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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://medium.com/foundation-of-african-americans-for-civic/why-black-lives-dont-matter-and-fanon-s-colonial-violence-af2769901f75">medium.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Why Black Lives Don’t Matter and Fanon’s Colonial Violence?</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Prof. Hatem Bazian - July 10, 2022<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div role="button" tabindex="0"><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/560/1*OvjHa1QdyU5oRQ7SbnZZMA.png" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="174"></p></div>Image from <a href="https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/fanon-violence-and-struggle-against-colonialism" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/fanon-violence-and-struggle-against-colonialism</a><p id="gmail-6f86">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 <em>Wretched of the Earth</em>’s framing on colonial violence and the divided world of the colonized and the colonizer.</p><div role="button" tabindex="0"><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/560/1*hn7CHsGx0NU81UFjCLeL_w.png" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="268" height="392"></p></div><p id="gmail-fba9">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.</p><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/146/1*VjcyepMzbrb6fSTMkZNRlg.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="146" height="219"></p><p id="gmail-dda6">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.</p><p id="gmail-d8f7">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.</p><div role="button" tabindex="0"><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/560/1*O-Fm-1YzBGOmWx4fa4eAvQ.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" width="700" height="394"></p></div>Image from <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/03/us/jayland-walker-police-shooting-video/index.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/03/us/jayland-walker-police-shooting-video/index.html</a><p id="gmail-0603">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.</p><blockquote><p id="gmail-670f">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.”</p></blockquote><p id="gmail-ce5e">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.</p><p id="gmail-389e">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.</p><div role="button" tabindex="0"><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/560/1*FWAEgntjcg2UaMU6HFQgoQ.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="268"></p></div><p id="e8b3">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).</p><blockquote><p id="gmail-fd11">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.”</p></blockquote><p id="gmail-4dd7">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.</p><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/368/1*s-iWo3BglAyieBkYZSQSIw.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="368" height="305"></p>Image from <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/critical-voices-in-critical-times-fanon-africa-decolonisation-g/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/critical-voices-in-critical-times-fanon-africa-decolonisation-g/</a><p id="gmail-a498">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.</p><blockquote><p id="gmail-912c">“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.”</p></blockquote><p id="gmail-ce4a">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.</p><blockquote><p id="gmail-addd">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.</p><p id="gmail-934a">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.”</p></blockquote><p id="e8c8">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.</p><p id="gmail-15c0">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.</p></div></div></div>
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