Political Ecology Begins When We Say "Black Lives Matter"
http://midwestcompass.org/watersheds/map.html
"They say it's a joke they say it's a game." The slogan was launched on
the Chicago streets by the group We Charge Genocide, in the middle of a
demo demanding reparations for victims of police torture. The folks on
the street chanted those words, we hurled them out of our mouths in
staccato bursts, while looking round at the passers-by who pretended not
to notice. What the chant means is either enigmatic, or it's painfully
obvious. There is a kind of disdain that minimizes a death or a beating
or a torture or a life sentence for black people in the name of
lawfulness, efficiency, morality and humanist ideals. That kind of
disdain has made democracy impossible in the US - and other places too.
Our group, the Compass, allowed two main tracks to run parallel for
years. Bioregionalism on the one hand, minority rights and prison
solidarity on the other. We were ecologists and social justice people,
not the same thing but at the same time. The divide ran less between the
members than inside each one, a split in a collective personality. At a
meeting in the city of Madison the group decided that the split could be
overcome. Political ecology begins when we say "Black Lives Matter."
Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the movement, puts it like this:
"#BlackLivesMatter doesn't mean your life isn't important - it means
that black lives, which are seen as without value within white
supremacy, are important to your liberation." Some would say that
climate change makes every other issue pale by comparison. But black
slavery, or the taking of life as a commercial object, started hundreds
of years before the industrial revolution. The poisoning of the planet
was built on the way our enlightened societies treat other human beings.
The objectivist poet, Matthias Regan, and the critical cartographer,
Brian Holmes, put two and two together. Regan worked through hundreds of
local newspaper articles, distilling social diatribe and media
obfuscation into concise accounts that shock by their familiarity.
Holmes situated both the poetic artefacts and the raw documentary
material on a map of Midwestern watersheds, where the city of Ferguson
lies at the center of the way things flow down in our region. The aim
was to bear witness, at least partially and incompletely, to the names
and the places and the stories of killings that have finally become
unbearable, thanks to the courage of those who have created and
sustained the protest movement.
This map only makes sense if you use it to examine the current state of
American society. One way to use it is to go beyond the provided media
link (often the first flash report, typically from the police
viewpoint). The map encourages you to explore the fragmentary and
conflicting texture of knowledge about police killings. The character of
the objectivist poems arises precisely from the activity of sifting
through these reports, with their many voices cold as ice or warm as
love. Sometimes you will be dismayed and almost paralyzed by the mayhem
and violence of our impoverished neoliberal cities. Other times you will
come upon the traces of ongoing struggles.
Another way to use this archive is to pay attention to the places where
death is delivered. Zoom deep into the map, grab the little "Street
View" man and place the dotted circle around the gun or at the tail of
the shooting star icon. The reports typically give a block location,
sometimes more - in any case, you're in the area. What you will see is
the everyday landscape of shootings, taserings and physical blows that
have typically been considered legitimate for the police. This landscape
is ubiquitous. It's the local environment of normalized disdain that
confronts black people everywhere in today's society. It's the banal and
utterly ordinary theater of overwhelming force, whose careless excess
lies equally at the root of climate change. A tiny "X" up in the
right-hand corner of the image affords a welcome exit from these urban
and suburban traps. You can click your way back to safety, go ahead. But
this isn't a joke, this isn't a game. We won't be liberated so easily.
The counting of the dead and the quest for an end to the abuse are
far-reaching efforts, involving large numbers of people whose work
deserves close attention. Below we list the crucial texts and database
records on which our own work has been founded. Art, in this case, is
not invention, it's respect. Let everyone do what they can, or what they
formerly couldn't, for a transformed world in which black lives really
do matter.
.
.
--Articles
Alicia Garza, A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/
Frank B. Wilderson, "We're trying to destroy the world": Anti-Blackness
& Police Violence After Ferguson
http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/frank-b-wilderson-iii-were-trying-to-destroy-the-world-antiblackness-police-violence-after-ferguson.pdf
Naomi Klein, Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate
http://www.thenation.com/article/what-does-blacklivesmatter-have-do-climate-change/
--Databases
Operation Ghetto Storm
https://mxgm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Operation-Ghetto-Storm.pdf
We Charge Genocide Shadow U.N. Report
http://report.wechargegenocide.org/people.html
Killed by Police
http://www.killedbypolice.net
Fatal Police Taserings
https://fatalpolicetaserings.wordpress.com/
Wikipedia list of killings by law enforcement officers in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States
--Complete book of objectivist poems
Forthcoming
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