Diary of a mothering worker. June 2, 2020.

Post 377.

Just as we showed solidarity with South African sisters and brothers under apartheid, so too we should share the anger of African-Americans rioting against the US police murder of George Floyd, which followed police killing of Breonna Taylor in March.

Non-Black folk have a responsibility to support struggles against anti-blackness across the Americas. This responsibility is bigger than the historical disdain between Indo- and Afro-Caribbeans. It is bigger than APNU–AFC electoral fraud in Guyana and heightened racial distrust as a result. It’s bigger than UNC-PNM campaigning in Trinidad and Tobago, and the PM’s bizarre and race-baiting reference to a “recalcitrant and hostile minority” exactly 62 years to the day after it was said by Eric Williams on April 1, 1958.

Anti-blackness is the legacy of a new world order birthed by colonialism – which combined genocidal capitalism, dehumanizing white supremacy, sexual violence and imperial expansion. At the centre of its cold heart is the idea that White heterosexual masculinity presents an ideal representation of Man or what it means to be human, with all others from women to LBGTI folk to those from across the ‘Third’ or majority world mattering less.

Entrenched through slavery, and not yet dismantled, blackness biologically represented the ultimate non-human. Once defined as property, black bodies remain the least valued of all. This is the reality in the US where state violence against black communities enforces such continued coloniality. #BlackLivesMatter and #IndigenousLivesMatter movements highlight the legacy that some bodies and lives, and their decimation, still matter least.

In Canada, on May 27^th, police killed Regis Korchinski Paquet, a 29 year-old Afro-Indigenous woman. Thousands have been marching in Toronto against police violence, and its intersection with anti-black and anti-indigenous racism.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there has been an increase in police killings since 2018, predominantly of poor Afro-Trinidadians. Here too, black lives are disposable and we pay attention, only briefly, when communities burn tires to protest these murders and witnesses dispute police reports of self-defense.

As Dylan Kerrigan writes, “There is no consideration of the context of social problems, the background to the problem, or the historical evolution of the issues… poor black victims are simply ‘bad people’.”  When we pay attention, it is less to the injustice than to the threat to a social order in which some lives are, nevertheless, always under greater threat.

We saw such US reporting shift attention to the looting over the past week which simply distracts from and belittles legitimate rage. Young activist, Tamika Mallory, put it well. America has long been looting black lives, and the violence of looting in this week’s protests has been learned from the example of impunity over hundreds of years, beginning with the looting of Indigenous land.

Jamaicans for Justice have been protesting the May 27^th murder of Susan Bogle, a 44 year-old mentally challenged black woman in August Town, St. Andrew, who was killed inside her home by Jamaican soldiers. For the year, there have been investigations into 361 incidents involving Jamaican police and at least 18 incidents involving Jamaican soldiers.

Violent protests by communities result from a broken social contract that leaves no investment in obeying power or rules. That said, the US government has a dirty history of undermining Black Power, peace and environmental movements, including by instigating violence, and no doubt this is happening today.

Excessive state repression, which we are watching with horror on TV, is historically rooted in vicious repression of plantation rebellion just as much as it is reflects the current militarization of policing. All that military hardware, developed for armies at war, has to be sold. For the last two decades, it’s been sold to police and used against citizens demanding justice. Even GG wanted to send military tanks up into Laventille.

The 175^th anniversary of Indian arrival to Trinidad and Tobago requires that we honour our participation in the legitimate, and if necessary violent, resistance against injustice which has long defined the hemisphere.

Interestingly, this is also the 50^th anniversary of Black Power in Trinidad and Tobago, and commemorations included debate on whether the movement included Indians or mattered to them. It’s clear there was no mythical mixing of the Ganges and the Nile, but that was then. Indian-African solidarity is now ours to define and live just as coloniality remains a contemporary reality for us to collectively end.

How ironic that we were bothering with sanctions against Venezuela when all can see tyranny in America’s glass house and the time for US regime change.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. October 31, 2018.

Post 307.

When UWI students protested their vulnerability to robbery and rape on campus, we witnessed the brutality of overly-weaponised police unnecessarily roughing up two young dreadlocked male students, pressing their faces to the ground with their knees on their necks, and then throwing them in the back of the police jeep in order to later charge them for protesting feelings of insecurity to crime.

There didn’t seem to be any sense of irony that that dealing with such feelings of insecurity through repressive state force misses what a younger generation is legitimately telling both police and the nation about our own institutional failures. It was clear that police escalated the situation and that their training to deal with illegality – whether student protests or gang turf wars – is a single-minded and excessive hypermasculinity that strikes back to strike fear in the hearts of anyone out of order.

I thought about students’ lack of familiarity with strong-arm policing, and their naïve investment in police benevolence. Students believe they have a right to pursue a neoliberal dream of individual study, advancement and success as if the society isn’t falling apart around the borders of the campus.

Rather, students have to recognize that such a dream is a myth. Individual advancement is threatened night and day by wider social alienation, by widespread gender-based harm, by state institutional failure, and by systemic inequality and injustice – and this will reach students through threat of all kinds, whether robbery or rape, on campus just as anywhere else.

I’m not saying there isn’t more that the campus could do, but that fear and insecurity are social and economic problems, requiring institutional responses from an integrated justice system, and collective citizen investment and involvement in everything required for such transformation.

I thought too about how those very students probably don’t think too much about such policing as the modus operandi in poor and insecure communities, and the necessity of their solidarity with them, having experienced what that m.o. looks and feels like when the “good”, versus ghetto, youth get violently put in place.

We are all horrified by the murder rate and widespread fear of armed robbery and random shootings. We understand justification for shooting back at criminals who shoot at police. We understand that police are defending law-abiding citizens, and even wealthy non-law abiding and corrupt elites, with their working-class lives and families on the line. We understand that police share our fear as individuals and experience even greater occupational fear.

However, there is more to this seductive, simplistic, narrative. Where do individual badmen come from? Do they emerge in our society from nowhere? Is the gun-talk of “a war they want…a war they will get” going to change the disturbingly low rate of convictions or the shockingly slow pace of the justice system which institutionally reproduce the problem? Will it solve the fact that crime also continues because those responsible for patrolling streets and borders also are those running blocks or, as Rudder would put it, letting the guns and cocaine pass? Will it solve the fact that men in prison have higher than average rates of illiteracy or that they come from poorer households and communities, and schools failing children or, often, from situations of familial neglect and abuse?

In countries where crime has been reduced and jails emptied, has it been through being “rottweilers of aggression”? What of the fact that prison creates criminals by mixing men convicted of smaller offenses with gangs to whom they must show loyalty both in and, later, outside of jail in order to survive inside and, later, outside? As the restorative justice movement has long warned us, the fact that prisons officers, and police officers, are at risk of death is a problem exacerbated by how we imprison.

Anti-punk policing seems like the solution we have been waiting for, but fighting firearms with more firepower may leave us without sustained pursuit of real solutions. UWI students should know, only those solutions will offer greater safety. Who else in their generation will make them happen? As students should also now know, police can very quickly and forcibly turn against you, no matter how good a student you are, how respectable your family or how just your protest.

Students must invest in a creating a different society as part of investing in themselves, for peace is not the imprisoned security of greater surveillance and more guns, nor a society where support for police killings intensifies a spiral of excessive violence without end.