America Returns to Its Violent Normal
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Tags: Politics, Justice, Society, Police, Race

America Returns to Its Violent Normal

Violence is only permissible here when it’s state-sanctioned

Police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 29, 2020. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

I find myself once again struggling with the American definition of violence. With who gets to define what violence is, and what it looks like. Some of this is because violence is so often discussed only as action, and not inaction: Protesters in the streets, but not institutional neglect. Violence in this country is so often discussed in the present, without any historical context. Our country talks about a city on fire, but rarely about what had to burn and who had to be left behind for a city to exist in the first place.

America now finds itself in another moment of reckoning, right as the country opts to “reopen,” a catchall term for some kind of return to normalcy that also whitewashes the risks for those who can’t work from home and must now return to the workplace. States like Ohio are setting up databases to report employees who don’t come to their place of work. Make no mistake: This is an act of violence. In a country where unemployment has skyrocketed and 40% of people can’t afford a $400 emergency expense, the wealth of billionaires continues to accumulate at the expense of exploited workers. This, too, is violence. People who are unhoused sleep outdoors in cities where hotels sit largely empty. Covid-19 has run through multiple prisons and detention centers, leaving many incarcerated individuals sick, and some dying without proper care. All of this, violence.

The timing of not just the killings, but also the uprisings in response to the killings, has made me question what American Normalcy is and who gets to celebrate a return to it.

In concert with America’s quest to return to normalcy, people have taken to the streets to protest the killings of black people by the police: Breonna Taylor, killed in Louisville in March. George Floyd, killed in Minneapolis on May 25. Tony McDade, killed by police in Tallahassee just two days later. The timing of not just the killings, but also the uprisings in response to the killings has made me question what American Normalcy is, and who gets to celebrate a return to it. So much of the discourse around the material nature of reopening has revolved around finances. Around markets and labor and the economy. But significantly less ink has been spilled on the subject of what opening means for our nation’s obsession with policing, with surveillance, and with punishment. Most likely, it means more of the same for America’s vulnerable and marginalized. And, as we’re seeing in Minneapolis and around the country right now, many of those people are fed up.

The pandemic revealed even more clearly how systemic the inequality in this country is, and the extent to which the power structure values lives differently depending on race, income, and privilege. The pictures that show white protesters storming statehouses alongside those that show black protesters drowning in clouds of tear gas should send a powerful message, though at this point I believe many people should be beyond a need for visual contrasts. I also don’t feel particularly interested in shepherding people to some kind of awakening. Many people aren’t who they were three or four months ago, and the illusion of the country’s greatness has found a new way to wear thin. A country that was, and has been held up by workers, by insular communities stretching themselves to the limits to give people what they need. Those are the people once again marching along the streets right now.

And for many of us, this moment feels familiar. We are up late at night again. An otherwise dark bedroom, punctuated by the light from a cellphone screen showing a building on fire or a fist thrust into the sky illuminated by fire. There are people who know the routine of marching in their city’s streets for hours, only to return to their homes and watch the videos of people marching elsewhere. To search for bail funds on the internet and do math with whatever money they have to spare. Many of us are here again with the understanding that we never left.

This is American Normalcy, too. The country didn’t imagine a return to protest, but it was inevitable. We live in a place that was founded on and profits from violence, even if the state won’t define it as such. There are those who obsess over the burning of a Minneapolis police precinct but not a man’s broken neck. Who prefer demonstrations of peace because such tactics are less likely to disrupt bubbles of comfort. But also because when people fighting for freedom use tactics some would deem violent, it is holding up a mirror to a violent country. Whether or not that result is intentional or understood by those in power. So much of what is labeled as violence was learned through American machinery or American neglect.

And so, this is our grand reopening, same as it ever was. But this time people have seen the nation grind to a halt when they were removed from its workforce. They’ve seen the rich grow richer. They’ve hoped for something better, or at least different, on the other side of a pandemic. And still, here is the same America. A country so eager to return to normal — howling with grief, soaked in blood.