Thread by @hermit_hwarang

The point of resisting carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence is not to fulfill some conspiracy to leave Asian people vulnerable to violence. It's because the imperialist state cannot be trusted to protect us; they will use that mandate to protect to brutalize others & us.

Empowering law enforcement to "stop hate crimes" will not result in them going after the most dangerous threat to our communities: organized state, capitalist, vigilante white supremacist violence. Generally speaking, the police do not arrest their colleagues.

This understandably raises some questions. What do we do about the violence then? What about perpetrators who are not white and therefore COULD be allayed by police intervention?

Let's start with the 2nd question: post-1980s prison & police expansion was sold to the public in the name of "safety," even for poor Black and brown communities. We know this development didn't make those communities safer: they only exposed even more people to violence.

Not only were countless people needlessly jailed, maimed, and killed, but the posing of police as the answer to "public safety" also justified the budgetary drain on public services to finance the state's repressive apparatus. This is an essential feature of neoliberalism.

We are far from having anything close to comprehensive info about non-white people who have attacked Asians in the last year. However, I don't think it's a stretch to consider how rising poverty, crumbling social services, and other economic factors dispose people to violence.

Given these factors, we have to ask: what will the effect of empowering racist police as our anti-racist defenders mean in the long run? Will it actually address the root cause of this violence? Will it even diminish that violence?

We also have to consider the relationship of this violence to imperialism & permanent war in our homelands. The military & police are entangled. They exchange personnel, equipment & tactics regularly. How will empowering law enforcement in turn empower US police action abroad?

The empire already poses itself on the world stage as a defender of Asian "human rights" against "authoritarian" state enemies. How will police "protection" of Asians domestically contribute to the empire's "protection" of us at gunpoint overseas?

You may be wondering at this point: maybe some of these points are worth reflecting on, but we still have a problem that needs dealing with. So what is to be done?

I'd like to invite everyone to reflect on this passage from James & Grace Lee Boggs.

The answer is that we have to take it upon ourselves to reorganize society. We have to be honest with ourselves about how far we will have to go to achieve such a goal. This is not something we can do alone, and this is not something that can be done without Black liberation.

This work has already begun: pandemic-era mutual aid programs, incl community safety work, are part of how we reorganize society, how we prepare new institutions to eclipse & take power from the old state. The next step is building people's institutions that control production.

This is how we address the root causes of violence: by providing for people's needs where the state abandons them, and by bringing our communities into symbiotic & revolutionary relationships with other colonized peoples the state has segregated us from.

In the work of transforming society, we will also have to transform ourselves. We will have to interrogate the class interests and divisions in our communities, and how certain elements have benefited from parasitic economic relationships within and beyond our communities.

Is this the easy answer? No, it's actually the most difficult one, but that's precisely why we need it. The easy way out is to defer to the state so they can protect the status quo while making superficial changes. Liberation takes responsibility, that's what it means to be free.