Faces From Ferguson: Ashley 'Brown Blaze' Yates | Maytha Alhassen

"If they are killing us every 28 hours, what do I have to lose?"

Ashley Yates, also known to the Twitterverse as @brownblaze, was citing a Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) report, "Operation Ghetto Storm," on the extrajudicial killings of Black people at the hands of law enforcement and vigilante violence. (The report was first issued in 2012, and the most current data adjusted the previous finding of 36 hours to 28 hours.) More than a nod to a deterministic nihilism, this was an accentuated skepticism in a system of domination that routinely devalues Black lives, one that operates on the logic of "state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death" (as CUNY Graduate Center geographer Ruthie Gilmore defines racism) to Black bodies. In doing so, Yates located vitality in righteous resistance to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, because, as Assata Shakur (often quoted by Yates) said, "We have nothing to lose but our chains."

Crowded in the basement of St. Louis' Saint John's United Church of Christ ("Beloved Disciples Building Beloved Community") at the end of the Labor Day weekend, Yates continued by recounting almost a month's worth of harrowing encounters with a militarized police force to a room of Black Lives Matter freedom riders. She woefully explained that as the days bled into one another, she began "marking days by police tactics."

After that weekend, I was fortunate enough to continue communicating with Yates via tweets and texts, at rallies in Ferguson/St. Louis (Ferguson October: Weekend of Resistance), and over soul food meals. It was only natural to profile her for the Faces From Ferguson series, as our conversations seemed to organically engage the theoretics and practices of justice:

Faces From Ferguson: Ashley 'Brown Blaze' Yates | Maytha Alhassen