Our Burning Memory: Social War & The Combatants for Black Liberation
“I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason.”
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
Our history is a history of names of the dead.
Oscar Grant, Kimani Gray, Alton Sterling, Freddy Gray, Brionna Taylor, Mike Brown, Timothy Green, Kajeme Powell, Vonderitt Myers, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, Rekia Boyd, Sonya Massey, Ta’Kiya Young, and on, and on, and on….
Since about 2015, when I first found people who were keeping track, the average number of people killed by police every year is about 1,500 people. 1,500 unique individuals whose lives were snuffed out, whose absence ripples across a whole constellation of relations – relatives, friends, loved ones, communities, etc. That, of course, is only explicit murders, not a variety of different forms of death in custody that are also murders, not harassment, not brutality, not sexual assault and rape.
So great are our dead, and at every turn they should be honored and remembered. Who remembers them and honors them better than our fighters? But…who are our fighters? Who makes note of and remembers them?
Our history is a history of defeat, and that defeat has us adopting the worldview of the enemy, has us accepting the limits of our chains. The left wing of capital, the self professed revolutionaries and yes even many anarchists, have adopted a stance of self victimization. In shock from the violence of oppression, the daily blood quota to keep a system of racial caste domination functioning, many will flee from what is asked of us, talking about safety before talking of fire and gunpowder – if they ever do. They will say “White Bodies To The Front!”, “Dismantling White Supremacy is White People’s Work!” as if someone could ever fight in place of us. They will tell people to stay out of the streets, to stay in line, to not come out before ever thinking of picking up a rock and a stick. They will talk infinitely about the strength of the police, but will never talk of their weaknesses.
When those few brave individuals, no longer accepting the daily misery and humiliation, no longer accepting the limitations thrust upon us by the color of our skin, strike out in displays of ferocity and courage, the activists and revolutionaries rush in to spit upon their memory. They’re adventurists. Individual action doesn’t do anything. Your actions are going to bring repression upon us. You’re making us look bad. You’re a fed. That was a false flag. They’re not affiliated with us, we’re the good ones. We’re the docile ones. We’re the cowardly ones who never dare to strike against our chains.
This tension is notable in looking at who is worth remembering. We talk of the innocent, the unarmed killed by the police and vigilante. If the innocent deserve our support, the guilty do doubly so. So much breath is wasted in trying to justify why so and so isn’t a criminal, was innocent, didn’t deserve to die. As though all our other kin deserve death. All the while the dominant order continues to stack our bodies because they see crime not in the action but in the origin – the birth in black skin.
I do not identify with this mythical figure of innocence – a white figure, an appeal to white morality. In the figure of the shoplifter, the drug dealer, the prostitute, the carjacker, the shooter I will always see more of myself. I know what is done is incidental, irrelevant, an excuse to play out fantasies of violence against black people, a desire to punish the Black Other to affirm the Goodness of White.
In an act of reclaiming the memory of the guilty, of uplifting our fighters I wish to talk about two particular individuals – Christopher Monfort and Korryn Gaines.
Our Memory Is A Burning Fuse
“My intentions are the best for the city and the country. The things I’m accused of are selfless acts. I didn’t get anything out of them.”
– Christopher Monfort, Seattle Times Interview
October 22nd. Smoke rises from the Seattle City Maintenance Facility – multiple cop cars have burst into flames. A note is left at the scene referencing the video of King County Sheriff Paul Schene repeatedly punching 15 year old Malika Calhoun who is held in custody.
The perpetrator gets away, the attack remains unsolved.
10PM on the 31st, a cold Halloween night, and a vehicle drives through the streets of Seattle’s Central District. It pulls up next to an SPD patrol car and the window rolls down. The officers turn their heads to look over and from the darkness of the vehicle they are greeted not with a face, but with a barrel of a rifle. It opens its mouth to speak.
KRAK KRAK KRAK.
This exchange of speech in a language the police know so well lasts less than a minute before the rifle disappears into the darkness of the car. The vehicle quickly turns around and speeds off from the direction it came.
A look back over the scene: An SPD patrol car riddled with bullets, one pig slumped in his seat dead, the other injured.
“And when we die there ain’t no fireworks or fuckin parades”
– Bambu, Since I Was A Youth
November 6th, the armed death cult of SPD hold a public memorial – a procession through the city they occupy, a show of force. Around the same time out in Tukwila a snitch, a cop without a uniform, calls in a suspicious vehicle that matches the description of the vehicle that opened fire on the occupying army. The enemy encroaches on an apartment complex, a man brandishes a 9mm Glock and flees up the stairwell. The enemy approaches, the man pops out from the corner putting the gun into the cops face and pulls the trigger – click – he forgot to chamber a round. He goes down in a hail of gunfire into his head and stomach.
The enemy enters the man’s apartment. They find a small armory – a bolt action rifles and 2 semi-auto rifles, a shotgun, another .45 handgun, homemade explosives and firebombs and booby traps.
Ballistic and DNA forensics identify this man – Christopher Monfort – as the arsonist and gunman. Despite all odds he survives, now paralyzed from the waist down with a bullet lodged in his spine and with brain damage.
“So when the system seems to break down what do we do? We march, we protest, we form groups and the police scowl at us on the sides of the road and talk about the overtime they’re getting. If you stand close enough you can hear them. They have no intent on listening to a thousand or ten thousand people marching for police to stop their brutality. When you see a couple police officers brutalizing or murdering someone there’s always a few, maybe half a dozen, of their friends around them. They’re not gonna tell on their buddies. They’re not crossing the blue line.”
-Christopher Monfort, Final Statement to the Court
Despite everything, Chris was able to speak for himself. He was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2017 in his cell at Walla Walla State prison, allegedly from overdose. Anarchists continued to support him until his death.
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“’She always was a little radical, and she was hardcore about certain stuff. She did a lot of research … laws of the land,’ Rhanda [Korryn’s Mother] said. ‘And right after Freddie Gray got killed, it amplified because he was a neighbor to us. We used to see him.’”
– Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines
March 10th, 2016. A woman is pulled over for driving a vehicle with a piece of cardboard where a license plate should be. She is ordered out of her vehicle as a cop threatens to taze her. “You are not going to kidnap me, you are going to have to kill me.”
She is arrested for a disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She is held for two days in isolation with neither food nor water.
August 1st, police come to her door to serve a warrant for missed court dates. The door is opened, the the cops are greeted with a shotgun to their face. They retreat and call for back up and a 6 hour standoff ensues.
Initially they try to frame the situation as a kidnapping but have to roll it back as a Facebook livestream of the stand off goes viral, with her calmly in her home and the occasional shot of her children in the background eating and playing. She talks about the situation while friends and followers cheer her on and tell her to hold strong.
In part of the video, Gaines asks her 5 year old son “Who is outside?” He answers “The police.” She asks why; “To kill us.” He responds.
Toward the end of the standoff, the Baltimore Police – with compliance from Facebook – gain access to her account, shut off the live stream and deactivate the account. Within moments of the live stream going down, the cops shoot through the wall, killing Korryn and wounding her child.
“’Officer shot through a wall and couldn’t even see nothing,’ Rhanda said. She describes the sentiment of the officer as, ‘Nerve of this little Black girl to stay in this house when we said to come out!’”
– Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines
The Black Liberation Army Is A Living Tension
“…our final consideration is whether or not these masses must centralize their organizing (not to be confused with the obvious need to coordinate their efforts!). To that I answer with an emphatic, ‘no!’ and further, I contend that such centralization will only make it easier for our oppressors to identify and level repression upon us – prolonging the crisis our generation must deal with.”
– Russell Maroon Shoatz, The Dragon and the Hydra
These two stories are a drop in the ocean – there’s a thousand stories like these. Hidden, buried, choked out by our enemies and the cowards who enable them. Names and acts we will never know. The point in recounting and connecting these stories, beyond the inspiration of individual action, is to describe a living tension.
Once is an act of insanity. Twice is a lone wolf. A thousand times begins to look like an army.
While revolutionaries waste their ink and breath talking of conditions, of “the people” not being ready, the past two decades has been the informal spread of practices and the development of ad hoc fighting formations. The shooters, the rock throwers, the looters, the arsonists, the getaway drivers. A black liberation army – a de facto informal network of fighters across the territories dominated by the american state – has been building and fighting right before our very eyes.
Many look at this and see disorganization, a child needing the strong hand of the Patriarch to guide them, whether in the form of the vanguard party or the leader, to the real means of freedom that these chaotic and ungrateful negros will never grasp on their own. But any closer look shows that we are very obviously organized and coordinated – perhaps the most organized forces in these territories and perhaps it’s the revolutionaries who need a lesson in organization.
Or better yet, the revolutionaries need to be pushed out of our way.
Yes, the organization, the coordination, the fighting spirit is all there. What is needed is for us to consciously recognize this – that we aren’t fighting alone, that to some degree or another we have built upon the ideas, strategies and practices of others, refined in the forge of street combat. This consciousness has been developing over the past 20 years and through bitter and bloody experience will continue to develop is greater and lesser degree, in different ways, in different territories.
I don’t have a plan or a great analysis to give you to beautifully close this out. All I can offer is this; I see tensions that need to be pushed, memories that need to be reclaimed, and developing practices that need to be analyzed. Through writing, through video, through music, performance, crime, and practice in the instances of street combat to come I seek to spread and clarify these and be in dialogue with the development of the black liberation army, walking alongside it as an anarchist and developing it as a participant.
If nothing else has been made more clear to me, I can clearly see that many individuals in many different territories see a similar trajectory and, like me, awkwardly stumble towards it. Just as I develop and dialogue with local and regional tensions, I hope to dialogue with you all, sharing our ideas, sharpening our practices.
I cannot say what the future holds, victory or defeat. All I can say for certain is that no savior from on high will deliver us from the position we find ourselves in; that our destiny is in our hands alone, so let’s make sure our hands are armed.
In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres.
In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder.
Peace By Piece
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Our Burning Memory: Social War & The Combatants for Black Liberation
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17424
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