So true.

I think an additional complexity is what equality means for America and what it means for black people. If you look at the black resistance tradition even as recently as over the past 70 years, it has been a critique not just of American official and state-sanctioned violence against black people but also a critique of violence generally — that is, a critique of empire. So when black people have said equality, we have meant a fundamental change in the very architecture of the American society which is built inextricably on violence against othered peoples such as Africans and Native Americans. But the equality the US society is offering black people is an equality of assimilation into the structure of violence so that instead of having primarily white men meeting out the violence on others, black people participate in deploying the violence. In an extreme example we see black cops murdering black people; and now we see black people in the military going, ironically, to Africa to the very places their ancestry traces back to, to participate in corporate wars in which “black on black violence” framed as war and sold as national security for the United States is engendered. In other words, we are being offered an equality that requires us to partake in the very violence that we have been subjected to for centuries and have resisted for just as long. This is why Dr King has been sanitized; he wasn’t for any of that.

So we need to emphasize what we mean by equality: clearly we don’t mean inclusion into an architecture of viciousness and cruelty.