The Null Hypothesis

Black Death as Limit Case

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.

Empire treats Black death as the null case:

it assumes no consequence, unless proven otherwise.

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 Martinot, 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 only when the world flinches—

when a death breaches the threshold—

does Empire respond by giving it a reason.

A backstory.

A narrative arc.

A redemption angle.

A tragic flaw.

A lesson.

George Floyd gets a biography.

A curriculum.

A scholarship.

A street with his name on it but no change beneath it.

But all of that erases the real point:

His murder was meaningless at the moment of commission.

He was murdered to test whether or not meaningful justice or justification would be demanded—

or whether the meaningless-ness of his death would be accepted as matter of fact.

Because that meaningless-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 gives the mourning of others definition.

Black death is the zero that lets others count.

The Narrative Machine

And most grotesque of all?

Empire doesn’t clean up after the murders that get messy.

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.

And so we don’t just mourn.

We distinguish.

We celebrate the Black first, the barrier broken, the legacy secured.

We script excellence as protection, as promise, as plea: See me. Spare me.

We perform our lives and our losses in the hope that they will register.

That they will be counted.

That they will be spared deletion.

It becomes compulsive.

A disorder, really: Post-Colonial Signal Compliance Disorder.

We overarticulate.

We overachieve.

We stage grief for public consumption.

We mourn in ways that prove value.

We mark our dead with distinction to ward off disappearance.

We work the narrative so that the null won’t apply.

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, their proxies, and their redeemers—

junior partners in the enterprise of Empire—

look away while we process the horror.

Mourning becomes management.

Testimony becomes cover story.

The dead get worked one last time—

not for justice, but for coherence.

To make everyone else feel human.

But most of our dead don’t even get that.

They’re not storied.

They’re not mourned.

They vanish into the background.

Absorbed as noise.

Too ordinary to warrant repair.

Meaning isn’t the system.

It’s the patch.

A retrofit applied only when the filter fails.

A story slapped on when a Black life threatens to matter.

Not tribute. Not mourning—containment.

Refusal

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.

That’s the truth no one wants to sit with:

George Floyd wasn’t special.

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.

Global Protocol

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 unbearable Black death,

when it threatens to break us,

can be force-fit with false meaning—

and that meaning will be bought, sold, analyzed, taught, and then forgotten.

Proof of Concept

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.

This is how live-streamed genocide in Palestine becomes ambient.

Processed as background noise.

Filed under nothing new.

Because the null hypothesis was tested, perfected, and confirmed—on Black flesh.

Empire learned from Black death how to disappear a people in plain sight.

How to murder daily, visibly, slowly—and still not interrupt the feed.

The inaction that surrounds Gaza is not an exception.

It is further proof of concept.

Empire does not innovate when it kills Palestinians.

It applies an already validated method.

A logic stress-tested in Congo, in Haiti, in Mississippi.

When the machinery of murder by commission and omission runs in Rafah,

it is because it ran first in Kivu.

And the world learned to look away.

Or worse—watch, and do nothing.

But if we refuse?

If we say:

“No. There is no reason.

We die to test whether meaning is required.”

Then we break the machine’s feedback loop.

And only then—only in that refusal—can we begin to unmake the world that needs us dead.

Not as martyrs.

Not as symbols.

Not as human beings.

But as test subjects

in an experiment that must be ended,

not explained.