Dear Funk the War
I have observed your downtown protests for many years and expected Friday’s paint attack on the Armed Forces Recruiting Center on L St NW.
This annual publicity stunt, in which you vandalize the front window of the AFRC, seems to be part of your core strategy. I have not witnessed any other attempts at communicating or organizing with anyone at or around this center at any other time during the year and I work on this block. Change requires that you talk to people, build relationships, and speak truth to power. Please explain to me how throwing paint on a building once a year – paint that has to be cleaned up by a wage depressed, non-union (and most likely immigrant) worker – helps you achieve your mission?
Furthermore, the MPD knows exactly what you are up to (SMARTEN UP) and dispatches a fleet of officers, at overtime pay rates to prepare for this prank. That money could be used for other public services which the city so desperately needs to fund.
I understand your desires for civil disobedience, but I ask you to reconsider this one particular tactic as it seems to be a pointless and wasteful act. You don’t get any media coverage, and can’t even present your own version of the story, C’MON SON.
It’s not Pershing Park. It’s not the Battle of Seattle.
Update – by Sunday, the only remnants of Friday’s “action” was this chalking on the sidewalk:
Filed under: Upset The Setup | 16 Comments
Upset The Setup
Hip Hop music, culture and politics from Washington DC. by dj.eurok aka PJ Urquilla aka PEACE JUSTICE UNIVERSAL.
DJ Eurok | Upset The Setup
Email!
The “a working class person has to clean this up” argument is problematic. It’s up there with suggesting that blockading roads might interfere with a working class person getting work. That effectively says that you can’t take action anywhere ever for fear of inconveniencing someone.
You’re invoking the spectre of an assault on the working class without you actually being able to point directly to an instance of someone being seriously fucked over by that paint on the window. That treats the people who clean the window as if they are voiceless. The MPD overtime argument is also similar: That’s not how allocation of funds works. The overtime paid to MPD does not come out of funding for other city projects/services. And I’m sure you don’t mean this but one could make the jump from this logic that because MPD overtime is involved, we simply shouldn’t engage in any kind of demo that brings us into conflict with the state.
It’s also not true that people don’t do counter-recruitment work in the area. There are a legion of peace groups in DC that do this kind of work. The notion that the people who organized this demo and the people who threw the paint never do any kind of direct organizing work is a false dichotomy that you’re pulling out of thin air for the simple reason that we actually know who did the paint bomb job.
There is a LOT of room to talk about the efficacy of tactics used by the anti-war movement, 9 years into two wars that don’t seem to be letting up at all. And it’s pretty much fair to say that the majority of the tactics used are getting played out as fuck. And yes, a lot of this is becoming ritualized and needs to get challenged. But it’s reasonable to challenge the tactics on the grounds of efficacy, not on the grounds of some imaginary person neither you nor I can really point to.
Assault on the working class. My my my, we’re getting fancy with our language. Point is: played out means it’s performance means it’s pastiche means it’s useless. Dig deeper or move on.
So you acknowledge that the claim that throwing paint at the recruiting station somehow fucked over the working class makes no sense? Because you’re simply repeating one of the conclusions made by DEAR UPSET THE SETUP
lets roll the tape:
also, dumb shit like this makes it easier for THEM to do shit like send agent provacateurs into REAL CIVIL ACTIONS and start smashing windows to instigate a police beatdown:
http://upsetthesetup.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/protestor-or-provacateur/
pj
while you’re right to call for more talking and organizing, don’t you think that paint bombing a recruitment center IS speaking truth to power? 500 kids blocking traffic with a roving dance party, stopping to educate each other at war profiteer’s offices, engaging in civil disobedience and throwing paint is a pretty powerful youthful voice saying no to war. and just like you advise, they did it by talking to other students and organizing.
people that look a lot like you and i are being killed by our government in multiple countries. no justice, no peace, bro. what is a more appropriate response to years of government sponsored murder than civil unrest? we should commend these students for using creative nonviolence and it is the police that respond with violence and disregard for people’s safety that should be condemned. no act of property destruction should ever justify “a police beatdown” of nonviolent protesters.
you can disagree with the tactics, but calling it “dumb shit” is not ok. these are very smart people doing thoughtful organizing and taking courageous action. they put themselves at risk to fight the most powerful government, which would probably prefer that they ‘grow up’ and march in line. they are upsetting the set up aren’t they? and they’re literally doing it while blasting funk and hip hop tracks. hip hop… as in graffiti… as in paint on walls without permission.
don’t forget pj, these protesters are your allies… at sunday’s immigrant rights march these same kids were in the streets (and respectfully not throwing paint bombs) “funk the borders” was a powerful part of the march, specially for us that didn’t want to wrap ourselves in the american flag like organizers wished.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnandersonywc/page2/
in the modified words of emma goldman,
if i can’t paint, i don’t want to be part of your revolution.
I’m surprised by so much opposition and even outrage at Upset the Setup’s criticism of FTW’s tactics. In San Francisco, New York and New Orleans, there is much more advanced, thoughtful conversation and coordination around mutual aid, solidarity organizing and protest tactics employed by white anti-racist organizers to stop violence against people of color.
It doesn’t appear that FTW has taken any lessons from Miami 2003 and scores of other white-led protest blunders that have cost many people/communities dearly. While white people raged, brown and black-skinned passersby were beat down and went to jail. Studied *anti-racist* anarchists are looking at the Miami Model (pre-emptive policing, profiling, infiltration, etc) as one of the serious repercussions and obstacles of (of course, first expanded repression tactics by the state – we know who calls out the dogs) but also from disconnected, uncoordinated individualized strategies that choose targets and employ seemingly spontaneous actions without community consensus, and put a lot of people in danger of police arrest and assault.
Typically, white people skate arrests and charges (and of course day to day criminalization and repression) while people of color pay the big price. White people can throw a rock or paintball at a building and vanish into the thin air of gentrification and white privilege that’s permeating this city. Got a college degree? even better. The city establishment would love for you to “take back the streets” from Black and Latino families. Take ‘em! No one is really standing in your way.
No surprise then that (predominantly Black) cops didn’t respond to so many taunts by frat-like ‘anarchists’ during the FTW march. Some of the more absurd moments that day? Two enraged white men yelling in the face of three Black cops – “If this were Birmingham, would you still be on that side?” FUCK COPS, FUCK THE PIGS!, again mostly directed at Black cops. One white guy feigned being pushed off of his bicycle by a cop – no one fell for it but other white folks were on guard, ready to brawl with the police – over what again?
I mean, it’s fine if you want to fight the police but set your own appointment with them and invite people to that event, see who comes. Hell, even plan a “white people against police brutality” march and go for it. But don’t co-opt the tremendous desire of people to end the state’s assault on people of color so that you can play act ‘resistance’ in the streets. FYI, it’s always advisable to have broad community support, particularly from people you’re claiming to advocate for.
Most anti-racist activists know that if you’re going to do a direct action that will get a reaction from the police, you go alone or with an affinity group, not drag other protesters into potential danger. A friend of mine appropriately termed this phenomenon “date rape” when USD students invited hundreds of people to a keg party and turned it into a protest.
This isn’t 1999 and DC is not Kansas. there are many levels of class, race, gender, ableism complexity in DC. if you actually have little to nothing physically at stake in the day to day, except your conscience, take the back seat in public mobilizations and street protests. Practice, instead, more direct political strategies with people of your own socio-economic, political and cultural class – Universities, Congress and NGOs and support community and working class/poor people’s movements too. You’ll be infinitely more helpful pushing the race and class issue in shwanky downtown NGO offices and the halls of Congress than with this kind of approach.
The fact that the editor of this blog seems alone in their assertion that these tactics are problematic worries me when considering the prospects of creative, anti-racist, truly effective direct action in DC. Much more deep and informed conversation is necessary here – not attempts to shut down but to hear what people’s issues with FTW’s organizing tactics are. You must be accountable to conscious critics, and we are many.
rvltn.
two things, and you know i have mad respect for you.
1. paint bombing a recruitment center is not speaking truth to power
You know I support the rusto-revolution: No More Prisons spoke truth to power, shit even BORF spoke truth to power. THIS IS POSEUR.
2. “if i can’t paint, i don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
that shit is not a revolution.
LOL. Wait, how is what BORF did “speaking truth to power” and throwing paint at a recruiting station NOT?
You’re creating a hierarchy of “acceptable vandalism” based on what received popular accolades–sort of like when people said “Oh BORF is just shit, Cool Disco Dan is a *real* tag.”
If you include the one, you have to include the other by default.
Moo, I think that you are on to something.
dude. going all city with a krylon campaign that makes the world sit up and take notice (a la Cost and Revs, No More Prisons, Cool Disco Dan, Banksy or Borf) IS speaking truth to power.
One incident of paint throwing in broad daylight doesn’t measure up. Unless your toy fantasies of been a rogue street artist is the ends to the means.
Calling people “toy” because they disagree with you on the internet is macho antagonism and not really becoming someone posting with the name “Peace Justice”. Your use of AWESOME graf slang like “going all city” doesn’t impress either.
No, I’m sorry but 200+ people blockading the street and some people throwing paint at a window of a government institution devoted to enticing, tricking, and entrapping working class youth and youth of color in particular to go and murder other people is good and just as much part of the fabric of resistance as anything else.
And Cool Disco Dan, if I recall correctly, was not an anti-war protest. While we’re at it: You do know BORF is an anarchist and would prob be generally okay with throwing paint at windows?
Your argument doesn’t have cohesion and I’m noticing no one seems to be responding to the incredibly fucked up problem with the OP of speaking on behalf of some imagined working class immigrant.
this shit is publicity stunt protest politics and doesn’t even conjure publicity, therefore its WACK. all caps. its the same spinning wheels of protest privilege and fantasy revolutionary role play.
see you next year…
EUROK.UPSETTHESETUP
and oh BTW, its not “a window of a government institution”, its the window of retail space in a mixed use downtown office building that contributes to the tax base to subsidize for your CITY EXPERIENCE. theres a big fucking difference.
And finally, I stand by this statement: “paint that has to be cleaned up by a wage depressed, non-union (and most likely immigrant) worker”