Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

Why I Avoid Using the Term “White Privilege”

By Mark Naison (September 26, 2016)

In challenging racism, even in ways that get in people’s faces, I usually avoid the use of the term “white privilege”. Here is why:

Addressing “whites” as privileged not only erases vast differences in their economic status, including the downward mobility and hardship many have been experiencing in the last 20 years, it fails to account for the trauma that many carry in their personal histories that still haunt their imaginations. US whites are the descendants of many groups, whether Appalachian “hillbillies”, or Jewish, Irish, Italian and Slavic immigrants, who not only had a harsh path to escaping poverty, but have historic memories of starvation, disease and persecution, in some cases in the US, in other cases in their countries of origin. And while an objective observer may see that most now have significant advantages over their African American counterparts in wealth, income, and personal security, traumatic memories still haunt their imaginations in ways that make them feel anything but secure. Trying to erase these experiences and memories by presuming they are irrational virtually assures that the person you are addressing will not hear you, or regard your intervention as hostile or insensitive. And since you want to win some of these people over to fight for the rights of  Black people, or others under duress, you end up making enemies where you could have recruited friends and allies”

Some of you will write off these reflections as coming from one of the most privileged people in the country, someone who is white, male, tenured, and advantaged in numerous other ways. I make no pretense to hide my own privileges. They are many. However, at a time when many white working class voters and former Democrats are rushing into the arms of Donald Trump, others will consider the argument on its face value.

One more thing: When you describe fair treatment by the government that is supposed to represent you as a “privilege” rather than a basic human right, it reflects a much lower expectation of how government is supposed to function than I would endorse. How black people are treated by law enforcement is UNACCEPTABLE because it violates their basic human rights. If we regard fair treatment as a “privilege” rather than a right, than the presumed norm we are invoking is that of a dictatorship, not a democracy.

I’ll Never Tell You to Do Anything

By Teka Lark (September 22, 2016)

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When I owned a newspaper in South Central Los Angeles I endorsed one candidate over another. I regret that decision, not because I didn’t believe in the candidate I endorsed. I did believe in what that candidate stood for, but I believe the game of politics is evil.

When you endorse one person over another in politics you’re legitimizing the game. You’re saying you feel as if the game is fair. You’re saying that you think the game is a vehicle to get people to freedom. This system isn’t going to free anyone, not in its current format.

So why would I tell you to participate? I truly don’t even feel comfortable discussing it, because I feel it is as relevant to my life as what Beyonce is having for lunch.

Did I say don’t vote? No, I didn’t say that. Did I say to vote? No, I didn’t say that either. I know in this world of black and white and yes or no, there is this lack of understanding of gray or a nuance of opinion or even an opinion that doesn’t end with:

Vote for this Jack Ass.
I don’t believe in binaries.

Just because I don’t agree with something doesn’t mean I am implying people should do the opposite of what I think.

The game of politics is unjust. The two party system compromises with corporate capitalism and the Democrats are not the party of the people. I don’t believe in compromising with assholes. I don’t believe that for the average person that anything is going to change under anyone who does the “revolutionary” act of running for office. I don’t believe you can spare anyone from the side effects of capitalism by running for office. That includes the Greens and that would have included Bernie.

In Los Angeles year after year I saw the poorest sections of L.A .get poorer and poorer. L.A. did become safer (depending on your definition of safety), but that added safety was just for the “better” people coming in to gentrify. Let me state that better and not just regurgitate what keeps getting written to avoid talking about the details of power. Parts of L.A. were made safer for the investors who want to bring in people and projects that could make more them more money.

In Los Angeles I also saw the middle class disappear. In Los Angeles people are either very rich or very poor. This happened under Democrats.

Under a Democratic California, under a bunch of fake nonprofits, under a bunch of racially diverse Southern California based politicians, under a bunch of fake neoliberals who used the poor for grants and think pieces the actual people of L.A. have gotten poorer.

Recently I moved to New Jersey. On my way out of Los Angeles I stepped over about twenty homeless young people. My friend traveling with me looked a bit disturbed. I tried to put their mind at ease by explaining how it was totally normal that people were living in squalor and sleeping in their own feces. I also explained that there is this nonprofit that is going to build them little houses. Little houses with no bathrooms or kitchens, but better than a cardboard box.

This explanation did not seem to make my friend more comfortable, so then I said, “The valet in L.A. is really cheap, that almost makes up for the other stuff.”

As I went through the other states I wanted to know, “Where are the homeless people?”
I actually kept saying, “There are no homeless people here, where are the homeless people?”

I was used to people being very poor in L.A. The poor are part of the Southern California landscape. They are like the Pacific Ocean and the Hollywood sign.

In L.A. poor college students live in tents surrounding the community colleges.

When I told people in New Jersey about this they said, “Oh they must want to do that. You guys in L.A. are so trendy.”

No, it is not some trendy thing they want to do. The young people here (and some of the old ones) are actually homeless.

And the thing is this, they are kept poor, because that makes more money. It makes more money to keep people poor in Los Angeles than to invest and make it nice. No federal monies, no grants, no tax break incentives if you work to keep a community nice and if it’s a Black or Brown community then why the hell would you want to waste any kind of investment on that when you can just over police it, keep it poor and make sure the jobs pay nothing…I mean with that you can write think piece after think piece on it, you can start all kinds of cool nonprofits, you can do art projects, you can do radio shows, you can do a sort of exploration and seem cool and liberal with your FB updates about how this person of color did this interesting thing and this person of color did that interesting thing…it is like doing missionary work, but you can get home in enough time for drinks and bike riding.

I will never again tell you who to vote for. I will never again imply that your life will be improved, because you punched a hole next to that politician’s name.

I get some people want to vote for the lesser of two evils, but you know…for me I guess because so many of the poor people in L.A. looked like me or maybe because I have empathy or something and don’t think anyone should have to live in squalor, so that the middle class can be numbed as it is dragged to the working class. I say fuck evil, all of evil, even a little bit of evil.

Teka Lark is a journalist, poet and satirist based in the Metropolitan New York area. She is the founder of the Blk Grrrl Book Fair, Feminist Preschool www.FeministPreschool.com
and the author of the upcoming book, Queen of Inglewood, to be published on Word Palace Press.

Jill Stein Has Convinced Me to Support Hillary

By Chris Lowe (September 22, 2016)

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Since last year I have toyed with the idea of pursuing a “safe state” strategy if Bernie Sanders did not get the Democratic nomination, i.e. finding ways to support Hillary Clinton in swing states with money or phone banking, while voting for Jill Stein in Oregon because the Green Party platform is basically social democratic in ways I mainly support, and because I do object to the constriction of our political debates by our version of “the two party system.”

However, the Stein campaign’s strategy is to only criticize Donald Trump by linking him to Hillary Clinton and criticizing both of them simultaneously in the same ways, without calling out the distinctiveness of the evils he represents. Worse, many vocalizations of Stein supporting friends and participants in post-Sanders groups go further, criticizing Clinton exclusively and *never* criticizing Trump, or in some cases, actually arguing that Clinton is worse and more dangerous than Trump.

Thus, the Stein campaign and her supporters have convinced me that to support Stein in any way would be to abandon fundamental commitments that define even minimal progressivism for me.

——–

If people want to be against the “duopoly” of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, which considerably share neoliberal economics and militarism, I can understand that. I share the criticism of the dominance of neoliberal economics, entirely in the RP and to a large degree in the DP, and of bipartisan U.S. militarism and warfare. I see parties as less important as a focus for changing them than many anti-capitalist and anti-“corporatist” friends.

I don’t understand how supporting Jill Stein would change the duopoly in the least.

I do understand that many people think or hope it might, somehow, and respect that motive for supporting Stein.

What I don’t understand, accept, or respect is ignoring that the duopoly analysis involves TWO parties, and that Donald Trump represents the worst forces and values in RP side of the duopoly, which need to be directly confronted on their own terms, by themselves.

Trump promotes an aggressive racist and misogynist authoritarian nationalism at home. He makes alliance with the anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ religious right, for prominent example in elevating the hard religious right Mike Pence to his VP candidate. Trump also promotes “mainstream” Republican neoliberalism on economics including massive health, safety and ecological deregulation proposals, reversal of expanded social insurance in health care, and aggressive expansion of fossil fuel extraction, exports, and domestic use. His opposition to the TPP is an outlier, and his main statement about that is that he would negotiate “a better deal” for U.S. companies — not seek trade that protects worker rights and the ecology, both of which are anathema to him.

Trump’s mobilization of authoritarian nationalism affects his approach to international affairs, which is not isolationist contrary to some wishful thinking on the left and MSM narratives. He is not anti intervention. He criticizes Democrats for weakness and poor interventions, but wants more. He wants to be freed of restraints that respect for European concerns and Japanese and South Korean concerns might impose on him. He proposes a hostile and aggressive attitude toward Mexico and expanded U.S. warfare in Syria and Iraq.

———

If Jill Stein were running a campaign that was based on “oppose neoliberalism and militarism in all their forms,” aggressively identifying Trump as a neoliberal, an authoritarian, a bigot, and a warmonger, all of which are true, and making a case for how opposing the duopoly on both sides of it by supporting her offers a path to a better future, I could at least consider supporting her.

But her actual stance of in effect saying that Clinton is a bigger threat than Trump, which is both a lie, and undermines the “duopoly” argument and Stein’s sincerity about it, and the adoption among far too many pro-Stein supporters of that position even more overtly — Stein at least has the grace to be a little murky about it — makes it impossible for me even to consider supporting her, as I once did consider.

There is NOTHING progressive about giving Trump a pass.

The Left Underestimates the Danger of Trump

By Arun Gupta (September 21, 2016)

I know it’s the fifth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, but there is little to celebrate at such a grim moment. That being the likelihood Trump may very well win.
If he does, Black Lives Matter will be declared a domestic terrorist outfit, just like the Earth Liberation Front was under Bush.
Trump and Attorney General Giuliani would relish using the National Guard to crush blockades of oil pipelines and trains, and indigenous people defending their lands. There will be no more climate justice movement or even hesitant steps toward limiting climate change.An English-only law would likely be passed, DACA be withdrawn, and sanctuary cities outlawed. White supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the Klan, and the Alt-Right would all be welcome into his administration, overtly or covertly.

There would be an all-out assault on reproductive rights and Planned Parentood

Significant gains made at the National Labor Relations Board in the last few years will be overturned.

Huge swaths of the West under federal control will be turned over to logging, ranching, mining, and oil and gas industries.

Tens of millions would go from inadequate healthcare to no healthcare.

The Alt Right will aggressively disrupt the left.

Massive voter suppression becomes the norm.

There will be organized vigilante violence, perhaps even mini-pogroms, against Muslim and Mexican communities with the state turning a blind eye.

Don’t think it can’t happen; the WWI period saw hideous pogroms against African-Americans and Chicanos with state support. Entire communities were wiped out and thousands killed.

This would just be the beginning. Trump makes Reagan’s Voodoo economic policies like a beacon of rational economic planning. His combination of budget-busting tax cuts, decimating social welfare, roiling U.S. alliances, and abrogating free-trade deals would send the economy into a nosedive. As soon as a recession hits, Trump would immediately go hunting for scapegoats to distract his followers. This could include a ban on Muslim immigration, a registration program, and mass round-ups of immigrants, meaning concentration camps to hold them before they were ousted, overseen by his “deportation force” of Brownshirts.

There is a quaint notion on the left that somehow Trump is hot air. This ignores the dynamics he’s set in motion that will make new types of state-sponsored racial violence all but inevitable. This is not just a quantitative change over Obama and Clinton, but a qualitative one. In fact, it may even be worse that what I am outlining here. This is a man who muses about using nuclear weapons, he ignores even basic bourgeois political norms or rules, and he is lustily cheered by tens of millions when he calls for the assassination of his opponents and mass ethnic cleansing.

Yet a significant portion of the left is obsessed with how terrible Hillary Clinton is, both as a candidate and politically. As if this is somehow news. I see very little from the Facebook left on the extreme dangers Trump represents. I’ve gone to six different Trump events, and it’s evident he has consolidated a white nationalist movement that is demanding a 21st century apartheid state. Even if it doesn’t happen right away, Trump will inevitably go down this path as he sabotages the entire economy and U.S. foreign relations.

Meanwhile, there is a bizarre faith on the left that the ruling class will somehow keep him in check, despite the fact he will have control over every branch of government. This is matched by a warped belief that somehow extreme racist violence will create new left-wing mass movements. In reality, all the recent organizing gains will whither as the left is forced to wage losing defensive struggles against violent white nationalists.

No one will be able to stop his dictatorial, white supremacist agenda. Congress won’t stop him. He will have a majority on the Supreme Court, and while sections of the ruling class may be deeply unhappy, they will still be safe and obscenely wealthy and can always escape.

This election is a choice between two movements. Do you want to see movements like Black Lives Matter, Climate Justice, low-wage workers, immigrant rights, and other left social forces continue to grow and develop? Or do you want to see Neo-Nazis, the Klan, the Alt-Right on the offense and backed by a Trump administration?

A painful, radical truth: we are the problem

By S. Brian Willson (September 21, 2016)

As much as we choose to blame politicians, corporations, the military industrial complex, capitalist economics, etc., for causing our severe problems, in the end, virtually all of us moderns are complicit. None of these institutions have been created in a vacuum. They are creations of human beings like ourselves, and most “First World” peoples demand continuance of incredible material consumption at the expense of outsourcing unspeakable consequences to other people and the Earth. We have become slaves to money, things, technology, and comfort and convenience (me, too). This is totally unsustainable – ecologically, or morally.

Our own lifestyles provide the political and economic fuel feeding this system. Our lives are now totally dependent upon the elaborate infrastructure of imperial plunder, gouging the earth and other cultures of their lifeblood, including electricity, requiring mining of and burning carbon. And most of us are in debt to sustain this modern materialism, precluding the kind of fierce independence needed for serious collective obstruction of business as usual while abandoning our dependence upon the system.

We have been the problem; now we have the opportunity to save ourselves by becoming the solution – not by obeying or abiding by the system, but by re-configuring ourselves in very local, simple tool and food sufficient communities – thousands of them in communication with one another. The stakes are high – our survival with dignity, even if with substantially reduced numbers.

RX: Radical downsizing/simplicity, replacing national currency with local community cooperation and sharing. In essence, sharing and caring in communities within each bioregion.

White Supremacy and Trump Cannot Have Our People

By Chris Crass (July 28, 2016)

White working class anti-racist leadership is rising all around us and points us towards the work that must be done to unite white communities away from the death culture of racism and into the life-affirming, liberatory mass movement for racial justice and Black Lives Matter that is all around us. And to help us get there, it’s important to take note of the differences between a middle class and a working class orientation to the work of ending racism.

One of the dangers of a middle class-oriented anti-racism is that it replicates some of the ways middle class people are institutionally positioned in society. This isn’t about individual people making mistakes, it’s about a political orientation that evolves out of the lived experiences of people trying to survive in a capitalist society invested in the exploitation of the vast majority of people’s labor, hearts, and souls.

A middle class-oriented anti-racism often operates from:

1) a focus on individual achievement, rather then collective/community justice. Often those recently becoming middle class are encouraged and rewarded for looking “down” on their working class and poor communities, families, cultures, and pasts.

+ for anti-racist work, with a middle class orientation, this then often looks like an over-emphasis on changing personal behavior, using correct language, and calling out other people who aren’t acting and speaking in the right way. It can lead to a looking down on the communities that you have come from and distancing yourself from your own past by ruthlessly criticizing everyone who acts and talks like you did two weeks ago.

2) fundamental insecurity based on striving towards a vision of the American Dream that puts you in massive debt, overworking, emotional isolation trying to present as “we’re doing fine, we have it all together”. Insecurity which isn’t just imagined, but rooted in the soul crushing, body breaking realities of how capitalism functions to make the vast majority of us live in regular fear of losing our ability to take care of and provide for our families and loved ones. Capitalism thrives on mass structural, cultural, and social insecurity and it understandably then shows up in our liberation movements. To be middle class is to be just making it, and to properly internalize and project the insecurity.

+ for anti-racist work, this can translate into a wanting everything to look perfect, fear of making mistakes, and external and internal pressure to appear and convince oneself that “we’ve got it all figured out”. This fuses with the individual achievement to again push many of us into an individualistic mode of operating – to work as hard as we can (into burnout), to experience a sense that nothing we do is ever enough, to continually doubt our selves and doubt the possibility of large scale transformative change. To deal with the structural insecurity by tearing down everyone around us, to use cynicism and critique to appear more experienced, effective, and sophisticated then others in the movement.

The enemy is capitalism, not middle class activists. And a middle class orientation isn’t something that only middle class people can have, it’s the orientation that all of us who aren’t ruling class are raised to endlessly and exhaustingly strive for.

A working class oriented anti-racism often operates from:

1) a focus on structural change and collective/community power and pushes us beyond a focus on unattainable personal perfection and into the long haul person commitment to build grassroots liberatory power. A working class-oriented anti-racism often leads people into seeing the institutional injustices failing their communities, how racism mobilizes working class white communities into active agents of perpetuating everyday acts of racism that serve to enforce and maintain the structural racism that generates wealth and power or the ruling class.

+ for anti-racist work, this translates into a vision of organizing white communities in ways that addresses the real ways they are screwed over in this system and unites the demands and efforts for justice to an understanding of how white supremacy helps maintain a lack of economic security in white working class communities, and how racial justice is central not only to economic justice for all, but freeing the humanity of white people from the death culture of white supremacy. This means seeing the messy, contradictory, complex humanities of white people and looking for opportunities to move white people into justice work, rather then a focus on distancing through easy denouncements. This means become experts at seeing and illuminating opportunities for large number so white people to join in the struggle and be on the right side of history, rather then a focus on personal purity of “perfect politics”.

2) a focus on long haul change rooted in history, rooted in loving our people, rooted in knowing that our people are not just privileged through socialization into whiteness, but our people are also battered and twisted by whiteness that turns our capacities to love into engines of hate.

White working class anti-racist leadership is growing all around us:

With Drew Joy and the Southern Maine Workers’ Center organizing in white working class rural communities for health care and for Black Lives Matter, and being part of national multiracial coalitions that unite white working class leaders with leaders of color to fight for an agenda rooted in racial, economic, gender, social, and environmental justice.

With Meredith Martin Moates and the McElroy House: Organization for Cultural Resources in rural working class Arkansas creating community gatherings to learn about cooperative economics, Transgender liberation, and what it means to stand against racism in these times.

With Jardana Peacock calling white anti-racist healers, spiritual leaders, and activists to share personal practices that help ground them in times likes these and help them take action for racial justice, for Black Lives Matter, and then collecting these practices as a resource for white people to use all over the country.

With Kellie Kelly, a Unitarian Universalist faith leader who is creating cross class conversations in UU congregations on economic justice, how anti-working class attitudes permeate middle class culture, the importance of supporting working class faith leadership, and in all of this, why majority white faith communities need to act for racial justice and Black Lives Matter.

With Rahula Janowski and Catalyst Project, putting forward a vision of a working class-oriented anti-racism, mentoring and developing white working class leaders from around the country, and helping to illuminate how parenting and families are part of liberation movement, rather then a distraction from it.

With Zoe Williams in Colorado engaged in organizing a multiracial working class coalition for improved public transportation, through the working class women’s rights group 9to5, while also bringing their leadership to their local SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and nationally through anti-racist toolkits for white families.

A working class-orientation isn’t something that all working class people just have, nor is it something that middle class people can’t learn. A critical step is learning from and supporting working class leaders and the work they are doing. Another step is developing class consciousness of our own experiences, taking time to understand our class position (knowing that capitalism does as much as it can to create class confusion), and then making choices about the class orientation of our work.

We are not here to become the perfect white anti-racists, to make changing behavior and language the goal (rather then part of the larger process), to strive for an educated white anti-racist elite.

We are here because those of us raised to be white in this white supremacist society refuse to be silent and complicity in this racist society that devours lives, dreams, humanity and dignity in communities of color, while also poisoning the hearts and minds of white people who then blame our economic miseries and insecurities on communities of color.

We are here because we are ready to rise in love for all of our people, and in rage for the structural nightmare of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

We are here for collective liberation, with the values of socialism rather then capitalism at the heart. And in this white working class leadership, organization, and a working class orientation to the work are all key to not only defeating Trump, but to all of us getting free.

Dan Savage on the Green Party: Just No

By Adam Hefty (July 20, 2016)

– Incredibly privileged gay white man comfortably speaking for all the oppressed? Just no.

– Acting as though political change in the US progresses in some gradual, arithmetic way from local races to national races? Just no.

(How could anyone think this after just watching the Bernie Sanders campaign? Yes, I’m aware that it happened within the context of a Democratic primary. But we just watched one of the two most significant insurgent, progressive presidential campaigns in the last 40 years, and you are seriously telling people to run for city council to the exclusion of higher offices? Also the Greens are running for city council in many places … but it’s the fact that Savage thinks this is a serious argument and people seem to buy it that I find flabbergasting.)

– My 2 cents, since I’m already counter-ranting: it’s not just California; if you live in one of 35-40 states that are probably safe for one major party or the other, and you have left-liberal, progressive, or radical politics, then you are wasting your vote if you vote for Clinton, in that you are voting for something you do not want when you could be voting for something you more or less do want. Live in one of the swing states? I dunno, consult your conscience, higher power, or friends, and make a call. Vote one way or the other, realize that your hands are dirty either way, realize that voting is a rather incidental political act, and join an organization that is doing something to fight anti-immigrant politics, Islamophobia, white supremacy, austerity, etc.

– On “tone” or the ethics of the discourse: engaging with a Dan Savage rant about electoral politics as if he’s not just a hack on this topic drags the conversation into such a muck. Who and what benefits when we stop having careful conversations about third-party politics and the dangers of a Trump presidency or a Clinton presidency and we descend into a slug-fest of shaming, chiding, vitriol, and condescension? Responding to this or the Rebecca Solnit article from 2012 feels like getting masterfully trolled by a puppetmaster with a Bill Clinton mask. I’m a sucker every time.

We Have Seen This Bitterness Before: Reflections on 1968 and Now

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By Mark Naison (July 20, 2016)

I have many friends, most of them younger than me, who are terrified by the divisions in the country, by the violent acts that periodically add to the tension, and by an election which brings out a level of fear and anger they have never seen before.

Unfortunately, this is not new to me. I have vivid memories of the year 1968 and that Presidential election. We had a terrible war. Assasinations. Riots in every major city. Campus take overs. And a country divided down the middle over race and politics

I will give you snippets of this to put things in perspective. Race was a huge divider. There was bitter white resentment of Black urban uprisings and campus protests, fueled by a third party candidate named George Wallace, and used as a political platform in somewhat less visceral ways by the Republican candidate Richard Nixon. You could feel the tension on the streets, especially in neighborhoods which were undergoing rapid racial change. I vividly remember signs along the Cross Bronx Expressway which said “This is Wallace Country” as the line separating whites from Blacks and Latinos quickly moved from Tremont Avenue to Fordham Road. It also divided families. I was basically kicked out of my family for falling in love with a Black woman and adopted by her extended family, which had a base in the Bronx. Walking hand in hand through the city was like maneuvering a minefield. You never knew who was going to blow up at us

But it wasn’t just race. It was the war, drugs and the “hippie youth culture too.” I vividly remember driving through the Midwest with white friends on the way to Chicago, all of whom had long hair, and getting hate looks from parents while the children passed the peace sign. Some of my friends had been virtually disowned by their parents too, for growing their hair long, opposing the war, or participating in protests..

Those of us who were living through it saw no end in sight. Many of us thought we would die early deaths and that there would be a revolution or the emergence of some kind of fascist state. We had our apocalyptic fantasies and great music to fuel our fevered imaginations.

But though some people died, others burned themselves out, and families fractured, the nation survived and we stumbled on without our political system collapsing.

I suspect the same will happen now. We will hurt one another, and leave some lasting scars, but we will not turn into some unrecognizable dictatorship.

So friends, by all means worry, but do not despair. We will get through this. Damaged, but not destroyed.

Melania’s Speech: Bootstrapping and Manifest Destiny

(July 19, 2016)

Phoenix Calida:

So um, I get all the jokes about Melania plagiarizing.

But can I please just point out that the speech in question was about the moral and ethical superiority of capitalism and boot strapping?

And both white republicans AND white liberals couldn’t stop jizzing themselves over the greatness of the bootstrap message?

There’s an underlying problem when both parties look at people from “unfortunate” circumstances- one black, one an immigrant- and praise their bootstrap struggle, rags-to-riches life rhetoric like The Holy Gospel.

We should be concerned the same words were so popular at political events of parties that are allegedly opposites. These political parties are not for the people as a whole. But we knew that.

Chris Crass:

People seem to have completely missed the point of ‪#‎MelaniaTrump‘s speech. She was giving everyone a glimpse of what it means to Make America Great Again; rich white people so deeply accustomed to taking and benefitting from the fruits of unpaid Black labor, so entitled to it, like Indigenous Nations land through Manifest Destiny, that they can effortlessly and cavalierly claim the work of “subgroups” as their own, and be celebrated for their genius.

Plagiarism? This is Donald Trump and the Angry White People Party reestablishing their vision of the proper ruling order.

Oregon is Out of Step on Police Use of Force

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By Joseph Orosco (July 13, 2016)

Last week, I wrote that tackling the problem of police violence was going to be difficult without altering legal standards around the use of deadly force. I used the example of Missouri’s laws which shielded Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Some people contacted me about the piece and asked me how Oregon state laws compared. Others wrote and insisted that police training really could make a difference and cited our local Corvallis police department as a nationally recognized example of what good cops can do.

I want to insist that better training of police officers may be a good thing, but the deeper issue is what police officers are legally allowed to do—that is, what legal standards around using deadly force can law enforcement officials use to defend their actions in court?

As it turns out, the Missouri legislature is working to alter their legal standards this year when it realized that their laws ran contrary to US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) standards. In 1985, SCOTUS ruled, in the case of Tennessee v. Garner, that police officers may not use deadly force to prevent the escape of a suspect unless the officers have “probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” Missouri law previously allowed a police officer to kill someone if they believed that a suspect had merely committed a felony or attempted to commit a felony. For instance, if Darren Wilson had believed that Mike Brown had robbed the convenience store, then he would have had legal justification to shoot him dead if he tried to flee arrest.

In 2015, Amnesty International issued a report that reviewed the use of force standards across the United States. Their key findings:

Nine states and Washington DC have NO legal standards at all on the use of deadly force by police officers.

All 50 states and Washington DC fail to comply with international law and legal standards on the use of lethal force by police.

The international standards set by the United Nations in 1990 hold that:

“Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.”

Thirteen states have legal standards on the use of deadly force by police officers that do not even comply with the Garner standard set by SCOTUS.

Oregon is one of those states.

Oregon law allows police officers to shoot to kill a suspect if (among several conditions) the suspect is believed to have committed a felony involving use or threat of imminent physical force against someone, or engaged in kidnapping, arson, or burglary. Indeed, the law allows officers to use deadly force if they believe a suspect has committed any felony at all, given the “totality of the circumstances existing at the time and place” as they appear to the office and whether or not the suspect poses imminent threat of death or grave harm to the officer or someone else.

In other words, Oregon law allows police officers to use deadly force against suspects in a manner that is contrary to both national and international standards of law.

Body cameras and better training won’t stop the kind of killings we have seen if it is the law itself that licenses those actions.

It would appear to me that any groups in Oregon interested in preventing police brutality against people of color should have as part of their work a strategy to force state lawmakers to reform Oregon’s use of deadly force standards and bring them in line with the nationally and internationally recognized laws. Missouri has done some of this work. We should also.

Police Brutality: The Pattern Continues

3rd

By. S. Brian Willson (July 13, 2016)

As a criminologist I find it instructive to place police brutality in its historical perspective (it is not an aberration). For example:

(1) The 1968 “Walker Report: Rights in Conflict” examined the civil disturbances (“rioting” at the DNC in Chicago, Aug, 22-29). It took more than 20,000 pages of statements from 3,437 eyewitnesses and participants, looked at 180 hours of film, and over 12,000 still photographs. The report essentially concluded that disorders resulted primarily from refusal of authorities to grant permits and from the subsequent systematic brutal and indiscriminate attacks by Chicago police on demonstrators, most of whom were peaceful. So, in effect, we witnessed government brutal violence against US Americans at home protesting an illegal war abroad, while that same, the government was committing brutal violence against Vietnamese in their homeland who were protesting the illegal war waged against them. It was the police, in effect, who had rioted against the people. The Walker report cited “ferocious, malicious and mindless violence” and “gratuitous beating” by the police.

Many years later it was discovered that “almost one in every six demonstrators was an undercover agent” (see Myra MacPherson. “All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone” (New York: Scribner, 2006), 421)

(2) The 1931 (Hoover) Wickersham Commission’s Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement concluded that the “third degree,”– the willful infliction of pain and suffering on criminal suspects–was “widespread.” The commission discovered that “official lawlessness” by police, jailers, judges, magistrates, and others in the criminal justice system was widespread in many jurisdictions, including major cities. It investigated illegal arrests, bribery, entrapment, coercion of witnesses, fabrication of evidence, “third degree” practices, police brutality, and illegal wiretapping. It defined “The third degree” as employment of methods which inflict suffering, physical or mental, upon a person, in order to obtain from that person information about a “crime”, saying it was “widespread” and “secret.” It called the practice (torture) “shocking in its character and extent, violative of American traditions and institutions.” It catalogued some of the “third degree methods”: physical brutality, threats, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme cold or heat–also known as ‘the sweat box’–and blinding with powerful lights and other forms of sensory overload or deprivation.”

This behavior IS very much part of the (US) American tradition and institutions. We need to unravel from the entire mythology about the US founding and its continuing “exceptionalism.” Exceptionally diabolical, perhaps.

We need to develop nonviolent revolutionary strategies of noncooperation, withdrawing support from dependency upon the system while radically downsizing into cooperative, locally food sufficient communities.