This is why civil society is so genuinely terrified by the prospect of Black paramilitary terror. Everyone knows (if only instinctively) how all-encompassing and timeless the terror which subsumes Blackness is. When civil society is stable, this knowledge can be a comfort, for it helps non-Black people fashion self-hood...by way of a comparative calculus which reveals to them that they are safe on the shore of contingent violence rather than adrift in a sea of gratuitous violence; that even when 'terror' engulfs them violence can still 'mediate relationship[s] through the intervention of a third term,' and can harvest symbols which restore their lives to relational logic. But when the Black paramilitary picks up the gun, the crisis on the horizon is not one of a radical shift in the temporal drama of value...nor one which portends a new and disorienting map...It is not a crisis which looms, what looms is a catastrophe of symbolic capacity, for no symbols can represent what Black violence portends. no rational assessment of the objective conditions can soothe the nerves. This is what the phrase, 'fear of a Black planet' really means: the fear of no planet at all, the fear of living one's life like a Black. A life in which there is no civic, no society, in which death is a synonym for sanctuary.
Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement” (Ill-Will Editions), pg. 25