is listening to Ambrosian chants on Pandora, and folding up Market Anarchy & Anarchist Classics zines for shipment. This month: Kevin Carson & David S. D’Amato, Hebert Spencer, and an awesome photo featuring a school of fish and a shark.

And if it was, it is poorly written.

Well, you know, if Sheldon writes that he thinks something is “appropriate” as a tactic and you respond to him by concluding that he thinks it is “inappropriate,” or if he says that “a sit-in at a private lunch counter” categorically is “a trespass,” and then goes on to defend sit-ins at private lunch counters, and then you interpret him as “not allowing trespass against the private property operated by bigots,” then I’m not really sure how much better writing could possibly have helped you.

He also believes (this is the point of the closing paragraph that I assume you’re referring to when you inaccurately summarize Sheldon’s view as being motivated by “economic reasons”) that in the actual historical context of the Jim Crow South, white store owners — as the economic beneficiaries of massive racist violence, and the use of this violence to dispossess black workers and suppress competition from anti-racist alternatives — may not have had any really legitimate claims of ownership in the stores that they controlled. Now this is it seems to me an interesting view and in fact it is exactly the view that you claim to think an anti-capitalist Anarchist ought to hold — that the “private property” operated by bigots is (at least in that historical context) not in fact owed any respect, that their private property claims in that context have little or no ethical significance for the kinds of protest you can direct against them. Yet you interpret him as holding exactly the opposite.

He does not hold the opposite. But his defense of nonviolent trespass is in any case not based on that claim; it would hold up even if he rejected it. It is in that sense a broader defense of the legitimacy of sit-in protests and similar forms of trespass than the one that you offer. He spends the entire article up to that very paragraph arguing that even when a sit-in at a private lunch counter does count as a trespass against the legitimate owner of the counter, that’s still perfectly compatible with the kind of nonviolent confrontation that Sheldon (following SNCC) is defending. If it turns out that there wasn’t even a trespass worth discussing — because the “owner” did not really have legitimate proprietary rights over the counter — then that’s just gravy.

Perhaps you think that this is not clear from what Sheldon wrote, and if it’s what he meant, he should have said so more clearly. No doubt we could all be clearer. But it seems to me that when he explicitly tells you that he’s OK with trespass as a protest tactic, when he phrases this in the form of a simple question-answer (“Isn’t a sit-in at a private lunch counter a trespass? — It is.”), when he states that his argument there is not dependent on, but is only “buttressed” by, the paragraph that follows, etc., and you come away from this with the conclusion that you did, that sounds to me more like motivated misreading than it does like bad writing.

He says that a sit-in is an appropriate response to segregated businesses, and then in the first sentence of the next paragraph he also categorically states that a sit-in is a deliberate form of trespass. Thus he states that trespass is an appropriate response to segregated businesses. Your interpretation of the conclusion in his article seems to be exactly the opposite of what he actually wrote in that article. Will you admit that this reading of yours was mistaken?

The question of how sit-in protesters should have responded when threatened with arrest for their trespassing is a separate question from the question of whether the trespass and the sit-in itself was justified. Perhaps sometimes the right thing to do is something that will get you arrested; and perhaps sometimes you ought to accept arrest as a consequence of doing the right thing. Now Sheldon says that the students in the sit-in movement were right to sit in, and also that they were right to accept arrest without resisting it by force. That is “nonviolence” without a doubt, and there’s a conversation to be had about that. Maybe Anarchists should reject that position. Maybe that position is wrong. But right or wrong it is a position that is being completely misrepresented if you claim that he is criticizing the use of “trespass” as a tactic. Rather the position being defended is that the sit-in activists were right to trespass, and also to accept arrest, when it came to that, without violent resistance.

Now again, maybe you have a problem with the last half of that position. But we should at least keep in mind that that half of the position that Sheldon is defending was you know, for good or for ill, the considered tactical and ethical position adopted by people in the sit-in movement at the time, who did, after all, think they had some good reasons not to use violence in their resistance. (This is not incidentally the same thing as being “totally passive,” unless you think that the only way not to be passive is to be violent instead. But you can hardly expect advocates of nonviolent resistance to agree with you.) Sheldon is here taking his lead from and defending the chosen tactics of the social movement, not criticizing or policing their behavior. Now there’s an important and perfectly valid discussion to be had about nonviolence in different contexts, but I would like to suggest as gently as possible that your position on this is hardly the only one that might possibly qualify as Anarchistic. And that I have some trouble seeing much coming of any conversation on the topic if it is going to proceed from a presumption that a bunch of white activists and commentators would know better than SNCC how to put on an appropriately anti-racist sit-in.

I think you should re-read the paragraph you just quoted from Sheldon’s article. It’s specifically an endorsement and a defense of the deliberate use of trespass as a tactic for anti-racist social activism. Not a rejection of it.

The claim that Sheldon is “talking about how it would not have been appropriate” when the first sentence in the quoted passage directly and specifically refers to “my inclusion of sit-ins in the list of appropriate nonviolent forms of protest,” seems like a pretty bizarre misreading.

So what do you call it when the “social media marketing” for a show actively disengages you and discourages from wanting to keep up with it? Because every time I find a large cluster of Walking Dead fans talking on the Internet, I can’t help but thinking that really I don’t want to be part of a “social network” with the people (*) who seem to take the scenario and the constant sociopathic behavior of the principals more as some kind of fantasy wish-fulfilment than as a horror show.

(* And when I say “people,” it’s really about 99% dudes specifically.)

Occupy Chicago march downtown at Chase Tower. Placards, picket and street theater on financial control and deformation of higher ed. Some affinity groups headed on next to Fifty Five E Jackson to confront DePaul U administration and protest upcoming tuition hikes.