The Truth Beneath the Label: How the State Manufactures Aggression to Shield Systemic Violence

Story by Alvin Flores

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Illo by Fern Bonowicz

We begin by refusing the lie.

For centuries, the ink of the law and recently the lens of the camera have collaborated to draft a fiction. They have taken our breathing, our grieving, and our very existence and rebranded it as aggression. They have built a system that looks at people of color and sees a threat before it sees a human being.

The Architecture of the Lie

We must look past the walls of silence and false neutrality to understand why the system is so obsessed with labeling our people. This is not an accident. It is a calculated strategy of control. The label is one of the system’s greatest inventions. It is a shield for the state.

When the system labels people of color as aggressors, it creates a hall pass for brutality. If it can convince the public that we are the provokers, the gang members, the illegals, the dangerous ones; then every chokehold, every cage, and every bullet becomes “necessary procedure” instead of what it truly is: a sanctioned crime.

This flips the burden of proof. It forces us to spend our lives defending our worthiness, our innocence, and even our right to survive, instead of demanding our rights. They want us busy trying to be the “good ones” so we never become the powerful ones.

And when people of color act out of fear, survival, or self-protection, the system is far more likely to label us dangerous than deserving. What gets recognized as self-defense for some is too often recast as aggression when it comes from our communities. The law does not simply judge the act. It judges the body, the history projected onto that body, and whether the person standing before it is seen as fully human.

Media Complicity

The media was, and still is, the megaphone for this deception. It is not a mirror reflecting reality. It is a filter designed to protect the walls of oppression, to flatten complexity, and to ensure that only the voice of power is treated as truth.

It takes state violence and turns it into public relations. It takes our pain and edits it into suspicion. It takes our resistance and renames it disorder. Again and again, it teaches the public to fear the people most harmed by the system while protecting the institutions doing the harming.

Reclaiming the Truth, Reclaiming Justice

We refuse the label of the marginalized minority. We are not a group to be managed or a problem to be solved. We are people of color with deep roots, unshakable dignity, and histories that existed long before the state tried to define us through criminality and control.

The system does not fear our violence. It fears our autonomy. It fears people of color who do not apologize for who they are. It fears communities that can see through the badge, the headlines, and the courtroom theater to the truth beneath. The real aggressor is the one holding the gavel and pulling the trigger.

For too long, the aggressor label has been a ghost story told by a system built on displacement, erasure, and domination. It is a lie used to criminalize the very people whose labor, culture, blood, and memory are woven into this California soil.

But the masks are coming off. Through tools like the California Racial Justice Act, we are turning the tables and using the system’s own data to expose what our communities have always known: the danger was never our existence. The danger has always been the bias embedded in the system itself.

We are not merely fighting for cases. We are reclaiming our narrative. We are reclaiming our dignity. We are reclaiming our right to walk through California without being haunted by a story that was never ours to begin with.

The haunting stops when our voices begins.