Umph.

I've been watching all these videos and reading posts from rightfully angry white people. They are shocked. They are outraged over yet another killing by ICE.

What we are witnessing is a moment when a people who were raised to believe the state ultimately exists to protect them, now realize the state can also erase them and then lie about it with a straight fucking face. But for these rightfully angry white folks, this realization is landing as “authoritarianism,” “police state,” "Nazism," “this is what dictatorships do."

They keep saying this because liberal whiteness has long located tyranny somewhere else. In other countries, other regimes, other histories, other people’s bodies. Not ours. Not to US citizens. Not white mothers and ICU nurses.

But for Black folks, state violence has never needed a new name. We didn’t have to wait for the language of fascism or authoritarianism to understand what it means when armed agents can kill you and then script your death into criminality and blame you for your own death. WE have been living inside that grammar for centuries.

What’s new ain't the state violence. What’s new is WHO is being forced to recognize its structure.

Do y’all believe us now?

Now that the camera shows what our bodies have always known. Now that the lie is so naked even citizenship and white bodies can’t cover it. Now that you’ve felt, for one searing second, what it means to be disposable to the state.