THIS DOESN''T END

 Just because police killings of Black youth get buried under other stories, it doesn't mean they aren't still happening . Why isn't this called terrorism ? I'll be that child felt terror with the bloodthirsty pigs bearing down on him . I'll bet his parents and the entire community feel terrorized by these police actions . I have no doubt that people will turn their grief into rage and organize for some form of justice. This has to fucking end .

A campaign of terror

WW Commentary

By Benny Schaft posted on August 6, 2026

Police in Austin, Texas, actively participated in state-sponsored terrorism against the Black community on July 29. After responding to a 911 call by 17-year-old Anthoneil Willams III, three officers repaid him for involving them by shooting him 20 times. The community has responded to this lynching by the Austin Police Department (APD) with full organizing and calls for justice.

Anthoneil Williams III

The Black community and most especially Black youth have experienced a horrific amount of violence this year, mostly police violence. Victims include 19-year-old Kadir Skinner, shot in the back in July by a Wilmington, Delaware, police officer who ignored his cries that he couldn’t breathe while dying in handcuffs; to Kohen Wiley, who was only a year old when police in Senatobia, Mississippi, opened fire into the car he and his mother were in; and most recently it was reported that in May the body of 16-year old Juilana Nzita was found lynched, hanging from a tree in a churchyard in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Now Anthoneil Willams joins the list of these young Black victims who have been murdered at the hands of the ruling class, not only this year, but for centuries.

This goes to the core of this country’s history and legacy of preserving the white supremacist system. Capitalism relies on white supremacist ideology to keep the system going, as ideology functions to exploit and murder the working class, especially Black workers. Where this comes into play most clearly, regarding not only the death of Anthoneil Willams II. but the sheer campaign of terror the state is engaging in, is on full display in the actions of the armed wing of the ruling class, which the APD is a part of.

The APD has lynched other Black people: In April 2020, Austin cops murdered Michael Ramos, a 42-year-old Black Latine person, killed after he drove away from an apartment complex. This happened a month before Geroge Floyd was lynched by Minneapolis cops in May 2020, a killing that sparked the rebellions of that summer. Four years before that, in 2016, the APD murdered David Joseph, who like Anthoneil Williams was 17 years old.

Even after death, the ruling class gives its victims almost a second death at the hands of the capitalist propaganda machine. As Malcolm X said in 1964 which has been repeated by many sources: “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent, and that’s power, because they control the minds of the masses.”

What makes Malcolm X’s words relevant today is what the reactionaries in the propaganda machine have made sure to do in Anthoneil’s case, using the twisted paternalism of claiming that this 17-year-old boy committed “suicide by police,” a framing rooted deeply in white supremacist denial of police killings. This is especially clear given further updates that came out, such as the July 30 report from KVUE TV stating that police later determined the item in Anthoneil’s waistband — which the killer cops claim they thought was a gun — was a water bottle.

Furthermore, an activist from the organization Equity Action brought up additional vital information during an Austin City Council meeting: The officers involved have a long history of misconduct.

Class struggle is key

The state is conducting terrorism against Black youth, who are being targeted not only because of their race but because Black youth are becoming radicalized and revolutionized every day, both because of the material conditions they live under and because of the state-backed terror used against them. This is why we must organize alongside our Black people, not just as part of the class struggle but out of revolutionary solidarity.

Within the left movement, especially among white people, we often see the question of Black liberation and the dismantling of the white supremacist structure being ignored — sometimes out of the belief that the problem of racism will be solved simply by abolishing class and capitalism. And yes, that will set us on the path to achieving equality, but white supremacist ideology will not just go away on its own. We as revolutionaries must recognize that this is a process that will take time, and that during that time we must not only center but include Black workers in the leadership of the revolutionary struggle and eventually in the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., a workers state.

This process will lead to the full destruction of the racist structure in the belly of the beast, not only by including Black people but others as well: women and gender-oppressed, disabled, migrant, LGBTQIA2S+ siblings and other people of color. Only by centering the most oppressed can we stop this terror campaign from continuing and claiming more lives. Only by being out there, struggling alongside the people and educating both ourselves and the working class, can we achieve liberation.