An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

We should be outraged but never be surprised. Black and Indigenous
peoples will never get justice in the US because it is a police state. The
democratic project has been designed to control them/us. You can’t have
justice in a state built on enslavement and the dispossession of Indigenous
land until something new emerges. One of the many challenges is that we
often can’t see beyond a course of action as simple as say voting. Voting is
important but so is changing how elections are financed. We need a political
imagination beyond what we can’t seem to be able to get.
On June 1, 2020, I tuned into the ESPN show First Take, anchored by
Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman. While I don’t usually enjoy Stephen
A.’s yelling and sports takes, I do like to see him and Max go back and
forth. But on this day, I was concerned about how they would discuss the
ongoing rebellions happening throughout US cities. Stephen A., who I
consider an ideological liberal at best and only slightly left of being a black
conservative—“stay off the weeeeed” comes to mind—came with the fire. I
told my homie, “He sound like Malcolm X.”
While I enjoyed the discussion between the hosts and their guests, what I
was really struck by was some of the language exhibited in the signs in
ESPN’s protest footage. Because protest signs and other visuals are
carefully chosen by the media for spectacle, one of them stood out to me. It
had the hashtag #holdthepoliceaccountable, which got me thinking about
other phrases and ideological suggestions for how we might get free: “End
police brutality”; “We need police reform”; “We need a community review
board”; “We need police who are a part of our community”; “Defund the
police.”
Pundits, including CNN’s Don Lemon and Black athletes, while offering
some critical commentary, also suggest we need white athletes to speak up
more. I want us to think about some of these asks. Do we really need more
white voices? If history has taught us anything, they almost all refuse to go
into the heart of the beast of racism: in their own families and with their
friends. White terrorists and supremacists aren’t part of some random group
of lone radicals; they are the friends and family of our white colleagues,
neighbors, friends, and people who provide services on our behalf.
Additionally, if you’re Black, Indigenous, and Latinx, and you have a
family member in the police, you have to deal with an uneasy and
complicated choice between your love for your family and your belief in
revolutionary justice—to quote N.W.A, it’s a matter of Black police, and