On Tuesday, 20 April, this year, a jury in Minneapolis, Minnesota found police officer Dereck Chauvin guilty of murdering 45-year-old <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/george-floyd">George Floyd</a>. Minutes after the verdict was delivered, police in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. Floyd and Bryant were two human beings with full, complex lives enriched with many different kinds of relationships, struggles and triumphs. And they are now two more names in a long list of Black people killed by police and self-deputised law enforcers in a centuries-long history of anti-Black violence that demands nothing short of prison-industrial complex (PIC) abolition.
This essay is an introduction and an invitation. It is broadly written for people who witness the routine violence of the state against Black, Indigenous and other people of colour, trans and gender non-conforming people, disabled people and the poor (groups that often overlap), and who ache for a different way of doing things. It is more specifically written for people who are deeply disturbed by the converging events of 20 April, who are curious about slogans like “defund the police” and words like “abolition” and wonder, “Is justice possible if even when it seems like a victory is delivered, our reality immediately reminds us that a conviction is not enough?”
This is an essay on abolition, accountability and justice. Its central claim is that justice is not an event. That is, justice is not something that happens at a specific moment and it is certainly not something that happens in response after the fact of harm. Justice is collective improvisation grounded in unending critical, communal reflection and relationship-building. Justice is safety, not security. The two events of 20 April together articulate and necessitate our understanding of this.
The first thing to understand is that Chauvin’s conviction is not justice. More people today than ever before are recognising that jailing a single killer cop is not and cannot be a solution to the problem of police violence because the problem is not one of a few exceptional “bad apples” but rather the entire structure and function of policing itself. <a href="https://scholarsforsocialjustice.com/critical-resistance-professor-dylan-rodriguez-its-not-police-brutality/">As Dylan Rodriguez explains</a>, the phrase “police brutality” is redundant because all policing is brutality and in the specific context of 20 April, <a href="https://newsone.com/4143261/george-floyd-makhia-bryant-abolition-police/">as Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie write</a>, “A single conviction of a single cop won’t change the system that produced and enabled him; in fact, it will embolden it to continue business as usual under the pretext that it can deliver justice.” Analyses like these are grounded both in the overwhelming evidence produced by increased scrutiny of the prison-industrial complex since Black Lives Matter has become a hyper-visible social justice framework and in the long histories of policing written and spoken about by scholars such as <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869046127/american-police">Khalil Gibran Muhammad</a>, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/race/garrett-felber-struggle-abolish-police-not-new">Garrett Felber</a> and <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/police-reform-prisons-racism-vitale">Alex Vitale</a>. The police who killed Floyd and Bryant, then, are not exceptional but embodied examples of the logical extension of the function of policing in the United States.
As people begin to understand that the problem of police violence is not reducible to individual “bad cops”, often a more difficult leap to make for some is that the court and prison system is insufficient for providing justice when someone is killed by the police. That is to say, it is relatively easy to comprehend that Chauvin is not singular nor exceptional, but rather, representative of policing. Yet, to many, it remains unclear what to do about that and how to proceed from this understanding, outside of the framework he represents.
If, as Kaba and Ritchie write, Chauvin’s conviction is not justice, what would justice be?

There is a definitive answer to that question:
Justice would be a world in which George Floyd and Ma’Khia Bryant (and Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Korryn Gaines, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and so many others) were still alive and not subject to <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake">the imminent and immanent threat of premature death</a> that structures Black life in <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374531157">the afterlife of slavery</a>. This is why justice is not an event. It is not a moment or a response.
Abolitionist thought refigures our sense of justice from something that we can point to that happens in response to harm to something that is always happening to build a world where harm is less ubiquitous and where there are mechanisms in place to respond to harm in restorative, transformational ways.
This answer is definitive, but in many ways unsatisfying. We do not live in that world and it is hard to think outside of the carceral logics of our current one. But defining justice in this way moves us away from thinking of “justice” as something that is “done” or “served” in response to harm and towards thinking of justice as a practice of worldmaking.
While “a practice of worldmaking” sounds frustratingly abstract, the rest of this essay will outline what it looks like in practice by briefly defining a few key concepts in abolitionist thought. Readers will note that there have already been quite a lot of links to other sources in this essay, and there will be many more in the next half as I fulfil my promise of only briefly defining key abolitionist concepts.

<h5>Justice, accountability and punishment </h5>
First, it is important to distinguish between justice, accountability and punishment, three terms that our current so-called justice system conflates into being near-synonyms.
For example, in the wake of the jury’s decision in the Chauvin trial, many folks took to social media to declare that while a guilty verdict was not justice, the trial offered accountability. Others went further and claimed that Chauvin’s conviction was neither justice nor accountability but merely punishment. To be clear, abolitionists absolutely believe in the importance of accountability. <a href="https://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/06/22/on-trans-and-queer-prison-abolition-and-sustaining-movements-an-interview-with-eric-a-stanley/">As Eric Stanley explains</a>, though, the imposition of carceral punishment is not actually accountability.
Chauvin shall be punished. However, that punishment is a consequence imposed by the force of law. Precisely because this process was carried out by an adversarial court system rather than through engagement with the community that Chauvin harmed, it is not an example of accountability. That is because accountability requires relationships and Chauvin has no real relationship with the people he has harmed. Accountability could come out of a long process of building a relationship between Chauvin and Floyd’s family, or the police department and the Black people of the city, but adversarial court processes, as a fundamental matter of their structure, certainly don’t build such relationships.
That is to say, we must ask: to whom is Chauvin being held accountable? Certainly not to the Black people of Minneapolis, who are absolutely in no way represented by an adversarial court system whose primary job on a normal day-to-day basis, is locking them away.
As Kaba explains throughout her work, <a href="https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba">especially in this interview</a>, relationships are the core of abolitionist worldbuilding. That is because an abolitionist conception of justice is built on the fundamental distinction between safety and security. As Kaba puts it, “Security and safety aren’t the same thing. Security is a function of the weaponised state that is using guns, weapons, [and] fear&#8230;” In this way, as Angela Davis outlines in detail in her monumentally important book <a href="https://www.akpress.org/areprisonsobsolete.html">Are Prisons Obsolete?,</a> prisons function more to create illusions of safety by disappearing people construed as ‘threats’ through a use of violence that we are all supposed to just accept.

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Abolition Detention Hassockfield

<h5>Security is not safety</h5>
Instruments of violence do not create safety; they create security. <a href="https://abolitioniststudy.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/security-does-not-mean-safety-1/">As incarcerated activist Stevie Wilson writes</a>, “as prisoners, we live in a very secure environment. But security doesn’t mean safety. There are barbed-wired fences, concrete walls, locked doors, cameras, gun towers and officers with riot gear, shock shields, tear gas and metal batons. But are we safe?” Of course not. While locking up Chauvin gives us security – a killer cop is no longer roaming the streets free to kill someone else – Ma’Khia Bryant was not made any safer by the punishment inflicted on Chauvin.
This further shows that even accountability, when it is true accountability in the sense that it is in relation to the victims of harm, on its own is still not safety, because holding Chauvin as an individual to account for the harm he has caused does not transform the conditions that allow for the kind of harm he enacted in the first place.
That is, <a href="https://transformharm.org/restorative-justice/">even the implementation of a restorative justice process</a> to hold Chauvin to account would not have kept Bryant alive. Only an even more fundamental commitment to safety over security could do that. And that commitment to safety means cultivating what Stevie Wilson calls “right relations”. While the restorative justice process hinges upon accountability as a relationship to the victimised, it is still isolated to the incident. To have relations that engender safety, Kaba contends, “necessitates a whole transformation on so many levels”.
That necessity for “a whole transformation” is why <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/">Ruth Wilson Gilmore says we need to “change everything”</a> in our pursuit of abolition. Gilmore repeatedly makes the point that abolition is not merely about getting rid of the prison-industrial complex, but that “abolition is a presence”. <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/12/angela_davis_on_abolition_calls_to">Angela Davis concurs</a>, saying that “abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about re-envisioning. It’s about building anew.” And because abolition is so comprehensive, it is also radical – as in, it gets at roots. It is beyond partisan politics and in Stanley’s words, it is, “a commitment to dreaming collectively beyond and against the pragmatism of the political as such”. Abolition is about completely uprooting our currently dominant ways of organising sociality by way of law-and-order thinking in order to plant and nurture seeds of collective care, a concept that scholars like <a href="https://www.bookforum.com/culture/an-essay-from-grief-and-grievance-art-and-mourning-in-america-24310">Christina Sharpe</a> and <a href="https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-saidiya-hartman/?fbclid=IwAR1Qxk1bo7e7G8SZ--7xXsdZfxZJ2KRMccQkjfgqGKrG4Z_oc6XxtqfndQc">Saidiya Hartman</a> thoughtfully meditate on in their work, as it exceeds the boundaries of the academy.
The good news is that this work of simultaneously uprooting and planting seeds is entirely practical, grounded and individually conceivable even as its aims are overwhelmingly far-reaching and conceptual. The even better news is that this work is already ongoing and there are people to join and learn from in figuring out how to organise for the world we so desperately need.

The organisation <a href="http://criticalresistance.org/">Critical Resistance</a> (CR) has done incredible work creating tools and guides for activists, including important explanations of the differences between <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f17f/t/5b65cd58758d46d34254f22c/1533398363539/CR_NoCops_reform_vs_abolition_CRside.pdf">“reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms”</a> to help organisers strategise around specific policy proposals. CR has also worked with <a href="https://incite-national.org/">INCITE</a> to articulate principles of abolitionist feminism. <a href="https://trueleappress.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/cr-incite-statement-on-gender-violence-and-the-prison-industrial-complex.pdf">These principles</a> build on decades of activism, scholarship and organising, and can be seen in specific historical examples of anti-carceral feminist forms of justice outlined by <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/">Victoria Law</a>, <a href="https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/look-feminist-forms-justice-dont-involve-police">Kristian Williams</a>, <a href="https://nyupress.org/9780814776223/arrested-justice/">Beth Richie</a> and <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/68zcs2nd9780252042331.html">Emily Thuma</a>. They can also be seen in and are expanded upon in the principles guiding queer abolitionist organisations like <a href="https://www.prisonactivist.org/resources/black-and-pink">Black &amp; Pink</a> and in the analyses of the contributors to Stanley and Nat Smith’s anthology, <a href="https://www.akpress.org/captivegenders2.html">Captive Genders</a>. Taken together, these various sources, which only scratch the surface of on-the-ground abolitionist work, clarify that abolition is not about pretending that harm can be eradicated, but that we can completely rethink how we respond to harm as we transform the conditions which facilitate harm in the first place.

<h5>Abolition, capitalism and individualism</h5>
Many abolitionists, including Gilmore, Davis and Kaba, argue that abolition cannot be accomplished without eradicating capitalism. Consequently, some thinkers and activists focus on how the prison-industrial complex performs the logics at play in the very notions of private property. Whereas our present society presumes and takes for granted a “rugged individualism” that conceives of individual, independent subjects, an abolitionist analysis reveals the violent history enabling such a focus on the individual.
It might help to think about the verb separate to make sense of this connection between the PIC and private property within capitalism. Prisons and jails literally separate people as expendable populations, containing them within walls and cages. The notion of private property is emblematised in the instance of privately-owned land. Private property separates space with boundaries of ownership – This is mine, not yours. That is yours, not mine.

The basis of this, and what this reinforces, is the very notion of the individual Self at the heart of “rugged individualism”. That is, there can be no such thing as “private property” if there are not absolutely independent, individual, separate Selves to do the independent enjoying of individually-owned property. The logic of private property, prisons and – disturbingly for liberals – individual rights all depend upon the Western Enlightenment’s version of the liberal individual Self to cohere.
In historical terms, the very idea of a rugged individual subject was made possible by (1) the legal transformation of people into property through the system of chattel slavery and (2) the violent genocidal disavowal of indigenous conceptions of relation to land and ecosystems through the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. There is no such thing as “private property” without the liberal individual Self, and there is no liberal individual Self without slavery, land theft and attempted genocide. Abolition therefore looks towards relation rather than separation or individuation as a basis for organising society.

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TD Police Abolition France

<h5>Abolition is a collective project</h5>
One way of transforming the conditions which facilitate harm then, is to radically reconceptualise our notions of property, <a href="https://writersfestival.org/events/spring-2021-live-online-events/on-property">as Rinaldo Walcott encourages us to do</a>, and in so doing begin to practice politically conscious mutual aid, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/interview-dean-spade/">as Dean Spade describes it.</a> Walcott builds on the historical analysis to which Gilmore and Davis are significant contributors that I allude to in the previous paragraphs to extend PIC abolition to include not only the abolition of prisons and police but also of private property itself. And Spade’s work describes ways of understanding a kind of political work beyond the horizon of elections that has been taking place among marginalised communities since before the term “mutual aid” was ever formally used. Through mutual aid, people learn to support each other’s mutual thriving outside the formal machinations of an antagonistic nation-state. In short, Spade introduces and analyses the idea that we can and must take care of each other, because, ultimately, we are not simply radically separate rugged individuals.
Of course, the radical critiques of property embedded in practices of mutual aid were made by <a href="https://africaworldpressbooks.com/blood-in-my-eye-by-george-l-jackson/">George Jackson in Blood in My Eye</a>, the book he completed just before being killed by the state in 1971. I end this long (but in relation to the project at hand, quite short) introduction and invitation to abolitionism by mentioning Jackson because fundamentally, abolition will be steered by the theorising of those who have been directly attacked by state violence. So in addition to all of the resources which I have embedded in this piece for readers to pursue, I would encourage you to seek out the <a href="https://www.sunypress.edu/p-4133-the-new-abolitionists.aspx">writings of currently and formerly-incarcerated thinkers</a> like Jackson, <a href="https://www.akpress.org/assata.html">Assata Shakur</a> and <a href="https://www.revolutionbooks.org/book/9780380727667">Mumia Abu-Jamal</a>. And even wider, to expand notions of carcerality to include (as an incomplete start): <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/2021/05/14/sheikh-jarrah-is-israels-self-destruct-button/">Palestine under Israeli occupation</a>, Native American reservations in the United States and <a href="https://theconversation.com/when-good-intentions-dont-matter-the-indian-residential-school-system-165045">“Indian Boarding Schools”</a> across North America, increasingly securitised K-12 schools, slaughterhouses, and, transhistorically, slave plantations, Jewish ghettos, asylums, chain gangs and concentration camps from colonial southwest Africa to the Western US and Europe during WWII. All of these disparate examples cannot be reduced to being merely equivalent to each other, but understanding them, along with many more unnamed here, as coextensive pieces of a world that needs to be abolished, where that verb indexes both eradication and creation, enriches our understanding of abolition and opens even more possible lanes to run in this team marathon that no one of us can complete alone.
Abolition is not the work of an exceptional soloist. It is choral work. If 20 April 2021 was a day that left you feeling that this cannot be the way the world has to be, that it must be possible to make something different, then I invite you to join the chorus.

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Abolition Detention Hassockfield 2

<pre>Body Photos: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/abolishdetention/">@abolishdetention</a></pre>
<pre>Featured Photo: Elvert Barnes via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/perspective/50004216227/in/photostream/">Flickr</a> [USA]</pre>

Abolition &#8211; Burn the System &#8211; Flickr

An introduction to the uprooting and planting contained in abolition, which brings in the scholarship of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba and Angela Davis, among many others.

Justice is not an event: Towards understanding abolition

On 13 June 2020, I stood with a few French friends on the corner of Boulevard de la Villette and Rue du Faubourg du Temple discussing the rise of socialism in the United States. We had forked off from the Vérité pour Adama manifestation (“Truth for Adama” protest) and, along with <a href="https://www.lameute.info/posts/la-generation-adama-met-la-france-face-ses-ideaux">a few thousand others</a>, had marched through traffic up the hill to the Belleville neighbourhood. In this quartier – populated largely by migrants from East Asia or North Africa, or their children and grandchildren – the stalled traffic responded with cheers, honking horns and raised fists, while the protesters clapped and cheered in accord. Chants and signs echoed those originating in the Anglo world, “Black Lives Matter”, in English, alongside the familiar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_justice,_no_peace">“Pas de Justice, Pas de Paix”</a> (“No Justice, No Peace”), as well as more local slogans such as “Vérité pour Adama” or the beloved and now time-tested “Macron, démission!” (“Macron, resignation!”). For me, the noise, discord and togetherness were a great relief after two months of one of the strictest quarantines in the world.
The Vérité pour Adama movement responds to racist policing in France and demands truth and justice after <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Adama_Traor%C3%A9">Adama Traoré</a>, a 24-year-old Black man from the Val-d&#8217;Oise department just outside of Paris, died in police custody. After four years of medical exams, the autopsies have been <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2020/06/04/france-what-happened-to-adama-traore">inconclusive</a>.
Here, I consider the similarities and differences between French and US movements around the issues of racial justice and police violence. Both movements have the same underlying demands for the respect and protection of Black lives, and these demands crystalize particularly in moments of austerity. In France, the movement addresses itself largely to the state, citing its alleged commitment to equality, welfare, justice and truth. In the US, the demands are similar but focus more on dismantling state structures that enforce racial and economic inequalities. At the same time, socialism is on the rise among younger generations in the US and the <a href="https://www.8toabolition.com/">#8toAbolition</a> platform calls for the reallocation of resources to sustaining communities as a crucial step to abolishing the police state.
As we stood at that intersection of the two main streets in Belleville, my French friends started talking about how they were interested in studying the growth of socialism in America. I was puzzled at first – it seemed strange to me, in a place where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/04/french-workers-cherish-welfare-state-strike-reforms-macron">the welfare state still has some shaky legs to stand on</a>, to be looking to the US. But there are some things the French left admires about the US left. For one, the recognition of identity as a category of oppression is still something that is resisted by the centre-left in France, although contingents of the far left and younger generations acknowledge it more. The French left won its power through socio-economic struggles – and while the <a href="https://theconversation.com/revolutionary-ideals-of-the-paris-commune-live-on-in-black-lives-matter-autonomous-zone-in-seattle-140673">radical history of France</a> also fought against colonialism, for racial justice, and for sexual and gender liberation – the prevailing left in France hangs its hat mostly on fights over union power, labour law and taxation practices.
Redistributive justice is certainly the bottom line of any struggle for liberation, but in a country plagued by a history of racism, sexism and anti-immigrant structures, focusing purely on bread and butter issues like pensions, job security or family leave excludes many comrades and contingent workers whose work is not recognised by labour laws, who don’t have pensions, and whose gender or chosen family is not acknowledged as medically, legally or existentially valid. In France, by and large, the struggle has been for equity and inclusion in these existing structures. The US, on the other hand, while one of the most <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/working-class-death-rate.html">economically punishing places in the world</a>, has also been home to some of the most beautiful and inspiring examples of mutual aid, protest culture and liberation movements, including the Black Panther Party, ACT UP, the Seattle Alterglobalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, and now multiple waves of Black Lives Matter protests. As one French colleague explained it to me, “it’s the only place in the world that can make these amazing movements out of total shit.”

In the working-class banlieues (“suburbs”) where the Vérité pour Adama movement began, police violence is nothing new and has been a long-running problem and trigger for unrest. In the autumn of 2005, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/world/europe/behind-the-furor-the-last-moments-of-two-youths.html">a series of protests and riots</a> broke out sparked by the death of two adolescent boys who were hiding from the police in an electrical switching station and were accidentally shocked to death. The fact that the boys instinctively ran from the police – to their death – rather than expecting protection or justice was seen as an articulation of how the state treats largely Black and brown, and largely immigrant or first-generation, poorer populations in the banlieues. The banlieues went up in flames in anger: 10,000 cars were burned, 3,000 people arrested, and <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11248098/The-heat-rises-in-Frances-banlieues.html">a state of emergency was declared</a>.
The lockdown has exposed further issues of inequality, including living conditions and police violence in the banlieues. French policing has drawn international criticism because of the disproportionately <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/world/europe/coronavirus-paris-suburbs.html">harsh policing of the poorer banlieues</a> during confinement, where admittedly, larger families live in smaller quarters and were less successful at quarantining themselves. In the midst of this, the Vérité pour Adama movement has gained traction and has become France’s “Black Lives Matter” in many ways – taking the case of Traoré as an example of the overarching threat of the police and their lack of accountability vis-à-vis these populations.
The demands of the movement differ in some ways from the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. One main difference is that there is little discussion of <a href="https://www.essence.com/feature/breonna-taylor-justice-abolition/">police abolition</a>. In addition to an urgent emphasis on the recognition of the value of Black lives, the French movement focuses on more republican themes like <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-europe/assa-traore-and-the-fight-for-black-lives-in-france">justice, truth and equality</a>, which are owed to the people by the state. French anarchist platforms have indeed published <a href="https://lundi.am/Manifeste-pour-la-suppression-generale">manifestos</a>, “triggered by the assassination of George Floyd in the United States”, calling for the abolition of the police, but the comité pour Adama has focused on justice for victims of police violence, rather than on defunding.
However, budgets are still an issue – pensions, health care, public transit and education are all being contested at the moment, and all have their own protests, strikes and social movements forming in their defence. While the US left has developed strong attention to mutual aid and identity politics, this might be in part because there is barely a welfare state to hold people together and of which to make demands. But, like the police, the assaults on the welfare state in France won’t attack everyone equally – the poorest and most vulnerable will suffer the most. Some of the key demands of the US abolitionist movement <a href="https://www.8toabolition.com/invest-in-care-not-cops">call for an investment</a> into something like a welfare state, which will <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-defunding-abusive-institutions-goes-wrong-and-how-we-can-do-it-right/">support communities</a> before they fall victim to the social ills that the police might be called to react against.
What remains to be seen, as with all other nations struggling against austerity in our current moment, is whether we can succeed in a true convergence des luttes – whether there will be a redefining of what is “essential” to human life and whether we will recognise and protect Black lives, not just within the nation but globally. If so, it will certainly require a conflict with, and overthrowing of, the forces that exist to enforce inequality and which harvest our resources and lives. In other words, this struggle requires not just an end to police violence but a reallocation of economic resources, from institutions that operate through violence to ones that support life, education, art, childcare and health. A clear distinction needs to be made between a welfare state and a police state, and we might find that the boundaries of the nation state may be insufficient to bring about the required economic reforms. The greatest struggle of these movements may be to bridge this gap from the local, municipal or national, to the global – which is, indeed, the geopolitical terrain from which oppressive power is exercising itself.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Twitter</pre>

Justice Pour Adama

Social movements in the name of Black lives are gaining visibility internationally, but as part of this, the reallocation of economic resources must be prioritised on a global scale.

France, USA, and the Fight for Black Lives

There is a life before and a life after Hamilton. The groundbreaking and multi-award-winning creation by Lin-Manuel Miranda, that has recently graced screens on Disney+, is a production that is not only watchable, but immediately rewatchable. Repeatedly. Rarely have I experienced anything on or off screen which has gripped me so.
As a researcher in English literature, theatre lies at the heart of my work. Shakespeare’s Globe and the West End have been personal haunts, and in early postgraduate years I reviewed theatre for a number of outlets. From musicals to opera and everything in between, the West End has been an unquestionably enjoyable but stuffy experience. Almost without exception I would be one of a handful (if that) of BAME people present on and off the stage. My brown visibly Muslim presence an insertion provoking frequent sideways glances as I brought discomfort to the white privilege of these spaces. Of the productions themselves, the music would be melodious but not game-changing. The printed programmes would often describe a higher purpose that on stage would be buried in the muddle of art. More than anything, theatre entertained – in a narrowly defined frame for that term.
Hamilton breaks all such boundaries. An overwhelmingly BAME cast, makes theatre a space visibly and viscerally for all. The talent – broad, breathtaking – makes one believe again. History intertwined with art in a manner that melds politics with pleasure, tragedy with talent, democracy with dance and power with all people. And if all else were laid aside, the music, to take Hamilton’s own words, will be enough. There can be no denying that Miranda is a musical polymath. From hip hop to traditional show tunes, this production seamlessly traverses genres and pushes the socio-culturally imposed boundaries of musical theatre in a manner that holds a mirror up to the shortsightedness of our expectations. One is left astonished at the realisation that this production broke new ground – that this richness has not been the norm in musical theatre this whole time, and that we have not demanded it.
Notwithstanding its impressive credentials, however, Hamilton undeniably has its failings on the story of race in America. In a world in which the Black Lives Matter movement has finally brought to our collective consciousness the scale of brutality and oppression which campaigners have spent centuries raising, Hamilton is viewed in a renewed – and crucial – light. While an all-BAME cast furthers the cause of a more representative theatre and breaks ground for artists and art alike, colour-blindness does not tackle the harsh realities of history and oppression. While slavery and abolition is mentioned, no slave is given a voice. While the Founding Fathers are celebrated, their slave-owning is touched on lightly. And while the narrative of Black oppression is inadequate, the history of Indigenous genocide is entirely non-existent.
There is something to be said for the challenge of concentrating decades of complex history into a two-and-a-half-hour piece. Furthermore, the global BLM movement has laudably shifted the goalposts, and what was groundbreaking then has scope to go further now. Historic context is also worthy of consideration; that Black and Indigenous voices were indeed choked. As abolitionist Frederick Douglass would declare, &#8220;What to the slave is the fourth of July?” Figures like John Laurens, portrayed by Antony Ramos, did critique slavery and strove to establish the first 3,000-man Black regiment to join the fight for freedom. Hamilton himself along with Hercules Mulligan, played by Okieriete Onaodowan, would help establish the New York Manumission Society, which worked towards abolition. Yet, as the musical itself observes, it matters who lives, who dies and who tells your story. Including only white men’s efforts against Black oppression is not enough. As Miranda has duly acknowledged, “All the criticisms are valid.”
Despite its flaws, Hamilton remains an irresistibly riveting work. Like the many who are now streaming it, I am feeling the loss of not experiencing Hamilton live – yet. And more so that I may not ever experience it with the original cast. Miranda’s Hamilton is captivating and maddening, exuding the un-inhibitable energy of a man in too great a hurry to make history to await anyone. Leslie Odom Jr is Aaron Burr in walking envy; his performance renders his ambition and hatred tangible in equal measure. His powerful vocal capacities are in turn envy-inducing. Renée Elise Goldsberry’s standout performance exudes the intellect and grace of Angelica Schuyler such that her presence on stage is a presence in your very room. Relatively infrequent but powerful, every exit leaves one awaiting her return. Meanwhile few can fault the brilliantly footloose comedy of Daveed Diggs as Lafayette and Jefferson, and the fabulously wild-eyed Jonathan Groff as manic King George III.
But perhaps the character most endearing is Eliza Hamilton, portrayed by the talented Philippa Soo. The wife of Alexander Hamilton, Eliza Hamilton is a presence of love and fortitude in a production that engages the full turbulence of national realisation. From War of Independence to the struggles of a new nation, while others falter and sway as the country is tossed at sea, Eliza is an anchor, steadying not only her restless husband but the nation at large. A call to calm, compromise and a vision that extends beyond disagreements of the moment – “look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now?”
While Hamilton would not make it to 50, his widow would survive another 50 years garnering five more decades of respect and philanthropy. During their marriage she would draft with him some of his most iconic documents, while raising their eight children. Following his death she would battle to preserve his materials, going on to collect his biography while concurrently engaging in numerous historic initiatives, from the creation of the Washington Monument to the founding of the first private orphanage in New York. The play awaits the very final scene to truly centre the remarkable woman without whom the eponymous man would not be who he came to be, and without whom his long-fought yet cut-short legacy would likely have been ground into the dusts of history. Indeed, even Hamilton the musical itself would not have been possible were it not for the decades of the widow Hamilton’s industry to protect the Founding Father’s documents and legacy. While the closing scene touches on this reality, it is far from adequate and leaves one seeking more.
But then perhaps this sense of incompletion was intended. For nothing would be a more perfect follow-on to this musical sensation than one treading the footsteps of Eliza Hamilton. Here’s hoping that Miranda has another phenomenon up his sleeve – that we too can compel him to include women in the sequel. Hamilton took seven years to complete and a sequel may take no less. I for one am willing to wait for it.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Hamilton / Disney</pre>

Hamilton Disney 1

Despite narrative imperfections, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s renowned stage production is in a creative league of its own.

Hamilton: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

Upon learning of <a href="https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/netflix-when-they-see-us-most-watched-show-premiere-1203241480/">the success</a> of her 2019 Netflix mini-series <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80200549">When They See Us</a>, Academy Award-nominated American director Ava DuVernay tweeted, “Imagine believing the world doesn’t care about the real stories of black people&#8230; Our stories matter and can move across the globe.”
The four-episode series dramatises the true story of the Central Park Five, the name given to the five black and Latino boys (Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise) wrongly convicted of the brutal rape of the Central Park Jogger, white 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili. Though DuVernay calls her new project “a new truth for a new day”, it tells a tragic yet familiar story of an attempted public lynching.
<h5>The historic “myth of the black rapist”</h5>
The mini-series has been a commercial and critical success, earning <a href="https://www.goldderby.com/article/2019/when-they-see-us-emmy-nominations-history-acting-netflix-news">16 Emmy nominations</a>, including eight in the acting categories and eight in the writing and directing categories. Last night its 21-year-old lead Jharrel Jerome took home the award for Outstanding Lead Actor, and <a href="https://www.emmys.com/video/71st-emmy-awards-outstanding-lead-actor-limited-series-or-movie">paid tribute to the Exonerated Five</a> in his acceptance speech – all of whom were present in the audience and thanked him with a standing ovation.
When They See Us fits aptly into DuVernay’s retrospective on race relations in the US. Along with Selma (2014) and her <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/13th-americas-profitable-legal-slavery/">2016 documentary 13th</a>, When They See Us allows DuVernay to assert herself as leading a social justice movement that has continued to re-examine policies targeting black and Latino people in the United States.
With this series, DuVernay also joins a lineage of black women activists like Ida B. Wells and Angela Davis in exploring what Davis calls the “myth of the black rapist”, which has pervaded American society since Reconstruction and the beginnings of the Jim Crow South. Civil rights activist and author of Southern Horrors (1892), The Red Record (1895) and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), Ida B. Wells highlights that the image of the black male rapist was used to justify the lynching of members of the black community. Wells writes in The Red Record that when it came to accusing black men of such crimes, “the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait for the result of the investigation – that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward” (p.70). Accusing black men of raping white women was, according to Wells, a political and economic tool to combat black upward mobility and citizenship. Eighty years later, University of California professor and political activist Angela Davis wrote of the institutionalisation of this myth in her book Women, Race, and Class (1983). She asserts, “the rape charge turned out to be the most powerful of several attempts to justify the lynching of Black people” (p.185). As American society was built on white male supremacy, Davis finds that the enduring fiction of black men as rapists continues to legitimise excessive violence in defence of women’s virtue (p.187).
This myth of the black male rapist reverberates throughout 20th- and 21st-century American politics and culture from the true stories of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teens falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931, to the brutal murder of 14-year old Emmett Till in 1955, falsely accused of flirting with a white woman in Mississippi. The miscarriage of justice during the Scottsboro Boys trial and Till’s murder, and the initial acquittal of his killers, still symbolise the long tradition of racial bias in the criminal justice system. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-Prize winning best seller To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) examines racism in the criminal justice system in its depiction of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama, while James Baldwin’s novel <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/editors-picks-for-your-2019-reading-list/">If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)</a>, adapted as <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/if-beale-street-could-talk-an-unusual-protest-film/">Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-nominated film in 2018</a>, explores the enduring love between Fonny and Trish after a white police officer frames Fonny for the rape of a Puerto Rican woman.
Along with the omnipresent myth of the black male rapist in the American psyche, decades of high unemployment, police corruption and mob violence were combined to galvanise the public against the Five as well. New York City’s rising crime rate throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s was originally attributed to police corruption and rising unemployment in the mid-‘70s, <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2014/08/07/the-rise-and-fall-of-crime-in-new-york-city-a-timeline/">pushing the city towards bankruptcy</a>. The late-‘70s crime wave, fuelled by the David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz murders, blackouts and lootings, was followed by the crack cocaine epidemic and racially-motivated mob violence of the ‘80s. Black MTA worker Willie Turks was killed by a mob of white men in Brooklyn in 1982; Michael Griffin was murdered in 1986 while being attacked by white men in the predominantly white community of Howard Beach, Queens; and a mob of white male teens in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, targeted and then shot 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2014/08/07/the-rise-and-fall-of-crime-in-new-york-city-a-timeline/">in 1986</a>. The hysteria around the myth of the black male rapist and surrounding black and Latino men in general is as old as the United States itself.
Seven years after Ken and Sarah Burns’ documentary <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2380247/">The Central Park Five</a>, Ava DuVernay’s <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80200549">When They See Us</a> provides a gripping indictment of a nation still captive to racist mass hysteria. The true events of When They See Us echo many of the real and fictionalised stories that continue to shape black and Latino communities in the US. DuVernay tactfully uses Donald Trump’s role in the persecution of the Five to link his manipulation of the myth of the black rapist to his political campaign and presidency 30 years later. During the trial, real estate developer <a href="https://time.com/5597843/central-park-five-trump-history">Donald Trump spent $85,000 placing ads in four newspapers</a> calling for the lynching of the Five, with the exclamation, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY! BRING BACK THE POLICE!” In 2015, President Trump would rely not only on the myth of the black rapist, but he would also invoke the myth of the Mexican rapist sent illegally to the US to begin his presidential campaign. In her illustration of Trump’s central role in the miscarriage of justice against the Five, DuVernay signals that this new story is a centuries-long call for the lynching of black and Latino men from those within the highest echelons of power.
<h5>Old stories of injustice for a new day</h5>
When They See Us succeeds not because of its “new truth for a new day” nor for its harrowing depiction of the US criminal (in)justice system. Rather, the mini-series is most spell-binding because of its intimate portrayal of the boys’ commitment to each other, their fraying relationships with their communities, and the inner workings of their personal lives within a penal system and society that has abused them.
The first two episodes sweep the boys through the night of the rape, where they all gather with a large group of peers at the park on the night of Meili’s brutalisation. The episodes then subject viewers to the chaos of the police’s reckless search for the attackers and dramatise what is the most difficult part of the Five’s story: their confession to the crime, despite later claiming their innocence. The first and second episodes reflect <a href="https://www.innocenceproject.org/why-are-youth-susceptible-to-false-confessions">The Innocence Project’s findings</a> that “in the past 25 years, 38% of exonerations of crimes allegedly committed by youth involved false confessions&#8230; when you are imposing those techniques on an individual who is young, who is intellectually vulnerable, the capacity of the person to withstand the process is easily overcome.”
In the mini-series, Linda Fairstein, attorney, author and inspiration for the character of Olivia Benson in Law and Order: SVU, is positioned at the epicentre of a plan to scapegoat the boys through utilising deceptive confessionary techniques. DuVernay depicts Fairstein (played Felicity Huffman) as instigating the boys’ false confessions and exemplifying the worst-case scenario of weaponising the real tragedy of Meili’s brutal rape to solidify her authority within the Manhattan sex crimes unit. Despite no physical evidence tying the boys to the crime, they are convicted and sentenced to between 5 and 15 years in juvenile detention or prison. It was only <a href="https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a28038525/matias-reyes-central-park-five-jogger/">Matias Reyes’ 2002 confession</a> – not continued police investigations – that exonerated the boys of their conviction.
The third and fourth parts of the series balance DuVernay’s social commentary on the savagery of the US criminal justice systems with the boys’ personal and familial relationships, as they are released from confinement and grapple with their public images as rapists. Antron (Caleel Harris) confides in his mother, played by Emmy-nominated Marsha Stephanie Blake, with, “I feel like the whole world hate us.” Blake’s Linda McCray compassionately responds, “I love you enough to make up for everybody.” These poignant, and at times fragile, personal connections transform When They See Us from a show that is agonising to watch to one that enthrals, as the series draws the audience into the inner lives of these boys, their communities and their families.
These more intimate moments shape the second half of the mini-series and reach its crescendo with Jharrel Jerome’s Korey Wise, the eldest of the Five, who at 16 was sentenced not to juvenile detention but adult prison. His relationship with his mother and his connection to his transgender sister Marci Wise (played by Isis King) are some of the most memorable arcs in the mini-series, succeeding in aligning different kinds of persecution, alienation and courage. Jerome, now the winner of the Emmy, gives a heartbreaking portrayal of a young man trapped by the system, yet ultimately able to reclaim a part of his soul still untouched by the brutality around him.
For audiences unfamiliar with the indelible mark the myth of the black male rapist has left on American society, When They See Us moves people across the globe to see and protect black humanity. The series is also an opportunity for the Exonerated Five, as they are consciously re-named in the post-show Oprah interview – an essential afterword to the mini-series – to bring their experiences to new audiences and advocate for much-needed criminal justice reforms. Yet for those fully aware of the depth of this history and those who continue to live in fear of persecution by law enforcement, When They See Us may be triggering and leave us craving for more.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Netflix</pre>

When They See Us &#8211; Netflix Image

Ava DuVernay’s moving mini-series broke Netflix records and portrayed the very real consequences of a centuries-old racist myth.

The Exonerated Five: How Ava DuVernay Captured a Harrowing History and Captivated Netflix Audiences

The literary world lost its most important writer of the past century this month when Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, died at the age of 88. In the words of Dionne Brand, whose <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-toni-morrison-transformed-the-texture-of-english/">reflection on Morrison</a> you should read, “Toni Morrison was the greatest writer in English of the 20th century and the 21st”.
Perhaps best known for her novel Beloved, whose story is inspired by that of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave mother who killed her children rather than have them taken back into slavery, Morrison was prolific. She published 11 novels, two plays, a libretto, multiple children’s books and countless essays and speeches, many of which are collected in 2019’s The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. Morrison’s fiction exemplifies an excellence in literary and aesthetic craft, and is equally sophisticated in its rare, deep political and philosophical insight. One of my favourite sentences ever comes from A Mercy, a novel with a shifting setting in the North American colonies at the end of the 17th century: “Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to be made into a world.” This sentence lingers in the ear and weighs on the tongue – the commas slowing it down, drawing out the sensation of ‘aching’ towards active creation out of an inchoate and painful history, which the novel as a whole distils through its connected but disparate characters. Equally important to that sentence’s aesthetic beauty is its articulation of the very project in which Morrison was engaged in her life’s work: world-making.
In an interview shortly after the publication of Beloved, Morrison asserts, “Slavery broke the world in half.” Writing in, from and for a broken world, Morrison’s language – equal parts beautiful and devastating – seeks not merely to describe, to paint a picture, but to make a world. And not just in the pages of the novels. When Morrison imagines the interior life of Beloved’s Sethe, she fundamentally challenges the world in which she and her readers meet through her language at the same time as she is building a world for her fictional characters. Where the historical archives have only recorded slave histories as property gained and lost, Morrison dares to imagine life through her writing. The most powerful lesson I have learned from reading her work is that writing and language can be a vehicle for building the world anew in the midst of ashes.
One of Morrison’s most-often repeated quotes is, “the function of freedom is to free somebody else,” and her life’s work testifies to this ethic. Had she “only” gifted to us her fiction, Morrison would have left an immeasurably influential mark. But she was not only a writer; she was an editor as well. While working at Random House, Morrison helped usher now well-known black authors into wide readerships, including Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis. One of her most important projects was the publication of <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/ghosts-in-the-house">The Black Book</a>, an anthology-collage of black life in North America from slavery through the early 20th century. Between her editorial work and her profound, brilliant literary criticism – indeed, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is an indispensable theoretical text – Morrison exemplified black feminist praxis which seeks not merely equality within the existing parameters of the world, but a new world altogether, built not for and/or by one exceptional individual, but for and by multitudes.
Famously, Morrison declared unequivocally throughout her career that she wrote for black people, especially black women, and one of the most important aesthetic and political aspects of her writing is its absolute refusal to perform for the white gaze. She neither genuflects to it nor fights it. Instead, her language conjures possibilities for black life to exist and mean in a world without being “thrown against a sharp white background”, in Zora Neale Hurston’s famous words. This refusal of the white gaze opened intellectual space for Morrison to be one of the most important American philosophers of race since W.E.B. DuBois and Anna Julia Cooper, and all of our collective thinking has been enriched by it.
If you had not read Morrison’s work before learning of her passing, there are dozens of possible starting points. In addition to Beloved, you could not go wrong reading Sula, Song of Solomon or A Mercy. You will likely want to read more as soon as you finish one. Just beware the feeling of “finishing” one of her novels. Her work will teach you that an ending is only an ending if you are not looking, listening or otherwise attending carefully enough.
I wrote earlier of one of my favourite sentences Morrison wrote, and I want to end with a word on my favourite character, not only in Morrison’s work but in any fictional world: Pilate Dead in Song of Solomon. Without spoiling Pilate’s story, she is described by another character observing, “without leaving the ground she could fly”. There is no piece of language that has stayed marked in me as vividly as this. What does it mean to fly without ever leaving the ground? I see this as a profound question about what it means to live in the world and make community with others, and I think about it every day. And I think that Morrison was able to approximate this paradox embodied by her fictional character. Without ever leaving the world, she soared and shaped – shapes – it.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Mike Strasser via Flikr</pre>

Toni Morrison_ Flickr_Large

How Toni Morrison taught us to build the world in the midst of ashes

And She Was Loved: Remembering Toni Morrison, Builder of Worlds

Reiterated stories and visuals on immigration are marginalising America’s most vulnerable communities 
A migrant boy spends three months alone in quarantine upon his arrival in New York City. From a small cubicle, the isolated child looks through the window and stares at the Statue of Liberty. The picture of a child holding two dolls and staring terrified at the camera next to the title, Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention, is published in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/us/migrant-children-shelters.html">New York Times</a>. The first image is of a nine-year-old Vito Corleone on Ellis Island in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071562/">Godfather Part II</a> (1974) while the latter is one of several images disseminated by the media in the past few months. 
<a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Screen-Shot-2018-08-28-at-16.10.21.png"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-13187" src="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Screen-Shot-2018-08-28-at-16.10.21-1024x644.png" alt="Migrant Children USA Godfather 2 II" width="360" height="227" /></a> 
Although two portrayals, one fictional and the other real, are 44 years apart, they both testify to the role of the media in shaping the popular imaginary of migration politics. Earlier this year, the emblematic cover of <a href="http://time.com/5317522/donald-trump-border-cover/">Time Magazine</a> showing Trump looking down on a sobbing toddler next to the caption “Welcome to America.” was accompanied by several other news items relating to the Trump administration, ranging from officials likening shelters to “summer camps”, to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/6/21/17489632/melania-trump-jacket-zara-i-really-dont-care-do-u">Melania Trump’s jacket</a> bearing the words, “I really don’t care. Do you?” as she met detained children. 
The parallel between the representation of a young Vito Corleone alone in quarantine in Ellis Island in 1901 and the circulation of images of detained children in 2018 not only depicts the vulnerability of migrant children through the marked absence of parents, but also indicates a more endemic understanding that suffering is inherent to immigration. Such naturalisation of pain informs widely accepted representations of immigration, which endorse the neoliberal narrative of the self-made man, an important figure for the rhetoric of the current US government. It is loneliness and not fear that affects the experience of young Corleone, who despite being alone in a cubicle, sings Italian songs and looks through the window with curiosity. The contrast between the experience of confinement and the Statue of Liberty signals the hope America holds for the migrant child, whose isolation is also put in context by the spectator’s knowledge of what the future has in store for him (since Godfather Part II is a sequel). 
[continued below] 
<a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Migrant-Children-USA-Time-Magazine.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-13185" src="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Migrant-Children-USA-Time-Magazine-776x1024.jpg" alt="Migrant Children USA - Time Magazine" width="360" height="475" /></a> 
Likewise, the opening sequence of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086250/">Scarface (1983)</a> is an aestheticised representation of the border-crossing experience with footage of the Mariel Bootlift accompanied by Tony Montana’s theme song. Before building a multi-million dollar empire, Cuban exile Tony Montana went to a refugee camp. Neither Corleone nor Montana had an easy way in, nor were “welcomed to America” in the New York Times’ terms, but they both succeeded in a survival-of-the-fittest fashion. The pain involved in immigration is made to seem like a natural process for character-building purposes. 
Despite being fictional, the successful narratives of Corleone and Montana act in dialogue with celebrations of the prosperous histories of immigration, which are seen as integral to the formation of the USA. The country did not change for them, nor did it make fitting in any easier. In fact, these immigrant figures never managed to fully integrate as they continued to operate from the margins. Instead, they found a way to live the American dream through money, power and work, albeit through criminal means. 
The popularity of such masculine, violent and entrepreneurial immigrant characters, appears to re-assert the figure of the self-made man. Although Corleone and Montana shared the experiences faced by immigrants in detention centres, they “made it” in their own right. The celebration of such narratives promotes precisely the myth of meritocracy epitomised by the figure of <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/12/16/trump-and-the-problem-of-disbelief/">President Trump</a> – who has been presented as a successful entrepreneur, connecting deservingness and hard work. This myth justifies the marginalisation and suffering of many who should be able to “fit” and “adapt” to succeed in the current system. After all, why should public policies change when the success of integration lies in the hands of the individual and not the state? 
For this reason, immigration should not be framed on its own once it has been aggravated by a rhetoric that marginalises minorities in general, placing on them the responsibility of failure. While the balance between reward and effort promised by the American dream shapes the experience of young Corleone and Montana in the USA, this rhetoric becomes perverse when trying to guarantee and secure a better future for the immigrant children in today’s images. 
Featured images: Godfather II / Time Magazine / NY Times

Migrant-Children-USA-featured

Vito, Tony and Donald Trump: How US Immigration Policies Fed Off the Image of the Self-Made Man

In early January, Donald Trump once again managed to top his own record of offensive vitriol when <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.cb098aac2e98" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">he referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and the entirety of the African continent as “shithole countries.”</a> He was having a conversation with lawmakers about a potential bipartisan immigration deal, including protection for vulnerable immigrant populations, when he made the racist comment. His ensuing remarks further underlined the economic logic behind his words, when he opined that the United States should solicit more immigrants from “places like Norway” and that Asian immigrants were more likely to bolster the country’s economy. In other words, Trump values immigrants according to their capitalist potential to bolster white supremacist American capitalism: if they don’t make the country whiter, then they at least have to make the white elite richer.
On the surface, Trump’s racist finger-pointing at African and Latin American populations as hailing from “shithole countries” doesn’t seem connected to the Islamophobic fearmongering we associate with the Muslim Ban, which primarily targets Arab countries. However, the shifting of the Muslim Ban country list westwards into central Africa has created a direct geographical overlap between the seemingly separate strands of xenophobia.
This geographic overlap opens our eyes to the shared economic agenda behind the racist “shithole” comment and the Islamophobia of the Muslim Ban: in its essence, the Muslim Ban is just another mechanism for excluding people from countries that have borne the brunt of economic exploitation under the capitalist world system. Trump’s “shithole” comment reveals the core capitalist logic that both created and sustains American white supremacy. In what follows, I give some more background on the Muslim Ban and explain how its pivot westwards into central Africa signals an age-old process whereby countries are economically exploited, politically repressed, criminalised on an international scale, and then banned.
In late September of last year, the Trump administration announced its third version of the “travel ban,” more accurately dubbed “Muslim Ban 3.0” by protestors. The first version blocked immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, as well as refugees from Syria. The second version removed Iraq from the list. The third version then removed Sudan, but added its Saharan neighbor Chad. Just one week later, four US soldiers were killed in Niger, the country located just west of Chad: the soldiers were not killed in response to the ban, but the close timing of the two events is not exactly a coincidence either, given the recent timeline of American military activity in the region and its political context.
Both the ban on Chad and the presence of US special operations military forces in Niger are indicative of a larger trend in which the geographical apex of American intervention is increasingly shifting towards Central and West Africa – specifically the Lake Chad Basin and greater Sahel. This trend traces back to the Obama administration in 2008, when the US Africa Command (Africom) was created to confront Al-Qaeda in northern Africa. Africom subsequently played a role in the Libya crisis. By 2014, the US had trained and equiped counterterrorism units in Libya, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger; that year, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/obama-moving-war-terror-africa/">Obama asked Congress for $5 billion</a> more to expand operations. As of 2018, there are US drone bases, security coordination arrangements, weapons conduits and special operations forces across the region. Despite this, their presence remains opaque and <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/04/20/how-a-simple-request-got-me-blacklisted-by-the-pentagon">journalists have struggled to gain access</a> to even the most basic information, like lists of base locations.
The soldiers’ deaths in Niger thus came as a surprise to the American public. Elected officials from both political parties were likewise unprepared for the news, claiming that Congress has been kept in the dark about the extent of special operations in the region. Media quoted a number of politicians sternly announcing their intent to investigate the situation. However, they seemed more upset over their political exclusion than the violence clearly escalating in Niger. For example, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/20/politics/lindsey-graham-increase-military-operations/index.html">Senator Lindsey Graham condemned the secrecy</a> but embraced the expansion of violence, explicitly condoning increased military operations in Africa and more lax criteria for kill strikes. 
But has Congress actually been excluded from the long years of warmongering that brought us to this point? In 2002, Senate voted overwhelmingly for the post-9/11 “Authorisation of Military Force” bill that gives the military a carte blanche to secretly send the Armed Forces anywhere and everywhere in the name of the War on Terror. In September 2017, mere weeks before the Muslim Ban 3.0 was announced and the soldiers were ambushed in Niger, Senate voted 2:1 to reject an amendment designed to revoke the authorisation.
Furthermore, Congress is deeply complicit in the Libya crisis that precipitated the current surge of violence in the Sahel region. With US support, NATO imposed its no-fly zone on the same day that African Union leaders were slated to fly in to Libya and negotiate the terms of a peaceful transition with both Qaddafi and the opposition government. The immensity of this thwarted moment in Pan-African diplomacy would become painfully clear over the following two years, as multilateral war erupted in Libya and spilled over the border into Mali. The flood of arms from Libya to neighboring Sahel states enabled Boko Haram – a militant organisation in northern Nigeria – to rapidly expand across the Lake Chad basin between 2012 and 2014. Since May 2013, the conflict between Boko Haram and Nigerian security forces has displaced 2.3 million people, with at least 250,000 fleeing Nigeria for Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
All of this is to say that the current US presence in Chad and Niger is just the latest episode of post-9/11 American interventionism. In a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/lake-chad-the-worlds-most-complex-humanitarian-disaster">recent New Yorker article</a>, journalist Ben Taub describes a pattern in which the United States backs a repressive government like that of Chad’s President Déby in the name of stability, but in doing so actually exacerbates the conditions of social breakdown and support for armed groups. Kenyan writer <a href="http://africanarguments.org/2018/01/23/will-the-stability-doctrine-in-africa-destabilise-the-world">Nanjala Nyabola</a> concurs: “In the name of this ‘Stability Doctrine’, foreign governments… bolster the short-term status quo, even if that means disregarding visible discontent and overlooking state abuses. They pick power over protesters.” 
Given that the UN is currently providing aid to those displaced, Taub argues that people have come to rely on conflict as the only consistent cash cow in a region where fishing and agriculture has been decimated by climate change. He writes, “Travelling through the Lake Region, I got the impression that almost everyone there—and especially those in the Presidential palace—has a stake in Boko Haram’s continued existence as a distant, manageable threat.”
In conclusion, Chad is not on the Muslim Ban 3.0 list because it’s a “state sponsor of terror.” On the contrary, it is <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/you-might-not-know-where-chad-us-military-has-big-plans-it">one of the United States’ most steady allies</a> in the region, currently hosting a major base camp for drone operations. While the exact reasons for its inclusion on the list have not been publicly confirmed, it seems that certain factors are preventing Chad from adequately screening its citizens before issuing travel documents. According to a <a href="https://www.amnesty.ie/repression-recession-rising-cost-dissent-chad">2017 report by Amnesty International</a>, over the past year Chad has cut civil society and army wages, sparking widespread protest followed by a wave of state repression and incarceration of human rights activists. Essentially, in a strong-man security state, everyone beyond the government is suspect: if stability is bought, then the officials who line their pockets are the only ones with stable loyalty. 
From this perspective, the Muslim Ban has come to its fullest bipartisan, capitalist expression by banning immigrants from Chad, a country whose people successfully staged a national strike in 2016 to protest their president and to demand a constitution. If there is one thing the American empire despises more than terrorism, it’s the thought that African people might get free and throw a wrench in the corporate plunder of their continent.

In fact, African organising has the potential to not just uplift African people, but also to halt the destruction that fossil fuels and weapons industries inflict on all of us, all around the globe. Numerous powerful countries are setting their sights on Africa right now because the continent has a vast untapped resource base: will those riches be dedicated towards the sustainable development of the continent, or will they be siphoned off to sustain American polluters and weapons manufacturers?
As Pan-African community leader Ahjamu Umi wrote about <a href="http://www.abetterworld.me/blog/green-berets-killed-in-niger-the-news-you-need-to-know-about">local resistance in both Chad and Niger</a>: “People in the US are programmed to view the US as the centre and initiator of everything in the world. The truth couldn&#8217;t be farther from that. These uprisings in Africa are the current steps towards fighting for one unified socialist Africa to cement the final battle against imperialism on the world stage.”
The silver lining of Chad’s addition to the Muslim Ban is quite literally putting Chad on the radar of international solidarity, prompting students like myself to ask questions and look for answers. Now that we are increasingly connecting the dots between Western military intervention, extraction industries, autocratic national elite, the making of “shithole countries” and immigration policy, I hope this understanding will translate into more effective organising that recognises the shared economic roots of both domestic xenophobia and international imperialism.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the March-April 2018/1439 edition of Islamic Horizons, a quarterly magazine published by the Islamic Society of North America.
<pre>Photo Credit: US Army Africa / Shejal Pulivarti via Flickr </pre>

American, Chadian medical professionals partner to treat patients, hone skills

As the US Africa Command expands operations, the geographic focus of Islamophobic rhetoric and immigration restrictions will follow suit.

Is the Muslim Ban Turning into an Africa Ban?

People tend to make fun of Donald Trump’s hair. The first joke in The Telegraph’s list of the “The 21 funniest jokes about Donald Trump” <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comedy/comedians/the-best-jokes-about-donald-trump/">(28th April 2017)</a> is Albert Brooks’ tweet of 16th March 2015: “Donald trump announces this morning that he will run for president. His hair will announce on Friday.” A trawl of Trump jokes on Twitter reckons “about 70-80 percent of the entries” are about his hair. The Channel 4 comedy comment show The Last Leg pokes fun at Trump so often that it has <a href="https://twitter.com/thelastleg/status/830176815226507264?lang=en">inaugurated a jar</a> in which to put money every time any of them makes a Trump joke – atop it is a miniature golden toupee in the Trump style.
Laughing at the rich and powerful is good for one’s health. Laughing together bonds us in mutual scorn of the enemies of humankind. But we should also be wary of political fun-making. Laughter is an agreeable experience that may make us affectionate for what occasions it; mockery is cruel, which may make us feel sorry for its object; laughter is a safety valve that may relieve us of our horror at a thing like Trump while not actually changing the thing itself. We need to laugh in these terrible times but we also need to think about just what it is we are laughing at. And really Trump is no matter for laughter.
Trump’s hair is not just weird and noticeable, the basis of most of the jokes, it also literally embodies what fuels his appalling policies. Most obviously it is a sign of male vanity. Teasing of men’s attempts to deal with balding is one of the most venerable of all sources of merriment – it’s there in ancient Greek and Roman comedy, in Shakespeare, Molière and Goldoni, in Carry Ons and stand-up. Good – great to undercut the pomposity that comes with masculine ageing. The immediate humour in jokes about comb-overs, toupees and implants is that they – the hair-dos – never really work, merely draw attention to the vanity that produced them. But the jokes also tease the anxiety over loss of virility, of both strength and sexual prowess, of power over other men and over women. Trumpian hair jokes might nail the president’s misogyny in his “grab a pussy” remark and his prowling of the stage in <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/trump-vs-clinton-on-debate-night">television debates</a> with Hillary Clinton, and in the near total absence of women in his entourage except for the sprinkling of family members, staring out from faces and bodies lifeless from diet and surgery.
But there’s also a class dimension to the hair. Cosmopolitan, metropolitan, professional men don’t do comb-overs, toupees and implants. They’re naff. Honestly balding heads and receding hairlines are cool. Conceivably the biggest single thing that undermined Arthur Scargill’s gravitas as a leader in the 1984-1985 <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/defiance-and-defeat-in-still-the-enemy-within">miners’ strike</a> was his brillo-pad comb-over. Trump’s hair is in this lineage. One of the things that is difficult to understand about Trump’s victory is the support for this born well-heeled, multiply-bankrupted, mega-rich boss among the chronically poor, deskilled and unemployed, the idea that somehow he can represent them. No doubt misgivings about success and riches are less widespread in the USA than in the UK, but it is also his looks that make him plausible as the champion of those left behind and precisely in his spun-over, planted-atop, lacquer-heavy hair. And the problem is that every time we make some screamingly witty remark about it we confirm the rightness of the hostility and resentment felt by Trump’s supporters towards the smart-ass, clever-dick, above-it-all political, professional and cultural classes. From this perspective, our jokes about his hair not only do nothing to undermine him, they even reinforce his position.
Then there’s the colour of his hair, some kind of golden. If they have any, all men’s hair in later life goes grey and white – in old age, bald or not, different ethnic groups are follically equal. And they can all dye their hair. But to have it blonde (yellow gold) at that age only looks appropriate on white men. This is the most sinister aspect of the 45th president’s hair – it shrieks whiteness. Even Trump is politically astute enough not to declare himself white supremacist. When the alt-right announced their joy at his victory, he distanced himself from their statement, in a rather mealy-mouthed way (“it’s not a group that I want to energise”). Having said that, alongside his Teutonic surname and Scottish first name, he comes trailing clouds of white heritage. (And historically the Klan claimed a connection to the clans of Scotland.) If the sparse sprinkling of women around him is striking, the sea of whiteness is even more so. This is the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/13/us/politics/trump-cabinet-women-minorities.html">whitest administration</a>, not since Obama but since before George Bush Jnr., for chrissakes.
In the 19th century, white people had no compunction about speaking of the superiority of white people. Subsequently, they have been contented to lead the world in the name of a common humanity which they alone have been entitled to embody. Trump leans on this assumption of the invisibility, inevitability and unspeakability of white ethnicity, but when he speaks of putting America first, he really means putting white America first. This is increasingly noted – if nothing else, we can be grateful for Trump having made whiteness visible and spoken again.
The male vanity, class naffness and excessive whiteness of the Trump hair are not incidental to his nastiness and dangerousness as a politician – they fuel it. Commentators often lament that politics now is all about personality instead of policies. But not always was this probably ever so, it is misleading to think either that personality is not political or that it doesn’t matter what the personality of a politician is like as long as he or she has the right policies. Politicians have to take decisions, usually under pressure – so their personality matters and suggests which way they will jump. Trump’s hair tells us that he has no qualms about limiting women’s control over their own bodies by withdrawing funding for birth control and abortion; it boasts of who has the bigger weapons in his risky face-off with Kim Jong Un; it will readily put the men he feels at home with before the future of the planet in his withdrawal from the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/children-lead-the-fight-against-climate-change">Paris climate agreement</a>; and it puts white America first by making a start on excluding non-white entry to the country with Mexicans and Muslims.
The president’s hair is horrible and ridiculous, but perhaps we should react to it more with horror than ridicule.
<pre>Photo Credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_-_Caricature_(27612582462).jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Wikimedia Commons</a></pre>

The Presidents Hair_Richard Dyer 26_11_19_LA

President Trump’s iconic hair has become the comical cultural reference of our times, but what it represents is far more sinister than we have given it credit for.

The President&#8217;s Hair

It is a quirk of human consciousness that, whether collectively or as individuals, we work out where we are going by trying to make sense of the past. Time flows continually, and the present does not exist, since as ancient philosophers pointed out every moment is fleeting. Given that we can only guess as to the future, the past has particular authority over the direction of our societies. While conservatives urge us to keep calm and think of Churchill, progressives still dream of the spirit of ‘45 and the ethos of the welfare state.
In 1922 in Paris, two celebrity intellectuals, Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein, debated whether time is an objective, mechanical fact or an aspect of experience, felt in multiple and dynamic ways. Film has a great ability to capture time as a feeling, recalling worlds long gone and elapsing whole years in minutes within tremendous states of longing or anticipation. This was on my mind as I watched a number of historical films at the recent <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/lff2017/">BFI London Film Festival</a>.
One of the best, Mudbound, takes ‘return’ as its subject. Told through six different voice overs, its diverging points of view give it the feel of being both modernist and recalling the classic novel. Two young men, one black and one white, return to their families in rural Mississippi after distinguished service in Europe in WWII. In a South determined to maintain old racial hierarchies the real battle is at home, where there is no place for heroes. Its end returns to its opening scene as the two families pass each other in hostile silence, the white brothers burying their recently departed, violently segregationist father, and their black dependents forced to confront a rather different tragedy.
‘Return’ has a wider meaning in a US whose 400-year history of racial hatred refuses to be buried. Last year’s documentary of writer and activist James Baldwin, <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/lessons-james-baldwin-taught-me-2">I Am Not Your Negro</a>, began by contrasting footage of police attacking Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson in 2014 with the faces of southern whites insulting black students trying to go to school in the early 1960s. The title of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, only indirectly refers to Obama’s presidency, as it quotes Reconstruction blacks in the 19th-century after their brief participation in political life was terminated by a racist South who was keen to halt the advance of equality after the end of slavery. The Ku Klux Klan, a group dedicated to restoring the values of the slave era, appear in Mudbound in a scene whose horror owes in no small part to its contemporary relevance given <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/donald-trump/">President Donald Trump’s</a> flirtation with their current Grand Wizard, David Duke. It is hard in these post-racial times to maintain faith in progress, when the beasts of the past raise their unslain heads once more.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of Americans in the wake of WWII that they were “men who had been swamped, lost in too large a continent, as we were in history, and who tried, without traditions, with the means available, to render their stupor and forlornness in the midst of incomprehensible events.” Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying gives a sense of this forlornness in a land now forced also to contemplate its greatness as itself history. Set during the capture of Saddam Hussein, it follows three ageing ex-Vietnam vets played by Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston and Steve Carrell as they take a road trip across a rather downbeat America to bury the latter’s son who was killed in action in Iraq – or so the military claim. As they consider ageing through the prism of their own disillusion with a government who lied about Vietnam and has lied again about Iraq, the leads are just about engaging enough to carry the male badinage of the script. The casting of Fishburne as a preacher who has renounced his youthful debauchery is a minor masterstroke given his first role as a whacked-out 17-year-old marine in the classic Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, but the fantasy of patriotic reconciliation that ends the film undoes the confrontation of past ingloriousness that precedes it.
A rather different kind of fantasy is found in the creature-romance adventure The Shape of Water from Pan’s Labyrinth director <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/bfi-lff-perspectives-confronting-the-wicked-past">Guillermo del Toro</a>. Like that earlier film, the fairytale allows escape from the all too human violence of repression, as the battle between US and Soviet scientists centres upon classified experiments on a captured Amazon reptile river-god. Science fiction more normally extrapolates from today to offer a vision of our potential future, but this homage to the classic sci-fi inverts this relationship and is set in the 1960s of the sci-fi B-movie’s heyday. This period is rendered as a weird place removed from nature, and the inhuman objectives of its Cold War fanatics provide a comment on our relationship to the ecosystem, and a song of love for its virtuous wonders.
Remaining much closer to the historical record of imperial power is Zama, Lucrecia Martel’s tale of an 18th-century Spanish colony on the Asuncion Coast. Martel drops us in this location without explanation, somewhat in the manner that we find her lead character, a Spanish magistrate, continually promised a transfer home that never comes. The setting on the water’s edge, and an antagonistic relationship both with the subjugated people and the bands of outlaws surrounding them, turns this into a beautifully-realised tale of the state of non-being that is waiting at the hands of a distant, stagnating colonial power.
In writing on the decline of faith in progress, Svetlana Boym noted that “the 20th century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia.” This would fit the British film The Party, Sally Potter’s political satire of a disastrous celebration held by Kristin Scott-Thomas as an opposition MP taking up a position as Shadow Health Minister. Although its setting is contemporary, the 71-minute chamber piece is shot in a black-and-white that recalls the era when its characters’ worldviews were first set. Its all-star ensemble embodies the permutations of post-68 politics, from Bruno Ganz’s homeopathic life-coach to Cillian Murphy’s Blairite privatizer. The brilliance of its balance between sensitivity and farce rescues the film from being as ostentatiously self-regarding in its politics as the well-heeled and well-intentioned intelligentsia that it caricatures.
Marcel Proust wrote that “the time at our disposal every day is elastic: the passions that we feel expand it, those that inspire us shrink it; and habit fills it.” The films discussed above not only fill the time, but place such individuality of experience within the scope of history. They restore to us our perspective, and connect our feeling to something wider.
<pre>Photo Credit: Mudbound / Netflix</pre>

Re-Living American History On_Louis Bayman_27_10_2017_UA

The passage of time is depicted in imaginative ways by directors of Mudbound, Last Flag Flying and The Shape of Water

Re-Living American History on the Big Screen

Historically racialised and narrowed language is curbing self-reflection and positive mobilisation in the United States 
In the hours and days following the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, politicians and many media outlets reflexively described the shooter, Stephen Paddock, as a solitary madman who planned and carried out the mass killing without apparent connection to any larger network, group or ideology. Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, for instance, depicted Paddock as “an individual” and “a sole actor, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1710/02/es.02.html">lone wolf type actor</a>”. 
When perpetrators of violence are people of colour, journalists, politicians and many citizens treat their violence as natural, expected. But when shooters are <a href="http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242">white men</a> who kill white victims, politicians, mainstream media, and many other facets of white America, reach for the notion of an unstable, angry, isolated person driven to mass murder. 
These descriptions make sense on many levels. Though it’s still very early in the investigation, nothing to this point suggests that Paddock had ties to a larger organisation, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/us/politics/viral-claims-and-rumors-in-the-las-vegas-shooting.html?_r=0">fake claims from the Islamic State</a> notwithstanding. And turning to the language of mental illness seems entirely apt when describing an act that appears so far beyond the bounds of sanity or civilisation. 
At the same time, however, there is something telling about the tendency to reflexively describe Paddock as a lone wolf or individual-level madman — a label widely used even though authorities don’t yet know conclusively whether Paddock had help as he amassed his arsenal and planned his unthinkable crime. 
The description of the “lone wolf” shooter is a relatively new one: the image of a disturbed, gun-obsessed, white male loner who presents a threat to mainstream society emerged alongside the rise of mass shootings over the past two decades. To pick but one example, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting of 2012, killer Adam Lanza was <a href="http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-school-adviser-gunman-a-loner-who-felt-no-pain-2012dec15-story.html">repeatedly described</a> as a deranged “loner” who “felt no pain”. 
We emphasise the mental health of white mass shooters because these men look like “us”, meaning that there is nothing predictive about the ways they look that might foretell their actions. In other words, they could be anyone — part of what gives these events their terrifying valence. Put bluntly, the only reason we aren’t <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/04/lone-wolf-white-terrorist-las-vegas">referring</a> to mass killers like Paddock as terrorists, even though spectacular events like the Las Vegas shooting meet the textbook definition of terrorism, is because of their race. 
Blaming non-white “cultures” when guns are involved is a tradition with deep roots in American history. Indeed, the dynamic took shape decades before the current double standard of white “shooters” and Muslim “cultures” emerged. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, a number of high profile black activists and political leaders advocated for gun rights for African Americans, arguing that the Second Amendment applied to all citizens and that black communities required firearms for self-defence because police offered little protection. Without a single shot fired, police, government officials and mainstream U.S. society labelled these leaders and the larger movements they represented <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis">insane</a>. 
The FBI <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malcolmxm1carbine3gr.gif">diagnosed</a> Malcolm X with “pre-psychotic paranoid schizophrenia” and membership in the “Muslim Cult of Islam” after he posed with a gun and advocated armed black self-reliance the day after his home was <a href="https://worldhistoryproject.org/1965/2/14/malcolm-xs-house-is-firebombed">fire-bombed</a>. The bureau similarly diagnosed Robert Williams, the controversial head of the Monroe, N.C., chapter of the NAACP, as schizophrenic, armed and dangerous after he advocated for black, armed “self-defence” and, later, authored a book titled “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Negroes-Guns-Robert-F-Williams/dp/1773230522/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Negroes With Guns</a>”. 
These and other African American leaders were far from mentally ill. But the often reflexive associations between armed non-white individuals and mental illness allowed white America to enforce the legal privilege of bearing arms as a white privilege. Legislative approaches such as the so-called castle doctrine, the notion that “a man’s home is his castle” and he has a right to defend it with a gun – or the “stand your ground” legislation that applies outside of the home – often treat firearms as the tools of white protectors. Unlike the ideas that drove the pejoratives and suspicion that greeted black activists arguing for armed self-defence, these laws envision a heroic white homeowner fighting off a violent threat. Indeed, these laws were initially written to assure gun rights solely for “<a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/02/25/517181355/race-and-the-controversial-history-of-stand-your-ground-laws">white, heterosexual, property-owning men</a>,” and often play into the mythologies surrounding American firearms. 
When we are faced with today’s automatic assumption that white shooters who commit acts of terror are isolated, deranged individuals, not connected to any larger cultures, networks or ideologies that might foment violence, we must ask ourselves whether the lone-wolf framing potentially plays off of, and perverts, the same lionisation of white male individualism so often used to justify gun rights in the United States. 
Absent the lone wolf narrative, horrific incidents like the mass shooting in Las Vegas might also force us to discuss the ways in which American white masculinity itself may have grown increasingly <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005EXSN20/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1">solitary and guarded</a>, as the types of labour white men produce become less vital to the workforce, and increased competition emerges from women and minorities, and demographic changes threaten to reduce white men’s “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reform">status and respect</a>”. Or maybe we might take more seriously the cultural re-emergence of what gender scholars call <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/toxic-masculinity-and-mass-murder/486983/">toxic masculinity</a>, a threatened, defensive form of manliness that appears to manifest in many <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/the-american-impulse-to-equate-guns-with-freedom-and-masculinity-with-violence-is-killing-us/">mass shooters</a>. 
Of course, over-generalising after mass shootings to cast blame on entire races or religions is just as wrong when it applies to white males as other groups. Yet our refusal to talk about broader contexts when shooters are white suggests the opposite problem: a narrowed language for self-reflection and a fear of confronting difficult topics. 
Such self-reflection seems all the more urgent as we, as a nation, come to terms with yet another senseless act of mass violence carried out against innocent civilians. As we mourn and pray and begin yet again the process of grief segueing to questioning, which so often becomes resignation, it seems high time to advance a richer understanding of the ways that white mass shooters represent both isolated loners cut off from white mainstream society, and also in some ways emerge as pathological extensions of it. 
By so doing, we might then begin to use this moment of tragedy as a chance to rethink the racially hierarchical assumptions and mythologies that pull Americans apart when we should be coming together. Doing so would involve applying new frameworks to the <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/white-men-have-committed-more-mass-shootings-any-other-group-675602">epidemic of white mass shootings</a> — frameworks that might better identify and prevent the lethal actions of “them”, but do so while also developing more honest and vulnerable ways of expressing and forming community around the realities, frustrations and everyday tensions of “us”. 
After all, perhaps a lone white male protector is not the best way to prevent the actions of a deranged lone white male shooter. Perhaps, at the end of the day, it takes more than individuals working alone: it takes mass mobilisation, public policy and a national commitment to curb gun violence. 
A version of this piece ran originally <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/06/when-the-shooter-is-white/?utm_term=.23838bc17d9e">on 6 October in the Washington Post</a>.