Speech at the 1967 third world liberation conference, Havana – Stokely Carmichael

“We greet you as comrades because it becomes increasingly clear to us each day that we share with you a common struggle; we have a common enemy. Our enemy is white Western imperialist society. Our struggle is to overthrow this system which feeds itself and expands itself through the economic and cultural

exploitation of nonwhite, non-Western peoples-the THIRD WORLD. Black people in the United States are a part of this Third World. Our people are a colony within the United States; you are colonies outside the United States. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the black communities in America are the

victims of white imperialism and colonial exploitation, This is in practical economic and political terms true. There are over thirty million of us in the United States. For the most part we live in sharply defined areas in the rural black belt areas and shantytowns of the South, and more and more in the slums of the northern

and western industrial cities. It is estimated that in another five to ten years, two-thirds of our thirty million will be in the ghettos-in the heart of the cities. Joining us are the hundreds and thousands of Puerto Rican, Mexican and American Indian populations. The American city is, in essence, populated by people of the Third World, while the white middle class flee the cities to the suburbs. In these cities we do not control our resources. We do not control the land, the houses or the stores. These are owned by whites who

live outside the community. These are very real colonies, as their capital and cheap labor are exploited by those who live outside the cities. White power makes the laws and enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks in the hands of white racist policemen and black mercenaries. The capitalist system gave birth to these black enclaves and formally articulated the terms of their colonial and dependent status.”

ReplyForward

Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues On language and belonging. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

When I lived in the Zionist colony in Palestine, Israel, I used to find myself frequently answering questions such as: “Why are you pretending to be a mizrachit (an oriental Jew)?” or “Why don’t you write about your own mizrachi identity?” I was asked these questions because my academic education and occupation as an independent curator deviated from what was assumed to be the normative profile of a mizrahi woman in Tel Aviv in the early 1990s.

The first question posed by ashkenazim (Central or Eastern European Jews) presumed that I was pretending to be something that I was not. They recognized me as “one of them” and could not understand why—or sometimes even felt a kind of betrayal in that—I claimed to belong to an inferior group: mizrahim. In their skeptical inquisitions, it was as if they had asked: “What’s the point?” Mizrahim posed a question that similarly accused me of concealing who I was, but in a different manner—they insinuated that I did not embrace my mizrahi identity in what they saw as its proper, if not singular, mode of expression. From my perspective, however, there was almost no difference between the two questions. Both associated this category, mizrachiyut, with an identity—as if the idea of having “an identity” is not itself the product of the colony and its regime—and used it to police me. They presumed they knew better than I did who I was and how I should think and behave. I notice in retrospect, despite having refuted these accusations, that I was uncomfortable with the term mizrachi. My discomfort, however, was not based in the same assumptions of those who posed these questions to me. I refused to align myself with any of the fabricated identities that secularism, Zionism, settler colonialism, and the liberal marketplace offered. In retrospect I read in my answers an understanding that this entreat to “choose” was premised on imperialism’s incitement of children to turn their back on their ancestors and make “better choices” or to encourage them to endorse their ancestors’ “choices” and justify them regardless of the harm they perpetrate. This is inseparable from the logics governing racial capitalism’s eugenicist initiatives.

At the time, however, I certainly could not see the similarities between the assignment of the Israeli identity to Jews in Palestine (which extended to include those Jews from Arab or Muslim countries) and the process by which French identity was forced upon the Jews in Algeria. The mizrahim category was created by Euro-Zionist nomenclature and served a strategic discursive function in sanitizing the state narrative of the (ongoing) destruction and colonization of Palestine. More specifically, the production of the category “mizrahim” promoted the moniker of “Judeo-Christianity” as an unquestionable historical truth, and thereby implied that any trace of the Arab-Jewish or Muslim-Jewish world must be destroyed along with the sacrifice of Palestine. This had far-reaching implications for different Jews beyond the borders of the newly established state.

Only a decade ago, when I left the settler-colonial state built to destroy Palestine, was I able to fully withdraw from the identity assigned to me at birth—“an Israeli”– and the sub-identities it created (such as mizrahim). It was only then that I also fully grasped the role this category played in ending the diverse Jewish-Muslim world they were part of in North Africa, the orchestration of their instrumentalized mass migration, and the relegation of their different attachments to their cultures—languages, crafts, traditions, clothing, communal and family formations etc.—to “the past.” Both identity categories—Israeli and mizrachit—meant that my paternal family’s life in Algeria was theirs, not mine, not me. The Israeli identity defined people’s way of belonging in a society manufactured by colonizers. It provided its subjects with a version of the past that they were socialized to recognize as their own. While nothing in the Zionist story became mine, the “Western” culture that Zionist ideology privileged did. When I was young, I worked hard to make that culture mine, studying art, literature, and philosophy. However, I never felt—nor was I allowed to feel—native to it. The invention of the category mizrahim was needed to conscript those Jews who migrated from the Maghreb—from the Arab-Berber-Jewish-Muslim world—and socialize them to identify with the greater fabricated entity: the Jewish people. This notion was invented in Europe in the late eighteenth century and was concretized by Napoleonic state apparatuses. It was then exported to the Maghreb with the French colonization of Algeria, which included a systematic campaign to replace local Jewish formations and traditions with those already standardized in France through the Israelite Central Consistory establishment. Algerian Jews, though, had already received their first lessons in the putative superiorityEuropean Jews in the Muslim countries where they lived for centuries.

Growing up in a settler-colonial state where lies are made facts, one can either ignore the incongruities and endorse the fabricated reality or opt to unlearn them. For me the theoretical articulation of an instinctive practice of unlearning came years later. Every day, from first grade to the end of elementary school, my teacher would enter the classroom, open the attendance register, and read out students’ names. Azoulay was among the first, following Abergil, Abuksis, and Abutboul—all designated mizrachi kids, descendants of North African families, deemed inferior in the colony.

At home, however, our name was dissociated from these names, often mentioned dismissively. Knowing as a child that we were not like “them,” involved also knowing that we, in fact, were—or that we may be perceived to be like them; a distance was recursively produced to maintain this negation. Nobody explained to me why we were unlike the other mizrahim, or why it mattered. I had to figure it out on my own. That in primary school I still believed that my father was French clearly indicated my parents’ investment in ensuring that our family would pass as something different than what our name—Azoulay, clearly a Maghrebi name—indicated. Now I assume that as children we understood that we ought not ruin this identity deception, despite never being explicitly asked to do so. Understanding that the name Azoulay did not differ from these other names on my class roster spurred a process of unlearning certain lies about my father’s origins, but also my mother’s and the many others in which these were enmeshed. My mother took pride in being a third-generation native to her place of birth, but since 1948 (when she was seventeen years old), she could no longer call that place by its name. She had to internalize the Zionist command and relate to Palestine as a metonym for the Jewish enemy. She retroactively re-asserted herself as an Israeli, even though Israel was only invented in 1948.

When I was about twelve years old, my older sister suggested that we change our last name to a Hebrew one. This was a common practice, mandatory among people in official positions and voluntary among those who wanted to dissociate themselves from their lineage and assimilate into Israeliness. In Israel a Hebrew name means an Israeli one—one distinct from those that carry the mark of what Israel defines as “its” diaspora. This regime of name changing affected ashkenazim and mizrahim alike; as the state imposed itself as the center of “Jewish life,” it endowed its fabricated Jewish subject, “the Israeli,” with an epigraphic history and future. I was unable to discern this conflation between Hebrew and Israeli. However, through my sister’s request, I could no longer shield myself from the truth that my teacher uttered every day when she read our family name aloud: there was something wrong about our name and about us. We were like “them,” those North Africans from whom we were supposed to distinguish ourselves. With a child’s intuition, I understood that I had to support my sister’s plan. Yet my parents rejected her suggestion, asserting: “One doesn’t change one’s name.” This was a lesson for me, one that turned our difference into a source of power and liberation. Who our family is surpassed what is inscribed in our name; our name is not reminiscent of bygone times. At that point I still didn’t understand what an identity meant, but I did understand that I was heir to an ancestral refusal of colonial nomenclature, evidenced by my parents’ determination to keep our name intact.

In response to our proposition, my mother continued to console us by stating that from her side we were fourth-generation natives to Palestine and from our father’s we were French. These “facts” were meant to squander the undeniable foreignness of our Algerian-born, French-identified father, a foreignness that exceeded what the name we carried signified. Our last name was never discussed again at home. As an adult I attempted to reconstruct that event, but my mother denied that my sister ever suggested changing our name.

When I was seventeen years old and preparing to study in France, I applied for a French passport. My eligibility for French nationality reasserted my father’s Frenchness. Though the stories about Algerians receiving French citizenship sounded absurd, I was delighted to utilize the lasting rewards of this historical conjuncture without asking too many questions. For me the French passport was not an identity but a benefit of which I could take advantage. I began intense correspondences with French government offices to complete the process, and had no interest in the content of these documents but only the passport they guaranteed. Otherwise, I would have already noticed then that the name of my paternal grandmother—Aïcha, a common name to both Jews and Muslims of the Arab world—was concealed from us.

I was unaware of the toll it took on my father and his family to become French in Algeria in the nineteenth century. My education never guided me to ask questions about their Frenchness nor to interrogate the role that the Israeli state played in locating his place of birth—Algeria—beyond our reach. I recently found a map of Africa I was asked to draw when I was in primary school. Today I’m astounded by the foreignness of the continent that we were asked to produce with colorful crayons when we—the Abergils, Abukasis, Abutbouls and Azoulays—were actually drawing the places from where our parents came. The fact that I cut a third of the Maghreb (Tunisia is not on my map), was not even noticed by my teacher who graded me with an A.

Part of being “Israeli” means relating to the places from where your parents came as mere biographical details, relevant only when filling certain boxes on official forms. At the time, I didn’t understand the conversion of Algerian Jews into French citizenship nor the role this conversion played in destroying thousands of years of Jewish life in North Africa. No one offered any detail or thread to follow. Many were gagged by inculcated ignorance, others by dissociation provoked by settler colonial apparatuses. I speak not only about my family and social entourage in Tel Aviv, but also the people I met at the university in Paris. It is astonishing that I studied with Pierre Bourdieu for two years and we never spoke about Algeria. In our family life in Israel, “Algeria” was a piece of information that designated the birthplace of my father and what rendered us mizrahim in the eyes of others. My mother preferred to avoid its mention and my father behaved as if his birthplace had nothing to do with him. Though it may seem that my rejection of the Israeli identity mirrors my father’s break with his Algerian identity, let me briefly mark two points of difference. First, Algerian identity was expropriated from Algerian Jews by a colonial project, while my Israeli identity was bestowed upon me by a colonial enterprise. Second, unlike my father, I do not behave as if my birthplace has nothing to do with me—I commit myself to struggle for the abolition of the settlers’ regime, which continues to destroy Palestinian existence and livelihood.

Contrary to my parents’ attempts to distance themselves from the category mizrahim, from an early age I claimed it—partially to resist their disavowal, but also because it liberated me from trying to believe things that didn’t make sense in the colony. Even as I spoke about myself as a mizrahi, I did not feel part of a collective identity. My father never spoke about Algeria as a place. Though he shared some childhood memories from there, Algeria was never part of the story. I still don’t fully understand why my siblings and I never asked him questions about his birthplace. Before he turned sixty-five, I asked him to tell me some stories that I included in a photo album about his life. When I recently returned to read it, I realized how many things I heard him say without actually hearing. If I had not been deprived of the proper context to hear and understand what he was telling me, I would have asked questions. While he didn’t try to turn Algeria into a place we could cherish dearly, or experience with a sense of second-degree attachment and belonging, perhaps we failed to make the space for that to happen; or maybe we were we raised to fail.

After my father passed away, I was determined to find any traces he may have brought with him from Algeria, even if he acted as though—or I assumed that—there were none. I started to write letters to him, my paternal ancestors, and many others. I found many treasures, beads that I string together still. Perhaps these beads that I found could shine only after his death, since during his life they were overshadowed by his admiration for France, for the colonizers. He certainly knew how to transmit this admiration as it inspired my dream—his dream?—to study in Paris.

My father spoke very little but told many stories. If I had any questions, I would ask my mother. When I applied for the French passport, she repeated a story about how my father managed to mark “France” as his place of birth in his Israeli papers. He arrived in Israel in 1949 as a volunteer and had a return ticket for the end of that year. When he decided to stay, he had to fill out some papers to enjoy the newly Zionist-crafted Law of Return of 1950, extended to “the Jews” worldwide and encouraging them to literally take the place of Palestinians who were still being expelled and denied return. When he was asked by the clerk for his place of birth, he replied with great confidence: “Oran, France.” For years I pictured that scene at the Ministry of the Interior vividly in my mind as if I had been there myself: my father leans towards the reception window, facing him is the tired face of a bored clerk. My energetic, amused father utters a single word, “bonjour,” with the hope that, as it often did, his French greeting would open doors for him. The clerk is not amused and asks him matter-of-factly for his place of birth. When he hears the answer, “Oran,” he pauses momentarily and asks with obvious disinterest: “Where is that?” My father repeats the name of the city and even doubles it: “Oran, Oran,” as if to say to the clerk, “don’t you know about Oran?!”—reifying his cosmopolitan Frenchness in his capacity to teach this state deputy a lesson.

I can imagine the hint of a smile that emerged on his face when he looked into the clerk’s eyes. Now I hear what I was incapable of hearing earlier—a tone of pride in his city underscored my father’s voice. Oran is a familiar name, known by any Frenchman whose esteem for his city far exceeds that the clerk possessed. My father glances left and right, reassuring himself that no one witnesses his act of geographical fraud. Then, with great satisfaction, he finishes: “In France, obviously.”

When I still lived in the settlers’ colony and was asked about my family’s origins, I often told this story. It filled me with pride—not that my father was French or from France, but that he managed to cheat the Israeli state apparatuses, the very ones I learned to hate from him. My father was lucky to meet an ignorant clerk. It took me several more years to understand that my father was not cheating but suffering from the colonial syndrome as explained by Frantz Fanon—the interiorization of the colonizers’ geo-mental fraud as his reality. When I still lived at my parent’s home, I asked my mother about it. Offended and defensive of our family patrimony, my mother replied: “Why are you always digging?! Your father is French. Algeria was part of France and the Jews were the first to receive French citizenship.” It was her turn to take pride—this time in the fact that the Jews were the first. My mother’s emphasis was on the truth-value of my father’s identity. The violence that created those realities didn’t infringe on her conception of the truth. If this was the truth, then she couldn’t be lying, even when she said that she was Israeli, a truth that was incommensurable with her pride in being a third-generation native of Palestine. The truth, as far as she was concerned, was in proving that no lies were told. 

In an imperially constructed world, truth is required to justify settler’s identities, to anchor them in reality. My father, by contrast, showed no interest in truth. He didn’t feel compelled to prove that he was French. He would just plug-in his single earphone at bedtime and sail on short waves to French-speaking worlds of which we were not a part. For him, being French was a pure and harmless pleasure: good wine, baguettes, camembert, and charcuterie. Even the Algerian pastry that he adored tasted French in his mouth. “After you bury me,” he used to say, “play jazz and eat French food on my tomb.” Had it been possible, I think he would have just as eagerly enjoyed becoming an American—they had, after all, landed on the moon, invented jazz music, and created life in XXL size. He always felt stuck in the wrong place. Nothing in Israel inspired him enough to be embraced as part of his identity. Truth had nothing to do with his identity, which was shaped by what he believed made life worth living: good music and good food. He was never bothered by whether his identity was truly French. In his encounters with officials, as he faced those who inquired about his identities, papers, or taxes, he was incredibly creative. He reinvented himself repeatedly, taking advantage of their ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and underlying motives that he did not respect. Regardless of whether he intentionally sought out this twilight zone or entered it by chance, he derived pleasure from being “there,” in a territory that was underdefined enough for his stories to take over.

When I was in my early teens, my older sister brought me a pamphlet from a small leftist political party. I still possess a haptic memory of that slim booklet, its soft cover, the staples that held it together, the simple typesetting in black print, blocks of text with no photos. Through this booklet, I first came upon the words, “occupation” and “land confiscation.” At first they seemed unrelated to the little I knew about the place where I grew up or the deeds of the people there. I remember several other words that exposed the proximate violence that I could not imagine surrounded me: expulsion, expropriation, theft, disenfranchisement, and refugee camps.

These words felt foreign in my mother tongue, and with a certain intonation I sought to preserve their protuberance, to resist their naturalization in my palate, to refuse letting them camouflage among others. When I first encountered these words, I felt that they were too big for me to use; but I also felt a duty to pronounce them, especially at home. I learned quickly that my mother would take offense at them; they threatened the validity of a state she was enlisted to justify automatically and disrupted her unwavering commitment to its mission. Reciting these words was my means of redressing the lies she maintained about this place.

There was something rotten about all talk of being native to the land, “being sabra,” or being the third or fourth generation. That my father was an immigrant did not undermine the privileged sense of being chosen to be a sabra that my mother passed on. My father was never interested in this cult of sabra—this made a sound case for undermining my mother’s mission to make us good citizens of the state. His foreignness and the distance he cultivated between himself and Israelis—that same distance that embarrassed me as a child—transformed into a resource for me to drive a wedge between myself and the industry of Zionist lies that were presented as facts. For a long time, I saw my father’s French identification as a lie because he was born in Algeria. I’m astonished by the number of years it took me to realize the double-blind spots in my logic. I saw his aspiration to Frenchness as an expression of his natural desire for upward mobility and Western inclusion. I disregarded the history of colonial violence waged upon my paternal family in Algeria and its effects on my father. He was indeed French, since in 1870 his ancestors were forced to become French and he was born to believe that he was a Frenchman. He was born into colonial amnesia. By insisting that he was not truly French, I surrendered to the colonial gaze that determined who among the colonized (or later immigrants) was worthy of being recognized as French. He didn’t aspire to this nationality, it was forced upon him. This is the core of the tragedy. What I had disregarded was not only about him, but about myself. I was impacted by two colonial projects: a descendant of those colonized in Algeria, and a daughter of colonizers in Palestine.

Realizing that we were like “those” mizrahim in my class meant acquiring a new disposition to connect the dots and fill in the blanks. I came to retroactively understand the meaning of certain sayings and attitudes expressed toward me that I had disavowed for a long time. I realized this at approximately the same time that I started to understand that Palestine was not elsewhere but in the same place as Israel—the fact that Zionists struggle to destroy it does not change this ontological status. In that moment, my mother’s “truth” was stripped bare before me. I grew increasingly fond of my father’s relationship toward his identity.

Despite the distinct nature of these two “discoveries” I held my mother responsible for both. Perhaps this was because she had denied my discoveries and continued to reiterate her—the state’s—“truth.” My father preferred the French Club of Netanya, the French embassy’s parties for the 14th Juillet (the Bastille Day), and the tricolor over the blue-and-white Israeli flag. He did not attempt to rid himself of his heavy French accent. He didn’t like Israeli popular music. He took pride in his rich acquaintance with world music that he showed customers in his small electronic and music store. He hated Israeli food rituals like cracking sunflower seeds or grilling meat outdoors. He scolded customers who dragged their feet when entering his store (which he considered to be his castle). He never conceived of going out to wash his car in anything but a collared shirt and gabardine pants. My father’s inclination toward the French colonizers’ identity seemed to harm no one; he did not attempt to control or conscript others’ subjectivities. His Frenchness was merely a matter of personal preference. It took me years to understand that his personal matters were mine too. He disrupted my attachments to my ancestors and brought me to the world as a malleable substance in the jaws of the settlers in Palestine.

Would I have been able to distance myself from the identity assigned to me at birth if I hadn’t inherited my father’s distance from it? Would I have been able to hear the hollowness of my mother tongue? Would I have been irritated by its syntax built to extract my complicity and force me as a child to affirm its plunder-made-truth deals? My mother-tongue is that of the colonizers. It encourages a certain polemics so long as they are recited among Israeli-Jews and uphold the imperial temporality of a fait accompli—the existence of the state can neither be questioned nor reversed. Luckily enough, however, the tongue my mother used was made up of disjointed slogans spoken in the streets and didn’t stem directly from the ideological springs of Zionism. If it had, it may have been more difficult to withdraw from Zionist ideologies. My mother barely completed eight years of school and neither she nor her parents were schooled by Zionist ideologues. Her mother, my maternal grandmother Selena, was not born in Palestine and moved there by mere coincidence. She spoke Hebrew poorly and always remained “a foreigner.” But this did not impact my mother’s obedience to the state nor her will to maintain the image of herself as a real sabra. After the state was created, this was her capital.

Not yet knowing how to unlearn my mother tongue, I was irritated whenever I encountered various truth agents of the state: schoolteachers, youth movement counselors, politicians, and neighbors. They all lied—not always in what they said, but in the Zionist grammar and temporality they used to describe what was done to Jews in Europe as a way of justifying what they were doing in Palestine. “National home.” “Ours.” “We were persecuted.” “All Arabs are murderers.” “All they want is to drown us in the sea.” “It’s their fault.” “They fled.” “They have no problem killing one another.” “We fight for the life of every one of our soldiers.” Even just trying to argue with or refute these lies, let alone refusing to reproduce them with my mother tongue, made my palate ache. I still knew very little about the destruction of Palestine and nothing about the destruction of Jewish Muslim world and the ahistorical construction of Arabs and Muslims as enemies of the Jewish people. My rage was mixed with a sense of insult. My mother tongue had misled me; my mouth rebelled.

During that time, I was prescribed an orthopedic posture corrector designed to straighten my back. This contraption, which was supposed to fix and correct my ancestral deformation, condemned me to silence: a silent mouth and a silent body. Under the aegis of this silence, the “we” that I was born to be a part of became “them.” Years passed before I understood that the traces of my father’s otherness—always there and always present—had also been impressed upon me. This gave me the ability to choose not to recognize myself in the “us”—Israeli Jews—and to see it as “them.” Thus, I still questioned the nature of a “we” of which I could be part.The journey I embarked on outside the realm of “we” divested me of language. The orthopedic instrument tightened its grip around me and I discovered that I knew how to be silent. Silence had resourceful potential. The metal poles, the leather straps, and the plastic pelvic mold rattled and clicked proudly, sounding new, clean, technical syllables. These were the building blocks I could use to exit the settler language that was fabricated to be my native one.

To speak as she did, my mother had to repress her own mother tongue, Ladino. I loved the sound of it when she spoke with her mother, even though I was excluded from their conversations. When my grandmother passed away, I understood that my mother guarded this language zealously as her private reserve, hidden beneath what appeared to be a quintessentially Israeli life. She didn’t share it with anyone. Years went by before I realized that what I had identified as my mother’s sense of belonging was her way of responding to a command, a need to express allegiance to the national flag. As if on a mission, she sought to indoctrinate us into the covenant of the sabra—a pact that required one abandon all diasporic attachments. She, however, did not discard all traces of the diasporic existence she inherited from her mother. When I was nine years old, her mother passed away. The music of the Ladino language disappeared from our lives, save for the few expressions of love my mother used with us (“bendices manos,” meaning “blessed hands,” which she used whenever I immersed myself in craft; or “alma buena,” meaning “good soul,” which she used cynically when we were mean to each other). We were unable to respond to her unconcealed longing for it, nor contextualize her loss within a history of disruption that began in the fifteenth century with the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain. With the establishment of the state of Israel came the sacrifice of language to manufacture a colonizers’ version of Hebrew that was imposed as our mother tongue. Our ancestors’ languages had to be killed for our parents to converse with us in a language that was foreign to them, one they could use in an instrumental way. When I was able to understand the demise of Ladino, I understood that it was not French that my father had deprived us of, but Arabic—the language that my ancestors spoke in Algeria. I missed the opportunity to ask him when it was that he stopped replying to his parents in Arabic and asserted French as his mother tongue. Though my father and I spoke only in Hebrew, there was another language I learned from him: that of stories. He had a talent for fictionalizing the world, unimpeded by his functional syntax and relatively impoverished Hebrew vocabulary. Whenever he rose from his armchair and left home, even just to go a few meters away, he’d stumble upon an incredible event that occurred, if not in the real world, then at least in his stories. It was as if he could not let reality disappoint him. As unsound as his stories sometimes were, however, they always had some basis in reality.

As a child, I tried to resemble my father, not the storyteller, but the one who fell silent between stories. I had to overcome my tremendous urge to speak. His silence left me awestruck. I saw in it a sign of nobility and pride. Distress, pain, sadness, and longing were softer when experienced in silence. I trusted the silence. I have a vague memory of someone once commenting on my father’s poor Hebrew. In retrospect, I realize that this was the moment that I began to behave as if a countdown had started, and I had an obligation to catch up. I wanted to read all the books that could help me counter this shame. In our home there were only a few books, most of them French detective novels (Série noire). I was still a young teenager and had my own library card, but I was only allowed to borrow three books a week. I made a point of borrowing books with opening sentences I couldn’t understand. I read them without really reading. I wanted the words I did not know to become my own. I enjoyed the fact that my sisters took pride in my reading. I enjoyed the way those books kept me company, gradually drawing closer to me or drawing me closer to them. I liked their feel, their presence on my pillow, the sense of security they imparted. Much later I came to understand that it was easier for me to read a book after it had spent some time in my company. This has since become a habit. I still purchase books knowing that it will take some time before I read them.

My mother tongue was contaminated. It clamped the pained mouth shut. It dulled the pain—including that of my mother—with words. Rather than listening to the pain and speaking with it, my mother tongue exacerbated it by speaking in its place. Hebrew is contaminated. The Hebrew mother tongue is contaminated. It was abused to provide Israel a mother tongue. Hebrew was made into a settlers’ language.

Individuals don’t speak their mother tongue. Rather, they engage with others who share it, use it, and abuse it. As long as I lived in the settlers’ colony, my attempts to extricate myself from my mother tongue would fail. I wanted to bite into it, watch its defeat after all that it had instigated. Yet I love its Hebrew components. I love the language. I love the mother. For the past several years I stopped writing in Hebrew so that I could one day use it again with a Judeo-Arabic grammar; so that I could recount what had happened forward and backward; so that I could reawaken what had been neglected so that it might become the heart, spine, and chariot with which history could be unmoored from borders and patrols; so that a potential history in non-imperial geographies and temporalities of repair could be conversed in Hebrew.

My father tongue was a gesture—a gesture of impersonation, otherness, foreignness, multiplicity, practicality. It was also the gesture of someone who was colonized, evicted from his ancestors’ world, and unable to find a path away from substitute worlds shaped by colonizers. This gesture of foreignness repeated itself in every language my father could chat: the different languages spoken by the customers with whom he interacted in his store. He took pleasure in his ability to register words in foreign languages and behave as if he spoke them: Amharic, Russian, Spanish, and even Yiddish. Did he ever speak in Arabic in his store without us knowing it? There was no father tongue I could initially make mine except the gesture. However, I gradually transposed his visceral expression into a written language, before using it as a spoken one. My father’s fables were so powerful that even when it was clear that his life was not as colorful as his depictions, they continued to perform a certain magic. It was a magic that endowed me with the power to emigrate from the captivity of my mother tongue by one day proclaiming: “I’m a Palestinian Jew.” When my father died, I began calling myself by his mother’s name—Aïsha—which he had concealed from me. Despite knowing our tradition’s ordination to do so, he didn’t give me her name at birth and later suggested I instead give my daughter the French name of his mother, a name nowhere even written in her papers. Once I inhabited the name Aïsha, I also said, in my ancestors’ language: “I’m an Algerian Jew.” Only by depriving me of these two attachments could the settlers’ state apparatuses assign me the identity they manufactured and use it to reproduce their regime.

Since my father died, I’ve been piecing together the fragments of a world where this ancestors’ tongue was more than a gesture. This requires actualizing a potential history that rejects the colonial project that shaped him—the colonization of Algeria by the French and the destruction of the world of Arab-Berber-Jews-Muslims—and the one that shaped me—the colonization and destruction of Palestine. When thought of as two distinct histories, the outcome of the first colonization becomes irreversible by the second and vice versa. This disjunctive logic implies that I should accept as a fait accompli what he—or his ancestors—were unable to successfully resist or reverse. I don’t. My father tongue includes the gesture of silence, quietly present like a scar. It took me a long time to understand that my father’s departure from Algeria after WWII was not a matter of choice—neither was his decision to conceal that he was an Arab-Jew upon meeting my mother and deciding to remain in the Zionist colony. In an imperial world, the notion of choice obscures what is often a predetermined tabulation of imperially crafted alternatives to conceal imperial crimes. Why would my father have wanted to return to Algeria, where he was sent to a concentration camp by his beloved French colonizers (for whom he later fought), only to find that there he was neither French nor Algerian? Why would he have wanted to be an immigrant from North Africa in Israel in the late 1940s where Arabs were demonized as the enemy? Which sabra woman would have possibly wanted, shortly after the Arabs were expelled from Palestine, to marry an immigrant from North Africa, especially if she herself could successfully camouflage her Sephardic origin behind blond hair and green eyes? When referred to as Algerian, my father felt taunted; when referred to as French, he felt complimented. He avoided the company of other immigrants from North Africa and was careful not to be identified with them. He was a foreigner in Israeli society and avoided the paths to assimilation it offered. This experience of foreignness was a solitary one.

My mother sometimes played a tape that was recorded in 1972 over the course of a family road trip to Ashdod. I was nine years old. My father was driving. My mother sat beside him. My youngest sister and I sat in the backseat with our maternal grandmother. I held the microphone. Unlike other tapes that my family had allowed to vanish over time, this one was preserved because it contained the voice of my maternal grandmother on the day before she had a stroke and died. When I listened to it, I could only guess that the woman with the heavy accent—was it Bulgarian? Ladino?—was my grandmother. It was not how I remembered her. Her china-white face and black hair were preserved voiceless in my memory in the way voices are erased from photo albums. Other voices from that tape also sounded unfamiliar. I listened as the little girl in the car—me— implored the others repetitively: “Talk to me.” When I listened back, I was struck by how I could distill the trials of my entire life into those three words: “Talk to me.” The little girl whose voice rang out on the tape, giggling and protesting, reminded me that my intellectual interest in the drama of language and silence—which relates to questions of ownership, expropriation, belonging, responsiveness, apprenticeship, pronunciation, foreignness, loneliness, anxiety, disenfranchisement, betrayal, silencing, effacement, compatibility, and immigration—was preceded by an act written in the body. Since listening, I have slipped the cassette into the tape player several more times but have not dared to hit the PLAY button again.

The gesture of silence hid in my body like a genetic code before I attempted to emigrate from my mother tongue. Many years passed before I realized that even my mother, whose speech embodied collective Israeli identity, emigrated from it most of the time she was in our living room. There, as long as I did not provoke her, she forgot about it and her duties toward it. With her husband, my father, she could, for fleeting moments, permit herself to embrace her own estrangement from Israelis, to participate in my father’s evening aperitif ceremony, to indulge in her own sewing, to dream about her family’s mansion in Sofia, and to long for her mother whose foreignness never embarrassed her. When I asked my mother questions about the Palestinian washerwoman who had worked in my mother’s parents’ house in Rishon LeZion (who must have taught my mother the impressive number of Arabic words she knew), or when I wondered what she thought when the Palestinian laborers who worked in my grandfather’s orange grove did not show up for work, I encountered the one-dimensional figure of a sabra. The voice of the nation sprung from her throat and replaced the woman who raised us most days of the year. Speaking in a nationalistic voice, she sought to squander my inquisitions, setting me back on path and recalibrating my vision to a vantage point from which I, too, was expected to ignore the crimes that had transpired.

My mother marked me as a rebel the day I began inquiring about Palestine. She no longer spoke to me as a mother would a daughter. My act of heresy opened a wide and painful abyss between us. Only after my mother’s death did I realize that when I approached her through altercations, seeing her exclusively as an embodiment of the sabra persona, I inadvertently endowed this persona with more power than it actually had over her. I might have undermined its power had I allowed my mother’s own sense of estrangement to crack through. That sense of estrangement, I still believe, protected her from the pain of losing her childhood landscape—the characters, customs, forms of dress, and flavors of life of her beloved city, Rishon LeZion—where, up until the foundation of the state, Arabs and Jews intermingled. From the moment she turned seventeen and Palestine was ruined, a hollow language of independence sought to make this destruction irreversible and replace the pain and loss. I refuse to believe that Palestinian Jews, who were not yet committed Zionists, felt no pain or loss when this language took over.

Had I asked her about this sense of estrangement, her sabra self probably would have denied its existence; out of fear, she would have remained silent about what she could not share, as if I were a traitor who would turn her words into testimony of what had to be concealed. Her sense of estrangement exemplifies the loss some Jews experienced when Palestine, the land of which my mother proudly declared herself to be a native, was suddenly ruined, and its familiar Arab inhabitants evacuated and replaced by others who were imposed as kin. I refuse to believe that my mother did not recognize the catastrophe that occurred, even while she was lured to adopt the hegemonic story that justified it and forced to deny its meaning. Had I not delineated the contours of her estrangement, I would not have been able to unlearn my mother tongue and turn to my ancestors’ tongue to utter a potential history of Palestine premised on the unconditional return of Palestinians including all their descendants. I can hear my mother telling me in Ladino that she misses the washerwoman’s “ojos negros” (black eyes), musical accent, and the special sound she produced when she rolled her name on her tongue as a child—“Zehava.” She may have paused for a second and added, “I also miss the feel of her hand when she caressed my golden curls and gathered me up in her arms.” From that point on, the conversation would start flowing and she would regain vitality. She would lighten as she became a person no longer required to engage in the trying effort of covering up the deeds of the Zionists who betrayed her, too, when they destroyed Palestine—the place where her paternal grandmother immigrated in the late nineteenth century, not as a Zionist.

When one is surrounded by a roaring silence, the words “talk to me” express a longing for the act of speech. When one is surrounded by the rustle of speech, the words “talk to me” implore that one do away with existing discourse. Speech uttered by those whose voices have been assimilated into the voice of the nation, speech that does not address a conversant, is no speech at all. “Talk to me” demands both an act of speech and an act of silence. Indeed, the plea “talk to me” was a plea to be spoken to. The plea was a demand for time, a request not to be abandoned while I attempted to close the gap between words and body. The plea did not attempt to efface what was impressed upon the body, but only to expose the body to the air, centimeter by centimeter, through direct speech, speech directed at me, toward the body, reinstating it by means of the tongue so that word and body could be reconnected. Signs impressed upon the body cannot be removed, though often they are devoid of specific content. They abet processes of negotiation within language.

But one can refuse the meanings offered by signs and say, “no thank you,” continuing to search for others, even if it takes a very long time. “No thank you, I am not interested in writing about mizrachi identity.” If I were, I would have never been able to unlearn enough to say that I’m an Algerian Jew. “No thank you, I am not interested in forgetting that I am a mizrachi woman or in neglecting your racism toward others and me.” If I were, I would have never been able to unlearn enough to say that I am a Palestinian Jew.

There Is No “Migrant Crisis” The problem isn’t new; it’s the bordered logic of global apartheid itself. by Harsha Walia

I grew up on the short story “Toba Tek Singh,” an Urdu satire on the Partition. While the story’s protagonist is a Sikh man, for whom the story is named, the character that stuck with me most was an unnamed man in a mental health facility in Lahore. Refusing to take part in the partitioning of patients between India and Pakistan, he climbed onto a tree and proclaimed, “I do not want to live in either India or Pakistan. I am going to make my home here in this tree.”

The Partition—the scars of which reverberate today in brahiminical Hindutva fascism, the genocidal Indian occupation of Kashmir, mass protests of debt-ridden farmers, and counterinsurgency in Panjab—displaced at least 15 million people and killed at least one million across the newly drawn borders. My grandfather’s own family was displaced from their village, after which he started working the passenger and cargo trains that transported up to 5,000 refugees a day. He later recounted stories of torture, kidnappings, burnings, rapes, and massacres. In the afterlife of this carnage, I found the seemingly mad man on the tree marvelously rebellious and utterly lucid.

To be a modern nation-state in a state-centric world presupposes the necessity of a secured border. Radhika Mongia argues, “Today all states embody a historically produced colonial dimension, with the citizen/migrant distinction as one of the primary axes of such differentiation.” Borders maintain hoarded concentrations of wealth accrued from colonial domination while ensuring mobility for some and containment for most—a system of global apartheid determining who can live where and under what conditions. The Indian Border Security Force is the world’s largest border security force, Europe’s Mediterranean border is the world’s deadliest border, and Australia jails detainees for an average of 689 days in its matrix of offshore immigration detention centers. As Toni Morrison described in her prophetic 1997 work, “Home,” “The contemporary world’s work has become policing, halting, forming policy regarding, and trying to administer the movement of people. Nationhood—the very definition of citizenship—is constantly being demarcated and redemarcated in response to exiles, refugees, Gastarbeiter, immigrants, migrations, the displaced, the fleeing, and the besieged.”

We are witnesses to the horrific impacts of this categorization and control of people. Suffocation in the back of cargo trucks in Texas and Arizona, dehydration in blistering heat in the Horn of Africa’s eastern corridor, unmarked graves in the Sonoran and Sahara deserts, deadly pushbacks of migrant caravans in Melilla and Croatia, and wet cemeteries throughout the Mediterranean are the deathscapes of borders’ victims.

As the (always racialized) body count grows, language such as “border crisis” becomes a pretext for more border securitization, including repressive practices of interdiction and the criminalization of smuggling. Migrants and refugees become the cause of an imagined crisis at the border, despite the fact that approximately 95 percent of displaced people remain internally displaced or in refugee camps. In fact, mass displacement and immobility represent the outcome of the actual displacement crises of capitalism, conquest, and climate change. The catastrophic effects of climate disasters, which displace one person every two seconds, are a primary source of escalating border militarization in our era. While ruling elites fail to mitigate climate change, “climate security” is the latest screed of eco-apartheid proponents. “Borders are the environment’s greatest ally; it is through them that we will save the planet,” declares the party of French far-right politician Marine Le Pen. Meanwhile, the Australian Defense Forces have announced military patrols to intercept climate migrants, and the United States has created Homeland Security Task Force Southeast to enforce marine interdiction and deportation after climate disasters in the Caribbean.

In addition to the nascent scapegoat of the “climate migrant,” the border merges a range of other constructed threats. There is the illegal (bear in mind: Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis launched political battles for Indigenous tribal recognition after being considered illegal immigrants); the terrorist (never forget: 779 Muslim men and boys were imprisoned and tortured at Guantánamo Bay); the criminal (remember: Clinton’s 1996 immigration laws dramatically widened the net for detention and deportation for those with convictions); the bogus refugee (recall: most refugees from Vietnam were welcomed during the Cold War, while most Haitians fleeing U.S. destabilization were deemed bogus and faced detention and deportation); the swarm (Trump infamously propagandized: “Working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal immigration: reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools, hospitals that are so crowded you can’t get in, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net”); the undeserving (Obama peddled: “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids”); the diseased (still counting: 1.7 million Title 42 expulsions from the U.S. during the pandemic); the foreigner (compare to: “We’re talking about Europeans [Ukranians] leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives”).

The mass production and social organization of difference is at the heart of border-craft. Bordering regimes, as Wendy Brown asserts, “do not simply respond to existing nationalism or racism. Rather, they activate and mobilize them.” Borders control through selective inclusions and expulsions, making and maintaining the “good versus bad” migrant, as well as the colonial, racial, gendered, sexualized, ableist, and class-based hierarchies among legal citizens. Today, as white nationalist, anti-trans, and xenophobic fascism swells, the border has become a central site of struggle.

all around, and creeping
self righteous, let’s say it, fascism,
how else to say, border

—Dionne Brand, from “Inventory”

Borders are not fixed lines demarcating territory. They are elastic; bordering regimes can be enforced anywhere. Subjected to surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms within the nation-state, undocumented migrants endure the omnipresent threat of immigration enforcement, dangerous and low-wage work, and barriers to accessing public services. The production and policing of the border becomes a quotidian workplace ritual as law enforcement, doctors, teachers, landlords, and social workers regularly report migrants to border agencies.

Borders can thus follow people indefinitely. Moreover, as employers and elite leaders intend, the making of “illegal workers” acts as a firewall (or border) blocking solidarity between workers. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, simmering working-class dissent over rising unemployment and shrinking state programs is being redirected into xenophobic propaganda, which calls for the Saudization of the workforce and immigration enforcement. In 2017 the Saudi monarchy arrested a staggering 2.1 million migrants, mostly from Yemen and Ethiopia.

Bordering regimes are also increasingly layered with controls far beyond nation-states’ territorial limits. The United States, Australia, and Europe subordinate Central America, Oceania, Africa, and the Middle East by compelling countries in these regions to accept border checkpoints, drone surveillance, offshore detention, and migration prevention and interception campaigns as conditions of trade and aid agreements. Nauru, formally under Australian administration and United Nations trusteeship until 1968 and devastated through centuries of resource colonialism, is now Australia’s dumping ground for refugees. When Australia started offshoring refugee detention there over twenty years ago, its increased aid to Nauru represented a third of the country’s GDP. Nauru, Libya, Mali, Mexico, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Turkey, and Sudan are becoming the new frontiers of border militarization. Similarly, Croatia, Ukraine, and Moldova—in joining or aspiring to join the EU—must participate in EU border management missions and partnerships.

The outsourcing of border controls for migration management globalizes border violence and maintains a colonial present. For example, a century-long line of dirty coups and trade agreements has created displacement and migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. Today U.S. initiatives that outsource border violence to these countries help to extend the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States’ imperialist claim on Mexico as well as South and Central America. Initiated by President Bush and expanded under Presidents Obama and Biden, the multibillion-dollar U.S.-Mexico Mérida Initiative provides funding for a battery of police and migration checkpoints from southern Chiapas to the U.S. border. Mérida and its counterpart, the Central American Regional Security Initiative, paramilitarize the entire landscape through the triad of the war on drugs, the war on Indigenous lands, and the war on migrants. The United States also funds immigration enforcement in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Shortly after the United States launched the Mexico-Guatemala-Belize Border Region Program, Homeland Security officials declared that “the Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border.” Writing on the U.S. empire of borders, Todd Miller remarks, “Close your eyes and point to any landmass on a world map, and your finger will probably find a country that is building up its borders in some way with Washington’s assistance.”

Europe also outsources border controls to many African countries in the Sahel region, maintaining colonialism’s civilizational myth. The Khartoum Process, Valletta Summit, Migration Partnership Framework, African Peace Facility program, and EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa all promise EU development and aid in exchange for reducing African migration into Europe. The EU also directly funds anti-migrant surveillance, military equipment, detention centers, border enforcement trainings, and troops in Tunisia, Niger, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Rwanda, and Sudan. As former Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti put it, “Securing Libya’s southern border means securing Europe’s southern border.” The massive scale of ongoing imperialist European land grabbing, resource extraction, and military expansion on the African continent exists alongside the enforced expansion of border enforcement within Africa to serve Fortress Europe. A coalition of African civil society organizations describe these murderous practices as “hunting policies for migrants that grow everywhere on the African continent with the support of the European institutions under the guise of the fight against ‘irregular’ migration.”

But border enforcement is not only the terror of outright exclusion and expulsion. In the mid-1800s, militias at the U.S.-Mexico border, made up of slaveowners, patrolled the border to keep Black people within the nation-state and to prevent them from escaping to Mexico. As Robyn Maynard stresses, the “devaluation of Black life and labour under slavery” underwrites “Jim-Crow style” exploitative labor migration into the United States and Canada. After its formal inception in 1924 until World War II, the U.S. Border Patrol was overseen by the Department of Labor. Borders are not intended to exclude or deport all people but to create conditions of deportability, which produces immense precarity for labor. The border captures workers’ labor power for employers to exploit. Workers are kept compliant through threats of termination and deportation. According to one U.S. study from 2012, 52 percent of companies undergoing union drives threaten to call immigration authorities. In 2019 ICE raided the Peco and Koch processing plants in Mississippi shortly after a high-profile unionization drive and detained 680 workers. Workers are declared illegal, but the surplus value they create is not.

Even state-sanctioned, temporary migrant workers are central to state formation, citizenship regulation, labor segmentation, and segregated social ordering. In Gulf Cooperation Council countries, migrant workers represent a whopping 66 percent of the total labor force. Capitalism requires the constant segmentation of labor, and the border offers it a “spatial fix” by bifurcating the global labor force. Adam Hanieh remarks, “We need to situate migration as an internal feature of how capitalism actually functions at the global scale—a movement of people that is relentlessly generated by the movement of capital, and which, in turn, is constitutive of the concrete forms of capitalism itself.” Around the world contemporary Bracero programs represent an extreme neoliberalization of both immigration and labor policies. Withholding full immigration status and tying visa status to an employer creates pools of cheapened, indentured laborers. These legal-but-deportable workers are often spatially and socially segregated: housed in separate labor camps, unprotected by national labor laws or unions, refused access to public services, and unable to bring their families with them.

Labor migration shapes the state to manage citizenship and sustains capital’s ability to coerce labor. The designation of “foreign workers” creates a material and ideological differentiation that further affixes race to citizenship. “Foreign workers” is essentially a euphemism for “Third World” workers, and jobs that cannot be outsourced to the periphery—such as farm work and domestic work—are thus insourced through migrant work. Even where migrant workers enter the same national labor market as citizens, or work for the same corporate employer transnationally, the border enforces wage differentiation based on race, citizenship, and gender. Insourced labor (from labor migration programs) and outsourced labor (in free trade zones) thus represent two sides of the same coin: deliberately deflated labor and political power.

Finally, borders rely on and reproduce the idea of a homogeneous body politic, emphasizing difference not only from those migrants deemed deviant and undesirable but also from those alienated and minoritized citizens who are essentially stateless within the nation-state. From the sweatshop floor and the refugee camp to the reservation and the gated community, borders are the scaffolding for ordering regimes that simultaneously manufacture and discipline surplus populations while parasitically extracting land, labor, and life itself. Classifications such as “migrant” or “refugee” do not represent social groups as much as they symbolize state-regulated relations of difference and state-manufactured conditions of vulnerability. While the rich from wealthy states enjoy borderless mobility—as global investors, bankers, expats, or hipster tourists—racialized poor people are subjected to discursive and material criminalization and illegalization.

Borders are simultaneously monetized and militarized. Racial capitalism and racial citizenship rely on the dispossession and immobility of migrants to maintain state power and capitalist extractions. Like the carceral construct of criminality, illegality is invented and policed as a race-making and property-protecting regime. And—like policing, prisons, and private property—borders destroy communal social organization by operating through the logic of dispossession, capture, containment, and immobility. As Angela Davis and Gina Dent write, “We continue to find that the prison is itself a border.”

Borders thus shape and are shaped by social relations. The border reproduces a global colonial racial social order that fortifies the rich against the rest, deflates labor power, treats sacred land as a possession, and provides the ideological basis for all repressive immigration enforcement. “Border crises,” then, are not merely domestic issues to be managed through tweaking immigration policies. They reflect a crisis of globalized asymmetries of capital and power—inscribed by race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship—that create migration and constrict mobility. The border is a tool of imperial management, labor segmentation, and social ordering that is both domestic and global. For example, it operates unambiguously in the deployment of the U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Units not only at the border, but in Iraq and Guatemala where they train local forces, and in Portland where they repress Black uprisings.

In BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (2019), Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi emphasize that the politics of migration is embedded in anti-Black racial logics. “Movements that we now call migration are founded in anti-blackness, taking their logic from transatlantic slavery,” they write. The sustained capture and punishment of Black mobility, the racialization of Muslim people dating back to the Reconquista, the genocidal corralling of Indigenous peoples onto reservations, the violent transformation of noncapitalist land stewardship into the regime of private property, the dispossession and proletarianization of millions into caste-oppressed indentured labor, and the deliberate cleaving and creation of “post-colonial” nation-states are all constitutive of the global policing of migration today. Declaring the migration crisis as a new crisis for Western countries is offensive: it conveniently erases the violence of capitalism, colonialism, genocide, slavery, and indentureship—the interlocking unfreedoms that create the conditions that make the border possible. The liberal nation-state is not a victim; it has aborted the dream of genuine decolonization and liberation by providing a territorial and jurisdictional grounding for capital and becoming the most legible form of coercive state power.

If borders of nation-states are designed to cement structural inequities through porous segmentation and ordering, can they ever become an anti-colonial architecture? Just as police and prisons will never serve the interests of survivors of racial, gendered, or transphobic violence, borders are not a method of safety or self-determination. As Adom Getachew suggests in Worldmaking after Empire (2019), we can look to Black nationalist struggles against colonialism: they did not envision decolonization as the globalization of the nation-state into the capitalist economy and international hierarchy but rather proposed to reconstruct the world through internationalism and redistribution. We might follow their lead when considering how our modes of worldmaking and homemaking could be organized differently. William C. Anderson offers a meditation in this regard: “We are fighting for an existence where there are no states to deport, dispossess, murder, detain, imprison, pollute, and police us on behalf of the ruling elite of the world.”

While liberals who argue for more humane immigration policies presuppose a “natural” border, Nicholas De Genova suggests, “If there were no borders, there would be no migration—only mobility.” In other words, while open borders might mean freer movement across nations in a world otherwise still configured under the status quo, to abolish the border would mean emancipating ourselves from all the unfreedoms it upholds. Migrante International, a global network of Filipinx people in over two dozen countries, advocates against the “plunder of economies, destruction of the environment and wars of aggression that cause widespread poverty and injustice” in the Philippines, and also for “migrants’ rights and dignity against all forms of discrimination, exploitation and abuse in the workplace and in the community.” Abolishing borders can secure these propositions: the freedom to stay, meaning that no one is forcibly displaced from their homes and lands, and the freedom to move with safety and dignity. A world without borders is necessary if we are serious about ending the ravages of imperialism, the violent extraction of capitalism, and the oppressive racial social organization of our world. Following Eduardo Galeano’s invocation, “The world was born yearning to be a home for everyone,” a world without borders is a world where everyone can find, make, and belong at home.

While a world without borders certainly requires us to stretch our futurist imaginations, it is also already here in present-day, practical politics. Movements that call for the abolition of border enforcement agencies, border controls, deportations, and the criminalization of migration offer prefigurative visions of the future, as do those that advance granting immigration status, labor protections, and universal public services for all. The Manifesto of the Sans-Papiers movement in France states: “We demand papers so that we no longer suffer the humiliation of controls based on our skin, detentions, deportations, the break-up of our families, the constant fear.” And in Australia RISE: Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees demands housing, healthcare, language services, education, work rights, legal aid, and freedom of movement for all asylum seekers. While these and other movements may demand that the state offer material relief, these struggles ultimately aim to render the border obsolete.

Radical articulations such as “No human being is illegal,” “No borders on stolen land,” and “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” refuse the rights-based, liberal platitudes of innocence, desirability, and assimilation and challenge the legitimacy of the border itself as an institution of governance. Many movements also highlight how migration is an embodied expression of decolonial reparations and redistribution, thus revealing a convergence of migrant and global justice movements (against the arms trade, vaccine apartheid, unfair trade agreements, debt, climate change, and so on). Les Gilets Noirs, a collective of mostly African undocumented migrants in France, assert their presence as an accounting for the exploitation that is a precondition for Europe. They boldly pronounce: “We are the freedom to move, to settle down to act. We will take it as our right.” In Canada the proclamation “No One Is Illegal, Canada is Illegal” highlights the hypocrisy of the settler-colonial state positioning itself as an arbiter of immigration. The Red Nation compellingly articulates “We have an Indigenous-centered perspective of migrant justice and organizing that rejects the settler state’s notions of citizenship and instead creates solidarity between Indigenous people and undocumented migrants. . . . We demand the abolition of all borders from Palestine to Turtle Island.”

On Indigenous Wet’suwet’en land, elders and matriarchs exercise alternative conceptions of governance rooted in their laws. Everyone entering their lands is asked: What is your intention? How will your visit benefit the community? Are you here on behalf of industry or the government? These questions are fundamentally about consent and an explicit counterforce to the logics of carceral, colonial, and capitalist states. They remind us that our responsibilities to one another and all living beings are actively negotiated and can and must be de-propertied, de-carceral, demilitarized, and decolonial. A liberatory, no-borders politics destabilizes the machinery of the colonial-capitalist state itself.

“No borders” is also a clarion call for the established left, specifically the environmental movement and major labor unions. State formation, class relations, extractivism, and social hierarchies are generated through each other. The conditioning of environmental movements and class struggles through citizenship reinforces the logic of scarcity upon which austerity and carceral governance depends, maintains the international division of labor and a lowered wage floor upon which capitalism relies, and aligns with far-right racism and ruling-class extractavist ideology. More specifically, environmental movements advocating for conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuel production, and alternative energies are often complicit in greenwashed colonialism. Even more progressive proposals such as the Green New Deal have become trapped in imperialist imaginaries of rich countries as white sanctuaries and gated communities. In a similar vein, unions that call for border enforcement against migrant workers in the interests of “citizen workers” (itself a problematic term) misunderstand the role of the border and capital. The border cannot protect the working class against neoliberal globalization because immobilized labor generated by the border serves the interests of free capital. Racial capitalism and racial citizenship require bordered labor.

Migrant workers do not cause environmental degradation or suppress wages; bosses, corporations, and borders do. An internationalist, feminist, abolitionist, labor rights platform is perhaps best articulated by migrant sex workers enduring the intersection of sex work criminalization, precarious migration status, and gendered labor—all of which, not coincidentally, uphold the feminization of poverty. Canary Song, a coalition of migrant Asian and Asian American sex workers in the United States, articulates a vision against policing, deportation, and anti-trafficking raids, while advancing labor rights for all sex workers and migrant workers to “openly assemble without fear, share resources, and collectively organize for better wages and working conditions.”

Abolition, Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us, is concerned with collective presence and building life-affirming institutions. Hundreds of campaigns are fighting for solidarity/sanctuary cities, where undocumented residents are guaranteed access to public needs and local jurisdictions limit cooperation with federal immigration agents. Dozens of civilian solidarity/rescue missions on land and on sea are engaged in lifesaving, and often illegal, efforts to provide food, water, shelter, and transportation to migrants and refugees. There are many ways people and organizations are extending networks of collective care and safety: people opening their homes to refugees, congregations of faith sheltering migrant fugitives, people distributing food and medical supplies at border sites such as Calais and Nogales, houseless and stateless squats and encampments, migrant workers and labor unions uniting to establish rank-and-file worker centers, direct actions preventing immigration raids, and internationalist organizing. These actions create liberated zones of belonging beyond and against neoliberal, nationalist conceits. These ecosystems, even if small in scale, model different forms of social relations, solidarity, and kinship through the process of joint struggle.

And the everyday unsanctioned movement of people—defying borders and risking death—is, in itself, worldmaking and homemaking. Without romanticizing or generalizing the politics of those on the move, we must recognize the sheer will and productive power they represent. In their determination for a different life, migrants and refugees subvert the multibillion-dollar global industry of barbed wire walls, drone surveillance, militarized checkpoints, and bureaucratic violence aimed at fatally deterring them. Revolutions bring no guarantees, but they do call on us to dream, listen, commune, act, struggle, dismantle, rematriate, create, to move and make anew.

The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex By Dylan Rodríguez

Perhaps never before has the struggle to mount viable movements of radical social transformation in the United States been more desperate, urgent, or difficult. In the aftermath of the 1960s mass-movement era, the edifices of state repression have themselves undergone substantive transformation, even as classical techniques of politically formed state violence–colonization and protocolonial occupation, racist policing, assassination, political and mass-based imprisonment–remain fairly constant in the US production of global order. Here, I am specifically concerned with the emergence of the US prison industrial complex (PIC) and its relationship to the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC), the industrialized incorporation of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of government-proctored non-profit organizations. In my view, these overlapping developments–the rise of a racially constituted prison regime unprecedented in scale, and the almost simultaneous structural consolidation of a non-profit industrial complex–have exerted a form and content to US-based resistance struggles which enmeshes them in the social arrangement that political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal names an “industry of fear.” In a 1998 correspondence to the 3,000-plus participants in the conference Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, he writes,

Americans live in a cavern of fear, a psychic, numbing force manufactured by the so-called entertainment industry, reified by the psychological industry, and buttressed by the coercion industry (i.e., the courts, police, prisons, and the like). The social psychology of America is being fed by a media that threatens all with an army of psychopathic, deviant, sadistic madmen bent on ravishing a helpless, prone citizenry. The state’s coercive apparatus of “public safety” is erected as a needed protective counter-point. 12 

I wish to pay special attention to Abu-Jamal’s illustration of the social fabrication of fear as a necessary political and cultural condition for the rise of the US non-profit industrial complex, which has, in turn, enabled and complemented the massive institutional production of the US prison industrial complex. As I understand it, the NPIC is the set of symbiotic relationships that link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements, since about the mid-1970s. Abu-Jamal’s “cavern of fear” illuminates the repressive and popular broadly racist common sense that both haunts and constitutes the political imagination of many contemporary progressive, radical, and even self-professed “revolutionary” social change activists. Why, in other words, does the political imagination of the US non-profit and nongovernmental organization (NGO)-enabled Left generally refuse to embrace the urgent and incomplete historical work of a radical counter-state, anti-white supremacist, prison/penal/slave abolitionist movement? I am especially concerned with how the political assimilation of the non-profit sector into the progressive dreams of a “democratic” global civil society (the broad premise of the liberal-progressive antiglobalization movement) already presumes (and therefore fortifies) existing structures of social liquidation, including biological and social death. Does Abu-Jamal’s “cavern of fear” also echo the durable historical racial phobias of the US social order generally? Does the specter of an authentic radical freedom no longer structured by the assumptions underlying the historical “freedoms” invested in white American political identity–including the perversions and mystifications of such concepts as “democracy,” “civil rights,” “the vote,” and even “equality”–logically suggest the end of white civil society, which is to say a collapsing of the very sociocultural foundations of the United States itself? Perhaps it is the fear of a radically transformed, feminist/queer/anti-racist liberation of Black, Brown, and Red bodies, no longer presumed to be permanently subordinated to structures of criminalization, colonization, (state and state-ordained) bodily violence, and domestic warfare, that logically threatens the very existence of the still white-dominant US Left: perhaps it is, in part, the Left’s fear of an unleashed bodily proximity to currently criminalized, colonized, and normatively violated peoples that compels it to retain the staunchly anti-abolitionist political limits of the NPIC. The persistence of such a racial fear–in effect, the fear of a radical freedom that obliterates the cultural and material ascendancy of “white freedom”–is neither new nor unusual in the history of the US Left. We are invoking, after all, the vision of a movement of liberation that abolishes (and transforms) the cultural, economic, and political structures of a white civil society that continues to largely define the terms, languages, and limits of US-based progressive (and even “radical”) campaigns, political discourses, and local/global movements.

This polemical essay attempts to dislodge some of the theoretical and operational assumptions underlying the glut of foundation-funded “establishment Left” organizations in the United States. The Left’s investment in the essential political logic of civil society–specifically, the inherent legitimacy of racist state violence in upholding a white freedom, social “peace,” and “law and order” that is fundamentally designed to maintain brutal inequalities in the putative free world–is symbiotic with (and not oppositional to) the policing and incarceration of marginalized, racially pathologized communities, as well as the state’s ongoing absorption of organized dissent through the non-profit structure. While this alleged Left frequently considers its array of incorporated, “legitimate” organizations and institutions as the fortified bulwark of a progressive “social justice” orientation in civil society, I am concerned with the ways in which the broad assimilation of such organizations into a non-profit industrial complex actually enables more vicious forms of state repression.

The Velvet Purse of State Repression

It may be appropriate to initiate this discussion with a critical reflection on the accelerated incorporation of progressive social change struggles into a structure of state accreditation and owning-class surveillance since the 1970s. Robert L. Allen’s classic book Black Awakening in Capitalist America was among the first works to offer a sustained political analysis of how liberal white philanthropic organizations–including the Rockefeller, Ford, and Mellon foundations–facilitated the violent state repression of radical and revolutionary elements within the Black liberation movements of the late 1960s and early 70s. Allen argues that it was precisely because of philanthropy’s overtures toward the movement’s more moderate and explicitly reformist elements–especially those advocating versions of “Black capitalism” and “political self-determination” through participation in electoral politics–that radical Black liberationists and revolutionaries were more easily criminalized and liquidated. 13  Allen’s account, which appears in this collection [The Revolution Will Not Be Funded], proves instructive for a current critique of the state-corporate alliance that keeps the lid on what is left of Black liberationist politics, along with the cohort of radical struggles encompassed by what was once called the US “Third World” Left. Perhaps as important, Allen’s analysis may provide a critical analytical framework through which to understand the problem of white ascendancy and liberal white supremacy within the dominant spheres of the NPIC, which has become virtually synonymous with the broader political category of a US Left.

The massive repression of the Black, Native American, Puerto Rican, and other US-based Third World liberation movements during and beyond the 1960s and 70s was founded on a coalescence of official and illicit/illegal forms of state and state-sanctioned violence: police-led racist violence (including false imprisonment, home invasions, assassinations, and political harassment), white civilian reaction (lynchings, vigilante movements, new electoral blocs, and a complementary surge of white nationalist organizations), and the proliferation of racially formed (and racially executed) juridical measures to criminalize and imprison entire populations of poor and working class Black, Brown, and Indigenous people has been–and continues to be–a fundamental legacy of this era. Responding to the liberation-movement era’s momentary disruption of a naturalized American apartheid and taken-for-granted domestic colonialism, a new coalition of prominent owning-class white philanthropists, lawmakers, state bureaucrats, local and federal police, and ordinary white civilians (from across the already delimited US political spectrum of “liberal” to “conservative”) scrambled to restore the coherence and stability of white civil society in the midst of a fundamental challenge from activists and radical movement intellectuals who envisioned substantive transformation in the very foundations of US “society” itself. One outcome of this movement toward “White Reconstruction” was the invention, development, and refinement of repressive policing technologies across the local and federal scales, a labor that encompassed a wide variety of organizing and deployment strategies. The notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) remains the most historically prominent incident of the undeclared warfare waged by the state against domestic populations, insurrections, and suspected revolutionaries. But the spectacle of Hooverite repression obscures the broader–and far more important–convergence of state and capitalist/philanthropic forces in the absorption of progressive social change struggles that defined this era and its current legacies.

During this era, US civil society–encompassing the private sector, non-profit organizations and NGOs, faith communities, the mass media and its consumers–partnered with the law-and-order state through the reactionary white populist sentimentality enlivened by the respective presidential campaigns of Republican Party presidential nominees Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. It was Goldwater’s eloquent articulation of the meaning of “freedom,” defined against a racially coded (though nonetheless transparent) imagery of oncoming “mob” rule and urban “jungle” savagery, poised to liquidate white social existence, that carried his message into popular currency. Goldwater’s political and cultural conviction was to defend white civil society from its racially depicted aggressors–a white supremacist discourse of self-defense that remains a central facet of the US state and US political life generally. Though his bid for the presidency failed, Goldwater’s message succeeded as the catalyst for the imminent movement of White Reconstruction in the aftermath of US apartheid’s nominal disestablishment, and in the face of liberal reformist changes to US civil rights law. Accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Goldwater famously pronounced,

Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives…. Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens. History shows us–demonstrates that nothing–nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders. 14 

On the one hand, the subsequent exponential growth of the US policing apparatus closely followed the white populist political schema of the Goldwater-Nixon law-and-order bloc. 15  Law and order was essentially the harbinger of White Reconstruction, mobilizing an apparatus of state violence to protect and recuperate the vindicated white national body from the allegedly imminent aggressions and violations of its racial Others. White civil society, accustomed to generally unilateral and exclusive access to the cultural, economic, and political capital necessary for individual and collective self-determination, encountered reflections of its own undoing at this moment. The politics of law and order thus significantly encompassed white supremacist desire for surveilling, policing, caging, and (preemptively) socially liquidating those who embodied the gathering storm of dissidence–organized and disarticulated, radical and protopolitical.

In this historical context, COINTELPRO’s illegal and unconstitutional abuses of state power, unabashed use of strategic and deadly violence, and development of invasive, terrorizing surveillance technologies might be seen as paradigmatic of the contemporary era’s revivified white supremacist hegemony. 16  Contrary to the widespread assumption that COINTELPRO was somehow excessive, episodic, and extraordinary in its deployment of (formally illegal and unconstitutional) state violence, J. Edgar Hoover’s venerated racist-state strategy simply reflected the imperative of white civil society’s impulse toward self-preservation in this moment. 17  Elaborating the white populist vision of Goldwater and his political descendants, the consolidation of this white nationalist bloc–which eventually incorporated “liberals” as well as reactionaries and conservatives–was simply the political reconsolidation of a white civil society that had momentarily strolled with the specter of its own incoherence.

Goldwater’s epoch-shaping presidential campaign in 1964 set up the political premises and popular racial vernacular for much of what followed in the restoration of white civil society in the 1970s and later. In significant part through the reorganization of a US state that strategically mobilized around an internally complex, substantively dynamic white supremacist conception of “security from domestic violence,” the “law and order” state has materialized on the ground and has generated a popular consensus around its modes of dominance: punitive racist criminal justice, paramilitary policing, and strategically deployed domestic warfare regimes have become an American way of life. This popularized and institutionalized “law and order” state has built this popular consensus in part through a symbiosis with the non-profit liberal foundation structure, which, in turn, has helped collapse various sites of potential political radicalism into nonantagonistic social service and pro-state reformist initiatives. Vast expenditures of state capacity, from police expansion to school militarization, and the multiplication of state-formed popular cultural productions (from the virtual universalization of the “tough on crime” electoral campaign message to the explosion of pro-police discourses in Hollywood film, television dramas, and popular “reality” shows) have conveyed several overlapping political messages, which have accomplished several mutually reinforcing tasks of the White Reconstructionist agenda that are relevant to our discussion here: (1) the staunch criminalization of particular political practices embodied by radical and otherwise critically “dissenting” activists, intellectuals, and ordinary people of color; this is to say, when racially pathologized bodies take on political activities critical of US state violence (say, normalized police brutality/homicide, militarized misogyny, or colonialist occupation) or attempt to dislodge the presumed stability and “peace” of white civil society (through militant antiracist organizing or progressive anti-(state) racial violence campaigns), they are subjected to the enormous weight of a state and cultural apparatus that defines them as “criminals” (e.g., terrorists, rioters, gang members) and, therefore, as essentially opportunistic, misled, apolitical, or even amoral social actors; (2) the fundamental political constriction–through everything from restrictive tax laws on community-based organizations to the arbitrary enforcement of repressive laws banning certain forms of public congregation (for example, the California “antigang” statutes that have effectively criminalized Black and Brown public existence on a massive scale)–of the appropriate avenues and protocols of agitation for social change, which drastically delimits the form and substance that socially transformative and liberationist activisms can assume in both the short and long terms; and (3) the state-facilitated and fundamentally punitive bureaucratization of social change and dissent, which tends to create an institutionalized inside/outside to aspiring social movements by funneling activists into the hierarchical rituals and restrictive professionalism of discrete campaigns, think tanks, and organizations, outside of which it is usually profoundly difficult to organize a critical mass of political movement (due in significant part to the two aforementioned developments).

In this context, the structural and political limitations of current grassroots and progressive organizing in the United States has become stunningly evident in light of the veritable explosion of private foundations as primary institutions through which to harness and restrict the potentials of US-based progressive activisms. Heavily dependent on the funding of such ostensibly liberal and progressive financial bodies as the Mellon, Ford, and Soros foundations, the very existence of many social justice organizations has often come to rest more on the effectiveness of professional (and amateur) grant writers than on skilled–much less “radical”–political educators and organizers. A 1997 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Citizen 501(c)(3)” states, for example, that the net worth of such foundations was over $200 billion as of 1996, a growth of more than 400 percent since 1981. The article’s author, Nicholas Lemann, goes on to write that in the United States, the raw size of private foundations, “along with their desire to affect the course of events in the United States and the world, has made foundations one of the handful of major [political] actors in our society–but they are the one that draws the least public attention.” 18  As the foundation lifeline has sustained the NPIC’s emergence into a primary component of US political life, the assimilation of political resistance projects into quasi-entrepreneurial, corporate-style ventures occurs under the threat of unruliness and antisocial “deviance” that rules Abu-Jamal’s US “cavern of fear”: arguably, forms of sustained grassroots social movement that do not rely on the material assets and institutionalized legitimacy of the NPIC have become largely unimaginable within the political culture of the current US Left. If anything, this culture is generally disciplined and ruled by the fundamental imperative to preserve the integrity and coherence of US white civil society, and the “ruling class” of philanthropic organizations and foundations may, at times, almost unilaterally determine whether certain activist commitments and practices are appropriate to their consensus vision of American “democracy.”

The self-narrative of multibillionaire philanthropist George Soros–whom the PBS program NOW described as “the only American citizen with his own foreign policy” 19  brings candor and clarity to the societal mission of one well-known liberal philanthropic funder-patron:

When I had made more money than I needed, I decided to set up a foundation. I reflected on what it was I really cared about. Having lived through both Nazi persecution and Communist oppression, I came to the conclusion that what was paramount for me was an open society. So I called the foundation the Open Society Fund, and I defined its objectives as opening up closed societies, making open societies more viable, and promoting a critical mode of thinking. That was in 1979…. By now I have established a network of foundations that extends across more than twenty-five countries (not including China, where we shut down in 1989). 20 

Soros’s conception of the “Open Society,” fueled by his avowed disdain for laissez-faire capitalism, communism, and Nazism, privileges political dissent that works firmly within the constraints of bourgeois liberal democracy. The imperative to protect–and, in Soros’s case, to selectively enable with funding–dissenting political projects emerges from the presumption that existing social, cultural, political, and economic institutions are in some way perfectible, and that such dissenting projects must not deviate from the unnamed “values” which serve as the ideological glue of civil society. Perhaps most important, the Open Society is premised on the idea that clashing political projects can and must be brought (forced?) into a vague state of reconciliation with one another.

Instead of there being a dichotomy between open and closed, I see the open society as occupying a middle ground, where the rights of the individual are safeguarded but where there are some shared values that hold society together [emphasis added]. I envisage the open society as a society open to improvement. We start with the recognition of our own fallibility, which extends not only to our mental constructs but also to our institutions. What is imperfect can be improved, by a process of trial and error. The open society not only allows this process but actually encourages it, by insisting on freedom of expression and protecting dissent. The open society offers a vista of limitless progress….

The Open Society merely provides a framework within which different views about social and political issues can be reconciled; it does not offer a firm view on social goals. If it did, it would not be an open society. 21 

Crucially, the formulaic, naive vision of Soros’s Open Society finds its condition of possibility in untied foundation purse strings, as “dissent” flowers into viability on the strength of a generous grant or two. The essential conservatism of Soros’s manifesto obtains “common-sense” status within the liberal/progressive foundation industry by virtue of financial force, as his patronage reigns hegemonic among numerous organizations and emergent social movements.
Most important, the Open Society’s narrative of reconciliation and societal perfection marginalizes radical forms of dissent which voice an irreconcilable antagonism to white supremacist patriarchy, neoliberalism, racialized state violence, and other structures of domination. Antonio Gramsci’s prescient reflection on the formation of the hegemonic state as simultaneously an organizational, repressive, and pedagogical apparatus is instructive: “The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class.” 22 

Certainly, the historical record demonstrates that Soros and other foundation grants have enabled a breathtaking number of “left-of-center” campaigns and projects in the last 20 years. The question I wish to introduce here, however, is whether this enabling also exerts a disciplinary or repressive force on contemporary social movement organizations while nurturing a particular ideological and structural allegiance to state authority that preempts political radicalisms.

Social movement theorists John McCarthy, David Britt, and Mark Wolfson argue that the “channeling mechanisms” embodied by the non-profit industry “may now far outweigh the effect of direct social control by states in explaining the structural isomorphism, orthodox tactics, and moderate goals of much collective action in modern America.” 23  That is, the overall bureaucratic formality and hierarchical (frequently elitist) structuring of the NPIC has institutionalized more than just a series of hoops through which aspiring social change activists must jump–these institutional characteristics, in fact, dictate the political vistas of NPIC organizations themselves. The form of the US Left is inseparable from its political content. The most obvious element of this kinder, gentler, industrialized repression is its bureaucratic incorporation of social change organizations into a “tangle of incentives”–such as postal privileges, tax-exempt status, and quick access to philanthropic funding apparatuses–made possible by state bestowal of “not-for-profit” status. Increasingly, avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some self-declared “revolutionary” groups have found assimilation into this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm a practical route to institutionalization. Incorporation facilitates the establishment of a relatively stable financial and operational infrastructure while avoiding the transience, messiness, and possible legal complications of working under decentralized, informal, or “underground” auspices. The emergence of this state-proctored social movement industry “suggests an historical movement away from direct, cruder forms [of state repression], toward more subtle forms of state social control of social movements.” 24 

Footnotes

Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The Industry of Fear,” open correspondence to Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, July 1998.

Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (1969; repr., Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990). An excerpt from Black Awakening is reprinted in this volume [The Revolution Will Not Be Funded].

Barry Goldwater, acceptance speech, 28th Republican National Convention, San Francisco, CA, July 16, 1964.

Some useful background texts include: Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee, eds., Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization in the United States (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002); Christian Parenti, Lock down America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso Press, 2000); Ted Gest, Crime and Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jill Nelson, ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Stuart Hall, et. al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).

See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 1-62.

See generally Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton,
1992).

Nicholas Lemann, “Citizen 501(c)(3),” The Atlantic Monthly 279, no. 2 (February 1997), http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97feb/5013c/5013c.htm.

George Soros, interview by David Brancaccio, Now, PBS, September 12, 2003, transcript, http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_soros.html.

George Soros, “The Capitalist Threat,” The Atlantic Monthly 279, no. 2 (February 1997), http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97feb/capital!capital.htm. ]

Ibid.

Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1995), 259.

John McCarthy, David Britt, and Mark Wolfson, “The Institutional Channeling of Social Movements by the State in the United States,” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 13 (1991): 48.

Ibid.

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies by June Jordan

1

I will no longer lightly walk behind

a one of you who fear me:

Be afraid.

I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits

and facial tics

I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore

and this is dedicated in particular

to those who hear my footsteps

or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery

cart

then turn around

see me

and hurry on

away from this impressive terror I must be:

I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon

surrounded by my comrades singing

terrible revenge in merciless

accelerating

rhythms

But

I have watched a blind man studying his face.

I have set the table in the evening and sat down

to eat the news.

Regularly

I have gone to sleep.

There is no one to forgive me.

The dead do not give a damn.

I live like a lover

who drops her dime into the phone

just as the subway shakes into the station

wasting her message

canceling the question of her call:

fulminating or forgetful but late

and always after the fact that could save or

condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2

How many of my brothers and my sisters

will they kill

before I teach myself

retaliation?

Shall we pick a number?

South Africa for instance:

do we agree that more than ten thousand

in less than a year but that less than

five thousand slaughtered in more than six

months will

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3

And if I

if I ever let you slide

who should be extirpated from my universe

who should be cauterized from earth

completely

(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the

terrorist degree)

then let my body fail my soul

in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I

if I ever let love go

because the hatred and the whisperings

become a phantom dictate I obey

in lieu of impulse and realities

(the blossoming flamingos of my

wild mimosa trees)

then let love freeze me

out.

I must become

I must become a menace to my enemies.

from Things That I Do in the Dark (1977)

and from Directed by Desire. The Collected Poems of June Jordan.

Copyright 2005 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate Trust

How The Bronx Was Branded / The New Inquiry

ESSAYS & REVIEWS

How the Bronx was Branded

Art moguls, real-estate developers, city institutions, and local elites unite in the name of development for the few, displacement for the many

By SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ DECEMBER 12, 2018

IN July 2015, a slick, minimalist billboard appeared above the Bruckner Expressway in the South Bronx, proclaiming: “South Bronx—Piano District. Luxury Waterfront Living. World-Class Dining, Fashion, Art, + Architecture. Coming Soon.” The billboard featured the logo of Somerset Partners and their business associate the Chetrit Group and was funded by developer Keith Rubenstein. Earlier that year they had purchased land along the formerly industrial Bronx waterfront for $58 million, a process facilitated by Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. As with the renaming of other places in New York City like “SoHo” and “East Williamsburg” in previous decades, the billboard signaled with colonial arrogance that two working-class neighborhoods of color—currently known as Port Morris and Mott Haven—were now destined to be carved into new territories of luxury real-estate development. Two 25-story towers were to be constructed, with market-rate apartments starting at $3,500 per month. Angry Bronx residents revolted against the proposed name change, and it culminated with the “Piano District” billboard being defaced.

The billboard announced Rubenstein’s desire to purchase the South Bronx and build a luxury colony in one of the poorest regions of New York City, which for decades had been associated in mainstream media with stereotypical images of dereliction, crime, and violence. As suggested by the slogan of the billboard, an appeal to “art” would be crucial in transforming the image of the South Bronx from marginal working-class zone to among the most hyped-up frontiers of property speculation in the city—a process led by developers that would unfold with the full support of local and city government. Each of these entities—developers, local elected officials, and the city administration—weaponized the arts to move this initiative further along. It reveals an unnerving intersection of power that positions real-estate developers, the art world, and city government in an alliance to advance gentrification, as a process of systematic repopulation, further into poor and working-class communities.

Rather than simply erasing the cultural history of the Bronx, contemporary neoliberalism has worked to appropriate it in the service of rebranding. Though this process is spearheaded by figures like Rubenstein, Bronx-born elites have themselves been complicit in it, including homegrown celebrities like rapper-producer Swizz Beatz. In turn, the apparently more benign discourse of “social-practice art” is poised to play a role in this process as well, especially through the cultural initiatives of New York City Director of Cultural Affairs Tom Finkelpearl, whose work will inevitably be integrated with the pro-developer policies of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as Finklepearl makes appeals to community engagement and local cultural heritage.

During the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War and large-scale deindustrialization, which led to massive unemployment, the Bronx was largely abandoned by city and state agencies. New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan espoused a philosophy of “benign neglect,” also known as planned shrinkage, in the borough, which essentially withdrew city services such as sanitation, street repair, and firehouses. What followed was the murderous mass torching of buildings and homes in the Bronx by racist, greedy landlords looking to collect fire-insurance money from these properties. By 1977, “the Bronx is Burning” would be a catchphrase heard all across the world as it became a symbol of urban decay, sending Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan into the bombed-out borough to pander for votes.

In the midst of this wave of plagues, young people in the Bronx formed a new culture, a radical avant-garde art movement that would shape culture globally: hip-hop. The South Bronx continues to be a beacon of art and culture. Young people there reinvent language, fashion, music, and dance at lightning speed. By the time this genius is “discovered” by some corporate exec, it is already stale, and these young people have moved on to new iterations of joy and survival expressed through this cultural practice.

Despite this genius, honorable cultural distinction reserved for the Bronx has not affected its political economy; marked as the poorest U.S. congressional district in 2010, the Bronx continues to rank among the areas highest in poverty, unemployment, asthma, obesity, and malnutrition in the country. In New York, the importance of the Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop has only recently been embraced and acknowledged—but as a marketing tool. The hip-hop origin story has become a selling point for luxury developers in the South Bronx.

While the aesthetics of Keith Rubenstein’s first “Piano District” billboard in July 2015 were minimalist and matter-of-fact, the kickoff promotional event for his campaign to rebrand the South Bronx was an extravagant spectacle of the borough’s traumatic history. The event, entitled “Macabre Suite,” was held on Halloween 2015 in one of Rubenstein’s newly purchased warehouses slated for development on the waterfront. It was orchestrated by Salon 94 gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who commissioned artist Lucien Smith to create installations in the former piano factory where the party took place. The installations entailed a clichéd reimagining of the South Bronx in the 1970s. Bullet-ridden cars were installed in the space along with hobo-style bonfires in metal barrels. Rubenstein then chartered buses for A-list celebrities and art-world impresarios making their way from Manhattan. The social-media accounts of attendees swarmed with the hashtag of the night, #thebronxisburning, creating a mockery of the arson committed by slumlords decades earlier.

Backlash ensued in protests and in the press and Rubenstein receded from the media spotlight to let the controversy die down quietly, launching an offshoot of Somerset Partners under the name Somerset Hospitality Group. This entity began systematically opening local businesses in the vicinity of the Piano District project as a way to expedite the gentrification process. La Grata Pizzeria and Filtered Coffee were the first to open in the neighborhood. Locally, he invested in young Bronx designer Jerome LaMaar’s boutique 9J, the boxing gym South Box, and the nonprofit art gallery BronxArtSpace. Under the guise of “trying to do right by the community,” Rubenstein hired locals to work in his pizzeria and coffee shop. As he told NPR, “People who live in the public housing down the street work at the new pizza place. The boxing gym will offer scholarships to local kids. And residents who’ve been clamoring for access to the waterfront will finally get it.” Rubenstein uses the deceptive rhetoric of “job creation,” forming a human shield to ward off criticism, but the relatively few people who are employed by the local businesses Rubenstein floats do not outweigh the massive number of people who will be forced to move because they can no longer afford their apartments. Rubenstein will shamelessly parade around the recipients of his benevolence, but the wages they earn will not be enough to save them from displacement.

The Rubenstein strategy is simple: build a planned community by planting “Trojan horse” businesses in the area to hold space. Artists in search of cheaper rents will inevitably flock to the South Bronx, where the rent is quickly becoming unaffordable for long-time residents but is considered affordable to newcomers who have been priced out of Brooklyn. Struggling artists will inevitably respond, and through no fault of their own set in motion the displacement of the people who live there, before they are eventually displaced too. Rubenstein’s shallow investment in local businesses and talent takes advantage of a people who have historically been locked out of pursuing creative business endeavors. While this is the case, protests and boycotts of those local Bronx residents who crossed the hypothetical picket line and accepted Rubenstein’s patronage are obligatory. Rubenstein knows all too well that artists and the poor and working-class people of the Bronx are starved of funding and opportunity and seeks to exploit these circumstances for his own profit. Developer tactics range from “lending” spaces to artists and curators for pop-up shows in new developments built in the middle of poor and working-class neighborhoods to draw in potential renters, to funding start-ups and small-business ventures to create ambiance and selling points for neighborhoods still considered too “edgy,” to donating free studio space to up-and-coming artists as a way of generating interest in their new investments.

Positioning himself as a benevolent and pragmatic capitalist with a conscience, Rubenstein insistently suggests that support for local upstarts and artists today might absolve him from travesties committed tomorrow, that charity will exonerate him when he eventually bulldozes and displaces a whole neighborhood. Rubenstein mimes the philosophies touted by progressive liberals who believe that working within the system can produce some kind of “conscious capitalism,” but his philanthropy is a smoke screen. With a significant amount of local support Rubenstein was ready to re-announce his venture in the South Bronx. Rather than throw another party himself, he brought in a famous Bronx native armed with his own philanthropic project: rapper-producer Swizz Beatz.

Kasseem Dean, who goes by his stage name Swizz Beatz and is a well-known art collector, joined the board of trustees of the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. In August 2016, Dean was hired as “Global Chief of Creative Culture” for Bacardi and launched the project No Commission, an art fair that showcased the work of emerging artists of color alongside prominent African-American artists. Dean’s motto, “If you free the artist, you free the world,” was widely applauded. The No Commission model allowed artists to sell their work directly to buyers without paying the high commissions charged by galleries. This commission-free selling took place in the context of a four-day music festival that was free and open to the public, as long as attendees RSVPed on the Bacardi website. The audience was privy to performances by DMX, Q-Tip, Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, Dean’s wife Alicia Keys, A$AP Rocky, Young Thug, Fabolous, and many more. There was a Ferris wheel on-site for partygoers to enjoy, and the outer walls of the venue were covered in a mural by TATS CRU, the legendary graffiti collective. The Bacardi was free.

“I think without the Bronx in the world, a big hole would be missing,” declared Dean nostalgically as he bicycled through his old neighborhood with A$AP Rocky in a promotional video for No Commission. But this nostalgia did not stop Dean from partying at the Macabre Suite event the year before, reveling in the mockery of the same people who were now the object of his sentimentality. In fact, the No Commission event served as a vehicle for reintroducing the Keith Rubenstein project to the Bronx, helping Rubenstein reframe the site where the Macabre Suite party had occurred. Dean’s street cred and social capital served as the ultimate buffer for Rubenstein’s project, though his musings about making the arts accessible to Bronx residents weren’t reflected in the event. The RSVP on the Bacardi website didn’t work for many, and the barricades surrounding the venue with manned NYPD officers certainly made it unwelcome to the people in the neighborhood.
As a result of Dean’s collaboration with Rubenstein, No Commission was heavily protested by groups such as Take Back the Bronx, Why Accountability, and a wide variety of folks from the community, among their numbers many outraged New York–based artists of color. When Dean was forced to respond, he applauded the “landlord” (Rubenstein) for pushing back his development project for two months so that Dean could hold the festival (the delay cost Rubenstein only $2 million). Ultimately, Dean treated the gentrification of the South Bronx as inevitable, and his indifference to how it would affect the borough that raised him was made plain in an interview he did with Vibe magazine about working with Rubenstein: “The plan is already done . . . so let’s go out with a blast.” The minute the No Commission event was over, Dean jet-setted out of the Bronx, leaving local artists and activists deeply divided. Some initiated conversations in the community about the implications of a famous hip-hop star from the Bronx lending his street cred to a developer. Others—missing the bigger picture entirely—focused on the fact that Dean didn’t include local Bronx artists in the show. Other artists who did participate resented the activists for protesting what they saw as their big break, since opportunities of this caliber for artists of color are rare. Meanwhile, Rubenstein made a clean getaway, as the debates around these complex issues turned the focus away from his development project.

The potential for social and economic advancement for a few puts countless long-time residents in danger of displacement. Hip-hop culture and its icons, from the oldest pioneers to the youngest up-and-coming emcees, are co-opted by developers who operate in the Bronx with strong government support thanks to Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. In 2016 Rubenstein hosted a $2,500-a-plate fundraiser at his home for Díaz’s reelection campaign. Díaz in turn champions gentrification as revitalization and is a long-standing ally of developers. He points to Rubenstein’s shiny new Potemkin village as an example of urban progress, and manipulates the desires of the people of the Bronx, who have endured decades of benign neglect. In his cozy relationship with real-estate interests, Díaz is not unusual among New York City politicians. Many of these politicians cower before the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), two powerful groups that lobby on behalf of landlords and fill the coffers of every politician from the Bronx to the state capital in Albany.

With a Bronx borough president in the pocket, Rubenstein is guaranteed to receive the proper governmental infrastructure necessary to accompany the lifestyle needs and aesthetic markers that define a neighborhood as “up and coming.” This appears as the revitalization of public spaces. The city plants new trees, replaces street signs, repairs and repaints roadways, and creates bike lanes. After years of neglect, public services beneficial to everyone are expedited solely because it serves a developer’s needs. In 2016, St. Mary’s Park, located a 20-minute walk from the Rubenstein property, received $30 million as part of the NYC “Anchor Parks” initiative. For Mott Haven, this upgrade of St. Mary’s Park is being accompanied by a new $50 million state-of-the-art architecturally avant-garde police station. The new 40th-precinct police station, whose completion is scheduled to coincide with the completion of the nearby Rubenstein project in 2019, will have a green roof, a courtyard, and a training area. It will also have the first-ever “community meeting room” located within the station itself. Inside the community room, a work of community-engaged art will be installed, commissioned by Percent for Art, a division of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, which requires that a percentage of the construction budget of new buildings be used for public art. This art project could be viewed as a step in building a bridge between the community and the police, but what it actually accomplishes is placing art in the service of an abusive and authoritative apparatus of state power that in turn maintains the institutional frameworks upholding the conditions for profitable capital accumulation.

Borinquen Gallo, one of the artists selected to create the installation, contributed a project informed by interviews she conducted with NYPD officers at the 40th precinct and neighboring Bronx residents. Her research culminated in the production of a pair of neon signs. An interior sign, facing the space where officers will hold briefings, will read “Black Lives Matter,” and an exterior neon sign, facing the community room, will read “Blue Lives Matters.” The work is intended to be an equalizer, an effort to bring the police and the community together, but Gallo’s effort collapses under her false assumption that the many generations of people who have lived under the authority of the NYPD, and who are routinely harassed, beaten, and arrested by police, can access equal power in a space located inside a police station. She assumes that the NYPD will not exercise its authority and just unplug the interior sign, leaving the Blue Lives Matter sign blazing and asserting the truth about the power dynamic Gallo glosses over.

The project at the 40th precinct is within the purview of the Department of Cultural Affairs, which is spearheaded by art-world darling and social-practice champion Tom Finkelpearl, who joined the de Blasio administration in 2014 and is charged with overseeing city funding of the arts. In his role as director of cultural affairs, Finkelpearl’s goal is to promote cultural diversity in arts programs citywide; he sees artists and cultural organizations as vital not only for the economic benefits they bring to the city but also for the integral roles they play in their communities. For this reason, Finkelpearl has championed social-practice art, which he understands as art that is not just isolated on the wall of a museum for judgement by an individual viewer but a form of collective participatory interaction engaging with public matters in an urban context.

To his credit, Finkelpearl understands clearly the dilemma faced by artists trying to pursue their practice while living in New York City. As he told Artnet News in 2014,

There are problems for artists related to housing, but the problem in general is that housing is too expensive, and actually I would combine that with the crisis related to student debt . . . But debt is also a big problem for low-income individuals in general. So how do you create coalitions to have artists and folks in the art world understand the coalitions that they should be building with other low-income folks? That’s fundamental to the vision of the administration.

However, as director of cultural affairs, Finkelpearl is beholden to the de Blasio administration. While his personal vision may not be aligned with the goal of assisting developers in hyper-development, his ideological underpinnings allow the city to co-opt his ideas and to bastardize them in the service of private development. This co-optation hinges on Finkelpearl’s idea of what praxis should be—an idea he derives from the famous community organizer and progressive liberal icon Saul Alinsky. Alinsky espoused “realistic pragmatism,” believing that one should focus on single issues and work within the system to achieve winnable goals. But in this approach, concessions won through struggle will always remain within the power structures that grant them. Finkelpearl could preside over the greatest overhaul in cultural equity this city has ever seen, but instead he risks inadvertently providing the channels for the city to utilize the arts as a path-clearing tool for predatory development.

In his book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky attempts to persuade future community organizers to follow his “pragmatic” approach, which he says must begin from the premise that we must “accept the world as it is.” In order to change it, one must work within the system. He is only interested in concessions that can be gained from the powerful elite, leaving undisturbed the structures that constrict freedom and hold time and space captive.

Writing extensively about the organizing he stewarded with his Back of the Yards organization, Alinsky propels the role of the organizer to the forefront as “the architect and engineer” of campaigns. This hierarchical positioning of the organizer over the community is also found within most union organizing, where bureaucratic negotiations are managed by a weak leadership that is uncomfortably cozy with the bosses. This absence of antagonism renders the unions largely powerless vis-à-vis their employers. Nonprofit organizations have also adopted Alinsky’s model of “single-issue,” service-oriented community work administered by a paid staff who, in order to keep their jobs, must prioritize the desires of the foundations that fund them over the needs of the community. At their core, philanthropic foundations aim to determine the priorities and limits of community organizing. Foundations requiring grant recipients to focus on a single issue is a tactic, and the Alinsky model of organizing follows suit.

In his classic 1969 text Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert L. Allen details the strategic interests of these powerful foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and the National Alliance of Businessmen, in the fight for civil rights and black liberation. The nonprofit foundation, he writes,

was designed to counter the potentially revolutionary thrust of the recent black rebellions in major cities across the country. This program was formulated by America’s corporate elite—the major owners, managers, and directors of the giant corporations, banks, and foundations which increasingly dominate the economy and society as a whole—because they believe that the urban revolts pose a serious threat to economic and social stability.

This mixture of counterinsurgency on the one hand and accommodation and integration on the other haunts what we now know as the “nonprofit industrial complex,” defined by Dylan Rodríguez as “set of symbiotic relationships that link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.” This helps explain why Finkelpearl’s Department of Cultural Affairs has commissioned artists to decorate a new NYPD station house in the Bronx: Both departments are arms of the same apparatus.

The Rubenstein development in the South Bronx is well underway and has been sold to Brookfield Properties for $165 million. Rubenstein remains in the South Bronx, as he has opened offices for Somerset along the Bruckner and now owns other properties in the area. The coffee shops are open and the real estate is booming. Ultimately, the wave was too strong to escape, and the people in the Bronx scramble now to get ahead of any city planning sessions for rezonings to try to stop these developer giveaways in their tracks. What developers, city officials, and politicians have ultimately taken from us is space.

In New York City, artists experience this crisis of the disappearance of space alongside other New Yorkers in many ways. Less space on the subway, which is constantly delayed and in disrepair. There is less space for work, as opportunities to sustain our lives continue to disappear and our hours and budgets are trimmed while the rent on our studios and our apartments increases.

Like many other major cities, New York has been reorganized into roommate-driven living systems where we barely restore our bodies, in order to repeat the process of sustaining our lives so we might continue to prop up the structures that continue to allot less time to actively pursue leisure or, more importantly, to organize and agitate for our freedom. How would an artistic practice that aims to disrupt alienation appear in our hallways, elevators, and all the spaces we share in our communities? What if these considerations were practiced outside of the art world, without foundation grants or institutional support as just an act toward freedom? Rather than only thinking about the aesthetic qualities of space, artists can aim to topple the neoliberal scaffold that holds capitalism steady above us, like a firmament.

Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”

Jean-Paul Sartre 1961

NOT so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon! ... therhood!’ It was the golden age.

It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices

still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed, the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that bark don’t bite.’ A new generation came on the scene, which changed the issue. With unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our values and the true facts of their lives did not hang together, and that they could neither reject them completely nor yet assimilate them. By and large, what they were saying was this: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart.’ Very much at our ease, we listened to them all; colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and for that matter they do not read much of him, but they do not need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy consciences are caught up in their own contradictions. They will not get anywhere; so, let us perpetuate their discomfort; nothing will come of it but talk. If they were, the experts told us, asking for anything at all precise in their wailing, it would be integration. Of course, there is no question of granting that; the system, which depends on over-exploitation, as you know, would be ruined. But

it’s enough to hold the carrot in front of their noses, they’ll gallop all right. As to a revolt, we need not worry at all; what native in his senses would go off to massacre the fair sons of Europe simply to become European as they are? In short, we encouraged these disconsolate spirits and thought it not a bad idea for once to award the Prix Goncourt to a Negro. That was before ’39. 1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.’ The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds: ‘Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away from it.’ In other words, she’s done for. A truth which is not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced, are we not, fellow-Europeans, in the marrow of our bones? We must however make one reservation. When a Frenchman, for example, says to other Frenchmen ‘The country is done for’ — which has happened, I should think, almost every day since 1930 — it is emotional talk; burning with love and fury, the speaker includes himself with his fellow-countrymen. And then, usually, he adds ‘Unless ...’ His meaning is clear; no more mistakes must be made; if his instructions are not carried out to the letter, then and only then will the country go to pieces. In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice and these remarks are so much the less shocking in that they spring from a national intersubjectivity. But on the contrary when Fanon says of Europe that she is rushing to her doom, far from sounding the alarm he is merely setting out a

diagnosis. This doctor neither claims that she is a hopeless case — miracles have been known to exist — nor does he give her the means to cure herself. He certifies that she is dying, on external evidence, founded on symptoms that he can observe. As to curing her, no; he has other things to think about; he does not give a damn whether she lives or dies. Because of this, his book is scandalous. And if you murmur, jokingly embarrassed, ‘He has it in for us!’ the true nature of the scandal escapes you; for Fanon has nothing in for you at all; his work — red-hot for some — in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, never to you. The black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished; the days of colonized laureats are over. An ex-native French-speaking, bends that language to new requirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized only: ‘Natives of an under-developed countries, unite!’ What a downfall! For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our well-known crimes: Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar: but he does not waste his time in condemning them; he uses them. If he demonstrates the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations which unite and oppose the colonists to the people of the mother country, it is for his brothers; his aim is to teach them to beat us at our own game.

In short, the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. We

know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that enslaved peoples are still to be found there, together with some who have achieved a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who have obtained complete freedom but who live under the constant menace of imperialist aggression. These differences are born of colonial history, in other words of oppression. Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole. In the heat of battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen- proletariat of the shanty towns — all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists. The example of Katanga illustrates this quite well. Thus the unity of the Third World is not yet achieved. It is a work in progress, which

begins by the union, in each country, after independence as before, of the whole of the colonized under the command of the peasant class. This is what Fanon explains to his brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America: we must achieve revolutionary socialism all together everywhere, or else one by one we will be defeated by our former masters. He hides nothing, neither weaknesses, nor discords, nor mystification. Here, the movement gets off to a bad start; then, after a striking initial success it loses momentum; elsewhere it has come to a standstill, and if it is to start again, the peasants must throw their bourgeoisie overboard. The reader is sternly put on his guard against the most dangerous will o’ the wisps: the cult of the leader and of personalities, Western culture, and what is equally to be feared, the withdrawal into the twilight of past African culture. For the only true culture is that of the Revolution; that is to say, it is constantly in the making. Fanon speaks out loud; we Europeans can hear him, as the fact that you hold this book in your hand proves; is he not then afraid that the colonial powers may take advantage of his sincerity?

No; he fears nothing. Our methods are out-of-date; they can sometimes delay emancipation, but not stop it. And do not think that we can change our ways; neo-colonialism, that idle dream of mother countries, is a lot of hot air; the ‘Third

Forces’ don’t exist, or if they do they are only the tin-pot bourgeoisies that colonialism has already placed in the saddle. Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force, when he can command it; the native has only one choice, between servitude or supremacy. What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks, and he is sure we have no more up our sleeves. It is to them he says: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she lets go. It’s a good moment; nothing can happen at Bizerta, at Elizabethville or in the Algerian bled that the whole world does not hear about. The rival blocks take opposite sides, and hold each other in check; let us take advantage of this paralysis, let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we've no other arms, the waiting knife’s enough.’

Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.

In this case, you will say, let’s throw away this book. Why read it if it is not written for us? For two reasons; the first is that Fanon explains you to his brothers and shows them the mechanism by which we are estranged from

ourselves; take advantage of this, and get to know yourselves seen in the light of truth, objectively. Our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable. It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realize what we have made of ourselves. But is it any use? Yes, for Europe is at death’s door. But, you will say, we live in the mother country, and we disapprove of her excesses. It is true, you are not settlers, but you are no better. For the pioneers belonged to you; you sent them overseas, and it was you they enriched. You warned them that if they shed too much blood you would disown them, or say you did, in something of the same way as any state maintains abroad a mob of agitators, agents provocateurs and spies whom it disowns when they are caught. You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades above all to some of them who are rather too Westernized — the solidarity of the people of the mother country and

of their representatives in the colonies. Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment. You see, I, too, am incapable of ridding myself of subjective illusions; I, too, say to you: ‘All is lost, unless ...’ As a European, I steal the enemy’s book, and out of it I fashion a remedy for Europe. Make the most of it.

And here is the second reason: if you set aside Sorel’s fascist utterances, you will find that Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day. Moreover, you need not think that hot-headedness or an unhappy childhood have given him some uncommon taste for violence; he acts as the interpreter of the situation, that’s all. But this is enough to enable him to constitute, step by step, the dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.

During the last century, the middle classes looked on the workers as covetous creatures, made lawless by their greedy desires; but they took care to include these great brutes in our own species, or at least they considered that they were free men — that is to say, free to sell their labour. In France, as in England, humanism claimed to be universal.

In the case of forced labour, it is quite the contrary. There is no contract; moreover, there must be intimidation and thus oppression grows. Our soldiers overseas, rejecting the universalism of the mother country, apply the ‘numerus clausus’ to the human race: since none may enslave, rob or kill his fellowman without committing a crime, they lay down the principle that the native is not one of our fellow-men. Our striking-power has been given the mission of changing this abstract certainty into reality: the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of the annexed country to the level of superior monkeys in order to justify the settler’s treatment of them as beasts of burden. Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job; guns are levelled at the peasant; civilians

come to take over his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for them. If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his character and make his inmost self fall to pieces. The business is conducted with flying colours and by experts: the ‘psychological services’ weren’t established yesterday; nor was brain-washing. And yet, in spite of an these efforts, their ends are nowhere achieved: neither in the Congo, where Negroes’ hands were cut off, nor in Angola, where until very recently malcontents’ lips were pierced in order to shut them with padlocks. I do not say that it is impossible to change a Man into an animal I simply say that you won’t get there without weakening him considerably. Blows will never suffice; you have to push the starvation further, and that’s the trouble with slavery.

For when you domesticate a member of our own species, you reduce his output, and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes by costing more than he brings in. For this reason the settlers are obliged to stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor animal, is the native. Beaten, under- nourished, ill, terrified — but only up to a certain point — he has, whether he’s black, yellow or white, always the same traits of character: he’s a sly-boots, a lazybones and a thief, who lives on nothing, and who understands only violence. Poor settler; here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He ought to kill those he plunders, as they say djinns do. Now, this is not possible, because he must exploit them as well. Because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization.

But it does not happen immediately. At first the European’s reign continues. He has already lost the battle, but this is not obvious; he does not yet know that the natives are only half-native; to hear him talk, it would seem that he ill-treats them in order to destroy or to repress the evil that they have rooted in them; and after three generations their pernicious instincts will reappear no more. What instincts does he mean? The instincts that urge slaves on to massacre their master? Can he not here recognize his own cruelty turned against himself? In the savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find his own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed through every pore and for which there is no cure? The reason is simple; this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of the ‘inferior races’ will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. Three generations did we say? Hardly has the second generation opened their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their fathers being flogged. In psychiatric terms, they are ‘traumatized’, for life. But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the European will pay for sooner or later. After that, when it is their turn to be broken in, when they are taught what shame and hunger and pain are, all that is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury

whose force is equal to that of the pressure put upon them. You said they understand nothing but violence? Of course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror. Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen, by their ever-present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men because of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of them — because of him, and against him. Hatred, blind hatred which is as yet an abstraction, is their only wealth; the Master calls it forth because he seeks to reduce them to animals, but

he fails to break it down because his interests stop him half-way. Thus the ‘half- natives’ are still humans, through the power and the weakness of the oppressor which is transformed within them into a stubborn refusal of the animal condition. We realize what follows; they’re lazy: of course — it’s a form of sabotage. they’re sly and thieving; just imagine! But their petty thefts mark the beginning of a resistance which is still unorganized. That is not enough; there are those among them who assert themselves by throwing themselves barehanded against the guns; these are their heroes. Others make men of themselves by murdering Europeans, and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony exalts the terrified masses. Yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the fear that they experience when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression but also that which their own fury produces in them. They are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of their humanity. Read Fanon: you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious. If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy — and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood. They can only stop themselves from marching against the machine-guns by doing our work for us; of their own accord they will speed up the dehumanisation that they reject. Under the amused eye of the settler, they will take the greatest precautions against their own kind by setting up supernatural barriers, at times reviving old and terrible myths, at others binding themselves by scrupulous rites. It is in this way that an obsessed person flees from his deepest needs — by binding himself to certain observances which require his attention at every turn. They dance; that

keeps them busy; it relaxes their painfully contracted muscles; and then the dance mimes secretly, often without their knowing, the refusal they cannot utter and the murders they dare not commit. In certain districts they make use of that last resort — possession by spirits. Formerly this was a religious experience in all its simplicity, a certain communion of the faithful with sacred things; now they make of it a weapon against humiliation and despair; Mumbo-Jumbo and all the idols of the tribe come down among them, rule over their violence and waste it in trances until it in exhausted. At the same time these high-placed, personages protect them; in other words the colonized people protect themselves against colonial estrangement by going one better in religious estrangement, with the unique result that finally they add the two estrangements together and each

reinforces the other. Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by his demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays him compliments; but the jeers don’t stop for all that; only from then on, they alternate with congratulations. This is a defence, but it is also the end of the story; the self is disassociated, and the patient heads for madness. Let us add, for certain other carefully selected unfortunates, that other witchery of which I have already spoken: Western culture. If I were them, you may say, I'd prefer my mumbo-jumbo to their Acropolis. Very good: you’ve grasped the situation. But not altogether, because you aren’t them — or not yet. Otherwise you would know that they can’t choose; they must have both. Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens. Our enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same thing. The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent. Laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the contradiction is explosive. For that matter it does explode, you know as well as I do; and we are living at the moment when the match is put to the fuse. When the rising birthrate brings wider famine in its wake, when these newcomers have life to fear rather more than death, the torrent of violence sweeps away all barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it. The ‘liberals’ are stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough to the natives, that it would have been wiser and fairer to allow them certain rights in so far as this was possible; they ask nothing better than to admit them in batches and without sponsors to that very exclusive club, our species; and now this barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t spare them any more than the bad settlers. The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But, all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left scolds them ... ‘you’re going too far; we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up their backsides. Once their

war began, they saw this hard truth: that every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out of them; they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant favoured treatment to no one. There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power. The more far- seeing among us will be, in the last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot help seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that these less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of humanity. Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest souls contain racial prejudice.

They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it — that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them. The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we consider it as a triumph of barbarism; but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter. You may fear or be feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the disassociations of a sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity. When the peasant takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten. The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot. At this moment the Nation does not shrink from him; wherever he goes, wherever he may be, she is; she follows, and is never lost to view, for she is one with his liberty. But, after the first surprise, the colonial army strikes; and then all must unite or be slaughtered. Tribal dissensions weaken and tend to disappear; in the first place because they endanger the Revolution, but for the more profound reason that they served no other purpose before than to divert violence against false foes. When they remain — as in the Congo — it’s because they are kept up by the agents of colonialism. The Nation marches forward; for each of her children she is to be found wherever his brothers are fighting. Their feeling for each other is the reverse of the hatred they feel for you; they are brothers inasmuch as each of them has killed and may at any moment have to kill again. Fanon shows his readers the limits of ‘spontaneity’ and the need for and dangers of ‘organization’. But however great may be the task at each turning of the way the revolutionary consciousness deepens. The last complexes flee away; no one need come to us talking of the ‘dependency’ complex of an A.L.N. soldier. With his blinkers off, the peasant takes account of his real needs; before they were enough to kill him, but he tried to ignore them; now he sees them as infinitely great requirements. In this violence which springs from the people, which enables them to hold out for five years — for eight years as the Algerians

have done — the military, political and social necessities cannot be separated. The war, by merely setting the question of command and responsibility, institutes new structures which will become the first institutions of peace. Here, then, is man even now established in new traditions, the future children of a horrible present; here then we see him legitimized by a law which will be born or is born each day under fire: once the last settler is killed, shipped home or assimilated, the minority breed disappears, to be replaced by socialism. And that’s not enough; the rebel does not stop there; for you can be quite sure that he is not risking his skin to find himself at the level of a former inhabitant of the old

mother country. Look how patient he is! Perhaps he dreams of another Dien Bien Phu, but don’t think he’s really counting on it; he’s a beggar fighting, in his poverty, against rich men powerfully armed. While he is waiting for decisive victories, or even without expecting them at all, he tires out his adversaries until they are sick of him.

It will not be without fearful losses; the colonial army becomes ferocious; the country is marked out, there are mopping-up operations, transfers of population, reprisal expeditions, and they massacre women and children. He knows this; this new man begins his life as a man at the end of it; he considers himself as a potential corpse. He will be killed; not only does he accept this risk, he’s sure of it. This potential dead man has lost his wife and his children; he has seen so many dying men that he prefers victory to survival; others, not he, will have the fruits of victory; he is too weary of it all. But this weariness of the heart is the root of an unbelievable courage. We find our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond torture and death. We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind. The child of violence, at every moment he draws from it his humanity. We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of higher quality. Here Fanon stops. He has shown the way forward: he is the spokesman of those who are fighting and he has called for union, that is to say the unity of the African continent against all dissensions and all particularisms. He has gained his end. If he had wished to describe in all its details the historical phenomenon of decolonization he would have to have spoken of us; this is not at all his intention. But, when we have closed the book, the argument continues within us, in spite of its author; for we feel the strength of the peoples in revolt and we answer by force. Thus there is a fresh moment of violence; and this time we ourselves are involved, for by its nature this violence is changing us, accordingly as the ‘half- native’ is changed. Everyone of us must think for himself — always provided that he thinks at all; for in Europe today, stunned as she is by the blows received by France, Belgium or England, even to allow your mind to be diverted, however slightly, is as good as being the accomplice in crime of colonialism. This book has not the slightest need of a preface, all the less because it is not addressed to us. Yet I have written one, in order to bring the argument to its conclusion; for we in Europe too are being decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for

pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners nor victims. Very well then; if you’re not victims when the government which you’ve voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of doubt, executioners. And if you chose to be victims and to risk being put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your irons out of the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out; they’ll

have to stay there till the end. Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors. You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new continents’, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the threat of a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation. This fat, pale continent ends by falling into what Fanon rightly calls narcissism. Cocteau became irritated with Paris — ‘that city which talks about itself the whole time’. Is Europe any different? And that super- European monstrosity, North America? Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour, patriotism and what have you. All this did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers, dirty Jews and dirty Arabs. High-minded people, liberal or just soft-hearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters. While there was a native population somewhere this imposture was not shown up; in the notion of the human race we found an abstract assumption of universality which served as cover for the most realistic practices. On the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-than-humans who, thanks to us, might reach our status a thousand years hence, perhaps; in short, we mistook the elite for the genus. Today, the native populations reveal their true nature, and at the same time our exclusive ‘club’ reveals its weakness — that it’s neither more nor less than a minority. Worse than that: since the others become men in name against us, it seems that we are the enemies of mankind; the élite shows itself in its true colours — it is nothing more than a gang. Our precious sets of values begin to moult; on closer scrutiny you won’t see one that isn’t stained with blood. If you are looking for an example, remember these fine words: ‘How generous France is!’ Us, generous? What about Sétif, then? And those eight years of ferocious war which have cost the lives of over a million Algerians? And the tortures?

But let it be understood that nobody reproaches us with having been false to such-and-such a mission — for the very good reason that we had no mission at

all. It is generosity itself that’s in question; this fine melodious word has only one meaning: the granting of a statutory charter. For the folk across the water, new men, freed men, no one has the power nor the right to give anything to anybody; for each of them has every right, and the right to everything. And when one day our human kind becomes full-grown, it will not define itself as the sum total of the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of their mutual needs.

Here I stop; you will have no trouble in finishing the job; all you have to do is to look our aristocratic virtues straight in the face, for the first and last time. They are cracking up; how could they survive the aristocracy of underlings who brought them into being? A few years ago, a bourgeois colonialist commentator found only this to say in defence of the West: ‘We aren’t angels. But we, at least, feel some remorse.’ What a confession! Formerly our continent was buoyed up by other means: the Parthenon, Chartres, the Rights of Man or the swastika. Now we know what these are worth; and the only chance of our being saved from, shipwreck is the very Christian sentiment of guilt. You can see it’s the end; Europe is springing leaks everywhere. What then has happened? It simply is that in the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The ratio of forces has been inverted; decolonization has begun; all that our hired soldiers can do is to delay its completion.

The old ‘mother countries’ have still to go the whole hog, still have to engage their entire forces in a battle which is lost before it has begun. At the end of the adventure we again find that colonial brutality which was Bugeaud’s doubtful but though it has been multiplied ten-fold, it’s still not enough. The national service units are sent to Algeria, and they remain there seven years with no result. Violence has changed its direction. When we were victorious we practised it without its seeming to alter us; it broke down the others, but for us men our humanism remained intact. United by their profits, the peoples of the mother countries baptized their commonwealth of crimes, calling them fraternity and love; today violence, blocked everywhere, comes back on us through our soldiers, comes inside and takes possession of us. Involution starts; the native re-creates himself, and we, settlers and Europeans, ultras and liberals we break up. Rage and fear are already blatant; they show themselves openly in the nigger-hunts in Algeria. Now, which side are the savages on? Where is barbarism? Nothing is missing, not even the tom-toms; the motor-horns beat out ‘Al-gér-ie fran-çaise’ while the Europeans burn Moslems alive. Fanon reminds us that not so very long ago, a congress of psychiatrists was distressed by the criminal propensities of the native population. ‘Those people kill each other,’ they said, ‘that isn’t normal. The Algerian’s cortex must be under-developed.’ In central Africa, others have established that ‘the African makes very little use of his frontal lobes’. These learned men would do well today to follow up their investigations in Europe, and particularly with regard to the French. For we, too, during the last few years, must be victims of ‘frontal sluggishness’ since our patriots do quite a bit of assassinating of their fellow-countrymen and if they’re not at home, they blow up their house and their concierge. This is only a beginning; civil war is forecast for the autumn, or for the spring of next year. Yet our lobes seem to be in perfect condition; is it not rather the case that, since we cannot crush the natives, violence comes back on its tracks, accumulates in the very depths of our nature

and seeks a way out? The union of the Algerian people causes the disunion of the French people; throughout the whole territory of the ex-mother-country, the tribes are dancing their war-dances. The terror has left Africa, and is settling here; for quite obviously there are certain furious beings who want to make us

Pay with our own blood for the shame of having been beaten by the native. Then too, there are the others, all the others who are equally guilty (for after Bizerta, after the lynchings of September, who among them came out into the streets to shout ‘We've had enough'?) but less spectacular — the liberals, and the toughs of the tender Left.

The fever is mounting amongst them too, and resentment at the same time. And they certainly have the wind up! They hide their rage in myths and complicated rites; in order to stave off the day of reckoning and the need for decision they have put at the head of our affairs a Grand Magician whose business it is to keep us all in the dark at all costs. Nothing is being done; violence, proclaimed by some, disowned by others, turns in a vacuum; one day it bursts out at Metz, the next at Bordeaux; it’s here, there and everywhere, like in a game of hunt the slipper. It’s our turn to tread the path, step by step, which leads down to native level. But to become natives altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger. This won’t happen; for it’s a discredited colonialism which is taking hold on us; this is the senile, arrogant master who will straddle us; here he comes, our mumbo-jumbo.

And when you have read Fanon’s last chapter, you will be convinced that it would be better for you to be a native at the uttermost depths of his misery than to be a former settler. It is not right for a police official to be obliged to torture for ten hours a day; at that rate, his nerves will fall to bits, unless the torturers are forbidden in their own interests to work overtime. When it is desirable that the morality of the Nation and the Army should be protected by the rigours of the law, it is not right that the former should systematically demoralize the latter, nor that a country with a Republican tradition should confide hundreds and thousands of its young folk to the care of putschist officers. It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name, it’s not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgement on yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues. Eight years of silence; what degradation! And your silence is all of no avail; today, the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that does not ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a single action that does hot betray our disgust, and our complicity. It is enough today for two French people to meet together for there to be a dead man between them. One dead man did I say? In other days France was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the name of a nervous disease.

Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted. Today, we are bound hand and foot, humiliated and sick with fear; we cannot fall lower. Happily this is not yet enough for the colonialist

aristocracy; it cannot complete its delaying mission in Algeria until it has first

finished colonizing the French. Every day we retreat in front of the battle, but you may be sure that we will not avoid it; the killers need it; they’ll go for us and hit out blindly to left and right.

Thus the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you will have to fight, or rot in concentration camps. This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters; never fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge. Then, perhaps, when your back is to the wall, you will let loose at last that new violence which is raised up in you by old, oft-repeated crimes. But, as they say, that’s another story: the history of mankind. The time is drawing near, I am sure, when we will join the ranks of those who make it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Excerpts from "The Pink Glass Swan" by Lucy R. Lippard

The general alienation of. contemporary avant-garde art from any broad audience has been crystallized in the women's movement. From the beginning, both liberal feminists concerned with changing women's personal lives and socialist feminists concerned with overthrowing the clas­sist/racist/sexist foundation of society have agreed that "fine" art is more or less irrelevant, though holding out the hope that feminist art could and should be different. The American women artists' movement has concen­trated its efforts on gaining power within its own interest group—the art world, in itself an incestuous network of relationships between artists and art on the one hand and dealers, publishers, and buyers on the other. The public, the "masses," or the audience is hardly considered.

The art world has evolved its own curious class system. Externally this is a microcosm of capitalist society, but it maintains an internal dialectic (or just plain contradiction) that attempts to reverse or ignore that parallel. Fame may he a higher currency than mere money, but the two tend to go together. Since the buying and selling of art and artists are done by the ruling classes or by those chummy with them and their institutions, all artists or producers, no matter what their individual economic backgrounds, are dependent on the owners and forced into a proletarian role- just as women, in Engels's analysis, play proletarian to the male ruler across all class boundaries.

Looking at and "appreciating" art in this century has been understood as an instrument (or at best a result) of upward social mobility, in which owning art is the ultimate step. Making art is at the bottom of the scale.

This is the only legitimate reason to see artists as so many artists see them­selves—as "workers." At the same time, artists/makers tend to feel misun­derstood and, as creators, innately superior to the buyers/owners. The innermost circle of the art-world class system thereby replaces the rulers with the creators, and the contemporary artist in the big city (read New York) is a schizophrenic creature. S/he is persistently working "up" to he accepted, not only by other artists, but also by the hierarchy that exhibits, writes about, and buys her/his work. At the same time s/he is often ideo­logically working "down" in an attempt to identify with the workers outside of the art context and to overthrow the rulers in the name of art. This conflict is augmented by the fact that most artists are originally from the middle class, and their approach to the bourgeoisie includes a touch of adolescent rebellion against authority. Those few who have actually emerged from the working class sometimes use this—their very lack of background privilege—as privilege in itself, while playing the same schizo­phrenic foreground role as their solidly middle-class colleagues.

Artists, then, are workers or at least producers even when they don't know it. Yet artists dressed in work clothes (or expensive imitations thereof) and producing a commodity accessible only to the rich differ drasti­cally from the real working class in that artists control their production and their product—or could if they realized it and if they had the strength to maintain that control. In the studio, at least, unlike the farm, the factory, and the mine, the unorganized worker is in superficial control and can, if s/he dares, talk down to or tell off the boss—the collector, the critic, the curator. For years now, with little effect, it has been pointed out to artists that the art-world superstructure cannot run without them. Art, after all, is the product on which all the money is made and the power based.

During the 1950s and i 96os most American artists were unaware that they did not control their art, that their art could be used not only for aesthetic pleasure or decoration or status symbols, but as an educational weapon. In the late 96o5, between the civil rights, the student, the antiwar, and the women's movements, the facts of the exploitation of art in and out of the art world emerged. Most artists and art workers will ignore these issues because they make them feel too uncomfortable and helpless. If there were a strike against museums and galleries to allow artists control of their work, the scabs would be out immediately in full force, with reasons rang­ing from self-interest to total lack of political awareness to a genuine belief that society would crumble without art, that art is "above it all." Or is it in fact below it all, as most political activists seem to think?

Another aspect of this conflict surfaces in discussions around who gets a "piece of the pie"— a phrase that has become the scornful designation for what is actually most people's goal. (Why shouldn't artists be able to make a living in this society like everybody else? Well, almost everybody else.) Those working for cultural change through political theorizing and occa­sional actions often appear to be opposed to anybody getting a piece of the pie, though politics is getting fashionable again in the art world, and may itself provide a vehicle for internal success; today one can refuse a piece of the pie and simultaneously be getting a chance at it. Still, the pie is very small, and there are a lot of hungry people circling it. Things were bad enough when only men were allowed to take a bite. Since "aggressive women" have gotten in there, too, competition, always at the heart of the art-world class system, has peaked.

Attendance at any large art school in the United States takes students from all classes and trains them for artists' schizophrenia. While being cool and chicly grubby (in the "uniform" of mass production), and knowing what's the latest in taste and what's the kind of art to make and the right names to drop, is clearly "upward mobility"—from school into teaching jobs and/or the art world—the lifestyle accompanying these habits is heavily weighted "down­ward." The working-class girl who has had to work for nice clothes must drop into frayed jeans to make it into the art middle class, which in turn considers itself both upper- and lower-class. Choosing poverty is a confusing experience for a child whose parents (or more likely mother) have tried desperately against great odds to keep a clean and pleasant home.'

The artist who feels superior to the rich because s/he is disguised as someone who is poor provides a puzzle for the truly deprived. A parallel notion, rarely admitted but pervasive, is that people can't understand "art" if their houses are full of pink glass swans or their lawns arc inhabited by gnomes and flamingos, or if they even care about houses and clothes at all. This is particularly ridiculous now, when art itself uses so much of this para­phernalia (and not always satirically or condescendingly); or, from another angle, when even artists who have no visible means of professional support live in palatial lofts and sport beat-up hundred-dollar boots while looking down on the "tourists" who come to SoHo to see art on Saturdays. SoHo is, in fact, the new suburbia. One reason for such callousness is a hangover from the 19 50s, when artists really were poor and proud of being poor because their art, the argument went, must be good if the bad guys—the rich and the masses—didn't like it.

In the 1960s the choice of poverty, often excused as anticonsumerism, even infiltrated the aesthetics of art.' First there was Pop Art, Modeled on kitsch, advertising, and consumerism, and equally successful on its own level. (Women, incidentally, participated little in Pop Art, partly because of its blatant sexism—sometimes presented as a parody of the image of woman in the media—and partly because the subject matter was often "women's work," ennobled and acceptable only when the artists were men.) Then came Process Art—a rebellion against the "precious object" traditionally desired and bought by the rich. Here another kind of co-optation took place, when temporary piles of dirt, oil, rags, and filthy rubber began to grace carpeted living rooms. (The Italian branch was even called Arte Povera.) Then came the rise of a third-stream medium called Conceptual Art, which offered "antiobjects" in the form of ideas—books or simple Xeroxed texts and photographs with no inherent physical or monetary value (until they got on the market, that is). Conceptual Art seemed politically viable because of its notion that the use of ordinary, inexpensive, unbulky media would lead to a kind of socialization (or at least democratization) of art as opposed to gigantic canvases and huge chrome sculptures costing five figures and filling the world with more consumer fetishes.

Yet the trip from oil on canvas to ideas on Xerox was, in retrospect, yet another instance of "downward mobility" or middle-class guilt. It was no accident that Conceptual Art appeared at the height of the social movements of the late 1960s nor that the artists were sympathetic to those movements (with the qualified exception of the women's movement). All the aesthetic tendencies listed above were genuinely instigated as rebellions by the artists themselves, yet the fact remains that only rich people can afford to (i) spend money on art that won't last; (2) live with "ugly art" or art that is not decorative, because the rest of their surroundings are beautiful and comfort­able; and (3) like "nonobject art," which is only handy if you already have too many possessions—when it becomes a reactionary commentary: art for the overprivileged in a consumer society.

As a child, I was accused by my parents of being an "antisnob snob" and I'm only beginning to set the limitations of such a rebellion. Years later I was an early supporter of and proselytizer for Conceptual Art as an escape from the commodity orientation of the art world, a way of communicating with a broader audience via inexpensive media. Though I was bitterly disap­pointed (with the social, not the aesthetic, achievements) when I found that this work could be so easily absorbed into the system, it is only now that I've realized why the absorption took place. Conceptual Art's democratic efforts and physical vehicles were canceled out by its neutral, elitist content and its patronizing approach. From around 1967 to 1971, many of us involved in Conceptual Art saw that content as pretty revolutionary and thought of ourselves as rebels against the cool, hostile artillacts of the prevailing formalist and Minimal art. But we were so totally enveloped in the middle-class approach to everything we did and saw, we couldn't perceive bow that pseudoacademic narrative piece or that art-world‑oriented action in the streets was deprived of any revolutionary content by the fact that it was usually incomprehensible and alienating to the people "out there," no matter how fashionably downwardly mobile it might be in the art world. The idea that if art is subversive in the art world, it will auto­matically appeal to a general audience now seems absurd.

The whole evolutionary basis of modernist innovation, the idea of aesthetic "progress," the "I-did-it-first" and "It's-been-done-already" syndromes that pervade contemporary avant-garde and criticism, is also blatantly classist and has more to do with technology than with art. To be "avant-garde" is inevitably to be on top, or to become upper-middle-class, because such innovations take place in a context accessible only to the educated elite. Thus socially conscious artists working in or with commu­nity groups and muralists try to disassociate themselves from the art world, even though its values ("quality") remain to haunt them personally.

The value systems arc different in and out of the art world, and anyone attempting to straddle the two develops another kind of schizophrenia. For instance, in inner-city community murals, the images of woman are the traditional ones—a beautiful, noble mother and housewife or worker, and a rebellious young woman striving to change her world—both of them cele­brated for their courage to be and to stay the way they are and to support their men in the face of horrendous odds. This is not the art-world or middle-class "radical" view of future feminism, nor is it one that radical feminists hoping to "reach out" across the classes can easily espouse. Here, in the realm of aspirations, is where upward and downward mobility and status quo clash, where the economic class barriers are established. As Michele Russell has noted, the Third World woman is not attracted to the "utopian experimentation" of the Left (in the art world, the would-be Marx­ist avant-garde) or to the "pragmatic opportunism" of the Right (in the art world, those who reform and co-opt the radicals).;

Many of the subjects touched on here have their roots in Taste. To many women, art, or a beautiful object, might be defined as something she cannot have. Beauty and art have been defined before as the desirable. In a consumer society, art, too, becomes a commodity rather than a life-enchanting experi­ence. Yet the Van Gogh reproduction or the pink glass swan—the same

beautiful objects that may be "below" a middle-class woman (because she has, in moving upward, acquired upper-class taste, or would like to think she has)--may be "above" or inaccessible to a welfare mother. The phrase "to dictate taste" has its own political connotations. A Minneapolis worker interviewed by students of artist Don Celender said he liked "old artworks because they're more classy,"4 and class does seem to be what the tradi­tional notion of art is all about. Yet contemporary avant-garde art, for all its attempts to break out of that gold frame, is equally class-bound, and even the artist aware of these contradictions in her/his own life and work is hard put to resolve them. It's a vicious circle. If the artist-producer is upper-middle-class, and our standards of art as taught in schools are persistently upper-middle-class, how do we escape making art only for the upper-middle-class?

The alternatives to "quality," to the "high" art shown in art-world galleries and magazines, have been few and for the most part unsatisfying, although well intended. Even when kitsch, politics, or housework are absorbed into art, contact with the real world is not necessarily made. At no time has the avant-garde, though playing in the famous "gap between art and life," moved far enough out of the art context to attract a broad audience. That same broad audience has, ironically, been trained to think of art as some­thing that has nothing to do with life and, at the same time, it tends only to like that art that means something in terms of its own life or fantasies. The dilemma for the leftist artist in the middle class is that her/his standards seem to have been set irremediably. No matter how much we know about what the broader public wants, or needs, it is very difficult to break social conditioning and cultural habits. Hopefully, a truly feminist art will provide other standards.

To understand the woman artist's position in this complex situation between the art world and the real world, class, and gender, it is necessary to know that in America artists are rarely respected unless they are stars or rich or mad or dead. Being an artist is not being "somebody." Middle-class families are happy to pay lip service to art but god forbid their own children take it so seriously as to consider it a profession. Thus a man who becomes an artist is asked when he is going to "go to work," and he is not so covertly considered a child, a sissy (a woman), someone who has a hobby rather than a vocation, or someone who can't make money and therefore cannot hold his head up in the real world of men—at least until his work sells, at which point he may be welcomed back. Male artists, bending over backward to rid themselves of this stigma, tend to be particularly susceptible to insecu­rity and machismo. So women daring to insist on their place in the primary rank—as artmakers rather than as art housekeepers (curators, critics, dealers, "patrons")—inherit a heavy burden of male fears in addition to the economic and psychological discrimination still rampant in a patriarchal, money-oriented society.

Most art being shown now has little to do with any woman's experience, in part because women (rich ones as "patrons," others as decorators and "home­makers") are in charge of the private sphere, while men identify more easily with public art---art that has become public through economic validation (the million-dollar Rembrandt). Private art is often seen as mere ornament; public art is associated with monuments and money, with "high" art and its contain­ers, including unwelcoming white-walled galleries and museums with classical courthouse architecture. Even the graffiti artists, whose work is unsuccessfully transferred from subways to art galleries, are mostly men, concerned with facades, with having their names in spray paint, in lights, in museums.

Private art is visible only to intimates. I suspect the reason so few women "folk" artists work outdoors in large scale (like Simon Rodia's Watts Towers and other "naives and visionaries" with their cement and bottles) is not only because men aspire to erections and know how to use the necessary tools,

but because women can and must assuage these same creative urges inside the house, with the pink glass swan as an element in their own works of art—the living room or kitchen. In the art world, the situation is doubly paralleled. Women's art until recently was rarely seen in public, and all artists are voluntarily "women" because of the social attitudes mentioned above; the art world is so small that it is "private."

Just as the living room is enclosed by the building it is art and artists, are firmly imprisoned by the culture that supports them. Artists claiming to work for themselves alone,  and not for any audience at all, are passively accepting the upper-middle-class audience of the internal art world. This situation is compounded by the fact that to he middle class is to be passive, to live with the expectation of being taken care of and entertained. But art _ should be a consciousness raiser; it partakes of and should fuse the private and the public spheres. It should be able to reintegrate the personal without, being satisfied by the merely personal. One good test is whether or not it, communicates, and then, of course, what and how it communicates. If it, doesn't communicate, it may just not be very good art from anyone's point .. of view, or it may be that the artist is not even aware of the needs of others, or simply doesn't care.

For there is a need out there, a need vaguely satisfied at the moment by "schlock."t And it seems that one of the basic tenets of the feminist arts should be a reaching out from the private sphere to transform that "artificial art" and to more fully satisfy that need. For the art-world artist has come to consider her/his private needs paramount and has too often forgotten about those of the audience, any audience. Work that communicates to a danger­ous number of people is derogatorily called a "crowd pleaser." This is a blatantly elassist attitude, taking for granted that most people are by nature incapable of understanding good art (i.e., upper-class or quality art). At the same time, much ado is made about art-educational theories that claim to "teach people to see" (consider the political implications of this notion) and muffle all issues by stressing the "universality.' of great art.

It may be that at the moment the possibilities are slim for a middle-class art world's understanding or criticism of the little art we see that reflects working-class cultural values. Perhaps our current responsibility lies in humanizing our own activities so that they will communicate more effec­tively with all women. I hope we aspire to more than women's art flooding the museum and gallery circuit. Perhaps a feminist art will emerge only' when we become wholly responsible for our own work, for what becomes of it, who sees it, and who is nourished by it. For a feminist artist, whatever her style, the prime audience at this time is other women. So far, we have tended to be satisfied with communicating with those women whose social experience is close to ours. This is natural enough, since there is where we will get our greatest support, and we need support in taking this risk of trying to please women, knowing that we are almost certain to displease men in the process. In addition, it is embarrassing to talk openly about the class system that divides us, hard to do so without sounding more bourgeois than ever in the implications of superiority and inferiority inherent in such discussions (where the working class is as often considered superior to the middle class).

A book of essays called Class and Feminism, written by The Furies, a lesbian feminist collective, makes clear that from the point of view of work­ing-class women, class is a definite problem within the women's movement. As Nancy Myron observes, middle-class women:

can intellectualize, politicize, accuse, abuse, and contribute money in order not to deal with their own classism. Even if they admit that class exists, they are not likely to admit that their behavior is a product of it. They will go through every painful detail of their lives to prove to me or another working-class woman that they really didn't have any privilege, that their family was exceptional, that they actually did have an uncle who worked in a factory. To ease anyone's guilt is not the point of talking about class.... You don't get rid of oppression just by talking about it.6

Women arc more strenuously conditioned toward upward cultural mobility or "gentility" than men, which often results in the woman's consciously betraying her class origins as a matter of" course. The hierarchies within the whole span of the middle class are most easily demarcated by lifestyle and dress. For instance, the much-scorned "Queens housewife" may have enough to eat, may have learned to consume the unnecessities, and may have made it to a desired social bracket in her community, but if she ventures to make art (not just own it), she will find herself back at the bottom in the art world, looking wistfully up to the plateau where the male, the young, the bejeaned seem so at ease.

For middle-class women in the art world not only dress "down," but dress like working-class men. They do so because housedresses, pedal pushers, polyester pantsuits, beehives, and the wrong accents are not such acceptable disguises for women as the boots-overalls-and-windbreaker syndrome is for men. Thus, young middle-class women tend to deny their female counterparts and take on "male" (unisex) attire. It may at times have been chic to dress like a Native American or a Bedouin woman, but it has never been chic to dress like a working woman, even if she was trying to look like Jackie Kennedy. Young working-class women (and men) spend a large amount of available money on clothes; it's a way to forget the rats and roaches by which even the cleanest tenement dwellers are blessed, or the mortgages by which even the hardest-working homeowners are blessed, and to present a classy facade. Artists dressing and talking "down" insult the hardhats much as rich kids in rags do; they insult people whose notion of art is something to work for—the pink glass swan.

Yet women, as evidenced by The Furies' publication and as pointed out elsewhere (most notably by August Rebel), have a unique chance to com­municate with women across the boundaries of economic class because as a "vertical class" we share the majority of our ,most fundamental experi­ences—emotionally, even when economically we arc divided. Thus an economic analysis does not adequately explore the psychological and aesthetic ramifications of the need for change within a, sexually oppressed group. Nor does it take into consideration how women's needs differ from men's—or so it seems at this still unequal point in history. The vertical class cuts across the horizontal economic classes in a column of injustices. While heightened class consciousness can only clarify the way we see the world, and all clarification is for the better, I can't bring myself to trust hard lines and categories where fledgling feminism is concerned.

Even in the art world, the issue of feminism has barely been raised in mixed political groups. In 970, women took our rage and our energies to our own organizations or directly to the public by means of picketing and protests. While a few men supported these, and most politically conscious male artists now claim to be feminists to some degree, the political and apolitical art world goes on as though feminism didn't exist------the presence of a few vociferous feminist artists and critics notwithstanding. And in the art world, as in the real world, political commitment frequently means total disregard for feminist priorities. Even the increasingly Marxist group ironi­cally calling itself Art-Language is unwilling to stop the exclusive use of the male pronoun in its theoretical publications.7

Experiences like this one and dissatisfaction with Marxism's lack of inter­est in "the woman question" make me wary of merging Marxism and femi­nism. The notion of the noneconomic or "vertical" class is anathema to Marxists, and confusion is rampant around the chicken-egg question of whether women can be equal before the establishment of a classless society or whether a classless society can be established before women are liber­ated. As Sheila Rowbotham says of her own Marxism and feminism:

They arc at once incompatible and in real need of 0ne another. As a femi­nist and a Marxist, I carry their contradictions within me, and it is tempt­ing to opt for one or the other in an effort to pr0duce a tidy resolution of the commotion generated by the antagonism between them. But to do that would mean evading the social reality which gives rise to the antag0nism.'

As women, therefore, we need to establish far more strongly our own sense of community, so that all our arts will be enjoyed by all women in all economic circumstances. This will happen only when women artists make conscious efforts to cross class harriers, to consider their audience, to sec, respect, and work with the women who create outside the art world—whether in suburban crafts guilds or in offices and factories or in community workshops. The current feminist passion for women's traditional arts, which influences a great many women artists, should make this road much easier, unless it too becomes another commercialized rip-off. Despite the very real class obstacles, I feel strongly that women are in a privileged posi­tion to satisfy the goal of an art that would communicate the needs of all classes and genders to each other, and get rid of the we/they dichotomy to as great an extent as is possible in a capitalist framework. Our gender, our oppression, and our female experience—our female culture, just being explored—offer access to all of us by these common threads.