Last night, I spoke at an event keynoted by Dr. Angela Davis. The event titled “If You Want Peace, Fight for Justice” addressed gun violence, social justice activism, and the work we must do to build a path forward.

Each panelist had 3 minutes to offer comments after Dr. Davis spoke. These are mine as written. The comments that I delivered varied a little from my original text.

My comments tonight center on the insidious & (for too many) invisible violence deployed under the pretext of ending gun and other forms of violence and crime in our city.

I’ve lived in Chicago since 1995 and I’ve never experienced a summer like this one.

For us, in my community, the summer kicked off with intense, relentless, and surely illegal police harassment of young people and specifically of young black men.

Young people riding their bikes on sidewalks instead of being ticketed were hauled into police lockups where they were accused of resisting arrest and then funneled into Cook County jail where preparations began in April to make room for such egregious arrests.

Young people leaving a program that we incubate called Circles and Ciphers were followed by cop cars and asked where they were heading. One cross word led to being roughly thrown on car hoods in front of the whole neighborhood.

Walking through alleys as a short cut to head home from work, young men were hounded, provoked, dragged to the station – but not before being beaten in the car without any concern for health conditions like seizures.

On the West side, colleagues and friends shared stories of young people being picked up without cause and driven into rival territory where they were dumped without wallets or phones only to hear the cops announcing loudly that they belonged to the rival gang. Those young people tried to make it back home in one piece.

Then there was the friend incarcerated for years and now working to support young men so that they don’t end up locked up who was pulled off a city bus by the Feds, taken home, his apartment ransacked looking for what? Who knows.

All of this state violence happening out of public view under the guise of ending gun and other violence – a reminder that we live in at least two different cities.

It should be no surprise then that in a peace circle that I facilitated last January for young black people (ages 15-18) after the Sandy Hook tragedy: the idea of ‘gun control’ was met with skepticism by some and with derision by the others. All 14 youth in the circle had been impacted by gun violence.

In the absence of a serious discussion about U.S. militarism and police violence, it seems unlikely that any efforts at disarming the populace will gain a positive foothold. Because while the NRA didn’t call for young black men to arm themselves after Trayvon Martin’s killing, Dr. Martha Biondi has recently written about their efforts to win converts on the South Side of Chicago:

“Last summer, the NRA held a major event on Chicago’s South Side to cultivate support for a “conceal and carry” law in Illinois. The framing of the event was steeped in 1960s Black Nationalism, and the crowd was filled with veterans of those struggles, now gray-haired middle-class homeowners. The event organizers screened the documentary Negroes with Guns, chronicling the heroic struggle of Robert F. Williams, the radical advocate of armed self-defense, followed by the propaganda film No Guns for Negroes. Interestingly, when the lights went up, the very first thing that host Cliff Kelley emphasized was that guns today should not be used against the police. No, no, this popular Black radio personality declared, police were not the bad guys and certainly not the enemy of law-abiding Black residents. The enemy was gang-bangers (and this was said again and again) who were taking over previously safe and peaceful communities. So, apropos of Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” theory, that the NRA—a conservative and, let’s be honest, paramilitary organization— was able to go into a beleaguered community reeling from disinvestment and portray itself as a friend and as a savior. And it was a pretty effective pitch.”

Where does all of this leave us? We can’t have an honest conversation about gun violence with the American public while the police become increasingly militarized and our military polices the entire globe using drones to kill brown-skinned innocents with impunity. We have to connect these dots between militarism, wholesale economic disinvestment and its resulting intractable poverty, and empire-building if we are to have any chance to effectively address interpersonal violence at the community-level.

Journalist Cheryl Corley moderated the panel and in her opening comments, she had mentioned that Chicago is being called Chiraq by some and referenced Stephen Colbert’s comments about the city: “If America Cared About Shooting People, We’d be Invading Chicago.” So at the end of my written remarks, I shared some thoughts about how detrimental it is to keep characterizing Chicago as a war zone. Regular readers of this blog already know my thoughts about this.