Here's a video of Sascha at the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco April '08

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2152061687257398524 

The Secret Life of White People
3:00pm Sunday at the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair
Come hear Sascha Scatter from The Icarus Project tell an untold story about anarchist community, unspoken assumptions, and the psychotic race war in his head that once pushed him to the brink of suicide because he didn’t know how to tell his friends about it. A 20 minute action-packed talk about whiteness and privilege in relationship to punk rock and anarchist activist culture, the power of shame to keep people divided from one another, and the important role of the “creatively maladjusted” or “Mad Ones” in breaking through stale stereotypes, revealing hidden power relationships with xray visions, and carving new paths in the cultural landscape.

taken off The Secret Life of White People forum thread:

that's a really interesting and sweet response. I guess that would explain why i was looking out into a crowd and there were a handful of people with wide eyes staring at me with looks of recognition and then a bunch of people that looked kind of uncomfortable and were squirming in their seats! I suppose it’s not just the content, it’s the frequency we’re tuned to. Some people are good at making tangential jumps – I believe “loose associations” is what the psychiatrists call it…

And yeah, I know how lucky I am that people actually listen to me when I talk. It wasn’t always like that. I’m all too aware of what it’s like to be the one who’s “crazy.” But I really have come to enjoy this roll of being able to say things other people aren’t supposed to say, with the aim of carving space for more people to feel comfortable speaking their truths. Sometimes life is so complicated that we make ourselves forget really important things because otherwise they might drive us mad with guilt or fear or anger or confusion. But I’ve really come to believe that it’s our personal stories, especially the complex and charged ones that lie below the surface of our consciousness, that become the fuel behind the fire of social movements. When you screw up the courage to tell me a story from deep inside your heart that makes me feel safe enough to tell you mine—that act of sharing between us, that alchemical safe space that is created from our trust and courage, it then allows others to step up and tell their stories. We weave our future from the stories of the past. And why shouldn’t it be the “mad ones” and the “creatively maladjusted” who take responsibility for speaking the hard truths? Maybe we’re the only ones crazy enough to do it?

Going back and looking at my notes from a winter of writing, what feels like the most important stuff are the stories that are still all in fragments. But I’m going to just try and scratch the surface of one of those stories in particular cause two of you mentioned it and it’s an especially intriguing one.

Okay for everyone who doesn’t feel like sitting through me rambling on tangentially about my childhood and the race politics of the 1980’s: in that video link above I tell a story about going to elementary school with Assata Shakur’s daughter and not realizing it till I was in my mid-20’s and living in Oakland, CA around a bunch of old Black Panthers and learning my history of what actually went down in this country in the 70’s.

In Assata’s autobiography she talks about her daughter Kakuya who was born in behind bars, raised in New York City by her grandmother, and then, after her mom escaped from prison, came to live with her in exile in Cuba in 1985. I realized that though I hardly knew her, Kakuya Shakur was in my elementary school class for years and then mysteriously disappeared one day. When I tried to think about what happened to her the only thing I could come up with was this memory of my 5th grade classroom, lining up for lunch, Kakuya not being there, and this rumor floating around my class (of 9 year olds) that “Kakayua’s mother had murdered Martin Luther King.” What?!? How to make sense of a memory like that?

Like most people in this country that are my age or younger, I learned about the Civil Rights Movement in elementary school. I went to a public school in Manhattan in the early 1980’s. My school, Hunter College Elementary on 94th and Park Avenue was an incredibly racially integrated place, a proverbial melting pot of cultures. Looking at old class pictures I see a rainbow of beautiful little faces, all of us growing up around and rubbing off on each other. Puerto Rican and Japanese and Jewish and WASP and Russian and African and African-American, all the Eastern European mutts and mixes and hybrid descents of immigrants that makes New York City such a vibrant place. My environment was so multicultural. Along with Christmas and Hannukah we celebrated Kuanza, the Pan-Africian holiday. But we were all Americans. We celebrated Thanksgiving Day and Columbus Day, sang The Star Spangled Banner and recited The Pledge of Allegiance just like everyone else.

I don’t remember being very conscious of race when I was a kid. I was taught by my parents and my school to believe that, like Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently put it in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, that people should be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” President Ronald Reagan signed King’s birthday as a holiday into law in 1983 and around that time I remember watching slide shows about MLK and his Dream of social equality. We learned about how a Long Time Ago in the South, which was Very Far Away, Black people weren’t allowed to be in public places with White people. Black people had to sit in the back of the buses and couldn’t eat at the same lunch counters as white people. We learned about a Black woman named Rosa Parks who one night got up the courage and bravely refused to sit in the back of the bus. We learned about the courageous women and men, Black and White, who held non-violent Sit-Ins to protest segregation. We learned about the Freedom Rides. We learned about a peaceful movement that forced the government to change its laws.

So we learned about the Civil Rights Movement as if it was a piece of the past, disconnected from the present. And we didn’t learn ANYTHING about the Black Power movement that emerged in the late 60’s out of the wreckage of that era. We didn’t learn about Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, The Young Lords, the Brown Berets, The George Jackson Brigade, the Black Liberation Army, COINTELPRO, any of it. All that history was hidden under a whitewash of liberal crap about “we shall overcome." We were never given the vocabulary to talk about power and privilege, about race and culture. We didn’t learn about our history as a nation of immigrants and slaves severed from our own histories and lineages. We were Americans and supposed to be proud.

I’m piecing this all back together from very fragmented memories, because the honest truth is that I don’t actually remember a lot of elementary school. I watched a lot of television and played a lot of Atari 2600 video games and read a lot of comic books. I actually remember some TV show characters more than I remember most of my classmates. Like many children of my generation, I was raised in front of the television. We were the generation that went straight from Sesame Street to MTV (but this was before they started diagnosing all of us with ADD.) The television was my culture—my second family, my window to the outside world. The television was my ritual, my religion. Without a stable family I watched The Cosby Show and Different Strokes and they became my family. So, for example, all these years later I can’t really tell you anything I learned about Kuanza, but I can sing you dozens if not hundreds of TV show theme songs and commercial jingles. In fact, here’s a piece of one that’s been in my head lately, tormenting me. It’s from the sitcom Different Strokes, which was about these two black kids from Harlem who go to live with a rich white family on the Upper East Side

Everybody's got a special kind of story,
Everybody finds a way to shine.
It don't matter that you got, not a lot, So what?
They'll have theirs, and you'll have yours, and I'll have mine.
And together we'll be fine!
Because it takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world.
Yes it does. It takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world.

Do any one else remember this? I watched that show religiously. Those people were like my second, corporately sponsored family. Same goes for Good Times, The Jeffersons, What’s Happenin’, The Cosby Show, A Different World...there were stable in my life, where my outside life wasn’t.

So…put the comment about Kakuya’s mom in that context of the 1980’s. I grew up in a place where, even though it was really “racially and ethnically diverse” we were handicapped by the limitations of our language and culture and society and lack of understanding of history. And for all we knew, the Black Liberation Army had murdered Martin Luther King….

there is so much more to the story, in my mind i can see it like a web of connections that leads right up till last night and the passover seder we had at our house--the historical relationship between Blacks and Jews in this country--the heroic narrative of Moses in the story of Exodus and the Chosen People. how many of the stories we live are we just living because we watched them on television or read them in the bible? what's going to happen with all the hidden history rises to the surface like old ghosts? there are so many political prisoners locked away in this country, so much bloodshed washed under the table, so much justice to be served. but what happens when the oppressed get the power to oppress and are so damaged from years or generations of abuse? do we just play out the same stories over and over again? or do we figure out how to heal with each other, find common ground, and flip the script?