JAMES TRACY

Part of the 6th Annual Howard Zinn Book Fair! https://howardzinnbookfair.com.

Sunday, December 8th, 2019 12:30-2:00
Mission Campus of City College of San Francisco
1125 Valencia StreetSan Francisco

Alice Bag (Alice Bag Band, The Bags, Castration Squad, author Violence Girl)
Michelle Gonzales (Spitboy, Bitchfight, author The Spitboy Rules)
Shawna Potter (War on Women, author Making Spaces Safer)
John Avalos (former San Francisco Supervisor)

Moderated by James Tracy, co-author of No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today.

Punk Rock nearly a half-century old has always been contested political territory. Radical anti-capitalist visions have competed with corporate cooptation. Anti-racist currents clash with bigoted beats. Feminist sensibilities conflict with sexism ingrained in many punk communities. These panelists will explore the radical traditions of punk and ask if there are any radical possibilities left.

Time flies. About six years ago a group of booklovers associated with AK Press, Haymarket Press and the Green Arcade Bookstore (& some non-affiliated folks) all agreed that the left needed a non-sectarian space to discuss and debate ideas. That’s right, an event where progressive people, socialists, anarchists, feminists, Black, Brown, Yellow and Red liberationists, working-class partisans, insurrectionists, electoralists and more could actually talk with each other.

(And nerd out on cool books.)

Your typical Zinn fair is an example of organized, grassroots joyful chaos. We welcome about 70 exhibitors, we hold about 60 sessions in a community college setting. Famous authors are given the same respect as ‘zinesters and bloggers. Looking over our roster from past years, over 60% of our presenters have been women. The majority have been People of Color. And we haven’t done this through some sort of head-counting thing. We just make sure the invitation to participate goes out far and wide. If you look for excellence, it stands to reason that excellence is going to be found, in multiple colors/genders/classes.

So we are doing this again, for the sixth time! 

It seems a little indulgent to put so much energy into a Book Fair, when the world is literally burning.

Yet, if this armageddon circus is going to be turned around, we are going to need ideas.

Listening to conflicting ideologies. Considering ideas. Developing theories from the grassroots. Taking action.

So please accept the Howard Zinn Book Fair 2019 as a humble contribution towards this.

We are looking forward to seeing  you:

Howard Zinn Book Fair 2019
Sunday December 8th
10am to 6pm
City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus
1125 Valencia Street
We are pleased to announce that the 6th Annual Howard Zinn Book Fair will take place on December 8, 2019 at CCSF Mission Campus. The theme of this year’s book fair is “Strike! Discovering Our Power.” We selected this theme to celebrate the ways in which everyday people discover their ability to work together. Inspired by the wave of strikes across the United States in the past year, the massive General Strikes in India, and the recent uprisings in Algeria and Sudan, we expand the idea of the strike to include all of the ways people can take collective action to preserve their homes, protect life on earth, respect indigeneity, shut down the machinery that produces racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and inequality, and build movements that are strong enough to last. The Strike! is not only about withdrawing our labor, but about redirecting it to create a better world.

The Howard Zinn Book Fair will host dozens of 90 min session slots for workshops, readings, panels and performances.

Over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been publishing interviews with interesting authors and musicians at 48Hills.org. Thanks to Marke B. for publishing them!

AIDS, sex, and ‘Illuminations on Market Street’

LIT JAMES TRACY – AUGUST 14, 2019

Activist-author Benjamin Heim Shepard turns to fiction, inspired by working in an SF AIDS housing program in the mid-1990s.

The Mekons’ Sally Timms twangs in to support Community Land Trust

ALL EARS JAMES TRACY – OCTOBER 3, 2018

Country-punk legend speaks out about musical politics, joins bandmate Jon Langford for special Thu/4 benefit.

Leticia del Toro grounds her ‘Cafe Colima’ in the lives of ‘everyday Latinas’

LIT JAMES TRACY – JUNE 26, 2018

Short fiction award-winner speaks about growing up under Reagan in Crocket, Ca., and the pressing need for diversity in literature

Author Amanda Huron on housing and the power of urban ‘commoning’

LIT JAMES TRACY – APRIL 26, 2018

New book explores DC’s equity housing cooperatives—and may offers some lessons for SF.

Ananda Esteva’s border-crossing, jazz-driven Califaztlan tale

LIT JAMES TRACY – MARCH 9, 2018

New novel ‘The Wanderings of Chela Coatlícue: Touring Califaztlan’ from the Chilean author is a feminist, ‘choose your own adventure’-type quest.

‘Knucklehead’ author Adam Smyer takes on the turbulent ’90s

LIT JAMES TRACY – MARCH 3, 2018

A new novel gives a tour of the dystopian Clinton years from a black protagonist’s point of view, with a wicked sense of humor.

(It has taken me over a year to write about lessons I learned from my dear friend, Gil Fagiani. Gil died in Spring 2018 and his loss is still felt through all of the communities he was a part of. -JT)

In 2007, I was looking for a man named Gil Fagiani. At the time, I was doing  research for Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power. Gil’s name had come up in both original documents and interviews as a member of White Lightning. White Lightning was a New Left organization made up of white, working-class New Yorkers. Like their cousin organizations such as Rising Up Angry, The Young Patriots Organization and October 4th Organization they attempted to “Organize their Own” in coalition with radical organizations of color. White Lightning members played an important supporting role in the takeover of Lincoln Hospital. They worked with the Young Lords Party and were the only white organization invited to assist in security work in the Attica solidarity protests in Harlem.

When I finally tracked down Gil’s contact information, I cold called him. When I told him the purpose of my call, and of the research, he was initially taken aback. Turns out that he had circulated a similar book proposal a few years prior. I could tell that he was suspicious, but he promised to let me know if I could interview him before I got on the plane for a trip to New York. That call came just a  few hours before my departure. He acknowledged that he had wanted to be the one to write the story, but that he would be more than happy to be interviewed and help myself and my co-author Amy Sonnie out in anyway he could.

When we met a few days later, it took hours to even start the interview. It turns out that we had both had a deep love of poetry, especially Passolini. In the 1990s, Gil was one of the organizers of Italian-Americans for a Multicultural U.S., while in the 2000s I had worked in ad-hoc organizations such Avanti-Popolo and the Italian-American Political Solidarity Club. We shared a belief that despite the acute white supremacy and conservatism in our communities that Italian-Americans could be extremely receptive to anti-racist ideas.

“But you can’t reach our people sounding like an ideological ton of bricks. You have to start with what we value and make the case that what we want for our families is what all families should have.” Gil said.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a story that Gil shared with me. In 1971 or 1972 he wrote an essay comparing the trial of Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti to the Angela Davis trial going on. He believed that histories of solidarity and resistance could be deployed to counter-racism in white ethnic communities.

The story of this essay was painful to him. Gil had clearly hoped that the essay could help turn Italian-American hearts towards the cause of Black Liberation. However the essay never saw a broad audience. After an initial circulation, it was so thoroughly castigated by many people on the left that he destroyed as many copies as he could get his hands on. The main objection was the belief that any positive take on white ethnic history would somehow bolster racism. When I pressed him as to what organizations or individuals made this critique, he refused to name them specifically.

Decades later, we are living in a time  of an emboldened racist right, that has consolidated power. Central to their world view is the idea that European-American values, history and accomplishments will be thrown to the rubbish heap. In Gil’s worldview, history could be used to build up a sense of multi-racial solidarity. In the paranoid world of today’s extreme right, history only holds a single lesson: white supremacy must be maintained or risk erasure.

The consequences of the extreme right’s move to center-stage are all around us, and make it extremely difficult to envision humanity surviving the next several decades of environmental reckoning, let alone making noticeable progress around inequality within racial capitalism. Much of this rests on the  stories that the racist right tells us about what we don’t have in common. I can’t help but think that the stories that Gil wanted the anti-racist left to tell might have led to a better conclusion if allowed to grow and integrated into the long-term organizing project.

Paul Street’s essay “What Would the Black Panthers Think Of Black Lives Matter?” has gained attention on social media since it was first published on Truthdig (October 29, 2017). Street attempts to raise important questions about the impact of foundation funding within social movements. This is not what he accomplishes.

Street jettisons a critical conversation about the “corporatization of activism” in favor of inaccurate personal attacks on Black Lives Matter’s founders and an ahistorical summoning of the Black Panther Party (BPP).

Given that Street is an accomplished historian, we’re certain he’s well aware of the numerous ideological debates among Black Panthers, past and present. This includes debates about reform and militancy, nationalism and internationalism, when (and if) to engage in multiracial coalitions, how Black radicals should relate to electoral politics, and what economic analysis supports self-determination given rising neoliberalism. These debates are well documented. Many remain active questions within today’s movements.

Street ignores these complexities in favor of a one-dimensional story about the Panthers, and an equally one-dimensional critique of Black Lives Matter (BLM).

He quotes our book, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power,in an attempt to shame BLM for not doing enough — presumably — to reach poor and working-class whites or to mimic the Panthers’ serve-the-people programs. There are three problems with this.

First, Street focuses his criticism on BLM’s founders — Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors — and falsely discredits their organizing experience. He questions their ability to reach poor Black communities and then insults those same communities by writing, “Few among the ghettoized and incarcerated black poor sit on the internet puzzling their way through the intricate policy ideas.”

This is a confounding statement in an article evoking the Black Panthers, who engaged the poorest of the poor in studying both theory and policy.

In fact, BLM is a network of many leaders, some new to activism and others — like Garza and Cullors — who have been organizing in Black communities, in prisons, and in grassroots multiracial organizations for nearly two decades.

Second, Street implies that BLM’s focus on Black dignity and power is too narrow, going as far as sympathizing with the All Lives Matter camp.

Much to their credit, BLM leadership has never been narrow in this regard. In addition to direct solidarity with Indigenous movements, many BLM leaders actively support the development of white — and specifically white working-class — activists through close collaboration and strategic alliances with white anti-racist organizations.

Street conveniently leaves this out, seeking instead to lay blame at BLM’s feet for the lack of organized working-class resistance that ushered in the Trump era.

Street spends the bulk of his article critiquing Garza, Cullors and Tometi for what he feels they left out of particular speeches or essays. In doing so, Street conveniently ignores the intellectual and political work of the entire BLM network, whose breadth of vision is clear: “We are a collective that centers and is rooted in Black communities, but we recognize we have a shared struggle with all oppressed people; collective liberation will be a product of all of our work.”

Finally, if we must make parallels, let’s be accurate. The Panthers never directly organized white communities nor did BPP water down its message to appeal to white feelings. The Panthers organized Black communities first and foremost, establishing a vision and serve-the-people model that inspired others. Strategic alliances emerged in that context.

Under the leadership of the Chicago Panthers, the Rainbow Coalition emerged after decades of Black-led organizing during the Civil Rights Movement and a deliberate shift to fortify Black Power and Third World Liberation. When Fred Hampton reached out to the Young Lords in 1969 and Bob Lee visited the majority-white enclave of Uptown in Chicago, it was because these communities were already organizing their own people.

“We never expected the Black Panther Party to come and organize poor white people” confirms Hy Thurman, a founding member of the Young Patriots Organization. “We were already organizing in Uptown and the Panthers sought us out for an alliance because of that.”

These groups found commonality fighting greedy landlords, poverty, police violence, imperialism, racialized capitalism and, specifically, anti-Black racism as a central, shared goal. This happened because a powerful Black-led movement existed in the U.S. and anti-colonial struggles were actively reshaping the global South.

While Street mocks BLM for playing identity politics, the Rainbow Coalition was arguably a model for identity-based class struggle. These alliances took time to build, happened under very specific historical conditions, and, ultimately, suffered because of deadly government repression.

As BLM faces increasing repression, there is a lot to learn from this history. But easy comparisons do little to instruct or inspire.

While Street evokes the Black Panthers as a rhetorical device for a catchy headline, the Black Lives Matter network has been deeply engaged in developing a broad vision, learning from history — including in-person meetings with former Panthers and veteran organizers — and confronting new challenges.

We are not here to speak for the Panthers or for BLM. Rather, we have appreciated numerous opportunities to see BLM leaders speak about these crucial questions directly. In fact, some of the most critical assessments of BLM have come from Garza, Tometi and Cullors themselves, alongside their contemporaries. Appropriately, many of these deeper debates happen offline and in the many grassroots spaces where real movement-building happens.

Street positions himself as uncovering a story about BLM that has been silenced on the Left. In reality, Mr. Street has uncovered more about the problems with the Left’s persistent self-immolation when it comes to criticism offered without concrete solutions.

We get the impression that Mr. Street has put a lot of thought into how to run a movement without foundation funding or the influence of Democratic party politics. Judging from his other important books and articles, that would be a truly worthy essay. We hope to see it.

Amy Sonnie and James Tracy are the co-authors of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times. Sonnie works as a Librarian in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tracy teaches in the Labor and Community Studies Program of City College of San Francisco.