A twelve-year-old took what would turn into a life-changing trip to The Black Wax Museum in Maryland. The trip would prove a portrait to lifetime of lessons issued to her by way of her parents. The exhibit started with a walk-through a mock slave ship, to which black bodies hung nude, lifeless, and objectified. She works toward a staircase that betrayed a deceptive kindness unveiled in her hysterical peer who ran up the staircase with a face red and drenched with tears.

The twelve-year-old walks down three steps and turns around.

“Are you scared?” said Maya, the school dean,  with a subtle disappointment.  

She shakes her head.

“Well, take her upstairs she’s scared,” Maya responds assertively implying the significance of what lies beneath the stairs.

“No, I’ll go,” she replies.

She casually jogged down the stairs, wondering what could be so terrible.

Finally, she reaches the bottom, and makes a sharp left. There it was.

A white man held a bloody hatchet. A black male slave stood with his crouch area transformed into a gaping wound–blood squirting from his crouch—his genitals severed  from his body.

This depiction casts the black man as without yet within the paradigm of white supremacy. The castration is persistent with the latest Las Vegas tragedy in which the black narrative is once again overshadowed, castrated from memory, and issued as an impotence that prevents its reproduction.

A similar inhumanity exists in dissolving the dark struggle in lieu of white “loss.” I place loss in quotations because even in death or destruction whites receive more than most blacks will in a lifetime.

The twelve-year-old witnessed a loss that produced a real shock that wold last a lifetime—not the performance of shock that dominates the contemporary mood. The Las Vegas shooting, yet another casualty of white male privilege, illustrates a  fictive performance of shock.

…

I recall waking up to news reporters speaking of the tragedy “Americans” would have to wake up to. Her voice, low and sympathetic, illustrated a dedication to the role of sympathetic white Woman. This performance proved an act of terrorism in itself–illustrating a compassion noticeable absent from any coverage on murdered blacks.

During the Trayvon Martin trial, reporters seemed mechanical in their temperate coverage.  I don’t recall sympathy or even empathy from whites, or other persons of color that was not self-serving. To most, whether explicitly stated or written in a Facebook status or implicitly present in their silence, Martin was wrong, and the cause of his own death. Most could “relate” to the pseudo fear Zimmerman felt when a hooded black teen  walked frighteningly home with an Arizona Iced Tea. This is similar to what the entire world saw in 1989 the the world believed five black teens raped a white female jogger, in 1994-when most of the world assumed OJ Simpson was guilty. Ida B. Well’s Southern Horrors documents blacks slain in the later 1800s and 1900s, the pre-Trayvon’s and pre-Oj’s- the literally or figuratively castrated casualties of white evil. Moreover, seeing the trajectory of the instant and irreversibly guilty black man, makes the shock surrounding the most recent example of white male murder a predictable but festering insult. Considering the history and trajectory of the white man, mass murder is the most natural component of whiteness.   

In twenty years, news stories like Vegas, the shooting at the Ariana Grande concert, and Sandy Hook, will dominate the examples of white male terror. Martin, Brown, Crawford, Lacy, Bland, Castile, Sterling, and the innumerable number of blacks slain in the wrath of racial psychopathy will become a disappearing act of white supremacist sorcery. The Charleston 9 will receive less air time than the killer’s bowl cut, and if referenced will be referenced as “Christians” murdered by “lone wolf,” not blacks murdered by a racist psychopath. Vegas, will serve as yet another means to erase the black struggle to ensure that the black struggle is stagnant.

Vegas, also proves yet another opportunity for whites to grieve. Vegas, functions like the Holocaust, The Great Depression and 9/11–an extended opportunity for whites to claim victim status for “tragedies” resulting from the same privileges they enjoy daily. This is the exact reason why these events, despite their similarities,  function as isolated incidents. Incidents were blacks kill whites, which are statistically few and far between, are referenced as facts proven by patterns–patterns fictively composed by the countless wrongfully sentenced blacks. The white man–the biggest criminal humanity has ever seen, paints himself as the exact opposite, the black collective bearing the sullied image deserved by their oppressors.

It is also fascinating that the pattern of white evil remains limited to attacks of gun violence. The white man performs similar crimes in variation. The gun represents a supplementary phallus, in which the white man who feels disconnected from the pedestal he is conditioned to expect from life, seeks to penetrate the world and cast his seed of rage in bullet form. This act is mirrored in CUNY professor Ari Nagel, who  uses his sperm like bullets to cast off his seed into the world. Although he informed news reporters that he was “giving a gift,” the sole gift he is giving is to himself. He is giving himself the gift of dominance and the ability to supplement phallic superiority. Nagel mirrors the white slave master who inflated plantation population and an ego contingent on black dominance by forcefully placing his seed into the black female body to further his own agenda and birth the next generation of subjugates.

White male terror is perhaps most obvious in the treatment of black men by the police, who once armed with their supplementary phallus become intoxicated with a fictive importance, only maintained in murder.

The white man who dominates the education system and miseducates black youth, programming them for self destruction is just as evil as a white man with a loaded gun. He too will murder the body, but the death will be gradual, not instant. The subtle mental bludgeoning will cast the black body in the role of subjugate, a role that without incentive to do or think otherwise, blacks will spend a lifetime perfecting.

Feeling anything but numb or contemplative with regard to these recent attempts is to perform a the role created and cast by white supremacists.  The prodigious injustice that burdens the black psyche must trigger all reactions- not the cues of white supremacy. To do so illustrates the black body decentralized as subject and objectified as the concluding act of white supremacist sorcery.

For blacks to feel for victims is an act of humanity, but a portrait of the inhumanity to which renders black objectification. Whites have made it so that blacks feel for whites everything that they could never feel for themselves. To feel for the children of Sandy Hook, in a way most don’t about the children in their own neighborhood being educated on how to be a good slave one day, or the little girls murdered in the 1963 church bombing. To be sad for the Vegas victims and even the shooter, in a way that most couldn’t help but feel that Bland somewhat brought on her own murder, like Brown, like Martin, like Crawford– like them all. Whites nurture the world to see the best in themselves, even in the worst of times.

All blacks have a cache of moments that illustrate the totality of white evil. It may not be a physical castration, but castration by way of a seized narrative, withheld history, or general miseducation. So, what black should see, whether whites donning a smile or scowl, a white coat or white gloves,  is that white man with the bloody ax, or smoking gun, ready to fabricate his superiority at any cost. We must never cease to remember our seized memory, space, and time –our bodies forced to assimilate or become annihilated.

The fictive white male of The Black Wax museum who castrated the black man, symbolically represents the white terrorists that ruthlessly combine gunpowder with privilege to conjure the colonial potion that is white supremacy. A potion many drink voraciously via media, literature, conversation, or the various facets of ignorance.

Through a collective self-determination manifested through focus, understanding, and strengthened black economics, we can castrate white influence and consummate the journeys of our ancestors.

This, of course, is far easier said than done, but worth saying nonetheless.

Black Power ❤