When I read the various local statutes for “resisting arrest” (see the Virginia code here: https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter10/section18.2-460/) I get sick to my stomach.  The entire premise that these laws are built around is that whatever an officer of the law (police, judge, etc.) is doing is justified and correct.  There is an assumption of moral and ethical correctness on the part of the people carrying guns and wearing body armor.  Their job justifies their actions. No questions asked.  I’m sickened because the assumption is built on a disturbing legacy.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, “Here’s What’s Happening in America, in Six (Mostly) Russian Terms” 6/9/2025 – Kuznetsova/ Storyev (Article available here – NYT subscription required) the authors highlight the Soviet-ization of our political systems through language.  I can’t disagree.  There are other scholars who draw parallels between what we are seeing from the Trump administration (travel bans, mass deportations to foreign prisons without due process, medical criminalization, book bans, disinformation campaigns, domestic militarization, etc.) and Nazi era Germany in the run up to 1938-39.  Again, I can’t disagree.  But as we watch army bases being returned to the names of Confederate soldiers, and the dismantling of education, I can’t help but think that what is often missing from the broader discourse is the specific heat that powers the uniquely American socio-political hurricane that perpetually churns across the nation: anti-blackness.

Understanding “anti-blackness” is not as simple as saying “racism”.  Not everything is about race.  Anti-blackness is not entirely about skin color bias.  Skin color bias is the low hanging fruit and oversimplification of the cultural psychology of anti-blackness as a signifier for “the other.”  Anti-blackness is about having the permission to exclude.  A uniquely American brand of anti-blackness sits at the center of our entire social operating system of assumptions, including our entire world of policing.  This is more than an assumption of whiteness as being equivalent with correctness; it is the assumption of blackness as both being equivalent with and setting a standard for measuring incorrectness.  Any arrest of blackness by police is justified because blackness (in body or concept) is always assumed to be “wrong”.

“At least I’m not black” is doctrine, policy, creed and social goal.

Within the American equation, blackness has always been the conceptual “bridge too far.”  One look at the uncountable number of laws limiting, shaping and controlling blackness, dating from the founding of the European colonies in the Americas up to today, and one can conjecture that the United States may never fully recover from its racist fever dream; there will always be some residue lurking in some corner somewhere (think racial covenants that still appear in land deeds.)  Anti-blackness gives silent ethical permission to all of the other social obstructions, barriers and exclusions in the United States.  “At least I’m not black” is not just the language that emboldens and echoes among some of the most put-upon migrants/immigrants to this country, not to mention social and economic minorities who regularly move in the direction of success and acceptance long before people of African descent.  “At least I’m not black” is doctrine, policy, creed and social goal.

The labyrinthine complexity of race in America cannot be reduced to just black vs. white…and at the same time, it can.  The “both/and” of race is what makes it so devilish.  Again, anti-blackness doesn’t just live in skin color.  Anti-blackness is the psychology of the binary, the dialectic equivalence[1] drawn between blackness as bad/evil vs whiteness as good/pure that underpins much more than questions of the race myth. Our media, our politics, our sports are full of the good/bad, winner/loser mentality.  The negation of the incorrect and illegitimate other is reinforced by the myth of American exceptionalism.  Some tout this as the American superpower; some of us regard this triumphalist hubris as our national shame.

Our society’s obsession with “one side of the coin or the other” and the perpetual search for a hero-winner as part of our collective decision making is playing out in the immigration crack downs in Los Angeles and across the country.  While it is not directly about black vs white, our entire understanding of immigration in the United States is informed by a peculiar institutional concept of good vs. bad.  The Trump administration has determined that migrant/day laborer = bad which justifies deploying US Military = good.  It is not just immigration.  The “us vs. them” reality show is playing out in all aspects of our government, international policy, local battles over school systems and libraries and even our access to healthcare.  We must not lose track of the fact that this duality first learned to speak American English when it was written into the United States Constitution and then proudly enumerated in a federal census that only counted white people and slaves[2].

Anti-blackness is not racism…it is permission to race, to gender, to alienate, to sexualize and to hate.

To be clear, I am not trying to flatten, blend or confuse and conflate issues, nor am I trying to reduce everything to a question of “race”.  My challenge is to recognize how anti-blackness has served a variety of unique functions beyond the Enlightenment era social organizing principle of “race”.  In the United States, we have accepted “race” as a universal truth and equalizer…part of the fabric of how we understand the world.  This is where we fall afoul of reality.  The so-called objective impulse to seek what is “universal” is the cloak under which empire and religion have masqueraded to devastating effect.  Anti-blackness is the unbreakable thread that binds this Western assumption of what is “universal” together.  Scholars of African descent (Douglass, Du Bois, Wells, Césaire, Fanon, Wynter, Spillers, Mills, Wilderson, etc.) have been naming this and the particularity and poison of anti-blackness in the Americas and around the globe from the moment we were first given the opportunity to do so.  Anti-blackness is not racism…it is permission to race, to gender, to alienate, to sexualize and to hate.  The “color line” is not just the problem of the 20^th century per W.E.B. Du Bois[3].  Anti-blackness was and still is the core problem of America.  We cannot fix anything until we fix anti-blackness.

Many liberals seeking to resist tyranny, turn to the famous quote by Rev. Martin Niemöller for inspiration, “First they came for the socialists…” (Full Text Here).  Just remember that resistance is exactly what “justified” the lynching of thousands of people of African descent.

First things first.

–ALD

[*] Chicago Forum Council. One of the greatest debates ever held, 1929. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries

[1] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

[2] “Measuring Race and Ethnicity Across The Decades: 1790—2010 – U.S. Census Bureau,” accessed May 2, 2023, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010.html.

[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).