UTC Demo Ateneo (from 4-09-16)
We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, April 9, 2016, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles briefly mentioned below.
Over the past few months a small, growing, and dedicated group has redoubled its efforts to complete a People's Investigation on the shooting death of Asa Sullivan. The investigation seeks to advance the family's on-going efforts for justice. On June 6, 2006 Asa was gunned down by police in the compact crawl space of the Parkmerced apartment he was staying at and renovating. Answering a well-being check, the officers entered into the residence scattering Asa and a companion into different parts of the apartment where, after an extended confrontation, two officers shot Asa at point blank range killing him instantly. The court room where the family had hoped to find some kind of truth or justice was no less violent. The state apparatus, in this case the judge, defense attorneys, and a cadre of "expert" witnesses vilified and criminalized Asa convincing a jury that his death was orchestrated by him, or "suicide by cop."
At one time, the assassination of young Asa was talked about in the streets of San Francisco and the rest of the Bay. The circumstances of his being taken from his family and those who cared for him were known to a community versed in police excess. The earlier mobilization on behalf of Asa and the more recent effort through the People's Investigation resonate with a political energy, an energy that reverberates with each shooting in San Francisco, Oakland, the Bay Area, and rest of the state. Indeed, the shootings and the mobilizations continue to draw greater visibility but in many ways the struggle seems to have reached an impasse.
While some justice campaigns have had greater weight than others —garnering more or less public attention, pushed to the forefront of a national outrage, forcing the state at various moments into various intricate contortions, nonetheless the mobilizations for each victim have seemed to be derailed recently, both locally and nationally. In many instances, the intensity of the outcry is tied to the legal options that the family, always with the support of the community, have pursued. In the wake of very notable killings beginning with Oscar Grant, Michael Brown and a score of Latino and Native people who have been less visible in the mainstream media, police, sheriffs, and correctional officers manage to walk free with cases dismissed before going to trial. Those that do see the inside of the court room or grand jury process endure verdicts in favor of the defense. Despite our collective rage, we are forced to watch a kabuki theater of police dissembling, where each performer evades a responsibility for the violence wrought on the community. The state feigns a certain pathos, yet in the long view of decades of killing there has been little to no change with the exception of occasional calls for more officer training and concessions for more civilian review —as though the beatings and the shootings will end if we have the right set of training programs appropriately administered and more civilian oversight organized around “transparency” and “accountability”. Yet even as the cameras and the cell phones remain on—as they must—and the brutality is laid naked before us, there are experts to tell us what we see.
The persistent state violence and the growing reliance on militarized policing takes place amidst the din of election primaries rife with Republican party racism and Democratic party hypocrisy. The nation witnesses unabashed race hatred manifest at home and directed abroad at the same as the mainstream are inured to the spectacle of folks of color publicly decried as social, economic, and political threats to an imperiled polity that worries about imminent attacks from outside and within its borders.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues “the US state (from local to the national) can claim permanent ideological surplus value in the realm of ‘defense.’” (see, Gilmore, “Globalization and US Prison Growth: from Military Keynesianism to post-Keynesianism militarism.”) At the core of Gilmore’s insights about the warfare state and its effort to designate who belongs and who does not is the violence of abstraction that “produces all kinds of fetishes: states, races, normative views of how people fit into and make places in the world.” (See, Gilmore, "Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Noteson Racism and Geography.") Denise Ferreira da Silva's examination of the state violence directed at Rio de Janeiro'sfavelas puts "the state at the frontlines of racial subjugation." She introduces "a formulation of racial violence that captures how raciality immediately justifies the state's decision to kill certain persons —mostly (but not only) young men and women and others of color— in the name of self-preservation." "Such killings do not unleash an ethical crisis because these persons' bodies and the territories they inhabit always-already signify violence." (see, Ferreira da Silva, "No-bodies: Law, Raciality, and Violence."). "Today's democratic state," warns Anselm Jappe, "is better equipped than the totalitarian States of yesteryear to do evil and to track and eliminate anything that could oppose it." The state's arsenal is substantial and it keeps growing amidst renewed "crises." According to Jappe, "in times of crisis, the state has nothing to offer its citizens other than 'protection.' It can rid itself of all its functions but not the maintenance of order." So, as the state increasingly abandons its commitment to provide a social wage and maintain services it increasingly invests in what it does best, violence. (See, Jappe, "Violence, What Use is It?")
The violence of abstraction can be observed in the state's investment in maintaining apartheid and its involvement in such projects that spatially divide people in order to produce race. For Peter Gelderloos gentrification as part of this process must be carried out by the police and must necessarily be tied to "colorblindness." Taking "colorblindness" as more than a discourse, Gelderloos recognizes it as an active process of "blinding ourselves to racialized histories and power dynamics, pretending to erase the ever present legacies of slavery and colonialism and start with a clean slate, colorblindness emphasizes not race per se but other closely connected cues and traits to determine inclusion and exclusion in the new system." In other words, for Gelderloos colorblind discourses are more than the statements that people assert when they insist that racial difference is no longer a factor in the contemporary world except if people continue to complain about it. The colorblind is a moment where people actively determine who belongs and who does not belong. "The intersection of race and class achieves primary importance," explains Gelderloos, "meaning that people of color have to effusively signal that they belong or desire to belong to the dominant class in order to win approval of the gatekeepers of law, order, and economic advancement, from police to lenders to employers." The result of the premium of state violence to maintain a flexible segregation and neo-apartheid organized around colorblindness requires "police cultural sensitivity trainings, precisely so that cops don't kill the wrong people of color." (see, Gelderloos, "Precarity in Paradise: the Barcelona Model.") "The problem of the creation and use of racial difference within practices of accumulation and dispossession," conclude Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, "and its link to financialized abstraction and property law, ... would thus require not a reduction or integration, but an articulation of different modalities of abstraction, including race itself as an abstraction." (See, Bhandar and Toscano, "Race, real estate, and real abstraction.")
But what of Asa —how is the struggle for justice for Asa indicative of a larger struggle against the intersecting violences of double abstraction, or put another way the intersection of capital and race. To be sure, Asa was at the intersection of confronting precarity and the state's investment in institutional violence, both the violence it claims fulfilling its obligations to insure safety and its effort for its self preservation.
South Bay and North Bay Crew
