Robin D.G. Kelley - Mike Brown's Body: A Meditation on War, Race, & Democracy

Black Study, Black Struggle

Robin D.G. Kelley, The Boston Review

In the fall of 2015, college campuses were engulfed by fires ignited in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This is not to say that college students had until then been quiet in the face of police violence against black Americans. Throughout the previous year, it had often been college students who hit the streets, blocked traffic, occupied the halls of justice and malls of America, disrupted political campaign rallies, and risked arrest to protest the torture and suffocation of Eric Garner, the abuse and death of Sandra Bland, the executions of Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Walter Scott, Tony Robinson, Freddie Gray, ad infinitum.

That the fire this time spread from the town to the campus is consistent with historical patterns. The campus revolts of the 1960s, for example, followed the Harlem and Watts rebellions, the freedom movement in the South, and the rise of militant organizations in the cities. But the size, speed, intensity, and character of recent student uprisings caught much of the country off guard. Protests against campus racism and the ethics of universities’ financial entanglements erupted on nearly ninety campuses, including Brandeis, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Claremont McKenna, Smith, Amherst, UCLA, Oberlin, Tufts, and the University of North Carolina, both Chapel Hill and Greensboro. These demonstrations were led largely by black students, as well as coalitions made up of students of color, queer folks, undocumented immigrants, and allied whites.

Conflict can destroy movements. We need to fight the system, not each other

Erica Garner & Kemi Alabi, The Guardian 

On 17 July 2014, New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo killed my father, Eric Garner. More than 11 minutes of video footage show Officer Pantaleo placing him in an illegal chokehold, and people all over the world soon learned my father’s final words: “I can’t breathe”. Faced with yet another incontrovertible act of police brutality, angered viewers formed resistance groups – practically overnight – to demand justice.

#FeesMustFall: Democracy Under Fire

Adam Haupt, The Con

The rise of the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa has revealed key fault lines. I would like to offer two arguments here. The first is that the use of police brutality against peaceful protesters on campuses undermines citizens’ rights to free speech. The second is that the corporatisation of public institutions produces the same negative effects on the public sphere as state repression of dissent. Public institutions’ mandate to preserve an information commons is undermined by an economic system that places a low premium on public spending. Universities are thrown at the mercy of the market and, effectively, cost barriers to education are introduced. It is in this way that any talk of a national democratic revolution is reduced to empty rhetoric.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: 'We are not leaving!'

Kate Janse an Rensburg, Mikaela Erskog & Fezokuhle Mthonti, Daily Maverick

Picture by Kate Janse van Rensburg

At Masifunde, a local nongovernmental organisation in Bathurst Street, Grahamstown, six women are sitting on and around the staircase. Two women talk urgently on the phone as they relay information to various stakeholders. This concerns the bedlam that has descended upon the city since Wednesday 21 October. One week has passed since a xenophobic outbreak, fuelled by the rumour mill, began in the City of Saints.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: Police Fail the Community

Paddy O'Halloran, Daily Maverick

On Monday 19 October 2015, Grahamstown police reinforced by officers and equipment from East London twice dispersed protesting students at Eastcape Midlands College (EMC). Students at the college were protesting corruption by their institution’s administration. They had been joined by students from Rhodes University, down the hill, who had shut down their institution early in the morning as part of the national protest against unaffordable tertiary education. The police threw stun grenades and, in the second dispersal, chased students with a water cannon using chemical water that caused severe itching. When the students retreated to the Rhodes University campus, the police gathered in force at the campus entrance until the vice-chancellor went to the police station to officially request that they stand down. Elsewhere in South Africa so far this week — in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Port Elizabeth — protesting students and academics have been met with arrest, tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. With the exception of Rhodes, the reaction by state and universities has been to break the protests using force.

They Die Out There: It Matters Not Where, Nor How

Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

On Monday morning there was a protest, in the form of a road blockade, organised from a shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. The settlement, officially known as Quarry Road but popularly known as KwaMam’Suthu, is on a sliver of land that runs along a river bank squeezed between two busy roads. It is in the suburbs to the North of the city. The current sequence of open contestation between people occupying land in the interstices of this part of the city and the local state stretches back to the ‘80s. It has a prior history that, before the mass evictions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, came to a head in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. Over the last decade it has ebbed and flowed as the state has alternated between offering material and political concessions and responding to struggle with increasingly violent repression. Recently things have been getting hot again. Last month residents from the nearby Kennedy Road settlement burnt a municipal truck during two days of protest.

Policing student politics: Is there a ‘right’ way to protest?

Jonis Ghedi Alasow, The Daily Maverick

On Friday 28 August the Black Student Movement (BSM) at the institution still known as Rhodes University reached a watershed moment in its short history. University management called armed police officers – with dog units – to confront students who wished to address the University senate on accommodation during the short vacations. There was an overwhelming sense of fierceness among the police, dog units and university campus protection.

Police and Plunder

Peter Linebaugh, CounterPunch

In December 2014 the discussion of “police” began to look at the roots of the institution. Peter Gelderloos concluded a three part study in CounterPunch flatly stating, “The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system.”[1] Sam Mitrani, a scholar of the Chicago police, concluded similarly, “The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it.” [2] Yet a physician in Ann Arbor, Catherine Wilkerson, caused a local stir when she stated “that neither racism nor racist police violence can be abolished under this economic system, i.e. under capitalism”.

Sean Jacobs on racist police violence in the United States and South Africa

From Michael Brown to Assata Shakur, the racist state of America persists

Angela Davis, The Guardian

Although racist state violence has been a consistent theme in the history of people of African descent in North America, it has become especially noteworthy during the administration of the first African-American president, whose very election was widely interpreted as heralding the advent of a new, postracial era.

Eviction at the Marikana Land Occupation (Cape Town) - 22 August 2014

22 August 2014 Eviction at Marikana from Pablo Pinedo Bóveda on Vimeo.

Marikana, Gaza, Ferguson

Richard Pithouse, The Con

In colonial wars the occupying power invariably reaches a point where it has to acknowledge that its true enemy is not a minority – devil worshipers, communists, fanatics or terrorists – subject to external and evil manipulation, but the people as a whole. Once this point is reached every colonised person is taken as a potential combatant and the neighbourhood and the home are cast as legitimate sites of combat.

This is the moment when liberal paternalism breaks down.

The lang-arm of the law is a deadly dance

Jane Duncan, Mail & Guardian

In his budget speech last month, Police Minister Nathi Nhleko promised to demilitarise the police, as proposed by the National Development Plan, improve the police’s crowd control skills and equip them with less lethal crowd-control equipment. He made these promises to reduce police violence against protests, which had led to several protester deaths.

These initiatives are much needed, but are they enough to arrest the authoritarian drift in protest policing? Unfortunately not. One reason for this is because the militarisation concept is understood very superficially in public debate, and because the government, journalists and many analysts have equated militarisation largely with the reintroduction of the military ranking system to the police.

An Israeli Soldier's Story - Eran Efrati

Miners Shot Down

Gaza: Words and Weapons

Richard Pithouse, The Con

Words are the raw materials for building a house. Words are a country.

-       Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presence

In The Jerusalem Post, articles on Gaza report that Israeli “soldiers” have engaged Palestinian “terrorists” in battle. In our colonial historiography, “soldiers” were often reported to have fought “warriors”. In the 1980s, “soldiers” were reported, much like in Israel today, to have been deployed against “terrorists”. Today, as state murder is increasingly normalised as an acceptable tool of social control in our deeply compromised democracy, the police are, we are often told, at war with “criminals”.

Police wars and state repression in South Africa

Police wars and state repression in South Africa by Melissa Barton

No to Police Brutality! No to Attacks on the Right to Protest!

Durban Graffiti: I Am Scared of the Police