NOBODY Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

Marc Lamont Hill Book Response 

NOBODY Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

 
I read this book during my plane ride back to Seattle from Detroit. The experience of doing so almost felt surreal as I’d just left my hometown and witnessed the phenomena that I was reading in this book from effects of broken window policing to evidence of the Flint water crises. I sat in the passenger seat of my boyfriend’s red S10 pickup truck as drove past the blocks burned down houses on our way to his home on the Eastside of Detroit. After taking my traditional picture with the Spirit of Detroit in downtown, we drove a few miles only to see a repetition of countless liquor stores sandwiched between abandoned businesses with barred windows and food deserts with the homeless roaming like nomads without gloves to protect their fingertips from the frost. 

While reading this book suspended 30,000 feet above it all, I couldn’t help but recall the sights that I’d witnessed just before stepping onto the plane. Hill’s words were speaking to me in a way that directly recalled my experiences while educating me on the politics behind how my people are forced to live this way. 

Hill divides this book into 8 chapters, beginning with: Nobody. Hill defines the Nobody as a class of “invisible” people, “rendered disposable through economic arrangements, public policy, and social practice (29)”. These people are considered expendable by the state and therefore many indications of state imposed recklessness can be identified within their community. Hill threads in stories of people who have been killed as a result of state violence as well as others who have suffered as a result of the exclusive actions of the state. He places us first in Ferguson Missouri, the setting of Micheal Brown’s death in 2004 where he critically thinks about the events leading up to the murder and the history of the area which once restricted Blacks to “Negro Blocks”. Hill reminds us, “The law is but a mere social construction, an artifact of our social, economic, political, and cultural conditions (9)” We must also remember that the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions for Black people in the United States has never been favorable, therefore it is no surprise that the law of this society also unfavorably targets people of color while also  capturing the lives of others. There are not only Black people suffering behind bars with outstanding sentences for petty crimes, a system that was created to destroy is not selective in it’s destruction as it expands. Our prison system has expanded into a monster that makes America’s prison population the largest ratio of any developed country, the land of the free and the home of the enslaved. The reason why the United States is focused on maintaining and increasing their incarcerated populations is because, “there is money to be made in over policing minor offenses; and that poverty, race, and gender nonconformity are identifiers of moral failures so rich that there is no longer any reason to recognize the rights, the citizenship, or the humanity of those so identified (p.11)” These so called “moral failings” of those living in urban areas make them targets to over policing, state violence, arrest and imprisonment. In White capitalist America the money made to sustain the economy through the prison labor provided by the mass-industrial complex is exploited from the inmates that are arrested in these over-policed communities in the same  way that slave labor gave the United States the economic lee-way to become a world power. We must recognize that because the exploitation of Black bodies have been normalized in our society, incidence of violence and exploitation are actually accepted and justified within our criminal justice system, “Wilson also obediently and uncritically followed the protocol of a system already engineered to target, exploit, and criminalize the pos, the Black, the Brown, the queer, the trans, the immigrant, and the young”. This is why our men women and children can be unjustly killed without their being any consequences on the officer(s) responsible, because their just following protocol, and protocol excuses, if not calls for, the massacre of Black bodies. 

Broken windows policing, is a war strategy that is evident all around Detroit city, especially in less affluent residential areas. “As tolerance for small-scale crimes leads to an atmosphere that encourages, within the same space, larger crimes to be committed…because a window left unprepared conveys a message that the people in the neighborhood do not care (39)”. The littered streets, boarded up houses and broken out windows create an environment that cultivates crime. Here data from political scientist James Q. Wilson suggests that officers ignore, or even promote  with the lack of enforcement, crimes that litter the community and cause property damage in order to allow a symbolic corruption of the area that increases crime. 

This strategy points us toward the business behind policing, while using the broken window strategy the state cultivates behaviors that they can criminalize, “revise the shelter and one improves the people (14)”. When officers allow for the degradation of the city they are also promoting the degradation of the people who reside there. Being sure that the behaviors to criminalize are always being practiced allows the state to use the ghetto as a constant supply of bodies to be bargained over in the criminal justice system. These bodies that are captured in the city are bargained by the state, paid for by the tax payer and exploited for labor by large-scale corporations.  

This need for over-policing areas of poverty explains the increased militarization of the police, making community servants look more like an occupying army. But along with officers, the American public is becoming an armed society. So much so that a meaningless disagreement in a parking lot quickly escalate to the loss of a life. This is shown in Michael Dunn’s case after he murders a young Black teen, Jordan Davis, in the parking lot of a gas station for refusing to keep his “thug music” turned down. Hill explains the role of White male pride in this heartbreaking situation where, “a dangerous conception of patriarchal masculinity that imagines ’true manhood’ as an identity that must constantly be protected through various forms of violence (98)”.

Millions of people in America live in cages. The cages of prison cells are where America keeps its “disposable” populations which include the poor, mentally, ill, unemployed, and anyone else who found themselves on the outside of what Western culture defines as acceptable. In this section Hill also touches on the case of Trayvon Martin where gun policies like the “Stand Your Ground Law” cost the life of another black teen at the expense of a perceived ‘suspicion’ that is undoubtably shaped by our society that criminalizes Black men, “The right to self-defense and ’true man-hood,’ however corrupt an idea it is, does not include Black citizens (110)”. This is why gun laws that protected American citizens right to bear arms were restricted once Black Panther Party members began to practice this right. In 1967 Ronald Regan enacted the Mumford Act in California, banning the public carrying of loaded firearms in response to the BPP’s cop watching, patrolling Oakland neighborhoods to stop police brutality.  

With all of these factors in mind we must understand that we are now in a state of great emergency. Residents in Flint Mi, a city in the suburb of Detroit with a majority Black populations been forced to live with poisonous drinking water pumping into their homes since April 25, 2015 when Flint water sources were switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Now in 2017 residents are finding rashes on their children’s bodies and no one has taken responsibility for the lead poison’s effects that we’ll be able to see in Flint residents for generations. How we could we allow water, that has been scientifically proven to be catastrophically dangerous to consume, be pumped into our citizens faucets, showers, bathes, food, dish washers, laundry cycles and every other facet of life that we need water to perform? Even when officials were offered to switch the city’s water back to it’s original source in This is not irresponsible, or ignorant, it was certainly an attack on the vulnerable and impoverished people, majorly people of color, in Flint, MI. 

Hill offers a solution to readers which includes, “Crafting a new set of framework for our economy, for our schools, for our criminal justice system, for our public housing,(180)” this would require a commitment for us to keep our money in our community, supporting our Black owned businesses and using Black owned alternatives to the convince of our current shopping practices which fund the institutions that orchestrate to oppress us. 

Hill ends the text on an optimistic note, reminding us that although we have been vilified and ostracized by the state we live in and depend on, we are not disposable and we are in fact ‘Somebody’.  He explains how the climate of our country has provoked a greater need for organizing and demonstration within the Black community.  Hill mentions the work of university campuses, Black churches and even foreign alliances, like the residents of the West Bank whose being oppressed by armed forces in Gaza is reflective of the Black American struggle. We’ve proven the legitimacy of our agenda in our mass responses to incidents of violence on our people, “the value of Black lives has become a key talking point in the 2016 presidential elections. The deaths of citizens at the hands of the State have been subjected to increased scrutiny (183)”. Now we are calling out the criminal justice system and state officials on their BS with an army of Black lives matters activists recording incidents of unjustified violence, posting evidence on social media, tagging those involved and creating slogans and hashtags of phases like “I can’t Breath”, “Hands up, Don’t shoot” and “Say Her Name” that remind the army of those who shout Black Lives Matter worldwide of the injustices on the vulnerable population of our country, “Everyday citizens are beginning to question the legitimacy of unfettered capitalism, mass incarceration, and State power (184)”. Although the State has marked us off as rightful beneficiaries of the ‘American Dream’, has placed us in to the ’Nobody’ category and tossed us into the invisible class, we must identify who we are. We’ve proven our strength in our history of grassroots organizing and in the work of our leaders. We are Somebody and even in the bowels of oppression in Flint, Ferguson and beyond we will rise. 

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