How “Black Visions Collective” & “Reclaim the Block” Support Slaver Colonialism

Anonymous submission to Unsalted Counter Info

Posted on “∞ Genders 4 Black Communisms” medium.com on February 11, 2022 – Link

 

screenshot of an august 2021 tweet by Black Visions Collective which reads: "Governor Tim Walz has betrayed us. In 2017 he said “Any line that goes through treaty lands is a nonstarter for me.” Now he’s building it. Join us on 8/25 as we hold space at the Minnesota Capitol until he hears us — or Biden steps in."

In June 2020 — just after the peak of the uprising that took place in response to the killing of George Floyd — a group of Black activists in Minneapolis wrote an open letter demanding transparency from the two “nonprofits” named in the title of this post, BLVC & RTB. They had received over $30 million from white liberals & celebrities without explaining what exactly they were doing with it. The calls for financial disclosure were brushed off, & today these organizations continue to play the repressive, colonizing role all similar organizations are meant to play. However, some details did emerge about their more regular funders:

The address in question is a house which appears to be owned by Alondra Espejel Cano, the democrat who was city councilor for that area (Ward 9) from 2014-2021.Another even bigger funder was the McKnight Foundation:

screenshot of a 2018 tax form filed by the McKnight Foundation, demonstrating that they gave over $100,000 to Black Visions Collective through the democratic party front organization TakeAction Minnesota.

a screenshot from a presentation which notes that the David M. Wark and Mary Ann Barrow Wark Foundation gives annual support to Black Visions Collective. the slide notes the warks are part of the family that owns BMO Harris, a Chicago-based bank with hundreds of branches in the u.s.; mary ann has a bulding named after her in the Twin Cities area. simply put, this is an incredibly wealthy, ruling-class family.

You could go on making connections like this (& internet searching reveals others already have), but the point to be made here is ultimately political: these organizations function as tools of white liberalism, the “progressive”, reformist wing of a worldwide system that works to keep Black people & others overwhelmingly, brutally, violently oppressed.

One way this manifests is in the organizing tactics of these groups & the people in their orbit, which feature attempts to use the institutional channels of the slaver-colonial local government to enact piecemeal reforms — submitting complaints, lobbying for or against specific policies or politicians, & other typical abolitionist fare. If there is any innovation here, it’s in the fact that many of these liberals are deceiving others about their politics by showing support for protests & marches which include property destruction & attacks on police. By refusing to condemn such actions & even supporting them, they’re effectively engaging in “reform by riot”, using the much more militant actions of people generally more oppressed than them to try & push through their milquetoast bullshit.

This adds up to an organizing strategy which effectively says: “it’s okay to break the rules to change the rules!” This strategy does not challenge the fundamental legitimacy of the system, no matter how much its practitioners claim (or even genuinely believe) they are doing so. Outside of the specific reform-by-riot campaigns, there are some social patterns within these activist scenes which reveal this truth (and these patterns can be observed across much of the so-called “left” in the u.s., not just minneapolis):

  • proclamations of socialist, communist, anarchist, & other radical politics that don’t stop the people claiming them from voting for the democratic party, which is fundamentally opposed to these things
  • a general refusal to seriously consider the path of revolutionary armed struggle beyond occasionally acknowledging people who fought far away/a long time ago
  • the omnipresence of careerism— activists getting jobs, degrees, & similar life opportunities from public “anti-oppression” organizing while conditions remain unchanged for the overwhelming majority of the oppressed
  • systematic apathy & ignorance towards more or less the entire non-u.s. world, with exceptions mostly determined by mass media news cycles

What is important to understand here is that the anti-Black politics of the NPIC have the effect of stifling militancy in activist scenes generally, not just among people directly affiliated with specific nonprofits. Because of their resources — again, handouts from white liberals — Reclaim the Block & Black Visions Collective act as a center of gravity around which many others must operate (unless they break with the established left entirely, which so far isn’t happening). Social capital orients itself with the financial capital of these organizations; this can be seen online where a small, ~multiracial~ crew of abolitionists with thousands of followers all support each other & these counterinsurgency efforts simultaneously. Look at the people who appear frequently on the Twitter timelines of RTB, BLVC, MNUPRISING, MPD150, & other organizations to get a sense of this scene both locally & nationally.

We can now return to the tweet included at the beginning of this post. What kind of politics would frame the governor of a stolen u.s. state built on genocide— one which, like other u.s. states, repeatedly called out the army to put-down uprisings against anti-Black violence — as somehow “betraying” social movements? In what world is joe fucking biden stepping in to decide a question of resource extraction on indigenous land a positive development? Hopefully, you now have some idea.