Zine :
Lien original : Destruction Worker
En français :
“This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death.” – Edouard Glissant
A man was killed on the F train earlier this month. He was hungry, exhausted. Meager in frame and lean in muscle. He yelled in a subway car and some of the passengers thought it best to subdue him instead of hearing his pleas. Witness accounts hover around something about hollering, “I want food!” while throwing his belongings on the floor in demand that his pleas be heard. A tiny fragment of Best and Hartman’s “black noise” butting up against the sense and rationality of those not born of any void. Basic necessities are undeserved for the absolutely impoverished but death is surely on the table for the black ones.
His capacity to commit harm is immaterial to me at this point. His level of danger is minuscule in the face of a non-black anxiety’s dedication to its own preservation, always against the inherent danger of a boisterous blackness. They all strangled him. Everyone in that car. A few pairs of hands at his feet and one pair of arms around his neck, but even the witnesses were willing participants. The city of New York released the man’s criminal record, as they always do. They needed to establish their bedrock for when the justifications came flooding in, as they always do. “He was dangerous, he threatened me, I feared for my safety.”: claims never forced to appeal to the reality of those threats nor with the boundaries of some imagined safety because blackness is always this monstrous object the world needs to be protected from.
A man was killed at 4th and Market at the end of last month, outside of a Walgreens. I don’t know if he was hungry and I’m not sure of his exhaustion levels. But I know he was killed over stuff, things. There was a scuffle in the store that led outside. It was essentially finished and the man left, followed by the security guard who pulled out his gun and shot him. Over, in the guard’s mind, an alleged theft. The outpouring of grief and anger from the city of San Francisco was minimal in comparison to what happened to Jordan Neely. Part of me thinks it’s because Banko Brown was a trans man. The mundanity of black death is extrapolated with trans people, trans women especially. Outside of family, friends, and those embodying the supernova of a black non-existence with such a horribly short life expectancy, people just don’t respond to the deaths of black trans people.
His alleged transgressions are immaterial to me at this point. Property, big or small, is of the utmost importance and its protection and preservation is tantamount. Windows or candy bars, cars or cigars, their violation, especially at and in black hands, is enough to warrant violence. Death is just a bonus, and who doesn’t love a bonus? There’s a myriad of stock answers available as to if that man stole anything why he deserved to die. They live in the lobe and quickly find the tongue when the police or the media begin an inquest. Black people dying is easy like that, and the more inexplicable the situation, the easier it is to find an answer: he was loud and he stole. Banko’s friends are fighting for him but in tiny numbers. Their demands are clear but their voices are being smothered by people denying them any sort of coherence.
I hope Jordan Neely haunts every subway tunnel. I hope the hands that bound his feet and the arms that cut the wind from his body find themselves broken, bloodied, and severed. I hope the eyes that played witness to a lynching fall out of their sockets. I hope every pair of lungs in that car, lungs that sighed in relief as Jordan was being dispossessed of his life, I hope they all collapse and those people never take another breath. I hope the guard that pulled his gun and drew down on Banko Brown chokes in his sleep and I hope it hurts. I’m not remiss in my thoughts of revenge because that’s all we have, Our Revenge. The burning of precincts and retail stores that carry more value than black life is Our Revenge. The disquieting of non-black fragility through force and fire is Our Revenge. It may unsettle some that civil and political society are so squarely in my cross hairs, but their domination extends beyond structure and capital. They extend beyond city halls and police stations, beyond the failures of private and state-run mental health facilities, beyond the purposed inadequacy of commodified housing, and into the psychic anxieties that glue material daily life into place. The anti-blackness of everyone else’s safety, security, and care. That’s what needs to be attacked. That is what will begin to cement Our Revenge.
“Worn down, in a debasement more eternal than apocalypse. But that is nothing yet.” – Edouard Glissant
The inane became asinine fairly quickly. Conversation about Neely’s death immediately went from the facts of his murder into a cavalcade of ridiculous opinions about whether or not the man who killed him, Daniel Petty, was an informant of some sort, the two men who held his legs undercover police officers, whether Petty was related to police officers himself, continue to expand the questions without a lick of sense. On the other hand, as dumb as that conversation is, it needs to be attended to eventually, not because any of that might be true, but because there is an instantaneous self-deputization at play from true crime fanatics who feel the need to crack the overly complicated mystery of a fairly simple occurrence: people saw a black man collapsing in on himself and hurried to accelerate his demise.
The more daunting and lamentable conversations came from people with the wherewithal to demand and deny the coherence of Neely’s cry for help and therefore any access to their Humanity. They were all positioning themselves within the relevance of their hypothetical safety. The logical coherence of the subject position of The Woman (in this instance read as the cis-gendered Non-Black Woman), the mythical poor and working people who were just trying to get home, and “regular” people who shouldn’t have to be subjected to the poverty of the impoverished. The absolute refusal of the Humanity of the poorest, blackest person in the equation, because he had deigned to stray outside of the approved bounds of his social status, was placed at odds with the unquestionable sanctity of non-black safety, security and care. The death of Neely became the springboard out from the tragic non-occurrence of black suffering into the demand that all of the various non-black subject positions go about their lives undisturbed. Black death, Neely’s death, is the necessary or constituent element to the safety of those poor souls subjected to our, to his, suffering.
It’s difficult for me to write about Brown’s death any deeper than something purely analytical. There’s a necessary air of experience that I do not have, a purely visceral anxiety surrounding the increased likelihood of demise because of a clear rejection of not only the gender binary but cis-masculinity and the thwarting of a type of capture within a framework that is organized through sheer violence. There are others far better suited for that who theorize daily life from a black-trans subject position. I know the piece of shit security guard who murdered him was not in fear for his safety. I don’t need to see footage to know that. His decision was clear and controlled and, while easily settled into a pathetic protection of property, can possibly be read as the outward expression of what might be his own transphobia. But fuck him. My sorrow for Brown is sympathetic because I know that, way down on the scorecard, there his name will be. I don’t know if I’m lamenting its lack of prominence in the current consciousness or its possible complete absence. I just know that I don’t want it to be meaningless.
“Peoples who have been to the abyss do not brag of being chosen. They do not believe they are giving birth to any modern force.” – Edouard Glissant
Abolitionist platitudes ring especially hollow at this point. Tensed-up stomach muscles push “we keep us safe!” into the air with such an assurance without any thought of if that claim even makes sense. Or if the sense it might make frames them squarely in a space as the grand bestowers of a safety that ultimately denies those outside of even the loosest boundaries as irreconcilable with the idea. The common thread among everyone who claims solutions to houselessness and insanity, the two most digestible explanations of the Negro Problem, is soft incarceration. Whether involuntary commitment, as the New York Post advocates for, or broader access to mental health facilities (whatever that means), both private and state-run, the solution is to lock away the undesirable. Because bars and handcuffs aren’t immediately recognizable it doesn’t smell like imprisonment to their quaint sensibilities. House arrest is without physical bars and cuffs but, through the coercion of monitoring and the threat of physical prison itself, it’s still imprisonment. The psych ward, my own least favorite place, though lacking steel bars, still contains elements of imprisonment: locks, restraints, monitoring, isolation, coercion, the lurking threat of imprisonment itself. Medication is both cuffs and gun if your condition isn’t as easily treatable. And if your condition is merely a response to the anti-blackness of daily life, you are untreatable. Then the real restraints, the real cuffs, and real prison start to enter the picture. I say all of that from experience. That is what safety looks like at this juncture and its liberals who are fighting the hardest to expand that safety. Such liberal conceptions of the world and how to achieve that world need to find a grave before it finishes digging one for those of us who will never manage to stay above dirt.
“…what sufferings came from the unknown!” – Edouard Glissant
I refuse to posit strategies or solutions here. I simply wish to decompress. A million voices clamoring to explain, excuse, and justify black death. A million voices, none of them looking in the mirror and asking what’s their stake in all of this. A million voices, all of them discussing progression but none of them begging the question: how do we just stop? Look around and you’ll see we’re still in the holds of the ship, stewing in the belly, in its womb. A place expanded beyond space and time, rendered as our irreducible social condition. This construction is reformulated as the slave relation sees fit, to silence our black noise. Whether muting the cries of those languishing amidst unforeseen opulence, dulling the claws climbing out of a false emancipation, or defanging mouths gnashing at the Hobbesian contract noosed around our necks. The black noise erupting on the F train, the black noise ringing out from out front of the Walgreens on 4th and Market, that’s the language of the ship. What’s unintelligible to them is loud and clear to us.
For the dead, known and unknown,
– TACKY
