Dialogue Description:

The past few months have been full of excitement with the building power of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to systematic police brutality and murder of black and brown people.  In response, the media, along with individuals and activists alike, are questioning the strategy and tactics of the emergent street mobilizations and organized responses.  Throughout this analysis are various opinions about the meaning, role, and position of “violence” in this movement movement.  In this WNC Dialogue, we will explore the meaning of violence and safety, especially through the lenses of white privilege and gendered oppression.  Throughout this movement, and more broadly in our society, we will ask what is considered violent and what is considered safe?  For whom is safety a “right” to be protected by institutional forces, and for whom is it a “privilege” to be earned?

To ground this dialogue, we offer the following readings as prompts for our discussion:

• On Ferguson Protests, the Destruction of Things, and What Violence Really Is (and Isn’t), Mia McKenzie, Black Girl Dangerous
• Pumpkin Riot, Ferguson, and the White Privilege to Turn Down for Whatever, Kevin Gostzola, The Dissenter

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

Check-ins

• Securitization- private security
• Experience of violence
• Racism about Oakland “violence’ when communicating sympathy
• Who’s safety do we prioritize?
• Criminalization victimless acts, police can then go around creating criminals.
• Violence perpetuated in our name for our safety
• Co-dependency and capitalism
  • Theory of co-dependency, victims, rescuers and perpetrators
  • Homogenous groups of people who play those roles- how do we complicate those categories
• Victimhood needs to be complicated
• Recent murders in the neighborhood, homeowners rallying to do something
  • But what will people do with it?
• Vigilante neighbors and landlords that align with those actions
• Projected fear turns into racism
• How to maintain voice without alienating myself completely
• White fear of black people
• Complex victimhood narratives by a group of Jewish people that justify Islamphobia
• Paying attention to the anger I have at the system that creates physical violence that has hurt me.
• What holds me back from intervening in an emotionally violent situation around race.
• Violence and non-violence
• Ways non-violence play out that is very violent
• Economic violence is also violence
• Violence is something that people and animals do to other people and animals.
• Property destruction is not violence but emotional violence is violence.
• Want to add in earth, people more invested in what we have built upon it than what is underneath
• Looking at the way bodies have been devalued and property has been over valued over the time since dawn of capitalism
• In that time people see their possessions as an extension of themselves
• tied to a real feeling of security with the erasure of commons
  • how to break the connections to the commons
  • Looking at how we value life of indigenous, poor people, black people
• How to make distinction between false violence against property and true economic violence
• American Dream
• Any discussion of violence grounded in historical context- indigenous genocide, the commons, safety nets that allow for collective autonomy. By foregrounding the violence of colonialism, we see actions like stealing a bottle of alcohol differently and looks at who play which role- who goes in the store, who stays outside, who looks for cops, who tells the story, who defines it as looting or not.
• Family history- interesting in immigrant families, cannibalism experienced within the family history because of starvation and that has an impact on a white identified family through generations.
• Important to remember family history and intergenerational trauma as we speak about victimhood
• BlackFriday14- response of Bart to civil disobedience that has vilified and threatened Black leadership at the same time that Bart decimated West Oakland and the thriving neighborhood. And then the audacity to call that action violent.
• Knowing our own history and communities right to self-determination in our struggles. WE can only know so much about my own history let alone history of folks in west Oakland. So we must trust in people’s own self-determination and support where I can. Especially since those most inspiring leaders are acting from a place where they know their history.
• Disconnect that happens over history where we forget the violence that has happened and how we are responding now, so that when there is an insurgency
• Strong National physche to forget our history of true violence
• It is now criminal to not protect oneself from domestic violence, especially with children. And at the same time people in prison because they did defend themselves.
• Shows up in our psyche that the victim is to blame, we are not to defend ourselves. And state violence is not violence according to our mythology, just the way things are, so its hard to defend against it.
• Implied in the language to carefully define violence and make one right and one wrong. Hierarchy. Yet what about the framework of supporting violent resistance.
• What if violence is anything that exacerbates power relations. Any act that exacerbates current power gradients. Then resistance to anything that is exploitative is not .
• Reverse racism complex where similarly violence is only violence is committed by the person in power.
• Language distinction between prejudice and racism- with racism only in existsance with power behind it.
• But even prejudice is still white supremacy that has been internalized by everyone including POC.
• Pillars of white supremacy- war with the other, capitalism and slavery, genocide and indigenous erasure. all within hetero-patriarchy.
• Scarcity of true victimhood. Rape victims and hate crimes fighting for right to be true victim and incarceration and how that all just increases power of state.
• Friend says that you should be afraid walking in the neighborhood at night as a white women and that he as a black man is not afraid.
• Racism brings up in me a fear response at night and that is an issue and yet people say you should be worried.
• We need to hold that if we are in a body that has violence collectively experienced by it than we hold it. The trope is that women are less safe even if statistically a black man is more likely to experience violence than a white woman.
• Fear is what animals feel when there is uncertainty.
• What do we do with that fear and how to we uproot fear that perpetuates racism
• Statistically white women are most likely to get hurt by white men that they know than by a black man and yet we are taught to fear black men so the state can incarcerate them
• Interesting to hire private security to track white collar ‘crime’ or harm since that is what is actually happening in rich white neighborhoods.
• So much entitlement as white people to have no harm, especially to our property, in our neighborhoods while there is complete indifference to the harm in poor neighborhoods.
• Evolution of our language and understanding over the generations.
• Difficult conversations- 1 on 1 convo who you really care about shifting then you must understand what they are afraid of and listen to that.
• We need to make people uncomfortable if they are going to listen and learn, cause most people are not even going to engage.
• In tuscon someone scared by immigrants because that is the dominant narrative that desperate people come across the border and steal and hurt people. Tried to explain that there is violence against the countries that make people flee and if some people
• Having conversations with people in Israel who always bring up rockets in Isreal when I’m trying to talk about ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I want to acknowledge that yes people have died in Israel and that is awful, but that is not the story I want to lift up.
• Pain and suffering is part of systemic injustice, I don’t want people to die but if we are going to have a true revolution that we need then their will be loss of life.
• How do we take care of ourselves as we do this
• Victim and perpetrator understanding- being able to frame justice something that happens when you are able to shatter the category of victim and perpetrator and acknowledge the mutual entanglement. For example in Israel, yes there is a power gradient against Palestinians for sure. And yet there is no narrative of pristine victims and evil monsters.
• So how do we acknowledge the privilege of our oppressive position and also the experience of pain, and harm.
• Im both, the perpetrator and the victim, both all the time. And from that place how to try to work in justice, to see our privileges and our complicity.
• Safety- Privilege not to experience racism so directly, but instead step away and shelter myself when we can.
• Violence that we perpetuate against ourselves
• Recently complicated the narrative of stepping back being a privilege. Yes it is and there is more spaces for us to do that as white people and at the same time we all do as people and we should take them when we need them.
• Need to have hard convo with neighbor I haven’t met yet.
• Home ownership is crazy, that you can buy a house and not care at all about the neighborhood and be so ready to dismantle it.
• The time I have been successful in difficult convos is when Im in relationship and we can handle the hard stuff and also other parts of ourselves. Relationship building is the critical foundation when more pressing times will come.
• Whats on the flip side of pain and anger, and love is the flip side of those things. That helps break down my individualized alienation and shame.
• Transformative justice interventions, harm that happened, and then intervention within a context of oppression
• Transformative justice spaces- inspiring work happening with youth coming out of camp Sweeny
  • When youth come out there is a re-entry circle, and all the people in their lives come out to commit supporting them in a specific way.
• Restorative Justice Council in North Oakland- working with law enforcement, so when the cop is called, the youth are given a chance to do a restorative justice circle and if they complete it they will try and get them a job. Community responding to the cause of the harm. District 1
• Transformative Justice- fix situation that lead to people harming others. Transformative justice takes into account the conditions that cause the harm to happen.
• Revolution Starts at Home – confronting violence within activist communities. How do we navigate through situations that come up in our communities that doesn’t create divisions in the movement and continues to call people in. A lot of violence happening, especially gendered violence.
• Process work- psycho civil activists- how all the history has created the psychological contexts that we are in. Deep democracy. 500 people in a room and have enormous engagements with each other acknowledging history, oppression, cultural back grounds . Book- Sitting in the Fire
• Childhood rifle and going to target practice. Socializations as a southerner is pro-gun. Gun control, don’t thing people should be controlled in any way the government isn’t. As a white women I am very averse to violence even though as a women my experience is grounded in violence.
• State and society. Animals in nature, violence wasn’t a good or bad thing, who is being violent. Violence as individual act vs. domination and exploitation.
• The way violence upholds the daily comforts of our lives and how that is getting outsourced to the global south. No longer can see the violence against trans people locked in prison, or the death by our armies against people, robots killing in our name. Very different situation in which communities are resisting the incursion on our land by force. We are in a liminal space, where violence has become more abstract.
• If we were a community being invaded for community extraction and we were debating whether to take up arms. Complicates what resistance looks like if its transnational.
• Violence of capitalism, ford plant in Northern Minnesota, outsourced to the Mexico side of the border. They then organized across borders in an inspiring way.
• No longer use the nature argument to justify violence because we have evolved an ecosystem of power that all our actions are embedded within. Our intellect has evolved but not our limbic system.
• I think if capitalism were not in our way, creating all of these incentives and coercions, we are in a place intellectually, emotionally to create a just society.
• Commitments
  • Talk to my neighbors to lay ground work for resisting private security
  • Walking more in my neighborhood,- not an easy in-road with people, sometimes convos don’t come up organically, I can bring things up and put things on people’s radar.
  • Stay active working on multiple levels, understanding internalization of body as machine, also understanding interpersonally and systemically. Workshop framing sex crimes and hate crimes within abolition.
  • Have convos around violence and safety with more and different people, better understanding our history, the difference in white peoples histories, how to deal with peoples different histories with violence.
  • San Jose PD just bought a drone. There have been on-line discussions, and meetings. I have been disengaged in the future of surveillance and tech future violence. So I need to go to that next meeting.
  • Deserving victims- Obama speaks to campus sexual assault, if privileged places can have this we should solve it there first and then it will trickle down. Want to get more involved in that conversation.
  • Stopped a practice of cop watching for my own reasons, and I want to re-start that practice.
  • Need to find some white men in the group I am part of to address this white man who said something racially offensive.
  • Keep do the recuperative activities.
  • Embodied trauma- Waking the Tiger- gonna finish it.
  • Learning about transformative Justice- Bay Area Transformative Justice Collaborative
  • Need to connect with neighbors
  • Keep dancing to keep my body alive and energized
  • Finish Caliban and the Witch- learn about the dawn of capitalism, European history of resistance.
  • Have been in this struggle a long time as an older person and am retiring to part time, feeling so tired and ready for comfort but this dialogue re-connected to a genuine desire for racial justice work
  • Create a workshop about this topic and invite my landlord to it.
  • Justice is what love looks like in public – Cornel West. So Im gonna love some people