Democracy Ateneo Announcement 4-19-14

Compañer@s

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, April 19, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose <http://www.casavicky.com/>) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.

On Saturday, April 12th families and friends gathered in Eden Park in Stockton for a barbeque and speak out organized by the Inter Council for Mothers of Murdered Children and other local community groups. As families and children prepared for a short walk to the police station at around 3:45pm, assembling banners and posters with the images and names of loved ones lost to police and other militarized violence, between 25-30 police appeared from a side street in full riot gear. With military-style jogging two officers at a time in a long column, they split to spread out and stand shoulder to shoulder, cordoning off a corner of the park and attempting to barricade people inside. The officers on foot were supported by between 8 to 10 police motorcycles, roughly two motorcycles at each park corner, as well as transport vehicles and police cars. Those streets running proximate to the park were blocked so no traffic could pass by the park. Over the course of the next three hours, the police attempted to restrict all exit from the park and, using long truncheons, to force those who had taken to the streets and sidewalks back into the park. The ongoing assault by state forces against Black and Brown communities in the Stockton area and across California are well known to those gathered for the picnic. And from inside the park and spilling out past its edges, down to the littlest ones present at the picnic, the response was resistance. Clanging, shouting, dancing, running, pushing back, confronting, eating, laughing—those assembled for the picnic kept the cops running back and forth in the hot sun all afternoon in their vain attempts to maintain a formation and “secure the perimeter.”

It’s a victory when the state reveals that it is that afraid of a community organizing itself with a picnic—here were gathered the mothers and families of James Rivera, Jr., Kerry Baxter Sr. and Jr., Donnie Ray Haynes and Alexander Fontau Mahan, among others. Signs and posters had been hoisted across the park between trees and on benches, while glossy postcards were handed out narrating details of the events, naming officers responsible for the killings and identifying the coroner responsible for the cover ups. The Saturday afternoon picnic is the perfect system of information for networks of families (CCRA, Convivial research and systems of information <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/convivialres/system-information>). Like the buttons and t-shirts worn across the Bay to commemorate losses within the community, these postcards and banners are part memory, part refusal, part investigation, and part archive circulating among families gathered to share food and speak publicly about what they face as a community.

At Eden Park last Saturday, this speak out included updates on families' cases against the state and a collective recognition of the magnitude of the violence. In this context, the most recent waves of gentrification was brought in, a telling and retelling of how families of color are being pushed further and further inland, out from Oakland and San Francisco to cities like Stockton. It included reiterations of the last Stockton City Council meeting, where in the limited time for community issues, the municipal leaders prioritized for discussion the discomfort of stray animals in Stockton over families’ demands for responses to the killing of their children. Here too stories were swapped between picnic chores of the recent use of SWAT like raids that now accompany parole officers into family homes on routine probation checks for nonviolent parolees. Women speak of numerous police cars surrounding a house, and all those living there subsequently ordered out of their rooms and into a central room while one room is searched. These stories swapped during the picnic across multiple connections reverberate as intersecting systems of information. Such systems pose a threat to the state as they make visible a system of apartheid enforced against particular communities through militarized policing, mass incarceration, deportations, and surveillance (Khalil Muhammad on “Facing our Racial Past” <http://vimeo.com/44918795>). There was also time in the speak out and in the spaces in between to collectively remember those lessons learned from the last street occupation in the name of James Rivera Jr. and the shut down of the city.

Both the Eden Park barbeque as a space of encounter and the Inter Council for Mothers of Murdered Children as a node in a larger networked resistance among families are sites where systems of information are elaborated and expanded. H.L.T. Quan draws on the work of Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism, arguing for an “alternative historical construction…that is the documentation and articulation not of the singularity of class, race, or gender, but of communities of women and men as agents of history, of dignity and of resistance.” Notable organizers of the Eden Park barbecue, the Inter Council places at its center a knowledge of silences, silences inextricable from gender and the state. As mothers take a prominent position in the struggles against militarization across the Bay Area, we can understand “gender as an infrastructure of resistance…[one that] provides the beginning of a vocabulary for the under analyzed feminist politics of articulation” (H.L.T. Quan, “Geniuses of resistance: feminist consciousness and the Black radical tradition”). This is an articulation based on listening as much as speaking. Such an articulation provokes new possibilities for forms of civic pedagogy rooted in collective learning and spaces and practices of assembly. Rather than pleading with the state, making demands of the state, or organizing around media awareness and “consciousness raising” that the masses simply must respond to, communities organized around their own learning and assembly are engaging the prefigurative. In these spaces, systems of information form a critical component to community convivial research projects and investigations. Convivial research can be seen as a research praxis that constitutes the desired change.
South Bay Crew

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