Culture of Resistance

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report 

The fetishization of voting is part of the larger African American imperative to “get in the game” even when you know its rigged. It is as if history has bequeathed Blacks a racial and personal responsibility to redress centuries of social, political and economic exclusion. We must participate, because the ancestors could not. 

On August 18, the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations holds a national conference in Newark, New Jersey, to explore the efficacy of engaging in electoral politics in the United States and throughout the global African Diaspora. The coalition’s stance on Obama is well known. Black Is Back was formed, in large measure, as a public statement that not all African Americans were drunk on ObamaL’aid.  

The imperative to participate in the vote game, no matter how putrid the personalities listed on the electoral menu, will surely be part of the Black Is Back discussion, in Newark. Possibly the greatest obstacle, however, to organizing African Americans for their own empowerment is the belief that electoral activity is the only kind of politics. 

This notion of elections=politics is pervasive across the American racial landscape, and is one of the most frightening aspects of the hegemony of capitalist market ideology, whose message is: if you’re not playing our (rigged) game, you don’t exist. For African Americans, the marginalization of non-electoral political activity – the rejection of mass, grassroots action – is a negation of, literally, the vast bulk of the Black historical political experience.

 bar, glen ford, black is back, conference, african american, elections, community, civil rights, obama, democrats, resistance,

socialismartnature:

The killer of Trayvon Martin may be behind bars, but the struggle to end the killing of African Americans by police and racists must continue to grow.

 … If an entire section of the population is criminalized under accepted and perfectly legal law enforcement policies, should it come as any surprise that police are prepared to shoot first and ask questions later?

The NYPD racks up more killings of unarmed Blacks and Latinos than other police forces because of its quasi-military character, its size and its quantity of armaments. But police across the U.S. follow the same pattern.

 … There’s no way to predict when and how a new anti-racist movement will take shape. But the elements are in place: a criminal justice system that continues to incarcerate African Americans on a mass scale; police who act as judge, jury and executioner in the streets; and now, thousands of activists across the U.S. who decided to take a stand for Trayvon Martin.

The struggle to win racial justice has a long history, and it has never been an easy one. But the murder of Trayvon Martin may well be the spark that ignites that movement once again.

socialismartnature:

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Signatories:

Noam Chomsky, Institute professor (emeritus), MIT

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights*

Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union*

Dave Zirin, Sports Editor, The Nation

Ahmed Shawki, Editor, International Socialist Review

Anthony Arnove, Editor, Haymarket Books

Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed*

David McNally, Professor of Political Science, York University, Toronto

The Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education (CACHE)

Mike Davis, Professor, UC Riverside

William Keach, Professor, Brown University

Deepa Kumar, Associate Professor, Rutgers University

Hector R. Reyes, Associate Professor, Harold Washington College, Vice Chair, HWC Chapter, AFT Local 1600

Helen C. Scott, Associate Professor, University of Vermont

Marvin Surkin, Professor, Long Island University, Ramapo College

Pranav Jani, Associate Professor, English, Ohio State University

*Organizations listed for identification only

URGENT APPEAL

This is an urgent appeal for your support to defend Professor Loretta Capeheart in her struggle with her employer, Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in Chicago. After four years of legal action, we are now awaiting a key decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals—a decision that could set a precedent for free speech rights on campus and possibly move the case on to the Supreme Court.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)  wrote, “If upheld on review, the district court’s ruling would deal a major blow to professors’ academic freedom and free speech in the Seventh Circuit—and quite likely beyond, as it would send the unmistakable message that faculty members aiming to speak out and be active in campus dialogue risk having their careers damaged.”

WHAT IS THIS CASE ABOUT?

Capeheart is a ten-year tenured professor at NEIU and a respected union and community activist. Capeheart has been a leader in union struggles, anti-war work and attempts to promote the rights of students and faculty, especially Latino/a faculty.  Unfortunately Capeheart and other campus activists face one of the most repressive and scandal-ridden campus administrations in the country, presided over by NEIU President Sharon K. Hahs, an arrogant opponent of student, worker, and minority rights on campus.  NEIU administrators have engaged in a well-documented history of retaliation against Capeheart for her principled activism. The administration has denied Capeheart a department chair position and earned merit pay increases, and waged in a campaign of slander against her.  

In Capeheart v. Hahs et al., a Federal judge concluded that Capeheart could be punished for speaking out against the war because she advised a student club.  The court agreed with NEIU’s lawyers that academics have no right to free speech under the Supreme Court decision Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006).

In Garcetti, the Supreme Court stripped most government workers of their rights to speak in the workplace but made a footnoted exception for professors. In deciding against Capeheart, the lower court effectively ignored this footnote and left faculty—and all workers— with fewer rights. Other federal courts have similarly misapplied Garcetti. Now the pending decision from the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals will either reject the new limits on faculty rights set by the lower courts— or further establish them.  Either way, this decision could then proceed to the Supreme Court.

socialismartnature:

Central Florida leftists insist something new is happening here since Trayvon Martin’s killing. In the era of Occupy and global resistance, small towns draped in Spanish moss are now home to budding activists raising their fists to demand justice for Trayvon.

Where this will go from here I have no idea, but one thing is certain: There are Floridians who say they’re forever changed by this case, and some of them — to the horror of bigots — will cite this as their entry into a life of organized left-wing politics.

On Monday at the University of Florida’s flagship campus in Gainesville, more than 250 Black and white students marched together to the FBI building to demand the Feds take action to arrest Trayvon’s killer, George Zimmerman. That is not a large protest to folks in New York or Chicago, but in a deeply segregated town where Blacks literally live on the other side of the tracks, where  activists passed a Klan rally of dozens along the road home afterward, a multiracial march of this size is a triumph.