New Morning, Changing Weather

“No matter who wins the elections – All you community organizers, you’re going to wake up on November 5th and do the same work you’ve always been doing.”

That’s what spoken-word artist Walidah Imarisha (Bad Sista of duo Good Sista/Bad Sista) told a crowd in Seattle on Saturday night. She’s right, of course – the work of grassroots organizing is the same, and can’t be changed by the election of any politician.

Still, there is a new atmosphere this morning, I’m just not sure how to describe it. I went to sleep last night to fire works in the streets, neighbors talking and horns honking, and woke up to hear a political buzz like I’ve never heard – on the bus, in the hallways on campus, and, of course, in e-mails and on blogs. Someone calling me on the phone about other business immediately asked, “So what’d you think about last night?”

How to capture this? I don’t know. Here I don’t want to outline my own opinions. I only want to share selections – like Imarisha’s statement – that resonated with me. Some of them might contradict – if they do, that’s good. Those are tensions we need to work through.

• Selections from discussions among anarchists:

“Too often, anarchists are reflexively dismissive of electoral politics (something I’ve also been guilty of in the past), ignoring the implications of the mainstream political landscape and how it can shape organizing strategies on the ground. Despite Obama’s long list of corporate sponsors, hawkish foreign policy team, weak domestic policies, and overall centrist outlook, it is clear that his campaign has made a significant mark on the country and we should have a serious conversation about how to engage with Obama hysteria without compromising our principles.I have no illusions about Obama’s hope and change rhetoric, but as a community organizer and person of color who works with latino/a immigrants and lives in a prodominately black neighborhood, I think change is palpable already. If nothing else, it seems clear to me that his administration will have a considerable impact on race relations in the U.S., on a level we can’t possibley measure. I imagine the dominant conversation will take the shamefully shallow “post-racial society’ track, but amongst working-class people of color I think there’s a potential opportunity for a stronger black-brown alliance, particularly around labor issues–an arena where anarchist people of color can make inroads.”

I think U.S.-based anarchists, particularly of the white-male-middle-class variety–who seem to be the majority–tend to overlook the significance of Obama’s victory for working-class people of color. I don’t think Obama genuinely has the latters interests at heart, but I think his voice and image has legitimized the notion that real change comes from the bottom, and that we should seize the opportunity to remind people that he’s absolutely right and begin mobilizing folks–particularly around prison issues, labor, health care, and institutional racism.

I think it’s worth reading Obama’s memoirs. He is a great writer, no doubt about it. He’s also a grass roots activist and has been since his 20s. He also spent 5 years of his youth in Indonesia right after the coup and knows what despotism and poverty look like from the street up, rather than from the dizzy heights of power down. He’s also lived through a degree of structural persecution I will never understand and he spent most of his life trying to understand it.

He’s certainly middle class, and he’s certainly not a revolutionary, but he’s a damn site better than anything else on offer (not that you said otherwise of course). He’s also charged by ideals that many of us share even if we don’t think he’ll be able to realise them through the instruments of the state and capitalism. He’s also made his way through the political upheavals of the 60s in his own way and seems to have fairly standard Marxist views about history and power – at least that’s what he wrote 13 years ago.

What surprised me most about the campaign was that everyone tried so hard to keep race out of it, but as soon as he won it’s all anyone’s talked about. I think that’s inevitable, but I don’t think he’s inspiring because he’s half Kenyan (though it is also really inspiring); I think he’s inspiring because he’s a real person who’s really thought about politics and the people and has campaigned for most of his adult life on behalf of other people and against the odds and made it in the way he wanted to.

Bear in mind also that his memoirs were published 13 years ago, just after he got the presidency of the Harvard Law Review and well before he went into politics.

He’s an activist first and now he’s a politician. I think the worry for anarchists is how successful he’s been. I think the challenge for us is to hold him to account and to push the agenda without sacrificing our principles. “

“The two funniest moments of the coverage on the BBC last night were:
a) an interview with a poor-looking woman in some gawdawful dump in the midwest – she was asked whether she expected great change and she replied “well they’re politicians and politicians are politicians and the president doesn’t have that much power anyway, so I don’t expect much change”. It just completely stunned the presenter.

b) Ted Koppel being asked about the prospects for Obama’s presidency and responding about how this wouldn’t really affect the underlying racial problems and that Obama would have pretty much zero space to maneouver given the crisis and he would just be fire-fighting – he was interrupted by the presenter saying “er, this is no time for doom and gloom”.”

“It will be interesting to see how these people operate and see things now that the election’s over. The important thing is to engage and work alongside these people. We all know the underlying reality, and need for radical change, but there is no denying that this is a historic and significant moment in the US. Some elder comrades (people in their 60′s) have helped me understand that. I was at an eviction blockade in Mattapan (one of Boston’s majority Black working class neighborhoods). One of the organizers stated “we should be celebrating last night’s victory, but instead we are here, defending the home of a Black woman who continues to suffer. This is where we belong.”"

In the UK this evening they had Dizzee Rascal on for his thoughts, alongside Baroness Amos (a Government peer) and he scored pretty highly too.

“No, one person doesn’t make change, people together make things change”. Plus he was moving around enough to leave camera shot.

• Dead Prez offer their opinion (the only hiphop track I’ve heard yet critical of Obama… at least until Dizzee cuts a track, I guess): Dead Prez – PolitriKKKs

The Grace of Inactivity

These past few weeks have seen me in limbo between Bellingham and Seattle as we scrambled to complete our video in daily marathon editing sessions. The video finally debuted on September 4th as Present In All That We Do (from the Baldwin quote about history). We have other prospective showings lined up in the coming months, but nothing to justify my lingering days in Bellingham extending any longer.

–

Now I am in Seattle’s University District. Whereas Bellingham was a place whose history I could begin to understand, and maybe even began to grasp my own place in that history, given its small size as a city, I’m left floundering here, not knowing where to begin.

My father swears he once lived only a block or so away from where I do now, but he either can’t remember what his building looked like, or it has been torn down. Whether the building still stands or not, I think my father’s memory says something about this area: a young person’s presence here is fleeting, transient, leaving behind nothing to remember one by, and one leaves with nothing to remember about the place itself.

This is a place of impermanence, and so I’m thinking it will be a good introduction to the metropolis: no need for the knowledge of my neighborhood here. Instead I can concern myself with my new surroundings – find a job, get political. For now I’m left with nothing do but job hunt and generally laze, which explains the origins of this blog post, and the title too.

–

I have also been reading.

A roundabout connection to the above: George Woodcock, author of Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, once taught at the University of Washington (so says the back of the book; his Wikipedia entry says nothing about it). His book appeared in 1962, and the era permeated throughout Woodcock’s book, both in the style it is written and in its general pessimism about the prospects of anarchism in general. The book is generally concerned with what happened in anarchism’s history, not why, and given its breadth – basically all the European countries are covered – perhaps that’s all a book like this can do. Woodcock was an English professor, and it shows – he seems to dedicate an entire chapter to Leo Tolstoy simply because he was a novelist, and Woodcock is always interjecting little asides about the literary quality of the anarchists’ writings.

Overall it was an interesting read, but nothing I would ever recommend to someone looking for an introduction to anarchism – his subjects are all one hundred years or so in the past, and he remains centered completely on the anarchist men of Europe. Perhaps the only new insight I take away from it is the historical failure of anarchists to organize as anarchists. The success of anarchism, in my eyes, demands participation in larger social movements, those not organized around an idea but a practice. Groups of anarchists are important to me, but only as a circle (a circle A!) to share ideas and insights, which we then carry into our struggles elsewhere.

I also recently completed Benevolent Assimiliation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 by Stuart Creighton Miller. Anna and I have plans to visit the Philippines in the next few years, so I’ve been looking to learn more about the history of the archipelago. I learned next to nothing about the Philippines in this book, though I learned a great deal about the early history of American imperialism overseas – often despite Miller’s soft-pedaling, moderate liberalism. The book is inordinately concerned with the debates, scandals and squabbles amongst the powerful – mostly US politicians and generals – during the early years of the US occupation of the country.

I generally couldn’t care less about the powerful, but several short – too short – passages in this book make the invaluable connection between US conquest of the North American continent, and imperialism overseas. A great many of the men sent to pacify Filipino revolutionaries had also been deeply involved in US campaigns against Native Americans, including the Wounded Knee massacre. The tactics of concentration camps, rape, and wholesale murder of Filipinos had been tried and tested on the American frontier.

One point that Miller does have the courage to make: the collective memory of the US is one of amnesia and eternal innocence, an innocence that insists we are always doing these things to help people. The justifications have always remained the same: bringing civilization and democracy to ungrateful savages. After reading a book like this, the historical trail leading from the US frontier, to the Philippines, to Vietnam, and eventually to Iraq become undeniable.

100 years of labor, migration, violence…

The following is the current abstract for a project that is demanding a great deal of my attention these days (sometimes I fear more than I’m able to give?). My partner on the film is my good friend Ian Morgan, who is completing the project for his senior project at Fairhaven College.

We are sponsored in part by the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force and Community to Community Development. We also submitted this to a conference concerned with similar riots that took place in Vancouver less than a week after events in Bellingham, but have yet to hear back.

If anyone is interested in taking a look at the research we’ve been doing for the film, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll email you.

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” – James Baldwin

In 1907, more than two-hundred East Indian workers in Bellingham, WA were attacked by a mob of white workers. The white rioters broke into the East Indians’ houses and workplaces, stole and destroyed their valuables, and threatened and beat the East Indians until they were forcibly expelled from the city. In the course of one night, an entire community was driven from the town – in the approving words of a local paper, “wiped off the map.” One hundred years later, 2007, hostility towards non-white immigrants in Bellingham continues. Raids and detentions by government immigration agents are ongoing; so are surveillance and harassment from both government agents and groups like the Minute Men. How have the events of 1907 shaped Bellingham as we know it in 2007? What has changed and what remains the same?

We propose a documentary film, presently untitled, centering on Bellingham in 1907, that explores the history of immigration and racial tensions in the Pacific Northwest – history, in Baldwin’s sense, the past as it lives on in the present. Accounts of Belligham’s past, illustrated with photographs and texts, will provide a starting point for a discussion of Bellingham today. Through interviews with local activists working for immigrant rights and immigrants themselves, we will paint a portrait of immigration at present and the possibilities of the future.

The film (or, more accurately, video) is being proposed by Andrew Hedden and Ian Morgan, two college-educated white males hoping to put our access to university resources and our interest in film to use in the greater discussion about immigrant rights in the United States. The film will be completed and debut in Bellingham, WA on September 5th, the 100th anniversary of the Bellingham riots. One version of the film will be roughly forty-five minutes in length, hopefully ideal for community education and discussion, though a longer version may also be produced.

History gets shit on in Port Townsend, WA

Literally. Look at all the bird doody on this historical marker.

This marker can be found on the Northwest (?) side of Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA.

It reads: “CHINESE GARDENS. The Chinese comprised 20% of Port Townsend’s population. Here they operated truck gardens to sell produce door to door in town from double-decked wagons. Late 1890′s Early 1900′s.”

But nothing about why fewer Chinese live in Port Townsend today than one hundred years ago; nothing about the legacies of racist and exclusionary legislation, or how Fort Worden was a training ground for imperialist armies.

Perhaps history is getting shit on in more ways than one.