This week, Bursts spoke with Bennu Hannibal Ra Sun, co-founder of the Free Alabama Movement and the National Freedom Movement, which is helping coordinate prisoner-led organizing across the so-called US. Bennu just finished a 5 year period in segregated housing for his organizing efforts. For the hour, they talk about the National Network coordination, the continuation of slavery from chattel slavery in which black and brown bodies were private property to the modern slavery of mass incarceration, pandemic behind bars, the importance of platforming prisoners in their struggles, the January Boycott FAM is conducting against prison industries, reform efforts and more.
This week on the Final Straw, we’re sharing another audio gift from comrades. Isbel Diaz Torres is a participant in the Taller Libertario Alfredo López / ABRA in Havana, Cuba, recorded in late 2018. In this chat, Isbel talks about the ABRA which is the only openly anarchist organization in Cuba at the time, about the LGBTQ movement and abortion rights which are both facing repression due to pressure from Cuban Evangelical and Catholic churches on the Cuban government, political discourse and difference, government co-optation, neoliberalism, animal rights, repression of dissent and the erasure of anarchist history.
In May of 2019, Isbel and his boyfriend Jimmy Roque Martinez were arrested on their way to the annual Conga Against Homophobia and Transphobia, essentially Cuba’s main Pride Parade and detained 24 hours in order to block their participation. As Isbel talks about in the interview, the state-run National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) had bowed to pressure from right wing Christian groups and canceled the event so activists were planning to hold an autonomous Conga resulting in several more arrests. A report with updates on the subject can be found at the Rosa Negra / Black Rose Federation website. You can also find an audio statement from Mario from the TLAL space on the subject in Spanish via BRRN.
This week on the The Final Straw you’ll hear me speaking with Cora Borradaile, who sits on the advisory board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center and works around issues of tech security in movements and is an associate professor at OSU.
We discuss the use of phone cloning by US Marshall’s and other law enforcement while engaging protestors in Portland, OR. We talk about UpTurn’s recent report concerning widespread use of cellphone extraction tools to copy and search the contents of cell phones captured during interactions with cops. Finally, we talk about Keyword Searches, where (often without warrants) google hands over information from peoples google searches to law enforcement.
We’ll also be presenting a segment by Sean’s fiance, Lauren, about his current silencing and the injustice of his case. More on president-in-exile Sean Swain can be found at Swain2020.Org and SeanSwain.Org.
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Transcription of the conversation with Cora Borradaile
BOG: So I’m speaking with Cora Borradaile who is on the advisory board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center or CLDC and we spoke before about a range of issues in May of this year, and before the George Floyd uprising and the resulting ACAB Spring. During the uprising researchers, journalists, and activists saw that applications of new, or new to us, surveillance methods were being used by security forces against the populace in the so called US, so I was hoping to pick Cora’s brain a bit about this and see, especially since upcoming months in the US also might get a little spicy with the election and all. Thank you Cora very much for taking the time to have this conversation.
Cora Borradaile: Yeah, it’s great to talk to you.
BOG: So just to list off a few things, like this summer we saw the use of military drones surveilling and sharing information with law enforcement in Minneapolis, lots of militarized gear being brought out in the streets across the US, or for late May at least protests against police violence, and collusion with para-state white supremacists have been ongoing in Portland, Oregon. In July we saw the deployment of federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) including Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent out to fight against protesters in the streets of Portland and attack and kidnap people. Including journalists from that and other cities. the US Marshalls also had their own aerial surveillance to track crowds in Portland, it came out this summer. On the tech side of things, the public got wind, apparently from leaks within the department of homeland security, that DHS had been cloning activists’ cell phones. Could you talk a little bit about this and what cell phone cloning is?
CB: Yeah, from that report their were very few details so a lot of it is guesswork as to what could possibly be going on. I could imagine two different ways in which their cloning cellphones- One which is scarier than the other. The more likely I think, is the less scary version which is if they manage to physically get your cell phone, like if you’re arrested and your cell phone is confiscated from you. Even if it’s confiscated temporarily, then they’re copying everything from your cell phone and possibly making a new cell phone that behaves just like your cell phone. So it would allow them to intercept calls possibly receive messages that you were intended to receive.
The scarier version but probably less likely, is the ability for them to be able to do the same thing without having the need to confiscate your phone to do so. That feels unlikely to me that they were doing that. If it was some sort of remote cloning I would gather that they were just cloning the sort of network ID of your phone, and not the contents of your phone. This would still allow them to do things like intercept calls, and intercept data, but in both scenarios I think end-to-end encryption (E2E) apps that you use like Signal or Keybase or Wire, that enable E2E encryption, I think the messages you’re receiving there would still be safe and that the cloned device shouldn’t be able to have the keys enabled to decrypt those messages that were intended for you. And even traffic that is encrypted – if you are visiting a website on your phone that your accessing via HTTPS, where the S stands for Secure – I think that even they wouldn’t be able to see the contents of that web page either because there is a key exchange that happens between you and the web server that they would have to play man in the middle on. Which is more complicated to do in a way that you wouldn’t be able to tell that something was going wrong.
All that’s to say, it’s still scary and I think if you have poor encryption practices like keeping your phone in an unlocked form, they have access to all of your encryption keys for things like Signal and Keybase and whatever other secure messaging apps you might be using. You should do whatever you need to do to alert everyone you contact with to delete your contact from their messages, groups, and so on. And if you have a phone that is confiscated – and certainly in an unlocked form – I would not trust that phone again. If your phone is confiscated but it was locked at the time and presumably you have a good password so they can’t easily unlock your phone, I would still maybe do a factory reset of your phone and start fresh by installing everything over again.
BOG: So, I’m not sure what the basis of this is, but conversations that I was having with friends when we were talking about the latter of the two instances that you were talking about- the hypothetical that remotely the cloning of the network ID or SIM connection could be done. It would be similar to you getting a new phone but having the same number, and that if Signal was installed on that device and it was connecting to the same phone number, by a Man in the Middle attack via a cloned SIM, it would appear that the interception could still be happening but that everyone would see a notation that there had been a change in safety number. Is that maybe what would happen?
CB: Yes. That is perfectly said. Right, so for them to be able to both clone your phone and intercept messages without those “safety number has changed” messages happening would be very, very difficult. So yeah, certainly if there are reports of anybody who’s had a confiscated phone and then all of a sudden all of their contacts are noticing that their safety number has changed with them, that would be super interesting to find out. —
BOG: –Or they stopped getting messages.
CB: Also horrifying.
*Laughter
BOG: Yeah. You know, they noticed that they stopped getting messages, everyone notices that the safety number changed, then that means that hypothetically the cloned phone or whatever would now be in those chats.
CB: So I don’t know if it’s as simple as that, because when you add a new device on Signal all the other devices get a notification of that.
BOG: Oh I see. So if I had a desktop and at least one cell phone that was getting messages… Yeah, but if that device was no longer getting new messages because the traffic was being routed to a different device, you wouldn’t like –
CB: Right so, your contacts should at the very least get the notification saying that the safety number has changed. If it’s a remote clone I think the only way in which the cloned phone would be able to read the messages in preexisting groups, for example, would be if the device was physically confiscated and copied. Because there are encryption keys that are used to start those conversations which are needed.
BOG: Do you mean the messages that were in loops before?
CB: No, to continue to receive messages from conversations that had already been going on. If someone started a new conversation after the cloning then the other people in the conversation might not be able to notice, but if you were continuing a conversation that had started before the cloning I don’t think you would be able to get that information without having physical access to the device and being able to copy over the encryption keys that were used to start those conversations.
BOG: Because they’re being stored on the phone and not on the server.
CB: That’s right, yeah. So for example, when you add a new Signal device part of what happens is copying over the encryption keys needed to continue conversations. And there’s a QR code that, say if you have Signal on your phone and you start using Signal on your desktop, you link those 2 devices so that both devices are able to receive and decrypt messages that go to you as an identifier.
BOG: If you know that if someone in your group or one of your friends has changed their number, whats a good verification?
CB: Don’t message them on Signal, and ask them, right? Because who knows who’s answering. Try to find a different form of communication even if its via friend or via a regular phone call, but ideally via email or some other band that is unrelated to your phone would be perfect to ask them, ‘Hey, I noticed your Signal safety number’s changed, what went on?’ Most of the time, or every time this has happened to me, the answer’s been ‘Oh, I had to reinstall my operating system on my phone’ or ‘I dropped my phone in a pool and had to get a new phone’. That’s usually the reason for a safety number changing, but definitely what you want to do is find a different way to ask that, other than using Signal and ideally other than using the phone. Especially if we are worried about cloned phones. Because if you just use a normal SMS text message to send to your friend and your friends phone has been cloned, then it could be the cops responding saying ‘Oh, yeah I had to get a new phone’.
BOG: I’ve seen some people do a thing where they ask someone in a group, when their safety number changed, ‘Hey could you leave a voice memo with your name and current time that you’re recording the memo and send it into the loop?’ And that way everyone hears this person’s voice, and it’s the time when they specifically get asked to record the memo so it’s outside of Enemy-Of-The-State-level NSA level operation that’s probably not somebody compiling an automated voice message in that person’s voice.
CB: Yeah, that’s a pretty good method for doing that. As you point out, synthesizing peoples’ voices can be done, but taking into account what your threat level is – are you someone who they’re going to be throwing everything at and be able to synthesize your voice in a very short time? For the protest movements we’ve seen, probably not. However if you are the leader of a protest group, hmm… If you are someone that they’re really going to be going after because they think that going after this one person will completely destroy the movement – which I don’t think is the kind of movement time that we are in right now which is good, to avoid those specific people who could really destroy a movement – that’s a pretty good method.
BOG: If you could speak to that prior scenario, is that actually copying the contents of a phone? I think that was the subject of the recent article by Upturn called Mass Extraction —
CB: That’s right.
BOG: If you could talk a little bit about what the findings were there. I was kind of surprised yet kind of not surprised to see the local law enforcement here in Asheville spent at least $49,000, according to their studies, on cell phone extraction tools. But what are mobile device forensic tools, and what do you know about them, how widespread and what kind of stuff do they do?
CB: So these things have existed for a long time. We’ve been talking about them at CLDC for a long time but this Upturn report is really wonderful for just as you say, how widespread they are. Small police departments have them, medium police departments spend hundred of thousands of dollars on access to this over the course of 5 years, and some of the capabilities were actually, I suppose, not really surprising. But reading them all in one place and knowing how low cost access to that technology is was sobering.
So these cell phone extraction devices, they come in different forms but the kind that is most popularly seen is a small stand alone device that you plug a cell phone into and that stand alone device either tries to break into that phone if it’s locked or otherwise just copies all of the content of that phone for later analysis. Some of the things that were surprising to me was how much was available even when the phone was locked and encrypted. There’s a lot of data that is existing in an unencrypted form on your phone.
For example say your phone is locked, you receive a phone call and the name of your contact still shows up, right? It’s not the name that your contact is sending you, its not metadata associated with that contact. if your mother is calling you, it probably shows up “Mom” in your phone, and the reason it says that is because your address book has an entry with that phone number and the name “Mom” attached to it. So your address book entries are existing in an unencrypted state, for example.
Some of the other things that were sort of surprising that were pointed out, that exist in this unencrypted state even though your phone was in a locked condition, were Telegram files and Discord files, and files associated with Google mail. I think a lot of this stuff could just be from bad decisions that the app developer made. Like Telegram is not necessarily focused on security, and so for convenience or speed they may just not be hiding that information behind the device encryption.
There was definitely some reporting in that Upturn report about being able to brute force guess passwords and so there are some things that you can do to protect yourself from that, which is to have a long enough password. Or if you have an Apple device you can enable your phone to self-wipe if you have 10 incorrect guesses, for example. Which if you have a small child at home maybe you don’t want to do because I almost guarantee you will end up with a wiped phone by the end of the week.
BOG: With encrypted files, if there are messages or what-have-you that are saved in an encrypted section on the phone would that just get copied and saved, and tested against decryption later? Is that the idea?
CB: I think what’s happening in most cases is they’re taking a copy of encrypted information, possibly in the hopes that they could decrypt it later or in the hopes that they would be able to get the unlock password from you by other means, like a court order for example. You know, they did point to instances where they were still able to bypass security features like encryption because of security flaws, which is very common. If your phone is badly out of date and you haven’t been keeping up with installing security updates, always install your security updates. That’s a common thing in computer security, that there are flaws that can be taken advantage of that can allow bad actors to break through otherwise strong encryption. But I think if you’re keeping an up-to-date phone, I think that’s the best that any of us can do.
BOG: Another point that was interesting in the article, and I’m glad that they pointed it out, was the sorts of instances when this is being applied to people. You hear about Apple being pressed to give up encrypted information or give a back door when there’s a mass shooting, or a sort of incident that may involve multiple conspirators and the loss of life – something very serious. But in the Upturn article they talk about how through their research and requesting of records it showed that a lot of law enforcement agencies, even local law enforcement agencies, are attempting either to pressure people whose devices they get a hold of or apply for warrants to copy peoples’ contents of their phones for minor things that they’re being accused of.
Like if it’s something like shoplifting or graffiti or public intoxication, petty drug charges, sex work, these are a few of the examples that they give. Considering the way that policing works in the United States, and this shouldn’t surprise anyone in the listening audience, police tend to focus their attention on poor and racialized parts of the population. So if law enforcement gets people’s data, whether by asking for it and pressuring people into it or by using devices, and then saves it for a later investigation and there’s no sort of oversight of this, it seems very likely that the sorts of data that they’re collecting could be used to build future cases or for building profiles on people for things they haven’t actually been accused of so far.
CB: Yup. Phishing for data. Maybe they’re just trying to justify the purchase of this stuff. In Oregon they spend half a million dollars on cellphone extraction technologies, Portland alone spent a quarter of a million in a period of 4-5 years. That’s a lot of money to justify, right? If you’re only using it 3 times a year for homicide cases then maybe you can’t justify actually spending that money and you would just farm out, whenever you do need it for something like that, either to a fusion center or a pay-per-service from one of these companies. So it might just be they’re partially covering their asses and saying ‘Oh yeah, we use it 10 times a week’.
But we’ve also seen examples of law enforcement agencies that just collect so much data, almost for the purpose of just having data. The LAPD famously uses Palantir which is a horrible company, to do all sorts of data analytics for their region collecting data on pizza purchases and parking passes and all sorts of things that don’t seem relevant at all to law enforcement, but it’s almost a compulsion to just collect the data and see what they can do with it.
BOG: Another thing that I had seen was Google was recently in the news when court documents were unsealed in Detroit relating to witness intimidation and arson by an associate of R. Kelly, and this in regards to keyword warrants. Are you familiar with this case and could you talk a little about keyword warrants and what they are?
CB: Yeah, so keyword warrants. I hadn’t heard about them before this news story came out earlier this month, but it’s not surprising. I certainly was familiar with just how many requests for data Google gets and responds to, affecting hundreds of thousands of user accounts every year in the US. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Google, instead of just getting requests saying ‘Hey, I’d like to have all of the emails associated with email address thefinalstraw@gmail.com’, which seems to be the more straight forward type of request related to a specific account that might be included in a law enforcement issue… probably not though. To expand that to ‘Hey, I want to know all of the information you have about people who searched for ‘The Final Straw’ ’. So that’s the keyword warrant or the keyword search request that happened in this case. We’ve seen examples of Geofencing warrants happening for Google Maps asking for anybody who has searched for an address within a given region, that there were a few stories about over the last year. So yeah of course, the data is there why not ask for it? Google is not going to say no, why would they?
BOG: Basically, again by collecting information based on its availability then attempting to apply it. So in this case with the arson, they asked for people who had searched for the address of the house where a car got set on fire within a certain period of time and then cross-referenced that to a Geofence of what phones were in the area within a period of time, and were able to pinpoint and place charges. And not all of the information came out from that, some of the court records are still sealed. It’s kind of a frightening application of technology and as you say, a very happy-to-oblige industry.
CB: Yeah. I think the potential for false arrests and harassment of people, like say you happen to find someone in that area who you don’t like for one reason or another you can arrest them and hold them for a while even if you have no evidence. Harassment arrests are used all the time by law enforcement and have been for decades, centuries probably.
BOG: So I guess… use DuckDuckGo if you’re going to be committing an – – – – ?
*Laughter
CB: I would avoid Google, I definitely use DuckDuckGo. I prefer DuckDuckGo for selfish reasons, I find the personalized search aspect of Google to be somewhat infuriating. When I search for something I don’t want to find what Google thinks I want to find, I want to find the documents related to my search. It’s hard to avoid these tools, but I think DuckDuckGo, anything but g-mail for email please, and there are alternatives to Google Docs as well. Cryptpad seems to be getting better. Every month there are improvements. It offers collaborative online editing to documents, all E2E encrypted.
BOG: I am going to presume with this question that you are not a lawyer, am I correct in that?
CB: I am not a lawyer, no.
BOG: It seems things like intercepting phone calls, peoples text messages, or getting deep into their cellphones and all of the information that’s collected in them for arguably unrelated topics, might overstep into the realm of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), or might overstep into the realm of one of those amendments that protects our rights against unfair search and seizure. That just doesn’t seem to be the case? Or in these instances is it that these methods haven’t been brought before courts to be challenged?
CB: Everything I know about the law I learned from CLDC, and Law & Order in a previous lifetime. So what I do know about these from reading various news articles and conversations with CLDC is, as pointed out by Upturn, a lot of the extraction of data from cellphones was based on consent and not a warrant. It was about a 50/50 split depending on jurisdiction. So this was probably the case of intimidation by a cop to a person with a cellphone, to say ‘Oh, well let us check your cellphone”. I’m not sure if they give full disclosure of what they mean by ‘let me check your cellphone’, right? (laughs) ‘Let me copy everything there is on your cellphone off your cellphone, if you’re not guilty of this minor misdemeanor’. You know, they’re just asking permission.
That’s one of the things CLDC shoves down the throats of everyone at their trainings, which is don’t consent to searches. Just don’t do it! Even if they’re going to go ahead and do the search, even if you’re not consenting to it, say over and over again ‘I do not consent to this search’. Have a sticker on your phone that says ‘I do not consent to this search’. Because then it can’t be used in the court of law at least. The other thing that we’ve seen over the years is, parallel reconstruction. I don’t know if I’ve seen a well researched example of this but certainly people have hinted that this a common practice, where they’ll find out something via methods that wouldn’t be admissible in the court of law and then they figure out a way to reconstruct what they know using admissible methods.
BOG: Oh like in The Wire.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So that’s something that might be why they’re getting information that they can’t necessarily use. The other part is just general intelligence work. It’s not necessarily going to be used to arrest anyone, it’s not necessarily going to be used in a court of law, but they just want to know what’s going on, and so are going to collect as much data as they can. Unless you find out about it and unless you prove harm in a court of law, then how are you going to stop it from happening? Which is why this report about the Google keyword searches and Google Geofencing searches is so important. If we can find out about that and we can get a case brought forth and have it deemed unconstitutional to do this kind of search then that would stop those kinds of requests from happening. Then you could put pressure on a company – even a company like Google – you could put public pressure on them to say ‘Don’t respond to these requests, they’ve been deemed illegal’.
BOG: There are a couple of other, I guess not insights but points in that Upturn article that I thought were useful. Like if someone deletes information on their phone, are they actually deleting information off of their phone, and are there appropriate or useful, good tools for actually wiping data off of phones or does it just kind of sit there?
BOG: –MAGNETS–
CB: I don’t know of a good tool. I think that if you do a factory reset of your phone that’s most likely to help make that data inaccessible. Even then, is it actually getting completely deleted? It might not be. You have memory on your computer or on your cellphone, and when you delete something it just kind of takes the index away… I’m trying to use an analogy that people would remember. Do people remember libraries and card catalogs? (laughs) All of my analogies are too old.
BOG: I think it’s fair, go ahead.
CB: You think people will remember?
BOG: I think so, or they’ve heard the analogy enough they’ll recognize what a card catalog is.
CB: They’ve seen a movie with an old-timey library and card catalogs?
BOG: Ghostbusters
CB: So. you have a big library with books on all the shelves and the way you know where to find a book is to go to the card catalog. You look up the book that you want and you find its listed location on the shelf and then you go to the shelf and you find the book. Well now, when you delete a file from a computer, really all you’re deleting is the card from the card catalog. So when it comes time to put a new photo in the memory of your computer or cellphone, you go to the shelf and you find out ‘Oh, there’s supposed to be space here because according to the card catalog there’s nothing stored here, so this old data must be something that I don’t need anymore, now I’m going to delete that old stuff.’ Right, ‘I’m going to remove that book from the shelf whose existence was deemed not there anymore by the card catalog, I’ll throw it away now and put my new one in.’ So it’s not until you use the memory again that the old information actually gets deleted.
BOG: At least on computers there’s – for instance I had to reinstall my operating system recently. And when I installed it I went to encrypt the home folder and the file system and it asked ‘Do you want to overwrite everything else on the hard drive?’ Is that what you’re talking about?
CB: Yeah, so that would be the equivalent of actually going to all the shelves of the old library and removing all of the old books. So that’s pretty common when you’re setting up on a computer but I’ve never seen that option on a phone. I’m wondering, does a factory reset actually delete all of that information? I haven’t noticed that myself.
BOG: Microwaves. I mean I saw –
*Laughter
BOG: Yeah, I got nothing.
CB: Drop your phone in the pool, start over.
BOG: They invented this thing called rice though, where if you put your phone into a bag of rice it extracts the water… and the data…
*Laughter
BOG: Well are there any other things you’d like to share with the audience concerning digital tech or any insights?
CB: I did want to share one thing. You asked about them getting this data, and is this illegal search and seizure. There are still strange laws that date back to the 80’s, for example e-mail can be accessed by law enforcement form somewhere like Google with just a subpoena and not a warrant, necessarily. For a law enforcement agency to get information that would otherwise be deemed illegal search and seizure, they need to get a warrant from a judge that proves probable cause for them to get that data or that physical item. But if it’s email on a server held at Google then they don’t need to prove probable cause and they just need a subpoena which is essentially just a ‘Please can I have this information’. I think that’s where these keyword searches are coming in, I’m not sure that they actually need to have a warrant for those. So that’s maybe one extra detail on that front.
BOG: In those instances it’s in one centralized place, although if your doing a keyword search… Yeah I don’t know– I guess I don’t know how Google works on the inside and if it’s just constantly categorizing what people are typing into its different services for later use and then providing that in easily digestible pills to law enforcement. If you’re sending email and it’s unencrypted, it’s probably getting Hoovered up somewhere and fully readable anyway.
CB: Depends on who your adversary is. I don’t think the Portland police department has access to a big Hoover of data on a global scale, but they certainly can ask Google for all of the emails of the activists whose email addresses they’ve extracted from the phones they confiscated during protests.
BOG: Cora, thank you so much. Cora is an associate professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University with a focus on Security State and The Adoption of More Secure Apps, and also is on the board of the CLDC. Thanks again for having this chat.
I found this interview extremely illuminating, perhaps like many other people who might not have strong ties to either academia or popular education models of learning, I had sort of written Oscar Wilde off as this kind of white dead rich guy who carried little to no relevance apart from a model of queerness that we could look back on. This interview very much proved that this isn’t the case, and that he and the circumstances around him very much influence how we as queers and as anarchists can sense historical threads that pull on our lives very tangibly today. Thanks a million to Scott for researching and conducting this interview!
You can learn more about the author, Kristian Williams, who is most known for his book Our Enemies in Blue, which is a critical history of American policing and police, at his website kristianwilliams.com.
Help Charlotte Jail Support Rebuild!
One announcement before we begin from our comrades at the Charlotte Uprising, Charlotte Jail Support has been getting extremely targeted harassment for some months from CMPD and the sheriff’s department. In times of rebellion or revolt, it is the support infrastructures that are often the most vulnerable to repression and violence. All of their supplies have either been seized or destroyed by the police, if you would like to support them re upping their much needed materials, you can Venmoing them @Ashwilliamsclt or Cash App $houseofkanautica.
This is a slightly edited transcript of Scott’s interview of Kristian Williams on Kristian’s book, Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde, published in 2020 by AK Press. Thanks to Jim of the MKE Lit Supply for all the work!
Kristian Williams on The Final Straw
First aired on 9/12/2020 at https://TFSR.WTF
Scott (TFSR): I’m talking to Kristen Williams, who just published the book Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde. Kristian, would you please just introduce yourself, your pronouns, your name and any information that you think would be pertinent to the listeners of the Final Straw?
Kristian: Sure. I’m Kristian Williams, author of a handful of books, probably most famously Our Enemies in Blue, which is a history of the police in the United States. As you mentioned, my most recent book is Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde, which is probably the book that has taken me the longest to write. I started working on it about 13 years ago.
Scott (TFSR): Oh wow. Is it nice to have it out? Was it a big passion project for you?
Kristian: Yeah, it was the thing that I was always working on, never finishing, and had a surprisingly hard time interesting publishers. I think everyone I approached about it, their first response was, “that sounds great, but no.” Eventually AK [Press] asked to take another look at it, and I don’t know, here it is.
Scott (TFSR): Well, that’s exciting. And I’m glad [for] that.The shadow of Oscar Wilde kind of loomed large for a long time on anything that was related to him,so I’m glad that’s not still persisting, and they published the book. I also just incidentally, as an aside, I was writing my dissertation with a chapter on Wilde and got super sick during it, writing about Dorian Gray. And I ended up in the hospital, and I couldn’t finish that chapter, so I don’t know if there’s like a curse with writing on Oscar. I always thought about that. All right. Well, I’m really excited to talk to you about Oscar Wilde and anarchism. The main argument of your book is that to really understand Oscar Wilde, or at least to understand Oscar Wilde as a political thinker, we need to think about all of his art and philosophy through the lens of anarchism. And it’s really exciting to read the book and see how Wilde kind of intersected with anarchism and anarchists at the time. To read about the history, like the fear of anarchism that we’re [still] presented with today, and then just like getting another perspective on Wilde as a person, his relation to the aesthetic movement, the beginning of the queer movements, and all of these things I think still are pertinent today. I think a lot of people have heard of Oscar Wilde, maybe read a little bit or heard his epigrams, but do you think you could just give a quick overview of who he was as a figure and a person?
Kristian: Sure. Let me see if I can do this at all efficiently. So, Wilde was born into the Irish aristocracy, educated at Trinity College in Dublin and then in Oxford, where he excelled in classics. Immediately, [he] became of sort of an early example of a person who was famous for being famous.Having developed a kind of celebrity and notoriety before he had really accomplished very much,[he] then leveraged that notoriety into a year long, a little bit more, lecture tour in the United States on the aesthetic movement. After that, he went on to publish a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and then really rose to prominence with a set of four society plays, which were sort of nominally comedies about the manners and dramas of the elite of English society. At the peak of his popularity he became embroiled in a dispute with the Marquess of Queensberry, because Wilde was having an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, who was Queensberry’s son, which led Queensberry toward more and more public and offensive behavior toward Wilde, which then led Wilde to file a ill-advised lawsuit for libel, which Queensberry very aptly turned back on him and produced criminal charges for gross indecency, which was the criminal term for homosexuality. That led Wilde to prison for a couple of years. He lost his family, lost his fortune, lived the short remainder of his life in exile in France and died virtually penniless.
Scott (TFSR): Thanks for that overview. And I want to touch on a few of those elements that you brought up just, [but] because this is an anarchist radio show podcast—I [want to] to start with anarchism in particular—did Wilde identify as an anarchist?
Kristian: There are two occasions when he did. One was an interview in which he said, “once I was a poet and a tyrant, but now I am an artist and an anarchist.” And another, in a separate interview, he said, [when] asked about his politics, he said, “I’m a socialist, but we’re all socialists nowadays, so I must be something more. I think perhaps I’m an anarchist.” There were other occasions where he sort of flirted with the term, and probably my favorite is in a letter.He tells the story of being on a sailing trip with these two young men, and them getting caught in a storm, and it taking hours for them to get back to port. And when they got there, they were freezing cold and completely drenched and they rushed back to their hotel and ordered brandy. And the hotel proprietors sadly explained to them that because it was after 10 o’clock on a Sunday, the law prohibited him selling brandy. But given the circumstances, he decided he would just give them the brandy. And Wilde’s comment was along the lines of,“Not a bad outcome, but what utterly stupid laws” and then he finishes by saying that,“the two young men are, of course, now anarchists.”
Scott (TFSR): If I knew that that was the way to convert people, I’d be taking more sailing trips with young men. I’m always wondering. So, he used the term sometimes, but clearly anarchism and anarchists were out and about in Wilde’s time. I’m wondering a little bit what the common conception at the moment was of anarchism, and anarchists, and how it might have changed since then.
Kristian: At the time, it was considered practically synonymous with terrorism, and in particular of a foreign Eastern European sort of conspiratorial, random blowing things up kind of terrorism. That reputation has in different forms haunted anarchism really since the beginning. And while the sort of bomb throwing aspect has always been very much a minority affair of what anarchism is about, it wasn’t entirely baseless. I mean, there was a tendency called propaganda by the deed, which had this theory that a spectacular attack against the symbols of authority would reveal authority to be both artificial and vulnerable and inspire the masses to an uprising. In fact [though] it never worked out that way. It was a theory that was partly developed under the circumstances of autocratic rule in Russia, and then exported into Western democracies. In Russia, where it was basically illegal to even speak about anarchism, there was a certain rationality to moving to direct attack.And that was also in a way legible to the population who was also suffering under this kind of censorship. But when it moved into the Western countries, really the effect was to baffle the population and to largely turn them against anarchism, as it became synonymous with things randomly blowing up. Wilde, in fact, in one of those interviews that I quoted earlier immediately followed his statements that he must be an anarchist with, “But of course, the dynamite policy is quite absurd.” Meaning that even at the point where he was embracing this term, partly for its shock value, he also felt like he needed to distance himself from its more extreme and somewhat bloody elements.
Scott (TFSR): And that’s interesting. Do you think that there’s a way that he uses the term specifically for it’s just like surface level or superficial subversiveness or, as you said, the shock value?
Kristian: I think that he always wanted to be just shocking enough to be interesting, and not so shocking as to actually get himself into trouble. Which was a line that he was not always successful in judging, obviously. And so yeah, I would suspect that some of his rhetoric about that was chosen, like in those particular instances, [it] was chosen for the way he positioned himself outside of the mainstream. When he said, “well, I’m a socialist, but we’re all rather socialists nowadays. So I must be something more,”it suggests that he’s looking for the position, which is just slightly too far. Interestingly though, in his most directly political writing, which is called “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,”what he describes is a socialism without the structures of coercion or authority. And he’s very explicit about that. He doesn’t use the term anarchism anywhere in the essay. And in fact, he begins one paragraph by saying “Communism, socialism or whatever we choose to call it,” sort of signaling that the particular distinctions may not be that important and that in any case the word is certainly not the thing that matters.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, because there’s a strategic way to use the word anarchism to get people interested, to get people to talk about things, and to use the way that it’s presented and represented in media. But then attachment to the word doesn’t necessarily help it if people are sort of doing their own thing. That was really illuminating to me to hear you put it that way. Since you brought up “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” kind of the central argument of your book is that this provides a key to give Wilde’s whole body of work a certain kind of cohesion through the lens of anarchism. I was wondering if you’d talk a little bit more more about some of the ideas that he presents in that essay. And then if you want to move on to how it shows up in other writings of Wilde’s.
Kristian: He begins the essay by saying that the main value of socialism is that it would free us from the burden of living for other people. Basically, in a society where everyone’s needs were being taken care of, it would be possible for people to pursue their own interests and to develop what is unique about themselves in a way that the burden of earning a living and the responsibility for taking care of your family, your dependents and all that sort of thing really limits a person’s ability to freely explore whatever it is that they find fascinating, both in the world and of themselves. And so he starts right at the beginning by arguing that the purpose of socialism is that it would make a kind of individualism possible. And in his conception, these two notions of socialism and individualism are tightly bound together. And that it’s possible for certain extremely privileged people to exercise a kind of individualism under capitalism, but for the vast majority of humanity, their lives are too taken up with drudgery and the struggle for survival.And a socialist economy would relieve them of that set of burdens, and therefore makes individualism a universal pursuit. He argues that when that becomes available we’ll see this whole renaissance of culture and art and science and intellectual and an aesthetic sort of blossoming of the human spirit. And then at the same time, he argues that any kind of authority or coercion is corrosive of that entire project, and that therefore no authoritarian socialism would be acceptable. What’s needed is socialism as this kind of voluntary association between free and equal individuals, which I’m not the first person to note is basically the anarchist conception.
Scott (TFSR): Right. That’s interesting, the emphasis on individualism. So in the way that puts him in a different place than some of the other aesthetic aesthetes and decadents. It made me think of that famous line [from the] Goncourt brothers about, you know, living our servants do that for us. The way that Wilde talks about some people, the people who are allowed to live some version of individualism are [enabled] to create beautiful things or even to think like that. Profound thoughts are relying on the work of others to do that. So his his individualism isn’t like a kind of selfish, narcissistic individualism, but one that is trying to extend that privilege to everyone.
Kristian: Exactly. And what I argue in the book is that if we take Wilde’s political writing, and in particular,“The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” seriously, it helps us understand a lot of his other work, and that you see [that] marriage of individualism and socialism (and that version of individualism that should not just be the special property of the aristocracy) show up in other respects. And maybe the place where that pairing is clearest is in those lectures on aestheticism that he delivered in the United States. Where in addition to talking about the importance of sort of surrounding ourselves with beautiful things and treating life itself as a kind of art, meaning making the process of living as beautiful as possible. He also talks surprisingly much about labor and about investing in the skill and the craftsmen of the workers, such that the process of work becomes a creative pursuit and is pleasurable and then also produces beautiful things. Rather than everything being simply judged by its commercial value, and the worker simply being this kind of cog in a giant capitalist machine, where all of his initiative and all of the creativity is removed from the process in order to maximize the efficiency of profit.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah, that was really exciting to me to read your argument in the book. One line that that especially stood out to me. You make the claim that while socialism is more aesthetic than economic, because, “ it takes as its model the artist, rather than a proletarian, and as much concerned to free the repressed bourgeois as the oppressed worker.” And that sticks out to me because I think you can [take as model the artist], just thinking about anarchism today. But I was wondering if you maybe would elaborate a little bit on this idea of shifting the revolutionary subject away from the traditional understanding of the workers, that kind of disciplined [and] manly person, and maybe that can also verge onto a critique of work, too. There’s a lot of anarchism goes away from this kind of idolizing of the worker as the person that will lead us to freedom. So, yeah, if you could talk a little bit about what this shift in thinking allows us to see for revolutionary politics.
Kristian: Yeah. I don’t know if he had an idea of a revolutionary subject, as you put it. Like, I don’t know that he thought that there was a particular class of people who were going to be responsible for the transformation of society, or at least not a particular economic class. What I meant in that passage was that rather than seeing the proletariat as the class that would become all of humanity, and therefore the model of how human beings would be, he looked to the artist. And so part of that, I think shows the influence of William Morris, who considered himself a Marxist, but whose politics are pretty hard to fit into any current conception of Marxism. And Morris largely thought that the purpose of socialism was to—rather than sort of a standard Marxist conception where industrialization will produce a particular class of worker who will then take over society—Morris thought that the purpose of socialism was to destroy industrialization, that he wanted to get rid of the factory system and its rigid division of labor, and in particular, this conception that there was a class of people who sort of designed and created and imagined the products of the world, and then there was this other class of people who were basically just like hired hands, who just did the work by rote without any input into the process. Instead, he wanted production to take the form of skilled artisans, bringing their full creativity to their work, and also therefore experiencing the work as an expression of their creative selves and finding joy and pleasure in the process of creation. And Wilde basically took Morris’s conception on the whole, which suggests that under socialism, rather than society being organized on the factory model with this mass of proletarians, who basically just like have the position in the assembly line and do the same rote task over and over again, that society would be organized as this free collective of artists and craftsmen, who would be able to express their individualism in the creative process while also providing for the needs of the society. So I don’t know that it’s a question of the revolutionary subject. It’s more a question of like: Under socialism, is the world populated by proletarians or is the world populated by artists? And the hope was that under conditions of freedom and equality, work would be more like art and therefore the individuals doing it would be more like artists and less like assembly line workers.
Scott (TFSR): Right. And that’s interesting these ideas, like you said [with regard to] industrialization, modernization. I mean, in Wilde’s concept of socialism there are machines that do the kind of dirty work so that people don’t have to and they kind of replaced that class of people. But this isn’t to enable some hyper-modernization, but to enable a kind of smaller scale of life that allows people to engage in the pursuits they want rather than this larger idea of driving civilization on, or something like that?
Kristian: Yes, I think that’s exactly right.
Scott (TFSR): There’s another thing that they’re brought up for me that is interesting because, you know, when you think of aestheticism, you think of Wilde and Art—art with a capital A—there’s already a kind of class distinction that’s assumed within.High Art versus other forms of art, but Wilde maybe through Morris and also Ruskin, [who] I know was like a teacher of his, isn’t making this big distinction between high art and crafts or other forms of creation. So then he’s also kind of envisioning a classless art world—would you say that’s right?
Kristian: I would say at his best, that is right. I think he was also prone to a certain amount of snobbery and ready to claim certain privileges of an Artist—with a capital A—that may not extend to everyone in society. And both sides of that showed up in his trial, where on the one hand when they tried to cite his writings as evidence against him and brought in The Picture of Dorian Gray and a set of aphorisms he had contributed to an Oxford magazine and that sort of thing,and they would ask him things like, “well, what is the interpretation that an ordinary person would put to these lines?” And Wilde would say something to the effect of, “I know nothing of the opinions of ordinary people, I’m only concerned with the opinions of artists.” And so he was willing to fall back onto a sort of special status for the artist, and in particular that artists could only be judged by other artists. At the same time, though, the prosecutor was absolutely outraged that the young men that he was associating with were often men of the lower classes. They were servants of various kinds or people who were just frankly out of work. And though nominally the court was concerned with the sort of homosexual nature of these relationships, the fact that he was bringing these servants into polite society was as much a focus of the cross-examination as any sort of sexual relation. And so the prosecutor would repeatedly ask questions like, “is this the sort of young man that a gentleman should associate with?” And Wilde would respond,“Absolutely—if the young man is interesting.” And he said over and over again, “I recognize social distinctions, not at all.” Meaning he didn’t care about their origins. He didn’t care about what they did for a living. What he cared about was their personal beauty and their radiant personalities. And that in particular was outrageous to polite society, in a way that [with regard to] mere same sex relations (there was a lot of that sort of thing at like the British public schools and then at Oxford and Cambridge) the men of Wales class were somewhat ambivalent about that. But the cross-class nature really was outrageous to public opinion and ultimately to the law.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah, and that’s something that you elaborate [on] a little bit in the book in a way that I found very interesting. That people at the time, [some of whom] were anarchists and some weren’t, were kind of thinking about the cross-class same sex relationships as a sort of liberatory engagement. And that made me think that there’s sort of seeds of the radical gay liberation or queer liberation movements already in place in the end of the 19th century when these things were kind of being defined. I mean, I don’t know if any of these thinkers would go so far, but I was like reading into this this idea that men across class having relationships would be a sort of undermining of capitalist society. Could you talk a little bit about how the ways of this kind of cross-class relationship were being fought by the queer and anarchist thinkers at the time?
Kristian: Yeah, [and] this wasn’t just an anxiety on the behalf of the aristocracy. The men engaging in these relationships often did sort of theorize that it was going to destroy the class barrier and thus crash the social hierarchy, and that for them that seemed like an advantage. Of course, in retrospect, that all seems very naive, right? Like the ideas that wealthy aristocrats paying young men of the lower order for sex would destroy class relations just seems sort of fanciful. But it was a popular notion among radicals in those circles at the time. And I think to understand that, we need to remember sort of the difference between the traditional British class system and the sort of emerging capitalist system, where they still had the trappings of an aristocratic hierarchy, so that class position wasn’t simply a matter of who had money and who didn’t. And the divisions between the classes weren’t simply a question of one class being an employing in class and one class being a laboring class. The differences were also cultural, and it was possible to be kind of a destitute aristocrat, and it was also possible to make a fortune and yet remain ultimately sort of a middle class person. That [it] was a matter of both of the culture and the expectations and the values that people in those positions would have. But it was also a matter of how they would be regarded socially. So that in some way would even be more respectable to be an impoverished aristocrat than it would be to be a wealthy merchant. So there was this element where simply having kind of intimate contact with people of other social classes seemed subversive, seemed destructive of the barriers that kept them apart. And in particular, Wilde’s interest in the culture of the lower classes, and then also his interest in exposing them to what we would call High Art seems deliberately like trying to erase that cultural line between the upper and [the] lower. Though interestingly, he had basically no interest in the middle classes at all.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah, which I guess makes sense. So there’s something interesting there, too, because you know, Wilde initiated a libel suit against the Marquees of Queensberry because he left this card at the hotel, where Wilde was staying.[And] that at least one reading of it, you say in the book of that card, posing as a sodomite reads like a misspelling. So he is being accused of posing as a homosexual. So this just made me think about how the class positions weren’t necessarily tied to actual wealth. But you could kind of portray the image of an aristocrat. And I wonder to what extent that relates to an understanding of aestheticism, like the kind of the idle dandy and the aristocratic bend to that. But you’re arguing that even though that’s one understanding aestheticism, it actually has a kind of anarchist political and ethical value or valence or something. So, yeah, I’m kind of thinking [and] wondering about this idea of posing, posing as queer [or] posing as an anarchist, and how Wilde uses these different positions.
Kristian: So artificiality was, in Wilde’s schema, a value rather than a vice. And part of that was that he had this idea that the purpose of life was this kind of self-cultivation, [this] sort of self-creation, which means that to a certain extent it is going to be an artificiality, that is going to be an element of artistry to the life that you create for yourself and the character that you develop in yourself, and also the presentation that you make to the world. And Wilde very deliberately created an image of himself early on as this sort of idle genius, and also as this person who in some ways was outside of the categories of conventional society. And he relayed that with his sort of flamboyant dress. He created that image by making a habit of saying outrageous things as he matured, the outrageous things that you said tend to have more of a subversive undercurrent to them. But especially early on, [it] seems like he was often just reaching for the thing that was going to outrage public opinion. So there was always this matter of posing.And one of his aphorisms is that it’s only shallow people who don’t judge by appearances. One of the things he meant by that is that it is the appearance that we choose for ourselves. That is the way that we decide to present ourselves to the world. And that that’s important, right? And that, you know, it’s like you can tell a lot about somebody from what they choose to show you. So there was always this self-consciousness to Wilde’s presentation, especially publicly, and there was connected in that a gendered element where he presented himself as the sort of foppish, flamboyant aesthete, which was always interpreted like the dandy, [which] was always understood as sort of an effeminate character. But it actually wasn’t really until Wilde’s scandal that it was fully identified also as a homosexual character. And so he was often seen and sometimes mocked as this living affront to the ideals of masculinity. And this is hard for us to kind of imagine now, but at the time that wasn’t necessarily associated with homosexuality. Which makes Queensberry’s claim that he was posing as a sodomite, a little bit complicated. And part of the work that the trial did was to construct this notion of what a sodomite is like, such that a person could be posing as it. And this gains a kind of circular momentum, where the image that it constructs is partly the negation of the ideal of a respectable middle class family man, but partly just the reflection of the image that Wilde has been projecting all along. And so in the course of the trial, what a sodomite is, the figure of the sodomite, is built so that Wilde will resemble it. Then once that equation takes hold, Wilde really becomes the icon of sort of what a gay man is expected to be like. I’m borrowing here from the work of Alan Sinfield, who wrote a book called The Wilde Century, which makes this argument in about 250 pages. So if you’re interested in that, and how exactly that happened, that is the place to look.
Scott (TFSR): It seems really important, and something maybe a lot of people don’t know, is that we’ve inherited a kind of gay male type or stereotype that can be traced back to Wilde, and these trials.That even over over 100 years, a lot of that hasn’t changed that kind of identity type that Wilde embodied, or even like the lampoon of Wilde’s identity still marks understandings of gay male effeminacy and campness, how Sontag talks about him. So I think you bring that out really interestingly. But like in your book, the thing that I think is really important that you add is that in the aftermath of Wilde’s trial, the queerness of Wilde sort of has an influence on anarchist thinkers at the time. In a way not only is Wilde’s queer identity becoming politicized and codified, but also there’s an anarchist element to that, and I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on that—about the trial and how his sexuality became influential for anarchist thinkers.
Kristian: Sure. This went in a lot of different directions and had several different elements. But maybe the clearest is that Emma Goldman. Other American anarchists as well, but Emma Goldman in particular was initially extremely sympathetic with Wilde, but simply as an example of the puritanical hypocrisy of the legal system, and as a victim of state oppression, it wasn’t until later that she became exposed to the sort of sexological literature that was elaborating the theory of homosexuality, where she realized that it wasn’t just a particular case of the state doing what the state does, but there was also an element[of] Wilde’s trial was intimidating and terrorizing for anentire group of people. And that it wasn’t just a matter of individual suffering and individual persecution, but that there was a group element to this. And so it became important to her to specifically stand up for the rights of homosexuals, sort of as a class rather than simply opposing the state putting people in prison, because of course we’re against the state putting people in prison. Another direction that that developed was that in Great Britain and in the US, the anarchist sexual politics at that time were already interested in sexual liberation, but mostly in the framework of a critique of marriage and free love and advocacy around issues of legitimacy, meaning really the rights of children who are born out of wedlock. And so adding to sort of queer element to that, they were already kind of primed for that development. And then what that meant was that it wasn’t just that Wilde’s trial affected anarchist’s sexual politics, it meant that a particular kind of sexual politics came out of that, that [they] were interested in gay rights as an expression of sort of sexual freedom overall. There was a natural affinity between the way anarchists were already thinking. And the sort of challenge and rethinking posed by the Wilde trial. Another direction that developed was that in Europe, and especially in Germany, individualist anarchists took a somewhat different lesson from the Wilde trial, and were less interested in conceptions of group identity and more interested in understanding it simply in terms of sort of individuality, individual rights and [an] individual person’s ability to express themselves and find pleasure in whatever way they chose, regardless of laws or social convention, or religious or moral precepts. And that, curiously, also circulated back into the United States, partly through Benjamin Tucker and his paper Liberty, which reprinted some of the European coverage of the Wilde trial, and also editorialized on its own, and very much in a more sort of individualist, libertarian kind of approach. So there were a couple of different developments from that in terms of how Wilde’s persecution shaped anarchist politics in the generations after.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah, that’s interesting. This is a still a kind of problem and paradox within queer liberation—the idea of an identity and a group type or a minority group demanding rights, and then [the] kind of queerness that critiques and wants to do away with identity. And obviously, the way you were outlining Wilde’s understanding of posing and artificiality is already showing kind of ambivalence to that, even as he’s being put in the position of defining this type. So it’s interesting to see these things that [still] are. Anarchists today are always fighting identity politics as well, whether or not they’re queer. So I think it’s interesting to see that these things were already happening at that moment.
Kristian: Wilde himself directly addressed this question in a short story called The Portrait of Mr. W.H., which the story itself is complicated, and I’m going to do my best to sum it up quickly. Basically it involves a relationship between two men, one of whom has a theory that Shakespeare’s sonnets were inspired by and devoted to a young boy actor named Willie Hughes, the W.H. of the title.[He] then persuades the other man of this. The other man then goes and engages in a relationship with a third man and also tries to persuade him of this theory. And the whole thing is in some ways an excuse to make this argument about the history of homosexuality and its influence on culture. So it looks at the presence of homosexuality in ancient Greece. I mean, there’s no way to talk about this that isn’t anachronistic. I should say that,first of all. Like, Wilde never used the term homosexuality, but the presence of homosexuality in ancient Greece, the importance of homosexuality in the Renaissance, the importance of homosexuality for Shakespeare, and then more recent examples. The thing about the story is that they have this argument about the sonnets, but there’s no proof for it. And in order to try to persuade each other, each of the men engages in this fabrication of evidence [of] different kinds. The evidence itself, including the portrait of the title, is a beautiful work of art, but it’s also false. It’s also a fraud. And each of the men, once he persuades the other one of the importance of the theory, is then fatally compromised and dies–one of them by suicide, one of them by consumption. And at the end, you’re left with, on the one hand, this exercise in the construction of a homosexual genealogy, like a cultural genealogy of homosexuality. And on the other hand, the story itself exposes that construction as this kind of artifice and draws into question the wisdom of sort of latching your identity onto anything exterior to yourself. And so it’s both this exercise in the creation of a gay identity, and it’s also this deconstruction and critique of that exercise at the same time.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah, and that seems like it could also be like a fitting parable for the attempts to naturalize or biologize sexuality and gender towards increasing rights for so-called gender or sexual minorities. Like these stories that we’re telling ourselves here in that essay or whatever you want to call it, like a story essay.
Kristian: Yeah, it’s a little hard to know how to characterize it. It queers our categories.
Scott (TFSR): I mean, it’s all just part of the seduction anyway. I think that you’re reading of that is really interesting. One of the things that [is] still kind of going on, this idea of identity.The thing that stood out to me after reading your book was that the legacy of Wilde, in a way, entangles these three groups, the people that are are kind of unwanted or undesirable anarchists, the aesthetes or the dandies or decadents or whatever, and and whatever was being defined at the time as homosexual, we might say queer now. And thank you for pointing out that we’re talking pretty anachronistically. But, yeah, just these three types. Right. Anarchists, aesthetes, and queer people even at the time were sort of confused in people’s minds and had this sort of like specter haunting people as like unwanted types. Could you talk about how that sort of legacy still persists today? [How] these entanglements of these different positions politically, artistically and sexually persist today?
Kristian: Yeah.Well, I mean, some of it I think you’ve already hit on. Anarchism, as it existed circa 1895, was already a sort of hospitable environment for a gay politics to emerge in a way that most other sort of political realms were not. Because anarchism already had this critique of sexual morality, it already has its critique of the family structure. It was already advocating for birth control and the rights for children who were born out of wedlock and the equality between men and women and free love and all of that kind of stuff. So it was ready for the addition of the concern of homosexuals. And I think once that took root there, of course, gay politics have then expanded far outside of anarchism and even arguably outside of the left. But it’s now just very infused with the sort of culture of anarchism and also the values and those sort of self perception of what anarchists do expect ourselves to be like. The fusion between aestheticism and queer politics has developed somewhat differently, but it also remains there, right? Where on the one hand, this becomes an annoying stereotype,and on the other hand, it’s also something that gay men especially sort of celebrate about their shared culture, such as it is. Where it’s like there’s an expectation that there are going to be these sort of fabulous creatures with good style sense and immaculately decorated houses and an interest in music and theater and that sort of thing. And also for the same reason, it’s always a little bit suspicious when an adolescent boy takes too strong an interest in painting or poetry,right?So there’s a weird kind of both good and bad aspects to the two of those things coming together and forming a type, or a stereotype. The connection between aestheticism and anarchist politics is in a way more complicated. On the one hand, it means that on a shallow level it has helped inform the attraction of anarchists to sort of the artistic avant-garde, which has shown up really throughout the 20th century from Dada to the beats to punk, really. Greil Marcus territory there. And on a deeper level, though, I think that the notion that life should be the sort of splendid adventure, and that the way individuals live should be reflective of their character and personality, rather than bounded by convention and predictable and productive, but not necessarily very creative or interesting. I think that this has done a lot to maintain sort of the spirit and attraction of anarchism. And that puts us more in the lineage of the situation as to crime think, right. But then there’s also this this paradox, where especially in the last couple decades anarchism has taken a very moralistic and sort of puritanical turn that has also always been sort of a feature of it. You know, at sometimes if you look at a figure like the early Alexander Berkman, his ambition toward martyrdom and his sense of asceticism and his harsh judgment of other people is just annoying. So there’s always been that kind of puritanical element to anarchism as well. But at our best, that is counterbalanced by this free and flowing and urge toward the beautiful. At the moment, it feels like the sort of purist and puritanical element is more to the surface.And the notion that the life should be anything other than, [or] something more than, just the political struggle and the urge to purify oneself and the group of people around you. It seems to have receded. I worry that we’re at the moment insufficiently aesthetic, and I. I wish we could bring that back more to the surface.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah. I mean, it’s a beautiful idea. I really like the way that you politicize Wilde’s aestheticism because I mean, it is such an old argument in a way that’s kind of like tedious and boring.That, even like Sartrean committed literature is against the art for art’s sake, because that is like amoral or even elite. But your reading of Wilde’s shows that even within the stuff that isn’t explicitly political, there’s like an ethical and political understanding that we can get. You say one line that I really liked—your reading [of] the plays is that Wilde’s evasions often hide the seeds of subversion. So there’s a way of reading Wilde that when he’s not saying, like, I’m an anarchist and let’s smash the state, he’s not saying that, but there’s something that happens in his work that allows the subversiveness of his thinking to come differently, [while] not hitting you over the head.
Kristian: Let me run with a couple of points of that. One is that I think that had his politics been more direct in his writing, probably his work would not have survived as well as it has. And while I think that there is even something which on the surface just seems like this exercise in silliness, like The Importance of Being Earnest. If you read carefully, it’s actually shot through with political concerns. Concerns about legitimacy, concerns about the rights of women, concerns about Irish independence and Fenian bombings, right? There’s all sorts of political elements, political themes, political subtext, political references in what at first seems like just this almost Dadaist banter about nothing in particular. But I think [that] had Wilde instead taken the approach of like a movement writer or a message writer, then the work would seem dated and less interesting and wouldn’t remain as fresh as it actually does. The other thing I wanted to say, and this goes back to aestheticism, is that my argument about Wilde’s aestheticism is that it’s not just the places, especially early in his career where he said things about, like the importance of labour and re-conceiving labour, conceiving of labor as a kind of art. It’s also that he pushes the sort of values where beauty doesn’t have to justify itself. And that’s really what art, for art’s sake means. It doesn’t have to have a moral message. It doesn’t have to have a social use. It doesn’t have to be commercially viable. That just the fact that something is beautiful and gives you pleasure is itself important. And I argue that that is an implicit critique of the values, especially of Victorian capitalism, and what Max Weber would later articulate as the Protestant Ethic.Which was supposed to value sobriety and hard work and thrift, and that every moment of every day was supposed to be invested with this improving moral weight, which meant making yourself a better person, but chiefly meant making yourself a better person through hard work. While aestheticism is just like a torpedo in the hull of that ship. Interestingly for us, I think it is also a good corrective to the more stoical and dour and sad faced parts of left wing thinking, the kind of Marxism that thinks that we should sacrifice everything for the party, or the kind of anarchism that thinks that the main purpose of politics is to morally cleanse ourselves of anything that may be socially compromised. That kind of puritanism, that kind of stoicism, that sort of often workerist, but also often workaholic element, I think need something to temper it. And I think the Wilde’s work, if we take it seriously, and also if we are willing to accept it as lightly as he produced it, can help us to avoid some of the temptations, if you will, of that kind of puritanism.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah. And the way you elaborated that is really helpful because we see how, you know, anarchists then and other people who might identify as leftist or Marxist are replicating some of the kind of capitalist mindset of that work and seriousness. And Wilde, [with his] emphasis on pleasure and pleasure as a kind of perversion, I think is specifically queer and specifically helpful in a way as a corrective, as you said, to those tendencies. While you were talking, I was thinking a little bit also about like James Baldwin, who makes similar kinds of arguments [yet manages an] avoidance of being explicitly political in his fiction, [and how] he still he speaks to anarchists, as another kind of queer figure. These people who value the ambiguity of art, are also evading that Protestant ethic that goes along with the kind of capitalist path of individual development. I’m just really grateful for the way that you you expand on that in the book. There’s a bunch of a bunch of things that I can bring up. But one thing that we haven’t really spoken about, but that also I think resonates with today’s anarchism is Wilde’s experiences in prison. And so I wonder, he was incarcerated for two years and then his final writing was on prison. And I think that a lot of people are coming into anarchism specifically now through the abolitionist movement. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Wilde’s experience in prison, his relationship to prison and how that fits into his writing, and what he gives to us today as current abolitionists?
Kristian: Yes, I guess the first thing to say is that Wilde was against prison for his entire career. He thought that the whole notion of punishing wrongdoing was self-defeating and also barbaric. And in The Soul of Man Under Socialism in particular, he predicts that in a future society, there will be no need for crime, because there will be equality and there won’t be either the desperate need to resort to fraud or violence in order to meet one’s needs,nor the kind of resentment that results from being in the lower position of an unequal relationship. And that whatever traces of criminality remain, he argues, would just have to be the product of some sort of mental illness which should be treated by a physician, and not by the courts. So from early on, he was arguing a kind of abolitionist line. He also, partly from seeing the example of Irish nationalists who were being imprisoned, thought the prison could also be the sort of heroic and elevating kind of experience. And he had almost a Thoreauvian line that they could jail your body, but your spirit would remain free. What he learned when they put him in prison was that that was completely wrong. And he should you really should have known better based on what he already understood about the degrading nature of menial work and about the elevating possibilities of beauty and beautiful surroundings versus the degrading and oppressive nature of ugliness. And then he was put in this environment, which was really just designed to concentrate ugliness with the idea of breaking the prisoner’s spirit. And it was anticipated when he was put in prison that he would not survive the two years, that a man of his age and his class would not be up for the hardship and the deprivation, and were it not for the political intervention of some of his friends and the agitation of especially anarchists in Europe, who were demanding his freedom all together, he likely wouldn’t have survived those two years. And instead he was offered a number of privileges that were there to avoid the government’s embarrassment of him dying in prison. And he was very aware that that was the thing that was keeping him alive and that he was receiving this kind of special treatment.Much to his credit, he did his best to extend those benefits to the other inmates around him. [Mainly in that] he was allowed to request books and was allowed additional books from outside the prison. And reading his letters, you can see that among the books that he requested, there are books that he doesn’t particularly have an interest in, but he knows that the other prisoners would. And then for a while, he got the job of taking the library cart around to the cells to give prisoners the books they wanted, which importantly gave him the opportunity to talk to other people, because at that point, the prison system was entirely on a solitary confinement kind of basis.And then also gave him the opportunity to learn about the interests of the other prisoners, and again, sort of facilitate their intellectual pursuits. And then once he was released, he immediately set about agitating to improve the conditions for the prisoners and wrote a couple of long letters to the Daily Chronicle about conditions in the British prison system. In particular centered on the case of a prison guard named Thomas Martin, who had been fired essentially for being too kind to the prisoners. Martin’s specific offense was that he had given ginger cookies to very small children who were locked in prison for poaching rabbits. Wilde pursued both publicly and also less directly, through writing public officials and that sort of thing, the reform of the prison system, noting specific things that could improve the conditions for the prisoners, while also insisting that no amount of reform was ever going to be adequate, and in fact [stating] that the entire basis of British justice was badly founded and needed to be scrapped. This sort of reached its peak with his last published work (during his lifetime anyway) which was the Ballad of Reading Gaol, which I also think is his best poem, which his correspondence makes clear really intended as both a great work of art and also as the sort of political message that we were talking about earlier. It was intended as a pamphlet that would outrage the public against the prison system as a whole. And for what it’s worth, his agitation had some effect. There was a parliamentary commission that was investigating prison conditions at the time, and it took up many of the reforms that Wilde had suggested in his letters to the Chronicle. And just in terms of literary genealogy, The Ballad of Reading Gaol in particular became this almost scripture for anarchists talking about prisons in the decades that followed. So you you find references to it over and over again in the anarchist literature about prison, really all the way up into the 60s.
Scott (TFSR): That’s really interesting. I mean, there’s part of Wilde that is like the “Be Gay Do Crimes” sort, romanticizing the prisoner. But then there’s this seriousness, and it’s especially after his two years of hard labor imprisonment, where he is specifically acting against the prison system and going outside of the romanticism of the like criminal type or something like that. In your going over that history, another thing came to me that you show really well, there are somethings, like Wilde just seemed like a good person, like someone you want to hang out with and be friends with. And in that way, there’s [almost] another aspect of like Wilde the person and his actions that I think are worth reflecting on, [and] not just as a figure, thinker, a writer, but that he embodied this anarchism in his relationships with people, even about the way that he engaged in relationships, whether they’re like intimate or just in passing.
Kristian: Yeah. For a person who is renowned or notorious for being extremely individualistic and extremely sort of egotistical, he was also very, very generous. And he was generous with his wealth when he had wealth, and he was generous with other people’s wealth when he did not. Toward the end of his life, he was practically penniless and living on the generosity of his friends. And yet when people that he knew in prison would get released, he would send them money. And one of his friends and benefactors got kind of annoyed with him about this, because here they are giving him money, so that he can keep body and soul together, and here he is just giving it away. And he said, but if my good friends like you take care of me, how could I not take care of my prison friends? Which I think really captures both something of his spirit and also something of the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity. Friendship for Wilde was not a trivial matter. He didn’t think of his friends as just like people that you happen to know, he saw friendship as this deep and complicated ethical commitment, this kind of like practice of life. Which I think goes back to his reading of the classics, and probably Aristotle in particular. And so it’s also interesting that, lacking the vocabulary that we have now about like homosexuality and queerness, he described those relationships and the possibilities of those relationships in terms of things like passionate friendship and really saw them as, in addition to the sexual component and the political implications, also saw them as this tight interweaving of two people’s lives, and a sort of practice of generosity and engagement. Like a way that people could relate that was in a way deeply ethical, and in another way unconcerned with the conventionality and what at the time was was viewed as morality. So, yeah, I think there’s was something very anarchic about how he looked at that. And again, it was that very generosity that turned out to cause him so much trouble in the trials. Like had he just been hiring prostitutes and paying blackmailers, it wouldn’t have had the, I mean this is somewhat bizarre from our point of view, but it wouldn’t have had the outrageous moral implication that it had—that he was like taking these young men to expensive dinners, and buying them champagne, and taking them to the opera, and buying the suits, giving them silver cigarette cases with personalized inscriptions on them. All of that was like… You know, prostitution and blackmail was just old hat for a Victorian aristocrat. But that kind of intimacy with people of the lower classes and that effort to sort of extend to them the benefits of the society was politically very troubling and morally outrageous.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting how all of these things sort of overlap. I don’t know, like reading your book, I’ve always loved Wilde and had an affinity for Wilde and in a way Wilde has explained to me my gayness, my queerness. But then reading your book, I’m like, oh, my affinity for Wilde also has something to do with my anarchism that I’ve had over my whole life. And I just think the way that you tie those together and show them through going through his letters, his the biographical details, [and] the anarchists kind of response to him. And his work is really compelling. I guess the final question, you know, going back to talking about the role of art and the kind of corrective that we can bring to the sort of dour anarchist politics. The other aspect of him, maybe the term we could say is a utopian, and he uses that in The Soul of Man Socialism. Is there anything that you can say about Wilde bringing a sort of utopian anarchist politics or any way really you want to kind of send us off with, like, how Wilde speaks to us today? Because I think that this book is something that we can learn from in our current moment. So, yeah, any anything in that line that you want to kind of send us off with on Wilde, the utopian anarchist.
Kristian: Yeah. You know his utopianism makes sense, given his aestheticism, given the emphasis on the imagination and on sort of the fanciful and the artificial and the the creative possibilities. And therefore, he didn’t see Utopia as this thing that we achieve and preserve, which might be more of the Puritan model. Instead, he saw Utopia as this this aspiration of humanity that was always just past the horizon. And so it kept us moving. And so he says in The Soul of Man Under Socialism that all the progress is a realization of past utopias. And the utopia is a country where once we land, we immediately set sail looking forward again. And so there’s the idea that in order to achieve progress, we have to be able to imagine the better world. That once we achieve the world that we think we want, we’re going to imagine a better worlds still. And that, rather than that being a frustrating Rosero problem, in fact [it] is this beautiful hope that we can always be doing better. And, you know, right now I think we are pretty desperately in need of some utopian imagination, you know, with the pandemic really throwing our our usual social practices into question, and revealing the threadbare nature of many of our institutions, and the failure of hierarchical leadership structures to address the crisis in any sort of meaningful way, along with the increasingly present effects of climate change and the existential danger that that poses. And then also with the bizarre and perverse political culture that we inhabit in the United States, with the kind of polarization that makes every position a point of conflict and makes any sort of like of, I don’t know, reconciliation or even notion that we will arrive at an understanding of shared humanity, seem increasingly remote. We really need to be able to imagine something better. The alternative, I think, is a very bleak nihilism that just sees the future as only an extension of the present. And I think that from that view, nothing good can come. I saw a picture of some graffiti that said,“another end of the world as possible.” And I think that that that captures pretty well the need for utopian thinking right now.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah. That even the dystopian stuff has dried up, I think. Yeah. I mean, you just said it pretty beautifully, so I don’t really have anything that I really want to add. I really love spending time with Oscar Wilde’s thinking and writing, and just thinking about him as a person. And you do, I think, a really important thing in kind of bringing him out as an anarchist thinker and bring him to us right now. And maybe it’s just like something worth living for. Like that in the end is like something, you know, he, sorry, my mind starts going in all these different directions…
Kristian: Oh, good! That’s what I’m aiming for.
Scott (TFSR): Yeah. I mean, going from like living up to the blue China to dying so that he doesn’t have to see his wallpaper. But I think Wilde actually took things seriously in a way that’s instructive, even for all this kind of humor and artificiality. So, yeah, I don’t know. Again, I’m like really grateful for the book and for the chance to talk to you. And if you have any last things you want to add or also any other places you want listeners to go to the to access your work or whatever you’re up to at the moment.
Kristian: Yeah, I have a modest website it’s kristianwilliams.com, Kristian spelled with a K. Whenever I have a new article or whatever, I put something about it there and put a link to it. And then there’s some sort of category-based archives that you can look and see what I’ve written about the criminal legal system or about literature or about comics. And yeah. So if you’re interested in seeing what else I’ve done, that that would be a good place to start.
Scott (TFSR): Cool, and yeah I recommend people pick up this book, Resist Everything Except Temptation, and of course, Our Enemies In Blue is super important too. But yeah, I’m grateful for the time that you gave to talk about Wilde with me.
Kristian: Yeah, well, I appreciate the invitation. It was a good conversation.
This week, we’re happy to air a conversation I had with the author and activist, Modibo Kadalie, author of Pan-African Social Ecology as well as Internationalism, Pan-Africanism and the Struggle of Social Classes. A version of Dr. Kadalie’s conversation with Andrew Zonneveld of OOA! Publishing, entitled Pan-Africanism, Social Ecology and Intimate Direct Action appeared up in the recently released collection Deciding For Ourselves, edited by Cindy Milstein out from AK Press. Dr. Kadalie has also been involved in political organizing including resisting the draft of the Vietnam War, labor organizing in Detroit and Memphis, ecological protest, community self defense in Atlanta and currently is working on writings about ecology and living in the territories of southeastern Turtle Island, including those of the Creek and Seminole peoples, and working at the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology in Midway, Georgia.
In this hour, Modibo talks about autonomous community organizing, the contradictions between the survival of the species and capitalism, CLR James, his read on Pan-Africanism and Social Ecology, the pandemic, and direct democracy. We also talk about Geechee history in south so-called Georgia, the weaknesses of nationalism, hierarchy and revering individual historical figures and the strength of spontaneity and community action.
This conversation was recorded before the killing of George Floyd and but after the increased awareness of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery nearby to Dr. Kadalie in Glynn County, GA, which reflects in the discussion. Modibo shares some criticisms of official Black Lives Matter, liberal cooptation and the veneration of representative leadership.
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Featured Tracks:
Marvin Gaye – Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) – What’s Going On
Quincy Jones – Everything Must Change – Body Heat
Sam Cooke – A Change Is Gonna Come – Ain’t That Good News
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Transcription
TFSR: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat, Dr. Kadalie.
Dr. Modibo Kadalie: It’s very good, thank you very much. I’ve seen thiscollection. It’s a very good, very easy read, deciding for ourselves, it’sgot quite a few different perspectives. What makes it so good is that everybody talks about where does this ideal society exist, where can you find it, and what we got to do is showhow it’s emerging all over the world. The collection is a really good read. I recommend it highly.
TFSR: Awesome, we just received a copy from AK Press which we are excited to dig into. I’d like to say first off that I really appreciate the wide focus lens that you use when discussing the history and popular movements and popular participation in discourse. When you have Q&As and discussions. It seems like a lot of your public presentations are focused on the idea of de-centering the individual as the focus, and you engage other participants in lively discourse, rather than a monologue. I feel that says a lot about your politics.
MK: Don’t you find monologues boring? I think their peculiar emergence in a liberal individualistic society. The lecture shows you that somebody’s got the answers, and you’ve got to listen. It is very boring and authoritarian.
TFSR: Absolutely. One thing that I noticed from some pieces that are in your collection from OOOA! was you talked a lot about the impacts of, among other people, C.L.R. James on your thinking. We’ve never had anyone talk about his writings and what he brought to the Marxist tradition and the postcolonial struggle tradition. Can you talk a little bit about, maybe like some of his thoughts that influenced you and interactions that you had with him?
MK: The most dramatic thing was he was a critic of the nation-state. Of course, I was disappointed because he never went as far as I wanted him to go. He was a critic of the nation-state, yet he venerated certain pan-African statesmen. I don’t think he ever made a distinction betweenclassical Pan-Africanism, which is statist in its nature, and neo-Pan-Africanism, which is what I am. I’m a neo-Pan-Africanist, I believe that Pan-Africanism as any kind of humanism has to emerge from my people sitting down,talking, and discussing things to decide how they will go in their society, consistent with their natural ecosystems there that they depend upon for their survival. And these ecosystems are mutually dependent on human beings, symbiotically, relating in a natural world. And I believe we’ve got a real serious problem because capitalism has taken human beingsinto a very bad dark place. It’s a real detour that people have degenerated, and the technology, it is not very impressive when you look at it from a social-ecological perspective, all the patterns and human knowledge and all that stuff. Beginning with the industrial revolution, it was really inhuman what they did. It’s a very vicious and horrible period we live in. And they’ve been successful in making us believe it is the golden age of human thought and existence. To me, it is just the opposite. You get weapons of mass destruction, human beings fighting all the time with other human beings. Capitalism is driven by the private ownership of property and wealth accumulation. The writers of history look at human society as something which is not only great but the modern technology is wonderful, but the tragedy of it allis that they cannot see the inhumanity. We are on the verge of completely destroying the planet. Nobody seems to understand that human beingswho try to own everything and try to rule everybody, there is a danger. The danger for the survival of the species and human society and human advancement not in the materialistic sense but in a humanistic sense.
TFSR:I think what you are saying plays with the definition of social ecology that you give in some of your pieces. Can you break that down a little? Because people may not be familiar with the term?
MK: The term ‘social ecology’ was coined by Murray Bookchin. His contribution was that he saw that human society was natural as opposed to the people who thought human society was unnatural. The rest of the natural world was natural and humans were pitted against the rest of nature. Bookchin saw that human beings and human society were a natural outburst of nature, and what we have to do is reintegrate human society with the rest of the natural world as a naturalsymbiotic relationship, a mutual affirmation.
TFSR:Where do social ecologists feel like it went wrong? You pointed out the industrial revolution- and I think some people might point to the application of Cartesian Logic, but some people might go back to primitive accumulation.
MK: Well, I have a serious break with Bookchin at the point when you start venerating the Age of Reason, venerating the American democracy. I really don’t think American democracy ever existed. I think that in the American state, there is a particular bastardization of democracy, of direct democracy, for sure. Now, there’s gonna be a debate about that. Because there are people who believe that the American and the European experiments with the rise of the nation-states in the Age of Reasoning and, of course, what they call modern science… I believe that science hasexisted, as long as human beings have tried to live collectively on the planet. So I’m a little different there, and I’m gonna write more about that later. But I believe that American democracy is no contribution to human social history. And we can see it’s not any kind of contribution to ecology at all. Look at America today, look at what’s happening in the North American continent, this is probably the most unnatural of the continents, because, by the way, you have to put this element in it, this idea of individual ownership of property, the unbridled right to own people, including other people, as it began. And this private property is against human collectivity. Human beings have existed socially and as a species for documented over 200,000 years. And if the greed and avariciousness and competitiveness that we know now, that defines individual relationships with one another, the kind of exploitation and the kind of brutality that human beings exact upon each other and nations, exact upon one another.
And as you know, nation-states in their legal systems have a right to kill people. They call it capital punishment, and war. They venerate people who kill people, those who kill the most other people are the people who are the heroes. So I mean, capitalism and individual private property really must be looked at seriously, because that’s just where human beings, and that’s where the detour began to take place. Now, there was some hierarchy before, old against young, against women and men, but it never reached the point that it exists now. The point it exists now is almost unimaginable. Can you imagine, some nations can wipe out every living thing on the planet with their weapons? And they got all kinds of technologies circling the planet, most of its purpose, of course, they tell you, the purpose is to facilitate communication, but most of its purpose is to seek some advantage over one another. So that they can develop this diplomatic concept that they call Mutual Assured Destruction. What an inhuman concept! I’m laughing because I’m hurt so bad by it.
Bookchin and C.L.R. took me up to a point. But they were people of their time, just like I am a person of this time. So hopefully, we can write this stuff down so other people can take a look at it and critique it and see where they don’t take it.
TFSR: So if we decenter the individual, just in terms of decision-making or deciding what’s best for the communities in which we live and the repercussions that we have to live with as individuals, I can see people who have been raised in places like the United States, we’ve been taught what democracy is to be this representational constitutional republic, whatever it is, that people would reject the term Democrat outright, because that’s what has been fed to them. Are there any visions of democracy that you can talk about that you’ve been personally influenced by that have had a different, more decentralized and human-level version?
MK: Even you can look at the most popular movements of our time, which have started off as direct democracy. And even the native people that were culturally and socially destroyed with the North American genocide, (when I say ‘we’, I don’t mean ‘me’) the American government wiped out all these democratic forms which they could have learned from. Anytime you see a picket line, when a local group, when a local society is under great pressure and in crisis, like in a storm or flood, people do what they have to do. People get sandbags, they don’t get paid for that, they line on the riverbanks with sandbags, they feed themselves, theyfeed other people that are in this pandemic. But let me give you a good example of how we don’t even know because we’ve been so brainwashed, don’t even know what’s happening for us.
For instance, Black Lives Matter. When Black Lives Matter started off, it was completely democratic. People were marching in the streets and raising their slogans and saying what they needed to say. But by the time the social workers and various people came in from the outside, as people came in, it became the Black Lives Matter. Next thing we’ve been raisingindividual people who were running for office, who were credited with founding the Black Lives Matter movement. First thing, it became the Black Lives Matter movement, because the media did that, the media named it that. And so it became. So they had to interview somebody, to interview these people who claim to be articulators of the program of the Black Lives Matter movement, but the Black Lives Matter movement was spontaneous of people from the suburbs of St. Louis. And basically, when we look at it, we’re looking at what I call a state creep. The state is taking it back over. And now people are running for office and using the Black Lives Matter environment as credentials. So they become members of the bureaucracy. But what you’re looking at is the shadow of the Black Lives movement, the aftermath, what the state has creeped up and done. Like the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement started in Montgomery. These people spontaneously began to organize themselves. Martin Luther King didn’t really know what was going on. And they organized an alternative transportation system on their own, boycotted the bus. They boycotted the buses. But that wasn’t an important thing. The important thing is a lot of those people were getting to work on time. Taxicab drivers were organizing, people who had cars organized themselves. And so they maintained a transportation system because the city continued to function despite what they call the boycott. Martin King came in, they got somebody who can speak, they always get the best speakers to articulate what the masses want. But they usually are not clear on what’s going on anyway. And even now, I don’t know if you know about a young black man who was killed in the streets of Brunswick, Georgia.
TFSR: Yes.
MK: Okay, let me tell you something about it because you have to look at it. When the history is written, if we don’t say anything, it is going to be the NAACP leaders, the ones who call the rally on the steps of the courthouse, and then, of course, they interview his mother. And that’s the story we get on TV. But what happened was that Ahmad was a very popular young man. And his friends went over to that suburban, almost all-white community after he was killed. After they got the story straight, because they had to go through the story to get the story straight, the officials. The official story was that he was trying to rob, there was a burglary in progress. And the police came in with these other guys helping to stop this burglar. And so after the story got out, people didn’t believe that, they were his friends. So these young people went over to the community where he was killed and started walking up and down the street and saying, “We runwith Ahmad, all of us, we run withhim“. And so they started running down the street. But there were no preachers there with no Bibles, no black leaders with no suits and ties telling them how to conduct themselves. And then when the guy who took the video saw that these kids were getting some publicity like that, he then released the video. And then when the video was released, then everybody knew them. But these kids are not gonna get any credit for any of that.
TFSR:Because they don’t have a non-profit or a pulpit.
MK: Yeah, because people don’t look for direct democratic, spontaneous people as being significant in human history. But that’s where the new society is born, and that’s why we have to write it like that. And once they see it, and once you look at it, everybody knows, yeah, that’s what happens. Because you can verify it, like in the case of Montgomery, the Montgomery Improvement Association was having regular meetings, but the black bus boycott, it already jumped off. And I saw it in Detroit, in New Orleans, when these people were trying to keep their community running. And next thing all the drug stores are flooded. So you are going to the drug store and ask the cashier to get you some Pampers, but there is no cashier in there. And the kids need Pampers, people need medicine. So they go in and get it and give it to people. But then when the media gets it — they’re looting the drug store.
So we just have to begin to look at history from a real directly democratic eye. Because that’s how it’s been happening the whole time. And you can see it even in the dark ages. If you look at European history, that gives you a good example.
Before all these philosophers, like Locke, and Hume, and Berkeley, even Rousseau started writing. That was the Dark Ages. And that was between the period of the fall of the Roman Empire, the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and the rise of these kingdoms in northern Europe and the periphery of the Roman Empire.
These are the Dark Ages because the church was not strong. There were no strong kings, these are the Dark Ages. But the people were organizing guilds, the artisans were organized, they were directly democratic forms. So when they say the Dark Ages existed, then what we got to do is shed some light on the Dark Ages. And when they say that African people were not capable of civilizing, that’s why they have classical colonialism, we have to show that these people were civilized, self-organized, but they don’t look at directly democratic organizations as being any form of civilization. And that’s why European capitalists in these states who now rule the world, or some form of their organization all over the world, this is a very dark period of civilization in human history. And I don’t know if we can survive it or not. What do you think?
TFSR: I hope so.
MK: I think we will.
TFSR: You pointed to how these directly democratic forms are coming up when people are feeling under pressure, you pointed to Katrina, you pointed to more recently during the pandemic, these examples of mutual aid and goods redistribution. I think there’s a lot of hope in there. I think the scale is lacking, and not that things have to be centralized, but if things can integrate together, if these things are happening in a bunch of different places, there are forms of communication between them, but it seems like networking and sharing resources.
MK: All the time now I’ve been zooming my ass off. I’ve been on a Zoom in Europe, people from Belgium and France, and I’ve been all over the screen and read my screen right in front of me. Young people understand it. But the point is, as long as you measure human beings by some material wealth and some private accumulation of property and federate these corporations because that’s all they are, they are just people organized to amass enormous material, wealth, and control. These things have to be dismantled along with the state. They put up these big centralized states, people have to become unmediated human beings. You can’t represent me, I can’t represent you, we have to get together and talk about what we want to do and figure out what we want to be. And we can figure it out. Human beings have always done that. Human beings wouldn’t exist for 200,000 years in some kind of without any kind of mutual aid or some kind of cooperation. And if they were selfish and individualistic, there would have been no more human species, human society. That’s why we got to this point by people understanding that despite all that… Sometimes people do it without even knowing it. If you went to Montgomery, Alabama, and asked anybody black, even a month or two before the bus boycott broke up. If you asked them, “Do you think that black people in Montgomery, Alabama can organize an alternative transportation system that can get people to work on time for a year?” “No, can’t do that? Who is going to teach us how to do that?” Well, you teach yourself, you work yourself, you work yourself through. I feel very strongly about it, I guess you can tell that.
TFSR: And you’ve done a lot of thinking and observing of that, too.
MK: Oh yeah, it’s a marvelous thing to behold. It’s like anything else, beautiful. If you know what to look at, it becomes greatly beautiful, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you won’t be able to appreciate it. We are all learning, of course.Do you have any examples that you marvel about in your life time?
TFSR: Well, it’s hard to not have like the tinted glasses of retrospect and be like, “Well, that was weak for this reason, that reason, but definitely like the mutual aid stuff…
MK: Where are you now?
TFSR: North Carolina, Asheville.
MK: Asheville, North Carolina? And where did thatbookstore come from?
TFSR:That came from people getting together and saying, “We want this in our community.” And that’s how it gets supported, it definitely doesn’t make money.
MK: Y’all trying to make money in a massive fortune?
TFSR: It would not work. That’s probably the joke at the beginning of every presentation.
MK: You want to have a whole book chain of all these books, so you can get on your computer and count your money?
TFSR: Here, we have a couple of mutual aid projects that are distributing goods that are donated from people and doing deliveries of groceries or handing out sandwiches and coffee to houseless folks or folks who just need a little up in the morning.
MK: Who taught you to do that?
TFSR: Our program’s named after the Black Panther Party Survival Program, and they learned from someone, too.
MK: Does it make you feel good?
TFSR: Yeah, absolutely.
MK: And you know who’s not going to be there and who’s going to be there when you get ready to do it. That’s how it works.
TFSR: Yeah.
So we’ve talked a little bit about the decision-making and the organizing aspects of what some of the things that we’ve experienced that humans are capable of in our societies. Shifting a little bit, you mentioned militarism and mutually assured destruction. Trump just dropped out of the Open Skies Treaty. And before that, he removed the US from the INF Treaty and the Iran nuclear deal. And there’s talk of sparking an arms race with Russia and there’s been saber-rattling with China. A lot of the people that are listening to this show have grown up under the war on terror, and haven’t known a time when the US hasn’t been actively engaged in a war abroad. Besides the police interventions that were going on in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, or whatever you want to call it.
MK: I grew up during the Cold War. I thought the Russians would come. We used to duck and cover under the seats in the school expecting a nuclear attack. But the only country that used nuclear weapons against the civilian, nuclear weapon against anybody is the United States government.
TFSR: And you resisted the draft, right?
MK: Yeah. That didn’t make sense. As dumb as I was, that didn’t make sense. For whatever reason, I wouldn’t go into that one. That’s the whole history of the last century. Nation-states fighting armies. Only ones that have armies are Nation States. Nation-states got armies, and they got legitimate armies. You can be a nice guy from Northern California and get drafted into the military. You can’t get drafted now into the military. And you can go into a place that you have never been before. And because you’re an American military person, you can kick down somebody’s door and shoot him in the head and get away with it. And then come back a hero. Cowardly, what you can do is just become technologically savvy and send drones over there to do it.
TFSR: And then afterwards, you carry the trauma of having done that sort of thing as a human being in a lot of cases, right?
MK: Yeah. And you do it because other people tell you to do it, you don’t even have a chance to think about it, you follow orders. I don’t mind following something that I’ve agreed with other people that we are going to do. I don’t follow somebody telling me what to do, that I never had anything to say about. And I think that’s a human, not so much an instinct, but I think human beings are wired to work in common with other human beings and to not destroy other human beings, except over something material. And we are taught that I think.
TFSR: Yeah, because we’ve been taught that, I wonder how – especially for those folks that have been living under this war on terror thing or those of us who grew up during the Cold War – how do we move away from being influenced by these leaders who… it’s obvious that Trump and the administration feel that not only have we lost the prestige of our imperial halcyon days of the Cold War, but the economy also could do for a boost, and all these other associated things with militarism, like patriarchy and white supremacy. And these things are waning in some ways, because of the threat of social justice movements, or just people being good to each other.
MK: It’s the way they mobilize everybody behind the banner of patriotism and stuff. So it’s not just a war on communism, or war on terrorism, it is the war on poverty, the war on the virus. The American policymakers know one thing, they know that to get everybody behind a policy, you got to declare war. There is a war on everything, on drugs, etc. And so what we have to do, is get out of our mindset, this jingoism when we get involved in a debate about policy. Anytime it says a war on something, what that means is that they’re trying to rally people and appeal to their nationalist fervor. You have a war on virus – what the fuck is that? So what you have to do is criticize, there is no war on viruses and we’re not all in this together either. Some people ain’t even in it, but they’ll send you to be in it. The fact is that there are people who are unevenly affected by this kind of thing.
So, what you have to do is you have to explain it to people that these are viruses, these are naturally occurring viruses that are part of the evolution or the failure of the evolution of the human body to adjust to the environment, to their immediate environment. And then you have to explain it scientifically that there is a cancer pandemic. People understand that very well. Because cancer is the human body trying to adjust or accelerate evolution in an uneven way. So, all these tumors and everything come as a result of the human body trying to adjust. And these viruses are like that. These viruses come in for several reasons, they turn down the natural support system of other life forms on the planet. They are trying to survive, their bodies have viruses, too, and what we need to do is understand how we have to live within the scope of our own context. And we have to put scientific knowledge in the service, not of developing a vaccine, and showing that a vaccine is gonna make a lot of people a lot of money, a lot of people will get famous. So that’s why over a hundred different corporations are putting money into vaccines as an investment. And explain the system to them, and how the policy arguments are not fruitful. The argument that we have to look at is how do we take control of our own local communities and help other people do that. And we have an opportunity here too, because the virus attacks community, locality. And that’s why you have outbreaks here and there, and you have to work it from that angle. But the rhetoric gets to be really emotional.
We have to have a war on this and a war on that, and then, of course, everybody’s thinking that Biden is going to save us. And Trump has betrayed us. That’s what the liberals think, and the more conservative think that Trump is trying to save us, and all you other dummies are trying to stop them from saving us. But the point is, people will have to have an enlightened discussion about the relationship between human society and the rest of the natural world. And we will have to understand that the nation-state and the corporations and individual ownership of property stands in the way of human beings realizing the scientific and ecological future. A lot of people are going to say “What the hell are you saying?” But over time, and we have to sacrifice ourselves, your children will understand, that generation will understand. But if we have nothing written down, no kind of discussions like this on tape, then they will have to reinvent the wheel, because these things will be suppressed. So we have to keep these things alive, so they won’t be suppressed. So I don’t see my role too much, I just trying to write something down so that people have something to think about in the next generation when the real pandemics come. What we have right here is nothing compared to the real pandemics, the real wars and stuff and real confusion.
Young people understand climate change, but the really important thing, all of the major real issues have nothing to do with state policy in the sense. Climate change is across borders. Borders don’t mean anything to climate change or the pandemic. And it doesn’t mean anything to these immigrants. People gonna go where they go and people gonna fight where they need to fight. And then they go organize themselves to make the fight. And we have to put a mirror in front of them. So they’ll see who they are, what they must do, and support them in doing it and not try to interpret what they’re doing in some capitalistic bourgeois bullshit way. I get tired of reading these people, you read them, and they reach, they get to the point where all the shit is wrong, obviously, they’re wrong. But you know what they end up doing? But we got to develop, we got to change the state so it can really save us, we got to make sure the corporations are accountable. That’s where they fuck up right there. We got to get beyond that point.
TFSR: They haven’t rejected the state structure or capitalism fully, but they recognize the climate crisis is real. And they recognized the patterns of disease and how capitalism facilitates its spread. I just keep thinking back to all the money that’s been poured into the airlines, and how much of an effect on the ecology there’s been since fewer flights have been going, and how cheap the planes are right now, and how it’s just trying to stay alive. But it’s literally the vector for not only massive amounts of pollution for people to make pleasure trips in a lot of cases or business trips or whatever. But it’s also the vector for so much of the disease spreading. So many of these huge places where it’s become pandemic are not that far from an international airport and then it’s complicated by racialized and class-based impacts of capitalism.
MK: I just enjoy looking at the sky and not seeing vapor trails. I don’t know whether you noticed it, but in the morning, the sun is much brighter and the grass is much greener. And seeing like nonhuman nature seems to be responding, releasing itself in a very good way. I’ve seen animals come out of the woods. I have a comrade in China, he texts me and he says, he’s from Beijing. He says the sky is blue in Beijing. I thought it was great. You got to see the sky. That has an impact. And I understand that the fish coming up into the Grand Canal in Venice now. You don’t have those big luxury liners going up in there. So you can catch a fish off the Grand Canal. People don’t see that. The earth is telling us something.
TFSR: Yeah, and we need to heed that and we need to stop this shit from coming back.
MK: It’s gonna come back, but it’s not gonna come back without being seriously challenged next time. It goes like that way. I have another little difference with my friends. They think that I’m some kind of a historical generator of spontaneous upheavals. Because they think that what we should be doing is agitating and telling the masses, they must fight and engage blah, blah. No, no, no, this isn’t the period of propagandizing, this is the period when we conceptualize stuff, and when they erupt, that’s when we should be agitating. And they say, “Spontaneity, what is that?” “That’s the NewSociety trying to emerge?” “How come they never take over?” Because they aren’t trying to take over, they just try to understand who they are, what the world can look like. And over time, it’ll become clear to everybody. Let me just draw a line right here, I have drawn a line with my mentor C.L.R. James, when he venerated certain black heads of state, he says, the states are evil and we must go beyond them. But then he turns that around and venerates the guy like Lenin, a guy like Kwame Nkruma. If you’re gonna be against the state, you gotta be against all of them, whoever they were, whoever they are. He’s circumscribed by us all the time. He can only act in a certain way. And Bookchin, he’s gonna raise the Age of Reasoning and the American Revolution. I broke with him there.
I just want you to know that I’m thankful for these guys. But we got to go further than that. If we stay where they stood… And I’m sorry that there are people who are venerating these people now without understanding what they represented in the development of certain ideas and certain political trends and stuff. You should never venerate anybody, no individual person should be… When you put out a work, or you engage in the discussion, like you and I, it’s supposed to be for critical purposes. So you can understand one another better.The axe doesn’t get sharp on his own must be sharpened by file. That’s a metaphor.
TFSR: It’s a good metaphor. I was talking to a friend the other day about having this conversation and she was asking, “What are you reading?” And I mentioned your book and she asked about social ecology. And she also asked “What’s the definition of Pan-Africanism?” and I gave like the Wikipedia definition. I wonder if you could break down what that phrase means to you and what it means to be a neo-Pan-Africanist.
MK: Pan-Africanism is a concept that arose to counteract the colonization of Africans on the continent of Africa and the segregation of African people in the new world along with some other colonies in the Caribbean and Central America, which were black. The original Pan-Africanists saw that the empowerment – that’s why I call them classical Pan-Africanists – that the empowerment of African people requires that they create state bonds, state formations, and unite them like the United States in North America so that they can be on the world stage as representatives of the will of the black masses, both in the United States, the Caribbean, and in the continent of Africa. That’s what classical Pan-Africanism is. Now, most people don’t make this distinction. My distinction is neo Pan-Africanism is for the empowerment of all African people, wherever they might be, without the state, the empowerment of African communities all over the world in unity with the rest of the people all over the world. So that’s what I call neo-Pan-Africanism. Now, most people don’t make that distinction. So if you talk to somebody, you tell them that that’s the distinction that I’m making. So they won’tthink that you haven’t thought about it as well. To be clear, classical Pan-Africanism is associated with a response to classical colonialism. Classical colonialism is the period in human history where European nation-states sent their direct administrative apparatus to administer their colonies. They lived there. Neocolonialism is the period in human history where indigenous groups of people emerge to take over control of these states and administer them like they’re doing now. The period of classical Pan-Africanism is a response to classical colonialism, the idea of neo-colonialism, neo-Pan-Africanism is a response to that.
TFSR: And is the need within the neo-Pan-Africanist push, or as you experienced it, or that delineation that you make, you said that the nation state format is an unnatural, or at least a detrimental form…
MK: Yes, it is unnatural, and it needs to be swept aside, along with these various confederations of states, like the Organization of African Unity. People see them as that. People just say, “Why don’t they act right? Why don’t they be what they’re supposed to do that?” The Organization of African Unity and various governments, they call socialist governments in Africa, like in Tanzania, sometimes, Ghana sometimes, and even Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela never was anything but really a classical Pan-Africanist and, actually, he was a more broad-based classical Pan-Africanist, because he united with the Cubans as well, and the Chinese as well. But he never was a socialist, even of the old classical socialist ilk, but he’s like Martin Luther King. You can say nothing against Martin Luther King because that’s being racist, and he’s denying black people and he was turning against your race and all that, but you got to criticize him. Even Malcolm X. These people understood liberation in the context of nationalism, black people, white people have got nation-states. And what we need to do is have nation-states of our own, and that’s how you liberate yourself. To me, that was bullshit from the beginning.
TFSR: But you do feel that it’s important that people of African descent have been able to organize together, right?
MK: Yeah. Being organized together in places where they have a commonality with other people organized with them too. I don’t see it as a separation thing, it’s like right here, down here in Midway. There’s Black people and white people. Black people can organize and then white people want to come and we can organize together on how we want to live. And as time goes on, you will see more and more of that.
TFSR: Can you talk a bit about the community that you live in and some of the history of resistance there? Your interactions with the authors ofof Dixie Be Damnedand other essays that you talk about are really impressive.
MK: Well, I live on the coast of Georgia. And during the reconstruction, during the Civil War, this was a rice plantation area. And you had rice plantations up and down the coast of Georgia and up and down the coast of South Carolina. But even before the Civil War, there was a shift in the south, where big money was invested in cotton, cotton don’t grow well down here. If you look at the Black Belt, that is a demographic area where there were large black populations before the migration to the north, you don’t find the coastal areas included except in various places. But you’ll find the use of those plantations in central Georgia, central Alabama, up and down the Mississippi on both sides and up into Western Tennessee and Eastern Arkansas. That’s where,in North Carolina, South Carolina. But when the Civil War broke out, the market and rice were already gone. So the rice plantations don’t look like the cotton plantations, the rice plantations were left alone and they workeddown here. The owners only came as traders who actually traded that it didn’t last so long during the Reconstruction. People just claimed the land for themselves. And then they didn’t give any kind of acknowledgment to white ownership. And they just claimed that, that’s why when Shermancame down, he issued Field Order #15, and he said that all of the land, from the ocean to 31 to 32 miles inland couldn’t be claimed by the emancipated slave as their own. So they did.
So as the country grew and developed, there was an erosion of that ownership of land, but people held on for a while. I was born down here. When my parents came from central Georgia… And by the way, these people voted. They couldn’t run for office in the South, because the state government didn’t allow that. But they could vote for white people.
So I had all kinds of Gullah Geechee communities and all kinds of African retentions. And all kinds of independent, autonomous institutions. So that’s who they were. The Geechee had a reputation of being a rice-eating, fish-eating, mean, recalcitrant, disagreeable person, short, black. And those are the people I grew up around. So it has a collective history.
And even the people who ran the county government really didn’t bother the black people too much. When the paper companies took over some of the lands, they just want to make sure that the people brought the wood to the sawmill like in many other places. But that tradition was a part of who I am. So I never believed that black people were not resourceful and could not govern and decide for themselves what they want to do. I never believed that. Other people believed that, I think in central Georgia, there was less of this kind of self-organizing activity. But in coastal Georgia and coastal South Carolina, there were a lot of legendary leaders who guided the people to some kind of autonomous existence. And their history is written. There’s a place called Harris Neck, Andrew went over there, he was amazed because they still live over there, even though there’s a great push from Northern, New York people primarily from Long Island to settle down here after they retire, instead of going all the way to Florida. So it’s always changing. But that’s the context. You want to come down here sometime.
TFSR: I’d love to.
MK: When this is over, you come down and take a look around.
TFSR: You also have a Social Ecology center down there, right?
MK: Yeah. We just found that about three years ago, after I retired from my teaching career. We set up, primarily myself, Andrew, one of my students, and another friend of mine, a guy who found a Geechee Cultural Center in Riceboro, which is about four miles down the road. But he passed on. So we became the convenersof the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology. Now, that’s a complicated name. But we wanted to have a name that was not confusing to what we were doing. If we called it the C.L.R. James Center, that would be an amorphous venerationof some individual person and that wasn’t serious. We wanted people to know that it was autonomous, which means we have a different kind of fuels, historical development. And we want to let them know that it was an institute for direct democracy, we’re not interested in people writing about their heroes and famous baseball players or anything like that. And it is for social ecology. But we believe that direct democracy, social ecology cannot be achieved without having a direct democratic social organization. And a group of people who could see that. History shows that, the Native American people show us that. I’m writing about some Native American people, it will probably be released next fall. So I’m here working now and talking to you of course.
TFSR: That’s awesome. Are the Gullah and Ogeechee communities what one might consider to be Maroon communities?
MK: Yeah, you can consider it, but Maroonage has taken on all kinds of forms. It’s not just people running away and setting up their own… Some of those communities right on theridge in the front of plantations and interacting with some of the people. And some of the people went far distances and set up very complicated societies and stuff. So the type of Maroonage is dependent upon demography, history, the type of plantation and was the type of monocrop that was being raised, and how people fed themselves, what kind of transportation was available.
TFSR: It’s kind of attesting to the adaptability of people.
MK: Oh, yeah, they adapted. They were all overif you study Maroonage, they were in Mexico, and across the islands, the big islands, they have substantial populations in the hinterlands, like in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and, of course, in Cuba, and Jamaica. In Haiti, that was Hispanola, and after slavery was over, a lot of those people just simply took over the land in the Caribbean and grew crops to feed their families. And that’s why in places like Trinidad and Guyana, they had to import plantation labor. So the black people who were slaves developed their own autonomous communities. They grew crops on their own, no monocrops. So if you wanted a monocrop labor force, they had to go to inland and get that. That’s why he has an in the population in Guyana and Trinidad, coming out of that type of relationship with labor with capitalist mercantileagricultural laborers.
TFSR: Is the nature of the writing that you’re doing right now on indigenous populations about what might be understood as social ecology of… to put that term onto what communities were experiencing and living? What’s the topic?
MK: Well, the two examples that I’m using to do some detailed writing, the Forte Moseexperience and Spanish experience in northeastern Florida. How the Seminoles evolved from this interaction. And how the Creek Seminoles where the creeks came from autonomous, complicated, hierarchical society. Do you know anything about anthropology and archaeology in St. Louis, upper Mississippi, and middle Mississippi areas? Have you heard of Cahokia?
TFSR: Yes, Kevin Tucker writes about Cahokia. He lives right outside of it. So I’ve heard it referenced.
MK: In that connection, I’ve talked about how Cahokia ,which was a hierarchical kind of society, and peoplelook atthe big leaders in Cahokia, but I was trying to explain how Cahokia… People left Cahokia, people didn’t like it. That’s why the Creeks were fleeing Cahokia and that’s why they migrated down the Mississippi and all the way up to Northern Florida. And they went along creeks that’s why they were called Creek Indians, but I hook them in and then the African populations which fought with the Yemassee in early Charlestown, the early Charlestown settlement, and they went south to St Augustine and then to Cuba. That’s what that’s all about. Then I’ve got another section, which is a more naturalistic section, it’s got to do with the Great Dismal Swamp and the history of that geographic area. I’m looking at that one as a part of the lore, the place and why it became known as the Great Dismal Swamp, but it really wasn’t dismal. Depending on who you were, if you were running away, it was a paradise. But I think it’s coming in the right size. I remember the first book I wrote, that thing was way too big.
TFSR: I still use it as a reference, though.
MK:It had all the documents in the back. I think that’s just saving grace, the rest is shit. I lose to self-organization every once in a while. But that was where I was in the 1970s, a young man trying to put it together.
TFSR: And at least he referred to the book very clearly on the cover as the raw notebooks.
MK: It’s raw, really. Because my students, one student, in particular, he came by the house and I was rummaging through some stuff andhe said “What’s over here?” It was oneof those manuscripts. He put this together. He grabbed the thing, and took it back to the office, and started hunting and pecking, I said, “What are you doing?”, and he said, “I want to put all this together”. They organized it and put it in a book. It’s very raw. It offers no real solution. But it shows certain attempts: it shows the 6th Pan-African Congress, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and its lack of democracy. And it shows the African Liberation Support Committee. So it came from the minutes and stuff that I was keeping at the time. So it has an empirical side to it, I think
TFSR: It’s interesting to hold that up to your shorter book The Pan-African Social Ecology, because a lot of those events that are in a lot of cases you and Andrew talking about or that you referenced during speeches, to be able to dig back into this book and say, like, “Well, here’s the notes from that time, here’s a little deeper context of what was going on with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers or the 6th Congress”.
MK: I guess it has that value, but it doesn’t speak to any kind of ecology. When I started exploring questions of ecology, I was really out of the anti-nuclear movement, I just thought the nuclear shit was dangerous to the planet. But I didn’t have a real conceptual context you put it in. And I was just trying to deal with some Marxism and critique the limitations of Marxism, especially the vanguard party in need for the revolutionary people to lead the ignorant masses to victory.
TFSR: It’s so patronizing.
MK: It’s preposterous. But I think we got a nice size for people to actually read this. There are pictures in it, too. A guy from Nova Scotia was in my last zoom session. And he saw a picture of me on hillside. That was me. I owe a lot of that to Andrew [Zonevald]. Andrew edited and put this book into great context, and the introduction is of great detail. And when I mentioned something he says “Oh, man, we should have put that in there”…
TFSR: I like your working relationship. It’s really awesome. I like Andrew a lot, too.
MK: Yeah. And Andrew brings it out. He knows when I get contradictory, he says, “What does this mean in relation to what you just said?”
TFSR:That’s the beauty of conversation.
MK: When there’s an election, I do vote in the local election, and I vote for sheriffs, representatives on the county commission, but the rest of the stuff, I don’t vote for. But I know these people. And that guy who’s running for the county commission chair thing, I sat down with him, and he says that he’s gonna make sure and he made it part of… He’s been on social media and essentially, his thing is to get people involved in the decision-making of their local government, and he said that he will have some town-hall meetings where he don’t say nothing unless they call along. And he’ll organize in such a way that everybody gets their say. And he’s committed to what he calls participatory democracy, which I don’t know what that means for him. But participatory democracy is not the same as direct democracy. But if we really get it kind of close like that. And if he wins, which he stands a good chance of winning, more people understand that we’ll be able to set up a couple of forums, regular forums, where people can actually decide something about their local government.
TFSR: It seems like that critique of the stuff that was going on in Jackson for a while.
MK: You can’t just stop at participatory. You can’t have people come in and they talk and talk and they listen to you, and then they go do what they want you to, you can’t do that. Not only do people have to decide, but they also have to actually implement, that’s what direct democracy means.
TFSR: Because there has to be, some sort of accountability and recallability. Right?
MK: Yeah. There has to be a direct recall. And no hell of a lot of money involved beyond the task, if you enlist somebody to do something, you paying for that and that’s it. No lifetime appointment, no president-for-life shit. So I’m involved in that. But if the guy doesn’t win, he’ll at least raise the credit, but he got a good chance.
TFSR: That’s better than a lot of us have right now. We just got to not stop at participatory.
MK: In terms of the state legislature and state governments, I don’t vote in that kind of stuff. But people are really upstanding Trump, it is primarily a black community still in East Liberty County.
TFSR: Again, some meandering. Here Modibo shares some criticism on decision-making in vestiges of Leninism, and projects like Cooperation Jackson, and the Zapatistas.
MK: That’s all that they were doing. They were trying to push the gathering over and think it was supposed to be an anarchist gathering in Detroit or somewhere, and they were pushing, the people in Jackson have been in the vanguard of what they call this concept they introduced as organizing dual power, which means that they were kind of stuck with the Leninism. And I really think that they need to examine that. I don’t want to get associated with that. Because dual power, to me, is a statist concept in itself. When I started writing about the origin of dual power, and how it’s a statist concept, and how we got to break with Leninism. And I couldn’t explain that in an article and stuff. So I just want to hit on a road. That turned out to be about 12 or 14 pages. Andrew said, “Why don’t you put that with your critique of direct democracy and republicanism?” So I put it there. And then it turned into a chapter and like the explanation of what representative democracy is and the difference between participatory democracy and all these sham democracies? So I never did. Because if I got associated with that, and somebody was gonna write a book and reference that book, and reference somebody else in that book, and then I’d be associated with people trying to organize the democratic institutions. The point I’m making is that getting organized is shit, people don’t do that. All you have to do is shepherd the process.Frankly, I found it kind of vanguardist because I know what’s going on in Jackson, Mississippi is not a direct democracy. I know that so I’m not gonna even go there.
TFSR: I feel like in the book, at least, that’s one of the goals they point to and say they get a lot of influence from Rojava and the Zapatistas. I know that there’s a history of Leninism in the backgrounds of both of those.
MK: Well, the Zapatistas, I gotinto a tiff with Andrew on that. Andrew was sympathetic to the Zapatistas, which is a Leninist, Marxist organization stuff, plus their stated goal was to take power in Mexico, they see themselves as operating in the kinds of... And then when the Cheran people emerged, that’s what you need to be looking at, the Cheran people.
TFSR: I don’t think I know that. How do you spell that?
MK: Cheran. It’s in the book. The women who stoned the logging trucks that were taking logs from the forest.
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.
// 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.
This week we are pleased to present an interview William conducted with Gabriel Khun and Maxida Märak on the 2019 PM Press release Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North. This book, of which Khun is the author and editor and Märak is an contributor, details a political history of the Sámi people whose traditional lands extend along the north most regions of so called Sweden, Norway, Finland, and parts of Russia, as well as interviews conducted with over a dozen Sámi artists and activists.
Maxida Märak is a Sámi activist, actor, and hip hop artist who has done extensive work for Indigenous people’s justice. All of the music in this episode is by Märak and used with her permission, one of which comes off of her 2019 full length release Utopi.
In this episode we speak about the particular struggles of Sámi folks, ties between Indigenous people all around the world, and many more topics!
Maxida Märak (MM):My name is Maxida Märak, I work as a hip hop artist and producer. I’ve been acting quite a bit before I started to do music, and I’m also known for being an activist in Indigenous groups and especially for the Sámis, cause I’m Sámi. We are the Native people of the Scandinavian north. We live and breathe in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and parts of Russia. So for people who are political, they will probably know me as an activist-artist, I would say.
I don’t know what more I can say, I live in Jokkmokk which is up north in Sweden. I have a daughter, she’s 8 years old, and yeah that’s me. Parts of me.
Gabriel Kuhn (GK): So my name is Gabriel Kuhn, I was born and raised in Austria, then I left the country about 25 years ago, and moved around a lot until I ended up in Sweden in 2007, and I’ve been living here since and work as a writer and translator. And I’m involved in various social and political projects.
TFSR: So, firstly I’d love to start out with a question for Gabriel. We are here to talk about your book Liberating Sápmi, which came out this year (2020) from PM Press. Would you lay out some groundwork about this book, and how you came to writing and compiling it?
GK: Yeah! So the book, basically it’s an introduction to Sámi history with a focus on the political struggle of the Sámi people and anti-colonial resistance. The book is laid out in two major parts, there is an introduction, which I wrote and is called “A Short Political History of Sápmi”, so Sápmi being the traditional homeland of the Sámi people. And that provides general background information, and then the main part of the book which makes up about two-thirds are interviews with twelve Sámi artists, activists, and scholars. So Maxida is one of them.
In addition there are illustrations in the book, photographs, and artwork. And there is a resource guide at the end of the book, which has information about more English language literature and music and film and some online sources that people can look into.
And the reason I got the idea for the book was that I thought such a book was missing on the english language market. There are quite a few books about the Sámi people in English, some of them are very good, but most of them are academic studies, they are hard to find, or they’re quite expensive. So my intention was to do a book that was accessible, easy to read, easy to get, affordable, and that’s how the idea came about.
TFSR:I loved the interview component of the book, the introduction was really well done and I loved it too, but I also loved the intertwining of the interview component in the book and bringing in voices from all over Sápmi and all of these different backgrounds.
GK: That was the most important part of the book!
TFSR: Definitely! And I wonder Maxida if I could ask you, insofar as this is possible would you speak about the history of Sápmi and the history of Sámi people who live on the land?
MM:Wow that’s a big question! Well we are Indigenous people, so we’ve been where we are for what you can tell for over 10,000 years. The hard part is that Sweden always wanted to categorize us as a “minority”, which we are, but not just a minority. We are Indigenous, and I think that one of the hard things has been to proving that because we have a history of not leaving trails. That we are guests in nature, so we haven’t left anything to find really, no big marks. But we are Indigenous people, we have been very isolated because we live in the northern part of Sweden which is for many people I think unknown ground. When you travel far up north in Sweden, and I’ll talk just about Sweden-Norway-Finland, it’s a lot different. The landscape is a lot different from the middle part of Sweden and down to the south. So it’s kind of hard to live there if you don’t know how to use the ground and how to hunt and fish. And so we had been kind of isolated.
Then around 16th century, like in many other places in the world, the Church became very central and started to travel. And to make a very long story short they started to go farther up north and of course tried to get the Sámis into the church for the same reasons as.. I mean they treated the Sámis the same way they treated Indigenous people all around the world. So it was a battle between religions I would say. Only the fact that Sámis never went to war, we don’t even have a name for war in the Sámi language. We’ve never been a people of war.
We’ve been mistreated and killed, and slaughtered, like other Indigenous people. And I can just go on and on about how they have been treating us. I can say that the Sámi culture is very different from the Swedish culture, which is also I mean, what I notice is that it’s hard to combine, the Swedish culture and the Sámi culture, or the non-Sámi culture and Sámi culture because we live a lifestyle where the goal is not profit. We have reindeer, we still do reindeer herding, we are the only people in Scandanavia that does reindeer herding. In Sweden we have no wild reindeer anymore, so it’s just like cattle but they are free. And we have the language, our history of the yoik[traditional Sámi singing and music], like I said I could go into specific areas, so if there’s anything specific you want to talk about I can tell you.
TFSR: I mean, this is a very complex question, because how do you distill 10,000 plus years of history of a people in a short answer to a question. But I think that the groundwork that you laid just now will be very useful for listeners in just conceptualizing the things that we are speaking about. And I do wanna talk about reindeer some more, I wanna talk about music, I wanna talk about a bunch of other stuff that I think will come up organically.
MM: I can tell you one thing that I usually tell people that don’t really know what Sámis are. And that is that I feel more related to my Native American friends and my Inuit friends than I feel related to my Swedish friends. So our culture is very similar to the other more known Indigenous people, and that’s a good way to explain it. That we are not Swedish, the culture is very very different from the Swedish culture.
TFSR: Yeah that makes a lot of sense to me, and there was a question that I had later in the interview about sort of the construction of race and the construction of whiteness as it relates to Sámi folks..
MM: That is a very interesting topic! A very dangerous one too.
TFSR: Especially because of, I was born and raised here on Turtle Island [decolonial name for the so-called US] and my understanding of race is very specific and very culturally rooted here. And I was wondering if you had any words on the construction of race and whiteness as it relates or doesn’t relate to Sami folks or you specifically?
MM: This is so interesting because in Sweden, they never ask me this question because the topic is so toxic. And in Sweden we don’t say “race”, like you can’t even mention it. I’ve been to the US or Canada, and there people will come up to me and say “what race are you?” And you could never do that in Sweden, ne-ver do that! That word is like, bad. Which is for good reasons, often. But for Sámis it’s very interesting to talk about, because one thing that we don’t always have in common to other Indigenous people is that you can’t always tell if a person is non-Swedish, or if they’re Sámi. We look very different.
Like I have friends that are very tall, very light skinned, you couldn’t tell the difference between a non-Sámi person and that person. But that person could still be a Sámi. And then I have friends and my own family who are very dark, like I said, people ask me all the time where I’m from. They can’t really put a finger on it where I’m from. And that is one of the of course terrible things when it comes to racism, that you get categorized in what race you are and valued by the tone of your skin. And that is horrible! But it has also been one of the things that I think has been hard for Sámis sometimes, that we have to hold on so tight to the other cultural things that we have as Sámis because you can’t really tell by just looking at us all the time.
And I know I’ve heard stories from my elders that when Sweden came, and when I say “Sweden” I mean the church or the people who collect the taxes, they would actually tell Sámi women that they think she was cheating, fooling around, because they had kids who looked so different, you could have one kid that was so dark and one that was so light. So, I mean that is a question that I think is even toxic to talk about among Sámis actually.
Of course we have groups in Sápmi that are very against mixing between Sámis and non-Sámis, still! Like that you should keep the blood “pure”. And more areas are more into that than others, and definitely how connected you are to the reindeer herding, I mean only 10% of the Sámi population in Sweden is working as a reindeer herder. That’s not a lot, but it’s still one of the biggest and most important thing in Sámi culture and that becomes very important, the question of are you in the reindeer herding business or not. And how much of non-Sámi blood do you really have, I mean that is definitely a topic but it’s very toxic to talk about.
And do you have a Sámi last name? I belong to one of the people, like I do have a Sámi last name. And many people don’t, and there’s a reason for that, Sweden came and took it!! I mean, we see now the results of what they’ve done to the Sámi people that is very hard for specific groups in Sápmi to “be” a full Sámi. If they don’t have a last name, they don’t do reindeer herding, they don’t have a membership in a Sámi village. And that is nobody’s fault but Sweden’s and Norway’s.
So yeah, definitely, this is something that does exist.
Can I give an example? I have such a good example, like I have a daughter, she is NikkeSunnas, she is turning 8 this summer. I come from a very culturally Sámi family, Märak, and my grandfather, he passed away this December. He was a living legend, and now he’s just a legend, but he was one of the greatest people we’ve had in Sápmi. He was the first Sámi to become a priest, that combined this other religion with the church. He helped so many people, he brought back yoik to the church when it was still forbidden, when it was a sin. So my family’s very known for that part of the Sámi culture, the yoik and the storytelling. And my daughter’s father, his name is Pärak, and he comes from a very known reindeer herding family. They’ve been doing reindeer herding since the beginning, and his grandfather was well known, well known. So my daughter she is now brought up in such a strong Sámi culture family, like she has 2 heavy last names, and her first name is also very heavy “NikkeSunnas Märak Pärak”. She knows how to ride a snowmobile, a four wheeler, she has reindeer, we have a lot of cottages up in different places in Sápmi. She has the whole package, and she looks like a little elf, you know?
They will never, no one will never question her ever of her heritage, where she’s from. Everybody knows her parents, her parent’s name, grandparents, the areas that we’re from. I mean, the history goes way back, no one will ever question her. She has a friend, and I won’t mention her name, but her mother is, well we say she is mixed. She is a little bit Sámi, a little bit Finnish, a little bit Swedish, a little bit something-something, you know? And her mother, I mean she was searching for her Sámi roots when she was a grown up, so she has not been brought up in the Sámi culture. She has a daughter with a man from France, so the kid is very mixed I mean she’s amazing. So my daughter and her friend they went to the same preschool, which is a Sámi preschool for the Sámi kids and they can speak their language and get a foot into Sámi culture. It’s mainly for reindeer herding kids.
When they were supposed to start school, this friend went to the Swedish school instead of the Sámi school. And the main reason why she started Swedish school instead is because her parents wanted to spare her from being that kid in the class that is the least Sámi of them all. She has no cottages, nobody knows her grandparents, she has no connection to the reindeer herding whatsoever. Like she’s just a kid, but she is of course Sámi! She has Sámi blood! But she has not been brought up in a Sámi culture family. Which can actually make it pretty hard, because all the other kids are so connected, we have this – I don’t know what it is – but I mean it’s a special connection, we share everything and all the kids go to the reindeer herding things, and all the kids go to the cottages during the summer and the wintertime.
And this kid would be an outsider from that. And she will get questioned when they grow up, like people will start questioning her “how much Sámi are you? Where are you from? Do you really belong here?” I wont say that that would definitely happen, but there is a risk.
I wouldn’t act the way that her parents did, because I believe that we are actually developing now and are not as harsh as we were before. But I mean, of course there’s a risk, and I don’t think the Swedish people know this. That there is such a cultural difference between the Sámis and the non-Sámis that they wanted to spare her from a young age from not being the outsider who wasn’t Sámi enough. So, that’s just an example. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, like did they do the right thing? I think they should have put her thru Sámi school, cause she will probably grow up like her mother and wonder like, hey why did you do this? Like I have a connection to this world and you made a choice for me. Because this is in one way a choice, I know this for a fact because I live in Jokkmokk. And in Jokkmokk there is only 3,000 people in this little town, so here it’s very much like “did you go to the Sámi school or not?”
If you didn’t you have to explain yourself, why? Ok, so now you wanna become a Sámi?? you didn’t have to go thru all the shit that we did, that went to the Sámi school, getting bullied and whatnot. But now that you are a grown up, now you want to become a Sámi, and have the traditional costume and.. ok.. you know what I’m saying? I mean, you can see this in different cultures but in Sweden I don’t think the people have any idea of how it is.
TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much for that example. I think that what you’re bringing up is making me think of really just complex currents of understanding and belonging, especially in communities and in people that are heavily impacted by the ongoing violences of colonialism and how complex that can look.
Gabriel, I would love to ask a little bit more about the book and about your process in writing the book, and about sort of how you approached this kind of research and history work as somebody who is outside of the community that you are seeking to uplift and do this kind of work with. And I’m wondering what sorts of things should other researchers keep in mind in your opinion if they are seeking to do this kind of work as well?
GK:So I think this is a very important question. It’s also a question that makes me slightly uncomfortable because just the fact that I decided to do this book as an outsider doesn’t necessarily mean that I know how to do that work, or that I did it the “right” way. So I’m sure there are plenty of things I could have done better, I’m sure that people have very valid criticisms, in general I don’t think there is a blueprint for how to do this.
So I can say in response to your question, it’s all going to be very subjective. Obviously I gave that much thought before I embarked on the project. I mean, this was in many ways but also in this way a very special project for me because let’s say I work on a book about sports, or I work on a book about straight edge, I do not question my validity as an author. If I feel I have a good idea for a book and I find a publisher who wants to release the book, then I get to work and do the best I can. But I don’t really go thru a process of asking myself “is this really my place?”.
Now with this book, that was a very big question, that was the decisive question. At the beginning I felt that I had a good idea but I was not sure whether I was the right person to do it. So the first thing I did, which I guess maybe is the first part of answering your question, the first thing I did was basically to look for approval within the Sámi community. Now the Sámi community is no monolithic block, people have different opinions, there are no individual Sámi who can speak for the whole community. But I was looking for feedback and opinions of people I knew, and people whose thoughts for different reasons were particularly important to me. And I mention this because – oh and I also mention it in the preface to the book – I remember there was one very important phone conversation I had very early on with Anders Sinna, a Sámi painter who Maxida knows well.
And I’m a big fan of his work, and I also wanted him to be one of the people in the book that I interviewed, which then he agreed to. And so very early on in the process I had a conversation with him on the phone and I presented the idea to him and was just wondering what he thought. And quite frankly, had he said at that point “ah, I don’t think that’s a very good idea” or “I don’t think you should be doing a book like that”, I might have dropped the project right away. But he didn’t say that, and he was rather encouraging, and so I reached out to more people who I also got encouragement from. So thru those steps I started to see a path that I thought I could follow and reach a satisfying result.
Now, what was important along that path, I think a lot of that is common sense although I’m aware of the fact that historically people who have written books about communities that they themselves don’t belong to, didn’t necessarily follow those common sense guidelines. But one thing that I felt was important was that I was very clear about my position and what I was able to do and not able to do. So I have no firsthand experience of Sámi culture, I am not an expert scholar on Sámi culture, my approach comes from a longstanding interest in Indigenous peoples and their struggles for justice. And so because of this interest throughout the years, because of travels I did and studies I did and conversations I had, I felt that I acquired enough knowledge that allowed me to basically build a platform in this case for Sámi voices to reach a broader international audience.
So to make this really short, I just felt I could be a facilitator to spread knowledge that I thought was important.
And then the second part related to that, and this is maybe even more common sense, is that in the process of working on the book, obviously I am 100 percent dependent on Sámi contributors and Sámi advisers. And in that process you gotta be respectful, you gotta be honest about your intentions, you have to acknowledge people’s contributions, put the community at the center of the project and not yourself. And again, I cannot speak for how well I managed to do that, but this is what I tried. I can maybe add one more thing that I think helped in this process, which is that this is not a book that I will make a lot of money off. This is not a book that helps me with an academic career that I do not have. And it helped I think because those aspects add yet another layer of ethical questions that I think are difficult sometimes to deal with. So luckily, I didn’t have to deal with those. So I think that also made it in a sense easier.
I think there are very general guidelines that would probably be useful for anyone working on such a project, but then of course it very much how that plays out specifically very much depends on the specific project that people are working on. Where they are and what their position is, what their relationship is with the communities they write about. So, exactly, there is no blueprint, I think there are some general guidelines, but if you decide to do a project like that these specifics you have to work out in that specific project you’re working on.
TFSR: One thing I am curious about, Gabriel and Maxida, what kinds of support for Sámi issues is there amongfar left and anarchist spaces and anarchist people in Scandinavia and any invitation or provocations that you might have for how people, people around the world but specifically how people on the land can have y’all’s back a little bit better or if they’re doing something really well and you want to name that, I would love to hear.
GK: How about this, I can say something about my experiences here in the broader activist community because that in a sense there was also a, I don’t know if motivating factor is the right word, but it played into my idea of doing this book. And I know that Maxida has things to add to what I’m going to say, and then we can maybe look at more specifically what especially people outside of the Nordic countries can do to support Sámi struggles.
So if I just speak about this, my experience here with the so called activist community, it was very surprising to me when I first came to Sweden in 2007 because from the time I spent in North America and Australia and New Zealand, my sense was that, again very broadly speaking, the activist communities there with all the flaws and shortcomings and mistakes that we all make, at least had a very clear and I felt sincere ambition to be good allies, accomplices, collaborators, whatever the preferred terminology was, to Indigenous people, so to stand in solidarity with them.
And I kind of expected that to be the case here as well, but I don’t think it is. So if you look at the non-Sámi activist communities in the Nordic countries, to me there was – and maybe it has changed since I got here – but I think there still is a surprising level of ignorance. I mean I’m simplifying here, but if you talk to the average leftist radical activist in, say, Stockholm, they’re often very well versed in what’s happening in Palestine, Chiapas, perhaps even on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but they’re very ignorant about what’s happening in Sápmi.
And I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think there are a few reasons for this and I’ve not really come to conclusions so these are kind of guesses, but I mean one thing is that this ignorance is a reflection of general ignorance among mainstream society here about the Sámi people. So in that sense it’s a reflection, but I think there are other issues as well. One is, I think that historically the left (and that reaches from social democracy to the far left) in the Nordic countries was particularly technocratic and “progress” oriented. So industrialization, technological progress, science including at the beginning of the 20th century racial biology, all of that was supposed to be a way toward socialism and was considered progressive. So if you have that picture, Indigenous people like the Sámi are basically a stumbling block, they don’t fit into this picture, so I think that is one thing that you can still feel people don’t really know. Its something that doesn’t fit into this historical leftist ideology and so people have a very difficult time dealing with that.
And more concretely, I think that is then enhanced by what I as a complete outsider because I am not even originally from the Nordic countries, see as a bit of a cultural problem. What I mean by that is that here in the Nordic countries, maybe particularly in Sweden, people often have a really hard time with dealing with conflict. Whenever there is conflict, or there are certain issues that are complicated, people get very insecure and confused. Now if you look at the broad activist communities here, and the views that people have and the issues that are important and the norms that are often attached to it, some of them clash with the realities in Sápmi.
So to take an example, is like animal rights, people here on the left are often anti-hunting. Hunting is a part of traditional Sámi culture, reindeer herds are protected from predators, for example wolves. So here we have one example where that sort of clashes with what is often perceived as an anti-hunting norm. In the left, similar with environmentalism; people are in support of green energy, this is fine. However if you look at how that plays out in reality, wind parks are predominantly established in Sápmi because that’s where they least disturb mainstream society although they majorly disturb reindeer herding. So there you have another conflict that some people on the left find difficult to deal with.
Also things like national identity, a lot of Sámi activists would speak of the Sami as a nation and find that important. We have one contributor to the book for example Aslak Holmberg, who speaks of cultural nationalism as something that’s important. That clashes with some of the criticism of anything that has to do with the nation among the left here. So I think rather than addressing these issues and accepting that this is challenging, and thru dialogue and conversation which can be painful and complicated, modify your position or enhance your positions, people would rather just shy away from that and pretend it doesn’t exist which means that very often, you know, Sámi issues would seem to become too “complicated”. And I can’t just as a final example which I thought illustrated this well, there is a well known Swedish writer who writes a lot about this situation in the northern provinces of Sweden, and urban rural divide, the social injustices implied in that. He doesn’t write anything about the Sámi, and he once explained that saying “oh no, that topic is just too complicated, whenever you write it’ll be wrong” meaning whatever you write someone will criticize you for that, perhaps harshly.
And while that may be true, and I understand on a personal level that you don’t want to put yourself in that position, if most people have that approach you will miss out on debate.
And then a third aspect that I might mention, and Maxida knows a lot about this because she has experienced all of this firsthand, is that if you look at the tactics that again, the sort of average Nordic activist employs, and that’s nothing that’s specific to the Nordic countries that’s true for all of western europe, it is very much based on an urban environment. So you can be a pretty anonymous figure who attends protests and meetings, but if you want to go about your daily life you can do so pretty much undisturbed. This doesn’t work in an environment like Sápmi, or any rural environment for that matter, because people know you and there’s not place to hide if you’re outspoken on certain issues. It also means the risks you’re taking are much higher and the demands are very different, so I think topolitical activism. And what a lot of people in the urban general leftist activist communities are used to. So I think that creates another complication.
MM: You’ve done your job Gabriel!! Everything that you said is exactly how it is. I mean, that is so correct.
I mean, in Sweden people here are so afraid of conflict. And I’m sad to say that there is not a lot of true activists in Sweden. I have a word for this which essentially means a fake activist. I know a lot of people and a lot of so called activists groups that say that they fight for justice, when you come down to it it’s not about justice at all it’s about making yourself heard, about making yourself look cool, but when it comes to the source like what do we fight for? Or should we really fight, shouldn’t we try to gather? They back out.
So like Gabriel said, there’s a lot of so called activists, that it clashes with the Sami way of living. One example is one of my close friends, he got prison, seven years of prison, because he was accused of killing a wolverine. And I can tell you that his family, they got so thrashed for years from the so called activists, the animal friends. So I mean, we struggle with both the politicians in Sweden, the Swedish government, and the so called activists. A lot of the the Indigenous friendly people are allowed to go to the US to protest, I mean do you know how many people from Sweden went to Standing Rock? We had so many Swedes that went there, for the Native Americans! They want to put a feather on their fucking head and pretend to be some kind of spirit animal. But they would never, never, go up north to do the same for us.
And I think that is also because, Sweden I mean, the history that we have, now you can really tell the difference tho between for example the US and Sweden. Sweden has been pretty protected from war, so the Swedish people don’t know what a revolution is. The people in Sweden that have been abused are the Indigenous people, and the people that immigrate of course into Sweden. But the Swedish people have not been thru trauma. So I think this is a result of that, that when it comes down to it, they get too afraid. They will never choose a side. Like if you ask Swedish people what they vote for, 95% will not tell you. Ever. NEVER will they tell you. And if you do, you have a mark on your head and you will live with that for the rest of your life.
I mean so, that is like Gabriel said, it clashes. We have a lot of so called activists in Sweden, but to be honest, there’s not a lot of real activism going on here in Sweden. And I can just agree to everything that he said and it was very interesting to hear him speak about it, he can see it from an outside perspective, because I think that Swedish people would probably not agree. And that is also why, it’s kind of hard to live in this world because sometimes it feels like we have everyone against us, we can never do anything right. The whole culture and the way that we live and breathe up here just doesn’t combine to anything else in Sweden. We have the same temple and this is of course the Swedish government has been very good at keeping quiet, like not teaching Sámi history. So when we claim our rights, people don’t even know that we exist, it’s kind of hard to claim your rights if they don’t know that we exist. And then we get questioned about that.
So everything that Gabriel said is completely true. Which is sad! It’s very sad.
TFSR: It is, and it’s making me think of sort of something that happens here a lot, there’s a running, not a saying but, but the Indigenous people here who have been kind enough to talk to me about issues of decolonization is lean into the discomfort, because colonialism affects everybody and it affects you, the colonizer as well, and it disproportionately affects people who are impacted by the ongoing violences of colonialism and colonization, but it affects everybody. Decolonization is an uncomfortable process. It’s not like sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, it’s a very uncomfortable process so like, that’s making me think of conversations that are happening here about the specific situations that are happening on this landmass. But thank y’all so much for going into that!
I’m wondering if you have any ideas on, or if you even want to have more of a solidarity with the far left and what do you think that will take if that’s a desired thing.
MM: Definitely, but still I think it’s also a bit dangerous because you still want the right people to be on your side. The far left can also be fucking crazy. And that’s one of the things that I try to tell people who come out and ask us is you have to stop the fight. People love to put themselves into different groups and just fight among those groups, the more groups the better. And I try to remind people that what is the goal? My goal is to get people to be on my side. And if I just stand there and scream and disrespect people, and expect people to know everything about me already before they open their mouths. So you want to have people from both sides to have our backs.
Of course not the far right, right? But I feel it’s dangerous to categorize a whole culture to just be on the left, I think the goal is for people to understand that this is our norm and we need people on every political party – except for the racists – to be on our side. And not just activists, but normal people you know what I’m saying? People that are non-activists, people that don’t dare to be an activist. You can’t expect everyone to be the way that I am, I am very outspoken and I’m very unafraid, but people are not just like that. Everyone is not like that. So of course the goal is to get people on our side, but for the right reasons and in the right way.
And you have to aim high. You have to aim for the Swedish government. You can’t just be a grassroot, you know? That’s what I said when I started as an artist, and some people started to question me when I went to big events with all kinds of people like known artists and politicians, like ‘why is she there, she used to be in the woods screaming?’ yeah I used to be in the woods screaming, but my goal was to be in on the fucking round table!
I have to be up there with the big horses, to speak out because I need them on my side. Not just the grassroots community, you have to aim high. So I want the Swedish government, that’s my fucking goal, to get them on our side. And hopefully the next generation are smarter, but it’s important to not just look at the leftists, cause then we put ourselves in that little group one more time. The group needs to be bigger and more welcoming. The rights that we claim, they are weird! Like why shouldn’t we have our rights? it’s common sense. I mean if we start to educate people in Swedish history, colonization, what is actually been done to the Sámi people, what is happening NOW to the Sámi people, a lot of people will understand.
Cause I believe in the good in people. The dangerous thing is when you believe that most people have bad intentions. If that is what you think about everyone you’ve already lost. And I have to believe in the good in people. Maybe I have to say things ten times before you get it, but the tenth time, maybe you’ll get it. And then you will come over to my side. Cause in the end it’s about human rights, you can rape a person, you can kill a person, and the police talk to you for fucking 24 hours and then you’re out again. But if you kill a wolverine, you get two and a half years prison?! And that’s only for reindeer herders, cause our cattle are free, so that’s why we aren’t allowed to protect them, cause they’re free. Like if we had them as cows or pigs, that is different rules. But only Sámi people have free cattle, so we have different rules. I mean, that’s just an example of how it looks today.
And when you tell people this, a lot of people actually understand. I’ve met all the big politicians in Sweden, I’ve done TV shows with a lot of them. And I’ve been criticized for sitting with people who vote for different parties than I do. I’m very left, my heart is to the left. But I have friends that are from different parties, and of course there are parties in Sweden that I would never ever socialize with. Like any racist party, I would never do that. But I’ve been criticized for having friends who vote for different things than I do.
But then I tell them, they meet me and I’m the first and only Sámi they will ever talk to, and they hear my history, maybe I will change someones political views. Maybe they will think different the next time the question about mining industry comes up, and they will remember me. And they will remember that I respected them, and they will remember my story. And maybe the outcome will be different.
So I just think that love and respect, I mean it sounds very cliched but that is actually very true. The dangerous thing with activists is the people who do it for the wrong reasons. Just for the fight. And in the end we don’t want the fight, we want peace. We have to live next to each other, we have to know how to combine different worlds, that is the only way that we can survive in the end is to get along. Not to kill each other, not to fight. So I think that the true activists need to have that in mind. That of course I want the left to be on my side, but I also want the right to be on my side. And if they are on my side, they will become left!
TFSR: You know, the whole love and respect thing being a cliché, people really respond to it positively. And I seepeople from all over the world saying it, we just need to understand each other. So thank you for saying that.
MM: Of course I wanna say too, Nazis and racists are a completely different question. Just to be clear.
GK: Just real quick, since we are not at the peace stage yet, but there are struggles ongoing, I just wanted to get back real quick to what you said earlier, what was implied in your question about how people can concretely support Sámi struggles today if they wanted to. I was wondering just a very practical thing, when this is going to be aired can you add links? Cause there are cases that are ongoing about resistance to development projects, mining, there is a big plan for a railway that is supposed to be built on the Finnish side of Sápmi. And there are ongoing court cases about different things, land rights, hunting, the forced culling of reindeer herds, so there is information that people could access and they could spread it. Very often the is very concrete information on those websites, about how to get involved.
TFSR: I would be interested to hear from both of y’all about, Maxida you mentioned far right Nazis and racist political parties. We have all seen the rise of a street level and government level far right, alt right, and fascism all around the world. I’m wondering what kinds of impacts that has had on Sápmi and on y’all specifically.
MM: It’s very ironic! Because a lot of people are like yay, because we have the Swedish Democrats (a racist political party). And I often get the comment that ‘oh they will love you Sámis because you are the native Swedes!’ And that is definitely not the case, no no no. They are against probably everything that we do and especially the reindeer herding. And like all the parties, except for the left ones unfortunately, are for for example the mining industry. And the Sámi people especially the reindeer herders take up so much land.
I mean, they are against everything that is not “really” Swedish culture. And we are I think, when you start to talk about what Swedish culture is, is where you can really see that the Sámis are different from the Swedes. So I mean, of course we are affected by it, and if they would get more power than they have it would be a definite issue for the Sámi villages and for the reindeer herding industry, definitely. They want to open up the Sámi villages, and this is kind of hard to explain because then I’d have to explain what exactly a Sámi village is, but you could almost call it a tribe. And in this so called ‘tribe’ you have to have a membership, and only if you have a membership can you have reindeer. And we have specific areas in Sweden for every village which can have reindeer on. And on those areas, for every specific village or tribe, we have fishing and hunting rights. And we are the only ones who actually can fish and hunt there, because we are the so called protectors of it. So people won’t come there for vacations or a sports trip, or whatever. And so that’s one example, they want to open up the Sami villages and make it free for everyone to have reindeer, and everyone to fish and hunt.
And the result of that would be catastrophic! We would lose everything! So I mean, yeah we are definitely affected, and affected in ways of course that they are just racist pigs that hate everyone that is not white.
GK: So if I can add one thing that I think is interesting, if you observe the especially the far right parties that now are in all the parliaments of the Nordic countries, so the Sweden Democrats here in Sweden, and the so called ‘Progress Party’ in Norway, and the True Finns in Finland. I think if you look at their policies toward the Sámi, it’s interesting because it reflects a trend on the far right that goes from let’s say traditional very crude forms of racism based in biology to you know, what is sometimes referred to as ‘ethno-pluralist’ or basically cultural forms of racism. I find it interesting that sometimes you can have representatives of those parties pay lip service to cultural traits of the Sámi – the language, or traditional clothing, or whatever – something that appeals ideologically to their idea of national coherence and unity and whatnot.
However, at the same time all of those parties explicitly deny any special social or political rights to the Sami as Indigenous peoples or just minorities –
MM: Exactly!
GK: – So what you end up with is they are allowed to be part of the nation state project of Sweden or Norway or Finland, as some kind of exotic spice or possibly a showcase of how supposedly ‘tolerant’ those people are, because they let these ‘minorities’ who don’t speak their language or whatever.
But what it essentially means on the ground is that you deny them all civil and democratic rights which are essential as a foundation of sovereignty and self determination. Or if you want to put it the other way around, the only way that Sámi can get civil and democratic rights is if they become fully assimilated as citizens in the nation state project.
And this is a very deceptive, and thereby also a very dangerous form of, and I would speak in terms of ongoing racism in that case that these parties represent. But also as Maxida said you can see that very concretely here in Sweden, for example the Sweden Democrats are very clear in wanting to take away the exclusive right to reindeer herding from the Sámi. In Norway, the Progress Party is very clear about wanting to abolish the Sámi Parliament, which is one of the most important at least symbolic political institutions of the Sámi, and they want to turn it into alternatively a museum or a hotel or whatever.
So those attacks are very clear, this is nothing hidden, but there are sometimes accompanies by as I said these statements ‘oh but of course the culture is great and the culture is beautiful’ so this is very dangerous.
MM: Yes this is coming back to that question that you asked before about race, cause here it becomes very important that we have to claim our rights and they question like, either you are Swedish or you are not. What are you? So we get questioned, like Gabriel said, they want to take our rights away. Because if we live in Sweden and we claim to be Indigenous, then why should we have special treatment? That is one thing that they really push out, like, no special treatment for you guys. And this is just history repeating itself. And this is also why some people have memberships in Sámi villages and some people don’t. There are Sámis that did reindeer herding before the Swedish government and the history, they let them keep their membership in the Sámi village, and if you did not do reindeer herding you got kicked out from the village and lost your membership.
And this is the same thing that the Swedish Democrats are doing now, like, either you are Swedish or you’re not. You claim to be Sámi, then get the fuck outta here. If you want to still be in Sweden, then ‘act Swedish’. I can just see history repeating itself once again.
But like I’m saying, this is also very interesting, we live in a time now of climate change for example, and now we have this fucking coronavirus just taking over the world. And I can almost laugh and say they’ve been trying to kill us Indigenous people for ever! But they never fucking succeeded, and why is that? Because in the end the knowledge that we have is the most important knowledge. That is one thing that I notice now in Sweden, now people are starting to get more interested! Like ‘how do you live up there?’ and they want to learn, even vegans are thinking about learning how to hunt. Because we see that when the world collapses, money and guns don’t work, you have nothing!
That is a war that everyone is prepared for. So if you have guns and money and power, you can fight a war. But with climate change and a virus?? The most important things to know is Indigenous knowledge, that is how you survive. I just want to say that because that is a change that I see now, that now for the first time I hear people becoming more interested in how we live. This is also probably history repeating itself, and this is probably why they never succeeded in killing us. Because something always happens in the world, like catastrophe and trauma, and when it comes to that it’s a special kind of knowledge that you need to know. It’s a special way of living that you need to know that will make us all survive. And I just find that quite interesting actually!
TFSR: That is really interesting! This gets into a question that I had specifically about reindeer herding. I was interested in reading Gabriel’s introduction to Liberating Sápmi, sort of horrified to read that Sweden, or like the colonial governments, were sort of gate-keeping Sámi identity, and maybe this is a misrepresentation and please let me know if so, but gate-keeping Sámi identity by saying essentially that if you don’t herd reindeer you’re not Sámi? Is that correct?
GK: What is true specifically in Sweden you have this strong distinction which comes from a law from the early 20th century between reindeer herding Sámi and non-reindeer herding Sámi. There were some particular rights granted to reindeer herding Sámi that were not granted to other Sámi, and that is a classical example of a colonial divide and conquer strategy that has caused big problems also within the Sámi community which maintain to this day. So I think this is the part that you are probably referring to.
MM: Yeah I mean, parts of this definitely still exist. Like I said before, you have to have a membership in a Sámi village to have reindeer for example. And with having a membership you get specific rights, and if you don’t have a membership you don’t have the same rights. And that is also a part of that whole history and what Gabriel talked about, and that has definitely been – and still is! – a very toxic conflict in Sápmi, that forces Sámis to fight against each other because we still have families that try to get back their memberships in these Sámi villages, but there’s not enough space for them to have reindeer. We are only allowed to have a certain amount of reindeer, because we only have this and this much land to be on.
So I mean the conflicts that we have in Sápmi are horrific, and that is a definite result of the Swedish history and how they’ve treated us. Now we are left to solve all this without any rights as an Indigenous people, and it’s very hard to solve these conflicts. So that definitely still exists, that the reindeer herders have rights that non-reindeer herders don’t have.
GK: But then one could add maybe that the rights of the reindeer herders are also controlled by the government. So that’s where the forced culling comes in for example, because the number of reindeer that a specific Sámi village can have is still determined by the nation state government. If the numbers are too big, the government will come in and say ‘ok, you have to slaughter – whetever – 20% of your herd because your herd is too big’. And this is one of some of the most current, prominent examples of conflicts in court between Sámi and the governments.
TFSR: It’s really reminding me of the government of Canada and how that government really gate-keeps and detrimentally affects the lives and identities of the Indigenous people who live there. I would be interested in hearing y’alls take on, so Sápmi is a pretty large territory, it spans many hundreds of miles, and it gets crossed by several colonial borders, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia.
I know in Canada, there are many peoples, the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Mohawk, and Coastal Salish and others, all those territories are crossed by a very heavily militarized colonial border, to say nothing of the colonial border in the South. And I’m wondering how that colonial border has affected the relationships between folks who are Sámiwho live in Sápmi. I wonder if y’all have any words on that?
MM: I would say that this a beautiful thing with this culture, is that we still see Sápmi as, if we could say, one land. So for us we know, I mean I am Lule Sámi, which is one type of Sámi, and my people we go way into Norway. So I speak the same language and have the same traditional clothing as a lot of people in Norway, so for us they [the borders] are non-existent. We really see Sápmi as one area without borders, but of course we know that they are there! It affects the reindeer herding a lot. But I think for us, that is one of the most beautiful things in the Sámi culture is that we don’t have any borders, we have family in every country, and travel like nomads did before over the borders and everyone knows everyone.
Politically, we definitely notice it.
GK: The practical problems, just right now I mean with the pandemic-
MM: UGH oh my god!!
GK: – you know with the European Union and special treaties with Norway, since that opened up the borders generally, I think they’ve lost some of the significance they’ve had up to 20 years ago. But just right now, I mean all the borders came back up. I just emailed or texted with people a few days ago who live along the Tana River which for a very long stretch, maybe 100km, marks the border between Finland and Norway. And you have Sámi families literally on the opposite sides of the river, so some of them live in Finland and the others in Norway.
And suddenly you now have the borders coming up it becomes very difficult for them to visit one another. So obviously the practical complications that these borders create and have created, they were partly responsible for forced migration historically. As Maxida points out, that would have been my impression from talking to everyone, every Sámi I’ve talked to in connection with the book, the stress that for Sámi identity those national borders don’t matter.
And that would also include the Sámi community in Russia, which especially in the 20th century with the Iron Curtain, was very isolated from the rest of the Sámi community. But my sense is, and Maxida I would assume would confirm that, is that they are a clear part of the Sámi family and community because of the strong historical and cultural ties.
TFSR: Yeah, thank you for talking about that, and thank you so much for your time and your willingness to come onto the show, it was an absolute honor to get to speak to y’all about the work that y’all are doing and your experiences. Is there anything that we missed in this interview that you want to give voice to in closing?
MM: Shoutout to my Natives!!
I think one of the powerful things is that in percent, we are not that many Sámi, and there are not that many Inuits in Greenland, and whatnot, but wow what a huge group we are as Indigenous people. And that is so powerful to see, some of my closest friends are Indigenous from different countries. And when we ally and hold each other’s backs, I mean the government should fucking beware this new generation coming up, and just how easy it is now to have contact with one another! I mean you know Tim “2oolman” Hill of A Tribe Called Red? He is one of my closest friends, and just to see how powerful it is when Indigenous people gather as one is just amazing. And I just want to say that I am so grateful for being in this community because it is so powerful and so loving, and they can just keep on trying to kill us but they will not succeed. So never shut up, my Natives!
TFSR: And that was our interview with Sámi hip hop artist and activist Maxida Märak and author and activist Gabriel Kuhn about Kuhn’s 2019 release Liberating Sápmi; Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North available now thru PM Press. If you are interested in learning more about Sámi struggles, which cover a lot of ground between government’s forcing reindeer culling and anti-mining campaigns, check out our show notes for links from our guests.
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.
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
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.
. … . ..
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.
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.
This midweek, we’re sharing two segments. First up, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin talks about attempts in the 1960’s and 70’s at building a prisoners union in the United States and parallels with inside / outside organizing in the USA today. Then we hear from Ohio death row prisoner from the Lucasville Uprising case, Bomani Shakur (aka Keith Lamar) about his struggle to stay alive and call out the injustice in his and so many cases.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin is an author, black anarchist, organizer, former Black Panther and former political prisoner based in Kansas City, Missouri. In this segment, Lorenzo talks about prisoners organizing unions and other associations in the past, the thoughts of George Jackson and Martin Sostre and more.
JoNina Ervin, an autonomous organizer and also a former Black Panther, who is married to Lorenzo has put out a specific request for solidarity to help these elders weather the pandemic and lighten the load of mutual aid in their community which we’ll share in our show notes. Suffice to say, donations to help them get safer access to laundry can be made by sending a donation via Paypal account at: organize.the.hood@gmail.com / cash app: $CaseyGoon / venmo: @casey-R-goonan. I’ll read JoNina’s appeal after Lorenzo’s interview.
Free Keith Lamar / Bomani Shakur
Bomani Shakur speaks to us from death row at OSP Youngstown in Ohio. Bomani is accused of crimes related to the 1993 Lucasville Uprising he claims innocence of and has an execution date set for November 16, 2023. For a little over an hour we speak about his upbringing, his case, injustice in white supremacist and capitalist America, Bomani’s politicization and struggle to find himself, defend his dignity and his life. This interview was recorded on April 29th, a little over a day before the end of the month of solidarity with and direct action for Bomani Shakur. Thanks to Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement – NYC for hooking us up with the chat and helping coordinate the Month Of Solidarity. More on his case can be found at KeithLamar.Org, on the facebook page “Justice For Keith Lamar” and at the twitter account, FREEKeithLamar. On his website you can find a link to his book, Condemned, ways to donate to his phone fund, and a link to the excellent, 30 minute documentary on youtube about his case also named Condemned. If you’re on twitter, there is a twitter storm planned for April 30, 2020. Find our twitter or @FreeKeithLamar to join in.
Phone Zap about Covid-19 and North Carolina Prisons
Over the past month, covid19 has blazed through NC prisons like wildfire.
Across DPS facilities, over 600 people have tested positive — roughly the same number of cases in all of Wayne County, which has a population that is 3x larger. One person (at Pender C.I) has already died of complications, and a single facility (Neuse C.I.) has a mind-boggling 466 positive cases.
The reason Neuse has so many confirmed cases is that DPS decided to test everyone there–and they should do the same at all facilities with significant numbers of positive cases, such as NCCI Women, where 81 people have tested positive so far. This is the only way to know the full scale of the outbreak and to be able to take appropriate measures to mitigate further spread.
Please call Commissioner of Prisons Todd Ishee on Thursday, April 30 to demand universal testing at four hard-hit prisons!
Word is now coming out that today, April 30th 2020 there is a demonstration growing at Pendleton CI in Indiana by folks incarcerated there. A number of prisoners will refuse meals today due to neglect, poor treatment and prison officials’ complete lack of care and concern in regard to crisis management or emergency response during this global pandemic. Prisoners have reported receiving sparse and poorly put-together sack lunch and one small bag of cereal a day. They are demanding proper nutrition during this time that will serve to sustain and to fortify themselves against sickness as well as proper Personal Protective Equipment and cleaning supplies in order to clean and sanitize their cells and such. Word comes out from inside Pendleton despite the apparent manipulation of prisoners jpay tablets that are used for communication. It’s presumed that the disconnections are done in order to slow/stop communications with the outside world. The tablets were disconnected completely for several days about a week ago leaving prisoners with absolutely no way to contact anyone on the outside after a physical altercation occurred between pigs and prisoners when the pigs attempted to house prisoners confirmed to be covid-19 positive with those that had not been confirmed to have it.
An article discussing this topic should be forthcoming by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is incarcerated at Pendleton, some time today. You can call Pendleton CI in Indiana to lodge a complaint for this treatment, support for the hunger–strikers and express a concern by calling 1(765)778-2107
Josh Williams Parole Hearing in June
One last announcement before we get started with the interviews. Josh Williams, who’s serving an eight-year sentence connected to his participation in the Ferguson uprising, is up for parole in June 2020 and there’s a call for people to write support letters. The letters themselves should be addressed to the parole board but sent to Josh’s prison address. You can find a sample letter people can see here: https://www.freejoshwilliams.com/freejosh
If people would like to send a printed letter but don’t currently have access to printing, you can contact the co-ordinator at freejoshwilliams@gmail.com and hopefully sort something out that way. Please feel free to pass this information on to your contacts and generally share in whatever way you see fit.
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Tracks sampled in this episode:
Souls Of Mischeif and Adrian Younge – Stopped (instrumental) – There Is Only Now (Deluxe Edition)
Soul Chef – Back In The Day (instrumental) – The Kool Truth Instrumentals
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Lorenzo Komb’oa Ervin Transcription
True Leap Press: So yeah, we’re talking about the prisoner union, and this is the ‘70s?
Lorenzo Komb’oa Ervin: Yeah. ‘73, ‘74 and ‘75. It’s actually all the way up to ‘77, when the Supreme Court made a ruling that it was unconstitutional.
TLP: To have a prisoner union?
LKE: Yeah, it was unconstitutional, the United States Supreme Court. But by that time, they had signed up 1000’s of prisoners all over the country, in different states that started their own union there in that state in the state prisons. But here’s the deal all this came after the Attica Rebellion and the massacre there and everything. And the anger of the prisoners took various forms. You had other rebellions, and you had strikes, and you had a number of things like that happening in local prisons.
But thensome people organized, I think it was in North Carolina, as far as I can remember. The original prison labor unions were started by a guy, Jim Grant, who was a civil rights activist, and some other prisoners in the North Carolina state prison system. It also was going down in places like Walpole [State Prison, currently MCI Cedar Junction -ed] in Massachusetts, and that movement first was just the strike. And then after that, and they made contacts with activists on the outside — which is a common thing back in the 1970’s and the ‘60s, was to make contacts with activists on the outside — and they were able to get some support from outside. And so they just started organizing a union, they didn’t ask for a union. They didn’t say “Can we have a union warden?”
So they started organizing unions all over and it started just sweeping the country, you know. You know, California had a big, big contingent, you know, and everything, and other states as well, you know, and it just starts sweeping the country. And, and before long, 1000’s of prisoners were in these unions, and they were demanding prisoners rights, and end to the beatings in prison and long term confinement, the problem of the basic human rights and all this kind of thing. And so, as it got stronger, it tried to build a central union, and it was that point, that this is after some years of going down and having protests and organizing people on the outside putting pressure on the government, and so forth, after all this is going on, then they tried to create a central prisoners labor union. That’s when the wardens took, took them to prison, various state wardens — prison wardens — and so forth, took them to court and wound up filing in the United States Supreme Court. I think it was ‘77 or ‘78 that they got the decision against the whole idea of this, this kind of movement being unconstitutional, they said, and a threat to prison security.
So, what was interesting that, at that time, many of us, we had a split in our ranks, because someone was believed that going to court and fighting and all this was a good thing to do, and others of us felt like we should just continue organizing and build the strongest possible movement that could even resist, repression. And it didn’t matter in final analysis because they just came down on all those of us that they thought were leaders and so forth and just put us away.
Now, there’s one thing though: in the federal prison system, I knew Jim Grant, I met Jim Grant in prison, they shipped him out of North Carolina down to the Atlanta federal prison. And we had started to build a federal prisoners labor union, tried to do that. And, of course, around that time that the decision came down and everything and they isolated a bunch of us and all that.
TLP: Shit.
LKE: But here’s the deal: the prison’s labor union, the difference between it and just the strikers that we’ve seen in recent years is, it was hooked up with the Black Power movement hooked up with the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement, and other organizations that were still live on the outside, you know?
TLP: Can I ask a question?
LKE: Yeah.
TLP: What would you say, then, of the need to connect groups like Movement for Black Lives, into more radical black organizations that do like grassroots stuff on outside with the prison movement?
LKE: Well, I’ll say this, it might require some study — but I just off the head I would think that the movement has to be led by prisoners, and the movement on the outside has to be supportive of the prisoners struggle.
But like I had written myself some time ago, about how activism on the outside have got to start pressuring the state governance and the Feds and everybody else, while the movement on the inside is building. It doesn’t just mean standing on the outside with a picket sign, but, you know, as I’ve written about, going where the officials have their meetings, and, and all these corporations that make money off of prison labor, — and there are quite a few of them — expose that. And some of the stuff that the Free Alabama Movement has started to talk about in this period. We should be doing it that way.
And as far as organizations and movements, well, I’m not sure that those forces are looking for a mass campaign, a mass approach. When I was in prison what broke up everything was this attempt by organizations on the outside, to find some so-called leader or something on the inside, or make him a leader — some prisoner — and, and he was spout their line and all this kind of thing. So, I think, I’m not sure that these movements that exist right now would be willing, or able, to take leadership from prisoners. I’m not sure. I don’t know. We don’t, we can’t say this is 1970-something, and the prison movement that existed at that time saw itself, and actually people on the outside saw it as being the autonomous protest movement
TLP: You’re bringing a much needed critique right now.
LKE: Well, but in terms of that movement then, it had already reached a high stage of development, and struggle. That’s one of the things to bear in man. So you can’t just get that overnight.
Now, I think the movement now would be different and should be different. Technology or different political perspectives, and so on, some of that’s good, some of that’s bad. Some of it is, you know… I don’t know how much support on the on the inside there is with, you know, for instance Black Lives Matter and all that stuff to be quite honest. And it’s a different kind of organization from most of the groups in the 1970’s, it’s much more of a petit-bourgeois organization. And they’re very sectarian in a lot of ways, that’s what I found.
But, nevertheless, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about the ability of the movement on the inside to see the use of legitimate allies, especially in the Black community, which is really, really important, has been missing for so long. You know, I’m saying other than Attica, that moment with Attica, there has not been a mass base of support in the Black community for prisoners. You know, it just hasn’t existed.
TLP: Well, I remember when we were talking though, I remember when we were talking, and we were talking about — it had just been right after the prison strike in 2018 — and we were talking about the moment in the late ‘90s, where it was like 1998, there was Critical Resistance-
LKE: Right.
TLP: – there was the Anarchist Black Cross, it like just emerges, kind of a reemerges, as a federation and a network.
LKE: Right.
TLP: And there’s INCITE! — Women of Color Against Violence. So like, there’s this moment and then you’re also even calling, in 2002, you’re calling for a united prison front, a whole united movement across, and you actually say verbatim “Critical Resistance, the North American Anarchist Black Crosses, and all movement for like, queer, disabled, an all oppressed people, colonized people, united prison front. And so I just wanna say that, like, that moment-
LKE: Did it come though? The thing is, did it come? Did it happen?
TLP: But what what needs to be addressed is that these organizations and networks are in place, and it’s like taking those existing containers, and then doing them, right?
LKE: Well bear this in mind, it isn’t really about organizations as much as it is about prisoners and their families and the communities they come out of, versus what the state has done to communities of color ever since they resorted to the war on drugs, for instance. And the rise of the police, the paramilitary police, and all these kinds of things, you know. This was stuff that the original Black Panther Party had educated about and tried to fight about. And they been trying to explain to white radical allies and so forth, that, the party… we’ve talked about it — the party had a perspective on fascism and the state. And, you know, their thing was that they realized that prisoners could not free themselves, they could not liberate themselves, they had to be part of a broad base mass movement.
And that was actually starting to happen to some extent. And as George Jackson was laying it out, you know, he was explaining a lot of things. He was a key figure in explaining why we had to have this kind of unity.
TLP: You also talked about Martin Sostre.
LKE: I do. I, you know, Martin saucer is my mentor so what do you think, you know? But uh, you know, but but Martin was different. See, Martin, he came, well first he came along before George did and his organizing was to lay the basic foundation so that you could even read and talk about revolutionary activity, you know what I’m saying? Or revolutionary politics. He laid the foundation with is lawsuits.
TLP: He talking about the language of fascism, right? This is the language of anti-fascism. Right? He was an antifacsist, right? That’s the term he was using?
LKE: That’s the terms he was using. And, because he said “We’re not fighting the police.” He said, “we’re fighting the state.” You know, that’s some profound shit! When I first heard that, and you know, cuz the left, it was about “all these fucking cops” and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the cops are the epitome, they’re, they’re agents of the state, but they’re not the state, you know. And that’s the kind of shit, that’s the kind of shit he always would tell me, it’s important to understand the distinction between what they call police power… And it was a certain period, when the so-called police power thing came into existence in the in the 70’s and 80’s. You know, where they started creating their unions and allowed them to be autonomous from the mayor or some shit like that, or, you know, on some level. And then their rise with paramilitary policing and the SWAT teams and beyond that, you know what I’m saying?
Cause what we were talking about how there’s differences in this period, and which, you know, which reduced the strikes and the period that produced the prison labor union. And the prison labor union was a mass movement in and of itself, and it was, you know, it was an autonomous mass movement. And they went out in states all over the country. And so it took the Supreme Court to rule that this was unconstitutional. And to this day, now in this day hardly…activists don’t hardly know about it. Activists have to be charged to always know about these kinds of movements. You know what I’m saying? Because it makes, it makes our work easier in this period in our level of understanding of how we can fight and win.
And so this this thing was more than just them having strikes. They were organizing local groups, and in local areas they had they had outside organizers that had groups on the outside working in communities and stuff. Because I remember one of the things when I was in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, there was this group called Community Aid to Prisoners. And they used to have a radio show on college radio, in Atlanta. They used to come inside, and work with the person, or the group we had in there and everything. And the so called legalize group, the cultural group, they’d come inside, but their thing was to make sure that prisoners were not destroyed, because they seen the shit happen in Attica, and all that. So their thing was can’t let that happen again.
We also gotta link the community with prisoners and the plight of prisoners and shit, you know? And talk about the unjust and unequal condition of Black people that forces us to go to prison anyway, or allows us to be victims of prisons, you know, this kind of thing. So, I don’t know about right now, you know better about right now, about what kind of community based organizing is going on around prison support.
The thing that George Jackson was putting forward is that he said that he wanted, his idea was to have a movement where the masses of people in the streets — including the communities where the prisoners were from, and radical prisoners and revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party — could work together all over the country. And have a dynamic revolutionary perspective on the one hand, but a organizing campaign to make the prison movement into a survival movement. Like the Black Panther party organized shit.
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Bomani Transcription
TFSR: So my guest is Bomani Shakur, also known as Keith Lamar. And he’s a man who’s currently held in death row in Youngstown, Ohio as a result of Lucasville Uprising. Bomani was present at the southern Ohio correctional facility during the uprising and prosecutors have accused him of leading a death squad that killed a guard and some prisoners. Thank you so much, Mr. Shaker for taking the time to chat.
BS: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
TFSR: Would you tell us a little bit about yourself and what Ohio was like when you were coming up in the 70’s and 80’s?
BS: Well, I’m 50 years old, so I was born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the bigger cities in Ohio. I grew up in the in the 70’s, 80’s. I don’t have too much of a recollection of the 70’s per se, in terms of the political situation and whatnot. But I grew up in a small place called The Village. It was a working class neighborhood and mostly who lived and worked at steel mill, the public steel mill. My grandfather worked there and paid for his house in this little community. And oh, it was 100 houses in this community and everybody, you know, owned their own home, worked in the mills.
So my early childhood was relatively peaceful, you know. The most memorable part of my upbringing was that when I was between 5 and 10 years old when my family and I, my mother, my brother and sister — I had two brothers and a sister — still young and lived in the village. Not long after I turned 11 or 12 years old, we moved away from the village. And so that was my entrance into, like, mainstream society basically. Start going to public school, a school called Cranwood. And because, in the village, we were poor, but we didn’t really realize we were poor because that wasn’t the values or standard for that community. You can go over anybody house around dinnertime and eat. Everybody was family, literally, and figuratively. A lot of people were cousins, because of, you know, the close proximity we all was, it was like a close knit community. So you had a lot of overlap in relations and whatnot.
And that was a good thing. Because, you know, I could play with my friends, my cousins, on a daily basis, and there was really no judgment about your attire, your social economic status. Because everybody was pretty much the same, even though you had some people had more than others, but it was never really made a point, something to focus on. But when we moved away from the village, that’s when I first became aware that I was poor poor. You know, and the kids, my peers taught me that. [They] made fun of my attire a lot, my appearance a lot. I was a young kid, at the time, I 8 or 9 years old, is what I’m referring to. And so, I was more into playing than I was intoworrying about my hair being combed or anything like that. And my mother and stepfather didn’t really mess with us boys about our appearance, so I showed up this school looking like, basically like a homeless person, basically [chuckles]. And the kids basically let me have it/.
And so, gradually, in response to the ridicule and criticisms I received in elementary school I developed a complex about my appearance and started trying to cut grass, deliver papers and whatnot to make money so I can buy the various clothes I needed to stop this ridicule. And so that was really where I kind of learned — and of course, as I grew older, and went further in, in the school system, this lesson was compounded — but elementary school was basically where I learned that to have what you have is more important than who you were. I don’t know if the kids, I’m sure the kids wasn’t aware that that was a lesson that they were teaching, that we were teaching each other, but that’s essentially what I came away with when I was around 12 or 13.
And as I entered into junior high and then high school I went deeper and deeper off into that erroneous idea about having things was more important than, you know, the person I was becoming. And I fell into start selling drugs when I was 13-14 years old, and to accumulate money to buy these clothes, Polo, Ralph Lauren shirts, Guess jeans, and Michael Jordan shoes, all this material trappings that you see young kids pursuing today. It was no different back then but with the exception that we were literally dirt poor. I became a drug dealer and by the time I was 15 I was living in my own apartment, driving a Mercedes Benz, wearing Rolex watches, had a pocket full of money and a whole bunch of “friends” quote, unquote. People who wouldn’t have anything to do with me when I was had a shabby attire but now all of a sudden because I had name brand clothing I was, you know, pretty much one of the most popular individuals at my school.
And at the time I turned 17 years old had really exhausted all my options as a drug dealer basically. I mean, I was driving around in this foreign automobile and, you know, driving around the same- fill up my gas tank and just traveling around all day basically like a politician. You know, selling drugs, picking up money, shooting dice, and it was the same day over and over again. I got really like exhausted living like that. And there at the end when I was around 18 years old, a group of guys tried to rob me. I had been robbed several times leading up to that, and a group of guys came to rob me instead of turning over, giving them my jewelry as I did the first case, I pulled a gun out and engaged in a shootout. You know, I was shot twice myself, in the legs and ended up shooting the guy twice in the chest. He died and I came to prison. That’s how I ended up in prison, in a nutshell. Yeah, so….
TFSR: So fast forward, I guess, 4 years, right? To, because you went in ’89, to The Lucasville Uprising in April of 1993. Can you talk about what SOCF [Southern Ohio Correctional Facility] was like at that point, what Lucasville penitentiary was like, and and where you were when stuff popped off? What you were doing?
BS: Yeah, well, I have to go back a little bit because where Lucasville was in 1993 was a result of what it was in 1991. And 1991, white school teacher was murdered by a Black inmate. I emphasize the race because Lucasfield is located in southern Ohio, in a predominantly white community and the prisoners are a majority Black prisoners, from the inner city and whatnot. And these are kind of like, I guess you would call hicks, people who haven’t really haven’t had any day to day interaction with Black people,except through stereotypes or in the prison.
So who know when this guard, when this female guard was murdered, people in the surrounding community was calling for the prison to be locked down, calling for more severe measures to be implemented to, you know, quell some of the violence that was going on. Because Lucasville was one of the most dangerous prisons in the state of Ohio. Probably still is, though I haven’t been down there and two decades now. So they appointed the new warden, Arthur Tate, and he was brought in as someone who was believed to be a hardliner, that he will put the hammer down, restore order, and get the prisoners in line. So he enacted a whole lot of draconian standards and practices and whatnot, just forcing guys to cell with people that they didn’t necessarily get along with, you didn’t really have any say on were you cell or who you cell with. Which was something in prior administration you had, that because you living with people and so that you created a kind of unstable situation if you forced to live with somebody you don’t get along with. But he didn’t, really care about those types of things. And he wanted to assert his dominance.
Flash forward a few years after the teacher was murdered in 1993, and he had drew lines on the floor, we had to stay within the lines. It was almost like a military academy, it’s what he would seem to be after at the time. And of course, when you have your foot on people’s necks, who are already oppressed, it only created a kind of powder keg, that this building and building.
Then right before the uprising, they had, every year they came around and tested prisoners for tuberculosis. And this particular year, for some reason, the Muslims refused to take the test on the grounds that the tests contained the alcoholic substance called “phenol” and apparently, it prohibited from ingesting alcohol because of their religious beliefs. They try to have an audience with the warden and the deputy warden, to try to suggest alternative ways this test can be administered, but Tate in keeping with his hard line attitude and refused them all and gave them an ultimatum and told them they could take the test or they’re going to be locked up, you know, put it in the hole.
He told him this, I believe, on a Thursday or Friday and let him stew over on their decision over the weekend. And the Muslims on Sunday, April 11, Easter Sunday, decided that they will, take that day as an opportunity to stage what they claimed would be a peaceful protest on April 11. This is according to the record, several Muslims attacked gaurds commandeered the keys and opened up all the cell doors, like I said, to start this protest. But once they opened the doors, it was like striking a match. And things very swiftly got out of hand.
You know, when the riot first occurred, I was on the yard, on the recreation yard, and this is one of the first first few days of spring and the yard have been closed the whole winter. And so, I took advantage of the opportunity to go out and get some fresh air. I was out there running and, you know, exercising and a guard came when it was time to come back in, a guard came running out with blood streaming down his face and whatnot. So that was the first indication that I or the people on the yard had of something going wrong on the inside. As the time went on we realized that it was a disturbance that was happening. And that the Muslims, they had made it known that they had commandeered to prison and that they were staging a protest and asked if anybody wanted to participate. Because, they weren’t, they weren’t the only ones who were being oppressed. We all were. We all were living under these kind of adverse conditions, and subjected to these arbitrary rules and regulations and whatnot that Tate was implementing. For him, to his way of thinking would quell the violence that was going on. It really just made things worse, as it often does.
So, you know, eventually one of my friends came out, and he told me, gave me a hint of what was going on, and from what I initially understood was that guys was going into other guys cells stealing their personal belongings and whatnot. I didn’t have much, and I also didn’t appreciate the magnitude of what was going on, this was in the beginning of the uprising. So, you know, I’m thinking that it will probably be something, a minor skirmish, and it’d be within within an hour. As you probably know it last 11 days, and so I was way off in my estimation of how serious and severe things were.
So I went inside and I happened to be celling in L6, on L side in the 6th pod and that coincidentally was the pod where the guards had been pushed into shower stalls and later where the alleged snitches were allegedly killed. I went back into that pod before these things happen to check on my personal belongings. And I saw the guards in shower stall, and you know, of course seeing that put me on notice as to the severity as to what was going on. Because whether or not that lasted 11 days or not you have taken the step to take on hostages, this is serious now. So, once I gradually understood the seriousness of it, of course, I compared it to my personal belongings and decided to go back on the yard. I was 23 years old, at the time, wasn’t necessarily political. I had been doing some reading, like Malcolm X and Franz Fanon and things of that nature, but I wasn’t necessarily what I would call political or even necessarily aware of this that anything can be done about the oppression that we were living under. That wasn’t my mentality at the time, I didn’t really have that kind of awareness. And not a lot of people did. In fact, majority of us filed out into the yard and stayed on the yard until late in the evening, early morning, actually, until the highway State Patrol.
So, you have the Muslims commandeered the prisons, then you have the Aryan Brotherhood who joined ranks with the Muslims and another group of individuals called the Black Gangster Disciples. And so now you have three gangs or organizations presiding over this uprising, and then you have guys who, like myself, were out on the yard watching everything unfold.
A lot of people are under the impression that since I’m on death row that I was a part of one of those three factions, but I wasn’t. And I came out on the yard was actually picked up from the yard when the highway state patrol came out late early morning, April 12 and ushered us all into the gymnasium. And so I didn’t stay inside for the 11 days, wasn’t present when the murders was happening. I was on the yard when they brung bodies out onto the yard and dumped the bodies on the yard. By that time the highway State Patrol had took up stance around the perimeter fence to make sure no one escaped, but they didn’t come in to try to quell, you know, the uprising. They, you know, stood there along with us and watched as dead bodies were dumped on the yard.
So I witnessed that part of the uprising and little did I know at the time that I would ultimately be accused in killing these individuals who I was watching, whose bodies I was watching being dumped on the on the yard. That was one of the first disconnects in how, I became involved in this whole thing.
As I said, they put us in a gym early the next morning, stripped us of all our clothes and so we were naked, 10 of us, and forced us into the cell. And that’s really where, my problems started. I write about it extensively in my book so it might not do justice describe it over the phone. But while in that cell an inmate named Dennis Weaver lost his life. I was ultimately accused of forcing individuals to do that and participate in it but in actuality, it was another guy named Shabazz, who, really sparked all the confrontations in that particular situation and saw a way to shift the blame on me after he and the other two guys who helped him murder Dennis Weaver. Because Shabazz and I got into an altercation while we was in the cell, he was kind of like a bully type individual, and he was going around really trying to put his bluff down on each of the individuals in the cell and when he got to me, I just hauled off and punched him in his face. Something that I talk about in my book. And because of that altercation I think that was what gave him the incentive to really just say “Keith did it!”
And that became the reframe, you know, as I later but it wasn’t simply somebody pointing the finger at me. Later, when they put us under investigation, and for nothing, we didn’t have anything to do with the riot we was on the yard, and they put us under investigation, took all our property. And so, it was really in that context that I began to become a little political. Not knowledgeable about the politics, I don’t mean to say that, I just mean to say that to buy into that “us against them” mentality.
And so, we start, the group of guys who I was around, this after the riot is already over with, after all was said and done, the bodies and whatnot, had us under investigation for something that we had. And that got old pretty, fairly quickly. We started tearing up the cell blocks we were in, throwing our food onto the range, getting into confrontation with the highway State Patrol, suggesting or advocating that no one talks to the authorities and, and that’s how I became a target. You know, by participating in those demonstrations.
And one of the things I like people to understand about the uprising is that immediately after the uprising the state sent in their investigators and they trampled the crime scene. And they collected over 22,000 pieces of “evidence”, quote, unquote, but none of it could be matched to any victim or assailant, no fingerprints, no forensic or anything, because they rushed in and trampled the crime scene basically. They sent everything off to a crime lab to be tested and came back empty handed. And so what they had to do, the only thing they could do is create a team of informants and select people who they wanted to indictment put on.
Quick question, just just for clarification, so that if I’m making a mistake I should know, do you prefer Keith, do you prefer Bomani? I know like one ties directly to the legal case and like legal support, what should I be calling you?
BS: Well, yeah, we should talk about that because that’s a question that a lot of people ask me. So, Bomani Shakur is a name that I selected, when I was thrown into the midsts of all this madness and needed something to kind of steer me through without losing hold of myself. So, it’s not so much a rebellion against my government name so, so to speak. It’s just a way to reaffirm my purpose and conviction, because it’s easy to lose track of those things when you’re in a situation like this, and that stretches over such a great length of time and difficulties.
TFSR: Yeah, especially when you’ve got a number imposed on you, like that’s attached to your name. And it seems really powerful to be able to pick something that is like, so symbolically important to you and representative of your struggle.
BS: Right right. But a number along with, you know, just the structure of this place is a reduction, right, of humanity, to just reduce you to animal. And so you know, choosing the name Bomani.
The full name is Bomani Hondo Shakur. “Bomani” is strong soldier, “Kuandaa” [possibly mispelled -editor] is preparing for war, and “Shakur” is for thankful. So those attributes, you know, so when somebody say, “hey, Bomani” it’s just a reminder, just that you have that you are a mani soldier and that whatever difficulties that I might be experiencing at that time it’s just a reminder that you can rise above those things, whatever it may be. And Kuandaa, be prepared assistance, stay focused, and to study, just try to be as prepared as you possibly can. And “thankful”, Sakur, is just no matter how difficult or dark, no, the present moment might be, to be thankful for the fact that you are alive, that you are healthy that you have a lot of good people in your life. And that, although the circumstances are out of my control to a certain degree, to be thankful that I still have my faculties that I can still stand up and fight for myself.
So, you know, I’m thankful for all the good things that are in my life that me staying the course, has produced in my life. And so, my name is not just words, it’s, like my prison number, it’s just it resonates meaning for me, you know, when somebody call me Bomani, they just really called me to remember who I am. And, so that was, it’s my freedom name, you know, a way for me to hold on to my freedom in the midst of all this, because it’s overwhelming being in a situation like this.
And a lot of times, you feel no, you know, especially in the beginning, you know, I felt like I was in this by myself, not so much now, you know, I’m 50 years old, and I’ve come a long way in terms of my development and whatnot. And so, I’ve been lucky enough, you know, to garner a lot of support. But in the beginning, when I was not who I am today, it was, ykind of a whole lot more difficult to navigate, things, and so the name started with that, you know, that was the first realization that I needed to, inject some purpose into my life, and not just drift aimlessly through my days, that I need to be about, the business of freeing myself and represent myself. The name along with writing the book, the other things have just been me putting one foot in front of the other and trying to find my way forward, basically.
TFSR: So getting back to the days of 1993, you had said that you hadn’t before, but you’ve done some reading, you hadn’t been like, what you would consider to be like, very much engaged in politics, you’ve read some Fanon and some Malcolm X. I know for a lot of people like looking back and studying the uprising between the self advocacy of the Muslims, you know, rebelling against this obvious insult to their to their strictures of their faith. And also the, the fact that those three groups in particular, the Muslims and the Black Gangster Disciples, as they were called at the time, and the Aryan Brotherhood could come together and — you know, obviously imperfect — but decrease the amount of killing and theft and harm that was occurring within the facility, possibly, and a lot of people took from it this message of like a convict race of a common shared oppression by the system. It seems like the story of what happened next what happened in the courts was was in a lot of ways a continuation of that same call the baying for blood by the neighboring communities.
Like this is happening at the same time as the Waco invasion is happening in Texas and so that’s one reason that a lot of people won’t have heard about the Lucasville uprising. That’s that’s where all the cameras are pointed.
BS: Right, uh huh.
TFSR: But I’d love to hear what you have to say about following the initial investigation where everything was trampled, how the trial was conducted, and why do you think it was so easy for these people maybe who participated in the violence to finger you, and state prosecutor Mark Piepmeier and others to target us throughout the case for blame?
BS: Well, I think they, you know, mainly I believe they were primarily interested in convicting someone for the guard’s murder. Of the 11 other people who were killed, his life was the only life that really have any real value, right? You know, they didn’t give a damn about the prisoners who was killed, as I said, they stood there and watched along with everyone else, as those bodies was dumped on the yard, I could have been one of those bodies. And no, I wasn’t political but I was extremely upset at the way that after the riots, as in the way that we were being treated. And I was vocal in my anger, treatment.
I was doing 15 years to life with the possibility for all at the time. So, when they finally, singled in on me, me focused in on me, they didn’t do so with the belief that I will go forward and demand a trial. They came to me, “Hey Keith”, you know they called me by my first name as if we was old pals or whatever, and they say, look they spelled it out for me, basically did the math for me. It’s real basic math, “if you go forward, you know, we’re going to put you on death row, if you take this deal you have a possibility to go home in your early 50’s”. But I said “but I didn’t do what y’all claiming I did. I didn’t have anything to do with it I came out on the yard.” They said “Listen, we’re not here to talk about that about what you did or what you didn’t do, obviously, it’s a moot issue at this point. We trying to figure out whether or not you want to accept this deal. It’s a good deal.” And it was a good deal! You know, 90% of people who are in prison are here because they’ve taken a deal, they’ve taken a lesser sentence than the one that they can potentially get if they demand a jury trial, you know.
But I had taken a lot of deals up to that point in my life. I dropped out of school, I became a drug dealer as I recounted. I had really, really just turned my back on my potential. And I didn’t realize that until I came to prison, until I really had to type of opportunity to slow down and see what I had done with my life. Because, you know, when I was 14 all the way to 19 it was just a blur, really that every day was a party, basically. I’m getting high, I’m selling drugs, I’m shooting dice, I’m spending money. And, I’m living what I thought, I believed at the time, was a good life.
But I had, at the end as I had mentioned, I had came to the realization that, you know, something was amiss, and right before I caught the murder case, I had disavowed the drug dealing and getting high and all that and I got baptized. Here’s the funny thing. I turned my life over to God, and that’s the second time I had done that in my life. I did it once when I was 13 when I felt like my life was coming apart, when I was losing control of the direction of my life. And I did it again, when I was 18, six months before I ultimately took somebody’s life and came to prison.
So it was always a part in me that wanted to find my way back to myself, to the self I was before I get caught up in, you know, the mainstream, I guess you could say. Before I get caught up in all the material trappings that go along with, you know, this society, you know. So when I came to prison, and when I was offered the deal I was just tired, man. I was just sick of just taking the easy way out in my life, you know? So I refused. I said “I’m not gonna do that. I’m done taking deals, I’m done going along?” Because, not only are you taking deals to get home to the possibly I could get on the stand and lied on somebody else even though a lot of guys take that route, that just wasn’t an option for me.
So the only option, that I had, because they made it plain that somebody is going to death row. In fact, before we were even put on trial, a lot of us was moved to the bottom range at the death row pod so we can get accustomed to the idea and it was it was crazy. So I had a kind of foreshadowing, a kind of glimpse of what death row would be like, because that was there before I even went to trial.
And I still made the decision to go forward. I had never had a trial, as I said, not a lot of people have. And so, I didn’t really know what to expect but, you know, they offered me a deal. I refused it, I demanded a trial. And, I got to see firsthand really what justice is about in this country, man. A lot of people look at these crime dramas on television and think from that they have a sense of what the American justice system is. But that’s TV shit. In real life, the first thing they do, especially if you Black, the first thing they do is try to strike all the Black jurors from the jury pool, so they can have an all white jury. That’s their secret weapon, to assemble an all white jury, that’s the first thing.
And they, go through this process called “voir dire”, where you’re allowed to question people, try to figure out what their political leanings are and whatnot. And it was just amazing. I was 23-24 years old at the time, and so, wasn’t really, really adapting, interpreting all these different, complicated words and processes and whatnot. But I was, you know, I grew up in the streets, I grew up with people who say one thing and do another, and I grew up around con men. And I saw the jury, that they was trying to finagle their way onto the jury so they can have the experience I guess, to tell their children one day, “I put a Black man on death row”. If you know anything about history — and I’ve seen history books about the lynching that went on in this country — you see most of those lynchings were attended by crowds of white people. Standing there with sandwiches, like it was some kind of, you know, picnic, you know, some kind of extravaganza or something, something to tell your children about that “I did this”.
So, I saw that whole thing, and then I saw the judge colluding with the prosecutor to deprive me of a fair trial, withholding evidence, coaching witnesses, all these things, [Audio interrupted here by an automated message from OSP “You have one minute remaining”]. And I was pretty much learning by trial and error. I was looking and learning, a little bit too slow, but I was learning though. So the stuff that I’m saying and sharing, I might not be the benefactor from the knowledge because it’s after the fact, it’s hindsight, is what I’m talking about.
But I’m just telling people, as somebody who has seen it with my own eyes, what the system is really about, you know, I’m one of the few who has peeked around the corner and have developed a vocabulary to talk about these things, to articulate, you know, what the reality of this system is. You know, so that’s basically what my primary objective is, is to tell people that this system is a sham. It really is. You know, from day one as they say, it’s just one big mockery, man. It’s just you know, like…
TFSR: So Bomani, I wondered if you could talk a bit about… You had a you had a Brady Hearing a few years back to attempt to get a new trial, as far as I’m aware, because there were so many instances where the prosecutors had denied potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense. And we all know that like public defense in this country anyway is perpetually like underfunded when you get a good defender who actually wants to do their job. We’ve had Niki Schwartz on the show before, which we’re very lucky for. But I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of that evidence that you’re aware of that was withheld from your ability to defend yourself and and what that Brady hearing was like too?
BS: Yeah, well, when you go to trial, one of the first things defense attorneys do is filed a motion for discovery, because the discovery is the mechanism through which you defend yourself and you want to know who said what and when. How many times they say it. And when we requested this discovery, the statements, witnesses who testified on me, and it’s not just people who said they saw me kill somebody, the exculpatory evidence of people who said they saw somebody else kill the same people for whom I was charged with.
And so what they did, and it was the first time – I haven’t heard one attorney say that they have ever seen anything like this – what they did instead is turn it over to statements, they divided the names of the individual who made these exculpatory statements in one column and put a summary of the statements in another column, mixed them up, didn’t tell us who said what or you know, what’s going on — I talked about this in my book — and they said, “Well, this the best we can do.” So it was it was a straightforward from the from the beginning.
Not only that, I found that afterwards that a guy — I was accused of being the leader of the death squad, and you remember, I said it was three groups who were, it was widely known that they were in charge of the riot Aryan Brotherhood, the Muslims and The Black Gangster Disciples. Well the leaders from the Black Gangster Disciples were basically made up the star witnesses for the state, after everything was all over said and done. Particularly a guy named Lavelle and Stacey Gordon. And Stacey Gordon – from what I’ve been able to piece together since the riot – he may have been the leader of the death squad, based on some of the people who actually saw what was going on. But, that didn’t come out till after the fact, because one of the other things that the state did, when I asked for my discovery, they gave my discovery to Jason Robb and gave Jason Robb’s discovery to me and so on and so forth, switched up, they put everything, mixed everything up.
So we didn’t find out until we got on death row proper, that what the state’s strategy had been. And I found out that a guy named Aaron Jefferson that came forward and admitted to killing somebody for whom I was sentenced to death a guy named Darrell Depina. For people who read that statement, the interviewer may have some doubts about his recollection of the death of the guard, because he admitted to assaulting the guard, Vallandingham, who was ultimately killed in the riot, and he admitted to assaulting a guy named Emanuel Newell and during that interrogation the interviewer called into questioned his recollection of these incidents, but not the one pertaining to Darrell Depina, which is the guy he admitted to killing. But they had already had me on the hook for that. And so they, they just blew over it just, buried that statement.
And not only that, you know, some of the key witnesses for the state it wasn’t till their fourth or *fifth* statements that they all agreed that Keith Lamar was the leader of the death squad. In a first generation, the first statements, the first copy of the statements, they were pointing the finger at someone else or didn’t know who did what. But what happened in there, remember, go back to what I was saying, of the 22,000 pieces of evidence that was collected: none of it, all of it was contaminated. So they didn’t have objective case. So what they did, the only thing they could have done is put together this team, they moved into this hospital called Oakwood here in Ohio, and they went over a script. They had an open door policy and all this is documented after the fact.
They had a open door policy in this prison where the informants going back and forth, sharing stories, collaborating on this narrative, and they just rode it out man. And we didn’t realize…because that’s the only thing they could do. And not only that, they put together this snitch academy – is what it was later came to be known as – but they prevented me from putting forth a proper defense. That was part of a strategy as well.
Well flash forward to 2007 that I won an evidentiary hearing, the federal courts called me back to court and allowed us to call the prosecutor, prosecutor Piepmeier, who you mentioned earlier. And we put him on the stand and he admitted on the stand that they used what was later defined as a narrow standard with regard to Brady. You know, his standard was, “okay, it’s only exculpatory if we call somebody forward and he, at the end of his statement, says ‘And by the way, Keith Lamar was not there.’ Unless he says that-” so just to just let you know what I mean by, that if a guy came forward and claimed to have saw somebody do the very thing that I was accused of, and explained it in graphic detail. Iif this person before he get up and leave that interview, if he didn’t say “Oh, by the way, Keith Lamar was not there” that statement was not turned over to my defense. And all the judges, in doing this evidentiary hearing – Hasan’s attorney, Jason Robb’s attorney, James Were’s attorney – they were present when this was going on. When the prosecutor Piepmeier made these admissions, and they jumped right on it. And they filed the necessarily briefs and then they got their cases put on hold, and some of the cases are *still* on hold.
And the judges, in they respective cases, said “Listen, this is the narrow standard that the prosecutor Piepmeier used, and we’re gunna allow y’all to go back to comb the file yallselves. And if y’all find something that’s exculpatory, that y’all deam is exculpatory bring it back to me and I’ll make that determination.” My attorneys for some unsensible reason, didn’t follow those motions. I talk about this also in my book, and this is one of the main contentions around which we fell out, you know. Because after they promised that they would file the motions to put my case on hold, because, mind you it was at my evidentiary hearing that these admissions were made, and so if anybody should benefit from this new knowledge it should have been me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that other guys were able to benefit from it, but I’m just talking about the, the shabby representation that I had. And see, that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t understand about the criminal justice system. You know, if you poor you really don’t have a say in your representation. You know, you know, you know, these attorneys expect you to sit there and shut your mouth.
And a lot of times, as is my case, I was so young I didn’t really know anything about the criminal justice system. And you know, I’ve learned a great deal since my conviction, but you can’t put the wine back in the bottle as they say. You know, you know, I’m grasping at straws, basically, as you might know, I received an execution date last year for the 16th of November 2023. And one of the things: the Ohio Supreme Court issued that execution date. In 2014, the Ohio Supreme Court, the same body of judges, convened a task force to study the death penalty here in Ohio and charged them to come up with recommendations to make the carrying out of capital punishment more equitable here in this state. And one of the recommendations that the task force – and the task force was made up of lawyers, academics, ex-judges, and whatnot, so credential people paid for through taxpayer funding – one of the recommendations that they came up with, that they gave to the Supreme Court here, Ohio Supreme Court, is that no one can be sentenced to death based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of jailhouse informants.
So not only can you not put them on death row, but you cannot, you *definitely* can’t kill them based on this uncorroborated testimony. And as I said at the outset, when they came into the prison after the uprising, they trampled the crime scene. So there’s no forensic evidence, there never was. And that’s the crux of where my case stands right now. Is trying to get the Ohio Supreme Court, the people who gave me an execution date, to follow the recommendation the task force that they convened.
You know and that’s what I’m hopefully going to build my movement around. Just that fact alone. I’m not even supposed to be on death row. For the simple fact that I’m innocent first and foremost, but secondly, legally, they wasn’t supposed to be able to put me on death row because they didn’t have any corroborating evidence. All they have is jailhouse informants who they paid to say what they said, and I can prove that.
TFSR: And so those informants were paid how? Were they given like, breaks on their sentences or?
BS: Paid in early paroles. Paid in cushy prison assignments, they was moved from maximum security to minimum security. The majority of them went home early. A lot of them have blood on the hands so they were paid in reduced sentences. And Lavelle, who was the ringleader, and possibly – from what I understand – had something, had a hand in killing the guard, is on the street now. So paid, in a real way, in a real sense.
TFSR: How are you requesting for people on the outside to help with that push to get the Ohio Supreme Court, I guess, to reassess your conviction?
BS: By doing the things that we’re doing now, you know? The whole point of me doing this interview is to make people aware of my situation. That’s the whole point of writing the book, you know. Because people have to believe in, in order for a movement to sustain itself, people have to believe in what they involved in. So what I’m basically trying to do is retry my case in the court of public opinion, and just get the people to learn the particulars of my case, and not just the particulars of my case, the particulars or the MO of the system, how the system operates. Because this is a playbook that I’m actually talking about. I mean, it seems incredible for me to say, “Hey, listen, I was framed, and this is how” but if you go back to the Attica riot, if you go back to you know, they just got this movie come out Just Mercy with Bryan Stevenson and the ways that it railroaded this innocent man to death row. It’s the same thing happened in my case.
So it’s a playbook that I’m talking about. A old playbook that stretches back to slavery, after it became you know, extrajudicial murders, lynchings, were frowned upon in society. So, it’s legal lynching now. And it’s a way that they go about doing that, you know, and I’m just trying to get people to wake up to the realities of how the system actually operates. And wake up to the reality that we like to believe that we have overcome as a society, as a people, that we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country. But, you know, fundamentally, especially when you’re talking about the justice system, fundamentally nothing has changed, basically.
TFSR: Mhm.
BS: Nothing has changed. So I don’t like to talk about my story as something new, that this is something that’s only happening to Keith Lamar, to Bomani Shakur. You know this is the system that I’m talking about. I mean, for people who are, hearing this message and wondering why you should give a damn about me and what happens to my life you need to understand that this can happen to somebody that you love, somebody that you care about. And when it’s your turn, they don’t, as they say in Just Mercy they don’t need any evidence, or fingerprints or anything.
And so, you know, we have to come together to, make sure that justice is a two way street. Make sure that the people who are, you know, exacting these harsh penalties, that they are held accountable when they are wrong. And that they are held to some kind of accountability, when it’s discovered that they are wrong. Cause it can be said that, “I didn’t know” at the time. And I don’t see how in my instance they couldn’t have known, right? But what they assumed, and they had reason to believe, that I was plead guilty. Because that’s what people do if you poor, if you Black, if you dealing with a racist system. It’s not a matter of whether or not I’m innocent or not but what kind of deal I can get, I mean, that’s what it comes down to, basically.
And I knew that, I understood that. You know, I’m not saying that I was completely naive, I had dropped out before, but in that instance I was actually guilty. And I didn’t think I was getting away with anything. Like I said, I just got baptized six months before I caught the murder case, so I had an inkling that I was on the on the wrong path. And so me pleading guilty was another way to reclaim myself, to find my way back to myself. I wasn’t really trying to find the easy way out. But I pled guilty because I was guilty. And here these people come around and asked me to plead guilty to five murders! As if we’re talking about five dollars or five Big Macs, you know, five hamburgers.
Because that’s essentially what, if you poor and you Black in this country, that’s essentially what your life amounts to. Your life isn’t worth really shit. And the only value that your life has the value that you place on. So that goes back to, me selecting the name Bomani, that’s a way for me to inject value into my life into… And I intend to pursue it to the bitter end, if need be. If people, you know, hear my story and it resonates with them and they feel that, they support me because they understand that they too are caught up in the same system, then with those people I’m in solidarity. I don’t necessarily believe in fairytales, I don’t necessarily believe that, you know, that this situation will end happily ever after. More likely than not I will end up doing the rest of my life in prison, or strapped down to a gurney somewhere. So I’ve already come to terms with those realities. So that’s not really what’s guiding me now, a fear of the outcomes.
TFSR: Like, as you said, this isn’t just about you, but it is about you, and you’ve made a lot of efforts while on the inside to – while building your case, and trying to seek justice and reprieve from this injustice – you’ve also been working very hard writing the book, revising it. You participated in a number of different interviews with folks on the outside, academics and journalists, and you’ve helped to set up and run Native Sons as a program. Can you talk a bit about how you’ve been giving back to the world, while Ohio has kept you locked in a cage?
BS: That, again, goes back to me trying to redeem myself, you know? When you go to prison, you know, the idea, or the theory at least, is that you are a member of society who has ran afoul of the standards and laws of the community, and so you are sent to prison to be repaired to that community, right? But we all know that that’s not the case. And that, really, the criminal justice system is a business. It’s an $8 billion a year business. So we’re talking a lot a lot of money is involved in, putting people in these cells. And you can say whatever you wanna say, but they created the justification to lock people up in these cages. And I came to that understanding quite late in my life, but I came to it though.
So, one of the things you talk about the nonprofit getting books into younger people, part of my understanding about my life, my life is just not for myself. I come from a community, from a people, you know? And this community that I come from are oppressed. There’s some young person right now sitting at home or walking down the street right now who would be where I’m at, because that’s how the system works, right. And, and so it’s my job to try to get some kind of information to this young persons hand to try to help him interrupt this plan that is set up for him. Because it’s not anything personal and that’s really the most horrifying thing about living this this life. I mean, they don’t really give a damn about Keith Lamar, Keith Lamar is nobody. Another nigga we gunna kill. And they been killin a nigga in America for 400 years and everybody know that. You know, I mean let’s talk real about it.
But that’s how *they* feel, it’s not how *I* feel. So I have to, you know, behave in a way that reflects my beliefs and feelings. So, what I do is try to get books in these people hand, because books, or becoming into a greater awareness of who I am and what life is about, is what has allowed me to survive what I’ve been through. You shouldn’t have to learn about life- shouldn’t have to come to prison to learn about life, to learn about who you are, to be educated. And that I was mentioning to someone the other day about the root word of education is “educe”, to bring forth that which is already there. That’s not being done in the public school system. You go through all those years of education and end up at the end all of that “learning” and don’t have a *clue* about who you are. And that’s on purpose. Because your life is not your life as far as these people are concerned. As far as they’re concerned your life is just a piece of firewood that they can throw on fire when the fire [phone call was, infuriatingly interrupted yet again by an automated message from OCF “this call is originating from Ohio Correctional Facility and may be recorded and monitored”]. That’s all it is. It’s not just Black people, it’s poor people in general.
People don’t give a damn about our lives. That includes the guards that work here. I was telling a guy yesterday about when I was younger I used to hate the police, man, the guards. Because it was obvious to me that they was profiting from my pain, off my pain. Not so different than me standing on the corner profiting off the pain of these drug addicts and whatnot. See that’s how I saw it, I still see it that way but I realized that they just poor people trying to provide for they family. It’s despicable, though, but that’s what capitalism is about. It’s about degradations, it’s about bringing people down to they lowest level so they don’t have any qualms about exploiting, you know, they neighbor. That’s what it’s all about.
But you as an individual, you might not be able to change the world but you can change yourself. That’s the knowledge I’m trying to get into young people, to understand that, you know, this thing is big. Yes, it is. The universe is vast, man, it’s big. And you might not be able to change racism, because people who are far more intelligent than I am have tried. Yet here we are in the 21st century and we’re still having the same conversation. So I’m not under the illusion that I’m gunna be able to say anything to change the system, but I have changed myself. And no matter what these people say, no matter what they ultimately do, they can’t change that fact. That’s what I’m trying to get other young people to understand, you know?
TFSR: Yeah. Kind of in that same general topic about the degradation and the view that poor people are replaceable, whether they be the people that are in the cages or the people that are walking around and get to go home at night…
BS: That’s right.
TFSR: Across the US, government’s at various levels have shown themselves totally incapable of effectively dealing with the spread of Coronavirus throughout the population, particularly hitting populations of color for a lot of reasons.
BS: Yeah, right.
TFSR: And prisons are most certainly an area that we see folks really denied the means of sanitation, food, exercise, fresh air and protective gear. How have you experienced the pandemic at OSP Youngstown? Do many guards and prisoners seem stricken with COVID-19 and are there any safety precautions being offered?
BS: I’m in solitary confinement and I was already in quarantine. I’ve been in quarantine for 27 years now. You know, I already had a mask because if they sprayed mace in here we’re all connected to the same ventilation system. So if a guy is sprayed down with mace in another pod, ultimately that mace will find it’s way to me. So we already had masks. We were already you know, prepared for Coronavirus basically. Nothing much has changed where I am. And from my understanding one guard tested positive and pretty much we’ve been wearing masks openly around here now. The administration of the prison passed out masks to each of the prisoners here.
But, you know, we in a closed environment, that’s what solitary confinement is. You don’t have any contact with the outside world basically. And so, if there’s any advantage to being in this type of situation, you very seldom if ever get sick in these places. And I’m not saying that we are not concerned, we definitely, definitely are concerned about catching the virus cuz it’s not so much catching it’s about what happens to you if you do. Because the health care in these places, as you might imagine, leave a lot to be desired, man. Because, the money has been reallocated to build more prisons, the money that they have to take care of prisoners when they get sick or whatever, that money has been put in other places.
For instance, at the prison here in Marion, Ohio, my understanding that they have over 1,900 prisoners who have tested positive for the Coronavirus. Damn near 80% of that particular prison. And for when I’m understanding – it’s been hard to get the exact numbers – but from what I understand, you know, 6-10 people have died, prisoners and and some staff. And it’s my understanding, I don’t know whether or not is true or not, but I’ve been given to understand that they have shipped other guards into Marion because they are running low on workers. So there again is an example of just poor people just being thrown in the fire, man. A lot of these guards obviously don’t live with the awareness that they share something in common with the people they are guarding.
Because that comes down to narritive, right? I used to tell myself a story when I was standing on the corner selling drugs to my community. And that’s how you do those things and salve your conscience. You tell these stories, lies basically. But these are just poor people. So, you know, as I said I used to hate these people, but the opposite of a hate is not hate. The opposite of hate is understanding. And so, I just tried to keep my mind focused on that, on trying to understand what I’m caught up, and then trying to understand where I end and where there’s other shit begins and so I can protect myself. That’s what each of us are trying to do inside these places.
I wear a mask, I wash my hands, to the point now where my hands are basically raw. I’m trying not to catch it, you know, I’m trying to stay alive. The same thing I’m doing, by talking to you, this is all about just trying to stay alive because I have a right to be here.
TFSR: Yeah.
BS: My life means something to me, you know? And in as much as my life is not for these people to take, I intend to fight them. If that’s by wearing a mask or writing an essay, or whatever form that takes, I intend to fight them to the bitter end. And that’s on everything.
TFSR: So what do you plan on doing when you get out?
BS: I don’t think I think a lot about getting out, you know? I’m doing, I’m living my life right now. Trying to be true to who I am right now. And I imagine, or at least I hope, that I would be able to continue with myself should I find myself on the other side of this. But I don’t particularly like to look at life as in and out. Particularly when it pertains to all the things we’ve been talking about. I’m not the only one doing time here, we’re all doing time, in the sense that we are all, you know, kind of trapped in these dichotomies. Black, white, poor, whatever, gay, straight, whatever. Those are prisons, basically.
When I first was thrown into this place they only allowed us to have four books. And that’s been one of my major support networks in prison, having an informative library. I tell people all the time that my library is like my family, my extended family. Richard Wright, James Baldwin, particularly James Baldwin. And so, when they told us we can only have four books I was really in a pickle, because, I can’t, it’s like choosing between your brothers and your father. Like, you got to get rid of them. So, I memorize a lot of books, a lot of main paragraphs and whatnot. And James Baldwin, in particular, his book The Fire Next Time, I committed damn near that whole book to memory. His book, more than any other books, really gave me the sense that we are all in the same boat. We here on planet Earth. And just because these people who are in power, say that “oh you in prison and so you must behave in this particular way, because you are in prison,” that’s all about being imprisoned. That’s all about being when somebody else tells you “you have to be a prisoner, an inmate”. No, I’m a human being!
And, so, I would like to like to think that, you know, if I’m somehow blessed with the opportunity to walk through those gates that I will continue to be a human being. But one of the things that James Baldwin – and I wanted to share this with listeners – first get that book, The Fire Next Time, it’s an awesome book. It was written probably 30-40 years ago, but a lot of what he talked about in that book, especially if you Black, especially if you a young Black person in this country, a lot of it is still pertinent today. But one of the things he said that was pertaining to all of us he said life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and because the sun rises and sets, and one day for each of us it will go down for the last, last time. So that’s the reason why life is tragic. That no matter what we do that tomorrow will be Thursday. And then the day after that will be Friday. We can’t stop it. And that the sun inexplicably rises and sets and that one day for each of us, I mean, yover you know, 30-40,000 people have died on Coronavirus. Those people were not imprisoned, they were out there, on the outside. You know, so we all kind of on death row because that’s what being on this planet is about. And one of the other things that James Baldwin said, he said that that’s the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty in our lives, will imprison ourselves in taboos and totems and churches and steeples and mass and races and armies in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
So here I am on death row and we havin’ this conversation, you are in a different situation than I am and that I think it’s the misunderstanding. But your life is in just as a serious situation as mine is, if you’re looking at it properly. You only have a limited amount of time to do something righteous with your life. All of us do. And the fact that these people who are in power, who create definitions on, or limits on we can become and what we can do, you have to move beyond that. And understand that this is your one shot life, and it’s on you to make mean something. And that’s whether you in prison or on the street. You know I’m not waiting for some magical day when the doors open to live my life, I’m living my life right now. I’m doing what I feel is right, right now.
And that’s the thing about if you want to be my comrade, if you want to be somebody circulating in my circle, then that’s the understanding that I have about who I am. You know, I mean, we in the same boat. And that is we on planet Earth. And it’s a hell of a place to be. I mean, you got kids right now walking through deserts trying to get over to this country. In the middle of the fucking ocean, man. Kids in Syria right now sleeping in mud, eaten mud. So, I’m not under the the impression that I’m somehow in the worst possible situation you could be in on this planet, I don’t buy.
So that’s, I just don’t want people to come at me “woe is Keith, poor Keith” you know what I mean? This is a hell of a planet, man, it’s fierce. And you have to be strong and you have to uphold your convictions, you have to be clear, you have to be educated, you have to arm yourself, you have to be intelligent. And that takes a community effort, not just something that you just can do by yourself. You know, you gotta build circles, you know what I mean? You have to build communities, you have to reach beyond yourself in order to make your life mean something. So, yeah, if that’s the last exchange together that’s a good point to leave on.
TFSR: Yeah, I appreciate that. And thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. And with the audience.
BS: No problem.
TFSR: I wish you so much solidarity.
BS: Yeah, same here. And I just want to also acknowledge young people at RAM in New York. You know, they the ones who initiated this month of solidarity and I just want them to know that my heart goes out to them, and I’m really appreciative of them taking the time to involve themselves in my situation. And hopefully, through our exchanges, they’ve been able to understand that I feel the same way about them. We’re both in this struggle, and that putting our heads together, the least we can do is change ourselves. We might not be able to change this system, you know, because these people get nuclear bombs, you know? [laughs at the absurdity of it].
TFSR: [Laughing] That’s some perspective.
BS: You know what I mean? But we could change ourselves, though and that’s what Viktor Frankl said, when you confronted with circumstances you cannot change, the challenge is to change yourself. And so I’d encourage each and every one to take up that challenge, man, because that’s the most important thing. To change yourself, to not be a slave. And, you know, at the end of the day, not to be on the side of the executioners, man.
On this podcast minisode, we feature the voices of two incarcerated comrades: Jennifer Amelie Rose and Comrade Z. Both chats were conducted through the mail and are voiced by comrades in the Channel Zero Network.
First you’ll hear Jennifer Rose. Jennifer, formerly known as Jennifer Gann, is a member of the Fire Ant Collective which just released it’s 6th issue and is due to put out another very soon. She is a trans woman who came up in the southern California punk scene, became politicized and began organizing inside of prison since the late 1990’s. Jennifer Rose has a parole hearing that she could use support letters for coming up on July 28th, 2020 and also more letters in support of her commutation application. You can learn more about Jennifer Rose’s case by visiting BabyGirlGann.noblogs.org where you can find out how to donate to her legal fund. You can read issues #1-5 of Fire Ant Journal up at Bloomington ABC’s website & #6 at Blue Ridge ABC’s website.
And you can write to Jennifer at:
Jennifer Rose E – 23852 Salinas Valley State Prison D3-1250 P.O. Box 1050 Soledad, CA 93960
You can find out how to format support letters, you can email her lawyer, Richard Rutledge at RLaw@RutledgeAttorneys.com or write to Mr Rutledge at: Richard Rutledge, Attorney At Law 7960 B Soquel Drive #354 Aptos, CA 95003
You can write letters of support to the Board of Parole Hearings on behalf of Jennifer by addressing them to the following address:
Board of Parole Hearings Post Office Box 4036 Sacramento, CA 95812-4036
And you can write to the CA governor, Gavin Newsom on Jennifer’s behalf by addressing them to:
Governor Gavin Newsom 1303 10th Street, Suite 1173
Sacramento, CA 95814
Then, we’ll hear from Comrade Z, aka Julio Alex Zuniga, an anarchist prisoner in Texas, about the situation at the Darrington Unit. Comrade Z was mentioned by Jason Renard Walker at the end of our interview that we aired on April 19, 2020. Although all three conversations cover some hard to listen to subject matter, we want to give a special warning to Comrade Z’s portion, which talks in detail about terrible conditions at Darrington and discusses suicide and death of prisoners. You can read another interview with Comrade Z that appeared recently on ItsGoingDown.org and you can check out and/or purchase his artwork on instagram by viewing @julioazunigaart. Thanks to Matt Brodnax for helping us set this interview up and his support for Comrade Z.
You can write to Comrade Z at:
Julio A. Zuniga #1961551 Darrington Unit 59 Darrington Rd. Rosharon, TX 77583
Jason Goudlock
As a closing note, I had hoped to share recent words from Jason Goudlock, currently incarcerated at Toledo CI in Ohio, give a brief update on his situation and how the ODRC is not handling covid-19 however technical difficulties got in the way. Suffice to say, prisoners were still being transferred into Toledo CI shortly before April 15th, prisoners were not given any significant protective gear nor cleaning supplies and folks were starting to get sick. Learn about Jason’s case, watch the documentary about him and find out how to support him at FreeJasonGoudlock.org. You can reach Jason via jpay email or write him at
Jason William Goudlock, #284-561 PO Box 80033 Toledo, OH 43608
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Transcription of Jennifer Rose interview
TFSR: Could you please introduce yourself for the audience? Who are you and where are you?
Jennifer Rose: I’m glad to hear from you and happy to have this opportunity to participate in The Final Straw Radio.
So, to introduce myself, my name is Jennifer Rose. I’m a a trans woman incarcerated in California and currently held at Salinas Valley State Prison, a men’s facility.
TFSR: Can you tell us a bit about where you came from and how you came to be incarcerated?
Jennifer Rose:I’m from Southern California, born and raised in Riverside, and spent my teenage years living in Huntington Beach (Orange County). I was in the 1980’s punk rock scene around the L.A. area doing a lot of drinking and drugs which led to my involvement in an attempted robbery and another armed robbery for which I was jailed, convicted and sent to prison for seven years.
TFSR: How did you become politicized?
Jennifer Rose: While I was serving my time at Folsom Prison, I became involved in prison protests and abolitionist struggle, for which I was targeted, placed in solitary confinement and beaten by guards.
This is how I became politicized as a prison rebel, resisting brutality and torture, sabotaging and breaking a dozen prison cell windows in the inhumane ‘Ad-Seg’ unit. I was involved in the gladiator fights where guards encouraged racial violence and then shot at us with 9mm assault rifles using live ammo. There were additional charges brought against me for attacking a pig officer, for weapon possession, and for two assaults on a state prosecutor and associate warden. For these I was given a 25 years-to-life sentence under the ‘three strikes’ law. This was around 1995 and 1996.
TFSR: Can you talk about the struggle of being a woman in a male-assigned prison? What sort of support have you received and what sorts of hurdles?
Jennifer Rose: To answer your question about being a transwoman in a men’s facility, we have faced the most adverse circumstances imaginable. From the discriminatory harassment and brutality of the pigs, to the hatred and violence of other prisoners, and even rapes and murder! This has began to change more recently, at last in California with many legal reforms and court victories.
I have been able to find widespread support from outside groupls like Black & Pink and TGI Justice project, among others. Also, lots of support among abolitionist and anarchist collectives, and the extended family of LGBTQ prisoners. The main hurdles we face continue to be our unsafe housing conditions, exposure to homophobic and transmisogynist violence from gangs, domestic and sexual violence. We are in a very disadvantageous situation facing the various types of gender violence on a daily!
TFSR: Is there anything else you’d like to say about how you discovered anarchism and what inspires you about anarchy?
Jennifer Rose: I became politicized during the 1991 Folsom Prison Food Strike, which was a protest against proposed visiting restrictions that cut our visiting days from four times a week to twice (weekends and holidays). Just prior to this, I was given a copy of the anarchist zine Love & Rage by another prisoner and had also been influenced by Jailhouse Lawyers to educate myself about so-called legal rights and remedies for which I became a strong advocate.
Eventually I would learn the hard way that the pigs don’t give a fuck about the law, or peoples rights. It’s only used at their convenience as a tool of social control and criminalization of marginalized people and communities. The people thing that inspires me about Anarchy is the simplicity of the idea, of abolishing the State and it’s illegitimate Power. They claim their Authority from God and Natural Law… and originally as white male property owners under colonial government. That’s crap! I love the basic concept of Anarchy, which is Freedom! It’s basic principles of voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, non-hierarchy and autonomous collectives, internationalism and solidarity, etc.
TFSR: Have you been able to do much organizing within prison? If so, around what sorts of issues and how did it go?
Jennifer Rose: I’ve done a lot of organizing within prisons, including legal advocacy and ‘jailhouse lawyer’ work, as former leadership in Black & Pink and working with TGI Justice Project to change discriminatory policies and improve living conditions for trans women in the men’s prisons. We’ve had a lot of success and made progress over the past 12 years or so, including betteer access to basic trans health care (e.g. hormones, surgery, etc), access to and inclusion in prison programs and job assignments, accommodation of women’s clothing and cosmetics and more awareness of and prevention of sexual abuse among other things. I am currently awaiting an approved gender affirming surgery and transfer to a women’s facility sometime this year!
TFSR: You mentioned in a letter with me that you organized briefly with Maoists. Are you now or have you ever been a Maoist (that’s a Senator McCarthy joke)? But, really, how did that happen? What was that like?
Jennifer Rose: As for Maoists, yes, I did work with MIM-Prisons for a while which offered study group sand worked directly with prisoners on many projects. I carried on a dialogue with them via correspondence, often debating with them over my anarchist sympathies and their political line on gender and State power (their ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’). I did think I could work within that Maoist framework at one point, but eventually had to reject the ideological bickering sectarianism of Maoists. I’ve always been an anarchist at heart, even when I went through this stage in my personal development. Eventually I came in contact with insurrectionary anarchist writings from Greek comrades in the FAI-IRF and CCF, which I was strongly influenced by, and developed friendships with like-minded comrades.
TFSR: You’re a collective member of Fire Ant. Can you talk about the project and what part you play in it?
Jennifer Rose: I’m extremely proud of my involvement as a member of the Fire Ant collective. The project started as a concept I was discussing with several different comrades via regular correspondence, including Robcat, Michael Kimble, Sean Swain and Bloomington ABC. We all had similar ideas of trying to organize and faciliate a national or international anarchist prisoner conference where we could bring together the collective voice of imprisoned anarchist rebels, perhaps publish a paper, start a support fund to raise funds and material aid, and generally build anarchist prisoner solidarity in a way we haven’t yet seen!
We’ve always had ABC and National Jericho Movement mainly focus on leftist ‘political prisoners.’ Many imprisoned anarchists are not recognized as ‘political.’ In point of fact, we are anti-political! However, we believe that ALL prisons are political. Anyways, the part I played is pulling all these comrades’ ideas together, and putting them in direct contact about this exciting project.
Once Robcat offered to facilitate a zine, Bloomington ABC offered to provide printing and distribution free! And they also halready had a support fund set up. So we all pulled together and formed the Fire Ant collective. Robcat came up with the name and we all contributed to the zine connecting our individual and collective struggles from prisons across the U.S. and internationally! I’m proud to be an accomplice in this seditious conspiracy toward worldwide anarchist insurgency.
TFSR: There have been some victories of recent in your sentence. Can you talk about what happened?
Jennifer Rose: As far as my recent sentence reduction on October 28, 2019, this only affected one of my sentences for assault and battery on the prosecutor, a ‘non-serious’ felony, which was knocked down from 25-years-to-life to 8 years. Yay!
TFSR: Similarly, you were telling me of improvements in the conditions of your confinement as relates to gender, right? And what are next steps for you and what can listeners do to support you and try to hasten your release?
Jennifer Rose: My next steps are getting my surgery, transferring to a women’s facility, and a parole suitability hearing on July 28, 2020 with the Board of Parole Hearings (BPH). The greatest support comes in the form of letters to the Board and/or the Governor advocating for my release, and any amount of commissary funds which I can receive via jpay.com.
TFSR: I’m not sure if you’re much of a reader, but do you have any book suggestions for the audience?
Jennifer Rose: As for recommended reading, I would strongly suggest the Emma Goldman autobiography and Assata Shakur autobiography, Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow’, and anything by Butch Lee, Sean Swain or Greek insurrectionary anarchists of CCF!
TFSR: Any comrades you want to shout out on the show?
Jennifer Rose: Shoutouts to Robcat, Breezy, Michael Kibmle, Sean Swain, Eric King, Marius Mason, Jeremy Hammond, Sacramento Prisoner Support, Nashville ABC, Nadja in Bloomington and Chelsea Manning! And in case I missed someone, solidarity to all anarchists and antifascists! Thank you for your efforts in the struggle. To The streets!!! Thank you!
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Transcription of Comrade Z interview
TFSR: Would you please introduce yourself for the audience? Who you are, where you are, how you got there?
Comrade Z: Hello Everyone, Thank you for having me on The Final Straw. It’s an honor. My name is Julio A. Zuniga. Alex is what everyone calls me, or Comrade Z for those who are standing with me 10 toes down in solidarity.
I am a survivor of B-Line solitary confinement at Dirty Darrington Unit and currently trying to reach out to activists and anarchists in the area who can help me organize a statewide work stoppage. Enemy of the State and of the Dirty Darrington administration, my whole heart and soul is hellbent on bringing the attention of the entire nation to the administration and it’s human rights violations, cruel and unusual punishment, physical assaults by staff, mailroom policy changes, inadequate law library, commissary price gouging, infestation of roaches, mice and spiders, sewage leaks in the cells, constant power outages, the list goes on and on. The torture tactics are of primary concern because it’s driving people to die by suicide. So far it’s been 1 suicide per year since I’ve been here. How I got here was because abolitionists in East Texas rose up against Telford Unit, for Housing Administrative Segregation inmates at that facility without telling the surrounding community about it. They were against it. People of New Boston, TX and Texarkana found out about TDCJ housing G4 and G5 offenders because an Officer Davison was murdered by a solitary confinement offender who was being tortured by Telford Unit by withholding his mail and refusing him basics he needed, like food. This caused the entire town to begin the takedown of wardens and the torture of all inmates by using lockdowns for 90 days or more, then by stopping all hot meals for an entire year in 2017. So, since that officer died in 2015, it was the people who brought forth change to that unit. It is now a pre-release unit, no administrative segregation offenders and no solitary confinement. I was not blessed with any kind of support, so I intentionally got into trouble just so they could ship me off. Best move I ever made, so I thought. However, that is how I ended up here.
TFSR: What can you tell the listeners about Darrington Unit and your experience being held by the TDCJ?
CZ: The Dirty Darrington Unit is a hub unit. Thousands of inmates pass through here weekly, transferring to other units, coming off of UTMB Medical Branch at Galveston, or Psyche Unit Jester 4. Some of them are bleeding, soiled in feces and urine. All mentally ill persons coming off Jester 4 have had no kind of hygiene for over 3 days. All these lay over cells are so unsanitary it takes a healthy person 24 hours to get sick by sleeping in one of these cells. There is nothing humane about that. They usually house people with wrong custody levels, endangering lives at will, resulting in physical and sexual assaults. It’s Dirty Darrington’s specialty.
I encourage you to ask administration how many lives Dirty Darrington has claimed because they refused to help suicidal inmates. Also, how administration uses offenders to snitch on others with a false hope of beating a disciplinary case, then throw them back into population, leaving them to kill themselves behind the dishonor. On the 2nd week of November 2019, a guy killed himself after spilling the beans on others. When he asked them to help him because he felt suicidal, they ignored him. This is the suicide I witnessed that really proved verbatim the words Sean Swain voices in Last Act of the Circus Animals. When Rico killed himself, the show was like Cirque de Soleil. You had every basic need availed to you – blankets, mattresses, toilet paper, toothbrushes, toothpaste, cleaning materials, officers serving trays like they do in population with full portions. They even gave us light bulbs. It was disgusting to see it. You saw paint crews, utility crews, the works. For a week the unit experienced humanity, but once the coast was clear and the administration got away with murder, it was back to torture tactics, a pattern I have seen one too many times on Dirty Darrington.
Overall my experience has been depressing, lonely, stressful, painful. I’ve seen this administration use psychological torture for 23 months straight, for this is how long I’ve been held in solitary confinement. Only recently was I magically released and placed in E-Line (G5) administrative segregation – the filthy administrative segregation area that is notorious for roach infestations, no lighting in showers, no restrooms on the rec yard so if you have to urinate or have a bowel movement you are going to on the same area men play basketball. Fecal matter is all over the floor and people wonder how they got sick. Easy – as soon as you come in from outside rec, they serve chow. If you have been playing basketball then munch on your baked chicken, then suck the grease off your fingers. You just sucked on chicken flavored fecal matter and urine. Dirty Darrington knows exactly what it’s doing. Environmental disaster, B-Line, E-Line, G-Line, A-Line, C-Line, D-Line are all torture areas. In the winter it’s cold showers. In the summer they heat your water for you. No coincidence. There is so much more. There are over 200 men in administrative segregation and solitary confinement on Dirty Darrington. Some men are going through it worse because they believe this is normal prison policy. It’s not. I’m here to expose this unit and it’s human rights violations. I appreciate you hearing me out.
TFSR: It’s hard to imagine that the staff and administration aren’t aware of the conditions there. Are they showing any signs of working to fix the situation?
CZ: I knew something was terribly wrong with this unit when it runs through 4 wardens in less than 2 years. They are aware of every single atrocity. They personally handle all grievances and it’s rare an inmate ever wins on Step 1. They have to go all the way to Huntsville with their grievance to get fair treatment. By that time it’s been 60 days solid since the claim was made.
It’s designed this way to ensure we never win any kind of grievance claim. Another way, as it is now, that they refuse us grievances all together on Dirty Darrington because they also are aware that if they hand them out they will be reading grievances for years. They know this place is crumbling to pieces. If it rains outside it rains inside too. The guards look like underwater welders when it rains. They wear rain coats indoors to stay dry. Nothing is being done except punishment and enslavement. I am on a mission to learn from outside sources how to organize, to create a psychological warfare on this administration in the name of all the dead that could not deal with their torture chambers and for the mentally ill who cannot speak out against them who are, as we speak, living in horrible conditions on Major Pharr’s solitary confinement. It’s only a matter of time before another death by suicide. We can thank Dirty Darrington’s Administrative Segregation ringmasters for imposing torture on the already weak men by starving them, by withholding their mail, by refusing mailroom to give them pictures of loved ones or birthday cards, or by sending their shakedown team to physically abuse them and confiscate their property. It’s all designed to break you. It’s happening every day.
TFSR: How do the conditions you’ve described above affect the health of prisoners? What’s the condition of physical and mental healthcare available at Darrington Unit?
CZ: Personally I don’t get sick easy, but since being on Dirty Darrington I’ve had a serious sinus infection, primarily from the mold in the showers and the dust that carries all kinds of germs. As far as psyche at Dirty Darrington goes, it’s got potential. As far as physical, you’ve got the infamous Nazi doctor Speer, extorting everyone, but not giving adequate care to anyone. If you get sick they still allow this idiot to practice. Nothing gets done about his childish outbursts. He once tried to do a rectal exam on me, He said it was my yearly check-up. This was the first time I met him. As he stood up and slapped on a latex glove my spidey-sense told me to ask a simple question, “What’s the name on the computer, sir?” He said “You’re Contreras #… blah blah blah” I was like “I’m out!” I’ve had problems with this doctor ever since, namely because retaliation is a trend on Dirty Darrington when you file a grievance. I tried to explain to everyone what this man tried to do. No one tried to help. He’s still here. All my medical treatment was taken away by this man for no reason other than I am or was chronic care hypoglycemic. If you have heat restrictions, work restrictions, anything that will make your ailment easier to handle Dr. Speer will terminate it and then send you into a Twilight Zone of sick calls, just so he can charge the co-pay. Others – he refuses to treat simply because it’s not life or death.
TFR: Can you talk about the suicides that you’ve been aware of during your time and are there any in particular you’d like to reflect on? Are there any strings that tie the circumstances together?
CZ: Well, I’ve been on Dirty Darrington for two years, going on three. I got screwed out of my legal work, got all my medical restrictions taken away, basically because I am indigent and I have no one on the outside to call here and raise a fuss, which is the only time you see inmates get what they need.
So, B-Line 3rd row, 15th cell, 2018 – A young man hung himself. The image of a nurse chest compressing this man never left me. It really caused me a lot of anger. It was senseless. It taught me just how they break men’s minds. It would disgust you. I remember this older man who would wake up screaming and just slowly, losing all reality, these torturers left him in that cell with a stack of trays, full of food with dead mice and roaches that he would just stack up toward the end of his sanity. Inmates could smell death. They tried to talk to him but couldn’t stand the stench of death. So, they brought Captain Lance the kitchen boss to remove the trays, stacked 20 high. But, you cannot talk to a broken man. He was a vessel, nothing more. After 2 canisters of pepper spray, still nothing until finally Captain Lance had the courage to tell administrators that he was no longer right. It was his voice that forced them to send him off that night, never to be seen again. For months they left that man in this condition. It’s happening now. This is normal? I’m not trying to hear that.
For these men, I ask to be armed with support, to feed the torturers a taste of their own medicine. I opened my eyes all the way at this past suicide in November 2019. I’m done talking. We need a bombardment of activism, protest, support. We need an uprising so this administration will be forced to take responsibility for all their fuckery.
One thing I know is we have nothing to gain for staying in good standing. “Good time credit” is not counting toward parole. “Work time credit” is another tool they have to control prisoners. Only the prisoners that still believe in the tooth fairy are too scared to accept this fact. People have tried for years to have these laws passed. Republicans are not interested in helping us. With a statewide work stoppage we will bring all these men’s dreams to fruition. We need to spread these facts to the entire state and shut it down. Stop slaving for your ringmasters. You want a real change, stop doing your slave jobs. Stop putting money in politicians pockets and ask them to put it your account to pay for the work you do. Slave days ended over 150 years ago – Why do you volunteer to work for the oppressor? Those of you who have no one, wouldn’t you like to support yourself in prison instead of risking solitary confinement for stealing food to sell in your living areas for hygiene. I can go on and on.
TFSR: What are working conditions like the prisoners incarcerated by the TDCJ as you’ve experienced? What sort of privileges come along with work, what sort of pay (if any), and sort of work is it?
CZ: They work these guys to exhaustion. They do not pay. The work is back breaking. No one will receive as much as an extra portion of food. These units are still slave plantations, only the name has changed. Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Research “The Sugarland 95” – You’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s time to bring this slavery to a screeching halt.
TFSR: How have you experienced support while you’ve been on the inside? What would you like from folks on the outside?
CZ: I had to go to extremes again to have the support I have today. I never conformed to prison culture. I love tattoos, motorcycles, art, hunting, fishing, boats and the only way I was ever going to see or hear about that is by reaching out. As a result of picking up a contraband cell phone I met “Mongoose Matt” by calling a random tattoo shop. Haha! It was awesome. Fineline Tattoo NYC is Matt’s workplace and it took all but 60 seconds to make one of the best friends I’ve ever had. It makes me so proud to say that. Shortly after getting pinched for contraband Matt has been there through all my solitary confinement, sending in anarchist literature, commissary bread for hygiene and art supplies, and in 7 years now on a 15 year sentence for a so called “murder” it’s his solidarity and support that saved my life and sanity.
Dirty Darrington had officers from the McConnell unit come hit us for shakedown and those creeps took all my property and left me with nothing. This was my breaking point. I just felt like giving up, but Mongoose comes flying in with letters and powerful words of encouragement and because of him I am fighting today. They tried to break me intentionally. I know this for a fact. Only problem is I survived. TDCJs “Cease to speak or cease to breathe” motto doesn’t scare me. I have nothing to lose. Now, I’m asking for you to stand with me until we punch a hole in this darkness and make it bleed light. Sean Swain is the other reason I fight. How you doin Sean?
Here’s the deal – folks out there, my only weapon at the moment is this here pen. I want surrounding activists to contact me so we can get started. This is still far from over and I believe that it’s only through the voice of the people that we can bring this down on a statewide level. I could use all the support available in my fight against the state. Things are slowly changing for me, so I will be allowed more visitors on Dirty Darrington Unit. Soon I will be allowed to call out. In the meantime, anyone can write me. There is so much to learn and prepare. No doubt that without your direct support places like Dirty Darrington and surrounding plantations will continue to thrive, rubbing it in the community’s face.
The Texecution state is also a slavery state. Shut em down. Nobody is gaining a thing. It’s a slap in the face when the officials of the state come here to lie to everyone that they are doing everything they can to change these laws so that we actually become productive. The only laws passed are laws to make it harder on us to get home to our families. For the oppressed indigent offenders who cannot afford hygiene products, organizing a hygiene run to bring forth relief, peace of mind, and a sense of compassionate care. I’ve seen exactly how good this place could be, but as long as we have ringmasters like these hypocrite wardens, coward-ass majors and captains, vindictive supervisors who love to use cowardly acts and body slam people while in restraints such as Sergeant Akinsonu, Sergeant Williams, Sergeant Estrada, Sergeant Baker, who writes her own rules when it comes to keeping people down. All these cowards and a few more on my shit list need to be burned at the stake for their inhumane treatment of human beings. We need to give them a little perspective. We need to all come at them via phone calls, media, advocacy centers, anyone that can hit them where it hurts, to show them that we are not alone. We are not going to accept this kind of abuse and pretend it’s normal. It’s policy. Policy is made up as they walk to the pisser. It’s a shame the population is in love with their ringmaster.
As a survivor of these gulags, food is still the #1 tool used to break solitary confinement offenders. Many months I went hungry and many months I eat the unwanted veggies inmates discarded just to survive. Sometimes portions were almost a smear of meat on tray. We need to end this today.
TFSR: What inspires you these days? What brings you joy?
CZ: Oh that’s easy – Defiance from Detritus Books is my inspiration. I’ve gotten very close to Comrade Mongoose and against the peace and dignity of the Texecution State I’m in constant contact with Comrade King and Comrade Swain. I wish them the best in the struggle and hope to see them soon, for I am coming up for parole soon. It’s a crap shoot, but optimism is helpful in situations such as this. I get my jollies by sending Matt handcrafted portraits of all kinds of cool, weird characters. Y’all are actually owners of one of my pieces. Thank you.
TFSR: Is there anything I failed to ask you about that you want to talk about?
CZ: You all can check out my Instagram @julioazunigaart or contact Matt to place an order for a handmade portrait. I only have No.2 pencils to work with because this unit will not allow my supporters to send me art supplies. Anything that makes people happy like greeting cards and pictures are slowly being taken from us as well. Go figure. This is Bible seminary college too. This is the unit that pumps out “field ministers”. Unbelievable, huh? Bass-akwards, I tell ya! I gotta let ya go for now. It’s been an amazing and liberating experience. You all are amazing. Please allow me to send hugs to Sean Swain, Eric King and to all the comrades who are in the trenches fighting their ringmaster. Thank you for setting the example. I hope to be in that position soon. Thanks y’all. Hope to hear from you soon. I would like to close with a quote from Benjamin Tucker:
“Power feeds on its spoils and dies when its victims refuse to be despoiled. They can’t persuade it to death; they can’t vote it to death; they can’t shoot it to death; but they can always starve it to death.”
If you would like to contact Alex, please send a letter to:
Julio A. Zuniga #1961551 Darrington Unit 59 Darrington Road Rosharon, Texas 77583
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Tracks heard in this podast:
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles – You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me (instrumental)
