Dismantle the Pipeline: A Review of Susan Anglada Bartley's "A Different Vision: A Revolution Against Racism in Public Education" (Luminare Press)

By David Gilbert

School was always a breeze for me. "Correct English" came naturally--it was the way people spoke at home. As for social studies, I was well-versed in the mythology of American democracy that masqueraded as "history." My parents instilled confidence that I could excel at science and math, which they saw as a career path for me. It was only in my college years--as I became intent on understanding why some people are obscenely rich while as many others are desperately poor--that I started to get into trouble.

Unusually well-educated for a New York State (NYS) prisoner--the average incoming inmate is at a 6th grade level--I've done a lot of work as a teacher's aide and a tutor. Early on I was struck by a conundrum: Many otherwise bright and brave guys just froze when it came to academic work. After many conversations I saw a frequent pattern: from early on in school they were treated as discipline problems, not as promising learners, and often humiliated and punished. Rather than accept a framework that made them feel stupid, they decided that school was b.s. And that they would prove their self-worth in the streets. In communities where decent manufacturing jobs fled but where the "War on Drugs" made them a lucrative trade, that seemed like the ready route to wealth and prestige. Before long, of course, that led to incarceration. Welcome to the school-to-prison pipeline. In NYS, Blacks and Latinos/as constitute 37% of the population and 72% of state prisoners.

Susan Anglada Bartley is a passionate anti-racist educator. Her new book, A Different Vision, looks at the school-to-prison pipeline as part of a fundamentally white supremacist education system. The various forms of exclusion are key--the ways students of color are told they are slow learners, are tracked away from college preparation courses, and are disproportionately subjected to harmful forms of discipline. The latter isn't just a product of cultural misunderstandings with white teachers; studies show that students of color are treated much more harshly for the same behaviors as whites. Once students are held out of the classroom, they're much more likely to fall behind on their work and then drop out. In the U.S. Black students are 3 times more likely than whites to be suspended or expelled, which foreshadows the 6 to 1 Black to white incarceration rate for males. Another school-to-prison pipeline has been built over the past 40 years, for the flow of dollars, as funding for incarceration has increased at twice the rate of that for education.

I cringed at A Different' Vision's description of how humilation is a standard technique for keeping students in line. As a teacher at Franklin High School (FHS) in Portland, Oregon, Anglada Bartley learned how to move away from that and toward engagement. She realized that especially as a white teacher, she had to earn the trust of her Black, Latino/a, Native American, and Asian students which she does in part by being willing to tell brief stories about her own life. She makes an effort to talk with students at eye level rather than down to them; she addresses issues individually rather than dressing students down in front of the class; she never writes them up for disciplinary punishment. More importantly, she's a big enough person to learn from her students and to acknowledge that.

To keep a class together without acting as a tyrant, a teacher needs a relevant and lively curriculum. To do so, a teacher has to learn about her students and their range of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds in order to create a culturally welcoming environment. While Anglada Bartley doesn't present a lot on curriculum in the sense of the subject matter, which would entail volumes in itself, she cites the best source of articles and references on that, Rethinking Schools Magazine. I would have liked to see her say more about the ways challenging white supremacy could also benefit many whites--when we can overcome clinging to privilege and pride of place--through more funding going to public education; wider availability of college; and a fuller, truer, richer understanding of history and culture.

Anglada Bartley knows her students can excel. In 2007, mentored and supported by an outstanding, Black principal, Dr. Charles Hopson, she created an Advanced Scholars Program (ASP) at her high school. The program encouraged students who might otherwise be tracked out to take the advanced placement courses so crucial to getting into succeeding at college; each student was provided a mentor. By 2016, ASP had 465 students, and every participant went on to higher education; seven of them became Gates Millennium Scholars; FHS overall, with more than 50% of students living in poverty, had a graduation rate within one point of the wealthiest school in the district.

After Anglada Bartley won all kinds of accolades and prestigious awards for this stunning success, the hostility of a new white administrator and some resentful teachers resulted in restrictions that undermined her work and led her to leave FHS. While A Different Vision has many useful examples of teaching methods, the other, essential dimension of the book involves the broader fight against white supremacy in education and in society at large. The needed changes can't happen when 82% of the teachers and 88% of the administrators are white for a population nove moving past 50% students of color. They can't happen when funding is so unequal and inadequate, when students of color have to worry about violence and incarceration, and when they face difficulty getting quality jobs. Given those realities, A Different Vision strongly advocates building active movements and coalitions from below involving the communities, parents, educators and students to challenge white supremacy and fight for quality education. That's the road to "a different vision"-- "One in which empowerment replaces humiliation, relationships replace control. One in which respect for humanity and our earth are central [...]" (223-4)

Liberation Theologies: Decolonizing the Masters' Tool

By Gregory Stevens

On August 21st, 1831 Baptist preacher, Nat Turner, lead one of the largest slave insurrections in the history of the United States. In an explosion of prophetic and apocalyptic rage, Turner overthrew his legal owners ruling by fighting back, killing the elite colonial slave-owning families who had subjugated his life to a hell on Earth. With more than 70 other liberated slaves, Turner's insurrectionary self-defense sparked brutal repression from local white vigilante militias and the State. After six weeks of freedom, he was caught and brought back to Southampton County, Virginia to be put on trial; his revolutionary actions were recorded by white lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, later titled, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first! (Gray)

Being Born into slavery as the chattel property of Benjamin Turner, Nat or Nathaniel (the Hebrew meaning, "gift from god") Turner inherited two conflicting yet syncretized versions of religious expression; the first, and most obvious, being his Christian identity as a Baptist preacher, sharing the religion of his slave masters (he was bought and sold between 4 legal owners); the second, being his Mother Nancy's African folk-traditions brought directly over in the year 1799 when she was purchased by a Methodist slave owner. Further in his recorded confession he details multiple mystical experiences: talking to spirits, having flash backs to previous lives, practicing divination through tree leaves, and deciphering hieroglyphic characters all of which direct his passion toward revolt. In an act of religious syncretism Turner used knowledges from Baptist Christianity (individual freedom and soul freedom), the Hebrew prophets (histories of prophetic witness), and past-life ancestral mysticism (possibly informed by indigenous African traditions) to act upon his direct liberation from slavery. In this way Turner used the religious tool of his master and the indigenous traditions brought over from Africa by his Mother to subvert and challenge the legal slave-system for collective emancipation. For Turner, God had judged the materiality of slavery as demonic and condemned the institution to exorcism; it was God who actively directed him through revelation, signs, scriptures, visions, and dreams to defend himself from slavery. Turner embraced the counter-violence of God against slavery and dehumanization, igniting violent insurrection to advance the Kingdom principles of freedom, equality, liberation, justice, and salvation for the common good. "It was not motivated by hatred, racism, fanaticism, or evil. His revolutionary violence was the self-defense of the oppressed slave and God's counterviolence against the inherent barbarism and violence of slavery" (Lampley 3).

To understand the use of colonial religion as a strategy of liberation it is important to understand the severity of oppression and the overwhelming violence that colonialism brings to a people. The psychological, emotional, physical, spiritual, and social distress brought on by slavery creates an existence defined by perpetual trauma, abuse, and objectification. The opium of the masses loses its mind/body-numbing affects in the face of endless violence against black and brown bodies and becomes the methamphetamine advancing insurrectionary resistance.

The structural repercussions exacerbate conditions of trauma on a local and global scale through what Anibal Quijano theorizes as, the coloniality of power. Quijano argues that the development of the colonial project begins with the fabricated notion of race as a "supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to others" (533). The conquered and dominated peoples of Africa and the Americas were racialized as "other;" they were "situated in a natural position of inferiority and, as a result, their phenotypic traits as well as their cultural features were considered inferior" ultimately determining racialized categorizations as the "fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world, population into ranks, places, and roles in the new societies structure of power" (Quijano 535). With the development of newly racialized historical identities, a foundation was created for the global structuring of social roles, geohistorical places, and the unequal planetary phenomenon of transmodernity (Mignolo 57). This social hierarchy of racialized bodies and knowledges forms the crucible of eurocentrism, modernist epistemologies, and the Westernizing project of the North through a coloniality of power that also controls the labor force, the means and lands of production, and the flow of capital itself. In this Western expansion, ideas from the colonized peoples were expropriated or ignored, often stripped of their ability to be re/produced from below. This equates to the destruction of cultures through the racialization, alienation, and commodification of peoples. Resistance lead to the hanging, burning, and murdering of millions of people for the promotion of an "evolved, modern, and civilized" society (it was an evolved, modern, and civilized Methodist pastor who first bought Nat Turner). "The expansion of Western capitalism" Coloniality theorist Walter Mignolo writes, "implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and the state" (59). This Western supremacy was crafted in suppressing other- and non-scientific forms of knowledges, and was especially suppressive to the subaltern social groups whose social practices were informed by such alternative epistemologies (Santos ix). Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos sees the suppression of indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the African slaves as a form of epistemicide - the other side of genocide. The epistemological foundation that the global world capitalist economy is structured on is the imperial ordering of knowledges with the North at the top and the South at the bottom. This North/South divide is metaphorical and geographical in Santos' use, consisting of systems of visible and invisible distinctions that have material and cognitive ramifications. "The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms;" in the creation of "the other" as inferior, "the other side of the line vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced nonexistent" (Santos 118). This non-existence is a radical exclusion, deeming all that is produced by the other as inferior, incomprehensible, and unworthy of serious consideration. Thinking from above abyssal-line, from the North, is the foundation on which modern theologies, sciences, and everyday societies are situated and are therefore in need of radical uprooting, decolonizing, and re-envisioning.

The cognitive supremacy of the Western expansion chose Christianity as its divine right to domination. The Christianity of the Spanish Empire used Theologies of Domination to "disseminate a characteristic ideology through all segments of society, propounding a set of fundamental values and principles which, while expressed in terms of lofty abstraction or eternal truth, nevertheless serves to further the interests of those who hold power" (Lincoln 269). These religions of the status quo replicate and co-produce the ideologies of capitalism: competition, hierarchy, racialization, epistemicide, and patriarchy. If Christianity was the religion of the colonial project, is a decolonial Christianity even possible? Is it possible to develop a Christian theology that subverts, challenges, and decolonizes its recent historical use in crafting the Western expansion of colonialities of power?

Audre Lorde's well-known declaration that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" proves helpful in this integration of the colonial religion of choice. The immensity of the coloniality of power through Western expansion and the development of the United States as a force of global Empire by the blessing of a majority of Christian authorities, institutions, and lay persons alike, brings many to a frightening conclusion: "if the master's tools cannot be appropriated then, in an age where our capitalist masters claim ownership over everything, only resignation is possible." Do we give up on our faith and spiritual tradition forfeiting our theologies to colonial powers as we seek material emancipation? Do we give up on our Christianities as the masters' tool to colonize, modernize, and under-develop most of the world? Or do we use the masters' tool against the masters by re-shaping the tool itself, after all it was the Hebrew prophet Isaiah who wrote, "They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks" (2:4)?

The masters did not pluck their tool out of an ahistorical revelation but co-opted the religiosity of Christ-followers (the pejorative 'Christian' translated directly) to transform the world by thinking-with religion to bless their oppressive colonial project. Lorde was not making her argument to squash revolutionary determination, but rather attempting to articulate a similar message to that of the decolonial project that is attempting to open epistemology up to other ways of knowing and being, as valid, and co-equals in the production of our various worlds. Speaking from her experience as a black lesbian feminist, she refused to replicate the modes of racist patriarchal white-feminisms that honored her oppression through their ambivalence toward the continuing colonial project.

The question remains, can our Christianities be used as a tool to destroy the masters' house? Activist and co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, Michael White, complicates our answer with this insight: "If we learn anything from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's exceptional, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it should be that the dominant powers appropriated from us first." He uses the example of war, which most associate as a tool of the master, to demonstrate his point, "based on anthropological, archeological and philosophical evidence, they hold that warfare was originally developed by nomadic anti-State forces and was only later appropriated and turned against its developers" (White).

Christian theology has not always been a colonial project. Based on anthropological, archeological, and philosophical evidence, Christian theology began in Roman Occupied Palestine, from within a peasant's movement inaugurating the Commonwealth of God in direct confrontation to the Kingdom of Caesar. It would be a mistake to think we could reverse 1700 years of Christian world-making to discover a pure first century form, rather early Christinaities are a reminder that the "masters' tools" have not always been in the hands of the masters, he stole them.

The convoluted histories of Christianity defy the simplistic conclusion that the entire tradition is a product of the coloniality of power. Exilic, resistant, and silenced voices have glittered Christian theological praxis for its entire history. And in the same way "religion" seems impossible to define, Christianity can be equally difficult "not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes" (Asad 29). If we take Talal Asad's critique of religion seriously, we must refute any notion of a monoculture of theological discourse and seek to resurrect the various historical elements of Christianities worth saving. In this way, our theological reflections can reclaim stolen tools, blending cultural and social multiplicities that defy the homogeneity of dominant culture, and forming something altogether new. For liberal theologians, this kind of syncretism is often rejected as "cafeteria style" consumer religion, but for the colonized, syncretism is their mode of survival. By reclaiming and recreating the masters' tool the possibilities of collective liberation are opened wide.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui troubles indigenous notions of identity by theorizing hybridity as a potent mixture of coexisting multiplicities of cultural difference that do not collapse in on one another but "antagonize and complement each other" each giving the other a possibility to "reproduce itself from the depths of the past and relates to others in contentious ways" (Cusicanqui 105). Theology from below is not a sterile mule without an ability to reproduce, but a motley trinity of indigeneity, de/coloniality, and critical theory with the ability to birth something quite different "merg[ing] features of its ancestors in harmonic and as yet unknown blend[s]" (Cusicanqui 105). This decolonial hybridity, a mixing of knowledges that are not limited by their original logics, is a defining character of Liberation Theology, for it is the reclaiming of our stolen tools for the purpose of emancipation/salvation.

In the 1960s the redemption of the Christian tradition was attempted again by using the masters' tool for emancipatory soteriology. Liberation Theology birthed out of the historical struggles of epistemicide and genocides in the Global South (Gustavo Gutierrez), and from persons within the heart of the United States empire who were racialized others and deemed inferior (James Cone). This mixology of Marxism, (de)colonial theologies, and indigenous traditions for the sake of liberatory emancipation created an entirely new decolonial theological discourse. The shift Liberation Theology brought to the larger conversation was a much stronger reflection on the matrix of material conditions creating poverty and dependence on capitalist economic social formations. It was Karl Marx's social and critical theories, along with the Marxist guerilla movements birthed out of the early 20th century, that greatly influenced the priests and theologians expressing theologies of material soteriology from below. The liberatory theologies developed by Latin American and Black American scholar-activists of the radical 60's were syncretic for the sake of survival, the oppressed were also using the master's tools without replicating the masters' epistemic coloniality.

Theologians of the North, those above the abyssal line, were debating classical philosophical ideas about the Kantian "priority of concepts versus things," while ignoring the structural and physical violence brought to marginal communities around the globe (Cone 56). Theologies of material soteriology interested a colonized people, for what was 'real' for them was the very presence of oppression and the dire to end the brutality. The problems of the auction block, Jim Crow Laws, Neoliberal developmentalism, and the prison industrial complex will not be solved through philosophical and theological debates void of the materiality of demonized peoples' intersecting oppressions. In this way liberation theologies break from dominant colonial discourses on Christianity by embracing radical subjectivity and rejecting theology as a universal Western language that never spoke with oppressed peoples, only down to them (or completely ignored them all together). Reflecting on theological epistemicide Lampley writes, "Euro-American and European theologies have tried historically to claim objectivity and universality while black theology and other liberation theologies have exposed their Eurocentric tendencies and worldview" (33). Christian theologies that do not rupture the colonial suppression of alternative knowledge production continue to reproduce the logics that uphold world-systems of planetary devastation and should be discarded to the fires of Hell.

Black Liberation Theology in the United States emerged alongside Latin American Liberation theology as a way for black Americans to assert their dignity as God's beloved and fight for their freedom and self-determination. In the same ways academics and activists have ignored the Global South they have ignored Liberation Theologies birthed out of the colonial distress of life on the margins of empire. The father of Black Liberation theology, James Cone [1], argues black Americans have been systematically ignored and removed from legitimacy, their oppression and marginalized ignored by liberal protestants and Catholics alike leading to a Liberation Theology as a rupture within the abyssal line of colonial theologies. Cone writes,

Whites debated the validity of infant baptism or the issue of predestination and free will; blacks recited biblical stories about God leading the Israelites from Egyptian bondage,…White thought on the Christian view of salvation was largely "spiritual" and sometimes "rational," but usually separated from the concrete struggle of freedom in this world (Cone 54).

Black Theology uncovers the "structures and forms of the black experience," creating emancipatory theologies through "the thought forms of the black experience itself" (Cone 17). Black Liberation Theologies, much like the decolonial project of subaltern studies/activism, arises out of alternative epistemological formations centered on the experience of blackness, the experience of dehumanization, the experience of the Global South. The theological discourse of the North, of the West, and of Liberal academia centered on the White experience and White logical systems re/produces the colonial subject.

There is a striking similarity between the oppressed racialized communities in the Unites States with those below the abyssal line in the Global South fighting for cognitive and social justice, fighting to be heard, to be recognized, and to be validated. Blackness is produced through modernity, it is created and shaped by coloniality. Whiteness in Cone's context is the colonial project as expressed in the United States, the racialized ideas of the West - where everyone has to look, think, and act the same. Whiteness is for Cone the capitalist economic structure and way of organizing society into slaves and owners, producers of knowledges and those subjected to them. The creation of emancipatory knowledges from the black experience, was and is the purpose of Black Liberation Theologies. This too is the purpose of decolonization and the only hope for Christian theology if it is to matter today.

As a product of decoloniality, Liberation Theologies are "undertaken by the oppressed people themselves" and stem "from the values proper to these people," that is, the logics and grammars of anti-capitalist decolonial world making through which a "true cultural revolution comes about" (Gutierrez 91). We see this in the life of the Baptist revolutionary Nat Turner, his rejection of the theologies that bless racialization, colonialism, and economies of slavery; we also see it in his recreated theological imaginary emerging from his direct experience of all three. He reclaimed the stolen tool of Christian religiosity to remove the nails driven through his life and climb off the cross of coloniality. A hundred years later Liberation Theologies are attempting to further this work: these alternative ways of knowing and shaping the god-world-relationship reject the myth of progress and the myth of historical evolution into a modern state of abundance. Locating the site of hermeneutical reflection for decolonial theology in the experience of colonized bodies necessitates this rejection. Out of a motley mixology of theological, social, and critical knowledges from below a strategy for liberation and revolution emerges without replicating the logics of the colonial masters. Theo-knowledges birthed out of liberatory struggles can and do refuse to replicate the masters' use of tools. The tool of religion in general, and decolonial Christianity in particular, can be used to articulate an egalitarian, life-affirming, ecological society, one that stands in direct contrast to the religious tool used to develop the coloniality of power. In this reshaping, the masters' stolen tools used for domination are queered for collective and self-determined decolonial liberation.

This originally appeared on Gregory's blog .

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. 2009. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2012.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2012. "Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization." . South Atlantic Quarterly. 111 (1): 95-109.

Cone, James H. 1975. God of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. 1979. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. London: SCM Press.

Gray, Thomas R.; Turner, Nat; and Royster, Paul (Depositor), "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (1831). Electronic Texts in American Studies. 15. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/15

Lampley, K. 2016. Theological Account of Nat Turner: Christianity, Violence, and Theology . New York City: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lincoln B. 1985. Notes Toward a Theory of Religion and Revolution. In: Lincoln B. (eds) Religion, Rebellion, Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mignolo, Walter. 2002. "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference." South Atlantic Quarterly. 101 (1): 57-96.

Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. 2000. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South. 1 (3): 533-580.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2008. Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London: Verso.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2016. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge.

White, Michael. The Wisdom of Audre Lorde. Web. https://www.micahmwhite.com/on-the-masters-tools/

Notes

[1] James Cone passed away on April 28, 2018 just five days before the presentation of this paper. I am forever indebted to his work. May he rest in Black Power.

South Carolina Prisoners Reflect on Causes of Violence in Prisons, and Solutions

By Jared Ware

The deadliest incident of violence in a United States prison in a quarter century took place at the Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina on April 15, 2018.

According to multiple reports , including SCDC Director Bryan Stirling's own, prison guards and EMTs made no attempt to break things up or lend medical aid from moment the fight commenced until hours after it was over, while imprisoned people were beaten and stabbed to death. Seven people were killed and dozens were injured, with at least twenty two requiring hospitalization.

On April 22, I interviewed three individuals from various prisons inside the South Carolina Department of Corrections. One of the prisoners identified himself as a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group of imprisoned human rights advocates that has made national calls to action for a prisoner-led strike in response to the conditions they feel are truly responsible for the violence and hopelessness within prisons across the United States. The strike is expected to begin on August 21st, 2018.

Throughout our conversation, these three individuals, who are identified only as D, S, and E to protect their identities and prevent retaliation by prison officials, highlight the impacts of policies pushed by President Bill Clinton's administration and implemented by states across the country. They also point to the dehumanization of prisoners and challenge our conception of "gangs," which does not take into account the ways in which incarcerated people are forced to create their own collective means for safety, survival, and camaraderie in a situation where hope is the scarcest commodity.

They also urge the public to reconsider the nature and source of violence within prisons and the absence of human dignity and a rehabilitative environment within our nation's prisons. They present actionable solutions to mitigate some of the harm caused by prisons on our ultimate path toward shedding carceral responses to legitimate societal needs.

As I write this introduction on May 2nd, 2018, South Carolina prisoners have confirmed that all Level 2 and 3 facilities have remained on a statewide lockdown since April 15th. This means people imprisoned in facilities have been denied any freedom of movement, regular access to showers, recreation, or meals outside the confines of their cells.

We grant permission for individuals and news organizations to republish this interview in its entirety for their audiences. It is imperative that we deepen conversations around the causes of violence in prisons and the real impacts of incarceration on all people, inside and outside the walls.

Editor's note: this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jared : Firstly, for context for folks who are reading this, there have been a lot of things that have gone down in South Carolina prisons over the last year or two, if you guys could lay down some of that context for people, because I think a lot of people don't understand some of the things that prisoners throughout South Carolina have been dealing with and how those conditions might contribute to prisoners really feeling a sense of hopelessness?

D : I'm going to take you back a little step here, to 1996 at least. I'll cover it a little bit, and I'll be as brief as possible. Prior to Bill Clinton's Prison Litigation Reform Act, anti-terrorism act, these acts that went into full effect in 1996, initiated what is known as the 85% or Truth In Sentencing [1] throughout most of the states inside this nation today. It's not just necessarily something that incubated inside the South Carolina, it was actually national. There was a domino effect, okay? But in 1996, specifically, the reason why I'm pinpointing that is because at that particular point in the state of South Carolina, there was no such thing as a natural life sentence in the department of corrections. There was no such thing as a forever-type sentence, where individuals thought that they weren't going to be able to get out.

Even if you had a violent offense, or a labeled-violent offense, you still had something known as a work release date. You still would have some type of eligibility to go to work release, and that also meant the eligibility to go to work at some place on the street, or go home even on the weekends in the state of South Carolina. They had opportunity to make state pay [2] during that particular time period. Even when you [were] at what was known as the max yard. These yards [were] clearly open, everybody could roam and move around free.

But when 1996 set in, and you had this mindset that started to kicked in, that was known, as Hillary Clinton called [it], as locking down these "super predators." They called it also the War on Drugs, which I call the war on the Black and Brown community. All these things is playing into effect at that particular time period, and that created the environment inside.

We found fences starting to be wrapped into the prisons, we found prisoners that was labeled as violent offenders, was sent into these fences, and caged into buildings all day. We found that the food started deteriorating, we saw the clothes removed, and we saw the ways that [imprisoned people] could make money removed out of the system. There was no longer any type of state pay. Even though state pay was very minimal, it was still an opportunity to buy a bar of soap or a Honey Bun or something like that. We saw that visitation was being restricted.

It was just a host of things that started being incubated. And then the hopelessness set in. Because what happened then is we started having these life sentences coming through under 85 percent, where prisoners knew they were never going to see daylight again. We started having what we call "football numbers:" 80, 100, 150 years coming through 85 percent [time served, where prisoners knew they were] never going to see daylight again.

So this is where actually a lot of the problems started accumulating. And not only that, but actually education was removed by the prison system. Any type of Pell Grants, all that was gone. Education, technical colleges, everything was removed. So that's a little bit of a picture of what kind of started to shape the environment back here.

Jared : Thank you, so that changed obviously the overall conditions of how prisons across the country changed and sort of the hopelessness that set in. Can you talk to me a little bit though of some of the specific things that happened in South Carolina over the last couple of years?

D : And this is when the most sadistic mindsets start to set in. Prisoncrats… And I'm going to [let] the brother answer that one.

S: So for one, as the brother was just telling you with the "football numbers," prisoners got a lot of time to serve, but actually with nothing to do. When they took away all the privileges, they took away a lot of the programs. Stuff like that, it leads to just standing around with nothing to do, except to indulge in negative behavior, and reactionary behavior, and just all different forms of escapism--whatever they can do to pass the time.

They drug test you so they can take away your privileges. Why do they need drug testing inside the prisons? People are already in here doing time, it's irrelevant. I can see if somebody's getting ready to go home for parole or something like that and you're going to test them, but just to constantly test them, that's kind of like a waste of money. They always waste their funds on things they don't need to waste their funds on. [1]

We have no means of supporting ourselves because there's no state pay. Because we have no state pay, we have no way to eat. As the brother said, even though it was just a little bit of money, but it still was something. You still could buy some hygiene [products].

When they do lockdown, they're supposed to give you showers Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, whatever the lockdown be for. But they don't ever honor it. They want to do one cell at a time, and it'll take you a whole week before you get a shower. You have some prisons where the water system is messed up. Particularly at Lieber [Correctional Institute], their water system has been messed up forever. When you flush the toilet or pour your water, it smells like rotten eggs. They say it has sulfur in it or whatever, but it eats up the actual metal, and causes mold and stuff to be all over the prison. If they were to go do a tour through that prison right now, and they go all the way from the lock-up to the yard, the ceiling is falling in, metal hanging down, it's dripping all over the place, mold is all over the place, people who are in prison for 15-20 years are dying from cancer. But they don't have no cigarettes inside, you feel me?

We're confined to a cell a lot. They do a lot of counts and the counts always last for a long period of time. The purpose of counting is to make sure that we're here. In all reality, they should just count us and then let us back out for recreation. If you count from the time you eat dinner on a Friday night to your next meal on a Saturday, it's 17-18 hours before you get your next meal. And on the daily basis, you're talking about 12 to 13 hours from when you get your first meal to your next meal, that's almost like a half a day, that's a long time.

So you eat up all your [food purchased from the] canteen, which forces you to go the canteen and spend a lot of money on a bunch of a junk that they price gouge, that's super high, but this money is coming from their family members who are out there working hard to help support you as well.

D : One of the things that has not fully been addressed in South Carolina is the nature and culture of disrespect from the officers inside the South Carolina Department of Corrections, as well. They have completely in my eyes mastered the art of dehumanizing prisoners. Once again, we have to keep in mind they intentionally went into an overdrive of taking the prisoners clothes. Not only taking the prisoners clothes, cutting the prisoners hair the same way, had it to where you can't have your money in your pocket, just a number of things to take away your individuality. And in the process of taking away your individuality, they begin to treat you as if you were garbage. What I mean by treat you as garbage, just by dehumanizing us it makes it easier for them to abuse us, and this abuse a lot of times takes place as physical abuse.

We had in the Super Max Units out in Columbia, South Carolina maybe about a year or two ago, guards bumrush a prisoner inside his cell, stab him up. We've always had a number of incidents with regards to them cuffing prisoners, then cut prisoners up, slamming prisoners on their heads. In some cases we've had some mysterious deaths, some hangings that prisoners are clearly not comfortable with labelling them as hangings on these maximum security prisons.

We've also had incidents where prisoners, when he speaks of recreation, understand something about this recreation a lot of places and a lot of areas right now, prisoners are no longer getting rec at all. It's like every blue moon before we even see any sunlight or daylight to be able to get rec. What we are finding is that, that itself is causing a lot of attitude problems. A lot of aggressiveness.

When we talk about the food, we don't get any fruit, no real fruit anyway. At one time they actually had salad bars; they removed all of that over two decades ago. Now you get nothing. Some of the food is labeled "not for human consumption." So these are normal things that we are actually dealing with inside the prison system.

For visitation, there's no contact with your visitor, with your loved ones. One kiss in, one kiss out. Rather than a hug, sit down, embrace each other. Be in the comfort of each other's company. We're finding that is moving further and further away, and I'm very fearful that we're moving to the stage of video visits very soon, in the very near future.

Jared : Talk a little bit about the angle of this around technology. Bryan Stirling has been for at least a year now, probably more, he's been on this kick about getting cell phones out. You know there was this sort of fairly high profile escape less than a year ago, and they blamed cell phones for that. And they're also blaming this riot on cell phones. They're talking about phone jammers. So just talk a little bit about cell phones in relation to the prisons and what they mean or provide to prisoners and how realistic some of these narratives or fears that are being stated by SCDC are.

S : SCDC's main reason for not wanting the phones inside the prison system is because the phones got camera access, video access, and the phones can expose the things that they do. When they're using extreme force - the same way people are using cell phones out on the street when they're catching certain things that cops aren't supposed to be doing and stuff like that - see they can be exposed, they can't hide when we've got the phones.

The prisoners utilize the phones to communicate with their family members. The phone system that [SCDC has], the phone prices are entirely too high, nobody would use that. They get money off it, too, and everybody knows that. And prisoners use the phone as a means of staying connected to their families, fathers staying connected to their children. Some fathers back here are raising their children from prison by staying in contact with them. [2]

So SCDC just wants the phones out of the prisons because they don't want to be exposed. They don't want the videos of the fights and stabbings to be shown. There's other things prisoners are shooting videos of. They're showing videos of the brown water, they show videos of the mold inside the buildings. They show videos of the prisoners who've been dead in the bed for two hours and the guard ain't come and check on the man yet. So it's a fly on the wall for them, that's why they don't want them in here.

Jared : I've heard some reporting on how high the death numbers are from South Carolina over the past couple years, but I've also heard from some prisoners that they believe the death numbers are actually much higher than what's being reported. For example, I've had a prisoner tell me that, even though SCDC is officially stating death toll numbers in the teens over the last year, and these numbers are very high based on national averages, that the numbers are actually higher but they believe SCDC is only reporting certain kinds of deaths.

S : Yeah they are only reporting certain kinds of deaths, not including some deaths that they have caused themselves. And just to give you an example, they have a cell in the area they call the RHU (Restrictive Housing Unit) that's supposed to be the area they put people that get in trouble or whatever. And they've got a cell that's called a CI (Crisis Intervention) cell. That's where they strip you, make you get butt naked you got no clothes on, no nothing, and when they do bring you something, they'll bring you a suicide blanket only.

So you had a guy years ago, where he said he was going to kill himself, so they put him in the CI, so the guy told one of the Lieutenants later on that night he was cool. The Lieutenant gave the man a sheet and then they say the man hanged himself. That's what they said. But by policy and by rule, nobody is supposed to have [any] sheets in [any] CI cell and everybody know that, especially the Lieutenant, who's a supervisor. So that's their fault. He was a mentally ill patient. That's on them. So of course you know when they write it up, or they give the information to the public or his family, they [aren't telling those] people that.

D : Absolutely. I'd like to add to that as well. One of the reasons why the number is probably higher as well is they're dealing with medical neglect. So I'll give you an example. I saw a guy that fell out of his seat. And the guard looked over the guy, but the prisoner was the only one that responded and started to give the guy mouth to mouth resuscitation. Well, come to find out the guy who was giving him resuscitation, his face started turning blue. Five minutes later the nurse arrives, and they lean over and they tell the guy and tell the officer they'd been giving mouth-to-mouth the wrong way. I honestly sat there and saw them kill this man for that particular incident.

And we've also seen incidents where guys fall out, no medical treatment whatsoever. I consider those direct murders, as well, of the state. When staff are failing to respond or respond and say, "Oh, you're faking it, you're not having a heart attack," and you fall out and die right there. We saw that happen several times as well. So this also would account for why some of the prisoners would say that these numbers definitely would be higher, after they are witnessing some people being allowed to die, the way that they're being allowed to die.

If I can, I wanted to kind of backtrack on the question you asked earlier on cell phones.

Jared : Sure.

D : First things first, I always have to understand the basic fundamental nature of today's prison system throughout this nation is slavery. We understand that it's based on the 13th Amendment of the United States constitution, we can't get around that. There's a profit business, so it's all about profit, it's about the profit margin. That's what fuels the numbers in the prisons across this nation. It's no different in the state of South Carolina.

Technology, with prisoners having access to communication, the phone business has lost billions literally, in this state right here alone. Billions! They have put in certain rooms in here, they've put these machines in called kiosks, they are getting no play. This is where you're supposed to be able to send out literally something like text messages to your people. They thought this was going to be a booming industry, nobody is using it. This is a loss of revenue.

We have these same phone companies that are investing in the department of corrections, literally for free, giving them equipment to find cell phones. Giving them equipment to search our families at the front gate when they come in to visit us, giving them equipment to monitor the gate areas. So they're giving them this. This wasn't just a free handout, but this was because [they] need to make money, [they] need to get these phones out of the system. That has always been understood.

Even now, I'm hearing that, even with the jamming equipment that Bryan Stirling is requesting and supposed to have a hold of for Lee County right now, I think the company is called "Tech something," I'm not really sure exactly, but my understanding is that the parent company is GTL.

Jared : I heard that rumor as well.

D : So, I have to do my research on that, [but] this is definitely what I'm hearing. This is all about business, this is all about money. The minute they can wipe out, it's like using one stone to kill two birds at the same time. You kill that communication gap, that gap where they've been reporting on, because most of the time, when they come out with a lot of frivolous things, it's immediately refuted by us, by some pictures or some videos or something. Saying, "No, this is what happened." This is unusual. This is something that's very revolutionary, [a] very new generation in the prison system. They are not used to that; they had all communications with media locked down.

Keep in mind, SCDC has a policy where we are not allowed to converse with the media unless it's authorized by the South Carolina Department of Corrections. And I have a big beef with that.

Jared : Absolutely. So let's pivot a little bit because there's a lot of talk right now about violence. So there's a couple of questions I wanted to ask related to that. One is, what do you all see as the source of violence within prisons? And then the other one is about gangs and this idea - because I think that people don't really think about this very thoroughly - about why someone might join a gang in prison and why they might be even more likely to join one in prison versus when they're out on the outside?

E : I would have to say dealing with the gangs… Well, I'm going to start first with what the brother asked about what stimulates the violence. Me personally, I feel that the violence is stimulated by the overt oppressive nature of the beast and what they're doing. Like y'all already had mentioned, they're constantly taking [things] away and keeping us confined to a box. And you take three or four different tribes, who normally may get along, or see eye-to-eye on a business level or whatever the terms may be, but you put them in a box and you don't separate them or give them anything to be… So you may know that this area may be predominantly this culture, or that area may be predominantly that culture, but I'm going to take them all and mix them up, just so I can make it confusing. Because to me, it seems like they stir the violence up because that's the type of media they need to put their spin on things.

Then it goes back to the [cell phones], and we come and tell the truth on the fact and that's a problem for them, because they're going to say [the violence] is because of a cell phone, or it's because of this and that. They're not going to sit there and tell you it's because [they] keep oppressing us, and taking away from us, and not giving us any outlets to do and be about positive things. [3]

Nowadays, you got the tribes, or the "gangs" as some may say, coming up with positive ideas to do and bring together and unify, despite what the police or the officers are doing. They're steady trying to take away all our hope, but we still got brothers and organizations coming together, still trying to rectify unity on a level where we don't even have nothing to look forward to. So you can only imagine how discouraging it gets when it's like we're striving to do so much better and so much greater but we're still getting a foot on our neck. Me personally, that can ignite [drama] any time, any place, on the street, in the penitentiary, wherever.

So I have to say, it's incited by them, themselves. I feel like they feel like, if enough violence goes on, they can put their spin on it and they can basically - like my comrade said - bring lock-up to the yard. They keep us locked down for nothing. Every little thing, they blame it on [staff shortages]. They don't give us showers, they blame it on [staff shortages].

If an incident goes on, there's no officers there to protect anybody. That's another thing about the gangs. Nowadays, you don't know, these young brothers might need protection. They can't look at the officers and say these officers are going to protect me and keep me safe. It ain't no such thing as that. You gotta fend for yourself back here. So I look at that, that's another reason why people are joining these gangs like that. Not everyone, but you can only imagine, you've got kids coming back here 16, 17, have nobody. You're throwing them in here with [prisoners] in a maximum security prison with a 100 year [sentences]. You're going to have to have somebody or some type of way to get around. Or some people just lose hope and just fall by the wayside, and just do whatever they've got to do to get through, but you got some people that try. And to me, it's like sometimes the gangs [are] a better outlet for them, because then they don't have to worry about people taking advantage of them.

Because like I said, it's fend for yourself back here. It ain't like it used to be where you had enough officers and stuff. [Back then], something might pop off, it might go down, and it gets broken up and under control. Nah, now the officers are running the opposite way.

You might try to escape from being hurt, they'll lock you on the wings and cause your death. That's exactly why they're trying to take these phones, because we're the ones who are putting that out there and letting people know this is what they're doing. This man live could've been saved, but the officers didn't do their job.

S : People aren't born criminals. They are criminalized by the environments they are socialized within. United States Constitution's 13th Amendment is proof alone that the mass amount of the warehousing of prisoners is not by accident. And even prisoners convicted of violent crime or who may be involved in violent activities, they may one day return to society still. People's cases can be overturned, some of these guys got max-out dates, some may make parole. So wouldn't it be wise for them to be implementing programs that would better the prisoners, not make them worse? They should want to heal anything that they consider to be sick or whatever.

Society itself promotes and produces violence. People ain't getting like that in prison, they're already like that out there. [4] Television, movies, video games, comic books, novels, cartoons alone. They are indoctrinating this psychological behavior. They're doing that out there in society.

Like the brother said, some of these guys that are locked-up in here are juveniles. That's a learned behavior, they weren't born violent. And in regards to the survival thing, we create our own means of survival, because the state don't provide us with adequate supplies of anything. They give us one roll of tissue a week. One roll a week, that's it. It's 15-18 hours between meals in here sometimes. That's just reality.

Only prison industries workers get paid for working. Everybody else's work is free labor. But we're looking at these other prisoners going to work, knowing that they're getting a paycheck, they even file taxes. They can pay child support and provide for their families on it. All prisoners should get paid for all work, not just prison industries.

They're making millions of dollars off federal prisoners and state prisoners across the country through prison industries. That's facts.

D: Very true. Most prisoners, when they come to prison, come with the mindset that they want to get themselves together, and I think a lot of people miss that right there. Even the ones that are labeled violent--and when I hear people say "violent," we have to be careful with that term. Because a lot of times people are using this term "violent," and we're seeing politicians saying "well, we're not going to be supporting violent offenders." It's a new theme now, where we just promote policies [that benefit] non-violent offenders. And that kind of sickens me because, at the end of the day, who determines what's violent? Who determines what's a violent offender? To me, that's a bunch of people making up these laws, and they determine what's violent and what is not. And a lot of times people have non-violent offenses and these are straight up violent offenses in my eyes. You know, so I'm very careful with that term non-violent versus violent offenders.

The people that they want to categorize and label as violent offenders for the most part, these brothers and the women that come into prison, they come in with the mindset that they want to do the right thing. I think the minute they enter through those gates, and the minute they begin to observe their surroundings, they begin to recognize immediately, that any change they wanted to do, they don't need to do it, because they're going to be perceived a certain way and they're going to be handled a certain way, you know, and it's going to be a lose-lose situation for them. And people have to really understand that humans are entering through these gates and becoming prisoners, and in the process of that, the environment back here is making it worse. It is creating something in these prisoners that is a lot worse than when they came in for a lot of these guys and women.

Because, once again, they may have done some terrible things out there, but for the most part, when they start going through and they recognize the days ahead of them, they want to change, they want to do something different. Hell, I know I was about that when I came in here until I went through the reception and evaluation center, and saw it wasn't going to work out that way.

That is another reason why some people want to group up. Some people want family back here as well. I like to call them street formations [as opposed to using the term gang]. A lot of times, people need someone that can look out and care for their best interests, too. Not just in the protection role, but also somebody that gives a damn, because the system is so cold. So when you're sitting back here, and you're drinking, you're smoking, you're dabbing, you're talking about your loved ones with your homeboy there, that's a different feeling versus when you can get outside that cell and you're looking at the prison itself, and the environment itself, which is a cold place.

So everybody looks for some sense of comfort, some sense of love, which is another reason I think the prison system eliminating our contacts, our family ties, is really detrimental to prisoners re-entering society successfully, but that's another subject.

S: Let me do a quick rebuttal on what he said on the non-violent versus violent offenders, because I like what he said. Out there in society, when they're talking about what people are incarcerated for--like if somebody is convicted for murder--that's considered to be a violent offense. But that could've been a first time offense. And then he comes to prison, he's been in prison for fifteen years, and he ain't never had another violent offense on his record, he ain't never had a violent offense in prison, he's not involved in any violent activity [on the inside], so why is he still considered to be a violent person? Just because he's got a violent charge on his record, that don't mean that he's indulging in violent activities. Because sometimes, the people in prison that have non-violent charges, sometimes they're the ones involved in violent activities back here.

Jared: Lee Correctional Facility is named after the county, Lee County. And that county is named after Robert E. Lee. So you have a Confederate General and a former slave owner and you have a facility that is in his name, that really, as you all have mentioned, really carries on that same tradition into 2018. To what degree do you think this registers with prisoners? What does it mean to prisoners that make that connection?

D: And when did Lee open up, 1994?

Jared: Yeah in that era. [3] And just to give a little more context, the county was first named Lee County in the 1890's after Reconstruction had ended.

S: My only response to that is that the prisoners, who were probably from the Bishopville area who may have had that information through the educational system, or conscious prisoners who read and research things--those prisoners might be aware of that, but for the vast majority of prisoners, that don't have any significance to them because most of them are not aware of that.

D: I would have to second that. I don't think prisoners for the most part have any awareness of that. Matter of fact, to be honest with you, as much reading as I have done, as much cultural reading as I have done, I was very ignorant of that up until very recently, up until the last several weeks. I just learned this information.

As far as the effect, I can tell you for me, personally, it says something about progress and where we were at mentally. When this prison came about, I think between '92 and '94, for you to still name a prison after that during that time period... Although, don't get it wrong, we all know a prison is nothing more than a modern day plantation. So we understand that fact, so really it's quite fitting. But still, it would seem you wouldn't want to name one of your state institutions after this right here. It seems like someone would raise their hand and say, "No."

I think that also tells me, as a Black man, how conditioned a lot of Black people are around in these southern areas as well. Because I'm sure that they knew what the Lee County name stood for, what the name represented. The ones that voted in this particular institution in that area, the ones that were saying it would hold this name, they knew, and they didn't say anything.

This is the type of mindset we're dealing with in the state of South Carolina today, which is why I'm constantly reminding people we have the highest rate as it relates to racial disparities in the nation. We are in the top six or seven states as far as racial disparities as it relates to sentencing and imprisonment rates in the nation. I think we're only like 20-30 percent of the population in South Carolina [4] and over 60-something percent of the prison population. [5]

They did a recent study not too long ago that told us that Black people specifically were being automatically over-sentenced by judges. It said if you were Black, you were 50 times more likely to get jail time for a minor offense versus if you were any other race. If you were compared to white defendants, you were over 70 percent more likely to be sentenced to longer sentences, based on your race. [6] Everybody knows the color of the state of South Carolina when you walk into the prison system. [5] I think all of this is an indicator of the nature of the beast that we are dealing with.

And I have to note that, even when South Carolina was going through their Reconstruction phase, all of these same Blacks that were a part of the Reconstruction phase were eventually thrown out of power, and that's because there was a compromise between the North and the South. And we have to always remember that right there. That's when we get back to 1865, that's when we get back to the 13th Amendment, that constitutional amendment and the compromise that was reached across the table. The power dynamics in the South has never changed. And I think we're seeing the rottenness of it in today's times. That's why I think we're seeing these extreme responses, these extreme reactions in the prison systems throughout these southern states.

S: Every time prisoners do strive to organize, to come together to make things better for themselves, the administration really doesn't give you much support or they attack you. For example, one of my comrades, he recently had been released from prison over the last year or so. He was housed at Lee County at one point and he was a coordinator on the compound.

He was able to organize over 150 members every week to come together positively, sit down and have discussions, and things of that nature. Whenever there would be any type of altercations or whatever, they would try to talk over things first and most often if they couldn't, then they would handle it like men and knuckle it up. But there wasn't so much knives, and people getting killed or stabbed up. All of that was calmed down for a while. So you had the STG (Security Threat Group) supervisor from headquarters and he got with the warden at that time, and they called him to a conference and they wanted him to explain to them how is it that you could have Crips, Bloods, Muslims, etc., in the same room every week and there's never any violence going on? The [STG] told [the warden] that [the prisoners] were up to something, that's how they felt. And what did they do to [the prisoner coordinating the program]? They shipped him to another institution.

When they moved him to another institution, they started to do things on the Lee County yard from a program perspective. To make a long story short, [the coordinator] was eventually sent home. While he went home, now you had other things popping off at other yards, who didn't have these types of positive things going on. They moved these guys around, piled all these guys up on one yard, all on one side, waited for one thing to happen. Boom! You get the worst thing that happened in the last 25 years. That was strategically implemented.

D: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that's very important to note that, back to Lee County very briefly, that all of this right here is not by accident. None of it is by accident. That's the sad part about it. [6]

S: Yeah, they were used as lab rats. One more thing with regards to laws and stuff like that: a lot of times in South Carolina, people get convicted unjustly. And whenever somebody discovers that--and it's something that affects a lot of prisoners--and they put it into the courthouse and they pass a law or something on it, and they know they've done a lot of wrong to a lot of people, but what they'll do is they'll slide a word in it so that [it doesn't take effect] retroactively. Because if they had to [implement it] retroactively, they'd have to let a lot of people go, because they convicted a lot of people unjustly. They've been doing that for the longest.

Jared: So I want to give you all an opportunity to talk about change. What changes would you like to see in the prison system? What changes do you think could improve the situation? And then the second part of that is, what would you like to see people on the outside do to support? But let's start with the first part.

D: So what changes would we like to see in the prison system?

Jared: Yeah. I know some of you are abolitionists, but what can be done for immediate needs in terms of reforms.

D: Yeah, I'm always thinking about it as a dismantling process. I've been trying to push that for a while. We call it a dismantling process. And that gives the opportunity for other people to get in with their reform ideas, because I don't think we can go from one angle all the way to the other angle, like from zero to a hundred, it's just not going to happen like that. It is not going to play out like that.

Nonetheless, some of the things that I feel can actually improve. Improvement. First and foremost, sentencing. Sentencing reform in the state of South Carolina. It's not just sentencing reform in the state of South Carolina, it's actually sentencing reform across the nation. They need to get rid of that Truth-In-Sentencing deal, period.

We need an end of dehumanizing conditions, and that means food improvement. We need open yards again, not just enclosed rec yards, we need these open rec yards again, where prisoners can move. We need prisoners to start being treated like humans. We need more rights to our visits. We need education programs, I'm a big one on education programs, in particular Pell Grants, there's some other names, they need to be brought back to the prison systems again.

Not only that, but what the state of South Carolina did as the prison population fell they--instead of closing down the maximum security prisons, they closed down their work releases. We need work releases re-opened back up and expanded. Then we need one last thing: we need pay. We need prisoners to be able to be paid for their labor. If you're doing general labor, you need to be able to be paid for that labor, just the way it comes in at ending prison slavery. We need to end prison slavery, which I think is a trigger toward abolitionist work. But nonetheless, we need to end prison slavery to bring back a lot of these prisoners getting paid their wages. So I think those are immediate things that can be improved on. Was there another question beyond that?

Jared: The second question was, what can people on the outside do that actually care about the situation, care about the conditions of prisoners, care about what's going on in South Carolina?

D: On the outside right now, one of the biggest things we're moving into in particular in Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, we need to move into becoming more involved in the electoral process, in particular local politics. We need to become more involved in that. We're hoping that our loved ones outside that support us, we need to organize more ground support as it relates to prisons. We need to see more protests, we need to see more meetings with these directors, we need to see more organizing at state capitols. We need to see more support of what has already been initiated on the ground in the state of South Carolina.

We need to figure out how to get our local county jails and get people who are detained there registered to vote, and get the voting machines into these county jails, and get these prisoners the ability that they can have the vote. The problem with state of South Carolina is it's a good-old-boy system, and we need to change the face of it. And the only way we're going to be able to change it is we have to get more involved in the electoral process, but not just voting for a Democrat or Republican or Independent or whatever, but voting for people that have prisoner's best interests. [7] Every group of people have interests and we have to find people that have our interests at heart.

E: I really agree with what D said, that's all I was really going to say, really, about sentencing reform, more programs, even the better nutrition, and rec, let us get some physical exercise and more education.

S: I think we also need an outside grievance system. Because the grievance system is definitely not fair or impartial back here. The same people that work for the prison are the same people who are deciding if we should get results or not from our grievances. Everything else I think the brother already covered. But I also want to say for society, to them let he who has not sinned cast the first stone. Prisoners, some of us in here, have made mistakes and some of us did the things we did, but we made mistakes. But we have paid for our mistakes. Show some humanity. That's what we want society to do is show some humanity.

D: One last note that I wanted to add, the ground is vibrating right now for a national strike August 21st throughout the nation. We have a number of states that are already vowing to participate in this national strike, particularly in support of the state of South Carolina and the recent issues that just happened. They say South Carolina is an example of what's actually occurring throughout the nation. It just so happened that these particular people died here [at Lee Correctional] so they want to get in the back of this right here and they want to highlight it by mobilizing throughout the inside.

So we can ask those folks to support it on the outside, we need to support it on the outside to really support these actions. Let the people know that wherever prisoners may decide to have a strike or a sit in that the public is mindful and they are watching for any type of retaliatory actions that may take place throughout the process of this resistance that may be taking place across this nation, on August 21st.

Jared: Great, absolutely, is there anything else anyone wants to add about Lee or any of the other points where we might have missed something?

E: I would just like to add that in the aftermath of the incident that happened over at Lee, and all over the state, we're being massively punished. No showers, power is being cut off all this time, we've been locked down for a week, almost going on two weeks, and we've only had one shower and that was like, they cut the hot water off. What type of inhumane thing is that?

Jared: Are there other conditions you want people to know about since the incident at Lee that haven't been addressed?

S: One of the things is they have the metal plates on the window where you can't see outside, you can't see the sunlight, you can't see the grass or the daylight. They got it sealed out where you can't get no oxygen through it, the ventilation is all messed up, these are things that they just recently did. They're putting flaps on the doors so you can just slide the meal through it. They are animalizing the prisoners.

Jared Ware is a freelance writer and advocate for the rights of incarcerated peoples. He is also the producer of the prison abolitionist podcast Beyond Prisons, and co-host and co-producer of the anti-capitalist podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.

Notes

[1] Truth In Sentencing Laws were part of a national movement in the mid-nineties to end parole and increase the length of prison sentences, as well as ensuring that offenders for certain offenses served at least 85% of their sentences. Although it was a national movement, here are some details about South Carolina's laws: http://www.ncrp.info/StateFactSheets.aspx?state=SC

[2] According to Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, "state pay" was a system where the state paid every prisoner, for example, $5.45 an hour for up to 18 hours every two weeks. It was enough to buy real hygiene products, a few snacks, and smokes. Prison officials took it away during the national changes that were rolled out in the mid-nineties.

[3] It opened up in 1993 according to SCDC http://www.doc.sc.gov/institutions/lee.html

[4] 27.5% according to the most recent US Census https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/SC/PST045216

[5] Black people represent 62% of the prison population in South Carolina, despite representing roughly 28% of the state population.

[6] This may not be the study D is referencing, but here is a study that talks about disparities in sentencing in South Carolina and other states: http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/The-Color-of-Justice-Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparity-in-State-Prisons.pdf

A Liberation Theology as Black as Malcolm X: The Uncompromising Vision of James Cone

By Ewuare X. Osayande

"If the church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms. It must become prophetic, demanding a radical change in the interlocking structures of this society." So begins what is one of the most controversial and consequential works of theology in the history of the United States. Black Theology and Black Power stands as a work of theological passion that sought to break the stronghold of white supremacy that lies at the foundation of the ivory towers of Christian thought. From this theological torrent would emerge an entire new canon of theological interpretation of the Christian message in the modern world.

A work wrought against the backdrop of Black rebellions across America in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, Cone's Black Theology and Black Power gave theological voice and justification for the rage that marked the Black liberation movement at that time. A new testament from one of our own. Who never denied us. Who never betrayed us to his last breath. As King himself said, "A riot is the language of the unheard," Cone's tome was a wake-up call that was received by a slumbering Christian church as a slap in the face. Cone channeled every ounce of anger and communal pain experienced by Black America and called for atonement on the part of a white Church establishment whose theology justified slavery, made peace with segregation and rendered Black people an aberration of God's creation. His challenge was clear. His charge unequivocal. Cone dared declare that "in twentieth-century America, Christ means Black Power."

As one would suspect, Dr. King loomed large in Cone's theology. But for Cone, it was Malcolm that made his theology Black. And Cone further stated that it was Malcolm's "angry voice that shook [him] out of [his] theological complacency." And like Malcolm, Cone had little patience for Black apologists for white liberal appeals for reconciliation. According to Cone, "black people cannot talk about the possibilities of reconciliation until full emancipation has become a reality for all black people." But Cone didn't stop there. He went on to offer a radical reinterpretation of reconciliation as an experience of Black people being reconciled to an acceptance of our Blackness as made in the image of God and a shedding of the shame that has been imposed on us by a racist society that would address us as "some grease-painted form of white humanity."

Cone's first articulation of Black theology was not without its holes, gaps and outright contradictions. But, unlike, the white theologians he challenged, Cone was open and receptive to the challenges of his peers and students as they helped him hone his theological outlook into one that would come to move beyond the strict confines of a Black nationalism that was male dominant, homophobic, classist and US-centered. The debates that followed would usher forth a host of Black and Third World theologies that, together, would be united in two volumes of works Cone co-edited with his long-time friend and comrade Gayraud Wilmore.

One of the most critical and prophetic essays collected within those pages that would aid in the development of Black Feminist and Womanist theologies was Jacequlyn Grant's "Black Theology and the Black Woman." She targeted the issue squarely, "In examining Black Theology it is necessary to make one of two assumptions: (1) either Black women have no place in the enterprise, or (2) Black men are capable of speaking for us. Both of these assumptions are false and need to be discarded." Later, she concluded, "The failure of the Black Church and Black Theology to proclaim explicitly the liberation of Black women indicates that they cannot claim to be agents of divine liberation. If the theology, like the church, has no word for Black women, its conception of liberation is inauthentic."

Cone came to terms with this prophetic indictment when, writing in the Preface to the 1989 Edition of the book, he confessed:

"An example of the weakness of the 1960s black freedom movement, as defined by Black Theology and Black Power, was its complete blindness to the problem of sexism, especially in the black church community. When I read the book today, I am embarrassed by its sexist language and patriarchal perspective. There is not even one reference to a woman in the whole book! With black women playing such a dominant role in the African American liberation struggle, past and present, how could I have been so blind?"

He went on to discuss his temptation to rid the 1989 edition of the book of its sexist language and add references to women that are missing in the original edit. He would leave it as it was stating that, "It is easy to change the language of oppression without changing the sociopolitical situation of its victims. I know existentially what this means from the vantage point of racism."

Cone's desire to change the sociopolitical situation was evident in his sustained commitment to being in conversation with other Black theologians invested in the project of developing a Black Theology that spoke to the aspirations of all Black people to be free, not only from white supremacy, but from the oppressions that plagued the Black community from within as well.

In addition to Black Feminist and Womanist theologies, Black queer theologies would also emerge during this period as a criticism of the entrenched forms of homophobia that remain embedded in many Black churches and Black communities. Speaking about the radical inclusivity of an "in-the-life" theology of liberation in the second volume of Black Theology: A Documented History, Elias Faraje-Jones clarifies that "an in-the-life theology of liberation would be one that grows out of the experiences, lives, and struggles against oppression and dehumanization of those in-the-life. It understands our struggle for liberation as being inextricably bound with those of oppressed peoples throughout the world, as we all struggle against racism, classism, imperialism, sexism, ableism, and all other forms of oppression. Such a theology also offers to other theologies a liberation from the strictures of homophobia/biphobia, as well as liberation from heterosexism which creates the climate for homophobia/biphobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual, and by its display of power and privilege."

These Black theologies are, in themselves, an expression of the undying will of Black people to be free by any means necessary. The very expression "Black Lives Matter" that has captured the imagination of organized Black struggle all over the world is - in itself - a theological statement that is as poignant and prophetic as any text written since Cone first penned Black Theology and Black Power. Written on the bodies of Black people marching in the streets, it is stating unequivocally that Black existence is sacred and complete and whole without need for apology or compromise in the face of a white supremacist assault that continues with renewed vigor and violence. It is the fundamental theological text written on the dark-hued faces of unarmed Black youth staring into the blue wall of violence. They come untutored in the Testaments. Yet, no Bible required to show what must be done. Here Cone's Black Theology is born anew in their defiance to injustice; their self-love and love for the living and the dead. With arms outstretched in a show of surrender. But not to the authority of this land. They walk in the valleys of death, fearing no evil. Unintimidated. Undaunted. Undeterred. As Gospel as it gets.

The promise of Black Liberation Theology lies in its potential to awaken churched Black people in the same way that Malcolm's rhetoric shook Cone out of his slumber to an awareness of the need for revolutionary struggle against the forces of white supremacy. The promise of Black Theology uncompromised by a Black church operating within the dogmatic confines of middle class aspirations or stuck within the ideological blinders of a Black intellectual class more concerned with dissertations and divinity degrees is the development of a theology that presents itself as a challenge to the very foundations of the system of capitalism that is profiting from and predicated upon the exploitation of Black people worldwide. If Black Liberation Theology is to have a future, it will be found here.

As the spiritual forebearers of Cone's Black Theology, Dr. King and Malcolm X both would come to this understanding in the final year of their lives. In his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," King makes the clear the relationship of racism to the global structures of economic inequality:

"… the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Malcolm, for his part, also was in the process of making clear connection between racism and capitalism. In an interview conducted shortly before his death Malcolm says, "… all of the countries emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don't think it's an accident. Most of the countries that were colonial powers were capitalist countries, and the last bulwark of capitalism today is America. It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."

Cone, himself, articulated the need for a deeper understanding of socialism, indicating his disbelief that capitalism could solve the problems Black people experience in the United States. At a seminar addressing "Religion, Socialism and the Black Experience" in 1980, Cone said the following, "Although the socialist tradition among Black church people is small, it is still present and we black theologians and historians should rediscover it in order to enhance our vision of liberation." He goes on to state, "The Black Church cannot simply continue to ignore socialism as an alternative social arrangement. We cannot continue to speak against racism without any reference to a radical change in the economic order. I do not think that racism can be eliminated as long as capitalism remains intact. It is now time for us to investigate socialism as an alternative to capitalism."

Cone is envisioning a Black Theology that is truly revolutionary in that it is committed to the restructuring of the very socioeconomic order that profits from the oppression that Black people have faced since those first Africans were sold as property on the shores of the colony of Virginia. Such a Black Theology is most necessary if it is to take seriously the work of Black liberation today.

Such a Black Theology can no longer be confined to the white-funded walls of academic conferences. It can no longer just write or preach about the problems of the poor. It can no longer be a Black Theology that, like white theology, appeases the Black poor with neoliberal acts of charity and affirms philanthropy and mission as the Gospel's answer. It must become a Black Theology that is responsive to and affirming of Black workers and the Black poor marching not just in the streets of Ferguson and Flint in the United States, but those in the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of Soweto. As Cone asserts in God of the Oppressed, "… who Jesus Christ is for us today is connected with the divine future as disclosed in the liberation fight of the poor. When connected with the person of Jesus, hope is not an intellectual idea; rather, it is the praxis of freedom in the oppressed community."

In the last years of his life, James Cone said it was the cry of Black blood that called out to him as he wrote Black Theology and Black Power. That cry of Black blood has only grown louder and more insistent in recent years as the bruised bodies of Civil Rights activists at the bully clubbed hands of a Bull Connor have been replaced with the bullet-ridden bodies of random Black people murdered by police across this nation. Like Malcolm before him, Cone's criticism was not only reserved for the white Christian church and white society at-large. That cry of Black blood urged him to call out the contradictions of a Black church that is all too often reluctant to defend the defenseless.

"The black church must ask about its function amid the rebellion of black people in America. Where does it stand? If it is to be relevant, it must no longer admonish its people to be 'nice' to white society. It cannot condemn the rioters. It must make an unqualified identification with the 'looters' and 'rioters,' recognizing that this stance leads to condemnation by the state as law-breakers. There is no place for 'nice Negroes' who are so distorted by white values that they regard laws as more sacred than human life. There is no place for those who deplore black violence and overlook the daily violence of whites."

That question posed fifty years ago has now become a condemnation of a Black Church establishment that has grown sinfully silent in the face of the wholesale state-sanctioned slaughter of Black youth. That condemnation is echoed in the sound of Black youth leading themselves in a confrontation with the American Empire. By the multitudes, in the streets across this nation and around the world, there is a generation of Black people that are the living, breathing embodiment of Cone's Black Liberation Theology who are saying with their feet what Malcolm made plain: "I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion."

The crisis of Black survival in a world run over by a white supremacist order, in a country led by the likes of an ungodly crypto-fascist capitalist, cannot be overstated. Such should become the challenge and inspiration for advancing a Black Liberation Theology that is wholly Black in all the expressions of our shared humanity and determination to be free. A Black Theology as uncompromisingly Black as Malcolm. A Black Theology as courageously Black as Fannie Lou. A Black Theology as Black in aspiration and articulation as the Black working class that gave birth to them both.

Ewuare X. Osayande is an activist, essayist and author of several books including 'Whose America?: New and Selected Poems' and 'Commemorating King: Speeches Honoring the Civil Rights Movement.' Learn more about his work at Osayande.org.

Structural Oppression, White-Male Terror, and a Few Words on Violence

By Mimi Soltysik and Colin Jenkins

We recently saw a meme on social media that stated the following:

"There can be no 'unprovoked' violence against a Nazi. The sole aim and focus of their philosophical existence is violence. If you take up that identity, you've already declared violent intent. Anything done in response is just varying levels on self-defense."

We think it's reasonable to take this a step further and include anyone who advocates for inherently racist/oppressive systems/structures. That support for inherently racist/oppressive systems/structures means people will suffer. Many have and will die as a result of that support. There can be little appeal for justice in a system that's flawed by design, that's inherently oppressive by design.

Violence is endemic in the United States because it is structural. We are all born into this violently oppressive society that is shaped by multiple, interconnecting systems: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, xenophobia, gender-normativity, and ableism. Some of these systems are intentional, and some are residual. For instance, capitalism creates and maintains strict class divisions in a very deliberate way, which in turn creates corollary systems of control (dictatorship of capital, militarized police, ICE) and residual systems of cultural oppression (misogyny, racism, homophobia, ableism). All of these systems interact to produce societal norms which are inherently oppressive and violent.

Structural violence is insidious because it is hidden beneath the surface, embedded in the systems that dictate our everyday lives. The violence is inherent in the forceful obstruction or dispossession of human dignity, autonomy, and self-determination. The systemic obstruction of basic needs (capitalism), such as food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and education, is violent. The systematic targeting of Black and Brown lives (white supremacy), which manifests itself in daily extrajudicial killings of people of color by police and violent interventions and extractions carried out by ICE, is extremely violent. The dehumanization of transgendered folks (gender-normativity) is violent. The vitriol and hatred directed against women (patriarchy and misogyny) is violent. The underlying assumption that our value as human beings is based in what kind of productivity we can offer to the capitalist system (ableism) is violent. The proliferation of global wars and destruction (imperialism) is obviously violent. As an all-encompassing and all-consuming society of violence, the United States and its structures are designed to maintain hegemony and control.

In a 2017 piece, Devyn Springer and Joel Northam break down this layered process:

"As we unmask the US's hegemonic power, we find that it is maintained not only through sheer violent exploitation, but through perpetuating powerfully constructed western-centric epistemology as well. Within this epistemology, or societal perception of truth, validity, and opinion, the concept of 'violence' is constructed at a young age to be something always done unto the US and never perpetuated by the US. The US would not paint itself as an aggressor in any instance, presenting subjects like slavery, colonialism, and foreign regime changes through a lens of benevolence rather than the actual violence they represent. The ways the US crafts the narratives surrounding its history of enslaving Africans, for example, shows terms like 'worker' and 'laborer' often put in place of 'slave' or even 'enslaved African' in state-funded textbooks.

Another example of this crafting of narratives is the legacy of the Black Panther Party, which has been popularly referred to as an 'anti-white terrorist group' (shout out to Tomi Lahren) and compared to the KKK, even though all facts show this is far from where their actual legacy should be. This is an act of crafting a specific epistemology, one that projects a sense of benevolence and lack of responsibility onto the US legacy."

This breakdown is important because it not only exposes the complex process of legitimizing systemic violence, but also illustrates how struggles against this inherently oppressive system (like in the case of the original Black Panther Party) are so easily (and incorrectly) demonized. Under this sophisticated trickery, oppression and dominance from above is painted as the righteous state of things, while resistance from below is labeled "terroristic" or "immoral" or "illegal."

Both conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, work in tandem to legitimize this control from above.

An interesting element that springs from this structural violence comes from within the population at-large, both organically and through indirect support from these systems. The residual systems of cultural oppression, while shaped from the top, are essentially maintained through the formation of fascistic tendencies. These tendencies develop from the bottom as means to empower those who are structurally powerless.

In the United States, this development is most noticeable among white men. While white-male terroristic hate has been a staple of American society since its beginning, it has become especially apparent as both a reaction to the political ascendency of Barack Obama and a component of the political rise of Donald Trump.

It's 2018. The socio-political landscape is evolving. This month, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) referenced a recent report by South Asian Americans Leading Together detailing a rise in hate-inspired violence tied to the 2016 elections. The SPLC recently reported that the number of hate groups in the US has grown by 20 percent since 2014, and "more than 950 hate groups operated in the country last year, with the majority focused on white supremacy." Basic observations confirm this, with torch-bearing neo-Nazis making their presence known, so-called "alt-right" groups forming throughout the country, white-supremacist groups coming out of the woodwork, and numerous instances of white-male terrorism, including public shootings and knife attacks specifically targeting Black citizens, a recent string of mail bombs in Austin, Texas, and yet another mass shooting in a long line of mass shootings, this time at a Waffle House restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee.

Responding to both the structural violence stemming from systems and the internal violence stemming from fascism and white-male terrorism is crucial. While they both operate on separate fronts, they indirectly support one another in many ways. The overlap between police agencies and white supremacists is indicative of this on a cultural level, and the hesitation of our legal systems and media to address white-male terrorism is indicative on a systemic level.

Social justice work is multi-pronged and must be carried out by the Left. Fighting violent and oppressive systems through defensive-violence is not only a basic human right, it is often imperative for survival. Those who are backed into a corner cannot merely sit down and hope for the best, especially when those who have backed them into the corner have exhibited such vile levels of hate and disregard for human life. Instead, survival dictates that we start swinging. Or, at the very least, develop the means and propensity to respond with equal or greater force. We don't see what we are suggesting as advocacy for violence. We see this as a rational response to grand-scale violence. A response that may be necessary to preserve life while working to establish peace and justice.

This commentary originally appeared at The Socialist .

Colin Jenkins is founder and Social Economics Department chair at the Hampton Institute, a working-class think tank. He is also a member of the Socialist Party USA, Industrial Workers of the World, and General Defense Committee.

Mimi Soltysik is a member of the Socialist Party Los Angeles Local, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the Coalition for Peace, Revolution, and Social Justice, and is the educator at the Maggie Phair Institute. He was the Socialist Party USA's 2016 presidential nominee and ran for California State Assembly in 2014.

The White Noise of Forgetfulness: How Imperialism and Racism Remain Central to Capitalism

By Steven L. Foster

Michael Corleone in the The Godfather II (1974) is son of the Godfather seeking legitimacy for the family's amassed Mafia fortune. It was attained by violent extortion from those considered more vulnerable and lesser people, through mass murder, general mayhem supporting groveling servitude, sexual slavery, and other gruesome activities. The money needed protection and cleansing, so Michael invested it into enterprises respected by the business community. The fortune was placed into legal gambling in Las Vegas because there's nothing more respected in capitalism than gambling against money tendered by other people. He achieved a veneer of acceptability.

He accomplished this by working with high level politicians while gaining respect from prominent members of the community. Even the church hierarchy paid him homage. Yet, while his son (and heir) was being baptized, the real ways the family gained wealth was busily doing what they do; murder and mayhem by systematically eliminating any, and all, potential rivals. Terrified fear as respect was always legitimacy to Mafioso. When questioned before the Congressional committee investigating him, he tells a story wholly unrelated to the truth, and may have even been convinced of his own confabulatory history.

Confabulation is a psychological term where historical recollections leave out important details, while making things up and twisting meanings placating personality dysfunctions-like narcissistic disorders. Argentinian born scholar, Enrique Dussel, has applied the term to western ways of narrating history.

The west has forgotten important details of an inordinately violent imperialist past supporting capitalism and central for making formerly marginal world cultures fabulously rich and globally dominating to this day. When the topic of imperialism is discussed, it's often treated as an artifact from an unfortunate past. Or, it recasts itself as the beneficent patron without which all of humanity would be in a far worse place had it not arrived. It's been deemed as socially evolutionary.

My purpose in taking us on a very short not so magical history tour is for clearing away the white noise of the west's forgetful self-deception about capitalist imperialism and the necessary racism accompanying it. My claim: capitalism has been devolutionary to human flourishing and not evolutionary as claimed by many supporters. I want to show that my Godfather illustration is more than mere metaphor.

In doing so, my intention is not berating people of western origins since the Scots represent half of mine. However, to understand the present and change the future, an honest and courageous appraisal of our pasts is indispensable.

A simple syllogism outlining my argument is: Western imperialism is (essentially) racist. Capitalism is imperialist. Therefore, capitalism is racist.

In western modernity imperialism, racism, and capitalism is a single historical package. You may define them as separate, but, historically they are inseparable as I hope to show.

Without segueing into what constitutes capitalism as a cultural construct, I'd like to use the term generally to include its various historical forms: mercantile, 19th century "free market", Keynesian, mixed-market, neoliberalism and whatever other flavors may be so bandied. The types and when they appear, disappear, and reappear, or even if present all at once in history, doesn't affect my use of the term since all types have directly, or indirectly, benefitted from imperialism throughout modern history.

Importantly, my charge regarding racism is: if capitalism can't use people of color as labor commodities driving down costs as much as possible for maximizing profits, the tendency is for killing them in vastly large numbers to gain what was wanted from them. Using racial difference has helped provide a certain relaxed ease in making the whole earth into one large mass grave for racially designated 'others.'

I refer to the attribute "white" in this essay as an artificial construction deeply situated in the legacy of the racist lexicon used for denoting an ingrained idea of "higher" and "lower" human natures.

First, let me briefly define in theory what are imperialist activities. Then I'll touch on only a few historical points from imperialist practices.

(To track sources and citations, I use a purposefully short bibliography of recent scholarship at the end of the essay [a number of them award-winning] so my argument won't be considered "dated", referring to last names in the narrative and locations in their works when necessary. It makes, hopefully, for an easier read.)

Mann defines imperialist actions as: "a centralized, hierarchical system of rule acquired and maintained by coercion through which a core territory dominates peripheral territories" (pg. 17). By "core" territories he follows Immanuel Wallerstein who assigns core to the original capitalist nation/states, like: Spain and Portugal (infant forms of capitalism), the Netherlands, Britain, France, Japan, and once colonies that gained independence like: the U.S.A., Canada, South Africa, Australia, etc. Those on the periphery would be the geographic areas and peoples pillaged by the core countries controlling their resources, institutions, labor, and cultural self-understandings, among other needful things between the core and periphery; as well as, dictating how the peripheries are to conduct relations with each other.

There are decidedly racial differences between core and periphery that can't be historically blurred. There was no such thing as a make-believe "melting pot."

Many post-colonial thinkers suggest capitalism as a globalizing social system began with Columbus. So, we'll start with him.

Columbus: Trail-Blazing Slaver

There are increasing histories written about the horrors of the African slave trade and who profited and how, but, few dealing with the enslavement of Amerindians. With apologies, my cursory focus will be more on the American Indigenous enslavement while still referencing the African occurrence because both were indispensably central to Europe's wealth accumulation.

Columbus was a seasoned sea-merchant operating in the Mediterranean early capitalist mercantile system before setting sail in a profit-making venture for his investors and himself. He correctly believed by travelling west he'd find a trading passage to the rich East, thereby circumventing hostile Muslims who dominated trade by controlling the Silk Road networks connecting Europe to the East. At Columbus' time, dissimilarities in human essences were deeply ingrained in the European mind (defined as 'the races' early in the 16th century and becoming solidified in the vocabulary during the 17th century). Papal pronouncements declared "blood" differences between Christians, Muslims, and Jews providing divine sanction for the permanent enslavement of non-Christians who were taken captive through "religious" crusades. Those definitions were extended to include the Indigenous of the Americas and African peoples, even though they were not at war with the Europeans as were Muslims.

Columbus visited the Portuguese fortress-Sao Jorge da Mina (later known as Elmina located in modern Guinea), 10 years prior to his famous voyage. At the time of Columbus' visit, it was already fast becoming a notorious port that ended up disembarking millions upon millions of enslaved Africans over the next centuries for the very lucrative Atlantic slave trade with human "product" destinations in the Caribbean, Americas and elsewhere in the world.

Todorov documents that the Europeans had not run into any people like those they met in the Caribbean on Columbus' first voyage. As Resendez remarks, the climate was like Africa, but the people were not as dark as African slaves, having straight hair, their physical features more like the Europeans, hence were considered cleverer than Africans. Columbus noted their mental capacities, but, recorded seeing them as "weaker and less spirited" than the Europeans, and therefore, ripe for domination. He wrote of their ingenuity and docility, how they shared things in common and freely gave gifts, were scantily dressed without immodesty, all characteristics Europeans thought people from hotter climates possessed, "making them suitable as slaves," like those sold from Africa (Resendez, pg. 22).

Columbus' voyage was a commercial venture above all else as he was to receive hefty percentages from all future wealth generated by his trip when Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain underwrote the endeavor. Mainstream histories have made much of Columbus' wish to "Christianize" the pagans of the "new" world when he "discovered" it. However, as his letters and diary entries attest, he was far more interested in finding gold than bringing new converts to God, using gold as motivation to keep potentially mutinous crews in line. Finding gold was a European preoccupation. An Amerindian lead the Spanish to where it may be found thinking no consequence in it. How wrong he was.

The curiosity displayed by Columbus toward the Caribbean peoples changed dramatically after initial quantities of gold were pointed out. The docile potential future subjects of the crown suddenly became labelled as savage, pagan idolaters and cannibals, not making for good vassals under civilized rule and suitable only for slavery.

Part of the return voyage's cargo included a couple dozen "Indians" (believing he had actually reached the Orient). They served as tokens of his success because quantities of gold were disappointing and they could possibly serve as interpreters for planned future voyages. Columbus' pressed business plans urging the crown to consider wholesale slavery from the Americas.

It was the reason the destination of Columbus' second commissioned voyage, consisting of seventeen ships carrying provisions and fifteen hundred colonists looking for golden opportunities, carried him further southwest in exploring any business potentials the hotter climates were thought to possess.

Resendez notes that 1600 Indigenous slaves were brought to port for the second voyage's return to Spain, 550 of which were crammed into four small boats since most of the colonists returned disappointed in not finding enough gold. Provisions and booty needing room were also loaded. Over 200 slaves perished on the voyage with half arriving in Europe very weakened and ill. Columbus again pressed his slaving proposal to Isabella and Ferdinand and indicated that he could easily ship 4,000 slaves, commanding large profits according to his most conservative calculations, but it would require a sizable number of ships in order to accomplish the task with less damage to the cargo. Resendez suggests Columbus wished to transform the new European outposts in the Caribbean into a similarly lucrative slave port like the one he witnessed on the West African coast.

Slavery was not readily accepted by the Spanish monarchy when there wasn't a war involved, the practice becoming technically illegal by Spain in the mid-16th century. Yet, it continued by the Spanish for centuries as it was firmly entrenched in the encomienda systems where land and everything contained on it, including human inhabitants, was given to loyal recipients. The English (along with other Europeans) quickly filled the role of legal slaving of those from Africa and vastly expanded it.

Since the African slave trade was legal, its extent could be readily quantified by comparing shipping bills of laden, formal property assessments, etc. This is not easily accomplished with the Indian slave trade in the Americas. Yet it was a thriving practice as Resendez uncovers, paralleling the profoundly inhuman trade in human flesh of the African slaves even though Indigenous numbers were ravaged by genocidal land grabs. He and Horne consider the slave trade of the Amerindians and Africans (along with a host of other scholars) playing the dominate role in what Todorov considered the greatest genocidal catastrophe in human history.

Indian numbers were thought by the Spanish as rather plenteous and could be used up and discarded as easily replaceable commodities. This assessment turned out to be wrong as whole language groups were eliminated from human history in the Caribbean and on the American continents. As slaves, the Indigenous endured unspeakable cruelty-similar to the Africans that followed, being used as beasts of burden in place of domesticated animals with the women from largely matriarchal societies forced into sex slavery in utter cultural humiliation.

Silver extracted from the Americas washed the European continent making it rich beyond compare. It became the preferred precious metal backing credit and trade. It was Indigenous slave labor digging the silver producing ore, often taken from mountains at perilous heights. As Resendez documents, Potosi in Bolivia has a peak of over 15,000 feet, many mine entrances at 12,000 feet. Tunnels were hand-dug hundreds of feet into the mountainsides and the ore was brought to the surface on the backs of Indigenous slaves who would then crush the rock into powder extracting the silver using mercury and lead, both known today as highly toxic materials causing severe disabilities and death. This mine alone was productive for centuries, to the extent that Spain built a minting factory near it. Hundreds upon hundreds of silver mines dotted the Latin American landscape, with over 400 in Mexico alone-that territory's top producing mine at its height yielded 14 times the amount of gold produced during California's gold rush bringing over 300,000 migrating prospectors for work in the western United States. This provides an indication of the amount of slave labor used to mine just silver alone.

As Horne documents, "From the advent of Columbus to the end of the nineteenth century it is possible that five million Indigenous Americans were enslaved (pr. 7)." Moreover, for reasons not just due to mining, the obliteration of an Indian labor force made the vast importation of African slaves a necessity for monocrop production that was then exported to European markets. As Horne indicates, this influx of African slaves represented two-thirds of those coming to the "new" world in the 17 th century alone. Against their will of course, and as hugely profitable commodities.

Horne, Ortiz, and Resendez follow a number of modern scholars who have convincingly refuted the allegations that up to 90-95 percent of the Indigenous died from diseases carried by immune Europeans for which Indigenous were biologically unprepared to thwart. The initial waves of disease were devastating. But, so were the plagues in Europe which decimated 40 percent of the populations in some areas, with plagues still occurring even at the time of Columbus. In Europe, not over 90 percent died from 'initial contact' from plagues. Horne suggests "Population may have fallen by up to 90 percent through devilish means including warfare, famine, and slavery, all with resultant epidemics (pg. 8)." Ortiz similarly comments that Jews were used as slave labor in the Nazi war production system, work from which an overwhelming majority went to their deaths because of diseases. Not all six million deaths came through the gas chambers and other means of directly systematic executions.

But, confabulated disease theories continue shrouding history helping frightened consciousnesses not question capitalist benevolence claimed by the imperial victors writing their own histories.

Sequels of the Same Saga

Those from the Iberian Peninsula sought treasure using slaves for its extraction. The English saw "empty" land in America as something to improve-meaning, English-style tilling making it materially profitable for capitalist agricultural production. It was a divine mandate: "subdue the earth" as God's useful creation to be mastered by humans; and natural law: idle land demands profitable use (Fields). Permanent colonies were needed for carrying out these mandates.

What constituted 'productive use' was being systematically defined (culminating with John Locke) as making land a commodity to be owned and used as the owner saw fit-as long as it was made profitable and tilled properly. Therefore, when the first permanent English colony survived at Jamestown, they had a narrow understanding of how land's productivity should look. Amerindians were considered wasting a divine gift! (Of note: a few short years after Jamestown survived as a colony, they purchased African slaves to work the land they ethnically cleansed of its inhabitants.)

Fields writes of two schools of thought about how wasted, empty land could be obtained from the Indians: "…the English could acquire Indian land lawfully by purchasing it." (Buying and selling land was a totally foreign concept for First Peoples). Or, they "could lawfully take Indian land (his emphasis)." Either way, 'lawful' is a key condition for ownership, and laws changed over time. Therefore, it's not surprising that taking the land from savages was the better cost option and this view gained widespread appeal after being introduced earlier in colonization by clergymen such as Robert Gray. He and a raft of other men-of-the-cloth underwent the utter demonization of the Amerindians, describing them as little more than violent animals with a propensity toward cannibalism. After the American Revolution, the foreboding portrayal of the ruthlessly savage won over land-hungry imaginations. First Peoples became cleansed from the land and any remaining were 'at-will' tenants with no rights to land claims against settlers enclosing their environments.

As the land was cleansed, plantations and smaller land holdings established, African slaves were imported by the 100 of thousands, with totals amounting to over 13 million during legal slavery in America. In some areas, slaves significantly outnumbered the "whites" who controlled them.

Also, the 'new' lands were colonized as a release valve from the social tensions occurring in England and other European territories due to a plethora of wars, with many displaced and unemployed because of the land enclosure processes occurring first on the British Iles and then throughout the continent that didn't end until the early 20th century. Ortiz records that approximately half of those coming to America financed their way by indentured service-some contracts of bond slavery lasting up to seven years-a very profitable capitalist ploy in leveraging the distress of others and gaining low-cost labor in return. Yet, as difficult as the work would be for bond-service, they knew they'd be better off than those considered beneath them as humans: First Peoples and African slaves. And, they'd be free after service ended to pursue their dreams of owning and farming their own land.

But, there was a difference in the promise of land and the fact of its actual possession. Therefore, waves of colonists functioned both as settler-farmers, and well-armed militia, cleansing the land of its original inhabitants. As new immigrants arrived to an independent America from different parts of Europe, it became a culturally normal duty slaughtering Indigenous as African slave importation filled the need for workers in areas newly claimed through conquest. Killing heathen became a socially unifying venture, a perverse right-of-passage into the higher "white" race while building a sense of pride in a national mission given by God- a "manifest destiny"- as land grabbing and massacre was later described in the 19th century.

The whole mission helped gloss over real class divisions between capitalists and those Europeans immigrants exploited by them (see Ortiz).

What the settlers turned into Ortiz describes as a "culture of conquest, violence, expropriation, destruction, and dehumanization (pg. 32)." Ortiz references historian John Grenier describing America's "first way of war" as it was fought against Amerindians: "razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders…." (pg. 56). These were methods of war that Europeans found largely abhorrent when fighting amongst themselves in Europe prior to emigration (though it did occur), or even during the American Civil War, but, thoroughly applicable when dealing with those not considered fully human.

Imperialism needs justification for its missions. Theology and natural law joined science with the political/economic intentions of the times in the later portion of the 19th century. Evolution became the ultimate rationalization for exterminating those standing in the way of "white" control of resources and wealth marking an idea of progress. As summarized by an iconic American literary hero in the second half the century, Walt Whitman: "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history…. A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out" (quoted in Ortiz, pg. 117).

The enslavement and genocide of humans inhabiting the Americas and Africa for the sake of profit, as well as the monumental exploitation of resources, positioned collections of backwater cultures in Europe for violent world dominance. This is especially true of England whose rise as an empire had extensive control throughout the world. Populations not useful, or in the way, were massacred without mercy.

Liberal Democracies and Very Illiberal Behaviors

The nineteenth century has been labeled by Immanuel Wallerstein as "centrist liberalism triumphant." Political leadership and capitalist elites felt it was either provide a degree of salient state support for their populations, or, the rabble would pummel the system into submission. Initiated by Bismarck in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, some of the rudiments of the modern welfare state were instituted deterring revolt against capitalism. Other countries began to recognize its value (England and France), with America's New Deal (though never completely implemented) becoming supposedly standard fair after WWII. Capitalism could now remain intact and any democratic processes would be controlled enough by monied concerns ensuring capital would hold sway over governments.

However, liberalism's rise is also called the "age of imperialism," and "the new age of empires" when a 'scramble for Africa' occurred, the push for America to reach "sea to shining sea" was being completed, and British gun-boat diplomacy was subduing China and other parts of the world. Western nations of all stripes joined the ravenous quest for resource extractions in order to better position themselves in the context of unequal international "free trade." Yet, as if oblivious to imperial history, Western historians nostalgically referred to the time-frame from Napoleon's demise-1815, to the Great War's outbreak in 1914, as the "100 Years Peace." And except for the intense ruckus internal to nation/states because of restive populations under thumbs of capitalist elites, there were very few international conflicts by warrior Europe's prior historical standards.

Contrastingly, the 100 years of European international peace should be juxtaposed to the rest of the world's conflagration at the hands of, in-truth, not-so-peaceful Europeans.

The inordinate violence and forced labor by capitalists only accelerated all over the world during this time of liberal democratic visions, especially after Africa was carved into spheres of influence following the Conference of Berlin in 1885-a meeting setting the rules for colonization and resource extraction from the periphery ensuring core states would stay away from conflict with each other. Mann reports grisly casualty figures for non-Europeans: over 50-60 million Africans and Asians were massacred at the hands of the imperialists scratching for raw materials. Ninety percent of these casualties were civilian.

And the rationale for the carnage? The now universal mission statement used by "white" cultures: "survival of the fittest"- the phrase coined by the influential English intellectual, Herbert Spenser. His views on natural selection saw the elimination and supersession of 'others' by European cultures as a necessary component for evolutionary progress (see the Whitman quote above).

After all, savages do not have the capacity for understanding what resources they possess and are profligate-mismanaging their treasures a civilized world could make better use of-a tried and true argument used for centuries. It was a "white man's" burden on an evolutionary mission dragging all of humanity toward progress.

Even tiny Belgium was economically transformed during liberalism's growing prevalence. It became the sixth largest economy in the world within less than a generation, making its King-Leopold II one of the earth's richest men. According to Prashad, the piece of Africa Belgium received after 1885, the Congo-immensely rich in raw materials, was eighty times the size of their home country. And, populating the Congo was a ready-made work force for Belgium's profitable exploitation. Heads were cut off as an encouragement for others to work harder. In a single day 1,308 severed hands were sent to an official showing that those under his charge were being optimally motivated for doing their jobs. Mutilation, rape and torture, were prevalent. The imperial brutality reduced the size of the Congo's population from 20 million to 10 million during the short period 1885-1908 (Prashad).

Of course, when the gruesome actions came to light, there were outcries of bloodthirstiness levelled against Belgium; ironically, especially from the British. Yet during this period, as Prashad continues: "…much [the same] had been standard for the English elsewhere…the Putumayo region between Colombia and Peru followed the same kinds of barbarism, the U.S.-based United Fruit Company in Central America…, and in Portuguese Angola as well as French and German Cameroon…. (pg. 18)."

Horne, Ortiz, Prashad, and Resendez, from our short bibliography, document the war-driven nature of imperial Europe's technology (and capitalist Japan during liberalism's rise). Through their technological applications they've been able to inflict mass punishment from the 16th century until the rise of industrial levels of killing during liberalism's triumph. The new technologies were field tested on those of color.

Then, Europeans turned the weaponry on themselves in 1914.

It occurred at a time when Europe controlled 85 percent of the earth's surface for capitalist goals of insatiably competitive profiteering. Competition between capitalist countries was key in driving them into the Great War. As newer technologies for mass slaughter were invented, the ability in detaching a combatant from the carnage wrought through distance helped desensitize them from the results they inflicted. Destruction from long-range through the incessant artillery shelling caused 60 percent of the war's casualties. However, killing by dirigible and then plane was to revolutionize devastation from a distance. Yet, before the annihilating capacity of flying machines was used in the Great War, it had already been tested on non-whites.

Prashad quotes R.P. Hearne from Airships in Peace and War (1910), "In savage lands the moral effect of such an instrument of war [the air bomber] is impossible to conceive. The appearance of the airship would strike terror into the colored tribes," for these machines can deliver "sharp, severe and terrible punishment," and save "the awful waste of life occasioned to white troops by expeditionary work (pg. 42)." It became "standard policy" (Prashad) by Italians in North Africa, the British in India and Iraq, the Americans in Nicaragua, and other European nations visiting the Basques and Moroccans with air-born weapons.

When the Great War didn't end all wars between the imperium, the Second War brought its own new technological horrors that also included "The Bomb."

Much overlooked are the preparations a culture requires for dehumanizing others to the point of genocide. For the West, their preparation is marked by centuries of imperial debauchery against 'others' considered less human. Once practiced, it becomes easier for transferring supreme malice to anyone deemed 'other.'

The racist violence of the Nazis did not suddenly appear from a void. Germany already possessed a racist legacy destroying populations in Namibia, Uganda, Cameroon, and Tanzania prior to the Great War in 1914. German ideas of racial superiority provided license for invading eastern Europe in the late 1930s and executing 'master race' designs against "lesser" Slavs, and first and foremost-Jews. After using "commies" as warmups in populating the concentration camps, the sites would become thoroughly modern administrations of genocide.

Following the horrific revelations of the Nazi holocaust during the war crime trials, Martinique intellectual, Aime Cesaire, suggested what was being shockingly evaluated and brought to justice at Nuremburg had been occurring against non-whites for centuries. However, when genocide is committed by Westerners on people indistinguishable from themselves, breasts are pounded in anguished soul-searching despair.

The U.S. economy after WWII was unscathed by the war-and running at full tilt in need of trading partners. With its military prowess (it had demonstrated it would use the atomic bomb), the U.S. provided a needed role as the leading Western imperial power-an exhausted and bankrupt Britain relinquishing the hegemonic "burden." It's mission: making the world- it thought it "owned" (Noam Chomsky), safe for democracy American style. In reality, the mission is administrating the global capitalistic system.

The processes of rebuilding selected capitalist countries, including war nemeses Germany and Japan, were heavily controlled and financed by three U.S. dominated international institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) - both established in 1944 (Bretton Woods institutions) dictating international monetary policy and providing loans for reconstruction. Additionally, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) -effective in 1947- had goals of lowering tariffs and quotas on imported goods and services while opening doors to outside investments for promoting international trade.

The United Nations was founded in 1945 in hopes of achieving international cooperation and peace, what an earlier League of Nations failed to do. With high ideals, the UN General Assembly issued The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In it, the humanity of all people on the earth was outlined mandating respect for basic human needs no matter the geographic and racial origins.

However, in matters of security and UN troop deployment, the U.S. dominated through the five-permanent member UN Security Council with allies in tow (Britain France), (the other two-Russia and China). The Council's determinations are legally binding with overriding power on questions of where and when to engage in violence, negating the General Assembly decisions of all UN nations.

UN human rights aspirations were placed on hold when tensions between the U.S. and Russia reached a very dangerous point in a Cold War. With the 1949 Maoist victory in China, battlegrounds of the Cold War took place in a "Third World" hungry for their own self-determination, but, consigned as pawns in an international struggle not of their making. Violence broke out in Korea, a country divided by Russia and the U.S. after WWII, with likely unifying elections in that country subverted by the U.S. War was waged in Korea and mass extermination of 'others' from a distance was brought to new heights.

The amount of munitions dropped from the air in the Pacific campaign during WWII amounted to 503,000 tons of ordinance in total. The U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of aerial munitions, mostly on civilian centers north of the Korean division which included 35,000 tons of napalm - the jellied gasoline bombs used in 1945 decimating Tokyo's civilian populations principally living in wooden structures.

Following an unresolved cease-fire on that peninsula, Third World revolutions for independence struggling to wrest control away from imperialism raged all over the globe. Irrepressible desires were recorded through the UN General Assembly's declaration of December 1960: On the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. It expressed conditions towards reversing direct and indirect types of western imperialism entrenched for centuries.

America intervened in a number of countries before the 1960 statement and then militarily entered a fray in Vietnam, a former French colony winning independence after a long bloody struggle with the colonizer, American involvement occurring in more deliberate fashion after the statement by the UN.

The U.S. dropped on Vietnam the equivalent of a 500-pound bomb for every child, woman, and man, a country comprised largely of poor farmers with a total population numbering 12 million. Napalm was liberally used on civilian populations as was the defoliating chemical Agent Orange. The conflict also included an American "secret war" in Laos and Cambodia with Henry Kissinger's desire to "bomb them into the stone age" - a fact hidden from an American public's view.

Laos, a nation with a population of about 2.5 million, attained the dubious distinction of the world's most bombed country in history, receiving 3.4 million tons of ordinance including over 250 million cluster bombs. Today, many of these initially unexploded bomblets are being accidentally detonated by farmers working in fields and kids playing unwittingly in infected areas causing 34,000 Laotian deaths, with many more maimed, since the Vietnam war ended.

Post WWII, liberal democracy's leader- the U.S., has very illiberally been directly or indirectly involved in overturning approximately 50 governments across the world, many democratically elected (Noam Chomsky), in spite of the UN declarations. In the process, the U.S. and its allies have supported some very undemocratic regimes for imperial interests, funding killing machines in Iran, Guatemala, Uganda, Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, Iraq, and many, many more. According to research provided by James A. Lucas in a November 2015 report for Global Research, since WWII, America has been involved with their clients in killing more than 20 million people in 37 countries, overwhelming territories of "color," with the U.S. directly accounting for approximately half of those deaths through military conflicts and economic wars of sanctions-like the 1990's Iraqi sanctions causing 500,000 child deaths according to UN studies.

Former U.S. Defense Secretary under George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, when asked about Iraqi casualties, stated, "We don't do body counts." Nevertheless, others do. The levels of civilian deaths in the Middle East are frighteningly atrocious.

Underscoring the deep cynicism in which liberal democracy is embroiled in its foreign affairs, technology is now exploring small-scale versions of nuclear weaponry for tactical use with one trillion dollars in developmental appropriations authorized by the first African-American president of the U.S., and a 2008 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

Keep in mind though, as I stated earlier in the essay, if cost-saving labor might be attained from those of "color," at the cheapest rates possible, ways to control that will be found.

Tummy Tucks Over Rotten Guts: Imperialism by Other Means

A new imperial mission statement has superseded the older ones. This occurred following the unavoidable independence of a Third World. The mission: development. More innocuously attractive than a phrase like "civilizing mission," or, "survival of the fittest," it's nevertheless mere cosmetics masking real intentions that have always accompanied capitalist imperialism: maximally making more money at the expense of non-western populations.

The meaning of development in the peripheries during the decades following WWII has changed. Development has shifted from "New Deal capitalism" or "social capitalism"-governmental redistribution of some wealth for financing state administered programs for people, to something else. As Robinson explains, now development means fostering "…laissez-faire, comparative advantage, free trade, and efficiency…." (pg. 54), an "ideology, a culture, a philosophical worldview that takes classical liberalism and individualism to an extreme. It glorifies the detached, isolated individual-a fictitious state of human existence-and his or her potential that is allegedly unleashed when unencumbered by state regulation and other collective constraints on 'freedom' (pg.55)." Neoliberalism drives our current international developmental regime.

Both forms of development, New Deal and neoliberal, are capitalist impositions of social ordering too often with little regard for real internal needs expressed by the populations being developed. Plus, to receive money, both demand strict criteria be met through aligning with the economic and political goals of the core countries doing the developing. Both have profitably exploited the periphery while claiming unmitigated beneficence.

Complicating things, no longer is it core imperial states dominating periphery territories and nations. Now, domination comes in the form of multinational corporations and transnational finance. This makes imperial control opaque, hidden behind life's every-day routines. Describing the current form of imperialism, Screpanti explains in his introduction, "[global capitalism is] a system of international relations in which state policies are forced to remove the obstacles that national agglomeration place in the way of the process of accumulation [profits] on a global scale." Global markets dictate to nation/states forcing them to dismantle barriers to international trade and the profits reaped. Not surprisingly, most of the bases of operations of transnational corporations and finance are in the core countries made rich to begin with though imperialism exercised over centuries.

Central are the post WWII governing bodies already mentioned, Bretton Woods institutions (IMF and World Bank) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)-born after several rounds of negotiations expanding GATT. The WTO administers and arbitrates the world's regional and global trade agreements. There's nothing democratic about these institutions even though they shape global economic policies in a time of liberal democratic triumphalism. (Authors in the bibliographic material below elaborate how they work because brevity beckons in this essay).

What has this meant for labor in developing the global periphery?

After all, hasn't poverty been reduced, jobs been added, hope primed into the previously dry pumps of hopeless futures? The short answer is: No. Appeals to GDP averages for a country's workers tell a very truncated story as they don't specifically provide how income is disseminated unless intentionally parsed for detailed information. Plus, cost of living change is excluded. Currently, inequality of wealth distribution is only increasing all over the world (See Oxfam reports and numerous university studies).

Economist John Smith introduced his work, stating: "The wildfire of [job] outsourcing spread during the past three decades is the continuation, on a vastly expanded scale, of capital's eternal quest for new sources of cheaper, readily exploitable labor-power." When a "crisis" of diminishing profits occurred in the core during the 1970s, elites began searching for cheaper labor pools as national worker costs were thought too high. As international investments took off in the 1980s and 90s-especially after 1995 with the expansion of the WTO, the whole world became a large labor resource from which capital could draw low-wage workers. Now, worker competition for jobs pits each against all in a global labor market. This is especially true in labor intensive manufacturing productions delivering most of the commodities exported from the periphery to the core. With advancements in technology, production formerly accomplished within a territory or nation, could now be done across the globe. The orchestrated poverty in the periphery under older forms of imperialism is being leveraged for low cost labor approaching near slavery status.

For example: The U.S. is the largest consumer of clothing in the world, but, makes only two percent of the clothing it purchases. Smith reports that in Bangladesh, a garment worker earns "1.36 euros in a day working 10-12 hours and producing 250 T-shirts per hour, or 18 T-shirts for each euro cent paid in wages.…" (loc 218). Nearly 85 percent of the garment workers are women because they are paid significantly less than their male counterparts. "The basic wage is barely one-fifth of what is necessary to nourish, house and clothe a garment worker, one adult, and two child dependents" (loc 244). This means lots of additional hours and multiple members of a family working just to get by. A cheap T-shirt may be marked up by 150 percent with low labor costs contributing to large profits on the item. More expensive clothing (and more heavily advertised) has mark-ups of over 700 percent, with some reported by Smith as much as 1800 percent.

Examining commodity supply chains, Smith shows how various components comprising a more complex product (like computers) needn't be made and assembled in a single location (the old corporate model of efficiency). Different tasks may be done in various countries completing segments in stages of a manufactured item assembled elsewhere. No longer is a multinational company compelled to invest in building overseas infrastructures for their operations and take cost responsibilities for maintaining an overseas work-force. Now, they can just issue contracts to different regions for various component production, keeping investment costs low and letting the lowest bidder perform the tasks demanded by the agreement. It's what Smith calls "arms-length" production. This lets the transnational corporation off the hook for any environmental degradation and worker exploitation. The foreign companies picking up the contract work and their governments are said to be responsible, making compliance to protections (if they exist) issues of the nationally based parties involved.

Additionally, because bids for pieces of product manufacture are very competitive, profit margins for those taking on the assigned operations are slim. A supplier's profit on the T-shirt example is claimed being in the single digits. It provides greater incentive in squeezing their workers and making the thin slice of profit for the company working on the consigned task thicker. Therefore, it's not only a race to the bottom for workers, it's also a similar situation for many contractors picking up arms-length agreements issued by large transnational companies, contractors often overtaken and put out-of-business by those from other geographic areas of exploited cheap labor doing a task for less.

Smith discusses Foxconn, International in China, the successful mammoth assembling arms-length contracted products for giants like Apple and Samsung. Foxconn puts together components made by low-paid employees from other global regions. And the Chinese workers' portion in the sale price of the iPhone? About 3.6 percent according to Smith's research. Foxconn is an example of Export-Processing Zones, "now found in over 130 countries…," all competing against each other for contracts with only a small fraction getting consistent business-like Foxconn has achieved. It's the logic of so called efficiency, meaning, the largest returns on investment over the shortest time for the benefit of transnational investors, regardless of social consequences. Social considerations, like the environment and basic worker needs being met, are externals deemed separate from business calculations.

Further, as Robinson documents, "capital-labor relations [are] based on deregulated, informalized, flexibilized, part-time immigrant contract, and precarious labor arrangements (pg. 52)." Robinson continues, "The International Labor Organization reported that 1.53 billion workers around the world were in such 'vulnerable' employment arrangements in 2009, representing more than 50 percent of the global workforce (pg. 53)." This means, in most countries (including those in the core), large segments of populations are working in so called "flexible labor" positions with little to no benefits and no guarantees of consistent future employment. Investment money may come and go freely across borders. People cannot do so when already insecure jobs leave with the investors. Expulsed workers in precarity are trapped in a system, if allowed to do so, that's driving wages toward the very profitable levels of quasi- slavery.

It seems approaching conditions of slavery is an ever-present goal for the capitalist. My, how things remain the same under the façade of change.

What happens when food prices jump because of market "forces"? - nearly 80 percent during the 2008 commodity crisis in some impoverished areas of the world causing food riots. A large portion of income for the majority of workers in the South goes toward food they can no longer grow themselves-unlike the slaves under former agrarian economies. Leech suggests violence should include human suffering "caused by social structures that disproportionately benefit some people while diminishing the ability of others to meet their fundamental needs…needs like food, health care and other resources… (loc 205)." Systemic violence by capitalism entails more than just imperial wars.

Conclusion

Are there specific counter-examples to my claims supporting something other than the contentions in the syllogism at the beginning of this essay? Of course. However, because all birds don't fly doesn't mean we stop saying that birds have the gift of flight. Look at the whole, not anomalies. Should someone reveal from actual history, while looking at the whole, that modern imperialism/capitalism isn't racist, or that actually existing capitalism didn't arise from imperial endeavors, unlike the paper-premises and theories from the Austrian School of Economics-Joseph Schumpeter's response to Lenin in particular, then let's talk about it. Have there been totalizing systems other than capitalism and its triumph through liberal democracy that have done better, like central state communism-Russian Soviet style, or state administered fascism? Not really, because both were imperialist, with fascism essentially wedding capitalist interests with the state and the U.S.S.R.'s massive bureaucracy controlling the "efficiencies" of quasi-capitalist style production; those forms invading others in superimposing their will. But, does that mean all options for the future are exhausted? Aren't we creatures who can dream of alternatives and work toward creating them?

But, what about capitalism with an Asian face in state dominated China? A new leader may fix it all.

Under new imperialist tenets called development, China is already looking for cheaper labor outside its borders to fuel its own budding consumerism while keeping costs down and profits up. No longer does it just wish to be the manufacturing work-shop of the world. Its massive financial tentacle is far-reaching with infrastructure projects all over the world benefitting its own economic necessity at the expense of local populations. This is expressed through ventures such as large dam, mining and deforestation projects displacing Indigenous peoples and destroying food producing land, high speed rail construction leading to important Chinese cities-remaking the urban spaces and environmental landscapes through which bullet-trains travel, continued fossil fuel activities, purchase of arable land in food insecure areas (East Africa and elsewhere) for feeding themselves by exporting agricultural production necessitating local populations' importation of food as they're displaced off ancestral lands, etc. Plus, defaults on loans provided to poor countries are occurring and looming in greater numbers. What pounds of flesh will be exacted from them? It's flexing its military muscle in the South China sea and squashing dissent at home with a leader who wants that position without term limits. Though leading in renewable energy, historically with capitalism-profit always trumps environmental prudence. Yes, they are in competition with the U.S., but, increasing threats of violence is part of a competitive capitalist past that's sealed in its very concrete history. China is new to capitalism, but already the logic is becoming deeply ingrained.

Michael Corleone would likely not bet on China for providing a legitimate cultural framework cleansing capitalism. He's well aware how murder and mayhem work.

For the future of human flourishing, capitalism in all its forms is essentially violently imperialist, and therefore, racist. It's devolutionary because it's ultimately parasitical, devouring the host, and therefore killing itself (Michael Hudson) along with our environments -both natural and cultural (if you can even divide the two). It's also devolutionary for the fewer and fewer people gaining from it because capitalism makes them competitively callous human beings, stifling the very human abilities of mutuality and empathetic concern. And, it's all for the sake of what capitalism has been designed to do by elite beneficiaries from the beginning: make more money above all else-including human life and all life on the planet.

References

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous People's History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2015.

Fields, Gary, Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror, University of California Press, 2017.

Horne, Gerald, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in the Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean , Monthly Review Press, 2017.

Leech, Gary, Capitalism: A Structural Genocide, Zed Books, 2012 (Kindle book locations).

Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power: vol. 3, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Prashad, Vijay, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, The New Press, 2007.

Resendez, Andres, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2017.

Robinson, William I., Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Screpanti, Ernesto, Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis: The Uncertain Future of Capitalism, Monthly Review Press, 2014.

Smith, John, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: The Globalization of Production, Super-Exploitation, and the Crisis of Capitalism , Monthly Review Press, 2016. (Kindle book locations)

Todorov, Tzvetan, Conquest of America:The Question of the Other, Harper and Row, 1984.

Building a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins

By Bryant William Sculos

(A shorter, edited-down version of this interview was first published with Truthout under the title "Inspiring a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins," published Feb. 24, 2018. The full version of the interview is reprinted here with permission.)

(The following is an interview conducted via email between Nov. 30, 2017 and Dec. 30, 2017, slightly edited for style)

Bryant Sculos: Can you say a bit about how you became an activist and what your early experiences were like?

Eljeer Hawkins: I was born and raised in East Harlem, New York City. It began for me at the age of 18 years old. I discovered the speeches of Malcolm X to the chagrin of my mother who was a child of the 1950s and 60s. My mom was 14 years old when Malcolm X was murdered; she wasn't very enthused to find her oldest listening to old Nation of Islam tapes with brother minister Malcolm X calling the "white man the devil." (laugh)

I never had a black history course until college. I was accepted to Howard University, but didn't have the resources to attend early classes that were in 1992. My dream was to attend Howard; I went to John Jay College for Criminal Justice, I wanted to be a defense attorney. My uncle, Wayne, my mom's brother, became instrumental in my early development as he helped me navigate US history, black history, art, and music particularly the black aesthetic. I will always be indebted to him and what he taught me.

So Brother Malcolm X was a natural starting point. My father wasn't in my life, so Malcolm X and Uncle Wayne were the men and examples I looked to growing up politically and culturally. The first bookstore I visited was Liberation bookstore in Harlem and bought my early black nationalist, cultural nationalist, and socialist books. In college, I joined the Organization of Black Students-became very active on campus-to the determent of my school work. My life changed forever when my mother died at the age of 43 from a massive heart attack. At this time I was engaged in solidarity work with a group in the Congo-formerly called Zaire under the brutal dictatorship of Mobutu. I also was on the periphery of the Workers World organization but never joined.

My mother's death destroyed me; I lost focus and left school after two years. I wanted to dedicate my life to the project of revolutionary ideas and action.

BS: Did you consider yourself a socialist from the beginning or did that develop later?

EH: I was a black revolutionary nationalist until one winter night after a protest in 1995. A sister activist asked me what society after the revolution was I aiming to build. I had ignorantly dismissed revolutionary Marxism as a white man's ideology. February of 1995 I attended a gathering of dissent Congolese organizations with various political and economic leanings. I worked with Serge Mukendi and the Workers and Peasants Movement of the Congo (POP). Brother Serge and the POP declared themselves to be Marxists; he played a foundational role in my political development and hunger to understand the world. Well we attended this meeting of the minds, and we stayed with a member of Labor Militant in Boston, Massachusetts (now Socialist Alternative). I began to look at the brother's bookshelf and was spellbound. I wasn't a member of any socialist organization at the time. So the comrade gave me the contact information of Labor Militant members in New York City. From February to about the early summer of 1995, I attended meetings and discussions. The organization was tiny at the time. After genuinely studying and reading the program, I decided to join and commit my life to the project of building socialism and workers' democracy internationally. I joined at a time following the fall of Stalinism, the triumphalism of capitalism, and decline of the workers' movement. So I participated in a dark moment for socialist ideas, and frankly, it steeled me in every way to march forward armed with a program, analysis, and history. So all the things I've learned and continue to learn have guided me, 23 years later in the international class struggle for socialism. Today, we are witnessing a resurgence of socialist thought and action. I'm humbled to be here for this moment.

BS: What is your take on the current state of the US left-as well as the left globally?

EH: We are at an embryonic stage of socialist ideas. The crisis of capitalism and decline of the institutions of capitalism like their two parties (Democratic and Republican) has led a whole generation to question what the hell is going on and what I can do to change things. Occupy Wall Street was the first shot across the bow, followed by vital social and political explosions and banners like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, and Arab Spring revolutions, etc. This is also a time for debate and discussion on how the socialist left globally can make gains and what is the best strategy and tactics to take the struggle forward. We need a level of patience, because this is a new and young milieu of activists and organizers who are feeling their way through this period of reform or revolution-battles for self-determination like in Catalonia, an environmental crisis like in California, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean, and increased racial and sexual oppression. I think as this new left continues to engage in the struggle they will be forced to draw conclusions and rethink what they thought initially. We are truly living in a period of revolution and counter-revolution. We must prepare ourselves through an intense engagement in history, social struggle, and political analysis because of this uncharted territory moment.

BS: Given the unique path you've taken to become a socialist, now with decades of activist experience, I think people would be interested in hearing what your worst experience as a socialist activist has been? Best?

EH: The worst has always been debates to the point of losing sight of the centrality of the working class and their potential revolutionary agency to change the world. Now, please do not get me wrong, a debate organized and focused can provide clarity and a general roadmap on how to proceed in the struggle. The Bolshevik Party is a brilliant example of debate and discussion in the workers' movement-interconnected with political perspectives, action, and the program always centering the international working class and peasantry in the worldwide socialist revolution.

The best experience is winning a debate (laugh), just kidding. I would say witnessing how consciousness is transformed by events and interconnected developments that lead people to draw various conclusions. Consciousness can leap forward or backward based on events, how a situation is given a contextual explanation like an electoral win or defeat, and importantly who and what explains this process like an individual or organization in the struggle. I think of Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner and her political awakening. After the death of her father, she immersed herself in telling the truth and keeping his spirit alive in organizing daily for a full year to decry law enforcement violence. That is powerful to me as an activist and grassroots historian. Mamie Till, the mother of Emmitt Till, said it best when events shape one's consciousness, "Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, `That's their business, not mine.' Now I know how wrong. I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all."

Socialism is longer a dirty word, the gains like the fifteen dollar minimum wage spearheaded by low-wage workers, electoral victories and organizing of Socialist Alternative and socialist city councilor Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Washington, and a strong showing of Ginger Jentzen in the city council race in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The growth of independent working-class politics is on the agenda. The best moments are witnessing or participating in grassroots struggles that win, raising the morale, confidence, and fighting capacity of working people, the poor, and the most oppressed to change their conditions.

BS: In early November 2017 when you came to speak at a Socialist Alternative event in Worcester, MA, you said that you were a perpetual optimist. Given the state of the world today, the increasingly frequent and devastating crises of capitalism, structural racism, rampant unrepentant sexism and misogyny, and continued ecological degradation, how you can maintain your optimism?

EH: James Baldwin stated, "I cannot be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."

That optimism comes from a study of history and examples of people fighting back to form a union, stopping an abusive boss, people organizing together for a common goal. Now, we need as Dr. King correctly stated, an urgency of NOW! And we need some action to go along with that urgency. Yes, we have dark days and nights ahead of us, particularly in this era of Trumpism and the economic terrorism of capitalism. That's why we must engage in struggle and critical political study to fortify our resolve. History teaches us when people become fed-up and can't take it anymore, people begin to move. What is crucial for the radical socialist left globally is to be prepared for that moment building organization, program, and leadership in these battles are essential as victory or defeat hangs in the balance.

BS: Building on that question, do you think there is possibly a strategic role for a kind of hopeful pessimism -a kind of expectation, given the forces rallied against the left (as well as the left's self-inflicted failures) that, at least in the short-term, things probably aren't going to turn out well, but that is precisely why we need to struggle and remain hopeful that they can, in the future, turn out well? The strategic idea being that if left activists (especially those who are new to socialism or activism in general) become too optimistic about the possibilities of short-term victories, they will become disillusioned and demobilized when faced with failure. Do you think there is anything to this perspective?

EH: You can't have a blind optimism or a cheerleader's mentality that is not rooted in the reality of class struggle-its ups and downs. The 90s were difficult, but I would not trade it in because I learned during a period of defeat. I was politically developed as a member of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) that has a sober approach that follows in the best traditions of genuine Bolshevism. The CWI draws out global political perspectives to explain the events and developments we are living through, even more, critically elaborating on an action program to present to workers and youth in the class struggle rooted in their lived experience under this system.

It is true the left has made mistakes, and there is an uneven history when it comes analysis, strategy, and tactics. With that said, we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater either. The building of the left or revolutionary party, even more so, Socialism, is a project that will demand the full participation and activity of the working class, youth, poor, and oppressed on a daily basis. I firmly believe we need more than smart prose, intellectual verbiage that a tiny minority in the activist world can understand, and commentary that is divorced from the concrete struggle and lives of working people. I wonder what that term "hopeful pessimism" means to someone who has been on the left for years, who carries scares and tears, or a new person discovering these ideas and their voice in the struggle. That "hopeful pessimism" seems abstract and divorces oneself to standing on the sidelines and waiting. I would prefer to engage and test out my ideas in the living breathing struggle and allow the movement to judge me if I am right or wrong.

BS: Given that, and the importance that you (and Marxists in general) place on history, what historical models, regarding movements and organizations, do you think offer the best inspiration (both regarding principles and strategy/tactics) for the contemporary left?

EH: The debate and discussion that is in the air is reform or revolution. This past November marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and many are questioning the Bolshevik Revolution and party itself. I would say the Bolshevik Revolution would be instructive to study, but I would recommend all activists especially the new generation of activists to explore all the significant revolutionary movements of the past. Particularly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, like the German Revolution of 1918, Chinese Revolution (1925-27), Spain between 1931 and1937, etc. And counterpose it to the revolutions after WWII in the aftermath of the strengthening of Stalinism and Social Democracy, like China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and anti-colonial revolutions in the so-called "third world." In my mind, this is vital because I think this generation needs a sense of historical memory and clarity of what a revolution is and how it comes to life under particular conditions and social forces. As you engage in this study, I think the Bolsheviks will stand out as a unique force that made a successful socialist revolution and fought to keep the flame alive in the face of imperial attack, third world social conditions, civil war, and isolation.

BS: You and I are both members of Socialist Alternative (SA), so obviously we have a shared vision of principles and strategy, but what is your perspective on the uptick in popularity and paper membership of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA)? How should SA orient itself toward DSA, both locally and nationally? What are your experiences in working with DSA?

EH: This version of DSA is not your momma or daddy's DSA. DSA is a different organization from its original foundations in the 1960s under the leadership of Michael Harrington; I think this past summer's convention proved that to be true. I am interested to see how it will continue to develop with 30,000 members and several DSA members taking office on a city and statewide basis nationally. The Occupy banner, Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and the capitalist crisis have led us to this moment where socialism is being examined seriously for the first time in a generation or two. This generation will be worse off than their parents; they are living through a new gilded age of the super-rich reaping profits beyond imagination, and their lives are precarious in every way from income inequality to the climate crisis.

SA has worked with DSA members and chapters nationwide and would love to do so moving forward around the critical issues facing working people, poor, and the most oppressed around issues such as healthcare, jobs, education, housing, and ending law enforcement violence. We also want to engage in comradely discussion and debate around strategy and tactics for the left and related movements. We are aware of the meaningful conversations taking place inside DSA around the role of Democratic Party, building a sustainable fight back against corporate power, and countless other issues. SA wants to build a multi-racial mass movement of the working class with socialist forces as its backbone. I think the 40,000 strong rally and march against the forces of hate and reaction in Boston, MA (Aug. 2017) was a brilliant example of genuine united front work. And campaigning to show the potential power and organizing capacity of the working class and left that overshadowed and dwarfed the racist and neo-Nazi forces made the national and international news. This will be a period of clarification around ideas, history, and movement building strategy. SA is looking forward to engaging this new generation of activists and organizers because we are on the clock with no time to waste.

BS: Lastly, what do you see as the greatest obstacle to achieving progress towards socialism over the next, say, 5-10 years?

EH: We are up against an empire and global capitalism. There is no final blow against this system of oppression, war, hate, and environmental destruction. It has weapons of mass distraction and destruction at its disposal. We must be clear about what we are up against. As the Russian Revolution of 1917 and many other social movements against tyranny and corporate power have shown us, as the great Fannie Lou Hamer taught us, when people become sick and tired-the winds of change begin to swirl-what seemed impossible becomes possible. We have to prepare, which means we have to rebuild the fighting capacity of the working class, poor, and most oppressed, organizing in our workplaces, schools, and communities in a systematic and daily manner that encompasses defensive struggle to maintain what we have won and offensive battles to fight for what we want and need right now. One of the immediate tasks in front of us is reigniting the early stages of the resistance against Trump and the Republican Party as they advance the corporate agenda just like at this tax bill its naked class warfare. We must forge a mass movement that is not episodic but is sustaining and always pushing forward. Living that famous civil rights anthem to the fullest "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around."

Trump can be defeated, but we must have the will, strategy, analysis, approach, and program that centers the lives of working people and seeks to unite the working class in a common struggle against the ruling 0.1%. That's why I am incredibly excited and interested in the Poor People's Campaign this year and its possibilities in forging that movement. I may not see socialism in my lifetime, but I have been proud to be part of the struggle for socialism. To stand with the millions around the world as we say enough is enough! We will build a new world with our bare hands rooted in love for humanity, a socialist society is possible.

--

Eljeer Hawkins is a community, labor and anti-war activist, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and member of Socialist Alternative/CWI for 23 years. Eljeer is a former shop steward with Teamsters local 851 and former member of SEIU 1199, currently is a non-union healthcare worker in New York City. He contributes regularly to Socialist Alternative Newspaper, socialistworld.net , and The Hampton Institute on race, criminal justice, Black Lives Matter, and the historic black freedom movement. Eljeer is a member of the editorial board of Socialist Alternative newspaper. He has also lectured at countless venues including Harvard University, Hunter College, Oberlin College, and University of Toronto.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, adjunct professor at Florida International University, contributing writer for The Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power . His recent work has been published with Constellations , New Political Science , Class, Race and Corporate Power , Public Seminar , New Politics , and in the edited volumes The Political Economy of Robots (Palgrave, 2017) and Marcuse in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, December 2017). He is also a member of Socialist Alternative/CWI.

The Endless American Horror: Lynching and Police

By Devon Bowers

This article was originally published on AHTribune.com.

Please note that this article contains graphic descriptions of lynchings. Discretion is advised.

In 1918 Brook County, Georgia, a local plantation owner was killed by Sidney Johnson, a black man who had been leased out to the plantation via the convict lease system, in a dispute over unpaid wages. Upon hearing this, the white community went on a rampage and lynched not only Johnson, but anyone they thought to even be remotely involved in Johnson's decision. One of these men was Hayes Turner. Not only was he lynched, but also castrated.

Turner's wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant at the time, began to speak out against her husband's lynching; unfortunately, she too, became a victim. A white mob "hanged her by her feet, set her on fire, sliced her stomach open, and pulled out her baby, which was still alive." They stomped on the child's head, killing it. Then the mob "[took] the time to sew two cats in Mrs. Turner's stomach and making bets as to which one would climb out first."[1]

This can be described as nothing short of demonic. In many ways, even that fails to fully encompass the horror and pure wickedness of this event. Though, the only thing more horrid is that in a way, lynchings continue in the form of police murder.

Before delving into the connections between the aforementioned violence, it is imperative to first understand lynching. The origins of lynching truly lie in slavery where "there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder." [2] Punishment ranged from lashings to family separation to mutilation and branding. The overall idea behind these actions were that black people were not human beings, in a way, they weren't even property, they were just things, lesser than both humans and animals. This mindset continued in the post chattel slavery era, where slavery took on the form of both the convict leasing and sharecropping systems respectively. Yet, it also took place in the form of mob violence against blacks.

There have been many explorations as to the reasoning behind lynching. E.M. Beck, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, posited the argument that lynching was linked to the cotton markets. He argued that lynchings "[increased] during times of sparse cotton revenues, and declining with increasing cotton profits." The lack of profit from cotton led unemployed whites to want to replace black workers and that "Mob violence was a form of intimidation to facilitate this labor substitution." [3] While further studies have shown that fluctuations in cotton pricing don't explain lynching [4], it should be noted that white elites would have an interest in fueling white angst into hatred against blacks, effectively utilizing poor whites as foot soldiers in their mission to maintain the current racial and economic hierarchy.

The cause of lynching was first and foremost the culture of white supremacy that had existed for the past two centuries or so. Blacks became scapegoats for many of the problems that were going on and thus a subculture of violence that had arguably already taken root in the days of slavery, took on new form. "The existence of a subculture presupposes a complex pattern of norms, attitudes and actions" which "reflects 'a potent theme of violence current in the cluster of values that make up the life-style, the socialization process, [and] the interpersonal relationships of individuals living in similar conditions." [5] Effectively, violence becomes normalized and is used as a tool of to socialize and condition people as to how the society operates.

This normalization and conditioning can be seen in the form of the lynching. Lynchings were very much a community affair in which legal authorities seldom if ever got involved as "the judge, prosecutor, jurors and witnesses-all white-were usually in sympathy with the lynchers" and "local police and sheriffs rarely did anything to defend Negro citizens and often supported lynchings." [6] Newspapers as well were extremely biased in covering lynchings. "Southern editors often used sympathetic language in describing lynch mobs while reserving callous damnation for lynch victims. The southern press was extremely creative when it came to providing moral, if not legal, justification for the action of lynch mobs."[7]

We can see the affect that journalists had on the public's view of lynching in the case of the murder of the Hodges family in Statesboro, Georgia.

Henry and Claudia Hodges lived on a remote farm, near a black community, some of whom were the employees of the Hodges. Late on the night of July 28, 1904, two men saw the Hodges home aflame. They went to investigate and found the mutilated, charred remains of the entire family. The suspected motive was robbery as it was known that Hodges was better off than most farmers and it was even rumored that he possibly had several hundred dollars stashed away on his property.

The following morning, Bulloch County sheriff John Kendrick formed a group to hunt down the killers. After discovering strands of hair, a knife, a shoe, and tracks of mud, they were led to a small shack occupied by Paul Reed, a black laborer. While Paul denied involvement, he, along with his wife Harriet, were arrested and taken to jail. When being interrogated, Harriet broke down and revealed that her husband and another black man, Paul Cato, had planned to rob the Hodges. The shoe matched the one found on the Hodges farm and blood stains on his clothing seemed to seal the deal with regards to Paul Reed's guilt, however, no money was found. The sheriff also arrested thirteen other blacks who lived in the general vicinity.

Despite the lack of hard evidence in the form of money, newspapers assumed Reed's guilt. The Macon Telegraph wrote "The wholesale butchery . . . of the Hodges family near Statesboro by dehumanized brutes adds another to the long list of horrors perpetrated in this state since the emancipation of the African slaves in 1865" and noted that "the people of [Statesboro] ... displayed great moral courage and forbearance in permitting the perpetrators to escape summary punishment without the forms of law,"[8] a statement clearly hinting that lynching was on the table as an option. Others went even further in their demonization of the alleged perpetrators, such as the editor of Statesboro News who penned "Good farmers awoke to the fact that they are living in constant danger, and that human vampires live in their midst, only awaiting the opportunity to blot out their lives." [9] Language such as this only served to heighten white anxiety and fears that a black uprising had occurred in response to white mistreatment, something that had been the in the backs of their minds since the institution of slavery began.

The media actively went and pushed erroneous and misleading evidence, such as was with Morning News which stated that Reed had made a 'partial confession' to the murders, despite there being a lack of legal evidence to support the assertion. The Statesboro News continued to utilize inflammatory language, publishing an article which said in part "Their guilt has been established beyond a doubt - every chain has been traced and all lead to their door." [10] Additional stories argued that the rape of both Mrs. Hodges and their daughter Katy, where the real motives for the motive for the murders, again without the slightest shred of evidence.

Newspapers also noted that Reeds and Cato belonged to a distinct subset of blacks who were lazy and shiftless. This contrasts with the blacks who 'know their place' in society and often work on white farms. The only reason this was even discussed was because there were rumors floating around that the Hodges family may have been killed due to Mr. Hodges being too friendly with blacks, something that only aided to reinforce the region's racial caste system and conjure images of murderous black people who would attack whites were they to let their guard down.

An Atlanta News editorial minced few words in its character analysis: "It is true that the negroes in the turpentine campus of south Georgia are in the main a lot of irresponsible and half-savage vagabonds, apparently hopeless to the redeeming efforts of civilization, and that their presence makes a continual menace and threat to the peace and safety of the people."[11]

On August 15, the court case finally got underway. Superior Court Judge Alexander Daley was forbidden by Georgia law to request a change in court venue, despite his wanting to as to possibly give people time to 'cool off.' This was actually dangerous in some ways as such changes were often used by mobs as an excuse to lynch blacks on the grounds that they may have a chance to 'escape justice.'

When the trial began, the press continued to present rumor as fact. The Statesboro News reported that Reed had admitted to being part of a gang of blacks who were roaming the Bulloch County countryside, robbing, raping, and killing whites. Once again this increased the amount of fear in whites and put them more dead-set on lynching. It didn't help that throngs of whites were milling about outside the courthouse.

The actual trial was incredibly brief, lasting less than a day and a half, with Reed's and Cato's respective defenses lasting barely eight minutes, both men plead innocent. Still, the court sentenced them to hanging. As soon as this was done, the white mobs that had been surrounding the courthouse burst in and took both men, making no effort to hide their identities, despite the fact that soldiers (without any ammunition) had been dispatched to protect the men. Both men were beaten and eventually doused in kerosene and set ablaze and dead by 3:30 pm.

Many newspapers actively defended the lynching. The Forest Blade published an editorial which argued "While we will not say we are in favor of lynching principles, there are crimes - and this is one of them - that fully justified the act," similarly another editorial in the Sparta Ishmelite wrote "What society does not do for them [Georgia's whites], efficiently, they do for themselves." [12] The press played a major role in increasing tensions and outright encouraging lynchings, a serious act which helped to normalize the very act itself.

The normalization of lynching was rampant in Southern society. In 1893 in Paris, Texas, a black man by the name of Henry Smith was lynched for allegedly killing and raping the sheriff's daughter. Smith's lynching was in that a spectacle was made of it. It was the first "blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern Black by a large crowd of southern whites with features such as 'the specially chartered excursion train, the publicly sold photographs, and the wide circulated, unabashed retelling of the event by one of the lynchers.'" [13] It should be examined in detail that there were a number of "event-like themes, such as a float, carnival, and parade" all of which indicates "that within the act of justice, the structures of entertainment were organized. […] In addition, the souvenir scrambling for burnt remains as well as promotional materials for acquisition or purchase provides a similar semblance to paraphernalia purchased at modern-day sporting events." [14]

Thus, what we see is within the context of lynching, there was also an aspect of entertainment and even revelry, as if it was something to be celebrated and loved. The squabbling over Smith's remains reinforces the unbroken idea from slavery that black people aren't human beings, but rather just things, in this case a trophy.

The situation went even further in the case of Jesse Washington, a 17 year old mentally disabled boy who was accused of murdering a white woman and subject to a kangaroo court. Children were even bought to view his horrific lynching:

Fifteen thousand men, women and children packed the square. They climbed up poles and onto the tops of cars. . . . Children were lifted up by their parents in the air. Washington was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire of boxes and sticks. Wailing, the boy attempted to climb the skillet hot chain. For this the men cut off his fingers. The executioners repeatedly lowered the boy into the flames and hoisted him out again. With each repetition, a mighty shout [from the crowd] was raised. [15]

It is in acts such as this, with the involvement of children and, as with Smith's lynching, the selling of Washington's remains as if they were memorabilia, that the murder of black people becomes normalized and something beyond a source of maintaining racial hierarchy, something akin to a form of entertainment. Among this murderfest, though, there were those who fought back such as Ida B. Wells.

Wells was a black woman who was mainly focused on battling racial discrimination and penning articles. This changed in 1892, "when a close childhood friend of hers, Thomas Moss, was lynched" in Memphis [16] Wells was of the mindset that lynching was an overreaction by whites against rapists, however, her views quickly changed given the fact that Moss was lynched for defending his grocery store from armed whites and being lynched for the simple act of self-defense. On top of this, Memphis law enforcement didn't even bother to lift a finger to arrest the lynchers, who were publicly known.

Wells took a bit of an academic-esque approach to the situation, thinking that if lynching were exposed as the incarnation of racial hatred it was, it would no longer be socially acceptable. For three months, she traveled around the South investigating lynchings and interviewing witnesses. She found that not only were Black men lynched for having consensual relationships with white women, but also virtually all lynchings became about rape after the lynching went public. She took her information and published a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Eventually due to threats on her life, she fled Memphis and moved to Chicago, where she continued to write and speak out against lynching. Still, there were others who took a more hands on, self-defense approach to lynching as took place in Decatur, IL.

On June 3, 1893, in Decatur, IL, a black day labor by the name of Samuel L. Bush who had been accused of rape, was taken from the Macon County jail and lynched by a white mob after they had went on a rampage searching for him from March 31 to June 2. During this time, rather than meet with members of the black community to discuss Bush's situation, "State's Attorney Isaac R. Mills, Decatur Mayor David Moffett, Deputy Sheriff Harry Midkiff, and Decatur Marshal William Mason were meeting with Charles B. Britton and Charles M. Fletcher, the leaders of the vigilantes." They attempted to appease the leaders, with Mills stating that if Bush wasn't sentenced to death, "it would then be time to resort to extreme measures." [17]

Despite days of lynching rumors floating around, the authorities allowed for nearly one thousand people to gather across from the jail where Bush was being held and made no effort to move or in any way ensure Bush's safety. Just before 2 AM, "a mob composed of some of the county's leading citizens broke Sam Bush out of jail and lynched him." [18]

In response to the lynching, Wilson B. Woodford, the only black lawyer in town that Bush had hired, published an open letter to blacks living in Decatur, urging them to attend a mass meeting where a strategy for dealing with the lynching would be formed. At the meeting, Woodford advocated taking the legal route, pushing the state attorney, the same one who had been complicit in Bush's lynching, to take action. Some, such as Edward Jacobs, rejected it and pushed for armed blacks to go themselves and arrest Bush's murderers. The resolutions committee backed Woodford's strategy and messages were sent to both the governor and state attorney.

Woodford and Jacobs were coming from two separate worlds. Woodford, having a legal background, "was predisposed to distinguish between the law and enforcers of the law. Woodford, like other liberal race men and women, believed that racial prejudice and contempt for law and order were the twin causes of lynching" whereas Jacobs questioned this method of thinking. Jacobs acknowledged the cozy relationship between lynchers and the police and knew that "knew the authorities had mobilized the vigilantes to help them in capturing Bush but had rejected African-American support either to protect Bush or to arrest his murderers." [19]

Interestingly enough, the two strategies would merge as both Woodford and Jacobs were members of the National Afro-American League, an organization that push for black development and fight against white responses to said development. NAAL "combined the pre-eminent philosophy of self-help and racial solidarity with the protest tactics of legalism, direct action, and violent self-help."[20]

A year later, James Jackson, a black male porter, was accused of raping a white woman under questionable circumstances. The father of the woman was pushing for Jackson's lynching and stated that help was coming from Mt. Zion. This situation would turn out rather differently than Bush's.

Blacks controlled the streets surrounding the jail. They could be seen in doorways, under stair wells and behind wagons, armed and ready for action. Other African-Americans patrolled the streets scrutinizing whites who happened to be out at that late hour. And unlike at the protest meeting, at least two black women participated. [21]

They continued to patrol the streets around the courthouse, the police didn't attempt to intervene, and there were no attempts to lynch Jackson.

As the case with Bush shows, the police themselves were many times the very ones who were, at best, complicit (not that that truly matters), and at worst, active participants in lynchings. This shouldn't be surprising as not only were the police entrenched in the same racial mindset as the lynchers, but also the purpose of the police was (and is) a tool of social control, especially against black people.

The police themselves came out of slavery as "slave patrols and night watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities." [22] In fact, in 1871 Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, "which prohibited state actors from violating the Civil Rights of all citizens in part because of law enforcements' involvement with the infamous group. "[23] (emphasis added) The police themselves oftentimes were directly involved in lynchings such as with the case of Austin Callaway, a sixteen year old boy.

Callaway was shot and killed in LaGrange, Georgia on September 8, 1940, having just a day earlier been accused of assaulting a white woman. He was arrested and taken to the local jail. Later that night, six men, one of them armed, went into the jail, forced the jailer to open the door, and murdered Callaway.[24] Though the killers were never found, it is known that the police were personally involved. It was noted in 2017 by LaGrange's police chief, Louis M. Dekmar, in an apology regarding Callaway's murder. Specifically, Dekmar said "I sincerely regret and denounce the role our Police Department played in Austin's lynching, both through our action and our inaction." [25] Callaway's story is just one in many[26] where police were directly or indirectly involved in lynchings. It is this historical backdrop in which police actively murder black people that today's police murders continue.

With lynchings, the body would hang for days as both a reminder to other blacks to 'stay in their place' but also a part of the aforementioned spectacle. This spectacle continues as can be seen with "the fact that Michael Brown's body was left on the street for hours after he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson," something "that points to just how little has changed in American race relations since the days of Jim Crow." [27] Leaving Brown's body out to languish was an illustration of the lack of concern and decency the Ferguson police department had for him and is reminiscent of leaving a lynch victim's body out for all to see, to remind everyone where black people stood on the racial hierarchy: the bottom.

The media, too, plays a role in police killings as they did during lynchings. Once again, the Michael Brown case puts this in stark view. Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, described him in disproportionate and even inhuman terms.

"When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan," Wilson, who is 6′ 4″ and 210 lbs., said of Brown, who was 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs. at the time of his death. […]He said Brown tried to get his fingers inside the trigger. "And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked." [28]

Not only are black people described in nonhuman terms, but there is a constant implication that
they deserve to be shot due to past transgressions. In the case of Akai Gurley, "The New York Daily News ran a headline, Akai Gurley had criminal record, innocent when shot by cop, which they later switched out for ' Protesters call for arrest of rookie cop who shot Akai Gurley as victim's sister says he didn't deserve to die . '"[29] There is also guilt by association. When twelve year old Tamir Rice was killed by the police, the media bought up the fact that the family's lawyer had "also defended the boy's mother in a drug trafficking case" [30] and that Rice's father had a history of domestic violence. [31] Regularly, the media brings up information that has nothing to do with the actual incident in question, but actively works to defame and sully the victim's name.

Where there once were slave owners and slave catchers, the KKK, and lynch mobs, they have all now "become largely replaced by state agencies such as the criminal justice system, and local and federal police." [32] In August 2016, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent went on a mission to the United States. In their conclusion on their findings, they wrote: "Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching. Impunity for State violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency." [33]

This assessment is quite correct, especially within the ideas of the spectacle and normalization. While there may not be a sports theme to current police murders, there is a spectacle in and of itself in the near constant sharing of videos of black people dying at the hands of police and the footage being played again and again on the nightly news. While one shouldn't discount that videos are being shared to raise awareness and may very well get people involved in activism, at the same time by the videos being shared and viewed over and over, it can very well create a situation where it the death of black people is normalized and an immunity of sorts built up to it. As writer Feliks Garcia notes

To witness the final moments of someone's life is not supposed to be a regular experience, yet it feels like every week, we're presented with a new video of a different unarmed black man-or child-killed by police.

With the reach of social media, each of these videos is viewed ad nauseum, and you have to ask what purpose this serves. Who needs to see these videos at this point?[34]

Due to the constant viewing of black people dying at the hands of the police, coupled with the media's twisted narratives, seeing black people die becomes a normal occurrence.

The ongoing police murders of black people draw strong parallels to lynchings: from the involvement of the police to the utter dearth of justice to the larger social implications. It is both a tragedy and a nightmare, an endless horror.

Notes

[1] This American Life, Suitable For Children, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/627/transcript

[2] Robert L. Zangrando, About Lynching, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm

[3] E. M. Beck, "The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market For Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930," American Sociological Review 55:4 (August 1990), pg 526

[4] James W. Clarke, "Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South," British Journal of Political Science 28:2 (April 1998), pg 272

[5] Clarke, pg 275

[6] Robert A. Gibson, The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950 , Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute, http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html

[7] Richard M. Perloff, "The Press and Lynchings of African Americans," Journal of Black Studies 30:3 (January 2000), pg 320

[8] Reed W. Smith, "Southern Journalists and Lynching: The Statesboro Case Study," Journalism and Communication Monographs 7:2 (2005), pg 63

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid, pg 64

[11] Ibid, pg 65

[12] Ibid, pg 70

[13] Rasul A. Mowatt, "Lynching as Leisure: Broadening Notions of a Field," American Behavioral Scientist 56:10 (August 2012), pg 1371

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid, pg 1376

[16] Amii Larkin Barnard, "The Application of Critical Race Feminism to the Anti-Lynching Movement: Black Women's Fight against Race and Gender Ideology, 1892-1920," UCLA Women's Law Journal 3:1 (January 1993), pg 15

[17] Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "A Warlike Demonstration,' Legalism, Armed Resistance, and Black Political Mobilization in Decatur, Illinois, 1894-1898," The Journal of Negro History 83:1 (Winter 1998), pg 54

[18] Ibid

[19] Cha-Jua, pg 57

[20] Ibid

[21] Cha-Jua, pg 59

[22] Victor E. Kappeler, A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing , http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing

[23] Ibid

[24] Northeastern University Law School, Austin Callaway, http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/georgia/austincallaway/

[25] Alan Binder, Richard Fausset, "Nearly 8 Decades Later, an Apology for a Lynching in Georgia," New York Times, January 26, 2017 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/lagrange-georgia-lynching-apology.html )

[26] State Sanctioned, Police and State Involvement with Lynching, https://statesanctioned.com/police-and-state-involvement-with-lynching/

[27] David G. Embrick, "Two Nations, Revisited: The Lynching of Black and Brown Bodies, Police Brutality, and Racial Control in 'Post-Racial' Amerikkka," Critical Sociology 41:6 (June 2015), pg 837

[28] Josh Sanburn, "All The Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown," Time, November 25, 2014 ( http://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-brown-demon/ )

[29] Simple Justice, The Outrage of the Victim's Rap Sheet Must End, http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/11/23/the-outrage-of-the-victims-rap-sheet-must-end/ (November 23, 2014)

[30] Brandon Blackwell, "Lawyer representing Tamir Rice's family defended boy's mom in drug trafficking case," Cleveland, November 24, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/lawyer_representing_tamir_rice.html )

[31] Brandon Blackwell, "Tamir Rice's father has history of domestic violence," Cleveland, November 26, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/tamir_rices_father_has_history.html )

[32] Embrick, pg 838

[33] United Nations General Assembly, Report on the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to the United States of America , https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/183/30/PDF/G1618330.pdf?OpenElement (August 18, 2016)

[34] Feliks Garcia, "Police brutality is modern lynching- and you may be a part of it," Daily Dot, April 20, 2015 ( https://www.dailydot.com/via/black-men-police-violence-lynching-internet/ )

Is It Nation Time?: The Black Nationalism of Black Panther

By Sean Posey

In the fall of 1992, a unique moment in American cinema captured the attention of the nation. Auteur Spike Lee released his magnum opus, Malcolm X, to wide critical acclaim. But more than that, for the first time, a biopic of one of the central characters in the history of Black Nationalism reached an audience around the country and the world. Hats with the 'X' logo appeared on the heads of black youth everywhere, and the film itself inspired introspection and dialogue among not just black intellectuals but also among African Americans from all walks of life. The film's ending credits merged scenes of Malcolm throughout his life and connected Harlem to Soweto and America to Africa.

A similar moment seems to be upon us with the recent release of Black Panther, a comic book film about an African king/superhero and the fictional nation of Wakanda. Symbols and themes from Black Nationalism and Pan-African history are laced throughout the film, which manages to elevate the comic book genre flick to a visual textbook for not just inspiring black pride, but also for reflecting important elements of the black past and possible future.

Black Nationalism is a complicated concept, one with roots stretching back to the nineteenth century and beyond. The reality of chattel slavery in the West led to the call for the birth of a black nation from men such as Martin Delany, often called the "grandfather of Black Nationalism," and Robert Alexander Young, author of the 1829 Ethiopian Manifesto, which postulated a universal connection between all black peoples.

Young was writing about an old idea - Pan-Africanism. Envisioning a future nation for blacks in North America and beyond (Black Nationalism) - and building connections between African peoples around the world (Pan-Africanism) - are concepts that pulse throughout Black Panther. During the early nineteenth century, Paul Cuffee, a black businessman and abolitionist in America, began bringing African Americans to Sierra Leone. The English had already begun to bring freed slaves to the area after the Revolutionary War to a place called Granville Town, also known as the "Province of Freedom." Cuffee hoped the region could be a future homeland for blacks looking to flee oppression in America.

In the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey, perhaps the most famous of the Black Nationalists and Pan-Africanists, envisioned Liberia as a future homeland for blacks looking to flee violence and discrimination in America. He hoped that such a place would become an advanced country where blacks could prosper and build a power the equal of any in Europe. The Garveyites and other such Black Nationalists saw themselves as indelibly linked to Africa.

In Black Panther, a modern and technologically advanced black nation in Africa has already been realized. The nation of Wakanda masquerades before the world as an underdeveloped state, but hidden behind an elaborate façade is the most advanced country on Earth, powered by a fictional metal known as vibranium. Mined from a sacred mound, the substance powers nearly everything in the country.

In this technologically advanced nation, what Patricia Hill Collins calls the "main ideas" of Black Nationalism - self-determination (political), self-definition (cultural), and self- reliance (economic) - are all fully realized.[1]

Maglev trains, Talon fighters, and vehicles designed to mimic flying animals are among the more wonderful aspects of Wakandan technology that we see in the film. Unlike Western countries, Wakanda incorporates technology that both mimics and exists in harmony with the natural world. Afrofuturistic cities mingle with gorgeous vistas of waterfalls and trees. There are skyscrapers sporting thatched roofs, grass sidewalks, sophisticated public transportation systems, and no visible cars.

There is nary a white face in sight as black vendors sell their wares in the street, and a black king, T'Challa, rules over a country that has never known colonization. According to Carvell Wallace, director Ryan Coogler loosely modeled his idea of Wakanda after the Kingdom of Lesotho, a landlocked country surrounded by South Africa. But Black Panther's kingdom is a futuristic polity beyond the wildest dreams of even Marcus Garvey.

From as far back as the nineteenth century, women such as Maria W. Stewart, a servant turned public figure, espoused the ideas of Black Nationalism on the national stage in America. However, in North America and throughout the African Diaspora, patriarchal structures relegated black women to largely supporting roles in the struggle for black liberation. Such gendered systems of power are absent in Wakanda.

It is easy to see the inspiration of historical figures such as Amy Jacques Garvey and Henrietta Vinton Davis in the characters of Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong'o) and Okoye (played by Danai Gurira).

Okoye is head of the fearsome Dora Milaje, an all-female bodyguard that protects Black Panther and the royal family. They might be thought of as a cross between the "Amazonian Guard" that protected the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and the Nation of Islam's Vanguard or "Warrior Class" of the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class. The Dora Milaje bring to mind the term "an army of Amazons to lead the race," used to describe women in the United Negro Improvement Association. [2] Indeed, the Dora Milaje have been compared to the all-female African army of the Dahomey Amazons, who once fought the French in what is now the Republic of Benin.

Unlike Okoye, Nakia is a spy, a member of the secretive "War Dog" squad, which operates in a capacity similar to the C.I.A., minus the overthrowing of foreign governments. During the course of the film, she attempts to convince T'Challa of Wakanda's responsibility to help other embattled Africans across the continent. However, it has long been the tradition in Wakanda to avoid any entanglements with the outside world that might draw attention to the country's true power.

The tension between Wakanda's wealth and the impoverishment and agony among black populations throughout the world is symbolized in the character of Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). Killmonger is the son of a murdered Wakandan spy and prince, N'Jobu. While working undercover in Oakland, California, during the 1990s, N'Jobu witnesses the poverty and racial oppression facing blacks in America. He comes to believe that Wakanda should use its technology to aid the suffering of fellow blacks, wherever they may be.

N'Jobu comes to work with hated arms dealer Ulysses Klaue to in order to smuggle vibranium of out of Wakanda in order to facilitate an uprising among African Americans. When T'Chaka, who is both N'Jobu's brother and also T'Challa's father, confronts him, N'Jobu refuses to come back to Wakanda to stand trial and is killed by T'Chaka.

N'Jobu's son, the young Killmonger, is left behind in America. He grows to become a member of a black-ops unit, training for the day when he might return to Wakanda and seize the throne. There is more than a bit of Malcolm X in Killmonger, who wishes to arm the black people of the world for a final battle against white supremacy. But unlike X, Killmonger descends into violent acts against his own people (especially women) in his quest for power.

When he ultimately does return to Wakanda to confront T'Challa, it is easy to hear the words of Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, a Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist, who spoke of the plight of blacks in the United States during the twentieth century: "How long shall we have to wait for something to be done for the black people's of this country?" [3]

T'Challa, the Martin Luther King to Killmonger's Malcolm X, rejects the idea of a global war. But he remains torn over Wakanda's policy of isolation from the rest of the world, particularly the black world outside of his country's borders. By the end of the film, T'Challa decides to open outreach centers throughout the United States, bringing Wakanda's technology to those in the African Diaspora - a true act of Pan-Africanism.

The chant of the Black Power movement during the 1960s and 1970s (Is it nation time?) is symbolically answered in Black Panther. For although Wakanda is a fictional African country, its importance extends throughout the diaspora.

The concept of Black Nationalism in modern times goes beyond the idea of creating a physical polity. According to Kate Dossett, "Black Nationalism in the United States has always been closely linked to Pan-Africanism, and can be better understood through an imagined community notion of nationalism rather than a euro-centric state model." [4]

Wakanda's example is one that reaches out beyond Africa to the masses of people of African descent. It is an imagined nation for an imagined community throughout the world.

Black Panther has the potential to help engage audiences with these concepts and with the history of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. The beauty of the costumes, characters and the fictional world of Wakanda can do much more than entertain. They could mark the beginning of a new cultural and political awakening in a century where the key questions of black self-determination, self-definition, and self-reliance continue to be part of a needed dialogue.

Notes

[1] Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 75.

[2] Kate Dossett, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 157.

[3] Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 181.

[4] Doessett, 6.

A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense

By Chad Kautzer

Editor's Note: This essay is an adapted excerpt from Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense (ed. scott crow).

In his 1964 speech "Communication and Reality," Malcolm X said: "I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence." Earlier that year, he made a similar point in his Harlem speech introducing the newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity: "It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent."

To portray self-defensive violence as natural, in no need of justification, or as so commonsensical that it could barely be called violence has a depoliticizing effect. Since the goal of Malcolm X's speeches was to undermine critiques of armed black resistance, this effect was intentional. For good reasons, he was attempting to normalize black people defending themselves against the violence of white rule. When Malcolm X did speak of self-defense as a form of violence, he emphasized that it was lawful and an individual right. In his most famous speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964), he explicitly stated: "We don't do anything illegal." This was also, of course, how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense justified its armed shadowing of police in Oakland in the late 1960s: it was the members' Second Amendment right to bear arms and their right under California law to openly carry them.

To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self through its social relations and conflicts.

Because communities of color defend themselves as much against a culture of white supremacy as they do against bodily harm, their self-defense undermines existing social hierarchies, ideologies, and identities. If we were to limit ourselves to the language of individual rights, these interconnections would remain concealed. Violence against women (but not only women), for example, has a gendering function, enforcing norms of feminine subordination and vulnerability. Resistance to such violence not only defends the body but also undermines gender and sexual norms, subverting hetero-masculine dominance and the notions of femininity or queerness it perpetuates. Since the social structures and identities of race, gender, class, and ability intersect in our lives, practices of self-defense can and often must challenge structures of oppression on multiple fronts simultaneously.

In the following, I do not focus on the question of whether self-defensive violence is justifiable, but rather on why it is political; how it can transform self-understandings and community relations; in what contexts it can be insurrectionary; and why it must be understood against a background of structural violence. It is necessary to clarify these dimensions of self-defense for two reasons in particular. First, arguments advocating armed community defense too often discuss the use of violence and the preparations for it as somehow external to political subjectivity, as if taking up arms, training, or exercising self-defensive violence do not transform subjects and their social relations. The influence of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) on the early Black Panthers, Steve Biko, and others derives precisely from Fanon's understanding of the transformative effects of resistance in the decolonizing of consciousness. "At the individual level," Fanon writes, "violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude."

The second reason for clarification is to distinguish the strategies, ways of theorizing, and forms of social relations of liberatory movements from those of reactionary movements. There is an increasingly influential understanding of self-defense today that reinforces a particular notion of the self-a "sovereign subject"-that is corrosive to horizontal social relations and can only be sustained vis-à-vis state power. This notion of the self runs counter to the goals of non-statist movements and self-reliant communities. To be aware of these possibilities and pitfalls allows us to avoid them, a goal to which the following sketch of a critical theory of community self-defense seeks to contribute.

Resistance and Structural Violence

At the National Negro Convention in 1843, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet issued a rare public call for large-scale resistance to slavery: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency." I describe resistance as opposition to the existing social order from within, and, as Garnet suggested, it can take different forms, such as self-defense, insurrection, or revolution. We can think of an insurrection as a limited armed revolt or rebellion against an authority, such as a state government, occupying power, or even slave owner. It is a form of illegal resistance, often with localized objectives, as in Shays' Rebellion (1786), Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831), the insurrections on the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841), the coal miner Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), Watts (1965), Stonewall (1969), and Attica (1971).

Distinguishing between defensive and insurrectionary violence can be complicated. In the Amistad case, for example, white officials initially described it as a rebellion and thus a violation of the law, but later reclassified it as self-defense when the original enslavement was found to be unlawful. In a rare reversal, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the captives on the Amistad as having selves worthy of defense. That was never in question among those rebelling, of course, but it does indicate the political nature of the self and our assessments of resistance. "Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me," writes Fanon, "there was only one answer: to make myself known." On the Amistad, rebellion was the only way for the enslaved to make their selves known, meaning that their actions were simultaneously a defense of their lives and a political claim to recognition.

A sustained insurrection can become revolutionary when it threatens to fundamentally transform or destroy the dominant political, social, or economic institutions, as with the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico in 1994 and the recent wave of Arab uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, including most significantly Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. The armed rebellion led by John Brown in 1859, which seized the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, was intended to instigate a revolution against the institution of slavery. Although the insurrection was quickly put down, it inspired abolitionists around the country and contributed to the onset of the U.S. Civil War.

Brown's rebellion was not a slave revolt (and thus not an act of self-defense), but it did highlight the nature of structural violence. Henry David Thoreau, the inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience and, in turn, that of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the most insightful analysis of this violence at the time. In his essay "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau defends Brown's armed resistance and identifies the daily state violence of white rule against which the insurrection took place:

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. . . . I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause [i.e., Brown's insurrection].

In this passage Thoreau highlights how the so-called security of one community was achieved by oppressing another and making it insecure. To properly understand the insurrection, he therefore argues, one must view it as a response to illegitimate structural violence. He enumerates the commonplace mechanisms of this rule, which, for whites, fades into the background of their everyday lives: law and order upheld by a neutral police force, enforced by an objective legal system and carceral institutions, and defended by an army supported by the Constitution and blessed by religious authorities. The violence of white supremacy becomes naturalized and its beneficiaries see no need for its justification; it is nearly invisible to them, though not, of course, to those it oppresses. "The existence of violence is at the very heart of a racist system," writes Robert Williams in Negroes with Guns (1962). "The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself."

We all exist within hierarchical social structures and the meaning and function of violence, self-defensive or otherwise, will be determined by our position vis-à-vis others in these structures. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, described the self-defensive practices of the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and thus insurrectionary, if not revolutionary. Surely his assessment had more to do with the threat self-reliant black communities posed to white domination in the country than with the security of government institutions. "When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence,'" writes Williams, "what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists." These structures of domination and monopolies of violence are forms of rule that operate in the family, the city, and the colony, and resistance to their violence, both dramatic and mundane, "makes known" the selves of the subjugated.

A satisfactory notion of self-defense is not obvious when we view self-defensive acts within the context of structural violence and understand the self as both embodied and social. Writing specifically of armed self-defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja defines it as "the protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." While this is appropriate in many contexts, the primary association of self-defense with protection does not capture how it can also reproduce or undermine existing social norms and relations, depending on the social location of the self being defended. Describing the effects of his defense against a slaveholder, Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote that he "was a changed being after that fight," for "repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant" had an emancipatory effect "on my spirit." This act of self-defense, he asserts, "was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me." Our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformativepower of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups.

Social Hierarchies and Subject Formation

To see how self-defense can have several effects and why a critical theory of self-defense must, therefore, always account for relations of domination, we need to understand in what way the self is both embodied and social. By embodied I mean that it is through the body that we experience and come to know the world and ourselves, rather than through an abstract or disembodied mind. The body orients our perspective, and is socially visible, vulnerable, and limited. Much of our knowledge about the social and physical world is exercised by the body. Our bodies are sexed, raced, and gendered, not only "externally" by how others view us or how institutions order us-as, for example, feminine, masculine, queer, disabled, white, and black-but also "internally" by how we self-identify and perform these social identities in our conscious behavior and bodily habits. By the time we are able to challenge our identities, we have already been habituated within social hierarchies, so resistance involves unlearning our habits in thought and practice as well as transforming social institutions. As David Graeber writes, "forms of social domination come to be experienced in the most intimate possible ways-in physical habits, instincts of desire or revulsion-that often seem essential to our very sense of being in the world."

Since our location within social hierarchies in part determines our social identities, the self that develops is social and political from the start. This does not mean that we are "stuck" or doomed to a certain social identity or location, nor that we can simply decide to identify ourselves elsewhere within social hierarchies or somehow just exit them. To be sure, we have great leeway in terms of self-identification, but self-identification does not itself change institutional relations or degrees of agency, respect, risk, opportunity, or access to resources. These kinds of changes can only be achieved through social and political struggles. Our embodied identities are sites of conflict, formed and reformed through our practical routines and relations as well as through social struggle. Since the actions and perceptions of others are integral to the development of our own, including our self-understanding, we say that the self is mediated, or is formed through our relations with others in systems of production, consumption, education, law, and so forth.

In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois theorized black life in a white supremacist society as experiencing one's self as split in two, a kind of internalization of a social division that produced what he called "double-consciousness," or "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Although one may view oneself as capable, beautiful, intelligent, and worthy of respect, the social institutions one inhabits can express the opposite view. Part of the experience of oppression is to live this otheringform of categorization in everyday social life. Even when one consciously strives to resist denigration and to hold fast to a positive self-relation, the social hierarchy insinuates itself into one's self-understanding. In the most intimate moments of introspection, a unified self-consciousness escapes us because our self-understanding can never completely break from the social relations and ideologies that engender it. Social conflict is internalized, and it takes great strength just to hold oneself together; to live as a subjectwhen others view and treat you as little more than an object, and when you are denied the freedoms, security, and resources enjoyed by others. Ultimately, only by undermining the social conditions of oppression through collective resistance can the double-consciousness Du Bois describes become one.

Racism produces race and not the other way around. Racial categories emerge from practical relations of domination, unlike ethnic groups, which are cultural forms of collective life that do not need to define themselves in opposition to others. Racial categories are neither abstract nor biological, but are social constructions initially imposed from without but soon after reconfigured from within through social struggles. As with all relations of domination, the original shared meanings attributed to one group are contrary to the shared meanings attributed to other groups and, thus, often exist as general dichotomies. This oppositional relation in meaning mirrors the hierarchical opposition of the groups in practical life-a fact that is neither natural nor contingent.

Masculinity and femininity, for example, are not natural categories: they are social roles within a social order and thus have a history just as racial groups do. Yet, like those of race, the social and symbolic relations of gender are not contingent. Indeed, masculinity and femininity exhibit a certain kind of logic that we find in every institutionalized form of social domination. Because gender is a way of hierarchically ordering human relations, the characteristics associated with the dominant group function to justify their domination. Group members are said to be, for example, stronger, more intelligent, and more moral and rational. Nearly every aspect of social life will reflect this, from the division of labor to the forms of entertainment.

In reality, the dominant group does not dominate because it is more virtuous or rational-indeed, the depth of its viciousness is limitless-but due to its dominance it can propagate the idea that it is more virtuous, rational, or civilized. "The colonial 'civilizing mission,'" writes María Lugones, "was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people's bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror."

The fundamental dependency of the oppressor on the oppressed is concealed in all ideologies of social domination. Although the very existence of the colonist, capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarch relies on the continuous exploitation of others, they propagate the idea of an inverted world in which they are free from all dependencies. This is the camera obscura of ideology that Karl Marx discusses in The German Ideology (1845-46). The supposedly natural lack of autonomy of the subordinated groups is, we are told, the reason for social hierarchy. Workers depend on capitalists to employ and pay them, women need men to support and protect them, people of color require whites to control and decide for them, and so forth.

Resistance to domination reveals the deception of this inverted world, destabilizing the practical operations of hierarchy and undermining its myths, for example of masculine sovereignty, white superiority, compulsory heterosexuality, and capital's self-creation of value. Violence and various forms of coercion support these myths, but such violence would be ineffective if some groups were not socially, politically, and legally structured to be vulnerable to it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." Indeed, to be vulnerable to violence, exploitation, discrimination, and toxic environments is never the choice of the individual. Any radical liberatory agenda must therefore include among its aims the reduction of such group-differentiated vulnerabilities, which would strike a blow to many forms of social domination, including by not limited to race. This is not to say that vulnerability can be completely overcome. The social nature of our selves guarantees that the conditions that enable or disable us can never be completely under our control, and those very same conditions render us vulnerable to both symbolic and physical harm.

Turning specifically to consider self-defensive practices, while they cannot therefore eliminate vulnerability, they can reduce it for particular groups and undermine it at a structuring principle of oppression. Training in self-defense, writes Martha McCaughey in Real Knockouts (1997), "makes possible the identification of not only some of the mechanisms that create and sustain gender inequality but also a means to subvert them."

The Politics of Self-Defense

If we accept a social, historical, and materialist account of group and subject formation, and understand that groups are reproduced with the help of violence, both mundane and spectacular, then we can see why self-defense functions as more than protection from bodily harm. It will also be clear why self-defense is not external to questions of our political subjectivity. If we acknowledge that we are hierarchically organized in groups-by race, gender, and class, for example-which makes some groups the beneficiaries of structural violence and others disabled, harmed, or killed by it, we see how self-defense can either stabilize or undermine domination and exploitation.

Self-defense as resistance from below is a fundamental violation of the most prevalent social and political norms, as well as our bodily habits. As McCaughey writes: "The feminine demeanor that comes so 'naturally' to women, a collection of specific habits that otherwise may not seem problematic, is precisely what makes us terrible fighters. Suddenly we see how these habits that make us vulnerable and that aestheticize that vulnerability are encouraged in us by a sexist culture." Organized examples of resistance to this structured vulnerability include the Gulabi or Pink Sari Gang in Uttar Pradesh, India; Edith Garrud's Bodyguard suffragettes, who trained in jujitsu; as well as numerous queer and feminist street patrol groups, including the Pink Panthers. McCaughey calls these self-defensive practices "feminism in the flesh," because they are simultaneously resisting the violence of patriarchy, while reconfiguring and empowering one's body and self-understanding. We could similarly think of the self-defensive practices of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement as anti-racist, as decolonization in the flesh.

Although self-defense is not sufficient to transform institutionalized relations of domination, unequal distributions of resources and risk, or the experience of double-consciousness, it is a form of decolonization and necessary for other kinds of mobilizations. The praxis of resistance is also an important form of self-education about the nature of power, the operations of oppression, and the practice of autonomy. When conditions are so oppressive that one's self is not recognized at all, self-defense is de facto insurrection, a necessary making oneself known through resistance. While the most common form of self-defense is individual and uncoordinated, this does not make it any less political or any less important to the struggle, and this is true regardless of the mind-set or intentions of those exercising resistance.

We must, however, also be attentive to how resistance, and even preparations for it, can instrumentalize and reinforce problematic gender and race norms, political strategies, or sovereign politics. A critical theory of community self-defense should reveal these potentially problematic effects and identify how to counter them. There is, for example, an influential pamphlet, The Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869), written by Sergey Nechayev and republished by the Black Panthers, which describes the revolutionist as having "no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name." This nameless, yet masculine, figure "has broken all the bonds which tie him to the civil order." But who provides for the revolutionist and who labors to reproduce the material conditions of his revolutionary life? Upon whom, in short, does the supposed independence of the revolutionist depend?

Although the machismo and narcissism here is extreme to the point of being mythical-George Jackson said it was "too cold, very much like the fascist psychology"-it does speak to a twofold danger in practices of resistance. The first danger is that self-defensive practices are part of a division of labor that falls along the traditional fault lines of social hierarchies within groups. Men have, for instance, too often taken up the task of community defense in all contexts of resistance, which has the effect of reproducing traditional gender hierarchies and myths of masculine sovereignty. Considerations of self-defense must therefore be intersectionalist and aware of the transformative power and embodied nature of resistance, as discussed above. The group INCITE!, for example, seeks to defend women, gender nonconforming, and trans people of color from "violence directed against communities (i.e., police brutality, prisons, racism, economic exploitation, etc.)" as well as from "violence within communities (sexual/domestic violence)."

The second danger is a commitment to the notion of a sovereign subject, which is the centerpiece of authoritarian political ideologies and motivates so many reactionary movements. The growing number of white militias, the sovereign citizen movement, as well as major shifts in interpretations of the Second Amendment and natural rights, are contributing to an increasingly influential politics of self-defense with a sovereign subject at its core. For this sovereign subject-whose freedom can only be actualized through domination-the absolute identification with abstract individual rights always reflects an implicit dependency on state violence, much the way Nechayev's revolutionist implicitly relies on a community he refuses to acknowledge. The sovereign subject's disavowal of the social conditions of its own possibility produces an authoritarian concept of the self, whose so-called independence always has the effect of undermining the conditions of freedom for others.

Although one objective of self-defense is protection from bodily harm, the social and political nature of the self being defended makes such resistance political as well. Self-defense can help dismantle oppressive identities, lessen group vulnerability, and destabilize social hierarchies supported by structural violence. The notion of a sovereign subject conceals these empowering dimensions of self-defense and inhibits the creation of self-reliant communities in which the autonomy of each is enabled by nonhierarchical (and non-sovereign) social relations being afforded to all.

This excerpt was originally published at Boston Review .