To Those Who Choose to Defend Themselves: NYC Banner Action

Submitted to It’s Going Down 

When a community is living under an armed occupation any act of violence is an act of self-defense.

The United States, since its inception, is a country predicated on white supremacy. The quality of life afforded to its citizenry is maintained through anti-blackness and every time revolutionary fighters attempt to combat this foundational racism the ugly American truth boils over again.

From the military to the police and their prisons, the justice system attempts to maintain a totalizing form of oppression. Just as slave patrols worked to confine black people to plantations in South Carolina, the police today are used to deliver mass laborers to prisons where they are forced to labor for pennies, and live in exactly the same shackles as in the Antebellum period.

How else does one explain not only the brazen atrocities black people not only face but are asked to accept as the status quo? We think Kimani Gray is outrageous and then Trayvon Martin is murdered. We were stunned when Eric Garner was choked to death only to wake up at another time and learn about Alton Sterling. We were shocked when Tamir Rice was killed in a drive-by, by police, only to hear years later about Korryn Gaines being executed with her child in her hands.

The sad truth is that this is normal life in America; this is not an anomaly, but a continuation of the American practice of subjugating black life. But Korryn Gaines, like many other before her, chose not to surrender without a fight and she will be immortalized forever in the popular tradition of all people who fought back against this barbaric society.

The state reserves the right to commit violence with impunity but some people will push back.

The slave masters have dropped the whips and replaced them with badges and handcuffs but resistance will continue. It is in celebration of the resistance that we left this banner hanging over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. We celebrate Korryn Gaines, the rebels at Abolition Square, and all freedom fighters who are fighting back against the system. We salute all the rebels who choose to defend themselves against the United States’ racist violence, and all those who are fighting to make a better world without the state and capitalism.

To those who choose to defend themselves: you are not alone; our strength will grow.

-Anarchist Fighters for Black Liberation