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<h1 class="title">Ferguson: Escaping Post-racial Hypnosis</h1>
<p class="meta"> on <time datetime="2013-08-20" pubdate="">20
Agosto 2014<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://commonware.org/index.php/cartografia/436-ferguson-escaping-post-racial-hypnosis">http://commonware.org/index.php/cartografia/436-ferguson-escaping-post-racial-hypnosis</a></small></small></b><br>
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<p><span style="font-size: small;">Interview with GEORGE
CICCARIELLO-MAHER - by ANNA CURCIO and LENORA HANSON</span></p>
<p><em>Our first question has to do with the way that Ferguson
exploded after Michael Brown’s murder and the police response.
What are the social dynamics that led to and preceded these
intense riots? What led to the uprising of the black community
and how can you explain the violence of the police response
there?</em></p>
<p>To get into the broad historical context, especially for those
not in the US, it is important to say that police violence here
is not an abstract or universal phenomenon. It is a phenomenon
that has focused on certain peoples and certain “problem”
populations, specifically although not solely on
African-American and black Americans. When we look at Ferguson
and the fact that it is a suburb of St. Louis, this in
historical and racial terms is already in many ways a point of
conflict and racial tension. Ferguson itself was almost entirely
white until the 1970s, but has become a city that is in its
large majority black, around 70-65%, and yet the police force is
almost universally white. And when we look at some of the recent
FBI data has come out we find that, for example, 92% of those
arrested in Ferguson for disorderly conduct are black, which
gives a good insight into the way that people are systematically
harassed. People in Ferguson are harassed by police and petty
charges like disorderly conduct are used by them as a social
control over this population. And again what we have is not an
abstract problem but a manifestation and repetition of
historical, white, supremacist police violence in which black
lives are worth nothing and black death is almost always
legitimized. And this is continuing to play out with the media
narrative that follows, as if coherence were completely
irrelevant, the 3-4 police explanations that serve to legitimize
this violence against this young man to the public. They say
Michael Brown was maybe involved in a robbery, which the police
claim was earlier that day although he seems to be wearing
different clothes if that’s him in the videos they released;
maybe he was jaywalking, which again needs to be understood in a
context where the police are harassing people for minor crimes.
And, of course, this makes it very clear to the white
populations nearby that this is a question of black or white,
just as when the police released images of the so-called
“looters” in Ferguson, which they did to remind everyone that
police were out there protecting property against the so-called
violence of others.</p>
<p><em>You referenced “white flight” in the Midwest above. Can you
talk about its relationship to deindustrialization, which has
important class implications, and how that “white flight” has
produced class and racial tensions in Ferguson?</em></p>
<p>We’re talking about the geography of race, and race is always a
phenomenon that manifests geographically. The way that it
manifests in the US more often than not has been the flight of
whites into the suburbs, which began as a process a long time
ago but especially in the periods of deindustrialization in the
1970s when it accelerated. So you have large cities in the
Midwest and elsewhere, such as where I live in Philadelphia,
where what you find in this so-called post-racial era is that
race is more likely to be coded geographically than it is to be
coded openly in racial terms. So whether it is through a coded
language of school districts or dangerous areas or moving to the
suburbs to give your kids opportunities, what we’re talking
about are the ways that segregation is actually an <em>increasing</em>
phenomenon in the U.S. Ferguson is clearly one example of those
places that once was exclusively white and has now become a
predominately black town; so you know, we’re talking about
another example of this geographic manifestation where the
police are there not just to police the population but also the
borders. The function of the police is to keep people in line
and in their zone or in their lane as it were, and Ferguson, a
city that went from being a white city to a black city, is a
city where the population has to be terrorized by police, but
where the police also have to keep the population away from
whiter suburbs in that area.</p>
<p><em>Because you were just talking about the police and the
black community, can you suggest what the people in Ferguson
are bringing to the streets, or what kinds of experiences and
feelings they are bringing there?</em></p>
<p>This is one thing that many white observers but also liberal
observers just don’t grasp about the police killing of blacks in
the States, which is that it is always embedded in this long
historical trajectory that is not even a long memory. I mean, we
are even talking about the highly publicized murders of at least
5 black men in the last month by police in this country, so this
is a constant trajectory of police murder. And the off-the-cuff
expressions of people in Ferguson attest to that when they say
that this is about everything from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin
to the present, that is a long trajectory, and the failure to
recognize it is a failure to grasp the depth of rage in these
moments. That rage is in many ways a product of feeling slightly
helpless about the constant repetition of this violence, but is
also the dedication and the insistence that something must be
done, and that in the absence of legal reform which accomplishes
anything, in the absence of electing officials and congressman
accomplishing anything, maybe these rebellions and riots will
work. Which, historically speaking, is actually not a terribly
inaccurate judgment if you look at cases throughout U.S.
history. Riots and rebellions have played a huge role in, if not
directly, then at least indirectly in transforming the political
sphere and political action and leading to concrete results. If
we look at Ferguson we see the withdrawal of the St Louis county
sheriff from policing the situation as a direct result of this
intervention in the streets and the conflicts with this heavily
militarized police force.</p>
<p><em>Can we follow up on your point about how liberal whites
deal with situations of violence or the question of violence
in protests? It seems that within the past day or two the
media has latched on to images of police officers marching
with protesters, giving preference to vigils and peaceful
actions over what appeared in the beginning to be not only
riots but also looting and protests in the streets. What does
such privileging of “peacefulness” over “violence” do to
obscure the history of racism in the U.S. but also to
misunderstand what it might take to respond to that history?</em></p>
<p>Absolutely. We should be perfectly clear. There’s a headline
now from when the state highway patrol went to the protests
yesterday, and the headline was “Police Join Protests.” We
should be perfectly clear: the police were not joining the
protests. This is counter-insurgency, this is a historic
strategy of counter-insurgency that involves backing away from
the heavy-handed, iron fist of military response, which is what
the police force brought initially, and a turning to the velvet
glove or soft strategy to disarm protest. This doesn’t change
the fact that the goal is to disarm the protest and weaken the
mobilization of the people and to do so through cooptation, and
that should be understood as a starting point. It is not a good
thing that the police went to the protests, although it is a
less brutal phenomenon. And this gets to the second part, which
is that what is going on in Ferguson is not about the
militarization of police. That militarization is a huge
phenomenon that has occurred over the past decade, especially
since Sept. 11, through which police departments acquired
military grade technology through the Department of Defense,
through grants and counter-terrorism funding. But if the
terrorist threat never existed or if it dissipates, this
military hardware is there and asking to be used. The old saying
goes that if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is exactly what we’re seeing in the streets with these
county sheriffs deploying armored personnel carriers. If you’re
sitting on the top of one of these personnel carriers looking
through a scope of a sniper rifle, then everything looks like an
insurgent. Everything looks like an enemy combatant. And that’s
crucial but its not at the essence of what is going on; because
if we look at the essence of what is going on with the
militarization of police we neglect the fact that the police of
the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were not militarized but were still
racist, brutal occupiers of black communities. And so we need to
keep both these threads in our analysis, while avoiding the easy
recourse to simply saying that we need to reform the police or
take away their tanks. Again, Ferguson police are almost
entirely white and policing a black community, doing so brutally
and terroristically. Taking away their heavy weaponry won’t
solve that. We need to understand this within the long-term
history of white supremacy, which is one of continuity rather
than change. And we can pair that up with the transformation of
policing, which has indeed been a progressive process of
militarization.</p>
<p><em>To your point about the continuity of race relations and
violence in the US, we could propose two poles that could be
mapped onto Ferguson, MO and New Orleans, LA. So on the one
hand in New Orleans, the impact of Hurricane Katrina attested
to the mass, systemic abandonment of a largely black
population, and in Ferguson, we see the intervention of direct
violence on the part of the police applied to a black
population. How might these two instances point to an
important historical relation in the U.S. that suggest that
when there’s not direct violence, there is always a consistent
environment of abandonment?</em></p>
<p>This question of abandonment versus direct violence is actually
more of a spectrum. I’ve never been to Ferguson, but my guess is
that it’s somewhere in between in the sense that in the course
of becoming a heavily black city that it was increasingly
abandoned. And yet this was not simply a city that was sealed
off and allowed to govern itself. It was structured according to
this systematic police violence as many black cities are. And so
that two really work hand in hand. So understood in the long
context we’re talking about firstly, in the most recent history,
this process of deindustrialization, as a process that renders
huge numbers of the U.S. population irrelevant to the process of
production, and these populations are almost entirely black; in
other words these become surplus populations. And the response
of the state is to incarcerate them on a massive level or to
essentially warehouse them in facilities and maybe then extract
some surplus through forced labor. But the point is really about
warehousing and abandonment on a certain level. Seen in the
broader context this is also a shift in the historical tension,
especially in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, which has to do with
the process of formal abolition and the anxiety that results
immediately upon abolition, which is namely what do we do with
these former slaves. And here again, continuity is a huge part
of the aftermath of slavery, which was an aftermath of
sharecropping and also the immediate turn to convict leasing in
which prisoners could be could be legitimately enslaved thanks
to the 13<sup>th</sup> amendment of the U.S. Constitution. And
this entire process of developing police institutions begins
directly with that continuity of slavery. The police are a part
of this process, because they emerge as an institution in
response to the threat posed by free black labor, the mobility
of free black labor after abolition. And so this is really one
long historical complex that we see playing out.</p>
<p><em>To pick up on this point about incarceration we might think
about the popularity of Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New
Jim Crow”, which has been important in the U.S. for
demonstrating that continuity between the end of slavery and
the advent of mass incarceration. But much of the response to
that book has been to advocate for reforming the law around
incarceration. How does Ferguson demonstrate the failure of
something like legal reform to address the history of race in
the U.S.? </em></p>
<p>On the one hand the question of reform is the constant
temptation in these moments and it goes hand in hand with the
question of pacification and of essentially shutting up and
silencing the people who are in the streets in Ferguson, who are
after all some of the most silenced people already. And you have
this really unfortunate tendency of liberal commentators to
engage in this double silencing, when they say, “yes maybe its
legitimate to resist and protest, but we would really like to
police and dictate the terms of that protest.” They make certain
claims about understanding how social change occurs, when
actually those claims are almost entirely wrong. The way that
social change occurs is often through these moments of mass
eruption and spontaneous riots and the way change often unfolds
is through this attempt by reformists to co-opt them. So on the
one hand I think we definitely need to be hesitant and resistant
and critical to these reformist temptations. We also need to
recognize that they are inevitably going to surface and that’s
actually more likely how change is going to occur. But the
danger, especially in this situation, is the question of what
kind of reforms are we talking about? Are we talking about
reforms to police training, about sensitivity training for
police, are we talking about some kind of quotas to change the
demographic nature of the Ferguson police department? The
reality is that the function of the police will remain the same.
You can have a police department that is entirely black and the
function of that police department will still be white
supremacist, not only because they protect property but because
of the relationship between property and whiteness in the U.S.
Police protect whiteness as well, they uphold the color line by
dictating which populations are subject to violence and which
are not, and which populations need to be contained and which do
not. So the reforms won’t really solve these questions and this
again brings us again to the question of so-called post-racial
America, in which the election of a president allegedly tells us
a great deal about the nature of society. In reality in can be
understood in dialectical terms as the opposite, it can be the
latest in a new strategy to counteract popular resistance to
white supremacy and to obscure that fact. So we have Obama going
on television saying things that are correct about the police in
regards to the protest, but also saying that there’s never any
excuse for violence against the police. Which even just on the
face of it, even though people were eating it up, was a
nonsensical statement, because it doesn’t say anything about the
Civil Rights struggles in which the police were violently
abusing black Americans. Even Obama himself would have to
recognize the legitimacy of self- defense in these things. So
reformism also doesn’t tell us much about how to respond in the
present to those very same phenomena. The danger of reformism is
easy to see in the request to the FBI to handle investigations;
the FBI, I mean, come on, this is not a serious suggestion. And
yet, many so-called civil rights organizations are going in for
that as opposed to going in for claims about more substantive
community control over police, which themselves often are too
reformist. These community oversight boards are often toothless
institutions that don’t have any potential to fire violence and
abusive police officers.</p>
<p><em>Can we think about the frequent murders of blacks by police
that you mentioned above as a strategy to control the black
community that works together with the mass incarceration?</em></p>
<p>Absolutely. And I think mass incarceration is not just about
prisons, it is the police and prisons as a complex. It is a
process of terrorizing communities and gathering nearly at
random certain members of those communities to put them in
prison—we say nearly at random but again 92% of those arrested
in Ferguson for disorderly conduct are black. It doesn’t even
need to be said that the statistics show that white people don’t
get charged with disorderly conduct because it’s the kind of
bullshit charge that you throw at someone who is either talking
back to you, or as Michael Brown allegedly was, jaywalking in
the street. If you’ve ever been near a police officer in the
States, and I’m guessing many other places, all you have to do
is question their authority to really see the fury that they are
prepared to unleash. This is because what the system requires is
that they have not only the legal force that they’re granted,
but also a discretion on the street which is really a sovereign
discretion to decide who is going to jail and who is not, who is
subject to including legal violence and who is not subject to
that violence. I myself walking down the street am not judged to
be subject to that violence for the most part, but any black
youth is always already potentially a legitimate target for
violence. And so policing is part of this mass incarceration
system that inflicts terror on these communities, that destroys
communities and tears families apart just as slavery did for the
most part, and it is really an attempt to contain through
submission these communities. It is not simply to take away a
large percentage of their numbers, which it does, but it is also
to terrorize and force the others into submission. You have had,
as I said, young black men killed several times in the past
month but what stands out about Ferguson is not the killing but
the resistance, and the really truly heroic nature of the
resistance. This is not a resistance of thousands of people, but
a resistance of small numbers in a small town who regardless of
all of the force and all the attention and attempts at
cooptation are in the streets every single night, who are
responding in many ways to the police attempts at cooptation
which were touted in the media yesterday, by again rebelling
last night and saying we’re not going to buy this line about
police being on our side.</p>
<p><em>In response to what you said above about the resistance of
small numbers of people, we could talk about the importance of
subjectivization in what is going on in Ferguson, or in other
words how the black community in Ferguson has been able to
transform a fear of police control into a will to take to the
street. Sometimes this transformation happens but not always,
so what could account for this change? And has the preceding
event of the murder of Trayvon Martin contributed to that
capacity?</em></p>
<p>That’s right. We’re in a historical moment that needs to be
understood as very specific and the same time, which is part of
a long historical trajectory. This means that the emotional
response to another killing in your community of a young black
man is the cause for anger but also the cause for desperation
and a sort of helplessness, as I said before, that maybe nothing
will happen to change this, that this is constant and not a new
thing or an exception. It’s a constant reality but at the same
time the very same course of helplessness gives rise to sense
that there’s not a great deal to be lost by resisting. If you’re
talking about putting yourself in the shoes of a young black
man, who merely as a result of being a young black man has a 30%
chance of spending a good portion of their lives in prison,
there the stakes of continuing the status quo are almost as high
as the stakes of going out and resisting, even if you’re not
guaranteed any kind of transformation. So you have to combine
that underlying situation with the sense that we are breaking
out of the post-racial hypnosis that reached a peak around 2008
with the election of Obama. Ever since then the morning of Jan.
1 in 2009, just before Obama took office, Oscar Grant was
murdered by a police officer in Oakland, sparking a series of
riots in which I was involved in, and giving rise to a major
transformation of the political situation in Oakland and in CA.
Not long thereafter Trayvon Martin brought to the national stage
a very similar debate and discussion. And so you do see people
gradually realizing that the idea of post-racial is a sick
brutal joke and moving out of the comfort zone of the Obama
presidency to enter into a greater willingness to resist. I
think that is a huge step in historical terms, and despite
everything it was important for Obama to be elected because it
was very important for people to come to this realization that
he was not going to save us. Now that we’ve passed through this
and we have a black president who is willing to turn a blind eye
to this kind of racialized violence, to make such ridiculous
statements about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, to continue
to fund the Israeli government when it continues to bombard
Gaza, and now that we have a potential candidate in Hillary
Clinton who is willing to do much worse, then it gets much
easier for people to come to a clear conception of the reality
of the situation and to act accordingly.</p>
<p><em>One other historical precedence to ask about is that of the
Occupy movement and the national connections that it
established, which we see quickly emerging between Ferguson
and other cities in the U.S. Can we think about Occupy as a
key moment that activated the level of collective resistance
we see today?</em></p>
<p>The answer as with the answer to any question about Occupy is
yes and no. Yes, because Occupy is an important touchstone for
recent political phenomena in the U.S. it certainly influenced a
whole generation of radicals and militants nationwide, and it
has galvanized the willingness to act and it has forged and
reinforced certain modes of action like assemblies, popular
democracy, street protests. No, in the sense that we need to
understand Occupy itself as part of a historical trajectory; in
the Bay Area, Occupy had its radical, militant nature in large
part because of the organizing around Oscar Grant’s death in
2009. That organizing provided an understanding of the reality
of police and a willingness to engage in street action and
recognition that that action could bring very real
transformation and benefits. These were all lessons that were
brought into Occupy. And even beyond that local reality, if
we’re talking about Occupy on a global scale then we’re talking
about the Arab-North African Spring, we’re talking about the <em>indignados</em>
in Spain, the waves of rebellions across the world and that have
become a defining element of the last ten or twenty years. And
so Occupy itself is part of this broader trajectory that allowed
it to press forward in certain ways and that has drawn from
existing understandings and connections. And part of the reason
we can’t center on Occupy is that then we run the risk, again,
of failing into civil libertarianism or falling into neglect of
the historical realities of what policing means in the U.S. So
you have, for instance, Anonymous, which for all the criticisms
you can have of them has played a very important role in many
political advances and in the events of Ferguson, and has done
more for the events of Ferguson than all of the other liberals
out there on Twitter. But even Anonymous is calling for limited
reforms in regard to police oversight and militarization,
because if you abstract away from the history of police and
white supremacy, you can understand what’s going on in Ferguson
as a question of the technical apparatus that the police carry
as opposed to the structural function that the police play. And
that’s where we need to keep both these things together. That
relates in many ways to Occupy, which itself was torn and
divided over this question of are we simply reforming US
democracy in a way that brings us closer to the U.S.
Constitution or are we radicalizing U.S. democracy in a way that
understands the white supremacist history that Constitution is a
part of?</p>
<p><em>A last question could be again about the black community in
Ferguson, because we have seen some images of black males in
the mainstream media that were talking against violence, but
without producing a distinction between police violence.
Instead everything became violence. And so our question is, do
you think this could be a sign of a fracture in the black
community, both in Ferguson and outside, that runs around
class issues? </em></p>
<p>Yes, but understanding and bearing in mind that class is not
manifesting strictly as an economic phenomenon, but as a
political one, in the sense that to be middle class is very much
a mindset and very much an identity regardless of one’s income.
So I think you do have this fracture, and the phrase often used
in the U.S. has to do with what is called respectability
politics, in other words demonstrating that how well-behaved you
can be, in the hopes that behaving well will actually transform
social relations, when we know in reality that that’s not the
case. And so the constant argument that is made is that if young
black men would dress a little better and pull their pants up,
if they would talk better, then maybe their situation would
change. But we know from a structural reality that that’s not
the case, that there are not jobs out there waiting for people
who behave better and that the situation is a far more
structural one. But you do see the same thing manifesting and
you see it even in some of the ore radical spokespeople, you see
it in Al Sharpton coming out and grabbing the family of Michael
Brown and putting them behind him and trying to urge people to
calm down. And you have a whole number of liberal commentators
doing the same thing and emphasizing the question of violence of
the protests, which is really an amazing an inverse perversion
of the reality of protests that are protests <em>against</em>
violence. It almost doesn’t need to be said, but the protestors
in Ferguson haven’t killed a single human being, which cannot be
said for the police in the streets. So if we’re talking about
anything other than the violence of the police then we’re really
already in enemy territory. But it even goes beyond that,
because even those who emphasize the violence of the police, who
say well, this is about the militarization of the police or
about how the police responded in a brutal way they do so in a
way that excises and cuts off the actual cause of the
protest—namely, the violence against Michael Brown. And so that
needs to be the starting point. People did not go to the streets
to protest against the police response to protest, they went to
the streets to protest against white supremacist murder of
Michael Brown. That needs to be kept in focus and there will be
a number of voices calling for a more non-violent response, but
if we understand violence as violence against human beings,
there really hasn’t been much if any violence in these protests.
The violence has been in the violence against Michael Brown and
the violence of the police against protesters and we shouldn’t g
in for this rhetoric although it will be very dangerous. I think
the protestors themselves in their response last night sent a
very clear message about those self appointed mediators that
they don’t speak for them, that they don’t speak for the people
in the streets who, I argue, have a better understanding of
social change then these liberal spokespeople who insist that
the best way to change US society is to go through the
established channels, to elect representatives, to elect a
Democrat. I think that all of U.S. history and the arguably the
history of the world shows that that is quite simply not true,
that the Civil Rights movement succeeded as a result of the
threat of the Black Power movement, that political institutions
in Oakland when Oscar Grant was murdered only began to move when
people rioted and rebelled. And the same exact thing is
happening in Ferguson today. We can simply point to the fact
that the county sheriff has been withdrawn from the streets to
say that these protests have already begun to work.</p>
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