Prove Me Wrong… I’ll Wait

You present your argument with such confidence and stand by it with such arrogance. Yet you miss the factual evidence standing in front of you. 

You claim to try to be an ally, which for one, isn’t a title you can bestow on yourself, yet the closest title I would give you is racist. But for kicks, I’ll play along. 

Let’s see if you can prove me wrong. Because there’s no doubt in my mind how this conversation will end.

Tell me how it’s a figure of my imagination.  That I tend to make problems out of nothing. 

Tell me that I’m overreacting or too critical. That like my fellow sisters, my aggressive tone drowns out any sense I make and I just need to take it down a notch. 

Tell me that that perception does not demonstrate a larger issue of societal disproportion as when you speak, it’s considered enlightened and an example of feminist exceptionalism. 

Tell me that it takes the partnership of educated and outspoken black and white women to accomplish anything. But let’s not forget Sojourner, Rosa, Angela, Assata or Michelle and the lack of space for any of us at your Women’s March. 

Prove me wrong…. I’ll wait.

Tell me that rights are universal, equitable, and fair. That no matter who you are, people are born with the same indiscriminate privileges to survive in the world. Yet poverty, ailment, and lack of education wreak havoc on post colonized lands across continents. 

Tell me we haven’t been trapped in a Eurocentric system of supremacy for a millennium and the ownership of black bodies doesn’t keep getting passed from one white hand to another. 

Prove me wrong… I’ll wait.

Tell me that the land of opportunity is not only for the pale majority, but for all who worship the United Racists Under Trump. That good things happen to those who abide by the system, the same one engulfed in the flames still burning from KKK crosses. 

Tell me racism is over and the noose I struggle through daily was psychologically woven, not made by hands of former slave owners. But then how do me and my black brethren wear matching ones, I wonder? 

Prove me wrong… I’ll wait.

Tell me that the justice system is built on fairness. That law sees no color. 

Tell me that a black homeless mother seeking a better education for her child calls for a five year sentence but that same action by a rich white Hollywood actress violating several other laws only calls for ten months, for which she only served 14 days. 

Tell me that mass murderers deserve bullet proof vests but an aid worker sleeping deserves 8 bullets. That justice shouldn’t be Just Us and law doesn’t stand for “Lethal Amongst Whites”. 

Prove me wrong…. I’ll wait.

Tell me that these cases are just one in a million….oh no wait, a thousand….okay, more like a hundred. Out of the BILLIONS of people in the world! Because the saying  “once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action” is just philosophical mumbo jumbo. 

Tell me it happens to all people and our coffee toned wrapping doesn’t also serve as target practice for the country’s most lethal assassins. 

Prove me wrong… I’ll wait.

But while I’m waiting you know what I can bet? That you have continued to go on about your day, strutting the same walk, spewing the same talk and doing nothing to actually challenge what we BOTH know. 

I can bet you scrolled past every post, ignored every tweet, and drove straight past that protest you saw on your way home without a second look. And why? Because your desire to prove me wrong extends further than the tunnel vision that is your outlook on societal structures. It prohibits you from seeing an even deeper superiority complex you hold over a fellow woman with the major difference being that of skin. 

So while you are able to take the time to construct a cleverly crafted rebuttal to this assessment, I must continue my fight against the system you say fights for me. I don’t have the luxury of time to devote to your white fragility. 

At the end of this, you’ll go into your cozy condo up Northwest where they never ask you if you live there, kickback with your favorite Kendrick playlist, and let the trivial, privileged worries of your day fade away. While others pray they make it home, you pray nothing changes because your life is just perfect. You’re a complacent bystander in a world of murder. Bet that’ll look great on your resume. 

So keep talking, prove me right…. I’ll wait.

Silence = Inaction = Betrayal

Image: CC – 0  Free Stock Photo

Reanalysing Violence as a Tool for Justice

In this post, Svetlana Onye explores the way violence has been understood in society and question whether it can be reconceptualised as a tool for liberation.

What values have you amassed and embodied with such an ease that you have lost the ability to come to terms with your own psyche? 

In discussions of liberation, Western society encourages the idea of change through peace. Through collective silent walking, through speaking your thoughts freely but not loud enough as to rouse the baton of a police officer or to threaten a fragile yet fortified sovereign state. It can be argued that this is because of the Christian teachings which remain present in the values of Western society or it can be argued that submissiveness cast as peace allows one to be dominated in a way that appears to look like security and care. 

In the words of Assata Shakur, “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who are oppressing them.” This quote challenges us to wonder what states of being and tools of change we are employing when seeking to make a difference and whether they will work. If we are employing tools given to us by those who oppress us to seek change, will change truly manifest or instead will it be hindered? Because those tools were never made to incite liberation but rather created to maintain the order which currently exists. Therefore, we ask ourselves whether peace is really a tool for change or instead does it come through violence.

Violence is often brandished with the label of barbarism, through the observance of its fatal and often ugly repercussions, as well as the belief that pursuing change through violence only prolongs one’s own injustice. The August 2011 riots against the unlawful killing of Mark Duggan, was called “criminality pure and simple” by then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron; in the US, American conservative personality Tomi Lohren called anti-police brutality riots in New York, sparked after the unlawful murder of Stephon Clark by police, as events which only “advance the ill and society grievances.” It is almost as if the perceived feral behavior of violence is something that should naturally not possess the civilised man, despite the fact that it is through violence we have built the civilised man. History shows us this. Slavery, with its subjugation, brutality and dehumanization was violent to the body as it was to the mind, othering black people through all facets of self in order to distinguish the binary of the civilized and savage man, creating a history of the plight of trying to rid the stain of the latter in order to become the former.

Or must we believe that violence is only innate to the man who lives in places of corruption? Or the man who does not have the moral values which have been shaped through socialised comparisons? If we understand violence as innate to all men and as integral to change, we can see violence as having been castrated to permit the violence of some and to dehumanise the violence of others, the latter of whom need to reclaim their natural state to capture their freedom. As humans, we are made up of violence as much as we are made up of love. History shows us that many men chose to create systems where worldly growth could only be yielded through violent means.  

We live in a world where the many things we consume, the many institutions we enter and the values which it teaches have manifested from violence. The great economies of the West are the residue of boats crossing cold waters while carrying black bodies, of displacement and rewritten histories, of labour without citizenship and many other acts of violence which could not be resigned to time for it now exists across generations. Such violence colonises some but permits freedom for others, oppresses many but spreads wealth to a few and in this inequity, it is those who have suffered from such violence who have been taught to dissociate from their own. 

In his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon states that violence can be viewed as the remedy for decolonisation, as colonialism is “violence in its natural state, and it will only yield with greater violence.” If colonialism is violence in its natural state, then violence itself, which is structured and systemised, transcends merely physical violence. Rather, the form of violence which has structured the modern world is a violence which affects the mind, the body and the soul and dictates the course of life, death and culture.   

Why has this violence been normalised? It can be argued that is because we are surrounded by this violence in its natural state. For the nature of colonisation pulsates in the police force, in politics, in schools, in hospitals and many entities which enforce racial discrimination and social injustice. These methods of violence are normalized because it yields economic wealth and permits a system with a particular set of morals and norms that create order and assimilation, while violence for means of liberation threatens to incite the dismantling of it.

Or maybe we fear the capacity to which our violence can materialise when we use it towards our own betterment. When we are made to believe that violence is a dark physical energy that is not innate, but rather roused through poverty of upbringing or evil, we are unable to come to terms with the full capacity of it. Instead, we have pent up frustrations towards a system which seems too intangible to break, loneliness from a cyclical work life which juxtaposes the suffocation of our peak time trains, ideations of wealth and status and the ability to have access to the lives of others, comparing our loses to their gains, colours and weight and cursing at the fact that our appearances can dictate the paths some of us take.

Where do these grievances go? When they are built up inside, when they are reflected in the faces of our children and their children, when the people to blame appear too high to touch. These grievances are thrust upon another, the violence remains on the ground as people fight their neighbours, brothers and sisters, as we create gangs to belong and to release as people shout only at the people who are within their reach. These actions, these formations are then presented as examples of savagery. Examples of why the system exists, of why morality has to be shaped and moulded by those who will never have to fight to reclaim their stolen rights. 

Fanon tells us that violence is a tool for change and justice because it is retribution, the act of seeking liberation on terms which does not please nor align with what oppression has taught the individual. It is not about negotiations and empathy, it negates second thoughts and love because these are the very things that you have been denied. It is having access to a violence that you hold within you because “you now realise your life, your breath, your beating heart is the exact same as the settlers” (Fanon, 1961). 

Though Fanon employs the example of the Algerian revolution in his book, the Haitian revolution is also an example of how utilising violence incites change. The 1791 Haitian Revolution happened after years of slavery, discrimination, dehumanisation and abuse suffered by West African slaves in the colony formerly named Saint-Domingue. It was the ultimate sugar island at that time and a crucial source for the economic growth of France. The slaves believed that change could only come through violence because they had understood that there was no other way to demand liberation if those who you are asking to liberate you, do not see you as equal nor deserving of a quality of life. Therefore, they spoke to them with the same language they have been spoken too, reflecting onto them the horrors which they have suffered.

So, is violence the tool for change and justice? It is a question we should not be afraid to ask for through our exploration of the idea we may find the correct procedures in creating the changes that remain missing in the world. 

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0