Anti-Racist Action
Anti-Racist Action, also known as the Anti-Racist Action Network, is a decentralized network of militant far-left political cells in the United States and Canada. The ARA network originated in the late 1980s to engage in direct action, including political violence and doxxing against rival political organizations on the hard right, mainly violent groups of neo-Nazi skinheads, to dissuade them from further involvement in political activities. Anti-Racist Action described such groups as racist or fascist, or both. Most ARA members have been anarchists, but some have been Trotskyists and Maoists.
The network originated among the hardcore punk skinhead scene in Minnesota among a group known as the Minneapolis Baldies which had been founded in 1987. The network grew and spread throughout North America. The Midwestern United States, particularly the cities of Minneapolis, Chicago and Columbus, were the main hotspot for activity, but notable chapters existed in Portland, Los Angeles, Toronto and elsewhere.
In the early 1990s, the Anti-Racist Action Network began to organize an annual conference, attended by representatives of the official chapters, along with prospective members. These events often feature guest speakers and hardcore punk bands. In the late 1990s, the network was affiliated with a short-lived international grouping which called itself the Militant Anti-Fascist Network and consisted of mostly Europe-based groups such as the UK-based Anti-Fascist Action and various German Antifa factions among others.
Politically, the network has always stated that anti-racism and anti-fascism are its main goals, adopting a non-sectarian approach to party affiliation for chapter members, and there is no pre-requisite to adhere to any particular party line outside of the five "Points of Unity".
History
Origins in Minneapolis hardcore punk scene
Anti-Racist Action originated from the hardcore punk subculture in the United States at Minneapolis, Minnesota, among suburban mostly White American teenagers during the late 1980s. The wider punk subculture had flirted with extreme political symbolism, as a form of "shock value" from its early days, including anarchist, communist and Nazi symbols, though many did not take this seriously. Eventually some bands such as Crass in the United Kingdom began to more seriously integrate an anarcho-communist political ideology into their music and associated anarcho-punk subculture.This spread to the United States and had a strong influence on the Minneapolis hardcore scene. Some of the people involved in this scene created a skinhead street gang, inspired by Nick Knight's book Skinhead, known as the Minneapolis Baldies. The Baldies, who formed in 1986 and regarded themselves as leftist, anti-racist skinheads, frequently engaged in political violence with rival far-right skinheads in Uptown.
The Baldies were associated with bands such as Blind Approach, while their rivals from the East Side, the White Knights, were associated with Mass Corruption. According to Kieran Knutson, they organized a demonstration with the University of Minnesota Black Law Student Association, including Keith Ellison who later became the Democratic Party's Attorney General of Minnesota.
In May 1989, Chicago skinheads formed their own Anti-Racist Action. Chicago ARA activists fought with the neo-Nazi skinheads of Chicago Area SkinHeads. A group called Skinheads of Chicago consisted mostly of black skinheads and adhered to left-wing and black power politics. In 1989, some of them featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, opposing CASH who were guests.
People in the hardcore punk scene became more widely aware of ARA across America due to a nationwide magazine called Maximum Rock and Roll, edited by the counter-culture influencer Tim Yohannan who worked at University of California, Berkeley, which started to promote them from 1987 onwards. At a meeting in Minneapolis on January 14, 1989, with 80 or more anti-racist skinheads from Milwaukee, Kansas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Ohio, they founded a network called "the Syndicate". Other chapters in attendance included the Brew City Skins from Milwaukee, the North Side Crew also in Chicago, and groups in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Lawrence and elsewhere.
1990s spread beyond the Midwest
From the late 1980s into the 1990s, the network began to grow. One of their main rallying points was in relation to the trials of Tom Metzger, a neo-Nazi activist associated then with a group calling itself the White Aryan Resistance. Metzger, originally a "suit-and-tie" far-right talkshow show host, had begun to play a significant role in the creation of a neo-Nazi skinhead subculture in the United States, inspired in part by Ian Stuart Donaldson of Skrewdriver. Many British skinheads like him also joined groups such as the British Movement. This growing network of neo-Nazi skinheads in the United States were in conflict with the far-left leaning skinheads associated with Anti-Racist Action for control of the scene.In 1988, some of Metzger's skinhead followers in Portland belonging to East Side White Pride killed an Ethiopian student, Mulugeta Seraw, and were charged. Metzger was sued and ordered to pay extensive financial damages to Seraw's family. Mic Crenshaw and some other Minneapolis ARA members relocated to Portland and founded the Portland ARA chapter there in response.
Public attention given to this case caused a growth in networks affiliated with ARA. New sections sprung up around the issue, including in Los Angeles, where it was also known as People Against Racist Terror. Some members of Anti-Racist Action in Minneapolis had been affiliated with an anarchist group called the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League.
Marty Williams of Chicago ARA stated that, by 1992, the network had expanded beyond its original subcultural base in the skinhead scene to include students, workers, anarchist punks and older left-wing activists. Anti-Racist Action built up connections to black power groups in places like Chicago, and integrated aspects of third-wave feminism and, as part of this, defended abortion clinics against fundamentalist attacks. According to Bray, ARA was "predominantly anarchist and antiauthoritarian, as reflected in the influential role of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, an unorthodox anarchist group with Trotskyist and New Left influences, with whom they worked closely.
Starting on October 15, 1994, Anti-Racist Action chapters in the Midwest began to organize an annual conference under the banner of the Midwest Anti-Fascist Network. The first took place in Columbus, Ohio. These annual conferences had guest speakers at each event. The first featured Signe Waller, the widow of Michael Waller, a Communist Workers' Party member killed during the Greensboro massacre in 1979. In 1995, Chip Berlet was the guest speaker, along with Rita "Bo" Brown of the George Jackson Brigade as well as Waller.
The network expanded into Canada, particularly Toronto. In 1992, the Heritage Front, at the time the largest neo-Nazi group in Canada, marched on Toronto's courthouse; organising against this catalysed the formation of a local ARA chapter. The Heritage Front supported the German-born Holocaust denier and apologist for the Third Reich, Ernst Zündel, who was the subject of a significant political controversy with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the organized Canadian Jewish community. According to a 1997 article in The Ottawa Times, Anti-Racist Action's Toronto branch built up a close working relationship with B'nai B'rith Canada, a major Jewish advocacy group.
In 1996, B'nai B'rith Canada attempted to secure state funding for Anti-Racist Action through Sam Title, who stated at the time that B'nai B'rith had "worked with them before." Karen Mock, the National Director of B'nai B'rith was pictured at an ARA conference in 1997. After Mock attended the meeting the relationship was subject to the feature in The Ottawa News in 1997, which courted controversy for B'nai B'rith due to ARA's links to violence and "extremism". One of the more notable events involving ARA in Toronto was the trashing of the home of a Heritage Front member on 11 June 1993. According to The Ottawa Times, "as reported by the Canadian Intelligence Service, the ARA has also been linked by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service with the 1995 arson attack on Ernst Zündel's home". Zündel, of German-birth, was in any case deported from Toronto, Canada that year.
In October 1997, ARA Minneapolis and ARA Toronto attended a conference in London, which brought together twenty-two delegates from the emerging international, mostly European, militant anti-fascist movements. There was a significant disagreement between two of the major groups: the Autonome Antifa , a German Antifa delegation based in Göttingen, and Anti-Fascist Action from Britain, who had partly inspired the creation of ARA in the first place. The British-delegation were mostly working-class and argued for a class basis for anti-fascist struggle as well as for physical force against those it defined as fascists. The German AA , who were more based in the middle-class intelligentsia, argued that the movement should be based primarily on a "feminist and anti-imperialist" analysis and downgrade "squadism". At the end of the conference, nine groups followed Anti-Fascist Action into the Militant Anti-Fascist Network, including the North American Anti-Racist Action branches, and the German groups Antifaschistische Aktion Hannover and Aktivisten-Gruppe ROTKÄPPCHEN, and a group from Zaragoza. In 1999, the international collapsed, as Anti-Fascist Action in Britain became essentially defunct.
As part of their wider anti-police sentiment activity, including involvement with Cop Watch, members of ARA were involved in supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted for the 1981 murder of PPD officer Daniel Faulkner. In September 1999 in Baltimore, ARA activists organized a seven-car caravan with a loudspeaker in each, voicing slogans in favour of Mumia Abu-Jamal and handing out leaflets to the general public.