The Null Hypothesis
Read this, but don’t cry.
Don’t thank me.
Don’t apologize.
Don’t ask for grace.
If it cuts, let it.
If it burns, feed it.
Don’t bring me tears—
bring fuel to add to the fire.
Black Death as Limit Case
Test Subject #1,119,864,038
The null hypothesis is the assumption that nothing is happening.
No effect is present. No cause can be proved.
Empire runs this test on Black flesh.
Not to prove guilt.
Not to measure wrongdoing.
But to see if the system will even register loss.
The null hypothesis requires multiple trials.
So Empire repeats.
“One cannot master [anti-Black violence], regardless of the intimacy or longevity of one’s experience with it. One can only sense its frightening closeness as a probability, as serial states of brutality or derogation. The dread and suffering of those in the way of these repeated spasms of violence is always here and always on the horizon.” — Jared Sexton & Steve Marinot, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy”
George Floyd was murdered to see if it could be done—again.
Not because he was bad.
Not because he was good.
Not because of race or class or training or fear.
He was murdered to test how meaningless a Black death can be made.
That’s the experiment.
An ongoing experiment.
Global.
Scalable.
Repeatable.
From the plantation to the prison yard.
From São Tomé to São Paulo.
From Ferguson to France.
From Kuwait to Kivu.
Empire kills Black people to find the bottom.
Not to punish but to calibrate: to find the exact tolerance threshold of a death that doesn’t interrupt brunch, GDP, or Instagram scrolling.
How meaningless can a death be and still be ignored?
How visible can the murder be and still be rationalized?
How slow can the torture be and still be explained away?
They don’t kill to make a point.
They kill to find out if a point is even necessary.
So they test it.
Over and over.
They kneel for nine minutes.
They pour sugar on wounds.
They crush skulls with sledgehammers.
They disembowel.
They bury people in tunnels.
They work people to death.
They force people to dance before dying.
They reject asylum claims.
They call it a migraine, hand her Tylenol, and wave her out while her brain hemorrhages.
(That one wasn’t history. That was my mother.)
And they document.
And circulate the documents.
To see what happens.
To see if the world flinches.
And when the world does flinch?
They respond by giving the death a reason.
A backstory.
A narrative arc.
A redemption angle.
A tragic flaw.
A lesson.
George Floyd gets a book.
A school.
A street name.
A scholarship.
But all of that erases the real point:
He was murdered for no reason.
And that no-reason-ness is not a glitch.
It is the system.
It is the design.
It is the method.
Black death without cause is how meaning is made for everyone else.
It’s the baseline.
The contrast that makes other deaths legible.
The negative space that allows mourning to have definition.
Black death is the zero that lets others count.
And most grotesque of all?
Empire doesn’t clean up after its murders.
It delegates that to Black people.
It enlists us—grief-stricken, scared, reaching for meaning—to do the janitorial work of narrative.
We scrub the floor. We stage the vigil.
We say: “He was turning his life around.”
“She wanted to be a nurse.”
“They were loved.”
We collect the quotes, post the photos, dress the body in borrowed dignity.
We tell the story that makes the death make sense—
because the alternative is too terrifying to bear.
Because to say “there was no reason” is to feel like we might be next.
But that fear?
That urge to explain?
That’s the labor.
That’s the trap.
That’s the most twisted bit.
It lets white people look away while we process the horror for them.
It turns mourning into management.
It turns testimony into justification.
It turns the dead into workers—again—made to perform one last service:
to make everyone else feel human.
So no, I won’t read the biography.
I don’t care if it’s well-written.
I don’t care if it’s “nuanced.”
I don’t care if it tries to be “anti-racist.”
Because its very existence participates in the cover-up.
It tries to retrofit meaning onto a murder that was meaningful only because it refused meaning.
George Floyd wasn’t special.
That’s the truth no one wants to sit with.
He was one of millions.
Murdered not for something.
Murdered to test nothingness.
And the machine is still running.
Still testing.
Still producing books, documentaries, syllabi, policies, hashtags, murals, —
All to distract from the experiment that hasn’t stopped.
That is, in fact, accelerating.
(Accelerating to match the planet’s fever—
calibrating how much Black death the world can absorb
before it convulses, combusts, or chokes on its own cynicism.)
Until we can sit with that—really sit with it—we will keep missing the point.
And worse, we will keep participating in the lie.
The machine of Empire—the planetary capture device—is conducting a live, global experiment:
Can a people be killed so often, in so many ways, with so much visibility and detail… and still not matter?
Can a life be ended, tortured, dismembered, raped, enslaved, discarded… and still draw no real consequence?
Can an entire planetary population be brutalized without motive, without narrative, without logic—and still keep the system running?
This is what Blackness without distinction is for.
Not to labor, though it is worked.
Not to entertain, though it is consumed.
Not to terrify, though it is feared.
But to mark the limit of meaning.
To show what a world built on “reason” does with the unreasonable.
The question isn’t why George Floyd was killed.
The question is how many more Floyds will need to die before someone says:
“Maybe there’s no why.”
Maybe the murder is the method.
Every time someone tries to explain—
“It was poverty.”
“It was capitalism.”
“It was a bad apple.”
“It was bad training.”
“It was a history of trauma.”
“It was addiction, poor schools, urban decay…”
—they feed the experiment.
They pass the test.
They help Empire prove that meaningless Black death can be given meaning—
and that meaning will be bought, sold, analyzed, taught, and forgotten.
Congo is the strongest evidence.
No other place has absorbed so much suffering with the world keeping a straight face.
So many millions murdered, mutilated, raped, disappeared—
not for resources, not for war, not for power.
But to prove that meaningless death is sustainable.
Profitable.
Tolerable.
Forgettable.
But if you refuse?
If you say:
“No. There was no reason.
He died to test whether meaning was required.”
You break the machine’s feedback loop.
And only then—only in that refusal—can we begin to unmake the world that needed him dead.
Not as martyr.
Not as symbol.
Not as man.
But as test subject #1,119,864,038
in an experiment that must be ended,
not explained.
