Our Destinies Are Tied

Five years ago, I thought we could put an end to this. We took to the streets, we worked both, at the institutions we belonged to and on ourselves. And by “we” I mean anyone that marched for Black Lives six years ago when Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland were murdered (for context this was the same year that the Charleston church shooting and the Orlando nightclub shooting happened). But, clearly the world wasn’t ready to solve this. Another sum thousands of lives lost, at the hands of police officers, later (in what we call our homeland but is really stolen land obtained through genocide) and we are back in the streets again. It’s frustrating to think that all we accomplished last time was that we got a larger group of people to realize it was wrong. Now those people are informed enough and angry enough to do something.

I’m sad. My first and most persistent feeling is sadness. My heart aches for the Black community and for anyone that has lost someone due to police brutality. I’m disappointed that the media and non-black people are so focused on looting and burning buildings. A Target means NOTHING to me when it comes to the unjust loss of a life. Someone’s job, I’m sorry, can take a pause if there is a national funeral procession for every Black life that has been brutalized or taken to enforce systemic racism since the moment the UK colonized this country. If Black folx built it for free they can take it back. If it is a product of capitalism (aka everything you consume) then Black people own it. And they own it because without their labor, it wouldn’t exist.

Three years ago is when I first learned about abolitionism. It was the first time I’d heard of abolishing the police, ICE, developers and landlords, prisons, etc. But it was something that I’ve dreamed of since childhood. My hatred of capitalism and any institution that stemmed from capitalism came from my deep desire to eliminate money. It came from the need for relief from the constant ache of living in survival mode. It is a dream come true to finally hear people in the streets chanting “defund the police” because it means that the state might actually invest in healthcare, mental health, and education.

Let me make this clear: this movement, the fight to end systemic racism is inseparable from the movement to end capitalism. Allow me to explain. Five years ago, I was terrified that we were entering into a civil war. Now I realize that we’ve been in a civil war ever since Black folx were stolen from Africa, planted in the US, told that this was home and then were continued to be hunted for leisure. White supremacists and institutions that enforce systemic racism, aka the police force, have been waging war on Black people since capitalism began. Non-black folx have never noticed because we thought we were profiting from it. We thought we were part of the “American Dream,” that we could achieve wealth and safety. Capitalism and the belief that we will one day “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” is a lie. Even though non-black, non-native people were not enslaved to build capitalism across the world; we are convinced to uphold it.

Now we can’t ignore it, police and prisons disproportionately target, imprisoned, enslave, and murder Black people. We are living in an oligarchy with the wealthiest 1% dominating the media, politics, technology, and the pharmaceutical industry and the rest of us are scrambling for the essentials. If we want to be free from capitalism, we must work tirelessly to end the exploitation of Black people, people of color, and the working class. We must stop the militarization of the police because they aren’t here to protect us; they are here to imprison anyone who disagrees with the state (or that the state disregards as valuable; i.e. BIPOCs, gender non-conforming and transgender people, and womxn). We must defund the police so everyone has access to healthcare, mental health resources, education, and sustainably grown food, not just the few. We must dismantle the prison system, put an end to slavery, and invest back in our communities so that Black youth have a fair chance at a happy and healthy life, free from fear.

Bottom line racism and capitalism are innately intertwined, we cannot fight one without fighting the other. When we fight one we are fighting the other. When we fight for the liberation of all black people, we are fighting for our own liberation from the 1% that controls and profits from capitalism (regardless of your race, skin color, or socio-economic class). Our destinies are tied. As Martin Luther King Jr stated in his “I have dream” speech, white freedom is “inextricably bound” to the freedom of Black people. “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘when will you be satisfied?’ We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”