Belly of the Beast

by Da'Shaun L. Harrison

  Perhaps that’s true, but the larger issue is not just that DuBose would not get out of his car quick enough, but that someone who looked like DuBose—a Black man who was larger in size—would disobey the demand of someone who was higher in stature, even though Tensing was far outside his jurisdiction as a campus police officer. The shooting was a result of Tensing’s inability to control/tame/properly capture this Beast.

  Just over a year later, Alton Sterling was murdered.

  On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was shot and killed in Baton Rouge by two police officers who were called to apprehend “a man in a red shirt” standing in front of a convenience store with a gun, selling CDs. Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II were filmed pinning Sterling down, with one of them straddling his legs as the other kneeled down beside him. In the captured footage, Sterling is visible from the chest up and from his lower legs. His right arm lay by his side, his left arm not visible. In a matter of moments, one of the officers yells, “he’s got a gun” as they begin to open fire on Sterling.16 While being interviewed, witness to the murder, Abdullah Muflahi, stated that Sterling was shot six times. Muflahi claimed that Sterling never once went for a gun in the midst of this altercation with police. He continued by saying that Sterling’s gun was, in fact, “never visible at any point.” According to the police, Sterling warned that he had a gun, which Salamoni took as a threat. The officer yelled “gun” and shot Sterling three times. According to Muflahi, the two officers yelled again for him to “get on the ground”—despite him already being on the ground and having already been shot—before firing three more rounds into Sterling. He died on the scene.

  Two years after the shooting,17 the Baton Rouge Police Department released the footage they had from the officers’ body cameras showing what happened before the shooting. In that footage, the officers became physical with Sterling almost immediately upon their arrival. They attempted to arrest Sterling, shot him with a stun gun, and, after he got back up from that, they tackled him to the ground. They never saw a gun. All they saw was Sterling, his CDs, and a Beast they could not tame. Sterling lay on his back as the officer wrestled with him. As with Garner, Sterling’s greatest weapon was being the Black and the fat—always already animalistic and dangerous in nature.

  Nearly four years after Sterling’s murder, the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd.

  On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was apprehended by Minneapolis police after being reported for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. Seven minutes after the report was made, police arrived on scene and approached the vehicle Floyd was sitting in with two others. Former officer Thomas Lane pulled out his gun and demanded Floyd get out of the car. Lane grabbed Floyd to pull him out of the car, and from there it is alleged that Floyd resisted being handcuffed. Once handcuffed, however, he became compliant. Minutes later, several other officers arrived on the scene, including the officer who would soon murder Floyd, Derek Chauvin. Chauvin pulled Floyd from the passenger side of the police car, forcing him to the ground. Though already handcuffed and lying on his stomach, face planted into the ground, officers began to further restrain Floyd. Chauvin placed his knee firmly into Floyd’s neck, and Floyd released the plea “I can’t breathe” more than twenty times. For nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck and told Floyd to “stop talking” because it takes “a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.” Floyd exclaims, “Can’t believe this, man. Mom, love you. Love you. Tell my kids I love them. I’m dead.”18 Six minutes into the nine-minute-twenty-nine-second time period, Floyd reportedly “flailed” for about a minute due to seizures until he fell silent.19 Bystanders yelled for them to check his pulse. One officer did and said that he “could not find one.” No other officer moved, and Chauvin’s knee remained on Floyd’s neck for almost four more minutes before Floyd was given any medical attention.

  In a matter of thirty minutes, Floyd went from buying a pack of cigarettes at a local convenience shop to lying unconscious in the street after being restrained by police. While Floyd was not fat, he was a larger man, and how his life and body were treated—both in that moment and following—was largely a result of that.

  Floyd was six feet, four inches tall and 223 pounds and lived with several health issues, including hypertensive heart disease and coronary artery disease, according to his autopsy.20 Floyd’s family’s lawyer rightfully denounced the official autopsy upon its release after noting that it ruled out asphyxia—or being strangled—as a cause of death. In that autopsy, medical examiners claimed that Floyd had drugs in his system, concluding that it was “potential intoxicants,” along with his underlying medical conditions and the restraint by police, that led to his death. The Floyd family commissioned a second autopsy and that one concluded that he died of asphyxiation due to neck and back compression.

  As has already been seen, police, lawyers, and medical examiners will use the size and medical conditions of a Black person murdered by police as a reason for why their murder was their own fault. But Floyd did not die because of his heart condition or any other illness he had;21 Floyd was murdered by an anti-Black officer who was committed to taming Floyd’s body in whatever way he felt necessary. That was his goal. He wanted to show off the dominance and power he had over Floyd, as every other officer examined here so far has done.

  These stories are not often told in full. Many times, the narrative around the murders of Black people by police is centered only on their Blackness. However, it is essential that the inherent fatness read onto Black subjects, and the health often always disassociated from the Black fat, is part of that narrative, too. As already covered, the Black is the fat; the Belly is attached to the Beast. This means that police and policing, especially in the United States, exist because the Black fat is to always be caged, just as a Beast is always to be captured.

  In her book Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson adds to an argument presented by Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America that “the process of making the slave relied on the abjection and criminalization of the enslaved’s humanity rather than merely on the denial of it.” She continues by saying that “humanization is not an antidote to slavery’s violence; rather, slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human.” By this, Jackson is arguing that the subjectivity of black(ened) flesh is what constitutes, or establishes, what she calls “the human” and “the animal”; that, since there is a “liberal” or “Eurocentric humanism,” the Black and the animal—or, as I call it, the Beast—coexist as one. As such, being Human is not the answer to anti-Black violence, but rather for anti-Black violence to exist—for there to be a Slave—there must be the Human. The Black as the Beast, and the Beast as the Black, are essential to the maintenance of “the Human”—even and especially as the Black/Slave/Abjected are removed from Humanness. In this way, Black subjects are not denied humanity, or dehumanized through slavery, but rather are forced to become the Beast of humanity; the lowest on the scale of hegemonic humanity and placed among “the animal.”

  Jackson adds to this, first for her book and later adapted for an essay titled “Animality and Blackness”:

  As long as “the animal” remains an intrinsic but abject feature of “the human,” black freedom will remain elusive and black lives in peril, as “the animal” and “the black” are not only interdependent representations but also entangled concepts. While there are particular Euroanthropocentric discourses about specific animals, just as there are particular forms of antiblack racialization based on ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and national origin, for instance, these particularizing discourses are in relation to the organizing abstraction of “the animal” as “the black.” To disaggregate “humanity” from the production of “black humanity,” the one imposed on black(ened) people, assumes one could neutralize blackness and maintain the human
’s coherence. But the neutralization of blackness requires the dissolution of discourses on “the animal” and vice versa, but that is, to say the least, unlikely because “the animal” is a mode of being for which Man is at war. What is more plausible is that attempts to neutralize blackness and “the animal” will continue to be in practice, if not word, a means of discipline and eradication.

  As the Black is the Beast, the Black fat is always already criminalized and engaged as something, and some Thing, that needs to be neutralized, euthanized, put down.

  Slavery was already an institutionalized entity in the United States by the time the first slave patrol was developed, which meant that the Black—more directly, the Black fat, the Slave—was already claimed. In America, policing can be traced back to a few different sociopolitical moments in history, the most prominent of them being slavery. North Carolina, known then as the Province of Carolina, was home to America’s first slave patrol in 1704, which would be considered the first police department in the South. This is made clear by K. B. Turner, David Giacopassi, and Margaret Vandiver in “Ignoring the Past: Coverage of Slavery and Slave Patrols in Criminal Justice Texts” where they state:

  A legally sanctioned law enforcement system existed in America before the Civil War for the express purpose of controlling the slave population and protecting the interests of slave owners. The similarities between the slave patrols and modern American policing are too salient to dismiss or ignore. Hence, the slave patrol should be considered a forerunner of modern American law enforcement.

  The idea behind a police force, and overall policing, was that since the Slave was property, and property had socioeconomic value, there was a need for an institution that could help maintain order (among the enslaved) should they ever become disruptive (to the institution designed to cage them). This meant that the slave patrol had three duties: to catch all enslaved people who ran away from the plantation, to take any and all action they deemed necessary to terrorize the enslaved as to prevent any type of revolt, and, to borrow from the words of Foucault, part of the duty for the slave patrol was to “discipline and punish” any enslaved person who disobeyed the order and control of their enslaver(s). After the Civil War, the role of the slave patrol was modified and taken over by groups who saw a need to continue in the tradition of capturing, abusing, and ultimately murdering the Black—most notably, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). But by this time, institutionalized police forces were already developed in almost every major city in the United States, and many of those officers took it upon themselves to use their position and power to work alongside the militia members who had not yet become part of the American policing institution. Following the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871—a law that disallowed state officials who were engaged with the KKK from tramping on the alleged rights of Black people—that all changed. More institutional police forces were established across the South, and this birthed what we know now as the “Jim Crow era.” The sole job of the police, irrespective of how often the name changed, was to participate in a system forged to capture and put down the Nigger, which is the Black, which has always, too, been the fat.

  What this means is that the Black—which, as noted, is always already the fat—was the first “criminal” insofar as the categories “Black” and “fat” were created specifically to be criminalized, subjugated, and objectified. If the Black fat was always already designed to be criminal, unlawful, outlawed, then the Black fat can only ever exist on the run, as a fugitive because there is never a “home,” the Walking Dead among the living. To borrow words from Cheryl Harris,22 whiteness as property means that humanity—and the rights, privileges, and freedom reserved for those who possess it—is denied to the Black fat always already. To this point, as has been covered in the previous chapter, for the Black to exist so too must the fat. If we agree that this is the case, then what also makes the Black “criminal” is the fat(ness) assigned to the Black. Policing is not just an institution; it is a social agreement, an assignment for those who have a(n) (in)vested interest in the control of the Black fat. For policing to have existed as an institution there must have first been a social need, by which I mean desire, voiced by thin, wealthy white people for the Black fat to be policed. As such, “criminality” is not easily dismissed by the so-called dismantling of groups like the KKK, nor is it abolished alongside the abolition of police forces. Total abolition, then, must mean the destruction of the World through which the Black fat is always made the Beast, the Other, the fugitive.

  In the late 1990s and early 2000s—following the Clinton administration, which helped to cement the rapidly growing mass incarceration rates in Black communities—prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois, played a “game.” This game’s name was masked under the pseudonym “The Two-Ton Contest,” but among the prosecutors and judges alike, the game was more affectionately referred to as “Niggers by the Pound.” The sole objective was to be the first person to prosecute as many Black people, most of whom were men, it took to amount to four thousand pounds. The more one person weighed, the more points they were worth. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, who is a professor in the sociology department at Brown University, inserts more details about this in her book, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court:

  Here is how you play: Look at the weight of the defendant in the case file. Convict the defendant, and then tally the weight as a conquest to earn yourself points for pounds. One strategic tip: Convictions of the heaviest defendants are worth big points in the game, so you must offer them good plea deals, regardless of their crime, to incentivize the conviction of the fattest defendants. Be the first prosecutor to convict four thousand pounds of niggers and you win!

  She continued, “Defendants potentially ‘deserving’ of longer sentences received short ones. Conversely, other defendants received harsher sentences not on the basis of their crime or the evidence against them, but according to their weight.”

  Police officers, with the help of policies implemented by presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, fabricated evidence they knew would make it easier to arrest and convict Black people in Chicago. They forced people to assume the role of a witness to a crime so that they could give a false testament in court. They harassed and coerced defendants into making confessions of crimes they didn’t commit—reminiscent of the infamous Central Park Five. And while officers did this, prosecutors awaited their opportunity to play courtroom games as judges sat idly by—even worse, turning their heads from the very obvious destructive actions taking place in their courtrooms, and even worse than that, joining in on the laugh before helping the prosecutors win this game. This was what followed the reform of slavery and the institutionalizing of police(ing).

  Black feminist scholar and abolitionist organizer Angela Y. Davis further clarifies this in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?, wherein she provides the reader with a necessary comparative analysis on slavery and the prison industrial complex and on just how much the prison has been reformed and how many lives it still lays claim to despite that fact. She writes:

  Imprisonment itself was new neither to the United States nor to the world, but until the creation of this new institution called the penitentiary, it served as a prelude to the punishment. People who were to be subjected to some form of corporal punishment were detained in prison until the execution of the punishment. With the penitentiary, incarceration became the punishment itself. As is indicated in the designation “penitentiary,” imprisonment was regarded as rehabilitative and the penitentiary prison was devised to provide convicts with the conditions for reflecting on their crimes and, through penitence, for reshaping their habits and even their souls.

  She continues, writing, “the penitentiary was generally viewed as a progressive reform, linked to the larger campaign for the rights of citizens.”

  In the third chapter she states, “It is ironic that the prison itself was a product of conc
erted efforts by reformers to create a better system of punishment. If the words ‘prison reform’ so easily slip from our lips, it is because ‘prison’ and ‘reform’ have been inextricably linked since the beginning of the use of imprisonments as the main means of punishing those who violate social norms.”

  The Black fat is constantly experiencing the harms of these reforms, even those camouflaged as abolitionist, because reform should never be a goal and we must go further than abolition as an end goal. The end goal must be a complete destruction of Society itself. The deaths of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, and George Floyd all relay this truth. For Scott, DuBose, and Sterling, their actual weight and health were not nearly as central to their stories as the others, but their bodies and size most certainly still mattered in how they were engaged and ultimately murdered. They, along with the others mentioned throughout this chapter, embodied exactly what the Slave, the Black, the Black fat have always been, which is to say that in an anti-Black, capitalistic World, they can only ever be the Other and that makes them Beasts.

  Eric Garner, in an attempt to survive a World always already unsurvivable for people like him, was literally choked to death. Over untaxed cigarettes, he was engaged as an immediate threat even to the people who held enough sociopolitical power over him to kill him without immediate arrest. That was an intentional act of anti-fat, anti-Black violence—even if it is never named as such by the people who murdered him. There is a belief that fat Black people—in these cases, men—are supposed to withstand alarming amounts of pain, so much so that they can even survive being choked. Or, as an alternative, that whether or not they can survive the pain doesn’t matter so long as they suffer it. This is why the officer didn’t care that Garner couldn’t breathe. The words “I can’t breathe” didn’t register as a warning because, to the officer, they were only proof of life. While “I can’t breathe” became a rallying cry for Black people around the country, it became a slogan that officers around the country mocked with great pride—as if they were celebrating their best and latest kill, as though the officers’ intent was to antagonize the animals that roamed the streets angrily before they made their next kill.