Inevitable and Justified Rage- A Call for a Winning Strategy
By: Eric Spencer
Image by: Eric Spencer
The inevitability of the events taking place in cities across America has been palpable to anybody paying attention for some time now. The fuse on the powder keg that is our contemporary society was lit some time ago. This has been clear to me for as long as I can remember.
When I was about 19-years-old, I’m 38 now, I went with a group of around 7 friends to find a college party we had heard about. We drove to the campus, parked in the lot, got out, and began to make our way through the cars towards the dorms where the parties usually took place.
Just before we exited the lot we saw three police officers talking to what looked like a couple of students. They all suddenly stopped talking and stared at us intently as we passed by. At this point I should mention that I am a white man and the friends I was with that night were all young black men.
Unable to find the party, we all reluctantly began to make our way back to the parking lot. As we entered the lot, around 10 police officers emerged from behind cars, converging on us from all directions, guns drawn screaming for us to put our hands up. We all threw our hands up, were put up against parked cars and searched. After searching us, one of the officers informed us that a couple of men were on campus the night before brandishing a gun and he said all of us fit the description.
“All of you besides you,” the cop said, pointing to me.
We waited an hour for them to bring a witness up to make an identification. Police cruiser spotlights were shined in our faces so we could not see the witness. The officer then reappeared and said the witness had positively identified one of my friends.
My friend was beside himself and explained to the officer that he was at work last night. The officer called my friend’s supervisor at the airport where he worked and the supervisor confirmed his alibi. The officers eventually let us all go.
What if the witness had falsely identified another one of my friends? The friend who confirmed his whereabouts was the only one with a credible alibi. What if he didn’t work that night? We asked ourselves these questions for months after the incident. That’s is how easy it is for a black man to be unjustly thrown into the system in America, if they are lucky enough to live past being detained. I, personally, have a dozen other stories like this I could tell.
Police culture in America is toxic. It is criminal really. The idea that it is somehow a case of a few bad apples is preposterous. This should be clear to anyone with an internet connection at this point. Many black folks in America have been aware, for well over a century, of the racist, violent and criminally fraternal nature of police culture. It wasn’t until Rodney King’s beating, followed by the age of body cams and cell phone footage that some affluent whites began to understand.
The grotesque violence and disregard for human life we see committed by police across this nation is not simply a result of “Trump’s America.” The 1994 Crime Bill signed into law by Bill Clinton (and drafted by Joe Biden), combined with the war on drugs, broken windows policy, stop and frisk, etc., gives carte blanche to cops to terrorize, overwhelmingly, the black and brown citizens of this country coast to coast.
Our prison population has doubled as a result of these policies, making us the most imprisoned population of any country on earth by far. Police in the U.S. kill more of its citizens in a month than the police in Britain have killed, ever! In addition to the brutality committed by the state, arbitrary laws have been added to the books whose sole purpose is to hand out more fines, thus generating more revenue for the state at the expense of its poorest citizens. “Criminal justice” in America also works to line the pockets of the private sector. The multi-billion dollar a year prison slave industry is now a major part of the U.S. economy.
This country finally got its first black president and its first black Attorney General in 2009. The result: the Obama administration allowed cops to brutalize peaceful protesters at Occupy Wall Street, brutalize water protectors fighting against the Dakota Access Pipeline, brutalize the people of Ferguson and proceeded to militarize local law enforcement agencies across the country. Obama sent 24 times as much military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies than George W. Bush.
The nation has been pushed to the brink. The anger and frustration seen in the streets of cites across the nation and the manner in which it is manifesting was inevitable. As JFK said in 1962:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Meanwhile, the tone deafness of mainstream media is on full display as they broadcast endless images of looters and their talking heads make endless excuses for the police’s violent behavior while calling for civility among the citizenry. As if the looting of a Target store or a grocery store even compares to the looting of this entire country by corporate America, including the $5 trillion in stimulus money that went straight to the richest people in America, which is said to be the largest transfer of wealth in human history.
Millions were poor and desperate before the pandemic, and we are in much dire straits now. We live in an impoverished society, with poor healthcare, poor education, kept in line through state violence, mass incarceration, and racism. All while the resources of the country are either given to the pentagon to massacre people all over the world or out-right handed to the oligarchs.
As MLK said in 1966:
“…riots are the language of the unheard.”
But as much as violent societal outbursts may be justifiable and indeed inevitable, it is not how we’re going to win. Violence is the state’s game, and they are masters of it. They are comfortable with it. That’s why the state sends in undercover provocateurs dressed as protesters to insight, provoke and commit violence. If they can paint a movement as violent they justify their violent response, which is the only way the state knows how to respond to any type of uprising. We won’t win that game.
Even if we could rise to the same level of violence as the state, what would that look like? It would be civil war. Fractured factions of the citizenry and the government fighting separately for vastly different causes and all fighting each other. It would truly be the end of the American experiment and would result in an unfathomable level of human suffering.
Certainly, the alternative is not to lay down. We cannot tolerate the system that kills unarmed black men with impunity, who imprisons at an inexcusably astronomical rate, who renders its citizens poor, unhealthy and uneducated.
To defeat this system, we must attack it at the root of its power. Our labor is indeed the root of its power. Our willingness to be a cog in their machine is the system’s power, therefore the power is ours. An organized front that has clear and ambitious demands is our only hope.
In Minneapolis, union bus drivers have signed a petition, vowing to not aid the cops in policing the protesters calling for justice for George Floyd’s murder. Many teachers, postal workers, nurses and hotel workers also signed the petition.
This is a template for what must happen everywhere. Not only to stop the state from murdering our black brothers, but to end the gross wealth inequality in America and halt the hollowing out of our nation, and indeed the planet, by the oligarchs.
Grinding the gears of the system, that is crushing people, to a halt is the only thing that will force the change this country, and the world, desperately needs. So, organize, strike, carry out non-violent direct action and make clear demands. Our refusal to participate in the oppression, subjugation and murder of citizens will render the corporate state’s attempts to do so impotent.