Thursday, June 18, 2015

When Black Lives Don’t Really Matter in the USA . . . This is Where it Leads


Politicians, preachers and others are trying to exploit the slaughter by a young white racist terrorist of 9 worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in North Carolina including the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the church pastor who is also a state senator there in North Carolina.  They are trying to steer the discussion away from the subject of race and saying  that it was an attack on the Christian faith – and somehow had nothing to do with race.


It *IS* about race . . . and not only that . . . it *IS* because in the USA - as we see over and over - BLACK LIVES REALLY DONT MATTER - the system makes that clear and a racist whose father gives him a gun for his 21st birthday takes it to the next level.

The guy wears racist emblems on his jacket, brags about connections to racist groups, makes racist jokes, tells the victims he is shooting them for racist reasons - then these white politicians and preachers say "its not about race."

In recent months it has been made abundantly clear that in the eyes of the “powers that be” – Black Lives – really don’t matter.  In case after case, many caught on video and broadcast repeatedly on new sites and television, unarmed Black men and women are gunned down and beaten down by police, in one case mauled by a police dog . . . and police are protected from questioning, release of information is delayed, investigations move along at snail’s pace, waiting for community outrage to lose some steam, and then results are announced: no indictment, not guilty, no charges, police just doing their job.

The message?  Black Lives really don’t matter in the USA.  That plants a seed.   Impressionable minds, perhaps raised up with a racist American subculture, watching cops get off for killing unarmed Black men and women, over and over . . . cops that are held up as the heroes of society to be venerated (like soldiers also are venerated) are being molded.

Meanwhile, sectors of the Black communities across the USA “ain’t having it.”  The Black Lives Matter grass roots movement is exploring strategies and tactics to attempt to demand justice, stepping outside of established barriers of normal protest (permitted march on a weekend around empty buildings) and political expression (like pouring political capital into the Democratic Party that  proves itself ineffective in representing the concerns of Black Lives Matter) and disrupting traffic, commerce, seeping into the expression of high school students in the classrooms . . . 

All of this is making a certain sector of white America nervous – a sector that supports mass incarceration and likes to know that such a large percentage of Blacks are incarcerated or on the verge of being incarcerated, a sector that parrots the police line of defense every time they blow away another unarmed Black man or woman, a sector that believes they are truly entitled to their more comfortable lot in life and truly believes that those who are barely surviving or not even deserve their plight because they do not work as hard (or some other pablum) . . . they are nervous that part of the super oppressed Black population of the United States is becoming restive.
The killer made allusion of this fear in the quote: “'I have to do it. . . . you're taking over our country. And you have to go.”

Whenever there is a mass shooting there are theories of what made the killer think: violent video games, violent themed music, violence in television and movies . . . 

Well how about this theory.  This is obviously a racist mass murder – the killer’s roommate even says the killer had been planning it for 6 months.  Across the country police are blowing away and otherwise beating and killing unarmed Black Men and Women and even children and they are getting away with it.  The justice department, the prosecutors, the judges, the political representatives, the two dominant political parties justify the ongoing blood spill.  Meanwhile as much as politicians and everybody else says we have too many prisoners and we need to do something about it – nothing is being done and the police continue to enforce laws that criminalize poverty and the impoverished and round up thousands of mostly Black and Brown and almost exclusively impoverished into the mass incarceration facilities.

Maybe the fact that in the United States the powers that be make it clear that Black Lives Don’t Matter in their view triggered this racist youth – after his daddy bought him his gun for his 21st birthday – to pump bullets into the bodies of 9 Black worshippers. 


The only hope is for the Black Lives Matter movement to continue to organize and thrive and develop into a sophisticated unbought movement – to gain justice for the victims, to be the kind of force organized and united and in motion that the powers that be have to be careful about and have to address in actuality – not with superficial reforms that leave the system of impunity intact – but with actual justice . . . NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!  #BLACKLIVESMATTER !

In NJ . . . we can struggle in this direction by organizing for the most massive march possible on Saturday, July 25 in Newark - the Million Peoples March Against Police Brutality:



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