Recentering Anti-Black Racism: Preparing for the Summer

Since the election of Donald Trump, national direct action resistance efforts have focused attention primarily on the Muslim Ban, NoDAPL and ICE deportations, which is a shift away from Black Lives Matter and anti-police terror struggles. I do not want to fall into the trap of comparing different experiences of different oppressed communities and urging a choice. Instead, I want to recognize that many of the politically active and aware people around me have already made such a choice. Our attention has already shifted, including my own behavior. I am a white person living in Milwaukee, one of the most racially segregated and aggressively anti-black cities in America, so my experience might be more exaggerated than elsewhere, but I suspect it is not entirely uncommon.

Reasons for this:

– The Trump regime has been choosing the battles. During the first 100 days, they have been most ostentatious in targeting the Muslim Ban, Sanctuary Cities, and DAPL. This seems like an intentional strategy to keep the attention off the Black community, where resistance has been most militant and organized in recent years.

– There has been an influx of white activists into radical communities. Many of the newcomers carry insufficiently examined anti-black prejudices.

– Trump rode a backlash against riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, Sherman Park, and elsewhere into the presidency. Fear of that backlash, often unadmitted and unacknowledged, has created distance between the Black Lives Matter movement and their white liberal allies.

– Obsessive attention paid to national level electoral politics, which has largely overlooked the already increasing levels of police terror in Black communities. No matter how anarchist and opposed to the circus we are, the chaos going on in DC is relevant to our work. Will Trump be impeached? Where are the Democrats actually standing up to him? What is the next lightning rod for mobilization? Where are potential fracture points? The answers to these questions shape any mass movement organizing effort and dominate our attention.

Problems:

– Letting the Trump regime determine the agenda is unstrategic and stupid. Steve Bannon will eventually get around to putting the crosshairs on Black people. Letting him pick the terms, terrain and time of that fight is the best way to go about losing it.

– Backlash is only the fault of liberation struggles in so far as it results from their success, and withdrawing in response to backlash undoes that success. It is a shitty analysis that blames a far-Right backlash on those who they target, but that analysis is still common, especially in a white radical community diluted with the newly woke.

– The radical community has been diluted by an influx of newly-woke people of all races, who lack an informed analysis of race in america, and carry naïve foolish ideas (like doctrinaire nonviolence, or respectability) about strategy and tactics.

– Even radicals in the white community are deep indoctrinated with the anti-black perspective, which is incredibly limiting. For myself, when I saw black people complaining about the attention given to executive orders on the Muslim ban and sanctuary cities, my knee jerk response was that they were being divisive and disrespectful of the groups who were under direct attack at the moment. Bullshit rhetoric about attention-seeking black organizers even appeared in my own head. Which tripped me out. When Milo Yiannopoulos’ talking points show up in your thoughts, its a good cue to step back, listen and reconsider.

– While it is important to have a sense of what’s going on in the halls of power, to identify fault lines or lightning rods in the political establishment, paying too much attention to this circus takes us away from the kinds of actions that have the most potential to crack those fault lines and corrode the system. The more attention we pay to the circus the more the agenda will be set by either Trump, or sell out Democrats. Our current form of government (democracy) thrives on legitimacy, and it is direct action and extra-parliamentary struggle that puts democracy into crisis, which pressures the loyal opposition to be more aggressive / responsive to the rebellions in the streets. If you want Trump impeached and vigorously opposed in congress, the best thing to do is to light something (maybe even anything) on fire, (figuratively speaking of course).

Predictions for Summer of 2017:

– Inner city crime rates will increase when the weather gets warmer, as they always do.
– Police will respond with an increase in brutality, terror, paranoia and murder, as they always do.
-Trump’s law-and-order regime will boost that increase, empowering and encouraging police forces to drastically increase the already terrifying level of police violence in targeted communities.
– Those communities will fight back. Riots, arsons, resistance will continue and escalate, because these are sensible and satisfying resistance options for a community subjected to the levels of deprivation and violence (both economic and political) that low income black communities have been subjected to.
– The erosion of white solidarity discussed above will remove liberal buffers that (insufficiently, but substantively) stayed the hand of police forces and white supremacist paramilitary organizations during the summer rebellions of other recent years.
– Solidarity with Black Lives Matter and black liberation struggles will be more left in the hands of anarchists, antifa, and other more militant white and brown allies, who will have to step up their game.
– The Right will step up in response. Violence against both the Black community and their allies from both state actors and right wing paramilitaries / neonazi organizations will increase even more drastically.

What to do:

– Recenter antiblackness more in our analysis and rhetoric.
– Build substantive relationships across race lines in your city.
– Train, prepare, get ready to fight in a variety of ways.
– Undermine the assumptions of white liberals, including nuanced, subconscious manifestations of anti-black indoctrination. Including our own assumptions.
– Confront anti-black sentiment wherever it shows up. Draw it out by pushing analysis around race, nonviolence, and backlash, and then address it directly.
– Make a line of what constitutes substantive solidarity vs lipservice, identify who is on your side of the line, stop wasting time with people who think electoral politics, a more progressive Democratic party, and other circus shows will resolve this conflict.
– Push that line. It is better to know who your real friends are before the fighting starts than to try and figure it out in the thick of battle.
– Do not drop other fights, but connect them. Deportations and Muslim bans effect the Black community. There are undocumented Black and biracial people in the US. Their experiences tend to be different than Latinx communities, but it is only the right who benefit when we make “undocumented immigrant” synonymous with “Mexican”.
– Resist the tendencies within these fights for sorting people according to deservingness. Liberals love to talk about the ivy league student from Sudan who was detained at JFK. They love to talk about hard working Latinxs with no criminal histories. These rhetorical positions bolster the same politics of respectability which struggles against anti-blackness are well familiar with. Instead, we must make the struggle against ICE a struggle for no borders, no governments, no law enforcement, a struggle that also takes power from institutions that target the Black community.
– Recognize the urgency of this situation. It is not hyperbole to talk about massacres. Make sacrifices and shift priorities in your life to make space for preventing them. Get strategic with your time and money. Make space for self-care, resilience and community building, but also recognize that, if there is going to be a break with normal democratic society in our lifetimes, it will likely happen in summer of 2017. This is terrifying. Many people will get hurt, but fighting back, even when outnumbered and outgunned, is the best way to reduce the toll, deter further violence, and maybe even end the slow-grinding genocide that has been a part of this country since its inception, and was increasing for decades prior to Trump’s election.