As I’m writing this saturday night, it’s 54 years today since the Kent State massacre,1 where the Ohio National Guard fired at students protesting the Vietnam war and the expansion of US military violence into Cambodia. Only ten days later that same year, police opened fire on student protestors at Jackson State College in Mississippi, killings that did not get the same press coverage and continue not to have the same reverberation in mainstream media as the Kent State killings,2 for reasons detailed in Nancy K. Bristow’s Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College, notably published in 2020 during the uprisings protesting the murder of George Floyd and police brutality against black people in this country.
Having spent so many hours this past week on that westside campus, I’m thinking, too, of the student-organized sleep-ins at UCLA in April of 1985 demanding divestment from apartheid South Africa, how their encampment that sustained until June of 1985 began the same date as this year’s April 25th student encampment demanding divestment from Israel, calling for an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and an end to the apartheid occupation of Palestine.
The camps are practices in open and collective community commons, where people are blurring the line between student, community member, and neighbor by providing bridges through shared meals; notebooks and pens handed out free so that everyone can notetake, participate, and be involved; translation to overcome language barriers; an extended hand with cut watermelon and pieces of homemade za’atar flatbread with a citrusy, acidic tang; casually proffered mutual aid funds towards housing or transit when a comrade needs help with rent or a late night ride home.
There are libraries and spaces for popular education, rows of printed paper zines neatly arranged on the lawn, stacks of books in front of the corner tent where a crew of volunteers has just re-entered with hot food for lunch; covid testing protocols laid out on a whiteboard and a variety of masks arranged on a table by the wooden pallet entry gate; sandwich fixings and board games in front of the medical tent where medicine and supplies have been carefully sourced and mental health needs are attended to, protective gear including helmets, headlamps, gas masks, and goggles safely stowed; makeshift barber shops; places for art making, ceramics, and knitting; musical performances scheduled; designated meeting times for camp-wide lessons and teach-ins that generate conversation, debate, constructive criticism, and insights from everyone circling up.
Questions of scale and perspective matter enormously here. US-funded atrocities and mass killings escalating in Gaza harden our conviction that any action we can possibly take is worthwhile, that any thing distracting us from the collective goal of stopping the ongoing genocide is worth divesting from, that Palestinian voices must be at the center of our movements. Perspective stiffens my resolve to show up. And at the scale of community care and connection, at the immediate human and neighborhood scale, I find that my own perceived needs for shelter, food, and security, learned at the heart of empire where violence is actively invisibilized to us, can be met more creatively through the generosity of the collective.
“Encampments require urgent and consistent participation,” PF reminds. “This is how we experiment with the scalability of direct democracy and participatory decision making practices.” We’re catching each other up on the latest attacks on students by pro-Israel militants, failed tactics and strategies in building up physical structures and relationships, our favorite amusing gen z chants heckling the cops, spanning between West Philly and various Los Angeles student camps.
I call E early in the morning on May Day, both of us commuting into work by train and by bike, out of breath, horrified, and distracted. E is leaving her work as a teaching assistant and scholar at Columbia University to lecture and lead studio coursework at CUNY that wednesday, and I had just heard a broadcast interviewing professor Shana Redmond on the Columbia encampment before it was violently swept,
“these students have taken the worst of circumstances on a global scale, and the worst of circumstances at a very localized university scale, and turned it into something beautiful. The encampment here, complete with a library, complete with a de-escalation team, complete with lessons and teach-ins, has modeled for the campus what open and free inquiry and debate actually looks like. As the students say, we keep us safe, and so we as faculty are here to ensure that that is made true.”3
It’s crucial that neighbors and community members feel called to this role, to the protection and safekeeping of the encampment. Teachers and elders, both those affiliated with the university and those local to the neighborhood, have been offering insights and advice to the students at Cal State LA, spurring generative, complicated, and delicate conversation about horizontality and leadership, detailing histories of realistic yet ambitious goals set by protest movements of the past, how to carefully calibrate demands or escalations, parsing questions of private property and defining vandalism, considering seriously how rituals like graduation are valued by the working class, immigrant families of commuter students. Mobilizing both smaller, local, grassroots community groups and larger, more established, top-down organizations brings in the numbers needed to defend the camp, as is the case with the Palestinian Youth Movement rally planned for later tonight, tuesday.
The willingness to defend necessitates respecting the asks and uplifting the directives of student organizers. After confronting pro-Israel militants at a planned, university-sanctioned4 counter-protest at UCLA the sunday before last, chanting and holding the line with banners and signs, forming human barricades between the students and attackers, we watched counter-protestors disperse after only a few hours.
With the encampment remaining in full lockdown, this left a group of us sitting just outside the northwest entrance for most of the afternoon, our number swelling and shrinking as friends passed by; joined up with us; shared a bagfull of apples; relocated to drop off supplies at a different entry point; bolstered us to stay resolute and not respond to occasional zionist heckling; paused to greet us when briefly stepping out of the encampment in groups to pee at the student center.
Driving home, MT notes that despite never gaining entry into the encampment that day, our afternoon sitting on the curb and cross-legged on the pavement was “a real value-added corner.” We’re engaged in fruitful conversation about community spaces in Los Angeles versus the Bay Area, how the fragmentation of cities has a direct impact on relationships between grassroots organizations, how the freeway system stretching across all of LA county differs sharply from the bay bridge separation between the East Bay and San Francisco, how cultures around public transport directly impact our ability to forge relationship, the impact of urban realities and relative scale, histories of intergenerational movement building that are present in the bay and ought to inform our movement spaces in LA.
I’m writing this as a reminder to me and to you — the relationships that we are building, even as we defend our physical encampments, are built things that they cannot take away. It’s the students’ sheer will and unshakeable conviction in moments of potential escalation or late-night, time-sensitive deliberation that are most revealing. “We keep us safe” is not an aphorism, it is a code of conduct. It’s a commitment to each other in the camp, that even as we prioritize the maintenance of physical structures for uninterrupted protest, for continued encampment, we affirm protection for each other. Coalition building, community care, and trust are structures built to last beyond the anticipated and arguably inevitable police brutality.
In multiple accounts from the past week at UCLA, it is clear that both police and university institutions prioritize the defense of private property over the defense of people. LAPD, the California Highway Patrol, rent-a-cops with APEX, and so-called “campus safety” officers were called in to protect buildings and campus property adjacent to the encampment, with flagrant disregard for student safety tuesday night,5 and with the explicit intent to injure and brutalize students wednesday night.6 In her May 6th op ed for the London Review of Books “Under the Jumbotron,” UCLA professor Anahid Nersessian writes
“the police, as well as campus security forces, were there, but they did not intervene. Rather, for roughly five hours, they stood at a comfortable distance, laughing and occasionally chatting amicably with the mob, which was made up not only of self-professed former IDF soldiers but also several white nationalists, including members of the far-right Proud Boys, whose former leader was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol. Since white nationalists are, as a rule, hostile to Jews, it is worth asking why their assault on the encampment – which included a large number of Jewish students – has yet to be ruled antisemitic by the university administration.”7
Per one sign affixed to the UCLA encampment, “Ask yourself: Why do I care about graffiti while my taxes kill children? Do you care about property or life?” These slogans make explicit the ties between increased police surveillance and harassment on college campuses, and the university’s fixation on graffiti and vandalism, which has been mischaracterized by some university administrations as hate speech.
Spray paint on a heavy wooden door or brick facade, a broken window, the peaceful occupation of a building through an organized sit-in, do not comprise violence; the thousands martyred in Gaza,8 and the destruction of homes and buildings such that the UN estimates it would take more than a century to rebuild what has been lost,9 when it hasn’t even been 100 years since the first nakba, that is violence against another three generations of Palestinians “even after reaching a ceasefire.” As Lebanese-American composer and writer Hamed Sinno has put it,
“I watched a man break down and exit an under-equipped tent in tears, leaving behind a confused child. He had to tell her that he wouldn’t be able to reattach her arm, which she had picked up and brought to the “hospital” tent. All this, and some of you have the gall to complain about tents obstructing your way to the library, protestors obstructing your way to work, words making you uncomfortable, or a resistance group not being palatable enough for you. White supremacy attributes more value to the broken windows of an ivy league library than a child’s ribs. The children of this empire are pushing it onto the sword it so arrogantly brandishes, and it will burn. If your insides are not already burning over and over again with every image out of Gaza, I pray that there is a god to burn you along with it.”
After leaving camp wednesday night, still running off one hour of sleep since the previous 5 a.m. night on campus recording footage of the hours-long pro-Israel militant attacks on students, I fall asleep fitfully, wake at two to scroll anxiously through every group chat, fall into a dead sleep, and wake at half past three with wracking, full-body sobs. The presence required to access emotion can be hard to grasp. I dissociate when I read the news, consume statistics, pain dulled by my utter inability to grasp the scale of violence and devastation in Gaza. Screaming at the Israeli consulate in Washington DC one night last october with PYM, standing alongside M, is the last time I can remember accessing a full range of emotion, bodily. Learning the contours of a chant in Arabic loosens the grief. It both propels me forward, motivates me, and slows me down, distracts me, to access the human horror of it all. But the loss of the camp is a sharp pain that I feel at the small scale of my own body.
The loss registers as an absence of place. My conception of place —the belonging that I source from shared presence and community sited in frequented and familiar landscapes and physical structures— is inherently rooted in a settler colonial illogic, in multi-generational occupation of stolen land. I consider that so many of these universities, UPenn in West Philly, USC in South LA, Columbia in West Harlem, notoriously gentrify their surrounding neighborhoods, oftentimes where majority black families have lived for generations and are now being pushed out by speculative development as the university buys up sites for student housing, for the expansion of campus. The criminalization of public space and incarceration of unhoused people is rising, and so are the numbers of vacant market-rate developer housing units too expensive for people to rent.
“Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.”10 This phrase from Amílcar Cabral’s 1965 book detailing the practices underpinning the liberation of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde reverberates between local SJP chapters and university encampments care of social media, instagram, and group chats throughout this past week, in the wake of sweeps and mass arrests. The camp exists principally to pressure the university to divest from all ties to Israel. There is historic precedent for the success of such student protest movements, and evidence for the enormous impact of university endowments on US military presence globally. Even as we recenter our demands and refocus our efforts, pushing toward the uncompromising goal of divestment, to keep the camp intact for as long as possible lets us experiment with another way to live and be in relationship.
I think of poet and found of invisible college Ariana Reines’s tirade on instagram this past weekend,
“The problem with trying to think things through these days is — you’re expected to formulate your position internally — then state it publicly and stridently, and just take the consequences. We on the left have created this culture — we can’t pick things apart together, we can’t think unless we already agree. We are a sanctimonious mess. We ourselves are a culture of cops.”
In her 2016 book Conflict is not Abuse, Sarah Schulman calls for “mutual accountability” in the context of “a culture of underreaction to abuse and overreaction to conflict”11 to analyze how this cultural context damages both our movement organizing spaces and interpersonal relationships. Schulman’s analysis is informed by years protesting the Vietnam War, fighting for abortion rights, founding direct action organization Lesbian Avengers, and many years in ACT UP and Jewish Voice for Peace. Per Schulman, who has served as a faculty advisor to College of Staten Island’s local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine,
“At many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for external danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve… When I think about moving forward, in mutual recognition, towards resolution, I think about the word agreement. Not that we would hold the same views, but rather that we would communicate enough to agree on what each of our different views actually are.”
Having a clear shared goal of forcing institutions to divest from all ties to Israel focuses our movement and opens up the opportunity to practice and debate differentiated tactics and strategies. Schulman’s framing highlights how this deliberation and direct communication advances our understanding and sharpens our definitions. We need to get clear on what we mean when we say “unsafe” versus “uncomfortable,” what is meant by “violence” versus “damage to private property,” the distinction between “war” and an “attack” or act of “genocide” by a militarized nation state on a population with no formally recognized government let alone defense, the difference between hierarchic leadership structure and horizontality, and the spectrum that exists between those two polarities. Words mean things.
When I scale out, attempting the impossible task of placing this moment in historical context in realtime, I think about how those of us not in service industry work or maintenance labor on a societal level, managing civic infrastructure and direct services, during the pandemic lockdown, carried out so much of our movement organizing work online, contained to social media, instagram, and group chats. The physical encampments are a remedy to these years of disconnection and disjointed organizing, and call back to our early 2010s Occupy encampments, which so many of us have come to today’s student encampments to discuss, collectively remembering our lack of clear demands, our inability to effectively defend our camps.
I’m talking with a housemate who isn’t feeling hopeful or proximate to the student movement for the liberation of Palestine right now, and it is made clear to me that the algorithm and echo chamber of the internet takes many forms. There is bearing witness to the martyred, to the devastation in Gaza, to the words and calls to action of Palestinians on the ground. And then there is an inundation of trauma porn, where merely bearing witness is paired with aid requests, cash requests, which when you don’t have literal money to contribute becomes a paralyzing shame rather than guilt that can be mobilized into useful actionable and sustained behaviors.
Educational and informational videos for dealing with tear gas and police formations and dearrest tactics, calls for in-person gathering and community spaces where I can put my body on the line or meaningfully contribute, offer a different kind of communication through online channels, where the objective is to get in-person, resting together and rallying together. I take that housemate with me to the PYM rally last night, in the fading daylight, a relatively low-risk action, for a first visit to the local encampment.
Three days ago I wake to the news that the USC encampment, too, has been swept, this time with no arrests, as the only 40 students on site were not able to get significant community support into their locked-down, heavily-policed, highly-militarized private school campus. A friend, a university staffer on another campus, reports back after arrest and detainment to tell us that “the students were really brave, but they were really scared— and, it’s always an honor to hold the line with them, really.”
At the level of interpersonal relationship in the mundane context of day-to-day living, by which I mean, sustaining ourselves with our various labors within the capitalist death machine, I am experiencing a huge surge of community care and friends showing up for each other, for our coworkers’ siblings, for our friends’ partners, for strangers who are friends of friends, in ways that strike me as unprecedented. I say this as somebody who spends every waking moment of their spare time trying to connect and bridge between groups of folks from night group bike rides, community gardening gatherings, folks in experimental music, dancers, architects and urban planners, k-12 teachers and professors, artists of all kinds, and am accustomed to being surprised by the unanticipated intersections. But so much is heightened and activated right now. I am actively choosing hope when I say, may I wake every morning more radicalized against the cult of normalcy and more prepared to resist the destructive violence that is actively invisibilized to us at the heart of empire.
“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose love we choose to move against fear – against alienation and separation. The choice to love is to connect – to find ourselves in the other.”12
The state will never respect what we build because it’s better than what they’ve got. All my admiration, appreciation, and awe to the students at CSU LA, UCLA, and across this so-called country calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza and an end to the occupation in Palestine, centering the demand for immediate and total divestment, and building out such full and flourishing spaces in well-organized and principled solidarity with books, resources, places for popular education, spaces for art-making, sign-painting, pottery, ceramics, crocheting, and drawing, all the medicine and mental health resources needed to sustain the camp, barber shops, and makeshift eateries. Cops will always fear us because they’ll never have what we’ve got: each other. When we say, “LAPD KKK IOF, you’re all the same,” that is literal and includes the zionist agitators attacking students. Cops are not workers and cops are not people; the militarized police state exists to protect capital against the interests, well-being, and existence of people. Every encampment swept, every protest mass arrested, may ten more spring up in their place. We will be back.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/kent-state-massacre/
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/jackson-state-killings/
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/30/hind_hall_columbia
https://dailybruin.com/2024/04/30/block-indicates-potential-consequences-for-protesters-condemns-campus-aggression
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/us/ucla-protests-encampment-violence.html
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-01/la-me-ucla-camp-police
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/may/under-the-jumbotron
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/5/5/israels-war-on-gaza-live-neither-side-willing-to-budge-in-truce-talks
https://twitter.com/Hanine09/status/1787532353922834739
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1965/tnlcnev.htm
Sarah Schulman. Conflict is not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Arsenal Pulp Press: 2016. Print.
bell hooks. All About Love: New Visions. Harper Collins: 2001. Print.