[Peace] AWARE at Farmer's Market - and SJP UIUC #SaltwaterChallenge - and Black Students for Revolution UIUC's demands
Stuart Levy
stuartnlevy at gmail.com
Sat May 13 01:17:35 UTC 2017
AWARE will have a table at the Farmer's Market, for the first time this
season, tomorrow morning -- Saturday, May 13th, 8am-noon.
We'll have a collection of anti-war flyers, as well as buttons and
bumper stickers.
I'll also bring some copies of the Black Students for Revolution's
demands - we can talk about them with whoever stops by. On the whole I
think that they're admirable.
Another admirable effort - hearing about this now - is the
#SaltwaterChallenge international campaign, which Students from Justice
in Palestine UIUC <https://www.facebook.com/SJP.UIUC/> is participating
in, in solidarity with some 1700 Palestinians in Israeli prisons who are
protesting the only way they can: through a hunger strike, now in its
21st day. Theirs is a risky effort which merits our awareness and support.
SJP UIUC thanks several other UIUC student groups as supporting them in
that effort, including Black Students for Revolution
<https://www.facebook.com/BSFRUIUC/>, Black United Front UIUC
<https://www.facebook.com/AllBlackUIUC/>, UIUC Beyond Coal
<https://www.facebook.com/UIUCBeyondCoal/>, UMMA UIUC
<https://www.facebook.com/ummauiuc/>, and Arab Student Association at
UIUC <https://www.facebook.com/ASAUIUC/>.
Stuart
On 5/11/17 10:13 AM, Harry Mickalide via Peace-discuss wrote:
> Carl, here is my frustration. You continue to assert that BSFR (Black
> Students for Revolution) is engaging in identity politics at the
> expense of being anti-capitalist and anti-war when multiple people
> have told you that BSFR is very much anti-capitalist and anti-war.
>
> Here are some quotes from their list of demands to prove it.
> https://www.bsfruiuc.com/our-demands
>
> From demand 1
> "While students are being handcuffed with loans, private lenders are
> making a profit and the federal government is spending public funds on
> wars, drones, wall street bailouts, and corporate subsidies. Situated
> at the intersection of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy,
> today’s education model marginalizes and excludes both the working
> class and students of color. As a first step towards a tuition-free
> and debt-free reality within higher education, we demand that tuition
> hikes come to an immediate and permanent end, and that MAP Grants,
> regardless of state funding, should continue to be issued to recipients."
>
> From demand 8
> "We believe adequate shelter, food, water, and health care are human
> rights owed to all workers, and that a living wage is a first step in
> ensuring that for all people."
>
> From demand 13
> They call for divestment from "corporations which actively support or
> enable states currently carrying out human right’s abuses (e.g.,
> Israel, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar), all private prison corporations, and
> all private military contractors and weapons manufacturers."
>
> Despite this clear overlap between the goals of AWARE and BSFR, you
> refuse to support them because they are also choosing to rally around
> their shared blackness? That seems hella racist to me.
>
> On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 9:20 AM, Carl G. Estabrook via Peace
> <peace at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>
> More useful than Google (not, perhaps, the most revolutionary
> organization...) is the ‘Search’ function on the Peace-discuss
> archives, Karen.
>
> This is from six months ago, re
> <https://www.bsfruiuc.com/our-demands
> <https://www.bsfruiuc.com/our-demands>>:
>
>> ...The list certainly raises (once again) questions of the nature
>> and provenance of identity politics (the mainstay of the Clinton
>> campaign).
>> See Adolph Reed's mordant description … :
>>
>> "[Identity] politics is not an alternative to class politics; it
>> is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of
>> neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a
>> political order and moral economy in which capitalist market
>> forces are treated as unassailable nature.
>> "An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the
>> critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class
>> power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity
>> that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we
>> essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued,
>> following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a
>> society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the
>> resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were
>> black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the
>> appropriate proportions were LGBT people.
>> "It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses
>> more unambiguously the social position of people who consider
>> themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant
>> staff positions in service to, the ruling class”
>> <http://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/
>> <http://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/>>.
>>
>> It’s difficult to see how a serious critique of US war-making can
>> arise from identity politics. (Not enough blacks and women among
>> Special Forces killers?)
>> It would seem that US war-making arises from domestic and foreign
>> class conflicts; given that we’ve killed more than 20 million in
>> 37 nations since WWII, we should be clear about causes.
>> <https://www.popularresistance.org/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-in-37-nations-since-wwii/
>> <https://www.popularresistance.org/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-in-37-nations-since-wwii/>>.
>>
>> AWARE has seen as its task for 15 years to encourage awareness of
>> how and why the US government is the greatest purveyor of
>> violence in the world today.
>> And to do that we must tell the truth and shame the devil, as
>> Hotspur says.
>>
>> I’m not convinced that endorsing these demands contributes to
>> that effort. —CGE
>
> Six months on, and as worthwhile as some of the goals of the
> demands seem, that still seems right to me.
>
> Regards, Carl
>
>
>
>> On May 11, 2017, at 9:06 AM, kmedina67 via Peace
>> <peace at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Carl, Google it.
>>
>> Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device
>>
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: "Carl G. Estabrook"
>>
>> Send me their list of demands (and read Reed…)
>>
>>
>>> > wrote:
>>>
>>> Point to items on their list that are identity politics
>>>
>>> -------- Original message --------
>>> e.g. Adolph Reed’s critique:
>>>
>>> <http://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/
>>> <http://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/>>.
>>>
>>> AWARE was founded to foster local opposition to US war-making
>>> and racism - and, by implication, capitalism, the source of both.
>>>
>>> We should be willing to cooperate with others who have effective
>>> ways to do that as well.
>>>
>>> But as Reed explains, identity politics is a defense of
>>> capitalism - and therefore at best only accidentally useful in
>>> an anti-war anti-racism effort.
>>>
>>> —CGE
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Carl,
>>>>
>>>> It is online. I can't copy and paste the url from my cell
>>>> phone. But you can Google their demands.
>>>> -karen medina
>>>>
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