[BRC-NEWS] Symbolic Marching Is Not Enough! Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Mon, 24 May 1999 17:50:06 -0700 (PDT) source - Sundiata Cha-Jua The Black World Today May 17, 1999 Symbolic Marching Is Not Enough! By Sundiata Cha-Jua "Violence is as American as cherry pie." --Jamal Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown) Unlike the O.J. Simpson verdict, if you are Black and conscious, you experienced no suspense awaiting the Riverside, California District Attorney's press conference. Thursday, May 6 he exonerated the four cops who fired 12 bullets into 16-year-old Tynisha Miller as she slumped unconscious in her car. We have heard it all before. The D.A.`s words had an ancient century-old ring to them. The decision was a contemporary variation on lynching rulings. During the old nadir, 1890-1915, all-white grand juries, North and South, routinely found "The negro died by hanging or gunshot wounds at the hands of parties unknown." Today, white authorities habitually find the police murder of Blacks "reasonable." The specter of racist violence haunts the Black experience in United States. Racial violence has been perpetuated as a matter of public policy by the state at all three levels government. Yet, this despicable decision, the execution of Isaiah Shoels in Littleton Colorado, the murders of Amadou Diallo and James Byrd, Jr. confirms not only the continuation of state terror, but that racist violence in the United States has always been both state-sponsored and private. Hegemony may explain the domination of the white working class, but Black folks are ruled by old-fashioned bald-faced brutality. Racist violence is not an "option of last resort," it is a persistent reality that deforms our lives. Its intensity may ebb and flow according to economic and political factors; the working class, youth, and males may experience its full ferocity more often, but ultimately all Black people in the U.S. are subjugated by racially-motivated savagery. Racial violence began with the European Slave Trade and continues to this moment. S. W. Koelle's "Polygotta Africa," the only survey of how Africans were captured reveals that 64% of "12 million" enslaved Africans were either kidnaped or captured through raids on their villages. The inhuman violence of the middle passage is self-evident. The blood-drenched trade in "black-skins" was as Karl Marx stated "the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production." Slavery was predicated upon physical and mental abuse. Amazingly racial terror accelerated after slavery! No longer the embodiment of both labor power and capital African Americans were subjected to genocidal violence. During the decade between 1890-1900 a Black man, woman or child was lynched every two and a half days! Race riots, police brutality, and state authorized murder, whether through legal executions or political assassination, has defined our existence in the 20th century. From my vantage point it looks like private hate crimes and state-sponsored terror will continue to deform our lives well into the 21st century, unless we put a stop to it! How do we stop the killing? Before I suggest an answer, I want to comment on what we are doing. As always, we have reached into the chasm of the past and extracted "repertoires of contention" or tactics of struggle. Thus, predictably, Black spokespersons have responded to the most recent upsurge of police murders with civil rights suits, legislation and mass marches. Marches have been a ubiquitous tactic since 1955. During the 1960s they were perhaps our most effective tactic. Yet, today's marches have little in common with their 1960s predecessors. Unlike during the 1960s contemporary marches are mainly symbolic media events. Therefore, despite the militant chants and hip-hop beat, today's marches are more akin to parades than the defiant mass mobilizations of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Marches were successful in the 1960s mainly because they were a component of an ensemble of tactics that collectively embodied campaigns of mass direct action and civil disobedience. They were designed to rally the troops, to demonstrate the movement's mass support, and to heighten the contradiction. Marches were effective because they were used as offensive weapons. They took the battle into the enemy's camp. They were disruptive. Civil rights demonstrations forced federal, state, and local governments to act, because they intruded upon space and seized rights that whites arrogantly had sought to abrogate to themselves. How do we stop the killing? Bear with me for a momentary digression. When I was in the third grade, a white classmate "sicced" his dog on me. I will spare the gory details, but after the dog was pulled off me and I was being taken to get a tetanus shot, I declared that I was going to "kill" that dog. My older cousin Terry, who was always wise in acts of aggression, replied, "The dog, get the boy! He sicced the dog on you." The point? The police are the "German Shepherds" of the white ruling and middle classes. They act as agents of repression, rather than public servants, because their job is to preserve capitalism and white supremacy. Thus, they protect the property and personages of wealthy whites and contain, control, and crush people of color and working class whites. If we want to stop public and private racist violence, we will have to target their masters, the white elite and middle classes. We must rehabilitate the march as an offensive weapon. Let us take a lesson from our comrades in South Africa, the last place in the African diaspora where the march was used effectively. During the 1980s the United Democratic Front resloved to make South Africa ungovernable. If they are to be effective, marches must disrupt the peace and contentment of the white elite and middle classes. Let us interrupt their holiday parades with militant marches against state-sponsored terrorism. We must make the lives of the white elite and middle classes uncomfortable by demonstrating at operas, plays, museums, sporting events, concerts, malls and even donut shops. Copyright (c) 1999 Sundiata Cha-Jua [Messages on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and cross-posted, as long as proper attribution is given to the author and originating publication (including the email address and any copyright notices), and the wording is not altered in any way, other than for formatting. 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Thank you.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- BRC-NEWS: Black Radical Congress - General News/Alerts/Announcements -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: Email "subscribe brc-news" to -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: Email "unsubscribe brc-news" to -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: Email "subscribe brc-news-digest" to -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Discussion: Email "subscribe brc-all" to -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Press Releases: Email "subscribe brc-press" to -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive: http://www.egroups.com/list/brc-news (The first time, you need to "Join" and set your preferences to "Read it on the Web") -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Questions/Problems: Send email to -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Black Radical Congress WWW Site: http://www.blackradicalcongress.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-05.26.99-12:27:37-12963