Video by Kate Levy

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The Trump election has emboldened the most right-wing, racist elements and encouraged a culture of hate. Reports around the country and here in Michigan indicate an upsurge in threats and attacks against many sectors of our population including African Americans, Latinx, Muslims, the LGBTQ communities, migrants, people with disabilities, women and others. We need to respond with more than messages of unity and solidarity. [Continue reading.]

The Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press have written about last night’s demonstration inside the EMU Student Center.

We can’t help but to waste another ten minutes critiquing the white supremacist propaganda that Media Relations Manager Geoff Larcom continues to circulate—not, we might add, out of ignorance; but rather as a tactic of narrative-management.

Larcom stated to the Free Press that no student activist has missed any class time and that the EMU administration’s actions have not “interfered with a student’s ability to progress toward their degree” as the result of sanctions stemming from their Student Center sit-in.

Larcom must not be up to date on any of the multiple articles and studies that demonstrate how Black people, who already traverse minefields of whiteness on the daily, are re-traumatized—sometimes acutely—by the forms of “sanction” that EMU is subjecting them to.

But we also know that Larcom’s only following orders. From whom? Leigh Greden, Rhonda Longworth, President James Smith, and this gleaming clique.

Event details may be found here.

Natasha Lennard

The transcendental experience of watching Roger Federer play tennis, David Foster Wallace wrote, was one of “kinetic beauty.” Federer’s balletic precision and mastering of time, on the very edge of what seems possible for a body to achieve, was a form of bodily genius. What Foster Wallace saw in a Federer Moment, I see in a video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face.

You may have seen it, it’s a meme now, set to backing tracks of Bruce Springsteen, New Order, even a song from Hamilton. The punch, landed by a masked protester on Inauguration Day, lends itself perfectly to a beat. Spencer, who states that America belongs to white men, was in the midst of telling an Australian TV crew in D.C. that he was not a neo-Nazi, while pointing to his neo-Nazi Pepe the Frog lapel pin. A black-clad figure then jumps into frame, deus ex machina, with a perfectly placed right hook to Spencer’s face. The Alt-Right poster boy stumbles away, and his anonymous attacker bounds out of sight in an instant. I don’t know who threw the punch, but I know by his unofficial uniform that this was a member of our black bloc that day. And anyone enjoying the Nazi-bashing clip (and many are) should know that they’re watching anti-fascist bloc tactics par excellence—pure kinetic beauty. If you want to thank Spencer’s puncher, thank the black bloc.

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Six days later, police are releasing no new information about Friday’s shooting of a man by a member of the Washtenaw Metro SWAT.

What’s been reported:

• The victim was a 33-year-old man who was taken to the hospital for “non-life threatening injuries.”
• The shooting occurred in the 700 block of Lowell Street in Ypsilanti, reportedly in response to a barricade situation.
• The SWAT member who shot the man is a Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office deputy and is now on paid vacation.
• Michigan State Police are investigating the shooting.

The lack of any further details is a red flag. Police never withhold details for long—that is, if those details look favorable to the police. Yet we’ve learned next to nothing from the sheriff’s office, the state police, or the Ypsilanti Police Department, who called in the SWAT. What information is Sheriff Clayton, who claims to support transparency and accountability, withholding?

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