The Problem of Black Lives Mattering

“How come with the thousands of black cops in America you ain’t never picked up the paper, turned on the TV, or the news and seen white folk crying because this black cop shot my loved one in the back of the head cause he thought the cellphone was a gun. How come you don’t see that? You think black cops is more spiritual? You think better qualified? Nah. They got enough sense to know that white folks ain’t going to tolerate it. And the only reason they do to us what they do cause you tolerate it.” -Dick Gregory

By Omar Ricks, Ph.D.

Sometimes, different people can independently arrive at the same conclusion. I didn’t start and haven’t been affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Movement, but I respect their analysis of the problem and their desire to end it. Around the same time as #BLM was starting, I, like many other people, was thinking along the same lines about what the fundamental problem was behind seemingly rampant police murders of Black people. And for once, I didn’t feel alone in centering the problem of what Black life means. If Black life doesn’t mean anything, the USA would be a genocidal slave state in which the killing and punishment of Black people is meted out and widely considered acceptable, regardless of guilt or innocence, gender, socioeconomic status, or other factors. And that’s exactly what it is.

#BLM (Black Lives Matter) is a grassroots coalition-based social movement started in the United States by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in the wake of several unpunished (or lightly punished) incidents of police killing unarmed Black people, including the killing of Oscar Grant and Kenneth Harding in Oakland, as well as Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, and Michael Brown. While it consists of people with diverse viewpoints and tactics, the movement’s central aim is to oppose the systematic normalization of Black people’s deaths, which makes violence against Black people more likely and more acceptable. #BLM began as a social media movement, but has quickly become an on-the-ground social movement with many different actors and organizations that aren’t necessarily connected as one organization but have the same general aims.

Actions and policies of the state result in the disproportionate killing, injuring, and incarceration of Black people, but the struggle for Black life to matter is not just about opposing policing practices against Black men and boys. It is also about how domestic abuse victim Marissa Alexander was not allowed to defend herself against her abusive husband under the same “stand your ground” defense in Florida law that George Zimmerman used to get exonerated in the killing of Trayvon Martin. It is also about how Black transwoman Cece McDonald was prosecuted and convicted for defending herself against a hostile and racist group of white youths in Minneapolis. It is also about how broader political practices, like the mass disenfranchisement of Florida and Ohio Black voters, the shutting down of water services to Detroit residents, and the anemic federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, show a remarkable disregard for Black lives.

Because the nature of racism is not just prejudice but also the power to enforce prejudice, these problems cannot be addressed individually, by punishing or educating those who commit violence against Black people without justification. It’s too big a problem. The conservative Wall Street Journal reported that in 2011 NYPD had more stops of young Black men in Manhattan than there are young Black men in Manhattan. And at least one former NYPD police officer has stepped forward to say that he was specifically ordered to stop young Black males at every opportunity. But he is just one officer, and NYPD just one department. Police officers everywhere have broad latitude to stop anyone they suspect may be involved in a crime and use that latitude to systematically target Black and Latino men and boys. The problem is deeper than any one department and its “stop-and-frisk” policies.

For one thing, it’s everywhere, not just New York. One report described anti-black racism as “baked into” police practices. “The root of the problem,” says #BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, “is anti-black racism.” In other words, there is a unique, deeply ingrained, and pervasive kind of racism that American society at large feels toward Black people that goes a long way toward explaining these disparities as well as many others.

And so when I wrote a correspondence for The Feminist Wire from the Democratic National Convention in 2012, there was no question that there was a problem. But as I watched the events around me, I was so disgusted by the lack of conversation among so-called leaders representing largely Afro-descended constituencies that were then and are today being disproportionately murdered without any discernible sense of national outrage or demand for major action to address the problem, that I became convinced those leaders were part of that problem. I ended my article saying the following:

“And if electoral democracy holds out no better promise than this, then there are few options that remain aside from those that Assata Shakur and George Jackson recommended. And so it was that at the Blackest convention in some time, I watched Black leaders repeatedly miss a real opportunity to assert directly and publicly that Black life matters. Middle class or not. Employed or not. Black life matters. Even raising it as a matter of discussion, apparently, is too much to ask. But I will say it again and again—our lives do matter. It is not too much to ask. And we will not be asking always.”

I was hoping (against hope!) that leaders who purported to represent my interests in Washington would make a full accounting of the fact that I want to live and that that desire means something. Instead of more discussion about how to expand and enrich the ever-shrinking Black middle class and further privatize public education and other public services, I wanted an acknowledgment that segregated spaces like those where the majority of Black people live in Detroit, East Oakland, East St. Louis, and South Side Chicago were hazards for Black health, where we were being starved of things like healthy food, potable water, a living wage, enriching education and child care, and health care. I wanted an acknowledgment that, in essence, the ghetto itself is violence against the people who live there. If something like 500 people who look like me were victims of homicide in the city of Chicago alone that year, the so-called leaders who wanted my vote — especially those hailing from Chicago — would apply all their powers to center a conversation about this horrific problem in the political discourse, addressing questions of why this was happening, especially how it related to the ongoing structural inequalities of inter-generational poverty and anti-blackness shared by victim and killer alike, and what a solution might look like that rightly targeted the systems that created and re-created these structures of power. (If your life doesn’t matter to the society, how can it matter to the people who live on your block?) If a report uncovered the fact that at least every 28 hours, a Black person was killed by law enforcement, security forces, or vigilantes in the United States, I wanted everyone in attendance at DNC to be aware of this report and push it to the middle of the conversations at the convention.

Of course, I knew this conversation could not reach its fullest expression in the asphyxiated political discourse of the electoral arena — and the especially constricted discourse the racist power structure affords Black elected officials — and that it would require movements that impact those structures in revolutionary ways. I guess I was hoping for an ethical leadership that would speak truth (regardless of whether it got to keep a posh Washington job) in the service of Black folks and the fundamentally ethical and very long Black Freedom Struggle. Unfortunately, and predictably, the inescapable conclusion was that Black existence did not matter enough for people with the reins of institutional power to risk losing their tenuous grip on that power.

So I spoke about something that I knew. It was something ringing in my ears from conversations I had been having with colleagues, all of whom were reading things like Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Hortense J. Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” and Frank B. Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black. The problem wasn’t fundamentally one of changing practices. It was a problem of changing meaning. What does blackness mean to America? There are not-so-subtle hints everywhere.

Black people make up approximately 12 percent of the US population, but constitute more than 40 percent of the prison population.

White Americans use illegal drugs at rates that are comparable to, or well in excess of, the rates at which Black Americans use illegal drugs, but Black Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses 10 times more.

In 2012, a Black American was killed by police and security forces at least once every 28 hours. According to another report, “black teens were 21 times more likely to be shot dead [by police] than their white counterparts.”

The problem is not just that a de facto police state is ready to descend on Black people at any time, but also, more broadly, that the entire population of African Americans is perceived by the broader society (1) as a potential threat and (2) as unworthy of being listened to when we protest through legal, institutional, or other means. This problem must be viewed as a systemic one, not just an individual or institutional one, and it must be addressed on multiple levels, including not only institutionally or interpersonally but especially in our unconscious thought, the deeply ingrained thought processes that are reflected by our actions before we even have the opportunity to think. Before we can change our thinking to make Black lives matter, we must truly understand that the problem of Black lives not mattering is a problem of meaning that isn’t just individual or institutional but structural. It is rooted in what America is.

America needs Black lives to not matter. Due to centuries of negative images and stereotypes about Africans and racial blackness, in the collective psyches of the United States, throughout the Americas, and across the world blackness means, as Fanon said, “the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul.” A field of study within cognitive psychology known as implicit cognition (or implicit bias) finds quantifiable evidence of what Black people have been knowing for better than 1,000 years (had anyone with power bothered to listen): that deeply rooted negative attitudes toward people of African descent are held widely across the American population, even among those who claim to be non racist, even when other possible causes for these attitudes (like socioeconomic class or education level) are taken into consideration—and these attitudes tend to increase people’s willingness to use violence (interpersonal, institutional, or state) and punishment against Black people.

One recent quantitative study from Stanford, titled “Not Yet Human,” shows that people of African descent are commonly associated with apes at an unconscious level of mental processing. According to the study: ”this Black–ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about white convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not.” This finding agrees with the earlier work of Stanford literature professor Sylvia Wynter, who found that police in Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s commonly used the incident code “NHI” — meaning “no humans involved” — for incidents involving African Americans. While many people acknowledge this police code to have been racist, the Stanford quantitative study shows that even people who don’t think themselves racist have the same thoughts.

Other studies show that children of African descent are believed to be older, more mature, and less innocent than their white counterparts are, something that might explain why teachers suspend African American preschoolers at triple the rate of white preschoolers and why police and prosecutors are more likely to charge African American youths with harsher crimes or in adult court than they are in cases involving non Black youths. It might also explain why 12-year-old youth Tamir Rice was shot dead by police at a playground in Cleveland, Ohio, while holding a toy gun, whereas white youths are free to regularly play with toy guns in their neighborhoods.

Another set of studies (“shooter bias” studies) shows that Black males holding cell phones are, on quick glance, believed to be holding guns, while white males are believed to be holding cell phones. These studies also found that people would be quicker to shoot and slower to holster their weapons when faced with a Black male who might be holding a cell phone or a gun, compared with a white male in the same position. These studies might explain why plainclothes police shot unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo after he reached for his wallet, presumably thinking the officers wanted to see his identification or were trying to rob him.

Still other studies have shown that a stereotypically-named hypothetical Black defendant will receive a higher rate of conviction and harsher degree of punishment for the same crime than will a stereotypically-named hypothetical white defendant, even when identical evidence is presented.

A hypothetical job applicant with an African-American-sounding name is less likely to receive further consideration when a hypothetical job applicant with a white-sounding name is granted further consideration, even when both have the exact same resume except for the name at the top. An applicant for housing or mortgage will be similarly screened based on assumptions about whether they are Black or not, thereby shaping geographic segregation patterns.

African-American employees are more likely to be evaluated poorly by employers than are white employees.

Black NFL players are required to return from injury sooner than their white counterparts with the same injury. Other studies show that the medical profession is slower to give aggressive treatment to African Americans and less sensitive to the pain of African American patients.

Regardless of whether one stands on the side of addressing the problem, like the founders of #BLM, describing the problem, like researchers at Stanford, or even denying the problem or defending police murders of Black people, the central problem is not a swirling morass of practices to be altered. It is a structure. These problems of anti-black racism are not simply problems of individual or institutional practice or prejudice because they are repeated across widely disparate individuals and institutions with the same independent results. The psyche of anti-black racism is not individual or institutional. Both the psyche and the institution are networked together as part of one dynamic, fluid, and massive structure. The psyche, like the institution, is a structure. The problems of Black life mattering are hence fundamentally problems of structural power. Keith Lawrence and Terry Keleher’s 2004 essay “Structural Racism” is helpful on this count:

“Structural Racism encompasses the entire system of white supremacy, diffused and infused in all aspects of society, including our history, culture, politics, economics and our entire social fabric. Structural Racism is the most profound and pervasive form of racism – all other forms of racism (e.g. institutional, interpersonal, internalized, etc.) emerge from structural racism…

The key indicators of structural racism are inequalities in power, access, opportunities, treatment, and policy impacts and outcomes, whether they are intentional or not. Structural racism is more difficult to locate in a particular institution because it involves the reinforcing effects of multiple institutions and cultural norms, past and present, continually producing new, and re-producing old forms of racism.”

The problem of Black life mattering extends to unconscious levels of thinking and is not only deeply rooted, but also widely diffused and reinforced through multiple networks of power. It is therefore quite challenging to uproot without a massive change in the social structure that abolishes the ways that both personal and institutional practice, as well as individual and social frames of meaning, are tethered to the genocidal slave empire of the modern world, the United States. If we only think about the practice of prejudice without centering the ways that all racism derives from structural racism – what I call anti-blackness – we will be at pains to explain why there is so deep a reserve of animosity that can result in normalized violence toward Black people and why the mass loss of Black life does not constitute a national emergency or a cause for widespread grief. True dedication to the principle that Black lives matter will require a revolution using all means necessary to end the structure of anti-blackness.

by Michael Clift

This article is directed to veterans who are frustrated with the direction their lives have taken. The Establishment expects us to come home and get back in the game, but we know it isn’t that easy. They would like us to sink into the couch and keep our appointments, get back to working and keep waving that flag; that flag that shrouds thousands of coffins. A flag that only gets buried with “good” soldiers, not chicken shits or suicides.

They do not expect us to show up at anti-war rallies or police brutality marches; they do not expect us to produce art and poetry and beautiful things; they do not expect us to LIVE beyond our usefulness to them, they do not expect us to ride bicycles across the country, teach and speak at schools and libraries.

They do not expect us to stand up and fight back. They hope that the fight has been driven out of us. We are supposed to be too tired and wasted to struggle against them, we are supposed to be apathetic and jaded; and we are to be grateful.

Ever since the first army was mustered, soldiers have borne the brunt of a nation’s poor choices. The nation suffers whether in victory or defeat, and every victory brings more problems and gives birth to new enemies. Every defeat heaps on more suffering and discontent. There is no escaping the fact that warfare is the sad, slow, suicide of humanity.

Throughout history, soldiers have mutinied, rebelled against the chain of command, and have killed their leaders; particularly when the army is getting its ass handed to them and it seems the war is lost. And veterans have led resistance to injustice after their service. Some of the better known instances of military veterans participating in acts of civil disobedience or even outright revolt, are Shay’s Rebellion and the Bonus Army, the GI Resistance Movement during Viet Nam, and the Occupy movement. Everyone comes home knowing the war is fucked, but fewer ever stand up to say it.

During the formative months of Occupy, every encampment had its share of homeless veterans spanning the generations. It was possible to share a bottle of cheap liquor with 4 generations of veterans standing in the driving rain. The veterans basically self-organized, and many were instrumental in the establishment of camp infrastructure such as medical tents, field kitchens and security patrols. They trained people in the use of radios and taught basic first aid classes in public parks. Going forward the challenge is to draw in the homeless and radicalized veterans, the ones still in possession of the strategic faculties granted to them by the United States Military, and the ones who most need to refocus their lives through this type of work, so they can come together as organized groups to combat social injustice and end war.

The veteran has a vested interest in ending the war (Now). The problem these days is that the average American civilian “…has no skin in the game” since America’s wars have increasingly come to be fought by other peoples’ children. With no draft, war is fought by poor people commanded by rich people.

Today’s anti-war movement is vigorous; it is hard at work, everyday, somewhere in the streets protesting the ongoing wars. But who is fighting against the wars? Who is sabotaging production facilities, jamming communications, interrupting supply lines? Who is blockading munitions plants, hacking the Pentagon or physically preventing military recruiters (head hunters) from coming onto our children’s school campus?

Veterans from all walks of military life need to step up their duty and reclaim some fresh living. Our hearts may still weep, yet our stories can inspire and our hands can teach. If we can provide some safety; some collective wisdom, learn from what it means to be under constant stress and hungry, and how through team work and dedication we were able to overcome our challenges, we can become an invaluable asset to the “revolution”.

I say, quite LOUDLY: Fuck the system. Fuck it for every sleepless night, every bottle of pills, every failed relationship, every lost job, every lost limb and every life wasted making those fuckers at the top richer than we will ever be. FUCK THEM for every drunk driving accident, every beaten spouse and every bottle hidden under the bed.

It is better that military veterans compost our skills and experience into a productive force for change, not succumb to the pressures of “re-integrating” into the War Culture; not throw away the GI Bill money trying to “become” a happy tax payer by getting a business degree, getting into security jobs, and all that.  Use that money for music lessons, art school…pursue your passion, and if it is business; let your business lead the way in hiring veterans for “green” jobs…do not try to fit into the social templates that are expected of you.  Recall the many jams you got yourselves out of by coming up with unexpected solutions.

To learn more about the efforts to organize veterans in SF, follow the author’s blog at:
http://occupyveteranssanfrancisco.weebly.com/

by Dagmar (Eggplant) Spannagel

I grew up in Berkeley in the fifties and sixties, and have been a social and animal activist for most of my adult life. I moved to Montana almost seven years ago to be closer to the wolves and Yellowstone National Park Bison that I love. My heart is heavy with pain because of the war on wildlife in Montana and in other wolf states in the west. As I write this, I am in West Yellowstone, Montana, with Buffalo Field Campaign, trying to bring attention to, and stop the current slaughter of the small population of some 4,000 genetically unique and pure remaining wild bison. This last remaining population survived from the approximately 60,000,000 sacred beasts that were slaughtered in the 1800’s to cut off the food sources of the Plains Indians, so that the Indigenous Peoples could be removed from their land, be put on reservations, and the land settled by Europeans. These Native Americans had, and still have a strong Spiritual relationship with their world, including the animals.

As I write this, over 500 Yellowstone National Park Bison have already been baited and hazed into capture facilities inside Yellowstone National Park by The National Park Service, and shipped to slaughter. They want to capture an additional 400 to 500 of these Sacred wild animals and also ship them to slaughter, This is in addition to the regular hunting season kills and Treaty Hunts. I have already shed my tears for them today. Buffalo Field Campaign needs volunteers to come to West Yellowstone to help to stop this slaughter, as well as to help to get them placed on the Endangered Species Act List.

Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections have been removed from wolves and management turned over to each states’ fish and game agency by a sneaky rider attached to a Congressional Budget Bill which has produced disastrous results. These states are controlled by the livestock, hunting and resource extraction industries, and government officials have a hatred for wolves and bison due to lies, fables, greed and ignorance. Here in Montana, the fourth largest state, with approximately two and one half million cattle, and over half a million sheep, 34 cows, 9 sheep, 1 miniature horse, and 1 dog have been confirmed killed by wolves. Prior to the 1995 Wolf reintroduction, there were 89,000 elk, and yet even with wolves, 2013 elk counts reached 145,000.

Yet despite these small depredation numbers and increased elk numbers, the state of Montana has a 6 month wolf hunting season, and allows trapping with no quotas on how many wolves can be killed. Each hunter can purchase 5 hunting license tags, landowners can shoot up to 100 additional wolves if they are perceived a threat (Total landowners, not each landowner). Montana Fish Wildlife And Parks, the Agency that is supposed to manage wolves, does not use non-lethal management, which haven’t been proven to work, but with USDA Wildlife Services, kills wolves for wolf/livestock conflicts, not only killing individual wolves, but removing full packs, as well as killing pups, known as “denning”, with taxpayer money, for the benefit of the already publicly subsidized livestock industry. Besides all these attacks on wolves, there are cruel and illegal killings by wolf haters such as shooting them in the gut and spine intentionally to cause the most pain. Wyoming and Great Lakes wolves have recently been returned to ESA protections due to their agencies’ mismanagement, and Montana, as well as the worst of all the wolf states, Idaho, need to have their wolves returned to Federal ESA protection to stop this carnage.

The Bison and the wolf have been proven to have tremendous benefits to their habitats, and to the other wildlife that live there, bringing health and balance to these ecosystems, so we must all fight to protect them. People that love wildlands, wilderness, and wildlife need to move to these states to bring our love and voice, and to balance out the haters, to save these sacred animals from suffering and extinction, and save these sacred places for perpetuity.

Come out here and make a difference. For more information on how to help and to how to volunteer, email bfc@wildrockies.org.

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.

One of the functions of media is to capture events, people and issues of the day as they unfold and transform. Reality isn’t static. When recording an event or experience, it is important to maintain the life behind the scene, to keep it fermenting. Even the format of this paper shifts. Recently the post office ordered us to mail the paper in an envelope, not put labels on the back. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand we now have more of the back cover for content where there used to be postal information. It also means we had to move the calendar to page 19.

As we go to print, the downtown Berkeley Post Office is the site of a year-long occupation. A 24-hour vigil demands that another service for the public trust not be sold and turned into more banal shops. The brokers are Richard Blum and developers who regard money above what the people who live here actually want. The vigil can use more people. Mostly, it’s a homeless encampment, which reveals the sad state of things in the Bay Area. People are either too busy making money to invest in protesting—or they are able to be on the front lines as long as they can live with abject poverty. The recent Black Lives Matter protests are a notable exception, with a consistently reinvigorating turnout. It suggests what we could accomplish if more people turned out for protests and direct action. We attempted to make a special issue in late December to document the feverish amount of activity but couldn’t rope in enough people to drop everything and write. We kept that theme as a cornerstone for this issue and we welcome more uprisings to inspire a future “emergency issue.”

Failure, loss, and disappointment are important aspects of fighting the war of resistance. Losing a cause like the post office is something we can learn from… and should. But losing a person is a deeper thing. The black lives stolen by police demonstrate how frustrating and soul-crushing death is. Losing people in the struggle creates a unique hole, for they are the people who make up the front line of engagement when it would seem that the whole world is oblivious. It saddens us that many radical aspects of a city we love, like nearby SF, are dying or being killed off. The death of anarchist poet Alfonso Texidor, a long time Mission District resident, occurred while wrapping up this issue. Late last year we lost Homes Not Jails organizer Ted Gullicksen and we also lost the Bay Guardian newspaper. The hole that they leave behind in SF is immense. We will all have to compensate. We did write one obituary this issue. It is fortunate that we didn’t have to write a second one: a long-time contributor to Slingshot and Long Haul recently had a heart attack. He was at a picnic and luckily a doctor was at the park during the emergency. Now he’s back, keeping us warm with his presence. As we proof-read the articles for this issue, he hung out downstairs, filling the room with his laughter.

Other victories arise. One of our collective member’s mother was misdiagnosed while fighting cancer and nearly lost her life. We are happy to have her first article ever in a radical journal themed around an issue she has worked on for years. Why don’t you consider putting together your thoughts and sending it to us sometime? Articles, interviews, art, photos… a lot of shit. (We don’t tend to print poetry, though.)

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers, translators, distributors, etc. to make this paper. If you send something written, please be open to editing.

Editorial decisions are made by the Slingshot Collective, but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this: Aimi, A. Iwasa, Babs, Eggplant, Finn, Hayley, Heather, Isabel, Korvin, Jesse, Joey, Longshanks, Maggie, Michael, Owlx, Snow, Soren, Suzie Quattro, Vanessa, Xander and all the authors and artists.

Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting

Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on August 23, 2015 at 4 pm at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below.)

Article Deadline & Next Issue Date

Submit your articles for issue 119 on September 12, 2015 at 3 pm.

Volume 1, Number 118, Circulation 20,000

Printed March 5, 2015

Slingshot Newspaper

A publication of Long Haul

Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley CA 94705

Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

Phone (510) 540-0751 • slingshot@tao.ca slingshot.tao.ca • twitter @slingshotnews

Compiled by Jesse D. Palmer

Here’s some radical spaces Slingshot found out about since we published the 2015 Organizer, plus some corrections to the Organizer. These spaces are the Bert to the Ernie of recent militant street action coast-to-coast. Each needs the other to build an enduring radical grassroots movement because you need to hold physical space to build the deep communities that are so crucial. Visit these spaces or find one near you with Slingshot’s on-line radical contact list: slingshot.tao.ca/contacts

La Conca / Ovarian Psychos Bicycle Brigade – Los Angeles, CA

A community center featuring fiilm screenings, self defense classes, shows, and women’s bicycle events operated by an all-women-of-color feminist bicycle collective. Their website says “we envision a world where women are change agents who create and maintain holistic health in themselves and their respective communities for present and future generations.” Hell yeah. 1214 East 1st St. Los Angeles, CA 90033 ovarianpsycos.com

Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore – Sylmar, CA

Social justice bookstore with events, classes and social groups dedicated to Chicano culture and history, women’s health, empowerment and writing, and bilingual open mics. They also promote local protests, actions, and anti-capitalist gatherings. 13197 Gladstone Ave, Unit A, Sylmar, CA 91342 818-939-3433 www.tiachucha.org

Backspace – Fayetteville, AR

A DIY show, art and event space. 541 W Meadow St. Unit H, Trailside Village Fayetteville, AR 72701

Eso Won Bookstore – Los Angeles, CA

Indepenent Black-owned social justice-focused bookstore. EsoWon means “water over rocks”. 4327 Deghan Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90008 323-290-1048. Esowonbookstore .com

Change Point – Reno, NV

A harm reduction drop in center with HIV testing, safe injection supplies, condoms, hygiene items with coffee and pastries. Anyone is invited to visit. They focus on injection drug users, homeless people, sex workers, people in extreme poverty and transgender people. Operated by Northern Nevada HOPES. 445 Ralston St. Reno, NV 89503 775-997-7519 nnhopes.org

Chuco’s Justice Center – Inglewood, CA

Community center for education and organization with a focus on incarceration / police brutality and also a hub for dozens of grassroots groups. 1137 E Redondo Blvd., Inglewood, CA 90302 323-235-4243

Cocoon Room – Milwaukee, WI

A show space and art gallery. 820 E. Locust Street Milwaukee, WI 53212

Yin-Yang Fandango & The Tango Tea Room – Corpus Christi, TX

A privately owned vegan/veggie cafe that has space for art and activist materials and is a local counter-culture hangout. 505 S Water St #545 Corpus Christi, TX 78401, 361-883-9123

Heart of Art Gallery – Los Angeles, CA

A DIY gallery and venue for women, youth, trans and members of the LGBTQIA community. They also run an animal rescue project. 1907 Rodeo Rd. Los Angeles, CA 90018 heartofartgalleryla.com

Dill Pickle Food Co-Op – Chicago, IL

A cooperative grocery store selling healthy and sustainable food. 3039 W Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60647, 773-252-2667 dillpickle.coop

LA Fort – Los Angeles, CA

An art co-op/community center (Do It Together space) that provides low cost artist workspace, music practice space and hosts craft nights, poetry readings, workshops and art openings. They are working through government red tape to re-open an all-ages show venue. 736 Ceres Ave Los Angeles, CA 90021. thelafort.weebly.com

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement – Des Moines, IA

A non-profit grassroots organization focused on environmental and economic justice. 2001 Forest Ave, Des Moines, IA 50311 www.iowacci.org

Vermont Workers’ Center – Burlington, VT

A non-profit grassroots organization focused on worker and labor issues. 294 N Winooski Ave., Burlington VT 05401 802-861 4892 www.workerscenter.org

Pehrspace – Los Angeles CA

Community art space and all-ages music venue. 325 Glendale Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90026 213-483-7347

Raíces Infoshop y Cocina Vegana – Tijuana, Mexico

An infoshop with a book store, bilingual zine and book library and free internet. They host ESL and Spanish classes, movies, shows and DIY workshops. They share the space with a vegan café. 8232 Santiago Argüello, Centro, Tijuana, B.C. Mexico raicestijuana.wordpress

East Village Arts Collective – London, Ontario, Canada

A show space / community art gallery that hosts workshops and events. They host Food Not Bombs and Black Flag Anarchist Free School. 757 Dundas Street, London, ON. N5W 2Z6 Canada. eastvillagearts.ca

Corrections to the 2015 Slingshot Organizer

– We published the wrong address for Resistencia Books in Austin, TX. The correct address is 4926 E. Cesar Chavez St. Unit C1, Austin, TX 78702 512-389-9881.

– The Furnace in Albany, NY no longer exists.

– Laughing Horse books in Portland, OR closed after almost 30 years in existence.

– The Burrow in Winona, MN has closed.

– The address for Ojata Records in Grand Forks, ND is wrong. The correct address is 1300 University, Grand Forks, ND 58203 701-757-4002.

– Acme Artworks in Chicago, Il is not at 2251 W. North Ave. It might be at 1741 N. Western Ave or it might not exist anymore. If you live in or visit Chicago, please let us know.

– The Real School / Dragon Valley in Houston doesn’t seem to be at 2805 Wichita anymore. Let us know if you have their new address.

– Word on the street is that Station 40 in San Francisco might close soon.

– We got mail returned from Krank it Up in Tallahassee, FL and the phone number we published for them doesn’t work, but the internet seems to indicate they exist, so please let us know what is up if you’re in Florida.

– In Slingshot #117 we printed a correction to the Organizer indicating that the LA Infoshop was a private business not an infoshop. Since then Slingshot collective member Alex has visited and he writes “I think it’s unfair to simply write it off as a private business. It’s a print shop that is privately owned, but they are in the process of starting to print their own materials as an Infoshop and I think there’s a lot of potential in that.”

By Longshanks

1967: If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

2015: If you’re coming to San Francisco, be sure to bring some dollars for your fare.

Six unforgettable and unforgivable years ago I moved to San Francisco, hoping to flourish in a libertine paradise of limitless self-expression, and ran straight into a wall of disappointment. My naive hopes of hedonistic revelry in a sort of mirror universe where queers ruled and everyone got along were violently shattered. What I found were the glimmering fragments of a fallen utopia usurped by greedy opportunists and conservative reformers, embroiled in a full-scale class and culture war, as various groups of people sharply divided fought for limited resources in a compact space and the cost of rent was outrageous… and rising. I lost my job, house, and direction in life completely, then experienced a radical rebirth, became a squatter and fell in love with life outside the capitalism box, and arrived at a “free living” philosophy that I believe will influence the rest of my life.

Standing presently at a crossroads in my life, I’d like to record my impressions of the City’s disturbing transformation, touch on ways I’ve felt degraded and subhuman due to being homeless, and highlight the consciousness-raising adventures I’ve had here with shout outs to some people and places with whom I feel connected as well as the profound liberation that grew out of my experience of having no fixed home. I’m permanently changed and a little shellshocked by all that’s happened, excited but uncertain about the future, for me and for SF, which is, as Candace Roberts sings in her great new music video that you should definitely find on YouTube (http://youtu.be/-yoRVJzQAe0), “Not my City any more.”

During my first two years in the Bay Area I was violently mugged and assaulted in Fruitvale, got a good job with a global hospitality company but then lost it due to PTSD resulting from the Fruitvale incident, shared a house in the Richmond (my first in SF) with a creepy and perverted older man who terrorized me when I couldn’t make rent, escaped that nightmare to an SRO, worked for the 2010 Census, learned a lot about SF history, moved into a house atop Mt. Davidson (highest elevation in the City) where one of my housemates was a maniacal con artist living under a false identity who tricked me into giving him money, wrote for SF’s main LGBT paper the Bay Area Reporter (now a pale conservative shadow of its radical roots), got a job as a clothing checker at a club called Blow Buddies which had nothing to do with blow dryers, then moved into a flat on Folsom Street with a British witch dominatrix thinking I’d finally found my “Tales of the City” niche, only to lose my job and realize I couldn’t make rent. I was burned out by stress and the fruitless quest for employment, which required me to be passionate about brands and advertising (yawn), knowledgeable about technologies I couldn’t afford, or willing to go the route of human exploitation. I checked “none of the above,” and fell into the abyss.

SF’s longrunning and recently revamped Street Sheet asserts that “no one chooses to be homeless” and that “most homeless people in SF were residents before they became homeless.” Both are true in my case. I spent the first month in a parking lot. If I didn’t leave by 7am, a parking lot worker would wake me up and hustle me out. Still, I was luckier than the people camped out on the sidewalk in front of the lot. City workers came by every morning at 5am and gave them five minutes to clear themselves and all their stuff off the sidewalk or get sprayed with cold water.

Policies like this have earned SF a reputation as, to quote a Food Not Bombs organizer, “one of the nastiest cities toward homeless people.”

Eventually I left the parking lot, wandered the hills and valleys awhile in grim solitude, and started using speed as a way to stay up all night. I got enough to eat thanks to food stamps and the soup kitchens, and only occasionally resorted to stealing to make ends meet, and only from large corporations. (Such as Goodwill, which has grown profitable by taking things freely donated and marketing them at steadily rising rates; I think we should bypass Goodwill completely and set up a free market to give the stuff directly to poor people.)

Occasionally, I showered at the multi-service center in SoMa, but hated the prison-like feel of the place and its depressed and depressing security guards, and my hygiene took an unavoidable plunge. I rented a storage space for my clothes and other valuables, only to lose it and everything I owned later on.

Whether it was courage that drove me, or apathy that made me not care, I defied the police and sensational news stories I’d read about missing people and burned corpses and set out to explore all the parks, devoting the most time to Golden Gate Park of course, bewildered by the sheer size and complexity of that labyrinth, which completed my sense of having entered another world… one that the tourists will never know.

The parks were closed at night, and police were known to raid Golden Gate Park with dogs in the pre-dawn hours (another barbaric policy), but in daytime I could sleep there with less fear of harassment; I became nocturnal, further isolating me from the mainstream. All over I found little forts and hiding places, remnants of camps left by others, and way too much litter. I grew up in national parks and got in the habit of picking up after myself outdoors, no excuses. Perhaps if we all did so, there would be less opposition to drifters crashing in public spaces.

That being said, SCREW the no camping rule, in SF or anywhere else. If a person has no other option, they can spend the night in any park or public space where they feel safe, with or without a tent, end of story. Laws or ordinances to the contrary are inhumane and devoid of compassion, and I do not recognize them. Your inconvenience at having to look at homeless people while you walk your dog in the morning takes a back seat to other people’s basic need for sleep and shelter.

One man let his dog mock-attack me in my tent early in the morning, startling me awake.

Another time I woke early to a woman’s voice calling, “WAKE UP, it’s time to move on, the police have been called!” When I zipped open my tent to ask her why she felt the need to call the police about someone sleeping, she held up the bag of dog shit in her hand and replied, “I’m cleaning up.”

And one afternoon as I was taking a nap on the Civic Center lawn, a surly police officer kicked my foot to wake me up, told me I was too close to the playground, and when I reacted angrily, he gave me a ticket with a court date.

What is wrong with these people? Frankly, I don’t see how parks that are designated public can be closed anyway, it seems like a lawsuit needs to happen at some level to challenge that. Recent attempts to get a “homeless bill of rights” passed are on the right track, but have failed so far in SF and Sacramento. I guess the state’s homeless people lobby doesn’t have deep enough pockets.

Early on I made a friend named Alix who influenced my course, a visionary with a DIY art space called the Big Gay Warehouse, located in gentrification-resistant Bayview. Once I discussed with Alix my surprise at how quickly I’d adapted to this animalesque life of sleeping outside and foraging by night, and how I related more to raccoons than humans at times.

“This should feel strange, since it’s so different from how I was living just two months ago, but for some reason it doesn’t.”

She replied that a lot of people were feeling the same call back to nature, that the future for people like us might be to leave the city to the drones and the corporations and return to the land, like the Radical Faeries at their sanctuary in Wolf Creek, Oregon.

In the short term, she recommended I hook up with Occupy Wall Street, who had just set up camp in a plaza by the waterfront and were making quite a scene.

After the night it rained and I woke up literally lying in a puddle of cold water, I decided to ditch the park and follow up on Alix’s lead.

And that’s when everything changed.

Many people shit on Occupy later, and veteran activists were occasionally scornful of the “johnny come-latelies” and weekend warriors who emerged from the woodwork with excellent intentions but few clues. But Occupy for me was the gateway to a liberation I had not previously known to be possible, the death of my former self as a round peg in the square wheel of capitalism and the portal to a new life that I have come to view as infinitely more satisfying. How I miss – well, sort of – the golden calamities of the Occupy SF tent camp (occurring nearly nightly), with its police confrontations, clamoring discordians stirring shit up in drunk and hungry rage, and Department of Public Health inspection media storms! It was so nice of DPH to suddenly care about us.

More importantly, through Occupy I hooked up with Homes Not Jails, which became my surrogate squatter family for the next two years (2011 to 2013.) We fought a lot and had personality conflicts, and public drama-filled meetings that ran way too long, and I drifted away from the group eventually into a private escape universe of trauma recovery. When I finally emerged from that solipsism bubble, it seemed everyone had dispersed, so I never got a chance to say it really, but I loved those HNJ kids. When we descended at night on the city like a squad of housing ninjas going about our extralegal but wonderful work, all the drama flew out of the window and we were united. Every time we cracked a new house, I felt like I was 18 years old again, with a whole life of infinite possibility before me.

At first, I used the newfound total freedom of homelessness for self-indulgent reasons. I gravitated away from the HNJ model of organized public actions toward a solitary program of sleeping occasionally in public parks, stairwells, and other weird vacant empty spaces I find during my catlike prowlabouts through the City. But gradually I developed a sense of social responsibility and a wish to re-engage the real world. The resistance movement is under attack, but my recent experiences of volunteering at the Tenants Union and with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (antievictionmappingproject.net) have convinced me the movement is not dead, but merely changing, as it must in the face of new challenges.

The old SF is shrinking but can still be found in some great places, such as Diamond Dave’s radio show at Mutiny Radio (pcrcollective.org, 2781 21st St @ Florida) every Friday 3p to 6p; Eviction Free SF, which holds public meetings every Wednesday 6pm at the Redstone Building (2926 16th St @ Capp in the Mission); and VolxKuche, a veggie/vegan “people’s kitchen” that convenes on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist, 110 Julian Ave @ 15th St in the still-radical inner Mission.

Join the movement and protest the proposed installation of a 350-unit luxury condo building at 16th and Mission, and help Station 40 (3030B 16th St) fight its unlawful detainer (a press conference was about to take place just as this article went to press), so Food Not Bombs can continue to prepare and serve food there. Don’t let Mission Street become Valencia Street Part II: the Extremely Gentrified Sequel.

As for myself, SF has changed me in some ways that will surely be lasting. Life is exciting when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep tonight. If severe instability is the price to pay for something approaching true autonomy, for now, I will pay it. I would so much rather live life on my own terms, investing my time and energy in meaningful work and in communities I care about, than spend every morning waiting for a bus that’s too crowded to take me somewhere I don’t want to go.

+11+ longshanks@spaz.org