WHITE SUPREMACY and  

“Free Speech”

on college campuses:

 a

(digital)

toolkit

“Free speech or die! Death to the enemies of America!”

~A white supremacist who attacked people with a knife on a Portland train on May 26, 2017

“When we say that these words, and these speakers, are dangerous, we don’t mean ideologically or in the abstract. We don’t mean in a battle or contest of ideas. We’re talking about our lives.”

~Bryn Buchanan

A Word from the Contributors of this Document

We are students, workers, alumni, and community members of the University of California. We have assembled this document to serve as a toolkit for others who are organizing against the spread of white supremacist and fascist violence. For many of us, our immediate local context for this toolkit is an upcoming event: so-called “Free Speech Week,” a conference of white supremacists and arbiters of violence scheduled to take place at UC Berkeley between September 24-27. Potential speakers include Steve Bannon, Pamela Geller, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Erik Prince, and many others. We are organizing in dissent of both the racist ideas and practices these speakers promote and the highly militarized campus environment our university administrators have created to protect them.

This document, an homage to “The Official Anti-Milo (Digital) Toolkit,” extends the political analysis and advice presented in that previous document to account for the shifts that have taken place in and beyond our community since Milo’s scheduled February 1 talk at UC Berkeley. Berkeley is our primary example, but the lessons learned here, we hope, can help other campuses to preempt and out-organize those who would use “free speech” as a means of harming the vulnerable people in our communities. We hope that others far beyond Northern California find the resources here useful in your organizing against white supremacy, and we look forward to learning from you, our comrades, as we continue this struggle together.

Last, we write this document anonymously because, contrary to members of the far-right’s and the liberal class’s assertions, our speech is not free. We believe that publishing under our chosen or given names can and will lead to doxxing, harassment, and potential physical violence. We feel that our energies are best spent elsewhere.

In Solidarity Now and Forever,

a collective confronting white supremacy

An Introduction:

Where Are We in this Political Moment? 

As students, teachers, and community members committed to fighting white supremacy in all of its forms, we recognize this political moment as both particular and also embedded in a longer lineage of struggle. This country was founded on indigenous genocide and formed its supposedly democratic structures around a capitalism dependent upon slavery, heteropatriarchy, and xenophobia. From its inception, white supremacy has been fundamental to the fabric of this toxic nation.

However, this particular moment also demands specific strategies to respond to the shifting character of white supremacist violence. In the past months, universities--the spaces where many of us learn, teach, and work--have become hotbeds for white supremacist organizing. We have experienced the abstraction and warping of “free speech” into a rallying cry for hate and violence. We have experienced the attacks on our communities supported by college administrators who rhetorically espouse a commitment to liberal multiculturalism but have shown time and time again that when it comes to violence, they do not have our backs. In short, while they care about our tuition, they seemingly do not care about our well-being or our lives.

As universities and academics fetishize the abstraction of “free speech,” they are choosing to side with white supremacists through selectively subsidizing speaker fees and giving fascists priority to campus space while militarily repressing dissent. This violence unfolds in a context in which our university is pushing draconian budget cuts, increasing class sizes and workloads for teachers, cutting jobs and student services for marginalized communities, and raising tuition amid supposed scarcity. At the same time, they are spending millions of dollars--upwards of $600,000 per day--on security alone during white supremacist speaking events to militarize our campuses and repress community protest. Our campuses are not exempt from racist and transphobic police violence. Campuses have seen an increase in police violence against students, including racial profiling, and even murder. The murder of Georgia Tech engineering student and trans activist Scout Schultz by campus police manifests that arming campus cops endangers the lives of marginalized students. In funding increased militarization, our universities are making our campuses safer for white supremacists and more dangerous for us. In this toolkit, we are not engaging in the “debate” about free speech (see the Anti-Milo Toolkit for tools on that). Rather, we aim to provide organizing tools for combating the white supremacy spreading through the alt-right’s mobilization of “free speech,”particularly on college campuses and in their surrounding communities.

Nationally, the conversation has shifted away from the material harm our communities are facing. We must not forget the death of Heather Hyer, the beating of Black antifascist Deandre Harris, the deaths of two individuals on a Portland public bus, and other brutal attacks motivated by racial hatred, even as the media attempts to shift the conversation away from violence against activists and toward an endless debate on the “nature of free speech.” As organizers, we have witnessed the media’s misrepresentation of events and its silence on the stakes of the current struggle.  Given these realities, this toolkit reaffirms what we already knew: that at the end of the day, the education and protection of our communities is in our own hands.

Table of Contents

Part I: Examining White Supremacy on College Campuses 

Part II: Confronting White Supremacy at Our University

Part 1: Examining White Supremacy on College campuses

White Supremacy and “Free Speech”: A Sample Syllabus 

Histories of White Supremacy’s U.S. Roots

Black, E. “The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics.” History News Network. September 2003.

Swanson, D. “How US Race Laws Inspired Nazism.” ConsortiumNews. 22 April 2017.

Buchanan, B. “Free, But Not to Kill Me.” Medium. 2 January 2017.

The False Cover of “Free Speech” on College Campuses

Figueroa, M. and Palumbo-Liu, D. “Why Berkeley’s Battle  Against White Supremacy Is Not About Free Speech.” The Nation. 8 September 2017.

UnKoch My Campus. “Koch Network’s Student Protest Ban disguised as ‘Campus Free Speech.’” 1 March 2017.

Hofmann-Kuroda, L. and de Martelly, B. “The Home of Free Speech™: A Critical Perspective on UC Berkeley's Coalition With the Far-Right.” Truthout. 17 May 2017.

Harkinson, J. “The Push to Enlist “Alt-Right” Recruits on College Campuses.” Mother Jones. 16 December 2016.

Martin, C. “Welcome to our university! We’re delighted to have you, but if you think we’re going to cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, you’ve got another think coming.”  McSweeny’s Internet Tendency. 6 September 2016.

Policing as White Supremacy

Sunshine, S. “The Growing Alliance Between Neo-Nazis, Right Wing Paramilitaries and Trumpist Republicans.” Colorlines. 9 June 2017.

Sepulveda, J. and Johnson, B. “Do Police Allow Safe Spaces for White Nationalist Violence?” KQED News. 16 August 2017.

“What Counts as Violence: Why the Right Can Shoot Us Now.” CrimethInk. 23 January 2017.

Armstrong, A. “Why Did Fascist Agitators at UC Davis Reenact the Violence of the ‘Pepper Spray Cop’?” Truth Out. 24 January 2017.

Further Reading

The Campus Antifascist Network’s extensive syllabus on antifascism

“Tone at the Top”:

An Analysis of UC Berkeley’s Liberal Administrative Rhetoric as Cover for White Supremacy

Organizing on campus requires that movements contend with administrative management. Studies have shown that administrators treat racist incidents as “bad PR” instead of systemic problems firmly rooted in university practices. We’ve broken down this PR with an example from UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, who has been consistently using her power and platform to send emails with her interpretation of “free speech” to the entire campus community. The following is from her email on August 23, 2017 with our added commentary.

From Christ’s email: “The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections. ”

Analysis: The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has exceptions. Those are: incitement to violence, defamation, fraud, obscenity, child pornography, fighting words, and threats. As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid ‘incitement’—speech ‘directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action’ and ‘likely to incite or produce such action.’ UC administration has consistently refused to answer questions and challenges to their interpretation of what speech is protected under the First Amendment.

Additionally, a reliance on constitutional law for justice will always be limited. A deeper analysis shows that “rooting these issues historically, we have to start with the power inequalities created by cissexism, anti-blackness, and nationalism. The Naturalization Act of 1790 extended citizenship to ‘free white men with property’ — meaning that citizens were required to have these social positions in order to be incorporated under the Constitution of the United States. For those of us outside of that frame, neither our speech nor our bodies were free.”

From Christ’s email: “But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint—that we’re required to allow it—but of value.  The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. ”

Analysis: What Christ is actually saying is that allowing white supremacy and fascism space to be heard as legitimate platforms is fundamental to our democracy and mission as a university. In some ways, she’s not wrong: the university has historically played a key structural and ideological role in white supremacist imperialism and nation-building. But we see this as part of the problem, not a solution.

From Christ’s email: “The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.”

Analysis: This logic of a “free market of ideas” shares the flaws of its economic counterpart. Free market ideology maintains that every participant has equal access to the market, allowing merit and value to prevail. Free speech ideology insists that every view has equal access to platforms and “opportunity of exchanging error for truth,” and that somehow rightness and truth will prevail in this free circulation of ideas.

However, the university is already using its institutional power and authority to determine what speech is appropriate. At the urging of well-funded Zionist groups last fall the administration cancelled a class on Palestine, which was only reinstated after concerted activism on the part of students. The wealthy donors and foundations interested in funding and pressuring the university to allow these talks include the Koch Brothers, Goldwater Institute, and Horowitz’s “Freedom Center.” There are strong economic and social forces interested in providing white supremacists with a platform to strengthen, legitimate, and circulate ideas that, if you follow them to their logical endpoint, can end only in genocide.

In September of 2017, these trends have been accelerated and escalated by a militarized response that has robbed resources necessary to hold actual academic talks, and prevented freedom of movement and assembly on campus.

From Christ’s email: “Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus.  Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right.  It is who we are.”

Analysis: The history of the Free Speech MovementTM is far more fraught than the liberal administrators would have us to believe. The Free Speech MovementTM coalesced as a coalition between radical and conservative student groups and was deliberately depoliticized as a strategy to diffuse militant and Black radical influences on campus. As two observers note, “it is both timely and urgent that we release ourselves from the nostalgic hold of FSM to make room for reflection, critique and militant movement beyond depoliticized and increasingly fascist demands for free speech. We must demand the right to speak only insofar as that demand is coupled with a clear political commitment to anti-racist and other anti-oppressive struggles, lest our movements function primarily as mechanisms to build inroads not with those facing oppression, but with those who perpetuate it.”

From Christ’s email: “Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy.  It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community—tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity.  Some constitutionally-protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful.”

Analysis:  In this framing, Christ echoes the conservative framing of university students as “snowflakes” and the stakes of white supremacist hate as simply “hurt feelings.” This completely elides the institutional and structural nature of white supremacy and the actual physical violence it promotes. We are not engaged in a disembodied debate about values and identities that remains abstract and philosophical. This is about our bodies and our lives. Advocating for violence on our community is not simply “in conflict” with our value of protecting each other. It is an assault on our lives.

From Christ’s email: “However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial.  Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.”

Analysis: One does not respond to white supremacy by granting it the legitimacy of an official platform. Identifying violence as such does not remedy its harm. Listening to Nazis and trying to reason with them does not make them go away. In prioritizing narrative control over community safety, we begin down a very dangerous road.

From Christ’s email: “We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities.  You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous.  We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space.  These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.”

Analysis: White supremacist speakers do not come to offer a debate of ideas; they and their followers come to humiliate and incite. Pairing this imminent physical danger with the hyper-militarized police presence and mobilization of a mutual aid security army to control and intimidate students begs the question of what we are being educated into, and what kind of world we are being prepared for. If the campus is to be effectively closed in order to provide a police-secured safe playground for white supremacists and their followers, creating a context in which “faculty cannot teach, staff cannot work and students cannot learn,” then what good is our public university? Who and what is this space intended to serve?

It is a common liberal trope to tell people that they should respond to oppression by developing resilience, or “grit.” Audre Lorde reminds us that “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” For the communities under attack by white supremacists, this current wave is nothing new, and the “inner resilience” developed by ancestors and generations is already the backbone and inspiration for this fight.

From Christ’s email: “ This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley.  The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal.  If you choose to protest, do so peacefully.  That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor.  We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.”

Analysis: Christ again shows that she understands free speech primarily as a concept which forces all of us, students, workers, faculty, to be a captive audience to a small portion of society which favors ethnic cleansing. It also seems she is completely unaware that the primary reason why so many at Cal are now anxious about their security and safety is because of the Free Speech Week carnival of bigotry that she has promoted so dutifully. Christ also grossly misrepresents the true actions of the university, which has has never favored disempowered voices. The original Free Speech Movement had roots in the fight against local hotels discriminating against Black workers, which of course the university opposed at the time. Today, when low wage workers, Black Lives Matter, and disabled people fight for what’s right, the university still opposes us.

Furthermore, the administration’s approach to “security” during the events of September 2017 leaves no room for peaceful protest. By creating an inaccessible battleground on the most heavily trafficked pedestrian zone on our campus, the administration renders impossible effective non-violent, speech-based action while claiming to respect “free and open dialogue.” If we are free, why does our campus look like a war zone?

Reimagining the Role of Chancellor:

A How-to Guide

Dear Chancellors and Administrators, looking for a way to backtrack out of “defending free speech” hell? Follow this handy guide for tips.

Step 1: Watch the performance of UC Berkeley Chancellor Carrot Christ as she issues an apology about her flawed understanding of free speech and recognizes the role she has played in providing cover for the spread of genocidal politics: “UC Berkeley Chancellor Carrot Christ Issues Heartfelt Apology”

Step 2: Think about this performance, following the guidelines below.

Concept behind this performance intervention:

In order to remake our university systems into just places where white supremacy is abolished, we need to reimagine what campus authority might look like. How would “free speech week” and the surrounding mediatized debate look different if a highly paid campus authority were to come out as against hate speech and for marginalized students? This performance by “Carrot Christ” and her group of supports “Students4Christ” aims to provide a pathway for chancellors to reflexively engage with their own actions and to do things differently (while modeling fabulous wig-wear).  The accompanying letter urges students to call the chancellor’s office and hold the chancellor accountable. Through using performance as a means of intervention, we can collectively imagine different more just futures and do the creative work necessary to build a campus safe for all students, not only a privileged few.

Step 3: Abolish the position, tear down the fence, and democratize the regents. Simple!

The Paradox of Tolerance (an infographic)

Escalations in Berkeley’s Repression against Anti-Fascist Organizing

Any action that you take is likely to experience push back. Berkeley has faced an escalation of repression against students, workers, and community members seeking to organize against the spread of white supremacy and fascism. Since the dramatic February 1 shut down of Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled speaking event on the UC Berkeley campus there have been a number of reactionary efforts to repress organizing. Below is a partial list of the changes that have taken place since then:

  • The day after Yiannopoulos’s talk was cancelled amid student protest, Trump threatened to pull federal funding from UC Berkeley (source); Yiannopoulos’s talk was protested most dramatically when the campus community learned he was working with  David Horowitz on a campaign to target undocumented students and the sanctuary campus movement (source).
  • The city of Berkeley has moved to classify antifa as a “gang,” even though antifa describes a broad collective movement that embraces a wide range of tactics for resisting the encroachment of fascism (source).
  • The city of Berkeley approved police use of pepper spray as a crowd control measure, indicating that this chemical weapon will be used to target individuals wearing masks at demonstrations (source); the use of masks is an important safety tactic used to prevent individuals from being doxxed and harassed by far-right trolls and to help protect lungs from chemical particulate.
  • The UC Berkeley administration has prevented peaceful assemblies, like the August 27 “Bay Area Rally Against Hate,” from taking place on campus, encircling campus space with concrete barricades and forcing people to rally in the streets; this shift creates a significant safety risk, as the far-right has increasingly used vehicular assaults to target antifascist demonstrations (source).
  • The UC Berkeley administration has spent millions of dollars on military-style police and security measures for white supremacist speaking events (source); they do so in a year where they face a $110 million deficit (source). We ask: why is there seemingly infinite money for militarization but not for public education?

What Can Berkeley Cops Get Away With?

The Berkeley City Council on Tuesday September 12th authorized the use of pepper spray on protesters (they are also permitted batons and other chemical agents). UCPD also has an agreement of “mutual aid” with other police from around the bay, so you can expect to see officers from all sorts of different departments and cities on campus in big protests. On August 26th the UCPD emailed the entire student body encouraging them to “stay away” from the rally, providing this truly ridiculous list of banned items where anyone caught with these materials was subject to citation and arrest:

•               No backpacks or bags                        •               Weapons (firearms/simulated firearms)

•               Ammunition                                •               Weapons (dirks/daggers /ice picks)

•               Improvised Weapons as determined        •               Mace/pepper spray/bear spray/wasp spray

 by Law Enforcement Officers                •               Gas masks

•               Tasers /stun guns or similar devices        •               Animals other than working service animals

•               Hard plastic, metal, or glass bottles         •               Shields

and jars (Nalgene, water bottles, etc.)        •               Hard or frozen fruit/vegetables

•               Wearing masks of any kind                •               Baseball bats

•               Helmets                                •               Aerosols/pressurized cans

•               No object/sign larger than 30” X 30”         •               Hard coolers

(objects/signs will only be allowed if         •               Artificial noise making devices

made of foam core, cardboard, paper)        •               Laser pointers                        

•               Balls or other projectiles                •               Skateboards/scooters/bicycles

•               Sticks /selfie sticks/poles/clubs/        •               Balloons

pipes (wood, plastic or metal)                •               BBQ Grills of any kind

•               Chains with padlocks                        •               Wagons or carts that can be pulled

•               Fireworks                                •               Packages

•               Incendiary devices                        •               Monos/tripods        

•               Batteries                                •               Umbrellas        

•               Tobacco products                         •               Illegal drugs        

(including e-cigarettes)                        •               Structures, canopies or pop-up tents        

•               Bicycle U-locks                                •               Drones and other unmanned aircraft

•               Liquid (other than water in factory                systems        

-sealed, clear plastic bottles)                

Before the rally had really started, police arrested some people for covering their faces with their shirt. Individuals from the National Lawyers Guild said that these actions are not constitutional, but police will still try to get away with it if they can. You are most vulnerable to police violence if you are alone. If you are going to a rally, we recommend that you meet with your affinity group beforehand and travel together.

Cops: An Unnecessary Evil

University administrators have been responding to white supremacist threats with further militarization and cooperation with policing on federal, local, and campus levels. This creates a repressive climate and represents a model of safety that is about protecting property, the state, and white supremacy. It is not about protecting us and our lives, and it is not about justice.

U.S. policing has its roots in slave patrols and continues to be a violent force of repression, particularly for Black and Brown bodies, trans and gender nonconforming people, people of color, queer folks, and undocumented communities. Police departments, including the Berkeley police department, engage in close coordination with white supremacist groups before and during rallies while mobilizing militarized response to prevent protesters and antifa from protecting their communities. Powerful organizing groups such as Black Lives Matter have begun developing deep analyses of the histories and consequences of our current system of policing and what we need for community controlled alternatives.

The urgency of demilitarizing and opposing the police stretches from local  to the federal and international levels. At a meeting between top administrators and student and faculty organizers a few days previous to the first proposed Milo Yiannopoulos visit on February 1, 2017, Nils Gilman, Chief of Staff for the Chancellor admitted that the administration had been in close contact with the FBI concerning the event. This begs the question of what FBI involvement means in terms of surveillance and the “freedom” of students to express their political views. The history of university-federal connections have historically meant the targeting of students the state deems enemies. In New York, students who were Muslim U.S. citizens were particularly targeted for surveillance and considered potential terrorists if they were more spiritually engaged (Ali, 2014). There has been a blurring of definitions of "demonstrator" and "terrorist" with the cooperation between universities and state officials, even, as was the case at UC Davis, entailing creation of secret administrative programs to put student activists under surveillance, including through monitoring their social media and interactions with student affairs advisors and counselors (Maira and Sze, 2012). This surveillance and repression is intended to silence students who are organizing to protect their communities, and we must defend them including from police terror.

Part 2: Confronting White Supremacy at Our University

Diversity of Tactics

This section of the toolkit is a series of tactics developed in response to the presence of white supremacists on campus at UC Berkeley and elsewhere in Northern California. All organizers have different resources, skills, and access needs. Not all of us have capacity to show up for a mass mobilization. In fact, protests can be extremely inaccessible spaces for people with disabilities, people with trauma around police violence, and people with insecure immigration statuses. For some, the best tactic may be to organize departmentally, writing letters and hosting events. For others, organizing a direct action may be the most effective tactic. Here we list a variety of ways to engage: from model letters from students and faculty to filing a workplace grievance; from organizing a direct action to undoing white supremacy in your classroom. There are so many other modes of activism that deserve much more attention than we can give here - the important thing is to engage with the struggle. Activism involves a huge diversity of forms of labor, including labor that is often gendered, racialized, and invisibilized. We consider feeding protesters, providing emotional support, providing jail and court support, and taking care of each other forms of important activist labor. We hope that this section of the toolkit will help you assess your own capacity and figure out where and how to link in.

This section begins with various letter writing campaigns. It then moves into a workplace strategy grieving unsafe workplaces created by white supremacist rallies and militarized campuses. The final materials provide how-to guides and know your rights resources for building counter demonstrations with materials UC Berkeley campus is preparing to use during “Free Speech Week.”

Disarm Our Campuses

A Letter from the UC Student Workers Union to the UC Regents

Statement:

We, UAW Local 2865, call on the University of California Regents to disarm police across the UC system. The continued armament and militarization of our various campus police departments is harmful to our safety and the safety of our students. Historically and contemporarily, police forces, armed with deadly weapons and technologies of terror, have assaulted and killed marginalized peoples and bodies. This means that their mission lies contrary to the stated goals of the University, and indeed to those of any teaching institution. At a time when University administrators are preempting student protest and criminalizing voices of dissent through force, they are colluding with campus and local police department’s pursuit of greater access to weapons against “potential threats.” We demand that this collusion and criminalization end, and that the University disarm its policing forces for the safety and protection of all students and workers.  

Background:

The UC system’s Academic Plan says "The distinctive mission of the University is to serve society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge.” The mission of the University is to serve society. But whose society is being served when our campuses are patrolled by officers who could end our lives at any given moment?

This isn’t hyperbole, although we’ve seen officers and administration laugh off the concerns of students and workers. This statement is a response to the recent attacks on Black bodies at UC Merced and UC Davis in the past few months. What if one of us fails to “look like a student?” What if one of us is Sam Duboce? What if one of us is Antonio Guzman Lopez? Cameron Redus? Bartholomew Williams? What if the officer who pulled his gun on student protestors at UCSF had pulled the trigger? Campus police are not exempt from the systemic problems facing American policing as a whole. Not only are armed police life threatening, they often target and harass students and workers - making everyday life dangerous for those who participate in campus life. Campus police may be nominally separate from other kinds of police, but culturally and materially they remain agents of the state. There is no magic distinction that makes them less violent or aggressive to Black, Brown, trans, womxn, and undocumented bodies.

The history of campus policing is rooted not in safety but in violent exploitation, the protection of property, and the criminalization of Black, Brown, and queer bodies. Campus policing is a recent white cis hetero patriarchal classist phenomenon that arose as an administrative backlash against the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, desegregation, and increased higher education access for people of color and others outside the elite, white, masculine population. 92 percent of public universities arm their police forces, compared to just 32 percent of private institutions. Despite these differences in armed police forces on campuses, private institutions are not safe havens from crime--their student bodies are just more likely to be composed of white, upper-middle class students. Discrepancies in policing, then, are not based on the size of an institution or on differences in crime rates, but on assumptions about the criminality of a more diverse student body and biased expectations of violence or resistance. Policing and armament are racialized, sex and gender-based, nativist, ableist, and classed institution in our education system. While administration pays lip service to celebrating greater levels of diversity, they simultaneously and consistently ‘minoritize’ students and prepare for the “problems” diversity supposedly brings by arming campus police, utilizing armed police to suppress student protest, and looking the other way when police exceeds their bounds.

The idea of the “problem student” is useful in understanding the expansion of police powers into campus life. Many police departments have used fears generated by school shootings to gain increased access to military-grade weaponry, including automatic weapons, assault rifles, and armored vehicles (In Berkeley and the town of Davis[1], for example). Not only does this escalation in weaponization ignores the fact that white men make up the majority of mass shooters - the same population that supports police armament so fervently - but it spuriously associates police armament with improved outcomes from these shootings (an argument that is not backed up by evidence). White men are most often perpetrators of mass shootings, yet Black and Brown people suffer the brunt of the consequences of armed policing. The “problem student” narrative allows campuses to avoid doing the hard work of changing disciplinary and judicial structures to hold white supremacy and toxic masculinity accountable. It also ignores the way both white supremacy and toxic masculinity inform police forces themselves, which are composed predominantly of white cis hetero men. This means that universities are arming the largely white cis hetero police forces to fight the outcomes of white supremacy and toxic masculinity.

It doesn’t work.

This narrative implicitly associates armed police with greater safety, but this is simply incorrect. Police want us to believe they are stopping campus shootings, or preventing them from happening. Mass shootings account for <1% of homicides, and murder generally is on the decline. “According to IACLEA (The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators), from 2000-2013 there were just 12 active-shooting incidents at the nearly 5,000 U.S. degree-granting institutions — fewer than one a year.” What happens in those rare cases when there is an active shooter situation? Campus police rarely intervene in time. Perhaps they need weapons to prevent increases in violent crime? Turns out, not so much. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that “violent crime on campuses has declined by 27 percent over the past decade.” So there are relatively few cases of mass shootings, armed police often prove ineffective in stopping campus shootings when they do occur, and violent crime is down overall. Yet, police forces continue to ramp up attempts to build up their arsenals on campuses.

Current Moment:

College campuses have begun to see the rising connection between militarization and overpolicing on university grounds. Two notable campaigns have been  #DisarmPSU, which has resisted the arming of their campus police on the same grounds we call for the disarmament of our own, and UC Irvine’s Black Student Union which has gone even further to call for the dissolution of the police force on their campus. There is a growing national awareness that police forces are a danger to those they supposedly protect, especially marginalized bodies (e.g. people with disabilities, Black and Brown folks, and trans people). Students and workers on campus are no different from the rest of the population in this regard.

In the face of this growing national awareness, police are fighting back. The election of Donald Trump, and potential repeals to the stay on the 1033 Program (which provided military surplus weapons to police departments) means that students are under threat and surveillance of an increasingly militarized police force. Police have also worked more closely with various campus administrations to quell protests - rooted in resistance to white supremacist, nationalist, and transphobic systems - and to limit the rights of students and workers.

We, UAW 2865, see armed campus police as a direct threat to our ability to organize and to work, and so we vehemently oppose the use of coercive, deadly force and technologies of terror, such as drones to ensure compliance from people with a right to oppose the systems which exploit them.

Conclusion:

We will organize in solidarity with students and workers across the UC system to see our goal of disarmament accomplished. If the University of California cares for its students, it cannot continue to arm a police force which is part of the epidemic of police violence across this country. The University is policing knowledge, bodies, and resources; instead of fulfilling its mission, it is more concerned with maintaining power with coercive force. The mission of the University should not be to continue to replicate state violence and domination or act as another mechanism of exploitation.

We endorse the University’s stated goal of serving society, and call on the University of California system to serve its students by disarming campus police. We denounce the actions of the police officers from Merced and Davis, recognizing that this is part of a broader institutional problem with policing. As a union, we believe this not only necessary to protecting ourselves as workers, knowledge producers, and educators, but to protect the students we mentor.

A Letter from the UC Berkeley Anthropology Department about Censoring an Invited Speaker During “Free Speech Week”

An Annual Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology by Dr. Tsing that was scheduled for September 25, 2017 was cancelled because it coincides with the Milo Yiannopoulos performance. This is after the community on February 1, 2017 overwhelmingly declared that Yiannopoulos is not welcome on campus. These actions show that the administration shows fundamental disregard for the desires of the community and the safety of those most affected by provision of a platform for hate speech. It also shows that the priorities of the administration are not academic.  As the letter points out:

“[T]he university is willing to prioritize a vitriolic white supremacist speaker, who seeks to disrupt academic life through his performance, over and above a renowned scholar and thinker committed to thoughtful scholarly engagement. If this “Year of Free Speech” is about giving an equal platform to all speakers, it would seem that it has already failed. Hate speech has taken precedence over academic discourse.

We offer this as a stark reminder of what precisely is at stake in vague and abstract claims of “free speech.” What is at stake is the very value of the scholarly discourse we offer to our students and to the world. Last semester it became quite clear that the university administration prioritizes “free speech” ideals in the most general terms over the physical bodies and livelihoods of our students. This semester, at a moment of unprecedented vulnerability for our undocumented students, Yiannopoulos is again being offered a platform and a microphone for his vitriolic hate speech that not only denigrates these students but jeopardizes their very existence in this campus community, in this nation, and on this earth. Before his planned speech last year, Yiannopoulos announced that he would divulge the names of undocumented students, knowing full well that this would put them in danger of personal attacks and deportation. During other campus visits he has directly bullied and threatened individual students; in the case of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, a student was forced to leave the university due to the persistent and egregious harassment she suffered following Yiannopoulos’ targeting of her during his performance.

It is this brand of hateful speech and the noxious actions it gives rise to that are currently being prioritized over dialogue and debate with an invited scholar who had planned to visit our campus to discuss her work. We urge you to think very carefully about the lives you are risking in giving white supremacists an even larger platform than they already have. We also urge you to consider that, in giving this platform so freely to white supremacists, you take it away from those who engage in thoughtful, compassionate, and respectful scholarly discourse by actively threatening the spaces available to them for such engagements.

 Template Departmental Letter Sent from Graduate Students to Faculty, Administrators, and Staff

[The following letter was signed by current and past graduate students and delivered directly to faculty, administrators, and staff of a department. The department has requested that the original version of the letter not be shared publicly, so the letter has been revised as an anonymous template to be used in departmental-level organizing.]

Dear department faculty, administrators, and staff,

We are writing to urge you to use your connection with the performance venue where various alt-right speakers are being hosted to demand they shut down their programming on September 14 and September 27. The campus administration wants us to cancel or move classes in order to promote and protect racist, misogynist, and hateful speakers. Let us work in community as a department and tell them: NOT IN OUR THEATERS. Ben Shapiro, who is speaking this week on September 14 is a racist rape-denying misogynist homophobe. Milo Yiannopoulos is a white supremacist known for doxxing and sexually harassing trans and undocumented students and inciting his audiences to violence. He is programmed to speak at Zellerbach on September 27th.

We urge you to tell the UCB campus and Berkeley community that our department believes in programming that accords with the department mission statement, which states: “we make diversity and inclusion a key part of our teaching, art making and public programming.” Shutting down classes to make space for Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulis, and a highly militarized campus creates an unsafe learning and teaching environment that jeopardizes our education and that of our students. Please tell this venue and the administration that our department does not condone hate speech and strives to create a space where the arts are accessible to all, not just a white misogynist minority.

As a department, we need to demand that the venue reassesses its priorities and refuses to provide space for white supremacist movement-building in our theaters. We believe in art as a powerful tool for social justice. Performances that violently marginalize members of our community should be fiercely shut down, not through panels, emails, or statements, but through action that manifests the venue’s support of a safe learning environment for students: they need to refuse to host Shapiro and Yiannopoulos’ talks. Our department needs to work in solidarity with survivors, queers, and people of color and shut down the series of hateful speakers programmed to speak in performance venues on campus. Please use your affiliation with this venue to demand they choose student safety over profit.

We are deeply disturbed and disappointed that our performance space is being used to espouse hate speech in the guise of free speech. As teachers, we ask that you show your support of our students and release a public statement condemning the programming at Zellerbach and demanding that the administration cancel these talks.

We also ask that you write and display a message on the website and in the main office stating that our department commits to dismantling hate speech and violence against students in all of its iterations to the best of its abilities.

Thank you for listening and for your commitment to serving the students of this department and this campus,

[names redacted]

Boycott the Alt-Right @UC Berkeley,

September 24-27th

[An open letter from Faculty to Administration Calling for a Boycott of “Free Speech Week”]

 

While there has still not been an official announcement from campus administrators, we are learning that from September 24th to 27th,  the University of California at Berkeley will provide a platform to Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Stephen K. Bannon, Breitbart media and their far right audience. A series of explicitly violent Alt-Right, militia and pro-Fascist events are also, again, being scheduled for Civic Center / MLK park in downtown Berkeley on those days. 

Once more, signs point towards an escalated and uncontrollable confrontation both on and off campus during these four days. The history of these events has been chilling. Since Inauguration Day, Alt-Right followers have shot someone at the University of Washington, stabbed two people to death on public transport in Portland, stabbed to death a college senior in Maryland, beaten numerous nonviolent protesters at the University of Virginia, and most recently murdered a peaceful protester with an automobile in Charlottesville. Most immediately troubling given Trump’s decision to end DACA, is that these forces have publicly expressed their intent to specifically target "sanctuary campuses" and disclose the identity of undocumented students. As concerned faculty members, we cannot remain silent while students, staff, colleagues, and fellow community members are threatened.

Therefore, as faculty committed to the safety of our students and our campus, we are calling for a complete boycott of all classes and campus activities while these Alt-Right events are taking place at the very center of UC Berkeley’s campus. As faculty we cannot ask students and staff to choose between risking their physical and mental safety in order to attend class or come to work in an environment of harassment, intimidation, violence, and militarized policing. The reality is that particularly vulnerable populations (DACA students, non-white, gender queer, Muslims, disabled, feminists, and others) have already been harmed, and are reporting increased levels of fear and anxiety about the upcoming events, the increased police presence on our campus, and how all this will impact their lives and their studies.

It is not just physical violence that our campus faces from this media circus. Many of these provocateurs’ most committed audiences are online, and the Breitbart media machine uses that audience to harass, cyberbully, and threaten anyone who speaks out against them. Students and faculty on our campus have already had their lives threatened for speaking out against Milo and his followers. Online threats are real threats, and if we allow this intolerant and bullying version of free speech to take over our campus, then it can only but come at the expense of the free speech rights of the Berkeley community as a whole. In fact, the administration has just forced the Anthropology Department to cancel a public talk during “free speech week” in the name of campus safety. This makes clear that the administration understands the imminent threat to campus safety while also revealing that the loud demands of the Alt-Right has the effect of silencing members of our campus community.

 

We recognize that as a public institution, we are legally bound by the Constitution to allow all viewpoints on campus. However, there are forms of speech that are not protected under the First Amendment. These include speech that presents imminent physical danger and speech that disrupts the university’s mission to educate. Milo, Coulter and Bannon do not come to educate; they and their followers come to humiliate and incite. If the administration insists upon allowing the Alt-Right to occupy the center of our campus for four days to harass, threaten and intimidate us, as they did during Milo’s visit in February, then faculty cannot teach, staff cannot work and students cannot learn.

We refuse to grant the Alt-Right the media spectacle that they so desperately desire. This strategy responds to the concerns voiced in the letter authored by the chairs of the three departments most impacted--Gender & Women’s Studies, African American Studies and Ethnic Studies--and also follows the lead of the SPLC advice to ignore these agitators. As faculty, we reject both the administration's rhetoric of false equivalency that all speech - including “hate speech” - merits value and respect and also the impulse to see direct confrontation as the only strategy of resistance. A boycott of all campus activities during these days is the only responsible course of action.

Therefore we are calling upon faculty to take the following steps:

 

  1. Cancel classes and tell students to stay home. A boycott of classes affirms that our fundamental responsibility as faculty is to protect the safety and well being of all our students. While we understand the argument that canceling classes might be seen as a penalty to students who want to learn--by holding class when some students CAN NOT attend by virtue of their DACA status and the imminent threat that these campus events hold, faculty who DO hold classes are disadvantaging DACA students and others who will feel threatened by being on campus.

  1. Close buildings, close departments and let staff stay home. If the campus is unsafe for student learning then it is unsafe for staff members to work. We should work with campus maintenance and building managers to close as many departments and buildings as possible, starting with those in the immediate vicinity of Sproul Plaza. No one should be forced to work surrounded by men with clubs, police with guns and the sting of teargas.

  1. Faculty who decide to hold class during this week, in the face of these explicit threats, should not penalize students who are afraid to come to campus. It is unfair and discriminatory for faculty to schedule exams or require attendance during this week. Such an expectation forces students to choose between their physical safety, their mental well being, and a grade. Consider making a video lecture available, give the students a take-home assignment, or creating another alternative class plan.  If you decide you must hold class, please do it away from campus, away from the Telegraph Avenue point of campus entry, and away from Downtown.

The Administration, in failing to halt these events, has left concerned faculty with no other choice than to act to prevent further harm to our community. We urge you to join us in keeping our students and our campus safe by signing on to this call for a campus-wide- boycott.

In Solidarity,

[names redacted]

Workplace Grievance Campaign

At UC Berkeley, we drew together a campus-wide collective grievance, filed on behalf of union members and delivered to Labor Relations. As we see the presence of Nazis and white supremacists on campus and the increased militarization of campus police as a threat to workplace safety, this grievance addressed the violation of several terms of our contract, including health and safety, non-discrimination, and workplace and instructional support.

Attachment One: Violation of the Contract

The University administration is potentially hosting a series of talks by far right-wing speakers during the week of September 24, 2017. In public comments and in private correspondence between members of our union and the Office of the Chancellor, the University administration has argued that it is constrained by First Amendment jurisprudence in what actions it can take to block these speakers from campus. Regardless of the viability of this argument, the University administration has the undisputed ability to establish the time, place, and manner in which these speakers are permitted to speak and hold related events. While the University has yet to make a clear statement about confirmed speakers and their locations, the administration has elected to divert funds toward heightened security, costing upwards of $600,000 per day for such events, at a time when core education budgets and student services have been cut.

Both the proposed heavily militarized policing and the time, place, and manner of securing these events violate article 13 (health and safety), article 20 (non-discrimination), and article 32 (workplace and instructional support) of our employment contract.

  1. 13, Health and safety: The university is obligated to “make reasonable attempts to maintain in safe working condition the assigned workplace,” which is our school campus. The significant militarization of our campus community for such events--which has included, subjecting student-workers (especially those of color) to "stop and frisk"-type searches, hiring bomb and K-9 units, and bringing military-grade weapons onto our campus workplaces--compounds the already unsafe and hostile workplace created by speakers who promote hate and violence. The University administration's response to safety threats to academic student employees is to dramatically and visibly increase police presence in our worksites. UCPD and other law enforcement officers have intimidated and racially profiled ASEs in the past, including during the cancelled Ann Coulter events last spring when a graduate student of color was profiled and arrested. Conditions like these prevent workers from carrying out their assigned workplace duties.

  1. 32, Workplace and instructional support: These events are staged near many of the multi-cultural and queer support/organizational spaces that cater to marginalized students and academic student employees, as well as the Student Learning Center. This placement obstructs ASEs’ access to vital spaces, including core campus buildings that were subjected to lockdown (some of which are workplaces for our members). This includes tutors’ workplace in the Student Learning Center in Cesar Chavez, study and work space for GSIs, readers and tutors in the MLK building as well as in Sproul Hall.

  1. 20, Non-Discrimination clause: This racially-targeted police presence, along with impaired access to multicultural support structures and organizational spaces, will have a disproportionate impact on minority student workers’ and is in violation of the contract’s non-discrimination clause.

The events are scheduled to take place all day on Monday (9/25), Tuesday (9/26), Wednesday (9/27), and Thursday (9/28) and thus serve as contractually barred disruptions to ASEs represented by our union. (For further description of unsafe working conditions, see the open faculty letter calling for a campus boycott).

Attachment Two: Remedies

We demand:

  • The immediate disarmament of campus police and all mutual aid security forces hired to protect speakers who incite hate and violence against ASEs and other students and workers on campus;
  • That no ICE officers be allowed to endanger ASEs and other students and workers on campus at this series of events and henceforth, in line with UC’s guidance on Federal immigration enforcement on campus that limits access to UC property because of privacy concerns, operations needs, or safety concerns, including when ASEs are working;
  • These unsafe events be cancelled so as not to endanger ASEs;
  • In this and future events, the University will consult with ASEs in order to determine how to prevent the violation of ASE rights when accommodating controversial speakers.

What to Do When a White Supremacist or Fascist Comes to Your Campus

The Campus Antifascist Network (CAN)’s recommendations for what to do if a white supremacist or fascist speaker is coming to your campus:  

1. As soon as you hear they are coming, organize a large meeting

Find a location and issue a leaflet advertising this meeting and distribute and post them broadly across campus and in important community locations (progressive bookstores/coffee shops, etc.)

  • Some insights: At Berkeley, far right and white supremacist groups have been disrupting leftist meetings to doxx, harass, or otherwise threaten organizers. There is utility to large, public meetings, but we recommend asking comrades to watch the doors.

2. Before the meeting reach out to key organizations and individuals to attend the meeting and ask them to join an anti-fascist coalition against the fascists who plan to come: 

Contact sympathetic on-campus and off-campus organizations (labor unions, student organizations that would be targeted by the fascists, sympathetic faculty, etc.)

3. At the organizing meeting, work to build a consensus—or at the minimum a majority of people at the meeting around the following points:  

In the context of fascist intentions to come to campus to harass and intimidate:

  • Inform university of your intention to demonstrate,  while recognizing the need to organize independently of the University police and administration.
  • Issue a leaflet for the demonstration, as early as possible, specifying: DATE, VENUE, that will be broadly distributed and posted on campus and in the community—with a special emphasis on members of the coalition mobilizing their organizations and constituencies. List all the organizations involved in organizing the demonstration—this will ensure that those organizations mobilize their members. For organizations which wish to endorse the protest, ensure that you have established a concrete material ask for each organization. What exactly are you asking organizations to do?
  • Begin the process of training trusted members of the coalition to organize self-defense against the fascists—we cannot rely on the campus or local police to protect us against the fascists’ violence.  Self-defense looks like non-violent de-escalation, linking arms to eject agitators, and a presence of trained street medics.
  • Elect a demonstration steering committee to handle issues of speakers at the rally, security, self-defense and whether or not to attempt to shutdown the fascist meeting. We need to have consensus that such an action will only be undertaken if we clearly outnumber the fascists and are likely to disperse them. We do not want to engage in a confrontation that we might lose—that would only embolden the fascists.
  • Prepare for an organized exit from the demonstration. Stick in groups to avoid being isolated and attacked by the fascists.

4. On the day of the demonstration:  

  • Make sure that the Coalition steering committee and activists trained in self-defense and marshalling arrive at least one hour before the time of the demonstration. They should “scout out” the area, determine where to station marshals and self-defense groups and determine possible routes to either disrupt the fascist meetings or effectively retreat in case of attack.
  • Begin speeches when the crowd is of sufficient size—the program should last less than 30 minutes, followed by massive chanting and possible disruption.  
  • Remember—as organizers of the demonstration you have the responsibility of not only getting out the maximum numbers, but ensuring their safety, whether in an effort to disrupt the fascist action or not.

What to Expect at a White Supremacist Rally

From Charlottesville to Berkeley, white supremacist rallies have now become disgustingly commonplace. But they can also vary wildly, depending on the venue particulars, geographic proximity to areas with a higher concentrations of white supremacist groups, and other things. Here’s what you need to know.

Generally, rallies have frequently included the following elements:

~ White nationalists (some very high profile) mingling and organizing with local people sympathetic to their ideologies; some may be in military clothing and carrying weapons

~ Several organized provocateurs, some who physically shove or assault leftists and bystanders

~ Live streamers and photographers who record the events for live broadcast, ridicule, and doxxing (a tactic where right-wing provocateurs attempt to document and disseminate organizers’ identities and private information).

~ A mixture of local police presence, likely militarized and dressed in riot gear, and private security (some in plainclothes); police can often be seen collaborating with white nationalists and fascists before and during demonstrations

Come prepared:

~ Learn to recognize and support all of your allies (including those who are engaging in lower stakes peripheral support work and those who engaging in higher stakes risks to help cancel these events) from agitators who may try to blend in with your allies to sow confusion

~ Be prepared for the diversity of tactics that your allies, accomplices, and coalition groups may be engaging in, including direct action and confrontation; if you are prepared for more direct engagement here is a good resource for protester safety info

~ Check in with your affinity group (a smaller group of people you know and trust) and decide on your levels of participation and escalation beforehand; stick together and have a “buddy” with you at all times; designate meet-up points with the rest of your group in case you become separated

~ Coordinate with trained street medics to ensure the safety of your communities; a useful street medic guide can be found here. For pepper spray and other chemical irritants, use a half mix of plain, alcohol-free liquid antacid and water, or bottled water. Milk is not helpful (and is honestly pretty gross!)

~ Be sure to watch for vehicles that might approach your demonstration to try to harm people; this is a terrorist tactic that white supremacists are increasingly adopting in the U.S.

~ Some people have found it useful to anonymize themselves (e.g., through wearing face masks and/or bandanas) in order to avoid harassment or targeting by agitators, alt-right filmers/doxxers, or police.  Try to educate your allies who may not understand the purpose of masks ahead of demonstrations where they may be used. A heads up: police are increasingly targeting individuals with masks for arrest. Alt-right types and police have also been filming and releasing photos and footage of protesters, attempting to identify us and expose us. If you want a picture of the crowd, move to the back of the crowd and take a picture from further behind to avoid capturing people's faces. Careless photography can endanger our safety.

~ Prepare to care for yourselves and for each other in the hours and days following protests. Care for each other in the days prior to the protest too. Anxiety and anticipation can sometimes creep up! Have a plan for how to deescalate and find relaxation.

 “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an

act of political warfare.” - Audre Lorde

Print this flyer to hand out to people at rallies to help educate fellow demonstrators!

 

Know Your Rights

In California we have the right to document police and the right not to speak to them. It is generally good to stay at least 3 arm’s lengths away from the cops. If you are filming police and/or fascists, be careful about not accidentally capturing other protesters in the frame to protect them from potential doxxing or state retaliation.

Police may try to engage in pleasantries with you. Do not engage in conversation for your safety and for the safety of other protesters. Instead, repeat these phrases:

If cops tell you to stop recording them: “I am not interfering.”

If they tell you to move back: “Okay, I am complying and taking a step back.”

If cops try to talk to you: “I’m choosing to remain silent. I’m going to walk away.”

If they don’t let you walk away: “Am I being detained? Am I free to go?”

If they try to search you, or your possessions: “I do not consent to a search.”

If cops try to make you unlock your phone: “I do not consent to a search.”

If they decide to physically restrain you: “Am I being arrested?”

If you are being arrested: “What are you arresting me for?”

Keep your phone locked and make sure that you do not have a fingerprint or face unlock enabled.

Also, know that having “rights” will not necessarily mean that the police respect them. Because we live in a society based on violent and arbitrary social stratification, your identities (race, gender expression, citizenship status, body type, etc) may also mean that your “rights” are in more danger of being discounted by police. At the end of the day, it is up to each of us to protect each other and our communities.

In case you are arrested, you have the right to remain silent, to ask for a lawyer, and  to make a phone call after being booked. Keep advocating for yourself respectfully but firmly. If you do get to make a call, contact the NLG SF chapter at (415) 285-1011. The person on the other end will guide you through the conversation. We advise writing the phone number on your arm with a marker before a demonstration where you might risk arrest. Stay safe and stay strong out there, and remember that knowledge is one form of power!

Physical Health: Street Medics and You

Knowing your rights only gets you so far. In the wake of attacks on protesters, police violence, and other incidents of trauma knowing your rights doesn’t mean you won’t experience potential bodily harm if you are participating in a direct action. If you are hurt during an action, who can you look to for help? Street medics! One way of supporting any action is providing medic support. Medics are non-combatants during actions, and their primary job is to spread calm in the case of injury and advocate for the needs of the folks experiencing harm.

Here’s a comic put out by Occupy Oakland Medic Collective:

Step One: Preparing Properly and Ensuring Others Are Prepared19030725_1375602675840344_1487368247468687901_n.jpg

Step 2: On The Day Of The Action

19113864_1375602679173677_7226814893566523642_n.jpg

Step 3: Aftercare (SUPER IMPORTANT)19059984_1375602712507007_8192733911999604033_n.jpg

This comic gives you the basic tools you need to be a medic - to help yourself and others in the event of physical harm. There’s a lot more out there, and if you want to learn more there are two major ways to continue to learn how to help heal.

If street medic work is important to you and you want further training there are two major ways to get involved in street medic training:

  1. Organize a Training Session:
  • Reach out to local medics, or get in touch with medic collectives like the Occupy Oakland Medic Collective to organize a training session.
  • Utilize training programs through Red Cross for basic First Aid and CPR training.

  1. Read this handbook:Do No Harm.JPG

                

 

Digital Security

Trolling, online harassment and threats, and doxxing (searching for and publishing private or identifying information about a particular individual on the internet, typically with malicious intent) are some common tactics of the alt-right, white supremacists, and fascists. Activists who attach their name or identity to op-eds, event groups, or protest actions should know that this may make them a target. Organizers and activists are encouraged to use non-university affiliated email accounts (better yet, set up a protonmail account) and end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal to communicate with one another. They are also advised to keep personal information about themselves out of the hands of alt-right members by using pseudonyms, wearing identity-obscuring masks on the day of the protest, etc.

If you are worried that you have been doxxed, that your identity has been compromised, or that you are in immediate danger from white supremacist groups, there are some immediate steps that you can take to protect yourself:

  • Make sure that you feel physically safe, which may entail finding a friend or comrade to stay with or accompany you to and from your work or school.
  • Manage your social media filters, passwords, and privacy settings.
  • Make sure that your home and work address are not easily available online through people searching and data compiling websites.

Generally, there will always be a tension between security and organizing. Organizing in some senses can mean being public and loud, and putting our faces, names, and bodies out there. Too much privacy paranoia can hurt our ability to draw other people into the work.

Doxxing is just another form of surveillance as police/state/white supremacist repression, and this has been going on for a long time, from registries and profiling to COINTELPRO infiltration. As long as they’ve been trying to surveil and intimidate us, we’ve been finding ways around it.

You can find more information, links, and suggestions about controlling your data and personal information here.

Safety and solidarity!

“No Hate In The Bay”

Saturday, September 23, 12pm

63rd and Adeline in Berkeley

“Berkeley Rally Against White Supremacy”

Monday, September 25, 12pm

Crescent Lawn in Berkeley (Oxford and Addison)

In solidarity with the faculty-led call to boycott campus business as usual during so-called "Free Speech Week," join us for a rally on Monday, Sept. 25 on UC-Berkeley, Crescent Lawn. We are students, workers, and members of the UC Berkeley campus community, the City of Berkeley, and the larger Bay Area. We are immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, queer and trans people, leftists, liberals, and others. We think it’s time to come together in a united front, celebrate our differences in solidarity, and speak out against the hateful currents on our campus while affirming our vision of a free, inclusive, and equitable society.

Since the 2016 election, white supremacists have been coming to Berkeley to intimidate, harass, and incite violence against us. This time, the UC Berkeley administration is set to spend hundreds of thousands of public education dollars and heavily militarize the campus to ensure that Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, Stephen Bannon, and others speak at our university from September 24-27. We believe these speakers and their supporters are dangerous to our community. They support deportations of our undocumented friends and family and are leading figures of the white supremacist movement. They uphold the structures of power that violently suppress the speech and democratic rights of workers and oppressed people around the world.

But we will not be silenced or intimidated. The massive demonstrations of August 19 in Boston and August 26-27 in the Bay Area proved that when we come together, we can protect our communities and politically defeat the bigots. In that spirit, we are meeting on Crescent Lawn to reject white supremacy, speak to each other about the world we want, and reclaim our campus, our city, and our democratic rights. Join us, bring signs, bring friends! Facebook invite

Care as Activism

Angela Davis writes that we often do the work of the state in our interior lives (Freedom is a Constant Struggle, 2016). Even in our classrooms, our activist communities, our friendships, and our relationships, we often play out the systems of oppression built to suppress us. We enact violence on each other. We essentialize for strategic purposes. We forget that those at the furthest margins are best equipped to lead movements. As we work to examine and confront white supremacy on our campuses as it plays out in events surrounding “free speech,” we need to also set an intention to actively deconstruct the way the state works through us, through our communication, through our organizing strategies.

Let’s face it-- we’re going to be at this for a while. How can we build a sustainable movement that we and others want to be a part of? A movement that fills us up, that keeps us whole, that allows us to keep building collectively from a place of community defense? How can our movement-building also give us life, hope, inspiration, beauty, love? How can we build deep, trusting, accountable relationships with one another? Queers and trans femmes of color have historically done the labor of both creating the most revolutionary urgent direct actions while developing strategies for care, survival, and sustainability.

From the femme shark manifesto:

FEMMES ARE LEADERS IN TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS/ DEFENDING OUR QUEER AND TRANS OF COLOR COMMUNITIES.

WE USED OUR STILETTOS AS WEAPONS AT STONEWALL

WE WERE THE TRANSWOMEN WHO FOUGHT BACK AT THE COMPTON CAFETERIA

WE’RE THE GIRLS WHO STARE DOWN ASSHOLES STARING AT OUR LOVERS AND FRIENDS ON THE SUBWAY.

WE WALK EACH OTHER HOME

ACT CRAZY ON THE BUS TO GET ASSHOLES TO MOVE AWAY

AND KNOW HOW TO BREAK SOMEONE’S LEGS

WE SHARE WHAT WE KNOW.

To the femmes of color in our lives: we see you. We thank you. Your care activism tears down the bullshit and builds new worlds. We wouldn’t be here without you.

As the BadAss Visionary Healers write, “Babes supporting Babes supports overall Babe-hood” (4, 2013). What are ways you support the babes in your life? How do you offer care for those in your networks? How do you receive care?

Fight the Fascists

A Mixtape for the movement

For joy/rage/Sonic care

Track List

  1. Bambu ft. Rocky Rivera - “Rent Money”
  2. The Coup - “Guillotine”
  3. Bush Tetras - “Too Many Creeps”
  4. Sonic Youth - “Youth Against Fascism”
  5. Calle 13 - “Querido FBI”
  6. M.I.A. - “Paper Planes”
  7. Ana Tijoux - “Somos Sur”
  8. Sex Pistols - “God Save the Queen”
  9. Bikini Kill - “White Boy”
  10. Oi Polloi - “Bash the Fash”
  11. Suprême NTM - “Police”
  12. Public Enemy - “Fight the Power”
  13. Blue Scholars - “50 Thousand Deep”
  14. Anohni - “Drone Bomb Me”
  15. Mashrou’ Leila - “Tayf”
  16. Mala Rodriguez - “Quien Manda”
  17. N.W.A. - “Fuk da Police”
  18. ZSK - “Antifascista”
  19. Dead Kennedys - “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”
  20. Propagandhi - “The Only Good Fascist is a Very Dead Fascist”
  21. Rupa and the April Fishes - “Por La Frontera”
  22. REBEL DIAZ || B. Dolan || Dropkick Murphys - “Which Side Are You On?” [covers!]

***


We’ll see you at the barricades.

[1] This “Mine Resistant Armored Vehicle” was also available to UCDPD.