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We are inheriting what we have sown in the wind. Charlotte, North Carolina; Sanford, Florida; Staten Island, New York; Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland: Angela Davis dropped the mike on this ages ago.
Last Wednesday was the 23rd anniversary of the Rodney King riots. There have been riots since then. There have been Rodney Kings, Trayvon Martins, Jordan Davis'...ad nauseum. My post last Tuesday was similar to my complaint of Occupy Wall Street: web sites are generally informative and entertaining. The Tea Party have that, and got some of their "believers/insane inmates" elected to public office. That trumps web sites, no matter how much smarter you are. The Bernie Sanders endorsement is a noted recent exception. Equivalently, the wanton violence as I stated was understandable, but neither strategic or politic. In Hegelian theory: thesis - antithesis - synthesis - King was "thesis"; Malcolm was "antithesis"; The Civil Rights and Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts were the "synthesis." This dialectic logic is absent from any goal or strategies I see thus far. Now,"thug" is the new n-word as Stanford Honor Graduate and NFL champion Richard Sherman pointed out, and has sadly been misused by the powerful that should know better.
These are the "chickens that have come home to roost" (Malcolm X quote) in America. The systematic dumbing down of American education is deliberate; the collective powers of critical thinking reduced to cliché, jingoism and sloganeering. Our stupidity is being engineered to devastating effects economically and nationally. We will soon not be able to compete globally.
What we're not asking since the greatest financial meltdown post the Great Depression is why we're testing our youth to the point educators feel they have to cheat to get them through, and, unlike Wall Street thugs - an appropriate label given the magnitude of the malfeasance, the teachers were convicted for their crimes; the Wall Street thugs were not.
SIX multinational companies control everything entertaining and informative - print media, the Internet, radio, music channels - that we see and hear, and thus think. The fact that the "successful" presidential candidate from either major party has to now raise a billion dollars to win a $400,000 job means our democratic republic is a broken memory; its only balm our participation.
What does ALL this have to do with Baltimore and Freddy Gray?
This: Every trade policy since 1980 has focused on one thing: increasing corporate profits. That has resulted in a pretty steady formula recited like a cult mantra: tax cuts. Locally, it siphons funds from municipalities that must gather funds by other means, usually by harassment of the poor and on the backs of the dwindling middle class. It is a policy devoid of any regard for not just ethnic underclasses, but citizens as a whole, exacerbating income inequality; turning the wage gap into an echoing canyon. When corporate taxes are either cut or deferred, everyone becomes members of the "taxed enough already" party, yet few realize their libertarian rants are being orchestrated by the same entities that benefit from it; the poor in rural and urban neighborhoods alike suffering the most from this dodge. Roads are not repaired; schools, teachers and public servants (like the police) are underfunded; factory jobs are shipped overseas (no need to educate for employment that's not there); housing and office buildings are shuttered; neighborhoods either fall to crack or meth respectively, irrespective of the dominant culture present. The "Corporations are People" predates Citizen's United, piggybacking on the 14th Amendment intended to establish the personhood of African Americans, using it arrogantly for themselves. Every effort is made to maximize profit over the commodity that replaced the barter system - monetary wealth, now in ones and zeros and socked away in foreign shores' tax havens. As human chattel/capital, we are all discarded. Our police have been militarized to "protect and serve" not citizens, but oligarchy; cutting taxes has turned the beat cop of my youth into Robocop: mechanized, weaponized; ruthlessly cold and methodical. We are all targets of opportunity; "trickle-down" economics having the acrid, ammonia smell of golden-flow.
The answer is: the conditions that created the neighborhood/hood that Freddie Gray lived in were the result of decisions made in boardrooms that if they had someone that looked like Freddie, she or he probably had to "go along to get along." Beyond that boardroom and their companies Affirmative Action goals, their exclusive neighborhoods are likely that, and homogeneous. During the South's "peculiar institution," it is fact that every white person could not afford to own even one slave. They were the beneficiaries of an apartheid system - slave codes cum black codes cum poll tax cum Jim Crow - supported by domestic terrorists in white sheets who at that particular dark time wanted to "take their country back" before the humiliating surrender at Appomattox. The hierarchy of capitalism-status quo-ethnic supremacy remains intact as a Moloch altar, even for those who will never partake of the inner sanctum of the temple's wealth, and it requires an underclass on which to lay blame for all ills and obedient serfs that can easily be duped by propaganda. Like the poor southerner, they are not "them" (blacks); but believe they could be like "them" (slave owners), without any evidence they would suddenly own a plantation; a work crew and overseers with whips - or in the modern case, a multinational corporation. It was an early version of "magical thinking" without the presence of knowledge they were no different than the people they were conditioned to disdain. After the Civil War, land grabs reminiscent of the promised "40 acres and a mule" allowed the zombie devotees of inequality to benefit from government largess. In that case, reparations met out did its work, and reinforced the system still in effect. Now of course, the "other" include Hispanics, LGBT, Women's Rights - any shell to shift on the table in the great game. Now of course, Freddie "broke his own back" - a LIE, the typical leak to the aforementioned concentrated media; the scripted attack on the dead like an act of social necrophilia. I held my breath baited Friday when the promised release of information on his death was instead turned over to the district attorney - I was pleasantly surprised. The second prisoner in the van along with Freddy will hopefully not also have his character assassinated on this side of the grave as this flagrant canard failed to deliver.
The technology of mobile devices simply reveals what used to exist as rumor and innuendo. Hence, states like Texas are moving to outlaw that 1st Amendment Right (they can apparently only count to and count the 2nd). Sadly related, the state possesses far more firepower than any anarchist. What the powerful fear is the vote; what they fear is civics knowledge propagated and acted upon; what they fear most is accountability and that any reparations - fairly distributed - goes not to merely a culture, but a number: 99%. Until there is a reckoning on this point of ignored history, until we can seize our rightful place in governing a democratic republic; until we can stop treating fellow humans as lesser beings, there will always be riots! Lastly, we need not spread "democracy and freedom" around the world, until we clean up our own house.
Amazon.com:
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and American Capitalism,
Edward E. Baptist
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