Malcolm X: The Black Messiah

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Republished from the author’s blog.

“I now introduce to you, a man that would give his life for his people,” Benjamin 2X told the crowd in the Audubon Ballroom. That would be the last time 2X would have the honor to make such an introduction. Because on that day, February 21, 1965, in front of close to 500 people, including his pregnant wife and children, Malcolm X was shot 15 times.

On Saturday morning, February 27, 1965, in Harlem, New York, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was laid to rest. The public viewing of his body was attended by up to 30,000 mourners. Another 3,000 people made the pilgrimage to pay their respects at the Faith Temple Church of God to their “shining Black prince.”

J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to “neutralize,” a “true Black revolution” in the United States. By any means necessary, they were hellishly bent on preventing “the rise of a” Black “messiah.” Hoover and the FBI identified Malcolm X as the one who, “might have been such a ‘messiah.’”

James Baldwin said, when Malcolm talked, he articulated the long-denied pain and suffering for all of the Black people in the United States. That Malcolm corroborated the reality of Black folks, and by doing so, he affirmed that, “they really exist.”

Malcolm spoke directly to their soul.

The primary role of the Messiah, from an Old Testament perspective, was supposed to be one of a liberator, by militant means. He was to, “strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,” and, “with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked” (Isaiah 11:4). According to Sigmund Mowinckel, author of He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism, The Messiah always had, “political significance,” and, the Messiah’s mission is to restore his people, “and free them from their enemies.”

Malcolm and his message were messianic.

That made Malcolm X dangerous.

That made Malcolm X a revolutionary worthy of being neutralized in the eyes of Hoover and the FBI.

Malcolm saw the “Black Revolution,” as “controlled by God.”

Two days before his assassination, Malcolm said, “It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.” Hoover wanted to, prevent Malcolm the messianic from rising. Hoover felt the only thing that could save this country was the elimination of people like Malcolm. He feared Malcolm’s ability to, “unify, and electrify, the militant Black nationalist movement.” Hoover correctly labeled Malcolm as a “martyr of the movement,” but it seems that Hoover viewed martyrs as people who sacrificed life for the sake of principle.

Hoover viewed Malcolm X as dead.

As past tense.

Malcolm is a Muslim. When he was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom, he was gunned down fighting for the liberation of the oppressed. 15 bullets entered his body, but he did not die. Allah says in the Quran, “And say not of those slain in the way of Allah: ‘They are dead.’ Nay, they are living, though ye perceive it not.”

Malcolm X is alive.

He lived in the Black Panther Party (BPP).

Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the BPP said:

“The fact that Malcolm X had been murdered…drove Huey and I to a point to say that we were going to have to create an organization, reflective of what he was talking about. The fact that Malcolm said that by legal constitutional right, the 2nd Amendment, that every Black man, woman, and person in this country had a right to have a shotgun in their home to defend themselves from unjust attacks by racism was one point that influenced us very much. But what influenced us, even more, was Malcolm’s emphasis that we must have a political organization that felt most immediately with the housing, and the clothing, the shoes, and the food for the people.”

Dr. Huey P. Newton adds that “Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with…We continue to believe that the Black Panther Party exists in the spirit of Malcolm…the Party is a living testament to his life and work.”

Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael went as far as to emphasize that, “we who have an ideology today use Malcolm X as our framework. Our basic framework. Our point of reference.”

Malcolm was there, but he saw him not.

Olympic medalist and human rights activist John Carlos was born and raised in Harlem. He would follow Malcolm X around the streets, picking his brain as a teen. Reflecting on the first time that he sat and listened to Malcolm speak, Carlos notes:

“I’m sitting this close to him to listen to him. And I can just feel the blood just run through my body, man. I couldn’t sit still. I was — just with excitement for me to be there and see somebody live that I could touch that was talking like that. Because the way he was talking is the way I was feeling because I’m seeing what’s happening in my community.”

Somberly, Carlos continues.

He thinks back to February 21, 1965.

He feels guilt.

Carlos, in some ways, blamed himself for Malcolm being shot 15 times at the Audubon. He believed that if he were there, he could have saved Malcolm from a fate that he had already foreseen. Carlos says:

“I was supposed to be there that Sunday. And we decided, me and some of the guys I was with, Machine and Metal Trades and the track team, that I was going to go try and get my driver’s license that Monday. And we took a road trip and drove up to Buffalo, New York — not Buffalo, but Bear Mountain. And we passed by West Point, and just as we passed by West Point, it came on the news that Malcolm X was shot. Man, we turned around. We shot back to the hospital. By the time we got back to the hospital, he was gone, and everybody was milling around.

And I can tell you, man, probably the better part of 40 years, not 40 years, but 20 years of my life, I felt real bad, felt like if I was in the Audubon Ballroom that day, I could have did something to prevent him from dying.”

Malcolm was alive and standing next to John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics as he raised his clenched Black fist in the air.

Malcolm X is alive in the hearts and minds of every one, whose evolution in life involved the reading of his autobiography. He is alive in every lashing out for liberation by Black folks uncompromisingly fighting tooth and nail against the interlocking systems of white supremacism and anti-Blackness.

He is alive because Allah says so.

He is alive because we won’t let Malcolm rot away.

Yes, on this day, in 1965, the physical shell of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was adorned in white linen, and placed into the ground, but from that day forward he lives everywhere.

We're All Living in a Future Created by Slavery

[Art by Alex Williamson]

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, composed of 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

When I was 19 years old, I was arrested.

Instead of a dungeon, I was held in an overcrowded holding cell. Instead of being shackled and transported across the ocean on a floating prison, I was handcuffed, sitting shoulder to shoulder with another young Black male being hauled across the county on a prison bus.

During intake, I was stripped of my clothes, forced to stand naked as officers stripped me of both my pride and my dignity. I tried to cover my genitals. It was my last grasp at holding onto my humanity. I was commanded by officers to remove my hands. They had guns. I had nothing. I complied. The officer barked, “Lift up your nut sack.” I had no choice. I was ordered to “squat down and cough.” When I was finally handed a pair of state-issued boxer shorts, I was so desperate to have on anything to cover my exposed body that I did not give a damn that the underwear had been passed down, circulated among others who had been stripped naked before me.

Author and scholar Saidiya Hartman once wrote, “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship.” I echo her pain as I think about — and live through — the ongoing crisis of carcerality and those affected most by its existence.

I think about the African diaspora. I think about my family. I think about myself.

In the summer of 2017, I visited the continent of Africa. While there, I basked in the beauty of the lively Ramadan nights in Morocco. I stood in the searing sun of Egypt. I took pictures with the great pyramids as my backdrop, mimicking Malcolm X during his visit in 1964. When I made it to Ghana, I visited the final resting place of Kwame Nkrumah. While standing at his tomb, I thought about Nkrumah writing, “All people of African descent whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African Nation.” I stood there thinking about the divide between being identified as African and being of African descent. I was in the homeland of my ancestors, and yet I knew none of their names or faces.

But I did know why they were forced to leave. I had reached a point where I could not return home to the United States without experiencing the carceral castles on Ghana’s Gold Coast.

My feet were firmly planted, affixed to the weather-beaten ground of the Castle of St. George in Elmina. I stood in front of a cell, designated for incarcerated Ashanti, Mandinka, Hausa, Wolof, Fula, and Susu from various kingdoms who had been deemed as deserving of death because they fought to live in freedom. I stood there in front of a thick black wooden door hauntingly marked by a human skull and a set of crossbones carved into stone.

Behind that door was a darkness I never experienced.

In the 7x10 prison cell, there was a total absence of light. There was also an abject emotional darkness that came with knowing folks, wrapped in the same skin that I’m in, were left there to starve and rot in death.

The captives imprisoned at the Castle of St. George were a part of what I call the carceral class. I am a member of this class.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent who are systematically stigmatized as unfit for freedom and deserving of the dehumanization that comes with being incarcerated. It is essential to the idea of Black people being framed as the locus of crime and Blackness as being synonymous with criminality. As a classification, the carceral class denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

Although he didn’t name it, Malcolm X knew about the carceral class too.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent. It denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be systemically ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

In Malcolm X’s blistering 1963 speech, “Message to the Grassroots,” he spoke of the systemic condemnation of Black folks in the United States. He lasered in on the uncomfortable common bond of being Black in America. Malcolm made it plain and uncompromising. “We are all Black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves,” he said. “You are nothing but a ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

I wrestle with what Brother Malcolm said. Not because I disagree with the troublesome truths that he spoke, but because I feel his analysis can be built upon.

His words still ring in my mind on a loop.

“You are nothing but a ex-slave.”

You are nothing but a slave.

You are nothing.

You are a thing.

Malcom’s speech takes me back to Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. In it, Mbembe lays bare his views on what it means to be branded, burned with the mark of being a slave. He viewed slave as the “forename” one must “give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered — with impunity.”

I think about a time before enslavement. Before Africans were ensnared in the wretchedness of having both their labor and their lives exploited from can’t see in the morning to can’t see in the evening, they were prisoners of a particular kind.

Those who were captured and eventually enslaved were regular folks: commoners, farmers, wage workers, domestic servants, and artisans who worked with their hands. Two-thirds of those held captive were young African men. As Marcus Rediker recounts in The Slave Ship: A Human History, slave raiders targeted “‘the roughest and most hardy,’ and avoided the privileged ‘smooth negroes.’” The class-based vulnerability of the common folks figured centrally in their capture and confinement. Rediker continues:

Second to war as a source of slaves were the judicial processes in and through which African societies convicted people of crimes ranging from murder to theft, adultery, witchcraft, and debt; condemned them to slavery; and sold them to African traders or directly to the slave-ship captains… Many Africans and (abolitionist) Europeans felt that judicial processes in West Africa had been corrupted and that thousands had been falsely accused and convicted in order to produce as many tradeworthy bodies as possible.

A judicial system of injustice had waged war on African commoners, criminalizing them into a world of carcerality.

Malcolm’s raspy tone echoes again in my mind. I hear him saying, “You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

And again, Brother Malcolm was correct.

We did not willingly travel to the Americas on the Mayflower. We were forced here on the White Lion and the Clotilda. It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

The largest wave of forced African diasporic movement was anchored to punishment and carcerality. Everywhere the descendants of the Middle Passage were forced to find footing, carceral-class status and the struggle for liberation followed.

Malcolm knew the global connectedness of Black folks’ oppression. He knew that in the West, the African diaspora’s carceral-class status is still branded to our being.

Forty percent of the 10 million incarcerated Africans brought to the Americas and sold into chattel slavery ended up in Brazil. Today, it is estimated that 75% of Brazil’s prison population are Brazilians of African descent. In the country’s capital Brasília, Afro-Brazilians make up 82% of those incarcerated. Although only 11% of the country’s total population is between eight and 24 years of age, this age group represents approximately one-third of those imprisoned.

In the United States, Black adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than white adults. As of 2001, one out of every three Black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime. While 14% of all youth under 18 in the United States are Black, 42% of boys and 35% of girls in juvenile detention facilities are Black. Among Black trans folks, 47% have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

The criminalization of Black folks in the United States is both a pathologizing and totalizing practice. No group is spared. No group is left unvictimized. These are progeny of the commoners, prisoners of war, and freedom fighters who made up the original carceral class.

Malcolm also knew that as a Muslim, “There is nothing in our book, the Quran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully.”

On Christmas Day in 1522, 20 enslaved Muslims, wielding machetes, attacked their Christian masters on the island of Hispaniola. It was the first recorded enslaved African revolt in the Western Hemisphere.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

Four years later, enslaved African Muslims rebelled against the Spanish on the coast of present-day South Carolina. It was the first rebellion by enslaved folks in the history of North America.

In 1729, Granny Nanny, a self-liberated African Muslim leader and warrior, led her army of Maroons in Jamaica into the battle with the British — and crushed them in combat. On August 14, 1791, an enslaved African Muslim named Dutty Boukman led other enslaved folks in an uprising against the French. This rebellion and the death of Boukman are marked as being one of the sparks that lead to the Haitian Revolution. On the 27th night of Ramadan in January 1835, a group of enslaved African Muslims in Salvador of Bahía, Brazil, organized one of the largest slave rebellions in the history of the Americas. After being forced aboard on June 28, 1839, Sengbe Pieh, an enslaved African Muslim, led the aquatic revolt on the Amistad.

For members of the carceral class, resistance is in our blood. Resistance is a binding component of our collective experience. Resistance is in our history. This is the history of Black folks like Safiya Bukhari, Iya Fulani Sunni-Ali, Kamau Sadiki, Jamil Al-Amin, Mutulu Shakur, and Russell “Maroon” Shoatz.

This is why we resist to this day.

In the end, I return to where I started, thinking about Saidiya Hartman’s words. We live in a time created by the original mass incarceration — the transatlantic slave trade. The “peculiar institution” that is rooted in carcerality. Malcolm X knew this. Political prisoners in the United States today, who need to be freed, know this. I, too, know this. There has not been a point in my life where I have not been intimately impacted by the carceral state. We know this because we have all been subject to and subjugated by the carceral state. It is this experience of knowing that informs my fight to abolish the carceral state.

Breonna Taylor and the Framing of Black Women as "Soft Targets" in America

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Originally published at the author’s blog.

12:38 a.m. was the last peaceful minute of Breonna Taylor’s life.

On March 13, 2020, at 12:38 a.m., Breonna Taylor and her partner Kenneth Walker were asleep in bed. At 12:39 a.m. officers beat on her door for approximately one-minute. During that 59-seconds of banging, Taylor screamed “at the top of her lungs,” “Who is it?” But no one said a word. “No answer. No response. No anything.” The boogeymen kept beating on her door. By 12:40 a.m. Plainclothes Louisville Metro Police Department Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison, as well as Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, shattered the forest green front door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment with a battering ram.

“Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.”

The police blindly shot over 20 rounds of bullets into the home of Breonna Taylor. Eight of those officers’ bullets found their way into Breonna’s Black body.

Sgt. Mattingly spoke to Louisville Police internal investigators roughly two weeks after Breonna’s killing. During that conversation he said officers were told her ground floor apartment was a “soft target” and that Taylor too was a soft target, because she, “should be there alone.”

A “soft target.”

A soft target is a person, location, or thing that is deemed as unprotected. As vulnerable. As powerless against military or terrorist attacks. Attacking soft targets are meant to, “disrupt daily life, and spread fear.” They are meant to target, “identities, histories and dignity.” They are meant to ambush and bring unexpected carnage. In 1845, attacking soft targets is how James Marion Sims, who is considered to be “the father” of modern gynecological studied, was permitted to experiment on enslaved Black women without consent, without anesthesia, and without consideration of their humanity. In 2015, attacking soft targets is what lead to 13 Black women testifying against Officer Daniel Holtzclaw. They spoke of how Holtzclaw targeted them during traffic stops and interrogations. How the officer forced them into sexual acts in his police car or in their homes. Prosecutors spoke to how Holtzclaw, “deliberately preyed on vulnerable Black women from low-income neighborhoods,” while committing his acts of sexual terrorism. 170 years separates the hellish acts of Sims and Holtzclaw, but what bridges the gap in time between those two men serially targeting the identities, dignities, and humanhood’s of these Black women is an unbroken history of war being waged on their entire self.

I cast my mind back to Malcolm X’s rebuking of this nation in 1962, when he said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” Here we are, in the year 2020, and the Louisville Police are framing Breonna Taylor as a “soft target.” It’s as if Brother Malcolm was talking about Breonna’s death before she was even born into this world. Before she was awakened by police pounding on her front door. Before she had a name that needed to be said. While Malcolm’s words may feel prophetic in their preciseness, they are not. They were painfully predictable. Malcolm lived, and died in anti-Black America. He was a scholar of America’s history of anti-Blackness.

There has never been a period in the history of America where Black women’s bodies, hearts, minds and beings have not been reduced to being treated as soft targets.

Black women have always been exploited in America. Violated in America. Terrorized in America. Killed in America. The relationship between Black women and America was birthed in targeting and torture.

In Antebellum America, white owners of enslaved African women freely and with legal impunity raped them, often in front of their own families and fictive kin. In Jim Crow America, close to 200 Black women too were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South, many of whom had been raped before having their necks bound and burned by knotted nooses before being hanged to death.

Black women too, were strange fruit.

Black women like Eliza Woods. Woods was a cook. A cook, who in 1866, was accused of poisoning a white woman to death by the woman’s husband. She was arrested and taken from the county jail by a lynch mob. She was stripped naked. She was hung from an elm tree in the courthouse yard. Her lifeless body was then riddled with bullets as over a thousand spectators watched.

In 1899, the husband admitted that he poisoned his wife — not Woods.

Black women like Laura Nelson. Nelson allegedly shot a sheriff, in 1911, to protect her 14-year-old son. A mob of white people seized Nelson along with her son, and lynched them both. Laura Nelson, “was first raped by several men. The bodies of Laura and her son were hung from a bridge for hundreds of people to see.”

Elderly Black women like 93-year-old Pearlie Golden (2014), 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson (2006), 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs (1984), and 66-year-old Deborah Danner (2016), all were in their homes and shot to death by the police. Michelle Cusseaux (2014) was 50-years-old. Kayla Moore (2013) was 41-years-old. Aura Rosser (2014) was 40-years-old. Tanisha Anderson (2014) was 37-years-old. Natasha McKenna (2015) was 37-year-old. Alesia Thomas (2012) was 35-years-old. Miriam Carey (2013) was 34-years-old. Charleen Lyles (2017) was 30-years-old. India Kager (2015) was 28-years-old. Sandra Bland (2015) was 28-years-old. Atatiana Jefferson (2019) was 28-years-old. Mya Hall (2015) was 27-years-old. Meagan Hockaday (2015) was 26-years-old. Shantel Davis (2012) was 23-years-old. Korryn Gains (2016) was 23-years-old. Rakia Boyd (2012) was 22-years-old. Gabriella Nevarez (2014) was 22-years-old. Janisha Fonville (2015) was 20-years-old.

The police did not give a damn about the ages of these Black women. They did not care if they had nearly lived for a century on this earth, or if they were just a few years removed from their high school graduation. They killed them just the same. The police have shown that anybody, at any age, can be on the fatal end of their force, if you were born with Black skin.

Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones was only seven-years-old. On May 16, 2010, at 12:40 am, a Detroit Police Department Special Response Team Officer ended her life. Her last peaceful minutes in this world were spent sleeping on the couch, near her grandmother. That’s before a no-knock warrant (at the wrong apartment) was executed. That’s before law enforcement threw a flash-bang grenade through her family’s front window. That’s before the grenade burned the blanket covering Aiyana’s body. That’s before the wooden front door exploded under the force of police boots. That’s before Officer Joseph Weekley fired a single shot, that entered Aiyana’s head and exited through her neck — all while an A&E crew were filming an episode of the cop- aganda program, The First 48.

There is no softer target in this world than a sleeping child.

Aiyana never had the chance to reach womanhood, but had she, her “soft target” status, both in perceived personhood and lived location, would have left her vulnerable to domestic anti-Black police terrorism attacks. The disturbing truth is that, as Kimberlie Crenshaw notes, “about a third of women who are killed by police in the United States are Black, but Black women are less than ten percent all women,” in this country. This speaks directly to the hazard level and susceptibility to anti-Black police terrorism faced by Black women of all ages in America. The devil is in the details. Look directly into the data, and see how many of the law enforcers who have killed Black women have been convicted of committing a crime. The American Judicial System does not protect Black women. It too treats them as soft targets. The lack of Black women’s names being said in conversations surrounding anti-Black police terror speaks directly to their deaths and narratives as being deemed as unworthy of outrage. Of newsworthiness. Of action.

Breonna Taylor’s killers are free. Brett Hankison, Jonathan Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove are walking the streets…free. Breonna was shot dead in her home in March, and we are in the month of August. 143 days have passed…and her killers are free. There is no justice to be had for Black women when the intersections of their Blackness, their class, and their gender mark their bodies, their homes, and their narratives as “soft targets” to be attacked with little to no consequences.

The politics of Black women being unprotected against targeting in America, predates America being a sovereign nation. It goes as far back as Virginia’s December 1662 decree, “that the children of enslaved Africans and Englishmen would be ‘held bond or free according to the condition of the mother’ which, in effect, monetarily incentivized the sexual terror against Black women, “as their offspring would swell planters’ coffers — a prospect boon to countless rapes and instances of forced breeding.” One must understand, when you witness Black women passionately protesting on behalf of Breonna Taylor, yes, it is a fight for Black women today, but it is also a part of the uninterrupted fight Black women have always faced in America — the fight against being casualties of “soft target” terrorists attacks.

Anti-Black Police Terrorism

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Republished from the author’s blog.

An email was leaked the other day. In it, the sender praised the police, and wrote that people protesting in honor of George Floyd were involved in a “terrorist movement.” I repeat, the writer wrote that the protesters were involved in a terrorist movement. The person responsible was the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Police — Lieutenant Bob Kroll. The same Kroll who was accused by four Black officers of openly wearing a “White Power badge” on his motorcycle jacket.

For eight minutes and 46 seconds we watched. For eight minutes and 46 fucking seconds we were forced to fix our eyes on George Floyd’s face buried into the asphalt, gasping for air, crying out for his deceased mother’s help — but no help came. We watched a dying man scream, “Tell my kids I love them,” to whomever was willing to listen. We watched Floyd bawl, “Please let me stand,” while two policemen pinned his handcuffed body to the ground. We watched as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck until he could no longer cry out, “I can’t breathe.”

For eight minutes and 46 seconds…

We watched an act of terror.

We watched a man being terrorized.

We watched four officers, on camera, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, commit an anti-Black

act of domestic police-terrorism.

I was not an eyewitness, but I know what I witnessed.

What I saw, with my water-filled eyes, was not a case of mere excessive force. Nor was it simply an act of police brutality. There was something so much more precious than Floyd’s civil rights being violated. That language did not fit what I watched for eight minutes and 46 seconds. There was something morbidly perverse about how unbothered Officer Derek Chauvin was as he took Floyd’s life. There was no struggle. No sense of danger. Chauvin appeared to be at peace with his decision to lynch George Floyd.

I am calling the lynching of George Floyd an anti-Black act of domestic police-terrorism because that is what I witnessed. And I am doing so by employing the framing provided by the government of the land of the (un)free, home of the enslaved to make such a proclamation.

Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act defines domestic terrorism as an act that occurs primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. It is an act that is dangerous to human life, that is intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or influence the government, by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. The FBI adds that acts of domestic terrorism are, “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”

Minneapolis is within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

George Floyd is a human being that had his life violently taken away. The four men who nonchalantly terrorized Floyd, are a part of a larger group of state-sponsored law enforcers. Law enforcers who throughout America have historically and contemporarily racially profiled and targeted Black civilian populations.

Some Americans have the birthright to view the police as protectors and peacekeepers. Some fully embrace the plethora of programs painting law enforcement as heroes, heroines, and damn near deities. I am not from that America. I am from the Othered side of America. Coming from where I’m from, the police protectors of the people is a fallacy. But it is a fallacy I am familiar with. It is a fallacy that is persistently pumped into the brains of Othered-American imaginations through copaganda. Film franchises like Beverly Hills Cop, Rush Hour, Big Momma’s House, and Bad Boys all are pro-police programing. But those movies do not mirror the real-life horror films being captured on cellphones and shared through social media. We are watching Black civilians being put to death in public execution videos. And the executioners are the police.

I repeat…

For eight minutes and 46 seconds, we watched four officers, on camera, commit an anti-Black act of domestic police-terrorism.

It may come as a shock to some that I am calling the police terrorists, and their anti-Black actions acts of domestic terrorism. I am diagnosing what the police do to Black folks acts of terror because it is the truth.

I am calling it police-terrorism because I need you to come to

a

complete

stop.

I need you to critically reflect and decolonize the context in which you engage with the term terrorism within itself. It reminds me of Malcolm X asking a room packed full of Black folks, one of the most crucial questions I have ever heard. The question Brother Malcolm asked was, “Who taught you [Black people] to hate yourself?” With that question in mind, I would ask, who taught you what terrorism can be imagined as being? Who taught you which individuals and groups gets the dishonor of being labeled as a terrorist? Former White House Task Force Deputy Director on Terrorism in the Reagan administration, Edward Peck said that terrorism and terrorist are, “in the eye of the beholder.”

I am looking at police-terrorism through the eyes of a Black man.

I am looking at the police the long memory of the Black experience in America.

I am looking at policing through the Black gaze.

Policing units and individuals have terrorized Black people in the United States as far back as the slave patrols and night watches, and continue to the present. When bell hooks said, “Black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversation with one another a ‘special’ knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people,” some of that special knowledge was, and still is, dedicated to surviving encounters with the police. That special knowledge is passed down from the elders to the young folks when they reach a certain point in physical maturity. My elders called it, “lookin’ grown.” It was an acknowledgement that I clearly was not an adult, but in the eyes of all (citizens and law enforcement) invested in policing my Black boy body, I looked older. I looked less innocent. I looked criminal.

I looked killable in the eyes of those policing me.

Black parents are forced to pass down special knowledge with their children about how to hide in the shadows and the shade to avoid the adultifying policing gaze. What routes to take coming home. What clothes to wear. What tone to speak in. How to reach for your wallet. It’s all a part of the talk to try and teach your child how to survive the unfortunate potentiality of being terrorized by the police.

The predictability of police terrorism took the lives of Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Kathryn Johnston, Kayla Moore, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others. The randomness of these people reminds the broader Black community that as long as you are Black and breathing, the police are willing to steal your last breath.

While the public debate has largely focused on the appalling injustice of state-sponsored terror against individual Black folks, an additional, overlooked injustice is taking place. It is the collective consequence of seeing individuals that look like you, or someone that you love lying defenseless and dead in the streets. It is when an individual being terrorized is converted into communal terror. Police-terrorism spreads acute fear, among the whole Black community. The people who are wronged are not only those who are killed, but also their Black neighbors who witness the terror through their windows. The Black bystander filming Black death on their cellphones. The Black families who bury their breathless bodies afterwards. They feel a justifiable fear or terror of the police.

This fear is not incidental, but intentional.

From the Black gaze, the police conduct themselves as a state sponsored group of, “racially motivated violent extremists,” that target the Black community, which according to the FBI, makes them a “national threat priority.” But American history has shown that protecting Black bodies from the threat of domestic terrorism is not a priority.

Reminder…It is 2020 and lynching is still not a federal hate crime in America.

Reminder…It is 2020 and the Ku Klux Klan are not classified as a terrorist organization in America.

This is America.

And in America, the police are permitted to treat Black people with, what James Baldwin would call, a special disfavor, because of the color of our skin. It is in this special disfavor that we can have our doors kicked in by the police, and be shot to death in our sleep. It is this special disfavor that can lead to the police shooting us in the back, as we run with the same feet as our enslaved ancestors fleeing from Slave Patrolmen. It is this special disfavor that can lead to the police gunning our children down in less than two seconds, while they’re playing outside. It is this special disfavor that made a policeman rape 13 Black women, and that same special disfavor made those Black women believe that no one would believe them. It is this same special disfavor that renders the souls of Black folks breathless, while we are still physically alive. It is this special disfavor that made the world stop for eight minutes and 46 seconds to witness an act of anti-Black domestic police terrorism.