For members of Students for a Democratic Society, this is that strange time of year when classes are finished but we start to hit the books with some renewed fervor. Yep, we’re in the lead-up to the National Convention once again! This go around with the SDS National Convention, there’s been some back and forth on caucuses and how they will work, attempting to sum up some lessons learned on what to do and what not to do.

With that in the back of my mind, I felt like writing at length about my experience with the SDS People of Color Caucus, from the period of SDS’s founding National Convention to the current day.

Bite your lip and take a trip

My most vivid memory of a caucus 2006 (Chicago) round, where (like everything else) the caucuses were chaotic: first they were all scheduled against one another (women’s caucus versus people of color caucus — as if there were no women of color); then caucus times were swapped around by the various constituencies; then the people of color caucus was accidentally locked out as the U. of Chicago wasn’t open at the time that had been scheduled.

Amid all this, there was some white chauvinist behavior going on. Common spaces such as the makeshift mess hall were monopolized by white crust punks who (without telling anyone at first) stocked it with dumpster dived food. The spaces for political discussions and debates of race (a panel on white privilege) were missing facilitators and participants. Mostly, these were pardonable mistakes of a rookie organization of young people, but they certainly grated on those who came to the caucus.

When we got around to holding a caucus – we ended up taking over a room mid-day – it went on in a rambling way. In the end, we reached a conclusion on two things. First, that our common gut reaction to what was transpiring around us wasn’t “just” a gut reaction – that it was a response to being in a situation where white subculture had de facto been favored.

More importantly, we concluded that unless we charged ourselves with the task of saying that this was wrong, folks were going to let that error slide, potentially into dangerous territory.

We ended up writing a terse statement, trying to criticize what was going on in a comradely way. It was read in the middle of some debate on national structure that wasn’t going anywhere – some folks were relieved that it had been interrupted – and then there was a back-and-forth on it.

Keep on pushing

I bring up events from some two years ago (might as well be an eon in student activist years), to show folks to see how far we’ve come since then. Back at the first SDS Convention, it was taken for granted that you had to be a crusty punk in order to be an SDS’er. At subsequent conventions and events, we’ve taken pains over how not to have anything associated with white subculture at events (sometimes to our detriment).

Witnessing SDS’s rapid expansion in the past few years, it is most striking that in having broken the chains that bound SDS’s organizational practices to white subcultural practices (dumpster diving, crustiness, etc.) energy was freed up for people of color to both join and latch on to the organization. The “SDS demographic” is much harder to pin down these days. We are becoming more reflective of college campuses’ demographics.

People of color in SDS have had to scrap and struggle to get ourselves and the organization this far. The Caucus had to weather white chauvinism and white guilt in equal measures at first, sometimes biting our tongues and sometimes ranting at length. Later there were the anonymous, pseudonymous, and pretty brazen accusations of acting as some conspiracy to import identity politics into SDS.

Eventually there were breakthroughs, solidarities and bonds formed with sympathetic white members of the organization. In short, we had to struggle in order to find an operating unity with SDS.

It is tempting to rest now. Mainly, I detect in SDS in general a certain tendency to classify caucuses as a sort of self-help circle; once people are no longer so aggrieved by the cultural tics of the organization at large, the caucus is somehow supposed to evaporate. The temptation for the caucus itself is to abide by this, and to narrow our mission to only being reactive to certain incidents of white chauvinist behavior in the organization.

If the fight against white supremacy has been a marathon, staying to this narrow mission is like running its distance on a treadmill – the exertion is the same but the progress is nil. We can stick to criticizing everything that is negative in the organization, and we only end up having wasted our time on people who aren’t going to give us the time of day anyway.

Our dreams are our only schemes

The cultural chauvinism surrounding SDS is contained at the moment. We will have to be vigilant to keep it in check, but it is time to move on. The new challenge: quit singing kumbaya and coming out swinging at white supremacy.

There’s two areas we have to address:

We first and foremost have to address questions of SDS’s orientation on the questions of race and nationality in American society. This is a strange era in which to be an activist. On the one hand, we are at a time when Left-based activism as a whole is relatively high. On the other, we are at a moment in which the grounding of the Left as a whole is no longer as rooted in the various struggles led by black and Latino forces against white supremacy.

In fact, we are at a time when many are willing to settle for pulling the crank for Barack Obama and declare their own racism functionally ended, even as they demand ridiculous denunciations of Rev. Wright.

Where does the People of Color Caucus help lead SDS in being a multiracial organization in this terrain? Why do we choose to work in solidarity with racially and nationally oppressed groups and organizations?

Second and subsequently: after the question of overall political direction, what are the strategies that the People of Color Caucus find that work toward advancement? How do we work in multi-racial and multi-organizational fronts and do so with mutual respect, without the sort of chauvinist missionary logic that provoked splits in the New Left era?

On the first area, orientation, this is not a matter of white supremacy as a singular issue. It’s also a matter of what principles we agree to abide by in our work in general. That is, beyond outright issues concerning race – the Sean Bell shooting, or Hurricane Katrina survivors fates – because white supremacy is so pervasive in society, because it is necessary to the functioning of American capitalism, we will need to be able to see where it operates outside of plain sight.

On the second matter of strategy, this could be described as a matter of applying orientation correctly: balancing the mandate of our politics against the harsh realities of the world. Who and what do we attack at the given period? Who and what do we support?

In all, we need to start thinking about what it means when the authority on race is still Dr. King, the dream he presented is still considered the ultimate program for racial equality, and yet what that dream was precisely has been so thoroughly co-opted as to become indistinct from any other marketing slogan.

Perhaps it is time not to just dream but also scheme

Do not obey, we must have our say, we can past the test

For this year’s convention, all caucuses have been asked to work in advance – set up facilitation, work out what needs to be done with those not in the caucus, and having an agenda that is more than just a list of complaints. It fits in properly with where we’re at in the POC Caucus, where those SDS’ers of color that I’ve spoken with are universally for holding a People of Color Caucus this year, and for moving beyond the territory we’ve already covered a couple times over.

I suspect this year, there have been some controversies in the Left outside of SDS that are going to come to our doorstep one way or another: the controversy of Seal Press, or the drama of clueless white anarchists talking shit about APOC. I don’t know if we’ll have time to address them, though perhaps through this blog I can get a teachable moment with folks.

I’ve told a few friends in the Caucus that I’ve got high hopes for it this year: for our role in SDS to shift toward making positive contributions for the organization, rather than having to use the caucus to halt something negative from the Convention floor; and internally transcending some of the pettiness of mainstream politics of Clinton v. Obama (the “every woman is white and every person of color is male”) to have our caucus be truly intersectional and put sisters in the center of it.

All told, I think this year may be a chance to actualize the People of Color Caucus so that we no longer have to worry about what people think we are, only that we are presenting ourselves the way we know we are.

Via Hegemonik

What’s good, all of you talented artists out there?? I am presently lookin’ for a band to accompany me on some upcoming show dates. If you’re interested, then please do hit up my e-mail at smoothesmg@gmail.com with the subject line of ‘BAND.’

P.S. All type of bands are welcomed to entertain this, as long as you’re ready to rock out wit’ Da Hustler!
Good luck!
SDH

Via Grandgood

Community Organizations are gathering to hold a festival and a press conference to bring to light the struggle of the Black Riders Liberation Party who have been wrongfully imprisoned and being held on trumped-up charges. Black Riders members General TACO, Aryanna, and Stress were arrested near Oakland and the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles for the charge of “Conspiracy to Buy and Sell Illegal weapons.” The bail for them is set from 500,000 to 1,000,000 dollars.

Lala from the Black Riders says, “The Black Riders are a new Black Panther Party formation, and have been subject to repression since their inception over 10 years ago.

” They do community programs like the “Watch a Pig” program which observes the police while they harass, intimidate, and terrorize Black and Brown communities

Different individuals and activists are uniting for the fight to free them at this festival. People from different walks of life: anarchists, feminists, animal rights groups, grass roots community organizations, students, and families.

There will be a press conference and festival to educate our communities around this case and to build support for the members of the Black Riders Liberation Party so we can stop the attack against people who are fighting to change the conditions in our communities.

Present will be original members of the Black Panther Party speaking: Elder Freeman, Wayne Phar, and also Bloodhound will be bringing Crips and Bloods for peace and unity and tie the red rag and blue rag together for symbol of truce and unity.

The conference will be facilitated and hosted by members of Cop Watch LA GC.

How do we resist? How do we resist capitalism, this system based on a logic that reduces human bodies, nature and life itself to mere economic inputs to be bought, put to work and then sold for profit? How do we resist its exploitation in our homes, in our workplaces, in our schools, in our communities?

This question is about how we organize ourselves and what tactics we use. It has always been the key question and all of our struggles, past and present, are dedicated to answering it. And it is through struggle, not some sort of so-called intellectual activity separate from struggle, that we come up with our answers.

The struggles of French workers that was the Paris Commune (1871) gave the radicals of Mikhail Bakunin’s and Karl Marx’s days a vision of participatory democracy and of an economy run by those who actually do the work. The sit-down strikes of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and of American auto-workers in the 1930s showed how the newly-emerging assembly line, itself meant to weaken the power of skilled or craft workers, could be brought to a standstill by workers siting down at their machines and refusing to work. Beginning in the 1960s campus strikes and occupations showed how students too could resist by refusing an education meant only to turn them into obedient workers.

Today it seems that our various struggles are coming up with another “answer” or rather part of an answer as no single form of organization or tactic is ever enough on its own. The struggles I have in mind include most loudly the piqueteros or the unemployed workers movement of Argentina that began in the mid-1990s.

How do workers who no longer have jobs and therefor can no longer strike or shut down production at its immediate site, resist? Their answer has been to occupy and block, even in the face of brutal and sometimes deadly police attacks, Argentina’s major highways and bridges. Using this tactic they are able to prevent the circulation of goods and people (or inputs and outputs of production from a capitalist point of view) and in general prevent business as usual. And they have won victories that seemed impossible only a few years ago including an employment insurance-like program whose funding they have used to build an autonomous network of worker-run shops and stores.

Closer to home, the leading practitioners of this tactic have been indigenous peoples who, like the piqueteros, have repeatedly occupied land, roads and railways in their struggles against Canadian colonialism. This recent wave of struggle includes the Six Nations occupation of land and of Highway 6 near Caledonia, Ontario, several occupations of railways across the country in solidarity with the Six Nations and most recently, the occupation (using an old school bus) of the major Toronto - Montreal railway line as well as the blockade of the major 401 highway by the Mohawk of Tyendinaga near Belleville.

Of course throwing a wrench in capitalism’s movement of products and people is not “new” especially when talking about strikes by transportation workers including the summer 2006 strike wave that included strikes by Montreal public transit workers, Greyhound drivers in Western Canada and Canadian Pacific Railways and Canadian National Railways conductors and maintenance workers. However two things stand out about these recent struggles.

First, capitalism has changed in a crucial way. While capitalism has always depended on the smooth flow of products and people, this dependence has today reached new heights. In response to the factory-based struggles of the industrial worker, capitalism has exploded the large factory or workplace into an infinite number of fragments kept together through networks of high technologies and transportation infrastructure. This is not the capitalism of the factory town but rather of the network where a car is made up of parts produced in 100 small factories, in 10 different countries and then delivered to thousands of dealers to be sold to millions of consumers all over the globe. In the service sector, think of the thousands of McDonald’s and Starbucks stores spread out over the world yet linked by information technologies and rail, highway, ship and plane.

From the point of view of those who struggle, the ability to disrupt the smooth flows of capitalism thus becomes an important source of power, perhaps as important as was disrupting production in the factory in the era of the factory town. The fact that the two-week CN workers’ strike alone caused hundreds of millions of dollars in profit losses leading to such headlines as the Toronto Star’s “Companies alarmed by CN strike” is a testament to the potential power that we can gain from this tactic.

Second, and even more important, is the potential that this tactic may spread to the struggles of people not only outside of the transportation sector but excluded from or on the margins of the economy as a whole. It is hard to think of people more excluded from the economy and society (and thus disempowered) than unemployed workers in the South or indigenous nations in Canada/Turtle Island. But, by disrupting capitalism’s flows of products and workers, these two groups have been able to gain tremendous victories (as in the case of the piqueteros) and attract more attention and force more movement on the issues than decades of so-called peaceful negotiations ever have (as in the case of the Six Nations).

These two struggles are showing something very important to us, to the unemployed factory worker whose job has been moved to where workers are more intensely exploited, to the young worker making minimum wage at a multinational chainstore, to all the people and communities that have been the target of the neoliberal onslaught (think run-away factories, cuts to social programs, police oppression, land grabs, etc.). They are showing that, despite our marginalization and apparent powerlessness, we too can organize our communities and disrupt this insane economic system by clogging its channels, by disrupting the smooth flows of goods and people it so depends upon. They are showing that we too can resist and resist effectively.

Of course the state and corporations will defend capitalism from our attempts to disrupt its circulation. The Six Nations blockade at Caledonia was raided by OPP forces and the Canadian government sent Canadian soldiers to the Tyendinaga Mohawk nation’s blockade. Both groups face numerous legal charges and the Tyendinaga Mohawk nation is being sued by CN Railway for millions of dollars in lost profits. Blocking a railway line or a highway is illegal. In this sense, this tactic is similar to the strike before it was legalized in the early 20th century. During that time striking workers were thrown in jail and far too often killed in cold blood on the picket lines by police.

But by organizing themselves and their communities, they were able to continue resisting until governments all over the world recognized the right to form a union and to strike. Today, the Piqueteros and the Six Nations (and other indigenous groups) are also showing that an organized community, one that has the solidarity of other communities, can effectively use tactics considered illegal by the state and stand up to the oppression of the state and billion-dollar corporations.

So now that we have these examples what do we do, we who are not directly involved in these struggles? It seems that a good place to start is by learning even more. One article will not due. Learning more may also lead to finding out how we may show some real solidarity with these struggles. Most importantly however, is to go back to and organize our own communities whether this be the workplace, the school, the local punk scene or whatever. Resisting and eventually doing away with capitalism is going to require all our efforts. Just like a local music scene thrives off the interactions and connections it makes with other scenes our struggles need to multiply and connect if they are to resist and eventually do away with the exploitation and oppression that we face everyday.

Via Linchpin

The campaign includes two Web sites discussing a 2007 referendum in which Cherokees decided to remove about 2,800 freedmen descendants and other non-Indians from tribal rolls, said Mike Miller, spokesman for the nation.

The sites also address what’s at stake if the congressional lawmakers have their way: denial of $300 million in federal money to the country’s second-largest American Indian tribe. The money pays for health clinics, Head Start programs, elderly care and housing assistance.

Summer is upon us! Let’s celebrate our work for equality with a festival in the park!

Join us for the Third Annual New York City Gender Equality Festival, a celebration of arts and activism, taking place Saturday July 19th in Von King Park, Central Brooklyn. This is a free public event open to New Yorkers of all ages and genders. Over 100 community artists, organizations, and local politicians will participate, offering inspirational performances and important information on every day activism, ending police violence, reproductive justice, and more. Come participate in education, community interaction, resource sharing, and the arts!

Third Annual New York City Gender Equality Festival
A celebration of arts and activism, taking place Saturday July 19th in Von King Park, Central Brooklyn.
Saturday July 19, 2008
10 am - 3pm, FREE!

Von King Park (Tompkins Park), Bedstuy, Brooklyn
Between Tompkins + Marcy at Lafayette
Subway: G to Bedford-Nostrand, A/C to Nostrand
Bus: B43 to Lafayette + Tompkins, B44 to Lafayette, B53 to Tompkins Ave.

Bring your family and friends to celebrate a day of Singers, Dancers, Poets, Community, Raffles, and more! Then join us afterwards…

For an After Party Fundraiser!
Get Down 2 Get Up, feat. DJ Ingie Pop & Tikka Masala
Doors at 9pm, Sliding scale
Donation: $10 - $5, 21 + up with ID

At Sputnik Bar, 262 Taaffe Place, Brooklyn
G train to Classon Ave.

Our celebration will stretch into the night with the sounds of DJ’s Ingie Pop & Tikka Masala, at Sputnik, as we celebrate movement building through music. All participating organizations of the Gender Equality Festival are invited to attend!

For more information on these events, or to sponsor or volunteer, contact - Meghan Huppuch at 718-857-1393 or sisters@ggenyc.org.

Via angry asian man

Addressing a congregation at the Apostolic Church of God, one of Chicago’s largest black churches, on Father’s Day, Barack Obama said:

“Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.”

This was his “Sister Souljah” moment. Just as Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign tried to reassure whites that he wasn’t too cozy with blacks by denouncing a rapper, Obama was appealing to whites by condemning his own.

Even so, I wasn’t surprised to hear him referred to black men as “boys.”

Obama has often taken to “playin’ blacks.” Playin’ in blackspeak means to fool or use a person or persons. (George Bush’s selling of a war on the Iraqi people to America is an example that readily comes to mind or - “Bush played us cheap” or “he played us for fools.” )

Early in the campaign year, Obama used one of the oldest racial stereotypes in a speech to black South Carolina state legislators: “In Chicago, sometimes when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say, ‘You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars’.” Translation; black people are dirty and lazy.

One would think getting money is a better plan.

Then, the day before the Texas primary, he let loose again, in a predominantly black venue: “Y’all have Popeyes out in Beaumont? I know some of y’all, you got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast. I know. That’s why y’all laughing. … You can’t do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school.” Translation; black people are fat, stupid and lazy.

How would people respond if John McCain (or any person of a different race, nationality or ethnicity) threw out stereotypes like these? What would we say if a white person had stood in the pulpit of a black church, or anywhere else for that matter, and referred to black men as “boys,” in any context?

But since it’s Obama, sounding like Bill Clinton before his fall from black grace, or Bill Cosby speaking out of his own personal pain, the change candidate’s remarks were met with hosannas mostly by a vapid, racist, white-dominated corporate media, the black people who say what their white bosses want to hear, and blacks and whites alike who shout amen even when Obama’s saying something plainly contradicted by their own life experiences.

It was no big surprise that after the speech those critical of Obama were dismissed “as out touch” with the new “post-racial” illusion. Bob Herbert of The New York Times appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball went so far as to say that anyone who disagreed with Obama’s Father’s Day admonition to black men was living in a racial “fog” of the past. Newspapers across the county affirmed the smear with headlines like “Obama tells black men to shape up” or “Obama speaks ‘inconvenient truth’ to black men” or “Obama calls black men irresponsible” or “He’s saying things people don’t want to hear” - with the inference that truth was flowing from his tongue.

I saw no headline lead with the word “some” black men.

Playin’ folk on any day is bad enough. But, as a father, grandfather and a black person, I see playin’ black men on Father’s Day as even more repulsive. The day is for honoring fathers. We don’t honor the vets on Veteran’s Day by pointing out those who choose not to fight, or the cowards, or even the enemy.

The Obama life narrative highlights that his dad abandoned him as a kid. So, maybe it’s his abandonment issues that he’s laying on the rest of us. That would explain why he kicked his father “under the bus” implying he had acted like a “boy” when he and his wife divorced each other. Was she acting like a “girl” at the time? It is as simple as one parent being good or a victim and the other a bad victimizer? And, what of the fact that both his mother and father remarried? Is it his wish that his mom and biological dad had remained unhappily married? Does he wish his half-sister had never been born? Is he against divorce? How does he feel about forced or even loveless marriages? Maybe he believes there should be a required economic declaration before a woman gives birth and that two signatures on paper are required before conception?

No doubt, there’s a difference between being a sperm donor and being a nurturing, involved parent. But you don’t have to share a living space with a child to have an influence on him or her. And you can share a living space and be a lousy father or mother. That’s life. I was very young when I first heard the phrase “staying together for the good of the kids.” As I grew I learned that oftentimes living arrangements between ex-lovers have to change for the good of the kids.

I’m not claiming to know the story behind the picture of Obama and his father at the airport, but I suspect that joint custody between Hawaii, Indonesia, Massachusetts, Kansas, New York, Illinois and Africa would have been tough.

Writing about Obama’s speech gave me a headache. I found myself getting testy just thinking it through and what it means to me and those around me. A lot of people have approached me to talk about Obama’s speech. People walk up to me at the gas checkout line and strike up a conversation about Obama. Just the other day, a black woman behind me in line pipes up and says, “Things sho’ gonna be better when Obama gets elected.” She was not pleased with my response to her uninvited optimism. But I don’t think what she said was or is helpful in real terms.

I was speaking to a single, black woman lawyer about my unease with the speech and she immediately went off on black men in general. Now, my lawyer friend is a smart, progressive person. She’s a former New York State prosecutor but I’ve never consciously deducted points from her humanity for her past employment choice. But in our conversation she threw out all the standard lines, “black men aren’t taking care of their kids,” and “they are sorry.” I countered by saying most social psychologists believe that an adolescent girl is more mature than an adolescent boy, so, who do we pin being the most irresponsible on? I asked her: If we believe that it is a woman’s right to chose whether or not to be a mother, then why should irresponsible black fathers be the sole point of Obama’s attack? And why should any aspect of black male-female relations be grist for the campaign mill?

What Obama’s “bash the black man” game leads to is an environment where black people – separate and not equal – is the issue.

Moreover, it passes on one of the lowest of all the smears and stereotypes: the lie that black men have no morals. It reinforces the white supremacists’ notion of blacks as irresponsible, overly sexual beasts; a notion that far too many black folk as well as white unwittingly buy into.

I happened to have what turned out to be a very short breakfast meeting with a white female friend who was also a former Hillary Clinton supporter. She’s now onboard with Obama. As we spoke, after not seeing each other for more than a month or so, the topic quickly went to Obama with me telling her I didn’t plan to vote for him, his speech being just one of the reasons. She responded by threatening never to speak to me again if I supported Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney. I don’t know if she was serious or not.

On the subject of the Father’s Day speech she followed up by asking in a somewhat careful way, “Aren’t black women more responsible than black men? That’s what I’ve always heard.”

She’s been married 3 times and has kids by her first husband.

But I didn’t mention that. Instead, what I think might have ended our breakfast prematurely was my black man race card response to the “irresponsibility” question. It’s the answer I give to anyone – black or white - who raises the question: A black man would have to be full of self or group hate to believe that black men are more irresponsible then white men or men of other races or ethnic backgrounds. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a host of other white guys who lied America into the Iraqi war, which has resulted in countless deaths, prove the point. And that’s just the most recent example of white, male irresponsibility. The history of the United States is drenched in blood due to the decisions of immoral, irresponsible white men.

A couple of weeks after the Father’s Day speech while waiting for a plane at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, I found myself in a conversation with a white, female airport worker. The woman, also a mother of mixed-race children, worked out on the pad, most likely unloading baggage and other such laborious tasks. She was sitting down resting between flights in the employee section, just a couple of seats away from me. She overheard me talking to a friend about the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death. This prompted her to tell me about her taking her two kids on a trip to the historic site. I felt her pride as she told her story of her trip. She remembered how she welled up with tears looking up at the balcony, and her kids asked why she was crying. She recalled how her kids responded when they got on the old ‘50s city bus and the recording yelled out, “Niggers move to the back of the bus!” She said it was then her kids understood why she had cried earlier. It presented her the opportunity to tell them how far things have come and what it took to get here. It was one of those moments when a parent feels like they’re teaching their kids something important.

At some point we started talking about Obama’s black man speech. She supports Obama. She told me of the pride her mixed-race kids felt in Obama’s success, him being mixed race like them. But at the end of our conversation she too concluded that Obama’s speech was aimed at white people.

When I first heard Obama’s Father’s Day speech, my immediate thoughts were of Camille, my recently married 30-year-old daughter. Around the time she turned 25, she informed me and her mother that she planned to have a baby. I simply told her it was her choice since she had to bear the primary burden of raising a child. Or, as the song goes, “if you dance to the music, ya gotta pay to the piper…”

When my daughter came to us, as parents, what we consciously didn’t do was lay a single-parent stigma on her, since nobody really raises a child alone. At least where I come from. So, we got a granddaughter to help raise and nurture along with our two other grandkids by my son and his wife who, coincidently, was a teenage mother before she and my son began dating in high school.

One of the jobs of a parent or grandparent is to prevent a child in their care from being saddled with guilt, self-hate or any other baggage society would strap on their backs – regardless of the circumstance of their birth, which a child has no say in. I see our job as rejecting the stigma, which paints a child as “a mistake.” Or, in political terms, it’s as simple as reinforcing Jesse Jackson’s “I am somebody” in a kid.

You don’t need to be Alvin Poussaint to know that a child – any child, regardless of color or economic status- who doesn’t value their life or feel their worth as a human or feels unloved grows up to be an adult who doesn’t value life – theirs or anyone else’s.

When Camille and her child’s father were going through their breakup, I had one of those heartfelt talks with the both of them. She and the young man had dated since middle school. And, although they had a child together, they were at a fork in the road with one another. It was one of those moments when young people learn adult things, such as the fact that a child does not always make a relationship better nor can it keep an unhealthy or loveless relationship together. And, when a couple splits, in the heat of it all, it’s important not to do or say something stupid that would scar not only their individual lives, but their child’s future as well. We told the young man that he was the father of our grandchild and nothing could alter that fact. We assured him that we didn’t expect anything less than him having a full relationship with his child. He has done just that over the years. But we didn’t call him an irresponsible boy. That seemed not only counter-productive but holier than thou. Of course, we weren’t running for president; we were just trying to give a kid a chance.

Camille married 5 years after NyAshia’s birth, but it wasn’t to her child’s biological dad. It was to a fellow who has three children of his own. He also shares joint parental custody with his ex-lovers. In the three or four years of his courtship of my daughter, his kids called my wife and me grandmama and granddaddy. While a marriage license and church service made it official, it didn’t take all that for us to be family. Everyone in this blended situation – the biological father of my granddaughter, the biological mother of our blended grandkids, and the rest of us – have always shared parental responsibilities.

Now, I’m not trying to universalize my family’s experience. But I sure wouldn’t lay Obama’s take on responsibility on the people around me. Nor would I suggest that they adopt his worldview of what a family is or should be. Because by his two-biological, heterosexual parents residing in same household definition of a family, every other type of family setup is inherently deficient in every sense of the word: economic, social, moral.

In the days after Obama’s speech, Ishmael Reed, Dr. Ron Walters and others rebutted the candidate’s targeting of black men with the Boston College study which revealed – surprisingly to some – that black fathers not living in the same domicile as their children are more likely to have a relationship with their kids than white fathers in similar circumstances. Walters, an Obama supporter, warned his candidate, “Black people are not voting for a moralist-in-chief.”

So, in light of the Brown study should we conclude that white men are more irresponsible than black men when it comes to spending time with their kids? Maybe Obama should find a white church and offer white men advice on Father’s Day? Can we expect to hear him call them “boys?”

Or maybe he should take a trip to the hollows of Appalachia and tell the “trailer park crowd” that if they would just “pick up the garbage” from around their trailers and “stop engaging in incest” (or whatever other stereotype that comes to mind) they would not have it so bad.

And shouldn’t he be advising the polygamist families out west? Or, hopping on a plane to Massachusetts to lecture the fathers and parents of the pregnant teens in Gloucester?

According to Health and Human Services, “throughout the 1990s, black teens have had the largest declines in teen childbearing rates of any group” while “Latinas have had the highest teen birth rate of any major ethnic/racial minority in the country since 1995.” Why doesn’t Obama take his message to the barrios? Maybe he could go to a Catholic Cathedral in the heart of an East L.A. Latino community and challenge Latino men’s machismo. He should use “boys” in his speech and admonish the parishioners not to eat so many burritos.

Truth be told, I don’t wish to see a particular racial, sexual, religious or ethnic group singled out for derision or used as a campaign prop. Stereotypical remarks about blacks, Latinos and whites in Appalachia are just as inappropriate and stupid as remarks about Jewish materialism or Irish drunkenness.

I’m old fashioned about some things. My mother is prone to say, “Keep your business out the streets.” I’m only putting out my family’s personal stories to illustrate why I’m leery about Obama.

Many of those around me plan to vote for him. For the most part, my response is to ask folks to look at their lives and check whether or not what Obama is saying squares with their reality. Never mind how they “should” be living – never mind how Obama’s “current” family looks. I just ask if, with all the troubles of getting along day to day, is it helpful to have his polish on how they should be living piled on top?

My new son-in-law has two young boys and a daughter. Like so many other black teens who weren’t as lucky as Obama, he got busted in his teen years and did a little time on a drug arrest. Obviously his life has turned around. Luckily, he’s a brick mason. If he didn’t work for himself in a skilled trade, it would be hard for him to find work. He knows that because he went to jail and his sons have 60 percent likelihood of going to jail. He has to fight extra hard to make sure his kids are not that statistic. And it’s a tricky thing. You want your kids to understand the many race traps but not be defined by them.

After Obama won the South Carolina primary, whenever I was asked, I’d say that in the general election my vote was his to lose. Prior to and after their wedding, my ex-offender son-in-law, somewhat of a race man (he planned to vote for Obama “because he is black”), who just recently found out he could vote despite his conviction, constantly reminded me of what I had said, “Remember, you said your vote was his to lose.”

Shortly after his and my daughter’s wedding, a couple of day after Obama’s Father’s Day speech, we were sitting together with a friend of his, a young, married father of one, who was in their wedding party. Once again he reminded me of what I had said about “my vote to lose.” I let loose with just about everything I’ve said in this article. I told him to look at his own life and then tell me what he thinks about Obama.

I asked my son-in-law to think about his wedding and the people who were there. There were lots of young mothers and fathers and children, divorcees, second marriages, common-law arrangements, ex-lovers, step-parents and grandparents, etc. Many of those people, if they believed Obama, could be passed off as being “irresponsible” and their kids dismissed as “mistakes.” I asked him: Did he truly believe that many of the people in that church, whose lives he knew, were less moral or responsible than others, as Obama inferred? Ex-offender, former unmarried father of three, rap music producer, isn’t he one of those whom Obama is condemning? On paper, anyway. Yet, he has raised three good kids.

Whenever I suggest to Obama insiders that he’s a lot like Bill Clinton, they go apoplectic. Yet, as race-baiting and race politics goes, Obama has proven himself to be as good, if not better than Clinton, long considered the modern master of race politics. If you believe, as I do, that he “played black men to court white voters,” then all Obama’s protestations about Bill Clinton’s race-baiting were just a ruse. And, in that light he is no better than Clinton when it comes to using race fears. He may even be worse than Clinton because he plays it both ways – assaulted and assailant. I’ll be willing to bet that if Clinton were honest in revealing how he really felt about Obama, that would be at the heart of his grievance.

No doubt, people are excited about the prospect of a young, vibrant, black person as president. They see their choice as between John McCain and Obama, and conclude that Obama is “the only option,” or say “He will never be as bad as Bush. He will never be bad as Reagan.” Or they say their man Obama “has a chance to win. We need to give him some latitude.” “We need to let the man do what he needs to do to win.” “We should trust him.” “Barack is one of us, no matter what he sounds like right now.”

As critical as I am, I actually want to believe he’s “one of us.” But I don’t see it.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Obama. If people like me don’t see Obama as “one of us,” that strengthens the belief of the powerful that he is “one of them.”

For sure, Obama has most black voters in the bag. I’m pretty sure that my vote falls in the “doesn’t matter so much” column. And from listening to Obama, a whole lot of my family members’ lives don’t matter much either.

I’m not really looking for change from Obama should he win. I’m looking for the fight to come.

Kevin Alexander Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina and author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike! The Fundamentals of Black Politics which will be published this fall by CounterPunch Books. He can be reached at: Counterpunch

Over the next couple of years, the EZLN redistributed the reclaimed land to indigenous farmers regardless of political affiliation, under one condition: that they refuse to collaborate with the government and that they never, under any circumstance, sign government documents pertaining to land ownership.

By refusing to legalize their land, Zapatistas free indigenous people from every law that was designed to rob them of their territory and natural resources. Even the ejido system (government-recognized communally held land that could not be bought nor sold) that Emiliano Zapata fought and died for was a compromise between government control over indigenous territory and traditional Mayan practices of collectively working land that belonged to everyone.

President Carlos Salinas de Gotari reformed Article 27 of the Mexican constitution in 1992 in preparation for the North American Free Trade Agreement, allowing ejidos to be bought, sold, and used as loan collateral. This was the spark that led to the zapatistas’ 1994 uprising, but it has also been the government’s most effective tool for carving out pieces of Zapatista territory and bringing it back under government control.

Recuperated land

Following the EZLN’s uprising and seizure of vast quantities of land, the Mexican government bought out the former owners of the recuperated land. It then offered free, no-strings-attached land titles to the Zapatistas and other indigenous peoples on the land in an attempt to bring the land back within the government’s domain. After all, owner-less recuperated land cannot be bought, sold, or used as loan collateral, but thanks to President Salinas’ constitutional reform, government-recognized ejidos can. Legalizing land, even if it means that zapatistas and their allies are its official owners, opens up the possibility that the extremely impoverished indigenous landowners will sell their land or use it as collateral for loans they cannot repay.

The EZLN saw through the government’s strategy and encouraged occupants of recuperated lands to resist legalization. However, some non-Zapatistas who had promised the EZLN they wouldn’t legalize, reneged and signed papers making them the legal owners of the recuperated lands on which they lived and worked. Wooed by politicians’ empty promises of community development projects, some zapatistas left the movement to join other indigenous organizations and legalize their land.

In other cases, indigenous organizations have invaded Zapatista lands, and rather than communally working the land with the Zapatistas, they block Zapatistas’ access to the land and its resources and work with the government to legalize it, excluding Zapatista families from the land titles. Local politicians encourage this behavior by offering to pay all expenses in the process of legalizing Zapatista lands.

The government has thrown its full support behind the carving up of recuperated land by arming, protecting, and collaborating with paramilitary organizations that invade autonomous lands and terrorize their inhabitants. The most infamous instance occurred in Acteal on December 22, 1997, when paramilitaries massacred 45 members of the pacifist Catholic organization Las Abejas. All but nine of the victims were women and children. The attack occurred while a police patrol stationed 200 meters (218 yards) away did nothing to intervene—on the contrary, the EZLN intercepted government radio communications that indicated the police were there to provide backup for the paramilitaries. When police finally did arrive on the scene after the violence had ended and the perpetrators had fled, they were under high-level orders to “pick up [the bodies] before the journalists get here.”

Paramilitary organizations

The international backlash that followed the massacre closed the book on classically defined paramilitaries in Chiapas. Paramilitary organizations like the Anti-Zapatista Revolutionary Indigenous Movement (MIRA) and Peace and Justice folded under international scrutiny. A more sophisticated, twenty-first century paramilitary organization rose from their ashes: the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC).

Founded in May 1998, just months after the Acteal massacre, the OPDDIC has a paramilitary heart and a civilian face. The Mexican government recognizes it as a registered NGO. Most of its members are unarmed—they provide the political legitimacy necessary for the organization to openly work with the government. Its founder and leader is Pedro Chulin Jimenez, former local congressman and ex-head of the paramilitary organization MIRA. MIRA was notorious for its armed invasions of Zapatista communities, forcing residents from their homes and preventing their return.

Presented as an alternative to the Zapatistas—as an organization that respects the law and works with the government instead of against it in order to win indigenous rights - the OPDDIC promotes the appropriation of more lands for indigenous campesinos. It offers to help indigenous people become the legal owners of their very own piece of land - land that was previously recuperated by the EZLN. To receive the OPDDIC’s help, indigenous campesinos become members of the organization. The OPDDIC then works with the government to legalize the members’ land.

Leaked minutes from OPDDIC-government meetings show how OPDDIC leaders and government officials plan the legalization of recuperated lands with the intention of excluding and displacing Zapatistas who occupy and work the land in question. Once recuperated lands are legalized under the ownership of OPDDIC-affiliated campesinos, all other occupants whose names were intentionally left off the land titles have three options:

• Leave their organizations and join the OPDDIC.
  
• Pay the OPDDIC a monthly fee to remain on the land.
  
• Face constant harassment, hostilities, and violence perpetuated by OPDDIC members and police.

The government supports the OPDDIC’s civilian side as well as its paramilitary side. OPDDIC members often cruise Zapatista territory in government vehicles driven by police officers. Ex-OPDDIC members have publicly testified to receiving weapons from the government on behalf of the organization. OPDDIC members enter and leave federal military bases, presumably for military training.

Terrorizing Zapatistas

The government also provides hands-on support to help the OPDDIC terrorize Zapatistas. On September 11, 2007, fifty to sixty OPDDIC members armed with machetes, clubs, and .22 caliber pistols attacked a group of nine Zapatistas alongside a highway near the hotly contested community of Bolon Ajaw. Six escaped, but the three who didn’t were brutally beaten. During the beatings OPDDIC member Jeronimo Urbina Lopez shot Zapatista Miguel Jimenez Alvaro in the chin. OPDDIC members took the three seriously injured Zapatistas to the Agua Azul jail, where police took them into custody, wrote down the prisoners’ names, and took their photos as OPDDIC members continued to threaten them, saying, “We’re going to kill you,” and “…we’re going to rape [your wives and daughters] and make them our women.”

Paramilitary violence and land invasions present the Zapatistas with a complex dilemma: they are designed to provoke a violent reaction, therefore justifying federal military intervention in the region to disarm the Zapatistas. Always the innovators, Zapatistas have found other ways to defend themselves.

When OPDDIC and police kidnapped the three Bolon Ajaw Zapatistas, Zapatista bases of support responded by felling trees onto roads and cutting the electricity to Agua Azul. This prevented the prisoners’ transfer to a Palenque prison and shut down Agua Azul, a tourist hot-spot owned and operated by the OPDDIC. The government was forced to negotiate with the Zapatistas’ Good Government Council and release the prisoners.

Other Campaign

The Other Campaign, initiated by the Zapatistas in 2005, has also rallied in defense of recuperated land. Responding to the Zapatistas’ call for a global Campaign in Defense of Land and Territory, the Other Campaign led a successful international boycott against the coffee chain Cafe la Selva and the Union de Ejidos de la Selva (UES), the cooperative that produces its coffee.

The Other Campaign initiated the boycott because UES coffee producers took advantage of the enormous displacement caused by a 1995 military offensive and claimed land Zapatistas had fled as their own, making themselves the legal owners. When Zapatistas returned to their homes, they found that their land now belonged to UES members. UES members visited Zapatista homes armed with machetes, trying to scare them into fleeing once again. Thanks to the boycott and protests, UES members retreated from the affected community and Zapatistas reclaimed their homes.

The Chiapas-based Center for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Investigations (CAPISE) has also joined the Campaign in Defense of Land and Territory. It sends brigades of national and international observers to threatened Zapatista communities to document threats and violence in the hopes that their presence and scrutiny will deter further violence and invasions. The brigades persist despite paramilitary threats—the OPDDIC has threatened to rape female brigadistas on numerous occasions.

The Zapatista uprising that inspired the world to action in 1994 was rooted in indigenous land rights. The land Zapatistas fought, bled, and died for is now under attack. The EZLN’s strength has always been national and international solidarity, not its weapons. What remains to be seen is if the international community is strong enough and willing to defend the Zapatistas from the most sophisticated and complex attack to date.

Via My Word is My Weapon

Unconventional Strategies 2.0 is a how-to guide for the disruption and subversion of this year’s electoral spectacle. It contains the most up-to-date strategy information, maps, schedules of events, contact information, and advice on plugging into the counter-convention infrastructure. We are especially proud of the new 7-sector map of downtown St. Paul, which makes use of likely RNC delegate bus routes and was assembled by a professional radical cartographer.

Because the conventions are less than 2 months away, UA publishing groups will not be using a professional printer to make a 15-30,000 print-run, as was done with previous papers. This one will have to be done the old-fashioned way, by printing them off the internet and copying it yourselves. Read-only and print versions of the paper can be found in the downloads section.

On a related note, several new beautiful posters have been added to this site, and an 11×17 version of the new St. Paul sector map should be up shortly. There are also still many bundles of the False Hope vs. Real Change paper available for free, which can be ordered at falsehopeorrealchange@riseup.net . With less of a focus on the conventions and more attention paid to the anarchist case against capitalism and electoral politics, this paper is be an excellent outreach tool for those unable to make it to the conventions.

Finally, while it is exciting to note that sectors 5, 6, and 1 of St. Paul have been claimed, the hot spots in sectors 3 and 4 are still lonely as can be. Any takers?

Via Unconventional Action