Meanwhile… in your printer!

Hello everyone!
We finally have a Print and Play and Tabletop Simulator mod for the Quickstart mode of the Meanwhile System! This is only the six most basic characters that we felt eased new players into how the rest of the system played. If you were ever fortunate enough to find us running a demo of the game, you’ll probably be very familiar with these squads and how they operate.

For those of you who are eager to see the breadth of what we put together (characters, maps, scenarios, etc.), we will be posting smaller chunks of that content over the next couple months as they are transitioned thematically, likely in two-week bits. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have opened up a call for new playtesters, as we have a few games in active development that we can always use new eyes on. If this Quickstart content has you excited for more, please join our community and help us make this the best it can be!

Before we link to the Print and Play content, as part of our ongoing education, we’re continuing to read material from Angela Davis, this time from an interview conducted by Frank Barat, and collected in Freedom is a Constant Struggle:

What does it say about the Black civil rights movement that more than fifty years after MLK and Malcolm X, the targeting of Black people, Latinos/Latinas, is still happening? Does that mean that the Black civil rights movement has failed or that it’s a continuous struggle?

The use of state violence against Black people, people of color, has its origins in an era long before the civil rights movement—in colonization and slavery. During the campaign around Trayvon Martin, it was pointed out that George Zimmerman, a would-be police officer, a vigilante, if you want to use that term, replicated the role of slave patrols. Then as now the use of armed representatives of the state was complemented by the use of civilians to perform the violence of the state.

So we don’t have to stop at the era of the civil rights movement, we can recognize that practices that originated with slavery were not resolved by the civil rights movement. We may not experience lynchings and Ku Klux Klan violence in the same way we did earlier, but there still is state violence, police violence, military violence. And to a certain extent the Ku Klux Klan still exists.

I don’t think this means that the civil rights movement was unsuccessful. The civil rights movement was very successful in what it achieved: the legal eradication of racism and the dismantling of the apparatus of segregation. This happened and we should not underestimate its importance. The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.

Economic racism continues to exist. Racism can be discovered at every level in every major institution—including the military, the health care system, and the police.

It’s not easy to eradicate racism that is so deeply entrenched in the structures of our society, and this is why it’s important to develop an analysis that goes beyond an understanding of individual acts of racism and this is why we need demands that go beyond the prosecution of the individual perpetrators.

It reminds us obviously of South Africa, where legally apartheid was ended, but an economic apartheid, even sociological apartheid, is still in place. When we were in Cape Town for the Russell Tribunal, I was shocked to see people of color waiting every morning at the corner of the street to be picked up by employers who deemed to pay them three dollars an hour, I was horrified by the ghettos and shantytowns. You drive around the nicest beaches of Cape Town and a few minutes later it’s like being in Mumbai or something.

Well, what’s also interesting in South Africa is the fact that many of the positions of leadership from which Black people were of course totally excluded during apartheid are now occupied by Black people, including within the police hierarchy. I recently saw a film on the Marikana miners, who were attacked, injured, and many killed by the police. The miners were Black, the police force was Black, the provincial head of the police force was a Black woman. The national head of the police force is a Black woman. Nevertheless, what happened in Marikana was, in many important respects, a reenactment of Sharpeville. Racism is so dangerous because it does not necessarily depend on individual actors, but rather is deeply embedded in the apparatus…

And once you’re in the apparatus…

Yes. And it doesn’t matter that a Black woman heads the national police. The technology, the regimes, the targets are still the same. I fear that if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist…

The “bad apples” type of…

…who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Chapter 2: Ferguson Reminds Us of the Importance of a Global Context
Interview by Frank Barat in Brussels (September 21, 2014)
Interviewer’s words in Bold, Angela Davis in Italics

We have our Quickstart content located here, which includes everything except the 6d4, 6d8, and 6d12 physical dice. It includes a printable sticker sheet if you want to be very fancy with your dice, or a simple conversion chart if you prefer to leave your dice uncovered. If you have additional questions, would like to utilize the TTS mod, or are eager to see more content, please fill out the playtesting form and we’ll get you in the conversation!

Thank you all for your interest and support!
–Smith at the Forge