We charge genocide: Racist state violence is a labor issue

With this powerful indictment, the Communist Party affiliated Civil Rights Congress launched its campaign to hold the US accountable for the atrocities committed against Black people in the US, most adequately captured, they argued, through the legal concept of “genocide”. The document listed 152 incidents of racist state and implicitly state sanctioned vigilante violence as evidence in support of the claim—including the killings of unarmed Black men and women by police and lynch mobs between 1945 and 1951. The document located this violence in a much longer history of genocide “perhaps the most bloody ever perpetrated, which for two hundred and fifty years enforced chattel slavery upon the American negro” (Patterson, 1951:23). The charges were presented to a 1951 meeting of the United Nations in Paris, and later published in book form as We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People (1951). Making connections between economic exploitation and structural racism, the action was rooted as well as contributed to building the Black Radical Tradition and has shaped much anti-racist, leftist organizing in its aftermath.

It was with this radical tradition organizing in mind that the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) International Committee formed a group to make sense of the devastation wrought by COVID-19 on Indigenous, Black and Brown communities, and to think through union actions that could address the impact of the state's (non)response on CUNY students and workers in particular. Our group was one of many within CUNY to address the crisis in relation to our community, with radical worker and student organizers across different campuses connecting the dots between the CUNY cuts and racist state and structural violence. Students, staff, faculty and community groups have organized resistance in various forms including protests, legal action, petitions and teach-ins.¹ Black, Latinx and People of Color faculty and student organizations have led the way, providing detailed steps of how we can achieve a broader transformation of CUNY into a truly anti-racist university capable of living up to its reputation as a “people's college”. The PSC also launched a “summer of struggle”² campaign using a variety of tactics to prevent layoffs and secure funding from federal, state and city governments to keep CUNY workers and students safe. However, many activists thought the union should increase its militancy to fight for a completely transformed CUNY based on a vision of racial and economic justice.

As New York City came to be designated as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, we decided to label our group: “We Charge Genocide”. No other framing, we decided, could convey the urgency of the trauma we faced as a community on both the material and affective levels. Evocation of this campaign also helped to explicitly align our group's political orientation with the social history of this document. Since the PSC International Committee mandate is to develop international labor solidarity, we also wanted to take account of US state racism inflicted elsewhere in the world during the pandemic, for example examining the impact of sanctions on Cuba, Iran and Venezuela. The fight against white supremacy, and its international expression as imperialism, must be at the heart of any labor struggle.

As members of a union at a public college that is overwhelmingly comprised of working-class, Black, Brown and Indigenous students, we knew from the outset that our CUNY community would be hit hard by the virus. Many students lost parents and other family members to the illness and several CUNY workers died as well. CUNY has had more COVID deaths than any other US university system. Emblematic of broader trends throughout the city, CUNY students, families and workers are more likely to have been forced to work throughout the pandemic in often low-paid and precarious jobs deemed “essential” to the functioning of society, as well as to have lost jobs, housing and access to health insurance. They are also less likely to have the means to “social distance”, thereby increasing their chances of contracting and spreading the disease to family and community members.

Like many of our colleagues, we identified the importance of mapping the current conjuncture onto the long history of state and private violence that underpins capitalist white supremacy, rather than stressing the exceptionalism of the current moment. This point was given more poignancy with the racist police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the national uprising these killings as well as others sparked. As with COVID-19, the murder of Floyd and Taylor both exposed and exacerbated systemic and structural racism dating back to the origins of this country in settler colonialism and enslavement. In fact, there has not been a period in US history, beginning with the massacres of the Wampanoag and Pequot peoples, free from acts of genocide (James 1970).

In recent weeks, the explicit ways genocide is pursued in this country have been further unmasked, as agents of the state shoot down Black people in the streets and in their homes, keep working-class, Black, Brown and Indigenous people in cages—even when we know that our jails, prisons and ICE detention centers are incubators for the spread of the virus, and force vulnerable individuals back to work without the proper protective equipment and remuneration, and before it has been scientifically deemed safe to return. There is also the “slow violence” inflicted by state policy on a university that serves the city's working class, which is itself racist. Part of a broader political project of neoliberal restructuring that predates the current crisis, CUNY has mobilized COVID-19 to justify the firing of thousands of CUNY adjunct professors and staff, who will lose jobs and health insurance. Despite receiving over a quarter of a billion dollars of bailout money from the federal government via the CARES Act, the university has also announced drastic cuts to the hours and pay of its part-time civil service employees as well as a stark reduction in course offerings in many CUNY colleges including Brooklyn College (25%) and City College (25%).

What would it mean in the current context of the crisis of racial capitalism for a union to move beyond platitudes and take concrete steps to resist the racist violence and exploitation upon which this country's political economy is built? There is a substantial list of radical anti-racist and internationalist labor activism—often subjected to anti-left state repression and marginalized within both dominant union organizing structures and historiographies of organizing (Horne, 2020)—from which to draw on for inspiration, including the Sociedad Fraternal Cervantes, Croppers' and Farm Workers' Union (CFWU), the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

Addressing racist police terror as a question of class has deep historical precedent in the campaigns and organizations that were instrumental in building the Black Radical Tradition specifically and class-based political movement more generally. We Charge Genocide pointed to the central role of the police (“To many an American the police are the government”) and the “intricate superstructure of 'law and order'” in “enforce[ing] an oppression that guarantees profit” (23). As Margaret Stevens has vividly illustrated, the CRC was only the latest at the time of the class-based mass organizations to have arisen since the Bolshevik Revolution that developed bases among Black people from the southern US and English-, Spanish- and French-speaking areas in the Caribbean Basin. From the early 1920s, with the beginnings of the African Blood Brotherhood, later came the American Negro Labor Congress and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. When nine young men in Scottsboro, Alabama, were threatened with legal lynching in the 1930s, the International Labor Defense organized a global campaign that saved their lives. Black labor struggles were also advanced beyond national borders by the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions. (Stevens, 2017).

Following the lead of the brave protesters battling day and night on the streets to pry public space free from the violent grip of the state-capital nexus, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) went the furthest of unions in the current moment—shutting down all 29 ports on the West Coast on June 19th—Juneteenth—the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States to demand “an end to white supremacy, police terror and the plans to privatize the port of Oakland.” As Clarence Thomas—former Secretary Treasurer of ILWU Local 10—put it, “fighting police murders and white supremacy is a class question.” (Blanc, 2020).

Across the country we have seen a rise in wildcat strikes, walk outs and other forms of labor organizing in various sectors of the economy, including formerly hard to penetrate corporations like Amazon and new tech companies. Could this be the beginning of a more generalized labor mobilization against the forms of accumulation and violence that underpin white supremacy? If so, what will the role of university workers be? For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2020) it should contribute towards the building of a “general strike”, where we “refuse the condition in which the university both neglects our needs and extracts the collective wealth that is given in those needs as surplus.” Could this signal a return to the kinds of revolutionary university organizing of the 1960s and 1970s? In particular, a return to their repertoires of strikes, protest and occupations that marked the era of Black power, leftist and anti-war mobilization, when important connections were made between the forms of exclusion, stratification and dispossession in operation within and outside the university campus under racial capitalism? We Charge Genocide was one way for us to study and learn from past struggles and to think through possibilities for radical action in the current moment.

1 DELINEATING GENOCIDE: DEHUMANIZATION, ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION, AND PREMATURE DEATH

The definition presented in the We Charge Genocide document was taken from the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It included “acts committed to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, or religious group as such,” such as: “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Like other aspects of International Law, as identified by the Martinican writer and political activist Aimé Cesaire, the Genocide Convention was by design meant to elide the atrocities committed by Europeans on non-European territories: 500 years of settler colonialism, enslavement, imperialism, and the numerous forms of violence underpinning racial capitalism. In internationalizing the struggle against white supremacy, the We Charge Genocide project also exposed the hypocrisy of the “international community” for its failure to recognize the humanity and therefore suffering of non-white/non-western people in its founding actions. Submitted to the UN by Black radical luminaries Paul Robeson and William Patterson, the paper presented a discursive as well as political challenge to the exclusion of Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations from the conceptualization of humanity underpinning International Law.

The political economy of genocide was also laid out in the document: “We shall prove that the object of this genocide, as of all genocide, is the perpetuation of economic and political power by the few through the destruction of political protest by the many. Its method is to demoralize and divide an entire nation; its end is to increase…profits.” The document charges “monopoly capital [as] the prime mover in this conspiracy to commit genocide because of the [billions of] dollars it derives annually from it and because of the political and economic control it maintains through it”(16). In addition to physical violence, the document pointed to the numerous forms of structural violence, with Black people “the last hired and the first fired…deprived of adequate housing, medical care and education.” Combined, these forms of violence result in the increased exploitation and shortened life span of Black people, reinforcing Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” and rooting it firmly within the Black radical tradition.

We Charge Genocide is organized around the different articles of the UN Convention with devastatingly detailed evidence provided to substantiate the case. Proof of state and state sanctioned private violence targeting Black, Indigenous and Brown people has only grown in the intervening years, from the murders of innumerable Civil Rights and Black Liberation activists throughout the 1960s and 1970s to the systemic and criminal neglect and colonial-capitalist extraction that followed hurricanes Katrina and María.

The race and class based inequalities reproduced and intensified by COVID 19 and racist police violence are made clear with reference to a number of macabre statistics: Black people are 13% of the US population, yet they have accounted for 25% of deaths during the pandemic; Black and Latinx New Yorkers are two times more likely to be hospitalized and to die from COVID-19 than whites and 75% of the city's “frontline workers” are People of Color; The Navajo Nation has surpassed New York and New Jersey for the highest per-capita coronavirus infection rate in the US.³ These statistics mirror the unequal impact of police violence across the country: Between 2013 and 2019, police in the United States killed 7,666 people. Despite only making up 13% of the US population, Black people are 3 times as likely as white people to be killed by the police (seven times as likely in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered and five times as likely in New York)⁴—and are incarcerated at a rate of more than five times that of white people (out of a prison population of 2.2 million, the number of incarcerated people who are known to be infected has more than doubled in the past month to 68,000; COVID-19 cases in US federal and state prisons are 5.5 times higher⁵—and death rates three times higher than the general population). As important as they are to building this case, We Charge Genocide accurately expressed the inadequacy of “words and statistics are but poor things to convey the long agony” (195) that Black, Indigenous, Brown and other oppressed communities have been subjected to over centuries.

As Whitney Pirtle (2020) persuasively argues, we cannot fully grasp the causes and consequences of these inequalities without a long durée understanding of how the modes of accumulation in this country have been inextricably bound to racialized forms of exploitation and dispossession. Employing the concept of racial capitalism as developed by Cedric Robinson, Pirtle explains how “racism and capitalism mutually construct harmful social conditions that fundamentally shape COVID-19 disease inequities”. With the number of prison infections rising rapidly (doubling over the past month alone), the interlinkage between the current health crisis and violence of racial capitalism is made clear.

These conditions were intensified during the era of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described as the state's “organized abandonment” under neoliberalism—entailing disinvestment in public goods, privatization, and concomitant increased spending on “organized violence” of the state—police and prisons to manage populations made “surplus” as a result of deindustrialization. The causes and consequences of these two processes—“austerity” in the realm of public goods and excess in relation to the state's repressive apparatuses—can only be fully grasped in their interconnectedness. Such an approach explains how in New York City, our schools, housing, health care and infrastructure—especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods—are chronically underfunded while the New York Police Department's budget stands at $6 billion, making it the largest and most expensive police force in the United States and, if it were considered an army, seventh largest in the world. This is what “accumulation through dispossession” looks like in real time.

If slow genocide is the modus operandi of racial capitalism in “normal times”, it is on high speed today. Black, Brown, Indigenous people and migrants, especially the undocumented, are more likely to have their labor exploited in the current moment as these groups are the least likely to be able to work from home, take paid time off from often already exploitative working conditions, or to receive proper protections when at work. They are also more likely to contract and die from the disease.

The racialized unevenness of the coronavirus impact on our CUNY community is stark. Not only are CUNY students disproportionately impacted, but so too are the most precarious workers across our colleges, including adjuncts and other temporary contract and low-paid workers, where working class, Black and Brown communities are over-represented.

We originally envisioned drafting these words as a way to think about US policy as genocidal in light of a biological plague. In the aftermath of the most recent police killings, we are reminded of the pre-existing plague of racial capitalism.

2 US IMPERIALISM AS GENOCIDE

The concept of genocide and the internationalism of the project in which the petition is rooted can also help us to connect the dots between the socio-economic conditions under which many people are forced to leave their homes in the Global South, and the vulnerability of much of the CUNY community—conditions that have been made exponentially worse by the coronavirus and the state's (non)response.

Contributing to an internationalist tradition that has included the Black Power Movement, the Puerto Rican independentista movement, American Indian Movement, Hawai'ian sovereignty movement, and Chicana/o Liberation Movement, the We Charge Genocide petition reminded us that US imperialism is the external expression of the organized violence of the state and white supremacy. “History has shown”, the document proclaimed, “that the racist theory of government of the United States is not the private affair of Americans, but the concern of mankind everywhere.” It was not a coincidence that at a time when the lynching of Black people in the post-reconstruction era accelerated, with 1,955 lynchings documented between 1889 and 1901, “American imperialism entered the international arena by subjugating the Filipino, Puerto Rican and Cuban peoples and reduced many Latin-American countries to economic and political vassalage.” (25).

US racism in the form of an interventionist foreign policy includes everything from direct military interventions, occupations and coups, to economic warfare in the form of sanctions, structural adjustment programs and other forms of economic intervention designed to benefit US/Western capital and discipline Global South sovereignty. These interventions, despite past and ongoing resistance, have contributed to the undermining of Global South state capacity, and of particular relevance in the context of the current crisis, the assault on public health (Ben Gadha, 2020). An overall context of neocolonial dependency has also contributed to food shortages and lack of access to affordable medical supplies.

Due to their structural location in the global capitalist economy, Global South workers are subjected even in “normal” times to superexploitation at the hands of western corporations and their subcontractors operating within global supply chains, in particular in the agricultural, mining, low-tech industrial, and service sectors (GRAIN, 2020). In the context of coronavirus, and similar to racialized and vulnerable workers in the United States, many Global South workers have been forced to return to work in particularly precarious circumstances as a result of pressure from the US and big capital. Workers in countries under direct or US backed military assault and occupation, have added “comorbidities” as a result of the impact of warfare on compromising immune systems and ability to reproduce working class life.

As union activists we want to take the lead from and amplify popular demands being expressed on the streets and in more sustained organizing structures for the abolition of the state's institutions of “organized violence”, which are designed to protect private property and maintain racialized hierarchies and modes of exploitation and accumulation within and beyond US borders. That includes not only its “domestic” iterations—the police, prisons, detention centers, and borders—but also, “internationally”, the US military, as imperialist violence functions to cut short as well as undermine the lives, livelihoods and power of global South workers and drain value from the periphery (Kadri, 2020). Trade unions must acknowledge the roots of the police in enslavement and Indigenous dispossession, and their role in disciplining labor and controlling the working class. Doing so requires a long overdue action on the part of the AFL-CIO to terminate its affiliation with police unions, as a step towards delegitimizing, defunding, and ultimately abolishing the police. Though the crisis is already being mobilized by capital and the state to extend modes of accumulation based on extraction and exploitation, with the recent announcement, for example, that the billionaire Bill Gates would be partnering with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to “reimagine education”, it is up to labor to use the moment to demand radical solutions—in the sense of the term that Angela Davis gave it to signify getting “to the root” of problems.

However, calls for abolition must be tethered to the broader political project of ending racial capitalism. As Gilmore insists, abolition is not just about closing prisons, but also about rebuilding the “vital systems of support” that capitalism destroys. Black, Brown, Indigenous and working class led movements including Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC),⁶ The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement,⁷ Cooperation Jackson,⁸ the Red Nation,⁹ the People's Strike,¹⁰ and International Migrants Alliance¹¹ have put forward revolutionary demands not only around abolition, but also calling for a fundamental redistribution of wealth and the ultimate transformation of capitalist modes of accumulation. From reparations for enslavement and its afterlives, self-determination and Indigenous land rights and restitution, to universal and high-quality housing and health care for all and truly democratizing the workplace. Doing so would help us to “build geographies of freedom for all life in the ashes of empire,” as the Red Nation statement in solidarity with Black Lives Matter put it. In this revolutionary moment we must be equally brave in reimagining our own workplace.

3 THE STRUGGLE FOR AN ANTI-RACIST AND DEMOCRATIZED CUNY

What would a fully democratized and anti-racist CUNY look like? It would most certainly be one free of police and racist surveillance, where “abolition is an immediate strategy and a long-term goal” (Critical Resistance Abolitionist Educators, 2020). Radical academic organizers such as Free CUNY!,¹² Rank and File (RAFA),¹³ Critical Resistance Abolitionist educators, Scholars for Social Justice¹⁴ have called on universities to terminate all ties with the police as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and increase funding to ensure greater access to and safety for working class, Indigenous, Black and Brown people. This includes calls to eliminate tuition (which would return CUNY to its founding orientation), provide free child care and public transportation, protect all faculty and adjunct jobs while fighting to completely overhaul this feudalistic, two-tier employment system and provide secure and well-paid jobs for all workers, lower enrolment minimums and course caps, and place the needs and well-being of the college's most vulnerable students and workers at the center of planning moving forward.

The PSC's “summer of struggle” has employed various methods to mobilize union members—letters, petitions, tweets and phone calls—to oppose the governor Cuomo's and the mayor Di Blasio's budget and layoff plans. The union has also engaged in legal action as well as street protest like car caravans and carefully spaced picket lines. Many PSC activists would like to see additional disruptive action, including job actions, joint NYC union solidarity and strike action, which would put us directly in conflict with the 1967 anti-worker and international law violating Taylor Law banning strikes of public-sector workers in New York state (Kissack 2016).

Many CUNY community members have been insisting for years that racist state violence is a labor issue. Our students are frequently harassed, brutalized, and subjected to surveillance by the NYPD, sometimes on campus. In addition to denouncing racist police murders, the PSC just passed a RAFA initiated resolution calling for police defunding and a diversion of funds from the police to social needs like the public university. It also called on CUNY to “refrain from requesting or approving NYPD presence on CUNY campuses in non-emergency situations” and for the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate with police unions. Much more can be done by our and other unions to mobilize public-sector workers as a force against the genocide inherent in racial capitalism.

A democratized CUNY would also by necessity be an “anti-colonial and anti-anti-blackness” university. In line with the broader movement demands it would be one that abolishes the university in Harney and Moten's (2020) words as a “regulatory” institution and a “machine for stratification”. It is a fully funded and truly public university that not only recognizes and addresses the material reality that it is founded on land stolen from the unceded Lenape homeland—Lenapehoking—but also one that does not contribute to further colonial displacement of racialized and oppressed communities through real estate speculation and gentrification. It is a university that works to dismantle white supremacy and to resist hierarchies within and outside of the classroom, individualization of knowledge generation and the professionalization of radical forms of study. It is one where the faculty and staff reflect the BIPOC communities from which the majority of the student body hail. We must follow the lead of Black, Latinx and People of Color faculty organizations across CUNY campuses, including Brooklyn College,¹⁵ Queens College and CUNY School of Law,¹⁶ including demands for changes to “promotion, hiring, assignment to and distribution of labor on committees, and tenure policies to honestly and explicitly reflect the now hidden workload of Black and non-Black faculty and staff of color”.

It is also a university, as argued persuasively by Lorgia García-Peña and Mordecai Lyon (2020), that centers the knowledge, theorizing, ways of knowing and experiences of oppressed “marginalized, minoritized, colonized, and racialized people” and breaks with extractive modes of (neo)colonial knowledge production. As the Black Faculty and Faculty of Color at CUNY Law statement put, all CUNY administration and faculty—including adjuncts, visitors, tenure-track, and tenured faculty—must educate ourselves “on anti-Blackness, racial capitalism … and abolition movements, particularly by engaging with work authored by Black people, incorporating critical frameworks like critical race feminism and queer theory, disability justice, abolition, and decoloniality, among others, throughout every course, and centering intersectional Black perspectives in the classroom.” A decolonial pedagogy should and could be weaved throughout all disciplines but also entails increased funding and protections for those departments, centers, and courses that have already been doing this kind of labor and often with very little material or administrative support, including Ethnic Studies, Africana Studies, Black Studies, Asian American Studies, Latin American, Latinx, and Puerto Rican Studies. A decolonized university is one that contributes towards rather than undermines revolutionary momentum.

Although only 3 months ago these proposals may have seemed idealistic, in the context of the current uprising anything is possible. It would be difficult to imagine the realization of these goals outside of a return to the radical tactics of the 60s and 70s. Many people are talking about the need for a general strike in radical solidarity with the protest movement and as a way to precipitate revolutionary transformation (Heron and Dean, 2020). For CUNY workers to join nationwide labor action would require taking on the Taylor Law that itself was a counter-revolutionary response to the mobilizations of that era. But the streets are beckoning and labor must heed their call. More than ever, New York City needs CUNY to live up to its claimed reputation of being a people's college!