Black Lives Matter - "They Can't Kill Us All": Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

"They Can't Kill Us All": Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement
Wesley Lowery
Little, Brown and Company
2016
248 pp

I moved from Canada to live in a small American town situated within an hour and a half drive of a major northern city. For two years I lived there and almost immediately upon my arrival I was exposed to racism. As a white Canadian I was treated well, even though my neighbors detected the accent of an outsider when I spoke, even though I was there to occupy a professional position that could have been staffed by a US citizen. My exposure to American racism under these circumstances only came in the form of invitations to participate in racial prejudice as townsfolk warned me about the Mexican families on my street or the black gangs that operated in town. Very quickly I realized that the general presumption was that all Mexicans were in the US illegally and all young black men were gang members. Small towns in the area that were only 80-90 percent white according to the most recent census data were spoken of as being overrun, or dominated by racial minorities.

While I witnessed racial prejudice on a daily basis, expressions of explicit racial hatred were rare. When I left the US, I left with an understanding that racial prejudice is very common in American society and systemic racism is a very real component of its structure, but also very few White Americans would consider themselves racist. My assumption is that the friendly Americans I met, with their friendly warnings to be careful with all the gangs (in a town with pretty close to 0 violent crimes but with about %10 black population) wouldn't consider their view of black men as gang members to be racist, its merely cautious realism, because to them real racism is using the 'n' word. Conversely, to many Americans real racism is raising race as an issue in a world where segregation and slavery and the most explicitly racist American systems are ancient history.

Wesley Lowery, a Washington Post correspondent, tells the story of covering the emerging Black Lives Matter movement, right from the day after Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson MO, where Lowery made a name for himself by being the first journalist arrested by Ferguson PD. I remember at the time of the Brown murder, images of Brown scowling at the camera (although some were captioned as Mike Brown but were clearly someone else) were circulating through social media as a way of legitimizing his killing. Lowery's story goes from Feruson to Baltimore post Freddie Gray, and other sites of police killing to note the rise of a new 'Racial Justice Movement'. This is the first book I've read that's clearly about Black Lives Matter, as other BLM media indirectly addresses the movement, such as Lezlie McFadden's (Michael Brown's mother) 2016 memoir and the excellent Netflix Luke Cage series.

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus
Adeed Dawisha
WW Norton and Co
2013
288 pp

The Second Arab Awakening is an overview of the Arab Spring, providing a state-by-state analysis of the popular pro-democracy uprisings that took place in numerous middle-east and North African nations beginning in early 2011.

The first 'awakening' referred to by this book's title were the mid-twentieth century anti-colonial revolts in a number of these countries, revolts that led to the emergence of the dictatorships the 2011 uprisings rose against. Dawisha discussed that history in relation to the recent uprisings.

Many of the Arab Spring books that have been published in English were rushed to publication before January 2012, containing hopeful visions of the near future. Dawisha's book was published in 2013 when the Arab Spring had resulted in a variety of results across the Arab world. By then the most successful-seeming uprisings of 2011 looked, in 2013, as a youth-facilitated transfer of power from secular military dictatorships to Islam-centric political parties. The author discusses countries like Jordan, that introduced democratic reforms without popular uprisings, but by 2013 the less successful Springs were brutally repressed while Syria entered a nation-destroying civil war.

Occupy Wall Street - 2013 - The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement
David Graeber
Spiegel & Grau
2013
326 pages

David Graeber is the former Yale assistant professor of anthropology who was let go from that institution, possibly for his anarchist political views. He currently teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. His anthropological work has been highly praised by others in the field, and as a far-left spokesman, he appears congenial and nonthreatening while expressing his thoughts in accessible language. He probably best known as an author for his excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which investigates the history of debt across time and cultures and provided part of the intellectual grounding for Occupy Wall Street.

In addition to Graeber's career as educator and author, he is also an activist and was a principle organizer for the Occupy Wall Street movement. This book, The Democracy Project, is Graeber's report on the initial stages of Occupy's formation, his own role in the movement, and his perspective on what occured in Liberty park during the fall of 2011. Much like he had in his earlier work, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Graeber combines his two roles in in this book, scholar and activist, to describe what worked about Occupy.

The purpose of Graeber's book is to report on Occupy at a time when everyone believes the movement to have died out. He repeats through his book that social movements take years, decades even, to achieve the changes they seek, leaving the reader with the thought that perhaps the Occupy movement that appears moribund at the time of reading was a dramatic phase of a longer-lasting movement. Besides describing the Occupy movement, Graeber also describes in this book a set of institutions: media, police, financial organizations, government, and outlines how they constitute power in American society and how Occupy constituted a response to that power. At a deeper level of analysis, Graeber discusses how these institutions prevent the practice of real democracy in American society and how the Occupy movement pointed towards such a practice. One chapter, How Change happens, is almost entirely dedicated to a description of how the kind of real democracy envisioned by the Occupy movement was practiced in real life when all of the institutions that make up the existing power structure were doing whatever they could to destroy it.

occupy wall street - 2012 - We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation

We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation
Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds)
AK Press
2012

The Occupy Wall Street Movement was, to an outsider, at some times exhilarating to watch, and at other times, very strange and occasionally disappointing. The police are part of the 99%? An anti-capitalist moment of silence for Steve Jobs? Why? Because he was a vegetarian in addition to being a brutal industrialist? Still it was a real uprising in America, in lower Manhattan, that largely adhered to anarcho-socialist ideals of building a new world in the shell of the old.

Occupy Wall Street generated a lot of literature within twelve months of the movement's start date of September 17, 2011. There were many books about Occupy published even before January 2012, when the movement still seemed like it may continue in its original form. We Are Many, from the venerable AK Press, is a collection of reflective pieces on the movement that came later in 2012, with a number of its authors referring to writing their entries during the summer of that year. Almost all of the authors are almost politically radical and while there is a great deal of variety to the entries, many of the pieces are critical of the more liberal side of the movement. This was the side of the movement who suggested that police were part of their class and, presumably, felt that Steve Jobs was an honorable exception to the plutocratic class the movement claimed to opposed.

The book includes dozens of short entries, including pieces on the handmade signs, spirituality, race and gender issues, connections to other uprisings, movement strategies and constitutive documents, and many personal reflections. The entry that struck me more than any other when I was reading the book was titled, The Tourist Brochures in People's Hearts: A Snapshot from Occupy Santa Fe. This was a piece in which the author, artist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore paints a picture of a local occupy movement directed by people who may be members of the %99 but they wouldn't be members of the %95, if that was the term adopted by the movement.  Bernstein Sycamore's piece expresses a passionate love for the ideals of the movement to be realized, and a bitter critique of a local encampment which was turned into a public relations forum for a thriving local arts market by wealthy art dealers, gallery owners, and artists. The piece reads like an address to a general assembly, and perhaps that's what it was written as, but more importantly it sketches out a situation where all of the radical energy of the movement was siphoned away by liberals and their wish-washy views on society. The idea that the arts community just plain belongs to Occupy is a liberal one. Bernstein Sycamore laments the tears of someone crying in anguish over the closing of twenty galleries, which, sure, sounds bad, until our author goes on to note how many many  galleries there actually are in Santa Fe and how much money and competition there is in their market. You might cry for the art galleries and you probably wouldn't shed a tear for luxury car dealerships but both types of commercial institutions cater to upper-middle class consumers and play a role in economic disparities.

The book covered many aspects of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but not all of them. The role of social media was actually downplayed in this book. I don't remember reading a mention of the 'We are the 99%' tumblr page that featured those iconic and mimetic images of individuals holding up their handwritten stories of woe in selfie shots and affirming their support for the movement. I don't think Anonymous' role in the movement was given much attention here, and I would have loved to have read something about the library at Liberty Plaza. Oh well... it's still probably the best book I've seen on the movement to date.

popular uprising - 2012 - Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
Paul Mason
Verso
2012
237 pages

Back in the years of 1994, 1995, and 1996, when the Internet was just emerging as a mainstream media service, a large number of books with titles like 'Cyberia' were published about the new frontier of digital freedoms to be found in cyberspace. These books made grandiose predictions about the utopia that lay beyond the horizon now that the internet's mass availability had just come into view. The predictions about increased democracy and global intelligence and everything else now seems incredibly naive to the critical observer, but now the gushing cheerleaders of 1990s internet freedoms and consciousness, like Timothy Leary, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Mark Dery are replaced by critics such as Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, Jodi Dean, and Robert McChesney; critics who discuss the adverse effects digital and networked technologies have on society, literacy, politics, commerce, etc.

One of the early adopters of these networked technologies as they appeared in the 90s, were the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN, popularly known as the Zapatistas, a group of indigenous revolutionaries struggling for greater autonomy in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Beginning their revolution on January 1, 1994, the EZLN disseminated their communiques via the internet, in Spanish and English, to the world, marking the very beginnings of what was popularly known as the anti-globalization movement and what is referred to by anarchist anthropologist (a title he refuses on his twitter page) David Graeber as the global justice movement (a name for the movement which I haven't seen in print in any source other than his work). The Zapatistas use of the internet to get their message out was notable for two reasons, first was the novelty of the internet at the time, and the novelty of its use by political radicals, and the second was that it was being used by revolutionaries in a remote and impoverished section of Mexico by indigenous people. That radicals of the fourth world were using the latest in communications technologies garnered the EZLN the label of the first post-modern revolutionaries. In the year 2000, with the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the anti-globalization movement became a global phenomenon with the full attention of the mainstream media, and one of the aspects of this movement the mainstream media fixated on was the protesters use of technology. At the time, it was of interest to observers that activists were using things like laptops and websites to any extent.

The interesting thing about Paul Mason's book, Why its Kicking Off Everywhere, is not that it has anything interesting to say about the uprisings seen around the globe in 2011. Mason's is far from the only book to examine those events, and what it has to say about them is typical of sympathetic journalists. Of course, Mason gets that the human element of these movements, but personal testimonies of movement participation have been a major feature of these uprisings, and there are entire books from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement written by the people. Its that it's a book-length emanation of this continued amazement over that activists are using digital technologies that makes it interesting. History is filled with examples of radicals using their contemporary communication technologies to disseminate their ideas at the same time that they engage in direct action. Consider the mass of writings produced by radical groups, such as the Diggers during 17th century England because of their access to printing presses, or the Yippies studies of television formats and media theories so they could appear effectively on the medium. That activists use current communication technologies in their struggle is to be expected, but because so much hope has been invested in the internet's potential to direct change, it is still possible, in 2012, for an individual to write a book with nothing more profound to say about activists than that they're using blackberries and facebook to communicate with one another. That's what Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere is, a lengthy assertion that technologies are at the forefront of political change rather than people and their ideas. A return to the hope felt in the mid-90s that the internet has produced new kinds of spaces where all our hopes for mankind will be realized. That recent communication technologies permit activists with rapid-fire abilities to evade systems of control and authority, a point of view that's obviously incorrect. When Paul Mason writes that new activists using smartphones and social media are "pioneering a major expansion in the power of the individual human being", he's echoing the never-realized transhumanist pronouncements of 80s and early/mid-90s tech gurus like Timothy Leary. When Paul Mason makes analogies between the current situation and the French Revolution and says "A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop." He's repeating the same amazement shown in 2000-2001 over activists using computers. I think it is possible that a reader could dive into the literature of the anti-globalization movement and come up with similar statements, and the major difference between then and now, is that now the brandnames for each communication format are noted.

Taken at a broader level, there is an intense delirium for digital technologies in all fields and social areas, and similar books are being written discussing how incredibly epoch making tablet computers and social media are in everything, including political activism. While its undeniable that these technologies are having major effects across society, I don't see how people can look at the internet and its related technologies, and also look at how they're actually used by people on a daily basis, and see their effects only as positive steps taken towards a more perfect world. One of the effects of the internet as a communications technology is that it occupies our fields of vision and sets limits on what we can see in ways that always refers back to itself. In this way, of course, digital and networked technologies appear to us as problem solving in an of themselves if they're all we can see in the world. In Mason's book, he quotes an activist who refuses to read radical texts of the past, instead favoring new ideas, especially if they're spread on twitter. While Mason offers these statements as examples of new kinds of activists who are resistant to ideologies, a ludicrous position as ideology is always at play, this activist actually reveals herself to be vulnerable to manipulation due to her preference in consumer communication products. These new consumer technologies commodify communication, friendship, emotion, and possibly even revolution. What's being described here is designer communication, and it is inserting itself into the revolutionary spirit in ways that are actually insidious. Mason is writing in 2012, now in 2014 it might be interesting to think about how an obsessive fetishizing of these communication tools contributed to the dissolution of the movements they apparently pushed forward a couple of years ago. They are, fundamentally, consumer products and provide consumer experiences, and a book can just as easily be written about these media companies like facebook doing things like deleting the Anarchist Memes page. Activists can hold discussions on facebook, activists can also lose their job for revealing their political attitudes on their facebook page. As communication tools, social media networks should not be taken as inherently revolutionary or the primary means through which revolution is won.

anonymous - book - 2011 - Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan's Army Conquered the Web

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan’s Army Conquered the Web

Cole Stryker

Overlook Duckworth

2011

304 pages

By now the phenomenon of Anonymous, an unspecified and unorganized mass of computer pranksters and social activists (popularly known as... ugh... ‘hacktivists’) is a part of the common imagination.  Everyone has at least seen images of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks (referencing not just the 17th century English anti-parliament terrorist but also the technique of mass identification with a social movement or anti-establishment attitude via obscuring one's individual identity as shown in the 2006 film V For Vendetta) or heard stories about members of anonymous hacking such and such institution or organization or declaring war via internet against a repressive regime. Less known (but still pretty well known) is that Anonymous, as a social movement, emerged from a specific online location, 4chan.org.

4chan.org was started in 2002 by a kid who calls himself m00t, real name Christopher Poole, who wanted to emulate Japanese anime discussion boards (specifically one called matsubara or 2chan). The site is interesting, in part, because it does not save any of the content that users contribute to it (some of the effects of which have been observed by an MIT research team) and therefore everything has to be constantly renewed. The repetition and variation on the forms that appear on 4chan have led to site users (who post under the name ‘anonymous’ and are not required to enter a username to contribute) to develop a large number of different graphic memes that have transcended the site, some of the more popular forms, like the LOLcats, have become mainstream pop culture phenomena. 4chan.org is the opposite of Facebook and as a contemporary internet phenomena, is far more interesting (Facebook itself is not interesting at all but the discourse surrounding the service is.) While Facebook is a global data-mining operation posing as a good-vibes world funfest where people can post their opinions and expect only agreement in return, 4chan is a carnival of all of the most transgressive subjects and images including discussions about gore, pornography, drugs, etc.

Cole Stryker is a freelance journalist who appears to focus on trends in network communication technology and its cultural uses. In Epic Win for Anonymous he gives a fairly detailed history of 4chan and a survey of its uses. Stryker’s text is not heavy on analysis, cultural or otherwise, but it still helps a lot in forming an understanding of the phenomena of Anonymous, their origins in hacking and online trolling/flame wars, as well as predecessors to 4chan site that fostered the kind of transgressive (verging on nihilistic attitude) that appears to dominate. Epic Win for Anonymous is a descriptive history of 4chan, its origins, and the actual social movements that have emerged out of it.

What interests me about Anonymous is that it’s never really clear what it is, because it isn’t something in particular. At its surface level it appears as a protest tactic, similar to the Black Bloc in its core emphasis on the intersection of mass protest and the protection of personal identity. On another level though, it is a form of mediated mass protest that appears to permit its participants to engage with their social causes to the extent that their individual technical abilities allow. If a target for direct action is selected (by whom, I’m not sure) then some Anons might proceed by breaking the target’s network security and obtaining documents, others make up mocking graphics with their photoshop skills, others might pile onto a denial of service attack, and some will don their Fawkes mask and attend the street protest.

Anonymous was, for example, instrumental in ensuring justice during the recent Steubenville rape trial, with Anons obtaining and disseminating the videos and images that served as evidence at trial, and also picketing the town through online action and street demos. Interestingly, this murky group that has grown out of an underground website largely devoted to exploring transgression had established a stable moral position with regards to that crime while much of mainstream America were perfectly willing to blame the victim for what happened to her, and to falter over what constitutes rape in their country.

The other level at which Anonymous is interesting, which Stryker discusses in his book, was the collective problem solving potential of the group. Anonymous is geographically dispersed yet they are localized (ugh...) virtually to 4chan. Occasionally a problem is brought to the group, sometimes in the nature of an image of an animal or child abuser, for example. The users of 4chan will use their collective knowledge to try to identify features of that image which can be used in identifying the abuser to authorities. This aspect of Anonymous reveals how much greater potential 4chan has at motivating people to action than the major social network websites. Facebook may be orders of magnitude more popular than 4chan, but 4chan’s impact on the culture has been immensely more meaningful than Facebook’s.