Lil Bobby Hutton and Bobby Seale leading a group of 29 Black Panther Party members and supporters into the California State Capitol on May 2, , 1967, to protest the racist Mulford bill designed to prohibit Panthers from carrying guns in public. Had the Panthers organized and used those guns against the state, it would have been ill advised and premature, but it wouldn't be African people being violent because their decision to do so was prompted by 500 years of terrorist state supported and sponsored violence against us.
Yesterday, I had an intense conversation with a European man who approached my table to challenge me on the definition of socialism. I'm going to reference that conversation to establish the framework for this article. Some people will read that and say its not fair for me to have a conversation with someone and then write about that conversation to people who were not a part of the conversation. To that I say many people know I write prolifically on this blog. And, if you don't know that, you should know it before you pick a fight with me because if you are arrogant enough to approach me with a nonsense argument, then I'm going to be committed enough to expose your racism to the world. As is usually the case, my conversation with this individual broached many different subjects, but I'm going to reference him asking me what I would do if a klansman showed up where he and I were talking. I told him if the klansman approached me, I would end his misery. From that, this individual attempted to go on a tirade accusing me of "being violent" because I didn't know the klansman and therefore, I had no understanding of his motives and consequently, I would be wrong to do anything to prevent him from "expressing his views." This individual became mortally offended when I told him he didn't know anything about what he was talking about and he sounded as ignorant as "a barnyard animal." Eventually, this person acknowledged, at least on a minimal level, the moral and historical correctness of my position, but that's not the point. I didn't want or need his validation.
The point is it has become normalized in current times for far too many people to accept the individualistic and immaterial vision of history that each situation has its own truth. As a result of this bourgeois logic, a klansman now has individual agency and his decision to represent an organization that has spent the last 150 years brutalizing, terrorizing, and murdering my people, suddenly has no basis of legitimacy in how we decide we must respond to this person to protect ourselves.
You see this distorted logic everywhere. The land reform programs that were initiated in Zimbabwe in 1990 and Azania, South Africa, this year, are being characterized as an unfair and violent theft from the colonizers whose ancestors violently and illegally stole the land in the first place. If those colonizers were so concerned about justice, why didn't they make effort some time ago to provide reparations for the injustices that placed them in the position of privilege at the expense of our people? Apparently, justice is only a word they know when they perceive themselves as being deprived of it. I'm clear across the world and I know the history of how they illegally got the land so I know they must know it. Yet, our people correcting a 500+ year injustice is being discussed as if these latest reform acts (long overdue and tame compared to what we should be doing to get our lands back) are just as unjust as the violent colonial domination that institutionalized inequality in the first place.
So there's little question that the dominant narrative on violence is that when the state executes and supports it, that's ok, but when the people exercise it, then its criminal. And, we are not saying that working class Europeans created this mindset. They didn't. We simply blame them for doing what they consistently continue to do, accept backward mindsets like that without even questioning or challenging it. In fact, most of them overwhelmingly endorse it. And, in doing so, they adopt this caviar attitude against our suffering, minimizing it, and acting as if their white vision is the only vision that has validity. I even saw pictures floating around the internet of white people making jokes about the silly outfits white supremacists were wearing to rallies around the country in recent weeks. I realize that if I was white, and therefore removed from the historical and systemic elements of white supremacist violence, I would probably think a good way to release my stress about the situation would be to dehumanize the imagery of these racists, but for us, our history of suffering from these people is far too great for us to dismiss any of them, regardless of how silly other white people think they look. Many white people look silly to us in any number of situations and scenarios, but we still can never drop our guard and dismiss them as harmless because history easily tells us otherwise. A klan robe all by itself looks silly, but compared to the horrifying stories I've heard my entire life from my Southern born and bred relatives along with the vast history I've studied, if the klan looked like donkeys I'd still need to take that as seriously as is humanly possible.
What all this tells us is we can never accept European definitions for our struggle on any level. We cannot even give them the time to express their views. In fact, there is nothing they need do around us except provide material support for our liberation work. If that support must come with European analysis, keep your support. We don't want or need it. Clearly, with far too many Europeans carrying this continued dysfunctional love affair with capitalism, we just need to accept that they will never see any effort we make to assert our dignity as justified because in their worldview, our opposition against capitalism is an opposition against them.
As for people's violence versus that supported and/or carried out by the state, we have to continue to boldly assert that are oppressed victims of the state, and those the state supports who would brutalize us e.g. vigilantes, white supremacist groups, etc., we have the right and responsibility to organize for the capacity to carry out revolutionary violence to overrun the forces of oppression. And, to be clear, when we say revolutionary violence, we are talking about the ability to organize to engage in planned violence to overthrow the state. We are not ducking behind the "safety" of claiming self defense. We are claiming our right to protect our current and future generations, other oppressed peoples, and the planet by stopping the ability of those causing harm to all those entities to do so. In other words, for those who are a little slower, if I stop someone from committing a rape, I'm not guilty of committing an act of violence. If those who show up to stop racists from normalizing racism, which means normalizing racist violence since that is the legacy of such people, then even if the people showing up to stop racism do so by physically stopping the racists from being physically present, those people doing the stopping are not committing acts of violence. And, to say so is being dishonest and inhumane.
Our issue is never with those who show up to stop racists from showing up. Our issue is that most of those people who do that stop there. They do not proceed to engage in the most important element of that work e.g. organizing European people so that they never join racist groups in the first place. And, if when showing up to stop those racists, the anti-racists do so using any means necessary, they are right to do so. If African people use whatever methods possible to stop ourselves from being brutalized by state terrorists and their surrogates, we are within our rights as human beings to do so. We shouldn't spend five seconds debating, arguing, convincing, about the morality of our position on this question. Anyone who doesn't get it at this point isn't interested in getting it. Any Europeans who continue to center themselves when we are the ones being systemically brutalized are only concerned about validating themselves. All we have to do is continue to engage in the work of organizing our people for revolutionary victory. If we do that, the rest will take care of itself.
The point is it has become normalized in current times for far too many people to accept the individualistic and immaterial vision of history that each situation has its own truth. As a result of this bourgeois logic, a klansman now has individual agency and his decision to represent an organization that has spent the last 150 years brutalizing, terrorizing, and murdering my people, suddenly has no basis of legitimacy in how we decide we must respond to this person to protect ourselves.
You see this distorted logic everywhere. The land reform programs that were initiated in Zimbabwe in 1990 and Azania, South Africa, this year, are being characterized as an unfair and violent theft from the colonizers whose ancestors violently and illegally stole the land in the first place. If those colonizers were so concerned about justice, why didn't they make effort some time ago to provide reparations for the injustices that placed them in the position of privilege at the expense of our people? Apparently, justice is only a word they know when they perceive themselves as being deprived of it. I'm clear across the world and I know the history of how they illegally got the land so I know they must know it. Yet, our people correcting a 500+ year injustice is being discussed as if these latest reform acts (long overdue and tame compared to what we should be doing to get our lands back) are just as unjust as the violent colonial domination that institutionalized inequality in the first place.
So there's little question that the dominant narrative on violence is that when the state executes and supports it, that's ok, but when the people exercise it, then its criminal. And, we are not saying that working class Europeans created this mindset. They didn't. We simply blame them for doing what they consistently continue to do, accept backward mindsets like that without even questioning or challenging it. In fact, most of them overwhelmingly endorse it. And, in doing so, they adopt this caviar attitude against our suffering, minimizing it, and acting as if their white vision is the only vision that has validity. I even saw pictures floating around the internet of white people making jokes about the silly outfits white supremacists were wearing to rallies around the country in recent weeks. I realize that if I was white, and therefore removed from the historical and systemic elements of white supremacist violence, I would probably think a good way to release my stress about the situation would be to dehumanize the imagery of these racists, but for us, our history of suffering from these people is far too great for us to dismiss any of them, regardless of how silly other white people think they look. Many white people look silly to us in any number of situations and scenarios, but we still can never drop our guard and dismiss them as harmless because history easily tells us otherwise. A klan robe all by itself looks silly, but compared to the horrifying stories I've heard my entire life from my Southern born and bred relatives along with the vast history I've studied, if the klan looked like donkeys I'd still need to take that as seriously as is humanly possible.
What all this tells us is we can never accept European definitions for our struggle on any level. We cannot even give them the time to express their views. In fact, there is nothing they need do around us except provide material support for our liberation work. If that support must come with European analysis, keep your support. We don't want or need it. Clearly, with far too many Europeans carrying this continued dysfunctional love affair with capitalism, we just need to accept that they will never see any effort we make to assert our dignity as justified because in their worldview, our opposition against capitalism is an opposition against them.
As for people's violence versus that supported and/or carried out by the state, we have to continue to boldly assert that are oppressed victims of the state, and those the state supports who would brutalize us e.g. vigilantes, white supremacist groups, etc., we have the right and responsibility to organize for the capacity to carry out revolutionary violence to overrun the forces of oppression. And, to be clear, when we say revolutionary violence, we are talking about the ability to organize to engage in planned violence to overthrow the state. We are not ducking behind the "safety" of claiming self defense. We are claiming our right to protect our current and future generations, other oppressed peoples, and the planet by stopping the ability of those causing harm to all those entities to do so. In other words, for those who are a little slower, if I stop someone from committing a rape, I'm not guilty of committing an act of violence. If those who show up to stop racists from normalizing racism, which means normalizing racist violence since that is the legacy of such people, then even if the people showing up to stop racism do so by physically stopping the racists from being physically present, those people doing the stopping are not committing acts of violence. And, to say so is being dishonest and inhumane.
Our issue is never with those who show up to stop racists from showing up. Our issue is that most of those people who do that stop there. They do not proceed to engage in the most important element of that work e.g. organizing European people so that they never join racist groups in the first place. And, if when showing up to stop those racists, the anti-racists do so using any means necessary, they are right to do so. If African people use whatever methods possible to stop ourselves from being brutalized by state terrorists and their surrogates, we are within our rights as human beings to do so. We shouldn't spend five seconds debating, arguing, convincing, about the morality of our position on this question. Anyone who doesn't get it at this point isn't interested in getting it. Any Europeans who continue to center themselves when we are the ones being systemically brutalized are only concerned about validating themselves. All we have to do is continue to engage in the work of organizing our people for revolutionary victory. If we do that, the rest will take care of itself.
RSS Feed