http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30489-killing-the-future-the-theft-of-black-life
Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life
Wednesday, 29 April 2015 00:00 By Nicholas Powers, Truthout | News Analysis
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"Tell me of the night your son was killed by the police," I asked. She sat up and a deep sorrow moved in her eyes. "I had a habit of looking out the window to see my son," Danette Chavis said. "But that night, I said to myself, 'oh leave the boy alone' and took a nap. The phone woke me up and my daughter was rushing out of the door. I followed her and saw police tape, cops standing around a body. I yelled to see if it was him. But they wouldn't let me close. Later, I went to the morgue and identified my son."
We sat in the café, a few seconds passed in silence. She looked away as if seeing him dead for the first time and I regretted asking the question. Around us, people typed on laptops or chatted over coffee. They were so carefree. How do we reach a city that mostly looks at people of color in contempt or pity, but not solidarity? How do we get them to listen?
I looked up from my notebook. "Ms. Chavis," I asked, "What do you miss most about your son?"
Making Wounds Speak
Imagine hearing that someone you loved, died. Your heart would jump in your chest. Your body would clench like a fist around their memory. How angry would you be? How loud would you yell at the sky, at God, at anyone you could blame? Afterward, you'd float in a limbo of grief until you got answers, made sense of it and then slowly, said goodbye. Gathering at the funeral, you could complete the storyline of loss.
The dead cannot be laid to rest because the cop who murdered them is not held accountable, and his violence is condoned.
The stages of grief depend on narrative closure, the shoveling of dirt on the casket, eulogizing the dead. But for African-American parents whose children were slain by law enforcement, the stages of grief grind to a halt. The dead cannot be laid to rest because the cop who murdered them is not held accountable, and his violence is condoned. And to eclipse the officer's guilt, the victims are "niggerized" in public. Have a criminal record? It will be paraded in public. Ever took silly gangsta photos? They will be proof of a "thug life." The parents see their child's image warped as they learn of more Black and Latino youth killed by cops. In a solidarity of despair, they embrace everyone's lost children as if they can hear the dead repeating their final words, asking for their lives back.
In December 2014, 10 mothers whose children were killed by police held a rally in front of the US Department of Justice. Chavis was there and said into the megaphone, "None of us are safe. Law enforcement around the United States is brutalizing, arresting and murdering." A large group surrounded her with signs and candles. One by one the mothers spoke. Some had fought for years like Chavis, who started a petition, now 35,000 signatures strong, to send to former Attorney General Eric Holder, or Valerie Bell, whose son Sean was shot dead by New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers in 2006. Other grieving parents were more recently bereaved, like Jeralynn Blueford, whose son Alan was gunned down by Oakland police in 2012. She stood in front of the rally, choking on tears and saying, "Alan's last words were, 'why did you shoot me?'"
"Alan's last words were, 'why did you shoot me?'"
Holding up the faces of their dead in front of the Department of Justice, the mothers confronted our nation's deepest contradiction. How can citizens be killed by agents of the very state that represents them, and not find any route to accountability? All of them were women of color. And many are working-class. Their presence was already the answer. Under our formal democracy is a long history of a legal racial slavery and segregation followed by a now informal White supremacist regime, in which White lives matter while Black ones don't.
The mothers rallied in front of the Department of Justice, but it was dark and empty. Faced with a closed building, but wanting justice, they poured into the street and marched on Pennsylvania Avenue. Blocking traffic, they walked in between cars and shouted, "Shut it down! Shut it down!"
From Slave Chains to Handcuffs
Years ago, I visited a traveling exhibit on slavery and saw tourists standing quietly around a table filled with rusted shackles and chains. The host pointed at one and said it was worn by those enslaved in the Middle Passage. I reached out, fingertips above it then pulled back. "Go ahead," he said, "Touch it."
I lifted it and felt a heavy sadness rolling down my arms into the shackle. Slipping my hand inside, I thought of those in my family's past, brought to this world wearing a thing like this. I wanted to rip the fucking metal apart. But I was only able to stand and hold a history I could not destroy.
To be Black in America is to be evidence of a theft.
Stealing Black lives at gunpoint is the most visible and violent evidence of history repeating in the present. To be Black in America is to be evidence of a theft. It is to be a descendent of human beings stolen from villages, stolen from their bodies, stolen from each other, sold and sold again. It is to see in one's family history, ancestors stolen from their language, stolen from their land and left as walking targets. And inevitably, we, their descendants are shot at with everything from microaggressions to all-out physical violence, from suspicious stares to racial slurs, from stop-and-frisk to bullets.
To be Black in America is to know White supremacy is a culture of theft. We feel it like a tornado that one can try to sidestep but other times, descends on us, ripping us out of our bodies. It's like an ancient vortex that split from another vortex, a slavery split from older forms of slavery that mixed with European capitalism, colonization and scientific racism. A whiteness took shape that churned through centuries and over continents, pulling people from their homes and "blackening" them. Whiteness is a social structure of extraction that rose in the triangle trade of slave ships, auction blocks and plantations, broken by the Civil War then remade as Jim Crow, in segregated public spaces and redlined ghettos, now reinvented again as a war on drugs.
A few weeks ago, I reread, Dr. Alexander Falconbridge's An Account of the Slave Trade in the West Coast of Africa; he was an 18th century abolitionist who sailed on four slave ships. The descriptions were ghastly. "The men Negroes, on being brought aboard the ship, are immediately fastened together, two and two, by handcuffs on their wrists and by irons riveted on their legs," he wrote. "They are frequently stowed so close, as to admit of no other position than lying on their sides."
At home, I put down the book and picked up an autobiography written by one of my students at the state college where I work. Every year I teach a class, during which students write 30-page memoirs and many talk of family members in jail. This semester, one wrote of visiting her father in prison. At times, she was sad he was gone. Other times, she was angry and punished him by not visiting. But eventually, she came back to see him. Year after year passed; he aged into a gray, bitter man, helplessly enraged that he missed out on her life. She wrote of leaving the prison and seeing men shuffling in leg chains; I couldn't help but think of Falconbridge's image of Black men with "irons riveted on their legs."
The Thin Blue Line
"Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice?" Olaudah Equiano wrote in 1794 in his slave narrative of the Atlantic slave trade. "Why are parents to lose their children, brothers, sisters, or husbands their wives?"
The conflict that has driven history in the New World is Black people's struggle to hold their humanity against a culture that objectified them as property. Twelve million Africans were sold across the Americas. Wherever they landed, they fought back and when they did, White men representing the state attacked them. In Haiti, these White men wore French uniforms and shot muskets at rebels. In America, they were slave patrols, searching forests for runaways. Championed as heroes in their time, they killed with a clear conscience because they saw us as semi-humans that would wreck civilization if let loose. Blinded by whiteness, they were caught in a vast cultural superstructure that rose from the economic base of slavery. It gave them racial privileges in lieu of class ones; it that taught them a visual vocabulary of darkies, Uncle Toms, niggers, mammies, jezebels and brutes. And the blood they spilled from Black bodies was the implicit ink of America's social contract.
In each generation, law enforcement has been the thin blue line against the Black freedom movement.
"Every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword," President Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address. As smoke from the Civil War cleared, he pointed to the line we crossed; slavery was a national sin and those freed from it were its victims; those who defended it, the new villains. But it was a line trampled by White mobs and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan riding horses into the night to burn Black homes and then Black people themselves. The legal infrastructure of slavery was broken, but the culture of racism washed over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments like a tide, its deep currents pushing back against the new citizens. In order to survive, each generation of Black people picked up that line drawn between slavery and freedom, held it up and carried it forward. But every step they took, they hit the thin blue wall of the police.
In the South, White plantation owners pushed for the Black Codes that criminalized everyday life: being unemployed or failing to pay a tax was a crime. Cops pulled in thousands of Black people into the ever-growing convict-lease system that recycled the debris of slavery into a new form. But in the first wave of the Great Migration, nearly 2 million Black people fled the South to the cities of the West, Midwest and Northeast and once there, race riots blew up as White mobs hung and shot Black people, and burned down Black neighborhoods. Police did not stop the violence.
Decades later, when Black people marched for civil rights as in Selma, police beat them bloody. In the 1970s, when Black people defended themselves in groups like the Black Panthers, the police shot them down, leaving shattered windows and blood-soaked beds. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Black youth sold drugs to buy their way out of the ghetto, police killed or jailed a whole generation. And today, when Black and Latino youth want to walk freely, they are stopped and frisked by police.
Every day, another person of color is shot by police and the holes left inside families are where loved ones used to breathe.
In each generation, law enforcement has been the thin blue line against the Black freedom movement. Today, the war on drugs, like the convict-lease system before it, has become an industry where the raw material is the criminalized Black body for an ever-growing prison infrastructure. And from the economic base of incarceration, a superstructure rises that trains White people, again, to see "blackness" in the ever-changing, ever-same visual vocabulary of race - the drug dealer, the thug, the rapper, the hoe, the pimp and the junkie.
The old racial line between "Black" and "White" has been redrawn as the line between criminal and citizen. And so up and down the class hierarchy from poor to wealthy, Black people have to dodge violence from microaggressions to economic sabotage, and public shaming to physical attacks.
But always, it's the bullets that are the easiest to see. Most of us aren't killed by cops. Most of us "survive" racism. But every day, another person of color is shot by police and the holes left inside families are where loved ones used to breathe. The cops not only steal the lives of our children; they steal the lives of everyone who loved them. A part of us freezes in place, goes numb.
In the endless wait for justice, families carry memories that grow in the imagination. When I looked at Chavis' Facebook page, I see a post about how her son Gregory would have been 29 this year. Other parents also keep track of the rites of passage their child should have had - like a wedding or graduation. The dead haunt us. They burn in our dreams. They ask for their time back. And more and more are added to the roster of names, those shot down as the police aim at that invisible target on Black people, as they protect that line that so many pretend ……………………………………..
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