by Mariann G Wizard
Rag Blog
December 13, 2011
scott
crow’s book tells of the abandonment of a great American city by the
powerful, the refusal of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens to lay
down and die, and the necessity for community self-reliance that is
Katrina’s great lesson.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a
Category 3 storm, the sixth strongest recorded to date, scored a direct
hit on the City of New Orleans. Over the next days and weeks, as
neglected levees failed and federal and state governments and aid
agencies floundered, Katrina became the costliest natural disaster, and
fifth deadliest, in U.S. history.
Katrina affected millions,
changed the lives of hundreds of thousands forever, and called some to
rise above all personal considerations and give themselves to the
Herculean task of saving the Gulf Coast and its people.
Among the
latter was a Texas anarchist, a lanky East Dallas white guy who looks
like he’s from way over in East Texas, easy-going but hard-bitten. And
while the person he was before Katrina may still be, he was forever
changed by what he witnessed and achieved in Louisiana.
scott
crow, like the poets raul r. salinas and e.e. cummings, doesn’t
capitalize his name. This is one of those odd contradictions, wherein a
desire to de-emphasize an individual’s importance to, say, an
international movement for compassionate autonomy, births the need to
explain that this particular person doesn’t do something most everyone
does, thus making it necessary to consider her or him individually.
Well,
humility can’t help but call attention to itself, if only by its
contrast with the egocentric world-at-large. As I told scott recently,
I’ve been wanting to read his autobiography since I met him.
I
knew his name before we met because a nonprofit foundation that I serve
as a board member gave money to hurricane relief work, beginning, I
think, in 2006. But I didn’t know he and his life partner, Ann Harkness,
were living in Austin until they came to my book release party that
fall with former Louisiana political prisoner Robert King and a couple
of his other friends.
Both Ann and scott have been valuable
change-makers in Austin since moving here shortly before Katrina. scott
is Director of Ecology Action, the grassroots community organization
that pioneered recycling in Austin while he was in grade school. Ann is a
gifted, witty photographer. Both are active in many community groups
and the core of a lively social scene that also embraces King,
antiglobalization worker Lisa Fithian, and other activists who date
their lives in Austin from Katrina’s floods.
Our community has
also seen them undergo the very public trauma of having a former friend
and sometime-colleague exposed as an FBI informer, in this reviewer’s
opinion responsible for inciting two younger activist friends to plan
violence at the 2007 Republican National Convention.
Black Flags and Windmills,
crow’s first book, focuses on Common Ground Collective, an
anarchist-based relief organization he helped found when official
disaster relief efforts not only failed to meet the needs of affected
residents along the Gulf Coast, but seemed intent upon criminalizing
them.
But that wasn’t what he set out to do. While millions sat
stunned, weeping at televised images of a drowned metropolis, as mythic
to the American psyche as Atlantis to the Greeks’, scott crow drove from
Austin, Texas, to New Orleans to look for a stranded friend.
Black
Panther Party matriarch Kathleen Cleaver’s insightful introduction sees
this as the fulcrum, asking, “What deep motivation drives anyone to
travel by boat across an unfamiliar flooded city looking for a friend
under life-threatening circumstances?”
The answer comes from another BPP icon, Geronimo ji Jaga: “Revolutionaries are motivated by great love for another world.”
It
is that love that most illuminates scott’s character and the pages of
this work. From details of organizational process-building among a
shifting cast of residents, volunteers, and core activists, to gritty
descriptions of clearing long-clogged storm sewers and scraping dead
animals from the streets, the bottom line is that he doesn’t leave
anyone behind.
It almost doesn’t matter that the friend he went
to find was Robert King, former BPP activist who served twenty-nine
years in solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison.
scott and Ann Harkness met King shortly after his 2001 release. scott
may not see it this way, but I think he would have done the same thing
for any number of other friends and comrades.
King’s particular circumstances and his exemplary humility and dedication—he continues to work for the release of his Angola comrades, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace—certainly helped draw crow back to New Orleans after a first failed, frightening, surreal sortie.
The
courage of NOLA residents who were also there at the beginning, Common
Ground co-founders Malik Rahim and Sharon Johnson, kept him there for
months under incredibly demanding circumstances. But the initial
determination to help a friend underlies all of scott’s work, pre- and
post-Katrina, and has made him something of an icon, if a reluctant one,
to antiglobalization activists around the world.
As an autobiography, Black Flags and Windmills
is unconventional; one must look to the “About the author” addendum to
discover scott’s age. He spends 15 pages on his childhood and youth. A
small, loving section on his Mom, Emily, shows the origins of his
empathetic nature. It reminds me of cousins and classmates, perhaps a
couple of years younger and drawn to the 1960s subculture in which I
participated. Emily came to womanhood before the words “women’s” and
“liberation” ever met, when racial segregation had but recently fallen,
and “race mixing” was still rare.
Scott was born in 1967; the Vietnam war was still escalating. Emily, a single mom, wasn’t an activist—but
she surely knew people who were. She wanted a better world for her son.
I knew young parents in Austin then who sent their children to the
“hippie school” in the country, or helped in a free breakfast for
schoolchildren program inspired by those of the BPP. Emily sent scott to
an East Dallas preschool run by former BPP activists. While the
preschool was not overtly political, the BPP’s 10-Point Program is in
his book and is a cornerstone of his activism.
Between East
Dallas and New Orleans, scott recounts his evolution as a “libertarian
anarchist,” a phrase I applaud in theory but find somewhat wanting in
rigor. Despite having been influenced by socialists and
socialist-influenced activists, he expresses more anti-communist views
here than anti-capitalist ones, although it may be that a critique of
corporate capital is implicit in the work as a whole.
He seems to view communism and/or socialism solely as political systems—authoritarian, anti-democratic ones at that—rather
than economic ones. This leads him, IMHO, into the error of rejecting a
priori tools that could serve a libertarian anarchist society rather
well, and this is a topic I plan to pursue with him and with Ann in
time.
Most of the narrative of Black Flags and Windmills, however, is not analytical but tells one man’s story—a man careful to “leave room for other stories”—of
the abandonment of a great American city by the powerful, the refusal
of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens to lay down and die, and the
necessity for community self-reliance that is Katrina’s great lesson.
Government
cannot help you. Government seeks to control you. In any disaster or
emergency, help yourself and those around you. Many tasks cannot be
performed by one person, thus, make principled alliances, work
cooperatively, share decision-making and resources. Ask what people
need; don’t assume. Express your own needs clearly.
Starting with
three people and $50, Common Ground helped thousands of individuals and
families, saved and rebuilt entire communities, and raised over a
million dollars in small contributions in two years, an astonishing feat
in the nonprofit world.
scott’s ruminations on privilege—his privileges of being white, male, able-bodied, etc. —illuminate
an ongoing contradiction of radical organizing: a person on the edge of
starvation has little time for considering organizational culture, yet
such consideration is vital for long-term success. His solution is to
use whatever social privilege he has for the benefit of those who have
none.
Stretched to his physical and emotional limits, sleeping on
the ground in sticky Louisiana heat, eating bad food, surrounded 24-7
by the stench of decay, death, and constant crisis, scott’s “privilege,”
one may argue, is what kept him up late writing and rewriting the
organizational principles, procedures, and other expressions of
self-determination necessary for group cohesion.
Expecting
certain rights also motivates one to demand them. scott’s experiences in
New Orleans, a white outsider in a black community rightfully skeptical
of offers to “help,” made me recall a personal white-girl introduction
to in-your-face racism: I was furious because a friend of mine was
insulted, my anger not for his humiliation, but mine. That was an
expression of privilege, you betcha!—but also a time-release capsule of truth, exposing just how limited such privilege was and its unacceptable costs.
Racism
continues to fester beneath public civility and political correctness
today, finding sustenance in toxic, chaotic situations. The privilege of
opposing it remains with the white moiety from whom it springs and
whose deception is among its aims. The illusion that white skin, male
gender, a college diploma, or other privileges are proof against
oppression and exploitation remains a primary obstacle to social change.
crow’s
frank, no-nonsense discussion of armed self-defense is also a valuable
contribution; recommended. As a young man, he feared guns and had to
overcome the phobia to become a good marksman when the need became
clear. The East Texas in him seems to have won out here; his attitude is
more that of a farmer who would resolutely drop a wild hog ripping up
his crops than of a poseur power-tripping on fancy weaponry.
Again
BPP principles are seen, not only in Common Ground’s acceptance of
self-defense as legitimate but in the determination to keep resources
gathered for the community from being stolen or destroyed.
scott
is as frank in discussing Common Ground’s internal issues as its
external challenges, and while his desire not to personalize problems
can be frustrating to the nosy reader, the conclusions he draws are
surely of more long-term value.
We don’t need to know who wanted
to, “Damn everything but the circus!” to recognize the “type” scott
describes in a section so subtitled: the loudmouth who shows up to
“volunteer” with their own, most often self-serving agenda. Sometimes,
after due consideration and an often numbing amount of talk, you just
have to show them the door.
In
this regard, the book is also notable for what is doesn’t include: long
explanations of why scott was right and other people wrong, or details
of endless debates over points that later were seen to be pointless.
Through principled, shared decision-making, Common Ground has been able
to grow through its occasional and inevitable disagreements relatively
unscathed. It apparently furthers one to have someplace to go!
In
sharp contrast to this overall amicability, crow’s brief criticism of
the racist, sectarian New Black Panther Party is well-founded and pulls
no punches. Two so-called “socialist” sects also come in for a
well-deserved basting; a disaster area is not a place to sell your
newspaper! Leaders have to speak against bullshit even when it wears a
revolutionary cloak.
Yes, I said the “L” word, and so does scott:
“Leadership happens when someone is given permission by the rest of the
group to lead.” Accountable, anti-authoritarian leadership must be
demanded, and taught. The notion that leadership is always to be
avoided, a major dilettante cop-out of the 1960s, has hopefully been
relegated to the dustbin of history!
Black Flags and Windmills
is chock-full of juicy quotes from rebels, poets, and rockers, and has
whetted my appetite to hear a bunch of bands I somehow missed, perhaps
during my deeply reggae years, such as Ministry, Skinny Puppy, the
Replacements, the Coup, and more.
But I was most struck by this
quote from the early Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose chords
are echoed today by Occupation troubador Makana:
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.”
—from “The Mask of Anarchy”
Another
contribution of crow’s book is its Appendices, including notes,
memoranda, and both internal and external Common Ground communiqués.
Here are appeals to the world outside for money and materiel, desperate
descriptions of need, calm accounts of the unresponsiveness and outright
hostility of government and other “official” disaster personnel to the
agile, popularly-based, collaborative self-help afforded by and through
Common Ground.
These documents may not only be useful to
historians of the future who seek to understand the impact of Katrina,
or the failures of the G.W. Bush administration, but to today’s
activists who seek to build new institutions, new processes, and a new
culture.
No matter how dire the circumstances, it seems, this
process is not easy nor always harmonious. A great deal of sweat and
inconvenience is involved. Troublesome details must be constantly
addressed. The more you bite off, the more you must chew. This book will
help you sharpen your teeth.
Black Flags and Windmills combines
hands-on information about what it really takes to change this world,
one big mess at a time, and a seeker’s vision of a better world. Well
done!