The state of White Anti-racism on this September 11

Fabulous blog by a white anti-racist activist, as published this September 11 on War Times (http://war-times.org)

Turning Away from Fear: Thinking on 9/11 About White Anti-racism

Tue, 09-11-2012

Clare Bayard 

This morning, I listened to the words of the inimitable Suheir Hammad, from her poem “First Writing Since.” Suheir ends that powerful piece by saying

“Affirm life. Affirm life. We got to carry each other now. You are either with life, or against it. Affirm life.”


I listen to this poem of hers every year today, and every time, it makes me cry. It unleashes my grief, rage, desperation, relief, and love. It reminds me how I am so lucky to do the work I get to do. Affirming life and every day learning how to better put that into practice collectively.

***

In 2001, I was living in Washington D.C. for a few months working on the international mobilization against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings scheduled for late September. This was during the height of the global justice movement within the U.S.. We had high hopes and brilliant plans for this convergence challenging the current form of colonialism and empire that millions of people around the globe were rising up against.

On the morning of 2001, I watched the World Trade center towers fall on TV in the living room of the house I was living in with my affinity group, those of us who were organizing the office space that the Mobilization for Global Justice operated from. Some of us had loved ones in New York and were frantically trying to get through blocked phone lines. Others went on reconnaissance downtown and came back telling us that tanks were out in the streets while the Pentagon smoldered.

Some of my affinity group members had been involved in land defense occupations with the American Indian Movement (AIM). Body-memories of being viciously attacked during raids, and the realities of violent state repression were prickling their skin to get the hell out of Dodge. Public transit was shut down and we tried to rally enough bikes to get us all into Virginia if it came to that. Remember that on that first day, nobody knew where this was going to go. No one did. All we knew was that people were dying and more were going to be killed in response. In the midst of the ash and fire, the looming specter was of violent repercussions on a mass scale, likely directed at brown people.

We knew the history of white supremacy and state violence in the U.S., and we did not leave D.C. that night. None of us are Arab or Muslim and most of us have white skin privilege. Those who had been injured standing with AIM knew that they had only been targeted like that because they were working within the indigenous resistance movement that has been the longest-running target of U.S. militarism in the history of this country. We knew that majority white activist movements which aim to challenge state and corporate power are, overall, third-tier targets, following the resistance of movements of color, and poor and working-class communities whose daily lives are marked by state repression. We also thought it was possible that we'd see live ammo at street protests. CNN sure made it sound that way.

We canceled the convergence and planned a peace march for which we fielded flack and accusations of cowardice from all over the country. In our house, we filled the bathtub with water, cooked gallons of soup for our friends and neighbors, drank whiskey, and cried together. We found fellowship and tried to figure out what the hell to do. We talked to west coast loved ones who seemed to be living in an entirely different reality.

We slept in our boots. Grief shook us down. That week is now fogged over with a level of confusion, mourning, and fear that I can recognize later as an experience of collective trauma. And underneath it all was the sense of helplessness, as Bush began rattling the swords and, within a month, made war on Afghanistan amidst an eruption of cheers and applause from all over this country. American flags hung off every highway overpass from D.C.to NYC.

Eleven years 

It's 2012, and millions of Iraqis and Afghans have been killed, injured, maimed, displaced from their homes, and have endured the staggering trauma of having their lives invaded. 'Collateral damage' of 'soft targets.'


It's 2012 and the names of everyone who died in the 9/11 attacks, including the first responders, have already been lost just as thoroughly as the names of the 6,000 some U.S. service members whose deaths are officially recognized.

It's 2012 and I don't know who has generated a head count of how many people inside the U.S. who are or appear to be Arab, Muslim, North African, South Asian have been harassed, detained, assaulted, fired, evicted, bullied, raided, surveilled, and killed.
State violence. Street violence. In the schools, the convenience stores, in the lines of men between certain ages from certain countries standing outside Homeland Security during the “Special Registrations.”

It's 2012 and the “war of civilizations” and fear-mongering frameworks of the hawk opportunists in power have devastated Afghanistan and Iraq, and eaten an abyss into the U.S economy, social fabric, and soul.

It's 2012 and a veteran of the U.S. military commits suicide every 18 hours according to some studies, or every 80 minutes, according to the VA. Then there's the epidemic of sexual assault and rape within the military, PTSD, physical and mental injuries, poisoning from chemical weapons and toxics “in theater.” The impacts ripple out into families and communities  when one person comes home bringing the war in their body.

This morning the Cost of War counter [2] was around $1,372,000,000,000 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Better believe that doesn't include reparations or sufficient care for veterans.

In 2012, the Israeli military trains the U.S. National Guard in tactics that were developed on the U.S. taxpayer dime and tested on Palestinians. I have a veteran friend who endured multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was dispatched to New Orleans post-Katrina. He became an antiwar organizer after the similarities in those experiences sunk into his bones.
He speaks of what he saw in peoples' faces while transporting prisoners and transporting evacuees.

It's 2012 and the U.S. leads the world in incarceration. The carefully fabricated fear of black and brown bodies, of poor people, of “immigrants,” makes security and safety impossible for most people who live in this country, and has repercussions around the world.

In 2012, though it is not new, more and more people inside the U.S. are being pushed into a desperate situation. The economic violence committed against to so many uses a cover of racism, invoking peoples' manipulated fears and grief.

White narrative divides us 


For those of us who are white, coming from every class background across the spectrum, we have to recognize how racism in the U.S. is fundamentally a divide and conquer strategy to convince non-ruling class white people to align with the 1%, against our own interests. It's a class war strategy presenting itself as a race war. The “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, which the Christian-dominated ruling class has employed for generations to expand its power, or to reach its 'manifest destiny,' got a massive steroid shot with 9/11.

I couldn't say it more clearly than a college acquaintance of mine said on Facebook today: “I will never forget how agents of the religion of war and genocide attacked innocent civilians in New York simply because they were who they were. People who loved freedom, their families, their work and America.”

Yep. There's the narrative right there. That's what we are fed in order to continue enlisting us in this project of accumulating wealth and power for a tiny handful of people, while Oakland and cities across the country are closing schools and telling teachers there's no money to pay them, and anyway, your unions are the real problem with this economy. That's how you enlist white people to support welfare deform, even though statistically white people receive more support than the African-American women who are attacked with obscene racist caricatures of  “welfare queens.”

But today I am thinking about some of the other layers in addition to the economic realities of why white supremacy hurts white people when we collaborate with racial oppression of communities of color.
When some peoples' lives are devalued, nobody's full humanity can flourish. When you see some of your neighbors as less than human, how does that affect your understanding of yourself?  When you permit some of your neighbors to be treated as less than human, you agree that those practices are acceptable.

Do you think it will never trickle down to you? When you believe that some mothers celebrate burying their children, how does that distort your own ability to love people from the deepest place in you?
When you co-sign a war budget that bleeds our schools in order to drop bombs on other peoples' children, what kind of future are you endorsing? When you make excuses for racial profiling, mass imprisonment, children losing their parents to deportation, torture in prisons in the U.S. and in our overseas allies, what part of your ability to love yourself dies?

Survival is at stake: economic survival, survival of the planet, and the survival of our core selves. Our abilities to fully love, connect, build healthy societies, look out for each other instead of tearing each other up.

Decolonizing our lives

The histories of people coming together to dream new visions, to develop functional alternatives to what we're strong-armed to accept, to find common points of interest and build joint struggle- that is the river into which flows the best legacies of white anti-racist organizing. We need each other. Across lines of power, privilege, violence, oppression, and the very real legacies of colonialism and racism that are inscribed differently in each of our bodies, we need each other. Navigating those lines is complicated and painful and we are all bound to mess up at times when we take risks. But if fundamental social transformation isn't going to necessitate some complicated, risky messiness, then what is?

I believe that my heart is sound enough to support me on a lifetime journey of decolonizing myself from the lies I've been taught. I believe I can unlearn the ways I've internalized privileges that distort my ability to connect with myself, other people, the world around me. I choose to believe that all of us are capable of this. And we all need to do this because we are all needed. We all must bring our varied strengths to bear on changing this world. No more 9/11s. No more CIA-backed coups like the overthrow of Chile's democratically elected Salvador Allende on 9/11/73. No more open-air prisons like the Gaza Strip. No more shootings in mosques, gurdwaras, burnings of Black churches, white supremacist attacks on Jewish communities. Affirm life.

What I might love best about Suheir's poem, beyond her fierce honesty and vulnerability, is the firm re-invention of Bush & Co.'s binary. You are indeed with us, or against us. The question is all about who is “us?” And as Arundhati Roy says in her heartshaking piece “Come September,” 9/11/2001 could be an opportunity, “To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: Welcome to the World.”


 

What becomes possible when we start understanding ourselves as being part of the world, rather than above it, or bunkered down against it sending out drones and poor and working-class kids to shoot other impoverished kids?

What becomes possible when we accept that invitation to re-grow our collective humanity?
There are so many places that sun is shining through the cracks right now. What I'm thinking about this morning:

In 2001, I was deeply engaged in immigrant rights work. When I returned to my home in San Francisco from D.C., just after the war in Afghanistan had been launched, it was heart-rending to hear from the immigrant leaders who had, prior to 9/11, been building powerful local and national movement. People said, “This just set us back ten years.” The levels of fear and repression hit different communities of color differently, and nobody escaped the impacts.


So it's eleven years later. The UndocuBus tour with the No Papers No Fear riders' historic freedom ride through the South just ended at the DNC to pressure Obama, who is deporting people faster than Bush ever did. The level of courage and militancy in the migrant justice movement, in the face of escalating state and federal level attacks, has risen to a higher public level than where it was on September 10, 2001.

There's more. Every day there are victories. Movements, woven out of relationships, organizations and community structures, are inexorably opening space for survival and dreaming our desires into reality.

This is a love letter. To the First Nations people whose occupied land I live on. To the folks in my life, particularly people of color, who have supported me in continuing to grow in my capacity to effectively place myself on the side of justice. To my affinity group in Washington D.C., to a memory of swimming in the Potomac with you all less than a week after September 11^th and feeling us buoyed up by the river and knowing that we were going to pull each other through because we were people who loved each other who were held by a movement so big it spanned the globe. To the global peoples' movements for democracy and liberation that have inspired every successful justice movement in the U.S.  And to those who continue to grieve, while they continue to love, whose hearts are so big that nothing can stop them. The work of affirming life is what makes our hearts unstoppable. To my white people, working together against racism is a love letter to the world, and to our own potential to regenerate the humanity that white supremacy asks us to cash in.
 
Thanks to Max Elbaum and Rahula Janowski for feedback.

Power to the People: Arundhati Roy

One of my inspirations, a brilliant, amazing woman and writer...

Interview with Arundhati Roy

New Internationalist Magazine

Issue 445

Arundhati Roy is probably the most ‘do something’ public intellectual of our time. In her interview with New Internationalist she offers her take on market-friendly democracy, people power and the wealth that is fed by people’s lives.

Your writings have grappled with ruthless state violence which is often at the behest of corporate interests. Much of the corporate-owned media in India shies away from covering the civil war-like conditions in many parts of the country. The establishment tends to brand anyone who attempts to present the other side’s points of view as having seditious intent. Where is the democratic space?

You’ve partially answered your own question – newspapers and television channels do not make their money from subscriptions or viewership; in fact, corporate advertisements actually subsidize TV viewership and newspaper and magazine readership, so in effect, the mass media is run with corporate money. Some media houses are directly owned by corporations, some indirectly by majority share-holdings. Some media houses in, say, Central India, have a direct interest in mining and infrastructure projects, so they have a vested interest in the push to displace people in the huge, ongoing land-grab in which land and resources are forcibly taken from the poor and given to the rich – a process which goes by the name of ‘development’. It would be foolish to expect objective reporting: not because the journalists are bad people, but because of the economic structure of the organizations they work for. In fact, what is surprising is that despite all of this, occasionally there is some very good reporting. But overall we either have silence, or a completely distorted picture, in which those resisting their impoverishment are being labelled ‘terrorists’ – and these are not just the Maoist rebels who have taken to arms, but others who are involved in unarmed, but militant, struggles against the government. A climate has been created which criminalizes dissent of all kinds.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of the poorest people in jails across the country under charges of sedition and waging war against the state. Many others are just charged under the common criminal penal code. There are the other ‘seditionists’ too, of course – those who have been fighting for self-determination after being inducted into the Union of India without their consent, when the British left in 1947. I refer to Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland… in these places, tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured in the nightmarish interrogation centres and army camps all around the country. And now, the Indian army is migrating to the heart of the country – to fight the adivasi people whose lands the corporations covet. They say Pakistan is a military dictatorship, but I don’t think the Pakistani army has been actively deployed against its ‘own’ people the way the Indian army has been: Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Hyderabad, Goa, Telengana, Punjab and now, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa…

Anti-corruption campaigning has been at the forefront of media-reported news in India. Meanwhile, the relative silence on civil war conditions continues. How does one explain this gap in what makes the news?

I have mixed feelings about the anti-corruption campaign. It gathered momentum after a series of huge scams hit the headlines. The most scandalous of them was what has come to be known as the ‘2G scam’ in which the government sold telecom spectrum for mobile phones (a public asset) to private companies at ridiculously low prices. The companies went on to sell them at huge profits to other companies, robbing the public exchequer of billions of rupees. Leaked phone taps showed how everybody, from the judiciary to politicians to high profile journalists and low profit hit-men, were in on the manoeuvring. The transcripts were like an MRI scan that confirmed a diagnosis that had been made years ago by many of us.

The 2G scam enraged the Indian middle classes, who saw it as a betrayal, as a moral problem, not a systemic or a structural one. Somehow, the fact that the government has signed hundreds of secret Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) privatizing water, minerals and infrastructure, and signing over forests, mountains and rivers to private corporations, does not seem to generate the same outrage. Unlike in the 2G scam, these secret MOUs do not have just a monetary cost, but human and environmental costs that are devastating. They displace millions of people and wreck whole ecosystems. The mining corporations pay the government just a tiny royalty and rake in huge profits. Yet the people who are fighting these battles are being called terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Even if there were no corruption and everything were above board on these deals, it would be daylight robbery on an unimaginable scale.

On the whole, when a political movement is mobilized using the language of ‘anti-corruption’, it has an apolitical ‘catch-all’ appeal which could result in a hugely unfair system being strengthened by a sort of moral police force which has authoritarian instincts. So you have ‘Team Anna’: a sort of oligarchy of ‘concerned citizens’ – some of them very fine people – led by the old Gandhian Anna Hazare, who talks about amputating the limbs of thieves and hanging people and who has praised Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who presided over the public massacre of thousands of Muslims in broad daylight. On the other hand, to shun the anti-corruption movement and set your eyes on a long-term political goal lets the corporate looters and their henchmen in the media, parliament and judiciary off the hook. So it’s a bit of a dilemma.

Recent Indian government legislation permits web content to be shut down for a variety of reasons. Film censorship is still widely used. Why does the state take such a paternalistic role towards what its citizens have to say?

I think overt censorship is slated to become a big problem in the near future. Internet censorship, surveillance, the project of the electronic UID (Unique Identity card)… ominous. Imagine a government that cannot provide food or water to its people, a government whose policies have created a population of 800 million people who live on less than 20 rupees [about 45 US cents] a day, a country which has the largest number of malnourished children in the world, which has, as a major priority, the desire to distribute UID cards to all of its citizens.

The UID is a corporate scam which funnels billions of dollars into the IT sector. To me, it is one of the most serious transgressions that is on the cards. It is nothing more than an administrative tool in the hands of a police state. But coming back to censorship: since the US government has pissed on its Holy Cow (Free Speech – or whatever little was left of it) with its vituperative reaction to Wikileaks, now everybody will jump on the bandwagon. (Just like every country had its own version of the ‘war on terror’ to settle scores.) Having said this, India is certainly not the worst place in the world on the Free Speech issue: the anarchy of different kinds of media, the fact that it’s such an unmanageable country and, though institutions of democracy have been eroded, there is a militant spirit of democracy among the people… it will be hard to shut us all up. Impossible, I’d say.

You have pointed out that nonviolent positions are difficult to hold on to when there is no audience to witness them, and when the opposing force does not blink at the moral challenge and responds with murder. Why do you think pointing that out caused such an uproar?

I have written at some length about this. I do not say that nonviolent satyagraha is an obsolete tool of resistance, not at all. It can be extremely effective; but has to be carried out in the public eye, in front of TV cameras, and for demands – like ‘anti-corruption’– which appeal to the sympathies of the middle class. However, I do believe that preaching ‘nonviolence at any cost’ from a safe distance to adivasi people who live in remote forest villages and have watched hundreds of security forces arrive, surround their villages, burn their homes and kill and rape their people, can also be pretty immoral. If the middle class were to join the battle, then of course nonviolent satyagraha would be an option. But of course it won’t. It can’t. That would be a political oxymoron.

Why does pointing this out cause an uproar, you ask? I think because of the fear that once those millions of people who have been so cruelly dispossessed of all they have in order to fire India’s ‘growth’ suddenly unshackle their imaginations and realize that they are not so defenceless after all, the Beautiful People know that no power on earth will be able to protect them. Sure, there may not be a perfect, synchronized revolution in which the masses will overthrow the ruling classes. Instead, there will be a messy insurrection, when all manner of brutality will occur. The poor may not win, but the rich will certainly lose. The feast will end. That’s why the uproar.

Are we talking about the narratives we like to make up and then believe in, regardless of the reality of the situation? What is your take on the narratives, especially those of the Western media, around the Arab uprisings?

Well, when the mainstream media begins to report enthusiastically about a series of uprisings – when they described the Arab uprisings as the Arab ‘spring’ – and when you know how loaded the reporting around the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is, then if you have your wits about you, you have to be on your guard, a little wary of swallowing the reports hook, line and sinker. If you follow what happened over the last three summers in Kashmir, for example, when tens of thousands of unarmed people faced down Indian security forces with as much courage and determination as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Yemen, you can’t help but wonder why the Western media switches on the lights to cover some uprisings, and blacks out others. I found it a little disconcerting how enthusiastically the 19-day ‘revolution’ in Tahrir Square was being reported, how excited [New York Times foreign affairs columnist] Thomas Friedman was about it – but only a few months ago reports seemed to suggest that Hosni Mubarak was sick and dying… Then you had headlines like ‘Egypt free, army takes charge’ and you know that the army is intricately entwined with the US. I worry that the anger and energy of people who have been repressed for years by puppet dictators is being siphoned off, carefully defused, while the West jockeys to retain the status quo one way or another and replace the old despots with a more streamlined, less obvious form of despotism. The last I heard, people were beginning to gather in Tahrir Square again…

Surges of people power, as in Tunisia and Egypt, and earlier in the Philippines, are capable of forcing climactic moments and sudden change. But the aftermath often sees a return to old systems and old corruptions. Why is human social organization so resistant to the change we yearn for?

While people in these countries lived under repressive regimes and yearned for democracy, perhaps they didn’t know that real democracy has been taken into the workshop and replaced by the market-friendly version, which is a far more sophisticated form of despotism, not easy for beginners to decode. It might take a little time for people to realize they’ve been sold the wrong model. But meanwhile they have fought heroic street battles, faced down tanks, celebrated victory. They’ve been applauded all the way, while they let off steam. For them to build up that head of steam again isn’t easy. It’ll take years. Human society isn’t resistant to change: it wants change; but sometimes it isn’t smart enough to get what it wants.

Another world is possible. What are the ways in which we can make it likely?

To work out the complex ways in which we are being conned and corralled into being ‘good’. To realize we’re on our own. Help won’t come. We have to conserve energy, know how and where and when to deploy it. We have to fight our own battles. Ask the Sri Lankan Tamils what it feels like when the chips are down and the ‘international community’ slinks away while your people are slaughtered and then returns to cluck and commiserate in hollow ways.

Read more on Anna Hazare and India’s anti-corruption campaign

More about Arundhati Roy: Arundhati Roy - princess to pariah (New Internationalist issue 436)

Interview by Dinyar Godrej

This first appeared in our award-winning magazine - to read more, subscribe from just £7

US Senate: More DREAMS Deferred...

These three are among the bravest, finest youth in America. John McCain and the US Senate have shamed us all.


Carlos, Marlene, and Francisco: I'm so sorry. I pray that someday all your DREAMS come true. This land desperately needs more good souls like you...

-------------------from America's Voice via Common Dreams-----------------

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 18, 2010
11:56 AM

CONTACT: America's Voice
Michael Earls
(202) 494-8555


Senate Votes Against DREAMs

WASHINGTON - December 18 - This morning, in a procedural vote requiring 60 votes to advance the legislation, the U.S. Senate voted against the DREAM Act by a 55-41 margin, effectively shutting the doors of opportunity to thousands of bright and talented young people who grew up in America and wanted to give back to the country they call home.

The following is a statement from Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America's Voice:

"Today we won a majority of votes in the Senate. Last week we won a majority of the votes in the House. But because of a Republican filibuster we needed 60 votes to pass DREAM and we fell short.

To those who did the right thing and voted for DREAM, you had our back and we'll have yours. But to the majority of Republicans and the handful of Democrats who voted against the best and the brightest of the Latino immigrant community, your vote against DREAM will be remembered as long as you are in politics. Many of you have expressed your sympathy for the DREAMers. But today we did not need your sympathy. We needed your vote.

As disappointed as we are in those who slammed the door of opportunity on talented young people who are Americans in all but paperwork, we are buoyed by the nationwide outpouring of support for this cause, the unprecedented mobilization in support of DREAM across the nation, and the leadership and courage of the DREAMers who came to Washington to insist on making their DREAM come true.

Where do we go from here? We will continue fighting, organizing, mobilizing and educating. We will continue to build an ever more powerful movement. We will continue to speak up and speak out for immigrant youth, for immigrant families, for immigration reform that embodies the best of our ideals rather than the worst of our fears.

We get stronger every day. We may have lost this battle, but in the war between justice and injustice, inclusion and exclusion, courage and cowardice, victory is not a matter of if, but a matter of when."



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America's Voice -- Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform. The mission of America’s Voice is to realize the promise of workable and humane comprehensive immigration reform. Our goal is to build the public support and create the political momentum for reforms that will transform a dysfunctional immigration system that does not work into a regulatory system that does.

------------So, what do we do now? A reminder from Arundhati Roy:---------

"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness, and our ability to tell our own stories..."

The God of Small Things.

"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability."

- Arundhati Roy (ripped off of Bill Ayers' blog, January 1, 2009)