Creeping Genocide

“Systems of classification direct our thinking and order our behaviors”

Stephen Jay Gould

Sleeping genocide raised from the border south

in sweeping classification others the Blacks,

through whiteness peeping genocide in historical lenses off their backs;

too weeping genocide overflowing river Jordan.

History echoes that lessons not learned repeat it

when whiteness is keeping creeping genocide in the crosshairs on the Blacks.

Jack Miller

In the wake of the brutal Rodney King beating at the hands of the Los Angeles police department, it was revealed that the police department had devised an acronym for its interaction with inner city, increasingly jobless, young Black men.  That acronym was NHI- No Human Involved. 

In attempting to explain why so many young Black males have died as a result of the Los Angeles police use of a specific choke hold technique, the police chief at the time, Darryl Gates, suggested that those judicial murders were a result of the abnormal windpipes that Black men possess.

These classificatory and explanatory tropes help us to contextualize why there is this reflex anti-Black male behavior on the part of judicial officers in their interaction with Black men. They see Black people as abnormal beings not fully human.

On the macro level, humanness is defined in white terms in European and Euro-American society.  Unless if your white and of Euro-American culture and descent, preferably middle class, you are the conceptual other who lacks the classification for being human.  By this definition, Black people are perceived by whites, and within the social order and process, as anti-human and therefore subject to anti-human coercive from the coercive apparatus in society, designed to maintain the status quo.

Since Black people are defined as others, thus outside of humanness, this society harbors no moral obligation to treat Black people as human.  Black people cannot, thus, be far removed from a genocidal thrust, if this society continues to define them as outsiders for whom no reciprocity of obligations, as it relates to a social contract binding on all citizens of this society, to protect their lives is warranted.

The genocidal effects of this historical antipathy towards Black people’s humanness is exhibited in the mass incarceration of young Black men and women, and their elimination by other violent means within the social order and process of the United States of America.

It behooves African Americans to be conscious of the moment they are in and to take the necessary measures to secure their safety.  Turkish nationalist and German Nazis employed a similar discursive classificatory narrative and acts before they sought the whole sale elimination of Armenians and Jews in Turkey and Germany, respectively.  If Black people globally do not take the necessary measures to secure their lives and safety racial capitalism’s genocidal thrusts towards them will not be abated.