Like countless others throughout the diaspora, I watched the disturbing footage of Anjanette Young, a black woman ambushed by police as she undressed. The footage shows a nude Young in a room full of ten, white male police officers who broke down her door and searched the apartment despite Young informing them (several times) that they had the wrong house. A resonant moment in this troubling footage is how the white male officer treats a nude Young with cavalier disregard by stating the following: “you do not have to shout.” This sentence proves that the African-Adjacent regard the African in America as unentitled to space and to the basic politics of human respectability. Additionally, this behavior proves that dehumanizing and humiliating black people is seen as inherently American and therefore more American than anything other than murdering blacks as a national pastime. What is also inherently American are attacks against the black collective disguised as awareness.

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Lightfoot faced extensive criticism for her attempts to conceal the footage, but with said criticism the public outrage appears to do one thing but does another. The public outrage appears to censure law enforcement in favor of a black woman, but what the world witnesses is white supremacy burning both ends of a white nationalist candle.

Most recently, the black community witnessed a similar systemic burn scenario with Daniel Cameron with regard to Breonna Taylor’s murder. As AG, Cameron was responsible for conducting an investigation and indicting the guilty parties. He employed his role to indict the officer who fired shots into a neighboring apartment. In this instance, the black collective irretrivably lost Breonna Taylor but also witnessed to systemic castration of a melantaed representative of white nationalism. This praxis, I contend, delineates a double lynching where an anti-black system lynches the black optic through psuedo awareness afforded to a victim of his or her “authority.” To be clear, I am not denying Cameron or Lightfoot as culpable agents in domestic terrorism. I do wish to underscore that they were hired for their espousal to a white nationalist justice system, then rendered scapegoats for implementing the very ideology and behavior that determined their eligibility.

Lori Lightfoot previously worked as a chief administrator of the Chicago Police Department Office of Professional Standards where she was in charge of policing the police. During her time, she accused Alvin Weems, a black man, of excessive force. I present this information in contrast to the result of Young’s unjust raid. None of the white men involved in the illegal raid have been charged, because. as indicated in her previous positions, Lori’s role is to police her own and prevent the policing of the African-adjacent at the expense of continued abuse against blacks inside and outside the police department.

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The berated black leader, as history has shown us, is always followed by an overt white supremacist who “cleans up” the effect of the black optic. This will undoubtedly be the case with both Lightfoot and Cameron. We saw this with Rudy Giuliani and David Dickins in New York City and Donald Trump with Barack Obama. Both Dickins and Obama administrations engendered tense relationships with the black collective falsely oscillated by the “return” of the overt white leader. There is, of course, no “clean-up,” but systemic terrorism employed to fester the myth of black inferiority and white presence as a national “necessity” and “saving grace.”

The black optic gains position to take the fall for an anti-black system. Casting the black optic as villain to a collective continuously under attack, the white system hangs two black bodies at once. Anjanette Young’s incident elucidates this double lynching as a black woman is terrorized in her own home and the black optic, not the anti-black officers or anti-black system of white supremacy, faces public scrutiny.

Furthermore, to eliminate the Daniel Camerons and the Lori Lightfoots does not and will not eliminate the Anjanette Youngs or Breonna Taylors. To dissent from the core of societal evil will both prolong and enable its ways, affording a cyclical role to the double lynchings of black “villian” and black “victim” on the geneological tree of an anti-black America.