#eric garner

Burn out The Darkess Bring in the Light! This is one of the Most beautiful photos that I’ve ever seen.❤️❤️ I stand with each and every one of my people that has had their life ripped away from them because of the color of their skin, .

Remember

‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

James Baldwin

Race is the labyrinth of despair – it is where the American Empire hides the bodies from which it literally and figuratively has extracted its entire existence into being. Race is a construct for punishment and power.

For much of America, race no longer exists, and so the labyrinth has become invisible. Gone are the days that it needed the pretext of race to justify slavery and Jim Crow. Instead, the absence of race is itself racist seduction, a fantasy through which white America discharges itself of its inherited privilege. Unaware and immune to the past and present atrocities, most people can continue about their business as if race doesn’t matter.

For racialized Americans the corridors of race are real and familiar. We can retrace the steps and speak of them. Make no mistake – the labyrinth is not a comfortable place; it is a place where one is apart from oneself. It is an identity burdened on us: Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, etc. All the while, America continues along, seduced by the myth of a post-racial society. This is precisely why we must maintain and increase the level of dialogue on the subject of race, no matter how much the rest of America tries to stifle the conversation.

The only way forward is backward; we must make America face the labyrinth.

If you’ve managed to miss the last 500 years of history, racism of the white supremacy variety exists and it has devastating, shattering, and demoralizing consequences for racialized communities. The modern concept of race is indeed an American one, born of slavery and colonization. The implications of race in the structures of our society are very real; they were explicit in the foundation of this country, they are the language of the operating system and so they are observable in the output. We can discuss racial inequality in tangible and empirical language. I won’t waste time arguing or proving the point. Here are a few reputable studies that do the job: on job market discrimination,on targeting Blacks in the “War on Drugs”,on educational inequality,on racism and healthcare.

So why the denial? Aside from the obvious answer, “white America benefits from it,” the most significant power in the arsenal of white privilege is the ability to evade race itself, to be an individual. It isn’t that white America doesn’t know that race exists, of course it does, primarily through Black history month, music videos, and small subsets of friends and coworkers. But white America has the special privilege of being optimistic about race. White privilege doesn’t immunize people from difficult lives: they can be poor, exploited, abused, or murdered – any number of difficulties can befall them. But race and its immense burden eludes them. White America sees the footage of the Civil Rights Movement, the legislation of the 1960s, the establishment of affirmative action, the rise of successful people of color, they misinterpret these to mean the end of racism. These convictions contribute to their sanguinity on issues of race.  

Those who do not believe in the oppressive force of race in society are likely to dismiss personal anecdotes of racial disadvantage as anomalous. Too often, we hear this dismissal in the form of the refrain “but things are getting better” or the vexed  “I didn’t have it easy!” In an economic system that fosters extreme income inequality, it is difficult for working-class white people to accept that there are structures in place from which they exclusively benefit. This notion often makes them outright resentful.

Shifting public perception and social norms have left less room for openly vitriolic hate speech. Today, most decent people (many of whom may be racist and not know it) awkwardly avoid racist language, replacing epithets with euphemisms, genuinely believing that racism is no longer a major issue. What they do not see is that racism is embedded in the political, economic, judicial and social structures of American society. It cannot be totally undone by changes of heart; understanding and tolerance can go but so far. Even the most well-meaning anti-racist, if he or she denies this reality, paralyzes any opportunity for change.

The problem of racism is both structural and cultural. The solution will be both. Racism must be confronted with relentless fervor. White America has only been asked to do that a number of times in its history, usually in the aftermath of historic turning points such as the 13th Amendment, the Watts Riots, and Ferguson to name a few, but never perpetually.

So we must continue to bring race to the fore. If it makes white people uncomfortable, so be it. Racialized people unfortunately understand this discomfort all too well. We must diagnose, expose, and unravel racism in all the structures of society. We must bring America down the labyrinth, to face the beast.

 ( photocredit: Rachel Towne/ http://goo.gl/PFiyXa)

As people take to the streets of NYC on December 13th to protest institutionalized racism and police brutality, they stand in solidarity with the Black community in a struggle older than this country. It is important for individual participants to reflect on what brings them to the march and what the specific issues are. Below you’ll find ten quotes that may help you through the process. 

On Police and State Violence

“The announced function of the police, “to protect and serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little or no pretext…” - Angela Davis

On Social Responsibility

“…this majority is you. Nobody else can do it. The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” - James Baldwin

 On Civil Disobedience

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” -Howard Zinn

 On Solidarity

“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”-Eduardo Galeano

 The Collective

"I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life.” - Frances Fox Piven

 On Community, Justice, and Privilege

“If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.”― bell hooks

Feminism Is It

“Feminist focus on women finding a voice, on the silence of black women, of women of color, has led to increased interest in our words. This is an important historical moment. We are both speaking of our own volition, out of our commitment to justice, to revolutionary struggle to end domination, and simultaneously called to speak, "invited” to share our words. It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important.“ - bell hooks

On the power of the victim

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.” — James Baldwin

Long Overdue

“And so we must say, now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to transform this pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our nation. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of racial justice. Now is the time to get rid of segregation and discrimination. Now is the time” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

On the distance

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.” – Arundhati Roy

Briefly, why race matters: 

1) The logic isn’t that race doesn’t matter, the logic is that individuals can be racist, and systems can be racist and all they require are complicit operators.

2) Unfortunately, the entirety of American history is a race issue. The concept of race in its modern form was born here. It began with the extermination and subjugation of the indigenous people (celebrated in Cowboy and Indian movies) and the violence against the African populations stolen in the Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation life.

Many slaves in the early colonies of the Caribbean were Irish or indigenous, as the demand for slaves grew so did the importation of African slaves. As the African slave population outnumbered the European, the idea of race, an exclusively Black slave population was born.  Resistance to this injustice catalyzed a reactionary intellectual movement that created the modern concept of racial difference in order to validate slavery. 

3) Policing did not begin with Civil Rights, slavery existed in the North, and racial discrimination was the law of much our country until 1964-65 when it was forcibly removed by the Federal Government. For example:

“In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.”

And so policing (especially on the local level) existed to maintain the status quo, that status quo was slavery, later that status quo became Jim Crow, and today that status quo is racist and class-based oppression.  

4) That being said, the systems that were in place don’t just go away. Nothing illustrates this point better than how quickly Angola Plantation became Angola Prison in Louisiana, to house Louisiana’s new “criminal” class of free-Black people shortly after emancipation. Criminalizing Blackness was of course a means to recapture a population and force them back into bondage and labor.

5) Think of the colonies throughout the world: are the colonized not themselves policing their own people in the interests of racist and exploitative regimes? In British India, the Imperial Police force was comprised largely of local Indians and Burmese, subordinate to European officers. Yet the colonial paradigm remained racist and exploitative.

In the contemporary American context, police officers can be of many ethnic or cultural backgrounds. The POC police officer need not be racist for their actions and the system to be racist, they need only be complicit with racist orders– and by being complicit they become part of the racist structure.

Twitter: @bodega_gyro_ao 

Protestors stand at the intersection of Mountain and College Ave. in Old Town Ft. Collins to fight against Rape Culture.
Photograph taken by Megan Fischer

Today –Monday December 8th – in Ft. Collins, the decision on the Andre Alders case was made, allowing an alleged rapist to walk free. In response to the decision, an immediate protest took place organized by a few people who had been following…

View On WordPress