By Huey Dessalines

February 11, 2020

Robert Williams, a New Afrikan man from New York City, allegedly spent the last few days striking fear into the hearts of the enemy police in the Bronx. Williams is accused of staging bold ambushes in two cases, wounding two police officers. The first assault occurred on a parked police van and the second occurred at a police precinct nearby on Longwood Avenue. Williams allegedly told a police officer at the hospital that in the event of his release, he will assault more officers without fail.

Of course, this is the NYPD we are talking about, the same department that has assaulted and murdered New Afrikan and Latino people for doing nothing whatsoever. This is the police department with the blood of Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and countless others on their hands. The police are the enforcement arm of the white supremacist system and those who work for the police while complaining about a “war” being waged on them are akin to soldiers complaining about getting shot at. Oppression in the most brutal way leads itself to tit-for-tat resistance; this is an unbreakable law of history.

Williams has a lengthy record, and the police are making much of it. He supposedly carjacked and shot at a person in 2002 and was tazed by police in a more recent incident. He was only released from custody in 2019. Williams can be rightly seen as being not an isolated incident or one madman who decided to attack the police on a whim. Whenever a colonized person lashes out, they lash out with the strength of five hundred years of slavery, national oppression, and superexploitation. Without taking this into account in our analysis, we will fall into moralization and chauvinist positions and logic. Whenever a colonized person attacks the enemy for whatever reason, we should commend it. It is right to rebel against reactionaries, and the US is the global home of reaction. Yet we are neither idealists nor anarchists. This attack failed to take out the enemy, unlike the assault waged by Micah X Johnson in Dallas a few years ago. It provided them propaganda in their eternal victim charade, living martyrs, and Williams will undoubtedly spend the rest of his life in the enemy prison.

This was an adventurist move, motivated by personal rage. Yet, personal rage is political. It is correct to loathe and despise the police. The police have nothing to offer except stolen lives and resources. The borough in which Williams allegedly carried out these attacks is in the grip of attempts to gentrify it out of existence and wipe away its proletarian character. The petit-bourgeoisie already have gotten hold to Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg, now they have their eyes on the Bronx. The police aim to assist this shift in character with force. May they meet those with the struggle spirit of Robert Williams guided by a revolutionary proletarian line and Party.