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.
This will be a regular feature here on CosmicHoboes.blogspot.com as well as on Anchor.fm and Spotify.
Check it out HERE or read the Black Thought of the Day.
Black thought for the day: Everyone is capable of leadership. I define "leadership" as the enactment of an ethics, the actualization of norms. Everyone is capable of leadership in certain ways and under certain conditions.
Now, the ethics enacted by leadership aren't always "good." (Criminal syndicates have ethics that say you get killed for snitching-- similar to how trump wants to end the careers of people who cross him or how the CIA assassinates those who won’t be bought off. That’s part of their ethics.) But how our leaders perform says a lot about the ideas of right and wrong we have allowed to dominate in our communities.
The established models of leadership we Black people have now come mostly from a bought-off elite leadership class, and what it shows is that our ethics are dominated by capitalistic and antiblack cowards, to a large degree, people who might sometimes have courageously put their bodies on the line in younger years but then later backed down from an uncompromising push for Black freedom as they get older and now get paid large amounts to deradicalize the demands of the youths by imposing irrelevant ideas like "nonviolent protest is the only way" (Keisha Lance-Bottoms, Barack Obama) and "pull up your pants and talk like white people" (Bill Cosby, Candace Owens).
That's an overgeneralization of people like John Lewis. Lewis was very courageous as a youth and has been to some degree during his career in congress. But even in his youth, he also deradicalized youths even when he was younger by opposing more radical Civil Rights voices like James Forman and Stokely Carmichael). Yet, to a large degree, those are general models of leadership that we are forced to aspire to because other leaders, like Fred Hampton, were murdered by police, other leaders, like Jalil Muntaqim, are imprisoned and fighting for his life against COVID 19 in a NY state prison, and other leaders, like Assata, are being hunted in exile. Even recent speaker, sister Tamika Mallory-- from what i’ve seen-- demonstrated remarkable leadership by pushing the line when she said this:
Don’t talk to us about looting. Y’all are the looters. America has looted Black people. America looted the Native Americans when they first came here, so looting is what you do. We learned it from you. We learned violence from you. We learned violence from you. The violence was what we learned from you. So if you want us to do better, then, damn it, you do better..”
Fortunately for Black people, more of us are beginning to push for a type of ethics that's not so shot through with obvious contradictions. So new models of leadership can be developed, but we have to seize the power to define the kinds of leadership we need. Problem is, there's a bully outside our communities and movements telling Black people that we can only have cowardly capitalistic types of leadership. So seizing the power to define our leadership requires that we punch the bully in the nose. That's sorta happening right now.
