Chris Gilliard reports:
From lantern laws to sundown towns, from COINTELPRO and STRESS to stop and frisk and all the way up to the current regimes of technologically aided surveillance, the tracking of Blackness in this country has a long and sordid history.
Being surveilled has been, and continues to be, the de-facto state of existence for marginalized populations in America, and not coincidentally, in private is often where movements within those communities start and where they gain momentum and power. This was made clear to me by my parents, early on in my life. Growing up in Detroit, under the specter of STRESS, there was the sense that my neighborhood, my community, was always under a watchful eye whose purpose was not to protect me but to protect others from me and people who looked like me.
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