White Terrorism and Black Liberation: Destructive vs. Creative Intellect
Something hit me today (June 26, 2015) as I was reflecting on three critical incidents that have impacted the Pan-Afrikan Community over the last two months.  The incidents in question here were the April 19 killing of Freddy Gray by Baltimore Police and the spontaneous “mini-riot” that followed on April 27; the June 17 massacre/hate crime/terrorist attack at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and the June 25 burnings of Briar Creek Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina and God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia, both of which police investigators are saying were acts of arson and may have also been hate crimes.

The Baltimore “mini-riots”, which were seen as a spontaneous reaction to the Gray killing, sparked some heated debates, as anti-police protests often do, about our supposed tolerance of what is portrayed as “Black-on-Black crime”.  The apparent point is that we fail to give sufficient attention to the crime we do to ourselves (such as gang members) in our zeal to point out the crime done to us by others (such as brutal police and violent racists).  I anticipate that the continued outcry over the terrorist act of Dylann Storm Roof, and now of whoever chose to set the blaze that claimed Briar Creek Baptist Church, a predominantly Afrikan-American house of prayer in Charlotte, will once again spark this shallow and self-serving debate from the country’s increasingly vocal racists and those who mindlessly follow them.

There is a key difference between the acts of violence we do to ourselves and those crimes of oppression and racism that are perpetrated upon us by others, however.  And it introduces an aspect of the crime-and-punishment discussion that not only has not been publicly discussed, it also may speak directly to the differences in the ways that conscious people of Afrikan descent and those descended from our historic oppressors have learned, over the centuries, to think, or to not think.

Let’s start with the favorite false narrative of the White racist (and the occasional unconscious compliant Negro commentator): our supposed tolerance of “Black-on-Black” crime.  Aside from the fact that crime is an act of convenience, not of ethnicity (We commit crimes against ourselves because we are invariably crowded together like sardines in ghettos and inner-city neighborhoods) and the fact that in economically-depressed communities inhabited by White, Red and Brown people, crime is similarly White-on-White, Red-on-Red and Brown-on-Brown, most of the violence seems to result from crimes of personal revenge (such as gang hits), crimes of passion (such as domestic or neighborhood disputes), or crimes of convenience based on physical proximity (purse-snatchings, car-jackings, muggings and stray bullets).  The perpetrator of the crime usually does not invest days, weeks or months in choosing a particular victim, especially not based on any socio-political motive, and wastes no time preparing an explanation for the crime and leaving it to conveniently be found on the Internet.  The victim, quite literally, was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.  The choice of victim was not the result of planning and thinking.  The carnage wrought, in that the perpetrator often cares not who the victim was, could be more accurately thought of as the result of a decision to not think.

Now, let’s look at the Charleston massacre, and the apparent arsons at the churches in Charlotte and Macon.  In the case of what has been called the Charleston Massacre, the apparent mass-murderer, Dylann Storm Roof, 21 years old, was found to have composed a rather extensive, if ill-informed, manifesto based on his regular visits to several White Supremacist websites.  He photographed himself holding a Confederate flag, burning a United States flag, and wearing the insignias of Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa, two White racist regimes that were historic relics by the day of his birth.  He created a website that he named The Last Rhodesian and chose to publicize his twisted, sick philosophy there for all to see.  He calmly participated in a Bible Study meeting with his victims for the better part of an hour before embarking on his killing spree, and as he shot his victims, shouting racial epithets throughout, he reloaded five times.  In other words, this crime was committed after extensive planning (Roof had stated that he knew he could not venture into the “ghetto” to pursue his campaign of wanton destruction, and he even “explained” his motivation to his victims as he was killing them, according to the account of a survivor of the attack: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go”).  When juxtaposed against the apparent church arsons in Charlotte and in Macon, Georgia, and the series of church burnings that occurred across the South in the late 1990s (for more on this, see “Churches Are Burning Again in America”, at www.theatlantic.com), it becomes increasingly likely that these crimes were committed by homegrown White terrorists as the result of much thinking and planning.

The pattern that emerges here is that of Black people committing acts of violence when we don’t think.  These White terrorists, as with so many terrorists around the world, seem to resort to acts of violence and hatred when they think too much.

We also see patterns when we restrict our observation solely to the thinkers among us.  When conscious Afrikan people think, we become engines of creation, building institutions for economic development or the liberation and uplift of our communities, and for the establishment of the ancient Afrikan moral code of Ma’at.  Indeed, this is part of the practical result of what Honored Afrikan Ancestors Dr. John Chissell and Dr. Kwame SabakhuRa meant by Deep Afrikan Thought.  Clearly, Whites are also capable of creative thought, as is often shown by peace activists, environmentalists, doctors and all manner of true servants to the people.  But for some reason, thinking does not seem to lead to such positive outcomes when the supposed “thinker” is a reactionary, right-wing racist.  More thinking does not seem to help them.  By contrast, when these racist terrorists think, they become dangerous, murderous engines of destruction.

When viewed in this way, it seems strange that so many mayors, governors, legislators and even presidents expend so much energy finding ways to cut spending on schools, libraries and recreation centers, particularly in communities with large numbers of Afrikan-Americans and other people of color, institutions that teach consciousness and help young people learn how to think, while at the same time fighting for the rights of manufacturers to flood the landscape with more and more powerful guns.  At the same time, while focusing on historically-Black civil rights groups such as the SCLC and revolutionary organizations such as the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement that were dedicated to the education, uplift and defense of Black, Brown and Red people from terrorism (and in the process the creation of a more fair and just society for all), so many of the truly dangerous groups, the Ku Klux Klan, the Neo-Nazis and several of the Skinhead organizations with direct ties to acts of anti-Black, anti-Red, anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish terrorism, managed to escape the same fate as the BPP and AIM.  Thus, the Panthers, AIM and MOVE could be destroyed because they possessed a few weapons with which to defend themselves from racist attacks by criminals, terrorists and police, while the criminals and racists who threaten these organizations and their communities could, and still can, get all the guns they want.

The Powers That Be seem to prefer to keep Afrikan people in a state of unthinking Zombiefication and helplessness, perhaps based on the fear of what fundamental changes a conscious and educated Black community will bring to this sick society.  Meanwhile, White racist terrorists such as Dylann Storm Roof and the Charlotte arsonists can continue to have access to xenophobic pseudo-education, and, oh yes, guns, guns, and more guns.

Perhaps they understood what rapper-turned-actor Ice-T was saying in his song “Lethal Weapon”: My lethal weapon is my mind. In that regard, our enemies want to keep us disarmed, while providing more and more ammunition to those who will ultimately bring even their own way of life to destruction.