Fight on Whose Side?

White people need to be willing to step aside if we are to have any true revolution.  Anti-racist movement will have to be the catalyst for any revolution which aims at social justice in the United States.  This is because the main antagonist force—in the United States—to liberation—is the white establishment.  Whatever can be done to destabilize white power will promote liberation for poor and working class people.  If our liberation is to find root it will have to come when the power structures, which have crystallized white supremacy, fall.

As people of color rally together, to fight against police violence, and racism in a broader sense, white people must do their work to lend support.  But we need not forget our own fights.  Because when the power structures which oppress people of color have been pushed back by anti-racist movement, we will all be closer to ending all forms of supremacy. 

My primary fight is for revolution in the “mental health system.”  I say that with sarcasm.  My statement is rooted in sarcasm because, I am certain, that it is the system itself which is alienating people who are said to be sick.  There is no such thing as mental illness if there is no pervasive fear that alternative mind-states cause suffering.  Mental illness has been manufactured in the United States and other developed nations. For evidence, look at cultures that give space for the cultivation of extreme states as part of spiritual rite.

I’ve been working hard to fight against the power structures which our purposed to suppress and pathologies extreme states.  And I have had success.  I was even allowed to speak out—to the commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Mental Health—but my work seems only to have constructively made me a more conscientious supporter of the mad pride movement.  And here I will say that I can choose one of two roads; I can settle on having a voice for mad pride…or…I can choose not to be a single issue radical.

To choose the latter—to choose to be a supporter of other people’s movements—I have chosen to be part of something bigger than what any revolt against the mental health system could ever hope to be.  We are, as anarchists, attempting to uproot the whole power structure which supports government, billion dollar corporations, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the list goes on.  All that divides us is the notion that although we have a common enemy, we have separate struggles.