Tea Party Prankster Robert Erickson Strikes Again! Protest at Immigration Office Exposes Racism and Hypocrisy of Deporting Latino Immigrants

Twin Cities Indymedia also made another great video of this action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmtcqFYY1XY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rry_SlPW7oU
http://tc.indymedia.org/2009/nov/tcimc-video-robert-erickson-punks-tea-party-full-story

The crowd reaction is priceless and check out the weird interactions w/ the teabaggers – including one pushing a kid off his bike and more weirdness. Columbus go home!

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/columbus_go_home/

What was caught on video doesn’t seem too severe, just a little pushing and doing dudely poses. The report is that someone attacked a counter-protester on a bicycle, probably because that was the only physical advantage they had. As usual with this teabagger shit, the teabagger group was primarily composed of older white people, and the counter-protesters were all young. This adds a note of near-melancholy to the speaker’s triumphant claims that the racists are winning, since the visuals you get is a group of aging racists that are simply going to lose the demographic war to younger people who have more open minds about living in a multi-cultural society.

http://www.bluestemprairie.com/bluestemprairie/2009/11/ruthiehendrycksfail.html

Most of the MINN-SIR supporters were slow to catch the satire, and so the cheering from that side of the crowd took a while to subside. As they realized they’d been punked, they stood in a cold, stunned silence, while the 30 or so counter-protesters urged Columbus to go home.

Just as shocking was the reaction of the state police working the rally, who pushed back those being attacked, rather than those attacking the counter protesters.

I’ve always thought that Ciudad Juarez and the seriously dangerous parts of Mexico along the border were at least partially about NAFTA’s free trade zones and that the killings of women in Juarez were at least partly to send a message to troublemakers who might organize unions or agitate for womens’ rights.

Question. And I don’t really have any answers to this. Why are so many leaders of the extreme racist right in America women? Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Liz Cheney, the list goes on and on and on.

Is there something about the nexis between racism and gender in America that’s laid the groundwork for someone like Palin? Is there some message here to racist, right wing men that “hey. If your women are stirring things up here, why don’t you have your guns out by now?”

True. There is a difference. But I don’t know if the difference is as big as a lot of people think. In both cases, the aim of racist shit talking is “I have power over you. You can’t stop me from displaying this kind of hate in front of you. You are powerless.”

For example, one of my coworkers quit his job to join the border patrol. When my employer found out, she said “good. We need to shoot some of those people coming across the border.” Now what message is she sending to me when she expresses that kind of openly racist sentiment in my face. It’s “don’t think you have any power here. I’m in charge.” Needless to say, had I been a person whom she needed to impress, she might have held off on the racist trash talk until she found out more about what I thought. But in this case, with me as the subordinate, she had no hesitation at all.

It’s a bit like the wife beater scratching his balls or wagging his dick in his wife’s face. The message is “this is my territory.”

Now contrast some of my coworkers/peers to my employer. One women (Cuban American ironically) and one man (Irish American) are both Glenn Beck fans. They were both Steve Lonegan supporters in the Jersey Governer’s race (Lonegan’s the guy who tried to get Spanish language billboards banned in a town in New Jersey and subsequently became a hero to the local wingnut base).

When they found out that I WASN’T a Glenn Beck fan, when they found out that I voted for Obama (not popular here I know) and when they found out that I was willing to debate them, they just refused to discuss the issue at all. Why? Because they knew they had no power over me, that we were on equal footing, and they’d have to defend their racist bullshit against an equal.

In short, it’s about POWER. In the Jim Crow south, the Klan was about keeping white people in line also, not to the extent that it was about terrorizing black people of course. But it was still about power, as much as race.

above sentence should read: “The over 800 young women in Ciudad Juarez (across from El Paso, TX) who have been “disappeared” are not not exploited within capitalist social relations…”

not only exploited…

In a violent white-supremacist world, I don’t know if I could consider myself being “lucky” to be a person of color (because I won’t have to deal with racist macho assholes talking shit to me?) vs. actual white supremacist structural violence. There is a difference. My point here is not to rate “who is more oppressed than who” kind of thing, but stress an awareness in terms of how we come to understand “violence”.

The over 800 young women in Ciudad Juarez (across from El Paso, TX) who have been “disappeared” are not not exploited within capitalist social relations; there is an act of feminicide taking place: the killing of women by men simply because they are women.

As the scholar/activist Rosa Linda Fregoso reminds us in an essay on feminicide on the U.S.-Mexico border: “Although, there is no doubt that the process of economic globalization may indeed be ‘out of control,’ globalism is a monolithic, top-down analysis that neither captures nor explains the complexity feminicide. Nor does conflating the exploitation of gendered bodies with their extermination (!!!, my emphasis) offer us the nuanced account of violence that the murders of women demand”. Fregoso argues that we need an analysis that seeks to “recognize the multiple structures of oppression in the lives of women”.

You write above: “As a white guy with a pretty authentic sounding Jersey accent…” Think about the meaning of this and then telling a person of color that “in a way you may even be lucky”.

Hope to continue building and struggling with you comrade, Kyle.