Jena 6 corners the Dems
I’ve always said that three P’s will make the Democratic Party nervous as the sheep of Wellington: patriarchy, Palestine, and prison. These are the issues they don’t want to acknowledge because their complicity on all counts is so intractibly deep.
The Jena 6 uprising is the reaction of one of the most consistent and abused core consitutencies of the Democratic Party — African America, which has been held hostage by the 2-Party 2-Step for decades, and kept in line by a lengthening list of Black gatekeepers who act as colonial surrogates.
Prison is the issue that comes to the surface with the Jena 6 focus on the aptly named US criminal justice system. We have the highest prison population (more than 2 million) on earth, even exceeding that of China (1.5 million) which is one in 800 people. Ours is one in 150. Black and brown folk are the VAST majority of that population, and the conditions in many of these lockups are utterly inhuman.
Here is a recent piece from the LA Times…
‘Jena Six’ case puts candidates on the spot
Obama and Clinton could court black support by joining in protests,
but such action could be a political liability down the road.
So far, they’re keeping their distances.
By Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 21, 2007
WASHINGTON — — In their quest for black voters, Democratic
presidential front-runners Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama
raced to Selma, Ala., six months ago to commemorate a historic civil
rights march. Each used tightly scripted church sermons to declare
their personal links to the freedom fighters of the 1960s.
But Thursday, as thousands poured into a small Louisiana town to
protest the case of six black youths that has emerged as a cause
celebre for the modern-day civil… FULL
The Buffalo In Da' Midst:
Crooks and Liars just put this up:
Neo-Nazi Hate Group Posts Personal Information, Threatens Jena 6
As the hate site says: “In Case Anyone Wants To Deliver Justice.” The editor of the website with a swastika at the top says on an audio at the site “I’d like to go down there and put a bullet in each one of those little black kids …” When asked if he might have brought any harm to the Jena 6 by posting that, he told CNN “I don’t know that doing justice can be considered doing harm.”
In full
22 September 2007, 8:51 pmRenegade Eye:
We both know the Democratic and Republican parties, are two sides of the same coin.
22 September 2007, 10:19 pmStan:
People are always asking where the connections are in politics; and when no satisfactory answer is provided, they run back up into the familiar… elections. Here is a shoutout from those terrible 2nd Wave feminists, esp MacKinnon. Liberal law protects the power that operates prior to the law.
Somewhere between Katrina and Jena (Louisiana has now become a kind of gravitational field) an aggregation of trauma in African America — the trauma that didn’t end between 1964-68 — has caused the system to again reveal itself to a colonized people… with two faces. Gentrifiction and the Criminal Justice system. This is a struggle that will be taken up by African America; but for white American radicals and the ever more numerous in-betweeners, our job is to fight imperialism at home, even if the geography is confused. The right connections and overlaps and synergy will self-organize without anyone’s toy vanguards trying to cobble together political Frankensteins. The system is not acquiring new spaces, it is abandoning them in a long term retrenchment.
In these interstices, we can begin to build our capacity to attack the system with self-reliance and locaql abundance… off the grid. This thought first occured to me in tecnicolor in Louisiana, when I saw Black residents and white anarchists rebuilding a school that the government told them they’d get to in 2008.
23 September 2007, 7:14 amLegume Sam:
Just some offhand thoughts on Louisiana…
I remember reading somewhere that northwest Louisiana was a part of the US where the corporations could get away with any sort of environmental pollution they wanted, as any sort of whistleblowers were constantly kept in fear for their lives.
I also remember taking a taxi through New Orleans in 2002 in order to get to a meeting of the short-lived experiment in ecosocialist activism known as the Green Alliance — and as our cab drove down one of the city streets we passed through endless rows of slum housing…
Do any of you hang with Malik Rahim?
23 September 2007, 8:21 pmAlex Steed:
[I apologize for posting this here, but I tried your address and it connected to nothing]
Mr Goff,
Quickly, I became acquainted with you when you spoke at the University of Southern Maine a little under two years ago. It was an impressive speaking engagement and I very much appreciated your time at my (then) school.
If you hadn’t already seen it,I wanted to bring to your attention Rev. Garret Keizer’s recent piece in Harper’s Magazine about staging a general strike on general election day (11.06.07). Having seen you speak, I think that you’ll appreciate it. It’s the most punk rock piece of academia I’ve seem come from a reverend–well–ever. It suggests that the left and liberals don’t want this administration to go away because it gives them something to be smug and cynical about. It suggests a large and strong degree of direct action. I spoke to Keizer a few days after the article came out and I wrote up the highlights in a blog article linked under the Harper’s piece. I think you’ll enjoy that as well.
I am hoping to speak with you by phone over the next few days for the strike site (and our various other outposts on Facebook among other places). Please let me know if this would be fine, and when I should try to get in touch.
Be swell and take good care,
Alex
http://whystrike.com/
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/0081720 (Keizer’s initial piece)
http://whystrike.blogspot.com/2007/09/interview-with-garret-keizer.html (interview with Keizer)
–
Alex Steed
WhyStrike?
Burlington, Vermont
c. (802) 999-2050
23 September 2007, 10:16 pminterweb: http://www.whystrike.com
James M:
[Jena mayor Murphy] McMillin has insisted that his town is being unfairly portrayed as racist—an assertion the mayor repeated in an interview with Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist group based in Learned, Miss., who asked McMillin to “set aside some place for those opposing the colored folks.” [emphasis mine]
[FULL STORY]
I grew up and spent the majority of my life in Louisiana, and I can report that this kind of doublethink — while entertaining enough as a kind of unintentional self-parody — is depressingly commonplace. Very few people, it seems, want to consciously assume the label of racist any more, but very few, also, want to make the kinds of revolutions in thought & action that would belie that characterization. They want it both ways — the appearance of tolerance and the reality of white supremacy.
A commentator on HuffPo laid it out: Whenever something like this happens, the white folks all chime the same refrain: “We’re not racist, we’re just decent, churchgoing, God-fearing folks” … (who probably — if they’re anything like the white churchgoers in my hometown — would immediately eject any black person who tried to join in their worship service. This was the policy at the church I went to as a kid.)
I seriously doubt this applies to anyone here, but if anyone anywhere was thinking of giving the white residents of Jena, the D.A., et al, the benefit of the doubt on this, I would entreat them to lay off the funny cigarettes for awhile. These Jena-ites protesting their innocence to the media are absolutely, unequivocally, f**king racists — the only difference between them and the Klan is that they’re too cowardly to don the white sheet.
25 September 2007, 12:42 am