Troy Thomas, Lancaster, California. “Black Lives Have Never Mattered in the United States of America and Never Will: A Modern Day Slave’s Perspective.” Sometimes different people can independently arrive at the same conclusion. I didn’t start, and haven’t been affiliated with, the Black Lives Matter movement, but I respect their analysis of the problem and their desire to end it. Around the same time that Black Lives Matter was starting, I, like many other people, was thinking along the same lines about what the fundamental problem was behind seemingly rampant police murders of Black people. And for once, I didn’t feel alone in centering the problem of what Black life means. If Black life doesn’t mean anything, the United States would be a genocidal slave state in which the killing and punishment of Black people is meted out and widely considered acceptable, regardless of guilt or innocence, gender, socioeconomic status or other factors. And that’s exactly what it is.
Black Lives Matter is a grassroots, coalition-based social movement started in the United States by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in the wake of several unpunished or lightly punished incidents of police killing unarmed Black people, including the killing of Oscar Grant and Kenneth Harding in Oakland, as well as Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride and Michael Brown. While it consists of people with diverse viewpoints and tactics, the movement’s central aim is to oppose the systematic normalization of Black people’s deaths, which makes violence against Black people more likely and more acceptable. Black Lives Matter began as a social media movement but has quickly become, on the ground, [a] social movement with many different actors and organizations that aren’t necessarily connected as one organization, but have the same general aims.
Actions and policies of the United States result in disproportionate killing, injuring and incarceration of Black people, but the struggle for Black life, no matter, is not just about opposing policing practices against Black men, boys, and girls. It is also about how domestic abuse victim, Marissa Alexander, was not allowed to defend herself against her abusive husband under the same Stand Your Ground defense in Florida law that George Zimmerman used to get exonerated in [the] killing of Trayvon Martin. It is also about how Black trans woman, CeCe McDonald, was prosecuted and convicted for defending herself against a hostile and racist group of white youth in Minneapolis. It is also about how broader political practices like the mass disenfranchisement of Florida and Ohio Black voters, the shutting down of water services to Detroit residents and the anemic federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, show remarkable disregard for Black lives: because the nature of racism is not just prejudice but also the power to enforce prejudice.
These problems cannot be addressed individually by punishing or educating those who commit violence against Black people without justification. It is too big a problem. The conservative Wall Street Journal reported that in 2011 NYPD had more stops of young Black men in Manhattan than there are young Black men in Manhattan, and at least one former NYPD police officer has stepped forward to say that he was specifically ordered to stop young Black men at every opportunity, but he is just one officer and NYPD just one department. Police officers everywhere have broad latitude to stop anyone they suspect may be involved in a crime, and use that latitude to systematically target Black and Latino men and boys. The problem is deeper than any one department, and it’s stop-and-frisk policies. For one thing, it’s everywhere, not just in New York. One report described anti-Black racism as baked into police practices.
The root of the problem says Black Lives Matter movement co-founder, Alicia Garza, is anti-Black racism. In other words, there is a unique, deeply ingrained and pervasive kind of racism that American society at large feels toward Black people that goes a long way toward explaining these disparities, as well as many others. What does Blackness mean to America? There are not so subtle hints everywhere. Number one, Black people make up approximately 12% of the U.S. population, but constitute more than 40% of the United States prison population. Number two, white Americans use illegal drugs at rates that are comparable to, or well in excess of, the rates at which Black Americans use illegal drugs, but Black Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses 10 times more. Number three, in 2012 a Black American was killed by the police and security forces at least once every 28 hours. According to another report, Black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their counterparts.
The problem is not just that a de facto police state is ready to descend on Black people at any time, but also more broadly, that the entire population of African Americans is perceived by the broader society as a potential threat, and as unworthy of being listened to, when we protest through legal institutions or other means. This problem must be viewed as systemic, not just an individual or institutional one, and it must be addressed on multiple levels, including not only institutionally or interpersonally, but especially in our conscious thought; the deeply ingrained thought process that are reflected by our actions before we even have the opportunity to think.
Before we can change our thinking to make Black lives matter, we must truly understand that the problem of Black lives not mattering is a problem of meaning that isn’t just individual and institutional, but it’s structural. It’s rooted in what America is. America needs Black lives to not matter due to centuries of negative images and stereotypes about Africans and racial Blackness and the collective psyches of the United States. Throughout the Americas and across the world, Blackness means, as the late psychiatrist Dr Frantz Fanon said, “The lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul.”
A field of study within the cognitive psychology known as implicit cognition or implicit bias, finds quantifiable evidence of what Black people have been knowing for more than 1000 years, had anyone with the power bothered to listen; that deeply rooted negative attitudes toward people of African descent are held widely across the American population, even among those who claim to be non-racist; even when other possible causes for these attitudes, like socioeconomic class or education level are taken into consideration, and these attitudes tend to increase people’s willingness to use violence — interpersonal, institutional or state — and punishment against Black people.
One recent quantitative study from Stanford titled “Not Yet Human” shows that people of African descent are commonly associated with apes at an unconscious level of mental processing. According to the study, this black ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about white convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not.
This finding agrees with the earlier work of Stanford literature professor Sylvia Wynter, who found that police in Los Angeles, in the 1980s and early 90s, commonly used the incident code NHI, meaning “no humans involved,” for incidents involving African Americans. While many people acknowledge this police code has been racist, the Stanford quantitative study shows that even people who don’t think themselves racist have the same thoughts. And there are a slew of other studies that support my contention. In conclusion, the Black Lives Matter movement is about trying to open society’s eyes to the reality that Black people are under severe attack, and have been for many years. We ask that people in America open their eyes and their hearts to understand what’s really going on. We thank you. Troy Thomas, Lancaster, California.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
