May 2021 Blog: "Defining Moments and Contextualizing Violence"
As we mark the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, let’s recall how the first police report framed the event: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” Without 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s video of the horror, that might have been the end of the story. Now we know that, in the words of Floyd’s brother Philonise, it was “a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.” While some claim that the term “lynching” is inaccurate and inflammatory, this framing helps us better understand the centuries of violence inflicted on Black bodies.
Historian Terry Anne Scott explores this in an upcoming book, Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence. Dr. Scott recalls how a number of anti-lynching organizations defined “lynching” in 1941. They agreed that it involves 3 or more people, results in a dead body, and the killers are motivated by a desire for “justice” – justice for society or justice for their race. Dr. Scott adds an important fourth element: the lynchers have little fear of accountability.
We live in a country which, for centuries, has allowed white people, often representing the state, to kill Black bodies with heinous impunity. Grim anniversaries of mass killings and individual deaths, from the Tulsa massacre to Trayvon Martin, remind us. Until police believe they are accountable to the public for the death of Black people, let’s continue to use the term “lynching” to describe such killings.
It’s instructive to critically examine what words are used to describe the aftermaths of these events. After Michael Brown’s 2014 death, as people poured into the streets, most journalists described what happened as “peaceful protests,” though others preferred the more negative term “disturbances.” When militarized police arrived, sparking more violence, pundits jockeyed over which descriptors to use. Was this “social unrest” or “protests” or “an uprising?” Many used the term often chosen to condemn African-American resistance - “riots.”
Elizabeth Hinton, head of Yale Prison Education Initiative, prefers greater use of the term “rebellion” to describe public resistance to white supremacy. Her new book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960’s, emphasizes the continuity of resistance by Black people. Unlike riots, which imply unplanned, sporadic, and destructive actions, a rebellion is more purposeful. People of color, Hinton insists, deserve more heroic framing.
From the very beginning of white supremacy, Black people rebelled. For example, Hinton explains that there were rebellions on one in ten slave ships. Enslaved people in America sought subtle ways to resist and undermine their oppressors every day. Though we think of “the civil rights movement” as beginning with Rosa Parks and ending with the assassination of Dr. King, Black activism was constant in America. As Prof. Peniel Joseph of the University of Texas explains, even in what is called “the nadir of Black activism” from the end of the first reconstruction through the Progressive era, Black church women organized and uplifted the Black community. (See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920.)
From the rebellions of enslaved people through the time of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the so-called “urban riots” of the sixties, Black violence has been condemned during a period when a racially-oppressive state apparatus accelerated its use of force. That’s a point journalist Gary Younge made in a June 2020 interview. (“Black Lives Matter & The Question of Violence,”) While Younge admits that riots are “polarizing,” “often hyper masculine,” and “a response to a problem that they rarely in themselves solve,” they have to be seen in the context of state sanctioned violence in the form of militarized police and mass incarceration.
Violence also descends on marginalized populations in the form of poverty – a type of violence that kills slowly, but kills nonetheless. For example, nutrition and health care disparities greatly reduce life expectancy for black men. Without economic justice, perhaps as a program of reparations, too many citizens will fall victim to violence we couch in deficient terminology and obfuscation.
Further Actions:
1) Watch and share a discussion hosted by Dr. Yohuru Williams, entitled, “Black History. Black Voices – The Black Liberation Struggle.” Panelists emphasize that the liberation struggle on the part of Black people has been more continuous than we often admit. Understanding the history helps contextualized continued police abuse and racialized incarceration.
2) Study the history of violence within our criminal justice system, from policing to prisons. Angela Davis, who at various times was condemned as a terrorist and dismissed as a Marxist, emphasizes the continuity of oppression that will not end with the conviction of Derek Chauvin. Davis explains, “There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.” Without significant political evolution, the United States will continue to rely on a prison-industrial complex. See also the work of Heather Anne Thompson, a professor who opened up the academic field of “carceral history.”. You can see an address she gave to the Philadelphia Ethical Society here.
3) Next month, as “Juneteenth” celebrations take place, read and share Brianna Holt’s column, “Juneteenth is a reminder that our freedom was fought for and not just handed over to us.” Develop a deeper appreciation of the importance of forceful resistance in the liberation of Black and Brown people.
4) Turn to a case study about the extent of state sanctioned violence against African-Americans – the incendiary devices dropped on members of MOVE, a radical organization in west Philadelphia, that destroyed 60 homes, left 250 homeless, and killed 11 people, five of them children. Police described this 1985 horror as necessary for achieving “tactical superiority” over MOVE members. Last year, former Mayor W. Wilson Goode Sr., who authorized the use of the incendiary devices, said we have yet to come to terms with this horrible event now 36 years in the past.
5) Share some previous blog postings with friends who want to better understand the complexities of state sanctioned violence and violent resistance to oppression. See “Blog #40: Radicalism is Relative,” “Blog #41: The Single Greatest Threat,” and “Blog #51: - Harriet and Malcolm: Any Means Necessary.”