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Because ‘blackness’ and ‘criminality’ are wedded in the US lexicon
The same formative relation of structural violence that maintained slavery remained—upheld explicitly by the police (former slave catchers) and white supremacy generally—hence preserving the equation that Black equals socially dead.
Just as wanton violence was a constituent element of slavery, so it is to Blackness. Given the ongoing accumulation of Black death at the hands of the police—even despite increased visibility in recent years—it becomes apparent that a Black person on the street today faces open vulnerability to violence just as the slave did on the plantation.
That there has recently been such an increase in media coverage and yet little decrease in murder reveals the ease with which anti-Black violence can be ignored by white society; at the same time this reveals that when one is Black one needn’t do anything to be targeted, as Blackness itself is criminalized
Thinking about this incident, it appears that the Black cop seamlessly moves from being a force of structural white supremacy (as a uniformed cop) to being shot just for being Black. To help make sense of this, it is necessary to understand that anti-Blackness can emerge at any moment with the existence of Blackness.
Anti-Blackness does not need any particular behavior to respond to; it is not a causal reaction. All that anti-Blackness needs to violently surface is the presence of Blackness; nothing needs to “happen.”
The following introduction—wh
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