Category Archives: Blacks

ACLU will no longer defend free speech rights of armed protestors

Blacks, History, Politics, Race, Racism, , , , ,

While routinely denounced as a bastion of liberalism, the ACLU has often drawn leftist fire for its defense of the free speech rights of the radical right – on the theory that vilified speech is what the First Amendment is designed to protect.

City officials in Charlottesville, Va., initially denied white supremacists a permit for their rally last weekend, but the ACLU filed a lawsuit defending their right to gather. However, in the aftermath of the Saturday violence, the ACLU has imposed a new limit on who it’s willing to defend. From the Los Angeles Times:

The national organization said Thursday that it would not represent white supremacist groups that want to demonstrate with guns. That stance is a new interpretation of the ACLU’s official position that reasonable gun regulation does not violate the 2nd Amendment.

More from AJC’s Political Insider

Posted by Libergirl

Black Dallas Group, Condoleezza Rice Thinks Confederate Monuments Should Be Preserved

Blacks, History, Politics, Race, Racism, , , , , , , ,

With the recent unrest in Charlottesville, Va., spurring efforts to bring down Confederate monuments across the nation, a group of mostly Black Dallas locals have teamed up to ensure that the city’s Confederate statues remain standing.

For Former Dallas city council member Sandra Crenshaw, removing the controversial statues isn’t the solution to combating racism.

“I’m not intimidated by Robert E. Lee’s statue. I’m not intimidated by it,” Crenshaw told CBS Dallas. “It doesn’t scare me.”

“We don’t want America to think that all African-Americans are supportive of this,” she added.

Crenshaw, along with Buffalo Soldier historians and members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, have banded together to prevent the city’s Confederate markers from toppling over, CBS Dallas reported. The group believes that such monuments, like the Freedman’s cemetery, tell an important part of history and help heal racial wounds.

“Some people think that by taking a statue down, that’s going to erase racism,” Crenshaw said. “Misguided.”

More from Atlanta Black Star

Posted by The NON-Conformist

America Asleep

Blacks, Crime, government, Law, Military, Police, Politics, ,

“The summer of 1919, called “The Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson, ushered in the greatest period of interracial violence the nation had ever witnessed. During that summer there were twenty-six race riots in such cities as Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Elaine, Arkansas; Charleston, South Carolina; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; and Omaha, Nebraska. More than one hundred Blacks were killed in these riots, and thousands were wounded and left homeless. The seven most serious race riots were those which occurred in Wilmington, N. C. (1898), Atlanta, Ga. (1906), Springfield, Ill. (1908), East St. Louis) Ill. (1917), Chicago, Ill. (1919), Tulsa, Okla. (1921) and Detroit, Mich. (1943).”

— Robert Gibson

“A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

— California Governor Peter H. Burnett, 1851

“At the time, Executive Order 9066 was justified as a “military necessity” to protect against domestic espionage and sabotage. However, it was later documented that “our government had in its possession proof that not one Japanese American, citizen or not, had engaged in espionage, not one had committed any act of sabotage.( ) These Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up to 4 years, without due process of law or any factual basis, in bleak, remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.”

— Michi Weglyn.

The recent attack in Charlottsville hardly stands out as in any way unique in American history. But there are several very telling aspects to this display of organized white supremacist values. First, how is it the police allowed it to happen? Well, ok, we know the answer. That was rhetorical. The next question would be perhaps the media coverage of this. Third would be the President and his response.

In a sense, the media coverage actually encloses the other issues. For the narrative being manufactured by the NY Times and Washington Post and all the rest, CNN and MSNBC is pretty much the same, with only variations that are designed to target specific demographics. The story of U.S. racism and colonial plunder, of a settler mentality and the reality of Manifest Destiny and genocide is simply erased. In its place is the fairy tale of white American goodness that I and millions of others were taught in school. Charlottsville is thus not a result of Trump, of his personality, of his friends such as Steve Bannon. It is part of a deep current in the collective psyche of the U.S.

There has never been a time when America was good. There was goodness in America, certainly in culture, in art and even in certain movements for social justice. There was the Wobblies and early socialists and union organizers. But the overriding reality has been one of acute racism, both institutional and individual, and of conquest and since WW2 of a rabid all consuming anti communism and quest for global hegemony. The U.S. was founded on the twin pillars of slave labor and the genocide of six hundred indigenous tribes. It is a settler colonial project that has never wavered in support for the Capitalist system. It was founded by rich white men, and that also has never changed.

“Blacks can’t run it. Nowhere, and they won’t be able to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand. … Do you know, maybe one black country that’s well run?”

— Richard Nixon (Whitehouse tapes)

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

I mean one could just go on and on. Woodrow Wilson worked to keep blacks out of Princeton when he was that Universities president. Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, James Polk — who deserves a special place as the most pro slavery president, perhaps, in U.S. history. In fact, its pretty hard to find a president who wasn’t overtly racist.

“While it may be tempting to dismiss 500 knuckle-dragging racists marching through Charlottesville waving Confederate flags as unrepresentative of a nation that takes pride in values of tolerance and racial equality, it would be wrong. Those who took part in those ugly scenes are the reality rather than the myth of America. They know that the American exceptionalism which Obama, while president, declared he believed in with every fiber of his being, is in truth white exceptionalism – ‘white’ in this context being not only a racial construct but also an ideological construct.”

— John Wight

But what has struck me is the outcry from the educated white class. Those gatekeepers to media and what passes for culture these days. The outrage is extreme and this has served to amp up the anti Trump sentiments even further than they already were. But none of these people uttered a peep about Obama and his CIA support for radical head chopping takfiri killers in Syria, and not a word when Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland (and John McCain) orchestrated the coup in Ukraine that installed a full on Nazi Party, complete with swastikas. But then U.S. foreign policy has a long history of support for fascism. In Africa, the U.S. supported war lords and mass killers…as Keith Harmon Snow wrote…

“The violence wreaked on Congo-Zaire by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame was exported by perpetrators who first waged genocidal campaigns and coups-d’état that violated the most fundamental international covenants on state sovereignty first in Uganda, then Rwanda, then Zaire (Congo). On 6 April 1994, they assassinated heads of state from Rwanda and Burundi, again the most fundamental and egregious violations of international law. The U.S., U.K., Canada and Israel could not have been happier.

These first campaigns of Tutsi-Hima guerrilla warfare set the stage for unprecedented violence as the terror regimes of Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame tortured, slaughtered, raped, disappeared, assassinated, and terrorized millions of innocent non-combatant civilians from Uganda to Rwanda to Burundi to Congo (and in South Sudan). They had the backing of western intelligence and covert operations at the start.”

Or take Haiti. The U.S. ushered out President Aristide at gunpoint and replaced him with former Ton Ton Macoute fascists. The U.S. removed Zelaya in Honduras (on order from Hillary Clinton) and replaced him with a far right wing fascist. The U.S. supports fascist Leopoldo Lopez and his friends in Venezuela at this very moment. But rarely if ever do I hear a word from those people *outraged* at the tiki torch Blood and Soil pro confederate neo Klansmen in Virginia this week. The U.S. openly supported the fascist loving Croatian secessionists under Franjo Tudjman, an ardent admirer of the fascist state of Croatia in the 1930s under Ante Pavelic, as they dismantled socialist Yugoslavia. The racist murderers in Charlottsville are ideologically the same as countless parties and leaders the U.S. has supported for sixty years. No, for two hundred years and supports today.

I read a meme on social media yesterday that described Trump as having disgraced the office of the President. This is from a liberal and a Democrat. Honestly I’m not sure what one would have to do to disgrace that office. Harry Truman ordered the destruction of two Japanese cities with Atomic bombs, the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, women, children, the elderly…everyone. Disgrace the office? The School of the Americas, now rebranded, taught torture and subjugation to several generations of right wing dictators, and helped train death squads throughout Latin America.

I suspect that if Barry Goldwater returned from the dead and ran as a Democrat today he would be hugely successful. There is a certain swooning adoration for rock ribbed conservatives in liberal America. It is the result of an endless inculcating of the idea of money equating with merit. Most Americans have an unconscious knee jerk respect for the wealthy. Listen to how the owners of major sports franchises are talked about…it is always MISTER Bennet, MISTER Dolan, MISTER Snyder, MISTER Kendrick. It is a kind of weird hologram of the plantation system brought to you on network TV.

“While demanding an Open Door in China, it had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a Closed Door in Latin America-that is, closed to everyone but the United States. It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the “independent” state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal. It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years. Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America.”

— Howard Zinn

The white liberal today operates from an ideological position of intellectual containment. One might think Hiroshima would be condemned without qualification. This is not the case. The intellectual containment is to partition aspects of history and simply ignore the disturbing parts — things like the reality of slavery for example. Hollywood goes a long ways in sanitizing the story of the slave trade, and more, of the enduring scars, emotional and psychic, that such barbarism produced. White supremacism is, as John Wight rightly notes, is an ideological construct.

So back to Charlottsville. The goofy Hitler haircuts and ridiculous tiki torches (Wal Mart sells them by the by) make for good TV and provide an easy target for hand wringing liberals, but the reality is, of course, that most people have no desire to upset the status-quo. How many white American football fans applaud Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the anthem? According to a Reuters poll 72% of Americans saw Kaepernick as unpatriotic. The overt racism and fascist symbols in Virgina are easy to denounce. They seem almost made for that. And the attendant cries of how empowered the Trump base is seem almost silly (for one thing Trump’s real base is upwardly mobile whites, suburban usually, and nominally educated). The cartoon crackers in Virginia are not a significant force. But they do have symbolic weight. And yes, a woman died. Killed by a former Marine. Quelle surprise says I. The police watched. The U.S. domestic police system was born of militia hunting runaway slaves. It has not traveled a very great ideological distance since.

“As an internal colony in what some refer to as a prison house of nations that characterizes the U.S. nation state, black communities are separated into enclaves of economic exploitation and social degradation by visible and often invisible social and economic processes. The police have played the role not of protectors of the unrealized human rights of black people but as occupation forces.”

— Ajamu Baraka

The U.S. society is one in distress. There is a desperation in the affluent classes that suggests a growing recognition that the system they believe in, that has protected their privilege, is starting to fray at the edges. And maybe worse than fray. A recent study on addiction to smart phones among teenagers links depression and feelings of isolation with smart phone usage. It also has resulted in a generation that goes out less, has less sex, and desires independence less. Teens live at home longer, and wait longer to get their driver’s license. One in four Americans take anti depressants.

Jonathan Crary’s excellent book 24/7 dissects the global present in which most Westerners today live. And disruptions of sleep play a prominent role in the infantilization of U.S. culture. Everyone today sleeps less. Six and half hours a night compared to eight hours only a generation ago. In a society that metaphorically sleepwalks when awake, the material reality is that people sleep less. They are more anxious, and more afraid.

“The anti war movement (of the 60s) had spawned an identification with pacifism and public empathy for the victims of war; but in the 1980s the conditions nurturing these currents had to be eliminated and replaced in all areas with a culture of aggressivity and violence. That millions of supposedly liberal or progressive Americans will not dutifully avow that they ‘support our troops’ while remaining silent about the thousands murdered in imperial wars attests to the success of these counter measures.”

— Jonathan Crary

This marked the conscious ridicule of the sixties counterculture in mass media. It also marked the start of an aggressive re-writing of history, even recent history. Today it is a criminal offense in many places to feed the poor. It is criminal in many places to grow a vegetable garden in your front yard. It is illegal to criticize the Israel, too. Poverty is shameful, and worse. Against this has come an onslaught of demonizing all communist leaders from Castro to Mao. Chavez is routinely called a dictator, a caudillo, a strongman. Never mind this is only more racism, it is also untrue, factually untrue. No matter. It is a society of mass propaganda on all levels. So Charlottsville will distract the educated white populace for a week or so, and Trump will be made fun of and denounced. One wonders who watched his TV show, though. I mean it can’t have been just those guys in Hitler haircuts, right? Now Trump is a vile and dangerous man. Clearly close to illiterate, weak, resentful and insecure. But Trump is only a signifier for a wider problem. And that problem is that the United States has never altered its basic course. It began as a settler colony, one with genocidal tendencies and a thirst for violence. And so it is today. Eight hundred military bases across the planet. And allies like Saudi Arabia, where women are beheaded for being witches. Where confessions are the result of torture. Torture that isn’t even denied. The UN appointed Saudi Arabia as head of their human rights council. You see the problem…its much bigger than Charlottsville. If a society has stopped reading, and cannot sleep, and is the most obese in history, and where fertility rates are in steep decline; well, one suspects this is the dawn of the Empire’s collapse.

Ajamu Baraka summerized it best I think.

“Looking at white supremacy from this wider-angle lens, it is clear that support for the Israeli state, war on North Korea, mass black and brown incarceration, a grotesque military budget, urban gentrification, the subversion of Venezuela, the state war on black and brown people of all genders, and the war on reproductive rights are among the many manifestations of an entrenched right-wing ideology that cannot be conveniently and opportunistically reduced to Trump and the Republicans.”

George Jackson wrote…“The Capitalist class reached its maturity with the close of the 1860-64 civil war. Since that time there have been no serious threats to their power; their excesses have taken on a certain legitimacy through long usage. Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe, with a sense of its legitimacy?” The U.S. military lays waste to parts of every continent on earth, or threatens to. There are U.S. troops killing people in Yemen, in Syria, in Afghanistan. The U.S. threatens small nations without real power. And the leadership today, and not just Trump, is infantile and narcissistic and ill-educated. It is as if the very worst and most stupid people in the country are now running it. But this has been trending this direction for thirty years now. It is not new. It has only gotten much worse, I think. There were mass pro Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 1930s. Americans adore royalty, too. The same Euro royals who have supported and protected fascists for hundreds of years. There is an unmediated worship of power and authority. Nearly anyone in uniform is fawned over. The American bourgeoisie always side with authority. With the status quo. With institutional power. Charlottsville is indeed a symptom, but it is not in any way an aberration.

By John Steppling/CounterPunch

Posted by The NON-Conformist

‘You’re a race-baiter!’: Watch Trump advocate lose her sh*t in bonkers CNN screaming match

Blacks, Politics, Race, Racism, Women, , , , , , , , , ,

 

More from Raw Story

Posted by The NON-Conformist

Our Fight Against Fascism

Blacks, Crime, current events, Education, History, Politics, , ,

When editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg asserts that “the struggle in Charlottesville is a struggle within our own civilization, within Trump’s own civilization,” and that in the wake of such events “an American president should speak up directly on behalf of the American creed, on behalf of Americans who reject tribalism and seek pluralism, on behalf of the idea that blood-and-soil nationalism is antithetical to the American idea itself,” who, exactly, can place his logic?

It reads nicely, and it seems a conscionable thought to have after a woman dies fighting Nazis on American soil. But, really, what history books has Mr. Goldberg been reading?

“Our civilization’s” ongoing genocide against indigenous groups and the violently enforced systematic oppression of Black Americans notwithstanding, the US government – of which Trump is now Commander-in-Chief – has a storied and bloody history of assassinating foreign heads of state precisely because, democratically, a body of citizens or voters “seeking pluralism” elsewhere in the world had commenced down an antifascist political path that did not suit Washington’s interests.

Ariel Dorfman, for instance, reminisces of the 1970s presidential inauguration of Salvador Allende in Chile:

[A]lmost three years later, a few days after the Hawker Hunter planes under the control of General Pinochet attacked the palace on September 11, 1973. Their bombs left a black yawning gap where the balcony stood. Where the president once waved his handkerchief, there is nothing. Allende is dead. And we can sense that outside the frame, below where the balcony jutted out, there is only emptiness…

Oh, were it so easy to condemn Trump for failing to say the “right thing” at the “right time,” and to have that be the end of it. Is this what the Liberal pluribus desires from America’s much-detested Caesar? It may be enough to keep Rachel Maddow employed, but, unfortunately, the reason for the president’s neutrality on fascism is much more serious than this—and let there be no doubt that he, especially, is unaware of the profound impetus for his now proven Nazi-sympathizing.

As we are thoroughly living under oligarchy, we should turn to Deleuze to elucidate a root cause of the Oval Office’s reigning fascist bent:

The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control…

Clearly, the rightward-leaning have shown a distinct susceptibility to every brand of hate-driven politics—and we should recall that the colonial residence of bigoted pilgrims did not predate the arrival of slave ships on American shores, but that it followed one year later (1620 and 1619, respectively). Nevertheless, Liberals have their work cut out for them if they expect to right the ship of American democracy simply by writing lukewarm editorials about “the American idea” and babyishly debating whether it is “OK” to punch Nazis in the face. In fact, our democracy is a ship that has always been listing! It has hardly been a democracy! And those who cry wolf because they think our political vessel founders only now really must have little-or-no experience with political organizing beyond the soothing environs of their yoga studio. Luckily for them, there is a very toothsome radical history they can get on board with.

Nearly a century ago, Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti offered very valuable advice during an interview he gave with the Toronto Star:

No government in the world fights Fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to Fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal Government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this Government who want to go easy on the rebels… We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism.

Our fight against fascism requires that we also set an example for the world, which the US military currently terrorizes. Huffing and puffing about what Trump says or fails to say is superficial. Of course, it is much easier than mounting a revolution to fight fascism to the death. And just how many bourgeois liberals, exactly, are willing to pony-up?

by Mateo Pimentel/DissidentVoice

Posted by The NON-Conformist

Race, Criminality and the Persistent Myth of Black on Black Crime

Blacks, Crime, Education, Law, Politics, , , ,

In America, more frequently than any other race of people, white people kill white people. In fact, Caucasians have a lengthy history of victimizing and killing one another in their communities and, in 2014, of the 3021 murders of Caucasians nationwide, Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics report 2488 of the offenders were white. As is customarily the case, white-on-white crime — murder, in particular—dominates federal statistics every year.

That same year, of the 2451 murders of African-Americans, 2205 were committed by Black offenders. In other words, in 2014, an African-American was killed by a member of the same race 90 percent of the time while a white person was killed by a member of the same race 82 percent of the time, a difference of eight percentage points. This eight percentage point margin has pretty much remained constant for the past four decades.

Given this relatively small difference, and the consistent recognition that people victimize and murder those closest to them both racially and residentially, it begs the question why so much attention has been paid to the issue of “Black-on-Black crime.” Tellingly, a July 2017 Harvard-Harris Poll reported 70 percent of voters said black-on-black crime in African-American communities is a bigger issue than police violence against African-Americans. Twelve percent of the poll’s respondents were Black.

So, here in 2017, why is there so much focus on this popular notion of Black-on-Black crime? And how did such a construct come about in the first place?

“The term, Black-on-Black violence, comes from a sunken place,” offers Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler.  A featured legal commentator for CNN, MSNBC and NPR, Butler is author of the recently released, “Chokehold: Policing Black Men.” “It is a way of pathologizing Black people and making it seem like we’re different from everybody else.” Upon acknowledging that intraracial crime is the norm, Butler points out, “White people don’t go around being afraid of other white people, yet they’re afraid of Black men or ‘thugs’ when they are much more likely to be victimized by other white folks.”

“But we don’t have an expression called ‘white on white crime,” continues Butler, clarifying, “that’s why I say that Black-on-Black crime expression comes from a sunken place, from this stereotype of Black men as thugs.”

“The term means we are focused on what Black people do to each other as a unique phenomenon,” echoes Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Author of The “Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” Muhammad explains the term “comes on the heels of a long history of stigmatizing Blackness as a criminal race, essentially that African-Americans have a unique heritage of and propensity to violence.” By the 1970s, continues the historian, Black-on-Black crime becomes “a way of saying that Black people are criminals, just look at what they do to themselves.”

Despite this history, some have argued this special focus on Black crime is warranted due to African-Americans’ disproportionate representation in crime statistics. African-Americans reportedly account for 13 percent of the population yet, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics, committed 52 percent of homicides recorded between 1980 and 2008. “Relative to their share of the population, African Americans commit dramatically more crime, especially violent crimes and murders, than whites do,” wrote National Review’s Patrick Brennan in 2013, in response to an article dismissing the notion of Black-on-Black crime. He noted when such a group is only one-sixth the size of white Americans and commits crimes at “shockingly disproportionate rates,” it “certainly seems like it should qualify as a ‘thing.’”

While such critiques fail to account for the role income and inequity play in the process — African-Americans are far more likely to live in impoverished communities with higher crime rates owing to a wide range of well-established historic, socioeconomic and systemic factors — Muhammad takes it a step further. He says such critics “don’t know the history, because the way to solve crime within the Black community, or among African-Americans, is no different than any other community.” Muhammad points to the current and rampant heroin and opioid abuse among white Americans and the wide range of “criminality related to that, including theft, rape and murder. For every so-called drug dealer in the hood, there are many thousands more drug dealers in rural white America, or who wear white lab coats as physicians deliberately overprescribing painkillers.”

The point being, stresses Muhammad, “we don’t talk about the solution to that crisis as a problem of ‘white-on-white crime,’ now do we? We don’t because we know the use of the Black-on-Black crime term is meant to divorce it from a social context of being a problem for all of us to being just those people’s problem.”

“Just like white people are responding to economic inequality by engaging in self-destructive forms of drug use and drug dealing, so too have African-Americans,” continues Muhammad, saying “the only group that gets labeled” with such an intraracial moniker are African-Americans as this history of stigmatization

The phrase “Black on Black” crime has been sourced to an August 1970 article in the Chicago Daily Defender where civil rights activist Jesse Jackson took Illinois’ and nationally elected leaders to task for their “silence and ineffectiveness in dealing with the present black-on-black crime crisis.” Incensed by the inequitable application of law enforcement in the Black community, Jackson challenged enforcement leaders to “investigate, arrest and prosecute the guilty” while exercising “equal vigor to protect the innocent.”

Then, in December, Defender columnist Warner Saunders reported being invited to speak at a seminar on “black-on-black crime.” Saunders prepared for the seminar by interviewing a local street hustler who committed crimes against other African-Americans because of proximity and his knowledge that apathetic police patrolling the Black community, unlike those in the white suburbs, would enable him to get away with it.

“We first see the actual ‘Black-on-Black crime’ term being used in the Black press in the 1970s as a way of saying that we need to stop hurting and stealing from and robbing each other, and that it used to be white people who were our enemy but, today, it is ourselves,” says Muhammad, adding “Black people were also responding to the overwhelming stereotypes that preceded them and had existed since the end of slavery.”

By 1972, the term had gone mainstream as the popular Chicago Tribune joined the discussion of intraracial crime in the Black community and noted African-American psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint published the book, “Why Blacks Kill Blacks.” Soon after, wrote CityLab’s Brentin Mock in 2015, “the tone of the conversation began to shift, from black writers chastising white officials for neglecting black victims of crime in black neighborhoods, to direct chastising of black communities themselves.” Consistently, in November 1973, a strongly-worded editorial in Ebony magazine gave notice such Black-on-Black crime “will no longer be suffered in silence.”

“In the midst of, essentially, the early days of the ‘War on Crime’ and Richard Nixon’s ‘Law and Order’ campaign,” says Muhammad, “overwhelmingly white policymakers were essentially saying that Black people themselves are admitting they have a crime problem and the best response to preventing crime and saving Black lives is to beef up our criminal justice apparatus.” In other words, he says, “The law and order rhetoric used the Black-on-Black crime myth” as a way of placing blame and justifying increased police spending while “saying that we are also helping Black people too.”

Seven years later — amidst growing urban poverty and crime, white flight from urban centers, increasingly segregated communities, and an affiliated disincentivization and reluctance by cities to maintain quality services — the NAACP passed a resolution at its 1980 annual convention in Miami highlighting, among other things, the need for the criminal justice system to “recognize that crimes committed by blacks — against blacks — are as unlawful, are as humanly devastating, and are as undesirable in our black communities as crimes committed by blacks upon whites, or any group.” The increasingly intolerant tone of the language employed by the country’s most established civil rights organization gave further license to those looking to twist or co-opt its intentions and attribute culpability to the community itself.

It’s a practice in full effect today as President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions seek draconian measures to criminalize and over-incarcerate the drug problem in largely-Black urban centers yet simultaneously declare a national crisis for the mostly-white opioid epidemic, including planned emergency funds for widespread treatment, expanded facilities and the training and supplying of police officers with anti-overdose remedies.

After acknowledging how Black social ills are commonly criminalized and stigmatized while large-scale white problems are deemed a matter of “public health”—his book, “Chokehold,” contains numerous and representative statistics — Butler drives home the impact of such a racially-skewed national lens.

“When we think Black-on-Black, but we don’t think white-on-white, it causes people to feel like the problem is with Black men themselves,” says Butler. He suggests a substantial portion of Americans likely believe “that if they would just pull up their pants and stop calling each other ‘nigga,’ then it would be all good. And if they would just do the right thing, then they wouldn’t have to worry about being shot by police.”

Of the numerous things the expression does, contends Butler, Black-on-Black crime “provides white people, in particular, absolution. It says that it’s not an issue they have to worry about, or can do anything about anyway, because it’s a problem that Black men have.” Therefore, “We don’t look at it as a public health issue, and we don’t look at it as a national emergency,” continues Butler.  “We look at it as thugs wilding out.”

By D. Amari Jackson/AtlantaBlackStar

Posted by The NON-Conformist

Opinion: Charlottesville… What White America Should Do About Trump

Blacks, History, Politics, Race, Racism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, August 12th, will go down as a dark day for America. A coalition of white nationalists attempted to rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Young and old donned swastikas. White militia in full camouflage and many openly carrying weapons set out to “protect” the demonstrators. Angry men and women screamed vile and racist slogans. Violence broke out with counter-protesters. Then James Alex Fields, Jr., a 20-year-old from Ohio, decided to plow his car into a peaceful crowd protesting the racist spectacle. Heather Heyer of Charlottesville was killed and at least 19 people were injured. Cornel West, who joined the counter protests with a group of clergy, witnessed it all and told me, “I have never seen this kind of hatred.”

If these were normal times, even if you believed a press conference to be typical American racial theater, you would expect the President of the United States to condemn unequivocally the hatred and bigotry of the white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville. But these aren’t normal times.

 Instead, Donald Trump offered a mealy-mouthed response. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

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