Hermes was a Bird and I Bit his Bowstring

I just finished Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth, and I’ve been reminded of and thinking a lot about a fucked up dream I had in high school. I haven’t really posted in a while. Maybe I’ve been too busy with grad school, maybe I haven’t felt the need to post since I left the University of Miami and know have other outlets for creative intellectual expression. 

For those who haven’t picked up any Fanon, he’s a founding postcolonial theorist as well as a psychoanalytical and existentialist thinker. He’s most known for his defense of violent revolution, which he frames in Wretched of the Earth as a cleansing, liberating praxis through which colonized peoples fully reject dehumanizing colonial worldviews (because colonialism is an “unthinking” system of violence, Fanon suggests that it can only be transformed through force or greater violence). Behind this is Fanon’s perhaps more fundamental theory, which is that colonialism is a “Manichean worldview,” a binary framework that opposes whiteness, civilization, purity, intellect, and everything good against blackness, savagery, evilness, passion, and sexual taboos. The psychological violence of colonialism, as discussed in Black Skin, White Masks, pushes colonized people to reject “blackness” desire and identify with “whiteness” (the opposite is also possible, but requires conscious political and symbolic maneuvering). In fact, however, the savage other is the creation of colonial situations - not only is there no colonized without the colonizer, but “blackness” in this Manichean system is in actuality a reflection of colonial anxieties.

So anyway, enough background. My dream took place in the colonial era (I think it was in Congo, but it was a long time ago), and I was both a missionary and a colonial subject. I mean, I was seeing the world through both peoples’ eyes, but they weren’t actually the same person. As a missionary, I was standing on a tall ladder outside of the church doing some kind of repair work. As a colonized subject, I was running through some dense underbrush to the mission (I guess there’s no need to sugarcoat it - my unconscious coded the whole scene within “the jungle”).

My missionary self knew that my colonial subject self wanted to kill me (since I could see both worlds at once). I was completely terrified. But I remember not being surprised - I may have even thought I deserved it. At that point, my colonized subject self ran out of the jungle and pushed the ladder down. The missionary self fell and I broke my neck. 

At that moment, I woke up. I remember feeling terrified that I could intentionally kill someone - even in a dream. 

is just a power struggle among elite groups playing out in the lives of the poor.

Elections make me sad. Although less sad than un-elected dictators.

Today I learned that oppression is best expressed as a segment of binary code. It is exactly as long as the number of discrete categories of identity you can name.

If you can’t represent domination using this model it doesn’t count.

I am so sick of working in this place that is so dedicated to imperialism. I’m sick of its neoliberal ideologies, its bourgeois anxieties, and its equivocal claim to social justice. I’m sick of its organizational inertia in the face of critique. So I’m dedicating the next few posts about it and its problematic politics.

I work at a place called the “Office of Civic and Community Engagement,” which exists within the administration of a large-ish private university. I am a lowly AmeriCorps*VISTA, which means that I’m payed by the federal government and placed in a public or nonprofit organization under a general rhetoric of “alleviating poverty.” So lets start off satirically, if simplistically: I alleviate poverty by building programs at a private university. The mission of my office is to “enhance university-community collaborations by engaging the university’s academic resources in the enrichment of civic and community life in South Florida.” I have found that “enrichment” in particular fulfills a double meaning, on the one hand framing rhetoric of social justice while on the other signifying a “Freudian slip” of sorts that signals our commitment to neoliberal expansionism. For the purposes of this blog, I assume that “enriching” South Florida within a capitalist framework also creates poverty, but you can read more about that here, here, or here.

I first became conscious of these tensions playing out in the office in late October. We had organized programing for Food Day, a national event focusing on health, sustainability, and worker justice. As you might expect, emphasis at our events was placed on the first two, although the CIW was kind enough to send a representative from Immokalee to speak on our panel despite that we did not cover their travel or lodging expenses (I think they spent the night at Occupy Miami, and I’m embarrassed to say that I did not realize this at the time and did not offer them my own place, either). Also, the comments directed at the CIW devolved into an elderly woman angrily telling the representative that she owned a small farm and that they should just go to the government and that will solve everything. I wanted to be all like, “READ THE REPORTS LINKED ON OUR WEBSITE,” but I asked my supervisor to say something to that extent in the closing remarks, instead.

We also organized a “Fair Food Fair” for organizations to table. One student group was distributing information about injustices, violations, and/or the lack of a living wage for food service workers in the university’s cafeteria. To give you some additional background, this particular student organization was a strong alley that organized demonstrations in support of a major custodial workers’ strike at the university back in 2006. This movement, which received a great deal of student, faculty, and community support, protested unfair labor practices, substandard pay, lack of benefits, and poor workplace safety.

The day after Food Day, we found out that we were in trouble! Apparently, the administration was concerned that the students actions, and more specifically their actions at an institutionally-sponsored event, could create tensions between the university and it’s cafeteria company. Our supervisor was chewed out by her higher-up, and she in turn made it clear that we would have to be more careful about these things in the future. Really!

What I learned from the experience: “civic and community engagement” happens off-campus, in “other” spaces,” but not within the campus community. Inequality can be addressed where we can be the ones “helping” rather than the ones profiting. “Positive social change” must exist within parameters set by the institution: It should not challenge the social relations within the institution, or provide space for organizations that may vocalize injustice perpetuated by the university.

It is often tempting to categorize social and political movement into categories or sections of right/left. However, upon deeper reflection people, organizations, and institutions that seem progressive may actually be highly invested in stabilizing the old regime and legitimizing exploitation. This is simply a matter of how you frame “social justice.” I think that this is the case in Miami, or at least in my office. Our role as the “Office of Civic and Community Engagement,” and our supposed goal of “positive social change,” these values directly conflict with our position within a private, bourgeois institution of higher education.

So here’s my starting place: I plan on continuing to building on these ideas in further posts.

1. Involves thinking seriously about alternative social realities
2. Involves thinking and rethinking the relationship between humans and technology/material culture
3. Makes me feel distopian
4. Marks its possibilities as such by situating its narratives in different moments in time
5. Tells us a great deal about contemporary mythologies
6. Is often whitewashed
7. Specifically, often relies on latent social-evolutionist models of social change, and hiearachical stages within this model are marked by “technological advancement”
8. Is often appropriated for radical counter-projects 
9. Is literally scientific fiction, in the sense that it is a social-scientific genre that explores the possibilities of past societies
10. Is frickin’ awesome

Basically, all these points can be reduced to… imagination! Also, 5-7 are all the same point.

P.S. Important difference: one involves imagining people who actually existed. Who are other peoples ancestors. The other does not.

for a service-learning program, especially one that allegedly takes aim at oppression, you are going to get an assessment that confronts the reproduction of classism through the program.

Why is anyone surprised that this happened? Were they expecting something else to happen? Sometimes I just don’t get higher education.

A few weeks ago I was talking to the editor of an anthropological journal and I said that it’s interesting how my work was received very differently as a presentation than as a written text.  I was talking about the flow of the narrative, but the editor just said, “Yeah, they’re two different animals.  People can be more critical of written documents because they can go back over and read the parts again.”  That’s strange, I thought.  My impression was not that the reviewers of my manuscript were more critical than the audience of my presentation, but that they took it really literally (rather than thinking through the metaphorical elements that structured the argument).

What a non-anthropological thing for them to say.  Lol.  I guess in anthropology you don’t say that writing is inherently superior, you just kinda do it.

I have ethical issues.  At work I’m writing a benchmarking report retain recent college graduates.  The idea is that Miami (my city) needs to reverse the “brain drain” of smarties leaving the region and retain young professionals and entrepreneurs because the economy (specifically, the ongoing shift to the creative/information economy), so I’m researching initiatives developed in six other cities across the US that address this problem and writing a preliminary report.  My office was asked to do this by the Knight Foundation.  They’re kinda a big deal and we’re a new office, so I guess the thought process might be that it’s a good chance to get our name out.  So we’re doing this preliminary report and then we’ll ask Knight for the funds to do a full study – maybe even with surveys and focus-groups – that can made formal recommendations for the city.

The thing is, I tend to think in terms of colonialism and, well, this is pretty much what colonialism looks like.  The entire rational of the project is to raise Miami up within the economic hierarchy – to strategically engage in the old struggle if establishing a place as a metropolis within the world system (or, at least, closer to the core in relation to the periphery).  The goal, then, is to invest in (what will grow into) a stronger professional and elite class.  And we do that by making Miami more attractive for the young professionals. 

What does it mean to shift a city’s resources towards materializing an “attractive” social landscape targeted for a professional and entrepreneurial class of young people (and draining these “human resources” from other places)?  Well, I guess it just means that social reality continues to be enacted through a uneven process of history (or power) in ways that disenfranchise poor people, especially if they don’t have the same access to higher education.  Actually, one of the practices I’m finding in this benchmarking study is engaging students and young professionals through civic engagement (volunteering, service-learning, etc).  I have very little confidence that this will have positive social effect.  Rather, I would expect that the general thrust would be a playing out of class anxieties that effects a so-called “social justice” that ultimately reenacts and extends the process of privileged groups deciding what the lives of oppressed people should look like according to elite norms and assumptions about how reality happens.

But then again, what can Miami do besides compete to move towards the colonial core?  Wouldn’t the other option be decline?  As Judith Halberstam once said, ‘when I have only two options I try to think about what else might be possible’ (or something like that).  The entire orientation behind the “retaining graduates” concept/strategy betrays a fundamental lack of imagination – actually, scratch that, because this benchmarking study itself is an exercise in imagination – it is a flexing of a colonial imagination.  Sure, coming up with a radical alternative will probably require more work than this study and I’m not going to pretend I have “the” answer.  But the point is that desiring those radical alternatives is a feasible starting point for a process of collective imagination, just as much as this study is a process of collective imagination.  We might not have all the theories we need, but otherwise we’re working with ones that we know are violent, so we might as well try.

Anyway, as I said I’m writing this post because I have ethical issues.  Should I make the report bad?  Can I even make it bad without making it also look like I did it on purpose?  Could I even, on a basic emotional level, hand a bad paper in (I certainly was trained not to!)?  Ultimately, I don’t even think that would work because even if I did (and even if I got away with it), once it was in the hands of my very capable coworker and supervisor, they’d just make it good.  Should I turn the report in and just say, “I have major ethical issues with this document and fully believe that it is part of a colonial process?”

The other day, I asked my supervisor if anything could come out of this report other than gentrification.  He told me he would be surprised if even that came out of it.  So there’s that.

I said that there are subjected bodies of knowledge that reproduce themselves on the margins of colonial society that have important things to say about the dominant discourse.  I said that these social memories extend farther back in time than I would have thought imaginable.  I said that entire philosophies, frameworks for reality and society predicated on entirely different assumptions, have been maintained in these spaces.  I said that what we don’t know is far more important than what we do.

One person asks me how I know the people I work with are “authentic” Indians.

Another asks me about the “accuracy” of oral histories.

Whatever.

The other day a student at the university I work at called me “bro” in an email.  This is a marked escalation from the use of “my friend” in this students’ previous emails.  Just to be clear, I know I’ve met this student in person at one point because his name is on the sign-in sheet for an anti-oppression workshop my office ran- but otherwise I have no idea who this person is.

Oh, the life of a university administrator.

Today I workshoped a (very) small group about anti-racism at the private university I work at.  Two of the students were Australian.  I don’t know much about racism in Australia, but it’s definitely a settler state.

Although apparently Australia had a national “Sorry Day” to apologize for the historical mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples and in particular the attempted forced assimilation of the Aboriginal population.  It commemorates the “Stolen Generation.”

And afterwards when I looked up “Sorry Day Australia,” I pulled up a government website that began:

Warning. This article may contain the names and images of Aboriginal and Islander people now deceased. It also contains links to sites that may use images of Aboriginal and Islander people now deceased.

While its nice that they’re clearly engaging with Indigenous people on their own terms, I didn’t read the article because I figure if groups of people might have issues with the names of their deceased ancestors being read then I probably shouldn’t read it.

Oh man, did you hear about how the City of Berkeley is in the process of removing their $3 million in assets from Wells Fargo and relocating them into a local institution (either a credit union or a community-based bank)?  I mean, its kind of a bourgeoisie strategy but its neat that this is a conversation that’s happening within government.

I just wanted to point out a couple things about the article.  1) Wells Fargo’s defensive stance:

“Over the past three years, Wells Fargo has donated more than $3 million to 89 nonprofits in Berkeley… And less than two percent of homeowner-occupied loans in our servicing portfolio have proceeded to foreclosure sale,” said Wells Fargo spokesman Ruben Pulido.

Eff you Wells Fargo.  Nonprofits aren’t things outside of capitalism that accomplish some kind of class-neutral social justice if you only pump them full of money.  Most of them tend to mirror the organization of business and participate in the dislocation of control away from the community and into the hands of an elite class.  They reproduce dependency, by which I mean the process where communities’ resources and labor are exploited to the extent that said communities ultimately are not able to socially reproduce on their own.  In fact, the people who benefit the most from nonprofits (the CEO’s and other high level staff) are themselves most often outsiders to the communities that they work in.  So again, Eff you Wells Fargo for this weak-ass “but we’re the good guys!” argument.

2) Reinvesting in local institutions is a better thing, and it’s certainly a relatively simple and cost-effective thing, but its not necessarily enough.  The prime benefactors will still be the elite (albeit the local elite rather than the national or global elite) and continue to have the most impact within the higher echelons of society - that is, the people who stand to make the most money and be the least exploited.  The City of Berkeley needs to start talking about how this will benefit the general public, and especially the counterpublic (e.g., poor people).

3) “Remember to vote with your dollars”?  Right, because impoverished people already have too much of a vote as it is.  Voting with your dollars is a great way to think about how the political, social, and economic inequalities of society are interconnected and interdependent - but not a great way of practicing social justice.

Step 1: Strengthen local institutions

Step 2: Vote with your participatory democracy

Step 3: ????

Step 4: Community control!

The best kinds of “metaphors” are the ones that are literal:

State Bill Outlaws Use of Fetuses in Food Industry

So not exactly what I was writing about in my last post, but an interesting aside nonetheless.  Yay capitalism!

Some things I’ve been thinking about:

One thing that always bothers me about non-violence is that it’s not even a thing.  I want to say, “Do you just not respect what you eat?”

There is an anthropology book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, which discusses (in part) Bolivian tin miners.  The miners often talk about a being that lives in the mines and consumes the workers.  The author of this book argues this belief arises because miners theorize the conditions of capitalism from the vantage point of their colonization and exploitation, then code these theories in their particular cultural idiom (in other words, that they communicate these ideas within a particular symbolic structure that is different from mine).

I was a vegetarian when I read this.  I didn’t eat meat because factory farms are wrong, because they mechanistically produce suffering and death both for the animals that are eaten and the people that work in them.  I was also struggling with what it means to try (and inevitably fail) to live ethically within colonial-capitalism.  I had read how people who go hungry, who die in famines, are often living in places that produce food for the global market.  But they cannot afford that food.  I had read about how Coke hired paramilitary forces to murder union organizers in Columbia.  I read about how clothes were produced in inhumane sweatshops, often with child labor.  Every day that capitalism continues, I figure, is more hunger, more violence, more death.

I can’t run from these realities because late capitalism itself can’t be escaped from in any meaningful way. So I spent a lot of time thinking about my basic, daily actions, like my subsistence, and how they reproduced suffering.

There is blood on everything you buy.  If you buy responsibly there might be less blood, and the stench might be faded, but it’s there.  A little rinsed off, maybe.  In the dominant culture in the US we’re trained to ignore blood, to remove ourselves from the process and pretend that it isn’t there while we consume it.

I could shop at farmers markets and buy fair trade.  But I don’t have a lot of money, so even when this is feasible it doesn’t have much impact.  And even if it did, I’m not sure that I would be resisting capitalism effectively or if I would just be buying my own morality, my own peace of mind.  I could live “outside” of capitalism, say in something like an ecovillage.  I could grow my own food.  I could live with people who make clothing.  But again, would that be an effective strategy for dismantling global capitalism or would it just be  a way to make myself feel better?

After I thought about The Devil and Commodity Fetishism for a long time I started eating meat again. I figured that although I had been vegetarian or vegan for five or so years, I had never actually ceased consuming the flesh of others – their blood and their labor.  Sometimes figuratively, other times less so.

When we eat, we put the death of things into our bodies.  As the dead things slide down our intestinal tracks, our bodies convert what they can into nutrients.  This is not a new idea.  There are Indigenous people in the US and I’m sure elsewhere as well who speak about life and death like this.

When we consume – not just food but goods as well – we build or stylize bodies and construct beings that can interact with others.  If you would believe queer or poststructural theory, there is no natural or pre-social “self” prior to this process.  It just so happens that in the US, our formation as social subjects is contingent upon capitalist consumption.

Cannibalism is an interesting construct.  Historically, I’ve been told, the idea was a label used to vilify groups of people, to make them into “savages,” generally with little if any regard to those peoples’ actual cultural practices.

Certain concepts that help us orient ourselves to reality, such as violence, oppression, murder, colonialism, racism, capitalism, become things that exists in our bodies. They are also social realities that organize our eating.  These ideas live in our bowels, in and all over our bodies.  We are the living, breathing creations of colonial-capitalism and we are bio-mechanical parts that keep it going.  We are the meat and the people that eat it – if disproportionately the latter.  The separation between what we are and what we eat is a social fiction that helps us preserve our sense of good and evil, our sense of right, and our ability to live with ourselves while we live in colonial-capitalism.

I try to think about that when I’m eating, especially meat.  When I’m dressing.  When I’m shopping.  When I’m watching television. When I’m sitting in a chair in front of a table with cups and paper and a computer. Like in most rituals, I don’t actually think of all these things all the time.  But it doesn’t really matter because it was already there to begin with.

So I was reading this article and learned that after the governor of Pennsylvania slashed $800 million from the education budget, many schools are not going to be able to pay their teacher’s salaries.  And as you would expect, poor communities are expected to bear the brunt of this.  According to the Education Law Center, cuts in poorer schools reaching as much as 10 times the cuts from wealthier schools:

For instance, Gov. Tom Corbett’s proposed budget means the Steelton-Highspire School District would get $1,139 less from the state for every student, or $28,477 less for a class of 25. That’s even though the district has a poverty rate of 68.2 percent and already has a tax rate of 24.3 mills, the second highest in Dauphin County after Harrisburg.

In contrast, Derry Twp., with a poverty rate of 12.3 percent, would get $121 less per student from the state, or $3,030 less for a class of 25. Its tax rate is 16.99 mills.

Because educators are fucking awesome,  teachers in the predominantly black Chester Upland district passed resolution that they would work without pay as long as individually able.  In the words of math and literacy teacher Sara Ferguson:

“It’s alarming. It’s disturbing. But we are adults; we will make a way. The students don’t have any contingency plan. They need to be educated, so we intend to be on the job.”

Still in a rage, I decided that it would be a good idea to read about more education legislation.  I learned that the Obama administration has this dubiously named “Race to the Top” program, which gives states $4.3 billion dollar grants to “come up with new ways to grade teachers and tie student performance to their paychecks.”  My state, Florida, is one of the 25 participants, and the Department of Education has developed a complex assessment formula, called a “value-added” formula, which attempts to measure the impact of individual teachers on students’ test scores.  Teachers who rank higher by these metrics make more, teachers ranked lower make less, teachers who rank the lowest for two consecutive years get fired.  This legislation is be mandatory for all state schools by 2014

The article I cited has some really strong critiques of the program.  There’s little or no evidence that this kind of program will have a positive impact on Florida schools.  In fact, some tests of the system had an error rate of 25-35% when teachers’ scores were measured against evaluations by school administrations.  Teachers are being subjected to a state experiment, and if the experiment doesn’t “work out,” will teachers be excused, excluded, or fired?  Teachers of subjects not assessed in the FCAT (Florida’s standardized test) will still be payed on gradients based on FCAT scores.  The legislation subverts teachers’ right to collective bargaining.  It’s not clear where the money to pay highly-ranked teachers is going to come from.  Poverty is completely left out of the formula.  And so on.

IMHO, this legislation is nothing short of white-supremacy in action and the flip side of the NDAA.  First of all, standardized testing is highly ethnocentric.  Minds cannot be measured according to a single universal criteria, plus the questions on tests presuppose certain cultural frameworks in order to achieve coherency.  This means that students’ who are already marginalized by settler colonial white supremacist and capitalist society can either watch as their schools are denied key resources, or they can assimilate.  Teachers will have to increasingly teach to tests (already a problem in Florida), because that’s what their salaries and even jobs hinge on, and the space for intellectual freedom will be annihilated.  Not only will teachers have to ignore students’ interests and passions in the subject matter as they arise, but classes will lose the flexibility to teach anything other than the dominant narratives.  This legislation means that very little can be taught unless it is not just sanctioned, but explicitly required by the state.  

What does it mean to only teach the dominant narrative?  In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks discusses how although segregation meant that black schools lacked much-needed resources, it also provided spaces for teaching alternative histories (such as black history).  Education, in hook’s experience of segregation, was political, and it could even be liberating.  In integrated schools, on the other hand, “Knowledge was suddenly about information only.”  Student’s were expected to learn obedience, not to incorporate knowledge into their everyday lives.  As in Dead Prez’s “They Schools”: 

They ain’t teachin us nothin but how to be slaves and hardworkers 
For white people to build up they shit 
Make they businesses successful while it’s exploitin us 
Knowhatimsayin? and they ain’t teachin us nothin related to 
Solvin our own problems, knowhatimsayin? 
Aint teachin us how to get crack out the ghetto 
They ain’t teachin us how to stop the police from murdering us 
And brutalizing us, they ain’t teachin us how to get our rent paid 

If teachers’ pay is based on centrally-designed tests, they they are less likely to teach materials outside of that test.  Such as black history and literature.  Such as Native American and Latino history and literature.  Such as womens’, GBLT, and queer history literature.  (Ok, I know that most teachers don’t cover these things anyway, but that’s a problem with the education system that needs to be worked out and this legislation is heading in the absolute wrong direction).  Education doesn’t have to be alienating.  Interestingly, bell hook’s narrative also suggests a way of working within this system: autonomy.  So maybe “failing” can be turned into a good thing, something with the potential to teach alternatives to the domination and even confront domination itself.  Infinitely easier said than done, sure.

Oh, and what I was talking about with the NDAA comparison: the NDAA allows the state to detain people indefinitely.  It’s a way of neutralizing populations that cannot be incorporated into the so-called “democracy” as “citizens.”  What’s happening in Pennsylvania and Florida are just different examples of how education is being reeled by the colonial and capitalist elite.  It’s a way of controlling what intellectual resources are available (as well as denying them to poor people and people of color).  It’s about controlling knowledge (and determining what kind of knowledge will get you where in life).  And if I’m not mistaken, both the NDAA and education reform are probably moves towards fascism.  There is a war going on for your mind.

Ugh.  I hear a lot about a study that the Knight Foundation did in which they rank some twenty or thirty US cities in terms of “civic engagement.”  The Twin Cities were placed first.  Miami/Ft. Lauderdale/Palm Beach were placed last.  OK, so given that I work at the “Office of Civic and Community Engagement” of University of Miami, its maybe not unreasonable that I hear about it so much about it.

The survey that provided that data measures a range of things, from if participants are registered to vote, to if they have taken part in a rally or political meeting, to reading the news, to talking with friends and family members over the Internet.  The report concludes that Minneapolis-St. Paul is so engaged because it has a culture of “adventurous experiment.”  Miami, I guess, does not have whatever adventurous experiment is.

I better leave the methodological critique to the quantitative sociologists, but as an anthropology student I find it narrow (and I will say that I find it ironic that a study proclaiming the value of “working across differences” uses such inflexible methods).  While I don’t disagree that Miami isn’t very “civicly engaged,” I think our very concept of what civic engagement is and what we look for needs to be retooled.  This kind of binary comparison - whose the most engaged and whose the least - naturalizes culturally contingent values and obscures more than it illuminates.  We should be not only thinking about publics and civic bodies, but counterpublics and those who do not have full citizenship.  For serious, Miami is home to loads of immigrants and the Seminole Tribe’s Hollywood rez - centering our analysis on the civic body, and by extension the state, just wont get us very far (unless we aim to assimihate).  We should be thinking about how we might value alternative ways of “engaging.”  

Well, it just so happens that after months of not being able to fully articulate how irked I was, I stumbled across the following excerpts while doing research for a pre-service workshop for a course called, “The Sixties.”  They are extraordinarily rich in terms of thinking through “civic engagement,” and if nothing else, illustrate that this is not by any means a new conversation.

From Miami, the American Crossroads: A Centennial Journey, 1896-1996:

 

On January 1, 1959, Americans and Cubans who had been exiled since the Batista coup of 1952 greeted the triumph of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution with enthusiasm. This euphoria was short lived. When Castro embraced Soviet communism, an ever increasing number of Cubans fled the island and sought refuge in Miami. Some of the early refugees were able to leave the island with part of their wealth intact, but many more were forced to leave everything behind and start over again from scratch.

The emotional difficulty of leaving a country that was so close—with so many relatives located within several hundred miles—and yet so distant, caused much human suffering.  The revolution and subsequent exile broke up Cuban families and orphaned children had to be cared for. New homes needed to be found. Language was a barrier and professional careers could not easily be resumed. Discrimination had to be endured.

At first, Miamians paid little attention to the Cuban refugees. Exiles had come in and out of Miami many times before. The Catholic church [sic], the local Cuban community and various charitable organizations stepped in to help the refugees. As time passed and the situation in Cuba deteriorated, more and more refugees streamed into Miami. Late in 1960, Miami leaders convinced the U.S. Government to supply federal financial support to what up to that point had been a local concern. The federal refugee program gave each qualified head of household food stamps and $100 a month. The federal government also gave the refugees surplus food. Many refugees recall receiving cheese and peanut butter. Cheese was a welcome commodity, but many Cubans, unlike their American counterparts, did not know what to do with the peanut butter.

From This Land is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami:

Since white Americans were extending themselves to incorporate Miami Cubans, the continuation of parallel Miami Cuban business and service institutions frequently frustrated American white elites. They expected assimilation into their organizations, while the alternative Latino business organizations should fade away. They desired a unified business community with the American whites in the lead and Miami Cubans having become Americans, speaking English and adopting what they viewed as American civic values. [Emphasis mine]

[Block quote:] “There is no impediment for any Hispanic to be involved in anything they desire in Miami. There are no barriers. With intelligence and money, anything can be achieved. But thousands don’t want to get involved further than their activities in the Latin Chamber of Commerce. I just found out that Miami ranks thirty-seventh out of fifty in United Way contributions, and this is because a majority of citizens, Hispanics, don’t care to give. All this is so sad, disappointing and a good barometer of how things are. United Way is a leveler, but even when headed by a Cuban one year, it didn’t make any difference” …

Although the American white leadership felt that “bringing the Latinos to the table” was progress, some Latinos, and especially many Miami Cubans, increasingly felt a sense of ownership that contrasted sharply with the white American notion of them as outsiders being allowed into the game. With a growing power base of their own and substantial economic resources, many Latino leaders could afford to decline what they perceived as condescending or patronizing invitations. A Miami media executive described the process: “The (American white) civic leadership invited some Latins to come to their place, sit at their table, and play by their rules.”

For real, “civic engagement” is a culturally-bound tradition largely of the white bourgeois.  That’s not inherently a bad thing, since all action is informed by traditions of some kind.  But when you naturalize and universalize these value systems, you lose the ability to see alternative ways of existing within society, leaving room for only a linear scale of supremacy.  Just because you call it democracy doesn’t make it not about power and hierarchy.

knowledgeequalsblackpower:

insaississable:

anegroking:

knowledgeequalsblackpower:

the-unpopular-opinions:

It’s stupid that because we are luckier than the starving children in Africa, we should feel ashamed of ourselves. Yes, I was born as a middle class white girl, does that mean I am Satan himself? Was it me that ate the food of the starving children? Did I start slavery?
No I didn’t. Let me enjoy the goods I were born with.

Something to say? Say it here 

This is the shit I’m talking about.
White privilege can kiss ALL of my Black ass.

Although she sounds arrogant and elitist, she kind of has a point? 

Do we hate her because of what she was raised to believe? OR Do we feel bad for her because her grasp of the social structure in which we live is flawed? 

What is the point? #1, It’s poor people everywhere… not just in fucking Africa. #2, I GUARANTEE that girl has NEVER.. EVER.. NEVER EVER EVER 

 

… never ever ever not enjoyed a day of her fucking privilege. When was the day that she was so ashamed of her privilege she couldn’t enjoy it !??? ?? Like,

“Oh.. those poor, starving dying kids on television in Africa are really destroying the flavor of my steak.”

Actually, she probably did eat the food of starving children.  Famines occur in the global marketplace when the price of food is too high for certain groups of people to afford it.  In fact, often the countries suffering from famine often are actually producing food.  That’s colonial capitalism, yo: there is a direct systematic link between how some people get quality food and others starve.

So yeah, I hate her because she participates and perpetuates the structure that allows people to starve because its profitable.  Which I guess also means I hate myself because I buy the food of capitalism, too.  Damn.

So I’ve been actually been avoiding my blog for a while now because I promised to write a series about white nationalism, and this post is going to be really fucking difficult.  But I had some Delirium Nocturnum in the fridge so I guess this is happening.

My last post was easy because I got to look like a BAMF punching neo-Nazis.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately.  bell hooks talked a lot about it when she lectured at my college.  I also recently watched this video where Richard Rodriguez touches on the concept a little as a way of moving beyond the ridged racial ontologies of the US and Canada, a rethinking of a history made by people with passions.  In the dominant culture’s Thanksgiving narrative, he points out, no one falls in love.  History should be hot!  It was hot!  On the other hand, Spivak makes the point that its silly to think that the dominant Western system of “romance” and “love,” with all its problems, is inherently superior to the socio-emotive systems of other peoples.  When I first heard bell hooks speak about love, I thought about how love can be used to justify and continue abusive relationships, and about the patriarchal micro-aggressions that we, regardless of our gender or sexual orientation, often enact and suffer from out of our commitment to the idea that we need to be doing “love.”

Wait, wasn’t I going to write about white nationalism?  What’s all this love shit about?

My senior year of high school, one of my closest friends dated—and fell in love with—a neo-Nazi.  Well, he may not have really been a neo-Nazi.  At least, that’s what my friend claimed.  Apparently, the people who said that were exaggerating.  Sure, this guy said things to get a rise out of people, but he wasn’t a neo-Nazi.  Because saying racist things to “get a rise out of people” is totally acceptable.

But he was a skinhead and he definitely wasn’t a SHARP.  Several of my other friends stopped hanging out with her, partly because of her romantic choice and partly because of other drama.  I didn’t.  We had major conflicts sometimes, and it’s not like I never considered it.  Although those conflicts were never directly about her boyfriend. 

Maybe she was trying to fuck with her parents.  I don’t know.  But one day she told me that she was in love with him.

And I bought into it.  It’s really quite amazing, actually.  I, a Jewish man, was willing to construct a reality where I could find common ground with—well, whatever you would call this guy (let’s just stick with “white nationalist” for now).  Although I can’t say that I ever understood why my friend was dating this guy, and it was certainly never easy for me accept, let alone talk about, that doesn’t explain why I gave this racist motherfuck the time of day—much less defended his not-neo-Nazi-ness in front of my other friends.  The particular friends who claimed he was a neo-Nazi had just kicked me out of our band, so maybe I just wanted to think of them as judgmental liars.  Ironic, huh?

I don’t know.  She was a psychotic, manic-depressive, ex-meth addict and I was a post-suicidal straight/queer border-crossing nihilist direct out of rehab.  We kind of needed each other.  Actually, now that I think about it, rehab might have had a lot to do with it.  There is nothing like forced living in the middle of the woods with a bunch of white drug addicts who love talking shit about niggers and faggots when the councilors are out of hearing range to really fuck with your sense of ethics, or even identity.  I came back to a world with an aching unconscious desire to have some kind of grounds for knowing myself.  Not that that makes it OK.

I actually met my friend’s white supremacist boyfriend once.  He was a big guy who worked as an exterminator.  He lived outside I-285, which forms a loop around Atlanta.  As far as I was concerned, anything outside 285 was bumble-fucking-Confederate-flag-ville, anyway.  He seemed nice enough, though, although I wonder if he wasn’t tricked by my blond hair and blue eyes.  Maybe another Jew might have gotten a different reaction.  Or maybe he too was covering up his beliefs to find middle ground with his girlfriend’s friend.

I framed myself as a “realist,” balancing essentialism with anti-racism.  I lived in the South and that meant dealing with whites who held racist beliefs, but were otherwise “good people.”   And for some reason I felt it was reasonable, or even important, that vehemently racist individuals should otherwise be recognized as “good people.”  I mean, people of all colors have racial tensions and prejudices, right?  So I told myself I was down-to-earth enough to relate to anyone—even a white supremacist.  Or at the very least tolerate his presence and even act friendly.  I never went so far as to forget the fucked up nature of his beliefs, but I once played cards with the local KKK leader, so to speak.  After all, my friend loved him.  And I became a philosophical contortionist so that I could justify my friendship with a white nationalist’s girlfriend.

At a later point in my life, some liberals told me I needed to remember that white supremacists are human beings, too.  Funny.

Anyway, my friend and her boyfriend.  They broke up and I didn’t have to deal with it anymore.  And that’s what I think about white nationalism and love.

Yo, Is This Racist:

<p>Is it racist to have to ask if something is racist? Aren’t you being racist by proclaiming something someone says racist just because you are not white and somehow you can divine the motives of whites (or any other non-white that is not your color)? I find this whole blog to be racist, you included.</p>

Haha, U MAD. (sorry guys, I was on a plane for 10 hours, and I think this post just cost me $35.)

Racism isn’t a motive, in this sense it’s a semiotic system.

Speaking of white supremacy… Sigh…

Trigger Warning: Neo-Nazis and White Nationalism

I’ve been thinking about anti-racist storytelling lately, and also about how the dominant culture doesn’t talk about racism enough.  So I’ve decided to write a series of posts about my personal history as I’ve interacted with white nationalism.  I figure it’s a way of approaching the issue at the level of blunt and extremist interpersonal racism that is easily accessible to beginning and non-identified anti-racists, but also an approach that hints at some of racism’s more nuanced dynamics.  I also think of it as a kind of healing process for myself.  So here it goes:

I grew up just outside of Little Five Points in Atlanta.  That was before it became basically a strip mall – back when people still talked about finding used syringes in the gutter (I never saw one, but I wasn’t the most observant child).  Now, our oral histories didn’t go that far back – say for example, to the white gentrification and take-over of the surrounding neighborhoods – but we knew that the Little Five Points generation just before me was marked by conflict between the punks and the neo-Nazis.  There were fights, lots of fights, and eventually the punks forced the Neo-Nazi’s out.  That’s what I’m told anyway, and that’s why there were relatively few white nationalists in my neighborhood growing up.

The first time I met a white nationalist in person, I was flying through the air into his face.  My friend (also Jewish) and I were at the Masquerade, a dilapidated venue that the management was always talking about closing down, but never actually did.  We were going to 80’s night, but the problem was that 80’s night was 18+ and we were only 17.  The strategy we developed was simple.  The Masquerade was divided into three levels, “Heaven” upstairs, and “Purgatory” and “Hell” downstairs.  My friend and I bought tickets for whatever was going on in Heaven, and then we’d sneak down the back stairs into 80’s night in Hell.  That night Heaven happened to be a metal show.  The band was really into Norse mythology, and the singer drank beer out of a horn.

While we were hanging out at the metal show, my friend pointed out a big guy in the middle of the crowd hailing Hitler.  I missed the first time he did it but I kept my eye on him.  When I saw him hailing Hitler again, I ran towards him (the crowd wasn’t very thick), jumped in the air, and slammed into him with my shoulder.  In retrospect, I shouldn’t have jumped (I would have hit him with more force if I hadn’t).  But despite years of being forced to take karate by my father, my fighting style was still mostly inspired by the Power Rangers.  But that’s OK because my goal was symbolic, anyway.  Fuck if some Nazi thinks he can go around hailing Hitler without anyone doing anything.  Motherfucker.

After I hit this guy, he punched me in the face.  It didn’t really hurt, which put me a little more at ease.  He might have been way bigger than me, but if he didn’t know how to throw a punch I’d be alright.

“NAZI SCUM!” I yelled.  I think his response was something like, ‘YES, I AM A NAZI, FAGGOT,’ which was kind of an, “oh, right,” moment for me. 

“FUCKING BIGGOT!”  My vocabulary simply wasn’t equipped for this.

At that point, two of his friends came and stood behind him.  I was tall for my age, but each of them were about a head taller.  Here I was, some skinny punk kid wearing purple zebra-print leg-tight pants faced with three big, fat, probably-would-have-liked-to-stick-me-in-an-oven Nazi’s.  One of the them yelled something about how I shouldn’t have been at a show like this anyway, or what did I expect, or something like this.  My friend was nowhere to be seen, not that I blamed him for even a second.  Fuck.

One of this them starts hailing Hitler, saying, “What you gonna do now?  Look, I’m hailing Hitler!  You gonna hit me too?”  I thought about it for a second.  I didn’t really want to throw the first punch and get the shit kicked out of me.  Fucking Nazis.  So I spat right in his face.  It was glorious, spit my spraying everywhere like a fountain.  Easily the best spit of my life.  He punched me and the entire right side of my face went numb.

Luckily for me, someone jumped in the middle and spread his arms out.  A few other people started gathering around, too, breaking up the fight.

“FUCKING NAZIS”
“FUCKING JEW!”

So I found my friend and we stuck around for a minute, then headed downstairs to 80’s night.  We passed near the neo-Nazis again on our way out.
“Fucking Nazis!”
“Fucking Jew!”

Since the Neo-Nazi’s had implied that the show was their space, I looked up the band when I got home.  They took an explicit anti-white nationalism stance on their website, basically saying that the bigots were taking over the scene. 

When I woke up the next day, I had to explain to my mother that I had this enormous black eye because I had gotten into a fight with a Nazi.

“Were you drunk?”
“No.”

“I guess that’s what happens when the Irish marry Jews.  “I’m glad you’re OK.  Nazi’s are dangerous.  They’ll kill you in the street.”

Needless to say, I felt like a total BAMF that day at school.  Until a girl I knew asked me why I thought violence was the answer.  I was pretty enraged.  Should I be expected to sit idly by and watch as people glorify the fascist regime that murdered millions of my people and could have wiped us all off the planet completely?  Why is it not ethically acceptable to challenge Nazi ideologies by any means necessary?  I had recently finished the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

But I wasn’t really able to express myself that clearly at the time.  “YOU RACIST!” I yelled at her.  She walked away.

This girl was Asian-American.  I’m white.  So that was weird.  

The next time I saw a Neo-Nazi, it was at a Dragonforce show.  This guy in the mash pit had a swastika tattoo.  I thought about fighting him, but I didn’t and he disappeared into the crowd.

More to come soon.

Wow, so I just finished this fantastic article on Aljazeera about whether capitalism is a workable system or not, but oh boy did they get their conclusion wrong.  You can’t theorize if capitalism is a workable system from within the conceptual constructs of white supremacy!  It just will not work!

Every explanation of anything means silencing other things, according to Gayatri Spivak.  Any time someone goes about explaining something they have to decide what information will be included in the analysis, what’s relevant and what’s not.  But the information included will also affect the outcome of the analysis.  Deciding what information is relevant is at least as much social and cultural as it is individual – in order to include information you have to have access to it, and more importantly you have to know that you have access to it (oh my meta).  Well, anyway this articles conclusion, its explanation, leaves out a crucial conceptual framework for any discussion about capitalism: colonialism and white supremacy (O.K., it left out a couple frameworks, but I’m only going to write about this one).  It talks about capitalism in terms of the environment and about health, but not in terms of colonialism.  Its o.k. (it’s not), we’re trained not to talk about it (*caugh*especially-in-economics*caughcaugh*).

The article begins by asking, ‘is capitalism a workable system or must it be overhauled?’  It concludes that capitalism should be regulated, not overhauled (but implying that regulation would need to undergo a paradigmic shift).  Underneath his discussion, however, is a common Eurocentric construct of “progress,” a cultural narrative forged in the smithy of colonial scholarship that legitimized colonialism by framing cultural and political superiority as natural.  Actually that’s a misstatement: it’s wasn’t really “framed” as natural, it was so uncritically assumed that it was natural that it became embedded into academic thought. 

This construct, called “unilinear cultural evolutionism,” is basically what the name says it is.  It framed all different peoples on a single scale with “primitive” at the bottom and “civilization” at the top.  Europeans were claimed to be at the top, with every other group falling into lower spots based on how “advanced” (how far up the scale) Europeans thought their technology was.  Many Europeans literally thought that primitive people were subhuman – that they were closer to primates than Europeans were. 

The explicit articulation of this framework is usually credited to anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan in 1877.  He divided human societies into three major stages in order of “progress”: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.  His technological criteria were extremely specific and inflexible, including bow, pottery, domestication of agriculture, agriculture, and metalworking. 

If image of reality doesn’t strike you as strange, it’s because over a hundred years later, we still live in a colonial society in which linear evolutionism is assumed to be natural (even after the theory was discredited by Franz Boas in the early 1900’s!). Even Marx explicitly borrowed Morgan’s ideas when he wrote about “the march of history.” Our society maintains that illusion by largely failing teach us about other cultures on their own terms.  If you do find it strange, you probably have learned how to see other cultures on their own terms, and it probably also seems like most other people haven’t.

So when you hear words like “progress” and “development,” this is where those ideas come from!  Wait, it isn’t a neutral descriptions of the world?  You mean paradigms of social justice themselves borrow from colonial ideology?  Crazy, right?  Now, this idea has certainly changed some over the last several generations, but the core conceptual structure remains the same.  Back to the article: every time the author invokes ideas such as the “progress” or “development” of modern, capitalist society, he’s relying on a basic cornerstone tenant of colonialism.  That’s kind of scary, and merits that we should problematize some of the premises of his argument.  Here are some quotes I pulled out for illustrations:

“Modern-day capitalism has had an extraordinary run since the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, lifting billions of ordinary people out of abject poverty.”  (A better question might be who has capitalism “lifted” out of poverty, were they really “liberated” or “empowered,” and whose situation remained unchanged – or even more to the point, who has capitalism placed in poverty and then who has it proceeded to “lift” out)

“But, as industrialisation and technological progress spread to Asia (and now to Africa), someday the struggle for subsistence will no longer be a primary imperative, and contemporary capitalism’s numerous flaws may loom larger.” (This is statement is so colonial I’m not even sure what it means.  The !Kung, a forager – sometimes called hunter-gatherer – society pushed into the dessert by so-called “modernization,” were calculated to have worked an average of a 20 hour week obtaining adequate subsistence.  So I’m not sure what the “struggle for subsistence” means.  Capitalist “progress” just isn’t a viable frame for this discussion.)

Furthermore, while each example the author uses to illustrate his argument also takes on racial dynamics, he does not discuss how socio-economic disparity, health, or the environment are affected by colonialism!  He simply doesn’t talk about it!  The result is that his conclusion is weak because it fails to fully acknowledge the injustices perpetuated by capitalist social organizations - it frames the problem in such a way that overcoming racism and colonialism is not the aim of social justice.

We have to talk about race more!

I think I’ve finally found the concept I’ve been trying to come up with for the last year and half: “segregated knowledges.” I intend to use the word to talk about the colonial processes by which various peoples’ (Indigenous peoples, for my present purposes) intellectual traditions are excluded from either the dominant canon or from academic discussions all together.

So basically, I intend the term to provide a critique of two things: multiculturalist scholarship that “silos” scholarship into Africana Studies, Latin American Studies, Women’s/Gender Studies, etc.  While this has been an important and transformational history, it is not a social organization that with the capacity to house a decolonized world.  More importantly, the other critique is of intellectual traditions that are still silenced through academic discourse - for example, Native people’s oral histories and symbolic traditions.  In the rare occasions in which these traditions are included in scholarship, it is either through the radical methods of community-based scholars or it through people who extract these ideas without challenging the colonial materialities in which this extraction is made possible and desirable.

One concern I have is that segregation is a term used for Black peoples’ experiences of colonialism - so I’m not sure what happens when I stretch the term.  It brings up the question, what does integrating knowledges look like?  Is it more like assimilation or is it more like sovereignty?  I’m worried that the historical implications of these terms would lead to a push towards mere inclusion, when I think what is needed is a more radical transformation of how and where we organize scholarship.  Community empowerment!

Thoughts? Reflections?

I have a hard time thinking of questions sometimes.  Which is funny really, since I like to think I’m going to become a scholar “when I grow up” (wait, then what am I now? A nothingness-in-becoming?)  Once, when I was confronted by an idea that had more of a physicality than most ideas I was used to, almost like a memory of something gone, I asked one of my teachers, “How do you do an archaeology of a conceptual landscape?”  He told me I wasn’t asking the right question.

Someone once told me that I’m a slow thinker, but I’m a thorough thinker.  Maybe that’s why I struggle with questions.  Someone else told me that I seem to grapple with issues beyond my vocabulary.  Maybe that’s it.  I’m pretty sure that most of my thinking is in words – or text, to be precise.  I think I said that to my partner once, anyway (any truth I come to about myself tends to be the result of a lot of labor and a lot of oversight, but I’m OK with that because a lot of my friends and I grew up questioning various parts of our identities and we decided pretty early on that oversight always happened).  I’m not really positive, but it seems difficult to analyze the nuances of concerns and conflicts that remain only partially articulated.

I’m told that I’m fairly good at ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological research because I’m good at listening.  The only thing is that because it’s hard for me to create questions, it’s hard for me to steer conversations.  Not that I need to steer all conversation to do good research, but a middle ground might be nice.  One of my teachers once told me that asking questions was more important than drawing conclusions.  After thinking about it, I have to agree.  Conclusions are authoritative, and I tend to change my mind a lot as I learn more.  Questions draw people into conversations, they create a collective for inquiry.  But they also set the terms of that inquiry, which gives direction for the future of the process.  Embedded in the conversations from before, but pushing them to cover new directions.

It’s difficult sometimes living in Miami because I don’t have that collective.  At least on a face-to-face level.  I don’t think a lot of people think like I do, either.  And that’s not a bad thing, by any means.   But sometimes I get tired of explaining myself.

A lot of the world is unthinkable.  Our talk, our ontological systems, they limit our appreciation of the world just as they enable us to engage with it.   When faced with unexpected and confusing events, many people will try to explain it.  In doing so, they might grasp at the terms they’re familiar with, that they know.  In doing so, they might fail to see the radical challenge presented before their system of belief, the exposure of its internal contradictions and unworkability.  For example, I was once told by a Muskogee individual that a particular image represented not a man or a woman, but a genderless being.  Coming from the colonial settler society, wasn’t quite sure what this meant.  I’ve never met a genderless being, I don’t think (this Native individual was talking about a kind of genderlessness that seemed distinct from androgyny as I’ve seen it enacted).  I think there is a lot of power in simply allowing something to exist for a time beyond explanation, beyond full comprehension.

I have another example, an interesting one about white nationalists.  In my experience (and no, I’m not just talking about New College), many people will say that everyone, even militant racists, are “entitled to their opinion.”  Many will also say that violence is bad, even violence against white nationalists.  The issue here is that these people are trying to grapple with a problem from within the limits of a universalized system of beliefs.  The issue is that non-violence as an ethical value simply does not make sense unless you are willing to justify a white nationalist’s right to space and deny that space from people of color and Jews.  In other words, non-violence as an abstract and universal value becomes more important than actual people, or even mitigating violence in material social relations.  My, what words can accomplish in so many ways.

Speaking of space and white supremacy, I was watching this clip in which the members of Rebel Diaz talk about the meaning of decolonization: “We talk about the displacement that occurs during those times when the Europeans first arrived.  What we’re seeing today with gentrification is a neo-colonization.  It’s a new form of displacement against our people.  And we understand that the police are only enforcing that greed of the bankers and the real estate interests that are behind the gentrification process… it’s a new taking of lands and we need to fight that.”

Colonization is a kind of misleading term because it appears to be a noun.  Often people think about it as a thing: something that existed, and perhaps something that still exists.  A thing, and especially a past thing, can be othered.  Because of its state of being, because it exists in the very enlightenment terms of selves it can be othered.  It can be separated from an autonomous and discrete subject.  The dominant strands in Western colonial society like to think especially in nouns.

When colonialism is thought of as something like, “the taking of lands,” it doesn’t just exist in an isolated past.  It’s a conditioning that sets the stage for more happenings. It is a verbish noun, an expression over time, a description of power as it functions to concentrate additional resources in the hands of the capitalist elite (although certainly not something that can be adequately expressed through a series of noun phrases).  A history made through unequal participation, an unequal level of control over the terms in which history will unfold. Historical processes don’t lend themselves to othering because “selves” don’t really make sense from within this frame.  Sure, you can have an agency of sorts, but separating agents from their historical context as autonomous “selves” just doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Apples and Oranges. I mean, it’s theoretically possible, just not in this context.  We are things made of colonialism, of particular habits of speaking, of thinking, and of ignoring.

Scholars, professional smart people, put a lot of energy into thinking about new nouns.  Maybe new verb tenses are more important things to make if we are going to ask new questions.

The more you say “capitalism” the less real it becomes.  Much unlike “I don’t believe in faeries,” who, contrary to popular belief, do not give up so easily.

Not only do I find Christmas the single most repulsive ritual of dominator culture in the US, but I’m Jewish. It’s not my culture, but its forced down my throat everywhere I turn! I can’t even go out in public without being reminded that I’ve lost the struggle for space. Christmas is on the the streets, in landscapes seasonally recreated by municipal governments.  I’m already pretty much forced to either buy Starbucks or go without caffeine boosts because it’s the only coffee shop I can walk to from my office, which is compulsory cultural domination enough, but do I really have to be subjected with signage and assaulted with Christmas music when I get coffee? I get it, you’re Christian. I’m not. RESPECT THAT, MOTHERFUCKER. It doesn’t even snow in Miami, WTF Starbucks poster? And no, adding a fucking menorah doesn’t help: that’s still not diversity, it’s half-assed tokenism that lets people feel good about including a single non-Christian religion so they can go on with their ethnocentric shit.

It’s all around me and I can either be marked as an other or be subsumed. My very production as a Jewish subject is just as much tied to the omnipresence of Christian ideology in the US as it is to Adonai. So I know my world is already culture-controlled by pseudo-secularized Christianity and mass produced by corporate capitalism. I know that pretty much every time I buy something (a compulsory act within a capitalist system) I’m supporting white-supremacist colonial exploitation, degradation, and often murder, and that my own marginalization pales in comparison. It’s just more obvious this time of the year. 

Christmas surrounds us, it is inescapable. Its even crept into my blog! So given that I am inextricably tied into Christmas whether I like it or not, where do I go from here? Maybe its good to have a seasonal confrontation with the entire apparatus of capitalism and cultural domination, a reminder of my own limited and conditional access to whiteness. On the other hand, Hanukkah, for all its problems, commemorates the overthrowing of imperialist forces, but this story seems to live in the past and very few are willing to let it live in the present.

UPDATE: Also, this.  At least its honest?

There’s been a lot of efforts at historical truth-telling in my Facebook feed these last few days, specifically about Thanksgiving and Native peoples.  While I think its absolutely fantastic that so many people are sending out the message, “DON’T FORGET COLONIALISM,” I still feel a little ambivalent about some of these posts.

One I’ve seen is the Addam’s Family Thanksgiving episode.  While a hilarious commentary on the whitewashing of history, I mean, are the Addam’s family supposed to be Indigenous or something?  Am I missing something, or is this another representation of a white person playing Indian, defining Native peoples and their histories?

Another has been the Trail of Tears Hipster.  While brilliantly juxtaposing racist practices with the hard historical truth-telling so glaringly absent from these moments, these images leave open the question as to how many different possibilities are there available, exactly, to represent Indigeniety.  How many and how complex representations of Indigenous identity, Indigenous history, Indigenous existence do we have at hand in the (semi-)mainstream?  Because I can see two dominant representations: running around in a headdress making “war cries” and lamenting the injustices of colonialism in the past while failing to address it in the present.  Both presuppose that Indians are not longer around, or at least that the dominant discourse need not be concerned with the complexities of Indian’s own claims.

I just want to point out that the issue at hand is also about shifting the constitutions of power, shattering the inclusions/exclusions in which representations of Indigenous people are made in a colonial society.  Its about interrupting the colonial ways in which authoritative speech about Indigeneity excludes Indigenous peoples.  Basically, my point is that the larger issue is about creating spaces for Indigenous self-representation and dismantling the intellectual and material systems that marginalize Native voices and Native traditions.  

Its about theory and practice.

Three professors at University of Miami are offering a course called “The Sixties” this coming spring and they’re going to offer an academic service-learning component.  My office is working with Catalyst, a non-profit here, to develop a pre-service cultural sensitivity workshop for the course.  Well, Catalyst is doing most of the design, but I’ve been researching Miami’s history.  The idea is to come up with a series of short vignettes that we can use for reflective exercises.  And one thing I’m realizing while I do this is that I absolutely love primary sources.

Actually, this research fits into the last three posts I’ve made about police brutality.  One of these posts discussed brutality in terms of a long history of the “state of exception.”  I focused on earlier periods of settler colonialism (feeding off of the post before which approached police brutality as a manifestation of shifts in a system of capitalist-colonialism), and I didn’t really talk about recent history.  For some reason, at the time I just didn’t put these ideas together with the research I’m doing at work.  But the state of exception was a technique that was used in new ways during the 60’s, and thinking about that legacy helps to grapple with what we’re seeing today. 

The first documents are two letters from UM’s Special Collections about Father Gibson, a leader in Miami’s black community who worked for integration.  These letters discuss Gibson’s detainment after refusing to hand over a list of the NAACP’s membership to a government agency looking for “subversives.”  The second is an article written by Matilda Graff, a Jewish activist from New York, for The National Guardian.  I found Graff’s article in South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945-1960.

        

Rev. Gibson is second from the left.  This first letter, dated September 14, 1960, is a memorandum from the Executive Secretary to the Board of Directors, the State Conference Presidents, the Branch Presidents, and the Youth Council and College Chapter Presidents of the NAACP.  I’ve uploaded a scan of the original document here.

As you perhaps have read in the papers, Father Theodore Gibson, militant and skillful president of the Tampa, Florida, Branch of the NAACP, is in a court battle for his freedom because he has refused to reveal the names of NAACP members to a Florida legislative committee.

Father Gibson has been found guilty of contempt of the committee and has been sentenced to six months in jail and a fine of $1200.00.

Robert L. Carter, General Counsel of the NAACP, has filed an appeal but no one is sure that Father Gibson may not be put in jail before the final determination of the question of the constitutionality of the legislative committee’ s action.

In other words, it is conceivable that the Florida courts would send Father Gibson to jail pending the determination of the constitutional question instead of allowing him to remain free on bond pending the determination of this question.

A hearing has been set on the appeal 30 days from September 6. In the meantime, we are certain that Father Gibson will appreciate messages from members of the Board of Directors and other NAACP members assuring him of our deep admiration for his stand, of our wishes for his freedom from· confinement and of our deep appreciation of his steadfaste defense of the NAACP and the cause of freedom.

His address is: Post Office Box 6, Miami 33, Fla.

Very Sincerely yours,

[Signed “Ray Williams”]

Executive Secretary.  

This next document is a resolution passed by the Diocese of South Florida’s Department of Christian Social Relations, in which the organization formally articulates their support for Rev. Gibson.  Here’s a scan of the original, as well.

WHEREAS, the Reverend Theodore R. Gibson, the Rector of Christ Church, Miami, Florida, in the Diocese of South Florida, has been indicted by the civil courts of Florida and found in contempt, and has been sentenced to prison for term of one year for refusal to violate the dictates of his own conscience

AND WHEREAS we are grateful to the Reverend Theodore R. Gibson for his courage and conviction in the field of human relations.

BE IT RESOLVED that the Department of Christian Social Relations of the Diocese of South Florida commend the Reverend Theodore R. Gibson to the clergy and the laity of the Diocese and assure him of our continued friendship and prayers.

Shifting gears for this final document, I have Matilda Graff’s article, “A Child is Born in Fear,” published in The National Guardian on September 27, 1954.  Graff describes being subpoenaed in the hospital after giving birth as a result of her activity in the Miami Civil Rights Movement:

Most parents who read this will remember their feelings of deep pride, satisfaction, happiness and serious responsibility at the birth of their children. Such were out thoughts as my husband and I made plans to bring our third child home from the hospital. 

We had for the moment forgotten the McCarthy-Brownell madness that is sweeping our country, and the Brautigam witch-hunt in Miami. But on Aug. 24, at 8 P.M., a process-server from State Atty. Brautigam’s office walked into my room at Mercy Hospital, falsely stating he had my doctor’s knowledge and consent to do so, and served a subpoena upon me and my husband. My child had been born four days earlier. My husband was ordered to appear before Brautigam at 11 A.M. the next morning, although he had been scheduled to bring me home from the hospital at noon that day. I was ordered to appear Sept. 1.

This invasion of the privacy of a hospital room; this severe shock to me just after childbirth; this persecution of us both, parents of three young children, aged 11 years, 7 years, and 4 days-all constitute a brutal attack upon human life and family that reeks of Hitlerism.

We assume that we are being summoned as part of Mr. Brautigam’s hunt for “subversives.” I inherited a sense of civic responsibility and patriotism from my parents. I was taught to be proud of my heritage as an American Jew. My father, a shop worker, was always a devoted trade unionist until the day of his death two years ago. My mother showed her keen sense of responsibility to her family and the community. From my student days I was imbued with the ideal of world peace, and in later years my interest in peace drew me into activity for the Wallace candidacy. Coming to live in Miami, and moved by the sharper forms of discrimination prevalent here, I joined with others, in the face of Klan terror, to defend the Groveland victims. I was also among the hundreds here who, shocked by the bombings that culminated in the dynamite murder of Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, raised their voices for punishment of the criminals.

I have devoted time and energy to parent-teachers work at the school my children attend. Young as our children are, they have already begun to develop civic consciousness. Just last week, they organized on their own initiative a fund-raising effort for the emergency polio fund which netted $25.

If my life and conduct can be labeled “subversive;” that label fits the majority of decent, thinking, civic-minded Americans. If my principles and community service record make me fair game for Mr. Brautigam’s persecution, then none but the minority of bootlicking conformists are safe. Let my bitter experience at the birth of my child be a warning to all who value their individual rights and their self-respect.

A state of exception is when the government declares something to the effect of a state of emergency and transcends legal authority.  Its a way of denying or stripping rights from selected populations and legitimizing detainment or elimination (social and/or biological) without due process (and the government maintains the ability to unilaterally decide who belongs to those subjected populations).  It’s what happened with the Nazi’s in Germany and led to the Holocaust.  

I’m not going to give you a conclusion because I don’t feel like making an authoritative statement today.

Today I woke up, booted up my computer, and checked my Facebook newsfeed.  And guess what I found?  Reports from Occupy Tampa that the police had brought out a motherfucking tank!  WTF?!?  

Well, as the day progressed a few other stories appeared in the news.  The vehicle isn’t actually a tank - thankfully it doesn’t have guns - but rather an armoured personnel carrier allegedly designed for rescue missions following natural distastes or terrorist attacks.  From what I read, it “can drive through five feet of water, handle winds up to 130 miles per hour, carry 13 passengers, and reach 60 miles per hour.  It’s also complete with “logos of ‘our sponsors,’” giving new meaning to “neo-liberal privatization” and the “military-industrial complex.”  And according to the TPD, the vehicle was just coincidentally “passing by” the Occupy Tampa camp on its way to a “Great American Teach-In Event.”  In the words of one Occupier, “It seems to me that he went pretty far out of his way to make sure that he drove by our camp” (I wouldn’t know).  Also, there are so many things wrong with a so-called “teach-in” (a play off of “sit-in,” a direct-action tactic used in the civil rights movement) run by police, let alone with tanks.

Otherwise, there’s not a lot of information about the “tank” appearance out there.  Understandably, lost of people have been grasping to find the meaning underneath these events.  The event does, however, seem to fit into an emerging pattern.

Basically, it looks to me like there are three different ways that governments are addressing the recent surge of popular mobilizations:  People in many countries are being subjected to extreme force; most Occupations in the US are facing subdued force; and a few places, including Occupy Miami, are enjoying peaceful relations with the police (although I’ve heard that this is only because the Miami-Dade Police Department are under federal investigation because they “shoot too many people,” which is a whole post - or book - in itself).  So here’s what I’m thinking:

In Egypt, for example, we’re seeing bloody clashes and militaristic suppression.  Egyptians poured into the streets, demanding that the interim military government give up its power.  Over the past few days, there have been at least 32 civilian deaths and thousands of injuries.  And that isn’t by any stretch of the imagination the worst, its the one I know about happening at this very moment.  

But I know a little more about the context of police violence in the US, so I’m going to focus here.  In the US, police violence - while still disgusting - tends to be more subdued.  We’ve seen tear gas, fists, rubber bullets, and now tanks, but as far as I know, we are lucky to have experienced zero deaths (not that there weren’t extremely close calls).  We live in a society in which the domination of the state is mostly reproduced through subtler techniques, and this should be expected.  Rather than direct force and suppression, the tendency seems to be terrorizing displays of potential force, or a symbolic performance of restrained domination.

Municipal governments and police have aligned themselves against protesters.  This in itself is significant.  It says, “We are the order.  You are not the people who define the law or morality of the state, and we are the people who enforce it.  We are standing opposed to you.  Your interests are not the interests of the United States.  We will push you out of our parks, we will tell you where you can be and where you cannot, and we are ready to use force against you if you do not comply with this social order.  We are the ones who define democracy, not you.”  In this video, the police have set up a barrier to push out OWS.  A man who tries to climb over the barrier is assaulted and a nearby women is punched in the face.  The man was trying to set up a flag on the other side of the fence, putting an ironic (if highly problematic) spin on the semiotics of occupation.  The police make it clear that they work for the state, not the occupiers, and that the state carries the political weight.  They are the ones who control this space.  Here, like elsewhere, its a matter of geopolitics, in a sense.

This stance has been taken up by police departments across the US and is paired with displays of subdued force: “Because we represent the state, and here you are standing against our order, we must force you out.  But we are a good state, a democratic state, so we will try not to hurt you so bad.  We could, but we will not if we can avoid it.”  Now, its still violence and force, and images and videos are cropping up across the internet.  The fact of the matter is that the state could avoid using all force against a citizens’ assembly, but that’s not the point of the technique.  The point is to display violence and frame it as restraint. 

In the WSTB article I posted in the first paragraph, a retired FBI agent is quoted as saying that pepper spray is among the “least violent” uses of force: “‘There are circumstances, certainly, in which an officer would be justified in using it with a non-compliant, non-violent suspect,’ Kensel explained, ‘Pepper spray is uncomfortable, but that’s all it is.  Within 45 minutes you recover, there’s no lasting effects.’”  While its nice that there are no long-term effects, “uncomfortable” is an understatement.  Regardless, police have pepper sprayed students while they were sitting down and they have pepper sprayed old ladies.  Oh, these are the deplorable cases: these officers were out of control.  But the point has been made.  ”You better watch out, because sometimes officers get out of control.  Some are bad eggs and we can’t always tell until it might be too late.”  Also, does framing these officers as in need of discipline imply that the other cases of police violence were more justifiable?

Ultimately, the state is showing us that they control society.  They are showing us that they can and will use force, but they don’t want to seem too mean about it (we’re part of the global north, after all).  The police are using pepper spray when they could be using batons or tasers.  They are shooting rubber bullets out of guns that can also shoot metal bullets.  They have a rescue tank, but they also have real tanks.  They have technology and infrastructure designed to do, well, what the police do.  Its a kind of paternalistic, a we-care-but-we-know-best approach to suppressing protest.  Set against the backdrop of militaristic suppression abroad, these tactics are quite simply terrorizing.  The voice of the state tells you how lucky you are to live in America where you can be free while it subdues you, while it neutralizes you.  

UPDATE: Another piece of the puzzle.

If you can get through this quote, I promise I’ll do my best to make the rest of this post as easy to read as I can (I probably will be unsuccessful):

Ongoing reaction to the U.S. Patriot Act or the war on terror by many white Europeans and white settlers suggests that their potential exposure to bare life comes as an unwelcome surprise. Produced by the securitisation of liberal modernity, white liberal subjects might think that the Act or the war abrogate freedoms promised by a law that should protect them – the very law that they invite racialised and colonised peoples to affirm, as if extending its rule leads to liberation rather than subjection. Yet if we situate the Patriot Act or the war on terror in context of settler colonialism, as does Indigenous feminist theorist Andrea Smith, we can ask what shifts ‘if we understand the Bush regime not as the erosion of U.S. democracy but as its fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as premised on the genocide of indigenous peoples?’ Such a perspective informs alliances by Palestinians and Indigenous Americans who critique the war on terror for having linked white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial nationalism to reinforce the United States and Israel as settler colonial states. In such a light, Agamben’s assertion might suggest that ‘we’ are all exposed to bare life to the extent that the colonial exception and its universalisation within Western law now mark all peoples for elimination just as Indigenous peoples always were and still are marked. Yet, conversely, if Agamben names an exception that settlers assigned to others now being potentially assigned to them, then for all of us to be exposed to bare life is to potentially position us all as settlers. I write provocatively here to suggest that a normative relationality between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘settler’ structures all logics of inclusion and exclusion in settler law and, therefore, in its universalisation as Western law. Scholars must interrogate how this power-laden distinction imbues not only settler societies, but also their conditioning of liberal modernity along global scales. We must theorise settler colonialism as historical grounds for the globalisation of biopower, and as an activity producing biopower in the present that requires denaturalising critique.

I read the above quote in an article by Scott Lauria Morgensen entitled, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now.”  Biopolitics is roughly the process of creating and regulating a social body that can be governed.  It is the political process through which “populations” are known and defined.  Biopolitics refers to biological issues implicit in the exercising of power: “Its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimising life chances, and biopower operates through surveys for the prevention of epidemics and scarcity.”  It is the state’s power to enable life; it is the regulation of mortality, both social and biological.

Yes, the entire article was as dense as the block quote above and I’m not going to pretend I completely got it.  But the gist of it is that Morgensen argues that we should understand “the state of exception,” that is, cases in which governments transcend or “temporarily” nullify the rule of law and say its for some “public good” (thanks Wikipedia!) - we should understand “the state of exception” as something deeply conditioned by settler colonialism (rather than something unique to more recent history or something other-than-democracy).  You see, the lives of Indigenous peoples and African-Americans were defined by states of exception within “democratic” nations since the colonial period.  Because they were considered either not-human at worst and primitive and childlike at best, colonial law and its protections didn’t really have to apply to them.  They were threats to the existence and legitimacy of the settler state that needed to be eliminated.  So they were exceptions to the legal process.  

Then threat had to be neutralized.  The liberal approach was to partially incorporate colonized peoples under the paternalism of the settler state.  In these cases, people of color were “eliminated” not through biological genocide, but through assimilation or at the very least the depoliticization of their difference (see “multiculturalism” for an interesting analogy).  For example, Indigenous communities can apply for tribal recognition from federal and state governments in order to receive some benefits and limited autonomy.  However, the settler state reserves the right to make decisions as to who is a tribe and who is not - they continue to hold all the political weight.  Ironically, in order to establish sovereignty Indigenous tribes need the approval of the United States.  You’re allowed to be different, but only as long as it doesn’t unsettle the colonial state, as a colonial state.  Morgensen writes about Canada’s similar policy:

While this procedure may appear to preserve life, in its definition of over six hundred ‘First Nations’ whose members received ‘Indian status’ by state decree, the Act also separated myriad communities of common nationality, radically reduced land bases (if any remained), and enabled the state to determine the fact or erasure of their existence. Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy director of the Department of Indian Affairs, argued in 1920 that his effort to place Indigenous people in a ‘state of tutelage’ sought its own end, in a time when ‘there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question’. The settler colonial governmentality that here wrests identity from Indigenous peoples also imposed a patriarchal authority within the law to assimilate them into the settler nation.

As groups acquiesced to these and similar kinds of subordination, they became incorporated to varying extents into the public body.  Law and “democracy,” rather than a state of exception, began to apply to them.

So when Morgensen talks about being “exposed to bare-life,” he means that detainment and other forms of extra-legal action was a constant possibility.  Until completely neutralized these groups required additional surveillance and were at risk from additional force or regulation from settler governments.  They could be enslaved because they were Africans and needed to be civilized.  Their children could be taken away and put in schools because they were Indians and needed to be assimilated.  

Thse things are absolutely necessary to establishing a settler state, even a “democratic” one.  In order to create a governable population, you need to neutralize those that “unsettle” (even “democratic”) state rule.   This is a logic of inclusion/exclusion that works to achieve the stability of the state.  The thing is, the state of exception doesn’t only apply to people of color - its just really obvious when looking at the histories of the colonized.  It’s been a very uneven process, historically speaking.  

Morgensen asks when the Nazi’s declared a state of exception, if they had not learned this from settler states.  Likewise, he asks if the Patriot Act is not simply an extension of the logic of the settler state to a more diverse body politic.  While many whites uncritically invite people of all races and nationalities to adopt and participate in their political ideals and systems, they are shocked when they themselves are exposed to the logic of settler state governance.

The same thing can be said about police brutality against the Occupations.  Can we understand this not as the erosion of democracy but its fulfillment?  I wrote in my first post that the lines between occupied and occupiers is becoming blurry.  Perhaps most white people are simply so used to accommodating capitalism, or perhaps they just thought that these forms of violence only happen to people of color.  Should we expect otherwise than to be handled as if by a colonial occupation?  If we aren’t, then have we failed to truly unsettle the processes by which wealth and power is so heavily concentrated in the hands of a few?  

I’m not saying don’t get enraged because that anger is a function of privilege.  As Audre Lordre writes in “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, “guilt is a form of objectification.  Rather, we need to expand what we are angry about.  Anger, Lordre continues that anger is a site for creativity, for coalition-building, and for effective, reflective action: “we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here.”

“Movements to shake the society must be inter-generational” - Rev. James Lawson

In case you haven’t heard, there’s been more police aggression and brutality against Occupiers these last few days.  There’s a fundamental opposition playing out here between the state and particularly it’s institutions of force and democratic process or a citizen assembly.  The really ambiguous question at hand is who do the police work for and what is their purpose?  Actually, its not very ambiguous at all.

Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver had this argument about the role of the police and the role of the military.  He didn’t see them as separate forces.  He knew that the police enforced a status quo established by and benefiting a hegemonic white-supremacist state and he knew that the military enforced a status quo established by and benefiting hegemonic white-supremacist states.  Both maintained a militaristic presence in communities of color - one domestically and one abroad - and protected the (white colonial) order.  I don’t care if you think we live in a post-racial society (we don’t), Cleaver was theorizing about the mid-sixties.

Yet while the United States is arguably beginning to moving away from white supremacy, class inequalities are widening.  So there’s this problem: sure, racism is despicable, but if we fail to also dismantle other key hierarchies how much have we really accomplished.  My first reaction is, “A lot, right?”

Globalization theorists are talking a lot about deterritorialization - basically, that we’re living in a world in which physical proximity is becoming less and less important in the ways we organize our lives.  This is especially true in terms of business.  Its also becoming more and more reasonable that the US would start participating in the “race to the bottom.”  You know all those awful conditions in the “Global South” or “third-world” where businesses go to find the cheapest workers unprotected by labor standards?  Rampant human rights abuses and hiring paramilitary to murder labor organizers?  Yeah, that’s what the race to the bottom means.

So basically, the era of colonialism was defined by the concentration of wealth and power in US and European nations and especially cities on a global scale.  This meant subjugating vast territories, transforming inhabitants into workers or slaves, and extracting the raw materials to fuel economic development in what became the global “center.”  Colonization was legitimized through white supremacist ideologies so these inequalities took shape in racial terms.  Of course, there were also dramatic inequalities within colonizing nation-states and between white people that resulted from this same system.  It took years of organizing and the deaths of many leaders to establish labor laws in the US that so many citizens take for granted: from the minimum wage to the 8-hour day.  This is all changing.

We are entering a new global landscape of domination characterized by an economic system that seems to be a lot like capitalism and a lot like colonialism.  However, deterritorialization means that elites are no longer defined geographically (or at least, not as easily).  It also means that the global elites are becoming more diverse - or at least that racially diverse bodies are being included in the elite group (matters of cultural hegemony are a different argument, one that I’m not prepared to make).  However, the world is still defined by many of the same sorts of systematic inequalities.  Basically, the racial demographics change, the economic system continues to reproduce human suffering on the same or increasing levels.  

One of the earliest critiques made against the Occupy movement is that middle-class whites are now facing the same anxieties that characterized the lives of people of color and impoverished peoples for centuries.  So its not really surprising to me that we see police brutality against Occupiers.  We saw bloody colonialism for centuries.  We saw paternalistic attitudes backed by militaristic threat or invasion from the US specifically, especially in regards to Latin America.  We saw the KKK and lynching, we saw police brutality against people of color.  As Cleaver argues, these are complementary processes of maintaining a colonial order in which groups of people are disempowered and disenfranchized.  I’m not surprised that now we’re seeing state force used against Occupiers because we’re seeing colonialism becoming somewhat deracialized.  On the other hand, capitalist elites used paramilitary “Pinkertons” against labor movements in the US, as well, so maybe times haven’t changed so much, anyway.

Movements that shake society must be inter-generational.  Its important to think about the terms of history, about whose concepts those are and where they might be going.  Its important to transform global conditions and not just incorporate different people into existing hierarchies.  Its important to build a movement that not only carves out a better life for some people in the United States but realizes that we no longer have a choice but to stand in solidarity and finally end colonialism.  We build on the legacies left by people before us, we adapt to new situations, and we look for the things that they did not see.

So University of Miami is a wierd place.

Yesterday morning as I’m walking to my office, I was met with a row of eight-foot-tall bright orange letters sitting across the Green (which is basically a lawn) announcing that it was “CANES SPIRIT DAY.” I read this unconventional memo as I strolled down a walkway which had been specially decorated with two similarly-bright-orange cloths strung between trees to form a angular, zig-zag design while listening to a white guy dressed in a Seminole-style patchwork coat hammering out a slow, methodological downbeat on a drum. I didn’t think to take any pictures, but here’s a pic of an anthropomorphic, hypermasculinized ibis so you know what color of orange I’m talking about.

Actually, the guy in the patchwork coat had been part of a larger group convened in the Green the day before. I was pretty excited at first. My partner works for the Florida Seminoles and she’s helping out at an event at the Big Cyprus Res this weekend, so I figured the group was promoting the festival. Sure, most of them looked white, and the others looked Latino, but often, for a variety of reasons, prescribed racial categories based on narrow phenotypic criteria simply doesn’t work.

So I went over and asked what they were up to. Apparently, they were part of an honors society called the “Iron Arrow.” So let’s ignore for the moment that by the time period in which Seminole people produced patchwork clothes they had been using guns for some time, because the concept of the “Iron Arrow” is dumb to begin with. Before contact, when there was no iron, Native peoples used a stone called chert for making a lot of their tools and projectile points. Good quality chert can rival contemporary razor blades in terms of sharpness. This book puts chert on roughly the same level as obsidian, which is sharper than surgical steel. Don’t quote me on this because I’m not an expert, but I have a hard time believing that any group of Native peoples adopted iron arrows in place of indigenous materials, especially considering the consecutive arrival of guns.

So there’s some Orientalism going on here. By that, I mean the decontextualizing of symbols, the stripping of their functions and histories, in the construction and representation of an “Other” to white society. It’s fun to play Indian, and actual Indians, or even historical accuracy, don’t really have a lot to do with these games. It’s part of a process about representing the Indian, severing the Indian from Indians, and signifying on that imagined concept within the symbolic structures of the colonial culture. For example, the concept of an “iron arrow” (in this context) relies on a linear-evolutionary model of human history (iron is better because it comes later, after all the iron age comes after the stone age, and iron came from Europeans so its inherently better technology, etc.) that simply does not reflect the Native histories that are allegedly signified upon.  Coherency and meaning are achieved from within a colonial semantic framework, or ideology that silences and objectifies Indigenous peoples.

I think it’s kind of strange to build a giant text that reminds everyone present to open themselves to the “school spirit,” to allow it to permeate their being and let it manifest in their actions and behaviors. People put on ibis masks to encourage the school spirit to come out. “DON’T FORGET THE SPIRIT IS IN YOU AND ALL AROUND YOU (WHEN YOU’RE ON CAMPUS, ANYWAY).” School spirit is weird.

I think its stranger to play Indian and parade around campus, assuming space and drawing the attention of passerby’s with costumes and sound, in order to proclaim one’s location in an exclusionary University society. Performing a stereotyped Indianness as a ritual of both belonging and difference. It’s just kind of odd: I’m not sure what these things have to do with each other, why they’re so closely tied.  ”DON’T FORGET THAT COLONIALISM IS IN YOU AND ALL AROUND YOU (WHEN YOU’RE IN THE DOMINANT CULTURE, ANYWAY).”

But then again, it’s not all that different. The other day I met a New College alum at Occupy Miami. We hugged, because we shared a connection and so we were close. My partner told me later that that doesn’t happen when she meets other FGCU alums.

And then there was also that time my senior year when a group of people were going to design a “Lost Boy’s” zone for a big party (called a Palm Court Party or PCP) complete with teepees. There was a reasonably strong outcry about this over the student email forum, and the party organizers – who it turns out were very aware of their always-in-process learning to live responsibly in a white-supremacist, colonial society – changed their plans. On the other hand, there was a huge explosion on the student forum of people who I guess really wanted to party in teepees. And let me tell you, if you want to talk about ritualized performances of simultaneous belonging and difference - and certainly “school spirit,” as well - go no farther than PCP.

I guess all this weirdness is a little more saturated than I expected, and for some reason all these things seem very closely connected. I read somewhere that the next stage of branding will be love-marking, where consumers create emotional relationships with brands. Does love-marking inherently mean acting out passions for capitalism, and by extension, colonialism? I wonder what, exactly, is going on in terms of school spirit, branding, and white-supremacy/colonialism. I know there’s a piece missing, but what?

And just by adding a “reshare” button, Facebook became possibly the most powerful tool for radical, decentralized organizing.

Sometimes I want to crack my head open and let everything inside spill out.  Please scoop up what you can!  Sop it up with paper, with hard drives, with networked servers. I want to empty my head so I don’t have to keep holding on too all these thoughts.  Put them down so I can free myself to think about other things, but still have them on hand for when I need them later.  On the other hand, I also want to let all my learned dominations drain out, to lay them out, finally, in the open, and to leave a record of this process.  I find that these two things are more connected than you might think, that they’re always overflowing and intermixing like old storm drains.  I want everything to spill out.  Everything, so others can look at the mess of ideas and figure out what it means, because I can’t possibly express it on my own.  Scoop it up into a glass.  Look at it, reflect on it, throw it away and fill the glass with something better!  I say all this, but somehow the image makes me really appreciate what my skull does for me every day.

I just got back from a service-learning and engagement conference in Orlando.  When we first started, a speaker told us his community college had reframed service and engagement in Native Hawaiian terms because the community included many indigenous peoples.  And thats exactly the right question.  How do we reframe democracy in a way that not only respects and bridges different peoples’ traditions but participates in their struggles for collective empowerment?  I wish I knew the answer.  Its something that will shift both language and action, but I have little or no idea how.  By the time we finished the week my eyes were blood-shot and my thoughts were swirling, my brain was overloaded with ideas about learning and democracy and it was starting to drip out from my forehead.  My notes are covered as much with doodles as with text, but for some reason it all makes sense.  One of the last workshops I attended was about reflection.  I tried to stay in the present but my mind kept drifting to a pilot course I’m helping three professors develop at University of Miami.  A history course about the 1960’s with a service-learning component.

The workshop facilitator drew a diagram on the board starting with “concrete experience,” the lived experience of engaging with the community.  This is followed by structured “reflection,” which does many things, including connect experience to course themes, illuminate hidden assumptions, and develop a real-world grasp on “abstract concepts.”  This process helps us take an “active” and intentional role with our everyday practices, which we take back to our “concrete experiences.”  A friend pointed out that this last leg of the cycle also gives us a place to change directions, to strategically and sometimes dramatically shift approaches to be more effective.  Rather than a closed cycle, its more of a dynamic flow with tributaries and crossing currents.  Flows among different individuals, working groups, and communities intersect and divert each other. 

Since this means we’re talking about action-in-time, we can take a step back and see what the cycle looks like at a distance.  It just so happened that this image took shape as a clockwise spiral: a powerful symbol according to my friend who is a Maker of Medicine for a Muskogee tribal town, but also a dangerous one.  A counterclockwise spiral symbolizes Power-in-motion, and a clockwise one is understood to signify an undoing.  One time I asked him how you know which way a spiral moves and how you know from which direction to look, but he didn’t answer me.  It makes sense to me here because so much of my work is unlearning and undoing: of racism, of colonialism, of sexism, heteronormativity, and bigotry.  Undoing is a kind of doing, and I think its one of the most powerful ways we can push history.

The workshop facilitator asked us to respond to a prompt: “Why do I serve?”  I thought about something else this elder Maker of Medicine told me.  He said that when his people dance during ceremonies, they pick up where they left off the year before.  According to their counts, some dances have been unfolding for thousands of years.  Its all a single dance, although the performers change and die.  I was still thinking about the sixties course, so I wrote “60’s” in the center of the spiral and “today” near the end.

Our facilitator continued that social engagement should be four things.  In reverse, it should be contextualizing, it should be connected, it should be challenging, and it should be continuous.  I think that these things are all the same.  Its not just continuous for an individual, but it is set in the continuity of history and struggle.  Continuity is an important concept for decolonization.  

In some ways I think we can see the reflections of the past right at our fingertips.  Occupy is so close to the sixties that when we reach out to each other we its as if we can touch it, when we amplify each other’s voices we almost break the barriers of time.  Maybe when students work with non-profits and think about history, they see how matters of social justice have changed and how they have stayed the same.  Maybe they start to see how they themselves pick up on the movements of others, where others had left off.  How they are confined by systems and how those systems can be turned in on themselves in revolutionary and liberating ways.  Maybe they see social justice as a longview historical praxis, maybe even a human history, maybe even deeper.  

   

Another man in the workshop responded to the prompt with the thought, “I love my kids.”  He said he tried to fit it into a response to “Why do I serve?” in the logic of English semiotics, but he couldn’t quite capture the relationship.  I’m young, so when I think of the future I tend to think about what I’ll have done in 20 years.  But when I’m old and tired, others will pick up my movements where I left off.  They’ll do it better, I’m sure.  They’ll look the movements of my time with the same unsure, critical eye that I look upon the 1960’s.  It is in struggle that liberation is found, and particularly as empowerment within struggle.  Someone much smarter than I am sent me a quote from an open letter to SlutWalk written by someone she claimed was much smarter than she:

I think this sentiment [that the examination of white privilege is a secondary goal to the movement] is another way of putting product (the march and rally) over process (our organizing) which is the way patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism organize[s] things in our society. We are taught in multiple ways that process and product are separate from each other, and that ultimately, product is more important. We need to flip the script—- no, we need to scramble it. Process IS product. The way we organize is the way we change the world. The way we organize is our product. 

                             

  

                                                   

                                                     

My mom sent me this image and told me I should post it on my blog.  It just so happens that I was struggling over this post when I realized this was exactly the frame that was missing.

If you listen carefully to running water sometimes you can almost hear the voices of the dead.  It just so happens that a little while ago, in an archaeological park with a stream in Florida’s capitol, several deceased people were reflecting on ancient history and deep memory.  Most of them had been dead quite a while, maybe six or seven hundred years.  You might expect them to be upset by recent political statements by politicians of the living made nearby, but they weren’t too concerned with these happenings.  Sure, recent talk about decolonization in academia made it seem like racism and expansionism might finally be giving way, and a Smithsonian museum was even developed with Indigenous collaboration (although not without its problems).  Some of these spirits thought this talk might even reach their very bones, which today sit in the state archaeological vault.  So don’t get me wrong - no one was happy about the timing - but there had always been groups of people to carry these spirits’ most important memories.  So they weren’t too concerned.

So Florida Governor Rick Scott doesn’t like anthropologists much.  Well, its not so much that he doesn’t like us as much as he thinks we’re worthless and should leave the state of Florida.  And he actually thinks this about liberal arts in general, but he’s decided that anthropology will be the poster child of higher education cuts:

“If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take money to create jobs. So I want the money to go to a degree where people can get jobs in this state. Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.” 

The idea is to funnel state funding away from the liberal arts and into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).  The proposal hasn’t gone over too well, and you can see the highly negative media response from a quick Google news search.

Yes, the liberal arts don’t just train people to be workers, but also to be democratic citizens.  And no, Gov. Scott did not back up his claim with data.  I’ve learned from news, blogs, and Facebook posts that anthropology jobs are actually growing above the employment average, albeit not fast enough to keep up with the number of degrees being granted.  And historic preservation in Florida happens to be in excess of a $4 billion dollar industry.  And people with bachelors in anthropology often go on to be doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, and pretty much anything else under sun.  Even career anthropologists may land forensic and corporate jobs.  So if you haven’t heard, anthropologists are good for corporate America.

But wait, hold the phone!  Just a month ago we were all talking about the lack of jobs, and how this was a PROBLEM!  I mean, I spent several months applying for positions across the state: public archaeology sites, the park service, CRM firms, non-profits, museums, schools, AmeriCorps, even public libraries.  A major reason for this problem is that programs that correspond to anthropology jobs are being cut.  CRM firms aren’t hiring because the government isn’t building infrastructure (which might actually be Rick Scott’s fault).  The park service was also recently cut, and non-profits are going under left and right.  Its really invalidating when everyone turns around and says that jobs aren’t the issue.  This is not something unique to anthropology, and we could be reframing the problem and organizing around it.  We certainly would have enough allies.

Actually, a lot of people seem to be justifying anthropology’s existence in terms of economics, in terms of high-status jobs, or at very best, contributions to elitist academic knowledge.  Many anthropological organizations tend to throw out their member numbers, which I assume is meant to illustrate that there are people with jobs.  Of course, there are some social benefits being named, as well (e.g. “infant learning” and “African-American heritage”).  I find it odd that all these different benchmarks would be placed together in the same articulation of why, exactly, anthropology matters - its as if we’re trying to blitz the mainstream ideology (if not tag in some centrist-liberal qualifiers to an overwhelmingly conservative response).

And before I get going, let me say that I understand the importance of funding and the drastic loss of sudden cuts.  I understand why people are responding to Rick Scott the way they are.  I certainly understand the value of appropriating resource flows for the ethical and reciprocal studies of subaltern and disenfranchised communities (plus, those flows were going to pay for my own degree).  But the terms of the conversation need to shift.

The overemphasis on the economic and corporate impact of anthropology makes me feel claustrophobic, like the walls have already closed in on me.  The emphasis on anthropology as a hard science that works with STEM makes me feel like we’re abandoning our humanistic roots and leaving the other liberal arts disciplines to a wolf.  The emphasis on anthropology’s contributions to academia makes me feel like we’re abandoning our informants and their descendants.  My friend put it this way in a Facebook chat:

“[Liberal arts] are ALWAYS framed in terms of their ‘value’ on the capitalist market.  How productive your degree is, what your job prospects are in the field, your earning potential”

This brand of reasoning is counterproductive and I’m tired of hearing it social scientists bowing to such kyriarchical terms.  These responses have adopted the very same values and validates the hierarchies underneath: as bell hooks might say, it reproduces the same ideology of domination. It silences human needs in favor of a narrow, economic-centric, self-serving, and implicitly imperialistic agenda and silences anthropology’s potential as a emancipatory endevor.

I mean, there’s an global occupation movement going on and anthropologists are supposed to accommodate a megalomaniac governor who (thanks to recent gains), has just over a 1/3 approval rating?  Why are we talking about the economic impacts of anthropology rather than telling Rick Scott to fuck off and go reflect on what it means to be a democratic official?  Why aren’t we carving out a space to respond on our own terms?

Why do our responses follow such a narrow formula and why haven’t I seen any counter-hegemonic strategies of action?  When Rick Scott asks, “is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists,” I want to laugh.  I guess it depends on how you understand the democratic state.  My anthropology is like my feminism: it exposes and dismantles capitalist-white supremacist-heteronormative-patriarchy.  Would the disenfranchised communities that anthropologists tend to study care if funding was cut?  Would the spirits of the dead that archaeologists study - or their descendants - care?  Actually, maybe some would.  In my own work, I find that Native people are extremely interested in what anthropologists say and especially what they have said in the past.  Although the research might be problematic, anthropologists create documents about their ancestors that otherwise are largely absent from the historical record.  These documents are powerful, even if they have to be read “against the grain.”  These are the frames that are missing from our responses to conservatives.  And ultimately, we will need to take space and assert revolutionary frames of reference.

The reason I’m applying to grad school with this shitty job market at all is because when anthropology is at its best, that anthropology can empower disenfranchised voices.  It can confound the basic, core assumptions and unseen practices that make domination seem natural and invisible.  My anthropology is precisely a force that operates against state hegemony to promote equity, against the dominant frames of reality and cultural meaning that allow inequality to permeate our world, and against the physical, mental, and spiritual coercion that regulates people in the centers and degrades people in the margins.  My anthropology is about collective empowerment and as I understand it, opposed to colonial-capitalist hierarchies.  Ultimately, this is a struggle over how we will define the heritage of anthropology.

How do we respond to Rick Scott from the position of a counter-public anthropology?  By this, I mean that anthropology is an institution with the potential to identify silenced and marginalized communities and stand in solidarity with them.  People around the world are occupying cities to take control over their world.  What are we doing?  Anthropologists already work with people who are routinely disempowered and disenfranchised by various states.  If we are to simultaneously confront that colonial legacy and embrace it as potential as a site of resistance, we may have to rethink our privileged relationship with governments, anyway.

If the question is why should anthropology matter to Rick Scott - let alone the state - maybe the answer is that it shouldn’t.  Maybe our allies are elsewhere.  Maybe our value to the “public” is in our ability to dismantle the civic arena in favor of empowering people in their collective struggles.  Maybe we could build community institutions and transition from statist ones.

The question of Florida anthropology is not “why does anthropology matter,” but rather, “who might anthropology be important to” and “what kind of impact do we want to have on the world through our work?”  Maybe anthropology will be at the forefront of building a society that revives human possibilities.  Maybe we’ll find the concept of “counterpublic” are too limiting, as well, and we’ll have to construct something else to organize our role in society.  But in the mean time at least we’d be getting out of this deadly cycle of subjecting human needs to economic expansion.

Today I went to Occupy Miami.  Since I just moved here a couple months ago and am terrified of the prospect of meeting people, I went by myself.  It was good.  I signed up for Food Not Bombs, attended the General Assembly, and hung around awkwardly around the outskirts.  I’ll keep coming back, but I’m not camping out (at least this week).

Some of my friends are concerned about the language of “occupation,” but I kinda like it.  Its not that I think these friends are wrong: I agree with them wholeheartedly.  In fact, sometimes I find myself thinking that high school-era protest chant, “occupation is a crime, from Iraq to Palestine,” and I have to tell myself not to say it out loud.  But its more than an issue of using the same language as colonialism (although perhaps not really–I’m into some Sapir-Whorf type shit these days): its also about glorifying the imperial and patriarchal imagination that gives the term “occupation” its rhetorical power.  Maybe you’ve read blogs or articles about how the movement needs to be more open and reflexive about racism before reading this one.  Not to mention the question as to if this movement is different than any other occupation of the Americas that history has seen since 1492.

I like the term “occupy” because we are the ones who in fact are occupied.  I don’t pretend that this perspective reflects what most people in the movement are saying, and I’m certainly not going to try and justify the term.  I just think its a useful idea to think with.

If the Occupy movement is about challenging the concentration of resources and political power in the hands of the capitalist elite, then can also be about disentangling the histories of colonialism that go hand in hand with capitalist stratification, right?  Colonialism means subjugating the “peripheries” in the world-system to the metropolises “in which an entire society is robbed of its historical line of development, externally manipulated and transformed according to the needs and interests of the colonial rulers.”  Of course, today we live in a world where colonialism is being deterritorialized while the hierarchies and imbalances remain.  And in other ways, we don’t always have “colonial rulers” as much as headless practices and values that systematically create disparity.  But the point is that its hard for me to talk about capitalism and class without also talking about colonialism which also means talking about racism.  If you’re want to read more about the inseparability of capitalism and colonialism, I recommend this book, this book, or if you’re really ambitious, this book.  Its kinda complicated, but the answer is history.

I may be the 99%, but I certainly had my share of privilege.  I mean, right now I’m drinking a glass of wine while writing a blog while those dedicated enough to camp out at Occupy are sitting through Miami’s tropic rains.

I grew up in Atlanta.  My mother was a single-parent schoolteacher who sent me to an elite private school.  Sure, I was on scholarship since my mom worked there, but it was still quite expensive.  I was also able see therapists regularly as I struggled through my parents’ divorce.  I began taking anti-depressants because I thought it would make me happier.  It didn’t, but my mother was able to send me to a very nice (and expensive) rehab center rather than Grady, and to even a second, longer-term treatment program after that.  To this day I have no idea how my mother managed to give me so much.

When I was younger, I was pretty sure that racism was something of the past.  It was something bad people did, but we had the civil rights movement and now its OK.  Looking back, I’m not sure why I thought this since I lived in a majority white neighborhood and four blocks away was a majority black neighborhood.  My school was almost entirely white, too, despite that Atlanta is a majority-black city.  Furthermore, the white students tended to hang out with other white students, although we always thought of it as the students of color hanging out with the students of color.  Yet I “knew” I wasn’t racist,  and neither were the people I knew, so racism didn’t exist.

I made good grades in high school and continued to a highly-regarded honors college in Florida.  My father lived in Tallahassee and it was a public college, so even though I didn’t get a Bright Futures scholarship like many other students, I was able to work and graduate with only about $20,000 in debt.  By this time I understood what is meant by “covert” and “institutional” racism, and I struggled deeply with these issues in college.  Even though my college was public, it was very small and, like my high school, almost entirely white.  I used to joke that between my first and second year the black male population doubled: from 1 to 2.  But despite these issues, I excelled academically and graduated with a B.A. in anthropology/gender studies (a “slash” is a special program that’s like a minor but less hierarchical).  I wrote a senior thesis on the queering and decolonizing the archaeology of North Florida, incorporating a community-archaeology component with a small Muskogee tribal town.  I’m even working on two articles for publication.  But I’m not trying to toot my own horn, I’m trying to set you up for the next paragraph.

I knew the job market was bad, so I began applying at the end of January (before I graduated).  By April, after god-knows-how-many applications and at least 10-15 interviews, I was offered a year-long AmeriCorps*VISTA position at the University of Miami’s Office of Civic and Community Engagement.  Its good experience and I’m thankful that I was able to find work doing something socially meaningful, but some days its hard to get past that I’m paid about $450 biweekly.  My aunt likes to joke that while my office puts so much energy into our Focus on Affordable Housing Initiative, I make so little that I have to live in her house.

At first I thought that the problem was me.  My professors kept telling me otherwise, but after a month or two it stopped feeling so sincere.  Sure, the economy was awful, but maybe if I had interviewed better…  Well, I’m not completely sure about this, but in retrospect I think I was competing against people with M.A.’s.  One of my co-workers has her Masters and twice as much job experience as I do (and I started working in high school).  I can’t remember if the other has her Masters, but she had also done AmeriCorps the year before.  She had experience working in a civic engagement office from another school and a breath-taking number of contacts in Miami’s non-profit community.

So I may be making $900 a month after doing everything right in school, but on the other hand I can’t get over how privileged I am to have a job right out of college.  I got here because my mother sent me to an elite high school and helped me attend an elite college.  Not to mention that both schools were segregated, so racism has pretty much directly contributed to my ability to feed myself.  Its actually not too bad living on such a small paycheck, either, because I’m privileged enough to have an aunt that owns a summer house in Miami and I don’t have to pay rent.  I even go to her brother’s house once a week and eat steaks.

So once again, why do I like the term “occupy”?  Because I am occupied and I am an occupier.

I gained a phenomenal education, but from within a system that concentrated resources in the hands of a (predominantly white) few.  In fact, had my school not had access to such resources, my education would have been substantially less effective.  This education, while so deeply embedded in racism and classism, gave me the tools with which I can now articulate a nuanced perspective on social justice.

When I speak about decolonization in anthropology conferences, people listen.  I’ve even won awards for telling people to be more open.  Much of what I say is simply repeating things that the elders of the Muskogee community I work with have been saying for decades (plus a little bit of extra critical analysis), but I’m the one making a career out of it.  While that makes me deeply uncomfortable, I also think that its a process of opening academia up to a new intellectual-economy.  I hope that at some point, I can look back and say, “even though it was problematic, it ended up being a good thing that I said those things.”

Oh, but it gets deeper.  One time (several times), when I was in elementary school, I went to see a movie with one of my close male friends.  At some point, I started raising my arm to put around his shoulder.  Realizing what I was doing, I pretended to be scratching my head and put my arm back down.  For years afterward, I made myself feel like a freak.  I knew that I had to act out my gender the “right” way, which meant in line with the dominant ideology.  Well, it turns out that part of colonialism in the United States involved “normalizing” the traditional sex/gender/sexuality systems of Indigenous peoples.  By that, I mean that colonialists tried to stamp gender and sexual diversity out.  It also turns out that colonialism was a process of subjugating workforces and appropriating natural resources for the benefit of capitalist elites.  So is the way I created my gender and sexual identity really that distant from broader histories of colonialism and capitalism?  Had history occurred differently, who else might I be?  Then is not my very self, my history, my being, occupied by colonial and capitalist forces?

I believe that everyone has both privileges and oppressions and that everyone occupies an ambiguous position in their relationship with domination and liberation.  So maybe its fitting that we would need to occupy the spaces of capitalism, the spaces of colonialism, in order to achieve collective liberation.  That we need to tell ourselves that we are the ones taking space even though we are grappling with the occupation of our politics and our possibilities, our minds and our bodies.  That we are “externally manipulated and transformed” into colonizing/colonized occupiers even as we try to assert our own autonomy through occupation.  That in some ways we are still the tools of much older occupations and that sometimes when we try to resist the appropriation of our labor and our land we end up as occupiers.  Perhaps these different “occupations” are more fundamentally intertwined than I would like to believe.

Once again, I in no way seek to justify or naturalize racism within the movement.  I’m just playing with words.