Theft and sabotage ARE reparations -- the counterplan establishes a permanent fissure within the system and provides a Blaqillegalist framework for survival and avoids the net benefit of criminalization and victimhood

Where Fugitive Slave Law regulated emancipated Black life as perpetually outside of the law and subject to recapture, Jim Crow and later mass incarceration repackaged the same legal precedent while revising its application. Of course, the most relevant of these developments in the U.S. is the constitutionality of slavery under the 13th amendment’s “punishment for a crime” clause. For if the legality of slavery rest on being punishment for a crime, Blackness itself is a crime, has already been constituted as a crime, and is the symbolic indication of future crime, making it perpetually eligible for enslavement under the law. Emancipation could not change the precedent at its core, which understands the emancipated Black person as runaway merchandise, assumes Black deviancy, and requires Black discipline and containment. Today the law underwrites all instances of police brutality, mass incarceration, and the extrajudicial killing of Black people. “Law and order” is a synonym for waging state violence against Black people. Likewise, the positionality of Blackness makes it almost impossible to appeal to the law as a form of justice or legal restitution. Countless examples of failed attempts at justice through legal channels confirm that Black injury cannot be seen by the justice system, and does not register as injury in the eyes of the law. In fact, to deliver justice to Black people is actually counterintuitive to the project of the law, which is always, the containment of Blackness. As Calvin Warren explains: “The Law recognizes the black only in its destruction, and this destruction is required for legal intelligibility. Thus, something like black redress is outside of the law’s jurisdiction to the extent that the aim of redress is restorative, and restoring black being is not only impossible but antithetical to the law’s aim” (Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror) Two Black revolutionary formations become important to analyze here for their markedly different approaches to the law and its relevance to Black struggle. The early years of the Black Panther Party saw the law as a tool that could be used to push Black revolution forward. The first armed demonstrations organized by the Party constantly reference the Second Amendment right to bear arms. New members of the Party were encouraged to read Mao’s Red Book and the United States Constitution. Huey P Newton personally studied the law fervently and for all of the loud and bombastic declarations made at the armed demonstrations, a great effort was made to keep them squarely within the bounds of the law. What the Party did not foresee is that when the law could not perform its function to contain and regulate Blackness, the law could be changed. Months after the 1967 Panther demonstration at the California Capitol, the Mulford Act was passed effectively banning the open carry of loaded weapons. As police repression increased, amounting later to shootouts, raids, and assassinations of key BPP leaders, it became clear that legality did not matter when Black revolutionaries pose a threat to the white power structure. The systematic attack on the Black Panther Party forced Newton and many others to dial back on armed demonstrations. The law remained unavailable for use as a form of redress in the pursuit of Black liberation, for Black liberation is against the law and antithetical to the laws aim. Huey himself briefly turned towards criminal activities later in his life in an attempt to organize gangs but was killed in the process. The Black Liberation Army emerged largely out of the fallout of the Black Panther Party and took an extralegal approach to Black liberation. It engaged in armed attacks, robberies, prison breaks, and other activities while rejecting the legitimacy of the law itself. Taking the lessons learned from the Black Panther Party seriously, the BLA understood that breaking the law would be required for Black liberation but refused to see what they were doing as truly criminal. They made distinctions between illegal activities that were explicitly political and those that were criminal. They argued that because their actions were political they should be tried not as criminals but as prisoners of war. When Black Liberation Army members were tried in court for crimes such as ‘domestic terrorism’ they famously rejected the legitimacy of U.S. courts maintaining that the court lacked the moral authority to do so. Kuwasi Balagoon in his trial statement said boldly: “I am a prisoner of war and I reject the crap about me being a defendant, and I do not recognize the legitimacy of this court. The term defendant applies to someone involved in a criminal matter, in an internal search for guilt or innocence.” The BLA’s refusal both recognized the court as an illegitimate colonizing institution and rejected the terms in which Black radical activity is marked as criminal. Instead, BLA members reframed their activity as existing outside of the jurisdiction of the law and requiring different legal machinery. The BLA members appealed not to U.S. law but international law pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war. In his essay The Vengeance of Vertigo, Frank Wilderson had this to say about Balagoon’s statement: “Its deepest insight is the conclusion that it reaches that the law is White, coupled with the inference that Balagoon was guilty prior to the Brinks expropriation. His innocence cannot be vouchsafed until all semblance of the law has been eradicated.” The way in which the BLA positioned themselves in relation to the law, both as the wholehearted embrace of Black illegal forms coupled with the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the law, has been an inspiration for this paper. I disagree with Wilderson’s complaint that the fault of the approach was the inability to empathetically account for Black suffering within the courtroom. Rather, the only fault was the assumption that an appeal toward ‘prisoner of war’ as a viable legal standing for BLA members could or would be heard at all by the court. Their non-cooperation with the law still relied on the law to see BLA members as subjects eligible to be tried as prisoners of war (when as Calvin Warren reminds us, the law ‘recognizes the black only in its destruction’). It represents an inability for the law to extend legal status to Black people that would absolve them of criminality. Further, it reveals the inability of the law to recognize Black people as Humans or anything other than runaway merchandise. The BLA was correct in claiming their activities were outside of the law’s jurisdiction, for Blackness itself is outside of the law and in perpetual contempt of the court. It ruptures the very coherence of the law since laws apply to those considered humans, yet the legal precedent is invested in recognizing the black only in its destruction. Given this context, where the law codifies Black containment, engenders Black criminalization, underwrites antiblack state violence, and denies Black appeal to the law as a form of redress, we can finally begin to make the case for a Black illegalism (Blaqillegalism). Blaqillegalism takes the fugitivity of Blackness, that is, the perpetual refusal of and flight from enclosure inherent in Blackness, as its basic starting place. It argues that Blackness breaks the law by its very nature; it is a fissure within the law. This fissure is read by the state as perpetual criminality and is the source of the systematic criminalization of Blackness under the state. Furthermore, Blackness is made into the perpetual criminal element that enables the law and its enforcement. Blaqillegalism maintains that the law remains necessarily unavailable to Blackness for making appeals of redress, that the law ‘recognizes the black only in its destruction’. Finally, Blaqillegalism understands Black life, Black survival, Black restitution, and above all Black freedom to be outlawed and in so many words illegal. The Blaqillegalist postulates that breaking the law is not only good praxis but becomes necessary for Black survival and even further, for the pursuit of Black liberation. If the law’s main function is to discipline and codify the state containment of Blackness, then breaking the law becomes an act of flight from the enclosure that the law engenders, and is thus a fugitive act. Due to the everyday conditions of Black oppression, which emerge as a consequence of white supremacist capitalism and state repression, Black people again cannot help but break the law be it by accident, circumstance, resistance, or necessity. Fugitive acts occur always in response to these conditions and are compounded by the criminalization that already marks Blackness. For these reasons, the Blaqillegalist says that under white supremacy the Black person already breaks the law as a consequence of their very being, and as a refusal to die under white capitalist oppression. This renders all efforts to remain lawful pointless and undoes any moral obligation Black people might have had in abiding by the law. Since we are ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’, the Black person might as well engage in illegal activity if it is responsible and for the survival of themselves and their communities. Of course, on the ground, Black people have already arrived at this conclusion. There are a great variety of illegal activities that are already employed by Black people every day. Of these, only some constitute a Blaqillegalist praxis, while others don’t. A Blaqillegalist position generally embraces both small and large-scale illegal activity pointed in the direction of Black collective survival and Black liberation and is critical of illegal forms that are ultimately detrimental to that project. Here we will examine and reclaim the Black illegal forms that would fall under a Blaqillegalist praxis. Disorderly Conduct Definitions for what actually constitutes disorderly conduct remain arbitrary, and on the ground, disorderly conduct could refer to any normal activity Black people do that break some arbitrary law imposed by the state. This could be anything from “being too loud” in a public place, playing loud music, selling goods without a permit, soliciting, loitering, trespassing, squatting, protesting without a permit, to even resisting arrest. These laws are almost always meant to target Black people specifically and are a residue of the slave codes that regulated Black movement and assembly in public spaces. Black people always break these laws, usually unbeknownst to them, because what is being regulated here is Black everyday life. Blaqillegalist praxis asserts that we should break as many of these arbitrary laws as possible while evading the police. Theft Under white supremacist capitalism, all theft by Black people that targets white individuals, institutions, and businesses are reparations. This includes shoplifting, petty theft, burglary, looting, expropriation, grand larceny, scamming, embezzlement, piracy, and fraud. Colloquially called swiping in the Black community, these acts have always been practiced and for some have been a viable means of survival. Black theft emerges as a direct refusal of capitalist oppression and resistance against a system that has stolen from Black people for centuries. A Blaqillegalist praxis would encourage continued decentralized theft of white institutions as the best means to obtain reparations for slavery and colonialism. Furthermore, the stealing and redistribution of food, medication, toiletries, clothing and other necessities serve the collective survival of Black communities. As long as the targets of such activities are white, this is Blaqillegalist praxis.