white supremacy – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

This is America: 2021 Edition

Vancouver does not have an active antifascist black block to oppose the white suprematist using mask mandates as an excuse to terrorize students and leaders of local schools. There are no giant national attention grabbing optics like there are across the river. They will go to Portland for a good brawl and then travel across a bridge to BBQ, drink, and harass locals daily. We LIVE with these people. We teach their children. They feel no need to hide who they are and what they are not only willing to do, but hoping to do.

By Amberlynn Montgomery (September 13, 2021)

Twice last week, Proud Boys gathered to harass kids for wearing masks on their first week of school. Many students reported being called all kinds of slurs and other names. Proud Boys and their supporters chanted USA and displayed white power symbols. A high school, a middle school, and an elementary school all went into lockdown as these adults attempted to enter the buildings. In order to curb the disruption to student learning, a Clark County judge issued an injunction at the district’s request to ban protest actions within a mile of any school district properties.

Proud Boys and other adults who don’t even have students attending the school planned to be there Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday on the second week of school. The injunction was impactful in that they did not show up (as far as I know) Wednesday or Thursday. (Although on Thursday, I read a few reports and saw videos of anti-maskers returning to their old target harassing local grocery stores. It came to fists at Target. I don’t 100% know if it is the same people who would have been at Skyview High school, but they are sending the same message.)

They DID plan to still protest at Skyview that second Friday despite the injunction, gathering just before the end of the school day so they can harass kids as they leave for the weekend. Of COURSE they see the injunction as illegally curtailing freedom of speech… especially as their interpretation of mask mandates are also that such mandates are illegal suppression.

That’s all pretty straight forward.

Here’s where things get complicated:

The local sheriff has publicly declared that the new state laws limiting police use of force (due to excessive force including deaths that protesters rallied against through most of 2020) means they can’t really do their job. They sent a letter stating this to everyone in the county, claiming that because of the law, they can’t respond to calls and can only respond to anything AFTER much violence has occurred.

It is clear that the sheriff’s interpretation is a political move. When the state took an inch the sheriff’s department declared they took a mile in order to turn support back in their direction. By declaring “the state won’t let us do anything” they can deflect anger and consequences for their actions and convince people that the use of force laws need to be repealed.

So, despite many people calling ahead of time declaring their fear for the safety of their children, the sheriff’s department responded by saying there’s nothing they can do. They are claiming they cannot enforce anything. As a result known violent offenders headed on over to the high school.

Proud boys have openly threatened school board members in many of the local districts. Other groups with other names with innocent sounding names like Washougal Moms, function as the public organizing force behind much of the harassment and claim they are victimized by the district. An armed militia patrolled the beaches this week. I have no idea if this is related or how often it happens.

A curious person asked and was told they were ensuring no homeless encampment show up there. Visible houseless communities have ballooned in our town over the past year. Portland has criminalized and frequently harassed their houseless community so much that many have moved here. The cost of housing has skyrocketed. COVID has sent many more people out of jobs.

Every local office has at least one candidate that has extreme ideology.

COVID cases have been higher than they have for the entire pandemic these past few weeks and not a single person I know who was against vaccines before has been swayed to change their minds.

This is my beautiful city that I love. There is also so much good here. But this sad report, I fear, could be written about any city anywhere.

This is America.

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.

Everything You Would Call the Cops For, The Cops Have Done to Me

By Teka Lark (June 15, 2020)

CW: sexual assault

I heard someone say, “We need the police, what if you get home invaded.” Chances of that happening are almost nonexistent for boring people who worry about being home invaded on Facebook. That’s a crime you have to plan out, it’s not a dash-and-grab kind of situation, and it typically involves people who you know.

I, unfortunately, DID get home invaded: by the police. I hid behind the piano while the police dressed in street clothes ransacked my house and destroyed my computer owing to some stories I wrote in my newspaper.

I remember my first interaction with the police. I was 14 years old, my friend had called the police on the drug dealers next door (look up Rampart for details on that). Turned out the drug dealers next door were also the police. They put guns to our heads and threatened to drop our bodies in the LA River.

My second interaction with the police, I was 15. I was a camp counselor, and for some reason, the police helped to run the camp. Anyways, a police officer offered to take me home. In the car, he put his hand on my leg. Right before he got to my house, he stopped the car and sexually assaulted me in the car. I had begged my parents to let me have a job. They said they were worried something would happen to me, so I did not tell anyone what happened, and I hung out at the library for the rest of the summer.

I have only called the police one time in my entire life.

In 2003, I called the police when my friend’s (who was on vacation) taco stand in Los Feliz looked like it had been robbed. When the police arrived, it became apparent that they were viewing me as the perpetrator of the crime, so I somehow managed to get them to let me go to the bathroom of the eatery next door, and once I got in the bathroom, I exited the window and went home.

I have been questioned half a dozen times by the police for not having a car and waiting for the bus to work as a special education kindergarten teacher. Fun fact: If the police think you’re a sex worker and question you about it, they also sexually harass and/or try to become a client when they stop you.

I have ZERO positive stories of the police. I have had 100% negative interactions. They have never solved a problem; they have never made anything better; they have almost always made things worse.

Literally, everything you call the police for, the police themselves have done to me. Is that called irony?

But really, I don’t think if you’re white, you’ll have to worry. I really can’t see the United States allowing you to be treated the way I have been treated, cops or no cops. That would be barbaric.

How to Deal With Racists on the Job and In Your Family: A Message for White People

By Mark Naison (June 15, 2020)

Right now, your Black sisters and brothers are depending on you to make this country a safer place for them to live, work and raise their children. That can only happen if white people hold other white people accountable for behavior which makes Black people feel isolated, stressed out, and in danger.

There is no simple way to do this.

In the long run, we are going to have to change the way key institutions function, the way history is taught, and how resources are allocated, but individual white people do have influence over how their white friends, co-workers, and family members conduct themselves in public

The most important thing you can do is come to the defense of Black people in your neighborhood, on the job, on your team, in your college residence hall or in a store or on the street when they are being racially profiled, intimidated or attacked, whether it is by a boss, a coach, by law enforcement, their teammates or fellow students, or by random people they encounter. In this society, it is the job of white people of conscience to risk their own safety to come to the defense of Black people under attack.

But secondly, you have to police the language of white people around you. Everyone has the right to hold views about important subjects you might disagree with so long as they don’t use threatening or abusive language, but the minute someone in your family, on the job, in the locker room, or at the local bar uses the “N” word or an equivalent reference to Latinos, Muslims, Jews or Gay people, you need to say “Hold It. You can’t say that word around me. If you say it again, I am not only leaving this gathering, I am filming you saying it and putting it on social media”

The normalization of racial epithets in private leads directly to racial intimidation in public.

It’s time white people of conscience risk being hated to make Black people in America feel safe.

Think that’s rough? What’s rougher is what this country will be like if we DON’T do that.

Why “Demilitarizing Law Enforcement” Will Make the Country Safer

By Mark Naison (June 9, 2020)

If we want to have a society where life expectancy and infant mortality are not at the bottom of advanced nations, and where 50% of the wealth doesn’t accrue to the top 1 percent, we have to gradually shift public funds from prisons and policing to education, health care, and affordable housing.

As we have learned from this Pandemic: NO ONE is safe when poor people and people of color are packed together in crowded residences, deprived of preventive health care, and concentrated in the most dangerous and lowest paying occupations.

As protests continue in every city, town and hamlet, we need to commit ourselves to “demilitarizing” our law enforcement apparatus and investing in a broad array of measures that improve public health and expand economic opportunity.

It is gratifying to see a broad range of leaders in business and government proclaim “Black Life Matters” and commit themselves to an honest effort to confront their own complicity in the promotion and preservation of racism and white supremacy, but without major changes in how law enforcement functions, and how public funds are distributed, these efforts at moral reformation may have little lasting impact on how we actually live
in our communities.

The Good Old Days Weren’t Good For Everyone

By Teka Lark (June 8, 2020)

During WW2, over 127,000 Japanese Americans were put into internment camps.

The Japanese American community lost $400 million, which would be $5 billion in today’s money. I don’t give a damn if Japanese Americans got a pathetic amount of reparations (if they were still alive), you never recover from someone uprooting your family and throwing you in jail. You can never make a thing such as that right.

The good old days were not good for everyone.

Racism creates two parallel worlds one for white people
and another for nonwhite people, a world where you have to be
exceptional, and nearly perfect, to have the life of an ordinary white person.

For Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Black people, the fear that white people have now due to Trump, we have known that fear, and sadly many of us are numb to it.

The only difference with this particular leader is he is messing with white lives now. He is going to destroy the white middle class. He’s going to destroy your colleges. He’s going to destroy your tenure. He’s going to dismantle your K-12 schools. He’s going to dismantle labor laws. He’s going to make you choose between getting your teeth fixed and paying your light bills. He’s going to make you choose between paying your rent and staying home to raise your child, which seems unreasonable, for a person, not working class, not Black or Latinx. Those problems are coming for you under Trump.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this US is much worse for you if you’ve never been enslaved in the US, lynched in the US, excluded from jobs and/or housing in the US, because of your race, murdered for reading, murdered for owning a business, had your whole life taken from you and your family locked away, because white people are afraid. I’m sure if you’ve never experienced this on US soil, this America is terrifying for you.

I’m sure my great-great-great-great-great grandfather was terrified too when they brought him over here in chains on a boat, so I understand.

I know you may think I am exaggerating, that’s because you live in an entirely different America than I do.

Many of us not protected by white supremacy have had the displeasure to come upon your grandparents.

You don’t need to warn us about things that happened outside the US. We have lived nightmares in this country under your leaders. Leaders like Washington, Lee, Roosevelt, Lincoln, McKinley, and Polk have murdered us, kidnapped us, stole our land, lynched us, and interned us. You don’t need to point to anywhere else, you can just point to the horrible things that happened to nonwhite people here.

You can say, “Please, don’t vote for Trump, because I don’t want to be treated the way the US has had no problem treating nonwhite people for the 243 years existence of this stolen country.”

No Longer Defensive

(Photo by Heather Mount, @heathermount)

By S. (June 2, 2020)

A number of thoughtful friends have reached out to ask me how I’m doing in the wake of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Christian Cooper and the riots that followed.

Short answer: I’m optimistic.

Longer answer: 20 years ago Amadou Diallo was murdered by the police and the conversations I had with many of my friends were very discouraging. Lots of blaming the victim. The discussions turned toward the circumstances. Oscar Grant was shot with the barrel of a gun pressed against his head 10 years ago. Many of my white friends just didn’t want to talk about it.

Six years ago was Michael Brown’s murder. He was no angel according to many people who didn’t know him.

When recounting the story of a family member’s brush with police, a close white friend wanted to know why he wasn’t faster in obeying the cop. This Becky blamed my family member for his brutal treatment, false arrest, and subsequent criminal record. Today, her posts are all fire. She gets it. In the past many of my white friends, possibly you too, dear reader, would go junior CSI on me and try to prove that every dead black person had it coming.

The majority of white people I know are waking up to the reality of being black and brown in America. They are no longer questioning the narratives of police brutality. Rather they are questioning the police.

I can finally talk to you all and not be on the defensive. I’m no longer having to bury my emotions so that we can have a rational conversations about the facts and circumstances. I’m no longer having to play defense attorney trying to prove the overwhelming and unbelievable story that a white cop might kill a black person without cause.

An Historian’s Thoughts on the Uprisings in Our Cities

By Mark Naison (May 30, 2020)

As an historian, I am am hardly surprised at the uprisings taking place in cities throughout the country.

The murder of George Floyd pushed people filled with rage at their position in Trump’s America over the edge.

It is not just that repeated murders of unarmed Black men and women, by police or self appointed security agents, had convinced many Black people that most whites signed off on policies that terrorized their communities, it is that they saw the rhetoric and policies of the Trump Administration as a daily assault on their safety and security.

In the minds of many people of color, it is wholly predictable– and profoundly infuriating- that a country that could elect a race baiting demagogue like Donald Trump would sign off on the murder of unarmed Blacks, and never send those responsible to prison

Think about it: you are living in country where gun toting, Nazi and Confederate flag waving whites are cheered on by the President while unarmed Black men and women are shot down in the streets and their own homes, and where immigrant children of color are put in cages.

If you think that experience wasn’t making people unbelievably angry, you are ignoring the lessons of history.

At some point, I suspected, that anger, which I know well because I feel it inside myself, was going to break loose. George Floyd’s death may have been the spark, but there were a long chain of grievances which have come to the surface in its wake

I do not know where these uprisings are going, nor how they are going to end.

I do know they have been a long time coming.

Anybody really LISTENING to what their Black/LatinX friends, colleagues,neighbors and family members have been saying over the last few years, in response to provocation after provocation, should hardly be surprised at what is taking place in the streets of our major cities.

Astroturf Protests Have Some Grassroots Backing

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Aoril 23, 2020)

The face of US fascism/white nationalism, a right wing populist element to it, but also the major Republican party donors, Koch, DeVoss, Coors, etc.

The Republican Party has become a US-style Fascist organization with its storm troopers and radical ideology, the price worth paying apparently for the billionaire donors, themselves libertarian and neoliberal (privatize everything).

But, it’s important to understand that it is not all top down; it does have a popular base that is not in it for the money, and in fundamental ways, the foundation of the fiscal military state (a state designed for war) that is the United States, supports their ideology. And, hey, they control every branch of the federal government, except the House of Representative, which is powerless with a fascist Senate; more than half of the states are Republican, and most of the former Confederate states plus several others are solidly right wing. Democratic Party functionaries and most office holding Democrats do not challenge the content of US patriotism but present a candy coated version of it.

Democrats equally strongly support the military, polls show that 75 percent of the US people “strongly support” the military; no other institution comes close (except the post office).

What If You Opened the Economy and Nobody Came?

By Mark Naison (April 20, 2020)

As protests against state wide shutdowns to prevent the spread of COVID-19 continue to erupt in many states, people are missing one key point. So long as people continue to die in large numbers from COVID-19 and our health care system is stressed well beyond capacity, a large percentage of the population will continue to voluntarily quarantine themselves and avoid situations which put them and their families at risk.

Given the legitimate level of fear people have of devastating consequences to their health if they resume “normal” ( pre-pandemic) activity in the absence of widespread testing and a vaccine, there will be no sudden rush to take advantage of openings of stores, restaurants, theaters, ball parks, hotels and amusement parks without the most extreme precautions being followed

You can change what governments impose , but you can’t change people’s behavior when it has been reinforced by trauma and death. Enough people now know of people who have been hospitalized or died as a result of COVID-19 that they are going to be extremely resistant to resuming activities where social distancing isn’t rigorously enforced.

The “Liberate America” protesters are a far smaller percentage of the population than those who have been traumatized by COVID-19 and fear what it could do to themselves and their families

If you “open the economy” without taking the necessary precautions, the surge in consumer behavior required to make a dent in unemployment will simply not take place.

When people have been traumatized my something real, they will not change their behavior until the source of the trauma has been removed.

Unless the “Liberate America” protesters are ready to drag people out of their homes and force them to shop, go to school and go to work, their protests will have limited impact on the level of economic activity in the country.

Structural Racism is the Reason People of Color Are Dying of Covid-19

By Teka Lark (April 13, 2020)

The Surgeon General, Dr. Adams, stated, to paraphrase, that we people of color (Black people and Latinos) need to lay off the alcohol and healthfully eat so that we won’t die of the COVID-19. People were quite (understandably) outraged, but I also found something similar in the Chicago Defender that also outraged me:

“If it was in place now, it would be issuing nutritional, dietary and lifestyle advice to Blacks that emerging research is beginning to suggest that may minimize the effect of the epigenetic damage.”

Respectability politics sometimes comes dressed in a three-piece suit and other times, it comes dressed in kente cloth. Still, regardless of its uniform, in the end, it blames Black people for our oppression, and it refuses to attack the root cause directly (fewer grants in that).

For many reasons, I don’t like the historical trauma argument. It implies that we’re damaged when we are born and that gives alive racists a get out of jail free card. I’m not willing to do that. I’m not throwing it out, but I feel it’s a dangerous game to play with white institutions, because white institutions are always looking at ways to pathologize Blackness and wiggle out of fixing themselves. Fixing themselves would involve no longer existing.

The disparity in care is a massive problem for Black people. It takes us twice as long to get help, and once we get help, it takes us twice as long to convince medical professionals to understand or rather, care what we ware saying. And once we do all that, we’re dead.

From NPR “All Things Considered” from 2016 Analysis by NYC Health

“Five years of data found that black, college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.”

This analysis and other studies point to a disparity of care.

Another challenge is that Black people live farther from their jobs. Black people and Latinos typically live farther from work and are farther away from good public transit options. That means Black and Latino people generally are walking more than a mile and transferring at least once to get to work. The 2015 “It’s About Time: The Transit Time Penalty and It’s Racial Implications” study of the Minneapolis and Twin Cities area stated that people of color communities were spending 11-46 more hours a year on their commute than white people.

You lose nearly two days of your life just for not being white.

More time commuting means more time being exposed to illness, disease, and just the elements and being in cold weather in addition to stressful commutes lower the immune system.

Another huge issue for Black people is that we typically work in the public sector and the service industry. In July 2010, the Center for Labor Research and Education released a report examining the state of Black workers in the years 2005 – 2007. It found that the public sector is the most critical source of employment for African Americans, and it is the sector that provides us with the highest paying jobs.

Those jobs include education, transportation, sanitation, the postal service. Even when we have degrees, we’re going to be working with the public, owing to the dynamics of race and access in the US.

In 2020 this is still the case.

Outside the public sector, we work in retail services and parts of the health care sector, including home health aides and nursing home workers, jobs that also expose you to the public.

And also the kind of jobs we have outside the public sector tend to be last hired, first fired. Jobs that you can’t do at home, that are at-will employment.

The cemented institutions of racism is the reason that Black people are disproportionately —exposed and dying from COVID-19.

There are no buts here. There are no if we just…no, it’s structural racism, that’s why and that is the only reason why.

References

Nelson, A. (2002). Unequal treatment: Confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Journal of the National Medical Association, 94(8), 666-8.