It's not an accident that historian Kellie Carter Jackson begins her exploration of violence in We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance with Fanon's observation on colonial violence. If she hadn't mentioned Fanon in her Introduction, I would have known, recognizing his influence. Fanon observed the violence of European colonialism up close once he moved to France. Beginning his practice by listening to white Frenchmen engaged with the torture and killing, he couldn't ignore the inequality and cruelty of oppression experienced by the Algerians fighting for their independence.
Recently, I must have been seeking my own independence of sorts from troublesome memories of my maternal uncles when I read in The Wretched of the Earth, when I came across Fanon's discussion of the role of police and soldiers in the settler's "rule of oppression". Police and soldiers, writes Fanon "are the official, instituted-go betweens, the spokesmen of the settler".
As "intermediaries," he continues, police and soldiers don't "lighten the oppression, nor [do they] seek to hide the domination". It could be said that their presence in the community of the oppressed is intended to send a message from those in power, grieving over the demand for more equality (loss) and democracy (replacement) that independence for the oppressed and democracy for all won't be so easy to achieve. Note how the police and soldiers, writes Fanon, "practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of peace"; for, as representatives of "peace", they are "the bringers of violence into the home and into the minds of the native".
I realized my role in hiding the truth. In my mind, for decades, I saw the first eleven years of my existence, living with my grandparents of uncles as "peaceful", despite the images I tried to hide from myself of a chair flying toward my grandmother, and all the unexpected and explosive shouting. Even if not all the time. I never asked what really happened to them, and that made it possible for me to sit with the stories a white supremacist society will create in order to cover up violence.
I observed the younger uncle returning home from his work as a sheriff of police. He told us stories, but he always began by calling us "civilians". "You civilians." We didn't know much! And we listened to his stories. These stories never recognized us or any black American.
My uncle who survived a brutal war in Korea, came back, and, I can only hope the poetry and jazz reached him in between bouts of what we now know was PTSD. While my oldest uncle seemed the least touched by what he endured as a black, in the US Air Force for 23 years. He was, for the most part, stationed in Okinawa. On his return, he referred to himself to us as "Your Lord and Master".
My uncles hadn't prepared for the violence that would bind them and us to only more violence. They had returned home changed, but they didn't exhibit the kind of change that could have liberated them, us, our community.
"You do not turn any society," Fanon writes, "however primitive it may be, upside down with such a program [a movement, a struggle] if you have not decided from the very beginning, that is to say from the actual formulation of that program into practice, to overcome all the obstacles that will come across in so doing. The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for the violence at all times."
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