Probably the saddest sign of our times is how many people respond with complete bewilderment if you mention direct action. Cutting border fences? punching nazis? sharing resources? blocking arms transports? building alternatives? They’re not even outraged, they’re just confused.
It’s like they’re so caught up in the spectacle of petitions, calling senators, ‘awareness’ and media visbility that they’ve completely forgotten that you can also just do shit without begging for permission.
Seriously, we’ve been so conditioned to seek permission for literally anything that the idea of just doing something yourself is seen as utterly unfeasible, pie in the sky, nonsense.
I for one am a huge believer in direct action and just making the changes we want to see instead of asking the powerful to implement them.
Want to house the homeless? Occupy some abandoned buildings. Want to replace your yard with a vegetable garden? Get you hands on some seeds and plant that shit. We can accomplish so much more by doing instead of begging.
While I agree with this to a point, we also need to consider, before we judge people for not doing for themselves, the fact that authorities have essentially shown willingness to shoot to kill for literally no reason at all. And they seem to be taking great joy in doing so. White people have the privilege of getting shit done without getting shot (in public, anyway) but Existing While Black is apparently a criminal act now, and far too often it results in death, so I can’t imagine that ‘Direct Action’ While Black, particularly when that direct action is actually illegal, would be any better. Especially when the other thing that’s been proven recently is that corporations seem to have more rights than people now.
Before we go, “Let’s just make the changes we want to see!”, let’s at least try to consider that it’s not just “we’ve been programmed to be sheep” that stops people, but the pressing issue of “those assholes with the guns will kill us if we do … and they will get away with it“. Direct action is great, but let’s at least make sure it’s the hill we want to die on. Because we just might, the way things are right now.
Exactly. Direct action is great. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for it, but it’s for people who aren’t going to be imprisoned for life or shot or who know that that is a risk they’re taking and are willing to take it. Let’s not shame people for making the entirely rational judgment that they have people who rely on them to be ok and that they can’t antagonize the government that has proven that it doesn’t give one single fuck about anyone who doesn’t make a six figure salary.
It makes me so so sad to see so many comments under this post that work from the assumption that direct action is something that is mostly done by people with the ‘privilege’ to do it when the exact opposite is true.
People with privilege have always been far more likely to put their fate in awareness campaigns, political parties, NGO’s and so on who for the most part look exactly like them and put on a convincing pretense of caring about them. When I talk about those
caught up in the spectacle of awareness raising, the first people that come to mind are white middle class over-educated people.Most direct action, and definitely most direct action that effectively identified the roots of a problem and dealt with them, has always come from those with the least privilege, those who know that the system doesn’t give a fuck about them and know that every politician and NGO is always going to use them and never going to bring actual change, those who know they have no choice but to do shit themselves, those who know they have the choice between ‘risk getting killed fighting for a better world’ vs ‘risk getting killed for existing while not fighting for a better world’.
And I don’t wanna romanticize any of that. It fucking sucks. But damn, people are out of touch with the history of activism and the reality of modern activism if they think the most dangerous work out there is done by white activists. It’s not.
Generally I like your posts (I was first attracted to your blog by the awesome “The media vs. the movement”), but here you’re completely ignoring the point of the previous comments, Queer Anarchism.
They never said white people did the most dangerous work in activism.
They said white people can get away with breaking laws and norms a lot more easily than POCs.
Generally speaking oppressed categories do risk a lot more than oppressors for the exact same behavior, it’s part of being oppressed.That’s especially sad that you didn’t grasp this point since it’s an important praxis-related issue.
Privileged activists often put other people in danger, creating situations from which they can easily emerge unscathed. Whereas oppressed activists won’t be so lucky.
Case in point: we regularly see cis white men directly provoking and charging police during protests, in contexts where police can easily net protestors, beat them up and put them in detention. Most of the times, these guys won’t suffer much, but the POC protesting with them? Yeah they’re fucked.P.S.: This is neither a criticism of illegal activism or of violent activism. I support both of them. It is good and ethical to steal food from supermarkets to feed homeless people, it is good and ethical to
punch cops and to destroy police equipment, it is good and ethical to vandalize bank offices and to beat nazis up. This comment doesn’t say “Do not do violent/illegal stuff”, but rather “There are nuances to consider”.
YUP, those ARE good points. Thank you.
If I missed this in the previous comments, that’s my fuck up. I’ve gotten so many ‘you gonna get shot, don’t do direct action because it’s dangerous’ kind of posts that weren’t at all about doing better direct actions that are more considerate of who is involved, just about scaring people into thinking direct action is for white kids, and I guess I just started reading most of these posts as extensions of that even when they’re not.
Thank you for taking the time to explain what I was doig wrong.
QueerAnarchism 