The New Dark Age

The Task Force for 21st Century Policing, Obama’s response to public disgust with police misconduct after Ferguson is the wish list of big city cops, nonprofits, Justice Department consultants, all of whom brought us the current system. With only 600-odd days left in office, it’s a contemptuous gesture on the part of the Obama administration and the black political class, whose proceduralism helped bring us where we are today.

The Obama administration shot double-barreled blanks in its response to the Black Lives Matter movement, “Both the Justice Department’s action in Ferguson and the Task Force report are indicative of the ineffectuality of what passes for criminal justice “reform” in 21st century America.” The Mass Black Incarceration State is incapable of meaningful reform. What’s needed is Black community control of the police.

Eric Holder and Barack Obama have shown themselves incapable of delivering elementary justice to Black people. Instead of indicting Trayvon Martin’s killer, the president invited the teenager’s parents to the White House for Black History Month. The nation’s two most powerful Black men get lots of love from African Americans but give nothing in return. “It is an awfully vicious cycle and people like the late Trayvon Martin pay the price.”

It was easy for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to emasculate Barack Obama on Capitol Hill. All he had to do was expand on the lies that both Israel and the U.S. tell about Iran – lies that Barack Obama cannot effectively rebut without exposing himself as… a liar. Since neither co-conspirator can rat out the other, the smaller party gains an advantage over the larger one. The most brazen liar wins, and the loser cannot complain.

The author, a noted whistleblower and activist, recently returned from a trip to Cuba, where she engaged in an intensive dialogue with Manolo De Los Santos, a Dominican American studying in Cuba. De Los Santos said Cuba has made great progress in uplifting its people and reversing centuries of slavery and racism. “People need to come to Cuba to see it for themselves.”

Last month marked the 147th birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the towering intellects of the 20th century and the founder of Black Studies as an “emancipatory” discipline. But today, Black scholars have largely “become disengaged, self-centered and in many instances a misleadership class.” The author calls for “a return to the Du Boisian idea of Black Studies as a part of the struggle for Black liberation.”

Black chattel slavery made the United States an economic powerhouse and a beacon to European immigrants. “By 1836 nearly half the nation’s economic activity derived directly and indirectly from the roughly 1 million Black slaves. The descendants of that cauldron of torture and death deserve “a massive federal program of reparations in partial and belated compensation for the massive horror and theft.”

In a rare instance of a Los Angeles police officer actually being tried for the brutal beating of a black woman in 2012, the state’s so-called “Peace Officer Bill of Rights” is a once again significant barrier to revealing the histories of abuse on the part of the cops involved. Federal legislation guaranteeing cops similar immunities nationwide were introduced repeatedly by Vice President Joe Biden when he was in the US Senate.

Attorney Flint Taylor connects the Homan Square ‘black site’ story to a larger history of secrecy, violence and abuse that spans decades, continents and wars. Flint was quoted in the much talked-about, Spencer Ackerman article The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’ at the Guardian. Taylor also wonders whether mayoral candidate Chuy Garcia has a position on the closing of Homan Square.

Malcolm X sought international unity among the non-white world based on the “common experience of colonialism and white supremacy.” If he were alive today, Malcolm “would encourage people outside of Haiti to stand with the people of Haiti.”

The Federal Communications Commission last week ruled that the Internet should be regulated like a public utility, with no fast or slow traffic lanes. “The Verizons and Comcasts of the world wanted to create a class system on the Internet,” said Kevin Zeese, of Popular Resistance. Far from opening the way for a government “takeover” of the Internet, “this is more like the First Amendment for the Internet, where people have freedom of speech and equal access.”

The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations has issued a call for Black community control of police. “We need to have the ability to hire, fire, train, set standards of behavior, fund, defund and establish the role of this force, so that it becomes a part of the fabric of the community, itself,” said chairman Omali Yeshitela. Control of police is a right of self-determination, he said.

Three years after George Zimmerman killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, the U.S. Justice Department has leaked that it will not bring federal charges against the vigilante. “The feds are held out as that dangling thing that will give you justice after you’ve just been punched in the gut by the local cops,” said Carl Dix, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. “But, Malcolm told us that “the federal foxes cannot be relied on to deal with the injustice that the local wolves are bringing down on you.” The whole system needs to be dismantled.

No Quick Fix in Movement-Building

Kevin Alexander Gray, the Columbia, South Carolina activist and author who edited Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, cautions that it takes time to build a movement. “The police are about introducing people into the criminal justice system, where they are tracked all their lives,” said Gray. “It’s about making people cower to power.” Building a sustainable movement to ensure that Black lives really matter, is a process. “It’s going to take a little bit longer than just two or three years,” said Gray.

Rev. Edward Pinkney, the Benton Harbor, Michigan, activist who was sentenced to 2 ½ to 10 years in prison for allegedly tampering with an elections petition, said judges and prosecutors must be made to answer for their crimes against Black people. “In Berrien County, they have one job: to send every single Black person to prison,” said Pinkney, now housed at the state prison in Marquette. “In the Sixties, it was called Negro Removal. In Bosnia, it was called ethnic cleansing.” Pinkney incurred the wrath of police and prosecutors when he resisted the Whirlpool Corporation’s gentrification efforts in mostly Black Benton Harbor.