The most befitting thing I can say on this day comes from James Baldwin. “To be black and conscious in America is to live in a constant state of rage.”
…Even the Left in the US engages in other forms of innocence frames outside of prison reform contexts, that still reference and reduce Blacks to criminality. Often the anti-war, or anti-globalization movements, including the current mobilizations on Wall Street explain acts of police violence or arrests as “just for exercising our right to protest.” These statements are an exercise in bad faith―they suggest that the police have some legitimate reasons for arrests, or that white bodies simply protesting the seat of American capital are innocents, not criminal. What would it mean to embrace criminality, as opposed to trying to rhetorically avoid it by notions of innocence or exercising “rights?”
Kenyon Farrow Remarks at the Memorial for Troy Davis in NYC, October 1, 2011
(via alphonsevanworden)
