Your Money, or Your Body
Photo courtesy of Koshu Kunii, via Unsplash
No more Black folks on the front lines. I have had enough with us putting our bodies on the line because our people’s bodies litter the pavement. I’m tired of our repeated human sacrifice not for life or liberty or the pursuit of anything other than the placation of an empire’s guilt. I’m tired of my friends returning to their homes battered, hopeful only that the work they put in will make tomorrow better. In the summer, what feels like every summer since I have been alive and aware of the bloodlust the state has for us, we take online and to the streets to first plead, then demand, then rage for our protection. And for the plea to simply let us be, Black and alive and outside without persecution, more of us end up peppered with rubber bullets, doused in burning, stinging chemicals—or worse. No more.
What I am still for, unequivocally, is Black organizing. I am still here for, and will champion, Black activism. But from now on we are to only be the generals of the cavalry against white supremacy. We are to be the ones who make decisions on what is the best strategy for advancing, precisely because we are (mostly) not the ones who took such a blatantly imprudent step backward in November of 2016.
Every time the state kills a Black person, a white person either nearby or far away and unconnected gains a little more freedom and safety. Whether white people confirm this reality is immaterial. We die so that the businesses in our food deserts don’t lose insured property, or so that your side of town can sleep without the wail of sirens and the din of our cries in the night. So now, it is your turn to fight for, and perhaps yes, die for us.
A neighbor of mine is a white man. I know this because I see him often, though apart from our initial introduction, I do not speak to him. Once, months ago, he asked if I was interested in politics, and had any plans of going to the (then-as regularly scheduled) Democratic National Convention; he was excited to go and “shake things up” because of how the Democrats would “steal the shit” from candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“No. I don’t vote.”
“Nah, politics isn’t really my jam.”
“Nah I don’t pay attention to the news.”
All lies, and all I’d gladly recite again through bared teeth. You have not, through repeated and concerted efforts of sacrifice for Black people, earned a spot at a table to which not even all my kin is invited. You, by no means, are deserving of entrance into the interior of my thoughts about my situation within the larger American political framework. And how audacious of you to assume otherwise!
He, disappointed, walked back upstairs to his apartment, and we have exchanged only glances since. I doubt he has put himself between the police baton and the innocent, but do suspect he walks with a box of matches in his pocket. Of course, observations such as these are anecdotal and based on instinct more than evidence.
Only, what is evidentiary information? What, pray tell, is so apparent that it can even stand to be called evidence? For entire generations, there have been truths that Black peoples of the world have known intimately, not bolstered by the ever-elusive objective fact. For even longer than that, arbiters of power, be they police officers, or political representatives, or heads of media conglomerates, or those who establish curricula in schools, have molded, eroded, and at times outright absconded with pieces of evidence to fit their agenda. Sometimes, they put this evidence in museums and claim their discovery to be the world’s true marvel. Sometimes, they put this evidence in reports that legitimize grabs for more funding for militarized police departments. And sometimes, they just bury it, showing more tenderness to their own failed humanity than the Black people they leave in the gutter.
Once, I had a boss who was a white man. I knew this because of the way he spoke to me about his background, and about growing up in his suburban New Jersey enclave. I knew this more intimately, however, because of how he edited my writing. When covering a piece about 2015 actions in coordination with the Movement for Black Lives, he edited its name to “Black Lives Matter.” When I responded that the two were actually distinct, the latter being a specific organization created by Opal Tometti, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors, and the former an umbrella network that supported BLM and several others with interconnected goals, he informed me that “nobody would know what the ‘Movement for Black Lives’ was” and that I “should stick to what the readers would be most familiar with.” Strangely enough, the fact that we were both journalists, tasked with the responsibility of informing readers rather than confirming their suspicions, did not sway him. Nor did the fact that the subject of my piece in question was not affiliated with Black Lives Matter outside of voicing support of its work. Nor did the glaring and perplexing admission that I was writing not for people like me, who would care about the distinction, but for people like him, who saw Black folks on TV and associated them all as one and the same. We disagreed, and I kept my piece accurate. That encounter, I suppose, was evidence of my poor fit within that newsroom, and while I was not asked to return after that month, I did not claw to stay and became another Black person pushed from the news industry. Again I ask: what is the value of evidence, of presumed fact?
More still, what is the value of intuition from a people who have been denied due process for their entire history? Whether the looming specter of mob rule and vigilanteism or quieter, more pernicious forms of subjugation have actualized for you is irrelevant. On any given day, you can walk outside and become someone we mourn for the next day; someone we will plead with our elected officials and celebrities with large platforms to bring attention to the day after that; someone whose name will ring through the night while cities burn the week after that. And, sadly, you will still be dead, a casualty of a war to preserve white supremacist capitalism.
What, even, of the place where alleged truth and intuition intersect? Every day there are new reports and studies to prove that Black people are not administered proper medical care because we are not trusted by the very physicians who treat us. Every day, Black mothers are denied proper services and care during their deliveries, which disproportionately to their white counterparts, often lead to their demise—even when they are extremely famous, rich, celebrity athletes.
Now especially, we find ourselves at a peculiar intersection of truth and feeling. We now have access to data that shows that Black people are disproportionately susceptible to coronavirus, and impacted by resulting covid-19. And still, Black folks know deep down that the count is either under or overreported. With no reason to trust the medical industry, coupled with all of us who have passed at home, it would be naive to trust the accuracy of reports from the CDC, or any corporate healthcare entity. So we just know, for ourselves. There is simply no reason we need to risk our life doubly: to the whims of the individual police officer nor to the spreading of a virus that we will then not receive prompt or adequate care to treat. White people have neither of these problems. Bolstered by an inherently racist medical care system and served and protected by a thuggish ruggish system of policing, white people are in a unique position to help save Black lives today and in the future, by allowing us all to stay home.
Except for those who can pass for straight, cisgender white men (and even then, there can be a thinning of that herd if there is an honest reckoning to be had among its ranks) no one is safe—there are only degrees to which you are suspended in peril. Poor white people, for example, continue to put themselves at risk of disease, malnutrition, and violence, eschewing what should be self-preserving loyalty to their fellow working-class folk, all to bask in the warm glow of white supremacy. If they feel their clothes begin to singe as the embers creep, their lips remain curled as they watch us succumb deeper in the mouth of the flame.
So now—as my mother and her mother would say—is the time for white folks’ feet to be put to the fire. It is in the ethical responsibility of white people in particular to stand on the front lines and distribute their wealth to people and organizations actively doing anti-racist work. It is in the ethical responsibility of white people, in particular, to place themselves in harm’s way to combat police violence. It is the very least that they, as a community, can do to begin to atone for the sins of their kin and the vestiges that bestow them comfort. It is in their ethical responsibility. And also, it is in the clear and inherent self-interested benefit of white people to be on the front lines as we tear down white supremacy.
Make no mistake: the divestment of capital and power for white people, while briefly jarring I’m sure, will, in the long run, pay enormous dividends to all branches of every white community. White women will benefit; poor white people will benefit; immunocompromised white people will benefit; disabled white people will benefit; Trans and gender non-conforming people will benefit; white folks with mental illness will benefit; whiteness will suffer, but white people will unmistakably benefit.
I do not have any factual evidence that, if white people divest their actual and social capital from white supremacy by redistributing resources and risking their safety in the street, resulting potentially in network news broadcasts of police violence against them and not us, will garner more sympathy and momentum toward police defunding, and ultimately, abolition.
But I have a good feeling about it.