Rev Left Radio - Anti-Racist Action and the Struggle Against Fascism

Episode Date: August 7, 2017

Mic Crenshaw is a hip hop artist and co-founder of the Anti-Racist Action Network that arose and was active in the 80s and 90s. The ARA is an anti-fascist organization dedicated to community defense against organized racism and fascism. Mic joins Brett to discuss the founding of the Anti-Racist Action Network and to discuss antifascism generally. Topics Include: ARA, Mic's experience fighting fascists, the differences between antifa then and now, the role of violence in our collective fight for liberation, the Portland train stabbings and Mic's connection to the event and one of the victims, the link between late capitalism and the conditions that give rise to fascism, the white supremacy inherent in policing, and much more.  ----- Follow Mic on Twitter: @MicCrenshaw Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/miccrenshaw/ Visit his website: https://www.miccrenshaw.com/home Music: https://soundcloud.com/miccrenshawofficial --- Please donate to our Patreon:  http://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter: @RevLeftRadio Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/revleftradio Don't forget to rate/review us on iTunes to help our overall reach! This Podcast is Officially Affiliated with the Omaha GDC and The Nebraska Left Coalition Random Song From Our Friends: The Movement, Mic Crenshaw   We cannot thank you enough for all of your support and feedback!

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. When the main function of a protect and serve, supposedly group is actually revenue generation, they don't protect and serve. It's simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house,

that can result in us not having clean drinking water, why should those be in anybody else's hands? They should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions. People engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back. and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Hello, everyone. This is Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea.

And this is the interview that we tried to do a few weeks ago, but my sound engineer David was out of town. I was trying to do it myself and I fucked up royally. But luckily, Mike Crenshaw decided that he would come back on and redo the interview because I think it's extremely important that we get this stuff out there. But before we dive into that interview, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to our Patreon supporters, Jonathan T, Lorena, Michael Rasmussen, Xavier, and somebody who just goes by the name, Fuck You.

They all donated some money to our Patreon, so I really appreciate that. The more content we put out, the higher the cost for our hosting site becomes. So every little dollar really helps keep this show going. So thanks to everybody who's donated so far. will in the future. All right, well, let's get into the interview. I'm really excited about this one. Mike Crenshaw, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, say a little bit about your background, and then we'll get into the questions. Okay, my name is Mike, Mike Crenshaw, and born and raised the first, like, you know,

in my early childhood in Chicago. I grew up south side of Chicago. or was starting to be brought up. I didn't grow up there because I didn't become an adult there. And from Chicago, I moved around Illinois, a couple other places, Joliette, Springfield, and eventually wound up in Minneapolis, St. Paul, lived in both St. Paul, and mostly in Minneapolis. And that's where I became a teenager and a young adult. And then I left for Portland, Oregon in the 90s. and I've been here since 92.

That's where I live now. I've got a background in anti-racist activism and organizing. And that gave me, kind of introduced me to other levels of political activity outside of just anti-racist action. And eventually became an independent hip-hop artist. So I currently do socially politically conscious hip-hop and spoken word. and combine that with popular education. So that's kind of how I survive as an adult in the world. Yeah.

And we're going to talk today about an organization that you helped found, the anti-racist action network. But before, you know, the anti-fascism work that goes along with that. But before we get into that, maybe just asking you so our audience knows, how do you situate yourself on the left? Do you identify with a specific tendency? and if not, what have been some of your main political influences? You know, starting with anti-racist action,

I think that was the beginning of my political consciousness and becoming active as an activist. And it was from doing the work on the streets of Minneapolis at the time and building religiouses with other anti-fascist crews and any racist skinhead crews across the Midwest that some of the older folks in the community took notice of the work I was doing and attempted to kind of intervene

and give me a broader and deeper political education and a lot of those people were actually communist so some of the people who gave me some of my early guidance and taught me how to look at capitalism critically and as a root cause of a lot of the different systems of oppression that we face historically and currently those folks were communists and a lot of the people I was running with on the streets were anarchists a lot of the people that I build with now are anywhere between communist socialist or anarchists and I don't identify with either of the

or any of the labels as much as I feel like I have an understanding that's been informed by a lot of thinking that comes from those different characters yeah and i think that's a a conclusion that i myself have been coming closer and closer to i struggle with um putting a certain label on my politics and stuff but at the end of the day i'm so influenced by so many different tendencies that it's hard for me to you know identify with one label to the exclusion of the rest i think any good leftist um should be informed by as many tendencies and as many strains of thought as possible and then put that and apply that into your own life in the best way that you can. I'm not against identifying with a tendency, but I certainly think that there's a lot

to be gained from a lot of different tendencies. I agree. So let's just get right into it. Let's do a little background information for people that might not be aware of what the ARA is. So what is the anti-racist action network? How did it get started? And what role did you play in its creation? Mid-80s in Minneapolis, there was a small group of us. It started with about seven guys. We were skinheads. We were anti-racist skinheads. We identified with more of the roots of the skinhead culture as a two-tone culture, multiracial culture, kids coming together.

Historically in England, you had West Indian kids, working class white kids, coming together and share music in style. And that was the birth of the skinhead style based on rude voice, Jamaican rude voice. And people picking that up in England. and combining it with whatever mod and punk tendencies they had there. And so we caught into that in Minneapolis in the 80s, and we picked up on the style, we picked up on the music. We were listening to a lot of ska, a lot of oi,

and around the same time that we got into the skinheads on our own in Minneapolis, there was a lot of media coverage of neo-Nazi skinheads and white power skinheads. on different talk shows and on networks, television networks, and a lot of the bigger magazines, there were articles about it. And so what we started to see on the streets and in our communities were a lot of white kids who began to copy and emulate what they saw on TV and what they were told was skinhead culture, which was being presented as a racist thing for white youth to do,

to be violent and racist and go out and pick fights with people. And so even though that was actually the opposite of what we were, we had to confront that in our communities as white kids started to show up. One group was actually organized by the clan by a guy who was a clan member, and that group was called the White Knight. So they were essentially a white power student head gang. and they were hanging out in some of the same areas we were hanging out in in South Minneapolis in the uptown neighborhood specifically and they were going to some of the same shows

some of the same hardcore shows we would go to and so we started confronting them and letting them know if you guys are white power then we're not going to stare for that we're going to give you an opportunity to denounce that but if we see you again

and you're still claiming white power then we're going to have to we're going to have to fight basically and we believe that we had to fight people who were violently threatening people who were not white just based on on the basis of them being racist we didn't believe that we could talk them out of their beliefs because their beliefs were violent and threatening and you know to be fair we did give them the opportunity to denounce them when we first encountered them. And we kind of kept track of who these guys were.

And if they didn't denounce it and they were still claiming white power, then we were fighting. And that was the beginning of what was a pretty violent period for my friends and I. We had started to call ourselves the Minneapolis Baldies because we wanted to differentiate, even though we weren't all white, we wanted to differentiate between us and the Nazi skinheads by giving ourselves a name

that would let people know we were not Nazi skinheads. And in order to be safe, we had to organize outside of our immediate social circles. And our click grew to be about 30 core members,

but we also reached out to people across the city and people who weren't necessarily from the hardcore punk scene. We started to reach out to people who weren't necessarily skinheads who built alliances with certain gangs that were active in the city at that time. A lot of us had cousins or relatives or friends that were part of the youth

gangs. And we reached out to kids that were part of different hip-hop cultural organizations. And ultimately, we wound up reaching out to people that were having the same problem in their cities. So we had a strong relationship with skinheads of Chicago. multi-racial skinhead crew that fought white supremacist of skinheads in their city. We had a strong relationship with any races from Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Madison, Lawrence, Kansas. A number of cities in the Midwest actually came together because of Minneapolis, of all these calls a meeting in about 87 I believe and that was the first time over 100 people had traveled from all these different cities in the Midwest to intentionally strategically

put our heads together and create a network where we could rely on each other um solidarity and support and fighting actively fighting Nazis in our cities and that That meeting, the group that formed out of that meeting, the network was called the syndicate. But the larger effort underway was called anti-racist action again. We called it anti-racist action because we believe we had to take action. Absolutely. And so this is the pre-Internet age. This is the 80s and 90s, and it almost seems novel.

now but just for the audience what were some of the ways that you connected up across you know across cities and across regions and across the entire nation how did you reach out to other anti-fascists in different cities that you didn't know personally it's funny you know people used to travel some of us did those of us that that that that that for whom that was a priority or who were privileged enough to do so would get in a van a pile in a car and go check out a scene in another city. Some people traveled because they were in bands and you would bring word back

of whatever was happening in that city that was similar or different to yours and let everybody know and share that information. And you'd make friends, like if I showed up in another scene like I was living in Minneapolis, I'd heard about black skinheads in Chicago

but when I left Chicago as a kid I wasn't into the hardcore scene. I thought I was too young. So when I would go back as a young adult, I would deliberately go to the places I knew the skinheads hung out of. And I find people and I introduce myself to people and, you know, ultimately became friends with those people and through the course of fighting together and traveling back and forth to each other's cities to fight and party and go to shows. You know, we developed a pretty tight bond. Those people were family. And I think there were also seen reports in the back of different magazines like

Your Flesch or Maximum Rock and Roll that wrote about the bands that we listened to and that wrote about the different scenes across the country. And lastly, I think that, you know, there was actually chain letters. I don't know if anybody in our audience is going to remember what those were. And I don't know that that technology still. exist as a form of communication, but there would be a letter that would travel around the country from city to city, and people would literally receive it in the mail because, you know, somebody would get your contact, your name and address.

You might call somebody on their landline, you know, talk to them on their own phone and tell them to send you the letter. They would send it to you, and you would add on to the letter. and when you were done with it you would put it in an envelope and sit it on to the next party and so people would find out about each other's scenes and actually organize that way that's amazing that's impressive

I can't even imagine now that the internet's so ubiquitous that it's just the main tool that we have at our disposal but without it it would be so hard to do that so that's really kind of inspiring that that worked out so well if you wouldn't mind telling the audience some concrete examples Like some experiences you had when you were in the streets fighting Nazis and white supremacists. Do any stories stick out in your head that maybe might be amusing to our audience or interesting to hear about? You know, there is this guy by the name of Paul Hollett.

And he was, what's the word, you know, there was this whole, like, skinhead, like pure, purest thing. You know, you just see it, for those of you that are familiar with skinheads, you might see. in what are called strad, the traditional skinheads. It's like a dress code. It's almost like a strict dress code to the point where there's like a uniform, you know, of boots and braces and a Ben Sherman shirt and, you know, Doc Martin boots, you had to have Doc Martin boots. Well, you know, some of us struggle with the contradiction that Doc Martin boots were actually made in England.

And if skinheads were supposed to be these working class guys who, wanted to support the workers in their own country as a form of political consciousness as a value then why were we wearing these boots that were made in britain and one of the ways it sounds really shallow now to talk about it but one of the ways that that showed up early on was some of the traditional skinheads wore doc martins but some of these guys who were white power skinheads early on were like i'm not going to wear doc martin's I'm only going to wear American boots. And so Paul Hollis was this white power skinhead who you could see from a mile away

because he wore these almost knee-high red-wing boots with his tight jeans rolled up over his boots. And, you know, he fancied himself. I think he thought he was a tough guy like most skinheads are or try to try to be. And knowing that he was a member of the clan, I was going to be. like, this guy's a fucking enemy. You know,

the clan is historically lynched and murdered black people with impunity. And it's even like, it's like a pastime for them. It's like their purpose for existing is to terrorize, brutalized,

and murdered black people. So this one fucking went on the news talking about how he was a proud clan member and knew he had this little crew of guys who followed him around. But I also knew where he lived. and he actually was dating this girl who went to high school with my brother.

So one night I decided if he wanted to be a Klansman and if he wanted to be on the news and he wanted to hang out in the neighborhoods we hung out in and he needed a brick thrown through his one dog. So I got a brick. I got one of my

my friend Stacy. She had a white Camaro, man. It's crazy. A little punk rock girl in a muscle car. So we hit the corner in a white Camaro, and I basically did a drive-by brick throwing, smashed the front window out of his apartment. So, you know, I was about 17, young, dumb.

So Stacey and I were so, you know, high off the adrenaline to what we just accomplished that we decided to hit the corner a few minutes later to see what the damage looked like. And we hit the corner and there's all these cop cars in front of the guy's house. And, of course, they made the car because it was a white Camaro with me and the passenger seat and Stacey with her like rainbow tushet hair down to her butt, you know, like we stuck out like sort of. So anyway, they arrested us to that. And I got charged with damage to property and disorderly conduct or something.

and basically had to come up with $400 of restitution is what they called it, to pay for the crime I had committed. And in order to come back then, you know, in about 87, 400 bucks for a 17-year-old, there was a lot of money. So in order to figure out how to come up with the money, I reached out to my community who supported what I had done. People championed that. and the anarchists and the punk rockers

and a lot of the hip-hop cats and the gangsters from King's Posse. We all got together and had a party at the backroom Anarchist Center, and we had bands and kegs, and we raised that money. And so that was one of the first organizing efforts that we kind of came together as a community to mount to cover the cost of me doing property damage to this this clansman's

this Nazi skinhead's property there's another story in which I saw him later and you know my whole thing was like man you you can't espouse like these violent racist

beliefs and be walking around free and breathing the same air I'm breathing like that's offensive you know and it's a it's a threat like there's there's your what what's implicit is that you don't think I should be walking around you think you have a right to murder me because you're white and I'm not so when I saw him on the street one night I was like hell no and I went you know I ran up on him some of

my friends were talking to him asking a wedding door walking around out in public and I'm like look man you're you're a clansman you're a leader in the Ku Klux Klan I'm a fuck you up. And so I started to punch this guy's face. And you know, it was embarrassing. Like, I beat his ass across the street and down the block.

And he never so much as like picked up, lifted a finger. He like never swung back at me. He never defended himself. He only like kind of ran backwards away from me. And I'm sitting here thinking, how are you this big, bad, mighty

clansman? that you want to kill black folks and you can't even stick up for yourself, you know? Anyway, so those are two stories that I can recall. Yeah, that's interesting because in our personal organizing, just general left-wing political organizing, we've had situations where, you know, our comrades have been arrested and myself have been arrested, and we still use that tactic that you use this fundraiser. Where we have music, we have spoken word poets, we have punk, we have hip-hop, we throw a show together

we fundraise and then we pay for the legal costs of being a left-wing activist and so from the 80s all the way up until to today that connection between music, left-wing activism and solidarity, it's still alive and well and so I like tracing that through the decades that's still happening today. That's wonderful.

Yeah, we've got a show coming up here on the 26th actually that's gonna, the proceeds are going to go towards people who were arrested during the June 4th demonstration out here where a bunch of Trump supporters and some of these famous racist buffoons from different cities who've been attacking people, attacking Antifa members at different demonstrations and they actually got famous from doing that.

They came out here and had some pro-Trump, pro-free speech rally, so people took a rest. Yeah, there's going to be a benefit show here on the 26. Yeah, and that brings up, that actually works well into the next question. In your opinion, what are the differences between the anti-fascist struggle then in the 80s and 90s and the anti-the-Nefas struggle now?

There's a lot of similarities because we're still fighting against the same, you know, enemies. Our adversary has been very successful.

and consolidating power and wealth and unprecedented, almost unimaginable, inconceivable ways since the 80s. I think I recently read something, I recently read a quote a couple years ago from David Stockman, who was a budget guru for Ronald Reagan, and I share this quote a lot in a lot of my presentations, but that I think there's like four. $43 trillion of consolidated wealth in the top 5% of the world's wealthiest people. And, you know, I first came across this quote, like maybe three or four years ago. So it's that the exponential growth in consolidation of wealth since then has actually increased manyfold.

But they had a net worth of $43 trillion and had created more wealth in the whole. whole of the human race had created prior to 1980. That's basically the gist of the quote. So, like, more wealth than the whole of the human race had created prior to 1980 had been consolidated in the hands of the world's wealthiest 5%. And there's even more recent articles, again, that that number of the world's most wealthy people is getting smaller. and the number of, you know,

people who make up the masses of the working poor and the poor is getting larger. So one of the things that they've been able to do with their consolidation of wealth mobilized resources to further control institutions like the military industrial complex. In the United States, we have the prison industrial complex and that being the most developed

and voracious prison system in the world. And the level of repression and surveillance that has kind of gone hand in hand with digital technology, it kind of changes the game and gives them more ways and means with which to go after people who are involved in civil disobedience to political organizing. and, you know, political violence.

And I think there's been more criminalization of people who are engaged in anti-establishment activities. So we see the way the demonstrations, you know, going all the way back to the WTO thing in Seattle, right? The criminalization of left activism, the characterization of activism and anti-fascist as terrorists. So I saw something recently where New Jersey had moved to creative law that stated, I don't know the exact language, but that stated that Antifa was a domestic terrorist organization. So there's that level of repression that's available that exists kind of really. criminalize and over criminalize the mandatory minimum sentencing and things of that nature

in the way that that could be used to target young people color or can be used to target political activists means that you could considerably be looking at more time behind bars, longer time behind bars, stiffer fees and penalties for being engaged in activists. Everybody is recording things all the time and how that can be used as evidence. against somebody. It means that people have to be more aware of their environment and the choices

that they make in that environment and really clear about what they're committing to. And, you know, it's interesting because I'm not trying to, when I talk about things in this regard in this context, I'm not trying to scare people away from doing what's right. You know, I'm not trying to

say don't organize or don't be engaged in civil disobedience. Don't be engaged in nonviolent direct action. Don't be, I'm not trying to suggest that people shouldn't be engaged in self-defense and community defense in the face of rising fascism and right-wing violence and racism and everything that goes with that. But what I am saying is that when we were kids and we were doing this, it was pretty simple in our minds.

it was like we need to find the Nazis and we need to kick their asses and we need to do that over and over again until they don't feel safe and they don't feel comfortable and they go they move on you know and that was what we did

and there's a lot of things that are problematic about that approach too you know I don't think it was as politically developed and thought out as it could have been but I do believe that it was a youth-led, youth-directed movement,

and we were doing what we felt was right based on our level of development at that time. Right. Yeah, and I also think, like, as capitalism continues to kind of bump up against crisis after crises, after it's consolidating more and more wealth

into fewer and fewer hands, leaving more and more of the population with less and less, that kind of creates the conditions for this rise of the far right of ethno-nationalism of this simplistic narrative that says it's brown people it's immigrants it's Muslims those are the problems and that kind of protects critiques against capitalism so in your opinion what role do you think capitalism and fascism have because it always seems that whenever capitalism starts to sputter fascism comes you know arises to kind of violence

defend the hierarchies that are inherent in capitalism, what would you say to that? I'd say that's right. I'd say that fascism is like the bully, you know. It's the thug. It's the henchmen. It's the brown shirt. It's the bodyguard. It's the bulldog. It's the Rottweiler. It's the pit bulls that are trained to be sick on the public to protect the interests of the elite who never so much has had to engage in a fisticuffs or armed confrontation of any sort.

You know, when I was a kid, I used to watch the news at my grandparents' house and take interest in the happenings in the world, and one of the first things I noticed was that at the time there was this war in Lebanon. Then, you know, there was the Israelis where at war

like they still are, you know, with their Arab neighbors. And there were these peace talks that would happen on TV where you would have these leaders get together and they would sit at a table with pictures of water and there would be microphones and, you know, the media would be there taking pictures and recording the event and these guys would shake hands and go their separate ways at the end of the meeting. But it never made sense to me that the people who were at war were always at these tables

having conversations and shaking hands when in the actual theater of war. and the communities and the countryside, people were dying, you know, by the thousands. And so in looking at the way that the system of consolidated wealth and power and ownership of the elite is able to protect itself through the military, through the police. And when it begins to fail, and it's not able to sustain a level of a level of access to prosperity and prestige that a certain part of its working class population once had access to, it has to be able to mobilize people who are the most ideologically linked with the values of the dominant system.

It has to be able to mobilize those people to protect the system at all costs. And that's where, you know, social fascism as far as the ideology of people who are aligned with the system because they believe. they have some incentive and some stake in the system, be it because they were born with a certain complexion or because they have a certain nationality and they identify with the flag and the interests of the rulers. Those are the people who are able to, you know,

become part of the organized structure of civil defense in interests of the state, you know, Whether it's the clan, the posse comitatas, different citizens' organizations, you know, tea party, whatever it is, there's going to be these folks who you can feed them whatever you want and you can point them in the right direction. And like you said, you can say it's the immigrants that are the problem in this country. It's all black folks have always been the blame, you know. It could be the LGBTQ people, you name it. I think we're both saying the same thing. Yeah, and I think that theory is borne out when you see the difference between how the state views and confronts the far right

and how it views and confronts the revolutionary left. You can go back to the Black Panther Party, to the movement in Philadelphia, to the weather underground, to any sort of really revolutionary left-wing organization, even us organizing peacefully in our community today in 2017 in our city, we have cops infiltrating our meetings. You know, every rally we have, even if it's just a peaceful May Day rally, where we're just celebrating working class tradition.

We have cops show up, you know, by the boatload to come and monitor us, to peek in our windows. But when the far right goes out there, when they're flying their Nazi flags or they're flying their Confederate, flags look on the news you know when you see an event like that watch how the cops interact with them it's never the way they interact with us it's it's almost like they they see comrades over there they're shaking their hands they're laughing with them off camera they're standing there and protecting them but the moment anybody from the left shows up their attitude changes they get

violent they want to smash our faces into the concrete they want to arrest us even in portland i think it was in portland where you saw um three percenters and oathkeepers helping the the pigs tackle and arrest Antifa activists. So this is very real and that theory is completely borne out every time you see one of these actions occur. It's true, man. I mean, I grew up watching, you know, in the history of my life, watching the police protect the clan,

watching the police protect the neo-Nazis time and time again at these public demonstrations and watching them brutalize everybody else. And so there's definitely a historical relationship between the police and all the government agencies that rely on violence and force to carry out their agenda and the white power organizations. They've all been part of the same kind of cultural reality. You know, the people talk often about the police departments being organized patrols of slave catches, you know,

that were sent out after runaway slaves. And that being the basis for the formation of the first police departments in this country. There, you know, there's historical evidence of race riots that happened in northern cities, you know, in Detroit, New York, and Chicago, where the police and the fire departments were actually violent gangs and white thugs who were going out and helped murder black folks. And so this relationship has proof, you know, there's historical proof with this collusion. between violent racists and the people who are supposed to protect us in our communities. I mean, I think, you know, black folks by and large have never really been under the illusion that the cops are there to protect us. And, you know, sometimes you see these articles come out periodically that say, you know,

there's so and so discovered that there's been infiltration in the law enforcement of the military by white supremacism and like this. When has the military industrial complex and police department's not been one and the same as white supremacy? Exactly. You know, fuck out of here with that. And it's, you know, people, poor folks sometimes join the military, you know, because they want to, they believe they're going to get better access to stability in their lives and maybe get access to a higher education. People from poor communities that are black or brown sometimes join the police force because, you know, they believe that even though they know it's a fucked up situation, it's going to be. be some stability and they get to be a civil servant and maybe they could do something right

but more often than not they get in there and if they're not a complete idiot like the dudes from Milwaukee that black cops is you know it's basically there to promote white power if they're not like that dude you know they they leave they realize they're part of a violent racist organization and they're very live and security are actually at state you had these cops who a group of black and brown cops in New York who came out recently blowing the whistle on the racist stop and risk policies of the New York Police Department. Yeah, and we see that over and over again.

Here in Omaha recently, we had a situation where a Native American man was in a mentally ill state and went missing from South Dakota, ended up here in Omaha, and the cops, they were aware that he was mentally ill. The guy's mother had contacted the Omaha police department and say, you know, my son Zachary, he's mentally ill, he needs to be taken to a

crisis center if you get a hold of him. And what ended up happening, this is just last month, they beat this man, they tased him 12 times, they beat him over the head 13 times until he died. And, you know, this guy just needed health care, and he got his ass beat by the police and murdered. And the cops were all cops of color, and they were all relatively new. So that's a very interesting dynamic because those cops now are being thrown under the bus very quickly. You know, they were fired charges have been pressed it's like huh this is a two-year-old you know a black cop that's been in the force for a few years what if he was a a white cop that's been in their 20 years how different would this situation have played out so even within the police departments that

white supremacy and that racism it plays out in its own deformed way and it's it's just a it's complex and it's disheartening and it's i don't know it's just made me think of it's yeah it's central. You know, white supremacy is so central to policing and the culture of policing in this country that those contradictions are always happening. I think the first time we talked, it was right around the time the black Somali cop, that's also Muslim, had killed the white woman in Minneapolis. She had approached this car. Him and his partner had responded to a sexual assault call. And then when they got to the location, someone had approached the car in dark clothing. It turns out the woman who made the call had walked out to approach the police.

And I guess she had on pajamas. And so the cop who was sitting on the passenger side fired a gun and killed it. And it was a white woman and he was a black cop. And so a lot of us who caught wind of that were sitting there like, okay, so how are the all lives matter? or the Blue Lives Matter crowd going to respond to this one. You know, and I'm not laughing to make light of the fact that an innocent person lost their lives when they actually needed to be helped because it's tragic, you know. But the dynamic is different when the police are black. And, you know, I've seen a couple of these compilations of police violence

that are circulating on the web for some years now where it'll be like a mashup, you know, of multiple incidents where cops are killing. folks are beating the hell out of people. And a lot of the cops are actually, you know, cops that are people of color. And again, we want to look at the relationship between consolidation of state power that is based in white supremacy, but that also has a class orientation and that at times supersedes the color or the race or the ethnicity. of those who are participating in the interest of the system.

You know, it's a thing that happens all over the world, actually, where neoliberal capitalism, which is what we're currently in in this late-stage capitalism phase. But, you know, the thing that we're dealing with now is it doesn't exist in a vacuum, you know, this product of history, it's part of this. continuum in which the wealthy and the powerful, regardless of the color of their skin,

use the same means to maintain their power and control over society. It's a play in Africa and has been for some time, where you have neol colonial leaders playing out the interests of the European financial elite, you know, through the World Bank and the IMF, but they're basically African people and acting in the interests of people who don't give a damn about African people. You know, and so on the ground, you're going to have, like, for instance, in a country like South Africa where the ruling party is the A&C, you're still going to have police brutality where black cops are fucking up black people.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. And going back a little bit, what you said earlier about, though, the white woman that was killed by the Somali officer, it really is worth noting going to Fox News and seeing how they phrased it. I think Tucker Carlson had a segment on it. And the right wing, all of a sudden cares about police brutality. All of a sudden, they're taking a stand. And like, this is unacceptable. This can't happen because a black cop shot a white woman and not only a black cop, but an immigrant. And so that plays very well into their narrative. But if those positions had switched, you wouldn't

even a hurt it on Fox News, you know? Or if you did, it would have been this huge excuse for why the cop did the right thing and why they have to stay on their ground and why they have a hard job. But the moment those racial narrative switch, you know, the right wing just clicks right into what they always do, which is race, bait, and all of that. So, but one thing I didn't want to talk about, we're about 15 minutes before an hour. I wanted to touch on this topic because it's very relevant to what we're discussing. What role do you think violence has in the struggle for liberation broadly and in revolutionary left-wing politics specifically like do you think it turns off more people than it helps or do you

think it's a necessary aspect of resistance how would how do you think about violence in those terms you know violence is a fact of life whether you want it to be or not and it's it's a scary frightening fact because you can get hurt or you can die and nobody wants to experience pain and suffering and death voluntarily unless uh you feel as if you absolutely have to you feel as if you have no choice um you know people if you ever see the horrific footage you know from 9-11 or or footage of buildings burning with people trapped inside of them, you know, people jump to their depths. And I always wonder, you know, what's it like, what must go through one's mind

when one decides to commit to something that's going to end their lives? Certainly, you know, when people are trapped inside of something that's burning and they have to choose, do I want to be burned alive? Do I want to die of this toxic smoke? or do I want to jump to my death, you know, and I from the impact when I hit the ground. And it sounds really morbid, but it's, these are the things that we're, these are the type of decisions

that some of us have been forced to make historically or some of the types of decisions that we have to anticipate having to one day make because of the power dynamic at play in society. because of the reality of the threats that are constantly waged against our very lives. The desire to be free from that interaction, the desire to be able to dream and to find joy and sustain happiness and liberation versus living in the face of oppression that limits your choices, that limits which you can even imagine. possible that is a violent struggle it's violent psychologically it's violent emotionally it's violent spiritually and at times it becomes violent physically

the right to defend oneself against an enemy that threatens to take one's life is a human right it's a natural law and so violence has a place because it's part of the world that we live in and I don't I would never want to advocate going out and intentionally hurting people for my benefit I don't that's just not the way I engage

you know I don't I don't violence isn't fun but if forced to defend myself I have to be able to do that I have to be able to protect my life and the lives of those around me And going forward and looking at left, left disorganizing anti-oppression movements, mass movements for people's liberation, we're always faced with this question around violence where we have to look at it. It's almost like we have to be a thousand times more accountable than the other side because we're always looking at violence. We're conditioned to think that there's something wrong if we have to use violence, that we're doing it wrong.

We're going about it the wrong way because Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., were nonviolent. And shouldn't we be nonviolent, too? If we actually engage in violence, doesn't that mean that we're being careless and irresponsible? Doesn't it mean we're dangerous? Doesn't that mean that we're actually terrorists if we engage in violence? And that's such a skewed one-sided narrative that it's not realistic and it's not even really something that you would entertain if you have self-respect. Because you know that the violence of the state, be it the violence of their economic policies that prevent people from having access to health care, the violence of their systems of capital and distribution. of the basic necessities of life, like food, and access to potable water.

You know, you got these institutions shutting off water in Detroit for working families and poor families, you know. That's a form of violence. You know, we had people who were engaged in the struggle with Standing Rock. to protect people's access to clean water on land that was rightfully there. And we had the state showing up with private security guards and mutual aid from many police departments and the National Guard, you know, and basically committing acts of mass violence against people who were there defending the water.

And so, you know, we see this thing where the state is not afraid to use violence, overtly, covertly, coercively, in many, in myriad of forms here domestically in our cities and our communities where a black person gets murdered every 28 hours, according to the Malcolm X grassroots movement, to what's happening in many different theaters of war all over the world. You know, we're not just this administration, our previous administrations, and going back to, historically, you know, who knows how long, how many generations were, we've been using weapons of mass destruction on innocent people everywhere. How many hundreds of people die daily based on our activity to consolidate wealth and extract resources and the military? that we used to do it all over the world. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, what really irritates me is this centrist liberal hypocrisy when it comes to violence. You'll turn on, you know, any sort of liberal talking head TV show or radio show or just engage with liberals online. And they're all about anti-violence.

You know, if you use violence against the Nazis, you're just as bad as them. but what the what the privileged elite comfortable liberals don't understand is that their privilege, their elitism, and their comfort is rooted in violence. They sit atop a mountain of corpses, the very capitalist system that allows them the comfort of talking about violence and wagging their finger at it. You know, that whole system is built on violence from the genocide of the Native Americans, which cleared land for capitalist development, to the enslavement of Africans, which provided free labor to to boost start capitalism, to even dropping nuclear bomb on innocent men, women, and children twice to flex their muscles to the rest of the world and sort of like, you know, stake their claim as we are the new superpower in this world. This entire system is built on violence, and we're having, we're drone bombing children across seas every single day, we're engaged in violent

activity in at least seven different countries, extracting wealth, putting sanctions on places like Cuba and Venezuela who just want to support their people and allow poor and working people to have a higher quality of life, you know, their entire system is rested and rooted in violence. And so it especially annoys me when liberals want to do their little liberal hand-ring about violence when the only reason that they have such a comfortable life is precisely because of the violence. But as long as it's happening to brown people, you know, thousands of miles away, I guess it's okay. you know and that's always something that just you know makes my blood boil it makes my blood boil and at the same time i think on a on a basic fundamental human level i empathize with

a rational person's fear of violence because again it goes back to pain and suffering and loss and nobody wants to have to experience that and there's a lot of fear that we carry around protecting ourselves from having to go through something like that I don't know what it would be like to see my family burned alive in front of me you know but hundreds of thousands of people all over the world know what that's like because they've survived it

And there's this kind of belief, this hope that if we just, if we're just law-abiding citizens and we do what's right and we don't criticize those in power, that we'll be protected from that because that's the promise of what the American dream is. That's the promise of what American prestige and privilege and prosperity buys you, right? if you patriotic and you do due diligence there's going to be this

this war machine that's going to protect your freedom and to people that that freedom means that we have the right to do that to other people

in our interests but nobody should ever have the right to do that to us and that thinking is problematic it's got to go

it's actually behind what driving potentially the extinction of our species as well as many others. And I don't know what it's going to take to turn the tide. But I have to behave as if my consciousness and my activity is contributing to something that's going to lead towards liberation and peace. freedom for humanity but because of their consolidated power of wealth it's not a fair

fight and that's the other thing that we have to come to terms with about violence and what I think a lot of people are so afraid of it even though they're not going to come out and say well I think non-violence is the best way they might not make the connection consciously, but a lot of what we're trying to grapple with is the fact that their systems of anti-personnel technology and weaponry and surveillance are such that you can't fight them on their own terms. You will not win. Right. Yeah, definitely. Totally agree with you. It's a great point. And I appreciate the fact that you reached out and you said that you also empathize with that non-violent mindset, because I do too.

And I think every leftist that I know, and I know a lot of them, none of these people take delight in violence. Nobody wants violence. You know, our ultimate goal is a world where nobody has to live in fear of violence and fear of oppression and fear of domination. But violence is just a sad fact of the world that we live in, and there's a part of me that things, you know,

if push comes to shove, you have to be violent back. If you're surrounded by wolves, you can't be Gandhi. and um but before we go this this has been a great conversation but there's one thing i want to touch on before we end up and that's what happened in portland this summer with the nazi stabbings and everything i know you have a connection to one of the victims and i want to keep saying this because i don't want these people to be forgotten i don't want their sacrifice to be forgotten so could you quickly maybe summarize what happened in portland and what your connection to one of the victims is yeah i was uh riding the bus one day

You know, my vehicle that I used to commute was broken at the time. And so I was on the bus running errands and it was hot and the bus broke down and I almost got on the train. And I decided to stay because I was so tired and lazy. I decided to stay on the bus until they worked out their problem. Well, what was interesting is that the train I would have got on and where I was at when I was having issues when the bus was having issues was the same. transit station that a few minutes later after the bus I was on, what happened said taking place. So I didn't find out immediately.

I didn't find out right after it happened. But later that night, after I got home, I started to see some posts on social media about stabbings and how there had been a lot of stabbings lately, because I think this was the third stabbing that had been publicized in the media in a brief period in Portland. And so a lot of people were kind of clowning like Stab Town, you know, given the city nicknames related to stabbings.

But even then, I didn't put it together that it was a white supremacist that had been attacking these two young women in color. And that's what, you know, kind of led to two people being stabbed to death and another person didn't stab and critically injured. it wasn't until I think really late that night that it came out that it was a race a hate crime that this thing that happened had been motivated because I had been motivated by this racist cat Jeremy who was attacking woman of color on the train so once I heard that I was like well shoot I wonder if I know anybody involved Portland's a small city and the next morning that was a Friday I think and the next morning that was a Friday I think and the next morning I woke up and I got a text and it said that the guy who survived the stabbing was Micah, a mutual friend of Micah and myself sent me that information and I was like blown away you know I was like wow I was wondering if I knew anybody that was involved and so I found out

where Micah was who was in the hospital and I immediately um that morning went to visit him I met another friend of mine, the one who told me the information. We went and visited Micah in the hospital, and, you know, we saw the gas in his neck from where he had been hit with the knife. The guy who had done it, who attacked, he had stabbed Micah in the neck as he was punching him. So he was, basically, he was punching with the knife in his hand. And he cut these other two people's throats and they died there on the train. and you know Michael was pretty doped up we'd just gotten out of surgery

and so I didn't want to bother him with details but I definitely wanted to be there to support him and you know I spent a lot of time with him after that happened and we've talked a lot about that event and what happened which was that this man Jeremy Christian was verbally assaulting to young women

and telling them that they couldn't be here in America and that he was exercising his free speech and he was threatening their lives and so people got up to intervene and Michael was one of those people who died and he got stabbed and survived well I just

yeah I mean I just wanted to to say that you know Micah if you're listening me and my entire audience you know we view you as a real hero and the two people that gave their lives paid the ultimate price to defend innocent people against a fascist attack those people are heroes and um you know they're they're in my heart and they're in hearts of everybody that's listening and we're and we're not going to forget

the sacrifice and every time that you see you know fascist or racist organizing or being belligerent um in a bar in a public area i don't want to to tell people to put themselves in danger but if you have the right situation speak up you know stand up it can make all the difference i know it's scary and I know the risks are very high, but this is what separates, you know, cowards from people willing to take a stand. And the people that took a stand on that train, I just wanted to say, you know,

you'll never, ever be forgotten. So thank you so much for what you did. Thank you, Micah. And thank you, Mike, for coming on today and having this conversation. I really appreciate, really appreciate you coming on, and I love hearing, you know, all your experiences and all your wisdom.

Before we end, though, can you please plug your website and art, your hip-hop, and give some recommendations for listeners who want to learn more about anti-racist action network or anything we've discussed today? Yeah, man. I'm looking, I'm hopefully going to be writing a book. I might be speaking to soon.

My comrade, Donnell Alexander, you know, he's like, man, you need to write that book. And I'm like, shoot, I'm trying to find time. He's like, well, you need to write 200 words a day. So I've been talking a lot recently, especially in the wake of the incident that happened on the train to different people around this question of historical anti-fascist organizing and anti-racist action in the role we played, the part we played in that history. And I love talking about it, but I think I do need to write about it because I think there's a lot of questions people have, and I think that my perspective can provide some clarity. from, you know, from a kind of a subjective point of view from somebody who actually was part of the movement

and lived through those years. That said, I don't, I'm not really sure where to point people now as far as an online resource or specific literature that's been published that could tell people more about it. So thank you, Brett, for doing your part and helping expose information that I hope is helpful. for people

and looking at what we've been through in relation to what we're going through and what we're going to continue to go through. My music is online at www. www. Mike Crenshaw.com. Mike Crenshaw.com is M-I-C-R-E-N-S-H-A-W.

I'm on Twitter at Mike Crenshaw, Instagram at Mike Crenshaw. There's Sonic Bids account. There's BandCamp. There's SoundCloud, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Mike Crenshaw, my music is available in many places. There's videos on YouTube, most recent one is obvious, and currently there's a single I just released that's available Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, called Earthbound, about the ecological world practice that we face and whether or not we're really going to have the capacity. to turn things around in the years ahead. And it's a heavy, you know, the lyrics are heavy,

but, hey, it's got a nice beat and you can dance to it. Check out Earthbound. And we got the movement. It's a recent single. I think you're going to let the people hear some of that. Yep. Right. So it's available on SoundCloud.

You know, I've been writing lyrics and performing and recording. Basically, as a reflection on the time, that we live in together. So I hope you guys enjoy my music and thanks for listening and thanks to get Brett for having me off. Absolutely, yeah. We're playing the movement by you

as the outro to this, and then we'll link to all your stuff in the episode summary. So thank you, brother, for coming on. I really appreciate you coming back and redoing the interview after we lost the first one. It's been an honor to talk to you

and let's keep in touch, man. Okay. All right, have a good one. Keep. Despite their mental illness quite resilient. Fight with wit and right this real shit volatility. Low civility. Don't let vulnerability.

Lower your agility. This moment is pivotal. Crucial, critical, while opponent is intentional. Bodily criminal to be truthful, our response has been useful and pitiful. Community defense happens when we control the city. The old perversity, thirstily. Worship in emergencies, a constant state of urgency. state of urgency, crisis creates currency, mass murder and the mayhem, massacres in strife,

manufacturing the chaos, the fascist race is right, merchants peddle weaponry and sell it to all sides, no guarantee will no tranquility after we all die, hostility, rage and anger killing me, they commit atrocities, plausible deniability, we must achieve the impossible, believe in our abilities, I'm a look to you and me, not Hollywood or Hillary, politicians and police, can't keep in bourgeoisie, Liberations closer than you think, but y'all ain't really feeling me. It's time to think fast, the movement. Learn lessons from my past, we're moving. Solidarity that lasts, the movement.

Y'all won't say we know about that. But what about the love? What about the good Lord and the heavens up above? The heavens up above, they are inside of you. Don't forget about the essence of the message tried and true. And to the hell below, we have access to that too. Depending on what you know, how you think, and what you're thinking, what you're I'm posted on the radius doing surveillance with my crew. Through the phone and from the drone, they spy on me in you.

Oh, you think you cool? They spying on you too. I know you think I'm a fool, but they spying on you too. So what you gonna do? What we gonna do? What we gonna do? It's time to think fast. The movement.

Learn lessons from my past. The movement. Organize the class. The movement. Solidarity that lasts. that lasts the movement It's time to think fast The movement

Learn lessons from my past The movement Organize the class The movement Solidarity that lasts The movement Yo they blasted on a park Right before it got dark

I saw the muzzle flash Out the window flying sparks Fuck the snitches and the narts Debating about marks They aiming at our children Here the baby in the heart Cold of silence I'm not promoting violence

promoting violence there's a science self-sufficient self-reliance efficient and defiant cheaters lepers lions one of us gives hit well three of them are dying self-control erosion of my soul PTSD detest me I won't give up before our goals protect our families communities and homes that's the weather we find peace bro that remains unknown time to think fast the movement learn lessons from our past the movement organize the The movement Solidarity that lasts the movement It's time to think fast The movement Learn lessons from my past The movement Organize the class

The movement Solidarity that lasts The movement Time to think fast The movement Learn lessons from my past The movement Organize the class

The movement Solidarity that last The movement to think fast, the movement. Learn lessons from my past, the movement. Organize the class, the movement. Solidarity that lasts, the movement.