When I heard that a young man, carrying a hairbrush
in New York, had been shot by police, I knew it was a young
Black man. It turned out to be a Black man. I am sure other
Blacks in America figured this out too on immediately hearing
the news.
The mother calls for the police and tells them
her son, behaving erratically, is nonetheless unarmed. Five
policemen arrive at the scene and encounter this eighteen
year-old shouting he has a gun. Khiel Coppin pulls out a
hairbrush, and according to the New York Daily News, he is
shot 10 times. I am sure the mother called not to have her
son killed, but to be subdued. Couldn’t five men contain
this situation without resorting to gunfire?
Now the explanation or the narrative: New York
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly declared the shooting “fell
within departmental guidelines.” Why? Young Coppin had a
“history of mental illness.” He was mentally ill! I wonder
if people outside of the U.S. think when this country executes
and shots its mentally ill. Could there have been some way,
granted more difficult and requiring concern for other human
beings, to bring this young man under control besides killing
him? But what am I saying? Killing is a way to remove the
crisis of Black existence in America. And we shouldn’t be
worried about Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Gang Abatement and Prevention
Act 2007?
When a white youth gathers his parents’ guns
(whites can have guns for “hunting”) and heads for his school
and starts shooting “innocent” students, it is news for weeks.
All involved, fellow students, teachers, principals, news
media and lawyers, distance themselves from this “strange”
kid with “arrogance” and an air of grand illusions or delusions.
In an “innocence” narrative that represents Black youth as
the menacing figure, with or without hairbrushes, cell
phones, or guns, these cases of white youth violence are denoted
as “isolated” and “unfathomable,” freaks of nature
itself! Narratives speak of an “isolated,” dark soul.
Media
consolidation is no accident. Regardless of the arbitrary
labels of “conservative” or “liberal,” don’t expect Fox
News or Air America to connect the dots. Most
white progressives fear the thought of recognizing white supremacy
as the tradition from which springs King George’s Pax Americana
Agenda. Even if this Agenda cares no more for the white working
class and the white middle class populations, the progressives
will have to admit to the exploitation of Black people in
particular and recognize how the institutionalization of racism
protects them, while reminding Black people everyday that
they are a crucial target of the “shock and awe” assault on
civil liberties in the U.S. — otherwise known as the “war
on terrorism.”
America’s appetite for violence sailed in on
the flagship RACE, or as John Henrik Clarke, noted, The
Good Ship Jesus. What’s happening to Black Americans
is a symptom, too, of America’s obsession with violence.
America’s own “radicalization of violent ideology” (see HR:
1955) is the violent creation of narratives justifying
domestic killings and the targeting of sections of Black communities.
“Homeland Security” means stopping Muslims at the airport,
tracking down and chasing the so-called “aliens,” Latino/as
people, and incarcerating or shooting outright, Black people.
Global corporatization is the militarization of the world
for the benefit of U.S. interests. A surge in law enforcement
in the Black community will lead (and has — remember the days
following Katrina in New Orleans) to Blackwater patrols storming
through neighborhoods and shooting “the usual suspects.”
No Black person living in the U.S. needs to be
told that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is intended to profit
King George’s brother, Neil Bush. NCLB continues where the
Preamble of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind left off: In
the Preamble his philosophical text, Hegel declares that Africans
have no history or culture and so, therefore, let’s move on
to discuss the mind, history and culture of human beings.
NCLB adds that Blacks have no future either.
While the educational institutions effectively
maintain a level of ignorance regarding historical deployment
of violence in the interest of U.S. domination, the media
is assigned the task of instilling fear as a preventive measure
against protest, against the idea of thinking resistance.
Seventy-five
percent of the American population opposes the kingdom of
corporatization and militarization King George and Darth Vader
have established here and around the world, yet they are frozen
in the state of fear. As a result, even some of these seventy-five
percent of the American public opposed to this current administration,
still believe that, for the most part, the U.S. government
is on the side of the people. What keeps Americans in a state
of fear is its lack of knowledge. And it is not just any
knowledge or the kind offered in American educational institutions
today that urges young people of all classes and races to
climb the mountain of corporate capitalism and, in the meantime,
keep an eye on the interior and exterior monsters roaming
the streets of America and deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Americans lack what French philosopher, Michel Foucault, called
the historical knowledge of struggles (Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977).
This kind of knowledge is and has been subjugated; in
its place is the kind of knowledge that supports the maintenance
of an American Empire. This kind of knowledge speaks of appropriate,
indeed, natural domination of white male economic power to
the exclusion of any alternative perspective. This kind of
knowledge speaks of patriotism, military conflict for corporate
profit, detention camps and torture, and signing decree after
signing decree to maintain law and order. And from what?
Why, a possible uprising on the part of those for whom the
knowledge of historical struggles is more real than the imagined
“enemy.”
Black Americans, for whom this knowledge of historical
struggles is more real that the imagined “enemy” of the State,
are, at once, the internal and external “enemy.” It is our
knowledge, along with the knowledge of Native Americans and
Latino/as, that is and has been historically under attack,
for as we have seen, our knowledge has at times thawed the
collective state of fear and forced the country into action.
Thought control works even without the presence
of a police state. We can police ourselves into a state of
fear if we assume that the myriad attacks on our children
are too overwhelming, and we sit down and allow the media
to torture us with words and images of our inferiority and
powerlessness.
We are engaged in a “war on terrorism” against
fascists who have established sites of relational power with
the intent of destroying us. (See Larry Pinkney’s Fascism:
An American Reality). They will do so by any means
necessary because for them, much is at stake. Destroy our
spirit of resistance and the rest of the country will come
quietly, like zombies, to accept authoritarian rule.
We are a people of conscience, political conscience,
and we can’t afford to forget the power of our knowledge of
historical struggles.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Lenore J. Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary,
resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories
with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative
violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched
dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator
of student and community resistance projects that encourage
the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator
of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia
for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern
American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory
(race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago.
Click
here to contact Dr. Daniels.