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<a id="gmail-label" href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/manifesto-anti-racist-manifesto-colectiva-feminista-en-construccion-2020" rel="bookmark"><font size="4"><span>MANIFESTO: The Anti-Racist Manifesto of Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, 2020</span></font>
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21 Sep 2022
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<div class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-body gmail-field--type-text-with-summary gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field--item"><p><em>The
Anti-Racist Manifesto of Puerto Rico’s Colectiva Feminista en
Construcción (La Cole) outlines a radical solution to capitalism,
colonialism, and climate change.</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://es-la.facebook.com/Colectiva.Feminista.PR/" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">Colectiva Feminista en Construcción<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>, also known as <em>La Cole</em>,
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, <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wbch0VC6ewx7FFx7PmzsIpj3MGOvae3j/view" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">abortion rights<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>, trans rights, and neoliberalism. La Cole’s <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1itymeavdI-qwEuWU09aVhLljXRaWXdBP/view" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank"><em>Manifiesto antirracista</em><span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>,
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.</p>
<p><strong>The Anti-Racist Manifesto of Colectiva Feminista en Construcción</strong></p>
<p><em>“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.”</em></p>
<p><em>~Combahee River Collective, 1977</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 [<em>saberes</em>] of Black people and people racialized as non-white in the period of European imperial expansion.</p>
<p>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” [“<em>blanquear</em>”] the progeny.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3><strong>The Racial State in the Colony of Puerto Rico</strong></h3>
<p>In the colony of Puerto Rico, the racial state operates with diverse logics. The <em>criollo</em>
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 <em>criollo </em>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In Puerto Rico, anti-Black violence is manifested in “<em>mano dura contra el crimen</em>” [“<a href="https://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/policing-life-and-death-the-perverse-consequences-of-an-iron-fist-policy-against-crime/" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank">iron fist against crime”<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>]
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The end of the racial state will be the end of the colonial state and the post-colonial <em>criollo</em>
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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p><strong>Claims:</strong></p>
<ol><li><strong>End the war against Black people</strong>: 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.</li><li><strong>Reparations</strong>: 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.</li><li><strong>Investment</strong>: 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.</li><li><strong>Economic justice</strong>: 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.</li><li><strong>Power to communities</strong>: Ensure that our communities
have active participation in decision-making on budgets and
infrastructure, desist from privatizing education through charter
schools.</li><li><strong>Political power</strong>: 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<em>ter protection and financing for institutions that do anti-racist work.</em></li></ol>
<p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1itymeavdI-qwEuWU09aVhLljXRaWXdBP/view" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank"><em>Manifiesto antirracista de la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción</em><span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>. English version reposted from <a href="https://www.latinorebels.com/2020/06/07/antiracistmanifesto/" rel="nofollow" class="gmail-0" target="_blank"><em>Latino Rebels</em><span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>.</p>
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