Anti-Racism and Abolition For White People Who Believe #BlackLivesMatter
1. Understand Grand Juries
2. Tear Down Colorblind Racism
3. Contextualize Violence Within White Supremacy
4. Contextualize Police Brutality Within the Prison Industrial Complex
5. Act on Analysis/Analyze Action to Dismantle Oppression
6. Commit Yourself to Collective-Liberation
Appendix A. DONATE
Appendix B. DEMONSTRATE
Appendix C. CHANT
Appendix D. Derailment Bingo
White activists must be very mindful of why and how we involve ourselves with anti-racist protest. If we speak for or over others, impose our analysis, white-wash messaging, or politically posture, we are actually taking away the power and voices we claim to support. We are here to support Black friends, families and communities suffering horrific loss and harm and the narratives, tactics and demands they make.
Although I wrote this in the format of a general ‘guide,’ I realized toward the end that I was writing it mostly to organize my thoughts for myself. Based on recent conversations I decided a more general background was important to get folks to the point of naming race, accepting the reality of racism, and centralizing Black experience and leadership. Information specific to #Ferguson has been compiled by a friend here. Hopefully the information and arguments presented here will be a helpful tool for white people to educate, mobilize and organize other white people. I also hope this is helpful for non-white people, although you all aren’t my primary audience.
I also hope this will help people in NYC push for ColorOfChange’s Millions March this Saturday. In the spirit of pairing analysis with action, the appendix contains practical resources for action.
This post is largely informed and inspired by the analysis of Black women and men who were the first people to resist and analyze racism in this country. In particular Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, and bell hooks have formed the basis of my understanding of police, prisons and the spirit of resistance.
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A grand jury is not a trial: a public adversarial legal proceeding to determine guilt or innocence of a crime. Grand juries a) Do not decide guilt or innocence, but whether or not to charge someone with a crime,[1] b) Are conducted in secret.[2] c) The state prosecutor has a monopoly on interrogating witnesses, presenting evidence and giving legal advice.[3] Point (c) is incredibly important because state prosecutors essentially work as the legal arm of the police. Missouri grand juries consist of 12 people selected at random without any screening for bias.[4] New York grand juries consist of 16 to 23 people and only the court can disqualify jurors for bias.[5]
A non-indictment is not non-guilty verdict, but rather a finding that there is no probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. Probable cause is a very low standard of evidence. For example, in civil forfeiture cases police can seize private property without a conviction and sell it to fund their department citing probable cause based on “hearsay, innuendo, or even the paid, self-serving testimony of someone with interests clearly adverse to the property owner.”[6] Police and prosecutors in New York State worked together to seize $93 million worth of property between 1990 and 2002, all of it ‘probably’ connected to drug crime. Prosecutors routinely find probable cause on flimsy evidence leading one New York prosecutor to admit he could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”
In Ferguson and New York, as everywhere else, local prosecutors have a built-in conflict of interest when police are on trial. If it is in their interest to find probable cause, like funding their programs with what they claim are illegal drug profits, they will find it. Otherwise, they won’t.
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Colorblindness is at the core of racial oppression in the United States today: it enables ‘liberal’ whites to feel self-righteously tolerant as they join the march of gentrification/displacement, it facilitates the aggressive appropriation and devaluation of Black culture, and most importantly it inoculates economic, social and political racism from serious public opposition.
Racism is the combination of individual prejudice and institutional power. As a society claiming ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ as central tenants, we should set a high standard against discrimination and accept statistical inequality as evidence of institutionalized racism.[7] For instance, the fact that Black unemployment tends to be twice as high as white unemployment, can be explained as a result of documented hiring discrimination and institutionalized inequality in education and urban de-industrialization. Racial inequality and segregation persist in health, employment, education, housing, and incarceration. And racism is a substantial cause.
Color-blind racism explains the inequality caused by racism “as the outcome of non-racial dynamics […] market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.”[8] Racial disparity in arrests and incarceration, for example, are explained by a ‘disproportionate’ criminality in Black people, rather than racist policing. But in reality Blacks are caught and caged for ‘more crimes’ because laws are enforced unequally. For instance, all races commit drug ‘crimes’ at roughly the same rate,[9] yet Black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than a white people.
Color-blindness accepts the racist status quo at face value: higher arrest, incarceration and police brutality rates for Black people are ‘imputed’ as cultural criminality, that is accepted as evidence of higher rates of crime, and ‘crime’ becomes code language for race.[10] Challenge the assumed guilt of Black people or the equation of Blackness with crime or dependency. Confront colorblind racists with the fact of unequal opportunity and oppression.
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While more white people are recognizing the genocide against Native Americans and African slaves, since the end of Reconstruction mass white violence against Black people has continued.[11] In addition to the better known history of lynching[12] and redlining: state-complicit slavery continued until as late as 1945,[13] rural ethnic cleansings occurred across the south and midwest,[14] urban white terrorism created ghettos in every city in America,[15] coercive sterilization targeting Black women was legal until 1978,[16] and bombings and lynchings continued throughout the ‘Civil Rights Era.’
White violence, turning people into property and property into a white-privilege, is the essential context for Black revolt. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed after the urban uprisings in the late sixties, if African-Americans have committed crimes during uprisings “they are derivative, they are born of the greater crimes of the white society.”[17] This has been true since the Stono Slave Rebellion in 1739, through 150 revolts until Nat Turner’s Revolt in 1831,[18] all the way to the uprisings in Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1935, Watts in 1965, Miami in 1980, and LA in 1992.[19]
The violence surrounding Black resistance in Ferguson is fundamentally the result of white violence. And since the uprising there have been classic indicators of white-supremacist terrorism: Mike Brown’s church was set on fire, and two Black, alleged grand jury witnesses, have been quietly lynched[20] and disappeared.
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The killing of Mike Brown and Eric Garner were not isolated incidents but part of a history and de facto state policy of racial mass-incarceration. During slavery sheriffs’ posses hunted self-liberated ex-slaves. After the civil war, southern peace officers funded themselves off profit from funneling arbitrarily arrested Black people into private forced labor camps, the persistence of which the FBI declined to investigate as late as 1942.[21] Police were often complicit with lynching and racial terrorism, standing by idly while whites cleansed rural counties and urban neighborhoods.[22] The Civil Rights Movement was fundamentally imprinted by police’s excessive use of dogs, clubs, fire hoses, and tear gas. Indeed, Malcolm X first rose to prominence for his response to police beating an innocent bystander of an arrest,[23] Martin Luther King Jr. was pressured to commit suicide by the FBI, and the Black Panther Fred Hampton was assassinated by the FBI in a military-style raid.
As Civil Rights ended Jim Crow, the Prison Industrial Complex emerged as a New Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement was immediately opposed by conservative ‘law and order’ rhetoric, which eventually developed into colorblind code-language for race.[24] By the 1980s federal grants, military donations, and asset forfeiture financially incentivized police to exploit the segregation and poverty of Black neighborhoods to make violent, military-style mass arrests.[25] The legislative and judicial branches have done their part by extending sentences,[26] legalizing discrimination against people with convictions,[27] and eliminating protections against arbitrary and discriminatory searches and prosecution.[28] In 2014 in New York City aggressive mass searches continue: 38,456 stops, 54% were Black. In Ferguson, which is 60% black, stops are 92% Black. The police interaction with Mike Brown and Eric Garner must be seen in the context of militarized mass-incarceration based on race.
The explosion of the incarcerated population, and consequent explosion in prison construction has given rise to the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC): the combination of state[29] and corporate[30] political and economic interest in prisons. Today 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the US, 36% of whom are Black. A staggering 6.9 million people are under state control through prison, probation and parole. Staffing and constructing prisons, therefore, is a massive state-controlled economic force and bargaining chip for politicians. Working alongside massive state institutions on a lesser scale are private prison companies profiting through state contracts and mainstream corporations, like Whole Foods and Wells Fargo, profiting from exploitatively cheap prison labor and dividends from prison company stock. In addition to creating economic interest in human suffering, the PIC creates powerful political interest in perpetuating mass-incarceration.
Abusive and racist policing is only the most visible aspect of a system profiting from the destruction of Black lives. Prisons are not rehabilitation facilities preventing harm but rather institutions of violence shifting and concentrating harm onto disproportionately Black populations inside prison walls. Poverty, financial exploitation, and abuse by guards generate desperation and violence leading 70 percent of men in prison to experience assault. Almost one in twenty men in prison is raped. Women are serially raped by prison guards. Trans-women are imprisoned in male facilities, where their gender-identity is systematically abused and over half of them are raped.[31] Drugs are widely available. Solitary confinement is recognized internationally as torture, yet it is inflicted without due process on children, people with mental-illness, trans and queer people, political radicals, and people arbitrarily labeled as gang members.[32] Execution sentencing is racist,[33] and people sentenced to execution have later been exonerated using DNA evidence or witnesses reversing false or coerced testimony.
In the long run the PIC should be abolished and replaced with radical harm-reduction and transformative justice practices. But today we are in the streets to support the families of those killed by police, the communities and organizations resisting police brutality, and the demands they are making for change.
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Racism is institutional, but we are individually responsible for the way we either undermine or reinforce it. Since white people principally experience racism and white supremacy through white privilege, our everyday frontline is naming, counteracting and dismantling white privilege. An inventory of white privileges shows pervasive personal and political benefits: avoiding harassment, finding housing, and not having to guess other’s racial biases. Simply acknowledging white privilege does not dismantle white supremacy. To do that we must create anti-racist institutions and foster individual anti-oppression praxis, that is analysis and action against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ablism, and classism.
Racism is internalized, so our anti-racist praxis, allyship, and solidarity must be a continuous process motivated by humility and love. Motivation from white-guilt and white-savior complexes tends to centralize whites’ discomfort and individual responsibility rather than focusing on those harmed and dismantling structural oppression. Motivation to be more counter-culture, radical, authentic, or impressive tends to erase or appropriate Blackness and creates competition rather than cooperation with other whites. Do not claim allyship as a fixed identity, but rather see it as a process and consider the impact of particular actions.
We must be live with our whiteness, and courageous with our anti-racism. We need humility to honor the voices, criticism, knowledge and leadership of Black people and other people of color. We need love to confront white peoples’ racism and colorblindness.
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This is a crucial moment in the struggle for racial equality. Colorblind racism is faltering as reactionaries struggle to justify the criminal injustice system without explicit appeal to racial animus. The general public is more aware and ready to act than it has for a decade. Our challenge, as white people, is to commit to this movement for the long haul and put our bodies on the line.
In addition to reading and understanding Black (and Asian, feminist, Latin@, disabled, Chican@, queer, Native American, and trans) authors, learn from the white anti-racists’ victories and limitations. Of course these go hand in hand since Black authors are often more interested in white anti-racism than those in the white canon. The legacy of white anti-racism runs deep though, just the beginning of a list would include: Thomas Paine, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, John Brown, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Emerson, Emma Goldman, Woody Guthrie, Anita Whitney, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Herbert Aptheker, Saul Alinsky, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Bettina Aptheker, Mario Savio, the Weather Underground, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Chris Crass, and Dean Spade.
Leverage your privilege only to more fully dismantle it. Use your ability to engage with white people to have genuine dialogue: genuinely attempt to understand their beliefs, and genuinely present your own. Use your financial resources, if you are lucky enough to have any, to invest in collective liberation. Use your voice to confront racism in everyday life. Put your body on the line to defend non-white protesters.
Racism is a white problem: Take it personally, confront it collectively.
Provide financial support to Mike Brown’s and Eric Garner’s families and Black organizations in Ferguson and New York. GoFundMe has shut down Mike Brown’s family’s fundraiser, but checks can still be sent to the Brown Family’s memorial fund. Eric Garner’s daughter started an indiegogo page and the Eric Garner Family Support Fund has a fundly.
Ferguson organizations have been compiled here. Organizations that have been active in New York are Communities United for Police Reform, ColorOfChange, National Action Network, People’s Power Assemblies, and the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee.
The National Lawyer’s Guild has a legal fund for #Ferguson related arrests. Ferguson OWS bail fund. New York OWS bail fund. Oakland OWS bail fund.
Check your privilege:
- Show up for Black friends, families, communities and organizations responding to unimaginable loss, and systemic racism not for your own agenda or image
- Be aware of your whiteness (#AllLiveMatter is whitewashing, “Our Streets” is colonialist)
Be aware of others’ starting chants (if you’re loud, e.g. a man, use your voice to support others’ chants)
- Don’t endanger people who might be undocumented (by agitating the police)
- Don’t take pictures without consent
Maximize non-violent direct action:
- Prepare
- Write the National Lawyers Guild number on your arm (NLG NYC 212-679-6018)
- Bring quarters for a pay phone
- Avoid wearing loose clothing, wear good running shoes
- Bring energy snacks, water and 1st Aid[34]
- Assert your right to protest and against police searches
- Protest Smart
- Go with friends you trust, share numbers, and look out for eachother[35]
- Stick together: in front walk slow, in back keep up, everywhere close gaps and link arms
- March on edges since police are less likely to assault and arrest you
- Stay calm and de-escalate with police, don’t give them any excuse to escalate
- Be aware of your surroundings: know the closest exit, look ahead for blockades, keep an eye on rowdy protesters
- Don’t listen to and spread rumors
Amazing Lyrical Chants from @ThisStopsToday
When we can’t stay silent and we can’t wait, let me hear ya’ll say: [THIS STOPS TODAY]
When genocide is on its way, let me hear ya’ll say: [THIS STOPS TODAY]
Another day to wait another day to pray, let me hear ya’ll say: [THIS STOPS TODAY]
When killer cops are getting away, let me hear ya’ll say: [THIS STOPS TODAY]
Ask what we fight for we fight for [THAT JUSTICE]
Ask what we fight for we fight for [THAT JUSTICE]
Investigate ‘em [THAT’S JUSTICE]
Expose ‘em all [THAT’S JUSTICE]
No broken windows [THAT’S JUSTICE, THAT’S JUSTICE, THAT’s JUSTICE]
Chant Recommendations from a non-Black POC friend (my notes in quotes):
NO
“You serve us!” (b/c police serve the state)
“All lives matter!” (b/c colorblind racist whitewashing
“No justice, no peace! No racist police!” (b/c police are all racist)
“Hey hey, ho ho! These racist cops have got to go!” (b/c police all racist)
“The whole damn system is guilty as hell,
Indict! Convict! Send that killer cop to jail!” (b/c jail is institutionalized violence)
(Alternative: “destroying Black lives with police and jails”)
YES
“Black lives matter!”
“Eric Garner, Michael Brown! Shut it down, shut it down!”
“NYPD, KKK! How many folks did you kill today?” (Alternative: “NYPD, Go Away: racist, sexist, anti-gay”)
“No justice, no peace! Fuck the police!”
“Back up, back up! We want freedom, freedom! All these dirty-ass cops, we don’t need ’em, need ’em!”
“They say get back, we say fight back!”
(Alternative: “When Black lives are under attack what do we do? Stand Up, Fight Back!”)
“Ain’t no power like the power of the people ’cause the power of the people don’t stop!”
MAYBE:
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
“Arms up! Shoot back!”
“Whose streets? Our streets!” (Alternative: Whose Streets? Eric Garner’s!)
“The people, united, will never be defeated!”
“Who do you serve? Who do you protect?”
“Shame! Shame! Shame!”
[1] MO Constitution Art.1§16, NY Constitution 190.60
[2] MO Statutes 540.080.1, 540.320.1, NY Statutes 190.25.4
[3] MO Statutes 540.130.1, 540.140.1, NY Statues 190.25.3, 190.50.2,
[4] MO Constitution Art.1§16, Statutes 540.021.1, 540.070.1, 494.425, 494.505
[5] NY Criminal Procedure §190.05, 190.20.2
[6] Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012. p 79
[7] As opposed to indignant white people’s insistence on ‘intent,’ forgetting that slave owners’ believed slavery was good for kidnapped Africans and therefore did not ‘intend’ to commit genocide. This standard is part of the environmental justice framework. http://www.unc.edu/courses/2005spring/epid/278/001/Bullard2000JSocIssues.pdf
[8] Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. p 2
[9] A federal study found racial differences in drug use were statistically insignificant in 2012 and 2013. http://archive.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2013SummNatFindDetTables/NationalFindings/NSDUHresults2013.htm#2.7
Illegal drug markets are segregated, meaning white drug users buy from white drug dealers. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/ cited in The New Jim Crow, p 100
[10] The New Jim Crow, p 44-5
[11] This section is inspired by Angela Davis’s interviews in Black Power Mixtape
[12] Wells-Barnet, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm
[13] Blackmon, Douglas. Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
[14] Jaspin, Elliot. Buried In the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
[15] Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. p 34
[16] Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. p 89-98
[17] http://www.scribd.com/doc/136906544/Martin-Luther-King-1967-Massey-Lecture-1-Impasse-in-Race-Relations-docx
[18] Apetheker, Herbert. The American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1993. cited in http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/
[19] Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 2006.
[20] “Deandre Joshua, 20, was shot once in the head and then set on fire inside his car.” Burning is a form of lynching.
[21] “Despite the Biddle directive [that peonage was slavery], FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially saw no need to mount another aggressive investigation [into a 1942 report of peonage]. […] ‘No active investigation will be instituted.’ Hoover wrote to Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge.” Slavery By Another Name, p 379
[22] Buried In the Bitter Waters and American Apartheid
[23] Haley, Alex and Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. p 233
[24] From Barry Goldwater and George Wallace to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and finally Bill Clinton there “developed a strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race.” The New Jim Crow, p 48
[25] In one SWAT raid in LA 1988 there were 1,453 arrests, most of whom only had traffic tickets or curfew violations. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 1992. 267-8; see also The New Jim Crow, p 72-80.
[26] The New Jim Crow, p 89
[27] The New Jim Crow, p 141
[28] The New Jim Crow, p 66-69, 115-19
[29] Policing, prosecution, parole, immigration enforcement, and prisons
[30] Private prisons, for-profit work-release programs, equipment manufacturers, construction, corporations profiting from prison labor, and shareholders in all of the above
[31] http://www.wcl.american.edu/endsilence/documents/ViolenceinCaliforniaCorrectionalFacilities.pdf
[32] http://ccrjustice.org/files/CCR-Factsheet-Solitary-Confinement.pdf
[33] “race-of-defendant effects were substantial, consistent, and statistically significant, or nearly so, in both the overall models of jury death-sentencing and in the analyses of jury weighing decisions” Baldus, David C. et al. “Racial Discrimination and The Death Penalty in the Post-Furman Era: An Empirical and Legal Overview, With Recent Findings from Philadelphia,” in Cornell Law Review: Vol 83:1638, 1998. http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/cornell-law-review/upload/baldus.pdf
[34] For pepper spray: one part maalox, one part water, doused or sprayed on face
For tear gas: cider vinegar on a hankerchief over mouth
For Long Range Acoustic Devices: ear plugs
[35] Awesome tips incorporated from Andi Dier
The person who created a h/tThankYouNYPD rally told BuzzFeed: “It’s just something to support the men and women who risk their lives for law abiding citizens against the criminals in our society.[…] Did you see the most common hashtag was h/tAllLivesMatter. Isn’t that really the point? Or is it just a black issue? Aren’t there black police officers?” Colorblind racism y’all.
There is a fascinating TV-argument on the Internet about Islamophobia from the TV-argument show, Real Time with Bill Maher. Of course, there are no Muslims present to defend themselves and their beliefs, but thats never stopped the breathless sputtering of TV-argument-havers. The arguers: Bill Maher, professional liberal; Ben Affleck professional handsome; Sam Harris, professional atheist; Nicholas Kristof, actual professional journalist; and Michael Steele, professional Michael Steele.
Radical Privilege 