Three members of the radical environmental organization Deep Green Resistance and two other individuals were detained for more than seven hours at the Peace Arch border crossing between Washington State and British Columbia on their way to Vancouver to attend a talk by author and activist Chris Hedges last Friday, September 25. They were questioned about the organizations they were involved in, their political affiliations, and their contacts in Canada before being turned away by Canadian border agents. Upon re-entering the United States they were then subjected to another round of questioning by US border agents. The car they were traveling in as well as their personal computers were searched.
The interrogation comes on the heels of an FBI inquiry into Deep Green Resistance last fall in which more than a dozen members of the group were contacted and questioned by FBI agents. Several months later the group’s lawyer, Larry Hildes, was stopped at the same border crossing and asked specifically about one of his clients, Deanna Meyer, also a Deep Green Resistance member. During the 2014 visits, FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents showed up at members’ places of work, their homes, and contacted family members to find out more about the group. Meyer, who lives in Colorado, was asked by a DHS agent if she’d be interested in “forming a liaison.” The agent told her he wanted to, “head off any injuries or killing of people that could happen by people you know.” Two of the members detained at the border on Friday were also contacted by the FBI last fall.
Since Hildes was last held up at the Peace Arch border crossing in June he filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program. In August he received a letter from the DHS saying the agency “can neither confirm nor deny any information about you which may be within federal watchlists or reveal any law enforcement sensitive information.”
It’s not only Deep Green Resistance members who have had trouble getting across the border. Environmental activists who were part of a campaign in Texas opposing the Keystone XL pipeline were the targets of an FBI investigation in 2012 and 2013 and have also been denied entry into Canada. At least one of those activists, Bradley Stroot, has been placed on a selective screening watchlist for domestic flights.
Nearly all of the activists involved are US citizens who have not had issues traveling to Canada in the past, leading them to believe that the recent FBI investigation and interest in their activities has landed them on some kind of federal watchlist. According to Peter Edelman, an immigration attorney in Vancouver, there are three broad categories under which Canadian border agents may deny entry to a foreign national: If they suspect you are entering Canada to work or study or you clearly don’t have the financial resources needed for the duration of the visit; if you pose a security threat to Canada or are a member of a terrorist or criminal organization; or if you’ve committed certain crimes. Edelman says that US citizens tend to get targeted more easily at the Canadian border because of the various information- sharing programs between the two countries. As soon as they scan your passport, border agents have access to a whole host of state and federal databases. Still, Edelman says, “Who gets targeted and who doesn’t is definitely an exercise in profiling.”
On Friday, September 25 Deep Green Resistance members Max Wilbert, Dillon Thomson, Rachel and two other individuals not affiliated with the group drove from Eugene, Oregon to attend the talk by Hedges, which was a collaboration with the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution. They got to the border around 1 p.m., told the border agents where they were going, and that they’d be returning to Oregon the next day. They were then asked to exit their vehicle and enter the border control facility, where they assumed they would be held briefly before continuing on their way.
Instead, they ended up spending four hours on the Canadian side, each questioned separately. At one point, an agent came into the building carrying Wilbert’s computer and notebooks. He asked the agent what they were doing with the computer and was told they were searching for “child pornography and evidence that you’re intending to work in Canada.” The agent also said they were “not going to add or remove anything.”
According to Edelman the searching of computers and cell phones at the border has become standard procedure despite the fact that there are questions about whether a border search allows for such invasive measures. Border agents take the view that they are permitted to do so, but the legal picture remains murky. “The searching of computers is an issue of contention,” Edelman says.
After four hours of questioning, all but one of the travelers were told that they would not be allowed to enter Canada. Wilbert, who grew up in Seattle and has traveled to Canada many times without incident, including as recently as January 2015, was told that they were suspicious he was entering the country to work illegally. A professional photographer, he had volunteered to take pictures of the event, which he had openly told the agents. “It was pretty obvious they were grasping for straws,” Wilbert says. “Under that level of suspicion you wouldn’t let anybody into Canada.”
The other three individuals were told they had been denied entry for previous political protest-related arrests. Rachel, a Deep Green Resistance member arrested in 2012 during a protest near the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, had traveled to Canada in December 2014 without any problems. The one individual allowed entry had no prior arrest record or explicit affiliation with any political groups. (Interestingly, several Deep Green Resistance members traveling separately, including one of the group’s founders, Lierre Keith, were allowed to pass through the border and attend the event.)
After being denied entry to Canada, the group turned around and attempted to reenter the United States, at which point they were again pulled aside and told by US border agents to exit their car. The group was then subjected to a similar round of questioning that lasted three and a half hours. This time, US agents took three computers from the vehicle into the border control facility and kept them for the duration of the interrogation.
According to Wilbert, the questions on the American side were more obviously political. Agents wanted to know the names of the groups they were involved in, what kinds of activities they engage in, what they believe in, and who they were going to see.
“It seemed very clear on the US side that they had already come to conclusions about who we are and what we were doing,” Rachel says.
Around 8:30 p.m. they were told they could leave and that it had been nothing more than a routine inspection.
Wilbert doesn’t see it that way. Two days later he got a new computer and says he plans to get rid of the one seized by border agents. Despite assurances from the border officials that nothing was “added or removed” he says, “We feel like everything we do on those computers will never be private.”
“It was pretty clear to us that it was an information gathering excursion,” says Wilbert. “They had an opportunity to harass and intimidate and gather information from activists who they find threatening.”
Adam Federman, Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Adam Federman is a contributing editor at Earth Island Journal. He is the recipient of a Polk Grant for Investigative Reporting, a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, and a Russia Fulbright Fellowship. You can find more of his work at adamfederman.com.
Republished with permission of Earth Island Journal
Earlier this month, transgender activist Trevor MacDonald published two opinionpieces on the Huffington Post, each to attack the feminist organization Woman-Centered Midwifery. Woman-Centered Midwifery has earned the ire of the transgender movement for their open letter to the Midwives Alliance of North America, protesting MANA’s decision to remove all mention of the word “mother” or “woman” from most of their literature. Woman-Centered Midwifery made a simple request, signed by over a hundred prominent birth experts, activists, and feminists – that an organization devoted to promoting and organizing midwives shouldn’t deny the link between womanhood and birth. This was, of course, enough to bring down a torrent of condemnation, harassment, and threats by transgender activists.
Woman-Centered Midwifery is led in part by Mary Lou Singleton, whose Facebook comment is also the subject of the second hit piece. Full disclosure: Mary Lou is a friend of mine, and someone I respect greatly. Her work with Stop Patriarchy’s Abortion Freedom Ride, Deep Green Resistance,the Women’s Liberation Front, and other radical feminist and environmentalist resistance efforts have inspired, encouraged, and even facilitated my own activism. But these ridiculous smears would be inappropriate when aimed at any woman, not just one who has so clearly demonstrated her commitment to women’s reproductive justice.
MANA and other groups that support the removal of “woman” from a discussion of midwifery believe that such language is offensive, due to the existence of a small minority of those who identify as men. As the logic goes, the obvious connection between pregnancy, birth, and womanhood must be excised so as to not invalidate their identities; instead of discussing mothers or women, the millions of adult human females who birth children across the globe will have their identities stripped and be relabeled “pregnant persons,” in deference to a handful of transgender activists.
As I attempted to follow this logic, I was brought back to 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for his lynching of Trayvon Martin. As black anti-violence activists began rallying around the cry of Black Lives Matter, the pushback from white supremacists was immediate – and their foremost response was the formation of their counter-slogan, All Lives Matter.
For those who are unclear, it must be said that All Lives Matter is a vicious expression of white supremacy hidden behind a façade of egalitarianism. Of course all lives do matter in a moral sense. But as many black activists have pointed out, we currently live in a system where the value of white life is affirmed in a way black life is not. To the police, courts, and prisons, white lives – especially rich, male white lives – have recognized importance. The growing piles of broken brown bodies across this nation make it clear that the same is clearly untrue for those who live outside whiteness– and that those inside it have shown little dedication to making their insistence on All Lives Matter a reality.
Luckily, it seems as if most liberals and leftists are on board with rejecting “All Lives Matter” as a slogan – yet they ape its logic when they berate activists who center midwifery, abortion rights, and other reproductive justice issues on women as a class. Some white people do suffer state violence, but we all see “Hey, not everyone killed by police is black!” as an insincere distraction. So why does the existence of a small minority of transgender parents turn “Hey, not everyone who has an abortion is a woman!” into a meaningful critique?
Black activists have repeatedly explained that saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean others don’t, and only the most disingenuous white folks disagree. But clearly MANA and others who want to remove any mention of womanhood from a discussion of birth believe the statement “Women give birth” does unjustly exclude anyone who might not identify as a woman. This double standard makes no sense; if the use of “mother” in a discussion of pregnancy is a violent act of erasure, then Black lives Matter is no more justifiable. Do we really want to travel down that road?
Police violence actually affects white people at a far greater rate than restrictions on abortion or access to childcare affect those who identify as transgender. But in both cases, that doesn’t change the obvious fact that these groups are not the intended victims. Cops are militarized into hypermasculine violence because a white supremacist state requires soldiers willing to do violence against black and brown citizens. White folks – especially poor white folks – are sometimes caught in the crossfire, but the bullets and batons are aimed directly at people of color.
In the exact same way, abortion restrictions are put in place specifically because women are seen as incubators. Their bodies are such that men can fuck them, wait nine months, and remove a (hopefully male) child. Female human beings who don’t want to identify as women still possess those bodies, and they inherit the violence that has been constructed to keep those bodies down – a violence that is specifically tied to misogyny. As Ophelia Benson writes on her blog:
It doesn’t help [pregnant people who don’t identify as women] to try to obscure the fact that attacks on abortion rights are highly political in a particular way – a sexist way, a misogynist way, an anti-women way. A trans man who needs an abortion is caught in a system that was organized to thwart women’s autonomy.
Gloria Steinem (or perhaps an elderly Irish cab driver!) famously said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” The reason transgender folks are refused abortion services, as well as any other reproductive care, has everything to do with the fact that they are seen as woman, treated like women, and navigate a structure of policy and law imbued with intentional anti-woman violence. Sacrificing those obvious connections in the name of inclusion is a victory for right-wing fascists.
Inclusion has become the ultimate liberal fetish. Unfortunately, the uncritical expansion of categories to protect feelings is less inclusion than dilution. “All Lives Matter” is, after all, a demand for inclusion, specifically the inclusion of white trauma into the narrative of black resistance. The classic line used by men’s rights activists – “Sometimes men get beat up by women too!” – is a demand that efforts against domestic violence be “inclusive” as well. But none of these discussions are improved in the least solely by making language less precise.
The whole project of politics is placing the complex web of human interaction into a formula of power: Who does what to whom? And when we say white cops use violence against black civilians, the First World extracts resources from the Third World, or men restrict reproductive healthcare for women, we aren’t claiming that other individual experiences are impossible; we’re saying that, beyond those individual experiences an organizing structure exists that shapes how groups of people interact.
If your goal is to despecify language to the point where all possible experiences are represented equally, then yes, by all means replace woman with “pregnant person.” And while you’re at it, replace “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Demand justice for “incarcerated persons,” not people of color. Set up shelters open to “the battered,” not abused women. Raise awareness for “colonized individuals,” not the Third World. Combat “discrimination based on orientation,” not homophobia. Then sit back, relax, and feel really, really great about just how inclusive you are.
But if your goal is a political analysis that actually confronts power, do just the opposite: Identify the white supremacy at the heart of police brutality, pinpoint the specific victims and perpetrators of domestic violence, name the agents of global empire, and, yes, be honest about who bears the brunt of reproductive oppression. At the heart of Black Lives Matter is the belief that oppressed populations have the right to narratives that center their experience of oppression, even if others who suffer from their peripheral effects may feel momentarily excluded. Reject this or accept it – but don’t apply it selectively. Victims of abortion restrictions and overmedicalized birth may indeed be “pregnant persons,” but only in the sense that those left bleeding, battered, and dead in our streets by psychopathic cops are “policed persons.”
Republished from Gender Detective, September 27, 2015
Why did the Australian aborigines never develop agriculture?
This question was posed in the process of designing an indigenous food garden, and I could hear the underlying assumptions of the enquirer in his tone. Our culture teaches that agriculture is a more desirable way to live than hunting and gathering, and agriculturalist is more intelligent and more highly evolved than a hunter gatherer.
These assumptions can only be made by someone indoctrinated by civilization. It’s a limited way to look at the world.
I was annoyed by question, and judged the person asking it as ignorant of history and other cultures, and unimaginative. Since many would fit this label, I figured I’m better off answering the question.
This only takes some basic logic and imagination, I have no background in anthropology or whatever it is that would qualify someone to claim authority on this subject. You could probably formulate an explanation by asking yourself: How and why would anyone develop agriculture?
First consider the practicalities of a transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
What plants would be domesticated? What animals? What tools would they use? How would they irrigate?
Why would anyone bother domesticating anything that is plentiful in the wild?
To domesticate a plant takes many generations (plant generations, and human generations) of selecting the strongest specimens, propagating them in one place, caring for them, protecting them from animals and people, from the rain and wind and sun, keeping the seeds safe. This would be incredibly difficult to do, it would take a lot of dedication, not just from one person but a whole tribe for generations. If your lifestyle is nomadic, because food is available in different places in different seasons, there is no reason to make the effort to domesticate a plant.
Agriculture is high-risk. There are a lot of things that could destroy a whole crop, and your whole food supply for the year, as well as your seed stock for the next. A storm, flood, fire, plague of insects, browsing mammals, neighbouring tribes, lack of rain, disease, and no doubt many other factors. A huge amount of work is invested in something that is likely to fail, which would then cause a whole community to starve, if there isn’t a back-up of plentiful food in the wild.
Agriculture is insecure. People in agricultural societies live in fear of crop failure, as this is their only source of food. The crops must be defended. The tools, food storage, water supply and houses must also be defended, and maintained. Defended from people, animals, and insects. Growing and storing all your food in one place would attract all of these. Defence requires weapons, and work.
Agriculture requires settlement. The tribe must stay in one place. They cannot leave, even briefly, as there is constant maintenance and defending to do. Settlements then need their own infrastructure: toilets, water supply, houses, trading routes as not all the food needs can be met from within the settlement. Diseases spread in settled areas.
Aboriginal people travel often, and for long periods of time. Agriculture is not compatible with this way of life.
Agriculture is a lot of work. The farmers must check on the crop regularly, destroy diseased plants, remove weeds, irrigate, replant, harvest, save seeds, and store the crop. Crops generally are harvested for only a few weeks or months in the year, and if they are a staple, must be stored safely and be accessible for the rest of the year.
Domesticated animals require fencing, or tethering, or taming. They would be selectively bred for docility, which is a weakness not a strength, so a domesticated animal would be less healthy than a wild animal.
The people too become domesticated and lose strength with the introduction of agriculture. The wild intelligence needed to hunt and gather would be lost, as would the relationships with the land and other beings.
Agriculture requires a belief in personal property, boundaries, and land ownership. Australian aborigines knew that the land owned the people, not the other way around, so would never have treated the land in this way.
Agriculture needs a social hierarchy, where some people must work for others, who have more power by having more wealth. The landowner would have the power to supply or withhold food. Living as tribal groups, aborigines probably wouldn’t have desired this social structure.
Cultivated food has less nutrition than wild food. Agriculturalists limit their diet to plants and animals that can easily be domesticated, so lose the diversity of tastes and nutrients that make for an ideal human diet. Fenced or caged animals can only eat what is fed to them, rather than forage on a variety of foods, according to their nutritional needs. Domesticated plants only access the nutrients from the soil in the field, which becomes more depleted with every season’s crop. Irrigation causes plants to not send out long roots to find water, so domesticated plants are weaker than wild plants.
Agriculture suggests a belief that the world is not good enough as it is, and humans need to change it. A land populated with gods, spirits or ancestors may not want to be damaged, dug, ploughed and irrigated.
Another thought is that agriculture may develop from a belief in scarcity – that there is not enough food and it is a resource that needs to be secured. Indigenous belief systems value food plants and animals as kin to be in relationship with, rather than resources to exploit.
Agriculture isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. Indigenous tribes engage with the landscape in ways that encourage growth of food plants. People gather seeds of food plants and scatter them in places they are likely to grow. Streams are diverted to encourage plant growth. Early explorers witnessed aboriginal groups planting and irrigating wild rice. Tribes in North Queensland were in contact with Torres Strait Islanders who practiced gardening, but chose not to take this up on a large scale themselves.
A few paragraphs from Tim Low’s Wild Food Plants of Australia:
The evidence from the Torres Strait begs the question of why aborigines did not adopt agriculture. Why should they? The farming life can be one of dull routine, a monotonous grind of back-breaking labour as new fields are cleared, weeds pulled and earth upturned. The farmer’s diet is usually less varied, and not always reliable, and the risk of infectious disease is higher…It is not surprising that throughout the world many cultures spurned agriculture.
Explorer Major Mitchell wrote in 1848: ‘Such health and exemption from disease; such intensity of existence, in short, must be far beyond the enjoyments of civilized men, with all that art can do for them; and the proof of this is to be found in the failure of all attempts to persuade these free denizens of uncivilized earth to forsake it for tilled soil.’
After all this, I’m amazed that anyone ever developed agriculture. The question of why Australian aborigines never developed agriculture is easily answered and not as interesting as the question it brings up for me: why did twentieth century westerners never develop hunter-gatherer lifestyles?
Most objections to the Nordic Model – laws criminalizing the purchase of sex, but not its sale – rely on one of two sets of talking points. First is the proud misogyny of men who oppose abolitionism solely because it prevents their easy access to the bodies of female strangers. But among those who consider themselves feminists, progressives, and Leftists, the greatest opposition to criminalizing pimps and johns comes from claims about the adverse effects those laws will have on prostituted women themselves. Spurred by Amnesty International’s ruling on the issue, the last month or so has seen dozens of articles, blog posts, and editorials attempting to show that the Nordic Model stigmatizes, starves, endangers, and (according to one blog post sent to me recently) “literally rapes and murders” women.
The majority of these objections are either intentionally misleading or just false. For example, defenders of decriminalization often claim the Nordic Model leads to the deportation of undocumented prostituted women who report violence or abuse. This is, unfortunately, something that does sometimes happen. But what these prostitution apologists don’t mention is that the same exact treatment would be received by an undocumented prostituted woman in New Zealand, Germany, or Holland. This applies as well to women who use drugs or commit other crimes.
Interestingly enough, while the supposed horrors of the Nordic Model are trotted out as reason enough for its rejection, the general principle is agreed upon when it comes to explicitly coerced women and girls who are obviously not consenting. Most supporters of decriminalization would, for example, agree that purchasing sex from twelve year-olds should not be legal. And from this position, it follows that some form of punishment or preventative measure should exist to stop men from doing so – one that would, of course, not criminalize the exploited child, but instead provide her with robust exit services, trauma counseling, and other resources. In short, the Nordic Model.
The two-pronged approach of the Nordic Model – criminalization of the clients and pimps, along with social programs to aid in recovery and healing – is generally approved of in the case of trafficking victims and children; the name may be taboo, but almost every meaningful response to sexual exploitation has fallen along its general lines. This is a serious problem for the decrim side, considering their previous position that legislating against clients makes women in prostitution unsafe. After all, it’s hard to conceive of a good explanation for why Nordic-style laws would hurt one group while benefiting the other. All of the dangers consenting women face under asymmetrical criminalization (whatever those dangers actually are) would almost certainly be equally likely for children, sex slaves, and other obviously exploited women and girls.
Consider the common objection that laws against sex buyers drives prostitution into secluded areas, where women are less able to assess clients or call for help should one turn violent. There are deeply flawed assumptions behind this argument – as Trisha Baptie once said, “Women date, get engaged to, marry, and live with men who end up murdering them. And I was supposed to figure out if a man was violent in fifteen seconds versus a minute?” The idea of moving prostitution into the open so women’s distress calls can be heard more clearly is also a callous gesture; apparently, there are large groups of people who respond to an industry wherein women routinely scream for their lives by saying, “You know, we should really make sure this screaming happens in a busy place.”
But you can put all that aside and still see the fundamental inconsistency in the decrim position. If the consenting women in prostitution have their ability to predict violence compromised, I can’t see why a prostituted child wouldn’t either. And if an empowered sex worker can’t be heard when she calls for help, why would the sounds of a trafficked sex slave travel any further? Does this mean that those who oppose the Nordic Model on these groups also support the legalization of paid child rape? If not, how do they take that position without opening themselves up to the same criticisms of endangerment that they use so often against abolitionists?
The same brute fact applies to almost every other complaint made against the Nordic Model. If consenting women will be forced into starvation as clients disappear, so too would children who depend on being purchased to survive. If those who freely choose prostitution will be marked with stigma and shame, there’s no reason to assume that burden would stay off the shoulders of the trafficked and abused. And if these reasons alone are enough to reject abolitionist law in the case of the former, why are these costs suddenly acceptable for the latter? Or, to put it another way: How does a supporter of decriminalization believe trafficking and the prostitution of children can be meaningfully addressed without providing legal cover to rape or creating the conditions that they claim render the Nordic Model unacceptable?
When faced with this dilemma, I see three options: He can agree that the Nordic Model causes harm to both categories of prostituted woman, reject it on those grounds, and endorse men’s right to buy sex from those who are explicitly coerced, in which case he has taken a position most of us find morally repugnant; he can claim that laws against sex buyers don’t harm trafficked or underage women and girls, in which case his argument against the Nordic Model is severely weakened; or he can explain why laws against clients and pimps lead to the deaths of consenting women but somehow manage to save the exploited, in which case he is engaging in denial, dishonesty, or outright fraud.
Thoughts on Dylan Roof, The Charleston Shooting, The Spectacle of Death, & The Roanoke Killings
by Dominique Christina / Deep Green Resistance
I hate writing about this stuff…
But today in Roanoke Virginia, a black man gunned down three people on live television, killing two of them. He even held a camera phone up to record himself doing the deed. I got wind of it late. That is usually the case for me. I actively avoid the news. It leads me toward feelings of hopelessness and I have kids to raise. I have to have enough language left in me to give them hope or something like it. But social media has a way of making sure you know things. I saw tweets like: And…And just like that I am again entangled in the too frequent conversation about violence in this country and gun laws, and questions about motive and debates about whether or not it was race-related and the connection between this event and the shooting in Charleston where nine people were killed by Dylan Roof who was named by the Roanoke shooter in the manifesto he wrote and sent to a news station two hours after he murdered the two newscasters.
And in spite of myself I went looking for who this man was that shot and killed two people on live television in Virginia today. And I found this…
But then I found this…
And I watched video that showed this woman…
…just moments before she was gunned down. You can hear her screaming…or somebody…somebody is screaming…and it is the same unlanguageable hurt that visits us regularly now. We’ve seen it all before. It’s almost naive to call it “unthinkable” now. We have made a home of it. The old familiar anguish, if you aren’t too desensitized to feel that, visits but only stays around a couple of days before we are right back to our lives, our business trips, our smart phones…But this shooting made me remember when my paradigm changed…
My son was just seven months old when two young men walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado killing fellow students and a teacher. I had just completed my Master’s program at The University of Arkansas and had moved back to Denver with my young son. My advisor had arranged for me to complete my student teaching in Colorado. I was assigned to Columbine High School. I was scheduled for a visit on the day of the shootings. But something happened that morning. My infant son woke up early with a cold. His first. I was a new mother. I freaked out. Called the school, told someone at the front desk that I was going to have to reschedule, was assured that that would be fine, hung up, and nursed my son until we both went back to sleep. When I woke up I turned on the television and saw this…
And this…
And this…
I didn’t have any language for it. I had no point of reference for it. A shooting at a school? What world was this?
In the days that followed, I, like many, grieved for the students, the teachers, and the parents. Like most folk, I struggled to make sense of it. America, the violent, was not news to me. But this new ugly rattled me. A lot. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t let go of the images of students pouring out of the school screaming. I needed answers. And then…
The parents of Isaiah Shoels, the only African American student killed in the Columbine shooting, decided to make their son’s wake and funeral available to the public. I decided to go.
At the wake I met Isaiah Shoels’ mother and stepfather. I talked with them for a long time. I was honored to be allowed to do so. I let their grief engulf me. They had just lost a son to unimaginable violence…unimaginable because it was the suburbs; unimaginable because it was in a school with so much privilege, unimaginable because they had moved to Littleton to ESCAPE the violence they knew and were met with another kind. I let their grief engulf me because I had my own precious son, unkilled and waiting for me at home. The very LEAST I could do was stand still and hold a space for them. I promised them both I would attend the funeral the next day. I promised them I would never forget Isaiah.
Before I left the wake I stared at him in that coffin. I was shell-shocked and destabilized by the whole damn thing. I remember having to pull over in my car when I left Pipkin Mortuary. The ululation…pinned me to the steering wheel and hung on for a good while.
I brought my son with me to the funeral the next day. There are things I remember with absolute clarity and other things are lost to the sadness. I remember the choir. I remember them singing “No weapon formed against me, shall prosper.” I remember the swell of folk in the church that day. I remember pressing my son so tightly against me at one point he squealed in protest and a man standing behind me reached out his hands and took my baby from me so I could cry like I needed to. I remember those things. I remember the church being stuffed with mourners and reporters…I remember his parents’ faces…
At some point I left the church that day. At some point I let the memory of Isaiah Shoels slip from around my neck and while I have NEVER forgotten that young man, I have not quite carried him with me either. I’m not sure if that’s noble or not. Today brought it all back though…
The man in Roanoke Virginia did something unspeakable. He murdered two people and he did so in a manner that encouraged spectacle. He wanted an audience. He wanted to inherit the legacy of other mass shooters. He named them in his manifesto. I will not do so here but…that broke me.
In the scraps that have been made available to the public from his manifesto, the shooter talks about being bullied for being black and gay. If that is true I doubt it not. This is America after all. Where God looks like a straight white man with a 401K plan. That is not a statement intended to legitimize what the shooter did. It is, however, a statement about the real life consequences of treating people like second class citizens and then using the old bootstrap anecdote on them when they become dysfunctional. Powder kegs often blow.
But here’s what I’m left with…in the wake of the Roanoke shooting, the thing that stuck out to me most profoundly was the media’s treatment of the event. Yeah…I’m going there…
The shooting of the two newscasters was done on live television. The shooter seemed deliberate about wanting the spectacle. But media outlets refused to show the killing. MSNBC stated that fact flatly. They would not show the video. CNN has just announced that they will “only” show the video of the journalists being shot once per hour. Here’s why that is noteworthy…
CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and others ran a constant loop of Michael Brown’s body, which lay on the ground for more than four hours after he was shot. They did not blur the image. They did not make speeches about “honoring the family” or “protecting the public from the horror.” I never heard descriptors like “gruesome” and “ghastly” attached to the sight of an 18 year old black boy’s body in the middle of the street, the blood pouring from his head and face creating a highway of blood several feet away from him.
Or this…
Eric Garner being murdered in front of our very eyes at the hands of NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo…it was played over and over again on various news stations. No pretty speeches about honoring the family, no blurred image. You can literally watch Eric Garner die whenever you like.
And the video of Tamir Rice, 12 years old, being shot dead by police officers in Cleveland which I still can’t watch but, which is readily available online if I ever change my mind.
And this…
The surveillance video inside Walmart that shows John Crawford being shot dead for holding a BB gun that was for sale in that same Walmart…found easily online…
And Walter Scott, a black man in South Carolina, shot in the back by a police officer who later lied and planted evidence…you know…standard procedure…
And this…Samuel Dubose…shot in the face by a University of Cincinatti cop who stopped Mr. Dubose because…he did not have a front plate on his car.
I can’t get on the internet anymore without seeing at least one streaming video showing a black or brown body being brutalized or murdered. It is literally EVERYWHERE. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr…oh yeah…remember Kajieme Powell? The young man who was shot by police in Saint Louis RIGHT after the death of Mike Brown? His death is available online too. See?
And on and on. Death as spectacle. But only if it is a black or brown body.
The televised shooting of the two journalists is being protected in a particular way and do you know why? Because they are human beings. And they are being treated as such. Their death is a tragedy. It is being treated as such. The victims and the victims’ families are being honored by not turning their murder into something to gawk at; something to be triggered and traumatized by.
But we have seen black bodies on display before.
There is no accident in such behavior. You brutalize a body out loud and in full view because of the function it serves. What better way to train docility, fear, or apathy into a people than to show them it is always hunting season. And they are ALWAYS the prey.
It’s like: “Look! I can murder you in front of witnesses and STILL get off. The system is designed to protect me and annihilate you. The spectacle of horror….
Now listen. I am not itching to see the two newscasters being shot. This ain’t that. If that’s your read of what I’ve said, go back and start at the beginning cuz I ain’t got time to help you grasp the obvious. What I am talking about is the inherent racism in regarding black bodies as sound bite and constant loop while holding white bodies with reverence and respect. What happened to the newscasters was loathsome. What happened to Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Samuel Dubose and so many others, was…you know…normal. And often times, while the loop of some black person’s death played on major media outlets, reporters were having conversations about the victims that vilified them in death. “She had marijuana in her system.” And, “He had been arrested before for a suspended license.” And “He had been suspended from school for smoking weed.” On and on…
And that’s the shit up with which we cannot put.
There has not been rigorous conversation about the possibility of mental illness in the shooter in Roanoke. Nobody is poking into the newscasters past to find out if they had ever smoked marijuana or been pulled over for a busted tail light or been convicted of petty theft. But in each case, when it is about a black or brown person being killed, those conversations are stentorian, all while the video of their death is played on a loop.
What I do know, is that at some point soon, we will all need to risk something in order to have deliberate and intentional conversations about race and the legacy of violence in this country. If we don’t, there will be more blood, more hashtags, more videos, more breaking news, more spectacle, and…there will be more events like the one in Roanoke. And if I know nothing else, I KNOW America is not ready to see marginalized folk invert that mechanism the way the shooter in Virginia did. Trust me, once you allow for one act of brutality to go uninterrupted, you permission the space for others like it.
The Roanoke shooter attributed his behavior to the Charleston shooting. He expressed admiration for the Columbine and Virginia Tech shooters. He aspired to be like them. Who’s ready for that to become the template of normal? For brothers to go gunning down the folk they feel are oppressing them? You ready for that? Because violence almost never trickles up. But it did that day.
I hate writing about this stuff.
I do not want my children to grow up in a world that feeds them a steady diet of executions, and particularly the executions of black and brown bodies while handling white bodies with care. I do not know what toll this has already taken on their psyche as black children trying to navigate this place. I’m not even sure what woman I am as a result of constant trauma.
More than that though, I am tired of us avoiding the conversations that are the most urgent. If you want to live, you better look at it. If you want your children to live you better look at it. Otherwise…I suggest you stay indoors. It’s hell out here.
I think I’m dying. My heart is beating too fast, I’m too weak to get out of bed most days, and some days I don’t even have the energy to eat. It’s been like this for years. It’s been getting gradually worse.
I haven’t read a book, taken a walk, watched a movie, visited a friend, or done anything useful in months. I can’t focus, can’t even think most of the time.
I’m not the only one. Many of my friends are also ill. I see the sickness all around me. Every year there are less fish in the sea, less birds in the trees, less insects. The air smells more toxic, the industrial noise is getting louder. Every day, 200 species become extinct. Most rivers no longer support any life. Around half of all human deaths are caused by pollution. We’re all dying of the sickness.
My own illness can be attributed to heavy metal and chemical toxicity, from mining, vaccines, vehicle exhaust, and all the chemicals I’m exposed to every day, indoors and out. They’re in my food, in the air, in the water I drink. I can’t get away from them. There’s no safe place left to go. I can’t get any better while these are still being made, being used, being disposed of into my body.
It’s not just chemicals, but electromagnetic fields, from powerlines, phones, wifi and cell phone towers. The food of industrial agriculture, grown in soils depleted of nutrients and becoming ever more poisoned, is all I can get. It barely provides me with the nutrients I need to survive, let alone recover. Let food be thy medicine, but when the food itself spreads the sickness, there’s not much hope for anyone.
When the soil life dies, the entire landscape becomes sick. The trees can’t provide for their inhabitants. They can’t hold the community of life together. The intricate food web, the web of relationships that holds us all, collapses.
Will I recover? With the constant assault of chemicals, electromagnetic fields, and noise, it seems unlikely. Will the living world recover, or will it die along with me, unable to withstand the violent industries that extract the lifeblood of rivers, forests, fish and earth, to convert them into a quick profit?
Western medicine can’t help me. All it can offer is more chemicals, more poisons. And new technology can’t help the land, the water, the soil. It only worsens the sickness.
If I am to heal, the living world must first be healed. The water, the food, the air and the land need to recover from the sickness, as they are the only medicine that can bring me back to health.
The machines need to be stopped. The mining, ploughing, fishing, felling, and manufacturing machines. The advertising, brainwashing and surveillance machines. The coal, oil, gas, nuclear and solar-powered machines. They are all spreading the sickness. It’s a cultural sickness, as well as a physical one. Our culture is so sick that it barely acknowledges the living world, and has us believe that images, ideas, identities and abstractions are all we need. It all needs to stop. The culture needs to recover, to repair.
I need your help. I can’t do this myself. I’m close to death. To those who are not yet sick, those who have the strength to stand with the living, and stop the sickness: I need you now. Not just for me, but for everyone. For those close to extinction, those who still have some chance of recovery. We all need you.
Today is the last day on Earth for many species of plants and animals. Every day, the sickness consumes a few more of us. If I didn’t have friends and family looking after me, I wouldn’t be alive today. When the whole community becomes sick, there is no-one left to take care. This is how extinction happens.
It doesn’t have to happen. It can be stopped. Some people, mostly those in the worst affected areas, are taking on the sickness, fighting because they know their lives depend on it. They see the root cause of the affliction, not just the symptoms. They are taking down oil rigs, derailing coal trains, and sabotaging pipelines and mining equipment. They’re blockading ports, forests, mine sites and power stations, and doing everything they can to stop the sickness spreading further. They are few, and they get little thanks. They need all the help they can get. With a collective effort, the sickness can be eradicated, and we can all recover our health.
