Two words: Pat Burke (some thoughts on anarchy and basketball)

I don't talk about sports on here too much, but I think damn near everyone knows that tomorrow's a big night for the Suns. Although it's decision to suspend Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw is unjust, the NBA has inadvertently provided us a great lesson in why anarchists are against law.

The law, like this NBA rule, is written by people other than those affected by it, and those who make the law, or those with a lot of power, money, influence or privilege can receive exemptions. Further, the law attempts to pre-imagine a set of circumstances and then pre-judge whether those circumstances justify being treated as offenses in the future. When real life happens (and it rarely matches up with the limited imaginations of politicians and commissioners), those pre-imagined rules are then applied after the fact. Hardly fair.

We see this in the case of the most recent suspensions of Suns players. Everyone is pretty much unanimous that neither Stoudemire nor Diaw deserve to be suspended for their actions. Even Charles Barkley came to their defense, although Shaq, always a lover of law and order, notably disagreed. No matter, though. According to the NBA, a rule's a rule, and the two players must be suspended, no matter how justified were their actions or whether the rule was even meant to apply in these kinds of circumstances in the first place. This effectively makes the Suns twice victims of Horry's rough and unsportsmanlike behavior.

Anarchists, unlike the NBA commissioner, cops and politicians, don't place mechanistic process or sticking to the letter of the law above the goal of achieving justice. In fact, many times sticking to the letter of the law - or even the intent - can lead to unjust outcomes simply because the law itself is unjust. Think about segregation, slavery and the subjugation of women - all were the letter of the law at various times. Homosexuality has been and in some states continues to be illegal. Arizona only very recently repealed its sodomy law. Getting justice in those times generally meant breaking the law. The law, it turns out, is very often not a very good way of judging what is right. Sometimes, in fact, it's the exact opposite: the law can be a great way to find out what's wrong.

So, in the spirit of the game, I will post here two sports-related articles that I think readers of this blog might find interesting. First is a New Republic interview with Charles Barkley, former Suns star. In it Barkley says a lot of provocative things that anarchists will find interesting and, perhaps, surprising. Like this:

CHARLES BARKLEY: Illegal immigration to me is the easiest thing in the world to fix.

TNR: How so?

All they have to do is penalize the people they work for. You should get penalized. It's all poor people who argue over illegal immigration. They want poor people to--I call it divide and conquer. That's all they do is divide and conquer.

The rich people are trying to divide the poor people?

Yes, they got all the money, they got all the power. Whether it's that, or they divide you racially on certain things. They divide you racially, economically, and on things like that. It just splits the vote, and the rich people still end up on top at the end of the day. They control everything.

So is that what interests you primarily--economic issues?

America is divided by economics strictly. You know, people always talk about race, and we have racial problems in this country. Of course we do. But the real issue is the rich against the poor. We've got to get poor white people and poor black people and Mexicans to realize they are all in the same boat. If you in one of those three groups and you are poor, you are going to be in a bad neighborhood, you are going to go to a bad school, and you are going to have strikes against you. You can't commit crimes in good neighborhoods. They will get your ass. Their kids go to private school, or they go to school in a good economic area. But the poor people, they are all in the same boat but they divide you based on race or stuff like that. A lot of these politicians say things like "We've got to stop all these illegal immigrants." I am like, "That is so easy to stop." They are not working for other immigrants.

Has your perspective on these issues changed in the last few years?

Yes, when I realized that rich people will always be rich and the poor people are like crabs in a barrel. They are going to fight with each other, but they are really in the same boat. They want you to argue about gay marriage. They want you to argue about the war in Iraq.

Check it out. It's not all gold, but there's a lot in there of value.

Also, consider reading this New York Times piece from a couple weeks ago about racial bias in NBA officiating. According to the Times, white refs (cops) called more fouls (arrests) on Black players than on white players.

A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.

Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”

...

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”

There's a surprise. The NBA commissioner, David Stern, who reportedly just canceled his appearance in Phoenix for game 5 due to the overwhelming shame of carrying through the suspension of Suns players, told the Times that he doesn't believe that racial bias exists in the NBA. True, the NBA has done a better job than almost any other sport when it comes to diversity. Nevertheless, when we add up the referees, 64 percent of them are white. And, of course, only one NBA team has majority Black ownership.

On a final note, I'd like to say just two words: Pat Burke.

All season we've been asking when this man was going to have a time to shine and this is finally it. That ruling was bullshit, but when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Pat Burke: Our Lemonade. Tomorrow is your night, buddy. Make it count. I believe in you.

Disarming Robert Williams. Re-arming Jim Crow. (Where's John Brown?)

Historically, gun ownership in this country results primarily from two tendencies, both of them racist. The first was the white wealthy elite's requirement that a large body of white men exist to police the slave population and put down insurrections. When the relatively color-blind system of indentured servitude was replaced with racialized slavery, an integral part of that bargain for white male colonists was the obligation to own a rifle and to serve in the militia. Blacks, of course, were denied gun ownership and the right to form militias.

This is where the "pattyrollers," the infamous slave-catchers, came from and, incidentally, the tradition that spawned American policing (that and putting down strikes in the North). The idea was that every white male, armed, had an obligation to put his right to bear arms to work and join slave patrols. In the North, he was obliged to catch and return escaped slaves to the South. Having his gun in his home made him available on short notice, which was important in an age of slow communication, and it allowed for the kinds of decentralized, terrorist violence that the system required to keep things running smoothly.

The second origin of American gun ownership rests with the need to have a white settler class that could dispossess Natives Peoples, eventually including Mexicans, from North America. In the West, this manifested in white supremacist vigilante groups like the White Caps and ad hoc policing organizations like the posse. We see the echo of this in today's Minutemen patrols at the border.


Nowadays, gun ownership has been democratized to a fair extent. Although the racist war on drugs and other state attacks on people of color have served a similar function to a fair extent by making felons of so many folks of color (therefore unable to own firearms), no longer is it illegal for non-whites to own firearms simply because of their skin color. This democratization is a progressive development, however flawed its application, and it is one to be defended and expanded.

But just because gun ownership historically has been racialized through law, that doesn't mean that people of color and their allies have always abided this unjust distribution of guns and rights. Through self-organization, Blacks and other oppressed minorities have often found ways of getting weapons when they needed them for self-defense or to attack the system of white supremacy, sometimes with the help of white allies. Let's remember that John Brown spent a lot of time gathering donations for arms for his raid at Harper's Ferry and the anti-slavery battles in Kansas. The point of the raid - and some of the fund raising itself - was to get guns into the hands of the slave class so that it could overthrow the chattel system in the South. Harriet Tubman led armed raids into the South to accomplish similar objectives, liberating hundreds of slaves. Likewise, as DuBois points out, it was a tremendous victory for Blacks when (a large percentage of them being former slaves) they forced the North to arm them and allow them to march under Union colors into the slavocrat heartland to free their comrades still in chains.

Despite the fact that it is primarily people of color that are historically disenfranchised of their rights by gun control laws, the claim by gun control advocates is often that such laws protect everyone, not just whites. But wasn't America shocked by the Columbine and other massacres precisely because the perpetrators didn't meet their stereotype? White kids killing other white kids? It was as unthinkable as it was intolerable to most of America.

But it's a double standard. Those who remember the case of Patrick Haab's armed abduction of a half dozen migrants will no doubt recognize the different treatment the system offers when whites use guns against people of color. Claiming self-defense against unarmed men, Haab walked free, as did local failed politician JT Ready when he opened fire unprovoked on a group of Latino men. According to the FBI, more than a hundred cases of murder remain without convictions from the Civil Rights struggle between 1954 and 1968. And, as we have seen time and again, even reaching for your wallet can get you killed as a person of color when the police are involved. The system so fears armed people of color that just to be on the safe side it presumes every male of color to be armed. The law may have changed, but the delivery has not.

People of color, particularly poor folks, have always been the most revolutionary class in America and by the same token the greatest threat to white capitalist rule. The maintenance of white supremacy in this country owes a great deal to the imagery and fear of the armed Black man and, here in the Southwest, of the armed "illegal". This fear is what primes whites of all classes to defend the white supremacist alliance and, however well-intentioned they may be, the arguments of gun control advocates play into this unholy cross-class racist relationship.

Tactically, in defending the right to own guns, we radicals ought to avoid the trap of sorting out gun purchases into legal and illegal as if one were appropriate and the other were not. There are a lot of reasons why people purchase guns illegally that are quite justifiable. Cost and availability, to mention two. The legitimate right to self-defense is another. The racist injustice system unfairly and routinely strips people of their civil rights - should they also lose their right to self-defense as a result?

In a country that disenfranchises an already economically disadvantaged minority and ghettoizes them in high crime neighborhoods with limited legal means to protect or support themselves, is it any surprise that illegal gun sales would tend to break down on race and class lines? The legal/illegal debate is in reality a debate about white supremacy and class because it is an argument about how best to target people of color for arrest or disenfranchisement of their Second Amendment rights. Not surprisingly, even the right wing argument that the crime from which folks in the ghetto are seeking to defend themselves comes from "their own" is a racist argument. After all, who determines the conditions in the ghetto? Rich white people.

Repeatedly in American history, the language of illegal and legal, as well as cost, has been used to disarm people of color, or to put legal firearms out of their reach. After Reconstruction, some states passed laws restricting gun purchases to more expensive military models - the kind already owned by Southern white veterans. Similarly, it's no coincidence that the Gun Control Act of 1968 came on the heals of the Black urban uprisings and restricted yet again the sales of cheaper weapons as well as mail order. Eldridge Cleaver, in response to the California Assembly's passage of gun control laws (sparked by the Panthers' party unintentional "storming" of the legislature but reflecting a general desire to strip the Panthers of their weapons), said,

"Some very interesting laws are being passed. They don't name me; they don't say, take the guns away from the n***ers. They say that people will no longer be allowed to have (guns). They don't pass these rules and these regulations specifically for black people, they have to pass them in a way that will take in everybody."

Nevertheless, while the language of such laws may be colorblind these days, the enforcement certainly is not. Further, registration itself cannot be divorced from white supremacy. In a great wave around 1920, much of the South implemented gun registration, intending it to apply specifically to Blacks, although the language itself was more broad. If the police determine who can get a gun, you can bet it won't be people they view as a threat!

For this reason, the implementation of state and civic campaigns against firearms never start in the suburbs. For the suburban white family, gun locks, education and other relatively innocuous solutions are proposed. After all, these people form the terrified reserve army and political base of white supremacy, disarming them would undermine the security of the state. Again, this is what we see with the rise of the Minutemen.

I point all this out because the history of guns in America is more complicated than I think a lot of gun control advocates would admit. While there are many legitimately concerned people of color that support gun control, the gun control movement itself exhibits a racist desire to ignore its white supremacist history, as if its effects were still not with us. This is a mantra we hear frequently from white movements. But assertions of "that was then, this is now" don't carry political weight in a country still suffering so severely from the impact of past and contemporary white supremacist policies.

We should be very wary of disarming the domestic population because the first to be disarmed will surely be people of color, followed by the radical whites that show them solidarity. This is precisely what happened at the end of Reconstruction in the South: freed from Federal occupation, the Klan swept through towns stripping the new Freedmen of their weapons. Where there were Black militias, some resisted for a while. "From the southern white's point of view, a well-armed Negro militia was precisely what John Brown had sought to achieve at Harpers Ferry in 1859," remarks legal historian Kermit Hall.

With the revelation that the most recent school massacre was likely perpetrated by a so-called "resident alien," we can expect the racist program of the gun control movement to harmonize increasingly with the arguments of the racist anti-immigrant movement. Although the shooter seems to have been Asian, disarming the immigrant and resident alien population will surely bring resident and citizen Latinos and other people of color under increased police scrutiny, leading to more oppression and less ability to resist vigilante and police attacks. Gun control will put one more tool in the hands of vigilantes and police, who surely will not find it nearly as hard to stay armed.

Disarming the domestic population leaves the military and the police, the two main purveyors of gun violence in the country and the world a free hand to continue their racist assaults on a disarmed population. As long as the state and the vigilantes have guns, then so should the rest of us - especially those of us who may one day have to defend ourselves from them, as so many have had to do before us.

So, in this spirit, I recommend three readings on the relationship between white supremacy and gun laws in America:

(1) "The Racist Roots of Gun Control" by Clayton E. Cramer
(2) "The Klan's Favorite Law" by David B. Kopel
(3) "Gun Control: White Man's Law" by William R. Tonso