Why Donald[s] Trump[et] is Just a Symbol

Donald Trump is a symbol of white supremacy. He represents and navigates a struxture of power that benefits from demonizing and exploiting the labor and bodies of non white people. He also directly benefits from this because the workers in his hotels, that sew his “brand name” clothing line and more are non white people.

He uses the lives of non whites to line his pocket with profit, but at the same time mocks that community in order to secure funding from other white supremacists in order to be elected in the white supreme hierarchy of amerikan government. He offers jobs and “opportunity”, when that really means racism and class war, profit for himself and his class, and continued exploitation of the working poor people of color. ($ounds like amerika)

I say he is a symbol because instead of talking about white supremacy, people are made to defend themselves from insults made from this profiteer that has this huge platform. Insults that shouldn’t even have to be validated, but do inform why refugees and undocumented migrants are fearmongered and indefinitely detained here, while also being ignored or erased by the assimilating Latino community. Like Donald Sterling, Trump isn’t a unique racist or the only person who thinks that way.. he just said it loud to reach his audience.

The Trumpet has blown; I like the collective outrage but feel like it will be manipulated, just as the categorization of latinx has been by imposed amerikan standards, and coopted from grassroots conversations in our communities around white supremacy, anti migrant citizenship privilege and amerikan assimilation… to a government voting bloc to be mobilized for electoralism.

Boo on that though. We can’t vote out white supremacy when the entire government and means of organization we have has been imposed by colonization, anti blackness and authoritarian violence.

This career/salary/wage race narrative in terms of job placement or employment rate after schooling pushes assimilation to a capitalist structure which coopts our creativity. In fact getting positions within the structure aka getting paid and wielding access to power is seen as success even though we are largely called upon to perform work in ways that works counter to our interests, produces harmful goods or destroys the environment.

This is done knowing that these models of work for profit are not accessible to large sectors of the population because of racism, heterosexism and ableism. In fact these systems are dependent on perpetual under classes of people, the undeserving, those who cannot exist under such criteria within their conditions.

Learning spaces could teach us how to work directly with resources to make them accessible. How to interrelate, to share and explore our herstories, create consent culture and self organize. Instead they teach us to assimilate to hierarchies of knowledge and to perform a function, to weigh options and institutionalize or capitalize off of collective solutions or communal practices and projects.

The University model creates an environment of access, or privilege (for the admitted) that is denied to the greater population. This is a level of access meant to be transitory to upward mobility but this mobility is ultimately determined by white supremacist models of education with rigid hierarchies. It is individual gain (and cost in terms of indebtedness to capitalism via student debt) to some extent, with more representation but still at collective expense.

They literally construct a shared community experience of learning, creativity and inter communalism and then use that space to hyper individualize the foreseeable future to adopt students into capitalist models and time structures that are significantly less voluntary than educational study. Through this we are socialized to not just compete for the benefit of a for profit economy but to excel at that competition at the expense of those without access who were not manufactured to excel and continue the structure but instead kept more easily exploitable.

And can I just say universities are platforms for electioneering with free labor from political students who are regularly corralled via lure of access and the nonprofit industry to funnel their social justice concerns away from their community and toward electoral politics. Get out the vote? Nah. /rant In response to this article http://m.aljazeera.com/story/201311373243740811

revolution is practice. not theory. ? it can take strategy but at this point constantly practicing agitation is necessary to demonstrate that resistance is possible. that managers and liberals can be challenged; city and local governments and police discredited; property disempowered.  the situation is dire; i could not scream loud enough. drones overhead and advertisements in my ears.

but all these are words. and almost everything has been said. aren't you ever frustrated? it won't get better without direct intervention toward alternatives and disruption; insurrection. it won't get better; it just depends on whose terms. 

the police and prisons do not solve crime, they do nothing to stop violence, they displace it by monopolizing it. they do not reform or prevent crime because the root of crime is POVERTY. instead of splintering and dividing over how we feel about destructive acts within our communities how about we SHOW SOLIDARITY against state intervention and cease relying on the outside forces of institutional violence that patrol and criminalize our communities. how about we stop deferring to them and instead intervene against them to urge ourselves toward practicing self organized solutions for deescalation, restorative dialogue and to defend our communities.

you cannot blame the subordinated or punish them for how they/we respond to their/our subordination- to this hierarchical system of economic enslavement that places property over people. this system of force punishes those who do not assimliate 'properly' yet it depends on the existence of a subordinated population to scapegoat and justify its existence. 

When you go to LA Pride or whichever Pride this year please take a moment to remember the noncompliance, entrapment, hate crimes and police brutality that the gay liberation movement faced in the 50's and 60's and 70's and 80's out on through today. remember that before there was a 'gay rights' movement that catered to the political bottom line (a middle class ascribing white gay moderately conservative male) there were queers and drag and liberation and rejection of assimilation in favor of radically altering the hegemonic social institutions that capture us, assign us genders, police our sexualities and assimilate us to stop being queer so we can be good workers for capitalism! Please remember it's not all about CORPORATIONS making money off of your struggle by treating you like the rest of their consumer/customers. Please remember it's not about that sheriff recruitment booth, and think of how many POC and queers are uncomfortable by the spectacle that has become Pride because of the constant thread of forced assimilation or celebration. What have we become?! when do marginalized communities have enough people together or space to actually talk or even do something about the issues/oppressions they face? well i'll tell you, when we do have enough people to actually talk about the issues that face us we're drowned out by music, or programme, or symbolic marches. We're told to celebrate our tokens. As if there is not yet work to be done! as if our genders and sexualities aren't being policed! as if we don't continuously exclude TRANS folk from our spaces by erasing their struggle with all kinds of normativity! as if forced assimilation and the narrative of 'equality' really applies to ALL of us! Please remember that 'rights' are only privileges when they can be selectively granted and taken away by the governmental and even social institutions that dominate our lives. and that privileges are not YOURS to hold onto, but a system to betray! Some of us don't want to keep begging for the rights given out by this system built by white property owning puritan males; it wasn't written for us. it doesn't represent us. and we can never be represented by another, we want to determine our own lives!. we don't want tokenized space facilitated by friendly faced cops, we don't want what humynity people care to grant us with a vote or forced smiles and less gay bashing! we want to take it, to bash back! remember this as you celebrate, that we exist. that this conversation is unfolding and will continue to unfold. and just maybe, understand that these spaces will not go unagitated for long. LIBERATION NOT ASSIMILATION. Solidarity with all those who resist the commodification of our dissent and the rendering of our ongoing struggles into symbolism and consumerism.

consequence is not a reason not to act. in fact, usually any particular consequence has been created deliberately to keep you from believing you can act, and is built on the basis that people cannot be trusted to act. hence, law.  these unwritten and written codes of action/consequence preserve a dominant social order and keeps us immobilized, and so we only ever have or take as much as is permitted to/of us. 

we only fail when we determine our actions, or fail to act, on the basis of external consequence rather than our communal needs.  the number one reason for this is because we don't have access to the power narrative that has created 'consequence', it is not used by all people but by particular people (who usually carry privilege) to subordinate some and protect themselves or legislate other, usually more marginalized, people. these people have been called 'minorities' in reference to their degree of power, and the fact remains that consequences for those with power and consequences for those without power are different because of the dynamics of power itself. it is the power of inclusion, and of exclusion, of applause or of consequence.

this shows us a very important thing. if power determines consequence, then what is the consequence of challenging power itself- the definition and application of it, the inversion of it, the demolition of it's forces. could it be that negating consequence is a negation of power itself?

the urge to act according to consequence (or to avoid it) produces an allegiance to a static relationship with our environment (stability- when we are not static beings) and a societal fear that we can lose more and have less than we already have unless we perform accordingly. this causes us to assimilate in order to 'improve' our conditions under the framework they have been granted to us. instead of believing we can digress and transform our frameworks, to make these conditions extinct.

we are constantly told to make what we can of our oppression in order to improve it, to change our lives in 'appropriate' ways and to avoid consequence thus correlating change with positive reinforcement and demeaning actions towards change that engage confrontation rather than erase it. the social war does not care for consequence because it plays out in secretive manipulative ways; it polices our genders and tells us that if we want to be safe we have to identify ourselves accordingly.

meanwhile the consequences of poverty and patriarchy play out over and over again in the night on dimly lit streets. if we are to ignore it, the consequence of our ignorance may find us anyway- in the form of an assault or any other traumatic experience in the hostile spaces of public or social life. if we are to engage it, the very disruption of breaking the narrative of acceptance and consequence-avoidance is seen as a challenge on society itself (and why shouldn't it be!) and these actions carry with them consequences that exist beyond formal imposition (i.e. not just laws or police, but other institutions such as family or friends, informal coercion to re-conform to silence and acceptance of social oppression). 

but if we engage it; there are others like us who will find us. who may not have found us otherwise. if one of us ignores or deviates consequence; then this brings the light of mind to others who lurk in shadows avoiding it. this is our courage; not in avoiding the nasty promises fascism has for us lurking in the night but knowing that their violence and terrorism is only justified if it succeeds in preventing us from expanding our ideas and practicing to act.

Little kid pulls out his toy stethescope and someone says "oh maybe he'll grow up and be a doctor". the mother says "I hope so, so momma can retire". Poor kid, 2 yrs. old. You don't walk away from that kind of pressure unscathed. Solidarity, working everyday to unlearn that shit.

i want to engage in radical self love, but there is so much about myself i want to betray. 

the way power is divided and distributed by the state, actually counts upon assimilation and the narrative that you should be 'grateful' for the gains you can successfully manipulate out of the system.