Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 23:14:22 -0500
From: vacirca-AT-charm.net (robert brown)
Subject: ARA article that might be interesting



>Hey Bob -
>
>Here's an interesting article (i thought) on Anti-Racist Action out of
>the new VIBE magazine that I got forwarded to me.
>
>  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Skinnin' Heads
>by Jonathan Franklin
>
>Forty years ago, Detroit's Motown Records made history delivering "the
>sound of young America."  Giants such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder
>were more than entertainers; they shaped American culture and even
>helped bridge the racial divide.  But today, there's another record
>label in Detroit that's opposed to everything Motown stands for.
>
>Since 1994, Resistance Records has distributed and promoted a
>soundtrack for white supremacy.  Resistance fronts skinhead groups
>like Berserkr and Nordic Thunder.  You can buy the latest releases at
>skin-sponsored concerts, on the Internet, even at some alternative
>record stores.  What are these bands preaching?  The group Berserkr
>chants: "Niggers just hit this side of town / Watch my property values
>go down / BANG! BANG! / watch them die / Watch those niggers drop like
>flies."
>
>These groups don't just make records; they also perform live, though
>many clubs don't welcome them.  Last November, members of the hate
>group Aryan Nation and executives from Resistance Records figured they
>could hold a fund-raiser and concert under the cover of the
>Thanksgiving holiday without making any news.  The organizers chose a
>suburb of Detroit where they rented a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall.
>On a rainy November 29, the racists arrived to rock out to Max Resist
>& The Hooligans, trade white-power Bound For Glorys CDs, and network
>with American and Canadian neo-Nazi leaders.  Instead, they were
>picketed and roughed up by a group of teenagers who appeared out of
>nowhere, shouted them down, maced them, and disappeared into the rain.
> When the police later arrested and questioned three protestors, they
>confirmed that the sweaty, brawling action was the calling card of a
>group calling themselves Anti-Racist Action, or ARA.
>
>NON-NONVIOLENCE
>ARA is a quiet revolution involving thousands of antiracist youth in
>the Midwest, with bases in Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis.  ARA has
>no president and no membership dues, but it does have a solid history
>of beating racist fascists - sometimes ideologically, sometimes
>literally.  When organized hate groups gather at events like
>Resistance Records concerts, ARA members blockade the entrances or
>lobby the owner - anything to get the concert cancelled.
>
>On that freezing night last Thanksgiving, 80 ARA activists surrounded
>the entrance to the VFW hall for three hours.  By night's end, a
>hundred or so neo-Nazis had busted through and entered the party, but
>carloads of racists skipped the event when they saw the protest and
>the cops it had attracted.  "We figured we pushed it as far as we
>could without starting to take major arrests," said 23-year-old ARA
>organizer Kieran, who, like most ARA members, keeps his identity a
>secret.  Kieran calls himself an antiracist skinheads but looks more
>like a white frat boy in his Boston Bruins hockey jersey.  "Even if we
>didn't shut it down one hundred percent, we definitely put them on
>notice."
>
>"They tried to throw a couple of beer cans at us," says Stevie, a high
>school junior who says he acted in self-defence during the protest.
>As the son of a black mom and white dad ("Call me muuuuulatto," he
>says), Stevie is a frequent target for racists.  He had his own
>reasons to protest the "white power" concert, but then they gave him
>the excuse he needed.  "This big, ugly motherfucker type, he tried to
>run through us like a linebacker.  I had a can of mace.  I sprayed him
>right in the eyes.  Then my friend" - he pauses to come up with an
>alias - "'Kfrog' hit him over the head with a Maglite."
>
>The next day, when Stevie returned to high school, the gossip spread,
>and the story mutated until talk of Nazis, guns, cops and ARA swirled
>through the school.  Suddenly, his friends began to strut the halls
>with ARA t-shirts showing a fist smashing a swastika.  Stevie is now a
>recruiter for ARA.  When the call comes down from the Toronto or
>Minneapolis chapters that something's about to go down, his Unity Crew
>pack up sleeping bags, bullhorns, mace, and hit the road to organize
>an in-your-face, get-out-of-town protest.
>
>This isn't just about breaking up racist concerts.  In Motown, ARA
>groups protest police brutality and the redevelopment plan for
>Downtown.  When the Michigan Supreme Court ordered the release and
>retrial of two white police officers convicted of beating black
>motorist Malice Green to death with a police flashlight, ARA hit the
>streets to protest the cops' release.
>
>When alternative record stores carry hate music by labels like
>Resistance, ARA "educates" the owner.  "At first the store owner says
>it's about free speech," says One Love, a 46-year-old ARA organizer in
>Detroit.  "But we tell them that it's about neo-Nazis organizing not
>only to take away your right to speak but your right to live."
>
>CRUCIAL CONFLICTS
>Since 1992, ARA has been on the front lines protesting against
>organized fascists, neo-Nazi skinheads, and the Klan.  Today they're
>the largest nationwide youth group to mobilize against hate groups.
>They have a proven ability to whistle together 50-75 students every
>time the Klan or neo-Nazi thugs come to town.  Last fall, when white
>supremacists organized a "Nordic Fest" in a forest in the upper
>Michigan pennisula, ARA members invaded the nearby National Cherry
>Festival and told the apolitical crowd what nobody wanted to hear: The
>Nazis were near.  The ARA launched a full PR assault: Thousands of ARA
>newsmagazines and stickers were distributed.  The group sold t-shirts
>with pictures of Hitler blowing his head off emblazoned with teh
>message "Follow Your Leader."
>
>If kinder, gentler measures don't work, ARA members use bottles, mace,
>fists and boots to kick undesirables - especially Nazis or racist
>skinheads - way out of town.  It's highly controversial - but also
>highly effective.  When the KKK paraded in Fresno last January,
>carloads of activists ran convoys into town, harassed the racists, and
>shouted them down.  In Memphis, ARA activists trying to prevent a
>Klansmen march on the spot where James Earl Ray killed Reverend Martin
>Luther King Jr. were gassed, beaten and chased away by Memphis police.
> In Detroit, a neo-Nazi clubhouse "outed" by the local chapter of ARA
>became the target of two drive-by snipers.
>
>Some ARA members acknowledge the danger in their use of more
>aggressive strategies.  "Violence isn't something you want to get
>addicted to," warns Kieran, who admits he "was attracted to the
>violence of ARA - for sure."
>
>In its willingness to face-off with the Klan and Aryan Nation, ARA has
>collided with the agendas of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and
>other traditional antihate groups.  "I can certainly understand the
>rage of those who want to take physical action," says Donald Cohen,
>Michigan director for the ADL, which places a premium on cooperation
>with the police, the FBI, and federal authorities at all levels.  "But
>when it turns to violence?  Challenging law enforcement?  When they
>are trying to maintain a peaceful situation?  I think it sends the
>wrong message."
>
>Tony, a 22-year-old organizer with ARA Detroit, argues that ARA needs
>an aggressive public face to recruit youth.  "A lot of these kids who
>get involved with Resistance Records don't know that there is any
>other outlet," says Tony, rings wiggling from all corners of his
>pierced face.  "This is at least a safety valve.  They can say, 'There
>is something else I can do; somebody else talked to me besides the
>goons.'"  Asked what message he'd send to high schoolers who love the
>sound of breaking glass, Tony smiles and rubs the tattoo on his left
>wrist.  "Break the right kind of glass."
>
>THE SKIN I'M IN
>Most people don't realize that the skinhead movement started in
>England in the late 1970's as a counter-action to the racist National
>Front.  But in recent years, knucklehead white-power skins have
>monopolized the public image of skinheadedness.  In much the same way,
>the image of ARA as a bunch of brawlers has lent them a kind of street
>credibility - but that was never the goal.  Before ARA was formed,
>Native American, African and white boys wanted to hang in Minneaplois
>with out being harassed.  A 16-year-old Native American graffiti
>artist known as Gator was instrumental in organizing what was then
>known as the Baldies, a skinhead crew that welcomed all races.  The
>multiracial Baldies rumbled with the Nazi-oriented White Knights gang
>- - and won.  Over time, they evolved into Anti-Racist Action, expanding
>
>their base and redefining their tactics along the way.
>
>Just as the racist rock movement has grown (Resistance Records showed
>a profit for the first time in 1996), so too has the antiracist
>movement.  Two yars ago, the ARA News - a free zine - went out to
>1,500 people.  Last January the circulation was 55,000.  During the
>same period of time, the number of ARA chapters across North America
>quadrupled to 102.  There are probably about 2,000 core members across
>North America, and if there isn't one near you yet, there probably wil
>be soon.
>
>Although racist music is part of the problem ARA is fighting, ARA has
>the support of a growing number of bands, from the New York ska group
>The Toasters to England's Chumbawumba.  There's even a tour called Ska
>Against Racism, inspired by Britain's old Rock Against Racism shows,
>organized by Asian Man Records.  Ska Against Racism, now completing a
>nation-wide jaunt that features performances by the Blue Meanies,
>Mustard Plug, Five Iron Frenzy and MU330, promises to bolster ARA's
>puny bank account and attract thousands of new members.
>
>A chance meeting at a 1994 Lollapalooza show hooked ARA up with their
>plaid sugar daddies, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.  The group's lead
>man, Dicky Barrett, stopped by an ARA booth at Lollapalooza in
>Cleveland and chatted up the volunteers.  "These guys told me they had
>actually been to Klan rallies and fucked them up," Barrett said in a
>recent between-shows telephonen interview.  "That impressed me.  They
>are the type of people who have the nerve to brawl, but they don't
>show up to brawl."  Now when the Bosstones play - last year they had
>an estimated 320 gigs - Barrett always points out the ARA literature
>table in the back of the club.  "We have given them lots of money," he
>says.
>
>Like the ARA, the Bosstones resort to action whenever necessary.  When
>misguided neo-Nazi punks wander into their shows giving the Nazi
>stiff-arm salute, the concert stops, and the action begins.  Barrett
>says he usually urges the intruder to get out before trouble starts,
>but Bosstones bassist Joe Gittleman doesn't always wait.  German Nazis
>murdered several of Gittleman's relatives, so he has little tolerance
>of neo-Nazis.  At one show in Florida, he flipped.  "I never saw Joe
>move so quick," says Barrett, laughing as he recounts the now
>legendary bonk to a Nazi punk's shiny bald head.  "Joe came off the
>stage; people kinda cleared.  The guy was just as ballsy as he thought
>he was and kept his Seig Heil! up."  That's when Joe came down on the
>side of his head with an electric guitar.  "In hindsight it probably
>wasn't the best idea, but it worked."
>
>"There's not much need for fighting at this time, it's
>counterproductive," says Jim McNamara of ARA Columbus, who's been
>organizing youth since 1967.  "Our work should now be political and
>educational, relating to people different than us, creating real
>inter-racial coalitions."
>
>According to statistics from Pennsylvania (which thoroughly tracks
>hate crimes), two thirds of racially motivated violence is committed
>by youth under the age of 20.  Thus, the best way to stop hate crimes
>is to organize young people.  Positive peer pressure may sound like a
>soft approach to organized neo-Nazis, but underneath those boots and
>swastikas are sometimes lonely kids crying out for attention.  When
>both parents work, millions of "virtual orphans" are ripe for
>recruitment into gangs, clubs, and secret societies of all extremes.
>"A lot of these kids haven't graduated from high school," says Tony of
>ARA Detroit.  "The minute somebody will share a beer with them, they
>think, You're my buddy, you're cool with me.  That is why we need to
>be there."
>
>For more information on ARA, check its Web site: www.aranet.org
>--
>  --

"A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer"  Long live the
fool.




     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---