The Domestic Genocide of the Internal Colony: Ivan Kilgore’s Domestic Genocide
Our struggles inevitably beckoned drugs. What started as a hustle ended with addiction. I stood on one end of the pipe—my mother eventually the other. Nonetheless, this was our African Queen. Despite poverty’s discordance, she taught us how to get through hard times and stay warm in those cold winter nights as we lay bundled together in Grandma’s old quilts. Government cheese, beans and canned meat kept our stomachs full. And the hugs this fiend would give, along with the ass whippings, assured us that she cared. She handled her business given what she had to work with despite opinions. Rain, sleet or snow, if she had to “ho up”—Mr. Hood got a show. If she had to slang blow, she did-it-moving and indeed went all-the-way out—schizo—tryin’ to feed her crumb snatchers. —Ivan Kilgore, Domestic Genocide
In Domestic Genocide, incarcerated author Ivan Kilgore examines how societal forces such as capitalism and white supremacy have worked to “institutionalize” Black communities. Kilgore begins his book by reflecting on his own life and the struggles of growing up “trapped in the cultural bubble of racism, drugs, poverty, and violence.” Recalling the impact of his father’s death, Kilgore states:
From the jump my real father had checked-out. Though he abandoned my mother and I, his departure was not by choice. Three bullets caught him in the back of the head. I was told he was murdered by a coward stepping to a hogg behind a “juice box” (a.k.a. some pussy). At the tender age of three, I vividly recall holding my sobbing mother’s hand as we approached… I was confused not realizing the impact of that day as we drew near the sky-blue box my father was lying in. Looking to my mother for answers, I recall asking: “What’s wrong?” “Why is Daddy just lying there?” “Daddy get up!” “Let’s play cowboy and ride my horse Big Red!” Daddy just stayed there as if he was playing sleep. As I continued to tug on my Mom’s dress, tears flowed from her eyes as if a river as she attempted to explain my father was gone forever. “No, he’s not! He’s right there,” I insisted not understanding the meaning of “gone forever.”
The death of Kilgore’s father “would harden my soul. Something inside of me would turn-off. Death and insanity seemed to ever claim those I cared for most. So, I just stopped caring.” In this way, Kilgore shows us how at a young age death and violence infected his life and his environment, hardening him to the point that he no longer felt remorse or empathy, but only anger.
Following this tragedy, Kilgore moved-in with his grandparents where he had brief moments of “normalcy.” However, at the age of fourteen, Kilgore returned to live with his mother and stepfather, both of whom had become addicted to drugs and “hustling.” Living with his parents, Kilgore says, “Domestic violence spoiled the tranquility of the home at least three nights a week. Their disputes were always about a lack of money, which also went up in a cloud of ‘coke-smoke.’” It is at this point that Kilgore talks about his journey towards gang life as a descent due to a world of violence: “By the time I was fourteen years old my senses had been assaulted so by violence they had grown callous. Violence was so commonplace in my life I had long learned to repress the emotion it once aroused.” From this point, Kilgore had read the “HOW TO SELF-DESTRUCT GUIDE” and “could steal a car in under 60 seconds, cook dope, and wasn’t afraid to let the pistol smoke.”
However, Kilgore believes that his situation was not caused by chance but by systemic issues. He argued that his situation was a product of the “institutionalization of the ghetto.” He, and many other poor Black people, are victims of the game of capitalism. He argued that “the invisible hand of capitalism plays Game God with the authority to prescribe conditions that invoke feelings of hope and desperation. With its enormous and tutelary power, it becomes puppeteer to the fate of those who reside here. It assures the conditions vital to transforming humanity into the androids that we become.” Indeed, Kilgore’s indictment of capitalism as a “game” invokes geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In this case, however, Kilgore is also critiquing capitalism as an exploitative system that creates and feeds off of economic inequality. Thus, what Kilgore is articulating is racial capitalism wherein capitalism creates and embeds inequality and race reinforces it.
In 1962 Black scholar Harold Cruse argued that “the Negro is the American problem of underdevelopment” created by the social condition of “domestic colonialism.” Cruse went to further elaborate that the situation for Black Americans was of the same as poor colonized peoples around the world. The lives of Black Americans, Cruse argued, are characterized by “hunger, illiteracy, disease, ties to the land, urban and semi-urban slums, cultural starvation, and the psychological reactions to being ruled over by others not of his kind.” Other scholars and activists such as Kwame Toure (Stockley Carmichael), Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party made similar critiques of the Black condition in the United States. Kilgore’s argument echoes and expands such critiques as he diagnoses the conditions and causes of the Black ghetto:
When reflecting on the social structures in the ghetto and the political and economic factors that go into creating them, we must remain mindful of the fact that they define boundaries, making it likely that those located within them will or will not have relations with particular kinds of resources. As we have observed, social structures affect the likelihood that people will or will not develop particular kinds of selves, learn particular kinds of motivations, and have particular symbolic resources for defining situations they enter.
It is here that Kilgore articulates the ways in which racial capitalism worked to limit the resources that Black communities have access to, forcing many of the poor in these communities to turn towards drugs, violence, and crime to survive. In many ways, what Kilgore argued isthat it is not by choice that people make these decisions, but, given the constraints and punitive nature of racial capitalism, Black people have no other options.
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