A Seven Part Series from decARcerate
Hip Hop and Policing
Killer Mike Looks Beyond Outrage to Get Black Community to Engage
Kwami Abdul-Bey
From Protest to Policy
On May 29, 2020, during the now infamous press conference held by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Dungeon Family member Killer Mike, stood up in tears to speak about how he felt after watching the video of George Floyd being murdered just a few days earlier. He said:
“I’m mad as hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn yesterday, because I’m tired of seeing black men die. He casually put his knee on a human being’s neck for nine minutes as he died like a zebra in the clutch of a lion’s jaw. So that’s why children are burning it to the ground. They don’t know what else to do. And it is the responsibility of us to make this better right now. We don’t want to see one officer charged, we want to see four officers prosecuted and sentenced. We don’t want to see Targets burning, we want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground.”
Since that day, Killer Mike has been a consummate ghetto philosopher imploring young people—particularly Black and Brown youth—to intelligently channel their frustrated energies in response to the police brutality, repression, and criminalization of a generation that Black and Brown communities have continued to suffer in America despite a global pandemic that should have, at minimum, significantly slowed down the machine that waging war against us continuously. An example of the humanity that weighs him down in moments such as these can be found in a recent Rolling Stone magazine article when he revealed what is really at stake for him: “I have a 20-year-old son, and I have a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them. … This is about a war machine. It is us against the fucking machine!”
And this statement is the glue that binds his real life to his artistry. As a member of the supergroup Run The Jewels, in 2014, he teamed up with Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha to pen his insightful, lyrical vision of where we may be headed in the song “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)”:
How you like my stylin', bruh? Ain't nobody stylin', bruh
'Bout to turn this mothafucka up like Riker's Island, bruh
Where my thuggers and my cripples and my bloodles and my brothers?
When you n*ggas gon' unite and kill the police, mothafuckas?
Or take over a jail, give those COs hell
The burnin' of the sulfur, God damn I love the smell
Like it's a pillow torchin', where the fuck the warden?
And when you find him, we don't kill him, we just waterboard him
We killin' 'em for freedom 'cause they tortured us for boredom
And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord'll sort 'em
In October 2020, Killer Mike headlined the three-day virtual youth conference sponsored by Sean Combs’ REVOLT.tv, encouraging both the panelists and the participants—both Democrats and Republicans—to stop “fighting over who has the best master,” and instead jointly begin reading, and listening to, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Antonio Moore, Yvette Carnell, the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, the Hon. Marcus Garvey, and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) so that Black and Brown communities can eventually return to the independent glory of what he calls "the only historical time period when America actually was great": the Reconstruction Era which witnessed the most concentrated, and widespread levels of Black community resilience and prosperity.
As the son of a former Atlanta, GA, police officer, and the cousin and friend of nearly a dozen current police officers throughout DeKalb and Fulton counties, Killer Mike carries a unique perspective on police misconduct and excessive use of force. He has discussed in multiple interviews over the last couple of years how his father specifically guided him and his brother away from following in his father's footsteps due to the corruption inherent within the police force. And, while Killer Mike listened to his father in this instance, he still holds a healthy respect for the men and women in blue.
At the same time, he is not afraid to speak the truth about how American police departments have been unnecessarily militarized, turning them into occupying forces with no true accountability. He does not believe that any TRUE accountability will ever come from within the law enforcement industry. Instead, he urges Black America to immediately begin “plotting, planning, strategizing, organizing, and mobilizing,” in a way that will create an opportunity for each of us to individually “kill [our] masters,” in the tradition of Boots Riley’s “Kill Your Landlord.” Killer Mike says that once we do this, we will have the independent power that is necessary to create a public policy platform that will enable us to end qualified immunity, the secret power that police departments and unions hold sacred and close in order to continually brutalize and terrorize our communities with impunity.
If we do not do this, Killer Mike believes that our apathy will be the fuel that keeps police brutality going and going like the Energizer Bunny long into the foreseeable future. His latest Run The Jewels song “walking in the snow,” which was released earlier this year, speaks directly to this:
The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four
Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowest
And usually the lowest scores the poorest and they look like me
And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"
And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV
The most you give's a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
But truly the travesty, you've been robbed of your empathy
Replaced it with apathy, I wish I could magically
Fast forward the future so then you can face it
And see how fucked up it'll be I promise I'm honest
They coming for you the day after they comin' for me
In the sixth episode of his 2019 Netflix documentary series “Trigger Warning with Killer Mike,” he actually demonstrates the practical way to do this by acquiring large plots of rural land and joining forces to grow food, engage in commerce amongst each other, and conduct self-defense training with various weapons.
Some have discounted Killer Mike as not genuinely radical because he does not explicitly advocate for the defunding and abolition of the law enforcement industry. It is argued that he instead espouses the rhetoric of there being both good cops and bad cops and it is the “bad apples” that we must strategically target. I see a complicated man with a complicated back story addressing a complicated problem in a complicated manner. I also come from a family with current and former cops. And, we all have our enhanced concealed carry permits and are doing our own preparations for that day. At the same time, I am writing legislation and engaging with the machine to do everything that I can to minimize its destructive impact on my community. So, I get where Killer Mike is coming from on all levels. His words and actions are not to be discounted, as they are part of the bigger picture.
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