By Ameer Hasan Loggins
“I now introduce to you, a man that would give his life for his people,” Benjamin 2X told the crowd in the Audubon Ballroom. That would be the last time 2X would have the honor to make such an introduction. Because on that day, February 21, 1965, in front of close to 500 people, including his pregnant wife and children, Malcolm X was shot 15 times.
On Saturday morning, February 27, 1965, in Harlem, New York, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was laid to rest. The public viewing of his body was attended by up to 30,000 mourners…
By Ameer Hasan Loggins
From the body-cam of a police officer in Rochester, New York, I watched a sickening scene unfold. The officer was in pursuit of someone fleeing on foot through the snow. I could not make out who the person was. All I was able to see was them slowly, running as fast as they could, and getting nowhere. All I could hear was the sound of the police officer’s feet pounding through the snow-covered pavement.
The officer caught their target — a 9-year-old girl.
When I think about 9-year-old children running through the snow, I imagine them…
Off-Duty or On-Duty, No One Should Be Shocked By How the Police Acted During the Coup at the Capitol
By Ameer Hasan Loggins
The news of off-duty police officers from around the country making the pernicious pilgrimage to Washington D.C. to participate in the armed and deadly takeover of the United States Capitol should come as a shock to no one. Nor should the grace that was granted to the angry clan of neo-Confederate Trump loyalists by some of the on-duty Capitol police during the attempted coup d’etat.
Amidst the madness, one of the Capitol police officers took a selfie with someone who was part of the mob that stormed the Capitol. …
by Ameer Hasan Loggins
The sound of silence surrounding the Capitol coup d’état is deafening by one of Trump’s most prominent groups of “friends” and financial supporters — the team owners in the NFL.
Aloud, the NFL has gone to great lengths to align its league with frontstage performances of pledging allegiance to patriotism. The league had no problem marketing manufactured nationalism as they partnered with the United States Department of Defense for Hometown Hero dedications to salute soldiers, fighter jet flyovers, and the unfurling of massive American flags on the field.
Abolition for the People
For centuries, we’ve had our freedoms ripped from us. But like our ancestors, we resist.
This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, composed of 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.
When I was 19 years old, I was arrested.
Instead of a dungeon, I was held…
Since before this country’s founding, Black women have been treated as vulnerable—and disposable
12:38 a.m. was the last peaceful minute of Breonna Taylor’s life.
On March 13, 2020, at 12:38 a.m., Breonna Taylor and her partner, Kenneth Walker, were asleep in bed. At 12:39 a.m., officers beat on her door for approximately one minute. During that 59 seconds of banging, Taylor shouted at the top of her lungs: “Who is it?” But no one said a word. “No answer,” Walker said later in a police interrogation. “No response. No anything.” The boogeymen kept beating. At 12:40 a.m., Louisville Metro Police Department Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison as well as Sgt. …
An email was leaked the other day. In it, the sender praised the police, and wrote that people protesting in honor of George Floyd were involved in a “terrorist movement.” I repeat, the writer wrote that the protesters were involved in a terrorist movement. The person responsible was the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Police — Lieutenant Bob Kroll. The same Kroll who was accused by four Black officers of openly wearing a “White Power badge” on his motorcycle jacket.
For eight minutes and 46 seconds we watched. For eight minutes and 46 fucking seconds we were forced to…
On the twenty-sixth of January, in 2020, Kobe Bean Bryant died. He died in a helicopter crash in the foggy hills of Calabasas, California. Nine people were on the copter — a pilot and eight passengers.
Kobe’s thirteen-year-old daughter Gianna Maria Onore Bryant was one of the passengers onboard the helicopter.
Kobe Bryant was a proud father. And had he survived the fatal accident he would have lived only to die in a different way. He would have had to live with the fact that his second born child was gone forever. That pain would have killed him every day.
…
Colin Kaepernick is a person. This seems like an obvious statement. But on countless occasions I see this person being treated like a thing. Colin, the person, has been reduced to an acerbic adjective for his antagonists. His detractors evoke his name with overtones of repugnance and disgust. His name has served as a pejorative metonym to describe the quality of being disregardable, disrespectable, and disposable. His name has served as a synonym for scorn, derision, and damnation. Colin the person is being situated as a euphemism for undesirable Blackness in the United States.
He is un-American.
He is un-employable.
…
