The STEP UP Coalition is made up of the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA) and various other activist groups in Providence. The CSA is a citizen-proposed ordinance that would address racial profiling and other abuses of power by police. Mayor Jorge Elorza recently said the CSA could pass before the end of the year.
This is the ninth year for PRONK! (Providence HONK!) which takes place every Indigenous People’s Day. It is not a Columbus Day parade. Local bands, such as the Extraordinary Rendition Band, What Cheer? Brigade, and Kickin’ Brass participated, as well as bands from around the country. Organizers describe PRONK! as “a cacophonous street celebration with out of town brass bands! We are a street intervention like no other, with outfits and misfits from Rhode Island and beyond – musicians, artists, activists, makers – taking over the streets as part of the Providence HONK Parade.”
Organizers go on to say that PRONK! “spawned from the original HONK! Festival in Somerville, MA that has “grown into a new type of street band movement—throughout the country and across the globe—outrageous and inclusive, brass and brash, percussive and persuasive, reclaiming public space with a sound that is in your face and out of this world.”
]]>“It is really a complete pleasure to support your film project because it is living history really,” says Dr. Richard Lobban, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College, who was a reporter at the time and wrote stories from the field. From 1961 until 1974, Amilcar Cabral and his African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde/Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) engaged in an intense war against the Portuguese who had colonized Africa. Though Cabral himself was not a Communist, the conflict became one of the hot fronts of the Cold War.
“Cape Verdeans have always seen themselves, because they are an immigrant Afro-American population, as not having an attachment to the African American experience, or at least the same attachment to the African American experience,” Araujo told me several months ago. “The Cape Verdeans in Providence do one job in Providence. They were all longshoremen. The ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association] 1328 is an entirely Cape Verdean union. It was founded by Cape Verdeans. It’s officers are still Cape Verdean-majority. It’s also a very protective union. They were also able to keep the docks honest, which is the problem that they had in Boston and in New York. And they were able to keep it open to Cape Verdeans, most importantly!”
“Cape Verdeans were relatively politically sophisticated to a degree more than Azoreans. And also because of the amount of shipping that passed through there they were also more cosmopolitan,” he said. “They identify as an international people.”
This is a point that is vital to understand because the tensions on the macro level that played out in Cape Verde were staged on the micro level in Rhode Island. For example, the contradictions of race and racism impacted Cape Verdean identity in unique ways. Segregation in schools and churches would confound a population that in some senses does not regard itself as an African population as much as from an island near Africa that has its own unique traditions and culture. The expansion of Brown University and gentrification effectively dispersed a historic neighborhood by the end of the 1960’s.
These were the challenges that Cabral and his contemporaries were encountering when they began an armed insurrection against the same types of systemic racism and exploitation perpetrated by the Portuguese. And this is where the PAIGC’s links with the Communist bloc states proved to be so natural, it was because the ethos of internationalism, which defined Communist solidarity in the anti-colonial struggle, were part of Cape Verdean identity.
“Amilcar Cabral was from Angola, so there was this recognition, the same way that Che [Guevara] was from [Argentina], not Cuba, that there’s an internationalism,” said Araujo.
Guenny Pires, who is directing the documentary, says “I grew up with his story but I never really knew what happened and why. I was little when we got independence in 1975 so I could not understand a lot of stuff… I thought as a filmmaker it would be my responsibility to tell this story.”
Pires says the film was created “to honor Cabral and to keep his message alive.”
Having been produced over the past 15 years, he is now seeking funding for the completion of the picture. And, because his production is partnered with a non-profit, all donations are tax-deductible.
For more information or to donate, visit the website of Txan Films or email them at TxanFilm@gmail.com.
]]>The Second line funeral march is an African American tradition most associated with New Orleans, it has in its roots a deep and unmistakable connection to African funeral tradition. In America the 2nd line was a way to mark the passage of Black life and demand recognition of our basic humanity. In the 2nd line the tears are mixed with joyous songs and expressions of Black kinship. In the 2nd line it was traditional to carry a decorated umbrella symbolic of protecting one from a storm as a shield, but also as an expression of beauty facing the heavens, shining in the rain. It is also traditional to carry a handkerchief for our tears but also as a flag of defiance and a part of our dance.
“The 2nd line can be seen as just a parade but it is a deeply powerful and solemn expression of homecoming and love. This invitation is offered in that spirit. Come mourn, come weep and wail, come to love, come to share and build power, come to witness, come to sing.”
Alton Sterling was a 37-year old black man killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Philando Castile was a 32-year old black man killed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Castile’s girlfriend and her 4-year old daughter were in the car.
The march ended on the water at India Point Park, where there were performances, remembrances and a final act of throwing flowers into the water.
Below find photos and video of the event. Much of the video was recorded by RI Future contributor Andrew Stewart.
]]>Leiko is a group that bears some striking resemblance to the first Velvet Underground album, back when Nico was lending her ethereal voice to the proceedings. They describe themselves as goth-folk. Check out their music below to take in some of this sonic odyssey!
The prize for “Most Politically Incorrect” float went to a truck emblazoned with a “Trump” campaign sign that displayed a series of posters of State House leadership that cited a series of political scandals and unpopular decisions. This was followed by two trucks full of Trump supporters, with one man waving a large Confederate Flag in support of the putative Republican presidential nominee. The presence of racist Confederate Flags in the parade was disturbing. I counted at least four.
Governor Gina Raimondo, perhaps sensing that her presence would not be appreciated, did not march in the parade. Her presence was felt, however, in every float that expressed dissatisfaction with her close association with corporations like Invenergy and Goldman-Sachs. Tracey Potvin Keegan rode a bike dressed as the governor, with bags of Goldman-Sachs money hanging like saddlebags and a $700 price tag on her head.
Marching in the parade were Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed and Representative James Langevin. Whitehouse did not escape criticism for his early support of Invenergy’s power plant. A woman marching with the power plant protesters held a sign with a quote from Whitehouse that said, “If I look back 20 years from now and I can’t say I did everything possible, I’ll never be able to live with myself.”
After first supporting the power plant, Whitehouse later back tracked, saying that weighing in on the issue would be inappropriate. Many in Burrillville and the surrounding areas feel betrayed by Whitehouse’s position, feeling that his reputation as the Senate’s strongest environmentalist is mere political posturing.
Almost as unpopular as the governor are the gypsy moths, who have infested the area and strip entire trees bare of foliage. One group of marchers came dressed as a gypsy moth caterpillar, with the words, “It’s raining poop” on it’s tail end.
The parade featured an appearance by Tony Lepore, the Dancing Cop. Lepore sported his new uniform, emblazoned with a special “Dancing Cop” patch, instead of his former Providence Police Officer uniform. Lepore’s career has been in free fall since he interjected himself into the incident late last year when a Dunkin Donuts employee wrote “Black Lives Matter” on a police officer’s cup. As a consequence of his words and actions Lepore lost his annual gig directing traffic downtown and lost out on a replacement gig directing traffic in East Providence.
Governor Raimondo is due to meet with Burrillville residents on July 18.
]]>Rhode Island celebrated World Refugee Day on Saturday in the People’s Park (Burnside Park) in downtown Providence. The Rufugee Dream Center’s Omar Bah, a Gambian refugee and now a United States citizen, was the emcee for the event. He noted that Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams, was a refugee from Massachusetts seeking freedom and safety in our state. Bah said that welcoming refugees is a Rhode island tradition that must be protected.
Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island sponsored the event.
On stage were cultural dances, poetry and music from around the world, including Colombia, Burma, the Congo, India and many more. The event ended with dancing from members of Rhode Island’s Syrian refugee community.
The United Nations notes that “World Refugee Day has been marked on 20 June, ever since the UN General Assembly, on 4 December 2000, adopted resolution 55/76 where it noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on 20 June.”
This is the first outdoor World Refugee Celebration in Providence. Representatives David Cicilline and James Langevin, as well as Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, spoke briefly.
]]>Going into this film, I was expecting that, like many other war films, there would be a bit of commentary embedded within about today’s political scene. Yet I was totally blown away here, instead of getting a Civil War film you get an epic class warfare film that reaches into the pantheon of great historical literature, at different points alluding to the contemporary journalism of Marx and Engels, who wrote a great deal on the American war for Horace Greeley, as well as the magnum opus of W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America.
Newton Knight, played by Matthew McConaughey, is a Confederate field nurse who deserts when he is tired of seeing young men die in a war for rich men’s cotton and little else. He hides out in a swamp with a group of free slaves, including the valiant Moses Washington (played by Mahershala Ali). When a group of Confederate officers, led by Lieutenant Barbour (Brad Carter), begin to requisition civilian property in a fashion that favors the 1% and leaves the 99% high and dry, these war widows, sons left to defend the family while father goes to war, and a trickle of Confederate enlisted men who are sick of the carnage, slowly join the group. As a fully-integrated camp, they hate the Confederates. But they also have very little love for the Union and the northern industrialists who they defend. So they become a small third, independent state, repudiating the duopoly, that grows into a vivid example of what a functional American social democratic society can be.
They allow these working people to own small plots of land to till and farm, much akin to the ideas promoted by Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, William B. Greene and Josiah Warren around and after this time as part of what would later become known as “unterrified Jeffersonianism”, individualist anarchism. Keeping with this philosophy, they uphold individual rights regardless of race or gender and grant autonomy as a central tenet of their system, saying “no man aught to tell another man what he’s got to live for or what he’s got to die for”. Yet rather than allowing this individualism to fuel a nihilistic, corporate Libertarian dystopia, it instead proves to be the mortar that builds a mighty fortress that poses a significant threat to the rich on both sides of the Mason-Dixon. After the war, these folks end up becoming a force fighting for justice in the Reconstruction period, coming into harsh contact with the proto-fascist Ku Klux Klan and trying to preserve a chance for democracy.
This is the perfect movie to watch with a Trump supporter. For this entire year, I have been watching the Trump people with a mixture of horror and guarded admiration. While their candidate is a complete disaster, the fact is that these voters are not fascists, they are pissed-off poor white working class people who are pushing back against the neoliberal political order, much in the way that many working class British voters have lately done likewise with their yes vote for the Brexit. It is not that I necessarily respect Trump voters, even though their refusal to accept any other candidate shows fortitude and resilience, as much as I have less respect for white middle class Bernie Sanders supporters who, though they do not live in a swing state, are now saying we must compromise and vote for a “lesser evil” who is still evil. No, instead we should be doing like the people in The Free State of Jones did and accept that the only path to true liberation is casting off the duopoly. Trump has broken the Republicans perhaps forever, much as Knight broke the Confederacy, now it is the job of progressives to break the irreparable and irredeemable Democrats. This film can be used to break down some prejudices that exist within Trump voters and begin building class solidarity.
The fact is that northern progressives and lefties need to work on something that hinders their efforts to be progressive, a condescending, look-down-your-nose elitist air that shows contempt for the rednecks. Yet for all the harping they do about class solidarity, these progressives forget the word redneck comes from a Southern miners strike, that the rebellious workers who got into a pitched battle with management were wearing red bandannas on their necks for reasons that had less to do with blood and soil as much as proletarian toil. Go figure.
]]>Steve Ahlquist’s excellent recent report on the events at the State House last week, wherein a woman of color, Vanessa Flores-Maldonado, was booed for mentioning police brutality, was the first domino in the chain of events that led to this. That blatant act of racism and misogyny so disgusted local activists of color that they felt it was imperative to hold another event at AS-220 on Friday, June 17 that would allow them to process through and mourn together in a safe place a man of color unleashing such violence against other people of color.
The evening began with a very emotional event that was so private I did not record audio or images. Several queer Muslims held a prayer service, the jumu’ah, attended by a variety of community members and allies, and led by a local Muslim professor who was sure to qualify that she was not an imam or Islamic scholar, just a prayerful believer who believed in God. The prayer leader had a queer niece who introduced her aunt and began to weep in the middle of her speech, saying at one point this was so important to her because “we as Muslims don’t talk about these things”. The congregation shared as one prayer mat a long and wide rainbow flag unfurled from the front of the main stage of AS-220. It was a breathtaking sight in its simplicity.
Following the prayer, the activists had a series of presentations articulating their feelings and emotions related to the events in Orlando. These included silly moments of singing classic gay karaoke tunes as well as moments of genuine sadness, with performers continuing to break down throughout. One instance was a queer male talking longingly of Omar Mateen, the Pulse shooter, asking in a painful tone not only why he had done these things but how he could have been so hurt by America’s white supremacist and homophobic culture to consider such violence legitimate. Another performer described his views as Marxist and queer while discussing how he is able to “pass” as white despite being a light-skinned Syrian.
The day before, Sam Husseini, an independent journalist who has given special notice to Arab news topic during his career, wrote this in a piece titled Noor Zahi Salman: Everything You’re Hearing About Me Is a Lie:
Some friends of Noor Zahi Salman are apparently speculating that what actually happened was that Omar Mateen was about to be outed as gay — and went nuts. This could have broader implications since “Israel surveils and blackmails gay Palestinians to make them informants.” That clearly is speculative. But far more responsible than speculation that is streaming forth from your TV.
The point that many of these queer and allied Muslims shared, regardless of their personal views regarding the Pillars of Islam, was that the Pulse shooter was one of them for multiple reasons and that his actions were an explosion of nihilistic rage not at homosexuality being condoned by a decadent libertine Western society as much as this self-proclaimed enlightened Western civilization being the central organ of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and imperialism in the world today. They pulled no punches, including a moment when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were displayed in large glossy photos onstage as part of a musical number that repudiated both Democratic and Republican racism. One of these performances included a line that summed up these sentiments, “Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you!”
The next day was Pride. Throughout the day, white stage performers were consistently, when referring to Orlando, using derogatory language about Mateen that ‘othered’ him while failing to articulate any recognition of him as potentially bisexual or as a member of a religious minority currently experiencing a tremendous level of state-sponsored violence at home and abroad. There was zero recognition of how our war on Afghanistan would have radicalized him. Instead, he was described as a “thug” or “hoodlum” by the MCs, which included one white drag queen wearing a Clinton campaign button. Backstage, one could spy David Cicilline and Jorge Elorza yucking it up and totally at home in a corporate Pride event.
After the PrYSM action, they decamped from the Pride site and went to India Point Park to hold an alternative evening celebration. While Gina Raimondo and her husband, two people who have made a living off corporate welfare while demonizing pensioners, were greeted with adulation by the crowds at the Pride parade, these people of color were celebrating genuine diversity and actual progressive values.
Statistically speaking, we know that people of color and particularly African Americans are the most Left-leaning voting bloc in both the Democratic Party and the American population. Surveys have shown they are in favor for abortion and LGBTQQI rights, gun control, Affirmative Action, universal healthcare, expansion of Social Security, free college tuition, and even wealth redistribution via a progressive income tax and reparations for slavery or other instances of historic systemic white supremacy.
In other words, these are the people who would be by default akin to Scandinavian social democrats. The reason Bernie Sanders failed to make significant inroads this year with the black vote was because he ran a typical white northern liberal presidential campaign, centering his energies on white middle class population centers known for progressive attitudes, such as college campuses and middle class communities, while failing to reach into the black community population centers in a meaningful fashion, though the younger generation, many of whom are first-generation college students, in certain instances did embrace his candidacy. (How Tad Devine, a native of South Providence, could not figure that one out is truly bizarre.) Indeed, in a recent report on The Real News Network, it was said:
[T]he below of the Democratic party is black folks. We’re about 25 percent of that party. And if our presence was going to transform the party, we’d be seeing a very different kind of party politically. Black folks are the most left-leaning constituency in the United States, that’s been shown generation after generation.
Those facts in the macro sense defined the generational and ethnic gap between the PrYSM and Pride celebrants in the micro sense.
These politically-engaged young people of color did not feel like Bernie Sanders campaigned to them this year and feel like Jorge Elorza is a phony, playing heartstrings with his story of humble upbringing on the West End while failing to vocalize any critique of the financial institutions that are now holding Providence hostage at a time when Wall Street has lower popularity than the Johnston landfill. They understand that they could be the base of a progressive political leader but instead they are ignored by politicians while real estate interests and Brown University gentrify historic black neighborhoods on the East Side, in the West End and South Providence. They know that the Democratic Party is a force trying to destroy their community so to break up their progressive voting bloc’s power in city and state government. These are the points of conversation I had with various activists over the last few days leading up to the Pride action and so define the coordinates of where any actual post-Sanders movement is going.
White progressives should take note.
]]>Midway through Gasland director Josh Fox’s new film How To Let Go Of The World (And Love All The Things Climate Can’t Change), the filmmaker comes to the stark conclusion that most people in the mainstream press are not saying out loud: climate change is here, it is already impacting our world, and we are well past the time when mythical natural gas “bridge fuels,” like those proposed for use in Burrillville would have been of any use to our civilization.
CLICK HERE TO GET TICKETS TO THIS FILM, OPENING AT THE CABLE CAR!
Picking up where his previous documentary about opposition to fracking left off, he goes on a globe-trotting journey to the Amazon rain forest, the Pacific islands, China, and everywhere in between to visit communities that are opposing fossil fuel infrastructure expansion while confronting the onset of the crisis. Yet unless one thinks this is all doom and gloom, think again, it is in reality a celebration of solidarity and includes within its coordinates the potential salvation of our civilization.
We witness the beauty of South American indigenous people rowing miles into the jungle to clean up oil spilled by reckless fossil fuel companies and the courage of Pacific islanders who form a blockade out of canoes trying to hinder the passage of an Australian tanker. There’s the majesty of the Chinese solar panel entrepreneur whose industrial-level output of renewable energy implements would put cranes in the air across the Ocean State. And here in America we see the aftermath of super storm Sandy as a preview of what is in store for all the coastal cities in America, including Providence, with 384 miles of coastline in the Ocean State that are in dire need of renovations and reinforcement to accommodate rising sea levels.
Fox’s operational budget and cinematography are notably hands-on, DIY. He has amazing panoramic views of the landscape because of a trusty self-flown drone he pilots with relative ease around the sky looking down on the decimation of climate change. One needs only recall the majesty of works by Dziga Vertov to see his film occupying a continuity that will rank it alongside other great works of documentary.
It is intended as a call to action. I hope that Sen. Whitehouse and George Nee will see this film and consider its points carefully. The climate crisis provides us with great opportunities but they begin with understanding that the Democratic Party is not going to be a force for change in the face of this emergency and that instead it is going to come from the masses of people who band together in the face of calamity.
See this movie.
]]>For the second time Mayor Jorge Elorza has opened the City of Providence to a fantastic festival combing international and local artists and performers. Elorza envisions PVDFest as one day becoming as important to the city as SXSW is to Austin, TX. Todays press conference to kick off the event was attended by Senator Jack Reed and Close Act Theater, amulti-disciplinary street theater company from the Netherlands making its East Coast debut with Saurus.
Last years’ arts festival was great. I expect big things this year.
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