Fighting Neo-Nazis and Neo-Nazis That Like Red, Building Community: A Report Back on May Day 2018 and Some Advice to the White Left BRG Follow May 2, 2018 · 11 min read

It’s been a pretty busy month: my senior thesis is about the role of armed struggle and armed self-defense in the Black Liberation Movement from 1954–1971 and 2014–2018. Once I finish it I’ll make it public. I got a firsthand experience in the necessity of New Afrikan self-defense on May Day when a couple of white opportunists posing as Communists came to a May Day event trying to start shit with me, physical shit. One of them thinks I doxxed his family, what happened was that this particular individual who grew up in a bougie suburb (and, ironically, lives virtually up the street from me) was talking shit about me “running a bougie book club” and “not doing anything constructive”. This individual’s idea of “doing something constructive” is going around with no mass base or support picking fights and engaging in petty property destruction. He’s free to do as he pleases, of course, he’s an adult. But slandering black activists as “bourgeois” while staying at your school superintendent dad’s house and coming out every now and then to be Eminem in the streets is the epitome of hypocrisy. My mother spent most of my high school career in prison, I grew up in North Saint Louis and Ferguson. Furthermore, I don’t have to justify myself to white people under any circumstances, I don’t care who they are. I mentioned the fact that this individual had a much more privileged upbringing than I did, and, like the typical spoiled white brat that he is, he flew off the handle. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned the school district that his father worked for, that was a mistake made in anger. I deleted the post after he complained to a comrade of mine. He continues to dwell on this fact and has a personal grudge that he has let boil over to the point that’s he’s threatening to “find me” and “expel me from revolutionary spaces”, as if white spoiled manchildren construct revolutionary spaces.

So they came to an interleft, community based event organized in large part by the local DSA along with other organizations including my own, one where children were present, not to take part or bury any imaginary hatchet, but to stir shit. Two white dudes, one wearing a Black Panther Party t-shirt presumably to get a rise out of me, the other looking like he took a break from cooking up meth to come attend this attempt at lynching. They hung around the food for a little while, then came up to me. I said hello, thinking they’d behave themselves. Of course, giving white people the benefit of the doubt tends to turn out disappointing, to say the least. The white wannabe Panther but actual Klansman said “YO I HEARD YOU’RE GONNA MAKE ME LEAVE”. Here we go. I told them they could stay as long as they didn’t start shit. He began ranting about me “doxxing his family” and calling me a “snitch” for my brief outline of Red Guards aligned organizations. Nobody cared, they began to draw negative attention to themselves as shit-starters. I took out my phone and started recording for two reasons, so that if I had to defend myself I had evidence that they assaulted me first, and second, to document the lengths that white opportunists are willing to go to, disrupting a community event. These aren’t rational, intelligent people, these are simpleminded white trash, and they got louder when I started recording them. They apparently thought I was going to engage in a fistfight with some Saint Charles wigger and his hardcore band buddy around a bunch of black elders and children. Unlike them, I have too much respect for my community to do this, and they moved out of the pavilion where the event was being held to the barbecue area. The individual in the BPP shirt knocked my phone out of my hand because he didn’t want his face shown and after I pointed out the irony of him wearing a BPP shirt while trying to assault a Black communist. Perhaps he shouldn’t have shown up trying to lynch me, white people generally aren’t very good critical thinkers though. People started asking them what they came there to start shit for, they said they didn’t come to participate but to “call me out”. Once again, white people intrude into community space and solidarity to lynch black people.

They eventually left after threatening to “find me”, telling me that “I’m gonna get it”, and mentioning that they “know where I live”. Comrades at the event that were familiar with these two convinced them to leave. Of course, if they hadn’t, in the words of one black brother at the event, “they would have had their legs broken and would have been forced to walk home”. When I started calling them crackers and telling them to get the fuck out, some white person I had never seen before told me that I was antagonizing them. I told them to shut up. Perhaps they shouldn’t have shown up threatening me with physical violence. When a black person is being threatened by white people, if you’re a white person that is trying to hold the black person back, you’re aiding and abetting white supremacy. Maybe you don’t care that crackers show up to stuff you’re at and try to fight you. Guess what? I kinda do. We not only have to fight the police (who weren’t called, we don’t do that in Saint Louis) and open fascists, but enemies within the so-called left that do not respect the vanguard role of Black revolutionaries yet attach themselves to struggles led by our people. They can’t have what we have, nor can they do what we do, so they become irrational and as destructive as any fascist. I recommend Lorenzo Komboa Ervin’s excellent piece, The Progressive Plantation: Racism inside White Radical Social Change Groups to my white readers to realize the frustration and anger that Black revolutionaries have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, and learn how to be real comrades. Ervin is a former BPP cadre and now is an anarchist, I’m a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. We’re united in that we’ve been around many ain’t shit ain’t never gonna be shit white trash calling themselves “revolutionaries” like the fascists that tried to jump me.

The truth is these white radical groups deal with racism from a totally white perspective. They generally have no ties or accountability to the Black/POC communities and do not work with activists of color except in a strictly token and manipulative fashion. This leads to serious isolation from the communities of color and dangerously backward ideals about racism, which they feel are academic anyway.

Some years ago, I attended an ARA convention in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is the home of Oho State University and at least a third of the city’s population is Black, but there were hardly any other Black people in attendance, except one guy who called himself a “Black skinhead,” a middle aged Black woman and a few other people of color, maybe 20 in all. It was clear to me that there had been no attempt to bring in folks from the Black communities in Columbus and other Ohio communities with substantial Black populations like Cleveland or Cincinnati. They did not even attempt to bring Black students off the OSU university campus.

Thus, you had this weird spectacle of hundreds of white people in a huge auditorium arguing and giving sanctimonious speeches about racism, from which most Blacks/POC were excluded. In attendance was every “alphabet soup” leftist sect you can (or can’t) think of: SWP, ISO, IWW, SL, SLP, Love and Rage and so on, under the banner of Anti-Racist Action.

At some point during the Plenary Session, to which I was hurriedly added, while an older Black woman was speaking about her experiences with racism, a white radical jumped out of the crowd, rushed up to one of the microphones and blurted out: “you shut up, we know what racism is!” This crystallized for me in instant what is wrong with such white-led “anti-racist” groups and with mother country radicals generally. They have arrogantly convinced themselves because of academic study and reﬂection that they know what racism is, even better than the people who experience it daily. How they know that and what it is they claim to know is really an open question.

Racism is a lived experience by peoples of color, not something easily given to textbook study. To be an outcast, an object of derision and violence merely because of pigment, race, or custom is not something that most white people can grasp. White radicals may claim to understand it intellectually, but it is not the same. Yet to me the very idea that white people profess to know more about racism than peoples of color themselves is a really a peculiar type of arrogance. It is why white radicals are so disliked and distrusted in the Black community. Many times, they disrespect you, all while claiming to be allied with you or opposed to racial chauvinism. That is unacceptable.

It is interesting that almost none of the white people in attendance in the conference contradicted the disrupters or defended the Black woman’s right to speak. I can only remember myself and the other people of color shouting them down, along with one white guy, Michael Novick, who was on stage with us. We afterwards became friends, but I recall coming away with a very bitter feeling overall. The next day, I pulled all the people of color together to issue a statement denouncing the incident, and calling for them to do the same. Because they were caught off-guard, the leaders of the conference agreed with our criticisms at the meeting, but then some weeks later they barred me from all subsequent ARA meetings for my “racial disruption.” For years, I was an outcast. In fact, it has just been recently, since the old Columbus leadership has been discredited, that any ARA people would even speak to me, and then only the folks in Los Angeles, where Michael Novick is situated. I consider Novick one of the few anti-racist whites who “gets it”, and whom I genuinely respect. While not everyone agrees with me now in ARA, at least because of Novick, they might listen and would not demonize me in his presence. Maybe we can even build a new movement in different principles and including peoples of color, instead of white radicals in command.

He closes with a warning and advice.

Here are 10 tips to transform your white social justice movement or center: