Tip of The Spear ch2 (check in and thoughts)

Hey, we're going to meet in about an hour and I wanted to remind you about it, and also send along some quotes that I thought about while reading "Black Solidarity Under Siege" (chapter 2 of Tip of the Spear).

(by the way, I also linked to "Like a Bag Trying to Empty: On the Palestinian prisoner and martyr Walid Daqqa" by Kaleem Hawa for Parapraxis, but if you didn't get a chance to read it, no worries)

quotes & reflections

As a white Western discourse that developed in dialogue with colonial conquest, the liberal humanist project attempts to define and demarcate the boundaries of humanity. ... Black and other colonized populations have functioned as the nonhuman Others existing beneath and beyond humanity’s normative paradigm. (page 51)

Prisoncrats legitimated their violence by hiding it, mystifying it beneath obfuscating language, and by labelling the rebels as the extremist initiators of violence.

[the Auburn rebels] ... introduced a counter-violence that communicated their willingness to universalize the disposability of life, if no other options were available. (page 63)

What does it mean to be crazy, to be extreme, to be mad, amid a condition that is itself beyond "reason"? (page 66)

When liberal humanist fixations with rights and incorporation into imperialist regimes are dislodged, a remarkable truth becomes evident: the Auburn rebels were never defeated. (page 76)

I wanted to bring a lot of other passages into the conversation (and I may weave in other quotes, if you join us today), but the theme of most of the quotes I was resonating with was the rejection of the paradigm that the prison system (and the broader carceral state) represented.

I'm thinking a lot about the salient understanding that the prison and the broader colonial apartheid system in the United States (and also, not to state the obvious, in Israel) exists to demarcate and draw both literal geographic as well as conceptual and spiritual boundaries of humanity. Israelis talk about Palestinians as pests to be eradicated; concrete walls place Palestinians within what is now an open-air prison; bomb shelters are located in Israeli settlements and prohibit Arabs from using them.

All that and more happens via this exceptional process that Burton breezes by, but could be a whole damn dissertation, when he observes how prisoncrats "mystify [their violence] beneath obfuscating language". I study algorithmic harms and violence and he just said something I've been thinking about for years, in something like one half of a sentence, on his way to another point.

But I digress.

At various points, the Auburn rebels rejected the hegemony of violence that the prison system represented, and also invested intellectually, culturally, and physically in thriving. The BPP focus on freedom coming from within, the training in martial arts, and reading groups, and strategic planning for opportunities to assert and claim their freedom. But also what Burton calls the "willingness to universalize the disposability of life" - and to be clear, not a decision or a willingness that they initiated, but rather one that they responded to (belatedly).

I also really want to discuss the PSC and its role, and I'm going to sneak this excerpt into the chat to get us started thinking:

...  the PSC functioned, in one member’s words, as "a vehicle whereby the prisoners themselves could speak to the people outside, could generalize their struggle, fuse their grievances and their hopes into the main current of rebellion that is rising in the country as a whole" (page 57)

What role can we take up, outside of occupied Palestine, to help generalize the struggle of Palestinians still in Gaza and the West Bank? What can we do to help preserve and nurture hope for Palestinians right now? I see material ways that some parties are giving hope to Palestinians that there will be an end to the constant bombings, the blockades, the withholding of medical care, the surveillance, the extortion, etc... but it's not enough.

video chat details

In about an hour (at 12pm ET) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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supporting The Sameer Project

If you can't buy Tip of the Spear from the bookstore, please consider making a donation directly to one of the Sameer Project's campaigns, or consider sharing a fundraiser with friends. If you can't do any of that, consider sharing the reading group with some friends; if some of them can buy the book from Open Books, or even make direct donations to The Sameer Project, then that would help enormously.