“A riot is the language of the unheard” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As I watch events in Ferguson, MO play
out in the media, I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King,
Jr., during an interview with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” in
which he said, “A riot is the language of the unheard. The U.S.
Government has failed to hear that the economic plight of the
American Negro has worsened over the past few years”.
It's crystal clear to the socially and
politically conscious that governments in the U.S. are defending the
interests of corporations, not defending or enriching the lives of
all American citizens. On the contrary, poor people who want a better
life often become capitalist cannon fodder. (Just think for a moment
about the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling.)
Once a group is socioeconomically
deprived, American governments add insult to injury and compound
their suffering. They treat poor people as if their poverty is the
result of a character flaw, as opposed to a set of systemic flaws in
American governance. They aim to punish people into developing “good
character” and the affluence that supposedly follows. That only
begins to explain what we see being played out in Ferguson, Missouri
(with its current “misery”).
In the capitalist scheme of things,
Ferguson is like that wayward child who needs to be spanked as an
example for the other children. And many Americans are buying into
that narrative by capitalizing on the crimes that Michael Brown was
suspected of committing – theft of a $49 box of cigars and simple
assault -- rather than the cop's lack of probable cause for stopping
him in the first place. It has cost much more than $49 to police the
Ferguson riots and neither the assaults by police nor the oppressed
have been simple. We've jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
I'd be remiss if I failed to mention
the fact that it was the police who escalated the situation by
bringing in K-9 units and conjuring up images of the civil rights
marches of the 50's and 60's. So, people react to an unjustified
execution by a police officer and more police are brought in with
dogs and only serve to exacerbate and compound the original problem.
Then the city police are replaced by county police, supposedly to
ease tensions. Then county police are replaced with national
guardsmen. Then the governor implements a curfew. And, throughout all
of this, public officials seem to be clueless as to why tensions are
only increasing. Or maybe they were trying to fill some for-profit
prison.
In 2005 the people made homeless by
Hurricane Katrina were accused of looting – even those who only
took perishable necessities from inoperable businesses. Now the media
ostracizes residents of Ferguson for looting. Our governments
continue to guard businesses from needy people who, in many cases,
are only trying to survive like the newly-homeless people after
Hurricane Katrina. They invest more in prisons than they invest in
education. My Marxist and Communist friends sometimes tell me that we
shouldn't say that poor people are “stealing”, but that they're
“taking what's rightfully theirs from the capitalists”. I would
add that, if poverty breeds crime, then it stands to reason that
decreasing poverty would, in turn, decrease crime and the
justification for investing in more for-profit prisons where it costs
much more to give inmates the necessities of life that they often
receive through social services anyway.
Social media is rife with references to
the looting of the world economy by Goldman Sachs and by Wall Street
as a whole with the help of the U.S. Congress and Bush 43 – and
rightly so. Let's not forget about how JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie
Dimon legally gambled away two billion dollars ($2,000,000,000.00) in
a single day and kept his job. Or how the Bush 43 and Obama
administrations facilitated the gift of 1.3 TRILLION dollars
($1,300,000,000,000.00) to Wall Street, in essence throwing good
money after bad by giving the poor stewards of our economy more of
our tax dollars to waste.
That brings us to the crux of the
issue and the gist of this post: How should we define “law”,
“civil society” or “civil behavior”? For citizens? For
police? For the military? For Congress? For any and all walks of
life? The various decisions by cops, courts and legislators
nationwide comprise a form of jurisprudence known as “legal
realism” which basically means: “We make the rules up as we play
the game and the “real law” is the abstract totality that emerges
out of what police, judges and legislators decide over time. It
focuses on how laws and rights are applied, NOT what's on the books”.
To a lesser degree, we are also dealing with matters of “critical
legal studies” – a school of thought that sees law as the
expression of the policy goals of the dominant social group – such
as the bourgeoisie or proletariat. (As people's reactions to an
unjust system intensify, this latter consideration will move to the
forefront and the “wealth protectors” will unabashedly slaughter
the oppressed.) With that in mind, let's establish a few working
definitions before we proceed (all from Wikipedia):
Jurisprudence: the study
and theory of law.
Scholars in jurisprudence, also known as legal theorists (including
legal philosophers and social theorists of law), hope to obtain a
deeper understanding of the nature of law, of legal reasoning, legal
systems and of legal institutions.
Jim Crow Laws: were a number of laws
of the United
States. These laws were enforced in different states between 1876
and 1965. "Jim Crow" laws provided a systematic legal basis
for segregating and discriminating against African-Americans.
Legal Realism: is a theory of
jurisprudence which argues that the real world practice of law is
what determines what law is; the law has the force that it does
because of what legislators, judges, and executives do with it.
Similar approaches have been developed in many different ways in
sociology
of law.
Critical Legal Studies: is a younger
theory of jurisprudence that has developed since the 1970s. It is
primarily a negative thesis that holds that the law is largely
contradictory, and can be best analyzed as an expression of the
policy goals of the dominant social group
Inverted Totalitarianism: is a term coined by political
philosopher Sheldon
Wolin in 2003 to describe the emerging form of government
of the United
States. Wolin believes that the United States is increasingly
turning into an illiberal
democracy, and uses the term "inverted totalitarianism"
to illustrate similarities and differences between the United States
governmental system and totalitarian
regimes such as Nazi
Germany and the Stalinist
Soviet Union.
Now let's juxtapose two recent, high
profile police killings. The 400-lb. Eric Garner was choked to death
by a New York City police officer on July 17th, 2014 for
selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. (Al Capone was imprisoned for tax
evasion.) On August 9th, 2014, the 6'4” Michael Brown
was shot at least six times by a police officer who supposedly didn't
even know yet that Mr. Brown fit the description of a man who was
suspected of stealing cigars from a nearby convenience store. That
raises some serious questions around probable cause for stopping
Michael Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson.
In both cases the men were large, one
tall and the other heavy. Both men were Black. Both were killed by
White cops. Both were suspected of committing “crimes” involving
tobacco products. (Quite honestly, in my struggle to quit smoking
cigarettes, being able to buy “singles” or “looseys” has
proven helpful. With the government encouraging cessation, you would
think they'd take that into consideration.) Eric Garner lost his life
over a police operation known as “Broken Windows” which
purportedly aimed to catch people committing petty crimes before they
committed bigger ones. Ironically (or maybe not), it was the police
who committed the bigger crime. Let's also factor in how four NYPD
officers were acquitted for the 1999 murder of unarmed Amadou Diallo.
Taken together with the myriads of
similar cases, a picture of “legal realism” begins to emerge. If
you are Black, you'll be targeted by White police officers. If you
are a large Black man, the police might fear you or want to prove
that they can whoop you. In either instance, you'll end up dead. The
government will imprison or kill you if they can't tax every bit of
income that passes through your hands – every little bit. Whether
you raise your hands in submission or attempt to show the police your
identification, you can be killed for it and the police can be
acquitted. Even after you're dead, cops might use your corpse for
target practice. (Landing only 19 out of 41 shots from point-blank
range is not good marksmanship, especially when you consider that
most of those shots were fired after Amadou Diallo was on the ground
dying or dead.) In a capitalist society, anyone who is both Black and
poor has a target on their back. This is the “political realism”
and the current “critical legal analysis” that Afro-Americans
have to live with.
Blacks are the poorest race in the
United States of America percentage-wise, though there are more poor
Whites in terms of raw numbers. Homeless people are, of course, the
poorest of the poor. The terms “Black” and “poor” are almost
synonymous. If we are cursed with a Republican majority in both
houses for Obama's last two years, then “Black” and “homeless”
will soon be near-synonyms. These are our social and political
realities.
I've been advocating for the homeless
since June 2006. Though I've never encouraged negative behavior by
any homeless person, I've met a few people who've implied things of
that nature. In one instance, I saw a mentally-ill homeless man
jumping up and down and spinning around in the library. I called the
Department of Mental Health. I then described the incident to a lady
friend, explaining that bystanders were expressing fear and
uncertainty. She said, “You mean to tell me that you see how the
homeless make OTHER people feel?! That's good, Eric”. In another
instance, I arrived early to a meeting a couple of years ago. During
some small talk, I said something about the bad behavior of a certain
homeless person, though I don't recall what incident I was
discussing. A man who was setting up for the meeting sarcastically
said, “You actually see that homeless people can do wrong too?”
Though I've never stated any support
for the wrongs committed by homeless people, I HAVE spoken out
against the unprovoked wrongs committed against the homeless. All
too often I'm called upon to speak to the issue of the
“criminalization of homelessness” – the practice whereby many
municipal governments in the United States of America outlaw the
fulfilling of basic human needs like sleeping or being fed in certain
public places, with the intent of making life more difficult for the
homeless. I also talk about how, even though it was called torture
when US. Soldiers were suspected of depriving their Iraqi captives of
sleep, the police in this country often deprive an unsheltered
homeless person of sleep by kicking them off of park benches and out
of other public venues – even in the wee hours off the night. Some
cops even wait in the alley around five or six o'clock in the morning
in hopes of seeing a homeless person relieve themselves. In our
system of inverted fascism, local governments go so far as to arrest
and jail the good people who feed the homeless or give them money.
I've spoken out against such laws and against the reduction of
funding for social services even as the need for such services
increases.
Some people have jumped to the
erroneous conclusion that I support the homeless doing others wrong
or being a public nuisance. I can't count the times that someone has
pointed to a group of about 30 homeless people hanging out on a
sidewalk near a 1,350-person shelter, chatting, smoking cigarettes
(possibly drinking alcohol or smoking K2) and told me that I
shouldn't fight for them because they don't want to help themselves.
If I were to give up on them, I'd be doing them a grave disservice;
as, the homeless are a disenfranchised group of people who often
can't stand up for themselves without assistance – though we are
8,000 strong in a city of 650,000 people.
Louis Farrakhan would agree with me
that Afro-Americans are the product of their environment, having been
shaped by the social injustices of slavery, Jim Crow law, racial
profiling and socioeconomic deprivation. He might even agree that a
failure to afford quality education to Blacks contributes to
generational poverty. Simply put, the disinvestment in quality
education which is so characteristic of capitalists has come back to
bite them in the ass. They like to treat people like mushrooms by
“keeping them in the dark and feeding them a bunch of shit”.
Well, now the mushrooms are “releasing” their spores.
That brings us right back to the words
of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: “A riot is the language of
the unheard. The U.S. Government has failed to hear that the economic
plight of the American Negro has worsened over the past few years”.
Sadly, what was said so many years ago is still true today. That
truth lends itself to the conclusion that government is either unable
or unwilling to address the socioeconomic plight of Afro-Americans.
Both may be true. Neither is acceptable.
During the aforementioned interview,
Dr. king advised against resorting to violence. That, of course, was
before he was gunned down. Gandhi also preached a message of
non-violence and met the same fate. In both instances, people began
rioting after their leader was killed. Though the British no longer
control India, the situation of Afro-Americans is worse now than it
was in the 60's. I'm forced to conclude that these messages of
non-violence didn't work for Dr. King or Gandhi and failed to get
through to their followers.
The mistreatment of Afro-Americans has
only evolved but never dissipated. The fact that socioeconomic
deprivation is more subtle than slavery or Jim Crow law makes it
considerably more difficult for us to make the case for America
having a grossly unjust system. America's “inverted
totalitarianism” results in citizens losing interest in politics
and leads to politicians being given full run of the house to do as
they please while not having their constituents' best interest at
heart. America's “inverted fascism” results in local police
becoming the “wealth protectors” who harass the homeless and kill
unarmed poor people who were poorly educated by the public school
system – all in the name of capitalism and the bourgeoisie agenda.
It stands to reason that, if Black
Americans were to become completely non-aggressive, then the fate of
the poorest – the homeless – would become the fate of the entire
race in this country. We'd be doomed to perpetual socioeconomic
injustice. Yet public officials including Barack Obama insist on
people calming down in order to have their demands met. So, even as
these supposed leaders failed to see how they were escalating a
volatile situation on August 10th, they also fail to see
how counter-intuitive it would be for the oppressed whose demands
have not been met during anyone's lifetime and who are reacting to
mistreatment by government to now meet government's demand for calm
so that government can tell Blacks what it will do for them. We
calmed down 46 years ago, right after the 1968 riots, and we have
nothing to show for it. Why make the same mistake again? While it can
be argued that Blacks shouldn't approach the oppressor for redress of
grievances anymore, the fact remains that, for the moment, that's our
only option.
So, while I REFUSE to add to the calls
for peace, I'll offer some advice. Blacks should learn how to
“sublate”: to create our own new system within the old until we
outgrow the latter. If and when that new system matures, we'll be
able to completely throw off the old. It behooves the “peacekeepers”
to encourage conversation about the new system that Afro-Americans
want and how they might begin to create it in spite of government,
rather than these “peacekeepers” wasting their time telling
people not to fight back against their attackers. (How do you “keep”
what you've never had, peace or otherwise?) After we've followed this
new path long enough, we'll also eliminate the need for Blacks to
depend on their oppressive governments anymore.
Those who've been paying attention know
that, throughout this post I've pitted our capitalist government
against Blacks. I've made no mention of other racial tensions. But in
closing, I'll give a couple of lessons learned from the Occupy
Movement to the non-Black Supporters out there:
During Occupy DC I heard Blacks asking
Whites, “Where were you for the past 50 years that Blacks have been
enduring so much social injustice? Why did you wait until you
couldn't find a job or pay off your student loan before you decided
to start a movement?” (The short answer is that many of the
occupiers – Black and White – were only 20 to 25 years old and
had only earned enough trust from their parents to leave home
unattended less than 10 years prior.) We eventually got past those
tensions and people of all races marched together. The lesson that
can be learned here is that non-Black supporters may need to show
patience and an ability to listen as Afro-Americans vent their anger
and frustration.
During Occupy DC Afro-Americans also
complained about how Whites were trying to lead them again. They
mentioned how that, during slavery and Jim Crow, the White man told
Blacks what to do. I often tell Blacks how that, when they clamor to
get into predominantly White schools, they send a message to the
White man that what Whites have created is awesome and we imply that
Blacks can't do as well or better. In any instance, you get the
picture. There's a big power differential at work here. The solution
to this problem is simple:
Let the Blacks lead this movement.
The End.
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