NOlympians by Jules Boykoff

Author:Jules Boykoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2020-03-27T21:55:19+00:00

Olympics / Non-Olympics Strategy

While the group targets the Olympics and is called NOlympics LA, opposing the Games is part of a larger enterprise. The group is intensely involved in ongoing struggles across the city that are not directly related to the Olympics. The group’s Olympics/non-Olympics strategy helps keep ties to DSA-LA strong, bolsters relations with coalition partners, and opens up possibilities for recruitment. It also raises questions about how much the NOlympics struggle is truly about the Olympics.

“Most of us came to this with the understanding that the Olympics are a symptom of capitalism,” Anne Orchier told me. “We are targeting these larger structures and ideologies, and the Olympics are a way of understanding and framing that, a concrete thing to organize around.” She added, “I think it’s very clear from how we talk about the Olympics and how we organize that our opposition is grounded in opposing these systems and their effects on frontline and marginalized communities whether the Olympics happen or not.”113 For NOlympics, the Games are a tool to pierce the scrim of Garcetti’s liberalism, thereby illuminating the gap between the symbolic and the material.

In doing so, NOlympics bangs away at the idea that capitalism has unleashed a persistent, low-boil attack against working-class people. Rob Nixon’s theorization of “slow violence” is apt here, “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”114 Although Nixon focuses on ecological phenomena like climate disruption and deforestation, the process of gentrification, as a wedge of displacement and dispossession, exemplifies “slow violence,” a sort of cruel accrual, more humdrum than sensational, more gradual than instantaneous. This is an incremental violence of accretion that has cataclysmic ramifications that shatter communities. It’s brass-knuckle dispossession for the poor, and what Sharon Zukin calls “pacification by cappuccino” for the gentrifiers.115

The nexus of housing, homelessness, and gentrification is a window into the crisis of social reproduction in urban centers across the US. Gentrification is not some magical enterprise driven by a colorblind market, but an urban process that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s out of an accumulation of decisions, choices, and responses by those in power. Folks don’t “lose” their homes; they’re forced from them by people, by policies, by institutions. Peter Moskowitz reminds us that this is an intensely classed process when he writes, “Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.”116 Gentrification is also blatantly racialized. “Land is in fact a place where economics and ideologies come together,” writes Andrea Gibbons of Los Angeles, “and where an intensely racist past lives on forcefully into our present.”117 As such, gentrification is a form of “slow violence” that facilitates white supremacy. It requires intersectional analysis and opens up opportunities for intersectional activism.

Under contemporary

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