[Xmca-l] My Hometown Minneapolis

[David Kellogg]

I was born in Minneapolis and grew up on both sides of the 3rd Precinct
(which burned down last week in what I have to say was an entirely
proportionate response to the murder of George Floyd).

Minneapolis is a town that's very well known for progressive politics--but
it's also known as one of the most tightly segregated cities in the USA. I
went to elementary school in Prospect Park, which had a chain-link fence
dividing the white part and the black part, and I remember the column of
black kids coming through the single opening in the fence, because it was
halfway to my own elementary school, Sidney Pratt, on Tower Hill.

Minneapolis also has a Police Federation, which is not a "union" but a
paramilitary organization which has a long history of defying the
Democratic-Farmer-Labor government, defending officers who murder black
people (George Floyd, Jamar Clark, Philando Castile)
and financing fly-by-night "Warrior Training" programmes that teach cops
how to use hair-trigger weapons bought army-surplus from overseas
deployments of the US military. Bob Kroll, the head of the federation,
sported a "white power" badge, and called George Floyd a violent criminal
(but he also said pretty much the same thing about Keith Ellison and Barack
Obama).

There's another Minneapolis. In 1934, radicals in the Teamsters Union
launched one of only four general strikes in American history (typical
Minnesota tactics--coal drivers struck in the dead of winter!) It changed
the Teamsters from a craft union to an industrial union. Yesterday a group
of health experts (also in Minneapolis) issued a statement which recognized
the need to mobilize in defense of the most-hard hit section of the
population in this pandemic, but worried a lot about spikes triggered in
mass demonstrations. As I watch events in my hometown from afar, I wonder
if it's not time for a second Minneapolis general strike.

(Mike--I was going to post this on CulturalPraxis as you suggested, but
there's some kind of log-in over there, and I'm not a member....)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Vm2igO0yAaLE3mAkgGfchEv-ca2Lr3AIuwlj_wiMAbd3Rf6_FH82-qjbaLRYQTUEzvRfuw$ 
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Vm2igO0yAaLE3mAkgGfchEv-ca2Lr3AIuwlj_wiMAbd3Rf6_FH82-qjbaLRYQTVxTHuUpw$ 
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