No justice, no peace...right?

What has resistance looked like in the past...what can it look like now?

We have been hurting, for years. The United States has made it its primary affair to inflict violence upon black people since they first arrived, in an all-too familiar history. However, the oppression writ large must not be construed as faceless, nor as impersonal: these institutional forces have intimately inflicted pain to this day. Local police forces with origins rooted in slave patrols and union-busting, and invigorated by militarization authorized by the Omnibus Safe Streets Act of 1968 harass, humiliate, beat, murder each of us and all of us, while “tough on crime” legislation passed at the state and federal level throws us into jails and prisons (and are not working for us), all of which we see and feel as individuals and as people, and which are inflicted upon us by institutions made up of individuals; after all, George Floyd knew his killer.    

George Floyd’s murder by members of the Minneapolis Police Department, and their subsequent violent response to peaceful, non-aggressive protests, proved to be the final straw which broke the camel’s back; this communal sharing of individual pain has erupted into a righteous anger, and into action. Insurrections have sprung in cities across the country, property destruction serving as material political speech for a tired people revolting against the propertied and the police who serve to protect their interests. We are not destroying our own communities: we do not own the property against which we inveigh, and the local precinct building or Target (which donated to said precinct) hardly represent bastions of the body politic--protesters are doing well to take advantage of these times to build power and fight for justice by any means necessary. 

Importantly, though, and I realize I am re-emphasizing this: this shit is not new. If you’ve been at marches, you’ll hear chants of state murder victims’ names spanning entire decades, see activists who have been working as long as they’ve been alive, abolitionists continuing a legacy of action since slavery. We, the people, have been outside for forever, and to what avail? 

America is an apartheid state, coming out of a slave state (which hasn’t fully left our rear view mirror, instead enjoying its reinvention in our carceral approach to justice and criminalization of black + brown people, homeless people, trans people). While its conceit revolves around the faux revolution of colonizers against the imperial power which sent them there and the premise of democracy for said colonizers, the state has only particularly responded to the will of its white + propertied members and was built on indigenous and black genocide. If America seems like a fair or free country, it’s awfully specific in its intentions with this equity and liberty; the chosen people of white supremacy bask in its legacy while poor and working folks of all colors fail to find a foothold, and black people find their fingers stepped on by a clambering educated and elite class reaping the benefits of a meritocracy which perpetuates a deepening chasm between the America black people experience, and the America accessible to everyone else. 

The framing of what we consider our state to exist + interact as is important, both in how we see its relation to us and how we lobby for change in said relation: amidst research and popular opinion suggesting that peaceful/non-disruptive protest begets the utmost political efficacy, the nature of the efficacy must be considered. What is the goal, and what is the context for the peace? What, if anything, is threatened by the peaceful movement? Moreover, what is the underlying + threatening counterpart to the peaceful movement? The historical context to Martin, Medgar, SNCC, and their ilk, after all, is a self-protecting, violently resisting counterpart which coexisted and superseded this powerfully (in)effectual appeal to a public that largely did not care: the Black Power movement (with the attendant Black Panthers, MOVE, Young Lords, Nation of Islam, Blackstone Rangers, and other self-defense + retribution oriented organizations), as well as a militant and decolonial left composed of the Students for a Democratic Society (and the Weather Underground after them), the American Indian Movement, and subsidiary outgrowths. 

These were, both in reputation and at times in effect, domestic terror organizations tasked with wringing liberation from the grimy, grisled hands of a government which ran psyops, misinformation and counterintelligence at home, and campaigns of proxy wars, regime coups, and exploitative market power abroad to collapse the people’s power. The Civil Rights Movement accomplished an end to de jure segregation and an institution of civil and voting rights for all (which are constantly infringed upon; white people are some habitual line steppers) with civil disobedience through negotiations with the state under the threat of violent resistance to the state from the less palatable revolutionaries who existed alongside them. And for what? Schools and housing are as segregated as they were (and are continuing to segregate), government resource allocation is as lopsided as ever, police continue to murder and brutalize as they did, lynchings are back in effect (and were never designated a hate crime in the first place). Are things better than they were? Absolutely; the ceiling for black people seems to have risen. But the floor is in hell still.  

Is the goal to force an obstinate government to an obsequiousness, to call for acquiescence to the black will? Or are people agitating for more: resistance, removal, revolution, reconstruction. People are tired of begging for master’s scraps, piecemeal puzzling together a haphazard democracy for the subjugated. The motivation is different, and ‘the fire next time’ needs to be the fire this time. It’s awfully tiring, seeking askance of a colonial power and segregated mastermind time and time again. What was it Malcolm said? Or was it Jeremiah Wright? The chickens will come home to roost. Black people have been more than gracious; “niggas is tired of grabbing shit out the stores, and the next time it’s a riot it’s gonna be...bloodshed...I don’t think America knows that, I think America thinks we were just playing, and it’s gonna be some more playing, but, it ain’t gonna be no playing. It’s gonna be murder...it’s gonna be like Nat Turner, 1831, up in this motherfucker”. That came from ‘Pac, a feature interview on Mortal Man with pre-recorded audio from 1996.

We should view the United States (both as devised and as exists) in the same lens as our fellow apartheid states South Africa and Israel, with the slavery-bound history it maintains, as the foremost and only lasting colony-turned-colonizer, which must be resisted by all means. Mandela was a terrorist; so too were John Brown, Fidel Castro. Africa shook free European overseers by and large through violent struggle; the Haitian Revolution, wherein the enslaved fought and murdered their masters, inspired the enslaved in the United States to emancipate themselves. Nat Turner was a fucking hero. What is terrorism to an unjust state that terrorizes you everyday, a system of capital which denies you access while taking advantage of your body, your mind, your will, all to own the final product of the fruits of the breaking of your continence? A true reckoning with the violence it beats into you, not a payback but a method of instilling fear in the afeared, not a conversation but a show of force to demonstrate that you’re done fucking around, not a truth and reconciliation while allowing the apartheid to continue but a bringing to bear of the powers whose violence on you is legitimized by virtue of its own brutality.