5 5 We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
—FRANTZ FANON
THE LARGER REASONS BEHIND THE KILLING of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Brown, and Tamir Rice, among others, seem to be missed by most commentators. The issues in question should not be limited to police misconduct and racist acts of police brutality, however deadly. What is also critical and needs to be explored is the growing use of systemic terror on a scale that summons to mind Hannah Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism. When fear and terror become the organizing principles of a society in which tyranny has been expanded by the despotism of an unaccountable market, violence becomes the only valid form of control. The system has not failed. As social critic Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out, it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, which is to punish those it considers dangerous or disposable—extending to more and more individuals and groups as power and wealth become concentrated in fewer hands. Arendt was right in arguing that “if lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.”1
In an age characterized by an utterly commodified and privatized culture, the delete button quickly erases all vestiges of memory and commitment. It has become easy for a society to remove itself from those sordid memories that reveal the systemic injustices and presence of state violence and terrorism. Not only do the dangerous memories of bodies being lynched, beaten, tortured, and murdered disappear in the fog of celebrity culture and the 24/7 entertainment/news cycle, but the historical flashpoints that once revealed the horrors of unaccountable power and acts of systemic barbarism are disconnected from any broader understanding of domination and vanish into a past that no longer has any connection to the present.2 The murder of Emmett Till; the killing of the four young black girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair, in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama; the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the killing by four officers of Amadou Diallo; the recent killings of countless young black children and men and women, coupled with the ongoing and egregious incarceration of black men in the United States—none of these is an isolated act or unexpected failure of a system. They are the deliberate expression and essence of the system, a system of authoritarianism in the United States that has intensified without apology since 9/11.
Rather than being viewed and swiftly forgotten as demented expressions of extremism, these incidents should be seen as part of a growing, systemic pattern of violence and terror that has emerged at a time when the politics and logic of disposability, terror, and expulsion have been normalized in American society. Indeed, violence has become the default position for solving all social problems, especially as they pertain to poor minorities of color. If police brutality is one highly visible expression of the politics of disposability, mass incarceration is its invisible underside. How else to explain that 77 percent of all inmates out of a population of 2.3 million are people of color? Or that “the United States incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did [and in] America the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid”?3
When ethics and any remnant of social responsibility and the public good are trampled beneath the hooves of the militarized finance state, there will be nothing left to sustain democratic values or justice. We live in an age of disposability—a historical period of increasing barbarism ruled by financial monsters and, as some studies show, psychopaths.4 They offer no political concessions and are compelled by a death-drive to terrorize those individuals and populations considered vulnerable and superfluous in a market economy, such as poor minority youth and immigrants, as well as those public spheres such as public and higher education that offer a space for the development of critical ideas, thoughtfulness, informed exchange, and modes of democratic solidarity. How else to explain the publication of a paper by an assistant professor at West Point calling for drone strikes against dissenting intellectuals, making clear what my colleague David L. Clark calls “the endgame of the war on thought.”5
Democratic values, commitments, integrity, and struggles are under siege in the age of neoliberal misery and disposability. The purpose of the terrorist state and its overlords is to crush any sense of dissent, civic morality, and political courage by instilling fear and squashing the very capacity for democratic beliefs, principles, and convictions. Under such conditions, power is not only made unaccountable, but divorced from any sense of moral and political conviction. Hence, the punishing state emerges as a way to govern all of social life. In this context, life is deemed disposable for most, but especially for poor minorities of color.
I think bell hooks is right when she states that “the point of lynching historically was not to kill individuals but to let everybody know: ‘This could happen to you.’” This is how a terrorist state controls people. It individualizes fear and insecurity and undercuts the formation of collective struggle. Fear of punishment—of being killed, tortured, or reduced to the mere level of survival—has become the government’s weapon of choice. The terrorist state manufactures ignorance and relies on induced isolation and privatization to depoliticize the population. Beliefs are reduced to the realm of the private, allowing the public realm to sink into the dark night of barbarism, terror, and lawlessness. Without the ability to translate private troubles into public issues, Americans face a crisis of individual and collective agency as well as a historical crisis.
As an endless expression of brutality and the ongoing elimination of any trace of equality and democratic values, the killing of innocent black children and adults by the police makes clear that Americans now inhabit a state of unapologetic lawlessness and extreme violence, one that both fills Hollywood screens with prurient entertainment and testifies to the presence of a growing culture of cruelty—and, unfortunately, provides confirmation of the ravaging violence that marks everyday life as well. Of course, this is not simply a domestic issue or one limited to the United States. As post-colonial theorist Arif Dirlik points out:
Life in general is being devalued for entire sections of populations across the globe. Let’s not forget the callousness with which people are being murdered by drones, U.S. troops, Israel, Han Chinese (Tibetans, Uighurs). The assassination of blacks by the police across the U.S. gives the impression of a vulnerable population being used as guinea pigs, to warn the rest of what to expect if we get out of line.6
Totalitarianism is on the rise across the globe, just as growing numbers of people who are vulnerable are being treated as disposable due to modes of governance wedded to militarism, unchecked market forces, corporate sovereignty, and updated forms of authoritarianism. Calls for minor reforms such as retraining the police, hiring more minorities in police forces, equipping police with body cameras,7 or making the grand jury system more transparent will not change a political and social system that has lost its connections to the ideals, values, and promises of a democracy.8 And calls for punishing the Wall Street crooks who caused the 2008 financial crisis will not reform the system that produced the financial debacle. In fact, pleas for reform have been more often made by apologists for the punishing state in the aftermath of highly publicized examples of police brutality, botched executions, the shootings of unarmed black teenagers, and numerous reports of torture, solitary confinement, and the ongoing criminalization of social problems.9 President Obama, for one, responded to the police violence and national uprisings by chastising blacks for looting and rioting. This is not merely another blame-the-victim narrative—it is an act of moral duplicity, though perhaps unsurprising from a president who makes George W. Bush look liberal when it comes to violating civil liberties and punishing whistleblowers while expanding the killing of civilians through the use of indiscriminate drone warfare. There is also former attorney general Eric Holder, who refused to prosecute Wall Street criminals, and yet assured the American public that the government would conduct independent investigations in the interests of the powerless. Credibility was more than stretched in this instance. Willful deception and lying is like a disease sweeping the country: authority figures say one thing, but clearly think and act in ways that belie their public statements.
More to the point, there is New York City Police Chief Bill Bratton, who vowed to retrain 22,000 police officers, but evaded questions about the police force using chokeholds on innocent victims. And then there is former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, appearing on Fox News Sunday, who suggested that some police reforms might be necessary, but then invoked the racist argument that blacks inhabit a culture of criminality. His comments are worth examining: “But I think just as much, if not more, responsibility is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community. It’s because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society.”10 As if this argument justifies the beatings, shootings, and killing of innocent individuals at the hands of the police. These calls for reforms are not only disingenuous coming from people entrenched in supporting the punishing state and its interests, they are invoked to hide the real causes of misery and violence in the United States—which arise from a society immersed in racism, economic inequality, and poverty, and increasingly shaped by the redistribution of wealth away from the public sector, the ongoing destruction of the welfare state, and a political system now controlled by financial elites.
The face of state terrorism has been captured in images of the police spraying tear gas into the crowds of peaceful protesters in New York City. It can be seen in reports of the police choking students, firing hundreds of rounds of bullets into the cars of civilians, and shooting an unarmed man in an apartment stairwell. It can also be seen in the comments of right-wing fundamentalists who try to incite moral panic over the presence of immigrants, protest movements, and any other form of resistance to the authoritarian state. How else to explain the comments made on national television news by Pat Lynch, the head of the New York City police union, who stated that Officer Daniel Pantaleo deserved to be acquitted by the grand jury in the death of Eric Garner because Garner was able to utter the words “I can’t breathe,” which allegedly indicated there was no chokehold applied to his neck, in spite of what the video displayed or what the medical examiner concluded? Even Orwell could not make this up. Lynch overlooked not only the evidence provided by the video of Garner’s brutal killing and the verdict of the medical examiner but also the fact that Officer Pantaleo had a history of racial misconduct in the police force. Pantaleo was not indicted, proving once again that “The first step to controlling the police is to get rid of the fantasy, once and for all, that the law is on our side. The law is firmly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civilians.”11
But, more important, the New York City police force as a whole has a long history of racist practices and violence, extending from an aggressive policy of racial profiling to bullying people in the name of the “broken windows theory,” which is a synonym for harassing young black men.12 It is only getting worse as fatal police encounters with black men reach epidemic proportions.13 Necropolitics—or the presence of sovereign power that exercises control even over one’s mortality—now drives the everyday existence of poor minorities. As race theorist David Theo Goldberg points out, how else to explain
the account Darren Wilson has given publicly about his sense of Michael Brown as a large, violent, probably armed young black man? Or the shooting with absolutely no warning of 12-year-old Tamir Rice for carrying a pellet gun in an otherwise empty snow-filled park? . . . Or the luckily unsuccessful shooting at a black father by mistaking for a weapon the 6-year-old daughter he was rushing to save from a severe asthma attack?14
It doesn’t end there, as nightmare videos appear like the one of a cop viciously beating a fifty-year-old, mentally ill black woman along a busy Los Angeles highway, and another report surfaces of a young black man being killed in a Walmart store for allegedly “brandishing” an air rifle, which he had been holding and leaning on as if it were a walking stick. What ties all of these events together is the fact that these acts of violence, corruption, and incompetence are not isolated practices, but add up to the new face of domestic terrorism in post-9/11 America.
Yet none of the alleged reformers situate the violence done to Tamir Rice, for instance, within a wider context of state violence. Rice’s death is never analyzed in the face of the charge that the Cleveland police force is a corrupt and lawless institution. No connection is made between how the police are trained and regulated and the evidence that the killing of a twelve-year-old black child was committed by a cop deemed incompetent by his previous department. Only recently has the militarization of local police forces become national news, but this has remained largely unassociated with the rise of a permanent warfare state and the militarization of the entire society. Little is learned from the ongoing evidence that black Americans are mostly terrified of the police, who act like an occupying force in their neighborhoods that consequently are treated like war zones. Social commentator Chase Madar is right in arguing that lawlessness is on the side of the police, and the law has become a license for them to kill with impunity. He writes:
Police demilitarization, the decriminalization of working-class people, new policing models: these are all projects that could work in Ferguson and thousands of other American cities. Although none of these large-scale ideas is explicitly race-conscious, they would most likely tighten the severe racial disparities in policing violence that exist all over the country, more so than pouring more money into racial sensitivity training for cops. These big-picture reforms are fundamentally political solutions that will require long-term effort, coalition politics that spans race, ethnicity and political affiliation—a challenge, but also a necessity. As police and prosecutors assume more and more power in the United States—regulating immigration (formerly a matter of administrative law), meting out school discipline, and other spheres of everyday life where criminal law was almost unknown even a generation ago—getting law enforcement on a tight leash is a national imperative. In the meantime, the constant stream of news reports of unarmed, mostly black and Latino civilians killed by police demands bigger, bolder approaches. They are the only available paths to getting the police under control.15
As this suggests, the question of police brutality has to be addressed far beyond the discourse of liberal reforms. But the questions being asked must also do more than focus solely on police violence. All of the cases mentioned above should raise questions about what kind of society produces such lawless institutions. In totalitarian regimes, the mass psychology of authoritarianism runs amok as indiscriminate acts of state violence are followed by the language of demonization, racism, cruelty, and mad utterances of hate. We can see this happening in the United States when black men are called dangerous criminals, drug addicts, or thugs—even by a black president in Baltimore. Or when Donald Trump in his presidential campaign announcement speech stated that most Mexican immigrants were rapists, criminals, and drug runners.16 This is a discourse of abusive certainty, unmoved even by an awareness of its ignorance, and determined to legitimate massive extremes of inequality, material deprivation, and human misery as it produces widening zones of violence and abandonment.
Lawlessness in the authoritarian state thrives on the purported existence of a “culture of criminality” much like the one invoked by Giuliani’s and Trump’s comments above. The culture of criminality thesis has taken on a new register in the American context as the punishing state increases the range of social behaviors it now criminalizes. If somebody is poor, unable to pay their debts, violates a trivial rule in school, is homeless, or viewed as the Other, they are prime targets for the criminal justice system. As the police become more militarized and the culture of cruelty becomes more pervasive, the senseless harassment of black men is followed by a spate of racist killings. Under such circumstances, the criminal justice system is not noted for its respect for justice but for how it has “become criminal in its lack of justice.”17 Unfortunately, there is not only a fabricated culture of criminality in the United States but a real one—it resides in the mega-banks, the ultra-rich hedge funds, and other apparatuses of the finance state. On this issue there is nothing but silence from alleged reformers.
The darkest side of the authoritarian state feeds and legitimizes not only state violence, the violation of civil liberties, a punishing state, and a culture of cruelty, but also a culture in which violence becomes the only mediating force available to address major social problems. America is awash in a culture of cruelty reinforced everyday by the mainstream media, popular culture, and an entertainment industry that trades in violence. Under such circumstances, a culture of violence erupts and punishes the innocent, the marginalized, and the demonized individuals who become victims of both hate crimes and state terrorism. The killings in South Carolina of nine black parishioners in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by a twenty-one-year-old white man, Dylann Roof, who claimed he wanted “to start a civil war,” once again register the lethal combination of racism, lawlessness, and a culture that sanitizes violence, rendering it so totally safe that the American public does not recognize it as violence anymore.
The institutional violence that now seeps into practically every sphere of American life has lost its ability to shock, move people to bear witness, and address the conditions that produce it. Violence is now both an American ideal celebrated in the production of war, soldiers, and the highly publicized workings of the surveillance state. Most important, it fuels an entertainment and news industry that uses violence as a way to produce pleasure, indulge voyeurism, and mobilize humanity’s darkest instincts. At the same time, American culture is saturated in myriad forms of material and symbolic violence that weaken public values while contributing to a hardening of the culture and a self-righteous coldness that takes delight in the suffering of others.
Under such circumstances, politics becomes corrupt and supports both the ideological conditions that sanction racist violence and the militarized institutional culture that celebrates rather than scorns such brutality. Should anyone be surprised by these senseless killings in South Carolina where the Confederate battle flag, the flag of white supremacy, “the flag of Dylann Roof—[flew until recently] on the Capitol grounds in Columbia,”18 and where the roads are named after Confederate generals, and where hate crimes are not reported? South Carolina is only the most obvious example of a racist legacy that refuses to die throughout the United States.
This deep-seated legacy has its political apologists as can be seen in the initial unwillingness of conservatives such as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and others to call for the removal of a flag on the grounds of the state capitol “that stands for slavery, racism, and treason.”19 As former New York Times columnist Frank Rich points out, this type of moral cowardice is symptomatic of a party that not only refuses to stand up to racism and the unreconstructed bigots that are part of the party’s base, but also registers the deep-seated racism that is fundamental to the party and its embrace of a species of racial hatred endemic to totalitarian politics in general:
Not even the slaughter of nine people in a church could stir the consciences of the Republican presidential contenders. They came out against the flag only after the previously hedging Governor Haley came around. No doubt she spent a long weekend calculating how failing to do so would inflict economic retribution on her state much as the “religious liberty” law had threatened to bring corporate and convention boycotts to Indiana. Before Haley finally spoke up on Monday, the only major Republican figure to unequivocally call for the flag’s banishment was Mitt Romney, who isn’t facing GOP primary voters in 2016. After Haley joined him, we were treated to the embarrassing spectacle of Bush, Rubio, and Walker—by most reckonings, the GOP’s three leading candidates—all asserting that they had agreed with Haley all along. This combination of disingenuousness and spinelessness on a no-brainer issue should disqualify all of them from the White House.20
While the controversy over the Confederate flag is not unimportant given the violent history and racist propaganda to which it points—all a matter of moral witnessing and the reclaiming of public memory—the debate ultimately is a diversion and buries the burning issue of an unregulated gun culture and its murderous consequences, the attempts to turn back voting rights, the rise of the racist mass incarceration state, the paramilitarization of the police, the rise of the surveillance state, the proliferation of homicidal police violence, and the increasing impoverishment of black communities. Taking down the flag in South Carolina and other states is not a sign of racial progress if these issues do not figure prominently in any debate about the proliferation of violence and racism in American society.
Violence has become like an out-of-control firestorm rampaging unchecked through American society. And it will continue until a broken and corrupt political, cultural, and market-driven system, now controlled largely by ideological, educational, economic, and religious fundamentalists, can be broken. Until then the bloodshed will continue, along with the spectacle of violence which will fill America’s screen culture, and the militarization of American society will continue. Neither Orwell nor Huxley could have imagined such a violent dystopian society.
What drives the increasing brutalization and killing of innocent people in the United States is a form of terrorism untethered from democratic oversight or any sense of social responsibility, guilt, and morality. This is a form of state violence and domestic terrorism fed by a culture obsessed with guns, the criminalization of poverty, the militarization of the lives of low-income and poor minorities, and the misery spawned by neoliberal slash-and-burn policies aimed mainly at the poor and the welfare state. It is also fueled by a racism that refuses to be acknowledged in an alleged post-racial society in which the election of an African American president serves to wipe any acknowledgment of either the legacy of racism or its persistent and poisonous influence on America society. Calls for reform of one or more parts of the system do not challenge the totalitarian politics and financial forces that rule American society; they simply give the system a veil of legitimacy suggesting it can be fixed. It can’t be fixed. This is not to suggest that it is better for cops to carry military-grade weapons rather than carry cameras, or that there is no point in creating new policing models. But these are short-term solutions and do not address the larger structural violence and racism built into the neoliberal financial state. It is a death-dealing system ruled by political and moral zombies, and it has to be transformed through the development of nonviolent social movements that can imagine a democracy that is real, substantive, and radical in its calls for justice, equality, and freedom. The dark possibilities of our times are everywhere.
The killing of Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose, and others serve as flashpoints that have mobilized people all over the country. Some people, especially black youth, are beginning to realize that the ongoing killing of black people is attributable not only to a persistent racism but also to the existence of the militarized finance state—a police and punishing state that operates as the repressive apparatuses of the financial elite. The demonstrations must continue full force, and, as a first step, criminal charges must be brought against rogue cops and lawless police departments that believe it is permissible for them to engage in racist repression and brutalize black neighborhoods by treating them as war zones.
In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence has morphed into the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial, or is shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security, or self-defense. State violence fueled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated and increasingly ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labeled as a form of domestic terrorism.21 Terrorism, torture, and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words now apply to democracy itself, which has lost the civic oxygen that gives it life and is on its death bed. America has become a place where democracy cannot breathe.
The mainstream press seems especially interested in such stories when the victims can be viewed as assailants, as in the case of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, but are less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and black culture cannot be invoked. When the victims of police violence cannot be tarred with labels such as super-predators or thugs,22 as in the case of Tamir Rice, who was only twelve when shot to death by a policeman—who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as unstable—demonizing discourse becomes useless and such acts of state terrorism simply fade out of view.
Why is it that there was almost no public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young black man who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island and spent more than a thousand days, two years, in solitary confinement, waiting for a trial that never happened? Shortly after being released he committed suicide.23 Would this have happened if he were white, middle-class, and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him different than the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison? What has the United States become in the age of domestic terrorism?
Not surprisingly, the discourse of terrorism once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized, as historian Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, is that the killing of unarmed African Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance to a war against black youth that is being waged on American soil.24 Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as a short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance is beginning with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Millennial Activists United, We Charge Genocide, and other groups.25
Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools, or any other areas in which the police can be found. A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever-increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence.26 More and more people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed, and violated by the police and other security forces because they are poor, vulnerable, viewed as disposable, or simply are marginalized by being black, brown, young, and poor.27 Let’s hope this scourge of domestic terrorism, especially aimed at poor black youth, signals the further development of a civil rights movement that confronts the horrors of the authoritarian state.
Under such circumstances, the reinvention of racist ideologies, institutions, and language under the new authoritarianism must be seen as part of a larger, systemic project of disposability, harassment, and expulsion. This project is supported in the United States by a culture that increasingly treats minority groups as potential “enemy combatants”28—a premise that lays the moral foundation for the brutalizing treatment, and in some cases killing, of young black men and others with impunity. A fundamental transformation of this culture of cruelty will only begin when political formations at every level of government dismantle the barbarous system run by financial looters and backed up by rogue paramilitary forces. The political left and other progressives need a cause that speaks to multiple instances of oppression, and that cause is the promise and struggle for a radical democracy. Let’s hope the endless array of racist harassment, shootings, and killings of innocent and unarmed African Americans by right-wing vigilantes, a militarized police force, and paramilitary security forces propel the beginning of a political and social movement to fight what has become a dark and gruesome form of governance in the United States.