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Title: Black liberal, your time is up
Author: Yannick Giovanni Marshall
Date: 1 Jun 2020
Language: en
Topics: George Floyd uprising, black liberation, anti-liberalism
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/1/black-liberal-your-time-is-up/

Yannick Giovanni Marshall

Black liberal, your time is up

As you ready yourself to attempt to hijack the work of radicals, to go

undercover dressed in our clothes and slip into the crowd pretending

that you were always there and that you are us, know that we see you.

Even now, as you are preparing your watered-down Black Lives Matter

syllabi and your “Hope and the Black Spring in the Time of Corona” book

manuscripts, which are by now ready for press, filled as they are with

the same dimly lit, unimaginative pablum about “improving race

relations”, feel-good “anti-racism”, and “ways to move forward”. We see

you. We know why you have come.

You are here to translate an uprising. You are here to show your black

skin so that you can claim the mantle of authority on anti-Blackness

that white liberals have bestowed upon you. You are here to sit at their

pundit tables, before their cameras. Your face beaming across the world

as it provides the safest possible interpretation of a revolution in

order to police its possibilities and pave over the threat of abolition

with as mild and ineffective a reform as possible.

Although uprisings are spearheaded by radicals, we are shut out of the

public discussion. Neither the Black radical, nor Black radical thought

is given air time. Instead, we are forced to endure being talked about

and having the revolution we fought for be defused and repackaged to be

palatable to a white liberal audience.

We see you gearing up for your mission. You will not be able to blend

into the crowd this time.

No interpretation of a revolution is needed. Its commentators should not

be the people who yesterday were only too happy to sit at the table with

white nationalists and who took smiling pictures with the “good police”.

It cannot be narrated by the same people who – alongside their white

liberal colleagues – jump Black radicals, beating us down with tired

Martin Luther King Jr quotes in an attempt to discipline our anger and

fix the boundaries of our action. Not by the same people who spew King

at every opportunity, wielding him as a cudgel against those whom they

have trained in the belief that King is king and his word is law.

It is a cult of King sustained, on the one hand, by the power of white

liberal media, schools and corporate offices that have bled him of what

little anti-colonialism he had in order to parade him for their

purposes, and on the other hand, by the effective silencing of his

contemporaries and his contemporary critics.

We have had to endure the silencing of people like Kwame Ture, who said,

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a

conscience. The United States has no conscience.” We have endured the

silencing of people like Assata Shakur, who said, “Nobody in the world,

nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the

moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

You have not only been complicit in the silencing of the radicals, but

by hogging the mic and having the prerogative on how Black struggle is

spoken of and its history remembered, you have engineered it. Even as

our people are permanently incarcerated or are made refugees and hunted,

they die a second death in your willful amnesia.

Black radical critics have proven to be right although you would not

know it by how little their names are known and how little room you have

given them. Get off the mic and give it to the people. Get off the

platform and out of the newsroom. Your time is up.

For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate

Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any

sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black

people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and

silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration.

We know that even now you are preparing to invade us with your linked

arms performing that played out “we shall overcome” nonsense in order to

reframe destruction in the colony and of the civil order as a quest for

policy changes.

You have come to firehose the fire in our uprising while pretending to

be angrier and more rebellious than the rebels. As if it were not just

yesterday that you were standing shoulder to shoulder with police and

politicians begging for calm and agreeing that this is sad.

We know that by the immensity of your power and the relative strength of

your megaphones you will have some successes in the coming fraud. But no

matter how well you carve and gut this revolution and lay its skin on

your face as your mask, we will still see you.

We know that when we say abolish prisons and police you will intercede

on behalf of the state and white power with your deliberate

mistranslation saying we asked for “less harsh sentences and more trust

between the police and Black community.”

When we say we want this thing over with, you will say we want “change”.

When we say this white supremacist settler-colony has anti-Blackness in

its DNA and is incapable of providing any adequate liberation you say,

“America is failing Black people”.

We say we want to get out of here. You ask “how do we move forward?” As

if we do not hear in your tone the hope that all this “unrest” can be

quelled and we can move quietly onto the next killing.

You insist on mistranslating us.

Black liberal, your time is up. You have held the mic for too long. Give

the mic to any random protester on the street. Any one of them will have

something more insightful and analytically sound to say than you do.

When you dress up in clothes with our slogans and go on TV all you do is

cry. What are you crying about? I cannot remember the last time I have

smiled so much.

You have been smiling too long with our oppressors. There is no reason

to cry when the resistance comes out. We would have thought you would be

ecstatic, all you who have professed to be interested in change.

You who would speak lovingly of the English peasants of 1381 who, torch

in hand, emerged from the ruins of the Black Death to burn the property

of the ruling classes in the hope of emancipating themselves. But now,

when Black people who are forced to witness themselves publicly hunted

and tortured to death on a weekly basis rise up, you attempt to coax

them away from their cigarette lighters.

When the Target starts burning down, the Black liberal will fight harder

to put it out than its owners. But as Malcolm X said: “You had another

Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses

– the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the

master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. If his house caught on fire,

they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.”

They gave you the platform, but there are more of us than there are of

you. The greatest trick you ever pulled off was to make it seem that it

was you who represented the majority of Black people and it were those

radically against colonial policing who were few and far between. Now

you see us in our thousands. Stop crying.

X: “That Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom

wears a top hat. He’s sharp. He dresses just like you do. He speaks the

same phraseology, the same language. He tries to speak it better than

you do. He speaks with the same accents, same diction. And when you say,

‘your army,’ he says, ‘our army.’ He hasn’t got anybody to defend him,

but anytime you say ‘we’ he says ‘we.’ ‘Our president,’ ‘our

government,’ ‘our Senate,’ ‘our congressmen,‘ ‘our this and our that.’

And he hasn’t even got a seat in that ‘our‘ even at the end of the line.

So this is the twentieth-century Negro.”

Black liberal, as we brace for the second wave of repression from your

government, remember that we still see you. When your police, your

National Guard, your dogs are sicced on us, when your P W Botha/Bull

Connor of a president who agitated for a Sharpeville 1960 against the

migrants, prepares to commit atrocities, despite our masked shouts,

stones and placards, we still see you. We know why you have come. But

you are too late.

For the first time in a long while we have also been seen and know that

we are not alone. Before we might have stepped out sheepishly, politely

asking to consider more radical solutions, thinking that we were moving,

vulnerably, naked and alone, into an open field of attack dogs.

But now that we have stridden bravely forth, without shields, into the

centres of white supremacy, we have discovered that we are covered by a

multitude of good people. Look at the world. We are not alone. As you

jump the bandwagon and attempt to wrestle the reins away from us, know

that this is a Black radicals’ moment. See us.

Black radicals are here to stay. Come up off that mic and get out before

you get “looted”. And take those Barack and Michelle posters with you.

They never belonged to us.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards Malcolm.

Peace after revolution.