Author: SpokenNothing

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Expose Texas State: Racism & Student Resistance in San Marcos

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

A long-brewing conflict at Texas State University in San Marcos has burst into a display of student organizing power & collective capacity. Since the afternoon of April 11th, students have been staging a sit-in at the campus LBJ Teaching Theatre. The move came after 19 senators were absent from an impeachment hearing for student body president Connor Clegg, ensuring that he would be able to fill out his term. Clegg was facing impeachment over his inability to represent marginalized students–particularly students of color–on campus. In February, screenshots emerged of Clegg’s instagram account featuring racist and sexist captions. This was the latest incident with Clegg, who earlier in the year had made calls to defund the student newspaper after a columnist published a controversial article criticizing whiteness.

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Long Live The Intifada! Israeli Apartheid Week at UT

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

 Last week, a series of on campus events demonstrated the strength of the Palestinian liberation movement at UT. The Palestine Solidarity Committee at UT hosted their yearly week of Israeli Apartheid Week actions, a chance to raise awareness about the struggles of Palestinians and initiatives like the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) campaign. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the mass displacement & ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, and the beginnings of Palestinian resistance to occupation. To make up for the lack of reporting in local and campus news outlets, we have gathered a rundown of the events and their significance here.

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Crash The Party: Shitty Moments from Roundup

Vandalism on the gates of Fiji from April 2017

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

CW: sexual assault, harassment, homophobia, racism

We’ve just made it through another series of hellish weeks, with SXSW and Roundup hitting us back to back. As we come out on the other side of Roundup, we wanted to highlight some of the moments from this weekend that made even clearer why Greek Life is, at its core, a racist, cisheteropatriarchal institution. We’ve captured some of the student discussions and other events of this weekend, including catcalls, insider secrets, and assaults. Remember that this is only a small sampling of the events and experiences of this weekend, and there are likely many more stories that remain untold due to fear, shame, stigma, or the normalization of the horrors of Roundup & Greek Life.

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Spitshine Spotlight

The 2018 CUPSI team

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

Ask a room full of organizers about the things that inspired and radicalized them, and you’ll probably end up with a good number of people. A few may specifically mention slam poetry & spoken word, a form of expression that often attracts radical and revolutionary thinkers because of its ability to give voice to experiences and ideas that are typically silenced. At UT, you may find some of these creative radicals in a local group called Spitshine Poetry. Founded in 2012, Spitshine hosts weekly writing workshops and regular open mic nights, where students may collaborate on and present their work.

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¡Viva La Huelga! Report-back from San Antonio’s Cesar Chavez March

This is a report-back submitted to us by The Autonomous Brown Berets de TejAztlan, SATX chapter.

 

Editor’s note: On Saturday, March 24th, The Autonomous Brown Berets de TejAztlan, SATX chapter, attempted to disrupt the local Cesar Chavez march, which had become nothing more than a liberal parade that failed to uphold Cesar’s politics. In particular, they were protesting the parade’s collaboration with the police (i.e. the strikebreakers of the ruling classes) and their refusal to endorse a boycott of an exploitative agricultural corporation, a direct affront to everything Cesar Chavez fought for.

 

We are republishing this report back in order to break the media silence around what happened yesterday. Despite numerous journalists with cameras taking photos of the disruption and the police repression it encountered, not a single news outlet even mentioned the protest or its content in their articles. We in Austin know too well how the police will silence stories and keep their media contacts in line, so that nothing that serves as bad press for the cops will make it onto a story. We encourage all who read this to share this article, spread the word, to recognize who the cop collaborators & enemies of the people are, and to discredit those who would seek to use Cesar Chavez’s image in service of exploitation and oppression.

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Words from Texas Prisoners: Excerpt from “Prisons are Plantations”

Austin Anarchist Black Cross demo in solidarity with striking prisoners in 2016

Anonymously published document. Full document here. Originally spotted on Revolutionary Horizon‘s facebook page.

 We are republishing a collection of excerpts from a larger piece composed of interviews with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks from Texas, Illinois, and Florida. The original document uses interviews and case studies with prisoners, guards, and historical analysis to demonstrate how prisons are extensions of the plantation system and mirror pre-1865 slave codes. We’ve highlighted passages that reflect the experiences and conditions of inmates in Texas prisons. We hope this will give students and other non-incarcerated folks a better idea of the conditions and struggles of prisoners, and expose students to some of the worlds that we are isolated from. In particular, students should recognize the complicity of their own schools in this system. UT’s Investment Management Corporation indirectly invests in two of the largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO group [1]. The prison has long been the hidden underside of the University. While the University produces new citizens & professionals, the prison strips away citizenship and produces captivity. We hope the following excerpts will inspire greater awareness and energy for anti-prison organizing.

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Marielle Franco: Local Reflections on Transnational Anti-Blackness

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

On Tuesday, March 20th, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies hosted a Foro Urgente–a regular series of panels & discussions on important recent events in Latin America–to discuss the assassination of Marielle Franco. Marielle Franco was a councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil who was a black woman from the favelas, a lesbian, and a socialist. Marielle frequently spoke out against the police genocide against black people and the military occupation of the city. She was shot to death in what many are calling a police assassination, as the bullets were the same kind used by the federal police.

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The Call–Issue Archive

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

To help make our publications more accessible, we are archiving previous publications of The Call, the zine published by the Autonomous Student Media collective. Originally published on May Day 2017, The Call has been a perennial feature of our organizing efforts. You can often find editions in stock at Monkeywrench Books, an anarchist bookstore & social space on North Loop (if you like their project, consider volunteering). 

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Blackshirt Alert! Far-right TPUSA Invades UT

Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable

Note: address info listed here is likely outdated

Over the past semester, we have been alerted to the occasional presence of an individual (always the same one) tabling for an organization called Turning Point USA–you may have seen them around with their big posters reading “socialism sucks” “free speech zone” and “I <3 Capitalism.” Upon investigation we discovered they were not a Registered Student Organization–the person tabling isn’t even a student–and so technically have no right to be on campus. Yet we know from recent history that Dean of Students doesn’t really care about that unless you’re a leftist organization! We decided to do some more sleuthing, and we’ve found some interesting information.

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UT Employs White Supremacists!

Dustin Ray Hamby is an employee of UT. He’s a vocal white supremacist who participated in the Neo-Nazi “White Lives Matter” rally back in November of 2016. After more local fascists were exposed, Dustin upped his security and removed more of his information–deleting/hiding social media accounts and address. The address listed below is his last known address as of 2016, and may be inaccurate. However, he still works at UT–and was recently promoted to cook!

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