Global Pandemic, Black Liberation and the Plague of Empire by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#10, JUNE-AUGUST/2020

A SITUATION

We did not choose this global pandemic. Nor did we choose a western imperialist continuum that plagues lived Black experience with an incessant monotony of structural-inert violence against human ‘being’. No matter, they are both ours now.

Indeed, regardless of whether the origin of this global pandemic turns out to be benign, nefarious or even tragically accidental, we are now responsible for it. However, existential responsibility does not equate to being in control of a situation, but rather equates to being able to exercise human agency up until and against the very limits of our mortality within any given situation. This dynamic of radical ontological freedom thus contributes towards giving meaning to the world in all its irrevocable immediacy.

Our existential responsibility of constitutive self-determination that confronts this world of contingency with potentialities towards the imposition of purpose, is purely indicative of the fact that there can be no ontological divorce between human agency and the force of socio-historical circumstance that mediates against it. As such, any deterministic escape into materialist causality, idealist dogma or linguistic sophistry is rendered trivial by this vital metaphysical tension that implicates the human condition with a lived temporality.

Human ‘being’ can thus be characterized by the irreducibility of our agency and its irreconcilability with the Real, that exhaustive necessity and tangible materiality of nature, culture and history against which consciousness is situated. As such, the dialectic intermediation of call and response between human ‘being’ and the Real, is not only the very course of radical ontological freedom, but also a reservoir of imperative towards socio-historical Revolt.

No doubt, even before the onset of this global pandemic, an ongoing plague of Empire readily discloses the absolute contingency of existence and comprehensive ambiguity of meaning that situates the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ as an exceptional antagonism within modernity bearing the ontological burden of socio-historical struggles for human liberation against western imperialist power. As such, lived Black experience finds itself as standard bearer of universality for the human condition itself.

To be clear, though the Truth of universality informs our human singularity as lived Black experience, Truth is not tradition or culture, it is not a given in history, but rather intervenes against the sedimentation of history, tradition and culture by rupturing the normative gaze and breaching the Real through emancipatory praxis.

This global pandemic, in facilitating conditions of possibility for a world encompassing break from the normative gaze, can assist in potentially disrupting previous unreflective modes of ‘being-in-the-world’ embraced by dominated non-resisting masses from too easy a reification back into conventional routine, arbitrary pursuit of leisure and daily grind of survival.

And yet, how might we avoid being led blindly back into convincing reconfigurations of coloniality that reinvest geohistorical legitimacy and accompanying economic resources into a violent topography of imperial coherence that structurally sustains the oppression of ascendant humanity as a socio-ontological underground of modernity dehumanized through ‘race’, exploited through class and juridically criminalized as foils to an imperial mainstream-as-civil society that sees itself as at least nominally ‘white’, if not typically bourgeois, and in an eager global cosmopolitan accommodationist relation to Empire?

Is there anything we can do to assist one another against a nostalgic return to previous consumerist hallmarks of socio-cultural mediocrity that merely preserve the status quo of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization, totalitarian security culture and burgeoning neo-fascist political orientations? Is it at all tenable to pursue this unprecedented rupture of the normative gaze to its limits, whereupon either new potentialities of emancipatory praxis or reactionary blowback surely await?

Contrary to such welcome contributions to political thought by comrades who seek to scientifically eliminate the risk of emancipatory praxis by distilling social change into controllable variables of materialist causality, the streets of history offer no guarantees of outcome. And yet, it is in the streets of history where any wager of emancipatory praxis must be ultimately settled, and there is no way to alleviate the pressing socio-ontological gravity of the decision to Revolt in the face of established power without struggle.

To be clear, it is precisely because so much about this global pandemic is uncertain and indefinite, with no potential cure in sight or end approaching fast enough, that each measure of our actions in response bristles with spiritual undertones of social commitment. But social commitment to what? An unapologetic return to social stability of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society predicated upon neo-colonial police occupation of Black community, mass incarceration and murderous repression of any assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ with impunity?

A CATALYST

A routine complaint is registered by neo-colonial police about cigarettes being purchased with a supposedly counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. And yet, within minutes of arrival on the scene, an officer first draws his gun then holsters it while barking at George Floyd to put his hands on the steering wheel of his vehicle. [1]

Ninety seconds of dialogue between them gives way to neo-colonial police combatively dragging Floyd out of the vehicle. These same police agents abruptly place handcuffs on Floyd and then sit him down on the sidewalk with his back against the wall of a nearby restaurant. After sitting peacefully for six minutes, neo-colonial police coerce Floyd closer to their vehicle and begin forcing him inside. Now stumbling to the ground under the weight of increasing police violence, Floyd alerts them for the first time to the fact that he is having trouble breathing as they contentiously grapple with and then shove him inside their police car.

Soon another vehicle of occupying imperial power arrives, which makes it a total of four neo-colonial police who now gang up and turbulently force Floyd back out of the police car and then subdue Floyd, who is already in handcuffs, face down on the concrete.

As one neo-colonial police agent looks on and runs interference against anybody gathering nearby who might dare provide Floyd with any assistance, another policeman stubbornly secures Floyd’s legs while yet another applies undue pressure to Floyd’s torso. The fourth neo-colonial police agent acts accordingly and succumbs to a banality of structural-inert violence against human ‘being’ by routinely lodging the brunt of his knee against Floyd’s neck in flagrant methodical disregard of humanity itself.

Floyd himself continues voicing alarm at the predicament of his very humanity while still literally face down on the street. Even with the increasing weight of three neo-colonial police bearing down upon him and his mortality, Floyd somehow finds the human agency to communicate a phrase he will repeat at least sixteen times within the next five minutes – “I can’t breathe.”

A telling attempt at dialogue ensues between a neo-colonial police agent charged with violently imposing the sovereign legitimacy of established power upon Black community, and George Floyd structurally positioned as ascendant humanity giving voice to the universality of lived Black experience as human ‘being’ against Empire.

“I can’t breathe man, please.”

One of the neo-colonial police agents responds by pretending to be incredulous to the situation – “What do you want?”

Floyd then employs facts in an attempt to pragmatically reason with the oppressor – “I can’t breathe, please, a knee on my neck. I can’t breathe sh*t.”

A nearby friend begins to panic and resorts to yelling clear and adamant instructions at Floyd, all the while hoping that the neo-colonial police will somehow follow suit and allow his exhortations to be realized – “Well get up and get in the car man!”

George Floyd responds to his friend in a way that attempts to simultaneously convince an imperialist occupying force that he intends to cooperate – “I will.”

The powerless friend frustratedly tries again – “Get up get in the car!”

Floyd then reminds his friend, while hopefully also reminding a neo-colonial police agent who has yet to even flinch, much less remove his knee from Floyd’s very neck, that “I can’t move”.

And yet, the eventual murder of George Floyd for merely asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ does move us to resistance by reawakening tremors of an exceptional antagonism that can erupt at any given moment towards insurrection-in-itself being decided in the streets of Empire.

“I’ve been right with the whole thing.” By bringing himself to account, Floyd discloses dread as lived Black experience confronting the brutal ambiguity that no right action or wrong action before the normative gaze of western imperialist power alleviates the relentless targeting and biopolitical pacification of human agency itself through unremitting neo-colonial police violence against Black subjectivity.

Indeed, the objective violence meted out by neo-colonial police force is not contingent upon the ethical behavior, legal, moral or social, of the oppressed. For such violence is structural-inert, an active originary violence reconfigured as passive structural relations of power over generations and generations by sheer monotony of systematic renewal and institutional sanction. The normative gaze of western imperialist power is reliant upon objective violence in tandem with miseducation of soul towards necessitating a lived, and often framed as ‘racial’, sometimes class based distinction of coloniality between people who merit human consideration as an imperial mainstream, and populations who are deemed unworthy of human consideration as a socio-ontological underground. Objective violence thus assists in constituting the sovereign legitimacy of Empire upon precisely such gratuitous measures of oppression meant as biopolitical pacification against any assertion of human subjectivity amongst the oppressed.

“Mama.” As the shadow of death encroaches upon his very existence, George Floyd enunciates a poignant Yearning of spirit, for the Woman whose very labor and love ushered him forth into the world, against the rapidly unfolding inevitability of his own murder at the hands of four neo-colonial police agents.

Floyd’s friend still refuses to cease in his exhortations – “Get up and get in the car right!”

After eight minutes and forty-six seconds of neo-colonial police marauders violently compressing his legs, back and neck into the concrete – “I can’t. I cannot breathe.”

A PHENOMENON OF INSURRECTION-IN-ITSELF

“Look at him” – a bystander implores to no avail. For in refusing to look at George Floyd and see in him an affirmation of our shared humanity, neo-colonial police everywhere must now deal with having to look at him in the whirlwind of insurrection-in-itself. Indeed, and in looking at him we see a binding universality of the human condition rekindled in the lucid flames of Black Rage as Molotov cocktails fly against hypermilitarized police repression of freedom and dissent, police vehicles that run over and through protesters [2] end up overturned or set on fire, and at the epicenter where the murder of George Floyd took place, an entire neo-colonial police precinct burns to the ground as a phenomenon of insurrection-in-itself spreads throughout the streets of Empire. [3]

Whenever impending death is no longer experienced as an abstraction existing elsewhere affecting only the Other ‘race’, as a rational signification of subhuman ‘objecthood’, meriting no human consideration whatsoever according to the normative gaze of modernity, it can imbue potentialities of life with meaning at its most urgent. No doubt, who could have foretold that protest-as-resistance and spontaneous rebellion would be the answer to how we decide to spend our time, now that social filters of spectacle, entertainment and distraction, along with technological engines of cultural hyperstimulation are suffering a loss of prestige in the face of this global pandemic that brings the uneventful prospect of random death to our doorstep at its most neo-liberal?

The tense unity of protest-as-resistance and spontaneous rebellion globally sets in motion a geohistorical dynamic of insurrection-in-itself across the streets of Empire as hundreds of thousands of everyday people, students, lumpenproletariat, adults, youth, rebels and activists, rediscover ourselves as ascendant humanity, and by choosing ourselves as ascendant humanity in resistance against the normative gaze of western imperialist power, the universality of the human condition experiences potentialities of metaphysical renewal through Revolt. [4]

Indeed, the plague of Empire is reliant upon the normative gaze for ideological self-justification through objective violence and miseducation of soul towards veiling socio-historical conditions that structurally undermine our shared universality of the human condition. We may die tomorrow from the global pandemic, or even tonight by the unaccountable and objective violence of neo-colonial police. And yet, the sheer proximity of our mortality is nothing new to lived Black experience. Rather, is it not the fleeting temporality of existence that compels us to give meaning to our lives and to the world around us? And by choosing Revolt in response to this plague of Empire, we disclose, rediscover and redefine the mortal contours of the human condition itself precisely by struggling in unity as ascendant humanity for Black liberation.

For the human condition is always already an imperiled venture towards the world and intersubjective resonance towards one another, the plague of Empire upon lived Black experience just makes this lived rhythm of praxis even more pronounced in all of its universality.

Without question, decisions to engage in insurrection-in-itself as a phenomenon capturing the tense unity of protest-as-resistance and spontaneous rebellion amidst this global pandemic build towards greater social commitment against the plague of Empire at a time that assuredly raises the socio-ontological stakes. Now questions that severely implicate our temporality can no longer be postponed without a fight. And in choosing to resist injustice in defense of the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, we recognize that such an exceptional antagonism introduces imperatives towards human liberation that cannot be satisfied within this contemporary world ordered according to the precepts of a western imperialist continuum. To be clear, the socio-historical relevance and ontological implications of Black liberation struggle against Empire disclose racist dehumanization as a fundamental faultline at the heart of modernity and introduces new lived potentialities towards redefining the geohistorical scope of universality through emancipatory praxis.

Scholars will one day look back upon us and survey these unsettling times we are now living through, with an objective tone meant to convey the work of a disinterested observer engaged in discovering an obviously rational narrative. A narrative that is methodically supported by the analysis of facts, figures and events that will ultimately go a long way towards judging contemporary social movements based upon future historical outcomes thus rendering our era of insurrection-in-itself both comprehensible and reasonable to the normative gaze.

And yet, the lived temporality of this era is exclusively ours alone to act upon and thus ours alone upon which to impose meaning. Let us not pretend however, to know exactly how this will all end up, and let us fully embrace the Truth that we don’t have to know. We struggle for social justice not because we are prophets but because we are principled. It is not some unknown future which eventually will explain to us the meaning of what we are doing, we have but to live this very struggle for it to bestow meaning upon us right now. And yet even as it eludes us in the media coverage of our actions as the normative gaze attempts to make us see ourselves from the perspective of established power, we are still responsible for granting meaning to the struggle through our various modes of engagement, our diverse ways of ‘being-in-the-world’.

For as neo-colonial police run rampant, beating us down and assaulting us in the streets for attempting to hold them accountable through protest-as-resistance for the accumulated slaughter of Black people, it is we who will decide in that very moment of radical contingency whether to manifest our unrivaled love for humanity by appealing to the good conscience of the oppressor or through fighting back by any means necessary against the oppressor. And it is in the lived struggle emerging from a combination of both that generates historical movement towards fundamental social change.

No doubt, we know for certain that plenty of mistakes can and will be made in any authentic struggle for Black liberation. Even more so however, we know for damn sure that the only mistake that we can’t ever afford to make is to spiritually abandon grassroots struggle for Black liberation or water down its exceptional antagonistic singularity. To be clear, it is precisely because ‘all lives matter’ that Black liberation struggle has never been more geohistorically imperative. Which is why this contemporary phenomenon of insurrection-in-itself is definitively all about brothers and sisters like Ahmaud Arberry, Breona Taylor, Adama Traore, Giovanni Lopez and George Floyd.

A GEONATIONAL QUESTION?

For this is about a world encompassing imperative towards genuine egalitarian human consideration in the face of established power. And yet, in as much as this latest uprising of Black liberation is accurately recognized as being global in scope, Black liberation movements speak to a growing consciousness that is so much more than global, and we can feel it as an intersubjective resonance of unity-as-diversity during each wave of protest-as-resistance and spontaneous rebellion. For in challenging the normative gaze of Empire with socio-historical demands of Black liberation that ultimately cannot be met within the advanced neo-liberal capitalist global order of western imperialist power, a trajectory of emancipatory praxis that is almost geonational in scope begins to become more and more manifest.

As such, whenever geonational insurrection-in-itself engulfs the streets of western imperialist metropoles in the name of Black liberation as everyday people, protestors, activists and lumpenproletariat risk their lives in vigorous street confrontations and clashes with neo-colonial police and their self-deputized collaborationist allies, never forget that such resistance involves a demanding socio-ontological wager over whether it will be the oppressor or the oppressed who has the last word upon the universality of the human condition.

[1] Narrative of events leading up to the murder of George Floyd and all ensuing transcribed quotations based on “How George Floyd was Killed in Police Custody”, Evan Hill, Ainara Tiefenthaler, Christiaan Triebert, Drew Jordan, Haley Willis and Robin Stein, nytimes,com, May 31, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html

[2] https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/06/29/detroit-police-drive-into-protesters-mh-orig.cnn, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/may/31/new-york-police-cars-filmed-driving-at-george-floyd-protesters-video

[3]“George Floyd: Protesters Set Minneapolis Police Station Ablaze, bbc.com, May 29, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52844192

[4] https://www.axios.com/george-floyd-death-sparks-global-protests-photos-790f29a4-588f-4ce1-b66d-e4dc86bfaafd.html, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/2020/06/10/how-george-floyds-death-sparked-protests-around-world/, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52969905, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/world/george-floyd-global-protests.html