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“Every Day!”: A View on the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

A View on the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

Map of the Autonomous Zone from June 10, 2020 on wiki-commons
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In the past few weeks since the uprising in response to police killings of Black and Brown folks around Turtle Island, amazing chances have presented themselves and folks have seized opportunities. One great and unfolding circumstance is known as the CHAZ or CHOP, an autonomous zone and occupational protest surrounding a police precinct in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The area was opened to community redesign after nights of intense battles with the police leading to the department evacuating the East Precinct to crowds of people chanting “Every Day”, meaning they would continue surrounding the police building. In many ways, the ability of the community, including anarchists and other radicals, to be able to respond to the situation was possible because of the mutual aid work that had been being developed during the covid-19 pandemic and years of building relationships.

In this podcast special, you’ll hear a fresh conversation with D. D is a Black Anarchist who grew up in and around Capitol Hill district in Seattle. He talks for this chat about that neighborhood and adjacent Central District’s rebelliousness and conflictual history with the Eastern Precinct that the Seattle Police abandoned, about his knowledge of the protests of past weeks and the retreat of cops from their pen. D talks about the foundation of what has been called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, aka CHAZ, aka Capitol Hill Occupation Protest (or CHOP), or as D calls it the Chopped City CHAZ. You’ll also hear a tiny bit about the history of occupations during protests in the city, engagement with the zone and indigenous communities in the area, the idea of monolithic Black Leadership, self-defense against the far right, the reproduce-ability of the auonomous zone model and other topics. We’re going to try to bring you more stories from this place soon and are super thankful to D for sharing his perspectives.

note: I was informed by my cohost William that in fact the retaining wall in front of the fourth precinct in Minneapolis that I was referring to was actually constructed by the Minneapolis PD, hence why it looks janky as shit.

A few of the resources that D suggests folks pay attention to include Converge Media,

Some of the occupations that D mentions include:

The website for the Duwamish nation is DuwamishTribe.org

And for the Suquamish nation’s website can be found at Suquamish.nsn.us

Political Prisoner Oso Blanco’s statement on the CHAZ can be found at FreeOsoBlanco.Blogspot.Com.

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Music from this podcast:

Liquid Liquid – Cavern – Discography (1981-1984)

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Transcription:

// Note from the transcriber: I got rid of some conversational language on part of the speakers, words ‘So, like, well’ and so on. This has created a text that reads a little more formally than the interview itself. The reason for this is that I want to make this as clear as possible to folks who want to read it but are still developing a fluency in English. Apologies for any loss of tone or voice on part of the speakers. If you are studying English and find that it works for you, you may enjoy reading along to get a better feel for the interview.

I put special emphasis on removing words that can be used for approximation when they were being used as placeholders, such as ‘like’ and ‘kind of,’ since without hearing the flow of the conversation meaning might be obscured. I also cleaned up some sentences where the speaker backtracks and corrects themselves, or broke up long flows of speech into shorter punctuated sentences, to give the reader an indication of where an idea wraps up. For example “ …Where I doubt any of the white officers have any roots in Seattle. And Seattle, they’re like cutting edge on shit like community policing and community engagement.“ //

TFSR: Would you be able to identify yourself, maybe what political tendency you identify with, your relationship with Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, maybe whatever name and pronouns you prefer?

D: Sure. My Name is D, I use he/him pronouns. I’m a Black anarchist born and raised in Seattle, I grew up at the bottom on the east side of the Capitol Hill so I’m really familiar with the history of the area.

TFSR: Thanks for taking the time to chat, I really appreciate it.

D: Yeah, no problem.

TFSR: So there’s this occupation, this autonomous zone that was formed in the Capitol Hill district. Can you talk a little bit about what the protests were like in Seattle following the police murder of George Floyd and other Black folks, and what it looked like in Capitol Hill?

D: It started off with the Friday night protest, the Friday following the burning of the third precinct. I had actually just got back into town and went in not knowing what to expect. It was kind of directionless, some targets were hit that made sense for people, like an Amazon Go store was hit which reflected the sheer hated of Jeff Bezos. Then it was a very confrontational atmosphere in the crowd but also [it was] kind of not knowing what to do or where to go and nightfall happened the demographics of the crowd got very younger and much more Black and there was a newfound energy.

People were going around downtown Seattle and made their way up the hill until like 2am in the morning. The following Saturday were more organized protests that were in the heart of the shopping district in downtown, and before the organized event could really get underway the confrontation with the police occurred and things got really wild throughout the evening. That’s where you see the burning cops cars and the Nordstrom’s getting hit and the different looting occurring downtown. That Sunday, the next day, there were hundreds and hundreds of people out on Capitol Hill marching around and the cops wouldn’t let people downtown. Groups would break off in like groups of 100 and try to find a different way downtown while another group would stay behind at each police line that would be formed.

Over the course of maybe like seven hours people finally made their way downtown in different, smaller groups. Simultaneously with that happening, on the east side of Lake Washington in Bellevue, Bellevue Square Mall got hit and looted with seemingly a coordinated group of people there where the police didn’t know how to respond. All they could do was watch a they got hit and looted. I wasn’t there for any of that, I have no idea how that even happened or came about. It was cool to hear about.

Then, on the following Monday, somehow the line, the gathering point for the protest and the goal was the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. That’s kind of where the siege began and it kind of just stayed there.

TFSR: Can you talk a bit about Capitol Hill: the dynamics in that neighborhood, who all lives there, and what standing conflicts are like with the police? Just to name a reference that I have, I was in Seattle for the protests in ’99 and I remember some rad shit happening in that neighborhood. I think that’s where there was a RCP bookstore or whatever. There were a lot of marches, a lot of burning dumpsters in the street and I remember the difficulty of transiting between downtown and neighborhoods like that because those roads that go over the highway are really easy choke points to block off for the police.

D: Yeah, I can give you a quick rundown. I want to say it was like in the ’50s they got all this funding to build I-5 and they basically cut the side of the hill and built the freeway. In doing so the built these overpasses to get to downtown that you were just talking about, which creates these choke points. I think there’s four main ones on Capitol Hill, popular ways, then there’s maybe two more a little bit north in what people call the hospital district or Pill Hill. It’s a pain because you could go from like one overpass to another and if you have a crowd to take the streets it’s kind of hard for the cops to navigate around to get to the choke point. But I feel like they’ve got really good at spreading out their force and being ready for it and not getting stuck.

The population on Capitol Hill, for me in like the ‘90s and the late ‘80s up to the 2000’s was a very counterculture scene. Capitol Hill is also on the edge of the historically Black neighborhood so there was always this counter-culture/Black-culture mingling that’s existed on Capitol Hill. Grunge came out of there, a lot of punk kids, D.I.Y. people, and the hipsters were a really big thing. Especially post ’99 the hipsters moved into Capitol Hill a lot, and at that point I think Capitol Hill had cemented it’s neighborhood legacy as being like the queer neighborhood. So the hipsters started coming in and started changing a lot of the demographics, it became more hip, more expensive to live on the hill.

TFSR: More white?

D: Yeah, more white, for sure. And even the whiteness changed, it wasn’t like counterculture white anymore, it was conformist but like indie. It’s kind of hard to describe. I always use this reference of being in New York and going to a talk learning about how the hipster culture was bad and that was the first time I realized what a hipster was. I realized they were the ones destroying Capitol Hill, it was weird to go all the way across the country to get a name for what was happening to my town. Now it’s a really interesting demographic because there’s definitely a lot of tech money and a lot of single, or young couples. They’re very liberal and progressive and from those ranks you get a lot of ‘allies,’ a lot of people who want to be down, but you also get those who aren’t at all. The contest-ability of the neighborhood is lost, or i thought I was lost up until recently.

But it was always known for protests. Occupy was camped out there, a lot of the more confrontational protests post-Ferguson were up there and the East Precinct in particular was the police precinct which oversaw the Central District, which is the historically Black neighborhood so there’s a very deep-seated relationship, bad relationship, with the Black community in Seattle and that particular precinct. Like gang unit used to operate out of there, one of the more powerful Black churches is like three blocks away from there. So it’s very dynamic but it’s a very controlled neighborhood.

TFSR: Can you talk a little bit more about your understanding of who the cops are and where they come from? Like are they folks out of Tacoma, are they out of like Bellevue or other suburbs, or are they people – if you want to call them people – who lived and grew up in Seattle?

D: I don’t think any of them grew up in Seattle. I’m probably wrong, there might be a few. A lot of them are from surrounding areas. The cops that I know of what area they live in, most of them are from like Sammamish, which is east of Bellevue, and Bellevue is east of Seattle across the lake, so like up almost into the mountains and passes there are little towns up there and bougie enclaves up there. I wouldn’t be surprised that some of them live as far south as Tacoma or as far north as Everett or even further north, in some of the areas you could get some land, rural areas or whatever. I doubt very few come from Seattle, if any at all. I feel like some of the higher-ups maybe will have their kids in some of the more bougie private high school around, but that’s about it.

TFSR: That’s a pretty common trajectory in a lot of cities police departments. Particularly if there’s concentrations of people of color or communities of color and then you’ve got a mostly white police force that comes in from the suburbs and has absolutely no connection to their lives that their work has.

D: Yeah, Seattle’s interesting. I don’t know about other locations regarding this, but I think the cops of color are probably the ones who are most rooted in Seattle or have the most history and relations to Seattle. Where I doubt any of the white officers have any roots in Seattle. And Seattle, they’re like cutting edge on shit like community policing and community engagement. So like when Trayvon Martin died there was a Black officer, her name is officer Cookie, she had just taken over a community started chess program. Basically by like getting the library where it was held to not hold it anymore, and then took city funding to start her own chess club in the same place and talked to all the parents and had the kids come to her chess club.

So that had been going on for a few months and then when Trayvon Martin died she took photo ops holding a bag of skittles and an iced tea can and stuff like that. And this is a Black woman. And this is a few years back, and even now it’s Carmen Best who’s Chief of Police in Seattle, a Black woman who can hit the talking points like “my grandchildren are out in the protest” and “my son/daughter in law is out in the protest” and that type of stuff. But it’s there’s always been like, even in the neighborhood I grew up with, there was the Black officer who responded to every single call that was every made in the neighborhood. He was the first one there because he was the community liaison and so Seattle’s good for that – their community policing’s cutting edge.

TFSR: Some people in the listening audience may have heard the term ‘community policing’ in a positive way as like it’s a way to de-escalate situations and to decrease the likelihood of use of force through that way by officers, and cement conversations in neighborhoods or whatever, the smiling face of cops. When in fact it’s notably a counterinsurgency method.

D: Yeah, in Seattle it came directly out of Weed & Seed funding. Weed & Seed was a Department of Defense project [transcriber’s note – I checked, it’s Department of Justice] and it was literally like weed out the bad and seed the good. I experienced that growing up in the ‘90s, basically it was like they would send these community police officers or whatever into neighborhoods to build relationships with community councils, which were often grassroots organized, and would build these relationships and convince neighbors to snitch on each other. In doing so people, families, lost their homes. They literally get their homes taken away from them because their kids or families members were breaking the law, and they’d be turned in by neighbors. It was a very insidious program. And community policing was not the like…you know, I never once played basketball with a cop. But the cop would be sitting there staring at all the kids who were playing basketball at the park nearby and would know whose parents were who so it would make rounding up people easier for them, if anything. It created more divisions in our community if anything. It was insidious but it was also that happy, like shake hands, I’m here for you, here’s my direct line, give me a call if you see anything sketchy. Then as new neighbors came in and the gentrification picked up it was the white neighbors who were calling the cops on kids for doing what kids do.

TFSR: Well, to sort of switch gears back to the narrative of what happened in the runup to the police retreat from the east precinct, can you talk about that siege that you mentioned, what that looked like and how that panned out?

D: The police precinct’s on an intersection, so it’s a corner building. Basically a block down from the precinct the cops set up barricades, basically in every direction and the western barricade is where people gathered first, and they kind of kept gathering. It was pretty amazing, one chant that really stuck out to me was “Every Day” and people chanted it all the time, they would just chant “Every Day.” At first it made me chuckle, like, okay, we’re not gonna be out here every day. But people just kept coming and kept staying and they’d be at that barricade which wasn’t a super hard barricade, it was like a metal bike rack. People would be there for hours and hours and then the cops would find some excuse or just get worn out or find some excuse and throw like a flash bang or pepper spray people, people would retreat maybe twenty to 100 feet, then you would hear the chant “Every Day” and people would go right back to the front line again. It was that over and over for a few days.

One of the things, the anarchistic intervention in that, there was a call to build a vigil for all the people who had been killed since the uprising started and we built one and it gave the crowd a place to be emotional and process everything. It was about halfway down the block from where that main front was against the police barricade. I would see people leave the crowd, go and kneel in front of these candles and flowers or light a candle and process everything, and then go right back into the crowd. The crowd size would fluctuate, be small in the morning and late at night and then throughout the day it would get bigger and then into the evening it would get really big and more confrontational. It just got to a point where people were sick of the barricade so they removed it. That led to a pitched street battle and the cops pushed the crowd back three blocks but every time they’d try to make a new line you’d hear the can’t “Every Day” and people would re-form. It was different for me ‘cause I’d never been in a situation like that, it wasn’t a march where you were playing cat-and-mouse with the cops. It was like, they’d throw their flash-bangs, people would try and throw them back or try and retreat, and then if you got shrapnel or stuff in your eyes you’d go to the side and you’d get the care that you’d need and then you’d go right back into it.

So they pushed us back like three blocks, then something really strange happened: they started conceding territory, it was like maybe forty-five minutes where they slowly backpedaled all the three blocks they had pushed us. After they had re-established the barricades and got on the other side of the barricades, then it was like we were right back in the same position we had been in for days. Maybe I missed something but over the course of those days people started setting up mutual aid tents because we had a consistent place. So there was a ton of medics everywhere, as soon as someone would be hurt you’d turn around and scream for the medic and they’re there instantly, probably already taking care of the person who wounded. There was snacks, there was water, there was people consoling – like a mental health tent that was set up early on. People were willing to take care of those places and man those places. The medics had a whole area set up and were rotating shifts and were everywhere. So that helped sustain the siege.

The day after we got pushed back those few blocks, the next day when the crowd got pretty substantial and it got to be kind of late but not quite sunset yet, maybe like 7:30, people completely removed the barricades and passed them through the crowd that time, and inched closer and closer to the police. Every time the police would yell a warning over the blowhard it would either be “Fuck the Police,” a loud “Boo,” or the “Every Day” chant again.

TFSR: [laughter] It’s so ominous.

D: Yeah, it was great. A lot of chants I feel like are used to help us rejuvenate our own spirits and keep our own morale up whereas I feel like this “Every Day” thing was like we’re going to ruin the morale of the cops. It was a siege. I think it was effective.

Yeah, so that day they get really close to the cops – they’re now like a foot away from the cops, the frontline of the crowd. Like directly under the spotlight, directly next to the sound system. There’s basically no more room for the cops to give up, no more space that they could relinquish to us. Then they came, and the day before the day before the mayor banned tear gas. I think the police were a little more on edge and trying to be a little more restrained in their tactics. At that point all restraint went out the window, they started using flash-bangs and tear gas. This time the National Guard was actively with them, not just being behind them but actively in their lines and their ranks and they pushed us back down the street and in doing so split the crowd on two sides. Immediately when that happened all the old police barricades got repurposed to protect our flanks and the backside, and I heard that there were other people at the other police barricades that were set up at different areas. We regrouped under the chant of “Every Day,” people took care of themselves and were able to maintain the siege even though we were divided a little bit. And that went on I think until two or three in the morning, and then the next day there was all these reports of the cops preparing to abandon and the news was publishing photos of moving trucks, and then the cops ceded the precinct, they boarded it up and left. I don’t think a lot of people realized on the ground was that those barricades we had created in order to protect our flanks and our sides became the boundary of the zone immediately after. It kind of just happened.

I don’t many of the anarchists in town were ready for it, or prepared. I don’t think many of the activists or the radicals that had been on the street for years were ready or anticipating that by any means. I think it caught a lot of us off guard in the best possible way.

TFSR: Yeah, I don’t think we have many examples of something that feels like a success or a win when confronting the police. They basically are out there usually out there to distract us and tire us out or injure us. I have a friend who spent a lot of time in Chile during the uprising there and they were talking about how a lot of people on Turtle Island don’t realize this but this is something they saw in so-called Chile, there are bodies in those uniforms and that will tire out and they will give up. They put up this visage of being never ending sources of power and determination and whatever else but ultimately they will tire out and there’s more of us than there are of them. It must have been a crazy thing to see like suddenly the footprint of your self-defense became the outline of this little space.

D: Yeah, and the composition of the crowd was like – it’s weird because everyone’s in masks, so it’s even hard to find friends. I think it was also because the crowd had seen what had happened that Saturday when things were on fire and being looted and they saw the precinct burn in Minneapolis and they saw looting occur other places, that there was a level of militancy that didn’t necessarily line up with people’s political ideology. Like Bernie Bros with gas masks. It was just absurd to see what was going on, how people came, you had like sorority girls in training with like White Claw at the front-line screaming at cops, for the good and the bad that that makes. It was a completely heterogeneous crowd and that might be an understatement. It was so different.

TFSR: I want to ask about what you think about where folks who were there were coming from, and the impacts of cohesion being formed in the neighborhood a little bit later. Since the police actually pulled out their stuff there’s a lot of discussion in media like “Are they going to burn it?” The socialist City Council member was talking about turning it into a community center, there’s been a lot of discussion about what would happen and it’s been a while now since the space has been there. Can you talk about immediately after the cops had left and the cops realized what had happened how the space transformed? There have been gardens built, right, for instance?

D: Yeah.

Yeah, so initially I wasn’t on the ground that morning, I showed up later in the afternoon. But it seemed like people were a little bit unsure what to do and a few people who had been kind of like chosen by the city as “leaders” didn’t want it to burn down and other people were unsure if it should burn down or if we should even there the premises. So just like nothing happened. Which the next day kind of made a weird split, the first split between the Chief of Police and the Mayor because the next morning the Chief of Police went out and made a video directly to the rank and file saying that it wasn’t her decision to withdraw from the precinct and kind of throwing the Mayor under the bus when talking to her rank and file cops. It seems like they were expecting it to burn down and they were preparing for that because all the press conferences and talking points the next day said that, that they had got word from the FBI that there were plans to burn it down. Weirdly it might have been a strategic advantage to not do it, we’re really gonna know the answer to that later, like after this all unfolds.

In terms of the area it was cool to see because there were already mutual aid tents set up, the vigil was set up, the medic tents were set up, people immediately started to use this cop free zone to do what they wanted, and started taking care of each other. The zone is attached to a pretty big park on Capitol Hill, Cal Anderson park, so people immediately started setting up tents on the soccer field that’s there. Just past the soccer field there’s a small grass hill and people immediately started building a garden that grows every day. Around the garden now a tent city kind of popped up around it, and just past that area is an even bigger grass field and people started woking on that field, growing mushrooms I believe. Then some people planted nut trees along the sides, the full length of the park. Every surface became a canvas, basically. I think on that first day when the zone was established someone came in with white paint and wrote “Black Lives Matter” really big across the length of the whole block. The next day local artists came and each one got a letter and they did their own art in the letter. It was all local artists who did it for free as far as I know. It’s a beautiful sight, you see art everywhere, people helping each other. It continued to grow in that manner to the point where last time I was there, they call themselves the ‘No-Cop Co-Op’ or something. There were people doing shopping, get toiletries, fresh produce, snacks and water, Gatorade and juice. They were handing out tote bags so people could do their shopping, it was unbelievable. Then directly in front of the precinct was a stage area, sometime there would be a literal stage there and bands performing. It became a place for speak outs and other organized events that continually tried to ground the space in the Black struggle, to make it so that identity was trying to staying there. I think it’s yet to be determined if that was a success or not. It definitely became like a tourist attraction on weekends. There’s a nightly rotation at the barricades and crews that are doing that, who maintain that.

TFSR: In terms of like the barricades and defense of the space, I’ve heard about community patrols to stop white supremacists attacks. Can you talk briefly about this fear and say what you can about what security’s looked like? Do you have an honest impression of – like, the right wing has all these talking points (and probably a lot of centrists and liberals) about ‘lawlessness’ and ‘violence being created in the space’ and I have no sense from out here if that’s an on the ground reality or if I just have my ideological perspective that people tend to take care of each other if they have the ability to.

D: One thing I can’t stress enough is that the on-the-ground-reality is constantly in flux there, but in terms of your question, the barricades themselves were a response initially to street battle with the cops and then became more fortified, but they’re very modular so people can open them up for cars that need to come in for whatever reason. There’s no checkpoint, anyone could just walk in. I think the difficulty with that is that the heterogeneous nature of the crowd, there were a lot of liberals and a lot of progressive types who were still very adamant about free speech and so as the right-wingers and the alt-right and the white supremacists have been trickling in to see what’s there, confronting them has often leads to a couple of people from the crowd trying to defend their right to be there and their right to free speech, often because they don’t understand who these people are or the history or the violence these people enact. So that’s very difficult. I think once you get enough people who know that or are with it they can get them out of the zone, but I’ve also witnessed some conservatives, maybe not alt-right or people who flirt with that, come to the space and are kind of like disappointed. One person vocalized that they felt lied to by the conservative media and they don’t know what to think anymore. Which was very interesting.

It’s hard, security, there’s different formations that I think if we knew ahead of time what was gonna happen we would have been more organized and maybe politicized those barricades a little bit more. I think again it was like, woah, we were just given this zone, we didn’t expect it. But I think because of the history of Seattle and the radical organizing over the last 15 years in that town people kind of fell into natural roles that they knew needed to be done, maybe natural is the wrong word but it just fell into place.

What safety means in that that space is very different in that space than the rest of the city, for sure. I’ve had multiple like femme bodied people who have mentioned that for them it’s harder to actually confront people who are being inappropriate or touching them in that space because they’re surrounded by liberals, whereas if they were just on the street they could actually do something. They would actually feel a little bit safer defending themselves, which is interesting. Not having police is a very big thing and I don’t think a lot of people who go to that zone are ready to deal with that reality. And it became especially difficult during the weekends when it was such a tourist zone, you’d get a lot of well-off drunk people, or well-off liberals who are coming to see what it’s about and don’t understand a lot of the politics of the alt-right and the white supremacists factions. There’s the video of the armed Black man with his crew running around on the night when we thought some Proud Boys were coming to town. They were kind of behaving like police, they never like physically kicked anyone out but you do have a machismo or a macho culture that’s associated with that crew that’s problematic. It’s hard to describe.

TFSR: It seems like a conversation. I think the way that people keep themselves and their communities safe is imperfect and shifting, and like you said stuff on the ground is shifting. If you’ve got like a peace police instance, not saying the crew with guns are peace police, where people are experiencing getting inappropriately touched or getting attention they don’t want or they can’t just defend themselves and be like “Get out of my space, get out of my business, leave me alone,” because you’ve got liberals who are like “Woah, woah, woah, peace peace!” That’s weird.

D: Yeah, everything’s strange. I wish there were more conversations about the difference between peace policing and self-defense, and more time and avenues to have those conversations with people. I think most of the people who were really invested in the space were having those conversations but I think the overall appeal as a tourist attraction made it hard to really figure out solutions to these problems.

TFSR: Yeah, it sounds kind of like some sort of Exarchia situation where they have to deal with a bunch of drunk western tourists wandering in and being like, “I hear this is a cop free zone.”

D: Yeah, exactly.

TFSR: So at different point’s there’s been talk of there being demands from the commune or from the autonomous zone. Are you aware of any decision making forum in the neighborhood and if so can you talk a little bit about the process and the makeup of it?

D: There was an attempt, they tried to do a general assembly to help facilitate some kind of way to make decisions and breakout groups so smaller groups could figure out what they wanted to do. It seemed like it was going somewhere after a couple of days, but again just the flux of people all the time made that model really hard to implement and people who were on the ground were making autonomous decisions, the people who were really invested in the space. In terms of the demands it seems like three demands came out of the city of Seattle as a whole, or the communities of Seattle as whole which were: defund the police, fund the communities, and then basically amnesty for all protesters or rioters, so, free ‘em all and drop all charges. It seems like ‘Defund the Police’ is a national call, so it seems that that was really popular, and the idea of funding community police was also really popular. I think a lot of people were down the third demand of amnesty for all but maybe when they talked wouldn’t push that line or that would be the one that kind of got left out sometimes. There was one speak out early on in particular where someone was really attentively listening and compiled a list of I think 19 demands out of the while speak out that’s like pretty exhaustive, everything form like free college to like closing the juvenile detention center, no kids in jail anymore, increased diversion plans, defunding the police, I think releasing nonviolent offenders, decriminalizing sex work and all drugs, it’s like pretty exhaustive. That’s really the only demands I’ve seen that come out of the zone.

Right now we’re in an interesting spot because there are certain people who are working with the city and small businesses and they’re working with I think like the Department of Transportation, the Fire Chief and like some of these small businesses nearby and one person from one of these mutual aid tents. They’ve opened up the zone basically, that’s currently underway right now. It seems like they’re trying to make it like a pedestrian zone area. They are allowing the garden to still exist, I think the tent city still exists as of now. But these leaders have been picked out of people who have been on the ground. I think they’re often picked out in the morning when there are very little people around but I’m not 100% sure about that. To me it’s interesting because the city didn’t roll in the mayor or the city council or the police, it was like the fire department and the transportation or department of utilities or something, the aspects of the city that people don’t have a hostility to naturally, they were the ones that came in and made these negotiations to open it up for emergency vehicles, which is I think for the most part and for the average person a really hard thing to fight against. It’s hard to tell the fire department, “No you can’t have the street to put out fires,” or you don’t think of the department of transportation as being, um..

TFSR: ..nefarious.

D: Yeah. Or doing the work of the mayor or the police. So that’s happened but it’s also increased some people’s antagonism again which is great. There are certain barricades that people are trying to keep erected and some people are feeling duped, honestly. They’re feeling like they got played by these department heads.

TFSR: Are people staying in conversation about that? It sounds like it, if you’re hearing it, people aren’t just trowing up their hands and walking away.

D: Yeah, it’s interesting. I feel like the anarchists and other radicals have maybe been a little burnt out and are exhausted to a degree. I’ve felt this way a bunch, where I’m kind of like “okay, that’s the end of that” and then something happens and brings the energy back. So I’m hoping for something like that. The precinct is still there, there’s an underground tunnel to the precinct so every once in a while you’ll see a cop in the building doing stuff. But figuring out what to do with that building beforehand or making sure it doesn’t get back into the hands of the police is a big priority for a lot of the people. The zone is one of these areas where some people are really, really invested with it and are going to hold it down til the last dying breath. Where other people might just be like, so much energy is going to this and our demands aren’t really being discussed with the city or leveraged.

TFSR: Well someone could always just like liberate a cement truck or whatever and fill in that tunnel pretty easy. [laughter] I saw pictures of a precinct in Minneapolis that just got a bunch of cinder blocks sealed up in front of the entrance in front of it.

D: That’s hilarious.

What’s been nice is that here people are like ‘how moveable are these things?” Anything in the zone people are like ‘we could do with it what we want’ which is really cool, that mentality is still there, it’s just how the energy turns. I’m personally waiting for the “Every Day” chants again.

TFSR: Weird question but is it CHAZ or CHOP? What’s the difference?

D: Uh…man, I’m the wrong person to ask. I’m up for either really, I also just don’t really care. The CHAZ thingI think was like a media branding more than anything. I want to say it came out of the Stranger because it sounds like something that they would do. The Stranger is the local, weird independent press that goes in-between being friendly with anarchists to despising anarchists. It seems like a very corporate brands so CHOP was the response to that. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about the CHAZ, the name. So the argument for the CHOP was that it’s like Capitol Hill Occupied Protest is somehow less offensive to the Duwamish people. Which from what I’ve heard the Duwamish people didn’t really care what this area was called. The Duwamish people are one of the indigenous people who were the original caretakers of what is now Seattle. There’s another argument I heard where someone tried to say that ‘occupied protest’ is more part of the Black radical tradition than autonomous zone, but I couldn’t follow the logic or history they were presenting. I think part of it was that some people felt like the name CHAZ came from the outside and they just wanted to re-brand it for that reason. Some people talked about CHAZ sounding super white and wanting to re-brand it for that reason. I’ve been referring to it as Chopped City CHAZ just to kind of like laugh at the name. But yeah, it’s interesting. I feel like the name being contested is reflective of the on the ground scene where there’s this contact flux and people are having identity problems, I don’t want to go as far as to call it a crisis but the space is still trying to figure out what it is.

TFSR: And the people that you – Suquamish, is that what you were saying?

Duwamish.

TFSR: That’s the S-U-Q-U-A-M-I-S-H?

That’s Suquamish. Duwamish, so yeah, the area of Seattle from the history I know, totally could be wrong, was a shared space from a lot of tribes: Mukilteo, Suquamish, Duwamish, Snohomish, I’m forgetting a bunch probably, maybe the Puyallup. The treaty as far as I know was signed with the Mukilteo people but I could be wrong*. I’m just gonna stop talking about it because I don’t want to mess up anything.

The Duwamish people are, the government considers them a part of the Mukilteo tribe but they’ve been fighting for federal recognition for a long time and they have a longhouse in west Seattle that was actually where the original settlers landed. Oftentimes the opening of an event you would recognize the Duwamish and Suquamish people as the original caretakers of the land. So those are the two that are often recognized as the original caretakers.

*transriber’s note – the treaty was signed in Mukilteo by a number of tribes

TFSR: We had someone come on the show and present an interview that they did with someone from up there who was talking about this community center that I think had an art collective – it was like Rising Star, I think was the name of the indigenous community space.

D: Was it Daybreak Star?

TFSR: Daybreak Star – yeah, I think so.

D: Yeah, that came out of the occupation of a military base. Seattle has a real strong history of occupations and getting those spaces. So Daybreak Star was one, I forget the name of the organization that runs it now.

TFSR: Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center…

D: Oh, okay. Then there’s El Centro De La Raza which is a Latinx community space that was occupied by Roberto Maestas and his crew back in the day, I dunno the full history very well but they have like a huge building, they have low-income apartments now, the area where it is is kind of a cultural hub for the Beacon Hill neighborhood in South Seattle. And then the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM), it came out of an elementary school building occupation that lasted for years, I think it’s still considered the longest occupation in US history minus the government US itself occupying all the territory of whatever. But it was a couple Black people who held down the school building for years and it was weirdly taken away from them and given to another Black group to then create the African American Museum and it has apartments above it. The people who were holding that down in the original occupation have occupied three other buildings in recent history and have been violently removed from them all. But there’s a radical history of people occupying stuff, I believe in ’99 that was a thing too, there were two or three apartment buildings that got taken over during the WTO thing

TFSR: I didn’t hear about that, that’s awesome. I’ll make sure in the show notes to link to some of these projects and spaces that you’re mentioning. I was wondering about the Suquamish folks because the political prisoner Oso Blanco put out a public statement saying there should be coordination and communication with Suquamish folks since it’s on occupied territory so it’s cool to hear that there is some dialogue and back and forth going on.

D: Yeah, there’s a lot of networks in Seattle that have been established over the years and I feel like a lot of those networks have moderate to pretty deep intimate connections with the CHAZ. I think figuring out how to turn that intimacy into a level of accountability is very, very difficult and takes a lot of energy that I think because people are doing so much stuff in this time they’re not, I dunno, the capacity isn’t all the way there. But I think on the second day of the occupation being established I overheard a phone call with the Duwamish tribe just getting clarification and I haven’t checked, they might have already put out their official statement. For the first week at the CHAZ there was drum circles, indigenous people were leading prayer and ceremony throughout the day at different times. It was indigenous people from tribes all around the region. I think there definitely could have been more connection and it could have been done much better but I think, again, people just not expecting this to happen. I think we were a little underprepared for that.

TFSR: Kinda ad hoc.

D: Exactly

TFSR: Well, also, this is all a process, and accountability requires like you said, intimacy and so hopefully if nothing else this is sparking people to deep their relationships with each other and such.

D: Yeah, I really hope so.

TFSR: Well I just have a couple more questions. Rates of infection and death from the COVID-19 pandemic are rising nationally as states “reopen their economies.” I know Washington was one of the places hit really hard and really early. People aren’t getting public assistance or the public assistance they were offered was pretty paltry and ran out , so people are feeling forced to go back to jobs and maybe are in danger of losing their unemployment if they don’t. These protests nationwide have been expressing rage and challenging disproportionate rates of death at the hands of police of BIPOC but also have presented a dangerous vector for infection, is a fear that I have. Are people in the sustained spaced of Chopped City CHAZ keeping up harm reductive measures around the pandemic, is that a conversation folks are having? Cause I know it’s easy to be like ‘we need to stop Black death in this way’ that’s a demand that’s 400 years old.

D: I think, in terms of conversations I haven’t participated in too many besides like a couple of my friends who thought they maybe got exposed and they went and got tested and they found out it was negative so they came out. But there’s hand sanitizer everywhere, everyone’s wearing masks for the most part, it’s hard to maintain social distance but I feel like if you want to step away, people will let you step away if you want to practice it. I was trying to find the numbers particularly for Seattle and it looks like 1% of everyone who’s gotten tested who’s been at the protest has been infected, so weirdly enough the numbers haven’t risen yet, I dunno if that’s because of the incubation time, I don’t really understand biochemistry very well. I don’t really know why.

I think people are taking the measures that they can take. It’s been interesting for me to see that now racism is being talked about as public health crisis. So I’ve been seeing a lot of talking heads from the medical field who are saying like, this COVID thing’s a thing but we also have to talk about this as being a public health crisis. I’m curious how that conversation continues to grow.

TFSR: Yeah, absolutely. For me too. I’d heard inklings among activist communities and occasionally public health officials about – I mean, are you referring to rates of infection being higher because of disproportionate access to resources and stressors throughout lifetimes among communities and individuals that are affected by immediate racism?

D: Yeah, and I think also it’s like how the medical field itself is governed by white supremacy, so like Black women given birth have a much higher rate of death than white women, or any other category of women. How white supremacy affects the health of Black people and non-white people. I saw someone on I think it was CBS News, a corporate news channel, push back against – I dunno what they’re called, the talking heads, journalists – the guy from the medical field was pushing back saying yeah the COVID thing is a crisis, too, but racism as a health crisis has been affecting people for hundreds of years and we should now acknowledge it and talk about it. I think part of it is related to COVID and the disproportionate infection rates among different communities of color, but it’s also pushing this conversation to a point where we are talking about white supremacy as a public health crisis beyond just COVID, or Corona.

TFSR: I’m really glad people are digging into the roots of this and bringing it up. So I guess the last thing I was gonna ask was folks have been talking about trying to create autonomous zones following the model of Seattle, and it seems like if I understand the situation was kind of ripe in a lot of really material senses for the CHAZ with a lot of neighborhood unity around hated of the police, police stepping back, momentum from the protests, talk about police abolition, and amidst collective traumas of grieving the murder of Mr Floyd and countless others and on the back of months of the pressures of quarantining in this slow strangulation of capitalism, to create autonomous zones it seems like the means to live, like access to water, food, shelter and a wide shared sentiment of solidarity kind of need there for it to sustain itself. I know Asheville had a very, very short lived attempt a few nights ago at an autonomous zone on auto-zone or whatever. It did not stick, it did not plant roots.

D: Yeah, the solidarity point I think is crucial. The goal was never to build an autonomous zone as much it’s its ever a goal to build an autonomous zone. It was a siege, and that’s what we got out of it. It definitely wasn’t the intention of most people that I know, to manifest an autonomous zone. It was just kind of a siege and I think that’s the interesting point, it was a siege and it exhausted that precinct. I haven’t got to the point where I can image we have the capability to force a tactical retreat, I just think it was a siege. I think they were just exhausted and I think the chief of police and the mayor were playing a media game, and not really making their decisions based on what was happening on the ground. I could be wrong. I dunno, I’m not in those halls of power. But the “Every Day” thing – that was huge, just people saying they were gonna be here every day and then living up to that.

I was just watching about, I forget where it was in the country, they were setting up tents and camping outside of a precinct. I think that might lead to something. I think the siege tactic was what got us the zone, not any intention to go out and build the zone, if that makes sense.

TFSR: Yeah, . think so. Were there any things I didn’t ask about that you have a burning desire to talk about or any other pointers that you think people should take with, or good sources for keeping up on this?

D: Sources for keeping up on it? There’s a media outlet called Converge Media, they’ve been on the front-line live-streaming everything. When we were in to confrontation with the cops they were literally on the front-line filming everything. They’re they’re whenever the Proud Boys – when a crowd forms around someone, they tend to get really good video and the guy doing the filming asks pretty good questions for the most part. But there’s even a couple videos on their YouTube where they find someone new to the zone. It’s a Black media outlet, too, but a Black person would come into the zone, really curious and they would meet this person who’s filming, his name’s like Amari. He would give them a nice tour of the zone, there’s like two or three videos where he would do that at different times so you can see how the zone progresses over time.

But just, yeah, keep at it. And the “Every Day” thing, I can’t stress how powerful that was. I think just getting people to say they’ll be there and then just keep coming back, and keep coming back, and keep coming back. I think for anarchists and other radicals just being smart with their interventions and thoughtful and maybe creative, being prepared for the unexpected and hopefully being able to communicate and move together pretty rapidly. And just recognize face-to-face communication is so much better than any kind of text thread or email chain or signal group, and meeting people where they’re at and realizing the people are a little bit more open than they’ve been in the past to typical anarchist talking points.

TFSR: Actually I did think of another question that I didn’t script out, and if you don’t want to tackle it it’s totally fine. One of the things people had passed for me to bring up, was I had written down ‘liberal co-optation’ and that kind of felt covered by the talk of the bureaucracies coming in the mornings and looking for representatives to talk about the demands of the community, or sort of chipping away at the edges of it. I don’t know if you have any views you want to share about the call for taking Black leadership. I know there’s this conflict around this idea of monolithic Black leadership or any kind of community representation and people, like well meaning white folks wanting to be allies or accomplices or whatever word they want to put on it, showing up for things and then in some instances the loudest voice or the voice that has the most amplification from power as it exists, as in institutional power, gaining the mic and directing folks. Do you want to say anything about this?

D: Yes, man, that’s a heavy question. I think it’s important as a Black anarchists who are up in the city and who has been pretty active mostly for like the last 12 years. I’ve seen people who I grew up with who regularly sit down and are in a negotiation with the city and other projects like that, specifically Black capitalist milieus and the Black church and a lot of those people who I know intimately, who I grew up with, who are typically positioned to suck the energy from any Black radical uprising or divert the energy into what they’re doing. When they abandoned the precinct they came up to me and were very congratulatory, like “Good job, keep it up,” things I would never expect to hear from these people. We’re all for Black liberation but our understandings of how to get there are in opposition to each other and we both know it, are now saying “Good job.” They’ve been pushed a little more radical or at least is an opening for them to be amenable to these more radical things happening. I think there’s examples of that of some of the discourse between the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, but I’ve never experienced that in my lifetime. I think that’s something that’s important to understand now, that the terrain’s different, especially with the recuperative measures from the Black bourgeoisie class or the Black Popular class or whatever you want to call it, and I think for specifically white radicals and white anarchists it’s important to understand that these so-called allies are coming out because they saw a precinct burn. In their mind they’re saying it’s for Floyd, which it may be partly, it may be in their heart. But they’re also responding to a precinct burning it’s not just the death of black bodies that’s bringing people out, it’s the action taken by those brave souls in Minneapolis. The discourse is a little different, that’s not to say these people have been pushed all the way radical but the conversations in Seattle – early on, it was oh this is kinda like Occupy except all the conversations are good.

TFSR: [laughter]

D: You know, you’re not banging your head against some person stuck in their liberal politics or whatever.

TFSR: Or jet fuel burned down the third precinct or whatever.

D: Yeah. I think it’s worth nothing that, and it’s understanding that the Black community is definitely not monolithic. Nuance is very important, but people have changed, this has changed people to some degree and it’s worth acknowledging that. So even though you might have a past history with a certain group, the dynamics have changed so the conversations are going to be different than they might have been in the past, at least in the context of Seattle. I think in terms of following Black leadership I think you’re always going to hit that contradiction like you were saying of the person whose voice is most amplified is probably going to resonate with the same logic of the people who govern over us. So it’s going to be difficult to navigate that, but I think there was initially at least, hopefully it’s still there, an underlying hostility that’s bubbling to the surface. I think things are different, people are different. I think it’s important that formations like John Brown Gun club or any anti-fascist formation or any anti white supremacy formation need to be clear about their politics and what they’re doing, especially when confronting people who are white supremacists or known fascist. And willing to share simple ideas with people they find around them, like: bring an extra t-shirt and if you do something wearing that shirt get rid of it, no souvenirs. That kind of stuff. I think people are really open to hearing it if you just tell them. I think one thing we could have done better is help the people we’ve seen on the ground organize themselves in non-hierarchical ways and faster. I think that would have been very useful. It sucks because it happens but it’s an anti-police uprising and it sucks because there are still some liberals who say we need to dialogue with the police. Or will try to become the peace police, but in Seattle there are a lot less than there used to be. I don’t know in other places how they’re dealing with or facing that. I know personally for me every time I met a Black person who was like,“we need to be peaceful,” it was really easy to be like, “You want to abolish the police, right?” and they’re like “Well, yeah.” To get them to acknowledge that policing is bad in some way, and then to be like “Well, look at Minneapolis. This is what they’re doing and their city council is already trying to figure out how to disband the police. So the simple fact is burning a precinct works.”

I kept going back to that a lot, in my conversations with Black people. I’m also Black so I don’t know how that would work with white people engaging with liberal Black people. I would say maybe don’t do, maybe find people whose ideas are resonating with you and figure out how to move together and be effective and safe.

TFSR: I really, really appreciate that. When you said “Burning a precinct works” makes me think of this artist in the Bay Area who, I was still living out there when the Oscar Grant riots were happening. They put out a poster, just black and white stark, this was their style, with a picture of that cop that killed Oscar Grant behind bars. It just said “Riots Work” in big letters on it. This Overton window, shit is shifting like you say, and without people pushing on it it wouldn’t shift. Sorry to speak over you.

D: Oh, no, no, you’re fine. I was just gonna reiterate what you were saying, like, “Hey, this tactic works” whatever it is. That it’s rioting, burning a police precinct, whatever. It’s something the state does, the state knows that. I once went to a talk during Occupy times. It was shortly after that May Day that the courthouse got hit, that Niketown and some other businesses got hit, and banks got hit.

TFSR: It was 2012.

D: Yeah, I think it was 2012. I went to a talk and there was this person called Connie Rice who’s actually first cousins with Condoleezza Rice, and her job is to basically go to different towns and help them, I dunno if she still does this, but at the time her job was to go to different towns and basically sit in a room with the cops, the fire department, city officials and Uncle Toms and Aunt Sallies and other Black recuperative forces, and explain to them what their job is and how they need to move to recuperate the energy. One of her big lines was “A million dollars of damage,” like once a million dollars of damage is hit you have to concede certain efforts and once that point is made it’s the job of the Uncle Toms to get involved instantly, to immediately be there with the politicians who are making the concessions. That was her thing, they do that, they know that. They know that at a certain level of damage they have to give concessions, and that if the Uncle Toms and Aunt Sallies are there the concessions can be very minimal, and that’s all they need to do to quench the fire, or at least that’s all they used to do to quench the fire. But now it’s a little different, I think. We could use that on our side, at least, explaining to especially Black and Brown folks, “Hey, look, this tactic works, we get what we need, we could live a better life if this happens.” I think specifically anarchists are positions in a way where we can also talk about the repression that comes later and add that to the conversation. I dunno if any of that makes sense.

TFSR: Yeah, absolutely. Well D, thank you very much for taking this time to chat. I really appreciate the candor and you sharing your perspectives. I know you’re super busy, I think people will get a lot out of this.

D: Shit, thanks for having me. Also I dunno if you want to cut this or not, I think it’s worth maybe trying to reach out to one or two other people because I feel like there are so many perspectives to how this all unfolded.

Hotel Sanctuary in MPLS

Hotel Sanctuary in MPLS

modified image of the Sheraton hotel that was taken over and used as shelter in Minneapolis
Download Episode Here

This week we got to connect with Rosemary, who is an organizer in Minneapolis, about the liberation of a former Sheraton Hotel in that city and its slow but steady transformation into something that is becoming so much more than a housing cooperative. They speak about how this resocialization came to happen, some of the circumstances involved, about how this is a very deep collaboration between un-housed folks in Minneapolis and people involved in doing care work, the power of George Floyd who was profoundly involved in doing that same kind of care work with un-housed people, and many many more topics. Check out their new website up at SanctuaryHotel.org and their fundraiser at GoFundMe.com/f/SanctuaryHotel

In this episode, you’ll also hear a statement by anarchist prisoners, Comrade Malik and Sean Swain.  We invite you to stay tuned for mid-week as we release a podcast special for the June 11th day of solidarity with Marius Mason and longterm anarchist prisoners. We hope to feature the voice of a longtime supporter of Marius with updates on his case, and that of anarchist prisoner, anon hacker and Federal Grand Jury resistor, Jeremy Hammond. More about June 11th on June11.org.

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Further resources from Rosemary:

Sharing from the Minneapolis Sanctuary Hotel FedBook page, hoping a website and crowdfunding link will be up soon so stay tuned!
Greetings community. We hope this long post finds you as safe and well as is possible during a righteous uprising. We wanted to provide you some updates and opportunities to plug in.
The Minneapolis Sanctuary Hotel is a community-led sanctuary space for over 200 displaced and homeless people who needed safety from the military occupation that occurred following the murder of George Floyd. We center values of autonomy, harm reduction, community care, mutual aid, and abolition.
1. First! This page, started as a space to boost all kinds of different work related to COVID, homelessness, and community care, is transitioning to become the Minneapolis Sanctuary Hotel Facebook page. Look for changing name and photos shortly!
2. We are overwhelmed with support. This is a good problem to have but we’ve had to rapidly scale up our infrastructure to meet the needs. Here are some ways to plug in:
> If you are media with interview or press release requests, please email: sanctuaryhotelmedia@gmail.com
> If you are a restaurant, catering company, or are interested in providing hot meals, please contact Kimberly at 612-203-2779
> If you are a new volunteer looking to get connected or are a previous volunteer with a special skill set we don’t know about, please fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScy9VNQ1Xnamf6pUC-kphgXrnI3OwakUucW4YAfYNVz7o5cBg/viewform
3. A few boundaries to set for resident safety, capacity, and COVID reasons:
> Please DO NOT show up at the sanctuary hotel if you are not signed up to work a shift.
> Please NO MORE *non-perishable food* donations.
> Please DO wear a mask when on-site
Please continue to watch this space for more updates as we continue to learn and grow in the work of building a sanctuary.

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Vigil For Fallen Comrades 6/7/2020 everywhere

From anarchist BIPOC & accomplices: Since the George Floyd rebellions began on May 26 2020, following his horrific murder by police, at least a dozen more lives have been taken by state and vigilante violence in the struggle for Black freedom. We wish to honor them by making space to say their names, commemorate their lives, and celebrate our own resistance. By acknowledging the risk we all take when we move into the streets, we remember the martyred and continue to fight for the living.

Calling for vigils everywhere, Sunday 6/7 at sundown.

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Music for this episode by:

Ratatat – Loud Pipes

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Transcription:

This week we got to connect with Rosemary, who is an organizer in Minneapolis, about the liberation of a former Sheraton hotel in that city, and it’s slow but steady transformation into something that is becoming so much more than a housing cooperative. They speak about how this re-socialization came to happen, some of the circumstances involved, about how this is a very deep collaboration between some of the un-housed folks in Minneapolis and people involved in doing care work, the power of George Floyd who was profoundly involved in doing that same kind of care work with un-housed people and many more topics.

And now some words from Comrade Malik, held by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Comrade Malik: Peace and blessings, sisters and brothers, peace and blessings. This is Comrade Malik, reporting in from behind enemy lines at the federal penitentiary in USP Pollock, Louisiana. I’m sure y’all have been observing the news. There is a war on black men in america. From Central Park Karen in New York to the mom who drowned her autistic son in Florida, who do they label the perpetrator of those crimes? Who is the usual suspect? The black man did it.

Like I said last year, it is not just bald headed white males with swastikas tattooed on their bodies who embrace these ideologies of hate. The millions of white women in america who embrace and practice these divisive and hateful white supremacist ideologies. [mocking voice] “Oh my god, this (?) man filming and stalking me! Someone call the police now.”

In 2020, we still ain’t free. I ain’t one of those house negroes y’all done bought. It’s me, Comrade Malik, a servant of the people.

Police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, we all see it on national TV. Yet we have to plea and beg for justice. You call that free? Oh say can you see, I don’t feel like I’m free, locked down in a cell shackled from ankles to feet. Another day in the pen, you now hang from a string. The oppressors would love it if I hung it up, but I ain’t gonna do that.

Ahmad Arbery murdered by vigilantes in Brunswick, Georgia and now our brother George Floyd murdered by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A close friend recently said that I shouldn’t mix anger with my messages. They said that you give the oppressors power when you talk about them. I don’t agree with that line of thinking. There is something horribly wrong happening right now in America. We don’t see images of young white men being pinned to the ground by police with kneeled pressed to their necks, the young white man screaming “I can’t breathe! Help me!” We don’t see that on TV.

Why do police in America feel as if it is okay to abuse, mistreat and torture back citizens in America? This is a pervasive and systemic problem. Black men and black women have feelings of anger and hopelessness when we see these images. However, violence against the police is not going to solve our problems. It may feel good for a moment, but it will only make our situation worse. We need justice and we must demand it. And we can’t allow the victimizers to tell us what justice should look like. The Minneapolis police department fired the police who were involved in the murder of George Floyd. That ain’t enough. These police should be tried for murder, they must be tried for their crime against humanity. We should never be allowed to allow law enforcement to do this to us again. However, even if they are tried and sent to prison, that will not solve our problem which is white supremacy, racism and police brutality against black men in america.

As each day passes I am drawn closer to anarchism, and it is our belief as anarchists that we the people must abolish police departments. To some, this abolition of the police may sound like a radical ideal. But please, for one minute, look at things from my perspective. Ingrained in my memory is over twelve years of abuse and torture at the hands of the Texas Department of Criminal Injustice. Ingrained in my memory are the systematic and systemic murder and executions of literally hundreds of unarmed black men and people of color by law enforcement in America. Ingrained in my memory are the children in the state of Texas, thrown into cages by ICE and Border Patrol agents, and ingrained in my memory is the bloody stain and legacy of slavery in America.

I keep saying that we want free, and like Meek Mill, I ask, ‘what’s free?’ I can tell you now, free is not what we have right now.

This is Comrade Malik, reporting in from the federal USP penitentiary at Pollack. Dare to struggle, dare to win. All power to the people.

Announcer: At the time of this recording, Comrade Malik had not heard of Breonna Taylor, and we know that there are plenty of sisters who are being cold-bloodedly murdered all across this country. We say her name, Breonna Taylor.

More of Comrade Malik’s thoughts can be found at ComradeMalik.com

Rosemary: My name is Rosemary, I use they/she pronouns, I live in Minneapolis on occupied Dakota land and I have been part of the efforts here to make a new place to live for about 250 people now, at the former Sheraton Hotel near Lake and Chicago. This was something that was made possible because of George Floyd. He gave us the power to be able to have this building. It’s hard for me to know exactly how to characterize it because it’s so new and it feels weird because we are winning and I wasn’t expecting that to happen quite so rapidly, but all thanks to George Floyd for giving us the power to carry on his legacy of supporting people experiencing homelessness by housing so many people.

TFSR:Absolutely, thanks for that. The whole really not understanding how to interface with winning is really resonating for me right now. Would you speak about your general experiences on the ground in Minneapolis since the murder of George Floyd?

Rosemary: So, I can really only speak to things in my neighborhood. I know that there have been things happening Northside, Midway and around the Twin Cities. In south Minneapolis there’s some pretty tight knit community and there’s just been so much happening. So there’s uprising that seems to have spread really far at this point and part of that is complicated so, there’s been a lot of property destructions for miles. Miles of buildings that have been burned and business that have been looted – or whatever – and it went on for days, it’s just very widespread. The landscape right now feels really different and still evolving, it’s hard for me to process what’s going to be happening during the day. There’s just a lot of energy going into a lot of different directions right now. And so during the day people would be out with brooms and trash bags, bringing out a grocery store’s equivalent of food donations by the side of the street, and people biking and driving up and down to see what was going on, and then go out at night and do it all over again.

There’s a lot of excitement that has come with things like burning the police station –

TFSR: I can only imagine.

[laughter]

Rosemary: Yeah, and like, multiple banks and large corporate retail outlet stores. And it’s complicated, there’s a lot of consequences from that in terms of food security, and family-owned, immigrant-owned, black-owned businesses and clinics and pharmacies and lot of disruption to basic needs things for people. The fires were affecting things in a major way for residents as well, and so a lot of people had to evacuate their houses in the night. There’s a number of people who lost their homes, especially if they were living above businesses. Everything has changed. I’m just trying to think about what it’s going to look like next, to think a few steps ahead. This in an area that has already faced a lot of speculation and gentrification, it’s very possible that this could accelerate that if there isn’t some organizing to address some of the land issues that we’re facing right now.

I think that the effort with commandeering this hotel will really help with propelling that in the right direction, it’s building on other tenant’s organizing that’s been happening with being able to get tenant ownership and cooperative control of the buildings that they’ve been living in so there’re been some good victories with that. In general some very strong organizing has been happening around housing issues that’s been uniting tenant’s organizing with people that have been organizing around homelessness, and un-sheltered homelessness, harm reduction work and public housing. I’m very, very excited about the ways these different communities and movements are coming together in a way that I’ve never seen. Historically it’s been hard to have housing organizers and homelessness organizers together, and particularly in the realm of homelessness, a lot of that happens through nonprofit-type, professionalized setting, and a lot of us work in that industry and that can be a limiting factor when it comes to being able to imagine more radical changes.

Right now we’re in this moment when our imaginations are all being challenged in some really new ways. We have to build back up from the ground and there are things happening that just did not seem possible. There are things happening because of the Covid pandemic that seemed impossible. The kinds of acts that I would have thought of two weeks ago seem super mellow now so being able to push ourselves to think of a horizon that seemed farther out than I realized…it’s good to be challenged in that way.

TFSR: That’s really amazing and I think that this is something that this country has not seen probably in more than a hundred years, so feeling your way forward, building up from the ground – I feel very resonant with that as well, thank you for going into that. Could you talk about how this liberation of the hotel happened, what is some context for this event; what do you see as some catalyzing moment or moments?

Rosemary: George Floyd was the catalyst. I don’t know how widely this is known but George Floyd worked at the largest homeless shelter in town for years, so there’s a lot of people that are living in the former hotel that knew him. This wouldn’t have been possible without him. He didn’t sign up to advocate like this and I don’t know how to characterize this in the right way at this point, there’s no way this would have been possible without the power that he’s given to all of us. There’s a lot of things that have happened spontaneously and I want to embrace that. This is something that we had been thinking about, and looking at, and dreaming about and thinking it would be kind of too hard to pull off for a while now. So it became possible this week and so we’re doing it, we’re just doing it and it keeps working out, I keep being surprised by all the things that are falling into place. All that’s a bit vague, I’m happy to get more into specifics if you like.

TFSR: Yeah, what I’m hearing you say is the groundwork for this thing that is unfolding before our eyes with the former Sheraton is that organizing had been laid brick by brick slowly over the years and then the catalyzing moment was George Floyd and his work and his like, people wanting to honor his memory and honor his life in this way. I’m wondering about the initial moments of the hotel takeover, are you willing to speak about that at all? I’d be really interested to hear how it happened blow by blow.

Rosemary: Yeah, and it’s weird, ‘cause there were no blows, too. I do want to make sure that it’s understood that it’s something that we’ve been organizing toward for a while and that organizing work was based on really deep relationships that people have with people that are experiencing un-sheltered homelessness in particular. And the relationships between particularly care workers and people who are experiencing un-sheltered homelessness, so people who work in the industry and have a radical analysis, people who are part of (?) Harm Reduction or other rad harm reduction outreach efforts, responses in the past to encampments in the area, native organizers since in un-sheltered homelessness here there’s just massive racial disparities – that just has to be very named and clear. So these were deep relationships that were made and expanded upon through the mutual aid organizing efforts that people have been doing all over the place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s this really, really smart groundwork laid where we use mutual aid efforts as a deliberate response to be outside of state control, to provide sort of a wedge to force public sector, nonprofit sector to pay attention to un-sheltered experiences. So with a stay at home order closing transit, libraries and public spaces, the shelters are full, there’s nowhere to go, people’s hustles dried up, money’s tight and by sort of really strategically mobilizing the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic and expanding the base of who is involved to be more than industry workers made this possible. It created conditions for people to have true, real relationships with our neighbors. I’m saying our…I don’t know exactly how to talk about these different kind of relationships right now, it’s complicated and I’m going to mess it up as I’m talking about because the reality is there are class and race and other divides between people who are doing care work and showing up in support of housed neighbors and people who are un-sheltered.

So those relationships were worked on really deliberately and around the country there’s been efforts. There’s empty hotels because the industry is failing due to the pandemic but there are people who don’t have a place to live. In Minnesota there are 82,000 hotel rooms and 20,000 people who are homeless – it’s obvious there’s no resource scarcity problem when you do the math, it’s an issue of distribution and choice and will and what we’re willing to do. And so around the country that’s an obvious thing and there’s been a lot of effort to reduce the concentration of crowded shelters, to reduce the spread of COVID. There have been a lot of institutional responses and it was never enough, it was systematically discriminating against people who were un-sheltered and weren’t part of a coordinated, formalized entry system. Like a poverty management model, this technocracy of how we deal with this problem of homelessness. So that’s the model that we’ve all been trying to challenge and that we’re also socialized into working and thinking in. The mutual aid work not only allowed for more people to have real relationships with unhoused neighbors, it also allowed those of us who have been working in the industry for a long time to shift the way we think about things and expand the imagination.

I want to make that clear, it’s not like these things just happened. You gotta do the groundwork, you gotta have relationships with people. You need to have actual relationships with people. That being said, the play-by-play of how we pulled this off was we tried to be really deliberate about exhausting all of our options and then moving someone in here and refusing to leave. It was exactly the right moment because the need was really obvious. The first night we had someone come in here the community paid for the room, above board. It was really necessary, the curfew had just been instituted, the national guard was invading the city as we were moving them the guard was approaching with a massive platoon of hundreds of guardsmen and armored vehicles, it was super surreal, we were very close to the third precinct and then just moving a mile down the way near Chicago and Lake to the former Sheraton hotel.

That night that intersection got real burnt, like hellscape burnt. There really were no other guests in the hotel other than journalists at that point, but there had been some families here because there’s a hospital nearby, who were here staying in the hotel because they had sick loved ones nearby. We had been looking at this site as a target for a while and were reluctant to do anything because we didn’t want to displace anyone who was staying here because they had sick family members. You know, do no harm. Then the hotel manager realized it was unsafe to be in the building with everything that was going on around, and planned to evacuate all the hotel guests out. So once we realized we wouldn’t be displacing anybody, we just went for it and crossed our fingers to see if it would work.

So we divided up roles in a way that would suit people’s talents. I got to be the talent of stubborn and just stay in the room, while other people who were more talented at negotiating with the owner did a very good job of that. The approach was just that we were trying to get another block of rooms for people who were still left behind and un-sheltered and displaced, and really just inform him that we were going to be here now. And then the owner said “Yeah”.

I mean, it took a lot of convincing and some of that convincing was having like ten of fifteen people, not even that many, who were waiting outside ready to come sit in the lobby when needed. He was inspired to say yes, and he’s still saying yes, and we now have an entire hotel, we have master keys to all the rooms, he trained volunteers in the system to make the keys so he can go home and sleep. It’s been a really interesting sort of relationship to have with the property owner. He is a motivated seller, the industry is tanked and in now the neighborhood around us the property values have tanked. We’ve essentially shamed the system into having to do something about un-sheltered homelessness in a better way and showing them what a better way is, and it’s worked.

We have a lot of support offered though county, state and city and different foundations. It’s complicated because those things can come with strings attached so we’re in a really powerful position right now and we know it. We’re taking our time and are really adamant the residents will be the ones who decide how this land will be held, and are letting things take the time that it needs to do that. It’s been a lesson in stepping into power and it’s still sinking in. People are here and are still worried about getting kicked out or this and that, and it’s sinking in now. At resident meetings (it’s majority native and black residents) people are saying things like “I used to be homeless.” There’s a woman who was saying the other day “We got our land back.” It’s not about having rooms, at really deep and fundamental level housing people is how we can redistribute land, housing is land, and we’re in need of some massive land and resource redistribution and this is one way of putting into pragmatic practice land repatriation. I’m hoping we’re able to shore up support in a way that lets that be the analysis that comes to fruition and doesn’t get sidetracked. We’re all conditioned to have constrained imaginations around this, it’s just a very unique thing.

TFSR: Thank you so much for going into that. Is there anything more you wanted to say on that topic?

Rosemary: I think we’ve been inspired by other work and I hope to learn more about what other people have been working on that we don’t know about but we’ve been inspired by Moms for Housing and the Homefulness community in Oakland who sent us a message of solidarity and support, that was really rad. There have been some actions with COVID organizing around commandeering hotels that have been limited to taking a room for a day and having some tight symbolic action with that, like some of the stuff Street (?) in LA has done, that has been cool. But like, we got an entire hotel and I think we might get another one, we got a long waiting list, and I just want that to spread.

TFSR:Absolutely. Just hearing you talk about it, I feel so activated and inspired in a good way, about what you all are doing and definitely sparking ideas on this end. We also live in an extremely hotel and tourist driven economy is that is pretty much going down the toilet right now and I’m just wondering about parallels we can draw.

Rosemary: Housing people keeps us healthy and safe. COVID has forced people to think about the impact of and connection between them because they’re afraid of getting sick from like the masses, and this is a different way of thinking about it. It has taken the awareness that I am affected by you and you are affected by me and our neighbors, and that housing people is a way of boosting people’s health and community health. This is a way of providing for health and safety in our community, not just for now but for the long term, we need to be thinking really carefully how we are responding, not just to COVID and not just to the aftermath of riots or the uprising but to this global economic depression we’re entering. How are we going to mobilize a community? If the economy in your area is failing, what are the resources and assets in the community and how can you make those community assets versus a privately held entity.

The other thing I’m exited about now is the union workers who used to work in the hotel here when it was a Sheraton, they’d been laid off I think about a month ago. And today the union workers came. The relationship between how we use our labor, how we’re grounded on the land that we’re on, all these things – it just feels really deep right now. We have the power right now, things just keep coming together.

TFSR: That’s really amazing. So the union workers came back to work at the hotel?

Rosemary: The union workers came back to see what we’re doing here, and see how they can offer support for what’s happening. I’m hopeful there can be an ongoing relationship about how organized labor and the workers who work here can be working together with the ongoing efforts here. Just as a connection point, too, shelter workers like George Floyd – it’s not like a high income job. One of the shelters in town, the starting wage is like $12/hr. Meanwhile just spitting distance from here, is a building that was not burned, a new condo building with these tiny rooms with murphy beds for like $1400 a month. So shelter workers can’t afford housing, so the connection between unionized work in a place that is now housing and what is happening in the homeless service industry is an important one to be making and is inspired by the disparate movements and communities that are coming together to learn from each other. I am learning so much right now, I feel silly being the person talking about this because there are so many people who are really solid strong organizers who have laid the groundwork work this or have been integral in making this happening. People are working their butts off to keep this going, it’s not easy, there’s a crisis around every corner but it’s happening.

TFSR: Since we only have a few minutes left I would love to ask how people, our listeners can best support y’all and are there ways folks can help get your back and send support and resources if that’s desired?

Rosemary: Yeah, the number one way would be to organize in your own community. Getting those messages of solidarity and support from other places is really really hopeful and hopefully we’ll get to the point where we can do the same for other communities as well. We’re pretty overwhelmed right now with trying to build everything up from the ground, so we’re still trying to get the infrastructure in place to handle an influx of volunteers and donations, and how to have a good system for responsibly taking in donations. I’m happy to pass on more information because I think it’ll be coming together soon here.

TFSR: Yeah, I would love to include that in the show notes. Just finally thank you so much for your time and your willingness to speak to us.

Rosemary: Yeah, thanks so much for sharing this story and I look forward to seeing what other people are doing.

Two Voices From MPLS: Medic and Abolitionist

Two Voices From MPLS: Medic and Abolitionist

A man facing a line of riot cops in Minneapolis during George Floyd Uprising, behind is a wall with anti-police graffiti
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On this episode, we’re featuring two voices from Minneapolis, the epicenter of mass demonstrations and uprising following the police murder of #GeorgeFloyd.

First up, you’ll hear from Jacquie, a professional medic living in Minneapolis. Jacquie talks about the impacts of corona virus on Black and Brown communities around the city, some of what she saw in the early days of the protests and the feelings expressed to her about the killing of George Floyd and the problem of police in our racist society. You can find a project of theirs on instagram by seeking @femmeempowermentproject.

Then, Tonja Honsey, executive director of the Minnsesota Freedom Fund, talks about bail and prison abolition, infrastructure to get folks out of jail and supporting the people in the streets. They’re online at MinneapolisFreedomFund.Org

Both interviewees shout out Black Visions Collective and Reclaim The Block, two police abolition projects in Minneapolis, and the Northstar Health Collective. Check our show notes for links to those projects, as well as bail funds for cities where solidarity protests have been met with police repression.

Announcements

Jalil Muntaqim

There is an effort right now to get compassionate release for Jalil Muntaqim, former Black Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army. Jalil has been held by New York state since 1971 and he recently has tested positive for the Corona Virus. His attempts at parole over the years have been stymied by police and racists pressuring and stacking the parole board for Jalil’s involvement in the death of two cops 5 decades ago. This has happened 12 times since 2002 when he became eligible. More info about his case at his support site, freejalil.com and check out this SFBayView article for how you can help push for his release.

Breaking the 4th Wall

Hey, y’all. First off, I just want to say how impressed I am at the power that people are drawing up from within in order to battle the police all over the country. Seeing videos and hearing stories from Minneapolis, Atlanta, Oakland, New York City, Omaha, Denver, St. Louis, Tucson, Los Angeles and elsewhere, plus the solidarity rallies and support coming out here and abroad is so heartwarming. This week, you’ll know, police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, an African American man and people were there to video tape it. Since then, people took the streets, were met with tear gas and rubber bullets, some held vigils while others held the streets and set fire to a corner of that world that holds them hostage, including a police precinct. The cops present at Floyd’s murder were fired, and finally the officer who murdered has been arrested. Mr. Last week, police murdered a Black Trans Man named Tony McDade in Tallahassee. Over the prior month and a half, that same force murdered two other African American men, Wilbon Woodard and Zackri Jones. On March 13th, Louisville police murdered Breonna Taylor, a medical First Responder, during a home raid. At a protest on May 28th for Breonna’s legacy, 7 people were shot by unknown parties. Video of the murder by a white, retired cop and his son in Glynn County, Georgia, of yet another African American man, Ahmaud Arbery, was released a few weeks back sparking protests and the eventual arrest of the killers. The police sat on that video since Mr. Arbery’s killing in February, allowing the killers to walk free.

Please stay safe out there, y’all. Already, some folks have died at these protests, riots and uprisings against the status quo. Wear masks to protect from covid but also to obscure your identity. Drink lots of water, get good sleep if you can, take care of each other and support each other in these hard times. You can keep up on ongoing struggle via ItsGoingDown.org’s site and social media presence, and you can watch amazing videos from Minneapolis via Unicorn Riot.

Housing Liberation in Minneapolis

“At 8:00pm on Friday, blocks from the epicenter of the uprising, we watched from a tent as armored vehicles and hundreds of national guard advanced on Hiawatha. The curfew was in effect and the state offered no options for a couple camped outside. The hotels promised to the large encampment across the highway left them and many other behind. The shelters were full. This couple finally found refuge in a largely vacant hotel a mile away. The next morning, they awoke to the burned remains of Chicago and Lake and learned that the hotel owners planned to evacuate. With nowhere else to go but with a community showing up to support, the couple declined to evacuate.

Together we invited displaced and unsheltered neighbors to join us. Overnight people came in with harrowing stories of terror from police and other white supremacists. National guard shot rubber bullets at us while we stood guard against that violence. At the time of this writing nearly 200 people have created sanctuary in the memory of former shelter worker George Floyd. We avenge Floyd’s death in the flames of the third precinct and honor his life in the reclamation of hoarded property.

We have protected this building by occupying it. There is no going back to how things were – this isn’t a Sheraton anymore, it is a sanctuary.”

. … . ..

playlist pending

. … . ..

Bail & Anti-Repression Funds Across The U.S.

National Bail Networks

By City / State:

Barry Pateman on Anarchist History and Challenges

Barry Pateman on Anarchist History and Challenges

Barry Pateman, 2015
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I’m really happy to share a chat with anarchist and historian, Barry Pateman. Barry, born in the early 1950’s, grew up in a working class coal mining town of Doncaster in the UK and became an anarchist in the 1960’s in London. He is a longstanding member of the Kate Sharpley Library which covers histories of little-known anarchists and events in history. Barry has also contributed to and edited numerous books including “Chomsky on Anarchism”, a two book document collection with Candace Falk and many more titles, many on AK Press. We talk about anarchist history, community, repression, defeat, insularity, popular front with authoritarian Marxists, class analysis and how to beat back capitalism. Find Kate Sharpley Library at KateSharpleyLibrary.Net

  • Transcript
  • PDF (Unimposed) – pending
  • Zine (Imposed PDF) – pending

Announcements

General Strike Call

I’d like to recommend listeners check out a recent call to General Strike by People’s Strike, which includes Cooperation Jackson. The beginning of their call, which can be found linked to in our show notes, is:

The CODVID-19 pandemic has starkly revealed the inequalities and injustices that daily plague the world.

The triple crisis of viral plague, systemic economic breakdown, and the failure and/or unwillingness of Governments to provide necessary protections, especially for the poor and people subjected to white supremacy, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and mysogyny has thrown us into a fight for our lives.

The “Free Markets” that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and others are seeking to protect and rely upon to address the COVID-10 pandemic will continue to produce chaos and needless suffering for millions of people. The economic nationalism and imperial rivalry we see on full display in the midst of this pandemic magnify the threat of war.

In the U.S. we are fed a steady stream of lies and authoritarian posturing. From Palestine to South Africa to Brazil to the U.S. and beyond, ooppressive regimes are actively sacrificing vulnerable peoples and communities and treating frontline workers as uttlerly disposable.

We say ENOUGH! It is time to stand up! It’s Time To Strike Back – For Our Lives and Our Futures!

Anarchist Views on Pandemic

You’ll notice that in this chat we’re mostly taking a slight break from the 24-7 covid-show for our broadcast, though the topic is touched on briefly. If you’re looking to hear anarchist-relevant perspectives concerning the pandemic and organizing, we do suggest people check out Episode #33 of A-Radio Networks “Bad News: Angry Voices From Around The World” which is up at our website and also available at A-Radio-Network.Org. I would also suggest checking out some of the awesome shows in the Channel Zero Network, of which we are a member. For instance, Kite Line Radio produces a weekly show featuring the voices of prisoners and the formerly incarcerated on all sorts of topics.

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Featured tracks this episode:

Apollo Brown – The Pursuit – Trophies Instrumentals – Mello Music Group

Chumbawamba – I Never Gave Up – Showbusiness! – One Little Indian

Doing For Selves: Open Source Supplies and Tenant Organizing

Doing For Selves: Open Source Supplies and Tenant Organizing

3d printed n95-quality face mask
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Welcome to a podcast special from The Final Straw. While William is was busy producing an episode featuring voices of medical professionals and activists inside and out of prison to talk about the impacts of covid-19 on incarcerated people for broadcast, I had a couple of conversations about work folks are doing on the outside that I’d like to share.

Sean Swain [00:08:06-00:15:12]

Hacking To Fight Covid-19

[00:15:12-00:33:01]

First, I spoke with Bill Slavin of Indie Lab, space in Virginia that is in the process of shifting it’s purpose since the epidemic became apparent from an broader scientific and educational maker space to work on the manufacturing and distribution of covid-19 related items in need such as testing kits, medical grade oxygen, ventilators and 3d printed n95 quality masks for medical professionals to fill public health needs. Bill talks generally about the ways that community and scientists can come together through mutual aid to deal with this crisis left by the inaction of the government on so many levels. They are also crowd-sourcing fundraising for scaling up their production and facilities and there’s a link in our show notes on that. The platform that Bill talks about in the chat is known as Just One Giant Lab, or JOGL. Consider this an invitation for makers to get involved.

Organizing With Your Neighbors For Homes and Dignity

[00:35:08-01:45:44]

Then, I talked to Julian of Tenants United of Hyde Park and Woodlawn in Chicago. What with all of the talk about rent strikes in the face of such huge leaps in unemployment during the spread of covid-19 and accompanying economic collapse, I thought it’d be helpful to have this chat to help spur on these conversations of how we seize power back into our hands while we’re being strangled by quarantine and hopefully afterwards. You can learn more about the group Julian works with at TenantsUnitedHPWL.Org. Philadelphia Tenants Union and Los Angeles Tenants Union were both mentioned and will be linked in the show notes, alongside a reminder that the national Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN) is being organized and folks can reach out to Philly TU or LA TU via email to get onto their organizing zoom calls. Finally, if you’re in the Chicago area and need a lawyer for housing, check out Lawyers Committee For Better Housing online at lcbh.org. Julian also mentioned squatting of homes in southern CA owned by the state, here’s a link to an article.

Announcements

WNC Mutual Aid Projects

Linked in our show notes is also a googledoc that Cindy Milstein and others are helping to keep updated that lists many mutual aid projects that have sprung up all over concerning the exacerbation of capitalism by the covid-19 crisis, as well as a similar page up from ItsGoingDown.Org

If you’re in so-called Western NC and want to get involved, the project Asheville Survival Project has a presence on fedbook and is soliciting donations of food and sanitary goods for distribution to indigent, bipoc, elder and immune compromised folks in the community. We’ll link some social media posts on the subject that list our donation sites around Asheville in the show notes and you can venmo donations to @AVLsurvival.

If you care to contribute to efforts in Boone, NC, you can follow the instagram presence for @boonecommunityrelief or join the fedbook group by the same name, reach them via email at boonecommunityrelief@protonmail.com find donation sites and venmo donations can happen up at via venmo at @Bkeeves.

NC Prisons Covid-19 Phone Zap

Flyer about call-in to NC prisonsAnd check our show notes for an invitation to call the NC Department of Public Safety and Governor’s offices to demand the release of NC prisoners susceptible to infection and possible death of Corona Virus in the NC system due to improper care. Wherever you are listening, consider getting together with others and calling jails, prison agencies and the executive branches to demand similarly the release of AT THE VERY LEAST the aged, infirm, folks in pre-trial detention, upcoming release or who are held because they can’t pay bail.

North Carolina Corrections Department-Prison Division

(919) 838-4000

North Carolina Governors Office

919-814-2000

https://governor.nc.gov/contact/contact-governor-cooper

sample script:

My name is ________, and I am a North Carolina resident  deeply concerned about the safety of the states’s incarcerated people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Incarcerated people have a unique vulnerability to disease due to their crowded, unsanitary living conditions and lack of access to adequate medical care. For humanitarian reasons as well as reasons of public health, we call for the immediate release of all people in the North Carolina prison system. We also urge that you stop the intake of new prisoners during the pandemic. The cost of failing to take these steps will be paid for in human lives, and we refuse to abandon our neighbors and loved ones to die in lockup.

CALL AS MANY TIMES AS YOU CAN

stay tuned to the twitter accounts for @NCResists and @EmptyCagesColl for updates

10th Anniversary

Even while the world burns, our 10th anniversary still approaches and we’re still soliciting messages from you, our listenership. Not sure what to say, likely you have a LOT of time on your hands, so go back through our archives and dive in. If you want a deep dive, visit our website where you can find hundreds of hours of interviews and music. If you want to drop us a line, check out the link in the show notes, or you can leave a voicemail or signal voice memo at +18285710161, you can share an audio file with the google drive associated with the email thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net or send a link to a cloud stored audio filed to that email address. Tell us and listeners what you’ve appreciated and or where you’d like us to go with this project.

Spreading TFS

If you appreciate the work that we do here at TFS, you can also help us out by making a donation if you have extra cash rustling around. The link on our site called Donate/Merch will show you tons of ways. If, like most of us, money is super tight at the moment, no prob, we struggle together. You can share our show with other folks to get these voices out there and more folks in the conversation. And if you REALLY like us and have a community radio station nearby who you’d be excited to have us air on for free, get in touch with us and we’ll help. The page on our site entitled Radio Broadcasting has lots of info for radio stations and how to let them know you want us on the airwaves. Thanks!

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Featured music:

  • From Monument To Masses – Sharpshooter – The Impossible Leap In One Hundred Simple Steps
  • Filastine – Quémalo Ya (instrumental) – Quémalo Ya
  • Etta James – I Don’t Stand A Ghost of a Chance (With You) – Mystery Lady: The Songs of Billie Holiday

Revolutionary Witchcraft, Magic, Imagination, and the Weird Left; An Interview with Sarah Lyons

Download Episode Here

This week I had the pleasure to sit down with Sarah Lyons, who is an author, activist, and a practicing witch about her new book Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism which came out in 2019 from Running Press.

This was a great interview to have for me, because this is a topic we haven’t yet presented on this show and we cover a wide range of topics; our guest’s personal history with witchcraft, what is meant by magic, witchcraft, and animism, how anti-racists and anti-imperialists could approach having a magical practice that doesn’t fall into appropriation, and many many more topics! We also discuss her new book at length, what led her to write this book, and what she hopes readers might get from it.

. … . ..

You can go to sarahlyons.org to see more information by and about our guest, plus upcoming projects. You can also follow her on Instagram @citymystic and on Twitter @_sarah_lyons_.

You can read further articles by our guest at her website or at her Medium page!

Support the Maroon Movement and the Baltimore Free Store!

@MaroonMovement and a coalition of anticapitalist organizers are looking for individuals and organizations that want to assist with a regular Baltimore Free Store that will offer no cost food, gently used clothing, toiletries, books, housing items, & services such as sewing, haircuts, classes, etc.

The are actively fundraising to purchase food, toiletries, rental space, transportation, serving items, storage and other fees needed to launch and make Baltimore Free Store happen. They would appreciate the solidarity. Any amount – $1, $5, $10 etc. – helps to alleviate the real life effects of anti working class budget cuts and poverty that impacts our community! Together the village will win. All Power To The People!

PayPal: https://paypal.me/simarbg

(or fcrcollective@gmail.com)

Cashapp: https://cash.app/$Simaleerbg

Venmo: @Simaleerbg

simalee.bandcamp.com

To donate items, volunteer, or for more info email thebaltimorefreestore@gmail.com

To hear our interview with Sima Lee, one of the founders of the Maroon Movement, you can follow this link!

. … . ..

Music for this episode by:

Feminazgul – The Rot in the Field is Holy off of their as yet unreleased album No Dawn for Men, scheduled for release in June 2020. More from Feminazgul, and related projects, at their bandcamp!

TIMESTAMPS (for podcast version):

00:00:17 Introduction to the show’s main content, Sarah Lyons on Magic, activism, and her new book Revolutionary Witchcraft

00:01:11 Announcement to support the Baltimore Free Store!

00:02:31 Words from anarchist prisoner Sean Swain, Sean speaks about his experiences with the Parole Board

00:10:05 “speak about your book and what led you to write it?”

00:15:38 “what would you say to skeptical listeners to hold their attention?”

00:19:59 “describe what you mean by magic and witchcraft”

00:23:21 “could you go into animism a little more?”

00:31:22 “we are taught that the witch trials = six crazy days in Salem that one time. Could you go into the actual scope and some of the context?”

00:40:06 – 00:45:31 Musical Break with Feminazgul’s The Rot in the Field is Holy off of their as yet unreleased album “No Dawn for Men”

00:45:31 “talk about the tension between inspiration and appropriation in a magical practice?”

00:58:40 “how is capitalism trying to incorporate witchcraft and how can people push back against it?”

01:03:50 “is there a spell or practice that you would suggest to listeners, especially those who are interested in incorporating magic into their activism?”

01:07:34 “how can people learn more about you and get in touch?”

01:09:23 closing sentiments.

Sima Lee on Resistance, Repression, Hip Hop, and Creating New Worlds

Sima Lee on Resistance, Repression, Hip Hop, and Creating New Worlds

Download Episode Here

This week we are super pleased to present an interview done with Sima Lee, who is a queer Afro-Indigenous hip hop artist and community organizer of long standing, about a recent raid that occurred at Maroon House in DC this March. We speak about Maroon House, its story and what it is in the process of becoming, the ask for support in helping this movement build and heal from the brutal police repression, her newest album Trap Liberation Army, and many more topics.

Sima Lee has given some interviews recently about her political trajectory, her life, and relationship to anarchism in detail. Rather than having a repeat of those words, we are going to link her past interviews below!

Link to Bandcamp where there was an ask for monetary donation to help support the Maroon Movement and the Food, Clothing & Resistance Collective.

Ways to get and stay connected:

Further interviews:

Independent artists and labels:

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Music for this episode:

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Transcription

TFSR: Sima Lee, thank you so much for coming on to The Final Straw Radio Show. It’s a huge honor to get to talk to you. Would you just introduce yourself for listeners? Name, pronouns, anything you want listeners to keep in mind as they like hear your words?

Sima Lee: Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. I’ve definitely checked out some of the other podcasts in the past and really enjoy them. It feels good to be up here to be able to talk about what’s going on.

I’m Sima Lee the RBG. I am a hip hop artist, radical hip hop artist, organizer, revolutionary, I founded Maroon Movement, Maroon House and Food Clothing Resistance Collective, which has been operating since 2015. We are mutual aid, direct action, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anarchist, autonomous maroon squad, basically just trying to show how we can cooperatively, collectively, communally have dual power as we build up to take down this empire.

Whether that’s us helping to feed the community, helping to give out free clothing and other items, or making radical music, or creating a space for people to be able to come together to organize, to have culture, to talk about alternative medicine and alternative herbs and other things of that nature. That’s the work that I’ve been deeply embedded in. In addition to helping to do anti-gentrification work, just building up in these urban centers as we try to take down the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex. It’s a full time job just trying to not be oppressed. To put it frank, that is what I do. I try full time to not be oppressed. I appreciate to be able to be on the program.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much. I really resonate with that as well. As the world is moving more and more and more towards… it’s always been chronically unstable for folks who are more marginalized by systems of power, but becoming more unstable as far as our climate goes, as far as our systems of infrastructure go. So I really appreciate projects like Maroon House, and the Maroon Collective for just taking power and taking care of themselves in the face of a lot of instability.

You’ve given a lot of really amazing interviews in the past, as far as your personal history and political development goes. You’ve talked about Maroon House a lot, but I’d love to hear a little bit about how that project got started and about the meaning behind the maroon part of Maroon House.

SL: Well, what came first in the process, to give a sped up version, I’m originally from Norfolk, Virginia. That is pretty much surrounded by the military industrial complex. The largest naval installation in the world is Norfolk, Virginia, and Hampton Roads area in general. So, from an early age, this is what I saw. I saw the military industrial complex, for what it’s worth. In addition to that, I saw everyone else suffering from low wages and oppression.

Virginia is where a large amount of liberated people who were once enslaved escaped into the swamps, and in particular the Great Dismal Swamp, and connected with other people who escaped harsh conditions. Sometimes they were deserters from war, sometimes it was other indigenous groups that were native to the land. They would build, what we would call today, dual power within those swamps, creating a community of resistance. So when other people would escape, they had an oasis, a place to go. They made their own rules and regulations and created their own law of the land, outside of the rule of the day, which still was legalized slavery.

So, much of how I developed my thought came from being from that area of Virginia, and the history from 1619 until, and the history of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser and other others who basically took it upon themselves to try and liberate themselves, and in conjunction with others and strong abolitionist movements that were built and upheld in Virginia. I took the concept of people working together and coming together. Of course, maroons are not just in Virginia. Maroons were everywhere Europeans dropped African bodies. There were maroons in Haiti, and maroons in Jamaica, and you have the Qilombo’s in Brazil and you have the Garifuna in Honduras. There’s just about everywhere that you go in Latin America and the Caribbean and other places that Africans created independent resistance and community.

When I came to Washington, DC, I attended quite a lot of other people’s events showing solidarity, just trying to learn the history and processes of what was going on locally. But I felt that there needed to be a place where people could come together from other organizations, from within the community, to be able to have a place to build and create and express themselves and have culture. Similar to many other spaces that have been like that in the past. It’s not a model that we invented. This is usually something that many people do in order to survive. Basically, a space where survival programs can be done, is what I felt that we should have.

So, after the Peace House split from the particular house that we were living in (which is another longtime mutual aid, direct action, anti-capitalist group) we continued, or I continued, in that same space in Washington, DC and named it the Maroon House. So Maroon House was intentionally Black, intentionally queer, and intentionally radical and all encompassing of what was going on at the time in Washington, DC. Which meant also cannabis advocacy and education. This will lead directly to why we got raided.

I don’t know if that’s the lead in questioning, but this is just giving a background of how we started and previewing to how the space ended, because we did have all these different radical elements within it, as well as entertainment, and as well as (as I said) cannabis education and advocacy after the passing of Initiative 71 that legalized cannabis in Washington DC.

Maroon House basically operated in the middle of a neighborhood and connected everyone. So that we could open up community gardens and have free stores and free schools. It was just a beautiful flourishing village. I wanted something that I didn’t see in other spaces. I think it’s very important for us as organizers to do that, because quite often we read books, and we see what others do. Outside of our imaginations, we blindly tried to imitate that, instead of creating new models that fit our reality. So I felt that it was important, whether it was successful or whether it failed, that it was important to hold down a space and operate it on our own terms, something that we felt reflected us.

The movement aspect of it, where we’re at transcends from a Maroon House to a movement is trying to get others to duplicate it and replicate that. To have their own houses and centers and co-ops and collectives and communes and farms, to be able to, again, have dual power and be free within this very, very oppressive system that is just pushing us all down. These are traditional, indigenous ways of resistance as well as anarchist. I can’t just say it’s all just anarchists models that I’m using. But it is a combination of a bit of both.

That’s how maroon House came about. It was very much needed. It was very successful. We got to a year before we were raided. It was actually not long after our one year anniversary that we were raided by the Metropolitan Police Department on the context of a neighbor’s complaint. Well, we knew that wasn’t true, because one of the things that we did not want to do was gentrify an already gentrified, Washington DC. So, we made sure that the core of what we were doing is building up the community. When I say building up the community, I mean the community within the community, meaning connecting everyone because there are always separate communities within community, but to have a hub where everyone could come together and we could talk to people about what’s going on within the neighborhood, within the larger Washington DC area… that’s what was important to me. There was no way we were going to set up there and just have events without having connections to our neighbors.

So, our neighbors would come to our free stores and the People’s Pantry. Our neighbors would come when we would have events. Our neighbors would even come when we would have classes or concerts or cannabis education events. It was a broad spectrum of people that would come through, because we made sure that everyone felt comfortable as long as you weren’t oppressive to others. We knew that the neighbors had not called because we actually knew our neighbors.

It was basically just intimidation. The actual sergeant who came in and this was a violent raid, mind you, they had AR-16’s and red beams on us. This was a violent raid. This was meant to terrorize the community and us. To set an example. But the police officers told us that they knew of our work, they were aware of our work, they respected our work, and then offered as they’re taking people out in cuffs (at the same time that they’re doing that) offered to donate to us for our free clothing giveaway. They actually did. The very next day, they dropped clothing off. As insult to injury, after they’ve terrorized our home and brought dogs and pointed guns at us. They offered us some of the clothing that they had and donated it.

What was important to me is that they told us that they knew the work that we were doing. Which means that they had been watching us. I don’t know how long they had been watching us, but they they definitely had. That is something that happened in March of this year. And as a consequence of it, we had to revamp the type of events that we had, because we knew that they were looking at events, anything of a cannabis nature, in particular.

TFSR: Yeah, that is a lot. I’m so sorry that y’all were forced to endure something so heinous. And to add insult to injury, the cops being like, ‘Yeah, we’ll donate to your thing.” I shouldn’t be surprised at the ridiculous, inhuman nature that cops move through the world in.

But I really connected to what you were saying about the flexibility of the organizing model that Maroon House had, where you said “that people read about stuff in books and they try to copy it verbatim or word for word.” I think that that kind of tends to perpetrate a lot of the problematic patterns that people have visa vie settler colonialism, or toxic whiteness, or what have you. They’re like, “Oh, we’ll just go back to the land and buy some land that we have no relationship to and that we have no idea who whose land it is actually.” So I really connected with that.

SL: It was very important that our space, even though it was ran by Black queer women and femmes, it was very important that it was brown and indigenous centered in addition to that, and it very much was. So the Black and Brown unity aspect was something that was always in effect, as well as bringing in white leftists. We felt that our job, to be quite frank, was to make sure white leftist left feeling a little less toxic, a little less settler-ish, a little less centered. Because you cannot be the center of an imperialist movement when your ancestors were the imperialist. When your current family members are the imperialist, there’s something has to give, when we are on stolen indigenous land and indigenous people are not at the forefront of what we’re doing. Or they are but you’re not listening to them.

So part of what we had to do within that Maroon House was to treat every white leftist who came into that space and white anti-racist as the potential next Marilyn Buck or John Brown. That’s how I looked at it. So when you leave, if you did not feel that way when you came in, I want you to feel that way when you when you go out. If you came here as an ally, I want you to leave as an accomplice.

The space was so important. It wasn’t just because of mutual aid, it was because of the living teaching. I am an early childhood educator, and I give lectures, and I teach adults as well but it’s the living model that people need to see. It’s the communication that they don’t always get. That was very much important about this space. So, I talk about that space a lot, because I want to see others, again, recreate spaces like this and for people to help do the work of building it up. It was extremely difficult to do that work, to open your doors and select strangers and is a lot. There are different models to do it. That was just the way that we chose to do it to open up our home, but there are different ways to do it. But because we lived there and we worked there and we taught there and we played there, when the police came they disrupted all of that.

So, right now there is is no Maroon House DC. It’s not because we were not able to sustain the events that we had that kept the space up. We had to revamp them, but we continued to have events, we continued to have people coming, because I refused to let them destroy what we’re doing. This is the anniversary, not long ago, of the killing of Fred Hampton and that was the raid that happened. We know how they raided the Los Angeles Panthers with the first use of SWAT. We know how they raided the Philadelphia Panthers. Infamous pictures were taking up them in their underwear to humiliate them. They do things of this nature to shake you and break you.

Because things had changed a bit within the demographics of the people who were in the collective, with some members having already left, new people being added who we really probably hadn’t vetted the best, and things that pretty much seemed like sabotage from within now not just coming from the state. So you have sabotage from within, from newer people, newer faces that we don’t really know as much. I made the tactical decision to retreat. So that I would not end up the next freedom fighter who has been murdered in their sleep by the police, or sabotaged from within by new members that we hadn’t vetted or hadn’t had a chance to vet as much. So now we’re in Baltimore, we’re no longer in Washington, DC, but the work continues. We do want to get another Maroon House. That is the goal.

TFSR: Absolutely. That’s amazing. That’s that’s really making me think of an interview that we did a couple of months ago with a rad space in LA called La Concha. They were having a lot of trouble being infiltrated by like authoritarian Maoist, state-communists, basically. They were talking about that as being something that they were really keeping eyes on infiltration from the State as well as infiltration from other ‘leftist groups.’ I feel like anti-authoritarian leftist resistance and energy is building on Turtle Island. And so resistance to that from bad actors is also building.

But I’d love to hear how people are holding up who were working in Maroon House? How are people doing and how can listeners help support y’all? How can listeners send you love if they are inclined to do so?

SL: Well, I’ll be honest, because I think about, again, in history we’ve learned from people who have gone through things and we look at it and try to relate to it. I think about how, so often a lot of the revolutionaries that we’ve studied, especially those from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, they would go through these horrible things of State repression or infiltration, or even sometimes… and I have to be careful when I say infiltration because I invited people to live within the perimeters of this space because they fit the model of what we were doing. But it’s not always some strange person walking in. It could be people that you know who end up doing a 180 of whatever they were doing when they originally met you, or said the right things to get into the door, and then change what they were doing afterwards. Or there is sabotage by way of not helping, not assisting. There is sabotage by the way of doing things to suck the morale out. There is sabotage by ways of leaving doors unlocked when you’re in the middle of military situations, or leaving windows open. Things that are odd. You find something might be in your food that originally wasn’t in your food or in your drink. There are different ways to sabotage that may or may not even be connected to the State.

For me, I don’t know if those things happen from the State 100%, or if it was just personal or other things. But all of these things are important when you’re thinking about having open memberships into into your space.

So for us, it has been rally our comrades get support to be able to get out of the space, which we totally absolutely did with a lot of people across the country supporting us so that we could get to another space in Baltimore. Originally our first space was in Baltimore and so we were returning back to Baltimore. Our first Maroon House was actually in West Baltimore. Right now what we’re doing is healing because, we feel that we got to just keep going and we don’t have time to heal from the everyday trauma. It is important to heal your body and your mind after you’ve been through something violent and we deserve that. I say we, meaning revolutionaries, we tend to think, “Oh shake it off, my ancestors had so much worse,” but we’ve got to take care of ourselves or we’re not going to be here, as the indigenous folks say (as myself, Afro indigenous) for the seventh generation. We’re not going to be here to leave a legacy for them if we burn out.

So what we’re doing now, first off trying to heal. We’ve just now talking about what we went through. This happened in March and it was so traumatic, we didn’t want to talk about it, because we had no idea if there was another raid coming. Was there more sabotage coming? We are also learning to trust again. I’m learning to be able to let my guard down a bit and still attend other events and speak with comrades and meet with them, even though one would be extremely paranoid after all the things that happened. I am extremely cautious right now.

But that’s what’s going on right now. We’re healing, revamping, rebuilding, and refocusing. We’re doing different things, basically, to be able to come up with a new space. However that that plays itself out, we’re trying to connect with more people on social media. We may set up a blog and start doing some art connected projects, some zines, just to be able to put out more information to tell our story. People can follow us on social media. Food Clothing Resistance Collective is on Facebook and it’s on Twitter and all the major social media sites. Maroon movement is also and myself, Sima Lee.

Some of our main core comrades are no longer within the vicinity of the space, but we still keep in good contact with each other. They’re treading on with what they’re doing as individuals. We’re looking right now for the first time to actually expand and recruit because we always kept it within the house, the members, because it was a little easier for me to feel that we could make sure that we knew everybody. That didn’t necessarily work, but at least for the first year it did. So right now we are actively looking for the first time to expand and recruit outside of the house. I’ll be working on that, probably for the next couple of months, what I want that to look like as far as the process, and what we want it to look like as far as the process of how we go about doing that and how we go about letting people know. But right now we’re just trying to add more people on social media and get people to reach out to us there and then we can connect in person.

TFSR: That’s awesome. And thank you so much for giving voice to something, this very complex and difficult to articulate phenomenon in leftist circles of sabotage by way of not helping out or sabotage by way of doing odd stuff. I feel like that’s not something that we have so much on our radars. So thank you for speaking on that, because I feel like it’s not spoken of enough.

SL: It should have been talked about really, really, really a lot after Occupy. We dropped the ball and went right into more pushing. We did not unpackage all of the things that we saw that was very weird, very sporadic, random types of acts that just didn’t make any rational sense towards the movement and we didn’t unpack that. I’m saying that as anarchists, we really should have talked about that and what it looks like to vet comrades and to find out more about each other. Still not wanting to invade on people and not to be authoritarian, but this is important. We’re doing radical work in major urban cities or in rural areas where definitely everybody knows everybody, and who are these people coming into this situation and we really need to be more careful. I know we get into this theory a lot, but the praxis is so important when you get into acting out what you’ve learned. You’ve got to be cautious with security. Our security culture is lacking across the board, not just anarchists. My revolutionary socialist comrades as well, our security culture really needs to be tightened up with everything that we know from COINTELPRO. We should know better by now.

TFSR: Absolutely. That resonates with me really hard. You mentioned COINTELPRO and learning about our own revolutionary history is the first step to understanding what kind of threats we face from the State and learning how to walk a line between not trying to be… Paranoia is a healthy thing sometimes, like there’s healthy paranoia, because sometimes there’s really bad actors out there. But there’s a sort of overblown paranoia that tends to be exclusive or exclusionary, or paranoia for paranoid sake, and learning to walk the line of being safe and getting yours and your comrades backs…

SL: There’s a thin line between healthy skepticism and then these rogue maoist units that are beating up comrades. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about when I say that we need to have a better security culture, in fact, those things raise red flags of provocateurism. It’s just a part of study, and it’s just a part of growth. This is what you have to deal with, when you’re organizing. We’re in the heart of the empire, what makes us think we’re not going to be scrutinized and watched every step of the way? What makes us think that they’re not watching our social medias? I just gave mine out @SimaLeeRGB on Twitter and on IG. Sima Lee on Facebook.
I know that they’re already watching those things, so even when we put out public information, watch what we put out. How much do we want to give face to face? How much do we want to give electronically? These are all things that we should constantly be thinking about, because they’re constantly after us. Whether we know it or not, they are. They’re not gonna make an announcement. They didn’t announce that they were coming to our house. They just came and then they went away. Incidentally, all charges were dropped from that raid. I didn’t say that part. So, no one has been charged. There are no charges. No one’s in jail. It was just a complete disruption. Just a violent act just for the sake of doing it.

TFSR: I’m glad no charges, but obviously, there’s enduring trauma as there would be naturally if you have that kind of shit happen in your house.

So, you are a musician and you are a hip hop artist of some long standing. There was a call for people to download your most recent album Trap Liberation Army and there was a call for donations via that platform. I’d love to hear about that album, your process in creating it and some themes that it focuses on.

SL: Trap Liberation Army is an homage to Black Liberation Army, which was an underground fighting unit that splintered off, some from the Black Panther Party, but there are members who are also members of Republican New Africa and other Black liberation units, who felt that the above ground fight could desperately use arm resistant units in the underground. They worked in conjunction with brown liberation movements and white liberation movements. I mentioned Marilyn Buck, and David Gilbert, and so many others, Laura Whitehorn, so many others were a part of actions taken with the Black Liberation Army.

I thought of the proliferation of trap music, that’s the sound of the time. So, I thought I could combine the two concepts. “Why don’t we have a trap Liberation Army?” That’s more of a modern type of a twist on the same thing. Trap being the hood, the ghetto, and in particular, drugs. As far as peoples using drugs to make an income in an oppressive, imperialist setting. The colonized people might have to take measures to make money by any means necessary. With Trap Liberation Army, it’s about “how about we don’t do that? How about we look for alternatives, by any means necessary not just for income, but for liberation.”

It’s just a twist on it. There are good and bad things within the hood. I’m from the hood. I’m from the trap. I’m from the concept of not necessarily drug dealing, but it was surrounding me it was completely engulfed in the community that I was in, it was in the middle of the crack era. I always wanted to be liberated from that paradigm of suffering and pain. This is not to shame people who use drugs by any stretch of the imagination, but there was much suffering and pain and it led to the mass incarceration of my people. We’re still dealing with it right now.

So, Trap Liberation Army is a project that talks about the community, talks about the hood, talks about liberation and what it looks like, gives homage to those who fought in the past, because Black Liberation Army definitely used to fight against the surge of drugs that was coming into the Black community. My elders were a part of some of those units that taught me as a youth when I was in the community of the Umma movement which was connected to political prisoner Jamil Abdullah al-Amin.

So it’s just a way of me like mixing the old with the new, and pro-cannabis, pro-sarcasm, but very anti-imperial. Something you can nod your head to, because sometimes anti-imperial music is kind of boring. I mean, it is. It can be. To make it more interesting to give it a little bit of funk, to reflect the background that I come from. I call myself a trap or ghetto intellectual, because I don’t run away from my poor background. I think we tend to look at poverty as something that reflects us as opposed to something that is done to us. So I’m celebrating the beauty and the ugliness that comes within the trap, and the ability to liberate ourselves and look for a better future. I guess a lot of people call that Afrofuturism. But that is what the album is about.

Through Bandcamp, we’ve been able to get a lot of new followers and people who want to support the project. Also Bandcamp will recommend other music to you. So it’s a way that you can find out “If I like this particular song, can you recommend me something else?” So it’s a way, I hope that they found new artists after they listen to my music that are similar to the vein of what they’re doing. But I feel like we need freedom music right now, we need a revolutionary background to what we’re doing. While we’re tagging and feeding people and doing everything that we’re doing. So, I’m looking forward to introducing my music to some more new people, but also creating hopefully some new music and 2020 to put out there. So people like Franklin Lopez can stop asking me where my next album is out. [laughs]

But I’m really proud of the fact that he’s digging my music and also that it was featured in the documentary on Sub.Media in the documentary “And You Don’t Stop” for Trouble. I got to get introduced to some comrades that I’ve liked their music for a while and I didn’t really know them, but I got to talk to them and stuff after that, like Lee Reed and Sole. So that was pretty cool. Music is a cultural weapon and I’ve been involved in hip hop for a very, very long time. It’s always been my favorite expression. So just using it like Dead Prez, Public Enemy, X Clan, other groups that inspired me to help and boost the morale of the people.

TFSR: Absolutely. I loved that episode of Trouble that focused on hip hop. It was so awesome and La Marea and I’m forgetting who else was in there.

SL: Mic Crenshaw…

TFSR: Are you listening to anything right now that is giving you strength or other artists that you want to plug?

SL: I always say the same thing: I want to plug independent artistry and labels and collectives that I know of, that I’ve been a part of, because they are the ones that inspire me. Three different entities, collectives, independent labels that I’m connected to are Soul Trust Records out of Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is who I released Trap Liberation Army out from. These are comrades that I’ve known for a very long time. They’re my friends, really good friends, but we decided to have a space for independent artistry together. We put out some really good work so Soul Trust Records is just one big mass of incredible artists that people should check out.

Beat Conductors is a local collective in DC, Maryland, Virginia area that has a lot of Beat contests as far as like producer displays and battles. I mean, some really incredible instrumentals are played at these events. A lot of artists from across the country are gathering, it’s a competition but it’s more a building up of a family of musicians and artists, traveling together and explaining and working together, how we create in our creative processes, tutorials and classes. It’s been pretty cool working with them as well.

Then also Guerrilla Republik, which is a clothing label as well as a massive collective of artists that the brother Rob and Iz have been doing this for quite some time now. The people have really resonated. It’s been really heavily focused on Black and brown resistance and inspired by the Haitian Revolution. That body of revolutionary clothing and revolutionary art and music combining has been a beautiful thing. The artists that people might most associate with Guerrilla Republik would be Immortal Technique. But there are many, many, many talented artists that are affiliated with Guerrilla Republik, and I’ve had a pleasure to work with some of the comrades in Washington DC. I would tell people, if you’re looking for radical music to inspire you to definitely check out Soul Trust, Guerrilla Republik, and Beat Conductors.

TFSR: Thank you for that. One of the last questions that I had scripted out is about any words that you had on like your relationship to queerness and the relationship that queerness has to Maroon Collective, and to the Food Clothing and Resistance Collective? You as somebody who’s moved through and navigated and worked in a lot of political and social spaces, what things have come up for you visa vie queerness? And how have things changed over the years that you can locate? If that makes any sense?

SL: Change has been dramatic from losing spaces. The culture of queer visibility is a bit different now. Queer people are taking it upon themselves, I mean, as they always have, to be able to represent themselves, but it’s connecting in a different way. Where I see, on the one hand, there is more of a social acceptance via visibility, it doesn’t necessarily reflect all the time within movement circles and what leadership looks like. But people are loud and out there and they’re doing it. I’m very proud of the development of the queer folks that are out there and really getting it. Queer, trans non binary, gender non conforming, such as myself, we’re really taking it upon ourselves to attack the hetero patriarchy that has been the foal of so many movements.

Something that really pushes people away is a lack of feeling like they can be themselves in far too many leftist circles. There is homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. The importance of me being myself, and being comfortable… I decided a long time ago, either I was going to just be myself or I was going to play a role to fit in, and the choice I made very early on was to just be myself. So, I’ve never had to deal with a lot of resistance to me, as far as anyone saying anything to me in a hurtful manner.

I know I’ve been excluded from certain things, though, because of my my sexual orientation, and probably even more so my gender nonconformity as a masculine woman. But I really don’t give a damn because they couldn’t have been my comrades if you’re going to make such superficial choices, not to judge me by… I’m not going to say morality… principles, and ideological realness, because a lot of us say that we have ideological followings, but we don’t act through with them. So my integrity, wouldn’t allow a lot of people to come up to me and say certain things and oppress me. But I know that I’ve been left out of certain things because of my queerness.

We’ve had incidents within white queer spaces where we did not feel comfortable as Black and brown queer bodies. I see how my trans sisters are treated, and I see how my trans brothers are quite often just ignored and forgotten. Across the board, I see how people are taking it upon themselves to create their own Houses, their own scenes, their own films, their own music, and this body of resistance is coming out from queer people. That is a continuation of what we’ve been doing for over 40 years. It’s passing from one generation to the other to keep it going.

It’s not easy in Pan African circles, to be openly queer. It’s not easy. I’ve navigated through Pan African socialist circles, Islamic circles, revolutionary socialist circles, and again, quite often queer people, trans people are not centered in the circles. So, I’ve always felt that I would be that lance that was strike in the middle of that, and you’re gonna have to deal with me, and you’re gonna have to deal with my comrades, and you’re gonna deal with us, not as us feeling like we’re waiting for your acceptance, but you’re just gonna have to get with our program.

That’s how I’ve always felt about it. I’m not begging for acceptance, I’m taking my stake in this world that is all interconnected. In that aspect, my visibility is my weapon. I want you to see this masculine body, who’s not toxic, and who’s not following by the gender norms that you profess so well every day and the hetero patriarchy were my visibility, the visibility of my comrades and a collective that was ran by Black queer women and femmes was very important. It is very important. So I will continue to do this work even though I know that I’m probably not wanted in certain spaces. I’m not going to ask.

I’m not going to ask, “Can I be liberated? Can I be free? Can I be treated like anyone else?” I’m going to take it. So that’s always been how I viewed it. I have been a victim of hate crimes. I’ve been assaulted. I’ve been brutalized. I’ve had a lot of things happen to me as far as sexual and physical and mental violence. I am a survivor. I would tell any other queer youth that are out there and who are organizers to make sure that you build an intentional family to protect you, and to buffer you, and to laugh and to cry with because it’s very, very important. We’re trying to make worlds within worlds within worlds. It’s okay to create that. It looks like nothing that has been done before. It’s alright. It’s okay. It’s okay to create something new, and to be relentless with that.

We met a lot of queer people that came to the space and I didn’t realize until after we were packing up just how many different people that we touched with this work. So, I’m so eager to get another space so that queer people can feel that way in Baltimore as well with a particular spot. Not saying that there aren’t spots already, but to add to it. Because Baltimore is an incredible resistance town, and I just want to add to it with another space and reach out to the queer, Black and brown people here and trans Black and brown people here and gender non conforming non-binary comrades.

We’re on the verge of changing the reality. No more, would you see our faces on the front of newspapers as some things to be objectified and laughed at. You will respect us and that’s just what it is. So that’s how I take my day to day life as a queer activist. Not an activist, really just I’m queer and you’re going to deal with me and you’re going to respect me. This is how it is and we have a right to live and exist. It’s not very easy, always, especially if you’re visible. But is this is the work that must be done so that we can be free, because nothing’s given to you, you kind of have to take it.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much for that. I really resonate with that as somebody who’s subjectivity is a mixed race trans man who either gets as near as I can figure coded as either white or Arab depending on who is doing the coding and what kind of situation is going on. So, I very much resonate with the taking space, carving out safe space. And also, I have seen queer spaces become a bit less toxic, a bit less white, a bit more taking queerness as history as something that was very much like spurred on given energy by and created by Black and brown queer people, as you know, and is something that has been tried to be co-opted into like HRC, gay rich white kind of circles. But we have a long way to go still.

SL: A lot of the reason that that gets co-opted is because of the economic situation that queer and trans bodies are put into, because of the oppression that we face. So oftentimes, we feel like we’re unemployable. Or we’re easily fireable outside of the nonprofit industrial complex. So, here comes the nonprofit industrial complex. Some of our greatest queer and trans minds right now are working at jobs at nonprofits and they hate them. But they have to eat, and sex work is criminalized, and and you can’t do this and you can’t do that. So it’s so many things that that you can’t do, you can’t have events and have a space in the middle of Washington, DC and just be self sustainable, apparently. So people end up in non-profit industrial complex and their ideas are stolen. They’re not respected, and they’re still underpaid. Still whiteness is centered at the end of the day. It’s still white supremacy. It’s still a platform for the othering of people while they’re using these people. They will bring in, it’s almost as if they have a checklist, “Okay, I need one queer Black woman, I need to trans man…”

Trans people are speaking up for themselves and people are starting to really, really, really, really resonate with what’s going on. So let’s get a bunch of trans people in and you don’t respect those trans people that you’ve got to come in. You’re not paying them what they’re due. You’re taking their ideas and you’re literally using queer and trans bodies. It’s a big problem. But I don’t know how we get around around that other than creating grassroots orgs of our own, and not giving all our great ideas to these nonprofits? Maybe? I don’t know.

But that’s a serious thing. I feel sorry for my comrades, I see you out there. I know you’re drained. I know you don’t want to be in these spaces. It could even be just a different type of nonprofit that isn’t queer, but you feel drained and you feel used, and you feel marginalized, with people that saying they’re doing social justice work. I know, that hurts. I hope that you can liberate yourself from that, because it’s not a good feeling.

TFSR: Yeah, it is not a good feeling. I think creating projects like La Concha, like Maroon House, like Maroon Collective, is a really viable step in the direction of real queer liberation from white supremacy. Real liberation period from white supremacy, because white supremacy gave us all of this shit that we’re dealing with.

SL: …and capitalism, and so it all has to be toppled. So while I’m educating the hetero patriarchy, I’m educating white queer and trans folks, as well. Because you’re not separate from that. You might not be embraced fully as you might want to be. Sometimes I think people just want to be embraced more by the Empire, like when we were fighting to have trans or queer people be in the military, that’s not an advancement for queer and trans bodies, to be in the military. But I understand why some people do it, because this is the only way that they can get medical and other things.

We’re often put into these situations, because again, we’re not free and we’re not liberated. While we’re organizing and losing spaces, more spaces are popping up. So we’re just gonna have to keep pushing for our independence and autonomy and to to be heard and to lead even as we’re talking about horizontal leadership or temporarily. It’s still important to have Black, brown, indigenous queer trans two spirit bodies in these spaces. And I don’t see that from a lot of white leftist groups. So people are organizing their own and a lot of the new groups that I see popping up are led by queer and trans people. I just say, “What’s up? Keep doing it. Power to the people.”

TFSR:  Well, if you if you ever come through Asheville, it’s been noted before, both on air and off air that pretty much literally all of the anarchists here are queer or trans. Like it’s notable when you find a cis-het person who’s an anarchist, we’re like, “Oh, it’s the unicorn!!”

SL: That interesting, but that’s what I’m saying. Create your own reality. We can flip the reality around and that is wonderful. Now I need to go to Asheville.

TFSR: Yeah, come through, come through. Yeah, we’ll show you a good time. We have all the vegan barbecue you could ever eat… or any kind of barbecue, whatever, people should eat what they want.
Sima Lee, those are all the questions that I had scripted out, but is there anything that’s on your mind that you want to give voice to or any words that you’d leave listeners with as a parting words?

SL: Feed the people. Go out and feed people, go out and give people clothing, sabotage capitalism, like sabotage it. You see it cracking, you see it breaking, you see it lashing out across Latin America and the Caribbean, and here, and Asia, and the Middle East people are lashing out because capitalism is no good and we see it. Whether it’s Chile, or Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, Paris, people are resisting. It’s time for Turtle Island, so called North Amerikkka to start sabotaging the wheels of the empire. Because other people need for us, within the belly of this beast to do that.

We need it for ourselves, first and foremost. I’m living in Baltimore, Maryland, which is segregated. It is very much segregated. It has a higher population of men in jail, Black men in jail in Maryland, more than in Mississippi. Again, I’m gonna say it again, it’s segregated. We’re living in segregated cities. We’re living in a place where food stamps are being cut from the masses. We’re living in a place where corporations we’ve known since children are closing. We’re living in a time where what it looks like to make money is changing. Hasten what work looks like, redefine what work is, redefine bartering, redefine what family looks like. We’re redefining everything, gender, everything. Redefine it, evaluate it. It’s good to learn from the past, but also learn from the mistakes.

I’m just anxious to see what 2020 looks like as we go into these ridiculous elections and all of this stuff that’s going on. Whether they impeach Trump or not, as long as we have imperialist capitalism ruling over us, it doesn’t matter what the figurehead is. So, I just want to see my comrades across the country, across the globe, to hasten the fall of imperialist capitalism, of racism, of sexism, of ableism, all of the things that have been impeding us and holding us back. Get your trans power, get your queer power, your Black, your brown, your indigenous power, and even Fred Hampton said, “you poor white people get your power too.” It cannot be on the back of your comrades and on the platform of white supremacy, we need you to be your European descended selves. Whiteness has to go, as far as a category of social political oppression.

So we would like to see the abolition of whiteness, and bring back the greenness of our land, and the blues of our water and our skies, and deal with this ecology that is just crying out for humans to just chill. This is where we are, we have so much work to do. I don’t know how to give any one thing other than to say, “Push it all.” If you think you’re pushing too much. I tell you, you’re not pushing enough. Push, push. Let’s see the end of this oppression and let’s create a new reality.

TFSR: I love that. I love that. Yeah. Thank you so much for your words and your energy and your heart and your mind. Like it’s been a beautiful experience for me getting to talk to you. And I hope that we get to like build and fight and work together in future.

SL: Absolutely. I plan on going as much as possible up and down the east coast, down south, and I’ve been invited a couple of times out west so maybe I might finally get to Cali and Seattle and Portland and other spots. I know the comrades are always doing their thing. I’m looking forward to meeting anybody and everybody who’s down to really push anti-capitalism as far as we can, in these colonized territories.

The State of Resistance and the Struggle for Dignity in Chile: An interview with a Chilean anarchist about the current protests there

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This week William had the chance to interview someone, a 20 year old anarchist from the territory of so called Chile, about the uprisings which have been occurring there. The protests began on Monday October 14th in Chile’s capital, Santiago, as a coordinated fare evasion campaign by high school students which led to spontaneous takeovers of the city’s main train stations and open confrontations with the Chilean Police. While the reason for these protests was a fare hike for public transportation by the government and the transit companies, this was only the tipping point in a much larger and diffuse situation of economic pracarity. We will post a great info graphic on social media about all that is tied up in this situation, but in short education and healthcare are private and so are very expensive, jobs pay very little (400 US dollars a month on average), and it is the only country in the world where water is privatized. According to Food and Water Watch, having a privatized water system increases the yearly cost of water by 59%, or over twice the amount as public water. Many of the systems that people are forced to live under, such as the current mechanisms of the State of Emergency and the pension system, were created under the Pinochet dictatorship and have not been updated to reflect the so called “democratic” rule.

 

Our guest outlines these situations, and also speaks about the violence that protestors are facing from the police and from the state. They also speak on the relationship of this current violence to the violences that Indigenous Mapuche people have been facing from the Chilean state all along.

According to the Wikipedia article on the 2019 Chilean Protests, as of yesterday October 26th “19 people have died, nearly 2,500 have been injured, and 2,840 have been arrested. Human rights organisations have received several reports of violations conducted against protesters, including torture.” Our guest outlines the peaceful nature at the outset of these protests, which were quickly escalated by hyper repressive tactics on the part of the police, and says that these actions are making it clear that the “democracy” – which was fought for by the generations above them – is a fake system.

To keep updated on this situation, and away from the tvs like our guest suggested, you can follow Radio Kurruf, an anarchist radio station in Chile, and read their analysis on the current wave of repression here. https://radiokurruf.org/2019/10/26/state-of-rebellion-in-chile/

You can also visit our blog at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org for a partial list of links and accounts to follow, including some on the ground reporting by crimethInc.

@RadioVillaFrancia

Here is the transcript of a brief exchange between TFS and other comrades in Rojava (podcast only):

Solidarity with Rojava

Here is an announcement on behalf of the IDOC Watch:

IDOC (Indiana Dept of Correction) Watch is an organization in Indiana, composed of people directly affected by the prison system and prison abolitionists, that is organizing to expose and stop the widespread abuses in the Indiana prison system, with the long-term objective of dismantling the prison system. (check out IDOC Watch at idocwatch.org)

This event will be a panel discussion on the base-building IDOC Watch is doing in prisons and communities affected by incarceration, prisoner struggles and counter-insurgency in Indiana, and the effects of the prison-industrial complex on individuals, families, and communities.

Featuring:

Zolo Agona Azania, former Black Liberation Army activist and long-term New Afrikan political prisoner from Gary, IN, who beat two death sentences after being falsely accused and convicted of murdering a Gary police officer during a bank robbery. Zolo was released from prison in 2017, after serving over 35 years. He is currently working to establish re-entry housing for people being released from prison in Gary, through the Gary Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated.

S.T. : A mother and grandmother from Gary who organizes with IDOC Watch and currently has a son incarcerated at Indiana State Prison, a maximum-security facility in Michigan City, IN.

An organizer with FOCUS Initiatives LTD, an abolitionist re-entry project in Indianapolis, IN: focusreentry.com.

Location
1845 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL 60208
217 Fisk Hall

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 at 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM CDT

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Music for this episode in order:

Llueve – La Trova Pank

Somos Peligrosos – Los Crudos

“We either organize or we die, our lives depend on this!” – Reflections on Anarchism in Borikén (Puerto Rico) after Hurricane Maria and #RickyRenuncia

Anarchist Perspectives in Puerto Rico

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This week we have the opportunity to share a talk by Coco (they/them pronouns), who is a queer, Black, Puerto Rican anarchist about the recent 17 days of direct action against no-longer-governor Ricardo Rosselló and organizing as an anarchist after Hurricane Maria.

They talk about some of the lead up to these revolts – about the fascist campaign and term of office of Ricardo Rosselló -, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, decolonization and fighting US imperialism as it relates to PR, queer people and femmes on the front lines of the protests about Ricardo Rosselló, the active warping of this situation by media outlets, and many many more topics!

Coco originally presented this talk at the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair 2019 on Saturday August 24th.

I wanna give voice to something that came up in the Q&A after the talk, which was not recorded, in which Coco made space for an open conversation about revolt in Puerto Rico. They asked of the audience what we thought when #RickyRenuncia was trending on Twitter, and people were saying stuff like “we need to look to PR and learn from people there in order to figure out what to do where we’re at”. And a really good conversation wound out about disaster/riot tourism that has always been a problematic current on the far left, especially where the struggles of non-white folks are concerned. It was located in that conversation that the support of people interfacing with struggle that isn’t theirs is very conditional and fragile, and it was stated by participants of the conversation that there needs to be another way of looking at struggle that doesn’t involve an attitude of entertainment style consumption but rather comes from a place of real solidarity and real support.

As Coco stated, the media has really been messing with the narrative of what has been going on in PR, painting it either as super pacifist or like people are “out of control hooligans” or other such nonesense. For better sources of information, you can visit our blog at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org where we will post links to people and accounts you can follow who are on the ground or have a perspective that isn’t beholden to the larger capitalist media outlets.

Those links are:

https://twitter.com/_DESinformate

https://twitter.com/TodasPR

https://twitter.com/ClaridadPR

https://twitter.com/80grados

Here is an announcement on behalf of the upcoming Queer Conference at UNC Asheville:

Communities? Will a rainbow flag on a police car protect queer folks from a culture built around (trans)misogyny / misogynoir and sexual assault?

We are constantly reminded that our culture is still built on anti-black, anti-queer violence by the all too frequent murders of black transwomen, the further criminalization of queer sex workers, and the erasure of rural LGBTQ+ identities experiencing the pains of addiction, joblessness, and lack of resources. Today, we are at another fork in the road, where there is nominal acceptance of certain gay and lesbian identities (namely white, educated, middle-class families), while a wide range of experiences of people under the LGBTQ+ umbrella get forgotten. As queerness becomes hip and queer subcultural styles are being bought and sold, we must ask how the culture, lives, and sexuality behind the looks can survive and thrive. With the rise of global fascism, the impending doom of large-scale environmental collapse, and the inevitable next crash of capitalism, can we still envision a queerness that seeks liberation rather than admission to the status quo and benefits of a vastly unequal US society? How can we balance these visions with protecting the precarious lives most threatened by the current sociopolitical landscape?

To submit a proposal, follow the link at https://queercon.wp.unca.edu/

For any questions you can email qsconf@unca.edu

. … . ..

Music by:

Princess Nokia – Brujas (instrumental loop by William)

Ruby Ibarra – Us off of Circa 91

Calle 13 – Afilando los Cuchillos, or Sharpening the Knives, which is all about the revolts against Ricardo Rosselló.

On Nurturance Culture w Nora Samaran

On Nurturance Culture w Nora Samaran

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This week, Bursts spoke with Nora Samaran, author of the essay “The Opposite Of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture”, which became the seed of her book “Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture.” This book is recently out from AK Press.

We talk about harm, entitlement as relates to positions of power like masculinity or whiteness in our cultures, the need for connection engrained into our biology and sociality, accountability and healing among other topics.

You can find further reading up at norasamaran.com. You can find a list of suggested further reading by searching “How To Not Re-Injure Survivors.”

Announcements

ACAB/PansyFest Reminder

Next weekend is the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair (or ACAB) happening in Asheville, NC. Events start on Friday with a welcome table at Firestorm from 1-7pm. Simultaneously, there’ll be presentations on Veganism and non-violent direct action, trans-national and indigenous poetry, anti-racism in Appalacha, Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement and anarchism in Puerto Rico. That night, Pansy Fest begins with a show at Sly Grog Lounge at 7pm. This sparks a weekend of activities from 11am til 2am around the city. If you want to learn more about either event, check out acab2019.noblogs.org and pansycollective.org or give a re-listen to our August 4th episode of The Final Straw. And please come visit our table if you’re in town on Saturday or Sunday and say hi.

Sean Swain’s 50th Bday

We’re lucky enough to include Sean Swain in this week’s broadcast. If you’ve been missing him on your radio emissions, you can find a link to his audio essays up at our website, he produces one every week, find updates on him at Sean Swain.org or now follow him on twitter at @SwainRocks. Please be aware that his 50th birthday is coming up on September 12th, so send him some loving kindness. Also, if you’re in town for ACAB, swing by The Final Straw table on Saturday, August 24th before noon to participate in a birthday surprise for Sean. Shhh, don’t tell him.

Other Notes

There are some updates on the case of anarchist prisoner, Eric King up at his support site, supportericking.org. And stay tuned to our website and podcast stream for some special audios about him. Also, keep an ear out for the August 2019 episode of BADNews in the same places.

Continue reading On Nurturance Culture w Nora Samaran