State-Sponsored Violence Is Not New to the African American Community

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers are murdering American citizens. They are carrying out state-sponsored violence. But this is not new to the African American community, which has long labored against it.

The community’s history of resistance goes back centuries to slave ship revolts and maroon communities, which is why this moment in America’s history should not be conflated with Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang theory, a political theory that describes how violent, repressive tactics used by an empire in colonial and foreign territories are eventually brought back and used against its own citizenry.

Consequently, this violence is not following U.S. troops home but is homegrown, a part of America’s founding. The terrorizing presence of ICE agents in American cities is painfully familiar to marginalized communities.

“The system continues to fail black people,” Valerie Castile, the mother of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in 2016, said. “Because this happened with Philando, they’re coming for you, for you and all your interracial children. Y’all are next and you’ll be standing. You’ll be fighting for justice.”

You have likely heard it said across social media platforms from African Americans, some variation of “we told you so.” But it should not be read as a snarky quip. Instead, it is a historical clip of a consistent witness of opposition against indigenous erasure, racialized oppression, economic exploitation, and the militarization and hyper-surveillance of police, practiced until perfected on citizens racialized as black and brown.

It’s why African Americans have collectively agreed to sit on the sidelines during protests after the November 2024 presidential election results, effectively reclaiming their time. Because you cannot have unity without justice. Because millions of European Americans still did not get the lesson that injustice against one group diminishes the freedom of all. 

Because apparently the gruesome murder of George Perry Floyd Jr. was not enough literal “suffering under the boot.” Because evidently, book clubs, antiracism trainings, DEI initiatives and professed allyship were ineffectual. Because clearly, people racialized as white will vote against their own interests to preserve white-body supremacy. 

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” Maya Angelou warned. The community heard their ancestor this time. Because after the #MeToo movement, founded by Tarana Burke, why else would persons elect an adjudicated rapist?

Because what more can be said or done? What hasn’t been said or done by African Americans for hundreds of years? 

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” Fannie Lou Hamer pointed out. She told her audience that freedom is not a solitary pursuit but a shared experience. Even as leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were being surveilled, arrested and murdered, African Americans were calling for solidarity.

The day before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee and in his final sermon, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. demanded, “Be true to what you said on paper.” Live up to the promises made in the country’s foundational documents. Living in the chasm between stated principles and actual practices, King’s last altar call is for authenticity and consistency.

America’s history of hypocrisy ensures his final words’ enduring relevance. King’s criticisms of America have been historically misunderstood, willfully or ignorantly, as unpatriotic and evidence of disloyalty.

“I criticize America because I love her,” King said. “I want her to stand as a moral example to the world.” This is known as critical or conscious patriotism with Nikole Hannah- Jones rightly describing African Americans as “the perfectors of democracy.” 

She wrote in an essay titled “Democracy” in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story: “That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to abandon these lands is an astonishing testament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals.” Lincoln’s reasoning during a meeting with African American leaders: “Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence.”

Change requires a confrontive and constructive criticism, which begins with truth-telling aimed at improvement. “I love America more than any other country in the world and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually,” James Baldwin explained in Notes of a Native Son.

Expressing profound disillusionment with the country’s direction, the response has often been, “This is not the America I know.” Now, ICE officers are murdering European American citizens who put their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors from authoritarian reach.

For European Americans who will not uphold the status quo of white-body supremacy and allow ICE agents to terrorize the immigrant community, they will know America as it has been known—with some not surviving to tell the story.