arugalove if it's bad for my mental health, my mental health has been bad and no one has been speaking up. I don't get to choose to not be crazy? Or Personal experience is not being disavowed at all, on the contrary I am presenting these experiences in a safer way by presenting them as aggregated in historical accounts and situating them within a framework that can name victims and perpetrators. In this knowledge situation, though representation of experiences is limited to the mention of its diversity, on the other hand, no one's first hand experience is being called into question... except for, again, with reference to the task of the identification of victims and perpetrators.
Like idk if you're a black person or a trans person or an indigenous person, but if you're not, or even if you are (since im a trans person and I do this), ask yourself if youre 'really' saving your mental health by avoiding some action that presents itself, even if it is only posting in a thread somewhere in whatever way you can. Read about sick woman theory. I know I have really able-ist rhetorical tendencies here, but I also believe that self-care may have become a norm that consists in regulating bodies and that sometimes I know I say to myself "Well, how agoraphobic am I really going to act?", or I myself wondering "Who will go to the rally/protest/planning meeting for the agoraphobic people?" Maybe I should? It is well-known that ability-disability is a profit generating narrative within capitalism. I maintain that the discourse of self-care has positioned itself as part of a health aesthetic that should be examined critically by certain actors, 'dont just stop checking your privilege'.
I really believe in racism, I believe it is inside our laws and our norms, thus white persons and non-white persons that imitate white people can take steps to address it.
If you think that specifically black people's personal experiences are whats required in a thread like this. I refuse this, and think this is a very unhealthy attitude within a capitalist political moment. As always I would at least remind you that:
"You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
You don't have to watch the video.
@!^-216"
I would add, you dont have to post in the thread, or on facebook. i mean i feel like this should go without saying. you dont have to get it up for your white/moderate friends who are just starting to realize 'oh shit, this racism stuff isn't just some tumblr shit after all', you dont have to like their statuses.
But, I always, always remind you, as a mental health care 'professional', that participating in direct political actions, which may include social media/w.e but not really, is actually considered a 'safe' coping skill, even a very good, healthy, coping skill. It just happens to not be safe, cause of you know, the violence that accompanies politics.
we need to listen to black people, which may also demand not forcing them to speak. Black bodies are already made to speak, we just don't listen to their words.
I don't have a problem accepting poc leadership... and though I may be tokenizing at times, I can also do the work of explaining these issues to other white people. I am quite privileged after all.
http://www.goldenwrites.com/whiteprivilege.htm
http://www.openanthropology.org/fanonviolence.htm
although it may seem like social scientific evidence is being authorized above experience, actually the attempt was to authorize the diversity of experiences at all, in the first place, by using historical/scientific data rather than just pointing out/alleging that 'all poc know that racism exists' or 'all black men know that black men are more likely to be criminalized'.
Because it actually hurts a lot more, and would be that much more confusing for the audience, for me to post a link to a kanye west video. Or to a season 1 of Treme. i used to use quotes from treme in my sig btw:
"Never thought I'd come back to see even this much of it.
This goddamn bridge.
Gretna police standin' there with their guns out, Waiting to make us walk the hell back.
And here we are, drivin' the other way.
Like it didn't even happen.
-You don't have to stay.
Just drop me and turn around.
I'll be fine."
emphasis mine
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-bridge-to-gretna/ (warning contains a cop talking a lot)
Is that whats needed? Like an invocation of hurricane katrina?
im crying now.
Aldaron, my problem here is not with a concept of a state at all, it is with black fungibility within capitalism, i.e capitalism finds infinite use for black bodies, which does serve some political ends of course. I maintain that these ends are not democratic or pluralistic.
"
I feel sadness for the families of the cops who were killed especially the brotha's family who was a cop (montrell jackson) who was gunned down in in the colonial settlement of "baton rouge"... I am also sad that the infinite uses of blackness (black fungibility) within capitalism perpetuates black folx being used as not only the victims of state violence but simultaneously (in the case of mr jackson) as modern day slave overseers (read:cops). Jacksons death notes the precarious position black law enforcement finds itself: simultaneously the victims to and harbingers of state violence against the black community in so called "baton rouge".
While my heart goes out to his family and those that loved him I would be amiss if I didnt say that Montrell Jackson, a cop, did in fact perpetuate state violence against his own people for monetary gain on a daily basis as a cop... and while I dont wish death on any person, I do not value his life over other victims of state violence; I think it is more important for me to remember and think on all the continuous , unknown victims of state violence through death and disposability that we may never know that were effected by his "job"as a police officer... how many lives of folx in the colonial occupation of " baton rouge" alone were cut short through his active enforcement of racist state policies ...policies that he was complicit to in terms of policing, imprisonment, drug laws,etc etc ) ??? THIS type of ongoing genocide is my focus this evening... not on eulogizing modern day slave overseers of the state...
"
It really depends on your political orientation with regards to what it means to get rid of police. If you're a progressive you play the legal game, decriminalize drugs, change appeal procedures, 3 strikes laws, etc, unfortunately capitalism/politics is always ahead of you, that is what I hinted at when I said the worst thing about the police is that they exist at all in the first place. I'm a bit more of a radical, I prefer abolition of solitary confinement as an immediate step in a process of prison abolition that replaces the police with (unarmed) crisis interventionists trained in de-escalation techniques and familiarized with the community, expansions of medical and counseling services in place of prisons; in the place of a war on terror or war on drugs, wars on climate change and homelessness. People like a good war, I am told.
I mean you're not gonna get me to come out and say it aldaron... I'm not a beginner, amateur, or local at politics. and i dont talk about politics with beginners, amateurs, or locals. except when i post on these forums maybe. thats what the vanilla-isis conservatives do aldaron, they come out and say it. I don't come out and say it, babe. if you say it you lose, thats why free speech is the last resort of losers, 'you're censoring me'. I don't lose, I won, and so I have to continue to be careful.
I question if those 'taking the base as the US state' (careful aldaron with this 'base' talk you might get accused of 'cultural marxism' :p) are fully aware of the history of U.S colonialism and slavery and specifically I strongly suggest looking a bit further into the pages of the link above called 'whiteness as property', it is a legal review, not some piece of pure theory. I sort of 'resent' you taking my opposition to police as conceptual or theoretical, as I maintain it is based in historical and psychological evidence. As I mentioned, read the declaration of independence, it is pretty obvious the 'founding fathers' imagined the american citizen as a white man who was invested in economically displacing native americans and in the slave trade. The legal, political, and psychological implications of this history are sometimes difficult to reveal, but it is vital.
Implying there is some conceptual disagreement taking place obfuscates that I am actually discontent with events that are taking place and have taken place and that there can be little disagreement about these things happening, they are 'facts' even. The implication, you may already be aware, is that when you talk about the police, or perhaps 'the state' you make mention of it divorced from its reality, taken as a concept with an abstract necessity, where as I have nothing to say about a concept of police, state, etc, only about their history, or it's factual existence (sorry if this weirdly 'you vs me', i dont mean anything hostile by it). I will repeat: the fact of the police is the worst thing about them, they already happened. There is no concept of police to be grappled with at all here. And so it is unsurprising that the police turn out to be unnecessary, for what we suppose the police are needed for, the ends they serve to instantiate, I claim that these ends are either, not good , or else, that the things the police actually
do and have done turn out to not serve these ends. 'Safety' and 'security' are prominent terms within the american political lexicon's 'new speak', I maintain that our communities and particularly democracies need to be made safe from militarized police forces and secured against neocolonial violence, but when we talk about police bringing safety to communities it is clear that we should not confuse the safety the police provide with these types I just mentioned as preferable, and why would we value whatever the police does provide, if anything preferable, over these other securities?
The question is not what is the police or what is the state, or at least I can say for myself that I have no doubts about what these things consist of, or how they function, from nearly any view or angle tbh. But who do these things serve? who is protected? if the police protect you from me, who is gonna protect me from the police? that is the question I hope can be grappled with? protect and serve who? I say they protect and serve the aristocracy. In this account the police are perpetrators and absence in a community signals victims, and profits. I wish I could give a pluralistic account of the police, but such history does not exist.
It is infinitely frustrating to be perceived as an idealist, because my accounts of political phenomena are historical and evidence based, and inevitably contain a flair for 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism is neither negative criticism, which one could claim offers no positive project (i.e, an alternative to the police), nor a stance of moral judgement. It does track changes and note complexities. It is critical of liberal idealism, and tends towards a sort of realist-centering assessment of actors as well as ideologies:
"Her newest monograph,
Cruel Optimism, was published in October, 2011, by Duke University Press. This book works across the U.S. and Europe to assess the level of contemporary crisis as
neoliberalism wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state.
[1] Cruel optimism manifests as a relational dynamic which individuals create attachment as “clusters of promises” towards desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises. Maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable.
[2] Elaborating on the specific dynamics of cruel optimism, Lauren Berlant emphasizes and maintains that it is not the object itself, but rather the relationship: "A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can’t say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it’s how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on he other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it’s not the object that’s the problem, but how we learn to be in relation."
[3]
It would be preferable for the local constabulary to not be bound to a set of neocolonial legal forms, the affect/ articulated aim of which is economic displacement. <-that is what i will say on the subject of any disagreement about the concept of the US state in this thread.
btw im still laughing at the person who said we need police for automobiles, str8 missed it entirely. keep driving ur hummers yall, nothing changes right? least of all the climate.
i can track historical changes thats why i think changes can still be made.
http://abahlali.org/files/__Black_Skin__White_Masks__Pluto_Classics_.pdf
"I sincerely believe that a subjective experience can be understood by others; and it would give me no pleasure to announce that the black problem is my problem and mine alone and that it is up to me to study it. "
I don't expect anyone to read all these links which amount to at least 3 full length works and more, but
arugalove i think you both let people off too easily and make it seem quite a task to engage in these issues at the same time...
which would be the case if the goal was to convince some other poster or reader, but that isn't my goal. they have to convince themselves
w.e just gonna post since macle baited it.
