#Kandist Mallet

[notchainedtotrauma]

But for a revolution to happen, we will all have to break out of our own mental kettles, because it’s not going to get any better. It’s about to get a lot worse. And it’s up to us to make sure that our enemies suffer just as much as we will.

Push It to No Limits by Kandist Mallet

[t4t4t]

VO: Legal scholar Cheryl L. Harris, in her very important text “Whiteness as Property,” argues that the ultimate property in society is whiteness. And for many white folks, especially in this country in 2020, [whiteness] may be the only property they own. Part of why so many have come out to the street this time is because they realize that the wages of whiteness have gotten really low. It’s important to understand that whiteness and property are inextricable from each other: without one there cannot be the other. We tend to think of property as tangible things or commodities, but it also includes rights, protections, and customs of possession passed down and ratified through law. Whiteness emerges as the race of people who are neither Indigenous nor enslavable—national identities are increasingly collapsed around the distinctions of slave/free and black/white. 

So when black folks rise up and attack property, they’re also attacking whiteness. That is an understanding that goes back to the plantation: when you attack your status as property, you attack whiteness as domination over you.

...

Yes. Whiteness only exists as the condition under which you can oppress black and Indigenous people. That’s the identity of whiteness. There is nothing [else] there. The peace of whiteness is a peace of the grave. It needs to be abolished—and if we’re talking about abolishing whiteness, we’re also talking about abolishing the police. Police evolved from slave patrols, slave catchers, colonial overseers (in the Caribbean as well as Ireland), and as anti-riot forces designed to control new urban non-white populations. The earliest modern police force in the world was in Charleston, South Carolina: the City Guard. It existed mostly to control and terrorize the quarters where “hired out” enslaved people lived at some remove from their plantations and enslavers, and thus represented some small amount of autonomy, and the possibility of rebellion or organization—which was a threat to the white establishment.