Hold
. . . the ditto ditto fills the archives of a past that is not yet past. The holds multiply. And so does resistance to them, the survivance of them: the brittle gnawed life we live, / I am held, and held
. . . across time and space the languages and apparatus of the hold and its violences multiply; so, too the languages of beholding. In what ways might we enact a beholden-ness to each other, literally? “Beholden: to hold by some tie of duty or obligation, to retain as a client or person in duty bound” (OED Online).
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
I’m on my way to another meeting. Kit’s driving her black pickup, Peter, through the West Side; she’s an anarchist. She was radicalized (self-described) at sixteen, in a bookstore called Red Emma’s in Baltimore. I met her inside a small historically black church in Hyde Park after another meeting, during my graduate anthropology studies at the University of Chicago. Kit learned the Frankfurt School there too, studied the Angel of History. She learned anthropology at Freie Universitat in Berlin. Frank Chapman, the unofficial leader of the Alliance, whom we are driving to meet, learned the Frankfurt School from Angela Davis, and anthropology and philosophy in prison in the late sixties. Frank’s been doing the work first inside and then outside, since the surge of prison releases sparked by the Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners committees in the early seventies that freed him.
It’s 2017, and I am doing fieldwork. This meeting was called by the city, on the topic of police accountability, and will take place in a rec room in a recently renovated, light-filled school. They chose the school for a reason, that year they closed half the schools and half the mental health clinics on the South Side. Kit’s nervous, she has to speak, she keeps rolling the windows up and down and down and up, and talking to me about the biography of Emma Goldman she’s currently reading. I don’t know what to say to her. I make a dumb joke; “socialist in the streets, anarchist in the sheets.” She laughs. Later, in the hall with the barely glued-together ceiling tiles, she gives a speech, shifts the atmospherics of the room. The alderman there on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s behalf stops smiling his self-assured smile and shrinks back into his chair. We are fifty thousand signatories strong, and for a moment, we are winning this sensory aesthetic game called politics in Chicago. Frank’s in the back, smiling.
Close by is a mural of Fred Hampton, huge plastered shades of turquoise, chairman fred scrawled above his face. It’s just blocks away from where he was murdered by the FBI and the Chicago police in 1969. The house where he was murdered, in turn, sits blocks away from Homan Square, a well-known CIA-style black site where Chicago police disappeared and tortured people well into this century. Disappeared is the word that many of my activist friends I’ve met during my fieldwork use to describe what the legal system does to people of color in the city. Police violence affects women too, but the more time I spend on the South Side, the more I notice the men are missing. In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) Christina Sharpe reminds us, “the disaster of Black subjectification was and is planned.”
Weather
The weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack. And while the air of freedom might linger around the ship, it does not reach into the hold, or attend the bodies in the hold.
. . . But the shipped, the held, and those in the wake also produce out of the weather their own ecologies. When the only certainty is the weather that produces a pervasive climate of antiblackness, what must we know in order to move through these environments in which the push is always toward Black death?
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
Those who enter here leave all hope behind. In his 2019 memoir The Damned Don’t Cry, Frank remembers seeing Dante’s words carved by the state in stone above the gates of the Missouri State Prison when he entered in the early sixties. The same prison the assassin of MLK escaped from, under the watch of the same warden that tortured Frank. The prison where Frank first read Marx and Engels, and learned what he titled the “revolutionary side of our misery.” He was there twelve years, serving a 150-year sentence. He’d matched a description in an armed robbery and murder case, a story that even early in my fieldwork was already too familiar to me. Inside, he mounted a legal fight and began organizing.
Frank had an M.A. in anthropology too, but never told me that, let me find my own dead ends. The first time I talked to him I stayed after one of the regular Monday night meetings and asked him if I could do an ethnography with the group. Frank asked me where I was from—near Frankfurt—“that’s where all the radicals are from!” he said. He paused, he smiled, I smiled. Then suddenly, in a more sinister voice, an unsmiling face, as if to test me: “I learned about those cats in prison!” I didn’t know what to say; I paused for what seemed to me too long, slightly panicking, defaulted to California casual, said “Oooooh” with widened eyes and head cocked to the side like he was telling me some juicy gossip. He burst out laughing, pulled out a chair for me.
Frank says inside the prisoners were split into philosophic camps. Inside, they passed around Marxist Leninist literature, and particularly the contributions of black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, O. C. Cox, and E. Franklin Frazier. They worked on their legal defenses together, shared books. Frank taught black history to members of the Nation of Islam in the tradition of Du Bois, traded Hegel for cigarettes. The white prisoners were split into the faction of Nazis “who swore by Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the gangsters who swore by Machiavelli’s Prince.”
Frank’s defense committee formed back in ’69, before Angela Davis’s. It sprang up after Frank helped force an integration of the prison, the first in Missouri to do so. The warden shuffled the most activist prisoners, black and white, all into a long shower room, gassed them, drugged Frank with pharmaceuticals. Frank and the other prisoners endured the sort of torture we’d hear about from Abu Ghraib. (ditto ditto ditto, the archives repeat again.) He’d done ten days in solitary for teaching communism. A friend from prison that got out carried Frank’s message to Hershel Walker, the head of the Missouri Communist Party at the time. Frank had read about him in a socialist paper. A letter was smuggled back from Walker and the committee was formed, sustained for years by smuggled letters written under the identity of Frank’s sister to another prisoner. Walker would ask Frank about his life, they’d discuss activist pedagogy and socialism and strategize ways to free political prisoners.
In January 1971, Angela Davis walked into a courthouse in Santa Clara County, California, and raised her iconic fist. A few days later, in New York, the first defense committee for Davis was formed. The response to her imprisonment was planetary. Committees formed on almost every continent and across ideological and capitalist lines, from East Germany to West Germany, from Apartheid South Africa to Communist Angola. She insisted they become the committees to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. In the middle of ’71, unaware of the movement ricocheting across sixty-eight countries, paying for Hegel in cigarettes still, Frank walked into a Missouri courthouse, passing protestors chanting Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners! a chant he’d later describe as more powerful than any legal argument. Frank waited in a local cell, visitation allowed, met with people from the outside, asked about the movement to free Davis, wrote letters freely, and made connections. A few weeks later, the judge sent him back to prison. The protestors did not stop, got Davis out. Still did not stop. In the spring of ’73 in a hotel in downtown Chicago, Davis, the leaders of her committees, and over six hundred other grassroots organizations formed the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. The Alliance took Frank’s case as a political prisoner, and organized fundraisers to pay his tuition that summer, a condition for study release. Sparks flew. Hershel Walker, whom he’d secretly been corresponding with for years, came to drive him home, and they “let him out the gate with a communist,” as he recalls in his memoir. Many of the living Panthers made it out that way. But he never told me all that, about the education, because if the years since then told him anything, the roads to revolution do not come from reform. They come from carving out power, inch by inch.
Some of the people at these meetings on the West Side are Marxists, but most of the old ones broke with the Communist Party back in the nineties. Sometimes notes from Lenin slip in and the civil war becomes defined as taking property away from property owners. Sometimes they invoke him explicitly. Protests are like sparks, Lenin wrote in his newspaper, Iskra. We’re trying to work out how to fan the sparks into flames that capture, or captivate, or something like that. You have to read between the lines, “find out what revolution means for yourself,” Frank says. Or not, depending on what’s better for you or the moment. “The revolution is far off and by no means inevitable,” Frank says. Anyway, what matters is keeping people alive in Chicago. Or keeping the dream of the Panthers alive in Chicago, while the bodies pile up. Through the legislation crafted and introduced to the City Council by my activist interlocutors, community control of the police is closer than ever to becoming reality, but the police in Chicago still kill with impunity. For thirteen years the Alliance has been working with the black and Latino community to craft this legislation in Chicago. For the last fifty years, they have been working with hundreds of Chicago police torture victims, helping to free the falsely convicted. It’s about being ready, Frank says, for the moments when the sparks fly. Later, I see pictures of him, out in the streets of Chicago with his walker, during the uprising of 2020, smiling, remembering this.
“The campaign isn’t over,” Angela Davis reminds us at a huge rally she flew out from California for, at Trinity United Church on the South Side. We’re in the first weeks of summer, when Chicago begins to burst into bloom, another meeting, nearing the end of my fieldwork. “It’s about all political prisoners, all around the world.” “Community control of the police is the old Panther project, imagined to open doors to other struggles,” Davis tells us. It is “fighting inch by inch to carve livable space,” Frank says. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is the name of Davis’s book, but also the credo of the alliance. “No one is free until every last one of us is free,” Frank says. “We’re building this project here because if it can happen in Chicago, it can happen anywhere.” The road to something like a revolution, whatever that may be, is composed of murmurs, not ruptures.
I’m at another meeting, a people’s hearing on police crimes, also at Trinity United Church of Christ. During a smoke break, I rub my icy fingers together and walk through long corridors of fluorescent lights interrupted with gold. This Chicago institution sits on the 95th Street corridor on the South Side and is vital for this organizing work. It was President Obama’s church, until 2008, when videotapes exposed Jeremiah Wright, now pastor emeritus, referring to 9/11 as America’s chickens coming home to roost. He’s probably not wrong, I think, as I smoke and try to digest and exhale some of what I’ve heard inside into the freezing cold air. Practice is activist pedagogy too, Frank reminds us.
“That’s nothing to clap about,” the man who is testifying at the hearing says, after the crowd erupts in a cheer when he talks about being cleared of false charges and released from prison. His release didn’t change the fact that he was sixteen then, and is fifty-two now and shaking, standing on a metal office chair in a church on 95th Street to show us the bullet wounds in his legs from when the cops had shot him, close range seventeen times. The police squeezed his testicles until he passed out, after the gunshots. They collected him, a child, from the front yard of his parents’ home, accused him of shooting at a cop. He had nothing to do with it. They took him to the Robert Taylor Homes, the infamous Chicago housing projects that have been demolished now, but were known then as hubs of gang violence.
The sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wrote his notorious book Gang Member for a Day there. He provided data from a drug dealer’s account book so that political scientists who didn’t know any poor people in America would be able to later run data sets that showed that being a drug dealer paid so little that the decision to take the job as a dealer was “an irrational choice” (as if on the South and West Sides of Chicago all things were possible, simply a matter of choosing). What’s less well known is that the Robert Taylor Homes also housed so-called police cells, black sites older and less sophisticated than Homan Square, where police also used to systematically disappear and torture people. They disappeared the man who is testifying, tied him up, shot at him seventeen times, once more than the number of years in his life, tased him, pinned a charge on him, and made him disappear for ten years.
Illinois has a Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to investigate police crimes and free the falsely convicted. Hundreds of people have been released from prison as a result of the findings. During the year I studied in Chicago, dozens more were exonerated, their confessions found to be false, made under severe duress produced by police torture. Still, hundreds more are jailed, and at the big courthouse on California Street, judges wring their hands, order death by juridical delay.
Chicago is where Richard Zuley, the head of interrogation at Guantanamo, learned his tactics, in a culture of torture built by convicted Detective Guevara and all the rest of the gangs of officers operating, seemingly, outside the legal system, as widely reported after a lengthy investigation by The Guardian. After September 11th, when the United States government began detaining terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, those in charge of operations contacted the Chicago police to recruit the former military officer Zuley, who upon discharge had joined the Chicago department. Within Guantanamo, he applied torture techniques he had practiced on black Chicagoans for decades to extract bunk information for the security state. Under an old but seamlessly transferable logic of the racialized other, torture was already routine. The Chicago police department has a long tradition of honing its invasive tactics under the veil of legality through successive waves of activist repression, beginning with the Haymarket riots in the 1880s, then the Red Scare, the anarchist scare, labor union and tenant movements, stockyard rebellions, the Young Lords and the older Puerto Rican massacres, to the famed murder of Fred Hampton, orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover himself and executed faithfully by the Chicago police. “It never ended,” Frank says. After finishing my undergrad at UC Berkeley, I was in Oakland, researching the Oakland police, another notoriously violent and repressive department. A young black officer told me, “Well, we’re not like Chicago.” The department in Chicago forms the exemplar of bad policing, even amongst the police. But the first semester I arrived, during Occupy, the UC Berkeley police beat students camping on Sproul Plaza in the middle of the afternoon, while most of us, committed students, sat in class, the sun floating through the dusty glass panes, not expecting a thing. I heard reports from friends at Davis about sitting on the ground in peaceful protest, pepper-sprayed in the face, an image that UC Davis later paid good money to try to erase from the internet. Then there’s where I came from, where the Holocaust haunts every corner. These things weren’t too difficult to believe.
Three months into my 2017 fieldwork in Chicago, we wake up to news that all Black Lives Matter activists have been put on a domestic terror list. COINTELPRO 2.0. We have another meeting, this time at the small office downtown with the black-and-white picture and poster patched walls that, over time, spell to me a U.S. history. “It’s nothing new, we know what this means . . . get ready, we need to talk about this. There are people here who have had their homes raided by the FBI. They can teach you how to endure,” Frank says. Now looking up at us, dead in the eye, each of us, all across the room, Frank says, “Send your informants, we don’t have any secrets.” People keep telling me to be careful. But for most people in the Alliance that I work with, marked by melanin, it’s not like staying silent protects them. There’s another watching, this deadly trace that was never outside standard practice in Chicago. One of our allied organizations, the Arab American Action Network, reports that since 9/11, one in every five persons of Middle Eastern descent in Chicago has had their home visited by the FBI.
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There is a certain rhythm to police brutality. In the circuits of national attention, it lies dormant and distills, surges and sparks. For affected communities, the sense of occupation, the simmering emergency, is more constant. There’s buildup, but also an ordinariness, the shifting in your seats, the discomfort, this work, this caustic Chicago wind hitting you in the face as you talk to person after person on the street, on the way to another church for another endless meeting. Kit picks me up in the mornings, brings me coffee in a thermos that warms my chilled fingers, fingers that will shortly be numbed even in gloves holding signs that escape from my hands in the Chicago wind outside the courthouse downtown on another day when another activist friend is in jail for their dissent. We are submitting to being shuttled like cattle through the security lines at the courthouse next to the jail to attend another hearing. But there’s always another delay, another killing, a sense of anticipation hushed. “The mouth of hell,” Kit says. People talk about how their aldermen pit people against each other and about how it’s easier to just drop off, go home, turn on the tv, have a beer, and try to stay warm. Mostly, everyone is exhausted—working class and poor and lower middle class in late capitalist America in a rapidly changing city. It’s hard to stay awake, to give evenings, mornings, Saturdays and Sundays to work that has little immediate payoff. There are always more phone calls, labors, trials, hearings, rallies, meetings, and affects to be exchanged. Things are thrown together, mostly haphazardly, at the last minute. It’s easier to walk away, to dissociate, to pretend it (didn’t) doesn’t happen, even if it happened to you. Political repression relies on the cyclical nature of trauma, the ordinary fading away and wearing out of courage and capacity. Traumas have their own afterlives, repression counts on this too. “There is so much death,” another friend tells me.
Trauma compresses, fragments, and splits time; linearity disappears. Memories become vertical, bear down, fracture the present with shrapnel from the past. Time collapses and warps. Things are experienced in moments, echoes, little flashes. The ditto ditto of the archives repeats again and again. It doesn’t leak, for leakage implies containment, which is something different yet from the hold. In this way, though, through the fragmented sensation of time stacking above you, the lessons aren’t lost to linear time and distance, they’re right there under your skin.
There is a discipline in the making. It’s not just sounding an elegy, it’s finding a way to seduce a different future into being.
Frank says: “It’s not a question of changing hearts and minds, it’s about power.” But it is also a question of persuasion, of bodies moving in space. Within the structure of Chicago politics, Frank says, “This movement also lives and dies by the attention of the black community.” Within activist pedagogy, there is always this swaying sense of revolutionary potentials and their interruption. Solidarity and attunement are difficult to sustain, we get distracted; the attention, the work of care can also maim us. With Christina Sharpe: “I ask again, borrowing [poet M. NourbeSe] Philip’s phrase, what does it look like to ‘defend the dead’?”
You feel the state with and through capitalism. It is so openly genocidal, a friend says.
When the Alliance protests on the Magnificent Mile, the shopping district, on Thanksgiving, the day before “Black Friday,” the city has snipers planted on the rooftop. They warn protestors to behold, they warn them to be quiet. The circumstances of Laquan McDonald’s killing back in 2014 were revealed four hundred days after the murder (sixteen shots, thirteen while he was already on the ground, seventeen years old with a knife walking away from the officer who killed him, Jason Van Dyke). That was the first year activists protested on Thanksgiving, when the atmosphere changed; tens of thousands of Chicagoans came into the streets. The Alliance was already involved in resurrecting the old Black Panther project of community control of the police long before then, building the circuits of refusal that would later channel surges of rage. By waiting four hundred days to release the video of Laquan McDonald’s killing, the mayor’s office relied on a flawed neoliberal calculation of linearity, of temporal and affective distance equaling diffusion, in order to manage the atmospherics of refusal around the killing. The powers that be do not understand how the emergency is experienced, and refused, again and again and again. Finally, after the video was released, and the attorneys attempted to imprison the reporter who wouldn’t reveal who leaked the real coroner’s report (the city had released a fake one), and the protesters did not stop, they forced charges for Laquan McDonald’s murderer and eventually, forced legislation for community control of the police into city council.
Years after the killing, during hearings, at the courthouse on California Street, the state created an aesthetic of occupation with war-like formations of police, both in the courthouse and on the usually eerily empty blocks surrounding the massive structure of the adjacent Cook County jail, with its razor wire and sniper tower construction, the blocks with fast food restaurants where usually families eat and Uber drivers wait, where lines of police cars now sit, stand back and stand by. The pretrial hearings drag on for two years and the activists return to the courthouse for every hearing. “Let’s not get too far into the future, let’s not let our imagination deviate too far, this is our task so far,” Frank says. “There isn’t going to be a revolution unless you work for a revolution.” When Jason Van Dyke came to some of his hearings, SWAT teams waited outside. A sheriff always stood judiciously placed in the center of the courtroom with a vest jam-packed with neat zip-tie clumps. Once, he fumbled with them, jiggled them back and forth, eyed us, looked down at his hands, and smiled at us to flash his familiar-to-us sign of mass arrest.
Before one of the hearings, another friend, whom I can’t name here, uttered a shocked “what” after the judge presiding over the Jason Van Dyke case had a defendant in another case arrested for raising his hand while the judge was speaking. In response to the shocked “what,” the judge ordered my friend to the stand and arrested him too. They kept him in solitary for a week. He didn’t get a phone call for three days, legally required in Illinois within an hour of arrest except in cases of special threat. He didn’t get his medicine, lost his job. The week in solitary that spring wasn’t the first time he felt the state on his skin. For years he’s felt it, almost weekly, tracing the already abnormal electrical circuits in his brain. After we’d leave the meetings, he’d roll himself a joint and ask me to drive; I always did. He needed the joint, and he needed me to drive. He has epilepsy, made endlessly worse by the torture by taser he endured at the hands of the Chicago Police Department some years back. Traumas have their own afterlives; repression counts on this too.
Ruttier
Dionne Brand’s “Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora” [refers to] “a long poem containing navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart and recited from memory.” The “Ruttier”: (historical and present) “contained the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavours of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea.”
“Ruttier,” then, as a way-making tool and a refusal of nation, country, citizenship; it is a barometer, a reading of and a response to those atmospheric pressures and the predictably unpredictable changes in climate that, nonetheless, remain antiblack.
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
We’re in another meeting now, one the city called, this time at a school on the West Side, a place where the contours of the white neighborhoods and the black and brown neighborhoods begin to bleed into one another and big and little acts of gentrification combine with the tradition of police violence. You can glimpse it, through the duality of the heavy police presence and the giant well-made posters exclaiming decontextualized non-active, non-specific words like integrity, values, and respect onto the tall old whitewashed walls of this building and through the hipster coffee shops planted newly down the street. The renovated building has huge windows and skylights so light can flow, like the knowledge that’s meant to be exposed in these halls, fiat lux, let there be light, the motto of my alma mater. But on this May day with the Chicago white light, there are rungs of heavily vested police officers for a community meeting. There’s the snarling City Council member, a small man known as Rahm’s man, but also the well-meaning liberals who still believe in some kind of order—if only there were just a different procedure, more community input, more knowledge, a restoration of trust forged through speech and representation, things would be different. It’s not about changing hearts and minds, Frank says, it’s about power.
My friend from the courthouse still comes to the meetings; he doesn’t lie back and tend to his wounds for too long. It’s only been a week since he’s been released, and he’s up, broad shouldered, pacing, standing with the woman in the black beret and the black sunglasses who is performing, aesthetically and sonically, the Ruttier of the Panthers. He stands in solidarity behind the others who feel the state on their skin too.1 It’s only a week after his release and he is the closest to getting arrested again (we’re in that school, swarming with cops and liberals and City Council members, a sign spelling out integrity above our heads, and they’re watching him closely), but he’s also the closest to capturing by captivation, to passing on the ruttier.
The city called this meeting to discuss various proposals for civilian oversight of the police. The Alliance rejects the ideals of “oversight” and “input” pushed by the alternative police review board brought forth by the city’s political architecture in response to the Alliance’s community control legislation. Other civilian oversight boards have passed, and failed to protect civilians, all across America, because speech and representation only go so far. The Alliance requires, first and foremost, civilian control of the police—an all-civilian, all-elected council with the power to hire, fire, discipline, and make policy and budgets for the department. A lot of the people who come to meetings for the Alliance aren’t communists, or conspiracy theorists, or any of the things you can’t be in polite liberal America anymore. Anyways, it’s not like that America is really winning elections anymore. Some of them are strong Midwestern union boys, with crew cuts and arms bigger than my thighs. They spent their young adulthoods in Afghanistan or Iraq or flying drones out of Nevada. They’re concerned with their own sort of wakes, for their friends who died, but also for those they killed. They know how engineering works on materials, but also how it works on subjectivities. They know how, through these wars, the divide between combatant and civilian was flattened, and how those men and women who return are kept in silence (the longest wars, the wars we won’t acknowledge). They are human remainders that we funnel, quickly and quietly, into jobs in the police forces at home. (Are you home? Are you held?)
How do you interrupt the settlements, the hold, the histories snapped into place?
Sometimes, these men at the meetings are so captivated by the spectacular images of tanks in the streets of Ferguson, or Chicago, or Oakland, or Minneapolis, or wherever else (never in white neighborhoods, though) that they miss the origin of their captivation with militarization of the police that can’t be disentangled from the state of capture, what Christina Sharpe calls the weather of Black America—“the belly of the ship births Blackness.”2 By attending to this one image that captivates them and sends them back to Iraq or Afghanistan, they miss that black people were subjugated in America, and elsewhere, long before the Germans developed the first Panzer, long before the first grenades of gas were thrown in the fields of Ypres in April of 1915. That this is warfare on all levels of life, atmospheric, isn’t a pathology, but part of the plan. How do you hold this much death inside your body? Capitalism is always the elephant in the room, Angela Davis told us at the church.
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47th and Prairie. Bronzeville. Frank was seventeen the first time he came to 47th Street, straight off the bus from St. Louis. On June 7, 2018, on this corner, a black man was shot in the back three times by Chicago police. On this Saturday, the heat is so strong it pushes into your lungs and makes it hard to stand and shout and pass out flyers. We’re here, again, not only because the man was shot, but because of the blatant repression of protests against the police. Last Saturday, there were fewer of us. The officers came and shut down the table where activists were passing out flyers for the Alliance, and also shut down the taco stand across the street. An activist tried to assert his right to assemble and stop them from punishing the street vendor for his adjacency to protest and told the police, “This is what democracy looks like.” The cops threatened to arrest him and said, “This is what capitalism looks like.” Community control of the police is about “stop killing us,” Frank says, but also, “you work for us.”
The city of Chicago spends 40 percent of its annual budget on policing.3 Sometimes, whiteness comes to meetings, when well-intentioned white people ask strange questions, act like they know what’s best, suggest supporting particular candidates (“no, that’s complicity,” the older activists say, in much nicer terms). Harold Washington, a former black mayor of the city, talked about community control of the police for ten years before his election, campaigned on it. Once elected, the official is beholden to the structures of power already in place, the ones that are not easily rocked from the inside, or the outside. Inch by inch, Frank says.
Lenin kind of makes sense in Chicago. The labor that matters here is a tiny spliced node of the working class that holds power in this city and cities across America, the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union. I’ve heard both professors and activists describe them as thugs, as a gang, perhaps the most powerful one in Chicago. Abandonment by the powerful is always coupled with an intense attention elsewhere. Frank says the outside is the only place from which to maintain an autonomy that translates to real power.
In the contemporary, there are historical residues and resonances that reverberate in myriad ways. ICE becomes the Gestapo. Border detention camps become Konzentrationslager. But if ICE is the Gestapo, then Chicago PD is also the Gestapo and the prisons, on California Street and the high-security ones dotting Indiana due south of us in which potential terrorists and all Muslim prisoners are held, become Arbeitslager, echoes of pogroms. And where does that take us? How does that help us? Frank says the only way to resist something is to build something else.
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1. I have borrowed the phrase “feeling the state on your skin” from Maple Razsa’s The Maribor Uprising: A Live Participatory Film.
2. Sharpe, In the Wake
3. Freedom to Thrive: Reimagining Safety & Security in Our Communities Report on Policing by the Center for Popular Democracy
