Bill Ayers

Searching for something else, I found these two short pieces I’d written a couple years ago, more relevant now:

The Myth and the Reality

When slavery was formally abolished in the US, the former owners felt aggrieved as if they were the victims of a terrible injustice. Many sought, and some even won, reparations for lost property—unlike the formerly enslaved workers (the former “property”) who instead of reparations got Black Codes, Jim Crow, regimes of lynch-mob terror, red-lining, mass incarceration, militarized occupying police forces, and more. For those who’d been blithely enjoying their privileges while riding on the backs of others, justice and fairness—equality—can always be made to feel like oppression. It’s not—it is instead a cruel if powerful illusion. But privilege works like that. Today young people are leading and building a broad and hopeful movement—the next step in the centuries-old Black Freedom Movement—demanding the end of militarized police targeting and occupying Black communities, an end to the state-sponsored serial assassinations of Black people, the creation of decent schools and good jobs, the abolition of mass incarceration, reparations for harm done, and simple justice going forward. Black Lives Matter! To some privileged people it’s as if a terrible injustice has once again befallen them—and of course it hasn’t. To proclaim that “Jewish Lives Matter” in Germany in the 1930s would have been a good thing—those were the lives being discounted and destroyed; to say that “Palestinian Lives Matter” in Israel now would be to stand on the side of the downtrodden and disposable. And to shout out that Black Lives Matter! in the US today is to take the side of humanity. Every City Hall and every police precinct should hang a large Black Lives Matter! banner over the front door, and then we should all mobilize to demand a society in which that slogan can be brought authentically to life.

Burn Down the Plantation

“White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudiments of their freedom through the killing of whites.”
~~~Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

Stay calm, white folks. Coates is referring to the bloodiest war in US history, the Civil War, a war begun by confederate traitors willing to blow up the whole house in defense of a single freedom: their assumed right to own other human beings. But still…

That war never ended, once and for all, and the afterlife of slavery included the infamous Black Codes, chain gangs, segregation and red-lining, Jim Crow, poll taxes, and the organized terrorism of lynchings and night rides. Now the afterlife of the afterlife abides in the serial murder of Black people by militarized police forces, the Thirteenth Amendment and mass incarceration, separate and unequal schools, disenfranchisement, the creation of ghettos and homelessness through law and public policy, and more.

Of course there’s also prejudice, racial bias, and all manner of backward stupidity, but the well-spring of that bigotry is the structure of inequality itself, not the other way around. That is, the reality of inequality baked into law and economic condition as well as history, custom and culture generates racist thoughts and feelings as justification, and those racist ideas keep regenerating as long as the structures of white supremacy and black oppression are in place. Race itself is, of course, both everywhere and nowhere at all—a social construction and massive fiction, and at the same time the hardest of hard-edged realities in everyday life.

To end the racial nightmare we’ll need more than body cameras or prison reform or sensitivity training or education—even if some reforms would be welcomed. The answer requires us to face reality and to courageously confront our history, tell the truth, and then destroy the entire edifice of white supremacy—metaphorically speaking, it means we must burn down the plantation.

And when the plantation is at last burned to the ground, people of European descent, or “those who believe they are white,” will find the easy privileges they’d taken for granted disappearing, and along with them their willful blindness and faux-innocence. Also gone: the fragile, precarious perch of superiority. White folks will have to give up their accumulated, unearned advantages, and yet they stand to gain something wonderful: a fuller personhood and a moral bearing. We face an urgent challenge, then, if we are to join humanity in the enormous task of creating a just and caring world, and it begins with rejecting white supremacy—despising and opposing bigotry and backwardness, of course, but spurning as well all those despicable structures and traditions. It extends to refusing to embrace optics over justice, “multiculturalism” or “diversity” over an honest reckoning with reality—to becoming race traitors as we learn the loving art of solidarity in practice…

Let’s burn down the plantation!

All admiration and gratitude to the young organizers who’ve brilliantly framed the issues and named our political moment, inviting millions of people to “demand the impossible!”: get cops out of schools, abolish the police, abolish prisons, people above property, REPARATIONS!

Celebrate Freedom!
Demand Freedom!
Into the streets, fire from below!

Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman
By Sonia Sanchez

1

Picture a woman
riding thunder on
the legs of slavery    …    

2

Picture her kissing
our spines saying no to
the eyes of slavery    …    

3

Picture her rotating
the earth into a shape
of lives becoming    …    

4

Picture her leaning
into the eyes of our
birth clouds    …    

5

Picture this woman
saying no to the constant
yes of slavery    …    

6

Picture a woman
jumping rivers her
legs inhaling moons    …    

7

Picture her ripe
with seasons of
legs    …   running    …    

8

Picture her tasting
the secret corners
of woods    …   

9

Picture her saying:
You have within you the strength,
the patience, and the passion
to reach for the stars,
to change the world    …    

10

Imagine her words:
Every great dream begins
with a dreamer    …    

11

Imagine her saying:
I freed a thousand slaves,
could have freed
a thousand more if they
only knew they were slaves    …    

12

Imagine her humming:
How many days we got
fore we taste freedom    …    

13

Imagine a woman
asking: How many workers
for this freedom quilt    …    

14

Picture her saying:
A live runaway could do
great harm by going back
but a dead runaway
could tell no secrets    …    

15

Picture the daylight
bringing her to woods
full of birth moons    …    

16

Picture John Brown
shaking her hands three times saying:
General Tubman. General Tubman. General Tubman.

17

Picture her words:
There’s two things I got a
right to: death or liberty    …    

18

Picture her saying no
to a play called Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
I am the real thing    …    

19

Picture a Black woman:
could not read or write
trailing freedom refrains    …    

20

Picture her face
turning southward walking
down a Southern road    …    

21

Picture this woman
freedom bound    …    tasting a
people’s preserved breath    …    

22

Picture this woman
of royalty    …    wearing a crown
of morning air    …    

23

Picture her walking,
running, reviving
a country’s breath    …    

24

Picture black voices
leaving behind
lost tongues   …

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen~~~Lenin

https://portside.org/2020-06-06/mpd150-working-towards-police-free-minneapolis

Defund the Police!

What would a public safety and policing look like in a free and democratic society?

A key question to raise up and organize around.

Police would not deploy military equipment and weaponry, would not get training from Israeli armed forces, would not act like an occupying army, would not carry lethal weapons, and would not operate with a contract beyond any popular scrutiny or control and a shadow leadership with more power than elected officials.

Police would be under community control—a democratically chosen citizen review board (100 people, to whom they are accountable.

And budgets would reflect people’s priorities—millions more for education, housing the unhoused, community mental health clinics, drug treatment centers, health care, job creation, guarantees of income…Money taken from the bloated and extravagant police budget.

See the link? Policing, surveillance and prison are the last entitlements, while every social need and priority is hollowed out or eliminated, and the occupying police forces are brought in to manage the predictable crisis.

Defund the Police!