Read the following excerpts from Tip of the Spear by Orisonmi Burton and discuss the questions.
Section 1:
“Queen Mother Audley Moore explained that Green Haven’s imprisoned men were
enduring “re-captivity”. Offering an analysis made popular by her political mentee
Malcolm X, she argued that prison walls made visible a condition of incarceration
that is constitutive of Black life in America. Black people are a “captive nation”; the
physically imprisoned had therefore been captured “doubly so”. Moore then
explained that it was not the captives, but the White Man who was “the real
criminal.” She reminded her audience—comprised of people variously convicted
of robbery, assault, rape, murder, and drug-related crimes —that none of them
had ever stolen entire countries, cultures, or peoples, or sold human beings into
slavery for profit. Although some of them had tried to imitate the White Man, she
continued, they had never really stolen and neither had they ever really murdered.
“Have you taken mothers and strung them up by their heels?” she asked. “And took
knives and slit their bellies so that their unborn babies can fall to the
ground?…”Have you dropped bombs on people and killed whole countries of
people, have you done that brothers?” Given that American empire is constituted
through apocalyptic violence and incalculable theft, Moore argued that “crimes”
committed by the human spoils of war were necessarily derivative of the
organized crime of the state. “
p. 1-2
Explain why Moore argues that imprisoned Afrikan people are enduring a “re-captivity”.
How do we “imitate” the White Man?
Section 2:
“The aim of the White Man’s science (white supremacy), was to “denature”
African people: to crush their spirits, destroy their cognitive autonomy, and
transform them into obedient “negroes” with no knowledge of their history
or will to resist”
“Tip of the Spear argues that prisons are war. They are state strategies of
race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency. But they are also
domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these
white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy,
freedom, and liberation.”
“Within and against captivity, rebels employed diverse methodologies of
attack: political education, critique, protest, organizing, cultural
production, litigation, subversion, refusal, rebellion, retaliation, hostage
taking, sabotage, armed struggle, and the intimate labor of care. Like
Moore they saw prison walls not as boundaries between freedom and
unfreedom, but as material demarcations of different intensities of
captivity, vulnerability, and rebellion.”
p. 2-4
What is the aim of white supremacy? How does this show up in your life/relationships?
How can we resist/attack white supremacy?
What is the function of prisons for the oppressor? For the oppressed?