Back to Eastern Kentucky II - via New Orleans, Brooklyn, New Bedford, Guatemala & Italy

I’m trying to figure out a way of conceptualizing and researching what I’m imagining as abolition economies. So here’s how I’m thinking about it now. Prisons and exclusionary/punitive migration policy are technologies of dispossession that deepen existing racial and class relations. For example, felon disenfranchisement and nationalistic regulation on employment make it exceedingly difficult to work, as an employee or in licensed trades. So what do folks do to make a living, and how can these alternative economies be built on as a source of resistance to the systems of oppression and dispossession? Kernels for these ideas come from a conversation I had a couple years ago when I first visited New Orleans and interviewed Shana Griffin of the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic (unfortunately now closed, it seems). She told me that part of ending violence against women meant rebuilding community economies and infrastructures. If we were to think about community gardens or neighborhood businesses, within this thought are responses to the structural violence of hunger, of industrial food production, the economic exchanges that can circulate in a neighborhood rather than through big box chains, the social ties that can be fostered through particular community institutions, etc. And this can be the case with prison-siting, too. Since the 80s, prisons and contracting for prisoners have been sold/used as a form of economic development, but places that are already poor when they build a prison stay just as poor; this is a nutshell of Gregory Hooks’ research. I’m paraphrasing, but Ruthie Gilmore once pointed out that unplanned distribution of a pot of money to folks living around a prison would be a more effective economic development model. The point is that much better can be done than that or prisons, so that’s where she looks at what she calls grassroots planning – what are the alternative futures that people want to create for themselves, their kids, and their communities?

Cultural economies can be an important aspect of this project. My conversation with Nick @ Appalshop about cultural work and youth media education and time in New Orleans help make these connections real. Fatalistic resignation to a future of harmful industries and livelihoods rests on a naturalization of these harms (fatalism and fatality). And it rests on forgetting past struggles and losses – remembering a struggle that was lost or crushed is entirely different than thinking that there has never been opposition and no possibility for change. The dispossession of memory is a dispossession of histories of creativity, identity, and struggles as a resource for change. Creative projects can recognize and revalue this past and present are part of the capacity of resisting more harms. Finding that one has a claim on a place and a future goes hand in hand with finding how one’s going to make that claim. Is it writing, film, music, community building, documentation, poetry, what all? If, it seems to me, alienation from cultural production is a huge part of how people can be rendered politically passive, creating the conditions for expression and change is part of people coming to learn their power. So the young person who decides to make music rather than follow the well-worn paths to prison or the military or other harmful industry can be read as an act of refusal. When consciously and collectively acted on, this can be a prefigurative project of bringing into the world the future one wants. This same idea I also experienced in Asheville and Athens around locally grown food. And in New Orleans, where I write this post, Jordan Flaherty tells me that cultural workers are central to rebuilding community institutions. This is as much about the amazing arts that are produced here as the social sensibilities and relations that are created.

I’m talking mostly about the practices and social relations of these intentional economies, but a perfect illustration is a bag I am taking with me across the country. Just before leaving on this trip, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, and I were talking about the effects of migration policy, the appalling situation for migrants in Europe, and immigrant activism and solidarity.* At some point the conversation came to networks of mutual aid and solidarity, and Silvia brought out this bag. It was made by women who had been arrested in the New Bedford, Mass. ICE raid @ a factory making materiel for the US military. Most of the women arrested are from Guatemala, a place in which the US has a sordid history of military and economic interventions. The bags are a project of forged out of necessity, which also capture multiple layers of displacement, violence, and dispossession. But they are also a kernel of anti-violence and facilitate circuits of a solidarity economy.


With that, off to a night of music to raise money to re-open Charity Hospital.

*Here’s an email I just received for a day of upcoming actions in Italy:

CALL Antiracism ROME
October 17
National events
PIAZZA
DELLA REPUBBLICA 14.30
,1989 Hundreds of thousands take to the streets in
Rome for the first major demonstration against racism.
On 24 August of that year at Villa Literno, in the province of Caserta, had been killed a South African refugee, Jerry Essan Masslo. Just 20 years later, racism has not been defeated, continues to cause fatalities, and is powered by the Berlusconi
government. The security package passed by the center-right government offends
human dignity, introducing the crime of "illegal immigration". The death of
immigrants in the Sicilian Channel, which is turning into a graveyard marine, is
the tragic result of the inhuman logic that guides government policy. This
dramatic situation is dangerously in society and legitimating fueling the fear
and violence against any diversity. It 'time to react and build together a great
response and solidarity to fight to defend human rights by rejecting any kind of
racism.
Therefore we appeal to all secular and religious associations, trade
unions, civil society and all movements to the streets October 17 to stop
the spread of racism based on this platform:
* No racism
* For the legalization generalized for all
* security
* Reception Retreat Package
* No for all the rejections and the bilateral agreements providing
for them
* For the clean break of the link between residence permits and
employment contracts
* Right of asylum for refugees and displaced
* To the final closure of the Centers for identification and expulsion
(CEI)
* No divisions between Italians and foreigners
* Right to employment, health, housing and education for all
* Maintenance of the residence permit for those who have lost their jobs
* against all forms of discrimination against LGBT

* Solidarity with all workers fighting to defend work

Road trip day 5 - back to eastern Kentucky, part 1

Taking you back to eastern Kentucky and day 5 of the road trip.

After staying the night in West Virginia, I traveled to Whitesburg, Kentucky to meet with Nick Szuberla at Appalshop, just across the state line from Wallens Ridge in Virginia. Appalshop is a multimedia arts and education center started with War on Poverty money in the 1960s. The question then as now is how the arts can foster social and economic justice in a place whose economy has been dominated by coal.
The remoteness of Whitesburg belies its connection to globalization. The mechanization of the multinational coal industry created even greater unemployment in an already struggling region. With a prison located atop an old mountaintop coal removal site, we have one story of how a place reliant on extractive industries tries to retool its economy. With Appalshop, we have another story of how building cultural resources and capacities can be a source of resistance and a cultural economy that provides alternatives to the deadly paths to the mines, prison (as guard or guarded), and military.
I’m here to learn about the Thousand Kites project, which has become an important communication and cultural infrastructure linking imprisoned folks and their families and communities on the outside. Amelia Kirby and Nick started the project about 10 years ago soon after Red Onion and Wallens Ridge opened. Appalshop’s radio station broadcasts reach the prisons and they began hearing stories about prisoner abuses and decided to do a project on the prison system. Over the years they (and countless other folks) have created several projects, including a film, Up the Ridge, a weekly radio broadcast, Holler to the Hood, and the yearly Calls from Home radio program, which is syndicated to over 200 radio stations across the country. Ms. K in Richmond, VA, whom I interviewed when I first started the trip, is on the air every week and uses the broadcasts as a powerful mobilizing platform. Likewise, the radio and documenting personal narrative has also been used to bring prisoners back to the states where they were convicted. Wallens Ridge is among the prisons that contracts with places outside Virginia, such as New Mexico, DC and the Virgin Islands to rent space for prisoners.

Cruelty & Invisiblity

In Athens I got to begin some good conversations with folks about spectacle and how state violence becomes everyday. This article by Henry Giroux (thx, Nick B!) captures this sense of how everyday cruelty is produced.

Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a
culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to
corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?

What Giroux captures is feeling really visceral to me on this road trip when military bases and detention centers pop out of nowhere and just as quickly recede, and when a friend tells me about a white mob @ town hall meeting on health care. What kind of health system could possibly be created when some politicians are working "to make sure the health plan did not become a magnet drawing new illegal immigrants to the United States"? The nativist, racist animus that would see spending $8 million to keep 8 undocumented people off the health care rolls speaks not only to a sort of blind fury, but also to the many times in the past when white folks have cut off their own noses to make sure other folks don't have basic services.

Columbus to Lumpkin, GA

I took a longer route to Miami from Athens and spent the afternoon measuring the geographic proximities and gaps between Fort Benning and Stewart Detention Center. From the road, Fort Benning's landscape is unobtrusive, and I didn't go searching around for anything super identifiable either. It's clearer from the business and school signs in Columbus that one's in a military town than it was from the road I traveled; I was on the base as quickly as it disappeared. The only reason the same stretches of kudzu and stands of pine took on meaning was knowing that I was traveling between the site of the School of the Americas and the site of one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the country. The institution responsible for military and paramilitary practices that have sent hundreds of thousands of people into movement, whether from wartime or economic violence, is a short 30 miles north of Lumpkin. Lumpkin is a tiny little Southern town with a city hall in the center and one-story brick storefronts across the street on all four sides.

I spent half hour or so driving up and down the country road looking for the turn-off to Holder Road. The woman at the gas station in town asked if i was looking for "the camp," and everyone inside told me how easy it was to get there. And Stewart Detention Center is easy to get to once you ask. No large signs on the road, but you turn off onto CCA road and immediately see a large water tower and some curiously messaged greeting signs: "You are important to CCA." I honestly do not know who their audience is.

There is no guard gate, so I pulled in past the entrance sign into a monochrome landscape of black asphalt and grey starkly cut against the wild overgrowth [where my plant people?]. Layers of grey building, grey fences, grey razor wire all blurring together in the dusk sky. And painfully silent at this time of day. The tensions between the mundane and stark, unobtrusive and sudden razor-wire demarcation, and scales of movement of people and violence are what I'm sitting with at the moment.

Will share more photos later - must get on the road to Miami. Also, be looking for news from eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, and Atlanta. And thanks, friends, for the chats on these grim weekend drives.

Happenings around Highlander Center

Quick update on action around Highlander Center. I got to visit on the day of their Homecoming celebration. It’s a stunning setting built atop rolling hills of eastern Tennessee, just east of Knoxville. Highlander is a venerable institution that has been in the work of social justice and popular education since the last Great Depression. A group of neighboring residents formed Jefferson County Tomorrow to organize against plans for an intermodal transport center that Norfolk Southern wants to site off of I-40 at New Market. The transport center would be built next to a school on farm/bog land. Jefferson County Tomorrow has many concerns including the state’s use of eminent domain, the air pollution from another 300,000 trucks to a place that already has some air quality problems, and the lack of transparency on the part of Jefferson County officials. Not only did the officials sign a non-disclosure agreement with Norfolk Southern, but they’re also failing to tell area residents where the access road may be located. One potential site would cut through Highlander Center property.

North Georgia Detention Center - Gainesville, GA

unspectacular pix of the new North Georgia Detention Center, a converted city jail, on Main Street, Gainesville, GA. ICE apparently will have offices next door or on site.

Snapshot of Immigrant Detention January 09

These maps show immigrants detained in January 2009. They are part of an interesting new study issued by the Migration Policy Institute. The first depicts the regional concentration of migrant detention in the South and Southwest, and the map on the right depicts type of facility. Some 70% of immigrant detention remains in city and county jails. Posting this from Athens, GA, there is a CCA facility in nearby Gainesville that is slated to open next to new ICE offices.