THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#5, DEC/2010-FEB/2011
A certain and brutal death awaited Oscar Grant while neo-colonial police forced his face down to the floor and pulled his arms behind his back, thus violently subduing him into compliance with the will of his ‘law enforcing’ murderer. This in spite of Grant’s measured and tactical response of acquiescence to the orders of neo-colonial police agents, who regularly exercise objective violence against any assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ while patrolling the constantly shifting coherence of imperial topography. Tragically, such measured acquiescence ultimately failed to prevent his execution style death by a point blank gunshot to the back of his head.
What recourse then remains, for those of us whose ‘being-in-the-world’ has been a tentative socio-ontological commerce of acquiescence to Empire-as-western imperialist power, for the mere suggested possibility of bare survival and cheap spiritual leisure? Has turning our gaze away from the horizon of emancipatory praxis really brought an end to the globalized oppression of human ‘being’ we Black people suffer in coercive anonymity? The murder of Oscar Grant discloses the Raw of coloniality as a pitiless antagonistic reciprocity, existing between imperial mainstream of modernity and the socio-ontological underground, consistently veiled by the normative gaze of Empire.
Since acquiescence fails to keep us alive, do efforts to more vigorously resist neo-colonial police violence preserve our life? Does resistance change the murderous outcome of our encounters with neo-colonial ‘law enforcement’? Is there any historical value or socio-ontological insight into the human condition which is revealed by our resistance? Does resistance open potentialities of sustaining human subjectivity against the tyranny of objective violence inscribed in modernity, even at the risk of succumbing to the inherent mortality of our human ‘being’? Our assertion of human agency may indeed lead to an untimely death, even as the spiritual integrity of our emancipatory praxis may be all that distinguishes and sustains the trajectory of our human subjectivity against a more complete socio-ontological decimation of our existence.
Lovelle Mixon chose to resist the tyranny of objective violence by constituting his human subjectivity against structural-inert global power through lumpenproletariat vendetta as force of arms against neo-colonial police, ultimately ensuring four police officers cross the precipice of mortality along with him. Still, the singular legitimacy of Mixon’s all too human response to oppression, should not obfuscate the clear distinction which exists between ethically justified spiritual resentment that spontaneously erupts into lumpenproletariat vendetta, and socio-ontological imperatives for revolutionary historical transformation unleashed through emancipatory praxis against Empire.
The normative gaze of established power constitutes the murder of Man as necessarily objective violence that permeates modernity in its contemporary guise of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization. This objective violence is unsustainable without racist dehumanization as the very condition of its possibility. Indeed, genuine recognition of our shared humanity pierces through veils of coercive anonymity which makes no distinction between Oscar Grant and Lovelle Mixon: both were murdered for that ‘problematic’ assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. As such, there are no absolute ethical practices, informing diverse modes of resistance, by which to safely guide our emancipatory praxis away from the reach of a vast and violent apparatus of oppression. The assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ explicitly discloses the truth of our shared human condition as implicated temporality which acquaints our existence with untimely death and perpetual incarceration, not as accidental occurrences, but as historical consequences of an ascendant humanity situated within the confines of a pervasive western imperialist continuum.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and Black Liberation Army are now a distant bitter memory, having been functionally annihilated, socially persecuted and ideologically discredited by Empire. Since their resounding defeat, which deliberately coincided with the sovereign appropriation of formerly non-aligned nations within Empire, we now experience that ominous and objective violence of neo-colonial police force in the solitude of knowing that there exists no geonationally legitimate organized form of armed resistance to the imperatives of established power accessible to the wretched of the earth who constitute the socio-ontological underground of modernity. This vacuum is the very condition of possibility for the growing frequency of postmodern lumpenproletariat vendettas against neo-colonial police agents.
Whether in acquiescence or resistance to the dictates of neo-colonial police agents, the ever present possibility of death remains an infallible concern. As such, to acquiesce is to gamble on the benevolence of the oppressor, to resist is to wager upon the inviolable truth of our human condition. Pursuit of emancipatory praxis is no safe haven from injustice, and yet neither is lying face down with our hands wrapped behind our back. The inevitability of this impossible decision confronts us with the dread of realizing our freedom of human ‘being’ and assuming responsibility for the insurgent trajectory of our human subjectivity against the gratuitous prospects of our violent persecution by Empire.
Insurrection-in-itself served as an emancipatory counterweight to the murder of Oscar Grant, not by directly confronting Empire, for neither neo-colonial police agents nor police station were targets, but by spontaneously Returning the objective violence of oppression back upon itself in utter rejection of a socio-historical quietism which seeks to veil the murder of Man.
While we obviously have unprecedented access to much more media technology with which to document and disclose the sanctioned accumulated slaughter of ascendant humanity; what remains inaccessible to us, out of sheer dread and trepidation over the prestige of Empire, is that existential reservoir of human agency from which to inspire relevant potentialities of emancipatory praxis, surpassing the dead end of choosing either protest-as-ritual event or spontaneous rioting. Mckay’s Harlem Renaissance era sonnet haunts us even now:
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
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