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Title: Magic Actions Author: Tobi Haslett Date: 2021 Language: en Topics: George Floyd uprising, defund the police, riots, Amiri Baraka Source: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/magic-actions/ retrieved on 7/19/21 Notes: For a zine version w images / fun layout go to [[https://dl.orangedox.com/magicactions-bw]]
LEST WE FORGET. The fear, the weeks of waiting, the vivid force of the
eyewitness testimony; the replaying of grisly footage and then the shock
of the conviction: the whole drama of the Derek Chauvin trial—its
obscenity and thin catharsis—would not have taken place at all were it
not for last year’s riots. Police trials are rare. So is national
uprising: looting, acts of vandalism, and the nightly carnival of
torched police cars are what vaulted George Floyd’s death from single
cruelty to American crisis, as the fires of Minneapolis swept through
every major city. It feels both near and far now.
It’s been a year: long enough for the events to be flattened and
foreshortened; long enough for the authorities to paint their account
over the true one. Last month’s statements by Nancy Pelosi et al.
exposed the hope that a guilty verdict for Chauvin will be enough to end
this episode, sating the popular fury and killing the memory of the
rebellion. We shall see. Even now, an official narrative has yet to
emerge from the chaos of last spring. But it was stunning to watch the
corporate media try to summon one and fail, confounded by the images
they flashed in the public’s face. At the DNC last fall we saw how the
uprising may be remembered: a sunny, noble blur of soaring rhetoric and
“peaceful” crowds—a fabulous alternative to the rawness on the ground.
But certain facts remain; some things can’t be wished away. Too much was
born and broken amid the smoke and screams. The least we can do is
remember—to try, after the riots, after the speeches, after the backlash
and elections, and after this latest (live-streamed) liturgy of American
“criminal justice,” to recall what really happened, extracting and
reconstructing the whole flabbergasting sequence. Last year something
massive came hurtling into view and exploded against the surface of
daily life in the US. Many are still struggling to grasp what that thing
was: its shape and implications, its sudden scale and bitter limits. One
thing we know for sure is that it opened with a riot, on the street in
Minneapolis where Floyd had cried out “I can’t breathe.”
THOSE WERE ERIC GARNER’S LAST WORDS. To hear them repeated, six years
later, by another black man slain on camera by police, lent the instant
rage and hurt a humiliated futility. The dream of Black Lives Matter now
seemed shredded by events. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in
Baltimore—the murders of these young black men launched explosive local
uprisings, which were followed (but never matched) by demonstrations
across the country. Those were marches, not rebellions; large and
passionate, but a degree removed. For the first few days it seemed that
Minneapolis would follow suit: a riot in a single city, to be met with
the old routine: lament the stubborn “tensions” that wrack this
“complex” country—then try to pin the violence on notorious “outside
agitators.” Videos had already surfaced of white militants smashing
glass. There were other videos, of course—the ransacked Lake Street
Target; brute assaults by the police; clouds of tear gas blotting out
entire city blocks—that revealed the robust presence of black people in
the street. But fantasy proved irresistible. Was this a plot by
anarchists, or the radical right-wing fringe? Tim Walz, the Minnesota
governor, announced that 80 percent of the rioters had arrived from out
of town. No matter that this was a total falsehood, to be rescinded the
following day. In high authoritarian style, the rumors rhymed
felicitously with the song sung by the state.
But the destruction of the Third Precinct—this was striking, and truly
new. The situation in Minneapolis burst beyond its early outline. On the
evening of May 28, the third night of the rebellion, the police were
forced to evacuate their own building, trounced on the very territory
they had disciplined and patrolled, broadcasting to the nation their own
fear and vulnerability. (Malcolm X, who dreamed of a black revolution
that would lift lessons from the French one, would perhaps have smiled
at this latter-day storming of the Bastille.) The retreat was caught on
camera and streamed on social media: the infiltrated precinct feasted on
by flames, vans pelted with projectiles as they sped out of the parking
lot, the sound of shattering windshields mixed with the rebels’ howls
and cheers.
The event felt like a fulcrum. The whole country seemed to tilt: sacked
shopping malls in Los Angeles and pillaged luxury outlets in Atlanta, a
siege on New York’s SoHo and flaming vehicles from coast to coast.
Pictures of Philadelphia and Washington DC showed whole neighborhoods
bristling with insurgency, crowds smashed the lordly windows in
Chicago’s Loop, and rioters set fire to the Market House, where slaves
were bought and sold, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the town where
Floyd was born. Not all of this, surely, could be the work of agents
provocateurs. Something deeper and more disruptive had breached the
surface of social life, conjuring exactly the dreaded image the
conspiracy theorists refused to face. This was open black revolt:
simultaneous but uncoordinated, a vivid fixture of American history
sprung to life with startling speed. A thousand seven hundred US towns
and cities—the number was absurd. Within a week 62,000 National
Guardsmen were dispatched to support city forces as they lurched to
regain control. But what emerged under the banner of blackness was soon
blended with other elements, flinging multi-racial crowds against
soldiers and police. In living memory, this breadth and volume was
virtually unprecedented, apart from the national uprisings sparked by
the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.—a name wheeled out, on cue, to
bemoan the unruliness of the rebellion.
But “rebellion” and even “uprising” soon fell from widespread use: as
spring slid into summer, the preferred term devolved to “protests,” a
change that marked the last phase in this jagged political sequence.
There was constant, fractious overlap between differing attitudes and
tactics. At first, battles in big cities outweighed more ordered, placid
actions, but these soon became the standard (although Seattle and
Portland were gripped by an insurrectionist element for months). A
controlled but keen exuberance ruled the last months of demonstrations,
which were less likely to result in ravaged property or mass arrests. By
fall, the marches of the Obama years had in many ways returned, but
flushed with a new fury—a gift given them by the riots.
We need not fear that word. In fact it’s vital to insist, over the drone
of an amnesiac discourse, that last year’s spate of protest was
propelled, made fiercely possible, by massive clashes in the street—not
tainted or delegitimized by them, nor assembled from thin air. Those
threatened by that fact will work to wipe it from our minds. The first
phase of BLM thus made the case—unleashed the anguish—that was acted on
last spring, in the flash of confrontation with the shock troops of the
law.
Some were more prepared than others. At the start of the New York
uprising, I saw a line of baton-swinging officers break through a
makeshift barricade; a group of marchers fell back, and were chastised
by a young black man who chose to stand his ground. “What are you
doing?” he screamed at those retreating. “What did you even come here
for?” A few nights later, under citywide curfew and after the trains had
been shut down, a friend and I called a cab home in a bid to evade
arrest. As we sped along the East River, the driver glanced in the
rear-view mirror and asked if we’d come from the demonstrations. Yes, we
told him carefully, we’d been going out every night. His eyes smiled
above his facemask. “You have to find the biggest brick you can,” he
said, “and then you make it count.”
“I AM NOT SAD,” Martin Luther King wrote, as cities exploded in the late
1960s, “that black Americans are rebelling; this was not only inevitable
but eminently desirable.” He was killed on a motel balcony before he
could see those words in print. They appear in “A Testament of Hope,” an
essay often cited as proof of his socialist politics, which grew more
rigid and explicit by the time he was taken out. (It happens that
“desirable” and “historically inevitable” are key terms in Rosa
Luxemburg’s account of the mass strike.) King had begun to direct the
Civil Rights movement toward the struggle of black workers; in 1967, he
described the National Liberation Front not as a menace, but a
legitimate “revolutionary government seeking self-determination” in
Vietnam. And he arrived at a rapprochement with what had come to be
known as Black Power: his late alliance with Malcolm X posed a brazen
challenge to the white power structure that, in the wake of both men’s
convenient assassinations, pitted them against each other in a facile
national myth. Malcolm, the black Muslim, was denounced as a vengeful
thug; King is now for many a picture of eloquent docility. But he was
hated by the kind of moderate who now invokes him to condemn the riots.
King’s nonviolent protest was the fruit of a rigorous spiritual
discipline—as well as a tactic, deployed pragmatically, before a scrim
of mounting chaos. This was a theory of “direct action.” Tension and
confrontation were fundamental to the task. By applying unremitting
pressure to every facet of civic life, he wished, as he wrote in “Letter
from Birmingham Jail,” to foment “a situation so crisis-packed that it
will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” The backdrop to that
negotiation was the black rage breaking out in cities across the
country; armed resistance groups were forming in black enclaves in the
north and west. Here was another “crisis-packed” possibility, so some of
the state’s concessions to the Baptist reverend may have been clinched
by the urban rebels. And by the late 1960s, as King’s vision swept
beyond mere equality before the law, he came to see revolt as a simple
fact of his political moment. Nothing to relish or openly cultivate—or
bombastically decry. “The constructive achievement of the decade 1955 to
1965 deceived us,” he wrote. “Everyone underestimated the amount of
violence and rage Negroes were suppressing and the vast amount of
bigotry the white majority was disguising.”
This later King has been supplanted by a glimmering hologram of bland
obedience, beamed in instantly to vilify anything violent or simply
rude. (I saw many demonstrators chide others for their taunts and foul
language.) Years of peaceful BLM rallies had met with years of elite
inertia—but many last spring insisted that “bad” protesters (smashing
property) would undo the work of the “good” ones (holding signs), some
of whom were so flattered by this divisive strategy by the press that
they went to flamboyant lengths to broadcast their own grinning, willing
harmlessness. A pageant soon ensued (and thankfully subsided). Officers
armed to the teeth marched besides newly minted pacifists; National
Guardsmen did the Macarena with the people they were licensed to kill.
Nonviolence, once a tool, today glows with the power of fetish. And,
unlike King, many marchers seemed to believe that good manners would be
repaid with gentler policing.
They were vigorously disabused of this, as peaceful crowds were bashed,
gassed, cuffed, maced, kettled for hours, and driven into by police
vans—on May 30 alone, eight people were left partly blind from rubber
bullets. On the first night of the New York rebellion I was nearly
struck by an NYPD vehicle barreling down a crowded street; the driver
came out and howled at us before bursting into tears. The next week I
was arrested at the most orderly demonstration I saw all spring—not a
single broken window. After less than an hour of marching through the
South Bronx, we were choked on all sides by officers who kept us in
place until the emergency curfew fell. Then came the attack: cordons of
police pressed hard on either side of the trapped crowd and began to
wallop anything that moved—many officers clambered onto parked cars to
swing truncheons at our skulls. (My friend had worn his bicycle helmet,
which within minutes was shattered in half.) The marchers were picked
out from the crowd one by one as the police beat their way through the
screaming kettle: two officers grabbed my arms and slammed me to the
tarmac; a third knelt on my spine and bound my wrists in plastic cuffs.
I stayed in that position, arms twisted behind my back, for eight of the
seventeen hours I spent in police custody. But from the chaos of that
night, one thing burns brightest in my memory: the hush that fell over
the crowded cell as the gate swung open for a young white man. Like us,
he was still in cuffs. But he’d been beaten worse than anyone else, his
head cracked so hard that his red hair was plastered to his skull and
his small face blackened with dried blood. With his arms pinned behind
his back, he looked like a bird in an oil spill.
As more mayors imposed curfews, suspended food programs, and—in the
sadistic instance of Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles—closed Covid-19
testing sites in revenge for the rebellion, the wheedling rhetoric of
“nonviolence” implored marchers to submit to official diktat. “Anyone
who is a peaceful protester, it’s time to go home,” Bill de Blasio said
on live TV. I suspect that King would be sickened that his legacy was
being travestied by the state that terrorized him—and rueful, if
unsurprised, that revolt was still flaring in 2020.
But the riots worked. The beast groaned. Despite the many criticisms
streaming through the media, the destruction of property struck many as
a defensible answer to state violence: Newsweek—not known for its
anarchist sympathies—reported that a full 54 percent of Americans saw
the siege on the police precinct as “justified.” The riots were too
large and widespread, and expressed too popular a discontent, to be
explained away by belting out the familiar anthems of condemnation. One
old lament—that looters were destroying their own neighborhoods—seemed
especially flimsy this time, as post-Minneapolis, crowds waged war on
the (well-insured) commercial districts of the nation’s downtowns.
In 2014, the failure to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown
doubled the sense of helpless fury; within days of Floyd’s death,
Chauvin was charged with murder in the third degree, which as the riot
roared along was promptly raised to second. Another third-degree charge
was added just before the trial’s start at the end of March. But the
punishment of particular officers was no longer the thrust of this
social movement. (To some demonstrators, it’s anathema.) “People are
still out protesting,” Andrew Cuomo moaned three weeks into the
uprising. “You don’t need to protest. You won. You won. You accomplished
your goal. Society says, you’re right. Police need systemic reform.”
This statement—a lovely mixture of condescension and real fear—sped
deftly past the fact that for many, “reform” is not the point. They’re
fighting for abolition: an end to the police.
“ENOUGH,” Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist organizer, wrote in mid-June.
“We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is
to reduce contact between the public and the police.” That this opinion
was printed in the New York Times announced its debut in the dominant
discourse. Here, in the paper of record, was an argument for stripping
departments of funding with a view to their full elimination—the chief
demand of the rebellion, as the latest round of “police reform” has been
a costly, shambling farce. Obama’s Task Force on 21st-Century Policing,
which concluded in 2015, offered recommendations on training, equipment
and department culture, often with the effect of increasing law
enforcement spending; indeed, many of these proposals had been adopted
in Minneapolis. The blasted carcass of the Third Precinct hinted that
the issue runs somewhat deeper. The abolition of police and prisons has
always been the ideological engine of BLM, an inheritance of the Black
Panthers’ Ten Point Program: “We want freedom for all black men held in
federal, state, county, and city in prisons and jails,” reads number 8.
This tradition was kept alive by grassroots groups and championed in the
academy and public sphere by the scholar-organizers Angela Davis and
Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
But even they must have been astonished when, on the thirteenth day of
the rebellion, the Minneapolis City Council made an unexpected
announcement: it had voted to disband the city’s police. The day before
the vote, mayor Jacob Frey had been booed out of a rally for refusing to
back the measure: chants of “Go home, Jacob!” thrummed the air as he
picked his way through the livid crowd. (His embarrassment was, of
course, compounded by the fact that the council’s vote was veto-proof.)
The proposal was for a full-scale dismantling of the Minneapolis police
force, to be followed by—something else. But the change may never take
place. The effort has already hit a legal roadblock, as the department
is protected—and given chilling autonomy—by a city charter from 1920.
Faced with the enormity of the consequences, council members walked back
their earlier pronouncements and reduced the 2021 police budget by a
meager 4.5 percent. From the start, some abolitionists feared that this
attempt could even lead to an insidious sharpening of social control (as
when the police in Camden, New Jersey were disbanded in 2013) or the
city being taken over by the Minnesota State Patrol. Now it’s clear that
a transformation on the municipal scale will take the continuing
mobilization of the people in the street—as well as a deepening of the
conversation about what the police do, and are. Scrapping departments
isn’t enough; neither is closing prisons. Incarceration and policing
have become the state’s annihilating reflex when confronted with murder
and sexual violence, but also homelessness and addiction—the social
disintegration that marks those lives consumed by poverty.
Prisons mop up poor people, not bad people. (Last year’s decarceration
program—a measure adopted in many, but not enough, jurisdictions as a
means to curb the spread of Covid—has yet to be statistically linked to
rearrests.) Vital to abolitionist thought is, as a first step, a
redistributive mission. The extraordinary amount of money spent on
punishment in the US should instead go to preventive and rehabilitation
programs—a “nonreformist reform”—but more crucial is an assault, on
every level, on the political consensus that’s ripped the welfare state
to ribbons. This will raise the “social wage” and drive fewer to the
desperation simply classified as crime.
But behind even the most sparkling policy initiatives lies the knowledge
that a world without police and prisons can only follow from ruthless
criticism and transformation of every piece of the social whole. This is
a revolutionary project. “Abolition,” Gilmore has said, “requires that
we change one thing, which is everything.” It’s this position, which
treats the struggles of race and class as historically and strategically
linked, that’s sparked and revived debates within and beyond the Left.
The Panthers were armed socialists; Davis was a 1960s militant who’s
been the Communist Party Vice Presidential candidate, twice. And in
Golden Gulag, Gilmore’s geographical study of the boom in California
prisons—her argument is driven in large part by the Marxian conception
of “surplus”—she titles her Ten Theses on abolition after Lenin’s famous
pamphlet: “What Is to Be Done?” Somehow this is the movement making
strides in the United States of America. To the scattered victories of
abolitionists towards the tail end of last year—the weakening of police
unions, severance of several law enforcement contracts with universities
and public schools, the (token) shrinking of police budgets in a handful
of major cities—we might add an ideological one: black radicalism has
hacked a path back to the mainstream political scene.
Naturally, the calls to defund police departments have appalled some
self-styled sympathizers of the protests; high-ranking Democrats now
claim the slogan harmed them in local elections. And common-sense
pundits have leapt into the fracas, citing problems that only a vast,
armed, proudly ungovernable, extravagantly subsidized municipal fighting
force can solve. It appears not to matter that by nearly every measure
US police forces are far from competent (the clearance rate of murder
cases across the country is abysmal). In fact, one in thirteen of all
murders are committed by police; of those committed by strangers, the
proportion is one third. And there’s no evident curiosity about the
social roots of “crime.” Skeptics are of course right to point out the
high incidence of murder and assault, but scant effort is made to
prevent them, or even explain why these violations are so common in the
US.
No economy in the “developed world” is as unequal as this one. And no
state in human history has thrust so many behind bars. (This is true per
capita and as well as in raw numbers, as the US accounts for a quarter
of the global prison population.) These are linked phenomena: where the
state claims to root out roiling chaos and depravity, abolitionists see
whole stripes of the population deemed irrelevant to capital—the
melancholy underside of a glittering accumulation. That accumulation has
twisted nimbly into new and savage forms. In the public mind, the great
victims of the neoliberal order are white workers stripped of factory
jobs, and castaways from the middle class. But they are not alone.
Those who were already subject to high levels of joblessness and
homelessness, who rely on the support of eviscerated public services,
and whose rent is currently multiplying in an open bid to banish them,
have also been impaled on the rapacity of this new world. They’re seen
as scrapped, depleted people, darkly troublesome in their superfluity,
doomed to rattle through the metropolis until they’re hunted by the
state. Many of them are black. In reactionary folklore, they all are:
“law and order” policies, tools for disposing of these “surplus” people,
were first sold to voters as a way to ward off black rebellion.
(Included in that category was the now-hallowed Civil Rights Movement.)
Now the “informal economy” beckons to those shipwrecked by the real one;
cages and police bullets claim the poor and unemployed. Only a steroidal
ideology can beat back the glaring fact that the surge in jails, bail,
police, prisons—that is, “mass incarceration”—is an expression of this
system at its most crashing and advanced. This a moralism without
ethics, an “austerity” of waste: the catastrophic maintenance of a
specious urban peace.
That peace is paid for, dearly, in the daily lives of the black poor.
For decades every slice of the political class has told a little fable
about why this is: absent fathers, the “culture of poverty,” a lack of
“opportunity,” the startling attitudes trumpeted by certain genres of
popular music. The right wields these clichés as the weapons they in
fact are, while the Democratic center opts to mawkishly rephrase them.
Perhaps the blare of sentimentalism can drown out the churn of the
machine. Take Mayor Frey’s indulgent bawling as he knelt beside Floyd’s
casket, and the vaudevillian spectacle of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi
striding into the Capitol last June, joined by a clutch of their party
colleagues to introduce the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of
2020. Each wore an Ashanti kente cloth—a sign of “solidarity” in the
florid realm of culture—and proceeded to perform a ritual dreamed up by
“peaceful protesters” last spring: the Democrats kneeled in silence for
eight minutes and forty-six seconds, exactly the length of time
Chauvin’s knee dug into Floyd’s neck. Their gesture echoes Colin
Kaepernick, but given the details of Floyd’s passing amounts to a
pantomime of his murder.
The Act itself, a second version of which passed in the House in early
March, was an echo of the Obama-era reforms. It was also scraped of any
acknowledgement of the conditions that made it “necessary”—namely that,
measured against whites, black people are vastly poorer and more
imperiled. They are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed, twice as
likely to go hungry. They’re more than twice as likely to be killed by
the police, more than three times as likely to be incarcerated, and last
year were twice as likely to lose their lives to Covid-19. This is not a
coincidence. It follows from the slashing idiosyncrasies of their
history as a people, their specific wincing intimacy with the
abstractions of “state” and “property.” Black people were property: any
abolitionist will remind you that the many US police departments grew
from slave patrols meant to enforce this, raking the land for runaways
and throttling black revolts. From forced labor to endemic joblessness,
from hated ballasts of the economy to hated exiles from its present
form: this road was paved with bloodshed and contempt enshrined as law.
Lynching, segregation, the Great Migration, restrictive covenants,
discrimination at work, exclusion from unions, and throughout all this
the drumbeat of state violence in the street—the varieties of
degradation are enough to make you fling a brick.
It is hard to find new words for this. Radical passion has been gutted,
blunted, deflected, suppressed—and frozen into rhetoric, peddled as
commodity. In the face of establishment cynicism and the promise of
“representation,” it can be hard to voice real outrage, and the ache of
collective grief. “Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty
land of the farms or upon the hard pavement of the city streets, you
usually take us for granted and think you know us,” Richard Wright wrote
in 1940, “but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are
not what we seem.” Indeed, some of the most celebrated black literature
of the last century centers on state terror and the rebuke to it, books
planted throughout the culture as flags for blackness itself. Every
James Baldwin novel but the last hangs on a false conviction or a scene
of police abuse. The climax of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a riot
that streaks through Harlem after officers kill a street vendor: the
protagonist can’t help but marvel at the chaos that envelops him, the
“bursting, tearing movement of people around me, dark figures in a blue
glow.” Some of the best poems of Gwendolyn Brooks’s explicitly militant
period—“Boy Breaking Glass,” the three-part “Riot” sequence—are angular,
late-modernist renderings of an era of black revolt, an era hymned in
Amiri Baraka’s tribute to the Newark rebellion of 1967. Baraka was
beaten and arrested, then thrown into solitary confinement, but his riot
poem, “Black People!,” rings with euphoria: “Smash the windows daytime,
anytime, together, let’s smash the window drag the shit from in there.
No money down. No time to pay. Just take what you want. The magic dance
in the street.”
MARTYRS DRIVE THIS MOVEMENT: they are its origin and blazing emblems.
But some of the most infamous police murders extend from more quotidian
debasements. Everyone knows that “broken windows” theory—that cracking
down on minor infractions will deter more serious crimes—has drilled an
armed state presence deeper into the lives of the urban poor. Eric
Garner was harassed repeatedly before his death in 2014; police even
took his exhausted fury at this as pretext to throw him to the ground.
“I told you the last time,” he begs in the video recording as officers
close in, “please leave me alone!” Seven years earlier he’d been stopped
on the street and told to flatten himself against a police car.
According to the federal lawsuit that he later filed against the NYPD,
an officer pulled down Garner’s pants, groped his genitals, dug his
fingers into his rectum and jeered that he was a paroled felon who
should never have been given a job with the city’s parks. The officer
“violated my civil rights” for “his personal pleasure,” read the suit,
which Garner wrote out—by hand—while jailed on Rikers Island.
In Ferguson, Darren Wilson was cleared of all federal civil rights
violations after an investigation led by Eric Holder, the head of
Obama’s justice department. The findings did, however, expose that the
city had been fending off fiscal apocalypse by ticketing black people at
outrageous rates. One section, titled “Ferguson Law Enforcement Efforts
Are Focused on Generating Revenue,” revealed that “issuing three or four
charges in one stop is not uncommon in Ferguson. Officers sometimes
write six, eight, or, in at least one instance, fourteen citations for a
single encounter. Indeed, officers told us that some compete to see who
can issue the largest number of citations during a single stop.”
Police plundered the black population because at bottom they knew they
could. They knew that in the eyes of authority, the black poor are
threatening monstrosities, but also violable and devalued, available to
be pulped. You can stalk them, prod them, punish them; feel free to take
whatever you want from them. Those who didn’t pay their fines on time in
Ferguson were slapped with warrants for their arrest. So when after
years of fleecing and abuse, the police slaughtered a teenage boy and
left the corpse splayed in the street, the people did what they could:
they ripped the city to pieces. Within months the local government
declared that all prior warrants for tickets would be annulled. Those
people are still impoverished and overwhelmingly endangered; they didn’t
topple the racial hierarchy or reverse their dispossession. But the
events last spring would be unthinkable without the example of
Ferguson’s poor: under the spotlight of the national media and the fire
of the National Guard, they broke open a new phase of struggle when they
forced the state to flinch. “Smash the window at night,” wrote Baraka,
“(these are magic actions.)”
Within this rage and mourning, there are layers, contradictions. Breonna
Taylor was killed by Louisville, Kentucky police who bashed down her
door in the night and started shooting. They were looking for her
ex-boyfriend while scouring the area for undesirables, in advance of a
“high dollar” real estate project planned for that section of the city.
Taylor’s murder took place two months before Floyd’s. But his was the
one that stirred popular passion, lending further credence to the black
feminist claim that, although almost every media-friendly voice in this
movement has belonged to a woman (Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and
Opal Tometi founded the Black Lives Matter Network in 2013), victims
such as Rekia Boyd and Sandra Bland are tacitly deemed less significant
communal losses, and thus less worthy of mass grief. The same measure
applies to black trans victims such as Tony McDade, who was gunned down
last May by Tallahassee police. Though recognition is spreading fast
that black trans people face great volumes of targeted violence, the
riots were not for him.
Meanwhile the black elite has rarely been so resented by the “community”
it claims to champion. Class, a topic scrubbed from much of US political
discourse, has swirled into peculiar shapes within black life since the
1960s. Desegregation did little more than lift the legal barrier to the
labor market, which meant a ripple—not a revolution—in American
arrangements of race and wealth. This new league of professionals has
remained so faithful to the Democrats that Biden couldn’t help but boast
of his seigneurial entitlement to the black vote: “If you have a problem
figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black!”
The statement neatly captures the chuckling smugness of his party. Four
days later, Floyd was killed. “Black liberal, your time is up,” ran the
headline in Al-Jazeera, as the riot crashed through Minneapolis. Black
mayors of big cities—Keisha Bottoms in Atlanta, Muriel Bowser in
Washington DC and (infamously) Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot—were among the
most strident voices raised against the rebellion. Writing in the New
York Times, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offered a biting summary of the past
few decades of black Democrats: “Black elected officials have become
adept at mobilizing the tropes of black identity without any of its
political content.” A movement that first tilted gently against party
leadership and sought some form of redistribution has since bowed to
corporate influence and the edicts of the DNC. All this has been
justified by the desire for “black faces in high places.” The
Congressional Black Caucus and a cluster of black mayors joined the
party in embracing finance and austerity, as well as “law and order”
policies meant to douse the mounting flames.
It’s worth lingering, here, to note that the chief beneficiaries of
Civil Rights were those black people poised to scale the heights of
class and meritocracy. (The rest were left to languish as a sociological
“problem.”) But the path has been a swerving one, lined with prickling
little ironies. Many of these people heaved themselves into white-collar
employment just as the middle class began its crumble into neoliberal
instability and launched their long march through the universities as
degrees plummeted in value. A large chunk of this layer grew up within
familial earshot of urban poverty, and thus carries the vivid memory of
what proletarian life actually looks like: many of them know the pain of
visiting family behind bars. So their middle-income existence is pressed
up against the so-called underclass—a link to be minimized or insisted
on, grateful for or raged against, brandished as cultural birthright or
folded shrewdly into sensibility. But never fully severed. They still
know the sting of condescension or outright hatred. And though abolition
is still a new notion, their children are largely raised with blunt
distrust of the police. With little wealth to inherit, these families
possess far less property than their white counterparts, and even that
prosperity seems to vanish with mortifying frequency. “White boys who
grew up rich are more likely to remain that way,” pronounced a study
published in the Times in 2018. “Black boys raised at the top are more
likely to become poor than stay wealthy in their own adult households.”
For huge swathes of black America, Obama was a triumph and realized
dream; for the middle class, he was a mirror. The fierce, conflicting
aspects of their harrowing evolution were prettily reproduced in his
image and political style. His centrist managerialism was cast as a
triumph of Civil Rights; the old injunction to be “respectable” was
softened by his much-touted love of rap. His speeches seemed to stream
down from a place of unpretentious elevation, so he could lash out at
poor black people and expect gratitude for his frankness. Drone strikes,
deportations and fealty to the banks were balanced by the moral prestige
of the historical black struggle.
Ferguson ripped a hole in the middle of Obama’s second term. He lapsed
into ambivalence: though sometimes sonorous about the forces arrayed
against young black men, he lambasted the Baltimore uprising as a terror
wrought by “thugs.” Those sympathetic to Obama saw him as having to
placate irreconcilable constituencies—a position he also held as the
recession disproportionately affected black families. The period between
2008 and 2016 saw black homeownership decrease at calamitous rates:
negative home equity shot up in the black community when the housing
bubble burst and continued to skyrocket for years after it began to
decline among whites, all observed from an astral distance by the first
black commander-in-chief. So he was—at best—irrelevant to the fates of
those who loved him most. No trill of rhetoric or stirring gesture could
stop the tank of financial capital, or shield the fragile fortunes of
the new black middle class.
It’s that part of the black world—their anger, their comfort, their
belated conscription to the harried scramble for the American good life,
their uncertain place beneath the fluorescent lights of the corporate
office—that’s become a point of panicked fixation in the aftermath of
the riots. It was hard not to laugh at the official response to the
rebellion, as every brand and elite institution rolled out the same
manic public statement, declaring their love for their black employees
and allegiance to BLM. But, perhaps inevitably, that daffy piety became
the rule. One outcome of the uprising is the expansion of a zealous
antiracist discourse that remains silent about the street battles that
gave it marvelous topicality.
This is not a new phenomenon. The past six years had seen the passions
of Ferguson displaced by efforts to give white professionals moral
lessons and a smattering of black people prestigious posts. Black
professionals, after all, are the crown jewels of the liberal reformist
mission: their presence on the campus or conference call performs a
shining symbolic task. This is the only sliver of black America to feel
the full effects of integration—so the shivering, conflicted existence
of this minority within a minority stands as talismanic promise that the
wound of history might be healed. In Obama’s first public statement
after the events in Minneapolis—months before he intervened to break a
strike by professional basketball players—he began by quoting an email
sent to him by an “African American businessman.”
Any sign of this group’s ingratitude provokes perplexity and dismay. One
of the most sensationalized early episodes from the riots concerned two
lawyers in their early thirties who faced decades in prison for their
alleged actions in New York. One is Pakistani-American and the other is
black: raised working-class in Brooklyn, he was plucked by a non-profit
organization and spirited away to a bucolic boarding school, followed by
Princeton, law school, then a budding career as a corporate attorney,
only to see this fantastic future evaporate when—for reasons
breathlessly speculated on in the national media—he drove his friend
around the demonstrations as she pitched Molotov cocktails at police
vehicles. This may or may not point to something rustling through the
spring, when quite a few young black people placed within this rickety
middle class chose to cross the mystic threshold between
“respectability” and dignity: they went out to meet the riots.
“WE SHOULD NOT JUST SCREAM,” Mike Davis said in May. “We need to start
breaking things, quite frankly.” But this interview on the podcast Time
to Say Goodbye appeared a full week before Floyd’s death; his comments
didn’t refer to police murder, but the economic and social catastrophe
triggered by the spread of Covid-19. No reckoning with the eruption in
late May can elide the role played by the virus. It should come as
little surprise that last year the most unequal developed nation racked
up just under 20 percent of global deaths from Covid-19. The crisis has
brought chaos to the incarcerated population—which, as a result of
crowding and neglect, reached an infection rate over five times the
national average—and detainees at Rikers Island were forced to dig mass
graves for Covid casualties in New York City. Deaths across the country
are highest among the non-white poor: black and Latino communities were
hit especially hard, and several Native American reservations soon
became capitals of infection.
The spectacle of governmental fecklessness—right-wing legislators
dismissing the likeliness of an outbreak, only to quickly reverse their
policies as infections soared—reflected an element of popular will. This
is the land of the free. The most furious market imperatives throb deep
within the soul. It will be hard to forget that the Lieutenant Governor
of Texas insisted with pride that many vulnerable senior citizens,
confronted with the prospect that a lockdown might wreck the economy for
their grandchildren, would rather die. It was easy to scoff or screech
at this, but beneath the boom of right-wing rhetoric, you could make out
the faint, metallic whirring of liberal technocratic complicity: the
Trump Administration’s relief plan, drafted in collaboration with
Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, passed with near unanimous
bipartisan support.
It was a stop-gap. And after decades of neoliberal consensus, perhaps
the most one could expect. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic
Security Act (CARES), followed by dribbles of supplemental legislation,
was a forced experiment in social democracy. A single check for $1,200
was supposed to tide people over for months; relief to workers suddenly
stripped of income was routed through unemployment insurance and ran out
while the virus continued to soar. (A second relief bill proved
impossible to pass before the November election.) The historian Robert
Brenner has characterized the bill as plutocratic plunder. High earners
whose work was uninterrupted by lockdown measures made out quite well,
which explains the uptick in national savings and the relative health of
the financial markets.
The bill was a corporate bailout of historic proportions, allowing for a
galling amount of Federal Reserve money—10 percent of annual GDP—to be
handed to the heads of the largest companies, with scandalously little
oversight. And what about the entrepreneurs—those mascots of national
ideology and great victims of the rebellion? In December, the Times
reported that of the $523 billion disbursed through the Payroll
Protection Program, over a quarter was awarded to the top 1 percent of
applicants—among them corporate law firms and a steakhouse chain owned
by CNN founder Ted Turner. As pundits howled last spring at the
sickening spectacle of looted storefronts, the vast majority of small
businesses were floundering not from riots, but from lack of federal
support. (Hundreds of businesses received checks for $99 or less.)
Across the economic field, a brief period of relief gave way to a
still-unfurling disaster: record numbers are facing eviction, record
numbers cannot feed themselves, at least eight million people have
fallen into poverty. For months before Floyd’s death, the horrors were
compounded, and combustible.
Black struggle struck the match. The future of that struggle now lies
coiled in an enigma: why, at a point of overlapping crises and hypnotic
social freefall, did the killing of a single black man unleash the
largest wave of demonstrations this country has ever seen, as well as a
multi-racial revenge on private property and the state? Something more
than liberal sympathy was at work here—something more potent and less
vaporous, at once rooted in the American past and reflective of recent
developments. Slogans notwithstanding, institutions historically
justified by the hatred of black people have turned a greedy eye toward
other groups. In the US, Native Americans see the highest proportion of
people killed by police. Punitive immigration policies have caused
prisons and detention centers to swell with Latin American detainees.
(The Los Angeles riots of 1992 are remembered as a black uprising, but
the majority of those arrested, as well as those charged with arson,
were Latinx.) Although black people are still incarcerated at by far the
highest rates, abolitionists have long claimed that the state would
happily lock up higher numbers of poor whites, as has been proven with
brutal flair across the country.
But the fight against police and prisons remains bound up with black
liberation because one people feels the harshest shocks of economic
earthquake and has served as a kind of vanguard in its subjection to
state cruelty. A practice of militancy issued from this historical
experience. Clattering with internal disputes and handed down for
generations, the real black movement isn’t the nursery rhyme recited
brightly in the public sphere, but a protracted battle against
domination at its most naked and unconstrained—King, on the day he was
killed, was to give a sermon called “Why America May Go to Hell.” So
it’s possible that the death of Floyd reverberated so painfully because
under the delirious conditions induced by the pandemic, whole sections
of the middle class seemed to walk through the political looking glass.
In an instant they were poorer and even more insecure, their noses
bluntly rubbed in their disposability to capital. Left without a
livelihood by callous fiat in a moment of crisis, they were treated to
that peculiar mélange of state control and state neglect—the punitive
abandonment that paints the lives of the black poor.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? (The fraught, irrepressible question comes twisting
to the surface.) The paths pursued by Occupy Wall Street and BLM—the
twin children of the financial crash—may trace the silhouette of the
present challenge. Occupy shot up spontaneously as a brisk political
motley—anarchists jostled beside progressives who wanted only to rein in
the financial sector. The most lasting legacy of the encampments (which
were, of course, stormed and at last destroyed by municipal police
forces) was the rhetoric of “the 99 percent”—populist, universalist, and
by the end of the decade emblazoned across both primary campaigns of the
social democrat Bernie Sanders. (The anarchism had been forgotten.) With
him “democratic socialism” entered the mainstream political lexicon.
Last spring, when the black movement came flashing back to life, it was
less legitimate, less “nonviolent”, and looked nothing like the
socialists seeking glory at the ballot box. And the riots burst mere
months after Sanders bowed out of the primary, so the two strands of
struggle fell into an enlightening juxtaposition. From Occupy to Bernie;
from BLM to the Floyd rebellion. One rocketed up the ranks of state,
while the other fought its power far more fiercely this time around; one
pinned its hopes on universal programs to be beamed down from the Oval
Office, while the other floods streets under the sign of a single group.
One takes up distribution, the other force, repression: two functions,
in the end, of selfsame state machine. But under the particular
conditions bequeathed by US history, the first was coded “white,” the
second—starkly—black.
Yet the fights are fused, and need each other. They form two spokes on a
single wheel: the sociopolitical cataclysm of rising un- and
underemployment. It’s no coincidence that the first time the black
movement has laid claim to cities since Black Power was amid the
post-crash “jobless recovery”—nor that the riots came hurtling back as
millions were stripped of work last spring. The racist, decades-long
program of mass incarceration accompanied austerity and stagnant wages,
as the incomes of the vulnerable fell even further into perilous
uncertainty. And even the smallest steps on the path to abolition will
rely on Gilmore’s call to raise the social wage: a call being answered,
almost exclusively, by a newborn socialist left. Over two thirds of
American voters support this left’s main proposal, Medicare for All—as
private health care is a rarefied employee benefit in a time of widening
informality. Nothing in recent memory has fulfilled the socialist hope
of politicizing state and city budgets with the swiftness of the spring
rebellion. And we’ll never know if Biden’s recent stimulus bill, which
constitutes a historic leftward lurch in fiscal policy, could have been
passed without the battles in the street. If this really does foretell a
break with neoliberal governance—a somewhat shocking claim repeated in
certain quadrants of the left—any honest account of this change will
have to feature not just the efforts of progressive legislators, but the
rebirth of the black struggle.
But both camps are internally divided and brim with distrust of the
other. BLM’s most officious, nonprofit element still risks becoming an
ornament to philanthropy and public relations; the technical
“leaderlessness” of the movement has rendered it malleable by the
liberal center. Sanders was savaged loudly, and only sometimes in good
faith, for his supposed indifference to US racism—laughable hypocrisy
from the Democratic establishment, which he was nevertheless terrible at
rebutting. This did not, however, stop him from joining Joe Biden in
coming out against defunding police. It’s impossible to say what comes
next, either for the black movement against state terror or the
state-facing redistributive effort, but short of a defeat of capital in
a single, stunning stroke, any left that hopes to assemble its flailing
forces must find a way to join the two clearest fronts of conflict: on
one hand build class power by wresting benefits from the state, on the
other slay the beast that eats the dark and poor. Real unity will have
to be established by new kinds of action and organization. (It bears
repeating that the New Deal, a social democratic reform and nostalgic
model for a slew of progressive policymakers—itself riven by racial
exclusions—came into being after years of police beating and
tear-gassing “disruptive” throngs of the unemployed.) Policy-minded
leftists, liberated from their dreams of capturing the executive branch,
have now been forced to reckon with the humbling blaze of urban
uprising. Socialists must learn from the riots. Legible, polished
politics and the smashing fist of black rebellion—they may be linked by
the dialectic, which in the famous allegory chains the master to his
slave.
“A revolution is not just constant fighting,” James Boggs wrote in 1968.
Of all of the black radicals whose legacies are now being scoured for
lessons, his is among the brightest and most appropriate to this new
phase. Born in Alabama in 1919, he spent nearly thirty years working in
the Chrysler plant in Detroit, during which he agitated on behalf of
black workers and came to see their predicament—their degradation and
exclusion, their tenuous, subordinate place in a midcentury union
movement slouching toward obsolescence—as the prelude to a wider crisis.
Decades before neoliberalism, he knew that postwar growth and high
employment would evaporate, and that the working class was changing
shape. He knew that the bitterest battles, those with the power to make
the most ambitious assault on the order of things, would be waged by
those locked out of politics as well as their means of subsistence: this
new avant-garde would be molded from the black poor and unemployed.
They were not the majority. But they were the most disruptive and
inventive force in the US, vested with the historic capacity to call
every facet of social existence into question. Boggs’s ’60s were spent
cultivating organizations that would not only fortify black labor, but
forge a bond between shop-floor struggle and a fast-inflating sphere of
conflict. As the Civil Rights Movement thickened into the militancy of
Black Power, he knew that riots—the destruction of property and mass
clashes with police—would be a routine feature of a society riven by
racial hatred and which refused to feed its poor. The task was not to
disavow the smashing clarity in the street, but to build forms of
collectivity that could outlast the days of rage. There was power in a
riot, in its rippling, adaptable passions—power that might even express
itself, at some point, by winning seats on city councils (as long as the
movement knew not to deify this strategic foothold in the state).
Although he split with his mentor C.L.R. James, Boggs held to James’s
belief that despite the fixation on “equal rights,” the vigorous
challenge posed by the black movement proved that it was power, not the
democratic ideal, which was being fought for and forfeited every second
in the real world. “Rights are what you make and what you take,” he
wrote in The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook,
published in 1963—the high noon of Civil Rights.
The book was bracing. Boggs foresaw an America stripped of manufacturing
jobs, its cities bristling with surplus people—disproportionately, black
people. They were left without stable employment or even the distant
hope of it, banished from abundance and desperate to get by: “Being
workless, they are also stateless.” No organization dared to speak for
them. They’d have to organize themselves. From this restless, black-led
mass would flow new forms of political practice. He called his fourth
chapter “The Outsiders”:
The present workforce is itself a product of the old society and
struggling to survive within it. This means that we must look to the
outsiders for the most radical—that is, the deepest—thinking as to the
changes that are needed. What ideas will they have? They have not yet
expressed them clearly, but their target is very clear. It is not any
particular company or any particular persons but the government itself.
Just how they will approach or penetrate this target I do not know, nor
do I know what will happen when they have done what they must do. But I
know that the army of outsiders which is growing by leaps and bounds in
this country is more of a threat to the present “American way of life”
than any foreign power.
LAST YEAR AN ARMY OF OUTSIDERS, their ranks swollen by the ravages of a
freak disease, launched the most widespread spontaneous uprising in the
history of the United States. Behind these rigid objective conditions, a
few splintered and subjective ones. Something has changed in America;
something is still pulsing beneath the carapace of party politics. The
rebellion didn’t just release a jet of fury, but lodged the riot,
without apology, in the very rhythm of political life.
Explosion became routine. Summer and fall were studded by local clashes
prompted by other murders by police. In June Atlanta rose up again after
the killing of Rayshard Brooks: demonstrators obstructed a five-lane
highway and burned a Wendy’s to the ground. The shooting of Jacob Blake
in August set off a citywide revolt in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and yielded
the most riveting images of summer: the packed parking lot of a used car
dealership transformed into a shining sea of flames. In response to the
murder of Walter Wallace earlier that month, Philadelphians shattered
windows just days before the election. But perhaps the most stunning
juxtaposition arrived in late September. Less than a week after the
death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg sent Democrats into fits of panic, it was
announced that the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor would face no
charges. While columnists hymned Ginsburg’s devotion to gender equality
before the law, the people of Louisville inflicted their own feminism on
the city: they burst back into the street to avenge their fallen sister.
Soon there will be more riots. The murders of Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia
Bryant, Adam Toledo, and Anthony Alvarez over the past two months are
proof of the ongoing horror; the bursts of action in the street mark the
arrival of another spring. Again—we shall see. But it’s not pat or naïve
or triumphalist to say that people were changed by the rebellion: they
did things they’d never done before, things that no one knew were
possible. In late May, a Fox News helicopter broadcast footage from
Philadelphia that proved the insolence of these new insurgents: as the
camera swept up to pan the length of a city street, rioters pushed an
empty squad car until it crashed into another. Officers looked on,
powerless; within minutes, a whole row of vehicles had been fastidiously
destroyed. These weren’t “outside agitators,” but dauntless outsiders,
and there was something marvelous in their comportment, their light,
balletic elegance as they slashed tires and popped car hoods to light
fires on the engines. They moved with the evident, placid confidence
that in that moment, they were winning. The camera zoomed in on one
young vandal as he reached his arm through a smashed rear windshield. In
an echo of those Antillean slaves who devised the J’Ouvert carnival to
mock their masters, he retrieved a blue police cap and placed it
rakishly on his head.
I’d seen the footage in May; I cried hard a few months later while
watching it again. In an instant it brought back the floating feeling,
the roaring weightlessness, of spring. I remembered the elation cut with
fear, the shards of unreality and lakes of psychic calm—times when the
knowledge rippled invisibly through the sprinting, shouting crowd that
the young people of the city had outpaced the armed police. I remembered
the first day of the uprising, the sense of being released from the grip
of quarantine into the city’s three-dimensionality. Here were buildings
and swarms of people, thickly present in the stabbing sun.
“What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for
sacrifice in these Parisians!” Marx gasped in a letter when news reached
him that the members of the Paris Commune had repelled the imperial army
and abolished the police; he said they were “storming heaven.” And a
version of that thought—a degraded, baffled paraphrase—flashed to mind
as I saw the masked children of New York slam their skateboards against
police vans and throw themselves at lines of officers packing guns and
shields and nightsticks; chanting the name of a dead man while sprinting
with hundreds down an avenue, I’d never felt an ecstasy more complicated
or a freedom less false. On plate glass window in Soho, someone
graffitied, simply, “GEORGE!” So many of the faces I saw streaking
through spring and summer—lit by burning cars and reflected in broken
windows, doing victory laps around sneaker stores and bloodied by
batons—belonged to adolescents. Armed only with their psychotic courage,
they were running, dancing, singing, smashing, burning, screaming,
storming heaven: all rapturous varieties of Baraka’s “magic actions.” I
listened to 19-year-olds talk nonstop throughout the night we spent in
jail, as they howled insults at the officers and swapped stories of
humiliation by police. It struck me that they were too young to have
seen the initial phase of BLM. Though well-acquainted with power and
violence, they were tasting “politics” for the first time. Whatever the
fate of the movement, I suspect that much of their future thinking will
be measured against the feelings that filled the nights of 2020: the
vastness and immediacy, the blur and brutal clarity.
Last year the whole world was watching, to quote the ’60s slogan. Along
with expressions of international solidarity—the marches in foreign
capitals, the Molotov cocktails hurled at US embassies in Athens and
Mexico City, the mural of George Floyd’s face covering a massive wall in
Idlib—2020 saw rebellions abroad that cleaved to local circumstance.
Riots broke out in France against Macron’s ban on sharing footage of the
police, and for a moment a link was forged between the gilets jaunes
blockades and the migrant rioters of 2005 who burned the banlieues after
the deaths of two teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois. But the deepest
resonance came in October. Nigeria—whose economy is over 50 percent
informal—saw the sudden resurgence of the movement to abolish its
Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). (It has since been scrapped and
virtually reconstituted under another name.) The unit was ruthless,
lawless, feckless; under the auspices of public safety, officers beat,
surveilled, harassed, and fleeced anyone who fell outside the charmed
circle of the elite, such that many victims came from the tottering but
vocal middle class. One trigger for the demonstrations was a video of a
SARS officer shooting a motorist and driving off in the dead man’s
Lexus.
The eruption was unreal. Looting on an enormous scale, massive clashes
in the street with soldiers and police, official buildings set on fire,
and in Benin, capital of Edo State, demonstrators laid siege to a
correctional facility and sprang prisoners from their cells. The next
day, the police massacred twelve unarmed demonstrators at Lekki
Tollgate; a total of thirty-eight civilians were killed by officers that
night. #EndSARS can’t be reduced to a postscript of BLM—it bloomed from
the particular chaos of the Nigerian economy and kleptocracy—and the
revolt last year in many ways surpassed the Floyd rebellion. But the
similarity is striking. For much of the 20th century, revolutionaries
argued bitterly over whether the black movement in America could be
compared to African struggles for independence. But now that the
“informal proletariat” is the fastest-growing class on the face of the
planet, the fights that flank the black Atlantic have never seemed so
interlaced. A global wave of outsiders is crashing on the shores of
states. As one wise vandal spray-painted on a wall in Minneapolis:
“Welcome back to the world.”
The phrase hangs like a banner above the ruptures of 2020—a year that
began three months into a civil rebellion in Iraq, which, like its
Western torturer, saw the largest uprising in national history. Last
spring I was reminded of the demonstration where I first saw windows
smashed: I was 20, at the 2012 march against NATO in Chicago, just after
the “end” of the Second Gulf War. Among the gathered thousands—scraps of
a flouted pacifist left—was a group the others hated for its frank
aggression toward the police. Today they’re known as antifa; back then
the term was “black bloc.” At the end of the march, a group of them
grappled with armored riot cops, shattering the glass of a fast-food
franchise before being cuffed and dragged away. But my clearest memory
is of their chant, which I found myself joining in. It rang with
then-recent outrages—the murder of Oscar Grant, new incursions into
Palestine, and crackdown in Syntagma Square: Oakland, Gaza, Greece! Fuck
the police! None of us had ever heard of Ferguson, Missouri.