COMMERCIAL UNIVERSITY SELLS OFF FOOD SERVICES, CREATES A NEW DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL STUDIES

Sidney Glick 

(Glick, a widely published journalist, has agreed to join the staff at Heartland Radical. His feature essays will appear from time to time).

(Disassociated Press, Commercial Town) The President of the Board of Trustees of Commercial University, in a press conference opened to twelve journalists, announced today the purchase of the university’s campus-wide food service by oil giant Oxxon. He also unveiled a plan by Oxxon to establish a new Department of Social Studies, known as the Carbon Emissions Department of Social Studies. 

“Commercial University, a leader in the development of the electronic toothpick, is committed to privatizing all its facilities,” Board of Trustees President Elliot Rosewater said today. He indicated that there were still pockets of university facilities that were not yet privatized, and thus not profitable. He mentioned the washrooms, stairs, elevators, classrooms, and chalk boards as examples. 

“We believe that only the profit motive can ensure the intellectual growth of our student population and stimulate the kind of research that has been a key to our work.”

The Third Vice-President for Human and Natural Resources Raymond Strangelove said that “American universities are falling behind universities around the world because we have set as our goal providing well-rounded educations for our students and inspiring our faculty to pursue research to improve the human condition.” This, the Third Vice-President said, must stop. “Only calculations of personal gain will ever stimulate the kind of development of civilization we all seek.”

“We at Commercial University are well-placed to promote the full development of markets in every nook and cranny of our campus.” If our society were not driven by profit, he said, “we would have to invent a substitute.”  The promotion of self-actualization and altruism, he claimed, is no way to run a society.

Rosewater indicated that workers in the traditional sectors of the university that have not yet been privatized should not worry. Commercial University will take care of them.

In addition, Director of Curriculum Jason Rockefeller reported that the new Carbon Emissions Department of Social Studies will be headed by Carl Tucker, a noted expert on oil, gas, and society. Sub-fields in the new department will include those relating oil and gas to international relations, US politics,  and comparative carbon studies.  

Chairman Tucker pointed out that all courses in the new department will be fair and balanced. “In this regard there is a desperate need for experts who celebrate the contributions carbon emissions to be heard.” He said that most comparable departments in universities around the country are too one-sided. “In the spirit of academic freedom all sides to questions of public policy must be given equal voice.”

Director of Curriculum Rockefeller proudly announced that the new department will receive $3 billion in startup money for teaching and research from the Oxxon Corporation. He stressed, however, that the money will not in any way influence the content of the curriculum.

Tucker said he hoped to work with colleagues from other departments, particularly in the STEM fields, to develop interdisciplinary work focused on oil, gas, and society.

After the press conference the 32 Commercial University Vice-Presidents assembled in a ZOOM meeting chanting: “Markets Up.”

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE

by Harry R. Targ

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE 6

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

"AMERICA NEVER WAS AMERICA TO ME": From the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter

Harry Targ

O, yes,

I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

(From Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” 1938)

Fifty years ago, in 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The Party inspired African American and white leftists who were beginning to see capitalist exploitation and racism as central to the American experience. The BPP saw the need for Black people to organize to defend their communities; to develop a theory that would help Black people understand their subordinate condition; to construct institutions, particularly health care, education, and food distribution, to serve the people; and to act in solidarity with liberation struggles on a worldwide basis. To articulate its goals the BPP wrote a 10-point program that would serve as a guide to programs and action for party members (collectiveliberation.org).

The BPP program included demands for community control, access to “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace,” and an end to police violence and mass incarceration of Black people. In each issue of The Black Panther newspaper, all 537 of them, the platform was printed. The dramatic escalation of state violence against the BPP and the Black community in general by the FBI and local law enforcement agencies testified to the fact that the Panther program resonated in urban communities around the country, particularly among the young. 

The Party encouraged grassroots activism and community control basing its appeal on the idea that it would serve the needs of the people. Establishing free breakfast programs for children, health clinics, and education, had enormous appeal. And with growing violence against the community by the police the BPP advocated collective self-defense.

Fifty years later a new movement, Black Lives Matter, has emerged to address the unfulfilled dreams articulated in the BPP vision. The immediate impetus for BLM, as with the BPP, was defense against state violence. Mass incarceration, criminalization, indiscriminant police killings, creating police occupation armies with high technology weapons, and growing economic devastation of whole communities in 2016 very much parallels the racism that motivated Newton and Seale to pick up the pen and the gun in 1966. Economic inequality; massive poverty; lack of access to quality education, healthcare, housing, transportation; and political marginalization plague African Americans today almost as much as was the case fifty years ago.

Black Lives Matter issued a detailed platform on August 1, 2016 resulting from the deliberations of at least 50 organizations whose membership includes thousands of Black people around the country. It comes at a time when the visible incidences of police violence have been experienced everywhere and young women and men have been hitting the streets expressing their outrage. The capsule summary of “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice” includes six core demands (The Movement for Black Lives, Portside, August 4, 2016; the BLM website is policy.m4bl.org): 

            

             End the war on Black people

            Reparations

            Invest-Divest

            Economic Justice

            Community Control

            Political Power

Since so many of the problems that animated the rise of the Black Panther Party unfortunately still exist, the core demands of Black Lives Matter remain all too familiar. But, in addition to the remaining core problems of racism, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and police violence the more recent statement wisely expands its vision and agenda. For example, the introduction to the document declares that “We believe in elevating the experiences and leadership of the most marginalized Black people, including but not limited to those who are women, queer, trans, femmes, gender nonconforming, Muslim, formerly and currently incarcerated, cash poor and working class, differently-abled, undocumented, and immigrant. We are intentional about amplifying the particular experience of state and gendered violence that Black queer, trans, gender nonconforming women and intersex people face.”

The statement acknowledges its domestic focus but declares that “Patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy know no borders. We stand in solidarity with our international family against the ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism, human-made climate change, war, and exploitation.”

Perhaps the greatest contribution that the BLM platform makes is in its detailed 40 demands for change, each of which comes with an explanation and policy proposals. Whereas the BPP platform concentrates on a critique and demands for revolutionary changes, the BLM platform adds doable intermediate changes in public policy. “We recognize that not all of our collective needs and visions can be translated into policy, but we understand that policy change is one of many tactics necessary to move us toward the world we envision….We are dreamers and doers.” 

And the BLM movement recognizes that it is linked to the long history of struggle for liberation. “This agenda continues the legacy of our ancestors who pushed for reparations, Black self-determination, and community control, and also propels new iterations of movements such as efforts for reproductive justice, holistic healing and reconciliation…” (A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice, policy.m4bl.org).

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE 5

Sunday, November 15, 2015

RACISM ON THE CAMPUS: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

Harry Targ

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Frederick Douglass

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. W.E.B. DuBois

What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Mitch Daniels

All across the country students, black and white, hit the streets and the campus malls to protest racism; structural and interpersonal. One thousand students rallied at Purdue University on Friday, November 13, to show solidarity with students at the University of Missouri and to announce 13 demands they were making to address racism at Purdue; a racism that the university president says no longer exists.

Of course nationally and locally the struggle for social and economic justice is historic. Rev. William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays Movement, points to the “Three Reconstructions” in post-Civil War American history. The First Reconstruction occurred in the 1860s and 1870s when black and white farmers and workers came together to write constitutions and to create a new democratic Southern politics. The hope this first reconstruction raised for a truly democratic America was dashed by a shift to the right of the federal government, the reemergence of the old Southern ruling class, and the rise of a brutal violent terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Racist policies, coupled with terrorism, instilled formal racial segregation in the South and subtle forms of institutionalized racism throughout the rest of the country.

The Second Reconstruction, Barber asserts, was inspired by the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. With militant sectors of labor, a grassroots Southern civil rights movement revived all across the country. In the 1960s, it culminated in civil rights legislation that outlawed racial segregation and guaranteed voting rights. Also the “war on poverty” was launched. Shortly after these victories, the Republican Party presidential candidate Richard Nixon employed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to shift federal and state politics to the right. The forerunners of today’s Tea Party rightwing reaction expanded their political power at the federal and state levels.

Rev. Barber believes that, with the movement that elected President Obama, there has emerged a Third Reconstruction. It features the mobilization of  masses of people--blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, blue collar and white collar workers, young and old, people of faith and those who choose no faith--coming together to reconstitute the struggle for the achievement of a truly democratic vision. This vision is of a society that is participatory, egalitarian, and economically and psychologically fulfilling.

The resurgence of protests on college campuses, although narrowly focused, represents the contemporary form of the kinds of struggles for social justice Frederick Douglass talked about.  For example, on the campus of Purdue University, the struggle for racial justice has a long history. For the first 60 years of the twentieth century the African American population was less than one percent of the student body.  The numbers of African American students grew to a few hundred in the 1960s. And in the context of the Second Reconstruction and activism around civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, some students organized a “Negro History Study Group”(which later became the Black Student Union). In 1968, to dramatize what they saw as institutional racism coupled with an environment of racial hostility, more than 150 Black students carrying brown bags marched to the Executive Building. At the building they took bricks from the bags. The bricks were piled up and a sign “Or the Fire Next Time,” was set next to the bricks. The students submitted a series of demands including the development of an African American Studies Program and a Black Cultural Center. 

The demonstration was dramatic. The demands clear. The justice of their motivation was unassailable. Administrators and faculty set up committees to discuss the protests. And in the short run, only minor changes were implemented, such as Purdue’s 1968 hiring of the first African American professor in Liberal Arts.

One year later, after an African American member of the track team was castigated for wearing a mustache and his verbal response led to his arrest, Black students launched another protest march with more demands. This time the Administration and the Board of Trustees authorized the establishment of the Black Cultural Center, which today is an educational, social, and architectural hub of the campus. In 1973, Antonio Zamora, educator, accomplished musician, and experienced administrator was hired to lead the campus effort to make the BCC the vital embodiment of the university that it has become.

One of the leaders of the 1969 protest, Eric McCaskill, told then President Hovde by phone during the protest march and visit to the Executive Building: “We are somebody. I am somebody.” Forty-six years later one thousand similarly motivated students rallied together on Friday, November 13 on the Purdue campus. They expressed outrage at the systematic violence against people of color throughout the society and the perpetuation of racism in virtually every institution. On the Purdue campus they protested the lack of full, fair representation of African Americans on the faculty and in the student body, a climate on and off campus that perpetuates racism, and the continuation of all the old stereotypes of minority students that has prevailed for years. They also shared their solidarity with the students of the University of Missouri and they made it crystal clear their disagreement with the statement by the Purdue University President that the Purdue campus was different.

The organizers provided thirteen demands including:

-an acknowledgement by the President of Purdue University that a hostile and discriminatory environment still exists at Purdue

-the reinstatement of a Chief Diversity Officer with student involvement in the hiring process

-the creation of a “required comprehensive awareness curriculum”

-the establishment of a campus police advisory board

-a 30 percent increase of underrepresented minorities in the student body and on the faculty by 2019-2020

-greater representatives of minority groups on student government bodies

Frederick Douglass was correct.  Progress requires struggle. DuBois is still correct about the twenty-first century as he was about the prior one: the problem of our day remains “the color line.” And many of those who observed, participated in, and applauded the organizers of this latest protest at Purdue believe that the struggles are long, the victories sometimes transitory, and each generation of activists is participating in a process of fundamental change that will move society in a more humane direction. The generations of Purdue students of the 1960s and the second decade of the twenty-first century are linked in a chain for justice.

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE:4

Friday, October 24, 2014

4.RACISM, THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, AND CIVILIAN POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY

Harry Targ                         

Over the last several years the criminal justice systems at the federal, state, and local levels have threatened the basic rights of citizens, particularly people of color and youth. These violations of equal treatment under the law have included:

-a “national epidemic” of police and vigilante killings of young African American men, for example Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis in Florida, Eric Garner in New York, Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, John Crawford III in Dayton, Ohio, Vonderrit Myers Jr. in St. Louis, and Ezell Ford in Los Angeles

-the mass incarceration of people of color such that, as Michelle Alexander has reported in her recent book, The New Jim Crow, more African Americans are in jail or under the supervision of the criminal justice system today than were in slavery in 1850;

-the institutionalization of laws increasing surveillance;

-and the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws, justifying gun violence against people perceived as a threat.

On August 9, 2014 unarmed nineteen-year-old African-American Michael Brown was shot multiple times by a Ferguson, Missouri policeman. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and the threatening of street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city was heightened by the killing of Michael Brown.

Significant events since the police murder have been protests, the visit to the Ferguson community by Attorney General Eric Holder and national mobilizations in Ferguson and around the country. Subsequent to that police killing, many more African American men have been killed by police officers across the nation.  However within the last few days “testimony” leaked from the grand jury investigating the police crime has appeared in the St Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post that promotes a narrative that the police officer who murdered Brown was acting in self-defense.

Along with police killings other police abuse occurs regularly. In Hammond, Indiana, on September 24, 2014, an African American women, who was the driver of a car and mother of two children in the back seat, and an adult male friend in the front passenger seat, was pulled over by a police officer for a seat belt violation. Fortunately nobody died, but the policeman drew his weapon and shattered the automobile’s front side window. The policeman had ordered the male to roll down the window, tasered and then arrested him while the seven year old daughter of the driver cried in the back seat. Subsequently Hammond authorities have defended the conduct of the police officer.

In a recently released study, journalists discovered that between 2010 and 2012 young Black males were shot to death by police 21 times more than young whites. Their data was limited to those two years because earlier information accumulated by the FBI was incomplete. Prior to that time police departments had not filed required reports when police used force.

Even though data is partial, Professor Colin Loftin, co-director of the Violence Research Group, University of Alabama, said, “No question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice system.” (Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones an Eric Sagara, “Deadly Force, in Black and White,” http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white, October 10, 2014).

A growing body of evidence suggests that the criminal justice system administers justice in an unfair way--from general police/community relations, to trials and incarceration, to the use of violence and deadly force against minority youth. 

While police are supposed to serve the interests of the communities in which they work, compelling evidence suggests that, to the contrary, force is used to stifle dissent and challenge assertions of political and cultural autonomy. The data overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that police systems are institutionalized forms of racism. 

In response to racist police violence the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a branch of the National Alliance founded in 1973, has been working to “stop police crimes,” establish “prison reform,” and to oppose the incarceration of persons wrongfully incarcerated including political prisoners.

The CAARPR has proposed the establishment of a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) for the city. According to the plan, the city would create an elected CPAC which would oversee the personnel and policy of the police department. CPAC would appoint the Superintendent of Police, revise rules for police practices, investigate police misconduct, investigate all police shootings, and provide for transparency in investigations. The central premise of the CPAC idea is that the police exist to serve the community not oppose it.

Real community control of police and the criminal justice system is basic to any democracy. Along with the generalized declining perception by Americans about the legitimacy of political institutions, minorities and youth see the police more as an occupying army than a force for protecting the safety, security, and independence of members of their community.

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE 3

Angela Davis featured at National Forum on Police Crimes at University of Chicago

Police repression and ideological mystification are the glues that maintain structural violence.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | May 19, 2014

Stop Police Crimes!

End Mass Incarceration!
Free All Political Prisoners!

(Rally with Angela Davis, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, Illinois, May 17, 2014).

CHICAGO — It was inspiring and informative attending the rally with Angela Davis and the celebration of the lifelong political work of Charlene Mitchell, the founder of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR). The rally and award ceremony honoring Davis and Mitchell capped a two-day National Forum on Police Crimes at the University of Chicago.

The National Forum held workshops highlighting police crimes against undocumented and other immigrant workers, the labor movement and all workers, the LGBTQ community, women, peace, and solidarity activists, and people of color.

Central themes reflected in the workshops and the rally included the current condition of police misconduct in the United States, an analysis of the fundamental role of the police and incarceration in the United States, the interconnectedness of forms of repression and the struggles against them, and the twin roles of repression and ideology as the glues holding together a global political economy in crisis. Last, the celebration of the 41 years of the NAARPR illustrated the possibilities of struggle and victory.

The call for the National Forum highlighted the contemporary crises of civil rights and civil liberties including:

§  a “national epidemic” of police and vigilante killings of young African-American men, such as Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant;

§  the mass incarceration of people of color such that, as Michelle Alexander has reported, more African-Americans are in jail or under the supervision of the criminal justice system today than were in slavery in 1850;

§  the targeting and deportation of millions of immigrants;

§  the institutionalization of laws increasing surveillance;

§  the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws, justifying gun violence against people perceived as a threat;

§  and the continued persecution of political prisoners from the recently convicted Occupy Movement activist Cecily McMillan, to the 30-year listing of exiled Assata Shakur, living in Cuba, as one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists, despite the fact that her original conviction for murder was based on faulty evidence.

Several speakers during the rally made it clear that the primary purpose police forces play in the United States is to protect the stability of the existing economic and political system. In short, the police in virtually every community serve the interests of what Occupiers call the one percent in opposition to the 99 percent.

While laws and police often come to the aid of aggrieved members of communities, their primary function is to protect the unequal distribution of wealth and income and political power. The physical presence of police, with larger numbers in poor and Black and Brown communities than others, constitutes a threat to the physical survival of people, particularly young men. For most people in poor communities of color, the police represent an occupying power.

Police repression in the United States is embedded in the history of slavery, institutionalized racism, the legitimized use of violence, and the interconnectedness of violence against African-Americans, Latinos, women, gays, transgender people, and workers.

Further, police repression on a global basis serves to impose policies in keeping with neoliberal globalization, including the privatization of public institutions, cutting back on social safety nets, opposing demands by low-wage workers for economic justice, and extracting larger shares of the value of the labor of workers.

Since the embrace of neoliberal policies virtually everywhere in the world, economic inequality has grown dramatically. With growing protest activities, police and military repression has increased as well.

Speakers suggested that the criminal justice system — the police, prisons, and laws restricting political participation — is a form of direct violence.

Speakers suggested that the criminal justice system — the police, prisons, and laws restricting political participation — is a form of direct violence that is seeking to create pliant behavior by force or the threat of force. Further, the criminal justice system is an instrumentality of structural violence; protecting the various forms of exploitation and oppression embedded in the society at large.

In addition it is replicated in the broader culture. Mass media romanticize police behavior, courts of law, even vigilante forms of violence. Police programs, the portrait of scientists engaged in uncovering crimes, and even police comedies pitting bungling but wise police investigators against incorrigible criminals give credence to the necessity of police, prisons, oppressive laws, and the need for order. Consumers of pop culture are rewarded for their willing acceptance of the systems of control as they exist for an hour or two of entertainment. Besides, most people think, what are the alternatives to armed police, laws, prisons, and the right-to-bear arms?

The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression successfully struggled to free Angela Davis and many others falsely incarcerated and inspired mobilizations of activists everywhere to protest police violence, prisons, the death penalty, and Stand Your Ground laws. The Alliance in Chicago continues the struggle and has demanded civilian control of the police.

Angela Davis posed the vision of an unarmed police force administered by the community and the elimination of prisons entirely. While these proposals cannot be achieved in the short run, she and the Alliance believe, as the World Social Forum suggests, “Another World is Possible.” To make these visions reality they say, “a multi-racial, multi-national and multi-cultural broad-based movement” is needed to create “united democratic action.”

 

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE:2

Sunday, August 21, 2016

THE MEANINGS OF FERGUSON AND MILWAUKEE

(Portions of this essay, “The Meanings of Ferguson,” appeared on August 20, 2014 in Diary of a Heartland Radical).

Harry Targ

In addressing violence, researchers, educators, journalists and religious leaders have usually concentrated on its most visible forms: murder and war. The central features of such violence include physical assault and killing. In our own day terrorism has joined war as the most popular common subject for study.

Over the years, peace educators have developed intellectual tools to uncover more diverse meanings of violence, their differences and their connections. Structural violence has been distinguished from direct violence. Researchers continue to analyze direct violence, physical assault and killing, but also study structural violence, the various forms of human suffering that take more time; impose pain, sickness, depression, and death on populations; and are perpetuated by leading institutions and relationships in society. Structural violence includes economic inequality, low wages and poverty, inadequate access to health care and education, and the psychological damage that economic suffering causes. These injustices, the concept of structural violence suggests, are embedded in economic, social, and political institutions.

It is possible to disaggregate further the structural violence that is embedded in institutions. Institutional violence refers to unequal distribution of power and influence in major societal institutions: political, criminal justice, and educational, for example.

Finally, cultural violence refers to the images, symbols, and educational materials that value some population groups over others. Culture refers to the public consciousness of history, traditions, and popular narratives that describe people. Stereotypes are short-hand representations of a culture.

In total then violence is direct, structural, institutional, and cultural. These kinds of violence may occur separately but in most cases are inextricably connected. It is this fourfold conception of violence that is relevant to the crisis that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri.

Ferguson, Missouri 2014      

The tragedy of Ferguson, Missouri came to national attention because of direct violence. A Ferguson policeman shot and killed an unarmed young African American male. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and threatening street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault, parallel to Israeli bombings in Gaza and United States targeted air strikes in Iraq. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city escalated since the killing of Michael Brown.

Beyond the threat of direct violence in Ferguson is structural violence, less visible but as important. Brookings Institute researcher Elizabeth Kneebone (“Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty,” brookings.edu, August 15, 2014) reported that the community of Ferguson experienced a qualitative economic decline over the decade before the shooting. The city’s unemployment rate increased from 5 percent in 2000 to 13 percent by 2010. Earnings of community members declined by one-third. One-fourth of the population was living in poverty. 

Kneebone indicated that poverty rates have doubled in suburban neighborhoods surrounding the 100 largest cities in the United States. “By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents lived in the neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53 percent.” Of course, poverty is highly related to declining schools, inadequate access to health care, lessened prospects for jobs, and large-scale youth unemployment.

Institutional violence is reflected in a 300-year history of slavery and racism. Professor Clarissa Hayward, Washington University, said: “The St. Louis metropolitan area has been an extreme example of racial segregation for 100 years.” She pointed out that St. Louis geographically was at the nexus of the South, the Midwest, and the West and added: “The practices and politics of St. Louis created the problems that underlie the tension that boiled out in Ferguson this week.” (Puneet Kollipara, “Wonkbook: The Social and Economic Story Behind the Unrest in Ferguson,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, August 18, 2014). 

In terms of the Ferguson political system, two-thirds of the community is Black and the local government has been almost all white. At the time of the shooting of Michael Brown, five of six city council members were white, the Mayor was white, and six of seven school board members were white. And fifty of 53 police officers were white.

Finally, cultural violence addresses the issue of ideology, consciousness, images of the other, and additional ways in which whites see African-Americans. Racist culture socializes the dominant class and race to reflect its superiority. For example, Missouri Lt. Governor Peter Kinder said shortly after the shooting: “That’s one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, that we do not have politicized trials. We let the justice system work it out.” The mayor of Ferguson declared that his community was free of racism.

Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, police and politicians organized a campaign to demonize the victim of the police killing. The tall young man, an African-American, was a robber, a drug consumer, and violence-prone. Also, the days of protest in Ferguson were framed to privilege the peaceful, religious, mourning adults and to explain night-time violence not as police violence but violence perpetrated by outside agitators from New York, Chicago, and California. The fact that young African Americans left their houses at their own risk could not, the frame implies, engender outrage.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin 2016

And in August, 2016 Milwaukee, by many measures the most segregated and racist big city in the United States, experienced the police shooting of Sylville K. Smith followed by two days of frustrated rebellion by some residents of the Sherman Park neighborhood. State violence, poverty, and racial segregation have created a tinderbox of frustration and anger in that city. According to a 2015 NPR report, the state of Wisconsin invests more in prisons than education, incarcerating a higher percentage of Black men than anywhere in the country. “…in Milwaukee County more than half of all Black men in their 30s and 40s have served time.” In one zip code alone 62 percent of Black men have been incarcerated for some time by the age of 34. The prison population of the state has tripled since 1990.

NPR also quoted a study finding that Milwaukee has the second highest black poverty rate in the country with an unemployment rate four times higher than whites (Kenay Downs, “Why is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?” NPR, March 5, 2015). A Madison, Wisconsin group,  the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition, after defining the idea of a “neighborhood,” found that 31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black neighborhoods are jails and an additional 21 neighborhoods are apartment complexes or section 8 housing or both. Prisons and poverty dominate the life of Black communities (YGB, “31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black Neighborhoods are Jails,” ).

Summing up the situation in Milwaukee, Alderman Khalif Rainey said: “The Black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression. This is their life.” (Tanzina Vega, “Milwaukee’s Staggering Black-White Economic Divide,” CNN Money, August 17, 2016, money cnn.com).

So from police violence--killing, gassing, beating--to economic despair, to lack of political representation to cultural rationales for state violence, the basic characteristics of American society are uncovered. And once again, the victimization of people of color, as well as workers, and women, suggest the following conclusions:

--the root cause of exploitation, racism, and sexism is structural violence (capitalism).

--physical violence is used to crush rebellion against class exploitation and racism.

--unrepresentative political institutions are dominated by the wealthy and powerful.

--dominant cultural stereotypes and specific narratives about society reinforce the economic system, the political system, and justify the police violence in the St. Louis area, Milwaukee and all around the United States.

Black Lives Matter

But between Ferguson and Milwaukee a new social movement has emerged, Black Lives Matter, led by young women and men representing over 60 organizations around the country. Recently they issued a powerful programmatic statement “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice, The Movement for Black Lives (POLICY.M4BL.org). It presented six demands, each with detailed recommendations:

-End the War on Black People

-Reparations

-Divest-Invest

-Economic Justice

-Community Control

-Political Power

These demands represent African Americans, Women, Workers, and all oppressed peoples. They address direct violence—Stop the Killing—and structural violence—Redistribute Wealth and Income, Political Power, and Opportunity for Human Development for All. The struggles continue.