Order and Law

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I wrote the first version of this essay about a month after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and updated it shortly after the 2025 presidential inauguration. It just took me forever to post it!

Order and Law

  • W. Yusef Doucet

Months have now passed since the U.S. voting public re-elected Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States by a slim margin, a plurality, not a majority. I am not a member of the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party. I do not vote for Democrats nor Republicans. Nonetheless, I preferred Harris had won the contest between these contending factions of the ruling interests, not because I expected a progressive vision or action from a Harris-Waltz administration, but as a defense against an empowered and further emboldened Trump and the anti-democratic forces with him and behind him, and for whom he serves as an embodiment and instrument. Many point out that a Harris victory would maintain the inertia of Democratic party intransigence on the most socially progressive policies popular with the Democratic party base, and I find that conclusion more than reasonable. At the same time, we do not approve of greater repression and worsening material conditions, nor do we celebrate the shrinking of the political space for resistance. People will be driven to action by the intensified repression that has now launched in 2025. We may be driven to action, any number of actions. As always, organized, politically educated action will make the difference. That would have remained the case under Harris, with the regular amount of repression.

As Trump blaringly announces the regression we can expect in his second term, one of his promises continually pushes to the front of my thoughts. He promised to pardon all of the January 6 insurrectionists who had been convicted. That also meant that any active cases would be thrown out of court or the investigations ended. He did it. The convicted felon, 34 counts, will move back into the White House instead of serving time in a luxury prison or under house arrest at Mar-a-Lago. The self-declared party of law and order, a claim central to Republican policy and campaigns since the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, and the Republican candidate who on brand campaigned stoking fears of out-of-control crime in the street and a lack of respect for police forces throughout the country poise themselves to sanction multiple crimes committed in open: threats of violence, political violence, destruction of public property, assault and battery on police officers, all committed on live television and live streamed around the world for hours. These are the same members of the U.S. Congress and the same president who will see Mumia Abu Jamal, Movement for Black Lives activists, so many more African and indigenous and Puerto Rican and Hawaiian and white working class activists, organizers, and revolutionaries remain in prison for the crime of daring to free others and themselves. 

As 2024 lurched to its close in the wake of the presidential election, the Daniel Penny verdict came down in a New York courtroom. A New York jury found Daniel Penny not guilty of murder, the murder of a Black man, an unhoused Black man, a Black man suffering a mental health crisis. Another jury in the United States acquitted a white man taking justice into his own hands by claiming the power monopolized by the state, the right to end a life. Being an annoyance is not a capital crime; threatening people on the subway is not a capital crime; being unhoused is not a capital crime; suffering mental illness is not a capital crime. Nonetheless, Daniel Penny summarily executed Jordan Neely really for those conditions. And when I heard the news of his acquittal, I felt a little more of myself die.

I felt a little more of myself die. I felt it in my gut, in a center-most place within my stomach. It felt like a quick stab from a long needle or ice pick. Here was one more reminder of how cheaply so many people hold Black life to be, how deeply ingrained fear of Black criminality resides in the thinking of U.S. juries such that they will see the Black victim as more culpable than the white perpetrator. Here was one more instance when the legal process justified the pre-judicial execution of a Black man. Here again was the system doing the work of grinding Black bodies through the gears of the machinery of oppression, and we who witnessed Jordan Neely’s life murdered and then murdered again by the not-guilty verdict feel the weight of the machine crushing us beneath its mass. Day by day through a myriad of these actions and inactions, the unremarked and the spectacular, the system tears life from our bodies, assaults our psyches, and keeps us in a continual crisis state.    

Consequent to the not guilty verdict, Daniel Penny appeared on reactionary media platforms who are promoting his acts as heroic. Then Vice President-Elect Vance invited Penny to sit in Trump’s box with the incoming president-elect, and several proposed members of the new cabinet for the Army-Navy football game. Daniel Penny acted out a fantasy deeply held by many white men in this country, the personal destruction of a Black body. This has always been a mark of heroism in the United States. Historically, the country has embraced killers of black and brown bodies, of African and Indigenous bodies. This case unquestionably echoes the acquittal of Bernard Getz for shooting Black teenagers on the subway in the mid-1980s because he felt threatened by their presence. The jury found his actions reasonable. The jury found George Zimmerman’s actions reasonable. The jury found Kyle Rittenhouse’s actions reasonable, which should have made clear that allies of Black people are subject to be treated like Black people. Daniel Penny was Jordan Neely’s executioner. U.S. social policy condemned him to death.

It never seems to matter that crime statistics have long indicated decreases in crime. Evidence shows that the spike in crime when there has been a spike in these last four years emerged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic hardship consequent to the pandemic. Those statistical facts did not sway folks nor swayed an election that reveals an appetite for a return to the tough-on-crime status quo. What can that mean in this country when those whose mission is to administrate an orderly society openly and blatantly flout the laws that they themselves have created, be those laws the international laws and treaties or the local and federal laws broken and flouted by the outgoing presidential administration and incoming presidential administration and their backers?

The rulers have created the (dys)order of this life, and have rendered the law empty, even as they prepare to use the law to unleash the most coercive and repressive sectors of both the state and what generously, if inaccurately, we call civil society. The law is the codified opinions of the ruling class, the class that uses the legal structures to legalize itself. Law holds a privileged position in not only the social order but in the symbolic order. The law sets the limits of acceptable behavior, and even acceptable ideation, until ruling interests cross beyond the limit, and the lawmakers create a new limit. Where is the limit now, following 1500 pardons and commutations for January 6 insurrectionists, a re-election for the confessed sexual abuser and felon  inciter-in-chief, and the promise of human rights violation in the wind? We have moved into the open rule of billionaires. The sheets are off, exposing the familiar face of naked terror. The Trump regime makes plainly transparent the gangster character of the U.S. ruling class. They have destroyed the mirage of plausible deniability. The Trump regime aggressively reasserts the old social order of open white supremacy to correspond to the racialized and gendered hierarchies of their imaginations. The United States is an abuser on a global scale, and this once and once again president of the United States probably best embodies U.S. American depravity, brought to us by the ineffectualness and complicity of the political duopoly, and here to punish us all.  

The PASLA Panel for the Joko Collective

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Here is a conversation with veterans of the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PASLA), a dynamic cultural formation based in South Central Los Angeles following the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Here are folks who lived the PASLA motto: “Social Growth Through The Performing Arts.”

Black Dot Clubhouse drops November 6

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https://worldstagepress.org/product/black-dot-clubhouse-by-w-yusef-doucet-pre-order/

It is my humble honor to announce the publication of my first collection of poems. These are pieces created during my youth: the years of my undergraduate education, the years of my graduate education, the years I became a husband and a father and a teacher. Several poems have been previously published; others have been regularly included pieces in my live reading sets; most have never been published nor read in public. Poems of the body, mind, and spirit, a window into a poet’s unfolding vision, Black Dot Clubhouse is one human voice speaking to our common human experiences: the large and the small, the public and the private, the sacred and the profane.  I invite you to join me in the Black Dot Clubhouse. (cover art by Madrid Rivera)

Echoes of Vincent Chen

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Janice Mirikitani and Cecil Williams at Third World Liberation Front action

Echoes of Vincent Chin – W. Yusef Doucet

A massacre in Atlanta, and the United States turns its media eyes on the harassment and violence visited  upon Asian communities. The scope of murder in Atlanta made it impossible to continue to keep this particular expression of white nationalist violence muted in the public consciousness. Folks have organized demonstrations in cities around the country with minimal media coverage, in contrast to the coverage of the 2020 uprisings. Instead, we hear performances of anti-hate postures and statements, and I have seen a noticeable increase in Asian performers in commercial advertisements and public service media. It feels like a rather ghoulish disaster capitalism.  The danger is real for Asian communities and individuals, and it is an old danger, and a danger as pervasive and long-lasting as all the other peculiarly U.S. racisms against people who are non-white.

The city and state in which I live had several eruptions of anti-Asian violence throughout their history. In Downtown Los Angeles, in a place on Los Angeles Street not far from site of the Pueblo’s founding, at a place that was called Calle de los Negros, Negro Alley, nineteen Chinese workers were murdered by a mob. This was in 1871, a period in which anti-African violence intensified throughout the country, the U.S. government waged a war of extermination against the First Nations of the West, and the epidemic of lynching spread through every region of the U.S. These routine deployments of violence and terror, as well as antagonistic actions from state agents and civil society formations, have always been about the same thing, the assertion that the United States is a white country, and the Asian body is a foreign body, a body that threatens contamination. This applies to every region of Asia.  

I think about this, and I think about all the Asian people that have been part of my life. I remember Milky. I don’t remember her real name. We called her Milky, a Japanese girl, one of several in our kindergarten classroom at Thirty-Ninth Street School, now Tom Bradley Science Magnet, in Leimert Park, mostly African children, many Japanese children, and a few Mexican children, in 1967-1968. I think of William, a Chinese boy who I grew up with in our neighborhood, the neighborhood now called King Estates, on Van Ness Ave. William was just another homey in the ‘hood. As we got older, went to different high schools, we spent less time together, but we remained friendly for as long as we continued to cross paths, and until my family moved out of the neighborhood for the Athens neighborhood halfway through high school and those encounters became even more rare.  I think of Bob’s Market and the Filipino family that lived across the street from my grandparents on Bonnie Brae Avenue, one of the families closest to my mother’s family on the block, the camaraderie of my mother, my aunt and my uncles with the daughters and the son, my grandparents and the parents, and the welcome and the treats that my cousin I received when we visited Bob’s Market on the corner of Bonnie Brae and Temple, Bob, the father in the family. In think of Evelyn, their youngest daughter and our first babysitter, and of how much we loved her, and when she disappeared as a babysitter from our lives while adults spoke in hushed tones about her and left our questions unanswered, and of how much my family cried at her funeral after a battle with something they called leukemia.

I think of these dear ones fondly, and so many others really, relationships that we formed before I was ten years old. This continued through junior high school and high school.  Asian folks lived, schooled, and worked next to us. Asian folks shared an experience of white violence and racism, exploitation, and alienation. We identified around those experiences, those histories. Sometimes some Black kids, bullies and bangers, picked on the Asian kids. Sometimes some Asian kids, bullies and bangers, picked on Black kids. Yet mostly and every day, we all got along. We all identified with Bruce Lee. We all idolized Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. We loved that Bruce and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were friends.  Some of us even knew about Asian members of the Black Panther Party. Plus we all knew Black folks with an Asian parent. 

I didn’t know any of the victims in Atlanta. I don’t know who among my Asian friends, colleagues, and students have faced recent harassment. I assume all of them have because I don’t know of a time when anti-Asian racism hasn’t been a routine aspect of life in the U.S. So militant white nationalism has muscled up in the last year, fueled by a blustering demagogue of blistering effect.  Last year, these folks drove trucks into demonstrators. Deeply frightened and deeply entitled people have begun to unleash pent-up resentments that have stewed since the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, cultivated by cynical politicians and by a profitable and quite mainstream propaganda industry with religious conviction, and handed down to the generations that were to be end of racism. Still it lingers. Still it poisons. Still it kills. Still, it fills bank accounts.

I could not help but think of Vincent Chin. I didn’t know him either. But He remains a touchstone for me, this Chinese American man who two white men decided deserved execution because they would not be replaced, would not have their jobs replaced by the Japanese.  In that moment, any Asian would do. They were all Japanese, and this was just another American atrocity. Vincent Chin received nothing like justice. His killers received three-years-probation and a fine for $3000 each, and eventual acquittal from federal charges.     Within two years of his homicide, Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign declared that it was “morning in America again.”  It’s still morning in America, a red, hellscape morning. Black lives matter. Asian lives matter. The people remain in the street. Today, once again, people say his name, Vincent Chin.  We know our departed loved ones hear us. This is something Africans and Asians share. I hear Vincent Chin, crying, and bitterly laughing, mourning in America.

Liberation Cinema!

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The Brothers’ Quarterly Presents:

PapaMontero

“Octavio Cortazar’s docu-drama La Ultima Rumba de Papa Montero (The Last Rumba of Papa Montero) uses rumba beats and Afro-Cuban lore to tell the story of one of Cuba’s great rumberos. As with any nation obsessed with dance, Cuba comes alive here with every stomp of the foot. Even in death, Papa Montero is resilient—buried in a local cemetery he’s now become “a dead man who won’t go to heaven.”” – Ed Gonzalez
Friday, July 5, 2019
AFIBA Center
Doors Open at 6:30 PM; program begins at 7:00 PM
Free: donations accepted
5730 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles
Off-street parking available