SCPD

busy busy before leaving, but it feels too important to let it slip by. the Dakota story, part one and two. time to go to the Santa Cruz Police Department. i actually dress up a little (which is immediately overdressing here…), as i plan to play to the decent citizen, well resident, i mean, alien non-resident, you know.

“i want to speak to a police officer concerning a possible case of discrimination.” my request is treated with a seriousness that somewhat wears off into slight scepticism when i’m asked for the context – admission to a bar. i’m in for a long wait in the lobby of the SCPD. obviously not an emergency. i phone the dispatching three times to check on my officer, and each time i have to explain the situation again. each time i get a different kind of dismissal of the case. this promises to be frustrating.

then comes the officer. he invites me into one of the interrogation rooms. i explain both evenings in some detail, although i consider that the “this is a stupid American rule…” detail might best be skipped over. i mention the different IDs we had (turkish passport, german drivers licence, british student card, belgian passport, belgian drivers licence, iranian passport). the question: is that book the bouncer showed us (with north american IDs) indeed a legal base for accepting or refusing ID cards?

the officer grimaces, hesitates, shifts his weight (of which he has a lot) on his chair. yes and no. strictly speaking, the book the bouncer showed us has no legal value. but. she does have a legal obligation to check IDs. and the book helps her in distinguising valid IDs. for all other kind of IDs, she must feel confident on her judgement whether it is a valid ID or not. if she feels she can’t make that judgement, she can refuse. cause if someone is caught with a false or non-valid ID, the bar will be held responsible. so yes, if she doesn’t feel comfortable judging foreign IDs, she does have the right to refuse. then he gives a smart example. say she doesn’t feel comfortable judging the validity of an iranian passport, say she can’t read it properly, then she can refuse.

i want to get across that this is a structural exclusion and discrimination, but the framework is too different. when i try to bring it back to discrimination, he gets interested in what she said. “was she verbal abusive?” “well yes, the first time i did find her abusive.” “did she say, for example (oh the guy is smart in this examples…), dirty iranian go home?” “no she didn’t say that.” but whether she said stuff like that or not, we soon ended up home anyway. “hm, cause that would have been out of line. mind you, we do have freedom of speech in this country”.

this, of course, was not my point in raising discrimination. i try again. “but you have to understand,” he says, “that a bar is privately owned” oh god, here we go again… the white house is private, bars are private… once more i resist. they might not be fully public (argh… as if the english word Pub came falling out of the blue….) but they can’t be compared to a private house. he conceedes a tiny bit. okay, but they do control admission. “you must understand,” he insists, “that the Dakota is a special place. it caters to a diverse community.” ah, so that’s police talk here for a lesbian bar. “and so they follow the rules very strickly in order not to get into trouble. and they don’t cause trouble. take Blue Lagoon, they were shut down last year, lost their permit for a while, and had to pay a lot of money to get it back. and if they lose it one more time they won’t get it back. every weekend we’re called out for a stabbing or shooting. they are trouble. the Dakota doesn’t cause us any trouble, because they have a strict door policy.”

sigh. i try again to raise the issue of discrimination. how come one perfectly valid ID apparently doesn’t equal another. his respons takes off in yet a different direction. “but after they treated you like that, why would you even want to go there?” and he gets consumed by the maths of it. “so wait, 4 of you the first time, 4 the second and 5 more that would have joined you, that makes 17 people, imagine if everybody has two drinks of 5 dollars, and that’s not a lot for one evening, that makes 170 dollars, plus cover charge, we’re talking about more than 200 dollars here. do you want to give your money to a place that treats you like that? no, you’d want to take your money to a place where they treat you better.”

in between a total privatization of the place and a proposal for a economic boycott of it, the ground to argue about discrimination in terms of a structural measures that regulate access to a space was shrinking away… although my private (?) tutorial session with a representative of US law and order enforcement (a session that was filled with “in this country…”, “US laws say…”) did confirm that the sidewalk in front of the Dakota is public space. aha, it exists! not much, but something to begin with…

beirut

from a phone-call with sarah in beirut last night:
the deep disappointment with how easily a new grassroots space,
born out of vital need for survival and organization,
is taken over by leftwing machoism and the sectarianism of the SWP-like…
and how life goes on
and raisha’s blog: waronlebanon.blogspot.com

beirut

from a phone-call with sarah in beirut last night:
the deep disappointment with how easily a new grassroots space,
born out of vital need for survival and organization,
is taken over by leftwing machoism and the sectarianism of the SWP-like…
and how life goes on
and raisha’s blog: waronlebanon.blogspot.com

cws 3

a particularly intimate session of our challenging white supremacy meetings with Sharon. just maría 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!

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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.)
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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 Niña, 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. maría 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. maría 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…

american dream

i am driving through endless fields of waving corn. i get tired and pull over, in the shadow of an old barn. i get out the car to strech my legs and i light a sigarette while my eyes wander over the horizon. my thoughts are interrupted by laughter, which i figure must come out of the barn. curiosity guides me to a crack in the wood, and i look inside. the time my eyes take to adjust to the dark… holy shit. bush, rice, cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz and more of their ilk are sitting around a table. the words i managed to catch in between the bad jokes tell me that they are designing the new middle east. my eyes quickly scan the barn. some security guys, but they are all facing the table. i move away from the crack and look around me. no other soul to found. then my eye falls on some red shiny dynamite between the corn. it all happens very quick. grab the dynamite, take my lighter, shove the sissing dynamite near the crack and jump in the car. drive away as one life depends on it. the big bang, the image of the barn blown into pieces in the rearview mirror.

hours and hours of driving till the adrenaline is gone. a gas station and a diner. i slide in with the hope of not being noticed, and find myself an empty booth in a corner, with a view on the television. no need to be worried about getting noticed, i can’t even get my order taken, the few people in this place are glued to the screen. a big black whole in a cornfield. digital reconstructions of how the barn must have blown up. looks like a video-game. people are mesmerized. their mouths open, unable to produce a sound. no witnesses, no clue about the terrorist group behind this attack. i keep on driving for days and days, from diner to diner, from small town to small town. gradually people find words again, they start speaking, laughing, it’s over. whoever did it, maybe it was god, or perhaps the people, the important thing is that it’s over. a new fresh day.

i wake up in a great mood. go to pergolesi to work with maría, but we can’t begin before i’ve told her the dream. i also talk about the need to be in brussels now, for the first time ever i feel we need to be able to push and work the european institutions. is it about a feeling of political powerlessness connected to being in santa cruz? or connected to how mass mobilizations all over the world against the war on iraq ultimately failed to stop that war? i do not know…

yoran adventures

yoran in the SC fire department

yoran doesn’t know where to look first when we pass the Santa Cruz fire department. the fire-fighters see yoran’s eyes and invite us in…

his adventures don’t end. today lotte and wim and the children visit the mystery spot. when he comes back, i ask him what he saw. i try to imagine the concrete things he might have seen, like a crooked house and furniture that doesn’t quite stand straight, and all the other constructions they make to frame the optical illusion.
“so did you see the house, yoran, what did you see?”
he looks a bit disturbed at me, why is she talking about things as trivial as a house, and all the graveness in the world he answers: “no, i saw gravity.”

(and gravity sure on the little boy’s mind. some months ago, wim tells me, yoran’s teacher let a glass slip through her hands. yoran comforts her: “don’t worry, it’s only gravity.”)

real world

a message from sarah in beirut this morning makes us so very sad. sahar leaves today, our house will not be the same, i will miss this sharing daily life tremendously. wim drives us over the santa cruz mountains to the airport in san jose. a sweet message in the guestbook sahar got for the house ends like this: “now back to the real world and to people who don’t have the resources to be “healthy”, however they want that…”

more light

innerlight.gif sunday morning and sahar wants to go to church, we join leta to inner light. different from last time; without penduling cynthia, with reverend deborah. she’s definately a charismatic figure. but the comparison with last time clarifies how her charisma serves to wrap up the emptiness at the heart of this church or gathering.

there’s something else in her charismatic style that strikes me. she did the black preacher thing. the language, rhetoric, accent. maybe not a surprise, you might say, considering she’s a preacher and she’s black. but it striked me because in washington, at the spiritual activism conference, she spoke in a different way. seeking spiritual authority through well-composed speeches delivered in a slightly austere posture. what’s particularly interesting about her doing the black preacher thing, is that the church is so white. what does this “black performance” for a mainly white audience mean? plus the lesbian thing. what kind of intentional and non-intentional economies of subjectivity go into the white liberal santa cruz crowd seeking for words of wisdom from a black lesbian? you might say: why do you need to insist that she’s a black lesbian? she’s a preacher of the church, she happens to be black and lesbian, and the church happens to be mainly white. i tend to be sceptical about this kind of “happen to be”, but there’s more than that. virtually all the people that have spoken to me about the church did not talk about its particular beliefs or theology (i’d actually doubt that there is a coherent story to tell about the church’s theology…), but about the amaaaaazing reverend deborah who – did you know? – is a black lesbian. yes, that’s santa cruz (with a slightly complacent smile), we have a church with a black lesbian reverend. oh poor white knee-jerkingly liberal santa cruz, where do you go for redemption…

interestingly, a part of the sermon is about virtual space. its apparent disembodiment (“an affair in cyberspace doesn’t really count…”) but as we are spirit, as it’s all about where you put energy and creativity, it is as real as anything else, the reverend tells us. the theme of the month is creativity. sahar points out that she says some good things, especially considering the context of california and santa cruz, where people are “into creativity”. creativitiy, rev. deb. stresses, doesn’t necessarily produce good things. “we didn’t get a heart to love with and one to hate with – its the same heart.” likewise with creativity. it is also the source of computer games that are all about violence and destruction. clearly a message for those in church – must be a good bunch of them – commuting to silicon valley every day.

if last time the sermon was a mediocre lecture on global warming without charisma, this time it was an charismatic apolegy for neoliberalism. in the end its all in your own hands… healing, responsibility, what you make of your life. but all religion is apolegetic, sahar insits. perhaps for something, but not necessarily for neoliberalism. much of the ‘robust’ religious revivals articulate a position partially breaking out or in tension with capitalism and neo-liberalism. but then they’re apologetic for sexism or homophobia, sahar replies. and it goes without saying that this neo-liberal church honored a youth queer group this morning. divisions of the persistent kind…