James Forman – Freedom Will Come From A Black Thing

February 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

32.Various.BLM.Liberationwillcomefromablackthing

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Transfem / Transmasc DIY HRT Zines

February 7th, 2025 by muntjac

Info taken from diyhrt.info zines made by www.littlemouse.fun

Transfem Print

Transfema Read

Transmasc Print

Transmasc Read

 

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Tankbuster: A Reading List

February 3rd, 2025 by muntjac

The state is garbo, here’s a bunch of texts to beat the trots over the head with.

 

Lausan are SO fucking good. This peice is just an example. 
Really good critque of the Bolsheviks 
Classic on the Hungarian Revolution 
Indian Maoists on China
Her peice on the Russian revolutions most loyal forces (The Sailors in Kronstat) and how they were brutally repressed by Trotsky and Lenin is a BANGER. 
Leroy is a Black Zimbabwean anarchist in the ZACF. 
An ‘unnoficial’ account by the CNT’s historian, pointing out how the Anarcho-Statists and stalininsts doomed the spanish revolution. 
The lead article here on the Misrepresenation of the State-Led cooperative movement in Jamacia is a banger. 
Chinese anarchist /libertarian marxist journal. 
A anarchist in Cuba talking about how castro is a wasteman. 
Recent uprising in Cuba

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Baedan – QUEERS GONE WILD

January 26th, 2025 by muntjac

Baedan_Queers-Gone-Wild-2

 

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Ashanti Alston & Hilary Darcy – Be careful of your man-tones! Gender politics in revolutionary struggle

January 23rd, 2025 by muntjac

Interface-2-1-pp22-35-Alston

This interview  took place on the 4th of March 2009 and focuses on gender politics within the Black Panther Party and beyond. In particular I wanted to understand what forces shaped and changed the patriarchal nature of the Black Power movement in the late 60’s from a time where women were viewed as a threat to the strength of masculine self-realisation, as detailed by bell
hooks, to a point where women held leadership positions in the Black Panther Party.

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Lisa Insansa – The Colour Of Anarchy Is Black: Anarchism and Black Liberation [2021]

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Study Guide: This is a short introduction to anarchism, published in A6 zine format as part of UK publisher Fem Press’s Political Pamphlets series. https://femzine.bigcartel.com/product/political-pamphlets-1-2-3 

Source: Printed zine. 

Anarchism’s guise is one of self indulgence, meaningless chaos and destruction, usually fronted by a white face clothed in a punk-y aesthetic. It’s a political ideology that has been thrown out by the “respected” right and left, clumsily branded as self-indulgent and frivolous. This narrative against anarchism is born from the rotten fruits of capitalist realism, bolstered up by the beam of state realism, which aims at bleaching a free and democratic future.

Socialism is a broad term, one that is usually overtaken by Marxist and specifically Marxist-Lenninist principles: principles that push for a vanguard party, transitional state and rule of the majority against the minority (dictatorship of the working class). Even looking up at groups (and individuals within them) such as the Black Panther Party as a means to an end inhibits real autonomy, clouded by ideas of looking up to others to fulfil revolution. Anarchists argue that all of those structures perpetuate hierarchy and justify control as a necessary step in the struggle of autonomy. As Bakunin – a Russian anarchist prominent to its founding theory – put it: “Upon this contradiction our polemic has come to a halt [Marxists] insist that only dictatorship (of course their own) can create freedom for the people. We reply that all dictatorship has no objective other than self-perpetuation, and that slavery is all it can generate and instill in the people who suffer it. Freedom can be created only by freedom.” 

Whilst anarchists and Marxists agree on the elimination of capitalism and the wage slavery it invokes, there are sharp differences in the vision to get to a free society. Anarchists want an immediate abolition of the state and the hierarchies entangled within it. As white Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau express in their theory of the social contract, the state’s legitimacy is justified as a means to protect people’s rights – arguably concerning property – in exchange for giving up certain power to the state. It is put forward that the people consent – whether consciously or tacitly – to relinquishing some of their freedoms for the overall good of their survival, and at the point that this contract is disturbed by the state, the people should resist.

For Black people, this idea of a social contract does not bide with our experiences, something highlighted in Jamaican philosopher Charles W Mills theory of the Racial Contract. Mills argues that racism is central to the social contract. Mills argues that racism is central to the social contract and that the creation of the modern state was based on the subjugation of racialised peoples. He writes that what was established was in reality: “a racial polity, a racial state, and racial juridical system, where the status of whites and non-whites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom.” 

With severe exclusion from participating in the state, comes fierce resistance to its apparatus. Historically, we have seen Black people reacting to their repression through typically anarchist anarchist means. For example, when the Windrush generation came to the UK to help rebuild the country in its post-war era, Black people were often refused access to banks and other resources. We often hear about policies of redlining in the US and sanctimoniously flag it off as an American problem, but similar practices were happening in the uk. This led Black communities to set up their own systems of finance through a lens of mutual aid, whereby they would support each other collectively (co-operatives) 

Mutual aid is one principle of anarchism which is common amongst the spectrum of anarchist thought. However, like any other political ideology, anarchism comes in many forms, such as anarcho-communism, insurrectionary anarchism and egoist anarchism, amongst others. Some more common characteristics that spread across different anarchist schools of thought include:

 

Autonomy: reflecting one’s ability to make their own decisions without coercion by high bodies/institutions.

Decentralisation: pointing to an anti-statist approach where power is spread out in horizontal (non-hierarchical) structures. 

Direct Action: meaning being proactive in resisting and tearing down the capitalist state. This can be violent or non-violent, as long as it disrupts. Many anarchists believe that these acts will encourage others to realise their own power and capabilities to resist (also known as propaganda of the deed), whilst also highlighting the feeble nature of the state. 

Accountability: whereby people engage in open critique of each other in order to expel the exploitation of individual freedoms. 

 

These principles are not exclusively white, however anarchism as a theory was created by white thinkers and is now very much entangled with white people.

However, we must understand the impact and relevance of Black people within this history, whether named as anarchism or not. 

This is similar to the argument brought up in Black Marxism, a book by Black radical thinker Cedric J Robinson, which tells the history of Black resistance to capitalism and how this history needs to be valued in contributing to the overall history of socialism.

This single story narrative of socialism, and here specifically anarchism, obscures Black resistance, as stated above through the example of the Windrush generations set-up of anarchist systems, doubled with the bleaching of histories by a domineering Marxist narrative. In the African independence movements of the mid-20th century, statist movements dictated the story. When in reality, there were people advocating for a more communal structure, something that prominent Black anarchist Ashanti Alston points to in his pivotal speech Black Anarchism. For example, within the Zambian struggle for independence in the early 1960s, Black socialist state forces came up against an anti-statist liberation movement who were massacred by the newly formed Zambian independence government. This is not to overlook the incredible work of African socialist leaders such as Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba (all assassinated), but rather interrogates the problems with centralised power especially conserving that African states were created by white imperialists in the interest of capitalist “enterprise” a.k.a. exploitation.

In our critique of centralised power, we should also call into question the way we approach political action or “activism”, which is too plagued by hierarchy. 

Throughout our life, we have been programmed into behaviours of reliance, moulding us into beings that are always looking up to someone to solve our problems. This debilitation is a direct product of the capitalist system which creates and perpetuates teacher–student/boss-worker/state-subject dynamics , geared into making us unable to fight against injustice. We must obliterate this saviour mentality and acknowledge the capability within ourselves. In a practical and relevant sense, we need to stop idolising speakers at protests or “revolutionary leaders” but instead realise that every single one of us is capable of being a powerful disruptor of this system. Down with the vanguard, up with the people.

As Black people, we must be the drivers of our liberation. This means acknowledging that the overbearingly white anarchist movement holds limitations in dealing with, and even seeing, the manifestations of white supremacy. Black people can often get held back in having to deal with the problems of already established liberation movements. Instead of putting in all of our energy to change this, we must recognise our power and work on achieving true liberation, joining with other people (affinity groups) who share the idea that obliterating capitalism entails the eradication of all oppressive structures, including white supremacy.

In organising for this future, we have to engage in direct disruptive action that takes power away from the state, such as the squatting movement, strike, boycotts – including tax boycotts – and re-education outside of the state. Exposing the vulnerabilities of this system will bring us closer to breaking it and allow others to realise their power to free themselves.

There will never be a utopia but we can have a future that runs in a more mutually beneficial way, a future that does not trod on the backs of others to achieve its goals and which will not stay stagnant, but will move as we make decisions to create a more fitting world for us.

As the Black surrealist movement believes: if we can dream about liberation, we can push for it.

Let’s be the maroons of today.

 

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Situationist International – The Watts Riot, 1965 – The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy [1965] 

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: 2003 Firestarter Press Zine, Translated by Ken Knabb https://www.thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/4814.pdf

Study Guide: An article written by Situationists (A political current inspired by Anti-Authoritarian Marxism and Surrealism and the Dada movement) in France on the nature of the Watts riot, largely using the news and the array of condemnations by Black and left-wing political organisations to lay out an understanding of what happened, why and how. 

August 13th, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned.

Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests. Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an unhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say?

He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal Mclntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.”

And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never their real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve? We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion.

The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, the situationists issued an address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system.

Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation.

In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out.

It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers.

Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.” The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally.

They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects.

But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the politic of destruction. People who destroy

commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.

The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population  women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California super opulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global  spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power.

Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike [the FSM] challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role.

The spectacle promptly responded with exposes of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality, the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity.

The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to

hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates.

The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic—cultural spectacle.

By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life —- they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves.

It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general.

The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not sustained, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer tolerable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad side that initiates the struggles that change history” (The Poverty of Philosophy).

Africa has no special monopoly on that. The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people that the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because of irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere.

The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models.

This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see —- the moment they engage in a negating practice  that every hierarchy is absurd. The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values.

Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security.

They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown. Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage.

This is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks)  the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status).

It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war. A revolt against the spectacle even if limited to a single district such as Watts calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that would fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

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Chineme Ebi – The Aba Women’s War

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

https://medium.com/@stephanieebi/the-aba-womens-war-172e4c1a543c

There are some who believe that Africans openly embraced colonial domination. This is not true. Across the continent, there were several revolts against these colonialist governments, and the Aba Women’s War — incorrectly referred to often as The Aba Women’s Riot — is just one example of these. Beyond depicting one of many instances of Nigeria’s resistance to colonial rule, it also depicts the not-often-mentioned solidarity that exists between Nigerians, despite all the differences between us. It is important to note that although this war was fought mainly by women of Igbo descent, these women came from many different clans and provinces, and were also market women who are typically in competition with one another. Yet, they came together to battle the British authorities and warrant chiefs who were oppressing them, fully aware that this would have severe consequences.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the incidents surrounding this war, the contributions of this war towards promoting national unity and cohesion, and the unique resilience and togetherness possessed by Nigerians, as seen in the way these Igbo women were able to put their differences aside, unite, and offer support to one another in order to achieve a common goal.

Introduction to The Women’s War

In November 1929, a period of great political unrest began in the southeastern area of Colonial Nigeria. The unrest was in the form of massive agitations from thousands of women from various provinces and tribes, including Opobo, Ogoni, Anaang, Ibibio and Bonny, against increasingly despotic policies from the colonial government. They protested against the excessive taxing on their livestock, crops and household properties; specific plans to further tax Igbo market women; and the oppressive “warrant chiefs” of the time. The women from Calabar and Owerri are said to have led these protests which lasted for two months. This turbulent period of time is referred to as The Women’s War, the Ikot Abasi Women Rebellion, or most popularly (though most incorrectly) as the Aba Women’s Riots.

Prior to colonial rule, women were able to take part in the governing of various regions. Men and women were also previously recognized as cooperative partners when it came to housekeeping and family life as a whole, and each of their roles in maintaining a balanced domestic life was acknowledged as important. In addition, women who married elite members of society had the privilege of taking part in various political movements that occurred in the regions during that period.

The colonial authorities that invaded the Nigerian region saw these practices as chaotic and looked to change them. They implemented a society that recognized only masculine authority and effectively became patriarchal by forcefully creating political institutions that commanded authority and monopolized force, recognizing only organizations headed by men while ignoring those of women. Women naturally became unsatisfied, especially because there was an increase in educational fees. There was also a spike in the level of corruption of native officers, and forced labour became a trend.

In April 1927, direct taxation was introduced to the various regions in Nigeria. It was implemented in April 1928, but only affected men, and then in September 1929, a change in the serving district officer of the Bende division from Mr Weir to Captain J. Cook brought about some changes. Cook, noticing that the nominal roll excluded clear details about the wives, children and livestock and thus seemed inadequate for taxing purposes, decided that it needed revision.

This revision was an introduction to direct taxation for women, who were already taking care of the taxes for their husbands and supporting their families. Their political roles had been stripped from them, and thus, they had no voice in negotiating these unfavourable conditions. These women decided to take action.

The Women’s War

The war was known as Ogu Umunwanyi, and was sparked by a dispute between a woman named Nwanyeruwa and a man named Mark Emereuwa. Mark helped in making a census of the people living in the town which was controlled by the Warrant of Okugo. The financial crisis of 1929 hampered women’s trade and productivity, so they sought assurances from the colonial government that they might not need to pay taxes. Faced with a lull in political demands, the ladies decided to not pay taxes or appraise their property.

On the 18th of November, Mark approached Nwanyeruwa, who was a widow and demanded she count her goat, sheep and people. Understanding it to mean that she would have to pay tax on them, she angrily asked him if his “widow mother was counted”. This question arose because up until that point it was understood that Igbo women were exempted from paying taxes. Then they continued to exchange angry words which eventually escalated to Mark attempting to choke Nwanyeruwa. Following this exchange, she went to the town square and discussed the incident with the other women who were talking about the issue of taxing women. The Oloko women invited other women from other areas in the Bende district, Umuahia and Ngwa. They gathered nearly 10,000 women who protested at the office of Warrant Chief Okugo, demanding his resignation and calling for a trial.

Furthermore, using the traditional practice of censoring men through all-night song and dance ridicule (often called “sitting on a man”), the women chanted and danced, forcing warrant chiefs in some locations to resign their positions.

The women reportedly targeted European-owned businesses and Barclays Bank. They also targeted colonial authorities’ Native Courts, setting fire to many of them. Police and troops from the colony were dispatched. They opened fire on the crowds in Calabar and Owerri, killing more than 50 women and injuring more than 50 more. During the two-month war, at least 25,000 Igbo women were involved in protests against British officials.

The Aftermath of the War

Reports vary, but it is said that over 50 other women died during this battle; some were killed by bullets, while others drowned in the Imo River when they tried to escape. Many more were injured. Despite this, the women were successful. Massive reform was seen in the southeastern region, as the plans to tax the market women were dismissed, and the authority of the warrant chiefs was checked. A “Women’s Wing” of the Ibibio State Union was established, thus allowing women to participate more in the affairs of the region, and the Union began to actively encourage women’s education. Subsequently, a number of associations promoting the betterment of women’s lives were established, including the Family Support Programme, the Better Life for Rural Women Programme and Nka Uforo Ibaan (Women’s Development Association).

The Aba women’s rebellion banded together a whopping 25,000 women from Bende to Umahia and other parts of the east with a common goal. Prior to this, protests of this kind of magnitude were unheard of. That level of social solidarity in that time (and even now) was beyond impressive. It is particularly interesting to note that the women mobilizing in thousands was a direct reaction to an assault on one woman. The phrase “One for all and All for one” has known no truer expression in Nigeria’s history.

It is believed that the success and bravery of the Aba Women’s rebellion set the tone for the protests that followed it. People across the nation (and continent) were suddenly awoken to the strength in their numbers and the rights they had as the original owners of the land with their pre-existing traditions and customs and began to fight to re-legitimize these traditions. In 1947, a similar protest was led by Olufunmilayo Ransom Kuti in Abeokuta. The protest in this instance was also against unfair taxation of women when women did not occupy any roles in the local council. The result of this protest was the removal of the taxes and the creation of four seats for women on the local council.

Key Participants In The War

Madame Nwanyeruwa

Nwanyeruwa, also called Madame Nwanyeruwa, was an Igbo woman from the Oloko clan of Nigeria. After a fight with a male Igbo Warrant Officer, Nwanyeruwa coordinated 10,000 Nigerian ladies in a dissent against the frontier and local authorities.

She assumed a significant role in keeping the fight peaceful. She, alongside different ladies of Oloko town, motivated ladies in other Nigerian towns to begin their own political developments as well. Under her recommendation, the ladies fought in routine, “sitting” on the Warrant Chiefs until they gave up their badge of office and surrendered. As the revolt spread, different gatherings followed this example. Nwanyeruwa’s job in the Women’s War was one in a progression of activities which went about as an impetus for social and political change in Nigerian history, helping the early African patriot development around there and the development for autonomy, which finished in freedom being allowed in 1960. Her activities denoted an achievement in both African patriotism and women’s privileges in Africa.

Madam Mary Okezie

Mary Okezie was another important woman who drove the Aba Women’s Riot in 1929. She was the first Ngwa lady to acquire Western training and was instructing at the Anglican Mission School in Umuocham Aba in 1929 when the women’s revolt began. Although she wasn’t a direct protester, Madam Okezie was exceptionally helpful to the women’s motivation.

She was the one who presented the memo of complaint to the Aba Commission of Inquiry. Today, the significant essential hotspot for contemplating the riot is the Report of the Aba Commission of Inquiry. After the revolt, Madam Okezie arose as a head of Ngwa ladies and established the Ngwa Women’s Association, working for as long as she could to make women aware of their rights in Nigeria.

Adiaha Edem Udo Udoma

Commonly referred to as Madam Udo Udoma, she was one of the key fighters in the Women’s War of 1929. At that time, she was a well-known market leader in Ikot Abasi, located in present-day Akwa Ibom before she became one of the leaders of the war.

On the 16th of December, 1929, Madam Udo Udoma and hundreds of other women were protesting at the Consulate Beach, Egwanga Opobo, when the colonial troops opened fire at them using pistols, rifles, and even a machine gun, despite the fact that the women were mostly unarmed, except those who had sticks and stones. During this fight between the troops and the women, Madam Udo Udoma is reported to have grappled a rifle out of the arms of one of the soldiers and broken it in half across her knee. A statue depicting this moment of immense courage was erected in her honour and can be found at the Women’s War Memorial, Ikot Abasi.

Conclusion

The women’s war was the first stepping stone in the fight for a Nigeria independent of colonial rule. On the surface, the market women were protecting their custom against the taxation of women, but on a much grander scale, we see that this was truly a fight to recover the power snatched by the colonists when they replaced many other age-old customs with their laws. The women’s war in itself was an expression of unity and a grand one at that, however, the unifying effects of the rebellion did not stop there. It went on to inspire other uprisings in other parts of the nation (and the continent) thereby fanning the flames of nationalism in Nigeria and eventually weakening the hold of the colonial masters in various regions of the nation.

The war was also seen as the introduction of mass African nationalism — a group of political ideologies which are based on the idea that the people have the right to freely choose a body, person or institution that has ultimate authority over them in order to change an existing law or make a law. It made people understand that they can come together to make decisions about their country, and that they could govern themselves without the interference of the British colonial masters. This played an important role in the decolonization of Africa. To quote Ndanyongmong H. Ibanga, thanks to these women, “[we] do not pay tax to [any] British monarch who has no jurisdiction on our God-given corner of this globe.”

References

  1. Anoba, I. (2018, 10 1). The Aba Women’s Riots of 1929: Africa’s Great Tax Revolt. African Liberty. Retrieved from https://www.africanliberty.org/2018/10/01/the-aba-womens-riots-of-1929-how-women-led-africas-great-tax-revolt/
  2. Byfield, J. A. (2003). Taxation, Women, and the Colonial State: Egba Women’s Tax Revolt. Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 3(2), 250–277. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/407888
  3. Nkechi, O., & Nzewi, H. (2016, September). WOMEN AUGUST MEETING AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF SELECTED COMMUNITIES IN ANAMBRA STATE: A PERCEPTION ANALYSIS. International Journal of Research in Business Management, 2(9), 47–56.
  4. Johnson, Cheryl D (1981). “Grassroots Organizing: Women in Anti-Colonial Activity in Southwestern Nigeria” (PDF). African Studies Association. 25: 138–148
  5. Matera, Marc; Bastia, Misty; Kingsley Kent, Susan (2011). The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. ix–x, 19–21, 45–46. ISBN 978–1137377777 — via myilibrary.
  6. Zukas, Lorna Lueker. “Women’s War of 1929”. Retrieved 8 October 2014
  7. “Sitting on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women, Author: Judith van Allen, Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 6, №2, Special Issue: The Roles of African Women: Past, Present and Future (1972), pp. 165–181 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/484197
  8. Falola, Toyin (2008). A History of Nigeria. Cambridge University Press. pp. 133–135. ISBN 9780511399909.
  9. Chima J. Korieh, “Gender and Peasant Resistance: Recasting the Myth of the Invisible Women in Colonial Eastern Nigeria, 1925–1945.” in The Foundations of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola, ed. Andrew C. Okolie (Africa World Press, 2003), 623–46, 630
  10. Glover, Jonathan (1995). Women, Culture and development: A study of human capabilities. Oxford University. p. 449
  11. The Testimony of Nwanyoji, March 14, 1930. In The Women’s War of 1929 by Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011.
  12. Judith Van Allen, “Aba Riots or the Igbo Women’s War?-Ideology, Stratification and the Invisibility of Women.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 6.1 (1975)

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Casey Brezik – Conditions Of Confinement [2015]

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: https://kansascityabc.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/conditions-of-confinement-new-zine-by-kansas-city-anarchist-prisoner-casey-brezik/

Study Guide: This text is a personal account of a small prison uprising after a prisoner was assaulted by a pig, it really rings home just how limited action inside of the prison system can be. Much to my frustration, it’s almost impossible to find other writings of Casey’s anywhere… For starters his supporters site [https://web.archive.org/web/20190308175808/https://supportcasey.org/] went on a ‘Indefinite break’ in late 2019 and only a small part of his page has even been archived.  For the record, In his available political writings, Casey himself has never identified with being Black in, in a letter he wrote to Wildfire magazine & elsewhere, he identifies with being a person of colour.

Before going to prison for the stabbing, he had been in prison a few times and was living a rather transient life. Train hopping across the country and sleeping rough from time to time. He struggled to develop friendships with other people socially and at times he acted out in ways that have further alienated him.

In prison he studied maths and tutored other prisoners, got married to another prisoner in a different facility and participated in June 11th, writing a short statement in 2016 against prison reform and for prison abolition. He wrote letters in two issues of Wildfire magazine, issues 1 and 3, he wrote about Charlottesville arguing that the energy used and against street mobilizations of fascists would be better used elsewhere. His comrades held a demonstration against the very governor he went out to assassinate and held a few fundraisers for him. Producing stickers and zines of his writings.  In his later writings he theorised about space travel and starting a colony on the moon, but since then there’s not been much available about him at all. He was due for release in 2022 but pleaded guilty to assaulting a guard that year so he’s looking at a bit more time. Whatever he’s doing now, I hope it brings him joy.

Casey Brezik Conditions Of Confinement [2015]

From The Editor (Publisher)… 

 

Casey Brexik, an anarchist from Missouri, was arrested in September, 2012 for attacking and slashing the throat of the Dean of the Metropolitan community College-Penn Valley. This zine is a compilation of the personal diary entries that Casey wrote in July of 2015 surrounding the response to an assault on a fellow inmate by the CO’s. The honesty and candor is rare amongst anarchist writings. Moments of revolt.

however small, are written far too often without the depth of emotion they deserve. The text speaks of fear and confusion with a vulnerability we often lose in the overly glamorized and one-dimensional writings on revolt.

 

Allegedly, his original target was the Governor of Missouri, day Nixon, who had been scheduled to speak at the college that day, but had canceled his appearance last minute. Charged  with two counts of first-degree assault and two counts of criminal action, Casey was found “incapable” of standing trial in February 2011. He spent the following 11 months locked up in Missouri Mental Institution. In June of 2013 he was

sentenced to 12 years in prison.

 

Since his incarceration Casey has seen most of the larger anarchist milieu turn their back on him and his case for a variety of reasons. While we do not implore people on the outside to support some amorphous group or “anarchist prisoners”, we do suggest engaging in a dialogue with Casey about his life and the nearly 10 years he has cumulatively spent as both an anarchist and a prisoner. If you do want to help him transition to life outside of prison, please visit his support site or write to us to donate to his release fund.

-causerie editing crew

 

Introduction 

 

This zines purpose is to document and provide an analysis of an event for which I experienced while in segregation. I’ve been incarcerated several times in many states and even other countries. It’s understood that the conditions of confinement do tend to vary from place to place. This is to say that what’s possible in one place is not necessarily possible in another. At least not as easily. It’s also thoroughly understood that even though someone incarcerated does not mean they’re in the same position as everyone else.

 

Whether we’re on the outside or we’re stuck on the inside behind these razor wire fences, we’re all imprisoned so long as our survival is dependent on conformity to the existing system. A survival that is complacent to the roles they would have us play in their society. Complacent to their will. This zine is for

all of those among us whom are willing to say ‘no’. For all of us who are willing to break their laws designed to keep us in line. For all of those that would bite the hand that feeds.

 

Of course, this zine alone is not enough to satisfy the fires which burn within each of us. These fires can only be satisfied when they’re allowed to burn. We all must find our own ways to give our fires air to breathe and content to consume. This, nor any other zine, can grant us the freedom we so desire. This zine can only allow us to make our own analysis of an event that I felt was meaningful. My hope is that everyone can take something from it, whether that’s inspiration or simply an honest warning of what it’s like to be behind these fences so they might remember why security culture is so important.

 

These journal entries were recorded in real time. Originally I’d begun writing for a different zine with a different purpose. Afterwards, I’ll give you my thoughts on the event. Enjoy!

 

July 16th, 2015 (Thursday) 

 

This the first day of my supposed “break” from disciplinary segregation. I received a violation for writing my girlfriend in another institution a “sexually explicit” letter. In a sense, that terminology probably downplays it. They actually came to my cell two days ago and told me I was prohibited by the warden to write her anymore. Which is crazy because I love her and have 5 years left to do. She has 6. Maybe we can still get married while we’re in here. I’m not sure, we’ll have to see.

 

GROUND BREAKING NEWS!

 

I’’ve waited for this moment for 21 days. Finally, there’s unity in segregation!ll Everyone coming together! Two CO’s just assaulted an inmate on the staircase! Everyone’s coming together to assure they don’t get away with it! Something is better than nothing, so now several cells have been flooded. This is bound to be a long night. I’ll come back and write more about the day’s events. I need to assure these pigs don’t confiscate this. A sprinkler was just popped.

 

-Alright, I’m back. So the entire wing was just flooded because an inmate was assaulted by the CO’s within view of everyone. The strangest part or maybe the most inspiring is that for at least some, the injustice transcended the color barrier that’s always present here to at least some degree.

 

I’ve wanted to see unity among inmates for some time and have witnessed it today in a bittersweet sense.

 

Here’s how things played out after the cells were flooded and a sprinkler head popped. The CO’s came in looking for an inmate to clean it up. They naturally went to the wing’s walkmen (the ones paid extra food and cigarette butts from the CO’s ashtray to“clean” the module on a daily basis). Which is a questionable

job to begin with, but tolerated because it provides a means for things (tobacco) to come into the wing occasionally. They were able to pull one inmate worker. Despite the entire wing opposing the police. His celly refused to allow him back into the cell until a captain came through and threatened to write a violation, I guess. He signed an enemy waiver and allowed the “snitch” to come back into the cell. A narrative took place and a fight ensued. The “snitch” is checking out right now (the other inmate, who lost, is on the bench- a a metallic grilled bench they handcuff and shackle us to for prolonged periods of time to cause us discomfort under the guise of convenience for them.) Several inmates were written up for major violations from “inciting a riot” to “organized disobedience”. The cells that have been flooded, whether the residents were flooding their cells or were victims of other people’s toilet water flooding into their cells, were left flooded. Only the day room was squeegeed by tho CO’s and their pot. The water has been off for hours. ‘Toilets can not be flushed. CO’s are laughing. Mocking. With their major violations that have been handed out, out-dates are going to be taken. Stays have been extended because they’ve dared to stand up against injustice.

 

This was a victory in that we challenged them as one and did not stand aside while they beat a handcuffed man in front of us, but a loss in that many of us are quite possibly here for longer, owing to the parole board’s habit of pulling parole dates for major violations.

 

It was a truly amazing moment with penned-up frustrations culminating to a point and exploding all over the place only to leave us feeling depleted afterwards. We’ll be collecting ourselves for a while.

 

Now for a little backdrop into how my stay in ad-seg has been. To start with we’re allowed 3 t-shirts, 3 boxers, 3 pairs of socks, 2 shoes, 2 towels, 2 washcloths, 1 pillow case and 1 blanket. We have laundry once per week, but if your lights are covered (because the fluorescent bulbs often illuminate our cells 24 hours a day and they come around for laundry around 1am) when they come around somehow that counts as a refusal. ‘We’re given one 2 oz bar of soap per week for both showers and washing our hands. We only have showers Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Again, if your lights are covered whenever they decide to come around in the morning it counts as refusal. ‘There is no warning or notice given, you just find out when it happens to you. We have a very bright fluorescent light in our cells that frequently stays on 24 hours. Specifically, when they have an inmate in the wing that’s on suicide watch. They’re not supposed to house “suicide watches” in this wing because of the double bunks that provide a means for someone to cause themselves harm. However, for whatever excuse they have, they do so anyway.

 

They’re trying to force an inmate into a cell that hasn’t been cleaned out yet. He’s refusing to go and claiming he’s suicidal. He wants others to ride with him but the energy has dissipated. Often they ignore people’s claims about being suicidal or ‘even requesting Protective Custody (PC). Sometimes these claims are used as a means to switch cells or to do something (anything) to cure the restlessness. That’s no excuse to ignore people though. They still have a job to do. There may very well come a time when someone isn’t “crying wolf”. In fact, the 2 murders that have occurred since I’ve been here were in segregation.

 

The inmate that was being forced into the cell was kept in the dross out cages until the wee hours of the morning when most of us are asleep. The toilets had been off for a while. There just so happens to be one cell next to the dross out cages that remains open and is used as a nurses’ station. As soon as they came to move him to the suicide housing unit (8 house), he darted for the nurse’s station, while in handcuffs and leashed to one of the CO’s, he dropped his pants and took a big dookie in their toilet! The CO’s weren’t happy and ended up beating him in there. The CO called code and others responded. The inmate was heard apologizing profusely. He was bleeding from his face as he was finally escorted to the suicide unit.

 

They never offer us cleaning supplies to clean the cell with. I was very lucky to come in hero with one and a half bars of dial soap. I’ve been able to use it as a disinfectant of sorts. Others aren’t so lucky.

 

We order commissary every other week. Surprisingly, we’re able to buy some snacks, but only junk food. We’ll go next week. Til need to buy some more soap and toothpaste. I’ll probably hold out on the deodorant and use soap and a washcloth instead. I’ll have to buy what I can in food, junk or otherwise. Ramadan just ended [Editor’s note: Casey decided to fast for Ramadan in solidarity with other prisoners in the jail.]  Somehow they got away with feeding us only 2 meals per day. They’d give us an early breakfast and a sack lunch at nightfall. Sometimes the bag didn’t even contain a full meal. Often bags were shorted. I say something, but am always ignored. I write kites to the caseworker, but again, ‘m always ignored. (Kites are essentially notes or requests to the caseworkers) He’ll talk with us when he makes his rounds as though he’s done something, but he doesn’t. It’s frustrating. I’ve been missing laundry for weeks now. My bag came open after the CO failed to tie it properly. Now, I run the risk of being charged for it. They actually tried to write me up for it, but I was saved because I took the time to hand write copies of every “kite” I filed. On top of it all, I’ve lost about 10 pounds during the fast.

 

I try to keep track of everything and write it all down. Maybe there’s some way in which I can fight them eventually to bring about change. I don’t see it right now, but that doesn’t mean I give up hope, I’m afraid to even consider what that would be like, although I often feel it becoming my reality; This is a dark place meant to destroy one’s hope and render them both helpless and hopeless. It’s designed to “break” you.

 

Many have already broken. It seems like they have no hope for the future and therefore, only live in the immediate gratification of the present. The here and now that exists in this very moment. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t the best and fullest form of freedom. For I feel in order to retain hope for something better far off in the future, I have to pacify myself in the present. A lot of times I feel that I’ve got to let an injustice go unaccounted for because I know the fight within these fortresses of theirs is frivolous. I just like to know that people are still capable of banding together and we haven’t been “all the way” pacified. Rebellion is needed from time to time, but it’s difficult to get away with.

 

‘That’s It for tonight y’all. I’m exhausted. Hopefully I can make this into a daily diary entry and keep everyone updated. Goodnight.

 

july 17th, 2015 (Friday)

 

Today I’m left reflecting about what can really be done to stop these incidents like last night’s assault from occurring. This morning after they turned the water back on for our showers, and so kindly allowed our cell to fill with shit water again while we were away (there was still flood water in the day room), I was left thinking about what I could do to demand I get some soap from them to use on my floor. There’s really nothing. Throwing a tantrum only gets you ignored, as does not throwing a tantrum. Checking into PC, demanding medical attention under false pretenses, or claiming you’re suicidal might get you out of your cell, but you’re likely to get a edv (conduct violation) to extend your stay and it’s definitely not going to got us any soap.

 

Eventually, I was forced to accept that there isn’t anything I can do about it. Even the filing of an IRR (informal request for remedy, the required step before filing a formal grievance and the official process of our expressing our complaints) seems frivolous. They make the process take forever, they never admit they’re wrong, and even if we take it all the way to court our claims are likely to be turned down if we haven’t phrased it just right. Doing so requires that we know exactly what our rights are and aren’t as defined by the courts. However, we’re not allowed to request any legal material unless we’ve already been granted a Qualified Legal Claim from the court (in other words, the courts have to say we need them). The legal process seems so long and drawn out that it doesn’t seem worth the effort or the money ($300 is quite a bit). Especially, considering how often we’re shut down as inmates. So it seems hopeless from the inside.

 

However, when I think about the fight from the outside, things don’t seem any more hopeful. The possibilities for action are more numerous, but what about a means to an end? There seems to be none in sight, nor in mind.

 

‘Today was the first day I’ve been able to go outside in 3 weeks. It was hot and I was still dehydrated from the Ramadan fast.  I managed to get some much needed exercise in the 4’x8’ rec cages they have. I was able to work on a nice little sweat even. I even did some more after lunch. I don’t have any excuses not to be exercising anymore.

 

July 18th, 2015 (Saturday)

 

I was expecting action last night but none occurred however. In the aftermath of everyone’s disappointment last night, floods have occurred once more today. Everyone that’s flooded their cells has done so to take a stand against police brutality as perpetuated by a CO named Beasley 2 nights ago against an inmate.

 

I’ve spent the morning and last night reflecting on my role in all of this from several perspectives. Most prossing is my lack of participation in these demos. They’ve been minimal, at most, despite my supporting them 100%. Frankly, I feel as though I’m a coward.

 

The first night me and my celly saw our cell Hooded. The CO’s refused to allow us to clean up. To be clear, this was not our doing, but due to our lack of planning. The water from other toilets flooded into our cell. It’s dirty water and smells of sewage. They refused to do anything, and as seems to be policy, ignored us. I hated how they were able to treat me in a way that wouldn’t even be acceptable for animals. So, it seemed the options I was poised with..well let’s just say there were a few options, but none were appealing. The consequence of participation is being treated as though we were nothing, and helpless to do anything about it. It’s frustrating especially considering that I wasn’t to blame. I’m left to account for others actions. It’s just another item to add to the list of things that serves to reinforce that it is “us vs. them.”

 

If further proof was needed, I heard CO holding a discussion with a neighbor yesterday. The inmate was getting onto tho CO for letting their “snitch” back into the cell in order to get whooped after assuring the man his safety. The inmate stressed the CO’s job of protecting the inmate. Strangely, I believe him to have meant it was his job to protect him because he’s an inmate, not because he’s their snitch. However, the CO went into a long hate-filled speech about how he didn’t give a damn about us inmates. Particularly whether or not we died. He said the world was a better place without us and expressed a sense of pride at being able to look at our dead corpses with indifference, as he had in the past. Again, it’s frustrating to be so powerless.

 

So despite every fiber in my being crying out for justice now, I refrain. My aspirations require it and I know in the larger picture this is a small demo, although the significance is great for us here and now in our frame of reference. I have to wonder if I won’t regret it.

 

They’ve kicked off a second round of flooding now today. The CO’s are at this point ignoring it. Although I’m not participating, I understand their frustrations…there’s so much to write about, I really don’t know how to organize it all. Our world is framed by abusive repression at every turn. There is injustice everywhere. We feel helpless to do anything, but destroy what’s around us. Our “homes”. For which our captors don’t care about anyway. We’ve been rendered powerless, helpless and hopeless.

 

I don’t see the fight as taking place here behind their walls. There’s only so much we can accomplish here. The reason for our fighting them needs to be limited to our not allowing them to treat us just any sort of way. Whenever they get out of line, it makes sense that we should let them know it. But aren’t they all the way out of line for holding us in these cages and treating us whatever sort of way with impunity. Further, our fighting back every time they hop out of line, is, in all reality, only slowing the transition of a progressively oppressive and increasingly unaccountable system. We’re screaming with all our might, but we’re already out of earshot.

 

I’m not participating because I want to attend the Associate of Arts program at Bonne Terre. I’ve been waiting for a transfer since mid-June. I’m not sure how long it will take, or if I will even go to Bonne Terre. I could only request it. I feel as though I’ve been pacified into my non-participation. I see the futility, yet I see the importance of giving voice to our complaints and realizing a sense of unity among the inmates. Still, T want my fight to be on the outside. I’ve fought on both the inside and out. Many times I’ve flooded my cell, been maced, and occasionally tazered. At times I’ve even attacked the guards. Once in defense of another inmate they were beating and once in an attempt to escape possibly the second worst conditions I’ve ever found myself confined in. Second only to the small jail in the mining town of Hidalgo Del Parral in Estado Chihuahua, Mexico. I could easily argue it was worse. Other times my acts of protest were merely an act of defiance accompanied by a speech to other inmates of why I felt it was so desperately important.

 

I’ve spent over 7 years incarcerated. That’s small in comparison, even for those my age. Being only 27, this means I’ve spent over a quarter of my life incarcerated. If I include the time I’ve spent under their supervision (probation/parole), that number becomes 10 years. That’s all of my “adult” life although I realize that I never came into “adulthood” until recently.

 

Most of my life has been spent avoiding responsibility and doing what I wanted. That meant fighting against injustice, but always in small ways. I want to fight on a grander seale and be more effective. I want something more than a sense of euphoria to come from my activism. I’m not extraordinarily educated, or very sociable, I know that my heart is in the right place, I just don’t possess the ability to struggle as meaningfully or effectively as I would choose. I want to get to that point. I choose to educate myself.

 

Currently I’m studying mathematics. I’ve come a long way since I arrived at this camp. This Is the first place I’ve been since Icaught my charges that has an actual library. I was ordering books on electromagnetism, electrodynamics and so forth while I was in county but they were beyond me. I needed to fill in the gaps of knowledge I was missing, I ordered a math book, but it to as beyond ma. In diagnostics (where you first enter the prison system and await transfer to a permanent camp) I washed inmates laundry everyday and muled contraband for stamps. I did everything I could to get stamps to send to this company to buy some books I’d read about. I was successful, but these too ware beyond me. Although, I’ve at least been able to hold onto them.

 

Upon arriving here I was able to gauge where T was mathematically and build from there. It turns out i was somewhere in what would be considered algebra, requiring a refresher on quadratics. I’ve been able to build on it surprisingly, this was already beyond most inmates, so it made sense for me to become a tutor. Math being the main struggling point for most. Mine being English, specifically writing. Well, I was lucky in that on my arrival here, the library ordered a textbook on college algebra and shortly after a textbook on trigonometry and then finally a book on calculus! So I’ve been able to further my studies fairly drastically. In order to study the physics books I worked for in diagnostics I need to complete calculus IIL. I’m currently in segregation, I’m able to study from a calculus workbook that emphasis bare bono essentials to understanding calculus I. It’s not a far stretch of the imagination that I should be able to test out calculus! once I’ve finished this workbook.

 

I worked 16 months as a tutor helping others receive a higher education. I spent a considerable amount of time and effort inquiring about correspondence courses, only to find they were all too expensive to obtain a degree on any wages I’m capable of earning here. Still, I’d resolved to try to obtain a better

 

paying job in order to take some courses. But was surprised to find that despite my jumping through their hoops in order to obtain the privilege I was still looked over..repeatedly. It was frustrating to the point I was giving up, but then my mother read on-line about a program being offered by St. Louis University at Bonne Terre, another Missouri prison, I went to the case worker to ask whether I was eligible and was told I’d have to get there and ask them. So, I’m trying to transfer.

 

My plan, along with my girlfriend, is to move to Albuquerque upon our release. I’ll attend UNM (University of New Mexico). They have a doctoral program for nanoscience and micro systems engineering I’m trying to pursue. That’s such a vital part of our world today, I imagine it will be of vital importance for activists to have at least some knowledge in. I’ve been studying computers in conjunction with mathematics, However, I’ve placed the priority on math because it serves as a bridge.

 

July 19th, 2015 (Sunday)

 

A third round of flooding occurred last night. Now, as participation has dwindled, I’m starting to see a pattern where people are just acting up. No longer is there unity aimed at a common cause. Now it’s merely individuals trying to assert who’s the “hardest” or “realest”. However, | did notice something spectacular. Subtle, yet spectacular. As far as I know, no one else has noticed. After the third round of flooding, the CO’s came in and were silently doing their job of cleaning up our mess. They even had the CO that started all of this in the first place cleaning up the water. What’s spectacular was that, at least for that night, they stopped ignoring us. If someone needed something while they were in here, they’d go to their door and hear them out. It’s a small concession, but it seemed profound in the sense that at least for a few hours they treated us with some dignity.

 

It’s so frustrating when they ignore us. Some people have legitimate issues that need to be tended to, while some only want to jeff around, curse at the guards, or the worst one, flash their penises at the nurses. That one gets to me. Those are sexual predators living in a delusional state where they’ve convinced themselves that these nurses and female CO’s actually want that, despite being written up for it time and again. Collectively, these issues probably lead the CO’s to feel it’s alright to ignore us all the time. Most of the time it’s not something important. I don’t think it should require that someone be dying in order for them to come to our assistance, but I see why they feel justified in implementing a policy of ignoring us. If a nurse walks into the wing to give out meds and every third cell is jacking off in their window calling her all sorts of names, how is she able to hear the soft spoken one trying to get his meds? The one she’s skipped over. Further, if even that approach has been used repeatedly to get her to  watch, then why should she trust it now? Why shouldn’t she ignore us to the best of her ability?

 

There are so many different possibilities in here, it’s difficult to come together collectively. It’s rare. Possibly, it occurs once every 3 or 4 years or so. That’s why I felt so inspired by what I saw. It has since finally fallen apart again and it’s now inmates vs. inmates in their constantly misguided struggle for power and domination over each other. I’ve come to recognize this as each inmate’s respective search for significance in an otherwise meaningless life. Society has a way of brainwashing us into accepting that we’re worthless. The only semblance of moaning many of us find lies in our accumulation of material goods and how many people we can manipulate. Every single day I hear someone bragging about how they max out on their spend limit every store day in order to belittle someone with less money. It doesn’t matter that the money they’re using was given to them by friends and family. Unless, of course they’re trying to rub in the fact that they have people out there that love them and the poorer person must not. As though love were something quantified by money. Unfortunately, in many instances it is.

 

This whole ordeal has changed me personally in another subtle yet significant manner. I’d always felt compelled to thank the CO’s whenever something was given to me or done for me. Regardless of whether that was handing me my tray or opening my cell door. I was raised to say “please” and “thank you” to everyone just as a basic decency to fellow humans, period. I believed everyone was deserving of some level of respect. For some time now I’ve been trying to break myself of that habit. I’ve been unsuccessful because the part of me conditioned to say these things held more power over me than my will to not say it. I couldn’t justify my seeming rudeness until the CO finally made me snap. They owe me at least these things. I don’t need to thank them for what they are supposed to be doing. If anything, that’s just lending credit to their fucked up mentality that allows them to think they’re doing us some sort of favor by providing us with our most basic needs for survival. As though they’re somehow giving us more than what we rightfully deserve. It reinforces that they are our masters and we their undeserving captives,  I can see this now and regret having taken the point so lightly in the past.

 

Another thing I do or don’t do, since the CO ignored me in my request for soap, because I feel far too often that I’m begging them for something in my repeated pleas that fall consistently upon deaf ears, is that Iask them for as little as possible. Hopefully that can continue to be absolutely nothing as it has for the past few days now.

 

‘My hatred for these pigs has grown tenfold. I was dormant for a while in the casual adapted comfort I’d allowed myself to find in my surroundings. It’s been reignited as I’m reminded day after day what I’m fighting for. My eyes are wide open again.

 

I think when my comrade from ——— responds to my letter I’d sent her, I’ll ask if she might be able to hold a fundraiser on my behalf so that I can order a typewriter. That would allow me to write these dispatches on my own. I can’t expect my comrades to do that for me. It doesn’t feel right that I should ask for something so grand and only put in minimal work towards seeing that it becomes a reality. I’ll feel better about myself if I can do the brunt of the work.

 

I’m not sure that my ideas are going to work, but hopefully I can adjust things as needed. Particularly, I’m concerned about the contents of my zine. It’s never really seemed like people have had much interest in what I’ve had to say. Possibly, I’ve just failed to hold their attention. I do have a few stories I can tell though. Those seem to at least make people laugh.

 

The floods actually continued today. The CO’s are visibly ‘exhausted. So much so they’ve given up on attempting to clean them up, knowing that they’re only going to start as soon as they leave the wing all over again. Now that their shift is coming to an end and they’re cleaning it up with the help of their snitch. They put down numerous small long green sandbags in front of tho doors whore tho most water has puddled at. Tho back corner I’m in has remained relatively dry since the first night. I erected a barrier out of plastic bags I’d held onto. I was able to tear thom and lay them flat. I positioned them to block the corners too. Then I placed towels and clothes on them to weigh thom down. I thought it was somewhat ingenious that I should be able to recycle what would otherwise be trash to fortify my cell. Unfortunately, it seems like I won’t get to test my engineering skills this time. Still, I’m proud of my craftiness.

 

In a sense, the wing has erupted into some degree of anarchy (if the word is to be taken to be synonymous with chaos)… possibly there’s an alarm going off right now. From what I can gather, it sounds as though they might have popped the sprinklers in another wing. ( Each housing unit has 4 wings. I’m not sure whether this was done in solidarity with our wing or not) I’m not sure it isn’t just a train passing by on the tracks.

 

Those tracks. They serve as a reminder of a freedom I once had but can never go back to. That was a time I considered my only responsibility to be staying alive. Sometimes not even that. Those were strange times. I often wonder why my acquaintances in —- — treated me the way they did. Not that they treated me particularly bad, only that they seemed to merely tolerate my presence until suddenly they just stopped. It happened all at once and I still struggle to understand why. Possibly, I was too high to understand at the time. I just don’t want to spend my entire life feeling like I’m on the outside looking in. I feel I’ve matured a lot since them, but I also realize that being incarcerated for as long as I have is bound to shaped the

 

the way I interact with others in ways I’m not able to recognize immediately.

 

I guess I’vo always been somewhat of a loner though. Not by choice. I guess those were just the cards I was dealt in life. We all make do with the hands were dealt.

 

Tomorrow is commissary day. We’ll get our order on Thursday. I’ll still be here. I’ll get to see how they decided to pay me for my last month as a tutor. | wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to pro-rate it and subtract pay for the 9 days 1 didn’t work. I made $20/month total as a tutor. $8.50 of that is what they call state tip, an amount the state’s been required to pay us for the last 30+ years. The base amount has never risen, despite the rising cost of our commissary items and the recent inclusion of sales tax to our orders. Wouldn’t be so bad if maybe they had job positions for everyone, but they don’t. Beyond that, anything over $10 is deducted 10% and placed inside of our ‘mandatory savings account’ where they won’t allow us to access it until we’re released. All the while, they’re collecting interest on the money they say is ours and will pay us eventually, Capitalist bastards.

 

For now I’m just going to ignore the few people rapping and yelling out of their doors and try and get some sleep. Hopefully there’ll be pancakes in the morning.

 

July 20th 2015 (Monday)

 

Things have already popped off early this morning. They sent a sergeant in early to go door-to-door checking with the inmates in every cell to make sure they were alright and to listen to our grievances and requests. Then they sent in the captain, a couple lieutenants and the Fum (the caseworker over the entire house) to do the exact same thing. While I was speaking with the Fum about my kites being ignored, another inmate was assaulted on the top walk. I didn’t see it, only the CO’s standing around what seemed to be a body lying on the ground. Presumably he was in handcuffs because his cell door was open as well as his “chuck-hole” door. (They call it a chuckhole because inmates chuck things out of it, LOL) It’s used to give us our food tray. They never let us out of our cell without handcuffing us, unless it’s one of those willing to work for extra trays and the cigarette butts left outside by the CO’s. Usually, that’s also their snitch.

 

Hal My neighbor across the walk just showed it to the CO asshole. Dudes are always making stupid comments…I’m feeling it now (the mace)…anyway. He’d gotten into it with CO’s earlier, Now as they walk to collect his tray he stuck his hand in the chuck-hole refusing to move it. This agitated the CO to mace him to try to get him to move his hand, so he could secure the door. Well, at the same instant the CO sprayed his mace the inmate removed his hands and put up a barrier. This caused the mace to repel back into the CO’s face! LOL. However, this particular CO is full of pride at being better than us “worthless” inmates. Therefore, there’s no way he’s just going to let this inmate get the better of him. LOL. He tried to mace him twice more! LOL. Each time getting the same results! He had to call a code requesting assistance over his walkie-talkie. When the CO’s responded, they all ran into the mace too! LOL. Now they’re all coughing with their eyes watering, hacking up mucus, noses running. LOL! The inmates just sitting on the bench, shackled there talking shit to these fools. He’s been unaffected.

 

This comes as an added bonus to the wing giving the CO’s some “act right” over the weekend. First thing this morning, as I said, they had sergeants, lieutenants, captains and fum in here going door-to-door asking if we had issues that needed to be resolved. This feels like the first victory I’ve seen the inmates win in a long time. Possibly ever. It’s a significant moment. It shows that our sustained resistance has the effect of wearing them down. Further, this recent incident with the mace shows that it’s possible to outsmart them and win victories that way too. I’m left inspired.

 

Those were my journal entries for the weekend of July 16th – 20th 2015, I told you in the beginning, I don’t feel the same about them now. Possibly, that’s only because the intensity of the experience has dissipated. I do feel that it served to inspire and motivate me to put more work into the struggle.

 

However, the significance stops there unless someone reading this is able to pull something from it.

 

Don’t get me wrong because I still see it as significant in that it needed to take place. I just don’t see it as significant in the broader scheme of things. It hasn’t changed but in that moment, in that isolated place. The world continues on as though nothing has happened. It’s just a moment in time. Can’t pull any solutions out of this. Not even suggestions. Possibly, it can serve to inspire others,

 

In the meantime, I’ll continue to struggle for solutions in here and hopefully you’ll continue to do the same out there. No one knows where the answers might come from. Maybe it’s you.

 

In solidarity comrades,

Casey M. Brezik

 

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Raven Rakia – Black Riot [2013]

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: https://thenewinquiry.com/black-riot/  

 

Study Guide This essay was originally published on November 14, 2013, Raven Rakia is a Black freelance journalist who at the time of writing was based in New York. It was formatted into a zine by a group called Radical Paper in 2017. The zine version has several illustrations. I’ve added in a quote at the start from the zine version. archive.org/details/FugitiveDistro_BLACK_RIOT_Anonymous/mode/2up

 

“The difference between riots and protests has more to do with who and where than what”

– Julie Mehretu. Excerpt (Riot) 2003

 

As thousands in Khartoum, Sudan, and surrounding areas took the streets at the end of September and Twitter blew up under the hashtag #SudanRevolts, I waited patiently for Western media to catch up. When it finally addressed that something was happening in Sudan, their message was clear: “Amidst Riots, President Bashir won’t be attending the UN conference.” read one headline. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Even though the same media had been enthralled by the mass protests in Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Greece, and Spain; Sudan’s mass protests received three short paragraphs, focused on their effects on the nation’s president, with “Riots” in the headline.

 

I’ve been to protests In Istanbul and Greece. I’ve seen windows smashed, graffiti drawn, Molotovs prepared, and things set alight. Still, the situations where lighter skinned people were filling the photographs: protests. When darker skinned people are involved? Riots. The decision to call one riots and the other protests has nothing to do with the amount of violence in the demonstrations. Violence is a realistic factor, and sometimes, a tactic, in all of these protests. Resisting is never peaceful. If the State fears you, it will crack down on you violently, despite your kumbaya circle.

 

Protesters’ natural response to a State’s violent crackdown (usually police brutality) is self-defense. The self-defense is often barricades — blocking the police from getting to the crowd of people. Barricades can be formed with large objects, fires, or human beings. Those on the front lines can use their bodies as buffers between the police and the rest of the crowd, stopping the police from getting to the masses. Rocks may be thrown at the police to push them back. In the face of police brutality, without self-defense, a protest usually cannot survive.

 

With the destruction of property, violence can turn from an aspect of self-defense to a useful offensive tactic. Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property. In America, property is racial. It always has been. Consider the racist violence which stretches from slavery to lynching to the ongoing extrajudicial killings of black men and women. For 300 years, the very idea of a black person’s freedom was a direct threat to white men’s property. After slavery, lynchings were often targeted at blacks who had gained relative wealth and therefore, challenged the wealth and property of white men. This year, George Zimmerman was found not guilty for killing an unarmed black child-who he assumed was breaking into homes in his gated, white community, or threatening the property of his white neighborhood. When property is destroyed by black protesters, it must always be understood in the context of the historical racialization of property. When the same system that refuses to protect black children comes out to protect windows, what is valued over black people in America becomes very clear.

 

One cannot discuss the immorality of damaging property without devaluing the rage that brought protesters to this point. You, too, have to decide which one you value more: human life or property. As Vinz so eloquently says in the film La Haine, when rage spills into the streets after a brutal police beating left a young man from the ghetto on life support: “A homeboy’s dying; fuck your car.”

 

In Sudan, where IMF-backed austerity measures have hiked gas prices so high that the average person can’t afford to get to work or eat a basic meal, destroying gas stations and signs of wealth has an obvious symbolic significance. Forcing the question once more, who do you answer to: starved citizens or a fancy building?

 

But for the darker skinned (Africans and Blacks in the Diaspora), the violence of a few always represents the actions of the whole. In fact, it is our entire colonized history in a nutshell. For us, there is no nuance. No acknowledgement that in a group of thousands, a handful of people decided to break a window. Compare this to Greece, where media takes the time to emphasize that “99 percent of the protests in Greece are completely peaceful.”

 

To say that what’s happening in Greece or Istanbul are protests that involve violence is to say that they are fighting non-peacefully for a greater cause. This is, from what I saw, true. But to diminish Sudan’s protests as “riots” because of their violence is to say the people protesting are violent beings absent of complex thinking and tactical strategies. In short, it’s racist.

 

The term “riot” implies disorganization, running amok with no end means, goals or demands outside of individual gain. Rioting implies you’re not on the streets for a greater cause or a greater advancement. It implies you’re more interested in looting a store for a television than breaking and taking property as a subversive act. It reproduces the racist claims about black subjects: that they are violent, ignorant, selfish, and depoliticized.

 

Many on the left called the predominantly black 2011 London uprisings a “consumer riot,” arguing that they were not a moment of resistance but a reflection of greed run amok. Breaking and taking property happens in pairs. Since the elite detest both, they are equally effective. But for black protests, it’s easy for others to fixate their colonial gaze and forget the breaking aspect while focusing in on the looting since, you know, black people steal. The historical context is, of course, conveniently ignored. Since colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, white wealth has been and continues to be built off the backs of black labor, off the exploitation of African resources and bodies. But wait for the courts to grant reparations, and remain waiting. Looting is the opposite of apolitical; it is a direct redistribution of wealth. And yet, even on the left, when a black or African protester destroys and takes property, they are stripped of the tactical or historical will inherent in the decision. It is instead understood through the colonial conception of the political backwardness of black communities: they become apolitical rioters, pure and simple.

 

The media’s method is clear with regards to African resistance: quietly declare the demonstrations “riots” and then move on to the next piece of news. No more than three paragraphs, if that. No nuance, no debate, no critical thinking so that it is an easy argument to make when the state puts rioters down like one would a rabid dog. Like in Newark, 1967, where the National Guard occupied the city, complete with snipers on rooftops that shot and killed black people for looting, or running, or coming out of their homes. Or in Sudan, where police forces opened live ammunition on demonstrations and killed over 200 people in a week. State-sanctioned killing and military force is all of a sudden a “complicated” issue where there is no clear “good” side. Yet, while one group is destroying property, the other group is murdering human beings. When oppression from the state breeds outrage that is then silenced with state murder, how do we respond? Do we internalize and blame ourselves or are we persistent in our refusal to back down? At times some say protesters are “provoking” the police based on their tactics but how do we equate people destroying property to the state mass murdering its people? Why is property on the same level as living, and breathing human beings? When the state kills, we must ask ourselves how we got to the point where the blame is on anyone but the state and its actors.

 

Throughout the 20th century, the KKK and white rioters destroyed massive swaths of black property, not to mention murdering black people, usually with implicit or actual state support. More recently, the Greek Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn would go into immigrant neighborhoods in Athens and destroy their stalls and storefronts (and also, murder immigrants), with little state resistance (indeed, many Athenian police are Golden Dawn supporters). The destruction of property is a red herring, used to divert attention from the fact that it is the goals, not the methods, of the protests that the media and the state object to.

 

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” 

-Assata Shakur

 

Most resistance is nonviolent, but those who choose to be nonviolent should not dismiss or distance themselves from others who use violence strategically. When demanding change, all tactics must be brought to the table. Selective historians consider this unnecessary; they will use the Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent resistance as an example. They will demand that you stand perfectly still as you get sprayed by water hoses and attacked by police dogs. They’ll conveniently forget to mention that while MLK was leading non-violent resistance in the form of sit-ins and marches, “riots” were raging through America’s black ghettos. It was the potential for more riots, like those that exploded in Birmingham in 1963 as the freedom riders campaign grew increasingly resistant to police violence, that had Robert Kennedy convincing his brother to pass Civil Rights legislation, lest the whole country follow suit.

 

In a world where blacks are forced to wear their perceived violence on their skin, many will see violent tactics as moving backwards. Some will caution the masses against using violence towards property as a tactic. They will ask everyone to stay calm and collected. Pay attention to where they are yelling from (their luxury apartment, perhaps). The State and the elite are counting on this: the notion that all (black) violence is uncivilized or barbaric. But what is more realistically threatening than “moving backwards” is staying right where we are. In a society where black people are always-already guilty, pleading for change instead of demanding it will do just that.

 

Trying to change tactics in a desperate attempt to fit the media’s narrative is not an option, because the media’s narrative always ends with the world fundamentally unchanged. The media is obsessed with protests that receive a large scale of police brutality and at the same time, uncompromising in the idea that protesters must be “peaceful” by all means necessary. It’s pretty obvious that one cannot both defend themselves and fit this accepted profile. It’s almost as obvious that one can barely survive— both individually and as a movement— and fit this profile. The state kills us; the media wants us silent.

 

All this begs the question: Is mainstream media needed? Do we need its support? Despite media’s non-coverage, when the government in Sudan realized protesters weren’t going home after a week (despite the threat of death from live ammunition), they first promised they would give cash out to needy families and raise salaries. This, of course, didn’t stop the protests. When people still didn’t go home the government then arrested and detained 800 activists and journalists. This crackdown-generosity-crackdown vacillation is a tactic often used by the state when those in the streets have a chance of winning.

 

Instead, in order to win support, we should look no further than our communities. Protesting, after all, is just one form of resistance. When thousands aren’t out on the streets (or preferably, while thousands are out on the streets), we should be working on building and existing in the type of world we’d like to see. Our communities should always be at the forefront of our minds. So these questions must always be asked: Which windows are being broken? Who are we hurting? What exactly are we destroying?

 

There was a great moment in Istanbul that happened over and over again. Police would shoot tear gas canisters into a crowd of people. People would panic and start running. To escape the gas, they would duck into a nearby building, all the while coughing, spitting, eyes watering. Ten minutes later, with lingering tear gas still in the air, the crowd would re-emerge, smiles wide and looks that said, “we’re still here.” They would start moving forward, chanting louder, clapping in rhythm.

 

It’s no wonder that shooting protesters dead in Sudan only resulted in more people out on the streets. After being detained, beaten, tortured and threatened with rape by security forces in Sudan, Rania Mamoun said, “Some experiences strengthen you, while others break you. When you’re beaten to a pulp, your dignity is assaulted, your safety compromised, your freedom stolen, there is only one way forward – to continue what others initiated. There is no return, we can only go ahead, and that’s what they do not know. Your beating and your torture does not frighten me nor break me. It will not force me to retreat…You ask me: Are you not afraid? And I say: I’ve become stronger.”

 

When our bodies are beaten and dismissed, our survival is dependent on our persistence. We don’t need the mainstream media; instead, we should recognize that the media is a part of what we’re up against: the dismissal of our dead bodies, the excuses for the hands that kill us.

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