Reading Darren Wilson's grand-jury testimony, it's abundantly clear he lied through his teeth, was not pressed on his contradictions, and, as many others have noted, conjured a (deeply genealogized) white fantasy-spectacle of black criminalization and death, first in Wilson's fantasy that he was going to be killed by a black man, then in his fantasy of killing a black man, which he succeeded in doing (and which he seemed to enjoy, especially now that he's gotten off without charge, as expected). But Wilson's likening of Mike Brown to Hulk Hogan, and himself to his five-year-old self, is perhaps the most telling part of this complex fantasy play:
And he said, 'hey man, hold these.' And at that point I tried to hold his right arm because it was like this at my car. This is my car window. I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car any more. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.
Holding onto a what?
Hulk Hogan, that's just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm. (212)
Wilson, as we know, was a 6'4" armed police officer in a police car he could've driven away at any moment. Brown was a teenager Wilson wanted to fuck with by ordering him to get out of the middle of the road. That Brown ended up dead, murdered, by Wilson has everything to do with the unaccountable power of the police to kill—and to kill black bodies specifically—as much as with the ongoing psychic economies of whiteness that render blackness by turns fearful and disposable, and pleasurable, too. A five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan, only Wilson was the hulk and Brown just a kid, his death, and the resistance in Ferguson, turned into entertainment by TV news, the biggest perpetrator of the white fantasy-spectacle of black criminalization and death there is.
We need to abolish policing and prisons and the criminal-"justice" system, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, but we also need to abolish the structures of settler colonialism and enslavement, and their intertwined fantasies of domination. Education is important in this regard, but education otherwise. White U.S. subjects need to work against our racialized socialization at every moment, in every way.
Comments