What is the State?

Smack Bad Politics, Abolish the White Race

by Sam Emm

Part of being a good comrade is being able to give and accept critiques of each others' politics. When a comrade puts forth politics you have disagreement with, it should be your responsibility as a comrade and a revolutionary to voice those disagreements in a principled way. To do otherwise would be liberalism and serves only to weaken the revolutionary movement. 

It is in this spirit that I offer a critique of the weaknesses of the politics of the "Smack a White Boy" group within Anarchist People of Color (APOC) and a small critique of APOC itself. It is my hope that this will contribute to the debate currently happening within APOC and lead to more cohesive politics and a stronger APOC.

comradely,

Sam Emm, APOC-NYC

As a participant in Anarchists People of Color (APOC) in New York City, I have been very aware of the serious weaknesses of the APOC model. We organize around two things: being Anarchists (some prefer Anti-Authoritarian or Autonomist), and being people of color. There are a few serious potential problems with this.

Firstly, the "Anarchist" part of Anarchist People of Color is never defined. Anyone who has spent any time at all studying Anarchist politics knows that someone calling themselves an Anarchist can range from repairing bicycles and serving dumpster-dived food to building revolutionary unions or other forms of dual power. The politics of participants in APOC (I use the term "participant" over "member" because APOC is generally not a membership-based organization) reflect this diversity.

Secondly, while I think it's safe to say that we have a shared definition of what it means to be a "person of color" (which I would briefly define as a person who does not receive the set of privileges enjoyed by "white" people), the implication here is that we share a common experience of racism. This is just not the case, with people of African descent and indigenous peoples suffering from the effects of white supremacy in a very different way in the United States.

With APOC having such ambiguous politics, I watched with interest when a group of APOC coming out of D.C. APOC and Philadelphia APOC put out the "Smack a White Boy Statement" in Mid-March of this year. The same groups just recently put out a "Smack a White Boy Part Two" statement. While both statements definitely put forth a more focused set of politics for APOC, there is a serious problem: it gets white supremacy all wrong.

The first "Smack a White Boy" (SAWB) statement/action was organized around the March 21st, 2009 anti-war march in Washington, D.C. organized by the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition. The SAWB group had a few critiques of the ANSWER march.

First, they call them on their own racism saying that "the current anti-war movement is rendered irrelevant by its refusal to address the critical component of white supremacy" and "[t]he racist anti-war movement is devoid of any self-critical process to acknowledge or address how white supremacy contributes to the oppression of people of color within the movement."

Secondly, they critique the march itself saying "[a]side from providing one the opportunity to pat oneself on the back, what purpose is served, or more explicitly, how are activists supporting the people of occupied Iraq and occupied Palestine by marching on the offices of warmongering corporations on a Saturday when no one is there?"

This is all well enough but what is the alternative SAWB offers? They say that "if we as people of color maintain our continued involvement in their spectacle of 'resistance,' outside of our disruption of this spectacle, it will further empower their smug entitlement and white supremacy" so they proposed to disrupt their march to "stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Palestine" and that their disruption will be a "space of unity, empowerment, and self-determination wherein it will be made explicitly clear that we will no longer be marginalized, tokenized, and ultimately silenced by those who claim to speak in our names or in the names of our family and friends fighting for liberation around the world."

From the choice of the "Smack a White Boy" phrase to the action they proposed and carried out, the SAWB group personalizes white supremacy and misdirects people from seeing white supremacy as a systemic issue. Instead it posits it as being an individual issue.

This individualism is seen in the proposed solution in the call: to participate in a march as an act of "resistance" and making it a place of "unity, empowerment, and self-determination." The white left is rightly criticized for the "spectacle" of their march being resistance but the posited alternative is to go and "stand in solidarity." How does this build power for people of color and for the working class as a whole?

The second SAWB action, called "Smack a White Boy Part Two," takes this individualism to a whole other level. In late July of 2009, a CrimethInc convergence was organized in Pittsburgh, PA in a people of color neighborhood that is being gentrified. Eight folks organizing around SAWB politics, in order to stop CrimethInc's "gentrifying force" came to the convergence space, gathered up the possessions of those in attendance, and shouted "Get the fuck out!" as an "eviction" action. "This is not an act! Get your shit, or we'll remove it for you!" they said. When some of the attendees of the convergence attempted to use force, their response was to say "Don't try and fight us, we are not pacifists, we will defend ourselves!"

Here individualism has degenerated further into machismo. Their attempt at attacking white supremacy here goes beyond disrupting the activities of other Leftists, this time they were willing to get physically violent in their confrontation (under the guise of self-defense). Again, this does nothing to attack or disrupt the system of white supremacy and instead focuses its energy on attacking those who accept what W.E.B Dubois called "the psychological wages of whiteness."

White supremacy is a system. As the original Bring the Ruckus statement says:

"White supremacy is a system that grants those defined as 'white' special privileges in American society, such as preferred access to the best schools, neighborhoods, jobs, and health care; greater advantages in accumulating wealth; a lesser likelihood of imprisonment; and better treatment by the police and the criminal justice system. In exchange for these privileges, whites agree to police the rest of the population through such means as slavery and segregation in the past and through formally 'colorblind' policies and practices today that still serve to maintain white advantage. White supremacy, then, unites one section of the working class with the ruling class against the rest of the working class."

What does the actions and politics of SAWB do to fight this? Nothing. It also serves to do the State's job for it by creating further disunity in the Left (more than anything, it discredits APOC as a whole and has created conflict within it). Instead of falling into this kind of individualism, the task for APOC should be to attack the systems that prop up white supremacy such as the police, prisons, ICE, etc. Projects like Take Back the Land in South Florida or the various Copwatches around the country are good examples of this.

Race is a biological myth, but a social fact. We don't need to "smack" individual white people (although I can think of many who deserve it). APOC needs a strategy that attacks whiteness itself. A strategy that breaks up the system of white privilege and forces white workers to join people of color united as a class instead of holding us down to prop themselves up.

Our motto should not be the individualistic motto, "smack a white boy." It should be the revolutionary watchword, "Abolish the White Race!"


Sam Emm is a member of Bring the Ruckus in New York City.

Slavoj Zizek at Google

"Post-Marxist" philosopher spoke on his book "Violence" at the Google NYC office in September as an "Author@Google Speaker." It's interesting that a major corporation like Google would have a communist come speak at their office. Anyway, here's a video of his talk:

Soldiers of color and the weight of war

This article originally appeared on Racewire.

The Army recently reported 133 confirmed suicides last year; 18 soldiers killed themselves in February alone. The public knows little else about who they were and where they came from.

Though military officials have acknowledged unmet mental health needs in the armed forces, the suicide rate exposes persistent barriers to treatment. The consequences could be especially acute for soldiers of color, a major but often overlooked subgroup.

A study by the RAND Corporation last year estimated that 31 percent of returning troops from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffered from a mental health condition, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, or traumatic brain injury. Researchers also found that “women, and Hispanics are more likely than their counterparts to meet screening criteria for PTSD and major depression”--both risk factors in military suicide.

Research on veterans from the Vietnam Era (when the military was less racially diverse) have linked ethnicity to PTSD prevalence: Blacks, Latinos and American Indians suffered from especially high risk, and experiences of racial discrimination could amplify the trauma of combat.

An untold number of troops suffer in silence. Only about half of those surveyed by RAND sought professional mental health care in the past year. Many troops fear stigma and career repercussions, on top of a paucity of quality treatment services.

For people of color, the scope of the problem remains largely undefined. As with the mental health system generally, a lack of culturally competent services could deter many veterans of color from seeking help through military health facilities.

And little is known about how race may influence the effectiveness of mainstream therapies. In a 2007 report on PTSD treatment, the Institutes of Medicine of the National Academies noted that medical research has been “mostly silent on the acceptability, efficacy, or generalizability of treatment in ethnic and cultural minorities... The committee expects that the psychotherapies in particular might pose special challenges in different cultural groups but was unable to comment because none of the studies addressed it.”

Outside the combat theater, military suicide folds into a host of other stressors, including family and economic problems in soldiers' communities. Today, the country, and its troops, face the perfect storm of social and military trauma. If the Pentagon is serious about focusing on the psychological fallout of war, it will need to look deeper into the military communities historically rendered invisible.

Image: Iraq Solidarity Campaign

Is Obama Ending the War in Iraq?

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mess O'Potamia - The Iraq War Is Over

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Managing the People Managing You

I found this video to be interesting and useful. It's geared towards the workplace, but I bet the tips in the video can be useful in political organizing as well.

Reading Capital Volume 1

About a year or so ago I attempted to read Capital Volume 1 in a two-person study group with a comrade of mine. I read the first three chapters and, although I felt like I was mostly understanding what I was reading, the study group fell apart.

Since then, I've really had a desire to read Capital Volume 1 but doing it on my own with no real guidance or structure presented a great difficulty for me.

Last June, I stumbled on Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey which is a "close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by David Harvey" and I finally felt like I'll be able to tackle this book on my own.

I think it's interesting to see the effect technology can have on making information accessible to regular, everyday people. 20 years ago I would really have been on my own or I would have had to put in a lot of work trying to find a study group to help me. Now, I can read the chapters and watch a lecture on it from a distinguished professor all for free from home or on my BlackBerry on the way to and from work. It's amazing.

I only now, several months later, actually have the time to do this (I just finished re-reading Chapter 1) but I'm very excited about it and hope that I'll be able to tackle Volume 2 on my own.

Former BART Cop Finally Arrested

After close to two weeks since he murdered Oscar Grant in front of many witnesses, Johannes Mehserle has finally been arrested. Since he was in Nevada when he was arrested, there will need to be an extradition hearing before he can be brought back to California.

Ask yourself this: if you shot a cop in the back in front of a bunch of witnesses, there was video evidence of this, and he died as a result of your actions, would you have had two more weeks of freedom to collect your thoughts?

I think we all know the answer to that question. Any one of us would have been arrested right away and would have gotten the beating of our lives when no one was looking. Ridiculous.