Mourning the Present: Jennifer Grubbs Guest Blog

In this week’s blog post, MQUP author Jennifer Grubbs looks back to the tragic murder of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, shedding light on the troubled and hostile nature of the current American political climate. Through her contextualization of recent civil unrest in America, Grubbs explores the consequences of white nationalism and the Trump presidency, as well as the dangerous realities of systemic racism and the troubling legislation it produces.

Disenchanted by indirect forms of protest designed to work within existing systems of corporate and state power, animal and earth liberation activists have turned instead to direct action. Through detailed ethnographic account, Jennifer Grubbs’ new book Ecoliberation: Reimagining Resistance and the Green Scare takes the reader inside the complicated, intricate world of these powerful and controversial interventions, nuancing the harrowing realities of political repression with the inspiring, clever ways that activists resist. Grubbs provides a captivating and creative glimpse into the world of direct action, animal and earth liberation, and political repression.

A few months from now, on August 12 to be exact, marks the fourth anniversary of the murder of Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heyer was born just three months after me, in 1985, and was 32 when she was killed attending the counter-demonstration. James Alex Fields Jr., drawn to Nazism, traveled to Virginia from a town about 30 minutes from my home in Ohio, to join white supremacists across the U.S. Fields drove the vehicle into the crowd, injuring 19 people and killing Heyer. Under the presidency of Donald Trump, fascists were not made; they were empowered. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric tapped into the racist and anti-Semitic consciousness that undergirds the U.S. He is a trust-fund baby who has transformed himself from a failed real estate tycoon, to a canceled reality television star, to a rebel ex-president that bathes in the swamp he promised to drain.

In my new book, Ecoliberation: Reimagining Resistance and the Green Scare, I move anarchist eco-activists from the margin to the center of anthropology and social movement studies through a decade-long ethnographic account of their resistance to and interpolation of state-sanctioned violence. As an activist from within the movement, I have spent over half my life boycotting, protesting, and engaging in grassroots organizing for ecological and animal liberation. I’ve been yelled at, thrown out of businesses for disruptions, and harassed online. My partner has been arrested and assaulted by police countless times over the years. In the book, I focus on how the construction of ecoterrorism facilitated targeted legislation to silence dissent. I provide a snapshot of the period referred to as the “Green Scare” in which state and federal agencies engaged in covert and overt repression of anarchist eco-activists. The reference to the Red Scare intentionally echoes the counterintelligence and disruption strategies that targeted Communists, Socialists, the Black liberation movement, the American Indian Movement, and so on.

Heyer’s death reminded many of us that state power is not always enforced downward, but rather, it can be most potent when enforced hegemonically from the ground up. The foot soldiers of the state do not have to wear fatigues or brandish legitimized and deputized forms of power. Since Heyer’s murder, Oklahoma, Florida, and Iowa have passed legislation that grant immunity to anyone that drives their vehicle into protestors on the street. Other Republican states have signaled that they, too, would like to provide immunity to racial vanguards that use physical violence to intimidate and assault activists. These pieces of legislation harken back to the Jim Crow era where civilians engaged in overt, public attacks against those who oppose fascism, racism, and white supremacy with impunity. The state relied on its citizens to enforce the ideology of racism, while simultaneously denying the existence of institutionalized racism. This was one of the many hypocrisies Trump propagated. He strategically conflated this existing racism with a fascistic nationalism; relying on citizens to enforce the ideologies that the U.S. could not blatantly promote within the contemporary neoliberal moment. If the green scare marked the construction of the ecoterrorist, Trump’s presidency marked the construction of Antifa-terrorist (shorthand for Anti-Fascist).

As a Jewish person, I commemorate the death of a loved one by lighting a Yahrzeit candle at sunset on the eve of their anniversary date. The candle, made of a simple white wax and housed in a plain glass jar, will burn for 24 hours. Yahrzeit, the Yiddish word for “time of the year,” marks a period of reflection where we connect with family and friends to share stories and memories of the person whom we are mourning. Together, we recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, a blessing that honors the dead by focusing on the future. The prayer doesn’t mention death or mourning, but instead asserts that we hope for peace in times ahead. While I prepare to honor Heyer’s death by this Jewish custom, I reflect on what the future holds. I grapple with the omnipresent nationalism littered all over my town that is used as a shield to mask white supremacy, Nazism, and xenophobia. I ache for the mothers whose babies cannot safely walk the streets because police and vigilantes deem their Black bodies less valuable than my own. I celebrate Heather’s courage for showing up that night, facing these individuals who were united by hatred. I honor her death and hold the state accountable for producing foot soldiers like Fields to do their bidding in their name.

Jennifer D. Grubbs is assistant professor of anthropology and the Prison Justice Initiative convener at Antioch College. She is the author of Ecoliberation: Reimagining Resistance and the Green Scare.