Category: Represent Our Resistance

Don’t talk about race. Or anything that calls attention to you as a Black person, and while you maneuver the terrain that is Kenosha, Wisconsin, please keep even informed opinions to yourself so as to not raises the anger of whites who will punish you—with impunity—because power is wrapped so tightly around their skin that it is one and the same thing, isn’t it?

With a wave of a capitalist’s wand, it’s one big coating of white supremacy flowing freely over the African savanna, desert, villages, cities. Over the minds of the African people. But not all. Always, not all.

Anti-Black is a symptom Trump shares with many white Americans. We are living in an America that can’t accept the truth—and that truth is that white America today is implicated in the maintenance of white supremacy. All pervasive and deep. Yet, despite the protests and Black Lives Matter movement, some Americans keep pointing to images of ‘looters’ as if the 400 years of America’s worship of violence against Black Americans will disappear. Down a memory hole.

Forty out of forty-six of the Founding Fathers are slaveholders. In the northern colonies the accumulation of wealth depends on the smooth operation of shipyards, ship builders, merchants in the slave market. South, united in the recognition of it’s identity and interests, recognized, writes the Blumrosens, American liberty as what could be “defended as the desire to protect black slavery.”

Blacks can’t complain. But whites can complain about Blacks invading their neighborhood or store or housing complex—daring to live in an apartment on the other side of the living room wall.

Black Americans, consisting of 12.5% of the country’s drug users make up 29% of the country’s citizens arrested for drug offenses. After spending time behind bars, the real crime commences because it’s white America’s false recognition of what makes them unsafe that brings about the convergence of the criminal justice system and young Black youth.

the nation’s drive west in the creation of a democratic society for Caucasians is further evidence of the formation of white supremacy as a founding ideology. The demand for docile people of color in this Caucasian democracy to serve as a free labor force is contrary to a reality of a nonwhite (as it was at the beginning) society that is, thanks to conquest and enslavement, a bedrock of inequality.

To change course, to simply decide not to continue on a path that can only produce more bloody corpses of black bodies, is to demand a new course for law enforcement.

calling on Americans to call forth their “better angels” may have been a marketing strategy for someone like Oprah to hold on to her white women, middle and upper middle class audience, it’s not intended, however, for someone like Breonna Taylor, who, as an EMT, put her own health on the line for the great good. But you won’t hear the media referring to her as an “angel.”

Faulkner, in the 1910s and 1920s Mississippi, would have sat on some adult’s lap to hear stories about the gallantry of Robert E. Lee. In Chicago, at my Catholic elementary, I heard about Robert E. Lee. I saw pictures of him in my history textbooks before I was told anything about Frederick Douglass. Devoid of all his anger and fight, of course.