“>statement on the occupation

This is not the first time that disgruntled white ranchers have made common cause with other white men prepared to give their lives to keep brown people off a patch of land. Malheur is unceded Paiute territory, stolen in the late 1800s by ranchers, homesteaders, and the US Army. Today’s noveau homesteaders are even more explicitly white supremacist, like Malheur occupier/ anti-Bureau of Land Management/anti-Islam activist Jon Rizheimer, who rallied armed protestors against an Arizona mosque. These are the people who want to continue the tradition of “enclosing the commons,” privatizing land that was being used for the common good. Enclosures are a critical building block of how capitalism developed as an economic system (powerfully chronicled by many people including feminist scholars Silvia Federici and Maria Mies).

Malheur vividly illustrates the intersection of anti-government pro-privatization activism with racism and entitlement. These people may be fringe, but their causes are central to the project of this nation. Malheur is Manifest Destiny 2016, just as much as the U.S. Empire of bases and military installations projecting power around the globe. So why is there so much laughter about #VanillaISIS?

Timely and smart humor can be inspiring, disarming, soothing or illuminating. But all these so-smart articles and Twitter handles are so busy self-congratulating that they miss the point. What’s happening here isn’t outlier idiots who took their hunting rifles to a birding sanctuary to rail against the guvmint.

Articles like the Concourse’s Jamokes piece, stating “these men aren’t scary, their guns are scary,” are just wrong. What’s scary is twofold: what they might do with those guns, and that they are responding to domestic disinvestment and neoliberalism by organizing working class white people into rightwing ideologies of individualism, racism, and militarism. They are speaking to peoples’ real, material needs as well as perceived socio-cultural needs, and clearly finding purchase. And it’s not because they’re idiots.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way about jokes that make fun of rural people: in this country, this category is a mix-and-match of themes (stupid people with bad teeth, guns and dogs who marry their cousins, hate the gays, don’t read and lack “culture”) that aren’t hard to understand as deeply classist. These jokes function mainly to imply the superiority of the joker, who is often some combination of coastal, Northern, class privileged or more economically comfortable, and who wants to be seen as more socially evolved. This isn’t the caliber of humor that lays an expert blade to a tangled knot, or exposes what needs to be seen.

What do we gain by dismissing this occupation, these men, this militia movement? This humor is leading us astray from the critical point, articulated by Arthur Chu in his article about this type of violence as quintessentially American: “Is it really any wonder, then, that America seems to have a recurring cultural problem with white men who feel they’ve been denied something they’re owed getting their hands on guns and seeking to get back at the world through violence?

If our primary response to entitlement violence is to invent puns that mesh dog-whistle Islamophobia with rural images of classism (#Shania rule, #YeeHawd, #YallQaeda, etc), we fail to address the root causes of this situation (let alone addressing the ways that Islamophobia & racism and classism are real weapons, deployed in the violence of government policies as well as violence on the streets).

Similarly, who does it serve to call them terrorists? Yes, these militia occupiers are clothed in the Kevlar vests of white privilege (camoflauge, in their case). They are shielded in how they’re labeled and treated by people with the power to legally kill or jail them. Instead of lobbying for more people to be called terrorists, let’s name what is actually happening. This is white privilege protecting their real bodies that the government is choosing to protect, even as they declare intent to undermine the Federal government (and possibly execute the local sheriff). Dena Takruri interviews several occupiers on this topic in her excellent AJ+ video, What if the Occupiers were Muslim or Black?

The blatant racialized double standard between Malheur and the tanks rolling over the last couple years in Ferguson, Oakland, and towns near you is textbook white privilege. In this case, the privilege to have a Federal agency “work to resolve this peacefully,” rather than what we’ve seen for generations when Black or indigenous people occupy public, or even private spaces. That bombed (see: MOVE in Philadelphia) or shot out or starved out (see: Wounded Knee, Alcatraz). Even comparing Malheur to the coordinated state violence deployed nationally against the Occupy movement encampments shows where these fault lines lie. It reminds me of last year’s calm arrest of Dylann Roof, the young white supremacist who massacred Black churchgoers. Remember the police getting the kid some Burger King on his way to be booked? Remember how a few days before Malheur, a grand jury chose not to indict the officers who killed a Black child named Tamir Rice in Cleveland?

As Paiute leader Jarvis Kennedy said, “If I was out there with a bunch of my guns and rifles and Native brothers, what would happen?” (you can also watch him tell the occupiers to “get the hell out of here, we want nothing to do with you.”)

We can lift up this hypocrisy, and call out the political calculations behind whose lives and rights to protest are protected, without trying to popularize “terrorist” as a name for anyone confronting the government. That will not serve social movements which seek real change, which inevitably includes direct confrontation of unjust policies and practices.

What if all the creativity going into two-word Twitter handles (that sh*t is hard! Concise, loaded jokes in fifteen characters?) could go into the real questions at the heart of Malheur?

How do we scale up the scrappy efforts currently underway by grassroots organizations to meet the needs of impoverished, isolated rural communities, as well as working-class and poor urban communities? How do we diminish the appeal of groups like the 3%s, Oath Keepers, and other paramilitaries formations that are speaking to peoples’ fears and the hatred that has been manufactured over generations by people with an interest in distracting us all from whose hands are actually in our pockets? And compete with the real way they are speaking to the material needs of people who are struggling to get by and do not feel supported or valued?

How can we deeply re-envision land stewardship, in a way that centers Indigenous sovereignity? That calls upon and nourishes the wisdoms of many different cultures in how to organize human populations to live sustainably in different ecosystems? What kind of national support might the Burns Paiute Tribal Council be interested in, to not only exercise their jurisdiction on this wildlife refuge occupation, but to have their rights restored to their traditional land?

What is the response that we want to make to armed, hostile people who take over buildings to express their grievances? What does it take to organize real community safety for people like ROP organizers, who are literally putting their lives on the line, as they work county to county in a state where many people are undecided about where their alleigance lies? (and others are quite clear, as local sheriffs get on stage beside paramilitaries at their rallies)

What is the deep work of healing that needs to happen for the people whose humanity is in such distress that they rally with guns at mosques, and how can we seriously engage that work while also prioritizing protection for the people they stalk?

What are the questions it brings up for you?