Here’s the thing. White supremacy crafted the problems of Detroit just as much as capitalism did. In fact, in many ways, White Supremacy and Capitalism can not be separated. They are the same thing. And so when you hear things like: Detroit should be left to die, or Detroit is dead, or Detroit is dying, or the dying/death of Detroit is so tragic–in many ways, what you are hearing is White Supremacy commenting on itself. Or: White Supremacy encouraging the viewer to look the other way in the face of its violence.

— Detroit housing

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. WEST SIXTH TODAY, EAST FOURTH TOMORROW…OHIO CITY AND COVENTRY THE DAY AFTER THAT.
Where does it end? Lakewood? Shaker? The thin blue line is all that is stopping this from happening, but it’s probably too late. Cleveland…the domino theory at work.

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grizzster commening on Reported beating of a Morehouse graduate by off-duty officer adds to controversy in Cleveland’s Warehouse District

Seriously, (almost) every single comment on this article is intensely racist.  Thank god the plain dealer comments are here to make sure everyone knows that Cleveland is serious about keeping black people in their place (as the commenter says, keeping them from ‘ruining’ certain neighborhoods)  and cracking down on black troublemakers BAMN.

from the original article:

The men said they had gone out that night with white co-workers from a downtown bank, members of the same executive training program. The two were in the lobby near the door, preparing to leave, when a security guard pointedly told them it was time to go.

Ruiz, who recently moved here from Charlotte, N.C., said they responded that they were waiting for friends to come down from upstairs. He said the security guard shoved them out the door and onto the sidewalk.

Ruiz said that when he objected, another security guard grabbed him and slammed him onto the roof of a parked car and began punching him.

The street was busy with people and police, and Ruiz said he assumed police would come to his aid. Soon, he said, he realized he was dealing with a police officer.

In a police report, Officer Anthony J. Sauto said he was working off-duty and in plain clothes for Velvet Dog when he saw Ruiz and Parilla refusing to leave and he intervened. He said Ruiz became “verbally and physically aggressive,” then resisted arrest and tried to hit him.

I hear a lot of people from the northern part of the United States talk about how racist the southern part of this country is, but honestly I am not sure I have been anywhere in this country where serious racism and open/outward support of segregation is more a part of public/private discussion than cleveland. And I know you obviously can’t judge a whole city by the people who comment on newspaper webpages, but its a bizarrely frequent part of normal conversation.

Ohio has a complicated white supremacist history, and it seems like we might fare better in the future if we really seriously got down to business and dealt with our white supremacist present.

For months, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles has quietly refused to accept most Puerto Rican birth certificates, the primary document for people applying for a driver’s license or for a state identification card.
State officials say they judge the document to be untrustworthy and note the prohibition is temporary.
By Sept. 30, all Puerto Ricans born on the island are expected to have newly issued birth certificates with enhanced security features. The Ohio BMV is ready to accept those documents, said spokeswoman Lindsay Komlanc.

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Ohio BMV policy leaves people from Puerto Rico with identity crisis

Cleveland is in the midst of a puerto-ricans-are-not-to-be-trusted-and-probably-aren’t-u.s.-citizens-anyway freakout (and, you know, maybe they should just go home instead of Cleveland going to all the trouble of making ballots in more languages than just English).

It never dies, because it is at the heart of the beast that is US capitalism and imperialism. To mix a monster metaphor; it is well past time that a stake be driven into the heart of this demon. To destroy white supremacy it will be necessary to ‘expropriate the expropriators’. Comrades, look at the horizon! Arm yourselves! The zombies are coming and they want blood!

— The Summer of Zombie White Supremacy

This is just another example of how the people if this area are their own worse enemies. In this area integration is 2 black people, 98 white. If there are three black people, it’s a gang. If it’s 5 or more black people, it’s am invading horde that will overwhelm the world.

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Giveupthefunk commenting on Warehouse District struggles with popularity, race issues and the legacy of the Flats

This is a fairly accurate assessment of Cleveland.

All the wealth that black and white workers had created was looted from the city by the capitalists and moved out to the suburbs or down to the southern United States. Along with that went the tax base of the city, and forty years later the city is falling apart due to an emaciated infrastructure. This story is shared by other cities where brown and black folks rose up to take their city back. Gary, Indiana and Newark, New Jersey are only two more examples. I’ve heard Detroit described by visitors as resembling a war zone — well that’s what it is; it’s the American Third World.
Growing up in Detroit you learn to appreciate the hidden beauty of a city gutted by white supremacy and capitalism. The resilience of the people there, despite all we’ve endured, is one testament to black civilization and oppressed peoples everywhere. I have friends from the east coast who say that Detroit and much of the Midwest has its own unique form of scathing charm that is normally attributed to the tough personality types of New York. To survive in a war zone you gotta be tough. The working classes of New York live in a city which some of the most brutal capitalists in the world call their home, and everyday they go head-to-head with these capitalists. In Detroit it’s a little different. We were left for dead, and despite that, and all the odds stacked against us, we remind the bosses, the crackers and the cops that we’re still here.

— The Landscape of Detroit [via&via]

Policing is the practice, empowered by the state, of enforcing law and social control through the use of force. The roots of policing in the United States are closely linked to slavery, the capture of escaped slaves, and the enforcement of Black Codes and Jim Crow. Police forces were also routinely used to keep new immigrants “in line” and to prevent the working classes from making demands. Clearly, not much has changed. Policing is still set up to target poor people, people of color, immigrants, and people who do not conform to socially acceptable behavior on the street or in their homes. For example, police frequently target women, queer and gender non-conforming people, people of color, and young people just based on their appearance or behavior. The choices police make about which people to target, what to target them for, and when to arrest and book them play a major role in who ultimately gets locked up.
Some of us are comforted by the option of being able to call someone when we need help. Some of us are told from a very early age that the police are our friends who will help us when we’re in “trouble”. But the impact of policing on many of our communities — more people beaten and killed by cops and the growing number of our friends, family members and loved ones being locked away behind bars — shows us that the police hurt rather than help us.
Policing is, in its very nature, in opposition to self-determination. The practices of watching, questioning, intimidating and arresting people through the use of force are violent practices. Not only do cops use threats of violence — the guns on their hips, the billy clubs on their belts — to control people, they often use force in making stops, inquiries, and arrests. Harassment of people on the street or “stop and frisk” practices — stopping people to frisk them for drugs or weapons — are tools often used to intimidate, monitor, and control poor people and people of color. While we’re told the police are on the street to stop or solve “crime”, their very presence is a way of enforcing social control, and actually creates more violence.
When people die at the hands of the police, more often than not, the state concludes that the use of force was reasonable. Police review boards are completely useless. And even though some people argue that police abuse is an isolated problem that can be blamed on the actions of rogue officers, it is really a systemic problem that is fundamental to the way the policing system in the US is built and maintained.
In recent years, the militarization of the police has increased dramatically. Not only has US law enforcement come to resemble the US military more closely, but it has also begun to be equipped with the same technologies. From providing training in tactics and instruction in using certain types of equipment to the cooperation between the military and domestic law enforcement at the US/Mexico border, militarization of law enforcement has meant that the US has become another space within which the military can operate and has meant that residents of the US are potential military targets to be eliminated.
The same way that locking people in cages does not help us build the healthy, stable communities we want, relying on the state to force people into acting in ways that serve the state doesn’t encourage the kinds of cooperation, trust, and accountabilty we know are at the heart of building what we truly want.
Instead of relying on the violent establishments of police and prisons, what if we got together with members of our communities and created systems of support for each other? We are capable of looking after and caring for one another, providing each other with our basic human needs, creating community self-determination. Relying on and deploying policing denies our ability to do this, to create real safety in our communities.

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This statement was written by members of Critical Resistance [via]

For more information please contact us at: 
510.444.0484
croakland@criticalresistance.org

Still, the “blending” of America could be overstated, especially given the relatively low rate of black-white intermarriage compared with other groups, and continuing racial perceptions and divisions, according to some sociologists.
“Children of white-Asian and white-Hispanic parents will have no problems calling themselves white, if that’s their choice,” said Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queens College of the City University of New York and the author of a book about race.
“But offspring of black and another ethnic parent won’t have that option,” Professor Hacker said. “They’ll be black because that’s the way they’re seen. Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, have all known that. Will that change? Don’t hold your breath.

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Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar

So, ‘blending’ means passing as white? Also, assuming whiteness/white privilege seems to be significantly more than ‘calling oneself white’.

Idk I hate this article. Its like “lets talk about interracial marriage as a way to talk about expanding the boundaries of whiteness rather than challenging white supremacy”

Most of those guys probably weren’t informants. Which is a pity because it means they are not getting paid a dime for all the destructive work they do. We might think of these misogynists as inadvertent agents of the state. Regardless of whether they are actually informants or not, the work that they do supports the state’s ongoing campaign of terror against social movements and the people who create them. When queer organizers are humiliated and their political struggles sidelined, that is part of an ongoing state project of violence against radicals. When women are knowingly given STIs, physically abused, dismissed in meetings, pushed aside, and forced out of radical organizing spaces while our allies defend known misogynists, organizers collude in the state’s efforts to destroy us.
The state has already understood a fact that the Left has struggled to accept: misogynists make great informants. Before or regardless of whether they are ever recruited by the state to disrupt a movement or destabilize an organization, they’ve likely become well versed in practices of disruptive behavior. They require almost no training and can start the work immediately. What’s more paralyzing to our work than when women and/or queer folks leave our movements because they have been repeatedly lied to, humiliated, physically/verbally/emotionally/sexually abused? Or when you have to postpone conversations about the work so that you can devote group meetings to addressing an individual member’s most recent offense? Or when that person spreads misinformation, creating confusion and friction among radical groups? Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist.

— Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence in Movements Enables State Violence

So our history isn’t everything — it’s also what people bring with them. While we have a racist past to be sure, we likewise have the ongoing settler expansion, which continues to this day as an internal influx of people from other parts of the US. The population of Arizona has more than doubled in the last thirty years, thrusting Phoenix practically overnight from a backwater to the fifth largest city in the nation, and gobbling up land at a rate that quickly gave our city a geographical area larger than LA, bumping uncomfortably up against the two O’odham reservations that sit to the south and east of the Valley.
While many people in states outside Arizona bemoan the backward nature of Arizona politics, it’s important to note that given this flood of people from other parts of the US, Arizona’s politics are not really just “Arizona’s politics”. They are the politics of the rest of the country, magnified — smashed together in collapsing now but once overpriced suburbs and set on fire by long commutes to work in the company of hot-headed right wing radio jocks.
In Arizona, white people who have moved two thousand miles in just the last few years to set up their suburban homestead or to secure their cheap retirement denounce the movement of people who may have only traveled a few hundred miles, or who may have migrated back and forth for generations. Or, it’s true, who may have been deported during one of the previous economic crashes, dispossessed of their labor and their meager earnings and deposited across la linea when they became inconvenient to the demands of Capital, just like the Wobblies from Bisbee in an earlier era, the largest part of whom were Mexican.
Perhaps people who move here can be forgiven for not knowing the history of Arizona, but did they not at least look at a map before they piled their possessions in a U-Haul and headed West? That funny shaped thing to our South is Mexico! And Phoenix is in the “Sonoran Desert”, a name it shares with the Mexican state of Sonora that borders us. The Sonoran Desert also contains the O’odham pilgrimage site of Magdelena. The rising border fences and military deployments that so many new Arizonans request will impede or even make impossible this yearly voyage. Likewise the demands for papers cannot be met by many traditional people, born outside cities and unable to acquire documents acceptable to law enforcement and border authorities. Sometimes the obvious ain’t so obvious to everyone.
But, unfortunately, when these internal white American “immigrants” and migrant workers to Arizona (and what else do you call people who moved here for jobs at Taser International and Boeing that now find themselves foreclosed and dispossessed in the era of the new austerity?) left their crowded East Coast cities and turned West, their RV’s and East Coast and Midwest accents weren’t all they brought with them: they also brought their racist politics, which finds fertile grounds in the not-so-long-ago-stolen Arizona land.

— The fight continues: A reminder from the Phoenix Class War Council about the struggle in Arizona