Time for a rant. This one is about the potential long term aftermath of the Trayvon Martin murder. Yes, I am calling it a first degree murder in spite of what the jury said. I believe, though I cannot prove, that George Zimmerman is a type of serial killer who gamed the foolish laws of his foolish state so that he could premeditate a situation where he could draw his weapon and shoot someone in the chest and get away with it. But that’s not my rant. My rant will focus on the merger of two ideas from two women who don’t know each other. The first is my new writing colleague, Deborah Borchert amazon/Debra-Borchert/e/B00CSW9MH0 , who is writing a novel about the French Revolution. The second is Michelle Alexander whom I recently listened to on Alternative Radio alternativeradio.org/products/alem001-dava006 as she described a new dysfunctional policy that has swept across the nation—The Prison Industrial Complex. Under this policy, a disproportionate percentage of black men are locked up for long terms for relatively minor drug offenses, e.g., life sentence for possession of marijuana. I’m sure there were a lot of extenuating circumstances behind those sentences, but the net of it is that a lot of young men ended up drawing life terms for what should never have been prosecuted in the first place. Not to worry, having 2.3 million persons behind bars has given us a new industry—prisons, e.g., the Corrections Corporation of America (ticker symbol CCA). They lobby hard to keep expanding the prison population with ‘get tough’ policies like stop-and-frisk, mandatory minimum sentencing, and three strikes programs. These policies tend to feed on themselves when convicted felons end up back on the street with little possibility of finding a job and end up returning to prison a few months later. Moreover, they are further entrenched by the impact on unemployment should we come to our senses and stop disproportionately incarcerating so many black men. Now let’s compare that situation to the French Revolution of 1789, in particular the Bastille and the social policies that kept it so full for so long. I won’t bore you with the details. There’s a good treatment of the Bastille at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storming_of_the_Bastille , and by the time it was stormed, it was more a symbol than a death sentence. There are a lot of parallels between the Bastille and the CCA, and if history provides us with a window on the future, then I have to ask if black people will soon give up on achieving a true post-racial society and “Storm the CCA!”... and the White House, and the Capitol Building, and whatever else they think of along the way. The non-violent philosophies of Gandhi-King have been revered by the black clergy for fifty years in this country. In the 1960s we credited those philosophies with bringing us profound policy changes like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 68, and 91, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But we need to remember that the black clergy did not act alone. Their ‘carrot’ was aided by some substantial ‘sticks’ such as Huey Newton and his Black Panther Party. These groups may not have been truly violent in the sense of an all-out armed revolt, but in the white man’s paranoid imagination they were a thing to be feared. Today the policies of the 60s don’t seem to be holding up so well given the recent Supreme Court voting rights decision and the Zimmerman acquittal. If anything, we are in rapid retreat from the enlightenment of Lyndon Johnson. The non-violent black clergy is still in place, but the Black Panthers fell into decline in the 1970s. Then in 1989, a New Black Panther Party formed. Unfortunately, it was usurped by former members of the Nation of Islam. Today they are listed as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Type-cast as militant Islamists, they may be scary but they will be marginalized in the modern civil rights movement.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 22:25:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015