Across the US of A, Black Lives Matter protests are still being maintained against the violent policing systems that target Black people. Blacks are still being killed, maimed and imprisoned for demanding their rights to life and justice. In Trinidad, many protests have too erupted against police brutality and extrajudicial killings of Black people. Yearly Black neighbourhoods are under heavy surveillance and Black lives are snuffed out with wanton disregard.
The most recent police killings of three unarmed Black men, whose bodies were dumped at the back of a police van, would ignite the ire of a people who were fed up of the lack of police accountability in the island. Many took to the streets in protest and were quickly met with excessive police force. Live rounds were shot at protestors, killing Ornella Greaves, a pregnant woman who was standing in solidarity with her people. However, the police and the media continue to frame the protestors as gangsters. This framing strategy is aimed at ensuring that the killing, maiming and imprisonment of Black persons fighting for justice goes unchallenged, because many will see them as one a them thugs who ask for what they getting.
Those who are less learned than they would often portray themselves, still maintain that the Black Lives Matter is a North American movement that cannot be used in our context. The argument is made that having Black officers kill Black people cannot be considered racist. These people would do well to learn their intellectual limitations. The BLM resonates globally because our global systems are built on white supremacy and economic injustice that are the foundations that policing systems worldwide rest upon.
History 101 would reveal that all policing systems were birthed out of the white colonial desire to maim and control commoditized Black bodies. While policing agents in the Caribbean would change from white to Black/Brown as the years went on, the very same racial and class structures they were founded upon, would remain. The race of police officers does not matter, as the objective of policing systems remains unchanged. Statistics 101 would reveal that while non-Black POC are often victims of police violence, it is Black people who face the brunt of this brutality and who often end up dead. It is why many other races can protest peacefully and/or violently but are met with little resistance, but when Black people do the same, they are met with unhindered violence. Our systems of existence that continues to marginalize and oppress Black people are not broken, as many seem to think. They are operating precisely as they were intended. These systems which emerged out of colonial hetero-patriarchal capitalism have ensured that Black lives are valued less and are not offered accountability for the crimes against them – particularly if they come from poor and working class communities.
Many criticisms against the protests that are occurring in the USA and Trinidad are pushing the narrative that one cannot fight violence with violence. It must be noted that even during peaceful demonstrations, protestors were attacked with shots, pepper spray and beatings. The police escalate peaceful demonstrations all the time, as their intent is to show aggressive and dangerous thugs who must be contained. Police are not interested in peaceful resistance; they are interested in killing movements. It is highly disingenuous and tone deaf to tell a hurt and targeted people that they must continue to protest within the confines of laws that exists to target them. As the late Dr. Walter Rodney, whose death anniversary was elaborately mulled upon last month said, “No one but the working class can liberate the working class. Freedom is not a gift, it is something you take.”
On the point of our late historian however, it is interesting to see the continued way in which Rodney’s name and ethos is used to denigrate Black Guyanese activists and their commitment to Black liberation. If the only Black activist you can speak positively on is one that was killed by the State at 38, one might have to start reconsidering whether you really care about Black people or more about the performative optics of Black allyship. Were Rodney alive today, I believe a lot of people would also be calling him a racist for giving voice to the issues faced by Black people. The struggles, out of which the BLM movement was birthed, were the same imperial power and State violence struggles that Rodney resisted and would ultimately die from. Police violence is but one symptom of State violence and if it is one thing the State continues to prioritize is the suppression of leaders who challenge the State’s oppressive systems of existence. Rodney understood that while Black oppression and liberation were more clearly defined in the North, “Blacks in the poorest section of the colonial world” faced a level of existence that was comparable in its oppressive nature.
Police violence in Caribbean countries such as Trinidad, Guyana et al is centred on racist beliefs and stereotypes. The violence is systemic and the only way it shifts is through sustained systemic political, economic and judicial changes. There is need for a cultural shift that promotes the necessity of rooting out internalized anti-Black racism and how our systems of power continue to benefit from Black suppression. Recognizing one’s privilege in the areas of race, class and gender, is a first step in breaking out of a colonial mindset. Too many however, get stuck in performative addressal without doing the active work of challenging their own internalized biases and that of those around them. In removing oneself from performativity, one would find how much more capable they are to understand the struggles of those who are different from them and who live in different realities from them. It is in this understanding that true liberation work begins.