by Kenny Anderson
Over the past year, since the racist police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the acquittal of white 'killer-kop’ Daren Wilson, Blacks across this country have consistently protested against the on-going racist murders of Blacks by police.
Over the past year, since the racist police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the acquittal of white 'killer-kop’ Daren Wilson, Blacks across this country have consistently protested against the on-going racist murders of Blacks by police.
These racist police murders have become routine, like the
recent murders of a Black male and female in Texas. Christian Taylor, a
19-year-old male, was murdered by a white cop in Arlington, Texas; Sandra
Bland, a 28-year-old female was found dead while in police custody in Walker
County, Texas.
From my perspective, the majority of Blacks protesting
against racist police murders, and the Blacks who are not protesting, believe
that most whites are empathetic to our struggle against injustices, along with a
belief that the American government is against racial injustices. The reality
is, both of these notions are ‘untrue’
– they are false!
According to the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute survey released June 23rd
of this year, the survey found that 63% of white Americans believe that
protests against unequal treatment are good for the country.
However, when Blacks are protesting against injustices, less
than half of whites, 48%, believe that Black protests are good for the country;
white protesters are viewed as an ‘activists’
- while Black protesters are often viewed as 'thugs’.
What was ‘note-worthy’
in the Public Religion Research Institute
survey, and needs to be highlighted, is that, young whites in their 20s, the millennials,
have basically the same racist views as older whites.
This survey showed that the so-called ‘post-racial generation’ of whites aged 17 to 34, were only
slightly less likely than whites 65 and older, to say Blacks were ‘unintelligent’ – a 1.5 point difference,
or ‘lazy’ – a 3.6 point difference.
Indeed, the election of a Black male president Barak Obama
and a post-racial America is a farce! With regard to the Obama Administration
supporting the Black protest struggles against racist police murders and
injustices of the system is also a farce.
Emails recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed that Obama’s Department of
Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black
Lives Matter group, one of the leading groups protesting against racist
police murders. No surprise, nothing has changed! During the 1960’s President
Johnson’s FBI under J. Edgar Hoover constantly monitored Martin Luther King,
Jr. and the SCLC when they protested against Southern white supremacy racist
police brutality and murders.
What were Blacks thinking when they believed racism was
decreasing in America just because Obama was elected as president? Blacks have been politically neglected by Obama and our worst off socio-economically under his administration. In the words
of Eddie Kendrics: “It was just my
imagination running away with me.”
This post-civil rights political imagination is rooted in the
idealistic – romantic excerpt from ‘The I
Hade Dream Speech’ by an over-optimistic and naïve Martin Luther King:
“I have a dream that
one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I
have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves
and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a
table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of
Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and
oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a
dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not
be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I
have a dream today.”
As Blacks we forgot these latter words of a more mature and
seasoned Martin Luther King:
“I remain an optimist,
though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of racial
equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself
to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich productive and awesomely
powerful? The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and
attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both
economically and socially, justice for Black people cannot be achieved without
radical changes in the structure of our society, exposing evils that are rooted
deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than
superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is
the real issue to be faced.”
Though protesting is necessary it’s not sufficient’; protesting alone makes us dependent on whites granting us justice, as Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) stated: “Then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.
I think your final quote by Kwame Toure should have constituted the entire blog. Nothing else needed to be said. There is no injustice from the Euro-American ("white") power structure toward the Melanated ("black") population. Injustice implies that cause and effect is not an active natural law which orders all physical life. If we abdicate our responsibility to build a self-reliant civilization within this well-polished savagery we call America, it is perfectly just that we be consumed by such savagery. If a gardener lazily lets his garden plot lay fallow long enough, it will be overrun with weeds and damaged by erosion. If he is as stupid as he is foolish, he will blame the elements for destroying his plot and scarcely consider his own negligence. We as a Melanated people have the money, knowledge and energy to rebuild our community beyond anything conceived of by our forefathers. As oppose to using these vital resources to construct the first civilization in America since that of the Indigenous people, we choose to squander our money, knowledge and energy on glorified whining, moaning and complaining. In a word; protesting. We do so in light of the fact that it wasn't effective 50 years ago. This point is supported by the fact that such resource expenditure provided us with an embarrassingly negligible degree of advancement. In fact, we have entered a "deflective state" in virtually all areas of our reality since the protests of the 50s, 60s and 70s; fratricide, baby mamma-ism/daddy-ism, drug addiction, alcoholism, incarceration, disunity, self-hate (currently glorified through corporate rap), ignorance (heavily en vogue), irreverence toward the elderly and an assorted variety of depraved tendencies and habits have increased manifold since the time of (official) Jim Crow. Our abysmal condition is, without a doubt, prompted by racism and melanaphobia from the Euro-American establishment. It is, however, perpetuated by irresponsible Melanated intellectuals, activist and revolutionaries. Kwame Toure also once said, in essence, that the act of protesting presupposes that those being protested have a conscience to which one may appeal. If the American government and the vast majority of the Euro-American population had no conscience back then, why should we assume that they have one now? What does it say about us intellectually if we behave as though they do have a conscience if we have substantial knowledge that they don't? The most popular definition of insanity; Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same results yet expecting different ones. Protest is as impotent today as it was yesterday. About this, you can be certain. Much of what we refer to as injustice is merely the country's collective subconscious contempt toward us for being so careless, unimaginative and wasteful with our power. I'm not implying that their attitudes and actions toward us are right. In fact, human history has never seen a psychosis as entrenched and pervasive as that which afflicts the mind of the average Euro-American (Albert Einstein described racism as a white persons mental disorder). I'm simply acknowledging that it is endemic to the nature of most humans to insult and injure people who insult and injure themselves. It doesn't matter whether the self-destructive people do so actively(murdering, drugging and neglecting each other) or passively (not creating products, businesses and opening schools which meet their desperate needs). If we continue to not invest ALL(every bit!) of this precious time remaining within the revolution toward building a powerful economy and systematically repairing the minds and hearts our Melanated people, whatever calamity that besets us... we deserve; all the hollering, marching, anger and indignation in the world will not subvert natural law. I'm developing plans to create something in Detroit that I believe will help in the effort toward legitimate liberation. Let me know your thoughts: www.newtroit.org.
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