Democracy Ateneo Announcement 9-13-14

CompaƱer@s

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, September 13, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the second Saturday of the month.

It has been well over two years since we first gathered to pursue a series of related research questions as part of a larger effort to examine emerging moments of radical democracy and to better understand the obstacles we confront with Western Liberal Democracies, especially the kind exported by the U.S. On December 17th 2011 we inaugurated the Democracy Ateneo proposing we take up the following themes: a) projects that historically and politically undermine democratic promise  (e.g., democratic despotism, development, neoliberalism, and (global) prison industrial complex); b) projects that attempt to democratize mainstream liberal institutions in the areas of education, local government, health, environment, and food; c) autonomous alternatives to traditional, representative democracy (e.g., Zapatistas subversion of the party-state system, opposition to the Fourth World War, and experiments with a politics of encounter);  d) the strategies, practices, and formations that promote the production of a collective subject. These themes continue to be relevant given the persistent link between "democracy" and militarization.

Over the course of the summer months we have been horrified by the violence that consumes the mainstream media yet inspired by the resistance to Israel's "50 day assault on the Gaza strip" and the on-going rebellion in Ferguson and other parts of the U.S. following Darren Wilson's shooting of unarmed Michael Brown. While the nation is inescapably confronted by the escalation and complications of militarized policing, shootings of unarmed Black and Brown youth continue across the country. Not surprisingly, our collective research over the past year has documented the impact of militarized policing on the multiple communities that comprise the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. Our investigations have noted the intricate relationships between the core regions of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose as well as the "periphery" of Salinas, Stockton, Vallejo, and Santa Rosa.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media and government officials pretend to address the impact of militarized policing while at the same moment refusing to acknowledge the U.S. execution of low intensity conflict directed abroad and at our own communities. Although the dominant system has been forced to interrogate the reality of police forces having received military equipment and technological assistance long before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is a refusal to acknowledge how policing culture has been dramatically transformed by military material and support. More importantly, the presence of military equipment does not fully explain how value has been created by its redistribution and its use, as in the case of SWAT teams routinely making drug raids in low income communities.

More to the point, what we remains unasked and seems inescapable is that the U.S. can not have an authentic dialogue around race. It's not that long ago that President Obama sat down with Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and officer James Crowley over a beer to talk about why officer Crowley would have assumed the well-known professor was breaking into his own house and that he was not a resident of the affluent Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood he claims as his own. More than ever the fiction that universities are sites of engaged debate and critical inquiry has been shorn away. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's un-hiring of professor Steven Salaita in the American Indian Studies Program for his critical tweets opposing the barbarity of Israel's attack on the people of Gaza exposes the neoliberal university's service to corporate funders and pro-Zionist watch-dog organizations.

Un-hirings of critical faculty who challenge the neoliberal university or a celebrated professor's indignity one afternoon that resulted in a White House "Beer Summit" in some ways seem trivial against the pleas, outrage, and loss of ordinary working mothers and fathers forced to take the public stage because their child has generated media attention for being shot by police. Yet an interrogation of racialization in its imbrication with social relations produced by capital reveals the connections between ongoing exclusion and violence that extend from the Academy to the streets to the prisons and across Black and Brown communities in the US. Recent events in Ferguson as well as protests, rallies, and forms of encuentro across the Bay recognize the efforts towards justice of the other mothers and fathers of sons and daughters who have been similarly mistreated. We can not ignore the recent violence in the Bay targeting Latin@ and Chican@ communities --Yanira Serrano Garcia shot in Half Moon Bay, of Angel Ruiz, Osman Hernandez, Carlos Meija, and Frank Alvarado shot in Salinas, and Antonio Guzman Lopez gunned down by San Jose University police. Beginning on September 8th, and likely continuing for the next several weeks, is the trial in Oakland for the San Francisco Police Department's murder of Asa Sullivan on June 6, 2006 in a crawlspace in a Parkmerced apartment. The very fact of the trial marks a victorious and tireless eight year fight waged by Asa's family to bring the police responsible for the violent attack on Asa to court. We continue to recognize the urgency in placing these struggles at the center of our work and analysis of the current racial regime impacting the Bay as critical to our project of radical democracy.

South Bay and North Bay Crew

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