In the first of 3 episodes, G & O begin a discussion of the films Django Unchained (2012) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). G explains how fantasies of freedom can be constructed by film, and that his first impression of Django focused on its potential to construct a fantasy of violent resistance to slavery that could be useful for Black liberation. "People's imagination is shaped," G explains. "It's not just that you imagine yourself as being free even if there's no representation of your freedom... Look at how long there's been a representation of Black people being unfree and that being normal." But O begins to ask whose fantasies filmmaker Quentin Tarantino really cares about and serves.
Today, July 27, 2020, makes 120 years since the valiant four-day shootout that a Black laborer named Robert Charles had with a police-led lynch mob in New Orleans. G & O recount Charles' story, which Ida B. Wells preserved, and its importance for Black freedom struggle today.
Few people today remember the massacres of scores of Black people in New Orleans in the year 1900, but even fewer have even heard of the Black man whose bold and defiant actions those massacres were in response to. Robert Charles, a Black man who worked as a laborer, a Black man who sold newspapers to help promote the cause of Black people escaping amerikkka and returning to Afrika, a Black man who believed Black people had a right to defend ourselves against the violence of both the state and civil society, a Black man who, in the end, took up arms in resistance to police abuse and the terror of white lynch mobs. The white people in and around New Orleans would have found an excuse— any excuse— to lynch Black people and burn us out of the communities we work so hard to build. But when Robert Charles smoked 7 white people and wounded 20 more, he taught the police and the lynch mob that he was hard to kill— that, as G says, it’s gonna take some ass to get some ass— and they couldn’t stand to be taught a lesson in violence— their native tongue— by a mere Black man.
I don’t know about you, but i never learned about Robert Charles until a friend hipped me to him. He was not among the Black freedom fighters i heard about in school— an i’ve had a lot of schooling and done a lot of reading specifically in Black history and radical Black thought. Obviously, his exclusion from our history books is a deliberate attempt to police the thought of Black people who might otherwise be inspired to stand up for ourselves against structural antiblackness.
The press of the country has united in declaring that Robert Charles was a desperado. As usual, when dealing with a negro, he is assumed to be guilty because he is charged. … Because they failed to find any legal evidence that Charles was a lawbreaker and desperado his accusers gave full license to their imagination and distorted the facts that they had obtained, in every way possible, to prove a course of criminality, which the records absolutely refuse to show. Charles had his first encounter with the police Monday night, in which he was shot in the street duel which was begun by the police after Officer Mora had beaten Charles three or four times over the head with his billy in an attempt to make an illegal arrest. In defending himself against the combined attack of two officers with a billy and their guns upon him, Charles shot Officer Mora and escaped. Early Tuesday morning Charles was traced to Dryades Street by officers who were instructed to kill him on sight. There, again defending himself, he shot and killed two officers. This, of course, in the eyes of the American press, made him a desperado. (Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 1900, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14976/14976-h/14976-h.htm)
Even legendary New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton, also a contemporary of Robert Charles, said that a local folk song was written about Charles, but quickly silenced by New Orleans authorities, suppressing the memory of the man and punishing those who sang the song:
They had a song out on Robert Charles, like many other songs and like many other, er, bad men that always had some kind of a song and somebody originated it on ‘em. But this song was squashed very easily by the department. And not only by the department, by any of the surrounding people that ever heard the song. Due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder and it never did get very far. I used to know the song, but I found it was best for me to forget it. And that I did, in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side. (Morton, "Library of Congress Narrative" http://www.doctorjazz.co.uk/locspeech1.html)
In the land of free speech, in the land supposedly based on the idea that “all men are created equal” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” — Black people are not included in “the People,” Black people have no free speech, and cannot be allowed to have even a memory of the violence it takes to fight for anything even resembling our equal rights.
It is similar to the way that, in these times, declaring that Black Lives Matter is said to be terroristic.
Oh, sure, in the brief moment, we see a few statues coming down of those who, like J. Marion Sims, experimented sadistically on Black women to found the modern field of gynecology, those who, like Christopher Columbus, slaughtered and tortured Indigenous people and trafficked little girls— we still hear the overwhelming rejoinder that these statues commemorating the oppressive and racist people who “made amerikkka great” should be remembered and allowed to be displayed prominently. Such people might say, “You can remember Robert Charles as long as i can remember Nathan Bedford Forrest.”
So for people who resisted lynching, memory might be allowed as long as the memory of the people who lynched is also preserved. Such false, moral equivalencies obscure what’s really going on. The powerful oppressors— who dot the land with memorials rationalizing their racist genocide and enslavement of people —know that statues and other memorials perform ideological labor. They make white people feel proud of those very things of which they should feel ashamed. They know that whiteness — which, again, is not a racial or genetic category but some made up BS — is enforced by genocide and slavery, and so it is imperative to tidy up the memory of genociders so that people will normalize the violence they have done and continue to do through subsequent generations. They know that these memorials do violence to Indigenous and Black people — more violence than we could ever return, for their violence shaped the realities we live in, the realities the modern world must endure. There is no equivalency between the oppressed who can barely hear the names of our freedom fighters spoken or sung about and the ones who slaughtered us who have their faces on 20 dollar bills.
It’s like Walter Rodney said: "By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?" (Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 2019, London: Verso, p. 16).
white people are not fighting for their very lives. We, Black people, are fighting for our very lives. When everywhere we walk, we see statues of our oppressors towering overhead, while on the streets below we see people who look like us forced to sleep on concrete—or being strangled to death—remembering those who fought back against the racist structure is ideological insurgency and life breath to a people who can’t breathe.
Take it from the expert. In The Wretched of the Earth, Black freedom fighter, psychiatrist, and revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon remarked on something he observed about the attitude that oppressed people in the middle of a struggle take toward those who get branded as “criminals” when they fight back against the police.
In order to maintain their stamina and their revolutionary capabilities, the people also resort to retelling certain episodes in the life of the community. The outlaw, for example, who holds the countryside for days against the police, hot on his trail, or who succumbs after killing four or five police officers in single- handed combat or who commits suicide rather than "give up" his accomplices, all constitute for the people role models, action schemas, and "heroes." And there is no point, obviously, in saying that such a hero is a thief, a thug, or a degenerate. [Fanon (Richard Philcox trans.), 2004, NY: Grove, p. 30]
In these coronavirus times, in these times of protests seeking justice for Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd — among countless others — it is very important that we maintain or develop our stamina and our revolutionary capabilities, as Fanon said, by re-telling the stories that many of us are just hearing for the first time. It is part of our healing. It is good news that isn’t even new— that is only new because we never knew that we have resisted our oppression at every stage.
Today is July 27, 2020. It has been 120 years since the valiant 4-day shootout that a Black laborer named Robert Charles had with a police-led lynch mob in New Orleans in the year 1900. Ida B. Wells fought to preserve the good memories of those who knew him in her book “Mob Rule in New Orleans”:
Men who knew him say that he was a law-abiding, quiet, industrious, peaceable man. So he lived.
So he lived and so he would have died had not he raised his hand to resent unprovoked assault and unlawful arrest that fateful Monday night. That made him an outlaw, and being a man of courage he decided to die with his face to the foe. The white people of this country may charge that he was a desperado, but to the people of his own race Robert Charles will always be regarded as the hero of New Orleans.
On today’s episode of the All Thought Is Black Thought podcast, brother G called brother O to see how he’s holding up in the out-of-work Covid times. The brothers talked about how so-called idle time carries unique anxieties for workers and holds up unique possibilities for organizing new possibilities.
What does it mean when white people just irrupt against Black people and it's caught on video?
What would we have seen if 14-year-old Emmett Till had had a smartphone and Instagram to record his interaction with Carolyn Bryant, the woman who had him murdered?
Today, G & O discuss the videos of "karens" and "chads" losing their minds and policing Black and brown people's public appearances and behaviors when they ought to mind their own business. The "karen" and "chad" videos are little documentaries exposing the violent antiblack fantasies of individual people that reflect a broader collective antiblack fantasy. This fantasy shapes the antiblack social structure we live in, including things like the urban geography and disposal of environmental toxins. G & O also go into how the same structure of antiblack fantasies that created the modern world 500 years ago is still visible in the "karen" and *chad" videos.
For July 4th, All Thought Is Black Thought podcast hosts G & O talk about the ways white people are still hitting the crackpipe of antiblackness in the fantasies they have about what life is like for Black folks. Because the power dynamic of slavery is still present in Black lives, Black people's knowledge of how slavery has continued to define our lives can empower us to effect radical change. That's why, in a time when the lens of slavery is among the sanest ways to look at the contradictions of modern Black life, many forces are trying to suppress Black folks' acknowledgement of how slavery remains present in our lives. When it comes to Black thought, policing isn't just done by the "boys in blue," but by other parties-- including educators, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and karens-- who are unofficially deputized to police Black bodies and Black thought.
Episode #2 of All Thought is Black Thought is out wherever you listen to podcasts!
Episode #2, Expecting the Unacceptable, an audio version of a recent piece Myrrh wrote here on CosmicHoboes, goes into the contradiction of expecting Black people to just go along with our unpunished murders, a contradiction that makes the modern world possible. What Black people are forced to expect-- traumatic violence-- is something we cannot accept. We have nothing to lose by resisting. So what do we expect to happen? "[W]e 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."
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, 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.
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.
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'tburn 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.
