What Kind of Third Eye the Handcuffs Cut Into my Wrist

by Tongo Eisen-Martin

San Francisco sells to the rich the destruction of the poor. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, delivers them to the poor. San Francisco gentrifiers, despite their phenomenal bourgeois transience, are a people. A people unified by a need for racist police. 

Alex Nieto tried to participate in the rolling hills of San Francisco. SFPD carved their execution of him into the Bernal Hill eastward view. 

A rookie-season white San Franciscan [interpretation my own] called the police on him. Nieto was dead six seconds after police arrived. 

Throw a bullet in the air, expect a part of it to stay stuck. Throw a city in the air…

Again, whiteness is a deputization. 

To be white is to be united by a function. And that function is to be a private extension of the police state. To be the homing systems for a war machine. To be white is to provide targets. Telling who to kill, who to imprison, who to excommunicate, who to fire, who to expel. And of course, whenever possible and if capable, to carry out tasks of destruction oneself. 

In turn, to not be white is to be a human being who, under the organized insistence of a violent system, treats every white person or representative of the white establishment as if the presence of their very demise is in front of them, and cower accordingly. The pieces of Nieto’s bullets that stayed stuck in the air were the pieces that had all of our names written on them.

As enjoyable as an accomplishment is; every facet of an imperialist society that can be made into an institution or structure, at root, serves to make us easier to police; more prone to cower. 

How am I supposed to experience the totality of oppression? 

What am I supposed to do with these gaps of space that the state resizes for violence? 

Do people deserve a better revolutionary than a poet?

We are formed and transformed by our whole practice of life and our awareness of the forces that determine these practices. What the white power structure knows is that to establish an institution is to change human nature by changing the greater wholes that we determine our individual identities from. Art… cultural work is indeed a path for people waking up to a people-determined whole. A journey of the psyche towards a clarity of revolutionary identity. But we have to come to terms with the fact that a people-determined whole, similar to its institutional antagonist, requires committed and organized practice from the people to live, struggle and evolve together towards liberation. 

One of the more insidious ideas that helps ruling class hegemony thrive is the illusion of a multi-existence of power; that society is the aggregate of various autonomies of cultural, political, economic, and military function (and scope); existing in cooperation and conflict across a sea of societal existence. We may have better luck next year. More progressive upstarts might enter congress. Some wars might end. Some prisons might close. Some colleges may lower tuition costs or be free. Some debts may be forgiven. Some federal judges might step up. Some police might calm down. Some artists will be given the keys to buildings. But the truth is, poetry is not a power and all “privilege” is just the spoils of crimes against humanity.

What is the modern species-life of San Francisco?

After a stint lending a hand to organizing efforts out of town, I returned to San Francisco. It was like wandering into a Hip-Hop-less city. San Francisco was Katrina New Orleans, and the sea level was in the shotgun seat. Destabilized segments, purported to know how to live, hooked on the opiate of having emotional breakthroughs in a capitalist society. There was a floral pattern of stories of new San Francisco white people screaming racial epithets out of cars at my people.

Hordes of new citizens partied to the violently goofy ideal that the state and “tech” corporations were the keepers of human evolution. Money hires genius… therefore money is smarter than genius. Our well-being belonged in their hands.  And that the unequal distribution of political life, population displacement, extrajudicial killing of non-white people etc. were the side effects of a ruling class who was growing more hip and benevolent. Now billionaires have black friends. Walking downtown, all I saw were cops and people wearing corporate death necklaces… pardon me...wearing laminated name badges.

I walked through the city of corridors talking to myself (albeit a well-populated self) about how this terrible recreation of San Francisco made me miss even my childhood bullies.  

The United States is a population of people who mainly do not belong to themselves. The ruling class realized that it was cheaper and safer from growing revolutionary militancy and sophisticating political clarity to move production outside of the United States. But the people of the United States have never stopped producing “the one thing”: they never stopped producing the very power that is lorded over them. The more mundane tasks become, the more you become alien to yourself. This is true for tasks of labor, but as the post-industrial freefall continues, this is even truer for the more and more mundane tasks of the modern psyche. 

What do they have to sell you so that when you look in the mirror, you see a lion?

The United States pretends to be a continent while deciding which child to eat first. It’s ruling class encouraging me to either die or open my hunger to madness. I didn’t think billionaires could be so whiny. 

I walked through a preparatory epoch. Talking to myself about the summary execution of poet, Chinedu Okobi by San Mateo Sheriffs. About how an SFPD firing squad murdered Mario Woods for all black middle schoolers to see as they waited for public transportation during preteen rush hours. About how his Buddhist practice did not sway SFPD from killing Alex Nieto.

I hear that once upon a time, a flower was placed in the barrel of a rifle; but San Francisco reminds us that too much of the time, a notebook is just a notebook in a sketch about genocide.