Adventures of an APOC distro.

Last week, I tabled at the London Anarchist Bookfair with my friend, Shabina. We named our distro, "Spit Vicious: An APOC distro," and sat beside our friends from Elm City infoshop (Adam is also an APOC). Anyway, we experienced somewhat typical reactions of white anarchists to an APOC distro and some unbelievable, almost surreal responses. The first thing that was interesting to me was seeing all the dreaded/ folks with mohawks pick up the cultural appropriation and hairstyles zine. Shabina, Adam, and I watched as curious white folks with dreads picked up the zine and leafed through it. Most appeared somewhat intrigued initially, then, as they read through it, they developed an uncomfortable/slightly guilty expression, put the zine down and slowly backed away. We had maybe one really honest and self critical reaction to it. A woman with dreads approached us and admitted that she "probably needed to read this," because she had drunkenly got dreads and it didn't have political significance to her. Another said that she should probably read it, but that she had put so much time and effort into it and didn't want to shave her head. However, the most hilarious (but in the most horrible way) thing happened when a white punk picked up a zine on white anti-racism. He approached us and asked us how much the zines cost. We told him that they were pay what you can. Then he said, "I know it's ghetto, but I only have $0.98 in pennies... It's my crack change." I couldn't believe it and burst out laughing. He said this to three POC, at an APOC table, while buying a white anti-racist zine... The irony couldn't have been more palpable. I don't even think he noticed that we were just like "wtf. wtf." and didn't know if we should have been laughing or crying.

There was also a zine being distro-ed at the AW@L that I found inexcusably offensive on "segregationism," which basically used terms like "homosexism" and said that women's, trans, queer, and POC spaces were being reverse sexist or whatever, and had to confront a woman at the table and ask her if she had read it, and if she had not, why she was distro-ing it (because it pretty much undermined a lot of the other literature that they were distro-ing).

On a positive note, however, I'm becoming more aware of my tumblr famedom. The person who was tabling for Molotov Rag (I think his name was Karol) recognized me and told me that he followed me on tumblr. He then came to my table and bought a bunch of literature, which was cool.

Overall, despite somewhat typical shitty white privileged behaviours (though I had some really positive and good responses from some white people), I had a great experience distro-ing for the first time. Shabina and I are thinking of lots of projects (including nice APOC zines) and having a launch party. Let's hope this things pull through cause, I don't know, Shabina is cool and I feel a certain sense of comfort being able to do POC projects. More on POC stuff and APOC stuff because I had some good conversations with Adam this week. I feel like I have too many things to talk about however, and should do real school work now.