Breathe: Notes on White Supremacy and the Fierce Urgency of Now

• In Event: Assaults on Communities of Color: Transacademic Exploration of the Realities of Race-Based Violence

Abstract

This paper explores the urgency of action in the critical moments of 2013-2015, well into the second term of the Obama presidency, where assaults on communities of color make visible the weaknesses of democracy that claims to be color-blind and post-racial but so glaringly enacts a reality that is clearly race focused and assaultive. While activism in the Movement is reaching new heights, the truths of colonial state repression are not new: violence is as American as cherry pie, deep in the DNA of a nation founded on conquest and theft, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Africans. The power of the State has always been in the business of violence—inventing and stockpiling weapons, training thousands to wield them, invading, conquering, occupying. The paper authors discuss why when the institutions of society—police and prisons, schools and housing and transportation and employment and health care—are perfected to maintain the conditions of subjugation, the status quo itself is a form of violence against the oppressed and the marginalized. The paper suggests that the solution is not simply to make them work “better,” but instead to tear down the whole thing, rethink and rebuild in new ways.

Authors

• William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Richard Ayers, University of San Francisco