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Abolition BCC GM

Joseph: Blessed are you lord, our god Queen of the

Universe who made the great sea.

Baruh Atah Adonai Eloheynu HaMelekh Haolam Shesah

ethayim Haggadol

Latvia, Poland, Ukraine I think? Somewhere around they

are amidst the pale. Born as orphans, adopted by the

community, and then spit back out. The year is 1903 and

we flee; we embark. He embarks on a journey across the

Atlantic to explore a new life. Escaping pogroms,

massacres of the jews, only to lose the mark of our

heritage. See when entering America, the past remains lost

across the ocean. Gaylin, Galin, Galinski? I think? How

could someone willingly give up their name? It was willing

because it meant becoming white.

Peymaan: War, corruption, poverty, I think? For

momman, Trauma from being the first born before a boy,

but she was always second hand? For bobba, Friends killed

in front of his eyes because of a war he didn’t start? The

bullets only missed him by a couple inches; if it was for

that I wouldn’t be here. Momman flew from Iran but still

“Death to the system, and death or exile to the master, is the only motto.” Wendell Phillips

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Abolition BCC GM

felt those bullets fly across her head. The travel across the

sea was supposed to be a dream, but became a nightmare. I

was raised more by America then I was by my parents. The

assimilation of my family and me is a product of a lie

forced on our identity, a practice to rally the troops to

defend whiteness, the lie naturalized by our migration.

Joseph: Atran. What even is that? Some mashugana

invention, but what’s in a name. Something that is not even

close to Yiddish, yet perfected assimilation. My family

accepted it. They embraced it. They never spoke about it.

The past lays hidden in the Atlantic and yet we moved

forward. Moving forward to America, the place where my

grandma was a devil with horns. Moving past the coins

rolled down the halls to test the greedy Jew. The jew is the

cultural other and for my family that holds true, but how

did the jewish become synamous with white. A culture that

arose from northern Africa. A culture established in

Senegal, Ethiopia, and in communities throughout Africa

firmly grounded, yet even more willingly buried. Being


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Abolition BCC GM

jewish today signifies whiteness and is grounded in the

material creation of whiteness.

Peymaan: How can we know who we are if we don’t

know how we got here? Travel across the ocean signifies

many things for many different people. Many remember

the travel only through the trauma. Some travel and sustain

their life, some have it ripped from them, and some arrive

at their destination to only see it slip away. The ocean holds

within itself a vast history of the evolution of life, and

specific events and moments that reshaped the world. The

history of the ocean is the history of all people. This is the

exploration of the privileges and the disadvantages of how

society has positioned me—from the enslavement of

Afrikan people to the migration of my family—through a

history masked by whiteness.

Joseph: We are here as pieces of the giant puzzle of

liberal democracy. We must figure out who we are and

what are role is in society and our communities. Debate

white washes identity, just like white democracy has

created one interpretation of the ocean. The first thing

learned in this activity is that we assume the position of the “Death to the system, and death or exile to the master, is the only

motto.” Wendell Phillips3

Abolition BCC GM

USFG, ignoring the role of our specific positions we come

from. Seeking recognition creates a “Postmodern racism

[assuming] the guise of tolerance only to be usurped by

relativism, a proliferation of differences rather than a

leveling of power relations. That is, according to Flecha,

postmodern racism fragments educators and students’

ability to discern the difference between democracy and

dictatorship.” “This reasoning allows for the mistaken

claim that whites suffer from discrimination (e.g.

reverse affirmative action) just as blacks have suffered

from it ‘in the past.’” “In order to ‘see’ the formation in

full view, whites have to mobilize a perspective that

begins with racial privilege as a central unit of analysis.

Since starting from this point would mean whites

engage in a thorough historical understanding of ‘how

they came to be’ in a position of power” “The costs are

real because it means whites would have to acknowledge

their unearned privileges and disinvest in them”

“Whites would lose many of their perks and privileges.

So, the realistic appraisal is that whites do have a lot to


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Abolition BCC GM

lose by committing race treason, not just something to

gain by forsaking whiteness. “ 1

Peymaan: The port of Baltimore has a unique and

bitter history. The dominant feel-good narrative of the

production of the Star Spangled Banner is ruined by the

morbid history of the initial records tracking the trade of

enslaved people. Baltimore was only one stop on the path

to New Orleans. Now that legacy lasts as the port solidifies

the disparities that destroy black and poor communities in

Baltimore. The Port of Baltimore plays a vital role in

Maryland's economy, generating $3.2 billion in annual

revenue and local purchases, as well as supporting 50,700

jobs. It serves over 50 ocean carriers making nearly 1,800

annual visits. We advocate for the occupation of the port of

Baltimore.

Joseph: The democratic system functions by reducing

difference to create nuetrality; a subject without

identityThe historical whitening of Judaism naturalizes a

1 Leonardo-2002- Race Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2002 The Souls of White Folk: critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse ZEUS LEONARDO California State University, Long Beach, School of Education, Start with privilege


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Abolition BCC GM

perspective of the world centered by whiteness. BUT I

SAY NOT IN MY NAME! This is not a confession but a

chance to situate my identity within a politics of revolution.

We recenter history to understand the material creation of

power and to disinvest in the power whiteness affords us.

The affirmative does not end; it is a project that we

continue to debate and advocate for in this space as training

for abolition. My past is not the trope of a Jewish

immigrant family it is me and yes it is the process of

whitening that is used to incorporate individuals into the

system of whiteness. It is the forgotten history that we use

for material analysis, as a blueprint for engaging and

abolishing the norm of the white Christian heterosexual

male.

Peymaan: The assimilation of my family produced by

white or liberal democracy is a renaming of identity and a

process to incorporate Middle Eastern people into

whiteness to vindicate its ethicality and its violence of

others who can’t assimilate. This creates a condition where


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Abolition BCC GM

if one with difference doesn’t strip away their identity to

live in America – if my mother didn’t take off her hijab or

if my father still was Muslim their names as a threat to

America and what it stands for. A threat is not my name,

and the violence of whiteness and its privileges are not in

my name. Without an understanding of relations of power it

is impossible to produce an analysis of the history of

difference used in order to remove or divest the perks and

privileges of white and non-black people.

Joseph: This democratic system only benefits “the

liberal individual— [who] exists in a temporally and

historically sealed vacuum, made possible by the clear

disjunction between past, present, and future.”

“Because the individual is this neutral substratum…

differences are cast into that inconsequential space”.

“ Neutrality thus functions as the conceptual glue of the

modern political project of classical liberalism”. And

“we access [neutrality] only by stripping away the

merely historical attributes of difference” but those who

can not abstract their difference have their freedom—“the


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Abolition BCC GM

expression of power, over which one has conscious and

rational control”—stripped away. Whiteness or the white

citizen is what valorizes gives power to the subject, if they

can move away from their difference. The decision of who

gets power or “the decisions about when, how, and which

differences matter will remain in the power of the

neutral individual” 2 . This country is structured of of the

white citizen and in opposition to blackness. The oceans are

only one part of many ways in which US transports its

democracy and its expectations to neutralize the world. The

current democracy is full of institutions made to “control

us in order to foster their interests”. “When we identify

ourselves with, and attach ourselves to these institu-

tional entities, we absorb their values; their purposes…

When we become institutionalized, we become little

more than robots—servo-mechanisms—functioning in

response to how we have been programmed to perform” 3

2 Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom, pp. 37-433 Butler Shaffer, 2012, (B.S., Law, 1958 and B.A., Arts and Sciences, 1959, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; J.D., 1961, University of Chicago; Member, Colorado and Nebraska State Bars) The Wizards of Ozymandias 85-86


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Abolition BCC GM

Peymaan: “Clearly, there are more ‘harmonious’

ways of teaching the topic of race and racism.”

However, “a pedagogy of politeness only goes so far

before it degrades into the paradox of liberal feel-good

solidarity absent of dissent, without which any

worthwhile pedagogy becomes a democracy of empty

forms. This does not suggest that educators procure a

hostile environment, but a pedagogical situation that

fails to address white racism is arguably already the

conduit of hostility.” “ This alows the white psyche to

speak of slavery as ‘long ago,’ rather than as a legacy

which lives today; it minimizes racism toward non-

white immigrants today through a convenient and

problematic comparison with white immigrants, like the

Irish or Jews. [Whiteness] is Fleeting because it must

deny the history of its own genesis and the creation of

the Other. It can only be concerned with ‘how things

are and not how they got to be that way.’”

Joseph: This abolition is what creates space for anew,

what builds anew. The history of our oceans of us as a


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Abolition BCC GM

people has shown hundreds of years of institutionalized

racism that has come to build this white democracy, its

time we move away from the institutions that uphold the

democracy or transform them. Abolition is not just about

destruction of the current democracy, but a creation of new

institutions, ones that protect and starts from the people.

After a year of debating for justice nothing was

accomplished because a debate round doesn’t change the

life of others. Just like the integrated anti-slavery meetings

we meet at red emma’s to firgure out the flaws in the police

officer’s bill of rights or to link up with other organizations

to get involved in their work. Where is this in debate? What

practical work can we take back to our communities?

Liberalism sets limits on democratic participation. The

civic education and participation debate preaches only

works at a top down nationalistic level removed from any

true relationship with others. 200 packed in a small

bookstore for an intimate discussion of “what to do next?”.

That builds relationships that is what brings people together

to seek justice. But just like the integrated anti-slavery

meetings, this isn’t the only thing being done in Baltimore


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Abolition BCC GM

the work of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, HBCU’s,

Baltimore Bloc, and many other organizations bring Black

leadership to a majority Black city. What is being built in

Baltimore is what we need. A politics built out of a

community’s love for one another.


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baltimore city college gaylin motevalli aff blake doubles

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