On Ten Years

how the murder of Michael Brown radicalized me and a nation

Michael Brown at his graduation <3

The first time I moved to the United States, now almost fifteen years ago, I did not understand the totality of anti-Black racism.

Of course, I knew it existed, I knew how violent and rife it was, as an Australian I even understood how there were parallels between the way Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are policed, and surveilled, like Black Americans, but I didn’t get how it is this, anti-Black racism that ruptures every crevice and space in the U.S, marking invisible lines that were drawn hundreds of years ago, delineating what is deemed “good” (code: white) and what is not. Through time and observation, I began to realize the totality of evil that this country has spawned, through a lecturing of its own supremacy, and how through this legacy it curses and traumatizes everything it touches. And it remains in denial of its true nature. What I also began to understand, very quickly, as a 19-year-old, was how unwillingly most white people were (and are) to do anything to change this.

Like redlining (a discriminatory practice where financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities) across neighborhoods to distinguish racial lines, I recently found out that New York City has a 9/11 Compensation Fund… ostensibly to support all victims of 9/11. I didn’t know that many survivors are now terminally ill, many from cancer, suffering from the multiple traumas of the day and its aftermath. Yet… I recently was told that a friend of a friend who has cancer, who was raised in NYC, and survived 9/11, is not able to apply for this fund because the fund itself has limitations from neighborhood to neighborhood, block to block… can you take a wild guess how these blocks are organized? Yeah, by class and racial lines.

This is the United States of America - where not all people are equal or free.

When I moved here, I thought that I was an ally because I was a radicalized person of color and I assumed this made me worthy of trust.

It took me a while to understand that it doesn’t and it didn’t.

Trust is built, it’s shown through time.

It was not until Michael Brown’s murder that I realized, really understood in my body, that most likely, this would never happen to me. South Asian Muslim bodies may be surveilled, hated, and invisibilized in their own ways, but I began to realize that my body would never face state violence like this. It was then that I also realized I had to dedicate my life to Black liberation, to liberation, and that I had to put my body, my safety, and my livelihood on the line. There was no other way.

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Most of the time I don’t listen to what white people say to me, I watch how they act.

I don’t care if you think you’re an ally, how are you gonna treat a Black person or a person of color when nobody is watching, when there is nothing to socially gain from your allyship? How do you talk about Black people or people of color to your other white friends? To your family? What feelings do you really harbor in your soul? I think these are important questions that one has to self-interrogate all the time, because I believe we live in an anti-Black, racial capitalist world, so we all have to actually confront ourselves to ask these difficult questions.

It’s also important to ask: how do we participate in violence?

There’s a clear level of disassociation going on and I find it interesting that so many white people are just fully disengaged, like Homer Simpson levels lalalala with fingers in the ears, pretending as if they’re not seeing what many of us are seeing. Fascism is already here, banging pots and pans on the streets of Dublin. Being willfully ignorant won’t get you anywhere.

Even with white people I’ve been organizing with in the last several months I sometimes wonder what they’re willing to lose. Like really. If you’re not asking yourself what you are willing to lose then you’re not doing it right… but so many people in the West have never really had to lose anything. Maybe our parents did, but what have we? We live within our discrepancies, I include myself in this, our hypocrisies for a wanting a better world that we do nothing to really sacrifice for.

Like, is not buying an Apple Macbook Air enough to stop the genocide in Congo? Like… let’s be real. I think we should do this, one hundred per cent, but what I’m saying this in itself is not enough. As June Jordan reminds us, we must become a menace to our enemies. This means organizing. This means real action.

The Global North spends more emissions than the Global South combined but the latter are the ones that continue to pay the price. They then also get beat up on the streets by proud boys who say “Go back to your own country” when the country they come from was bombed by the country they now live in.

I feel like so many people in the west have just accepted this as “the way things are” which feels almost childishly violent as if this system isn’t only a few hundred years old, it’s such a ridiculous form of gaslighting. Just say you’re OK with 40,000 Congolese children going into mines every day. Just say you don’t give a fucking shit.

It’s the no backbone for me, while posturing all kinds of niceties without real integration of the knowledge of Black radicalism or liberation that so many white people seem to espouse! You’re telling me after ten months of seeing twenty thousand children being murdered in Gaza the only thing you can think of is the desire to protect your own children's lives, but fail to hold the reality that you can do both? That, in fact, if you care about your child… it might make sense to care about other children not dying from a genocide that your country is funding. The moral obliquity of whiteness really needs to be challenged and written about. Like… what is going on here my guy?

I taught my first grief class a few months ago and in week two, the week of anger, one of my students bravely shared that they were angry at white people, especially in a container of grief when by and large it is whiteness that is causing everything violent around the world to perpetuate, to continue. This is also while, by and large, most white people continue to do……. nothing. Strangely, it was relieving to hear the truth spoken from someone else. To know, as many non-white people might be feeling, that it’s extremely hard to not feel complete rage at whiteness sometimes, and if you’re an ally, then you should understand that.

Similar sentiments were shared to me by my best friend just a few days ago, and a student in the Decolonization & Radical Imagination webinar Yumi and I taught last week also said the same thing. Many folks are feeling enraged by whiteness right now.

So what’s the anecdote to this, you might ask?

For me, it’s been seeing white people do the work silently. The people who do the work regardless, who don’t do it to say they’re doing it. I admire conviction and I admire commitment. As Grace Lee Boggs once accurately described, “Organization Means Commitment.” I like to see white people move through the discomfort of being distrusted but who continue to make those connections, those efforts. I admire people who know it’s nothing personal. Yet so often we have to make space for white people to do this work and it’s exhausting. It’s tiring on days like this. On days when you remember how a Black teenager was murdered by a white police officer, in cold blood, and there was an ENTIRE uprising… and nothing happened. Nothing changed.

What if you did the work of unlearning racism, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia from every crevice of your body, ringing whiteness (and supremacy) out to dry, leaving not a speck of it… what if you just devoted your life to doing this work without having to be validated? Would you still do it even if nobody patted you on the back? Even if nobody witnessed you?

The anecdote is action, it’s commitment. It’s knowing trust is earned.

Knowing this, would the work, this repair, still be worth it?

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I have never been able to stop thinking about Michael’s last few moments.

How they left him on the pavement for hours, in the sun, his body soaked in blood.

Do you think about that?

He was 18 years old.

I think about how the community must have felt, knowing his dead body was lying there for hours, rotting in the sun. I remember how I felt ten years ago following this information… I felt rage. I just felt pure fucking rage. Today, I still feel the same way.

A Ferguson local, Mrs Garrison, said in an interview with NPR: “You did feel a certain way. I didn’t know what the real circumstances were for him to be laying out there all that time.” Another Ferguson resident, Aliyah Courtney, who was just 14 when Michael was murdered, said. “Black people are outraged about what happened. Things like that shouldn’t happen and it’s still happening,”

The Ferguson riots changed me because they showed me how much I had been resting on my laurels. It made me realize how weak I had been, how if I wanted to be about liberation I better say it, and believe it, with my whole fucking chest.

Ten years ago, my blood boiled at the injustice we were being forced to witness as we were forced to dehumanize a teenager’s life like that.

How much Black death at the hands of the police will be enough to abolish the police?

How many more Black people need to be executed by police officers for us to make sure this never, ever happens again?

I know a lot has changed in ten years but honestly not enough.

Sonya Massey was murdered a month ago. A MONTH AGO!!! By a white police officer who was also afraid that the unarmed person in front of him was more threatening than him, a trained officer with a gun.

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.

White supremacy is a disease that must be plucked out, identified… and healed.

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I say all this because we require more militancy, focus and resolve as a people who might believe in liberation principles and praxis.

As I said last week, voting for Kamala Harris categorically will not help us liberate. Sadly. I’m also sad about this! But she is showing you she doesn’t care what you think or how you feel, she will girlboss her way through this and strengthen our borders with more police!!! So many US Americans think anything is better than Trump when just like Marie Le Pen knocking on France’s door… fascism is here babes. It’s alive and well. Every policy Harris has introduced (even her own VP… ) is showing us that she does not care for the people’s interests. This is liberalism. And what is liberalism? Liberalism is obsessed with a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise - without considering that these are not human rights. Human rights are simple: access to food, access to shelter, clean water, free education. The fact that all of this is being privatized while the U.S. is being told that they’re the beacon of democracy with two war criminals on the ballot… mate, it’s not looking great for this society. It’s almost as if, the U.S. doesn’t care about human rights… certainly not about the right of not getting shot by the police.

White people have created a system that allows them to say they want liberal values but what they won’t acknowledge is that in order for them to have such values they need to sacrifice the working class and the Global South and everyone they deem unworthy for the life of goodness that they believe only they deserve. Just this week I saw that there are certain groups, like the ADL, that are trying to make the word “Zionist” its own protected class. Just like white supremacists and the Nazis and the KKK did before them…

The fascist marches that happened all across Europe this weekend show how profoundly dark-hearted so many white people are, but also how the right has weaponized racism as a way to channel the legitimate anger at the state towards the immigrants instead - most of whom have fled their homes because these countries bombed, destabilized and started a coup in them… like do you get this is the legacy of the US, Israel and the West? Palestine, Congo, Sudan… The West goes in with its weapons and artillery, NGOS, WTO, and whatever bullshit liberalism crap it wants to spew to extract resources and pay off militia groups to rape and kill everyone… to permanently traumatize them so they never liberate… yeah, who do you think creates this chaos? Do you think this was happening before Europe colonized half the world?

This is the colonial project.

This is what needs to end and it’s connected to the collapse of the empire, as in the mightiest empire in the world — not because of its strength, but because of its immorality.

If Kamala wins it will be the same. If Trump wins it will be the same.

They only have one goal. To bring the apocalypse. Read last week’s newsletter for more information.

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So like what’s next?

People keep asking me this and I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

I think starting with the self starts with being accountable to your community about who you are, your values, and what you want to change. Transparency is everything these days. I think that’s another anecdote in a world that’s been filled with lies about people’s inferiority. What if we were all equal, truly? Wouldn’t that mean we would have to consider that as a reality?

I have hope, despite this desperate charade of fascism, as the dominant group continues to lose its grip on a people who no longer want to be compromised by the whims of whiteness.

Questions worth asking:

What am I willing to lose?

Here’s the thing, you might lose white supremacy, but you’ll gain a community of allies, of people devoted to the radical mission of liberation, to the radical work of implementing real human rights into worlds that want to decay us with tales about supremacy. But, what would it mean if you were equal to everyone in the world?

What would it mean for you to live more equally, and fairly?

Strangely, I don’t despair. I hope. Hope prevails because I understand the stars. Maybe that’s why. We are in the process of a deep evolutionary time. I don’t know if we will survive but I do know we have the capacity to; to change, to transform. I don’t think our end has to be the Don’t Look Up Hollywood propaganda of it all… what if we died more responsibly? What if we died more honestly? If our planet is about to go up in flames… may we learn to find humility in ourselves and find a good death.

To be human is to die. But everyone deserves a good death. An honorable death. A death with dignity. Many people don’t get it, and many of these people are Black, Indigenous and other people of color whose lands and cultures have bled for the sake of whiteness. What will it take to end this cycle?

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I leave you with the words that the Executive Director of Adalah Justice Project and St. Louis community member, Sandra Tamari, wrote today for the ten-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.

“Ferguson taught us that the fight for justice is a collective responsibility. Ferguson taught us that to struggle for a free Palestine also means to struggle to end the construction of Cop City. Ferguson taught us that no one is free until everyone is free.”

Ferguson taught me these things too. In the legacy of Ferguson, I remember the rage and I remember Michael Brown’s life today.

May you rest in power and peace, angel.

May we all be free. Onwards to Revolution.

Ameen <3