George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Belly Mujinga.

There’s a tremor with each murder. Ahmuad Arbery was shot in February by two white men while he was jogging. The video goes viral in early May. On the 13th of March Breonna Taylor is shot to death while asleep in her bed when the police bust into her and her partner’s home in the middle of the night. It is put down to a ‘clerical error’ and to date, none of the officers have been charged with her murder. In early April Belly Mujinga, a British Transport employee who worked at Victoria Station dies of Covid-19 after she was reportedly coughed at and spat on by someone who claimed to be infected with the disease. On May 25th George Floyd was killed by a police officer whilst being arrested for trying to spend a forged twenty dollar bill. The officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. He dies on the street. The video goes viral and the tremors become a quake.

When I first feel all this I make drawings of all the Black writers I have read this year so far, most of whom write at length about all the issues that suddenly flood social media. A week has passed since I started this post.

Ta-nehisi Coates . We Were 8 Years in Power

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

On June 1st I begin to notice Facebook and Instagram being flooded with the rising tide of protests, starting in Minneapolis but quickly mobilising in cities across the US. They are calling for the officers involved in Floyd’s death to be charged with murder. I am particularly moved by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sharing an infographic about what you’ll need to protest safely. Both because of the pandemic and because she knows that the protest against Police Brutality will be met with Police Brutality. As most politicians are advising people to stay home she is sharing advice not only on what to wear but how how to protect against tear gas and where on your body to write your contact information. There is such power in the simplicity of the gesture.

“Federal grant money for drug enforcement must end; drug forfeiture laws must be stripped from the books; racial profiling must be eradicated; the concentration of drug busts in poor communities of colour must cease; and the transfer of military equipment and aid to local law enforcement agencies waging the drug war must come to a screeching halt. And that's just for starters."

On Tuesday June 2nd there’s a social media protest #blackouttuesday. Everyone posts a black square in solidarity. We hashtag them black lives matter. I feel a pressure to post although it feels counter intuitive …my feed seems to go silent with black squares. Lizzo posts a video pleading, with not a little exasperation, for us not to use the BLM hashtag because it’s blocking necessary and life-saving content from being seen.

Later in the day we realise our error and begin sharing Black-centered content instead. And amidst the incredible plethora of memes, artists, content creators, articles and news clips, for the first time I begin to see all the demands to defund the police. Michelle Alexander’s book first made me aware of this idea, the redirection of money away from policing and the Prison Industrial Complex and into community led programs, education, mental health support and healthcare. Of course the idea has been a central demand for many Black and Indigenous people for as long as they’ve been fighting colonial oppression. In the opening chapters of Alexander’s book, she talks about how in the early 1970s the relevance of prisons in the U.S was seriously being questioned. New ideas and imaginings begin to germinate in my mind.

The organised working class, in consequence, which had been seen as the potential agent of social transformation during the phase of capital accumulation, one that had been primarily based on production, no longer has enough clout to put a stop to the process of expanding job erosion now that consumption has displaced production as the primary medium of capital accumulation. During the production phase, the category of the jobless poor, both in the First as well as in the reserve “native” Third worlds, had a function. This function had been that of providing an excess of labour supply over demand, in order to put a brake on wage costs. In this new consumption phase of capital accumulation, it has no function.

I revisit the article by Sylvia Wynter from 1992, No Humans Involved. I am reminded that the L.A riots were the product of rage at the Police Brutality against a young Black man identical to so many of the cases we’ve become familiar with over the years. I am reminded of the dehumanising of Black people that has been normalised so that this violence can continue unchecked. No Humans Involved was the note police would put on cases that involved the murder of and violence against people who were not rich or white. Wynter cites a claim by a police chief that a certain choke hold was more likely to kill African American males because their larynxes were somehow different from Caucasian larynxes. Latino men apparently suffer a similar, deadly anomaly.

As I get used to the idea of defunding the Police, I begin to read about abolition. The complete dismantling of Police and Prisons, carceral justice becoming obsolete. Again, this idea when I first hear it blows my mind. Another beautiful infographic circulates on alternative community led solutions to situations in which we would normally call the police. The poet Harry Josephine Giles directs me to the website Transformharm.org.

We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa. We persist in this belief regardless of what we know to the contrary: that the Nazis’ affection for high culture did not prevent their crimes.

More of my white peers than ever before seem to be actively engaging in and sharing the work of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. I watch Robin Diangelo talk about White Fragility. I watch James Baldwin in conversation with Nikki Giovanni in 1971. I watch further interviews and readings with Giovanni. I feel the sheer weight of this change. The actuality of Reparations, which Coates wrote about so passionately, being raised in mainstream conversation.

Meanwhile, Trump tear-gasses protesters to clear the front of a church for a photo-op. People begin to call the UK government out on its own systemic racism. I learn Sheku Bayouh’s name for the first time and remember Mark Duggan and Hackney burning ten years ago. The terms Restorative Justice and Transformative Justice enter my vocabulary.

“The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come.”

All Lives Matter. Reverse Racism. A vigilante group called Electric Boogaloo who want to start a second Civil War. These things spit poison at the call for revolution.

In Kindred, Butler sets her protagonist up for conversations with white people where she either has to explain their privilege to them, or protect them for her own survival. There’s a moment when her and her (white) husband have both been transported back in time; he’s excited about it and wants to explore and she has to remind him how dangerous it is for her to be there. She beautifully captures that moment when the person you love’s face clouds over with incomprehension and your heart dies a little as you realise you have to have that conversation with them for the first time. Some fundamental aspect of your lived experience in the world, that you had assumed they would somehow implicitly understand, must be explained and you know it is probably only the first conversation. I’m sure it’s a moment I’ve brought about in others before and I hope I will always work to fix it.

Toni Morrison . Sula and Song of Solomon.

“In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.” - Sula

What does it mean to be a witch? To be haunted? To go looking for gold and find your people’s history in a song about a man who upped and flew away. Toni Morrison knows. I read Beloved for the first time when I searched ‘ghost stories by women of colour.’ Nothing was ever the same again. But I actively had to stop reading straight white men in order to find everyone else because these voices do not come to you easily. You have to pull yourself out of the current of the white-cis-het maintstream .

I learn that the word ‘Loot’ is Hindi in it’s origin and was used by the British to describe Indian plundering when they revolted against their Colonial Rulers. There was no such derogatory term for how the British had taken the resources, land and labour from India and the other lands and peoples swallowed by the Empire.

When there is outrage by the destruction of property happening with some of the protests, Kimberly Latrice Jones responds with an incredible speech which ends with her saying: “They are lucky it is equality Black people are looking for and not revenge.”

However, it is important to note that the protestors taking part in the majority of the mass gatherings, which by now have spread to Europe and Canada, are peaceful. The police responses? Not so.

“We understood what was necessary -humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change, as if they have that kind of power. They do, however, understand forceful things, cruelties--they obey those.”

On Sunday there is a protest in Holyrood park opposite the palace. Everyone is respectful and tries their best to social distance. The speakers are eloquent. Those who want to show their respects but not get out of their cars make circuits, beeping their horns and revving their engines.

In Bristol they topple a statue of slave trader Edward Colston and throw him in the canal. This is all that is reported, as if it is a spontaneous act of violence. But communities within the city have been campaigning for nearly thirty years to get him erased from public view, successfully renaming streets and public buildings that once bore his name.

Emezi’s book is a revelation. Black Trans Lives Matter.

“But, in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hanging over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man’s history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.”

Somewhere near the end of the week I begin to listen to Angela Davis for the first time. A former member of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, famous for her activism in the late ‘60s and spending time in prison in the early ‘70s. A long time prison abolitionist, she has every reason to talk without hope, to see the riots as history repeating itself. But she is so hopeful. She posits that the rise of women to positions of power and those across across the gender spectrum having more of a voice, as the reason it feels like change is possible, now more than ever.

Minneapolis lawmakers vow to disband their police force in favour of community led alternatives. It is still only talk and it feels a little like other promises made in the midst of the pandemic: placating the masses in the hopes that attention will shift before anyone has to follow through on any hastily made promises…

But still, one has hope.

“Full Stories are as rare as honesty.”

A week has passed since I started writing this. The protests persist with violent police presences at curfew in New York.

I look at what work is being done in Britain. Defunding the police is all well and good, but I live under a government that just wants to defund ALL public and social services until their is nothing but privitisation and poverty.

Our past, our power, our wealth is colonial violence and facing up to that, reparations actual and real, feels unimaginable. When Trump came to power it was the ultimate proof that if you were a rich, white man you could do anything you wanted and his presidency remains intent on playing that out. And the current Conservative government is the same. Someone told me that as an alternative to changing street names and pulling down statues there were suggestions that we could put up plaques alongside these relics of our bloody tyrannical past listing the atrocities. And wouldn’t that be in theme? A reminder that if you are a rich, white man you can be guilty of the worst human rights abuses and still have streets and statues and cities named in your honour. Is that the history class you want to teach your children?

And if you’re going to argue that by getting rid of those men we’re erasing history you can get in the canal with Colston. The histories of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, the Herstory of Women, those of Trans and Non-Binary Folx and Gender Non-Conforming People, Gay and Lesbian histories… the only reason these survive is usually because people from their communities painstakingly retrieve them from where they’re buried beneath the cis-het male white washed annals people are so anxious to protect.

So while we’re imagining future history classes, think of this alternative: the class in which we teach the moment all the place names and all the statues changed. And why.

Teju Cole’s essay ‘A Reader’s War’: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-readers-war
James Baldwin and Nikki GIovanni : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZmBy7C9gHQ The title of this post is a quote from Clint Smith’s poem ‘Counting Descent’ from the 2016 collection of the same name
Kimberly Latrice Jones speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLDmB0ve62s
Bristol Mayor, Marvin Rees responds to the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgEzVHq1OFQ

Bloggles

No Justice. No Peace