laws, guns, & money, Pt. 2: The causes are coming from within the house

A couple of weeks ago, we took a look at the proposed solutions for mass random killings[1] in the States and how the would-be solutions can actually lead to worse conditions for the marginalized. What we found is that it would be a better use of time and energy to look at systemic causes and then try to seek solutions from there. Looking at such may even save us from other problems.

For the United States, the root of our mass shootings may be traced to the lack of accounting for the fundamental exploitation of violence which continues in an intractable pull towards violence, death, and destruction as the key component of our way of life. Like George W Bush, we may talk about our way of life being freedom—which *THEY* hate us for. But that is only true in a strictly consumerist perspective, which depends on spendable and gathered capital of both the society and of the individual. In America, unlike the East Germany of the 1980’s, we are free to buy Jordache Jeans, but only if we have enough money. We can buy our health, but only if we have enough money. We can buy elections, but only if we have enough money. We can buy enough tasty food, but only if we have money.

In a country founded on guaranteeing negative rights[2], primarily shoring up the livelihood of slavers and land-usurpers, we cannot expect much more than what we have now: A few are made rich on the backs of the poor, the workers, the enslaved, the racialized, the indigenous. And none of this capitalist concentration of wealth and inequality is sustainable without extensive and sustained violence and containment.

To understand random violence here (and, I’d argue, abroad), we must look to the militarization of our society. It is this militarism that guarantees that those who amass resources and wealth can maintain and keep what they’ve stolen. Dole, United Fruit, Exxon, Boeing, Walmart, Raytheon, Nike, etc, rely on the 800 military bases in over 70 countries under the United States’ direct control in order to extract resources and make a killing (what pun?). Those forces exert pressure on would-be sovereign nations to also keep working conditions at a disposable level, optimal for capitalist extraction. This partnership is strengthened by the Wars on Terror and Drugs as well as through more apparently benevolent strategies such as monetary aid and NGO’s. If the governments were to get out of hand, there’s always the CIA.

The violence that the US exerts throughout the world is necessary to keep peasants and workers from effectively demanding their own economic and workplace freedom. The answer to both civil and personal unrest and unease is breaking bones and breaking wills.

us military shooting

And this violence comes home through various policing strategies. The priorities of the local police and criminal justice system are to protect private property—to protect capital. As such, they are generally in opposition to the needs and often the safety of marginalized and oppressed people, among whom are the Working Class, People of Color, People experiencing homelessness, and those with mental health issues. That there is a large overlap is not incidental. The police and justice system in capitalism resolve the internal conflicts of capitalism through violence and escalation.

Capitalism at its height needs waste. Waste is what the Free Market resides in, how it operates. Its nature is to mine, alter, consume, and discard. The US, with 1/20th of the world’s population, consumes 1/5th of its resources. Yet it has the audacity to throw out a third of its own food[3] and judge other nations for not being able to properly feed their own, even as it embargoes them. This waste expands to the wider economy and to other precious resources, such as fossil fuels, innovation, and labor. The waste is considered beneficial because it illuminates both plenty-as-reward and scarcity-as-punishment, the carrot and stick of the Meritocracy Myth. Labor in this system is deprived of meaning because it is wasteful; it doesn’t build to anything that has any value. The Free Market ideology does not lead to anywhere but capital gain for its own benefit; it does not lead to truth or beauty or value or health but to monetization and only to monetization.

So Capitalism also disposes of people—not just the Working Class who toil to survive with the minimum means and relationships to survive—but even the Petty Bourgeois and the Bourgeoisie themselves as their lives are filled with the meaninglessness, the nihilism, of monetization. All relationships become monetized under Neoliberalism, and the United States is at the height of this contradiction as we citizens spend our days worrying about either not having enough money or worrying about holding onto money. Indeed, as with cash, private property rules everything around me.

Other violent enforcers of American capitalism include Immigration and Border Patrol agents—ICE allows conglomerates to hire immigrant workers at a small price and then run them out when they begin to mobilize—the feds—despite the FBI’s celebrity status among the #Resistance, it continues to upend movements of actual resistance—and of course the CIA—which along with the DOD works to destabilize international resistance to US and capitalist hegemony.

This violence is state-led for the purpose of maintaining a destructive way of life. It is proof that capitalism is destructive externally and internally, for the world, the community, the family, the body, and the soul.

As King suggested before his assassination (yet another touchstone of American capitalist violence), we can’t point fingers at instances of seemingly-random violence done by Americans without considering the extent and depth of the violence of the bourgeois state upon the world and upon our own. White Americans wreak havoc in public spaces of  innocence because that is what they know, what they see, how they experience the body politic of their country and identification. How else to explain our involvement in Vietnam, in naked attempts to overturn the will of the people in state after state  (including our own, where the choices are already breathtakingly narrow), in the militarized police occupation of Black communities during protest, in the extrajudicial choking of Eric Garner and the seventeen shots into Laquan McDonald’s body? It is how vigilantes have dealt with encroaching threats and kept populations in line, from the post-Reformation lynchings to subway “heroes” who shoot teens like they’re Dirty Harry (and are elevated to that status) or have a Death Wish, to George Zimmerman in Florida and Theodore Wafer in the Detroit ‘burbs.

Lastly and most importantly, we cannot ignore the connections between mass random violence and intimate partner abuse. Not only are many of these shooters cisgender men, but they have made it clear that they feel entitled to enact violence onto the women in their lives. What is practiced at home is a practiced enactment of ownership and brutality. This is tried in the private and semi-private, and then carried out in large scale. From intimate and gendered to public and indiscriminate.

The only viable solution for potentially-lethal problems in violent capitalism is escalation; the solution for fear and foreboding nihilism is lethality. We must cut out the heart of the problem.

—–Note: This content first appeared in the Patreon page. Consider subscribing for early and exclusive access.—-

[1] Mass random shootings need to be understood within its many contexts as distinct from yet also familiar to intimate partner violence (and the mass shootings that are extensions of that) and neighborhood violence in underground economies. More on the connections between MRS and IPV later. For more on VIUE, read here.

[2] I have been working on this connection for a while and hope to have something up on it soon.

[3] According to the USDA, this also leads to tremendous pollution in the making and wasting of unused food. To wit: “Food waste, which is the single largest component going into municipal landfills, quickly generates methane, helping to make landfills the third largest source of methane in the United States.”


Suppression, Revolution, and Commodification: On Baby Boomers and Millennials

The ongoing flame wars between Greedy Baby Boomers and Entitled Millennials is not only  tiring (its roots lay some 25 years ago when mainstream media dubbed us Gen X’ers “Slackers”), it lacks deeper analysis in need of some old fashioned dialectical materialism. Because the problem isn’t so much the people, but the conditions.

Let’s start with the coming-of-age of Boomers. The Post-War years brought along unheralded prosperity due in no small part to added productivity in the global economy (what with the US sitting out most of this war between Empires only to clean out on top at the tail end) and a large swath of the population missing. Semi-skilled labor, due to the work or threats of unionization, finally delivered living wages and a level of comfort unknown for the Working Class. Or, shall we say, the White Working Class, as Black and other non-White populations were denied entrance to many of the mechanizations of prosperity–such as drastically increased wages, accessible higher education, and the expansion of home ownership in the sprawling suburbs. The fact that the suburbs were sprawling and that home ownership there was so available was the work of a federal government once again expanding the terms of settler-colonialism through the mechanisms of the nation-state including reduced fuel prices and expanded interstate projects coupled with a new form of Homestead Act.

The benefits of the White Working Class mediated a distinction brought about by commerce and the bourgeois government that would lead to the creation of a large and placated White Middle Class to buffer against dispirited Working Class people. Higher social mobility through the GI Bill coupled with geometric mobility, allowing a large White Flight from the urban areas, where the new White Middle Class and industries were able to transport wealth gotten through wage theft of the working class Black and White people of the city. The same remnant working class people were stagnated in urban ghettos such as, in Chicago, Uptown or Bronzeville. Meanwhile, higher-paid White WC and Black Entrepreneurs moved to their own racially and class-segregated neighborhoods to act as yet another buffer. Because White Supremacist Capitalism thrives on buffers and interruptions. And so it’s important to note that any critique of the Baby Boomer generation as a whole is woefully inadequate, as it misses many of those purposefully left behind in this new ecology.

This social and capital mobilization was imprinted for the benefit of welcoming a White Baby Boom for the manufacturing and consumption of consumptive goods, the bread and butter of American capitalism. The rising Middle Class Baby Boomers were raised in this atmosphere, but globally and locally something else was happening: revolution was in the air. While many people give White hippies (the children of the rising White Middle Class in the US) credit for the burgeoning revolutionary spirit of the 1960’s, the reductionism is particularly nationalistic and racist. Revolutions against imperialist capitalism were happening throughout the under-developed world and were finally coming to a head in the 1950’s. Whether China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, or India and the entirety of the European colonized in Africa, people of color throughout the world were unshackling themselves from Western hegemony, often at great cost. The Washington, Belgian, and corporate influence could be felt at the peak of the bullet and bomb through Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Black America in the US South and Urban North. Other formerly-colonized began to rise up and stand their ground, including the Chicano and American Indian Movements while women (famously-but-not-solely White women in the US) were simultaneously struggling for social, economic, and sexual liberation (as all three are interconnected).

It was in this frame of the liberatory organizing of the Black and Brown proletariat that the occasional White ally would arise and, due to the power of Whiteness, would somehow amass a substantial amount of the credit. While not in the same vein as the FBI taking credit for dismantling lynching White Supremacist vigilante groups during the Civil Rights Movement, it’s clear that dues owed White allies such as the Weathermen during this time may be overrepresented.

Yet, the rise of radicalism in White Middle Class Baby Boomers was an effect of the times that were a-changing. Being White and affluent, they had more direct influence and it was harder to ignore these would-be class-and-race-traitors (in the most complimentary of tones). The way they would be silenced would be different from the silencing of Black and Brown radicals throughout the world and domestically. Key leaders of the Black civil rights, anti-war, and liberation movements were assassinated and the movements as a whole underwent severe repression on all fronts that the full lethal force of the federal and local police (and aiding vigilantes) and judicial system as well as economic depression, psychological and social warfare. It’s increasingly easy to argue that they had a hand in flooding our neighborhoods with illicit drugs and guns (while maintaining .the strict prison industry that severely punishes Black and Brown communities for obtaining or holding such).

The White Middle Class retreated back to the life they were raised to occupy, to take over the mechanizations of industry. To further expand the unsustainable economic growth they sought, they helped to usher in Ronald Reagan’s Neoliberal state (aka, the Final Stage of Capitalism).  They commodified public works and turned stable and previously accessible goods into get-rich schemes. They dismantled the welfare state, the collective organizing, and the infrastructure which had enabled their transition into the comfortable Middle Class. They also helped to dismantle Affirmative Action which had temporarily expanded a Black Middle Class.

So this exponential growth necessitated the dismantling of the means to that growth. Once the capitalist class established enough buffers and re-stole all the wealth they could (in a time of tremendous economic growth, the top ten percent came away with 99% of it, leaving the working and middle class with one percent) while exponentially increasing the cost of living.  The very stolen wealth has become its own buffer. And the Petty Bourgeois White Baby Boomers, who have already entered into a comfortable retirement, seem blissfully unaware that the next generation faces the void of the disparity between the standards of living of the Baby Boomer generation and the cost of living in the new millennium.

You see, a dialectical materialism will tell you that it’s not Boomers or Millennials you should be angry with, it’s Capitalism and Whiteness.

Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Double-Edged Sword of Racist Environmental Catastrophe

Global warming and its resultant ecological disasters are merely collateral damage to the environmental disaster that is global capitalism. It’s interesting that for decades the mass messaging has been worried about so-called ecoterrorism. But terrorism is a political name of a distinct violence that functionally distracts from the heightened and broad violence that imperialist and capitalist destruction wrought to communities of color. And when it comes to the ecology, this violence is double-edged.

Because, first, the repercussions of ecological damage hit communities of color first, most, and the hardest. We see that in the warming of the Atlantic Ocean and the hurricanes that have devastated the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, rocking hardest the communities of color that have little protection and infrastructure as they are put in harms’ way. We see that in neighborhoods where garbage dumps and smoke stacks are piled and children of color face enhanced lung disease, such as Chicago’s Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods, or Gary, IN, just across the border. In the placement of people of color near toxic dumps or vice versa. In the state of Michigan’s treatment of the water in Flint. People of color are sacrificed to the gods of efficiency because White Supremacy will not allow otherwise.

The second wave that eco-terrorism is wrought in communities of color is that they are then victimized for their survival even as their recovery is dramatically slowed. They are blamed for not leaving beforehand when they have fewer resources to do so. They are qualified as “looters” while white looting is overlooked or sympathized with. Recently, a White news reporter riding atop Houston in a helicopter bragged about calling the police on people of color requisitioning emergency supplies from a shuttered grocery store. We saw this in how Haitians were treated as children by aid agencies and yet, for all their hand-wringing and fund-raising after the earthquake, left to rot by multinational corporations and their NGO wings. Communities of color are given less sympathy and thus less resources with which to alleviate their immediate needs after disasters.

Puerto Rico perfectly encapsulates both ends of this manufactured dilemma. Long before Hurricane Maria came along, the island colony of the US was put in the line of debt and neoliberal privatization to such an effect that it was facing the largest bankruptcy in the history of the US public bond market at $123 billion[1] already back in May of this year, eight times larger than Detroit’s. As a result of this mounting debt and the pressure to pay it off, not only are its beaches being privatized (and thus denied to citizens) and its schools being closed (along with drastic cuts to teacher pay and shutting of other essential services), its infrastructure is sabotaged. The fact that the electrical grid collapsed under the weight of the storm is not due to the negligence of the Puerto Rican people, but to how debt is structured among people of color and the colonized. Haiti had no infrastructure to deal with natural disasters due to its economy being routed towards paying for debts as a two hundred-year punishment for its own Black rebellion against White empire.

By Eric Pancer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 

Racism is not only the reason communities of color like Puerto Rico are more susceptible to environmental disasters, but also the reason their recovery from these catastrophes is trashed. Unlike when the Wall St. banks and lenders were insured by the United States after they destroyed the housing market and countless lives, Puerto Rico, a protectorate of the US, is expected to pay debts it could not before the hurricanes. Its debt racked up under a Democratic president and it’s likely that a Democratic president wouldn’t have fundamentally altered or alleviate it. It just so happens that this openly White Supremacist and tactless president let the cat out of the bag by tweeting—while the island was under water and facing months without electrical power—that its first responsibility is to pay back Wall St.  Trump would not only blame the country for its own debt, but then, while failing to give the country the resources it needs for the people’s survival, called them lazy.

Haiti faced similar critiques and was criticized as too poor to prevent or treat the damage left by the earthquake in 2010, yet their blackness and abject poverty were tokenized for fundraising. Thus, even sympathetic aid organizations like Red Cross and the Clinton Foundation neglected or overthrew Haitian input while collecting hundreds of millions of dollars only to leave Haitians little better than before the quake. A Clinton donor, for instance, spent six billion dollars of raised money on building a handful of ‘hurricane-proof’ trailers that left homeless occupants sick from formaldehyde. Nine hundred Haitians died after Hurricane Matthew hit last year. Hillary Clinton, who claimed to be leading the response to the crisis, would as Secretary of State take the side of industrialists seeking to further exploit Haitian workers by working to deny pay increase demands and intervening in their elections. This after George W Bush assisted in a coup of democratically-elected President Aristide, following in his father’s coup of the same in the early 90’s.

We’ve yet to see how NGO’s will react in PR, but we know that banks were offering aid by merely compounding and prioritizing more debt to further consume the country and its public spaces. As a 100 year-old colony of the United States, however, Puerto Rico has very little agency in its own governance and largely relies on the US body politic, an engagement that they have no control over as the island has no representative vote.

To contrast, the neighboring socialist island nation of Cuba—undoubtedly also very poor—takes absolute, comprehensive precautions against these same tropical storms, thus facing significantly fewer lives lost than mainland US even as it takes the brunt end of these hurricanes. The country prioritizes prevention and protecting its most vulnerable people , whereas the capitalist nation state of the US undoubtedly prioritizes debt and economic growth, both at the expense of people of color. Cuba protects personal property, bodies, and affects while it’s clear that the corporations that run the US care only about their private property.

It’s about priorities, and global capitalism is perpetual war against communities of color.


[1] Nine times the size of Detroit, which then became another colony for the White ruling class to do with as they pleased.

“Food Is a Weapon”

From theologian James Cone’s The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other? (paper delivered in 1980):

I have been convinced that the black church cannot remain silent regarding socialism, because such silence will be interpreted by our Third World brothers and sisters as support for the capitalistic system which exploits the poor all over this earth.

For example, between 25,000 and 50,000 people die each day from starvation, a cause that is directly related to the persistence of national and international economic orders that foster distorted development. The former secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, well known for his racial slurs, said it bluntly: “Food is a weapon. It is now one of the principal tools of our negotiating kit.”

From a Rolling Stone story covering the Republican National Convention in 76, while Earl Butz was still Secretary of Agriculture (content note for racist/sexist remarks):



Pat shook his head no; so did I.


Pat gulped twice.

Butz resigned a few days after calls were made for his head, but he claimed he did it on his own (that seems unlikely) and that he did nothing wrong.

A few thoughts on reading these:

  • Remember that Pat Boone was himself a nice racist, hired to whitewash the Race Music (as in, Rhythm & Blues and early Rock N Roll that sounded too black) for the innocent White Christian kids across America.
  • Butz clearly outlined his racial animosity, and did so to a reporter and a famous musician. In the open. At a national convention. In the post-Civil Rights era. Don’t think that it isn’t still happening. Paul Ryan may be more careful about his views now, but he’s still racially animositic; in large part because class warfare is his life.
  • Butz was in control of food and production as a kind of supermanager of agrarian companies. What does it mean to black and brown farmers and consumers to have a white racist in charge of food supply and farming justice in the Land of Plenty? Why did it take a directly racist comment to get him fired when he admitted elsewhere that he’d use food as a weapon?
  • Butz was hired by Nixon and stayed under Ford. Until this article spread, no one deemed it fit to question how he operated, only what he said when they were dirty jokes.
  • George W Bush, Reagan and Nixon had a lot of the same characteristics of the Illegitimate President of the United States, but with some charm and/or intelligence and, by degrees only, humility. Many of the safeguards that Trump has taken out or will take out were already proposed or committed by the earlier three. What now is different besides the degree and the speed to which he’s taking it? What sets “p*ssy grabber” apart from Reagan who defunded family planning globally and domestically? I’m convinced that language plays a big part of it. Language and bluster.
  • Like Butz, Trump has no shame. None. Don’t expect Trump to go willingly, either. And since he has no shame and is a blundering racist, sexist, classist idiot, he’s a perfect cover for Republicans who can always say that they were forced to follow Trump, even though they’re informing him and using his bluster as a cover. Expect Medicaid and Food Stamps to be cut, with or without Trump’s blessing. Because food is a weapon.

The Threat of Melanin and Property

This morning, a Black pregnant woman walking on the sidewalk was shot to death by a white man who warned her and two brothers to get off his property. She was shot in the head and one of the brothers is paralyzed from trying to shield her. She was, because of the color of her skin, seen as a threat to the man’s property even as she was not on it. To further cement the idea that property and white people are more important than the lives of Black folk, the woman’s name isn’t even released in the initial story.

White people of all political persuasions all over the interwebz are arguing that Zimmerman had his time in front of Lady Justice, that the courts were fair and unbalanced, that the jurors objectively weighed the evidence and found Zimmerman innocent of murdering Martin. But the fact that this outcome is based on a very selective whitewashed reading of the law and evidence that the court and the judge forced upon the jurors – one that erases everything leading up to the decisive killing moment – tells those with ears to hear and experience to know that the verdict is not fair, Lady Justice is not impartial, the justice system is not just.

Trayvon Martin

If we pull back to see the prevailing trends in the US in terms of racial profiling, we see that Zimmerman was deemed – as most privileged White people are – innocent until proven guilty; but people of color are condemned guilty until proven innocent. Often, like Trayvon Martin, the innocence of people of color is taken from them by innuendo even after justice is denied. And justice denied after lives are nullified.

So we find ourselves, again, where the White man’s property – not just the rich white man’s, but the poor white man’s as well – becomes more important than the lives of black and brown people*. This we see in justification, still, for the slave-holding American South and its secession. This we see in the strange fruit of violent mob actions – Black bodies lynched for the slightest infraction. A glance, a whistle done upon the white woman, who’s “purity” is also a property of the white man and must be protected at all costs from the Black man, who has been treated and projected as a sub-human, irrational beast so much that there is no escape from that imagery in the popular White imagination. This is Emmett Till. This is Trayvon Martin. This is Texas Death Row. It matters not how one behaves or acts in US society – we are judged on the basis of our skin color. The lighter skin projects more innocence; darker skin projects evil intent.

So, somehow, Trayvon posthumously becomes a thug, a thief, a criminal, a drug-selling and -abusing threat to society.

And Zimmerman, according to the Black Threat narrative, had the foresight to see him as the thug he was.

In other words, George Zimmerman had the foresight, in his delusional visions of White culture vengeance, to see Trayvon Martin, in his hoodie and black skin, to be a potential threat to White male property rights. The capitalists and their lapdogs see these threats and try to neutralize them through closing down schools, through apartheid and gentrification, through disinvestment, through psychological warfare portraying Black people as criminals, buffoons, or entertainers – but rarely as fully-realized, embodied, intellectual human beings. Poor white people see these threats and justify direct or indirect, physical or economical, solitary or social violence – and sometimes commit it. Sometimes fatally.

We expand the circle and we see this violence enacted upon not just the African American man, but upon the Black woman, upon the indigenous, upon the Latina, the Chicano, anyone who appears Muslim or Arab. Upon all those with a deeper shade of melanin.

From the moment the first colonist Europeans jumped off the Santa Maria, the indigenous was seen merely as a means to or a hindrance to property – whether as a route to gold for the Spaniards, trade for the French, or land for the English settlers and the official US policy. The First Nation woman was such a threat that she was wiped out, lied to on paper after paper after war after war. Dislocated and then disempowered. Even now, she is blamed for her high poverty state when she is seen at all – except as a cartoonish sports mascot or through colonial gazing movies that center on White protaganists, her people are not recognized. They are depoliticized, for though they are promised autonomy, they are denied the ability to self-rule by a White Supremacist US government threatened by their presence and political voice, by ghosts and ever-present evil. For even when she complains about how she is denied agency to seek justice for the unfathomably high occurrences of rape (most by White men), she is ignored or pushed aside. She is seen as a threat to the very property she was large-scale murdered and vanquished for.

The Muslim is seen as a natural terrorist, prone to violence by nature of his culture, nationality, place, skin color. He is deemed suspect and a threat to US property not due to his or his family’s actions, but by the thinnest connection to a small subset of a fraction of a percentage of a population by the fact that his skin color is roughly the same shade  or who carries a vaguely similar name as a handful of men that blew some shit up. And by extension – because White Supremacy does not deal with precision of any sort – any person who appears to look Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian is suspect. No one suspects that all White Christians are Klansmen or Inquisitors. We blow up entire countries. And yet, the price of being the Orientalized Other remains and one-fifth of the entire human race is deemed too dangerous to be allowed on public transport vehicles without intense scrutiny.

Shocks of Recognition

The Latin American migrant is deemed a threat to US property and is denied access, though her property and work has been stolen by that same nation. She is deemed dangerous and interrogated at every turn, always under watch, always terrified of being detained. She has fears that the European immigrant does not need concern himself with. But again, the fears of her are not merely placed on her, for the animosity given to her is spread to all Spanish-speaking, Brown folk. Whether their families have been in the current United States since before the borders passed over and incorporated them or they are born US citizens by Constitutional right (a Constitutional right so-called Constitutionalists are consistently trying to repeal), or whether they have risked all for the treacherous, lethal pathway to the United States proper, they are deemed a threat in need of detainment, in need of lock-down, in need of fear, in need of separation from family, in need of depoliticization, in need of removal. Always a suspicious eye upon them. Always seen as a threat.

Stand your ground

The person inhabiting the dark skin is perceived a threat. Her experience negated by popular opinion, reviled as a Welfare Queen, despised as a negligent mother, rumored to be on crack, thrown to the nether regions by socio-economic practices. Depoliticized by courts and legislators afraid of her anger and ballot, disinvested by banks and financial institutions afraid of her gaining control of property. Underemployed for her worth is undervalued, underpaid for her work is devalued, bodily imprisoned for her skin is a threat to property.

Families of people of color have been and are being ripped from each other due to violence rained down upon the people of color. Because they are seen as a threat.

These are the sad realities of a nation of people raised to believe that property defines us, rather than character or humanity or justice or love or mercy. And when black and brown lives are perceived as less important than mere property, what makes white people with little property believe that their lives will be sacrosanct by those with much property – who through land and economic use “own” most of the property we inhabit? When will we all be shot for trespassing on their land?


*This post was completely influenced by/cribbed by a twelve year old bell hooks’ quote you may have seen spread on the internet this week. An interview with Jet just happened, so you should also read that.