I love my city. I love its people. But the government of my city has made the people the enemy.
During the protests this week, a 28-year old Black woman named Rickia Young, fearing for the safety of her teenage nephew, drove to pick him up from a friend's house. She took her toddler with her because she couldn't leave the child alone. She was being responsible. She was looking out for her family, knowing the dangers that lurk here for Black people.
Rickia, a home health aid and mother, was caught in her SUV between protesters and the police. They police told her to turn around. While she was making a K-turn, as the police directed her to do, the police swarmed her car and dragged her and her teenage nephew out of the vehicle. The woman and the teenager were brutalized by the police, and detained prior to being taken to a hospital. They were also separated from Rickia's toddler.
What happened next reveals the true face of policing in Philadelphia. The child was picked up by a police officer, and a photo was taken of the officer holding the child. Then, the FOP (Fraternal Order of Police, which is not in fact a union, but rather a fraternal order with a bargaining contract) posted this picture on their social media platform, claiming the child was found wandering barefoot and implying parental neglect.
Rickia was Black in the wrong place and the wrong time. Her teenage nephew and her child were Black at the wrong place and the wrong time. These days, that time and place seems to be the entire country. It was probably always that way, but I didn't know it when I was younger.
Rickia was not "looting" or even protesting. She was not even charged with a crime. Her child was separated from her by force, by the police, who then used a picture of the child for "copaganda."
The police are the real terrorists. They brutalized and terrorized this family. And as always, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who oversaw the police in Portland when they openly collaborated with White Supremacist gangs during clashes with protesters several years ago, spoke up after the fact. Outlaw is new to Philadelphia, but she has a history of overseeing cops who deploy excessive and indiscriminate violence against protesters and non-protesting civilians, and who collaborate with white supremacists. We saw this in June when a white supremacist mob of vigilantes beat up a journalist and another civilian in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, after curfew, while the cops watched and did nothing.
Neighborhoods in my city are being tear gassed. I smelled it in the air this week, wafting in from 52nd Street, when I took a walk to help me sleep better, because I now dread the sound of the low-flying helicopters oppressively hovering over my neighborhood. Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of childhood asthma of any city in the country, and among children with asthma in Philadelphia, Black children are significantly overrepresented. Many of these children live in the primarily Black neighborhoods being tear gassed. There was tear gas deployed in June, too, and rubber bullets, and the National Guard, and now this city's people are being once again declared the enemy of Capital, of Private Property, and the Racist, Neoliberal Police State.
We in Philadelphia are traumatized. We are terrified. We fear for the safety of our families, our neighbors, our coworkers, and for those of us in the caring professions, the people we serve.
To quote a great moral warrior, "The line must be drawn here. This far, and no further." (Picard, Star Trek: First Contact.)
I am living in a neoliberal police state that sees the people as the enemy.
There are lines I am willing to cross in the fight for freedom against racism and capitalism, but using children as propaganda, and hurting innocent people, and separating them from their children, are not among them.
Police are the protectors of private property. Human life is a secondary concern to them, because only humans, war and natural disasters can threaten private property, and the police have no power to arrest a war or a natural disaster. So they make us the enemy. They brutalize, terrorize and murder the people.
They call in the National Guard and they call that "mutual aid." That's beyond appropriation. It's Orwellian Newspeak.
The city and the media are pushing a narrative about election unrest, but that's not what has people here enraged. Not at all. Almost none of the people protesting in my city give two fucks about Biden Vs. Trump. They mostly agree with me that Trump is a symptom of a disease called Late Stage Capitalism. No election in the United States has ended or ever could end racism or the capitalist system that sustains it. It takes grassroots organizing and direct action to fight racism and end capitalism. It takes a bottom-up kind of democracy, the democratization of daily life. I call that democratization Anarchism. Anarchism is democracy in its purest form. And this "election unrest" narrative is extremely self-serving of the Democratic Party, which dominates local politics here. A "blue" city can be just as racist as a "red" city. It's not about red or blue. It's about racism and anti-racism.
People are in my city are not "rioting" over the election. Our concerns are entirely local. We want the city to be more compassionate and less violent. We want the city to house the homeless and stop murdering Black people. We want the Neoliberal Police State that is Philadelphia to repent and renounce intimidation and violence as a means of maintaining the social order. And Fuck The Social Order, too. It needs to be upended, anyway. No presidential election will do that. This is not about Donald Fucking Trump. It is about the history of racism and capitalism.
Racism and Capitalism will forever be linked because the most valuable and lucrative private property in our shameful history were human chattel. And let no one tell you that slavery was "ended." It was not. The Constitution makes allowances for slavery, as a form of punishment in the penal system, where Black people are disproportionately overrepresented, and many of those people are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. For example, white people are more likely to use or distribute marijuana than Black people. But more Black people are incarcerated for marijuana-related charges. The decriminalization of marijuana in my city didn't significantly impact this.
Black overrepresentation is a problem in the child welfare system, too. It's not because Black people are more violent or criminal than white people or that Black parents are more neglectful and abusive than white parents. The reason is because they have always been under more scrutiny by the capitalist State. Even if you go out into mostly white counties where Black people are not almost half the population, like Montgomery, Chester, or Bucks, Black people are still overrepresented in these punitive systems. So population doesn't account for this. The city's demographics, which include a significant Black population- and a rare, healthy Black middle class- don't account for this.
During my first semester in my social work masters' program, I learned that every year, since 1954, the Supreme Court has sent investigators to Philly's schools. The reason for this is that we still have a segregated school system. My city never actually implemented Brown Vs. Board of Education. The Supreme Court has no power to enforce that 1954 ruling. All they can do is send investigators who report back to the court that Philly is still out of compliance.
Philadelphia, as I mentioned, is one of a handful of American cities with a healthy Black middle class (although that health has taken some hits in recent years, due to economic disparities within the middle class). We are solidly blue with only token Republicans (only 2 Republicans sit on our current city council). Republicans really haven't had any power here in a long time. Our Democratic Party likes to pat themselves on the back like typical self-congratulatory faux-woke liberals and "progressives." But we are one of the most racist cities on the East Coast, if not in the entire country.
The aforementioned police commissioner is a Black woman. But she self-identifies as Blue before Black. All of my Black comrades would say the same thing I am saying. No one here except racist white people and a few minority tokens actually like or trust Danielle Outlaw. This is how a neoliberal capitalist police state functions: with illusion and deflection. "Our Commissioner of Police is Black. How can we be racist?"
But if recent events have proved anything, this is a lie. And this should surprise no one. We are the city that, in 1985, bombed a Black neighborhood and destroyed sixty-five homes to get at one Black activist group, in one house, that consisted of only thirteen people, eight adults and five children.
This country has been at war with Blackness since its inception.
And if we in Philadelphia can't get it together, what hope does the rest of the country have?
This country was born in Philadelphia. And it is dying here.
I say, Let It Die. Burn the plantation state. Salt the Earth where slave-cotton once grew, and where Overseers still police human property.
Like the man said, The Line Must Be Drawn Here.
(Patrick Stewart is an anti-capitalist, by the way, and I'm pretty sure he would agree with me.)