Many people are fascinated with watching buildings that are a danger to public safety demolished and imploded. From a majestic place high in the sky within seconds and a rattle of pops, flashes, and bangs, structures that once blocked out the sunlight are turned to rubble. Similarly, the once tight-knit Black girl magic trio of Congresswoman Cori Bush, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, and Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner is now quickly being razed under the pressure of the controversy spurred by Gardner’s handling of the recent tragedy involving 17-year-old Janae Edmondson.
Edmondson, who was visiting St. Louis with family for a volleyball tournament, was injured as a result of an accident initiated by 21-year-old Daniel Riley. The accident resulted in Edmondson’s legs being crushed, later amputated, and her hopes of competing as a college athlete dashed. Outrage over the incident has been directed at Gardner’s office because Riley accrued well over fifty violations associated with his failure to comply with the conditions of his bond, and Gardner’s office never formally moved to revoke his bond. The Black girl magic trio that once joined forces to suppress the uprising in the St. Louis city jails, and cover up police murder in the city, is now imploding amidst calls for Gardner’s resignation.
Shots Fired: Mayor Tishaura Jones Suggests that Kim Gardner Consider Resigning
Shortly after Edmondson’s tragic accident, Mayor Tishaura Jones took to Twitter, a platform that she allegedly “quit” several months ago in “protest” of Elon Musk’s tweet about the Ferguson uprising, to state that Gardner needed to do some soul searching as to whether she wanted to continue as Circuit Attorney. The not-so-subtle insinuation that Gardner should consider resigning from office was the opening salvo that set off a ripple effect that resulted in a number of state and local officials, from both bankrupt major political parties, calling for Gardner’s resignation.
In response to Mayor Jones’s criticism, Gardner suggested that the mayor’s upbraiding amounted to finger pointing and calls for her resignation mere political grandstanding. When given a deadline by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to resign by noon on February 23rd, Gardner and her supporters doubled down that the call for her resignation was yet another attempt to remove the beleaguered prosecutor from office by racist opposition.
Shortly before the firestorm created by Edmondson’s injuries, Mayor Jones was at the State capitol decrying House Bill 301(HB 301) and other legislation proposed by Republican lawmakers that recommend removing the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) from the oversight of the mayor’s office. Prior to 2012, SLMPD had been subject to the oversight of a board of Police Commissioners. Jones described these proposed laws as heavy handed and a slap in the face of voters who voted to elect Gardner and to have the police department overseen by the mayor. Jones even said that elected officials in the city knew how to best address crime because they were much closer to the problem than those in the legislature proposing such changes. What a difference two weeks and a tragedy makes.
HB 301: Conservative Backlash
Prior to the Edmondson fiasco, HB 301 was introduced in the Missouri legislature by Republican lawmaker Lane Roberts from Joplin, MO. HB 301 proposes to give power to the governor to appoint a special prosecutor to handle violent felonies where there are more than 35 or more homicides per 100,000 in a 12-month period. Initially, the bill specifically named Gardner as its target due to the growing violent crimes in the city of St. Louis. The sponsor of the bill may very well be racist. However, the bigoted nature of certain actions should not cause intelligent people to turn a blind eye to the reality that there has been an inability of Gardner’s office to ensure prosecution of crimes under normative terms, as odious as these can be. Her office has been understaffed for much of her tenure and has evidenced an inability to prosecute cases in a timely and efficient manner. This is what a substantial section of the Black community wants. But people don’t always know exactly what they want or how to get it. They will try everything, discarding one leader after another, until social explosions are no longer at their expense and the authorities and their police have to run in the other direction.
Ordinary people should not follow the lead of the Community Justice Coalition that has done everything in its power to help Gardner explain, evade, and rationalize the many failures of her administration. We can condemn the racist nature of legislation without lending legitimacy to Gardner’s regime. It’s alright to acknowledge that racism must be opposed while also admitting that Gardner’s constant missteps have been pitiable. However, ethical people can’t survive and prosper by the manipulation of the old party politics. Something more is required.
If the system is racist, as these activists who claim to speak for the community insist, why would they support an individual who is administering a racist system? Their continued support of Gardner exposes their conception of empowerment is hierarchical. These activists and their government continue to live by institutional power on normative terms instead of direct democratic power of the common people. Didn’t Mayor Jones suggest local people best understand the problems they face? When her police killed two Black men was that the desire of local people? As professional administrator of killing does that make her a grassroots personality?
Activists rallying around the Black political class don’t believe that ordinary people can govern their own affairs and instead prop up political frauds as embodied by the Black girl magic trio of Bush, Gardner, and Jones. These activists, who are open functionaries for the government, have scolded Mayor Jones not to disrupt the movement coalition they share together with Gardner. What anti-racist “movement” for justice includes the executives responsible for police murder and mass incarceration in the city?
Look for the Burning Bush: Corie Bush Comes to the Aid of Gardner
Congresswoman Corie Bush came to the aid of Gardner. But really, she also is coming to the aid of herself. A single spark can start a prairie fire. Several days following Mayor Jones’s public remarks, Bush entered the fray and defended Gardner’s right to continue to preside over the mass incarceration and degradation of poor and Black people in St. Louis City.
In a written statement Bush said that the tragic accident “isn’t about any one prosecutor or judge” and that “[T]he harm that Janae Edmondson has endured is emblematic of a system wide failure.” Bush said that, “We cannot allow this tragedy to be weaponized by reactionary forces whose sole mission is to expand brutal and arbitrary strategies that make us less safe.”
Yet, Bush, Gardner, and Jones are the reactionary forces. They are not forces of resistance. They are agents of the police state and the empire of capital whose sole mission is to conquer and kill those who would resist oppression. This system heaps degradation on the heads of those who would dare to struggle and win against the very system that they are apologists. By throwing their black bodies over it, they advance the system they supposedly oppose every day.
While a critique of the system is always appropriate (we should want its abolition), it is disingenuous coming from the mouth of someone like Bush. She has spent a great deal of time and energy trying to be a part of the system. It is self-evident she is not against the system. But is yet again appropriating strident rhetoric and grassroots instincts.
It should be incandescently clear that Bush’s remarks were made to support Gardner during a time when she is under siege. Her comments seek to deflect the calls for accountability that have reached a fever pitch. These are widespread in the aftermath of the Edmondson tragedy.
In her myopic mind, calls for Gardner’s resignation is a byproduct of the white racial state, even in the face of other Black rulers and justifiably angry Black grassroots forces calling for her to step down. The white racial state is a product of a bygone era. The current mode of rule is the ethnically plural police state and multicultural empire of which the likes of Bush, Gardner, and Jones have been tapped as the perfect embodiment of this project by the ruling class.
Bush’s supposed premise that specific individuals in office are not decisive where she claims to be opposing the system from within is contradictory. It would make sense, if she stood outside the system and mobilized ordinary people against it, whether whites or people of color held oppressive offices. But she mobilizes a section of the ruling class who wish to contain Black people. She specializes in pointing in the other direction from inside the government and says: “Look there is white racism!” Nobody points: “Look at the Black girl magic trio, who chatter about privilege, are funded by the white wealthy!” One thing is for sure. The Ferguson Rebellion and the 2020 year of rebellion was not funded by any section of the white wealthy.
If Bush, who supposedly opposes the system, believes individuals like Gardner are not decisive in office, why support Gardner? Why did Bush run for office herself?
Bush merely babbled into the fray because she knows that her role in the great mystification is also burning and imploding. Those who oppose systemic racism see her double-talk as well.
The Black Girl Magic Trio’s Role in Legitimating the System
Have Bush, Jones, or Gardner ever advocated upending the system? All of them have played a significant role in rebranding the system with their Black girl magic personas both as individual politicians and as a trio of Black women. Like Mighty Mouse, they arrived with a proverbial cape shouting “Here I’ve come to save the day!” Has anyone ever seen such a degenerate circle who bragged vacuously on their supposed super powers? Their activist advisors for justice tell us the system is not in fact in decline, it only has a crisis of legitimacy when white men run it. They say we must rally around the Black administrators of our subordinate lives. Why such stupidity in the name of the Black community?
The trio has perpetuated the very systems and institutions that continue to leave so many exploited and dispossessed. In their bids for office, they have claimed that they want to be the embodiment of power for everybody. How can one be for the police and those who the police murder and repress? Can one oppose mass incarceration while incarcerating millions of Black and poor people? Is it possible to be anti-war while voting for war budgets in Congress? Bush, Jones, and Gardner are as embedded in the system as one can be.
Mayor Jones, in this moment of crisis, runs for cover to legitimate herself with both the white wealthy and the Black grassroots, by taking a bite out of Gardner. Is this really all that surprising? She is a grave-digger, someone who has administered police murder, both in the streets of St. Louis and behind the walls of the St. Louis City Justice Center.
Jones and her women of color colleagues promoted the slogan that we should “listen to” and be led by people of their social identity. But under pressure they are all being revealed as careerists with an empty outlook. This compels the public to inquire what is the social function of the Black political class?
The Role and Function of the Black Political Class
The Black political class was installed by the wealthy and powerful to offer a veneer of ethics in response to the perennial crisis of police murder and mass incarceration. Following the 2014–2020 urban uprisings against police murder, that began in Ferguson and spread across the country, many activists initially had defined the oppressive regime as a white racial state. Most of these activists, like our presently prominent local nincompoops, worked for wealthy foundations that sponsored Black politicians to police and jail Black commoners.
Obviously, they did not know where they were going other than being functionaries for an electoral coalition. They revealed that their talk of “institutional racism” was only mumbling to support equal opportunity to rise to the top and administer the police state. Subtly, rarely openly, these activists for the government allowed the myth to spread that Black people in official posts were more competent, efficient, and moral in administering subordinate lives. How moral can one be who administers subordinate lives?
A new generation is finding out that the police state and mass incarceration cannot be rationalized. Further, consistent with past historical trends, with mass uprisings came the retreat of the police state in every city. By any measure, crime has increased. It is not a product of the white racial imagination.
It is a product of the police state being discredited and retreating. Any activist that cannot admit this is not part of a movement for popular and direct self-government. Such a movement would have to take responsibility for difficult truths unlike faker functionaries of the police state and its party politics.
It’s funny how activists for the government, supposedly against privilege and sponsored by the wealthy, like to chatter about racial disparities. The number one racial disparity, is how the Black political class above society administers most efficiently the subordination of Black lives.
Caught Between Crimes Above and Below Society
Black toilers are tired. Caught between stereotypes that Black people are criminals and especially toiling and poor Black people being maligned by people who look like them in their neighborhoods, we are compelled to come to terms with another menace.
The Black political class is also threatening Black life — the slogan “Black Lives Matter” functioned only for them to rise to the top. Not singular and isolated incompetent personalities. Rather, a social class of people who make their living, and gather honors, for managing the explosive conditions intrinsic to Black life under the state and capital. Efficient management is actually our death and mutilation with the least tears, anger, and rising from our people.
Certainly, the Black middle and professional classes by and large do not face what the Black multitudes face every day. This is obscured by the propertied racial disparities discourse. Black people, of all social classes, are conditioned to identify with “the dream.” This is the opportunity — a chance — to make a comfortable living and transcend burdens of survival toward a happiness. The management by aspiring Black rulers of the abuse of ordinary Black folks is their chance. Nevertheless, crime inside our communities among the poor are also very real.
How the Black Girl Magic Trio Came to Power in St. Louis
The Black girl magic trio of Bush, Gardner, and Jones in addition to riding the liberal slogan of Black Lives Matter, have been able to appropriate the identity of toiling Black women toward the end of advancing their professional ambitions. They invoke being Black mothers, previously being homeless, and deep involvement in the Black church to advance the false notion that they are just like everyday Black women who strive under great adversity to eke out a decent existence.
These “magical” politicians are often and mistakenly celebrated and given a venerated place in schools, neighborhoods, and churches. Nonetheless, the idea that they are the embodiment of everyday Black women’s struggles, who counterplan from their kitchen tables to make ends meet, is false.
They have been elevated to the positions we now find them because they play a strategic role in suppressing ordinary Black people’s desire to arrive on their own authority in the face of a bankrupt society that continues to fail the multitudes. Black people, and especially Black women, do not need to feel a desire to defend the legitimacy of the rule of Black women above society.
Their failures, not compared to racist white men alone, but by the measure of their abuse of ordinary Black people, do not represent the failure of the Black community as a whole or embarrass Black creative capacities to govern ourselves. Stupid or misbehaving Black folks above or below society do not invalidate Black historical achievement — if we really know what we have achieved.
We do not have to rejoice in their false victories because they do nothing for us and we cannot and should not live vicariously through them.
The Implosion of the Black Girl Magic Trio as Cause for Celebration
Witnessing the rending apart of the Black girl magic trio should be cause for celebration. Any activist that doesn’t make that clear is a treacherous tool of the old bestial party politics, whether they secretly act for one, the other, or both parties.
We need to modify that gospel song: “We fall down, but we get up.” The new word should be “they fall down, we get up.” The white racial state fell down, now the Black girl magic trio is rumbling down into the dust in St. Louis. We need not be manipulated by white racists or Black faces in high places.
The drama they produce together requires them to walk hand-in-hand. Necessarily pointing the finger at each other, their combined performance is to contain our rising. By pointing the finger at each other, the two different wings of the police state, the old declining and agonizing white racial side and the ethnic and gender plural side claiming the embodiment of a new birth, get back up again. We must keep kicking both while they are down. Activists who only draw people’s attention to one side are employees of the state and capital.
While the Black girl magic trio implodes, also pointing fingers among themselves fighting over their white elite patronage and Black loyalties, ordinary Black women and men need to get back up again. It’s not too late. There should be no condemnation for our delays, or our mistakes of perception, in what we must overcome.
The Black girl magic trio and the activists who apologize for their preferred sector of those who use the police state to jail, kill, and mutilate Black people, exposes the frailty of the premise of “Black unity” which is an idea that is based on one’s social identity instead of specific Black folks’ character and ethics. Additionally, the bankrupt notion that we should trust Black women without question, due to past or even ongoing oppression known by working-class and unemployed Black women, should be rejected.
Having known oppression and degradation does not justify anyone’s rule over others. While exploitation can lead to an understanding of systems of oppression and degradation, especially among sincere people who won’t exchange Black lives for Black private property, this is definitely not the case with the Black girl magic trio.
The trio falls down where they have drawn the errant conclusion that since Black women have been targeted for exploitation, Black women are best suited to replace those that have done the oppressing in a system that they claim is corrupt and racist. Any person who is truly against the system would seek to make a break with the system, not join it in the name of reforming it, and “it is our time now.”
It’s time to make a change. But not time to act lame and the same as unethical whites, and grab for money, power, and respect only for ourselves, sponsored by a section of the white wealthy. As the rebellions against the police and inside jails illustrated, the search for profound power needs no elite sponsors. It will not be funded. Neither will be the next risings in our neighborhoods.
As the establishment continues to be faced with crisis after crisis, ordinary people must realize that we are the leaders we have been waiting for. No one will be able to articulate and propose solutions to the problems we face better than we can. Anyone who says otherwise, or tries to maneuver to take our place in initiating and directing our own independent actions, is a liar and schemer.
The greatest proposal the grassroots placed forward from 2014–2020 was running the brutal police state out of the Black community. Everyday Black folks didn’t just talk. The Black Girl Magic Trio, with their double-talk, opened up the door, to let the police back in.
There are moments where broken glass everywhere, while not a legal expression, is the most intelligent political thought. Forming our own self-directed government requires additional reflection often found among Black mothers discussing at their kitchen tables at difficult times when there is no financial assistance or cheap symbolism to cloud our judgment.
Ordinary people holding the reins of society is the only hope to reduce the types of tragedies that have become all too common under elite representative government. Comprised of career politicians, whether white men or women of color, their claim to speak and act for the multitudes is imploding before our eyes. The community must again close the door to the police state in all its forms, while taking responsibility for judicial affairs, economic planning, education, the ecology and other challenges. This includes confronting those who menace our community from whatever sector they emerge.
This post was reposted from Stories by Adofo Minka on Medium
