Control of “space” is the primary goal of the U.S. hegemony.  Conquest of spaces on Earth where highly valued land, the oil and mineral resources on the land and the people who currently own the land are sought after by the U.S. agenda for world domination, displaces, marginalizes, impoverishes, and disconnects people from their home of origin. While the U.S. is on the road, imposing its brand of “democracy” and free market enterprise everywhere on the global, like it or not, people, mostly sharing racial or religious or class difference, are forced to create ways to survive the terror of a police state. 

Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, is “lost,” but she is quickly surrounded by people who look familiar, look like family members back home.  Collectively, they fend off the Wicked Witch of the West, whose campaign focuses on possessing the highly valued slippers on Dorothy’s feet.  Let’s just “go a piece of the way” with this arguably political allegory: The “Wicked Witch of the West” feels entitled to the “slippers” and therefore entitled to any and every space where those highly valued “slippers” exist.  Not satisfied with “magical” powers and advantages of a familiar landscape, the “Wicked Witch of the West” pursues her enemies in their dreams, forcing them to recognize her approach or encroachment as something to dread even while she urges them to come to her willingly.

In the reality of U.S. hegemony, some of us have been carried away by a cyclone, or if you like, a hurricane, so we find it difficult to locate “home” or ken.  In the new order, we cannot depend on Condi Rice or federal judges appointed by the administration or social agencies, or educational institutions. We do receive unwarranted and unfair attention however from the institutions of the criminal justice system, where, these days, the authorities look like kin, but chances are they are not “family” at all.

The egotistical use of language to capture “space” by the hegemony is astonishing.  To get to the highly valued things of the other, it must mark the “space” of the other.  The hegemony, like the Wicked Witch of the West, assures her enemy that escape is futile, and they will be hunted long before they ever are at “home” with themselves, their community, their possessions — their minds.

Black mothers on welfare are impinging on the economy, stealing the hard-earned money of the working class.  First-generation Black college students are “unqualified” thieves, taking valuable college classroom seats from more deserving students.  All Katrina survivors wading in the foul waters to locate water, food, and dry clothes are looters who should be shot for taking what does not belong to them. 

“People from Chicago,” appearing with Cs on their foreheads after crossing the state line between Illinois and Wisconsin, must be ticketed for noise, as they are taking the peace of the entire town of Madison. 

As a people who have historically resisted the voice of “reason” urging the willing arrest of our development in this country, we are charged with being uncooperative.

The real target is the “space” of our collective thoughts.  Mark that space as uncooperative. 

Somebody’s baby, Shaquanda Cotton, was 14-years old when a judge thought it suitable to sentence her to 7 years in detention for shoving a school hall monitor. The same judge thought probation suitable for a 14-year old white girl after she just burned down her family home! The “violence” of those deemed uncooperative IS (read) far more dangerous to the hegemony that even tried to claim the young Cotton would not “cooperate” with the terms of her probation.

Like Cotton, the young man Mycal Bell, in Jena, Louisiana has been released too but not before he was sentenced in adult court to 22 years in prison for a school fight, for defending himself and the right of Blacks in 2006 to sit anywhere, let alone under a tree, without the offensive appearance of nooses. 

Young Black children are escorted out of elementary classrooms for disturbing the peace by police officers. “When the 21st century came around, a nation that was once outraged at images of young children being hosed by water and bitten by dogs, became fully comfortable with the more tasteful oppressive-images of kids walking right out of performance-reducing schools and right into profit-producing prisons,” writes Charles Modiano (“The Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton, and the Blog Power”). 

In the space we call the Black community, the collective and individual communities we call home, the hegemony wants us to imagine its authority sweeping by on their brooms.  We are to imagine unwarranted arrests and sentencing for uncooperative behavior.  Imagine, we are told, the naturalization of a police state where no one will appear kin or kind.  Our spaces — whether plantation fields or cabins, rural shacks, or urban tenements and neighborhoods, our spaces, like “Black sites” have always been the site of brutality, harassment, repression, terror, exploitation…

We do not torture!  It is the policy of the hegemony not to torture!   

It is the Look from those who dare to look that repels and attracts me as a scholar. And although I have all the “intellectual” explanations for the Look, I am still baffled by the hate that lies behind it.  I am attracted to comprehending what might be impossible to ever comprehend.  Why do they hate? I am convinced that this hate is not limited to others.  After many centuries, hate becomes a way of being.  It is not about love, to echo Faulkner.  Even when it seems to be, it seems to focus on self, family, community; it looks like love, smells, walks, and acts like love, and yet it is something else all together.  This way of life is most egregious in the willing abuse and slaughter of children here at home and abroad.  What is concealed behind the mask of the humanitarian who agrees to wage wars with bombs that fall on children and the mask of the white hooded folks or the black-attired ninja-like war profiteers of Blackwater?  

Who are these people who make up the coalition of the willing — the willing to kill the spirits of Black children?

We can’t continue to placate hatred.  Click your heels. Nightmares of this kind have been haunting us since Alexander found his horse and pointed toward the highly valued things of Africa.  We learn to transcend our fears while surrounded by people who can’t face their fears.  If we take seriously our survival and consciously contemplate a Black radicalism in the spaces where we stand, we will find our kin and kind.  We will find each other, for “black radicalism,” writes Tyner, “is about alternative geographies,” spaces in which we imagine “new societies through progressive actions” that we initiate for our survival — the survival of our children.

“Mycal” and “Shaquanda,” are names created to defy the history of appropriating people and material resources.  These children represent those who will be our new Rosa Parks and Malcolm X.  For them and with them, we imagine new spaces and new dreams of freedom from hegemonic tyranny. 

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.