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.

outlaw motorcycle clubs, Mongols Motorcycle Club - book - 2011 - Out Bad

Out Bad
Donald Charles Davis
2011
247 pages

Out Bad is the other self-published (via CreateSpace) book by The Aging Rebel blogger and journalist Donald Charles Davis. The book The Aging Rebel was a collection of Davis’ better blogposts, each one a brief critique of something gnawing at the biker world. Out Bad is an in depth critique of the media discourse surrounding Operation Black Rain, a major ATF undercover operation that ultimately dismantled what was then theleadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club.

Davis' blog is great for its sharply intelligent analysis of the issues that press against a subculture widely viewed as dumb, but Out Bad is his great contribution thus far, a book which I consider to be a major addition to the literature on outlaw bikers. It responds to media accounts of outlaw biker affairs, often taking journalists to task for simply repeating law enforcement statements on MC-related crime scenes.  Also Davis’ critique expands the picture of those scenes, giving the fuller perspective on biker issues that he suggests are absent from media representations of the subculture. Furthermore, Davis is an interesting commentary on these issues because he A) writes from an insider’s perspective, the cover of this book features a photo of him riding with the Mongols and B) he writes at an intellectual level that equals that of the academics of biker culture, Daniel R. Wolf and Arthur Veno. Davis’ prose shows his talents as a seasoned journalist who can make information engaging, but his writing is also laced with literary and philosophical references as well. Out Bad is certainly a retort to every true crime text that paints the biker scene as an engine for lurid crime-scene imagery and brute stupidity.

Out Bad is not simply a reply to journalist accounts of bike-gang warfare and meth cookery, and the base repetition of police press releases.  It also criticizes many of the books published by biker-world figures over the last ten years such as Under and Alone by Mongols ATF infiltrator William Queen, No Angel by Hells Angels ATF infiltrator Jay Dobyns, and especially, Honor Few Fear None, the memoir by short-term Mongols national president, Ruben Cavazos. In his criticism of Cavazos book, Davis presents a much different view of the club, which is more racially mixed (while Cavazos constructed it as a means for retired LA street gang members) with many members disappointed with Cavazos leadership and the changes he instituted. As a sustained work of argument against another book, Davis produced for the biker world the kind of book-length works of criticism that readers find in the more traditionally intellectual fields of political theory, philosophy, and literature.

Out Bad's relevance is three-fold: it is an intelligent piece of media criticism aimed against those lazy journalists for whom newswriting is transcribing a brief and trite witness statement into a cut and pasted law enforcement press-release, it is a work of criticism against Ruben "Doc" Cavazos book and other appearance in mass media as well as his leadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, and it is in itself a work of journalism that investigates and examines the events of the ATF's Operation Black Rain from the perspectives of participants in the subculture.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2011 - The Aging Rebel: Dispatches from the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier

The Aging Rebel: Dispatches From the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier

Donald Charles Davis

2011

270 pages

Donald Charles Davis is a freelance journalist who currently writes and maintains The Aging Rebel, a blog about outlaw biker issues. This book is an anthology of posts from that blog although much of the blog material focusing on The Mongols Motorcycle Club is absent (and presumably rewritten into another of Davis’ self-published books, Out Bad) and rather focuses, for the most part, on peripheral subject matter to the outlaw biker lifestyle and image.

The items that appear in The Aging Rebel carry a few key themes. Many of the posts relate to motorcycling such as helmet laws, or for greater safety awareness among car-drivers. Many other items are obituaries for bikers who died on the road. Other items are relevant to the world of outlaw bikers, including pieces on a Hells Angels trademark lawsuit and criticism of other reporter’s handling of biker news.

Davis’ book is interesting because its good writing about bikers from someone who knows about the subculture. It’s also old fashioned reporting like what you imagine reporters on tv shows and movies about newswriting churn out. So much of what appears in the news, on all topics and in all sources, are institutional press releases with a reporter’s name added because they tacked on an introduction. Davis investigates his stories, and adds insight drawn from his immense knowledge of his subject matter. His work is exemplary of what journalism can be in an age of ubiquitous self-publishing possibilities, where mainstream journalism arises out of an industrial process and older professional values are taken up by individuals who have a vested interest in exploring a particular subject.

white nationalism - book - 1997 - The Beast Reawakens: The Chilling Story of the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement

The Beast Reawakens: The Chilling Story of the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement
Martin A. Lee
Routledge
1997
560 pages

There are a number of books published between approximately 1990 and 2010 that attempt to survey the post-war radical racist scene in various geographic contexts.  Perhaps the best recent book that attempts such a history is Leonard Zeskind’s 2008 survey Blood and Politics, which looks at the political efforts of American white supremacists during the second half of the 20th century. Martin A Lee, a co-founder of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, produced his own contribution to that subject, a lengthy work of investigative journalism on the global far-right scene of the post-WWII period, ranging from a post-Third Reich German Nazi underground to the contemporary American anti-semitic “second revolution” fantasizing militia movement.

Lee’s book is probably the only text about the racist far-right, that I know of, that follows the threads of that scene all the way back to the Third Reich. He describes the post-war influence of Nazi Party members who were close to Hitler including Otto Skorzeny, an SS Colonel who was in the Furher’s bodyguard regiment who, up to the time of his death, was involved in numerous racist organizations. The narrative of Lee’s history comes almost full circle when he notes that Oklahoma City bomber and American right-wing fanatic Timothy McVeigh had a contact in the German ultra-right wing scene in a section that sounds almost like conspiracy theory if only because this contact is not mentioned in other sources about the bomber.

white power skinheads - book - 2002 - A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America

A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America
Elinor Langer
Metropolitan Books
2003
398 pages

In the fall of 1988, in Portland Oregon, an Ethiopian student and taxi driver named Mulugeta Seraw was murdered by a group of White Power skinheads who called themselves East Side White Pride. Portland has been, since the mid-1980s, one of the centres of youth-driven radical white suprematism, as groups like the Northwest Hammerskins and other skinhead groups have emerged out of Portland’s eclectic underground culture.

The Pacific Northwest has been designated as a Homeland for White Americans by various segments of the White Power scene since The Order  (also known as “The Silent Brotherhood) emerged as a Neo Nazi paramilitary vanguard, operating out of rural Washington, in the early 1980s.  More recently, the former American Nazi Party leader and current founder of the secessionist Northwest Front, Harold Covington, has been pushing this idea of the Northwest as a locale for white settlement which he calls the Northwest American Republic. I’m not sure where this vision leaves the various Indigenous groups who, at the very least, have given the Northwest so many of its place names.  

A seal of the Northwest Front which covers Oregon, Washington, and Idaho states. The now largely inactive Aryan Nations (thanks to a crushing multi-million dollar lawsuit launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center) was based in rural Idaho.

In the 1980s the Neo-Nazi Skins were seen as a new vanguard for the White Power movement.  In the American context, the skinhead emerged from the hardcore punk subculture, and while the skinhead look was adopted by a variety of different ideologies, it became very popular among young white fascists (who would declare that their skin is their uniform) and thus this connection between the skinhead look and contemporary Nazism, also took hold in the popular imagination.  Other kinds of skins, like the SHARPs (an acronym standing for “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice”) were rarely represented in popular media, which reduced a complex subculture to a single malignant manifestation. Jack Moore’s 1993 text Skinheads Shaved For Battle, for example, acknowledged Anti-Racist skins but merely as street-fighting opponents to his primary topic, the Nazi skins.

At the heart of the over-representation of Skinheads of the Nazi variety were two media forces, the rise of daytime talk shows like Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo, and others, which, according to Joshua Gamson’s 1998 book Freaks Talk Back, were significant because provided a forum for voices often marginalized by most other forms of media.  The other force in media was Tom Metzger, a former Grand Dragon of the California KKK and electronics technician and entrepreneur who hosted a monthly public access television program called Race and Reason which was distributed to various audiences via VHS tape.  It should be noted that an appearance of Metzger and his son on Geraldo, where a violent melee resulted in the host’s broken nose in 1989, remains one of the most referenced moments in both studies of White Power subcultures and histories of Talk television.  During the 1980s Metzger was also the figurehead of a white power organization called WAR (or White Aryan Resistance) that recruited Skinheads and encouraged violent confrontation with non-whites as a matter of duty.  

A Hundred Little Hitlers is The Nation journalist Elinor Langer’s account of the story of Seraw’s murder and its aftermath. Her primary achievement with this text is to take the material for what could be an especially lurid true crime book and humanize all of the agents involved. Langer, of course, creates a powerfully sympathetic portrait of the victim of this particular episode of xenophobic rage, but she also adds colour to her renderings of the perpetrators as well.  She does not invite the reader to feel for the members of East Side White Pride, but she does strive to represent them as not strictly hammer-fisted thugs, rather as people who have struggled through fractured lives towards the situation that led them to their doom (Seraw murderer Ken Mieske, or ‘Ken Death’ - a name relating to his status as frontman for a death metal band rather than his willingness to kill - died in prison last summer).  She notes that many of the skinhead neo-nazis were street kids who admired Hitler’s virulent racism and his impoverished adolescence. When Langer discusses the (ultimately successful) civil suit launched by Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Centre against Tom Metzger, she is critical of Metzger’s racist venom AND some of Dees more underhanded legal tactics.

 

Langer is a Portland resident (at the time of her book’s publication) and her text reflects that. The author frequently inserts references to her own situation into her narrative of these events, noting, for example, the proximity of her home to that of the family of one of the Neo-Nazi murderers. Langer’s book is an examination of all of the lines of social force an event such as a hate-murder produces, from the impact upon Seraw’s family at home in Ethiopia, to the multitude of effects at its Portland epicentre including upon the author, a neighbor to the crime.

Mulugeta Seraw

irish republican army - book - 1999 - Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh

Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh
Toby Harnden
Hodder & Stoughton
1999
404 pages

At 404 pages in length, Bandit Country is, thus far, the shortest book on the Northern Ireland troubles that I have read.  The 2010 edition is 574 pages.  It is also the most highly focused as its author, journalist Toby Harnden, zeroed in on nationalist paramilitary activities in South Armagh, one of the most Catholic regions of Northern Ireland.  

South Armagh, the southern end of County Armagh, borders with Ireland proper, and according to Harnden is a traditional site of cross-border smuggling.  The IRA leader of South Armagh, ‘Slab’ Murphy, for example, has his ranch situated right on the borderline with the Republic of Ireland, a ranch that’s been assumed by British intelligence as a site of paramilitary command, and as a site of smuggling.   Harnden posits this regional tradition of smuggling indicates a cultural disposition towards subversive behavior in South Armagh, and a precursor to the intensity of the IRA’s violence against the British forces in that region.

Harnden writes about the republican struggle in Crossmaglen, one of the largest towns in the county, and the locus of some of the fiercest fighting in Ireland.  The British forces have set up watchtowers along the landscape to help them spot paramilitary activity, and Harnden describes an IRA operation where volunteers sprayed the contents of a fuel truck onto one of the towers and lit it on fire.  When a sharpshooter (later revealed to be a team, which Harnden hypothesized) plied his or her trade in South Armagh, signs were posted on roadsign posts stating “sniper at work”.  The region was very hostile to British soldiers, some of whom imagined working in South Armagh as being similar to serving in Vietnam.

Harnden’s book, like so many of the books about the IRA, is long and comprehensive, with detailed appendices and index.  It appears to give a lot of voice to British military personnel, who, for example, say things like the townsfolk are brainwashed by the IRA (rather than fully conscious sympathizers), without much authorial commentary on such statements.  Presumably such a disparity between military sources and IRA sources occurs in these kinds of texts because military sources are more readily available to journalists such as Harnden.