Dr. Sethi is always asking “What if we they just left? If all our kin walked away from the police, the military?” – that is, what if our skin-folk in Atlanta, in Haifa, in Paris, in Memphis, in Marseille, in Chandigarh refused to participate in the militarized, violent destruction of our own people? I ponder that some of the most violent and racist encounters I’ve had with police were with Black police. I reflect on the Black police and prison staff that continue enforcing the violence that allows Cop City to continue. I’m looking at the weariness on their faces – the mental and soul torment that is self-inflicted. I reading the witnessing new forms of fascism that are experimented with daily
What if we called out to our kin in these spaces to just walk away?
I spent this first Tuesday of July away from platforms and investments in neo-colonialism. I planted, read, and spent precious time in the presence of and present with family.
I came across a small video clip below, it’s a brief documentary on the Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (NLF, the so-called Vietcong) which was a revolutionary organization operating in concert with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the long struggle of the Vietnamese people against france, the united states, and their client regimes.
In the clip Phan Dinh, a former leader in the NLF, narrates how the humble peasants in his village “called in” members of the village who had been working with the amerikkkan backed forces. It was the aunts, uncles, sisters, elders, children who held these folk to account. These folk soon left the armies of the land-owners, coming back into the fold of the community. There are many powerful ways to make a revolution happen.
In a world where we are steadily being splintered apart, where so much of our social lives have been reduced to commercial interactions, and where fellowship and belonging are desperately lacking, we must relearn how to hold space and belief together in ways that anchor us to each other and to our collective moral commitments.
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You
Charles write here 