This week Joe Biden delivered his third State of the Union address. Notably, he expressed remorse for Tyre Nichols’s murder at the hands of the police and urged Congress to “do something” about it. His version of something was more training, more rules, and more money, nevermind the fact that Tyre Nichols was murdered by an elite, specialized police unit that was undoubtedly the product of past demands for more training, more rules, and more money. Nearly three years after the George Floyd uprisings, it was surreal to observe, in real time, how those uprisings and their attendant demands to defund the police have been so cynically subverted by the state - appealing to the deep emotions accompanying tragedy only to turn around and do absolutely nothing but stage events for the purpose of its own legitimation. It was surreal to observe the topic of police murder seamlessly worked into a constitutionally mandated policy speech about the status of national affairs somewhere in between remarks on COVID and immigration. It was surreal. Replete with the rhetorical flourishes and manufactured sincerity that speechwriters are tasked with inserting into moments like those - "There's no words to describe the heartache or grief of losing a child, but imagine, imagine if you lost that child to the hands of the law." As if those of us who remain are not already intimately familiar. As if the issue of police murder arrived on the scene just yesterday. As if this brutality isn’t something that the very government President Biden stands at the helm of tells us every day to tacitly accept in exchange for feeling safe. As if this brutality isn’t something that so many Americans have already tacitly accepted so long as it isn’t plastered on the news and generating protests that disturb brunch. There is, in fact, no problem with our ability to “imagine” the atrocities at hand.
Black people lose things and each other and their lives to the hands of the law every day. That is the status quo. It is, not only how it is, but apparently how it must be. Consider Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson is 80% black and home to a higher percentage of black residents than any major American city. Mississippi’s Legislature is thoroughly controlled by white Republicans, who have redrawn districts over the past 30 years to ensure they can pass any bill without a single Democratic vote. Every legislative Republican is white, and most Democrats are black. This week, a white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson that would be appointed completely by white state officials — the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would appoint two judges to oversee a new district within the city; the white state attorney general would appoint four prosecutors, a court clerk, and four public defenders for the new district; the white state public safety commissioner would oversee an expanded Capitol Police force, which has received broad criticism from Jacksonians for shooting several people in recent months and is run currently by a white chief. Democratic members of the House said if the Legislature wanted to help with the crime problem, it could increase the number of elected judges in Hinds County, of which Jackson is the county seat. Rep. Trey Lamar, the Republican who authored the bill, said that allowing the judges to come from areas other than Hinds County would ensure “the best and brightest” could “serve.” Black legislators said the comment implied that judges and other court staff could not be found within the black majority population of Hinds County. “Only in Mississippi would we have a bill like this … where we say solving the problem requires removing the vote from black people,” said Rep. Ed Blackmon.
The point is not that black enforcers of the law are inherently more righteous than white enforcers of the law. That was made unequivocally clear by the black officers who murdered Tyre Nichols. The point is that law itself - the set of rules created and enforced by social, governmental, and, increasingly, private institutions to regulate social behavior - mandates black people be governed in ways that humiliate and degrade. Despite Rep. Blackmon’s remark that only Mississippi would solve problems by removing black people from governance, the same is true of D.C. — a majority black place with deliberately little control over its own local affairs. Law enforcement is not the exclusive domain of police officers. When the rule of law is understood in more fundamental terms, it becomes easy to see how law enforcement includes elected officials themselves. Regardless of who is entrusted with its enforcement, the law routinely enforces regimes of regulation that reproduce either the physical lynching of Tyre Nichols or the social lynching of black Jacksonians and D.C. residents.
Frank Wilderson said that, for black people, to be “law abiding” is predicated on the absence of reciprocity, utility, and contingency. It doesn’t assume that whatever social cohesion is achieved by compliance can or will be extended to black people. It doesn’t assume that a mutual future is possible. The only guarantees are survival produced from our own subjugation and order produced by our own deaths. “The future belongs to the bullet.” If black people are ever to move from socially dead to socially alive (if it’s at all possible), the law and its myriad enforcers have to be contended with. That’s the state of the union.