In the wake of the U.C. Davis incident, much has been made about the increased militarization of local police departments, raising questions about the effectiveness of these tactics and a concern about the far-reaching authority of police to use force. However, this is hardly a new phenomenon. The increased militarization of America’s police forces can trace its origins to the black community, and like so much that is currently plaguing the criminal-justice system, it is a different so-called war that can be blamed: the war on drugs.
From War on Drugs to War on Occupy
By: Mychal Denzel Smith
The photos and description of what took place at Occupy Chapel Hill, an Occupy Wall Street offshoot in North Carolina, resemble the second tenet of the so-called PowellDoctrine. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Colin Powell said that “force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy.”
On Nov. 13 a tactical team of 25 Chapel Hill police officers equipped with assault rifles, helmets and bulletproof vests forced 13 people to the ground in handcuffs, including a reporter covering the protest, and arrested eight nonviolent and unarmed demonstrators and charged them with breaking and entering for occupying a vacant car dealership.
Later that week, there was the controversial NYPD raid on the original Occupy encampment in lower Manhattan, and more recently, a video of peaceful student protesters being pepper-sprayed on the campus of the University of California, Davis, went viral and sparked national outrage. The shocking imagery is now ingrained in the public consciousness, representing the increasingly violent response of police to these nonviolent protests.
Overwhelming and disproportionate, indeed. But what Powell was describing in 1991 was a new way of waging war, one intended as a last resort and to minimize military involvement unless absolutely necessary. What police officers at the Occupy protests were engaging in was not war.
MUMIA SPARED! No Death Penalty For Mumia Abu-Jamal
Written by Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA — Prosecutors have called off their 30-year battle to put former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal to death in the killing of a white police officer, putting to an end the racially charged case that became a major battleground in the fight over the death penalty.
Flanked by the police Officer Daniel Faulkner’s widow, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams announced his decision Wednesday.
“There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Officer Faulkner. I believe that the appropriate sentence was handed down by a jury of his peers in 1982,” said Williams, who is black. “While Abu-Jamal will no longer be facing the death penalty, he will remain behind bars for the rest of his life, and that is where he belongs.”
Abu-Jamal was convicted of fatally shooting Faulkner on Dec. 9, 1981. He was sentenced to death after his trial the following year.
Abu-Jamal, who has been incarcerated in a western Pennsylvania prison, has garnered worldwide support from those who believe he was the victim of a biased justice system.
The conviction was upheld through years of legal appeals. But a federal appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing after ruling the instructions given to the jury were potentially misleading.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in on the case in October. That forced prosecutors to decide if they wanted to again pursue the death penalty through a new sentencing hearing or accept a life sentence.
I think that both TNL and Mike’s views here are very helpful and insightful.
I took a somewhat different approach to this piece. Here are my notes after reading it:
1) This piece seems to make “white left color blindness” (no doubt a problem) into the “enemy” to the point of letting the main enemy of the imperialist ruling class itself recede into the background. Mistaking secondary effects (which are also causes) for primary causes, it misidentifies the principle contradiction here. Wouldn’t it be useful politically, and wouldn’t it be accurate analytically to have a wider frame and a sharper focus on the main enemy while raising these important concerns?
2) It is very indisputable that deep racial inequalities of all sorts persist, and this piece properly shines a light on a number of them. But the argument here is not simply an argument about inequities, or injustices, nor is it an argument about the sheer existence of white complicity or complacency; it is an argument about causality and responsibility, about who are what are to blame for creating and reproducing the conditions of oppression, exclusion, and super-exploitation within communities of color in this country.
This comes from Bring the Ruckus. Posting this essay here on Kasama does not imply endorsement of these views — however this essay presents an approach to some key questions that deserves study and critical engagement.
“The roots of left colorblindness lie in the white democracy and the distorted mindset it creates. It encourages whites to think that their issues are “universal” while those of people of color are “specific.”
“But that is exactly backwards. The struggles of people of color are the problems that everyone shares. Anyone in the occupy movement who has been treated brutally by the police has to know that Black communities are terrorized by cops every day. Anyone who is unemployed has to know that Black unemployment rates are always at least double that of whites, and Native American unemployment rates are far higher. Anyone who is sick and lacks healthcare has to know that people of color are the least likely to be insured (regardless of their income) and have the highest infant mortality and cancer rates and the lowest life expectancy rates. Anyone who is drowning in debt should know that the median net wealth of Black households is twenty times less than that of white households.
“Only left colorblindness can lead us to ignore these facts.”
Whiteness and the 99%
By Joel Olson
Occupy Wall Street and the hundreds of occupations it has sparked nationwide are among the most inspiring events in the U.S. in the 21st century. The occupations have brought together people to talk, occupy, and organize in new and exciting ways. The convergence of so many people with so many concerns has naturally created tensions within the occupation movement. One of the most significant tensions has been over race. This is not unusual, given the racial history of the United States. But this tension is particularly dangerous, for unless it is confronted, we cannot build the 99%. The key obstacle to building the 99% is left colorblindness, and the key to overcoming it is to put the struggles of communities of color at the center of this movement. It is the difference between a free world and the continued dominance of the 1%.
They didn’t have photographs in 1500, so the Spaniards drew pictures of their genocide of the Native people. The facts are not in question. The only controversy is over why there are parades celebrating these monsters?
In the U.S., some people teach their kids to play “Cowboys and Indians” — a mythic celebration of genocide.
German people at least have the good sense to fret on their country’s elevation of Hitler — They don’t allow their kids to play “SS and Jews” or organize parades on some Celebrate Past Genocide Day.
If the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has its way, Troy Anthony Davis will be killed by lethal injection at 7 pm on September 21. His body will be carried out of the maximum-security prison in Jackson, the word “homicide” printed on his death certificate—the thirty-fourth US prisoner put to death this year.
The killing of Troy Davis would mark a devastating end to a case that inspired a global mobilization against the death penalty. Davis, 42, has faced execution four times in the past four years for a 1989 murder in Savannah, despite serious doubts about his guilt. His conviction hinged on nine witnesses—no physical evidence linked him to the crime—seven of whom later recanted their testimony. Some described being coerced by police. Others point to a different man—the eighth witness, who first implicated Davis—as the real killer. “If I knew then what I know now,” juror Brenda Forrest said in 2009, “Troy Davis would not be on death row.”
Forrest was one of several people who met with members of the pardons board on September 19 to plead for Davis’s life. Others included Davis’s nephew De’Juan, who grew up visiting his uncle on death row and whose mother, Davis’s sister Martina Correia, has been his most tireless defender, while also battling breast cancer. Davis’s more high-profile supporters range from the pope to former FBI director William Sessions, who wrote recently, “It is for cases like this that executive clemency exists.”
But Davis is a black man convicted of killing a white police officer—and in Southern and Northern states alike, this fact alone will trump all others. “Race is everything in this case,” Georgia Congressman John Lewis declared in September 2008, on a day when Davis came within two hours of lethal injection.
“Something important is happening here. Especially around the question of US imperialism, Mexico’s role in the abolition of slavery, generally, and the relationship between these two communities.”
There has been brewing (after years of Black military recruitment and especially after 9/11) the problem of American patriotism emerging among African American people. And here it breaks out… openly. And part of the resolution is the discussion of the relationship of Black people to the United States (to belong? to aspire to belong? to defend? to adopt the USA-USA rant of the mindless ones?)
Radical Eyes suggested the following piece for posting on Kasama. It first appeared on Counterpunch.
Philadelphia’s Declaration of War on Black Youth
Flashmob Hysteria
by GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
The character of our present moment is undeniable, and the tangled web of causes and consequences is the same from London to Cairo to Santiago: budget cuts in the name of “austerity,” rising unemployment, increasing popular resistance, and an upsurge in racist violence and policing measures like “stop-and-frisk.” The failure of an economic system in the short and long term has generated an entire class of undesirables, living proof of that failure who must be contained, controlled, and silenced.
But even those who recognize the roots of distant rebellions are far more hesitant about upheavals closer to home. Philadelphia is currently in the grips of a bout of mob hysteria at least as virulent and far more racist than the backlash underway in London, to which the media, the police, the city government and the public have all contributed, and yet few have dared to call it what it is.
George Jackson was first known nationally through his book of letters Soledad Brother – a searing indictment of capitalism and U.S. prisons. However, he felt that his edge had been blunted (i.e. revised away) at the editorial stage. And so he wrote Blood in My Eye — a revolutionary and communist manifesto that defies anyone to misunderstand its purpose.
These works deserve to be engaged by everyone serious about ending forever the criminal rampage of U.S. imperialism. Here are a few quotations from George Jackson followed by a brief biography. We publish this in memory of George Jackson’s assassination by prison guards in San Quentin prison, August 1971.
“[The system] also breeds contempt for the oppressed. Accrual of contempt is its fundamental survival technique. This leads to the excesses and destroys any hope of peace eventually being worked out between the two antagonistic classes, the haves and the have-nots. Coexistence is impossible, contempt breeds resistance, and resistance breeds brutality, the whole growing in spirals that must either end in the uneconomic destruction of the oppressed or the termination of oppression.” (Jackson 1972: 182).
“Our purpose here is to understand the essence of this living, moving thing so that we will understand how to move against it.” (Blood in My Eye)
“Revolution is against the law….. I am an extremist, a communist (not communistic, a communist), and I must be destroyed or I will join my comrades in the only communist party in this country, the Black Panther Party. I will give them my all, every dirty fight trick in the annals of war.” “Classes at War,” Blood in My Eye
“To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t `cool’ or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred! It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction. If revolution, and especially revolution in Amerika, is anything less than an effective defense/attack weapon and a charger for the people to mount now, it is meaningless to the great majority of the slaves. If revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of `long-range politics,’ it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow.” (blood in my eye)
“Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.”
“After all, the single biggest achievement of punk is that it was the first musical movement to try to place men and women on an even footing, which few movements before and since have done; look at the players in the UK between ’76 and ’81, or NYC’s No Wave (corresponding to UK post-punk). If, as this book argues, punk’s attitude, poses, and costumes (highlighting socio-economic bondage) are things that can be taken off by white people, but not by black, then we have to doubt the sincerity of the former, but the whole point of a DIY and/or youth movement is that it doesn’t ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ but offers a vision, and a design for living, while it can.”
Stephen Duncombe White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
by Alexander Tudor
The central problem of punk is this: music that’s simple (to play, to record, to distribute, to imitate) lends itself to the expression of radical politics – challenging racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, and so on – just as much as it lends itself to less deserving causes (say: embodying all of the above). Like ‘the black CNN’ (as Chuck D later called hip-hop) punk reported from the ground before anyone else… but sometimes you couldn’t tell the Rock Against Racism crowd from the skinheads. It’s a problem worth disentangling, and anyone acquainted with punk history knows that Britain’s own punk explosion coincided with the arrival of cultural studies, or its blossoming into something lucid, readable, and (as much as it ever could be) productive; as in, likely to feed into the more sophisticated manifestoes, and recognize actual political engagement.
July demonstration Santa Cruz, photo by Bradley Indybay
This letter was received by the San Francisco Bay View on Aug. 12. The author is the writer of ” The Call,” the formal announcement that alerted the world to this massive hunger strike, in which 6,600 prisoners participated, according to CDCR’s own records. As the strike was about to begin, he wrote ” SHU prisoners sentenced to civil death begin hunger strike,” explaining the reasons for the strike.
This Hungerstrike is Far From Over
by Mutope Duguma (s/n James Crawford)
It is a sincere pleasure to once again extend my hand to my beautiful New Afrikan people. I have been recuperating from not eating for 20 days straight and I can tell you based on my personal experience that it was hell! I could feel the life gradually being sucked out of me.
It had been as cruel as I imagined it would be, but we had guys falling out every day and me and my celly lost 40 pounds. My celly is Sitawa (R.N. Dewberry), who sends his regards. He had to be shipped out to Corcoran SHU due to how frail he had gotten. He’s 6 feet 1 inch and weighed 206 pounds, and he went all the way down to 166 pounds. And I am a 6-foot-3-inch frame, weighing 250 pounds. I went down to 210 pounds.
It would be easy to denounce Breivik as a Norwegian exception, but this would be a mistake. While he is distinguishable by his actions, it is important to note that some of Breivik’s core concerns have also played a prominent role within Norwegian and European politics more generally. I spent four years interviewing far right activists, many of whom rejected political violence. Yet what became clear during this research was that there is, unquestionably, a culture of violence within the broader far rightwing subculture. Many of the ideas that were voiced during this research have also come to light over the past 48 hours: the perceived threat posed by Muslim communities, a belief that mainstream parties are incapable of dealing with this threat and strong emphasis on a “clash of civilizations” between members of the majority population and minority groups.
Norway attacks: We can no longer ignore the far-right threat
Matthew Goodwin
The tragedy in Norway this weekend may prove to be a watershed moment in terms of how we approach far right followers, groups and their ideology. Until now, European democracies and their security services had focused almost exclusively on the threat from al-Qaida -inspired terrorism. Rightwing extremist groups and their more violent affiliates were dismissed as a disorganised, fragmented and irrelevant movement.
This conventional wisdom, however, ignored wider evidence of a more violent and confrontational mood that was emerging within European far right circles. This shift may have been a response to the arrival of al-Qaida-inspired terrorism, or a sense that far right political parties in Europe (such as the Norwegian Progress party of which the attacker was once a member) were not having enough influence on issues such as immigration.
White racist crowd threatens and provokes sit-in demonstrators who are opposing whites-only lunchcounters.
This involves a critical assimilation of previous communist approaches. And it requires move off initial critiques toward new communist strategy around the anti-racist struggle for liberation within this prison-house of peoples. Recently we reprinted an initial discussion of J. Sakai’s work — which is concentrated in his book Settlers. Here is an interview with Sakai himself revisiting that work. This interviewed appeared on Kersplebedeb‘s site.
“Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants.
“But it isn’t a proletariat. It isn’t the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. Far fucking from it. As a shorthand i call it the ‘whitetariat.’ These aren’t insights unique to Settlers, by any means.
“Unfortunately, whenever Western radicals hear words like “unions” and “working class” a rosy glow glazes over their vision, and the Internationale seems to play in the background.”
An Interview with J. Sakai
EC: In the early eighties you wrote Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, a book which had a major impact on many North American anti-imperialists. How did this book come about, and what was so new about its way of looking at things?
JS: Settlers completely came about by accident, not design. And what was so “new” about it was that it wasn’t “inspiring” propaganda, but took up the experience of colonial workers to question how class really worked. It wasn’t about race, but about class. Although people still have a hard time getting used to that – it isn’t race or sex that’s the taboo subject in this culture, but class. Read the rest of this entry »
This was originally posted in The Root.
