Segregation doesn't only consist of physical walls or explicitly racist policies, but is also embedded in the structures and flows of the cityscape as well, in bridges, crumbling building facades, liquor stores, and, in this case, MUNI rails. This is one of the critical questions raised by the recent police murder of 19-year old Kenneth Harding, who was shot 10 times by police officers as he ran away from a fare inspection. While the mainstream media gets carried away breathlessly reporting (and later retracting) every new detail that SFPD feeds them, we are more interested in other questions: Why does SFPD patrol the trains in Bayview, while in the rest of the city the work is done (if at all) by simple fare inspectors? What insights do we get from understanding the murder as stemming first and foremost from a fare inspection?

In Bayview, the T-Third MUNI line functions as a gateway to the rest of San Francisco. Especially for youth and others who don't have access to cars, it's the primary path toward downtown and by extension to the rest of the MUNI grid that crisscrosses the city. Guarded by armed police officers who, we now know, are ready and willing to use their weapons, the Bayview MUNI station operates as a militarized checkpoint that serves as a form of population control, regulating the flow of primarily black youth into but most importantly out of the neighborhood. Even the police identify it as such. As the police chief has explained, fare inspections have been stepped up recently as a way of confiscating guns from Bayview residents who ride the trains. Fare inspections, in other words, are explicitly not about making sure people pay their fares. Rather, what they do is give the police an excuse to detain, search, and criminalize black youth in the moment that they attempt to navigate an urban landscape that has been closed off to them.

Segregation also rests on particular social relations -- again, to be clear, most San Franciscans have never even been to the neighborhood. Part of what's been so successful about the recent demonstrations against police terror in and around Bayview is not only the solidarity that they manifest but more importantly the high level of participation by residents of different neighborhoods in every action. Folks from Bayview turned out to the demo in the Mission last Tuesday; likewise, folks from the Mission and beyond have showed up at press conferences and rallies in the Bayview. Of course, the specter of the "outside agitator" (as imagined by both city officials and institutionalized non-profits) is never far off. But what seems to have characterized these moments of collaboration is something very different, a coming-together based on a recognition of points of commonality in the struggle against the police as enforcers of an unjust economic system. That such a convergence would arise doesn't require that everybody involved experience the same forms of violence -- of course they don't, and to suggest they do would be to purposefully ignore different manifestations of class/gender/race/etc -- but that they perceive the overlaps even within those differences.

This is how we should read the arrest of Fly Benzo (Debray Carpenter), a Bayview resident who has been one of the most vocal and visible critics of SFPD in the wake of the Kenneth Harding murder. Watch videos and you'll see his face; look at the SF Chronicle and you'll see his name; he was interviewed on the local ABC affiliate. His analysis of the situation, furthermore, is sharp; as he told the Chronicle:

"We need to shut down the T line until we get answers to our demands -- no police on trains, free trains or no trains at all. We'll make sure there are no trains at all if that's the way they want it."

Once again, it comes back (especially now, in the broader context of austerity) to public transportation, the trains that connect Bayview with the rest of the city. But if segregation also appears in the form of social relations, then the arrest of Fly Benzo -- a bridge between dispersed actors organizing around police terror -- represents yet another attempt to violently reinforce the segregation that has plagued Bayview/Hunters Point for decades.

As everybody who's been following this stuff is aware, UC Berkeley's Code of Student Conduct and the Office of Student Conduct (OSC) that administers it are a complete disaster. One concrete issue for which we've only just begun to scratch the surface has to do with systematically and structurally downplaying or overlooking sexual violence -- not to mention, in a number of cases, exacerbating its emotional impact on survivors. We will be following up on this in further posts.

But for now we wanted to follow up on a different thread. Another problem with OSC and the Code, which generally falls under the rubric of what's been called "the rule of the arbitrary," comes down to the fact that -- totally apart from the arbitrary uses to which pathetic OSC bureaucrats put it -- the Code enshrines the arbitrary as the basic mode of operation: "even when the Code is followed to the letter, its 'rule' is inescapably arbitrary and subject to the whims and political interests of the administration." There are two ways of making this argument: one frames it as a problem with the way the Code is written, that it contains certain unconstitutional provisions, for example, which could be resolved by re-writing them; the other sees these problems as structural, rooted in and basic to the daily operations of the neoliberal university, embedded to the point that no revisions could hope to resolve them satisfactorily. The latter formulation looks to abolish the Code and OSC, while the former looks to the administration-led Task Force that is currently working on a new set of revisions to the Code.

On this note, we've received an email that was sent by Vice Chancellor Harry Le Grande, who is heading up the Task Force, to the rest of the members, in which he proposes inserting an additional clause in order to codify a certain "flexibility" with regard to the Code. As a suggestion, he includes a provision that appears to come from the UC Santa Cruz Code of Student Conduct. Here's the email:

All,

I would like to discuss the possibility of having a clause in the code that would allow for the process to be suspended, but still allow for due process and provisions to remain. I think it would mostly result in being used in large disciplinary cases that the normal process has little ability to impact without it being an exception.

Below is text from another UC that allows that option. I would like to discuss this at our next general meeting.

"104.32 In the interest of fair administration of these regulations and procedures, and consistent with law and university policy, the chancellor or designees may interpret and make reasonable adjustments to jurisdictional and other provisions."

This clause would codify the "rule of the arbitrary" in the Code's provisions -- it would allow the administration to do literally anything it sees fit, from suspending the timeline, to eliminating the role of the adviser, to getting rid of the student's right to remain silent. Anything you imagine would be subject to the will of the administration. That this clause is currently part of Code at UCSC is extremely worrisome, and suggests that it's not simply a case of administrative overreach that will necessarily be overruled at the next Task Force meeting. But it is exactly what we should expect, to the extent that the university claims absolute jurisdiction over both the individual student's body and the collective student body. This is the paternalistic claim that Le Grande and his cronies in the administration stand for: "University knows best."

The Guardian is liveblogging the education protests in the UK. Real-time map of university occupations. Lists of and links to the occupations here and here.

[Update Wed 2:17pm]:

I.

Like all regimes of law (or quasi-law), the UC Berkeley Code of Student Conduct corresponds to a particular spatial jurisdiction, within which it is considered to be in effect and therefore applicable [1]. What is the nature, and what are the contours, of this space?

To begin, however, we must take a step back and start with a different question. What is conduct? According to the Code, the university constitutes a “community of scholars” governed by “rules of conduct intended to foster behaviors that are consistent with a civil and educational setting” (1). Although this “civil and educational setting” remains undefined, what is clear is that the Code is aimed at regulating the practices of those who participate within the scope of the university community. This formulation points to an initial, reflexive reading of the term conduct: what is at stake is the way in which one “conducts oneself.” That is, the Code (like the law) presumes to produce self-regulating subjects, or rather, certain kinds of subjectivities that become embodied in everyday practices. Here, a second understanding of conduct as transitive verb, one that suggests directionality or purpose, emerges: to “conduct something” is to advance it along a determined path. The Code of Student Conduct, then, is an apparatus designed to produce (student) subjects that are simultaneously subject to and defined by the privileges and restrictions accorded to that particular subjectivity.

The Code’s target, in other words, is the student body. It is telling that the administrators of the Office of Student Conduct consistently talk about the disciplinary process as “developmental.” As a biological metaphor, development reads the student body as unfinished material, as pre-person, as person-to-be. Thus, the Code’s language of “fostering” the development of the student body must be read as part of a matrix of evolutive images and ideologies that ground the legitimacy of the Code and its Office.

But the student body is not only the target of the Code: it is also the jurisdiction of the Code.

From Anti-Capital Projects:

Like any number of urban freeways, the I-980 and I-880 are lines of containment. They mark out the zones and boundaries of economic apartheid, making West Oakland into an island of poverty, a police zone, boxed in on all sides. A freeway, in this sense, is merely one of the most visible forms of the lines of force that cut up our cities and, in turn, our lives, that butcher them according to the logics of race and class, money and property. How can we see these arteries as anything less than instruments for the formation of a controlled population, instruments in the successive waves of urban centralization, white flight, gentrification? They are checkpoints and blockages -- massive pours of concrete, of labor, erected to determine who gets to go where and how. And they have no meaning beyond the insinuation of the automobile into every facet of our lives, the automobile which is hallmark of US economic power in the 20th century, token of class mobility, passageway to pseudo-freedom, emitter of poison gases, turning our lives into a cut-and-paste of frantic alienation and isolation, responsible for more deaths than the M-16. Who could love a freeway?

Those of us who chose to take our march onto the I-980 have been accused of turning our backs on the tactic that made the student movement so powerful and inspiring, the tactic which inscribed our actions in a lucid, anticapitalist language -- occupation. Don’t worry. We haven’t abandoned anything, only expanded our repertoire. The last six months have been a process of experimentation, one in which it becomes difficult to distinguish the failures from the successes, since the two fold into each other, since each action, regardless of the outcome, is a process of learning, of adaptation, part of a living conversation, one in which there is as much disagreement as there is agreement. On a day dedicated to the convergence of political actors from multiple spaces across the Bay Area it would have made little sense to barricade ourselves inside a building on this or that campus. If there were a suitably central, common and defensible target, perhaps we would have occupied that. Perhaps we will next time. We still look forward to the emancipation of foreclosed homes and apartment buildings, shuttered workplaces, to the permanent occupation of university buildings. None of that is behind us. We are not yet powerful enough for these things. We are still trying to build a force capable of taking and holding a space, and then another, and another.

Some people have counterposed the occupation of buildings to the freeway takeover on the grounds that the former challenges property directly, that a building can be emancipated, communized, turned into a liberated zone for care and conversation, planning, learning, fun and eating and dancing. This is true, although it forgets that none of this liberation can happen if you’re surrounded by hundreds of cops, as is often the case with lockdown occupations that target essential buildings. Still, the obvious point here is that you can’t communize a freeway. You can only destroy it. But so what? There is much we will need to learn to destroy. We will have to learn to do this well, to shut down the flows and pours of capital and labor. Those who oppose this action on the grounds of a theory of property or value miss the fact that property is not a thing; it’s not matter. It’s a social relation, a form of interaction between people that is mediated by objects and signs. By commodities and commands. The freeway is no less a part of this relation than a university building. At the most abstract level, ours is a world in which there are bodies and there are values. The freeway is an instrument for circulating the former according to the self-expanding imperative of the latter. Buildings have no intrinsic value beyond this circulation -- beyond the inbox of bodies and the outbox of values. As such, we must learn to attack not only the immediate place of production but its apparatus of circulation as well. We must learn both to destroy and to emancipate. It’s true that we must create new spaces, new relations, but none of this will happen without a negation of the old. When we shut down, if only for a few hours, the forms of compelled circulation that condition our lives, when we circulate against these forms, running along the freeway with banners and medic kits and black flags, with cheers and megaphones, cries of amazement and fear, we are a little part of the future, a future where all the obstacles to flow have been removed and all the flows have been blocked. I felt that. But yes, shutting stuff down is only one part of it.

On this day of convergence, we wanted to come together and we did. Those of us who were on the freeway can only laugh at the liars who sought, immediately, to paint this action as the joyride of a bunch of white-boy insurrectionists. On the contrary, we were women and men, white and Latino, African-American and Asian, gay men and lesbians and trans-people. We came from multiple political perspectives. We were anarchists and communists, liberals and libertines; students from UCs and CSUs and Community Colleges; teachers and public workers and taxi-drivers. We were 12-year-olds with skateboards. We were people who did and did not form a we, who formed other we’s inside of this one, people who might not agree on much but who were there together, for all kinds of reasons. Together we demonstrated that ruling class attacks -- on public education, on jobs, on immigrants -- will not necessarily be borne by managed and ineffectual forms of protest. We will not suffer these austerity measures quietly. Regular programming will be interrupted.

It is false, of course, to assume that the solidarity between those gathered on the freeway, the commonalities this action created, meant the complete and instant erasure of all hierarchies and all violence, the erasure of privilege, racism, sexism. This form of dissolution, sharing and solidarity is real, and has been attested to by many people, but just as often such situations of emergency and intensity bring out the worst in people, allow for the ugliest of manifestations. These situations have no innate political character; the social relations we want will not appear as if by magic . . . If we experience glimpses here and there of true collectivity, they are just that, glimpses. Still, it is hard to imagine anyone unmoved by the experience of hearing and seeing, across the street, the inmates banging on the windows of the County Jail as we were being arrested. It is hard not to think that, at that moment, the strength of the state which enforces separation, hierarchy and interpersonal violence, was not, to some degree, trespassed. The same goes for the motorists who got out of their cars and cheered and raised their fists as we were being led off the freeway.

Was it a fail? A win? We should not take 150 arrests lightly. No one should think of the action as successful in that respect. We wanted to get away, and we failed. We were hurt by police batons and by the legislative violence of the state. We lost time in the abyss of county jail. A 15-year-old (who, from all accounts, knew what he was doing) was grievously hurt, and there is nothing that can make such facts worth it, or justifiable. There is no calculus of victory or failure here. But the truth is that this is a part of the movement, too -- those of us who arranged legal support, who are arranging benefit parties, who brought food and cars to North County and Santa Rita, who attended arraignments, made phone calls and sent emails to find out if those we loved were alright, were just as much a part of this process of experimentation as anyone. We learn how to care for another, and we learn from our mistakes.

This wasn’t an activist arrest action. No one wanted that, and no one sat down. We wanted to get away, we ran from the hail of blows the OPD delivered and most of us got caught, and from this perspective, we fucked up. But the idea that such an action meant certain arrest is false. The march was ragged, and too slow, and undisciplined. If there had not been a squad of riot police following us onto the freeway, many would have escaped. We could have taken a U-turn at the junction of I-880 and I-980 .We could have been faster, or organized into clusters. If there were more of us, we could have backed the police down with material and rhetorical force. We could have blasted past the police car on the Franklin exit, entered the streets and begun Round Two. We could have built barricades. But we didn’t, and so, in this respect, we failed. But the past conditional, the retrospection, this is all part of the movement. This is how we go forward. Nothing can take back the baton blows, the faces rubbed in asphalt, the arrests, the money lost on bail; nothing can take back the suffering caused to Francois Zimany and his family. But these things will impel us forward. They will have their effects.

***

Marches enter the freeway at multiple points, pinning the police in a half-mile stretch. Motorcycle cops race toward the crowd, then stop. There are too many of us. Tires are lighted on fire. Road signs are pulled down and used for barricade material. Traffic has stopped throughout the entire metropolitan area. The streets now completely deserted of police, people move through the main thoroughfares, looting the stores. One group passes by the undefended police station, destroying everything. A nearby college campus has been liberated, and many of the people from the freeway reconverge there, sharing out the looted goods, mending wounds, talking and listening and learning from each other, going over mistakes, planning for the next day, arranging jail support. There is friendship and argument and the cooking and eating of food, there are everyday task becomes themselves a part of the struggle and they are just as important as fighting. Inside the County Jail they know we’re coming for them. And this is just the beginning.

More here.

Also, don't forget to sign the strike pledge for March 4 at ucstrike.com.