Black Rage and The Police State

Free the guys from the West End to the West Bank.

Every police officer in America who decides to put on that thin blue uniform is not a human being and should be treated as such. If you just let out a gasp or were taken aback by this opening statement then let me explain my reasoning behind this. When Tamir Rice was murdered on November 22, 2014, it forever changed how I viewed the world. I was 10 years old at the time and while I had some knowledge of the white supremacist society we live in through learning about the confederate past and present of Stone Mountain, I was unaware of the police state that we live under. That was until I had a rude awakening when I saw the video of  Timothy Loehmann shooting Tamir Rice and claiming that he shot a full-grown African American adult male even though Tamir Rice was 12 years old. Now a lot of things I’ve seen and have personally been through in my 20 years of life have changed me for the better and have changed me for the worse. Seeing that video at 10 years old was the latter. It was genuinely the first time I realized that no matter what age I am, the police and society as a whole won’t only see me as a brute black male, but they won’t even see my humanity. They don’t think of black people as human beings.

Fear is the name of that one Kendrick Lamar song and it’s also defined by Merriam-Webster as “an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger”. This is what I felt every time a DeKalb PD car passed by me or when I saw GSP cars hiding in the cut on the highway. Just like damn near every black family, we didn’t view the police in a good light because of past and present experiences. My grandpa grew up in the Jim Crow south in Mississippi and had to go through sharecropping and routine police brutality from a young age. It didn’t help that when he moved to Stone Mountain, he saw the same people who were in KKK robes patrolling the areas in cop cars the next morning. When I did an oral history recording with him in the fall 2023 semester I talked to him about draft dodging in the Vietnam War and he told me straight up that this was never a reality for him and the boys in his town cause the cops had no problem taking them from their homes and immediately putting them in jail. So, for him, as a teenager, his only options were to go fight in a war that he knew nothing about or do forced prison labor in a Mississippi jail. I can’t blame him for choosing the first option but fear was the driving factor here and in this context, fear of the police state traumatized him for life. Even if we go beyond the south and into the north I can tell another story about my father’s time as a college student in Minnesota. He was driving to church and was pulled over at gunpoint by two police officers because he “fit the description” of someone who committed a robbery that week. He obviously wasn’t the guy that they were looking for and after forcefully pulling him out of the car, handcuffing him, and putting him in the back of their car he was let go and that was it. This is why the death of George Floyd was heartbreaking but not surprising to me and especially not to my dad, but it was the fear that got to him when he realized that what happened to George Floyd could’ve easily happened to him just almost 3 decades earlier. It was the fear my mom experienced as she saw her friendly neighborhood police officers in Oklahoma turn instantly into anti-black pigs during the crack era. It was fear that made my parents have “the talk” with me as I watched news footage of black people getting murdered by the police day after day, and I’m seeing the rise of the black lives matter movement in real-time. Realizing that we lived in a police state not only in Georgia but across America made me fear the safety of not only my friends, my neighbors, and my community, but it made me fearful of myself and what could happen to me in a police encounter, if I happened to find myself in one. As a kid, this fear embedded itself within my mind for a long time, but as I got older, and as I saw that nothing was changing with our current police system this fear turned into something new, this fear turned into…

Rage is the name of that one Rico Nasty song and it’s also defined by Merriam-Webster as “an intense feeling” or “a violent and uncontrolled anger”. When I was 15 years old this fear turned into rage as I started to think what would happen if I was murdered in a police encounter. Would they be able to send me to DeKalb Medical or Grady in enough time? Would the officer who killed me get off on paid leave? Would people outside my family even care? Would they question if I was resisting? Question if I was armed? Question if the officer thought that the books in my bag were somehow a weapon and that’s why they shot? How would my family even grieve with the situation? Would my life amount to a settlement case and nothing more? Would my death change anything for the better when it comes to the police? All these questions and I still have no concrete answers for them but I do know that with every black person I saw die at the hands of the police, with every white supremacist that shot up a black church, a supermarket, a Dollar General, and with the current construction of a Cop City in DeKalb County that came as a result of conversations surrounding George Floyd not being able to breathe because of the knee that was on his neck for 9 minutes. I finally realized that my questions didn’t matter and that the only way to abolish our police system is to resist against it through any means necessary. It was rage that fueled me back then and it’s rage that fuels me now as I’m hyper-aware of the police state that we live in, more than ever. I see stories from Mainline about “Police harassing South Atlanta residents living near the Cop City Site” those APD pigs want to build. I see cop cars hiding in bushes and behind buildings with zip ties on their windshields as I ride on a lime scooter in the West End. I see the same fucking bullshit from when I was a child as 62-year-old Johnny Hollman is murdered by Kiran Kimbrough over a damn traffic stop and I see his life reduced to a settlement case instead of actual systemic change. So yes, rage takes over me when I see all these situations occur but can you blame me? If you had ANY shred of humanity you would feel the same as me. You would feel the same rage bubbling inside you and would want to see these pigs in uniforms experience the worst in life. Write this off as reactionary all you want to, but I can’t and won’t think any other way about them after what I’ve seen and how they’ve affected my community and the people closest to me. It is truly unforgivable and it’s why I use black rage and black resistance as a framework for police abolition.

Black rage and black resistance are quite literally why I exist right now. I’m not one of those black millennial dickheads that say “I’m not my ancestors” because if it weren’t for my ancestors resisting nonviolently AND violently I wouldn’t be here and that goes for every black person worldwide. So, it’s necessary that we follow in their footsteps while improving upon their work as our society changes. There’s no reason why black people should become martyrs simply because of the color of their skin and even though our ruling class has accepted that this is normal, we shouldn’t accept this as such. Throughout the world, we’ve seen that mass movements are the only way we can bring about actual systemic change, and while we might not see immediate results we have to remember that our resistance against the police state is for the future. I want to create a future where black kids don’t have this fear of dying in police encounters, I want to create a future where black kids don’t think that they have to adhere to respectability politics for survival, and I most certainly want to create a future where black kids are viewed as real/multi-dimensional human beings. So, my rage and how it fuels me isn’t a bad thing, but rather it keeps me grounded and makes me yearn for a better future. What I do with this rage makes me fight against Cop City, negro imperialists’, homophobia, transphobia, misogynoir, and it makes me directly impact my community throughout Atlanta in beneficial ways as I call for the liberation of all oppressed peoples worldwide. So, I call on you to use your black rage (or if you’re not black) your general rage through existing in a police state to fight against it in any way that you can. If you don’t, then our government locally and nationally will let these pigs run wild and we know what that ultimately leads to. As always free the Congo, free Sudan, free Haiti, free the guys from the West End to the West Bank, and free all the people fighting in national liberation struggles as we remember the folks that we’ve lost and fight in their names for a new world order.

Works Cited Page

“Fear.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fear. Accessed 15 May. 2024.

“Rage.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rage. Accessed 15 May. 2024.

Mainline Staff. “Police Escalate Harassment of South Atlanta Residents Living Near “Cop City” Construction Site”. Web. 14 May. 2024. https://www.mainlinezine.com/police-escalate-harassment-south-atlanta-cop-city-site/