Democracy Ateneo Announcement 08-08-15

Compañer@s, 

Unfortunately we will not be convening the Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, August 8. We will be taking a summer hiatus for the month of August. We will resume our regular ateneo schedule in September. However, below please find a brief question we are grappling with over the break.

The mobilizations following the death of Sandra Bland in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, have made visible the state's violent response to an assertion of dignity. From State Trooper Brian Encinia's orders for Bland to put out her cigarette to the announcement that she had hung herself three days later, the state's process of converting Bland into a non-compliant subject exposed ongoing and often less visible violence directed at Black women and other women of color manifest in everyday interactions with the state. It also exposed a continuity of state violence from law agencies operating “outside” extending across the walls of correctional facilities. The death of Bland has surfaced a number of other deaths of Black women in custody, including an additional four women in July alone: Kindra Chapman, Joyce Curnell, Ralkina Jones, and Raynette Turner. Also beside these five Black women is Sarah Lee Circle Bear, a twenty-four-year-old Lakota woman refused medical help in a South Dakota jail who died in July, following a DUI arrest. The pressure to insure these women's lives are not vanished by the same state forces that locked them up has also prompted attention to the "suicide spike" in the California Institute for Women, a women's prison in San Bernadino County, as well as drawing attention to the deaths of organizers inside carceral institutions, including Native American activist Rexdale W. Henry in Mississippi who like Bland ended up dead in jail following a traffic violation.  A widespread response prompted by the death of Bland, which Salon Magazine notes as evidence that “Black America is under attack,” included the emergence of “preemptive investigation” organized through the hashtag, “If I Die in Police Custody.” These assertions of preemptive investigation appearing in video testimonies and statements from within Black America and circulating across social media function to call out the lie of the state in advance, as well as sanction insurgency as collective response in the event that one's own life is taken by the state. As a tactic to demonstrate that Black America is under attack, the circulation of preemptive statements communicate and circulate struggle: in refusing an anticipated state “glossing” of violence, a new call for militancy and collective action is issued. One can read in these moments a newly emergent collective subject, as many testimonios call for collective action as an ongoing community response, even in the projected absence of one's own self following an act of state violence. 

A recent essay by Henry Giroux, “America's New Brutalism: the Death of Sandra Bland,” takes the Sandra Bland case as an opportunity to examine America's domestic war on terror. The essay addresses several of the issues we have been engaging as we advance the collective convivial research we have been pursuing regarding community safety along with the Community Safety Database (CSDbase) as part of the interconnected learning spaces of UT Califas. In addition, it is a welcome opportunity to acknowledge the several “databases” that have emerged to document the growing number of killings by police. Giroux highlights two: The Counted by The Guardian and the Investigation: Police Shootings by the Washington Post. Later he also references Operation Ghetto Storm by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. To this we would add another documentation project, Carry Their Names.

Giroux's essay is a welcome statement about how the “war on terror has come home and it has taken the form of a war on poor minorities, especially black men and youth.” Giroux rightly argues that “lawlessness is now integral to the police state, and extreme violence is the new norm,” and this articulated in spectacles of violence that legitimize racist state terrorism in service of elite capitalist interests. However, Giroux's analysis has a few gaps worth noting. The bulk of the article, with the exception of a few casual mentions, focuses on Black youth––omitting the alarming number of Latin@s who have been victimized by not only police but also by border patrol. The US investment in the War on Drugs and the related War on the Border have resulted in tens of thousands of lives lost through state and state-manufactured violence on both sides of the border. Indeed, US military strategy has very visibly shifted to smaller bases in relation to perceived threats throughout Latin America. The Pentagon currently worries most about, according to Raúl Zibechi, urban marginals of the urban peripheries of Latin America's mega-cities. (See, “Zibechi, “Subterranean Echoes") 

Not surprisingly Giroux also links the resistance to police violence to the Black Lives Matter movement. While it is important to recognize the significance of the Black Lives Matter mobilization, we can potentially sideline the long history of opposition that precedes Ferguson. Dating the “new civil rights movement” to more recent confrontations against police violence directed against Black youth runs the risk of expunging the longstanding copwatching effort that has been increasingly visible in the alter-globalization movement as well as in urban neighborhoods confronting police misconduct closely associated with processes of gentrification or urban extractivism. (See, Gelderloos, "Precarity in Paradise: The Barcelona Model").  Moreover, when it becomes all about Black Lives Matter we potentially narrow the complex fabric of struggle against “the domestic war on terror” to only one aspect of a multifaceted warfare and process of militarization that includes several intersecting wars. As a meme it is easily disrupted into “all lives matter” deflecting the analysis away from the role of race in class war. An analysis of forms of extractavism that are continuous across urban and non-urban spaces can illuminate circuits of capital in the present: among the urban marginals to which Zibechi draws our attention are the countless indigenous people removed from their lands in the context of a worldwide escalating extractivism. Indeed, the indigenous struggles across the Americas, including the steadfast and dignified battle for territorial sovereignty currently underway at Unist' ot' en Camp in British Columbia, evidences the scramble for resources everywhere and points to new sites of value production, while attesting to the strength of the resistances underway in the name of the commons. At the same time, this sheds new light on the high rates of Native Americans and First Nations people killed across North America (See, Police Are Killing Native Americans at a Higher Rate Than Any Race). This also provides a way to understand the feminicides that stretch across the Americas as a violence of capital particularly honed on indigenous women. How can we understand the violence against Sandra Bland as intimately connected to the violence of the feminicides? How can our struggles reflect this connection, beyond solidarity?

Although Giroux takes on the issue of war, in particular the war against terror, he leaves war and warfare under theorized. The result is that Giroux only casually links the violence directed against Black and Brown youth to a legacy of racial inequality and to market forces. Too often people limit the discussion of war and warfare to conflicts between nations with ethno-racial motivations overlooking how war operates as part of what Marx called primitive accumulation. War currently is a critical dimension of cognitive capitalism––that is war and warfare are one of capital's primary sites for the production of value. It is not just a means to enclose, but to produce surplus value through social enclosure and technological displacement of living labor. Without a class based analysis of current forms of warfare we are trapped in the high caliber explosive spectacle of violence that Giroux warns against. The domestic terrorism, according to Giroux, that takes place in full view of the American public ends up easily co-opted and commodified by mainstream media leading to the anesthetizing of consumers and disheartening levels of impunity. But, how do we dismantle the "disimagination machine" if we do not expose the intersections between class war and race war? 

We must link white supremacy to a white herrenvolk lifestyle rather than simply limit the discomfort with white supremacy to certain kinds of social privileges.  In so doing, it provides a scaffolding to address how white supremacy also affords specific market privileges that are determined in the intersections of financial and cognitive capitalism. The intersection of market and social privileges linked to an exclusive and xenophobic sense of national belonging, what W.E.B Du Bois called democratic despotism, also must be connected to the current environmental crisis we face. (See, Callahan, "In Defense of Conviviality") In other words, the privileges of class articulated through racial and national belonging come at the expense of an environmental degradation that is catastrophic––this is the danger posed by extractivism and the challenge of articulating a collective class subject. Zibechi recently warned that the scorched earth policy of extractivism creates disposable subjects, people with no connection to production. Similarly, the expansion of neoliberalism has meant that people increasingly are only connected through consumerism, unfamiliar with the contradictions of the production process or the inequalities around labor that are fundamentally raced. For Zibechi, it is only through struggle against capital's worst excesses that people come to consciousness and enlist in the class war. (R. Zibechi, "Extractivism Creates a Society Without Subjects")

South Bay and North Bay Crew 

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