Per request:
Bloc for everyone!
Or how I misspent my late teens & 20s.
Caveat: I learned bloc tactics from East Coast and West Coast activists, who learned from European environmental and anti-racist activists. And I learned a long time ago, as these things go.

BLOC EVOLVES.

A.
Bloc is a tactic, not a group. I first heard bloc tactics described as passive-aggressive resistance — More direct than pure sit-in/die-in, without being aggressors. The tactic INTENDS to put your most resilient people as a defense line, because your cohort has fragile people.

2. (Recall, I come into this via HIV activism. LOTS of fragile people to protect.)

3. I’ve seen the bloc tactic used everywhere from anti-nuke protests to hardcore environmental work.
And by people who aren’t even remotely allies.
That’s because it’s a TACTIC.
The bloc’ers amongst Pud Bois are not the same *people* bloc’ing for peace & justice.

4. They just wear the same color.
I shall now mumble something something entitled pearl clutching something something over-reacting to incomplete knowledge & prejudice something something. Uh-huh.

5. The job of bloc is to hold the line when the cops get aggressive.

Note how I phrased that. No if — it will happen.

And note that protesters have WAY more to lose than cops, so it’s vanishingly rare for protesters to throw the first punch/rock/bottle.

6. Ideally, bloc’ers can articulate this:

Bloc exists to hold police accountable.
Bloc reminds cops that cops are citizens first, subjects of the law first, and cops’ authority and ability are granted by all the citizens.
Bloc are the watchers who watch the watchmen.

7. (The watchmen, being emotional teenagers, resent this. This being the problem with our police selection and training programs. We select for unquestioning authoritarianism, incuriosity & emotional stunting.)

8. When an aggression comes from behind the bloc line, it’s almost always either a provocateur (impatient plainclothes) or one of the cops’ fellow traveler authoritarians.

For my generation, it was skinheads & SovCits.

Same shit, different name.

B.

Bloc need not be black; it’s black because
i) almost every person owns plain black clothing or can obtain some very cheaply, and
ii) black clothes mostly match.
It’s entirely practical — the idea is for everyone to be visually similar so it’s harder to ID any single person.

10. (I did white, then pink bloc - black’s too hot to wear in a desert summer, so we used painters’ cotton coveralls. When they got stained, we had a dye party.)

11. This is because protesting is risky.
It’s why we’re saying don’t show pictures of faces.
Facial recognition gets used against protesters.
Getting your pic in the paper for an AIDS action often meant getting fired or worse; now, if it goes online, it means getting targeted.

12. Cops target women, trans folk, POC. Cops grope boobs, just to try to make the men beside us react, so the cops had an excuse.

(Cops have not improved since then.)

If everyone wears the same color, hair covered, faces covered, all in layers? It protects everyone.

13. They aim for piercings (back when piercings were still rare-ish in the general population) and try to tear them.

(Pro-tip: “hold my earrings” is necessary. And any other piercings, including tongue & genital. Use soft silicone if your mouth. You don’t want a cracked tooth.)

C.

A bloc of anyone, all alike, is also intimidating.
It’s why the cops are geared up in identical riot gear, after all.
They want to be anonymous and obscured.
(Also see: mirror shades and the magically appearing electrical tape that always seems to cover badge numbers...)

15. It is not a crime to be perceived as intimidating!

Nor is it a crime to have a self-identity that’s a shorthand for the role a group is taking.

Note that media wear fluorescent vests with PRESS, street medics wear their own vests.
This is on purpose.

D.

Bloc should have some training.
A bloc group should practice and hang out together, so they trust each other and know what to do.

(The downside of the relatively peaceful late 90s until OWS? Some knowledge didn’t transfer/stagnated.)

17. Should doesn’t mean is, so some blocs end up being a lot more ad hoc than others.

We should see organization ramping up FAST.

(If you are a fast healing young’un with 6 friends... allow me to point at this: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/  )

18. I had some training, back when anarchist bookstores were more common than they are now. This stuff evolves. It’s ok!
But Bloc is local.
And it’s personal.
It’s a squad who trusts each other.
If this catches your eye, you will need to prove yourself trustworthy to be trusted.

19. This is stupid simple operational security: if you rush up to an established group like a badly trained Labrador and tell them you want to fuck up cops?

They’re going to send you for a bucket of prop wash.
And a breastplate stretcher.
And an ID10T form.

20. They will think you’re a provacateur! DUH. Because you’re acting like one.

Be cool. And don’t be a dick.

But do be reliable — show up where you said you’ll be, keep coming back.

Extend trust and it will be extended to you.

E.
Bloc knows they’re likely to get arrested. They’re thwarting cops’ will, even if they’re not doing anything specifically provocative, because as a front line, they keep cops away from the more vulnerable people.
So Bloc recruits people who can best handle getting arrested.

22. The reality is: a white suburban dude has social privilege — Likely more access to a lawyer, more capital, more likely to be released without charges, less likely to have poverty-based warrants (like failure to appear on a fixit-ticket), less likely to need maintenance meds.

23. Used to be, bloc groups got some training for arrests.
(Again, in the days of the anarchist bookstore, these local resources were easier to coordinate.)
The point was to put the people least likely to be harmed — physically, economically — by an arrest at the front.

24. If middle aged white ladies want to set up our Karen blocs, let’s roll.
Right now.
That’s what we SHOULD be doing.
We have all this unearned privilege, we should be spending it, protecting people who are more vulnerable than us.

F.

Bloc is the major infiltration target because cops have no imagination.

Truly: the most dangerous people in a protest are the nice Quaker ladies who make sure Food Not Bombs, the bail team and the street puppeteers all show up. Friends’ Service knows EVERYONE.

26. But that’s fuckin’ work, and cops can’t do this work.
And they can’t fake it.
They don’t know how to be people committed to peace, because if they did, they wouldn’t be cops.
Cops want easy targets, and a bunch of young’uns on the edge of bonehead?
VERY EASY TARGETS.

27. (Which is not to say cops don’t *try* to infiltrate Peace & Justice centers and Friends Service Committees. They do, they’re just very bad at it & turd in punch bowl obvious. Again: if they come to believe in peace & justice, they can’t stay the kind of cops who infiltrate.)

28. Bloc groups know they’re infiltration targets, so they’re suspicious! And this is not personal towards you, it’s just sensible.

Object lesson time!
So you know, a thing bloc groups *used* to do, and should probably start again?... spontaneous community clean-up.

29. It was better in the 90s, but even back then, cops would decide this was the day they wanted to crack skulls.

And you can tell — they show up in the riot gear.

You can smell the testosterone rolling off their body odor on days when they wake up with a hair across their ass.

30. And so... Bloc groups almost always each carried a couple trash bags in their pockets.
If the cops were in a bad mood, you kept your distance and picked up every damn piece of litter you could spot.
Because the goal is to ALWAYS fail to give the cops what they wanted.

31. Remember: Bloc is a passive-aggressive tactic.
It’s about physical and emotional territory denial.
If you’re bloc-ing, you’re denying the cops access to your fragile people.
And you’re making them show that they are the provocateurs.

Sometimes, you won’t be perfect. It’s ok.

G)

Bloc takes the blame.

I swear that white liberals have ALWAYS gotten high on the idea of passive resistance & demonstrations as THE FIX.

(The Women’s March was a *demonstration* — it showed we technically HAVE this power. Our mistake was we didn’t *exercise* it.)

33. Passive resistance goes hand-in-hand with more active resistance. (Well, socially distant together.)

Passive resistance & demonstrations alone do not create social change.
At min, you need legal, organization & electoral activists, & likely need the passive-aggressive ones.

34. We’re past the demonstration stage. By two+ years, but none of us WANTED to be past the tipping point.
It’s here — we have a lot of people who now literally have very little left to lose. Jobs are failing, savings are failing, the only thing left is the hope of justice.

35. The ones at the front line will take the blame, because it keeps occasional demonstrators safer, and out of the work of an Occupation, or a sit-in (or actually caring for dying people).

And since the Bloc tactic *exists* to be a visible shock absorber taking a beat down...

36. ...well, white liberals tend to shit their pants and point at the ones who are bloody, in their white, liberal, just-world fallacy way, so they can blame Bloc for getting beat. Without ever examining the context of Bloc defending the vulnerable from worse.

37. White liberals have had Officer Friendly drilled into their heads since they were barely verbal. They may know intellectually that cops are a danger to all, but early socialization rises & they side with the bullies, hoping if they suck up, they won’t be next.
So. Whatever.

38. Occasional demonstrators showing up and trying, even if they fade away when it starts getting hairy... It’s really fine.
They showed up. A few stay. A few become committed.
Don’t worry about them. Worry about knowing who is on your bail team and what your medic needs.

39. That’s the intro to bloc.

(I am now bail team & legislative team. I have a duty to my clients to not lose my license. My job is to sit here with my phone, and come bail you out. We will stop for takeout on the way home and process the trauma when you’ve had some sleep.)

40. Homework, if you’re in the streets:

Hong Kong is your model.

They are seriously the best organized protest I’ve ever seen. They’re SO good at this, and they, too, are in an existential battle. https://hongkongfp.com/2019/08/09/explainer-frontline-protesters-toolkit-evolved-hong-kongs-long-summer-dissent/

You, six friends, ,, — that’s how it starts.