Over a Thousand Protestors Face Militarized Police Forces at Anti-Klan Rally in Memphis

By J. G. / Deep Green Resistance Great Plains

On March 30th, sixty-five Ku Klux Klan members gathered at the steps of the Shelby County Court House and marched in response to the recent name changes of three previously confederate parks in Memphis. One of these parks, formerly known as Bedford Forest Park, was renamed Health and Science Park. Nathan Forest was the first grand wizard of the Klan and was responsible for massacring over three hundred black people during the Civil War.

Twelve hundred people turned out to the counter protest demonstration against the Klan despite the alternative event across town put on and promoted by Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. and city officials with live music and Easter festivities in efforts to discourage people from going to the rally site. The majority of those in attendance were residents of Memphis, however many organizations came from outside of Memphis including Florida Anti-Fascists, KC IWW from St. Louis, IWW, Deep Green Resistance, Black Autonomy Federation from Memphis, Concerned Citizens for Justice Team from Chattanooga, TN., Chattanoogans Organized for Action, Black Bloc Chicago, Anti Racist Action, Memphis Black gang members rep, Let’s Organize the Hood, and Direct Action Memphis.

Many of those who gathered marched down the streets, but were latter funneled into “Free Speech” zones where they could not see or get near the Klan. Hundreds of police in militarized gear lined the streets of downtown Memphis and lined the fences of the gated designated protest area. Lorenzo Ervin, a founding member of the Black Autonomy Federation and a main organizer of the counter protest wrote in a note entitled “Memphis Anti-Klan Demonstration: Protesting in a Police State“: “…in response to critics who asked why the Klan was being allowed to protest at all, they put together a police army of 600 cops, 4 military armored cars with machine guns, a chain link fence to separate protesters from Klan, and confine the residents of Memphis behind a line of paramilitary riot police was used to “protect” the Klan from the people.”

Thirty one year old Cedric Moore of Tipton County (twenty miles from Memphis) stated that “if the KKK had a real point to prove they wouldn’t need these police”. His sister, thirty-five year old Porteia More who is also a resident of Tipton County expressed her reasoning for coming out to the counter demonstration: “They came here years ago and I wasn’t able to come… I made it a point to be here on today but I did not know we would not have a chance to see them. I wanted to understand why they were here and marching… I understand they don’t want the symbol to be changed but it’s time for everyone just to get along.”

When asked what her opinion was of the police response to protestors she responded: “I think it’s just too much going on. We see many police out in uniform versus the KKK… I think it’s too much.” Twenty-year-old Lando from Horn Lake, Mississippi echoed similar sentiments: “It looks they are treating us like the enemy… They have police from all counties out here. All this money invested in some KKK.”

JoNina Ervin, standing chair of the Black Autonomy Federation and organizer of the counter protest, took issue with the permit process and what she views as an overall violation of people’s right to free speech. The Black Autonomy Federation had to apply three times to hold their protest and were finally approved only two days before the march. In the past, authority to approve permits lay in the hands of the city council, but it was changed to the police director the 19th of March two days before they applied for their first permit. “We thought the procedures to get the permit were unconstitutional,” stated JoNina.

“Once we find an attorney we want to go to court to challenge the city ordinance. We were told we could not bring any leaflets, flyers or posters into the protest area… I noticed at the Klan rally through videos they had posters. Our free speech has been restrained. How can you voice your first amendment rights when you’re being intimidated? Pretty soon we won’t have any free speech rights unless we challenge these policies.”

No one was hurt that day, and only one arrest was made.

If you would like to get in contact with the Black Autonomy Federation or offer support, please contact them at Organize.the.hood@gmail.com.

Black Autonomy Federation Spotlights Police Terrorism in Memphis

Black Autonomy Federation Spotlights Police Terrorism in Memphis

By J. G. / Deep Green Resistance Great Plains

On March 15th the International Day Against Police Brutality was observed for the first time in Memphis, Tennessee by the Black Autonomy Federation. People came to the event from as far away as Iowa, Ohio, and Denver. People gathered first outside city hall and spoke. Cardboard coffins were lined up facing out from city hall representing 13 of the 14 people killed by the Memphis Police Department in the last thirteen months.

Women have also been sexually assaulted by the Memphis police officers. JoNina Ervin, acting chair of the Black Autonomy Federation stated that they have been told by a number of women that there are police in Memphis that arrest women and force them to have sex with them, “That’s the kind of police we have here. This is a corrupt police department and a police department out of control.”

Lorenzo Ervin of the BAF stated that “We have out right atrocities that no one of these people can defend but the authorities here, the city authorities as well as the state prosecutors are engaged in a conspiracy to cover up and not to prosecute these crimes by the police, the authorities and others working in concert with them. This is why it is important for us to bring attention to the city of Memphis, Tennessee.”

People later chanted and marched to the Memphis police department and the Shelby County Jail. Activists and family members of those murdered spoke out. In attendance was the family of Delois Epps and Makayla Ross who were killed on August 26th leaving from a family get-together by a police officer Alex Beard. Thirty- three year old family member Shaquitta Epps asks “Why wasn’t he charged?” When asked if she was surprised by the response of the city and police department towards her family members death she responded “No it happens all the time but I never thought it would happen to my family. You see it in the paper and on the TV but you never really know until it happens to your family.”

Martin Ezsutton brother of twenty-two year old Rekia Boyd who was killed in Chicago by police officer Dante Servin stated that “The police were highly disrespectful.” Servin is not being charged with the murder and is being paid working a desk job that pays 90,000 dollars. “He just got a promotion for murdering my sister!…Who is going to take responsibility? They failed to prosecute him for his actions.”

Unfortunately the deaths of black people by the police in Memphis and across the country are not a rare occurrence with a rate of one black person every 36 hours being killed by the police in the United States (“Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 120 black people” Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, July 2012)

The next day a conference was held to discuss how to organize against police brutality and killings with activists from various communities. The BAF discussed the ongoing police killings and brutality in the context of the capitalist state. Lorenzo states that “ We understand we are not just fighting the police we are fighting fascism.” The BAF is calling for an international boycott against the town of Memphis until it “stops persecuting and killing poor working class black people and consorting with the KKK.”

On March 30th the Black Autonomy Federation are organizing a counter protest against the KKK. The Klan are prompted to come because of a name change of Nathan Bedford Forest Park to Health Science Park. Forest was the first grand wizard of the Klan. According to JoNina Ervin the city has been uncooperative with their efforts to organize an anti Klan rally. “There is a media campaign telling people to stay home, don’t come out, ignore the Klan, and the line they are using is that any person that comes out is crazy. They want to criminalize the people who are protesting the Klan when the Klan are the real criminals.”

According to members of the BAF the NAACP has been collaborating with the state in this. “The head of the NAACP in Memphis said on TV, people should stay home and wash their cars and shook hands with the Sons of the Confederacy. The constitution gives people first amendment rights they will have police to protect them but people opposed to the terrorism of the KKK are just supposed to shut up that day. They want us to be off in a corner some place. The city has been in collaboration with these neo confederates for so long.” For JoNina and others in the BAF, it is crucial for people in Memphis and from all over the country to come and take a stand against the Klan, “If you don’t let the Klan know that you’re here and opposed to their white supremacy, that gives them free range to keep on coming back here and that is why they keep coming back.”

If you would like to get in contact with the Black Autonomy Federation or offer support, please contact them at Organize.the.hood@gmail.com.

Joshua Headley: Morality & (Un)sustainability

By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York

As a socially conscious person situated within the heart of global industrial civilization, I often experience, directly and indirectly, injustices on a daily basis.

A week ago, the NYPD (via two plainclothes officers) murdered a 16-year-old boy, Kimani Gray, firing 11 shots – hitting him 7 times in total; 3 in the back, 4 in the front. Monday night a large crowd began a vigil that would kick-off a week full of protest in the neighborhood – the night culminated in trash being thrown into the streets to slow down the riot police, glass bottles being thrown at officers from rooftop buildings, and the NYPD entering numerous apartments without warrants. Following that night (and for every day since) the East Flatbush neighborhood has been under military-style occupation with no less than three riot police on every single corner for more than 30 blocks. By Wednesday, the NYPD had declared the neighborhood a “Frozen Zone,” essentially affirming martial law by limiting press access and arresting anyone who did not precisely follow police instructions. One week later, tensions are still as high as ever, and justice has yet to be served.

This is just one example of many injustices that occur in this city every single day. The NYPD “Stop and Frisk” policy continues to racially profile men and women of color, funneling the youth of Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn through the education-prison pipeline at alarming rates. “Crime” is on a steady rise, not as unsurprising as one may think due to the directly proportional rise in poverty among every borough and neighborhood in the city. Every day, more people lose their jobs, their access to food stamps and medical benefits, and every day more people lose hope for the future. In the last year alone, the city has seen multiple seemingly-random outbursts of violence– one man went borough to borough opening fire and stabbing pedestrians on the street at will; another opened fire near the Empire State Building after losing his job (while the NYPD themselves, in their attempt to “bring him down,” shot up to eight passerbys in their own cross-fire); and even a few people were, for unknown reasons, pushed in front of oncoming subway trains by complete strangers.

Subconsciously (and for some of us, consciously) we all know things are bad. Really bad. We don’t really need the mainstream media’s live Twitter feed to remind us of the state of decay in which our society functions. But often we ignore it – we do our best to keep our ear buds blasting noise and our eyes focused on the concrete to avoid any confrontation with reality. We say to ourselves, “I am a moral person, and I am responsible – I would never do such things and it’s really just a matter of educating and elevating others to my consciousness. If I lead by example, others will follow.” While one could (very easily) argue that this culture makes most of us, in fact, insane (or increasingly drives us to points of insanity), it still does take extraordinary leaps and bounds to get to a point in which we lose our morality and social responsibility entirely. I certainly know way too many socialists and activists who consider themselves to be The Most Moral and Just Citizens of the World™.

But, if that is generally true– if most leftists and activists do represent a moral high ground in our society, and our collective will for more social responsibility alone could alleviate the continually degrading human condition– why hasn’t it happened yet? Why haven’t those in power been persuaded to our side? Is this ultimately possible? Is it really just a matter of switching out the psychopaths that run our culture for more moral and responsible people? Will this result in the utopia of utopia’s in which all human needs are addressed and efficiently met thus eliminating all suffering? If not– if it really isn’t this simple – why do we waste so much time discussing it, and why haven’t our analyses and strategies changed?

Moral suasion as an argument and tool for social change is a bankrupt strategy. It not only falls short in the context of our current reality, it eventually becomes a counterrevolutionary force. Effective moral suasion is dependent upon the size of the oppressor(s). It generally does not work when applied to mass groups of people, and is generally only successful on a case-by-case basis with individuals and small groups. These individuals also have to be human beings, for the sole reason that to be persuaded they must have a conscience and/or an already existing morality (although it is pretty unlikely that an oppressor could ever have a conscience).

The reason, then, that moral argument is a bankrupt strategy for social change is because we are not dealing with individuals, small groups, or even solely human beings. What we currently face are arrangements of power through abstract systems and institutions of power (multinational corporations, nation-states, civilization, patriarchy, etc.) that involve large numbers of people that can be, and easily are, replaced. Our problems are systemic and no matter whom we “elect,” or choose to act on our behalf or for the greater good of humanity, the destructive nature of the system itself will continue unabated– acknowledging this is crucial to a radical analysis and a functional understanding of root causes of problems.

Many on the left, while acknowledging the various systemic problems in our society, do genuinely believe that if we switched to a more responsible, more moral society not based on greed or capitalism, that we will finally have the motive and incentive to create a sustainable and just future. The main oppositional force that prevents this change, so goes the argument, is capitalism – a highly inefficient economic system that funnels money, resources and power from the poor to the rich. It is therefore understood that it is capitalism’s social relations that create its inefficiency, and the hierarchy of its power prevents equitable distribution of its goods and services.

“We currently produce enough food to feed the entire world and yet millions of people die of starvation every year. If we change the social relations, and develop our personal capacities for mutual aid, we can feed every single human on this planet – no one would ever die of starvation.” Or so we are persuaded to believe. Sure, we can point to statistics of how much food is thrown out and wasted (in the United States alone, even) and logically come to a conclusion that this is a problem of distribution and efficiency.

Unfortunately, this type of logic fails to address the inherent “nature” of agriculture, industrialism, and civilization itself, which are all subject to (collectively and separately) diminishing returns and collapse. Ironically, these socialists, in their failure to question the given existence of these other systems, end up re-enforcing and defending the very processes they purport to oppose – a rather classic case of “revolutionaries” acting as their own counterrevolutionary force.

If this is the case, then here are some rather obvious questions we should ask ourselves: can industrial civilization and capitalism exist exclusively? Can we have a global industrial infrastructure functioning under socialism (even solely in a transitional phase), and still have a sustainable and moral society? Can we have our cake, and can we eat it, too? The answer: No. This isn’t only a fantasy – it is a seriously dangerous one.

For perhaps one could argue that certainly, under socialism, society would be more moral and ethical than how it currently exists under capitalism. But having a more moral society does not ultimately result in sustainability. These are two distinct (although highly interconnected) ideals. If our wish is to create both a fundamentally sustainable society and a fundamentally just and moral society, then we can’t forgive one for the sake of the other, and we have to start asking more radical questions about what this all might mean.

If there is one thing we understand about civilizations other than their rise and dominance in the last 10,000 years, it is that they are all fundamentally marked by collapse and degradation. Some last for thousands of years, some for centuries, but some (regrettably for us) barely make it past one or two centuries. The unifying processes here are the rise of cities, dense concentrations of population, the overshooting of carrying capacity, the limits to growth and the point of diminishing returns, and collapse (social, political, economic, and ecological).

Industrial civilization (i.e. urbanization, industrialism, industrial capitalism, etc.) is a specific arrangement of civilization characterized by massive urban centers and their dependency on machines and fossil fuel use. In its extremely short existence, just under two hundred years, we have seen an alarming rate of growth resulting in the hyper-interconnected global civilization of seven billion people in which we live today. The Population Reference Bureau describes this urbanization as such:

In 1800, only 3 percent of the world’s population [estimated in total at 1 billion people] lived in urban areas. By 1900, almost 14 percent were urbanites, although only 12 cities had 1 million or more inhabitants. In 1950, 30 percent of the world’s population resided in urban centers. The number of cities with over 1 million people had grown to 83.

“The world has experienced unprecedented urban growth in recent decades. In 2008, for the first time, the world’s population was evenly split between urban and rural areas. There were more than 400 cities over 1 million and 19 over 10 million. More developed nations were about 74 percent urban, while 44 percent of residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas. [1]

Megacities, as defined as urban centers with populations greater than 10 million people, have drastically increased – “just three cities had populations of 10 million or more in 1975, one of them in a less developed country. Megacities numbered 16 in 2000. By 2025, 27 megacities will exist, 21 in less developed countries.” This process of massive urbanization –unprecedented in size and scope – was made possible because of fossil fuel use, most specifically the “cheap” and “efficient” extraction of oil.

Because civilizations, in their inherent drive to greater and greater complexity, will inevitably reach a point of diminishing returns (i.e. when the amount that is returned per investment begins to decrease), they are subject to and defined by collapse. If the dramatic rise in human population was made possible because of fossil fuels (finite resources), it becomes crucial to question and understand when our civilization will reach the point of diminishing returns (peak energy).

The implications of reaching peak energy is a rapid decline in human population, a decline that will return world population to at least (if not less) the levels seen before the beginning of industrialism (a loss marked by billions). This process will occur whether or not peak energy is reached under capitalism or socialism, or a moral or immoral society. This is predominantly a structural problem – a problem in the way in which humans live on their landbase (a kind of social relation we often forget even exists).

As we can already see, based on our current dependency on energy intensive fossil fuel extraction (ex. Alberta tar sands oil) – at the same time of escalating erosion of soils, pollution of freshwaters, a rapid loss of biodiversity, and accelerating rates of biosphere pollution via emission of greenhouse gases – it should be a given that not only are we already past the point of diminishing returns but that the rate of collapse itself is accelerating.

Today, our current crisis is global and total in scope – our entire way of life and every living being (human and nonhuman) is hanging by a thread. Each day that passes, 200 more species go extinct, furthering a rapid loss of biodiversity. Each day, that thread gets thinner and the stress becomes even more unfathomable.

Current CO2 emissions are at 395 ppm – a level not reached in more than 15 million years. The time lag between levels of CO2 and temperature rise is roughly 30 years. Based on current levels of CO2 today alone, we are already locked into a global temperature increase of 3-6C over the next 30 years. An increase of 1.5C is all that is required to reach critical tipping points in which runaway global warming will occur, culminating in an abrupt extinction of nearly all biological life.

Each day, every single day industrial civilization marches on, the responsibility of action gets greater – but are we doing anything more than making sure we remain morally pure? Are we adequately escalating our actions to the severity of the problem?

There is nothing redeemable about this culture. Structurally, it is morally reprehensible – it requires massive amounts of violence (via conquest, genocide, slavery, repression, etc.) in order to “effectively” function and exist. There is nothing moral in having to steal resources from another group or landbase because your way of life is based on expansion rates that require more and more resources (from more and more places).

As has been said many times by others, the goal of an activist is not to try to navigate this culture and its systems of oppression with as much integrity as possible – the goal of an activist is to dismantle those systems. If we have a responsibility, as activists, to dismantle all systems of oppression and have a healthy, thriving planet for humans and nonhumans alike, we have to start talking more seriously (and radically) about where our problems come from and how to challenge them. This requires across the board questioning of everything we consider to be our “reality,” even when those questions get increasingly tough and hard to confront.

Where we go from here (and what we ultimately leave for future generations) is entirely up to us. If we are looking to be successful, the first step is (for once and for all) to throw away all of our bankrupt strategies and tactics. Our morality alone will not guarantee future generations will have air to breathe or water to drink. Throwing out one economic system for another, but not also taking with it its entire industrial infrastructure, will not stop the ecological degradation in any meaningful capacity.

Our time frame for effective action is rapidly shrinking and the longer we wait, the more destructive, chaotic, and total the collapse will be. If we have any expectation at all in not just surviving, but also repairing and restoring a thriving planet, we have to adapt a strategy that matches the severity of the problem. This culture must be stopped. We must dismantle industrial infrastructure, unlearn all destructive ideologies, and begin rebuilding genuinely sustainable communities as soon as possible, and by any means necessary.

[1] Human Population: Urbanization – Population Reference Bureau

Kourtney Mitchell:  Our Experiences Matter: On White Privilege and Backlash

Kourtney Mitchell: Our Experiences Matter: On White Privilege and Backlash

By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance

As a radical black male living in the most hegemonic culture to ever exist, I consistently find myself keenly aware of instances in daily life to recognize and critique white supremacy. I have experienced firsthand this culture’s systemic racism. From the racist and sexist police department which harassed and conspired against my mother while she worked for them, to the fairly routine instances of micro-aggressions, racial profiling and predatory business practices all people of color endure in this culture, I have a personal relationship with oppression informing my analysis of racism. So when whites accuse people of color of being unable to let go of the past, they are missing some critical considerations.

Many whites have a difficult time accepting any attempt to redistribute wealth and resources to historically oppressed classes because they fail to see the reality of life as a person of color in this society. And when our stories are silenced, the dominant narrative of this culture can proliferate.

So I want to speak directly to whites who honestly believe society is post-racial and that they are being oppressed. I want you to listen and try to understand if you can.

‎One of white supremacy’s more insidious aspects is that it has perfected the art of double-speak. While it appears you are saying society is post-racial and we are all equal now, and therefore any redistribution of resources to historically oppressed classes is reverse racism, what you are really saying is the comfort and safety which was a result of a historically privileged position in society as leech members of a parasitic class of people is being challenged, and that makes you uncomfortable.

You want to know what I mean with that statement. Dominant classes of people are parasites, because they feed on the oppression of others. Whether or not you realize it, if you are a member of a dominant class, you are benefiting from the oppression of another class.

As a man, I benefit from patriarchy and misogyny. Members of my class of people are leeches, and that makes me a leech as well. It is my responsibility as an aspiring male ally to women to constantly critique my own participation in this culture and to do whatever I can to deconstruct the sexist and misogynistic tendencies I possess from this culture’s indoctrination. That is the minimal task of an ally, and the same applies to whites who wish to ally with people of color to combat racism. You must first admit your complicity in it.

Whiteness is hegemony. To be clear, race does not exist inherently – it is a social construct with no basis in actual biology other than the melanin levels in your skin and its relationship to how your ancestors evolved on their preferred landbase. The creation of race was a direct result of the hegemonic tendency inherent in parasitic classes of people.

“White” is purported to be related to skin color and ancestry, but what is it really? A social class. If race is not actually real, then we must consider more real, tangible indicators of difference and their real effects on the material conditions of our everyday lives. When we search for other indicators, the most glaringly obvious one is privilege and access to resources. By far, without doubt, whites own more land and possessions, earn a higher income, and experience far fewer discriminatory experiences than people of color.

It is important to understand what it means to view racial oppression in the context of class analysis. Whiteness is a class experience, and not based in biological reality. But that does not mean one can just decide to stop being white, just like I cannot decide to stop being a man as long as the dominant culture classes me as a man. As long as you are classed as white, you will continue to benefit from white privilege. This is what allies need to remember.

The identity of persons of color serves the purpose of organizing through common cause. For my culture, black identity is about survival, not about superiority or a desire to exercise power over whites. It is a response to cultural genocide, an example of class consciousness as the starting point in combating oppression. As stated in Racial Formations in the United States:

Whites tend to locate racism in color consciousness and find its absence color-blindness. In so doing, they see the affirmation of difference and racial identity among racially defined minority students as racist. Non-white students, by contrast, see racism as a system of power, and correspondingly argue that blacks, for example, cannot be racist because they lack power.

When people of color are afforded opportunities on the basis of their skin color, this is not racism. It is redistribution of the privilege of access to resources, an attempt to even the playing field that is skewed towards whites.

If you think past racism has no effect on today’s reality, you are in denial. Your ancestors were given a huge head start because they were not enslaved and they did not suffer under white supremacist Jim Crow laws and murderous gangs of thugs in white sheets and hoods. They did not suffer under the tyranny of the White Citizen’s Council, or the 3/5 law, or the Fugitive Slave Law. They did not suffer under the Tuskegee Experiments, the Japanese internment camps, the ghettos and reservations and racist police departments.

To be white in this society is to start ahead, even if you are poor. The poorest white is still privileged in ways the middle class black person is not. Rich, wealthy and affluent blacks are still racially profiled and discriminated against in various ways.

The dominant narrative of this culture – that of the white patriarch – forbids redistribution of resources and privilege, because that would mean the empowerment of historically oppressed classes, affording them a little more ability to even the score. So this culture must adjust the narrative to encourage backlash against resistance to white supremacy, otherwise the narrative of the resistance will proliferate and threaten to turn the tide in our favor. So it convinces privileged members they are being discriminated against, and that they should not consider or listen to or even hear the stories of people of color, because goddess forbid you have your identity challenged for once. You cry reverse racism and deny the presence of the same tendencies of the past because you have never lived in our world.

Of course, redistribution of resources is not the end goal. We must ultimately bring down the capitalist, industrial infrastructure facilitating white supremacist oppression of people of color. We must permanently disable the control mechanisms of the culture – the police, the military and the media – because they all play a role in the subordination of people of color, the theft of their resources and the erasure of their cultures and stories.

A comprehensive anti-racist strategy includes a critique of civilization itself. It recognizes civilization as the interlocking systems of oppression inherent in infinite growth economies. It realizes the colonial, imperialist agenda of empires as being intimately connected to the white supremacist tendency, and as being the stumbling block to real autonomy and self-determination for people of color. And it relates the destruction of the natural world to the destruction of cultural diversity among human populations.

My people are being killed in the streets, incarcerated, enslaved and denigrated, and any analysis avoiding this reality is dishonest and immoral. If we are going to attempt to “speak truth to power,” we had better at least speak the truth, regardless whether or not people are ready to hear it. We do not have time to wait for people to “get it.” We needed militant action a hundred years ago. We are far into complete biotic collapse and continued genocide of non-white cultures. We must act now to rid the planet of this scourge and ensure it never returns.

Ben Barker: Anarchists and Torture Porn

Ben Barker: Anarchists and Torture Porn

By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin

Radicals and the sexual exploitation industry become more and more intertwined by the day. I wish I was surprised when I learned just today that the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is being held in a venue owned by the torture porn website, Kink.com.

Kink.com is infamous for its images of women “stretched out on racks, hogtied, urine squirting in their mouths, and suspended from the ceiling while attached to electrodes, including ones inserted into their vaginas,” explains feminist activist Gail Dines, who argues that the pornography website is in stark violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

If you don’t want to listen to some feminist, I’ll let Kink.com speak for itself. On the website, we learn that the project began when the founder decided to “devote his life to subjecting beautiful, willing women to strict bondage.”

Of course feminists sounded the alarm right away and demanded answers and changes from the Bookfair’s organizers. Of course they were only ignored or attacked.

To be fair, a statement addressing concerns about the venue choice was almost immediately posted on the Bookfair website. Not surprisingly, it attempted to justify the decision, with the bulk of the text being about the tight budget they were working with. With the handful of lines the statement devoted to feminist concerns, they deflected responsibility by claiming that “there is a valid political criticism of every venue that is potentially available,” because “we live in a capitalist society, and until we have created an explicitly anarchist infrastructure that can support this type of event, such contradictions and compromises are inevitable.”

It would seem that the organizers of the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair have little or no ties with Kink.com or their venue, and are indeed making somewhat of a comprise in hosting their event there, because there’s just nowhere else to go. But, yet, their statement goes on to show how aware of the issues they really are. They write: “We acknowledge that pornography and sex work have been divisive issues in the anarchist community. The choice of the Armory Community Center is not a political statement, and the Book Fair Committee is taking no political position on pornography. We accept that members of the community (and even members of this committee) have differing opinions on this issue. We will be organizing a discussion on anarchist perspectives on pornography during the book fair, and if this topic interests you, we hope that you will attend.”

This situation—a big political event hosted at a controversial location leading to public outcry—is familiar. It’s not unlike another incident of just last month, when a bunch of House Republicans booked their annual winter conference at a former slave plantation in Williamsburg (where, to add insult to injury, they planned to discuss “successful communication with minorities and women”).

But here’s the difference between the two events: When the Republicans announced the site of their gathering the Left was out in force to decry them as racist and insensitive to the historical reality of slavery. When the anarchists announced the site of their gathering the Left was out in force to decry feminist objectors as puritanical, moralist, and anti-sex.

Imagine if the House Republicans had put out a statement similar to that of the organizers of the 2013 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. They might write: “We acknowledge that white supremacy and slavery have been divisive issues in the Republican community. The choice of the former slave plantation is not a political statement, and the House Committee is taking no political position on white supremacy. We accept that members of the community (and even members of this committee) have differing opinions on this issue. We will be organizing a discussion on Republican perspectives on white supremacy during the conference, and if this topic interests you, we hope that you will attend.” That should be sufficient to ease the worries of the Left, no?

I beg the organizers of the Bookfair, and anarchists in general, to answer me this one question: is pain different when felt by a woman?

From Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/08/anarchist-book-fair-porn/

To read this article en français, see: https://www.facebook.com/notes/martin-dufresne/les-anarchistes-et-la-porno-torture/10152572173490595

“Racism has to be challenged”: An Interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

“Racism has to be challenged”: An Interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

By J. G. / Deep Green Resistance Great Plains

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin is a veteran community and anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-prison organizer. He was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, The Black Panther Party, and is a founding member of the Black Autonomy Federation. Lorenzo is the author of the underground classic, Anarchism and the Black Revolution as well as many other essays and articles about fighting capitalism and white supremacy.  A former political prisoner and political refugee, he currently lives in Memphis Tennessee and is working to bring attention to and combat rampant police brutality in the area including the murder of 15 year old Justin Thompson.

J. G.:  What is the Black Autonomy Federation and the Let’s Organize the Hood program?

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin:  Let’s Organize the Hood started out as a training program.  We were training people of color activists all over the U.S. and Canada  over the course of about 15 years.  Organize the Hood is kinda like something that you would organize in your own community.  It won’t be the same in every community.  Some places the issue might be unemployment in the black community.  Here in Memphis we thought the issue was going to be massive unemployment and poverty because this is the poorest big city in the country.  So far that has not proven to be the case though.

We trained people in Detroit who were interested in building a black led tenants movement.  We trained people in Atlanta who had issues that they wanted to deal with around massive unemployment and police shootings ‘cause, you know, we have experience in grassroots organizing around all of these things.  We don’t project ourselves as some sort of experts who are over and above the people but we’ve got practical experience.  We’re not putting out any national plan or something that we haven’t done ourselves; that we haven’t actually got our hands dirty in doing.  It’s a program that’s for the community to take up.

Organizers might bring it to the community but the plan is that the organizers would ultimately be removed and the community would run its own programs, ‘cause that’s the way I was taught in the 1960’s with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  You had organizers who would be sent to a community and in the community they would find who the leaders were and they would train and develop that leadership then they would get out of the way and let the people do what they feel like they needed to do.  Now they would be around if people had questions or wanted help or something but basically the community made all the major decisions.

So this is what we’re trying to develop in Memphis.  This is something brand new here in Memphis in the sense that we’ve only been living here for a couple years ourselves and our program has only been in existence two months.   And in two months time especially once we figured out that the community has had a long running history with the police department, we’ve become the main organization in the city dealing with police brutality.  There’s no other groups doing anything.  The so-called civil rights groups haven’t said anything.  They’ve been neutralized completely.

I guess you could say that Let’s Organize the Hood is what you want it to be in your community.  There’s no rule that says that you have to organize everything thus and thus and thus.  Although there is a national program.  We got areas that we work in but each community and sometimes even each neighborhood would be able to pick out its own particular program and carry that out.

JG:  What is the situation in Memphis with police brutality?

LKE:  To really understand why these things happen in Memphis, you have to look at the political structure here and go back a little ways.  Back some years ago there were so many shootings of black people here by what was then an openly racist police department.  An all white police department was killing black people including several young kids.  There was a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court called Tennessee v. Garner and in that case the issue was brought up of a “fleeing felon law” which allowed the police to use deadly force in situations where a person was unarmed and merely trying to elude capture.  Well they could shoot you in the back of the head and that’s what they were doing.  A lot of people were dying in that period here.

So this case wound up in the Supreme Court.  The court looked at this situation and they found that fleeing felon law unconstitutional.  They forbade the Memphis PD from using deadly force in a situation where someone was trying to elude capture that didn’t represent any threat of violence to the public.  Well of the nine people that were killed by the Memphis PD this year, none of them were armed and five of those were trying to run for their lives with police shooting at them.  And this young man Justin Thompson that was killed, they claimed he was shot just one time but there were at least four other bullets that they pulled out of peoples houses.  So he was shot at at least five times and they refused to let his family see the body.

In February a young man, 20 years old, was shot in the back.  They claimed that he was the leader of a car theft ring.  And when they ran up on him, they shot him in the back.  They admit he didn’t have any gun.  He was just trying to get in the car and escape.

Then you had the case of a young man who was 19 years old.  He was mentally challenged.  They claimed that he ran at six cops with a knife.  They knew who this guy was.  They knew he was mentally challenged and they had arrested him two months before this.  They shot him.  We don’t know how many times they shot him because they cover all this stuff up.  Now Memphis claims that they have a model for how to deal with mentally challenged people that does not require them to use deadly force.  And they claim to have at least 200 officers who are specially trained to defuse such situations.  Well the question is where were those officers at?  Because the police station is right up the hill within a couple of blocks from where this boy was killed.  Any one of these officers could have defused the situation.  They could have just overpowered him.  Six cops can do that.  The same night a white man was arrested with a knife and they didn’t beat him they certainly didn’t kill him.

Then there was another situation where a black man was in a relationship with a white woman and was driving around in her car.  She reported the car stolen.  Even after they found out that the car was not stolen, they went after this guy and shot him 32 times.

You got two people who were in police custody who got choked to death.  One guy was arrested at a July 4th party and he turned up dead, choked to death.  And the police won’t release the autopsy reports.  So part of our struggle is to get them to release this information.

Then you got two people killed here in an automobile accident with a police officer.  This guy was driving at 101 miles per hour with no sirens or running lights and just ran into a 13 year old girl and her grandmother and killed them.  And this is the third case of what is essentially vehicular homicide by a cop in the last five years.

In all these cases, every one of these people was unarmed.  One guy was sleeping in his car.  How do you get killed for sleeping in your car?  They say they beat on the door and woke him up and he jumped out of the car and grappled with the police and then jumped back in his car and started the engine and therefore they had to shoot and kill him.  This is their story.  And it really doesn’t matter to them what they tell us.

So this is the type of thing that goes on.  But Memphis has a long history of this.  Back in 1983 they killed seven young black men over a minor incident.  This group was a so-called MOVE type organization according to the cops.  So they set up an incident where they had the police go to the door claiming that someone had stolen something and forced their way in and surrounded the place.  They killed everybody.  They executed them.  They shot every one of those men in the back of the head.

So this is what accounts for this kind of police terrorism in this town that has gone on for years and years.  And we are the first group to be doing this type of grassroots organizing in 20 years.  But the civil-rights groups have been neutralized by the election of a black mayor and also by money and status and all that kind of thing.  In some places they will come out and demonstrate at least.  They will at least acknowledge a police killing.  But we’ve heard nothing in Memphis from the NAACP; nothing from the Southern Christian Leadership Council which we call the Southern Christian Liar’s Club; nothing from these groups.  So this wasn’t the issue that we thought we were going to be organizing around but we’ve been pushed into it by community need and we’re the only force dealing with police brutality in Memphis.

JG:  On September 8th there was a rally and march against police brutality.  Can you tell us how that went?  How do you see this movement against police brutality moving forward in Memphis and throughout the state?

LKE:  We did have people come to this event from other cities especially Chattanooga which is my home town some five hours away from Memphis.  And there is talk now of building a statewide movement.  But the demonstration itself was fantastic if you consider the fact that what the media here does is they don’t report on anything that we do.  We’re persona non grata.  They are extremely opposed to us.  If we give a press conference, nobody comes.  I think one media source is pretty sympathetic, he comes.   None of the other stations even report on it.

So if you consider this media white out that’s been going on for quite some time for us to get 70 people just with our own networks and flyers.  That is absolutely phenomenal.  And people were really militant and they took over the center of the city.  And we went to the police station with all these tough guy cowboy cops and demonstrated in front of there and they would not come out.

And this is the place where they’re quick to beat you up.  You can go on YouTube and see videos of them beating women up, beating children up, beating all kinda people up.  But they would not come out to face us.  So we marched on the city hall and went through the tourist district and had a 2 hour rally at city hall.

So this forced the media to come out and report on us.  They wanted to portray a lot of negative stuff about us.  Talk about my background as a revolutionary.  Talk about my wife’s background in the Black Panther Party.  Talk about the fact that I was a political prisoner; this that and the other.  But the fact that they had to report on people protesting really shook them up.  It allowed people to see that there are people who are willing to fight police brutality in this city.  And we are going to build a statewide movement.  And we are having an event on October 20th to raise the case of Justin Thompson, the 15 year old kid who was killed, and all of those who have died at the hands of the police.   What we want to do is publicize these cases enough so that they will get the same kind of attention as Trayvon Martin.  We want to eventually get a national march against police brutality.

It’s really important for people who’ve had loved ones die, whether that was last week or years ago, that they don’t give up the fight.  A woman that I used to work with came to the event from Chattanooga and had somebody pushing her around in a wheelchair.  But she wanted to be a part of it because she believes in this campaign.  Her father was murdered by the police in 1983 and she founded the Concerned Citizens for Justice that I became president of.  The CCJ led a 15 year campaign against police terrorism.  And we had, at one stage, one of the most advanced political formations against police brutality in the country.  ‘Cause our thing was grassroots organizing and protest as opposed to lobbying politicians and celebrity so-called leaders.  We’re trying to build a grassroots movement from the bottom up.

JG:  I first became aware of your work when I came across something you wrote about building a Poor Peoples Survival Movement and the need for autonomous communities to become self sufficient and eventually create bioregional federations.  How does that connect to the work you’re doing now?

LKE:  Well, you know, we’ve always taken the position of grassroots community organizing.  So the logical next step is to then talk about how we build a community or series of communities that are not beholden to the existing government.  How do we turn neighborhoods and communities into self governing communes?  Right now there’s widespread disaffection with representative government.  So the Idea is that on the local level people would start to build their own neighborhood institutions.

They’d even start to deal with community control of the police and building their own militias or self defense forces to deal with our own social issues.  So the city and all these racist vigilantes calling themselves police officers wouldn’t be in the community to kill people.  But you have to talk about how do you take a community that is extremely impoverished and create some kind of economic base where people can be given jobs and can build housing and infrastructure for themselves.

Urban food production is something that we’ve always recognized as a survival program.  And we’ve been doing urban farming in other cities that we’ve been in and trying to understand the skills and link all these things together.  We’ve got to deal with massive unemployment, police brutality and all of the things that are killing us.

Memphis has the highest number of infant mortality cases among black infants of any big city in the U.S.   It’s the city with the highest rates of cancer among black women.  And it’s the poorest big city in the country.  And there’s all these social disparities because of long years of economic segregation and also years of police terrorism.  All these things linked together.  So when you build this, you can’t just concentrate on growing food.  You have to organize around issues of people being disempowered by institutions that exist now.  You gotta build a whole synthesis instead of just single issue organizing.

Even though at this stage we’re dealing with police terrorism, we came into existence actually to deal with a number of issues.  One of them is the mass imprisonment of black youth.  One of them is to deal with massive unemployment and poverty.  And really this whole issue that we’re dealing with now is the one thing that no other groups wanted to deal with.  But they were stacking up bodies so quick that we couldn’t ignore that.

To the question of a bioregional area as opposed to just a city:  We cannot be limited to what the state says is the territorial limitation of an area. We need to be able to take land from corporations and use that to grow.  Even in Chicago we started to do that.  Because in the city of Chicago there’s all these plots of land.  Buildings have been torn down and nobody’s using it for anything.  So we started to just take it over.  First they said, “Well we’re gonna give you permission,” and we said, “You don’t have to give us permission.”  But it’s a fight.  It really is a fight.  And it’s not always dramatic.  A lot of times people don’t even hear about it.  We didn’t get any massive publicity for most of the stuff we did.  And like I said, every city we’ve organized in has been different.  And the expectations of people have been different.

JG:  So is the strategy of the Black Autonomy Federation to help organize communities, share knowledge and skills, and then spread that to other areas?

LKE:  This is essentially what we’ve been doing.  We’ve been in a number of different cities.  When we first got started in the mid nineties, we were in ten cities.  The whole idea of creating a national movement without creating local movement first is that it’s unsustainable.  When people see that you’ve got a sustainable movement wherever you started at, it can spread.  People will emulate it.  And that’s essentially what happened with the Black Panther Party.  They didn’t try to build a national movement.  They started in the Bay area and it just spread.  It was popularized through media and different things but it wasn’t planned.  That’s why we’re concentrating on Memphis.  I’m not saying that we won’t help someone start up somewhere else, but our objective right now is to worry about Memphis.

What we try to do is develop people so that they can take on leadership roles within the community.  And that’s really important otherwise you’ve just got a cult.  Everybody follows one guy or two people and nobody else can say anything or do anything and nobody’s being trained to do anything.

JG:  You’ve written before about the importance of supporting people of color in dismantling white supremacist institutions.  Unfortunately for most of the American white Left, the struggles of working class POC are either unknown or not considered a priority.  What would you say to those on the Left who pay lip service to anti-racism or ending oppressive systems but seem dismayed at the prospect of making actual connections with communities of color?

LKE:  First of all those groups and individuals have to be challenged by people of color organized in their own autonomous movements even if it’s within another organization.  They have to organize in numbers enough to challenge these people and change the direction of the movement. You’re fighting for the heart and soul of the movement is what it is.

Generally if you take a broad analysis you would have to say that they are corrupt and their efforts won’t result in a revolution especially one that benefits people of color.  I’ve criticized the Occupy movement because it’s predominantly a white middle class movement whose only concerns have always been predominantly for the white middle class.  Some would say “Well, there’s black people in this”.  That doesn’t mean anything.

What does matter is whether they have a voice or any power to create policy.  And if they don’t have that, if they’re just a puppet organization or group of people that they can trot out and say, “Here’s our blacks.”  We call that a Progressive Plantation.  And that is a very dangerous and dispiriting development for people who are in those groups.  And it’s very disempowering.  This is how the white Left has generally operated over the years.  They bring in a few people of color might even put them up front to be visible but they don’t have any power whatsoever.  They’re puppets and they are not respected in communities of color.  This is why the white left has rarely made any serious connections with communities of color.

What is really important right now is that people have to understand that racism is not going to go away on its own.  It has to be challenged.  And I don’t care what some white radicals, we used to call them “mother country radicals”, claim they stand for.  They have privileges.  Even the ones who claim to be broke.  They have privileges vis-à-vis people of color and they will often use that to try to neutralize or weaken any criticism of them.  They were happy when the Black Panther Party was attacked and destroyed and they didn’t try to help.  Their whole strategy was to profit from the death of the Black Panther Party by attempting to absorb all of their cadre and community supporters into their own movements.

In the 1960’s what you really saw was an autonomous movement of working class black people that was able to challenge white supremacy in the South.  And later when Black Power came in, it was able to challenge white supremacy and corporate capitalism throughout the country.  It’s really important to understand that and compare the fight against racism in that period to what’s happening now.  You’ve got so called anti-racist movements made up of white people who want to talk about right-wingers but don’t want to talk about their own internal white supremacy and how it is related to the state.

What people of color movements have to do is to understand this whole thing about decolonization which is an important concept but it has to be taken further than just trying to get the white folks to stop being racists or getting them to accept Indian claims.  It has to be understood that we’re trying to dismantle this entire society.  This entire capitalist system and the whole system of white supremacy worldwide.

JG:  Tokenism and exceptionalism have been common tactics used by the media to make people believe that we’re living in a “post racial” or “post patriarchal” society.  Do you think this has played a role in neutralizing resistance within communities of color?

LKE:  Well, I think that’s it’s been effective for quite some time.  We like to call it “black faces in high places”.   And essentially what that is, is a form of neocolonialism where they put a person of color in an alleged position of authority to be administrators within this system.

In the 1970’s when the Black Power movement was being defeated, the leadership wasn’t just killed or imprisoned.  They actually went after the minds of the people too because they wanted the people to think that we had now reached the state where we’d arrived and were now enjoying the benefits of the civil rights movement.  And what we really saw was a kind of entrenchment of black middle class forces going into the institutions and corporations or going into the government.

We went from seeing something like forty black officials nationwide to several thousand people of color inhabiting political positions.  The white power structure was asking themselves, “How can we deal with Black Power?  How can we deal with all these mass movements of people of color?”  So what they decided to do was to neutralize them with their own people and to do the same kind of neocolonialism that they’ve done in Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world.

It was Richard Nixon of all people who came up with this idea of holding up the black entrepreneur.  His whole idea was that “we’re gonna give ‘em grants.  We’ll give ‘em pay-offs and we’ll split them that way.  We’ll find the ones who are gonna sell out.  The ones who won’t sell out, we’ll put in prison or kill ‘em.”  And this is essentially what happened.   I was one of those that was put in prison and some of my comrades and other people I knew were hunted down and killed.  Now you have people many of whom are still in prison today and have been there for 30 or 40 years.

So now we get to Obama who’s now the president.  And the idea of a black president has been used to neutralize any protest in the street or opposition to the government from black people.  Everywhere else in the world, people are fighting tooth and nail against austerity measures.

Even the discussion by politicians of implementing austerity measures started mass protest in France, Greece and many other places; just the discussion of it.  In the u.s. nobody said anything.  They said “Oh, we’ll vote ‘em out”.  In the u.s., there’s a mysticism about the electoral system that doesn’t exist in a lot of places.  They see right through it.  Now people are starting to see through it here.  They’re gonna have to see through it more.  But there are millions of people that are still brainwashed that Obama’s going to deliver something to them.

JG:  Some would say that it’s the lesser of two evils or a gentler form of fascism.

LKE:  I do think that there’s a lot of confusion.  And I do think there’s anger but a lot of it is internalized so that you don’t see it in the streets.  I think that Obama is a pacification agent.  He was elected to neutralize the grassroots Left in this country which was becoming larger and they wanted to push people back into the democratic party fold.   The democratic party is the liberal reform party.  They had to posture with Obama.  They needed Obama more than he needed them, really.  Big corporate money went into getting him elected.  The liberal wing of the capitalist class put him in office.

Now Romney represents what I call, “Raw Money” and he represents the extreme reactionary right wing of capital.  Now what these people want is to have the state run directly by corporations.  They want a fascist corporate state.  The democrats also want to serve the corporations.  They just want to serve them in a different way.  We need to understand that neither one of these guys represent the interests of working class and poor people.  They’re both are agents of corporations.

There’s this inter-capitalist feud where they fight over which policies they’re gonna adopt; policies that are never in the interest of poor people.  And they know this and they’ll sit around and laugh about it at some stage, “I beat you that time, Raw Money!  You can get the next one.”  They know that they’re both serving the same people.  And those people are not down in projects.  They’re not in college dormitories.   They’re not common people.  They are the elite.  And I do think that it’s great that the Occupy movement started to raise that issue.  It’s just that they didn’t go to the logical extent and bring in voices that have never been heard before.

People of color were not part of the discussion.  We were not seen as being an important enough base for them to try to recruit.  When people do that to you, to me it is the worst kind of bootlicking to go try and beg to be a part of their movement.  It’s treachery.  So I tried to encourage people of color involved in Occupy to think about forming their own movement because it’s unsustainable.  And that’s what I see.  Some cities they’re not doing anything.  Here in Memphis, it’s just white folks sitting around a camp fire.   They’re in bed with the politicians.  They didn’t even attack them here and drive them away like they did everywhere else.

Politicians and Corporations are smoking the planet.  And they’re doing it in a way that will wipe out a significant section of the population.  They’ll kill off the ability to have crops.  Much of the things that we’ve been talking about are really survival programs.  They’re not popular at this point because people still see supermarkets and that kind of stuff.  But at some stage they are going to create a situation that’s so unsustainable that we won’t be able to eat their garbage food.  We won’t have access to their capital reserves.  Our lives are going to drastically change.  We might not even have electricity, who knows.

But we will not have the things that the petro-fueled economy has created for us.  As you know, without petroleum this whole thing is gonna collapse anyway.  But from the standpoint of people of color, we have to have our own agenda.  We have to be autonomous enough to have our own political programs.  Even if we work with white movements we have to have our own agenda.  We can’t let the white middle class set an agenda for people who have been historically oppressed in a different fashion.  That won’t save us at all.

JG:  What can people do to support your efforts in Memphis?

LKE:  You don’t have to live in Memphis to be concerned with what’s going on here just like you don’t have to live in Sanford, Florida to be concerned with what happened with Trayvon Martin.  We want people to write to A.C. Wharton the mayor of Memphis and complain about the situation here with police brutality.  Especially about Justin Thompson the young man that was just killed.  And we’ll have a website up soon.  The mayor’s email address is mayor@memphistn.gov.  You should bombard that guys mailbox because all he cares about is tourism.  And you should let him know that “If I come to Memphis, it’ll be to protest not to give you money.”  Wharton’s phone number is 901-576-6000.  The cops number is 901-636-3700.  And you can make a complaint to the police chief, Tony Armstrong, about his reign of terror and corrupt police force.  It’s really a national issue.  All of our lives are in danger in this place.

These people are insane.  They’re shooting people in the back.  There’s people that have survived police shootings as well here and we don’t know the figures on that.  There have been widespread rapes by police.  We’ve got several officers on trial now for rape.  We’ve also got officers on trial for prostitution.  Many of the cops are drug dealers.  In fact this last killing, we were advised, was the result of this cop being a drug enforcer and pick up man.  He killed another young man before he killed this kid in 2009.  So he’s a treacherous individual.  And this is the kind of stuff that goes on around here.  I’m not saying that this type of stuff doesn’t happen in many cities, but in our opinion, this is the most corrupt.