occupy oakland and opposition to the police

i have not been a participant in occupy, but i am tired of hearing people saying things like "occupy, after saturday, you must earn back my trust by becoming nonviolent again" and "occupy has morphed into something foreign from its roots." what did these people think a movement of "the 99 percent" was? what roots does an ostensibly "leaderless" movement have? when have the police ever let occupy be nonviolent? where is the outrage toward the police for their ongoing abuses of the poor and black and brown people, not to mention of the occupy movement? why expunge the long record that the police have? why apologize for the state?

the police do NOT get a blank slate for all the dirt they've done and systematically continue to do. if you are judging the way occupy responds to the police according to the things that you see from the corporate news media-- or even from your own window-- you aren't serious about opposing the racism that the police practice and enforce. that's insufficient information to formulate a judgment. that would be like saying, "from my perspective in beverly hills, the police are friendly and have fast response times. what are those people in compton talking about when they say 'fuck the police?'"

after seeing the cases of abner louima, omar edwards, amadou diallo, sean bell, julian alexander, and oscar grant (and i'm not even mentioning cointelpro or ICE raids or the government introduction of crack cocaine), i have a different perspective on what the real job of the police is. if you don't know those names, you should look them up. these cases are just the most famous of the few that reach daylight. they are black men killed by racist cops--every one of them. if the middle-class respectability narrative is your thing, one of these men actually WAS a cop who was off duty and trying to help out his comrades on a chase. shot dead. another was a young newlywed college student who thought he heard burglars in his yard and was trying to protect his family. shot dead. just like that. just as if they were any other black, brown, or poor person who undergo this all the time. these two were actually performing functions within a community that can be thought of as intra-community police functions. it didn't matter. they were shot down for LOOKING LIKE THE TYPE OF PEOPLE THAT POLICE SHOULD BE SHOOTING. even according to the most conservative standard of ethics, do you think that's right? and if not, shouldn't that shape your judgment of the police as an institution, of how to respond when the police start shooting projectiles at you just for marching? that is absolutely essential information to have BEFORE one starts making judgments about the ethical orientation of the occupy movement in relation to the police.

in lots of areas of oakland (to say nothing of ghettoes, slums, barrios, and favelas across the globe), the police are looked upon as an occupying force who do not merely fail "to protect and to serve" but actually make things worse and more deadly for poor people, and especially in neighborhoods populated largely by poor black and brown people. what does one do with such knowledge of the police that is widely held in these spaces? do you just ignore it and write off the people who would swear to its truth? it is worth listening to and considering, even if it has not (thus far) been part of one's own realm of experience. and the critique of the police that a lot of people in the occupy movement are making is what emerges from that listening-- and responding.

from everything i have seen of what happened on saturday, the police were the first to attack, as they generally have been. people trying to march in the streets and trying to peacefully enter an empty building do not require rubber bullets, tear gas projectiles, and stress-and-duress positions (to say nothing of inhumane jailing conditions and denial of counsel, as reported by the national lawyer's guild of san francisco).

but even if people in occupy began throwing tear gas canisters back at the police, i'm not prepared to say that they were wrong.

we cannot judge the conduct of the police on an incident-by-incident basis-- because, where would we begin? when does an "incident" start? did it start when the first group of dissidents began marching on saturday? or did it begin before that? how about almost 50 years ago, when they were doing the same thing in places like watts and detroit? 500 years ago? where to start? moreover, if the police have largely abused with impunity up to now, is there any reason to think they will be different now? and if not-- if police position themselves in solidarity with one another (via "mutual aid" arrangements--in which police from outside jurisdictions come to oakland to overwhelm protestors--as well as the thin blue line solidarity they show each other through organizations like the fraternal order of police) and continue to engage in coordinated actions across the country, can we not critique them as a structural apparatus of the state, and not just as an assemblage of individuals? aren't they doing the same to those who participate in the occupy movement?

the critiques of racism and corporate greed are not disparate. and no serious critique of racism can avoid being critical of the police (whose job it is to maintain an oppressive order premised on racism). their patterns of abuse and disproportionate focus on black and brown people and poor people have to be part of any informed thinking about how occupy should relate to them. the police have almost always struck first in these occupy protests (unless you believe in this ridiculous legal theory propounded by the police that says that merely sitting peaceably with locked arms in a public place constitutes "violence").

surprisingly, some liberals seem to think occupy started as a critique on corporations and that they should stick to that instead of being critical of the police. it is as though these things are separated by a bright line, or ever could be. even if one thinks occupy began as an anticorporate movement, that doesn't mean that occupy's tendencies that are against corporate america somehow trump those of antiracism (or those of antisexism, anti heterosexism, etc) as the "true" intent of occupy. lots of people i know who are involved in occupy see the connections of various forms of oppression and consider themselves accountable to communities of color, especially those under the boot of the prison-industrial complex. a lot of participants in occupy have a fundamental critique of capitalism that includes the ongoing ways that genocide and slavery enabled the great recession to fall out as it did. many of them were anti-capitalism prior to the recession.

how a movement that is supposed to represent "the 99 percent" responds to the police when the police shoot tear gas and rubber bullets seems central to its ability to critique corporate america. after all, how radically can a movement change the status quo if it is accountable to a fascist arm of the state that works on behalf of the rich?

letter to a white liberal friend

Thank you, crunktastic of Feminist Crunk Collective for White Women’s Rage: 5 Thoughts on Why Jan Brewer Should Keep Her Fingers to Herself.

An associate of mine said that he didn't understand the article's use of both Obama's Jane Brewer moment and his bear-like embrace of Gabriel Gifford. Here is what I said:

i think the author is very intelligent and this article is brilliant in spite of itself. the author's grouping of Giffords with Brewer is very intentional, although it's hard to tell that from the very subtle and repressed way this intention is stated.

i do not think the author is saying it's "offensive" for Giffords and Obama to hug. i just don't see that in the text.

the author is closely examining the "logic of white supremacy"-- the "privilege"-- at work in both the Brewer and the Giffords photos. it is as though both instances are two sides of the same privilege. In either case, Pres Obama's black body puts him in a specific kind of relationship to white women's bodies. the author is saying that (1) that relationship is determined predominantly by the force that the white woman's body holds in american/western society, especially toward black men, and (2) the relationship these white women have toward Obama mirrors in some important ways the relationship that white men have toward these women. in other words, white women enjoy a kind of white male privilege toward black bodies.

like white men, white women are allowed to have rage toward Obama that he cannot show back to them in self-defense. if Obama HAS TO keep his cool in the face (quite literally) of such threatening white rage (as he must also do with all the extreme degree of obstructionism, the fetishistic interest in Michelle Obama's posterior, a tea party candidate threatening openly to kill him and his family, a sitting Congressman interrupting his State of the Union address, and the generalized distrust of him that is obviously based in antiblack racism), it is for the same reasons as those for which HE MUST greet Giffords with not just a simple hug and a smile, but the biggest, longest, bearhuggiest hug you ever did see from any president and former university of chicago professor. he is required not merely to be exemplary of mlk-meets-jesus-type forbearance and forgiveness in the face of AN UNPRECEDENTED wall of hostility, a mere fraction of which made clinton and newt and nixon and lbj howl in protest; he is also AND AT THE SAME TIME required to be exceptionally affable and comforting toward whites. lots of people would like to believe that that's just who he "is." he just "is" unbelievably forgiving of all the "ignorance" he has to face. he just has this great, irrepressible smile as part of his nature. (a political analyst was doing a piece on his smile just yesterday, and, of course, harry reid commented that obama talks just black enough but not too black.) and that's a common white/nonblack fantasy that manifests in how liberals speak of Obama but that nobody black really believes to be who Obama "really is." he endures the abuse no one else in his office has faced because he has to make white people feel safe. that applies to white women and men. they have a right to their rage. he must suffer and smile exemplarily.

it is true that this is beyond your personal realm of experience. that's no slight on you; it's just that you are positioned in precisely the realm of safety of which the author speaks, not in a position that has to witness that realm of safety by virtue of being outside of it.

in retrospect, i suppose i realize that it was ironic that i even took this much energy to answer a question from a white liberal friend. more about this another time.

How Comedians Protect the (White Supremacist) State: The Example of DL Hughley with Ron Paul

Go to 07:30 in the above youtube clip and check out the giggly questions DL Hughley posed to Ron Paul in this 2009 interview about his positions, and how, in response to Paul's claim that the North could have just bought the slaves instead of having the Civil War, Hughley just laughs and says, "You make way too much sense. You can't be Republican!" Toward the end of the segment, DL clowns that in the next segment he will consider whether Jesus was a Republican. And that's about the extent of DL's critical examination of Paul's positions-- and of one position in particular that has especial relevance to black people.

I respect some of the work Hughley did before CNN pulled the plug on his news show. But I want to comment on why I think his performative moment here ends up doing more harm than good. Hughley may have been completely serious about how Ron Paul converted him to thinking that the US Civil War shouldn't have been fought, but it is also possible that he appreciated the irony of his being able to say to a powerful white conservative how unlike the others he seemed. After all, saying "You're too human to be a Republican" sounds a lot like what people say to black people all the time: You're so articulate/clean/smart/well-mannered/educated/etc.-- unlike the rest of your people. You must be from the Caribbean or Africa, right? The Backhanded Compliment par excellence (see Fanon, Du Bois, etc.). If that's what Hughley was going for, it doesn't work here, of course, because Paul will never be pulled over and locked up for being a conservative, and, if he were, he could simply disclaim his conservatism, while black people's black bodies are the reasons why we are attacked, fetishized, loved, hated, imprisoned, ignored, killed, etc. So even if DL was lightweight insulting Paul as a conservative, the joke backfires because he lacks the police power to make the insult really matter. Something else is going on here that slips away before his joke can really have any effect.

This clip is another example not only of how whack Ron Paul's politics in relation to black people are, but also of how black actors/comedians can serve (ie, be fungible to) the antiblack and white supremacist state and civil society, whether intentionally or not. Black people in spokesperson positions for the powerful seem to have a special type of effect, and those in power know as much and use them accordingly. Just like the black man the Pentagon used as its spokesperson for the invasion of Iraq, and like the black woman (Iris Cross) that BP is using to make itself look responsive to the black and poor Gulf communities it has killed, and like Kareem and Common being used to promote the US image abroad, and like the main lobbying group for Israel is deliberately seeking out black and Latino college students to promote its interests.

I'm sure that you can think of many other examples, one above all.

EVEN BEFORE A BLACK SPOKESPERSON SAYS ANYTHING, just the fact that a black person is standing there in a position to say certain important things functions as an ideological argument for how far "we" have come as a society (and as a people), concealing the fact that these handfuls of black people are just cherry picked, while the rest of black folk are struggling just to get things like jobs, health care, education, nongenocidal police, grocery stores that sell us food that isn't killing us, etc. And, of course, simply sharing the screen/stage with a black person is a cheap way to make a nonblack person look less racist, if not nonracist and downright cosmopolitan.

But I think what we see in this clip is worse because DL is functioning as a journalist, even if a comedic one. Journalists, unlike spokespeople, are supposed to encourage critical thinking. It's ostensibly their job to stop bullshit from filtering into the mainstream thinking. So when journalists can't come up with anything better that what DL does here, it doesn't just fail to check the expansion of bullshit, but it actually helps spread the bullshit.

DL might have, at the least, asked critically about the workability of the plan. Even a first-year (high school) student of history knows that South initiated the Civil War when South Carolina attacked Fort Sumter in 1861, so the idea that the rich white men of the North would pay the rich white men of the South for a war started by the rich men of the South is almost as absurd as the amount of money it would have taken to make the South give up all future profits it would have made from chattel slavery. DL's a smart dude and could have said that much.

More importantly, however, Paul's bullshit (unworkable) solution would have been a solution only for white people. Black people would still have been slaves because, instead of their emancipation being purchased by war, it would have been purchased by money. We all know that war is horrible, but slavery is basically living in a war that isn't called war. War is a contingent state in which a person's life is forfeit IF she/he is in one of the societies touched by that specific event of war, and, of course, even undeclared wars end when the contingencies for their arising are resolved (roughly speaking, when one side wins, loses, or draws). But slavery is condition that renders a person's LIFE permanently forfeited. And racial slavery renders the LIFE OF AN ENTIRE RACE forfeit. And so if someone purchases your freedom, you are still positioned by slavery, even if they no longer do you the disrespect of calling you a slave.

I'm not speaking out of school. Even the conservative Harvard historical sociologist Orlando Patterson, in his definitive work Slavery and Social Death, describes the emancipated slaves of the familia Caesaris of ancient Rome in the context of being slaves because...drumroll please...the one that giveth can taketh away. That's why even emancipated slaves are expected to maintain a posture of gratitude toward the (former) master class. Paul's whole idea is formulated so that white people might be free of the incursions of the state on their freedoms, without any consideration of the fate of black people. DL can laugh along with him, but Paul isn't talking about doing this FOR black people. He is not accountable to black people, and he wouldn't change the plan if black people said it was still the same shit as before (or worse). Paul is basically content to see black people being decided ABOUT rather than being decisionmakers. All he really wants is white supremacist states' rights, which is just as bad for black people as is a white supremacist centralized federal government.

Finally, Paul claims that this solution worked to resolve slavery in other places. Well, whatever events of slavery he is talking about, the matter of black slavery has not been resolved. That's part of the whole point of Modernity. Modernity is a network of entangled conflicts and antagonisms, and the fundamental antagonisms are between those who are recognized as humans and those whose humanity is always a big question mark. There is no place in the world where black people are that their blackness is not STILL in some way still tied to the slave or colonial (slave) past-- not in Brazil, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, México, the rest of the Caribbean, anywhere in Europe, Asia, or Africa. Moreover, there is something ethically bankrupt about the way Paul treats slavery as though it were a matter of dollars and cents. Historian David Eltis has shown that, if it were all about money, Europe could have enslaved its poor far more profitably. Slavery was also about the figurative uses of the slaves themselves-- various ways we were available to them to be enjoyed. The powerful ideological work we do can be even more effective in producing "the consent of the [white] governed" as any material we produce. It's sorta like the usages of a giggling black comedian acting as a journalist while a southern white man tells him that, basically, he would have sold him north and that would have resolved the slavery crisis. ha. ha.

I guess this clip points up the importance of the work that those of us who teach the teachers do. Hughley should be better equipped to do more than giggle along with Paul as though they share a joke. As skilled as DL was on this show, it ended with the hand that giveth taking away, so he may as well have been saying radical shit all along. Ron Paul's close association with white supremacists says waaaay more about who he is politically accountable to than does a 8-minute segment in which he holds his nose and deigns to share the screen with a black man. And Hughley's actions show that he didn't really know that the joke was ultimately on him and on all of us.

People-of-Color-Blindness: A Lecture by Jared Sexton

Quote of the Week #10

I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me, literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense. My response, then, is directed to those who write what I read and to those who read what I read--put concretely--to Toni Morrison and to people who read Toni Morrison (among whom I would count few academics). --Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory"

Where do I start? Last week the US government murdered Troy Davis and as I write this the government is showing no signs of collapsing in the near future. As I look for signs that Black folks are about to engage in organized confrontation with a nation state that is determined to render us civically, socially, and physically dead I see none. I wonder have we slipped into a delusional fantasy, a fantasy that is based on nostalgia for the 1960s and 70s when it seemed that revolution was in progress.

I know that the radical groups of the 60s failed for their not-so-radical practices, but what I long for is the affect that created a sense that the bullshit that is part of the fabric of life today was on its way out. There was a feeling that the racist, sexist, anti-Black power structure could not continue to rule. I thought by now we would be past lynching Black men and instead we have a Republican party whose base is cheering the deaths carried out by the governor of Texas. I can only believe that they think the majority of those killed in Texas were Black.

I wonder if I’m paranoid when I wonder if the Tea Party is against Obama’s healthcare plan because it will allow some Black people to live longer. I don’t see any sign of liberation in the future nor do I see the vast majority of Black folks being willing to acknowledge the political climate that exists in relation to black folks. For example, in Michigan Republicans want to take food stamps if you own a car worth more than $15,000. This echoes "welfare queens in Cadillacs." In the meantime Black Detroit and Saginaw with its larger numbers of Black folks will be starving. Any of the progress made financially is being wiped out by a recession with no end in sight and right wing policies aimed at eradicating us.

I thought the murder of Oscar Grant would be the last straw for Black folks. We are subjected to racial profiling, targeted for prison, and murdered by police who spend less than 2 years in jail if any time at all as in the case of Sean Bell. In light of a rapidly increasing onslaught against Black folks I thought by now we all would be giving much more consideration to the words of Dhoruba Bin Wahad., Bin Wahad wrote in response to the 2005 execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams:

Tookie Williams was executed to send a clarion signal to African youth that redemptive militancy is unacceptable - only rejection of your social history and complete surrender to the myths of white America could possibly save your life. In this sense, his execution was a commentary on the cowardice of many of today's Black leaders - who want to be both patriots and champions of Africans in America. This is the age of American empire, you can't be both.

I thought by now the realization that we can’t be patriots in a nation that is hell bent on destroying us would be forcing a strident voice to emerge from even the Black bourgeoisie. I’ve been wondering for years now what will it take to force those of use that believe that we are privileged to take a stand. Will we just quietly die?

I’m not longing for the conditions that brought about the militancy of the 1960s and 70s. I wish there would have never been a need for George and Jonathan Jackson. I wish we could have passed through the era of confronting the police and all that that has done to organic Black leadership without the damage. I wish Assata Shakur could walk free among us in the country where she was born, but she can’t. And as long as none of those wishes can't be true I have some others. I wish Black folk across the US would become unruly. I wish we would challenge every white, Asian, or Brown person on their anti-Black racism. I wish we would never give anyone a pass when they hate on Black folks, including other Black folks. I wish we would plot, conspire, sneak around, lie to the enemy, find ways to undermine white supremacy and the agencies that support it. Agencies like the public schools, public hospitals, police, prisons, and universities, the agencies that kill us. I wish young Black folk would talk to old Black folk and find out what they know. I wish old Black folk would talk to young Black folk and find out what they know. I wish every Black parent would raise their child to be a solider in this struggle, our Black struggle to be free of an enemy that cannot contain its murderous desire to destroy us. Teach them to love Black folks with all of our flaws.

I wish Black folk in the academy could learn to love those niggas in the hood. I wish the niggas in the hood could learn to respect what those niggas in the academy go through and find it in their hearts to teach what the struggle is. I wish we could all Black stand together and stand strong in the face of our murderous enemies and wage a beautiful struggle, a war motivated by love for Black folk. In Struggle!!!

Quote of the Week #9 -- In Relation to "The Help"

"No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk." -- bell hooks. Marginality as a site of resistance, in R. Ferguson et al. (eds), Out There: Marginalization and contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990: pp. 241-43.