This past weekend saw global demonstrations in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter in London, Rojava, and Palestine alongside protests in Baton Rouge and Dallas to raise public consciousness about the murders of black people in the United States, specifically #AltonSterling, who was unarmed (alleged to be armed by police), and #PhilandoCastile, the latter of whom was a registered gun owner who was killed for attempting to show his ID to the arresting officer. The NRA has not come out in support of Castile. Meanwhile, Prominent Twitter personality and activist Deray Mckeeson went to Baton Rouge to join the protests, and was arrested without reasonable cause – Mckeeson, along with about 30 other local protestors, were detained overnight. Although Mckeeson and those arrested with him were eventually released, the escalation of tensions following Micah Xavier Johnson’s assault of the Dallas protest shows us all how starkly divided our country is on the basis of race, as much as we might like to believe otherwise.

Let me be clear to you all – if you do not support the efforts of #BlackLivesMatter by now, without making caveats for so-called “good cops”, you are complicit in the White supremacist foundation of the United States. Time and time again, black people and their non-white allies have told us how the police racially profile them, murder them, do nothing to protect their communities, and cover up any wrongdoing via obscure legalistic bureaucracy. This might be more shocking if modern American policing did not have its origins in the slave patrols of the mid 19th century; additionally, there are many members of police departments who have been found to be members of white nationalist and other associated hate groups. As black activists also say, it is not the individual character of an officer that concerns them and causes many to declare #BlueLivesMurder, it is the system of policing which has proven itself to be only concern with protecting the interests of the ruling class and those it deems as tokens useful for pacifying the masses. More than one person on the Internet has pointed out the logical fallacy of cop-defenders, saying that unlike Blackness, cops can, at any time, remove their uniform and go back into the general population and not be discriminated against.

Blackness is now hyper-visible in the age of social media, though black people have yet to be seen as human and not objects to admire in sports and other kinds of respectability politicking. And I am convinced that Blackness is powerful, the best part of what underlies the United States; it is amazing to me that a stolen people, living on stolen land, has taken a construct that historically, was used to denigrate them, and has made it a vessel for goodness and revolution. Certainly, the #BlackLivesMatter movement is not perfect. There is lots of debate within local communities as to whether peaceful tactics are having any effect, organizing is often difficult and spur-of-the-moment, and there is undue focus on black cishet men - many LGBTQ black folx feel excluded from the mainstream movement. But more so now than ever before, the killings in Dallas have shown another divide within #BlackLivesMatter, a distinction between those who claim to occupy a more palatable ground between anti-police and anti-police brutality. As we’ve already covered, this is a false dichotomy considering the origins of policing and what its systematic function is within the American State. To be ideologically and logically consistent, one must necessarily be anti-police in order to be anti-police brutality. To claim otherwise shows either a lack of critical thinking, a desire for a “respectable”, performative radicalism without substance, or it shows the limits of one’s commitment to the cause of Black liberation.

In any case, if there are good cops, their individual contributions do nothing to overhaul and reform the institution they serve. We have tried the path of peaceful reform. They murdered the men and women who championed that philosophy, with no consequences or freedom for the people. The violence we saw last week is only the beginning of a long road to revolution.