[ A friend of mine, Nick Smaglio, says this: "They (the occupiers) are
are group of people who met in the heat of Ferguson, and are committed
to preventing the non-profits from swallowing the movement they have
been living in for the last two months. The other night, they led a
thousands-strong march to SLU and decided to remain there, in that
bastion of wealth and whiteness. This is a statement that came out of
the last few days." ]
We’ve Discovered White People!
a communiqué from the occupation of Saint Louis University
Five hundred twenty two years ago, the great Christopher Columbus
discovered a New World. Monday, on the day we all celebrated the daring
achievements of that fearless explorer, we too discovered a new world:
the world of white people.
Having spent the last 65 days protesting the police murder of Michael Brown;
having been beaten, shot at, tear gassed, ridiculed, and smeared since
the death of our brother;
having been treated as criminals and problems and sub-human beings under
police occupation our whole lives;
having been told – explicitly and implicitly, with fearful faces on the
street and with police guns pointed at us – that our lives are worthless
in the eyes of this society that claims to have achieved justice for all;
having undergone all these abuses and more in our Old Word, we decided
to venture forth in search of a New World of our own.
And we have found it. We have discovered the world of White people. They
call this settlement “Saint Louis University,” or sloo in their informal
tongue.
The first thing to note about the world of White people is that the
police are friendly and they pretty much let you do whatever you want as
long as nobody is actually getting physically injured. Strangely, they
do hang out behind the trees and take pictures of you, but whenever they
ride by on their bicycles they have big smiles on their faces and say
obvious things about the weather.
The second thing to note about White people is that most of them – those
who’ve greeted us, anyway – are very friendly. They are curious and
concerned about the world we come from, and seem genuine about wanting
to help us escape the brutal police state, which locks us up in cages,
which kills us with impunity, which terrorizes us every day of our lives
because of the color of our skin. We appreciate their smiles and claps
and support. But. We are reminded of bed time stories our families told
us about a strange people called “White Liberals.” According to the
stories, these people are split in half on the inside, and will support
you with their words but never their actions. They also will only like
you if you pretend to be like them, and will stop supporting you even
with your words if your anger disrupts their busy schedule. We wonder if
we haven’t met a lot of them since our arrival.
But not all of the White natives we have met are friendly. What is so
strange about them, though, is that they don’t seem to notice that they
are being unfriendly. In fact, they often insist that they are being
friendly and treating us with respect, even as they dismiss our accounts
of the world we come from, a world they’ve never been to.
Since our arrival, we’ve identified two main ways in which the Whites
that are not friendly express their unfriendliness without knowing it:
First, they seem to insist that the destruction of property is somehow
comparable to the murder of a human being with brown skin. In fact, they
seem to believe that the protection of property is more important than
the protection of our people from injury or death.
After our brother Michael Brown was shot dead with his hands up in the
air by Officer Darren Wilson and Mike Mike’s body was left to rot in the
street for four and a half hours in front of our people – our children,
our mothers, all of us – we were angry. We were filled with rage at our
situation. The media and politicians then suggested that Mike Mike’s
murder was somehow justified by his having taken some cigars from a
store without giving the store pieces of magic paper. This angered us
more. Some of our brothers and sisters were so angry that they set the
store on fire and took all the things they wanted, without any respect
for the magic paper that our oppressors are always telling us is so
important.
The White people who keep telling us these actions are “just as bad,” or
even that they are in any way comparable to the ending of a human life
of beauty and value beyond measure, are telling us (maybe without
knowing it) that we are lower in value than dead things, that we are
mere objects. When they do this, it makes us feel deeply hurt. And it
makes us wonder if they even know what it means to love another human being.
The second way the White people that we have discovered are unfriendly
to us without seeming to notice has to do with their fetish, a flag with
stars and stripes on it. To our surprise, it is the same exact fetish
that our oppressors have hanging in the Sacrifice Halls where they tell
us how long we have to spend in their cages. In our rebellion against
them after yet another one of our brothers, VonDerrit Myers, was
murdered by another police officer whose name we do not know, some of
our brothers turned our oppressor’s fetish upside down. Some even set it
on fire. When we discovered this New World inhabited by Whites, we
claimed it for our own just as the great Columbus did, and we planted an
upside down version of the fetish in this new, undiscovered soil, as a
sign of our freedom. But some of the native Whites of sloo were very
upset by this, because for them the fetish was a symbol of all that was
good in the world, and because, they said, their family members had
fought and died for the fetish. After a very long and tense discussion,
it became clear that this White tribe was prone to mistaking the symbol
for the things it is supposed to symbolize. They insisted that it was
the flag that their ancestors fought and died for and not their families
and homes (which, of course, would have been just fine without a flag to
symbolize them). Through this discussion, it seemed that we learned what
we already knew: that we were from different worlds, and being from
different worlds, the same piece of fabric can mean completely opposite
things.
Still, we think these unfriendly Whites were so upset about something
much deeper and much more serious than their fetish. We think that they
thought we were accusing them, as individuals who cared about their
flag, of being guilty of all the oppression we experience in our world.
When we spoke about how privileged they are to live in this beautiful
place where the police smile at them and say really stupid things about
the weather, they thought that we were blaming them for what we suffer.
We want to tell those Whites, from the bottom of our deep hearts, that
this is not what we mean. They, as individuals, did not create the world
we have suffered in, the world where we fear for our lives every day.
They are not guilty. It is not their fault that we live in a society
where Black lives don’t matter. As individual Whites who love their
fetish, they are not to blame for their privilege.
But nonetheless they need to understand that it exists, and they need to
ask themselves how they are going to use it. And the Whites we met have
two options: either they will use that privilege to help us dismantle
the oppression that our people continue to live under, or they will
continue to reproduce the world as it is.
Because we are discovering this New World is actually not a New World at
all. It is the same world, kept separated from itself by
misunderstanding, an inability to feel for one another, and – most
importantly – people with uniforms and guns who make sure this one world
continues to feel like two.
But here at sloo, a passage is opening.
We encourage others to join us or, better, to immediately start using
your bodies to open passages of your own.
For Michael Brown, VonDerrit Myers, John Crawford,
and all the Black men whose lives were and will be stolen by police,
Some anonymous participants in #OccupySLU
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