Akbar writes: "The Feds have been scouring social media accounts of black
organizers and flying surveillance planes over protests since Ferguson. (Not
to mention local police surveillance.) But reports of knocks on the doors of
leaders in the Movement for Black Lives suggest surveillance and
infiltration will intensify."
Protesters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in August 2014. (photo: Joe
Brusky/Flickr)
Policing Black Radicalism
By Amna A. Akbar, Jacobin
21 August 16
The US state has long sought to monitor and undermine black resistance
movements.
The most prominent image of Micah Johnson comes from his Facebook: arrayed
in a purple patterned dashiki, fist raised, expression somber. Reports after
the Dallas shooting heavily emphasized the symbolism in the photograph. The
dashiki and fist - widespread artifacts of black power, love, and resistance
- became suggestions of motive, red flags that should have brought on police
scrutiny sooner.
These symbols, summoned as indicators of motive for Johnson's murder of five
Dallas police officers, telegraph something important about our regime of
policing: whiteness is the baseline for lawfulness; and assertions of
political and cultural identity in communities of color are abnormal,
suspect deviations.
That is how Johnson's military training and participation in the US war in
Afghanistan become less explanatory of his shooting than his dashiki.
As the press and police pivoted from the dashiki and fist to make unlikely
connections between Johnson's shooting, black nationalism, and
#BlackLivesMatter organizing, it became almost certain that we will see
increased surveillance and infiltration of black communities and black
radical spaces.
The Feds have been scouring social media accounts of black organizers and
flying surveillance planes over protests since Ferguson. (Not to mention
local police surveillance.) But reports of knocks on the doors of leaders in
the Movement for Black Lives suggest surveillance and infiltration will
intensify.
Of course, such policing tactics were put to use in past eras of rebellion:
going back to European colonization of the United States, each wave of black
resistance has been met with repression and surveillance.
This time, the named target will be those willing to take up arms against
police, but the casualties will ripple through the black youth movement,
with its battle cry for a more equal and free society.
The obvious antecedent for efforts like these is J. Edgar Hoover's Civil
Rights-era Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). In the name of law and
order, the FBI spied on, disrupted, infiltrated, and discredited radical
political formations from the mid 1950s into the 1970s.
The agency's focus was black leadership and organizations: the program
famously targeted Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, but it also focused
on undermining powerful collectives of young people like the Black Panther
Party and the Young Lords.
But there is a more recent precursor to politically motivated surveillance:
the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program championed by the Obama
administration. In the last eight years, the FBI has developed a sprawling
apparatus to police the ideas and collective formations that take shape in
Muslim communities.
Tactics include extensive knock-and-talks, aggressive deployment of
informants and undercover police - to the point of constructing and
provoking plots - regular combing of social media, and surveillance of
spaces where Muslims gather, from the mosque to Muslim student associations.
The policing attempts to catalog ideas that correlate, allegedly, with
greater likelihood of committing terrorist acts. The theory is specious for
all sorts of reasons, including - as with the case of Micah Johnson's
portrayal in the media - the way it collapses expressions of culture and
identity with threats to the state.
Yet across the country the FBI and joint terrorism task forces have
collaborated with state and local police to monitor and influence the
political ideas taking shape in Muslim communities.
The CVE framework poses American and Muslim identities as opposite poles,
and identifies manifestations of devout religious practice - growing a
beard, regularly attending a mosque - and critiques of US treatment of
Muslims at home and abroad as indicators of growing extremism.
Government reports inflate and collapse connections between critical
discourse, commonplace cultural practices, and willingness to undertake
violence against the state. In the way it situates adopting Muslim cultural
practices or articulating critique of US foreign policy as indicators of
proclivity toward terrorism, the framework demands submersion of Muslim
identity in service of the American project.
But the United States does treat Muslims around the world as suspect: it
kills, captures, surveils, bombs, dehumanizes, and occupies them in the name
of global progress, peace, and security. Muslims live this reality across
diasporas.
But under the lens of CVE, naming this dispossession, dehumanization, and
violence is distorted from an expression of solidarity, shared humanity, or
critical politics into a sign of disloyalty.
This kind of policing generates a fear among Muslims of exploring or pushing
critique - let alone organizing resistance - at the same time it justifies
widespread surveillance of all Muslims.
The message of CVE policing is clear: we are here, we are watching. What you
say will be held against you. When the state targets critique and resistance
of state violence in communities of color, it punishes speech that is
central to the articulation of what it means to be a person of color in this
country.
Poor communities of color are on the receiving end of the most brutality and
inequality enacted by the state: their experiences constitute the most basic
contradictions of a liberal democratic society, where the promise of
equality and freedom coexists with structural inequality and violence.
CVE taxes and undermines the possibilities of resistance. It compels
acquiescence to the social, racialized order. It forces code switching. It
represses dissent and stifles rebellion. It destroys an ability to transform
the world, because it undermines the imagination of those people who have
the largest stake in changing it.
Under a CVE framework, naming your condition and expressing anger about its
causes and consequences become signs of dangerous difference. Resistance to
white supremacy and cultural and political expressions of self become
justifications for policing.
The policing of opinions and resistance easily expands from those who may be
expressing radical difference to all those within the target community -
American Muslims, or black folks. We should be equally concerned with both.
The suggestion that Micah Johnson's blackness is the reason that he killed
police officers suggests that CVE is coming home to black America - and
doubly so to those already targeted as Muslims.
There will be door knocks, more aggressive informants and undercovers, close
examinations of Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook feeds. While the public face
of any such program will be focused on black extremism, the black youth
movement will be a central target.
The black youth movement has brought international attention to America's
cardinal and ongoing sins against black people: Black communities are
surveiled, dispossessed, dehumanized, killed, arrested, brutalized, and torn
apart by the state every day.
The movement has reconfigured long-standing conversations about race,
policing, and mass incarceration into more honest referendums on the state
of white supremacy in this country. It has forced a more probing
conversation about the purpose and history of policing in the United States.
In the liberal imagination, policing is about law and order, a neutral value
that serves all. In the radical imagination, American law is anything but
neutral, rooted as it is in the history of enslavement and colonization.
Policing is a tool of the unequal status quo, emerging out of slave patrols,
to keep the dispossessed without property, the hungry without food, the
insecure uncertain, while protecting the wealth of the wealthy and
justifying the power of the state.
The initial images of policing in Ferguson were that of war: Michael Brown's
body in the street surrounded by police, tanks and tear gas aimed at the
bodies of protesters. But if tanks, sirens, and bodies are the obvious
footprint of policing, surveillance and infiltration are no less
significant.
Now, as ever, we should be paying attention to the narratives around
criminality, and rallying to protect spaces for dissent and democracy.
Policing enforces ideology, not just law.
A CVE approach to policing will try to quash this naming, this protest, this
rebellion. In the name of security, it will attempt to disrupt and dismantle
this wave of black resistance. The only way to persist is for us - black and
Muslim communities, and beyond - to come together to develop strategies of
resistance and solidarity against the surveillance state.
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Protesters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in August 2014. (photo: Joe
Brusky/Flickr)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/cointelpro-fbi-black-panther-party-young-
lords-hoover/https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/cointelpro-fbi-black-panther
-party-young-lords-hoover/
Policing Black Radicalism
By Amna A. Akbar, Jacobin
21 August 16
The US state has long sought to monitor and undermine black resistance
movements.
he most prominent image of Micah Johnson comes from his Facebook: arrayed
in a purple patterned dashiki, fist raised, expression somber. Reports after
the Dallas shooting heavily emphasized the symbolism in the photograph. The
dashiki and fist - widespread artifacts of black power, love, and resistance
- became suggestions of motive, red flags that should have brought on police
scrutiny sooner.
These symbols, summoned as indicators of motive for Johnson's murder of five
Dallas police officers, telegraph something important about our regime of
policing: whiteness is the baseline for lawfulness; and assertions of
political and cultural identity in communities of color are abnormal,
suspect deviations.
That is how Johnson's military training and participation in the US war in
Afghanistan become less explanatory of his shooting than his dashiki.
As the press and police pivoted from the dashiki and fist to make unlikely
connections between Johnson's shooting, black nationalism, and
#BlackLivesMatter organizing, it became almost certain that we will see
increased surveillance and infiltration of black communities and black
radical spaces.
The Feds have been scouring social media accounts of black organizers and
flying surveillance planes over protests since Ferguson. (Not to mention
local police surveillance.) But reports of knocks on the doors of leaders in
the Movement for Black Lives suggest surveillance and infiltration will
intensify.
Of course, such policing tactics were put to use in past eras of rebellion:
going back to European colonization of the United States, each wave of black
resistance has been met with repression and surveillance.
This time, the named target will be those willing to take up arms against
police, but the casualties will ripple through the black youth movement,
with its battle cry for a more equal and free society.
The obvious antecedent for efforts like these is J. Edgar Hoover's Civil
Rights-era Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). In the name of law and
order, the FBI spied on, disrupted, infiltrated, and discredited radical
political formations from the mid 1950s into the 1970s.
The agency's focus was black leadership and organizations: the program
famously targeted Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, but it also focused
on undermining powerful collectives of young people like the Black Panther
Party and the Young Lords.
But there is a more recent precursor to politically motivated surveillance:
the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program championed by the Obama
administration. In the last eight years, the FBI has developed a sprawling
apparatus to police the ideas and collective formations that take shape in
Muslim communities.
Tactics include extensive knock-and-talks, aggressive deployment of
informants and undercover police - to the point of constructing and
provoking plots - regular combing of social media, and surveillance of
spaces where Muslims gather, from the mosque to Muslim student associations.
The policing attempts to catalog ideas that correlate, allegedly, with
greater likelihood of committing terrorist acts. The theory is specious for
all sorts of reasons, including - as with the case of Micah Johnson's
portrayal in the media - the way it collapses expressions of culture and
identity with threats to the state.
Yet across the country the FBI and joint terrorism task forces have
collaborated with state and local police to monitor and influence the
political ideas taking shape in Muslim communities.
The CVE framework poses American and Muslim identities as opposite poles,
and identifies manifestations of devout religious practice - growing a
beard, regularly attending a mosque - and critiques of US treatment of
Muslims at home and abroad as indicators of growing extremism.
Government reports inflate and collapse connections between critical
discourse, commonplace cultural practices, and willingness to undertake
violence against the state. In the way it situates adopting Muslim cultural
practices or articulating critique of US foreign policy as indicators of
proclivity toward terrorism, the framework demands submersion of Muslim
identity in service of the American project.
But the United States does treat Muslims around the world as suspect: it
kills, captures, surveils, bombs, dehumanizes, and occupies them in the name
of global progress, peace, and security. Muslims live this reality across
diasporas.
But under the lens of CVE, naming this dispossession, dehumanization, and
violence is distorted from an expression of solidarity, shared humanity, or
critical politics into a sign of disloyalty.
This kind of policing generates a fear among Muslims of exploring or pushing
critique - let alone organizing resistance - at the same time it justifies
widespread surveillance of all Muslims.
The message of CVE policing is clear: we are here, we are watching. What you
say will be held against you. When the state targets critique and resistance
of state violence in communities of color, it punishes speech that is
central to the articulation of what it means to be a person of color in this
country.
Poor communities of color are on the receiving end of the most brutality and
inequality enacted by the state: their experiences constitute the most basic
contradictions of a liberal democratic society, where the promise of
equality and freedom coexists with structural inequality and violence.
CVE taxes and undermines the possibilities of resistance. It compels
acquiescence to the social, racialized order. It forces code switching. It
represses dissent and stifles rebellion. It destroys an ability to transform
the world, because it undermines the imagination of those people who have
the largest stake in changing it.
Under a CVE framework, naming your condition and expressing anger about its
causes and consequences become signs of dangerous difference. Resistance to
white supremacy and cultural and political expressions of self become
justifications for policing.
The policing of opinions and resistance easily expands from those who may be
expressing radical difference to all those within the target community -
American Muslims, or black folks. We should be equally concerned with both.
The suggestion that Micah Johnson's blackness is the reason that he killed
police officers suggests that CVE is coming home to black America - and
doubly so to those already targeted as Muslims.
There will be door knocks, more aggressive informants and undercovers, close
examinations of Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook feeds. While the public face
of any such program will be focused on black extremism, the black youth
movement will be a central target.
The black youth movement has brought international attention to America's
cardinal and ongoing sins against black people: Black communities are
surveiled, dispossessed, dehumanized, killed, arrested, brutalized, and torn
apart by the state every day.
The movement has reconfigured long-standing conversations about race,
policing, and mass incarceration into more honest referendums on the state
of white supremacy in this country. It has forced a more probing
conversation about the purpose and history of policing in the United States.
In the liberal imagination, policing is about law and order, a neutral value
that serves all. In the radical imagination, American law is anything but
neutral, rooted as it is in the history of enslavement and colonization.
Policing is a tool of the unequal status quo, emerging out of slave patrols,
to keep the dispossessed without property, the hungry without food, the
insecure uncertain, while protecting the wealth of the wealthy and
justifying the power of the state.
The initial images of policing in Ferguson were that of war: Michael Brown's
body in the street surrounded by police, tanks and tear gas aimed at the
bodies of protesters. But if tanks, sirens, and bodies are the obvious
footprint of policing, surveillance and infiltration are no less
significant.
Now, as ever, we should be paying attention to the narratives around
criminality, and rallying to protect spaces for dissent and democracy.
Policing enforces ideology, not just law.
A CVE approach to policing will try to quash this naming, this protest, this
rebellion. In the name of security, it will attempt to disrupt and dismantle
this wave of black resistance. The only way to persist is for us - black and
Muslim communities, and beyond - to come together to develop strategies of
resistance and solidarity against the surveillance state.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
