I guess this is proof positive to let you know that, if you're going to beat back racism, the feds are not gonna help you do it, and the civil rights laws in this country are not functional. They are not functional, and they are not meant to be functional. They've been functional in terms of creating a black middle cla** in this country, but they are not functional when it comes to beating back white supremacy; Violent white racism, they're not functional for that. That requires a ma** movement.
And that's what we've been doing in the south. Ever since I got out of prison, almost from the first day I got out of prison, I had to deal with the Black community up in arms over the police murder of a Black man in the city jail. And the daughter of this man formed an organization called the Concerned Citizens for Justice, that I became involved with and ultimately became the President of.
That organization ultimately became the ad hoc coalition against racism and police brutality, a region wide organization dealing with racist violence all over the south, of which there is still a substantial amount. You just know about the church burnings. There's been a hell of a lot of burnings of people's homes, activists particularly. There's been a hell of a lot of shootings of people. Shootings, drive by shootings racism, drive by shootings that purportedly had stopped happening thirty years ago.
The climate is beset with the economic inequality, the increase of that, with building of prisons, with the limitless acts of police terrorism all of these things are being allowed to happen by those in authority. And it's really important to understand that. That's why we can't get fooled by this notion about the "good cops". The "good cops" are the ones letting the so called "bad cops" do the dirt. Somebody said "Well we'll find a grave for them too."
The conditions for this kind of terrorism and this kind of racism is not an accident. Not a result of somebody's bad thinking or some ideas in white folk's head, it's not a question of that. This government is the criminal that allows this to go on. There's not gonna be any reforms, one thing that was proven by the Civil Rights period and it's being proven now. We're not going to get the kind of reforms that do away with racism under this system, it's not going to happen. This system has to be toppled, dismantled, and destroyed.
And y'know somebody was saying, in the book I wrote, friends of mine, they didn't wanna get me hurt or nothing: "Why did you put in that book that you wanted to see Tom Metzger shot?" Well, I'll tell you, you know, and it was provocative, it was meant to be provocative. At the time when I wrote, re-wrote, Anarchism & The Black Revolution in 1994, the folks purporting to be The New Black Panther Party were meeting with Tom Metzger in Dallas, Texas. They had him as the guest of honor in Dallas, Texas.
He gets up saying that "I'm a white separatist, you're black separatists, we can work together." That's impossible. That's the kind of contradiction in roles and terms that we're dealing with in the 1990s and beyond. That's the kind of sellouts that go on now. That's the kind of misinformation and misunderstanding of who the actual enemy is.
And that's the way that you look at race and cla** issues. If you don't look at race issues and make some sort of cla** an*lysis with it... Because if you look at this just in terms of the color of someone's skin alone and not attach an understanding to that an understanding about the nature of the state, and the nature of capital, and how they use race as a divider, and cla** as a divider, and rule over all of us with an iron fist... Unless you understand this you will turn and attack the wrong folks.
You'll think the state's on your side, or that the state is impartial, but the government isn't impartial. And my understanding of the state has nothing to do with protecting a so called "lifestyle". I'm not trying to protect my lifestyle, I'm trying to protect my damn life. And that's a big difference because the state is the biggest k**er, biggest oppressor, of all.
I mean throughout history the state has k**ed more people with wars, pogroms, ma** murders, of one sort or another. You can just point to it in any time in history and you can see where these criminals have actually perpetrated their acts of violence. So from my standpoint, the standpoint of how I see the world, and the things I put in Anarchism & The Black Revolution , and I wrote that when I was in a control unit in Maryland.
I wrote it when I was in a control unit in Maryland. And for those of you who don't know what a control unit prison is: It's a special high security unit. At that time it was also used for behavior modification. Forced drugging, and psychiatric tricks, and methods of breaking your will, so-called "brainwashing" and all that. But in the time I went into the control unit in Maryland, there had been ten people k**ed in it, and numerous people driven insane or had their spirits broken.
Well, I was fortunate in one sense in that when I went in the unit, there had been years and years of struggles by prisoners to resist it. And we fought our way out of there, through two lawsuits, through letters written and there was demonstrations around the prison. And I was fortunate to get out of there alive, a lot of people got k**ed in there.
So I wrote Anarchism & The Black Revolution while I was in there, one to declare to the world that I was an anarchist. Two, that in fact, we have to deal with race and cla** in our movement, in the anarchist movement. At that time people pretended that there was no such thing as racism or it wasn't a big issue. I had a person tell me "Oh that isn't something we worry about". I said "I'm sure it isn't some you worry about since all of you are white."
But it's something they worry about in 1997 since the Klan has spread all over the United States. And right-wing forces run the state, and they're in power, they commit crimes of terrorism all over, it's something you wanna worry about today, and as times goes by it's something you're gonna worry about more and more. Because we'll look up and we'll have an outright fascist dictatorship sitting over us if we don't do or say anything.
And for people of color, with every one-in-three young black male in their twenties in the penitentiary, or the so-called "criminal justice system". One-in-seven Latinos according to the report by the Sentencing Commission, in the system. And more people in prison today than it's ever been in prison anywhere in the world, and certainly in this country here. When you've got that many people that are in prison...
And the state has declare war on the youth. You have to understand that. The state has declared on the youth, and especially the black youth. To them, it's a national security matter, because they know that the youth can rise up and if they were politically motivated overthrow this system. They know this because they had the experience of a Black Panther Party of the 1960s.
And regardless of whatever errors the Black Panther Party made, it proved decisively that the most despised sector of the working cla**, particularly of the black working cla**, the most despised sector is capable of revolution. Of being a motive force for revolution, and that gave the government fits! And it also demonstrated for the first time, it isn't just white workers, it isn't white people that had to lead everybody around by the nose, but a autonomous Black movement could change the face of this nation and change history.
Now it can't do it necessarily all by itself. But the question of what is the agent for social change, the agent of revolutionary social change. It is a new day in the world. Capitalism itself is not even the same, what the hell. People think this is the 1930s and everybody's in f**ing, the big factories or something now? This is not. This is a post-industrial stage, people. You go in riding around cities and you see nothing but foundries and factories closed up.
We are not in the same period as in the 1940s or 50s or 30s. We've got to come up with some new ideas, we've got to come up with some critical thinkers. If there's any one thing I've tried to be, it is a critical thinker. Somebody who's not afraid to leap the bounds of the box. The ideological box. We need more people like that. I don't put myself as some sort of hero or leader of something or other. And I think that anyone is capable of intellectual and theoretical work.
Somebody asked me this morning "Well do I have to be some sort of revolutionary theoretician to be an anarchist?". Something like that, I might not be doing justice to what she asked me, but the point is we have got to able to explain our own ideas to the world. If you can't explain your own ideas to the world, except to those who are in your own box or tendency, then you're in bad shape, because we've got to reach so-called "ordinary people" and tell them about what anarchism is; What anarchism stands for; The kind of world we want. We have to be able to do that.
Somebody asked me "What does it take to be an organizer?" Somebody willing to get out in the streets and talk. You talk to each other all the time, but you talk to each other too much. You need to break out of the ghetto, break out of the anarchist ghetto and get into the community. So from my standpoint I would just say to you that it's really important that we make the ideas more than subculture. It has to be more than subculture. I know that people like punk rock, and they like hip-hop and so forth and so on, and the group I deal with, the people I work with are younger than I am, that's for damn sure by many years.
And you know they got their cultural... the things they like and and all that, but that won't make a revolution. If anything what the revolution does is it makes the culture widespread, not the other way around. We need to understand that, we need to understand that we've got to reach out to people, if we want real social change. We can't make the mistake of sitting in church and think everybody in the world's gonna come to them. It's not gonna happen, this ain't the anarchist church, we can't let it be.
I live in an area where in fact, there are people who have a particular set of problems, but after being here I didn't see anything that I didn't recognize. By that I mean, you've got the same set of problems. They may not be riding around, the Klan may not be strutting around in the community in a robe, maybe they're wearing a blue suit. They're the same force, you've got a serious problem in the Bay Area with police brutality. I see all sorts of people rising up, I see movements developing.
But what I don't see... I see radicals and activists talking to each other. What I don't see is people reaching to the community, reaching to the community where these people are the actual victims. Malcolm X said "If you want action, you gotta wake the people up", and I'll say that if you want action, not only do you gotta wake the people up, you gotta get over there and help them mobilize, and build autonomous formations in their communities.
Anarchism is not going to go by some wind or some belief or somebody's gonna wake up one day and say "Ooh I'm an anarchist", it's not gonna happen like that. You have to work, you have to talk to people, it's what you have to do. And you can't be satisfied to look around and see people look like you, when there's a city as diverse as this one is. I think that's a cop out and I think that's a damn sell out. So I really think it's a responsibility on us to get up and do something about that.