By Chris Lowe (August 22, 2017)
Which would do more to impede the growth of the racist right, and the attacks on people of color, immigrants, Muslims, and other targets: 1) Mobilizing against “Trump free speech” rallies that the white nationalist right is using to insert themselves into the Tea Party base and spread their rhetoric there, or 2) mobilizing against the policies of Jeff Sessions at DOJ?
This is a false opposition, of course. Both are possible simultaneously, of course, and might indeed be able to support one another.
But the rallies are the easier target, and that’s where the focus is. Yet, the threats from the DOJ are larger and more systematic.
In Portland, there is organizing against the City’s efforts to revise its agreement with the DOJ that requires some elements of police reform, though not nearly enough. We need to connect that organizing to Jeff Sessions, need to put pressure on the City Council not to collaborate in Sessions’ roll-back of the DOJ’s historical role as sometimes a force against local abuses of power, even if that role has never been consistent and has included its own abuses when the FBI takes on the role of national political police. IMO.
The City says it does not want to collaborate with racist and abusive federal immigration policies that break up families, says we are a Sanctuary City. We should hold ourselves as a community to the same standard in not collaborating with Jeff Sessions’ and Donald Trump’s policies of rewidening the scope for police impunity for acts of racialized violence and discriminatory policing.
Good points, and to the prospect of defending, or deepening the meaning, of being a “sanctuary city” I’ve encountered folks that are proposing a shift from the idea of sanctuary to solidarity. So, Solidarity City instead of Sanctuary City. This shift appears an appropriate intervention as it suggests more than simple state agencies not complying with federal policies, that also needed are programs of mutual aid and self-defense (including, but not limited to, the establishment of a modern underground railroad for refugees and undocumented peoples).