Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Gun Violence Choice Review



Routledge


The following review will appear in the January 2015 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only until our publication date of 01 January 2015

Social & Behavioral Sciences
52-2618
HV7435
2013-48555 CIP
Squires, Peter. Gun crime in global contexts. Routledge, 2014. 400p bibl index ISBN 9780415688598, $155.00.
The author identifies "weaponization" as a symptom of neoliberal globalization or Western domination of the world system, characterized by the widespread availability of largely Western-manufactured small arms and light weapons used to perpetrate mass killings and rampages, mostly by men whose gender identity is threatened by a postindustrial political economy based on knowledge rather than force.  Squires (criminology, Univ. of Brighton, UK) contrasts the UK policy response to the Dunblane school massacre (stricter gun control) with the US response to the Columbine school massacre (resistance to any stricter gun control policies).  Synthesizing five communities of academic interpretation in the gun proliferation and violence debate—criminology of gun violence, conflict studies of failed states, studies of weapon proliferation or trade, ethnography of violence and peacemaking, and the inter/national politics of gun control—Squires concludes that the metaphor of the authoritarian Western game of chance—rock, paper, scissors—may be used to illustrate the concept of the separation of unequal powers in liberal democracies that permit the hegemony of the powerful gun lobby, despite overwhelming evidence that the gun is a defective product that does more harm than good to the social contract.
--B. Agozino, Virginia Tech

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Headless People and Head Hunters

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By Biko Agozino

According to Achille Mbembe, in his book, Postcolony, Europeans tend to see Africa as "a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability ... a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete…in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos".





The exhibition of Mbembe sculptures from a ‘Nigerian community’ of that name at the New York Metropolitan Museum (until September 7, 2015) appears to follow Achille Mbembe’s  script by suggesting that the wooden sculptures from the 15th century Africans ‘with human heads’, including one ‘without a head’ can be cleanly classified into polar opposites of ‘killers and nurturers, All Surprisingly’ or into ‘Warriors and Mothers’, according to the New York Times reviewer, Holland Cotter who narrates how a Malian arts dealer sold those images of African ‘gods’ to a German collector in the 1970s and then vanished when the collector wanted to buy some more of the astonishing sculptures.



Such a Cartesian way of thinking in rational grids that compartmentalize complex reality into mutually exclusive categories that make them easier to master is typically a Western obsession compared to the chaos principles of African Fractals with emphases on interconnectivity, fractional dimensions, infinity, self-similarity, recursion, and scaling that characterize Africana designs compared to the authoritarian lineal geometries of Western designs or hierarchical Euclidean three-dimensional designs of American Indian Native arts, according to Ron Eglash in his African Fractals book. Achille Mbembe might be mistaken in believing that chaos is always negative – the internet is designed as a web with chaos theory to defy the dictatorial will to control, for example.



The reviewer of Mbembe sculptures, Holland Coitter, simply assumed that the Mbembe community exists only on the Nigerian side of the border with Cameroun and ignored the fact that Cameroun and Nigeria used to be administered as one country once upon a time in recent history with the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons as a liberation party campaigning for the restoration of independence under the leadership of Azikiwe; or that a Cameroonian theorist bears that communal name, Mbembe, as a testimony against the arbitrary division of interconnected African communities by lineal colonial boundaries; or that Congolese communities use the exact same name to identify a river monster believed to be capable of stopping the infinite flow of the river.



The structuralist division and compartmentalization of interconnected phenomena is also evident in the gendered division of labor between ‘killing and nurturing’, or between ‘warriors and mothers’ as if men are incapable of nurturing and women incapable of killing or as if only men are capable of being warriors in the African landscape peopled with ancient warrior queens and Amazons or even modern crusaders and jihadists of both sexes. One of the sculptures of a ‘nurturing mother’ is apparently that of a loving father with a flat chest just enjoying the blessing of carrying his own offspring on his laps for an ancestral blessing imperceptible to the patriarchal western eye, despite the rise of the culture of stay-at-home dads in western countries today.



When the Westerner sees a sculpture of the African holding a ‘human head’, the rush is to conclude that this must be a headhunter with the severed head of an enemy despite the fact that headhunting is now a non-violent practice of executive recruitment in capitalist industries. Of course, this is a common meme in colonialist anthropology to ideologically suggest that decapitation is a universal human trait found not only among genocidal imperialists but also among the Africans who gave to the world the gift of the philosophy of non-violence and whose democratic communal organizations were dismissed as ‘headless societies’.



According to the New Zealand legal theorist, Moana Jackson, colonial anthropologists went to the ridiculous extent of suggesting that the Maori have something they called a ‘warrior gene’ that justified the genocidal policy of wiping them out under British colonialism, despite the fact that the Haka remains a harmless trading of insults by ‘warrior’ performers. Similarly, American anthropologists identified Venezuelan tribes as being naturally warlike in line with a supposedly universal human trait by coincidence at the very same time that the Americans were vainly trying to persuade the Vietnamese with the aid of napalm bombs that mass murder was indeed a human trait, only to discover that the Venezuelan tribes, just like the Maori and the Mbembe and even Americans themselves, are better characterized as a peace-loving people instead of being ideologically mischaracterized as people with mythical warrior genes to justify militarism.



Sculptures of human heads do not necessarily depict ‘killers’ contrary to the ideological interpretation of the New York Times reviewer. Sculptures of human heads or masks are rather common tropes found in many cultures around the world for the performance of non-violent human cultural traits of spiritualism or in the realm of entertainment. In the case of the Mbembe, the sculptures of ‘warrior gods’ were actually appendages to drums that the people played not just for killing or warfare but obviously for fun or for the burial of their dead and the celebration of birth. But to western eyes familiar with the frequent contemplation of ghastly scenes, sculptures of human figures holding ‘human heads’ can only represent the literal figures of ‘killers’ or ‘warriors’, perhaps to justify the genocidal history of the killings of the ‘killers’ by the killer-killer master race from the west.



A more nuanced interpretation of sculptures of mythical heroes ‘holding a human head’ on the carving of a drum is to see them as the harmless depiction of the fact that the people are holding their own lives in their hands; that they must hear the messages of the drum with their own heads or risk the dismemberment of the Mbembe into separate colonies when they should unite across artificial colonial boundaries to ensure the reproduction of their pan African culture by men and women who must nurture the future generation together rather than be deceived into the limited typification of the men simply as ‘killers’ or ‘warriors’ and the women simply as stereotypical ‘nurturers’ or ‘mothers’.



Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech and the author of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Liberty Can't Breathe

By Biko Agozino
Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies,
Virginia Tech

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Firing four officers for killing unarmed, handcuffed, and non-resisting George Floyd while witnesses videoed the lynching and pleaded in vain for the officers to stop the assault was not enough to put out the fire of outrage. Not even arresting them and trying them would be enough especially given that the police union sought their reinstatement under the assumption that police brutality is business as usual. 

Washington Post and The Guardian reported that the police killed 2.5 white people for every African American they killed in the US. Police brutality is not a problem only for African Americans. Outraged white people also join the protests knowing that it could be them next or that injustice is an affront to all. The sorcerer's apprentice who concocts diarrhea cannot hide his own rear in the sky, according to an Igbo proverb. We just want to live like everybody else but for so many reasons, we just can't breathe.

Trump failed in leadership when he 'violated' Twitter rules against the 'glorification of violence' after he tweeted a threat that "looting comes before shooting". Trump did not call for the stopping of protesters who are armed with automatic rifles, confederate flags, and nazi swastikas, marching against only Democratic Party state governors enforcing lockdowns like all governors under COVID-19, he encouraged them with multiple tweets: 'LIBERATE MINNEAPOLIS ... MICHIGAN ... VIRGINIA and defend the great 2nd amendment right to bear arms'. The 'Meanerpolis' police officers had 18 previous police brutality complaints against them but continued to keep their jobs with impunity. Trump apparently wished that mean US city authorities would become meaner and go beyond  the 'homeycidal' kneeling against a man's neck, stomach and feet and preferably shoot innocent citizens for exercising the democratic right to freedom of expression. 

Trump thugged out when he reassured the police that they did not need to worry about hurting drug cartel suspects during arrests. Trump earlier called on NFL team owners to kick out athletes that he called sons of female dogs for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest lethal police brutality against innocent people in the US. George Floyd was neither a drug cartel suspect nor was he taking a knee, his neck was crushed by the knees of police officers who ignored his plea to 'please stop' for nine minutes. George Floyd was a deeply religious mentor of young people who spent his life in Houston trying to end violence in the predominantly African American community of the Third Ward. The police officer who continued kneeling on his neck (with a hand in his pocket as if wanking off with sadistic pleasure over the killing) even after he was lifeless worked at the same nightclub with Floyd but allegedly preferred to pepper-spray the patrons to control them, probably against the objections of Floyd. Ordering heavily armed military to 'dominate the streets' was not a power given to the government in the Constitution by 'We The People'.

Whoever called the police to arrest him for passing a suspected fake $20 note (that he may not have known was fake or may not even be fake) needs to tell the world what was alleged to the police on that call, how could they assert that he was 'incredibly' intoxicated? Instead of guarding their stores with huge rifles, why did they not join the protesters from all racial backgrounds against the unlawful killing of one of their customers? Was it like Amy Cooper, the unleashed dog-walker in Central Park who hoaxed about being threatened by an African American male, Christian Cooper, no relation? Thanks to Steve Jobs and all other smart phone inventors and CCTV monitors for arming the society with digital witnesses that never lie to enable the Black Panther tradition of policing cops by the community to remain alive and credible.


Policing emerged in America from the slave-catching posse of the 19th century and so it is hardly surprising that Grand Juries rarely indict white police officers who kill African Americans even today. Since Indigenous Peoples went on for thousands of years without the repressive institution of the police until Robert Peel imposed the fetish in 1829 to help the public to control the fear of the increasing population of freed Africans formerly enslaved in the UK and those still enslaved on the plantations in the Caribbean, and enthusiastically adopted by the US to replace slave patrol posse, we can abolish the police and redirect their huge funds to community safety measures decolonize the police and prisons with civic education and not incarceration; with reparative justice and not criminal justice.

"The Pentagon's budget for fiscal year 2020—$738 billion—was the "largest on record" and came "at the expense of healthcare, education, infrastructure spending, and public health research." – Congress Woman Barbara Lee

 

"For years, our government has failed to invest in programs that actually keep our country safe and healthy," said Lee. "By over-prioritizing the Pentagon and military solutions, our country is drastically underprepared for any crisis that needs a non-military solution."

 

African rulers should go beyond the shedding of crocodile tears over the lynching of George Floyd and recognize that the police forces imposed by colonizers were designed to kill Africans in genocidal proportions. Decolonize the police and prisons in Africa!


Any grown ass man, six feet two inches tall, armed to serve and protect the people, who tells the Grand Jury that he shot someone dead because he felt ‘like a five year old struggling with Hulk Hogan’ and that he saw the unarmed college-bound teenage Michael Brown as a ‘demon’ must have been drunk on absolute power or on the prejudicial fear that forced him to cowardly quit his job afterwards.

The official toxicology report on Darren Wilson did not test his blood for ethanol but indicated an abnormally high level of creatinine that researchers say is usually an indication of alcohol in the blood.

Given that 86% of the 179 people who were killed by New York police officers since that of Amadou Diallo in 1999 were colored people like Eric Garner but with the grand injury of hardly any indictments by Grand Juries, Liberty Can’t Breathe!



No sane or moral society can breathe easily when the air is frequently polluted with the race-class-gender articulation of repression by agents of authoritarian populism. Sadly, moral entrepreneurs continue to support police homey-cide disproportionately against African American men because ‘when you carry the corpse of another, it feels like the carcass of a dog’, according to an Igbo proverb. 

Michael Vick’s dogs surely got more justice than poor African Americans because if the police lynched a dog the way they lynched George Floyd, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, etc, etc, there would be more outrage.


The war on drugs must end so police officers cannot claim as ‘probable cause’, the testimony by Darren Wilson that Mike Brown’s stockings had the images of green marijuana leaves painted on them. Marijuana remains medicinal and much safer than alcohol and tobacco that kill hundreds of thousands annually while 800,000 Americans are arrested yearly for marijuana possession but no one ever died from marijuana use. No one should die from mere allegations of fraud while pleading with his co-worker of many years of nightclub security job:

"It's my face man
I didn't do nothing serious man
please
please
please I can't breathe
please man
please somebody
please man
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please
(inaudible)
man can't breathe, my face
just get up
I can't breathe
please (inaudible)
I can't breathe sh*t
I will
I can't move
mama
mama
I can't
my knee
my nuts
I'm through
I'm through
I'm claustrophobic
my stomach hurt
my neck hurts
everything hurts
some water or something
please
please
I can't breathe officer
don't kill me
they gon' kill me man
come on man
I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe
they gon' kill me
they gon' kill me
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can't breathe"

And they claimed that he was resisting arrest! Was Elijah McClain also resisting arrest when he was lynched by officers despite his politeness and appeals to their common humanity?


Decolonize Policing! Decolonize Prisons! Demilitarize the earth. Let your people go! Protest!