[News] Why Black Lives Don’t Matter and Fanon’s Colonial Violence?

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Why Black Lives Don’t Matter and Fanon’s Colonial Violence?
Prof. Hatem Bazian - July 10, 2022
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Image from
https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/fanon-violence-and-struggle-against-colonialism

Fanon’s work on race, racism and violence in the colonial context are as
relevant today as they were during the heydays of anti-colonial struggles
of the late 1950s and 60s. While Fanon wrote specifically on the context of
anti-colonial movements, the debate on armed struggle and revolutions,
nevertheless his analysis on colonial violence as an instrument of
domination is relevant to our discussion on black lives in America and
across the globe. More importantly, the recent police murder of Jayland
Walker and countless other Blacks is better understood by introducing Franz
Fanon’s *Wretched of the Earth*’s framing on colonial violence and the
divided world of the colonized and the colonizer.

Fanon’s framing centered on the violent relationship between the White
colonial European powers and the colonized populations, which consists of
the darker complexion indigenous people inhabiting colonies. The
relationship was founded and stoked through a regime of violence and terror
that is intended to bring about the total domination and surrender of the
colonized population. Violence, according to Fanon, rather than being
viewed as incidental, is foundational to the colonial structure and is used
to demarcate the two worlds, the one inhabited by the colonial and the
other is the domain of the colonized. Death and murder of the colonized is
premeditated and is the only way for the colonial to set himself up as a
master of colonized land and population. Genocide, slavery, violence and
terror are ontological and paradigmatic in the colonial system.

Here, Jayland Walker’s murder by the police is premeditated, pre-determined
and expected when the colonial-colonized relationship is understood
properly. Yes, the specific circumstances of each murder and how the
encounter unfolds are often unique, but the colonial superstructure
pre-determine the relationship, the daily encouters and the expected
outcome for the Black subject, death at the hands of the police.

The Black person in the United States is a colonial subject-category that
lives within the confines of the violent epistemology of White colonial
supremacy, which sets at the root of US’s structure and society. Nothing
escapes race and White supremacy in the United States, even attempts to
undo it often ends up affirming it. Fanon accurately points out that “The
colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border,
is represented by the barracks and the police stations,” which means
violence directed at the colonized population, Blacks as a group, and
Jayland Walker, as an individual, and all those who look like him/her in
the internal colonial, is constitutive, expected and staged to bring about
control.

Image from
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/03/us/jayland-walker-police-shooting-video/index.html

Institutional and structural violence is used to train the Black subject at
knowing his/her place in society and geographical border in the internal
colonial. “In the colonies,” Fanon observed that “the official, legitimate
agent, the spokes-person for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is
police officer or the soldier’” and the same applies in America’s inner
cities and the internal colonial. The colonial discourse and language is
rooted in violence, not only the police but also the official institutions
and the political leadership who use language of pure violence and
discipline to keep the colonized population under total domination.

Fanon observes: “In colonial regions, however, the proximity and frequent,
direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are
kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm. We have
seen how the government’s agent uses a language of pure violence. The agent
does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and
demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer and brings
violence into the homes and minds of colonized subject.”

Fanon’s understanding is applicable and accurately describes the lynching
era. Indeed, the end of America’s civil war witnessed a serious attempt at
challenging and possibly ending White supremacy and privilege but the
regime of terror and almost daily lynchings across the country made it
possible to more efficiently reconstitute the colonial White supremacist
power structure. The police, government institutions, economic resources
and religious order all were directed at keeping the Black person and
society in their “native” colonial quarters and dominated through the use
of pure violence to bring about the pacification of the population.

A secondary and as important of a goal was at hand, the use of unrestrained
terror on the Black subject made it possible for White colonial supremacy
to garner and establish White solidarity and affirm the existence of a
distinct “superior racial” category. Violence against Blacks brought about
the only meaning and the sense of belonging for Whites in the post-civil
war era (we can account for some whites who struggled to bring an end to
racism but they were in the minority). Violence was the instrument used to
make a free Black person regulate themselves to the dictate and power of
the White colonial supremacist structure. Think of all the Black mothers
and fathers who have to set down and talk to their kids on how, and what to
do when encountering the police: the structure of control and domination is
bearing fruits.

In the past, it was overt but today police violence and the prison
industrial complex are the tools deployed to bring about the same results
and even more successful. Indeed, we never miss an opportunity to blame
Blacks for their predicament and the society is very skilled at using
cultural racism to explain away the premature death of so many on the hands
of the police (please no Black on Black violence cultural racism trope or
missing dads from the home).

I like this principle: “if you can’t help the oppressed, then the least you
can do is not to be an aid to the oppressor.”

The political leadership, the media, the intellectuals, academics and
religious figures all use cultural racism to explain away the daily death
count of Blacks across the country. Some even talk and approach the topic
from what they think is a sensitive and supposedly a friend of the Black
community vantage point, while, in all reality, are apt and skillfully
reproducing White supremacist cultural racism at every turn. Yes, we all
need to take responsibility for our actions but if you say that Black
American cultural norms produces the death we are witnessing, then how do
you explain the non-stop killing and mayhem directed at Blacks in Africa,
where most of the wealth and raw materials exist! Did the Congo had a
missing father figure that made it possible for the genocide of almost 50%
of the population by the Belgium or current French intervention in Mali and
Chad! People can’t help themselves in reproducing White supremacy and
adopting its negative epistemological construction of Blackness and
everything related to it. This epistemological adoption reaches to the
extent that the murder and death of a Black person is transformed into
blaming him/her for their own death and their community-the supposed Black
cultural inadequacy, inferiority and criminality.

Image from
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/critical-voices-in-critical-times-fanon-africa-decolonisation-g/

The assault and producing the negative images of Blackness in the most
recent era can be traced to the 1980s Reagan campaign and presidency, which
deployed the Black woman Welfare Queen trope to win the elections, then
move to change America’s economic, political, religious and social systems.
Reagan used the image of the single Black mother, the Welfare Queen, to
shift the society’s focus from a “war on poverty” to one vested on “a war
on the poor” with Blackness serving as the foil to accomplish this goal,
even though the majority of those on welfare at the time were white.
Trickle down economics was rooted in trickle down racism, White supremacy
and the abandonment of the poor of all races. White Americans loved and
voted for Reagan in the same way that Whites voted and loved Trump because
both used race to mobilize White victimhood from a supposed unfair
privilege attained by Blacks and minorities, who are taking our America
away.

“The colonized’s sector, or at least the ”native” quarters, the shanty
town, the Medina, the reservation, is a inhabited by disreputable people.
You are born anywhere, any-how. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a
world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks
squeezed tightly together. The colonized’s sector is a famished sector,
hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The colonized’s sector is a
sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is
prostrate. It’s a sector of n…..s, a sector of towel heads.”

Fanon’s descriptions of the colonized sector applies to Black
neighborhoods, which if understood correctly would go a long way to explain
the total disregard for the people who live there and their daily
suffering. The economic disparity and lack of real resources is structural
and not incidental. Fanon further makes an immediate connection between
race and wealth when stating: “In the colonies the economic infrastructure
is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are
white, you are white because you are rich. ” Thus, the reverse holds true,
you are poor because you are Black and your blackness is a source of your
poverty. Here, don’t let the few Black millionaires or billionaires
distract you from assessing the total structural impoverishment of Black
communities in the US and across the world. The two world are distinct and
structured around race.

Fanon’s descriptions above are hauntingly accurate of Black suffering in
America: “You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space,
people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly
together. The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread,
meat, shoes, coal, and light.” The image also applies to the conditions in
the prison industrial complex.

Two separate and distinct worlds that are shaped around race and maintained
through organized and institutionalized violence: “…This compartmentalized
world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species. The
singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality,
inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never manage to mask the
human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is
clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what
race one belong to.”

In the United States, Black communities inhabit a colonized geography
governed by police force and the racist structure of domination that
permeates every element of society and all interactions. The dividing line
in politics, economics, social positioning and religious discourses are
governed by race, which also is sets at the crossroads of police violence
directed at the Black subject and Black communities. Here, the cases of
police violence we get riveted about and mobilize to oppose are those that
take the violence rooted relationship to its logical conclusion: the Black
body is a threat to the superior White supremacist shinning city upon the
hill. Thus, the every day violence directed at Blacks, caught or not caught
on camera, gets a passing grade. Violence against the Black subject is
atmospheric and nothing escapes it.

America’s cities are “a colonial world that is cut in two.” Indeed, anyone
that examines America’s racial reality closely will arrive at Fanon’s
conclusion: “The dividing line, the frontiers, are shown by barracks and
police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who
are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and
his rule of oppression.” Consequently, Jayland Walker and every other Black
person that comes into contact with the police, or the internal White
supremacist settler colonial power structure, the Black subject, “is always
presumed guilty,” and his/her death is justified, even when it is egregious
with 60 holes in the body.
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