[News] Now Is the Time for 'Nobodies': Dean Spade on Mutual Aid and Resistance in the Trump Era

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.alternet.org/activism/now-time-nobodies-dean-spade-mutual-aid-and-resistance-trump-era 



  Now Is the Time for 'Nobodies': Dean Spade on Mutual Aid and
  Resistance in the Trump Era

By Sarah Lazare / /January 9, 2017/

With less than a month to go until Donald Trump and his bevy of 
far-right appointees takes the White House, communities across the 
United States are preparing for a potential escalation in immigration 
raids, police repression, Islamophobic targeting, corporate exploitation 
and climate chaos. Many of those taking to the streets to protest 
fascism <https://www.ungovernable2017.com/> and preparing mutual defense 
plans 
<http://www.alternet.org/immigration/getting-prepared-fight-against-trump-immigration-raids-and-deportations> 
in their neighborhoods were also actively organizing throughout the 
Obama years, which saw a record 
<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661> 
number of deportations, open-ended wars 
<http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/17/war-stop-war-why-obama-doctrine-ravaging-middle-east> 
and the highest levels <https://www.aclu.org/prison-crisis> of 
imprisonment in the world.

In the following interview, activist, scholar and movement lawyer Dean 
Spade takes stock of this harrowing political moment and offers 
frameworks to help social movements navigate the treacherous waters 
ahead. Spade is an associate professor at Seattle University School of 
Law, founder of the the legal collective Sylvia Rivera Law Project 
<http://srlp.org/> and author of the book 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/normal-life-revised> /Normal Life: 
Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. 
/His writing <http://www.deanspade.net/writing/> and organizing spans 
issues from prison and police abolition to queer resistance and global 
anti-militarism. Spade told AlterNet, “We need to support the people 
getting killed in the current systems, and figure out how to build the 
systems we need to get everyone everything they need. This empire is 
crumbling and we’re going to keep losing the crappy, insufficient 
infrastructure that exists. We need to build infrastructure we want.”

*Sarah Lazare: You’ve argued previously that we should understand the 
U.S. government as being in a constant state of war. Can you explain 
what you mean by this?*

Dean Spade: For the last several years, especially throughout Obama’s 
second term, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, writing and connecting 
with others about the ways that major institutions and politicians 
co-opt ideas or symbols or words from left struggles and deploy them to 
shore up the very institutions of oppression that left struggles are 
trying to take down. For example, toward the end of Obama’s first term 
he came out in favor of same-sex marriage and repealing the ban on 
lesbians and gays in the military to make his presidency look 
progressive when under criticism for drone warfare, targeting 
whistleblowers, not closing Guantanamo, deporting records of numbers of 
immigrants, continuing U.S. military imperialism globally and more. 
Obama used gay politics to brand himself as progressive, just as the 
U.S. military used the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the ban on 
women serving in combat to rebrand itself as a site of liberation and 
freedom when it is the most significant source of violence on the planet.

Understanding this way that institutions, public officials and 
corporations manage public relations is essential right now. Whether it 
is a bank promoting itself as gay-friendly or an oil company promoting 
itself as green, grabbing left movement ideas, symbols and words is a 
widespread, effective propaganda tactic right now. Especially during the 
Obama administration, I was interested in how we could fight this form 
of propaganda, how we could build tools to discern when various ideas 
and symbols from our movements were being cynically used to cover over 
the ongoing operations of violence our movements exist to dismantle. 
Especially when I saw straight people who are usually very clearly 
anti-war celebrating gay military service and all the pro-military 
propaganda that came with it, or feminists who usually recognize 
marriage as a mechanism of gendered social control celebrating same-sex 
marriage as a moment of liberation, I felt concerned about how harmful 
institutions that are under attack from our movements can rehabilitate 
themselves through shallow “inclusion” strategies.

One frame that I think can help us through this, which has been central 
to so many left movements across time, is to understand the relationship 
between the United States and both targeted populations and resistance 
movements as a relationship of war. Movements have articulated that the 
U.S. is at war with targeted populations, and that the U.S. government 
uses counter-insurgency strategy when approaching our movements. In 
other words, the U.S. acts like this is war, so we should, too.

One example that is useful to look at is the framing from the 1951 “We 
Charge Genocide 
<http://www.blackpast.org/we-charge-genocide-historic-petition-united-nations-relief-crime-united-states-government-against>” 
petition brought to the United Nations arguing that the United States 
has engaged in genocide against black people according to the 
international law definition of genocide. The United States attempted to 
prevent the delivery of the petition, seizing the copies that were 
mailed to Paris and revoking the passports of Paul Robeson and William 
L. Patterson as they tried to deliver it. The petition became an 
international media sensation and a widely read document in the U.S. The 
framework it lays out remains vital <http://wechargegenocide.org/> to 
understanding anti-black racism in the U.S. Contemporary resistance to 
police violence has lifted up this same frame, arguing that state 
violence against black people is not about a few bad cops but is instead 
systemic. This is a particularly important frame in the context of 
contemporary rhetoric about how the U.S. is “post-racial” because we 
have a black president.

Indigenous movements in North America have also, obviously, consistently 
framed the United States and Canada as settler colonial nations that 
have engaged in warfare and genocide against Indigenous people. This 
frame is essential to comprehending the colonial context of their 
struggles, the outrageous claims of the United States to be in a “trust” 
relationship with Indigenous people, the meaning of treaty violations 
and the daily state violence faced by Indigenous people. The warfare 
frame has also been used by those working to dismantle the war on drugs, 
recognizing that it instead has been a war on people of color. Left 
activists have also consistently critiqued the war on terror as actually 
a war on Arab and Muslim people and a rationalization for permanent U.S. 
imperial warfare abroad.

/Image credit: Micah Bazant/

This war-frame lets us understand the relationship between the United 
States and our movements as one of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency 
has two prongs. The first is repression. The U.S. government 
consistently and overtly oppresses resistant movements. We can see 
recent examples in government spying 
<http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/black-lives-matter-government-surveillance-civil-rights> 
on Black Lives Matter groups, or the ongoing “green scare,” which 
includes infiltration of environmental and animal liberation groups, 
entrapment of members and extensive criminalization of activists. We can 
see it in the fact that police cleared the Occupy encampments across the 
U.S. These activities are part of a long, well-documented history that 
included the government infiltration 
<http://www.freedomarchives.org/Cointelpro.html> of the American Indian 
Movement <http://iacenter.org/polprisoners/lp_primer.htm>, the Black 
Panthers 
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/15949/how_the_fbi_conspired_to_destroy_the_black_panther_party>, 
Young Lords <http://nationalyounglords.com/?page_id=13> and other 
important organizations in the 1960s and '70s resulting in the 
assassination <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLSr76vKjBw> and 
incarceration <http://www.freethesf8.org/Persecuting_Panthers.html> of 
many leaders.

The other prong of counterinsurgency is recuperation. Recuperation is 
about increasing the legitimacy of the government and marginalizing the 
views of resistant movements. This is the part where the very 
institutions and arrangements that are being criticized by the movements 
are recast as sites of freedom and liberation. The Obama administration 
did both prongs very effectively, particularly the propaganda part. 
Obama’s presidency was consistently framed as progressive and associated 
with left causes and movements in a way that rehabilitated its 
reputation, and the reputations of its key institutions like the 
military, despite the realities of what the administration was doing.

The Trump administration is not using the same strategy of cloaking its 
activities in a surface-level nod to progressive politics: the war 
against targeted populations is more overt. However, understanding 
counterinsurgency will be just as important for shaping our resistance 
during this period, particularly because with Trumpism on the scene, so 
many elected officials, corporations and institutions will be declaring 
themselves progressive or “anti-hate” since he makes it a low bar, 
meanwhile continuing to take actions that harm people and the planet.

The warfare and the counterinsurgency frames can give us some useful 
tools for discernment and debate about who our allies are, and whether 
particular reforms are helping dismantle harmful institutions and 
arrangements or just rehabilitating their public images.

*SL: How do you see this warfare framework as helpful for navigating 
which reforms set us back and which move us toward harm reduction?*

DS: The powers that be (owners, industries, governments and militaries) 
want to keep things the way they are or enhance exploitation and 
violence. Our movements want to dismantle the apparatuses of control and 
violence that rob people of their land, labor and collective 
self-determination. When movements are growing to resist harm and 
violence, they first ignore us. When we get big and loud enough, they 
acknowledge the problem in some limited way and tell us they will take 
care of it, creating a minimal reform that, as much as possible, 
maintains the status quo.

Critical race theorists call this dynamic “preservation through 
transformation,” and the example that they often use for it is civil 
rights. In the face of a powerful, disruptive, widespread movement for 
black freedom, the United States made the concession of civil rights 
laws, which formally make racism and racial segregation illegal. So, the 
surface of the law changed, and the story the U.S. tells about itself 
changes (“racism is a thing of the past”). But the material conditions 
facing black people did not change much. Schools are wildly segregated 
<https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-the-resegregation-of-americas-schools/#intro> 
and unequally funded, the racial wealth gap 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/the-average-black-family-would-need-228-years-to-build-the-wealth-of-a-white-family-today/> 
continues to widen and the imprisonment of black people 
<https://konashen.com/2015/07/09/inforgraphic-colorblind-race-justice-in-modern-america/> 
and other people of color has skyrocketed in the last half-century. This 
is a major danger of reforms—that they change the surface, but the 
injustice and suffering that movements were raising hell about goes 
mostly unchanged.

Often we see reforms that are solely symbolic. The elected officials or 
institutions get to take up the cause and associate themselves with the 
idea of justice and freedom without having to endure anything actually 
changing. For example, after the Trump election public officials in 
Washington State, where I live, held a press conference to declare 
Washington a “hate-free state 
<http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/officials-declaring-washington-a-hate-free-state-are-shouted-down-by-youth-jail-opponents/>." It 
was a feel-good opportunity where they could all show how they are 
against racism, Islamophobia and homophobia. However, these are the same 
politicians who are building a $210 million new youth jail in Seattle 
while the school system is operating at a budget deficit. These kinds of 
empty declarations are a dime a dozen right now, and can effectively 
provide legitimacy and cover to institutions and people who should 
actually be held accountable for the harm they are doing.

Sometimes reforms are problematic because they aren’t totally symbolic, 
but they provide relief to only the least-marginalized of the effected 
group. An example would be immigration reforms that are aimed only at 
people with no criminal histories or are who are wiling to join the 
military or excel at school and pay for college without access to 
financial aid. Since poorer immigrants, black and indigenous immigrants, 
and immigrants with disabilities are more likely to have been targeted 
by police and less likely to have been given educational support, any 
policy that picks out the "deserving 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/28/dreamers-immigrant-rights_n_5227646.html>" will 
also reinforce existing hierarchies of vulnerability and legitimize the 
targeting of the most vulnerable.

Many reforms provide little or no meaningful change to conditions, but 
go far to legitimize and even expand harmful systems. We can see this 
when states propose to build “gender-responsive prisons” in the face of 
criticism about gendered violence in prisons. Building more prisons 
means filling more prisons, but cloaking that project in purported care 
for women prisoners can legitimize prison expansion. Similarly, police 
forces faced with criticism about racism and sexism sometimes initiate 
hiring focused on women and people of color. Our movements want to 
dismantle policing and imprisonment, not win reforms that expand them.

Because of these complex dynamics, a big question for movements is how 
you tell whether a reform (that we’re proposing or that the powers that 
be are proposing) advances our struggle or recuperates their institutions?

Some of the criteria that I have found useful are: Will it provide 
material relief? Will this improve the life chances of people who are 
most vulnerable under the current conditions? Does it leave out an 
especially marginalized part of the affected group (such as people with 
criminal records, people convicted of “violent” crimes, or people 
without immigration status)? Is it a reform that says some groups 
(families, children, people with jobs, people with education) are 
deserving and should be given relief but others (single people, adults, 
poor people, people on benefits, people with criminal records, people 
without degrees) deserve to get targeted? Is it dividing our 
constituency, undermining our power, and exposing the most marginal 
people to more harm? Does it legitimize and expand the system we’re 
actually trying to dismantle?

And the question isn’t just about the content of the reform, but also 
how it is being fought for. Who’s pushing for it? Is it a bunch of 
people in suits behind closed doors, or is it most affected people in 
the streets fighting for this? Are we building power in this fight, 
power that we can keep using to continue the fight? Or is this reform 
coming from the powers that be, the sheriffs and prosecutors and elected 
officials saying they have solved the problem and we can all go back to 
sleep?

In his recent book, The Failure of Nonviolence 
<http://leftbankbooks.bigcartel.com/product/the-failure-of-nonviolence-from-the-arab-spring-to-occupy-by-peter-gelderloos>, 
Peter Gelderloos suggests that we ask, “Does it have elite support?” 
That’s a very useful question right now, because with everyone excited 
to get on the Trump-is-bad bandwagon, the bar has gotten very low for 
what constitutes a racist. If you’re not Trump, you get to proclaim you 
are progressive or right-on, even if you’re actually a jail-building 
elected official. Many elites are trying to get mileage for their 
reputations out of supporting reforms that won’t threaten their power or 
the power of their donors, but make them look like they are on a moral 
high ground compared to Trump. It is a good time for us to be suspicious 
of any purportedly justice-oriented reforms that are backed by elites.

The organizer, educator and writer Mariame Kaba made a very useful 
contribution to this thinking about how we evaluate reforms in an 
article 
<http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27852-police-reforms-you-should-always-oppose> 
about evaluating police reforms. She asks: does it allocate more money 
to the police? Does it advocate for more police and policing? Is the 
reform primarily technology-focused? Is it focused on individual 
dialogues with individual cops? These kinds of concrete questions help 
advance our thinking about reforms, and they do so because they keep an 
understanding of the adversarial relationships between the government 
and capital and our movements in focus.

/Image credit: Talcott Broadhead/

*SL: What kind of organizing do you think is important in this political 
moment, less than a month out from Trump taking the White House?*

DS: Trump is not promoting himself as progressive. Obama did promote 
himself as progressive, but only as cover for his actual actions as the 
deporter-in-chief, the expander of drone warfare and domestic 
surveillance, the president of the most imprisoning nation in the 
history of the world, etc. The Trump moment is different from the Obama 
moment in many ways, but there are also important similarities. We’re 
under a lot of the same conditions, but not under any illusions that we 
can negotiate at the federal level to transform them. We’re all pretty 
aware that the levels of danger that vulnerable people (people in public 
housing, people on benefits, immigrants, prisoners) are in are very high 
already and worsening under Trump. A lot of people are scared and many 
are getting mobilized by that fear, whether they are the ones in the 
most direct line of fire or whether they are concerned for the people 
they care about.

This moment, importantly, turns us to the local level. Most of the 
things we’re concerned about—immigration raids, people losing their 
welfare benefits, public housing being closed or privatized, a growing 
private prison industry, more power for landlords, bosses and 
polluters—these things might be federal decisions, but when they are 
implemented on a local level. This is the moment to establish local 
projects to obstruct the implementation of these harms and support the 
people most endangered by these forces. It is time to build many, many 
local projects everywhere, to do things like support prisoners 
<http://www.blackandpink.org/>, go with people to housing court and 
benefits hearings, create rapid response and alert systems 
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2960-fight-trump-stop-deportations-by-any-means> 
for immigration raids, create community networks to house each other, 
create emergency response 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/occupy-sandy-efforts-highlight-need-solidarity-not-charity/> for 
climate-change created disasters, create community care networks to 
support people with disabilities and old people, create childcare 
projects and more. We need to do this mutual aid work alongside work to 
disrupt the operations of the systems that pulverize our communities. We 
need to be blocking deportations 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWVquJeUGw> with our bodies, 
sabotaging jail and prison building efforts and occupying public housing 
slated for demolition.

In contemporary culture, we are strongly encouraged to spend all our 
political energy declaring our positions on social media, and none on 
supporting targeted people or actually building the world we want to 
live in. The work we need to do is deeply local. It is not glamorous, 
but it is satisfying and radical. Figuring out how evictions work in our 
town, what resources tenants are missing in those processes, and how to 
support the most vulnerable tenants who are the least likely to make it 
through those processes when fighting rich landlords is work we can 
actually do. And when it fails, we must also be ready to use direct 
action to protect tenants and target landlords.

We don’t have to be lawyers to support people through bureaucratic 
procedures. Many of us have the research skills to support these kinds 
of projects and can share and build those skills with others. If we have 
the internet, we can be doing research for people getting out of prison 
about housing and health care, helping them with that transition. We can 
be using various kinds of literacy and access to create meaningful 
advocacy and accompaniment projects. It is the right time for solid, 
long-term, committed mutual aid work. It is a matter of survival, and it 
is a matter of creating a new world.

I’m very inspired by groups like No One Is Illegal 
<http://www.nooneisillegal.org/>, which has chapters across Canada. NOII 
has done organizing around people being in immigration detention and 
facing deportation. They consistently use grassroots organizing and 
direct action to assert political pressure to support people facing 
detention and deportation and delegitimize Canadian border enforcement 
policies and practices. We’ve seen these strategies building in the 
United States with the hunger strikes 
<http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/tag/hunger-strike/> of people in 
immigrant detention over the last several years and work to block 
deportation buses 
<http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/2013/10/10/tucson/>. #Not1More has 
demonstrated the powerful work that can happen with solidarity between 
people inside and outside immigration prisons.

When we’re committed to regular practice with group of people with whom 
we build trust to commit to a project, and those groups are in 
solidarity and connection with other groups in similar kinds of deep 
work, I think this is our way to prepare for this Trump moment and all 
the ongoing moments we’re going to face during and after this 
presidency. This work builds the relationships and movement 
infrastructure we need to prepare for the next storm, the next war. To 
be honest, we needed this work with Obama in office too. Local, 
grassroots work that is rooted in mutual aid and has lots of people 
participating is vital for both survival of the most targeted and 
building the power to displace the structures that have been making war 
on targeted populations for centuries. I hope that the ways that many 
people are feeling mobilized by the election help us develop more of 
this work.

*SL: You’ve talked about now being the time for ‘nobodies.’ Can you 
explain what you mean by that?*

DS: I got this concept from the activist, writer and filmmaker Reina 
Gossett. She talks 
<http://www.reinagossett.com/commencement-address-hampshire-college/> 
about "nobodies" and "somebodies" and asks us to think about when we are 
doing things to try to not feel like a nobody. When are we doing things 
to try to feel like a somebody? Her inquiry made me think about how many 
people are excited about social movement ideas and transformation but 
don’t actually give a f*ck about homeless people in their neighborhoods, 
or actual people in prison in their city and state. Even people who have 
been through poverty or criminalization or migration are encouraged to 
wash our hands of it as soon as we can, to villainize anyone still 
struggling.

In our movements, it often seems like people are struggling to be seen, 
to be somebody, to meet with someone who is somebody like the mayor or 
an activist celebrity or a Hollywood celebrity. What would it look like 
to turn that upside-down? How could I shift that and say, I can’t wait 
to shake the hand of the person whose name I don’t know who’s in 
solitary in the prison 50 miles from my house. And that’s my life goal, 
not meeting Beyoncé or Noam Chomsky, but connecting with someone who is 
being tortured and denied human touch.

As someone who has been a poverty lawyer and spent time fighting in 
these murderous bureaucratic systems, I have seen how they are very 
local and idiosyncratic. We need to getting in the muck of local 
systems. All of us need to figure out something that we’re kind of good 
at or willing to study up on, something we feel passionate enough to 
make a long-term commitment to and dig into material work. We need to 
support the people getting killed in the current systems, and figure out 
how to build the systems we need to get everyone everything they need. 
This empire is crumbling and we’re going to keep losing the crappy, 
insufficient infrastructure that exists. We need to build infrastructure 
we want. We need to actually, concretely build the world we want to live 
in, before the next blackout or storm comes, and in the face of the 
longer-term deterioration of our educational systems, hospitals, all of 
it. This local work is building our movement, because people who are 
doing that work are mobilized, have relationships with each other, know 
each other’s kids and elders, and have skills for connecting across 
difference that are lost in an individualist, isolating society.

The warfare frame helps us with this work. If we understood that there 
is a war against targeted people and our movements, we would be more 
ready to help people escape the raid, escape the jurisdiction, escape 
from prison.  We might be more ready to open our homes to the person 
getting out of prison, set up the bail fund, hide someone from the cops 
or ICE, give someone a ride, or whatever it takes.

/Debbie Southorn helped with this interview./

Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for 
Common Dreams, she coedited the book /About Face: Military Resisters 
Turn Against War/. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare 
<https://twitter.com/sarahlazare>.

-- 
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