| [image at right added; thanks for the share, Drew!!] |
| Summer 2015 | Vol:XV-3 | Whole #: 59 |
Today, for a broad swath of people ranging in age from those born in the waning years of the Black Power movement through the interstice between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this moment was embodied in Ferguson.
The precise calculus of generation is elusive. As Jeff Chang has argued, “Generations are fictions.” And yet, we all have a personal and public sense of time that places us within a cohort of history. Whether we use the branding terms “the Hip Hop Generation” or “Generation X,” or the not-for-profit ring of “Millennial Youth,” particularly for those of us who came of age under presidents Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama, the events in this small municipality outside northern St. Louis were profoundly meaningful.
It might even be said that the events of August stretching up until this present moment have helped distinguish the post-civil-rights generations from iconic baby boomers, because the months of mass protest announced what many of us feel is the most pressing domestic political crisis of our time: the emergence of a massive edifice of policing, surveillance, prisons, and punishment that is unprecedented in both U.S. and global history.
Built on recent centuries’ long substructure of white supremacy, but nurtured in an era of neoliberal retreat and technological advance, this massive state-building project, known alternately as mass incarceration, the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, or more simply, according to former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, “the world’s most advanced police state,” has become a defining feature of our times. It is impossible to understand the enormity of the reaction to Michael Brown’s murder without recognizing the daunting shadow cast by state repression in the fifty-year aftermath of the modern Civil Rights movement.
Police left Michael Brown’s body in the street for nearly five hours, immersed in his own blood. Like the body of Emmett Till, the devastating sight of this murdered youth was intolerable. Word and image spread first to the residents of Canfield Green where he lay and then, through the digital magic of cyber networks, to the rest of the St. Louis metro area, the nation, and the world. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Vine carried this story beyond the city’s periphery, ultimately forcing mainstream media to reckon with its gravity. As we will see, however, the media blitz focused not on the destruction of a person, but rather of property. The pattern continued in Baltimore, which is another economically devastated city located in the overlapping borderlands between the North and South that failed to attract sustained press coverage until fevered reports of “looting” became the focal point of the television news cycle.
Even more important to the impact and longevity of Ferguson as site of protest and mobilization was the ingenuity and commitment of the protestors who refused to leave—even when confronted with tanks, military hardware, and clouds of tear gas. Instead they started publicly counting the days of sustained resistance and in so doing announced to St. Louis County and the rest of the world that they would not stop until they had attained justice for Mike Brown and the many other men, women, and children shot down by police. The protest has been going on for some 300 days, and still, it continues.
What made Ferguson into such a watershed moment was not simply the terror-inspiring image of police impunity, but that a large cohort of African-American youth decided to fight back and confront state authorities. Along the way, they developed allies and “co-conspirators,” in the words of Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, from different ethnic and racial communities, more-affluent cities across the country, and international solidarity groups. This was nowhere more true than with Palestinians who tweeted from the West Bank in early August with instructions about how to mitigate the effects of tear gas. International exchange continued and deepened in the months that followed, as the twin threads of Boycott, Divestment, and (BDS) Sanctions against Israel and the burgeoning African-American-led movement against state-sanctioned violence inside the United States intertwined.
During Ferguson October, activists launched a sustained organizing effort that spanned a four-day weekend meant to draw support from across the country in a Black-Power-style remix of Freedom Summer. After attending a Hip Hop gathering including performances by local and nationally known artists such as Tef Poe, T-Dubb, and Dead Prez, I wrote the following words that captured for me the sheer force and beauty of the genesis of a new protest era unlike anything I had experienced firsthand:
I have no words to express what is happening in Ferguson. In the name of Michael Brown, a beautiful black storm against state violence is brewing so dense it has created a gravity of its own, drawing in people from all over the U.S., from centers of wealth and privilege to this city whose most prosperous years were a century ago. It looks explicitly not only to St. Louis City and County police and other municipal law enforcement, but also to the imperial wars in the Middle East as sites of murder and trauma. The call repeated over and over is Stokely Carmichael’s: “Organize, Organize, Organize.” And this growing youth movement has all the ancestral sweetness of kinship. In the words of a local Hip Hop artist/activist, “Our grandparents would be proud of us.”
Local police were not the only focus. Corporate chains Walmart and Quiktrip became flash points of conflict, even more so than the small businesses that the local news identified in the sensationalized coverage of looting in early August. Protestors frequently gathered outside the Department of Justice in St. Louis, while flash mobs appeared regularly throughout the metro area. Consistently, activists sponsored three or four simultaneous direct actions at different locations every day. These varied from flash mobs at Walmart, to protestors whistling “FTP” in Morse code outside the police station.
Organized actions abounded that would have warmed the heart of Saul Alinsky, like the beautiful baritone voice, replete with a full operatic chorus, that pre-empted the St. Louis Symphony’s performance of Brahms’ Requiem. Demonstrators adapted the lyrics from the United Mine Workers’ anthem, “Which Side Are You On,” from the deadly labor strikes in Harlan County, West Virginia’s, coal mines.
Which side are you on friends?
Which side are you on?
Justice for Mike Brown friends.
Justice for us all.
Afterwards, a multiracial group arranged strategically throughout the theater shouted “Black Lives Matter” over and over, a cappella. As they sang, protestors threw long, black-and-white cloth banners over the balcony, scrolled with signs and drawings including “Requiem for Mike Brown 1996 to 2014,” “Racism Lives Here” with an arrow pointing straight down to the skyline’s Gateway Arch, and “Come Join the Movement” adorned with a bright yellow shining sun.
While local residents formed the core of this wave of protest, constant outside attention and migration of people to support this movement of organized resistance played a crucial role. Black Lives Matter sponsored its own “freedom rides” bringing nearly six hundred people of African descent from 18 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, Winston-Salem, and Tucson.
In addition to Black Lives Matter, the faith-based not-for-profit group PICO, headquartered in Washington DC, provided support staff and resources from the earliest days of the protest. PICO organizers, in fact, helped stage a Moral Monday protest by local clergy in which they offered the sacrament of “repentance” to Ferguson police officers. To powerful effect, the clergy and other demonstrators called out the names of people who had been killed by the police, and rhythmically shouted after each victim, “Repent.” “Mike Brown – Repent,” “Vonderritt Myers Jr. – Repent,” “Raneisha McBride – Repent.” And so on for hours.
Protestors and ordinary people created and maintained memorials in the place where Michael Brown’s body lay, set up camp in front of the Ferguson police headquarters on South Florissant, and marched regularly along what a local minister called “The Jericho Road” stretching from Canfield Drive to the edge of Dellwood, a neighboring majority-black municipality. Demonstrators staffed pickets in front of the Ferguson police station for 21 hours a day, sharing rides and food as they crafted their own movement culture. Direct action protests like these later spread to the Shaw district of South St. Louis, following the murder of eighteen-year-old Vonderritt Myers, who was shot six times in the legs and once in the face after a policeman employed by a private security firm mistook Myers’ sandwich for a gun.
As this mosaic of struggle indicates, over the past year Ferguson and the greater St. Louis metro area has become a laboratory and genesis point for a new generation of activists against state-sanctioned violence. It has also helped inspire a new wave of twenty-first century iterations of Black Power both for local youth and for those across North America. These efforts, and the national and international press and social media coverage they generated, marked a turning point, a before and after, in which perception changed. Solidarity protests in New York, Los Angeles, and smaller cities throughout the country immediately followed, and in the process, a national collective memory was forged.
This is not to say that what happened in Ferguson was something entirely new; it certainly was not. Anti-police brutality protest has a long history, and a small segment of its most recent past could be traced as far back as the late 1970s and 1980s, to the police murders of Eula Love, Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Stewart, and many, many others. But I think to understand the social dynamics of Ferguson and the many months of protest that have followed in an era of both cybernetic networks and of the “Arab Spring,” we need to look to more recent struggles. The campaigns seeking justice for Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Troy Davis, Sakia Gunn, and Trayvon Martin strike me as Ferguson’s direct lineal antecedents. In fact, the events in St. Louis represented the culmination both of long-standing forces of repression and criminalization, as well as of resistance.
Watts Rebellion, Historical
Amnesia, and the Rise of SWAT
In a speech at the National Press Club in 1986—during Ronald Reagan’s second presidential term, on the eve of the Iran Contra hearings—James Baldwin reflected on the importance of history and of America’s discomfort in reckoning with the full burden of its meaning.
One of the things that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book, history is not even the past, it’s the present, because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of assumptions which are produced only, and only by, our history.
Locating the exact origins of the current epidemic of police violence is not an easy task. Its causes are many and cumulative, ranging over a broad swath of time. As Robin Kelley and others have pointed out, the link between race and criminalization in the United States is at least as old as the Atlantic slave trade itself. Slave patrols from the antebellum era, convict leasing and the organized system of terror in the post-bellum and segregated South, as well as the turn toward Jim-Crow justice in the years after the arrest of the Scottsboro boys are all part of the long history of race and criminalization.
Equally important to this history is private as well as state violence, as seen in the brutal act of racial vigilantism that killed Emmett Till with impunity. But to understand the nature of Ferguson protest, it is essential to look at the major developments of the last half century that are often elided or ignored in popular media.
Paramount to this history is the state response to the popular mobilizations of the postwar era and the criminalization of exactly the kinds of youth who participated in the popular upheavals of the 1960s urban rebellions and Black Power movement. It is in this moment of reaction that the seeds of contemporary police militarization are sown, as well as the divisions within the African-American community, which ultimately have made it difficult to organize in a unified way until very recently.
There are many examples to illustrate this point. I am a social historian, so I like to illustrate large concepts through documenting the history of particular places. Let me highlight one from California, a state that has helped lead the expansion of America’s incarceration rate. The history of the Golden State generally, and Los Angeles specifically, is essential to understanding how America has become a “prison nation” in the years of reconquista (reconquest) following mass protest and civil unrest.
California is home to Oakland’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Watts rebellion, and the law enforcement commando unit SWAT. These historical developments are not coincidental, but directly related. California has the largest prison population in the United States, which in turn has the largest prison population in the world. Strikingly, 70 percent of the state’s prisoners come from Southern California. To make matters worse, the city of Los Angeles alone has the ominous distinction of housing the largest number of urban prisoners on the planet. Significantly, in the year 2000 California incarcerated African Americans at a rate nearly four and a half times their representation in the general population, and Latinos at a rate three times as high.
To paraphrase Cornel West, race really does matter to this history. High incarceration rates of populations of color are not a recent development. California is part of “Aztlán,” or “occupied land,” seized by United States after its war with Mexico in 1848. During the lead up to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the state caged significant numbers of Native Americans who were then leased out to public and private employers. It also had one of the highest rates of lynching, not exclusively as a form of racial control, but as a system of frontier justice for punishing transgression and social crime. By the turn of the twentieth century, California already had the highest rate of incarceration in the country.
To put it bluntly, California has been putting large numbers of people in prison for a long time (especially those who are black, brown, and indigenous). But in the late twentieth century, this tendency vastly accelerated. And the state began to export some of its most brutal methods, including SWAT, gang injunctions, and gang enhancements, to the rest of the country.
To give us all some hope in the midst of a truly daunting history of occupied territory and racial punishment, I would like to start my tale of modern Los Angeles by talking about how African Americans and Latinos fought back against these oppressive structures, past and present.
The Watts rebellion, or the Watts riot as it is more popularly known, was the largest civil disturbance in U.S. history up until that point and was occasioned—no surprise—by an incident of police brutality. In August of 1965, five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the community of Watts in Los Angeles, California, erupted in violent protest over the police beating and jailing of a twenty-one-year-old African-American youth and the abuse of his mother. Watts surprised the rest of the country as it broke out in a moment of victory: the culmination of the southern Civil Rights movement’s push for civil and electoral inclusion. For the first time in history, African Americans of both genders had been granted full voting rights, with the federal government guaranteeing systematic mechanisms of enforcement. In essence, the final legal plank in the southern system of Jim Crow had been demolished.
Nevertheless, within several days after the passage of this historic legislation and the dispatch of federal voting rights marshals into the South, a cataclysmic urban rebellion erupted in an impoverished and largely ignored black migrant community on the West Coast. The Watts rebellion signaled that, despite the dismantling of regional, legally enforced segregation, African Americans throughout northern and western cities faced profound forms of racial discrimination untouched by the decade-long mobilization in the American South. Paramount among these was the constant abuse of police power: arbitrary arrest, shootings of unarmed people, harassment, beatings and murders of children, and, in New York, the first generation of stop-and-frisk laws.
Watts was in many ways emblematic of the problems of the black urban poor then and now. Located in the outer reaches of South Central Los Angeles, it was a direct portal for recent migrants from the American South. The forces of housing segregation and red-lining contributed to overcrowding, with aquarter of a million people hemmed into an area of less than three square miles. In fact, Martin Luther King argued that Watts faced the worst overcrowding in the nation. Contained within strictly drawn boundaries, law enforcement over-policed and underserved this impoverished area in South LA. Not surprisingly, while African Americans made up 98 percent of residents, the police department was nearly all white and drawn from distant white enclaves.
Perhaps more than any other neighborhood of its time, Watts embodied what two eminent social scientists have called “American Apartheid.” Like the other urban rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s, the residents of Watts registered their anger at police, and “the racial state” more broadly, by taking to the streets. The rebellion lasted six days, from August 11 to August 17, 1965. It left 34 people dead and property losses totaling over $40 million. Ultimately, officials called in the National Guard to quell the disturbance, and it along with other branches of law enforcement caused the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.
Looked at from hindsight, the Watts riot’s long-term causes, like those of the scores of other urban rebellions that swept through American cities in the 1960s to which Ferguson has been compared, hinged on two central issues: the political economy of race and the long-standing history of systemic police abuse and criminalization of Africans Americans. The urban rebellions and their political expression “Black Power” responded to what Bayard Rustin called the more “complex problems of housing, education, and jobs” in northern and western cities.
Few places embodied the devastating effects of the overlapping systems of northern (and western) racial discrimination more than Watts. Watts was an urban portal for the poorest and most recent migrants from the South, and Eldridge Cleaver remembered his hometown as “a place of shame.” As newcomers settled at the social margins of the United States’ second-largest city, they faced intense racial and class segregation, miserable schools, and large-scale joblessness. A hostile and overwhelmingly white police force engaged in routine traffic stops of motorists of color, beatings, and harassment. Given the collective black suffering in South LA, the chance to actually fight back directly against these conditions thrilled many residents.
Watts became emblematic of a new era of militancy that looked to armed self-defense, direct confrontation with the state, and economic redistribution as political imperatives. Indeed, many have argued that it initiated the new era of Black Power politics. Particularly for the young, the poor, and the economically marginal, Watts was a deeply meaningful rebellion that called attention to the everyday effects of racism and white supremacy. It made visible the problems of the urban north and its forgotten populations that had largely been untouched by the gains of the southern Civil Rights movement. And while many journalists and popular histories have denounced these so-called “riots” as tragic and destructive failures that destroyed liberalism, it is important to recognize how profoundly they influenced U.S. social welfare policy.
During the Black Power era, postwar redistributive programs responded directly to the hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in protest. It is doubtful that without this massive wave of civil unrest sharp increases in federal funding for higher education targeted to students of color, community action programs, small-business loans for “minority contractors,” and, more broadly, the expansion of social welfare infrastructure to impoverished populations of color would have been implemented. And while this remains an “inconvenient truth” to many, the specter of large-scale property destruction was indeed integral to protest tactics that won major concessions. Over the course of a single decade, from 1960 to 1970, state spending on housing and other urban policy issues expanded from $600 million to over $3 billion. Indeed, the federal government created a whole new agency to deal with the so-called “urban crisis”: the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
For many Americans, this account challenges some of the most cherished understandings of the heroes and villains of the 1960s. So much of our current national memory focuses on the triumphant efforts of an interracial, nonviolent movement that overturned the inequities of Jim Crow. But if you really want to understand the problems facing today’s African-American communities, it is the history of regions outside the South that are most instructive. It is the urban North and West that directly anticipate the problems that we see today. Although our national post-racial narrative focuses almost entirely on the elimination of legal segregation, it is actually these lesser-known histories that best explain the problems of structural racism, police violence, and mass incarceration facing successive generations in the years after the Voting Rights Act’s passage.
As many young people look back on the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they see only defeats. (I hear this all the time in classes and when I give public talks.) However, from the point of view of law enforcement and the state more broadly, this period represented an era of unprecedented delegitimization. It is hard to overestimate the anger and fear that militant black community mobilization inspired among authorities. City and state governments understood Watts, and the urban rebellions more generally, as apocalyptic destruction that should be punished. Like the iron fist and the velvet glove, the war on crime and the war on poverty were historically intertwined.
Indeed, in 1966, a year after Watts, an ambitious former actor who had recently switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, was elected Governor of California on a law-and-order platform opposing “Beatniks, taxes, riots, and crime.” Significantly, Ronald Reagan won by capturing a majority of white, unionized households despite his opposition to organized labor. This same man would later vastly expand America’s devastating war on drugs in the 1980s. A decade before, however, Governor Reagan’s hardline stance prompted his counterpart in New York, the historically liberal Nelson Rockefeller—who had equally grand national ambitions—to reverse his earlier public-health approach to drug use and to launch the most draconian anti-drug laws in the country in 1973.
So as the country arched to the right, the lesson that law enforcement drew from Watts was not that it needed to consider how its systematic mistreatment of African Americans had caused such large-scale destruction. No. Nor that greater community input was needed either. Instead, authorities responded to what they defined as an irrational wave of disorder by creating new and more repressive forms of policing that were modeled explicitly on American military campaigns abroad.
During and after Watts, the LAPD arrested over 4,000 people and conducted large-scale house-to-house searches. In addition, law enforcement worked to acquire military-grade hardware and elite tactical units as part of its “counterinsurgency” campaigns against urban protests and Black and Brown Power organizations. In 1967, the department founded SWAT with a compact force of former military veterans. Subsequently, the LAPD deployed SWAT for the first time against the Southern California Black Panther Party’s office at 41st Street and Central Avenue. The commando force used a tank on loan from the National Guard and won Department of Justice authorization for a grenade launcher.
SWAT marked a new era in law enforcement, not only for the city of Los Angeles, but for the rest of the country. It established a template for militarized policing across the country that laterally expanded in the overlapping domestic wars against drugs, gangs, and crime in subsequent years. In a move that influenced other police departments, the LAPD used federal monies from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to develop additional militarized units. Southern California law enforcement created a series of commando forces with ominous, martial sounding names, including TRASH, later renamed CRASH under community protest; Operation Safe Streets (OSS); and the district attorney’s own “Hardcore Drug Unit.” As this list of martial alphabet agencies demonstrates, starting with the invention of SWAT, Los Angeles helped lead the national militarization of policing. And it is here that we see the carceral thread linking the shocking scenes we saw in Ferguson to Watts and SWAT.
I have recounted this pre-history in such painstaking detail because it is almost entirely left out of the mainstream coverage of the events in St. Louis. At most, we hear a discussion of how the 1033 Program of the National Defense Authorization Act funded the adoption of surplus military hardware by police departments. But there is rarely a sustained discussion of the war on drugs, much less the bombastic response of law enforcement to the highly politicized urban uprisings of the 1960s that are Ferguson’s direct lineal antecedents.
The events in Ferguson and other parts of the country cannot be understood without considering state repression against the mass political upheaval of the 1960s. Large-scale arrests and authoritarian response by police during Watts paved the way for this new repressive era marked by federal and local cooperation in law enforcement and the widespread use of military hardware for crowd control. The political backlash against Watts, subsequent urban rebellions, and the Black Power movement more broadly are crucial to understanding the rise not only of bipartisan support for law and order, but of the contemporary carceral state.
Understanding the choice of the term “carceral state” requires some context. Its roots lie in a parallel movement in the university that has anticipated mass protest in the streets over police killings and subsequently flourished as protests have grown. Michel Foucault first popularized the term with the publication of Discipline and Punish in the mid-1970s. More recently, American academics have embraced the term carceral, from the Latin “carceralis” or “carcer,” of or belonging to prison, in order to identify a wide range of punitive state actions. These include aggressive policing; race and criminalization; moral panics and targeted punishment campaigns against illicit or informal economies; modes of incarceration across vectors of age, race, sex, gender conformity, and legal status; courts, prosecution, and parole; jails, prisons, asylums, and other forms of social immobilization; the school-to-prison pipeline; border patrol and immigrant detention; public and private surveillance; as well as restrictive and means-tested social service policies. This broad and capacious view of punishment has been chosen in order to analyze not only mass incarceration, but a more seismic shift from a redistributive to a punitive state in which carcerality, like the militarization of policing, saturates even the social welfare functions of governance in the late twentieth century.
Los Angeles is so significant to this process because in many ways, as Mike Davis argued in City of Quartz, it is the paradigmatic carceral city. And this is nowhere more clear than in the periods spanning Reagan’s governorship and presidency. Just as the post-Watts militarization of police laid the foundation for the contemporary carceral state, under Reagan’s intensified wars on crime, drugs, and gangs in the 1980s, the martial imperative of southern California law enforcement grew stronger. According to the Los Angeles ACLU, “the political rhetoric about a ‘war’ on drugs and a ‘war’ on crime … helped turn the police into soldiers—not civil servants or guardians of the community order—making them sometimes more aggressive and forceful than they have a right to be in pursuit of criminals and suspects.”
Domestic Wars on Drugs and Gangs
Now, I would like to turn to the legacy and effects of the drug war to better understand the origins of the burgeoning movement inside the United States against state-sanctioned violence. In 1971, President Nixon coined the phrase the “war on drugs,” but in reality, it was neither a single coherent entity nor a war itself, but rather a succession of executive-sponsored domestic and transnational punitive campaigns that vastly expanded in the Reagan and Bush eras, but have also been ratcheted up under Democrats Bill Clinton and, arguably, our first black president, Barack Obama. At the federal, state, and local levels, this carceral turn in government resulted in the criminalization of large segments of the U.S. population for illicit drug consumption, possession, and distribution. Indeed, in California like the rest of the nation, the war on drugs became the primary engine driving mass incarceration.
As in the earlier era of protest and urban rebellion, Los Angeles proved integral to this national development. Arguably, it became the most important theater of the Reagan/Bush war on drugs. Federally funded, punitive campaigns against drugs and gangs helped erect a new martial infrastructure in the city. Significantly, the state applied the brunt of militarization unequally by focusing on historic African-American and Latino neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles. Indeed, by 1992, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department gang database listed nearly half of African Americans between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four in Los Angeles County as gang members.
Los Angeles’ high profile war on drugs reflected the policies of President Reagan’s national punishment campaign, including saturation policing, eradication of youth gangs, civil forfeiture, federalization of drug charges, and strict enforcement of mandatory minimum sentencing. At the street level, the use of massive police sweeps with spectacular displays of overwhelming force embodied the city’s militarized vision of law enforcement, as did Chief Daryl Gates’ repeated calls to arms. When the LAPD police chief testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington DC, he argued, “The casual drug user ought to be taken out and shot.”
Behind his bombastic rhetoric lay a larger truth. In an era of drastic reduction of social services and deindustrialization, mass incarceration fueled by anti-drug and gang campaigns became de facto urban social policy for the residents of impoverished communities of color. The prescription for widespread joblessness and the illicit economies that accompanied urban divestment was simply to remove large numbers of people from the streets through prison warehousing.
The United States’ multiple war(s) on drugs worked in symbiosis with related punitive campaigns against gangs, crime, and in the later years, terrorism. In Los Angeles, for example, much of the carceral infrastructure for the city’s war on drugs relied on geographically targeted gang sweeps together with anti-gang legislation and prosecution tools. By conflating drug crimes with street-gang membership, law enforcement set up a comprehensive net for the criminalization of nonwhite youth.
Defining the war on drugs as a war on gangs justified the criminalization of everyday life in black and brown Los Angeles and other cities across the country. Modes of dress, movement, color of shoelaces, hand gestures, and mere association became defined as prosecutable offenses. Racially targeted policing combined with the denial of legal representation made it virtually impossible for youth to remove their names from gang databases. Anti-gang injunctions also relied on the poverty of their targets, who could rarely afford to hire lawyers.
While anti-gang injunctions and databases provided mechanisms for surveillance, control, and the assumption of large numbers of minority youth into “the system” for minor offenses, ultimately gang enhancement legislation contributed even more to mass incarceration. In 1988, the California legislature passed the Street Terrorism and Prevention Act (STEP), which mandated that persons convicted of crimes who have been designated as gang members face additional charges and sentencing. In the initial 1988 law, prosecutors could “enhance” gang members’ sentences with from one to five years of additional time in state prison per offense. Subsequently, California’s Proposition 21 amended the STEP Act in 2000 by increasing gang enhancements from 16 months to five years for nonviolent offenses and to 10, 15, 20, and 25 years to life for violent offenses. The dense layering of STEP, including added prison time for gun charges and for crimes committed within one thousand yards of a school, meant that it was not uncommon for very young offenders to receive multiple consecutive life sentences.
This repressive legal regime worked in tandem with the LAPD’s spectacular shows of force, mass arrests, and saturation policing. On April 9, 1988, the police set up an impromptu holding facility in the Los Angeles Coliseum and proceeded to arrest over 1,400 people, including more African-American youth than in any other single incident since the Watts rebellions in 1965. Over the course of the next six months, law enforcement jailed over 18,000 people. The scale and size of arrests in Los Angeles’ street-level drug war paralleled the repression following the Watts rebellion.
Unfortunately, while LA represents a particularly brutal historical theater of the drug war, America’s “second city” telescoped the future of the nation as a whole. Today, scholars have estimated that 51 percent of people in federal prison are there for drug crimes.
What Is to Be Done?
Punishment is not unique to America’s past half century. Indeed, it is constitutive of a settler society born of land expropriation, native genocide, and African slavery. However, since the passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s, we have witnessed an unprecedented intensification of the carceral state. Significantly, after decades of ever more punitive campaigns, its most concrete expression—the police killings of unarmed people who are overwhelmingly of African descent—has catalyzed mass protest.
It is a truism of left social history that repression breeds resistance. But the real question is not if, but when? And what conditions make this possible? The decades-long accumulation of police powers, and at a more foundational level, the elevation of punishment as the solution to all social problems, is indeed daunting. I think that is why Ferguson has been so meaningful to us all. To watch young people literally face-down tanks and protest 21 hours a day in the quest for justice for one of their peers has shown us all that fight back is possible.
Nested within the Ferguson movement are a number of important issues. Fighting the militarization of police is crucial, but equally important is confronting the problem of “policing for profit” as described in the recent Department of Justice report, which found everything wrong about the Ferguson PD, except the actual shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson.
However, the Department of Justice did provide a systematic account of how Ferguson and St. Louis County more broadly finance themselves, to borrow Toni Morrison’s phrase, “on the backs of blacks.” This larger problem, that many have dubbed “racial capitalism,” is key to understanding not only Ferguson protests, but the war(s) on drugs, gangs, and crime that predate it. Civil forfeiture has created an incentive structure for local police departments all over the country. Once a person is accused of a drug crime, their property can be legally seized. I want to stress here accused, not convicted. That includes everything from the content of their wallets, to a watch on their wrist, to a car, house, or mobile phone. In the late 1980s, at the height of the war(s) on drugs and gangs, the LAPD was earning between $10 million and $20 million a year in civil forfeiture.
We are dealing with a system in which racism pays. To push back against this, we need the kind of scrutiny that has been focused on St. Louis County to be applied to policing practices across the country. And we need to think about the deadly mixture of profit and racism that has incentivized mass arrests and even killings in the years since the urban rebellions.
The second point is that we need to recognize that each generation confronts the overarching structure of power in its own way. One of the most remarkable elements in Ferguson has been watching a whole cohort of new activists emerge in little more than six months. Strikingly, a significant number of people I met had felony convictions and spoke openly about their effects. So, we see how Ferguson protest has tapped the population most directly injured by the domestic warfare against drugs, gangs, and crime. Given how the shaming process around incarceration has helped inhibit organizing, this is a significant and hopeful development. Similarly, women with a range of backgrounds have served at the forefront of this movement, as have self-identified queer and transgender people. Black Lives Matter, whose hashtag was founded in 2012 and later expanded to local organizing committees throughout the country, has foregrounded not only the need to stop arbitrary arrest, murder, and detention by law enforcement, but to think about the central role of gender identity and sexuality in how we value life itself.
Too often, the killings of black girls and women, Latino/as, and transgender people of color, who are the single most vulnerable group to police and vigilante murder, have not received the attention and solidarity efforts they deserve. Black Lives Matter has incorporated some of the language and iconography of the Black Power movement, but has expanded its parameters to reckon fully with the tensions and contradictions inside our communities around the intimate and intra-racial questions of sexuality and gender. I think this is very important, and if we only search for charismatic male leadership as our model of social activism, then much of what is new and vibrant is not only lost, but rendered invisible.
Finally, I want to stress that we as scholars and researchers have a role to play in this growing movement against state-sanctioned violence. One of the most important lessons I learned from my research on the Black Panther Party is that the Panthers “started with a study group.” Throughout their history, intellectual production and research was key to how they conceptualized and developed new forms of social action from delegitimizing the police to using breakfast programs and liberation schools for political education. Both Black Studies and the Panthers are steeped in this tradition of intellectual engagement as political praxis, and we can learn a lot by drawing on their rich tradition in our present moment.
One of our biggest problems is that we don’t know enough about even the most basic and important facts of what law enforcement has done throughout the country. How many people have the police murdered over the past ten years? I have heard estimates as high as 10,000, but no one really knows because the federal government does not compile this data in any systematic way. So, much of the history of police and state-sanctioned violence in the United States remains undocumented. We need to work with local activist groups and develop tools for recovering this history in rural areas, small municipalities, suburbs, and larger cities. Equally important is looking for historical precedent to understand both the current tools of repression and of resistance. To quote Malcolm X, “Of all our studies, history is the best qualified to reward our research.”
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Revolutionary Black Nationalism for the Twenty-First Century
Kali Akuno interviewed by Riad Azar and Saulo Colón
| Summer 2015 | Vol:XV-3 | Whole #: 59 |
New Politics: Kali, part of your work and that of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) has been strategically and organizationally focused on the South. Can you explain the thinking behind this and also how it connects to your understanding of the specificity of the South (especially due to its changing demographics because of the recent migrations of Latino workers) in terms of capitalist power and racism?
Kali Akuno: First and foremost, it is critical to understand that the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is a revolutionary nationalist organization that is part of the New Afrikan Independence Movement. Revolutionary nationalism is a left-wing variant of nationalism, practiced by colonized and oppressed peoples, that seeks to liberate them from the yoke of their colonizers and oppressors and replace the capitalist-imperialist social order imposed upon them with a socialist social system. The New Afrikan Independence Movement is a multi-tendency movement struggling to liberate the southeastern portion of the so-called mainland territories now colonized by the United States government. The New Afrikan Independence Movement recognizes that territories it is claiming for its national territory rightfully belong to the indigenous nations of Turtle Island, and makes no claims that supersede their just claims. However, our aim is to unite with indigenous peoples and with other oppressed peoples throughout the United States empire and break the back of white supremacy and the settler-colonial project through a unified anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist struggle. So, it is critical to understand MXGM, and its parent organization, the New Afrikan People’s Organization, and their commitment to the South in this context.
It is also critical to understand the economic and political role of the South within the colonial-imperial framework of the United States government. Since the defeat of the Confederacy, the South has largely operated as an internal colony from which cheap natural resources and labor could be readily drawn. This strategic site of super-exploitation provided critical capital accumulation and other developmental competitive advantages to the U.S. settler-colonial project in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that played a critical role in the ascendency of U.S. imperialism on a global scale later in the twentieth century. And given the structural acknowledgement of colonialism and slavery within the U.S. political framework—specifically the creation of the electoral college, the unrepresentative Senate, and the limited number of congressional districts—the South has always played a disproportionate role in determining the overall politics of the empire. The South typically plays a decisive role in deciding the presidency and the makeup of the Congress, bending both toward right-wing settler-colonialism. This historic reality is what gives rise to the phrase, “as the South goes, so goes the nation.”
The changing demographics of the South, from our point of view, are a welcome phenomenon, in that they offer an opportunity to radically transform the South and the United States overall. In some respects, part of the rapid growth in the Latino population can be viewed as a re-indigenization of the Southeast and U.S.-held portions of North America. Overall this growth potentially weakens the base of white supremacy in the South. We say “potentially” because there is no guarantee that large numbers of Latinos won’t seek to be assimilated and incorporated into the white population, following patterns pursued by southern European immigrant communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There have to be a lot of mutual and intentional unity-building efforts between Blacks and Latinos in order for the transformative potential of this historical development to be realized. Revolutionaries of all nationalities, races, and ethnicities in the South have a decisive role to play in calling for and forging this unity.
NP: A founder and leading member of MXGM, Chokwe Lumumba (who unfortunately and unexpectedly passed away in 2014) was elected Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Part of his political work and the organizing behind his campaign was the Peoples Assemblies. Can you explain what they are, where the idea came from, and how they are functioning now?
KA: I would refer people to three works that tackle this question more deeply, these include the “Jackson-Kush Plan” (see navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2012/05/the-jackson-kush-plan-and-struggle-for.html), the “People’s Assembly Overview” (see navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2014/11/peoples-assemblys-overview-jackson.html), and “Casting Shadows” (see ww.rosalux-nyc.org/en/casting-shadows).
But, in brief, the People’s Assembly is a form of democratic social organization that allows people to exercise their agency, exert their power, and practice democracy in its broadest terms, entailing making direct decisions about the economic, social, and cultural operations of our community, and not just the contractual or electoral and legislative aspects of the social order. The germinating source of the Assembly comes, in the final analysis, from our people’s desire to exercise self-determination.
The People’s Assembly draws from many sources and traditions, going back to the Negro Conventions of the nineteenth century, which were very influential in Mississippi in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the mass meetings of the 1950s and 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement in the state. They also draw heavily on international experiences that include everything from the Paris Commune to the People’s Assemblies in Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s, to the Zapatista Assemblies of the 1990s on.
The People’s Assembly is starting to regroup and expand its horizons since the electoral defeat of the deceased mayor’s son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, in April 2014. It is still debating and assimilating the critical lessons from the last three years and is consciously working to incorporate these into its work to be a more effective instrument of dual power in Jackson going forward. The primary thing the Assembly is working on now is defeating the effort being led by white reactionary forces in the metropolitan region to seize control of Jackson’s water system, either by regionalizing its control board or privatizing it.
NP: The People’s Assembly seems to intentionally encourage, and build upon, an anti-racist consciousness that can arise through participatory practices and the building of solidarity between diverse communities. Can you explain the political strategy of people’s assemblies and your evaluation of them as mechanisms of popular democracy? Also, how would you compare them to the General Assembly that was part of Occupy?
KA: This is an excellent, but complex question. First, it should be known that national/racial diversity is rather limited in Jackson. Jackson is 80 percent Black, and more than 90 percent of the participants in our Assembly are Black. The greatest expression of diversity in the Assembly is class diversity. The overwhelming number of participants is drawn from the various sectors of the working class. But, there are a fair number of participants that hail from the Black petit bourgeoisie, namely small business owners and professionals (lawyers, doctors, and so on).
By weight of its membership, the Assembly has a working-class character, but it does strategically try to represent a broad multi-class people’s front. The reason is that its power is ultimately constrained by the forces of white supremacy that control the economy of Jackson and the statewide political apparatus. White supremacy is still very visceral and apparent in this state, and that creates the imperative for multi-class political forces amongst the Black community in Mississippi.
There are more differences than similarities between the General Assembly of Occupy and the People’s Assembly of Jackson. Occupy, at its best, was a classic example of a mass assembly. These types of assemblies are normally short-lived phenomena that emerge during times of acute crisis. Occupy was a product of the acute crisis of 2008, prompted by the bursting of the housing bubble that shook Wall Street and international financial markets. The Jackson Assembly, on the other hand, was intentionally built to last and to address the long-term systemic crisis of white supremacy, colonial subjugation, and capitalist exploitation that confronts Black people in the city of Jackson. As such, it is more of a representational assembly at this point in time, and its leadership, the People’s Task Force, is clear that the participation of the masses can and will fluctuate over time. But, the commitment to direct democracy, I believe, is ultimately shared by both.
NP: The assemblies also foster alternative economic models outside the logic of capital, specifically Cooperation Jackson where you currently work. Could you discuss how this model of cooperative economics has been practiced in Black communities and how they connect to your vision of Black Liberation and economic emancipation?
KA: To gain a deeper knowledge of how cooperative economics has been employed in Black communities, I would encourage everyone to read Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Action. It’s a must read.
Cooperation Jackson is a vehicle to advance and execute the vision of economic democracy and transformation contained within the Jackson-Kush Plan. Cooperation Jackson is an emerging vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership. Cooperation Jackson is working to develop a cooperative network in Jackson that will consist of four interconnected and interdependent institutions: an emerging federation of local worker cooperatives, a developing-cooperative incubator, a cooperative education and training center (called the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development), and a cooperative financial institution. To learn more about Cooperation Jackson visit www.CooperationJackson.org.
Now, it is critical to note that while cooperatives have a long history within the Black community, particularly in Mississippi, there are two things that make Cooperation Jackson’s experiment unique. First, it is largely an operation to start a network of predominantly worker cooperatives, and, second, it is in an urban setting. Working in urban environments has been limited in the South, and worker cooperatives have been very limited in the South. So, we are treading on some new ground and there will be a great deal of experimentation over the course of the coming years and decades in our work.
The drive to build cooperatives is first and foremost driven by the need to break the back of the white-controlled paternalistic capitalism that exists in Mississippi. On a deeper level, however, it is an effort to create economic democracy in our city and the state and to facilitate a just transition from the agricultural, extractive economy that dominates our local economy (and that of the world). Our people are clear that they no longer want to be the “speaking tools” of capitalist exploitation and are seeking creative ways to end this psychotic system.
NP: Could you talk about the role of MXGM and other similar organizations in supporting and helping to build the movement that has developed since Ferguson? Please also discuss the impact of the reportOperation Ghetto Storm that your organization released in 2012 and 2013.
KA: There is a spontaneous side and a historic buildup side to the current reawakening of the Black Liberation Movement that has emerged in the wake of the Ferguson rebellion.
MXGM without question has played a central role in the historic buildup over the past twenty years, but particularly the past ten years. I think we have to look at the current reawakening as a response to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. The disaster in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina exposed that the U.S. government was politically willing to discard Black people en masse, particularly those sectors of the Black working class that have largely become surplus and superfluous to the cycle of capitalist production in the United States. Black radical consciousness, I argue, has been gradually transforming and advancing in the wake of this catastrophe in qualitative ways. If we look back critically, we see a pattern of Black mass resistance that emerged in 2006 - 2007 and that started with the movement to defend the Jena 6. This pattern of mass outrage and mobilization continued and advanced after the extrajudicial killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 and has remained consistent in various ways since (Trayvon Martin, Kimani Gray, on down).
Operation Ghetto Storm (better known as the Every 28 Hours Report), I believe, laid a solid foundation for the reawakening that we are experiencing now. It revealed the extent to which Black people are considered disposable by the state and started a dialogue regarding what we can and must do about it. Unfortunately, most of the analyses, demands, and program that were contained in that work and its supporting works, including “Let Your Motto Be Resistance” (see mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/) and “We Charge Genocide Again” (see mxgm.org/we-charge-genocide-again-new-curriculum-on-every-28-hours-report/), have not yet been fully digested by the movement. But this is part and parcel of the ideological and political struggle that takes place within any mass movement. Going forward, it is critical that MXGM and organizations like it struggle with the masses to get them to understand that the U.S. settler-colonial project is beyond reform and that the capitalist-imperialist world system must be transformed and overcome and replaced by an new social system that respects the limits of the Earth’s productive capacities if our species is going to survive.
NP: The most well-known expression coming out of this movement has been “Black Lives Matter,” which shares an acronym with the Black Liberation Movement. How would you describe this movement in terms of civil and human rights versus revolutionary Black Nationalism? What does Black Nationalism mean in the context of neoliberal capitalism and the fact that the United States will be majority minority at some point?
KA: Black Lives Matter must be understood as a multi-tendency formation and budding movement. In my opinion it should be contrasted with the Black Liberation Movement, but must be seen as an expression of this long movement. Black Lives Matter, as both organization and movement, is still growing and still defining itself. It has developed some demands, but these are still very much in flux and advancing (or contracting, depending on chapter and context, as I understand it) with each passing day, and each emerging location of struggle—as can be seen from its recent responses to the Baltimore rebellion. Its most distinguishing feature and contribution to date, I think, has been an elevation and highlighting of women’s and queer struggles within the Black community. In this regard it is simultaneously an internal challenge to the community itself as well as an external challenge to the society at large, both of which are needed.
Now, Black Lives Matter as an organization has radical leadership, who I know are all committed anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. However, moving the organization and the movement in this direction is going to be a struggle and it is going to take some time. The overall weakness of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements in the United States means that the broad base that the organization is drawing from has little experience with these radical ideologies and social systems. We’ve confronted this limitation within MXGM for over 25 years, so we know the challenges. But, this is a new moment where folks are learning more in a few days then most typically learn in decades. So, one shouldn’t discount where this movement might land in terms of its politics and ideology. It’s too premature to do that.
That said, the movement is contending with the dominant accommodationist tendency that exists within Black politics. The organization and the movement have had to contend with efforts to distort and water down the meaning of the slogan and with its appropriation to advance narrow demands by many of the established civil rights groups. How the organization and the movement deals with this struggle will be telling, because the pull of the accommodationist forces and the capitalist and Democratic Party forces that back them is very, very strong. All I can say is that for my part, I’m going to continue engaging and encouraging this organization, and the many organizations that developed since the Ferguson rebellion, to adopt revolutionary ideology and politics and not become appendages of the Democratic Party.
Now, on the second part of your question, I think it should be made clear that it is the revolutionary nationalist tradition that has carried the banner of human rights within the long Black Liberation Movement. The civil rights and accommodationist tendencies fundamentally jettisoned the struggle for human rights in the early 1950s, when they succumbed to anti-Communist “red-scare” politics and made a Faustian bargain with the United States government for the limited degree of civil and political rights the settler-ruling class was prepared to offer. This narrowed the struggles for self-determination and economic, social, and cultural rights, and we are living with and trying to overcome the horrible outcomes of this bargain now.
Now, the question regarding the relationship between Black Nationalism and neoliberalism is complex, one that would take several volumes to satisfactorily address. But, let me say this, that as with all nationalist movements, there are left, right, and center tendencies. Some of the more right-leaning nationalist tendencies have accommodated themselves to the logic and imperatives of neoliberalism quite comfortably. In fact, it supports certain long-standing but narrow calls for Black capitalism, in the form of promoting types of Black ownership and businesses that only foster and create capitalist formations. It also expresses itself socially, for example, in calls for things, like private schools and even charter schools, that don’t seek to serve an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist agenda, but merely a variant ethnic or racial self-interest.
The revolutionary nationalist tradition understands neoliberalism to be another form of capitalist accumulation and imperialist domination and vehemently opposes it. But, the ascendancy of neoliberalism has seriously undermined the revolutionary nationalist movement in a number of ways, and the movement still has not adequately addressed its weaknesses in the face of this ideological, political, and social onslaught. And if we don’t get a grip on this, the changing demographics will count for nothing transformative, as the system will adeptly pit one people against another people, one working class sector against another, and each individual against all. So, we have some major, major work to do on this front.
NP: Could you discuss the impact of past World and U.S. Social forums on the development of current movement work, as well as give an update on the upcoming social forum in the summer of 2015 and its people’s movement assembly?
KA: To be honest, at first the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement was not too excited by the World Social Forum (WSF). We thought it was too liberal and possibly a distraction from the growing anti-globalization movement that was emerging on the scene when the WSF first got started in 2000. Initially we were much more invested in more explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist international movements and convergences like the International League of People’s Struggles, which emerged slightly before it.
Overall, our assessment of the WSF being very liberal hasn’t changed, but our stance on engagement has. The shift for us was Hurricane Katrina and the recognition that our people and our movement had entered into a new historic phase relative to the systems of white supremacy, U.S. colonial subjugation, and imperialism: a phase of disposal. To try and counter this we figured that we needed to galvanize the broadest possible level of support for our people and our movement, and the WSF was one of many venues to do that.
Now, overall, I think the WSF played a tremendous role in facilitating linkages between social movements throughout the world in the 2000s, particularly in the absence of radical international forces such as the Communist International and the demise of the movements linking the radical national liberation and socialist movements that existed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with formations like the non-aligned movement, the tri-continental movement, the movement for a new international economic order, and so on. This contribution cannot be discounted or diminished.
But, there are many questions as to whether the convergence model employed by the WSF and its regional and national expressions, like the U.S. Social Forum, can lead to the necessary movement coherence that is needed to eliminate capitalism and the ever-growing threat of climate change and ecocide. The 2015 U.S. Social Forum is an effort to change the model to facilitate concentrated dialogue about movement coherence. But, the organizing process for this forum has confronted many challenges, some due to perceived sectarianism (real or imagined), more drawn from concerns about what premature notions of coherence might mean (or damage), and some drawn from the fear of funders about what a genuine left force in the United States might foster. Time will tell.
In Jackson, Cooperation Jackson is engaging the 2015 U.S. Social Forum by hosting a Southern-oriented People’s Movement Assembly focused on a just transition. This Assembly is part of the Climate Justice Alliance’s Our Power Campaign’s “Summer of Our Power” (see www.ourpowercampaign.org). The People’s Movement Assembly is going to be held on Friday, June 26 through Sunday, June 28, 2015, at the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development, located at 939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi 39203.
NP: Could you introduce Grassroots Global Justice Alliance? What’s does GGJ do and why?
KA: MXGM is a proud member of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and has been a member since 2006. GGJ is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year (2015).
GGJ was initially born to facilitate the participation of U.S.-based grassroots organizations with the WSF. Its aim was to further the development of grassroots internationalism between forces in the United States and those in the global South. It has remained true to this mission, but has steadily enhanced the mission—and its vision—since 2005. There are now nearly 70 organizations in the alliance, and it is now key to the grassroots struggle against climate change in the U.S. and recently facilitated the start of the first U.S.-based chapter of the World March of Women. So, GGJ is on the move. For more information about GGJ visit ggjalliance.org.
NP: What’s your view of the politics of solidarity in the United States in light of these assemblies and forums, as well as the increase in direct action protests by diverse allies responding to their understanding of their role in, and critiques by, Black-led movements?
KA: In short, the growth of these activities is good, and the politics of solidarity is advancing by leaps and bounds. But by no means has it grown deep or broad enough for it to be transformative yet. We still have a long way to go to build the strength needed to transform the United States, meaning the end of its colonial domination of North America and its imperialist grip on the rest of the world and ending the capitalist system and the threat of climate change. We can’t settle for easy victories where we know there is far more work to be done.
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