Of the political world, abolition the interminable radicalization of every

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wilderson casting in which the court itself (and by extension the US. government) became defendants. Assata Shakur recalls how brothers and sisters came to her trial everyday to watch the circus Her narrative paints a vibrant picture of an intramural conversation between Black folks from all walks of life, for whom the court and the trials functioned much like backwoods churches did during slavery. A courtroom of people who joined the defendants in their refusal to rise when the judge came in folks giving each other the Black Power salute in full view of the US. Marshals Black Muslim men and women spreading their prayer rugs in the corridors of the court and praying to Allah Black parents explaining the underlying racism of the American legal system to their children. As the judge entered the courtroom, one such well-educated child looked up and said, Mommy, is that the fascist pig to the laughter and applause of the gallery (Assata With only small arms and crude explosives at their disposal, with little of nothing in the way of logistical support,
3
with no liberated zone to claim or reclaim, and with no more than a vague knowledge that there were a few hundred other insurgents scattered throughout the US. operating in largely uncoordinated and decentralized units,
4
the BLA launched 66 operations Especially after 1975, when the Vietnam War ended and the revolutionary White Leftmost notably members of the Weather Underground Organization, came out of hiding, surrendered to authorities, took the often meager sentences that courts imposed—often no more than probation—and then returned to a private and quotidian life. See Dan
Berger’s, Outlaws in America The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity; Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home The Weather Underground, The Red Army
Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies; Akinyele Umoja’s, Repression Breeds Resistance The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, On the Black Liberation Army Arm the Spirit. September 18, 1979; and my Red, White &
Black: Cinema and the Structure of US. Antagonisms, In her autobiography, Assata Shakur emphasizes the decentralized, nonhierarchical structure of the BLA—whether by design or desperation. This was also told tome by Marilyn Buck, one of the few White task force members of the Black Liberation Army, on one of my visits to her in Dublin Prison, Dublin, CA.
5
The number of operations that BLA members acknowledge,

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The Vengeance of Vertigo
against the largest police state in the world. Vertigo must have seized them each time they clashed with agents of a nuclear- weapons regime with three million troops in uniform, a regime that could put 150,000 new police on the streets in any given year, and whose ordinary White citizens frequently deputize themselves in the name of law and order. Subjective vertigo, no doubt a dizzying sense that one is moving or spinning in an otherwise stationary world, a vertigo brought on by a clash of grossly asymmetrical forces. There are suitable analogies, for this kind of vertigo must have also seized Native Americans who launched the AIM’s occupation of Wounded Knee, and FALN insurgents who battled the FBI.
Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence. Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and structural violence.
Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s disparate relationship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in whens he resists (or is perceived to resist) the disciplinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples subsumption by violence is a paradigmatic necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to be gripped simultaneously by subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of apolitical ontology which is radically different from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by discourse and disciplined by violence whens he breaks with the ruling discursive codes.
6
presumably because this number is a matter of public record. See Jalil Abdul
Muntaqim, On the Black Liberation Army Arm the Spirit. September 18,
1979.
6

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