violence

Even now, even here, even under blow and gun we resist. Still he resisted when they stopped him without cause. Still, he resisted when they snatched him from his dog.…

Image via ammoland.com (titled “America’s Gun Culture, We Are America”) 10 shots ran through the body of Alva Braziel because gun rights don’t apply to black and blackened bodies in…

The work is a tour de force if not for the sheer breadth of content, then for the refusal of its sweeping verse to comfort when comfort is not on the menu for the subjects at hand. It is more than unflinching—it unsettles, it bites, it scars, it lingers, and it loves, simultaneously in a language perfected by, common and accessible to those who have perfected the art of living while Black, BlaQueer or Queer….”

“and the Orisha got me covered
while you scheming to planning
shoot up the movie theater and shoot up a church
just when the wounds was healing its beginning to hurt
shoot at a black man and shoot up a club
when you niggaz gone take the blinders off
enough is enough”

Nothing terrible happens to you because of your race. No racial-violence, bigotry, oppression and fuckery is a result of someone else’s–be it system, culture, state, bae or boss–racial/power anxiety and need…

The data shows that black lives matter in the world of policing, we are its traditional focus, its funding bonanza, the propertied threat that must be managed, tamed, terrorized and exterminated. Perhaps, the question isn’t about the value of black lives, but the costs of anti-black violence? What if there were uniform, enforced and grave consequences to the negatively affecting the quality of black lives? Employing imaginative reconstruction, wonder with me, what the world might be like if police and prosecutors were retooled to serve and protect black people, black lives, black property and black interests?