Expecting the Unacceptable: We Cannot Live Like This [with audio]

CLICK HERE to hear audio of this piece on the podcast ALL THOUGHT IS BLACK THOUGHT 

What we have come to expect is something we cannot accept. 

It is actually quite simple: We just want to be free. That's more than emancipation, more than some white people saying "you're free" while white people as a whole keep us at the mercy of their whimsical fears and fantasies, our lives and freedom hanging in the balance of their perennial electoral shifts and policy pronouncements and pinky promises from politicians that change is coming.

The choice has always been clear: Build a just society or suffer the massive wildfires of resistance to injustice. The only reason it is made any more complicated than that is because nonblack people want to compromise our demands for freedom. They want to maintain an unsalvageable system that keeps their lives mattering more than ours. So it falls to us to create the justice they choose not to create despite all their pronouncements that "all men are created equal."

And, yes, there will be justice because there is trauma, concentrated and compounded like interest on a debt that grows like cancer within Black communities, a debt that rightly belongs to nonblack communities and the unethical power structure that relies on our pain and death. 

Trauma wants justice, even if it must mask itself for generations or centuries to get it. It will come out. The violence in the streets so far is but a small and bittersweet taste of that yearning for justice that seethes within our veins. 

If they expect us to "get over it," to live with this weight we carry for them, with all its unfairness, the very minimum they can do is not complain when we tell them to accept, with the same unfairness, that we have to burn their shit down and send cops to their graves occasionally. It's clear they just won't have it any other way. It's clear that there are no nonviolent ways to make Black lives matter.

But, of course, it will never even itself out. We come out with the worse end of the bargain. And that's not just because they have the advantages of guns and germs and steel on their side. It's because in order to get a good diagnosis of the problem we're dealing with, we have to bear witness to horrific, traumatic events that show us just what we mean to the society and the world we must call our home. And it absolutely tears us up inside, even though we also have to look. Even though to look is to be killed, to literally have our life expectancies shortened, by the amassed collective trauma of what we see, we can also die from not looking, from hiding.

What we have come to expect is something we cannot accept. And this is nothing new for us Black people, but it bears repeating.

We are so used to the terror of antiblackness that some strange balance of the worst options-- exposing ourselves to COVID-19 and right-wing violence or staying inside in brooding silence as we watch the videos of our murder played on repeat over 24-hour news cycles-- is the closest many of us get to what justice might look like. It's not much of a choice. It never has been.

Yes it is traumatic for us Black people to witness police and others terrorizing and murdering us again and again.

Yes, i am sick and tired of seeing it.

Yes, i am sick and tired of hearing about it. 

Yes, i am sick and tired of it being a reality. 

Yes, i am sick and tired of being sick and tired-- as Mama Fannie Lou Hamer said it. 

Yes, it is even more terrifying just to know that it happens whether we see it or not.

Yes, i am tired of living in constant trauma.

Yes, the videos of our murders and assaults at the hands of police and others traumatize us in lasting ways.

Yes, our ancestors were traumatized by direct, unmediated violence. 

Yes, trauma is a tool our oppressors use to sap our resolve to fight, and it has been since the slaveholders had us whipped in front of all the Black people on the plantation and since the lynchers dumped our mutilated corpses in our Black communities.

And yes, we can become saturated with trauma in ways that weaken our struggle.

But yes, trauma is also the only thing that has ever driven us to truly fight back.

Yes, we forget the names and faces of those whose deaths do not traumatize us.

Yes, elder Mamie Till said, "i want the world to see what they did to my boy!" And yes, we have never forgotten her son, Emmett Till, because when we saw what those white women and men did to him-- with impunity-- we were traumatized, and we struggled harder because Mamie Till made that sacrifice-- opening the casket and showing her son's horrifically battered and decomposed corpse to the press and the world-- a sacrifice that she and others should never have had to make. "I want the world to see..."

Yes, Black life is a constant state of navigating through trauma after trauma -- if it ain't one thing, it's another.

No, i don't know an effective nonviolent way for us to address this problem. 

Life is full of contradictions and compromises that we have to circumvent, resolve, or succumb to. That's true for everybody always. But Black life has special contradictions. The society in general and the world just expects, and tries to force us to accept, that things are one way when we know they do not have to be that way.

We find out that a brother, Ahmaud Arbery, was killed by two white men while he was jogging through a neighborhood in south Georgia. And we already know the drill. We are somewhat used to it, even though we know it is horribly wrong that two white men, a father-son duo, hunt and murder a Black jogger while another white man assisted them and recorded video in a kind of lynching bonding ritual. We're not that surprised about the fact that this shit is happening, but we also are that surprised that this shit goes down the specific ways it does. The trauma is in the details.

And then, before we can process that, we find out that a sister, Breonna Taylor, was killed by police, who stormed into her home in Louisville, Kentucky, and shot her to death while she slept. The police later realized they had the wrong address. And to top it all off they made a half-assed incident report that didn't even list her fatal injuries. And, to date, no charges have been filed.

And then, before we can process that, we find out that another Black man, George Floyd, has been choked to death by police in Minneapolis. One of the three officers who murdered brother Floyd was kneeling on his neck, his hands in his pockets, looking nonchalant about the fact that he was taking a life. And seeing the little details like that is traumatic in ways we cannot forget or forgive.

And then, before we can process that, we find out that another Black man, Tony McDade, was murdered by police in Tallahassee, Florida. And we cannot even find enough details in the news to be traumatized by, because he was a transgender man who struggled with mental illness, and therefore marginalized within the community as well as by virtue of being Black in an antiblack world.

And just as we begin to learn the details of McDade's life, we learn of the police murder of David McAtee-- aka the Barbeque Man of Louisville-- at a protest in a community where he was known for serving free food to cops.

And, of course, the present COVID-19 crisis and street protests carry their own specific contradictions for Black people. Police treat us like criminals for not wearing masks in public during a global pandemic in which not even hospitals can get masks, while the same police distribute masks to white people who are violating the social distancing and public mask laws. We are treated like criminals for wearing masks in public during a global pandemic because the masks supposedly make us look like criminals, unlike when white people wear the same goddamn masks. 

And then we find that a press pass means we can report on the protests against police abuse of Black people-- but if we're Black, it means we'll be abused by the police on national television while we're reporting on protests against police abuse of Black people.

Add those contradictions to the ongoing contradictions Black people have been enduring already, which boil down to this: Our lives are not mourned by the larger society when we die, and the society doesn't adapt to make our deaths less likely. 

We are forced to live in neighborhoods that kill us. We are killed in our own homes by police sworn to "protect and serve." We are killed (with impunity) while standing in a public place by those who are supposed to protect and serve us. We are arrested for breaking into our own homes. We accept a ride home from a lifelong acquaintance who lynches us. We have neighbors who shun us in moments of need, or shun our children during emergencies, or shoot us when we ask them for help. We go to schools that miseducate us, and school districts have us arrested for trying to get our kids into districts that give a higher-quality education. We go to hospitals that don't listen to even the richest of us about our health conditions, that have us arrested for trying to get lifesaving care and thereby cause our death. We send our children to a reputable children's hospital for something as basic as a tonsillectomy only to find ourselves praying the child will live when the hospital removes her from life support. Our children are prosecuted as adults. We get affirmed for the ways we appear to be something other than Black. When we try to affirm our own Black beautiful bodies, we are branded unruly and get kicked out of school, or fired from our jobs, or forced to cut off our beautiful locks that we have worked hard to grow. We elect Black presidents but remain unfree. We know we are human but must compromise with a world that is just as sure that we are not.

For Black people, the contradiction "Black life" has a special kind of sticking power because the non-mattering of our lives has been coded into the order of the modern world since its inception 500 years ago. We live with the fact that our lives don't matter to the world we live in.

This is a special kind of contradiction because it is not the exception to the rule: It is the rule stated in alternate form. "All people are created equal, but Black people are not people." "All people have the right to life, but incidents involving Black people are called 'No Humans Involved.'" 

Black life is a state of ambivalence. But it's not so complicated that we can't figure out which way is the right way to go. It's complicated because the world is so deeply invested in antiblackness that it codes the non-mattering of Black life into the DNA of the social order. It's hard to think outside of a world that is convinced to its core that Black lives don't matter, when everything within that world seems to confirm that principle. So simply thinking of what it would look like for our lives to matter becomes nearly unimaginable, even to us.

 

Just look at the video (above) of police brutalizing Marcia and Derek Gray, a mother and son who were trying to return a TV they had just bought at a Sam's Club in Missouri after the police interrogated them on suspicion of stealing the TV. Two people watching the incident are critiquing the Black people on the ground and rationalizing the behavior of the police. "I would have slammed his ass, too!" says one of the spectators. A spectator blames the Black man for being "irate" with police who were, at that very moment, brutalizing the man's mother. Never mind that white people are rarely body slammed and handcuffed for being "irate," even when they are treated like criminals. These folks have accepted the world telling them that our lives do not matter and that Black people should adjust and adapt to our lives not mattering in the world. They think survival entails accepting what we all expect, even though what we expect-- traumatic violence-- is something it is physiologically and psychologically impossible for a body to just accept.

Sure, it's complicated to get by in an unethical world. But there is still right and wrong. The first principle is that it is unethical for the world to rely on our death and brutalization. Frank Wilderson had a simple formulation for this in his book Red White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms: "Where there are slaves, it is unethical to be free." To be a "slave," in this case, can basically mean having a life that does not matter. Therefore, the first principle of ethics is resistance to a world that makes Black lives not matter. 

It is more complicated than that, but not that much more complicated. We don't have to be so obsessed with so-called "doing something" and so-called "being positive" that we go along with an unethical world just so we can "be positive" and "do something." Resisting the force elements of an antiblack world-- like the police who murder and brutalize us-- counts as an ethical way of being and doing in the world. Damaging the structures of multinational corporations that have shaped the neoliberal economy to routinely (and typically legally) rob our communities of resources for infrastructure, education, health care, social safety nets, and many other things so they can offshore the money through Mossack Fonseca and other high-end law firms -- resisting all that bullshit counts as an ethical way of being and doing in the world.

After all, the question "why do you respond violently to murder?" isn't a serious question; it's a delaying tactic. The real question is what level of force is it going to take to defend ourselves against genocide?

Most of the time, most of us lay our plans for survival on just cooperating with the structure that oppresses us. 

No. That jig is up. 

For all the pulling up of pants and signing of petitions and wearing of suits instead of hoodies and letter-writing campaigns and securing of promises from politicians and corporations, we are no closer to the freedom we are literally dying for. And when the terror and trauma revisit us, when there are high-ranking police officials saying they should actually be shooting us more, the people who push Black respectability as a cure to police violence have nothing they can say against the uprisings except "This is not the way."

Youths are replying, "What is the way, then?" And they are correct. If we have exhausted all nonviolent options, all options that don't disrupt, all options that don't burn and loot, all options that don't show the cops and the white supremacists (and the cops who are white supremacists or who wear its tattoos) that they can't just use us as target practice without catching some fire themselves -- what options are left? What do we expect to happen?

We have to stop denouncing those who don't comply, those who resist. 

I'm not saying we should walk around risking our lives. But, as always, it's going to take people who don't comply for us to get out of the kind of genocidal situation we find ourselves in. Until we make a society we can say "Yes!" to, it is enough to say "No!" to what we already know we cannot live with. And we cannot live with our dying, even if our resistance to our dying also means that we may die.

Yes, there is an uneasy tension between staying alive and resisting murderous oppression. It's not easy to find the right moments and locations and methods for resisting. And not all resistance looks the same. But we must resist the antiblack societies and world we live in, even if we don't have an immediate idea of what a society and world without antiblackness would look like. It is enough to acknowledge for now that we simply cannot live like this.