[News] Puerto Rico - Natural disasters are also catastrophes of colonialism and neoliberalism. Take, for instance, Hurricane Fiona

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 MANIFESTO: The Anti-Racist Manifesto of Colectiva Feminista en
Construcción, 2020
<https://www.blackagendareport.com/manifesto-anti-racist-manifesto-colectiva-feminista-en-construccion-2020>

21 Sep 2022

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*The Anti-Racist Manifesto of Puerto Rico’s Colectiva Feminista en
Construcción (La Cole) outlines a radical solution to capitalism,
colonialism, and climate change.*

Natural disasters are also catastrophes of colonialism and neoliberalism.
Take, for instance, Hurricane Fiona. A category 1 hurricane that made
landfall on Puerto Rico on September 18th, Fiona knocked out power to the
entire archipelago – some 1.4 million households – and left sixty percent
of the territory without clean water. Bridges, roads, and buildings have
been destroyed and massive flooding and landslides continue to be a
problem. Capitalism-induced climate change is certainly a problem here:
warming oceans have caused more frequent, and much more powerful, tropical
storms, creating an existential state of ecological crisis for Puerto Rico,
and for other territories of the Caribbean archipelago. Yet the problem of
climate change has been made more acute, and more devastating, by the
combined histories of colonialism and neoliberalism in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico has been a colony of the US since 1898. As colonial subjects,
the people of Puerto Rico have minimal US citizenship rights and none of
the benefits of  statehood. Economically dependent on the US, Puerto Rico
is the dumping ground for mainland products, the victim of suffocating
trade laws, and the recipients of an extortionist tax regime. Puerto Rico
also suffers from a racist, anti-Black, whitesupremacist colonialist
consciousness. At the same time, Puerto Rico’s economic stagnation,
combined with its colonial mismanagement, led to the expansion of its
sovereign debt to the tune of $72 billion with more than $55 billion in
unfunded pension liabilities. This debt led, in turn, to a state of fiscal
supervision under PROMESA, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and
Economic Stability Act, imposed by the Obama administration and enacted by
the US congress in 2016. Typically, debt restructuring has meant neoliberal
gutting. Public utilities, including the electricity grid, were privatized,
social services were slashed (although policing was increased), and
hundreds of schools were closed – the latter act instigated using Hurricane
Maria as justification. All told, in Puerto Rico, protections against
climate change have been undermined by a racist colonialism and undercut by
neoliberalism. Meanwhile Puerto Rico is becoming the playground for white
tech nerds, crypto-bros, and hedge fund bloodsuckers who are eagerly buying
up local properties while draining power to “mine” bitcoin.

Of course, Puerto Rico also has a long history of militant resistance to
Spanish and US colonialism, and, more recently, to the vicious austerity
programs of neoliberalism. The Colectiva Feminista en Construcción
<https://es-la.facebook.com/Colectiva.Feminista.PR/>, also known as *La
Cole*, is one of the more important institutions in this regard. La Cole is
a Black feminist political group largely based in San Juan, Puerto Rico,
that has been active since 2013. Through a range of militant interventions
and creative tactics, they have addressed questions of femicide, sexual
harassment, abortion rights
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wbch0VC6ewx7FFx7PmzsIpj3MGOvae3j/view>,
trans rights, and neoliberalism. La Cole’s *Manifiesto antirracista*
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1itymeavdI-qwEuWU09aVhLljXRaWXdBP/view>,
written during the heights of the global Black Lives Matter protests of
2020, is a radical statement that connects the Puerto Rico’s history of
coloniality to its problem of whitesupremacy, and links its neoliberal
economy to the persistence of a violent, heterosexist patriarchy. Among its
demands, the Manifesto calls for “the restoration of land, clean air, clean
water and the termination of the privatization and exploitation of our
natural resources.” It is only through the critiques and demands of
organizations like La Cole that we have a chance of halting the destruction
wrought by colonialism, capitalism, and Hurricane Fiona.

*The Anti-Racist Manifesto of Colectiva Feminista en Construcción*

*“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to
be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the
systems of oppression.”*

*~Combahee River Collective, 1977*

Racial states are neither ahistorical nor atemporal. They belong to a
concrete political experience called modernity/coloniality and begin from
the social construction of the category of race in order to establish
differences and hierarchies between individuals. This experience has
survived decolonization processes and has generalized the racial state
everywhere as the “natural order of things,” posing an almost impossibility
to its destruction.

Racial states are not established at the margins of capitalism. On the
contrary, the centrality of race as the axis of power relations was
possible thanks to the violent dispossession of the lives, work and
knowledges [*saberes*] of Black people and people racialized as non-white
in the period of European imperial expansion.

Racial states are not separated from patriarchy. These, rather, are
co-constitutive with the patriarchal system for it is in the domestication
of feminized subjectivities and in their marginalization as the infantile,
the perverse, the other, the beastly, the savage that racial states
configure their politics of race based on racial purity or racial mixing
for the purpose of “whitening” [“*blanquear*”] the progeny.

Racial states are not immovable. These are reconfigured and transformed
according to the possibility of sustaining white supremacy oppressing Black
bodies and bodies racialized as non-white in diverse ways, always with the
main objective of maintaining the status quo: white/capitalist/patriarchal
dominance.

Racial states are constituted under the myth of the nation-state in order
to establish borders that allow them to exercise different types of
dominance according to who is inside and who is outside. For this reason,
racial states are also imperial states that deploy colonial violence where
they prevail, in order to maintain or expand their economic and racial
interests.

Racial states are as nationalist as they are internationalist. While they
use the apparatus of border control or citizenship to establish life or
death of one or the other, they also ally themselves with those who share,
with them, white supremacy as state policy.

Racial states operate systemically. They establish an unequal system based
on race—evident in the segregation between neighborhoods, the unequal
distribution of state wealth, the policies of policing black communities,
and the lack of access to state resources.

Racial states operate in collective imaginaries. These are part of the
racialized identity of Black and white people, which makes each group have
different experiences of existing, of being, of surviving.

Racial states permeate the individual. In the depths of being, the white
subject assumes its role in the unequal relation of power, benefits from
the racial state and reproduces it with its fears, its anger and its
frustrations. While, in the depths of being, the Black subject survives and
resists the premature death announced since his being in the world.
*The Racial State in the Colony of Puerto Rico*

In the colony of Puerto Rico, the racial state operates with diverse
logics. The *criollo* imaginary reproduces racial narratives of a mixture
that does not recognize the anti-Black violence that it entailed. It is
hidden as well, behind the mixture of races, the confinement of Black
bodies/territories to the marginalized, the expropriable and the
criminalized. Just as is hidden the fixing of mestizo bodies/territories
with white aspirationism in different dimensions: from the aesthetic to the
economic. Likewise, behind the mixture of races, is hidden the devaluation
of the work carried out by visibly Black people and how their bodies are
turned disposable in the face of physical, economic and environmental
violence perpetrated by the racial state. However, the racial state in the
colony of Puerto Rico is not solely sustained by *criollo *imaginaries.
United States colonialism in the last 122 years has contributed to the
linking of racial imaginaries with white social practices such as
individualism, economic liberalism, neoliberalism, and also the aspiration
to be part, entirely, of the racial state par excellence: United States of
America.

This is why, we insist, racial states are not atemporal. They have not
always existed, they can —and if we dismantle them, they will— cease to
exist. Racial states are not ahistorical. They belong to a concrete
political experience that we are willing to abolish in order to build
another political form that does not reproduce, ever again, the violence
that has brought us here.

In Puerto Rico, anti-Black violence is manifested in “*mano dura contra el
crimen*” [“iron fist against crime”
<https://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/policing-life-and-death-the-perverse-consequences-of-an-iron-fist-policy-against-crime/>]
policies, the criminalization of poverty, the zoning of Black communities
as dangerous and insecure spaces and the policing of these spaces,
environmental racism and police abuse against the Dominican and Haitian
community in the country, as well as measures that impose control over the
bodies of women, particularly the bodies of Black women and women
racialized as non-white. Furthermore, the racial state operates with
complete impunity implementing austerity policies that leave Black people
and people racialized non-white without access to dignified housing,
education and health services.

In La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, given these hierarchies of power
that sustain the racial state, we reaffirm, together with the Black
feminists who have gone before us—that the liberation of Black women will
be the end of all oppressions, the end of the racial state in all its
manifestations and all its articulations with different structures of power.

The end of the racial state will be the end of the colonial state and the
post-colonial *criollo* state. It will be the end of capitalism, it will be
the end of patriarchy and it will be the end of systemic and
epistemological racism and its identitarian reproductions. That is why, as
Black feminists, we assume the revolutionary task of fighting for the fall
of the capitalist, racist and patriarchal system, recognizing that its fall
and the end of the racial state will be what will allow us to build other
lives and other ways of being and existing, other decolonized lives, in
short, other worlds.

For this reason, at the particular juncture we are living, we join the
demands of the organizations that form part of the Black Lives Matter
movement, demanding recognition of and accountability for the devaluation
and dehumanization of Black lives and we demand radical and sustainable
solutions that aim for the protection and the best quality of life for all
Black people. Therefore, we demand:

*Claims:*

   1. *End the war against Black people*: This includes abolishing the
   death penalty, mass policing and abusive police intervention in our
   communities, violence against Black people (including trans Black people,
   sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming people as well as the immigrant
   community), impunity for crimes against Black people, particularly those
   perpetuated by state agents, environmental racism through exposing our
   communities to polluting agents and the imposition of austerity measures
   that principally affect the country’s Black community and impoverished
   communities.
   2. *Reparations*: Immediate decolonization of Puerto Rico. Assume the
   past and current harms of slavery, such as mass incarceration of Black
   people, the destruction of our communities, and family nuclei, the
   implementation of laws that impede the integral development and improvement
   of our quality of life, reparations for the wealth extracted from our
   communities, that a dignified income and free and quality higher education
   be guaranteed, with open admission to the University of Puerto Rico, as
   well as community colleges, universities and technical schools.
   Decriminalization, immediate release, elimination of records and
   reparations for the derogatory effects of the “war on drugs” as well as the
   “criminalization of sex work” in our Black communities.
   3. *Investment*: Instead of investing state and federal funds for the
   police to monitor and repress our communities and for the benefit of
   exploiting corporations, we demand that the state invest in long-term
   security strategies, in strengthening access to justice programs and gender
   violence prevention. In the same way, that the improvement of our education
   system is prioritized, that an anti-racist and gender-perspective education
   curriculum is implemented in the public and private system. Investment in
   restorative justice programs, employment programs for marginalized and
   impoverished people and universal health insurance.
   4. *Economic justice*: That Black communities have real collective
   ownership of wealth. That the necessary actions be taken so that Black
   people can have access to a job with a living wage —with an increase in the
   minimum wage— social and labor protections, as well as access to housing
   and the basic food basket according to their family composition. That
   support be provided for the development of networks of social or economic
   cooperatives, and that measures and efforts that address systemic
   discrimination and protect the civil rights of Black people be
   strengthened. Additionally, that the right to the restoration of land,
   clean air, clean water and the termination of the privatization and
   exploitation of our natural resources be guaranteed.
   5. *Power to communities*: Ensure that our communities have active
   participation in decision-making on budgets and infrastructure, desist from
   privatizing education through charter schools.
   6. *Political power*: Through political participation in decision-making
   spaces such as government agencies, the legislature and municipalities.
   That the protection of the right to vote be guaranteed for all Black
   people, that universal and free access to the internet be provided;
and grea*ter
   protection and financing for institutions that do anti-racist work.*

*Manifiesto antirracista de la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción*
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1itymeavdI-qwEuWU09aVhLljXRaWXdBP/view>.
English version reposted from *Latino Rebels*
<https://www.latinorebels.com/2020/06/07/antiracistmanifesto/>.
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