Submitted by Pachamama
Talking Loud and Saying Nothing – Great Philosopher, James Brown
Black people and people of colour everywhere are in deep crisis. Wherever we go we see the indicators of cultural desperation. In some ways near slavery conditions still prevail. In others, there are attempts to reverse the hands of time. In still others, there is a pretence that real cultural advancement is irreversible. Underneath all this there remains a creeping and persistent destruction of African peoples in ways that fortify the notion that there was no clean break from the slavery period. In this article we will concentrate on the continuation of a silent genocide of Black American males. A genocide that connects with a straight line to chattel slavery, Jim Crow and this New Jim Crow. A genocide employing instruments of state and police powers against helpless communities.
This genocide has to be properly located within the wider context of cultural collapse amongst African-Americans in Detroit, the impoverishment of the middle classes, a normalized militarism at home and abroad, widespread perceptions of hopelessness by large swaths of the American population, the growing militancy of poor Whites as manifested by the rise in the numbers of Neo-Nazi groups, the privatization of the commons, a growing consolidation of capital; galloping and unrepayable household, corporate and national debt. Externally, the challenge to America’s dominance is growing; the world has fallen out of love with an Americanism made popular by movies and the over-abundance of consumer goods. This is the same America that has been killing young, Black, unarmed men in its streets as if there were to always be lynchings. And Black people seemingly have no permanent and legal redress. The police are seldom held accountable, unable to police itself. While the District Attorneys have continuingly shown a distaste for the prosecution of police officers to the fullest extent of what passes for law. By all other measures people of colour are targeted most. Whether it be Stop and Frisk or Driving While Black, police officers in the USA generally see people of colour as criminals, period! An easily available source for meeting daily targets.
This is a list of unarmed Black men killed by the racist New York Police Department in the last 20 years alone. Kimani Gray; Kendrec McDade; Timothey Russel; Ervin Jefferson; Amadou Diallo; Patrick Dorismond; Ousmane Zongo; Timothy Stansbury Jr; Sean Bell; Orlando Barlow; Aaron Campbell; Victor Steen; Steven Eugene Washington; Alonza Ashley; Wendell Allen. More widely, every 28 minutes a police department in the USA kills a Black man. The rules of most Police Associations dictate that officers do not have to talk to anybody about these killing for up to 48 hours afterwards. Giving them time to get their stories straight. And for the apparatus to use their people in the media to propagate all manner of false stories, including previous arrest records, in order to frame the victim as criminal even in cases where 41 shots are fired into the body of an unarmed Amadou Diallo.
To the uninitiated. Those who are law and order buffs. It maybe helpful to know that in most inner cities in the USA, and ‘inner city’ is a euphemism for places where mainly African-Americans or Hispanics live, policemen are mainly Whites drawn from the suburbs. They are not accountable to the community, like 150 years ago. All manner of devices, for example, having a second fake mailing address in a Black neighborhood to squirt around the regulation. More generally, Whites in NYC and elsewhere, especially the Irish and the Italians see it as a right to hand down their positions in police forces to their children or other family members. It is a cronyism, also within the Fire Department, that has no precedent anywhere else in Christendom. And nobody has been able to break this engrained culture of generational racism and entitlement which leads to the perpetual killing of Black young men.
It matters not that dey say a Black man is President. Or that Colin Powel was the ‘Black One’ that Nostradamus might have cited in his ‘work’. That dey say, slavery done. That most Black people like to think we are a distance from chattel slavery. None of this matters to the police departments within the USA and the wider world, for that matter. Every day in the USA we have dozens of Black young men being slaughtered by the current enforcers of the modern slave system. That system is undergird by a Prison Industrial Complex wherein more than 70% of the population are Blacks and Latinos. And they represent less than 25% of the US population. It is the commercialization of the prison system which helps to fuel the numbers and maintains a guaranteed occupancy rate of nearly 100%.
The recent public lynching in Saint Louis County, Ferguson, Missouri of Mr. Micheal Brown and the equally grotesque and recorded public execution of Mr. Eric Garner by Staten Island, New York City Police Department, have threatened the American establishment. There is a widespread fear that mass civil unrest may erupt. Disturbances not unlike the 1960’s and 1970’s but more generalized. This time triggered by a straw that threatens to break the camel’s back but could be fueled, not only by Black genocide but White exclusion as well. The White middle class women and men, highly educated but lacking jobs or prospects for jobs. Military veterans living in the forests of Florida and elsewhere, homeless, sickened by war, forgotten and made mentally unwell by incessant imperial wars of aggression. The potpourri of forces that may be aligned against the American establishment may represent an existential threat to empire, from within.
We have to be very careful about the charlatans who make a living on the graves of innocent Black men killed by a racist police force. Rev. Al Sharpton can be dutifully relied upon to direct public anguish to a financial settlement. In this dressage he will be preaching all kinds civil rights rhetoric from pulpits and TV screens. Parading the parents of the dead to all the media houses. All aimed at being a cypher for the establishment. Sharpton has for years been compromised and is no more than an ambulance chaser. Politically, he has his overlords in the Democratic Party to answer to and therefore will never ask for a Special Prosecutor, for example. He can be easily turned away from having any marches in Staten Island. He can be relied upon to maintain his relationship with Stanford Rubinstein, his paymaster, from the proceeds of previous settlements from police killings. He is no more than the biggest civil rights PIMP going. This master pimp has a friend who is the grandmaster of pimps living in a House that is White. But he has other semi-literate lawyers like Benjamin Crump in tow as well. Crump is well known for his feckless involvement in the Trayvon Martin case and now hawks these civil rights legal actions to enrich himself buttressed by the political connections Sharpton brings. Why is Stanford Rubinstein involved in all the civil actions surrounding Sharpton and police shootings that spawned them? Are there no public interests lawyers who could seek a permanent solution to this genocide by policemen? Where are elected representatives been for decades?
One would wonder how these kinds of killing could continue to happen in the most advance country in the world, dey say, and they continue to occur. One reason is the ambulance chasing mentality of Sharpton and his boys who have made a business out of this. And the willingness of states to pay hush money instead of finding a fundamental solution. We are no lawyers but are sure our colleagues Jeff Cumberbatch and ‘Amused’ will offer guidance but we contend that this genocide of Black men in the USA is also allowed to happen because no non-monetary remedy has been pursued by the political and legal apparati in Black communities within the USA. This is the same New York City legal system which banned the only man, Alton Maddox, an attorney, for nearly 20 years, because he wanted to end the genocide of Black men and the ambulance chasing prostitutes like Sharpton and company who dominate the market in the killing of Black men in the USA.
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