From this unprecedented cop city RICO indictment to the nation-wide retaliation against students and others protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the repression of social movements has become a shared experience for activists across North America. In this context, the Pittsburgh Anti-Repression Convergence (or, PARC) was organized this past summer. Over the course of three days, the Convergence committed to “studying the evolving tools of repression and what we have learned in our work to destroy them.” Panels, workshops, and group conversations drew from existing examples of jail and prison support, movement defense, and the various uses of technology as strategies to counter the state violence, surveillance, and trumped-up charged inflicted on movements.
Many of the presentations during PARC focused on the ways that movements suffer repression from within their own ranks. This week, we hear a reading of “Addicted to Losing,” presented during PARC, which offers a powerful account of the ways that white supremacy and anti-blackness within social movements undermine their own power to effect social transformation. The author, Athena, points to the implicit ways that radical milieus contribute to the unfreedom of people of color by reinforcing a sense of powerlessness. Instead, Athena calls for a joyful militancy that “turns to our fugitivity, an irreducibly black mode of sociality which affirms blackness as a force that escapes control.”