Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 9, 2020
Hello All – Concerned Families of Westchester (CFOW) endorses Jamaal Bowman for Congress in the 16th congressional district. Formed in the days after 9/11, CFOW has never before endorsed a political candidate, focusing instead on issues of peace and justice. But now the demands for peace and the dangers of war lead us to enthusiastically endorse Mr. Bowman. His domestic agenda, focusing on education, healthcare for all, and a Green New Deal, is what America needs now. But to us his positions on military and foreign policy issues are especially important: limiting military intervention abroad and redirecting much of our vast military spending to human needs. Our decision to support Mr. Bowman was made a no-brainer because of the pro-military record of his opponent, the incumbent Eliot Engel. Mr. Engel aligned himself with two of the greatest blunders in recent US history: his support of President Bush's war against Iraq in 2003, and his opposition to the President Obama's Iran Nuclear Agreement. It is time to retire Mr. Engel and inject some new blood and a peace perspective into the 16th CD representation in Washington.
"Defunding the Police"
The uprising now engulfing the United States incorporates many themes, but the uprising and the response of the liberal elite (political, media) are converging on police violence and police reform. A bill introduced yesterday in Congress would legislate into existence many useful reforms; but trending among the movements in the street is "defunding the police" or even "abolition." What are these demands about, and how do they relate to what the congressional Democrats are doing? And where do the roots of the problem we are trying to solve – police violence towards people of color – lie in our history and our institutions?
The Democrats legislative agenda fits into a long history of well-intentioned attempts to reform the police, either through institutional changes (laws regulating police conduct, police review boards, etc.), attitudinal adjustments for the police officers themselves (sensitivity training, etc.), or innovations such as "community policy" or other efforts to reduce the distance between the police and the people they are policing. For the most part, these reforms have been unsuccessful, as the current wave of police brutality illustrates. [For some examples of the fate of earlier attempts, one can read "The Subversion of New York City's Official Policy to Curb Police Brutality" by Lawrence Wittner, ZNet [June 8, 2020] [Link]; "The Only Solution Is to Defund the Police" by Alex S. Vitale, The Nation [May 30, 2020] The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of Police Reform" by Alice Speri, et al., The Intercept [[Link] to see how police-reform efforts or institutions have been thwarted.]
#BlackLivesMatter and other grassroots organizations agitating for an end to policing violence are talking now about "defunding the police," not reforming the police. Contrary to some media talk, "defunding" is not the same as "eliminating" the police. Rather, it is an effort to detach from the body or armed men and women – the police as we know them – all the functions that do not require armed force as a first-line of service or defense. As we have learned, many things that police do today – from being in schools to directing traffic, making "wellness checks," responding to claims of forged $20 bills, etc. – do not require people trained to use force and, if necessary, guns. And so proposals to "defund the police" would separate these functions from the police department and place them with specialists in mental health or homeless outreach or essentially non-criminal responders, and transfer adequate funding from police departments to these service providers. The most comprehensive such proposal comes from Minneapolis, where a veto-proof majority of the city council has vowed to work towards "abolition" – eventually dismantling the police department, redistributing its current functions among other agencies, and innovating new policing concepts. (For an interesting example of how this has developed in the northern Syria entity of Rojava, check out a "featured essay" below.)
Peace and justice advocates may recognize the spirit behind "defunding" the police as similar to the concept of "human security" in contrast to "military security." That is, just as COVID-19 revealed that spending billions on weapons was not effective in preventing the deaths of 100 thousand people who died from the virus, spending billions on big city police forces and stuffing them full of surplus military equipment actually makes citizens less safe than if funds had been spend on experts competent to deal with most problems of daily life. Needless to say, redistributing billions of dollars from the purchase of police or military weaponry to the provision of nonviolent solutions to basic needs will be stoutly resisted by the Powers That Be, but we have no choice but to press on.
Reading about "Defunding the Police" – There are now many articles (and some books) in the political mainstream that address what it means to "defund the police." For a sampling of useful essays, I suggest "The Best Way to 'Reform' the Police Is to Defund the Police: An interview with Alex S. Vitale" from Jacobin; "After Protests, Politicians Reconsider Police Budgets and Discipline" by Dionne Searcey, et al., New York Times [June 9, 2020]; "Movement to defund police gains 'unprecedented' support across US" from The Guardian [UK] A Practical Guide to Defunding the Police" by Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone. The City Council of Minneapolis has promised to "abolish" their police department and replace it with a range of service organizations and activities; one of the members of the Council described what they were thinking about in this segment from Democracy Now!
News Notes
Jamal Bowman's campaign to replace Eliot Engel in the House of Representatives has surged in the last two weeks. Andom Ghebreghiorgis, a well-liked leftist challenger, has dropped out of the race, leaving a clear fight between the progressive Bowman and the incumbent Engel. Bowman recently won the endorsement of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and popular State Senate member Alessandra Biaggi, and NYC politicians Jumaane Williams and Scott Stringer. To catch some of the excitement, read an op-ed from today's New York Times ("Can Jamaal Bowman Be the Next A.O.C.?") by Michelle Goldberg. To learn more about Jamaal Bowman's campaign, why he's better on the war & peace issues than Eliot Engel, and to get involved in helping him win, go here..
Last October, voters in Bolivia went to the polls and appeared to re-elect the incumbent president, Evo Morales, with enough votes to prevent a run-off. But claims of voter fraud were issued from the right, and three weeks after the election the Organization of American States issued a report claiming voter fraud. A US-backed coup followed, with Morales driven into exile and a right-wing government installed. Immediately following the OAS report and the successful coup, the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research issued a counter-analysis showing the flaws in the OAS analysis and the accuracy of the government's finding that Morales had indeed won the election; but little attention was paid to these claims by the US media and political elite until last Sunday, when the New York Times published a major investigation showing that it was the OAS analysis, and not the Bolivian election, that was "marred by grave irregularities." And so a rightwing coup was lubricated by the US-dominated OAS, ending democracy in Bolivia. For a good analysis of the role of the US and the US media, read Glenn Greenwald's analysis in The Intercept.
THINGS TO DO/COMING ATTRACTIONS
Wednesday, June 10th – A "Stop the Killing" rally will be held in Peekskill, in front of Senator Schumer's office (1 Park Place) at 4:30 pm. This is part of a statewide activity at Schumer's offices to urge him to cut $200 billion from the military budget and spend it on human needs; stop the wars on people of color, especially in Afghanistan, Somalis, Yemen, Niger, Iraq, and Libya; and stop the transfer of military gear to U.S. police.
Saturday, June 13th – CFOW has endorsed Jamaal Bowman for Congress in the 16th District, and we will hold a Bowman for Congress rally at the VFW Plaza in Hastings at 11 AM. Please join us!
Saturday, June 13th – Veterans for Peace, Chapter 34 (NYC) and other organizations will protest President Trump when he speaks at the West Point graduation. The protest will convene at the Abrams Gate to West Point, which is on the main road into Highland Falls and West Point, right in the downtown, starting at 10:30 am.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Until shut down by the virus, we have been meeting for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting (by Zoom conference) each Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. If you would like to join our meeting, please send a return email to get the meeting's access code. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Trump Has Adopted a "Viva Death!" Approach to the Presidency
An interview with Noam Chomsky, Truth Out [June 6, 2020]
---- The slaughter of Black Americans proceeds under the radar. The president, whose malice knows no bound, has been exploiting the focus on the pandemic to pursue his service to his prime constituency, great wealth and corporate power. One method is eliminating regulations that protect the public but harm profits. In the midst of an unprecedented respiratory pandemic, Trump has moved to increase air pollution, which makes COVID-19 far more deadly, so much so that tens of thousands of Americans may die as a result, the business press reports. As usual, deaths are not randomly distributed: "Hardest hit are low-income communities and people of color," who are forced to live in the most dangerous areas. It is all too easy to continue. The protesters know all of this very well. They need no studies. For many it is their lived experience. The protests are not just calling for an end to police brutality in Black communities, but for much more fundamental restructuring of social and economic institutions. [Read More]
Don't Stop Organizing
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, The Nation [June 5, 2020]
---- I recently wrote a piece with the subtitle "How to Destroy American Society From the Top Down." The answer remains painfully simple: This country courts destruction as long as the rich are allowed to organize society around their lives and needs. … From my first moments working at Tent City through my 25 years of grassroots organizing, I've come to see that inverting that subtitle in a positive fashion is crucial to our survival as a nation. Any true revival of American society depends on collective action by those most impacted by injustice and by the willingness of the rest of society to follow their lead. From the abolitionism of the pre–Civil War era to the labor movement of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and beyond, people on the receiving end of injustice have done best when they didn't wait to be saved but, out of necessity, took heroic action themselves. When the Kensington Welfare Rights Union declared that we were building a "new Underground Railroad" in Philadelphia in the 1990s, we were doing more than just invoking a powerful chapter in the history of the abolition of slavery. We were implicitly challenging the dominant notion of who the agents of change in our society should be.
America, This Is Your Chance
"We must get it right this time or risk losing our democracy forever."
By
[FB – Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow.]
---- Everyone knows that the police officers who killed George Floyd never would have been fired or arrested if a courageous black girl had not filmed the incident on her phone and posted it to social media. Deep down, we already knew this kind of thing happens to black people. All of us knew it when we watched Amy Cooper call the police on a black man who calmly asked her to put a leash on her dog. We knew it when we watched two white men in a pickup truck ambush Ahmaud Arbery and shoot him to death while he was jogging in a neighborhood outside Brunswick, Ga. And we knew it before George Zimmerman stalked and murdered a black teenager named Trayvon Martin. … I will not pretend to have a road map that will lead us to higher ground. But for those who are serious about rising to the challenge, I will share a few of the key steps that I believe are necessary if we are to learn from our history and not merely repeat it. [Read More]
Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness
By Kihana Miraya Ross, New York Times [June 4, 2020]
---- The word "racism" is everywhere. It's used to explain all the things that cause African-Americans' suffering and death: inadequate access to health care, food, housing and jobs, or a police bullet, baton or knee. But "racism" fails to fully capture what black people in this country are facing. The right term is "anti-blackness." … Anti-blackness is one way some black scholars have articulated what it means to be marked as black in an anti-black world. It's more than just "racism against black people." That oversimplifies and defangs it. It's a theoretical framework that illuminates society's inability to recognize our humanity — the disdain, disregard and disgust for our existence. … Anti-blackness covers the fact that society's hatred of blackness, and also its gratuitous violence against black people, is complicated by its need for our existence. For example, for white people — again, better described as those who have been racialized white — the abject inhumanity of the black reinforces their whiteness, their humanness, their power, and their privilege, whether they're aware of it or not. Black people are at once despised and also a useful counterpoint for others to measure their humanness against. In other words, while one may experience numerous compounding disadvantages, at least they're not black. [Read More]
Police Abolition and Other Revolutionary Lessons from Rojava [North Syria]
By Hawzhin Azeez, Roar Magazine [June 2020]
---- A common slogan heard at the protests is "No justice, no peace!," raising the essential question of how a political system founded on a bloody history of white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism can ever provide true and meaningful justice. Some call for police reforms. Others call for the redistribution of funds. Still others argue that abolishing the police is the best option, but many people — even on the left — find it hard to imagine the viability of such a system. Yet, a system of this kind already exists in Rojava, the autonomous self-administrative region of North Syria. In Rojava, Asayish (Internal Security Forces) and HPC (Civil Defense Forces) forces work together in a symbiotic relationship to provide safety and security to the community. … However, before the establishment of this system was possible, an alternative ideology needed to be developed that provided a blueprint for an ideal, democratic society. [Read More]
THE UPRISING
2020 Uprisings, Unprecedented in Scope, Join a Long River of Struggle in America
By Matthew Countryman, ZNet [June 8, 2020]
---- The river was the metaphor that best captured "the long, continuous movement" of the black freedom struggle for theologian, historian and civil rights activist Vincent Harding. Harding, who had served as a speechwriter for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote in his groundbreaking 1981 study of African-American history, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, that the freedom struggle was "sometimes powerful, tumultuous, roiling with life; at other times meandering and turgid." When I think of the sudden, explosion of anti-racist protest that has overwhelmed the nation's cities over the past two weeks, it is Harding's metaphor of the river that comes to mind. It is as if the dam has broken, and the many currents of the American protest tradition — not just the anti-racist tradition, but the anti-corporate and anti-war protest traditions; women's, LGBTQ and student movements; movements for workers' rights and economic justice — have all come together in a massive river of outrage and sorrow, exhilaration and hope. [Read More]
Ten Days that May Have Changed the World: an Internationalist Perspective
By Richard Greeman, Counterpunch [June 8, 2020]
---- Sparked by the police murder of George Floyd and fueled by Minneapolis authorities' reluctance to arrest and charge the murderer's three police accomplices, mass protests have been sweeping across the U.S. with an intensity not seen since the 1960s. In over 150 cities, African Americans and their allies have flooded the streets, braving the Covid 19pandemic, braving police violence, challenging centuries of racial and class inequalities, demanding liberty and justice for all, day after day defying a corrupt, racist power structure based on violent repression. … What is especially remarkable and heartening to see as we view the impassioned faces of the demonstrators through images on videos, newspaper photos, and TV reports, is the realization that at least half the demonstrators in the crowds proclaiming "Black Lives Matter" are white people! Here again, a serious breach has been opened in the wall of systemic, institutionalized racism that has for centuries enabled the U.S. ruling class to divide and conquer the working masses, pitting slave laborers and their discriminated descendants against relatively "privileged" white wage slaves in a competitive race to the bottom. Today, they are uniting in the fight for justice and equality.
Trump's Threats to Antifa Are an Affront to Black Agency and a Risk to All Protest
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [J
---- Trump's anti-antifa statements commit rhetorical violence, and provoke physical violence, in a number of directions. For one, it is a historical racist trope to suggest that black communities could not rise up and self-organize huge revolutionary action. In every major city, it is abundantly clear that these uprisings are being led by young black people. The promulgating of outside agitator myths is an affront to the agency of communities organizing on the front lines of these battles. The divide-and-conquer strategy is as old and tired as any "bad protester versus good protester" dyad, which again and again distracts from the plague of police violence attending every moment of antiracist protest. It just so happens that it was a strategy favored by the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1930s, the Klan issued flyers in Alabama stating that "paid organizers for the communists are only trying" to get black people "in trouble." As James Baldwin wrote in 1961, "It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated." [Read More]
(Video) Our System Is Corroded: Carol Anderson on Rampant Police Violence and Assault on Voting Rights
From Democracy Now! [June 5, 2020]
---- On Thursday, disturbing new details were revealed in the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was chased, ambushed and shot dead by a group of white men in Georgia in what many have called a modern-day lynching. In a nearly seven-hour hearing, a state judge concluded all three men — Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William "Roddie" Bryan — would stand trial for Arbery's murder, after special agent Richard Dial of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation testified Travis McMichael said "f—ing n—" after shooting and killing Arbery. We speak with professor Carol Anderson, author of "White Rage," about Arbery's slaying, the nationwide protests, anti-lynching legislation being debated in the Senate and the upcoming election
Additional reading about the history and culture of the police – As indicated in the essays in this newsletter, our problems with the police have deep historical and cultural roots that are not remediable by mere Reform. To read some useful articles about the history and racial culture of policing, some useful articles are "The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It," by [Link]; "The Racist Roots of American Policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops" bJune 2, 2020] [Link]; "Police Attacks on Protesters Are Rooted in a Violent Ideology of Reactionary Grievance," by Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept [June 6, 2020] [Link]; and "Police Militarization Has Fostered a Culture that Sees Protesters as 'The Enemy,'" bJune 2, 2020] Yes, American police act like occupying armies. They literally studied their tactics," by Stuart Schrader, The Guardian [UK] [June 8, 2020] How Police Became Paramilitaries," by Michael Shank, New York Review of Books [June 3, 2020] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Direct Action and the Rejection of Monumental History
---- Across the United States, protestors are explicitly linking the nation's history of white supremacy with contemporary police brutality. While some commentators condemn these acts as destructive, protestors understand that it is impossible to create a more equitable society as long as Confederates, segregationists, and other white supremacists are valorized in public spaces. Other opponents decry vandalism as an effort to "erase" history. Yet iconoclasm is as much an act of creation as destruction. With paint, rope, and fire as well as signs, chants, and memorials, anti-racist protestors are enacting a more participatory and more democratic historical commemoration. … In his book Freedom Dreams, Robin D. G. Kelley trenchantly asks, "What shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare?" As protestors topple statues and local governments remove others, we have an opportunity to consider not only which histories we should celebrate but how we should celebrate them. As we fight to build a better world, how should we remember our ancestors and predecessors? Activists in nearly every city in the nation are already showing us the answer. [Read More]
