colonialism

My world is empty without you/World is empty: on love songs, state violence, & Michael Laney

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On Monday night, Charlotte police officers shot and killed Michael Laney. Laney was handcuffed in police custody at the time of his murder. In nearly all mainstream coverage of this police execution, journalists have named Laney as an “armed robbery suspect,” because he was riding a red scooter apparently matching a description of one used in a robbery in the area the week before. Charlotte Observer makes a point of underlining the “precarity” of the officers’ situation (“They were in fear for their lives”), as if poor people of color everywhere in the United States (to say nothing of the state of affairs here in the United Kingdom and Europe) were not in a constant state of fearing-for-their-lives at the hands of a policy of institutionally racialized violence, in particular the systemic criminalization of Black bodies, who are always guilty, never to be proven innocent, the police execution itself serving as due enforcement of the law. “It just got to the point where the officer felt he had lost control of the situation,” [Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Rodney Monroe] said [of Anthony Holzauer officer who killed Laney]. “We’re talking about a firearm. We very well could be here, talking about the loss of two officers.”

There is absolutely no mistaking the meaning of this comment: the life of a potentially dangerous Black man (and it must be understood that under the white supremacist police state, all Black men are potentially dangerous) is forfeit in the face of “the loss of two officers.” “Why didn’t they shoot him in the leg?” Laney’s nephew asks at the end of the article. Tina Laney, Michael Laney’s mother, replies: “I don’t know.” The state could not be clearer about which lives it determines to be valuable, worthy of the protection of the “law,” and which lives it deems always and absolutely killable, without impunity.

From Dion the Socialist:

First, we heard someone had been shot. This was my first thought anyway. I was kind of shaken up by the fact that I had literally missed being in the area of the shooting by about ten minutes. Then, the chatter we heard was that it was the police who shot someone. Still, I assumed they’d shot the perp they were looking for.

Some lady walked past us and said “yall look scared.” We asked her if she knew what happened. That’s when she told us that the kid was being chased by some people and the police were called to help him. Somehow, the police ended up shooting the kid. The police shot the victim when they were called to help him.

That’s when I first heard the brother yelling at the police. He was saying that they shot his brother and that his brother didn’t have a gun.The police shot him even though he was unarmed. That’s when the coroner’s truck showed up (I think) and I decided to blog it so I could keep up with what was happening. This is also when more of the kid’s family showed up. I’m assuming the kid was a teen because his older brother only looked about mid twenties. His mother was screaming and crying at this point, as well as a younger cousin of his. It was heartbreaking.

His brother had a gun at one point. That’s when Corbin and I went back to our car. The chatter was getting louder though so we got out again and got closer to where we could see the crime scene. I saw them load the body.

I was approached by two or three detectives who asked if I lived in the house I was standing in front of at the time. That’s when I told them where I lived and asked if we could get to our house. The brother came up to the detectives and started yelling about how “you’re not gonna get away with this” and “he was handcuffed when you shot him.”

“We’re not going to let you put us in handcuffs anymore. Why would anyone let you put them in handcuffs when this is what you do? You handcuff him and shoot him in the back of the head. If you want head shots, I can give you head shots. I can put something on your head.” Detectives sent me to my car at this point and told me I could drive through and get home. As I was walking, I heard him say “one of yall cuffed him, the other said ‘he’s got a gun’ and yall shot him in the back of his head.”

When I got home, I could still hear his mother crying and screaming.

I can’t do this anymore. I can’t listen to his mother crying anymore and his brother screaming.

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On Feeling Red: a failed essay about eczema, riots, Mesut Özil and Zinedine Zidane, the Belarus Free Theatre, neoliberalism, austerity and the Eurozone, KLM Airlines, Derek Jarman, Mary Magdalene, clingy women, feminist killjoys, melancholic migrants, contamination, sickness, health, racism, capitalism, totalitarian patriarchy, “the barbaric,” suicide economies, refusing to leave your shit at the door, showing your wound, not getting over it, feeling it, still feeling it.

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(Note: Having not written at the [PANK] blog for nearly a year, I apparently thought the best way to make up for that absence would be to stuff an entire year’s worth of posts in one. I am definitely doing the Internet wrong. Also, this is failed essay is something of a throwback to the two failed essays posted here at [PANK]. I did say “failed.”)

Trinh T. Minh-ha, “All-Owning Spectatorship”:

To say red, to show red, is already to open up vistas of disagreement. Not only because red conveys different meanings in different contexts, but also because red comes in many hues, saturations, and brightnesses, and no two reds are alike. In addition to the varying symbols implied, there is the unavoidable plurality of language. And since no history can exhaust the meaning of red, such plurality is not a mere matter of relativist approach to the evershifting mores of the individual moment and of cultural diversification; it is inherent to the process of producing meaning; it is a way of life. The symbol of red lies not simply in the image, but in the radical plurality of meanings. Taking literalness for naturalness seems, indeed, to be as normal as claiming the sun is white and not red. Thus, should the need for banal concrete examples arise, it could be said that society cannot be experienced as objective and fully constituted in its order; rather, only as incessantly recomposed of diverging forces wherein the war of interpretations reigns.

Seeing red is a matter of reading. And reading is properly symbolic.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the color red. It started, in a way, by reading Derek Jarman’s essay “On Seeing Red,” from his book on color, Chroma. But what held me, reading Jarman’s essay, was his mention of eczema. I’ve written about sickness and eczema here at PANK in the past, but Jarman’s essay, in connection with various current political events, made me feel that I needed to write about it again. Feel it again.

Jarman:

I’m coming back from the blast furnace of St. Anthony’s fire, an eczema which turned me red. Violent red soreness. I turned almost purple. My skin no longer welcomed the world, but shut it out. I was in the solitary confinement of the senses. For two months I could not read or write. Work stopped on this book. The red eczema spreads across my face. ‘Where have you been on holiday?’ passers-by asked. A short stay in hell.

Skin that no longer welcomes the world; yes, that’s right. But it’s more than that. As an eczematic person you no longer welcome the world, but at the same time, in spite of yourself, you become hyper-porous to the world, excessively open, flayed, (hyper-hospitable? eczematic ethics? who or what is the eczematic other? what about the self-othering that happens in illness; how many times did I weep to my husband F., “I’m trapped in this skin, my body isn’t mine, why is it like this, why still, why always, don’t understand, it’s beyond me, what is it reacting to, what does it want, why, can’t, can’t?”).

For Jarman says the skin shuts the world out, but is that so? Or do you shut the world out because of your skin; does your skin shut you out of the world; does the world shut you up into the world of your skin? Is the eczematic a shutting out of the world at all, or is it in fact a radical irrupting into the world, and a radical irrupting of the world into the body? A visceral mutuality and exchange between the social and the biological, the political and the personal, between two sicknesses that are one sickness. The biopower of sickness. Twenty-first century immunology: the place where the world becomes ever more intolerable, while forcing our bodies to tolerate it–and the place where we stop being able to tolerate it.

No, what am I saying? It’s not just the twenty-first century. Immunology has always been about this. About the red no of the red blood. About saying, often without being able to say it: I can’t take this.

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