Gratuitous Violence Against Black Flesh... By Kelson Maynard

 

In the Euro-centric hegemonically controlled world system of white supremacy Africans and their descendants in diaspora are not accorded the status of human beings.  Freedom is not a human right, it is white privilege.  Black people are used as structural instruments for the execution of White peoples’ fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.  The enslavement of African people by White people developed into a relationally dynamic system of white supremacy enforced through violence.  The physical and social violence perpetuated against Black people is not based on discrimination.  Rather, white racial violence against Black people serves as a sort of health tonic for White people’s maintenance of white supremacy.

In the ideological system of white supremacy and the social order and process that it engenders violence against Black people is the law, not the result of law enforcement as is often assumed.  This is the foundation upon which the social structure of the United States of America is built.  Violence against Native Americans secured the land for the establishment of the colonial order for the benefit of Europeans and their descendants.  Violence against Black people in general secured the labor system that established the economic system.  Violence against Black women in particular secured the patriarchal social order.

The resources of this violent white supremacist structure is deployed to support the violent whims of those who consciously or unconsciously adhere to the ideology of white supremacy.  The narrative justification/rationale for this violence – physical and social – is almost always vacuous.  White supremacy’s default to violence cannot be rationally explained.  The principal reason for such violence is based on some notion of an inappropriate act or a transgression of social norms relevant to the maintenance/perpetuation of white supremacy. To meet

To shield itself from the horror of this irrational anti-Black violence, some spurious narrative explanation must be concocted.  In the ante-bellum period the narrative revolved around the enslaved inability/unwillingness to meet the labor demands of the plantation economy: the enslaved did not harvest the required quota of tobacco, cotton, or some other agricultural produce; escape/running away; the lack of maintenance of the master slave/ White Black social etiquette; the enslaved insistence of the integrity of their bodily autonomy.  In the post-bellum period and today these same tropes apply: defiance of racial capitalism or the utilization of the tools of capitalism for individual and group progress; challenging the social norms of white supremacy; insistence of bodily autonomy.

Gratuitous anti-Black violence is embedded within the foundational structure of the United States of America.  Violence against Black people is the law.  It secures the system of white supremacy.