Sublime

From this point of view, Rodney King’s protective reflexes, the disorderly movements by which he struggled to stay alive (he flaps his arms, staggers, tries to get up, stands on his knees) were described as being under his “total control” and as evidence of “dangerous intent,” as if violence were the sole voluntary action possible for a Black body,

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist natio

Seemingly contradictory calls to lock up and to save Black people dueled in legislatures around the country but also in the minds of Americans. Black leaders joined with Republicans from Nixon to Reagan, and with Democrats from Johnson to Bill Clinton, in calling for and largely receiving more police officers, tougher and mandatory sentencing, and

from the unrestrained elements within their own group. The result has been a tendency to be their own protectors, to bulwark themselves against careless and deliberate aggression. The Negro has felt, with some justification, that the peace officer of the community provides no defense against the offending or offensive white man; and for an entirely

a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White. I guess…

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the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it. Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.