The New Dark Age

21 July 2016 — Black Agenda Report

New This Week at Black Agenda Report

Ready Or Not, the Black Movement Enters a New Stage

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Black youth in the U.S. have crossed a kind of Rubicon, and the rulers are fearful — and so are their henchmen in the Black Misleadership Class. “When a Black beauty queen calls Micah Johnson ‘a martyr,’ we know that the movement’s values have been internalized by a broad strata of the Black public.” Both wings of the duopoly are issuing dark threats of repression — a clear sign that those in power feel genuinely threatened. 

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Blowback: Does the US Military Incubate Brutal, Abusive Cops Along With Their Deranged, Disconnected Shooters?

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Malicious authoritarians in both parties peddle fantasies connecting Black Lives Matter and the broad movement of millions against police immunity and impunity for violent acts against civilians with the deranged shooters of cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge. The connection they won’t talk about is that both the shooters and many violent and abusive police first practiced their trade in the twisted and deranged world of the US military.

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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

So-called “responsible” Black folks may dismiss the young Black veteran gunmen of Dallas and Baton Rouge as deranged, but who are really “the crazy ones” – those who believe the racist system will change under the pressure of peaceful protest, or those, like Gavin Long, who maintain that revolutions are won “through fighting back through bloodshed”? Black folks will have to wrestle with this question without interference from corporate voices. 

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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

In the 1990s the Clinton Power Couple destroyed welfare as we knew it and threw millions of poor people to the wolves, while imprisoning more Blacks than any previous administration in history. In Haiti, the Clintons rigged elections and preached that poverty is a competitive advantage. So, how in Hell did these two world class racists get a reputation as friends of Black people?

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by Paul Street

After having for centuries treated Black people, especially young Black men, as existential dangers to the (white) nation, U.S. rulers act surprised that the day of the Black American Sniper has dawned. There’s nothing complex about Gavin Long and Micah Johnson’s actions. They wanted to “exact Black revenge on, and to set limits to, racist police violence.” If racist police violence continues, expect similar responses. 

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Thanks, Mama Harriet

by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

The finest young people of every era are always those most impatient with injustice. It is they who are the heirs of Harriet Tubman and the maroon leader Zumbi dos Palmares. On our behalf, the poet acknowledges them. 

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by Mark P. Fancher

The U.S. Military Command in Africa, AFRICOM, is the West’s standing army on the continent, guardian of multinational corporations and the natural and human resources that keep the North America and Europe on top. AFRICOM claims its mission is “anti-terrorism” – a catch-all, “convenient excuse for AFRICOM to interfere with legitimate efforts to achieve African self-determination.” 

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by Ken Peeples

In the U.S., homicide is largely segregated by race – except when police are involved. But “white-on-white violence is almost never discussed,” despite the fact that most mass killings involve white perpetrators and mainly white victims. There is a very important difference between intra-Black homicide and police killings of Blacks: “When Black people kill Black people, they go to jail.  This rarely happens with police officers.” 

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by Steve Martinot

Police thinking resembles the circular reasoning of religious zealotry. “Against the pretense of an equality of persons, or equality of races, or a diversity of cultures, the police counterpose the law, but a law that has become the police as a law unto themselves through their impunity.” They command and control the rest of us. In cities and counties, “the police are a more powerful political organization than civilian go
vernment.”

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by Ann Garrison and John Banister

Barack Obama may get one last chance to arrive at a “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans, in the lame duck session of Congress following the November election. That’s when he might push a vote for his Trans Pacific Partnership corporate rights legislation, which is strong in the GOP but weak with Democrats. Bill Clinton, Obama’s political mentor, showed the way when he rammed through NAFTA against the wishes of his own party, a generation ago.

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by Colin Jenkins

From the very beginning of the system, “racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism.” The author traces the origins of the present day imperialist order, and concludes that “all personal wealth in the world has been built on a foundation of murder, extortion, exploitation, theft, illegal banking and debt schemes, colonialism, racism, slavery, and various artificial systems of hierarchy.” 

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by S’bu Zikode 

In South Africa, as elsewhere in the industrialized world, the jobs and amenities of life are in the cities. For more than a decade, Abahlali baseMjondolo, which means “shack dwellers” in Zulu, has fought for the human rights of the urban poor, despite often murderous repression by the ruling ANC government. “We saw the forced removals as a new kind of segregation, this time taking impoverished people out of the cities,” writes the author. 

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by Solomon Comissiong

The U.S. system of mass Black incarceration cannot reformed, but must be dismantled, root and branch. “The job of the police force in predominately African/black communities is to make sure those communities are contained and kept in a state of constant fear and terror.” 

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A “New Moment” in Black Struggle

The Black struggle in the U.S. is “approaching a new moment” when the country might “become ungovernable by the political class that is tried to Wall Street and the 1%,” said Duboisian scholar Dr. Anthony Monteiro, an activist with the Black Radical Organizing Committee. President Obama is fond of claiming that Sixties-type politics is over. However, Dr. Monteiro thinks “it’s almost as though we’re starting up from the 1980s, and going forward from the militancy of the 1970s; rather than civil rights, the whole problem of human rights and self-determination is what you’re hearing on the streets, these days.”

Democrats Fear Embarrassment in Philadelphia

The City of Philadelphia appears to be “starting to back down” on restrictions on protesting at next week’s Democratic National Convention, said Scott Williams, an organizer of the “Shut Down the DNC” march, set for July 26. The Democratic Party had taken over every public space in the Center City area for the entire convention,” Williams said. However, “the city, in some ways, is starting to back down, because they don’t want to see hundreds, or thousands, of Black people getting arrested at the Democratic Party National Convention, which is supposed to represent Black people.”

Armed March Set for St. Louis to Honor Slain Panther

The Revolutionary Black Panther Party will hold an armed march against genocide in St. Louis, Missouri, an open-carry weapons state, on August 5, to honor Angelo Brown, also known as General Houdari Juelani, the local party leader who was shot dead by police in nearby Belleville, Illinois, last month. The party also plans “to file human rights violations with the International Criminal Court and the World Court,” according to Chief General in Charge Dr. Ali Muhammad. Juelani died from a single bullet to the temple, but his face showed signs that he had been beaten before death. “Every time he was out he was harassed” by the cops, said Dr. Muhammad, a neurologist. “They assassinated him.”

Mumia Salutes Maroon Shoatz Court Victory

Russell Maroon Shoatz, the former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member who has been imprisoned since 1972, won an agreement from Pennsylvania prison authorities that they will never again place him in solitary confinement. Shoatz spent 22 years in solitary before being released into the general prison population, in 2013. Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, saluted Shoatz’s victory, which includes unspecified monetary compensation. “The struggle continues,” Abu Jamal said – “and, sometimes, you win.”

The Poor Suffer in Civil Court, Just Like Criminal Court

The nation’s civil courts process 100 million cases a year, some involving matters that are “the cutting edge civil rights issues of the day,” said David Udell, executive director of the National Center for Access to Justice, at Cardozo University. However, Udell said a survey by the center shows there is only one civil court legal aid attorney for every ten thousand poor people in the country. Although deficiencies in the criminal justice system get more media coverage, civil law is even more pervasive in people’s lives. “People are so often in court on debt collection matters, on family matters, on housing matters,” he said. The center operates a website at JusticeIndex.org.

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