Undercommoning

”Anti-authoritarians have been great at theorizing ‘dismantling the system’, but there is less emphasis on the importance of building alternative institutions. It is no coincidence that the work of growing alternative relations and networks has largely been invisible in our movements because it is gendered labor. Both the dominant political economy and the microcosm of our movements are subsidized by the labor of those who provide childcare, cook meals, do secretarial work and provide emotional support. Even recognizing these as forms of labor is an uphill battle; we are able to articulate critiques of capital and labor in the wage economy but continue to invisibilize care work in the unwaged economy. A transformative politics requires us to rethink, reimagine and reorient work and its relationship to gender and dis/ability—what is the work that makes all other work possible? How do we foster social relations across generations and communities based on interdependency, resilience, vulnerability, and solidarity? Connection is, after all, the anti-thesis of commodification and at the heart of a truly transformative politics.”

This has been the biggest issue I’ve had with the liberal elements within the local Black Lives Matter movement. A lot of people are way too focused on being good “allies” to POC seeing as how black and brown people facing the brunt of police violence and racist terror in their communities are not a monolithic group and that the interests and goals of some POC will not match up with others, it ends up being a liberal shit show. White liberal “allies” will align themselves with the safest possible grouping they can, looking to the Urban League or the NAACP for guidance while more militant organizations or autonomous individuals are ignored and even outright silenced. This played out several times during the 4th Precinct occupation organized by the Black Liberation Project and Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis. Nonprofit and NGO activists backed by the Democratic Party did their best to squash autonomous actions taken by local north Minneapolis street militants and their white accomplices. “White anarchists” were scapegoated for actions like the dozens of officers injured by rocks thrown by mostly black and brown youth militants. Radicals were accused of being undercover cops, agent provocateurs, or “hurting” the movement, “distracting” from the issues, or were “no longer part of the movement.” In the view of the liberals, the good white ally was a peaceful, non-confrontational, non-controversial protester who simply followed along, chanted the chants, and looked good for the cameras holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign. The “bad” ally was the protester who responded to attacks from police with rubber bullets, pepper spray, and baton strikes with rocks, bottles, and other projectiles. Who dearrested black youth by putting their bodies on the line and assaulting the arresting officers. Who barricaded streets with trash bins and dumpsters pushed into the street. While most of the militancy and rage was found in the young black north-siders at the occupation, the media, NGO activists, and the white liberals who self-identified as “allies” had the devilish “white anarchist” on the tip of their tongues whenever the cameras were pointed at them.

“The context of “Black Lives Matter” is not that other lives don’t. The context of “Black Lives Matter” is that the value of black lives remains under assault in the United States.”

Abolition is seeking submissions by artists for our inaugural issue.

Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is a new radical journal which highlights work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to push beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism. Today we seek to abolish a number of seemingly immortal institutions, drawing inspiration from those who have sought the abolition of all systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression. ‘Abolition’ refers partly to the historical and contemporary movements that have identified themselves as ‘abolitionist,’ but it also refers to all revolutionary movements, insofar as they have abolitionist elements — whether the abolition of patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, the state, or white supremacy. Rather than just seeking to abolish a list of oppressive institutions, we aim to support studies of the entanglement of different systems of oppression and to create space for experimentation with the tensions between different movements. Instead of assuming one homogenous subject as our audience (e.g., “abolitionists of the world unite!”), we publish for multiple, contingent, ambivalent subjectivities — for people coming from different places, living and struggling in different circumstances, and in the process of figuring out who we want to be as we transform the world. With Fanon, we are “endlessly creating” ourselves.

In this struggle, we see the voices of artists, and unique insights possible through the arts, as fundamental in both speaking back to existing systems of oppression and imagining different futures. Against the dominance of ‘academic’ rhetoric, Abolition affirms a multiplicity of ways of knowing the world. We aim to include art in the journal, not as simply illustration or supplement, but as a theory/practice of engaging with the world itself. This is a specific acknowledgement that academia (and also the written word, with whatever cultural understandings the primacy of literacy implies) doesn’t have a monopoly on knowledge or on working towards different futures. Art adds to conversations about abolition in crucial ways. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support and feature artists whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. We invite submissions by artists working and creating outside the ‘white cube’ circuit whose individual practice, themes or interventions engage with the goals ofAbolition in a meaningful way. We understand ‘art’ broadly to include many different forms and media: painting, video, drawing, poetry, multi-media, documentary, among others.

“When people ask me, “Who will protect us,” I want to say: Who protects you now?" 

- Mychal Denzel Smith — "Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality.” 

On March 9, 1960, the All-University Student Leadership Group published “An Appeal for Human Rights” in local newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and the Daily World. Making it plain, the authors criticized the “snail-like speed” by which this country ameliorates the existing conditions of Jim Crow segregation. Denouncing the innumerable inequalities in education, employment, housing, voting, hospital, law enforcement, they called out those in authority for assistance in the complete and unequivocal abolition of these injustices.

On November 20, 2015, Concerned Students, in conjunction with minority groups, released “Demands of Black Voices,” a comprehensive list ranging from racial bias, to mental health, to representation, to wages, institutional inequalities, among others.

But despite the grandiloquent language of these tireless activists, both demands fall of deaf ears. To quote Sister Ashley Benn, “Demands have been made since the 1960s, and although we just give you a list of demands, and yes I know they are a lot, and yes I know that it just doesn’t take a day…I know it takes some amount of time, it doesn’t take 50 years.” Praise is long overdue to la mujer de color.

The current generation must learn from our forbearers’ struggles. We can be as clear as day, but still, nothing will happen.

There will be those that ask, but why won’t anything happen? Because in the spirit of Brother Gil Scott Heron, the movement will not be on the starting five of the Atlantic Coastal Conference. The movement will not be on the front page for winning the Nobel Prize. The movement will not have a 20 minute harangue at commencement. The movement will not illumine in brisk evenings some obscure marketing firm in the middle of the Bryan Center Plaza. The movement especially will not dissolve in its token 15 minutes of fame, within the white noise of complacency. The movement is not a Duke conversation, sino que it is a demand.

Never mind the paternalist condescension of President Brodhead, “In a university, you have to actually think through and work them out what can be done…” Never mind the premier talking head of this university performing a micro-aggression that ridiculed all our efforts before the fact. As if we absentmindedly outcry our pain. As if our screams are impulsive. As if we never lived under the koan of white supremacy, that “If a person of color falls, does it make a sound?” If dark bodies litter the streets, does this country give a damn? The answer: no not until the sewage of our flesh clot their pocketbooks.

Hence the Mizzou Activists naked assertion, “We’re gonna be loud as fuck.”

A month prior, on February 1960, the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR) co-spearheaded, along with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the desegregation of local restaurants and hotels in Atlanta, as the city hailed as supuestamente “too busy to hate.” The pragmatic mayor, William B. Hartsfield, thanked the students for “letting the white community know what others are thinking,” but took no immediate steps to address grievances.

On March 15, after a series of carefully orchestrated sit-ins at ten lunch counters and cafeterias throughout the city, students suspended the sit-ins for upcoming negotiations with representatives of the business community. The representatives showed little interest in compromise.

After a month of planning, students campaigned a new set of sit-ins targeting a number of businesses, including the Magnolia Room restaurant at Rich’s Department Store, the city’s largest retailer. After vociferous tensions, including counterdemonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan, COAHR expanded the boycott to “bankrupt the economy of segregation.” They added an additional tactic: demonstrators arrested would refuse bail, in order to crowd jails. The result: sales figures decline 13%, downtown businesses lost $10 million. And suddenly, to the stroke of the almighty dollar, white business leaders met privately for a settlement.

Students deviated from a politics of recognition, to that of siphoning, figuratively bleeding the power structure to death. The historical lesson is simple, “Hit them not in their hearts, but in their wallets.”

Ahora preguntarás, what about Duke? That same restless spirit is evident, upon historical excavation.

April 1968, in the week following Dr. King’s assassination, as the racial fabric of Amerikkka ripped itself apart, a series of events transpired on Duke’s campus known as the Silent Vigil. A cadre of students, after lengthy discussions amongst themselves and advice from some faculty and administrators, marched to Duke President Douglass M. Knight’s home. They presented a list of demands including: Knight’s endorsement of a newspaper ad stating “we are all implicated” in King’s assassination, his resignation from the segregated Hope Valley Country Club, increased pay for non-academic employees, a collective bargaining committee for workers, among other concerns.

But note Knight’s words of legacy. Given the power of the board of trustees, he proved incapable to make binding administrative decisions. He “often had no authority but no power.” Es decir, Brodhead can and will not assist in these demands, if not due to private apathy, but due to top-down puppetry. In the words of underground rapper, Immortal Technique, “my issue isn’t with the white man I see, but with the white man I don’t see.” Namely, that committed social actors, from Knight to Dean Ashby, must fight against reactionary opinions among senior administrators. “There was a great many members of the Duke constituency who didn’t care whether Martin Luther King lived or died; they felt he was disruptive.” Such is our position. We are addressing a talking wall that invests millions of dollars to see us, if not destroyed, subdued.

Conversation is damage control at best, and slow death, forestalling the movement until leaders graduate or tire themselves. President Brodhead, as Duke’s talking head, anticipates the sweeping tides calling for his resignation. Mizzou then is not so much a school, but an epicenter, a historical conjecture of the Ferguson protests–and more broadly, the BlackLivesMatter movement—catalyzed ostensibly because the Football team indefinitely boycotted playing time. For the overseers of this ivory plantation, their beloved cash crop almost disappeared.

And until we threaten this school with the same penalty for exploiting our bodies, nothing will change but the day. The businessmen will trade their suits for lab coats, the doctors hear their cue. Progress is a white lie that will be administered at inauguration ceremonies, toasted at fundraiser dinners– the melatonin of the Amerikkkan dream. Desperate and exhausted, the ethnic body will eventually the liberal prescription. Sedated, the churchgoers of the preaching choir can rest easy for a few hours.

But by nightfall that dream dies, after four hours of bleeding out on the street because ninguna pinche ambulancia ever came. It dies clinging to its detention center, on the false promise that Obama granted amnesty to all indocumentados. It dies selling loose cigarettes at Staten Island, from attending a swimming pool party in Texas, from driving with a busted tail-light, to praying in Charleston. The congregation holds steadfast to that dream, until it’s literally beaten out of them.

The diagnosis is cyclical and simple: racial insomnia. We’re woke, because we can’t sleep.

We’ve had conversations, we’ve talked about these issues. The problem is those in power choose not to act about it.

Don’t get it twisted. This whole question of diversity is a giant farce, nothing more than a power point slide for the Duke brand; where every fiscal year, I set aside my reservations and put on some cultural performance that makes you look good, while I get nothing in return. Whether Marriot workers, a one year Program in Education faculty (te extrañamos Dr. Jason Mendez), or an undergrad, to be a person of color is to always be reminded that your labor is deemed more valuable than the rights you deserve. Because we are expendable.

And to my quierida gente de color, my celebration of dark skin, I say: in this deathbed of culture, we are its fleeting heartbeats. Multiculturalism is nothing but the management of difference, one commodifed for brochures. Engaged in a futile politics of recognition, we’re hunched low, we fight for scraps. Divided amongst ourselves, we apologetically dismiss each other’s struggles. It’s not under my timetable, that resources are meager. Yes, precisely because the white pie chart allotted the very minimum to placate outbursts. Precisely because we exist only for their lamination.

To my beloved students of color, and all others silenced, as the movement ensues, I plead: in this borrowed limelight, do not confuse justice with concession. Amidst all this blinding opulence, do not forget that 50 years ago, five black American integrated this campus in large part due to economic pressure from esteemed endowments explicitly threatening to withdraw their donations unless the school admit them. Our politics does not exist in a vacuum, but within a complex matrix of supremacist hatred, liberal dismissal, and the shameless worship of capital [prestige].

Así que to Hell with respectability. A la verga con realizando mi miseria! Duke, me cansé de rogarle, nunca me quisiste. You tar and feather my culture, so quite frankly, I might Tar Heel my brown ass out of here. But no se te olvide, I ain’t no traitor, because you betrayed me before my chanclas ever stepped here. But before I leave, jamas pararé, until I knock you down a few pegs, so that you may see our unpaid labor, quietly draining our spirits. Pagados bajo la mesa.

So what now? Ahora te dejo con unas palabras: James Forman, Executive Secretary of SNCC, said, “We can present thousands and thousands of bodies in the streets if we want to. And we can have all of the soul force and the moral commitment around this world. But a lot of these problems will not be solved until that shagged-old place called the White House begins to shake and gets on the phone and says, ‘Listen George [Wallace], we’re goin’ put to in jail if you don’t stop that mess.’ It’s not just the sheriff of this country or the mayor of the police commissioner or George Wallace. This problem goes to the very bottom of the United States. And you know, I said it today, and I will say it again, ‘If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off!’”

Con Ojos al Premio (With Eyes on the Prize),

“The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” - Malcolm X

Not yet halfway through the academic year, Duke University has — yet again — reminded us of the violence foundational to this institution. On October 18, a group of male students shouted racist hate speech and slurs outside the dorm room of an Asian-American woman. On October 23, a poster advertising #BlackLivesMatter event featuring Patrisse Cullors was vandalized with an anti-black racial slur. On November 5, a homophobic death threat was written on a wall in a dorm targeting a first year student. In response, Larry Moneta, the Vice President of Student Affairs, had the audacity to refer to this violence as nothing more than a series of acts of “copycat hatred.” Hate crimes are consistently labeled as mere “incidents” by the administration and little to no action is taken. These acts of terror are emblematic of the larger landscape and culture of Duke University that actively reproduce practices and expressions of violence against its marginalized students — the everyday realities many of us know too well.

When this erasure and oppression comes to a rupture, manifested in an act of phenomenal violence, the university pretends that it is an unexpected aberration, as if the university itself has not created, maintained, and continued to actively build the space that allows these antagonisms to exist. Each time a rupture of violence occurs, the people who are targeted are expected to come up with solutions to their oppression, a process that demands extraordinary emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual uncompensated labor. We denounce the exploitation of students, faculty, and staff who are called upon to perpetually reiterate and seek public validation of their experiences in the name of “discussion” — as if their pain has ever been taken into consideration by the administration. Duke has made it clear that it has no regard for the lives of marginalized peoples.

The administration’s passive, delayed reactions to these hate crimes epitomize its continuous silencing and dismissal of students’ concerns about their safety and welfare. If closed-door boardroom meetings, campus conversations, forums, and the like were effective, as the administrators wants us to believe, students would not be forced to confront racial slurs, vandalized posters, or homophobic death threats on campus — all of which happened this semester. Duke fully knows the actions it needs to take, because we, those who came before us, and those who came before them, have told them what to do, time and time again. But the university continues to ignore these demands and attempts to placate and distract us with “community conversations” and empty promises.

We are not interested in another “conversation.” We know that Duke has ignored all conventional avenues of action for change. We recognize that the creation of various institutional entities (whether task forces or diversity committees) with the sole purpose of “making recommendations” is a pacifying tactic that the administration has utilized, over and over again, to shelve the actual demands made by students over decades of student organizing. We do not have faith in the institution that has been unrelenting in its refusal to honor and fulfill our demands, while masquerading under the guise of “dialogue” that was never meant to include us.

We see through you. Administrators exploit ideals of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “collective responsibility” to absolve themselves of the violence that they both produce and maintain. By doing so, they try to sell us an illusion that all of us are conversing on equal terms, when truth is that they maintain a monopoly on access and resources necessary to enact transformative institutional changes. We understand that at the end of the day, Duke’s priority will always be its control of power and reputation over the well-being of non-normative members of our communities.

We carry, within us, the institutional knowledge and memory that you seek to obliterate. We know that you would love nothing more than for student coalitions to fall prey to intimidation, exhaustion, or compliance. When that fails, you wait for us to graduate and disappear. You can no longer pretend that you hold the interests of the marginalized at heart while continuing to foster an environment that only functions on the concept of temporary appeasement. These are the tactics that you have used to erase our labor, to suppress our dissent, but this time, we know better.

We know our history of resistance and your history of oppression. We remember that Duke was built on the stolen land of indigenous peoples acquired through genocide and settler colonial violence. We remember that the resources that built this institution were plundered from the backs of black and brown labor. Duke University was built with money generated by slave labor. This place was never meant to be for us, nor to serve us.  

We dwell in a long tradition of resistance; we are descendants of those who refuse to be silenced. We celebrate all those who struggled and all those those who dreamed of being free. We stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us, and we commit to honoring and continuing their work, for the sake of those who will come after us.

We are direct descendants of the People of Color Caucus, and we refuse to let their hard labor and truth-telling voices disappear into a quiet silence. We recognize not only the People of Color Caucus, but the countless students that led the struggle before them. We honor, lift up the forgotten names, and invoke the strength of all those who came before us: the first five Black students who in 1963 courageously stepped on this campus, still rotting with its white supremacist anti-Blackness; those who occupied the Chapel Quad en masse in 1968; Black students who fearlessly took over the Allen Building in 1969; those who protested U.S. imperialism and the cruelties of the Vietnam War in the 70’s, those who demanded the university divest from apartheid South Africa in the 80’s; those who led the demands for the hiring of Black faculty in 1988, and many countless others. Full of indignation, unwavering in our commitment to get free together, we rise up as Duke Enrage.