OK, so no belly laughs, but...

I did in fact attend the Why the Green Scare is the new Red Scare workshop in Providence. And while the speakers took up way too much time (in some cases saying very little of substantial use), thus displacing any time for Q&A... I did approach two of them afterward, to (as the kids say) "chat." One of them was a woman I'd seen present at Renewing the Anarchist Tradition last year, on a panel examining how communities (particularly communities of resistance) can exact and maintain accountability for transgressions of one shade or another. Her area of focus was how (in some cases staggering) patriarchal behavior and sexual assault have been grappled with in eco-defense communities, so it wasn't all that surprising to find her speaking on State repression of eco-defense activists, and having met before made being candid about the racially-loaded issues drawn into relief by the mere existence of a "Green Scare" discourse that much easier.

The other fella I spoke with was actually quite serious about our collective obligation to support those struggling against State repression of Muslims and Arabs (and for that matter, communites of color generally). So, again, being candid about things was quite easy. And the conversation that followed was (in my view) quite productive.

Ultimately, as the first gal put it, their position is that whether or not the anarchist community dropped the ball when it came to dealing with State repression of Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11, repression of eco-defense activists is targetting their community and they can't not support and defend those people. Fine, fair enough. So, they're conscious of what's drawn into relief by invoking the spectre of McCarthyism, but feel compelled to nonetheless. Granted. The problem is: If one acknowledges that there is some semblance of shared experience between these communities given their respective relationships to the US government, and if one can also acknowledge that it is likely that Muslims and Arabs have faced far more pervasive and vicious tactics at the hands of the State... Why is it that these panels, this discussion, and the proverbial talking heads of this discourse are almost exclusively white? Is the assumption that lawyers supporting Guantanamo detainees, Arab professors, or a host of others on the shit end of the post-9/11 world order couldn't possibly have any perspective whatsoever useful to the eco-defense community? On one hand, I suppose there's an answer to that question that isn't totally ethically compromised. On the other hand, the possibility of said answer or not, the discourse as it currently exists and plays out lines right up with the tried and true tendency of (white) anarchists to work from the tacit assumption that ours is the only game in town.

So, here's the big shocker for the weekend: Yours truly as a bridge-builder (no shit).

Apparently, there was some hope among these folks of setting up a panel for this year's RAT, and the aforementioned "chat" resulted in my being asked if I would be willing to speak on said panel regarding the relationships that need to be built between communities facing State repression. Of course, the last thing any such panel needs is one more paleface motor-mouth. So, I declined, and instead offered to pass along the names of folks working on post-9/11 civil liberties cases, who might offer fresh perspective to current conversations in eco-defense communities. This could be a really kickass development... except that anyone who's been to RAT would likely agree that it's hardly the audience that needs to hear this shit. Eco-defense activists don't tend to scramble for gatherings of those biased toward the intellectual, and the demographic that does tends to be a few steps ahead of the larger anarchist community on these sorts of questions. It would however be really kickass to have such a panel at next year's National Conference on Organized Resistance (which is now nortorious for drawing every shade of leftist anti-intellectual, some of whom fancy themselves eco-defenders). Perahps such a panel at RAT could be a worthwhile test-run. We'll see. Either way, I'd be game to help make it happen.