All animals are created [equal except pigs] – police brutality part 1

All animals are created [equal except pigs] – police brutality part 1

I haven't written in a while - which always reads as counter-productive in our consumerist culture - given that I run a blog. The reality is that I only write when I want to and I only write what I like - but sometimes both of those things are thwarted by compulsion- entertained as a supernatural force. Sometimes, I am compelled out of the confines of my thoughts, pushed to exist publicly- one of the greatest white women to ever exist in my literary landscape once said "Speak I must", and I felt that. I'm not Jane Eyre- and this isn't a discussion I have the range for. I'm making this disclaimer right now - that isn't to say that I'm not incredibly well-read, intellectual and deliciously truthful - but simultaneity is the fruit of life, and simultaneously two truths can intersect and co-exist.  I don't have the range. It is arguable that anyone who claims to have the range for this kind of fuckery is a liar or a well-versed sociopath. I have been black my whole life (surprise surprise) and I truly do not believe I have the tools to unpack the intense, multi-dimensional complexity of life at present- but I'll be dammed if I don't try. The two truth's that co-exist and that I am currently holding space for read as follows:

Despite living in one of the most violent post-colonial states in the world, being ravaged by intergenerational trauma, historical erasure and wide-spread structural and institutional racism... I have attentively watched, nose pressed to the foggy glass of the store-front window called Twitter, collapsed drunk on disillusionment and lying on the cold floor I could be found whisper "What the fuck guys?..."

What the fuck? 

That's about as eloquent as this summation is going to get. This year started off with the potential threat of world war three, and that is perhaps one of the calmest occurrences of the last couple of months. Sound bites of wild moments that have happened before where we are at present:

  • North Korean leader Kim Jung Un faked his own death, which was somehow publicized first by TMZ, in order to expose the potential dissidents amongst his ranks.
  • White South Africans compared lockdown regulations, instituted by a free democratically elected government in order to lessen the spread of an airborne virus in a particularly structurally vulnerable country, to Apartheid
  • J.K. Rowling has once again, exposed herself as a disappointing ambassador of white cisgender feminism and insists on being a transphobic dickhead
  • Virgil Abloh... [I just paused for five minutes and watched my cursor blink back at me] a fucking disappointment if we're keeping it 2 Virgils (100).
  • I let a man with sideburns hurt my feelings, in a whole 2020, and yes that's petty but he doesn't read my work- which I found out in a thread on twitter where he detailed how my feminine wiles and socialite inclinations are akin to delinquency in his opinion.
  • Doja Cat...
  • Cishet men collapsed without the premier league - and yet still managed to venerate Ronaldo, a self-professed rapist
  • Globally, Law abiding bad bitches have suffered an unexpected loss in the wake of COVID-19 and have remained indoors without nails, lashes or a fresh wax
  • Caster Semenya announced the arrival of a new member to her family - congratulations!
  • Beyoncé and Meg Thee Stallion gave the girlies a bop to survive the great indoors
  • Stephanie Meyer announced the release date of Twilight Sun - Robert Pattinson was found drunk in a ditch somewhere
  • Tough times are indeed lasting
  • The Kwa-Zulu Natal annual government have increased King Goodwill Zwelinthini's annual budget by R4.5 million
  • a white woman claimed to have invented Johannesburg Streetwear culture
  • The girlies are making a killing on OnlyFans
  • Zol smoking was stigmatized for somewhat legitimate reasons
  • Pineapples
  • Apparently Kanye West only posed as a MAGMA Trump supporter to aid Kimmy getting unjustly incarcerated black bodies out of jail - not just for the tax rebates. New information has surfaced that the ever infamous Mr. West actually neglected to donate to the Trump campaign and was in fact donating to democrats and Hillary Clinton.
  • Blood and Water was released on Netflix, and surpassed expectations quickly being ranked at NO.1 both nationally and abroad

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.                                                                                                           The iceberg?                                                                                                                                                        The iceberg looks like this - I am a black, coloured woman in a post-colonial state and I can relate to BoJack Horseman's level of pessimism. This is arguably, very obviously,  not one of the egregious injustices of the world but it is a cosmic, metaphysical alteration of my very own. Recently, the splendid underrated rapper Noname tweeted that "pessimism is a tool of white supremacy. They don't want you to be imaginative about a world free from genocide, wealth hoarding, patriarchy, est. In the moments you think revolution is impossible it's important to remember that way of thinking is inherently violent and supremacist". The pessimism that patrols the landscape of my mind is violent and it is a white cisgender man - he is telephoned by white women to occupy fleeting moments of peace and as of late, insists on handcuffing joy in guilt. I can relate to BoJack Horseman's level of pessimism - this is a violent shift in the emotional politics of my overturn window. Understand this, I am an ethnic women - my globalized experience and gendered conceptualization of reality exists on the opposite end of the spectrum from white men. We do not, and cannot derive our pain and trauma from the same well and yet - here I am, desperately wishing to exist as superficially as Carrie Bradshaw (but like no Big and black) and yet confronted by the horrid reality that I am currently being traumatized into a new world understanding. My brain? Is slowly morphing this global dystopian surrealism into something comprehensible - and I know not how to comprehend this level of structural and materialized violence silently.

I am a writer and there are no words - and yet, speak I must.

So let me start here, the world as we have known it is done. Covid-19 shone a light on the horrors of late-stage capitalism as borne out of white supremacist industry -and in the midst of a global health pandemic, racists have posed a more imminent threat to blackness than an incurable, highly contagious, airborne virus. White supremacy and the insidiousness of its manifestations in institutional culture, as well as white bodies, is more dangerous to blackness than an airborne disease.

We are witnessing the global denaturalization of whiteness not only as the default mode of humanity but as prioritized above all other lived experience. It is for this exact reason that 'Black Lives Matter' exists as a radical assertion - threatening the global paradigm of whiteness. In this paradigm, whiteness exists not only above the law but as a force capable of enacting the law, above reproach. In a kyriarchical understanding of the colonial world order, which has been institutionalized, lived experiences and bodies are ranked roughly as follows:

  • White men
  • White women
  • European men
  • European women
  • Eurasian men
  • Eurasian women
  • Asian men
  • Asian women
  • Arab men
  • Arab women
  • South American ethnic men
  • South American ethnic women
  • animals
  • Black American men
  • Black American women
  • More animals
  • African men
  • African women

[In an intersectional reading of this world order, which is somewhat flexible, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion and wealth are mitigating factors in how any given body is read in an archived bracket. For example, despite attending a #BLM rally, Iyanna Dior was attacked by a group of cisgender black men while cisgender women watched on. Her cashapp is $NajaBabiie.]

In a white supremacist, colonial reading of the "pre-existing" world order, white people lord over all other bodies and in Trump's America, as in Apartheid South Africa, whiteness and eurocentricity is held as the ultimate marker of nationhood. White, cisgender men have been socially validated not only as "true" Americans, with the rise of a fascist right-wing, redneck President but in this capacity as executors of the law. It is for this reason that Black Lives Matter is read, and understood to be a social threat. Not only does it mark an unearthing of racial dissidence it announces the need for equity - equity must be understood as a threat in this context. Equity exists as a perceived threat to white privilege and a real threat to white heroic notions of self. Whiteness is understood and valorized, especially in the united states, as a source of democracy and liberation. To call on the need for equity points to the horrific short-comings of a white bureaucracy, political landscape and institutionalized culture. This is unbelievably problematic to an understanding of whiteness which is constructed as infallible- not only intellectually but politically.  For American bodies who are inscribed as other in the gaze of whiteness - it is not socially permissible for these bodies to question the powers at be. Equity as championed by "the other",  threatens whiteness fundamentally as it socially echos ideas of dislocation and settler imposition. It must be archived, written about and understood that white Americans committed mass genocide in order to establish "America" as it is so known. This reality stands in direct opposition to the ideas around democracy and liberation which exist as the cornerstone of this country. Americas staunch, and somewhat alarming, patriotism is rooted in liberal ideas of democracy and injustice - ideas which are manufactured by whiteness to white ends. Practically speaking, much of American patriotism in Trumpland is ahistorical at best. Whiteness in America exists as oscillating between beacons of liberalism and justice - and disassociating from the violence of these ideas inception and execution. In order for whiteness to maintain ideas around justified power and general equity - it has to distance itself from its historic and present violence. Black lives matter socially unearths many untruths upon which whiteness is operationally reliant.

Blackness mattering is not only an affirmation of worthiness and inherent value it is the queering of whiteness on a fundamental level as understood beneath the white political lens. Blackness matters - independent of white validation thereof - but how is a fascist regime to successfully rule over assertions of ideological and social independence, and necessary insularity? For the record, outside the ambit of academia, black lives simply matter because they exist and because they ought to. That is not, and has never been up for debate. The inclination to read #BLM as a counter-narrative somehow asserting that other lives don't... like I can't unpack it because my brain actually works properly but like - no. Just no. Of course other lives matter, but they aren't being subjected to a social witchhunt by the police, institutionalized slavery and mass genocide okay? Okay. This isn't a space for willful ignorance - and anyone asserting that all lives matter is purposefully being obtuse, intellectually violent and undoubtedly racist. Moving swiftly onwards.

Capitalism cannot, in any way, be removed from the advent of #BlackLivesMatter - nor any global horrors if we're keeping it 2 Virgil's. Capitalism informs all of the discourse surrounding the destruction of property during rebellions as well as the police's racialized motivation for mass incarceration of black bodies. It must be noted that I am referring to black bodies - not just men. Black women and disabled black bodies are routinely targeted by the police - and are not spoken about nearly enough.

So - let us start with the pigs.

The police's history in America operates and exists as follows:

and funnels into privatized prison systems detailed here:

(I am not American and I have no interest in writing a thesis on the large juidical framework which operates enabling the pigs to incarcerate black bodies but keep that in mind too because the American judicial system enables modern-day slavery, which occurs in privatized prisons - thanks to white capitalism).

The American police force have historically been embedded in ideas of white nationalism and socially valorized as agents of rationalism, charged with executing the law (which assumed to operate fairly). The coperganda in America is rife, and exists in all of their entertainment culture which praises and creates heroes out of cops - re-inforcing the social idea that cops are neutralized bodies, graciously putting themselves on the line to protect citizens. This is simply not true.

The law has failed, until this week amidst mass global protests for #BLM , to hold police officers accountable not only to their alleged standard and protocol- but reprimand them for their excessive use of force. This is is perhaps the result of inequitable law - yes, but the greater reality exists that the state will never move to hold accountable its agents if this accountability means uprooting itself. To hold white cops accountable and "punish" them with the law, would not only be a degradation of whiteness- as they are held to the same standards as oppressed bodies - it would mean that the law could be separated from whiteness which is not the ideal of a white settler state. Ideological conditions make possible a political environment in which state mercenaries feel obliged to enact their ideas of justice. Justice in this context being the suppression of black democratic freedoms - because freedoms are reserved for whiteness. The state monopolizes violence and confers "legitimacy" thereof to bodies who they read as fit [read white men].

Last week, Trump went on national television and said the following:

[If listening to this disgusting, putrid mistake of a human being is too much for you skip to 3:15 pr just read the caption]

For the record, this tactic is referred to as a dog-whistle in politics. Dog-whistling according to Vox stands as "...political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people, but which also communicates something more insidious either to a subset of the audience or outside of the audience’s conscious awareness — a covert appeal to some noxious set of views.".  Trump exists as a cisgender, white, redneck, right-wing Presidental candidate, with parents who were active members in the KKK. Trump has socially, on numerous occasions espoused both deeply sexist,racist  and xenophobic statements. Statements which have been received and internalized by his core base- which exists as a simplified explanation as to why the rise of the fascist, right-wing and hate crimes have increased during his presidency. To make a national call, to a Republican base - who affirm much of their... ideology... around nationhood in their belief in the second amendment right - is to make a call to untrained, predominantly white bodies to bear arms and "protect" the state... from whom?  According to Trump, "Professional anarchist [whateveer the fuck that is], violent mobs [read systemically oppressed bodies and allies], arsonists, looters, ANTIFA and rioters." This is propaganda 101 - Trump set up a binary between us and them. Them, being disenfranchised bodies framed as anarchists. This is what I was referring to when I said that  The state monopolizes violence and confers "legitimacy" thereof to bodies who they read as fit [read white men] to use it as they please.  The grand irony also exists before us, that Trump called on untrained civilians to "restore" peace, when the entire root of this rebellion is against state-sanctioned, trained bodies who exert excessive force resulting in fatalities.

Now, let's dive into the idea of protestors being "thugs" and "arsonists" and the only acceptable method of protest being pacifism, allegedly. Let me start by referring to a quote given by Martin Luther King on the current protests.... oh wait I can't that's because the FBI murdered him. To expect and moreover demand pacifism in the face of a genocide is wholly unrealistic. The idea that black bodies need to always assume the moral high ground is a form of social gaslighting which is no longer acceptable nor permissible. Firstly, I don't understand how morality is the bargaining chip being used by an alleged rapist (re-confirmed by the recent Anonymous release of evidence pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein), known sexual aggressor and jailer of small children in cages. Okay? let's start there. Secondly... well just watch this:

If you don't have time for everything, I encourage you to make the time, but listen from 3:20- 6:08.

During the colonial quest, indigenous bodies were read as uncivilized and part of this "primitivism" was rooted in ideas that indigenous bodies are prone to emotional outbursts and thus lack rationalism. To condemn black peoples justified rage against severe state mistreatment is to hark on colonial ideas which aim to underscore the reality that the state needs to operate with custodianship towards black bodies, as we do not know how to control ourselves - and this is just obviously wrong. There is no room to negotiate with terror - having been designated as a systemically disposable body, your civility means nothing, your pacifism means nothing because ultimately your life in the eyes of the state means nothing. It is nothing short of ridiculous, to ask black people to operate calmly and with politeness in lieu of respectability politics. Respectability does not save black lives. Foucauldian thought frames the gesture of appealing to fascist and racist states consciousness with non-violence as futile when that state is devoid of a conscious - in order to exact violence at the propensity which it does.

The police are agents of white capitalism - their job is to protect property, not people. Inadvertently, through the mass incarceration of black bodies, which are then funnelled into the privatized prison system, police perform the exact same role of the slave patrol. They protect the property of white capitalism - during slavery this was slaves, now its a steady stream of prisoners which maintain the labour in privatized prisons.

Even so, if rioters burn America to the ground... insurance exists. Even if it didnt or doesn't, it must be prioritized and globally understood that black bodies are more valueable than commercial property. Moreover, African Americans arrived in America as slaves - slaves who built a vast majority not only of American commerce but physical structures, if they want to burn the facist state to the ground, it would be the most justified reason in the history of America. Remember.  white pilgrim settlers, not only burned indigenous communities to the ground - but did so for purposes of forced relocation. America has endured worse, for far less.

Also... America is globally known as war-mongers... how is a country that has not known peace since the 1920's now advocating for peace? Surely not?

Lastly... to touch on America's rising fascism.

  • 2 June 2020, the NYPD, devoid of warrants or probable cause invaded private homes in order to arrest protestors... guys - only dictatorships think its plausible to invade their citizens private domains. This happened during Apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany and...
  • 3 June 2020, Trump announced his intention to designate ANTIFA a terrorist organization, before the KK, despite the FBI not finding ANTIFA responsible for riots
  • 3 June 2020, cops refused to let citizens in NYC access the operational subways despite curfew fastly approaching... because America has a curfew. Despite the violation thereof resulting in an arrest. All of this to be understood while immigrants and POC work night jobs - ultimately inherently violating curfew.
  • America has insisted on using tear gas on protesters,  while COVID -19 is an airborne disease and African Americans have already died at a disproportionate rate. This is in contravention of the Geneva Convention
  • 3 June 2020, The DEA have been given authority to conduct surveillance on protestors... who have also been arrested after protests or found dead (as in the case of Furgeson).
  • 7 June 2020, In the Adelanto ICE camp, immigrants are being sprayed with HDQ Neutral every 15-30 minutes according to a complaint. This is being administered by guards wearing gloves and gas masks. This gas is sprayed on the counters and in the housing compound despite the ventilation being poor. detainees have complained of headaches, blisters, rashes, stomach pain, nausea, bleeding. this has been met with inadequate care.
  • A black CNN journalist was arrested before George Flyod's murderer. Much media repression has occurred nationally

If you're still here, bless you because this article is truly fucking long. Look, this is part 1 because I'm not American and police brutality isn't something they have a monopoly on - and I must write about here too. In part 2, I wanna talk about defunding the police, the fuckery of the SANDF, the necessity of joy and maybe allyship... maybe.

So in conclusion for now,

Fuck the police.

Fuck Donald Trump.

Fuck ICE.

Fuck respectability politics.

BLACK LIVES MATTER - OPEN YOUR PURSE.

Sign the petitions, here is a link to a google drive with petitions:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ehxsXaZo4ISd-ht9I82oQ1lE6Mjyv4l2JiOGQDr-kE0/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

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