F-ck bein' on some chill s--t. We reserve the right to go zero to 100 real quick. And last week, it could never be untoward to say that the whole Ohio Student Association squad was on some real s—t.
  I arrived in Xenia at around noon, having failed to wake up in time to join the march from the Beavercreek Wal-Mart. The marchers would not arrive for another two and a half hours, which gave me time time to explore Xenia, this quintessentially American town, which provided the setting for this quintessentially American tragedy.
  In Xenia, the Town Square is a strip mall. The Ten Commandments are proudly displayed on the courthouse lawn. The coffee shop across the street sells fair-trade coffee alongside Twinkies. The signs that line the street posted by the economic promotion consortium called Downtown Xenia Now extol Xenia as “a family adventure and an action movie all rolled into one.” The tobacco shop further down the road proclaims on its door that it is “American Owned and Operated.” And of course, in true small-town American fashion, everyone you met was nothing but friendly and hospitable.
  But Xenia is also a town where 60 percent of its children are on free and reduced lunch, where the two anchor sites in said Town Square sit empty. Xenia has been ravaged by two deadly tornadoes in 40 years. Xenia is the Whitehall to Beavercreek's Upper Arlington, and it was in the Xenia courthouse where it took only one day for the grand jury to decide not to indict the officers involved in the shooting of John Crawford.
  Nobody I have encountered believes that “this” is over. The larger question is what exactly “this” is. Fortunately, the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri did us the favor of defining the issue for us when he said “That's one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, is that that we do not have politicized trials.” To politicize a trial then is to reject Anglo-American civilization, and we all know whose backs and whose land Anglo-American civilization was built on.
  Such as it must be I guess, because we aren't stopping. Stokely Carmichael diagnosed the problem fifty years ago when he said “we've always moved in the field of morality and love while people have been politically jiving with our lives.” The key then is to move politically, which is precisely what the march to Xenia was.
  So let's do it, because Black survival is a form of resistance, and resistance against the police specifically. In the South, modern policing came out of slave patrols. In the North, it was a means to turn immigrant classes into proper proletarians. There is a reason that their mythological antagonists are robbers, and it is because the primary function of a police force is to protect property, property still held by occupiers, four centuries on. This is why we know that the issue is not one of reforming the police, of body cameras and sensitivity training, or disarming the police. Misguided liberals point to the noted lack of police homicides in Western Europe and wonder why America can't be more like them. They do not realize that by calling for America to be more like Europe, they are perpetuating the same colonial project as the police themselves.
  And so let us return to the people in the street, bodies in motion moving collectively and independently for their own ends. The rallying cry is for justice, and not the justice that puts people in cages, but the justice that as a current runs through each of us. The justice that, despite the legal system's best efforts, is uncommodifiable and uncontrollable.
  The justice they, we, speak of is not justice under this current system. We all know such a thing is impossible. The justice we are talking about is social justice. The justice we speak of is the justice that allows humanity to take flight, to transcend its self-imposed limitations, the ones that force endless conflict, and to live to our true potential. And to do that, I'ma block quote Fanon:

“Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. If we want to turn...America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us. But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries”

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