Originally I planned to publish this at a time when everything was seemingly peaceful, that is to say, a time when a dead black body wasn't grabbing the national attention. News commentary functions on the existence of a news story to comment on, that means waiting around for something--another colored body-- to materialize on our TV and internet screens so we can have words about it.
Therein lies an inherent concession to this toxic system. Reaction-ism. Waiting around for another one of our brothers or sisters to be brutalized so that our voices can be given momentarily heightened volume. That's vulturistic opportunism of the most insidious. That's cannibalizing the bodies of our people to gain strength for a platform. Yes a platform to speak our outrage. But if our, my, outrage can only gain its prescience from the energy created by the deaths of our people, in the end we are nothing more than profiteers of their suffering.
Shots must be fired, not as a response to brutality, but in times of seeming peace. Shots must be fired to break the illusion that we have ever existed peacefully in this country. Shots must be fired to change us from reactionaries into true agents of revolution.
IF officer Darren Wilson was indicted I would still be just as outraged. Because the system is unchanged.
Understand that an indictment is simply the legal admission that a person's accountability for their actions should be investigated. It's asking, given the law and the circumstances, can we even assign guilt or innocence to this person. Is there sufficient evidence and reasoning even for a trial? A trial is then where any designation of guilt or innocence is assigned.
Of course the grand jury said no, there's not sufficient evidence to charge Darren Wilson. He's a cop with extreme latitude to "defend himself" and the laws of Missouri ask that the shooter's state of mind be taken into consideration. The shooter's state of mind, not the mind of any given rational person.
Yes,
this is our country. This pattern:
white cop kills unarmed black person, and then nothing happens.
So the question again becomes what has to happen to make everyone see that? What has to happen to push people past the points of despair and disbelief and innaction?
Understand that even if Darren Wilson was indicted, tried, and found guilty, I would still be just as outraged. Because this is about more than Ferguson.
Every police officer is an agent of the state. They act with state authority and state sanction. Police violence against my community and all people of color, is state violence against my community and all people of color. And there is a long history of state violence against my people and all people of color.
When the state sanctions, either directly or through inaction, inability, or unwillingness to intercede, violence against you, it is both your moral right and obligation to protect yourself, your loved ones, and your community.
Yes that's an admission that we are at war. And while I can't morally condone any course of action which leads to more suffering and more death, of anyone, I also realize that just as it is immoral for anyone to take the life of another, it is also immoral to ask of a person being brutalized that they allow themselves to continue to be brutalized.
With that introduction:
shots fucking fired
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems
it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its
eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization
that justifies white supremacy—and therefore force—is a sick, morally diseased,
and dying civilization.
The fact is that America has been shaped by two centuries of
supremacist rule and thus is incapable of solving the major problems which its
existence has given rise: the problem of supremacy and the problem of
capitalism. America is unable to justify itself either before the bar of
“reason” or before the bar of “conscience.”
By hundreds of millions of men and women who, from the
depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges, the following charge is
leveled: America is morally and spiritually indefensible. This indictment is
brought against the country not by the American masses alone, but on a world
scale, for America has claimed in full the loathsome estate of its European
heritage; a heritage of white supremacy, of proletariatization, and of
colonization.
To hide from these truths American society takes refuge in
hypocrisy, which is all the more odious because the duplicity is less and less
likely to deceive. This hypocrisy is not of a recent date. This nation’s
enshrinement as a nation-state was accomplished through supremacist colonialist
procedures. The Founding Fathers, whom this nation exalts to godhood, were all
great liars and the most detestable flesh merchants. They pillaged, killed, and
plundered the lands of Africa, Indochina, and North America. Then they became
slavering apologists.
The chief culprit in this domain is the original European
pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equation white=civilized, colored=savage, from which there could not but
ensue abominable racist consequences who’s victims would be all peoples of
color.
So we must discuss supremacy. We must discuss the
pseudo-humanist thinking of the American bourgeois. We must discuss
colonization and all the inhuman practices it gives rise to—brutalization,
objectification, and destruction.
In discussing the supremacist, we can’t allow ourselves to
be the acmes of gullibility—duped by the guise of good faith into aligning with
cleverly misrepresented problems, the better to legitimize the hateful
solutions provided for them. In other words, the essential thing here is to see
clearly, think clearly—that is, dangerously—and to answer clearly the innocent
question first: what fundamentally is white supremacy? To agree on what it is
not; a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, or tyranny, nor
a force for the protection of the proletariat, nor a means through which to
expand the rule of law.
We must admit once and for all, without flinching at the
consequences, that the decisive actors are fascists, brutes, thieves, rapists
and cowards. Behind them stand the police and the politicians, and behind them
stand the stockbrokers, the hedge fund managers, and the commodities robber
barons. All have inside them the pirate and the slaver, appetite and force. And
behind them stands the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization
which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal
reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonist
economies.
So we must study supremacy. We must study how the police as
an institution, work to decivilize the
policeman, to brutalize him in the
true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to
covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show
that each time a man is shot in Missouri or beaten in New York, and in
Washington they accept the fact; every time a woman is raped and in Washington
they accept the fact; every time a prisoner-- be they in Arizona or Iraq or
Mexico-- is tortured and in Washington they accept the fact, civilization
acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene
sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all
these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been
propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these
prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have
been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all
the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the
veins of America and slowly but surely, our civilization proceeds toward
savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeois of America will be
awakened to a terrific reverse shock: the police are all busy, the prisons full
up, and the torturers around the racks will invent, refine, and discuss.
They will be surprised and indignant. “Outrageous,” they’ll
cry. “This is the end of America!” their chants will sound. “It’s Nazi-ism,”
they will say. And they will wait and they will hope and they will hide the
truth from themselves. Yes it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the
crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms, is that, yes, it is
Nazi-ism, but before they were its victims they were its accomplices. They
tolerated Nazi-ism before it was inflicted on them. They absolved it, shut
their eyes to it, and legitimized it because until then, it had only been applied
to non-white people. They have cultivated Nazi-ism and thus they are
responsible for it. Nazi-ism will engulf the whole of western civilization
because it currently oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
I speak about Nazi-ism in America because it should be
talked about. Nazi-ism makes it possible to see things on a large scale. It
allows us to grasp the fact that American civilization, at its present stage,
is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all people, just as it
has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics.
Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley
that is America, I mean the America of Roosevelt, of Truman, and of Reagan, but
also the America of Hume, of Rand, of Atwater, of Palin, and owing back as far
to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and all those original slave traders America mythologizes,
there is white supremacy.
At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day,
there is white supremacy.
At the end of police militarization and the increasing
police proliferation, there is white supremacy.
At the beginning and end of America, there is white
supremacy.
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor
of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and
black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or
jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry
with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical
difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever
forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must
be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in
favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Abraham
Lincoln
That rings clear, haughty, and brutal and plants us squarely
in the middle of howling savagery.
That point I drive at is this, supremacy does not come
innocently. No one practices supremacy with impunity either. A nation which practices supremacy, that
justifies supremacy, that tolerates supremacy—and therefore force—is a nation
that is morally diseased. Irresistibly progressing from one consequence to
another, one repudiation to another, calls for Nazi-ism, which will be this
nation’s punishment.
White Supremacy, bulwark of Colonization. A bridgehead in a
campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment, the
negation of civilization. Pure and simple.
I pull old skeletons from our closet, and rightly so, for
there is point in quoting the witnesses to the lynching of 17 year old Jesse
Washington:
Washington was beaten with shovels
and bricks, he was castrated and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the
iron chain that lifted him above the fire. Wailing, the boy attempted to climb
up the skillet hot chain. For this, the men cut off his fingers. “This is the
barbecue we had last night” reads a postcard of the atrocity.
There is a need to travel to Georgia and upend old whiskey
bottle grave markers to see which stories pour out, like that of Mary Turner:
After protesting the lynching of
her husband, saying she would swear out warrants against all who were involved
if she could, she was set upon by a mob, hung upside down, doused in gasoline,
set on fire, and while she burned a member of the mob cut her stomach open letting
her unborn 8 month old fall from her, where it cried before another member of
the mob crushed it under the heel of his boot. Then her body was shot more than
200 times.
Laura Nelson still swings eternally from that bridge in Oklahoma;
her image on all those thousands of post cards collected and traded. Her murder
and the murder of her son defended as “a case of extreme passion which no law
and no civilization can control.”
“Ancient” the
supremacist begins his hand-waving.
I cite the assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969, drugged by
an undercover FBI agent and then shot while passed out in bed next to his
pregnant girlfriend.
“We expected
about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place.
Only two of those black niggers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.” –
FBI Special Agent Gregg York
The dragging of James Byrd behind a truck for miles until
his head and arm severed. The murders of James Brissette and Ronald Madison on
the Danziger Bridge, fired upon without warning by multiple officers while they
fled hurricane Katrina. I point out Oscar Grant, shot while handcuffed and
subdued. Kendrec McDade shot while unarmed, his last words, “why did they shoot
me?” Kimani Gray, shot four times by the police after he left a friend’s
birthday. Amadou Diallo, shot 19 times when he reached for his wallet. Patrick
Dorismond, unarmed, shot and killed by the police. Ousmane Zongo, unarmed, shot
and killed during a police raid on a counterfeit CD ring he had no involvement
with. Timothy Stansbury Jr, unarmed, shot and killed by the police. John
Crawford, shot and killed inside a Walmart for holding a toy gun. Sean Bell,
unarmed, shot and killed outside of a club after his bachelor party. Eric
Garner, an unarmed man choked to death on the street for selling cigarettes.
Orlando Barlow, shot four times while surrendering on his knees, the murders
later found to posses shirts reading BDRT for “Baby Daddy Removal Team.” Aaron
Campbell, shot while surrendering with his hands locked behind his head.
Tavares McGill, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, Victor Steen, Steven Eugene
Washington, Alonzo Ashley, Mike Brown.
Yes or no, did these injustices happen? If these things are
true—as no one can deny—will it be said, in order to minimize them, that these
corpses don’t prove anything? Shall I quote another of our lauded former
Presidents?
“A slave dreads the punishment of stripes (that is whipping)
more than he does imprisonment, and that description of punishment has,
besides, a beneficial effect upon his fellow slaves.” - President James Polk
Tell me now how leaving a body in the middle of the street
is different from leaving one hanging from a tree or bridge.
I recall these hideous butcheries not out of some morbid
delight in them, but because I think these swinging black bodies, these
collections of genitals and ears, these babies crushed under boots, the burned
houses, these white-hooded invasions, the steaming blood, the towns evaporated
at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of. They prove that
supremacy, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man. That supremacist
activity, supremacist enterprise, supremacist conquest which is based on
contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to
change him who undertakes it. That the supremacist, in order to ease his
conscience, gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms
himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this
result, this boomerang effect of supremacy that I wanted to point out.
“God works most
inscrutably to the understandings of men; the negro is torn from Africa, a barbarian,
ignorant and idolatrous; he is restored civilized, enlightened, and a
Christian.” President John Tyler
The white supremacists justification for these acts of
barbarism has not changed in either wording or tone.
“The floating colored population is unusually large, and
Cairo, at some time or other, harbors most of the “bad niggers” from St. Louis,
Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans. It is these whom
citizens fear and for whom the police are constantly alert. The white people of
Cairo have always dealt indulgently with the negro. […] Yet this negro
population, coddled as it is, is a constant menace to the town. No white woman
dare venture outside of the house at night alone for fear of assault. Many outrages
of which the world has never heard have been attempted. This is why […] the
effect of the recent lynching will be salutary.”
Truly there are stains that it is beyond the power of man to
wipe out and that can never be fully expiated.
But let us speak of the oppressed.
I see clearly what supremacy has destroyed: civilizations
destroyed and people turned to chattel.
I see clearly the civilizations condemned to perish at a
future date, into which has been introduced the same principles of ruin.
I see less clearly the contributions gained. Security? The
rule of law? In the meantime I look around and wherever there are supremacists
and the dominated face-to-face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism,
conflict, and in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of millions of
subordinate functionaries, the “boys,” artisans, office clerks, and
interpreters necessary not for the smooth function of society, but for the
smooth operation of business.
I spoke of contact, between the supremacist and the
subjugated there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the
police, theft, rape, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency,
swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.
No human contact but relations of domination and submission
which turn the supremacist into a police officer, a prison guard, a slave
driver, and the dehumanized subordinate man into an instrument of production.
My turn to state an equation: supremacy = “thing-ifcation.”
I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about
“achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of living.
I am talking about
societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions
undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic
creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities
wiped out.
They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads,
canals, and railroad tracks.
I am talking about
millions of men and women sacrificed to the Atlantic Ocean. I am talking about
those who, as I write this, are being brutalized and murdered in the streets.
I am talking about millions of men in whom fear has been
cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to
tremble, to kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys.
They pride themselves on abuses eliminated.
I too talk about abuses, but what I say is that on the old
ones—very real—they have superimposed others—very detestable. They talk to me
about local tyrants brought to reason; but I note that in general the old
tyrants get on very well with the new ones, and that there has been established
between them, to the detriment of the people, a circuit of mutual services and
complicity.
They talk about civilization. I talk about
proletarianization and mystification.
For my part I make a systemic defense of the oppressed.
Every day that passes, every denial of justice, every
beating by the police, every demand of the workers that is drowned in blood,
every scandal that is hushed, every rape, every punitive expedition, every
police van, every gendarme, every militiaman, brings home to us the value of
our societies.
If I am attacked on the grounds of intent, I maintain that supremacist
America is dishonest in trying to justify its colonizing activity a posteriori by
the obvious material progress that has been achieved in certain fields under
the supremacist regime.
The proof is that at present it is the poor and
disenfranchised people who are demanding schools, resources, and supremacist
America which is niggardly on this score.
I make no secret of my opinion that the present day
barbarism of America has reached an incredibly high level, and here I don’t mean
Nazis, or the prison guard, or the police officer, or the adventurer, but about
the “decent fellow” across the way. Not about the member of the KKK or the
gangster or the cop but rather the respectable bourgeois. We’ve made progress,
today it is the possessor of the Christian Virtues who intrigues—with no small
success—for the honor of breaking black bodies according to the methods of
torturers. Cruelty, mendacity, baseness, and corruption have sunk deep into the
soul of the American. I repeat this is not about Nazis or the KKK or pogroms or
summary executions but about a reaction caught unawares. A reflex permitted, a
piece of cynicism tolerated.
Think of it, millions dead in this country, thousands more trampled
underfoot, crushed to bits, assassinated, tortures brought back from the depths
of the Middle Ages. Violence. The violence of the weak. A significant thing: it is not the head of a
civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart. I admit that as far as
the health of American civilization is concerned, these cries of "Kill!
kill!" and "Let's see some blood," belched forth by trembling
old men and virtuous young men educated by their supremacist fathers, make a
much more disagreeable impression on me than the most sensational riots that
occur in Missouri.
And that, mind you, is by no means an exception. On the contrary,
bourgeois swinishness is the rule. We've been on its trail for a century. We
listen for it, we take it by surprise, we sniff it out, we follow it, lose it,
find it again, shadow it, and every day it is more nauseatingly exposed.
And then lower, always lower, to the bottom of the pit,
lower than the shovel can dig, the Giuliani cry of “black on black violence!”
One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read a
thing. On the contrary he has read everything, devoured everything. And in that
his brain functions in the fashion of a digestive system, it filters. And the
filter lets through only what can nourish the thick white skin of the
supremacist’s clear conscience.
“83% of all white deaths are at the hands of other whites
yet there is no designation of white on white violence. When white people are
killed en-masse it’s recognized as an unthinkable tragedy. Crime in the black
community must be understood in the context of years of forced peonage, violent
reprisal, economic perilousness, lack of access to basic resources and
education.”
The white supremacist doesn’t want to hear anymore, he
flicks the ideas away, annoying flies.
Therefore, brother and sister, you will hold as
enemies—loftily, lucidly, consistently—not only sadistic governors and greedy
bankers, not only police who torture, beat, imprison and murder, not only
corrupt check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for
the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics wreathed in dollars
and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for pseudoscience, chattering
intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists,
the male supremacists, the corruptors, the lovers of exoticism.
We must sweep out the obscurers of truth, and sweep out all
'the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and
tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. And do not seek to know whether
personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they
have good or bad intentions. Whether personally - that is, in the private
conscience of Peter or Paul – they are or are not colonialists, because the
essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is
entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they
perform as watchdogs of colonialism.
Henceforth, all are answerable to expulsion from our
civilization through revolutionary action.
Don't let the subtleties of vocabulary, the new terminology,
frighten you! You know the old refrain: The-Negroes-are-big-children."
They take it, they dress it up for you, tangle it up for you.
I speak about the past a great deal because in recalling
these histories a simple fact shines out
The setting is changed, but it is the same world, the same
men, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of "the
flesh of other men."
Yes, in Ferguson, the hour of the barbarian is at hand. The
modern barbarian. The American barbarian. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism,
bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.
American domination - the only domination from which one
never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred. And since you
are talking about factories and industries, do you not see the tremendous factory
hysterically spitting out its cinders in the heart of our forests or deep in the
bush, the factory for the production of lackeys; do you not see the prodigious mechanization,
the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged,
undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve;
the machine, yes, have you never seen it, the machine for crushing, for
grinding, for degrading peoples?
The salvation of America is not a matter of a revolution in
methods. It is a matter of Revolution, to be obtained “by any means necessary.”
All love and respect to Aimé Césaire and his most elegant deceleration of war from which I re-purposed
