White Supremacy Archives - Deep Green Resistance Blog

Baltimore & Black Lives Matter by Dominique Christina

Deep Green Resistance member Dominique Christina wrote a very powerful piece sharing her perspective and experience as a black woman in an institutionally racist America where black people are killed almost every day via state sanctioned, extrajudicial executions. Christina watched in anguish and grief and anger and terror as the murders of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore drove home the knowledge that her fierce motherly devotion could not guarantee protection of her children from our unjust society. Black mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters have watched life after life stolen with little or no consequence to the vast majority of the killers.

Christina got involved with Denver Freedom Riders, a movement to attain liberation, self determination, and healing for the black community. She journeyed with other members to Baltimore, to witness and participate in the uprising of anger catalyzed by the latest prominent brutality in an all-too-long string. In her post, she shares her experiences there and relates them to a bigger picture analysis of racism in this country:

My grandfather was born in 1911. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He knew all about the spectacle of black bodies dangling from trees, burned alive, castrated and beaten. What I could not personally reconcile was that I was having the same conversations about the same culture of violence that he was having as a boy growing up in the West End of Little Rock, Arkansas. Nothing had changed. Martin Luther King’s magnificent legacy did not result in black people being a protected class. Malcolm X’s unapologetic, larger than life, tell you the truth to your face way of being in the world did not stop the slaughter.

Both of those men were cut down by bullets in their prime anyway, which should have been all the evidence the following generations needed that this country is willful about its acts of brutality against black and brown people. If we couldn’t be slaves anymore we could be prisoners. We could be disenfranchised. We could be economically dispossessed. We could be squeezed and starved and relegated to barrios and ghettos that would kill us one way or another anyway. We should have known better. But we couldn’t see it…too much blood in our eyes.

Christina’s writing is an important view into the ongoing repression faced by blacks, and what blacks and those in solidarity with their struggles are starting to do about it. Read the whole article and share with friends: Baltimore & Black Lives Matter.

(Not) Making Sense of Ferguson

Deep Green Resistance member Will Falk has written a piece exploring the inevitability of the decision not to indict the Ferguson police officer who recently killed an unarmed black youth. As described in Operation Ghetto Storm, such killings are tragically routine, as is the failure to hold executioners accountable.

Falk examines the question of reform vs revolution: are these incidents mistakes that can be corrected within the system, or is it all working precisely how it’s meant to? Drawing on authors and researchers Derrick Jensen, Michelle Alexander, and Omaha Samuel Walker, and on his own experience as a public defender, Falk argues convincingly that the entire policing and “justice” system must be dismantled for us to achieve the rest of our goals as environmental and social justice activists.

I do not write this to undermine, in any way, the justifiable rage being expressed around the country. I write this in the hopes that we can accurately diagnose the cancer characterized by the symptoms we have seen – symptoms like the death of another young black man at the hands of a white policeman, the failure of a grand jury to indict that policeman, and a mainstream media determined to paint acts taken in retaliation as somehow too extreme. Once we have accurately diagnosed the cancer, I want us to locate the tumors and remove them.

Read Will Falk’s entire article at Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

Derrick Jensen’s Resistance Radio on youtube and archive page

Almost every Sunday, Derrick Jensen interviews an activist, biophile scientist, land restorationist, or other person similarly engaged in building a culture of resistance. The interviews are always worth listening to, packed with interesting information and insights drawn out by Jensen’s experienced questions.

The interviews are available as mp3 downloads or audio streams from our Resistance Radio archive page, and we’ve now made them available on Youtube as audio with a still image of the interviewee, accessible to those who prefer to browse Youtube or want to add the episodes into playlists. We’ll keep adding new interviews as they’re released. See them all at the Deep Green Resistance Youtube channel, and please share these important conversations widely!

Operation Ghetto Storm: police killings of blacks in the US

“Operation Ghetto Storm” details how every 28 hours someone inside the United States, employed or protected by the U.S. government, kills a Black child, woman or man. These state-sanctioned killings are the casualties of what the Committee calls “Operation Ghetto Storm”, a perpetual war to invade, occupy and pacify Black communities ― much like the U.S. invades and occupies the Middle East. This report clearly lays out a horrifying aspect of the domestic half of civilization, which anthropologist Stanley Diamond says “originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”

Going beyond a compilation of raw statistics and details of killings from 2012-2013, the report, written by Arlene Eisen and with a preface by Kali Akuno, gives important background context and analysis of how racism manifests throughout US society.

Download the Operation Ghetto Storm report, or visit the report’s publisher, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, for more information. Then participate in and support anti-racist organizing and trainings in your area.

Saba Malik on Resistance Radio

Saba Malik is on the board of Fertile Ground Environmental Institute, a non-profit dedicated to political and environmental education, and on the advisory board of Deep Green Resistance. She is a mother of two and has been a feminist and anti-racist activist for most of her adult life. Derrick Jensen interviewed her for the May 25th airing of Resistance Radio.

In this interview, Saba Malik and Derrick Jensen discuss misogyny, ecocide, and the relationship between the two. Malik explains that a mindset of domination links the various forms of oppression we see in civilization. This mindset seizes on perceivable differences between groups to create classes, with one class justified in exploiting the other. This began with agriculture: the formation of sex classes gave men the “right” to use women for labor, offspring, and sex. As civilization expanded, this relationship was used as a model for dominating other “races” of humans and other species.

Play the embedded audio below, or listen to the interview on the DGR Youtube channel.

Browse all of Derrick Jensen’s Resistance Radio interviews.

Exploring Racism

Racism is one of the most effective tools of oppressive power. The concept of ‘race’ was created in the 1700’s by European scientists, who mostly based their practice on skulls. They went to the Caucasus Mountains, in western Asia/SE Europe (modern Chechnya) and measured skulls from this region, and compared them with other skulls from around the world. They found that skulls from the Caucasus region were larger, and decided that Caucasian people must be more intelligent than the other races: Negroid, Mongoloid, Malay, and American (Indigenous).This classification was explicitly and implicitly stratified – white people were at the top, with the most intelligence and virtue, and black people were at the bottom – this helped justify chattel slavery. Asian people were treated as the “next best” race after white, and so on. This hierarchy still exists, and is still manipulated for political purposes. For example, after the 9/11 WTC bombings, Arabic or Middle Eastern people went from being relatively high on this hierarchy to being the lowest of the low.

This “science” was used to denigrate people of color and justify the colonialism, land theft, and slavery flourishing in this period of expanding capital.

Understand: race was created. There is no such thing as race, scientifically. Genetically speaking, an Inuit person may have more genes in common with a Bushman from southern Africa than with an American Indian or Sami person.

The definition of race that is often used in anti-racism organizing is this:

Race is a specious classification of human beings created at a certain point in history by Europeans who came to be called white, which assigns human worth and social status using “white” as the model of humanity and the height of human achievement for the purpose of establishing and maintaining privilege and power.

Note: the word “specious” means “false but appearing to be true.”

This does not mean that race is not a social reality. It is a powerful idea that has been ingrained in us for 300-400 years, and it doesn’t just disappear because it’s based on a lie. Race has powerful and deadly consequences in the real world.

Everyone raised in this culture is exposed to race prejudice from a young age. It is practically impossible not to assimilate some of the racist stereotypes played out in this culture – an issue that plays out in many of us that is called internalized racism. At some level or another, all of us have internalized the lessons of race prejudice. Only by looking at these prejudices head on, analyzing what is behind them, addressing the role of power and hierarchy implicit in the race system, and working to dismantle this system at both personal and societal levels can we move forward.

Are You a 'Good White Person?'

Having been raised in a culture predicated on racism and vilification of the “other”, we have all internalized a racist perspective. Relationships across lines of difference often fall prey to power dynamics reinforced by this perspective. The proliferation of “good white people” has not made the situation any better. In fact, as argued in this blog post, they may have made it worse.

Excerpt:

If you’re a POC [person of color], you probably know at least one of these Good White People! If you’re white and reading my blog, maybe you are one; a well intentioned whitey. You’re ‘on my side’, right? You figured out racism is ‘bad’ so now you’ve joined the fight against racism! Maybe you work in a social enterprise, for a charity, with refugees, or Indigenous people, or in the multi-cultural arts. You’re proud of yourself for your many years of human rights work. You’ve claimed your anti-racist identity, you have friends and maybe even lovers who are people of colour, so how could you possibly be racist?

How could you NOT be racist? We have been raised in a white supremacy and we have all internalised racism. We are all racist.

I don’t have the emotional or political energy for friends and acquaintances who express that they are hurt and offended that I’ve inferred that they are racist by critiquing their behaviour or by simply withdrawing from their company. I know that it hurts to feel admonished or abandoned, but this is not comparable or relevant to the hurt and betrayal I feel by people who have tried to contextualise the racist behaviours I experience in terms of the person who has enacted racism’s ignorance, insecurities, or good intentions (which are factors in their behaviour, but don’t alter my experience of their behaviour as racism). This justification de-validates my experience, and though I remind myself that friends are well intentioned in trying to comfort me by convincing me that I needn’t feel bad because nobody meant any harm, they are silencing me as a person of colour, re-centering the experience around whiteness, and being complicit in white supremacy. In contrast, I emphasise how empowering it has been to share experiences of racism and have my anger and sense of alienation validated by others. This has been infinitely more ‘comforting’ than the friends who have had a ‘Don’t worry about it’ attitude. That’s their privilege not to worry about something that permeates all aspects of my daily, lived experience.

Excerpted from an article at harshbrowns.wordpress.com