Conflict, Abuse and Privilege

Links to an article entitled “Activist Scenes are No Safe Space for Women: On Abuse of Activist Women by Activist Men,” have been passed around various progressive and activist email lists in the last few weeks. I finally had a chance to read it today, and I was very affected, impressed and disturbed.

I was disturbed because I’ve seen or heard many of the behaviors and rationalizations that the author, Tamara K. Nopper, details.

Tamara Knopper very accurately points out ways that people who experience the abuse are minimized and their abusers escape responsibility. Here’s just a few passages that resonated as too familiar:

What’s scary is that I know activist men who were abusing and manipulating female activist and at the same time, writing position papers on sexism and competition between women. …

Not only do activist women have to confront and negotiate their abuser in activist circles, they must usually do so in a political community that talks a good game but in the end could give a shit about the victims’ emotional and physical safety. …

For example, when I was sharing with an activist male my concerns about how an activist female was being treated by an activist male who held a prominent position in a political group, the man “listening” to my story said in that voice, “Oh, she’s probably just mad ‘cause he started dating someone else” and went on to make fun of her. … More, his comments revealed an attitude that assumes that if activist women take issue with activist men, they are “crying abuse” to cover up hidden sexual desires and anger over being rejected by men who “won’t fuck them.” …

I have even seen some situations where abusive men become adopted, so to speak, by other activists, who see rehabilitating the man as part of their project and think little about what this means for the women who are trying to recover. In some cases, the male activist abuser was adopted while the woman was shunned as “unstable,” “crazy” or “too emotional.” …

More, many of these abusers use the language, tools of activism and support by other activists as means to abuse women and conceal their behavior. And unfortunately, in a lot of political circles, regardless of how much we talk about patriarchy or misogyny, women are sacrificed in order to keep up “the work” or save the organization.

The positive thing I can say is that our IMC is actively working on our mediation and conflict resolution procedures, learning from our experiences and trying to improve them in general. We are trying to address the fact that there are issues and instances of immediate safety and welfare that need to be dealt with quickly and with sensitivity to people who are threatened or in danger.

Our IMC also has a group working on climate issues — recognizing that policies and procedures alone will not solve problems that stem from sexism, misogyny and racism. That group is trying to address the fact that attitudes, behaviors and conduct have to reflect the principles of equality, anti-racism and anti-patriarchy. They’re working to explore how good attitudes, behciors and actions can be fostered and encouraged.

Those things are good, but they alone can’t be enough.

That’s the reason for my final point: Privilege.

Most of us in activist and independent media circles are pretty privleged people, especially white, middle-class American men like myself. It’s incumbent upon all people of privilege to examine it and recognize our responsibility for the harm it causes for those with less privilege, whether we want, endorse or personally create that harm.

Unforunately, all my talk here is kind of abstract. However, I just read a zine that I think really does a good job of putting some of these ideas into words. That zine is titled “Excuse Me, Can You Please Pass teh Privilege,” by Josh Russell. My partner ordered us a copy from Microcosm Distro, and I’m glad she did. I can’t recommend it enough.

Confronting your own privilege and attempting to deal with it is a personal struggle, but it is also a public and political one.

The reason I’ve combined these topics–conflict, abuse and privilege–is that I’m seeing more every day how privilege, especially the exploitation of privilege, is a base element in so many situations of abuse and conflict.

I think many activists see this dynamic as it plays out in politics, but do not take a hard enough look at how it plays out in their own lives and communities. Or how much they take advantage of privilege’s power themselves in ways that are exploitive and harmful to the people around them.

Abusers have privilege, which gives them power, which they exploit and use to manipulate and control. If we question privilege itself, I think it’s one notch we can take out of this toxic formula.

NYC IMC Subpoenaed Again

Being the target of city government harassment is a sign that NYC IMC is having an effect, but getting subpoenaed still sucks. According to a NYC IMC feature posted today, they received a subpoena for information they might have regarding the World Economic Forum. The IMC’s sensible response to the City’s harassing demands: “Why doesn’t the City ask the New York Times for all of their articles and emails relating to the World Economic Forum?”

Indeed, this shows every sign of being a determined pattern of legal harassment against the NYC IMC. The subpoena is the fourth time since August 2004 that US law enforcement has taken legal action against the IMC. Three of the four subpoenas have been issued in New York City.

Power does not like to be questioned or challenged, democracy or accountability be damned. That’s why we need Indymedia.

Happy 5th Birthday Indymedia

Today is the 5th anniversary of the Battle of Seattle at the 1999 WTO Ministerial protests, and so is also a fine day to celebrate the birthday of Indymedia. Although Indymedia actually formed over months preceeding the WTO, it was five years ago today that the IMC took center stage as the conduit of information from Seattle.

In November 1999 I was just barely aware of the preparations underway in anticipation of the WTO, though I knew it was going to be a big deal. Many people from Champaign-Urbana went to the protests, and in talking to them afterward and hearing about the IMC I kept asking them and myself, “why can’t we do that here?”

Less than a year later, enough people here who were asking themselves the same question got together and made plans for the Urbana-Champaign IMC, which had its “official” opening on January 20, 2001.

Since 1999 we’ve seen some of the first IMCs change, split and go on hiatus, along with over a hundred others join the network. I’m amazed that we’ve kept it together in Champaign-Urbana for almost four years, especially since compared to places like New York, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, we’re pretty far off the activist mind-map. Even so, the U-C IMC is facing challenges, including trying to find a new home for our physical space.

There are many justified critiques of IMC, from battles over editing website newswires, to more significant questions about diversity, disparity between the global North and South, and the effectiveness of the media we make. Critiques are important, because they remind us of the things we need to address and give consideration.

I think IMC is still an extremely effective approach to making independment media and networking geographically dispersed communities with common media approaches, strategies and solidarity. It’s far from perfect, but we must recognize that IMC is one big experiment that is not quite like anything attempted before. While it draws on the rich history of the alternative press, community radio, public access TV and other oppositional media movements, IMC is a multimedia endeavor that attempts to leverage the power of electronic and social networks.

The free association of local IMCs without hierarchies is the most powerful and protective element of the IMC movement. While it presents new challenges for global decision making, it also helps make IMC easy to grow and hard to kill.

Five years seems like a short period of time, but it’s an important benchmark for an alternative or activist organization, especially one that is not run in a top-down fashion. At this point, I’d bargain that it would take much more forceful direct and coordinated state repression to stamp out IMC. Even as individual local IMCs come and go, I predict the network has another five years ahead of it, at the very least.

Santa Cruz IMC has a short feature on the anniversary with links to a Freak Radio program looking back on the WTO protests and the audio portion of the This Is What Democracy Looks Like documentary. NYC IMC also has a feature that includes links to articles examining the legacy of the Battle of Seattle.

Wired News provides a smidgen more clarity on the Indymedia Hard Drive Seizure

From a story today in Wired News:

According to Devin Theriot-Orr, a Seattle-based IndyMedia volunteer and an attorney with Edwards, Sieh, Smith, and Goodfriend, around Sept. 22 IndyMedia volunteers received e-mail from Rackspace requesting the removal of the posting and alleging that it contained personal information about and threats against the two officers. The posting was edited to remove a comment about revenge being a dish best served cold and to blank out the officers’ faces.

EFF Sheds a Little Light on IMC Hard Drive Seizure, Promises Action

The Electronic Frontier Foundationhas a press release on the return of the global Indymedia hard drives. They note that the FBI has denied involvement, tracing the seizure back to a court order asked for by the United States Attorney’s Office in San Antonio.

The EFF vows to get to the bottom of the situation:

EFF will take legal action to find out what really happened to Indymedia’s servers and ensure that Internet media are protected from egregious First Amendment violations like this in the future.

It is amazing the number of just plain good things the EFF has done, such as fighting the RIAA, opposing the Patriot Act, and, now, defending Indymedia. They have gone to the top of my donation list, and can expect a check from me as soon as my next paycheck arrives.

NoRNC Phone Tech and the Evolution of Indymedia

Rabble of Anarchogeek worked this past week on a very cool last-minute project to make all sorts of information available by phone to protestors and reporters on the streets in NYC.

He also posts his thoughts on the evolution of Indymedia, which I think are spot on. He identifies some strenghts of Indymedia, which I couldn’t agree with more:

Indymedia is a media system built upon the premise that only by radical participation in a communal discursive space can a new conception of politics be created. It is this open publishing, participatory media making network which invites a broad spectrum of social movements to participate that makes indymedia special. …

We decided to not have a central office or staff.

We decided not to have presidents, directors, staff, or elections. ….

We’ve appropriated technology as an essential tool for radical social change.

We decided that each imc should be allowed tremendous autonomy. …

We’ve decided that we don’t care too much what other people think of us.

Turn to Independent Media for What’s Really Going on in Miami at the FTAA

In case you weren’t aware, I want to point out that there will be thousands of people on the streets of Downtown Miami this week to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit, beginning Thursday. The FTAA is an attempt to bring NAFTA style so-called “free trade” to the entire western hemisphere.

A Miami/FTAA IMC has been set up to provide the resources for independent grassroots coverage of the summit and the protests. Police presence has been incredibly high, with many reports that the cops are targeting protestors and activists for intimidation and harrassment.

As has been the case with recent anti-war protests in DC, and anti-corporate-globalization protests in Italy and Quebec, the police often do not distinguish between protestors, reporters and ordinary citizens, who all become the target of police violence and “non-lethal” weapons. With such an enormous police presence, we shouldn’t be surprised if the cops crack down on the IMC as soon as they can think up an excuse. Independent media reporters expose these strong-arm repressive tactics. That exposure is a threat to any power that relies upon these tactics to maintain power.

In addition to their website, the FTAA IMC has a web radio station set up, with several mirror streams to accomodate lots of listeners. Infoshop.org has also set up a special FTAA page to compile links to reports about the summit and protests from both the alternative and mainstream media.

Nine members of my local Urbana-Champaign IMC have joined the thousands in Miami and will be filing reports by phone and Internet to the U-C IMC website. The IMC’s “home support” crew is staying at the IMC most of the day Thursday and Friday to take calls from our reporters and publish the reports. With luck, I will be airing a live call-in report from some of the reporters during the mediageek radioshow this Friday at 5:30 on WEFT. For those of you outside the listening area, I will try hard to get the program archived here very quickly.

Documenting Indymedia – The Personal

Rabble is answering questions about his involvement in Indymedia for someone’s thesis and posting his answers on his Anarchogeek blog. He’s keeping his answers necessarily brief, though comprehensive enough to be enlightening for the casual reader, like me.

He’s only 3 questions in (out of 18), but already I think posting his answers on his blog helps provide some needed context and history of the Indymedia movement. What’s nice about these questions and answers is that they don’t attempt to result in a definitive history, but rather the history of one person’s experiences. That’s valuable both by itself, and also within a larger context if more people add their stories.

The power of Indymedia is that it encourages and enables a diversity of stories and responses on the news (and about what the news is) rather than attempting or requiring a single authoritative so-called “objective” version. It is only appropriate and most useful that documentation of Indymedia be similarly diverse, discursive and dynamic.

Indy Journalism Via Blog

Wired News has a story on a French blogger who posted updated reports about what was really going on in the streets around the G-8, as prostestors and police clashed throughout the weekend. However, I must point out that this is exactly the sort of thing Indymedia has been doing for over three years now — I guess it’s just not as cool as blogging right now. IMC is sooooo 2000.

Like too many Americans, I have to admit that this past weekend’s G8 summit just about passed right by me, even though I followed the news on the special Indymedia newswire set up for the event. Personally, I was too caught up in the FCC nonsense, but should have noted here how important Indymedia was in setting the record straight.

One might recall that two years ago in Genoa Italian police raided a welcome center and the local IMC, beating people as they slept, in addition to shooting dead one protestor. There is good reason to protest and fight such a closed, undemocratic forum as the G8, and independent media figures heavily in revealing the true undemocracy going on.

Urbana-Champaign Indymedia Center Mostly Open After City Overreacts

After a bit of a scare and quite a bit of wrangling, negotiating and meeting with Urbana city officials the Urbana-Champaign IMC remains mostly open after getting a notice of immediate closure last Thursday. However, the IMC’s all-ages performance venue, known as the “back room,” remains closed, as it was the target of most of the code violations.

On Wednesday night the IMC’s Steering Group drafted a statement that details what happened and what the IMC’s plans are. I’ll post it as soon as the edited and proofread version gets released.

But, in sum, although the IMC has been in constant communication with various Urbana city officials, has had fire inspections, and operated the peformance space in the open for over a year, the City claimed that nobody knew there were public performances going on.

In the aftermath of the fire disasters in Chicago and Rhode Island earlier this year the City of Urbana is understandably skittish about public gathering spaces being up to code. That is why the City decided to do a second inspection of the space after an initial inspection last Monday that yielded only a few violations in need of repair.

But in their apparent rush to deal with a situation they hadn’t been on top of for over a year, city officials overreacted by issuing closure order without even attempting to contact anybody at the IMC. Initial attempts by several IMC volunteers to talk to City officials about the closure last Thursday night and Friday morning met with resistance, and in the case of Urbana’s mayor, outright hositility and violence (he slammed around objects like a tea cup and threw a chair when the IMC’s treasurer came to meet with him Friday morning).

The list of repairs and modification necessary to bring the IMC’s performance space up to code is extensive and largely beyond the means of the IMC. Further complicating things is the fact that several of the violations deal with the whole building, including parts that the IMC doesn’t rent, making them the responsibility of the landlords (who are currently in Australia).

Rather than let this keep us down, however, the IMC is using this as further impetus in our drive to buy a building to permanently house the IMC.

Of course, many folks have wondered over the past week if the City’s action represent some kind of crackdown on the IMC and its independent voice of dissent. Frankly, that’s hard to say. Urbana is a small city — 34,000 people — and a fairly progressive one at that. The IMC has become an active space in an otherwise dying downtown, and there is significant support for the IMC on city council (one member is a founding member of the IMC). Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who dislike or hate the IMC — the mayor certainly falls into this category.

But if the City’s intent was to shut down the IMC, they did a shitty job of it. It appears that folks like the fire and building inspectors really thought they were doing their job, and later they personally expressed some regret that communication hadn’t been better. These City officials have also pledged their cooperation to help the IMC meet all relevant codes in a new space. Beyond the bad publicity of appearing to shut down a non-profit media center, they also risked bad publicity of appearing to suppress having active culture going on in the City’s downtown.

Now, I’m certainly not complacent, and I sure as hell don’t doubt that a pissed of mayor can make our lives difficult, but I also think it’s unproductive to try and find an enemy or fight where there isn’t one. If the IMC were just an all-ages peformance venue, we’d be screwed. But because the IMC also is a multi-faceted media and art center, producing a newspaper, radio program and video, and housing a library and art gallery, I think it has made itself valuable to a diverse bunch of people.

There has been a great deal of community support for our IMC, so we will see if there is enough support to help the IMC buy a permanent space and outfit it to be a real independent community center that will also stand as a permanent automomous zone in the middle of Illinois.