Gangs in Sudbury?

While it was once a routine thing for me to produce writing that had relatively high visibility in my local area, that has not been true in quite a few years, and I am no longer used to it. So I was a little anxious about having a recent op/ed piece published in a local newspaper. Thankfully, though the piece lays out a pretty unapologetic left position on an issue that has emotions running high in the city, most of the feedback I've received online and in person has been quite positive -- not all of it, to be sure, and I'm pretty certain there are other folks who've just been silent rather than disagree overtly, but a lot. And, while I'm well aware of the reasons not to make too much of it, it has felt a little hopeful, somehow.

Yet this sense of getting a broader-than-expected head-nodding response when writing about one issue was completely torn to shreds when I thought about writing about this:



This was a poster for a local police-organized community forum on gangs, as part of a province-wide initiative to prevent gangs from spreading to rural, remote, and northern communities. There are all kinds of levels of wrong with this. I encountered this image (and an expanded version) because a friend posted it to FaceBook and named the wrongness.

That is, Sudbury is a city with a population that was 94% white in the last census. Given that the indigenous population of the city is growing at a very rapid rate and that one legacy of colonialism is that indigenous people tend to significantly underidentify on the census, lets call this more like 92% or 91% white. Yet racialized youth make up way more than 8% of the youth represented on the poster, which pretty directly implies that the cluster of issues that the police group under the heading "gangs" is actually a problem with youth of colour. Not only is this racist in and of itself, this thinking, if it were to organize police practices beyond just questionable choices in poster design, is a recipe for racial profiling of youth of colour in the Sudbury community.

Note that this is not based on any presumptions about the initiative itself; it is based on easily obtained facts about Sudbury and a quick glance at the poster, and the hope that it doesn't reflect the initiative. Yet on FaceBook and in responses to another blog post about the issue, even this level of wrong, which is based on things that are very easy to find out and very easy to see, has been met with white indignation, objection, and refusal to see.

There is lots about this that is upsetting, but the particular flavour of the upset for me was a reminder -- it was experienced as a reminder rather than my everyday experience because of white privilege -- that broader-than-expected openness to certain kinds of critical politics does not necessarily imply much openness to other kinds of critical politics. Because there is more to be concerned about based on this poster than the racst overrepresentation of youth of colour, yet even that most demonstrable element of wrong is met with denial and hostility. Other levels of wrong that I can see (and there is probably lots that I'm missing) are less easily demonstrated and so would likely face even greater denial and hostility, but are no less crucial in understanding why people in Sudbury should be concerned about the poster and skeptical about police initiatives focused on gangs.

More on the Poster

One other aspect -- and noone else has mentioned it yet, which may mean I'm misreading the image, and I welcome correction -- is the other ways in which the poster is signaling "gangness" in the youth. This is particularly visible to me in the full version. Most of the youth, regardless of whether or not they are racialized, are shown as having particular kinds of personal aesthetics and many have their bodies posed in distinctive ways. To me, the images in mainstream popular culture that these echo are images, probably largely stereotypical, of youth of colour who are in gangs and youth of colour who are involved in hip-hop. Given that the most prominent figure in the image is a young Black man, and given the slogan is "WE are here... What'cha gonna do about it?" -- which also given the context reads most readily as an attempt to duplicate speech patterns stereotypically associated with poor and working-class communities of colour in the United States -- the take home message seems to be that Sudbury needs to watch out or youth of colour from the big city are going to come and contaminate youth in Sudbury, especially but not only youth of colour. This, obviously, is also racist.

(The other interesting thing about the image that is less directly about racism and more about stereotypes of 'dangerous youth', which admittedly do tend to get applied more vigorously to youth of colour, is the defiant looks on all of their faces. It is as if the message is that youth defiance and criminality blend in to each other, if indeed they are not the same thing, which tends to be a message that conservative parents and conservative community leaders are very willing to hear.)

Policing

That's all I get from the poster directly. However, it seems to me that the presence of this poster and this workshop need to be understood in a broader context, and that such an understanding should lead us to approach this whole process with some considerable concern. I do not know how this process is working, what people are saying at the events -- though I did hear through the grape vine that at an earlier event in this process a number of youth were excluded and a graduate student researcher was arrested for asking questions outside of the designated time, so that should give you a flavour -- or how it is all organized. I am not pretending to be presenting an analysis of what this process is actually doing. Instead, I am presenting some elements of context that indicate to me that this process should be met with considerable skepticism, and should be expected to prove that it deserves otherwise.

The first reason for skepticism is about policing in general. This tends to be a very significant social faultline. The dominant commonsense about policing, formed in white middle-class experience of the police and through vigorous public relations work by police themselves, paints a largely benevolent picture, sometimes tempered with an acknowledgment of occasional excess that is acceptable because they have to do what they have to do to keep Us safe from Them. On the other hand, lots of people regularly experience harassment and even violence from the police. This is particularly true of people who live in extreme poverty and racialized people. There have been a number of books released in the last few years documenting the extent of racial profiling by police in Canada. (Interestingly, a friend related to me that a Black police officer of her acquaintance objects to the term 'racial profiling,' which he thinks obscures what's going on, and instead we should just stick to calling it 'racism.') I've read only one of them, and I've heard that one isn't the best of the bunch, but that, various articles I've read over the years, and listening to personal experiences of friends who are racialized, makes it pretty clear how huge a problem this remains.

And I should be clear that police harassment of racialized people and poor people is not just a problem for big cities, or faraway places. A friend of mine was roughed up by cops in Sudbury a few years ago. In the course of some organizing around issues of police brutality in response to that, I heard a number of other stories of similar experiences, even given that the organizing was quite modest and was not sustained. And in doing anti-poverty work in the first couple of years I lived here, it was pretty evident that, much like most other cities, people living in extreme poverty regularly face harassment and sometimes violence from the police.

This is part of the everyday/everynight experiences of a portion of the population, yet it is not reflected in how the police get talked about in the media and it does not seem to be reflected in how social service agencies in the city relate to the police. Both of these sites accept the middle-class commonsense that police are defending the public, rather than the commonsense of some folks in Sudbury and elsewhere that police are a source of danger.

Now, there is a much larger discussion to be had about the social organization of policing and how that produces certain outcomes, as well as the place of policing in the context of social relations as a whole. There is also the consistent pattern of police manipulating fear for both self-serving institutional reasons and broader reactionary ideological reasons. I don't feel I know enough about all of that to get into it here, and I will leave it at this: the fact that a non-trivial segment of the Sudbury population experiences police primarily as a source of danger to me implies that any increase in police powers and resources should, at the very least, be met with skepticism. Actually, I think that means that there should be fundamental questioning of current social relations, but I haven't demonstrated why I think that, and I'm not going to try in this post.

Cops and Gangs

Another reason for skepticism is the larger North American context when it comes to gangs.

Generally, public discourse around gangs tends to be full of fear, full of racism, and largely out of touch with the contexts in which gangs happen and with what gangs actually are. "Gang" often serves as a stand-in or a codeword for some dangerous Other, a way of pretending to concretize vague fears that Something Bad Will Happen (often because Someone Bad made it happen). Often the discussion is based in a completely ungrounded "what if" that is more an expression of the fear of privileged people than it is of the challenges faced by the more oppressed and exploited people who are often the target of whatever police initiatives result.

(An anecdotal digression: A good example of this for me was back when I wrote articles about local issues in Hamilton, Ontario. Some sort of educational event had been hosted for local politicians, I think members of the Police Services Board, about gangs. I remember one local city councillor, who represented a downtown ward, repeatedly getting up in council meetings and going on about it in ways that demonstrated his ignorance, and the ignorance that the educational session had amplified in him. He was very concerned with graffiti and tagging, which he was convinced was a sign that gangs were overwhelming the city, though in my understanding tagging is more often something done by an individual artist with no particular affiliation. More outrageously, there was a business in the downtown owned by a young Black man, I think a clothing store, which had gotten together some local youth involved in hip-hop culture in various ways to do some artwork on the back of the building that his store was in. I don't know exactly what this guy's decision making process was around this, but I suspect he understood it as doing his bit to contribute to downtown renewal, to beautifying the core of the city while also making the presence of Black communities and hip-hop communities a bit more visible, as well as making his business more visible. But there was a serious initiative to try and force him to remove all of the beautiful paint on his building, this contribution to the cultural life of the city, out of some vague fear that it would somehow be making gangs worse.)

Anyway. The point is, public discourse about gangs tends to be pretty disconnected from reality at the best of times, so that is a reason to be skeptical.

Another reason to be skeptical is that frequently what 'police initiatives against gangs' translates into in practice in North American cities is racial profiling and attacks on racialized communities. In other words, part of the fear about what an event promoted by this racist poster might be leading to is a fear based in what actually happens in lots of places. It's particularly stark in some U.S. cities -- and it is interesting that the event this poster was promoting includes an expert from New York State, a place where attacks on communities of colour in the name of combating crime have been rampant.

Which isn't to say that the various things that the police tend to identify as "gangs" are not indicators of challenges that communities face. Often "gangs" get recognized as a problem in communities that are facing huge problems already. And it is not unusual for members of that community to want the violence associated with gang presence to end. However, organizing a significant portion of the public response to those challenges around the notion of a 'war on gangs' or whatever tends to do more harm than good. Not that there is no variation between different initiatives, and not that organizations in some communities don't work with the police despite misgivings. But focusing on 'gangs' tends to mean that huge, complicated, socially organized problems of violence and suffering get identified simplistically with criminality and that resources are used in ways that amplify violence rather than creating justice.

For instance, take Los Angeles, a city widely associated with gangs and a place I briefly lived. You have very large racialized communities that have been subject to systemic violence -- racist violence, economic violence, state violence -- for decades, even centuries. The phenomena that tend to get grouped together as "gangs" are one facet of the challenges that these communities face, and, yes, probably much of these communities wish that the phenomena labelled "gangs" weren't happening. But by addressing these huge systemic issues by focusing on "gangs" and prioritizing policing as a response, you are essentially refusing to address the underlying issues and inflicting even greater levels of violence onto these communities. You could be prioritizing racial justice, economic justice, gender justice, but instead you end up with police who claim to be dealing with the problem but who are reinforcing what amounts to a colonial relationship within the confines of the city.

There are obvious differences with the situation in Sudbury, not the least of which being that the dominant cultural imaginary of gangs based on inaccurate accounts of various kinds of social organization in particular contexts in U.S. cities is being used to name much different social forms in the context of northern Ontario. However, the continent-wide patterns in how police initiatives against gangs often happen -- as attacks on already-oppressed communities that claim to respond to very real problems but often just make them worse -- is still enough that those of us in the community should be skeptical. Though racial formation in Sudbury is very different than in most U.S. cities, this is a city with lots of people who don't have much hope for the future. We have a resource-based economy that leaves huge swathes of the community poor even in boom times, and we are not in boom times. We have governments that jump up and down and claim they are doing all they can to deal with poverty or to support northern Ontario or whatever -- well, I'm not sure the federal Cons actually claim those things -- but they steadfastly refuse to do anything that isn't cosmetic to deal with the real challenges that communities face. Yet they put money into anti-gang initiatives.

Yes, a recent newspaper article identifying that "street gangs [are] often stereotyped" and making the startling revelation that privileged kids do criminal things too is a welcome contribution -- though the failure to mention the stereotyping in the police poster for this event is notable. However, given the history and context of policing organized around 'gangs' it will take more than one short article to convince that such policing in Sudbury is not going to amount to additional profiling of racialized and poor people.

A cynical person, in fact, might think that such initiatives show a concern with keeping the impacts of colonization, racism, and capitalist exploitation from affecting people with relative privilege, rather than actually dealing with the challenges that colonized, racialized, and highly exploited communities actually face.

Like I said, none of this is claiming to be an analysis of what the Sudbury police and their out-of-town allies are actually doing, because the media reports have been pretty vague and I would be skeptical of published claims anyway. One intriguing and maybe even encouraging element is that a future event will involve Clayton Thomas Muller, who they bill as an 'anti-gang expert' but who is an indigenous radical from the Cree Nation who is heavily involved in environmental justice organizing. I'm not sure what exactly his participation means, and it certainly doesn't eliminate my skepticism about what the local police might or might not be doing, but he is someone worth listening to. On the whole, though, I'm skeptical. And I'm a bit depressed that my skepticism is probably not broadly shared in the Sudbury context. A number of local agencies and other organizations are co-sponsoring this process, which is just sad, and betrays an uncritical allegiance to a very distorted understanding of what policing actually does.

Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Left

A friend just drew my attention to this review by long-time labour activist and executive editor of Black Commentator Bill Fletcher, of Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, a new collection edited by Mark Bould and China Mieville.

I definitely need to read the book, and I think the review itself is interesting and worth reading. I nodded with particular vigour at this paragraph:

Science fiction has been a critical element in the imagination of much of the Left. However, among many left-wing activists and theorists, it is something that is often approached sheepishly, with a certain degree of embarrassment. It is almost as if one's interest in science fiction is an engagement in a childhood game, such as "freeze tag." Oddly, when leftists actually begin to engage in a dialogue about science fiction, myriad themes generally emerge that demonstrate that it is anything but childish. For many people, science fiction and fantasy are nevertheless signs of immaturity rather than an engagement with ideological and political issues in another dimension.

Now I just need to decide whether to order the book immediately, or to be patient and keep to my pledge to significantly reduce the size of my owned-but-not-read pile before buying any new books.

Quote: Said on Theory

Theory ... is won as the result of a process that begins when consciousness first experiences its own terrible ossification in the general reification of all things under capitalism; then when consciousness generalizes (or classes) itself as something opposed to other objects, and feels itself as contradiction to (or crisis within) objectification, there emerges a consciousness of change in the status quo; finally, moving toward freedom and fulfillment, consciousness looks ahead to complete self-realization, which is of course the revolutionary process stretching forward in time, perceivable now only as theory or projection.

-- Edward Said (quoted in bell hooks, belonging: a culture of place, pp. 98-99)

Review: Crude World

[Peter Maas. Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.]

This is a journalistic look at the global oil industry. The author is a liberal U.S. American journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine, as well as other outlets like The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and Mother Jones. Given that, you get what you might expect, more or less. The writing is lively and punchy, though given to occasional indulgences in a particular journalistic flavour of attempted cleverness; there is some quite interesting and useful reporting; and the (often implicit) political framework used to stitch all of the pieces together is pretty lacking.

Each chapter in the book -- they have titles like "Plunder" and "Greed" and "Mirage" -- focuses on a particular place where oil is extracted, from Equatorial Guinea to Texas to Saudi Arabia to Venezuela. In each of these places, the author has interviewed relevant sources and often visited relevant sites. His overarching theme is the way in which countries with significant oil resources tend to suffer harmful social and economic (and of course environmental) impacts. Corruption, dictators, big corporations, and U.S. American war-making are all named and deplored at various points. All of which is good, as far as it goes, but the context in which these anecdote-filled stories are told is pretty thin.

For instance, the chapter on Iraq is clearly not supportive of the invasion, though it falls rather more often than I would like into the liberal anti-war rhetoric that emphasizes bungling in the execution of this particular war rather than sticking to the basic wrongness of invading other people's countries and killing lots and lots of people. It is organized around investigating whether it was really a "war for oil." While it makes admirably short work of the laughable assertion that oil had nothing to do with it, it goes on to set up a straw person by assuming the most simplistic possible understanding of "war for oil" and goes for the gotcha by showing it was more complicated than that, without actually dealing with the issue of oil-in-a-larger-context in a particularly complex way.

Or take the chapter on Venezuela. Unlike much of the mainstream media in the U.S., even its more liberal wing, this book isn't full of knee-jerk Chavez hating -- some understated Chavez mocking, perhaps, but not hating. Its basic point that the dependence of Chavez's project on oil and the particular ways in which that money is being used create some serious issues for the future, particularly during times of lower prices and after Venezuela's reserves begin to dry up, is worth some serious reflection and probably touches on some core issues facing the Bolivarian revolution. But its conclusions about the doomed character of the Venezuelan experiment is based on a very shallow look at what is actually being done with the money, how social relations are or are not being shifted, what movements within Venezuela are saying and doing, and the larger context of the Latin American revolt against neoliberalism. I don't know enough to offer any definitive pronouncements either, but if I was going to try I know there is a lot more that I would need to investigate and talk about. Despite the author seeming to tilt towards the more progressive side of liberalism, there is something of this chapter that smacks of an age-old liberal attitude towards anything to their left, which involves performing sympathy, predicting tragedy, and being complicit with forces actively working to make it so.

The Conclusion, which responds to the reader's inevitable questions about what to do about all of the social and ecological damage done by the oil industry, and the corruption and power and ruthlessness of its acolytes, fits right in with the rest of the book. All of its ideas about technological advancement, political will, changes in social expectations, and initiatives promoting transparency are good as far as they go, but they don't adequately deal with the ways in which the problems are actually socially produced and the ways in which change actually happens (and the kinds of obstacles faced in implementing changes that threaten key elements of capital accumulation).

Anyway, this book is worth reading for the reporting, if it is an area that interests you, just try not to pay too much attention to the analysis.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Standing Together: Striking Back for a Stronger Future

A Sudbury Event...
Standing Together: Striking Back for a Stronger Future

6:30pm Saturday, February 27th
Fraser Auditorium, Laurentian University


An evening of music and stories in support of Local 6500 of the United Steelworkers

* Musical performances by Stéphane Paquette, Billy John, Pascal and O.B., Ryan Levecque and the Women of Steel.

* Videos including "One Day Longer", a clip from "A Wives' Tale," and scenes from the present strike.

* Speakers including: Richard Bertrand (Vice-President of Local 6500 USW), Kari Ann Cusack (Family Support Group for the Strike), Carolyn Egan (President of the United Steelworkers Toronto Area Council), Gary Kinsman (editor of Mine Mill Fights Back), Linda Obonsawin (Wives Supporting the Strike, 1978-79), Richard Paquin (president of Mine Mill/CAW Local 598), a worker from Ravenswood, and Pete Wade (USW local 6500).

Initiated by the Centre for Research in Social Justice and Policy, Labour Studies, the Graduate Students' Association, the Laurentian Association of Mature and Part-Time Students (LAMPS), Association des étudiantes et étudiants francophones (AEF), and the Laurentian University Faculty Association (LUFA) in collaboration with Local 6500 of the USW.

For more information contact: Gary Kinsman at 675-1151 ext. 4221 or at gkinsman@laurentian.ca

Op/Ed Piece Published

This is just a quick note to share the fact that a reworked and considerably shortened version of the post I did recently called "Why I Support Striking Vale Inco Workers" has been published as an op/ed piece by Northern Life, a local newspaper, under the title "Offering support for strikers as the rich get richer". (Thanks to PF for letting me know it had been published and thanks to CD for suggesting I submit it.)

Review: Another World is Possible

[David McNally. Another World is Possible: Globalization & Anti-Capitalism, Revised Expanded Edition. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2006.]

This book was an invigorating read but I'm a little worried that the moment that it was intended to shape is long past.

The author's project is clear: He wrote the book with the aim of cultivating a more explicit and rigorous anti-capitalism among people active or interested in the global justice movement in North America. Except, of course, this edition came out in 2006. While presenting a solid yet accessible and struggle-oriented introduction to at least one strand of anti-capitalist thought is still useful, the scattering of the global justice energies in other directions in North America probably means this book is unlikely to have quite the impact the author hoped for when he initially wrote it. However, despite the fact that it did not present a whole lot of ideas or histories that were new to me, I still got a boost form reading it because it carries in it a certain kind of energy, a certain tone, that reminded me of that not-so-long-ago moment when North American movements were a bit more lively and visible.

The book opens with an overview of the uprisings against globalization -- these days I would be more likely to use the vocabulary of neoliberalism, but I'll mostly stick with his usage for this review -- in the '90s and more recently. Then it examines in more detail what the phenomena grouped under the label "globalization" actually are, with an emphasis on the fact that so-called free trade mostly has very little to do with trade. Then the book links globalization to the dynamics of capitalism more broadly, with some quite useful discussion of things like enclosure and primitive accumulation both during the initial formation of capitalism as well as today, and a look at globalization as an enhancement of some of capitalism's less savoury features. Then there is a chapter that focuses on the ways in which relations of white supremacy and patriarchy are integral to capital, and a chapter on war and empire. Finally, he reviews some of the actual struggles that have gone on across the world against capitalist globalization, which eases into a more analytical look at how struggles might most usefully develop.

I like this book, and think it is very useful. Most of the time when you read political economy marxism, it is awful at dealing with race and gender and it is very detached from actual struggle both in its content and in the form the writing takes. In contrast, this book takes social relations of racial and gender oppression very seriously and emphasizes that struggles against white supremacy and patriarchy must be completely integral to anti-capitalist struggle. It also encourages readers in a more general way to figure out the connections between apparently disparate struggles, which I think is an absolutely crucial practice to cultivate. Of course, there are limits -- I suspect that you would get an end product more different from conventional marxism by starting to investigate social relations from scratch with attention to the role that all such relations have in organizing our experiences than if you add race and gender to a preexisting marxism, however determinedly. And I think those differences probably matter, both in understanding how the social world is put together and in figuring out how to change it. Nonetheless, the ways that this book talks about race and gender are serious and useful.

My reaction to the ways in which it talks about struggle are of sort of a similar shape. I like that it is written specifically to be picked up by people, probably mostly young people, who are actively involved in struggle. I like the copious attention it gives to struggle around the globe. Yet this, too, has its limits. The chapter that looks at different ways that ordinary people have reacted to the increased hardships brought on as part of globalization takes the form of a sort of "greatest hits" approach that feels a bit flat. It emphasizes the collective and confrontational moments of struggle in ways that wouldn't really give much of a hint to people new to this stuff that such moments are just one part of the story. If we are going to do neat things here in North America, we need the whole story. The chapter that has a more generalized discussion of how social struggle can and should happen says a lot of really smart, really important things, but I think it settles on an approach that is too constrictive and prescriptive (for all that it works not to do that).

Also, the book is far too dismissive of the example of the Zapatistas, and their choice to embrace partiality and in-progress-ness from a place of not seeking state power versus the choice made by movements in Venezuela and Bolivia to embrace partiality and in-progress-ness as part of seizing state power. Not that it is uncritical of Venezuela -- I was worried there was going to be the sort of Chavez-worship you sometimes find in some parts of the left, but was happy to see that there was a much more reasonable kind of measured support accompanied by a recognition of limits and contradictions. There is also a more general dismissal of anti-authoritarian (or horizontalist or anti-statist or anarchist or whatever you want to call them) approaches to struggle -- I definitely agree with his call for moving forward in ways that draw on the best of many traditions, but I'm not sure his actual practice in attempting to do so always strikes the most useful balance.

I'm not sure who I would recommend read this book. I think there is probably a small group of folks out there who would react like me, and enjoy something of the energy and tone and all-in-one-placeness of the book while not really encountering much that was new. I think there is also probably a group of people for whom it would be a useful, concise, and exciting introduction to important struggles over the last twenty years in a context that also introduces some important anti-capitalist ideas in an accessible way, though I would encourage folks in this group to read a lot more widely as well. I could also imagine that this might be a useful tool in classroom settings, though I'm not sure exactly what classrooms would be open to its use. All in all, I'm glad I read it, and I think it is a useful resource and reference to be familiar with. And if there isn't exactly the collective-in-motion whose trajectory could be nudged in anti-capitalist directions that might originally have been in the author's mind when he wrote this, there are still plenty of us out here who can take up what it offers as individuals and in our small groups as we work our way back towards something bigger.


[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Video: Relief, Occupations, and the Haiti Crisis

Here is a recent talk by Toronto-based activist and writer Justin Podur called "Relief, Occupations, and the Haiti Crisis." I always appreciate reading or hearing what Podur has to say. In contrast with the difficult and (to many people) unsettling way left thought is sometimes presented by folks more interested in performing themselves as "clever" or "radical" than in actually creating change, Podur has a real talent for bringing out how sensible and ordinary left analyses can be without losing political clarity or incisiveness. Give it a listen:

Relief, Occupations and the Haiti Crisis by Justin Podur from Justin Podur on Vimeo.

(Link found via the Socialist Project's LeftStreamed.)