Corridor collective was formed, and 3 years
later initiated the California state prison hunger
strike, which included 29,000 inmates
throughout CA prisons:
The creators of the Corridor Collective and
also the leaders behind the stike were Todd
Ashker, Arturo Castellanos, Ronnie
Dewberry, and Antonio Guillen, Each of the
leaders were prisoners within the Pelican
Bay Prison SHU (Security Housing Unit),
with Ashker being a member of the Aryan
Brotherhood, Castellanos belonging to the
LAstreet gang Florencia 13, Dewberry being
in the Black Guerrila Family, and Guillen in
the Nuestra Familia gang,
The strike sought “an end to long-term solitary
confinement along with group punishments,
better and more nutritious food, along with
ending policies surrounding the ‘identification
and treatment of suspected gang members.” In
the depths of some of the harshest conditions of
‘oppression in the modern world, these prisoners
{ound solidarity as the only weapon between
vastly different groups in order to strike back
against the prison system. One means of
accomplishing such a goal was printed in their
statement Agreement to End Hostlties:
Therefore, beginning on October 10, 2012,
all hostilities between our racial groups... in
SHU, Ad-Seg, General Population, and
County Jails, will ofcially cease. This means
that from this date on, all racial group
hostlities need to be at an end... and if
personal issues arise between individuals,
people need to do all they can to exhaust all
diplomatic means to settle such disputes; do
‘not allow personal, individual issues to
escalate into racial group issues!
‘As revolutionaries and abolitionists we must
take the example from these brave freedom
fighters. The racial divisions imposed in the
prison system are exemplary of the divisions
throughout society, The mechanisms of
repression and division are not as clear on the
outside of a cell
At this juncture we must return our attention to
36
‘wo examples that help us understand and
resist the mechanisms of hierarchical division
that are entrenched in the language of identity
politics. After the Grand Jury decision was
announced by Kentucky Attomey General
Daniel Cameron in the case of Breonna Taylor,
organizer and activist Tamika Mallory made @
Statement about the verdict that points to a
‘nuance in identity politics that is rarely spoken
about, she states:
As | lay and cried for and hurt for Tamika
Palmer, for Breonna Taylor, for Kenny
Walker...1_ thought’ about him (Daniel
Cameron) saying he is a black man ~ 1
thought about the ships that went into Fort
Monroe, and Jamestown with our people on
them over 400 years ago, and how there
were also black men on those ships that were
responsible for bringing our people over here,
Daniel Cameron is no diferent than the
sellouts who sold our people into slavery and
helped white men capture our people. You
‘were used by the system to harm your own
black mama, we have no respect for you, no
respect for your black skin, because all of our
skin folk, are not our kinfolk.
‘Tamika shows us the historical continuity
between past and present, between the black
“sellouts’ of the slave ships, and the Black
Attomey General who is complicit in the
murder of Breonna Taylor. Tamika temporatily
throws off the lens of identity poltics to view
the actions of Daniel Cameron as they stand,
and for who they serve, and revokes his ability
to use his identity to hide behind his
cowardice, It is Cameron's actions, not his
identity that make him a servant for white
supremacy.
‘Armed white supremacist groups have been
making more appearances enacting or
threatening the use of violence all of over the
US in response to the uprisings for black
liberation. Right-wing protestors have been
fing into crowds of BLM protestors, Alan
‘Swinney of the Proud Boys was seen pointing
@ gun a protestors, and 17 year old white
supremacist Kyle Rittenhouse shot three
37
peopled and killed two in a march in Kenosha,
Wisconsin, In Portland, Oregon after several
weeks of protests after the murder of George
Floyd, on August 29, 2020 in an act of
revolutionary solidarity, antifascist Michael
shot and killed an armed white supremacist
Aaron J. Danielson. Reinhold conducted an
interview about the kiling on VICE. He admits
killing Danielson as an act of self-defense and
in the interview said, “I could have sat there
and watched them kill a friend of mine of color.
But | wasn't going to do that.” A week later on
September 31d, Reinoehl was assassinated by
the FBI and US Marshals. Both examples point
to the abandonment of the use of pure identity
as a determinant for action. Cameron, the
‘Attorney General who should have supported
Breonna Taylor as a black man, chose to serve
white supremacy; Michael Reinoeh! who is a
beneficiary of white privilege, scarfied his life
to stand in solidarity with people of color.
In identity politics’ quest t0 find the most
‘oppressed, we sort through the different
identity formations looking for the most
authentic actor for change. But as Frantz
Fannon the Algerian writer on decolonization
has pointed out; decolonization and liberation
are processes, whereby acting defines and
creates a new human being
Decolonization never takes place unnoticed,
{or it influences individuals and modifies them
fundamentally... brings a natural rhythm into
‘existence, introduced by new men, and with it
‘anew language and a new humanity.
‘This understanding is of the utmost importance
and simultaneously points to the shortcomings
of identity based polis. Far from its point of
frigin in black feminism in late 1970's, US
identity politics now focuses mainly on
individual behavior and attitudes as reflections
‘of social privilege and oppression. Elevating
individual behaviors. asthe only
representations of oppression, signifies a
retreat from politics and the material conditions
‘of oppression itself. Arguing over ‘who is
allowed to bum the police station’ before
lighting @ single match, many activists, non-
profits, NGO's and politicians make a living on
‘continuously pronouncing that their particular
brand of action is authentic and effective, when
it is anything but this, to do this they rely
heavily on representation and mediation of our
rightful hatred of these system,
The theories of identity politics suit us in
understanding the hegemonic racial hierarchy
‘and identity, but to make the error of allowing
them to essentiaize us and define us in our
totality simply reinforces power, by denying
new constructions and formations of identity
and solidarity through struggle. We must begin
to judge one another based on what we do,
‘and not solely on who we are perceived to be.
I we believe in radical social change we must
also believe individuals are capable of radical
change as well. To recognize that the actions
taken in the streets in the last few months have
already fundamentally changed the people
who participated in the uprising. What is
Fequired of us now is the ability to make those
changes legible to ourselves by opening up our
Understandings of who the participants are in
this struggle for collective liberation.
38
FUCK IDENTITY WE NEED
SOLIDARITY
Pittsburgh Radical Perspectives
‘October 2020
‘htpsifillerpgh files. wordpress. com/2020/1 Uwe
_need_solid-online-reading-2,pat
Pittsburgh Radical Perspectives is a collective
of students who have been participating in the
‘movement for black lives and in the struggle of
latinx people against state-sanctioned violence.
We are anarchists, alropessimists, maoists, and
socialists that are united in our desire for an
‘autonomous revolutionary movement.
11. We Need Autonomous Organizing!
‘As a group of people of color, women, queers,
land poor people coming together to attack a
‘complex matrix of oppression and exploitation,
we believe in the absolute necessity of
autonomous organizing. By “autonomous’ we
‘mean the formation of independent groups of
people who face specific forms of exploitation
land oppression - including but not limited to
people of color, women, queers, trans* people,
‘gender nonconforming people, QPOC. But that
doesn't mean we think that we can organize for
liberation without crossing racial, gender, and
sexual divisions.
‘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 word
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
instiutions speak on behalf of social categories
Which are not, in fact, communities of shared
opinion. This representational poltics tends to
39
eradicate any space for political disagreement
between individuals subsumed under the same
identty categories.
We must explore the question of relationship
between identity based oppression and
capitalism. We must reject a vulgar "class first”
politics which argues that racism, sexism,
homophobia, and transphobia are derivatives
fof economic exploitation. I is true however that
fone can not end, for example, the fact that the
US is a white supremacist nation with a legally
Constructed "white race” which is given some
privileges, without organizing the white poor
and working class in alliance with BIPOC.
2. The Situation Today!
‘Nonprofits Against Revolution
Nonprofits are here to not just provide vital
social services in the spaces left by the state's,
retreat from postwar welfare provisions, but are
the 21st century public face of
counterinsurgency, except this time speaking
the language of civil, women's, and gay rights,
charged with preempting political conflict, and
spiritually committed to promoting one-sided
“dialogue" with armed state bureaucracies.
Over the last four decades, a massive
onprofit infrastructure has evolved in order to
prevent, whether through force or persuasion,
another outbreak of the urban riots and
rebellions which spread through northern
{ghettos in the mid to late 1960s. Racial justice
Ronprafits, and an entire institutionally funded
activist infrastructure, partner with the state to
echo the thetoric of past movements for
liberation while implicitly or explicitly
condemning their militant tactics,
When we look at Pittsburgh, we see countless
examples. Philanthropic organizations like the
Heinz Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and
many others have grown exponentially not only
as a result of the direct privatization of
‘America's New Deal-era social safety net, but
to endow many activist organizations and
nonprofits. We are the city of Andrew
‘Carnegie, where the library system was literally
built to throw off its workers.
"With increasing frequency.” Filipino prison
abolitionist and professor Dylan Rodriguez
‘argues, ‘we are party (oF participant) to a white
liberal “muicutural’-people of color’ liberal
imagination which venerates and even
fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of
‘contemporary Black and Third World liberation
movements, and then proceeds to incorporate
these images and vernaculars into the public
presentation of foundation-funded liberal or
progressive organizations. [These
‘organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit
status and marketability {0 liberal foundations,
actively selt-police against. members’
deviations from their essentially reformist
agendas, while continuing to appropriate the
language and imagery of historical
revolutionaries. Having lived in the San
Francisco Bay Area from 1995-2001, which is
in many ways the national hub of the
progressive ‘wing’ of the NPIC, | would name
‘some of the organizations...iere, but the list
would be too long. Suffice it to say that the
Nonprofit groups often exhibited) a politcal
practice that is, to appropriate and corrupt a
phrase from...Ruth Wilson Gilmore, radical in
form, but liberal in content.”
(On Promoting Voting and Elections
In Pennsylvania some of the most racist
policies and “reforms” have been advanced by
politicians of color. With an election year, we
have had it pushed on us that we should be
interested in increasing the racial, gender, and
sexual diversity of existing hierarchies of
power. When police departments and
municipal governments can boast of their
diversity and multicultural credentials, we know
that there needs to be a radical alternative to
this poltics of “inclusion.” Pittsburgh and
neighboring municipalities are 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.
‘Wilkinsburg Mayor Marita Garret, for example,
speaks the language of social justice activism
and civil rights but her political career in
municipal government clearly depends upon
satisfying rightwing business interests, corrupt
real estate speculators, and a bloated and
notoriously brutal police force.
In Pittsburgh there are City Councilmen R.
Daniel Lavelle and Ricky Burgess, both who
supported increasing funding for militarized
policing to control _an unruly population,
especially poor people of color, and have
supported several gentrifying developmental
projects. Burgess in particular wantonly
ignored the demands of Penn Plaza tenants.
Even the “progressive” politicians like Summer
Lee and Olivia Bennet are like the reformist
Prime Ministers of Third World democracies,
attempting to pass reforms and encouraging
passivity and confidence in an undemocratic
process, but because the police are like an
army uncommitted to following their civilian
governments direction, these politicians
attempts at reforms are denounced and
ganized campaigns to oust them make their
jectoral path’ impossible. Like Allende or
Mossadeq, they are disregarded in their reform
attempts. The police prow, categorizing, and
profiing, engaging in mass death as part of
their routine business. Making hunters of
human beings more diverse is farcical
Capitalism, Gender, Race
Establishing community mutual aid and setf-
defense against the violence of emergent
mainstream racist movements, against the
systematic rape and exploitation of women,
and against the systematic murder andlor
economic ostracization of transgender and
gender-nonconforming people, are all part and
parcel of finding greater unity in our common
struggle to racism,
40
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.
Capitalism can neither be reduced to the
“predatory practices of Wall Street banks" nor
Js it something which ‘intersects’ with race,
(gender, and sexual oppression. Capitalism is a
system based on a gendered and raciaized
division of labor, resources, and suffering. In
the US in particular, the celebration of cultural
diversity, the recognition of cultural difference,
the applauding of women and queers entering
the workplace, and the relative decline of
overtly racist or sexist beliefs among younger
generations, has not improved but instead
masked a dramatic deterioration of the material
circumstances of raciaized populations.
‘The US economy reproduces racial, gender,
and sexual inequality at every level of American
society-in housing, healthcare, food
sovereignty, education, policing, and prison. The
category of "race" is materially recreated and
endlessly renewed through these institutions
Which organize the lives of the undocumented,
the imprisoned, the residents of aging ghettos
\Which increasingly function as open-air prisons.
Speaking of capitalism as though it were
somehow separable from racist exploitation,
gendered violence, and the gamut of complex
Coppressions facing us in this world, confines
antracist and antipatiarchal struggle to the
sphere of culture, consciousness, and individual
privilege. The current dominant form of anti-
‘oppression politics in fact diminishes the extent
to which raciaized and gendered inequalities
fare deepening across society despite the
generalization of policies promoting linguistic,
cultural, gender, and sexual inclusivity
To destroy this means a great alliance of
autonomous groups and —_cross-identity
rganizing, not on the basis of guilt or requiring
reparations’ from working class and poor
whites who simply do not have access to the
41
capital to make such a thing possible, but on
the need for mutual iberation ofall
3. Anti-Oppression Theory & Practice in
Pittsburgh has Failed!
Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have
incapacitated antracist, feminist, and queer
‘organizing in this country by confusing identity
categories with solidarity and reinforcing
stereotypes about the politcal homogeneity
and helplessness of “communities of color
The category of “communities of color” is itself
fa recently invented identity category which
obscures the central role that antiblack racism
plays in maintaining an American racial order
‘and conceals emerging forms of nonwhite
interacial conflict.
Understanding racism as primarily a matter of
individual racial privilege, and the symbolic
affimation of marginalized cultural identities as
the solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the
dominant and largely unquestioned form of anti=
‘oppression politics in the US today. According to
this polities, whiteness simply becomes one
more ‘culture,” and white supremacy a
Psychological attitude, instead of a structural
position of dominance reinforced through
institutions, civilian and police violence, access
to resources, and the economy,
Identity categories are treated like they indicate
political unity or agreement. Gender, sexual,
land economic domination within racial identity
categories have typically been described
through an additive concept, intersectionalty,
Which continues to assume that political
agreement is automatically generated through
the proliferation of existing demographic
categories. Representing significant politcal
differences as differences in privilege or culture
places politics beyond critique, debate, and
discussion, leading to many opportunists
taking over and coopting the movement.
For too long individual racial privilege has been
taken to be the problem, and state or nonprof
managed racial and ethnic “cultural diversity"
Within existing hierarchies of power imagined
to be the solution, It is a well.wom activist
formula to point out that “representatives” of
diferent identity categories must be placed
“front and center’ in struggles against racism,
sexism, and homophobia. But this is
meaningless without also specifying the
content’ of their poles. The US Army is
simultaneously one of the most racially
integrated and oppressive institutions in
‘American society. We must urge all white
accomplices’ - there is no singular “Black
leadership" and don’ feel guited into folowing
those that claim that they are!
In looking at our anti-oppression activists —
who do advance a structural analysis of
‘oppression and yet consistently align
themselves with a praxis that reduces the
history of violent and radically unsafe
antslavery, anticolonial, _antipatiarchal,
lanthomophobic, and anticiscentric freedom
struggles to struggles over individual privilege
land state recognition of cultural difference.
Even when these activists invoke a history of
militant resistance and sacrifice, they
consistently fall back upon strategies of
petitioning the powerful to renounce their
privilege or “allow” marginalized populations to
lead resistance struggles. This was the case in
Pittsburgh, as it was elsewhere.
For too long there has been no alternative to
this poltics of privilege and cultural recognition,
and so rejecting this liberal politcal framework
has become synonymous with a refusal to
seriously address racism, sexism, and
homophobia in general. Even and especially
when people of color, women, and queers
imagine and execute alternatives to this liberal
politics of cultural inclusion, they are
persistently attacked as white, male, and
privileged by the cohort that maintains and
perpetuates the dominant praxis,
Is it any surprise that unlike Salt Lake City,
Portland, Atlanta, and other places where the
rebellion continued, there wasn't as powerful of
trend to relinquish power over to political
representatives? Pittsburgh is a city with a vast
nonprofit industrial complex and a class of
professional "community spokespeople” who
define the parameters of acceptable political
action and debate. This politics of safety must
continually project an image of powerlessness
and keep communities of color, women, and
queers “protected and confined to speeches
and mass rallies rather than active disruption,
For this polities of cultural affirmation, suffering
is legitimate and recognizable only when it
conforms to white middle-class codes of
behavior, with each gender in its proper place,
and only if it speaks a language of productivity,
patriotism, and self-polcing victimhood,
‘And yet the vast majority of us are not “safe”
simply going through our daily lives in
Pittsburgh, or elsewhere. When activists claim
that poor black and brown communities must
not defend themselves against racist attacks or
confront the state, including using illegal or
‘violent’ means, they typically advocate instead
the performance of an image of legitimate
victimhood for white middle class consumption,
‘The activities of marginalized groups are barely
recognized unless they perform the role of
peaceful and quaint ethnics who by nature
cannot confront power on their own, Fuck
reproducing stereotypes of passivity and
powerlessness, fuck voting, and fuck not
defending our right to land and housing, our
Fight to live without police murdering us!
‘When activists argue that people should follow
‘Black leadership,” itis clear that their primary
audience for these appeals can only be liberal
Uihite activists, and that they understand power
‘as something which is granted or bestowed by
the powerful. Appeals to white benevolence to let
people of color “lead political struggles" assumes
that white activists can somehow relinquish their
privilege and legitimacy t0 oppressed
‘communities and that these communities cannot
act and take power for themselves.
‘And of course it is extremely advantageous 10
the powers that be for the oppressed to be
infantiized and deterred from potentially
“unsafe” selfdefense, resistance, or attack. The
absence of active mass resistance to racist
policies and institutions in Pittsburgh and in the
US over the last forty years has meant that life
42
conditions have worsened for nearly everyone.
Thanklully this is turning around, but itis not
because "Black leaderstip” (largely inadequate
here) has led the ralles, its because Black and
other oppressed people have disregarded the
orders of these peace police and have writen
inthe streets with fre.
‘And when it comes to “allies” many of them
have been guited into following false leaders.
They have been told and bought into the racist
logic of communities of color being singe,
homogeneous blocs with dentical polical
opinions. Yet for identity polticians or those
chasing clout, claiming that they have such a
program and homogenizing us helps them
build up a white fanbase. This has proven to
bbe fundamentally conservative, silencing, and
coercive, especially for people of color who
reject that analysis and field of action,
4. Pittsburgh as an Example!
Alter May 30 County Councitwoman Olivia
Bennet took to Facebook to decry “white
anarchists.” The same claim would be echoed
by Mayor Bill Peduto and the Chiet of Police,
Scott Schubert. Nevermind the DADTS
published arresis over time, showing the
several Black and POC’ arrested for
participating in the rebellion! It became a potent
rarrative in enforcing social peace. In our
experience such misrepresentations were not
‘accidental or isolated incidents but a feature of
ntioppression polities in the city which outlined
how, instead of mobilizing people of color,
women, and queers for independent action,
people of color were erased and interracial
coaliton-building made impossible intentionally.
Enforcing peace has become part and parce!
of every street protest after May 30. The
exception of course being the East Liberty
protest. AL this protest the organizers had
chosen to respect the state enforced curfew,
ending the rally an hour and a half before the
curfew was even due to start at 7:30 PM. One
of them started playing "Where is the Love?”
by Black Eyed Peas (not joking!) as they
43
hoped the crowd would dissipate. Soon after
young Black organizers not affiliated with the
‘main group began urging people who were on
the sidewalk to continue, and were soon joined
by white anarchists and communists chanting
“oll the sidewalk, into the streets!” One of the
organizers attacked the young Black agitators,
telling them that they were being swayed by
the white people who joined them. They were
summarily dismissed, and correctly so - none
of us are too stupid to take advice or criticism
from white people, especially those who share
our desire for liberation!
By now though, because of the intervention of
the entity polticians and pro-electioneering
organizers, most Black working class people
have left the movement and stopped attending
the events! You go to a rally and it is mostly
sel-dentiied “whte alles” yearning for the
approval of prominent organizers. There is no
cone left to call out the bullsht, because these
certifed alles are too blinded in recognizing
the bullshit, too afraid of being labeled “racists”
themselves, or of “centering’ their own
perspectives. Today the last demonstrations
fare “Uncivl Saturdays” which, though not
bought off and tied to electioneering, have
bought into the same gulking of white people
as the road to iberation,
{At one event, one of the main organizers, not
only left a strobelight on, discomforing
epileptics and then later dismissing people
asking for not induding the strobelight by
saying “I ain't your mammie” (because being
asked nicely to be a decent person that does
not want people to de from seizures is
equivalent 10 being a racialized figure of a
Black femme that expends emotional labor on
‘white people's children), but then inctvidually
started shining a flashlight on white and Latin
people at the event. “Have you given money to
Black femmes this week?” After guily answers
of "rol" filled the sound of the night, the
organizer proceeded to tell them they should
be giving money to their legal defense before
they eat, When one person said that they had
overdrawn on his checking account, the
organizer told the person that they had Hulu or
"Netfic they should cancel it in order to fund their
‘account. Another young organizer proceeded to
‘accuse the white people there of having a
‘capitalist mindset for not giving money to Gam.
‘The truth is this. Broke white people are not
going to be able to aggregate their low wages
together to defeat racism and pay reparations,
because you can not "buy" away capitalism's
need for racalized hierarchies in the first place.
‘Those reparations can only be seized through
‘overthrowing capitalism and taking that back
pay back through forcing the corporate and
state actors who have profited from the legacy
‘of colonialism and capitalism to pay up. And you
‘can only get those reparations by allying with
broke white people to organize to overthrow this
system. In fact, hating on poor white people
who are coming out and attending your protests
‘consistently is indeed a capitalist mindset!
Organizers who do not support the voting shit
must study the tradition of Toussaint LOuverture,
Jean Jacques Dessalines, Lucy Parsons, Amilcar
‘Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Angela Davis,
Robert F. Willams, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, the
‘Third World Women's Alliance, CONAIE, the
indigenous militants of Bolvia in 1990, the
militants of Oaxaca in 2006, the Mohawk people
in the Municipality of Oka, Tupac Katari, Chris
Hani, Nelson Mandela (who led the ANC's armed
wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe), Emiliano Zapata,
Juan “Cheno" Cortina, Jose Rizal, Bhagat Singh,
Yuri Kochiyama, Kuwasi Balagoon, DRUM,
‘Assata Shakur, and countless other, who often
enlisted the support of white revolutionaries and
saw the path to liberation in the international and
National support of all oppressed people.
‘All must study and grasp that anticolonial
struggles are violent and radically unsafe.
Pittsburgh must grasp that, while rituals of
cultural affirmation are nice, they are not what
will destroy that which kills us consistently.
‘That the terrain of conflict is not within the
public discourse, but is rather with the material
infrastructure of this system, and the social
hierarchies that both sustain and reproduce it.
That its not white radicals who put us in
harm's way,” but often our own self-appointed
representatives,
‘That those who would build their brand off
Fepresenting “us,” those who appropriate the
iconography of past radical movements and
remake it in their own sick image, those who
insist that everyone who won't fall in with their
agenda is violating the will of "the" leadership.
they all work for the purpose of perpetuating
this system.
Towards a revolutionary solidarity,
Pittsburgh Radical Perspectives
STEALING AWAY IN AMERICA
Zo¢ Samudzi
‘June 10, 2020
hips:/jewishcurrents.org/stealing-away-in
americal
Since the murder of George Floyd by a
Minneapolis police officer on May 25th, the
‘country has been seized by protests against
police brutality. In addition to peaceful marches
‘and demonstrations, there have also been
ramatic scenes of looting and property
damage: for example, the burning of
Minneapolis Third Precinct, which was
preceded by looting of shops in the surrounding
neighborhood, including a Target. These
scenes—and similar ones in clies across the
rnation—have prompted the return of familar
‘arguments about looting that have periodically
arisen for years—including, in recent memory,
during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in
2005 and the 1992 LA riots that followed the
police assault of Rodney King.
This debate was also reactivated six years ago
at the beginning of the Ferguson uprisings, after
the murder of Michael Brown, when many
pundits and lay commentators praised the
peaceful protests against police brutality while
forcefully condemning looting as misguided or
even counterproductive. In response, Vicky
COsterweil published the essay “In Defense of
Looting” in The New Inguiy. In the essay,
Osterveil refuses the moralistic distinction
‘between “non-violent protesters” and “looters,”
wanting that looting actually reveals ‘precisely
hhow, in a space without cops, property relations
‘can be destroyed and things can be had for
free." She also pushes back on common
objections 10 these tactics, such as the claim
that rioters are engaging in self-defeating
‘behavior. She quotes a viral video in which one
Ferguson rioter says, "People want to say we're
destroying our own neighborhoods. We don't
‘own nothing out here!" Osterweil writes, "This
‘could be said of most majority black
45
neighborhoods in America, which have much
higher concentrations of chain stores and fast
food restaurants than non-black neighborhoods
How could the average Ferguson resident
really say its ‘our QuikTrip?" She goes on to
argue that liberal critics of looting are often
hypocritical. “The same white liberals who
inveigh against corporations. for destroying
focal communities are aghast when rioters take
their critque to its actual material conclusion,”
she writes,
Now, Osterweil has expanded her essay into a
book, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History
Of Uncivl Action, out this August. In the book,
COsterweil has developed the original essay into
searching examination of the origins and
evolution of policing, race, and property rights.
Ultimately, Osterweil demands we not only
‘overcome the respectability politics animating
four desire for “peaceful protests,” but that we
work f0 abolish the racial capitalist logics at the
heart of American empire—iogics that, she
argues, are contested by the very act of
property damage. In light of the resurgent
Conversation about whether to divide the
“Tooters” from the “peaceful protesters," | spoke
to Osterweil about her book and its view of
property damage as essential to the erosion of
the racist property relations that uphold white
supremacy—and the often fatal police violence
that enforces it.
This interview has been edited for length and
clarity,
Zoé Samudzi: Can you describe the
etymology of the word “looting” and how that
informs its present racialized usage?
Vieky Osterweil: The word “loot” was taken
from Hindi by [British] colonial officers. It frst
appears in English in an 1845 colonial officer's
handbook. From the very beginning i's this
really racializing word that contains the idea
that black and brown people were obsessed
‘with plunder—that they had a deviant
felationship to property, as opposed to the
proper ownership embodied by the colonizers.
This connotation persists today, which is why
people are so reactive and defensive against
the word. It really is a classic dog whistle
When Trump says, “When the looting starts the
shooting starts,” we know he's not talking
about the white protesters who might be
helping and participating. He's talking about
murdering black people.
ZS: In your book, you explain the relationship
between property rights and the evolution of
white supremacy and racial suctures. You write,
"Many historians have shown that strong, explicit
racist ideology does not appear in the historical
record in America unti the revolutionary period,
when the rights of man (and itis indeed man)
became the defining philosophy of US politics. IF
the rights to liberty and propery are inalienable,
then what to do about all these people who are
very clearly not in possession of liberty, or the
capacity of property ownership?” To solve this
‘conundrum, the colonists enforced the structure
and hierarchy of race in America by designating
white people as owners and black people as
things to be owned, therefore joining racial
identity and citizenship to property relations. How
‘can we think about looting in the context of what
you are describing as the racial roots of
Property?
Vo: [The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist]
Syivia Wynter talks about this in her essay “No
Humans Involved: An Open. Letter to My
Colleagues,” about the way LA police were
referring to a black criminal underclass using the
phrase "No Humans Involved," or “NHL” She
Uses that as a jumping-off point for her project
‘about the construction of the human: how the
idea of humanity itseff is buit on the denial of
[human] status to black people. This project of
Tights and legal bourgeois subjecthood is being
built on a definition of humanity that necessary
has an outside: That outside is always African
‘and Indigenous populations,
The enslaved—who were not only excluded
{rom property ownership, but were themselves
defined as property—understood innately that
the concept of property made no sense. They
‘would call just having a meeting “stealing” the
‘meeting, and they would call escaping “stealing
away.” Once you have been made into property
by a society, then you recognize that any
freedom you're going to have has to be stolen,
ZS: You write, “This specter of slaves freeing
themselves is American history's first image of
black looters.” realy love the way you play with
time, revoactively applying the word “Iooters”
land connecting it 10 contemporary usage. It
really allows us to connect the sheer magnitude
of the state's theft, traficking, and enslavement
of African people to its present fear of the black
looter destroying and stealing in return.
Vo: For centuries, black thinkers have been
arguing that slavery didn't actually end [ater
abolition and emancipation]. Frederick
Douglass was making that claim in the 1880s,
Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe talks
about how we have to understand the entire
capitalist world as living in the wake of the
techniques and modes of living that were
produced in colonization and the slave trade. |
think understanding that is really vital to
breaking out of the progressive narrative that
things have been getting better. In 1892, fewer
People were getting lynched than are being
killed every year by the police in America,
which means there are more police lynchings
now than there ever were at the height of
Iynching as a white fascist movement. None of
these problems have gone away. There have
been moments of uprising and resistance when
they have been pushed back: Reconstruction,
the Civil Rights Movement, even LA in 1992
But the fundamental structures never shift
ZS: | often find thatthe real objection to property
damage is about the fact that there's always a
caveat for the preservation and maintenance of
black life, a set of specific conditions under
‘hich most white people feel comfortable about
allowing black people to exist. You write that the
“specter of slaves freeing themselves,” the fear
of black looting, is really the white fear of and
‘objection to black people choosing terms of
existence beyond white law and order. Its a kind
of deep-seated existential objection—one that
we just dont see, for instance, in respongpes
even condemnatory ones, to white people
rioting and setting things on fire after a big
‘sports victory
VO: | think there is a desire on white people's
behalf to deny the existence of the anti-Black,
White supremacist state that we live in. They
don't want to believe in i! They live their lives,
‘organized around not believing in it even as
they benefit rom it.
Legal scholar Cheryl L. Harris, in her very
important text "Whiteness as Property,” argues
that the ultimate property in society is
whiteness. And for many white folks, especially
in this country in 2020, [whiteness] may be the
fonly property they own. Part of why so many
have come out to the street this time is
because they realize that the wages of
whiteness have gotten really low. Its important
to understand that whiteness and property are
inextricable from each other: Without one there
cannot be the other. We tend to think of
property as tangible things or commodities, but
't also. includes rights, protections, and
customs of possession passed down and
ratified through law. Whiteness emerges as the
race of people who are neither Indigenous nor
enslavable—national identities are increasingly
collapsed around the distinctions of slaveltree
and blackhwhite
‘So when back folks rise up and attack property,
they'te also attacking whiteness. That is an
Understanding that goes back to the plantation:
When you attack your status as property, you
attack whiteness as domination over you,
ZS: It's so interesting to think about the slogan
We often see: Being pro-Black isn't antiwhite
But i youre supporting black people in the street
protesting the police, if you're supporting white
people protesting against the violence of the
police, you are necessarily opposing whiteness,
VO: Yes. Whiteness only exists as the
condition under which you can oppress black
and Indigenous people. That's the identity of
whiteness. There is nothing [else] there. The
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peace of whiteness is a peace of the grave. It
heeds to be abolished—and it we're taking
about abolishing whiteness, we'te also talking
about abolishing the police. Police evolved trom
slave patrols, slave catchers, colonial overseers
(in the Caribbean as well as Ireland), and as
antriot forces designed to control new urban
‘non-white populations. The earliest modem
police force in the world was in Charleston,
‘South Carolina: the City Guard. It existed mostly
to control and terrorize the quarters where
hired out" enslaved people lived at some
remove ffom their plantations and ensiavers,
and thus represented some small amount of
autonomy, and the possibility of rebelion or
organization—which was a threat to the white
establishment, Further, one of the main [original]
tasks of the NYPD, the earliest police force in
the North, included enforcement of the Fugitive
Slave Act—kidnapping ffee black people and
sending them back into slavery—and putting
down the antislave catcher riots that were a
major part of the abolition movement in
antebellum New York
In other words, from the very beginning, police
exist to prevent black people from unsettling
their status as property and threatening
property itself, as well as to repress other
Unruly proles who might riot, refuse work, and
otherwise attack property and its systems,
ZS: In discussions about looting, people
sometimes categorize survival theft—for
example, stealing food or baby formula when
you need it—differently from what's seen as
‘opportunistic, joyriding theft. Do do you think
that particular distinction realy matters?
VO: No. | don't think so. Many people would, in
moments of peace, encourage opportunism:
They would tell you that you're just not working
hard enough, you just need to get a better jo,
you need to better yourself. But when people
who have been denied those legal “proper
routes toward wealth take an opportunistic
moment to act, then suddenly opportunism
becomes a ctime. Then opportunism reveals a
sort of villainous or lazy disposition. This
distinction ignores the law of value. If you were
really broke and you go into a department
A storefront in New York City, June 1st,
Photo: Lev Radin via Shutterstock
store and you grab as much food as you can
carry, that's going to last you a lot less long in
tetms of survival than grabbing a handful of
jewelry. You can carry a lot more value out of a
store in more valuable things.
This understanding also erases something
essential about the act of looting, which is that
its actually realy scary and tense and dificul.
I's not just an easy solution to the problems
you have. It also undermines the capitalist
system by pointing to a way of relating t0
things and 10 each other that doesn't involve
property. Its a way of immediately transforming
your relation to the world around you, | think
that’s also part of what makes it so scary for
onlookers, and why they want to divide
between people stealing a bag of rice and
people stealing a flat screen TV.
ZS: What about the distinction between looting
from or damaging small businesses as
‘opposed to chain stores or corporations?
VO: “Small business" has come to mean a
“moral” business, a “good” thing. As anyone
2020.
who has worked for small businesses can
attest, small businesses often subject workers
to just as much wage theft and workplace harm
as large ones. Small businesses may
occasionally uplift, but more often they prey on
the poor as much as big businesses, just a litle
less profitably.
In the case of riots, as looting is usually done
by people who live in the neighborhoods where
it occurs, distinctions are often made between
businesses that gentrfy or oppress, and those
that don't, Liquor stores, pawn shops,
Pharmacies, and gentro-cafes tend to be hit
much more readiy than the quaint “small
business’ the phrase is designed to evoke. |
believe we should trust those who loot and riot
to understand their targets and their actions: to
have analyzed the social world they lve in, and
therefore to trust them when they select the
targets of their rage and resistance—especially
when that rage is applied to property. No
amount of lost business is worth more than a
single lost le,
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ZS: You quote the black feminist scholar
SSaidiya Hartman—whom | consider the queen
of pleasure and anarchy—describing black
people taking small moments of pleasure as
stealing away’—which, as you noted, is a
phrase enslaved people used to talk about
escaping. I's so interesting that the language
used to talk about pleasure overlaps with the
language of theft, the criminal and also self-
emancipatory act of freeing oneself trom
‘bondage. This also makes me think about how
the revolutionary Frantz Fanon talks about
Violence as an act of self-making. What you
think is the function or role of pleasure in
looting? 1 don't think that part is negligible or
apolitical
VO: One of the things that scares police and
politicians the most when they enter a riot
zone—and there are quotes from across the
2th century of police and politicians saying
this—is that it was happy: Everyone was
happy. In the book, | quote a piece by the
playwright Charles Fuller, who happened to be
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young man starting out his career during the
Philadelphia riots of 1964. He talks about the
incredible sense of safety and joy and carnival
that happens in the streets.
| think riots and militant violent action in
general get slandered as being macho and
bro-y, and lots of our male comrades like to
project that sort of image, That definitely
happens, but | actually think riots are incredibly
femme, Riots are really emotive, an emotional
way of expressing yourselt. Its about pleasure
‘and social reproduction. You care for one
another by getting rid of the thing that makes
that impossible, which is the police and
property. You attack the thing that makes
caring impossible in order to have things for
fee, to share pleasure on the steel
Obviously riots are not the revolution in and of
themselves. But they gesture toward the world
to come, where the streets are spaces where
wwe are free to be happy, and be with each
other, and care for each other.
FE... and
OLA insurgency ond Beyond
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