It’s worth repeating. There is a direct connection between the killing of Tyre Nichols and the banning of African American studies courses in Florida. Between the spectacle of our public execution and the assertion that the study of black life has no educational value.
It’s the same line that could be drawn from the Klan throwing black people off bridges and the brutalization of black people in the art, advertisements, and scholarship of previous generations. A thread, a thread of manufactured black disposability that, if pulled out, would unravel this marathon of a colonial event that calls itself American society.
It’s worth repeating. Blacks are getting rid of the dark streets and in the curriculum, because it is not enough to drive the emancipated population off the white streets and rush them into prisons and jails and lifetime surveillance.
They were disenfranchised and “reassigned,” enmeshed in new and improved Jim Crow regulations, put in rhetorical stock, derided as “criminals” who did not deserve restitution in speeches intended to excite more than half the country.
When asking for mercy on the street, he retaliates with blows. A century of black writing marked by pain, thinking about ways forward meets book burning.
Only the most deplorable racism condoning “representatives” are called on news programs to speak for us, only to be talked down by black conservative frauds who produce articles that rub the shoulders of negrophobes. Blackophobes who then rush to brandish the same few recycled black conservative names, praising their pieces as “revolutionary” and “interesting new perspectives.” These perspectives are always as original as racism.
But what if the new perspective is really timely? Or, if not new, but dusted off from traditions older than the anticipation of the American Enlightenment and its promised land of civil rights and equality—one drawn to more thoughtfully pessimistic slave revolts?
What if the hope that does not weave in the beards of slave owners who work as presidents and child traffickers – who to this day are held up as the founders of freedom – arrived at its moment? Hope in the tradition of that part of the people that does not act at the time of the slave owners and does not wait for those who are addicted to whipping horses to see that “it is not right”?
Anti-colonial hope is the hope of those who did not accept “their place”. It is a philosophy of impatience, of setting boundaries, born of a radical disagreement with the colonial society’s view that black life and black thought are meaningless.
That is, with the point of view of white supremacy.
It’s not just the attitude of those with more versatile social media accounts or nothing to lose who responded to the Black Lives Matter movement with Black Lives Do Not Matter. Or those who mocked the murder of George Floyd, pretending to kneel on his neck in an attempt to prolong the pleasure of the murder, just as those previous generations removed the bones from the burned remains of lynching victims to keep as souvenirs.
This is the position of those who say that African-American studies have no value, and on the other side of the cheek say that Western civilization should be praised and that it should be a compulsory course.
It is the attitude of those who say that the murdered – Eric, Trayvon, Sandra, Michael, Ahmaud and thousands of others – were criminals, not martyrs. And about their killers – who used the complaints filed against them as a sham and falsified incident reports – that they are innocent, heroes and should be forgiven for their human error. The pursuers are frightened; the aggressors were pursued. Those killed “were not angels”.
It bears repeating, those who say this would lynch angels.
To throw out black voices like backbiting and erase the record of black pain is a more sophisticated, expertly crafted holocaust denial. Never the blatant holocaust denial of neo-Nazis, but the covering up of corpses to produce a revisionist narrative of America, the Good.
To ban black studies is to deny black lives the right to speak without the use of too heavy, too obvious a muzzle. Declare that a slave cannot testify. Disappear the historical record of white supremacy and replace it with Nazi-sanctioned history, the only history the state’s racist base will accept. Settler colonialism creates a population that is unable to do otherwise.
This is also the position of the Democrats. Those who openly and uncontroversially claim that congressmen who give speeches at white nationalist conventions are their friends. Who are forever frozen in a gesture of reaching out from “the other side of the aisle” to those desperate to keep the flame of Jim Crow alive. Who command our submission through “unity” with the side that still executes our innocents and gleefully ignores exculpatory evidence.
And that’s the position of liberals calling for “police reform” in a voice that’s becoming increasingly tired and meek and indistinguishable from the obligatory “thoughts and prayers” of conservatives after a mass shooting. Police reform should not be taken seriously. The state, in the name of the settler society, and in agreement with it, has beaten blacks and indigenous peoples everywhere for centuries.
A call for anti-bias training and body cameras is not a call for change. On the contrary, it is proof that society intends to protect the status quo. It is the act of masking the patterns in the prisons and streets of the settler-colonial world from Australia to Alaska with a tarpaulin of false hope. “Maybe justice will roll off like water if we tinker with recruitment and representation or add a Civilian Oversight Board.” Meanwhile, the former president, a darling of lynch mob society, is reportedly winning back hearts with promises of hangings, guillotines and televised “group executions” if re-elected in 2024.
But something is not working. Media spokespeople, academics, and respected cable news panelists are no longer trusted when they speak of shocking breaches of trust, training failures, disappointments in those they are “supposed to protect,” or whatever answer they pull from the raffle basket. to suppress black proletarian anger at the latest murder.
Racists and liberals rally around the belief that blacks are cursed to carry some generational cross of suffering always close at hand. And we are force-fed this from birth, trained to see our brutalization as unfortunate “tragedies” and the pogrom against blacks as “things just the way they are”.
But things are faltering. People are waking up. Yes, they are awake.
He woke up. A stolen term used by both racists and liberals to mock black radical ideas and the black temperament that no longer accepts such things. The people reject the old appeasement trick in the time of rapid fascism “democracy is slow”. They no longer tolerate a servile position, proving that humility deserves a deliberately ambiguous “change”.
He woke up. This generation’s term that will replace the “rebellious blacks” and “dirty rotten abolitionists” and the “arrogant” and “radicalized blacks” that we have forcibly made obsolete. An expression that no one doubts would be spat at by students imprisoned for sitting in separate cafes. And by the same people. Thrown with the same fervor and purpose as the N-word at schoolchildren integrating apartheid schools.
A term used as a license to erase this history from textbooks and, like a vase of flowers placed over a crime scene, a patriotic history placed on top of it. One describes those who were enslaved in the torture chambers of the colony’s industrial cotton fields as “happy farmers.” Lying. The best that colonist history can do.
Vigilance, with tar and feathers. Students are warned about it. Academics are quick to deny it. An awakened ideology – ridiculous and ineffective – and yet it must be illegal. The government and its client educational institutions must conspire against black thought, ridicule them on the air and at the colonists’ kitchen tables, in a desperate attempt to cling, tooth and claw, to a society that swallows up the black poor. It is the last attempt to dispel the anti-colonial boom and subdue the imagination of black radicals.
But their power flails, and the social order built by the slave masters burns. The anti-colonial future bursts forth. A future that escaped the clutches of white racism. Anti-colonialism that cannot be read only in the police stations that burn like the homes of slave masters, but in the Palestinians who resist ethnic cleansing, in the voices of the indigenous people who order the #return of the land, in the patriarchs who are imprisoned, in the sanctioned peoples who defy extortion, in trade union organizations everywhere. Even the seas and the sun are in rebellion.
On the front line of anti-colonialism, as always, is militant pan-Africanism without slogans. Solidarity without borders among those who were labeled as less by the colonial world. Not only did he refuse to sit down, he also smashed the back of the bus. Taking the reins of a new, dark-skinned future is as unexpected as it is inevitable.
After the colonial society’s “racial reckoning” that led, predictably, to nowhere, their set-up talks that solved nothing, achieving nothing but ratings and profits for the class that aids and abets the lynch society, black anti-colonial recognition is spreading. Racism is not, as is often claimed, a tragic legacy that encroaches on an enlightened “better” present. It’s a choice.
Having an anti-black world is a choice. Society decided to stay the same. And now fewer and fewer of us are content to stay on the porch, knocking on the door, peering through the blinds, hoping to catch a glimpse of freedom.
One knock was too many. Typing all day is absurd, let alone typing – how many years have passed?
Anti-colonialism says that those who beg at the door are irresponsible at best. Either way, they should stay there.
One cannot build a home with those who are still enslaved. There is no racial reckoning for the Rhodesias of the world. The masters decided to remain masters. And those racist apologists who scream about reform, training and crackdowns have lost their audience.
Welcome to an era that no longer exists.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.