Joseph Orosco – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

CFP: The Word for World is Forest Symposium, October 2022.

(Photo Credit: Maksim Isotomin, Unsplash)

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Ursula K. Le Guin’s anti-war novella The Word for World is Forest.

Written during the Vietnam conflict, The Word for World is Forest depicts a distant world invaded by human beings who are desperate for natural resources. It tells the tale of an alien culture that resists the invasion, but is forever changed by the decision.

The Anarres Project for Alternative Futures calls for abstracts for a multidisciplinary virtual symposium that aims to bring together activists, organizers, and scholars to consider the ways in which Le Guin’s tale can help us to diagnose social injustices in the present moment, and to imagine the ways we can catalyze solidarities to achieve more just futures.

Rather than strictly academic discussions or literary critiques, we are looking for presentations that take Le Guin’s novella as a basis for understanding themes such as oppression, patriarchy and toxic masculinity, racial justice, resistance, colonialism/imperialism, nonviolence and armed struggle, environmental justice, intersectional solidarity in the world today. We are especially interested in how the tale might help us develop strategies for mutual aid and community organizing against injustice today.

The symposium will be held on-line over Zoom on Friday, October 14, 2022.

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words by midnight (Pacific Time) Friday, September 9, 2022 using the submission form below.

What was the best sci-fi of 2021?

By Joseph Orosco (December 29, 2021)

The TrekWars@OSU collective (Dr. Randall Milstein, Dr. Joseph Orosco, and Dr. Jason Scully) gathered together again to discuss the best science fictions stories of 2021. We chose to talk about those sci-fi narratives that most impacted us in some way, either by engaging in innovative storytelling or by engaging us in thinking about future possibilities in new ways.

Our choices for best science fiction for 2021 were:

Randy Milstein: The Nevers, Season 1

Joseph Orosco: The Expanse, Season 6 and Doja Cat, Planet Her

Jason Scully: DC Legends of Tomorrow

We all agreed that the science fiction product that most underwhelmed us was : Dune 2021.

Along the way, we noticed that the theme of rendering care to young people was a growing theme in a lot of science fiction stories this year. We also discussed whether science fiction in the last thirty years has been hemmed in by a cyber punk aesthetic (blended with a neoliberal capitalist reality) that makes it very difficult to imagine, in Jason Scully’s words, a future of “exuberance”.

Let us know what you think. Did we miss something you think helps us grow a radical imagination (quite frankly–there was a lot)? (You can also watch our Best of Sci-Fi 2020 here.)

The AfroFuturism of the Fifth Dimension: Freedom Dreams in the Age of Aquarius

By Joseph Orosco (July 28, 2021)

I was listening to the interview with Questlove on NPR the other day. He was talking about the new documentary he produced (Summer of Soul) on the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969 and discussing the performance of the group, The Fifth Dimension. The Fifth Dimension, for me, is always connected with the songs from the musical, Hair, namely “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” so I always associated them with images of the largely white, hippie, Woodstock generation. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who made this association. In the film, lead singer Marilyn McCoo talks about how important it was for them to perform at the festival:

“MARILYN MCCOO: We were constantly being attacked because…

BILLY DAVIS JR: Yeah.

MCCOO: …We weren’t, quote, unquote, “Black enough.”

CORNISH: Marilyn McCoo, a member of The 5th Dimension – she teared up while watching footage of their performance.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “SUMMER OF SOUL”)

MCCOO: Sometimes we were called the Black group with the white sound. We didn’t like that. That was one of the reasons why performing in Harlem was so important to us – because we wanted our people to know what we were about.”

Hearing this made me go back to listen to the songs again and to see if I could find any videos of them from the era. And what popped out at me was that The Fifth Dimension can definitely be thought of Afrofuturist in 1969, and those songs from ‘Hair” as being infused as messages from what Robin D.G. Kelley calls the Black Radical Imagination.

In terms of the Afrofuturist aesthetic, check the the original video for “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”:

Nigerian writer Munachi Ogsebu calls this video a “major moment” in Afrofuturism!

I’ve also been reading Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams” (2002) and came across this important passage:

“Progessive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does; transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society.”

Kelley thinks music is an important component of social movements because they give life to this poetic/radical imagination:

“When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets–no matter the medium–who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.”

With all of this in the background, I have started to hear “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” in a new way, as part of the tradition of those freedom dreams from the Black Freedom Movement: spirituals, blues, jazz, and soul. Especially when you look at the lyrics, these songs are definitely in that utopian tradition of imagining a different world in order to provide hope and soothe pain in the struggles of the present.

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius
Aquarius

Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in

Oh, let it shine, c’mon
Now everybody just sing along
Let the sun shine in
Open up your heart and let it shine on in
When you are lonely, let it shine on
Got to open up your heart and let it shine on in
And when you feel like you’ve been mistreated
And your friends turn away
Just open your heart, and shine it on in

Dance as a Revolutionary Tool in the Struggle for Climate Justice

By Joseph Orosco (July 16, 2021)

In this episode of our podcast, Conversations on Anarres, we sat down with dancer and filmmaker Shane Scopatz to talk about his new work “Steps and Strikes”. Shane is a recent graduate of the Master’s Program in Environmental Humanities at Oregon State University. His film hopes to address the provocative question: Why did the environmental movement fail to protect us from ecological crisis?

We sat down with Shane to discuss his answer to this question We talk about the way in which global capitalism has dispossessed billions of people and created the conditions for climate catastrophe. But we also talk about the ways in which people resist–using the labor movement to build organized people power against corporate control of the environment. The big issue today is: How do we bridge the labor movement and the environmental movement?

An answer to this involves the way Shane has chosen to resist: that involves dance. Invoking the legacy of a radical dance movement from the 1930s, the Worker’s Dance League, Shane has decided to explore how dance can be a way to expand the radical imagination and get us to think about the ways to build connection between social movements. Art in general, but dance in particular can help to develop emotions like joy and ecstasy and sustain a guiding vision toward a more collective, just, ecologically attuned future.

If you haven’t heard of the Worker’s Dance league, you can start here.

This article gives some background, with video snippets, of the work of Sophie Maslow who carried on the legacy of the WDL, using dance to tell the story of working class Americans.

You can see Shane Scopatz’s film “Steps and Strikes” here.

Here is our full interview, with snippets from “Steps and Strikes”

Here is our podcast to listen and download.

Please let us know what you think!

The People’s Library of ABQ

By Joseph Orosco (July 7, 2021)

During the Occpy Wall Street, groups of activists organized a spaced called the people’s library. Thousands of books and magazine were organized to be available for free to whomever wanted to come to the encampment and find literature and radical scholarship that could help them make sense of Occupy or the issues behind the movement. The People’s Liberary inspired dozens of other projects in across the country where local activists tried to make books and other media available as part of collctive liberation efforts When the encampment in Zucotti park was finally demolished by the police, most of those books were confiscated and ended up in the landfill.

We recently sat down to talk to someone who is working in Albuquerque New Mexico to build a project with similar goals and aspirations. Fiadh is an activist who has created the The People’s Library of ABQ. She has been an anarchist organizer in many different spaces for a while now, but within the last year decided to create a lending library of radical books and zines. The People’s Library ABQ describes itself as “a community project of leftist theory anarchist history and radial education. We have books about queer, feminist, antiracist theory, indigenous resistance, transformative justice, philosophy and revolutionary thought”

We sat down with Fiah to discuss her inspirations for the project and to learn how it works, and how she would like it to grow in order to offer works that inspire the radical imagination to a broader audience.

You can watch the full interview at our YouTube channel:

Or listen to the audio podcast on Anchor.fm:

The People’s Library of ABQ’s collection of books, e-books, and zines can be browsed here: https://radicalbooksabq.libib.com/

For more information about the project and how to support it, contact: thepeopleslibraryabq@gmail.com

Open Letter to the Benton County Commissioners on Renaming the County

By Joseph Orosco (June 27, 2020)

Dear Commissioners Augerot, Malone, and Jaramillo:

This June, you issued a statement in response to the historic protests across the globe reacting to the killing of George Floyd. You recognized that communities were gathering together to “give voice to the centuries of inequality, exploitation and abuse suffered by Black and African American people in our country” and added, “The demands for change cannot go unanswered.” As part of your commitment, you dedicated yourselves to listening to the concerns of disadvantaged communities and to examining the ways in which the County might participate in historic racism. You promise that “All systems that reinforce oppression and racism must be thoroughly examined, changed where needed and rebuilt in coordination with the people that have been historically disenfranchised.”

I suggest that one of the tasks the Board needs to consider is renaming the County.

Benton County is named in honor of US Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who served in federal government for some thirty years from 1820 to 1850. He was instrumental in the promotion of settlement of the Oregon Territory. Though he never set foot in Oregon, he is considered someone whose political career was dedicated to the cause of opening the West for Americans.

However, Senator Benton was a notorious white supremacist. His championing of the Oregon Trail was so that white Americans could displace Native American tribes who he considered “savage” and “uncivilized.” He thought that Western expansion was a good idea in order for European and Christian ideals to spread to Asia and transform those cultures. Though he did work to end slavery in the United States, it was not because he considered African Americans equal to white people, but because the issue threatened the stability of the Union.

In 2017, Oregon State University, responding to student concerns and protests, initiated a review of building names on campus, including Benton Hall. I was the co-chair of the committee involved in organizing the review process. A team of professional historians investigated the background of Senator Benton and the naming of the building. While OSU chose to remove Senator Benton’s name from the building for reasons other than his historical legacy, historians found the legacy of Senator Benton to be “controversial and discomforting” because of his support of Native American removal and a white supremacist promotion of Manifest Destiny. This report can be found at:

https://leadership.oregonstate.edu/sites/leadership.oregonstate.edu/files/OID/BuildingPlaceNames/Historical-Reports/benton_hall_and_annex_historical_report.pdf

One way to remedy the harm to Native Americans caused by Senator Benton would be to rename the County after the Kalapuya people who were displaced by the United States from this area in 1855. There is precedent for this in Oregon, since ten of thirty-six counties are named after Native American tribes or use Native American names. The Board should consider consulting tribal historians and officials from Grand Ronde. Nearby Lane County is also involved in a process of reviewing its name for similar reasons.

If the Benton Country Board of Commissioners is truly interested in “dismantling” and “deconstructing” Oregon’s history of systemic oppression, then it should cease to honor one of the politicians who dedicated most of his life’s work to laying the foundations for it.

Lessons About Police Brutality from the Chicanx Experience

By Joseph Orosco (June 3, 2020)

The past week has seen an explosion of urban uprising that has not been experienced in the US in decades. Almost 5000 people have been arrested nationwide in protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd at the hand of police in Minneapolis. What is unique about this moment is that a majority of Americans support the protests, in part, because they have seen the violent response of police forces all across the country. Even mainstream media outlets are calling the police response disproportionate and many more people are starting to consider the alternative of police abolition as a serious option.

The history of Mexican American people in the US is one that emphasizes the point that police violence is not recent problem created by the militarization of police forces or of white supremacist infiltration. In the mid 1800s, police forces were created specifically for controlling Mexicans and Mexican American citizens. The Texas Rangers were created during the Republic of Texas era specifically to do border patrol duty with Mexico and then later became a regular unit when Texas was absorbed into the United States. The story of the Rangers is a bloody one of lynchings, massacres, and disappearances. From 1915-1919, in a period named La Hora de Sangre, Rangers abducted and murdered hundreds of Mexican Americans with impunity.

In the 20^th century, several cases are notable, not only for their brutality but also because of what they teach us about responding to police violence today.

Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots

The first is the 1942 case of the Sleepy Lagoon murder in Los Angeles that was popularized in the play and film by Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit. Dozens of Mexican American youth were arrested for killing another Mexican American under very uncertain circumstances. By this point, the LAPD was notorious for police brutality and especially for being effective at creating a blue wall of silence to protect their own (one famous case that demonstrates this is). But what was significant about this episode was the treatment of the pachuco youth by the whole criminal justice system—police, prosecutors, social workers, and judges. During the trial, the Mexican American men were denied being able to speak to lawyers, they were not allowed to wear clean clothes to hearings, and were subjected to testimony by state “experts” who told the jury about the savagery of the Mexican people and their propensity to use knifes to cut and maim that went back to Aztec times. The girlfriends of the young men refused to testify against them in trial and were then taken away from their families without due process and put into state custody at reform school.

What this points out is that thinking about police state violence will require more than reforming police forces with better training or body cams and so forth. Sleepy Lagoon revealed that there are many sites of power within the criminal justice system that can coerce and harm individuals. Moreover, this case also reveals how institutional reform may not matter much without confronting the way white supremacy structures culture and everyday life. The state dehumanized those young men and women and played off the stereotypes of violent Mexican gangs to secure their imprisonment and family separation. Those stereotypes would just simply explode a year later when police and military forces persecuted Mexican American youth in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943. In other words, police state violence would not have been possible if many white citizens weren’t willing to tolerate it in order to keep Black and Mexican American youth in their place.

The Bloody Christmas Episode

LAPD police brutality against Mexican American youth continued and crested in 1951 with the Bloody Christmas episode (which became popularized in the 1997 film LA Confidential). A group of young Mexican American men were confronted in a bar by police and fought back against the officers that were harassing them. They were arrested and brought back to the city jail. During a drunken Christmas Eve party, dozens of LAPD officers formed a secret gauntlet in the basement of the jail and forced the defendants to run through it while they beat them with clubs. The torture went on for an hour and half and several defendants had broken bones and ruptured internal organs. They were then forced to pose in photos with the officers they had resisted.

The LAPD expected this case to be covered up just like countless of other cases had been. However, the families of the defendants joined together and became part of a grassroots group called the Community Services Organization. The CSO had been organizing with Mexican American communities in Southern California for several years. When the families brought the CSO network to bear on their case, the city and FBI insisted on a review of the Bloody Christmas incident. In the end, a handful of LAPD officers were convicted of crimes and many were reassigned. It was one of the first times that the blue wall of silence was broken.

It should be noted on how CSO accomplished this victory. For some years, CSO had been conducting meetings in the homes of Mexican American families to inform them about issues and the power of collective community action. These meetings inspired thousands to see themselves as agents of change and not just passive subjects of state control. It had created a very successful voter registration drive that empowered thousands of Mexican American voters. CSO also encouraged multicultural alliances with other groups, namely Jewish cultural organizations and Black and Asian labor groups. This kind of solidarity enabled them to help to elect Ed Roybal to the LA City Council in 1949–one of the first Mexican American political officials in the city since the Mexican American War of 1848. Roybal was instrumental in getting pressure on the LAPD during the Bloody Christmas incident.

The organizer that helped to create this Mexican American political bloc was a man by the name of Fred Ross, Sr. He had gained a reputation about Mexican American communities because of helping them to mount a legal case in Southern California to desegregate public schools that went on to be a template for Brown v. Board of Education. After the victory of the Bloody Christmas, Ross went to San Jose to help form CSO chapters. It was there he met a young man by the name of Cesar Chavez, who later went on to become the national organizer for CSO for almost a decade before he helped to form the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta (who was also another CSO organizer).

(Cesar Chavez, Fred Ross, Luis Valdez, and Dolores Huerta)

Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War

The last episode has eerie resonance with today’s uprisings. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. The Chicano Moratorium was a nationwide group that came together in repose to the disprortionate numbers of Chicanx youth that were dying as casualties in the South Asian conflict. For months, the Chicano Moratorium group planned a huge march and rally in Los Angeles for August of 1970. When the day came, almost thirty thousand people showed up for the demonstration, making it one of the largest anti-Vietnam war protests in history. The march ended in a park, where there were speeches and performances. In a nearby neighborhood, there was a break-in of a local business and police were called. County and city officers responded by the dozens and they came with riot gear. Without warning or provocation, they rushed into the protest crowd, shooting tear gas, and indiscriminately beating people with clubs. There were several casualties, including the Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar, who was shot in the head with a tear gas projectile that was launched into an enclosed bar.

The casual nature of the police violence in this case, and the easy manner in which police were able to deploy weapons in a deadly way, demonstrated to many Chicanxs that mainstream America would not tolerate even nonviolent dissent from people of color.

Paths Forward Now

When we see the responses from police in today’s headlines we have to wonder whether anything has really changed in the last 50 years. The magnitude of the uprisings is certainly different, even if the state responses are not. The big question is how will the work on the street translate into the kind of institutional and cultural changes necessary to confront and end police violence?

Chicano leader Corky Gonzales presented an outline of reforms in his “El Plan del Barrio” in 1968, as part of his contribution to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. He suggested a program of economic reforms that included housing, jobs, and wealth redistribution that surely merits revisiting today.

A further lesson from the Chicanx experience is the importance of organized communities, like those with CSO, that can support families who find themselves victims of police violence. Sleepy Lagoon, however, demonstrates the need for more sustained work, because police violence is just the tip of the iceberg of state coercion toward communities of color. The Sleepy Lagoon trial reveals the need to think about reforms in the training of lawyers in law schools, and election of prosecutors and local district attorneys and judges. We need also think about the education of social workers, and others charged with public health and child protective services, to make sure they understand the various forms of aggression, macro and micro, directed at young children and their families from society and the state. This would also involve looking at how juvenile justice programs are operating. Much of this is on the agenda of prison abolition projects around the country already, but that then also raises the topic of the corporate intervention in the prison industrial complex that profits off the dehumanization of youth of color and the politicians that benefit from those business entities. Finally, it also means that ordinary white folks need to seriously contend with lingering white supremacy in their families and communities, and everyone, include Chicanx/Latinx people, need to acknowledge and grapple with anti-Black racism that is a cornerstone of the white supremacy that harms us all. Educators will have to craft explicitly anti racist curriculums, and discussions will need to happen in homes, workplaces, and especially, communities of faith.

The experience of Chicanx communities shows us that police violence is not isolated or even recent; it is also not something that can be solved easily by focusing on entirely on the prosecution of a few “bad apples”, or on police force reform. I hope that this history does not make it seem like dealing with this problem is an overwhelming and impossible task. Rather, I hope that we can see that there are many places to get involved, many different sites of struggle, for our energies. But it will indeed be hard.

Cesar Chavez and the Struggle for Justice During the Covid-19 Pandemic

By Joseph Orosco (March 31, 2020)

Some thirty years ago, Cesar Chavez staged his last major hunger fast. This fast went on for thirty-six days. In his statement issued at the end, Chavez said he had begun the fast because he had to do penance; he was ashamed of himself. For all his years as an organizer, he said he had not truly comprehended the pain and suffering of farmworkers due to exposure to pesticides. He felt he had not done enough to make people aware of the immensity of the problem.

So after his debilitating ordeal, Chavez went on to speak to numerous audiences across the country, repeating the stories of farmworker children, such as Johnnie Rodriguez, who died after a two year battle with cancer; or of Felipe Franco, who was born without arms and legs to a farmworker mother who had been showered with toxic chemicals in the field. Most importantly, he wanted people to realize that, to the extent to which we all rely on pesticides and cheap farm labor to provide our food, we are also responsible for the suffering of children like Johnnie and Felipe and thus have a responsibility to prevent more pain. Chavez wrote in his statement:

“The misery that pesticides bring will not be ended by more studies or hearings. The solution is not to be had from those in power because it is they who have allowed this deadly crisis to grow. The answer lies with me and you. It is for all of us to do more. We will demonstrate by what we do and not by what we say our solidarity with the weak and afflicted. I pray to God that this fast will encourage a multitude of simple deeds by men and women who feel the suffering and yearn with us for a better world. Together, all things are possible.”

I was thinking about Chavez’s words as I read about the two trillion dollar stimulus package passed by Congress to boost the US economy and provide relief for unemployed workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. As James Harrington–an organizer who worked with Chavez—points out, there are about 4 million undocumented workers, many of them farmworkers, who are not eligible for cash relief. And there are close to another 30 million poor people who are not eligible because they have not filed income taxes recently. Many of these people are likely to work in service or hospitality industries that have had to cut back or close down. Its not clear we are sheltering the most vulnerable among us with this package, but we are certainly propping up some of the biggest industries, with almost $500 billion in loans for airlines and manufacturers.

But I think the realization that made me most understand Chavez’s need for penance was thinking about the shelter-in-place regulations going on in many hard hit states. My social media is filled with funny memes and videos about people going stir crazy at home or dealing with their children. Yet, there are millions of working class people who can’t share in this humor because their work is considered essential: grocery store and pharmacy clerks, postal and special delivery drivers, truck drivers, sanitation workers, water and electric utility workers, and of course, public health workers in hospitals. They have to show up so the rest can work from home. Many of them are starting to realize that they are at a greater risk of exposure and have not received from their employers training to protect themselves, or hazard pay, or even masks and gloves. Some of them are starting to strike now, at Amazon and Whole Foods and other retailers, to improve these dangerous conditions. But I can’t get over the feeling that my well-being, and that of millions of other middle class people, depends on the labor of many people who were probably already struggling paycheck to paycheck to get by.

Of course, Chavez didn’t wallow in guilt and self-pity—his realization of the farmworker’s suffering was a call for him to think strategically and to act. First, he came to understand that the use of pesticides was the result of large agribusiness looking to make a quick profit rather than protect the health of workers: “The wrath of grapes is a plague born of selfish men that is indiscriminately and undeniably poisoning us all.”

It is undoubtedly the case that Covid-19 is a plague born of selfish men. Our top leaders in Washington last week were discussing the need to relax quarantine restrictions lest the economy suffer more damage—weighing human lives less than profit making. But more poignantly, we’ve seen how profit motives in New York City have shut down hospitals and, thus, reduced the overall hospital bed capacity over the last twenty years. The most blatant case of selfish greed is that of the large US manufacturer of ventilators, Covidien. In 2014, Covidien swallowed up a competing smaller corporation that had a contract with the US government to build thousands of newly designed and relatively inexpensive ventilators. Covidien then pulled the plug on the contract, saying it was not profitable to make the ventilators, even though the Centers for Disease Control were hoping to stockpile them for future emergencies.

So as Chavez said: “the solution is not to be had from those in power.” I’ve been so impressed to read of all the different mutual aid project erupting across the country in which people are stepping up to collect food and other goods for vulnerable people in their own communities. They are creating thick networks of assistance and developing skills for more organizers.

But more will have to be done. It’s said that physical distancing could become a regular occurrence, not only in dealing with a resurgence of Covid-19, but with other viruses that are expected to become pandemics in the future. We are going to have to yearn and dream for what we will need in a better society. If this experience teaches us anything, it is that we need a much more accessible and equitable public health care system, and better social welfare services, than the US currently offers.

This radical imagining means confronting both political parties that have but profit before people and the corporations that fuel political ambition. However, this is precisely the strategy Chavez envisioned. In an essay written in 1970, he said:

“The attacks on the status quo will come not because we hate but because we know America can construct a humane society for all of its citizens—and that if it does not, there will be chaos…The power class and the middle class haven’t done anything that one can truly be proud of, aside from building machines and rockets. It’s amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.”

Reflections for the End of the Term in Plague Years

By Joseph Orosco (March 16, 2020)

Last week, I held my last classes of the Winter 2020 quarter and, most likely, my last face-to-face classes for some time. It was the day after the university administration ordered that there were to be no in person exams or classes for several weeks. I knew going into these classes that my students would be scared, confused, angry, and traumatized. I was not wrong.

I began each class by just checking in with them to hear how they were feeling. Most expressed frustration about school—how was remote instruction going to work next term? What did they have to avoid doing in order to be safe? How were they going to manage?

I didn’t try to assure them that it would all be all right. I told them that, at least in terms of what to expect for their educational needs in the next few weeks: that its going to be a nightmare. The technology is not going to work all the time, and the educational experience is not going to be the same, and most likely, subpar to what they would have gotten otherwise. That’s because we are not offering online education, which is intentional, but remote education, which is about triage and trying to stuff material into new packages that are not necessarily time tested. Plus, I said, they were going to have to worry about more than their intellectual needs—they were going to have to think about their family and friends and themselves. How would all this work if they got sick, for instance? No our feelings of frustration and sadness are not going to go away anytime soon.

But I tried to emphasize that the work we had done in the past three months—thinking about peace, justice, human rights, and war in one class, and the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the other—could be useful for them to deal with these feelings of despair. Because the essence of our work together had been learning how to think about oppression and the philosophical tools to overcome injustice. Many of the tools we had examined had been forged over millennia from various wisdom traditions. Different cultures have grappled with trying to devise spiritual, moral, and meditative practices to struggle against the pain and suffering found in human life–some of it caused by our own selves, such as war and cruelty, and some of it which is just the inevitable in our existence, such as disease.

One of those traditions is Gandhi’s notion of Satyghaha—“soul force”—a kind of strength that comes from devoting oneself to committing no harm in a world full of harm and opportunities to perpetuate violence. Another one of those traditions of soul force was probably familiar to many (even though it is not one of my own). The early Christians sought to become spiritually resilient by imaging certain kinds of values they believed a person should embody in order to to be strong in the face of calamity. They arrived at the trio of faith, hope, and love. I admitted that when I tried to make sense of these theologically they often didn’t make sense to me. But I said I had been trying to work out the meaning of what these virtues in light of the philosophical arguments we had been unpacking together over the term. Here’s what I came up with for my students before we said goodbye:

Faith: Faith is usually taken as the belief in the existence or truth of something, God, without any evidence or reason to support that belief. It’s a belief that draws you toward it elementally—you either know God to be, or you just don’t. I admit I don’t. but I think I understand the psychological mechanism of faith. I see it as it operates in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had Christian faith, that belief in the existence of God that requires no proof.

But I’m more interested in the fact that his career as a crusader for justice was always driven by a utopian vision of society. Sometimes he called this the “integrated society”, sometimes the “Beloved Community”, other times “the Promised Land”. Early in 1961, in his “I Have a Dream Speech”, he told the nation he was propelled into public life by the dream of a society in which human beings cared for one another, supported one another, and believed that their full potential as human beings could only come about if other human beings also had their potential supported. He called on us to imagine a world in which we could each be our best selves, helping each other to reach that life.

Yet in 1967, he admitted that this dream was nowhere close to being a reality. This was even after the Civil Rights legislative victories of 1964 and 1965, demolishing segregation and clearing a path to voting equality. But the cruel bombing that killed little girls in Birmingham, and the horrific bombings that were killing thousands in Vietnam, made Martin Luther King, jr agree with Malcolm X: the United States was a nightmare, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and it would lead all of humanity to extinction if it could not cope with its addiction to violence, racism, and greed.

At the same time, he said he still had the dream enticing him, even though there was no good proof that we were actually on the way toward building that society. The dream was a like sun using its tremendous gravitational pull on his imagination. Though there was no good reason to believe that the Beloved Community was manifesting right now, its power as a vision of what life might be like drove him into thinking that it just might be possible to build. And that was enough for him.

So faith may not have to be theological to be powerful. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream can inspire us to activate our own imaginative powers to find that vision of a world of better selves that draws us out to make it real.

Hope: Here, I admit, that when I look at Christian theological discussions of hope, I get utterly lost. But it does seem as though hope is something that is in short supply among my students. They often tell me things seem “hopeless” or they don’t have “much hope” that the problems we study in class can ever be changed.

I recently read an interview with Cornel West in which he said that to talk about hope as some kind of sign that things are going to get better is probably a bad idea. Because, at least from the standpoint of Black folk in the US, there’s not a lot of reason to believe that the future is going to be so much brighter, more just. Instead, West recommends, we ought to think about “being a hope” rather than “having hope”. And what he seems to mean is trying to live an ethical life, devoted to justice and the ending of oppression, but without the satisfaction of knowing that your work is making any difference or that you will ultimately win in your struggle. Instead, the struggle itself is what should be meaningful.

The example of being a hope that came to mind for me is from Albert Camus’ novel The Plague (a book that apparently no one reads in high school anymore since only one person in two classes had ever read it). The story of the novel is of a plague that strikes the North African town of Oran and how people react to its destructive path. The character that stands out for me is Dr. Bernard Rieux. As the plague envelops the town, he is a tireless worker. He cares for the dying, tries to soothe them as best he can, and he watches hundreds die. He knows he cannot save so many. But each day he gets up and goes to work and tries to do the best job he can because he is a doctor. He is not motivated by any religious belief to help the afflicted, or any political ideology to stand with the oppressed. There are other characters that do that in the novel. He does what he does because he must—he’s a doctor and that’s what doctors do, and that’s who he is. He cares for the dying even though he thinks it’s not clear it will change the plague situation at all.

Rieux seems to be what West calls “a hope”. He does what he has to because to do otherwise is to betray the values that make him who he is as an individual. The trick seems to be then to figure out how to build a life in which one goes out each day and does good, ethical work, without any signs that it will change the world or motivated by the effects we have. Should we even try to do anything about climate change at this point? Will our efforts even matter to make life possible for human beings? Who knows? But a good person will try to work on this now because that’s just what a good person does. Can we even eradicate white supremacy in the US after centuries of its entrenchment here? Isn’t racism simply a permanent feature of our social landscape? According to Afropessimism maybe. But a good person will devote themselves to anti-racist work, personally and socially, nonetheless because that’s just what a good person does. There are no signs that our climate justice or anti-racist work will eventually succeed in grand victories, but that’s beside the point. Hope is not about those signs, but being the kind of people that think the struggle against those injustices and evils is worthwhile in itself.

Love: I’ve found that this aspect of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work is some of the hardest to understand and teach. King went to great lengths to try to explain what he means by love, and I know many Black activists even today who dislike this emphasis. My students scoffed especially when King would that white people needed Black people’s love in order to overcome their commitment to white supremacy (he talked a lot like this in the late 1950s—after about 1965 he didn’t speak of nonviolence in quite these terms anymore. He talked about creating crisis rather than sowing love).

It’s always important to remember that King did not mean that Black people had to like white people. By love, he meant respect (using the ancient term agape)–a caring for a person not because they have particularly likeable qualities, but simply because they are a person.

I think this makes more sense when we recall that the essence of oppression is about dehumanization—the capacity to forget or ignore the humanity of other persons. Phillip Halie says that oppression, or substantial cruelty, happens when there is a power imbalance that allows one group to ignore and crush the dignity of another group of people. In this way, oppression is really when power and authority imbalances eliminate love/respect.

King then was trying to find a way to make love of humanity the linchpin for just transformation of society. Halie warns that the answer to oppression is not individual kindness, not charity. We need structural revolution to remove the imbalances of power that inure people to one another. Its important then not to put too much emphasis on love as the end all, be all. Maybe its good to think along with Cornel West again: “Justice is what love looks like in public”.

In the next few months, love might be in short supply, supplanted by fear, suspicion, and panic that seem to be sowed by our leaders. But we will need to be patient, show kindness and compassion to ourselves and others. Most importantly, it will be necessary to make our love/respect real. This will be hard in time of what is called “social distancing”. I prefer to call this “physical distancing” because what we will need to get through the crisis of disease and institutional collapse will be even more social (or soulful) connection with one another. So much of our world is already full of loneliness, alienation, and social distance and the worst parts of this crisis will build on those tracks laid deep into the foundation of our every day lives.

I’m impressed with the accounts of mutual aid networks already being built up in neighborhoods to deliver good and services to people who might be more vulnerable to contagion. What kinds of support will be developed for all the hospitality servers that are going to find themselves our of full time work? More of this will have to happen, I’m afraid, because I think its clear from what happened in the case of Hurricanes Katrina in New Orleans and Maria in Puerto Rico, that the federal government is not to be relied upon to provide adequate care and services, especially for poor and working class areas. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge the government to be more proactive—we should, because otherwise its tendency will be to protect the powerful at the expense of the poor.

These are scary times. And it may get worse before it gets better. But hopefully we realize all these efforts at containing the virus, and helping the afflicted, are global and this is a experiment in human solidarity that we can learn from in order to do even more amazing and grander things in the future. Through the love we express today, we can start to gather the images for the society we want to have faith in later, and in our work, be the hope that gets us through the day.

American Autumn: A Viewer’s Guide

By Joseph Orosco (February 17, 2020)

As part of our third installment of the This is What Democracy Looks Like: A Genealogy of Movements film series, we are going to view “American Autumn”.

We will be in Milam Hall 318 on the Oregon State Campus at 6pm.

This is a grassroots documentary looking at the early days of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It illustrates the ways in which Occupy tried to connect the dots between so many different structural injustices. As Ronnie Schieb notes in this Variety review:

“Thus, in addition to airing grievances directed against banks and Wall Street by activists, professors, marchers, singers and comedians, the docu takes aim at student debt, covering marches protesting the skyrocketing cost of education; sits in on protestors seeking to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that increased the power of moneyed interests in elections; and interviews those involved in environmental protection and climate-control issues. The docu includes footage of an anti-foreclosure group, the Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending, as it interrupts the auction of a foreclosed home.”

Looking back at the Declaration of the New York General Assembly, its easy to see how the movement began by critiquing the undue influence of corporate money in the US political system, and the cascade of problems that follow the money trail:

“As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.”

Many people look back, almost 10 years later, and wonder if any of this noise made any difference. The cynical among my students, for instance, think it was a failure. I often have to remind them that there was a massive repression against Occupy, coordinated on a nation wide basis, just a few months in. Someone in power thought this was a threat.

But its also clear that so much of our political space today would not be as possible without the openings in the radical imagination created by Occupy: issues like student debt, minimum wage to living wage increases, houselessness, and the interest in democratic socialism represented by Bernie Sanders and AOC.

Emily Stewart, who does a good run down on the influence of Occupy still today, put its this way:

“But today, Occupy Wall Street no longer looks like such a failure. In the long run, Occupy invigorated ideas and people that influence today’s American left and Democratic politics.Occupy was in many, many ways a shit show,” Nicole Carty, a Brooklyn activist who was a facilitator at Occupy, told me. “But it deserves props, it really does, for unleashing this energy.”

This is What Democracy Looks Like: A Viewers’ Guide

By Joseph Orosco (February 11, 2020)

The Anarres Project for Alternative Futures is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Battle for Seattle with a film series that looks to see how social movements in the past 40 years intersect and influence one another. This is a brief viewer’s guide and background for the showing of “This is What Democracy Looks Like”–the grassroots created documentary that demonstrates the power of the global justice movement confronting the World Trade Organization.

This showing will take place at 6pm on Wednesday, February 12, 2020 at 318 Milam Hall on the Oregon State Campus.

Lots of different retrospective articles were published last November. This one, by veteran activist John Tarelton tries to remember the action and examines how the Battle for Seattle still reverberates into today’s politics:

“So did the Battle of Seattle change the world? No one protest can do that. But by spotlighting a rigged political and economic system and demanding radical changes, we were the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, signaling the devastating consequences of unfettered global capitalism and the future movements that would someday rise to challenge it. And if Trump and the Republicans try to steal the election next year, the kind of edgy but disciplined mass civil disobedience we saw in Seattle may take on a new relevance as well.”

Lisa Fithian focuses her retrospective on the tactics used in the streets by the protestors that shut down the WTO:

“The anti-WTO protests spawned the growth of new organizations and collectives: the Continental Direct Action Network, the Independent Media Centers, and the Radical Cheerleaders, to name just a few. Efforts to build a larger, more cohesive movement became possible as the Teamsters and the Turtles, the AFL and the Anarchists found common ground. Models of intergroup cooperation developed. We were on the offensive, targeting the capitalists in the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank; at the summits of the G8, G20, and World Economic Forum; and in transnational trade deals like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)”

Of course, no discussion of the Battle for Seattle can be complete without the widely read perspective of Chicana activist Elizabeth Betita Martinez, who noted the particular lack of people of color among the organizers:

“In the vast acreage of published analysis about the splendid victory over the World Trade Organization last November 29-December 3, it is almost impossible to find anyone wondering why the 40-50,000 demonstrators were overwhelmingly Anglo. How can that be, when the WTO‘s main victims around the world are people of color? Understanding the reasons for the low level of color, and what can be learned from it, is absolutely crucial if we are to make Seattle’s promise of a new, international movement against imperialist globalization come true.”