Author: Slingshot Collective

By A. Mutt

If you think it’s not hard being a woman of color in this world, try walking down the street as one. Not only do I get harassed about my body, but also about my race. “Are you Mexican?” “You look Japanese.” “Hey, white girl!” I get the last comment a lot and it makes me want to stop and correct the person, but I think that comment is more about my privilege than race. My mom is Salvadoran and Pacific Islander and my dad is Mexican, German and French. I’m thankful for my diverse background, but I know next to nothing about my heritage since I come from a broken family and never took an interest in it growing up. The older I get, the more I’d like to dig up my roots, especially now, where people of color are getting more visibility and a chance to speak up and change this crazy, messed up world.

While at times it makes me sad that I’m not close with my family, I am grateful that my upbringing has turned me away from traditional roles in society and instead gravitated me towards the anarchist and punk communities in the Bay Area. In these circles I find diversity and like-minded people of all races, backgrounds, sizes, ages, and gender, yet I can’t help but notice that a lot of people in my social scenes are white people of privilege. One day my friend and I were talking and I made a comment about how many white people I live with and how it made me uncomfortable. She flat out told me “But you’re white.” “No I’m not,” I said defensively. “Well technically you are.” This conversation not only upset me, but it made me question my ENTIRE identity and I wondered to myself, “Am I white?” Of course the answer is no, I am mixed and proud. Comments like the one made by my friend are harmful in many ways. Not only did they discredit my background and identity, but they didn’t stop and listen when I told them that I wasn’t white, nor did they ask questions about what I had just told them.

I’ve also felt discomfort in the very collective that I volunteer for, which is Slingshot. The Long Haul Infoshop, where we make the paper, is a very special place to me. I have felt welcomed since day one and continue to retreat to the infoshop when I need to recharge my batteries or when the world is getting me down. The people who are “regulars” are not just anarchists, but weirdos, wingnuts, queers, and one of a kind people who I don’t meet anywhere else. Sometimes I go there to read and listen in on the exciting conversations that occur on any given night. Topics that are discussed range from what happened at last night’s protest  to fun questions that are asked at the beginning of the anarchist study groups (one night they asked what everyone’s favorite cake was and most people answered “Pie.” How contrary).

Not everybody who hangs out at The Long Haul works on the paper, though. In fact, the Slingshot collective numbers seem to have dwindled due to member burnout or new volunteers feeling intimidated. In the past year, I’ve taken a step back from volunteering due to some attacks on my writing. A lot of the articles that are turned into Slingshot are at the academic level and that makes me feel intimidated to turn anything in since I’m mostly a self-taught writer. There is also a gender imbalance in the collective and I wonder where the people of color are at? Me and another volunteer brainstormed last summer about doing a call out on the slingshot collective about the lack of female presence and how it seemed like the leadership roles were not divvied up fairly and how certain members seem to dominate the space. Not only that, but I sometimes feel like I am asked to attend meetings and volunteer because I’m seen as one of the token POCs in the collective, but things are changing. At a recent meeting, there were more female-assigned people working on the paper and that made me feel a lot more comfortable and made me want to volunteer more of my time.   The paper is not perfect and maybe it never will be, but it’s a continued source of inspiration for many people around the world, which is evident in the letters and emails we receive everyday. Slingshot has helped shape my political beliefs and I’ve learned a lot from the collective process and the flaws within it. I’d love to see more POCs write articles and contribute to Slingshot because I know we have a lot to say.

 

By Arjun Pandava

“The police occupy our community as a foreign troop occupies territory.” –Huey P. Newton, 1968, Interview from jail.

Recent civil unrest in the United States has dragged into mainstream spotlight the violent relationship between state security forces and America’s Black population—specifically, the fact that Black people are routinely killed during security operations. But killings are only the tip of the bloody iceberg of violence and dehumanization that defines the state’s relationship with Black communities, communities of color in general, and the working class—a fact that mainstream narratives about police violence often seems to miss. For your standard American liberal, the response to police killings is to quickly put forward policy proposals around grand jury reform, or talk about citizen oversight committees, or other reforms that are underpinned by an ideology that sees the system as one that just needs a few tweaks to “get right”.

As radicals, our inclination must be to oppose this kind of superficial analysis and, as Angela Davis famously put it, to “grasp things by the root” and understand the fundamental dynamics of what we observe in the world. This requires recognizing and investigating into the ways that the state deploys surveillance and day-to-day acts of coercion against criminalized communities, as well as how this deployment is underpinned with the logic of capital accumulation.

Surveying State Violence

Ferguson, the municipality that first sparked the waves of anti-police rage that swept the nation, is a town which has undergone a demographic transformation in the past decade or so; as the housing and labor markets ebbed and flowed, working-class Blacks moved (and were displaced) into the cheaper apartment complexes in the city. Lock-step with the demographic changes, state security forces saw fit to erect “concrete barriers, fences, and gates” around targeted areas; Michael Brown’s apartment complex was so heavily barricaded that most of the time there was only one way in and out for residents.1 This practice of targeting working-class Black communities was one that was reproduced in municipalities across St. Louis County, and one that occasionally went too far even in the eyes of local state leadership. Take Darren Wilson’s employment history, for example: previous to his position with the Ferguson Police Department, he was an officer with the Jennings Police Department—a department so endemically corrupt, and so over-the-top in its racist brutalization of local population, that in 2011 the city council voted to fire the entire department and create a new one from scratch.2

It is important to place the violence of the state security forces into the context of economic exploitation. Within days of the Michael Brown killing and amidst the unrest that rocked Ferguson, a local law non-profit released a damning report about the racist and predatory nature of municipal courts in St. Louis County. The presented evidence pointed toward the fact that the budgets of local governments were heavily dependent on extracting money from working-class Black communities through punitive fines, facilitated by a Kafka-esque maze of regulations, bureaucratic barriers, and surveillance.3,4 Residents who are fined for minor infractions such as broken tail-lights, speeding, failing to signal a turn, etc., are regularly asked to appear in court, which comes with additional fees—it is routine for courts to order defendants to pay fees that are triple their monthly income. Failure to pay these fees can result in jail time, which itself comes with fees that are stacked on top of the original court fees, creating a brutal positive feedback cycle that can lock people into poverty.

It was found that of all the municipalities in St. Louis County, three were especially prone to systemic, predatory behavior—one of these three was the Ferguson Municipal Court. The Ferguson courts and the local police routinely and disproportionately stop and search Black residents: while Blacks are 67% of the population, they are 86% of all traffic stops, and are twice as likely to be searched and twice as likely to be arrested as are Whites. Persistent harassment is a highly lucrative strategy for the city; in 2013 Ferguson Municipal Courts raked in $2.6 M from fines and court fees, in addition to issuing over 24,500 warrants (on average, about 3 warrants per household). In what appears to be a revenue-maximizing strategy, the court (which is only open three times a month) routinely starts sessions half an hour before the official start time, and locks the doors five minutes after this time, making it incredibly easy for defendants to miss their appointment and have warrants issued for failure to appear.

In addition, the content of court proceedings reinforces the idea that these are revenue generating entities: defendants who are too poor to pay fines are regularly threatened with three to four days of jail time by the judge, and coerced to call anybody and everybody they know who could give the courts money—a practice that is disturbingly similar to how a criminal enterprise might negotiate a hostage deal. Dimensions of Kafka-style bureaucracy are also apparent, with one individual recounting a story of how the courts refused to let her in with her child, and was subsequently charged with child endangerment when she left her child outside; and several stories where people show up in court to pay fines for driving with suspended licenses, only to get pulled over right outside the parking lot because a cop inside the court room overheard this information.

In-depth studies of predatory and extractive policing tend to be hard to come by; but information about routine violence during day-to-day security operations around the country is far too easy to acquire. In Philadelphia, the police who operate in one particularly poor Black community are described by a University of Pennsylvania researcher as being “at full-fledged war with residents—they beat up people under arrest, steal from suspects, smash up homes while serving warrants and use the results of surveillance to turn lovers or family members against one another”.5 In Washington D.C., police routinely use a tactic labeled by locals as “jump-outs”, where multiple officers arbitrarily ambush groups of people by jumping out of unmarked cars, rushing them with weapons drawn, and then searching and interrogating detainees hoping to find contraband or glean information. Targets are usually young Black men, and many report being ambushed several times a week while out with friends and family.6 And in Cleveland—where twelve-year old Tamir Rice was gunned down while holding a toy gun—violence as routine policy was at such an absurd level that it attracted a review by the Justice Department, which blasted the department as “chaotic and dangerous”; the report reviewed incidents such as one where a woman was beaten on her front porch after she had made a joke at a nearby officer, and another where a young man was beaten while handcuffed in the back of a police car, and also noted that Cleveland cops had hung up a sign at one police station that labeled it as a “forward operating base”—making Huey P. Newton’s half-a-century-old comments about the police as an occupying force still ring dangerously true.7 And as in Ferguson, all of this day-to-day violence of the state is tinged with the logic of capital accumulation; just through the widespread practice of civil asset forfeiture, where the police can confiscate money and property at their own discretion, state security forces across the nation have pulled in revenues in excess of $2.5B—much of it seized from individuals who were never convicted of a crime.8

In Oakland, state security forces mimic Ferguson by adhering to a policy of prowling working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods for people to detain and search. Data collected between April 2013 and October 2014 shows that out of 44,1142 stops, Black people made up 59% of stops (while composing 28% of the population); while White people made up 13% of the stops (while composing 26% of the population). The data also showed that after being stopped, Black people were three times more likely to be searched than White people. 9 On further analysis, the data shows that a majority of these stops were for minor traffic violations (67%), a significant number of which were for trivial vehicle code violations—essentially punishing the poor for being unable to afford repairs to keep old cars up to code, and replicating the cycle of fines, court fees, and jail time that is endemic in places like Ferguson. 10

In addition, California police departments and city elites seem to be getting increasingly fond of using gang injunctions—a tactic where cities can label “gangs” as a public nuisance, and order accused gang members to stay away from certain areas and no longer associate, gather, or travel with one another. Gang injunctions are supposedly to protect the communities and neighborhoods onto which injunctions are placed; unsurprisingly, they typically criminalize communities of color (especially youth) and make it easier for the state to place residents under surveillance. Much of this is because once an initial injunction is signed off by a judge, there is very little oversight (sometimes none) over who gets added onto the list by police.

Furthermore, it seems that California police departments have siphoned off some of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial spirit and have been deploying novel methods of surveillance and coercion. One of the most disturbing trends in this entrepreneurship has been the use of “gang injunctions”, where cities place curfews and restraining orders on accused gang members preventing them from being in certain areas and outside at all during certain times, as well as restrictions on who they talk to and associate with. Between 2006 and 2009, four injunctions were placed in four San Francisco neighborhoods with a high level of alleged gang activity—which also happened to be areas targeted for development, raising accusations from locals, and even a District Supervisor, that injunctions were being used as a tool for gentrification and a way to profile, harass, and monitor the target communities’ predominantly Black and Latin@ residents.11 There are certainly serious questions raised by the fact that many of the accused “gang members” are not actually gang members at all, but people that have dropped out of the gang life, or are only associated with gangs by proxy of being friends and family of the accused (a quality of injunctions that is particularly widespread in Los Angeles).12,13 In Oakland, the gentrification angle seems clearer; two injunctions placed in North Oakland and Fruitvale were marketed by the Oakland police as being a good way to target hotspots of violence—despite the fact that neither area has the highest rates of gang activity, although they are adjacent to areas slated by the city for redevelopment.14

On Fighting Back

If there is one thing clear from this survey of the underlying forces of state security operations in the United States, it is that the material conditions that created the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s continues to exist today. Communities of color, particularly Black people, face continuous dehumanization and outright violence at the hands of the police; and today, arguably unlike the 1960s, this violence stems not just from the state’s need to control a potentially rebellious population, but also from decades of neoliberal restructuring of state institutions and the development of profitable methods of extracting capital from populations rendered superfluous in the eyes of global capitalism.

One of the main reasons why the Black Panthers—and more particularly, the strategies they deployed—had such a rapid rise in popularity and support in the few short years after they were founded in 1966 was because they created immediate and tangible benefits for people, that created obvious incentives for joining or at least being supportive. Initially, the Party was founded as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, as simply a self-defense group for Black people against police. The benefits were clear: by carrying out armed patrols of the police, harassment and violence was reduced. Today, such benefits might even be compounded by self-defense squads not only being able to reduce physical violence, but economic violence as well and acting directly against the predatory policing that can throw one out of a job, out of a rented home, and into a cycle of (deeper) debt and poverty.

This kind of direct, immediate rebellion against the state was what was needed in the late ‘60s—much to the dismay of political and economic elites and local so-called “community leaders”, who continuously tried to reign in and pacify participants of the increasingly violent riots that rocked cities across the US during this time period. In this sense, the Panthers did not so much lead the insurgency that was to grip the US in the years to follow, but rather simply read and understood the signs that were becoming increasingly obvious about the need for armed resistance and outright rebellion against the status quo. This situation echoes what we are beginning to see today, where “community leaders” and establishment elites chastise and repress militants in Ferguson and Oakland, while refusing to do anything about the conditions and policies that sparked the rage in the first place.

However, it is critical to understand that the Panthers did not gain popularity just because of their open militancy against the state; just as important—perhaps more so—were the social programs and community-based enterprises that they established, that addressed the day-to-day needs of impoverished Black communities, like food and medical care, that neither government institutions nor private businesses were willing to provide. The Panthers opened up breakfast programs, health clinics, and other critical services that—just like self-defense squads—had immediate, tangible benefits to either joining the Panthers or being supportive. And when the self-defense squads evolved from not just confronting and fighting the police, but also attacking institutions of capitalism (robbing banks, sticking up heroin dealers, expropriating cash from exploitative businesses), both the military power of the Panthers as well as their ability to support community-owned services were bolstered.

This kind of materialist analysis is critical for understanding and arguing not just how to resist the police state, and not just how to resist state and capital in general, but how to turn resistance and rebellion into a revolutionary movement. Radical action can intervene in the direction and dynamic of how capital flows, resist and invert the extraction of wealth from the masses that is capitalism’s equilibrium state, and create the economic platform on which revolutionary struggle becomes a self-fulfilling process.

And let us make no mistake that revolutionary struggle is essential to solving the question of police violence, entangled as the institution of security is to the institution of property. As long as class society exists, so too will the propertied classes use violence to defend and expand their holdings, and keep society divided in terms of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Only in attacking capitalism, redistributing wealth, and allowing people and communities to have autonomy over economic and political decision-making, can we end the racist, extractive violence of the police.

 

 

By Gerald Smith

MOVE member Phil Africa died at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, PA, on January 10, 2015. Phil Africa had been locked down since he was framed up, along with the rest of the MOVE 9, for the killing of Philadelphia police officer James Ramp, during the 1978 cop siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village home.

Upon learning of Phil Africa’s death Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote the following: “[Phil Africa] was born William Phillips, on Jan. 1, 1956, but few people called him by that name. Most people knew him as Phil, and after joining the revolutionary naturalist MOVE organization in the early 1970s, most called him Phil Africa. He was part of the confrontation of Aug. 8, 1978, in Philadelphia, where nearly a dozen MOVE members were charged in connection with that conflict, in which a cop likely died from friendly fire – but MOVE members were charged. Phil Africa was among 9 MOVE men and women charged and convicted in a hotly disputed trial, of third degree murder. So disputed, in fact, that several days after the trial, Judge Edwin Malmed would admit, in a locally broadcast interview, that he ‘Hadn’t the faintest idea’….”the faintest idea” (his very words) …who killed the cop.

“The 9 MOVE members were sentenced to 30 to 100 years: the longest in Pennsylvania history since third-degree became law in PA. Judge Malmed reportedly acknowledged the illegality of such a sentence, telling those sentenced that it may be reversed on appeal, but, for now, it would hold them. It appears Malmed believed the State Appellate courts were fairer than even they believed.

“But not to people named Africa it seems. For today, 37 years after the events of August, 1978, the fact that 7 remaining men and women are still in prison is nothing short of a scandal.The MOVE men and women should’ve been free, at least 7 years ago, when they reached their minimums. But this is Pennsylvania, where madness passes as normality.

“Phil lost a son back in the mid–70s, when police trampled his child, Life Africa. On May 13, 1985, when the police bombed a MOVE home, another son, Little Phil, was among the 11 people shot and burned to death.

“Phil was an extremely talented artist and painter. He was a man with a gift of lightness, a witty sense of humor, and an ever-present smile.”

The ongoing situation in Ferguson, MO, has brought to the attention of millions of Americans and people around the world the vicious nature of racist US capitalism. Despite the fierce resistance on the streets against the murder of people of color, with the passing of Phil Africa, we are reminded that there are still scores of political prisoners being held in the belly of the beast for the crime of participating in resistance movements of past decades.

May 13, 2015 is the 30th anniversary of the bombing of MOVE by the police of their Ossage residence. 11 people died as a result of this massacre, including 6 children.

Responding to calls from various organizations, collectives, and prisoner support groups across the US to commemorate this horrific event, we here in Oakland are starting to talk about activating our networks and organizations to built support for class war prisoners, continue the fire of the rebellion started in the winter of 2014, and draw connections between the battle against racist police terror and the struggle to free all class war prisoners in the US.

Towards this end, we are envisioning a series of panel discussions, film screenings, and an educational conference to work towards the release of the remaining MOVE 9 and all class war prisoners. We are also interested in generating a call for autonomous actions to be carried out around the time of the anniversary to encourage various groups and organizations to take action on their own accord. We envision:

1) A panel discussion composed of various members of different organizations and collectives supporting political prisoners that discusses the need to support Prisoners of the one-sided ClassWar the 1% is currently waging against us and the role of revolutionary solidarity in movements of struggle.

2) A film screening of the newly released documentary film, *Let the Fires Burn,* which features never before seen footage of the police campaign against the MOVE organization.

3) An educational conference designed to share information about political prisoners that brings together a wide network of support organizations fighting for the release of all class war prisoners.

This message is the first in an attempt to create a dialog with comrades we believe may be interested in such activity. We have yet to secure our venues. Nevertheless, if you are interested in speaking to us on this project further, please respond by contacting us at: nomorelockeddoors@riseup.net

 

By an anonymous social worker

For the past year and a half, I have been a working professional with a nine to five schedule. What is different about my job is who I work with and the type of work I do.

I am employed by a mental health non-profit to be part of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team. Supported by federally distributed tax dollars, we see each of the people we help at least three times a week and base their appointments off their individualized needs. Some people need therapy, some need help with grocery shopping, some need to get a free HIV test, others need to be accompanied to 5 different doctors, and most need someone to take a walk in nature with them and encourage them to get away from their television set for a few moments.

At times, I will use the word client to refer to the people we help. I am not in love with this word, but I assure you that I am using it as a way to dictate my professional relationship with these people and not to imply that I feel I am above them or that I am handling them with figurative safety gloves.

Most were hospitalized involuntarily and/or voluntarily multiple times — usually diagnosed with Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder. Our world is not necessarily built in a way that makes sense even to many without a mental health diagnosis. For those with severe and chronic mental illnesses, navigating it all without a support system is nearly impossible and sends them back into unpleasant institutional settings in which they lose their autonomy.

Sometimes, their family and friends have passed on or have become burnt out and we are their entire support system. We do our best to facilitate and link our people to natural (non-professional) support systems, so that they do not become disempowered. Our job is to keep our “clients” out of the hospital and out of jail cells. Our goal is to teach and facilitate healing. We want to help them live as independently as possible.

Many of the people we work with have been some of the most wonderful people I have come into contact with. Regardless, they still go through cycles and phases in which they might present as inappropriate, threatening, suspicious, or sociopathic to the untrained eye. Unfortunately, the untrained eyes in our society often belong to people who wield power, such as police officers. They do not understand how little is needed to interact with someone who is making violent or threatening statements. They have often not been socialized to understand that validation and empathy can and will take us further than corporal punishment.

Some write statements like I just made off as hippie swill. It sounds too simple and too idealistic. I have grown up in a sick world and refuse to live in ignorance, yet I still believe it to be true with every ounce of my being.

I have been in situations in which I know many police officers would have drawn their guns. Once, I was at a tall and built young man’s house, alone with him for an appointment. This is not unusual for me. It was only my second time meeting with him.

He said that he wanted to shoot me. A police officer might have pulled out their gun, or made defensive and aggressive statements to reassert their power, escalating his paranoia. I noticed that he was sitting back against his couch with relaxed body posture. I wanted to help him maintain this. I chose to ask him if it was me, the social worker, that he wanted to shoot, or if it was the voices he was currently hearing that seemed to be causing him anguish.

He clarified, no, it is definitely you that I want to shoot. I remained calm. I stated, if I wanted to shoot someone in my house, it would probably mean that it’s because I don’t want them in my house anymore. Would you like me to leave?

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I really want you to leave.”

I honored his request and left. He did not follow me or chase me, so I did not have a need to involve anyone else in the situation. If I had called the police, he would have been endangered further in ways that one might not anticipate. Even if a police visit stayed peaceful, his lease terms stated that if the police came, his landlord would break the lease. The punishment for having a short period of decompensation at the hands of a biological brain disorder could have been homelessness, police brutality or death. By simply not making assumptions and asking what he wanted, we avoided a situation that could have turned violent.

I am a white woman in my mid/late 20s and weigh about half of what this person did. I am what many people call “tiny.” To me, the irony of police brutality is that the men who shoot innocent people are certainly much stronger than me and sometimes those they are violent towards. They are more capable than me of physically defending themselves. They are told to be fearless and expected to behave fearlessly. However, they are trained to treat everyone as a potential threat, drilling fear into their minds. Fear is a primary emotion, and anger is a secondary emotion born from fear, sadness, and pain. Our patriarchal structure dictates that masculine beings and masculine institutions jump straight to the secondary emotion of anger with violence to match it.

Society might tell you that I am weak, small, and hopelessly feminine. Yet, I believe that how I respond to a potential threat at my job shows that I, and all of my colleagues who do this work, are much stronger than those who shoot people who became sick, who made a mistake, or who simply existed at the wrong place at the wrong time. I have had men tell me that I must not really want to work, given my chosen career. Trust me – this is work. But this is the work I was made for. It is strange to exist in a world that desperately needs what I do, while undervaluing it.

Police brutality continues and each day I am sickened by the newest story of a situation that could have ended peacefully in three minutes instead of turning into a tragedy.

Let’s say I go into work tomorrow, and another client states that they want to shoot me, but this time they pull out a loaded gun. If I decide to respond by also drawing a gun, I would lose my job and have my license taken away at the very least. If I shot them, I would likely receive consequences far beyond that. Why are police officers not held to these standards? If I am expected to do my job, which is to listen, empathize, clarify, and validate, why are police officers not expected to do this also? Like me, they interact with people from all walks of life on a regular basis and they need to be trained to do what we do.

We need more social workers and less police officers. I do not find it a coincidence that social work, like teaching or being a primary caregiver, is primarily female dominated, and thus undervalued, understaffed and overworked, while the police force is male dominated and nurtured by the system. My coworkers and I regularly put our lives on the line to empower people, regardless of race, gender, class, etc., who are struggling on deeper levels than I could ever imagine. Police have repeatedly shown that they would rather oppress and physically harm people of color and those with low incomes simply for daring to exist or wanting to move freely.

This continues to be supported and perpetuated, while mental health workers everywhere experience burn out and high turn over because of lack of emotional, societal, and financial support. When a mental health worker quits and gets replaced, that is a brand new person that many will have to learn to trust again. Trusting others can be hard after a life of being brutalized. The system expects them to live off of $750 a month. Society calls them lazy because they don’t/can’t work and the system cuts assistance if they try. With all these hardships, that trust and connection with another human being can make an enormous difference in somebody’s life.

I encourage those interested in working or volunteering in mental health to engage in radical self-care and to remind yourselves that you are learning and using priceless skills, even if others try to convince you that it’s a waste of time – that you are worthless or weak. I am hopeful that one day, there will be more client-centered mental health workers than police officers and that we can train the police on how to de-escalate situations using communication.

By Jesse Pfein

“The task for white subjects would be to stay implicated in what they critique, but in turning towards their role and responsibility in these histories of racism, as histories of this present, to turn away from themselves, and towards others.” –Sara Ahmed (Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism)

I don’t clearly remember how I first heard about Michael Brown’s shooting. Maybe my partner mentioned it or maybe I saw it on the news. What I do recall are the words, “a black teenager was shot by police with his hands up.” The fuzziness of this memory is interesting to me — that it is blurry is an indication that it didn’t stop me in my tracks. My next recollection is that about a week later, my friend and colleague Nia Austin-Edwards called white people out on Facebook, quoting Dr. Takiyah Nur Amin and asking white people, “Why aren’t you talking about Michael Brown? Your silence is deafening after hearing so much noise about the ALS Ice Bucket challenge.” Excuses that I knew were empty defenses ran through my mind: “It’s August. I’m on vacation. I’m unplugged!”

And then emerged my doubt… “what is my place as a white person to talk about violence against black and brown people?” It felt like it was not my rage to own or express. It’s not happening to me, to my community. I’m not under attack, I’m not afraid for my own survival. It was a moment that returned me to a fundamental truth of being white: I really don’t have to talk about race and certainly not racist violence. This could be summed up under the now ubiquitous term “white privilege,” the ability to not have to think about race or care about racism.

Yet I am married to a black person, my godchildren are black, I teach black students, and I’m going to say it — the horrible “yes, I have black friends” line. Why didn’t this love translate into more immediate concern and outrage? Is there something still illegible about black pain to me as a white person, in spite of these relationships? Does whiteness create a protective bubble around me that intimacy of all sorts does not completely pierce? These questions disturbed me.

As Nia’s call sparked me to work harder to find ways of responding to racist policing, I noticed within the #blacklivesmatter movement thus far a theme that strikes me as distinct, or at least more pronounced and announced, from other moments in the long movement for racial justice: repeated calls for white people to both “do something” AND to be reflective and thoughtful about what we are doing and how we do it Are we dominating the spaces where organizing is happening? How do we participate in protests? Does putting our hands up and saying “don’t shoot” make any sense at all since our whiteness protects us and gives us the benefit of the doubt? What are we chanting? How are the stakes of saying “fuck the police” at a protest different for white people? These critiques circulated in cyberspace, some popular pieces if you haven’t read them are: “12 Things White People Can Do Now Because Ferguson” by Janee Woods “Dear White Protesters” and “On White People, Solidarity and (Not) Marching for Mike Brown”.

These conversations raise the question of what white people’s role is in challenging white supremacy. They are connected to the past two decades of Whiteness Studies, an interdisciplinary field that calls for white people to put their attention on what it means to be white, and a growing grassroots of political organizing by white anti-racists. My involvement in this work began in 2006 when I attended the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s (PISAB) Understanding Undoing Racism™ + Community Organizing Workshop as part of professional development for my teaching job. PISAB’s workshop gave me a language to describe what I had slowly been noticing about race – that it was not about “difference” but about power and exclusion. The workshop named white power, white supremacy, and white privilege, and it gave tools for conscious, active anti-racist organizing at the organizational and community-level. Back at my job, I work with a multiracial group of teachers to develop relationships based in mutual vulnerability that enabled us to take strategic actions for racial justice within the school, not always successfully, but always learning from our mistakes together.

I feel it is important as a white person to challenge white supremacy not from a desire for our redemption or to reclaim a goodness that too often has always belonged to social constructions of whiteness as pure, innocent, and clean. I can participate best if and when I am motivated by ethics, a desire for justice. I often hear in white anti-racist circles that white supremacy “hurts white people too” and “we need to reclaim our humanity.” And I do agree that whiteness is harmful to white people even as we gain unearned advantages from it, for it’s a delusion about who and what we are, often breeding thin-skin that makes coping with disappointment and life’s challenges more difficult. I think whiteness can lead to addiction and mental health issues, that whiteness itself can be understood as an addiction to power. But I do not feel I do racial justice work primarily to restore my “humanity” for whiteness is what our society has used to define “human.”

White people don’t need more humanity, we need to question what is human and who is deemed to be human in the first place. Some white anti-racists think it’s motivational to focus on how racial justice brings “positive gains” to white people such as feeling more comfort in diverse settings or helping us build more “authentic” cross-racial relationships, learning to “use our privilege for good” and then feel good by patting ourselves on the back for it.

I suppose these things are nice and all, but I think white people also have to be willing to lose – our entire worldview for starters and the comfort that comes from ignoring racial inequity and suffering, but also our internalized superiority and sense of entitlement to being the center of attention. We might lose our friends who might reject us for being outspoken and “always talking about race…again,” our livelihoods from employers who might not appreciate our questions about racially equitable practices in the workplace, and even our lives. Yet even with all we stand to lose, I don’t think we can just re-write what whiteness means, all of a sudden escaping its confines or giving up the unearned advantages we receive as white people. I have to be willing to accept the limits to seeing and naming whiteness: it cannot be renounced just because I all of a sudden I am paying attention to it.

For me, the work of white people in challenging white supremacy has been a continuous balance of reflection and action as I stumble along in learning and unlearning so many things. I have to learn how to think critically about race because I have not had to think about it in order to survive, and I have been taught to suppress thinking about it, ironically in the name of trying to not be racially prejudiced by attempting to be “colorblind.” Working with other white people who are committed and engaged in anti-racist thought and practice has been crucial to this process, in order to not rely only on people of color to educate me about race. I feel I can lift some of that burden in dealing with whiteness by trying to confront it in collaboration with other white people. But this work with other white people must be balanced by genuine accountability to people of color, in my neighborhood, my workplace, other organizations I participate in, and in the collective movement for racial justice. I try to enact this accountability by asking what is needed instead of assuming I know what’s best, by being willing to fall back and not be in the spotlight, by letting go of my agenda and the need to always dictate what’s going to happen, by talking less and listening more, by being open to being called out (or called in) and not just cry in response or feel paralyzed by shame, and by being willing to be compassionate and loving towards other white people instead of putting myself on a pedestal above them for my anti-racism. There is no rest in this work – no vacation days off in August – I have to be will to unlearn over and over, again and again, with humility, every day.

Returning to Nia’s desire for her white friends to speak up, I ultimately felt I had to speak in a way that wasn’t about my emotions — not because at times I felt numb in my whiteness, but because I didn’t think they were the ones that mattered most. I didn’t want to use an expression of sadness or anger as a way to “prove” my anti-racism. What actions could I take that would be concrete solidarity?

So far my attempts to respond include sharing information about what was going on as the situation in Ferguson escalated and got more brutal towards protesters, donating money to grassroots organizations in Ferguson and encouraging others with financial means to do the same, planning with colleagues how to talk about the history and current context of police violence, asking my white friends and family to talk about it, supporting my students as they create artistic work about racism and connecting them to broader arts-activist communities, listening to and learning from people who have been to Ferguson, attending marches and protests together and spreading the word about other actions.

I have no real ending to this article because there is no ending to this. I hope more people of all forms of dominant groups recognize we can contribute to social movements challenging marginalization because we collectively are the systemic problem. There is important work to do for everyone, starting with remaining open to input and direction while being wildly imaginative about what our contributions can be. Thank you to Nia Austin-Edwards for feedback and edits.

Links to articles mentioned: www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/12-things-white-people-can-do-now-because-ferguson, bendstowardjustice.tumblr.com/post/104742740875/dear-white-protestors, freeqthamighty.tumblr.com/post/95573664816/on-white-people-solidarity-and-not-marching

By A. Iwasa, artsandcrust at hushmail dot com

With the recent wave of Black Lives Matter street demonstrations and the formation of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation/Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra and the Torch Anti-Fascist Network, I wanted to gather together some historical examples of attempts at local, national and international organizing by Anarchists in North America in the 1980s and ’90s, intervention in mass movements, and the importance of having our own media in this work.

Materials such as those from the 1990s Love and Rage Network/Revolutionary Anarchist Federation and the Network of Anarchist Collectives can serve as a good example of how Anarchists in the U$, Mexico and Canada organized, how they perceived then-current events, and what they tried to struggle with and against. There were some successes, but also many failures and shortcomings that could be studied systematically to benefit comrades now and in the future immensely.

The Baklava Autonomist Collective and Wind Chill Factor

Only with the demise of the Autonomous Zone Infoshop (A-Zone) in Chicago, where I was a member of the Collective at the time, did I find out that the A-Zone had been formed largely by the Baklava Autonomist Collective. As we packed up the A-Zone’s ‘zine library, one of my comrades handed me a copy of Baklava’s ‘zine, Wind Chill Factor, and told me it was the origin of the A-Zone. As I began to do my own research on the Anarchist movement during the A-Zone’s 1993 formation, I also found out that Baklava members had been involved with the start of Love and Rage (L&R) as an Anarchist newspaper, then a decentralized Anarchist network.

Love and Rage

Here at the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley (where the Slingshot office is located), I had my first chance to go through old copies of L&R and internal documents, including a pre-founding conference discussion bulletin!

I was amazed to see major history, such as the call for the first black bloc in North America at a national action against Operation Desert Storm in Washington, DC in January 1991; early coverage of the Zapatista Uprising from the Mexican L&R group, Amor y Rabia; and street level reports on L&R members’ participation in escorting patients to abortion clinics, in Anti-Racist Action (ARA), and many other struggles.

L&R split in 1993 into groups of people who wanted to maintain the decentralized Love and Rage Network that had formed from the groups that produced the paper, and those who wanted more cohesive politics within a disciplined, cadre-type organization. This led to groups such as Baklava splitting, and the re-organization of the Network into the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. The Federation continued to print L&R until it broke up in 1998. This led some ex-members to immediately form the Fire by Night Organizing Committee and others to join already-established groups, such as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Later, some ex-members were pivotal to the formation and development of other new organizations such as Bring the Ruckus (BTR) and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC).

Internal documents were a major aspect of L&R. Both the Discussion Bulletin (Disco Bull) and the Federation Bulletin (Fed Bull) are full of materials related to debates and decisions, news about actions and contemporary world events, and reflections on all of these things and more. These activities are largely carried out online now, though I generally believe that a great deal more thought and intention goes into this sort of work when people take the time to type, then print out and mail these sorts of things, as opposed to posting snarky comments on websites or promptly shooting off fiery e-mails.

There are aspects of snark and fire in the letters and articles printed in the Disco Bull and the Fed Bull, but I feel like the general thoughtfulness of these internal bulletins are literally the polar opposite of listservs and message boards online now.

Plus, it was simultaneously exciting and a bit depressing to read L&R members’ debates and discussions of so many of the same issues and participation in many of the same struggles as we face today. It was clear how, in many ways, they were a pivotal link between the New Left era and today, but, in other ways, I think a lot of their lessons have been lost as people have left or seriously stepped back from political struggle.

Once, while discussing squatting in Oakland, a younger comrade from the Long Haul with far more experience than me in both squatting and volunteering at the Long Haul said to me, “There’s no history of squatting in the Bay Area.”

Having just read in Nine -Tenths of the Law by Hannah Dobbz about the White Panther Party in San Francisco during the era of the New Left cracking open squats, then hooking people in need of housing up with it, I replied with that story.

After discussing it briefly, I took out L&R Vol. 1, No. 2 from May, 1990 whose front cover below the fold has the headline: “BERKELEY POLICE ATTACK SQUAT” along with some now-vintage riot porn as a concrete example of this history.

Though this comrade had been in the Long Haul Collective for years, she had never seen anything from the extensive L&R archive!

After a similar conversation with another younger comrade who had also spent more time squatting in Oakland and volunteering at the Long Haul than me, the second comrade went about discussing this article with one of the older comrades who was around at the time. The older comrade helped contextualize the article, saying that around then, many street level radicals in Berkeley had gotten their teeth sharp in the Anti-Apartheid struggle, and rowdiness and oppression were expected at demonstrations. He also identified that squat in Barrington Hall as part of the co-op defense against gentrification, which continued with Hellarity in Oakland, where they had both lived.

With all the focus that significant numbers of revolutionary Anarchists put on understanding the thoughts and actions of Anarchists from the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s, why hasn’t similar energy gone into understanding and analyzing the theories and work of 1980s and ’90s Anarchists? Especially since their movements are literally the direct predecessors of what’s going on now in Anarchism and not only are there all these great newspapers and newsletters around, much more importantly, many of the militants that made them are, too!

The Network of Anarchist Collectives and (Dis)Connection

Shortly after leaving the Love and Rage Network, Baklava helped start the A-Zone, whose Collective members in turn helped start (Dis)Connection, which, the first issue said was “a journal dedicated to information sharing for Radical Collectives and Counter Institutions. It was conceived during the 1994 Counter Institution Gathering in Detroit. 1,000 copies printed in Philadelphia, PA. Infoshops and collectives received master copies to reproduce as well. The producers of this issue can be reached at the Wooden Shoe, a long established collective bookstore in Philly which is still going! The Network of Anarchist Collectives (NAC) came out of this, and included the Long Haul and some long-since-closed radical spaces such as the Emma Center in Minneapolis, MN and Beehive in Washington, DC. There are 29 (Dis)Locations and 16 (Dis)tributors listed, in a time not largely known for radical politics!

The second issue was written by Chicagoans, and was largely about the A-Zone. The words, “Left Bank donated $50.00 to assist in our goal of one Uzi per A-Zone member” on the inside cover instantly sparked my interest. Though I’m sure there was never a gun fund for A-Zoners, I couldn’t help but enjoy the thought of Left Bank Books, a collectively-run radical bookstore from Seattle that’s still around, sending the A-Zone money for weapons!

This was actually the first issue I was able to read, when a comrade lent me this and the third issue in early 2009 to help with my research for a ‘zine on Infoshops in Chicago. Articles in this issue, such as “Against Half-Assed Race and Class Theory and Practice”, “Gentrifuckation and White Frontier Collectives,” and “On Boys In Collectives,” were somewhat-painful reminders about how many current Leftists in general and participants in the Infoshop Movement in particular are pretty good at re-inventing faulty wheels. Bringing back these past discussions and insights continues to be a goal of mine in both the research and writing that I do.

When asked to be on a panel about “Zines & Libraries” at Chicago ‘Zine Fest in 2010, I made a point in inviting one of the authors of these articles and bringing the two copies of (Dis)Connection with me, then talking about how Wicker Park was still 70% Latin@ at the time the A-Zone was there, according to the journal. I brought this up while talking about the current gentrification of Pilsen, for anyone there who still might not be taking it seriously.

It was also fascinating to see Food Not Bombs in Chicago declared dead forever. There were three different neighborhood chapters going strong, years later when I was reading the journal! The death of the Earth First! Movement was also pondered in this 1990s journal, showing how often we despair when there is still hope.

In an era of so-called “social networking” websites, these journals were a real charge to get a hold of, and I’m sure I would have read and re-read them if they were new. As I continued my research in early 2014 I found copies of #4 & #5 at the Taala Hooghan Infoshop in Flagstaff, AZ and posted them on Scribd (www.scribd.com). These issues include four articles dealing directly with the subject of this article, written under the rubric of Intercollectivism.

The networking that came out of these journals culminated in Active Resistance, a series of events that were held in Chicago in opposition to the Democratic National Convention, which met there in 1996. For years I perceived this as the main preceding step towards the mass mobilizations against the main political party nominating conventions that have happened steadily since 2000, but my study of L&R materials showed that similar protests also occurred in 1988 and ’92!

Those of us who dwell in the belly of the beast still live in an empire, even if it has gone into serious decline since the early 1990s. Radicals have a responsibility to try to learn from past mistakes, so we can take this rotten-ass system down once and for all, and replace it with the justice and equality that has been denied for far too long!

The Torch Anti-Fascist Network includes what I consider to have been the most radical elements of the Anti-Racist Action (ARA) Network, such as Chicago’s South Side ARA and the Los Angeles chapter, who send their paper, Turning the Tide, to prisoners in the U$ for free.

 

Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles / People Against Racist Terror

PO BOX 1055

Culver City, CA 90232

By Black Rose Anarchist Federation-NYC

An unprecedentedly broad, decentralized, confrontational, and leaderless movement has arisen in response to the police murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and too many others. With the back-to-back non-indictments of Officers Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, we have witnessed a powerful rage against the impunity of the police and their disrespect for Black life that has sparked a surge of activity not seen in recent times in NYC or across the US. What began as an isolated outburst in Ferguson has surpassed initial concerns about the longevity of the protests by quickly becoming one of the most profound American social upheavals in recent decades.

Many have said, “People are mad today, but will they still be mad next week?” Massive mobilizations over the past few weeks—-taking over streets, bridges, tunnel entrances, places of business, train and ferry stations, sometimes with planning, other times with no prior planning at all—-have allowed us to answer that question with a resounding YES.

But if we don’t expand the struggle, there will come a week when the answer is ‘no,’ and we risk a return to normal. Or if we are seduced into believing that the police can be reformed into submission with superficial policy initiatives like body cameras or civilian review boards, we may believe that we have fixed the problem only to witness more Michael Browns, more Eric Garners. At the end of the day, the police are the physical extension of the state and capital. So how can we continue the momentum while targeting the underlying systems of oppression behind the white supremacist state violence that has outraged millions?

The Movement

Since Michael Brown’s murder, an anti-authoritarian leaderless movement has emerged energized with the confrontational #ShutItDown mentality. In Ferguson, demonstrators have staged confrontational sit-ins in front of police stations, taken over streets and malls, and burned police cars. Protesters in New York City marched and successfully shut down five of the city’s bridges, two of its tunnels, two of its highways, the ferry terminal, Grand Central, and other transit hubs.

As opposed to the traditional image of the hierarchical, monolithic social movement directed from above by a handful of charismatic visionaries, we are witnessing a rapid proliferation of knowledge and experiences that is allowing protesters to apply methods of disruption to their local circumstances without looking upward for direction. As the conflict unfolds, more and more people are seeing beyond the false good cop/bad cop binary and thinking of the entire police force as the enemy.

The current decentralized movement of working-class African-American men and women and their many diverse supporters is in direct conflict with white supremacy. They proclaim #BlackLivesMatter, because combating the ingrained state violence that supports white supremacy and erases and destroys Black bodies is the ultimate goal. If you think this is just about a few cases, about just one individual cop versus one individual victim, you’re wrong.

Containment

The NYPD has allowed these marches and die-ins to happen. DeBlasio and Bratton, in conjunction with dozens of cities across the country, have devised a policy of containment and surveillance in response to the recent wave of protests.

Containment has allowed protesters to congest the traffic in the city. Bratton’s strategy is to allow the fire of the protesters to burn itself out by not providing it any extra tinder to burn by cracking down. The strategy is informed by the intelligence gathered by NYPD detectives observing the conflict on the ground in Ferguson.

Instead of busting heads right away, helicopters buzz overhead and tag protesters that step out of line; fire trucks and ambulances drive through marches scattering  and dividing protesters drawing power away from marches and actions. The NYPD is trying to make us tired, uncomfortable, and, above all, trying to make us stop.

However, the NYPD containment strategy is not hands off. The cops arrested 328 people during the first three days after the Eric Garner decision. They used pepper spray, sonic cannons, and good old fashion clubs when they felt they could. Beneath the NYPD’s veneer of civility and respect towards protesters lurks the full power of state violence. Cops are still cops.

Expanding the Struggle

Shutting down business as usual through marches and die-ins is an important first step toward magnifying popular outrage at police terrorism and crystallizing resistance into a movement, but, especially considering De Blasio’s containment focus, we must raise the stakes by enhancing the depth and scope of our actions.

What if students followed up walkouts with strikes and occupations until the killer cops were prosecuted? What if all of the thousands of people who flooded the city turned to their co-workers and organized die-ins at work? What would happen if the growing mobilizations for a $15 minimum wage or decent work conditions at Walmart pushed beyond the narrow agendas of the union bureaucrats to affirm that #BlackLivesMatter at work as well as in our communities? Or if environmentalists could affirm that their movement is no less racialized than any other, and spend more time addressing the fact that communities of color breathe air that is 40% more polluted, and less time on photo-ops with Leonardo DiCaprio?

To uproot white supremacy from a society whose racism is historically ingrained, we have no choice but to expand the struggle into all areas of our lives and recognize how it thrives on capitalist exploitation, heteropatriarchal violence, and state control. And so, while we affirm the importance of intermediate demands that defund, restrict, and push back against police abuses in developing this popular movement, and stand in solidarity with those who promote them, we must remember: as an institution designed to protect the rich and enforce a de facto system of racialized terrorism in working class communities of color, the police cannot be reformed! The only solution is a popular revolution of strikes, occupations, and mass resistance to abolish the class society that spawned the police into existence in the first place. brrnnyc.tumblr.com/

Eric McDavid is an anarchist and environmental activist who was entrapped by an undercover agent provocateur on conspiracy charges for an alleged “eco-arson” action that never took place. He was sentenced in 2008 to almost 20 years in prison — one of the harshest “green scare” prison terms out of a series of eco-activists targeted by the government as “eco-terrorists”. Despite the government’s alarmist rhetoric, no human was ever injured in any US environmental direct action. Slingshot issue #95 published an extensive summary of the outrageous entrapment in Eric’s case.

By Eric McDavid

It’s so beautiful to write this to you from out here! For a quick recap, I’m recently out of Federal prison after nine years. I was arrested in January of 2006 after being entrapped by a government informant. I was sentenced to 235 months (19 years and 7 months) after being found guilty at trial of conspiracy to damage or destroy property by fire or explosive. I was released this past January, 2015 because of the continuous and amazing support from Sacramento Prisoner Support (SPS) and their concerted efforts with attorneys Mark Vermeulen and Ben Rosenfeld. SPS was able to obtain thousands of documents through a Freedom of Information Act request that had been withheld during my trial. A number of the withheld documents would have heavily bolstered my entrapment defense during trial such as the love letters between me and the government’s informant that the U.S. Attorney during my trial claimed never existed. All of this new evidence formed the basis for a habeas corpus petition and ended up leveraging the government into giving me a time served deal for general conspiracy. This resulted in my immediate release.

The amount of support I received while I was on the inside has transitioned seamlessly to the outside and continues to leave me breathless. The aid I’ve received from the instant of my release — from letters sent to the SPS PO Box, vegan sausages, emails, cash, a backpack and water bottle, stamps, an event at the Station 40 space in San Francisco, and continued donations via my ‘youcaring’ fundraiser — make me perpetually grateful and nourished by the over flowing tangibility of community created by so many people both near and far. At the moment I’m having to dance with supervised released (probation), school, and all that comes with having to dance with the institutions that form society . My experience of your continued aid and support is a resounding sign that our communities know how to support each other through difficult and challenging times. Please don’t forget those of us that are still inside prison and kept from all they love. Create a moment or two to say hello and remind them that they are missed and loved.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. 2Muchlove. Find your joy.

Remember! Support for prisoners never ends when they walk out the prison door. Eric continues to need your love and support. For monetary support, visit: www.youcaring.com/ericmcdavid. For more information on Eric, his case, or how to stay in touch with him now that he has been release, please visit: www.supporteric.org

 

By Roxanne Llamas-Villaluz

My mom and dad are from the northern part of Luzon which is one of the largest islands in the Philippines.

When we were kids living in Fairfax County, Virginia my mom use to tell me that police cars were sundaes that had a cherry on top. When my dad would be driving along the freeway, anywhere in the U.S., my mom was always warning him to watch out for his “friend”.

Sitting in the car over the years I wondered each time why she always used such cheerful euphemisms? I mean they were the cops: protect and serve, right? They needed to be mean, right? Catch the lawbreakers and all, right? Why was she constantly trying to make them nice for me, always trying to make them seem innocuous and harmless?

I continued to ponder that question each time she would point out all of the “cherry-on-tops”, and all the “friends” pulled over on the highway or driving behind my dad. And when I would ask why, she would just say because their cars looked like sundaes & they were our friends.

Finally, at seventeen years old I got my driver’s license. I drove around in my mom’s borrowed Cutlass Calais and I felt free. I would drive along grateful to see all of those “sundaes” out on the road, my “friends” looking out for me.

And then one day, I don’t remember when, I was way too free with my foot on the gas driving down a highway and I saw that cherry light up. It was so red like the maraschino on a sundae. I saw the blue pulses and I heard the siren. I was pretty nervous, but I knew I had broken the law and I was hoping it wouldn’t be too bad.

I turned off my radio, rolled down my window, and remembered to immediately put my hands back on the steering wheel at 10 and 2.

The cop walked up, “license and registration?” I carefully grabbed my wallet and the registration out of the glove box and handed them to him with a smile and said, “here you are officer.”

He just looked at me, took what I handed him and walked to his vehicle. I was getting super nervous because he was using his radio looking at my license plate and registration and license. Fuck, did I break some weird law that involved speeding?

After a while the officer came back and asked whose car I was driving. I told him my mom’s. He then asked if I knew why he pulled me over? Shit, a trick question because I really didn’t know why except the speeding thing. But he took so long at his car I thought it had to have been more. So I took my best guess: speeding?

He agreed and told me I was doing 90 in a 60 zone, and that really that was reckless driving and he should arrest me. But he checked my record (lightbulb) – why he was talking on the radio and taking so long – and my record was clean.

So he was going to do me a big favor. Now he’s smiling. He was going to write down that I was doing only 10 miles over so that he doesn’t have to arrest me and I can go to traffic school to avoid the point penalty. I was so relieved, I signed my ticket and went along on my merry way vowing never to a break the law again.

After that, I preceded to get pulled over about 20+ more times in different cities: Irvine, CA; Houston, TX; Costa Mesa, CA; Fresno, CA; San Jose, CA; stretches of the I-5 and 405 in Southern California; stretches of the 99 and the 152 in Central and Northern California; and Oakland, CA.

Each time for valid reasons: speeding, unsafe lane change, rolling stop, running a red, passengers not wearing seatbelts; too many passengers, out taillights, out headlights, non-working brake lights, obscured back view, not signaling, etc. I was most often alone, sometimes with a carload of friends, sometimes with my son in the car.

The times with my son in the car were the most terrifying because the police officer would verbally assault me and shame me. I would cry desperate tears. Tears begging him not to make me get out of the car and arrest me and take my son to Child Protective Services.

The more sadistic ones pushed me to tears that terrified my son. In the rear view mirror through my own tears and sobbing, I could see his eyes wide, hear him whimpering not to take his mommy away. I would try to signal with my eyes it would be okay and he would begin to cry, sobbing because he knew it was never okay.

I would look at the cops, bile rising in my throat because I could see the sadistic glee on their faces, feel their hate radiating. “Is that your son in the back?” “I see you don’t have a wedding ring?” “Do you always drive like this with children in the car?” Assuming I must have more than one.

I could hear their pulsating thoughts in their questions: this bitch single mother driving recklessly with one of her many half-breed children in the back deserves to know she is irresponsible and shameful. And that as an officer of the law they must see to it that I know my worth is determined by their laws.

After every one of those encounters I would signal, carefully pull back on to the roadway and drive until the police was no longer behind me. Then I would find a side street that looked quiet, turn, pull over and cry until I was dry heaving and sick. My son was terrified and confused about how how to make me stop crying.

I would then pull myself together in the form of berating myself for stupidly going with the flow of traffic and not posted speed, or not signaling the mandatory number of feet before turning or changing lanes. I would apologize to my baby boy for endangering his life, pull away from the curb and drive as safely as possible.

As we drove home I would point out the police cars and how they looked like sundaes with cherries on top.I would tell my son that I need to be more careful when I see my “friends”.

And maybe next time we were out driving could he point out when he saw our “friends”, that ride around in sundae cars with cherries on top so I could be extra super careful.

And each time he would tell me angrily that those cars don’t look like sundaes and they are not our friends.

By Finn

Since the non-indictment of Darren Wilson and the increased visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement, there’s been a lot of dialogue about how white folks ought to act as protesters and organizers, especially with respect to how white activists dominate space during actions. Part of being white in the United States means getting to believe that it’s one’s inherent right to be dominant at all times. This belief is so pervasive throughout our culture that it often plays out in explicitly anti-racist protests, actions, and organizing spaces. Though many white activists come from a place of genuinely wanting to effect change, the culture around white social justice activism makes it easy for white folks to keep the spotlight on themselves.

Being involved with planning and events and carrying out high-profile actions is glamorous, doing behind the scenes logistics or shitwork is not. Nor is it glamorous to step out of the spotlight and change diapers or do dishes or skip the POC dance party or otherwise decentralize one’s own experience. This may be why, when white allies decide that an event or collective needs fewer white people or more POC, they often take steps to exclude white people while excepting themselves by virtue of being “allies”.

Within the Slingshot Collective, which is at the moment largely (but not entirely) white, there’s been a lot of conversation about constructive ways for white people to support Black Lives Matter. Some of us have encountered fliers at protests with suggested “protocols and principles” for white activists, but many of these fliers read more as a list of “don’t”s than a list of “do”s. To that effect, I’d like to offer an alternative, somewhat more fleshed out list of suggestions:

When gaining awareness of the history of oppression, it is common for white folks to react with feelings of guilt. Although this is an understandable way to feel, such emotions in and of themselves do not contribute to struggling against oppression, and often paralyze people from doing anything productive, especially when folks feel the need to process such emotions during a planning meeting or action. If you’re really struggling with feelings of guilt, try processing them with a therapist or trusted friends, outside of the meetings and actions.

Be a good listener. When you speak, speak in your own voice – not for other people – and make room for other folks to speak as well. Stepping back doesn’t mean never speaking at all – it means speaking with self-awareness and consideration of others’ desires to be heard.

Don’t be afraid of messiness and difficult emotions. Rather than focusing on our fears of imperfection, we could embrace our own imperfect humanity and accept that we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to get confused, and we’re going to feel uncomfortable. Acknowledge your mistakes, make an effort to do better, and move on.

Be honest with yourself about what you don’t know. As white people, there are times when we’ll be approaching solidarity with an outsider perspective – this isn’t inherently “bad”, it just needs to be acknowledged.

Avoid making sweeping assumptions about groups of people and their “leaders”. Following the leadership of people of color often assumes that POC are a monolithic group that all share the same goals, politics, and leaders. If an organized group of “white allies” wishes to seek out guidance, they have to make a decision on which POC are worth listening to, whose voices they think are most representative or worthy. Rather than assuming the existence of a “leadership”, educate yourself on a variety of perspectives and experiences.

Just because you have white privilege, doesn’t mean that folks of color are helpless and need or want white allies to step in and “lift them up”. None of us are benevolent saviors, and it’s paternalistic to act otherwise.

The phrase “white supremacy” often conjures up images of Nazi skinheads, but the reality is that white supremacy is not an extremist belief. It’s a structural, systemic problem that, beyond underpinning racial privileges and oppressions, universalizes white experiences such that white people do not have to think about the fact that they’re white. It isn’t anyone’s fault that they are born into a white supremacist society, and it also isn’t possible for white people to exempt ourselves from being part of this society, just by claiming “allyship”.

Challenging white supremacy is messy and complicated and all of us are going to fuck up. As white people, we need to get over this. Making mistakes is part of learning and growth and we don’t need to freak out about always saying the right thing or doing the right thing or otherwise being Perfect Non-racist White Activists. It isn’t All About Us. We don’t need to apologize or feel guilty for having privilege, or whine about how we aren’t responsible for privileges we didn’t choose to have, or make a lot of self-righteous noise to prove to everyone how not-racist we are. Ultimately, solidarity isn’t about self-absolution or feeling guilty or trying to prove one’s own benevolence. It’s about acting in support of others’ struggle for liberation out of a sense of shared humanity.