Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie. Sign held by a Hopi youth at a protest against Peabody in Denver, Colorado.

The indigenous environmental justice movement celebrated a victory, early January 2010, when a judge ruled that Peabody Energy cannot expand its coal mining operations on the Black Mesa in northern Arizona.  Former president Bush Jr. approved a permit for Peabody in the twilight of his outgoing administration—not surprising, when you consider that Peabody’s parent holding company was Bechtel, a defense contractor with strong political ties—a permit that failed to fulfill all administrative requirements.  Groups including the Black Mesa Water Coalition filed a petition in early 2009, charging that prerequisites, such as filing an Environmental Impact Statement, were ignored, thereby making the approved permit invalid.

For many Navajo, life in the past thirty years has been inextricably linked to coal mining.  As a small girl, Enei Begaye, knew to be quiet when visiting her friends’ houses.  Everyone in the small town of Kayenta, Arizona worked in the coal mines, which operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  Some worked night shifts, so Begaye and her friends would play quietly to not disturb the sleeping elders.  Most of the population of over 4,900 residents in Kayenta were employed by Peabody Energy and lived in the trailers the company setup for its workers.

As an adult, Begaye, now co-director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, questioned the coal mining that sustained her family and hometown, and devastated and torn apart Navajo and Hopi communities.  Energy demands increased in the late 1970s during the oil crisis and large corporations such as Southern California Edison casted about for other sources of fuel.  When the corporations spied the black gold underfoot the Navajo lands, the energy companies colluded with the U.S. federal government to raise questions about Navajo claim over the lands.  The land was transferred to the Hopis and 12,000 Navajo families were displaced from their ancestral homes.  Uprooted from their homes and traditional ways of subsistence, many Navajo fell into poverty and despair, forced to accept any jobs that came their way, including coal mining.

The Black Mesa Water Coalition and partners in the indigenous environmental justice movement organized to shut down Kayenta’s Black Mesa Coal Mine in 2005.  Apart from the low wages and hazardous working conditions of the mines, the operations polluted the township and surrounding environment.  Judith Nies described the disastrous environmental consequences of the technique, strip mining, of removing coal where “the land has turned gray, all vegetation has disappeared, the air is filled with coal dust, the groundwater is contaminated with toxic runoff, and electric green ponds dot the landscape.”  Sheep that drink from these ponds by noon, she added, die by suppertime.

The coal from Kayenta fed two power plants, the Mojave Generating Station and Navajo Generating Station.  The former, the Mojave Generating Station, provided electricity to Southern California and Las Vegas.  The latter helped to power the irrigation of the urban sprawl extending outwards from Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.  Neither provided electricity for the surrounding communities.  In fact, less than half of Navajo families have electricity or running water on the reservation.

The latest curb on coal mining on Navajo lands is a bittersweet victory for many on the reservation who are still dependent on the low wage jobs the mines provide.  Begaye found it hard for many years to return home to Kayenta to face her friends’ parents, who lost their mining jobs.  Now, organizers with the Black Mesa Water Coalition see their strategy for indigenous justice as two-pronged: rid the land of dirty coal mining and advocate for the just transition for Navajo and Hopi peoples to a sustainable and locally-owned economy that provides high quality green jobs and career pathways for indigenous youth and adults.  The Black Mesa Water Coalition and the Navajo Green Jobs campaign won another victory this summer when they successfully lobbied the Navajo Tribal Council to enact green jobs legislation.

The recent judge ruling supports Navajo leadership, not only among tribal nations but also for all of us, in defining the new green way of living.  “We don’t want to create a capitalist system within our tribal society,” explained Begaye.  “We’re in a special position, we’ve got a system that needs to be trashed, an economic system that needs to be gotten rid of.  We need to create a new economy that doesn’t devastate but create and empower our communities to function in a healthy way.”

Photo by the Black Mesa Water Coalition.

Forty years ago, the students of SF State joined in solidarity with the Third World in demanding inclusion in institutions of knowledge.  For too long, the histories of people of color have been deliberately omitted from official narratives.  Stories transmitted through oral tradition within families but never recorded in the texts that lined the libraries of learning.  Languages were a private code, spoken, within the walls of your home, but forgotten when interacting outside in the world.  People of color were the invisible labor, unseen and unheard, which fueled the engines of global capitalism to expand.

The struggle at SF State successfully opened up spaces for the Third World, domestically and globally, in the academy, to represent and record our histories and stories.  This opened the way for applied research and policy organizations to elevate the importance of race and its centrality in socioeconomic issues when advocating for equitable policies and practices.  Groups like the Applied Research Center, inspired by the success of SF State, sought to “race” policies and programs, so that the impact of communities of color were laid explicit.  Narrative frames that concealed race behind a color-blind curtain were thrown open to reveal how they served to reproduce the subordinate status of communities of color.

The Applied Research Center will survey the successes of ethnic studies, both in theory and practice, in a panel Ethnic Studies Beyond the Academy: Theory and Action at the Grassroots this Friday, October 9, 2009 from 11:00am to 1:00pm, in Rosa Parks C, at “Ethnic Studies 40 Years Later: Race, Resistance, and Relevance”, a conference to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Third World students’ strike and the both the birth of ethnic studies as a field and a college at SF State.   This will be an interactive panel, not just two hours of talking heads, where presenters will explore their effect of ethnic studies on their ideas and strategies, as well as the impact applied research has had on the academy.

Presenters will also address alternative frames for research to both move organizing campaigns and influence policymaking in the age of Obama.  They include:

• Gary Delgado, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley and the founder and former Executive Director of the Applied Research Center;
• NTanya Lee, Executive Director of the Coleman Advocates, who began her lifelong commitment to social justice as a Black 13-year old, free lunch kid fighting against Ronald Reagan’s “ketchup is a vegetable” policy, and since then has been a student activist, youth worker, community historian, policy advocate and organizer in the Midwest, East Coast and for the last eight years in San Francisco;
• Yvonne Liu, Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center, who is working on a Green Equity Toolkit currently to ensure that race and gender equity are part of the green economy; and
• Jorge Rivas, Multimedia Associate at the Applied Research Center and alumni of SF State where he majored in Raza Studies and studied the interrelationship of culture, community, and the Internet.

Today, we face both a historic opportunity and challenge.  The global crisis of capitalism places many of our communities, domestically and abroad, in a precarious position.  People of color bear the disproportionate burden of the Great Recession, in all measures of socioeconomic wellbeing.  This nation, built on slave labor and the greatest project of economic imperialism and expansion in the twentieth century, has a Black man for the first time at its helm.  We have a historic opportunity to bring racial inequities to light through research and analysis. Join us for this important discussion.

The concept of community is an ever-shifting one.

It first becomes applied to movements for social change after World War II, when a dissatisfied social worker Saul Alinksy shifted his efforts into organizing urban communities, based on geographic proximity. He was the first recognizable community organizer that developed a model beyond just delivering goods or providing services, like the settlement houses that serviced the poor in the late 19th century. Community to Alinsky was based on physical proximity to your neighbors and the goal of community organizing was to build neighborhood, place-based, mega-organization that united various service providers, such as labor unions and churches.

But, the focus was short-sighted, trained on winning a metaphorical stop sign on your block, with campaigns guided by non-ideological and pragmatic goals, divorced of any critique of racism or sexism. This shaped the role of the organizer as an apolitical technocrat, an outside specialist, distinct from the community. Often, the leadership and staff of these bureaucratic organizations were white men, who were capable of working endless hours to get that stop sign installed.

Enter the 1960s and the global struggles of the Third World to shrug off its colonial masters. Radical movements within the U.S., who sought to eradicate poverty and institutional racism domestically, identified common interests with liberation movements abroad. This was the third world within. The same axes of oppression—racism, sexism, and capitalism—operated within communities of color at home. This new sense of community, what the Applied Research Center’s founder Gary Delgado terms as “communities of interest”, led to multiracial formations that tackled a wide variety of issues, beyond a single campaign, and prioritized indigenous leadership by community members so there isn’t a bureaucratic apparatus that mediates political activity between decision-makers and the community. Community leaders are not just members, but also teachers, analysts, as well as actors.

Most importantly, multiracial formations placed race as primary in their political framework for identifying their vision and strategy. Race is historically and socially constructed, but with ongoing material ramifications for people of color. Structural racism is the primary form of oppression in this country that intersects with sexism and capitalist exploitation. The history of racism is embedded in the racist institutions that create conditions of poverty, lack of opportunity, and labor exploitation for communities of color.

Now, post-Obama, a new generation is defining community and its relation to social change. Organizing Upgrade, a collaboration by young organizers involved in multiracial formations, launched today. They define communities of interest based not just on shared oppression, but also on a shared, liberatory vision of what could be. This seems apt, given that we have a Black president in the White House, a former community organizer himself, and for the first time, our desires for our communities are possible.

Join the community of possibilities at OrganizingUpgrade.com

A single Chinese time zone is as much a fiction as a single Chinese ethnicity; recently, this truism was illustrated in the blood of Uighur protesters. Noon for Beijing was still seven in the morning for the western province of Xinjiang, the site of recent racially motivated uprisings that started this past weekend, on July 5, 2009.

Though China is often rendered ethnically homogeneous in the West’s narratives, the truth isn’t so simple. 92% of the population is members of the Han race, the dominant group with a monopoly over political and economic resources. But over 120 million citizens identify as members of some other ethnic group, known in China as “minority nationalities,” each with their own cultural practices, histories, and experiences. Some, like the Uighurs and Tibetans to the northwest, practice religious beliefs distinct from the Han. Others, like the Miao in the south and Koreans in the northeast, speak a distinct language. Still others, like the Hui, are indistinguishable from the Han in appearance and dialect, but practice a variation of Islam and trace their ancestry to the Muslim traders who settled in China along the Silk Road.

When Mao trooped through the countryside with his Red Army during the Long March in 1935, he promised the minorities they encountered along the way that a new communist republic would recognize the right of self-determination of ethnic groups. That was soon forgotten when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. One of the first tasks that the nascent People’s Republic of China undertook upon winning the civil war was to classify those living within their borders and create subjects out of them. The CCP sent out teams of social scientists, anthropologists, and statisticians to the far-flung regions of the country to gather data on peoples’ languages, cultural practices, and religious beliefs.

Party bureaucrats sorted through the mass of information brought back. They determined that 56 ethnic groups deserved the official recognition as minority nationalities. This included the Uighurs, nomadic steppe peoples who are Turkic descendants of Chinese Turkestan. Still, over 700,000 peoples are members of ethnic groups not officially recognized by the state. This includes Chinese Jews and Macanese, people of mixed Chinese-Portuguese ancestry in the island of Macau near Hong Kong.

The Uighurs suffered decades of internal colonization at the hands of the dominant ethnic group, the Han, starting from the 1950s onwards. Han migrated to Uighur regions at a rate that increased from 5% in 1940 to 38% in 1990. In popular and academic discourse, the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are portrayed as culturally inferior to the Han. Minorities are seen as exotic and primitive peoples that needed the civilizing rule of the Han to guide them into the modern age.

Dru Gladney, professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, wrote, “One cannot be exposed to China without being confronted by its ‘colorful’ minorities. They sing, they dance, they twirl, they whirl. Most of all, they smile, showing their happiness to be part of the motherland” (Journal of Asian Studies, Feb. 1994).

The process of grouping a heterogenous population into a singular identity was paralleled in the U.S. Race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant described countries like U.S. and China as “racial dictatorships” in their seminal book “Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s” (NY: Routledge, 1986/1989). Racial dictatorships consolidated identities into an umbrella category to negate any differences and oppositional identities. As Omi and Winant say, “Just as the conquest created ‘native’ where once there had been Pequot, Iroquois, or Tutelo, so too it created ‘black’ where once there had been Asante or Ovimbundu, Yoruba or Bakongo”.

Ideology has material ramifications. Han peoples get first dibs on choice jobs, capital investment to startup their own businesses, and monies to purchase properties. Uighurs find themselves economically marginalized, edged out of jobs and priced out of living in neighborhoods increasingly gentrified by the Han. It’s a story we see in the West, with different players but the same ending.

Is there any wonder that there is popular resentment by the Uighurs and other minorities at their treatment by the Han? Much of the English-language coverage in North America and Western Europe by mainstream news outlets have expressed surprise by the mass violence the Uighurs express towards the Han. This is a long-standing struggle for national liberation that Uighurs and the better known Tibetans engage in. To support their fight for recognition and freedom is also to endorse opening pathways for multiple constituencies to seize power from the state and the ethnic fictions it creates.

Photo of Uighur women protesting in Urumqi, Xinjiang on July 7, 2009 by World Bulletin.

Once a month, a movement courses through the streets of Los Angeles. Moving together, in solidarity, Black cyclists are spurred forward by the revolutions of their wheels. Each individual coming together to join the flood that takes over the streets. Their momentum stirs the air, setting in motion a gale that blows clear across the Internet to other locales like Brooklyn, New York. Biking will never be the same.

Freedom Rides, as the organized bicycle rides for the Black community are known, was started by James Spooner. The rides draw about a dozen riders of varying ages and backgrounds; women outnumber the men. Controversy also flares around the ride, as members of L.A.’s fixed gear community attacked the “segregated bike rides” as “racist”, asking if “this ride is a joke”.

James is no stranger to asking difficult questions about race and racial identity. “Race is a complex issue and you have to break some eggs”, he explained recently, over the phone. He authored the documentary Afropunk about Blacks in the punk scene and a semi-autobiographical narrative, White Lies Black Sheep, about a Black youth in search of himself in the white rock and roll world. Both films explore the double consciousness people of color experience in a predominantly white subculture.

The only Black or Brown person at a rock show. You sense that you are estranged, within yourself, from the language and culture you were raised in, as well as from your white peers, who consider you as their token friend of color. You are still the Other.

White kids have a ride. So do women. Why can’t we? Join the fifth Freedom Ride this Sunday at 1pm. The starting point changes monthly so the riders can explore different parts of the city. This Sunday’s ride starts at the Vons parking lot at the corner of Fairfax and Pico, pays homage to Michael Jackson at the dead pop star’s house, and ends with a meal at a Black-owned restaurant. Check the Freedom Ride’s Facebook Group for details.

FREEDOM RIDES 2009 (Los Angeles) from Tara Conley on Vimeo.

Image by Urban Envy.

Born on May 19, 1921, Yuri grew up in a white middle class suburb of San Pedro, California. Her life was irreparably changed when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She and her family were forcibly removed from their homes and interned at detention camps setup for Japanese Americans during World War II. There, Yuri connected the treatment of Japanese Americans with the history of racism in this country, where people of color are dispossessed of land, labor, and so-often freedom.

Yuri and her husband moved to Harlem in the 1960s, drawn by the burgeoning political activism of the civil rights and Black nationalist movements. She became acquainted with Malcolm X and joined his Organization of Afro-American Unity, when he departed from the Nation of Islam. She famously cradled Malcolm in her arms, when he was assassinated on February 21, 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom.

But, more than just a footnote to Malcolm, Yuri continues to fight for the liberation of people of color, both domestically and globally. I first met Yuri in 2004, during a trip to the Bay Area. A friend who was a long-time acquaintance of Yuri’s in Harlem suggested that I look her up. I found her, a small woman reliant on a walker with tennis balls stuck at the ends. What she lacked in stature, she made up with energy. She had just returned that afternoon from a visit to political prisoner Marilyn Buck in federal penitentiary in Dublin. Yet she was not tired, she was curious about the organizing I was involved with in NYC. She listened with wide-eyes at my descriptions of campaigns, asking questions, and every now and then pausing to remark “Oh Gee!”

For Yuri, as Diane Fujino cited in her book Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (University of Minnesota Press, 2005):

“The Movement is contagious and awesome because the people in it are the spirit of the Movement. And the Movement will continue because new concerned people will rejuvenate and revitalize this never-ending struggle. It just always makes you want to be part of it.”

Happy birthday, Yuri Kochiyama.

As people striving toward a nonhierarchical society, yes, we can—and should—be rigorously critical of Barack Obama. It goes without saying that we want a world without presidents; we want worlds of our own constituting via directly democratic structures, not states. But not all heads of state are alike, and if we fail to recognize both the historical meaning and power of this particular moment, we will ensure our own irrelevance.

We can—and should—also be in critical solidarity with people who have been violently marginalized, who see in the Obama campaign the possibility of their own agency. The inauguration affords a unique space for us to stand with a diverse group of activists inspired by Obama, many new to political organizing, even as we maintain our views on the limits of change from above.

Perhaps, as people working to build a world from below without electoralism or statecraft, we also need to listen on January 20. It is neither the time nor the place to critique hope or excitement on the part of people who have engaged in grassroots struggles in so many ways and won a substantial victory. The inauguration marks a watershed event in the often cruel history of these United States, and the whole world will be watching, hoping that we’ve done just a little to grapple with the legacy of slavery, lynching, segregation, displacement, and racism in general, both of the personal and institutional varieties.

There’ll be a true rainbow coalition on the streets of DC, made up of exactly those people who the libertarian Left has always aligned itself with and always should: those who are not radicals but who have been exploited, oppressed, and relegated to powerlessness. So instead of breaking things, if we’re serious about building visionary social movements, doing meaningful anti-racism work, and honoring those who have resisted and dreamed before us, we should break bread with those millions globally who will feel moved by Obama’s inauguration—many of whom were also moved enough to participate politically (well beyond voting) for the first time in this election.

With our bloc—using banners, photos, artwork, zines, theater pieces, posters, armbands, and other visual expressions—let’s illustrate the many moments when people on this continent and across the world aspired to better approximations of freedom, via their own forms of collective organizations and mutual aid. Let’s create and display images of social movements, cultures of resistance, and especially our experiments to institute the new society in the shell of the old: from popular assemblies to self-managed workplaces, from freedom schools to free clinics, from autonomous villages to reappropriated land, and much more. And let’s remember all those many moments throughout history when we took to the streets, factories, schools, and neighborhoods; when we built movements ranging from abolition and civil rights to the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers, from Zapatismo to Ya Basta!, from No One Is Illegal to anti-capitalist mobilizations, from Argentina’s factory occupations to Oaxaca’s federated assemblies; and when we reclaimed the commons and, in the process, ourselves.

For if we aspire one day to live in a world without borders and prisons, without states or capitalism—or presidents for that matter—we must stand in solidarity on January 20 with those most impacted by hierarchy and institutional oppression. Then, in the days beyond, we’ll join with millions of others in demanding fulfillment of, as Obama put it on election night, the possibility of change, as we support the growth of social movements toward a free and directly democratic society.

Points of Unity:

• We believe that human freedom and happiness would be best guaranteed by a society based on principles of self-organization, voluntary association, egalitarianism, and mutual aid. And thus, we reject all forms of social relations premised on systemic violence and hierarchy, such as the state, capitalism, and white supremacy.

• On January 20, we will actively seek to cooperate with as well as support anyone who is working to create a more liberatory world, and in fact, to learn from them and each other.

• We will gather as a bloc, unmasked and with open arms, respecting the celebratory spirit of the day—presence rather than protest—and will encourage others who want to honor social struggles from below to join us.

To sign on to this call, please send us an email at hopefrompeople [at] gmail [dot] com.

For the bloc’s meeting place and time, ideas for celebratory images, and upcoming details on the post-inauguration teach-in and party, keep checking this Web site.

Being in a new city, I feel so disconnected from remembering Brad and what he represents to me.  Brad for me is so wrapped up with the energy and the emotions of NYC, I say this although we were both in Miami for the FTAA protests.  But, he’s connected for me with the hopes and the dreams of the revolutionary and autonomist left.  A generation of dreamers that lived and breathed for a better world in NYC in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

A part of me feels like I’ve died with Brad.

1968 was a world revolution.  From Mexico City to Tokyo, Paris to Prague, Columbia University to Berkeley, it was a revolutionary event that at once failed and transformed the world. The process it put into place continues today.  1968, the long ‘68, altered fundamental balances of power and set the stage for today’s new movements.  ‘68 was a great rehearsal.  For what, it is up to us to decide.

The Global Commons Foundation, PM Press, and Historians Against the War invite you to a week of discussions and events on the worldwide events of 1968 and their legacies.

The events will run from Wednesday September 17 to Thursday September 25, and will be centered around an all-day symposium at the University of San Francisco on Saturday September 20th.

These events were made possible through partnerships with:  University of San Francisco, Intertribal Friendship House, American Indian Movement, Retort, Free Speech Cafe Program at UC Berkeley, CounterPULSE, Shaping San Francisco, KPFA, WarTimes/Tiempo

The symposium at the University of San Francisco was made possible through the support of: The Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought at the University of San Francisco, Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, USF Academic and International Activities, USF Center for the Pacific Rim, USF Department of Sociology, USF Environmental Studies Program, USF Gender and Sexualities Studies Minor, USF Offices of the Associate Dean for Social Sciences, Associate Dean for Arts & Humanities and Dean for Arts & Sciences

WEEK OF EVENTS:

WEDNESDAY 17th

American Indian Movement to the World Indigenous Movement, 1968-present
Intertribal Friendship House
523 International Blvd., Oakland
6PM – 10PM, Free
Participants include: Len Foster, Bill Means

40th Anniversary: San Francisco State Strike 1968-69
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
7:30pm Free

THURSDAY 18th

Archives of Dissent
Free Speech Café, Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley.
6-8:30pm, Free

Robert Hillary King
Book launch for From The Bottom Of The Heap: The Autobiography of Black
Panther Robert Hillary King
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street (at Gough)
San Francisco CA 94102
7pm, Free

FRIDAY 19th

National Teach-In on the Iraq War
University of California, Berkeley
9am-6:30pm, Free
Participants include: Daniel Ellsberg, Brian Willson, Paco Ignacio Taibo II,  Andrej Grubacic, Paul Cronin, Sam Green, Mark Danner, Tom Reifer, Staughton Lynd, Immanuel Wallerstein, Carlos Muñoz, Medea Benjamin, Antonia Juhasz, Tom Hayden

1968: A Discussion On The Lessons and Vibrant Legacy Of The Year That Shook The World
Julia Morgan Center For The Arts
2640 College Avenue, Berkeley
7pm, $10 (no-one turned away)
Participants: Robert Hillary King, Immanuel Wallerstein, Staughton Lynd, Andrej Grubacic, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

SATURDAY 20th

The Great Rehearsal? The World Revolution of 1968
Harney Science Center
Plenaries in room 127
University of San Francisco
8:30AM-7:30PM, Free
Participants include:  Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Immanuel Wallerstein, Denis O’Hearn, Peter Linebaugh, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Marta Petrusewicz, Ziga Vodovnik, Robin Balliger, Walter Turner, Muto Ichiyo, Sabu Kohso, Estella Habal, Uldis Kruze, Chris Carlsson, Frances Beal, Barbara Esptein, Ramon Grosfoguel, Robert Hillary King, Betita Martinez, William Means, Jorge Aquino, Lilian Dube, Laura Fantone, Raj Patel, Mayo Fuster Morell, Eddie Yuen, James Tracy, Anne Weills, Andrej Grubacic, Katharine Wallerstein, Tom Reifer, Mike Fisher, Brian Willson, James Tracy, Staughton Lynd

SUNDAY 21st

“Wobblies and Zapatistas” Book Launch
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco
5pm, Free
Participants:  Andrej Grubacic, Staughton Lynd, Denis O’Hearn

Cinema and the Long 68
A Retort event
San Francisco, venue TBA
8pm, Free

MONDAY 22nd

Paths to Liberation: Political Prisoners, Incarceration, and Struggle
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia St, San Francisco
7pm, Free
Participants:  Robert Hillary King, Denis O’Hearn and Andrej Grubacic

Paco Ignacio Taibo II in Conversation
Women’s Building, The Audre Lorde Room, 3543 18th St # 8, San Francisco
7pm. $10 (no-one turned away).
Participants: Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Donald Nicholson Smith

TUESDAY 23rd

Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement
Dr. Carlos Muñoz
Reading and discussion
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street, at Gough
7pm, Free

WEDNESDAY 24th

Global Africa: African liberation movements and decolonialization from 1945 to Today
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission Street, San Francisco
7:30pm, Free
Participants: Immanuel Wallerstein, Walter Turner, Will Grant

Real Cost of Prisons Comix
Book Launch with editor Lois Ahrens
The Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street, San Francisco
7pm, Free
Participants include: Lois Ahrens, Marlon Altan, Amie Dowling, Debbie Reyes, Karen Shain, Mara Taub

THURSDAY 25th

Incarceration, Resistance, Costs And Consequences: A Discussion with Authors, Activists And Former Political Prisoners
First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St, Oakland
7pm. $10 (no-one turned away).
Participants include: Robert Hillary King, Lois Ahrens, Victoria Law, Matt Meyer, Ashanti Alston, Rita ‘Bo’ Brown

For more information, contact Katharine Wallerstein, Executive Director, The Global Commons Foundation

www.greatrehearsal.org

Visit such exciting posts as interviews with AK authors, reviews of and excerpts from AK books, and reports on the events at AK. We will also post news about other anarchist publishers and booksellers, translations, interviews with activists behind other projects, and lists of relevant conferences. Be sure to look out for video and audio clips as well!

Initially, we will post new material three times per week, although we hope to publish with greater frequency in the near future. We encourage anyone interested to subscribe to our RSS feed and stop by as often as possible.

We would be honored if one day our friends and comrades count this blog among the many others in which important and helpful discussions occur.

www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org