#JusticeforMikeBrown: “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air”

#JusticeforMikeBrown: “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air” by Ahmad Greene-HayesSaturday, August 9, 2014, Ferguson, Missouri police officers executed 17-year-old Mike “Mike Mike” Brown to death. Eyewitnesses say Brown was shot 10 times. My heart sank when I heard this news. I didn’t know Mike and I’ve never even stepped foot in Missouri, but because his life—his black life—was deemed insignificant in that painful moment, I mourn this brother, too. Alas, yet another black man has been killed. Mike was scheduled to begin his college career on Monday, August 11. Unfortunately, he will never move into a college dorm, attend higher education classes or even indulge in the fun and craze of college social culture. Mike won’t even be able to join a campus organization, voice his concerns about the world around him, and form a network with other college professionals or even graduate.
Like Mike, I am a black man. I could have been Mike and Mike could be me. I could have been lying on that hard Missouri concrete, and he could have been alive writing this piece. See the thing is those police officers did not see Mike. They did not see the young man he was or the black man he would grow to become. What they saw was blackness. And as is customary in contemporary policing practices, “See Black, Shoot.”
As a black man, I am afraid for my life. I am afraid to ride the NYC subway. I am afraid to walk the streets. I am afraid to drive in my car. I am afraid to take the garbage out past a certain time. I am afraid to look police officers in the eyes. I am afraid to say anything but, “yes sir” or “yes ma’am” to officers when they ask me questions. I am afraid to breathe. Police officers patrol our communities—black communities—like slave catchers. They gaze upon our black bodies, criminalize us before we speak or act, and more-often-than-not, attack us, choke us, sexually assault us, spit on us, sic dogs on us, all in the name of law enforcement.
These men and women who wear uniforms and have taken oaths “to protect and serve” do more damage than the criminals they purport as society’s greatest problematics. These officers take the law in their own hands—like the mobocracists of the past—they lynch with 9-millimeters, crowbars, mace and excessive force. Not only do they perform these undeniably egregious acts, but they are also almost never punished.
This summer has been a period of great trepidation for black communities nationally. On July 17 of this year, the Staten Island NYPD strangled 43-year-old Eric Garner, a black man and father, to death, despite his dying plea, “I can’t breathe.” Garner was funeralized about two weeks ago, and many have likened his demise to the killing of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing character, Radio Raheem. Lee himself released a one-minute edited video proving that Garner, the chokehold victim, was the real-life incarnation of the murdered 1990s fictional character. The fact that those police officers reduced Garner’s black life to utter elimination, in that moment, was painful to watch.
But, in many ways that clip was like a scene in a horror film that I had seen replayed over and over all of my life. Garner’s murderers have yet to be indicted, even though his death was ruled a homicide. White racial supremacy, structural inequality and the West’s fascination with racialized and gendered Otherness are conduits by which the chokeholds of racist and heterosexist policing consistently steal life from the black and brown, the undocumented, the transgendered and a host of other marginalized identity groups. The extent to which these policing practices function are certainly informed by starkly racialized and gendered histories of oppression. Two weeks ago, Rosan Williams, a 27-year-old pregnant black woman was also put in a chokehold, like Garner, by an NYPD officer for “illegal grilling” in her Brooklyn neighborhood. Thankfully, Ms. Williams is still alive and her unborn baby was not harmed.
It is pure fact that black lives, historically and contemporaneously, have been subject to the oppressive arms of colonization, enslavement and neoslavery—from the pre-colonial African continent to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of the 15thto 17th centuries to the present-day ills of the Africana diaspora. Saidiya Hartman argues in Lose Your Mother, that we are living in “the afterlife of slavery,” representative of the “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” inherent to black communities (6).
In many respects, Hartman’s assertion is similar, if not closely identical to claims made by many revolutionary scholars, including political theorist Joy James, “The old plantation was a prison; and the new prison is a plantation.” The plantation symbolizes unconstrained disdain for the poor, non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual, evidenced most clearly by centuries of subjugation and exclusion. In America, full citizenship, human rights security and police protection are reserved solely for wealthy, cisgender, and heterosexual white men. This racial and gender configuration has life-threatening implications and complex repercussions for black men and black women.
America is obsessed with plantation politics, in fact, America is nostalgic of its former days—the unrestrained sexual exploitation of black women and the physical torture, castration and backbreaking labor enacted upon black men, coupled with the genocide of indigenous populations, the expansion of the frontier, the maltreatment of women, and other morally questionable facets of the colonial world. Today, this nostalgia arises in conversations about women’s reproductive rights, immigration reform, same-sex marriage debates and discussions surrounding the hyperincarceration of poor black women and men.
The nonstop murder of blacks, however, and the state’s unfair and racially fashioned policing of black people—since Jim Crow—is by far one of our society’s greatest examples of plantation politics reconfigured. In May 2014, Arizona State University Professor Ersula Ore was brutally assaulted by campus police officers for jaywalking while black and female, and recently, Florida State Attorney Angela Corey has vowed to prosecute Marissa Alexander again, with intent to pursue a tripled sentence of 60 years if Ms. Alexander is found guilty at her December 2014 trial, all for firing a self-defense shot into the air as a warning against her abusive husband. These kinds of events are commonplace.
Policing today resembles Jim Crow white terrorism from roughly fifty years ago, though it certainly has undergone several vicissitudes. It’s unsurprising then that two Florida police officers were recently exposed by the F.B.I. for having ties to the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). Though all police officers are not racist, sexist or connected to the KKK, what two things do the Klan and police departments across the land have in common? These two bodies are both the greatest killers of black lives and harassers of black people. Jonathan Ferrell. Sean Bell. Kimani Gray. Amandou Diallo. Rekia Boyd. Oscar Grant. Kathryn Johnston. Inity and Julia Marrow. And now, Mike Brown, among a long list of other black victims.
The existing state, as the progeny of colonial white heteropatriarchy, functions as the means by which the heirs of enslavers and colonizers—the Klan, white vigilantes, and police officers—are able to maintain power through physical violence. Slavery enabled this transgenerational preservation of power through the institutionalized racial hierarchy of the plantation, that of black and brown bodies at the bottom, followed by white women and poor whites, and of course, at top, the slaveholding class. Just as power has been passed down from one generation of white racists to the next, so has the “white gaze,” or what philosopher George Yancy describes—in reference to the Trayvon Martin case—as the “inherited, poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices” by whites that deem the black body as “different, deviant, ersatz.”
These racial-cultural analyses aren’t new. Police officers have killed numerous black folks, and each time, think pieces are written and black people raise hell.
…This cycle must be broken.
Crowds of black people have been protesting Brown’s murder. They have been yelling. They have been screaming. They have been exposing the full depravity of the Ferguson tragedy through social media picture uploads, status updates and tweets using the hashtags #MikeBrown and #Ferguson. All with their hands raised high in the air—no weapons, no violence, no retaliatory acts directed towards police. As I watched the videos, viewed the images and joined in on the Twitter hashtag, the words of Bettie Mae Fikes’s 1964 upbeat adaptation of gospel song, “Over My Head,” came to me. It calmed my spirit. It made me realize that even though these tragedies are never welcomed, our people have overcome and can still overcome. It reminded me of the black men and women who came before me. It reminded me that the struggle was never over. It reminded me that “Can’t nobody turn me around” and that as a black man, I come from a lineage of trailblazers, revolutionary activists and troublemaking radicals.
Fikes introduced the song at a Sing for Freedom Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, where freedom singers and civil rights activists gathered. That same year, the Civil Rights Act was passed, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a network of civil rights groups that included CORE and SNCC, launched a massive effort to register black voters during what had become known as “Freedom Summer.” Even with these strides and civil rights victories, white-on-black racial violence persisted. Black people did not give up, however. They did not give in. They stood strong. They marched. They sang. And some even took up arms against white terrorists and police officers. They defended themselves. Fifty years after 1964, I urge black communities across the land to meditate on the freedom songs of our ancestors and to take a bold stand against racist policing. I employ us all to look up even as our heads and hearts hang low, for truly, over our heads is freedom—freedom for Mike and freedom for us yet alive.
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Ahmad Greene-Hayesis a junior at Williams College, majoring in History and concentrating in Africana Studies. He is also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, whose research interests include 20th century African American history, Jim Crow, White Terrorism, Black Communism and Women's History. Follow him on Twitter: @_BrothaG