Stop Mass Incarceration Network Calls for Month of Resistance in October
March 10, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Revolution recently caught up with Carl Dix, from the Revolutionary Communist Party and an initiator of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, after what was a very intense month of February—a month in which there was the mistrial of the racist murderer Michael Dunn and the failure of the courts to convict him for the killing of Jordan Davis; demonstrations and other forms of resistance that took place on the anniversary of the murder of Trayvon Martin, which also took in Jordan Davis this year; and then Obama's speech on February 27, setting forth a program which he claimed would deal with the situation facing Black and Latino youth.
We'll be running large sections of this interview next week, but right now we want to excerpt a part that highlights an important initiative that the Stop Mass Incarceration Network has called for this October—a month of resistance against mass incarceration.
We asked Carl to compare this month of resistance to the program Obama had just put forward.
Two Different Outlooks, Two Different Programs
"Obama's speech [of February 27 on 'My Brother's Keeper'] is really training people what to think and how to think, how to look at this problem of mass incarceration and all of that. And to look at it as: 'Well, look, maybe there's some excesses, but what we're really dealing with here is people's behavior problems, that people are not taking responsibility for their lives, and especially Black men are not taking responsibility for their lives. And this is the problem that we're trying to deal with, and our solution is to encourage and give some assistance to these men to step up and play their role in society which needs to be the traditional male role of head of the family and keeping the women and children in line and in check, and that this is the solution and that if this step is taken it will strengthen America.' And I've already talked about how you need to look at America and that it is not something that the oppressed need to step up and help strengthen, but in fact they need to be part of a revolution aimed at getting rid of American imperialism. But this is what's being put forward as a solution.
"And the other thing about how people should think about this is that, look, some people have made it through—and he [Obama] had these guys from Chicago as an example of people who have made it through the minefield that the system puts out there in front of them and forces people to go through, and that if more Black men were doing it right, then a few more of them would make it through. And from that the way you're supposed to look at it is: 'Okay, let's see if I can get me and mine through, if a few more of us can make it, and in particular can I make it, can those that are close to me and that I care about, make it?' And see this is entirely the upside down wrong way to look at it. Because you have a system that is grinding people up, it's breaking bodies and crushing spirits, and it is no solution if you can maneuver a few bodies through that crushing and grinding that's being inflicted on people. In fact what's needed is people saying: no more of this, people standing up and resisting what's being brought down.
"And that is exactly what the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN) is aiming to do through this call for a month of resistance in October. Because look, more people are recognizing mass incarceration as a problem, they're seeing it: this is not good. People who are having it done to them, who are caught up in the criminal injustice system, but also people who don't directly suffer that but who are seeing what's going on and saying: I don't want to stand aside, I need to be involved in trying to do something about it. That's a good development but it's got to go much farther. People have to be more clearly exposed to the horrible outrages that are being committed on this front, people need to begin to see that this amounts to a slow genocide that has 10s of millions of people enmeshed in its web and they need to be moved to the point of standing up and joining an effort to stop it. Millions of people need to be exposed to this reality and many, many of them, thousands of them, have to be moved to being part of standing up and stopping it. And that's what the Network has in mind for this call. And that's why Cornel West and I issued this call for the Network that there needs to be a month of resistance, a month that will include coordinated national demonstrations nationwide on October 22nd, the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation, and something that has thousands of people out on that day. There needs to be a major concert that will have people sitting up and taking notice when they see who's performing together and that they're all performing around condemning, calling out and acting to stop mass incarceration. A statement issued by and signed by well-known and prominent people being published in major publications around the country, panels and symposiums on college campuses, expressions of opposition and resistance to mass incarceration in religious circles—all that and more. All of it is not worked out yet—we've got a basic vision and we're going to be getting people together and meeting and strategizing over fleshing out that vision and hammering out a plan to build up from now to October. But that's what it needs to bring forward—it needs to bring forward a sense of standing together and saying 'No More' to these horrors that are being brought down and having a view of not: how do me and mine navigate through all the obstacles that are put in the path of Black people trying to make it in this society, but a view of how do we break through these structures—what do we have to do to get rid of these structures that are holding people back. And look, what that comes down to is understanding that this stuff is built into the fabric and framework of this system and that it will take revolution—nothing less to end not only it but all of the horrors that this system is bringing down on people here and around the world."
A Vision of the Month of Resistance
We asked Carl to get a bit more into this point and in particular what was being envisioned in the planning meetings that he and Cornel West has called for, and which has been taken up by the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN).
"Well, here's the deal. Stop Mass Incarceration Network has looked at the situation and seen a need for a major effort to take the level of resistance to mass incarceration to a new level, a new height, involving thousands of people, as a springboard to ultimately enlist millions in this movement, and that we're going to work to do that through this month of resistance in October. And we're taking the responsibility to initiate this and to lead it forward. Cornel West and I issued the call for this meeting, and we want to bring together people who seriously want to take this movement of resistance to a higher level and be a part of working to do that, fleshing out a vision for it and developing a plan. And there's really a lot of people who need to be involved in this process.
"One, there needs to be young people involved, college students need to be involved in this from the beginning, at the meeting, contributing their understanding, their experience, and then leaving the meeting on a mission to spread the call for October and to build resistance up to October as part of what's being done in this. High school students should be there with the same thing, bringing their experience into it, and then coming out of it, ready to spread that in all the ways that they would want to do that—armbands days, hoodie days, days when people do stuff on social media, spreading pictures of themselves wearing armbands and hoodies on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and all like that. Generally people who are catching hell on this front need to be represented, and in addition to the young people there needs to be family members of people in prison, who played an important role during the California prison hunger strike—they need to be in this meeting. Family members of police murder victims, formerly incarcerated people—all of them need to be bringing their understanding, their experience into this meeting and being part of hammering out the vision for this and spreading it throughout society. We need to have religious leaders and lay people in this meeting bringing their own stance on this, their moral opposition to this, helping to hammer out the vision, and then figuring out the ways that this gets expressed powerfully in religious institutions.
"It's gotta be nationwide right from the beginning, people from different parts of the country who've come into New York for this so that we come out of the meeting with a framework that is in position to operate and spread this nationwide. People who are grappling with the problem of the immigration raids that tear families apart and disappear people—they need to be a part of this. Because this has everything to do with the incarceration that's going down in this society. They need to be there, they need to be in position to spread this and spread it nationwide. Legal people need to be involved in this meeting, people whose arena is the arts and culture need to be involved in this meeting. Everybody's bringing their experience, their understanding of this and then being in the position to pivot back and out and spread that throughout society and in the arenas that they function in.
"And in some of these different arenas that I've just talked about: prominent people, people whose voices have impact society-wide. Some of them need to be in the room for this meeting, people who can reach people throughout society when they speak up and stand up around a question, people who can play an important role in raising the kind of funds that's going to be needed. Because it's going to take a lot of money just to hold this meeting to get this process started which will then pale the size of the amount of money that will need to be raised to carry it through to the end. And we gotta have from the beginning people who have the connections and the experience in terms of doing that.
"And I guess the other thing I want to say about who needs to be in the room is that Cornel West and I were talking in the last couple of days about this, and we issued a letter. And that letter basically says, 'Look, if you're a young person, Black or Latino, who's tired of wearing a target on your back—you need to be involved in this effort and you need to think about coming to this meeting. If you're a parent who is tired of living in fear every time your children leave the house in the morning as to whether they'll make it back safely, if you're somebody who doesn't experience this but you're aware of it going down and you hate it and want to see something done about it, well, you're the kind of person who needs to be involved in this effort. You need to think about coming to this meeting. This is a meeting to get together people who are serious about it, want to do something to stop it, and see this vision of a month of resistance in October that takes the movement of resistance to a whole new level and that makes this something that millions of people in this society are seeing as a horrific problem and they're seeing determined resistance to it that involves thousands. If you want to bring that vision into being and make it real, you need to be at this meeting.'"
Black Students
We asked Carl how he saw what's going on right now with Black college and university students, and what role he saw them playing in October.
"One thing that is happening...well, there's actually two things that are happening and they kind of come together. One thing that's happening is that throughout the country policies are being enacted on the state level to end programs that attempted to deal with the numerical disparity between Black students and others on college campuses. Affirmative action programs, recruitment programs—all of those things are being cut away. And students have responded very sharply at some colleges about that: The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Black students at UCLA—at both of those schools students have done videos about how the numbers of Black students are being drastically cut. And I think one of them talked about: we're an endangered species on this campus. And that's the part about official policies that while they're saying: you gotta work hard, you gotta go to school in order to make it in this society, official policies are being enacted that are undercutting the ability of Black students to actually do that. So that's something that's happening.
"And then at the same time, and as part of this, there's been an unleashing of just naked white supremacy on these campuses. You see things like the University of Mississippi which was actually integrated in my lifetime—James Meredith was the first Black student to go there and there's a statue in his honor on the campus. Well, a lynching noose and a Confederate flag were hung on that statue recently. There's been all kinds of instances of fraternities and sororities having parties that revel in—and these are white fraternities and white sororities—having parties and other social gatherings that revel in racist stereotypes of Black people or Latinos. Like a ghetto party where people are encouraged to bring watermelons and dress 'street' and do this kind of stuff. And then a 'Mexican party' where they base it on stereotypes of Mexicans and Chicanos. And all of this is really being unleashed. So it's both 'cleansing' the universities of Black students but also creating an atmosphere—an atmosphere is being unleashed and is flowering of a pretty hostile scene for people to be in. And at UCLA Law School a student who spoke to some of this began to get racist e-mails, and then a couple of students just posed for a picture and put it up online: 'Stop being a sensitive nigger,' was what one of the students had written on their T-shirt in a social media message that they sent to this Black woman student who had said that Black students on this campus are under attack. And some of the white students wanted to underscore that that was really what was going on.
"So this is what's happening, and we really have to look at this. Because I spoke to the thing of the system offering no future and I focused that on the fact that large sections of the oppressed cannot be profitably exploited by the system. But here you have people who are working to try to get through that, following the rules, doing what you're supposed to be doing. And what they're finding is that for them the future that's being offered is: you can take that route, but we're going to put obstacles in your path, we're going to make it hard for you to get into college, we're going to obliterate the programs that were trying to deal with the fact that it was hard for Black students to get into college earlier. And a hostile atmosphere is going to be what's awaiting you. And it really does come down to: 'you can try to work your way into this system, it's going to be hard, you're going to have go over a lot of obstacles, and if you make it through those obstacles you're going to get a lot of shit and you just have to take it.' And there is a growing mood among the students that they won't take this and that's important. It's gotta spread, it's gotta be taken up much more. And it's gotta be linked in with what faces the oppressed overall because Black students have historically played an important role in struggles in this country. You look back to the 1960s and a lot of the important developments—whether that was the movement in the South with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, students and Black students played an important role in that. Also when you come down to something like the Black Panther Party—well, Huey and Bobby got together at a college in Oakland and formed the Black Panther Party. So Black students have an important role to play and can help to bring to the movement of Black people more of an understanding of the history. But also because they've been introduced more to grappling with and dealing with ideas, they could be grappling with how do we get out of this and bringing to people some of that understanding and helping to inject that into the developing movement of resistance. And that's something that needs to be gone at and worked on and expanded because this question of no future is not just something that people who are dropping out of school are up against; but also people who are fighting their way into college, trying to get into college, trying to make it, are up against the same kind of thing of what future are they being offered. And it's one that is horrific and they need to reject and stand with people who are fighting for a different future, a future that really can only be brought into being through revolution....
"There's other very important things that have happened, both in terms of attacks but also responding to them—San Jose State comes to mind, where there was an incident where a Black student had a noose put around his neck, was referred to as 'three-fifths'—a really horrific racial incident. But then there was a broad outpouring on the campus condemning this, calling it out and one that has continued and is continuing right now as we're talking about it. Also I need to bring in that there were students at Brown University who when the university invited Ray Kelly, who was at the time police chief of the New York Police Department, up to speak—students mobilized and refused to let him speak and said that: no, we're not going to have this guy who presides over a police department that is intensely criminalizing Black and Latino people... 'no, we don't want him to come up here and spread his poison....'
"And this is real important and it is something... I pointed to the fact that on a number of campuses things were done around February 26 and that's an important development. And things like that, and these incidents and the response to them that I've been talking about, need to be built on and spread. Because one of the things that has to happen is that these campuses have to be an arena where there is condemnation of and resistance to the slow genocide of mass incarceration. And that's gotta reach... that's really gotta be widespread come October. It's gotta be built now, resistance has gotta be manifested beginning now, and by October it's gotta be very widespread and part of the leap in the level of resistance to the horror of mass incarceration. And that's something that the Stop Mass Incarceration Network is approaching and I'm approaching as well."
A Multi-Pronged Role for Prisoners
We asked if he envisioned a role for prisoners. He actually envisioned more than one.
"Yeah, that's actually another very important question because people in the prisons play an important role in the resistance on this front. There were the very powerful hunger strikes that have been launched by prisoners in California against the torture of long-term solitary confinement. The summer of last year they launched a hunger strike that involved 30,000 people in the California prisons. There are other hunger strikes that have gone on. There's one right now in Illinois—I believe it's in Menard Prison that's going on right now.
"So there have been important expressions from inside the prisons but there also have been people in prison who have added their voices to the exposure of both the conditions in prison and the conditions that lead people to end up in prison and going in and out of prison—and to where understanding where this comes from and what needs to be done about it. And there've been important writings from prisoners that have been in the pages of Revolution newspaper and that people could actually find some of these writings by going to the website revcom.us. Because that has been a source of inspiration in terms of looking at it—because here you have people who are locked away, people who have been condemned as the worst of the worst, some of them who are not only standing up and asserting their humanity and resisting what's being done to them, but who are also grappling with why this is happening, where it's coming from, and what needs to be done about it. And they're engaging the advanced understanding that Bob Avakian has brought forward about where this is coming from and what needs to be done about it, and even reinvigorating and resynthesizing the understanding of revolution and communism that contributes to the ability of people to go farther and do better the next time revolution is made and power is in the hands of the people, And you've got people in prison who are grappling with this, who are dealing with this, and it reminds me of the time that I spent in prison back in the 1960s when I refused to go to Vietnam. And one of the things that was going on there was it was a place where people were grappling with revolutionary theory, including people who learned to read through that grappling, people who were not literate when they went into prison, but actually became literate through grappling with revolutionary theory.
"And that gets me to the point I wanted to make about what role people could play—because people from inside prison can speak in a very direct way to what are broad sections of people in this society up against: the criminalization that people encounter, the conditions that get enforced. But also they could speak to their aspirations for a better world, and in that way they are... this is through the actions of the people in California, now in Illinois, took reasserted their humanity... they're also doing that and it becomes something that can impact society and begin to be a thing of bringing to people an understanding that that's who's in prison—human beings who were facing and are facing horrific conditions, but striving for a different kind of future. And in that way, I think, that can help people who don't have that direct experience get kind of an understanding of what things in this society are really like and to understand more the outrage of the mass incarceration and everything that leads into it and all of its consequences and be strengthened in their determination to join the fight around this. So I think that people in prison have a very important role to play. And again, I just want to go back to: you can get some of these writings and some of the developments in different prisons around the country by going to the website revcom.us. And if you do it, you'll be rewarded because I find it a continuing source of inspiration."
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