Democracy, Disposability, and the Flint Water Crisis

First there was Detroit, and now there’s Flint. After more or less staying under the radar for over a year, in the last few weeks the water crisis has become national news. The overall story is pretty clear. Back in April 2014, the city stopped getting its water from the system that serves the Detroit metropolitan area, which it had been doing since 1967, and switched over to the Flint River instead. Residents immediately noticed the difference, complaining about the water’s taste, smell, and color. City and state officials ignored or dismissed them, insisting that the water was safe—and trying to hide evidence to the contrary. In fact, the corrosive river water had caused lead in the city’s aging pipes to leach into the water supply. A year and a half after switching to the Flint River, the proportion of children with above-average levels of lead in their blood had doubled. All of the children in Flint now have to be treated for lead exposure. In the same period, an abrupt spike in a rare, waterborne illness called Legionnaire’s Disease caused 87 infections and at least ten deaths. Late last week, Governor Rick Snyder finally declared a state of emergency and requested federal aid.

The main approach that’s been used on the left to understand and analyze the Flint water crisis is the “shock doctrine,” which foregrounds democracy (or the lack thereof) as the key analytical category for explaining what went wrong. This phrase was coined by the activist and writer Naomi Klein in her 2007 book of the same name to refer to the techniques used by neoliberal politicians to implement austerity policies. Since these measures are so unpopular, Klein argued, they can’t be put in place through normal, democratic means. Instead, opportunistic politicians take advantage of situations of emergency, when the public is distracted and no alternatives are readily available, to force them through without contestation. One of Klein’s best examples is the package of sweeping education reforms imposed in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which basically privatized the city’s public schools overnight.

Today, Michigan is probably the state where the shock doctrine framework is most applicable. For more than decade now, Michigan governors have been appointing so-called “emergency managers” (EMs) to run school districts and cities for which a “state of financial emergency” has been declared. These unelected administrators rule by fiat—they can override local elected officials, break union contracts, and sell off public assets and privatize public functions at will. It’s not incidental that the vast majority of the people who have lived under emergency management are black. Flint, whose population was 55.6% black as of the 2010 census (in a state whose population is 14.2% black overall), was under emergency management from December 2011 to April 2015. As noted above, it was during that period that the decision was made to stop purchasing water from Detroit and start drawing water directly from the Flint River.

Much of the commentary on the situation in Flint has focused on the emergency manager, and consequently the water crisis appears as a struggle that is being played out on the political terrain. Liberals see the problem as rooted in electoral politics—since Governor Snyder appointed Flint’s emergency managers, the source of the problem are the Republicans and their right-wing, corporate sponsors. They forget that Democrats have also appointed emergency managers. In any case, it’s harder than it seems to identify the responsible party here. It was one of Flint’s emergency managers who eventually made the decision to tap the Flint River, but it was after the city’s elected officials took the first key step, with the city council initially approving the switch away from Detroit in an overwhelming 7-1 vote back in March 2013. At a June 2013 meeting that included Flint city officials, representatives from the Genesee County Drain Commission, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the determination was made that the Flint River would be “more difficult to treat” but was nevertheless a “viable” source. Officials at multiple levels of government (city, county, and state) and across multiple jurisdictions played a role. The amount of ink that’s been spilled trying to figure out who’s responsible underscores the diffuse character of the structures of governance through which these decisions are made.

More importantly, what’s missing from this line of analysis is an acknowledgment of the structural shift in the global economy beginning in the 1960s and intensifying through the 70s and 80s. This brings us to a second approach to what’s happening in Flint, which frames the crisis through the lens of “disposability.” The deindustrialization of manufacturing cities like Flint and Detroit—first with suburbanization, relocating factories to segregated white suburbs, then with offshoring, relocating factories to other regions of the global economy—has had material impacts that are relatively insulated from political decision-making, especially at the city level. In Flint, notes historian Andrew Highsmith, GM’s workforce declined from more than 80,000 in 1955 to less than 8,000 by 2009 (pp. 2-5). As production was relocated and productivity increased, sectors of the working class have been rendered permanently superfluous to the needs of capital, and are expelled from the labor process, waged employment, and, increasingly, from what remains of the welfare state.

The result is a growing surplus population for which the state must deploy new forms of control. This has led, most obviously, to the massive expansion of policing and incarceration since the 1970s. But a second process, which has received significantly less attention, has also occurred in parallel to this one: the removal, withholding, or control of infrastructural systems and services—like education, health, and, of course, water—that are necessary for the reproduction of communities. In a recent article, Rada Katsarova and Jon Cramer analyze this second means of control in the context of the battle over the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department:

In the last decade, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, the urban centers of the Midwest such as Chicago and Detroit, but also in the Northeast, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, have developed a new dynamic: the use of the state (in the form of local or regional governments) to transfer infrastructural resources and their control out of or away from marginalized urban populations, which are predominantly black, brown, and immigrant. These infrastructures range from health and educational resources to natural and civic resources such as water and sewage systems. There has been a tendency to read these battles around infrastructure as just another round of neoliberalism—another example of the “shrinking state.” Such an approach, however, seems unable to grasp how these infrastructural grabs, rather than a consequence of the state shrinking, are in fact a distinct kind of raced and classed resource transfer mobilized and sanctioned by the state. Nowhere is this clearer than in Detroit, where the predominantly white suburbs succeeded under the cover of Detroit’s 2013-14 bankruptcy proceedings to pry the possession of the water and sewage infrastructure away from the city proper. Not only have the mostly African-American residents of the city lost control of these infrastructures, they now have to subsidize the social reproduction of the predominantly white, wealthier Detroit suburbs.

Local, regional, and state governments are removing the basic, infrastructural supports that are necessary for the reproduction of life. As a consequence, residents of cities like Flint and Detroit, in particular black and immigrant populations, have been subjected to increasing vulnerability in forms like declining life expectancy and appalling infant mortality. “Disposability” and “surplus population” sound like abstract concepts, but they’re a tangible, visceral reality for folks on the ground in Flint. “We’re like disposable people here,” one resident told the Toronto Star the other day. “We’re not even human here, I guess.”

These disposable populations are raced. The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” What racism names, in other words, is not bias, prejudice, or discrimination, but the systems that orchestrate the siphoning of resources away from some populations and redirect them toward others. These systems do more than just define which lives matter and which lives don’t—they materially make some lives matter by killing others more. When a Flint resident tells the Detroit Free Press that “we get treated like we don’t matter,” the message is clear that to not matter is to slowly be killed.

Most of the time, slow death is hard to see. In individual cases, it can be difficult to perceive the gap between a death that comes at the “right” time and one that comes “too soon.” Disposable populations usually die gradually, with years quietly shaved off their life expectancies through such “accidents” as heart attacks, diabetes complications, and asthma. What is different about the water crisis in Flint is that slow death has suddenly become visible, traceable back to a single cause: the water.

The removal of infrastructures and services is, then, the right-hand of the carceral system: a means of disciplining disposable populations by inflicting slow deaths upon them. But this process is not new. It is relatively continuous with the long historical trajectory of what appears from this vantage point as a form of race war, by which white communities withdrew material support from and indeed plundered black communities, barricading themselves into suburban lives through segregation and policing and insulating these lives with resource transfers from the increasingly black population trapped within the city limits.

To give a specific example, Highsmith shows that the suburbanization of Flint’s manufacturing, and the corresponding withdrawal of tax dollars, was already getting underway by the 1950s. As companies like GM increasingly decentralized production, taking advantage of tax benefits at local and federal levels, they also sought out and acquired infrastructural supports from the municipality. “In order to operate their facilities,” he writes, “business managers from GM and other firms required sewers, large quantities of water, and other services that were often unavailable in suburbs and rural areas. Representatives from GM thus aggressively lobbied Flint’s city commissioners to extend water and sewer lines to their new suburban plants. By the close of the 1950s, their efforts had resulted in new water and sewer hookups for at least seven of GM’s suburban plants.” The city of Flint also subsidized suburban production through a stratified rate structure for water customers. Residential customers living within the city limits paid a relatively higher rate for smaller quantities of water (32 cents per hundred cubic feet of water up to 10,500 cubic feet), while industrial customers at suburban plants paid relatively lower rates for significantly larger quantities (20 cents per hundred cubic feet in excess of 105,000 cubic feet). “This policy, which rewarded the largest consumers of water with significantly lower rates, amounted to a large subsidy for local manufacturers,” one that was paid for by city residents, a population that was increasingly black (p. 130). (More recently, one of the early signs of the magnitude of the water crisis in Flint was GM’s decision in October 2014 to stop using the city’s water at its engine plant due to concern about corrosion. The warning went unheeded.)

The Flint water crisis is best seen as continuous with these histories of expropriation, rather than sharply differentiated from them by new political instruments like emergency management. In this sense, the “shock doctrine” framework misses something critical about the situation in Flint. Because it emphasizes the lack of democracy, this approach tends to foreground either the responsibility of individual politicians—the governor, the emergency manager, the head of the state’s environmental quality department—or, more helpfully, the emergency manager law as a whole. This is an important part of the story, and we’re all for getting rid of them. But the exit of any or all of these political figures, and even the elimination of emergency management, will not change the fact that racialized surplus populations will continue to inhabit cities like Flint, and that states will continue to manage and discipline them in one way or another. By foregrounding “disposability,” we are interested in thinking about what it would take to reproduce communities, or for communities to reproduce themselves, without relying on capital and the state, to create autonomous infrastructures of social reproduction that do not continuously subject black, immigrant, and marginalized white populations to premature death.

“Y’all Ain’t Hearing Me”: White Liberalism and the Killing of Aura Rosser

1. On November 9, three months to the day after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson executed Mike Brown, Ann Arbor police officers killed a black woman named Aura Rosser in her home on the west side of the city. The official story released by the police is that Aura “confronted” the officers with a “fish knife.” Her boyfriend dismissed that claim, demanding “Why would you kill her?” Aura’s sister noted that she had worked in the food service industry for years and loved to cook, especially when she was upset. It helped her relax. The police shot Aura as she was coming out of the kitchen. She was probably cooking seafood.

In spite of the ongoing rebellion against police violence in Ferguson and around the country, not much happened in the first couple weeks after the killing of Aura Rosser. The local media reported the story the way the cops told them to, criminalizing Aura and her boyfriend and speculating about toxicology reports. It’s a familiar script. Ann Arbor is a mostly white, liberal college town. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that the organizing first started somewhere else. Far more racially and economically diverse, largely due to a legacy of segregated housing, Ypsilanti also bears more of the brunt of Washtenaw County’s policing apparatus. It was there that a group of activists calling themselves Radical Washtenaw organized the first demonstration in the area. It was a small gathering in downtown Ypsi, maybe about 40 or 50 people, who spent an hour holding signs, meeting each other and chanting to get the word out, writing emails and letters to the city council to demand justice.

What really kicked things off was the grand jury decision in Ferguson. Responding to the national call for actions in the wake, a small group of organizers called for a demo in Ann Arbor with the hope that 50 or 60 people might come out. It was set up as a “vigil” because the organizers weren’t sure there wouldn’t be enough people to march. Candles were acquired. But the grand jury decision was a spark that during the next 24 hours caught and spread like a prairie fire. The demo on November 25 was unlike anything folks have seen in Ann Arbor for years, even decades. Upwards of 1000 people came out to hear speeches by black, Palestinian, and Mexican students and community members articulate the specificities of anti-black racism and its overlaps with and divergences from other forms of racialized state violence both in the United States and abroad. Then, behind a glittery banner reading BLACK LIVES MATTER, the crowd easily took the streets and marched through downtown to the police station, blocking traffic the entire way.

There, a young black woman who had shared a jail cell with Aura Rosser grabbed the megaphone. “If you don’t know, we are at war! And you can’t fight war with peace. Tomorrow we go to war, ” she yelled. An older white woman in the crowd, a product of the New Left generation, yelled back, “No, tomorrow, we go to work, to work together.” The young woman responded, “Y’all ain’t hearing me.”

Energy was high after the march. An assembly was called for the following Friday, and 250 people showed up and collectively decided that the next action would take place at the Ann Arbor city council meeting on December 15. A smaller group of about 50 people signed up to organize the action. On a Monday night, in the middle of finals, 200 people came out and took the streets again. Chanting “How do you spell murder? A-A-P-D!” they again blocked the streets of downtown Ann Arbor until they pulled up outside the County Building where the meeting was being held. As chants of “No justice, no peace” echoed off the downtown town buildings, the mayor, agitated, came out, “Who is in charge of this?” “It’s America, you have the right to protest, but what are you planning on doing?” During the public comment section of the city council meeting, four demands were presented: fire the killer cop, suspend his paid leave, pay for the burial of Aura Rosser, and address the structural racism of policing in Washtenaw county. A second speaker called for three minutes of silence, one minute for each of Aura Rosser’s children. After fifteen seconds, the mayor tried to move on to the next agenda item. The gallery erupted into a volley of boos, feet stamping, and cries of “shame” and “three more minutes,” and he was forced to yield and sit quietly until the speaker stepped away from the podium.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to emphasize how out of the ordinary this is. In this respect, Ann Arbor is a testament to the emptiness of liberal politics. Speaking at city council is preferred to rallies, and rallies are preferred over marches, and marches, when they do happen, happen on the sidewalk. One friend who grew up in Ann Arbor told us she couldn’t remember any marches like these. The anti-war protests in 2003 may have been a little bigger, she continued, but they had a totally different character.

Could Ferguson really be everywhere? ask the white liberals. Yes, white supremacy is at work even in a mostly white, liberal college town like Ann Arbor. But isn’t this the point? Of course policing is racist here. How could it be otherwise? If anything, it is in places like this that white supremacy is at its most intense. Following Saidiya Hartman, we might decide to look not to the “terrible spectacle” of racist killer cops and turn instead to “those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned.” This approach might lead us to consider, among other things, the anti-racist organizing that took place on the campus of the University of Michigan last year, without which none of what is happening in response to Aura’s killing would have been possible. The #BBUM campaign, to take one example, highlighted not only declining black enrollment at the university but also the daily experiences of racism of black students in this overwhelmingly white space. A black student from Detroit named Dan Green described the unsettling feeling of traversing and inhabiting this space: “I feel less safe in Ann Arbor than I do in Detroit.” The liberal white college town operates as a machine for the surveillance and policing of black bodies.

To express surprise that “this” could happen “here” is only to ignore or erase the historical processes of gentrification and the racialized production of surplus populations at work throughout southwest Michigan. “Ann Arbor” is not a place, governed autonomously by a progressive city council, but a node in a national and global network of capital flows and accumulations. The overwhelming whiteness of the city—in large part a function of the overwhelming whiteness of the university that dominates it—cannot be separated from the unthinkable quantities of capital that have pooled and congealed there, or the relative blackness and poverty of nearby Ypsilanti and Detroit. To put it another way, Ann Arbor itself is a testament to the fact that “this” has already happened “here.” It was “this” that made “here” what it is.

#BBUM police circles the parties mostly attended by blacks

— Miss Britt (@brittgathing) November 20, 2013

https://twitter.com/SCTheWebSlinger/status/402895017544384512

https://twitter.com/GreatnessComing/status/402862669331705856

https://twitter.com/tonybah22/status/404332716545421312

Having DPS shut down any function over 15 people #BBUM

— Hitachi Uchiha (@QKillem) November 19, 2013

#BBUM being more afraid of a drunken group of white male students than ever before in my life, even growing up in "dangerous Detroit"

— sasuke’s missing arm (@ChampagneTori) November 19, 2013

2. Every 28 hours police, security guards, or vigilantes kill a black person in the United States. Since the Ferguson rebellion popped off after the police execution of Mike Brown, this has become impossible to ignore. Protesters around the country chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot!” a reference to Big Mike’s last gesture before being gunned down. And this has only intensified after the grand jury non-indictment of the cops who strangled Eric Garner to death on camera in New York.

One interesting dynamic in what’s been happening in Washtenaw County is that a movement has coalesced around the police killing of a black woman. Look at this list of small anti-police uprisings that have popped off in the country over the last five years—Oakland (2009), Portland (2010), Denver (2010), Seattle (2011), San Francisco (2011), Atlanta (2012), Anaheim (2012), Santa Rosa (2013), Flatbush (2013), Durham (2013), Salinas (2014), Albuquerque (2014)—and you’ll see that not one of them has a black woman at the center. Why has it been so difficult to mobilize public outrage for the black cis and trans* women extrajudicially killed by police? Why did the killing of Aiyana Stanley-Jones in nearby Detroit or Renisha McBride in nearby Dearborn Heights not elicit this response? What about the case of Adaisha Miller? Why has there been more outrage over and coverage of the killing of Tamir Rice but not that of Tanesha Anderson, both killed in November by Cleveland police? The point isn’t that Tamir Rice doesn’t deserve this attention but to spur us to think carefully about the affective conditions that make one life appear more valuable, more defensible, more grievable than another.

Alicia Garza, one of a group of black queer women that created the #BlackLivesMatter campaign in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin, describes the movement this way:

Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.

However, even this movement—far from, at this point, being an uprising—that has come together around the killing of Aura Rosser has not changed the discourse around police killings here. In our marches we chant “Justice for Mike Brown” more than for Aura Rosser. In our meetings, we list the names of black men and boys—they are at the tip of our tongues. In our speeches we emphasize the danger the police pose to black men, while making the threat to black women, trans persons, and the disabled invisible. As Garza notes, hetero-patriarchy is alive and well within these movements. Will placing Aura Rosser’s name and life at the center of our organizing, change this? So far, in large measure, it hasn’t. But time will tell.

3. The coalition that’s come together to organize around racist policing in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County more generally is politically diverse. Some folks seem to favor negotiations with the police and the city council and some are interested in demands for body cameras and civilian accountability commissions. Others of us are far less optimistic about official political channels or police “reforms.”

Ann Arbor, as we’ve said, is a liberal town. Even before their cops killed Aura, the city council had floated the idea of purchasing police body cameras. And at the December 15 city council meeting they made it official, signing a $174,000 contract with L3 Mobile-Vision, Inc., a company that markets its cameras not as a way to protect the populations subjected to continuous police surveillance, harassment, violence, torture, and death but rather as a way to “protect police officers.” As some Chicago copwatchers wrote in light of the uncritical acceptance of body cameras,

All reforms that strengthen the prison industrial complex must be strongly opposed. Body cameras will not halt extrajudicial executions by police officers, only providing us more horrific footage to view.  The only solution to oppressive policing is to abolish the institution.

The Ann Arbor Police Department (AAPD) is fully integrated into the structures of white liberal governance, in a city built on segregation and white supremacy. Take the case of the Dream Nite Club. In 2012, the officer who shot and killed Aura Rosser, David Ried, was named as a defendant, along with ten other police officers, the police chief, and the City of Ann Arbor, in a lawsuit filed by the Trinidadian-born owners of a club called Dream Nite Club. Located in downtown Ann Arbor, the club hosted events and DJ nights several nights a week that attracted a largely Black and Latin@ clientele. The suit documented dozens of incidents of explicit racism on the part of individual police officers, including Officer Ried, between 2009-2012. This included everything from racist language to physical violence. Officers frequently frisked, removed the clothes, and shined flashlights in the faces of black patrons in a threatening manner. They pushed black patrons at least 50 times during this period, pepper sprayed a group of 12 black women, and tased a black women without justification. AAPD also deployed squad cars in front of the bar, as many as 12 at a time on nights when the clientele was mostly black, in order to “intimidate the black patrons and further discourage their patronage.”

Like other officers named in the lawsuit, Ried formed an integral part of a racist police force, either actively or passively supporting racist language and activity. Not only did he not intervene when explicitly racist comments were made, but he was an active participant in the deployment of violence, and the threat of violence, against the club and the folks who passed through it. This was a determination that came from the top—the goal of the city and the police department was to shut down these “black-oriented nights.” Beginning in 2007, police officers began telling the club owners to get rid of these events. In 2010, two officers showed up at the club and the one in charge announced, “I am here to close this n****r bar down.” In 2011, the owners were approached by another officer, who stated “We’ll stop fucking with you if you stop throwing these black parties.”

The suit was dismissed by a district court. Citing the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the defense argued that the city and the police department had a material reason for their actions against the club that did not count as “racially-motivated” discrimination. In that case, Javaid Iqbal sued the federal government arguing that he had been detained in a maximum-security facility after the 9/11 attacks based on his race, religion, or national origin. The Supreme Court sided with the government against Iqbal, essentially agreeing that the state had a legitimate reason to profile the plaintiff. The judge cites Iqbal in dismissing the suit:

It should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the [September 11, 2001] attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.

Legal scholar Ramzi Kassem writes that “In one breath, the Iqbal Court not only acknowledged that Muslims were subject to heightened surveillance and monitoring as a result of law enforcement practices after 9/11, but also condoned the arrest, detention, and deportation of a large number of Muslim suspects as a necessary result of a legitimate counterterrorism policy.” He also shows that Iqbal has had a “sweeping impact” on the jurisprudential landscape. It has been cited tens of thousands of times by district courts like the one in Michigan that dismissed the Dream Nite Club lawsuit, and made it even more difficult for lawsuits based on racial discrimination to withstand a motion to dismiss. Through this juridical counterpart to the military equipment channeled to local police departments by the DOD through the 1033 program, the logic of counterterrorism has been embedded in the everyday policing practices of the liberal white city.

None of this, it’s worth mentioning, has appeared in media accounts related to the killing of Aura Rosser, despite the fact that the lawsuit comes up in the simplest Google search for the name David Ried. In any case, the point of these reflections isn’t to bring back the Dream Nite Club, which was forced to shut down in the wake of the lawsuit’s dismissal. Rather, it’s to highlight the invisibility of white supremacy as a structure of domination, substituting it for a thin notion of individual bias that is nearly impossible to prove. We’ve written that in the legal context race can only appear “as a disavowal, as (not) race.” A legally recognizable discourse of “public safety” is produced through forms of racialized policing that generate “objective” crime statistics and codify racial “truth.” Liberal white policing produces its racial raison d’etre.

The question that is facing the current movement in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County is if discussions with city council or programs to reform or better train the police force can eliminate structural racism. If not, the question then becomes what tactics can. Racism is not an inevitable result of ignorance or “natural” group dynamics but a social structure embedded in and expressed through material relations, and the police are necessarily implicated in the production and maintenance of this system. It is only through the abolition of the police and the carceral justice system, then, that this piece of white supremacy as a structure of domination can be eliminated.

(thanks for the artwork)

Race, Disavowal, and Urban Decline at the Trial of Theodore Wafer

 

On August 7, Theodore Wafer was found guilty of second-degree murder for the killing of Renisha McBride. After injuring herself in a late-night car crash, Renisha presumably sought help at Wafer’s house, but instead of providing it he shot her in the face with his modified shotgun. Dearborn Heights, where Wafer lived, is a majority white suburb (as of 2010, 86% of the population was white; shockingly, 100% of the police force is white as well) that borders on majority black Detroit, where Renisha lived (as of 2010, 83% of the population was black). After the verdict was announced, Wafer was remanded into custody and is currently being held at Wayne County Jail. Although the guilty verdict is the best possible outcome, it’s hard to say that justice has been done since Wafer’s conviction cannot bring Renisha back or contribute to abolishing white supremacy, which feeds on the policing and legal apparatuses of the state.

The law is incapable of addressing white supremacy in a meaningful way. Race rarely came up explicitly during the trial, and the few times it did it took the form of a disavowal. When the judge asked, “Are there any African American jurors that feel a sense of loyalty to their race that would demand a guilty verdict?” she did it not to affirm this sentiment but to excuse anyone who felt it from the jury. Another example of the disavowal of race is tied to the use and abuse of “criminality.” Thandisizwe Chimurenga writes of the intense logic of white supremacy that shaped the defense’s legal strategy of criminalizing Renisha by alluding to her alleged “thug life” and suggesting, without evidence, that she approached Wafer’s house not to find help but to break in. Similarly, Wafer’s defense, most clearly articulated in his testimony, aimed to establish a context of honest and reasonable fear in order to demonstrate that he shot in legitimate self-defense. To do this, he described his neighborhood as characterized by decline—once a safe space, it was now plagued by crime, drug use, and a general breakdown of social order. This argument, like the previous one, turns on the inescapably racialized category of criminality, a point that those who adopt it fully understand, as the explicit clarification of his attorney indicated: “DEF says Ted Wafer knows. Knows what its like to live in that fear. DEF says this is not about race.”

If the defense declined to speak explicitly of race, it may be surprising that the prosecution did too. After all, many protesters rightly connected Renisha McBride’s death to the racist shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman and argued that in both cases race contributed to the police’s initial decision to believe the killer and choose not to arrest him. According to the McBride family’s attorney, however, neither he nor the family believed the shooting was “racial.” And he went further and criticized the defense for wrongly “injecting race” into the trial by having Wafer describe how his neighborhood was “changing.” In other words, everyone involved understood criminality as a racialized category while rejecting the usefulness or applicability of race for adjudicating the case.

No one wanted to talk about race, but everyone was always talking about race. This is the condition of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls colorblind racism, which replaces “race” with a series of other categories, such as “poverty,” “culture,” or “criminality.” “Whereas Jim Crow racism explained blacks’ social standing as the result of their biological and moral inferiority, color-blind racism avoids such facile arguments. Instead, whites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.” In the legal context, likewise, the discourse of race necessarily appears as a disavowal, as (not) race.

Wafer’s story about the changing character of his neighborhood is worth examining in more detail. In many ways, it sounds like the commonplace history of “white flight” in the city of Detroit. After the 1967 rebellion, goes the conventional version of this story, Detroit’s white residents were terrified and as a result they began to move to the suburbs, taking with them their tax dollars and leaving behind abandonment, segregation, corruption, and violence. There is a kernel of truth in this story, but its simplistic cause-and-effect frame misrepresents both the chronology and the causality of white supremacist violence, segregation, and abandonment. As historian Thomas Sugrue documents, these processes were well underway by the 1940s—the 1943 race riot was a white riot—and “[w]hite resistance and white flight left a bitter legacy that galvanized black protest in the 1960s.”

 

But in Wafer’s account the “white flight” narrative takes on a new form. An obvious difference is that Dearborn Heights is not Detroit—it is, rather, the anti-Detroit, one of the suburbs to which Detroit’s white residents moved to escape the black “hordes.” But there is another new aspect in his story as well. It is not white residents in general who began to leave the neighborhood but a specific type of white residents—police officers. In his testimony, Wafer observed that his neighborhood used to be called “Copper Canyon” because many police officers lived there. For years, Detroit had a residency requirement which made it obligatory for city workers, including police, to live within the city’s limits. So they moved as far out as they could get without crossing the line. A quasi-suburb, “Copper Canyon” occupied a zone of official inclusion but affective separation from the city—a relation forged in the perception and rejection of the city to which, in jurisdictional terms, it actually belonged. Yet at the same time Wafer’s narrative suggests that he considered Detroit’s “Copper Canyon” to constitute part of his own neighborhood within the city of Dearborn Heights.

Wafer testified that things started to change after the residency law was overturned “in the late 90s.” In 1999, the Michigan legislature passed Public Act 212, which prohibited municipalities from “requiring individuals to reside within certain geographic areas or specified distances or travel times from their place of employment as a condition of employment or promotion.” A little over a decade later, about half the Detroit police force had moved and was residing outside the city. In general terms, this law contributed to accelerating the decline of the city’s population, which fell 28% between 2000 and 2013, when the city declared bankruptcy using population decline (and ineffective policing) as a major part of its rationale.

In his testimony, Wafer identified the revocation of the residency law as a key cause of the ongoing changes in his neighborhood. He moved there in 1994, and “felt safe” until the time the law was overturned. But as the cops who lived in the neighborhood—in a different city, remember, but in an area that felt like part of his neighborhood—began to move away, “lots of for sale signs” appeared, houses were foreclosed on, renters replaced property owners, and many stores closed. The neighborhood “definitely changed” and “is changing.”

As a result, Wafer stated, social order broke down and crime increased. Now neighbors “talk to one another about crime in the neighborhood.” He found liquor, bottles, drug paraphernalia, syringes, and “baggies” on his property. It got so bad that one time a neighbor “had to hold off 3 individuals with his handgun” because he found them “in front of [his] home using drugs.” Another neighbor had his home broken into. All of this led Wafer to buy a shotgun for protection. On the night in question, he claimed, he heard the sound of not one but multiple intruders banging on his doors and pulled out his gun to defend himself and his property: “I didn’t want to cower. I didn’t want to be a vic[tim] in my own house.”

In order to visualize Wafer’s testimony, the defense showed the slide at the top of this post. In the center of the image, there is a glowing white icon of a home labeled “FEAR.” Out of the darkness that surrounds it jab arrows from multiple directions, pointed directly at the home. One of the arrows is labeled “Crime in neighborhood,” another “Multiple intruders,” a third “Violent po[ssibilities?].” Despite the fact that self-defense is presumably based on a threat to a person, there is no body in the image, only property. The image thus encapsulates capitalist white supremacy in an age of colorblind racism—the defense of whiteness embedded in the defense of property, the naturalization of racialized fear, the weaponized language of “castles” under siege, the legitimation of extrajudicial violence.

This image is meant both to visualize and to rationalize Wafer’s fear, to make it appear honest and reasonable, and by doing so to neutralize his culpability according to the state’s self-defense law. But honest belief and reasonability, much like criminality, are themselves deeply racialized. What some people—property-owning white people, for example—find reasonable tends to solidify into the naturalized definition of reasonability. Against this purportedly universal understanding, other forms of reasonability appear as irrational or criminal. For some, avoiding, running from, and distrusting the police makes you look like you have something to hide; for many others, it’s the rationality of everyday life under a brutal regime of police occupation.

Beyond the impossibility of addressing race in a legal context which is profoundly invested in the individual and uninterested in structures of violence, Wafer’s story proposes police exodus as a new articulation of white flight, recalibrating white flight for an era of colorblindness. In this framing, (white) police exodus operates as the logical counterpart of (black) criminality. Police exodus not only works as a metonym for white flight but incorporates a specificity that carries inescapable associations of “social order” and the “rule of law.” Whereas white flight is often perceived in financial terms, of tax dollars, police exodus invokes the opening up of a localized state of nature, a lawless vacuum into which “criminality” naturally flows. It alludes to a need for constant police presence, normalized surveillance, and “punitive social control mechanisms” that resonate with the “Broken Windows” theory of policing, though it’s not clear how much the backers of Broken Windows buy into residency requirements. Still, as Raven Rakia writes in her discussion of the theory developed by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson,

they use the irrational fear of young, black people to promote policing and criminalizing their existence. Kelling and Wilson want to purge the neighborhood of the undesirable — the homeless, the poor, the loud, the young and black — by harassing, abusing and forcibly removing them so often that they either no longer appear in public or get locked in a cage.

If Broken Windows aims to purge communities of their “criminal” residents, police exodus offers a fantasy of who should replace them. In fact, it goes beyond fantasy—the city of Detroit recently offered to sell abandoned houses to police officers for as little as $1,000 to encourage them to move back into the city. The white supremacist theory of urban change sketched out in Wafer’s defense, in other words, has been literally transformed into official policy by Detroit’s elected politicians. A city full of cops… But Detroit cannot be repopulated with cops alone—at least we hope not—and in this sense police exodus operates more effectively as a story of decline than a program for revitalization. But it also helps to clarify both the centrality and the white supremacist logic of policing in any vision of a Detroit renaissance, whether or not race is explicitly invoked—and most clearly where it is disavowed.

Thanks to Thandisizwe Chimurenga (@idabeewells) and Oralandar Brand-Williams (@oralandar_DN) for livetweeting the trial—this piece could not have been written without your work—and to Alex Vitale (@avitale) for providing resources on police residency requirements.

Notes on the Detroit Bankruptcy

1. Looking back, it was all but inevitable. Kevyn Orr, who was appointed to be Detroit’s emergency manager by Governor Rick Snyder back in March, is a bankruptcy lawyer. He was selected to fix the city, and everything looks like a nail when you’re holding a hammer. Orr himself likened bankruptcy to a hammer of sorts, stating at a press conference that “in each restructuring I’ve been in, I’ve heard the same thing: This is a crisis. . . . Not at all. This is a tool.” The question, then, is what does this tool do.

One thing such tools do is produce winners and losers. Before filing for bankruptcy, Orr sat down with the city’s creditors to try to get them to voluntarily take a hit on what they were owed. Most of these creditors, which include “wealthy investors, money market bonds, bond funds, insurance companies, banks, hedge funds, and debt-traders,” would have received 10 cents on the dollar. Underfunded pension claims, however, would have received less than the 10 cents offered to the Wall Street counterparts. From the perspective of the emergency manager, not all debt obligations are created equal. Some, goes this line of thinking, can be squeezed harder than others. Although this proposal was rejected, the same logic continues to operate in the actual bankruptcy filing: retirees will take the hit while Wall Street gets paid first. And for corporations, of course, it’s an opportunity. “Crisis,” in other words, is never evenly distributed.

Moreover, even positing an equivalence between large bondholders and pension funds is like comparing apples and oranges for at least two reasons. First, these bondholders will invariably have forms of insurance (such as swaps) on their positions, which means that even in the event of a total default they will still receive some form of payment. Pension holders, on the other hand, do not. Second, bonds are truly debt instruments—investors know they carry risks, which is why they buy them—while pensions are essentially wages. Pensions are not IRA investments and should not be treated as such. By comparing the two sets of creditors, we impose a level of risk on pension funds that they did not carry for their original recipients, to whom they were sold as forms of deferred compensation.

2. Many activists, organizers, and especially liberal politicians have identified the emergency manager as the target of criticism and protest, arguing that his dictatorial powers—he is unelected and can override the decisions of the city’s elected officials at will—have been the critical element of the bankruptcy arrangement. This claim parallels the argument laid out by Naomi Klein in her well-known book The Shock Doctrine. Neoliberal reforms and austerity, she writes, are so unpopular that politicians can’t implement them through normal democratic procedures. Crisis, however, provides the opening and the opportunity to ram them through.

This is a compelling argument, especially to progressive-minded commentators, but at least in this case it is deeply misguided. The crisis in Detroit has little to do with “democracy”—the business-as-usual form of party politics dominated by corporate interests. In fact, “democracy” is what got us into this mess in the first place. Even beyond Detroit’s headline-catching ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (elected in 2002 and currently awaiting sentencing on a new round of felony convictions), city governance has been notoriously corrupt, not to mention astonishingly incompetent. Since 2005, for example, the city has turned to Wall Street for help in funding its pension obligations—essentially kicking the can down the road—in exchange for what by now has added up to $474 million in fees alone.  That’s more than enough to pay off the city’s current budget deficit, estimated at about $380 million.

Another example is the infamous revenue-sharing deal signed between the city and the state back in 1998. The idea was for Detroit to gradually reduce its income taxes, which were deemed by the state government to be too high, by a third, from 3 to 2 percent. In return, the state would contribute $333.9 million annually for a period of nine years. While the city kept its part of the bargain, the state—run at different times by members of both political parties—did not. As a result of this arrangement, Detroit lost out on about $700 million between the loss of tax revenue and the state’s declining contributions. Again, that’s almost double the city’s current deficit.

However much what’s happening in Detroit seems to resonate with the popular notion of disaster capitalism, no solution will be found in getting rid of the emergency manager and restoring authority to elected officials. We can’t vote capital out of office. To focus on the sphere of official politics is to fundamentally misrecognize the terrain on which this conflict is being fought.

3. To some extent, then, the fiscal crisis facing Detroit is the result of misguided priorities, ethical lapses, and effective spin on the part of the ruling elite. This last point is worth considering. There is good reason to be skeptical, for example, about the emergency manager’s “massively inflated” claims about the extent of the city’s pension liabilities:

Pension liabilities are enormously important but imaginary numbers based on projections about a combination of factors. Perhaps the most important of these is the discount rate, which in turn is usually based on the bond market. Using a higher discount rate makes liabilities seem smaller, and vice versa. The power to define that rate confers the right to define a pension’s viability.

Orr has played a savvy game around Detroit’s discount rate. In his creditors’ report, he noted that the old discount rate yielded a funding gap of just under $700 million, while using “more realistic assumptions” would boost the liability nearly five-fold to $3.5 billion. By repeating that number in talking to the press, without ever revealing the methodology behind it, Orr has mainstreamed the notion that the pensions face a funding crisis that demands emergency tactics.

That being said, the decline of Detroit is not only “imaginary”—it is also objective. Popular discourse about the city is so oversaturated with knowing assertions and lamentations about factory automation, outsourcing, white flight, and population decline that at times a sense of skepticism automatically kicks in, lending support to the counterargument that, if only we could reorganize our priorities or (the politicians say) vote someone else into office, the problem could be resolved. Unfortunately, this is not the case. What is happening in Detroit is one result of the reorganization of the global economy that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The “golden age” of manufacturing is long gone and it’s not coming back. The terrain of conflict in Detroit, then, is not democracy but capitalism. (Another way to put it would be to say that the only way the question of democracy enters into the picture is not in the form of political representation but workplace organization: “What kind of a society gives a relatively tiny number of people the position and power to make corporate decisions impacting millions in and around Detroit while it excludes those millions from participating in those decisions?”)

4. The bankruptcy petition filed by Orr includes a statement of approval signed by Governor Rick Snyder, which identifies population decline as one of if not the key element responsible for the fiscal state in which the city finds itself today. “Mr. Orr’s letter and prior report put in stark reality the dramatic impact of the City’s plummeting population. . . . The City’s population has declined 63% from its peak, including a 28% decline since 2000. That exodus has brought Detroit to the point that it cannot satisfy promises it made in the past. A decreasing tax base has made meeting obligations to creditors impossible” (p. 15). The statement does not note, however, the racial dynamics of these demographic changes. As many critics have observed, what happened in Detroit was an exodus not of a general population but specifically of the white population, which fled to the suburbs (with its tax dollars) beginning in the 1940s and 1950s. It was fueled formally, by racist policies like redlining—in 1941, a segregation wall was even built off 8 Mile Road to separate the white neighborhoods from the black ones—and informally, by varied and violent configurations of discrimination and fear. Today, Detroit’s population is still 83 percent black.

While that exodus has decimated the city’s tax base, it has also produced stunning concentrations of wealth just beyond its municipal lines. According to Forbes, there are seven billionaires living in the metro Detroit area. For example, Dan Gilbert, the owner of the mortgage company Quicken Loans who has been buying up massive amounts of downtown real estate, is worth $3.5 billion. While many in the media call him a hero who’s going to “save” Detroit, he’s not accumulating the built environment out of kindness—he’s in it for the money. Coincidentally, that’s precisely the amount of the city’s entire pension liabilities if we assume Orr’s sketchy calculations are correct. There is plenty of wealth in southeast Michigan—we just have to know where to look for it.

5. Which brings us to targets. Pleas to authorities will accomplish nothing, as the authorities are by design not accountable to the public. But even politicians who are nominally accountable will not listen—they are accountable only to the needs of the market. An offensive strategy must be creative, identifying points in the circuit at which the immaterial flows of capital through and around the city (e.g. debt) become material and concrete, able to block, break, or take.

What about, say, the Goldman Sachs aluminum scam? The other day, the New York Times published an article on the notorious Wall Street firm, which has coordinated muni bond sales for Detroit that were good for Goldman and bad for the city. By purchasing a company based in the Detroit area called Metro International, Goldman has been able to acquire a stranglehold on the world aluminum market.

The story of how this works begins in 27 industrial warehouses in the Detroit area where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers’ aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country.

(…)

Only a tenth of a cent or so of an aluminum can’s purchase price can be traced back to the strategy. But multiply that amount by the 90 billion aluminum cans consumed in the United States each year — and add the tons of aluminum used in things like cars, electronics and house siding — and the efforts by Goldman and other financial players has cost American consumers more than $5 billion over the last three years, say former industry executives, analysts and consultants.

Unlike the financial trades in which Goldman tends to deal, these warehouses are material and can be mapped. Blockading the warehouses, preventing the trucks from making one section of the loop, could cause a backup throughout, bringing the circuit of aluminum ingots—and the generation of profits—to a grinding halt. Interrupting this movement would be one small way of putting pressure on Goldman, and our blockade could last until the firm cancels the debt owed to it by the city of Detroit. The response to the bankruptcy must not be indirect, based on misplaced faith in political representatives, but direct, by intervening in the everyday operations of an economy that increasingly concentrates more wealth in the hands, and cities, of the few and leaves behind pockets of poverty and devastation.

(thx for the graffiti)

The University as a Site of Struggle: On Occupying in a Midwest College Town

A short reflection on the meaning of democracy and our experience at Occupy organizing at a large “public” university in Michigan.

 

The three of us first began organizing together under the aegis of Occupy in 2011 at the university where we work (though we were also involved in other regional/local Occupies). While the GAs on our campus initially drew more than a hundred students, our numbers quickly began to decline and we ultimately turned into a sort of affinity group that, while consistently active, became a closed space with little potential for movement building. Looking back, we remain convinced that universities are an under organized space in anticapitalist struggles but that the dominant organizing models, in particular their emphasis on democracy, require some fundamental rethinking. In what follows, we detail our experience with the GA and sketch out some of the reasons why it failed to serve as the organizing space that we had initially hoped for.

The GAs were one of the most visible and emblematic features of Occupy and were frequently celebrated as consensus-based decision-making bodies both based on and dedicated to principles of radical democracy. GAs helped to introduce thousands of participants to numerous practices that, while well known to anarchist organizers and professional activists (facilitation, stack, consensus, committees/working groups, etc.), were unfamiliar to many newcomers. Compared with the dismal charade of “politics” characteristic of the electoral system, the experience of “real democracy” was in many ways captivating. It created widely circulable images of protestors and offered a tangible way to imagine what they were seeking when they themselves refused to issue precise demands. These practices were quickly drawn into the everyday language of Occupy, most often in the form of “prefigurative” politics.

While GAs in New York, for example, seemed to draw large numbers over long periods of time, the GAs on our campus quickly became an exhausting and draining burden. First and foremost, they were really, really long. Open conversations often take a long time and at times can end up doing little more than going over the same ground. At the same time, since we weren’t actually occupying a space on campus, participants weren’t already gathered in the same place for an indefinite period of time—folks had other places to be, struggling to find enough time to study and work to pay to study. Second, as numbers dropped at the meetings, the bureaucratic structures of the GA began to seem a little ridiculous. When there are only 20 people in a room, there simply is not a need for such a formalized structure. Given that our meeting size varied so much, planning appropriately was a problem. Third, in part because we were not holding space, our meetings tended to be unfocused. Too much time was spent discussing demands and formulating principles, and not enough on planning actions. It was frustrating to attend a three-hour GA whose purpose could not be synthesized and which often had no product. Ultimately the long, drawn out, romantically declarative GA felt like a fetishistic performance of what we imagined politics to be.

We see these problems as arising not from inefficient or otherwise flawed procedures that impede the GA’s democratic function but rather from the obsession with democracy itself. Neither “better facilitation” nor “bigger GAs” would have changed the political valence of the Occupy model or, for that matter, the objective conditions of struggle on our campus. Democracy is synonymous with a liberal politics in which politics as such is defined as speech and individual rights take precedence over collective missions. Below we offer a series of hypotheses about how the GA conceived of politics and democracy and lay out some questions that, we think, might help us develop new ways to organize.

Democracy and the GA

Hypothesis 1: GAs are based on the notion that speech is equivalent to democracy and, as a consequence, politics. The structures of democracy that are embedded in the GA form (participation is showing via hand signals or voicing your opinion about a given topic, the human mic and repetition of speech, and so on) will always tend, despite strong disavowals to the contrary, toward a form of politics as speech. The GA absorbs direct action into itself, coordinating and distributing speech acts that come to stand in for the anarchist politics from which the GA emerges. So people talk about how Occupy has “already won” because it “changed the national conversation” about inequality. The premise is that speaking aloud comes to supersede and in a way replace structural change. Talking has to lead to action—the two are intertwined and there must be space for both, but mere denunciation is not enough. In our Occupy, which was not holding space, we spent far more time talking than doing. Meetings can be great, and can generate the social bonds that form the basis of solidarity, but without direct action that potential solidarity withers and dies before it can be tested, strengthened, and deployed.

Furthermore, many of our direct actions—such as interrupting a regents’ meeting or a speech at the Business school with a mic check—in fact took the form of vocal denunciations, of political speech. The most common reaction to the mic checks seemed to be mild irritation. Other than short delays, our speech had few material consequences. In fact, it could be argued that our actions served to improve the university’s image as a “site of free speech.” After we disrupted a regents’ meeting, the president of our university published an open letter to President Obama the next day beseeching him to address the issue student debt. Shortly after that, he appeared on campus for some photo ops. Tuition still increased 2.8% for in-state students and 3.5% for out-of-state students the following year.

Hypothesis 2: Given the dominance of the notion of politics as speech, the GA has a problematic tendency to become the primary site of subjectivization. In its presumptively prefigurative model, the forms of democracy it enables and proliferates come to stand as the embodiment of a coming “democratic” community. But the GA is a horrible site for introducing people to a movement, changing their minds, convincing them to get involved—don’t you want your life to be more like an unending series of 3-hour long meetings? In sites like ours where there is not already a significant level of radicalization (more than 10-20 students and faculty) finding ways of building a group of people to undertake actions and protest is critical. Equally important is having multiple points of entry and forms of involvement. What this means is that the structure of governance (a GA, a meeting, a spokescouncil) ceases to be the place we bring people to try to convince them that they should care more deeply about student debt, go on strike, or occupy a building.

Hypothesis 3: The GA is a weak organizing model because it doesn’t think of itself as an organizing model. This creates a problematic overlap between the “form of governance” and the “structure of movement.” These have to be separated. Take the following three cases. In Occupy Oakland, there was initially a dialectic between subjectivization in the streets and containment in the GA, but once this dialectic broke down (coming to favour the GA over the streets) there was no other structure supporting the movement. In Occupy Wall Street, there was a shift from the GA (form of governance) to a dual model with both a GA and a spokescouncil as a parallel organizational structure. Here, the separation between structure and governance is too pronounced and results in a form of shadow governance—the spokescouncil wields the real power and the GAs turn into performance art. In the Occupy at our university, this overlap between governance and structure led to the group’s transformation into an affinity group. Sensing the hollowness of the GA as an organizing model, we shifted to friendship, which is a firmer organizing structure, but which had high barriers to entry and few points for subjectivization.

Hypothesis 4: The most powerful GAs are tied to actions or called to determine if a group of people is willing to undertake a large-scale action (“large-scale” being a scalar term, depending on where and how many you are). If we stop thinking of the GA as either an organizational structure or as a site of subjectivization, we can then ask ourselves what it is they do well. In our opinion, the GA works best under two conditions: 1) it involves a decision on an action (in other words, it operates not as mechanism of containment but rather in a dialectic with direct action), and 2) the decision and process of making the decision has a profound effect of supernumerary collectivity (even if it is marked by intense disagreements with other participants). This does not require perpetual repetition or a reconvening as a general meeting structure, but is more of a collective beginning for a very tangible, visible struggle. It does not rely on a notion of politics as speech, but rather links speech and action.

Next Steps for Campus Organizing

While over the last few years we have seen significant examples of police violence and repression on campuses across the country (especially in California and New York), university administrations more often engage protesters in less direct ways which are highly effective in generating burnout. The denial of confrontation, which while possibly dangerous is at the same time useful for mobilization, ultimately leaves us inaudible. Coupled with the bureaucracy of endless meetings, the administrative response exhausts enthusiasm for movement building. Changing the university requires bringing a halt to the “business” of its everyday operations, something that will actually require the university to publicly confront protestors. For this to happen on our campus, we will need to build support for more militant direct actions.

One of the challenges to organizing on campus is getting undergraduate students—many of whom are being buried under mountains of student debt—to realize that their degree will probably not result in the comfortable middle class lifestyle that they’ve been told awaits them after graduation. This runs counter to their day-to-day experiences in which they do not yet find themselves in the uncomfortable position of not being able to pay back their loans. In a way, we are asking students to anticipate their own future failure. We need to think through the temporality of what people are being asked to act on and how that impacts participation. This requires a longer term relationship with students that may even extend beyond the time it takes them to graduate. Community involvement needs to include alumni and a more intergenerational approach to thinking the figure of “the student.”

With regards to graduate students and faculty, we need to dispel the notion that your scholarship can be your activism. Participation in university-based activism means material risk for individuals whose careers are tied to the institution in such an intimate way. Many of our colleagues, while championing anticapitalist, antiracist, and feminist politics in their work, routinely fail to participate in an open struggle to change the structures that govern our lives. While our writing and research can feed, nurture, and illuminate our struggles (and vice versa), the two should not be conflated. As scholars, we need to put our bodies where our theory is.

Given the current state of student debt, a vicious administrative class, and the prevalence of idealism and creativity, we believe that university campuses are logical and essential sites of struggle. That being said, the university is a trap—only university-based struggles that aim at generalization, at escaping the university and becoming part of wider social condition of refusal (as in Quebec), will have a shot at avoiding either recuperation or reformism. For us, this implies a two part, long-term organizing problem: first, organizing enough students to form a powerful bloc capable of acting on the terrain of the university, and second, organizing the communities that surround us.

Archipelago Issue 0

Recently we posted an essay, “Please Don’t Move to the Bay,” from Issue 0 of the new journal Archipelago. Now you can read the whole issue online. It’s on Issuu and available in imposed/readable PDF forms here. Check it out. And to get you started, here’s an excerpt from the Editorial Notes, copied from Anarchist News:

We’re pleased to present the preliminary issue of Archipelago, a journal of Midwest anarchy. We do this, not to affirm some idea of the Midwest as a strictly-bounded geographic area or to affirm ‘the anarchy’ as a static ideology– rather than align ourselves with a political position that bases itself on a program or utopian vision (read: anarchism), we want to engage with and subvert the chaos, the anarchy, that exists around us. Furthermore, we wish to acknowledge what ties us together: our separation from the coasts, our relative isolation from one another, our penchant for troublemaking, and our desire to overthrow everything in this terrible world. And, although we often find ourselves adrift at sea without a navigable course, lines of affinity occasionally appear to us with startling clarity, contributing to a burgeoning collective intensity and helping our islands seem a little less distant from one another.

While this journal will mainly focus on points of conflict that present themselves around us and that we involve ourselves in, we also want to draw lines between our struggles here and those in other places; coast to coast, across borders and oceans. We conjure inspiration and strength from our comrades everywhere, however, we don’t want to place them on a pedestal just because their actions appear more spectacular to us. We’re waging war on the existent here and now; we continue to experiment and process, to understand and convey these things as well as we can. There isn’t one way to overthrow empire or for us to see our cities in flames, but rather a multiplicity of positions and approaches that can bring us closer to the moments of rupture we long for.

…

[Certain] questions remain dear to us: how, in places where we are few and spread out, can we contribute to ruptures that feel necessary for our survival? How can we share tactics and analysis and compare notes in a manner that doesn’t revolve around cliquish counter-cultural circles and already-present points of contact? How can our struggles not feel so isolated to our individual locales, but relay off of and amplify each other? On this note, this issue-zero focuses primarily on acts and evaluation originating in a few midwestern cities. We hope that this won’t always be the case and, as this publication disseminates, those both known and unknown to us will contribute articles, critiques and conversations.

In putting our thoughts and analysis out into the world on paper, our intentions are multifaceted. The obvious tension between how things appear on the internet and how we engage with them in the world is rife with potential and pitfalls. We can’t begin this project without asserting our commitments to the printed word, but not solely as a reactionary position against the internet. We want a record of our thoughts and movements to exist in various forms, for careful consideration and fond recollection by history, and we want these records to exist on our own terms. We hold nothing but contempt for the media and place no trust in their (lack of) representation of our struggles. Let our direction be clear: we write for those whom we hold in our hearts, and for those who hold us in theirs. For those we have met, and the future comrades we yearn to encounter, and to anyone who is enraged by the tyranny of capitalism.

Please Don’t Move to the Bay

This post is an excerpt from a new soon-to-be released anarchy journal titled Archipelago and published by comrades in the Midwest. We repost it from Bay of Rage as part of a critical dialogue over the position of Oakland within the national context of social struggle and the necessity of maintaining a thriving and vicious network of hubs and nodes that spread far beyond the coastal metropoles.

The world isn’t as big as it used to be. Our ability to communicate and travel quickly over distance has created the illusion that place doesn’t matter as it used to. The internet is considered a realm where ideas can meet and intermingle, free of earthly burdens. While the ease of these interactions can be heralded as a breakthrough, what we’ve lost is context. The ways in which crisis unfolds and austerity is felt are not the same everywhere. Our regional differences create a much broader critique of capitalist infrastructure that is, in fact, global in scale. With our ability to disseminate information and material resources over a broad landscape, it could be argued that these diversified points of production are no longer a concern. We disagree.

Over the last few years, the San Francisco Bay Area (“the Bay”) has become a focal point for those wishing to do battle with the state in its varied forms. The clashes that continually transpire there are an inspiration to those fighting in other parts of the country. We sat with rapt attention as the nights and days following Oscar Grant’s murder unfolded. There were collective sighs of joy as BART stations were attacked and looted Nikes took flight down city streets. Frustration and delight filled us as a barrage of tear gas and cudgel blows rained on crowds that were adamant in their refusal to disperse.

The level of action and struggle that now appears commonplace in the Bay is something to be proud of. People have found one another and built the spaces, both real and ethereal, necessary for rebellion to begin to generalize beyond the obvious players. The process started decades ago with a consistent ebb and flow dependent on the proclivities and fashion of the decade. Discerning the exact methodologies or points that have created this current wave is impossible and unnecessary. Something that can be pointed to as one of many reasons has been the constant flux of anarchists from around the country both into and out of the Bay area. This shifting of bodies makes sense, and will continue to happen as long as places like Oakland hold the appeal that they do in this moment. In other words, we don’t blame you for thinking Oakland is hot shit.

At the same time, the situation in Oakland, specifically the Oakland Commune, does not exist in a void. It is not the exception to the inactivity of other cities and towns across the continent. Both the idea that other places are not active, or that Oakland has always been on the initiating end of the spectrum are common fallacies. A focusing of many of our attentions toward the west coast is one of the reasons it was able to create and strengthen itself for such a time. The back and forth between the street fights in Oakland and the solidarity actions that followed, both nationally and internationally, helped galvanize the widespread support that the Commune received. Locally, solidarity actions helped create a culture of responding to police attacks. The imagery of the ground war that unfolded in Oakland pushed many people out of otherwise pacified roles. They became active participants in a broader refusal to obey local law enforcement.

When tear gas ran through the air, and rubber bullets tore open the flesh of our friends it was not just us who called for the moments of solidarity. Occupy encampments in various cities were a large part of the call for passive solidarity marches, vigils, and other fairly detestable points in which fellowship could be shown. We may not agree with the tactics, rhetoric, or really very much of anything to do with these Occupy franchises, but the importance lies in the fact that they were paying attention. The gaze of the country was directed towards this one space, and in a moment it spun outward again. Marches, graffiti, small and large demos, new occupations, vandalism all happened in response to attacks by the OPD. And in that moment, the numbers swelled. All of our abilities to move forward became easier as we loomed larger on the horizon.

Local anarchist intervention into various occupy encampments helped shape the dialogue significantly. That being said, we have all been fairly disappointed by the American fall. Leave it to the Left in this country to take the momentum of the toppling of dictators and the mass occupation of public space and turn it into a symbolic Bank of America protest. The end result of the experiment that constituted taking space near Wall St. would have been much bleaker if anarchists had not positioned themselves at necessary intervals along the way. The intent never needed to be about strengthening the Occupy movement, or lending it support but about changing the terrain. Sometimes that looks quite a bit like disruption and sabotage. In the end, we found out that, for the most part, Occupy was just a hash tag, and the Occupation was, in fact, just a gathering. In the end, anarchists involved in many of the occupations were a primary source of the few redeeming aspects Occupy had to offer. The picture would have been desperately bleak had there not already been fairly well established anarchists dispersed around the country.

The circuitry of Occupations across the country have emerged as a weak, but discernible network of solidarity. One must ignore the pleas for non-violence, the unending consensus discussions, hand signals and wingnuts to get a picture of the more important themes revealing themselves. As anarchists we have poured ourselves into a thin layer, bunching up for certain moments and completely abandoning regions in another, often with little reflection beyond a personal interest in a summit or scene. It is in the spaces where this has been least prevalent, where people have called their cities home for more than 6 months, that the most exciting and interesting moments have transpired. They are minor in scale, but the ability to pull off street actions and building takeovers in places like Atlanta, St. Louis and Minneapolis can certainly be attributed to the influence of anarchists in those cities.

We want to recreate the feeling of reading about an eruption in places like Carrboro, NC and Memphis, TN that makes you yell out damn, even that place! When our presence is overweighted and the west coast starts to tip ever-heavier, we lose that possibility. We lose momentum, that feeling that we are a part of something larger. Not a movement, as we would never call for such. The idea of creating a platform, where our responses to the horrors that this world creates could be held to a standard or rigidly coordinated, is detestable. On the contrary, the possibility of a strategic positioning of ourselves and our resources, so that when a moment becomes hot we may strike, is what we are championing.

This is also not a charge for digging in, for stubbornly refusing to abandon ships as they sink around us. The small towns and lesser cities we occupy are not sacred spaces we dare not desecrate. They are often banal and devoid of the wealth of camaraderie we thrive on. But, this does not mean they are not home, and don’t move beyond the sentimentality that such a title can create. Indeed, they can become the places we love with such a passion that we want to burn them to the ground, where such destruction is the only appropriate conveyance of such passions.

There can be intention within the spaces we inhabit. A constellation of centers that information and bodies pass through, or places that reinforce them materially or politically. It is in fact this strategy that has created lasting focuses of rebellion across the country. The rapture that one feels at the eruption and escalation of revolt as it circles outward can’t be felt if we drain all the smaller cities and towns that dot the political geography. Instead, we must locate the important distinctions that can be made between areas known and areas lesser known and exploit them.

Distinctions between these two ideas do not need to be glaringly obvious, nor do they need to be static. Our towns can become strategic points for re-grouping, especially if there is already a precedent for such a thing. Conversely, the roads we do not tread as often are ripe for the execution of any number of plots. These contradictory stances can happen simultaneously, especially when multiple groupings share the same city. The concepts presented here are not particularly new or breathtaking; they are a reiteration and continuation of the methodologies implied in how many of us already live our lives. The difference in this permutation is intention. The conversations that materialize herein, particularly when discussing how major mobilizations and campaigns can effect our nighttime adventures, are ones worth having. Looking past the next season and into an idea of the future may in fact help create the force necessary to rip this future to shreds.

What if the organic way in which we separate the place where we play from where we work was more recognized? What if the tendencies we fall into, traveling to a certain city to get our kicks, while shopping and printing and eating big dinners together in another, had a greater level of intention? The last four years have shown that the war machine is possible, that we can care for each other and bandage the wounds that allow us to keep fighting, that we can procure the material resources necessary to move onto the next locale. The terrain is ever changing, the necessity we see before us is to become more equipped to change with it. More friends are going to be stolen from us, more beaten and bloodied. The edifices that hold them, that house their captors and those willing to tear open their flesh deserve our attention. We are going to lose this war, but the battles fought from here until then are open to all that wish to fight.

We Created It, Let’s Take It Over

Whether you are a student, a welfare rights activist, laid off, a union member, a teacher, an anarchist, or a concerned citizen, we all have come together to form Occupy Detroit for two reasons: because it is clear that the world around us, the world of the state and of capitalism, no longer work and because all traditional forms of politics, the parties, government, NGOs, no longer work either.

So we came together, occupied, and in less than a month, we have done things, such as learn how to self-govern, how to feed and care for one another and for those society has abandoned, and most importantly, how to take space, hold it and refuse to back down—all things that they, the state, the politicians, the 1%, and all those who live off the status quo, said could not be done.

But what is an occupation as a form of politics? What is our occupation in Detroit? And where is it going? First, to occupy means to take back what is ours: the parks, the city, the buildings, the street, the space both public and private—all this was built with either our hands or our money, on our backs, and as such to occupy means to take back what is rightfully ours. The occupations then have nothing to do with politics as usual, with parties, with the state (and their armed enforcers, the police), with NGOs. The occupation is then a force, its own force, our force, the power of direct democracy and direct action that says enough is enough and that is willing to fight for those who have been left behind, locked up, left to die. All of us who have participated in the occupation know what this force feels like: it’s the rush when we come to a consensus in a GA, or solve a complicated logistical problem in camp, or take the street and hold it against police threats during a march. This is the power of us, the power of the people.

If the occupation is a force what does it do? Or why is different than a welfare-rights organization, a union, a NGO, or a political party? The reason why the occupy movement is the most exciting social movement in the United States in many years is that it takes and holds space and most importantly it challenges the state. Why have cops beaten occupiers in Oakland, Denver, Atlanta, and New York? Why have city and state governments raided occupy camps in places too numerous to count with violence that has filled all of us with deep sadness and rage inside? It is because the state, the 1%, and the powers that be are afraid. This means we are doing something right. This means they are afraid that we will not be satisfied with a park, but will want a school, a factory, a bank. They know they have completely fucked over this country and they are afraid we are going to rise up and do something about it.

But what does it mean to rise up and do something about it? What are we rising up against? And why? For us, if the occupation is going to be something other than a party, a union, an organization for rights, it is going to have to fight for ourselves and those others who truly bare the full brunt of the 1% and the city and state governments that enforce their order. It means fighting for those who have been evicted and occupying their homes again. It means taking over closed schools and running them. It means taking over more parks, more buildings, until everything has been liberated, until all of society is run by neighborhood GAs, until we all make collective decisions about where the money goes, how education works, how we will live and care for one another. It is easy to see in Detroit that the state and city governments have failed. What’s more difficult to see is that as city and state governments fail, they inevitably become more repressive, and call in the cops to maintain order. Austerity, the “cuts,” are not actually cuts: they are not cutting, but shifting resources. For every dollar cut from social programs, from education, another dollar goes into the military budget, riot gear for cops, new prisons.

Michigan is only one of four states that spends more on incarceration than on higher education. In 2008, Michigan spent $2.08 billion on corrections, 1/5 of total spending from the general fund. In the city of Detroit, 1 in 25 of all adults are locked up. On the city’s eastside, in Brewer Park, 1 in 7 adult males is either behind bars or under supervision. Detroit provides the black and brown bodies for the prisons that are Michigan’s “New Economy,” structurally, the city has to offer up into the “pipeline” a certain number of bodies each year, so that conservative lawmarkers in the hinterlands can tout “job creation” with each new prison or prison employment. To this we say HELL NO. It is easy to see the abandonment of the city by the state; but we must also see and understand that this order of things can only be maintained through force. The young men of Brewer Park do not voluntarily line up in front of the prisons each morning, begging to be let in. They are put there, by a city, by a state, that no longer cares. We in Occupy Detroit are a force that opposes them. This is what it means to rise up, it means to fight, it means to take back the city and our neighborhoods from a corrupt and decadent power structure. Planting a garden is not going to dislodge them from power, nor liberate our city.

The visual evidence (abandoned buildings, train stations, schools) for the failings of the politicians, civic leaders, the 1%, is everywhere, but we must also confront the widespread repression that occurs daily, which can take direct forms like cops arresting youths or financial forms like the gentrification of Midtown which is being sold to all of us as “redevelopment.” That’s not redevelopment—redevelopment would be us as Detroiters deciding what gets to happen to our city—not funneling more money into the pockets of rich developers and their accomplices in the city government and saying that’s the best we can do. We have demonstrated in Occupy Detroit that that is not the best we can do, that there is another way, and that way is to occupy everything, to take back what is ours, to say we the people call the shots, we the people can best decide how to love and care for one another. You say more gentrification, more cops, more prisons, more foreclosures, attack the unions, more repression, we say ALL POWER TO THE OCCUPATIONS.

Right now, in Occupy Detroit we are facing two important challenges. The first is the looming eviction on Monday. The second is the winter. Both of these questions turn around the issue of what does it mean to occupy? Where are we going as an occupation, what are our goals? These are complicated conversations and ones that will require much thought, care, and debate. However, we’d like to make two points. First, there is no question that we should fight for the camp, we should resist and defend ourselves. It all comes down to a question of how much does the occupation matters to you. Do you have a comfortable life you can go back to? Or do you stand and fall with this movement, is it so important to you that you are willing to say “no, I refuse, I will fight for this space”? If we stay and we defend our space, our occupation, the force the city uses to evict us will be a black eye, and everyone will see that we are serious, that we are willing to fight for something we believe in, and they will join us in even greater numbers than before. If we lose and are evicted, we should come back the next day and everyday until we have taken back what is ours.

The second question, of what to do in the winter, is more complicated. It depends on how strong we are, how much space we can hold. Are we strong enough to take and hold a building throughout the winter? Would we be better served by maintaining a small presence in the park and staging temporary, symbolic occupations around the city (Cobo Hall, City Hall, etc) while organizing the neighborhoods into GAs? These are complicated strategic and tactical issues which will take much conversation to sort out. What is clear is that moving into private office space, paying rent, simply means that we have ceased to be an occupation and have become politics as usual, just another organization promising to make the city better, while turning a blind eye and refusing to fight against the daily repression occurring all around us.

Against Outrage

The news didn’t come in the middle of the night as we expected, but in the morning, at a reasonable hour EST. Hundreds of riot cops had raided the encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza, wildly swinging their batons and firing tear gas and beanbag rounds into a crowd made up of our friends, comrades, and allies who had for the last two weeks taken over and transformed dead space into the Oakland commune.

Our initial reaction was outrage, an intense hatred of the police and all those who look away, who justify their actions, who volunteer platitudes like, “They’re just doing their job.” Anger rose up inside of us. How could they—we growled indignantly, clenching our teeth—shoot teargas at innocent protesters?  What could possibly justify this show of militarized force? Is this really what democracy looks like?

And then we took a step back and started to think about outrage.

To feel outrage, we must hold that there are appropriate channels through which social conflict can be mediated and resolved. We must see the state as accountable to our needs and desires, effective and efficient in its provision of necessary services. We must forget that we are privileged, that in our privilege we are just like everyone else. That those who experience state terror at the hands of the police somehow deserve it. To feel outrage, we must believe that violence is the exception.

But it isn’t. Accountability is nothing more than a gilded myth: as the “Occupy” movement has recognized, the 1 percent has so taken hold of the political system that politics as such can no longer be said to exist. We are living under the rule of austerity capital. There will be no more necessary services, just as there is no more accountability. In Detroit, we know there’s no going back to that golden age of the welfare state, of union jobs, of a “comfortable” middle class life. Those jobs, and their conditions of possibility, are long gone. And even if we could, would we really want to return to a system that depended on the institutionalization of war, sexism, and racism to reproduce itself? These days, in any case, Michigan is cutting off welfare payments to those who’ve been unable to find work for four years and canceling programs that help poor families pay their heating bills in the winter. And winter, forecasted to be one of the coldest on record, is fast approaching.

To feel outrage is to give ourselves away. For those who face the brutality of the police every day of their lives, those who are stopped and frisked on the street, those who are arrested for inhabiting the wrong neighborhoods and the wrong skin color, those whose family members have been stolen by the prison-industrial complex, understand that the police are the foot soldiers of capital. To serve and protect—the 1 percent.

So. We have to smother our outrage, train ourselves to recognize the police for what they are, both rationally and affectively. It is only when we no longer feel outrage that we will be able to move beyond a reactive politics which traps us in endless cycles of legal battles, jail support, and internal investigations that never lead anywhere worthwhile. We must expect them. What Boston, New York, Atlanta, and especially Oakland have taught us is what we should have already known—that the cops are coming for us. All we can do is learn to defend ourselves, to move quickly. And to attack first.

* * *

At the march on Bank of America last week, which started from the occupation at Grand Circus Park and moved through downtown Detroit on a bright crisp fall day, we found ourselves astonished. Not at the 500 plus persons filling the normally deserted streets, not at the palpable joy in the air (the joy of realizing that we were no longer alone in trials and fears in this age of austerity, and the joy of finding a long-longed for family, filled with true care and love). Rather it was one moment, brief, and in the context of the brilliant and massive amount of organizational work that has occurred in the last two weeks perhaps easily overlooked: at one point in the march the police decided to intervene, to test us, and tried to force the march onto the sidewalk. They shouted threateningly, their cars darted at marchers, they revved their engines menacingly, but at the front of the march a man, holding his young infant daughter faced the police and refused to leave the street. He refused. He would not be moved. And in the face of his resolve the police relented, and the march followed him, shouting, singing, laughing in the streets.

His eloquent gesture said two things: this space is occupied and it is ours. If our movement is to become worthy of the name, we will have to learn two lessons. First, to be against outrage and the exceptionalism that it entails. From the state and the cops, we expect nothing but what they have already shown us: tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, all the technologies of foreign wars come home. And second, that occupy means to take and to hold space; that first we take a park, then the street, then the schools, then the banks, until what was built by all of us truly belongs to all, no gods, no masters.

Solidarity with Occupy Oakland!

Yrs in struggle,

Some communizers occupying Detroit