My Mostly Mute Mourning of Our Most Recent Martyr, George Floyd
Urban environments are engulfed in flames, the images flash before my face, and I sit reading in my apartment. Demonstrators flood the streets, shutting down highways, and occupying whole neighborhoods, and I sit reading in my apartment. Protestors are beaten bloody and bruised, and I sit reading in my apartment.
I have sat reading in my apartment for months, since the coronavirus pandemic and resulting quarantine began. Yet when George Floyd was murdered and hundreds of thousands took and continue to take to the streets to protest the unjust and atrocious murder, I’ve continue to stay inside reading, mourning silently while the maddened masses march.
As a Black man, how can I sit idly by while protesters across the nation risk their lives and livelihoods to have their voices heard? As a self-professed activist, organizer, and leader, how can I content myself with what appears to be inaction? Why is it that up until this piece you are currently reading I have been so uncharacteristically silent about the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd?
Don’t I care that an innocent man was murdered?
Don’t I care that the Black community is grieving?
Don’t I care about Justice?
Of course I care. My silence stems not from insensitivity but rather over-sensitivity. I’ve momentarily distanced myself from the pain of police brutality and the thinly veiled genocide of Black Americans for the sake of my sanity. The unfortunate reality is that as long as the white supremacist structures that govern the world stand unchallenged and unchanged, Black lives will never matter. So, I’ve momentarily dulled my own reaction to the individual incidents of police brutality to focus on developing a new ideology for collective political action that looks towards systematic change to address all of the challenges facing contemporary society.
Here’s how I see it.
George Floyd is the latest high profile, street-style, state execution of a Black man at the hands of the officers that uphold the laws of white supremacy and settler-colonialism. I wish I could say that his was the latest murder by a cop full stop, but, in the weeks since Floyd’s death, cops across the country have continued to contribute to their collective corpse count — both during the protests and outside of them.
The difference is that Floyd’s death made headlines. It made headlines not only because it was particularly heinous, but because the story was so familiar it sparked a collective PTSD.
As we watched him there,
It all felt like déjà vu.
Face forced into the concrete,
Black body turning blue.
Eric Garner is that you?
It’s like I can feel the knee
on my neck
and the stranglehold
on my throat,
struggling to say,
“I can’t breathe,”
while I choke.
It’s the same story every time
A brash cop steps out of line
Thinking, “justice must be dealt with these hands of mine.”
And with that thought,
They take a life
Often of an innocent man
With kids and a wife
They do so because they deny the humanity
Of our beautiful Black bodies
All to justify
Their homicide,
(Or did I mean genocide?)
Enraged by the injustice committed and their collective impotence to hold yet another killer cop accountable, the people gather in protest. What happens next depends on factors which are largely beyond the control of the organizers and leaders of the protest.
This is to say, there are two directions in which protests like these go: either they remain peaceful or they are agitated into riot and rebellion. I say the final direction of a protest is out of the control of organizers because these protests are potential powder kegs. All it takes is an agitator or two (all too frequently plain-clothes police officers) to turn a peaceful protest into a violent rebellion.
These rebellions, even when agitated by police, are understandable outgrowths and outbursts of anger from a people tired of tyranny. Even Martin Luther King Jr. referred to urban rebellions, what the media calls ‘riots’, as the “language of the unheard.” In agreement with MLK, I refuse to ever condemn Black people and communities who take to rebellion as a form of expression and grieving, and it certainly sickens me to see the media denouncing “rioters” and “looters” without exposing the injustices that bring us, time and time again, to moments such as these.
It’s the repetitiveness of the story that mutes my response in this moment. It isn’t that the frequency has desensitized me to the pain and trauma of this murder; on the contrary, I’m filled with more pain, trauma, and sensitivity to this issue, and others, than ever before. Rather, the repetivity of the story has me questioning the nature of the Black community’s collective response.
It has me questioning whether it might better serve our goals if we reevaluate our efforts and focus on developing and building around proactive strategies and political philosophies for a systematic restructuring of society on a global scale, even during times of tragedy and grief, instead of pouring that emotional energy and people power into reactionary strategies which rarely, if ever, serve to move the needle in our favor.
To me, the scenes playing out in Minneapolis and around the country are mirror images of Watts ’65, LA ’92, and Ferguson ’14 — among so many other urban rebellions which grew in response to state violence and police brutality.
They are mirror images of one another whose reflections have merely been distorted by history’s hall of mirrors. And, much like a hall of mirrors, each attempt to find our way out of these frightening circumstances brings us, once again, face-to-face with another image that emphasizes and reminds us of the most distorted and grotesque aspects of our nature. Each time we run into a mirror, we are so shocked and appalled by this new view of our societal hues, it’s as though we’ve never been here before — even though we’ve seen something similar so many times. Between each confrontation with these shocking images, we’ve typically seen so many different reflections of ourselves, many of which are quite flattering, we almost forget that we’re trapped inside a hall of mirrors.
White supremacist capitalism has turned society into a maze of mirrors which has distorted humanity’s image and understanding of itself for the fifth century in a row. We can’t find our way out, and we have no way of knowing which, if any, of the images we see are reflections of our true nature. Five centuries of collective confusion have clouded the consciousness of the couth colonizers and the contemptuous colonized alike. As a result, we find ourselves locked into economic and political systems that threaten to bring an end to effectively all life as we’ve come to know it through a global climate crisis and ecological catastrophe.
Yes, if you were paying attention, I just drew a direct line between police brutality and the climate crisis because they are connected as symptoms of society’s sickness. It is curing this sickness that I am concerned with, and that we all should concern ourselves with. Of course, we must treat the symptoms, but no matter how much we attempt to alleviate them, they won’t stop until the underlying illness is eliminated.
Yet, around the world, we stand star-struck by the sheer scale of the symptoms themselves that we fail to recognize that the symptoms can be treated and the sickness cured by a systematic treatment plan. If racial capitalism is a cancer (which it is), then I’m calling for chemo. However, unlike chemotherapy, the necessary treatment plan for fighting racial capitalism on a global scale hasn’t been developed yet, and it’s developing that treatment plan that I have concerned myself with. Because, now, more than ever, we need an idea, a strategy, a philosophy, a plan, something that can be used in every community, in every city, across every country, and on every continent, to address the systemic oppressions and injustices embedded into every culture by centuries of colonial conquest.
We need something of this scale because scarce exists a stretch of land left unspoiled by the environmental and cultural pollutions of colonialism. It’s important to understand that the evils of racism, police brutality, wealth inequality, heteropatriarchy, and climate change are the byproducts of colonialism and globalized, racial capitalism. If you don’t understand those connections, then I would suggest that you study the state of globalized, neocolonial society and its historical basis because exploring those connections is beyond the scope of the present piece.
Nevertheless, if you would indulge me and accept those premises to be true, as I certainly do, then I would like to illustrate why we must stop reacting to isolated incidents and instead focus our energies on intentional action guided by a greater vision of our collective future.
At the end of the day, I hope for everyone to understand that until we root out white supremacy and racial capitalism around the world, then we will never be free of the aforementioned evils. In the past two centuries, multiple attempts have been made, across various communities and countries, to address the social manifestations of white supremacist capitalism. From the abolition of slavery and Southern Radical Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to the #Blacklivesmatter movement, Black Americans have continually struggled against racial and class oppression. Each of these past struggles resulted in their own, substantial, structural reforms, but each of those gains were ultimately short-lived.
They were short-lived because the reactionary forces of racial capitalism remained unchallenged and unaltered in every single one of recent history’s great, progressive, mass movements, and it has left us saddled with the continuation of marginalization, oppression, and exploitation. As Michelle Alexander illustrated in The New Jim Crow, the racial caste system of the United States, which is used to justify the imprisonment and labor exploitation of Black people, was never eliminated; it has merely transformed itself to accommodate the restrictions of contemporary society.
While these examples are focused on racism in America, similar realities apply to the treatment of Africans and other “Third World” peoples in developing nations, which in most cases may be more aptly called “neocolonial territories.” That is to say, while significant advances were made towards independence during the revolutionary struggles of the mid-twentieth century, those were by and large eliminated during decades of neoliberal “free trade” and “aid” programs.
In all cases, what we have seen is that so long as racial capitalism exists unchallenged in some corner of the world, our gains and advances towards a just and equitable society can easily be undone. In many cases, progressive gains can be undone without most people realizing that it is happening because they are able to exert influence within the halls of government — as opposed to the mass movements which exert influence from without. The counterrevolutionary forces of racial capitalism don’t need to take the form of mass demonstrations against the system because they operate within the system, and these forces will continue to act so long as the system remains unchallenged and intact.
This brings me back to why my mourning has been mostly mute, and why I have not been in the streets demanding Justice for George Floyd or joining the cries to Abolish the Police. I fully support the protestors, demonstrators, organizers, and activists that are in the streets and the halls of government demanding change. It’s beautiful to see how much energy this is generating, and I think it has the potential to continue to grow and create meaningful change. Yet, this moment and this movement nonetheless run the risk of repeating the same cycle as before, where we achieve major gains that are eventually undone because we did not address the underlying political and economic institutions that create and uphold our twisted reality.
I believe, like many others, that it is time to challenge the structure of globalized, racial capitalism and use that challenge as our opportunity to address social, economic, and political injustices. In particular, I believe we need to approach this challenge through the lens of climate action and a just transition. I’d like to remind everyone reading that we still have less than ten years to address global greenhouse gas emissions before we face irreversible climate change.
If we can develop and organize around a framework that can guide humanity out of the hall of mirrors of white supremacist capitalism, then we would be able to use that framework to address sociopolitical injustices and socioeconomic oppressions. In these moments of mourning, I have rededicated myself to the search for such a framework centered on climate action and a just transition.
And I think I found it. However, I refrain from discussing it here.
It might seem odd to talk about the need for such a framework and to claim to have one yet be unwilling to share even a summary of said strategy. I’m choosing to remain temporarily silent on my strategy for social change so that I might maintain some control of the initial narrative to ensure people can clearly and easily understand it, why it is important, nay, needed, and how it can be used to solve the climate crisis while providing the foundation to address almost any extant injustice.
Towards that end, I’m actively elaborating an essay on the subject of my political philosophy and strategy for systemic social change.
More to come.
Update Sep 2020: Read my extended essay “Why Voting Matters but An Organized Electorate Matters More” for a first look at this philosophy.
