I’m on strike today in Syracuse, NY in solidarity with the general strike called in Oakland, California. When I read of the call to blockade the Port of Oakland as part of the general strike, I remembered a long history of anti-war blockades that have taken place here, with the support of Longshore workers, to stop US wars in Viet Nam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As happened last week at Oscar Grant Plaza, police forces responded to these protests with massive force. This evening, I went to court to witness the trial of the Hancock 38. Some of the 38 people arrested on April, 22, 2011 will be tried for blocking the entrance to Hancock Field to protest the Reaper drones that are piloted from the Air National Guard base near my home. Reaper drones are armed with missiles that are savaging the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
The power of the blockade is the power of stopping violence. There are other ways in which people come together to end state violence and impunity. It is significant that Occupy Oakland renamed the plaza they claimed after Oscar Grant. His death at the hands of the BART transportation police captures the stunning disregard for the lives of young Black men and other young people of color. His murder while waiting for the last train before midnight on a New Year’s Eve also captures the failure of public infrastructures to meet the needs of residents of the city, whether due to political recalcitrance or budget cuts.
I am on strike to write and reclaim my power to remember and share struggles between places that may not seem connected. The solidarity I see binding Oakland and Syracuse at this very moment is this shared undercurrent of opposition to far-away wars that are made from the places in which we live. Part of retaking and reshaping our cities means ending the military occupations of our cities and other people’s homelands. I want to connect some of the undercurrents of opposition to war, border militarization, and police occupations that are killing peoples and lands, separating families, and killing futures.
There is a lot to learn from Oakland and the ways in which people have been organizing against police brutality, gang injunctions, and patrols by immigration officials. And Occupy Oakland is not alone in naming policing as a central barrier to making just cities. New York is taking on stop and frisk, Philly’s opposing curfews. Groups in San Diego, Tucson, and Phoenix have been organizing against the collaboration between local police and federal Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. People in Los Angeles have been challenging the criminalization and policing of homeless people. There are more examples in more cities, but the central point is that in all of these places people are challenging the premise that a just city and safety can be created through more policing and targeting of the ‘right’ people.
Organized opposition to racial policing has deep roots in these places. This is evident in Oakland’s recent past, and in the histories and ongoing legacy of the Black Panther Party, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Critical Resistance, Applied Research Center. Groups in Syracuse like the Workers’ Rights Center have been part of the regional opposition to the Border Patrol presence in policing of migration status in our train and bus station. We drew on the city’s history of abolition and resistance to unjust laws in our efforts to fulfill abolitionist Reverend Jermaine Loguen’s dream of the Open City. We also drew on our inheritance of leadership and knowledge from the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which gave radical welcome to people escaping US-backed wars in Central America. And now Homeland Security has ‘quietly announced’ that they will no longer be conducting ID checks at transportation hubs along the US-Mexico border. Did our efforts contribute to this win?
Remembering these histories is a way of remembering how people together build power against egregious laws and state violence through accumulated struggles over time. And, as a friend of mine in Oakland, Irina, wrote, these histories of violence and struggle ricochet against each other to shape the present in unexpected ways. The 1970s Syracuse-based group Prison Research Education Action Project produced the invaluable Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, which is now back in print thanks to Critical Resistance.
On what expansive scale of love and solidarity can we read the statement of support from Cairo to Oakland? The government of Egypt, it is worth recalling, was one of the top recipients of US military aid. Their decades’ long struggle against police repression and for social justice inspired and emboldened our struggle in the US to occupy our cities and reclaim our capacities to organize reorganize our relations to each other, the economy, and the government. What is different for us in the US is that we also are responsible for ending US military aid and wars of occupation that constrain others’ people’s dreams of peaceful occupancy and just relations with the land and other people.
I was struck by one of the headlines for this evening’s trial of the Hancock 38 protesters: “Violence in Afghanistan escalates, Drone Trial Starts.” A stark reminder to the ongoing importance of this action, particularly when the announced December 2011 withdrawal of US troops from Iraq rightfully has drawn a buzz, while their redeployment to Kuwait has been much less recognized. Assembled in the courtroom were seasoned organizers with the Syracuse Peace Council, and the other 18 groups who formed the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars for the spring action. They are wearing blue scarves at the request of and in solidarity with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Assembled in the courtroom were activists whose ages span over six decades. Their histories of organizing against wars and US military also bring recent US geopolitical history in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Central America directly into this small town.
Armed occupations are not incidental to the reasons why the occupy (and decolonize) movement is continuing to inhabit public spaces across the country. Nor are armed occupations incidental to the dreams for freer, self-determined futures that so many people want. The US federal budget is so occupied by the military that human needs for homes, jobs, income, humane health care, mind-blowing education, and environmental justice are turned into scarce goods. Only those who can pay (or take out loans) can play, while everyone else is expected to scrap it out for crumbs.
The battle to take back the military budget is one part of the battle to create just cities. Another part of the battle is ending the wars at home. Much like the decolonizing critiques of the language of occupation has sought to transform and broaden the terms through which the movement understands its struggle, demilitarizing dominant understandings of safety and security will be important in connecting the dots among US imperial war-making, border militarization and ongoing colonial occupations of Native lands, and the ways in which racial policing manages social crises created by such tremendous racial and class inequalities. Again, Oakland and the other cities I’ve mentioned have a lot of history to share in connecting the dots between racism and state violence at home and wars abroad.
Let the ricochet of the trial of the Hancock 38 drone resistors meet the general strike in Oakland, in the solidarity of knowing that stopping the work of state violence is the measure of the power of the people.
#weareoakland #occupytogether #oo #occupysyracuse #ows #endthewars
++++Democracy Now! coverage of the ongoing trial of the Hancock 38 drone prostesters: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/4/drones_on_trial_38_protesters_face
+++Update1 December, 2011 on the trial verdict: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/update_thirty-one_drone_protes.html
The power of the blockade is the power of stopping violence. There are other ways in which people come together to end state violence and impunity. It is significant that Occupy Oakland renamed the plaza they claimed after Oscar Grant. His death at the hands of the BART transportation police captures the stunning disregard for the lives of young Black men and other young people of color. His murder while waiting for the last train before midnight on a New Year’s Eve also captures the failure of public infrastructures to meet the needs of residents of the city, whether due to political recalcitrance or budget cuts.
I am on strike to write and reclaim my power to remember and share struggles between places that may not seem connected. The solidarity I see binding Oakland and Syracuse at this very moment is this shared undercurrent of opposition to far-away wars that are made from the places in which we live. Part of retaking and reshaping our cities means ending the military occupations of our cities and other people’s homelands. I want to connect some of the undercurrents of opposition to war, border militarization, and police occupations that are killing peoples and lands, separating families, and killing futures.
There is a lot to learn from Oakland and the ways in which people have been organizing against police brutality, gang injunctions, and patrols by immigration officials. And Occupy Oakland is not alone in naming policing as a central barrier to making just cities. New York is taking on stop and frisk, Philly’s opposing curfews. Groups in San Diego, Tucson, and Phoenix have been organizing against the collaboration between local police and federal Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. People in Los Angeles have been challenging the criminalization and policing of homeless people. There are more examples in more cities, but the central point is that in all of these places people are challenging the premise that a just city and safety can be created through more policing and targeting of the ‘right’ people.
Organized opposition to racial policing has deep roots in these places. This is evident in Oakland’s recent past, and in the histories and ongoing legacy of the Black Panther Party, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Critical Resistance, Applied Research Center. Groups in Syracuse like the Workers’ Rights Center have been part of the regional opposition to the Border Patrol presence in policing of migration status in our train and bus station. We drew on the city’s history of abolition and resistance to unjust laws in our efforts to fulfill abolitionist Reverend Jermaine Loguen’s dream of the Open City. We also drew on our inheritance of leadership and knowledge from the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which gave radical welcome to people escaping US-backed wars in Central America. And now Homeland Security has ‘quietly announced’ that they will no longer be conducting ID checks at transportation hubs along the US-Mexico border. Did our efforts contribute to this win?
Remembering these histories is a way of remembering how people together build power against egregious laws and state violence through accumulated struggles over time. And, as a friend of mine in Oakland, Irina, wrote, these histories of violence and struggle ricochet against each other to shape the present in unexpected ways. The 1970s Syracuse-based group Prison Research Education Action Project produced the invaluable Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, which is now back in print thanks to Critical Resistance.
On what expansive scale of love and solidarity can we read the statement of support from Cairo to Oakland? The government of Egypt, it is worth recalling, was one of the top recipients of US military aid. Their decades’ long struggle against police repression and for social justice inspired and emboldened our struggle in the US to occupy our cities and reclaim our capacities to organize reorganize our relations to each other, the economy, and the government. What is different for us in the US is that we also are responsible for ending US military aid and wars of occupation that constrain others’ people’s dreams of peaceful occupancy and just relations with the land and other people.
I was struck by one of the headlines for this evening’s trial of the Hancock 38 protesters: “Violence in Afghanistan escalates, Drone Trial Starts.” A stark reminder to the ongoing importance of this action, particularly when the announced December 2011 withdrawal of US troops from Iraq rightfully has drawn a buzz, while their redeployment to Kuwait has been much less recognized. Assembled in the courtroom were seasoned organizers with the Syracuse Peace Council, and the other 18 groups who formed the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars for the spring action. They are wearing blue scarves at the request of and in solidarity with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Assembled in the courtroom were activists whose ages span over six decades. Their histories of organizing against wars and US military also bring recent US geopolitical history in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Central America directly into this small town.
Armed occupations are not incidental to the reasons why the occupy (and decolonize) movement is continuing to inhabit public spaces across the country. Nor are armed occupations incidental to the dreams for freer, self-determined futures that so many people want. The US federal budget is so occupied by the military that human needs for homes, jobs, income, humane health care, mind-blowing education, and environmental justice are turned into scarce goods. Only those who can pay (or take out loans) can play, while everyone else is expected to scrap it out for crumbs.
The battle to take back the military budget is one part of the battle to create just cities. Another part of the battle is ending the wars at home. Much like the decolonizing critiques of the language of occupation has sought to transform and broaden the terms through which the movement understands its struggle, demilitarizing dominant understandings of safety and security will be important in connecting the dots among US imperial war-making, border militarization and ongoing colonial occupations of Native lands, and the ways in which racial policing manages social crises created by such tremendous racial and class inequalities. Again, Oakland and the other cities I’ve mentioned have a lot of history to share in connecting the dots between racism and state violence at home and wars abroad.
Let the ricochet of the trial of the Hancock 38 drone resistors meet the general strike in Oakland, in the solidarity of knowing that stopping the work of state violence is the measure of the power of the people.
#weareoakland #occupytogether #oo #occupysyracuse #ows #endthewars
++++Democracy Now! coverage of the ongoing trial of the Hancock 38 drone prostesters: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/4/drones_on_trial_38_protesters_face
+++Update1 December, 2011 on the trial verdict: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/update_thirty-one_drone_protes.html
And check out Democracy Now! coverage of the ongoing trial of the Hancock 38 drone prostesters: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/4/drones_on_trial_38_protesters_face
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