Racism Works by Warping the Very Meaning of “Violence”
All Americans live in a violent country. By this, I do not necessarily mean explicit acts like murder rates or bombings and mass killings (though those too happen with some regularity). What I mean is that the United States inflicts a grand scheme of violence on its citizens in massive quantities every day, but that it hides behind what we think “counts” as violence and what doesn’t.
Is it not an act of violence, of terror, and of pointed and purposeful maliciousness to, for example, deny medicine to any citizen due to lack of wealth? Is there much of a difference in watching a man drown as opposed to being the one who drowns him? We’ve seen countless stories of diabetic citizens dying because they cannot afford insulin. Is that not murder in the form of neglect? Is that not violence? But we do not name it as such, allowing a further divide between what we let slide as a country and what we condemn.
Necropolitics: Who Lives and Who Dies
That is just one example of many. As philosophers Foucault and Mbembe have written, the fundamental attributes of a sovereign nation are deciding who dies and who shall live. Take, for example, the concept of war. On a simple level, during war a nation decides that its own citizens and soldiers deserve life, while those in the warring nation (the enemy soldiers, at minimum) do not. Mbembe writes that “war, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill.” But the nation also does this on a domestic level.
By exposing certain communities to a higher risk of death, the United States’ racist necropolitics are clear. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”.
So let’s take the United States’ state-sanctioned violence against Black people. Some of its examples of this are obvious — police murder, the killing of activists like Fred Hampton, and the MOVE bombing of 1985. But some are more insidious due to their hidden nature. Black people are more likely to die at early ages from all causes (x). This is the result of a whirlwind of realities: higher exposure to environmental disasters, a large wealth gap between whites and Blacks (the poorer you are, the more likely you will die early as well), higher risk of imprisonment despite the same rate of committing crimes, high rates of unemployment, high rates of punishment against Black children in schools, healthcare discrimination, and this is really just the start.
Explicit Versus Implicit Murder
Author Henry Giroux writes about the difference in racial violence with this quote comparing the murder of Emmett Till and the deaths of Hurricane Katrina victims:
“Till’s body allowed the racism that destroyed it to be made visible, to speak to the systemic character of American racial injustice. The bodies of the Katrina victims could not speak with the same directness to the state of American racist violence”.
Though the deaths of Katrina victims were also racially informed, its racism was not as explicit as Till’s lynching and therefore ignored as a specifically racist act of violence. A history of segregation and discrimination led most of Katrina’s victims to be poor residents of color who lived in areas that were not given adequate resources and safety measures. This was also coupled with what many see as a lack of an effective evacuation response. Bouie in Slate writes that it was common knowledge that “in a city defined by decades of poverty, segregation, and deep disenfranchisement, poor and working-class blacks (including the elderly, and children) would largely shoulder the burden of the storm”.
Therefore, seemingly small things like Black children getting more detention in school is actually an act of extreme malice. Those children end up more likely to then go into the juvenile justice system or lesser-quality schools, which then impact their futures. The same Black children grow up to have less wealth and employment opportunities than their white counterparts, and maybe one day they’ll want to move to New Orleans. The white adults now live in the safe part of the city, and when a natural disaster strikes, they make it to safety. The Black adults do not. They did not.
To put it simply, the state does not just kill Black people, it consistently lets them die.
Who is the Real Villain Here?
Are these examples not violence, and not murder? If we begin to define racism as Gilmore does — as making a specific racial group vulnerable to death — then looting a Target suddenly pales in comparison to what has been going on in all of our neighborhoods for quite some time.
Right now, it seems like people critiquing the protests see it as unbalanced — racism is bad but “violence is never the answer”. This is not the way to move forward. You must be peaceful, they say! But that assumes that damage to property is on the same level as damage to lives and livelihood. When in fact, the balance goes the opposite way. Every Target in the world could be burnt to the ground and it would not begin to match the violence that has occurred against Black folk in this country. That currently occurs, present tense, every single day.
We need to begin to question the very definitions of words we take for granted, because those, in turn, inform our world. When we see a word like “riot”, we want to immediately condemn it in favor of peace. But if you have never condemned the everyday violence against Black minds and Black livelihoods, if you have never condemned the looting of Indigenous lands, of Black resources, of Black labor, if you have never once spoken out against the chaotic riot of racism that occurs every day against dark skin — then you need to take a second look at what propaganda has nestled deep inside of you.
