race politics – Page 2 – somebody else's paradise

march for peace and unity

marÃa, veronica and i arrive at the Watsonville plaza just in time to hear the song of this year’s march played on the harp and the blessing by Lutheran priests. the churches should be here, he said, this is where our struggle is. jesus of nazareth is with us at this march, she declares. in 1994 the Brown Berets marched for the first time through all the neighborhoods of watsonville, to insist that the violence must stop, that the community must empower itself. this is how they started a work that still continues; they stand, in their brown uniforms, in silence and dignity.

los alteres. pictures of those who died, flowers and objects, the Virgen of Guadalupe. marÃa had noticed it: in the spanish text people were invited to bring objects for the altars, in the english translation the altars were not mentioned.

the White Hawk group which i had seen before at a march against violence in santa cruz. they are the head of the march, dancing the whole way through. stopping at some places, to perform rituals with incense. our intuition about these places turns out to be true: killings happened here.

names of peoples, their ages. placards at the front of the march, which we help carrying for a while. i ask the guy next to me, eventhough i see that he is not wearing the uniform, whether he is part of the Brown Berets. i don’t go to the meetings and stuff, he responds, but this is part of my heritage. this is my community, this is where i come from.

there are not so many people. if one would start counting the people affected by violence in this community, it doesn’t make sense. yet the march is powerful, in the way it stands for commitment and remembering.

see more reports and pictures on indymedia

brown berets

the first Brown Berets meeting i went to definately drew me in but this evening i’m very moved. my impression about the relationship to history and legacy is confirmed: also this meeting starts with a member briefly telling the history of the group. the 1960s, the inspiration of the Black Panthers, and urgencies provoked by police brutality and poor education. (Walkout! is a film that represents a part of that history.) the original group disbanded in the 1970s but local chapters remain. in 1994 the Watsonville chapter is established by high school kids after more gang killings in which a 9 year old sister and 16 year old brother die. the first peace and unity march takes place. sandino, who is telling the story this time, pauses on education. the each one teach one principle put forward by Malcolm X. the educational drive of the Brown Berets: educating ourselves and the community, as school were and are not teaching what we need to know.

the educational part of this meeting revolves around the alliance between brown and black power. the words of the guy running for the Santa Cruz city council at the protest serve as an introduction: we need to understand how the undocumented people from Mexico and other latin american countries picking strawberries are related to black slaves picking cotton. we watch an impressive fragment of a documentary, in which an old black woman in Mexico talks about her family history. her ancesters were run-away slaves from Florida, who sought and found refuge in a Mexican village. she speaks of a whole community of black people with a similar history, we see images of a group of black women singing the negro-spirituals that travelled with their ancestors to Mexico. the images, words and songs affect the gathering a lot, and people start talking about how “race” as we know it now was an alien concept to their black and latino ancesters. how it was about cultura. and through the imaginaries of resistance that are spun out, a strong presence of native americans emerges. stories about how the Chicapoos and Seminoles, Native American Nations, were known to provide safe places for those running away from slavery, and how it was possible for initial outsiders to become part of their nations. a recognition of how strong this Native American heritage runs through the Black history in this country.

returning to our ancestral roots, they emphasized, means understanding how these ancesters didn’t discriminate on the basis of “race” like in the system the whites brought with them. there’s a deep history of black and brown unity that needs to be reclaimed, and that finds more contemporary foundations in the alliance between the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets, and indeed the fact that the Brown Berets as an organization is modelled on the Black Panthers.

the conversation moves on into strong personal positioning. a black woman (she’s the only black person in the group) talks about what it means for her to be involved in the Brown Berets. how her family and community asks her questions about why she’s involved in someone else’s struggle. and she speaks about having Native American blood, and how that blood runs through black people in this country. a white guy (there are about three white people with myself included) speaks about what it means for him to be active in the Brown Berets. he refers to the “When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out” poem written under the Nazi regime. one of the core members of the group wants to respond to the charge of “reverse racism” that white friends of him tend to bring up. if black and brown power is okay for you, would it then be okay for me to talk about white power? his answer: listen, man, does it look like whites need more power in this world?

then a woman intervenes, almost in tears. all the things you’re talking about are very important, unity is important, don’t get me wrong. but there’s also other stuff going on. part of my ancesters are from the Cherokee Nation. but the Cherokee Nation, they also had slaves, they also participated in the slave trade. and now they exclude folks like me and my family. if you don’t have a rol number – but what kind of shit is that, i don’t even want a rol number – but if you don’t have it, you’re not considered Cherokee. but it’s part of my culture, my heritage. and they try to take that away through rol numbers, and blood quantum. what kind of shit is that… we also need to be talking about that.

the way people engage with each other is impressive. listening, hearing, taking people’s concerns and pains on, sharing them, constructing community. later during the meeting there is a time for nominating new members (i now understand better some of the dynamics of what seems quite a differentiated system of involvement and authoritative voices – everybody can come to the meetings but there’s a formal system of membership which works through nomination by a member in the meeting, followed by a vote about the person.) a guy of the core group nominates the black woman who spoke earlier. the political significance of this nomination escapes nobody and is expressed in a long round of applause. she starts crying, and i can’t help feel the tears welling up.

there so much more i learn, i’m not managing to digest and write about it all. touching upon three brief things for now. one, on October 13 & 14 the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Black Panthers in Oakland will be celebrated. two, the impressive woman running for the Watsonville city council, mireya gomez, has been a queer latina spokesperson at college and member of the Brown Berets. the Brown Berets is mobilizing to support her, which is presented to the meeting, and especially to young people, as yet another educational activity: how to do a campaign in local politics. (and in many school programs this will get you credits, it is mentioned.) three, as part of la Otra CampaÃ±a el subcomandente Marcos & co are calling for a secret meeting with latin@ leaders from the US. secret in the sense that of course the time and place will be kept secret, but also that it will not be followed by a public communiquÃ©. instead, the idea is to strategize for a while about possible common and complementary tactics. and so a delegation of the Brown Berets has been called for. (oh, what a smart and bold move of the EZLN, to initiate this kind of transnational coordination… and if Chavez keeps on doing his funky interventions…)

theories of slavery

getting into a UCSC class gets even more tough. Theories of Slavery by Angela Davis. maximum 15 students, of course there’s a waiting list and many people just show up in the desperate hope that there still might be a way to get in. i contacted Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness while i was back in europe, but the same story: since i’m not a student i can’t enroll nor even get on the waiting list. my emails were rather, well, insisting, and i had been telling myself, and friends, that i would take that class. (yesterday evening leta made me do the will-power thing: i will get into angela davis’ class…). but today’s situation was so awkward that i let go.

first an elaborate introduction to the structure and content of class, with all the tangible tension and eagerness of everyone wanting to be participating in what was presented to us. then the moment in which everyone introduced themselves… explaining why and how they really really really needed to be in this class. ay, i can’t do this… finally the moment of truth. angela carefully checked the list with 15 enrolled students. one free space and she got another student, who also wasn’t present, out (she should be writing up her phd these days, not taking classes.) two people from the waitinglist get in. two students from the Humboldt university in Berlin, who stressed that they had been unable to enroll through the normal procedure, got an impossible offer. this is what i propose, we make one extra space in the class, and the two of you decide among yourselves which one takes up the space. they looked at each other in terror… a number of people announced that they would be auditing the class, but angela responded that she had agreed to that before knowing that the class was so full, and that she would have to reconsider.

and that was that, the class was finished and full, as everybody knew all too well it would be. immediately a whole bunch of students queued up to speak with angela. i had put myself in the queue but with every second passing by i thought no, no, no, i can’t do this. i hear the german girls insisting that they can’t make that choice. angela responds that she has to submit the final list with names after this class, and if they can’t give her a name she’ll have to give the open space to someone else. almost angry, the woman just before me tells angela that the old agreement that she could audit the class was the only reason that she stayed in santa cruz after her graduation just before the summer. okay, so you can audit. note that we’re already at 17, with a long line still waiting. hardly disguised desperation on angela’s face. then there’s another thing i can’t help noticing. most of the students who got themselves enrolled, in the days following the announcement of the class in june, are white, and many of those in line are students of color. there clearly is an issue with who is fully and early enrolled (one needs a valid student number in order to officially enrol or even get on the waitinglist) and whose trajectory through these institutions is less evident and more fragile. in the end there’s a small group, all students of color, who insist that they really need the class and who will meet during the official class (but in another room) and do the same readings, and every other week angela will do a tutor session with them after class.

when it’s my turn to sit down with her, i just say “i’m sorry. this is awkward.” i look at her and smile. she nods, “yes, this is awkward.” “i would have wanted to audit the class, that’s what i would still want, but i see the situation. it’s okay.” her turn to smile. “you know what, just come next week. i think it’s okay.”

her presence is impressive. and there’s something about seeing her in action here at UCSC, after that other lousy-actor-Cali-governor (Ronald Reagan) made a public point out of it that Angela Davis would never teach at a public university in California again. and i’m eager to do the trajectory of this course. it’s aim is to look at slavery from the perspective of the failure of its abolition. the course is organized along six sections: (1) Paradoxes of Abolition and Legacies of Slavery; (2) Memory. Representations, Reparations; (3) Gender, Sexuality, Domination, Resistance: Feminist Approaches; (4) Slave Systems/Slave Lives: Classic Texts; (5) Political Economy of Atlantic Slavery: Anti-imperialist approaches; (6) Slavery and the Contemporary Era: Trafficking in Persons and Mass Imprisonment. i hope to be writing more about the classes in these pages, but listen, for next week we have to read the 700 pages of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, and it’s not getting better in the following weeks…

protest migra raids

a bus adventure to get to Watsonville. the autumn sun beats down on the watsonville plaza, where a bunch of people stand to demand justice for migrants. not very many, perhaps 150 or 200. as we walk towards the crowd, we talk about friends in santa cruz who didn’t see the sense in coming out here. what difference is it going to make? there will probably only be white and documented activists. but no, white people are rather absent (and frankly that doesn’t come as a surprise…). and yes, probably most or all people are documented here, which seems a logical division of labour, as long as these public meetings are not safe for undocumented people, in an economy of solidarity, no?

one moment i’m a bit taken aback by the situation. it’s almost the first public protest (there was a more spontaneous immediate one, in santa cruz, but they say that the group of protesters there was “really small”) after the raids and deportations, and there’s a nasty promise of more raids, yet so little people came out today. there’s no way you can stop it. but if everybody thinks like that, and clearly many many people do, it’s no wonder that the networks of collective action are so fragile. but slowly i get into the atmosphere of the gathering: there’s a sense of community and empowerment which is heart-warming. the shift in emotions is accompanied by one in moving bodies: moving away from the side-walk, where most protesters are standing with banners and slogans directed towards the street (how strange this sensation, cars as the main public of your protest), to the grass in the middle of the plaza. we sit down in a circle, and people talk.

the creation of a migra watch (already prepared by the Brown Berets), the mira migra, seeking to strenghten community connections and enable a fast-travelling alert system when the migra comes back to town. an agricultural laborer talks about working conditions. the head of a local school talks about the children whose parents been taken away, the children who’ve been taken out of school because of fear, and how the school now declares la migra unwelcome on their territory (oh, imagine all kinds of institutions doing that, declaring la migra unwelcome and organizing to keep them out…) fear is tangible and when one of the organizers asks if someone who was close to people who got deported wants to say something, there first is silence. then a woman steps up and talks about the children she works with, telling in fact the story of how she came to america, more than 14 years ago, and found herself working in the fields, not knowing english, and slowly slowly got herself into classes and trainings and now works in a kindergarten. a story of success, for which she is applauded. this should be possible for all, it is said. a member of the Watsonville City Council insists on how this country would crumble without migrant labor, how migrants in fact hold economic power. a black man running for the Santa Cruz City Council, holding a banner with “Black and Brown together”, invokes the image of latino workers bent over in the fields picking strawberries, and talks about how that image takes him back to his ancestors in the cottonfields. crucial that we make the connections, and building a struggle together. mireya gomez, who runs for the Watsonville City Council, speaks about the need to stand up, in the city council and at protest like these, and whereever you are, for those who cannot vote, and will not be officially represented. a refrain of Â¡Si, Se Puede!, and a people’s clap to wrap it up.

the Brown Berets are a discrete presence, without their uniforms, as agreed at the meeting. so that it can be a protest of “the people”. the other discussion last thursday now seems a bit unnecessary: what role the Brown Berets would take if the people want to go to the streets and march (the permit was for a rally at the plaza only). but it is not going to happen with this (small) crowd.

at some point marÃa and i stray to the taquerÃa, hang out for a while, search for a bus home. at the bus stop marÃa sees that bone-chilling advertisement for an agency that pays bail bonds, for sure they do good business in “gang” town Watsonville… Buy your freedom. still at the bus stop, a latino man who works here. when marÃa asks him, at some point in the conversation, whether he has friends here, he shakes his head. no.

as much as Santa Cruz makes me angry, Watsonville provokes a certain tenderness. both towns are equally small (~ 50.000 inhabitants) and have a basic agricultural layer, only Santa Cruz is on top of that a beach resort, a campus town, a silicon valley dorm-suburb, a hippie hang-out place, and supposedly the west-coast dyke capital. the things that give Santa Cruz a bit of an urban character, as people say. (but i keep on insisting that they got the notion of urban wrong.) and the things that make Santa Cruz so white and liberal – paradise as many here say. (but i’m sure by now you got my take on that.) oh, i have sudden strong fantasies of moving to watsonville. marÃa gives me a big sceptical smile, and of course i know she’s right (it would take us 4 hours a day to commute to campus by public transport, and since when do i like small rural places anyway… but i actually like this one, it is different from the white xenophobic place, where one gets beaten up if you are not “from” there, that shaped my visceral dislike of small rural places…). but it sure feels a good idea to spend more time here.

brown berets

before the meeting sandino wants to flyer for the march on sunday, protesting the migra raids, and october 7 event, the 13th annual peace and unity march. we enter some taquerÃas on the Watsonville plaza and put posters up. the Brown Berets meet in a backroom just off the plaza.

the room is filled with objects, posters and symbols of chicano power, black power and revolutionary movements in Latin America. once more the Che poster, familiar from sharon’s place in san francisco, which i’ve come to appreciate so much: At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love. the meeting is well structured, but full of humour and animo, in a combination that is starting to feel distinct (particular to a certain kind of US style leftwing groups) and familiar (the Chavez student coop, the Student Worker Coalition for Justice). although i must say i was happy that the meeting wasn’t as structured as in the other groups. it was a bit more fluid and warm.

many young people, i was reminded that the Brown Berets indeed remains, among many other things, a youth movement. (giulia, un mouvement de jeunesse! je retourne aux sources, pour apprendre comment les renouveller, pour quand on commence notre mouvement de jeunesse…). a meeting ground of students (high school and college) and youngsters with a past in the gangs, and these are overlapping categories. which do, on first sight, seem to be gendered: many of the students are (beautiful and intelligent) women, many of those with a gang past (and i have a vague, no doubt possibly mistaken, sense that i can distinguish, not so much on the basis of postures and looks, but in the way they are addressed by others) are young men. a third constituency: farmers and agricultural laborers. they are not there in actual presence, but by proxy, through some of the students and organizations working on issues of local agriculture, the Farmers Market…

coming out of violence, dealing with violence all the time. the woman who is keeping track of the killings announces that since last week, when they made the poster for the 13th annual peace and unity march – a poster on which they put all the names of people who died – she counted four more deaths. all homeless kids and people this time, one of them killed by other homeless people. she also tells the group that the stories of those killed are running through her head at night and preventing her from sleeping.

education to overcome violence. learning about history and legacies of resistance as a way to liberation. the room where the meeting takes place is called “the classroom”. apart from a sense of on-going education throughout all activities, it’s a separate point on the agenda. every week somebody prepares a talk. this week mario speaks about what he learned from living in El Salvador this summer.

these kids are from the states, from california, as i am reminded on several occassions. my surprise reflects problematic presumptions about connections with countries one’s family (used to) come(s) from. like i had expected the meeting to be at least partly in spanish, but english, infused with spanish words and expressions (Â¡sÃ, se puede!), was clearly the language of communication. it seems, i find out, that some of them don’t know spanish very well. or like mario’s story of going to El Salvador. his father lives there, was part of the resistance. yet mario organized his stay through a US organization. at some point it started to feel strange, he comments, to be working with white north americans in the country of his father. but before leaving this had seemed an obvious way to go there.
and more: throughout his presentation he insisted very much on the need for north americans to learn from a widely politicised culture such as the El Salvadorian one, a bit in the line of the conversation i had earlier with sandino. but then mario pointed to a terrain where he felt that “they” could learn from “us”: through all the violence in that society, starting in the times of Christopher “fucking” Columbus, as the guy is called in this classroom, their souls and spirituality were broken, and maybe some of the people from here could go back there and share spirituality. ay, i couldn’t help thinking, more californian nerve-wrecking spirituality, as an export product this time… but i shouldn’t let traumatic encounters with cali spirituality ruin this, it still remains to be discovered what kind of spirituality the Brown Berets seek to embody.

and of course these young people are californian, it’s my problematic surprise which should be questioned. complex and fractured threads of belonging in which the power of your actual physical location cannot be minimalized, even (or especially?…) if you’re invested in other belongings and build up a worldview to which other locations are central. [it reminds me of the story one of the students at the women’s studies summer school in madrid, when the planes crashed in the towers. she was mexican and had been brought up with a very critical anti-imperialist stance towards the US. then she got an opportunity to do a masters degree in NYC, a chance of a million which she didn’t want to waste. in 2001 she must have been based in NYC for about two years. the contrast between her own emotional reaction to 9/11 and the politicized reactions (“this is a respons to US hegemony”) of her family and friends back home, and how upsetting that difference was to her. after two years, which is nothing…]

and how different complex and fractured threads of belonging sometimes translate in harsh political realities. in the car sandino was shaking his head in disappointment while saying that, stupidly enough, there is quite some antagonism between the established latino communities and the newer immigrants from Latin America. as much as the Brown Berets talk about “our communities”, they are working with the knowledge that community is a political project in construction, that it’s about bonds and culture in the making.

cws 3

a particularly intimate session of our challenging white supremacy meetings with Sharon. just marÃa and me. we end up not talking about the texts but about difficult discussions with our political sisters and friends about the war, israel/palestine, israeli apartheid & the misuses of anti-semitism, how jews became “white” in the U.S. (with comparisons of how irish and italians became white), about the global action day against death penalty for homosexuality in iran, about tendencies within our feminist and lgbt movements not to address white privilege that end up making us complicit with white supremacist and imperialist geopolitics.

and how to do daily life in santa cruz with its sharp division between is very white character and the invisible latino labour of cleaning, care, manual labour… which is the back-bone of this town, and how to use “gate-keeping” positions – when you’re part of white privilege but for some reason have a position or connection or skill that you can use for the benefit of empowering those who don’t have white privilege, and in general how to become an ally.

and then there was New Orleans. i had spoken to Sharon on the phone just when she got back from New Orleans, and this beautiful and both fragile & powerful woman who will turn 70 later this year, said that she had only one word to capture the experience: life transforming. that her life and her way of political organizing would never be the same. this evening she shared many stories and analyses. things we had already learned about through the Reflections on Katrina conference and the events organized by the Student Workers Coalition for Justice earlier this year. but Sharon’s stories, characterized by great analytical and political sharpness and generosity, made it so much more tangible. the systematic ethnic cleansing, the amazing grassroots organizing, the complexities of the terrain in which to organize.

imagining her. she had been yearning to go back to New Orleans ever since the hurricane and the political respons hit the city, but she couldn’t because she lives with pain and needs to swim twice a day to manage the pain. she would need a swimming pool in the city to open. and the white privilege workshops she helped to organize for people from the Bay area going to reconstruct the most destoyed neighborhoods in New Orleans had added to an awareness of how to go and enter such a vexed place. then came, in the same week, an invitation from a community and organization leaders in New Orleans for a weekend of reflection on the solidarity work thusfar, and the news that a swimming pool had re-opened. a week later she left to New Orleans.

she arrived to the hotel where she had been a guest for many years, which was one of the few hotels in the french quarter of town that was up and running, and still had most of its same staff, mostly black people. happy to be supporting local business, and not to stay in the church where the Common Ground Collective volunteers were housed. the contradiction: the keys of the church were given only on the condition that only volunteers could stay there, no residents. (Sharon called this space “the colony”) but of course the contradictions don’t stop. after seeing familiar faces and hugging familiar bodies, her attention got caught by all the hugh tall men with very short hair in the hotel. then she starts seeing the uniforms. Blackwater, the private security firm, infamous for its actions in Iraq. from the one war zone to the other, operating in New Orleans under the Department of Homeland security. the hotel was one of it’s headquarters, one of the reasons it managed to stay in business. the image of the breakfast room with petite Sharon in her Free Palestine Tshirt (“i have no plain Tshirt…”) among all those bulldozers in uniform…

it had been lingering on mind and on our way back to Santa Cruz i take a decision: i want to go and do solidarity work in New Orleans.

stop the violence

Por el amor a nuestros hijos
Alto a la violencia!
For the Love of our Children
Stop the Violence!

in respons to more shootings and killings in the area, Barrios Unidos called for a march today. i join the arrival of march at the Louden Nelson Community Center in our street. a rally of some hours with kids and young people speaking about the issues of drugs, alcohol, gang violence and, basically, suburban boredom. social problems that are shot through with race politics, as is reflected in the communities that come to denounce the violence today: mainly latino and also native indian communities. (but none of the speakers, i notice, speak of poverty or the economic architecture of the social problems they raise.)

the dances and rituals performed by a native american group (from outside of Santa Cruz) affect me very much. i keep on trying to understand why, and i realize it’s the first time i see native american performances for an audience of a political march, and not an audience of tourists or researchers or a documentary…

(my thoughts wander back to those stories of and encounters with “indians” when i was 6 and which impressed me very much at the time. first cloud of memories. the lessons in american history at school, which in our school often included an afternoon of playing out the stories we had just been taught. i remember us playing the arrival of NiÃ±a, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. that was still fun somehow. then we played thanksgiving and “cowboys and indians”. in our class back then, 1977-78, in NY, indians were not very popular. most kids wanted to play pilgrims or cowboys. except me, i used to ask to play the indians all the time. cloud of memories number two. travel through america that summer, and getting all excited as we drive through new mexico and arizona. we would see indians, our parents told us. the reservations. the misery of it. the gaze of the little boy about our age throwing a stone at the car as we drive away. maud, do you also remember?)

the power of the performance has a grip on me. then the audience become participants as the dancers begin to draw people in and teach us the steps. there must have been a hundred of people dancing in a big circle, till one of the native american dancers breaks free from the circle. she becomes the head of a serpent of people that tries to catch up with the pounding of the drum. in the end we are running, out of breath, trying hard to hold on to the hands of those besides you. when the rhythm is finally broken, the people fall to the ground and thank the earth.

the Brown Berets are present. marÃa and i have been wanting to get in touch with them. i go to talk, and they invite me to their meetings on thursdays. i leave with the phone number of sandino, who drives every week from SC to Watsonville, and a happy plan for when i’m back in SC after the summer.

just before leaving i see a couple of elderly white women with small table and some flyers. about violence against women. we talk and i learn that Santa Cruz has an inexplicably high rate of violence against women. whether the statistics are compared to other towns of similar size, other beach resorts, or other college towns, an amount of violence consistently remains unaccounted for. the “this is a safe place” stickers and the (almost) free self-defense courses for women are starting to make sense. marÃa and me had wondered whether they were part of the progressive image Santa Cruz prides itself on, or whether there was another reason… and i think back of sahar’s impossible question if, objectivily speaking, and artificially disconnected from the rest of the world, Santa Cruz was a more liberated and more emancipated place. good to know the facts… the Commission or the Prevention of Violence Against Women just published a report on violence against women in Santa Cruz, to be checked out when i get back…

class

first in a mexican restaurant in the mission and then at diana’s place we dig deeper into class in america. starting point: the absence of reflections and political positions and strategies grounded in class as a social conflict. while it so obviously profoundly structures this society. while there is a language and political struggle and intelligence about race, gender, sexuality. speaking about race indeed often contains and addresses class matters. but mostly not as such, and it remains inadequate to get a grip on the class structure of this society. perhaps there’s something about the disappearance of the industrial working class in this country, but that also doesn’t do the trick: there’s an army of lumpenproletariat all over the place (notably in america’s army).

we already pondered upon how we were immediately attracted to the kind of marxist groups that we don’t necessarily have much affinity or patience with at home (i mean, i remember the brief moment of concern when at the first meeting of the Students and Workers for Justice someone of the lovely group wrote “All Wealth is Created by Labor” on the black board.), but the attraction lies in the recognition of the fact that class profoundly shapes this society – an acknowledgement which is generally quite rare.

so what’s up with class in this place? the ideology of the American Dream, with its principles and abstract promise that everybody can transcend the conditions in which they were born, can climb at least a few but potentially many steps up that ladder. a hegemonic ideology which leaves space for revendications about gender and race inequality or discrimination: it is possible to create some kind of a consensus around the fact that everybody’s access to that ladder should be equal, and that whatever holds specific (groups of) people back, outside of the will and responsibility of the individual, is unfair and should be eradicated. clearly not all feminist, anti-racist and civil rights political claims function on those (liberal and equal opportunities) grouds, but a part does. class struggle, however, doesn’t really function on those grounds, “class discrimination” (or “class pride”…) is kind of besides the issue. instead, a strong political perspective on class requires such a dissociation with the American Dream and vision on social antagonism and struggle (the end of “win-win” situations)… does all of this mean that the American Dream still works? let’s just say that its blatent failure in the daily lives of most people isn’t (yet) translated in scattering the ideological hegemonies. there’s much burn-out and drop-out and seeking healing and especially silence silence silence. i guess that means it still works…

cws 2

Our first working session with Sharon, from the Challenging White Supremacy workshop. We read Solidarity not Charity: Racism in Katrina Relief Work by Molly McClure and Unraveling the Myths. 500 Years of Oppression, 500 Years of Resistance by JosÃ© Lopez. The first text, a reflection on the role of white activists out of town in Katrina relief work, starting from the fact that “the mess of Katrina was caused by a storm of racism and poverty more than wind and water” and seeking what solidarity rooted in “looking at how power and privilege play out in our own lives” and the obligation to “consider our role in relation to the state and system that helped engineer this disaster.”

The second, an inspiring speech that looks at the legacies of 1492. “There are two obvious legacies that come out of 1492. The legacy that most of the governments of Europe and the established order around the world will celebrate is the legacy of Columbus as the heroic figure exemplifying the best of the European spirit of adventure and rugged individualism, who set out out to diffuse Western Civilization to the “lesser breeds of mankind” as Rudyard Kipling would say at the end of the 19th Century – that civilization about which Mahatma Ghandi, when asked by a reporter, “What do you think about Western Civilization?” responded by saying, “It would be a good idea.”” The text goes on to make the point that this “civilization” legacy is one of the West robbing the rest of the world. And then it links the history of Europe to that of the foundation of the U. S. “Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster, in which the taints, the sickess, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.” In the last part it looks at the legacy of resistance and liberation movements, from the Indians to the Maroons and slave resistance to the riots in L.A. “So, as we look at this infamous Columbian legacy, this legacy of racism, of genocide, of all that is rotten about the Western world, when you look at this, you also have to understand that the very moment that the Europeans arrived on these shores, people resistance, and developed another legacy – a legacy of a rich history of cultures of resistance.”

Although we were more tired than during our first meeting, it’s exciting to actually begin the work, and Sharon is wonderful in the way she weaves the conversation together. I keep on thinking of the work to do back in Belgium – concretely, the “broken white” workshops with Sara and Diny & co, and the “histories of liberation movements” project with Nadia. But for the moment being, i am so very grateful to have this opportunity dig into the history of the U.S. (my assignment for next session: what would an anti-racist history of Santa Cruz look like… so much more useful than me being angry at this place) accompanied by a soul so amazing and delightful as Sharon, in the steady company of marÃa and the caravan company of visiting friends, and with the virtual connection of friends on the homefront. Won’t be able to report back from all the sessions on this blog, but check out the Nextgenderation Belgium site soon (when i finally find the time to redo it…)

emancipation day

while investigating the history of Yosemite, and reading more about the Buffalo soldiers who were send to fight the Indian and Mexican wars, i realized i didn’t know when exactely slavery was officially abolished in his country. June 19, 1863. wondering whether there would be a celebration, i found that the Louden Nelson community center organized an Emancipation Proclamation afternoon in the park today.

food and information stalls, people sitting down in the grass, a stage for peformances and games for children. there were perhaps 150 people, mostly black, and with Val, a woman of the health stall, we were joking that this kind of represents the whole black population of Santa Cruz. Val had approached us, asking if we wanted to have our blood pressure taken. she was part of a ABC/African-American Health Group at the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center, and their group had a stall with all kinds of health information and number of basic health examinations including a dental check-up. she talked to us about the need to do outreach for health issues (and both of us kind of confessed our own strategies to delay seeing to doctors of all kinds… Val laughed a made some confessions herself.)

and she talked to us about the situation of the African-American community here, which isn’t very strong. it accounts for 1% of the Santa Cruz population. and then there’s the incredible story of the Louden Nelson center. Nelson was a black man who, after gaining his freedom, settled in Santa Cruz and made a good living. when he died, he left his money and property for education purposes, effectively becoming a (middle-class) philantropist. so the community center is appropriately named after him, only the white folks didn’t get his name right (for goodness sake….): he was called London Nelson, but the center is named Louden Nelson. exasperating looks, what else is there to say…

we saw Bob on stage, whom i had just met this morning while i was sitting in the sun on the steps of our house, taking over our house’ s garden sale while Leta went to her yoga class. already on his way to the park, Bob parked his car in front of our house, and lingered a bit at the garden sale, we talked about this and that. when he left, he got his guitar out of the car, and asked me if i could play.
“ah, not much, not worth mentioning… but i sure enjoy good music.”
“is that so? well come to Lulu Carpenter’s tonight. i’m playing. every saturday night.”
oh, so this was the famous bluesman from Arkansas that William had been telling us about… but the first time i saw him play was today in the park.

suddenly berna joins marÃa and me in the grass. she had tried the house and then figured we’d be in the park. she shoud have been grading papers, but was desperate looking for something else to do. when two girls come up to us with their yellow ball, it’s clear we’re meant to play volley ball this sunny happy afternoon…