President Rodrigo Duterte's Killing Fields and People's War in the Philippines: An Interview

By Andy Piascik

E. SAN JUAN, Jr., emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies, English and Comparative Literature, is currently professorial lecturer at Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He was a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously he served as Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium; and visiting professor of literature at Trento University, Italy; and at National Tsing-Hua University and Tamkang University, Taiwan.

San Juan received his A.B. from the University of the Philippines and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Among his recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington), US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell) and Between Empire and Insurgency (University of the Philippines Press). Forthcoming books are Learning from the Filipino Diaspora (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) and Filipinas Everywhere (De La Salle University Press). His recent anthologies of poems in Filipino are Kundiman sa Gitna ng Karimlan, Ambil, and Wala.

San Juan has received awards from MELUS (Katherine Newman Prize); Association for Asian American Studies, Gutavus Myers Center for Human Rights; Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, Italy; Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University; Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh;; and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. He is a member of the editorial advisory board for Cultural Logic, Humanities Diliman, Malay, and Kritika Kultura.

Who is President Rodrigo Duterte and who and what does he represent?

San Juan: For 22 years, Duterte was mayor of Davao City, the largest urban complex in Mindanao island, Philippines. TIMEmagazine dubbed him "the Punisher" for allegedly organizing the death-squads that eliminated drug dealers and petty criminals via "extra-judicial killings" (EJK)-no arrests or search warrants were needed, the suspects were liquidated on the spot. That's the modus operandi today. If Davao City became the safest or most peaceful city in southeast Asia, it was also called "the murder capital" of the Philippines.

Drug addiction is rampant in the Philippines. Previous administrations either turned a blind eye or coddled druglords, often police and military officials, infecting poor communities and generations of unemployed and unschooled youth. My relatives in Manila and friends in the provinces have complained that their children have been corrupted by the drug culture in neighborhoods and schools, so that when Duterte ran for president last May, he got 16 million votes (39% of total votes cast), 6.6 million votes ahead of the closest rival, Mar Roxas, a grandson of Manuel Roxas, the first president of the Republic in 1946. This implies that people want a government leader who can rid the country of the drug menace.

News reports described Duterte's victory as an upset, like Trump's win over highly favored Hillary Clinton. Is it accurate to say that voters simply wanted a change, regardless of the substance of Duterte's platform?

While the U.S. set up the electoral system in the Philippines, the feudal/comprador classes manipulate it so that personalities, not ideology, and bribery determine the outcome. Democracy in the Philippines is actually the rule of the privileged minority of landlords, bureaucrat capitalists, and business partners of foreign mega-corporations (called compradors) over the majority.

All presidential candidates promise change for the better. In the last two decades, the popular demand has been: get rid of corruption, drugs, rapes, wanton murders, etc. Over 75% of 130 million Filipinos are impoverished, sunk in palpable misery. Consequently, over 12 million have travelled to all continents to earn bare subsistence-about 5,000 OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) leave every day for Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, North America, Europe, etc.

Scarce decent jobs, starvation wages for contractual labor, unaffordable housing, lack of adequate medical care and schooling-symptoms of terrible underdevelopment- have pushed millions out of the country, or driven them into the hills and forests to take up arms against an unjust, exploitative system whose military and police are trained and supplied by Washington-Pentagon, IMF/World Bank, and global capitalist powers. The country has been a basket-case in Asia since the Marcos dictatorship in the seventies, outstripped by smaller nation-states like Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.

Relatively unknown to the MetroManila political milieu, Duterte's reputation as a scourge of druglords was glamorized to the point that he became a harbinger of change. His slogan was: "Change is coming." The public responded to this propaganda. Although unlike Roxas and his group, among them the Aquino-Cojuangco clan and Makati (Manila's Wall Street) corporate moguls, Duterte does not belong to the traditional elite dynasties, his campaign was supported by some of the biggest corporate stakeholders, such as the Floirendo agribusiness, and by billionaire investors (Uy, Te, Alcantara, Villar) engaged in mining, public utilities, construction with huge government contracts, etc.

We cannot underestimate the Marcos family's contribution, which added to the P375 million that Duterte allegedly spent. This fact explains why Duterte allowed the controversial burial of the Marcos cadaver in the National Heroes' Cemetery. Duterte's father, and other relatives in Cebu, collaborated with the Marcos martial-law regime.

Duterte thus belongs mainly to a hitherto excluded fraction of the comprador bureaucrat capitalist class, with links to the patrimonial landlord families. He now serves as a "populist" front of the parasitic oligarchy that has dominated the class-conflicted order of this dependency since the U.S. directly ruled the country from 1899 to 1946 as a classic colony, and a pacified neocolony during the Cold War up to now. Duterte's regime prolongs the moribund structure of colonial institutions and practices that feed off the labor of the peasantry, workers, middle stratum, women, Moros, and the Lumads (indigenous) communities-these last two are now mobilized to oppose this predatory status quo.

What is your assessment of Duterte's intent of becoming more independent of the United States and the moves he's made in that direction thus far?

This was a burning topic before the US elections, when the Cold War was being revived. Duterte got the cue. His move to invoke his youthful experience with the nationalist movement during his student days was a smart one. Tactically, he beguiled the leaders of BAYAN (the major anti-imperialist legal opposition) and their parliamentary foot soldiers to join him against the lethargic Roxas-Noynoy Aquino fraction of the oligarchy. Obviously he needed symbols of radical change monopolized by BAYAN, which reinforced the outsider image.

Part of his strategy is to firm up his base in the Mindanao-Visayas elite and consolidate his hold on the ideological State apparatus controlled by holdovers from the previous reactionary administrations. He has been doing this when Obama, the US State Department, and the UN entered the scene and began scolding him for his murderous method of amplifying EJKs, his jettisoning of the Philippine Constitution's Bill of Rights and various UN covenants guaranteeing the right to life and due process for all citizens. Karapatan (a human-rights monitoring NGO), church groups, and civil-society associations blasted Duterte for the "brazen impunity" shown by the orgy of police violence and State terrorism.

Cognizant of those criticisms, Duterte offered to renew peace talks with the National Democratic Front Philippines (NDFP) and its military arm, the New People's Army (NPA) which, up to now, is still stigmatized by the US State Department as terrorist. This broke the long stalemate in the peace talks during the Arroyo and NoyNoy Aquino regimes. Duterte made a token release of 18 political prisoners involved in the talks and promised to grant amnesty to 434 jailed dissenters. This was hailed by the local media as constructive and a promising change-maker. At the same time, Duterte also made noises about the meddlesome US military presence in Mindanao, the annual U.S.-Philippines "Balikatan" exercises, and the US intervention in the China Sea prior to his visit to China and Japan. This triggered heavy media coverage, projecting Duterte as a Latino anti-imperialist crusader like Fidel Castro or Chavez.

For a while, there were rumors of a CIA plot to kill Duterte. When former president Fidel Ramos berated Duterte for his anti-U.S. polemics and withdrew his support, was there a symptom of some crisis in the regime?

No, it was a calculated publicity technique to divert attention away from the bloody police-vigilante blood bath. Duterte's complaint was mere grumbling, blowhard gestures of the bully in the hood. His "pivot to China" may have calmed down the turbulent waters of the South China Sea, with the US fleet continuing to maneuver from its bases in Hawaii, Guam, and Okinawa. Obama dismissed Duterte as uncouth, ignorant of diplomatic niceties. Vietnam and Japan rolled out their red carpet to the cursing Leviathan of what academics designated as "Hobbesian" Philippines. Poor Hobbes, maybe Machiavelli's Borgia would have been the more appropriate analogy.

Nothing to worry about for Washington and the Pentagon. The U.S. military presence all over the islands, legitimized by the 1947 Mutual Assistance Agreement and the 1951 Philippines-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty, plus the recent Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), insure the continued stranglehold of Washington-Pentagon on Duterte's military, police, and various security agencies. With Trump's condoning of Duterte's "killing fields," Duterte has proved himself a wily demagogue whose touted popularity, however, is fast eroding on the face of mammoth protests all over the islands, and in the Filipino diaspora around the world.

Are we likely to see a decrease in the U.S. military presence in the Philippines soon?

Not at all. First of all, as I already mentioned, all the onerous treaties that subordinate the Philippine State security agencies are safe and stable. Even the Supreme Court and the trial courts follow U.S. protocols, as laid down initially by two well-intentioned civilizing missionaries, Justice George Malcolm and anthropologist David Barrows. Legal scholar Eric A. San Juan has clearly documented this fact in a recent essay, "Cultural Jurisprudence" (Asian Pacific Law & Policy Journal, 2013). In short, we have been thoroughly Americanized according to the racialized, utilitarian bourgeois standards of the industrialized metropole.

Of course, the entire ideological state apparatus, including the military-police, court and prison system, was systematically crafted by the U.S. colonial administrators for surveillance and repression of those unruly natives, as proven by Professor Alfred McCoy's research, Policing America's Empire. Incidentally, Professor McCoy has also documented the role of the pro-U.S. military in the People Power revolt against Marcos in 1986 and the subsequent coups against Corazon Aquino marked by the assassination of radical militants Rolando Olalia and Lean Alejandro.

Duterte's cabinet reflects the conjunctural alignment of class forces in society today. Vice-president Leni Robredo represents the Roxas-Aquino oligarchy which (except for Robredo, whose victory is now challenged by Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's patron) lost the May elections. Except for three progressive ministers, all the officials in Duterte's Cabinet are pro-U.S., chiefly the Secretary of Defense General Delfin Lorenzana and the Foreign Affairs Secretary Alfredo Yasay.

More revealing of Duterte's retrograde bent is the newly appointed Chief of Staff of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) Eduardo Ano, the notorious architect of summary killings and abductions of activists in the last decade. He is the prime suspect in the kidnapping of activist Jonas Burgos, among others. The party-list youth group KABATAAN called Duterte's appointment of this bloodstained general a signal for more massacres of civilians, forced disappearances of critics, and military occupation of the countryside. This is in pursuit of U.S.-inspired counterinsurgency schemes launched from the time of President Corazon Aquino and intensified by the Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo and Noynoy Aquino regimes.

Like General Fidel Ramos, who succeeded Corazon Aquino, all the military and police officials in the Philippines follow U.S.-ordained training, ideological indoctrination, and political goals. Their logistics, weaponry and operating procedures are transplanted wholesale from the Pentagon and U.S. State Department, following treaty regulations. Military aid to the Philippines rose during the Carter and Reagan administrations in support of the beleaguered martial-law Marcos regime. From 2010 to 2015, the US military aid totalled $183.4 million, aside from other numerous training and diplomatic exchanges, for example, the active presence of CIA and FBI agents interrogating prisoners at Camp Crame police headquarters.

Given the massive archive of treaties, ideological control, customary habits, and various diplomatic constraints, only a radical systemic change can cut off the U.S. stranglehold on this neocolony. At least, that's a first step in changing people's minds, dreams, and hopes.

Will President-elect Trump water down Obama's "Asian pivot" in view of his isolationist impulse, instead of allowing Duterte to assert a more "independent" foreign policy?

That remains to be seen. As of now, there is no real sign of a foreign invasion from China or anywhere else-it's the U.S. that has re-invaded several times. There's no sign of a brewing confrontation in the South China Sea today. The threat to the global capitalist system comes from the masses of oppressed workers and peasants, women, Lumads, and especially the formidable forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which Duterte has to address by diplomatic means before long. From Marcos up to Noynoy Aquino, for over four decades now, the Moro people have resisted total subjugation and genocide. It would be foolish, if not suicidal, for Duterte to persist in implementing a militaristic approach-unless the U.S. (via his generals) needs to dispose of surplus weapons following the imperatives of the profiteering military-industrial complex.

For all his braggadocio and macho exhibitionism, Duterte is unable to halt the attacks of the dwindling Abu Sayyaf group, the al-Qaeda-inspired gang of kidnap-for-ransom Moros in Basilan and Sulu. Like drug addiction, the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of a deep and widespread social and political cancer in society. Studies have shown that its followers have been paid and subsidized by local politicians, military officials, businessmen, and even by U.S. undercover agents. Only a radical transformation of class-race relations, of the hierarchy of power linked to property and economic opportunities, can resolve the centuries-long grievances of the BangsaMoro peoples.

Will you address Duterte's crackdown on drug dealing and drug use, the one thing about him people in the U.S. are likely to have heard about?

This is probably the only issue that preoccupies the infotainment industry eager for high ratings/profits. The international media (e.g., Telesur, Al-Jazeera, UK's Guardian, CNN worldwide) does not allow a day to pass without headlining or commenting on the new "killing fields" in the Philippines. The New York Times, December 7 issue, devoted a long elaborate video/print special to this topic, in English and in Filipino (at YOUTUBE) entitled "They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals." This equals in visual power the TIME report "The Killing Season: Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's War on Drugs" (October 10) that provoked Duterte's wrath. Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and social media have blanketed the atmosphere with Duterte's EJK performance.

Right now, however, reports of Russian meddling in the US elections have marginalized Duterte's antics, overshadowing even the horrible wars in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. We might have a reprieve on the carnage in that remote outpost of the Empire.

The New York Times reporter Daniel Berehulak counted 54 victims of police raids in the 35 days he accompanied the guardians of law-and-order in the urban complex of Metro Manila.

Filipino addicts and small-time pushers inhabit impoverished squatter areas in suburban Caloocan, Pandacan, Tondo, outside the gated communities of the rich in Makati or Forbes Park. As of now, the total victims of police and vigilante violence of Oplan Tokhang (the rubric for the drug war) has reached 5,800 suspects killed: 2000 by the police, the rest by vigilante or paramilitary groups. According to the Philippine National Police (PNP) headquarters, there have been 35,600 arrests that netted 727,600 users and 56,500 pushers. Duterte himself initially said he will kill another 30,000, enough to fill the waters of Manila Bay and to make funeral parlors thrive. This represents a new level of ruthlessness that has converted the country into "a macabre house of mourning."

Most of the victims are part of the vulnerable, marginalized sectors of society. Curtailing their basic rights to a life of dignity, denying them due process and equal treatment under the law, will surely not solve addiction. Everyone recognizes that Duterte's plan is an insane program of solving a perennial socio-economic malady. Scientific studies have shown that drug addiction springs from family and social conditions, contingent on variable historical factors. Only education in healthcare, a caring and mutually supportive social environment, as well as support from government and health agencies, can reduce the havoc wrought by this epidemic. Not by stifling human lives, no matter how damaged or dysfunctional. But as we've remarked, the hegemonic norms of a class-divided society do not allow this consensus to prevail.

So is there another motive or underlying purpose behind this terrible war against drugs?

Surely there is a larger political intent: dividing your enemy, splitting communities, demoralizing the angry citizenry. To some degree the climate of fear and terror has sown animosities among members of the middle class, and incited antagonisms among the lumpen and ordinary citizens toward the relatively well-off and those who welcome authoritarian policies and security in exchange for liberties. Meanwhile, the police ride roughshod over everyone, and so far there is no sustained legislative or court opposition to the relentless executive coercive power behind this unconscionable outrage.

Karapatan chairperson Tinay Palabay has acutely seen through the smokescreen of this drug campaign: the State's program to pursue counterinsurgency under cover of a hitherto well-meaning campaign. The AFP has labelled national-democratic militants as drug suspects, such as the case of anti-mining activist Joselito Pasaporte of Compostela Valley, Davao.

Under cover of the drug war, Oplan Bayanihan, the counter-insurgency low-intensity war of the AFP, proceeds in the form of civic action-peace and development programs. During Duterte's 100 days in office, Palabay's group has documented 16 victims of political murder, 12 frustrated killings, two cases of torture, and nine victims of illegal arrest and detentions, mostly involving indigenous peoples in Sumilao, Bukidnon, and farmers massacred in Laur, Nueva Ecija. As of December 12, the NDFP has documented 18 activists killed, 20 survivors of attempted assassination, and 13,000 persons victimized by forced evacuations from their homes. Consider also 14,000 cases of schools, clinics, chapels and civilian infrastructure being used as military barracks in violation of peace agreements in respect for human rights signed by both the government and the revolutionary NDFP.

Irked by Karapatan, Duterte has vowed to kill all human rights activists. His agents are already doing their best to sabotage and abort the peace talks. If he dares to carry out this pompous threat, he might drastically shorten his own tenure and stimulate the opposite of what he wants: mass fury against tyrannical rule and police-state barbarism.

What is the state of the revolutionary armed struggle that has been going on in its modern form since 1969?

As of last week, the revolutionary elan has peaked with huge nationwide mass demonstrations against Duterte's decision to allow the burial of Marcos in the National Heroes Cemetery. This has politicized millennials and a whole generation otherwise ignorant of the horrendous suffering of the people during the Marcos dictatorship. It has mobilized anew the middle strata of students, professionals, workers, women and the urban poor, as well as Lumads, Moros, and the peasantry who constitute the majority of the citizenry. The anti-Marcos-dictatorship resurgence has diminished Duterte's popularity, exploding the myth of his supposed incorruptibility and pro-change posture. It's more of the same, and even worse.

It's a mixed picture that needs to be viewed from a historical-dialectical perspective. While the size of the NPA has declined from about 25,000-30,000 fully armed guerillas in the 1980s to less than 15,000 today, its influence has increased several times. This is due to deteriorating socioeconomic conditions since the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. Thanks also to the immiseration of workers' lives and the pain inflicted by the vicious rampage of the military and police in the countryside. Large areas in Mindanao, Luzon and the Visayas are under the sway of partisan units of the NPA. Meanwhile, the MILF continues to preserve and defend its liberated zones from AFP incursions.

Meanwhile, the character of people's war has changed in its quality and direction. The shift to political and diplomatic tactics within the strategy of protracted war (following Mao's teaching) has made tremendous gains in organizing women, students, the urban poor, and Lumads.

Various cultural and social formations engage in pedagogical and agitational campaigns to expose the chicanery and deception of the Duterte regime. Not a single perpetrator of human rights violations has been arrested and punished, such as the soldiers guilty of the Lianga and Paquibato massacres, the murderers of personalities such as Romeo Capala, Fernando Baldomero, Fr. Fausto Tentorio, William Geertman, Leonardo Co, Juvy Capion, Rebelyn Pitao, Emerito Samarca, and hundreds more. Meanwhile General Jovito Palparan, who murdered many activists, continues to enjoy army custody instead of regular civilian detention. The scandalous "culture of impunity" is flourishing in the killing fields of the tropical neocolony.

Many disappeared activists (among them, Jonas Burgos, Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeno, Luisa Dominado-Posa, and others) have not been accounted for by the State, while martial law victims and their families have not been indemnified. All these existing anomalies may explain the belief that given the corrupt bureaucracy and justice-system, the only feasible alternative is to join the armed struggle against the rotten, inhuman system. This is why the communist-led insurgency cannot be defeated, given its deep roots in the 1896 revolution against Spanish tyranny and the resistance against U.S. imperial aggression from 1899 up to the present.

What is your assessment of Duterte's overture to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the BangsaMoro insurgency?

As I noted earlier, Duterte's overture was hailed as a positive step to solve a durable, national-democratic insurgency dating back to the sixties, when the Communist Party of the Philippines was re-organized and the NPA founded. The peace talks began with Corazon Aquino's recognition of the role played by the underground resistance in overthrowing Marcos and installing her. Similarly, Duterte implicitly recognized the political traction of the left-wing representatives in Congress in the last few years. While Duterte welcomed the unilateral ceasefire declaration of the NDFP, lately he declared that he would not grant amnesty nor release any more prisoners unless the NDFP stop fighting and submit to the government's dictates. The severely punished prisoners are now pawns in Duterte's gambit to coopt the subversives. Duterte's mandate has been changed to: One step forward, two steps backward.

Duterte allows his military and police to terrorize the citizenry. No substantive reform of those decadent institutions has been carried out. Criminalization of political activities still continues with the AFP arresting Lumad teacher Amelia Pond and peace advocate John Maniquez, charging them with murder, illegal possession of firearms, etc.-the usual alibi of detaining activists which proved utterly barbaric in the case of the Morong 45 during Macapagal-Arroyo's tenure. Rape, torture, robbery, threat of assassination, and warrantless arrest of innocent civilians remain the State's formula for safeguarding peace and order in society.

No tangible step has been made to seriously confront the Bangsamoro insurgency-unless Duterte's attempt to cement his friendship with Nur Misuari, leader of the other Moro group, the Moro National Liberation Front, is a tactic to divide the enemy. That may be his Achilles' heel.

On this arena of diverse antagonisms, with fierce class war raging all over the country, Duterte finds himself in dire straits. Sooner or later, he will be compelled to either defy the pro-U.S. imperialist hierarchy of the AFP and the fascist PNP if he is sincere in challenging the status quo, or suppress a rebellion from within his ranks. He has to reckon also with the opposition of the more entrenched, diehard cabal of the Ayalas, Cojuanco-Aquino, the comprador owners of malls and export industries, as well as the traditional warlords and semifeudal dynasties that depend on U.S. moral and financial support. That will be the day when Duterte's fate as "Punisher" will be decided. Meanwhile, the struggle for national liberation and social justice continues, despite the trumped-up charges inflicted on anyone denouncing Duterte and his friend, president-elect Donald Trump.-##

Andy Piascik is an award-winning author who writes for Z, Znet, Counterpunch and many other publications and websites. His novel In Motion was published earlier this year by Sunshine Publishing (www.sunshinepublishing.org).

White, Working-Class America: My Family of Addicts

By Susan Anglada Bartley

There is a pain that many of us hide, a truth that is hard to bear. It's a pain that starts slow, like a pin-prick, but flames into a fire that burns forever, until we are all consumed. We are a family of addicts. May I speak to you privately, family? White addicts and family members of addicts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and nationwide, especially those who voted for Trump, this is for you. As a fellow family member of multiple heroin​ addicts, I feel your pain, but family, hate will not heal our broken hearts.

Where did it start for your family? Was it your Brother, your best friend? Was it your beloved Mother? How long did you deny it? How much time, money, and energy did they steal? When did you lose your ability to trust? Can you ever regain it? What did you see that you can't unsee? Who did you lose that you will never, ever hold close again? How is the hole in your heart today?

At four years old, in 1982, I remember pressing my face close to the glass, making halos of steam on the inside of the window, staring out at my favorite Uncle-a brilliant, 30-something Irish-American man with shocking red hair, a man whose stories mesmerized neighborhood strangers. I waited for those stories, for days, for hours, for years sometimes. And there he was, waiting outside on a freezing winter day. He was not allowed to come inside the house because he was addicted to heroin and would steal everything we had. He stood out there waiting for hours, for days, through a whole Buffalo, N.Y. winter. He wasn't waiting for love. He wasn't waiting for justice. He was waiting for my grandmother to give him money to buy heroin.

Sometimes, when my Mother and Father weren't home, she let him inside the house. He came upstairs into her small room, talking her out of her social security check while I played with buttons on the floor. I waited for a wink, for a smile, for a flash of brilliance from his light blue eyes; I waited outside of his window for the day when he would break through his addiction, coming back to my childish heart, which revered him.

Anyone who really knows heroin knows that he never really did come all of the way back. He came back in fits and rages; he came back in bouts; he came back in moments of extraordinary storytelling; he came back in strums of his guitar; he came back in calls from jail; he came back from prison; he came back to life from suicide; but there was something in him that stayed far, far away forever.

And I still fucking miss him.

And that wasn't the whole story. The whole story is too hard to paint with a poetic brush. So I'll say it this way. They were a band of brothers living in Detroit during the Vietnam era. Due to one-eyed blindness that runs in the males in my family, they avoided the draft. Their Father, an Irish alcoholic who was an amateur boxer, horse-trainer, and expert auto-upholsterer before being fired from every auto-plant in the city of Detroit, was murdered and thrown in a ditch when my Mother was 18. At that time, the brothers fell deep into the Hippie Movement in Detroit, they all took up guitar; they were all taken by the needle.

When I was six months old in 1978, my Uncle James Fitzpatrick died of an aneurysm while battling heroin addiction. My Uncle Kearney, after fighting and playing with heroin and other opiates for the past thirty years, died an addict a few years ago. My beloved Uncle who waited outside the window, attempted suicide two months ago, and continues to battle with depression while managing his relationship with methadone and other substances.

Lately, I hear a new rhetoric about addiction--many Black and Latino writers say that the new efforts to remove the stigma of addiction are racist. In a 2016 PBS article, critical of Obama's campaign to end the national opioid epidemic, Judy Woodruff writes, "Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans." When I read Woodruff's words, which I know are true, there is still a part of me that asks does she really know what it is like to have a family member live and die in addiction? She must not really know because if she knew the reality of living with family members addicted to heroin, she could never speak against the work being done to destigmatize it.

The answer, though, is yes, she does know. F​or Woodruff and other Black and Latino family members of addicts, along with addiction, they also face the brutality of a system that incarcerates and kills their family members on a systemic level. Where I had thirty years, off and on, with two severely addicted Uncles, Black and Latino people actually faced the pain that we are feeling right now, while also experiencing racial hatred in society, and taking all of the stigma and shame of the beginning of our society's addiction only to see that now that their loved ones are dead or in prison. We want to take off the mask and ask for compassion for our pain.

When I think of all of you tonight -- family members of opiate addicts in a nation facing unprecedented levels of addiction in almost every state -- I want you to know that I truly feel that pain that you experience on a daily basis. What I need to say is that, statistically, it is evident that many of you also voted for Donald Trump. Have you thought about the way that he appeals to that last shred of pride in you, that part that hasn't been taken by your addiction, or your family member's addiction to opiates? Have you thought about the way that, in a moment when you and your family were hurting, he came along to say what you needed to hear--that you, your family, and your country could be great again?

I know the blindness that heroin causes in families of addicts. Are you unconsciously blaming Black and Latino communities for the presence of heroin and opiate-based pills, when really Big Pharma is profiting off of working-class whites like you as you vote a man to power who will boost their corporate reach, making a killing off of your family and friends?

Dig deeper. Those of us who have survived ancestral legacies of addiction must come together to unite against hate, despite the pain that we feel. We cannot blindly follow an individual who is promoting Nazis while promising us a stronger economy. Be honest. Seek the healing that you need as an individual; don't sacrifice your humanity for the promises of a rich executive who wears a mask while stabbing you and your loved ones in the back. Love yourself more. Love your faith more. Love your country more. Reject the hate machine of Donald Trump.

Susan Anglada Bartley is an activist, writer,​and teacher in Portland, Oregon. She earned her B.A. from NYU, and her M.Ed from Portland State University. She was awarded a National Education Association H. Councill Trenholm Human and Civil Rights Award in 2013 for her work to end racism in public education. She presented her work on Systemic Barriers to AP and IB Courses for Black, Native American, and Latino Students, and co-presented with Pedro Anglada Cordero, MSW on Invisible Fences: Removing Obstacles for Latino Students at the Teaching for Social Justice North West Conference and at the Evergreen Education Association Diversity and Social Justice Conference. She has published articles with Artvoice Buffalo, Literary Arts Portland, The National Education Association Magazine, NEA-Ed Votes, and The Hampton Institute: A Working Class Think Tank.

"How Much Do You Cost?": A Story of Sexual Neo-Colonialism

By Sonasha Braxton

I'll start at the beginning. Here is who I am…I am an African-American woman. I am 32 years old. I was born in the United States. My parents are from the United States. My parents' parents are from the United States and so on. Many of my ancestors were already here…Some of my ancestors were brought here in chains, and sold on auction blocks. I consider myself African by nature, American by nurture.

Once upon a time when I was 21 years old, I was a student at United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya. It was my first time in Africa. I had been there about for about two months, when I was out at a bar with my friends, very close to the campus. My friends and I were all college students, and dressed accordingly so. I walked myself to the bar and took 200ksh out of my pocket to buy my myself a beer. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. It was a Caucasian male in his late 40s with scraggly hair. This man was slightly out of place in a college bar, but not an unfamiliar sight in the Nairobi nightlife. The music was blaring. I couldn't hear him well, but he seemed to be pointing to another corner of the bar and making motions towards the beer I had already ordered. I side-eyed him and shook my head. Whatever it was I wasn't interested. I had what I came for. He tapped me on the shoulder again and motioned for me to bring my ear closer to his lips so he could tell me something without yelling. I sighed and conceded, bending down slightly. "My friend would like to buy you a drink," he said. I, beer already in hand, raised my beer and pointed to it. "I'm okay! I just bought myself a drink, but thanks!" I sashayed away back to my friends, and started dancing.

Scene 2. I was thirsty again. I walked back to the bar. The same 40-something white man with the scraggly hair was there. This time he stood up directly in front of the space I thought I would be able to squeeze into the bar. "My friend wants to buy you a drink! He wants to meet you!" he yelled, again pointing over to some dark corner. At this point somewhat curious, and one Tusker in, I replied "why can't your friend talk to me himself?". "He's shy," he responded. Amused that we had reverted to middle school interactions, and half expecting him to deliver a paper which said "will you go out with me" with "yes", "no" and "maybe" as boxes to check, I became curious. I thought, maybe his friend is a cute 20-something Kenyan banker, a gorgeous 30-year old Ugandan lawyer… I thought, who knows. "He's right over here" he insisted. I said "ok" and followed him just a few steps away from the bar, to a high top in the corner. The friend was an unattractive 50-something Caucasian- American. He greeted me, shook my hand, asked my name, and where I was from. I answered, recoiled my hand, said "nice to meet you, but I'm going to go back to my friends". He motioned for me to join them. I shook my head and hustled back to the table where my friends were.

Scene 3. Last drink. Same man. Same spot. Same question. Same refusal. Followed by the question, the first of many of the same design, with different accents, languages and configurations, that I would hear often while living in Kenya, "my friend wants to know how much". I said, "how much what?", totally confused. "My friend wants to know how much it would cost for him to sleep with you?". What happened next, is somewhat of a blur. I know that a fury engulfed me. I remember walking outside. I felt like I was suffocating. I remember coming back. I remember using a lot of expletives. But what I will never forget is how the situation was resolved. I was asked to leave the club… I was told I was making too much noise. I was disturbing business. This was not the last time something like this would transpire. It would go on to happen in Djibouti, and in Ethiopia, and in Ivory Coast. I Black woman, minding my own business, sexually propositioned by he, White man with a few dollars in his pocket, was at fault for disrupting a totally unacceptable and disrespectful attempted "transaction".

Since this first occurrence back in my 20s, I have learned to contain myself somewhat better, to learn to listen for the response to the question I now pose genuinely curious, "what makes you think you can buy me?". I have heard everything from "oh I'm sorry…I thought you were from (insert country here)" to "everything can be bought"; everything equally as insulting. All that these answers have amounted to is this, "as a Black woman, your body is a commodity, that I as a White man, have the right to purchase it/you". While this is a personal narrative, I do not share this burden alone. It becomes important as it makes the case of what I will call "sexual neo-colonialism", a legacy of the exploitation of the bodies of women of color. If we understand neo-colonialism, as the last stage of imperialism, as did Kwame Nkrumah, as its most dangerous stage; as a stage in which sovereignty is only a façade and that power is used for "exploitation rather than development", than we must too understand neo-colonialism as the most dangerous stage not just for the "developing state" but for its people, particularly its women. The African female whether in diaspora or continental stands to lose her sovereignty, and too be exploited, rather than space intentionally made for her to develop herself the way she sees fit.

Colonialism left in its wake the destruction of pre-colonial political, social and economic systems in which women ranked highly, and replaced them first with "native authorities" exclusive of women followed by clientele-patronage systems, which too excluded women. Women often lost tremendous power during the colonial period as well as economic autonomy. This resulted from women's exclusion from the global marketplace and new reliance of women's unpaid labor. Customary laws developed under colonialism and inherited from Europe, disadvantaged women favoring men. They accorded particular rights to men, such as the right to testify in trials, that were closed to women. Women were removed from power as heads of associations often with the final say over market or agricultural disputes, and replaced with men[1]. Simply colonial rule restructured family, sex, gender and sexuality by creating legal mechanisms to control women's positions in society, positions in their families, and expressions of their sexuality, for the sake of White Western capital.

The trickle-down effect of the disempowerment of the African woman has also emboldened the White hetero male to assume his place in the hierarchy of African affairs is one of superiority, and one in which any Black woman continues to be for sale. This is further reinforced often by the colonial mentality, the internalized colonialism of many members of African society, which favors and in fact protects unfettered white male hetero sexuality and promotes its unbridled exploits. It is this internalized colonialism, in actuality, the reaction of those around her, that asks the Black woman either to suppress her reaction to verbal sexual violence totally, or to react within the confines of what white hetero-males have sanctioned as polite gender normativity; to smile and say "no thank you", to gently brush away prodding hands, to repeat "no" quietly, avert our eyes, and meekly insist that we decline such advances. This internalized colonialism of its witnesses says she is "overreacting", when she yells, pushes away, tells, or even says no firmly. It says that "well, most other women would have said yes".

Someone will say that this will stop when African women stop having relationships with such men. Someone will say that when these women, who may find poverty less miserable than sex with the occasional dream peddling foreigner, simply say no, then all African women will stop being objectified. To which I would respond that until the system that has systematically underdeveloped not only Africa but the entire Global South, a system which has destroyed indigenous spirituality and replaced it with a White savior both hanging in the homes of its believers and walking the streets as sex tourists, is dismantled, then Black women, Brown Women, all women of color, will continue to be harmed by it.

This returns me to my story. The man in question was an American. There was no question of impoverished conditions. I clearly stated that I too was American, but this did not prevent the proposition, nor has it on multiple occasions. I, due to the intersectionality of my race and gender, was considered a commodity, buyable, and expendable. I am not the only woman of color who has had such an experience. I often exchange stories with my expat women of color friends, who have often witnessed and experienced the same. The globally internalized white hetero male superiority complex and systemic inherited exploitative North-South relations that support the continued effort to colonize, conquer and commodify the woman of color's body, as an economic enterprise, must necessarily change, and sexual neo-colonialism, must be destroyed and at last put to rest….

So I will finish at the beginning. I am an African-American woman. I am 32 years old. I was born in the United States. My parents are from the United States. My parents' parents are from the United States and so on. Many of my ancestors were already here. Some of my ancestors were brought here in chains, and sold on auction blocks. But, "How much do I cost?"…I am priceless. We are priceless. Not even on the auction block were my ancestors' souls for sale.

Black Lives Under Surveillance: A Review of Simone Brown's "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness"

By Brandi Thompson Summers

Modern capitalism has always placed an undue burden on black bodies. Slavery, forced labor, and dispossession have moved hand in hand with forces of surveillance and the power of the state. In cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Oakland-and countless others that have never reached national awareness-abysmal economic conditions have found an intimate partner in police patrols, drones, security cameras, and citizen-on-citizen reporting.

Today, poor communities of color are under constant surveillance and on the receiving end of brutal market forces. Where high unemployment, inadequate public transportation, and segregation are the rule, surveillance performs the work of control. Rebellions against state-sanctioned violence are inspired by feelings of both oppression and neglect, a contradiction at the core of capitalism's relationship to black people and black bodies. The supposed freedom and equality of the marketplace depend upon the contempt of the overseer.

Our American capitalism, founded in slavery, bore the antagonist twins of blackness and surveillance. Examining this birth and its afterlife, Simone Browne argues in her recent book Dark Matters, will help us come to grips with contemporary practices of surveillance that are often coded as technical and race-neutral advances in safety and security-and are usually anything but. Through her analyses of maps, newspaper articles, fugitive slave advertisements, slave narratives, personal correspondence, government documents, memoirs, and treaties, Brown exposes how blackness was shaped and produced through surveillance practices during slavery.

Slaves were a particularly unpredictable form of capital-they could congregate, organize, plot, and even escape-making their traceability essential. Browne examines the finely honed architecture of slave ships to show how important surveillance was to making black bodies into property, extracting wealth from their humanity. The capitalist discipline of black bodies starts with the design of this "maritime prison," the site of horrifying violence that thousands of men, women, and children did not survive. The strict compartmentalization of slave bodies, stacked one on top of the other, functioned to limit slave insurrection and other kinds of resistance. Furthermore, the documentation and examination practices that took place from slave trafficking ports on the African coast, through the Middle Passage voyage across the Atlantic, to slave auction blocks and plantations, prefigured modern carceral institutions meant to regulate and discipline black bodies.

Even in freedom, black bodies required surveillance. Government records such as the Book of Negroes instituted the tracking of black bodies through written text. This 18th-century document listed three thousand Black British Loyalists (self-emancipated former slaves) who boarded British ships to Canada during the American Revolution. The Book of Negroes, Browne argues, was the "first large-scale public record of black presence in North America," used by slave owners to distinguish fugitive slaves from freed black subjects.

Both before and after formal emancipation, capitalism marked blackness as a visible commodity. Defining the spaces where black bodies could or could not reside or move, what activities in which they could or could not engage, "racializing surveillance," as Browne names it, lay in what John Fiske calls the "power to define what is in or out of place." [1] Such social control, Browne notes, bound surveillance to the violent practices of making and deploying racial hierarchies that plantation owners and others could exploit for profit.

Accurately measuring, counting, and sorting black bodies also required constant visibility. So, slavers employed violent technologies like branding and "lantern laws" to account for slaves and deter escape. Lantern laws were instituted in cities like New York and Boston in the 18th century and required black, indigenous, and mixed-race slaves to carry candle lanterns after dark. Legislation like New York's "A Law for Regulating Negro and Indian Slaves in the Night Time," approved in March 1713, demonstrates how state-enacted technologies were used to surveil and control black populations. "Black luminosity" via lantern laws, as Browne suggests, operated as a "form of boundary maintenance occurring at the site of the black body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch, or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob."

The surveillance of unfree black bodies remained central to capitalism's dominance post-emancipation. After the Civil War, oppressive systems like "Black Codes," convict leasing, and sharecropping tied black bodies to the land, despite the fact that they were no longer legal property. These repressive measures generated significant revenue for several Southern states and were fundamental to the economy after slavery. States like Alabama relied heavily on convict leasing in coal mines, with nearly 73 percent of the state's total revenue coming from the system in the late 19th century.

The state-enacted Black Codes, in particular, both established the architecture of modern policing and ensured black people's limited access to capital. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains in 'From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Black Codes' were "imposed only on African Americans, criminalized poverty, movement, and even leisure." In some cases, laws prohibited the congregation of black people after dark and required black workers to be monitored by and in the service of their former owners. This legal subjugation of blacks in the postbellum South was justified under the logic of the tragically familiar language of "law and order." As Taylor argues, police were used to enforce various measures that limited black movement, black work, and even the right to accrue property.

Because capitalism has relied on the subjugation of black people as workers and largely excluded them from its material benefits, the specter of black uprising and criminality provokes police departments and other authorities to develop and adopt novel technologies of surveillance, like biometric measurements that verify, identify, and automate the production of bodily evidence. Deployed under a rhetoric of racial disinterest, these innovations draw on the long history of tracking blackness. They are far from identity-neutral. Recently, Georgetown University's Center for Privacy and Technology has found that police departments around the country use facial recognition software that track and racially profile African Americans disproportionately. [2] Biometric surveillance technologies form the background of urban life and continue to manage black freedom and mobility.

The protection of property underlies such quotidian acts of surveillance. In an effort to "curb shoplifting," Georgetown-area businesses worked with police through a mobile app, "Operation GroupMe," to secretly message each other about "potential suspects," who were almost always black. [3] Empowered by the ubiquity of surveillance and the ease of digital media, the race vigilante takes on the guise of the citizen shopkeeper.

In the post-civil-rights era, a black elite has emerged who have benefitted from the spoils of capitalism. They do not share the interests of the black poor or working class. As these elites have risen to political leadership they have intensified surveillance of those excluded from capitalism's prosperity. They have blamed "bad people" for making "bad choices," rhetorically cleaving black communities into deceitful criminals who must be monitored and virtuous citizens who deserve protection. The political elite then roll out more surveillance to protect precarious black wealth.

Taylor argues that surveillance also allows some political leaders to profit from the same population of poor black citizens they profess to protect. For example, Randy Primas, the first black mayor of Camden, NJ, supported the New Jersey Department of Corrections' construction of a $55 million prison in the largely black neighborhood of North Camden. Taylor quotes the mayor's bald declaration: "I view the prison as an economic development project. In addition, I think the surveillance from the two prison towers might stop some of the overt drug dealing in North Camden." Primas linked the building of prisons to increased employment, increased city revenue, and reduced crime. Yet this project also turned the landscape of North Camden into a prison itself. Watchtowers now surveil both those inside and outside the prison's gates. This kind of surveillance does more than impose the eye of the state on formally free neighborhoods; it marks North Camden as black, rendering the city subject to ever more monitoring.

It is because of this tacit connection between race, surveillance, and capitalism that, Taylor shows, we have seen the proliferation of the police state, expansion of the prison industrial complex, and laws putting more poor and working-class black people in debt and prison. No wonder, then, Black Lives Matter has emerged, even under the nation's first black president. Taylor argues that the movement constitutes a point along the decades-long arc of black community resistance to widespread police brutality and racial violence under capitalism. Over the past 40 years, we have encountered a War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and War on Terror, all of which increased surveillance and consolidated power in the hands of law enforcement. The proliferation of the police state, expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and laws putting more poor and working-class black people in debt and prison tie together race, surveillance, and capitalism in ways that both demand resistance and help to explain the rise of BLM.

State surveillance of BLM and similar organizations should be expected. Everyday practices of surveillance join the exceptional targeting of artists, writers, and musicians (especially hip-hop artists) under the guise of national security. [4] Extralegal programs like J. Edgar Hoover's infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which ran between 1956 and 1971, explicitly targeted and attempted to disrupt black civil rights organizations, activists, and leaders. Most recently, as detailed in a 2016 ACLU report, law enforcement agencies employed a powerful surveillance program using data from social media sites to track protest activity in Oakland and Baltimore. [5] Black Lives Matter has deftly employed social media to expose the killing of black men, women, and children at the hands of law enforcement, yet the medium is an especially ambivalent space, as government agencies track social media and employ surveillance tactics to monitor organizers and activists. [6]

How then can we transcend capitalism and challenge the strictures of surveillance? Browne employs the term "dark sousveillance" to introduce the "tactics employed to render one's self out of sight." Dark sousveillance, she argues, is a productive space "from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance." At the same time, exposure and visibility can be tactics of freedom, as for example in the use of camera phones to film police. Dark sousveillance can be a means of achieving parity with the state, Browne contends. "What does it mean," though, "when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?," as Audre Lorde famously asked. Lorde also provided an answer: "It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable." [7] Dark sousveillance offers critique, but not resistance. Acts of witnessing racializing surveillance have severe penalties. The civilians who filmed the state-inflicted deaths of Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, and Philando Castile were all subsequently arrested. None of the police officers has been convicted. We must use different tools.

Taylor raises a question parallel to Lorde's: whether the current economic and political conditions, structured by institutional racism, can be altered under capitalism. In other words, can we radically improve and humanize capitalism? The short answer is no. Capitalism continues to be exploited by elites to justify inequality. Rather than searching for new forms of capitalism, we ought to focus on alternatives.

Black enslavement was fundamental to the establishment and growth of capitalism and black oppression continues to feed it. Even black capitalists, Taylor argues, cannot hope to exist outside the constraints of white supremacy. Fighting capitalism requires coming together across the divisions and hierarchies that fuel it. With the recent election of Donald Trump as President, the imperative has only grown more urgent. Capitalism cannot be used to achieve black liberation. Only solidarity will free us all.

This review appeared at Public Books.

Notes

[1] John Fiske, "Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism," in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 15, no. 2 (1998), p. 81.

[2] See Craig Timberg, "Racial Profiling, by a Computer? Police Facial-ID Tech Raises Civil Rights Concerns," Washington Post, October 18, 2016.

[3] See "Hip Hop and the FBI: A Little-Known History," Esquire, June 4, 2014.

[4] Matt Cagle, "Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target Activists of Color," American Civil Liberties Union, October 11, 2016.

[5] See Terrence McCoy, "The Secret Surveillance of 'Suspicious' Blacks in One of the Nation's Poshest Neighborhoods," Washington Post, October 13, 2015.

[6] The Baltimore Police Department, for instance, has implemented various surveillance tools to listen in on calls and track mobile phones and developed secret aerial surveillance programs to trace vehicles and the movement of criminal suspects in the city. See George Joseph, "Exclusive: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter since Ferguson," The Intercept, July 24, 2015 ; Monte Reel, "Secret Cameras Record Baltimore's Every Move from Above," Bloomberg Businessweek, August 23, 2016.

[7] Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1979), in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Kitchen Table Press, 2015), p. 94.

ESPN'S Journal of Black Respectability Politics: The Undefeated, and the Surrender of the Black Middle Class

By Jon Jeter

". . . before you know it, we'll have Negro Imperialists."

- Fred Hampton

In a June 1st article for ESPN's new African-American focused property, the Undefeated, celebrity intellectual Michael Eric Dyson takes darker-skinned blacks to task for their begrudging refusal to exalt in the accomplishments of lighter-skinned blacks such as the National Basketball Association's two-time Most Valuable Player, Steph Curry.

"The resentment by darker blacks of the perceived and quite real advantages accorded to lighter blacks has sometimes led to a wholesale repudiation of all fairer-skinned blacks. There is, however, a big difference between asking for racial transparency in light privilege, and the unvarying treatment of fairer-skinned blacks as automatically guilty of exploiting their status."

As a work of either reportage or critical inquiry, Dyson's 2,000-word essay is an abysmal failure. Didactic, artless and populated with misshapen straw-men, it fails to identify a single African American who articulates anything resembling envy or disdain for Curry, let alone anyone whose resentment is grounded in his fair complexion. In fact, the two African Americans who Dyson quotes at length, current NBA player Kevin Durant, and the retired Hall-of-Famer Allen Iverson, are effusive in their praise of Curry.

But as a written reprimand to blackness, or a textbook example of how a feckless Black elite has corroborated the white settler state's attempt to alibi its criminal enterprise by manufacturing the Other, Dyson's critique is a singular achievement.

Consider that at no point in his polemic does Dyson mention the word "rape," for doing so would be tantamount to handing up an indictment for a 500-year-old crime spree that is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Virtually from the moment they alighted in the Americas, European expatriates set upon indigenous and African women, creating, from whole cloth, a language of sexual defilement - -mulattoes, octoroons, quadroons and Latinos - and giving birth, quite literally to the New World, and the Steph Currys that populate it.

"God, forgive us," writes a Civil-War era diarist wed to a South Carolina planter, "but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an inequity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."

It is unfathomable that the Ivy-League educated and employed Dyson, is unfamiliar with this history, or unaware that skin-tone has played no discernible role in the radical black political movements that are the sine qua non of liberal democracy in the US. Hence, the reddish-colored, first black mayor of Dyson's hometown of Detroit, the late Coleman Alexander Young, is as revered by African Americans in the Motor City as much - if not more - than the blue-black former mayor of Washington DC, Marion Barry.

Dyson's cognitive dissonance is hardly accidental and these clumsy but willful misrepresentations are a staple of the Undefeated, which is not an online chronicle of the African American experience so much as a literary journal of black respectability politics, or better yet, a declassified dossier of tribal dysfunction. Since it debuted in mid-May, the Undefeated´s virtually-all black staff has consistently trafficked in narratives in which history is inert, racism exists only inasmuch as it vexes Obama, and no injustice is so grave that it cannot be resolved by black folks pulling up their pants.

In his groundbreaking 1978 book, the late Edward Said posited that the West has historically sought to qualify its imperialism by assigning men of science and letters the exercise of shifting the blame for colonialism, from the colonizer, to the colonized.

Said named this brand of racist pseudo-science for the unfortunate term coined by the West to describe the Arab world to its East - - Orientalism - -and dated its practice as far back as France's 1798 invasion of Egypt, when Napoleon encouraged artists, writers, and anthropologists to re-imagine the Nile's inhabitants, or to Orientalize the Orient.

Of the famed French novelist's depiction of a 19th-century dancer, Said writes:

Flaubert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess (her) physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was "typically Oriental."

It does not require a postcolonial scholar to recognize the elasticity of Said's theory and how it provides a framework for contextualizing Rudyard Kipling's poetry, DW Griffith's landmark 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, King Baudouin extolling the civilizing virtues of Belgian colonialism on the eve of Congo's liberation in 1960, or the 2009 Sandra Bullock vehicle, the Blind Side. Orientalism even explains the 2003 remarks made by former Harvard College President Lawrence Summers when he sought to exorcise patriarchy from the body politic by wondering aloud if women aren't underrepresented in American laboratories because they lack the "aptitude" to succeed in math and science professions.

They do not, and the scientific consensus had said so for nearly 50 years.

Yet, if scholars define Orientalism as white people writing about people of color for white people, then the rise of a Black Jacobin class that is all-too-eager to validate a hierarchy in which they are invested has reformulated the colonial syntax. With the American Empire at its nadir and seeking both absolution and scapegoats, black journalists, academics, police, filmmakers and philanthropists in the Obama age are increasingly charged with Niggerizing the Nigger.

Orientalism is the new Black.

A May 18 Undefeated profile of the African American quarterback Robert Griffin III practically rebukes readers for believing their lying eyes. In 2012, Griffin set NFL rookie records for passer rating, and led the league in rushing yards-per carry. But his play tailed off sharply after the Washington Redskins' January 6, 2013 playoff loss when even a casual fan could plainly see that the rookie was hobbled and playing on an injured knee. And yet the veteran coach, Mike Shanahan - who once suggested in an interview that an All-Pro black quarterback was too dumb to understand the playbook - - refused to substitute for him until late in the contest.

"Look at his face, Daddy," former Washington Wizards center Etan Thomas quoted his seven-year old son, Malcolm, asking him in a Washington Post editorial published the day after the playoff game. "Why is he still playing if he is in that much pain?"

Seemingly intent on helping Shanahan land another coaching job, however, the Undefeated posited that Griffin is the real villain in this sporting drama, because, he's, well, uppity.

"Talk to people who worked with Griffin in Washington, and most will tell you he had chances - too many - to salvage his starting position and that many of his problems started with him. Griffin was too focused on his endorsements. He overindulged in social media. He alienated teammates by deflecting blame for his poor performances and ran his mouth too much in interviews. He should have spent more time in the film room and less on enhancing the cult of RG3."

Why would African-Americans traffic in such seditious caricatures, particularly at a moment when dehumanizing stereotypes conspire with wrenching austerity policies to produce material circumstances reminiscent of 1930s Germany when a demagogue blamed that country's immiseration on a population he categorized as nonwhite?

I was first confronted with the notion of black Orientalists when I read a fawning 2005 New York Times profile of Harvard Economist Roland J. Fryer, whose research explores genetics as a critical factor in racial disparities in intelligence. That no such disparities exist did little to discourage former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein from hiring the African American Fryer as a consultant to help untangle the student achievement gap.

Fryer was followed in quick succession by the likes of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, Dyson, and most recently, the historical illiteracy of Ta-nehisi Coates who asserts that Obama is the heir to Malcolm X's political legacy, and that blacks should eschew the game-changing traditions of political resistance for a monthly reparationscheck, cut by the US Treasury.

To be sure, financial remuneration partly explains the phenomena of Black Orientalists, but more than anything, the defection of the Black Vichy class is grounded in the twilight of the American century, and the post-industrial epoch that Gramsci refers to as the interregnum, in which the "old is dying, and the new cannot be born."

This was also the case a century ago when a precarious new economy and social order was beginning to take shape and mobs of alienated white youths terrorized the country in waves, climaxing in 1919 when racial violence washed over the country like a foamy, heaving sea.

Atlanta's Black unwashed rescued the city's Black elite from marauding white mobs in 1906, dutifully patrolling segregated neighborhoods with pistols and shotguns a-ready. When the smoke cleared, Atlanta's Urban League sought to reassure their white patrons of their fealty by organizing neighborhood clubs to teach "better housekeeping" practices to black maids and washerwomen, Karen Ferguson wrote in her book, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta.

The domestics complied initially, listening intently to lectures on cleanliness and punctuality. But when, they began to wonder, would the forum address the subject of pay raises for making an extra effort? Told that no pay raises would be forthcoming, the black domestics bolted, giving their Urban League sisters the side-eye as they left.

Similarly, an effort to organize black workers at the cigarette-maker RJ Reynolds in 1919, was met with opprobrium by Black mercantilists in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. According to Robert Rodgers Korstad, author of Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South, one Black banker, J.H. Hill, implored "my people" not to be tempted by "strangers. . . There is no need for a poor laboring class of people to try to make demands on any rich corporations. We are dependent upon these corporations for employment"

Underwhelmed, black tobacco workers boycotted stores that did not support the union, and threatened to withdraw their money from Hill's bank if he didn't relent. Conversely, Reynolds management tried to slow the employees' momentum by proposing a company or "yellow dog" union, recruiting another black merchant, Simon Atkins, to champion its advantages at a meeting with workers. But, Rodgers Korstad wrote, "Black workers. . .did not look to the middle class for their cues" and responded with "hoots and jeers."

Blacks' frustration with what W.E.B. DuBois famously heralded as the Negro's most "talented tenth" detonated following the 1931 arrest of nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight car just outside of Scottsboro, Alabama. The NAACP's timid, ineffective legal defense paled in comparison to that of the Communist Party who hoped to make inroads in the country by defiantly putting American racism itself on trial, organizing rallies as far away as Chicago, New York, London, Moscow and Johannesburg, and featuring as actors rather than victims, the plain-spoken but sympathetic mothers of the accused teenagers.

Initially reluctant to even accept the case for fear of tarnishing their brand, the NAACP's attitude towards the mothers was one of condescension; they soon withdrew from the case, leaving the Communists' to eventually win the release of all 9 accused.

Six days after excoriating Griffin, the Undefeated published an article by the veteran sportswriter Michael Wilbon that parrots the NAACP's gradualist approach in the Scottsboro case. Too clever by half, Wilbon's essay laments black indifference to the the new analytics methodology that is all the rage in NBA front offices. Wilbon dismisses out-of-hand the trope that blacks are incapable of understanding mathematical concepts, and while he stipulates that there is no demonstrable value-added to analytics in evaluating players, he still urges blacks to assimilate.

"For more than a few moments I felt guilty as hell for hating the intrusion of advanced analytics as much as I generally do. Because even though the reliance on this stuff seems to be a new safe haven for a new "Old Boy Network" of Ivy Leaguers who can hire each other and justify passing on people not given to their analytic philosophies, an entire group of people can't simply refuse to participate in something as important as this phenomenon. The cynical me can easily make the argument this is a new path to exclusion, intentional or not. Or is it creating an entirely new way of approaching sports that's reserved for the few?"

In Ferguson's book, Black Atlanta professionals wrote to New Deal bureaucrats to offer their services as race interlocutors in an effort to "help the Negro masses to adjust themselves to the type or world in which they must live."

The problem is that the Negro masses had no intention of living in such an immutable world, and in the days, months and years following the Scottsboro Boys' arrest, began to join Communists, and other working-class white allies to turn bad jobs into good ones, democratize the state, and create the singular achievement of the Industrial Age: the American middle class.

During World War 2, the Black RJ Reynolds employees who the Winston Salem elite had earlier scolded, collaborated with their white co-workers to integrate the union, but they didn't stop there, using the reconstituted collective as a springboard to produce what is likely the closest iteration this country has ever seen to the Paris commune. Led by an African-American, lesbian Marxist named Moranda Smith, Local 22 promptly proceeded to register thousands of African American voters, who in turn helped elect a black minister to the City Council, the first since Reconstruction to win an election in the Deep South against a white candidate. With their proxies at City Hall, Local 22 spearheaded efforts to build public housing, adopt price controls, improve schools, and expand bus service and jobless benefits.

Wilbon's call for black acquiesce mirrors that of his antecedents in Atlanta, North Carolina and Scottsboro, and like the Undefeated itself, does not account for the laboring classes' cycle of resistance, triumph, reversal, replayed endlessly as if on loop.

In the Orientalist war of narratives, the Undefeated, ironically enough, views African Americans as a thoroughly defeated people, and the Black elite as a kind of advance squadron trapped behind enemy lines, its reportage a kind of Morse code, tapped out daily on fiber-optic cables to warn the rear encampments that we are hopelessly outgunned.

"Do-Stop-Not-Stop-Attempt-Stop-A-Stop-Counteroffensive-Stop."

But Wilbon, the staff of the Undefeated, and the Black middle class writ large would be wise to revisit the words of an African American named William H. Crogman, who in the days following the 1906 Atlanta riots, wrote a letter to a northern white liberal crediting the Black proletariat-lumpen and otherwise- for coming to the defense of the black elites who lived in an aspirational neighborhood known as Dark Town.

"Here we have worked and prayed and tried to make good men and women of our colored population, and at our very doorstep the whites kill these good men," wrote Crogman, who would go on to become president of Clark College. "But the lawless element in our population, the element we have condemned fights back, and it is to these people that we owe our lives."

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Japan: The Next Battleground for the Left

By Emma Yorke

Anime, manga, Japanese video games. I love it all. I found Japan through my love of their art, music, and other media - I fully admit to being one of those dorky girls that's into all that stuff. Japan is a complex place; so much is nuanced, from their language to their rich, ancient history. The more you study Japan, the more questions you have...and I know I'm far from the first person to have made that observation.

But I think my most troubling question is political. Is Marx welcome in Japan? What does their current social and political landscape tell us, and how does it reflect what's going on in the U.S. right now?

On the surface, the similarities between America and Japan are striking. Japan's government is being hijacked by militant far-right nationalists, their airwaves are overrun with the shrieking of a small but really loud faction of nazi internet trolls, and tension is growing against ethnic minorities. There's a hostile current running through the Japanese working class, resentful of South Koreans for causing - or so they believe - a lot of the troubles Japanese people face. A group called Zaitokukai, short for Zainichi Tokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai (在日特権を許さない市民の会 - Association of Citizens Against the Special Privileges of the Zainichi), has formed with the express purpose of denying rights to Zainichi, or permanent Korean residents of Japan. They're a small fascist political action group, but they've definitely made waves since their formation in 2006, launching online harassment campaigns against prominent Korean writers and activists. It's easy to look at them and see the likes of Gamergate, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Breitbart, which is frightening because they're not afraid to inflict violence to achieve their aims (they've been arrested for fighting counter-protesters more than once). With a membership of between 9,000 and 15,000, they're hardly a mass movement. What they are, though, is loud and determined, and they're getting widespread attention...they've even got world-famous voice actresses preaching their platform. That's like One Direction campaigning for Trump.

I brought up Zaitokukai because they're a good example of grassroots ethno-nationalism in action. Fascism tends to start at the bottom, and it usually starts small, just by tapping into populist anger. What we're seeing across the world, and especially here in the U.S., is that when the working class gets swindled by big business and trade deals that only benefit the top 1%, it seems easier for so many struggling workers to look at "the other" in our society and blame them. People are discouraged and angry, and they're not looking left for the answers. Instead, the far-right seems like a more tempting solution to their problems. In Japan, angry working people are taking out their frustration on ethnic Koreans. Here in the U.S., a billionaire con man from Manhattan rode working-class rage to the White House, even as many people are still learning what the word "socialism" means. We're taking our economic anger out on Latinx people, and our police are allowed to murder black people at will.

When things get bad, it's way easier to scapegoat our minorities than it is to stop and look up to see the plutocrats sneering down at us.

A failure on the part of the U.S. Left has been for us to ignore just how deeply capitalism is entrenched in a given society. Here in America, it's easy to just look back to McCarthy and the Red Scare and blame that for American anti-left indoctrination. But it might go deeper than that. Japan has been deeply classist for centuries, and remains so today. Classism and capitalism go hand in hand, since one tends to reinforce the other. When you consider the 2012 case of Rina Bovrisse, an employee of Prada Japan, you see that misogyny is also part of the mix - a Tokyo District Court threw out her lawsuit against Prada Japan, even when CEO Davide Sesia claimed that he was "ashamed of her ugliness". Sesia once told Bovrisse that fifteen shop managers and assistant managers "needed to disappear" because they were "ugly" or "fat." Women over 30 are considered "old," and Prada outlet stores are commonly called "garbage bins for old ladies." The fact that one of the country's highest courts didn't take this woman's lawsuit seriously, forcing her to take her case to the UN, says a lot about the country's deeply reactionary culture. A patriarchal society that views women as commodities is a fertile seedbed for exploitation; capitalism thrives on inequality.

That's not to say that there isn't a vast desire for equality in Japan. At one of Zaitokukai's anti-Korean rallies, huge numbers of Otaku (anime fans) showed up as counter-protestors, holding signs condemning racism and shouting anti-racist slogans. Japan has a strong, growing feminist consciousness as well -- feminist author Mitsu Tanaka has been agitating for women's equality since the 1970's. "I realized that men only saw women as a convenience - either as mothers or 'toilets,'" Tanaka says (using the word "toilet" to refer to a repository of male bodily fluids). "While it might have been difficult (to stand up to men) as individuals, it ultimately became possible when women stood together, side by side."

Tanaka's call for female solidarity, as well as the young anti-racist crowds coming out to support their Korean friends and neighbors, seems to be a yearning for a true leftist movement in Japan. Over the last decade or so, the Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党, Nihon Kyōsan-tō) seems to have steadily gained ground; as of 2015, the JCP jumped to 21 seats in the House of Representatives, making them the world's largest non-governing communist party. As their membership surged after the financial crisis of 2008, it seems easy to see that many Japanese people are looking to the left for solutions to working-class problems. The Japanese Communist Party calls for an end to the long military alliance with the US, the removal of American bases and armed forces from Japanese soil, and forcing North Korea to the bargaining table by nonmilitary measures. On the equality front, the JCP promotes legalization of civil unions for same-sex couples. This is a highly radical stance in a country where women are still required to take a man's last name when she marries, though the measure might seem halfhearted to westerners. Josef Stalin once deeply criticized the JCP for their pacifist stance and their reluctance to fight a campaign of covert warfare against the Imperial government. The JCP's stance on the Emperor may be the most controversial; the Central Committee promises that, under their leadership, the Emperor would be allowed to remain, so long as the role of Emperor becomes purely symbolic. This position has chafed leftists for decades.

Naturally, a global working-class consciousness might be more necessary now than ever before; it's the only force that can stop the rise of fascism across the world. Whether it's through the Japanese Communist Party or a yet-unknown radical coalition, we westerners need to lend all the support we can to our leftist comrades in Japan. Socialism in action would start a brilliant chain reaction across every facet of Japanese society, and its effects would arguably be more visible there than anywhere else.

Sources

The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21648771-communists-become-japans-strongest-political-opposition-provinces-red-revival

Japan Times: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2015/10/03/lifestyle/women-japan-unite-examining-contemporary-state-feminism/#.WEHPdX3nVG0

America Is Indefensible: Reflections on Donald Trump and American History

By Adrienne Cabouet

Some people say Trump is America's Mussolini. Some other people say Trump is America's Berlusconi. Silly people say Trump is America's Hitler.

Here's a thing that no one says:

The world's first concentration camps were built in Africa. Thirty years before the Holocaust, Germany murdered over one hundred thousand Africans in three years in Namibia. From 1904 to 1907, Africans were driven into the desert to die or placed into concentration camps where they were worked and starved to death by the thousands.

Today, seventy years after the Holocaust (the capital H one where mostly white people died, not any of the THOUSANDS of lower letter h ones where brown people died), Germany still maintains a colonial presence in Namibia. Indigenous Africans live in poverty and squalor yards away from Nazi war memorials, windmills, and expensive high-rise condos filled with openly racist German investors and 'entrepreneurs.' Today the land where the concentration camps stood is a popular tourist destination for visiting Westerners.

Here's another thing no one says:

Hitler literally came out and said the tactics of extermination the Nazis used during the Holocaust were inspired by American treatment of Natives in the US.

As John Toland writes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Adolf Hitler: "Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity. He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government's forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination."

And yet: when the capital-h Holocaust happened, Americans and Europeans (the white ones) reacted in shock. HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED, they said. WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?

Africans and Native peoples were not shocked. The colonized people of "the third world" were not shocked. We watched the West go to war with itself over who would have control of the darker nations with weariness and caution. We understood then, as we do now, the true nature of Western so-called civilization. No matter who won, we lost.

America Has Never Been Great

American greatness, upheld by Donald Trump in his much derided but now iconic campaign slogan but also by Hillary Clinton in her many unapologetic exhortations of this country's exceptionalism, has always been fueled by atrocities and by the deaths and dehumanization of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. America's foreign and domestic policy is, and has always been, genocide, theft, torture, slavery, and organized campaigns of sexual abuse and rape that have spanned the entire globe.

Everyone knows about this country's birth in blood - few people will argue about the barbarity that characterized the Euro-American settler conquest of this nation: approximately 110 million Natives and over 30 million Africans raped, sold, enslaved, and murdered so the American empire could be born. But how many people know about the 2 million Filipinos who died in the Philippine-American war? Or the 1.5 million Haitians worked to death on sugar plantations during the American occupation of the island? Or the 3 million Arabs and Muslims dead from American sanctions and interventions in the Middle East? Or the tens of millions of Indigenous people murdered and disappeared in Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Columbia, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Cuba, equatorial Guinea, and Mexico by dictators, secret police, and cartels installed, funded, and trained by the US government?

Scratch the surface of any part of American history and you will find atrocities barely hidden beneath the myth. It is these atrocities which have made America the most powerful country in the world. The American Empire is an explicitly white nationalist, settler colonial project whose economic foundation is genocide and theft targeting the darker nations and peoples of this planet. There is no you, America, without the death of us. It is only with this context that one can provide a proper analysis of Donald Trump and what he and his so-called movement represent.

Donald Trump as a candidate and Trumpism as a movement do not represent an aberration or departure for American politics. They are the inevitable consequence of American nationalism and the violent expansion of the American Empire.

Every single horrifying thing that Americans quake in fear of Donald Trump bringing to the US, the US has inflicted in their name - often with their enthusiastic support - on people all over the world and within these borders. The difference is that the victims of these accepted American atrocities were African. Arab. Asian. Native. Poor. Brown. Women, queer folks, and children. Within the expansive cloud of hot bullshit known as Western conscience and Western morality and in particular American exceptionalism, those lives do not matter. Those lives are slaughtered so that the last gasp of the American dream may live. The sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are more or less ok with this reality as long as they don't get it too. The ones who think they have the moral high ground - the 'progressives' - will tsk tsk before ultimately hand waving it all away as a necessary evil.

But the thing about building an entire culture and economic system rooted in the exploitation of huge swaths of life on this planet is that it warps your humanity. It makes monsters. Monsters are real and in this context they are distinctly Euro-American, pink faced, stubby fingered, and they have bad hair.

You CAN NOT separate the brutal reality of American domestic and foreign policy from the conditions that gave birth to Trump. You CAN NOT separate Trump the candidate from the history of this country and what it has done. You CAN NOT hope to stop the ideology and consequence that Trump represents by voting in a person who will in every way continue the legacy of brutality, depravity, and pain that turned America into a superpower except this time wearing a three thousand dollar pantsuit and kitten heels.

Donald Trump is America, and America is Donald Trump. Americans cannot run from him. They also can't save themselves by voting for the more politically sophisticated lady version of him. By refusing to acknowledge the basic reality of their history, Americans are guaranteeing that another, much worse Trump will come.

So, What Do We Do?

So what do we do? Where do we go? How do we stop the inevitable rise of a new American fascism and how do we survive these times?

Americans must divest from empire. They must refuse to be complicit with atrocities committed in their name. They must reclaim their humanity and understand that their fate is tied to the fate of the rest of life on Earth. Americans must reject the parasitic relationship they have developed with the rest of humanity and they must join the growing revolutionary anti-imperialist movement while organizing to resist the empire's interventions abroad. Americans must struggle in solidarity with the global south and the colonized people of this land to overthrow this empire, destroy capitalism, and with it racism and white supremacy. They must stand on the side of the coming global revolution.

In practice this looks like rigorous study and political education focused on unlearning the indoctrination of American nationalism and learning the true history of the American empire. This looks like a complete rejection of so-called lesser evil politics. This looks like creating and supporting programs of dual power like the AAPRP breakfast program and the School of African Roots here in Portland and MXGM's Cooperation Jackson program in Mississippi. This looks like materially supporting the resistance of colonized people who are rising up all over the world and right here in the US: this means getting the fuck to North Dakota to resist DAPL with the Sioux Nation if you can or sending them money and supplies if you can't. That means moving beyond just saying "Black Lives Matter" to organizing for police and prison abolition, helping your community develop alternatives to keep each other safe, talking to your racist ass relatives, and spreading the word about and supporting the ongoing national prison strike, the largest in American history.

Above all it means understanding that you can't vote your way to liberation and feeling bad isn't enough. Realize that capitalism, imperialism, racism, and fascism are a feedback loop. The bigotry that you allow your state and media manufacture at home, provides justification for American barbarism here and abroad.

Divest from empire and reclaim your humanity.

This was originally posted at Adrienne's blog, The Race Card.

*The title of this essay is inspired by a line in Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism . You should read it.

White Workers Resisting Capitalism and White Supremacy: An Interview with RedNeck Revolt

By Devon Bowers

Below is the transcript of an interview I had with the admin of the Facebook page RedNeck Revolt, where we discuss the history of the page/organization, white working-class resistance to capitalism, and how the white working class is being manipulated by Trump.

So, what exactly led you to create Red Neck Revolt?

Redneck Revolt came out of the original work of the John Brown Gun Club, a working group of the Kansas Mutual Aid Collective based out of Lawrence, Kansas from 2002-2008. The John Brown Gun Club focused on attempting to simultaneously grow a militant and armed culture within already existing liberatory and revolutionary movements, and attempting to stem the tide of right wing reactionary recruitment within white working class communities. Our work had two main focuses then: providing armed community and tactical defense trainings to build the capacity of our movements and demystify the firearm, and to be present at social and economic gatherings of white working people where groups like the Klan, Minutemen, and white reactionary militias recruited. Over the course of several years, we trained hundreds of members of social movement organizations from across the country, as well as attended dozens of gun shows and similar events to head off racist recruitment.

When Kansas Mutual Aid ended its work in 2008, the John Brown Gun Club went with it. In early 2009, Redneck Revolt was founded in Colorado, and enjoyed a limited life within local gun shows as well as being present at Tea Party rallies in the Denver area. Redneck Revolt started to focus less on armed defense within already existing social movement organizations, and to refocus on the other goal of the John Brown Gun Club: to engage in anti-racist movement building within the white working class.

Redneck Revolt went on hiatus in late 2009. A decision was made to dust off the concept and the project in June of 2016, as the rise of street level fascism and reactionary ideology has swept across the United States in response to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. Several of us felt that it was far past time for this project to be active again. We feel that the specific analysis offered by Redneck Revolt is essential at this historical moment as part of a multi-faceted strategy for combating this rise in reactionary politics.

Do any of you have a particular political ideology? If so, what led you to it? If not, why?

Overwhelmingly, our members are anti-capitalist libertarians, or anarchists. Our politics are colored by primarily coming from working class communities and seeing the failures of capitalism and the nation-state project that protects it. We come out of communities already deeply seething with distrust for politicians, bosses, rich people, and law enforcement.

This class background and a focus on class within our organizing also makes us markedly different than groups like SURJ (Standing Up For Racial Justice) in that we are organizing around the impact that white supremacy has had on the white working class, and not just our roles in replicating and perpetuating white supremacy.

What we see is that historically, the white working class continues to align themselves as the foot soldiers of capitalism by adhering to a politics of white supremacy. We end up becoming the enforcers of the rule and will of the capitalist and political classes. Our goal is to push the understanding that this doesn't just harm, threaten, and destroy communities of color, but also ends up ensuring that working class whites accumulate little to no economic or political power as well. White supremacy is a tool used against us, even as we end up being the people wielding it against people who are not white.

We don't believe in a politics built upon white guilt, white savior paternalism, or merely being proper or good allies to other people's struggle. We see our struggle as enmeshed within the struggle of working class communities of color. We understand that we have a stake in seeing white supremacy abolished and capitalism and the nation-state project also dismantled and replaced with a truly liberatory, social, economic, and political project.

Talk about white resistance to capitalism. It isn't something we really learn about, beyond some minor discussions in school about the US labor movement.

White working people have been resisting capitalism since its inception. Just as white poor and working people resisted Feudalism and all other forms of economic and political subservience. Whenever a system of domination has been cemented into dominant culture, there has been resistance to it. From the Luddites in Europe, to the Paris Commune, to the revolutions that waged across Spain and Russia, to the massive labor movements here in the United States, there has been resistance to capitalism.

However, the times that this resistance has been truly potent in North America, is when white workers also see a joint struggle with communities of color and start to build movements across race, gender, religion, etc.. to create a truly revolutionary working class movement. We can see historical moments like that embodied in struggles like the Redneck War/Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, when thousands of white workers, alongside black and Italian migrant miners, created an armed insurrection against the mining bosses and fought for nine days in open warfare. The U.S. Army was brought in to quell the worker insurrection. Ultimately, the strike was defeated by overwhelming force, but the lessons remain: the gravest threat to capitalism is when white working people see that they have mutual interests with working people of color. When white workers stop being the foot soldiers of repression and oppression and instead fight for liberation of all people, the capitalist class is in real trouble.

How did Socialists and Communists in the 19th and 20th centuries attempt to bridge the racial gap between all workers?

While not necessarily a Communist or Socialist, we can't really talk about attempts to "bridge the racial gap between all workers" in the 19th century without talking about John Brown and the somewhat limited legacy of white militant resistance to chattel slavery in the early to mid 1800's. While John Brown was not the only militant white to aid in the struggle against slavery, he was perhaps the most effective and has become the symbol of white resistance to white supremacy.

Brown believed that whites had to put their lives on the line and wage a revolutionary war against slavery and servitude. And he did just that. He helped wage an intense war in Kansas and Missouri for the abolition of slavery, and then eventually led a small armed band to seize and briefly hold the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry (in what was then Virginia, but now West Virginia). Brown and nearly all of his co-combatants paid the ultimate price for their attempted insurrection. But Harper's Ferry became a pivotal moment that propelled the country toward what would be the Civil War.

Socialist, communist, and anarchist organizing in the late 19th century and early 20th century had a unique presence in recent migrant communities, mobilizing poor and working class migrant labor for strikes and other workplace action. Liberatory organizers pushed for the desegregation of trade unions, as well as building inclusive unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, that focused on organizing all workers, regardless of race, religion, language, or gender.

Later in the 20th century, one of the most important political formations of recent history was created, when the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Chicago allied itself with formations from a variety of national-liberation and working class struggles and created the Rainbow Coalition (not to be confused with the reactionary formation of the same name started by Reverend Jesse Jackson). The Rainbow Coalition was a street level working class formation that brought together groups like the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, Brown Berets, I Wor Kuen, and Young Patriots (among other organizations) to form a cross race movement against capitalism.

This single act by Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party perhaps represents one of the most potent and dangerous efforts of the BPP, bringing together, black, brown, white, and Asian working class youth into a street level movement that could threaten the very foundations of white supremacy and capitalism in the United States. Ultimately, Fred Hampton would be assassinated for his efforts at building the Rainbow Coalition among other successes of his organizing in Chicago.

Would you say that there is currently a racial gap between workers, given the tensions surrounding immigration?

Definitely. Migration has always been among the factors that splits the working class in the United States and internationally. It was this conflict between migrant workers and "nativist" workers in the late 19th century and early 20th century that made it difficult at many junctures for the efforts of organized labor to be more effective. This was one of the main reasons why the Battle of Blair Mountain was such a potent threat. Members of the United Mine Workers had started to work directly with and encourage union membership of not only black workers, but also migrant workers, primarily Italians, who had been shipped into the region to destabilize worker cohesion and union organizing.

Migrants and people of color become easy scapegoats for the failures of capitalism. As long as you can blame some outsider for the problems you and your community are facing, you don't look at the real enemy: the primarily white rich class profiting off everyone else's misery and exploitation.

Would you say that due to this economic climate of joblessness, free trade deals, and outsourced labor, it is easier to espouse an anti-capitalist ideology? That people are more receptive to it?

We are at a historical moment where many people from a broad spectrum of the working class are truly questioning capitalism. However, being anti-capitalist is not enough. In fact, being anti-capitalist but also reactionary can be genocidal. As Fascism is also inherently an anti-capitalist ideology, we have to understand that at this historical moment, when many are suffering under capitalism, and looking for better ways to live, that the working class, and particularly the white working class, is much more susceptible to reactionary and fascistic ideologies and influences. It is precisely because capitalism is a failure for nearly all people, including the white working class, that white supremacy has a foothold in the first place.

We, as people who want a liberatory world, must be very committed at this historical moment to working within the white working class to help change the trajectory away from reactionary and white supremacist politics. We have to not only speak from some moral platitude about how white supremacy is "wrong". We have to speak to the physical conditions of working class communities. We have to be able to show white working people that their misery is not caused by black, brown, or migrant working people. We have to be able to help point them at the actual enemy: the rich, mostly white people profiting at our communities' expense.

People are becoming more desperate as capitalism continues to unravel. Will we just let them become the shock troops of a new version of white supremacy? Or will we be there to show an alternative?

Given the recent events in Dallas, what do you think are going to be the short-term effects? We are already seeing stories being spread such as there being a plot to kill Baton Rouge cops.

Obviously the game has changed somewhat, especially for those of us who espouse armed defense as a viable tactic within our toolbox. However, something important and remarkable happened after the Dallas and Baton Rouge shootings that didn't happen after the assassination of police officers in New York City in 2014: the street movement intensified. After the attacks in New York City, the movement recoiled and allowed some relative social peace to return. The opposite was true after the incidents in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Being in the streets in the immediate aftermath, nearly no one was talking about Dallas or the police being shot. It was nearly impossible for the energy to be redirected or recuperated by the political class.

However, one immediate outcome that we must respond to is the increased response by right wing paramilitary formations to street level demonstrations by organizations like Black Lives Matter. In Phoenix, Oregon, Missouri, and other locales, there were immediately reports of demonstrations having sizeable armed reactionary elements standing against them. We have to prepare for the armed right wing to have a renewed and sizable response to our demonstrations and protests.

This is definitely the wrong time to be talking about disarming our own social movements.

What do you make of the fact, as was noted in the article This Was All Inevitable, that "the same right-wing reactionaries who call on people to arm themselves against their despotic government will rush to the defense of law and order and the state, and the police who serve these ends?"

The white working class has steadily been pushed to have more allegiance to those who protect what they assume are white interests, even if in doing so, these same white working folks contradict their supposedly deeply held stances on the state. The reactionary elements of the white working class tend to be anti-state until the topics of border patrol or law and order are discussed. It's precisely because these white working people have been fooled into thinking their interests are determined by their race, or the relative privileges they receive because they are white or "legally" in this country. However, for most of these people, this choice isn't as intentionally calculated as it may seem from the outside.

How is the white working class getting played by Trump? Do you think that the situation will worsen when Trump isn't elected?

The white working class gets played by all sides; we should be clear on that. When it comes to institutional organizations and political parties, we get played by the right wing, and we definitely get played by the left wing. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have the interests of any members of the working class at heart.

But Trump is speaking a language that the white working class understands and can relate to, even using some language from more liberatory elements of the left when discussing economics and conditions within working class communities. He stands against Free Trade, for example, a hallmark of globalized capitalism. He talks about bringing jobs back to the United States. And then he mixes in attacks on migrants and other xenophobic remarks that speak to the fear in the white community. He plays off the fear and misery that white working people feel. He speaks in clear and easy to understand soundbites. Although he is a billionaire, he has convinced millions that he speaks for them and their conditions.

The problem is that for decades now, those of us on the liberatory left have abandoned the white working class to the right wing. We don't enter those communities to do the hard work of organizing. We have relegated white working people to be backwards and inherently racist. While groups like SURJ and other "anti-racist" white groups use the same language of white supremacy to dictate that white people all experience the same privileges and power within our society, regardless of class or real economic or political power, upper class liberals have consistently positioned themselves as being superior or better to working class whites, especially from rural areas. We have all created a situation where working class whites have been alienated and pushed toward the right wing, where reactionaries stand with open arms to welcome white working people into the fold.

This is not to say that the white working class has not historically earned some of this venom and derision. After all, the white working class has overwhelmingly found itself on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of the struggle of other working class people. But that said, how have the efforts of those on the Left helped cement that relationship? How has the Left been complicit, especially in the last twenty years, to handing the white working class on a platter over to the racist right wing?

Whether Trump wins or loses, the terrain is dangerous and deadly at this current moment. Which brings us back to one of the other main focuses of our former work with the John Brown Gun Club that we want to revisit and revive. We need real formulated responses for the upsurge in reactionary and racist violence. We need armed community defense programs in every community. We need to be ready to rapidly respond to the armed right wing threat that menaces our communities. We need to stop being reactionaries when it comes to the topic of armed defense. We are approaching truly dangerous times. Will we be ready?

In what ways can white people support Black Lives Matter?

Again, it's important to conceptualize struggle in a way that does away with moral platitudes and calls for white people to feel guilt for their situations. It's nearly impossible to get most white working people to admit they have some relative privilege in society and that racism does in fact exist, when they are struggling to make ends meet and not get evicted from their decaying home. So, we must first understand that until we start to build movements in a way where white working class people also see that their interests are tied in ending white supremacy, white working class folks will consistently be found on the wrong side of social struggles including Black Lives Matter.

It is up to us then, as whites, to organize within white working class communities, speaking to the conditions on the ground, and building off the rich history and culture of white working people standing in solidarity with poor and working people of color to challenge capitalist, state, and white supremacist power. Putting out ally checklists and having endless workshops on white privilege will never cut it, and has helped maintain the situation we find ourselves in. We need people on the ground. At the gun shows, at the NASCAR races, at the swap meets and flea markets... We need people in the white working class communities speaking their language and bringing them over to the a liberatory political orientation. We need to be able to relate the conditions that white working people face to the conditions on the ground in communities of color.

We have to abandon paternalistic ally politics that speak of white working class people through the same language of white supremacy. White working people do not have more in common with white rich people merely because we are all white. We have more in common with working class people from all races and religions. Until we as anti-racist white working people put in the work to shed light on that reality to others from our community, then we are failing.

Black Lives Matter and communities of color don't need more feel good white allies. They need white accomplices who are preventing other whites from being the footsoldiers of genocide and colonial capitalism and bringing those whites over to our side. The real question is whether other white people are up to that task. Because we have a lot of work to do, and the current efforts of the vast majority of "anti-racist" whites are more counter productive than anything else at creating this reality.

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Violence, Counter-Violence, and the Question of the Gun

By Devon Bowers and Colin Jenkins

In June 2016, the Democrats had a sit-in on the House floor to push for gun legislation that had been blocked. It has been noted by numerous writers the myriad of problems with this bill[1][2] [3] as well as the hypocrisy of the sit-in itself.[4] However, this article is to talk about something deeper: the question of violence, so-called "gun control," and how these issues relate to politics and the working-class majority in its place within the socio-capitalist hierarchy.

There are arguably three main types of violence which will be premised in this analysis: state violence, group violence, and revolutionary violence. The first two forms of violence, coming from the state and groups empowered by the status quo, are designed to oppress. The third form, coming from revolutionaries and the systematically oppressed, is designed to strike back at this oppression for the purpose of liberation. The first two types (state and group) are violent, or offensive, by nature. The last type (revolutionary) is counter-violent, or defensive, by nature.

State Violence

Violence and politics are historically intertwined, so much so that the definition of the state is "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." [5] Due to this monopoly of violence, the state is able to put restrictions on what kinds of weapons people can have, and if they can have any at all. Because of the state's monopoly on the use of violence, which is directed at citizens of that state whenever deemed necessary, the issue of "gun control" is rather peculiar. It is also fairly unique to the United States, a country that was born at the hands of the gun, and a country that has been largely shaped by the degrees of "liberty" reflected in gun ownership among the populace. In modern society, gun control seems like a common-sense measure as it is quite obvious to many that people shouldn't have the right to possess tanks, Javelins, Scuds, nuclear weapons, and other military-grade weaponry. However, as technology in weaponry increases, so too does the power of the state in its monopoly of violence. Because of this natural progression of state power based solely in military hardware, a side effect of gun control is that it creates a polarization of power between the state and its citizenry. In other words, the state continues to build its arsenal with more powerful and effective weaponry, while the citizenry continues to face restrictions on access to weaponry. While this scenario may seem reserved for the Alex-Jones-watching, prepper-obsessed fringes, the reality is that, within an economic system (capitalism) that naturally creates extreme hierarchies and masses of dispossessed people, it is (and has been) a serious problem in the context of domestic political and social movements.

In the U.S. (as with many countries), there are underlying class and racial issues related to the state's monopoly of violence and its restriction of access to guns for its citizens. Looking from a historical perspective, when it comes to violence at the hands of the state, it is regularly used on the side of capital. One only need look at the history of the American labor movement during the first half of the twentieth century, which was an extremely violent time. Within the context of class relations under capitalism, whereas the state represents moneyed interests and a powerful minority, the working-class majority has faced an uphill battle not only in its struggle to gain basic necessities, but also in its residual struggle against an increasingly-armed state apparatus that is inherently designed to maintain high levels of dispossession, poverty, and income inequality. A primary example of the state using violence to aid capital is the Ludlow Massacre.

In the year 1913, in the southern Colorado counties of Las Animas and Huerfano, miners (with the help of the United Mine Workers of America) decided to strike. They argued for union recognition by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, an increase in wages, and an eight-hour work day, among other things. In response, the company kicked a number of miners off of the company land, and brought in the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency which specialized in breaking coal strikes. The Agency initiated a campaign of harassment against the strikers, which "took the form of high-powered searchlights playing over the colonies at night, murders, beatings, and the use of the 'death special,' an improvised armored car that would periodically spray selected colonies with machine-gun fire." The purpose of this harassment "was to goad the strikers"[6] into violent action so the National Guard could be called out to suppress the labor strike. It worked.

In October 1913, Governor Elias A. Ammos summoned the National Guard, under the command of General John Chase, who declared martial law in the striking area. Under control of the National Guard, a state-controlled militia, a number of atrocities took place against the striking workers, such as the "mass jailing of strikers, a cavalry charge on a demonstration by miners' wives and children, the torture and beating of 'prisoners,' and the demolition of one of the [workers'] tent colonies."[7]

The situation came to a gruesome ending when on April 20, 1914 gunfire broke out between the striking miners and National Guard troops. When miners who had taken up arms to protect themselves and their families went to a railroad cut and prepared foxholes in an attempt to draw the National Guard away from the colony, Guard troops sprayed the colony with machine gun and rifle fire and eventually burned the tent colony to the ground. An estimated 25 people died that day, "including three militiamen, one uninvolved passerby, and 12 children."[8] Unfortunately, this example of the state using its monopoly of violence to represent the minority interests of capital against the majority interests of workers. The state had previously come down hard on the side of union-busting with violence in the 1892 Homestead Massacre in Pennsylvania, and in 1894 when President Cleveland sent out over 16,000 U.S. Army soldiers to handle the railroad strikers in Pullman, Chicago.[9]

In 1932, state violence targeted a large group of war veterans who had assembled in Washington, D.C. demanding payment from the federal government for their service in World War I. The Bonus Army, an assemblage of roughly 43,000 people consisting primarily of veterans, their families, and affiliated activists, marched on D.C. to demand payment of previously received service certificates only to be met with violent repression. First, two veterans were shot and killed by Washington, D.C. police, and then, after orders from Herbert Hoover, Douglas Macarthur moved in on the veterans with infantry, cavalry, and six tanks, forcing the Bonus Army, their wives, and children out of their makeshift encampment and burning all of their belongings and shelter. "Although no weapons were fired, cavalry advanced with swords drawn, and some blood was shed. By nightfall, hundreds had been injured by gas (including a baby who died), bricks, clubs, bayonets, and sabers."[10]

Later in the 20th century, state violence continued, yet it had switched targets from union members and striking workers to political activists. An example is the Kent State shootings, where on May 4, 1970 "members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University [antiwar] demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine."[11] Kent Mayor Leroy Satrom had requested Ohio Governor James Rhodes to summon the Guard due to "threats had been made to downtown businesses and city officials as well as rumors that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and the university."[12]

The rhetoric of Governor Rhodes escalated the situation as he called the protesters "the worst type of people in America and [stated] that every force of law would be used to deal with them," which created a perception among both soldiers and university officials that "a state of martial law was being declared in which control of the campus resided with the Guard rather than University leaders,"[13] and on top of this, all rallies were banned. This helped to foster an increase of tension in an atmosphere that was already extremely tense.

On the day of May 4th, around 3,000 students gathered to protest the Guard's presence on the campus. At noon, it was announced the General Robert Cantbury, the leader of the Ohio National Guard, had made the decision that the rally was to disperse; this message was delivered to the students via the police. When this was met with shouting and some rock throwing, the Guard was sent in to break up the protest and, due to the students retreating up a hill and on to a portion of the football field, the soldiers who followed them ended up somewhat trapped between the football field's fence and the protesters. The shouting and rock throwing continued as the soldiers began to extract themselves from the football field and up a hill, and when they reached the top, the soldiers fired their weapons back toward the crowd, with a small amount firing directly into the crowd.

No matter how one looks at it, the entire point of the National Guard being deployed to Kent State University was to squash the protesters who had gathered under their perceived constitutional rights to express their collective displeasure with the Vietnam War. The state chose to deploy its monopoly of violence as a tool to end these public protests.

Assassination campaigns by the state, directed by the FBI or CIA, and often times carried out by local police departments, have also been deployed under this monopoly of violence. There is the notably disturbing case of Chicago Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by Chicago police due to his political views and membership in the Black Panther organization.[14] There is also speculation and credible evidence that the U.S. government was involved in both the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. [15] and Malcolm X.[16]

Today, state violence has manifested itself in daily public displays of police brutality and violence against citizens. This endemic use of state force has become so bad that a recent report from the UN Human Rights Council noted concerns "for police violence and racial discrimination" in the U.S. [17] Yet, despite this widespread recognition of state terror being directed at citizens, we see that the federal government (the highest level of state) is protecting its enforcers, with President Obama signing into law what is effectively an Amber Alert for the police[18], and states such as Louisiana passing 'Blue Lives Matter' bills which designates "public safety workers" (a clever euphemism for police) as a specially protected class of citizens, opening the door for possible "hate crime" legislation that further protects those who carry out state repression.[19]

This rampant use of state violence against U.S. citizens has also gone international. In the age of the Global War on Terror, the U.S. government has gone so far as to decide it has the power to use its monopoly of violence on its citizens abroad. The case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was killed via drone strike in Yemen in 2011, provides a notable example of this.[20] The significance of this extension to the parameters of "international warfare" or the often vague "fight against terror" is that any U.S. citizen deemed to be under suspicion of associating with "terrorists" may be immediately executed without due process. Since al-Awlaki, the U.S. government has officially acknowledged that it has killed four American citizens abroad, while claiming that three of those deaths were by accident.[21]

In looking at the state's (in this case, the U.S. state at multiple levels) monopoly of violence and its continued use against its own citizens, we see that this deployment of violence is always done in the favor of capital (a small minority) in order to expand and strengthen capital's influence, through its state surrogate, over the working-class majority with no regard for life.

Group Violence and Its Enablers

Group violence manifests itself in numerous citizens joining together in a common cause to perpetrate violence against other citizens who in some way fit the intended target of that cause. When discussing group violence, it should be noted that the subjects are non-state actors. While these groups may be directly or indirectly supported by the state, they essentially carry out their acts of violence as groups autonomous from the state apparatus.

The Ku Klux Klan (which is currently attempting to make a comeback[22]) has for decades engaged in numerous acts of group violence, from public lynchings to terrorism and coercion to bombing churches.[23] The purpose of this group violence has been to maintain a social order in which Anglo-Saxon, Protestant white men are able to keep their hands on the reins of power in the U.S., if not systematically, then culturally and socially.

In many cases, because they may share interests, group violence intertwines with and complements state violence. During Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War, the KKK had well-known ties to the more official southern state apparatus of power. In the modern era, white supremacists who adhere to notions of group violence have purposely and strategically infiltrated formal arms of state violence, including both the U.S. military and many local police departments around the country.[24][25] A similar group that is making major headway today is the Neo-Fascists, who can be seen in Europe being legitimized and assimilating into mainstream political parties such as Greece's Golden Dawn, the UK's UK Independence Party, Austria's Freedom Party, and France's National Front. Like the Klan, these groups seek to maintain a race-based, social status quo that benefits their own group. In the polls, they seek to gain some influence on the use of state violence, whereas on the streets they adhere to group violence and domestic terrorism.

A difference worth noting between the old-school group violence of the Klan and the new-school group violence (or at least contributing to an atmosphere of violence) that neo-fascists encourage and enact is that the new-school violence has been legitimized in many ways by both the media and the public at-large. In other words, we now have large segments of the population who are openly defending the neo-fascists through legitimizing means.

Back in the heyday of the Klan, there was violence, yet no one defended it under the banner of free speech or attempted to legitimize it through mainstream channels. It was certainly supported by mainstream power structures, and even gained steam through the insidious white supremacy which characterized American culture, but it wasn't openly defended. The KKK often carried out its operations in a clandestine manner, attacking and terrorizing at night, and wearing hoods to maintain anonymity. And many black people actively took up arms to defend themselves against it. [26][27] Today, the situation has been turned on its head, with many people arguing that fascists have the right to free speech and that they should be protected.

An example of this changing paradigm regarding right-wing extremism and group violence could be seen after a recent fight between Neo-Nazis and antifascists in Sacramento, California in late June 2016.[28] The incident brought out many defenders. Sacramento police chief Sam Somers stated that "Regardless of the message, it's the skinheads' First Amendment right to free speech." [29] Debra J. Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in an article that "the bullies who were protesting against fascists seemed to have a lot in common with fascists - they're also thuggish and simpleminded" and that "An informal army of anarchists uses violence to muzzle unwanted speech."[30] The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that they agreed with Antifa Sacramento that racism shouldn't be tolerated, but "What we disagree with is the idea that skinheads and neo-Nazis, or anyone else with a wrongheaded view, shouldn't have a 1st Amendment right to free speech." [31]

There are a number of problems with these statements. First, by defending fascists through arguments couched in free speech, such commentators are not only ignoring the underlying group-violence historically perpetrated by these groups, but also misusing the First Amendment itself. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." [32] Note, the Amendment says nothing about how other citizens may respond to free speech, nor does it say that groups of citizens can't abridge free speech; rather, it specifically applies to Congress and its prospective legislation. In other words, the Constitution of the United States applies strictly to the government and how it relates to its citizens, whereas the laws created by the government apply to the individuals and how they relate to the government.

Then there is the matter of ignoring power dynamics and creating a false equivalence. These responses create the illusion that each side is doing something negative and so neither side should be supported. This ignores the fact that one side (the neo-nazis and fascists) are assembling with the purpose of oppressing others, while the other side (the anti-fa and anarchists) are assembling to stop (violently, if necessary) the one side from oppressing. While the former adheres to violent means to oppress people based on the color of their skin, or their sexuality, or their Jewish heritage, the latter adheres to violent means to resist this oppression, or essentially oppress the oppressor. To equate their motivations is irresponsible and dangerous. This false equivalence that has been deployed by much of the media, both liberal and conservative, amounts to placing a murderous and whip-lashing slave owner in the same light as a rebelling slave who murders the slave owner to gain freedom. By using this hypothetical, it is easy to see that there is a fundamental difference between violence and counter-violence.

Another side effect of this public defense of the oppressor, and subsequent legitimization of group violence, is that it is used to increase state violence. Marcos Brenton, a writer at The Sacramento Bee, argued that "I would bet that future demonstrations will see a shared command center between the CHP and Sac PD instead of what we saw Sunday: CHP officers overwhelmed by warring factions. […]Law enforcement wasn't ready this time, but they have to be next time. In a climate where life isn't valued, life will be lost."[33] This is an argument that is implicitly in favor of an increase in state violence from an already hyper-militarized police force. And, when used in this context, the deployment of state violence will almost always be directed at those who assemble to stop oppressive group violence, because arguments housed in free speech and false equivalencies erase any and all distinctions between violence and counter-violence.

This is where the connection between state and group violence often manifests itself. As mentioned before, there is a rather long history of the police and the KKK being connected: On April 2, 1947, seven black people in Hooker, GA were turned over "to a Klan flogging party for a proper sobering up" by Dade County Sheriff John M. Lynch. In Soperton, GA in 1948, "the sheriff did not bother to investigate when four men where flogged, while the sheriff of nearby Dodge County couldn't look into the incident"[34] due to his being busy baby-sitting.

There is also the famous case of the Freedom Riders, three Civil Rights activists who were killed by the Klan, which amounted to three individuals being "arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders." [35]

This connection has yet to end. In 2014, in Florida, two police officers in the town of Fruitland Park were linked to the Klan [36] and in 2015 in Lake Arthur, LA, a detective was a found to be a Klan member and even attended one of the group's rallies.[37]

These connections allow for the state, and all the power and resources it wields, to be used directly to further the ends of white supremacy and empower fascistic, racist group violence in the streets. It also puts racial minorities from within the working class at greater risks since many of these bigoted individuals who carry out group violence on their own time are also allowed to carry out state violence while on the job. As agents of the state, they can kill, terrorize, harass, and imprison racial minorities with impunity vis-à-vis their roles as state enforcers and are further empowered by the public's and media's reverence of oppressive forms of assembly and "free speech," as well as the police officers who defend this.

Revolutionary Violence

Revolutionary violence is realized in two distinct forms: self-defense and/or counter-violence. It is a type of violence in which the goal is either self-defense for an oppressed people and/or full liberation for a people, whether that liberation take the form of autonomous communities, a nation state, or something else. It is also resistance to encroachment on the land by oppressive forces, such as in the case of indigenous resistance to expansionist Americans. Revolutionary violence may come in different forms and be carried out through various means. It includes everything from individual acts of "propaganda by the deed" to large-scale revolutions against a state.

Examples of revolutionary violence are abound throughout history, and include the slave revolts of Spartacus and Nat Turner, the Reign of Terror against the French monarchy, the Spanish revolt against the fascist Franco regime, Alexander Berkman's attempted murder of Carnegie Steel manager Henry Clay Frick, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Reconstruction-era blacks taking up arms against the KKK, the Mau Maus in Kenya [38], the Cuban revolution[39], and a number of national liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century that occurred around the world.

Revolutionary violence is different from state and group violence in that it manifests itself as a response to violence often stemming from one of these two opposing sources. For this reason, it is strictly counter-violent (or defensive) in nature, designed to break the violent oppression that its adherents find themselves under. The benefit of being able to deploy revolutionary violence is obvious in that it allows the oppressed to strike back at their oppressors. It is in this beneficial scenario where the question of guns and "gun control" come back into the mix. How are people supposed to free themselves, or even defend themselves from state and group violence, if they are unable to have guns? How are people able to protect themselves from oppressive violence if they do not have access to the same weaponry used by their oppressor?

When faced with systemic violence that is rooted in either a direct extension of the state (police, military) or an indirect extension of the power structure (the KKK, the Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists), written laws constructed by the same state and power structure aren't typically useful. And when doubled-down on by media and liberal establishment cries of free speech and false equivalencies, oppressed sectors of the population become even more vulnerable to state and group violence. Often times, armed self-defense becomes the only option to protect oneself, one's family, and one's community from these deeply embedded, existential threats.

Formulating revolutionary counter-violence and self-defense measures became a staple of the American Civil Rights movement. From Malcolm X's calls to defend the black community "by any means necessary" to the original Black Panther Party's organizational emphasis on armed self-defense, the Civil Rights movement as a whole gained strength due to these more militant strains centered around revolutionary violence. In 1956, after a "relentless backlash from the Ku Klux Klan," Robert F. Williams, a Marine Corps vet, took over the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and strengthened it with militancy by "filing for a charter with the National Rifle Association (NRA)," forming the Black Guard, "an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe's black population," and delivering weapons and physical training to its members.[40] In 1959, following the acquittal of a white man who was accused of attempting to rape a black woman, Williams summed up the need for oppressed people to take up arms in their own self-defense. "If the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence," responded Williams. "That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill." [41]

Revolutionary violence often finds itself up against difficult odds, being deployed by marginalized peoples with limited resources against powerful state and group entities with seemingly unlimited resources, professional military training, and advantageous positioning within the given power structure. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reflected this exact scenario, as a Jewish resistance in the hundreds, armed with handguns, grenades, and Molotov cocktails faced off against the powerful Nazi paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS). When reflecting on the uprising over two decades later, one of the Jewish survivors, Yitzhak Zuckerman, encapsulated the need for an oppressed and degraded people to strike back:

"I don't think there's any real need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn't a subject for study in military school. (...) If there's a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising."[42]

This human spirit referred to by Zuckerman is the same that compelled Nat Turner to take up arms against slave-owning whites, the same that led to the formation of the original Black Panther Party, and the same that motivated Robert F. Williams in 1950s North Carolina. Without access to weapons, this human spirit would result in nothing more than gruesome massacres at the hands of state and group violence. With weapons in hand, this spirit is presented with a chance to stunt pending attacks of physical oppression and terrorism, if not repel them.

Conclusion

The modern gun control debate has taken on two, stereotypical, opposing sides. The first side is representative in the Congressional sit-ins on the House floor this past June. They represent a common liberal viewpoint that gun-control measures should be taken to restrict or, at the very least, delay the acquisition of guns by citizens. Popular demands coming from this side include the banning of all automatic or semi-automatic weapons, the blacklisting of certain people (including those suspected of "associating with terrorists," the mentally ill, and felons), and the implementation of more stringent forms of clearances. The other side is represented by a reactionary right, mostly white, that is backed by both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its surrogate, the Republican Party. These who oppose the liberal attempt to stifle the Second Amendment historically come from privileged strata of the status quo, including whites of all classes and those occupying advantageous positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy.

Both sides of the modern gun-control debate cling to very problematic positions and ideologies that are tantamount to their respective arguments. Both sides, in their own ways, reinforce the embedded racial and class privileges that repress much of the working class, the poor, and people of color - in other words, those sectors of the population that are most likely faced with extremely dire economic situations, occupying police forces that resemble foreign armies, and (literally) daily, life-or-death interactions with both police (state violence) and vigilantes (group violence). The liberal or Democrat argument for gun control, like those represented by the Congressional sit-in, almost always target extremely marginalized groups, like felons who have been victimized by the draconian "drug wars" of the '80s and '90s, as well as those who have been victimized by the "war on terror" and find themselves on terrorist watch lists for little more than their chosen religion or Islamic-sounding name. The reactionary opposition to gun control, represented by the NRA and Republicans, remains embedded in white supremacy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and classism, and thus also ends up targeting these same marginalized populations. This latter group's motivation is evident in the overlap between fringe groups that historically adhere to group violence, like the KKK and Oath Keepers, and the more "mainstream" operations of the NRA.

Both sides of the gun-control debate, whether consciously or subconsciously, are motivated by what Noam Chomsky (paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson) recently referred to as a fear of "the liberation of slaves, who have 'ten thousand recollections' of the crimes to which they were subjected." These "fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture" (in racialized institutions of slavery and white supremacy) with reverberations to the present."[43] The liberal insistence on preaching strictly non-violent and pacifist tactics to poor, working-class, people of color exposes their privileged, white-supremacist leanings. The fact that they do this while also passing draconian legislation that has led to the virtual genocide of an entire generation of blacks (through drug laws and mass incarceration), and in the face of brutal, daily murders of black citizens by police, further exposes them. The recent silence from the NRA regarding the police killing of Philando Castile [44], who was licensed to carry a gun in Minnesota and properly identified his status to officers before being shot for no reason, has exposed the NRA's white supremacist leanings. Also, the split that occurred within the Oath Keepers when one of their members in the St. Louis chapter, Sam Andrews, encouraged black residents in Ferguson and Black Lives Matters protestors to practice their Second-Amendment rights [45] has exposed their own white supremacist leanings which they regularly disguise as "constitutionalism."

While white supremacy has an intense and insidious hold on every aspect of American culture - social, economic, political, etc. - it is especially strong within the gun-control debate. So much so that it drove then-California governor, Ronald Reagan, in 1967, to sign extensive gun control legislation under the Mulford Act[46] in response to armed patrols by members of the Black Panther Party. The classist nature of gun control can be found in the targeting of the most marginalized of the working class, along with the historically brutal state repression against workers collectively striking or standing up for their rights against bosses. The most common argument from the authentic, anti-capitalist left (not liberals or Democrats) against the idea of workers collectively exercising their constitutional right to bear arms has been housed in the insurmountable strength and technology owned by the government's military. Left-wing skeptics claim that an armed working-class will simply have no chance against an overpowering military. The problem with this is that it is preoccupied with a large-scale, pie-in-the-sky revolutionary situation. It ignores the reality faced by many working-class people who find themselves in small-scale, daily interactions with police and vigilantes, both of whom are heavily armed and not afraid to use their weapons to kill. It is in these very interactions, whether it's a black citizen being racially profiled and harassed by police or an activist being terrorized by reactionary groups, where the access to a gun may become vitally important and life-saving.

Advocating for disarming those who need protection the most simply doesn't make sense, especially in an environment such as the modern U.S. - a heavily racialized, classist landscape with over 300 million guns in circulation. Nobody wants to be drawn into a violent situation that may result in the loss of life, but our current reality does not allow us that choice. Unfortunately, we live a society where police oppress rather than protect; where violent reactionary groups are allowed freedom to carry out their terrorizing of marginalized people; and where politicians readily use their monopoly of violence to enforce capital's minority interests against masses of workers. Because of this, modern gun control can only be viewed as anti-black, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-poor, and anti-working class because it leaves these most marginalized and vulnerable of groups powerless in the face of a violent, patriarchal, white-supremacist power structure that continues to thrive off of mass working-class dispossession. The conclusion is simple: If the oppressor cannot be disarmed, the only sane option is to arm the oppressed. In the U.S., the Constitution makes this a practical and legal option.

"Sometimes, if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up."

-Huey P. Newton

Notes

[1] Philip Bump, "The Problem With Banning Guns For People On The No-Fly List," Washington Post, June 13, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/07/the-no-fly-list-is-a-terrible-tool-for-gun-control-in-part-because-it-is-a-terrible-tool/ )

[2] Alex Pareene, The Democrats Are Boldly Fighting For A Bad, Stupid Bill, Gawker, http://gawker.com/the-democrats-are-boldly-fighting-for-a-bad-stupid-bil-1782449026 (June 22, 2016)

[3] Zaid Jilani, "Dramatic House Sit-In on Guns Is Undercut by Focus on Secret, Racist Watchlist," The Intercept, June 22, 2016 ( https://theintercept.com/2016/06/22/dramatic-house-sit-in-on-guns-is-undercut-by-focus-on-secret-racist-watchlist/ )

[4] Tom Hall, "Congressional Democrats stage 'sit-in' stunt on gun control," World Socialist Website, June 25, 2016 ( https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/06/25/dems-j25.html)

[5] Fact Index, Monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, http://www.fact-index.com/m/mo/monopoly_on_the_legitimate_use_of_physical_force.html

[6] Mark Walker, "The Ludlow Massacre: Class Warfare and Historical Memory in Southern Colorado," Historical Archaeology 37:3 (2003), pg 68

[7] Walker, pgs 68-69

[8] Walker, pg 69

[9] Ronald J. Barr, The Progressive Army: U.S. Army Command and Administration, 1870-1914 (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1998), pg 7

[10] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX89.html

[11] Thomas R. Hensley, Jerry M, Lewis, "The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The search for historical accuracy," The Ohio Council of Social Studies Review 34"1 (1998), pg 9

[12] Hensley, Lewis, pg 11

[13] Ibid

[14] Ted Gregory, "The Black Panther Raid and the death of Fred Hampton," Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2016 ( http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story-story.html )

[15] The King Center, Assassination Conspiracy Trial, http://www.thekingcenter.org/assassination-conspiracy-trial

[16] Garrett Felber, "Malcolm X Assassination: 50 years on, mystery still clouds details of the case," The Guardian, February 21, 2015 ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/21/malcolm-x-assassination-records-nypd-investigation )

[17] Natasja Sheriff, "US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights," Al Jazeera, May 11, 2015 ( http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/11/us-faces-scathing-un-review-on-human-rights-record.html )

[18] Gregory Korte, "Obama signs 'Blue Alert' law to protect police," USA Today, May 19, 2016 ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/19/obama-blue-alert-law-bill-signing/27578911/ )

[19] Elahe Izadi, "Louisiana's 'Blue Lives Matter' bill just became law," Washington Post, May 26, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/05/26/louisianas-blue-lives-matter-bill-just-became-law/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.6d262fdb3218 )

[20] Joshua Keating, "Was Anwar Al-Awlaki Still A US Citizen?" Foreign Policy, September 30, 2011 ( http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/30/was_anwar_al_awlaki_still_a_us_citizen )

[21] Adam Taylor, "The U.S. keeps killing Americans in drone strikes, mostly by accident," Washington Post, April 23, 2015 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-u-s-keeps-killing-americans-in-drone-strikes-mostly-by-accident/ )

[22] John Bazemore, "Ku Klux Klan dreams of making a comeback," The Columbus Dispatch, June 30, 2016 ( http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2016/06/30/0630-is-klan-making-a-comeback.html )

[23] Southern Poverty Law Center, Ku Klux Klan, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan

[24] Hampton Institute, Rising Nazism and Racial Intolerance in the US. A report gathered and submitted to the United Nations, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/Rising-Nazism-and-Racial-Intolerance-in-the-US.pdf (April 30, 2015)

[25] FBI report on white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement agencies in the US. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf

[26] Rebecca Onion, "Red Summer," Slate, March 4, 2015 ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/03/civil_rights_movement_history_the_long_tradition_of_black_americans_taking.html )

[27] Akinyele K. Umoja, "1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement," Radical History Review 85:1 (2003)

[28] Ellen Garrison, Stephen Magagnini, Sam Stanton, "At least 10 hurt at chaotic, bloody neo-Nazi rally at Capitol," The Sacramento Bee, June 26, 2016 (http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article86099332.html)

[29] Ibid

[30] Debra J. Saunders, "Saunders: Freedom of speech stifled by Capitol rally fracas," San Francisco Chronicle, July 2, 2016 ( http://www.recordnet.com/article/20160702/OPINION/160709984)

[31] Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, "How anti-racists play into the skinheads' hands," Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2016 ( http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-neo-nazi-rally-20160627-snap-story.html )

[32] Legal Information Institute, First Amendment, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment

[33] Marcos Brenton, "Madness came to Sacramento, and the cops weren't ready," The Sacramento Bee, June 29, 2016 ( http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/marcos-breton/article86556112.html )

[34] David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), pg 336

[35] Civil Rights Movement Veterans, Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs, http://www.crmvet.org/mem/msmartyr.htm

[36] Michael Winter, "KKK membership sinks 2 Florida cops," USA Today, July 14, 2014 ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/14/florid-police-kkk/12645555/ )

[37] Bill Morlin, Police Chief Demands Resignation of KKK Cop, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-demands-resignation-kkk-cop (September 1, 2015)

[38] "Mau Mau Uprising: Bloody history of Kenyan conflict," BBC, April 7, 2011 ( http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-12997138)

[39] Andres Suarez, "The Cuban Revolution: The Road to Power," Latin American Research Review 7:3 (1972)

[40] PBS Independent Lens, A synopsis on the film, "Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power," http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/rob.html

[41] Ibid

[42] A. Polonsky, (2012), The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III, 1914 to 2008, p.537

[43] Hampton Institute, On the Roots of American Racism: An Interview with Noam Chomsky, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/chomsky-on-racism.html (April 22, 2015)

[44] Brian Fung, "The NRA's internal split over Philando Castile," Washington Post, July 9, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/09/the-nras-internal-revolt-over-philando-castile/?utm_term=.b0f673e3221c )

[45] Alan Feur, "The Oath Keeper Who Wants To Arm Black Lives Matter," Rolling Stone, January 3, 2016 ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-oath-keeper-who-wants-to-arm-black-lives-matter-20160103 )

[46] Wikipedia, Mulford Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

Racism is the Status Quo: Relinquishing the Reigns of White Power

By Susan Anglada Bartley and Samuel Burnett

Three days after the murder of Alton Sterling, two days after the murder of Philando Castile, one day after the sniper attacks on police in Dallas, four hundred plus years after the start of the trans-continental slave trade, we come together, in the highest state of white privilege--a white male college student and his white female former teacher--at a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, computer screens ablaze, to discuss how we might respond to the current political moment in a unified response that will help other whites to own, understand, and relinquish our white power in favor of a revolutionized society. Perhaps due to privilege, perhaps due to never being pulled over and harassed for a busted tail-light, never being followed in a store (even when I, the teacher, really was stealing at the age of 12), never being questioned and certainly never being beaten or detained for crimes we did not commit--perhaps due to these factors, or perhaps due to the tendency of our European ancestors to dream of utopian visions that we never fulfill, we have the audacity or the pretense to believe that this other society is still possible.

But we see a paradox. The path to the real "America" requires us to fully relinquish our privilege. For many white individuals, myself included (the student) discussions of race and privilege bring with them a slight discomfort, partly due to the knowledge of my ancestors brutality and savagery, but even more so because these discussions cause me to address a grim truth: I am, at some level, despite years of education from liberal mentors, despite deep analysis of how racism and racist practices are perpetuated at a state and international level, and despite an overpowering desire for equity, racist. This racism is not conscious--I don't actively mentally discriminate based on the color of a human's skin. But simply through growing up in a predominately white neighborhood, watching and engaging in mainstream media (which perpetuates negative stereotypes and tropes of black and brown individuals), and refusing to speak out against racist comments made in institutional settings, I developed a latent racism. The truth is this: for white America, modern racism isn't your "antiquated" aunt who comes to ruin Thanksgiving dinner; it isn't your grandfather who grew up during legalized segregation and viewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a "radical." It is you. The status quo in white America is racism, and while it is not pleasant to admit, while it brings me no pride to say, and while it forces me to confront my innermost demons and my external family and friends at the same time, it is a truth I cannot remain silent about. Until we admit that we, as privileged white individuals, have been indoctrinated into a racist system since the moment we were born, we cannot achieve the real American Dream. We cannot achieve equity--in fact, we promote the racist violence that continues to plague us.

On Facebook, Twitter, any social media site, I see many brave individuals speaking out and protesting against police brutality and targeting of minority communities (a practice that has been going on since the slave trade, but has only recently caught widespread attention). When it comes to being on the front lines, when it comes to speaking out in a board meeting, or in a political discussion with other whites, these individuals remain where they were--behind the computer screen. The historical moment requires us to consider the meaning of brave. Posting and sharing informative and supportive pieces on social media sites certainly requires some elementary level of guts, but true bravery in these situation is to, as a white individual, challenge yourself to combat your latent (or manifest) racism. Recognize you have been set up to operate with racist undertones, and refuse to be spellbinded by them. Scan your memories for times you let this racism influence you, and be resolved to eliminate it from your mental channels entirely. Bravery is using your whiteness to shield people of color at protests from unruly officers. Bravery is speaking up to your acquaintances, friends, and yes, even family, knowing that some bridges may be burned along the way. But if someone refuses to consider your sentiments when you question a racist comment they made, do they deserve your friendship? More importantly, do you really want theirs?

Along with the whites who create anti-racist posts, I also see an alarming number attempting in futility to justify the murders of minorities. Why is it that so many white individuals relate more to white police than to black or brown civilians? I (the teacher) remember looking up to my older brother as he refused to wear anything other than his policeman suit for several years of our childhood. While he also became a radical activist, and was raised by leftist parents who participated in anti-racist work during the 1980s, even he--and even I--developed the concept that police were there to protect me. The concept of white policemen as a key representation of the pinnacle of white masculinity engenders an extremely strong bond of trust in police for many whites in society. I can only imagine how deeply ingrained the (very paternalistic) concept that police protect the community is inside the homes of officers and their families. Many of these families must revere the men and women who leave their homes every day, risking death, to work among the 80% of us who will never own much more than our names and our legacies. Still, and this is the reality that is toughest to swallow, making a sacrifice for society does not mean that you are not a racist. Often, the very same paternalistic concept that motivates an officer to do police work leaks into an us-against-them mentality--a cops vs. thugs philosophy if you will, that is code for just-above-poor whites against stereotyped people of color.

How is it impossible to believe that police operate in a racist institutional framework, and that some of them are aware and actively perpetuate this racist framework? Police officers are as vulnerable to this latent racism as the rest of us, and for them too, racism is the status quo. Officer Nakia Jones of Warrensville Heights spoke out against police malpractice, and this is something we need more of--police within the racist justice system speaking out and actively trying to revolutionize it, as opposed to perpetuating racist practices. Yet, it is indeed fascinating that we have not yet seen a viral video from a white police officer who is willing to confess to the massive racism that Jones documents. Racism is a white problem, a problem whose consequences unfairly manifest themselves in minority communities. But it is a problem that abhors the entire human condition, and undermines all but those who benefit the very most from it. We are once again fortunate to live among such heroic black activists who refuse to allow us, as white people, to continue to profit from what Jesse Jackson termed the mental disease of racism. Instead of accepting the polarization of black Americans against the police, we must admit the omnipresence of racism in society, in ourselves, and even in the coffee cups we sip as we stare at our screens.

Privileged, white male scientist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." It was a wonderful remark; now it is time to refuse to accept this reality, to admit our responsibility to end the Apartheid state, to extract it from ourselves, and to refuse to propose a utopian vision for a new society without the presence of people of color who possess as much or more genius and insight than we ever will. Our vision, then, is not a portrait of shiny, happy people holding hands; but of fellow whites admitting, admonishing, and eliminating the latent racism in which we have been bred, and buttered.