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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