Society & Culture

The Question of Art: An Interview

By Devon Bowers

In a written portion of my series "The Question of Art," I talk to artists Johnny Bentanamo and Kelly Ann Gonzales Boyle about art and its importance to society. Part 1 is can audio portion and can be listened to here .



What kind(s) of art do you do? What/who got you into art in the first place?

Johnny: I specialize in musical recording & performance art as well as mixed media visual arts.

Essentially, I write music on an acoustic guitar as well as accompanying lyrics that I perform live as a soloist, I also compose noise records {that I refer to as "grind-pop"} which I release online. As far as the visual arts go, I mostly use found items to create impressionistic & abstract paintings.

When I was 8 years old, I was downstairs at my Grandparents house & put on the MTV where I saw the music video for Guns N' Roses "Welcome to the Jungle"...that was the moment when I knew what I wanted to do with my life & it's been a struggle ever since. Besides that important moment in my life, I've had many great friends that have doubled as teachers over the years & I own to them much thanks.

Kelly: I am a writer. I have been a writer since I first learned to read and write. Since I was a child, I loved nothing more than curling up and getting lost in a great book, and when you get lost, you often find yourself. My father always encouraged me to be an avid reader, writer, and lover of art. Each time he got me a book, he'd sign it, "Never stop leaning. Love, Papa."

I grew up in New Jersey, and my dad grew up in NYC, and he always wanted me to experience the city by bringing me to art museums. I tried my hand at drawing and painting, but while it's a medium I love and appreciate, I never quite honed my talent into it unlike writing which came much more naturally.


Why do you think that people nowadays seem to devalue art? We seem to live in this paradox where people will argue that art isn't important, yet they enjoy music, movies, theater, and the like.

Johnny: I think art is largely devalued by many because they don't see the most popular mediums as art. Things like that popular tv show, big budget films, & major label musical releases are made to make money & have little to no artistic value because they lack the intention to invoke emotion or challenge contemporary ways of thinking. The people that seek out art for the sake of art can find it, but it takes research & I think that that's a little bit too much work for the common person who is consumed w/ work, school, family, etc.

Kelly: Art is a series of contradictions. It's like life. Moving, terrifying, strange, and sometimes just downright boring. Art, like life, is misunderstood. We can hate art like we can hate our lives, but we can choose to say, "You know what? Not for me today. Not for me right now. Let me try again tomorrow." The same art I may have passed by in a museum ten, five, maybe even one year ago, can have a totally different impact on me today. Just based on new experiences or my mood for the day.

I don't think that people devalue art. I think people value and crave art more than ever before. People want to be connected and to feel something. The advent of social media is an example of this. We can sit here and lament the dehumanizing aspects of social media, or we can appreciate its ability to teach us something about each other, even if it's just parts of each other.

We all make choices each day to say to others and to ourselves whether or not we want to live our lives to the fullest. Art helps to enrich our lives through music, movies, theater, and so forth.


What does art do for you, if anything, on a emotional and psychological level?

Johnny: For me, art is therapy, plain & simple. If I didn't have a creative outlet I would be a miserable person to be around. I grew up in a physically & emotionally abusive house so I have some "demons" that I battle on a daily basis & whenever I'm feeling lost or overwhelmed I can just pick up my guitar or paint brushes to wash away those negative feelings...I've become a much calmer & centered person since I began creating more consistently about 7 years ago. Art is also a way to supplement my income since working a full-time job is not conducive to my medical disabilities, which are extensive.

Kelly: We are all part of a grand universe, and art is a means of connecting our selves to the world around us. Whether it's a fresco painting on the ceiling of a chapel or a black square on a large, white canvas, art speaks. It can speak a loud and grandiose volume for all to know its behemoth presence, or it can simply murmur and let its nearest passerby know that it's standing on the corner, too.

Art makes me feel everything. It has made me laugh and cry. It has angered me and plainly disgusted me. It keeps me begging for more and I find myself seeking out stranger and grander things. To better myself. To learn. To be a part of something greater than myself.


What is the most fun and most difficult part of being an artist?

Johnny: The most difficult part of arting for me is also the most fun part...performance. I give everything I have in me during a live performance, it's like some otherworldly entity is channeled through me. It is the most cathartic thing I have ever experienced but w/ that said, afterwards I hurt & usually need to sit or lay down for a hour or more. The most rewarding part of performing is not what it does for me though, it is what it does for others. I'm a naturally open & overtly expressive person, which most people are not, so when attendees approach me after I'm off stage & express to me how the things I did or said spoke to them or made them feel like they weren't alone, I know I did something good...even if it comes from a place of selfishness as I do not make art for anybody but myself.

Kelly: I once argued with someone I dated--and I suppose you can already guess that the brief relationship ended quite rapidly--about whether or not writing was an art. He believed writing was simply a skill that could be taught and refined. I believe it was both an art and a skill. You learn the skills of the grammar, punctuation, and the nuisances of the language. The art of writing is a different and impatient beast.

The most difficult part of being a writer is like exercising. To get up each day and committing yourself to doing it continuously. You can write or exercise in private and no one will know the wiser, but eventually you may find yourself stepping out into the world where a stranger may glance at your open notebook or laptop. You coworker will comment on your new weight loss. You are flattered.

Then you are also terrified. You want the compliments, but with compliments come expectation and criticism. The opportunity and the realization that there is more. There is always more.

The fun part is also the terrifying part. Recognizing the difficulty of putting yourself out there and keeping up that momentum. The thrill of jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet only to hurtle downwards with a parachute. That is writing. That is art. It's all part of the process.


In your opinion, what is the purpose of art, if any?

Johnny: Art has many purposes & can mean different things to many different people. For me, as I stated earlier, art is therapeutic. I create so that I can tolerate living but for many others it is simply something to decorate your house with or wear out to a fancy restaurant.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde says "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless." Now I don't agree w/ this sentiment but that's not the point, the point is that, what art is or what it does is completely up to the observer, it's relative to the person that is beholding the creation. In summation I would say that the purpose of art is to create something that was never there so that all of existence can become a richer & more evolved place. Art is life & just like all things, the individual works eventually cease to be.

Kelly: The purpose is to exist. The definition is up to the artist. Same thing with life. Don't think too hard about it.

Examine life in its present moment, but then move on. Don't overthink it. Just do. Keep going. Don't stop. Go live your life. Stop reading this and go make some art.


Mr. Bentanamo's art can be viewed here and here .

Mrs. Gonzales Boyle is the author of the novel Video Games and is readying a forthcoming novel tentatively titled, Through An Opaque Window.

Trump's Evangelical Opening: The Gateway Drug to a Fascist America

By Werner Lange

Masters of deceit are not necessarily fascists, but fascists are notorious for their nefarious use of the power of deception effectively with devastating results. The Trump regime is the most diabolical manifestation of that repressive power in US history, to date. Lies, especially big ones, deceptively called "alternative facts," are its ideological trademark; white supremacists, deceptively sanitized as "alt-right," form its frontline battalion in America's culture wars; and Trump's ruthless and relentless attacks upon the media, which he castigated in a recent rant in Phoenix as "fake news" generated by "really, really dishonest people" and "bad people" who "don't like our country," constitute the modus operandi of a regime hell bent on shutting up critics and shutting down any remnants of a free press that remain. This toxic combination of repressive traits is not altogether new on the historical stage. Big lies were the ideological weapons of choice in Hitler's propaganda arsenal; institutionalized racism degenerated abysmally into the fascist final solution of the Third Reich; and critics of the Nazi regime ended up in foreign exile or in early graves.

However, Trump is no American re-incarnation of Hitler, and his regime is not a fully fascist one. Trump is merely the gateway drug to a fascist America. That is what makes it so ominous, but also so vulnerable to decline and defeat before it transitions any further toward fascism. Its antithesis, America's democratic institutions and what's left of the American Left, though battered and bloodied, remains mostly unbowed but only partially unleashed. Essential for a broader and fuller unleashing of anti-fascist forces at this critical juncture in American history is a deeper understanding of the neonatal fascist nature of the Trump regime and its racist reliance upon a perverted faith-based false consciousness for its mass base at the bottom, and a pervasive theological social Darwinism for its delusions of grandeur at the top of our highly stratified and increasingly polarized social order.

While religion in its politically hijacked forms has repeatedly proven itself to the opiate of the masses, the Trump regime represents a contemporary illustration of how a viciously perverted form of Christianity has become the hallucinogen of the elite. An ideological profile of Trump's evangelical advisory board reveals each of its 24 members (almost uniformly rich white men) to be hopelessly mired in the theological swamp of the Prosperity Gospel or Christian Zionism, or typically both. In true social Darwinist fashion, the money-worshipping Prosperity Gospel (unlike the liberating Social Gospel) embraces the elitist notion that God's favor rests upon the wealthy, especially the super-rich, who are best equipped spiritually and empowered financially to run a nation under God. Among the most ardent proponents of the Prosperity Gospel on Trump's evangelical advisory board is Ken Copeland, who has an estimated net worth of $750 million and claims that his vast wealth is "the assignment that the Lord gave me." He resides in a $6 million mansion and regularly uses his $20 million private jet to spread the "good news" about prosperity through Jesus around the country and world. "God's Will concerning financial prosperity and abundance is clearly revealed in the scriptures," according to the website of the Ken Copeland Ministries, which operates from a 1500-acre campus near Forth Worth, Texas, with a staff of some 500 employees. Paula White, who gave Trump a bible signed by the evangelist patriarch Billy Graham and prayed for Trump at the 2016 RNC, successfully solicits large donations for her New Destiny Christian Center in Florida by claiming God will reward generous donors with special favors. Jentezen Franklin, pastor of two megachurches, routinely flies in his private jet between Georgia and California in order to provide Sunday services in multiple locations on the same day. Evangelical advisory board members, along with the nearly one thousand evangelical pastors who met privately with Trump in June 2017 as well the many who prayerfully "laid hands" upon him in the Oval Office, evidently all conveniently ignore the biblical passage (Luke 16:13) clearly stating that "You cannot serve both God and Money."

To praise the power elite as God's chosen class, as proponents of the heretical Prosperity Gospel essentially do with their self-serving hijacking of Christianity, is an ideological stratagem to enlist the elite, particularly high-ranking political officials, in the crusade by right-wing evangelicals to create a Christian theocracy in America within a fascist framework. Foremost in that evangelizing crusade is Ralph Drollinger, head of Capitol Ministries, who has for years conducted weekly bible study sessions for over 50 select members of the US House and Senate. With the 2016 election of Trump, Drollinger has been given unprecedented access to the White House and the Cabinet with his indoctrination lessons designed to sanctify their evil deeds and feed their hallucinations of being God's instruments. In his picture booklet, Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint, Drollinger fancies himself as a modern-day Apostle Paul with a God-appointed mission of "winning government authorities for Christ" (p.4) and "discipling political leaders for Christ" (p. 30) in preparation for the "Future Tribulation Period" when "wars will erupt, natural disasters will occur, and persecution will be common for all of Christ's followers" (p. 53) followed ultimately by a "1,000-year-long Millennial Kingdom" in which the "redeemed by Christ will be given the privilege to rule with Him, under Him, on earth" (p. 57). This projection of mass slaughter followed by universal Christian hegemony is, of course, sheer madness, but one increasingly embraced by the Trump regime and its deep commitment to Christian Zionism.

Despite its name, Christian Zionism has precious little in common with authentic Christianity or Judaism. Thoroughly embedded in violent racism and virulent dogmatism, Christian Zionism's uterine sibling is fascism. Both reactionary social movements rely upon widespread false consciousness among a distressed social base easily manipulated and deluded into thinking that an alien Other is the enemy. For the Nazis, the scapegoats were the Jews and many other targeted groups, particularly Marxist political opponents. For Christian Zionists it is Islam and the Muslims, particularly "radical Islamic terrorists," the label Trump relishes for his denunciation of Muslims and Islam.

Though embraced to varying degrees by every member of Trump's evangelical advisory board, the most vocal and passionate advocate of Christian Zionism is only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Vice President Pence has a longstanding friendship and close working association with John Hagee, the pastor of a right-wing megachurch in Texas and founder of the influential Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a rabidly anti-Muslim and pro-Israel organization which boasts some 3.3 million members. Ever since its founding in 2006, Pence vigorously and vocally supported CUFI as a US Congressman and Indiana Governor. As the Vice President addressing CUFI's 12th annual summit in July 2017, Pence had nothing but laudatory praise for "the largest pro-Israel organization in the USA" and its founder, John Hagee, "my friend," whom he profusely thanked for his "leadership on behalf of this nation and the Jewish state of Israel." In the course of his relatively short speech before thousands of CUFI members, the Vice President explicitly identified Israel as America's "most cherished ally" three separate times; he also identified Trump as a "tireless friend of the Jewish state of Israel"; stated his conviction that the formation of modern Israel revealed the "hand of heaven"; proclaimed that he and Trump will "stand with Israel forever"; and ominously declared Iran to be "the leading state sponsor of terrorism".

Pence is a sponsor of Drollinger's bible study sessions in the White House; and, given his strong commitment to Christian Zionism, it is no surprise that Drollinger would identify him as a modern-day Mordecai, a high-ranking Jew from ancient Persia who, according to the book of Esther, saved his people from persecution and destruction. However, to do so, Mordecai had the leader of the alleged conspiracy, Haman, along with his ten sons, summarily hanged; issued an order to kill all who would harm Jews; and consequently slaughtered some 75,000 Persians with his retributive pogrom. In this context, it is unnerving to note that Hagee, Pence's good friend, identified Iran (modern Persia) as equivalent to Nazi Germany and its former leader (Ahmadinejad) as the "new Hitler." Pence himself defines Iran as the world's leader in state-sponsored terrorism, and vowed that the US would never allow this Muslim nation to have any nuclear weapons. If people and nations are treated as they are defined, then the operative labels imposed by Christian Zionists upon undesirable others, particularly Muslims and Iran, constitute an open invitation to racist violence, ethnic cleansing and imperialist war, even nuclear war. For all of Trump's bluster about hitting North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen," it is perhaps a would-be President Pence, guided by the bizarre and barbaric notions of Christian Zionism which embrace inevitable cataclysmic war in the Middle East as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, that poses the greater threat to world peace.

Racism, particularly white supremacy, is also no stranger to the Trump regime or its evangelical advisory board. A recent reaffirmation of racism's operative presence in the Trump White House came with the official pardon in late August 2017 of "America's toughest sheriff." Joe Arpaio, who once bragged that his open-air tent city jail was run like a "concentration camp" and who was convicted of criminal contempt rooted in his sordid legacy of illegal Latinx profiling. A more revealing reaffirmation of operative racism in both the White House and its evangelical advisory board came earlier that same month. In the wake of Trump's revealing "many sides" comments, placing anti-racist protestors on a moral and behavioral equivalency with the violent white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville to spew their hatred and to attack, with murderous results, counter demonstrators, one of Trump's most ardent supporters and a member of the evangelical advisory group, Jerry Falwell Jr, praised the US President for his "truthful statement" and attacked the media for "trying to paint this as Republican vs. Democrat; Black vs. White; and Jew vs. Gentile." The only remaining Black board member, Mark Burns, directed his public criticism only at the counter protestors; and a third member, Robert Jeffries, who once labeled Catholicism as a "pagan religion" and claimed God placed Trump into the US presidency, blamed the media for allegedly distorting Trump's racist remarks. No member criticized Trump for his implicit endorsement of the violent display of fascism and racism at this watershed moment in US history.

Many of the white supremacists gathered in this "Unite the Right" demonstration in Charlottesville carried symbols of Christianity as part of their self-identification to continue the racist legacy of the KKK and its iconic burning cross. Members of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a fascist group that advocates for racially "pure nations" and an end to "anti-Christian degeneracy," wore a shirt adorned with an Orthodox Christian cross, the logo of the Neo-Confederate League of the South (LOS), whose goal is to establish a Christian theocratic state. And the leaders of the Traditional Youth Network (TYN), another prominent group in the "Unite the Right" movement, describe ideal activists for their racist causes as "warriors for the cross." Even loudly chanted by many torch-bearing fascist marchers, many proudly displaying the swastika, was the Nazi call for "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden). These are among the openly Christian fascist groups and individuals in America, all of which warmly welcomed the triumph of the Trump regime and envision it as a major breakthrough toward the eventual realization of white nationalism and white supremacy as official ruling forces in a future fascist America.

For their demonic goal to be thwarted, a qualitative change in both objective and subjective conditions is needed. Fascism relies upon two major conditions for its existence and growth: failed or failing systems in objective reality and mass false consciousness in subjective social reality. Both are present at alarming levels in contemporary America, and have been for some time. Objectively, the gap in wealth/income/power between the elite and the mass population in the United States has never been greater than it is today. Similarly, with perhaps the exception of the Great Depression, there has never before been a time of greater systemic failures in the social fabric of American life than now. Such dysfunctional objective conditions are fertile ground for right-wing political extremism propelled by false consciousness at the bottom and unbridled greed at the top of an increasingly polarized racial and social hierarchy. Pronounced false consciousness has been a standard feature of American society for decades, especially when it comes to the concept of class. Rather than defining class on the basis of ownership of sources of wealth and means of production, it is commonly defined and treated, even within social science, as nothing more than an income level resulting in the mass perception of a normative middle class and two deviant groups, one commonly hated and the other functionally envied, known as the poor and the rich. The poisonous harvest of this rampant false class consciousness came in the electoral victory of a racist, misogynistic billionaire perceived by millions of working-class voters as somehow representative of their interests.

A false political consciousness echoes this false class consciousness. Once vibrant and diverse enough to encompass every and any modern political allegiance, the viable political spectrum in American has narrowed itself to a functional dichotomy of only "liberals" and "conservatives" along with their operative political parties, Democrats and Republicans, two wings of the same bird of prey. The extent to which politicians and voters march lock step to these designations is as common in practice as it is dangerous to democracy in theory. Objectively, most Americans are not affiliated with either major party and therefore have their interests effectively marginalized or entirely excluded from representation. Subjectively, however, most would define themselves as conservatives in the raging culture wars, and identify liberals as an out-group which does not embrace traditional American values, but instead promotes calls for sinful and deviant behaviors. Such false consciousness is an ideal setting for fascist wolves in conservative shepherd clothing, a reality which has increasingly confronted the Republican Party in recent years leading to the Trump triumph.

However, the greatest vehemence in politics is reserved for false faith consciousness. Christian fascism, an oxymoron in reality, relies upon an inversion of Christianity in the mindset of its deluded evangelical mass base, which overwhelmingly voted for Trump and continues to unabashedly support him despite his plummeting approval ratings within the general population. The only "real Christian." in their warped worldview, is an "evangelical born-again Christian," an identity which precludes being a liberal but mandates allegiance to conservative principles and politicians, especially ultra-right ones. Only those who explicitly identify themselves as "evangelical born-again Christians" (i.e. social conservatives) are among the chosen few destined to deliver a chosen people and nation under God into the promised land. All others are not only marginalized out-groups, but outcasts ultimately destined to spend eternity in hell after desired exclusion from political office on earth. Such is the operative mindset of Christian fascism, and it is rampant within influential segments of American society today. The Trump regime has catapulted it, along with Christian Zionism and white nationalism, into the highest offices of our troubled land, an unmitigated American tragedy which should and must be a clarion wake-up call to us all.

To paraphrase a bit of social wisdom, all that is necessary for this emergent evil to triumph totally is for good folks to do nothing. As our Declaration of Independence, composed by a former resident of the Charlottesville area, Thomas Jefferson, exhorts American citizens then and now: "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." And as a great American, Frederick Douglass, prophetically proclaimed: "power concedes nothing without a demand… The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." It is time for Americans, the openly and latently oppressed, to do our duty and firmly close the gate on this tyrannical gateway drug known as the Trump regime before more damage by more potent and pernicious forces of fascism is inflicted upon us and all of humanity.

The Nature of the Reactionary: A Polemic

By Ben Harney

When I ask you why justice and equality will never be embraced by humanity, you respond with an answer that sounds as if it has been rehearsed in your head one thousand times:

"Human nature, of course. It is evil, it is greedy."

And now a sly smile creeps onto your face, you have just won the debate of the millenia. A tidal wave of release has swept through your soul; this response is almost a confession, but an easy one for you at that! To you, this nature is an infallible god. Think on what you have done, friend! Somehow, you have just redeemed the suffering of billions with one fell sweep from this Nature; and with its omnipotence comes your own liberation. Anything is justified with this Nature on your side. Somewhere, in one of the deepest caverns of your mind, one demon sighs with relief upon hearing your message from this new deity. He thought his work would have to be done in the dark recesses of your soul, but now, he knows, he is free!

The speed of your answer to my question betrays the intensity of how desperately you hold onto it. Why? I suppose there might exist some dragons within you which truly revel in this nature of yours. Or is it yours? Maybe it belongs to the others, just not you, O virtuous one! No, these dragons remain a part of you, they grew up with you; in your bed, at your dinner table, in your Church, in the yacht club, in Prep school. They whispered fire into your mind when you strolled by some fellow brother or sister sleeping in waste on the soulless concrete. They clawed and lashed at your eyes when you saw a cousin with a darker complexion. These dragons took a hold of your throat and cackled when you glared at that worn traveler or worker. The beasts within now have made you their own; your society nurtured them, and you never fought them.

I can only assume you to be a genius! Alas, you know the nature of all humankind! I wonder who told you, whoever has that kind of wisdom; I should like to talk with them.

In this answer, you have confessed not the nature of humankind, but yourself, my friend. Human nature is evil? It is selfish? No. You are evil, you are selfish. From that tower of yours, you look down on the stalwart people who carry on, and you spit. You look to your father, some banker perhaps, and orgasm to his success. Do you call him evil, is he selfish? Your eyes say no. Ah, I forgot, the nature you speak of applies only to the unwashed rabble, not your high kin! But wait, you do embrace it. The grin you don when such a question comes up is the real horror, but, evidently, you delight in this. The chains are broken, and you are let loose; make those millions, ignore everything else.

It seems that your own self, under the watchful guise of the wretched system which planted seeds in your psyche, has gorged on the pleasures of fear and laziness, of apathy and greed. You bow to one thousand generations of tradition. You bow to things as they are, you bow to suffering. Pathetic submission is your roll call, and this false creation you call 'innate Nature' commands you. Instead of seizing your sword, pushing forward with all your might, and ascending the summits of yourself in order to confront the dragons which now call your own mind their dominion, you act as their humble servant. But this is the rule, not the exception. The articulated and painted social existence which you were immersed in, one which if the surface is scratched at only slightly the rotten and tortured flesh below is revealed, has created a perfect mind for this kind of disease to flourish in. You and your neighbors all pat each other on the back in celebration of the evilness of humankind!

Do you say it is human nature for billions to endure exploitation, to endure a constant war for their dignity, because you, yourself, have become a slave to cruelty, to laziness, to the filthy heads of this hydra? But do you know that starving goes against human nature? Do you know that dying from black lung is in direct opposition to human nature? In the least, the nature of humanity is to live and thrive, just like any other species. Equality, freedom, now these are the philosophical pinnacles of human nature, you and your system has made it so. There is nothing more true than the rage and pain a mother may feel when her child is hungry. And there is nothing more unnatural than being relegated to a certain life because of the amount of a certain compound in one's skin. You say our present system is in harmony with human nature. I say this system makes billions cry out against it in one billion different ways for one billion different reasons, but all of these tears and fists can be traced back to the root, to the foundation. The coming revolution will be the culmination of five hundred years of pain and suffering and hope and unity, what do you have, what will you have, and where will you hide? Your nature prevents you from realizing a new society where the masses of humanity hold the torch of power in their own coarse hands.

But it must be known, to everyone, that your nature, the nature of the Reactionary, is the nature of the coward. There is no courage, or fire, in that soul of yours. All I can see is a fat and bloated devil which scrambles to bow the lowest when his master comes to him. It takes no strength to justify the pain and rape of one million souls, no bravery to be settled with the current state of things, when the 'current state of things' means no pain, and only pleasure, for you. But perhaps you do need some strength, I grant you, which you must use to hold up the unbelievable quantity of unseen cruelty within your heart. That must be a heavy weight.

To revolt means to first hunt down the socially implanted demons which lurk in one's own heart. If you confess that your own nature is to submit to these demons, to greed and evil, then you have already lost that battle. The beasts have slain you before the hunt even began.

So be it, you cannot accept justice and equality. But Humanity's nature is not yours to brand.

Fred Perry, Proud Boys, and the Semiotics of Fashion

By Anya Simonian

[Pictured: Traditional style influenced by Jamaicans, Italians, and Ivy League Americans from the 60s.]

Over the past week the Proud Boys, a self-described "Western chauvinist" organization whose members are tired of apologizing for "creating the modern world", have garnered media attention. Along with the disruption of an Aboriginal ceremony in Halifax by Proud Boy servicemen, the group is gaining notoriety for clashes with anti-fascist (Antifa) activists. Additionally, the Proud Boys have been involved with so-called anti-Sharia rallies . In New York, two Proud Boys and one "Proud Boys Girl" recently parted ways with their employers after their involvement with the alt-right group came to light and a social media campaign demanded the businesses take action. Proud Boys have degrees of membership. To become a "Fourth Degree" Proud Boy, aspiring members take part in "a major fight for the cause." Founder Gavin McInnes explained: "You get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa [anti-fascist activists]," to rise through the ranks.

Much Proud Boy media coverage has mentioned, in passing, the group's "uniform": a black Fred Perry polo shirt with bright yellow trim. The Washington Post's recent article, "The alt-right's Proud Boys love Fred Perry polo shirts. The feeling is not mutual" went further in its attempts to explain why Proud Boys have adopted a shirt that, at first glance, seems best suited for white middle-class dads out for a round of golf or game of tennis, quoting Zoë Beery's piece in The Outline, " How Fred Perry Came to Symbolize Hate ". While both articles offer an overview of the shirt's popularity among Mod and traditional Skinhead subculturists and its eventual cooptation by racist skinheads and neo-Nazis, neither emphasizes the degree to which the brand has long served as a site of political contest between the radical left and the far-right. Since the early 1980s, attempts to associate the brand with right-wing politics have been met with resistance from two main camps: 1.) anti-racist skinheads and 2.) "traditional" (non-racist) skinheads -- both of whom refuse to cede the meaning of the Fred Perry brand to the far-right in the same way that one might fight for the liberation of an occupied space.

The word skinhead most often conjures up images of white hooligans, or a particular aesthetic adopted by neo-Nazis. Yet, what it means to be a skinhead has changed over time. Periodizing skinhead culture is challenging but, broadly speaking, it can be broken down into three eras: the middle to late 1960s period of apolitical, multi-racial working class youth; the 1980s period of White Nationalist cooptation of the skinhead aesthetic and overtly anti-racist and left-wing skinhead political responses to that cooptation; and the period from the late 1980s to the present, in which the meaning of the skinhead culture and aesthetic is continually contested.


Skinhead Origins

1960s skinheads

1960s skinheads

In the late 1960s, the first skinhead subculturists were born of multiculturalism: the fusion of Jamaican "rude boy" styles and music brought to England by Jamaican immigrants in the post-war years, and the working class culture of the English Mods (short for Modernists) who decked themselves out in fine Italian suits and shoes, listened to American soul, jazz, and R&B, and rode Vespa scooters. Mod women sported miniskirts, flats, and sometimes men's clothing. Skinhead style emerged in Britain in the late 1960s as a simplified version of the Mod aesthetic that placed greater emphasis on projecting working class masculinity and a love of Jamaican reggae and ska.


Interpretations

Social scientists took note of these subcultures and worked to explain their meaning in relation to a changing post-war Britain. The seminal work on subculture studies to which all later studies pay homage, or attempt to refute, is Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. Published in 1976, Resistance Through Rituals, as well as the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from which the work emerged, understood youth subculture in Marxian terms as a manifestation of social, political, and economic change. The historical context for the CCCS interpretation was the post-war period of the 1950s that saw the rise of commercial television, age specific schools, and extended education that brought youth together for longer, more isolated periods of time. Adding to these challenges were the recent violence of war and more fatherless children as a result of war deaths. These factors contributed to the making of an isolated, and later unique subculture of resistance.

Drawing from Italian Marxist theorist Antionio Gramsci, a driving foundational assumption of Resistance Through Rituals is that one or more dominant groups in society hold "cultural capital" and subordinate groups or classes find ways to express or challenge their subordinate experience in their own culture. This dominant culture, according to the CCCS, exists solely within the framework of capitalism, whereas the struggle for "cultural capital" becomes a struggle between those with capital versus those who labor. The dominant culture acts as a hegemon and attempts to define and contain all other cultures, giving birth to opposition from less dominant cultures against this cultural hegemony. Although the less dominant culture (i.e. the subculture) enters into resistance against the dominant culture, the subculture is in fact derived from the "parent," or hegemonic culture, and will inevitably share many of its attributes. For example, working-class culture is considered by the editors of Resistance Through Rituals to be a "parent culture," yet the youth subcultures that arose from it have their own values, uses of material culture (which are often derived from the parent culture but are re-appropriated and given new meaning), as well as territorial spaces. The Fred Perry represents both an appropriation of the parent culture and a territorial "space" where politics play out.

The editors of Resistance Through Rituals write:

Sub-cultures, then, must first be related to the 'parent cultures' of which they are a sub-set. But, subcultures must also be analysed in terms of their relation to the dominant culture - the overall disposition of cultural power in the society as a whole. Thus, we may distinguish respectable, 'rough', delinquent and the criminal subcultures within working class culture: but we may also say that, though they differ amongst themselves, they all derive in the first instance from a 'working class parent culture': hence, they are all subordinate subcultures, in relation to the dominant middle-class or bourgeois culture. [1]

1960s Mod style from the 1979 film, Quadrophenia

1960s Mod style from the 1979 film, Quadrophenia

From this angle, Resistance Through Ritual examines the predecessors of the skinheads -- the Mod subculture of the 1960s which, in its most basic terms, consisted of dressing sharp in the latest high fashion (but only wearing particular high fashion brands, often stemming from styles of those involved in organized crime in 1950s and 60s Britain), hairstyles, soul and rock n' roll music, all-night clubs, riding Vespa scooters, and taking amphetamines. The Mod was all about style, and this sharp style, combined with the "uppers" they took, were cast by the CCCS in terms of opposition to the hippie culture of the day that to many Mods seemed to spell a slow, do-nothing death. This seemingly odd combination of interests was explained in terms of working-class resistance by Dick Hebdige in his contribution to Resistance Through Rituals, "The Meaning of Mod":

The importance of style to the mods can never be overstressed - Mod was pure, unadulterated STYLE, the essence of style. In order to project style it became necessary first to appropriate the commodity, then to redefine its use and value and finally to relocate its meaning within a totally different context. This pattern, which amounted to the semantic rearrangement of those components of the objective world which the mod style required, was repeated at every level of the mod experience and served to preserve a part at least of the mod's private dimension against the passive consumer role it seemed in its later phases ready to adopt...

Thus the scooter, a formerly ultra-respectable means of transport was appropriated and converted into a weapon and a symbol of solidarity. Thus pills, medically diagnosed for the treatment of neuroses, were appropriated and used as an end-in-themselves, and the negative evaluations of their capabilities imposed by school and work were substituted by a positive assessment of their personal credentials in the world of play (i.e. the same qualities which were assessed negatively by their daytime controllers - e.g. laziness, arrogance, vanity etc. - were positively defined by themselves and their peers in leisure time). [2]

As mentioned above, the skinheads were born from a combination of Jamaican immigrant "rude boy" culture and Mod subculture. Originating in the middle to late 1960s, the skinheads were of solidly working-class origin and resented authority and social pretensions. The skinhead community developed at a time of worsening conditions for working-class youth, and the CCCS interpreted this subculture as an attempt to recreate a traditional working-class community. Although the skinheads came from the working class, fewer opportunities meant that they almost acted out or performed working-class values rather than lived them. The early skinheads were intensely aware of their self-image and played up their exaggerated working-class style. They wore Doc Marten work boots, suspenders and blue jeans or Levis Sta-Prest jeans as a way to identify with this style and lifestyle in decline. Yet, they coupled this look with Ben Sherman button down dress shirts and Fred Perry tennis shirts -- a scaled down Mod look -- in an appropriation of neat middle-class style that turned middle-class values on their heads. This tennis shirt, worn by working-class skinheads, became a symbol of solidarity and a new kind of "class."

spiritof69.jpg

At clubs in the evenings the skinheads would often wear suits like those of the Jamaica "rude boys" and dance alongside Jamaicans to Rock Steady and ska music. Anti-racist and traditional skinheads -- sometimes dubbed Trojan Skinheads for their love of Trojan Records, producers of Jamaican music -- look back on this period as a golden age for their subculture. The phrase "Spirit of 69'" which originated in the 1980s is used by traditional/Trojan skinheads as a reference point for what skinhead culture can and should be about: inclusion, racial harmony, and a multicultural celebration of working class culture. Naturally, the CCCS interpreted skinhead solidarity as an act of resistance to a hegemonic order and its particular characteristics felt by working-class kids coming of age in the post-war years. By the 1970s, however, this variety of the skinhead subculture had largely faded away, but elements of it would be revived, in bastardized form, in the following decade.

Within the early skinhead subculture there had always existed a focus on masculinity, or acting "hard" in order project an "authentic" working-class ethos. This masculinity was expressed in the skinhead interest in soccer and the joining of "firms," or soccer clubs that rooted for their favorite teams and often used violence against opposing firms. The "firm" was also an expression of the desire to protect territory and, most importantly, an expression of collective solidarity. With the introduction and quick commodification of punk rock in the late 1970s, a second wave of skinheads was born. These skinheads, connected to the punk scene rather than the ska, Rock Steady, or reggae scenes of their predecessors, still aped working-class style while sporting the Fred Perry brand, yet their music was Oi -- a more aggressive, simplified version of punk that could never go mainstream. Non-racist bands like Cock Sparrer, The 4-Skins, The Last Resort, Sham69, and The Cockney Rejects led the way.

While this second wave of skinheads was at first largely apolitical, their penchant for soccer hooliganism made them prime recruits for England's far-right National Front. The Young National Front (YNF) began to recruit second wave skinheads at soccer matches, appealing to skinhead working-class sensibilities by scapegoating immigrants for the decline of the white working class. By 1979, the YNF had established Rock Against Communism, a music festival featuring white nationalist bands. In subsequent years neo-Nazi bands like Skrewdriver would bring hundreds of disaffected youth into the National Front. Along with this came the adoption of a new skinhead aesthetic that included the traditional Fred Perry or Ben Sherman shirt and Doc Marten boots, but added to it a paramilitary edge that included flight jackets, larger boots, more closely cropped hair, and symbols of white nationalism. This bastardization of the aesthetic and its coupling with far-right politics made its way to the United States in the 1980s.

Anti-racist and traditionalist responses to the aesthetic and political hijacking of the original "Spirit of 69'" skinhead subculture were swift. As historian Timothy S. Brown put it:

Reacting against this trend-which they considered a bastardization of the original skinhead style-numbers of skins began to stress the cultivation of the "original" look, making fashion, like music, a litmus test for authenticity. Violators of the proper codes were not skinheads, but "bald punks," a category to which racists-who, in the eyes of purists, failed completely to understand what the subculture was about-were likely to belong. The connection between right-wing politics and "inauthentic" modes of dress was personified in the figure of the "bone head," a glue-sniffing, bald-headed supporter of the extreme right, sporting facial tattoos, a union-jack T-shirt, and "the highest boots possible." Although the emphasis on correct style was not explicitly political, it grew-like insistence on the subculture's black musical roots-out of a concern with the authentic sources of skinhead identity. As such, it was heavily associated with the attempts of left-wing and so-called "unpolitical" skins to "take back" the subculture from the radical right in the early 1980s. [3]

sharp.jpg

In an effort to "take back" the subculture and its symbols from the radical right, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) was founded in New York City in 1987. Although anti-racist skinheads and left-wing anti-racist skinhead bands like England's The Oppressed had challenged the far right through song and protest, SHARP represented the first attempt to organize skinheads as a multiracial movement against racist, right-wing "boneheads." SHARP's logo was, in part, the logo for Trojan Records, producers of the Rock Steady and ska music so beloved by those first wave British skinheads. In fashion, SHARP emphasized a return to the early styles of skinhead dress, and sought to reclaim the Fred Perry brand (among others) as a symbol of multiculturalism, working-class pride, and the early skinhead subculture in general. As SHARP spread throughout Europe its growth, at times, led to violent clashes with white nationalist skinheads. The Oppressed led the charge in Great Britain, performing confrontational Oi music that pitted the group and its followers firmly against their racist opposition. For example, in their simple four chord song "I Don't Wanna," singer Roddy Moreno belts:

I don't need no bigotry

I know where I'm from

I don't need no racial hate

To help me sing my song

I don't wanna make a stand

But what else can I do?

I don't wanna be like you

Don't wanna fight your race war

Don't wanna bang your drum

I don't wanna be like you

Don't wanna live like scum

The Oppressed associated themselves with groups like Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and wrote anthems like "The AFA Song" meant to inspire the skinhead left in its fight against the right -- a fight that often resulted in street battles between rival skinhead factions in Europe:

We don't carry shotguns

We don't carry chains

We only carry hatchets

To bury in your brains

So come on

Let's go

So come on

Let's go

A.F.A.

In addition to overtly anti-racist organizations like SHARP, "traditional" or "Trojan" skinheads in the 1980s and 1990s avoided the political question altogether and instead simply decided to live the inclusive values found in the first wave skinhead movement while celebrating working-class pride coupled, at times, with an occasional soft patriotism. Other smaller groups like Red and Anarchist Skinheads (RASH) formed alongside SHARP that added a heavier dose of left-wing politics to SHARP's anti-racist stance.

Both groups have worn the Fred Perry and both have incorporated the laurel wreath symbol associated with the brand into album covers and traditional and anti-racist skinhead tattoos. The Fred Perry polo then, for them, is an object reclaimed, re-sanctified, and restored to its original meaning.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, echoes of these conflicts between left, traditional, and right-wing skinheads continued, though never quite reached the fever pitch the conflict had reached in the 1980s.

The Templars (1996), an Oi band from Long Island, NY

The Templars (1996), an Oi band from Long Island, NY

As we move further into this period of political and ideological polarization, brought on by capitalist crisis, we are seeing old partisan battles reignite. It is no surprise then that the Proud Boys have adopted such a politically-charged piece of clothing for their unofficial uniform. For those with an insiders' view of this decades-old culture war, the Proud Boys' adoption of the Fred Perry polo makes an unequivocal statement: we identify with the far-right uses of this brand. The adoption of the Fred Perry is not lost on Antifa, the Proud Boys' primary political opponents. Fashion, as one variety of symbol system, projects a clear political orientation for those able to "read" the language of what is signified by the brand. As anthropologist Edward Sapir pointed out: "The chief difficulty of understanding fashion in its apparent vagaries is the lack of exact knowledge of the … symbolisms attaching to forms, colors, textures, postures, and other expressive elements of a given cultures. The difficulty is appreciably increased by the fact that some of the expressive elements tend to have quite different symbolic references in different areas."

For those who have adopted or who understand the skinhead subculture in all its variegated forms, the Fred Perry, viewed in certain contexts, sends one of three messages: that one espouses white nationalist politics, far-left politics, or that one is a traditional skinhead who celebrates multiculturalism. For those in the latter two camps there has been a long-standing contest to wrest the symbols of the "Spirit of 69'" from the hands of those who would corrupt them. While "ownership" of a brand may seem trivial or ill conceived, this "ownership" embodies a struggle for agency, space, and the dominance of an ideology through appropriation of contested material culture.


Notes

[1] John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts, "Subcultures, Class and Culture," inResistance Through RitualsYouth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1993), 7.

[2] Ibid, 76.

[3] Timothy S. Brown, "Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and "Nazi Rock" in England and Germany." Journal of Social History 38, no. 1 (2004): 157-78.

The Nurses' Union That Made Medicine Sick: How the Oligarchs Hypnotized Labor Leaders to Betray Working-Class Communities of Color

By Jon Jeter

Opened in 1889, O'Connor Hospital was the first in the city of San Jose, and the second in California to be chartered and managed by the Daughters of Charity, a 400-year-old Catholic mission founded by St. Vincent de Paul. Its benefactor, Judge Myles P. O'Connor, made his fortune in mining and he and his wife, Amanda, were two of Silicon Valley's first philanthropists. They had originally planned to open an old-age home and an orphanage, but the local Archbishop convinced the couple that the needs of what would grow to become the state's third most populous city were far too prolific to address only that which vexed the very young, and the very old.

For the next 125 years, the Daughters of Charity faithfully served San Jose's sick, pregnant, and poor, the hospital's fortunes rising and falling in tandem with that of Santa Clara County's laboring classes. With paychecks buoyed by postwar productivity and assertive trade unions, the order built a new, state-of-the art campus on the city's east side in 1953, just as Americans were bursting at the seams with hope, and babies.

Similar to the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, however, O'Connor went broke, gradually at first, and then suddenly, as good-paying jobs dried up, culminating in the ruinous 2008 recession that left millions of Californians unable to pay their hospital tab. Forced to borrow heavily just to stay afloat, the Daughters of Charity Health System announced in 2014 what would've once been unthinkable: a sale of its network of six hospitals.

More jarring still was the colorful streetscape that greeted morning commuters on Forest Avenue as they approached O'Connor's main gate in the first days of 2015. As the low-watt January sun doused the Santa Cruz mountains in a champagne-colored dew, motorists were visibly puzzled, some even scratching their heads as they passed by.

On the campus' north lawn, nearly 100 protesters clad in robin's-breast red, chanted, cheered and hoisted placards that read: "Nurses and nuns agree: Approve the Sale."

To the south, maybe 20 yards away, stood another 100 or so demonstrators clad entirely in blue, brandishing signs that read: "Save our Hospital; Reject the Sale."

The dueling rallies prefaced a public hearing by California's State Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is legally required to approve the sale of nonprofit hospitals, and pitted one powerful labor union - the California Nurses Association in red - against another - the Service Employees' International Union, in blue.

Dubbed by the Nation Magazine as the country's most progressive trade union, the CNA and its umbrella organization, National Nurses United, endorsed a proposal by Daughters of Charity executives to sell the chain to Prime, a southern California-based healthcare provider with a reputation for ripping off Medicaid, its patients, and its workforce. A 2014 federal audit of Prime hospitals, for instance, found 217 cases of improperly diagnosed kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition that is seldom seen in the US, and typically found only in the global South. Unsurprisingly, Medicaid reimbursement rate for the the disease is quite high when compared with other maladies.

The SEIU, on the other hand, favored a sale to a Wall Street hedge fund named Blue Wolf with no management experience in the healthcare industry, but a demonstrated proficiency for dismantling businesses and auctioning its parts off to the highest bidders.

But here's the thing: San Jose's working-class communities - a Benetton- blend of Latinos, south Asians, Blacks and Whites - wanted neither, Prime least of all.

Had they bothered to show up for any of the dozen or so community stakeholder meetings held in 2014, the CNA's leadership might have known this. But Bob Brownstein, the executive director of the civic organization, Working Partners USA, could only remember seeing a CNA labor representative at a single meeting, and if he chimed in on the discussion, Brownstein couldn't recall.

Labor representatives for the SEIU, on the other hand, and Blue Wolf executives were fixtures at the stakeholders' meetings.

"I don't think either union did much of anything," Brownstein recalled more than a year later, "but SEIU was clearly more comfortable in dealing with the community. As I recall, there was someone from Blue Wolf and the SEIU at every meeting and they answered every question that everyone put to them. They were clearly trying to generate answers and they even made some changes to the original proposal" to win the community's approval.

"Their offer was more opaque but they did a much better job than Prime did in acknowledging community concerns. We never trusted Blue Mountain but the community was much more worried about Prime."

So much so that a coalition of 15 civic groups wrote a joint letter to Harris urging her to veto the sale to Prime. The stakeholders' clear preference was Santa Clara County which had bid on O'Connor, and whose health care network had a regional reputation for providing quality care to the uninsured that was second only to O'Connor's.

But Daughters of Charity executives did not want to break up the set, so-to-speak, and preferred selling all six hospitals to a single bidder.

"I don't know why the California Nurses Association didn't help us push the county's bid," said Grace-Sonia E. Melanio, Communications Director for Community Health Partnership, which was one of the authors of the letter to the attorney general's office.

"I assume it was because they don't represent county nurses but I don't know that for a fact."

By January of 2015, Brownstein, Melanio and others knew that shifting the conversation from the two labor-backed bidders to the county's bid was a longshot, at best.

Still, Melanio recalls her astonishment at seeing the the tsunami of red and blue as she pulled into the O'Connor parking lot ahead of that January public hearing.

"I was shocked," she said, "to see that the unions had the community outnumbered by roughly 100 to 1."


"You Got to Dance with Them That Brung You"

The question of who killed organized labor in the US has always been something of a whodunit for me, until I went to work as a communications specialist for the California Nurses Association in January of 2015.

The action at O'Connor was my first week on the job and the hospital's ultimate sale to a Wall Street hedge fund was tantamount to an exhumation. After examining the cadaver close up, I can report that all evidence identifies the killer beyond a shadow of a doubt:

It was a suicide.

What proved the undoing of the labor movement was not the bloodlessness of conservatives, but the faithlessness of liberals; not the 1 percent's dearth of compassion, but the 99 percent's failure of imagination; not the corruption of the managerial class but trade union leaders' desertion of the very communities that made the American labor movement a force to be reckoned with in the first place.

"You got to dance," the immortal Molly Ivins once wrote, " with them what brung you." After collaborating with workers of all races to create a middle-class that stands as the singular achievement of the Industrial era, unions switched dance partners mid-song.

In championing Prime Health Care, the nurses' union, and its Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro, carried water for a venal corporate class in much the same fashion that the Democratic Party, and its titular leader, Hillary Clinton, runs interference for Wall Street, leaving the people of San Jose to choose from the lesser of two evils, just as voters in next week's presidential ballot have no good options.

This is no coincidence. Beginning in earnest with Wall Street's 1975 takeover of New York City's budget, corporate executives have wooed both Democrats and labor union leaders with increasing assertiveness, in a concerted effort to thwart the interracial labor movement that is the only fighting force to ever battle the plutocrats' to a draw.

To put only slightly too fine a point on it, financiers' courtship of labor in the postwar era mirrors Napoleon's recruitment of Haiti's mulattoes to help put down the island's slave mutiny. Both counter- revolutions drove a wedge through the opposition with a psych-ops campaign that can be reduced to a question of identity:

Are you a worker, or are you white?


No More Beautiful Sight

The Bay area can make a credible claim to being the birthplace of the modern labor movement. When West Coast longshoremen went on strike at the height of the Great Depression, Blacks who had consistently been rebuffed in their efforts to integrate the docks, jumped at the chance to work, albeit for smaller paychecks than their white peers.

Confronted with a failing strike, the head of the longshoremen's union, an Australian émigré named Harry Bridges, toured African American churches on both sides of the Bay bridge, according to the late journalist Thomas Fleming.

From the pulpit, Bridges acknowledged the union's historical mistreatment of Blacks, but promised skeptical parishioners that if they respected the pickets, they would work the ports up and down the West Coast, earning the same wage as white dockworkers.

They did, and the strike's subsequent success triggered a wave of labor militancy that not only imbued the economy with buying power, but connected workers' discontent with broader political struggles for affordable housing, free public education, infrastructure improvements, and civil rights.

"Negro-white unity has proved to be the most effective weapon against the shipowners," the historian Philip S. Foner quoted a dockworker saying in his book, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, "against the raiders and all our enemies."

When Oakland's two chic department stores, Kahns and Hastings, denied pay raises to their mostly women employees in 1946, nearly 100,000 union members - mostly men - walked off the job in solidarity.

But they didn't stop there, shutting down the whole of Alameda County for the better part of two days, ordering businesses to close, and turning back deliveries of everything other than essential medical supplies and beer, which they commandeered to hold a bi-racial bacchanal in the streets of Oakland, dancing, singing, and exulting in the power of the many.

It was the last general strike in US history; within months, Congress overrode President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act which, among other things, outlawed so-called sympathy strikes, and mandated trade unions to expel Communists from their ranks.

Still, the working class maintained its swagger for another generation.

Invoking eminent domain, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency razed thousands of structures in the city's "blighted" Fillmore neighborhood, forcing nearly 10,000, mostly Black households to relocate, and transforming Geary Street into an eight-lane monstrosity which sealed off the Fillmore from the whiter and wealthier Pacific Heights.

In a 1963 interview with the Boston television station WGBH, about his iconic documentary, Take This Hammer, James Baldwin said this:

"A boy last week - he was 16, in San Francisco - told me on television….He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "You do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging - as most Northern cities now are engaged - in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out."

Among those who took notice of the Fillmore's gentrification was Lou Goldblatt, who was, at the time, the second-in-command of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the very same union that had integrated the West Coast's docks.

"There was no reason why the pension funds should just be laying around being invested in high-grade securities, Goldblatt later recalled. I thought there was no reason why that money shouldn't be used to build some low-cost housing."

The ILWU created the Longshore Redevelopment Corporation to pounce on the three city blocks-out of a total of 60- that the city had set aside for affordable housing.

In her 1964 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Josephine Solomon described her new digs: "I've just moved into my new home in St. Francis Square…and living here is quite clearly going to be exhilarating and, more important, the best possible place in which I can raise my children. About 100 families have already moved in…and we have representatives of all races and colors living together as neighbors. There is no more beautiful sight in this town than our marvelous, mixed-up collection of white, brown, and yellow children playing together in the sunny community square every afternoon."


Who's The Boss?

"C'mon people, what are some more nurses values?"

I was nearly four months into my stint at the CNA when I found myself in a half-lit, mildewed, second-floor conference room in the union's downtown Oakland office, seated among a clutch of maybe 7 or 8 other communications staffers, all but two of us-an Asian woman and myself-who are non-white.

The task this late April afternoon was to identify "nurses values," which I had assumed meant that I would help pore over the results of a nurses' questionnaire to produce a coherent ad campaign.

Instead, the communications manager, Sarah Cecile, stood astride an easel that leaned like a sprinter at the finish line, her magic marker poised to add to the wan list of nouns that glared accusingly at me, reducing Hegelian dialectical inquiry to a game of fucking charades.

"Wait," I said, "we're telling the nurses what their values should be? Shouldn't we be asking the nurses what their values are, you know, like in a survey, or a poll?"

"That's a bad word for us," said a graphic artist who'd worked for the CNA for several years. "Polling is frowned upon here."

"Maybe they know something I don't," I said sarcastically, "but if we're telling the rank and file what to do, doesn't that make the union just another boss that the nurses have to answer to?

Should communications organize a coup of sorts?" I asked provocatively.

When I returned to my office 30 minutes later, I had an email from De Moro's secretary, summoning me to a meeting with the executive director the following morning.

This was extraordinary for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that despite sharing the same floor as the executive staff, it was an unwritten rule that communications was to have no contact with top management. This directive went so far as to prohibit communications from either emailing executives directly, or from entering or exiting through the executives' north wing.

Moreover, I was told that both the executive staff, and the board, were almost all lily-white, save for one Latino and one African-American on each.

What I remember most about the next day's meeting is the mirthless half-smile that DeMoro wore like a mask for nearly the entire 45-minutes, reminding me of Sir Richard Burton's description of Lucille Ball as "a monster of staggering charmlessness."

She began by asking me if I had any ideas for trying to improve the union's communications effort, which was odd, since she'd blown off an email with my suggestions for doing exactly that only weeks earlier.

"Anything we could do to make this more of a bottom-up effort would be to the union's benefit," I recall saying. "It seems we spend an awful lot of time trying to talk to people who really aren't interested in what we have to say, and not enough rallying and organizing the community to put pressure on decision makers."

By this time, California's Secretary-of-State, Harris had already, effectively vetoed the sale to Prime by attaching such stringent conditions to the transaction that she knew no corporation would accept the terms. I had publicly predicted as much months earlier; knowing that Harris would rely heavily on Wall Street to finance her US Senate campaign, I'd proposed, unsuccessfully, writing articles interrogating the investment firm's mishandling of other businesses it had acquired.

But DeMoro's communications' director, a walking mediocrity named Chuck Idelson, had all of the imagination of a lamp post, and only half the personality. His idea of media relations was sending out at least one anemic press release per day, then marshaling the entire communication staff for two days to badger journalists we had no relationship with to cover news conferences that were wholly absent any news. A North Carolina rally for the Robin Hood tax on Wall Street transactions was attended by two people, the parents of Cecile, the communications manager.

As presidential hopefuls began campaigning in Iowa ahead of that state's all important caucus, the nurses' union planned to launch an ad campaign against Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker.

"Why in the world would you do that?" I asked Idelson one day in early 2015 just as the primary season was beginning to take shape.

"Well, Walker is really bad on labor," Idelson said.

"All the Republicans are bad on labor," I said. "All the Democrats too. You're gonna tell the rank-and-file that you spent a quarter-of-a-million dollars to help send union-busting Hillary Clinton to the White House? Why don't they spend that money on organizing, or on an ad campaign to support Black Lives Matter. Police violence against people of color is a public health crisis," I said. "Who is more credible on that issue than nurses?"

Moreover, I said, a California-based trade union buying ads in Iowa with union dues will surely be used as a cudgel with which to beat organized labor upside the head.

I repeated my concerns to DeMoro, but with that awkward smile on her face, she made it clear that she shared neither my faith in the rank-and-file, or the community.

"The nurses have some issues," she said at our meeting. "We need for more of them to support the Democrats and to work the phone banks and things like that," she said. "And frankly," she said, abandoning all pretense now, her smile dissolving into a contemptuous frown, "they need to be more progressive, more radical and to take more chances."

DeMoro's annual salary at the time was $359,000, more than triple the average nurse's yearly pay.


You Ain't White

Portraying Leftists as subversives, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required trade unions to weed out suspected communists, according to the historian Foner, by asking Black workers questions like:

"Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?"

And this: Have you ever danced with a white girl?"

Whites were asked if they had ever entertained Blacks in their homes, and witnesses, Foner wrote, were asked "Have you ever had any conversations that would lead you to believe (the accused) is rather advanced in his thinking on racial matters?"

Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, would later acknowledge that this purge of communists from trade unions was akin to severing the umbilical cord while the baby was still in the womb, starving the most democratizing social movements of a vital fuel-source.

Much of the labor movement's bandwidth however, could not be measured in muscle, or union-dues, but in imagination, as demonstrated by the ILWU's Goldblatt's vision of a Beloved Community, fashioned from the stevedores' pension fund.

"So let's all be careful," United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther once said, "that we don't play the bosses game by falling for the Red Scare."

And then Reuther went on to play the bosses game, expertly, chasing Marxists from the union, isolating Black workers, and reverting to the anodyne reforms that characterized the ineffective, segregated unions before the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. So disillusioned were Black autoworkers with Reuther's tripartite alliance with Detroit's industrialists and the Democrats that by the late 1960s, many had begun to joke that the acronym UAW stood for "U Ain't White."

The tipping point, however, occurred in the midst of the 1975 fiscal crisis, when New York bankers hatched a scheme to recoup their losses on bad real estate investments from the wages, pensions, and subsidies shelled out to city employees and the working class. The facts were not on their side, and so the financiers played the only hand they knew to play: race.

Doubling down on the Birth-of-a-Nation narrative, the city's oligarchs, and their friends in the media, portrayed Blacks as a menace to the civic project, exploiting racial resentment of a Black polity that had found its voice mostly through labor unions.

In a 1976 episode of the NBC television series, McCloud, titled "The Day New York Turned Blue," the stetson-wearing New Mexico sheriff- an avatar for white, male supremacy- almost single-handedly rescues Gotham from ruin, largely by convincing an Italian cop named Rizzo to cross a picket line, and help repel an attack by the mafia, who ambush police headquarters to kill a mob attorney-turned state's witness.

Aside from the mafia, the villains in this urban morality tale are the police union-led by the Bad Nigger that 1970s America loved to hate, Carl Weathers-which refuses to call off a labor walkout in the city's time-of-need, and a prostitute who is drugging her clients-one an accountant visiting New York to audit federal bailout money-with a fatal, suffocating blue paint.

Playing the role of Rizzo in real-life was the head of the city's largest municipal union, Victor Gotbaum. In his book, Working Class New York, the historian Joshua B. Freeman wrote of Gotbaum and his partner, Joe Bigel:

"Having seen the power of the financial community,the hostility of the federal government, and the divisions within the union movement, they shied away from a militant, independent labor strategy which might have led to them being blamed for a city bankruptcy. Instead, they preferred to make concessions and invest their members' pension money in city debt in return for a place at or near the table, where discussions about the city's future were being made by financiers, businessmen, and state and federal officials. Gotbaum became so entranced by the power elite . . .that within a few years he and (investment banker Felix) Rohatyin were calling each other best friends, even holding a joint birthday party in Southampton."

DeMoro is an heir to Gotbaum, not Goldblatt. If she or any of her lieutenants had an ounce of imagination I never saw it. Consider that at no time during the Daughter's of Charity sale, did I ever once hear anyone mention the possibility of pushing for legislation to convert O'Connor to a worker, or community-managed health co-op, similar to the ILWU's response to the Fillmore's housing crisis.

Shortly after Harris nixed the Prime deal, DeMoro called an emergency all-staff meeting in March of 2015, in which she bluntly asked the 65 or so staff members for their suggestions.

"If we don't do something different now, we're going to die," she said.

A young Latina labor organizer raised her hand, and said: "Why don't we start to build partnerships with the immigrant rights community that's politically active and organizing across California," I recall her saying. "We could really strengthen our own organizing capacity and deepen our roots in a community that is looking to join forces with institutional allies."

You could've heard a gnat piss on cotton in Georgia.

Later, the young organizer would tell me privately me that had she been a white, male labor organizer, and replaced immigrant rights community with some off-brand faction of Silicon Valley white liberals, say Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, DeMoro would've been over the moon.

"Everybody knows that RoseAnn loves her white boys," she said.

As for me, I was fired a week after proposing a coup because "you don't seem happy here."

It was May 1, or May Day.



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.

The Power of Candy: Celebrating Robert Hillary King's Freeline

By Holly Genovese

Freelines, a delicious candy make from large amounts of butter, sugar, evaporated milk, and of course, pecans, doesn't seem all that different from your standard New Orleans Praline. Much softer, and a bit sweeter, but if you didn't know any better you might think they were simply the homemade version of the mass produced French Quarter treat. But candy connoisseur and business owner Robert Hillary King has given these sweet, southern treats a life, and political purpose, of their own.

King was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Angola 3, a group of Black Panther members incarcerated in the Louisiana Stat e Penitentiary and falsely accused of the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. (They were given this moniker in the early 1970s when their mothers were organizing for their freedom). King, alongside Albert Woodfox and the late Herman Wallace, were Black Panther Party members sentenced to life in solitary confinement for this murder, which they ascribe to their association with the Panthers.

Can a piece of candy be an act of protest? Can it be intellectual work? Robert Hillary King believes so. And he manages, through one candy, to contest the legacy of the Black Panther Party, help to humanize the experience of the incarcerated, and to supplement his income.

King can talk for hours about the years he spent in the state penitentiary, his favorite books (Native Son by Richard Wright and the Bible rank high among them), and his most beloved intellectual influences (other incarcerated writers and activists). His home at the time I met him, a small Austin residence, was decorated with Angola 3-inspired art and ephemera.

Posters from events about the Angola 3 were alongside more singular art projects like an Angola 3 wall clock. His bookshelves were filled with books and articles about the Angola 3 and the New Orleans Black Panther Party. He gave me a few freelines (pronounced free-leans-like pralines) to take home, a candy he learned to make while incarcerated and began selling after his release because it was impossible for him to find employment. [1]

Freelines are a play on pralines, the French-inspired Louisiana candy common in New Orleans. [2] King shared how he learned to make his pralines with me. On his website, King describes his freelines and the process in which he developed them. King explained, "I had plenty of time to perfect the recipe from my cell in Angola Penitentiary. I created a make shift kitchen from a stove made out of coke cans and burnt toilet paper rolls to get heat. My friend 'Cap Pistol,' who was working in the prison kitchen, taught me how to make sugar candy and I gave them away, especially to the guys on death row."

King's freelines are packaged with a label that describes the process for making them and his education in prison, alongside "the story of the Angola 3." Next to the brief story is a Black Panther, symbolizing King's continued allegiance to the Black Panther Party, although it was officially disbanded many years ago.

Both the Black Panther Party and the story of the Angola 3 are central to the production and packaging of King's freelines - without them, they would seem like any other New Orleans candy. Even decades after the Black Panther Party officially disbanded, King engages with the party politically and intellectually. His activism is still informed by their ten-point platform, which emphasized the need for an end to the incarceration of African American men, education, an end to police violence, and an emphasis on ending economic suffering for low-income African Americans. King explicitly links the Black Panthers with the Angola 3 on his candy, and had done this while the other members of the Angola 3, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, were still incarcerated (Herman Wallace was released in 2013, 3 days before his death from cancer and Woodfox was released in January 2016). King saw the freelines as a way to garner support for their freedom. Black Panthers and the incarcerated are both stereotyped and remembered as violent militants. By protesting unjust incarceration and false perceptions of the original Party with candy, something both non-violent and associated with sweetness, King helps to subvert these dangerous stereotypes.

The case of King's freelines as an act of Black Power is particularly interesting because of his connection to the South as a native New Orleanian. While influenced by the French, the American praline originated in New Orleans, whereas black power is often popularly constructed as a northern and urban phenomenon (although the origins of both Black Power and the Black Panther Party are in the South). [3] By combining the pralines with the imagery of the Black Panther Party, King uses his candy to assert the connection between the Party, black liberation movements in America, and southern history. By doing so, he helps to reframe ideas about the Party and Black Power through this edible treat, while also creating awareness to the proud history of Black struggle in America.

King's freelines serve as a source of empowerment and protest for those who remain incarcerated. By altering this food in a way that made it possible to make in prison, King implicitly makes an argument for the innovation and creativity found within the Louisiana State Penitentiary. While King started selling them after he left prison, his adjustments to the standard New Orleans praline came about because of the limited tools and supplies he had available to him while incarcerated. This resourcefulness and creativity, which amounted to forging a stove out of coke cans and toilet paper roles, gives the Freeline a defining quality that cannot be matched.

But more than an act of protest, King's freelines are an act of survival. While many states and cities have taken action to "ban the box," (the checkbox referring to incarceration on job applications), it is still incredibly difficult for the formerly incarcerated to gain employment. [4] This amplifies tremendously in the case of someone like King, who spent 29 years incarcerated, much of which was in solitary confinement. Beyond prejudices towards the formerly incarcerated and African American men on the job market, King had missed almost 30 years of experience and skill building, time he couldn't make up. Because of this, King's freelines are an act of radical protest, as well as an act of economic independence. By starting a business out of his activism, while also writing his autobiography From the Bottom of the Heap and going on speaking tours, King defied the constraints placed on him as a Black man in America. This defiance should be celebrated.


Notes

[1] see Orissa Arend Showdown in Desire

[2] Pralines Are More Than Just New Orleans' Signature Candy, http://www.eater.com/2016/10/27/13422426/praline-new-orleans-pecan-candy

[3] Black Power was coined in 1966 Mississippi by Stokely Carmichael, then a leader in SNCC. While the Black Panther Party was founded in October 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College, they were both originally from the South. New Orleans in particular had an active Black Panther Party chapter, to which King and the other members of the Angola 3 were connected with.

[4] Ban the Box Campaign, http://bantheboxcampaign.org/ .

The Utopian Dream of Portland Is Lit by Flames of Racist Hatred: Educating the Next Generation Is Our Only Hope for Change

By Susan Anglada Bartley

When I moved to Portland 17 years ago, freshly graduated from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a degree in History and Literature of Marginalized Communities that I studied to earn with people so brilliant, people who worked so hard, researched so deeply that I should probably not say that I am associated with them--people like the great Dr. Tricia Rose, professor, warrior, TV commentator, and author of Black Noise and several other texts, people like Dr. Robin Kelley, highly regarded professor of History, author ofRace Rebels and Thelonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original and numerous other books and articles--toting Albert Gallatin Scholar and Founder's Scholar awards for my academic work, I was totally unaware of the depth of racism I would encounter in Oregon.

I left New York City with a dream of the West handed down to me by the beat poetry movement, namely Allen Ginsberg, who I deeply admired and had the chance to meet personally before he passed away in 1997, and from my Uncle Kearney, a member of the 60s counterculture who left his Detroit home to wander across the country and up and down the West Coast of the United States, staying at communes in Traverse City, Michigan, Hood River, Oregon, the Russian River, California, and finally in San Blas, Mexico, where he lived for 15 years. My journey West, then, did not initially arise from a desire to fight racism; it came from a desire to follow the footsteps of a dream that is in fact very racist--the escapist dream of the White American hippie. I was born a hippie. I was spoon fed the hippie dream when my uncles would wander into town from the road to visit, full of the shine of San Francisco (and full of marijuana), full of guitar, full of long hair, full of sex, full of Love. They basically told me three things -- Fuck the Man, Everyone is Your Brother or Sister, and Go West! These boys were raised in Detroit--they felt a brotherhood with Blues Music, felt close to Black Urban Poor folks, thought Black and Brown women were BEAUTIFUL, and felt no responsibility to serve anyone or change shit--other than guitar strings. It was through this lens of reality that Oregon always glimmered in the distance, like a mountain range to equality, peace, and brotherhood! New York was nothing like that. New York was halls, and elevators, and stairways. New York was smelly subways. New York was rich people who I served in restaurants or cocktail bars. Or New York was going back to Buffalo...and after what I felt I achieved at NYU, in honor of my Mother who never went to college, I couldn't give up on having a different life. To clarify--this dream wasn't consciously racist; but the unconscious privilege in the concept that one can just leave, escape the system and establish oneself in the magic of the West is the epitome of White blindness-- only a young White college grad would ever believe in the existence of such a Utopia (and let's not forget that it is all related to the constantly reproduced dream of settler colonialism).

Seventeen years later, I write in an area of Portland once called Felony Flats, where impoverished Whites were known to congregate and participate in the underground economy through collecting and selling metals and trading in mind-altering substances (and still do). While it once was a neighborhood populated by more White people, the neighborhood is now one of the most diverse in the city, with large Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, Somalian and Ethiopian communities coexisting with working class or unemployed Whites. The heartbeat of the neighborhood is either the parking lot of 7-11 at 82nd Avenue and Flavel, a methamphetamine and heroin and oxy sales station which is very close to a public park that holds much-debated homeless encampments, or the Vietnamese Buddhist Monastery at the end of my block, where monks meditate in silence for long periods of the day while people of all of these communities, including white-supremacist Nazis, walk by outside, or perhaps it is Franklin High School, a school with a lot of pride and a lot of poverty where I dedicated my life energy as a teacher and program leader for 13 years.

I write in an historical moment where a frightening murderous racist hatred has splashed blood on our streets. This hatred is not a new hatred; it is a hatred that has incubated since the inception of the State of Oregon, which, as an article for The Atlantic by Alana Samuels notes, was founded as a racist Utopia in 1859. It is a racist hatred that often wears a "progressive" disguise; it is a hatred that occupies every facet of public life, from public education to the mayor's office. And if we are going to hold onto our humanity, educators, parents, and citizens who care about the future of the State must use our collective power to rip racism from its roots and reforest. But to do so we must first see the way it operates, understand our role in it, and educate children in solidarity against it.

In 2013, I won an H. Councill Trenholm National Education Association Human and Civil Rights Award for my work to dramatically increase the number of students of color in Advanced Placement courses at Franklin High School. It seems appropriate, now, to point out that one can only win a Human and Civil Rights Award for opening doors that are already legally supposed to be open to everyone in a very racist environment. What doesvery racist mean? Doesn't racist sum it up? Very racist means that the culture inside schools in Oregon, minus a few islands, caters directly to White privilege and actively polices, rejects, intimidates, and totally fails students of color. Very racist means Black, Latino, Native, and Asian students being marginalized, in mass numbers, to remedial and lower-level courses while White students are ushered into higher level opportunities. Very racist means that the experience of children of color in Oregon schools are significantly different, based on their race, as are the results they get from their education. In the mid-2000s, I saw this going on at the high school I taught in, and worked with two tremendous Black Principals--Dr. Charles Hopson followed by soon-to-be Dr. Shay James, to end gatekeeping at one school. Through building solidarity between a group of teachers and counselors through the program I co-founded (called The Advanced Scholar Program) we opened the gates and provided needed supports and mentoring for students of color and students living in poverty. Through this work, we also became the school with the number one graduation rate for African American students in the State of Oregon. But soon after the fanfare of the awards (I also won the OnPoint Community Credit Union Award in 2014, which paid my mortgage for a year) wore off, I began to look beyond the myopic focus that was required to do the work I did at Franklin to examine what was going on at other schools.

The problem was, and is, everywhere. Students of color are relegated to lower level courses and locked out of AP programming, especially in Science and Mathematics, all over the State of Oregon. Noting this, I set out with a group of former students of color who are currently in college to author the Bill of Rights for Students of Color in AP & IB Courses. The document gives specific direction to the Portland School Board regarding exactly how to eradicate barriers for students of color. It contains budgetary suggestions, as well as immediate actions that can be taken by Principals to remove barriers like we successfully did at Franklin in the past. After creating the document, we built a coalition of local leaders including prominent leaders of the Black, Latino, and Native American Communities like Portland Black Parent Initiative Executive Director Charles McGee, I AM Academy Executive Director and Real Estate Investor Ellis "Ray Ray" Leary, Don't Shoot Portland Founder Teressa Raiford, Andrea Morgan of CAUSA Oregon, and now State Representative Tawna Sanchez. Each time a new leader signed on, we updated the school board, totaling more than eighty emails back and forth. Soon, the Bill gained national attention. Multi-platinum rapper Scarface signed on, as did Olympic Gold Medalist Steve Meslar. My college roommate, MacArthur Genius Michelle Dorrance, also reached out to sign on to the Bill of Rights, as did the League of Women Voters, and many other local and national leaders. With tremendous social pressure behind it, the Bill was passed unanimously by our school board. An article was published on the NEA Ed-Votes Website, encouraging other school districts to pass similar legislation. And then the school board and district totally failed to act on any of the initiatives in the Bill. Perhaps their failure to act can be blamed on lead contamination that was found, at exactly the same moment, in most of the Portland schools, making not also poisoning the children the clear priority for the district, trumping and overshadowing educational equity.

Very racist also means that throughout my experience of fighting for racial justice in Portland Public Schools, I have faced significant backlash from white administrators and even fellow teachers (though, interestingly, no African American administrator has ever admonished me or punished me in any way). After winning the awards, I was moved into an office and given no desk, while my male office mate had a desk. When I requested a desk, I was given a children's school desk, where, as an award-winning educator with clear, well-documented and published results, I was supposed to do my work adjacent to my male counterpart with an adult desk. While working on the Bill of Rights, which I completed entirely outside of the school day (documenting my hours so as to avoid the assumption that I was working for justice on company time), I was regularly berated by several administrators, and again placed into an office with no door to the main hallway so that students could not come in to see me. I was also told that in order to continue to operate my extremely successful program, I had to do it with less time, little real support, and constant threats of funding cuts. From 2003 to present, when I called out gatekeeping, I have been bullied by small groups of fellow teachers who do not agree with or understand civil rights law, or suggest that I am making trouble by suggesting we focus on examining the significant inequities in the system that relate to the way we do our work--and actually focus on serving children of color. When I say bullied, I mean ostracized and gossiped about; I mean that my work has been degraded multiple times. Though I have had eight Gates Scholars come through my classroom, some white teachers who are themselves incapable of conceiving of Black, Latino, and Native American academic excellence put down my work by claiming that I am making things easier for my students, or that my grading systems do not equate to their rigorous standards. Really, they are afraid to face their own complicity and responsibility in the system they have devised, with support from administrations, to uphold White supremacy in Portland Public Schools without ever even stopping to care. Of course, there are many educators who supported and collaborated in the work of eradicating racism, but these educators have never been asked to lead, and have never been in the majority -- we are always pushing against a racist status quo that governs public education in Portland, Oregon.

They'll say they cared. They'll say they devised systems, helped students write special essays about African American history. They'll say this and they'll say that--but some will know what I mean when I say no one ever really stopped to care. I mean it was never the sole focus for a significant number of years in many schools others than one or two. I mean that there was never a time when every single teacher was asked to take five years to really work on their relationships with students of color. There was never a time when every administrator was asked to look at who they privilege in the school, and how they make staff of color feel in the school environment. There was never a time when administrators were required, with appropriate accountability, including penalties for not doing the work, to examine the inequities in their advanced coursework, discipline data, grade data, and graduation rates for students of color. This district has never stopped to really listen to the amazing voices of the former students of the I AM Academy who will tell you one by one that the reason that they stayed in school, and often the reason they are alive is in part because of the wisdom of African-American educator Ray Leary--a man who himself has faced continued hatred, discrimination, and threats to his excellent program simply for doing great work with Black boys. This district never put its foot down around obscene parental funding at Lincoln High School, a school known to serve privileged White students on the West side of town, turning a blind eye regarding additional funding that parents put in to set their own kids up to win when they face less privileged schools in academic and athletic competitions.

And, it's not that the school teachers never stopped to care. Of everyone who is culpable for the racist system, teachers cared the most, but we are still complicit in the fabric of racism; we are still accountable. The truth is so hard to hear! To teach in Portland means to be complicit in a racist system. And there is racism in the roots of the system. In a 2016 article for KATU News, investigative report Joe Douglass writes, "African American K-12 students in Oregon are 2.3 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students...black children in Portland Public Schools are four times more likely to be suspended or expelled". But the racism doesn't end there--the racism thrives in the way history is often taught--as evidenced by the rape culture denial letter that went viral earlier in the year from a Social Studies teacher in Portland Public Schools. The presence of a prominent, if not LOVED, history teacher denying the existence of rape culture is an abomination of the field of history itself, for one cannot teach the history of Western Civilization and also deny the omnipresence of rape culture. To do so is a total denial of the reality of the history of the world. To do so is to deny the existence of women in history at all. To specifically deny the existence of Native and Black women is misogynoir, is absolute fiction, is simply the rhetoric of supremacy. Racism also shows up in Forensic Science courses, where some teachers still use terms like Mongoloid to describe people of Asian origin, Negroid to describe people of African origin, and Caucasoid to describe White Europeans. These terms, which were invented by racist Scientist Blumenbach in the 1780s were strictly forbidden, even by my history teacher, Mr. John Toy, in the early 90s, who was educated by Catholic Jesuits in New York City. It is an abomination that these terms are still in use in this state, but I've heard about their usage in a science class as recently as this year. Portland educators never stopped to truly investigate their curriculum for racist and sexist attitudes and make appropriate changes to rectify inappropriate attitudes found therein.

A diversity training program called Courageous Conversations, offered through the always-under-attack Office of Equity aimed to gently ask White educators to examine our biases--and many did, but some tried to refuse the training or chose not to absorb the benefits and made a joke of it as time went by. That eradicating racism is not the topic of discussion for every educator in the state every day of the year has troubled me since I arrived seventeen years ago; that systemic and overt racism is not the topic of discussion in every school now that we cannot deny the existence of a thriving, deadly white power movement in our city and state makes me wonder what the fuck I am doing here. One time, when faced with the reality that a student of Mexican heritage who was in fact a genius could not go to college because of his immigration status, I prayed on my knees, asking God to simply make me a woman of great faith. I prayed it sincerely. Sincerely, I prayed it. I prayed it with depth, with all of my heart. I can only say that if you ask God to make you a person of great faith, she is likely to give you some challenges.

The City of Portland, too, never stopped to care. Portland never stopped to care when Kendra James was murdered in her car by police while trying to unfasten her seatbelt. They never stopped to care for Quanice Hayes. They never stopped to care--it got so bad in schools that they sometimes just painted over swastikas and didn't report it to the parents. It got so bad that I once heard about a kid being sent back to class by an administrator when a teacher sent them out because they had swastikas drawn on their jean jacket---but the administrator didn't confiscate the jacket or send the kid home. He just told him to roll up his sleeves and go back to class. Isn't that just the way it is, Portland, Oregon?

I now realize that a large part of the problem that white Portland has with racism is that for many, they have been raised in such an isolated white supremacy that they really haven't had much contact with Black or Brown people, other than in this dynamic where they have total power. Black and Brown children are the only contact many white educators have, and Black and Brown children are under them. If they have contact with other Black or Brown people, it is often in a condition of subservience. There are, for example, many fancy restaurants, with almost all White waiters, and all Central American and Mexican workers inside the kitchen. The color caste system is so prominent and visible in Portland that many white Portlanders don't see any reason why that should change, nor do the teachers who come from this same society. Thus, the sharp and humiliating tongue of the White teacher is like a double lash on the backs of Black and Brown children who must bear the brunt of that pain twice as painfully as a White child who does not have to assume that some of the hatred is not just for their youth, but also for who they are as a person--at a soul level--their identity. For many students of color, the humiliation from racist encounters in Portland Public Schools causes feelings of dejection so powerful that students feel more comfortable outside of school and far away from certain classrooms, which ultimately impacts their ability to navigate the system, and reflects as low grades and lower graduation rates for students of color.

It's not that every teacher in Portland Public Schools is actively racist, except me. There is, in fact, a legacy of anti-racist work that started before my arrival, like the work of former teachers, who took students from Portland to Alabama to walk in the footsteps of Dr. King (a trip that continues through the dedication of several current educators). Currently, there are cells of anti-racist educators at many schools throughout the city; few of them will tell you that their work is fully supported. Many have faced significant challenges in order to stay focused on supporting students of color. All will speak of the greater financial support they would need to provide greater resources for students of color. Many anti-racist educators in Portland know the great faith required to continue to fight for achievement for students of color in a district that prioritizes equity in messaging, but not in reality.

What if every teacher in Portland felt part of the movement to transform Portland Public Schools? What if every teacher had the skills and humility to actually relate to and support students of color? What if every teacher was willing to look inside our attitudes, and inside our curriculum, to eradicate racism with the goal of creating social change in the city of Portland? What if?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the foundations of anti-racist education...and how they were laid in me. As I previously mentioned, my hippie Uncles were obsessed with Howlin' Wolf, and all of the Blues greats -- I had Blues songs for lullabies and still do. I get it that they were appropriating a dream -- but in that particular dream, there was a solidarity between White and Black working class dudes that I really have not seen since. For me, anti-racist education began in a bizarre if not obtuse, but totally child and heart-centered school, founded by complete hippies, called CAUSE School. This school was founded on the principle that through community-based education, community action, and education totally focused on unity between students of different races, anti-racist and non-violent social revolution could be activated. Throughout my early childhood, I was constantly surrounded by intelligent, counter-culture black adults who were speaking the language of Black Power. Whether they were struggling to get by or pursuing a doctorate, I felt a great sense of love and respect for the many Black adults in my life -- and I readily and eagerly gave that love and respect, and learned how to receive that love and respect, which was the greatest gift I ever received in terms of becoming an educator -- for I did not ever have to say, "I have a Black friend." I was part of a community that included many Black people who loved me and who I loved; in fact, my very definition of love came from the feelings I had from people in that community. Black love was my definition of love -- and though I am fully white and have lived a life of incredible privilege -- I also had the privilege of understanding some of the language of Black love. Part of that language is that you can't come out here as some dumbass White woman and define Black love. That would be some bullshit. You have to feel it. And I do.

If I really had to explain anti-racist education, I would say it through this anecdote: when I was a little older, attending another extremely radical hippie diverse Montessori school in the early 1980s, I noticed a Black boy who was very unclean. This school was also in the middle of the most impoverished Black neighborhood in the city of Buffalo, NY -- a community totally devastated by crack cocaine. Many other children said that his Mother was on crack. This made me so sad when I went home that I snuck into the cabinet and brought this boy a bar of soap. When we were in the hall alone, I walked up to him and quietly offered him the bar of soap.

SMACK!!!!

"I don't need no soap, White Bitch!" he said, slapping me hard across the face.

That was perhaps the best anti-racist education a White person can have. I was slapped out of savior at age eight. And it was a righteous slap. It was not a slap where you go tell the teacher. It was a you-better-fucking-not-go-tell-the-teacher-or-I'll-fucking-kill-you-next-time-slap. It was a slap into total submission and full realization that you do not pity Black people or in any way make assumptions about their level of resourcefulness or resources because you will have another thing coming. In my earliest years, I was surrounded by the children of Black nationalists who regularly spoke about African power. In my 7-9 year old Montessori class, we studied South Africa in great depth. The teachers focused on helping us to understand the meaning of racism, and working hard to connect us, through helping us to look at racism in our own society and in ourselves.

In my recollection, there was some very specific language they used that was effective for my young mind. When I say these words, I know that the intellectuals who read this will get their guns and start shooting me down with great acuity for how little deconstruction I am going to do here; however, in defense of these radical educators of the 1980s, they did something really amazing through focusing their entire methodology on anti-racist language. While they focused the curriculum on showing us the history of oppression and revolution throughout the world in depth, they also used slogans that a child could easily remember to help us to understand anti-racist philosophy in the way that worked for the mind of a 5 to 9 year old. The words they wove into us as we sat on the floor looking up at their mythic storytelling were, It's what's on the inside that counts.

It's what's on the inside that counts will not heal the deaths of all of the Black and indigenous people who have died, to date, from the largest genocide in the history of the planet. It's what's on the inside that counts will not bring back Trayvon, or Emmett, or any of the millions who died in the chokehold of White power, but for God's sake, Portland, we cannot go on like this.

Portland teachers need a new language and an entirely new focus on anti-racist education. Dr. Rosenberg's work on non-violent communication is a great place to start; and we must also be willing to take direction from our local educators and leaders of color who can convene and, if supported appropriately with pay, can help White Portlanders to understand what they don't see. Every teacher must be willing to investigate our own curriculum each year, each week, each day, to work toward bettering our relationships with students. We can do this by requiring that every teacher change from a teacher-centered model to a student-centered model that utilizes non-violent communication, as well as a variety of other techniques that I will discuss in a future article. Above all, we need more Black, Latinx, and Native American teachers in our schools. We know that the state tests filter out candidates of color because of various forms of bias. We also know that our schools are often currently not comfortable places for Black and Brown staff members. We must call for changes in how teachers are hired while also requiring administrators to work on school climate with a specific focus on racism, sexism, and White male supremacy, and how they manifest in staff culture.

We must turn the schools upside down, shake them, and put them back down with new walls, higher ceilings, open doors, and more light. In creating a new infrastructure that supports students of color, we can look to the legislation that is already provided for us by Dr. King, Reverend Shuttlesworth, Fanie Lou Hamer, and other heroes of the early NAACP and civil rights movement who fought to write their suggestions into law. Until this transformation takes place, the Portland School Board, current district leaders, high school principals, and even teachers must accept full responsibility for evident civil right violations and a culture of racism that operates in the public system. The Utopian dream of Portland is lit by flames of racist hatred. Focusing on eradicating civil rights violations in every school, supporting the Office of Equity in a large scale collaborative project to examine all questionable curriculum to remove racist attitudes, and gathering together as anti-racist educators to teach the next generation both anti-racist philosophy and inclusive student-centered curriculum is our only hope for change.



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, Latino Rebels, and The Hampton Institute: A Working Class Think Tank.

Americanism Personified: Why Fascism Has Always Been an Inevitable Outcome of the American Project

By Colin Jenkins

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." This quote, which has often been misattributed to Sinclair Lewis , is wise in its recognizing the authoritarian potential of both nationalism and organized religion. In slight contrast, Professor Halford E. Luccock of the Divinity School of Yale University said in a 1938 interview , "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'" Luccock's view was that of a Christian theologian during the height of Nazi Germany, likely meant to not only downplay the role of religion but perhaps more so warning against the false idolatry of nationalistic reverence.

Despite the tidbits of insight offered, both quotes underestimate Americanism as a highly-authoritative and dominating national project in and of itself. At the time of both quotes, America had already cemented strong elements conducive to fascism: an economy based in capitalist modes of production, a geography created through mass extermination of Native American populations, white supremacist ideals rooted in both dominant culture and pseudoscience , and aggressive expansionist and imperialist projects throughout the Western hemisphere. It should come as no surprise that Adolf Hitler studied, admired, and was inspired by the US genocide of Native Americans as well as its subsequent reservation program. "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," John Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography . "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."

This notion of American fascism is certainly nothing new. As Steve Martinot explains in his invaluable essay on " Fascism in the US ," this discussion has been around for a long time:

"In an early, now canonical discussion of racism in the US, Pierre Van den Berghe (1967) pointed out that a prevalent racial despotism coexisted with constitutionality, a confluence he characterized as 'herrenvolk democracy' - 'democracy for white people.' In his book, Friendly Fascism, (1980) Bertram Gross argues that the US under Reagan began moving toward a form of governance closely analogous to 1930s European fascism; he compares the social consequences of corporate influence to Mussolini's 'corporate state.' George Jackson finds no better word than 'fascism' to describe the psychotic use of power and violence by which white prisoners relate to black, or by which the prison administration maintains its hierarchical system -- and which he sees mirrored in white-black relations outside the prison."

As a settler-colonial project steeped in white supremacist domination and capitalist ideals, America is and always has been an ideal fascist breeding ground. The current rise of Donald Trump, the "alt-right," neo-Nazism, and white nationalism is nothing new, it is merely Americanism becoming further personified through the vulnerabilities opened by the failures of capitalism and the weakening of liberal democracy - systems that were constructed on shoddy, hypocritical foundations to begin with.


Fascism as a Capitalist Phenomenon

"People that are more concerned with the trappings of this pseudo mass society and its spectacular leisure sports; parades where strangers meet, shout each other down and often trample each other on the way home will never see the ugly reality of fascism. Amerikkkan fascism is so effective in emotionally appealing to people's desires and fears that when we point out to them that Amerikkkan capitalism has had 200 years to disguise and refine its face, and 50 years to consolidate fascist control of the country, they would simply dismiss us."

Shaka Sankofa Zulu


Fascism, as a conscious and working ideology, was intentionally constructed to serve as a polar opposite to the materialist conception of thinking that scientific socialism (Marxism) was based in. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, specifically noted this in his Doctrine of Fascism, which he wrote with Giovanni Gentile. Fascism is a collectivist ideology, much like socialism; however, fascism calls on a societal tie that differs greatly from that of socialism. While socialist collectivism is rooted in an inclusive, communal responsibility to have basic material needs met for all, fascist collectivism is rooted in an exclusive, nationalistic responsibility to dominate and conquer peoples who are viewed as not belonging. While socialist collectivism is based in worker-control of the means of production, fascist collectivism is based in a natural adherence to corporatism, which takes form in concentrated control of the means of production (mimicking that of capitalism). While socialism seeks to undermine and ultimately destroy the capitalist system, fascism seeks to fortify the late stages of capitalist accumulation by merging corporate power with the State.

As socialists view the working-class struggle as the primary vehicle to creating self-determination, fascists flatly reject economic (material) motives as a potential driving force for societal change. The authoritarian nature of capitalism is an ideal precursor to fascism. Because of this, fascism seeks to take the reins of the system and use it to carry out its nationalistic project that is based in a form of heritage or national identity as determined by the fascists. The Doctrine of Fascism explains ,

"Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, [which posits] the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production. Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society."

The authoritarian nature of capitalism is rooted in its most elemental relationship - that between the owners and the workers - which naturally creates minority class dominance over the majority class. Fascism seeks to transform this class dominance into national dominance. Because of this, parasitic billionaire exploiters of the capitalist class (like Donald Trump) become welcome members of this nationalist project, and exploited workers who embrace fascism are more than willing to overlook the complicity of the creators of their own misery as long as these overseers are willing to repent through an embrace and renewal of ethnic nationalism.

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The natural extension from capitalism to fascism is impossible to ignore. In structural terms, as concentrations of wealth and power are created through the mechanisms of capitalism, so too are widespread dispossession for the masses of people who exist under the system. Despite the construction of robust welfare and police states, which have been implemented to prevent this widespread dispossession from transforming into civil unrest, the weight of such unequal power dynamics is bound to crush the experiment we've come to know as "liberal capitalist democracy." This has never been more evident than in the neoliberal era, where both globalization and so-called "free-market" ideology have unleashed the system to do what it is designed to do.

An anarcho-capitalist (American "libertarian") analysis of fascism, presented by Sheldon Richman in the Library of Economics and Liberty, recognizes at least a part of the natural connection between capitalism and fascism, without overtly saying so:

"Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the 'national interest'-that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions."

While Richman would surely argue that such elements - autocratic control, currency manipulation, and the end of entrepreneurship - are not natural byproducts of capitalism, they perfectly describe the stage of monopoly capitalism (actual existing capitalism) that has inevitably developed as a result of the most basic mechanisms of the system: the labor-capital relationship and the private ownership of land as a means to exploit. In other words, what American "libertarians" like Richman describe as "corporatism" or "crony capitalism" is really just a mature and naturally developed stage of capitalism. The "cronies" are merely the beneficiaries of this inherent process. This point has been illustrated by many economists outside of the establishment , and perhaps most effectively and intensely by the Monthly Review school.

The insurmountable weight that capitalism has brought down on "democracy" has demanded the need for more authoritarian adjustments within government, as societal unrest becomes more likely. This mature stage of capitalism creates a ripe environment for fascism, both in its creation of a highly-centralized State apparatus that has already meshed with corporate power , as well as in its need to recruit masses of foot soldiers from within the systematically dispossessed population. The Fascist Doctrine describes the transfer of the "Liberal State" to the "Fascist State":

"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State."

The transformation that Mussolini and Gentile describe is that of a capitalist state with pluralistic tendencies that are conducive to capitalist growth to one of a corporatist state with homogenous tendencies that are designed to protect and grow nationalist interests. While modern fascists in the United States tend to focus on "multiculturalism" and what they refer to as "cultural Marxism," they fail to realize that the same structure which shaped these social dynamics happens to be a prerequisite for the fascist transition. The Western capitalist system required a massive, intercontinental slave trade to get started, centuries of internationalist/globalist expansion to spur continuous growth, and an imperialist agenda that has displaced entire societies throughout the global South. In other words, the tactics that have been used to feed the capitalist system, most of which could be characterized as crimes against humanity , not only created the incredibly unequal distributions of wealth and power both nationally and internationally, but also created the societal makeups that fascist foot soldiers decry. In this sense, capitalism has not dug its own grave, like Marx once promised that it would; it actually has birthed the inevitability of fascism.


From "Liberal State" to "Fascist State"

Through capitalism's reliance on imperialism, the transition from Liberal State to Fascist State has already begun. In order to be formally transitioned into fascist control, it merely needs time, political direction, and a forceful wresting of power from the entrenched Liberal State. Once completed, the nature of imperialism shifts from one of economic motivations to one of nationalistic motivations. The doctrine discusses this process:

"For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and it's opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice: this fact explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime, the character of many forces in the State, and the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy in the twentieth century, and would oppose it by recalling the outworn ideology of the nineteenth century - repudiated wheresoever there has been the courage to undertake great experiments of social and political transformation; for never before has the nation stood more in need of authority, of direction and order. If every age has its own characteristic doctrine, there are a thousand signs which point to Fascism as the characteristic doctrine of our time. For if a doctrine must be a living thing, this is proved by the fact that Fascism has created a living faith; and that this faith is very powerful in the minds of men is demonstrated by those who have suffered and died for it."

While gaining control of the State is formally accomplished through the emergence of electoral movements, it still requires a groundswell of support from the lower classes. The class divisions created by capitalism, especially within post-industrialized societies like that of the US, present the most opportune dynamics for what is sometimes referred to as "right-wing populism." Not only is the emergence of an industrialized middle class a key component in this development, but even more crucial is the subsequent collapse of this middle class. This second stage has been occurring in the US since the 1980s, with the onset of neoliberalism and globalization. Politically speaking, it has manifested itself in Reagan's neoliberal blueprint, the neoliberalization of the Democratic Party, the complete economic abandonment of the American working class by both major parties, the rise of proto-fascist groups like the Tea Party, the triumph of lesser-evilism, and now in the rise of 21st-century neo-Nazism and white nationalism, both of which have helped buoy an actual billionaire capitalist to the White House.

Gaining political support from the working class seems like a difficult proposition for those running for office, since the political parties in power are the same parties which have abandoned most Americans for the past several decades. However, this is where fascism's reliance on emotion and identity, or what Mussolini refers to as "duty," "holiness," and "heroism," over material need becomes so powerful. The structural dispossession of masses of people by macro-systems like capitalism is difficult to pinpoint, especially when systemic understanding is absent. Left-wing populism relies on these understandings, as well as the expectation that material conditions will motivate the working class to act in its own best interests, which are diametrically opposed to the interests of capital, bourgeois politicians from within the liberal democratic system, and of course billionaire businessmen. Fascism makes things easier, focuses on a national/racial identity, and deems all who exist outside of that identity to be enemies of the State. The structural pressure created capitalism, especially against that of the former middle class, or against anyone feeling as though they're losing privilege, creates an environment conducive for recruitment. This process was never explained more succinctly than by George Jackson :

"The shock troops of fascism on the mass political level are drawn from members of the lower-middle class who feel the upward thrust of the lower classes more acutely. These classes feel that any dislocation of the present economy resulting from the upward thrust of the masses would affect their status first. They are joined by that sector of the working class which is backward enough to be affected by nationalistic trappings and loyalty syndrome that sociologists have termed the 'Authoritarian Personality.' One primary aim of the fascist arrangement is to extend and develop this new pig class, to degenerate and diffuse working-class consciousness with a psycho-social appeal to man's herd instincts. Development and exploitation of the authoritarian syndrome is at the center of 'totalitarian' capitalism (fascism). It feeds on a small but false sense of class consciousness and the need for community."

The authoritarian nature of fascism is found in its reliance on identity, a fluid concept that allows for some maneuverability within the minds of its adherents, while also shoring up the herd mentality that becomes rooted in its perceived national agenda. In other words, the individual within a fascist movement may perceive themselves, the movement, and even the ultimate goal of the movement in varying ways; however, when called upon to act, their actions will always fall in line with the national agenda as set by its directors. This is why fascism requires the presence of strong leaders. Much like the Orc armies in JRR Tolkien's famous Hobbit series, the foot soldiers of fascism are easily swayed into violent action for a greater good that is constructed by a strong, charismatic leader. And with this support, those leaders can accomplish electoral feats previously unheard of.


Punching Down: The Fascist Engine of White Supremacy and Xenophobia

Despite the structural failures of both capitalism and "liberal capitalist democracy," American fascism would find difficulties materializing without a strong element of identity. Whereas left-wing populism clearly relies on the material desperation of the working class under capitalism, fascism's reliance on the vague concepts of "holiness" and "heroism" needs a constructed and recognizable identity. In America, the structural and cultural phenomenon of white supremacy serves as this identity, and therefore acts as the engine needed to redirect the widespread angst developed through the systematic dispossession created by capitalism and "democracy" into a nationalistic movement.

It is important to understand that white supremacy is not something only reserved for jackbooted neo-Nazis giving "Heil Hitler!" salutes, but that it is a systemic phenomenon which is heavily seeped in American culture. It is both a conditioned mentality and a material reality. The conditioned mentality that Black lives are substandard has been shaped through centuries of popular culture, from the racist Minstrel shows of the early 19th century, which utilized the " coon caricature" to lampoon Black people as dim-witted, lazy, and buffoonish, to modern TV shows like COPS, which perpetuates the racist stereotype that Black people are more prone to debauchery and criminality. The material reality has been shaped by two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping convict leasing Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. This history has built complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices, all of which have combined to shape a uniquely intense experience for Black Americans who must face both class and racial oppression.

The two factors (conditioned mentality and material reality) interplay with one another in a way that is increasingly disastrous for the ways in which American society views and treats its Black citizens. Because of the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, people on average are less empathetic toward their Black counterparts. Studies have shown that white children as young as seven years old believe that Black children feel less pain than them; that emergency medical personnel are less likely to give pain medication to Black and Latinx children who are in pain; and that "Caucasian observers reacted to pain suffered by African people significantly less than to pain of Caucasian people." The material reality shaped by institutional racism has created a landscape where Black people are disproportionately poor, unemployed, and in prison. Martinot talks about this seemingly never-ending cycle that is centered within a highly racialized criminal punishment system:

"The social effects of this process are catastrophic, yet familiar. Not only does felonization of a population insure massive unemployment (a general tendency not to hire people with a record), but routine felony charges amount to systematic disenfranchisement (14% of black people by 1998, according to Fellner and Mauer). Recent studies indicate that one out of every three black men under the age of 30 has been through the judicial system in the last 25 years. To continually remove a sizable number of people from a community in this way constitutes a massive disruption of its social coherence. This disruption buttresses its criminalization as a community in white society's eyes, and rationalizes the disinvestment of capital and a general financial obstruction of community asset accumulation. Racial oppression, impoverishment, imprisonment and police impunity are all of a piece.

Ultimately, the increase in prison population has become one of the arguments, in social discourse, for further drug laws and racial profiling. It is a self-generating cycle. What is significant about it is that it is not perceived by white society at large as an extant injustice. Instead, more prisons are called for and accepted, again with a sense form of cultural familiarity ("how else are we going to deal with crime?"). This acceptance euphemizes itself in political campaigns as being "hard on crime" as opposed to addressing the social conditions that generate crime. It inhabits a white consensus in solidarity with the police and prison industry that have allowed for their untrammeled growth -- a consensus whose content is white racialized identity."

When turned on its head, white supremacists can use this current reality to support their arguments that Black people are in these positions because of "poor decisions," "a lack of personal responsibility," "a lack of work ethic," "laziness," or even some type of biological shortcoming, as is argued by so-called "race realists" (the modern term for pseudoscientific racism). Individualizing systemic problems is both a convenient way to blame victims of societal oppression, by basically ignoring history, and the result of a general lack of historical and practical knowledge regarding how systems shape lived realities for people within those systems.

The latter point helps explain why ignorance is naturally drawn to reactionary politics, and why fascism has always been the likely outcome for America. As most Americans suffer from extreme deficits in sociological, historical, economic, and systemic understanding, any reaction against personal misgivings (which are experienced by the working class as a whole under capitalism) will surely default into raw emotion for many. This is fascism's advantage, as it feeds off aimless frustrations. Ignorance is easily swayed; and guiding these frustrations into an intense anger against women, immigrants, Muslims, Black people, Brown people, or LGBTQ people, is easily accomplished.

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Ignorance is also a harbinger to cowardice. Due to a lack of general understanding of the world around them, such people grow to see the world as a dangerous place. So they must back themselves into a corner, stockpile guns, become suspicious of any and all who do not look like them, and brace themselves for the globalist, Illuminati-led, Bilderberg-planned, Soros-funded, politically-correct, cultural-Marxist New World Order. Their lack of understanding leads them down a delusional rabbit hole, and their vulnerabilities and insecurities breed a cowardice that drives them to "punch down" at those who appear even more vulnerable than they. This authoritarian stance taken against class peers, and its need to dominate and brutalize marginalized people, is just waiting to get swept up in the fascist tide. And for many Americans, it inevitably has.


The Struggle Against Inevitability

Since the inevitability of American fascism is deeply rooted in both capitalism and white supremacy, any resistance against this fascist tide must be focused on destroying these two systems. Therefore, the only suitable orientation to embrace is one of a left-wing populist, internationalist, working-class, anti-racist ideology. The black-clad, masked anarchists and anti-fascists who have been physically confronting Trump's shock troops in the streets are firmly rooted in this orientation. They are the front lines of this struggle, but their effectiveness will ultimately be dependent on a mass, organized movement that includes political and labor-oriented groups on the left, and most importantly liberation groups that are rooted in justice for people of color and immigrant populations.

The upcoming war against American fascism will occur on multiple fronts. First, ground troops of the left (antifa and others ) are desperately needed to confront the violent, bigoted, gun-obsessed right wing that has formed under the banner of Americanism. These ground troops must be armed and proficient with guns, physically conditioned, and trained in hand-to-hand combat skills. A guerilla orientation influenced by the teachings of Che Guevara and Abraham Guillen , among others, and rooted in the approach of the original Black Panther Party and Fred Hampton's rainbow coalition (the BPP, Young Lords, and Young Patriots) is vital. Included in this need are community defense projects that can protect working-class people from the immediate dangers posed by right-wing militia groups, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and police.

Second, a multi-pronged attack against the capitalist system is needed. This must include a return to militant labor organizing and the inclusion and politicization of low-wage service sector workers. This must also include a left unity project that creates a coalition of anti-capitalist political, labor, and social justice groups that can effectively bring in and give the reins to immigrant laborers, the unemployed and underemployed, and specifically those who are most marginalized due to their racial, gender, or religious identity. A rejection of both capitalist political parties (Democrats and Republicans) is necessary in this struggle, as is a rejection of the lesser-evil approach to electoral politics that has brought the entire system rightward over the past 40 years.

Third, a struggle against government repression is unavoidable. The American government has a brutal history of crushing anti-capitalist dissent: the Haymarket martyrs , the execution of Joe Hill, the targeting and forced exile ofBill Haywoodthe Palmer raids, the framing of Sacco and Vanzetti McCarthyism, Communist blacklists, COINTELPRO , the MOVE bombing , the imprisonment of folks like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Oscar Lopez Rivera, and the forced exile of Assata Shakur , are a few examples. Legitimizing the movement with a formidable, nationally-based political wing can help with this. A third party rooted firmly in anti-capitalism is needed to serve as a vehicle for spreading class consciousness among an American working class that has been strategically and historically shielded from this. While electoral victories would be nearly impossible and largely ineffective in the current structure, political pressure and education is a crucial tool that should be used to create legitimacy and transparency.

This struggle must be carried out with an understanding of the role that liberals and many progressives play in protecting the fascist movement. While conservatives and those on the "alt" and far right represent a clear enemy, liberals can sometimes pose as allies when it comes to mainstream political rhetoric. History shows this is not the case. It shows that no matter how progressive their platforms may appear, liberals will always side with the capitalist system and, most importantly, with their own stability and comfort within the system. This has never been more evident than in their recent support of a proven corporatist and war hawk in Hillary Clinton, their red-baiting propaganda since the election, their blanket condemnation of anti-fascists, their constant cries against counter-violence, and their false equivalencies against "extremists on both sides." The fact that the Democratic Party sabotaged Bernie Sanders, a politician whose platform is nothing more than that of a New Deal liberal, shows how far to the right they have moved since the inception of neoliberalism. Nancy Pelosi's honest proclamation that "we're capitalists and that's just the way it is" while answering an unscripted question from a student at a January "Town hall" appearance perfectly captured the smug elitism of the party, especially when considering Pelosi herself is married to a wealthy "businessman/investor" and has a net worth in the range of $43 to $200 million. Capitalism has been great for her and her family; however, not so great for 200 million Americans. And now we have a war on our hands.

The Monarchy of Materialism: Understanding White Fragility

[PHOTO CREDIT: WARNER IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES]

By @badgaltranny

In my frustratingly liberal Ivy League classroom, I raised my hand.

My professor, a former editor in the New York Times, had opened class by saying that people are misguided in fearing Trump; most of his anti-immigration orders will be shot down by the courts.

I told her, calmly, that the fear is not misguided. Because of Trump, many immigration officers have become even more unabashed about their inhumane and often illegal practices.

She said I was challenging her knowledge so I relayed the real-life story of an unpunished criminal officer.

She framed it as a debate between her knowledge and mine. I told her, calmly, that she was arguing with facts.

It was this statement that she brought up in our one-on-one meeting a few days after she suggested I leave the classroom. She cited it as an example of why it was impossible to have a conversation with me. But facts are facts, and the story of the criminal officer was just one in a deluge of narratives reported even by her beloved New York Times.

If events like these happened only to me, this would be a boring story. But white people’s hostile emotional response to their knowledge being challenged—often marked by an accelerated heart rate, shortness of breath, and feelings of terror and rage—have become laughably predictable. 

One study calls it cultural anxiety. It’s characterized as “feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment.”

Apart from causing people to call 911 in fear of a hijab? It led 63 million people to vote for Donald Trump. Nationalist religious movements are popping up all across the world, not only in Europe but even in India and the Philippines, expanding wars and militarizing borders, murdering thousands inside their own nations, withdrawing reparations from their former colonies, and even closing borders to millions of climate refugees. If rising sea levels pose the greatest threat to our species, “cultural anxiety” is our greatest enemy.

Another name for this phenomenon is white fragility. When I packed my bags and finally left the East Coast to come home to the Midwest, I realized it’s just called white supremacy. Most people don’t like being called racist, and white liberals get especially triggered.

Someone who has some insight into this emotional phenomenon is Mark. He’s part of an anti-oppression education program on campus and agreed to speak under a pseudonym; he’s facilitated dozens of anti-racism workshops.

How does he help people move through their hostile emotions?

“By not making too much space for it in the workshops,” Mark says. “By acknowledging the emotions, and saying there are many reasons they may feel uncomfortable. Biases in their language, interactions, research, classes, conversations, you name it. I’m asking them to acknowledge that all of us have these implicit biases that have been culminating all our lives. In everything we consume.”

Yes, everything. Even for me.

I’m a transgender Indian-American woman, raised in an upper-class Hindu family in a beautiful American suburb. Since I wanted to find the truth at the root of white fragility, it brought me to an interesting dilemma: how do I escape my own biases?

I quickly realized it was both impossible and unnecessary. I’d say I’m pretty vocal in my low tolerance for bullshit even when it comes from myself. Instead of ignoring my life, how do I use it scientifically to understand cultural anxiety?

I followed three popular ways to find truth. The scientific method led me to the natural sciences. Studying history led me to social sciences. And, in what will probably draw tense laughter from the European-minded: meditation led me to the spiritual sciences.

And I’ll give you three guesses as to which of the three yielded the most reasonable answers. You might need all three.

I also encourage you to call me on any bullshit you find—I have so much to learn and I’d rather us help each other out. This article is long, so I’d section off about twenty minutes if you’re ready to listen.

“What is actually happening to a white person’s mind when they are called racist?”

The Oatmeal, a website for incredibly cute comics, explains it surprisingly well. In fact, if you haven’t already, read the comic quickly then come back when you see the last panel:

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Good? Let’s dive in.

“Confusion,” Mark says, describing responses he’s seen from people who were asked to recognize they could be racist. “A lot of times they don’t know what to say. You can hear hints of defensiveness, but my words are granted a little more legitimacy as an educator in those spaces specifically.”

Responses I’ve gotten to notifying white people of their racism? Being called libelous, sensitive, abusive, violent, and manipulative. That I’m hurting them. One professor even threatened to sue me, comparing me to Donald Trump and reporting me as a threat to the university.

We’re seeing different realities. Even when I’m crying, they still view me with terror. There’s a chasm between intellectual understanding and self-reflection, and I’ve seen few people cross it.

In the mid-1900s, Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel ran an experiment where participants would guess the lengths of a few lines. Unsurprisingly, errors in judgement were random. But when longer lines were labelled as ‘A’ and shorter ones, ‘B’, the errors got…less random.

They got uniform.

People thought the shorter ‘A’ sticks were longer than they actually were in reality, and that the taller ‘A’ sticks were shorter. Similarly, they thought the longer ‘B’ sticks were shorter than reality, and the shorter ‘B’ sticks as taller. The very act of categorization made participants see conformity to the category where there was none.

This example helps illustrate what happened. In one study, if uncategorized, Lines C and D were judged to be the same length. But once they were categorized, line C was inaccurately perceived as longer than line D. Source.

This example helps illustrate what happened. In one study, if uncategorized, Lines C and D were judged to be the same length. But once they were categorized, line C was inaccurately perceived as longer than line D. Source.

Henri Tajfel later became famous for his theories on social identity, saying that people tend to view themselves according to how society views them.

So: societies construct my view of others and myself.

I believe society’s ideas about me because inclusion provides me with assurance. Core beliefs (such as ‘A’ lines being taller than ‘B’ lines) are rarely questioned and always nurture my sense of reality. Members of “out-groups” are discarded.

But what if a social identity you are placed into…is not you?

I’m talking with a white-skinned professor of history at my university, whom I’ve named ‘Jane’. I’m trying to figure out what “white” even means. When I ask her what history has to say about this, she responds: “The meaning of white for whom?”

She points out how, in the nineteenth and twenty centuries, American newspapers—and even the Census—did not grant Whiteness to Jews, the Irish, or Eastern Europeans. And she notes how today, there is no Census category for Arab or Persian. Middle Eastern immigrants are legally white. What does white even mean then?

“I don't think there's a consensus,” Jane says. “So perhaps what has changed is who gets to be white, but what hasn't is the contested nature of that being.”

Even the natural sciences back her up. It is the scientific consensus that racial categories have no basis in biology. But this fact was not always the scientific consensus, and Jane’s words reminded me of something Mark had mentioned during our talk: the skull studies that made a lie scientific.

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Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 'science' of categorization split humanity into five different subspecies, with the Caucasians being the most ‘handsome’. As you can see in the sketch of him below, he was incredibly biased. But you be the judge.

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Craniometry, the study of skull measurements, formed the base of European scientific racism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. European scientists, most notably French scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, categorized the races as distinct species based on cranial circumferences. It is a fascinating case study not only in the psychology of Whiteness, but in the anti-human irrationality that continues to underlie Western sciences to this day.

Let’s put his skull studies in context.

Historically, the concept of race came after European elites began enslaving Africans.

Unable to rely on their own increasingly-poor, increasingly-angry citizens to run their plantations, their eyes fell upon Northern Africans. The Christian Church had already practiced hating North African Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition. This made the job of lazy European elites even easier.

Because North African Muslims rejected Christianity, Europeans convinced themselves that they weren’t human. Gone were the ideas that Africans were industrious, intelligent, and artistic peoples. To the European-minded, they became inhumane, heathens, irrational, backwards, threatening, childlike, animals. This allowed them to enslave the Muslims with little guilt.

But in the eighteenth century (think: French Revolution, American Revolution) plantation owners faced slave uprisings, revolutionary ideas of universal human rights, and the exciting possibility of creating a new nation independent from England’s taxes.

They sought to create a new nation but these lazy people needed trendy, secular, ‘enlightened’ ideas to justify enslaving Africans and murdering Native Americans. Thus: the very same process that Tajfel had noticed in his studies of social identification began—in reverse.

Imagine the sticks in Tajfel’s study. The tall ‘A’ and short ‘B’ ones. Now imagine if only the B’s have labels. The rest have no label. Place yourself in the shoes of one of those unlabeled lines. If Tajfel, who invented the ‘B’ category, told you that “you are a line because B is not a line,” it would be kind of terrifying on an existential level, right? Especially if you believe all lines matter.

The goal of the New England elites was to divide people to make profits for themselves. They feared unity. In one case, Bacon’s Rebellion—an armed rebellion by people of many classes and races against the Doeg tribe in Virginia and Governor William Berkeley—terrified them to their aristocratic core (they responded with the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705). But unable to find any actual cultural unity between the poorer European laborers and themselves, the proslavery rich simply created a ‘B’.

They targeted enslaved Africans. They called them “Black,” and scared the white-skinned poorer colonists about the “Black danger.” The elites then said to these frightened white-skinned immigrants, who were already anxious due to their unfamiliarity with the land, “Your enemy is my enemy, and we are friends. I’ll create a nation where you feel at home.”

It was a master stroke. Now, European elites could feign unity with poorer (and now, terrified) European colonizers despite having no unified culture with them. No ‘A’.

“White” came from this fear, a lowest common denominator between themselves and poorer white-skinned laborers, a manufactured friendship based on fear and greed. This ‘A’ would convince white-skinned settlers of their Manifest Destiny to murder thousands of Native Americans and expand white borders.

"American Progress" John Gast, 1872

"American Progress" John Gast, 1872

The skull studies come from this eighteenth-century period. White-skinned people exaggerated differences in their own bodies to make them seem as opposite as possible from non-‘Caucasians’. Whiteness became a cultureless culture. All it could do was manufacture fear against any “other”.

But maybe “any” is the wrong word. Whiteness means, quite literally, anti-Blackness. Its existence depends upon Black people’s dehumanization. Paired with nationalism, Whiteness means indigenous genocide to this day. (I find it interesting when white-skinned people ask me what my ethnicity is, expect me to say ‘Indian,’ and stumble when I ask them what theirs is. They rarely say ‘British’ or ‘German’ and instead say ‘American’ or ‘White’ as if either of these labels have even a semblance of a unified culture.)

But Black people and Blackness are humane (surprise, surprise). They were the first race to be identified. Blackness can exist and has existed without Whiteness. But Whiteness without Blackness, without an “other”? It does not exist, has not existed, and can never exist.

Yet, in the post-Civil Rights era that we find ourselves in today, where we know we are all the same despite our skin color, where the USA even grants ‘freedom’ to all its uncriminalized citizens, shouldn’t racism be gone?

It should…if racism was about skin color.

But the issue was never about skin. It was always about making Wall Street money off the ‘other’. Whiteness creates an ‘other’, and othering hasn’t vanished and it never will. It simply hides. If you can’t find it, simply praise, unconditionally, the humanity of the “Other” and watch as the entire culture comes out of the shadows to revolt against you.

Whiteness is holding on for dear life to its last hope: to create a white nation where they, ironically, don’t feel like “others”. With tanks and fences, to take back “their” country from “others” whom they’ve leeched off since before July 4th, 1776.

For the Wall Street elites, this is perfect: cultural anxiety makes white-skinned people ignore Wall Street.

But a white nation will never be great or even succeed, if you’re looking for some truth.

When white-skinned people tell me to leave their country if I hate it so much, I feel a little bad for them because they don't know their nation is an illusion. Lies can exist only in the mind and a white culture has always been a rich man's lie. A plantation-era anxiety. As the great Fred Morten said, "Settlers always think they're defending themselves. That's why they build forts on other people's land. And then freak out over the fact that they are surrounded." Identities built upon an "other" eventually cannibalizes itself. Even if they end up murdering me in their anger, I'll pass happily, knowing they'll soon destroy themselves. 

But if Whiteness is a lie, why does critiquing it feel so…real?

Well, because it is.

Whiteness creates horrible living conditions for the “other”. Sapped the “other” of their food, water, shelter, and even their children and their bodies.

On a spiritual level? Plantation owners knew how to convince us that the “other” exists. Millions of us have spent our lives believing Whiteness has the divine power to actually rip our humanities from us if we don’t show them respect.

Exposing Whiteness for its lie traumatizes our sense of reality—how could I have believed in such a demonic white lie?

So was this it? Misery and guilt, the answer at end of the scholarly road?

Not quite.

Of my three initial processes, I still had one path left: meditation guided by my gurus. And suddenly cultural anxiety became almost laughably (if frustratingly) simple.

Touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing.

According to the European sciences, I have these senses which have their sense organs: skin, tongue, nose, eyes, ears.

But how can I sense my humanity? How can I sense my Self?

During the questionably-named Age of Reason, European scientists championed secularity. Things that are touchable, testable, smellable, seeable, and hearable—only those can be evidence for anything. Only those exist.

But it is other people’s tradition is to recognize immaterial thoughts as another sense, with its sense organ: the mind.

And what does the mind sense when it thinks, ‘I’?

There is a basic truth that I had doubted for so long: that the mind senses something. I’ve been calling it ‘humanity’. To observe this, all you need to do is meditate on your mind.

If you can see, close your eyes.

What do you see?

If you answered “nothing,” you are wrong. What you see is the undersides of your eyelids.

Sit with this reality. Try it for ten minutes. If you start feeling anxious, ask yourself: “Who is feeling anxious?” If negative thoughts storm in, simply watch them. Ground yourself in love for your Self.

Did you feel this bliss? If you did, I feel it too. In coming to terms with my transgender identity (a life-long process) I am pulling myself from myself using this precise method.

Other than ‘humanity,’ people have called it Consciousness, the soul, the Self, natural law, the wild, divinity, God, spirit, the universal, Allah, the Brahman, Time, the Buddha, Jehovah, Truth, Jesus, Oneness, the Holy Spirit, science, history, Shiva, I, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, the fourth dimension, the irrational…you get the picture. Truth inspires limitless love.

But Whiteness finishes where Christianity left off: it asserts that this divinity is exclusive.

In a stunning (and for me, foundational) 1980 spoken essay denouncing both capitalism and communism, Russell Means, an indigenous freedom fighter, said, “The European materialist tradition of desacredizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person.”

Russell Means was an Oglala Lakota activist from South Dakota and a prominent member of the American Indian Movement. He passed away in 2012.

Russell Means was an Oglala Lakota activist from South Dakota and a prominent member of the American Indian Movement. He passed away in 2012.

I sometimes wonder what Darwin would say if I came up to him and said, “I am fully human.” How would he have convinced me of his materialism against my reason? The reasonableness of his rationality and the irrationality of my reason? Would he have asked for proof and then laughed if I presented myself?

This anxiety will never go away until the idea of an out-group vanishes. That is what we mean by spirituality, by Self-awareness. That I am not my ever-changing body, but the observer through it. It is the anxiety of Self-avoidance that protects the out-group in the first place. This fear gave birth to Whiteness. And it is with this existential anxiety that materialists colonize the world, create its governments and economies.

And when white people realize they are on this path to Self-destruction? There will be anxiety.

Yes. I think, by pledging themselves to the white culture, white-skinned people have come to dehumanize and avoid themselves.

It didn’t start off that way of course.

Prior to the revolutions of the 1700s, the Church answered the “Who am I?” question with divinity and secularity. Divinity is a separate entity: God. You are in God’s image. You are a child of God. You are human. You are human if you follow Jesus Christ the man—you are not if you don’t. The Church and Europe used “othering,” this false separation from the divine, this Hell, to terrorize people into terrorizing other people across the world. People who may have simply called “Jesus Christ” something else, something less material.

White-skinned people’s humanity itself was exploited, taken for granted, trivialized, ignored, and then: self-sabotaged.

“After all,” Russel Means says, “Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.”

The European Enlightenment’s rationality, in Russell Means’ words, “picked up where Christianity ended.” The Church conflated Peter with Jesus and Jesus with Peter. It asserts that the Self, this divinity, is exclusive only to followers of Jesus of Nazareth. The European sciences assert that Truth does not even exist.

Christian versus heathen.

Instead, their sense of humanity came from the material world. Human versus animal. White versus Black. In-group versus out-group. A world where fewer and fewer people get to be fully human.

René Descartes, dubbed the father of modern Western philosophy, believed that all living organisms are essentially biological robots - 'automaton' – and that humans alone have immaterial souls.

René Descartes, dubbed the father of modern Western philosophy, believed that all living organisms are essentially biological robots - 'automaton' – and that humans alone have immaterial souls.

Why this madness?

For millennia, people in the South Asian peninsula have written thousands of texts and constructed full-blown universities (such as Takshashila) where they studied and continue to study the Self. The mind and the body as one.

(It is interesting to realize that extremely-similar scholarly endeavors happened all across the Americas too, before colonial conquistadores burned or appropriated every text, artefact, and spiritual vessel they could find. I talk about the South Asian peninsula simply because it is closer to my area of knowledge.)

Their fundamental realization? Consciousness is everywhere. Of everything.

A view of a Buddhist stupa in Takshahila, in modern-day Pakistan. Takshahila was founded around 1000 BCE and is considered some of the earliest (if not the earliest) universities in the world. The big caveat is – how do you define ‘university’? Stud…

A view of a Buddhist stupa in Takshahila, in modern-day Pakistan. Takshahila was founded around 1000 BCE and is considered some of the earliest (if not the earliest) universities in the world. The big caveat is – how do you define ‘university’? Students came to study over 64 disciplines, including grammar, philosophy, ayurveda, yoga, agriculture, surgery, politics, archery, warfare, astronomy, commerce, futurology, music, and dance. Yet, school fees were considered perverse. They had no degrees, examinations were considered superfluous, and the use of knowledge to earn a living was considered sacrilegious. Knowledge was considered sacred.

You would even categorize their fervor for Truth as religious…which would be inaccurate. Religion implies non-religion: secularity. But the secular does not exist. The more accurate term for our fervor would be a way of life. A culture. A mental outlook.

The European sciences are catching up to our ancestors’ eons-old realization.

The human species evolved from ape species, which came from rats, which came from lizards, which came from fish, which came from worms, which came from sponges, which came from small multi-cellular organisms, which came from single-cell organisms, which came from molecular reactions, which came from planets, which all came from the atoms of the Big Bang.

There is no ‘out-group’ in the entire universe, no line between human and non-human, soul and soulless, divine and secular. Exclusivity is the imagination of people who ignore their Selves.

My true identity, my humanity, does not depend upon any human opinion—even my own. I am. I always am.

That is what we mean by Self-awareness. By seeing true divinity when the monarchs of materialism beg us not to. By cutting down their lies. By slowing down (and thinking) when they insist that we speed up (and forgetting). Laughing at our ignorance. Loving our Selves by upending borders wherever people create it. Unity through material difference, not despite it.

In our present era, this means to include Blackness so unconditionally, to uplift indigenous peoples so thoroughly, to free ourselves from women’s silence so completely, that we upend everything that resists our Selves. To realize that seeing undocumented, criminalized, and imprisoned people as fully human is a radical proposition—and the fact that it is radical reveals just how ignorant we have become.

That we begin to heal ourselves and each other from the violence of our ignorance through repentance and reparations. Heal our humanity instead of our bodies which will decay regardless.

Self-doubt is the deceptively simple root of white fragility.

See, this is why this topic of cultural anxiety is so important even for people of color. Whiteness is not limited to the lighter-skinned.

Self-avoidance also gave birth to murderous forces: slavery, colonialization, to both the Hindu-regimented caste system and the famines in the Indian peninsula manufactured by the British. To the Trail of Tears, Manifest Destiny, to Whiteness, European rationalism, fascism, to the White, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu nationalists.

To borders and fences. Self-doubt gave birth to fears and hatreds eons old. To guilt instead of joyous repentance and reparations. To glorifying military states instead of glorifying welfare states.

Peace and borders are incompatible.

And when we realize we’ve been led to doubt ourselves our entire lives by elites? When we understand that we are living in a terrorist nation? Sure, we’ll be anxious. We feel lost. This anxiety is within us.

 It too shall pass. The climate, and the times, are a-changing

The Pedagogy of Hip Hop: Underground Soundtracks for Dissecting and Confronting the Power Structure

By Colin Jenkins

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.



On the 16th track of Immortal Technique's Revolutionary, Volume 2, Mumia Abu-Jamal theorizes on the inherent contradictions between the lived reality of many Americans and the notion of homeland [in]security. In doing so, he explains how the musical phenomenon of hip hop captures these contradictions by displaying "gritty roots" that are bound up in systemic injustice and deep feelings of fear and hatred. These feelings, according to Mumia, engulf entire generations of children who have been betrayed by systems of capitalism and white supremacy, and their intricately constructed school-to-prison pipeline:

"To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture, and also about homeland security, is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security, it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice, that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth to climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society, the opposite is true. For here, more than any other place on earth, wealth is more widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safe?"

In his short commentary, Mumia refers specifically to the Black community in the US - a community that has been ravaged from every angle through America's relatively short history: two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping convict leasing Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. A history consumed with betrayal after betrayal, complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices. Mumia juxtaposes this unique experience to the "broader society," one that is riddled with insecurities stemming from "opulent and relative" wealth, to expose the irony of "homeland security," a term that he views as oxymoronic.

Mumia is correct in characterizing the reactionary temperament of both the American middle and upper classes - sects that both determine and maintain dominant culture. Broader society is molded by this temperament, which is buoyed by small pockets of socioeconomic comfort floating in a vast sea of instability that not only plagues the Black community in its never-ending struggle against both white supremacy and capitalism, but also poor and working-class white communities that have been similarly doomed by their forced reliance on wage labor. Despite what he describes as "bountiful wealth," American society has always been propped up on this hidden base of despair, felt by a majority of the population that exists below the façade. Since the 1980s, this façade has been slowly chiseled away as neoliberalism has successfully funneled wealth to the few at the top while creating a race to the bottom for everyone else, including those once deemed "middle class."

This race to the bottom has exposed the underbelly of instability through its attack on a fast-eroding, mostly-white middle class that now finds itself desperately seeking reasons for its newfound despair. While those of us at the bottom may welcome the company, in hopes that it will bring the critical mass needed to finally confront and bring down the capitalist system, it also signals trying times ahead. In being consistent with similar erosions of "relative and bountiful wealth" throughout history, the American demise brings with it a fairly high probability of a fascist tide. In fact, this tide has already begun to form, largely through millions of white tears dropping from the Tea Party, its Reaganite forerunners, the "alt-right," a surge of neo-Nazism and white nationalism, and Donald Trump's pied piper-like rhetoric that has pooled it all together.

While middle-class America comes crashing down along with the empire, the Black community remains steadfast in its centuries-long defensive posture. Despite facing an acute, structural oppression that is unparalleled in any other modern "industrialized" setting, and in spite of Mumia's sobering analysis, the Black community has in many ways survived and thrived like no other. This survival in the face of intense hatred has been expressed through many musical forms , from the early roots of rock n roll, Blues, and American Jazz to the hip-hop phenomenon that Mumia speaks of. This collective survival is perfectly captured in Tupac's poem,The Rose that Grew from Concrete, which tells the story of

…the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned how to walk without havin feet
Funny it seems but by keepin its dreams
It learned to breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared.

In explaining the meaning of the poem, Pac summed up much of the African-American experience, as well as the reactionary temperament often directed at it from those in more privileged positions:

"You try to plant somethin in the concrete. If it grows, and the rose petal got all kind of scratches and marks, you not gonna say, "Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete." You gonna be like, "Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!" Same thing with me… I grew out of all of this. Instead of sayin, "Damn, he did this, he did this," just be like, "Damn! He grew out of that? He came out of that?" That's what they should say… All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I'm just tryin to make somethin."

Pac's story also describes that of the entire American working class, as a collection of former slaves, indentured servants, peasants, and poor immigrants set up for failure by a capitalist system designed to exploit us all, collectively. The working-class struggle is tightly intertwined with the Black struggle. The Communist Party knew this long ago. The Industrial Workers of the World did as well. The original Black Panther Party also knew this, as did all those coming from the Black Radical Tradition in America: W.E.B. DuBois, the African Blood Brotherhood, Harry Haywood, the Revolutionary Action Movement, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, the Combahee River Collective, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African People, and so many others.

As this struggle commences and intensifies during what appear to be the end days of American Empire, underground hip hop provides us with a soundtrack that is laced with historical context, deep analysis, and valuable knowledge - all of which should be applied while moving forward. The "psychic fuel" that Mumia points to in his brief commentary, which "generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry" is far from misguided, and extends far beyond cathartic release. While in the mainstream, the Black Radical Tradition continues to be tragically mocked by identity politics , activist-celebrity tweeters pimping corporate brands , black liberation-themed credit cards , high-dollar-plate events, non-profit organizations, and the Democratic Party, its torch remains lit through the lyrics burning on underground hip-hop tracks. And this underground reflects the pulse of the streets, where tens of millions experience daily life in the underbelly of instability - not on Twitter, Facebook, or fundraising dinners at the Marriott.


Structural Oppression Under Capitalism

As resistance movements gain momentum in the days of Trump, an understanding of the disastrous effects of capitalism is necessary. Party politics are, as John Dewey once explained, the "shadow cast on society by big business (capitalism)." Politicians from both parties work within this shadow, delivering rhetoric to the masses before and after taking orders from their donors, sponsors, and corporate overlords. Regardless of who is in the highest office, whether it's an eloquent black President or a blustering billionaire, "the attenuation does not change the substance." As a popular Internet meme recently noted, the 'hood under Trump is the same as the 'hood under Obama, which was the same as the 'hood under Bush, which was the same as the 'hood under Clinton. Sadly, this sentiment could go on for as long as Presidents have occupied the white house. Politicians and presidents come and go, and nothing changes for most of us; because, quite frankly, it is not supposed to. Politics serve capitalism; and capitalism does not serve us.


"It's like an open-air prison and it remained packed"

Hip hop serves as historiography in this sense, documenting the conditions of neighborhoods throughout the US for the past four decades, examining the histories behind multi-generational poverty, and seeking ways to address the dire situations many find themselves in. Ironically, the rise of hip hop paralleled the rise of the neoliberal era, a period that has been marked by an intensification of the capitalist system. During this time, things for most have at best remained stagnant, and at worst become increasingly disastrous. The hook in Erykah Badu's The Cell (2008) captures this lived experience in sobering fashion:

We're not well
We're not well
We can't tell

Brenda done died with no name
Nickel bag coke to the brain
Will they ever find the vaccine?
Shitty-damn-damn-baby-bang
Rich man got the double barrel
Po' man got his back to the door
Code white stands for trouble
Shots from the po-po (blah blah)

Jean Grae's Block Party , the 4th track on her 2002 album Attack of the Attacking Things, provides an intimate glimpse into the state of Black communities during this time:

I don't wanna preach or come off bitter, this is a commentary auditory
Editorial, about the state of things, state of mind and state of being
What the fuck is goin on? How the fuck we gonna make it out?
It's hectic, from asbestos filled classrooms
To the stench of death that's still in New York
The air is thick with it, but it reaches further
Like the world murder rate

While illustrating the chronic conditions found in many communities, Grae immediately offers insight into possible solutions rooted in consciousness. Without actually saying it, her lyrics brilliantly dip into a structural analysis that calls for abandoning capitalist culture and realizing the tragic ironies in seeking individual materialistic goals. In doing so, there is an underlying theme to escape values that have been implanted into not only predominantly Black communities, but also working-class communities as a whole:

We need to globalize, further spread on this earth
To appreciate the full value of individual worth
To realize how ridiculous the thought of ownership is
And protectin your turf - that's bullshit man
That's how we got colonized
Missionaries create foreign schools and change the native way & thinkin
So in ten years, we can have a foreign Columbine
In some small village in the Amazon, c'mon man

Grae's second verse masterfully ties together a narrative based in seeking a collective consciousness while avoiding a house-slave mentality that aims to, as she puts it, "chill with rich white folks." Again, while directed toward members of the Black community, Grae's commentary is undeniably relative to the working-class struggle in its entirety, especially in terms of how the "rags-to-riches," so-called "American Dream" is framed strictly within individual pursuits of wealth and hyper-consumerism. Ultimately, as Grae suggests, this mentality must be shed through deeper calls for knowledge, community, and shared struggle:

It's every man for himself
That's why the black community is lackin in wealth, there's no unity
We soon to be chillin with rich white folk
And that means that we made it
Let our kids go hungry before our wardrobe is outdated

…If the system's corrupt, then change it
Fought for the right to vote, don't even use it
Forget electoral winnin
The way the world's goin, we in the ninth inning
Heh, and we still aren't up to bat
Niggas is happy just to have the rights to sit on the bench
Like floor seats is alright, and that's as far as we reach
Materialistic values, not morals, that's what we teach
I see it in the youth, hungry for fame and money
Not for knowledge and pursuit of the truth
Pick up a book or a newspaper
Take a free class in politics or human behavior

Talib Kweli and Rapsody's Every Ghetto , the 2nd track on Kweli's 2015 album Indie 500, echoes Grae's track in addressing the systematic ghettoization of the Black community under the intertwined tandem of capitalism and white supremacy. Crucially, the track challenges the often-mistaken attempt to characterize ghetto life as a monolithic existence, seemingly warning against the fetishization of the black struggle while reflecting Pac's poem of the concrete rose and highlighting the unique struggle and persistence of the Black working class. Kweli's bridge builds on Grae's Block Party narrative, celebrating the communal potential of struggling communities:

I'm good walkin' in every ghetto around the world
The hood often embrace ya when you profound with words
I say the shit they relate to, I keep it down to Earth
Other rappers sound like they hate you, them niggas sound absurd
So when they walk through the ghetto they get their chain snatched
They gotta talk to the ghetto to get their chain back
It's like an open-air prison and it remain packed
Nothin' but straight facts

Kweli's initial verse jumps directly into a layered analysis, with the first bar alone touching on chronic malnourishment, poor education, smothering crime, gentrification, and a culture of anti-consciousness:

Every ghetto, every city, like Ms. Hill
They way too used to the missed meals
Hard to concentrate, hard to sit still
Murder rate permanent place in the top 10
We live here, these hipsters drop in
You hear them barrels cockin'
They say consciousness mean a nigga ain't rugged
Until they get beat within an inch of it

Rapsody closes the track with a powerful verse, filled with structural and cultural critiques all tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Her verse is laced with innuendo in a masterful play on words as she illustrates the lived reality of generations of Black Americans who have been systematically targeted by America's settler-colonial project, pointing to everything from police terror and the destruction of the Black family unit to the false promises of individualized pursuits of wealth.

Indie 5, for the people by the people
Ya-ya, giddy up, who got the juice now?
Snatch it out your kiddies cups
The shit you gave us watered down
This one's for Basquiat
They be brushin' with death, uh
Is this The Art Of War for cops?
We double-dutchin' duckin' shots
Every home ain't got a Pops
Every man ain't sellin' rocks
A different will to win here
Different from switchin' cars
They pray that we switch our bars
To a fiend from a metaphor
Worldstar, Worldstar
Lotta love and this life hard
Keep us prayin' like "oh God"
Illegally thievery think us peelin' off easily
Frustrated we hate it
That's why we scream out "nigga we made it"
It's an odd future they ain't know we was all some creators
Somethin' from nothin' was told Kings walk and man you frontin'
For the people and by the people but them over money
I'm on my Viola Davis here, workin' for justice
How you get away with murder? Be a cop and just kill us
How we supposed to not catch feelings?
Innocent lives, boy we got kids in these buildings
I'm on my Viola Davis, it's what you call a defense
For all the drama they gave us I'm spittin' Shonda Rhimes wit
Too high for you like ganja, that's what Shonda rhyme with
I holla back in the Hamptons, you still black if you rich
Spread love ain't just the Brooklyn way, it's universal
360 and the nine lives, whoa, what a circle


"Keep it movin' on"

While systemic oppression has plagued many generations of working-class Americans, especially non-white (as noted by Grae, Kweli and Rapsody), the middle class has only begun to feel the pressure of the capitalist system. The American middle class is an anomaly in history. Its formation defied the internal mechanics of capitalism, a system that is designed to favor the privileged few who have access to enough capital to own the means of production. This anomaly was beneficial for America's capitalist class, in that it allowed for a slick rebranding of capitalism as a system of "freedom" and "liberty." For decades, the American middle class was held up as the ultimate advertisement for a system that we were told allowed for social mobility through "hard work." These fables became so strong that an entire century was spent trying to shape a benevolent form of capitalism through government intervention (Keynesianism) and a robust Welfare State. Because of its relative success, mainly due to US imperial endeavors abroad, the capitalist system was not only propped up, but it was even sold to the masses as "the only alternative." The era of neoliberalism ended all of that. As capitalism's internal mechanics were unleashed during this period, so too were its natural consequences - capital accumulation for the elites, and mass dispossession for the people.

While mainstream media outlets continue to push a tired narrative, hip hop has shed some light on the real effects of capitalism. Vinnie Paz's 2010 track Keep Movin' On provides insight into these effects, and especially how they relate to the American worker. The first verse informs us in two ways. First, Paz illustrates the workers' role in the capitalist system, which is merely to serve as a tool to be used and exploited until no longer needed. In this role, we are not considered as human beings with families, needs, and inherent rights; we are only valuable as long as we provide owners with an avenue of extracting surplus labor from us for their profit. Second, the verse specifically describes the plight of the American manufacturing worker and the demise of middle-class jobs over the past 40 years due to globalization, corporate offshoring, and free trade agreements - all elements of the proliferation of capitalism in the neoliberal era:

I lost my job at the factory and that's disastrous
They said it's due to regulation and higher taxes
They ain't give me no notice. They knocked me off my axis
I can't pay the electric bill. It's total blackness
I suggested some incentives for innovation
But that was met with resistance like it's a sin of Satan
I'm losing my patience over here. I'm sick of waiting
And I ain't never expect to be in this situation
And the manufacturing jobs are fading fast (Damn)
Can't do nothing else. I should've stayed in class
I have to wait till summertime to cut the blades of grass
I have this little bit of money. Have to make it last
I have children to feed. I have a loving wife
I had a hard time coming that was nothing nice
I keep asking myself what am I doing wrong
And they just look at me and tell me "Keep it movin' on"


"Kill my landlord"

Along with massive unemployment and underemployment, the working class is also constantly faced with insecure housing situations. Landlordism is a natural byproduct of a capitalist system which seeks to commodify basic human needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for profit. Under this system, the few who can afford to own multiple properties are allowed to exploit the many who can barely afford basic shelter for themselves and their families. Because of this, many of us go our entire lives without ever establishing a stable home environment.

As of 2017, this natural housing crisis has reached a point where it's being labeled an epidemic even by mainstream sources. As rent continues to soar , so do evictions. " As of 2015 , more than 20 million renters-more than half of all renters in the U.S.-were cost burdened, meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That's up from almost 15 million in 2001. And while rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent." In 2015, an estimated 2.7 million Americans faced eviction. Median rent has increased by more than 70% since 1995, while wages have stagnated for almost 30 years, and jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared during this same period. Landlords will go to great lengths to throw families and children out in the streets, sometimes even for falling behind one month on rent. "A landlord can evict tenants through a formal court process," explains Matthew Desmond , "or they can choose cheaper and quicker ways" to boot the families, such as "paying them a couple of hundred dollars to vacate by the end of the week" or even by removing the front door of the home. In order to protect this for-profit housing system from total collapse, the federal government uses numerous programs to assist people, including public housing, rental assistance, and even massive tax subsidies for homeowners. Despite this, many families are cold-heartedly exploited and discarded by landlords who want nothing more than to profit off this forced, human desperation. After living such an existence, The Coup's 1993 track Kill My Landlord , which featured the less-known rap duo Elements of Change, is surely to serve as a long-standing anthem for many:

Overlord of the concrete jungle but I'm humble
As I witness my opponent crumble
Like the shack that I live in the house that I rent from him
Roach infested I'm sure that the rats are nesting
The heat doesn't work he still hasn't checked it
Disrespected me for the last time
I loaded up the nine stepping double time
Bullseye, Another point scored
Right between the eyes of my landlord

All who have relied on rental property to live can certainly relate to the undignified relationship between landlord and tenant. Like bosses, landlords exploit us as resources. And the capitalist system not only allows them the power to do this on mass scale, it actually supports their rights with force if necessary. Our collective desperation is their individual gain. And our forced dependency on them leaves us with no leverage against their power. The second verse of The Coup's classic track reflects on this slave-like existence brought on by capitalism and landlordism:

So me I'm chilling at the table with my family
Hypothetically trying hard to keep my mind off the economy
Yeah I know the reason I find it hard to pass the test
Call me a victim cause I'm another brother jobless
Every day it seems like I'm moving closer to the streets
PG&E repo'ed the lights and my fucking heat
The situation's getting hard for me to handle
Had to trade my Nike's to the store to buy some candles
Last to first and I'm a-hunted and a ho I know
The man is going to come and throw me in the cold
Tears in my eye as I'm thinking of place to stay
While I'm staring at the freebie cheese up in my plate
I heard a bang bang bang knocking at my door
I looked up it was my motherfucking landlord, let him in quick
Followed by the sheriff deputy trying to come in
Every po on my property, staring me down
Mugging hard up in my family's face
While they're sitting at the table trying to say grace
But before I make this one my last meal
Any moves, yeah I'm looking for the damn kill
I said it twice in case he didn't hear me though
Sucker made a move evidently when he hit the floor
So now I'm in cuffs for the crimes I've committed
Maybe I'll go to jail, heh, or maybe I'll get acquitted
But the fact still stands I killed my landlord dead
Now I've got three meals and a roof over my head

In the third verse, Boots Riley connects the inherent injustices of landlordism to not only capitalism, but also to European conquest and the process of primitive accumulation that allowed settler-colonists to create wealth from the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indigenous holocaust. There is an overt racial component to this process, as descendants of former slaves are still forced to depend on descendants of former slave-owners for basic needs. Recognizing the injustices and illegitimacy of this system, and seeking revolutionary change, is crucial. Boots delivers knowledge:

Cash is made in lump sums as street bums eat crumbs
So I defeat scum as I beat drums
Rum-tiddy-tum like the little drummer boy song
Here comes the landlord at the door, ding dong
Is it wrong that my momma sticks a fat-ass thong
Up his anal cavity cause he causes gravity to my family
Says we gotta pay a fee so we can stay and eat
In a house with light and heat
The bastard could get beat, stole the land from Chief Littlefeet
House is built on deceit, got no rent receipt
So I'm living in the street and I'm down now
Don't you know to not fuck with the Mau Mau?
Notice of eviction, four knuckle dental affliction
Friction, oh did I mention
You'll be finger licking as I handicap your diction
And you say you're not a criminal like Tricky Dick Nixon?
While we're fixing to impose rent control
We didn't vote on it, this land wasn't bought or sold
It was stole by your great granddaddy's ganking
Osagyefo said they call it primitive accumulation
Plantations, TV stations wealth is very stationary
I learned the game and I became a revolutionary
Scaring the corporate asses cause the masses are a loaded gun
Killing the world banking and international monetary fund
I'm done, we're done with what you've done
For twenty-five score we've got a battle cry
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my landlord

While representing a main staple of capitalism, landlordism also mimics the dynamics of settler societies in that settlers gain a disproportionate amount of land ownership at the expense of the mass dispossession of native populations. In many ways, modern landlords in the US represent the traditional colonizer, often buying up property in "foreign" communities for the sole purpose of exploiting masses of renters through dispossession and forced reliance. As in the process of gentrification, landlords dispossess thousands of poor and working-class people in their never-ending pursuit for more and more property to commodify. E-Roc finishes the track strong, calling on a figurative Mau Mau rebellion to "kill" the modern version of colonizers.

I need six hundred dollars by the end of the week
My body is cold, dirty socks on my feet
Not a black sheep, but who's the creep
Trying to put me on the street while I'm trying to sleep?
I wanna kill my landlord, murder in the first degree
If there's something wrong he wants to blame me
Wants to be a threat so he carries a gun
Well I pack a 9 cause I can't trust 911
Son of a gun, I'm the one who cuts the grass
Wash the windows and he still wants me to kiss his ass
But I laugh cause America's not my home
My landlord took me away from where I belong
But it's a sad song so I face reality now
Pick up the phone and now here comes the Mau Mau
To the rescue, down with The Coup
Yo landlord, I've got a little message for you
I'm going cuckoo, fuck a machete or sword
E-Roc is on a mission to kill my landlord


How the Capitalist/Imperialist War Machine Works Against Us

On Track 7 of Immortal Technique's 2005 Bin Laden remix album, Mumia Abu-Jamal once again spits knowledge, this time providing brilliantly poetic commentary framing capitalism and imperialism as " a war versus us all ":

The war against us all
This war in Iraq isn't the end; it's the beginning of Wars to come
All around the world at the whim of the Neo-Cons in the White House
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; War, war and more war!
War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show
This isn't just a War on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims
It is ultimately a War on us all.
That's because the billions and billions that are being spent on this War
The cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes even salaries
For the 125, 000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on;
Education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing
Or to train and place the millions of workers
Who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone
The War in Iraq is in reality; a war against the nations' workers and the poor
Who are getting less and less
While the big Defense industries and making a killing, literally.
What's next Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela?
We've already seen the corporate media
Play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a War based on lies
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies
We're seeing the truth of its insight
When we see the sad state of American education
The rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians
Because American drugs are just too expensive
The threat of privatization of Social Security
And the wave of repression that comes with an increasing Militarized Police;
This is a War on all of us
And the struggle against War is really a struggle for a better life
For the millions of folks who are in need here in this country!
The fight against the War is really to fight for your own interest
Not the false interests of the Defense Industry
Or the corporate media or the White House
Down with the Wars for empire.

Immortal Technique's subsequent track, Bin Laden , is a masterful critique of US imperialism and the corollary effects of government control on American citizens. Written during the W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, the track touches on the fear-mongering that led to the Patriot Act, the hypocrisy of American politicians, and the CIA's dealings in the Middle East during the 1980s, which created and strengthened groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Tech begins by contrasting the lived realities of most American citizens with the artificial realities disseminated from the power structure and its calls for blind patriotic loyalty:

I pledge no allegiance, fuck the President's speeches!
I'm baptized by America and covered in leeches.
The dirty water that bleaches your soul, and your facial features.
Drowning you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers.
And if you speak about the evil that the government does.
The Patriot Act will track you to the type of your blood.
They try to frame you and say you was trying sell drugs.
And throw a federal indictment on niggas to show you love.
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians.
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in.

He wraps up the first verse by summarizing US foreign policy during the 1980s, specifically referring to the substantial financial and military aid provided to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during their prolonged war against the Soviet Union. During this time, Osama Bin Laden was a US ally who was a beneficiary of much of this aid, as was Saddam.

All they talk about is terrorism on television.
They tell you to listen.
But they don't really tell you they mission.
They funded al-Qaeda.
And now they blame the Muslim religion.
Even though Bin Laden was a CIA tactician.
They gave him billions of dollars and they funded his purpose.
Fahrenheit 9/11? That's just scratching the surface!

…And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons.
We sold him that shit after Ronald Reagan's election.
Mercenary contractors fighting in a new era
Corporate military banking off the war on terror.

The fact that the US government once supported and funded Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein is not the main point in Tech's lyrical thesis, but rather the context that leads us into deeper analysis on US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the rise of Islamophobia and the War on Terror. By showing how loyalties easily sway, Tech is showing us how the purpose of US interventions abroad are not really about "protecting freedom" or "defending us." Rather, US foreign policy is a chess game played by the capitalist ruling class for the purpose of engineering and maintaining the US Empire , which in essence is serving as the forerunner and protector of the global capitalist system. So-called terrorism and "Muslim extremism" are nothing more than a manufactured fears designed to scare a sizable portion of the American public into supporting these destructive efforts abroad. Samuel Huntington's 1996 book Clash of Civilizations is often looked to as the main driver in this farce of a cultural/religious global war. In supporting Tech's message, Noam Chomsky talks about the obvious contradictions of Huntington's thesis here , as Edward Said further discredits it here . A simple search of stock reports for major weapons manufacturers over the past decade shows how profitable the "war on terror" has been. Understanding geopolitics is often as easy as following the money.

Part of Tech's second verse includes a brilliant critique of state nationalism and patriotism, illustrating how and why government and capitalist interests are not the same as the peoples' interests, despite being advertised as such. While these wars spread and intensify, most of us continue to struggle.

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that's bullshit, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
'Cause if another country invaded the hood tonight
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fighting for Bush or White America's dream
I'd be fighting for my people's survival and self-esteem
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the South, my nigga
I'd be fighting to keep the occupation out, my nigga

…. 'Cause innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily

In a remixed version of this track that includes hip-hop vets Chuck D and KRS-One, Tech tweaks the lyrics to this verse in order to show how the "clash of religions" narrative, as highlighted by Chomsky and Said, is falsely perpetrated:

They say that terrorism revolves around the Qur'an
But that's stupid, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
Cause if this country was invaded and crumbled
I'd turn Harlem into a Columbian jungle
And I wouldn't be fighting for a Christian nation
I'd be fighting for survival from extermination
I wouldn't fight for Fox News, them racist niggas
I'd be fighting for the hood, for the faceless niggas

Tech also addresses the hypocrisy of America's fundamentalist Christian sect, which strongly supports the Republican Party, the clash of civilizations/religion narrative, the Israeli Apartheid state, and military interventions abroad. Christian fundamentalism in the US plays an important role as a conduit to white supremacy and class warfare, as seen in its common stance against the interests of both the Black community and the immigrant community, as well as the poor and working-class communities altogether. This conduit has shown itself in the Republican Party's four-decade-long Southern Strategy and the rise of Donald Trump's presidency, which has brought with it overt elements of white supremacy, or as Tech puts it, "devils that run America like 'Birth of a Nation,' a popular white-supremacist propaganda film from 1915:

Government front religious, but their heart is empty
Like a televangelist preaching out of his Bentley
Calling abortion murder in a medical building
But don't give a fuck about bombing Iraqi children
Talking like units in the fucking libretto
Look at their mansions and look at your suburban ghetto
The gulag, the new hood where they send us to live
Cause they don't give a fuck about none of our kids
That's why Blacks and Latinos get the worst education
While devils run America like "Birth of a Nation"
Affirmative action ain't reverse discrimination
That shit is a pathetic excuse for reparations


Fake News, Structural Misinformation, and How the Ruling Class Control Politics

The notion of "fake news" has become a prominent theme in American politics due to Donald Trump's constant use of the term to explain what he views as his unfair treatment and misinterpretation by some media outlets. Ironically, the term is also being used by liberal opponents of Trump to claim that Russia had influenced the Presidential election in Trump's favor. The Washington Post even went as far as publishing a report citing "anonymous groups" to list dozens of online news sources that allegedly served as "instruments of Russian propaganda" during the 2016 Presidential race. Despite some backpedaling on the initial article (to include an editor's note and the removal of some websites from the list), liberal-leaning media outlets like the Washington Post and MSNBC have persisted with this seemingly hysterical and bizarre Russophobic angle to attempt to discredit Trump's presidency. As if Trump's personal history, business dealings, fascist rhetoric, narcissism, constant lies, and hyper-capitalist policy platform are not bad enough.

There are some very interesting points to take from this liberal narrative. One is regarding the corporate media itself, which has both perpetuated the allegations of "fake news" and been accused of delivering it. Ironically, Trump is correct in referring to these news sources as fake. But they are not fake for the reasons he claims they are fake - which is only regarding how they portray things related to him. They are fake because they ceased being news agencies decades ago. They are now part of the entertainment industry. They are concerned with ratings and advertising profit, not with delivering information to the public. Information does not sell, sensationalism does. Fox News knows this just as much as MSNBC and CNN know this. To earn profit, you need ratings. To get ratings, you need people to tune into your channel. To get people to tune into your channel, you need drama, controversy, fear, sex, shock, sensationalism; in other words, entertainment.

Another point is regarding corporate news as a de facto fourth branch of government. Often referred to throughout history as the fourth estate, media and press journalism have long been relied on to provide a valuable fourth branch of checks and balances in the US. However, as time has gone on, rather than uncovering conflicts of interest, exposing backroom deals, and delivering investigative journalism, the media in the US has become both complicit and indifferent in and to government corruption. This was never more evident than in the months leading up to the Iraq War, which according to Australian journalist John Pilger , may have never happened if journalists had done their job of uncovering truths in the face of, and in spite of, power:

"…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist."

Media collusion with the power structure has been a central theme to the work of Pilger, who has consistently tied the media's full institutional compliance to what is properly referred to as "the deep state" or "invisible government" through the proliferation of propaganda . This was also the main theme of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, as well as the subsequent 1992 documentary by the same name. According to Chomsky and Herman, mass media in the US "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without overt coercion." Which is to say that profit-driven news not only seeks to appease popular narratives, but also will toe the government line in return for continued access or exclusive scoops, all of which are determined by government officials.

Immortal Technique's 2003 track, The 4th Branch , fortifies the work of Pilger, Chomsky, and Herman by illustrating how the media and its propaganda serve the ruling-class narrative. Released in the aftermath of 9-11 and during the beginnings of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tech weaves multiple theses into a central theme of propaganda versus reality. The hook sums up the track:

It's like MK-ULTRA, controllin' your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fightin' for freedom and fightin' terror, but what's reality
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

The opening verse introduces us once again to Huntington's clash-of-civilizations narrative and the role of Evangelical Christians in pushing forth this narrative. Tech focuses on the moral bankruptcy of Christian fundamentalism in the US and how US foreign policy is continuously designed on a base of hypocrisy and misinformation, carried out by agents of the capitalist class:

The voice of racism preachin' the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu'ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin' to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings

The remainder of the first verse continues the critique on conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalism, tying them into the ultimate hypocrisies perpetrated in the founding of the United States. The miseducation that most of us are subjected to through years of formal education interplay with Tech's exposure of the public misinformation that disseminates from media sources, all of which combine to produce a hidden history of the US that is a perfectly pliable tool firmly in the hands of the ruling class:

I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I'm facin' assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave
Indigenous holocaust and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin' offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won't trade humanity for patriotism

Returning to Vinnie Paz's track, Keep Movin' On, we see the experiences and views of an American soldier, handpicked from the working class to serve in illegal and immoral wars and occupations abroad. The verse touches on everything from the recruitment process and the brainwashing effects of patriotism to the gruesome effects of serving as tools of war for the capitalist ruling class :

I signed up cause they promised me some college money
I ain't the smartest motherfucker but I'm not a dummy
They told me I would be stationed in places hot and sunny
I had a lot of pride. Motherfuckers got it from me
These people over here innocent. They never harmed me
My sergeant tried to convince me that they would try to bomb me
I feel like an outsider stuck inside this army
Everybody brainwashed. American zombies
I ain't realized how much it set me back
Until I lost my leg and then they sent me back
I don't have anything now. I'm left with scraps
From a government who created AIDS, invented crack
People told me not to join. I tried to prove 'em wrong
Now I'm homeless and I'm cold without no food thas' warm
I keep asking myself, "What did I do that's wrong?"
And the government telling me, "Keep it movin' on"

Tech's closing comments on the 4th Branch summarizes the class-component that shapes the military industrial complex, a system designed to create, maintain, and protect private profit. Echoing Paz's verse on the experience of soldiers, Tech illustrates our role in this system while touching on the constant propaganda we are bombarded with, which pushes this narrative of "we," as if "we" have anything in common with the American ruling/capitalist class and their servants in mass media.

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn't speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone
And you know it's serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they're fair and balanced
When they're some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don't get the contracts to make money off 'em afterwards
We don't get weapons contracts, nigga
We don't get cheap labor for our companies, nigga
We are cheap labor, nigga
Turn off the news and read, nigga
Read... read... read

Tech's final verse is powerfully connected to liberation movements of the past, echoing among other the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, and his call for international, working-class solidarity during the beginnings of World War I. In his A Continental Revolution (1914) , Connolly sums up the profit motive and class-basis of war:

"… [in war] the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

… against the patriotism of capitalism - the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right - I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil.

To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy."

"Fake news" is simply propaganda constructed through ruling-class channels to boost systems and cultures that support the power structure. In other words, it is the status quo. It is nothing new. It happens rather naturally, flowing from concentrations of money and power. Regarding the newfound liberal version of "fake news," the final point to consider relates to the idea of an outside influence on American politics. Long before the Russia hysteria surfaced, the American political system had been bought and sold numerous times over. To suggest that politicians from either major party ever represented the interests of American people is incredibly naïve. Campaign financing and corporate lobbying determine who wins political races and which legislation is introduced and passed in Congress. Long before Russia was accused of influencing elections, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were proven to influence elections. Long before Trump supposedly got a boost from Putin, official US policy had been directly shaped by Israeli interests in the Middle East.

Access to oil has always determined foreign policy, access to capital for big business has always determined economic policy, and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision has ensured that the Kochs', Soros', Gates', and Buffetts' of the world will always hold more political weight within the electoral system than 100 million voters combined, if they so choose. Whether it's Goldman Sachs, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Putin, the American people have never had a say in what the political machine does or doesn't do. This fact renders the Trump-Russia hysteria as moot. Any real sense of US national interests has long been replaced by the global capitalist order, if they ever truly existed at all. In terms of political empowerment and self-determination for the working-class majority within the US, a foreign president is no different than any number of nameless American millionaire hedge-fund donors.


The Seamless Political Machine and the Failures of Identity Politics: From Reagan to Trump

Within electoral politics, lesser-evilism has become the dominant stance for at least half of the American population. For individual voters, the 2-party duopoly has been mostly abandoned as identifications with either party have reached near-historic lows . As of 2015, nearly half of registered voters identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. However, despite this overwhelming rejection of the 2-party system, many of these voters continue to choose what they view as the "lesser evil" in voting for candidates from one of the two major parties.

Since the Reagan administration and introduction of a seamless political machine based in neoliberalism (an intensification of capitalism), presidential administrations regardless of party have been almost indistinguishable. Despite this seamless identity that's emerged, many voters still insist on claiming differences between the two corporate parties, even if it means choosing what they view as the lesser-evil. The fact that some public radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis have proposed lesser-evilism lends this direction some undue credence. However, when we step back and analyze the big picture, away from the emotions that often emerge in the heat of electoral moments, it is easy to see that lesser-evilism, as an electoral tactic embraced by the Left, has pushed the entire political system to the right over the past 40 years. Clear evidence of this shift can be seen in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, which carried forth Reagan-esque economic policy, while also gutting welfare (Clinton), facilitating mass incarceration of the Black community (Clinton), escalating US bombing campaigns (Obama), pushing historical levels of deportation of immigrants (Obama), and maintaining the attack on civil liberties that began under W. Bush (Obama). Even more evidence is the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate who is viewed as being an outlier of the Democratic Party, despite an ideological identity that is consistent with run-of-the-mill liberalism of old. Yet, when compared to a Democratic Party that has clearly shifted rightward, toward more hard-line capitalist-friendly policies that have characterized the neoliberal era started by Reagan, as well as highly-destructive imperialist missions abroad, Sanders looks like a radical.

Killer Mike's 2012 track, Reagan, brings us to the start of the neoliberal era. In a social context, specifically regarding the treatment of Black communities throughout the country, the Reagan era merely picked up on hundreds of years of oppression. By implementing an official "war on drugs," this era provided the basis for what Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow , in her book with the same title. It also created a new wing of the military industrial complex through the construction of an extensive for-profit prison system and widespread militarization of domestic police forces. Mike's second verse introduces us to the Reagan environment, as experienced by the Black community:

The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like 'leven, twelve, or
Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit

The intensification of American policing in poor communities of color served a bigger purpose. As Mike explains in the same verse, it bolstered the cornerstone of US economics and capitalism: free labor. As per the 13th amendment of the US Constitution , "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In other words, the forced free labor of convicts in the US prison system is still legal. And the "war on drugs" helped to create nearly 1.3 million free laborers for mainstream corporations , as the prison population in the US grew from roughly 300,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million in 2015 . Killer Mike touches on this:

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Mike closes the track by moving the focus from Reagan to the system, telling us that Presidents (and most politicians, for that matter) are nothing more than "employees of the country's real masters," serving capitalist interests rather than the masses of people:

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country's real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
(Shh..) Who the fuck is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render
I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead

Reagan the man may be dead, but his spirit has survived in symbolic terms through the perpetuation of neoliberalism's capitalist/imperialist order. The actions of our last President, Obama, who may appear to be the polar opposite of Reagan in any superficial analysis, confirms this perpetuation. The 2015 remix, Obamanation 4 , hammers this truth home in magnificent fashion. Opening with excerpts of speeches from Malcolm X, the track sets up a premise of systemic analysis as Malcolm rails against the "international Western power structure (capitalism)," calling upon "anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change the miserable conditions on this earth."

Echoing Killer Mike's track, M-1 (from Dead Prez) uses his verse in Obamanation 4 to expose the systemic nature of our political system, illustrating how not only the Democratic Party, but also the first Black President, equal nothing more than cogs in an imperialist machine. His analysis begins by disregarding the propaganda stemming from right-wing sources like Fox News and syndicated radio, all of which claimed Obama represented a diversion from politics-as-usual by having some mythological "radical-left-wing agenda." In reality, Obama's administration continued, and even escalated in some cases, America's imperialist endeavors abroad. M-1 flips this "right-wing propaganda" and puts it back on progressives, rhetorically asking "who you gonna blame" now that the man in charge is no longer a white Republican named Bush:

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign, it's all simple and plain.
America customed the game.
Your President got an African name, now who you gonna blame?
When they drop them bombs out of them planes.
Using depleted uranium, babies looking like two-headed aliens.
Follow the money trail, it leads to the criminal.
Ain't nothing subliminal to it, that's how they do it.

Continuing on this theme, M-1 pinpoints Obama as the new head of the US' global imperialist agenda, even touching on the irony of a Black man carrying out neo-colonialism with white-supremacist underpinnings. M-1's verse is not only insightful in its blanket condemnation of the 2-party machine, but also in its inherent warning about the dangers of a brand of identity politics that seeks to plug folks from historically marginalized groups into the power structure. Ultimately, to M-1, as to all radicals and revolutionaries, it's the system that drives our injustices, not the figureheads chosen to facilitate the system:

See the game they run.
Give a fuck if he's cunning, articulate, and handsome.
Afghanistan held for ransom.
By the hand of this black man, neo-colonial puppet.
White power with a black face, he said fuck it I'll do it.
…. Last stage of imperialism, I ain't kiddin.
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye 'This ain't living.'

On the same track, Black the Ripper picks up on M-1's analysis, keeping the focus on Obama as nothing more than a figurehead of a system that must be opposed. This particular verse includes a harsh critique, deploying the house-slave mentality in describing Black figures in power, as well as their accomplices:

See it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.
He's sitting in the White House, so who cares if he's black?
And why's there still soldiers out there in Iraq?
Natural resources ain't yours, it's theirs, give it back!
You're just another puppet, but I'm not surprised
Look at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
They didn't change shit, house nigga's fresh off the slave ship.

The Obamanation remix includes a verse from Lupe Fiasco's track, Words I Never Said. The verse fits the overall narrative perfectly, keeping focus on systemic operations. Lupe takes the analysis even further, touching on various social aspects stemming from capitalism and imperialism, most notably those which keep the American public in line, agreeable, and ignorant through a process of devalued education, fear-mongering, and mind-numbing celebrity gossip. All of this, Lupe suggests, leads to what Chomsky has referred to as "manufactured consent," which he strongly rejects:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit.
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets.
How much money does it take to really make a full clip?
9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?
Uh, and a bunch of other coverups.
Your child's future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think that hurts, then wait, here comes the uppercut.
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up.
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust.
You get it, then they move it, so you never keeping up enough.
If you turn on TV, all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks."
Dude is dating so and so, blabbering 'bout such and such.
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homey, that's the news.
And these the same people supposedly telling us the truth.
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist.
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit.
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either.
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful.
And I believe in the people.

Lowkey concludes the remix with a strong verse on American imperialism, an agenda that has become indistinguishable between various Presidents and both corporate parties. He points to specific missions carried out under the Obama administration, seemingly calling to attention those who continue to portray Obama as a separation from the Bush administration. The verse serves as a prophetic warning about Syria, and nails home M-1's earlier reduction of Obama as just another "neo-colonial puppet" doing the job that every American President is called upon to do, including bombing an African country (Libya) and disposing of a leader (Gaddafi) known for promoting pan-Africanism throughout the continent:

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa.
I say things that other rappers won't say.
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay.
Hope you didn't build a statue or tattoo your arm.
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan.
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more.
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador.
Morales and Chavez, the state's are on a hunt for ya.
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia.
Take a trip to the past and tell em I was right.
Ask Ali Abunimah or Jeremiah Wright.
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya.
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry.
But the same president just bombed an African country.

The false hopes placed in the first Black President highlight the failures and pitfalls of identity politics, a political approach that is grounded in assimilation. This approach to social justice attempts to mold a multicultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript power elite by simply placing individuals who identify with these hyper-marginalized groups into the existing power structure. Thus, the ultimate goal is more Black bankers, more gay landlords, more transgender politicians, more women Senators, and so on. This approach has led to the creation of what the left-wing publication Black Agenda Report (BAR) has deemed the black misleadership class in the US. Obama was the ultimate product of this class, but not the totality of it. For as long as identity politics seek to assimilate into the power structure, this class will persist, as will the formation of other such classes: the gay misleadership class, the transgender misleadership class, the women's misleadership class (Hillary), etc..., because, ultimately, the power structure does not exist to serve the people, no matter how diverse it is. Nas touches on this in his 1999 track, I Want to Talk to You which addresses the frustrations of living under a government that does not represent:

Step up to the White House, let me in
What's my reason for being, I'm ya next of kin
And we built this motherfucker
You wanna kill me because my hunger?
Mr. America, young black niggas want ya
I wanna talk to the man, understand?
Understand this motherfuckin G-pack in my hand
Look what happened to San Fran
Young girl hit by policeman
Twelve shots up in her dome, damn
….Dissin us, discrimination different races
Tax payers pay for more jail for Black Latin faces

Coming full circle, Nas closes the track by delivering a prophetic warning against identity politics, characterizing BAR's "black misleadership class" as nothing more than "fake black leaders [who] are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget (rather than addressing problems that plague their communities)."

What y'all waitin for the world to blow up
Before you hear this rewind this 4 minutes before we timeless
Let y'all niggas bang my shit before Saddam hits
Let Nastradamus tell us what time it is
They try to buy us with doe
Fake black leaders are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget
The news got it all confused lyin to the public
They eyes watchin stay wise move above it
Water floods predicted, hurricanes, twisters
Its all signs of the Armageddon, three sixes
People reverse the system, politics vs. religion
Holy war, Muslim vs. Christians
Niggas in high places, they don't got the balls for this
People in power sit back and watch them slaughter us
Mr. President I assume it was negligence
The streets upside down, I'm here to represent this


Confronting the Power Structure

Modern working-class resistance is still rooted in Marx's class war analysis, whereas the proletariat (those of us who are forced to depend on our labor to survive) finds itself fighting for its collective life against the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the layered power structure created by this economic realtionship. It is also crucially intertwined in the fights against other forms of structural oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny; because, quite frankly, all forms of oppression that splinter the working class must be effectively destroyed if the working class has any hopes of overcoming the capitalist system.

In echoing Malcolm X's famous "the ballot or the bullet" speech from 1964, working-class resistance must include "action on all fronts by whatever means necessary." Since the police represent the front lines of a criminal justice system inherently designed to enforce class oppression, as well as structural white supremacy, working-class resistance must include a firm stance against not only police brutality and mass incarceration, but also against the very foundation of modern policing, which is rooted in "slave-catching" and strike-breaking. This means standing in blanket opposition to policing as an institution designed to "serve and protect" capitalist property and enforce laws created by a capitalist ruling class with capitalist interests in mind. Reflecting on the Black community's especially intense history of oppression at the hands of police, hip hop has delivered a proper analysis and call to action. From NWA's seminal track Fuck tha Police (1988) to David Banner and Tito Lo's Black Fist (2016), the armed extension of the capitalist state is consistently exposed, as it has left countless Black lives lying in its tracks with no signs of slowing. Banner and Lo's track captures the sheer anger and frustration stemming from this reality:

[Banner]

These crackers got drones. They are flying their saucers
Keep your white jesus, don't pray to your crosses
They are burning our churches, K.R.I.T. pass me the UZI
I know how to work it; I know how to Squirt it
No Martin, No Luther, No King, No Marching No choirs don't sing
The same christian lovers that raped our GrandMothers and hung our GrandFathers from trees
They are enemies!
Blood on the leaves, blood on the streets, blood on our feet
I'm sick of walking, I'm sick of dogs getting sicced on us, I'm sick of barking
I'm sick of spitting written sentences listeners don't get
Don't get, don't get, don't get!
Because they got Chains on their brains and that is not a diss

[Lo]

… I'm staying religious, cause we stay in the trenches
And gotta play where they lynch us, done came to my senses
I bet them crackas never came through my fences
Ya burn up ya cross, and I'll burn up ya corpse
Then I turn and bang and do the same to the witness
Hang 'em and dangle 'em in the street looking up at his feet
So you never forget this we did this for Martin and Malcolm, even Mandela
Jimmie Lee Jackson and then Medgar Evers
For Clyde Kennard, hard labor slaving in the yard
For Huey, for Hampton, for Bobby we GODLY
For Jordan Davis we gon' play this, for Sandra Bland we gon' stand
I'm still out here stomping, for Janaya Thompson, from the Coast to Compton

The video for Black Fist shows a series of events that encapsulate what working-class justice would look like outside the parameters of capitalism and white supremacy. This includes a people's arrest, people's trial, and subsequent execution of a police officer who was acquitted of murdering a Black teenager. The fact that this hypothetical scenario could be remotely controversial illustrates how strong we've been conditioned to equate our current system with any real sense of justice, of which there is very little if any. The environment of injustice that is bred under so-called legalities is masterfully summed up in Lauryn Hill's Mystery of Iniquity (2002):

Ya'll can't handle the truth in a courtroom of lies
Perjures the jurors
Witness despised
Crooked lawyers
False Indictments publicized
Its entertainment the arraignments
The subpoenas
High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas
Enter the Dragon
Black-robe crooked-balance
Souls bought and sold and paroled for thirty talents
Court reporter catch the surface on the paper
File it in the system not acknowledged by the Maker
Swearing by the bible blatantly blasphemous
Publicly perpetrating that "In God We Trust"
Cross-examined by a master manipulator
The faster intimidator
Receiving the judge's favor
Deceiving sabers doing injury to they neighbors
For status, gratis, apparatus and legal waivers
See the bailiff
Representing security
Holding the word of God soliciting perjury
The prosecution
Political prostitution
The more money you pay.. the further away solution

…Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it's own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system

Running hand in hand with capitalism's version of "justice" is the underlying dominance of white supremacy. In the formation of the United States as a nation, as well as the customs, cultures, and systems we've become accustomed to during this process, white supremacy has played a formidable role. It has created an all-powerful wedge among the working class, rendering its potential limited. Its divisive message is often hidden in powerfully emotional rhetoric regarding "American values" and patriotism, all of which secretly (or not so secretly in the era of Trump) call for protecting the Eurocentrism that has systematically devalued black skin in dominant American culture. In an old-school track from 1991, Ice Cube uses brilliant analogy and powerful lyrics while condemning America's history of white supremacy and challenging the toxicity of patriotic rhetoric, concluding with the need to " kill Sam":

I wanna kill him, cause he tried to play me like the trick
But you see, I'm the wrong nigga to fuck with
I got the A to the motherfuckin K, and it's ready to rip
Slapped in my banana clip
And I'm lookin.. (lookin..)
Is he in watts, oakland, philly or brooklyn?
It seems like he got the whole country behind him
So it's sort of hard to find him
But when I do, gotta put my gat in his mouth
Pump seventeen rounds make his brains hang out
Cause the shit he did was uncalled for
Tried to fuck a brother up the ass like a small whore
And that shit ain't fly
So now I'm settin up, the ultimate drive-by
And when you hear this shit
It make the world say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Here's why I wanna kill the punk
Cause he tried to take a motherfuckin chunk of the funk
He came to my house, I let 'em bail in
Cause he said he was down with the l.m
He gave up a little dap
Then turned around, and pulled out a gat
I knew it was a caper
I said, "please don't kill my mother, " so he raped her
Tied me up, took me outside
And I was thrown in a big truck
And it was packed like sardines
Full of niggas, who fell for the same scheme
Took us to a place and made us work
All day and we couldn't have shit to say
Broke up the families forever
And to this day black folks can't stick together
And it's odd..
Broke us down, made us pray - to his god
And when I think about it
It make me say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Now in ninety-one, he wanna tax me
I remember, the son of a bitch used to axe me
And hang me by a rope til my neck snapped
Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap
And put me under dirt or concrete
But god, can see through a white sheet
Cause you the devil in drag
You can burn your cross well I'll burn your flag
Try to give me the h-I-v
So I can stop makin babies like me
And you're givin dope to my people chump
Just wait til we get over that hump
Cause yo' ass is grass cause I'mma blast
Can't bury rap, like you buried jazz
Cause we stopped bein whores, stop doin floors
So bitch you can fight your own wars
So if you see a man in red white and blue
Gettin chased by the lench mob crew
It's a man who deserves to buckle
I wanna kill sam cause he ain't my motherfuckin uncle!

Ultimately, resistance in the 21st century must focus on the inherent inequities created by the capitalist system and the corrollary social hierarchies that support these inequities. There simply is no choice but to destroy and replace this system. Gang Starr's 1998 track Robbin' Hood Theory hammers this home, urging us to "squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power, and pour some back out so as to water the flowers." Just as reparations are needed to begin to address the history of Black enslavement in America, so too is mass working-class expropriation of the capitalist class. In realizing the illegitimacies of the wealth accumulated under this system , we must formulate bold moves toward recuperating it for all of society. Guru preaches, leaving us with our battle cry:

Now that we're getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future no doubt that's right and exact
Squeeze the juice out, of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers
This world is ours, that's why the demons are leery
It's our inheritance; this is my Robin Hood Theory... Robin Hood Theory

… They innocent, they know not what they face
While politicians save face genius minds lay to waste
If I wasn't kickin rhymes I'd be kickin down doors
Creatin social change and defendin the poor
The God's always been militant, and ready for war
We're gonna snatch up the ringleaders send em home in they drawers
But first where's the safe at? Let's make em show us
And tell em hurry up, give up the loot that they owe us
We bringin it back, around the way to our peeps
Cause times are way too deep, we know the 
Code of the Streets
Meet your defeat; this is my Robin Hood Theory... my Robin Hood Theory

…Necessary by all means, sort of like Malcolm
Before it's too late; I create, the best outcome
So I take this opportunity, yes to ruin the
Devilish forces fucking up my black community
And we ain't doing no more interviews
Til we get paid out the frame, like motherfucking Donahue
We're taking over radio, and wack media
Cause systematically they getting greedier and greedier
Conquering turfs with my ill organization
Takin out the man while we scan the information
You wanna rhyme you best await son
You can't even come near, if you ain't got our share
You front on us this year, consider yourself blown out of here
Yeah... by my Robin Hood Theory