The decolonial movement has a problem, a huge problem that can destroy not only the movement and individual decolonial activists but also the whole process in general. The problem i mean is colonization of our movement by whiteness and its proxy's. I will explain this with an example that recently crossed our path when we received a message through our Facebook page. The actual problem occured already long before and centred one of the founders of the grassroot that became
De Grauwe Eeuw. For all readers that are not familiar with us a very short explanation: We are a decolonial activist collective from the Netherlands that protest and take action against all formes of colonial glorification, that can be streets named after colonial criminals, logo's, events, white washed education etc. We frequently receive requests from media, students, individuals that want to support, and other collectives. The requests are usualy about interviews, help in study projects, diy tips, lectures etc. The request that caused this story wasn't very different and said:
Dear Actiegroep De Grauwe Eeuw,
I’m writing to you on behalf of Book-cafe The Barricade, an Utrecht-based community-run and anarchist-oriented public library. On October 14th and 15th we are celebrating our first birthday with a two day event of bands, presentations, talks, and obviously, books.
When we started, we inherited a collection of some two and half thousand books from a collection previously housed and evicted from local squats, eventually adding some new books of our own in an attempt to fill in what seemed like gaping holes on our ‘feminism’ and ‘decolonialism’ shelves. Still, out of the five hundred and something books in the permanent part of our collection, our ‘feminism & queer theory’ section currently contains only sixty-four items and our ‘decolonialism and colonial histories’ eighty-one, compared to the one hundred and sixty three (overwhelmingly white male authors) included in our ‘anarchism’ section. This is a problem we would like to try to start addressing.
We would like to launch this year of our work with a day of content that attempts to challenge the ways we think about knowledge, and how our libraries, our movements, and the stories we tell about their histories, prioritise certain kinds of knowledge over others. Taking cue from the Read-In collective, we want to collectively start addressing the question of “Why are the authors of the books we read so white, so male, so eurocentric?”
De Grauwe Eeuw’s work in fighting the whitewashing of the way Dutch history is presented and the refusal to allow the continuation of the glorification of Dutch colonial past, would fit in with our desire to address how history and knowledge are constructed along racialised and sexualised axes. We would like to extend an invitation to your collective to contribute to this event with a talk, lecture, discussion, workshop, reading-group or a book presentation. The format and focus is open to the speaker’s decision, and we would be offering a €40 euro fee your work. I hope this is something you might find interesting and that it’s a step towards establishing bonds of solidarity and future working together!
Thank you and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on this!
Sincerely,
*****// Book-cafe the Barricade
A request like this will be discussed in our collective where we will evaluate if we stay true to our values when we would participate in an event like this. Because we don't have a hierarchy there should be consensus about decisions like this. And it turned out that it's a good thing we decide as a group. In this case our decision was an easy one, you'll understand why when you read our response (i rather don't tell this story twice in one piece of text.)
Hello *****,
As promised, we hereby send you our feedback. It will be a long and detailed response but you'll understand why that is while reading it.
For us it's impossible to participate at your aniversary for several reasons.
I hope you will read it till the very end so you will understand our motivation but also because it is in your benefit if you take this feedback and use it for further decolonization of your valuable project, which has our full support. We are happy that those books are finally receiving the respect an anarchist library deserves instead of being stuffed away in some corner where only ****\ had acces to them.
Before i get to our motivation i need to make some things clear. It was for our collective really important to first clear this up before we'll get into detail. We want to make clear that we are aware that most of your groups members are not informed about the things that will be unravelled in this response and we hope that you don't see this as something to take personal or as a way to bring your library down. We decided to write all this because it's in everybody's interest and if you take us serious and act on it you will benefit from it in a decolonial manner. We also want to make clear that that is our main objective for this response and that every argument we give comes from a decolonial perspective and a non-white perspective. That means that you also have to try to look at our arguments from those perspectives which ofcourse is impossible in case of the non-white perspective, but since every oppression is a reproduction of the same structures it is possible to understand it pure in theory. One thing i want to add on a personal note is that i also wasn't aware of all the stuff that i will write down and that situations that will be described are written down as they have been told me. Most things were confirmed by other parties, i sent this answer to everybody in our collective to let them check if it's accurate. I have no reason to doubt any of the things, the people that told me are part of our affinity team, i had to rely on them several times and they did not dissapoint. Also these people know what they are talking about when it comes to the subjects oppression, colonization, racism. I can only conclude that you also trust them on their knowledge on these matters since you invited us. I will now come to the point.
-Our first reason not to participate is that you can't provide a safe space for non-white activists. I will explain it first before i go to the next reason:
Two of the founders of De Grauwe Eeuw used to do a lot of actions and demonstrations with/as Antifa. They were actually putting a lot of effort in decolonizing the anarchist and the antifa subcultures, i probably don't have to tell you about the masculinity, the hierarchichal structures and the whiteness in these two groups. One of these GE members called out Joke Kaviaar for racist behavior, he thought he could because they considered each other as friends, they did several direct actions got arrested and Joke came to his house lots of times. He also thought it was the right person to do this to because of her activities and radical mindset. A person as Joke Kaviaar knows that being called out on racist behavior is not an attack but a private moment with somebody you want your relationship to evolve and grow, at least that was what he thought. Racism is often a mindset or behavior people have because the society has put these stereotypes and standards in our brain. It is unintended racist and people aren't even aware of their behavior. Everybody that understands the complexity of racism knows this, still Joke Kaviaar did exactly the opposite from what he expected. She denied all the aggression towards him that he called her out for, she started whitesplaining, she started victim blaming and on top of that she decided to defend an anonimous racist troll, posing as Jan de Boer, she knows the identity of and who is constantly attacking De Grauwe Eeuw and other action group. He was even spreading rumours that some none white antiracist activists were silent cops. This Jan de Boer put the new location of one of our female activists online after she moved out from her previous town where she wasn't safe because of neonazis that threatended her. He also used a lot of sexist aggression towards her, we already made a status about his trolling efforts on our FB page. We have proof to back these accusations. Our co-founder tried to explain Joke several times that her behaviour was toxic but she didn't change her mind. He ended their alliance as activists and their friendship that same night because he could no longer feel safe at actions when the person he should be able to rely on (to not to go to jail, fall from a roof or whatever) turned out to be a racism apologetic and would drop him to defend their white acquaintance.
Being really blown of his feet by this racist situation he went to his parents in Maastricht for a week to digest this loss of a friend and to overthink the consequences this would have for coming actions and activities. He was a speaker at antifa or antiracist events at several occasions when she was also one of the speakers or artists (when she read her poetry for example). They for example were speakers at the same time at some events in ACU. You can see that this could get complicated in the future so his worries were legitimate. When he returned from Maastricht people from his squat told him that he was banned from ACU because he tried to ruin Jokes reputation, and the argument they litterally used was that Joke did so much more for the movement than he did. He is non-white if that wasn't clear yet, he also didn't speak to people about the thing that happened with Joke except for two people he trusts and are part of our collective but don't have friends in the antifa subculture and the people from his living group. He sent them the email conversation between Joke and him, that conversation where he called her out. It soon became clear that Joke requested to ban him. It turned out later that there wasn't consensus in ACU about a ban, most of the people didn't even know what was the situation. It was Hadrian Ferran (who also knows racist and sexist troll Jan de Boer and framed non-white activists for being silent cop together with him) that initiated this ban and Hadrian together with others from ACU (Sebas, Margerita), this group that claimed the Antifa Utrecht name and Joke started a campaign to exclude our co-founder. He did nothing more than calling out a person he trusted and when that response became even more violent he ended all communication, that is enough for this whiteness bubble to start a racist campaign against non-white activists. Stuff started to lead their own life and the stories about him became more spectacular every day. He wrote it down in his own words after things turned really ugly without even one person asking him about his side of the whole story. He decided to put it all on his blog because Hadrian, Sebas and Margerita just became more and more blatant (proxy) racist (we have screenshots of conversations on social media to back this claim) and instead of breaking down whiteness and decolonizing "Antifa Utrecht" made up some story that some person named Carly got harrassed on social media by an anonymous account and some hacker traced it back to him, they never even took the effort to prove their accusation but it worked. They criminalized their victim and never ever had to take responsibility for their racist, sexist, queerphobic (we'll get to that) white supremacist tactics. Joke was spreading the news that she was so devestated by the whole thing that her health got really bad and ofcourse nobody ever again spoke about her racism and attemps to destroy a non-white activists reputation. The sad thing is that racist stereotyping and the believe that white people should always back each other (white solidarity) made sure that a lot of white people bought those lies without ever checking with him what was happening. That's how racism works.
*Personal note. I think this part is the most destructive because i know this person as one of the most active and radical activists there is at this moment. He is the creative mind behind our campaign and because of him we already had major success in our first year. By trying to destroy his reputation they are literally attacking anti-racism which i can only see as a racist act. I never saw them put so much effort in attacking nazi's as the stuff they tried to ruin his reputation and credibilaty. End of personal note.
It is relevant to mention that not all was bad about this because there were also some people that understood what was happening and proved to be valuable allies. Also our close ties with AFVN union of antifascists restored faith in the antifascist movement. We know now that not all white antifascists make from our struggle their hobby and not all white antifascists use that hobby as an identity or subculture.
Here is all mentioned above in his own words:
http://indigenousintersectionalantiracist.blogspot.nl/2017/03/whiteness-in-antifa-nederland-movement.html
White
-Our second reason for not attending is because you can't provide a safe space for women activists
One of ACU collective members Rossella did actually see the racist situation ACU and "Antifa Utrecht" created and also saw that it was on purpose and the whiteness bubble around ACU and Joke was to be protected aggressively. When also Rossella spoke out towards Sebas and Hadrian she received a lot of gaslighting from these people and the sexsist aggression and the ableism from these white cis men were also so oppressive that she could no longer work in ACU. Also there was a racist situation between some woman Antifa and a non whites woman volunteer and Rossella wanted to end this but was worked against by Sebas. He didn't want his antifa buddies to have to check their privileges. Rossella also wrote down her story you can find it in this link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6lYYBf3axtpMzFWZk5Vbi1DX1U/view?usp=drivesdk
-Our third reason is that you can't provide a safe space for trans and queer activists:
Two years ago ACU used exactly the same oppressive tactics towards the queer community that organized a lot of things in ACU and from whom several worked as a volunteer there. They also called out Mike (don't know if this is the correct name) and never received any acknowledgement but got aggression instead and were systemically excluded. The bizarre thing is that they did have full support of Sebas but he also wasn't the 'Alpha male' yet at that moment. I can't provide you with a written statement but if you truly want to know we can put you in contact with a person that was victim of the queerphobic tactics of ACU collective. One thing needs to be added to this situation and that is that a non-white person got banned for two years when he got really angry for a racist incident that happened in the heat of this period in ACU.
-The forth reason we can't participate is because of the claims ACU makes that can only be seen as appropriating our struggles for their bar branding:
1. ACU claims to be against gentrification but is gentrified to the core. They even discussed opening during daytime when Voorstraat becomes car free and they can put a terrace on the sidewalk. They also don't do anything against gentrification so how is that 'anti' gentrification.
2. ACU advertises that they are a squat, they are not and they even treat squaters like filth. We know this because some of our members are squaters.
3. ACU claims that they are anti-capitalist which ofcourse is quite hilarious for a space with a mortgage. Also they charge money for entrance and serve drinks for major companies that can only be described as capitalist.
4. ACU claims to be anti-oppressive in their houserules. I don't have to explain why this is the biggest lie they tell.
We also have some criticism on Barricade: You are censoring books by not putting them in the shelves. You don't do this because you don't have space but because Hadrian (and maybe others?) don't agree with the books. For example he deliberately doesn't put some important works about nihilism in the library because he disagrees with it. We know hist because we were told by an anarchists that asked for specific books. How can you do that when you claim to be anarchists? This is hierarchichal, paternalistic, and censorship. If you want to know exact details about this point, we will put you into contact with our activist that wanted this mentioned in our response.
For us as a decolonial activist collective it would go against our own values to legitimize ACU as decolonial with our presence. We also don't want to put any of our members in a toxic situation with mysogynist, racists, ableists, transphobic, hierarchichal people. Also something you should take in consideration is whether it is morally justified that you organize a thing on decolonization and that you invite decolonial activists into a setting as ACU before you get things sorted out and fix things that need to be fixed with some of your members but especially with your host. Our judgement on that is that it's not morally justified. Your intentions are good we are sure about that, but your base is not. You really should solve the powerstructures that are very dominant in ACU at this moment before you can think of making events about decolonizing. That will not be a pleasant process in the beginning because you have to confront the people you maybe consider to be comrades, yet if you really want to to decolonize and if you really are anti-oppressive and anarchists than you also know that we are right in this one. We really hope that you will solve all these things in ACU and with some of your members, we don't want ACU to be completely written of because it was a nice spot with volunteers that were true to their ideologies. But, to become that place again there needs to be drastic change. We know some of you and believe that you can start making that change.
Since we don't see ACU as a safe space we do have a person we would suggest to you to talk about decolonizing, in case you want to organize an event like that anyway. We are in close contact with him because he is working really hard to decolonize his domain of activism. He came to us with a similar request as yours and we are pleasantly surprised by his clever perspective on this issue and by how fast he picks up relevant things. We know his intentions on decolonizing are pure because he saw clearly the bigger picture of colonialism. He acknowledges all his privileges and is aware of the missteps that are made easy like whitesplaining for example. Best part is that he is very familiar with ACU but also with our organization. Yes he is white, male, cis, straight, bodyabled etc but that is the only person we know that will not face oppression in ACU. The person wewe refer to is #######. If you need his contacts just send us a message.
We really hope that on your next anniversary we will be able to support your event. We are aware of the impact our respons will have on your motivation but we are decolonial activists and that comes with a moral obligation to speak out against colonized behavior/mindsets. We also believe that some of you weren't aware of the oppressive aggressions members of ACU, Antifa Utrecht use against people that is why we decided to take the effort to tell you everything because it is also your right to know. We know this because otherwise you would have spoken out and never contacted us without clearing up some stuff first. It's pretty common knowledge at ACU that he is one of the co-founders of the grassroot that became our movement.
We hope for the best for Barricade, that means that they can do their thing in a decolonized setting.
Thanks for your invitation and your believe im our cause.
With regards,
De Grauwe Eeuw
Actually we wanted to keep it to only this statement, this stuff occurred months ago so probably they have woken up now at ACU. Also our activists rarely went to ACU and we certainly didn't need ACU for our activities. Also we already have a lot going on at this moment. That was untill we read the following response on our statement:
Dear De Grauwe Eeuw,
Note before I start: The following statements are made by me as private person; I am not speaking on behalf of other Barricade members or ACU volunteers.
Thank you again for your very thorough response to my invitation to participate in the Barricade anniversary event. I understand and respect your decision and am greatly appreciative of the time and energy that went into the detailed explanation as to why you are not able to accept the invitation – I have and will continue to spend a great deal of time and effort thinking about what you’ve said and how to improve on the problems you have pointed out. I agree with you entirely, and it would be absurd to deny, that ACU as a space and as a collective has problems with racism, sexism, and queerphobia, and that there has been a number of situations, big and smaller, that have pointed to this fact.
The formation of the Barricade collective was originally partly motivated by the dire situation found in ACU at the time, one defined by either political indifference or just plain bad politics. It was started by a small group of people who wanted to work to change that within ACU itself as well as to attract more people who did want to use its resources for rigorous political thought. Our desire to organize this specific event, with the focus on structural biases in knowledge production within and without anarchist scenes, stemmed from the recognition of the structural racism, sexism and queerphobia rampant within the spaces in which we operate. This was our attempt to start from ourselves, look at how the Barricade itself can work to stop perpetuating those biases with its collection and actions, and by doing this to start having serious conversations about this in broader ACU, both as a space and as a collective.
Reading points one, two and three of your response, however, it has become clear to me that I was perhaps too rash in sending out invitations. I understand that – as much as the Barricade tries to operate as an autonomous group within ACU - it was naive of me at best to believe that the events organised and guests invited would remain untouched by the power structures perpetuated within the ACU in the broader sense, and would at worst expose activists of colour, women and queer folk we invited to participate, to risk of racialised and sexualised violence. The anti-harassment team we’ve worked to organise for the event, whilst attempting to minimise instances of racialised and sexualised aggressions occurring on the days itself, would admittedly be able to do little to protect anyone from the more insidious power hierarchies which are unfortunately very much in place within ACU. Thank you for bringing this to my acute attention.
As regards your critique of the Barricade – we have a collection of over 2500 titles, only one fifth of which fits into the permanent collection, and decisions naturally had to be made on which titles to include and which to put in storage (with the note that at the time of making the selection we did not know how much space would actually be afforded to us by ACU). Those were made on the basis of our members’ knowledge and preference. That does not mean that the other books are censored; they were put in storage as ACU did not have enough available space to store all of them. We are working on making the storage part of our collection readily available on request – we have an online catalogue containing all the titles and are still working on categorizing it so as to make it more easily browsable for the public and to make the requested books more easily physically findable to us. We have also built extra storage space closer to ACU to make the waiting time for the storage books eventually shorter. When all of this is in place and running, all 2500 titles will be available upon request.
Regrettably, we have not been able to put this in place as quickly as I had hoped for, but the Barricade collective consists only of a handful of active members, and to make a pile of thousands of books and tens of thousands of journals into a functional library is, as I’m sure you can imagine, a long and tiresome job. We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as we’re ready to respond to requests from the storage. Additionally, our e-mail address (barricade@acu.nl) is always open for suggestions on titles to include in the permanent collection, as well as for new titles to buy (although, for the reasons stated above, our ability to act on those suggestions might take some time). All of this being said, a response to a person asking for a specific title should not have been a flippant “we don’t have it cause I don’t like it,” but rather something more helpful and explanatory of the situation – I will make sure to start an internal conversation about how to handle such inquiries in the future.
This is as much as I can say from my personal standpoint at this time. I’d like to thank you again for pointing out that we are responsible for situations we invite people into and that their safety should be a primary concern - I intend to take this critique very seriously. Internal conversations about racism, sexism and queerphobia within white male-dominated anarchist spaces such as ACU are long overdue, and I, as you, hope that they can really come to the fore in our work in the coming year.
Kindest regards,
#####
First of all we want to explain why we share their response since it was sent as their own opinion and not in Barricades name. This person claims that their collective is working proactively to break down powerstructures in ACU in the broader sense by serious conversations. There are a lot of 'buts' in this claim. For starters is discussion often used to stretch the process before actual action. Many times it results in giving victims of oppression the false idea that they are being taken serious while actually discussion only legitimizes oppression. Why would you discuss with oppressors about their oppressive tactics, they will only try to create space for their ideology and to normalize oppression. You can see it happening on a daily base: alt-right nazi's are being presented as people that only have a strong opinion. Fascist terrorists are being played down to activists. Political leaders that openly support fascist ideas and write guidelines on how to be the biggest sexist are being presented as a young and eager guy that has some pseudo knowledge and sometimes speaks before he thinks. These are just a few examples but we thank them all to "discussion". ACU collective wasn't communicating at all with the people that called them out. NOT ONE single person in that collective asked for the victims perspective. ACU responded with an official bar ban based on lies and which is one of the most aggressive tributes to white supremacy we have seen in a long time. We'll show you exactly where these people are being white supremacists and their proxy's.
This official bar ban is not even official, our co-founder can walk into ACU whenever he wants. To exclude somebody from your bar you have to go through the official way and ask police and gemeente Utrecht to give you permission to give a person a bar ban. But what this ban actually is is the collectives official statement that they are oppressive as shit and also not willing to decolonize. Let's do his step by step:
-First of all this is an official lie because all the reasons they mention are things that happened after our co-founder got the message that he was banned from ACU. The night before this statement our co-founder got on their FB page and said that he would visit ACU with a lot of antiracists because he never heard one single sound from ACU, only the shit they were spreading about him and reached him in various ways. If they never told him it might as well be bluf from his living group or from the ACU employer. ACU knew there was not one valid reason for them to ban him, they must have been stressed because they had to produce valid reasons though failed miserably and just became more oppressive in their attempt.
-they decide for the person they oppressed the tone, location, and moment that he was allowed to self defend against ACU's aggressions. "If you don't fullfill these demands than you are destructive" is what they are actually saying in their barban. This is colonialism 101, how can they not see that themselves? You are litterally deciding for non white people how they should deal with racism they experience.
-Also this barban forgets to mention one tiny piece of information. The thing ACU accuses him of is something they were actually doing themselves. They were spreading shit in public about him behind his back, he even got banned behind his back where our co-founder did it all transparant on social media. They hated that ofcourse because saviorism activism is all about their image and awesomeness.
-The last and most important thing about the barban has to be the part where they even admit they are not decolonial at all and never intended to decolonize thus they use our struggle as bar branding. "Nothing you say will change that" they write and with that they mean that their actions show their best intentions. So these are moslty white people decide that their
intentions are what matters and NOT the impact their actions have on none whites. They won't even consider listening to a none whites perspective. The Europeans believed that they were entitled to colonize indigenous peoples because they brought “civilization" to those peoples, that mattered more than the indigenous perspectives. Nowadays the Europeans and their colonies practice the same methods of white domination by invading countries to bring “peace and democracy". What they really do is enforce white standards on non-white peoples from a false feeling of supremacy, this is called cultural racism. A
true ally asks the marginalized people they support how they can help instead of taking over the struggle and fight it from privileged perspectives. How can you fight an oppression when you don’t know how it is to be oppressed by that oppression? You don’t recognize (micro)aggressions that come with that oppression so how certain are you that you are not defending your privileges? This is white dominance to the core.
The ACU collective is not doing anything to change their mindset, that is obvious when you read the reply we got from the Barricade member. We knew from day one that they will rather destroy people than acknowledge their whiteness. It’s also clearly visible when you look over larger periods. All these oppressed groups they excluded are direct consequences of a repeating behavior. Not once did ACU show that they are willing to change. Never did they ever try to repair what they destroyed for their victims they simply rely on their privileges and their bar branding and their incrowd, mostly students that don’t stay long enough to see the patterns, assure that they can keep doing this over and over again. (White) activist organisations legitimize the collective even if they are aware of the oppressive environment, they do it out of white solidarity which makes them colonizers of our struggle too. You can also tell that ACU collective doesn’t want to decolonize when you see how they handle complaints about their collective and the environment they create. You can see here for example:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1439345849455204&substory_index=0&id=100001394080749
We also provide screenshots in case they remove the thread, they removed a lot of complaints and call outs on their page and blocked the people that posted them.
This example clearly shows that victims of sexual violence have to wait for a response more than 20 weeks only to hear that they didn’t receive anything while the person put in all effort to send a detailed report. ACU’s respons is that they can only fight the symptoms instead of changing the dominant mindset that is present in their space. They say that they don’t want a bouncer at their door but they have bouncers at their door frequently. As the matter of facts they even ask for bouncers when they can colonize the struggle.
This claim needs some explanation and that explanation also shows that ACU didn’t learn but they only became more aggressive in maintaining their branding. To understand how bad their mindset really is you need to know that in the past two of their victims, one queer person and (what a surprise) our co-founder, were part of a living group that squatted an apartment building in Kanaleneiland. They got a lot of
media coverage because it was an action that focussed on gentrification, capitalism and racism. This was the first time that squatters in the Netherlands linked gentrification to racism and it was for this group an important action because of that. They put in a lot of energy to think of a strategy involving media and even court cases. The two victims of ACU collective both had a court case on their name in this action and a lot to lose. The action turned out to be a success because of created jurisprudence, media coverage and their case recently was
discussed in parliament. While these two victims are not welcome in ACU and while ACU did nothing to compensate their violence, the collective went behind their backs to other members of this group that squatted that building. They asked them if they wanted to earn money (for the costs of the court cases about this action), to earn that money they had to be at the door on fridays and collect the donations, they also had to give a presentation about this particular squatting action. We point out again that this was the same squatting action that was on the names of their victims. With this arrangement ACU could profile themselves as pro squatting, anti-racist, anti-gentrification, anti-capitalist and pro radical activism. Sadly these squatters (who no longer squat) agreed, which is an indication of how strong the white solidarity and how horrible solidarity with anti oppression is in this scene of “anarchists"/ squatters/ "antifa". They did this one time and only then went to their ex living group members to ask them how they felt about this. Ofcourse they objected but the legitimation of ACU already happened. They eventually chose to talk about a different action but that’s the same thing because they still legitimize ACU. How horrible are you as an individual or as a collective when you use the action of two victims of your oppressive tactics to create a reputation for yourself that you are supposedly anti-oppressive? They actually banned the persons that were almost the only ones that knew all the details about this action and because of that the only ones that could do a presentation like that.
Let this last part sink for a while and than you can also not come to any other conclusion than that ACU collective is an oppressive bubble of whiteness that colonizes the decolonial struggle for their capitalist bar branding.
We are pretty sure that this story did not end yet and that there will be more to tell. We will update this story when it does and announce the updates. We put extra information in this story under the words marked in a different color, you can read more about ACU's history with oppressive situations and their lack of acknowledgement or willingness to decolonize in the links at the bottom of this story.
Spread the word and take action yourself against these oppressors. Confront them with their violence and use (when you are white) your white privilege to out them and force them to change. If you stay passive in this you are part of the problem, that means that if you consider yourself to be radical/anarchist/anti-oppression that you have a wrong picture in your mind about yourself.
Let’s claim back ACU as a space where we can really work on decolonization.
Publications and call outs about the powerstructures in ACU collective
Update: Sebas (Michael) the ACU "alpha male" came to visit our page to demonstrate how sorry he is and how he wants to decolonize
Update 2: Margherita from ACU collective teies to deny and defend all our claims with ableïsm, gaslighting, classism and derailing.
