Niggas sure do know how to die.
“Heard some white folks talkin’. Had a riot yesterday. 10 niggas died.”
“Die nigga.”
“Say what? 10 niggas died?”
“Yeah, die nigga!”
…
“Went back up to Harlem, heard a schoolteacher say, niggas sure are DUMB. Almost like they’re dead! Die, nigga!”
“Everywhere you go, niggas dyin’. Niggas been dyin’ for 400 years, niggas dyin’ with conked heads, niggas dyin’ in Ivy League suits.”
“Niggas know how to die. Been dyin’ for 400 years. Been practicin’ how to die. Niggas dyin’ in prisons… on farms… in dirty rooms… even learned how to die in mansions now.”
…
“Niggas watch their wives get raped. Watch their babies get stomped. Then niggas watch some redneck honky stand over them and laugh. Laughin’ talkin bout die nigga – ACTUALLY LAUGHIN!’… talkin’ bout ‘die nigga!’ We’re born to die nigga! You been dyin’ for 400 years, niggas know how to die. Niggas don’t know nothin’ else but dyin’.”1
As a young teenager, I, like many others, was enamored by hip-hop. I particularly enjoyed many of the classics which came before my time. The likes of Wu-Tang, Biggie, 2Pac, and NWA. I was about 12 years old when I first discovered NWA, though without knowing it, I was already familiar with some of their songs, mostly through osmosis from my older sibling who listened to them. I remember listening to “Fuck Tha Police” at that age. Though at my young age, I of course had not come into the ideological or theoretical understanding as to why the police did the things they did, I still knew that the pigs were no good news. When I listened to “Fuck Tha Police” at that time, it filled me with a spirit of rage, resistance, and indignation that it still does to this day when I listen to it. It represents the rage of the Black Nation transcendent into an art form, that we won’t put up with dying anymore.
Recently I was relistening to some of the songs I enjoyed when I was younger, specifically “Real Niggaz Don’t Die” from NWA’s album Efil4Zaggin. The song begins with an audio excerpt taken from the introductory quotes, which was a poem on a track titled “Die Nigga!!!” from the album “The Sounds of Black Power, 1967-1974”. When I heard the sample on the NWA song it immediately stuck out to me so I searched for the original and listened to the whole poem. It was as powerful and invigorating as it was a sad reflection of the reality of the Black Nation – the reality that during our existence in this land, we have been the target of a 400 year counterinsurgency, where our men are targeted with lethal force for extermination by the armed forces of the state, our women are targeted for domestication and sexual slavery under the oppression of white patriarchy, and our people as a whole are mocked, abused, beaten, maimed, murdered, and forced into economically and socially segregated areas of depressed living conditions – the Black colony. People are born, raised, and as George Jackson puts it, “live poor-butchered half lives”. Then they’re just one of many dead niggas.
The misandry of colonial patriarchy weaponized against Black men – particularly (but not exclusively) by white women under the cover of ‘feminism’, is one such component of the perpetual counterinsurgency against our people, used to legitimize the incarceration and extermination of Black men. The most famous example of this is of course the case of Emmett Till, who was lynched at the age of 14 by white citizen counterinsurgents after being falsely accused by Carolyn Bryant of sexual harassment. The men who murdered him were acquitted for the murders, and lived the rest of their lives as free whites despite admitting to the killing years later. You may have seen the images, the mutilated, grotesque state of Till’s body at his open casket funeral, pushed for by his mother to show the world that this is what the empire does to its Black colonial subjects – its men and boys. Despite the infamy of this case, it was of course not a one-off incident, but merely a particularly grotesque one. There are countless examples of these grotesque lynchings, judicial and extrajudicial murders. In 1998, James Byrd Jr. was beaten nearly to death, then tied by his ankles to the back of a truck and dragged for miles until he was decapitated. When his body was discovered by a passerby, his head was gone, right arm missing, had friction burns which were so severe that a mark was left on the pavement for miles where he was dragged.2 The Martinsville Seven, seven Black men who were executed in 1951 after a false conviction of rape. This is, of course, consistent with the weaponization of colonial feminism against Black men, which characterizes us sexually predatory beasts against whom (white) women must be protected. The Martinsville Seven were posthumously pardoned 70 years after their murders by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam.3 But pardons and platitudes of “we’re sorry” won’t bring them back.
It’s not like the empire has changed its tune, anyways. Since 1973, at least 200 prisoners who were executed have been exonerated. In the 200 exonerations where statistics are available, 108 of them were Black, a staggering 54%4 – despite the Black Nation only comprising around 13% of the overall population of the United States! Additionally, the state of Missouri executed Khaliifah Williams on September 24, for a crime for which there is no reliable evidence proving his guilt,5 and the existence DNA evidence which proves his innocence.6 Black men, as colonial subjects, are essentially treated as perpetual insurgents by the empire, which in many ways they are. It is upon this basis that colonial misandry is applied – the perpetuation of racist and dehumanizing stereotypes of Black men as rapists, criminals, ‘niggers’ whom it is impossible to rehabilitate; it is this basis that is used to justify the use of lethal force against us, for the pigs to murder us in the streets, for us to die in prisons, for us to be executed by mobs of bloodthirsty racists and executed by the state itself in kangaroo courts. According to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, these are also quite literally genocidal acts, under Article II, Points A & B, which define a components of genocide as A) “Killing members of the group”, and B) “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”
Black women are treated as the spoils of war, as violent, uppity, and recalcitrant, whom if only they could be subjugated by the white man, and bear increasingly “white” children (as whiteness is not a genetic reality, but simply a racialized phenotypical indicator) generation after generation, could be “tamed”, and domesticated, by way of national annihilation. This too is another component of the counterinsurgency.7 The attempt to eradicate our men via way of disenfranchisement, murder them via judicial and extrajudicial violence, and to, render them quite literally infertile (as in the Tuskegee experiments), and to murder and enslave our women, are ways in which the genocide of the Black Nation is accelerated. In “Black Skin, White Masks”, Fanon provides a psychological analysis of this process by exploring the relationship of the protagonist/author (on account of its semi-biographical nature) of Je suis Martiniquaise, Mayotte Capecia, and her white partner.
In a direct excerpt from Je suis Martiniquaise included in Black Skin, White Masks, Capecia writes,
“Among Andre’s [her partner] colleagues, who like him had been marooned in the Antilles by the war, some had managed to have their wives join them. I understood that Andre could not always hold himself aloof from them. I also accepted the fact that I was barred from this society because I was a woman of color; but I could not help being jealous. It was no good his explaining to me that his private life was something that belonged to him alone, and that his social and military life was something else, which was not within his control.”8
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon comments that “Mayotte loves a white man to whom she submits in everything… she asks nothing, demands nothing, except a bit of whiteness in her life.” And conversely, Andre submits nothing to her, not even valuing his Black partner enough to share the details of his personal life. He only values her body, as a colonial spoil of war. It is an unfortunate reality of this counterinsurgency that brings about our self-inferiorization – the necessity to prove our humanity to our oppressors who will never truly see humanity in us. This self-inferiorization is also a form of pacification, necessary to uphold the stability of the colony. One who is not pacified, who is proud of their national identity in spite of the psychosis of oppression, will fight and die to liberate their nation, and will rock the colony to its very foundations to do so. Such was the case when Wolof slaves (originating from modern day Senegal) in Santo Domingo rose up in 1521, initiating the earliest documented slave revolt in the Americas. So consequential was the slave revolt, that the Spanish authorities attempted to ban Wolofs from being imported as slaves in Santo Domingo.9 Their descendants would eventually succeed in this endeavor, liberating the island from colonial rule in 1804, forming the states that are now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It is this anxiety, of a conscious and active anti imperial agent manifested in the Black man and the Black woman, that the state carries out this perpetual low-level conflict against the Black Nation.
The application of colonial misandry and colonial misogyny is not unique to the Black Nation. It arises wherever colonialism exists, in particular settler colonialism. During the initial weeks following the incursion by the Palestinian resistance into the zionist entity, many false claims of widespread rapes and sexual assault were disseminated by the zionist propaganda apparatus and their Western media proxies. One U.N. report cited by many Western news outlets which reportedly stated that sexual violence was widespread and systematic during the October 7 incursion, actually stated the contrary, that many claims and accounts of sexual violence during the incursion could not be verified and that many require further investigation. What it also stated, was that sexual violence against Palestinian colonial subjects in prisons and concentration camps was in fact verifiable and widespread. Furthermore, the report mentioned that “it must be noted that the information gathered by the [UN] mission team was in a large part sourced from Israeli national institutions”, which of course have a vested interest in promulgating the notion of a Palestinian men as violent, savage rapists, to legitimize the ongoing genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip.10 In his YouTube documentary, “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising,” Adi Callai cites both contemporary and historical examples of the colonial weaponization of feminist phraseology that has been used to justify the use of lethal force against men who are colonial subjects. In his documentary, Callai states:
“While the weaponization of feminist discourse for the genocide in Gaza might seem new, the mobilization of colonial forces to ostensibly protect women from the colonized ‘savages’ goes way back. This phenomenon shows up throughout colonial history as one of the prime avenues to legitimize genocide both before and after the fact...”11
Callai draws an analogy to historical examples by displaying an 1892 painting titled “La Vuelta del Malon” which shows a fictionalized depiction of natives absconding with a defenseless white woman. It’s a story we’ve seen over and over again, that white women must be protected from sexually violent colonized “savages” at any cost – even genocide. The weaponization of this language, whether it be against Black people, Palestinians, or other colonized peoples, ultimately serves the same purpose – manufacturing political propaganda against the colonized for the purpose of counterinsurgency.
The act of anti-colonial resistance is just, sacred, and powerful, much more powerful than sporadic, non-directed acts which will not lead us to victory. In his book Blood in my Eye, George Jackson cites a letter he received from his younger brother, the great revolutionary Jonathan Jackson who was martyred at the age of 17. In this letter, Jonathan states that “we overestimate them [the pigs], or perhaps have little sense of our own power.”12 And this is true. The imperial forces are paper tigers, who can be overwhelmed if guided by the righteous rage of the people, organized into a force aiming for a direct, achievable goal. We in fact saw this during the 2020 Uprisings, when the 3rd Precinct of the Minneapolis Pig Department burned with the rage of the people, the rage of the U.S. empire’s colonial subjects. In the preface to Blood in my Eye, Gregory Armstrong wrote on Jonathan’s martyrdom that, “At 17, Jonathan had already come to the conclusion that the only way he could affirm his sense of justice was at the point of a gun”. It is true that Jonathan indeed affirmed his sense of justice – in the same way that the Black Nation affirmed our sense of justice with the burning of the 3rd Precinct in a manner most cathartic. Some will fall, and some will die. We saw martyrs in the aftermath of the 2015 Ferguson Uprising, almost certainly killed by counterrevolutionaries acting on behalf of the white supremacist power structure.13 We should not be saddened by their deaths, but rather proud of them – proud that they have been uplifted to the highest state of existence, that of a martyr. We must honor our martyrs. George Jackson had this to say about these comrades:
“[They] must make the first contribution. They will be the first to fall. We gather up their bodies, clean them, kiss them and smile. Their funerals should be gala affairs, of home-brewed wine and revolutionary music to do the dance of death by. We should be sad only that it’s taken us so many generations to produce them.”12
Either way, the Black Nation will continue to be the target of counterinsurgency and extermination. We will continue to die. We can die with a cause, a purpose, a love for life, our nation, and our community and ascend to martyrdom, or we can live brutish half-lives in ghettoes, dying in prisons, and on the streets to the pigs, and become just like many others – a dead nigga.